The Best New Horror 2 (48 page)

“The period during which you vanished? ‘Ran to earth’?” Jonathan was aware of his own sharpened, inquisitive gaze, of his more aggressive posture in the chair. He was automatically grilling Haskell. To atone he added, “Said the devil’s advocate,” and Haskell’s eyebrows arched.

“Jon, the Conclave doesn’t believe in what insurance companies call acts of God. They always try to anticipate what sort of scam will be run on them. I’m not the first to try, though I may be the first to succeed. The trick is knowing when to
stop
thinking like a Scripter. I planned not to plan, and wound up doing the sort of entirely random thing that would never be accepted in fiction. I took my knapsacks full of
incriminata
and hitchhiked. While I was riding my thumb, they went berserk scouring California, checking banks, monitoring LAX and municipal skyports and bus depots and Union Station and car rental agencies and I wasn’t even in California! But California is where they caught me. After I’d come back.” His eyes were aglint with some private joke, some fundamental trivium he was purposefully omitting from his story.

“Without the knapsacks.” Jonathan tried to sum the bits and orts of information in order to extrapolate.

Haskell stood up again and paced like Sherlock Holmes about to finger a murderer from suspects congregated before a Victorian hearth. “I know what you’re thinking, Jon—with a setup like I’ve described, it would seem reckless of me to just drop in on you after all these years, entirely by chance, right?”

“I was going to ask why me.”

“When I infiltrated the files at Briar Lane, I found a doctors’ directory—you know, that binder thing they constantly update with inserts. I looked up your name and hot damn, there you were. It was just like we’d speculated. I’d become a screenwriter—a Scripter—and you’d become a shrink. It even had your home address.”

“Conveniently enough,” said Jon. “A paranoid mind might see a plot brewing in a simple fact like that.”

“Oh yeah. My first thought. I guess that confirms me as a sicko. But consider, Jon: if you’d been seduced by the Conclave, you would’ve put me under with a drug in the cognac and remanded me to the boys in the white vans for pumping . . . except for one thing. The one thing they weren’t able to get out of me when they had me, through drugs or threats or promises, and the one thing they might be desperate enough to try subterfuge to win. The one thing I haven’t mentioned yet—the location of the blackmail material. Where I went when I took my little excursion.”

“My office could have been bugged without my knowledge, Haskell.”

“
Now
you’re thinking like a Scripter. Tempting job, isn’t it? At least, the way it looks from the outside. Mass manipulation of entire populations would especially intrigue a psychiatrist or a sociologist. I saw your sheepskins on both, Jon. They’re right behind the desk.” He watched Jonathan’s eyes track to the frames on the wall and back. “But I don’t think they’d try something as superhuman as bugging each of my past acquaintances in all of Los Angeles. The Conclave prefers buying people to equipment.”

Jonathan gestured impatiently, urging Haskell to get on with it. “So what’s the punchline, Haskell? You going to string me along, or tell me whether you trust me or not?”

Haskell smiled. “Ah,
now
you’re in character—do you see? The concerned analyst banking on his patient’s faith; just the right amount of deep sobriety and interest.” He held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Just enough irritation to prompt the patient to reassure him with the truth.” He moved to the closed curtains, arms spread as though entreating an unseen audience. “Is he playing a role?” He brought his hands together in one swift clap. “Or is he for real?”

“All right, Haskell, goddamnit!” His fingers were clawed across the chair arms like marble spiders; his face was indignantly flushed. “I’ll play this stupid game just to help you!” He pointed his finger like a weapon. “Here it comes, look out for it! What did you do with the blackmail material?” His eyes were bulging, and when his lips stopped speaking they curled back, loading a full clip of invective.

“
The question
!” Haskell shouted. “At last! And you know what, Jon? I’ll answer your question honestly if you’ll answer one of mine honestly.” He buried his hands in his pockets and leaned against one of the bookcases. “If you’re really my pal, then I’ve gotten this story out of my guts and into the ear of a real human being unlike those bloodless slugs in the Conclave. Plus I’ve gained a reliable fail-safe for my blackmail material; something very
desirable and worth a risk like coming here and exposing myself. Right?”

“Ask.” His gaze had turned metallic.

“Have you ever heard of the Conclave before tonight?” Now Haskell had folded his arms. All humor had fled from his face.

