Gun in Cheek (30 page)

"Patience, old car," she said aloud. "We'll make it yet, if we both have to walk." (Grace Corren,
The Darkest Room
)

The house talked. (Barbara Michaels, The
Dark on the Other Side
)

Other Gothics must be dipped into a bit to uncover their true colors. The way to do this is to look for descriptive passages of the following sort:

She nodded and they relapsed into a long silence, as though the immense soundlessness of the place muffled them under a pall. She began searching the sky for a bird flying, anything to take the curse off the emptiness, and for this reason missed the first sight of Drachensgrab—dense dark boxwood hedges rearing up seven or eight feet. When she came to, they were running over the abrupt thunder of a short bridge that spanned the remains of a moat, and approaching the most sinister medieval gateway she had ever seen in her life. Awful, cruel and menacing, it bulked astoundingly before them. . . . In the pale hot sunlight its ancient stones had a splotched silvery cast, leprous. . . . (Evelyn Berckman,
The Evil of Time
)

A lightning blast awoke her. She lay in bed, drenched with sweat, the sheets tangled about her body, one corner twisted completely around her pillows was over her head.

A nightmare? A dream?

Selina could taste the scream in her throat, its afterlife still raw across her vocal tissues. (Grace Corren,
A Place on Dark Island
)

Wrapped in a clean cloth and covered neatly with a branch of white spirea, she found a chicken sandwich and one small, cold sausage beside a vial of milk. 0 ambrosia! 0 manna from heaven! The sweet remains of the dear old man's lunch, which he had saved to share with her. God bless him! Trembling with hunger and felicity at the joy to come, she buried the food under her arm and shrank into the shadows of the grape arbor out of sight, wolfing the food like a starved alley cat. (Ruth McCarthy Sears,
Wind in the Cypress
)

One can also examine passages of dialogue. Curiously enough, those beginning with the word "no" seem the most fruitful:

"No," she said in full retreat, reviling herself for her weak surrender to the joys of premature tongue-wagging. (Evelyn Berckman,
The Evil of Time
)

"No," I replied coldly, as I glimpsed through the broad windows out over the back drive, the white panel truck driving up, with Bockstein '5 written in fancy script on the side. I said firmly, "Dolly will lay the table, if you've finished with the silver and crystal." (Ann Forman Barron,
Bride of Menace
)

"No!" If he felt less angry, his young vis-à-vis looked more antagonistic than ever, if that was possible. (Charlotte Hunt,
The Cup of Chanatos
)

Yet another way to separate the chaff from the wheat, as it were, is to carefully read the publisher's jacket or cover blurbs. The choice items will almost always be advertised in the fashion of Jeanne Hines'
Bride of Terror
(1976):

Her Honeymoon Heaven Turned Into a Flaming Hell

From the moment Devon saw the Casa del Cielothe "House of the Sky"—she fell in love with it. This ancient Spanish-built castle, high on an almost inaccessible Mexican mountain, was to be her new home as she began her life as wife to Drake Jane-way . . . Already she felt as if she had loved Drake forever, and that the Casa del Cielo had been made for them alone.

Little did Devon realize that but a few nights later she would stand beside her husband and watch flames licking around the towers. Little did she suspect the truth about this man who had captured her heart. Little did she dream how soon after her wedding night her nightmare would begin…

Bride of Terror is an interesting specimen—an alternative giant of the Gothic genre that also, heretically, breaks many of the form's cardinal rules. But it does start off typically enough:

Devon Layne stood at the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, grasping desperately at the floppy straw hat with the wide yellow band that mingled, wind-whipped, with her bright yellow hair that fell like a shining shawl over her slim shoulders. That same wind, she told herself, had ruffled the manes of the conquistadores' horses and glanced off their bright armor as they marched on Moctezuma's Palace.

After which Devon meets Drake, a mysterious but compelling figure. It is, of course, love at first sight.

His arm slipped easily around her shoulders and she felt her heart constrict. The scent of the roses on her lap was almost overpowering. If he kisses me, she thought, I don't think I can stand it.

Well, he does kiss her and she does stand it. Rather well, too. A member of the tour group Devon is with (who, incidentally, has come down with "Moctezuma's Revenge") warns her against growing too close to a man she knows so little about. But Devon ignores this advice and later, when Drake proposes, agrees to marry him. The author, like most Gothic writers of the "Had I But Known" school, is compelled to let the reader know at this point that all is not rosy in Devon's future.

On the way back they passed a billboard advertising an airline. In the warm glow of happiness that enveloped her, the caption on the billboard did not strike her as even faintly ominous. It said, "Fly now—Pay Later."

After Devon and Drake are married, they move into the "House in the Sky" and commence their honeymoon. (This is the first of the atypical qualities: Devon loses her virginity on her wedding night.) Later, she and Drake are chased and almost caught by two hard-looking norteamericanos; when she questions him about their identity, he admits that they are Mafia hit men who are after him because he has something the Mafia wants—but he won't tell her what it is. (This is the second atypical quality: the Mafia generally has better things to do than run amok in Gothic suspense novels, so you almost never find them in one.)

Not only does Devon have this to worry about, but at night, Drake cries out the name of his dead first wife, Carla (one presumes not at intimate moments). And then—the unkindest cut of all—he takes to sleeping with a gun instead of Devon. Naturally she's upset and rather miffed by all this.

On angry feet, she ran up the tile stairs. But once in the big bedroom with its tall fireplace that slanted toward the ceiling at a rakish angle, its hearth that was raised a step above but made of blue tiles exactly like the floor, its casements and its heavy carved doors—the one to the hall and the other that connected with Drake's room—she undressed quickly and crouched in bed with her arms around her knees, thinking.

