by Brian Bowyer
“It must have been hard for you,” Thomas said. “Weren’t you the one who found his body hanging from the oak tree?”
Emma nodded. “Yes. It was difficult.”
“Did he leave a note?”
“No. He didn’t have to. He used to say that everything he wrote was just a long suicide note.”
Thomas finished his drink.
Emma said, “Are you ready for a refill?”
“I would love one,” Thomas said. “But I’ve already had a couple, and I’m afraid one more might push me over the limit. I still have to drive back to New York.”
Emma finished her drink. “So stay here and get drunk with me tonight.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. You can sleep in one of the guest rooms and drive back in the morning. I’ve been drinking alone for twenty years, and I could use the company. Unless, of course, you already have other plans.”
Thomas shook his head. “I don’t have any plans. And tomorrow’s Saturday, so I don’t have any plans for tomorrow, either.”
“So you’ll stay and get drunk with me?”
Thomas smiled. “Absolutely.”
• • •
They drank all day and then Emma had Chinese food delivered to the mansion. She could not recall the last time she enjoyed a dinner so much, or such company. Their conversation was effortless. They had many preferences in common and shared similar interests. They laughed at each other’s humor, and she found Thomas’s dark, sarcastic wit infectious.
At one point he told her that he was ten years divorced, and she felt her heart flutter like a lovesick schoolgirl’s.
“How old are you?” she asked him, sometime after dinner.
They were sitting side by side on a sofa in the library. A fire was blazing in the fireplace.
“I’m forty,” Thomas said. “Four years younger than you.”
Emma sipped her drink. “That’s crazy. You look much younger.”
He smiled. “Thanks. So do you.”
“You also look very familiar to me,” Emma said.
“Perhaps you’ve seen me on television.”
“Oh yeah?”
He nodded. “Yes. I do some acting in addition to journalism. Stage work in plays, mostly, but lately I’ve had a few TV parts.”
She smiled. “Maybe that’s it. I do have a TV on most of the time, and occasionally, I even glance at it.”
They ended up making love in Emma’s bedroom. After that, Thomas spent the night at her mansion two or three times a week for the next couple of months.
• • •
On a Saturday in July, she led him from the library and out across the lawn. It was a hot summer day, and they sought refuge in the shade beneath the oak tree. Thomas pulled Emma toward him and held her.
She looked up into the tree, and he pulled away from her.
“You’re crying,” he said.
She nodded.
He wiped tears from her cheeks. “I love you, Emma.”
“I love you too.”
He led her back across the lawn, into the library, and they held each other.
Emma looked out a window, back toward the oak tree, and caught a fleeting glimpse of Ryan’s ghost, haunting her still. She told herself that she was happy for the first time in twenty years.
• • •
A week later, while they were drinking in the great room, Thomas said, “Emma, I want to talk to you about The Myth of Coincidence.”
They were seated on a sofa. A TV was on, but muted. Jazz music emanated from the stereo.
Emma sipped her drink. “What about it?”
“I think the play should be performed again.”
Emma’s heart started pounding and she suddenly felt dizzy. “I don’t think you know what you’re saying.”
He smiled. Then he reached over, took her hand, and squeezed it. “Emma, I’m not superstitious.”
“Neither am I. But Thomas, superstition has nothing to do with The Myth of Coincidence.”
Thomas squeezed her hand again. Then he said: “Surely you don’t believe that the play is haunted.”
“I don’t know how else to explain everything that happened.”
He released her hand. “It was crazy, to be sure. But all of it was coincidence, Emma. Surely you know that.”
“The play opened on Broadway just a week after Ryan died, and right after the curtain fell on opening night, the actor playing the part of Ryan collapsed on the stage and died instantly. Massive heart attack.”
Thomas took a drink. “A tragic coincidence.”
“The actor was twenty-four, the same age as Ryan when he died, with no known prior heart conditions.”
“Coincidence,” Thomas insisted.
“The play was staged again a month later, and one hour after the opening night’s performance, the main actor was struck by a cab outside the theater and killed instantly.”
Thomas took a drink. “Coincidence.”
“The play was staged again the following year, and about an hour after the opening night’s performance, the leading actor was shot and killed by a stray bullet during a drive-by shooting while walking home. The bullet struck him in the heart. He died instantly.”
Thomas nodded. “Yes. Another tragedy, but it was also just another coincidence.”
Emma took a drink. “Three deaths in a row, and all of them so soon after Ryan’s suicide. Well, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want anything else to do with the goddamn play, so I decided to pull it.”
“Yes,” Thomas said. “But then another agent persuaded you to permit the play to be staged two years later.”
Emma nodded. “Yes. He did. I never should have listened to him, but, like you, he believed the whole thing was a coincidence, and I let him talk me into it. The play was staged, and five minutes after the opening night’s performance, the main actor fell down a set of stairs backstage and broke his neck. He died instantly.”
Thomas took a drink. “That was the last time the play was ever staged.”
“Yes. Four opening nights, followed immediately by the four tragic deaths of the leading actors. After that, I wanted nothing more to do with it. I sold the rights to the play, and as far as I know, it hasn’t been staged anywhere since.”
