Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

“When was the last time you got laid, Jacobs?”

I was truly and genuinely shocked. The man was twice, maybe three or four times my age; he walked with a bad limp from having taken an off-duty slug delivered by a kid messing with a 7-Eleven; he was married, with great-grandchildren stacked in egg-crates; and he was Eastern Orthodox Catholic; and he bit his nails. And he chewed paper. I was truly, even genuinely, shocked.

“Hey, don’t we have enough crap flying loose in this house without me having to haul your tired old ass up on sexual hare assment?”

“You wish.” He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. “So? Gimme a date, I’ll settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade.”

I didn’t think this was amusing. “I live the way I like.”

“You live like shit.”

I could feel the heat in my cheeks. “I don’t have to — ”

“No; you don’t. But I’ve watched you for a long time, Francine. I knew your step-father, and I knew Andy. ”

“Leave Andy out of it. What’s done is done.”

“Whatever. Andy’s gone, a long time now he’s been gone, and I don’t see you moving along. You live like an old lady, not even with the cat thing; and one of these days they’ll find your desiccated corpse stinking up the building you live in, and they’ll bust open the door, and there you’ll be, all leathery and oozing parts, in rooms filled with old Sunday newspaper sections, like those two creepy brothers. ”

“The Collyer Brothers.”

“Yeah. The Collyer Brothers.”

“I don’t think that’ll happen.”

“Right. And I never thought we’d elect some half-assed actor for President.”

“Clinton wasn’t an actor.”

“Tell that to Bob Dole.”

It was wearing thin. I wanted out of there. For some reason all this sidebar crap had wearied me more than I could say. I felt like shit again, the way I’d felt before dinner. “Are you done beating up on me?” He shook his head slowly, wearily.

“Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll start all over.” I thanked him, and I went home. Tomorrow, we’ll start all over. Right at the level of glistening black alleys. I felt like shit.

I was dead asleep, dreaming about black birds circling a garbage-filled alley. The phone made that phlegm-ugly electronic sound its designers thought was reassuring to the human spirit, and I grabbed it on the third. “Yeah?” I wasn’t as charming as I might otherwise have been. The voice on the other end was Razzia down at the house. “The three women. them models.?”

“Yeah, what about them?”

“They’re gone.”

“So big deal. They were material witnesses, that’s all. We know where to find ‘em.”

“No, you don’t understand. They’re really gone. As in ‘vanished.’ Poof! Green light. and gone.”

I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. “Green light?”

“Urey had ‘em in tow, he was takin’ ‘em down the front steps, and there was this green light, and Urey’s standin’ there with his dick in his mitt.” He coughed nervously. “In a manner ‘a speak-in’.”

I was silent.

“So, uh, Lootenant, they’re, uh, like no longer wit’ us.”

“I got it. They’re gone. Poof.”

I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed. Why not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for me; and some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk with love who now had vanished in front of everyone’s eyes; and we still had an old dead man with his head hanging by a thread.

The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.

I didn’t collect old newspapers. I had a subscription to Time. And the J. Crew catalogue.

And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to me.

As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early forties, tired as hell but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed the dream of true love.

She appeared in a green light. I understood that… it was part of the dream, from the things the bum Richard had said, that the women had said. In a green light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how beautiful I really was. She assured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was. and we made love.

If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a goddess, and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.

I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted from serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with her, to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in each other’s adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.

I said: take me away.

And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the three-room apartment, before dawn of the next day when I had to go back to death and gristle and puzzles that could only be solved by apprehending monsters. And we went away, yes, we did.

I am very old now. Soon I will no doubt close my eyes in a sleep even more profound than the one in which I lay when she came to release me from a life that was barely worth living. I have been in this cinnamon-scented place for a very long time. I suppose time is herniated in this venue, otherwise she would not have been able to live as long as she did, nor would she have been able to move forward and backward with such alacrity and ease. Nor would the twisted eugenics that formed her have borne such elegant fruit.

I could have sustained any indignity. The other women, the deterioration of our love, the going-away and the coming back, knowing that she… or he, sometimes. had lived whole lives in other times and other lands. With other women. With other men.

But what I could not bear was knowing the child was not mine. I gave her the best eternity of my life, yet she carried that damned thing inside her with more love than ever she had shown me. As it grew, as it became the inevitable love-object, I withered.

Let her travel with them, whatever love-objects she could satisfy, with whatever was in that dirty paper bag, and let them wail if they choose. but from this dream neither he nor she will ever rise. I am in the green light now, with the machete. It may rain, but I won’t be there to see it.

Not this time.

Peter Straub is the author of a number of best-selling novels, including Ghost Story, Shadowland, Koko, The Throat and The Hellfire Club. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, two World Fantasy Awards and the International Horror Guild Award (for “Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff”). He also received the Life Achievement Award at the 1997 World Horror Convention.

More recently he published a new novel, Mr X, and the novella Pork Pie Hat appeared as part of Orion’s Criminal Records series. A new collection of shorter fiction, Magic Terror, is forthcoming.

About the following powerful novella, the author explains, “I had been thinking about what I might do with Herman Melville’s great story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ when Otto Penzler asked me to contribute to an anthology based on the theme of revenge. ‘All right,’ I thought, ‘let’s do a “Bartleby” about revenge.’

“I had to do something with ‘Bartleby’, anyhow, as I hadn’t been able to think about anything else since I reread it. Plus the idea of revenge exacted by revenge itself, which is the only kind of revenge interesting enough to write about, seemed to fit pretty well into a story about a man who cannot rid himself of a mysterious employee. Once I started, the entire story seemed to fall happily into place. I should add that the lyrical descriptions of cigar-smoke are jokes about connoisseurship.”