“There, now, kiddo. See what it’s really like?
“You didn’t do a thing.
“Pure as the driven snow, nigger. That’s the truth. And what a find you were. Never even suspected there was another like me, till Ally came to interview me after Decatur. But there you were, big and black as a Great White Hope, right there in her mind. Isn’t she fine, Pairis? Isn’t she something to take a knife to? Something to split open like a nice piece of fruit warmed in a summer sunshine field, let all the steam rise off her . . . maybe have a picnic . . .”
He stopped.
“I wanted her right from the first moment I saw her.
“Now, you know, I could’ve done it sloppy, just been a shrike to Ally, that first time she came to the holding cell to interview me; just jump into her, that was my plan. But what a noise that Spanning in the cell would’ve made, yelling it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, not Spanning, but Deputy D.A. Allison Roche . . . too much noise, too many complications. But I could have done it, jumped into her. Or a guard, and then slice her at my leisure, stalk her, find her, let her steam . . .
“You look distressed, Mr. Rudy Pairis. Why’s that? Because you’re going to die in my place? Because I could have taken you over at any time, and didn’t? Because after all this time of your miserable, wasted, lousy life you finally find someone like you, and we don’t even have the convenience of a chat? Well, that’s sad, that’s really sad, kiddo. But you didn’t have a chance.”
“You’re stronger than me, you kept me out,” I said.
He chuckled.
“Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don’t get it, do you?” His face, then, grew terrible. “You don’t even understand now, right now that I’ve cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?
“Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn’t do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you.”
I cringed. “And you waited . . .? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me . . .?”
“At the moment when you couldn’t do anything about it, at the moment you couldn’t shout ‘I’ve been taken over by someone else, I’m Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!’ Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you.”
I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. “You can . . . leave the mind . . . leave the body . . . go out . . . jaunt, jump permanently . . .?”
Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.
“You stayed in jail three years just to get me?”
He smirked. Smarter than thou.
“Three years? You think that’s some big deal to me? You don’t think I could have someone like you running around, do you? Someone who can ‘jaunt’ as I do? The only other shrike I’ve ever encountered. You think I wouldn’t sit in here and wait for you to come to me?”
“But three years . . .”
“You’re what, Rudy . . . thirty-one, is it? Yes, I can see that. Thirty-one. You’ve never jumped like a shrike. You’ve just entered, jaunted, gone into the landscapes, and never understood that it’s more than reading minds. You can change domiciles, black boy. You can move out of a house in a bad neighborhood – such as strapped into the electric chair – and take up residence in a brand, spanking, new housing complex of million-and-a-half-buck condos, like Ally.”
“But you have to have a place for the other one to go, don’t you?” I said it just flat, no tone, no color to it at all. I didn’t even think of the place of dark, where you can go . . .
“Who do you think I am, Rudy? Just who the hell do you think I was when I started, when I learned to shrike, how to jaunt, what I’m telling you now about changing residences? You wouldn’t know my first address. I go a long way back.
“But I can give you a few of my more famous addresses. Gilles de Rais, France, 1440; Vlad Tepes, Romania, 1462; Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary, 1611; Catherine DeShayes, France, 1680; Jack the Ripper, London, 1888; Henri Désiré Landru, France, 1915; Albert Fish, New York City, 1934; Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954; Myra Hindley, Manchester, 1963; Albert DeSalvo, Boston, 1964; Charles Manson, Los Angeles, 1969; John Wayne Gacy, Norwood Park Township, Illinois, 1977.
“Oh, but how I do go on. And on. And on and on and on, Rudy, my little porch monkey. That’s what I do. I go on. And on and on. Shrike will nest where it chooses. If not in your beloved Allison Roche, then in the cheesy fucked-up black boy, Rudy Pairis. But don’t you think that’s a waste, kiddo? Spending however much time I might have to spend in your socially unacceptable body, when Henry Lake Spanning is such a handsome devil? Why should I have just switched with you when Ally lured you to me, because all it would’ve done is get you screeching and howling that you weren’t Spanning, you were this nigger son who’d had his head stolen . . . and then you might have manipulated some guards or the Warden . . .
“Well, you see what I mean, don’t you?
“But now that the mask is securely in place, and now that the electrodes are attached to your head and your left leg, and now that the Warden has his hand on the switch, well, you’d better get ready to do a lot of drooling.”
