999

by Al Sarrantonio

  Burned all his paintings, yes, of course he did, Kinnell thought in his watery dream. He couldn’t stand what was happening to him, that’s what the note said, and when you get to that point in the festivities, you don’t pause to see if you want to except one special piece of work from the bonfire. It’s just that you got something special into The Road Virus Heads North, didn’t you, Bobby? And probably completely by accident. You were talented, I could see that right away, but talent has nothing to do with what’s going on in that picture.

  “Some things are just good at survival,” Judy Diment said on the TV. “They keep coming back no matter how hard you try to get rid of them. They keep coming back like viruses.”

  Kinnell reached out and changed the channel, but apparently there was nothing on all the way around the dial except for The Judy Diment Show.

  “You might say he opened a hole into the basement of the universe,” she was saying now. “Bobby Hastings, I mean. And this is what drove out. Nice, isn’t it?”

  Kinnell’s feet slid then, not enough to go out from under him completely, but enough to snap him to.

  He opened his eyes, winced at the immediate sting of the soap (Prell had run down his face in thick white rivulets while he had been dozing), and cupped his hands under the shower-spray to splash it away. He did this once and was reaching out to do it again when he heard something. A ragged rumbling sound.

  Don’t be stupid, he told himself. All you hear is the shower. The rest is only imagination.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.

  The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from outside.

  He got out of the shower and walked, dripping, across his bedroom on the second floor. There was still enough shampoo in his hair to make him look as if it had turned white while he was dozing—as if his dream of Judy Diment had turned it white.

  Why did I ever stop at that yard sale? he asked himself, but for this he had no answer. He supposed no one ever did.

  The rumbling sound grew louder as he approached the window overlooking the driveway—the driveway that glimmered in the summer moonlight like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem.

  As he brushed aside the curtain and looked out, he found himself thinking of his ex-wife, Sally, whom he had met at the World Fantasy Convention in 1978. Sally, who now published two magazines out of her trailer home, one called Survivors, one called Visitors. Looking down at the driveway, these two tides came together in Kinnell’s mind like a double image in a stereopticon.

  He had a visitor who was definitely a survivor.

  The Grand Am idled in front of the house, the white haze from its twin chromed tailpipes rising in the still night air. The Old English letters on the back deck were perfectly readable. The driver’s side door stood open, and that wasn’t all; the light spilling down the porch steps suggested that Kinnell’s front door was also open.

  Forgot to lock it, Kinnell thought, wiping soap off his forehead with a hand he could no longer feel. Forgot to reset the burglar alarm, too … not that it would have made much difference to this guy.

  Well, he might have caused it to detour around Aunt Trudy, and that was something, but just now the thought brought him no comfort.

  Survivors.

  The soft rumble of the big engine, probably at least a 442 with a four-barrel carb, reground valves, fuel injection.

  He turned slowly on legs that had lost all feeling, a naked man with a headful of soap, and saw the picture over his bed, just as he’d known he would. In it, the Grand Am stood in his driveway with the driver’s door open and two plumes of exhaust rising from the chromed tailpipes. From this angle he could also see his own front door, standing open, and a long man-shaped shadow stretching down the hall.

  Survivors.

  Survivors and visitors.

  Now he could hear feet ascending the stairs. It was a heavy tread, and he knew without having to see that the blond kid was wearing motorcycle boots. People with DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR tattooed on their arms always wore motorcycle boots, just as they always smoked unfiltered Camels. These things were like a national law.

  And the knife. He would be carrying a long, sharp knife—more of a machete, actually, the sort of knife that could strike off a person’s head in a single sweeping stroke.

  And he would be grinning, showing those filed cannibal teeth.

  Kinnell knew these things. He was an imaginative guy, after all.

  He didn’t need anyone to draw him a picture.

  “No,” he whispered, suddenly conscious of his global nakedness, suddenly freezing all the way around his skin. “No, please, go away.” But the footfalls kept coming, of course they did. You couldn’t tell a guy like this to go away. It didn’t work; it wasn’t the way the story was supposed to end.

  Kinnell could hear him nearing the top of the stairs. Outside the Grand Am went on rumbling in the moonlight.

  The feet coming down the hall now, worn bootheels rapping on polished hardwood.

  A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house with the driver’s side door open.

  The driver’s side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I’m going outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.

  Neil Gaiman

  KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES: A LOVE STORY

  I first met Neil Caiman in person at a strange and wonderful little duck of a convention, a kind of summer camp for writers at Roger Williams College in Newport, Rhode Island, called NECON. I did enjoy meeting him during a panel we did together on fairy tales, where I distinguished myself with my lack of knowledge (or interest, if you must know) on said subject—but where Neil showed off his own knowledge to marvelous effect. My real reason for attending NECON, to be perfectly honest, was to track down Gaiman (I had been E-mailing him for months, trying to get him to turn in a story for this book).

