Borderlands 5 (23 page)

The young man tries to open his mouth, feels the fingers of a dead man push between his lips, grabbing his tongue. The fingers are cold and dead and slimy, and they pinch and they pull.

The young man gags, expelling the putrid fingers from his mouth, and he screams into the phone as those cold hands wrap around his throat and begin to squeeze: “Blessed be the people who dwell within this residence and may they be free of your furious spirit when they stand in darkness, when they sleep within these walls that I bless in the name of Jesus, the Holy Son, and may they be free of your residual presence for as long as they live, and you shall be banished to the tape in this Earthly machine as your mortal frame is interned to the ground forever and ever in the name of our Lord!”

The hands drop from his burning throat, the icy dagger withdraws from his brain, and the room begins to warm, ever so slightly.

M
uch later, the young man is sitting in his home. He sits on the stool in the room that is almost empty except for the lamp on the floor, and he holds the new answering machine on his lap.

He is so very pale, and so very sweaty, and so tired beyond human knowledge, but he’s finished his job yet again. There will be burns all over his body from the hands and fingers of the Deceased, but he doesn’t bother to look. It goes with the territory.

The woman named Marge and all others who live in that house are going to be safe from the dead.

At least until Marge dies. He has a bad feeling about her.

The young man sits and he presses the PLAY ANNOUNCEMENT button.

The room’s walls hear a thick German voice say: “You’ve reached the private line of Mister VonMueller, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

The young man hears a screaming shriek: “I’LL KILL YOU, HURENSOHN, YOU LITTLE MUTHAFUCKER, YOU LITTLE STÜCK SCHEIßE, VERDAMMTE SCHEIßE, IF YOU DON’T LEAVE THIS PLACE NOW AND I MEAN RIGHT NOW …”

The recording goes on like that for almost seven minutes—the young man had no idea it had taken him that long to say the words he needed to say after he answered the phone, but he also knows that time works funny when he’s doing his job—and eventually the words of the Deceased turn into all German profanities and then they become the language only the dead understands and then finally there is the young man’s chant and nothing else.

He scoots off the stool in the middle of the empty room, walks to the closet door, and opens it. He turns on the light and steps inside.

The closet extends for as far as his eyes will allow him to see—hundreds of yards, maybe thousands, maybe more—and he walks until he reaches the place where the millions of answering machines lining both sides of the closet from floor to ceiling are barely stacked waist high.

He adds this one to the collection.

He knows he isn’t the only person in the world who has this job. He occasionally sees other people here, entering and exiting from any of the hundreds of doors that line the hallway, but he never talks to them. Doing so is forbidden, a violation of the most sacred laws of the universe, and that’s one of the reasons why the young man is lonely as hell. He wishes he knew his true purpose. He wishes he wasn’t so alone all the time.

Yet maybe there’s another call to answer in life. He suspects there’s more for him to do with his days than listen to the voices of the dead. The dead are dead, after all. They shouldn’t have any bearing on our lives.

They shouldn’t have so much control over
his
life.

Someday the young man hopes to move on, too. To be free of this terrible job and this wounded flesh.

Someday very soon.

Smooth Operator

DOMINICK CANCILLA

Rich Chizmar, and his Cemetery Dance Publications, has been nurturing the career of Dominick Cancilla. However, if we had been able to get this volume into print when originally scheduled, we could have laid claim to yet another new writer. The story which follows is a clear indication of the talent we recognized all those years ago.

F
or the eighth fruitless day in a row, Clarissa sat on a bench in the open-air mall and waited for Charles, her one true love. Through dark lenses she stared across the promenade toward the Surfside Café, a popular eatery with both indoor and patio seating. It was a casual but romantic place, the kind of place where a man, holding a woman’s hand in his own across the table, could speak the words which would make her every wish come true. Charles wanted to meet Clarissa there for just that purpose—she knew it without him even having to tell her. His every thought, his every word, his every motion was an open book to her, such was the depth of their love.

Clarissa wore the yellow flower-print sun dress he had bought for her, just as she had each day prior, and plain white gloves. Very elegant. Although the summer sun was still high in the sky, she found a scarf necessary to warm her head and he had been kind enough, thoughtful enough, to provide her with one.

She wondered where he was.

Every few minutes Clarissa glanced up and down the promenade, looking for his handsome face, his familiar smile. It was not like Charles to be late.

The hours passed slowly. Ten o’clock.

Eleven. Eleven thirty.

With nervous fingers Clarissa twisted her beautiful new silver and diamond ring through the thin fabric of her ill-fitting gloves. It was not an engagement ring—at least not yet—but more of a pre-engagement gift, a symbol of their undying love, and Clarissa was more than satisfied with that for the time being. Keeping the diamond in slow orbit about her finger brought Clarissa great comfort, even though the skin beneath the ring was slowly being rubbed raw.

Noon.

One o’clock.

Clarissa was not sure that Charles would be meeting her for lunch, just as she had not been sure if a champagne brunch had been his intention. By half past one she felt confident that it was a romantic dinner that he had in mind.

Two o’clock. Three.

Children played in the water of the fountain between Clarissa and the restaurant, and she caught herself wondering how her own children would one day look. She searched for her and Charles’ features in their smiling faces.

Three thirty.

By four she began to worry.

It was silly to begin fretting about such an odd hour, of course. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner and all that. Why would he show up at such an inconvenient time? No reason. Still, Clarissa didn’t move from her seat—just in case.

Five.

