Guzmán said, “I promised you you would see the real Mexico. I did not think you would see as much of it as this.”
Halperin insisted on inspecting her hotel room. It was empty and looked as if it had not been occupied for months. He stretched out on his bed fully clothed, but he did not particularly want to be left alone in the darkness, and so Guzmán and Filiberto and the others took turns sitting up with him through the night while the sounds of the fiesta filled the air. Dawn brought a dazzling sunrise. Halperin and Guzmán stepped out into the courtyard. The world was still.
“I think I’ll leave here now,” Halperin said.
“Yes. That would be wise. I will stay another day, I think.”
Filiberto appeared, carrying the owl-pig mask from Halperin’s room. “This is for you,” he said. “Because that you were troubled here, that you will think kindly of us. Please take it as our gift.”
Halperin was touched by that. He made a little speech of gratitude and put the mask in his car.
Guzmán said, “Are you well enough to drive?”
“I think so. I’ll be all right once I leave here.” He shook hands with everyone. His fingers were quivering. At a very careful speed he drove away from the hotel, through the plaza, where sleeping figures lay sprawled like discarded dolls, and mounds of paper streamers and other trash were banked high against the curb. At an even more careful speed he negotiated the cactus-walled road out of town. When he was about a kilometer from San Simón Zuluaga he glanced to his right and saw Ellen Chambers sitting next to him in the car. If he had been traveling faster, he would have lost control of the wheel. But after the first blinding moment of terror came a rush of annoyance and anger. “No,” he said. “You don’t belong in here. Get the hell out of here. Leave me alone.” She laughed lightly. Halperin felt like sobbing. Swiftly and unhesitatingly he seized Filiberto’s owl-pig mask, which lay on the seat beside him, and scaled it with a flip of his wrist past her nose and out the open car window. Then he clung tightly to the wheel and stared forward. When he could bring himself to look to the right again, she was gone. He braked to a halt and rolled up the window and locked the car door.
It took him all day to reach Acapulco. He went to bed immediately, without eating, and slept until late the following afternoon. Then he phoned the Aeromexico office.
Two days later he was home in San Francisco. The first thing he did was call a Sacramento Street dealer and arrange for the sale of all his masks. Now he collects Japanese netsuke, Hopi kachina dolls, and Navaho rugs. He buys only through galleries and does not travel much anymore.
THE SCARIEST THING IN THE WORLD
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Michael Marshall Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. He has published more than ninety short stories and five novels—Only Forward, Spares, One of Us, The Servants, and Hannah Green and her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence—winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth Awards, along with the Prix Bob-Morane in France. He has also received the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author.
Writing as “Michael Marshall” he has published seven internationally bestselling thrillers, including The Straw Men series (currently in development for television), The Intruders—recently a BBC America series starring John Simm, Mira Sorvino, and Millie Bobby Brown—and Killer Move. His most recent novel under this byline is We Are Here.
“One of the things I value most about being a writer is the occasional opportunity to catch up with old friends during conventions,” he explains, “while at the same time gaining a quick glimpse into a country; although it can also be strange—the concertinaing effect of maintaining relationships through an annual, or biannual, or every-five-years evening spent in a bar. It can make you very conscious of the passage of time, and what it’s doing to you … and them.
“Like the narrator of the story, I walked away from Helsinki with precisely two new words at my disposal: kiitos and moi (an informal word for ‘hello’). I never got the hang of pronouncing the former, but perfected the latter to the point where it became a problem, as people started to assume that I was a local, which led to me shrugging like a hapless buffoon as they launched into a stream of Finnish.”
I GOT THE cab to pull up a hundred yards short and paid the guy in cash, adding a generous tip despite having been told multiple times that people didn’t do that here in Finland. A few euros here or there make little difference to me, but they might to the driver. I worked as a waiter for a couple years, back in the day. What goes around comes around.
“Halloween party?”
“No,” I said. “Well, sure, tonight’s the night, I guess. But this is part of the Festival of the Fantastique.”
“Ah, yes. I heard of this.”
Hard not to. European cities tend to care a lot more openly about the arts, and the center of Helsinki was festooned with banners for this celebration of the Gothic and weird, in prose, film, and art—with big posters at most of the bus stops, and on the trams too. The venue for Greg’s event was an imposing neoclassical stone frontage that looked like a museum or embassy or church, strikingly up-lit on either side of a large central doorway. I’d asked to be dropped down the street to have a private moment for a cigarette, and also to see how the land lay. The line snaked fifty feet down the cold, dark street.
“Big crowd, huh?”
“Looks like it,” I said.
I climbed out, wrapping my coat around as a chill wind came whipping down the road, and used half of my grasp of the Finnish language in one sentence. “Kiitos.”
After the cab pulled away I blinked, stretched my mouth and eyes wide, and lit my cigarette. I was, I noticed, pretty drunk. That’s unusual for me now, especially at a festival, though in the early days it was near-mandatory. We’d arrive in a chaotic flock, get our work hung or installations set up as quickly as possible, and immediately head en masse for the nearest dive-bar to talk arty bullshit and get flamboyantly wasted into the small hours. Repeat for however many nights the event lasted, ending with a wretched train ride home.
