by Nick Craine
They crept along through enemy territory searching for the street. The houses they passed weren’t much different from the general Farclas variety, modest post-war bungalows and sixties’ ranchstyles, but they only had eyes for the most discordant and delinquent of details: a barbeque with a missing wheel parked on a front lawn, icicle lights left up since Christmas, a fly swatter dangling from a doorknob, a twin set of scraggly meatball shrubs flanking a cement stoop, a lidless can of whipping cream sitting on a window ledge beside a pink plastic back-scratcher with all but one finger missing – and guess which one.
“The true classless society,” observed Chellis.
They drove around for awhile, closely scrutinizing the street signs, amazed that there were street signs, until Elaine announced, “This is it.” She turned sharply onto a secluded and lushly treed side street. “Boswell Drive.”
“Drive? Claymoronians don’t have Drives. Or Crescents, or Ways. The whole place is on the other side of the tracks.”
“True, but pretension is ubiquitous, as you might say, and as I recall did say when you first saw my new house. But feast your eyes on that, over on the left, number 17. The stone one with the wisteria trailing off that wrought-iron pergola.”
“That’s not wrought iron, it’s an inferior polymer. So is the wisteria and the stone. All synthetics.”
Elaine parked on the curb opposite the house.
“Curbs, already,” said Chellis. “I wonder if they have running water.”
“Focus, Chel.”
“I am.”
“On the job at hand. What do you think?”
“I think we’re sitting here in full view of whoever is in the house.”
“Hence my disguise.”
“This is logic?”
“Someone’s coming out.” Her voice dropped to a whisper.
Out of shirker’s habit, Chellis instantly slid down in his seat and compacted himself into a wad of self. Elaine meanwhile snatched a container of dental floss out of her bag, snapped off a line, and began vigorously flossing her teeth.
“What are you doing?” Chellis wrenched his head sideways. “Apparently I did take too long in the can.”
“I’m being inconspicuous. Nothing but a girl going about her daily hygiene.”
“Hardly noticeable at all.”
“Yeah.”
“So who is it?”
“That guy who was at your place when you were out visiting Hunt. Some biker dude by the looks of him.”
“Jerry.”
“You know him?”
“He’s a businessman. Funny cigarette business.”
“Ew, there’s something wrong with his face.”
Chellis peeked over the dash. “Acne vulgaris. Also he has eyes on the side of his head, like a turbot . . .and Jesus H. Christ, do you see that?”
“What?”
“He’s got Uncle Bob! On his back, he’s wearing Uncle Bob!” So, another wound compliments of the treacherous and twisted sister.
“Stay down, he’s looking this way.” Elaine dropped the floss and flipped down the sun visor. She made a show of gazing into its mirror (a card with the periodic table on it was in fact taped over the mirror) and fussing with her hair. “Doesn’t suspect a thing, thinks I’m just some dumb broad. Brilliant, he’s getting into that muscle car parked in the driveway.”
Chellis chanced another look and saw Jerry back out onto the street in a car that was all sleek sinew and muscle, a brand new, black Saab. He cruised away in lordly disregard of Elaine’s jam jar on wheels. The sight gave Chellis cause to ask himself why every male he encountered these days drove luxury cars, even guys like Jerry who as he recalled didn’t indulge in other luxuries, like deodorant. What would his insurance buy as a replacement for his torched baby, he wondered? A skateboard?
“Let’s go,” said Elaine.
“Go?”
She was already climbing out of her bubble of a car, handbag slung over her shoulder. “Let’s check this place out.”
“Laney! There are sneakier ways of going about this. We have to be careful. What if they’re in there?” Those two snakes, entwined around one another. Although he hated to badmouth snakes; calling someone a human was usually the more apt condemnation.
Protest, even common sense, were of no avail when Elaine had a head of steam up. She was walking briskly toward the house next door to number 17. A few strides along and she vanished into their shrubbery. Chellis clambered out and ran after her, trying with all his might to shapeshift into a candy wrapper blowing across the street. Mind over matter. Mind would be flattened into matter if they got caught. He should have told her what was really going on here. What he more than suspected. What he knew.