  Neil Gaiman is, of course, author of the wildly successful Sandman comic book series and the creator of that perky young woman named Death; he is also the prose author of Neverwhere, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), and the collection Angels and Visitations, among many other works.

  In the end, as you can see, my pursuit of Gaiman was successful. Neil did, at the wire, turn in the following story—again, to marvelous effect.

  I am his Highness’ dog at Kew

  Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

  ALEXANDER POPE.

  On the Collar of a Dog which I Gave to His Royal Highness

  You can call me a bastard if you like. It’s true, whichever way you want to cut it. My mum had me two years after being locked up “for her own protection;” this was back in 1952, when a couple of wild nights out with the local lads could be diagnosed as clinical nymphomania and you could be put away “to protect yourself and society” on the say-so of any two doctors. One of whom was her father, my grandfather; the other was his partner in the North London medical practice they shared.

  So I know who my grandfather was. But my father was just somebody who shagged my mother somewhere in the building or grounds of Saint Andrew’s Asylum. That’s a nice word, isn’t it? Asylum. With all its implications of a place of safety: somewhere that shelters you from the bitter and dangerous old world outside. Nothing like the reality of that hole. I went to see it before they knocked it down in the late seventies. It still reeked of piss and pine-scented disinfectant floor-wash. Long, dark, badly lit corridors with clusters of tiny, cell-like rooms off them. If you were looking for Hell and you found St. Andrew’s you’d not have been disappointe
d.

  It says on her medical records that she’d spread her legs for anyone, but I doubt it. She was locked up, back then. Anyone who wanted to stick his cock into her would have needed a key to her cell.

  When I was eighteen I spent my last summer holiday before I went up to University hunting down the four men who were most likely to have been my father: two psychiatric nurses, the secure ward doctor, and the governor of the asylum.

  My mum was only seventeen when she went inside. I’ve got a little black-and-white wallet photograph of her from just before she was put away. She’s leaning against the side of a Morgan sports car parked in a country lane. She’s smiling, sort of flirtily, at the photographer. She was a looker, my mum.

  I didn’t know which one of the four was my dad, so I killed all of them. They had each fucked her, after all: I got them to admit to it before I did them in. The best was the governor, a red-faced fleshy old lech with an honest-to-goodness handlebar mustache, like I haven’t seen for twenty years now. I garotted him with his Guards tie. Spit-bubbles came from his mouth, and he went blue as an unboiled lobster.

  There were other men around St. Andrew’s who might have been my father, but after those four the joy went out of it. I told myself that I’d killed the four likeliest candidates, and if I knocked off everyone who might have knocked up my mother it would have turned into a massacre. So I stopped.

  I was handed over to the local orphanage to bring up. According to her medical records, they sterilized my mum immediately after I was born. Didn’t want any more nasty little incidents like me coming along to spoil anybody’s fun.

  I was ten when she killed herself. This was 1964. I was ten years old, and I was still playing conkers and knocking off sweet shops while she was sitting on the linoleum floor of her cell sawing at her wrists with a bit of broken glass she’d got from heaven-knows-where. Cut her fingers up, too, but she did it all right. They found her in the morning, sticky, red and cold.

  Mr. Alice’s people ran into me when I was twelve. The deputy head of the orphanage had been using us kids as his personal harem of scabby-kneed love slaves. Go along with him and you got a sore bum and a Bounty bar. Fight back and you got locked down for a couple of days, a really sore bum and concussion. Old Bogey we used to call him, because he picked his nose whenever he thought we weren’t looking.

  He was found in his blue Morris Minor in his garage, with the doors shut and a length of bright green hosepipe going from the exhaust into the front window. The coroner said it was a suicide and seventy-five young boys breathed a little easier.

  But Old Bogey had done a few favors for Mr. Alice over the years, when there was a chief constable or a foreign politician with a penchant for little boys to be taken care of, and he sent a couple of investigators out to make sure everything was on the up-and-up. When they figured out the only possible culprit was a twelve-year-old boy, they almost pissed themselves laughing.

  Mr. Alice was intrigued, so he sent for me. This was back when he was a lot more hands-on than today. I suppose he hoped I’d be pretty, but he was in for a sad disappointment. I looked then like I do now: too thin, with a profile like a hatchet-blade, and ears like someone left the car doors open. What I remember of him mostly then is how big he was. Corpulent. I suppose he was still a fairly young man back then, although I didn’t see it that way: he was an adult, and so he was the enemy.

  A couple of goons came and took me after school, on my way back to the home. I was shitting myself, at first, but the goons didn’t smell like the law—I’d had four years of dodging the Old Bill by then, and I could spot a plainclothes copper a hundred yards away. They took me to a little gray office, sparsely furnished, just off the Edgware Road.