The sun hung low, staring into Clarissa’s eyes. Deep in her heart she knew that he was not going to show up, and she knew where to lay the blame.

Oh, on the first day she had been surprised that he stood her up. She had run home crying when the restaurant closed its doors at eleven, cursing him beneath her breath, paying no attention when cars screeched at her fleeing form. But when she’d gotten home the reason for his disdain had been all too clear, staring out at her from the bathroom mirror. Red, puffy, tear-swollen eyes. Nose running. And hair.

Hanging down her forehead to touch her eyebrows, hanging down her back in a stream of red to brush across her hips. Hair.

It had repulsed him.

Not bothering to get the scissors, Clarissa had used a razor blade—left so long ago by a fickle lover—to saw off every strand that reached below her shoulders. It had been difficult work, arduous, painful as the threads tugged at her scalp. But the result was more than satisfying. Clarissa had left the ends uneven, giving her a wild, devil-may-care look that she knew would excite Charles.

T
he next morning she’d returned to her place at the mall puffed up with confidence and anticipation. And once again he had passed her by. It had been a Sunday, and she could picture him in her mind’s eye laughing at her, chastising her for thinking that what she had done would be enough to please him.

Clarissa knew that he was with another woman. Rutting, fucking, screwing, all the time taunting Clarissa, letting her know that it could have been her instead. Clarissa couldn’t see the other woman, who she was. Probably a prostitute, a stranger, a co-worker. Maybe his wife.

That night, Clarissa worked on her eyebrows, thinning them, and plucked the unsightly hair from her nose with a pair of tweezers. It wasn’t enough.

T
he soft hairs above her lip and on the rim of her ears drove him away the next day, forcing her to endure a thousand stings as she plucked them gone. She removed the last of her eyebrows for good measure.

C
larissa had not spent long on the bench the day after that. She had been distracting herself from the monotony of waiting by flipping through his wallet, and that was when she realized what was
really
keeping Charles from coming to meet her as he had intended.

The wallet was much as it had been when Charles left it on the seat of the bus for her to find—pictures (minus the one of his wife which Clarissa had “lost”), a driver’s license, someone’s address scribbled on the back of a receipt, a lottery ticket. The only real difference was that most of the cash was gone. And, of course, the credit cards had stopped working after the second day, but that wasn’t a difference you could see. With a flush of embarrassment, Clarissa remembered the clerk in the shoe store telling her that the card had been refused. Charles hadn’t bought her anything else after that, and she was forced to come to meet him each day with silk stockings that led the eye down to a grungy old pair of sandals.

But of all the wallet’s contents, it had been the pictures that gave Clarissa the clue she needed to unravel the mystery. One of the photos was a picture of a baby lying in a crib, newborn, hands in tiny fists. The other was a snap of Charles holding the child, looking down at it with an expression of infinite love. That was what had tipped Clarissa off. Soft, round, smooth—Charles loved the baby. Loved it. Loved it.

She’d been back home before noon.

On the bathroom floor, her bare bottom against the cold tile, Clarissa had sat with tweezers in hand looking at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. And as she looked, she groomed. She started with her face, wincing at the sight of her eyelids distorting as each lash was tugged away, watching the pale skin of her scalp emerge as her hairline receded. Clarissa worked her way down. Across her shoulders, down her arms, the hairs that ringed her nipples, the soft down on her belly—nothing escaped her notice. Her arms were aching almost beyond the point where they would obey her direction long before she had finished with her back, but she didn’t let the discomfort sway her. By the time she reached her inner thighs and her pubic mound, Clarissa was numb beyond feeling, and that, at least, seemed a blessing. She hoped that Charles would appreciate the effort.

It was after midnight when Clarissa finally cleared the last tuft of hair from the last toe. She stood, stiff, sore, and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hands roamed across her body. It was bare, smooth as a baby’s skin, soft as silk. With a whisk broom, she gathered the mass of hair into a large zip-lock storage bag and hid it at the bottom of her canvas purse, in case she had been wrong about Charles and needed to put herself back together in a hurry later.

I
n the morning, Clarissa found that the more sensitive parts of her skin were peppered with red welts, like angry goose bumps. After a cool shower, she rubbed them with lotion, closing her eyes and imagining Charles’ hands, enjoying the sensual slipperiness. A healthy splash of perfume to counteract the effects of four days in the sun on her dress, and Clarissa was ready to face the world. She headed for the mall.

By closing time, Charles had still not shown up.

Being abandoned a fifth time made Clarissa more despondent and confused than angry. She had done everything right, hadn’t she? How much more could she do?

Sitting at home staring into darkness, her hand had touched her leg and shown her the answer. Stubble.

W
hen her alarm rang at four, Clarissa got up and beelined to the bathroom. Plucking the short hairs, making herself perfect, proved more difficult than she had thought it would be, and Clarissa did not make it to her spot on the promenade until almost ten. To make up for her tardiness, she wore no underwear and accented her legs by splitting her sun dress to the thigh.

Clarissa was careful about how she sat, crossing her ankles, folding her hands. She was a vision, a goddess, exuding sex and desirability. She caught every eye, aroused every man’s base instincts. The thrill of being the center of attention was an aphrodisiac—invisible to those around her. Clarissa clenched her legs together and rhythmically flexed her thighs, bringing herself repeatedly to climax.

But when night enshrouded her and the crowds thinned, Clarissa found herself alone.

It was when she saw the body of a dead pigeon laying at the base of a tree no more than a hundred feet from her that Clarissa realized Charles was beginning to doubt his love for her.