Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

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Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories Page 19

by Kim Newman


  ‘It’s not what I want. This isn’t to please me, Keith. In this room, I don’t matter. This is your place. What do you want to say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Leitch smiled, with relief. ‘Super, Keith. That’s a half-step. You can admit that you don’t know. You understand now how difficult that is for someone like you. Someone used to knowing. It’s all right not to know, to have doubts. It’s all right.’

  ‘I’m so proud of you, darling,’ said a woman.

  He saw Heather, in the freestanding empty frame that represented his office door. No, not Heather. Rowena, face streaked.

  He tried to stand.

  Rowena stepped back, dark curtaining her face.

  ‘Not yet, Keith,’ said Leitch. ‘Later.’

  * * *

  More sets, more scenes. Leitch and Heather were his parents, taking him through a rerun of his teenage years, which overlapped with his memory but also contradicted it radically. They talked through his decision to turn down a directorship of the firm he had started with and set up on his own with Vince, Leitch stabbing in harsh questions about Vince’s reliability far more vehemently than his dad actually had done.

  Then the pair became Jake and Jennifer, eerily dead-on in their performances, wearing tailored adult-sized school blazers with overlarge badges to keep the scale. They quizzed him about their own lives and interests. It was a struggle to recall the pop bands and computer games the kids were obsessed with, to be rated harshly on his knowledge of trivia that had been a background buzz in his life for the past few years. He thought he knew the names of Jennifer’s best friends, in order of preference, but things had changed in the playground and he was working from last month’s crib sheet.

  He was sat down at a school desk he was uncomfortable with, and an elderly woman slapped a piece of paper in front of him. When he turned it over and recognised his Geography O level exam, he realised that the woman was Mrs Boat, his old form teacher from school. On the desk were a pad of lined paper (‘use only one side and leave wide margins’), a pen, a plastic ruler and a box of coloured pencils. Mrs Boat invigilated, holding up a stopwatch as he struggled to draw maps and write essays. He hadn’t used a fountain pen to write more than a cheque in decades. Blotches appeared on his hands and the paper. Twenty-five years ago, he’d got a B Grade pass; this was likely to be a washout, a Fail.

  There were no meal breaks. He was not let out of the long hut.

  The sessions went on and on. Days must have passed, but only he got tired. Leitch and his assistants all remained fresh.

  He played real games with Constant and Gratton, and mostly lost. One-on-one basketball, arm-wrestling, pool, snakes and ladders, dominoes, the mirror game, I Spy, Risk, Cluedo, Campaign, hopscotch, twenty questions, truth or dare, darts.

  Heather, as Mary, tried to seduce him in his ‘office’, while Rowena and the kids watched from chairs outside the circle of light. He resisted, though the woman, surely improvising, became more and more blatant and wanton. After an hour of this, Leitch let Rowena and the kids go, assured Keith that this was a time-out for them and that if he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity no one would be any the wiser. He also winked.

  Exhausted, he kissed Heather on the mouth. She slapped him.

  Leitch and his real lawyer, Simon Manfred, took him through the basics of sexual harassment legislation. They read long legal documents aloud, interpolating brand names of household cleaning products somewhere into every sentence, never repeating, always managing to conceal them so that sense was preserved. He found himself listening for ‘Lemon Jif’, ‘Daz’ and ‘Persil’, missing what was actually being said, which became more and more serious. Legal complications were set out which could bring his whole life crashing down and land him in prison.

  That ended, and he was in a sitcom. Rowena and the kids – the real ones – sat around the breakfast table, providing a laugh track as he tried to get through to them. They must have been brainwashed. In the end, he threw the props around, smashing things. His family found this utterly hilarious.

  He collapsed and slept, for maybe ten seconds.

  * * *

  He woke in complete darkness, handcuffed to something with a wiry hairy arm. It jittered, chittered and leaped, landing on his ribs with a lot of projectile weight. Hairy all over, it smelled rank. He was jerked into a sitting position as the thing bounded off. He was dragged across a bare earth floor. The creature screeched, and banged his wrist over and over against the ground. Keith lay limp, dreading long fingers that might come for the soft parts of his face.

  It was all over. They were just going to kill him now.

