The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

by Darrell Schweitzer

  “‘I don’t either,’ I said. I grabbed her by the throat with my left hand and lifted her till she stood on tiptoes against the wall.

  She tried to kick me in the balls then, but I just stepped aside. I held her dangling there, but just for a second—”

  * * * *

  “Christ—Sam! You didn’t—?” I felt sick then. I held onto the edge of the table hard. All I could do was think to myself, Oh shit, Oh shit—

  But Sam held up his hand. “Frank, please. It’s not what you think. You promised you’d hear me out.”

  “Okay. Yeah. I did.”

  * * * *

  “She barely managed to gasp, ‘Sam, don’t—do—anything stupid…’

  “I couldn’t wait any longer. It was time to let her in on my secret.

  “I sank my fingers into the side of her face, slipping under the skin by her left ear. The underside of her face felt like putty, and it was wet in there, and almost scalding hot.

  “I don’t think Joanne was quite conscious then. She seemed stunned, somehow paralyzed, and she didn’t make the slightest sound or motion as I slowly pulled outward and her face came away in my hand. For a few seconds I held it drooping over my fingers like half-melted cheese. Then it was no heavier than a cobweb, and a few seconds after that, my hand was empty.

  “I let go of her then, and when I saw the raw, red place where her face had been, I was violently sick. I ran into the bathroom and puked my guts out. Then I came out and walked slowly into the living room. I sat down on the sofa and just stared at everything, taking inventory, looking for nothing in particular but looking for it with desperate urgency. Nothing. That was the key. For all Joanne and I had lived here for twelve years, there was nothing left. The prints on the walls, the stereo, the furniture were all different. Even the tennis trophy we’d won together in college—I’d left her that when she’d asked for it—was gone from the shelf. The room told the story of a stranger’s life.

  “Then I heard her sobbing softly out in the hall. I stood up. It was time for me to go.

  “The woman sitting in the hall, the one wearing Joanne’s bathrobe and slippers, was no one I had ever seen before. I stopped and studied her face for a minute. The cheekbones were higher, the nose longer, the eyes brown instead of hazel, the eyebrows thicker and more arched. Her expression was that of someone who has suddenly stepped into life without any bearings, unsure of who she is or how she got there.

  “Her very unfamiliarity was comforting. I left the apartment without a word. Downstairs, I scraped my ex-wife’s name off the other woman’s mailbox.”

  * * * *

  The truly terrifying part was that Sam Gilmore clearly believed every word he said. I was trapped then, completely unprepared, and yet I had to do something, as surely as I would if I had come across a man bleeding to death in a back alley.

  “Sam,” I said, very deliberately. “Listen to what you’re saying. This is…crazy. I mean, you know, you really know, that people’s faces don’t come off like Silly Putty.”

  He folded his hands on the table.

  “But they do, my friend. They do. You have been my best friend all these years, but there’s one secret I’ve been keeping from you all this time. They do. I know it.”

  I was only stalling for time then, desperately, until I could come up with some sort of plan.

  “Okay. They do.”

  “I learned that when I was six years old, Frank. It was one morning a couple days after Christmas. I was hunting Injuns in the living room, crawling around under the furniture with my coonskin cap and Frontiersman cork-rifle. You remember, Frank? You had one too.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Well, it was barely dawn, much too early for me to be allowed up, and there I was. Suddenly the door to the guest bedroom opened, and my grandfather stepped out. I froze where I was, afraid he’d see me and tell my parents. But he just stood there in the doorway, fully dressed, with a suitcase in hand, staring into space as if he were trying to remember something.

  “Then he crossed the living room and went into the kitchen. I put my gun down gingerly and crept out a ways to see what was he was doing.

  “It was real, Frank. I was wide awake, not dreaming. Grandpa put down the suitcase, then reached up behind his head with both hands as if he were fumbling for the string to take a Halloween mask off—that was the image that came to me, even then—and he peeled his face away. It just came off. But he had his back to me and I didn’t see—I mean, I only saw when he held up the mask of flesh to the window. It was translucent in the pale light for just an instant before it vanished with a hiss, the way a thin slice of bacon will fizzle away into nothing on a hot grill.

