Doc bowed to applause and whistles, then a recording of Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre” began to play as Sam pulled the Asa Levitation table forward. Jean entered from stage left, her low-cut evening gown drawing catcalls from the audience. Doc ignored them to focus on the performance: first, he mimed placing his daughter into a hypnotic trance and then he helped her onto the table before taking his place behind it. He placed one foot on the secret hydraulic lift button in the floor as he lifted a hoop that he moved carefully around the table, following the twists and turns in the table’s hidden supporting arm. Finally he set the hoop aside, moved his foot to the “down” button, and lowered the table to floor height. As Jean appeared to reawaken from her trance and step from the table, Doc was pleased to hear the music drowned out by applause.
Then someone shouted out, “Show us the real ghost!” The call was swiftly accompanied by a murmur of agreement.
Doc knew this crowd wasn’t going to settle for a standard evening of classic illusions followed by a staged séance and the black-out. He had to improvise.
“Very well,” he said into the stage mic, “let us speak to the spirits. Mr. Crockett, will you please join me on stage?”
Jean gave her father an inquisitive look, but understood when Doc whispered to her, “Slates.”
The audience began to mutter and hiss as Billy stepped hesitantly onto the stage, looking far less confident now than he had when singing about girls in twirling skirts who break boys’ hearts. He let Jean help him to center stage, where Doc now held the two slates.
A voice shouted, “Here’s your chance for revenge, Jimbo!”
The audience howled laughter. Doc palmed another piece of flash paper from a pocket, calling out, “The spirits require silence,” as the paper ignited in a fiery flame.
It worked; the Rialto went quiet as a tomb.
Doc held up the two slates as he spoke into the mic. “What you see here are two ordinary slates, the kind you might find used to teach children . . . but tonight we won’t be teaching children, but reaching spirits.” Doc handed the slates to Jean, who walked to the lip of the stage, turning the slates end over end. “As you can see, both sides of the slates are empty.”
Jean finished showing off the slates, and returned them to Doc, who produced a piece of chalk he’d fished from a pocket as Jean had shown the slates. “Now, here we have a regular piece of chalk. I’m going to place this piece of chalk between these slates, and then I’m going to request that Mr. Crockett ask a question of the spirits who haunt this place.”
Doc made a show of placing the chalk between the slates and tying them together with a length of velvet cord. Jean took the mic to Billy, and Doc felt a pang of guilt when he heard how the boy’s voice was choked with genuine emotion. “Jim, if you’re out there—and I think you are, because I always knew when you were around—I want you to tell everyone here what happened. Tell ’em that we were just horsing around like we always did, that you fell when I was nowhere near you, that I’ve thought about you every day since and wondered if I could’ve done something to save you. Tell ’em, Jim. Tell ’em.”
The next part should’ve been Jean taking the microphone over to where Doc held the slates out before him, holding it to the slates so the audience could plainly hear the sound of the chalk scratching (really Doc’s thumb hidden on the back side). The trick should’ve ended then with pulling the slates apart to reveal, I AM JIM, written on one, and, BILLY IS INNOCENT, on the other.
Instead, the slates were suddenly ripped from Doc’s two hands by some unseen force.
He gaped with the rest of the audience as they flew across the stage, where one was cast aside violently. The chalk squealed as it was pulled across the surface of the slate. After a few seconds, the chalk dropped and the slate turned to face the audience, who saw these words written on its black surface:
LEAVE
BILLY ALONE.
I JUST FELL.
The lights went out.
Doc almost called out to Sam and Jean to get the ghosts and run through the audience with them, but then a different glow caught his eye. There was another loud noise as the slate fell to the stage, but what the audience was screaming at was the figure forming there, a shimmering blue haze congealing and focusing until it was a boy of maybe seventeen, tall and lanky, with a narrow face and an usher’s uniform.
In the audience, people began shouting, “Jim!”
Doc watched, too stunned to move, as the apparition began to glide across the stage, stopping only when its own glow revealed Billy, standing, shaking, with Jean half-crouched in terror behind him. Billy stood his ground, though, as the ghost of his friend came to him, slowly, floating . . . and then raised its right hand to waist level. Billy didn’t try to stifle a sob as he reached out for the hand. At the moment the two hands—one alive, one dead—would have touched, the ghost disappeared and the theater lights came back on.
For a second, no one knew what to do. The audience was frozen. Billy cried. Sam and Jean stared in disbelief.
After a few seconds, Doc stepped forward, grabbed the mic, and said, “And that’s our show, folks. Good night!”
***
WHEN THE TRUCK EMBLAZONED with gaudy banners for Dr. Morbismo’s InsaniTERRORium Horror Show! pulled out of Ginmill, Texas the next morning at 9:04, it was accompanied by a second truck carrying Billy Crockett and his Blue Burners, who had accepted Doc’s invitation the previous night to tour with them as the permanent opening act.
But there was also a fourth passenger on Doc’s truck. Neither Doc, Jean, or Sam were quite sure where he rode, but they knew Jim Black was with them. He’d appeared again last night after the show, backstage, and Doc—now a believer—had offered him an afterlife in the ghost show biz. As far as they knew, Jim had accepted.
