Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (77 page)

“It’s a spirit,” Sarah told the Nebraskan from the doorway. “It’ll go into Grandpa now, ’cause he killed it. That’s what he always said.”

The Nebraskan straightened up, turning to face her. “It’s a living creature, something like a cuttlefish, and it came here from—” He waved the thought aside. “It doesn’t really matter. It landed in North Africa, or at least I think it must have, and if I’m right, it was eaten by a jackal. They’ll eat just about anything, from what I’ve read. It survived inside the jackal as a sort of intestinal parasite. Long ago, it transmitted itself to a man, somehow.”

Sarah was looking down at her father, no longer listening. “He’s restin’ now, Mr. Cooper. He shot the old soul-sucker in the woods one day. That’s what Grandpa tells, and he hasn’t had no rest since, but he’s peaceful now. I was only eight or ’bout that, and for a long time Grandpa was ’fraid he’d get me, only he never did.” With both her thumbs, she drew down the lids of the dead man’s eyes.

“Either it’s crawled away—” the Nebraskan began.

Abruptly, Sarah dropped to her knees beside her dead parent and kissed him.

When at last the Nebraskan backed out of the room, the dead man and the living woman remained locked in that kiss, her face ecstatic, her fingers tangled in the dead man’s hair. Two full days later, after the Nebraskan had crossed the Mississippi, he still saw that kiss in shadows beside the road.

∇

To Live and Die in Arkham

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

A
rkham. A nice upscale college town. Just the right shops and bars and restaurants, grills, and cafes, if you have Money—a name helps too. If you don’t, there’s the other side of town—the side always twitching with things from the inside of Midnight. The city fathers and the police call it, The Downside. Drugs, and cheap street whores workin’ the dreamless corners by pool halls and gin joints and open sewers the city fathers call abandoned buildings where the homeless hide and hungry eyes that will take your cigarettes and your wallet and your watch and your life if you can’t walk fast enough or if you’re a plain John Q. Citizen who is not supposed to be roamin’ the cold blocks. That’s the side Albert Bergin had come to. He needed something done and this was the place to find fixers and doers of just about anything, if you have the money or the juice. $200 just for the name and directions to the door. Like anyone needs them, you just follow the rot. But Professor Bergin wasn’t looking for some tail or blow… He had a task that needed to be performed, he called it an old score, and for that he needed someone who knew The Game and how it’s played on The Bottom.

“You want him tits-up maggot food. What’d he do? Fuck yer wife while you were at some
sin
-posium fucking your secretary in the ass?” Will laughed. His 9 didn’t.

“He is in possession of an article of mine and I want it back.”

“Can’t blame a hound for not returnin’ good pussy. Can ya, Fuckhead? She give good head?”

“I’m not married.” Professor Albert Bergin sat rail straight. No smile.

“With that face and that gut I’m not surprised. They got this thing called walking nowdays. Ya might try it. Maybe you’ll meet some fat bitch who wants a mercy fuck?”

“Could we skip the…
bullshit
?”

“Ah. Now yer talkin’. Get yer thing and get it back to you and kill the fuck—Just like that…
That’s hard cash
. You prepared to soak me in it?”

“I have money.”

“I can see that, but are you willing to part with it? Your jones itch that much?”

“If need be.”

“It need be
.
”

“How much?”

“Details, then you get the bill. If you can pay, I play. If you can’t. You’ve wasted my expensive time and you pay in
other ways
. Or you can lay a grand on me right this fuckin’ minute and blow. Pick a door, fuckhead.”

“I will pay 25,000 dollars.”

“You’ll pay what I tell you… If I do it. And I get half upfront. Now, get on with it.”

“Professor Daniel Washington…”

Will skipped his regular info gathering. Spreading around cash would be a waste with these bookworm types. He’d follow the guy for a day or two and sit outside his house and see what he did at night. Besides, once Professor Washington showed up on a slab and the cops started digging, Will’s name would pop up as a person of interest if he inquired about Washington’s name or the address. Better to keep this as far under the radar as he could.

