Black Rock
Page 33
Harold nodded.
‘Then drive us away.’
‘I don’t think I can. I’m shaking.’
‘Your eyes, Harold,’ Martin said, making carving motions with the knife.
Harold drove.
22 - An Editor Calls
During the night things changed for Sarah-Jane Dresden.
She was aware of this when she awoke the following morning with a filthy grin fixed to her face. Things had changed - and for once in her life she felt as if they had done so for the better.
S’n’J lay in bed stretching and yawning and feeling very pleased with herself indeed. And very horny too.
She lay in bed for a while remembering last evening and planning what would take place when she dragged James back here tonight. During her relationship with Martin she’d developed a lengthy list of sexual fantasies that’d had to remain fantasies because Martin wasn’t receptive to them. James, she thought, would be a lot more interested…
I think you’d better go and throw yourself into a cold shower, my girl! she told herself, giggling. If you lie here playing with yourself you’re going to be late for your first appointment at the Barnstaple Bookshop and then you’ll be late all day.
Friday wasn’t a particularly taxing day - S’n’J had arranged it that way because in the summer on a Friday the traffic was normally pretty heavy. She only had another three calls to make after Barnstaple: the Ilfracombe Bookshop, the Mole and Haggis in Torrington and Mackenzie Dye Booksellers in Bideford. She was usually back here by five-thirty on Fridays - which was a distinct improvement on the six or even seven o’clock she got home on other days.
S’n’J threw the sheets off her and padded to the bathroom, the big sappy grin still affixed to her face. This morning, it didn’t seem to want to go away.
You’re smitten, she told herself, grinning. You’ve fallen in love!
It wasn’t until she was in the shower - under a hot jet of water rather than cold because she liked the warm, randy feeling she’d woken up with and didn’t want to kill it off -that she remembered Black Rock.
She thought of it the moment someone outside began to hammer on the front door as though their life depended on it. A stiletto of fear pricked the pit of her stomach.
Don’t let it be a fresh chapter! she thought, turning off the shower and stepping dripping on to the bathroom carpet. I don’t want my day ruined this early on.
She wrapped herself in a big towel and promised herself that if she found another buff A4 envelope on the mat she would bin it without opening it. Tonight she intended to turn one or two of her fantasies into reality and she wasn’t going to let anything stop her.
There was no envelope waiting for her, only the key that James had posted back through the letter box when he’d locked her in last night. Whatever was waiting for her was still on the far side of the door, but if she didn’t hurry up and open it, this wasn’t going to remain the case for very long. Whoever it was out there had begun to hammer on the door again and they wanted to be let in in a hurry.
‘Let me in, Drezy! For Christ’s sake! I’m in big trouble. Quick, open the door!’
In total disbelief, S’n’J unlocked the door and stood back.
The door flew open and banged on the wall.
And Janie Sanderson ran in and threw herself into S’n’J’s arms, sobbing. Her face was barely recognizable. Both her lips were fat and split, her right eye was swollen shut and one of her ears was inflamed and burning traffic-light red.
‘What happened?’ S’n’J whispered when Janie’s breathing had steadied a little. ‘For God’s sake what happened to you?’
‘He huh-hurt me, Drezy. He tried to kuh-kill me.’
‘Billy-Joe?’
Janie nodded. ‘Last night.’
‘Christ,’ S’n’J whispered.
‘He just went buh-berserk. He was going to puh-pull my front teeth out with a pair of pliers.’ Janie sobbed for a while. ‘I fought him. I got a ruh-rolling-pin and hit him with it.’
‘Good for you,’ S’n’J said, taking Janie into her arms. ‘I hope you hurt him.’
Janie nodded into S’n’J’s shoulder. ‘I did huh-hurt him. I hurt him badly but he kept getting up again. It was huh-horrible. It was like suh-something out of one of those books that Martin edits. He wouldn’t go unconscious when I hit him. I had to bash his head right in to make him stop. I killed him. He didn’t have a pulse. Then I ran away.’
‘And came here,’ S’n’J said, not liking the turn this was taking. It wasn’t so much the fact that Janie had hit Billy-Joe over the head, the really shocking thing was that Billy-Joe had suddenly gone berserk. … and kept on getting up again like something out of one of those books that Martin edited. The circle, apparently, was spreading. The arrival of Black Rock was the stone falling into the centre of the calm waters of a pond and the subsequent ripples were still flowing outwards.
‘What happened next?’ S’n’J asked, wondering if this story-addict’s fine was what Peter Perfect would have (or perhaps already had) scripted for her.
‘I went indoors and pulled the bent hoop out of my ear. Then I cleaned up a bit and went to phone the police. The front door was open and when I looked out Billy-Joe’s body was gone. Drezy, he was dead but he’d gone.’
‘He wasn’t dead then.’
