by Edward Lee
He had the merciful interruption of his phone signaling a voice mail. He evidently received a call while he’d been pumping gas. He picked it up from the passenger seat and clicked to play the message. Must have been a pretty long one since he’d had time to get back on the interstate before he knew he missed a call. He put it on speakerphone, glad for the distraction.
“You have 1 new message,” the automated voice informed him
A moment later, it began. “Brice? Damn it, where are you? This is Van Dreelen.”
For awhile, Brice had successfully forgotten about his other life—Van Dreelen and the shadiness he’d mentioned in their last conversation, Hathoway, Levanthorpe, the Form 1852, all of it.
Van Dreelen’s message continued. “I looked into that shit we were talking about last night. Man, you’re not gonna believe it. This morning I talked to Kline over at Bryson. I asked him for the point of origin of that supposed Form 1852 against you, told him we’d take him to court if need be. So he gave me the email: a research firm called MBD Limited. I had our guys look into to it, and it turned out to be a bogus pyramid company with a totally false background. So then I checked the domain name owner: Marcie Baxter, your ex.”
For a moment there was just the crackle of the connection, Van Dreelen perhaps in a cab, searching for words. Brice gaped. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
Van Dreelen resumed. “Nope. Marcie must’ve gotten into your computer to swipe our old account numbers and then tacked them onto the phony Form 1852. She orchestrated the whole scam to make Bryson pull the account from you and hand it to Hathoway. That’s some cold shit, buddy.”
Brice felt like his face had caught fire. His hands shook around the steering wheel. His teeth were clenched hard enough to shatter.
The betrayal ruined his life. It was why he’d been dragged on this trip in the first place and come home without a brother and a friend.
“Call me when you get this message, man. I need to know what you want to do about this…”
EPILOGUE
Marcie shouldered open the door to the penthouse and then leaned back to shut it. She set her shopping bags on the floor and went down the line of deadbolts, locking out the rest of the world. She slipped out of her Walter Steiger pumps, a leopard print design which ran about seven hundred dollars. Slumming a little bit, but the weather called for rain. It was funny to see all the skanks strutting around the city in cheap knock-offs with matching fake handbags. Those plastic bitches wouldn’t get within ten feet of this building before the doorman sent them packing, just like all the disgusting bums with their liquor bottles in brown bags. Both of those groups would probably suck a dick for some kind of gratuity. It was shameful and gauche.
The penthouse provided her a striking view of the city. The west wall was one large window opening onto the beautiful skyline with skyscrapers and the river beyond. It made her feel like she lived in a city in the clouds. She was insulated from the sirens and pretenders and poverty below. The worst of it once she stepped through the entrance was the doormen raping her with their eyeballs as she walked to the elevator, but it was simple enough to ignore them. She was probably the highlight of their day before they returned to shitty studio apartments with sobbing brats and nagging wives who always had a headache.
The expected rain never showed up and now there was a fuchsia sky from the brushstrokes of the setting sun in the magic hour. She didn’t have this view a year ago, unthinkable as that now seemed. Those had been the days with Brice in his condo, a neat and unambitious dwelling which was the ideal place for such a neat and unambitious man. She didn’t have to endure such mediocrity now, and she had herself to thank for that. She had upgraded her life in every way.
“Derrick?” Marcie called. “I’m home. Wait till you see the ermine stole I picked up at Caswell’s.”
A thought occurred to her and she smiled cunningly. She undid the buttons of her black blouse and slipped out of it, then unhooked the black lace bra beneath. There was a slight sag, which was natural enough given her voluptuous measurements, but nothing they didn’t have the money to fix. For now, she knew she looked damned good. She’d thought Brice was going to cry the first time he’d seen her naked.
Lastly she stepped out of her white skirt, which the doorman had ogled in particular for a hint of her underwear. He had searched in vain. She never wore it if she could help it.
