Parrish shook his head. “Very, very unlikely, Mr Stanhope. I know all my patients too well, and if Mr Mellor is upstairs I can assure you he is still there. Unless, of course,” and at this he gave Stanhope a meaty grin, “I actually am Mr Mellor.”
Stanhope suddenly felt so uncomfortable that he found himself searching for anything to change the subject. His eyes alighted on the paper lying on the floor.
“You’ve dropped something,” he said.
“Have I?” Parrish was in the process of getting to his feet to replace the folder on the shelf. He bent down, picked up the document, and peered at the heading. “My goodness me,” he said. “Thank you for spotting that. It would never have done to have left it lying around.”
Stanhope asked what it was, only to be rewarded with a dismissive gesture.
“A little bit more about our Mr Mellor,” said Parrish, “but seeing as you are so disturbed by the case, it’s probably better we just put it away.”
Parrish was about to return it when Stanhope stopped him.
“Read it,” he said.
Parrish looked shocked. “My dear chap, are you quite sure?” he said. “You do seem rather upset.”
“I want to hear what happened next,” said Stanhope. “Please read it.”
And so the doctor did.
<
~ * ~
PETER CROWTHER
Mister Mellor Comes to Wayside
THE FIRST DAY of May had come and the promise of a summer to follow filled the countryside. Mister Mellor had been here for a couple of weeks, during which time he had not been idle. He had discovered a solitary homestead and he had spent time there, talking to the man and the woman and the three children and even the dog. They had been unable to help him. Now they were resting. The police would call it different when they finally found them, but for Mister Mellor, “resting” was a reasonable catch-all.
He drifted into the nearby town - with the rather quaint name of Wayside - with the first hot day, not fully formed and completely undecided of what he wanted to be ... crouched down on all fours and slinking in, feral and deceitful, alongside the wire-mesh fencing by the town dump.
For the past day he had been holed up in the fields and the valley down along the Interstate between Carver and Durphin, playing with shapes and preening himself like a wily old cat just waiting for the right time to come along. That time was now, first day of the month, and he felt energized by his rest, felt frisky and ready for action.
He stopped at the sign and looked at it ... looked at it for several minutes. This must be the place, he reasoned as he had reasoned many thousands of times before, reading significance into weather variation, town names, people names, until he could no longer separate reality from the countless variations that may or may not lie ahead.
Wayside.
It sounded right.
Hell, it felt right. Wasn’t there an expression about falling by the Wayside? There was, he was sure of that. Maybe that expression had been forged from the same Cenozoic goo that had birthed him, the perpetrator and the prophecy; Yin and Yang ... the two elements that would provide the whole. He would fall in Wayside. It made sense.
It was just after six a.m.
The coming summer’s light sang to the weeds in the cracks in the sidewalks of Wayside, casting shadows of the sycamores and the oak that lined Bluffs Road (strange name, he thought ... another omen. Was he not the greatest bluffer in the world?) in the sharpest relief they would have all year.
Mister Mellor moved forward, changing as he did so, to start work.
~ * ~
Johnjo MacDaniels’s wide-eyed pit bull, Driver, cocked a leg and peed against Maggie Henderson’s old Dodge - the one her boy Drury had piled into the wall of Cy Simmons’s General Store over on McLintock Avenue - and the steaming yellow liquid ran down the door beneath the now-crusted bloody handprints that littered the window like a frantic mosaic.
If he could have talked, Driver would have told a couple of stories to anyone who had the time or the inclination to listen. He would have told about how he’d like to stick his pecker way up inside Fred Krueller’s Pekinese - so deep he’d split the little bitch into two ragged pieces - and about how some nights, when the wind was just right and whirling the dust and soft soil up into the air, and a gibbous moon held court, a dark-stained spectral teenager reappeared behind the wheel of that car and clawed at the door with broken hands while, all around him, silent white flames licked across his broken face and teased the blackened upholstery.
But not now.
Now, smelling of sweat, axle grease and rotting vegetables, Driver sniffed the air and let out a throaty rattle the way all dogs do when they see or sense something which humans can’t. The hair along his back and above his sawed-off tail stump rose up, bristling, and he gave a low moan, occasionally snapping at the flies to show how tough he really was. Soon, Johnjo would step out of his trailer and tell Driver to shut the fuck up before he unscrewed the top off of his Old Granddad and mouthed the glassy teat for the first shot of the day.
It could even be that Johnjo would be feeling so plain mean and hungover, the way he did most every day when he woke up, that he wouldn’t notice some things had gone from against the trailer. Things like a saw, a tyre-iron, a couple of wrenches and an old pitchfork with a splintered handle. But they were so rusted up from years of ignorance that he probably wouldn’t even notice. And Driver would be mighty pleased about that, seeing as how he got blamed for everything that went wrong around the place ... from a blown tyre on Johnjo’s Cherokee to a busted faucet on the water supply.