“No!”

“Why haven’t you had any of the brandy you brought from the kitchen, Jon?”

Jonathan grew flustered. “I thought you—” He stopped, wiped his face. “I was waiting to get rid of the Grand Marnier a bit before I had some.” The brandy bottle Jonathan had brought into the room sat untouched, as did Jonathan’s highball glass.

“Why don’t you have some right now?” Haskell’s voice was level, reasoned. Strangely, he looked much healthier now than when he’d stumbled across Jonathan’s threshold earlier this evening.

“In good time, Haskell.” He sighed, stabbing his finger in the air again. “I refuse to get angry with you. You’re—”

“Come off it, Jonathan!” Haskell spun, ran his finger along the spines of the books against which he had been leaning, and drew out Jonathan’s thousand-dollar Arion edition of Moby Dick. He let the front cover drop open, revealing a hollow that had been sliced out of the thickness of pages. Secured within the hollow was a small Sanyo tape recorder. Haskell slammed the book shut, dropped it to the carpet with a thump, and pulled from his pocket a cassette tape, waving it in the air. “I took this out while you were in the
john
, Jonathan! Over half an hour ago!”

Jonathan’s mouth was open but his teeth were not clenched anymore. His face went pale and he lost whatever words he had prepared.

“Your eyes went right from the book to the telephone, Jon. You know the number as well as I do: 727–3933. The numbers make a word, Jonathan, that’s how we remember it. Punch in that number and a white van will roll up your drive in a neat five minutes.” He shook his head slowly. “I was hoping you might not sell me down the river, Jon.” He made a furious, frustrated motion with his fist. “Shit! It couldn’t have been the money. It had to have been the control they offered you. Had to be.”

Jonathan pushed himself slowly up from the recliner. “The tape is part of my hardware, Haskell; it’s SOP for anybody who talks to me in as disturbed a state as you brought through the door with you. No plot, no boobytrap . . .” His voice had turned authoritarian and succoring. He was back in character.

“Have a jolt of brandy, Jonathan,” Haskell said, indicating the untouched bottle, perceiving in his heart the kind of arrogance it
took to carve a hole in a thousand-dollar book for the purpose of subterfuge.

“I will not.” Teacher to unruly delinquent. Jonathan turned his back on Haskell and moved toward the desk. He heard Haskell catch up with him, felt his hand grasp his own fore-arm, expected to be turned back certainly, to be struck possibly. His fancied control of the situation admitted nothing further.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to insist,” said Haskell, grasping, and spinning, and striking him, but not in the way he expected.

Jonathan saw Haskell’s flat, openhanded blow coming, with little real velocity to cause pain. He could weather the impact and remain standing. Then he saw the metal knickknack from Haskell’s pocket between his index and middle fingers, flying to meet him. He felt a sharp needle pain in the muscles of his neck. Haskell jumped away. Jonathan’s openhanded grab came up empty.

“
Damn!
” The tiny puncture stung, enraging him. He lifted the receiver of the desk phone and punched two digits before his hand swelled up and got too fat to function. He dropped the receiver. It clunked on the desktop and fell to the floor, uncoiling the cable. He pawed for the desk edge with an incredulous expression on his face, missed, and followed the phone to the floor, where he lolled like some armless, legless thing attempting locomotion. Haskell stood by the sofa, near the curtains.

“The CIA calls this thing a sting-bee, Jonathan. Like king bee, I guess. Most of your motor coordination will be out for about an hour. As you’re discovering, your eyes will still focus and you can hear me perfectly . . . but that’s it.” He parted the curtains for another check.

“I’ve done a little deduction, too, Jonathan, with the result of leaving you in another quandary, as you said. Sorry. But here it is: I guessed the Conclave would appeal to you. They must have propositioned you right after your divorce from Janice—same as me. As an acid test, an invitation, they want you to snare me for them, and they give you my story. You arrange for your name to be planted at Briar Lane as a memory key—it’s easily predictable, like giving someone a university yellow pages. You’d automatically look up your old compatriots, well, so did I, and this was a specific listing of psychiatrists, which made it a pretty sure thing. In return, you promise to uncover for the Conclave the location of the blackmail leverage, having gained in confidence from me. After all, I’m years in your past; easy enough to screw over for the right kind of carrot.

