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

Birdie took the umbrella and dragged her son back through the cabin door. They disappeared into the rain and darkness.

Jayne shut the door.

Her heart was pounding and her face burned. She was more embarrassed than afraid. She would leave early tomorrow.

For where? They’d be after her, by then. Hitch’s agents. Paramount and Universal. Walter.

Think of that later. After sleep.

The door blew open again and Arthur was there, breathing heavily. He had broken free of his mother.

“What’s in the sack?” he asked.

The question knifed into her heart.

Birdie came up behind Arthur, fingers hooked into talons, screeching …

Scree! Scree! Scree!

Jayne backed away and clutched the sack.

“What would you do for what’s in the sack?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing. Nothing. A negative.”

Arthur smiled wickedly as Birdie dragged him away again, kicking the door shut.

Jayne sat down on the big bed and hugged the sack. It was heavy, lumpy, hard. Useless, yet beyond value. A measure of her suffering, but just deadweight. She threw it away and it lay like an extra pillow.

She would sleep on the other bed, the small one.

If she could sleep …

She went into the bathroom and turned on the light. It was tile-floored. The mirror had a scrollwork border etched into the glass. The claw-foot bathtub bled rust into the cracks between the tiles. There was no shower attachment.

She ran the tap, just to make sure. Icy cold bit her fingers.

At least there were towels.

She breathed mist on the mirror and wrote JANA in it, then watched her name vanish as the exhalation evaporated.

She undressed, not like she did for pictures. Not for show, but to get out of her heavy, sodden clothes. She unpeeled damp, sticky layers — cardigan, skirt, blouse, slip, brassiere, shoes, stockings, panties. She would have to wear most of these again tomorrow, since she’d not thought to bring more than a change of underthings. They wouldn’t dry completely by then.

What was she doing?

The towels weren’t wet but they weren’t warm. The rough nap rubbed her skin the wrong way. She saw herself naked in the mirror. Without moleskin patches. She didn’t look the way she did on film. She looked already dead. Her next makeup artist would be a mortician.

There was a bathrobe. She pulled it on, wrapping it tight over her stabbable breasts, her slashable back, her sliceable limbs.

She turbaned her dried, scraggly hair with another towel.

Turning out the bathroom light, she stepped back into the bedroom.

Arthur was sitting on the big bed, the sack open. He had scratches down one side of his face. His velvet jacket was soaked. His slicker still hung in the cabin.

“What is this?” he asked.

The pie-shaped can lay on the bed, sealed with tape.

“Negative.”

“Answer me,” he insisted, angry. “No word games.”

“Negative,” she said. “Film negative.”

Arthur smiled, the penny dropping.

“Motion pictures,” he said. “Dirty pictures?”

“I’m naked in them,” she admitted. “And dead, like you said. Snatched dead moments. Useless moments.”

He ran his fat fingers over the can. She knew he wanted to see … but it was hopeless: he’d need to make a positive print, run it on a projector …

“It’s the thing you’re chasing after, Arthur. A woman, me, being cut up. It’s the only evidence it happened. The only evidence it happened to me… .”

She had stolen weeks from Hitch. Weeks it would take to stage again, with Janet or some other stand-in … if he could ever get it just so, just the way he wanted, which she doubted was possible, or hoped wasn’t possible.

The studio would pay, if Hitch wouldn’t.

Arthur scratched at the tape seal with his fingernails.

Jayne heard Hitch in her skull, ranting at her, raving at his loss … swearing vengeance and retribution and blood … impotent fury. “I shall make sure the chit will never work in this town again!” She’d heard that before … so had everyone. Sure, she could be blacklisted, but blacklists were broken all the time. Being dead to one producer just bumped you up on another’s books. Plenty would hire her because she’d pissed off High and Mighty Cocky Mr. Hitch. Directors without TV shows, who no one would recognize in the street … David Selznick, William Castle, William Wyler … the giant leech and dragstrip doll guys. She’d do all right.

The tape tore away in Arthur’s fingers and the can popped open. A coil of 35mm negative came loose, like guts spilling from a wound. Arthur tried to grasp it, but the edges scored his palms.

He saw the reverse image of her naked in the shower — a thin black body bleeding white — repeated over and over.

He smiled and she saw Hitch’s slobbering leer imposed briefly over the fat boy’s face.

M-m-m-murder!

She grabbed the film and looped it around and around his fat neck.

Arthur yelped.

She wound it tighter. The edges bit into his soft throat. There was blood, which made the film slick, tough to hold.

Jayne didn’t say anything. She just tried to kill a man. Any Hitch with a cock would have done.

The murder weapon was a murder. A negative murder.

“Good eeeev-ning, Jay-y-ne … do you swallow? Do you, do you?”

Shootable? Poisonable? Throttlable? Bludgeonable?

Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump …

Stabbable? Slashable? Beheadable? Deadable?

She made a noise in the back of her throat. More a croak than a screech.

Scree! Scree! Scree!

His fat hands flapped against the sleeves of her bathrobe. His sausage fingers couldn’t get a grip on the flannel.

Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump …

It was like wrestling a marionette, strangling it with its own strings.

Doo-doo-doo … Doo-doo-doo …

The door opened again and Birdie came in — wig gone, showing a mummy-like scalp, scaled with the last wisps of white hair — an umbrella raised like a dagger.

“Get your hands off my boy,” she screamed. “My precious, precious boy …”

“Mummy,” Arthur gargled, tears flowing freely, “mummy! She’s hurting me.”

The umbrella blows were feeble, hurt less than a prop knife, but the words — the panic, the love, the desperation! — cut through Jayne’s hot fury, dashed cold water over her homicidal impulse.

She let go of the film. She let go of her rage.

The old woman hugged her son and stroked his wounds. The fat young man shoved his face against his mother’s shrunken breast. They held each other, locked together in an embrace tighter than death. They rocked together, crone and baby, crying away the pain, all the pain …

“I didn’t mean any harm,” Jayne said.

… she wouldn’t kill, after all … she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

This was it, she realized, looking at mother and son, monsters both, bound by a ferocious love that seemed so much like murderous hate it was hard to recognize until the last moment.

This was it. The only ending they had.

Francis Perry shifted in the chair in front of Mr. Lewis’s antique desk. Lewis scanned the proposal, motionless pen poised between tan fingers. Lewis’s office was almost as big as the ambassador’s. The equatorial sun burned slanting lines through the curtains, bleaching the hardwood floor. Rows of diplomatic commissions from Lewis’s postings hung on one wall: Harare, Sanaa, Dongola, Lagos, Dhaka, Freetown, Kinshasa, and now Sayhad. The Democratic Republic of Hadhramaut was Perry’s first posting.