Penzler, Otto Ed v2

by Murder For Revenge

  Or choking him to death with a giant slimy boa constrictor

  Until his neck squished to putty

  And his face turned purple—and his eyes popped out

  And his bodily fluids squirted, gushed and geysered

  From every orifice

  He began matching the deed to the day of the week

  Sunday—stabbing

  Monday—mauling

  Tuesday—throttling

  Wednesday—whipping

  Thursday—tarantula

  Could a live tarantula fit into a man’s ear?

  Would a transplanted shark foetus grow

  Inside a human being?

  And what about pinching?

  Can one be pinched to death?

  Prodded? Poked? Scratched?

  These were possibilities worth considering

  And tickled—to watch him expire while

  That mouth laughed uncontrollably—ha ha ha

  But the eyes—the eyes wouldn’t be laughing—oh, no, no

  On special occasions he thought of skinning him—alive

  Then rolling his body—not gently—in rock salt and honey

  Then suspending him—by a barbed-wire rope

  Over an anthill under a hive of killer bees

  With a sex-crazed syphilitic gorilla sodomizing him—ha ha

  And if he moved forward a giant crocodile

  Would snap his head off

  And if he lay flat the ants would gnaw him

  And if he raised up he would hit the hive

  And the bees—the angry bees—would get him

  And if he stayed still, the panting drooling gorilla

  Would love him to pieces

  And if he screamed he would wake the hungry hibernating Kodiak bear

  Who slept fitfully at his feet—ha ha ha

  Oh, what thoughts he had.

  And time went by

  And then one pleasant evening

  While he luxuriated in thought

  Of dipping his enemy into a bathtub of piranhas

  Slowly—first the toes—then the feet... then

  Watching that face twisted in a—

  The face... the fac ... he didn’t remember the face

  And when he tried to recall

  What his enemy had done

  He couldn’t remember that either

  He had grown old

  Old in plotting, old in dreaming, old in list making

  Soon he might forget that there was an enemy at all

  There was the terrifying possibility

  That he might die before the other did

  And his enemy would go unpunished

  Or worse—the enemy might die first—

  Of natural causes

  Depriving him of his sweet revenge

  He must act now

  But how?

  No time for the exquisite pleasure of slow starvation

  He had no access to exotic poisons

  Ants and bees were... unpredictable

  And how do you train a gorilla

  For something like that?

  Stabbing? Choking? Amputations?

  They needed an expert hand

  And he was experienced in thought—not execution

  A bullet... the bullet was it

  Too quick? Yes, but after all

  It was the intensity of the agony, rather than the duration

  And—the horror—in those beady little eyes

  The realization—ha ha

  He bought a gun

  He went to the house of his enemy

  At least he remembered the address

  He peered in the window

  There he was—older and feeble

  But as vile and despicable as ever

  Even more vile and despicable in his decay

  He levelled the gun

  In a moment it would be all over

  Flash—bang-—-plop—all over

  The years of scheming and plotting

  The endless plans—the endless lists

  Flash—bang—scream—plop

  He took aim between those red rheumy eyes

  And then the thought struck him

  The gun—was it loaded?

  What if it misfired?

  And what if he only wounded him

  His hand was not that steady

  Let him off with just the pain of a wound?

  And be apprehended by the law?

  Or miss him completely—

  And, be apprehended by him

  Find himself in his power

  What horrible retribution that insidious

  Mind might extract

  No—not the gun—

  A stupid choice—conceived in haste—big mistake

  He dropped the gun and hurried home

  He sat down in his chair

  Until his heart stopped pounding

  He leaned back

  He closed his eyes

  He thought about the rats

  They wouldn’t be that hard to come by

  And yes, he was none too strong

  But the other looked even weaker

  Choking and stabbing were not out of the question

  And what about garotte?

  Feeding him broken glass?-—or metal filings?

  Or... or breaking his bones

  All of them—one at a time—every tiny little

  Bone of the foot—one at a time—

  Or—hey—sewing the tip of his penis

  Into his abdomen—yes—and then forcing

  Him to drink gallons of Bloody Mary mix—mixed with lye

  He got up and got his list

  He danced into the kitchen

  He made himself a nice cup of tea

  He brought it back to his chair

  And settled back down

  Bludgeoning!-—he hadn’t thought of that before

  Watching the pieces of that diseased brain—fly like...

