McGowren glanced at him and smiled.
Leonard couldn’t stop the laugh of disdain. “Are you serious? Never mind that this is all in your head, how long can you maintain a grudge? You put me down on your job application! And I let you pass when I could easily have told them not to hire you. God.”
McGowren said nothing.
“So, what, the thing in the coat closet was just you getting back at me through Laurel?”
“That was the first part of it.”
“The first part? How many parts will we have? Two acts or three? I can stop at a bar so you can get tanked and recreate the night in the coats.” He pushed his hand through his thinning hair. “Man, here I am, giving you a ride home because you lost your pass. And I’m the bad guy because I didn’t like you in high school. You’re really a piece of work.”
Everything had changed now. Leonard could see that so long as McGowren was around, there would always be another prank, another act of eternal escalation. He had to get rid of him, there was no choice. The question was how? How to make him disappear for good and not pay for it? He flipped through scenarios: sledge-hammer McGowren’s skull and then the floor in the basement and stick the body under that, except he didn’t have the concrete; okay, in the back yard then, hit him with a shovel and then dig a hole in the garden and plant the bastard under the roses; or better still, drive twenty miles to the state park and dump his corpse in the woods. Let him rot outdoors where nobody would ever connect them.
“You know what, Gary. I should just bring you to my place. We’ll have a drink or two and straighten this out between us once and for all. You can even talk to Laurel if she can stomach being in the same room with you.”
“Fine. That’s where I need to go, anyway.”
The way he said it, Leonard knew even through the heat of his own anger that something had already happened. The second act of the revenge fantasy had already begun. The train pass, the ride home—he reached into his suit and drew out his cell phone, flipped it open. Before he could even thumb a number he saw that the battery was out of juice. The car charger was dangling out of the cigarette lighter but he couldn’t plug the phone in on the parkway. He flipped it closed.
“Change your mind?” McGowren asked.
It seemed that maybe he didn’t know the phone was dead. Leonard saw no reason to disabuse him of this idea. “Yeah. That’s what you want me to do—call home.”
He closed his eyes, still smiling carelessly. “Right.” He brushed the hair down the back of his head, in the process pushing his collar down. Leonard saw scratch marks on the back of his neck. He forgot himself momentarily, and his foot backed off the gas pedal until the BMW behind him honked. He jerked up as if he’d fallen asleep, and accelerated. The next exit was his anyway, and he hit his blinker and edged off to the right. The BMW zoomed past, honking again to make sure he got the message. McGowren snorted.
“Anyway,” he muttered, his eyes still closed, “you’d just get a busy signal.”
“Really, how do you know that?”
“Because it’s off the hook. The way I left it.”
Leonard’s desire to dispense with McGowren evaporated, replaced by sickening uncertainty. “You left it?”
“Yeah. Right after I killed Laurel.”
He heard the words, so impossible they didn’t make sense, like he’d heard them out of order and needed to rearrange them to make a sentence he understood. But McGowren wouldn’t give him time.
“No, you know, we had quite a thing going. That night in the coats, that wasn’t exactly the first, and, man, she wanted more than just a taste. I thought it was over the second you walked in, you know, but she called me—I mean, right at the office, right underneath you. Said you were none too spectacular in the sack and that she was gonna stay on the prowl and I could either get it on or get lost. How’s your sex life been since Christmas, Len, hmm?”
Leonard’s brain ran through images, memories, doubts: guilty red-eyed looks from Laurel, withheld responses in therapy—even the therapist had complained that she wasn’t engaged—dinners shared in unbroken silences as she made eye-contact only with her plate. Silences were gaps and he could fill them with anything he chose. He sought and created hidden meanings everywhere. At the same time his body drove on auto-pilot, zooming past the speed limit, braking, turning, the car’s air gone stale, dead. He needed to open a window. His mouth said, “No.”
