Edited by, p.20
Edited By, page 20
“Deacon,” he said, shutting the door more carefully behind him, but the way he said it, Deacon hardly recognized his own name. “So what you got for me, bubba,” and the words sighed out, hushed of their intended tone, sieved raw. Deacon chewed at his lower lip, toying with a ragged piece of skin there, his eyes drawn past the impatient envelope to the dusty gray streaking the detective’s suit, unwashed hands stained with rust and dirt.
“C’mon Deke. You even look sober, man. Something’s up,” and still that brittleness, picture-perfect likeness of Hammond’s bluster, but cold porcelain cast and maybe already broken. Sharp and scattered edges waiting to slice. Deacon set down his coffee cup, no clear spot on the desk, so he put it on the floor a safe distance from his feet. And then he slid the big green book from beneath the envelope, Art Through The Ages and Matisse’s five dancing maidens on the cover, imperfect ring, left hand to right to left; began to flip through dog-eared pages as he spoke fast, nearly stuttering, before he lost his nerve.
“Remember when you said that it didn’t matter whether or not you believed, if I even believed, that the only thing that mattered to you was whether or not it worked? You said that, the first time—”
“I remember what I said, Deacon.”
“It’s important this time,” and he wandered past Hieronymus Bosch and the St. Anne altarpiece and into pages of baroque architecture; couldn’t recall the page number, but this was certainly too far, and so he began to search more slowly backwards. “It’s important, or else you’re gonna throw me out on my ass before I’m finished.”
And there, the top two-thirds of page 691, and he turned the book around so Hammond could see, bent across the desk; caught the fusty smell clinging to the detective beneath ubiquitous stale menthol, faint dampness, mold and iron rot.
“This was done by a Sixteenth Century German painter named Hans Holbein,” and he pointed at the two men in the painting, standing, neat-trimmed beards and somber faces, before an emerald curtain, arms resting on the tall side table between them.
“They were ambassadors to England. You have to understand, this thing is fucking meticulous. Look at the stuff on the table,” and he jabbed his finger, first at a globe, then a compass, astronomical and navigational instruments he knew no names for. “The realism is incredible. He got every detail, the numbers on the sundial, the broken string on the lute, and the perspective is flawless. But here,” and Deacon moved his finger down towards the men’s shadowed feet. “There,” and the gray-black slash across the bottom of the painting. “What do you see there?” Hammond took the book from him, shrugged, stared a moment longer before shaking his head. “Now,” Deacon said, “Move your face a little closer to the book, and look across the painting from an angle, towards the upper right-hand corner.”
Hammond hesitated, mouth drawn taut and sincerest I-have-no-intention-of-humoring-you-much-longer cast in his eyes, but then he obeyed, leaned close and tilted his head, stared at The French Ambassadors, eyes narrowed, almost squinting.
“Do you see it?” Deacon said, nearly a whisper.
Hammond shook his head again, his cheek almost touching the paper now. “Yeah, okay, it’s a skull,” he said, “but it’s still distorted, all stretched out.”
“That’s because Holbein meant it to be viewed through a special cylinder shaped mirror. Now,” and he reached for the envelope, noticed how his hands had begun to tremble, “look at this.” Deacon pulled out the giraffe drawing and laid it inside the open book. “The smudge up next to the head. Try the same thing, except this time, look out of the corner of your eye, straight down from the top edge of the paper.”
Hammond paused, then set aside the textbook and lifted the drawing, flat across both palms, to eye level. He turned his head away so that he seemed to be watching a row of file cabinets across the office, instead. Then, lips parted slightly and not exactly a sigh, but lungs emptying, breath across ivory-yellowed teeth and nothing drawn in to replace the expelled air.
“It’s there on every one of them, more than once on some,” Deacon said, and waited for a response. Hammond said nothing, laid the drawing on the desk and continued to stare at the file cabinets.