She reached into her Caswell’s bag and withdrew the lush stole, a total steal at five hundred dollars. It had been fifteen percent off, though the dope behind the counter hadn’t given her the discount. Marcie shrugged and handed over the platinum card. She couldn’t care less. If you needed it to be on sale to buy it, you didn’t deserve to own it.
“I’m trying it on for you right now!”
She draped the fur around her bare shoulders. She could have drawn it across her breasts to cover herself up, but the most she did was hold part of it up to her face to revel in its softness.
She walked across the plush carpet, which caressed her toes as she made her way to the bedroom. She paused in a warm patch where the sun had lingered in the late afternoon. Her finely manicured toes curled through the carpet. She was due for a salon visit next week. The ruby red toenails could use some touching up.
“Here I come, honey!” Marcie glided through the last stretch of floor. She threw open the door and swept into the bedroom, thrilled as always by its exorbitant furnishing. There was the Michael Amini bed, the eighty-five inch flat screen TV, the AICO chest and dresser—
Marcie’s smile drained, replaced by an expression of horror. Derrick lay atop the dresser in a cashmere bathrobe she had bought him for his birthday last month. His head hung off the side, nearly upside down. She could see his eyes, unblinking, staring at something far beyond the ceiling. There was an angry gouge in the crown of his head where something had been used to hollow out the wound. She followed a trickle of blood from the hole to the carpet where it pattered like rain drops on an umbrella. It joined a growing blot of crimson and white fragments of bone debris. Clear fluid also issued from the crevice, a long strand which stretched nearly all the way to the floor like drool.
Marcie backed up from the hideous sight of Derrick’s agape skull. The bottom of her mouth quivered. She tried to say something, but could only manage inarticulate sounds. Her backward progress stopped as she ran into something that shouldn’t have been there, and then a hand clamped over her mouth, sealing in her startled cry. She whirled away instinctively from the intruder.
She couldn’t have been more shocked when she saw who it was.
Brice?
He was naked from the waist down and the first thing she noticed was his erection; his penis was smeared red. Her reeling mind struggled for some kind of explanation as she continued to back up, not wanting to take her eyes from him. She kept a hand stretched out behind her, knowing the dresser was close, and then felt the sickening sensation of her first and middle fingers sliding into something wet and sticky—the hole in Derrick’s head. She yanked them back, a shudder riding up her shoulders. Her fingers were now coated in blood, and Marcie’s jaw dropped at the revelation of Brice’s bloody erection.
Brice advanced, his face split by an insane grin. He hoisted something up to his head, which in numb shock she recognized as a drill.
The world spun around and she found her beautiful plush carpet rising up to meet her. Brice loomed impossibly tall above her. Darkness fell across her vision like a drape as he knelt down to her on the ground. Only a gleam of spiraled steel managed to penetrate the blackness as she plunged into oblivion.
Marcie tried to scream, but the only sound in the world now was the savage grinding as Brice revved the drill.
— | — | —
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Edward Lee is the author of almost fifty novels and numerous short stories and novellas (or is it novellae? Hmm.) Several of his properties have been optioned for film, while Header was released on DVD in 2009; also, he
has been published in Germany, England, Romania, Greece, and Austria. Recent releases include Bullet Through Your Face and Brain Cheese Buffet (story collections), Header 2, and the hardcore Lovecraftian books The Innswich Horror, Trolley No. 1852, Pages Torn From A Travel Journal, Going Monstering, and Haunter of the Threshold. One of Lee’s creative ambitions is to one day write an effective M.R. James pastiche.
Ryan Harding is the author of Genital Grinder and the co-author of the upcoming novel Reincarnage, as well as a contributor to the multi-author collaboration Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road, all from Deadite Press. His stories have also appeared in the anthologies Excitable Boys and In Laymon's Terms, the chapbooks Partners in Chyme (with Edward Lee), A Darker Dawning and A Darker Dawning 2: Reign in Black, and the magazines Splatterpunk and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction.
