Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

  Larry didn’t know Sapphire’s name.

  She opened her eyes.

  A face stared down at her—a weirdly artificial but familiar clown’s face with a grotesque, comic frown. The face was distorted, fragmented.

  A word passed fleetingly through her head:

  Pixels.

  But after a distended instant of time, Renee realized this face was not composed of pixels.

  No.

  It was a mask—a ski mask, crocheted from wool. Eyeholes revealed hateful brown irises with rhythmically dilating pupils. The mouth was cut open to reveal snarling teeth between bright red lips that turned down at the corners.

  “It’s me,” said the figure with a tone of ironic gentleness. “Auggie.”

  Barely enough time had transpired for Renee’s neurons to begin to tell her she was frightened. Involuntarily, she seized a deep breath of air. Then, with a sudden, sickening slowness, the figure’s leather-gloved hands descended upon her, seizing her by the hair, thrusting her head violently underwater. Renee had just enough self-possession to keep her mouth closed. But her eyes and nostrils stung violently from the jasmine-and-pine bath oil.

  As she felt the two leather-sheathed hands press her head downward, ripping a handful of hair out of her scalp by the roots, dashing the back of her head with terrible violence against the porcelain, Renee’s thoughts and sensations fleetingly and incongruously mingled with those of her assailant.

  She actually felt the hands inside the downy lining of the gloves becoming soaked with the bathwater.

  She felt, too, the savage strength it demanded to hold her head against the bathtub floor, even while her arms and elbows thrashed about, her fingernails clawing a leather jacket with ferocious tenacity.

  Her legs and feet kicked furiously—but this seemed no more voluntary than the beating of her heart, which was now audible and almost unbearable. Her entire consciousness was focused on her lungs. She had seized an enormous gulp of air before submerging. Now, as the intruder held her under, she felt her body measuring this intake.

  Was it too much?

  Yes, it was. Her lungs were on the verge of bursting.

  Should I release some air?

  She had to—absolutely had to—even though any precious air lost now would never be regained.

  Pursing her lips tightly, she slowly released some bubbles of air.

  Just as she did so, she felt an ecstatic release of pressure.

  The leather gloves were gone.

  Her head leapt to the surface of the water.

  Her mouth opened wide, releasing an entire lungful of air.

  Then she tried to inhale, but her mouth and nostrils were clogged by droplets of stinging bathwater.

  At the same time, she heard—or imagined she heard—the telephone ringing in the distance. Must answer it. Even in her confusion, it seemed very, very, important to answer the telephone—more important than anything in her entire life.

  She coughed violently, tried to inhale again, and actually felt the welcome air. But before she could regain a fraction of her breath, the unseen gloves seized her by the hair again and thrust her under, more violently than before. She struck the bathtub so hard that she felt something break in the back of her skull. For a moment, a whirling blackness surrounded her. Then, through a garbled awareness, she felt her throat surge with hot, stinging water.

  She coughed spasmodically and watched great bubbles pass before her burning eyes. Water flooded down her windpipe into her lungs in a choking, agonizing torrent. With a moment of clarity, she maneuvered her thrashing foot to lift the bathtub drain lever. Now the water covering her face was flowing out of the tub. She could see that the surface above her was moving lower. Her head would soon be exposed like an island, and eventually the killing water would trickle away from all the crevices of her body.

  Not fast enough. Not fast enough.

  As consciousness fled for the final time, her right hand reached desperately upward. She felt her fingernails catch and tear a handful of synthetic wool, then make contact with real flesh and blood.

  Her last physical sensation was of the wound she had made, the ripped skin beneath her nails. It felt fateful, erotic, as if she were bound to her assailant in a supreme act of love. Then came an unbelievable, delicious lightness. Her last ounce of fear fled away as her life dissolved and disappeared.

  Message left by Marianne Hedison on Renee Gauld’s home answering machine, Monday, January 24, 1:45 a.m.:

  Renee, this is Marianne. Pick up, okay? I know you’re there. This is your open house night and you have to be there and I’m sure you’re still awake, so just pick up.

