The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  “Or,” said Mr Clubb, calming his own fires with another deep draught of cognac, “as the Golden Rule has it, what you do is sooner or later done back to you.”

  Although I was still one who listened but could not hear, a tingle of premonition went up my spine. “Please go on with your report,” I said.

  “The responses of the subject were all one could wish,” said Mr Clubb. “I could go so far as to say that her responses were a thing of beauty. A subject who can render you one magnificent scream after another while maintaining a basic self-possession and not breaking down is a subject highly attuned to her own pain, sir, and one to be cherished. You see, there comes a moment when they understand that they are changed for good, they have passed over the border into another realm from which there is no return, and some of them can’t handle it and turn, you might say, sir, to mush. With some it happens right at the foundation stage, a sad disappointment because thereafter all the rest of the work could be done by the crudest apprentice. It takes some at the nipples stage, and at the genital stage quite a few more. Most of them comprehend irreversibility during the piercings, and by the stage of small amputation ninety per cent have shown you what they are made of. The lady did not come to the point until we had begun the eye-work, and she passed with flying colors, sir. But it was then the male upped and put his foot in it.”

  “And eye-work is delicate going,” said Mr Cuff. “Requiring two men, if you want it done even close to right. But I couldn’t have turned my back on the fellow for more than a minute and a half.”

  “Less,” said Mr Clubb, “And him lying there in the corner meek as a baby. No fight left in him at all, you would have said. You would have said, that fellow there is not going to risk so much as opening his eyes until he’s made to do it.”

  “But up he gets, without a rope on him, sir,” said Mr Cuff, “which you would have said was far beyond the powers of a fellow who had recently lost a hand.”

  “Up he gets and on he comes,” said Mr Clubb. “In defiance of all of Nature’s mighty laws. Before I know what’s what, he has his good arm around Mr Cuff’s neck and is earnestly trying to snap that neck while beating Mr Cuff about the head with his stump, a situation which compels me to set aside the task at hand and take up a knife and ram it into his back and sides a fair old number of times. The next thing I know, he’s on me, and it’s up to Mr Cuff to peel him off and set him on the floor.”

  “And then, you see, your concentration is gone,” said Mr Cuff. “After something like that, you might as well be starting all over again at the beginning. Imagine if you are playing a piano about as well as ever you did in your life, and along comes another piano with blood in its eye and jumps on your back. It was pitiful, that’s all I can say about it. But I got the fellow down and jabbed him here and there until he was still, and then I got the one item we count on as a sure-fire last resort for incapacitation.”

  “What is that item?” I asked.

  “Dental floss,” said Mr Clubb. “Dental floss cannot be overestimated as a particular in our line of work. It is the razor-wire of everyday life, and fishing-line cannot hold a candle to it, for fishing-line is dull, but dental floss is both dull and sharp. It has a hundred uses, and a book should be written on the subject.”

  “What do you do with it?” I asked.

  “It is applied to a male subject,” he said. “Applied artfully and in a manner perfected only over years of experience. The application is of a lovely subtlety. During the process, the subject must be in a helpless, preferably an unconscious, position. When the subject regains the first fuzzy inklings of consciousness, he is aware of no more than a vague discomfort like unto a form of numb tingling, similar to when a foot has gone asleep. In a wonderfully short period of time, that discomfort builds up itself, ascending to mild pain, real pain, severe pain, and then outright agony. And then it goes past agony. The final stage is a mystical condition I don’t think there is a word for which, but it close resembles ecstasy. Hallucinations are common. Out-of-body experiences are common. We have seen men speak in tongues, even when tongues were strictly speaking organs they no longer possessed. We have seen wonders, Mr Cuff and I.”

  “That we have,” said Mr Cuff. “The ordinary civilian sort of fellow can be a miracle, sir.”

  “Of which the person in question was one, to be sure,” said Mr Clubb. “But he has to be said to be in a category all by himself, a man in a million you could put it, which is the cause of my mentioning the grand design ever a mystery to us who glimpse but a part of the whole. You see, the fellow refused to play by the time-honored rules. He was in an awesome degree of suffering and torment, sir, but he would not do us the favor to lie down and quit.”

  “The mind was not right,” said Mr Cuff. “Where the proper mind goes to the spiritual, sir, as just described, this was that one mind in ten million, I’d estimate, which moves to the animal at the reptile level. If you cut off the head of a venomous reptile and detach it from the body, that head will still attempt to strike. So it was with our boy. Bleeding from a dozen wounds. Minus one hand. Seriously concussed. The dental floss murdering all possibility of thought. Every nerve in his body howling like a banshee. Yet up he comes with his eyes red and the foam dripping from his mouth. We put him down again, and I did what I hate, because it takes all feeling away from the body along with the motor capacity, and cracked his spine right at the base of the head. Or would have, if his spine had been a normal thing instead of solid steel in a thick india-rubber case. Which is what put us in mind of weight-lifting, sir, an activity resulting in such development about the top of the spine you need a hacksaw to get even close to it.”

