“But how about you? Didn’t you have any say?”
“I was unconscious, Bob. I didn’t know anything about it until I woke up.”
I have never fainted, ever – not even when my cousin Freddie ripped off three of his fingers with a circular saw. But right then I could feel the blood emptying out of my brain and I was pretty darn close to it. The whole world turned black and white, like a photographic negative, and I felt like I was perspiring ice-water.
“What do you feel about it now?” I asked her. “How can you manage to live like this?”
She gave me a sad, bruised smile. “I try to treat myself with respect, and I try to treat Sheba with respect. That’s why I go out running, to give her body the exercise she needs. We always go out at night, and I always wear that ski-mask, so that nobody can see my face and my hair.”
“But you can talk. Dogs can’t talk.”
“Jack transplanted my vocal cords. I still get breathless, but I don’t find talking too difficult.”
She came up closer. I didn’t know if I could touch her or not. And if I did, what was I supposed to do? Kiss her? Put my arm around her? Or stroke her? I still couldn’t believe that I was looking at a huge brindled dog with a human woman’s head.
“Most of all,” she said, “I try to be Kylie. I try to forget what’s happened to me, and live the best life I can.”
I looked her straight in her Hershey-brown eyes. “You can’t bear it, can you?”
“Bob – I have to bear it. What else can I do? How does a dog commit suicide? I can’t shoot myself. I can’t hang myself. I can’t open bottles of pills. I can’t even get out of the house and run out on to the freeway. I can’t turn the door-handle and I can’t jump over the fences at the sides.”
“But how can Jack say that he loves you when you’re suffering like this?”
“He’s in total denial. He says he loves me but he’s obsessed. He’s always bringing me flowers and perfume. He bought me that painting by Sidney Nolan. It must have cost nearly quarter of a million dollars.”
I sat on that couch staring at her, but I simply didn’t know what to say. The worst thing was that I was just as responsible for this monstrous thing that had happened to her as Jack was. I had killed her. Jack had given her life. But what a life. It made me question everything I had ever felt about the chronically sick, and the paraplegic, and the catastrophically injured. At what point is a life not worth living any more? And who’s to say that it isn’t?
For the first time ever, I couldn’t think of any wisecracks. I could only think that tears were sliding down my cheeks and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
Kylie said, “My grandma had a dog she really loved. He was a little fox terrier and his name was Rip. After my grandpa died, Rip was the only companion she had. She used to talk to him like he was human.”
She coughed, and took a deep breath.
“Rip got sick. Cancer, I think. As soon as he was diagnosed, my grandma asked the vet to put him down. She held my hand on the day we buried him, and she said that if you truly love someone, whether it’s a person or a pet, you never allow them to suffer.”
“What are you saying to me, Kylie?”
She came even closer. I reached out and touched her cheek. She was very cold, but her skin felt just as soft as it had before, when we were lovers.
“Help me, Bob. I’m sure that it was Fate that brought you here tonight.”
“Help you?” I knew exactly what she was saying but I had to hear it from her.
“Let me out of here. That’s all you have to do. Open the door and let me run away.”
“Oh, great. So that you can throw yourself in front of a truck?”
“You won’t ever have to know. Please, Bob. I can’t bear living like this any longer.”
I stroked her hair. “You’re asking me to kill you for a second time. I’m not so sure I can do that.”
“Please, Bob.”
I stood up and walked across to the Sidney Nolan painting over the fireplace. “What does this mean?” I asked her. “These figures . . . they look kind of Aboriginal.”
“They are. The painting’s called Ritual Lake. It represents the mystical bond between men and animals.”
I looked down at her. She looked exhausted. “All right,” I said. “I’ll help you. But I’m damned if I’m going to let you get yourself flattened on the freeway.”
“I don’t care what you do. I just want this to be over.”
I led her through the hallway to the front door, and opened it. Just as I did so, Jack’s Audi SUV swerved into the drive, its headlights glaring, and stopped.
“Hurry!” I said, and began to run down the steps, with Kylie close behind me.