McGowren now looked straight at him and all but sneered. There was a bruise over McGowren’s right eye now that hadn’t been obvious before. It must have been recent, forming, hours old.
“You’re bound to say no, Len. But it’s yes. Yes, you’ve seen the signs. We’ve been meeting for months. Remember when they sent you to Boston? Oh, that was a night. Didn’t know she liked that kinky shit. Did you?”
“We were... she was seeing a counselor because of you,” he answered, but his mind had flown away back to a night last winter where she’d bound him with his ties and then teased him, tormented him, made him beg for her to sit on him. He’d loved it. Kinky shit.
“Counseling, yeah, right. She needed counseling.” Laughing.
He swallowed the metallic thickness in his mouth. “Get out of my car.”
“You kidding?”
“Get out—out of my car, out of my life, out of myhead!”
“See what I mean, Len? Total prick. Here I am confessing to you, turning myself in to you and you’re telling me to get lost. I’m filling in the blanks for you, dude. But if you want me out—” He started to open the door.
Leonard grabbed at him, but swung the wheel at the same time and the car veered. He screamed and slapped both hands on the wheel again, and narrowly failed to smack into the car in the right lane. Horns blared around him.
McGowren chuckled. He hadn’t opened the door, hadn’t gotten out. He was looking straight at the road. “You should have taken care of me at the Christmas party, Len. You should have kicked my head in through the coats. Shoulda woulda coulda. Now you won’t ever know, will you? Am I lying or telling the truth about Laurel? You just won’t ever be sure because a little worm’s gone crawling right up inside your head. The night in the closet—oh, that’s real. You can still feel the moment, it’s so raw. You can box it off, put police tape around it. Isolate it. Sure, but the rest is going to run around and around the squeaky hamster wheel in your head, eeky-eeky.” He laughed again.
Even as he made the final frenzied turn onto his street, Leonard saw the police cars—two on his front lawn—and the EMT wagon backed into the driveway. Neighbors outside, Monroe, the stockbroker across the street, standing idiotically beside his mailbox, envelopes in his hand.
McGowren leaned back and let go a deep sigh as if finally drained of all taunts.
Leonard slammed the car against the curb. The tire thumped, bounced. He fumbled, flung the door open before the car had stopped, snatching the keys, staring at his apparently dozing passenger one last time, then running, up the sidewalk, across the lawn. A cop at the front door put out a hand, but responded to the look of him and drew aside, saying, “Husband?”
He nodded as he pushed past, into his house, calling over his shoulder, “He’s in the car, I left him in the car.”
“Huh?” said the cop, but Leonard was already crossing the living room toward the hall. A flash went off in the kitchen, past the wall of live bodies. It seemed like a crowd, but it was no more than five: uniforms, plain clothes, medical, standing, gathered, starting to turn at his approach.
Between them as they parted, creating a sliver of an opening, he finally glimpsed his wife.
She was in the tall chair at the breakfast bar, her head hanging down. He thought again of the dinner plate. He should have made her talk, demanded to know why she wouldn’t look at him. Below her now on the floor was a little card with a metallic strip across it. Her blouse was torn at the shoulder, the bra strap broken beneath it, her shoulder red, cut with parallel gashes—fingernails had done th
at. What had McGowren’s fingertips looked like? Then, ever so slightly, she raised her bruised and swollen face, and saw him as he froze. She burst into tears. She sprang from the chair, reaching, reaching with red fingers. Everyone looked his way now, and he felt the impact of her against him, heard her wail, but he had come unmoored from the moment, from the world. The card on the floor, it was a train pass. And beside it... He stared into the half-lidded eyes watching him—the body on its back, scratched, battered, one arm flung out, fingers curled into a claw, the brown belt undone and chinos half down. The black handle of a German carving knife stuck out of the center of his chest like a flag planted on a hill. McGowren’s head rested on its Crown. His mouth was open as if in the middle of a word, a sentence, a laugh.
You won’t ever know, will you?