  Like confetti—ha ha ha ha ha ha

  Bludgeoning—yes.

  He put it under B.

  Peter Straub

  The suave trickster instincts of Peter Straub have never before been displayed quite as they are found here. From the quaintly comic yet undeniably sinister entrance of the titular pair to the scenes of extreme unpleasantness that follow, the author (renowned for such extravaganzas of the macabre as ‘Ghost Story’ and ‘Floating Dragon’,) takes his elegant time scaring us out of our wits.

  The good news is that restraint does figure as a definite factor in the ghastly delicacy of Mr. Straub’s overall effect; the bad news, as I perhaps don’t need to tell you, is that restraint is a word with more than one meaning.

  Still, it is clear that a great deal of fun went into the composition of ‘Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff.’ And that’s news as good as it gets. Whether he’s delving into the past in novels such as ‘Koko’, ‘Mystery’, or, most recently. ‘The Hellfire Club’, or scraping the edge of our psyches in the present, Peter Straub is a writer we love to see enjoy himself. Even—and especially—at the expense of our own peace of mind.

  Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff

  1.

  I never intended to go astray, nor did I know what that meant. My journey began in an isolated hamlet notable for the piety of its inhabitants, and when I vowed to escape New Covenant I assumed that the values instilled within me there would forever be my guide. And so, with a depth of paradox I still only begin to comprehend, they have been. My journey, so triumphant, also so excruciating, is both from my native village and of it. For all its splendour, my life has been that of a child of New Covenant.

  When in my limousine I scanned The Wall Street Journal, when in the private elevator I ascended to the rosewood-panelled office with harbour views, when in the partners’ dining room I ordered squab on a mesclun bed from a prison-rescued waiter known to me alone as Charlie-Charlie, also when I navigated for my clients the complex waters of financial planning, above all when before her seduction by my enemy Graha
m Leeson I returned homeward to luxuriate in the attentions of my stunning Marguerite, when transported within the embraces of my wife, even then I carried within the frame houses dropped like afterthoughts down the streets of New Covenant, the stiff faces and suspicious eyes, the stony cordialities before and after services in the grim great Temple—the blank storefronts along Harmony Street—tattooed within me was the ugly, enigmatic beauty of my birthplace. Therefore I believe that when I strayed, and stray I did, make no mistake, it was but to come home, for I claim that the two strange gentlemen who beckoned me into error were the night of its night, the dust of its dust. In the period of my life’s greatest turmoil—the month of my exposure to Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, ‘Private Detectives Extraordinaire,’ as their business card described them—in the midst of the uproar I felt that I saw the contradictory dimensions of...

  of...

  I felt I saw... had seen, had at least glimpsed... what a wiser man might call... try to imagine the sheer difficulty of actually writing these words... the Meaning of Tragedy. You smirk, I don’t blame you, in your place I’d do the same, but I assure you I saw something.

  I must sketch in the few details necessary to understand my story. A day’s walk from New York State’s Canadian border, New Covenant was (and still is, still is) a town of just under a thousand inhabitants united by the puritanical Protestantism of the Church of the New Covenant, whose founders had broken away from the even more puritanical Saints of the Covenant. (The Saints had proscribed sexual congress in the hope of hastening the Second Coming.) The village flourished during the end of the nineteenth century, and settled into its permanent form around 1920.

  To wit: Temple Square, where the Temple of the New Covenant and its bell tower, flanked left and right by the Youth Bible Study Centre and the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School, dominate a modest greensward. Southerly stand the shop fronts of Harmony Street, the bank, also the modest placards indicating the locations of New Covenant’s doctor, lawyer, and dentist; south of Harmony Street lie the two streets of frame houses sheltering the town’s clerks and artisans, beyond these the farms of the rural faithful, beyond the farmland deep forest. North of Temple Square is Scripture Street, two blocks lined with the residences of the reverend and his Board of Brethren, the aforementioned doctor, dentist, and lawyer, the president and vice-president of the bank, also the families of some few wealthy converts devoted to Temple affairs. North of Scripture Street are more farms, then the resumption of the great forest in which our village described a sort of clearing.