But Deacon knew what he’d seen, knew what Sarah M. had carefully scrawled there in the same deliberate hand as she’d decorated the giraffe. Knobby arc of wings and the ridiculous, needle-toothed grin, the spidery arms and legs, too many joints, ending in the stiletto intimation of claws. Pupiless eyes like poisonous blue-black berries.
“Okay, bubba,” Hammond said quietly, sometime later, after he’d finally returned the giraffe to the envelope and closed Art Through The Ages, “now it’s my turn.”
Deacon and the detective sat alone in the darkened conference room, their faces lit by a shifting salt-and-pepper blizzard of electronic snow; Hammond had hit the mute button even before the tape began, and now, past the three and a half minutes salvaged from Gramb’s apartment, the voiceless storm raged across the screen.
“The optics guys thought maybe it was a flaw in the camera lens,” Hammond said; he made no move to turn the lights back up or shut off the television.
Deacon concentrated furiously on the writhing static, but saw nothing past the last seconds, the last scratched frames of tape. Final, brutal close-up of Sarah’s face, harsh light and tears and something indistinct moving rapidly across the shot. And then the VCR had clicked itself off, rewind whir, and this, white and gray and black and him talking, the things he’d seen in his apartment when he’d held the giraffe, the darting blur and the piss-stinking place. Playing the proper psychic and describing every sound, the traffic, the dripping water, every vague, half-assed excuse for an impression he could recall.
And Hammond nodded, took out a Kool, but didn’t light it, held the cigarette tight between his fingers and stared down at the dull glimmer from the television reflected in his shoes.
“Yeah, bubba,” he said. “Well, we’ve been there. We tracked down a realtor friend of Mr. Grambs this evening, and he was nice enough to show us a basement over on Butler,” and Hammond coughed, clearing his throat, too loud in the dark room. “Shit, Deke, those guys had their own little Hollywood crammed into a hole about the size of the men’s crapper down the hall.”
“No,” Deacon said. “The place I saw was nothing like that.”
“They were keeping her in a subbasement, Deke. Christ, there are old cellars and tunnels down there that go all the way back to the friggin’ Civil War. Nobody has any fucking idea…” and Deacon turned, his chair grating on the tile; the detective looked like an old man, timesick, every line, every wrinkle deepened, and bleeding shadow.
“We found the trapdoor under a throw rug, right there in the middle of the basement. Brand new Yale padlock on it, big enough to choke a goddamn horse,” and he held up his fist to demonstrate.
“I climbed down first, this rickety-shit ladder, you know. Guess it went down twenty or twenty-five feet, and the floor was just cobblestones. It was like crawling into the sewers, man, the smell…” Deacon looked away, didn’t care for the sudden age masking Hammond’s face, clouding his eyes.
“That kid’s been missing since February, Deke.”
“She was dead?”
“Dead? Hell, she wasn’t even there. I stepped off that ladder right into a bunch of those goddamn mushrooms, huge things, high as my ankle and big around as dinner plates. I shined a flashlight around, hardly ten feet square, and it was just like before. Not a soul, just this perfect circle of those things. And the bones, pokin’ up out of all those toadstools. And this.”
Hammond removed something from the pocket of his jacket, handed it to Deacon. Slippery, cool plastic, an evidence bag, already numbered, and inside, something he had to hold up into the flickering light to see clearly. Four, maybe five ginger strands of hair.
“Listen, bubba. I’m telling you this because if I don’t tell someone…but it doesn’t leave this room. Do you understand?”
“Who would I tell, Hammond?”
“I picked those up right at the center, before anyone else came down the ladder. And I swear before the saints and angels and Holy Jesus, they weren’t just lying there, Deke, they were sticking up out of those old cobbles. I had to break them off.”
Deacon passed the bag back to the detective, and for a little while they sat, not speaking, only their breathing and footsteps coming and going in the hallway outside, muffled conversation from other rooms.