But Driver figured there comes a time when discretion makes for the better part of valour. He further figured that the well-dressed young man who tipped his hat to him and gave him a wink as he pulled together all of these things was not about to take kindly to a whole mess of barking and snapping. So he stayed real quiet.
And so neither the new season nor the well-dressed young man paid Driver any attention as the two of them, man and season, drifted off - slithered and slid, Driver might have said if he’d been able to speak - along Fairfax, towards the Good Neighbour grocery store where Wilhemina Sherbourg, the biggest and fattest woman outside of a carny sideshow, lay spread-eagled on her queen-size bed, her flabby elbows reaching over each side towards the dusty floor.
The first ray of sunshine spun and pirouetted through the torn curtains and drifted across Wilhemina’s slumbering naked bulk, lighting the pock-marked flesh and the feeding bed bugs, each one bloated with chocolate- and pizza-flavoured blood, and lingered on the wide spillage of breasts so big you could tear them off, hollow them out and then carry thirty or forty pounds of apples home in them.
But while the new season drifted past, heading on for the hills and the valleys, the plains and the fields, the tiny Main Streets and the mighty Interstates, something it had brought with it, like a seed on the breeze, slowed down and finally stopped at the paint-peeled door, sniffing, relishing the aromas that wafted through the gaps in the aperture, the grain in the woodwork, and even the walls themselves.
Why this door and not another was not certain. More than that: was not known. The truth of the matter was that there was no plan to such an event, no schedule to follow, no criteria to achieve, no standards to maintain, and no accounts to be settled. An entirely random visit.
Inside, a knock sounded at Wilhemina’s door ... gently insistent but somehow lazy, too. Kind of relaxed but inevitable, like the person knocking was in no hurry but, equally, was not going to go away. No way.
Wilhemina shouted, “Who is it?” half not caring and half not expecting any answer.
“It’s your destiny!” a voice announced, a voice that sounded for all the world like one of those guys on the TV quiz shows, all toothpaste and toupee, set to offer her her wildest dreams and make everything she had ever fantasized about come suddenly wonderfully true.
Wilhemina could he
ar, from somewhere off in the distance, that damned dog creating a stink about something. Mutt sounded like it had its dick caught in a gate, making all that noise.
“I don’t have no destiny,” Wilhemina called, petulant and sad, half-lifting her head from her pillow, a once-white cotton affair marked with a hundred nights of dribbled saliva and lost hope.
“Oh, but you do,” the voice said, gently correcting her. “Everyone has a destiny,” it said.
Wilhemina said, “Shit!” and rolled over across the bed to allow her gargantuan legs to spill off the mattress in wobbling folds of Jell-O flesh, slightly grainy with yesterday’s and the day before’s dirt and smelling like old meat, sweet and dangerous.
She pulled on an old robe, tied the cord tight around her belly, and shuffled to the door. She leaned against the wood panelling to hear if the guy was still out there, but she didn’t hear anything. “You still there?”
“Still here,” the voice confirmed. “Destiny never goes away,” it added.
“Whatcha want anyways? This some kinda sellin’ stunt? ‘Cos I can tell you—”
“No kind of selling stunt at all,” the voice said. Then, after a pause, it said, “This is the real thing.”
“Oh, hell,” Wilhemina muttered as she shifted the deadbolt and turned the latch. She took hold of the door-handle and gave it a good tug, seeing as how last fall’s rains and the lengthy winter had warped the wood right in the frame. And as it opened wide, she gave a small gasp.
There on the stoop was a fine-looking young man, a big smile beaming on his face and his hat held in one hand. “And it’s a fine good morning to you,” he said. “Might I come in for a while?”
Wilhemina tried to speak, but suddenly found that her voice had snuck off and hidden itself somewhere deep in the myriad folds of her ample bosom. She wanted to ask him who he was and what he wanted. She wanted to ask if she knew him - though she was pretty sure she didn’t - or who had sent him. More than anything, though, she wanted to know why a fella dressed so mighty fine was carrying a whole load of old tools, all rusted and broken, so’s they made a mess of his good suit. But somehow, she didn’t really want to know the answer to that one until it became absolutely necessary.
Wilhemina Sherbourg took a faltering step back into the hovel of her life while the young man answered that move with a couple of steps forward.
He kicked the door shut behind him and breathed in deeply the collective aroma of sweat and dirt and old food. “My,” he said, “now that smells good!”
He laid the tools down on the floor and turned, dropping the latch-lock and shifting the deadbolt back into place. “Tell me,” he said as he turned back to face her, “do you have any young ones - you know, children - around die place?”
Wilhemina shook her head and suddenly felt like she needed to pee.
The man looked disappointed at first but then he shrugged and smiled, tossing his hat on to the chair alongside the door. “Ah, well, not to worry,” he said. “We can proceed with just the two of us.”