Something else he knew, common knowledge in Farclas, was that the entire citizenry of Claymore were on welfare, and prospering by it, too, considering the upscale digs on this street, including the twee Cape Cod next door to the house of sin. The Cape Cod appeared to be uninhabited, but he didn’t think so. The suds-guzzling residents within were simply immobile, stuck to the floor in their own vomit. That or too lazy and boob-intubated to get up and take note of a stranger rustling around in their forest of rhododendrons, as Chellis himself was doing in hot pursuit of a handbag-toting girl detective. (Did women have to take their purses with them everywhere?)
Chellis assumed that Elaine’s paparazzi-plan was to snap a few photos of 17 Boswell from the vantage of this green cover. With luck, she might catch the two lovers leaving or arriving, or, with surreal luck, she might catch them sunbathing in the nude by the backyard pool (pool!), Dick sucking on Bebe’s toes. As usual, he assumed wrong. When he did spot Elaine, he was aghast to see that she was taking a much more direct approach. She was dragging a stepladder, pillaged from the Cape Cod’s twee, matching gardening hut, and heading straight for the den of iniquity.
Elaine motioned to him to come and help. She was dragging the ladder toward the back of the house.
“No way,” he hissed. Then he dashed over to help anyway, before she made a death-summoning racket setting it up. “Laney, this is insane. There’s more going on here than you think.”
“Such as?” She dug her cell out of her handbag and flipped it open, exposing its camera feature, a technology that made Chellis feel ill, given the speed with which it had spread throughout the world and considering the zillion private worlds it was capturing, exposure by exposure, the majority stupefyingly banal. “Hold this, will you.” She shoved her purse at him, and having placed the ladder beneath what she must have guessed was a back bedroom window, climbed nimbly up. She didn’t climb as far as the window, but reaching up held the camera close to the glass. She snapped a photo of the interior then climbed back down. Nothing to it.
Except that there was. Together, they gazed at the viewfinder and the image she had captured.
“Such as that,” Chellis now could answer.
“My God, what’s Mrs. Havlock doing here?”
“Writing,” said Chellis. “With a knife to her head.”
“Hey Chellis,” a voice came from behind, but not far enough behind, not far enough for a cornered creature to make a run for it. “Man, I love your bag.”
Chellis turned. “Gee, Jer . . . thanks.”
22
Scheherazade
“YOU’RE BLOODY LUCKY she didn’t stick a knife in your head, too.”
“Good point.”
“How does he fit into all this? Victim number one?”
“Let’s ask.”
Glib was presently going to have to temp for any earnest expressions of raw fear. It might even keep him from filling his boxers. Refusing to take anything seriously did have its uses, even when one was on the verge of being planted in the backyard or made to walk the pool’s plank in cement swim shoes.
Jerry had expressed a very convincing invitation to enter the house, followed by an emphatic suggestion that they spend some quality time – a quantity of time no long appeared to be an option �
�� in the basement and in a room that was unfurnished, unfenestrated, and locked.
Both he and Elaine were pacing, passing one another as they circled the room or crossed it kitty-corner, do-se-do, practising their square dance of death. Their mental activities, however, weren’t that well partnered, in that Chellis was worrying hard, trying to burrow into an invisible and inaccessible safe room, while Elaine was thinking hard, trying to find a way out.
Besides being aggrieved about Mrs. Havlock, who was not gadding about the country after all, the only other strengthening emotion Chellis was able to summon at the moment was indignation about Uncle Bob, also in captivity and equally passive. If only his leathery old pal were more like that man-eating shirt Hercules’s wife gave to him, the homicidal garment that ripped his hunky flesh right off his bones.
While still outside, Jerry had divested Chellis of Elaine’s handbag, so that shamanistic resource was lost to them, too. Unless, like the Almighty Himself, she could conjure up a destructive invention out of the dust balls that roamed the edges of the room. Evidently thugs weren’t given much to housework, only ridding houses of the harmless human element.