Drake gets reports that the Mafia hit men are closing in Casadel Cielo, so he decides to take Devon and flee to Mexico City, where a friend named Siggy, who works in the German embassy, will help them hide. Before they can leave, however, the hit men show up, and there is a running gun battle. (This is the third atypical quality: there is seldom anything so plebeian as a running gun battle in a Gothic novel.) Devon is sent to a bat-infested cave to wait for Drake's arrival. When he shows up, and they then leave the cave together, Devon is horrified to see that Casa del Cielo is on fire: "She stared at the pillar of flames leaping unchecked to the sky. Their honeymoon house. A leaping hatred rose up in her against the men who would do such a thing. Mafia monsters!"

They make their escape on horseback and are soon in Mexico City, safe in Siggy's apartment. A number of other exciting things happen to Devon in the Mexican capital—she goes shopping for new clothes, for one—and matters escalate until the truth about Drake and the Mafia comes out.

It seems that Drake met his first wife, Carla, on Capri and married her in Naples, not knowing that she was the daughter of a Mafia chieftain named Lantern Jaw Jake Barberetti. The Mafia Chieftain did not take kindly to his daughter marrying somebody named Drake Janeway, so he kidnapped his daughter and ordered Drake worked over by a couple of his—Lantern Jaw Jake's—goons.

But Carla and Drake got back together anyway, after Lantern Jaw discovered that Drake wasn't the first to deflower his precious little girl, and they did some traveling around Europe together with a pair of Mafia bodyguards. Carla was very jealous and believed Drake had been seeing other women on the sly. (Devon reflects that jealousy is a consuming passion: "There'd been a woman back in Applewood who was so jealous, she stabbed her husband with a paring knife when he answered the phone—and it had turned out to be a wrong number.") A few of Drake's friends began having fatal accidents, which he attributed to Carla and her bodyguards, and so he fell Out of love with her and decided to take the first plane home.

En route in New York, he learned that Lantern Jaw Jake, indicted by the 1"eds, had fled to Sicily and been shot to death by somebody who didn't want him to talk. Meanwhile, a woman named Ingrid, the wife of one of Drake's friends who had died in a fatal accident engineered by Carla, showed up at Kennedy Airport and told Drake she was going to kill Carla. Drake tried to talk Ingrid out of it, but she got away from him by shouting, "Oh, no, there's one of their goons now!" and then, when he turned to look, knocking him down the escalator with her suitcase.

It then developed that Ingrid murdered Carla in spite of her Mafia bodyguards, which made Lantern Jaw's right-hand man, Virelli, furious because Virelli was in love with Carla. Drake and Virelli had a terrific fight in Lantern Jaw's house in Cleveland (Drake had gone there to look for Ingrid because he knew the goons would have her there "burning designs on her stomach with cigarettes"). They knocked each other out, and when Drake regained consciousness, Virelli was gone. Accidentally—he was still groggy from the fight—Drake knocked over a bookcase, which in falling slid back part of the carpet, and underneath he discovered "this little hook-like thing in the floor." Knowing Lantern Jaw must have had a good reason for having a hook-like thing in the floor under the carpet, Drake tugged at it and was amazed to see a section of paneling slide back. Inside was a hidey-hole that contained four suitcases full of run-out money. Drake figured that since Carla and Lantern Jaw were both dead, he was the logical heir to all that loot. So he took it and later put it into secret-numbered Swiss bank accounts and a few well placed safe-deposit boxes.

And that was why the Mafia was after him.

Devon doesn't know what to say. But Drake is her man and she's determined to stick by him, even if he is a thief and an accessory to murder and has half the world's goons chasing after him. And there is all that money, of course, not that she cares very much about money. (This is the fourth atypical quality: the hero's wealth is not only ill gotten but is subsequently embraced by the heroine, which is something that is never supposed to happen in a Gothic.)

The novel's climax is very exciting. In a surprise twist, it is revealed that Carla isn't dead after all ("Carla! Not dead, but alive! Alive and well and living in Acapulco!"). It was Ingrid who was killed in Cleveland, which means that the postcard Drake received from Stockholm, supposedly signed by Ingrid, was a phony sent by the Mafia. So it was not only Virelli and the rest of the mob that were after Drake, it was Carla, too—because she wanted to take revenge on him for running out on her and for marrying another woman after she (Carla) was alleged to be dead.

The way Carla decides to kill both Devon and Drake is to have them jump off the terrace of a cliffside mansion into the roiling waters of Acapulco Bay below. And they do jump, just like the famed cliff divers at La Quebrada. But they aren't killed, of course; they survive the fall. Then they are almost sucked under by a riptide. They survive that, too. Then they hear a sudden roar, and a motor launch with Virelli at the wheel looms up in front of them. Also appearing, moments later, is a schooner belonging to Carla.

Devon and Drake are once again taken captive, this time aboard the schooner. But then there is another surprise: it is revealed that Virelli, in spite of his love for Carla, has been trying to take over control of the Mafia family that was rightfully hers after the death of Lantern Jaw Jake. Furious, Carla turns her gun on Virelli.

"No, Carla Maria! No, cara mia!" Instinctively Virelli brought up his own gun to shield himself. But too late. The gun in Carla's hand discharged twice, and Virelli, a shocked look on his face, suddenly doubled up, his fingers spasmodically clutching the trigger, causing his own heavy automatic to fire, and fire again, directly into that slender red-garbed figure who swayed like a reed caught in a strong wind and crumpled to the floor before he did.

With both Carla and Virelli dead, Devon and Drake slip out through a porthole and jump into the bay again. But when they surface, they hear more gunfire and realize that another boat, a cabin cruiser, has arrived on the scene. This one is populated by good old Siggy, "who helped them aboard with one hand, his other cradling a submachine gun which raked the deck of the black-sailed motor schooner, keeping all heads down."