He ran into the room. “Will you get away from there and come to bed!” he shouted. His shock, his treacherous imagination, were rushing his words out of control. “Why don’t you bring everyone into the garden if you want to look at them? Bring them into the house?”
She turned and stared at him. For an awful moment he was sure she’d forgotten who he was. “I’m Jack! I’m your husband!” but he couldn’t bear to say it, to know. After a while she began to walk slowly, painfully toward the stairs.
But perhaps she’d heard what he’d said. The next day several children were playing football on the pavement, using the top of their subway steps as a goal. “Don’t play there,” she shouted through the open window. “You’ll get hurt.” They came to the hedge and pointed at her, laughing, making faces. When she didn’t chase them, they ventured into the garden. Before Jack could intervene she was chasing them wildly, as if she thought the pavement was as wide as it used to be.
They were returning for another chase when he strode out. “If I see you again I’ll get the police to you.” He glanced at Emily, and his stomach flooded with raw dismay. Perhaps he was mistaken, but he was sure that as the children had run out of the far end of the subway he’d glimpsed in her eyes a look of longing.
Chasing the children had exhausted them both. She sat at the window; he read. The day was thickly hot and stagnant, nothing moved except the cars. He felt as though he were trapped in someone’s gaze.
“These children these days,” she said. It isn’t their fault, it’s the way they’re brought up. Do you know, some parents don’t want their children at all.”
What was she trying to say? What was she sidling toward? He nodded, gazing at the book.
“Did you see that little girl before, that we were chasing? She had such a pretty face. It’s such a pity.”
Surely she wasn’t heading where he suspected, surely she knew better. The heat held him limp and still.
“Don’t you think it’s up to people like us to help these children?” The longing was clear now in her eyes. “The unwanted ones, I mean. We could give them love. Some of them have never had any.”
“Love won’t feed them,” he told the book.
“But we could go without. We always buy the best meat, you know. I’ve still a little money that I’ve saved from housekeeping.”
He hadn’t known that. Why didn’t she invest it? But he felt too exhausted even to change the subject with that argument—exhausted, and depressed: she wasn’t musing any longer, she was serious. “And we don’t really need such a large house,” she said.
Before he could recover from this betrayal she said, “Don’t you think it would be nice to bring up a little girl?”
She had never mentioned adoption before. Nor had he; the idea of a strange child in his house had always seemed disturbing, threatening. Now there was a stronger reason why they couldn’t adopt a child: they were too old. “We wouldn’t be able to,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re too old! But when he met her bright, trusting, childlike gaze, he couldn’t tell her. “Too much work. Too exhausting,” he said.
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind that. I could do it.” Every objection he made she demolished. She had more experiences of life than most parents, she’d been brought up decently herself, she would love the child more than its own parents could, it would have a good home, they’d keep the child away from bad company. All day she persisted, through dinner, into the evening. Her eyes were moist and bright.
The orange light sank into the room, stifling. Emily’s words closed him in. He was trapped, shaking his head at each point she made; he knew he looked absurd. He mustn’t remind her they were old, near death. Why must she persist? Couldn’t she see there was something he was trying not to say? As he stared at the book, the orange light throbbed on his eyes like blood. “We could sell the house, that would leave us some money,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like a little girl?”
“No,” he blurted at the book. “No.”
“Oh, why not?”
His answer was too quick for him. “Because the authorities wouldn’t let us have one,” he shouted, “you stupid old woman!”
Her face didn’t change. She turned away and sat forward, toward the window. Her shoulders flinched as though a lash had cut them. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry,” he said, but she only sat closer to the pane.
He must go to her, hold her—except that when he made to stand up he felt intolerably fatuous. Every nuance of his apology echoed in his head; it sounded like a bad actor’s worst line, he felt as if he were at the mercy of an audience’s contempt. The sense of his own absurdity, more relentless than the heat of the orange light, pushed him back into his chair.