  (pause)

  Listen, I know this is crazy, but I’m starting to think it was stupid for me to come back home, and I’m thinking of coming back to Los Angeles. I can’t explain it. It’s just a feeling.

  (pause)

  I really want to see you. I really want to talk to you. Is that okay? I won’t do anything until you call me. Call me soon.

  (pause)

  Call me.

  The dark figure listened to the message on the machine, then rewound the tape. As the machine whirred, the figured glanced back toward the bathroom, noting the trail of little blood droplets on the floor. The figure touched its cheek.

  Still bleeding. She really had some spunk, for a simulation …

  The figure checked its watch for the half-dozenth time. Then it carefully removed its drenched leather gloves and wiped its hands on its pants. It pulled a white handkerchief out of its pocket. It wrapped the handkerchief around the fingers of its right hand before touching anything else.

  It went well. A little rough around the edges, maybe a little unconvincing in places, but all right on the whole. The real thing will be much better

  When the machine halted, the figure removed the incoming message tape and switched it with the outgoing tape. Lucifer the cat was hovering around the machine. The figure picked the creature up and petted it warmly.

  The figure turned the answering machine on to record.

  The figure then held the cat near the condenser microphone.

  Lucifer purred delightedly.

  01001

  PUNCH AND JUDY

  Two members of the coroner’s team were lifting the body out of the tub. Nolan noted that the head and neck had a greenish-red cast, and the hands and feet were tinged with blue. The underside of the body was discolored with lividity, the blood pooled there by gravity. The hair on its head hung limply, looking discolored with rust. The hair on the crotch was darker.

  Not her natural color, I guess. ’Course, nothing about her looks natural right at the moment.

  The body was grotesquely stiff and mannequinish from rigor mortis as the team maneuvered it to the floor. Even so, the neck had begun to relax and the face looked oddly slack. The lips were slightly parted. The ugly, sour odor of death was just starting to make itself noticeable over the scent of stale bath oil.

  Then Nolan felt a distantly familiar churning in his gut. It was a sudden, overwhelming desire to flee, but also a gnawing, irrational sense that the naked apparition would pursue him wherever he went. He actually felt himself trembling with something akin to both fear and rage.

  He was no longer inured.

  He had experienced tremendum again.

  But how? What brought it on?

  Nolan had no time to explore his feeling of connection with this particular crime, this particular victim. He had to get back to business.

  “Do me a favor, Smitty,” Nolan said appealingly. “Say it was an accident.”

  Smitty was peering at the side of the corpse’s head through his lowered bifocals. “Come on, Nol,” he replied pertly. “What do you think you homicide guys are doing here?”

 
“Humor me.”

  “Okay. The chick had maybe five or six too many drinks at the party, took a bath, opened the drain to let the water out, slipped trying to get up, knocked herself unconscious, and drowned before the tub could empty. End of story.”

  “Yeah, right,” Nolan said with a deep sigh.

  “Well, contusions back here could spell ‘accident,’” Smitty said, probing the underside of the corpse’s head. “But feels to me like there’s damage in more than one place. You reckon she fell down twice? Before all the water drained out?”

  “Could be,” said Nolan with a shrug. “I’ve done it myself on some of my nastier nights.”

  “Looky here,” Smitty said. “Bruises on her forehead. On her arms, too. Patches of hair yanked out of her scalp.”

  “Maybe she got in some sort of tussle earlier on,” Clayton chimed in helpfully. “So far, we don’t see any sign of a robbery, so what’s the motive? Maybe a boyfriend got jealous, knocked her around, she decided to take a hot bath to soak out the pain. Maybe then she fell the second time, or just passed out. Maybe she had a heart attack.”

  Smitty laughed coarsely. “Boy, you guys are in a creative mood,” he snorted.