“But you’d better start worrying about this, Jon: what if I’m a loyalty test for you? My whole story could have been fabricated as a Conclave gambit to test your resiliency—how far do old friendships reach? Did I escape tonight, or did you let me get away? Think about
it, when you’re explaining to the Conclave why I’m not here and why you don’t have what they want. That’s part one of your dilemma. Part two is this—if I’m not a test, then you’re going to have to cover for me. I anticipated this because I’m a veteran and you’re a tyro at this game. You’re going to have to dance pretty fast to convince them I’m either dead for real, or impotent as a threat to them, because if you don’t, they’ll kill
you
for botching things.

“If you succeed in snowing them, then you’ll be in. You’ll get to be a Scripter. And after a year, three years, five, you’ll get just as sick of it as I have. You see, Jon, you’re exactly as I was when I went in. I know how you’ll react. And perhaps a few years from now we’ll run into each other out there in the wilderness somewhere. As for now, I’ve just relieved myself out of the onus of paranoia that’s dogged me ever since I opted out. I’ve given it to you. And with that shadow hanging over your shoulder, you’ll learn how horrible the Conclave really is—you’ll learn it in the only meaningful way to be had, and maybe it’ll turn you into an ally eventually. As for right now—”

He pulled out Jonathan’s billfold, extracted the cash, and replaced it. Jonathan’s body was a wet, composureless mail sack. His eyes glared, beaten, amazed, and helpless. Drool rolled out of one corner of his slack mouth and was absorbed into the expensive carpeting.

Haskell ducked out of the den and reappeared with a can of Dr Pepper from Jonathan’s refrigerator, emptying it quickly. “Talk like this always makes me thirsty. Don’t worry, Jon, I’m gone, untraceably, just as soon as I make a phone call.”

He collected the phone from the floor and tapped the cradle impatiently until he got a dial tone. “You remember the word, of course, Jon? The word they gave us so we’d never forget the phone number? SCREWED.”

When he heard the connection go through, Haskell placed the open receiver on the desktop, tossed the prone form of Jonathan a little mocking salute, and left. Jonathan heard the back door slam, could even feel its vibrations against his cheek through the floor. That was all he could do. Haskell had thoughtfully extinguished the house lights on his way out, and he could see nothing.

Five minutes later, van headlights flashed against the backside of the den’s curtains. Then the house fell dark again.

P
OPPY
Z. B
RITE
spent her earliest years in New Orleans, the setting for the atmospheric story that follows, and describes the city as able “to make death seem romantic even to the most hard-hearted.” She has lived all over the American South and has worked as a candy maker, an artist’s model, a gourmet cook, a mouse caretaker, and an exotic dancer.

Her first fiction was published in
The Horror Show
magazine between 1985 and 1990 and, in the Fall 1987 issue, she was featured as a “Rising Star” of modern horror. More recently her stories have appeared in the anthologies
Borderlands, Women of Darkness II
,
Dead End: City Limits
and
Still Dead
(
Book of the Dead II
). She has completed her first novel, and she longs to travel to India.

“T
O THE TREASURES AND THE PLEASURES OF THE GRAVE
,” said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.

“To the funeral lilies,” I replied, “and to the calm pale bones.” I drank deeply from my own glass. The absinthe cauterized my throat with its flavor, part pepper, part licorice, part rot. It had been one of our greatest finds: more than fifty bottles of the now-outlawed liqueur, sealed up in a New Orleans family tomb. Transporting them was a nuisance, but once we had learned to enjoy the taste of wormwood, our continued drunkenness was ensured for a long, long time. We had taken the skull of the crypt’s patriarch, too, and it now resided in a velvet-lined enclave in our museum.

Louis and I, you see, were dreamers of a dark and restless sort. We met in our second year of college and quickly found that we shared one vital trait: both of us were dissatisfied with everything. We drank straight whiskey and declared it too weak. We took strange drugs, but the visions they brought us were of emptiness, mindlessness, slow decay. The books we read were dull; the artists who sold their colorful drawings on the street were mere hacks in our eyes; the music we heard was never loud enough, never harsh enough to stir us. We were truly jaded, we told one another. For all the impression the world made upon us, our eyes might have been dead black holes in our heads.