But I don’t go to festivals by train any more. Or doze my hungover way home in the back of some guy’s truck, buffeted by unsold prints and paintings. I fly. Actually, I am flown. If I find myself in a bar it’s an invite-only party and I arrive escorted by the organizer and their assistant, the PR, sometimes a gallery owner. I am deferentially handed a glass of obligatory champagne and sip it while chatting with whoever’s allowed through the cordon. I’ll have a glass of wine during dinner, two at most, before switching to espressos and water. Being drunk in public is fine for enfants terribles. Not for me. Instead I’ll retire to my hotel room, catch up on email, stand a while looking out the window at whatever city it happens to be. And go to bed.
Tonight the party hadn’t been at a public venue, but—as sometimes happens—the home of a notable collector of my work.
And that’s where the trouble started.
I dropped the cigarette butt in the trash and headed across the street.
Something of a frisson ran through the line as I walked toward the entrance. Half the crowd was in Halloween costume, thankfully all horror-related instead of the ballerinas and baseball players and other random crap you’ll see at home. I considered democratically joining the end of the line, but only for about a second. That just doesn’t work. People leave their positions to come say “hi,” and the whole system goes to shit and it’s hassle the organizers don’t need when they’re trying to get an event started in a timely manner.
The Festival secretary was at the front, standing with the people checking tickets. Her eyes widened as I approached: not three hours previously I’d told her I wasn’t coming to this event.
“Mr. Williams,” she said. She’d gotten into the spirit of the night in a low-key way, up-spraying her hair like the Bride of Frankenstein, completing the effect with curved brows and beesting lipstick. “What a pleasure to see you here.”
“Figured I’d come support an old friend.”
“Aha,” she said. “And did you announce you might be attending, on the social media?”
“I may have mentioned it.”
She smiled, and looked at the people snaking away down the sidewalk. “So that explains this.”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s been a while since he had a show. I’m sure there’s a lot of interest in what Greg’s come up with.”
She winked, as if we both knew that wasn’t true. “Still no costume for you?”
“I am what I am. That’s scary enough.” I held up my hands like claws and made a deliberately lame growling sound.
She laughed, but then her face turned a little more serious. “I should warn you,” she said. “Your friend … he’s in a strange mood, I think.”
“Probably nervous. It’s a big crowd.”
She nodded, as if reassured. “I’m sure that’s all it is.”
The ticket-collectors stood aside to let me pass, and the people at the front of the line nodded and grinned at me. That’s the weirdest thing, the aspect I still haven’t gotten used to. I mean, sure—I’m recognizable, somewhat, in certain milieux. The TV show did that, along with being laughably characterized as “the Anthony Bourdain of art,” and simple self-marketing tricks like always wearing a charcoal suit. But why does that mean I get to jump the line? I don’t get it.
For a moment I considered stopping, briefly joining the front of the line as a gesture of solidarity with the masses. But then realized I was being a bit drunk and in reality I needed both a piss and some more to drink and I didn’t want to wait for either, and so I swanned in as God intended.
A short, dark corridor led to a large, circular room with a domed ceiling. This was crowded with a couple of hundred people, chattering and milling about and waiting for the event to start. I wrongly assumed the gents would be at the far side of the room, and found myself heading down some stone stairs into a sepulchral space beneath the building, like a crypt made of corridors. There were big bundles of straw and rolls of cotton wool piled up against the walls throughout, and large barriers of corrugated cardboard, painted black. Sound baffles, presumably. But nowhere to piss.
I went back upstairs and found the john, and as I came out a festival underling spotted me and hectically led me to one side. She was shy, her English rather more heavily accented than most of the Finns I’d encountered so far, and so it took me a moment to understand where she was taking me.
But then, there he was.
Rather more overweight than his picture in the festival program suggested, significantly more balding, standing by himself in a cordoned-off area and holding a bottle of champagne bullishly by the neck.
“Danny boy,” he said. “As I live and breathe.”
“Greg,” I said. “Looking good.”
“That’s horseshit and you know it. You of course look exactly how you do on the TV. I guess that’s what a shit-ton of money will do for you.”
That, and going to the gym, and watching what I eat, I thought, and making the effort to do all the other tiresome things required not to look like crap at our age. Didn’t say it. “You going to give me some of that drink?”
“Oh yeah.” He peered around, eventually spotted the clearly visible array of glasses on the table behind him, and slopped a random amount of champagne more or less into one of them. “There were a couple of the festival people here, but I said something borderline rude to that organizer woman and they all kind of drifted off.”
“Rude about what?”
“You, to be frank.”
I laughed. “What did you say?”
“Just that I didn’t think you were all you were cracked up to be. ’Course at that point I had no idea you’d actually be turning up. Look at ’em …” he gestured out at the crowds milling around the room, more than a few of whom were sneaking glances over at us. “… isn’t that fucking weird? Them wanting to look at you like that? Or are you used to it now?”