  “When he turned back toward the living room, he was someone else, an older man I didn’t know.

  “I wanted to scream, Frank. I bit my fist hard to keep myself from screaming. At the same time, I think I was more consciously afraid of being caught up too early than anything else. My mind rejected what I saw. It was impossible, I told myself. Just what you’d say. A little kid doesn’t have a real good grasp of what’s possible and what isn’t, but there are limits, and that, even for a six-year-old, was too much.

  “I must have let out a little moan, because then he saw me.

  “‘No,’ I whimpered softly. ‘Go away.’

  “Our eyes met, and for just an instant it was still Grandpa there, gazing at me out of that stranger’s face—angrily, sadly, I couldn’t tell—and then he did indeed go away. Whatever there was, in the eyes, in the face, which remained of Grandpa was gone, and the stranger shrugged, picked up his suitcase, and left the house.

  “I lay there for a long time. Mother found me eventually. She thought I was sick. I’d wet my pajamas. I got a scolding and was put to bed, and she never understood, never suspected, and for years afterwards that scene came back to me in nightmares, or just popping up in the middle of a train of thought, and I tried to figure it out. I was much, much too young. Kids can’t understand that adults are real people too, with their own feelings and vulnerabilities. He was just Grandpa. He visited. He brought me presents. I couldn’t imagine what frustrations, what little agonies he must have gone through before taking that final escape route.

  “And sometimes I wondered: Was it because of me? What if, instead of ‘Go away,’ I’d said, ‘Please stay. We love you’? But I didn’t. I didn’t say anything at all.

  “And that’s how I found out my little secret.”

  * * * *

  We sat there quietly for what might have been five minutes. The last customers and even the waiters were gone, so we were alone but for the bartender in the corner by the television.

  There were lots of times I thought I would just get up and bolt, but I was afraid to. And Sam Gilmore was my friend, and friendship is a little like marriage—in sickness and in health—so I had to stay.

  “Sam, what did you do to Joanne?”

  He swirled the ice in his glass, gazing into it, seemingly oblivious to me.

  “I didn’t want to hurt her. I just wanted her gone, out of my life. Then it would be over.”

  “It isn’t that simple, Sam, and you damn well know it. People are going to wonder what happened to her. The police are going to start asking questions—”

  I stopped then, waiting for his reaction. Perhaps I had gone too far by mentioning the police.

  There were tears on his cheeks now. He put his elbows on the tabletop, covered his eyes with his hands, and sobbed.

  “It’s not like you think, Frank. No cops ever came looking after my grandfather. He was gone, like a stone thrown into a lake, and after a while the ripples just smoothed out. Grandma and my parents never mentioned him. He made a graceful exit. But, Frank, you’re right. It’s not that simple for me. That’s why you’re here tonight. I called you not merely to tell you about what I did, but because I need your help with something that is still going on. There has been, you might say, an unforeseen complication.”
r />   “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “It’s Joanne. It’s different with her. She keeps coming back.”

  II

  That was when the plan occurred to me. I grasped at it with quiet, desperate deliberation, because I had to do something, and this, at least, was something.

  I stood up and put my coat on.

  “Come on, Sam. We gotta get out of here.” He put on his coat.

  “Okay…”

  I took him by the arm and maneuvered him past the cash register. He was too befuddled then. I led him like a child or a very, very old man. I had to leave a twenty of my own to pay for the drinks.

  Outside the wind howled, and the stinging sleet was turning into stinging snow.

  “Where are we going?” my friend shouted.

  I just dragged him along. There were no taxis in sight so we made for the subway entrance.

  “We’re going to Joanne’s apartment,” I said. “We’re going to settle this crazy thing once and for all.”

  He yanked me to a stop, but I held on to him. He glared at me, teeth chattering.

  “It won’t do any good. She’s not there anymore.”