  “We were already behind schedule,” said Mr Clubb, “and with the time required to get back into the proper frame of mind, we had at least seven or eight hours of work ahead of us. And you had to double that, because while we could knock the fellow out, he wouldn’t have the decency to stay out more than a few minutes at a time. The natural thing, him being only the secondary subject, would have been to kill him outright so we could get on with the real job, but improving our working conditions by that fashion would require an amendment to our contract. Which comes under the heading of Instructions from the Client.”

  “And it was eleven o’clock,” said Mr Cuff.

  “The exact time scheduled for our conference,” said Mr Clubb. “My partner was forced to clobber the fellow into senselessness, how many times was it, Mr Cuff, while I prayed for our client to do us the grace of answering his phone during twenty rings?”

  “Three times, Mr Clubb, three times exactly,” said Mr Cuff. “The blow each time more powerful than the last, which combining with his having a skull made of granite led to a painful swelling of my hand.”

  “The dilemma stared us in the face,” said Mr Clubb. “Client unreachable. Impeded in the performance of our duties. State of mind, very foul. In such a pickle, we could do naught but obey the instructions given us by our hearts. Remove the gentleman’s head, I told my partner, and take care not be bitten once it’s off. Mr Cuff took up an axe. Some haste was called for, the fellow just beginning to stir again. Mr Cuff moved into position. Then from the bed, where all had been lovely silence but for soft moans and whimpers, we hear a god-awful yowling ruckus of the most desperate and importunate protest. It was of a sort to melt the heart, sir. Were we not experienced professionals who enjoy pride in our work, I believe we might have been persuaded almost to grant the fellow mercy, despite his being a pest of the first water. But now those heart-melting screeches reach the ears of the pest and rouse him into movement just at the moment Mr Cuff lowers the boom, so to speak.”

  “Which was an unfortunate bit of business,” said Mr Cuff. “Causing me to catch him in the shoulder, causing him to rear up, causing me to lose my footing what with all the blood on the floor, then causing a tussle for possession of the axe and myself suffering several kicks to the breadbasket. I’ll tell you, sir, we did a good piece of work when
we took off his hand, for without the nuisance of a stump really being useful only for leverage, there’s no telling what that fellow might have done. As it was, I had the devil’s own time getting the axe free and clear, and once I had done, any chance of making a neat, clean job of it was long gone. It was a slaughter and an act of butchery with not a bit of finesse or sophistication to it, and I have to tell you, such a thing is both an embarrassment and an outrage to men like ourselves. Turning a subject into hamburger by means of an axe is a violation of all our training, and it is not why we went into this business.”

  “No, of course not, you are more like artists than I had imagined,” I said. “But in spite of your embarrassment, I suppose you went back to work on ... on the female subject.”

  “We are not like artists,” said Mr Clubb, “we are artists, and we know how to set our feelings aside and address our chosen medium of expression with a pure and patient attention. In spite of which we discovered the final and insurmountable frustration of the evening, and that discovery put paid to all our hopes.”

  “If you discovered that Marguerite had escaped,” I said, “I believe I might almost, after all you have said, be -”

  Glowering, Mr Clubb held up his hand. “I beg you not to insult us, sir, as we have endured enough misery for one day. The subject had escaped, all right, but not in the simple sense of your meaning. She had escaped for all eternity, in the sense that her soul had taken leave of her body and flown to those realms at whose nature we can only make our poor, ignorant guesses.”

  “She died?” I asked. “In other words, in direct contradiction of my instructions, you two fools killed her. You love to talk about your expertise, but you went too far, and she died at your hands. I want you incompetents to leave my house immediately. Begone. Depart. This minute.”

  Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff looked into each other’s eyes, and in that moment of private communication I saw an encompassing and universal sorrow which utterly turned the tables on me: before I was made to understand how it was possible, I saw that the only fool present was myself. And yet the sorrow included all three of us, and more besides.

  “The subject died, but we did not kill her,” said Mr Clubb. “We did not go, nor have we ever gone, too far. The subject chose to die. The subject’s death was an act of suicidal will. Can you hear me? While you are listening, sir, is it possible, sir, for you to open your ears and hear what I am saying? She who might have been in all of our long experience the noblest, most courageous subject we ever will have the good fortune to be given witnessed the clumsy murder of her lover and decided to surrender her life.”

  “Quick as a shot,” said Mr Cuff. “The simple truth, sir, is that otherwise we could have kept her alive for about a year.”

  “And it would have been a rare privilege to do so,” said Mr Clubb. “It is time for you to face facts, sir.”

  “I am facing them about as well as one could,” I said. “Please tell me where you disposed of the bodies.”

  “Within the house,” said Mr Clubb. Before I could protest, he said, “Under the wretched circumstances, sir, including the continuing unavailability of the client and the enormity of the personal and professional let-down felt by my partner and myself, we saw no choice but to dispose of the house along with the telltale remains.”

  “Dispose of Green Chimneys?” I said, aghast. “How could you dispose of Green Chimneys?”