“It hasn’t,” Thomas said. “But I want to change that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, actually it’s my father who wants to change that, and I’m going to help him.”
Emma took a drink, and then repeated herself: “What are you talking about?”
“My father is the producer who bought the rights to The Myth of Coincidence from one of your former agents all those years ago. He’s in his sixties now, and he thinks the time is right to stage the play again. He put a company together, and it’s been in rehearsal for months now. And I’m the lead actor. I’m playing the role of Ryan Kinkade.”
Emma suddenly felt frozen as she stared at Thomas beside her on the sofa. “Unbelievable,” she said. “I mean, I believe you, but this is unbelievable.”
“Emma, when I first approached you, I only wanted you to sign the book and consent to an interview. I never planned or expected to fall in love with you. Please don’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, Thomas. I’m madly in love with you. And that is why I’m begging you not to do the play. Please, Thomas. Don’t do it. I do not want to lose you. Please don’t do that godforsaken play.”
“Emma, the play is going to be phenomenal. And plus I want to prove to you that the deaths were nothing more than coincidence. Me doing the play will free you from this ridiculous superstition.”
“Thomas, I’m begging you. Do not do the play. There’s already been four deaths. If you do the play, you’ll be the fifth. And then I swear to God I’ll fucking kill myself.”
Thomas finished his drink. He set his empty glass on a coaster and rose from the sofa. “I have to go. There’s a final rehearsal in the morning. The pl
ay opens on Broadway tomorrow night.”
Emma finished her drink and stood up. “Please don’t do it. I’m begging you.”
Thomas grabbed his jacket. “I’d ask you to come, but I know you won’t, so I’ll call you after the play is over. My father knows who you are, of course. I gave him your number, and told him to call you if anything happens to me. But nothing will happen to me. You’ll see. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He left.
Emma went into the library and mixed another drink. Then she carried her glass to a window and looked out at the oak tree.
• • •
The next day, the day of the play’s opening, Emma woke up and drank all day long. She knew she was going to commit suicide that night, and she wanted to consume as much alcohol as possible before she killed herself.
That night, she sat at her desk in the library and stared out a window at the oak tree in the moonlight. She had stopped mixing drinks earlier in the day and was now drinking vodka from a bottle. She was waiting for Thomas’s father to call her and tell her that Thomas was dead. She knew that there would be no other outcome. And then, after Thomas was dead, she would have no other reason to go on living.
Emma smiled at the rope on her desk. She had already fashioned a noose, and she believed that her death would be perfectly fitting.
She saw something moving out on the lawn. It looked like a man walking toward the oak tree. She stood up, swaying, and nearly knocked the chair over. She staggered to the French windows and opened them. Then she stepped outside into the night.
Lightning fired off on the horizon, and a low rumble of thunder followed the flash. Dark clouds moved across the sky directly overhead, intermittently blocking the moonlight.
She saw motion beside the oak tree, and she approached it. When she reached the tree, there was nothing there, but she thought she heard laughter on the wind. “Ryan?” she said. “Ryan? Are you there?”
There was no answer but the wind, and she no longer heard the sound of a dead man’s laughter.
She needed a drink, and realized that she had left her bottle in the library. While heading back toward the open French windows, she heard her cellphone ringing, and realized that she had left it, too, on her desk beside the bottle and the rope.
Her phone had stopped ringing by the time she returned to the library. She picked the phone up and saw that she had missed a call from a number with a New York area code. It was not Thomas’s number. Probably his father, she thought. Undoubtedly calling to tell me that Thomas is dead.
She took a drink of vodka. Then she checked the time. It was after eleven o’clock. The play would have ended over an hour ago by now, and still she had not heard from Thomas. She took another drink and thought: Thomas is already dead.
She grabbed the rope and the chair and carried them outside to the oak tree.
Lightning flashed. Thunder roared. Storm clouds raced across the sky, but no rain had yet begun to fall.
She placed the chair beneath a thick branch, stood up on the chair, and tied one end of the rope around the branch. Then she placed the noose around her neck.
She was just about to kick the chair out from beneath her when she heard Thomas yell her name. She looked across the lawn and saw him standing in the light of the open French windows. She had given him a key to the mansion, and he had evidently chosen to drive over and see her after the play rather than call her. “Emma!” he repeated. “No! Don’t do it!” He started sprinting toward her across the lawn.
“I told you,” he said, when he reached her. He had stopped about three feet in front of her, and he was smiling.
He pulled his phone out and looked at the screen. “Over two hours now, and I’m still alive. See? All those other deaths were just a coincidence.”
As soon as he finished speaking, an electric-blue bolt of lightning struck the top of his head. It was a direct hit, and the strike was catastrophic. His eyes blew out of his head and his hair went up in flames. His clothes caught on fire, too. Smoke poured out of his ears, and blue flames shot out of his chest. Emma could smell him burning, and felt the heat from three feet away. Then another bolt struck him and there was nothing left of Thomas but the melted remains of his tennis shoes.