  “Sam, you may be my closest friend, but you’re going to have to show me.”

  He didn’t resist then as I led him down the stairs, into the subway, steadying him. I dropped two tokens into the turnstile and steered him out onto the empty platform. I was more scared than ever. The waiting was the terrible part. We were alone, with nowhere to go and nothing to do for I didn’t know how long, and live rails just off the edge in either direction. As long as I was moving, doing something, it didn’t seem so bad, but waiting was another matter entirely.

  We would find the truth. That was the plan. If Joanne was in her apartment, then I would have to direct Sam, gently or otherwise, into the care of a psychiatrist. If she wasn’t, it was time to go to the police.

  At last the train came. I sat Sam down between myself and the window. As we rattled through the darkness he just stared out at the concrete walls weaving past. Then, after a while, he began to speak, but to himself, not in conversation, but just babbling aloud.

  “I couldn’t sleep that night when I got home. After I did it…I felt like…like a murderer. I was waiting for everyone in the building to start pounding on the walls and on my door and shouting ‘He’s the one! There!’ But I only lay still in the darkness, listening to the ticking of my alarm clock. It sounded like thunder. I listened to my own heartbeat too. I could hear it, as if my senses were all suddenly heightened, because…because I knew…like Roderick Usher. I looked at the clock once and it was half past twelve. Then I rolled over again and looked once more, and it was a quarter till four. I hadn’t felt any interval in between. It was like that, like a whole part of my life, all the years of my marriage, had been ripped out, destroyed. Once I was twenty-four. Now I am thirty-six. And there’s nothing in between. Nothing.

  “After a while, there was another sound. There was someone in the kitchen. I heard a cabinet open. Pans clinked. I thought for a moment that it would be burglars, that I would die the archetypal New Yorker’s death, knifed in my own apartment just after I had…

  “But it was someone fixing breakfast. I looked at the clock again. It was almost six.

  “And I heard, quite distinctly, Joanne’s voice. I knew I was not dreaming, even as I had been certain when I saw Grandpa that time. But it was not the way Joanne had sounded in years. She was almost a little girl again and was singing an old song she had been fond of. I used to ask her what it meant, but she never knew:

  How many miles to my love’s grave?

  Just three score and ten.

  Can I get there by candlelight?

  But never back again.

  Never back again.

  “I slid out of bed as quietly as I could, wincing as the bedsprings or floorboards creaked. I didn’t know what to believe then. I was past all believing.

  “I rushed into the kitchen, but there was no one there. However, a frying pan was on the stove, and Joanne’s blue bathrobe hung draped over a chair.

  “Even that wasn’t the end, Frank. No, it was just the beginning, the first onslaught. I went to work that day as if nothing had happened, but she was…everywhere. It’s not that I actually saw her but…one of the girls at the agency suddenly decided to wear her hair exactly the way Joanne did. And another had a ring that wasn’t like the one I had given Joanne on our first anniversary—it was that ring, even down to the scratch it got later. It was all I could do not to start screaming and yank it off her finger. But when she, that particular copywriter’s assistant, turned to me, I saw something in her eyes—hazel, like Joanne’s—that sent me back into my office without a word. That afternoon I found one of Joanne’s old love notes in a file of photos. It was from before our marriage and it said simply, I’m yours. Now those photos were for a brand new project for a brand new client, so how do you suppose that note got there? How?”

  The train came to a stop, then lurched into motion again. We were in the Fifties now. It wouldn’t be long.

  “I don’t know, Sam. Really I don’t.”

  “I’m being haunted by details, Frank. That’s how it is. She comes back, in a sound, in a ring, in a note, little things. When I got back to my own apartment that night everything was arranged just a little differently. Some of the books on the shelves were not mine, but hers. That was when I knew that it would only get worse and worse, until…well, I couldn’t just wait until the end, and so I thought of you, and I called you.”

  The subway had reached our stop. I helped Sam to his feet. He seemed weak, almost limp, but he wasn’t drunk. I think it was despair. He was giving up.

