The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Didn’t clash, those work shoes, and didn’t make much of a tap on the white tile floor. It was as if he floated. Oh yes, I said to myself, oh yes indeed: I could see how this messianic figure could wow even as tough a cookie as Ally. Oh my, yes.

  Fortunately, it was raining outside.

  Otherwise, sunlight streaming through the glass, he’d no doubt have a halo. I’d have lost it. Right there, a laughing jag would not have ceased. Fortunately, it was raining like a sonofabitch.

  Which hadn’t made the drive down from Clanton a possible entry on any deathbed list of Greatest Terrific Moments in My Life. Sheets of aluminum water, thick as misery, like a neverending shower curtain that I could drive through for an eternity and never really penetrate. I went into the ditch off the I-65 half a dozen times. Why I never ploughed down and buried myself up to the axles in the sucking goo running those furrows, never be something I’ll understand.

  But each time I skidded off the Interstate, even the twice I did a complete three-sixty and nearly rolled the old Fairlane I’d borrowed from John the C Hepworth, even then I just kept digging, slewed like an epileptic seizure, went sideways and climbed right up the slippery grass and weeds and running, sucking red Alabama goo, right back onto that long black anvil pounded by rain as hard as roofing nails. I took it then, as I take it now, to be a sign that Destiny was determined the mere heavens and earth would not be permitted to fuck me around. I had a date to keep, and Destiny was on top of things.

  Even so, even living charmed, which was clear to me, even so: when I got about five miles north of Atmore, I took the 57 exit off the I-65 and a left onto 21, and pulled in at the Best Western. It wasn’t my intention to stay overnight that far south – though I knew a young woman with excellent teeth down in Mobile – but the rain was just hammering and all I wanted was to get this thing done and go fall asleep. A drive that long, humping something as lame as that Fairlane, hunched forward to scope the rain . . . with Spanning in front of me . . . all I desired was surcease. A touch of the old oblivion.

  I checked in, stood under the shower for half an hour, changed into the three-piece suit I’d brought along, and phoned the front desk for directions to the Holman facility.

  Driving there, a sweet moment happened for me. It was the last sweet moment for a long time thereafter, and I remember it now as if it were still happening. I cling to it.

  In May, and on into early June, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper blossoms. In the forests and the woodland bogs, and often on some otherwise undistinguished slope or hillside, the yellow and purple orchids suddenly appear.

  I was driving. There was a brief stop in the rain. Like the eye of the hurricane. One moment sheets of water, and the next, absolute silence before the crickets and frogs and birds started complaining; and darkness on all sides, just the idiot staring beams of my headlights poking into nothingness; and cool as a well between the drops of rain; and I was driving. And suddenly, the window rolled down so I wouldn’t fall asleep, so I could stick my head out when my eyes started to close, suddenly I smelled the delicate perfume of the sweet May-blossoming Lady’s Slipper. Off to my left, off in the dark somewhere on a patch of hilly ground, or deep in a stand of invisible trees, Cypripedium calceolus was making the night world beautiful with its fragrance.

  I neither slowed, nor tried to hold back the tears.

  I just drove, feeling sorry for myself; for no good reason I could name.

  Way, way down – almost to the corner of the Florida Panhandle, about three hours south of the last truly imperial barbeque in that part of the world, in Birmingham – I made my way to Holman. If you’ve never been inside the joint, what I’m about to say will resonate about as clearly as Chaucer to one of the gentle Tasaday.

  The stones call out.

  That institution for the betterment of the human race, the Organized Church, has a name for it. From the fine folks at Catholicism, Lutheranism, Baptism, Judaism, Islamism, Druidism . . . Ismism . . . the ones who brought you Torquemada, several spicy varieties of Inquisition, original sin, holy war, sectarian violence, and something called “pro-lifers” who bomb and maim and kill . . . comes the catchy phrase Damned Places.

  Rolls off the tongue like God’s On Our Side, don’t it?

  Damned Places.