But Jack must have seen that the front door was open and he was quicker than both of us. As we reached the bottom step, he opened the door of his SUV and jumped down in front of us.
“Bob! Bob, my man! What a surprise!”
“Hi, Jack.”
Kylie and I stopped where we were. Jack came up to me and stood only inches in front of me, his eyes unnaturally widened, like those mad people you see in slasher movies. He was holding Kylie’s metal-studded leash in his right hand, and slapping it into the palm of his left.
“Taking Kylie for a walk, were you, Bob? I’m amazed she trusts you, after what you did to her.”
“As a matter of fact, Jack, I came round to talk to you.”
“You came round to talk to me? What could you possibly have to say to me, Bob, that I would ever want to listen to?”
“Well – maybe the word ‘remorse’ means something to you.”
“‘Remorse’? You’re feeling remorse? For what, Bob? For mutilating the woman I love so severely that this was her only chance of survival? Ruining her life, and my life, and ending Sheba’s life, too?”
“Jack,” said Kylie, in that high, harsh whisper. “Nothing can change what’s happened. All the rage in the world isn’t going to bring me back the way I was. I forgive Bob. And if I can forgive him, can’t you?”
“Get back in the house, Kylie.”
“No, Jack. It’s over. I’m going and I’m not coming back.”
“Get back in the house, Kylie! Do as you’re damn well told!”
Kylie turned on him. “I’m not a dog, Jack! I’m not your bitch! I’m a woman, and I’ll do whatever I want!”
Jack swung back his arm and lashed her across the face with her leash. She cried out, and cowered back, just like a beaten dog. I grabbed hold of the leash and swung Jack around, trying to pull him off balance, but he punched me very hard on my cheekbone, and I fell backward into the bushes.
“Now, get inside!” Jack snapped at Kylie, and lashed her again.
This time, however, Kylie didn’t cringe. She leaped up on her hind legs and pushed Jack with her forepaws. Even though she was a female, she must have weighed at least 130 pounds. He collided with the door of his SUV, and then dropped onto the driveway.
“You bitch!” Jack yelled at her, trying to climb to his feet. But she pushed him down again, and then she ducked her head sideways and bit him – first his nose and then his cheek. I saw blood flying all across the front of his pale blue shirt.
“Get off me!” Jack screamed. “Get off me!”
But now Kylie bit into the side of his neck, viciously hard. He bellowed and snorted, and the heels of his shiny black shoes kicked against the bricks, but she refused to open her jaws.
“Kylie!” I shouted at her. “For Christ’s sake, let him go!”
I clambered to my feet and tried to pull her away from him, but Sheba’s body was so smooth-haired and muscular that I couldn’t even get a proper grip. I took a handful of Kylie’s blonde hair, and pulled that instead, even though I was irrationally worried that I might pull her head off. But she kept her teeth buried in Jack’s neck until his blood was flooding dark across the driveway, and his shoes gave a last shuddering kick.
Eventually, panting, she ra
ised her head. The lower half of her face was smothered in blood, but her eyes looked triumphant.
“You’ve killed him,” I said flatly.
“Yes,” she said. “That was his punishment for keeping me alive.”
I checked my watch. It was almost a quarter of midnight.
“We’d better get going,” I told her.
We drove west on Sunset, not speaking to each other. There was a full moon right above us, and its white light turned everything to cardboard, so that I felt as if we were driving through a movie set.
We looped around the Will Rogers State Park and then we arrived at the seashore. I parked, and opened the passenger door, so that Kylie could jump out.
I walked out onto the sand, dimpled by a million feet. Kylie followed me, panting. We reached the shoreline and stood together at the water’s edge, while the surf tiredly splashed at our feet.
There was a warm breeze blowing from the south-west. I looked down at Kylie and said, “Here we are, then. Back at the ocean.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Jesus Christ. I don’t know what for.”
“For helping me to end it, that’s all.”
She trotted a little way into the water, and then she turned around. “You’re right about boomerangs,” she said. “They don’t really come back. Ever.”