  A light came on. Leitch was sitting on a milking stool next to him, a black-furred, pink-faced animal in his lap, stroking and petting and calming. Keith was handcuffed to some member of the monkey family, smaller and more spidery than a chimpanzee.

  ‘This is Kiki, my spider monkey,’ said Leitch.

  That made sense.

  Keith couldn’t believe he’d had that last thought.

  ‘You see the metaphor, of course,’ said Leitch. ‘It’s not quite literal. But if we’d put Kiki on your back, you might have been seriously injured. She’s a strong little thing. But you get the point. You must be used to the feeling that a part of you is beyond your control. Potentially dangerous, potentially frightening. But also exciting, entertaining, cute as a button. You can’t blame Kiki, and you have to love her, but she’s not good for you. No, dearie, you’re not. Sorry, but you have to say bye-bye to Keith now. There’s a good girl.’

  Constant snicked the plastic cuff. Keith had two leftover noose-bracelets on his right wrist now. Leitch passed the spider monkey to Constant, who carried it off.

  ‘Now, Keith, how would you like some crack cocaine?’

  Keith shuddered.

  ‘Just joking,’ said Leitch. ‘Time for tea and biccies though.’

  * * *

  Keith sat, dissociated, stunned. Around him, everyone had a tea break. Ro rationed two biscuits apiece to Jennifer and Jake, knowing Keith usually slipped them sweets against her program but not really minding. Gratton and Mary lit up cigarettes and went to the far corner of the hut, where Keith could swear they were flirting. Vince sat as far away as possible, whispering into a mobile phone that hadn’t been cut in half. Constant worked at the crossword of a newspaper, which was missing its front pages. Leitch slurped his urn-decanted tea like a connoisseur. Other people milled about, some familiar, others not.

  ‘Going well, isn’t it?’ said Manfred, cheerily. ‘It’s rather fun.’

  Nobody brought Keith any tea.

  Mrs Boat came back with his exam paper, covered in red ink.

  ‘A D,’ she said. ‘Good thing it was only the mock. You’ll do better under real fire.’

  He stared at his essay on Swiss crop rotation. Red scribbles on blue blotches.

  He couldn’t see how any of this was helping.

  Leitch finished his tea.

  ‘Back to work, everyone,’ he said.

  * * *

  Chairs were put in a circle, and Keith was love-bombed. Everyone told him how he or she really felt about him, mostly with tears. They all reminisced out loud about the most perfect moments of their relationship. Manfred remembered in convincing detail a weekend of walking in the fell country which Keith could have sworn he and Ro had gone on with Vince and his ex. Then, they all told him when they had started to notice the problem.

  Nobody said what the problem was.

  But they had all noticed it. Jennifer haltingly recounted the months during which she had gone from being afraid for to being afraid of, and how the nightmares had got out of control. Jake talked about the shame he had felt at school, when word got out and his friends’ parents told their kids to put distance between themselves and the Marion family.

  Vince, amazingly reluctant and halting, said the morale of the office was affected. The business might suffer.

  Leitch said not
hing, but looked at Keith throughout, fixed.

  Heather kept asking Keith how he felt, after each little speech. He felt less and less.

  The session seemed to go on for hours, days. It was an impossible shift.

  No one else got tired.

  A well-dressed man who turned out to be Keith’s tax inspector ran over the case notes for the last five years, flagging odd slips. Keith had made more errors in their favour than his. Only a few pounds were astray, but the man was meticulous. Also boring.

  Mrs Boat said Keith had potential but was easily distracted by extracurricular activities and could do better. Fair only.

  Mum blamed herself. She admitted that she’d always known, but hadn’t wanted to face it. But she would stick by him, would see him better. Dad agreed with her.

  Ro said she had thought about leaving.

  Finally, Leitch spoke.

  ‘It’s a house of cards, Keith, and you’ve built it. You’ve developed highly sophisticated systems for dealing with your problem, for hiding from it and behind it. They work, and will work for years. But it’s only a house of cards. It will collapse. The machine will run down. It’s up to you. All of us here have taken it as far as we can. We have to hand the weight back to you. There’s a lot of love in this circle, and it’s there for you. But it’s not unconditional. You have to reach inside, to make a break, to make an admission. Now, is there anything you want to say?’