  As we say in Latin, the situs of malevolent shit. The venue of evil happenings. Locations forever existing under a black cloud, like residing in a rooming house run by Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond. The big slams are like that. Joliet, Dannemora, Attica, Rahway State in Jersey, that hellhole down in Louisiana called Angola, old Folsom – not the new one, the old Folsom – Q, and Ossining. Only people who read about it call it “Sing Sing”. Inside, the cons call it Ossining. The Ohio State pen in Columbus. Leavenworth, Kansas. The ones they talk about among themselves when they talk about doing hard time. The Shoe at Pelican Bay State Prison. In there, in those ancient structures mortared with guilt and depravity and no respect for human life and just plain meanness on both sides, cons and screws, in there where the walls and floors have absorbed all the pain and loneliness of a million men and women for decades . . . in there, the stones call out.

  Damned places. You can feel it when you walk through the gates and go through the metal detectors and empty your pockets on counters and open your briefcase so that thick fingers can rumple the papers. You feel it. The moaning and thrashing, and men biting holes in their own wrists so they’ll bleed to death.

  And I felt it worse than anyone else.

  I blocked out as much as I could. I tried to hold on to the memory of the scent of orchids in the night. The last thing I wanted was to jaunt into somebody’s landscape at random. Go inside and find out what he had done, what had really put him here, not just what they’d got him for. And I’m not talking about Spanning; I’m talking about every one of them. Every guy who had kicked to death his girl friend because she brought him Bratwurst instead of spicy Cajun sausage. Every pale, wormy Bible-reciting psycho who had stolen, buttfucked, and sliced up an altar boy in the name of secret voices that “tole him to g’wan do it!” Every amoral druggie who’d shot a pensioner for her food stamps. If I let down for a second, if I didn’t keep that shield up, I’d be tempted to send out a scintilla and touch one of them. In a moment of human weakness.

  So I followed the trusty to the Warden’s office, where his secretary checked my papers, and the little plastic cards with my face encased in them, and she kept looking down at the face, and up at my face, and down at my face, and up at the face in front of her, and when she couldn’t restrain herself a second longer she said, “We’ve been expecting you, Mr Pairis. Uh. Do you really work for the President of the United States?”

  I smiled at her. “We go bowling together.”

  She took that highly, and offered to walk me to the conference room where I’d meet Henry Lake Spanning. I thanked her the way a well-mannered gentleman of colour thanks a Civil Servant who can make life easier or more difficult, and I followed her along corridors and in and out of guarded steel-riveted doorways, through Administration and the segregation room and the main hall to the brown-panelled, stained walnut, white tile over cement floored, roll-out security windowed, white draperied, drop ceiling with 2-inch acoustical Celotex squared conference room, where a Security Officer met us. She bid me fond adieu, not yet fully satisfied that such a one as I had come, that morning, on Air Force One, straight from a 7–10 split with the President of the United States.

  It was a big room.

  I sat down at the conference table; about twelve feet long and four feet wide; highly polished walnut, maybe oak. Straight back chairs: metal tubing with a light yellow upholstered cushion. Everything quiet, except for the sound of matrimonial rice being dumped on a connubial tin roof. The rain had not slacked off. Out there on the I-65 some luck-lost bastard was being sucked down into red death.

  “He’ll be here,” the Security Officer said.

  “That’s good,” I replied. I had no idea why he�
�d tell me that, seeing as how it was the reason I was there in the first place. I imagined him to be the kind of guy you dread sitting in front of, at the movies, because he always explains everything to his date. Like a bracero labourer with a valid green card interpreting a Woody Allen movie line-by-line to his illegal-alien cousin Humberto, three weeks under the wire from Matamoros. Like one of a pair of Beltone-wearing octogenarians on the loose from a rest home for a wild Saturday afternoon at the mall, plonked down in the third level multiplex, one of them describing whose ass Clint Eastwood is about to kick, and why. All at the top of her voice.

  “Seen any good movies lately?” I asked him.

  He didn’t get a chance to answer, and I didn’t jaunt inside to find out, because at that moment the steel door at the far end of the conference room opened, and another Security Officer poked his head in, and called across to Officer Let-Me-State-the-Obvious, “Dead man walking!”