With that, she began to swim away from the seashore. Looking at her then, you would never have known what had happened to her, because all you could see was a blonde girl’s head, dipping up and down between the waves.
I stood and watched her swimming away until she was out of sight. Then I threw her leash after her, as hard and as far as I could.
Black Box
Gemma Files
The Clarke Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s attendants had Carraclough Devize dolled up and waiting for him when Sylvester Horse-Kicker arrived, very slightly late, due to a winning combination of parking, streetcar maintenance on Spadina – Toronto’s only got two seasons, boy, winter and construction, so watch out, his mum had said, when he’d told her getting into the Freihoeven Institute’s Placement Program meant he’d be moving to the city – and a plague of migrating aphids filling the downtown core with the disgusting equivalent of green hail that squirmed when you wiped it away. She stood in the corner of the room like some reversed still from a lost Kurosawa film (Kiyoshi, not Akira), both taller than you’d think, yet thinner, with her colourless mass of hair hanging down and her glasses angled so the light erased her eyes.
On closer inspection, he saw that those white things poking from her sleeves weren’t cuffs but bandages.
“Miss Devize? I’m—”
Impossible to tell if she looked up or not, her voice all-but-affectless, as ever. “We met last year. The Eden Marozzi inquiry – those diorama photos. Abbott asked me to consult.”
“Yes, absolutely, sorry. It’s just . . . we didn’t talk much. I didn’t think you’d remember me.”
A shrug, one no-brow slightly canted, as though to project: Well, there you go. And – ugh, could he actually hear the echo of those same words trace his inner ear with sticky film, like walking through a spiderweb and only noticing it later?
I’m in the wrong damn job, if psychics creep me out this much.
Devize smiled, as though he’d made the remark out loud. As though he’d meant it as a joke.
“Abbott’s note mentioned storage,” she said. “So that means an item assessment.” He nodded. “Then I’ll need to drop by my office, get my camera. It’s in—”
He held it up: a vintage Polaroid One-Step, rainbow swoosh and all. Christ knew where she got the film. “Abbott told me,” he explained, unnecessarily.
“Of course.”
In the seven years he’d worked for the Freihoeven Institute’s ParaPsych Department – two during his internship, five after – Sy was pretty sure this was the first and only time he’d ever dealt with Carraclough Devize without the presence of Freihoeven head-man Dr Guilden Abbott, who seemed to consider himself her surrogate father-cum-self-elected handler. Never forget, Sylvester: Carra is special, Abbott was fond of saying. Our single best resource, the standard by which all other psychic – assets – must be judged. When Dr and Dr Jay were doing their initial survey of the greater Toronto area, they concluded they’d never met anyone like her, and never expected to; that’s good enough for me.
Which wasn’t completely true. Certainly, Sy’d spent enough time in Records to know that Abbott continued to test Devize’s crazily high ratings biannually, regular as seasonalized clockwork. The latest series of arrays usually coincided with whenever she’d checked herself out of the Clarke, which she used like it was either a five-star spa or her summer cottage/winter retreat/spring and fall whatever; special, for sure. In all senses of the word.
Between commitments, Devize spent the bulk of her time at the Freihoeven itself, often even sleeping there (Abbott had assigned her an office, for that very purpose), with very occasional return trips to the basement apartment of her mother’s decaying Annex home. And though records showed she was at least ten years older than Sy, pushing forty harder than a Midvale School for the Gifted student at the door marked “pull”, she still drifted through life displaying all the fine social skills of the child prodigy she’d once been – the thirteen-year-old whose destitute, grief-drunk mother Gala had rented her out to any seance circuit freak seeking solace from beyond the grave. Who, on promise of $10,000 and a “consulting” job, had accompanied the aforementioned Drs Jay and Jay – Freihoeven’s founders, Abbott’s mentors, both late and lamented – on their extremely unsuccessful final mission.