Wilhemina took another step back and tried to speak. It was still no use.
“I see you’re interested in why I’m here,” the man said as he bent down to rummage through the things he had brought. He picked the saw and the tyre-iron and stood up again.
“They say that inside every fat person there’s a thin person trying to get out,” he said. “Let’s see if that’s true.”
And the two of them set to playing.
<
~ * ~
MICHAEL MARSHALL
Failure
IT IS ALWAYS difficult to discern the boundaries of existence. Children valiantly insist upon putting black lines around the shapes and people they draw, in an attempt to divide and master the continuum of being, but real life does not come with such clear separation. It’s hard to tell where your existence stops and the external world begins, and equally tough to determine within that what counts as work, and what is merely “life”: or, perhaps, what is merely work, and what has been the thing that, when you look back from the final precipice, will constitute the life you have lived.
Many people never even stop to consider these questions. Jonathan did, however. He monitored his progress, paying increasing attention as he entered his late-fifties and became ever more aware of his position on life’s journey. Often the process of scrutiny was reassuring. He felt broadly content, for example, with his performance as Operations Director of a growing chain of copy shops, and had reason to believe they were content with him too. His thirty-year marriage to Elaine was similarly successful. They’d weathered storms large and small with patience and good humour, and there was no one in the world with whom he’d rather spend time. They always found something to talk about. They told each other they loved one another, with patent sincerity.
Even as solid a relationship would ultimately be terminated by death, however, and Jonathan would one day retire. The things you do by your own hand pass and fade away. The most important and lasting marks, therefore, are the ones you leave behind, the deeper scratches you make on the world - and it was here that Jonathan had begun to lose confidence in what he’d achieved.
Here, and specifically in the shape of his son.
~ * ~
He told Elaine he was going for a drive. This had long been his habit in the evenings, and she wished him well without bothering to look up from the copy of Sunset Magazine she was reading on the sofa. He picked up the keys to her 4Runner - the area’s default domestic vehicle, and less noticeable than his own Boxter (itself a rare indulgence in a life that was otherwise remarkably unshowy) - and walked out into the evening. It had been unusually hot all day, without the welcome breeze that normally freshens Northern California afternoons, and the air retained warmth even in twilight.
As he opened the car door he raised a hand in greeting to his neighbour, who stood peaceably watering her front yard. Everyone in the neighbourhood employed teams of very competent Mexicans to perform such tasks - in most cases aided by automated sprinkler systems - and so this could only be a self-imposed diversion, an excuse for being out of doors on a pleasant night. And why not? She waved back as he drove away.
He passed a car parked fifty yards away down the street, in the shadow of trees. Beyond noticing it was another 4Runner, he did not give it any thought.
~ * ~
He found it hard to recall when he’d first started to feel concern that things were not going as they should. Ryan had been a mercurial toddler and a fractious boy, sure, prone to pout and to sweep things to the floor while possessed by inarticulate fury, but Jonathan suspected you could say the same of most children unless you were determined to maintain a pretence of perfection in front of other parents. There were other times when the child was as sweet and helpful as you could wish for. The two poles balanced, for the most part, more or less.
Nonetheless Jonathan gradually became aware of how many times he’d picked up some treat or trinket while away on business, telling himself he’d give it to his son to reward a notable piece of good behaviour, only to discover the object in a drawer six months later, no obvious occasion for celebration having presented itself in the meantime.
Ryan grew more even-tempered as he entered his teens. His schoolwork was uniformly better than adequate, keeping him in the second tier of students year after year. He was a good-looking boy, decent at sport, charming when it suited him. This combination meant that, after he entered high school, his father and mother became accustomed to meeting and welcoming the girls with whom their son became involved. And it was at this point, perhaps, that Jonathan had started to observe more closely, though he hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time.
There were four girlfriends worthy of the name during the teenage years. All had been attractive, polite and evidently enamoured of their son. Then, a few months later, the liaison would prove to have been discontinued. Ryan never volunteered anything beyond sayin
g it hadn’t worked out, and hadn’t seemed to suffer any particular emotional turmoil or distress when this happened. There would simply be a period where he did not have a girlfriend, after which a new one would materialize.
The pattern did not have long enough to assert itself as notable, however, before Ryan finished school and left town to attend law school on the other side of the country.
~ * ~
Jonathan drove in an aimless fashion for an hour, tracing shapes around a town he had known for most of his life. When it finally got the other side of nine o’clock he looped back and headed for The Jury Room.
Santa Cruz’s most barefaced example of a hardcore drinkers’ bar, The Jury Room lurks at the northern end of town, close to the highway, a ramshackle sign above the door proclaiming it has been proudly manufacturing and servicing hangovers since 1976. It’s open from six in the morning until two on the other side of midnight, after which the staff presumably crash out on the floor for four hours before starting again. Jonathan had never been inside.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 54