  My father was New Covenant’s lawyer, and to Scripture Street was I born. Sundays I spent in the Youth Bible Study Centre, weekdays in the Combined Boys and Girls Elementary and Middle School. New Covenant was my world, its people all I knew of the world. Three fourths of all mankind consisted of gaunt, bony, blond-haired individuals with chiselled features and blazing blue eyes, the men six feet or taller in height, the women some inches shorter—the remaining fourth being the Racketts, Mudges, and Blunts, our farm families, who after generations of intermarriage had coalesced into a tribe of squat, black-haired, gap-toothed, moon-faced males and females seldom taller than five feet lour or five inches. Until I went to college I thought that all people were divided into the races of town and barn, fair and dark, the spotless and the mud spattered, the reverential and the sly.

  Though Racketts, Mudges, and Blunts attended our school and worshiped in our Temple, though they were at least as prosperous as we in town save the converts in their mansions, we knew them tainted with an essential inferiority. Rather than intelligent they seemed crafty, rather than spiritual, animal. Both in classrooms and Temple, they sat together, watchful as dogs compelled for the nonce to be ‘good,’ now and again tilting their heads to pas a whispered comment. Despite Sunday baths and Sunday clothes, they bore an unerasable odour redolent of the barnyard. Their public self-effacement seemed to mask a peasant amusement, and when they separated into their wagons and other vehicles, they could be heard to share a peasant laughter.

  I found this mysterious race unsettling, in fact profoundly annoying. At some level they frightened me—I found them compelling. Oppressed from my earliest days by life in New Covenant, I felt an inadmissible fascination for this secretive brood. Despite their inferiority, I wished to know what they knew. Locked deep within their shabbiness and shame I sensed the presence of a freedom I did not understand but found thrilling.

  Because town never socialised with barn, our contacts were restricted to places of education, worship, and commerce. It would have been as unthinkable for me to take a seat beside Delbert Mudge or Charlie-Charlie Rackett in our fourth-grade classroom as for Delbert or Charlie-Charlie to invite me for an overnight in their farmhouse bedrooms. Did Delbert and Charlie-Charlie actually have bedrooms, where they slept alone in their own beds? I recall mornings when the atmosphere about Delbert and Charlie-Charlie suggested nights spent in close proximity to the pigpen, others when their worn dungarees exuded a freshness redolent of sunshine, wildflowers, and raspberries.

  During recess an inviolable border separated the townies at the northern end of our play area from the barnies at the southern. Our play, superficially similar, demonstrated our essential differences, for we could not cast off the unconscious stiffness resulting from constant adult measurement of our spiritual worthiness. In contrast, the barnies did not play at playing but actually played, plunging back and forth across the grass, chortling over victories, grinning as they muttered what must have been jokes. (We were not adept at jokes.) When school closed at end of day, I tracked the homebound progress of Delbert, Charlie-Charlie, and clan with envious eyes and a divided heart.

  Why should they have seemed in possession of a liberty I desired? After graduation from Middle School, we townies progressed to Shady Glen’s Consolidated High, there to monitor ourselves and our fellows while encountering the temptations of the wider world, in some cases then advancing into colleges and universities. Having concluded their educations with the seventh grade’s long division and Hiawatha recitations, the barnies one and all returned to their barns. Some few, some very few, of us, among whom I had determined early on to be numbered, left for good, thereafter to be celebrated, denounced, or mourned. One of us, Caleb Thurlow, violated every standard of caste and morality by marrying Munna Blunt and vanishing into barnie-world. A disgraced, disinherited pariah during my childhood, Thurlow’s increasingly pronounced stoop and decreasing teeth terrifyingly mutated him into a blond, wasted barnie-parody on his furtive annual Christmas appearances at Temple. One of them, one only, my old classmate Charlie-Charlie Rackett, escaped his ordained destiny in our twentieth year by liberating a plough horse and Webley-Vickers pistol from the family farm to commit serial armed robbery upon Shady Glen’s George Washington Inn, Town Square Feed & Grain, and Allsorts Emporium. Every witness to his crimes recognised what, if not who, he was, and Charlie-Charlie was apprehended while boarding the Albany train in the next village west. During the course of my own journey from and of New Covenant, I tracked Charlie-Charlie’s gloomy progress through the way stations of the penal system until at last I could secure his release at a parole hearing with the offer of a respectable job in the financial planning industry.