Emily leaned closer to the window. Suddenly he knew she was trying to see her face in the glass. She went to the hall mirror. He saw her see herself, her age, perhaps for the first time. Her face seemed to slump inward. She walked past him without a glance and sat before the window.
“Look here, I’m sorry.” He was whining, each word made him feel more contemptible. Perhaps it was her contempt for him that he was feeling. It gathered darkly on him, atrociously depressing.
He couldn’t comfort her while he felt like this. In fact, if it were his own depression, it might be affecting her, too. He must go upstairs, hoping she would heal by herself. Even to stand up was a struggle. She sat still as he left the room, glancing back miserably at her.
Upstairs he felt a little better. At least he could close his eyes and clear his mind. He lay limply in the heat; orange painted the dark within his eyelids. Emily would get over it. She would have had to realize eventually. He couldn’t think for her all the time, he shouted defensively. He couldn’t protect her all her life. The orange glow didn’t contradict him. It was soothing, empty, calm.
No, not entirely empty. Something was rushing toward him from deep in the emptiness. As it came it breathed depression at him, thick as fumes. It was rushing faster, it was on him. A face was pressed into his, bright with hatred. Before he had time to flinch back, there was nothing—but something was rushing toward him again; it thrust into his face for a moment, grinning. Again. The face. The face. The face.
He woke. His hands were clenched on the sheets. The face was gone, but for a moment, though depression muffled his thoughts, he knew why it had been there. The man had been killed without warning; he meant Jack to feel the sudden ruthless terror of death. And Jack did. He lay inert and appalled.
All of a sudden, for no reason, his depression lifted—as if someone standing over him had moved away. His mind brightened. He scoffed at his dream. What nonsense, he had killed nobody. It took him a while to wonder what Emily was doing.
He needn’t run. She would only be sitting at the window. But he fought away the soothing of the orange calm and hurried to the stairs. Emily was in the hall, at the front door. Her hand was on the lock.
“Where are you going?” She glanced up at the sound of his voice. As she saw him her eyes filled with a mixture of disgust and fear. She pulled the door open; orange light spilled over her.
“Emily, wait!” She was on the path. He ran downstairs, almost falling. He was halfway down when the depression engulfed him like sluggish muddy water. At once he knew that it was surrounding Emily, blinding her to him. It had reached its intended victim.
She was running, a small helpless figure beneath the orange glare. The light spoiled her blue dress, staining it patchily black. She was moving headlong, as fast as the threat in his dream. She snatched the gate out of her way. Amid the nocturnal chorus of the city, a car was approaching.
“Stay there, Emily!” Perhaps she heard him; something made her run faster. The light throbbed, his eyes blurred. For a moment he saw something perched on her shoulder, a dark thing as big as her head, trembling and vague as heat. When he blinked his eyes clear, it had gone, but he was sure it was still beside her. He was sure he knew its face.
&nb
sp; She was on the roadway now, still running—not toward the far pavement, but toward the speeding car. Jack was running too, although he knew he couldn’t save her. She was determined to be killed. Even if he caught her, their struggle would take them under the car.
But she mustn’t die alone, with the whisper of hatred and depression at her ear. That death would be like his dream, but prolonged endlessly. She must see that he was with her. He ran; the road and the lamp-standards swayed; the orange light pounded, and his breath clawed at his lungs. He had no chance of overtaking her. She wouldn’t see him.
Suddenly she slipped and fell. Jack ran faster, panting harshly; he felt the pavement change to roadway underfoot. Perhaps he could drag her out of the way—no, he could hear how fast the car was approaching. He ran to her and cradled her in his arms. She seemed stunned by the pain of her fall, but when her eyes opened he thought she saw him and smiled weakly. He managed to smile, too, although he could feel a darkness rushing toward them. Suddenly he wondered: since her tormentor had stayed here, would they be tied here, too? Was this only the beginning of their struggle?
He pressed her face into his chest to hide from her what was upon them: the car, and the grinning face inflated with blood.