They stopped pacing and stared at one another.
“Damn,” said Elaine. “He’s got my new window opener.”
“Is that like a can opener?”
“It’s a remote. I was working on it when you ran through the kitchen. Press a button and zim your window flies open. Handy for old ladies.”
“I feel like an old lady, but perhaps you’ve been too deep in thought to notice that our prison has no windows? A can opener would be more useful. We could knock ourselves out with it.”
“Tell me what’s going on with Mrs. Havlock, will you? I don’t get it.”
“That makes two of us.” Which would have been ideal under normal circumstances. “They’re forcing her to write something, as we observed. Imagine trying to concentrate with a knife flashing around your head about to slice it up like a melon.” Chellis was still staggered by the image that had been displayed on the camera phone, which, naturally, had also been taken away from them: Mrs. Havlock seated at a small metal table, fingers working the keys of a laptop, while Bethany, weapon of choice in hand, had either been dictating something to her, or simply threatening her. The knife, a stylish stiletto and not some crude utensil rustled up from a kitchen drawer, had been positioned a breath away from Mrs. H’s temple. Gun to the head was the usual formulation, but the firearms conjured tended to be figurative and drawn from a self-manufactured arsenal. Like most writers, Mrs. H might even be accustomed to the feeling, which could explain her remarkable air of calm. “Writing what, though? A new will? Some crackerjack manifesto that will get great reviews, but is published posthumously?”
“God. Where’s Dick, do you think? I thought he’d be here.”
“Out getting us pizza, is my guess.”
“This whole thing is fucking nuts.” She scratched her head.
“Now look what you’ve done, your wig is crooked.” He reached up and straightened it for her. Gave her a soulful look. “You are beautiful. Even under a bushel of someone else’s hair.”
“Chelly.” She slipped her arms around him, pulled him close. “Are you scared?”
“Shitless.”
“Don’t worry, don’t. I’ll think of something.”
“I know you will.” He broke away, gazed at her for an ardent moment. “I’m entrusting my life to you. Keep it safe, will you, while I go to the john.”
“You can’t hide in the bathroom again!”
“Nature calls. Where is that minder of ours? Oi, Jerry!” Chellis walked over to the door and began to pound on it. “Emergency here!”
Jerry unbolted the door and thrust it open, a SWAT team of one, but not a member of the redemptive side. He was holding a handgun – no theatrical knives for him – which he pointed at Chellis’s chest. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Not my heart, or I’d ask you to fix it. Is that shiny piece of hardware registered by the way?”
“Sure, I’m a model citizen.”
“Excellent. I find that under these stressful circumstances my bowels have loosened, and therefore I require directions to the men’s room.”
“Jesus. Ed said you were chickenshit.”
“Ed? I know an Ed? An Ed who has opinions about my person?”
“Edna.”
Chellis delivered a blank look that was soon enough filled with Jerry’s own ravaged features. It seemed that the man had been scrubbing his face lately with steel wool, which was no way to treat a suppurating case of acne, however entrenched. “Are you telling me . . . are you saying that Bethany’s real name is Edna?”
“You got it.” Jerry squinted at him. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing.” Chellis sucked in his lips. Edna!
Somehow this demystifying piece of information emboldened him, and he felt even bolder once inside the junior league, basement bathroom. Bolder but desperate. Anxiously, he searched the room for something, anything that might be useful. Toilet paper? He could compact it into a ball and stuff it in Jerry’s mouth and then . . . die. A grungy, yellowed toilet bowl brush was leaning against the wall, but this didn’t strike him as a particularly great weapon, either, even though there was something cheering about the levelling and democratic demands of bacteria. Jerry could pump the bowl full of bullets and still not kill a thing.
“Hurry up in there.” Jerry rapped on the door with the butt of his gun. “And don’t stink the place up.”