  “Come on, old buddy,” I said, all but hoisting him outside and up the stairs.

  When we reached Joanne’s apartment building, he hung back, but I dragged him inside. We stood in that very lobby with the mailboxes. Joanne’s sticker had indeed been peeled off.

  Sam tried to be jovial again.

  “Say, Frank old chum, let’s you and me just…forget the whole business. Whaddaya say? It’s all been a big joke. A practical joke.”

  As usual, it didn’t work. I knew he was trying to offer me, and himself, an escape. But it was long since too late for that.

  “Come on,” I said gently. “We have to go up.”

  There was an elevator, but, as he had done two days previously, we climbed the stairs.

  “You may be wondering,” he said as we went, “…I mean, there is an element of logic missing…so why didn’t Grandpa come back and haunt us, like Joanne has? I think I know why. Because he wanted to go. It was his time to leave his body and become somebody else. He knew that. But I forced Joanne. It wasn’t right, and I have to pay for what I have done.”

  We reached the fourth floor. I rang the bell at 4D and waited.

  I rang again, feeling some of what he must have felt, that first time, the desire to find some hasty reason to avoid going through with what we had come to do.

  Maybe nobody is home.

  That would have helped him a lot, two days previously, but now it would be no help at all, for either of us.

  This was the totality of my plan, to ring the bell, to confront the truth, to find Joanne living there and discover that my friend had lost his mind, or even to find her corpse…I was ready for that…and to admit that he was a murderer.

  But I wasn’t prepared for the one thing that did happen.

  A stranger came to the door. She fit the description Sam had given, darker, with brown eyes and arced eyebrows. She was, I think, a little taller than Joanne, and her hair was longer, straighter.

  When he saw her, Sam put his head on my shoulder and cried softly. The woman stared out at us through the partially opened door, nervous, ready to slam the door in our faces.

  All I could say was, “Excuse me, Miss, but does Joanne Gilmore live here?”

  She shook her head and closed the door part way. “I don’t know no
Joanne Gilmore.”

  “Well then, did she live here? You must have just moved in. Do you know the name of the previous tenant?”

  She glanced at me, then at Sam, then back at me.

  “I don’t know nobody by that name. What do you want?”

  “Let’s get out of here, Frank,” Sam said.

  “Nothing,” I said to the woman. “Sorry to have disturbed you.”

  Sam was pulling me toward the stairs.

  III

  “So you see?” he said. We stood in the frigid air, huge flakes of slushy snow whirling around us.

  “No, I don’t see. Someone else lives there now, that’s all. Where is Joanne?”

  He turned to me, hurt, shocked. “You still don’t believe me. I haven’t been lying to you, Frank. It’s all true. Everything I told you is true.”

  “Sam, I’d like to believe you. But you know I can’t.”

  He began to walk briskly toward the subway entrance.

  I ran after him.

  “I want you to come to my place,” he said, a trace of anger in his voice. “You’ll believe me then.”

  That was the one hope I had left to cling to, that Joanne had for some reason moved back in with Sam, and was living with him now, in the other apartment in Brooklyn. Maybe she had done it out of pity, as she saw his mind crumbling, and he, in his madness, had developed this whole fantasy as a defense mechanism in the aftermath of their particularly messy divorce. It wasn’t a comforting notion, that my best friend was having serious mental problems, but it made some sort of sense.

  On the corner by the subway entrance was a newsstand. An old woman was buying a newspaper.

  “There!” Sam shouted to me. “Look! There’s proof!”

  “What?”

  Before I could react at all he had snatched the lady’s change purse out of her hands and come back to me, breathless.

  “Here. You see? It’s another thing of hers. Joanne’s. I gave her this purse once. See the initials—”

  The initials were unquestionably J.G., as in Joanne Gilmore, but I didn’t look very closely because the old woman was screaming and the man inside the newsstand had stepped out, an iron bar in his hand. I grabbed the change purse from Sam and threw it back to its owner.