  Smitty studied the corpse’s thighs and legs. “Don’t see anything looks like rape,” he said. “The lab’ll check, though.” Then he noticed something. “Vern, get a bit of this, here,” he said, pointing to the fingers on the woman’s right hand. A scalpel-wielding assistant scraped under a couple of fingernails.

  “Find something?” Nolan asked.

  “Looks like it,” Smitty said, taking the scalpel out of Vern’s hand. The scalpel bristled with a tiny patch of red and white. “Fibers. Not a lot, but enough to keep me in a job. Maybe tissue, too.” The medical examiner looked at Nolan and grinned. But Nolan’s expression seemed to startle Smitty, who stopped his work for a moment. “Listen, I don’t like this any more than you do. But the lady was murdered, and that’s a fact. Someone held her down and she definitely struggled. I’m sorry, fella. I don’t make this stuff up.”

  “How long has it been?” Nolan asked.

  “She’s in rigor mortis—just starting to come out,” Smitty said. “And it’s fairly warm in here. So I think close to twenty-four hours. No more’n that.”

  “Probably last night pretty soon after the party was over,” Clayton said.

  Smitty nodded. “Wonder who let the water out? Makes our job easier.”

  The three men were silent. There was only a crackling sound as Vern put paper bags over the victim’s hands. Then the team zipped the entire body into a bag and carried it away. Smitty left with the team. Nolan and Clayton stood in the hallway in silence.

  “We gotta get out and knock on some doors,” Clayton said after a few moments.

  “I know,” Nolan replied. But he couldn’t make himself move.

  “You really didn’t want it to be murder, did you?” Clayton asked.

  “Who ever does?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Nolan nodded. “Most times I can keep my feelings out of it,” he murmured. “Or at least I think I do. But this time …”

  He stopped. He didn’t want to describe his feelings. How could he, when he didn’t understand them himself?

  “You know who she was, don’t you?” Nolan said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “A talk show host on KFLE. Always listened to her program whenever I could. Man, she was hot.”

  “You ever hear her say anything that would make somebody want her dead?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t think so. Oh, she knew how to nail somebody to the wall, all right. But she wasn’t mean—just high spirited. It’d take one hell of a sore loser to really hate her. She was a blast. See, she’d get these really big-shot guests with loads of brains and money and power on the air, then she’d very sweetly cut them down to size—not so they sounded like idiots, but so ordinary folks could make sense of them.”

  “There’re plenty of prima donnas out there,” Clayton said. “Lot of ’em don’t like being brought down off their pedestals.”

  “No joke. Maybe it’s kind of a kiss of death having a gift, being able to do something nobody else can do. There’s always some asshole out there who just can’t stand it. What a fucking waste.”

  Clayton walked off toward the living room. Nolan looked around the bathroom one more time, then followed his partner. The place was still littered with paper plates, napkins, and cups. Several enormous, empty champagne bottles with fancy labels were overturned here and there. A table covered with a white tablecloth still bore the remnants of numerous party confections. The furnishings were bright and eccentric. Even if the woman was dead, her home still seemed wonderfully alive.

  Nolan stared out the living room window into the dark, wet, California winter night. For the first time, he noticed the steady sound of rainfall outside. How long had it been raining?

  Sergeant Tyler, a uniformed policewoman, poked her head into the living room.

  “Hey, Grobowski, Saunders. You might want to hear this.”

  Nolan and Clayton followed her into a small office-bedroom. “Listen to this,” Tyler said, turning on the answering machine. Instead of a voice, the speaker produced a low-pitched rumble that seemed to ebb and flow.

  “An incoming message?” Nolan asked.

  “Maybe,” said Tyler. “Unless it was recorded right here.”

  “Any other messages?” Nolan asked.

  “Yeah, several after this,” she said, consulting a note pad. “Some calls from the radio station. The neighbor who found her, McKeever, left a couple of messages. He wanted to know why she hadn’t shown up for a snack. Second message said he was worried.”

  The rumbling continued on the machine.