“I’m not going to be able to help you anymore,” Deacon said, and he stood up. Hammond remained seated, had gone back to staring at his shoes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I truly am sorry about that, bubba, but after this shit, I guess it’s fair enough. You take care of yourself, Deacon Silvey.”
“Yeah, you too,” and then Deacon walked to the door, slow, stepping cautiously around other chairs, invisible in the dark and the flittering afterimages from the television screen. The doorknob was cold, almost as cold as the fluorescent light that flooded in through the open door, keen and sterile light that could cut like scalpel steel if you looked directly at it long enough.
He shut the door behind him.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.
W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child” (1886)
Anamorphosis
Lethal Kisses, published in 1996, was intended as a follow-up to Little Deaths, which was a sexual horror anthology, but with the theme of revenge and vengeance. The book was commissioned by Caroline Oakley of Millennium. Publisher Anthony Cheetham changed our title Wild Justice to Lethal Kisses: 19 Stories of Sex, Horror and Revenge, with the cover art showing a sexily dressed woman standing with her back to us, holding a knife behind that back—and a guy with no shirt seated next to her. Few, if any of the stories, are at all sexual.
“Anamorphosis” by Caitlín R. Kiernan, a harrowing, early story by the author.
The Hortlak
by Kelly Link
(From The Dark: New Ghost Stories, 2003)
Eric was night, and Batu was day. The girl, Charley, was the moon. Every night, she drove past the All-Night in her long, noisy, green Chevy, a dog hanging out the passenger window. It wasn’t ever the same dog, although they all had the same blissful expression. They were doomed, but they didn’t know it.
Bız buradan çok hoslandık.
We like it here very much.
The All-Night Convenience was a fully stocked, self-sufficient organism, like the Starship Enterprise,or the Kon-Tiki. Batu went on and on about this. They didn’t work retail anymore. They were on a voyage of discovery, one in which they had no need to leave the All-Night, not even to do laundry. Batu washed his pajamas and the extra uniforms in the sink in the back. He even washed Eric’s clothes. That was the kind of friend Batu was.
Burada tatil için mi bulunuyorsunuz?
Are you here on holiday?
All during his shift, Eric listened for Charley’s car. First she went by on her way to the shelter and then, during her shift, she took the dogs out driving, past the store first in one direction and then back again, two or three times in one night, the lights of her headlights picking out the long, black gap of the Ausible Chasm, a bright slap across the windows of the All-Night. Eric’s heart lifted whenever a car went past.
The zombies came in, and he was polite to them, and failed to understand what they wanted, and sometimes real people came in and bought candy or cigarettes or beer. The zombies were never around when the real people were around, and Charley never showed up when the zombies were there.
Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire. Eric had thought that, even before he knew about the dogs.
Sometimes, when she didn’t have a dog in the Chevy, Charley came into the All-Night Convenience to buy a Mountain Dew, and then she and Batu would go outside to sit on the curb. Batu was teaching her Turkish. Sometimes Eric went outside as well, to smoke a cigarette. He didn’t really smoke, but it meant he got to look at Charley, the way the moonlight sat on her like a hand. Sometimes she looked back. Wind would rise up, out of the Ausible Chasm, across Ausible Chasm Road, into the parking lot of the All-Night, tugging at Batu’s pajama bottoms, pulling away the cigarette smoke that hung out of Eric’s mouth. Charley’s bangs would float up off her forehead, until she clamped them down with her fingers.
Batu said he was not flirting. He didn’t have a thing for Charley. He was interested in her because Eric was interested. Batu wanted to know what Charley’s story was: he said he needed to know if she was good enough for Eric, for the All-Night Convenience. There was a lot at stake.
What Eric wanted to know was, why did Batu have so many pajamas? But Eric didn’t want to seem nosy. There wasn’t a lot of space in the All-Night. If Batu wanted Eric to know about the pajamas, then one day he’d tell him. It was as simple as that.
Erkek arkadasınız var mı?
