The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Saturday night.

  “Okay, take it easy. Go on, tell me the rest of it. Borlan comes to you, and he begs you to read Spanning’s letter and . . .?”

  “He didn’t beg. He just gave me the letter, told me he had no idea what Henry had written, but he said he’d known me a long time, that he thought I was a decent, fair-minded person, and he’d appreciate it in the name of our friendship if I’d read it.”

  “So you read it.”

  “I read it.”

  “Friendship. Sounds like you an’ him was good friends. Like maybe you and I were good friends?”

  She looked at me with astonishment.

  I think I looked at me with astonishment.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” I said.

  “Yeah, really,” she said, right back at me, “where the hell did that come from?” My ears were hot, and I almost started to say something about how if it was okay for her to use our Marx Brothers indiscretion for a lever, why wasn’t it okay for me to get cranky about it? But I kept my mouth shut; and for once knew enough to move along. “Must’ve been some letter,” I said.

  There was a long moment of silence during which she weighed the degree of shit she’d put me through for my stupid remark, after all this was settled; and having struck a balance in her head, she told me about the letter.

  It was perfect. It was the only sort of come-on that could lure the avenger who’d put you in the chair to pay attention. The letter had said that fifty-six was not the magic number of death. That there were many, many more unsolved cases, in many, many different states; lost children, runaways, unexplained disappearances, old people, college students hitchhiking to Sarasota for Spring Break, shopkeepers who’d carried their day’s take to the night deposit drawer and never gone home for dinner, hookers left in pieces in Hefty bags all over town, and death death death unnumbered and unnamed. Fifty-six, the letter had said, was just the start. And if she, her, no one else, Allison Roche, my pal Ally, would come on down to Holman, and talk to him, Henry Lake Spanning would help her close all those open files. National rep. Avenger of the unsolved. Big time mysteries revealed. “So you read the letter, and you went . . .”

  “Not at first. Not immediately. I was sure he was guilty, and I was pretty certain at that moment, three years and more, dealing with the case, I was pretty sure if he said he could fill in all the blank spaces, that he could do it. But I just didn’t like the idea. In court, I was always twitchy when I got near him at the defense table. His eyes, he never took them off me. They’re blue, Rudy, did I tell you that . . .?”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember. Go on.”

  “Bluest blue you’ve ever seen . . . well, to tell the truth, he just plain scared me. I wanted to win that case so badly, Rudy, you can never know . . . not just for me or the career or for the idea of justice or to avenge all those people he’d killed, but just the thought of him out there on the street, with those blue eyes, so blue, never stopped looking at me from the moment the trial began . . . the thought of him on the loose drove me to whip that case like a howling dog. I had to put him away!”

  “But you overcame your fear.”

  She didn’t like the edge of ridicule on the blade of that remark. “That’s right. I finally ‘overcame my fear’ and I agreed to go see him.”

  “And you saw him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t know shit about no other killings, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he talked a good talk. And his eyes was blue, so blue.”

  “Yes, you asshole.”

  I chuckled. Everybody is somebody’s fool.

  “Now let me ask you this – very carefully – so you don’t hit me again: the moment you discovered he’d been shuckin’ you, lyin’, that he didn’t have this long, unsolved crime roster to tick off, why didn’t you get up, load your attaché case, and hit the bricks?”

  Her answer was simple. “He begged me to stay a while.”

  “That’s it? He begged you?”

  “Rudy, he has no one. He’s never had anyone.” She looked at me as if I were made of stone, some basalt thing, an onyx statue, a figure carved out of melanite, soot and ashes fused into a monolith. She feared she could not, in no way, no matter how piteously or bravely she phrased it, penetrate my rocky surface.

  Then she said a thing that I never wanted to hear.

  “Rudy . . .”

  Then she said a thing I could never have imagined she’d say. Never in a million years.

  “Rudy . . .”

  Then she said the most awful thing she could say to me, even more awful than that she was in love with a serial killer.

  “Rudy . . . go inside . . . read my mind . . . I need you to know, I need you to understand . . . Rudy . . .”

  The look on her face killed my heart.

  I tried to say no, oh god no, not that, please, no, not that, don’t ask me to do that, please please I don’t want to go inside, we mean so much to each other, I don’t want to know your landscape. Don’t make me feel filthy, I’m no peeping-tom, I’ve never spied on you, never stolen a look when you were coming out of the shower, or undressing, or when you were being sexy . . . I never invaded your privacy, I wouldn’t do a thing like that . . . we’re friends, I don’t need to know it all, I don’t want to go in there. I can go inside anyone, and it’s always awful . . . please don’t make me see things in there I might not like, you’re my friend, please don’t steal that from me . . .

  “Rudy, please. Do it.”

  Oh jeezusjeezusjeezus, again, she said it again!

  We sat there. And we sat there. And we sat there longer. I said, hoarsely, in fear, “Can’t you just . . . just tell me?”