And he turned around to jaunt back out of me, and I closed the perimeter. He tried to jaunt, tried to leap back to his own mind, but I had him in a fist. Just that easy. Materialized a fist, and turned him to face me.
“Fuck you, Jack the Ripper. And fuck you twice, Bluebeard. And on and on and on fuck you Manson and Boston Strangler and any other dipshit warped piece of sick crap you been in your years. You sure got some muddy-shoes credentials there, boy.
“What I care about all those names, Spanky my brother? You really think I don’t know those names? I’m an educated fellah, Mistuh Rippuh, Mistuh Mad Bomber. You missed a few. Were you also, did you inhabit, hath thou possessed Winnie Ruth Judd and Charlie Starkweather and Mad Dog Coll and Richard Speck and Sirhan Sirhan and Jeffrey Dahmer? You the boogieman responsible for every bad number the human race ever played? You ruin Sodom and Gomorrah, burned the Great Library of Alexandria, orchestrated the Reign of Terror dans Paree, set up the Inquisition, stoned and drowned the Salem witches, slaughtered unarmed women and kids at Wounded Knee, bumped off John Kennedy?
“I don’t think so.
“I don’t even think you got so close as to share a pint with Jack the Ripper. And even if you did, even if you were all those maniacs, you were small potatoes, Spanky. The least of us human beings outdoes you, three times a day. How many lynch ropes you pulled tight, M’sieur Landru?
“What colossal egotism you got, makes you blind, makes you think you’re the only one, even when you find out there’s someone else, you can’t get past it. What makes you think I didn’t know what you can do? What makes you think I didn’t let you do it, and sit here waiting for you like you sat there waiting for me, till this moment when you can’t do shit about it?
“You so goddam stuck on yourself, Spankyhead, you never give it the barest that someone else is a faster draw than you.
“Know what your trouble is, Captain? You’re old, you’re real old, maybe hundreds of years who gives a damn old. That don’t count for shit, old man. You’re old, but you never got smart. You’re just mediocre at what you do.
“You moved from address to address. You didn’t have to be Son of Sam or Cain slayin’ Abel, or whoever the fuck you been . . . you could’ve been Moses or Galileo or George Washington Carver or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Mark Twain or Joe Louis. You could’ve been Alexander Hamilton and helped found the Manumission Society in New York. You could’ve discovered radium, carved Mount Rushmore, carried a baby out of a burning building. But you got old real fast, and you never got any smarter. You didn’t need to, did you, Spanky? You had it all to yourself
, all this ‘shrike’ shit, just jaunt here and jaunt there, and bite off someone’s hand or face like the old, tired, boring, repetitious, no-imagination stupid shit that you are.
“Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it . . . you must’ve looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m’man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I’d killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.
“Because . . . and here’s the big difference ’tween us, dummy:
“I unraveled what was going on . . . it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don’t.
“There’s an old Japanese saying – I got lots of these, Henry m’man – I read a whole lot – and what it says is, ‘Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience – twenty times.’ ” Then I grinned back at him.
“Fuck you, sucker,” I said, just as the Warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.
I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I’d done more than a jaunt . . . this was . . . shrike; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal, Rudy Pairis, who was baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind . . . and then gone . . . and I came up from Ally’s shoulder, and I could barely speak.
“Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” I murmured. “He’s gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark.”
I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult – not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than anybody could imagine – I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.
And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.
Because – get on this now – all my wasted years didn’t have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my “gift” of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:
I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn’t get out of his own way.
Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.
STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN
Necrology: 1993
1993 ONCE AGAIN PROVED to be a depressing year in which we lost a number of major writers, artists, performers and technicians who significantly shaped the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres in fiction and film . . .
AUTHORS/ARTISTS
Collector, publisher, journalist and dealer Gerry (aka Gerreaux) de la Ree died of cancer of the kidney and lymph glands on January 2nd, aged 68. At one time he had one of the three biggest science fiction collections in the world. He entered semi-professional publishing in 1954 and produced many books, chapbooks and portfolios devoted to the work of such artists as Virgil Finlay, Hannes Bok and Stephen E. Fabian.
Dark fantasy/horror writer T. (Terry) L. (Lee) Parkinson died on January 7th of complications resulting from AIDS.