  Keith was cold inside.

  He made the words in his mind. I have a problem. He knew the reaction that would get. The gathering around, the tearful hugs, the firm handshakes, the shoulder-claps, the restoration of rights and responsibilities.

  He had no spit in his mouth. His tongue was old leather.

  He could only creak.

  Expectant eyes were on him. His lips went in and out.

  ‘I…’

  Breaths were held.

  Could he lie? Could he fool them?

  No, firmly, no. He could not lie.

  He shrugged, and sat quiet.

  The disappointment waves were worse than blows. His family and friends and associates were all too drained to react. They had poured out so much and this wasn’t the ending they had yearned for. They bristled, resenting him for not backing down.

  Leitch made a mark on his clipboard.

  Vince got up and walked away from the circle. Jennifer began to cry, softly. Mum and Dad held hands. Rowena looked at him, with something close to hatred.

  ‘You’re a strong man, Keith,’ said Leitch. ‘Strong and clever. It’s worse for you because of that. You’ve incorporated the problem into your makeup. You’ve put up thick walls around yourself. You’re in real danger. This place is your last stop before the void. Deep down, you know that. We certainly do. That’s no threat. Just a statement.’

  ‘Daddy, please,’ said one of his kids.

  ‘Come on, mate. Get it over with.’

  ‘Keith, Keith…’

  ‘It can’t be that difficult.’

  ‘Just say it, Marion.’

  ‘Son…’

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘You could do better.’

  ‘You can do it, Keith.’

  ‘Now, please.’

  Voices from the circle, overlapping, rising.

  Inside him, a wall was dismantled. His stomach was ice. His mind floated, far off, then clicked back, into sharp focus.

  ‘Okay, all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a problem.’

  A beat. Quiet. Incipient rapture. Shining faces.

  Leitch still looked expectant. Keith didn’t get it.

  ‘I admit it, Leitch. I, Keith Marion, have A Problem.’

  Leitch nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘good. Progress. Breakthrough. Now, Keith, you have a problem.’

  Dead inside, Keith looked at the therapist.

  ‘So, Keith,’ said Leitch, ‘what are you going to do about it?’

  RED JACKS WILD

  A PRELIMINARY WORD. This story was commissioned by Marvin Kaye at Weird Tales for a prospective series which would pair reprints of classic stories first published in the magazine with newly written sequels. ‘Red Jacks Wild’ is a follow-up to Robert Bloch’s ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ – though, for some bizarre reason, it ended up in another magazine with no mention of Bloch or its status as a sequel. I first read Bloch’s 1943 story in a paperback collection, The House of the Hatchet, in the early 1970s and it made a lasting impression on me; it’s frequently anthologised and adapted (for radio several times and for TV as an episode of Thriller directed by Ray Milland in 1961). You should, of course, read ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’ before ‘Red Jacks Wild’.

  I’m John Carmody but… yes, you can call me Jack.

  As it happens, I didn’t come up with the ‘trade name’. Those letters weren’t from me. I daresay a reporter needed to fill column inches. With no fresh kills, interest dies down. I’d have obliged the gentlemen of the press, but the ritual precludes indiscriminate slaughter. So, an unknown hack dashed off red-ink scrawls signed ‘yours truly, Jack the Ripper’. The catchy tag got the story back on the front page.

  I’m an American, though I studied surgery – and other, more arcane disciplines – in London. I am a qualified medical doctor, devout in my religion and a licensed psychoanalyst. Stretching on the couch in my office on West 74th Street and telling me your dreams sets you back seventy-five dollars an hour. Plus tax, old man…

  The consulting work I do for the FBI and the NYPD is pro bono. It helps me keep abreast of developments in my field. Also, listening to manic ad execs and depressive wives gets boring. Criminal analysis is a mental tonic. Seeking out like minds keeps mine sharp.

  In 1951, I celebrated my 100th birthday yet I look no older than I did in 1888. The secret of my success is… well, killing disposable people.

  Suffice to say, I’ve kept my bargain with Hecate. A ritual, repeated every third fall. Six offerings. Six bodies, arranged just so… to propitiate the Goddess of the Moon.