Do you have a boyfriend?
Recently Batu had evolved past the need for more than two or three hours sleep, which was good in some ways and bad in others. Eric had a suspicion he might figure out how to talk to Charley if Batu were tucked away, back in the storage closet, dreaming his own sweet dreams, and not scheming schemes, doing all the flirting on Eric’s behalf, so that Eric never had to say a thing.
Eric had even rehearsed the start of a conversation. Charley would say, “Where’s Batu?” and Eric would say, “Asleep.” Or even, “Sleeping in the closet.”
Charley’s story: she worked night shifts at the animal shelter. Every night, when Charley got to work, she checked the list to see which dogs were on the schedule. She took the dogs—any that weren’t too ill, or too mean—out for one last drive around town. Then she drove them back and she put them to sleep. She did this with an injection. She sat on the floor and petted them until they weren’t breathing anymore.
When she was telling Batu this, Batu sitting far too close to her, Eric not close enough, Eric had this thought, which was what it would be like to lie down and put his head on Charley’s leg. But the longest conversation that he’d ever managed with Charley was with Charley on one side of the counter, him on the other, when he’d explained that they weren’t taking money anymore, at least not unless people wanted to give them money.
“I want a Mountain Dew,” Charley had said, making sure Eric understood that part.
“I know,” Eric said. He tried to show with his eyes how much he knew, and how much he didn’t know, but wanted to know.
“But you don’t want me to pay you for it.”
“I’m supposed to give you what you want,” Eric said, “and then you give me what you want to give me. It doesn’t have to be about money. It doesn’t even have to be something, you know, tangible. Sometimes people tell Batu their dreams if they don’t have anything interesting in their wallets.”
“All I want is a Mountain Dew,” Charley said. But she must have seen the panic on Eric’s face, and she dug in her pocket. Instead of change, she pulled out a set of dog tags and plunked it down on the counter.
“This dog is no longer alive,” she said. “It wasn’t a very big dog, and I think it was part Chihuahua and part collie, and how pitiful is that. You should have seen it. Its owner brought it in because it would jump up on her bed in the morning, lick her face, and get so excited that it would pee. I don’t know, maybe she thought someone else would want to adopt an ugly little bedwetting dog, but nobody did, and so now it’s not alive anymore. I killed it.”
“I’m sorry,” Eric said. Charley leaned her elbows against the counter. She was so close, he could smell her smell: chemical, burnt, doggy. There were dog hairs on her clothes.
“I killed it,” Charley said. She sounded angry at him. “Not you.”
When Eric looked at her, he saw that that city was still on fire. It was still burning down, and Charley was watching it burn. She was still holding the dog tags. She let go and they lay there on the counter until Eric picked them up and put them in the register.
“This is all Batu’s idea,” Charley said. “Right?” She went outside and sat on the curb, and in a while Batu came out of the storage closet and went outside as well. Batu’s pajama bottoms were silk. There were smiling hydrocephalic cartoon cats on them, and the cats carried children in their mouths. Either the children were mouse-sized, or the cats were bear-sized. The children were either screaming or laughing. Batu’s pajama top was red flannel, faded, with guillotines, and heads in baskets.
Eric stayed inside. He leaned his face against the window every once in a while, as if he could hear what they were saying. But even if he could have heard them, he guessed he wouldn’t have understood. The shapes their mouths made were shaped like Turkish words. Eric hoped they were talking about retail.
Kar yagacak.
It’s going to snow.
The way the All-Night worked at the moment was Batu’s idea. They sized up the customers before they got to the counter—that had always been part of retail. If the customer was the right sort, then Batu or Eric gave the customer what they said they needed, and the customer paid with money sometimes, and sometimes with other things: pot, books on tape, souvenir maple syrup tins. They were near the border. They got a lot of Canadians. Eric suspected someone, maybe a traveling Canadian pajama salesman, was supplying Batu with novelty pajamas.