Dr. Morbismo’s InsaniTERRORium Horror Show! would be the only ghost show in the world with the real thing.
* * *
LISA MORTON is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. She is the author of four novels and more than 130 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, and a world-class Halloween expert. She co-edited (with Ellen Datlow) the anthology Haunted Nights; other recent releases include Ghosts: A Haunted History and the collection The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats. Lisa lives in Los Angeles.
* * *
HOT BABE
by Bill Pronzini
“Drive all out today, Jack,” she said. “Faster than ever before. Fast, fast, fast.”
* * *
SHE WAS THE HOTTEST BABE FLINT HAD EVER seen. Flaming red hair, juicy red lips, black eyes full of smoky heat with a voice to match, a body that would make a priest drool. She was with Bruno Gianetti when he first set eyes on her in Sparkie’s Tavern, but she wouldn’t be for long.
Sparkie’s was where a lot of the guys from the Speedway hung out, and Flint was there that day sipping suds and listening to Rick Neale and Sam Clements bull about the hundred-lap main event on Saturday afternoon. He had a table all to himself, like always except when he was with a chick. The other drivers didn’t want anything to do with him.
They all thought he was too reckless on the track, that he’d deliberately caused the last-lap spin-out up north that had killed the kid leading the pack so he could win the race himself.
Well, he had, but so what?
It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten away with that kind of tactic. Jockeying claimers and hardtops at the state tracks was dog-eat-dog—you did what you had to do to collect a purse, and to hell with anybody who got in your way.
Saturday’s main was the top event in the local racing season. It wasn’t official from the Speedway promoters yet, but rumor had it that the purse for the winner would be five percent of the gate. Any way you hashed that out, it came to two grand or better if ther
e was a full house, and there always was whenever they had a hundred-lapper.
Flint and his Deuce had won two mains already this season, and he intended to win this one too. But it wouldn’t be easy. There were a lot of good drivers entered, Neale and Clements among them, but the stiffest competition was likely to come from Bruno Gianetti.
Gianetti was real good, drove hard and played almost as rough as Flint. Flint had been racing against him off and on for two years now and knew the Deuce was faster than Gianetti’s Dodge on the straightaways if he played it smart; he’d taken him more times than he’d been taken by hanging back, not letting the bugger nose him toward the wall or the infield, then punching out in the stretches. Gianetti was good, all right. But Flint was better. He’d win that two grand prize on Saturday one way or another.
That’s what he was thinking, sitting there with his Lucky Lager, when Gianetti came waltzing in with Brenda on his arm and started showing her off, calling her his woman, acting the big-stud role. He’d picked her up at a track down in the Central Valley after winning a $500 purse in what he claimed was a record time. She dug speed, he said, the faster the better, the more hard-nose driving the better.
She didn’t deny it.
Flint knew he had to have her as soon as he saw her. Yeah, and she knew it too. The first time their eyes met, sparks crackled between them. Gianetti saw the sparks fly—hell, they probably singed him on the way by—but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He’d been stupid-lucky to get his mitts on her in the first place. He was no prize to look at—big, but with plenty of fat mixed in with the meat, and ugly as sin. Maybe it was the ugliness that had turned her on. Flint was no James Dean himself, but his looks had a hard-ass smolder to them that Gianetti’s lacked. He’d never had any trouble getting chicks to drop their pants for him. But none he’d ever had looked half as hot as Brenda. The two of them were made for each other.
Flint figured it would take a little time to yank her away from Gianetti, maybe not until after he won the Speedway main, and that he’d have to maneuver some to do it. But he was wrong. She showed up at his pad that night, wearing the same tight green dress she’d had on at Sparkie’s, the flaming red hair hanging low over shoulders, and those juicy lips licked wet.
He said, grinning, “How’d you find me so quick?”
“It wasn’t hard. Everybody on the circuit knows Jack Flint.”
“Yeah, and the jealous bastards are all afraid of me. But not you, huh?”
“No. Not me.”
“You have any trouble getting away from Gianetti?”
“Never mind him,” she said. “It’s you I want and me you want. I knew it as soon as I saw you this afternoon.”
“Baby, so did I.”
Two minutes after she came inside, they were going at it hot and heavy. Man, oh man! He’d known she’d be a pistol in the sack, but not one as scorching as this. Best he’d ever had by a mile. And she couldn’t get enough, wore him out all through the night and part of the morning.
In between times he tried to get her to tell him where she’d been and what she’d been doing before Gianetti got hold of her, but she wouldn’t talk about herself. Okay with him. He didn’t like talking about his past, either. The present and the future were all that mattered.
“You’re mine now,” Flint said just before she left. “Not Gianetti’s or anybody else’s, now or ever.”
“And you’re mine.”
“A hell of a team, you and me. After I win the main on Saturday, we’ll take the two grand and head for Vegas, have ourselves a ball before I start burning up the tracks again.”