  Her eyes looked at stone. A man of stone. And she tempted me to do what I could do casually, tempted me the way Faust was tempted by Mefisto, Mephistopheles, Mefistofele, Mephostopilis. Black rock Dr Faustus, possessor of magical mind-reading powers, tempted by thick, lustrous eyelashes and violet eyes and a break in the voice and an imploring movement of hand to face and a tilt of the head that was pitiable and the begging word please and all the guilt that lay between us that was mine alone. The seven chief demons. Of whom Mefisto was the one “not loving the light”.

  I knew it was the end of our friendship. But she left me nowhere to run. Mefisto in onyx.

  So I jaunted into her landscape.

  I stayed in there less than ten seconds. I didn’t want to know everything I could know; and I definitely wanted to know nothing about how she really thought of me. I couldn’t have borne seeing a caricature of a bug-eyed, shuffling, thick-lipped darkie in there. Mandingo man. Steppin Porchmonkey Rudy Pair . . .

  Oh god, what was I thinking!

  Nothing in there like that. Nothing! Ally wouldn’t have anything like that in there. I was going nuts, going absolutely fucking crazy, in there, back out in less than ten seconds. I want to block it, kill it, void it, waste it, empty it, reject it, squeeze it, darken it, obscure it, wipe it, do away with it like it never happened. Like the moment you walk in on your momma and poppa and catch them fucking, and you want never to have known that.

  But at least I understood.

  In there, in Allison Roche’s landscape, I saw how her heart had responded to this man she called Spanky, not Henry Lake Spanning. She did not call him, in there, by the name of a monster; she called him a honey’s name. I didn’t know if he was innocent or not, but she knew he was innocent. At first she had responded to just talking with him, about being brought up in an orphanage, and she was able to relate to his stories of being used and treated like chattel, and how they had stripped him of his dignity, and made him afraid all the time. She knew what that was like. And how he’d always been on his own. The running-away. The being captured like a wild thing, and put in this home or that lockup or the orphanage “for his own good”. Washing stone steps with a tin bucket full of grey water, with a horsehair brush and a bar of lye soap, till the tender folds of
skin between the fingers were furiously red and hurt so much you couldn’t make a fist.

  She tried to tell me how her heart had responded, with a language that has never been invented to do the job. I saw as much as I needed, there in that secret landscape, to know that Spanning had led a miserable life, but that somehow he’d managed to become a decent human being. And it showed through enough when she was face to face with him, talking to him without the witness box between them, without the adversarial thing, without the tension of the courtroom and the gallery and those parasite creeps from the tabloids sneaking around taking pictures of him, that she identified with his pain. Hers had been not the same, but similar; of a kind, if not of identical intensity.

  She came to know him a little.

  And came back to see him again. Human compassion. In a moment of human weakness.

  Until, finally, she began examining everything she had worked up as evidence, trying to see it from his point of view, using his explanations of circumstantiality. And there were inconsistencies. Now she saw them. Now she did not turn her prosecuting attorney’s mind from them, recasting them in a way that would railroad Spanning; now she gave him just the barest possibility of truth. And the case did not seem as incontestable.

  By that time, she had to admit to herself, she had fallen in love with him. The gentle quality could not be faked; she’d known fraudulent kindness in her time.

  I left her mind gratefully. But at least I understood.

  “Now?” she asked.

  Yes, now. Now I understood. And the fractured glass in her voice told me. Her face told me. The way she parted her lips in expectation, waiting for me to reveal what my magic journey had conveyed by way of truth. Her palm against her cheek. All that told me. And I said, “Yes.”

  Then, silence, between us.

  After a while she said, “I didn’t feel anything.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing to feel. I was in for a few seconds, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t see everything?”

  “No.”

  “Because you didn’t want to?”

  “Because . . .”

  She smiled. “I understand, Rudy.”

  Oh, do you? Do you really? That’s just fine. And I heard me say, “You made it with him yet?”

  I could have torn off her arm; it would’ve hurt less.

  “That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that kind of question. I didn’t like it much the first time, and I like it less this time.”

  “You’re the one wanted me to go into your head. I didn’t buy no ticket for the trip.”

  “Well, you were in there. Didn’t you look around enough to find out?”

  “I didn’t look for that.”

  “What a chickenshit, wheedling, lousy and cowardly . . .”

  “I haven’t heard an answer, Counsellor. Kindly restrict your answers to a simple yes or no.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! He’s on Death Row!”

  “There are ways.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I had a friend. Up at San Rafael. What they call Tamal. Across the bridge from Richmond, a little north of San Francisco.”

  “That’s San Quentin.”

  “That’s what it is, all right.”

  “I thought that friend of yours was at Pelican Bay?”

  “Different friend.”

  “You seem to have a lot of old chums in the joint in California.”

  “It’s a racist nation.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “But Q ain’t Pelican Bay. Two different states of being. As hard time as they pull at Tamal, it’s worse up to Crescent City. In the Shoe.”

  “You never mentioned ‘a friend’ at San Quentin.”