Laurel had stepped back, sensing the wrongness of him, the immobility and hardness. He gazed from McGowren’s dead eyes into hers. Was there guilt there? Something more than relief? Leonard could hear her story already—she would tell him McGowren had shown up drunk and attacked, wanting to finish what they’d started in the closet, would never let it go because there was so much more to destroy yet, the same as in high school, and even in the car. He wouldn’t stop until he’d pulled everyone down along with him, that was McGowren. She was only act two. What was the last?
He pushed Laurel away, backed and then turned from the hall and ran out of the house, down the drive behind the EMT van. His car, parked askew with one wheel up over the curb. Empty. Empty. He’d told the cop, he’d said...
He shuffled his feet, unable to go in any direction, unable to get away to anywhere. He heard his name, and sure it was McGowren, he spun around. Two officers had pursued him, and the nearer one spoke his name again.
Up past the drive, Laurel stood at the front door, a million miles away across the lawn. She was calling to him, too, but her voice, his name, seemed to break apart beneath a crackling in his brain, the noise of something awful burrowing in for a long, long stay.
The first story of mine that was published, in The Twilight Zone Magazine a long time ago, was about Edgar Allan Poe, and I feel as if I loop back upon him now and again. When Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories was being put together for Golden Gryphon Press, the illustrator, Jason Van Hollander, made an illustration of Poe central to the design of that book. Poe, the self-destructive genius, will forever fascinate me.
If anyone lived a life exemplary of “The Imp of the Perverse” it was Poe. His is the biography of a man who undermined himself at every opportunity, unleashing a demon of pettiness and jealousy. He would gratefully accept jobs and then, tiring of them, sabotage the position either via vituperative reviews upon writers who weren’t measuring up to Poe’s notions of literature—after which he had to be let go—or else by direct abuse heaped upon on the people who’d—more often than not, kindly—given him a job in the first place. It’s remarkable that he could write such a story and then continue living it as if unaware of his part in it. Maybe we’re all blind sailors to some degree, but Poe’s imp sabotaged him even after his death. It would be hard to top that.
For “The Final Act” I began with Poe’s man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about his crime. I’d been teaching a lot, and one of the exercises that I’d given my students that really seemed to catch fire is called “Two people come out of a building,” an exercise by Alice Mattison from the book Now Write! that I like a great deal. And so mostly as an experiment, I decided to take Poe’s character and write my own “two people come out of a building” story. That’s all I started with, and the story coalesced from there as it was written. I did not know, going in, who was alive and who was dead. That rather key element emerged as I wrote, surprising me as much as I hope it does the reader.
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* * * *
Laird Barron’swork has appeared in places such asThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCIFICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural,and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.It has also been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence,was recently published by Night Shade. Mr. Barron is an expatriate Alaskan currently at large in Washington State.
* * * *
Strappado
By Laird Barron
Kenshi Suzuki and Swayne Harris had a chance reunion at a bathhouse in an Indian tourist town. It had been five or six years since their previous Malta liaison, a cocktail party at the British consulate that segued into a branding iron hot affair. They’d spent a long weekend of day cruises to the cyclopean ruins on Gozo, nightclubbing at the elite hotels and casinos, and booze-drenched marathon sex before the dissolution of their respective junkets swept them back to New York and London in a storm of tears and bitter farewells. For Kenshi, the emotional hangover lasted through desolate summer and into a melancholy autumn. And even now, when elegant, thunderously handsome Swayne materialized from the crowd on the balcony like the Ghost of Christmas Past—!