  No, it doesn’t get easier…

  When I sacrificed on the altars of Whitechapel, the brightest sparks in criminology thought a crook was identifiable by the bumps on his head. No one knew about fingerprints. A policeman couldn’t ask impertinent questions of a social superior. It was a miracle if any half-intelligent wrong ’un got caught.

  In ’51, the ritual was dicier. If the FBI hadn’t called me in to work up a dossier – they call them profiles, now – I might not have completed.

  It helps to select your disposables carefully. Certain victims command fewer police resources than, say, archdukes or bankers’ wives. As the world knows, I began on whores. Still a good wheeze. I fall back on street sluts whenever nothing else comes to mind. In New Orleans in 1909, I took coloured children. They called me the Voo-Doo Man. The cops didn’t listen to the parents until I was done. In California in 1933, as the Hobo Hacker, I picked on jobless transients.

  Last time, the Red Knife preyed on card-carrying communists… labour organisers, blacklisted teachers, a writer, an actress. I left their cards inside their open stomachs. Some commentators half-seriously said the killings might not technically be a crime. Other Red Knives were inspired to action, which made it easy to pin my offerings on a patsy. I spun a lot of analytical moonshine and led Special Agents Finlay and Dwight to Abner Polk. Expelled from a back-room revolutionary cell, Polk had dismembered two comrades. I walked the boob – sozzled on hooch and gore – through a confession. He wound up taking credit for six additional murders.

  Public sympathy for the Red Knife evaporated. Polk wasn’t a True American, but another Killer Commie, as bad as his victims. I had a ticket to his execution at Sing Sing. They gave him more juice than the Rosenbergs.

  Once, the world was satisfied with an unsolved mystery: the ship that vanished… the killer who was never caught… the unknown monster in the fog. Now, the public want a final chapter of the serial
, an explanation for the magic, and a villain to strap into the electric chair.

  So long as America finds new sub-humans to hate, my three-yearly chore will pose only technical challenges. This fall, it might be homosexuals… or career girls who hold down jobs that ought to go to ex-servicemen… or these new negro-sounding white folk singers.

  Juvenile delinquents, though, are off the board. That franchise has been taken for 1954. My red jack has been trumped.

  * * *

  ‘They’re out to get me, Dr Carmody,’ said the fleshy, balding young man who couldn’t lie still on the couch. ‘They want me off newsstands. They want me up before the committee. They want me out of the business.’

  Sheldon Loesser was a problematic paranoid. It was hard to advise the patient to ignore his imaginary demons… since some of them were real.

  He owned High Integrity Comics, publisher of Morgue of Horror, Weird Planet Stories, GI Guts and other titles. He was also a prolific writer of crime and horror yarns for his own books. Several of my rituals, including the Red Knife business, had been fodder for the ‘Ghastly – But True!’ feature he wrote in HIC’s top-seller Annals of Crime.

  Loesser came to analysis after a reader’s parent – upset by ‘Live Bait’, a Crack of Doom story about a cruel angler who gets impaled on a giant hook and dangled in a shark tank – wrote to say the writer should have his head examined. The writer duly made an appointment, intending to write it up as an amusing one-page article. The Post Office requires that comics carry a certain amount of text between illustrated stories. In that session, we discovered Loesser was one of life’s couch junkies. He relished sorting childhood memories and everyday frustrations to identify the source of every sick idea which cropped up in his eight-page bloodbaths. Chronic insomnia hindered attempts at dream analysis, but his unconscious was poured out in his stories.

  At nineteen, he inherited HIC from his father. Mendel Loesser, a funny book pioneer, died unexpectedly, just as the masked hero and amusing animal titles which had made HIC’s name were flagging in an oversaturated marketplace. Overnight, the son leaped from office assistant to publisher and sole support of his mother and several sisters. Noticing a sales uptick in crime and horror comics, Loesser concentrated on them. At first through financial necessity, he wrote most of the books himself. He stayed in the office after hours, on liver-abusing quantities of black coffee and pep pills, typing script after script. Younger, hipper, odder, cheaper artists came through the door and HIC became profitable again. Other companies began copying the HIC formula, the ultimate sign of success in comics.

 

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