All the prim and proper Miskatonic U crowd had their paper reps and little else, he figured. An old boys and ignored pussies clique, who at the end of the day wanted what everyone else wanted, they just took a deep breath and stayed hush-hush about it.

“Sinful Suzie” Jaymes, 5’ 6”, 109 lbs., Green/Blonde, 38D [so her doctor said after cashing her check for 10 grand]-25-36, she was a favorite of lawyers, investment suits, and bookworms. Will hit the The Treasure Chest looking for Suzie. They’d been on and off half a dozen times in the past few years and the straights really lost it for her. She came on like a librarian turned feral and if you had the cash she had the ass, many of her clients said it could start a revolution, or she had any other part your kink required.

Lap dances in your home. Blow jobs in your car. Bubble baths or spankings in hotel rooms, you pick it she pretty much did it, just so as you paid up before the ride.

Will bought her a drink and asked if either Washington or Bergin were on her dick list. Washington was a no go to both the name and the photo, but Bergin was known. Some of the girls said he was heavy handed. A real Mr. Wham-BAM!. He’d spread around some big money to cover the scars he’d left on a couple of girls.

“He’s been in here sniffing around, but never looked at me. Never looked at any of the girls with big tits. Likes ’em skinny and young I hear. Your mark is a hardcore power-tripper. No fuckin’, only head. You peel, dance around a little, and give. He gets. You’ve met the type.”

Will had. Fuckin’ pussy scumbags. They’d bounce a woman around—fists or whatever else was handy when they popped, but didn’t have the balls to even talk hard to other men. Fit his assessment of Bergin.

He left her a C-note and told her he’d call her.

He hit the street. Time to circle the target’s nest and see how to play this out.

Will got all the formal paperwork on the S. French Hill St. property of Daniel Washington from the bureaucracy first then cased the house. Two floors, open access from the back and sides, and a botanical garden’s worth of trees and deep, tall scrubs all around. Almost the perfect place for a quick and quiet in and out.

1 P.M. Sunny. A model afternoon on a model street. He walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. He had his line ready should need arise. Waited. Played it casual. Looked in windows—bookcases and bookcases and bookcases. Suppressed a laugh examining the lock.

It’s a wonder these idiots have indoor plumbing.

Assholes, so deep into their books and lectures and papers they didn’t know how to lock up and lock down properly. Not that it really mattered, no one wanted to rob these academic types, their houses were full of books and books and books—like anyone was going to pay good money for Professor Hilary Shitfart’s Memoirs of Some Dead Old Fuck From East Boring as Hell or Sir Ralph Fuckface’s A Case Study of the Glories of 28 Quiet Sundays in Solitude, and art crap you couldn’t pawn easily, not in New England. No expensive TVs, no DVD players, no iPods, bullshit laptops, and next to no jewelry. And tryin’ to dump big heavy antiques in this part of the state was a sure fire 3 to 5, the way the Staties were all over the market. Fuck robbin’ ’em, they spent their whole lives in their minds.

Tomorrow night. If he was home. If he was alone…

Will rang the bell. Daniel Washington answered. Will’s gun backed the older man up.

“Sit yer fuckin’ ass in that chair and don’t say a word. When I ask you a question, you answer, then shut the fuck up. Got it?”

“Yes.” Thin, weak, frightened as his eyes. “Good. If you move or talk you die.”

Washington nodded.

Will looked around the room… He froze. There was a photograph of his mother on the mantle and one on the desk. Expensive frames. Dusted though most of the other things in the room were not.

“Where did you get the pictures?”

“I had them taken nearly thirty years ago.”

“Why?”

“I was going to ask Seton to marry me.”

His mother’s name on the lips of this stranger. The gun was moving right to left. Finger and trigger hungry to talk.

“Keep talking.”

“Do you know her?”

“I ask the fucking questions, Asshole.”

“I was a student at M. U. Seton worked in the diner on Boundary near St. Mary’s. We were in love.”

“What happened?”

“Why are you so interested? Did you—”

“I said,
I ask the questions
.”

“There was a terrible—She died.”

“I know that.”

Daniel Washington looked at the man. He had her eyes. Her coloring. Could this somehow be her child?

How could he be?