Kenshi wore a black suit; sleek and polished as a seal or a banker. He swept his single lock of gelled black hair to the left, like a gothic teardrop. His skin was sallow and dewlapped at his neck, and soft at his belly and beneath his Italian leather belt. He’d been a swimmer once, earnestly meant to return to his collegiate form, but hadn’t yet braced for the exhaustion of such an endeavor. He preferred to float in hotel pools while dreaming of his supple youth, once so exotic in the suburbs of white bread Connecticut. Everyone but his grandparents (who never fully acclimated to their transplantation to the West) called him Ken. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he spoke meager Japanese, knew next to zero about the history or the culture, and had visited Tokyo a grand total of three times. In short, he privately acknowledged his unworthiness to lay claim to his blood heritage and thus lived a life of minor, yet persistent, regret.
Swayne wore a cream colored suit of a cut most popular with the royalty of South American plantations. It’s in style anywhere I go, he explained later as they undressed one another in Kenshi’s suite at the Golden Scale. Swayne’s complexion was dark, like fired clay. His slightly sinister brows and waxed imperial lent him the appearance of a Christian devil.
In the seam between the electric shock of their reunion and resultant delirium fugue of violent coupling, Kenshi had an instant to doubt the old magic before the question was utterly obliterated. And if he’d forgotten Swayne’s sly, wry demeanor, his faith was restored when the dark man rolled to face the ceiling, dragged on their shared cigarette and said, “Of all the bathhouses in all the cities of the world...”
Kenshi cheerfully declared him a bastard and snatched back the cigarette. The room was strewn with their clothes. A vase of lilies lay capsized and water funneled from severed stems over the edge of the table. He caught droplets in his free hand and rubbed them and the semen into the slick flesh of his chest and belly. He breathed heavily.
“How’d you swing this place all to yourself?” Swayne said. “Big promotion?”
“A couple of my colleagues got pulled off the project and didn’t make the trip. You?”
“Business, with unexpected pleasure, thank you. The museum sent me to look at a collection—estate sale. Paintings and whatnot. I fly back on Friday, unless I find something extraordinary, which is doubtful. Mostly rubbish, I’m afraid.” Swayne rose and stretched. Rich, gold-red light dappled the curtains, banded and bronzed him with tiger stripes.
The suite’s western exposure gave them a last look at the sun as it faded to black. Below their lofty vantage, slums and crooked dirt streets and the labyrinthine wharfs in the shallow, blood-warm harbor were mercifully obscured by thickening tropical darkness. Farther along the main avenue and atop the ancient terraced hillsides was a huge, baroque Seventeenth Century monastery, much photographed for feature films, and farther still, the scattered manors and villas of the lime nabobs, their walled estates demarcated by kliegs and floodlights. Tourism pumped the lifeblood of the settlement
. They came for the monastery, of course, and only a few kilometers off was a wildlife preserve. Tour buses ran daily and guides entertained foreigners with local folklore and promises of tigers, a number of which roamed the high grass plains. Kenshi had gone on his first day, hated the ripe, florid smell of the jungle, the heat, and the sullen men with rifles who patrolled the electrified perimeter fence in halftracks. The locals wore knives in their belts, even the urbane guide with the Oxford accent, and it left Kenshi feeling shriveled and helpless, at the mercy of the hatefully smiling multitudes.
Here, in the dusty, grimy heart of town, some eighty kilometers down the coast from grand old Mumbai, when the oil lamps and electric lamps fizzed alight, link by link in a vast, convoluted chain, it was only bright enough to help the muggers and cutthroats see what they were doing.
“City of romance,” Swayne said with eminent sarcasm. He opened the door to the terrace and stood naked at the rail. There were a few tourists on their verandas and at their windows. Laughter and pop music and the stench of the sea carried on the lethargic breeze as it snaked through the room. The hotel occupied the exact center of a semicircle of relatively modernized blocks—the chamber of commerce’s concession to appeasing Westerners’ paranoia of marauding gangs and vicious muggers. Still, three streets over was the Third World, as Kenshi’s colleagues referred to it while they swilled whiskey and goggled at turbans and sarongs and at the Buddhists in their orange robes. It was enough to make him ashamed of his continent, to pine for his father’s homeland, until he realized the Japanese were scarcely more civilized as guests.
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