The goal: catalogue and/or exorcize Peazant’s Folly, a haunted house located on a natural gas fault up near Overdeere, Ontario. The cost: one archaeologist, one forensic psychologist, one well-established mental medium and two noted parapsychological researchers, all removed in body-bags, straitjackets, or simple police restraints. Devize, the youngest party-member, had been listed as Glenda Fisk’s “apprentice” on the original proposal; she came back in a coma, then woke with a convulsive blast of telekinetic energy that broke all the windows on her floor of the Toronto Sick Kids’ Hospital, signifying her emergence as something entirely new: a mental medium turned physical, ghost-touched from one category straight into another, with little to show for the experience but a broken hip, a lingering limp, and a complete inability to screen herself anymore.
Sy remembered a piece of video footage he’d stumbled on – Abbott’s first interview with Devize after assuming control of the institute, when she was only two months out of the hospital. Pretty much the same figure as today, barring a few more crow’s feet: downcast face hair-shadowed, eyes glasses-hidden. Blank as any given winter street, snow new-fallen over grime, just waiting for fresh defilement.
You look well, Carra. Better.
Mmm-hmm. Ready for work; that’s what Gala says, anyhow.
Oh, well, there’s no immediate need—
No, it’s all right. Take a look: I’m fine, no harm, no foul. No scars . . . but then, there wouldn’t be, would there?
Sorry?
Oh, Doctor. And here she almost smiled – almost. Asking, gently: Are you really going to tell me you haven’t noticed?
Sy could still see Abbott’s brows, already too close for comfort, attempting to knit themselves inextricably together. I, uh . . . I don’t understand.
How I have no skin anymore.
(That’s all.)
And that would be the attraction, right there, ever since: a wound so deep, so all-encompassing and impossible to heal, it practically counted as a super-power. Carraclough Devize, human ghost-o-meter – steer her towards anything suspected of weirdness, sit back, and take notes. By Freihoeven standards, there was no better confirmation/debunking method than letting her wander through a site and come back either edge-of-puking, a-crawl with automatic writing stigmata, or simply shaking her head in that numb, vaguely disappointed way.
> The Folly, protected by Historic Site status, had finally been converted into a haphazard tourist attraction; it had endured, unoccupied except for half-hour stretches three times a day, until 2002, when the lights went out during a lecture and the tour-guide’s assistant lit a candle. Meanwhile, the Freihoeven prospered, even without the Jays. Guilden Abbott kept his job, and so long as he did – apparently – so did Carra Devize.
Incautious, that last observation. Sy felt her prying absently at the edges of his brain again, perhaps without even meaning to – her half-hearted attention in the back of his mind like grit, sanding a horrid pearl.
“Where is Abbott, anyways?” she asked, turning the camera over in her hands, rather than probe any deeper. Which was . . . nice of her, he guessed. Jesus, I’m bad at this.
Not like he’d never dealt with psychics before, for Christ’s sake. Just not ones this strong, or competent. Or unpredictable.
“He had to go to the States, on very short notice. Boston.”
“Lecture?”
“Estate sale, actually. Plus a silent auction, by the candle.”
“Huh.”
(Fitting.)
They were almost to the gate now, Sy waving at the orderly who’d let him in, who nodded, curtly. Turning Devize’s way, he reminded her, voice softening: “You need to be back by five, Carra.”
“I know, Paul.”
“Five, on the dot. Or we gotta put you back in the no-sharps room.”
She made a clumsy okay sign with both hands, thumbs barely meeting forefingers; tendons might be still a bit foreshortened from the patch-job, Sy supposed. “I know, Paul. Seriously.”
“Well, just sayin”. You been here long enough.”
As the contact gate screeched open, Sy stepped through with her on his heels, uncomfortably close. He felt, rather than saw, her give that same slight head-shake, a bit sadly.
“Not quite yet,” he thought he heard her murmur, under the alarm’s screech.
Spirit Cabinet, circa 1889, the label read, in Abbott’s neat handwriting. From the estate of Katherine-Mary des Esseintes/Lardner-Honeycutt crime scene (transfer handled by Wilcox Labrett Oyosolo, 2007, through Auction House Miroux).
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror Page 43