BUNNY DIDN’T TELL US by David J. Schow
David J. Schow was born on July 13, 1955 in Marburg, West Germany—a German orphan adopted by American parents. His travels eventually led him to Los Angeles, where he now lives. An avid film fan, Schow claims to know more movie trivia than even Dennis Etchison. Schow’s short fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, Weird Tales, Whispers, Fantasy Tales and elsewhere. He has been a columnist for various publications and a contributing editor to film books. His eight-part series on the television show, The Outer Limits, written for Twilight Zone Magazine, formed the basis for his book, The Outer Limits Omnibus, due from Berkley Books this autumn. Schow has also written a dozen or so novelizations and series novels under at least four pseudonyms—most recently a series of four novels based on television’s Miami Vice, written under the by-line Stephen Grave. Later this year Tor Books will publish his horror novel, The Kill Riff. Schow’s two previous entries in The Year’s Best Horror Stories have ranged from mordant whimsy (“One for the Horrors”) to gut-wrenching horror (“Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You”). In “Bunny Didn’t Tell Us” Schow treats us to a bit of graveyard humor.
The graverobbers worked as quickly and silently as they were able. It began to rain lightly.
The fact sounded more like the opening line to a bad grade-school joke, but the fact was that most of the embalming crew on the night shift at Forest Lawn were tae kwon do freaks. They spent as much time showing off new moves as they did tending the latest batch of customers, and were so self-involved that they represented no threat at all. Ditto the guards—they usually hated blundering about (he vast cemetery in the rain. Professionalism was one thing; superstition another.
Riff favored working in the rain no matter what the scam. Water seemed to wash away both sentries and their willingness to pry, as well as providing safe background noise for nocturnal endeavors.
They were knee-deep in the hole. Riff gathered a clump of turf in one hand and squinted at it as he crumbled it apart. Rain funneled in a steady stream from the vee of his hat. “Recently tamped,” was all he said, wiping his hand on his grimy topcoat. All around them the rainfall hissed into the thick, manicured landscaping.
Mechanically, Riff jabbed his folding Army spade into the dirt, stomped on the edge, and chucked the bladeful of earth over his shoulder to the right. Klondike faced him in the hole, duplicating the moves one half-beat later. Both had learned how to turn out a foxhole in Korea, and in no time they were four feet down, then five.
Klondike’s spade was the first to thump against something solid and hollow. “Bingo,” the larger man muttered.
Riff hesitated, then tossed back another gout of dirt anyway. Klondike smelled like a wet bearskin, and his permanent facial shadow of black beard stubble served to camouflage his face in the darkness. Riff did not necessarily enjoy working with someone as coarse as Klondike, but all his life he’d made a virtue of never questioning orders.
“Wait,” he said, and the big man froze like a pointer. Riff tapped the surface beneath their feet with his spade. “Sounds funny.”
They knelt and swept away clots of dirt with their gloved hands.
“Time,” said Riff.
Klondike peeled back the cuff of his glove and read his luminous watch face. “0345 hours,” he said. The fingertips of his gloves were stylishly sawn off, and Klondike promptly used the moment of dead time to pick his nose. “Ain’t got us much time,” he whispered. “Funk-hole’s turning to mud.”
“I know that,” Riff said, hunkered down in the bottom of their excavation and resisting the urge to add “you imbecile.” He plucked a surgical pen-light from a coat pocket and cupped his palm around the beam, leaning close. “Look at this.”
The dime-sized dot of light revealed a silver dent—left by Riff’s spade—in a smooth surface of brilliant, fire-engine red enamel. Klondike ran his fingers over it. and stared dumbly at his hand while the tiny scar in the otherwise flawless surface refilled with water.
“Bloody hell!” snapped Riff. “Bunny didn’t tell us that the guy was buried in his goddamn car!”
Suddenly the drumming of rain on the exposed metal surface seemed to become incriminatingly loud.