“Coming!” Chellis reached over to the handle of the toilet and flushed, then turned on the tap and began to run the water full blast. A bar of Dove, the milquetoast of soaps, sat in a puddle of muck on the counter beside the sink. A thin, pinkish hand towel lay crumpled and stiff beside it. He crouched down and opened the door of the cabinet below. It was completely empty except for a weapon of mass destruction that had been tossed carelessly into a corner. He snatched it up and slid it into his pants pocket.
Once back in the room, Chellis and Elaine barely had time to consult before Jerry returned. “Ed wants to see you. Move it.”
Bethany – it was hard to get used her new nominal guise – was waiting for them upstairs in the living room, seated in a midnight blue, wingback chair. Velvet. It was the classiest chair amongst an oddly-matched family of furniture, although this didn’t seem to matter much, as he and Elaine were not invited to take the weight off their feet. She was dressed more conservatively than usual, in a businesswoman’s black pantsuit, although she had retained the pointy green shoes of her former role. Her killing accoutrement was nowhere in view, which could only mean that she found them totally harmless.
“Edna,” he said.
“Chellis,” she smiled. Not unfondly, he didn’t think.
She turned her attention to Elaine. “And who are you supposed to be? Madonna? The aging Madonna.”
Elaine said not a word, but increased the voltage of evil eye she had fixed on Evil Edna.
“So Bethany, I mean Bebe, no, it’s Ed, how does one keep track? You’ve been up to no good.”
“Shut your face, asswipe.” This classic, guard dog comment (and mixed metaphor) came from Jerry, stationed directly behind them, his weapon at the ready.
“It’s okay, Gerald,” she said. “He never knows when to shut up.”
“He’s a prick.” Jerry again.
“He’s more sap than prick. A wimp, a stooge, a buffoon. One could go on and on.”
“But one can’t find one’s thesaurus?” offered Chellis.
“To get back to your original question, I’m actually up to great good. For myself.”
“How is that, Eddie? I’m dying to hear.”
“Don’t call me Eddie, I don’t go in for childish diminutives, Chelly. You’re right about the dying, though. Sorry about that, I’ve gotten kind of used to having you around. Like a pet. You don’t make a half-bad curry, either. But you fit into my plans so well.�
�
“Enlighten me and I’ll make you another curry. I might even bark.”
“Someone has to take responsibility.”
“For Jude Thomas? An old flame of yours you stomped out?”
“He was useful. I learned a lot about the publishing world from him, and learned a lot about Mrs. Havlock. He was obsessed with her, it was a little weird. He also got in my way, tried to stop me doing what I wanted to do, typical male. I bet you don’t know that I’ve written a novel. It’s amazing.”
“You don’t say? Then don’t also forget brilliant, rivetting, shocking, astonishing . . . you’ll have to find that thesaurus so you can write your own blurb.”
“Why would I need to do that?”
“Because your book is bound to be a pile of doggy-do and no publisher will touch it.”
“Funny, that’s more or less what Mrs. Havlock said when I first sent my manuscript to her. She scrawled some derisive comments across the front page and sent it back to me. But you know what, she didn’t even read it. I could tell. So I wanted to make sure that she did read it, you see. I wanted her to read it and read it and read it until she had it memorized, and then I wanted her to rewrite it until it was up to speed, according to her, since she’s such an expert, such a successful award-winning author herself.”
Out of all the unsolicited manuscripts that poured like a Niagara onto her plate, beginners desperate for help and endorsement and a leg-up, trust Mrs. Havlock to somehow single out for her ire the one sent by a psychopath. “She’s your ghost.”
“She is. Having reached the end and having crossed the deadline, she’s that indeed. There you go Chellis, you’re not the only one who can make execrable puns and get away with it. I’m also her long-lost daughter, by the way. I’m the product of a quickie affair, given up for adoption years ago, and terribly crushed to have lost her so soon after our tearful reunion.”
Chellis’s gaze dropped to his boots. He felt sick and she was sick, their only likeness and connection. “Right, of course,” he said quietly. “You scooped up documents at her place.”