  Officer Self-Evident nodded to him, the other head poked back out, the door slammed, and my companion said, “When we bring one down from Death Row, he’s gotta walk through the Ad Building and Segregation and the Main Hall. So everything’s locked down. Every man’s inside. It takes some time, y’know.”

  I thanked him.

  “Is it true you work for the President, yeah?” He asked it so politely, I decided to give him a straight answer; and to hell with all the phony credentials Ally had worked up. “Yeah,” I said, “we’re on the same bocce ball team.”

  “Izzat so?” he said, fascinated by sports stats.

  I was on the verge of explaining that the President was, in actuality, of Italian descent, when I heard the sound of the key turning in the security door, and it opened outward, and in came this messianic apparition in white, being led by a guard who was seven feet in any direction.

  Henry Lake Spanning, sans halo, hands and feet shackled, with the chains cold-welded into a wide anodized steel belt, shuffled toward me; and his neoprene soles made no disturbing cacophony on the white tiles.

  I watched him come the long way across the room, and he watched me right back. I thought to myself, Yeah, she told him I can read minds. Well, let’s see which method you use to try and keep me out of the landscape. But I couldn’t tell from the outside of him, not just by the way he shuffled and looked, if he had fucked Ally. But I knew it had to’ve been. Somehow. Even in the big lockup. Even here.

  He stopped right across from me, with his hands on the back of the chair, and he didn’t say a word, just gave me the nicest smile I’d ever gotten from anyone, even my momma. Oh, yes, I thought, oh my goodness, yes. Henry Lake Spanning was either the most masterfully charismatic person I’d ever met, or so good at the charm con that he could sell a slashed throat to a stranger.

  “You can leave him,” I said to the great black behemoth brother.

  “Can’t do that, sir.”

  “I’ll take full responsibility.”

  “Sorry, sir; I was told someone had to be right here in the room with you and him, all the time.”

  I looked at the one who had waited with me. “That mean you, too?”

  He shook his head. “Just one of us, I guess.”

  I frowned. “I need absolute privacy. What would happen if I were this man’s attorney of record? Wouldn’t you have to leave us alone? Privileged communication, right?”

  They looked at each other, this pair of Security Officers, and they looked back at me, and they said nothing. All of sudden Mr Plain-as-the-Nose-on-Your-Face had nothing valuable to offer; and the sequoia with biceps “had his orders”.

  “They tell you who I work for? They tell you who it was sent me here to talk to this man?” Recourse to authority often works. They mumbled yessir yessir a couple of times each, but their faces stayed right on the mark of sorry, sir, but we’re not supposed to leave anybody alone with this man. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d believed I’d flown in on Jehovah One.

  So I said to myself fuckit I said to myself, and I slipped into their thoughts, and it didn’t take much rearranging to get the phone wires restrung and the underground cables rerouted and the pressure on their bladders something fierce.

  “On the other hand . . .” the first one said.

  “I suppose we could . . .” the giant said.

  And in a matter of maybe a minute and a half one of them was entirely gone, and the great one was standing outside the steel door, his back filling the double-pane chickenwire-imbedded security window. He effectively sealed off the one entrance or exit to or from the conference room; like the three hundred Spartans facing the tens of thousands of Xerxes’s army at the Hot Gates.

  Henry Lake Spanning stood silently watching me.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  He pulled out the chair, came around, and sat down.

  “Pull it closer to the table,” I said.

  He had some difficulty, hands shackled that way, but he grabbed the leading edge of the seat and scraped forward till his stomach was touching the table.

  He was a handsome guy, even for a white man. Nice nose, strong cheek-bones, eyes the colour of that water in your toilet when you toss in a tablet of 2000 Flushes. Very nice looking man. He gave me the creeps.

  If Dracula had looked like Shirley Temple, no one would’ve driven a stake through his heart. If Harry Truman had looked like Freddy Krueger, he would never have beaten Tom Dewey at the polls. Joe Stalin and Saddam Hussein looked like sweet, avuncular friends of the family, really nice looking, kindly guys – who just incidentally happened to slaughter millions of men, women, and children. Abe Lincoln looked like an axe murderer, but he had a heart as big as Guatemala.

