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

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course not. You are an innocent party in this situation … my m-m-mother deserves to die, don’t you think? And not naturally. No, that would not be just. She is a most exquisitely m-m-m-murderable personage.”

He had worked hard to overcome a stutter, but it slipped back.

“Shootable? Poisonable? Throttlable? Bludgeonable?”

Arthur’s fat-wreathed eyes came alive. He reminded Jayne of …

“Stabbable? Slashable? Beheadable? Deadable?”

His recitative was almost a tune. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump …

He broke off.

“Happy thoughts, Miss Wobble.”

“But morbid,” she ventured.

“Practical. What do you do for a living, Miss Wobble? Presuming that you do live …?”

Normally, she would say she was an actress — which was partially true. But that always prompted the same response. “Have I seen you in anything?” And that lead, if the enquirer was at all interesting, to “If you’ve watched most of my pictures, you’ve seen me in not much of anything at all …” Then, smiles, drinks, and a happy ending.

Now, she was a thief, a saboteur. She had to be careful. Arthur was not interesting, not in that way.

“I’m in motion pictures. Makeup girl.”

“An interesting expression. Makeup girl? What do you make up for?”

“Hard nights, mostly. Filling in the cracks so the camera doesn’t see.”

Arthur unbuttoned his slicker. He took it off and hung it on a coat-tree, as if it belonged there. She hadn’t invited him to stay.

“The camera sees all, though,” he said, pointing at one of the portrait pictures. A dramatic, Satanic pose — a big-eyed vamp resting her chin on her crossed wrists, under a stuffed goat head on a pentacle. Jayne thought she could see Birdie in this jazz-age sinner. The eyes were the same.

“The laughter is frozen and the rot shows through,” said Arthur. “The pleasure garden in spring is a family plot in autumn. Photography makes corpses of us all. Snatches little dead moments and pins them down for all eternity. You apply makeup to the dead, too.”

“Not me. I work with actresses.”

“Actresses should be dead, don’t you think? Mahmah once called herself an ‘actress,’ though she never set her dainty foot on a the boards. Stage fright, would you believe? Who would you wish dead, Miss Wobble?”

Men. Hitch.

“Me? Oh, no one. I say live and let live, you know. I like love stories. Not stories with murders.”

“All great love stories end in murder, though. Or could end in murder …”

He sat down in a cane armchair, crossing his stubby legs and settling his stomach into his lap.

His torso was like a big egg, with another big egg — his head — set on top of it. Soft-boiled, unshelled. If she had a knife, like the movie prop knife, could she cut into those eggs? Find the yolks still molten and trickling.

Arthur’s murder talk was getting to her.

“How would you like to murder my mother, Miss Scribble?”

That was like a stab to the chest.

“You couldn’t be traced. Not with your signature, your phony address …”

Phony . That stood out. A wrong word. American, not consistent with Arthur’s British manner of speaking.

“I can be counted on to give a most misleading description. You wouldn’t even be a woman. You’d be a man … a swarthy, horny-handed man … the type my mother is attracted to, but who are no good for her, no good for anyone … a man’s man, a man from the Isle of Man … a man with big hands, workman’s hands, neck-snapping, larynx-crushing hands. Afterwards, we would both be free …”

“Free?”

“Yes. I would be free of Mahmah, of this place. You would be freer, free of … of the constraints of petty Protestant morality.”

“I’m Catholic.”

“Well, easy to do it then! You sin on Saturday night and are washed clean Sunday morning … just take care not to die unshriven between the two sacraments. The sacraments of murder and confessional.”

“I don’t really like this, Mr. Hayslip. I’m not comfortable.”

“We’re just talking, Miss Alias … shooting the breeze, yarning away the night hours while the storm rages without … without what, I always think, without what?”

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” she said.

“A bold, sweeping statement. Would you kill to protect yourself from, say, a vile ravisher?”

Too late for that.

“Or to secure an inheritance, a fortune that you could use on good works if it were liberated from a miser who makes no use of it?”

“Is your mother rich?”

“No, she’s strange . She hasn’t a bean, Miss Alibi. Just this place. Half on the cliff. Half on the beach. She has only her memories. Her disgusting memories.”

“I’m sure she’s not as bad as that. She’s just a woman.”

Arthur leaned forwards, eyes shining. “Just a woman? Just? Maybe … maybe, at that … but it’s no excuse, is it? It’s no reason she should be spared from God’s judgment. Quite the opposite. It was Eve, was it not, who lead mankind into Sin? Eve, the femme fatale and the farmer’s wife. Eve who brought about the Fall. Should not Eve be punished, over and over and over …?”

A thin line of spit, like spider-silk, descended from Arthur’s wet mouth. He repeatedly slammed a pudgy, soft, tiny fist into the palm of his other hand.

It struck Jayne that Arthur Hayslip was hateful, but harmless.

If she killed this stranger’s mother, what would he do for her? What wouldn’t he do for her? Rain rattled the windows. The cabin shook, like a train compartment on an express.

“You don’t know how to do it to a woman, do you?” she said. “You blame her, your mother, but it’s your weakness.”

He drew back. “I am a man of the world, my dear,” he said. “Your sex holds no mystery for me. I know too much for that.”

She tittered. He flushed, red.

“You couldn’t hurt a fly, if you wanted to. You don’t want to murder your mother, you want someone else to murder your mother. But that would be the end for you, the ending you didn’t guess was coming. The twist in the last reel. There would be nothing. Without her, you’d be a dummy without a ventriloquist …”

“Mummy,” he murmured, “mummy’s dummy …”

All at once, she didn’t want to press on. There was no point in it, in making an unhappy wretch more wretched. That wasn’t heroic, that was bullying. She’d been bullied enough herself to hate that.

How many times had she been stripped and stabbed this week? In play, in fun, for entertainment? She had been murdered, over and over …

“Has he asked you to top me?” shrilled a voice from the door. “He asks all the lodgers to top me. All the ones he fancies, at least. Girlies and boysies, he’s not too particular …”

Birdie flapped into the room, trailing a soaked shawl. Her wig shone with rainwater.

She pinched her son’s pendulous earlobe and yanked.

“Naughty Arthur, bothering the girlies …”

Arthur’s face screwed up with pain.

“Lord knows I’ve tried, ducks … but my boy’s just a nasty little shit. No other words for it. I’ll get him out of your hair and you can turn in. He tell you about the hot water?”

“There isn’t any?”

“That’s right. Pity, but there it is. Come on, Arthur … time to say nighty-night.”

Birdie pulled Arthur out of the chair. She was taller than him.

“Be polite,” she insisted, twisting the earlobe.

“Nighty-night, Miss,” he said, through tears. “Nighty-night, Aphrodite in a nightie …”