‘But I’d checked his pulse and his breathing and none of it was present. He was dead. I flipped. I got in the car and drove away. When I was half-way to the motorway, I pulled over to smoke a cigarette and calm myself and… and…’
S’n’J knew exactly what Janie was going to say next. This too fitted like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. This had to be Peter Perfect’s work because he knew what S’n’J’s innermost fears were and her largest one was finding someone waiting for her in the back of her car. Not only that but it was also a real old-fashioned and hackneyed horror-story cliche of exactly the type that Black Rock’s author favoured.
‘… and Billy-Joe popped up from the back seat and got me round the neck and put the pliers in my mouth and, well… I still had the rolling-pin. And I made sure he wasn’t going to wake up again, Drezy. I’m sorry but I couldn’t help myself.’
‘And then?’ S’n’J asked.
Janie’s reply was ominous. ‘I drove here. I don’t know why.’
No, but I think I might have a fairly good idea, S’n’J thought and said, ‘And his body’s still in the car?’
Janie nodded. ‘What will we do?’ she moaned. ‘I murdered him.’
S’n’J guided her friend into the lounge and sat her down on the sofa. ‘You stay there. I’ll get you a drink, put on some clothes, and go down and look at Billy-Joe. Then we’ll work out what to do.’
S’n’J went to the kitchen, found a bottle of Remy and poured stiff slugs into two glasses. It didn’t look as if she was going to get any work done on this particular Friday. It isn’t even eight-thirty yet and the day’s already been fucked up by that bastard down in Black Rock, she told herself as she carried the drinks back. However, there was always a c
hance that Billy-Joe wasn’t dead, but in a coma.
Janie sipped her drink and winced. ‘Stings,’ she said sadly.
‘Keep at it,’ S’n’J said. ‘It’ll relax you. Just stay there and rest. You’re safe now. I’ll get some duds on and go down and look in the car.’
‘Be careful,’ Janie said in a dull voice.
‘Don’t worry,’ S’n’J said. ‘I will.’
23 - Three Missing Men
Janie had parked the VW about a hundred yards away in the exact spot where last night S’n’J had pulled an innocent woman from her car and almost punched her. This ‘coincidence’ was not lost on her.
If what Janie had said was true then it looked rather like the mysterious Peter Perfect had been stage-managing Janie and Billy-Joe as well as attempting to manipulate her. And S’n’J thought she knew how the other two had been drawn into what, after all, was her story and her problem.
She had met Billy-Joe only once - at Ace’s Christmas party at the Groucho last year - and once had been enough. Billy-Joe was drunk and offensive and S’n’J had begun to dislike him. Shortly afterwards Martin asked her, ‘How’s Janie’s old man?’ Now she thought about it she could clearly recall her reply: ‘About two drinks away from becoming psychopathic, I’d say.’
Until now, she had believed that Martin was the only person who knew she’d said this. But this evidently wasn’t true. Peter Perfect knew it too. Just as he knew everything else about her. Like an arresting officer, he was busily taking down everything she said so that it could be used against her.
If Billy-Joe had gone crazy and tried to kill Janie, it hadn’t happened naturally. It had been forced on him by the man at Black Rock. It all fitted so horribly well. Janie had even killed him with a rolling-pin, for God’s sake. And if that wasn’t a barb that was supposed to hook her and tell her what was really going on, she didn’t know what was.
S’n’J walked up to the VW slowly, not really wanting to see Billy-Joe’s corpse and half believing that if she did lay eyes upon it, it would come back to life and come after her like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator unit.
Her heart got busy in her chest as she drew closer to the car, and her mouth suddenly felt dry. The driver’s door was closest to the kerb and it wasn’t quite shut. Which meant one of two things: either Janie had neglected to lock it in her panic, or that Billy-Joe was coiled up in there like a snake, ready to strike the moment she drew level.
She walked past the car, keeping a good three feet between her and the door as she went by. The back seat had a rug thrown over it and there was something bulky beneath that rug. As far as S’n’J could make out, the thing wasn’t moving.
She walked back the other way again.
The thing under the rug stayed put.
On her third pass, she worked up the courage to stop.
There was blood on the car’s door handle.
Janie’s, she told herself, seeing more blood down the edge of the door.
Feeling that odd intensified deja vu sensation as though the world was shifting around her again, S’n’J took hold of the door handle.
I will not be fictionalized, she thought distantly. You cannot rewrite my life.
As she pulled the door open she felt the remnants of Snowball the hamster vanish from her past. A part of her mind’s eye watched the memory fold itself up and disappear in the same way she’d watched Mr Winter vanish. She was left with only the memory that the hamster had belonged to the girl in Black Rock.
Trying to dispel the dizziness that was speeding her towards the edge of collapse, S’n’J yanked the car door open. There was blood smeared down the inner door panel and down the edge of the driver’s seat.