  “Reluctantly, sir,” said Mr Clubb “With heavy hearts and an equal anger. With also the same degree of professional unhappiness experienced previous. In workaday terms, by means of combustion. Fire, sir, is a substance like shock and salt water, a healer and a cleanser, though more drastic.”

  “But Green Chimneys has not been healed,” I said. “Nor has my wife.”

  “You are a man of wit, sir, and have provided Mr Cuff and myself many moments of precious amusement. True, Green Chimneys has not been healed, but cleansed it has been, root and branch. And you hired us to punish your wife, not heal her, and punish her we did, as well as possible under very trying circumstances indeed.”

  “Which circumstances include our feeling that the job ended before its time,” said Mr Cuff. “Which circumstance is one we cannot bear.”

  “I regret your disappointment,” I said, “but I cannot accept that it was necessary to burn down my magnificent house.”

  “Twenty, even fifteen years ago, it would not have been,” said Mr Clubb. “Nowadays, however, that contemptible alchemy known as Police Science has fattened itself up into such a gross and distorted breed of sorcery that a single drop of blood can be detected even after you scrub and scour until your arms hurt. It has reached the hideous point that if a constable without a thing in his head but the desire to imprison honest fellows employed in an ancient trade finds two hairs at what is supposed to be a crime scene, he waddles along to the laboratory and instantly a loathsome sort of wizard is popping out to tell him that those same two hairs are from the heads of Mr Clubb and Mr Cuff, and I exaggerate, I know, sir, but not by much.”

  “And if they do not have our names, sir,” said Mr Cuff, “which they do not and I pray never will, they ever after have our particulars, to be placed in a great universal file against the day when they might have our names, so as to look back into that cruel file and commit the monstrosity of unfairly increasing the charges against us. It is a malignant business, and all sensible precautions must be taken.”

  “A thousand times I have expressed the conviction,” said Mr Clubb, “that an ancient art ought not be against the law, nor its practitioners described as criminals. Is there even a name for our so-called crime? There is not. GBH they call it, sir, for Grievous Bodily Harm, or, even worse, Assault. We do not Assault. We induce, we instruct, we instill. Properly speaking, these cannot be crimes, and those who do them cannot be criminals. Now I have said it a thousand times and one.”

  “All right,” I said, attempting to speed this appalling conference to its end, “you have described the evening’s unhappy events. I appreciate your reasons for burning down my splendid property. You have enjoyed a lavish meal. All remaining is the matter of your remuneration, which demands considerable thought. This night has left me exhausted, and after all your efforts, you, too, must be in need of rest. Communicate with me, please, in a day or two, gentlemen, by whatever means you choose. I wish to be alone with my thoughts. Mr Moncrieff will show you out.”

  The maddening barnies met this plea with impassive stares and stoic silence, and I renewed my silent vow to give them nothing - not a penny. For all their pretensions, they had accomplished naught but the death of my wife and the destruction of my country house. Rising to my feet with more difficulty than anticipated, I said, “Thank you for your efforts on my behalf.”

  Once again, the glance which passed between them implied that I had failed to grasp the essentials of our situation.

  “Your thanks are gratefully accepted,” said Mr Cuff, “though, dispute it as you may, they are premature, as you know in your soul. This morning we embarked upon a journey of which we have yet more miles to go. In consequence, we prefer not to leave. Also, setting aside the question of your continuing education, which if we do not address will haunt us all forever, residing here with you for a sensible period out of sight is the best protection from law enforcement we three could ask for.”

  “No,” I said, “I have had enough of your education, and I need no protection from officers of the law. Please, gentlemen, allow me to return to my bed. You may take the rest of the cognac with you as a token of my regard.”

  “Give it a moment’s reflection, sir,” said Mr Clubb. “You have announced the presence of high-grade consultants and introduced these same to staff and clients both. Hours later, your spouse meets her tragic end in a conflagration destroying your upstate manor. On the very same night also occurs the disappearance of your greatest competitor, a person certain to be identified before long by a hotel employee as a fellow not unknown to the late spouse. Can y
ou think it wise to have the high-grade consultants vanish right away?”

  I did reflect, then said, “You have a point. It will be best if you continue to make an appearance in the office for a time. However, the proposal that you stay here is ridiculous.” A wild hope, utterly irrational in the face of the grisly evidence, came to me in the guise of doubt. “If Green Chimneys has been destroyed by fire, I should have been informed long ago. I am a respected figure in the town of —, personally acquainted with its Chief of Police, Wendall Nash. Why has he not called me?”

  “Oh, sir, my goodness,” said Mr Clubb, shaking his head and smiling inwardly at my folly, “for many reasons. A small town is a beast slow to move. The available men have been struggling throughout the night to rescue even a jot or tittle portion of your house. They will fail, they have failed already, but the effort will keep them busy past dawn. Wendall Nash will not wish to ruin your night’s sleep until he can make a full report.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “In fact, if I am not mistaken . . .” He tilted his head, closed his eyes, and raised an index finger. The telephone in the kitchen began to trill.

  “He has done it a thousand times, sir,” said Mr Cuff, “and I have yet to see him strike out.”