Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Oh, he never touched her with anything that wasn’t sharp. Never even shook hands.

“How do you shake hands with a naked lady?” he’d asked, when they were introduced — she’d been cast from cheesecake 8 x 10s, without an audition — on set. How indeed? Or was that his way of avoiding physical contact with her? Did he not trust himself?

Others had auditioned, she learned … but turned him down. They’d found out what he wanted and preferred not to be a part of it. Blondes who did naked pin-ups, strippers, girls who did stag films …they didn’t want to be cut-up in a shower, even with Janet Leigh’s head on top of their bodies.

So, Jayne Swallow.

Scree! Scree! Scree!

Now, she really had what Hitch wanted … and he’d have to pay more than scale to get it back. But it wasn’t the money. That wasn’t her mcguffin. She wanted something else. What? Revenge? Retribution? To be treated like a person rather than a broken doll?

It wasn’t just Hitch. She stood in for Janet Leigh. He stood in for everyone who’d cut her.

Since driving off the Lot, she’d been seeing him everywhere. In the broken side-mirror, through the misted-over rear window. In every film, there he was, somewhere. If only in a photo on the wall. Unmistakable, of course. That fat, double bass-belly … that caricature silhouette … doleful, little boy eyes like raisins in uncooked dough … the loose cheeks, like Droopy in the cartoons … that comb-over wisp.

He was waiting for a bus. He was smoking a cigar. He was getting a shoe-shine. He was wearing a too-big cowboy hat. He was smirking in a billboard ad for an all-you-can-scoff restaurant. He was fussing with dogs. He was the odd, short, fat boy out in a police line-up of tall, thin, unshaven crooks. He was up on a bell-tower, with a high-powered rifle. He was in a closet, with a bag full of sharp, sharp knives. He was in the back seat with a rope. He wore white editors’ gloves to handle his murder weapons.

She looked at the mirror, and saw no one there.

Nothing beginning with H.

But there was a shape in the road, flapping. She swerved to avoid it.

A huge gull, one wing snapped. The storm had driven it ashore.

It was behind her now. Not road kill, but a road casualty. Suitable for stuffing and mounting.

Hitch said that about Marion Crane, too, in a line he’d wanted in the script but not snuck past the censors. They were Jesuits, used to playing word games with clever naughty schoolboys.

Birds … Crane, Swallow … suitable for stuffing and mounting.

Another dark shape came out of the rain and gained on the car. A man on a motorcycle. A wild one? Like Brando. No, a highway cop. He wore a helmet and a rain-slicker. Water poured in runnels off the back of his cape. It looked like a set of folded, see-through wings. His goggles were like big glass eyes.

Her heartrate raced.

… stop, thief!

Had the studio called the cops yet? Had Hitch denounced her sabotage?

“I’ll take it out of her fine sweet flesh” Hitch would say. “Every pound of meat, every inch of skin!”

She was a thief. Not like Cary Grant, suave and calculating … but a purse-snatcher, vindictive and desperate … taking something not because it was valuable to her but because it was valuable to the person she’d stolen from.

The cop signaled her to pull over.

He had a gun. She didn’t. She was terrified.

Cops weren’t your friends.

She’d found that out the minute she got off the bus in Los Angeles. She’d been young and innocent then, with a hometown photo studio portfolio and a notion to get into the movies. She learned fast. Cops locked you up when you hadn’t done anything. Cops squeezed the merchandise and extracted fines that didn’t involve money. They let the big crooks walk free and cracked down on the hustlers. They always busted the wrong man. Beat patrolmen, vice dicks, harness bulls, traffic cops. The enemy.

Her brakes weren’t good. It took maybe thirty yards to pull over. With a sound like a scream in the rain.

The wipers still ticked as the motor idled. The screech slowed.

In the rear-view, she saw the cop unstraddle his ride. The rain poured off his helmet, goggles, cape, boots. He strode through the storm towards her. He wasn’t like the city cops she’d met, bellies bulging over their belts, flab-rolls easing around their holstered guns. He was Jimmy Stewart lean, snake-hipped. A cowboy with an armored skullcap.

If she put on a burst of speed, would she leave him here?

No, he’d catch her. Or she’d go off the cliff into the Pacific.

The knuckle rap came at her window. The cop didn’t bend down. She saw the leather jacket through his transparent slicker. A wild one, after all.

She tried to roll the window down and the handle came off. It did sometimes, but there was a trick to fixing it back. She didn’t bother with the trick. She opened the door, first a crack, then halfway, using it to shield against the rain, and ducked her head out to look up at the cop. His goggles gave him the eyes of Death.

Two little television sets strapped to his face, playing the opening of that show. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump …there Hitch was, in a fright-wig, being funny, holding a noose or a big bottle with POISON stamped on it. A non-speaking woman boiling in a pot or strapped to a saw-horse.

“Good eeev-ning,” he said.

Not Hitch, the cop. And not with a British accent.

She waited for it. The come-on. Tonight’s stawww-ry .

“Going mighty fast?” “Where’s the fire, lady?” “The way you look, the things you do to a man … that ought to be against the law …” “See what you’ve done to my night-stick, ma’am …” “Swallow, huh? Well …?”

“License and registration?”

He was unreadable. Not a movie cop.

She didn’t ask what she’d done wrong. She knew enough not to open up that debate. She found her documents, sodden and fragile as used tissue, in the glove compartment.

Whenever she showed her papers, she was irrationally afraid they’d turn out to be false — or the cop would say they were. That blanket of guilt was impossible to shuck, even when she hadn’t had things to feel guilty about. She knew these papers were legit, but they weren’t in the name she was using. In the photo on her driver’s license, Jana wasn’t as blonde as Jayne.

Her papers got wetter as the cop looked them over.

“Wróbel,” he said, pronouncing it properly.

Then he asked her something in Polish. Which she didn’t speak.

She shrugged.

“Not from the Old Country, then?”

It might as well have been Transylvania.

“Santa Rosa, originally,” she admitted.

“Hollywood, now,” he said, clocking her address.

She was too cold to give him a pin-up smile. Usually, cops asked if she was in pictures … she must be too bedraggled for that now.

“You must be in pictures … dirty pictures,” was the usual line. Said with a grin, and a hitch of the belt buckle into the gut.

“You must be in pictures … horror pictures,” was the new take. “You must be in pictures … Alfred Hitchcock pictures.”

“Watch your driving,” the cop actually said. “This is accident weather. How far have you got to go?”

She had no definite idea, but said “San Francisco.”

“You won’t make it by nightfall. I’d stop. Check into a motel.”

“That makes sense, sir.”

“No need for ‘sir.’ ‘Officer’ will do.”

The cop’s skin, under the rain, was grayish. This weather grayed everything out, like a black-and-white movie. The hillside mud should have been red, like blood … but it washed over the road like coffee grounds. Dark.