David Morrell - NightScape

Carlos fought to still his trembling hands, tugged at his unkempt beard, and brushed back his shaggy hair. "It's my privilege to be the Great Man's servant. No sacrifice is too burdensome."

"You're an inspiration. His Excellency heard about the unfortunate loss of your wife. He sends his deep condolences."

Carlos gestured in grief as well as devotion.

But devotion to whom? he wondered. "As I said, any sacrifice."

In Madrid, he noticed Her Majesty's lips move and knew he had to feed her.

Three months later, having been ordered to move the crate to Lisbon, he knew that Her Majesty would be cold en route and covered her with a blanket.

Six months later, having relocated in Brussels, he knew that Her Majesty would have trouble breathing in the coffin and ordered his men to bring him an electric drill.

Finally the message arrived. Escape accomplished. Faithful friend, your obligation is at an end. Directions enclosed. With heartfelt thanks and immense anticipation, I ask you to return what is mine.

Yours?

Carlos turned to Her Majesty and sobbed.

The motorcade fishtailed up the snowy road that approached the chateau outside Geneva. The Great Man waited anxiously, breathing frost as he paced the driveway. Pressing his chilled hands under the crate, he helped his servants carry it through the opened double door. Impatient, he ordered it placed in the steeple-roofed living room and commanded everyone to leave, except for the genius mortician who had used his secret skills to preserve the Great Man's love and who now had been summoned to validate the results of his promise.

Each breathed quickly, ready with crowbars to raise the crate's lid but finding that it wasn't secure. Distressed, they reached to open the coffin but discovered that it wasn't locked.

Her Majesty looked astonishingly lifelike, even more than the genius had guaranteed.

But a hole had been drilled in the lid of her coffin.

There was a matching hole in her skull, the drill having gone too deep.

And rotten food bulged from her mouth.

And brains and blood covered her face.

Carlos lay on top of her, a bullet hole in his skull, a pistol in his hand, a beatific expression on his face.

In 1987, my fifteen-Year-old son Matthew died from strep and staph infections, the consequence of complications in a bone-marrow transplant that was a desperate attempt to cure his rare form of bone cancer. Thereafter, my imagination dwelled on the theme of grief. Eventually, I wrote several stories on the subject, many of which appeared in my earlier collection, Black Evening. In this further grief-themed story, I couldn't help thinking of Ted Bundy. Commissioned by writer/anthologist Dennis Etchison, it appeared in the 1992 anthology MetaHorror and was nominated for that year's Horror Writers of America best-novella award.

Later the song would have agonizing significance for him. "I can't stop hearing it," Chad would tell his psychiatrist and fight to control his rapid breathing. His eyes would ache. "It doesn't matter what I'm doing, meeting a client, talking to a publisher, reading a manuscript, walking through Central Park, even going to the bathroom, I hear that song! I've tried my damnedest not to. I hardly sleep, but when I manage to, I wake up feeling I've been humming it all night."

Chad vividly remembered the first time he'd heard it. He could date it exactly: Wednesday, April 20,1979. He could give the time precisely: 9:46 p.m., because although he'd found the song poignant and the singer's performance outstanding, he'd felt an odd compulsion to glance at his watch. It must have been a tougher day than I realized, he'd thought. So tired. Nine forty-six. Is that all?

Sweeney Todd. The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Stephen Sondheim's musical had opened on Broadway in March, a critical success, tickets impossible to get, except that Chad had a playwright client with contacts in the production company. When Chad 's wife, Linda, broke one of their marriage's rules and gave Chad a surprise birthday party, the client (pretending to be a magician) pulled two tickets from behind Chad 's ear. "Happy forty-second, old buddy."

But Chad remembered the precise date he saw the musical not because it had anything to do with his birthday. Instead, he had a deeper reason. The demon barber of Fleet Street. Come in for a shave and a haircut, have your throat slit, get dumped down a chute, ground up into hamburger, and baked into Mrs. Lovett's renowned, ever-popular, scrumptious, how-do-you-get-that-distinctive-taste meat pies.

Can't eat enough of them. To startle the audience, a deafening whistle shrilled each time Sweeney slashed a throat. Blood spurted. And one of Mrs. Lovett's waiters was an idiot kid who hadn't the faintest idea of what was going on, but he had misgivings that something was wrong. He confessed his fears to Mrs. Lovett, who thought of him fondly as her son. She promised that she'd protect him. She sang that nothing would hurt him-a magnificent performance by Angela Lansbury of a tune that forever after would torture Chad, its title: "Not While I'm Around." A lilting heartbreaking song in the midst of multiple murders and cannibalism.

After the show, Chad and Linda had trouble finding a taxi and didn't get back to their Upper East Side apartment until almost midnight. They felt so disturbed by the plot yet elated by the music that they decided to have some brandy and discuss their reactions to the show, and that's when the phone rang. Scowling, Chad wondered who in hell would be calling at such an hour. Immediately he suspected one of his nervous, not to mention important, authors with whom he'd been having tense conversations all week because of a publisher's unfavorable reaction to the author's new manuscript. Chad tried to ignore the phone's persistent jangle. Let the answering machine take it, he thought. At once, he angrily picked up the phone.

A man's gravelly voice, made faint by the hiss of a long-distance line, sounded tense. "This is Lieutenant Raymond MacKenzie. I'm with the New Haven police force. I know it's late. I apologize if I woke you, but… There's been an emergency, I' m afraid."

What Chad heard next made him quiver. In response, he insisted, "No. You're wrong. There's got to be some mistake."

"Don't I wish." The lieutenant's voice became more gravelly. "You have my deepest sympathy. Times like this, I hate my job." The lieutenant gave instructions.

Chad murmured compliance and set down the phone.

Linda, who'd been staring, demanded to know why Chad was so pale.

When Chad explained, Linda blurted, "No! Dear God, it can't be!"

Urgency canceled numbness. They each threw clothes into a suitcase, hurried from their apartment to the rental garage three blocks away where they stored their two-year-old Ford (they'd bought the car at the same time they'd bought their cottage in Connecticut, so they could spend weekends near their daughter), and sped with absolutely no memory of the drive (except that they kept repeating, "No, it's impossible!") to New Haven and Lieutenant MacKenzie, whose husky voice, it turned out, didn't match his short, thin frame.

Denial was reflexive, insistent, stubborn. Even when the lieutenant sympathetically repeated and rerepeated that there had not been a mistake, when he regretfully showed them Stephanie's purse, her wallet, her driver's license, when he showed them a statement from Stephanie's roommate that she hadn't come back to the dormitory last night…even when Chad and Linda went down to the morgue and identified the body, or what was left of the body, although it hadn't been Stephanie's face that was mutilated…they still kept insisting, no, this had to be someone who looked like Stephanie, someone who stole Stephanie's purse, someone who…some mistake!