“If you want to live you’ll tell me everything you can about you and her. Start right fucking now.”

“We were young and in love. I was a poor student working my way through my second year at M. U. We dated for almost a year. One night on her way home from work she was savagely attacked near Hangman’s Hill. Beaten, raped, and horribly scarred by her attacker. I went to the hospital several times to see her, but she wouldn’t see me. A nurse told me her face was horrible to look at.”

Will remembered her face, and the black veil she hid it under. He’d been four, maybe five. Remembered coming out of his bedroom in the small flat and seeing her crying before the mirror. He’d screamed. She closed the bathroom door.

“Two weeks after the attack I received a letter from Seton saying telling me to leave her alone. I went to her rooming house but her landlady said she’d moved away. I couldn’t find her… Back then I had very limited resources. Several years later I heard she died. That’s about all I know.”

Will knew the back end of her story. She scrubbed floors for a living. Drank gin straight from the bottle. And tried to never touch him. She didn’t abuse him, but she couldn’t stand to touch him. She didn’t like to talk to him either. When he was eight she slit her wrists in the tub with a broken gin bottle and he went to the orphanage. After that he went to jail and back to jail and back to jail… From the age of eight until seventeen days after his twenty-fourth birthday he was locked up.

And sitting before him was the only link to his past he’d every met. Ever heard of. He was here for money not to face his past. Will tried to keep his nights full and avoid solitude or any point in time where his mother’s ghost would sit across the table or at his elbow and watch him. It was like surf, rising, a great weight pulling him from his mental steeping stones toward… Outside. The zone of stark, lonely dunes no drug could cure, no woman could kiss away.

What the fuck is this shit?

“I said everything.” The rules are simple the 9 said. “And I meant
everything
.”

A delicate, hollow blind man lost in the echo of a love song frightened to death by evil, Daniel Washington went down in the dark place of cold rain better left undisturbed.

“Back then I had nothing but her smile and my dream. She gave me so much love, made me so very happy, then they told me she was… When she wouldn’t talk to me, see me, I searched for details. When you take Valentine’s Day from a man he seeks redemption. For me it was in facts.”

All the horror came out. Fact after fact. The ones carved in stone and the ones his heart knew but could not prove.

“I own a gun, but have never had the guts to shoot him.”

“Who?”

“I can prove nothing.”

“Give me the fucking name.”

Daniel Washington was trying to make sense of this, but couldn’t get his mind around it. All these years he’d been faithful to her memory and now this man he thought might be her son was going to kill him. How? Why?

“The fucking name.”

“Albert Bergin raped her. Left her for dead.”

Will tried to catch his breath. He’d sat in a room face to face with the monster that had killed his mother and sent him into the tombs.

The two men in the room were stone. Outside the world in an episode of cursed sensations. In a distant valley, naked, raped, no roof or sky, only despair… And anger. Crawling from the labyrinths of heart and mind. Claws bared. Hate sharpened and raw. Hate and claws becoming the everywhere. The red wind screamed the monster’s name.

The gun lowered. Eyes choking back tears.

“I can’t be completely certain it was him.”

The room the contract was written in was in Will’s mind. The face, he studied it and studied it. Took it apart. Something about that face. The set of the jaw. The nose… It was like… Looking in a mirror.

The gun almost slipped from his hand. Will had never known a single fact about his father until this minute. Now he knew too much.

“Look at me. Can you see him in my face? Do I look like him?”

Daniel Washington strained to see through his tears. And it was there.

“Exactly how old are you?”

Will told him. Washington’s expression told him the final fact.

“Your jaw, your nose—he’s your father. You’re the product of—”

“Rape.”

The air was almost too solid to breathe.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“Albert Bergin and I were rivals in school. We were both studying the same subject. I was a better student and quicker. Our professors favored me. I know Bergin disliked me and was jealous… Everyone knew how in love I was. I think he raped your mother to unseat me. If I stumbled in my studies he could catch up, maybe surpass me. He destroyed her because of professional jealousy. I always knew he had a black heart, but… I can’t believe I never saw this before. Guess I’ve always thought he was drunk or something and lost his temper.”

“But why do you think it was him?”