  “I never mentioned a lotta shit. That don’t mean I don’t know it. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

  We sat silently, the three of us: me, her, and Walt Whitman. We’re fighting, I thought. Not make-believe, dissin’ some movie we’d seen and disagreed about; this was nasty. Bone nasty and memorable. No one ever forgets this kind of fight. Can turn dirty in a second, say some trash you can never take back, never forgive, put a canker on the rose of friendship for all time, never be the same look again.

  I waited. She didn’t say anything more; and I got no straight answer; but I was pretty sure Henry Lake Spanning had gone all the way with her. I felt a twinge of emotion I didn’t even want to look at, much less analyse, dissect, and name. Let it be, I thought. Eleven years. Once, just once. Let it just lie there and get old and withered and die a proper death like all ugly thoughts.

  “Okay. So I go on down to Atmore,” I said. “I suppose you mean in the very near future, since he’s supposed to bake in four days. Sometime very soon: like today.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “And how do I get in? Law student? Reporter? Tag along as Larry Borlan’s new law clerk? Or do I go in with you? What am I, friend of the family, representative of the Alabama State Department of Corrections; maybe you could set me up as an inmate’s rep from ‘Project Hope’.”

  “I can do better than that,” she said. The smile. “Much.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just bet you can. Why does that worry me?”

  Still with the smile, she hoisted the Atlas onto her lap. She unlocked it, took out a small manila envelope, unsealed but clasped, and slid it across the table to me. I pried open the clasp and shook out the contents.

  Clever. Very clever. And already made up, with my photo where necessary, admission dates stamped for tomorrow morning, Thursday, absolutely authentic and foolproof.

  “Let me guess,” I said, “Thursday mornings, the inmates of Death Row have access to their attorneys?”

  “On Death Row, family visitation Monday and Friday. Henry has no family. Attorney visitations Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I couldn’t count on today. It took me a couple of days to get through to you . . .”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “. . . but inmates consult with their counsel on Wednesday and Thursday mornings.”

  I tapped the papers and plastic cards. “This is very sharp. I notice my name and my handsome visage already here, already sealed in plastic. How long have you had these ready?”

  “Couple of days.”

  “What if I’d continued to say no?”

  She didn’t answer. She just got that look again.

  “One last thing,” I said. And I leaned in very close, so she would make no mistake that I was dead serious. “Time grows short. Today’s Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thursday. They throw those computer-controlled twin switches Saturday night midnight. What if I jaunt into him and find out you’re right, that he’s absolutely innocent? What then? They going to listen to me? Fiercely high-verbal black boy with the magic mind-read power?

  “I don’t think so. Then what happens, Ally?”

  “Leave that to me.” Her face was hard. “As you said: there are ways. There are roads and routes and even lightning bolts, if you know where to shop. The power of the judiciary. An election year coming up. Favours to be called in.”

  I said, “And secrets to be wafted under sensitive noses?”

  “You just come back and tell me Spanky’s telling the truth,” and she smiled as I started to laugh, “and I’ll worry about the world one minute after midnight Sunday morning.”

  I got up and slid the papers back into the envelope, and put the envelope under my arm. I looked down at her and I smiled as gently as I could, and I said, “Assure me that you haven’t stacked the deck by telling Spanning I can read minds.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I haven’t told him you can read minds.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Did you . . .?”

  “Didn’t have to. I can see it in your face, Ally.”

  “Would it matter if he knew?”

  “Not a bit. I can read the sonofabitch cold or hot, with or without. Three seconds inside and I’ll
know if he did it all, if he did part of it, if he did none of it.”

  “I think I love him, Rudy.”

  “You told me that.”

  “But I wouldn’t set you up. I need to know . . . that’s why I’m asking you to do it.”

  I didn’t answer. I just smiled at her. She’d told him. He’d know I was coming. But that was terrific. If she hadn’t alerted him, I’d have asked her to call and let him know. The more aware he’d be, the easier to scorch his landscape.

  I’m a fast study, king of the quick learners: vulgate Latin in a week; standard apothecary’s pharmacopoeia in three days; Fender bass on a weekend; Atlanta Falcons’ play book in an hour; and, in a moment of human weakness, what it feels like to have a very crampy, heavy-flow menstrual period, two minutes flat.

  So fast, in fact, that the more somebody tries to hide the boiling pits of guilt and the crucified bodies of shame, the faster I adapt to their landscape. Like a man taking a polygraph test gets nervous, starts to sweat, ups the galvanic skin response, tries to duck and dodge, gets himself hinky and more hinky and hinkyer till his upper lip could water a truck garden, the more he tries to hide from me . . . the more he reveals . . . the deeper inside I can go.

  There is an African saying: Death comes without the thumping of drums.

  I have no idea why that one came back to me just then.

  Last thing you expect from a prison administration is a fine sense of humour. But they got one at the Holman facility.

  They had the bloody monster dressed like a virgin.

  White duck pants, white short sleeve shirt buttoned up to the neck, white socks. Pair of brown ankle-high brogans with crepe soles, probably neoprene, but they didn’t clash with the pale, virginal apparition that came through the security door with a large, black brother in Alabama Prison Authority uniform holding onto his right elbow.