Which ought to mean something very important, she thought, not yet knowing what. She tipped the seat forward and reached out for the blanket. Billy-Joe didn’t leap up and grab her when she pulled the blanket away… because Billy-Joe was just about as dead as a dodo.
‘Jesus!’ S’n’J whispered, looking at the series of deep dents in his head and the way the blood had run from those wounds. Billy-Joe might have been dead, but something was still happening to him.
A few seconds after S’n’J removed the rug, Billy-Joe began to fade. As she watched, Billy-Joe began to lose what little colour was left in his skin. After a moment, the colour of his clothes also began to seep away.
You’re hallucinating this, she told herself when he had faded so much he was almost transparent. Inside five seconds Billy-Joe had become clear. She could see the material the back seat was made of through his body, as if she was looking at it through thick glass. In another five seconds Billy-Joe had stopped looking like glass and started looking like he was no more than a heat-haze. And five seconds after that he’d vanished completely.
S’n’J stared at the space he’d occupied, unable to believe she’d seen him vanish. She put out a hand but her fingers met no resistance until they touched the stained fabric of the seat.
S’n’J put the blanket back and edged out of the car, her mind spinning. It looked very much as if Billy-Joe hadn’t been there at all.
‘But I just saw him!’ she complained. He was lying there under that blanket, dead.
She was no longer able to distinguish what was real and what was not. For all she knew, Janie might not even be in her lounge waiting for her to come back.
‘You’d better leave me alone,’ she whispered, looking towards the sky. ‘Snowy Dresden will no longer stand for this interference in her life!’
Oh Drezy, she moaned, suddenly wanting to sit down on the pavement and cry, you said ‘Snowy’. You did! Don’t let this happen because if it does you won’t be able to bring yourself back. If he gets you, you’ll end up being Snowy for all time!
S’n’J slammed the car door and hurried back to the flat.
‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’ Janie said when S’n’J entered the room. ‘How did you know?’ Janie shook her head. ‘It’s like a bad joke,’ she said. ‘It’s that story. It’s alive in some way. Like a disease. Once you catch it, it takes you over. You don’t even need to read it. Ever since I heard about it my life’s got crazier and crazier. As if the story’s drawing me in, or writing itself around me. I keep seeing pictures in my head of that haunted house. Black Rock. It just hangs there in my mind calling to me, and it won’t give up until I go to it. I suppose that’s how I found myself here this morning. It’s your story, isn’t it, Drezy?’
S’n’J sat down beside Janie and put her arm around her shoulder. ‘How do you mean?’
Janie sighed. ‘At first, when Martin told me about it, I thought you’d written it. Then I thought he had. But it’s bigger than that. It’s as if it’s God’s work. As if he’s writing a new draft of the Drezy story. And he’s in a bad mood. And as he does it, he alters all the surrounding characters, too. That’s the only explanation I can think of. After Martin read it, he could see images from it in his head. He saw you falling over the side of a steep drop.’
‘Martin saw me fall?
’ S’n’J asked.
Janie nodded. ‘We both knew you’d fallen. And i hadn’t even read any of the story. Then he phoned you and you told him to ring off because you needed an ambulance. I could actually picture your fall, Drezy. And at the same time, I was having to think about Billy-Joe because the night before he’d beaten me up really badly and I was in the throes of deciding to leave him. So what happened was that everything started to get all mangled up together. All the while the book was seeping into me, and the bits I knew about it were eating into my life. And all the stuff about Billy-Joe got entangled with this Black Rock stuff and
‘What?’
Janie began to cry.
‘Oh Drezy, I knew what would happen,’ Janie moaned. ‘When you’ve been in contact with Black Rock, it gets into you, and all the bad things you imagine come true. It should have been easy for me to leave Billy-Joe. He’s usually sleeping at the time I got home and even if he wasn’t I didn’t expect him to flip out and try to kill me. I may have let myself think it once during the day - y’know, worst-case scenario - but the author of Black Rock latched on to the thought and made it happen. Next thing I knew I was in a bad horror story. It was so clichedl I kept hitting Billy and he kept on getting up again. It was like it had been fixed to happen that way. Like it had been fictionalized. Billy-Joe wasn’t a good man. He was a grim bastard most of the time, but he wasn’t a homicidal maniac. If I’d really believed that, I wouldn’t have gone home at all. Black Rock did that for him. Like I say, it grabs the worst things you can imagine and makes them real. That’s how I knew Billy would be gone when you looked for him… because the worst thing I can imagine is his coming back from the dead to pay me back. And now he’s out there somewhere, stalking me. This story’s walking and talking, Drezy. It’s not your normal safe-as-houses horror-romp. It’s alive and it’s writing itself around us. Writing us into it.’