Riff’s ties to Bunny Beaudine ran back to the middle 1970s, and a half-witted punchline Bunny had fomented about finding employment for needy military vets. A decade before, Bunny had been just another seedy Sunset Boulevard pimp, chauffeuring his anemic, scabby stable of trotters around in a creaking, third-hand Cadillac whose paint job was eighty percent primer. Then Bunny discovered cocaine, and his future turned to tinsel. Coke required bodyguards, and Bunny learned to be Bad.
Riff suspected that Bunny got a kick out of two things: Hiring white dudes to accomplish his dirty work, and vigorously dipping into his own inventory for personal gratification, both the ladies and the face Drano. His usual checklist of dumb jobs included low-power dope deliveries, playing cabbie for the girls—Bunny now captained a fleet of Mercedes from the cabin of his own Corsair limo—and the odd bit of mop-up. It was a living.
Bunny’s strongarm boys packed magnums and broke bones with the frequency Riff broke wind after a plate of lasagna. Once he’d taken that first job for Bunny (a cash pass deliberately miscounted, as a test for Riff’s honesty), Riff understood that there was no shaking hands, no clean leavetakings. Since he had no other prospects—1976 was a lousy job year for vets—it was just as well.
Until this current assignment came along. Riff remembered how it had gone down in Bunny’s Brentwood “office.”
Bunny had been laughing, flashing his ten-thousand-dollar teeth. “Poor old Desmond,” he cackled. “Poor soul.”
Riff had gotten a phone call and had shown up precisely on the half-hour. “What became of Desmond?” Desmond was one of Bunny’s competitors. They cursed each other in private and slapped each other’s shoulders, trading power handshakes, whenever anyone else was watching.
Two of Bunny’s boys bellowed deep basso laughter from across the room.
“Why, poor old Desmond somehow got his ass blowed off,” said Bunny. “Terrible thing. You can’t even live in the city anymore ...”
The watchdogs stopped guffawing at a wave of Bunny’s hand. His pinkie ring glittered and his broad-planed African face went dead serious. Riff stood, arms folded, waiting for the show to end so business could become relevant.
“What it is,” Bunny said to Riff, “is this. You remember Desmond, Riff, my man?”
“I saw him a few times.”
“You remember all those rings and slave bracelets and shit he used to wear all over his hands?”
“Yeah,” said Riff. “Mandarin fingernails, too.”
“Them’s was for tooting. But you recall, r
ight?” Bunny was nodding up and down. So far so good. “One of them rings was a cut-down from that diamond they called the Orb in the papers—stolen from that bitch in Manhattan last year.”
“The one married to the toilet-paper tycoon.” Riff knew the ring. It was cut down, alright, but was still of vulgar size, and worth at least a hundred grand.
“You got it. Well, here’s a little piece of trivia that nobody knows. Poor old Desmond was buried wearing that ring.”
Riff was already beginning to get the picture. As with all pimps up from gutter level, Desmond had insisted on burial as lavish as his lifestyle, and in a boneyard as obscene as the diamond he’d hired stolen. Riff looked back at the bodyguards. “Why didn’t you just have your goons steal the ring after they blew the back of his head off?” he said, smiling.
Bunny kept his happy face on. “Why, there ain’t nobody in the world would finger me; that was a accident, man,” he said, his voice sing-song and full of bogus innocence. “Besides, we take the ring then, that means Desmond’s boys be hunting it, and I don’t want to end this life in the trunk of some Mexican’s Chevy being drug out of the ocean by the police.” He pronounced it police. He shrugged. “But now—now, as far as Desmond’s people are concerned, that rock is a permanent resident of Forest Lawn, by the freeway. Ain’t nobody gonna miss it now.”
The goons chuckled on cue. Riff drew Klondike as an accomplice mostly because the hulking halfwit was the wrong color to make it in the world as a bodyguard for Bunny, but the bonus Bunny pushed in Riff’s direction erased any objections. The only hitch was that no amount of cash could get Riff clear of Bunny now.
That was how Riff’s adventure in the rain had begun.
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