  “But what the hell’s that?” Clayton asked.

  “Thought you guys could tell me,” said Tyler with a smile. “Figured two gentlemen with your experience and expertise had heard just about everything.”

  “What do you figure?” Clayton asked Nolan.

  “Dunno,” Nolan said, shaking his head. “We’d better hang onto it, though. Did she have a spare cassette?”

  “We found a blank one in her desk,” Tyler said.

  “Then put it in the machine. Label this one and hang onto it.”

  *

  “Take that! And that!”

  Hunchbacked Punch, a tiny bell jingling atop his conical hat, lunged again at Judy with a wooden bludgeon clumsily clutched between his stiff, hand-puppet arms. Bonneted and homely Judy, replete with a hairy wart on her nose, dodged some blows but endured many others with brutal resilience, lurching and bouncing across the computer monitor and palpitating like a punching bag. All the while, an offstage music box played a sparkling little tune.

  “And that! And that! And that! And that!”

  Punch continued to shout in a shrill but plummeting voice that betrayed breathlessness and exhaustion. The tinkling music wound down with his slowing movements. Judy cackled shrilly all the while, dodging to and fro about the stage. Punch looked ready to drop from exhaustion. He let the bludgeon slip from his hands, reached awkwardly inside his parti-colored robe, withdrew an enormous flamethrower, and pulled the trigger. A shaft of red and yellow fire blasted across the stage. Judy burst into flames. She screamed like a demented beast, flailing her arms and careening everywhere.

  Soon the flames burned down, and Judy’s screaming died away. All that was left of her was a withered and blackened mandrake shape standing like a miserable scarecrow in the center of the stage. Punch coughed a bit, fanned away the smoke, turned, and bowed to the audience. The air was filled with the contradictory sounds of applause, booing, cheering, and derisive laughter. The music box tune resumed. A conglomeration of lovely bouquets and rotting vege
tables cascaded toward the stage.

  Judy’s carcass and the bowing Punch slowly rose to reveal the puppeteer himself. It was old Geppetto, a sweet, smiling, white-haired gentleman clad in a leather cobbler’s apron. Still bowing convulsively, the puppet Punch fit over Geppetto’s right hand like a glove. Geppetto’s left hand, though, was burned to a smoldering stump where Judy once had been.

  “Well, my bambinos,” purred the grandfatherly puppeteer, with an unlikely Italian accent, “so much-a for tonight’s show. How dooya like-a my Pulcinella and his lady?”

  Written comments rolled over the bottom of the screen.

  tena>boo hisssss!

  sudopod>i lked the flame thrwer. nice twst.

  tena>no no no no no no no no!

  tomsantpolly>ure gettng betr at the akshun.

  jzz>5 yrd penulty. pliticly n-correct. joody’s got it 12 times n a ro. wy cant she waste punch smtime?

  tena>lak of ireny & drmatic tenshun.

  A wooden hook at the end of a long handle reached across the screen and yanked away old Geppetto, his puppets, and the entire stage. The space was empty, white, and silent for a moment. Then came a drum roll and a cymbal crash. Hugo, the Snuff Room’s master of ceremonies—a tuxedo-clad skeleton with an axe imbedded in his skull, worms crawling out of his cavernous mouth, and rotting eyeballs rolling about in their sockets—leapt into the middle of the staring brightness.

  “Ha-haaaa!” he exclaimed with gravelly, preprogrammed gusto. “So ends another delightful excursion into the magical art of puppetry! And that, boys and girls, brings tonight’s festivities to a close!”

  Hugo started to break into a farewell theme song, but his voice was promptly drowned out by a chorus of audible boos and hisses. He covered his face to protect himself from a renewed barrage of vegetables.

  Lines of text appeared at the top of the screen.

  tena>we hvn’t seen awgy yet!

  jzz>hey hugo! giv us sum more!

  sudopod>i cud do bttr thn this shit. how do i sign up 4 nxt week?

  jzz>we want awgy!