  I had by then established myself as absolute monarch of three Moors in a Wall Street monolith. With my two junior partners, I enjoyed the services of a fleet of paralegals, interns, analysts, investigators, and secretaries. I had chosen these partners carefully, for as well as the usual expertise, skill, and dedication, I required other, less conventional qualities.

  I had sniffed out intelligent but unimaginative men of some slight moral laziness; capable of cutting corners when they thought no one would notice; controlled drinkers and secret drug-takers: juniors with reason to be grateful for their positions. I wanted no zealousness. My employees were to be steadfastly incurious and able enough to handle their clients satisfactorily, at least with my paternal assistance.


  My growing prominence had attracted the famous, the established, the notorious. Film stars and athletes, civic leaders, corporate pashas, and heirs to longstanding family fortunes regularly visited our offices, as did a number of conspicuously well-tailored gentlemen who had accumulated their wealth in a more colourful fashion. To these clients I suggested financial stratagems responsive to their labyrinthine needs. I had not schemed for their business. It simply came to me, willy-nilly, as our Temple held that salvation came to the elect. One May morning, a cryptic fellow in a pinstriped suit appeared in my office to pose a series of delicate questions. As soon as he opened his mouth, the cryptic fellow summoned irresistibly from memory a dour, squinting member of the Board of Brethren of New Covenant’s Temple. I knew this man, and instantly I found the tone most acceptable to him. Tone is all to such people. After our interview he directed others of his kind to my office, and by December my business had tripled. Individually and universally these gentlemen pungently reminded me of the village I had long ago escaped, and I cherished my suspicious buccaneers even as I celebrated the distance between my moral life and theirs. While sheltering these self-justifying figures within elaborate trusts, while legitimising subterranean floods of cash, I immersed myself within a familiar atmosphere of pious denial. Rebuking home, I was home.

  Life had not yet taught me that revenge inexorably exacts its own revenge.

  My researches eventually resulted in the hiring of the two junior partners known privately to me as Gilligan and the Captain. The first, a short, trim fellow with a comedian’s rubber face and dishevelled hair, brilliant with mutual funds but an ignoramus at estate planning, each morning worked so quietly as to become invisible. To Gilligan I had referred many of our actors and musicians, and those whose schedules permitted them to attend meetings before the lunch hour met their soft-spoken advisor in a dimly lighted office with curtained windows. After lunch, Gilligan tended toward the vibrant, the effusive, the extrovert. Red faced and sweating, he loosened his tie, turned on a powerful sound system, and ushered emaciated musicians with haystack hair into the atmosphere of a backstage party. Morning Gilligan spoke in whispers; Afternoon Gilligan batted our secretaries’ shoulders as he bounced officeward down the corridors. I snapped him up as soon as one of my competitors let him go, and he proved a perfect complement to the Captain. Tall, plump, silver haired, this gentleman had come to me from a specialist in estates and trusts discomfited by his tendency to become pugnacious when outraged by a client’s foul language, improper dress, or other offences against good taste. Our tycoons and inheritors of family fortunes were in no danger of arousing the Captain’s ire, and I myself handled the unshaven film stars’ and heavy metallists’ estate planning. Neither Gilligan nor the Captain had any contact with the cryptic gentlemen. Our office was an organism balanced in all its parts. Should any mutinous notions occur to my partners, my spy the devoted Charlie-Charlie Rackett, to them Charles the Perfect Waiter, every noon silently monitored their every utterance while replenishing Gilligan’s wineglass. My marriage of two years seemed blissfully happy, my reputation and bank account flourished alike, and I anticipated perhaps another decade of labour followed by luxurious retirement. I could not have been less prepared for the disaster to come.