***
FLINT SPENT THAT AFTERNOON at the Speedway, working on the Deuce’s mill, getting the timing right. He’d offered to go with Brenda to collect her stuff in case Gianetti gave her any crap, but she said no, she could handle him and there wouldn’t be any hassle. And there wasn’t. She was in Flint’s pad when he got home, already moved in and waiting in bed for him. She really couldn’t get enough. Well, neither could he.
They went out to dinner, and afterward to Sparkie’s so this time Flint could be the one to show her off. Gianetti was there, hanging onto the bar next to Rick Neale, pie-eyed drunk. His fat face got even uglier when he saw them.
“Hey, look who’s here! The bitch and the son of a bitch.”
Flint glared at him. “Shut up, Bruno.”
“Yeah? Why don’t you come over here and make me?”
Neale said something to him and put a hand on his arm, but Gianetti threw it off. He lurched away from the bar, knocking over his stool, and staggered to the table Flint and Brenda were about to claim, spilling beer from his mug on the way.
“Goddamn woman stealer.” Then, with one bleary eye on Brenda, “Goddamn whore stealer.”
The crowd in there got real quiet.
“You want a piece of me, fat-stuff?” Flint said. “One more crack like that and you’ll get more than you can handle.”
Gianetti raised the mug threateningly. “How’d you like this shoved up your ass?”
The table hadn’t been cleaned off yet; Flint grabbed an empty beer glass, cracked it against the table edge. The top shattered, leaving him with the jagged-edged lower half.
“Hey,” Sparkie yelled, “none of that crap in here!”
Flint paid no attention to him. Out of the tail of his eye he could see Brenda standing tense, expectant, her face flushed with excitement. Speed and sex weren’t the only things she dug.
“Go ahead, try it,” he said to Gianetti. “I’ll slice you to ribbons.”
Gianetti stayed where he was, breathing like an ox, the mug still raised.
“That’s enough!” Sparkie came out from behind the bar, the marlin spike he kept under it clenched in one big hand. “Both of you cool it now, or take it outside.”
Gianetti broke the stare-down first. He lowered the mug, backed off a step as Sparkie ran up. “This isn’t the end of it, man,” he said in slurred tones.
“You got that right.”
Sparkie snapped, “Flint, put that glass down and haul your ass out of here. And take her with you.”
Flint didn’t argue. He set the broken glass on the table, grabbed Brenda’s arm, swaggered out with her.
In the parking lot he said, “I saw the way you looked in there. You wanted to see me cut Gianetti, didn’t you? Slice him up.”
“No. Hurt him, yes, but not like that, with broken glass.”
“How then?”
“On the track tomorrow. Find a way to hurt him there.”
Flint laughed. “I’ll do just that. Count on it, baby.”
***
THE STANDS WERE ALREADY two-thirds full when Flint rolled into the Speedway pit area on Saturday afternoon. It was a little past one o’clock; the first time trials wouldn’t start until two. There’d be a packed house, all right.
Brenda was already there, in Section A right behind the starter’s flag, the best seating at the track. The promoters gave each of the drivers tickets for two seats there, no charge. Flint backed the trailer into his spot and then went up for a few last words with her.
“Drive all out today, Jack,” she said. The feverish excitement was in her eyes again. “Faster than ever before. Fast, fast, fast.”
“Pedal to the metal all the way until I’m first past the checkered flag, babe.”
Larry Timkins, the fish-faced grease monkey Flint had hired as his pit man, helped him jockey the Deuce off the trailer, gassed her from the five-gallon drum wired to the roll bars inside. Then Flint fired her up. The carbs were running a little rough, so he told Timkins to work on the idling jets.
The time trials started. But when it was time for Flint to make his run around the oval track, he discovered that Timkins had done a piss-poor job adjusting the carbs. His time was good, but not good enough as it turned out. He would have the outside pole in the main.
Gianetti would have the inside.
***
FLINT STOOD
WITH SOME of the other drivers to watch the start of the semi-main—a 35-lapper made up of the twenty-five slowest qualifiers. There wouldn’t be any heat races today.
Gianetti was over in the pits with his Dodge. Flint had seen him briefly during the trials, and they’d exchanged glares but that was all. For once Gianetti had kept his fat mouth shut.
The public address announcer called the main event, giving the cars plenty of time to line up on the track in front of the starter’s flag. You could feel the tension in the air; the overflow crowd was buzzing. Flint glanced up at Section A. He couldn’t see Brenda in the throng, but he knew she’d be on her feet yelling once the race started.
When the announcer finished introducing the drivers, Flint and the others revved up, and then the opening flag dropped. There was plenty of jockeying for position on the first lap, Gianetti hunched over the wheel of his Dodge casting hate-filled side glances in Flint’s direction. Then they reached the starter again, got the green flag, and the race was on.
Gianetti was after him right away. Instead of keeping to the outside, he edged over and bumped fenders hard, trying to make Flint lose control and spin out. Flint weaved to avoid him, straightened and floored the Deuce. But Gianetti didn’t let him get in front, cutting over just in time. Their fenders grazed again. Flint pulled back, let Clements in Car 12N take the north turn before he did. If he hadn’t, Gianetti would have forced him into the wall.
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