Coincidence? Emma thought. I think not.
She kicked the chair out from beneath her as rain began to fall.
SUICIDAL LOVE
Kendra was her name, and Ken thought it was providence that his name and hers would be so similar. He liked to dish out pain and she liked to receive it. He had first met her after walking down a dark alley one night looking for a place where there were said to be women with pleasures for men like him. Since then, they’d been inseparable. The love they made was brutal, usually with his hands bruising the flesh of her throat and her nails entrenching bloody gashes down his back. She also loved it when he reduced her skin to dripping ribbons with a bullwhip.
Before Kendra, Ken had never believed in love, and now he was madly in love with a beautiful masochist.
Tonight, after she was untied and had cleaned up all the blood from her body, they went out to a restaurant for dinner. Both wore black. Kendra’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight. Her lipstick was the color of dried blood. “Have you ever killed anyone?” she said.
Ken sipped his bourbon. “Yes. Many times.”
Kendra sipped her wine. “Tell me about the first.”
“It was dark and I had just come out of a nightclub. I was fifteen years old.”
“Wait a second. You were fifteen, and you had just come out of a nightclub?”
“Yes. I was already tall, and looked older than I was.”
“That’s funny, because now you look so young.”
He shrugged. “Plus I always carried fake IDs. Anyway, I was walking down a dark alley, looking up at the stars, when I almost tripped over an old wino lying in a doorway.”
Kendra sipped her wine. “So you got mad and killed him?”
“I killed him, but I wasn’t mad at him. I just wanted to see what it felt like to kill somebody.”
“And what did it feel like?”
Ken sipped his bourbon. “It felt amazing.”
“How did you do it?”
“Bludgeoned him to death. There were a bunch of broken bricks and cinderblocks lying around. I picked up one of the bricks and started bashing him in the face.”
Kendra smiled. “Oh my. Did he scream?”
Ken shook his head. “He never woke up. I hit him too hard and too many times. I bashed his face until there was nothing left of it: no eyes; no nose; no lips; no teeth. By the time I finished, his head looked like a watermelon that had been dropped from the top of one of the buildings.”
Kendra finished her wine. “Let’s kill someone.”
“Tonight?”
She nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Ken finished his bourbon. “Okay.”
He paid their bill with cash. They left.
• • •
They found a prostitute that first night and took her back to Ken’s house. He had no immediate neighbors and they took her down into the basement. They tortured her with knives and various tools until she died sometime after dawn. They found a homeless man the next night and tortured him to death down in the basement, too. After that, the majority of their victims consisted of homeless people and prostitutes.
Occasionally they got lucky and managed to snatch unattended children.
• • •
One night, maybe a month after Kendra had moved in with Ken, she looked at him and said, “It’s not enough.”
He took a drink of bourbon from a bottle. “What are you talking about?”
She looked down at the ruined corpse of their latest victim. “This. What we’re doing. All of this. It’s never enough.”
He ran a bloody hand through his hair and took another drink. “So what do you suggest?”
“That you torture me to death.”
He
shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t do it.”
“Please, Ken. I need to feel the pain. It would be the ultimate.”
He shook his head again. “No way.”
“Do you love me?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then torture me to death. It’s the only thing that will make me happy. I want to spend the last moments of my life looking into your eyes and feeling the exquisite pain as you torture me to death.”
He took another drink. “I’ll think about it.”
• • •
The next morning, after each had slept for a total of maybe two hours, Kendra was in the bathroom getting ready for work when Ken staggered out of the bedroom.
Ken didn’t have to work for a living. His parents had left him the house and some money when they died, plus he received a crazy check from the state to pay his bills. He didn’t know what Kendra did for a living. He knew she worked in the tallest skyscraper downtown, but he had no idea what she did there.
There was another bathroom on the other side of the house. He went in there and brushed his teeth. Then he went to the kitchen and opened a bottle of whiskey. He had a seat at the table and took a few drinks from the bottle.
Soon thereafter, Kendra entered the kitchen. Her hair was wet and she was dressed for work in her usual business attire. She had her purse in one hand and a briefcase in the other. “I’m running late.” She leaned over and kissed him.
One of the bulbs in the chandelier above them blinked and buzzed, sending a shock of pain directly into Ken’s brain. “I love you,” he said.
“Then do what I told you to do. Take me downstairs and make me the happiest woman in the world. Then I won’t even have to go to work today. Or ever again, for that matter.”
“But I can’t, Kendra. I love you, and I don’t want to live without you.”
She frowned. “I love you too. See you tonight.”
She left.
Right after he heard her car pull away, the Voice spoke up in his mind for the first time in a very long time. You should give her what she wants, the Voice said.
In childhood, many voices had spoken in Ken’s mind pretty much continuously. During his teenage years, the number of voices decreased to no more than nine or ten. Once he was in his twenties, the number had diminished even more, to only about three or four. By the time he was in his thirties, only one voice remained, the one he simply thought of as the Voice. Now that he was in his forties, the Voice barely spoke to him at all.