Gordon W. Fawcett who, with his three brothers built the Fawcett publishing empire, died of heart failure on January 16th, aged 81. In 1977, Fawcett Publications was sold to CBS for $50 million.
Science fiction author (John) Keith Laumer died from a stroke on January 22nd. He was aged 67. A prolific writer, he is best remembered for his “Worlds of the Imperium” series and novelizations for The Avengers and The Invaders TV series. His novel The Monitors was filmed in 1969.
Screenwriter and novelist Aben Kandel, aged 96, died on January 28th. His 1936 novel City for Conquest was filmed starring James Cagney, and his scripts for Hollywood include I Was a Teenage Werewolf, How to Make a Monster, Horrors of the Black Museum, Black Zoo, Konga, and Trog.
Gustav Hasford, author of The Short-Timers (which was filmed as Full Metal Jacket), died from untreated diabetic complications in Greece on January 29th. He was 45. In 1988, the year he was nominated for an Oscar for co-scripting Full Metal Jacket, he was investigated concerning the theft of nearly 800 books from 62 libraries around the world.
Scott Meredith, owner of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency and one of the most successful literary agents of all time, died of cancer on February 11th. He was 69. His many clients included Arthur C. Clarke, Marion Zimmer Bradley, P.G. Wodehouse, Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan and Roseanne Arnold, amongst others.
One of the comics greats, Harvey Kurtzman, died of liver cancer on February 21st, aged 68. His first cartoon was published when he was 14, and in the early 1950s he began working for William M. Gaines and EC Comics, creating Mad magazine in 1952 and its mascot Alfred E. Neuman. In later years he illustrated the “Little Annie Fanny” strip for Playboy.
Author Fletcher Knebel committed suicide with sleeping pills on February 26th, aged 81. He was suffering from lung cancer and heart ailments. With Charles W. Bailey III he co-wrote Seven Days in May, about a military plot to take over of the USA, which was successfully filmed in 1963. His other novels include Night of Camp David, The Zin Zin Road, Dark Horse, Vanished and a study of the Hiroshima bombing, No High Ground.
TV writer/producer Ed Jurist died on March 12th, aged 76. He was a principal writer on Bewitched from 1964–68 and produced The Flying Nun from 1968–70.
Bookseller, reviewer and author Baird Searles died of lymphatic throat cancer in Canada on March 22nd, aged 58. With his partner of 43 years, Martin Last, he owned and operated The Science Fiction Shop in New York City’s West Village from 1973–86. A regular reviewer for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for thirteen years, he was a consulting editor for Warner Books and his non-fiction volumes include A Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction (with Last), A Reader’s Guide to Fantasy, The Science Fiction Quiz Book, Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Epic! History of the Big Screen. He co-edited the 1991 anthology Halflings, Hobbits, Warrows, & Weefolk.
Acclaimed children’s author Robert (Atkinson) Westall died from respiratory failure caused by pneumonia on April 15th, aged 63. His numerous books, usually involving the supernatural, include his first novel The Machine Gunners (winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal in 1975), The Watch House, The Devil on the Road, Scarecrows (winner of the 1982 Carnegie Medal), The Haunting of Chas McGill and Other Stories and the adult collection Antique Dust, from which “The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux” was reprinted in the first volume of Best New Horror.
Mystery writer Leslie Charteris (aka Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin), the creator of fictional hero The Saint, died the same day, aged 85. The first Saint novel, Enter the Tiger, was published in 1928 and led to movies and two TV series featuring the character. Charteris also wrote scripts for Hollywood, including the plots for the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies and Tarzan and the Huntress.
Coin expert, SF fan and one-time husband of Marion Zimmer Bradley (she divorced him in 1991), Walter (Henry) Breen died April 30th f
rom colon cancer while confined to prison on charges of child molestation. He was 64.
Author and editor Avram Davidson died suddenly of a heart attack on May 8th. He was 70. His first professional sale was to Orthodox Jewish Life Magazine in 1946: His science fiction and fantasy novels include Rogue Dragon, Masters of the Maze, The Island Under the Earth and The Phoenix and the Mirror, and he wrote two mysteries under the “Ellery Queen” byline. The best of his highly distinctive short stories are collected in Or All the Seas with Oysters, Strange Seas and Shores and the recent The Adventures of Doctor Esterhazy. He edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction from 1962–64.
The Best New Horror 5 Page 59