  Henry Lake Spanning had the sort of face you’d trust immediately if you saw it in a TV commercial. Men would like to go fishing with him, women would like to squeeze his buns. Grannies would hug him on sight; kids would follow him straight into the mouth of an open oven. If he could play the piccolo, rats would gavotte around his shoes.

  What saps we are. Beauty is only skin deep. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Dress for success. What saps we are.

  So what did that make my pal, Allison Roche?

  And why the hell didn’t I just slip into his thoughts and check out the landscape? Why was I stalling?

  Because I was scared of him.

  This was fifty-six verified, gruesome, disgusting murders sitting forty-eight inches away from me, looking straight at me with blue eyes and soft, gently blond hair. Neither Harry nor Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

  So why was I scared of him? Because; that’s why.

  This was damned foolishness. I had all the weaponry, he was shackled, and I didn’t for a second believe he was what Ally thought he was: innocent. Hell, they’d caught him, literally, redhanded. Bloody to the armpits, fer chrissakes. Innocent, my ass! Okay, Rudy, I thought, get in there and take a look around. But I didn’t. I waited for him to say something.

  He smiled tentatively, a gentle and nervous little smile, and he said, “Ally asked me to see you. Thank you for coming.”

  I looked at him, but not into him.

  He seemed upset that he’d inconvenienced me. “But I don’t think you can do me any good, not in just three days.”

  “You scared, Spanning?”

  His lips trembled. “Yes I am, Mr Pairis. I’m about as scared as a man can be.” His eyes were moist.

  “Probably gives you some insight into how your victims felt, whaddaya think?”

  He didn’t answer. His eyes were moist.

  After a moment just looking at me, he scraped back his chair and stood up. “Thank you for coming, sir. I’m sorry Ally imposed on your time.” He turned and started to walk away. I jaunted into his landscape.

  Oh my god, I thought. He was innocent.

  Never done any of it. None of it. Absolutely no doubt, not a shadow of a doubt. Ally had been right. I saw every bit of that landscape in there, every fold and crease; every
bolt hole and rat run; every gully and arroyo; all of his past, back and back and back to his birth in Lewistown, Montana, near Great Falls, thirty-six years ago; every day of his life right up to the minute they arrested him leaning over that disemboweled cleaning woman the real killer had tossed into the dumpster.

  I saw every second of his landscape; and I saw him coming out of the Winn-Dixie in Huntsville; pushing a cart filled with grocery bags of food for the weekend. And I saw him wheeling it around the parking lot toward the dumpster area overflowing with broken-down cardboard boxes and fruit crates. And I heard the cry for help from one of those dumpsters; and I saw Henry Lake Spanning stop and look around, not sure he’d heard anything at all. Then I saw him start to go to his car, parked right there at the edge of the lot beside the wall because it was a Friday evening and everyone was stocking up for the weekend, and there weren’t any spaces out front; and the cry for help, weaker this time, as pathetic as a crippled kitten; and Henry Lake Spanning stopped cold, and he looked around; and we both saw the bloody hand raise itself above the level of the open dumpster’s filthy green steel side. And I saw him desert his groceries without a thought to their cost, or that someone might run off with them if he left them unattended, or that he only had eleven dollars left in his checking account, so if those groceries were snagged by someone he wouldn’t be eating for the next few days . . . and I watched him rush to the dumpster and look into the crap filling it . . . and I felt his nausea at the sight of that poor old woman, what was left of her . . . and I was with him as he crawled up onto the dumpster and dropped inside to do what he could for that mass of shredded and pulped flesh.

  And I cried with him as she gasped, with a bubble of blood that burst in the open ruin of her throat, and she died. But though I heard the scream of someone coming around the corner, Spanning did not; and so he was still there, holding the poor mass of stripped skin and black bloody clothing, when the cops screeched into the parking lot. And only then, innocent of anything but decency and rare human compassion, did Henry Lake Spanning begin to understand what it must look like to middle-aged hausfraus, sneaking around dumpsters to pilfer cardboard boxes, who see what they think is a man murdering an old woman.