“Doesn’t bother me,” I said, giving a little wave to a couple of people who seemed familiar. They looked delighted, and waved back.
“Having been recognized by their lord, the peasants rejoiced.”
“Piss off, Greg.”
“Why are you even here?”
“Dude,” I said. “It’s been a long time. But back in the day … I’d say we were friends, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure,” he said, reluctantly. “But I didn’t mean that. I meant at this festival. It’s all horror stuff. They can call it “Gothic” or “fantastique” or whatever they like, but that’s what it is. Horror movies, horror books, horror art. The genre slum. You haven’t done anything like that in fucking decades.”
“My Dark Side series two years ago—”
“Oh fuck off. Putting in more shadows and ladling on the burnt umber does not make you a master of the macabre.”
“I’m flattered you’ve been keeping up with my work.”
“Can’t fucking avoid it. Any idea what I’ve been doing?”
“To be honest, no. Not since.”
I left it there. He looked away, then back. It was the first time in the entire exchange we’d had direct eye contact. He looked drunk, also tired and hurt. “Installations.”
“Well, yeah, I know that. Which is what the thing tonight is, right? That’s great. I always said that was your best medium in the early days.”
“Are you taking the piss? These still are the early days for me, Danny. I am literally back where I fucking started.”
“Careers can be like that.”
“Not yours.”
“Look, what do you want me to say? I’ve been lucky.”
“And you sold out.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Is it? The annoying thing, the thing that really pisses me off, is you were good. You painted stuff that unnerved the crap out of people. But then you figured out there was no money in it, and so you jumped into the abstractosphere.”
“We all make choices.”
“Meaning?”
I shook my head. He knew I was referring to his defining moment. The point where—resentful at not receiving the recognition that in all honesty he probably deserved—he spiraled off into using a genuinely remarkable level of technical skill to start forging art instead of creating it. Of course faking is an act of creation, of a kind, not least in the level of attention to detail required to convincingly replicate the techniques of others, especially old masters. But it’s a road to nowhere good, especially if you have an ego as big as Greg’s. They say many serial killers get to the point where they basically want to be caught, either to be put out of their misery or—more likely—finally get the attention they’ve always craved. It’s the same with forgers. Almost none of them are in it for the money. They want to get one over on the gallery owners and collectors and other so-called experts who turn some artists into rock stars and consign others to obscurity. For a while it’s enough for you alone to know you’re doing this. Not for long, though. Consciously or otherwise, eventually you’ll leave a clue. Greg tried to pull the same trick twice (painting a semi-obvious forgery on top of a much better one, thus getting the latter accepted as real) and was caught. And vilified.
“Fuck you,” Greg said. He said it very clearly. Several people outside the cordon heard him, and quickly looked away.
“Thanks. I was the sole person from the old days who stood up for you. Literally the only one.”
“And that’s why fuck you. It was that which pushed me over the fucking edge. How do you think it felt, charity from somebody who gets his assistants to do all the work?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that rumor,” I said, knocking back the glass of wine. “It isn’t true. Everything with my name on it is mine. I work long hours. And I work hard.”
“With your eyes closed?”
I was saved from having to answer this by the approach of the Festival Secretary. She’d been hovering the bac
kground for a few minutes. “I’m sorry to … interrupt,” she said. “I just wanted to remind you it’s due to start in twenty minutes.”
“I know,” Greg said. “I can tell the fucking time.”
“Thank you,” I told her. She backed away.
“That’s why there’s a crowd here tonight, isn’t it?” Greg said to me, angrily. “You fucking tweeted it. Didn’t you. You couldn’t even let me have that.”
“Fuck’s sake. I’m going outside for a cigarette.”
“You still smoke? I’m genuinely amazed.”
“We all have a dark side, Greg. I just hide mine. Whereas you get yours out like your cock, and wave it around.”
“At least I’m honest.”
“Maybe. But the problem is then everybody’s already seen your dick and you’ve got nothing left to shock them with.”
There was still a line at the door, though shorter. It was getting close to show time. I walked quickly past with my head down and went far enough up the street that I could stand in a doorway without being seen. Not that I give a damn about people knowing I smoke. I’m fifty-two. My parents are dead and my wife is now an ex-wife, and there’s not really anybody’s judgement that I have to take seriously.
Except my own, of course. I stood huddled in shadow and sucked down the first cigarette quickly, decided to have another, on the grounds I had no idea how long this event was going to take: the description merely said it was something everybody experienced together, rather than wandered through in their own time. Seeing Greg had affected me in ways I hadn’t anticipated, too. Most of my reason for being here was genuinely to show support. But sure, I’ll admit a portion of it was to present myself to him. To the guy who’d always had so much more flair in the old days, always attracted the lion’s share of attention, who had no qualms about elbowing “friends” aside in order to get to the reviewer, gallery owner—or girl. The alpha creator, the hare, who’d burned out and let the beta male tortoise overtake on the long haul.
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories: Terrifying Tales Set on the Scariest Night of the Year! Page 30