  It was winter, and it was almost dark outside, but the lights were dim, except for a little desk lamp casting a pool of yellow light on the desk. An enormous man sat at the desk scribbling something in ballpoint pen on the bottom of a telex sheet. Then, when he was done, he looked up at me. He looked me over from head to toe.

  “Cigarette?”

  I nodded. He extended a Peter Stuyvesant soft pack, and I took a cigarette. He lit it for me with a gold-and-black cigarette lighter. “You killed Ronnie Palmerstone,” he told me. There was no question in his voice.

  I said nothing.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “Got nothing to say,” I told him.

  “I only sussed it when I heard he was in the passenger seat. He wouldn’t have been in the passenger seat if he was going to kill himself. He would have been in the driver’s seat. My guess is, you slipped him a mickey, then you got him into the Mini—can’t have been easy, he wasn’t a little bloke—here, mickey and Mini, that’s rich—then you drove him home, drove into the garage, by which point he was sleeping soundly, and you rigged up the suicide. Weren’t you scared someone would see you driving? A twelve-year-old boy?”

  “It gets dark early,” I said. “And I took the back way.”

  He chuckled. Asked me a few more questions, about school, and the home, and what I was interested in, things like that. Then the goons came back and took me back to the orphanage.

  Next week I was adopted by a couple named Jackson. He was an international business law specialist. She was a self-defense expert. I don’t think either of them had ever met before Mr. Alice got them together to bring me up.

  I wonder what he saw in me at that meeting. It must have been some kind of potential, I suppose. The potential for loyalty. And I’m loyal. Make no mistake about that. I’m Mr. Alice’s man, body and soul.

  Of course, his name isn’t really Mr. Alice, but I could use his real name here just as easily. Doesn’t matter. You’d not have heard of him. Mr. Alice is one of the ten richest men in the world. I’ll tell you something: you haven’t heard of the other nine, either. Their names aren’t going to turn up on any lists of the hundred richest men in the world. None of your Bill Gateses or your Sultans of Brunei. I’m talking real money here. There are people out there who are being paid more than you will ever see in your life to make sure you never hear a breath about Mr. Alice on the telly or in the papers.

  Mr. Alice likes to own things. And, as I’ve told you, one of the things he owns is me. He’s the father I didn’t have. It was him that got me the medical files on my mum and the information on the various candidates for my dad.

  When I graduated (first-class degrees in business studies and international law), as my graduation present to myself, I went and found my-grandfather-the-doctor. I’d held off on seeing him until then. It had been a sort of incentive.

  He was a year away from retirement, a hatchet-faced old man with a tweed jacket. This was in 1978, and a few doctors still made house calls. I followed him to a tower block in Maida Vale. Waited while he dispensed his medical wisdom, and stopped him as he came out, black bag swinging by his side.

  “Hullo, Grandpa,” I said. Not much point in trying to pretend to be someone else, really. Not with my looks. He was me, forty years on. Same fucking ugly face, but with his hair thinning and sandy gray, not thick and mousy brown like mine. He asked what I wanted.

  “Locking mum away like that,” I told him. “It wasn’t very nice, was it?”

  He told me to get away from him, or something like that.

  “I’ve just got my degree,” I told him. “You should be proud of me.”

  He said that he knew who I was and that I had better be off at once or he would have the police down on me and have me locked away.

  I put the knife through his left eye and back into his brain, and while he made little choking noises I took his old calf-skin wallet—as a keepsake, really, and to make it look more like a robbery. That was where I found the photo of my mum, in black and white, smiling and flirting with the camera, twenty-five years before. I wonder who owned the Morgan.

  I had someone who didn’t know me pawn the wallet. I bought it from the pawn shop when it wasn’t redeemed. Nice clean trail. There’s ma
ny a smart man who’s been brought down by a keepsake. Sometimes I wonder if I killed my father that day, as well as my grandfather. I don’t expect he’d have told me, even if I’d asked. And it doesn’t really matter, does it?

  After that I went to work full-time for Mr. Alice. I ran the Sri Lanka end of things for a couple of years, then spent a year in Bogotá on import-export, working as a glorified travel agent. I came back home to London as soon as I could. For the last fifteen years I’ve been working mainly as a troubleshooter and as a smoother-over of problem areas. Troubleshooter. That’s rich.

  Like I said, it takes real money to make sure nobody’s ever heard of you. None of that Rupert Murdoch cap-in-hand to the merchant bankers rubbish. You’ll never see Mr. Alice in a glossy magazine, showing a photographer around his glossy new house.

  Outside of business, Mr. Alice’s main interest is sex, which is why I was standing outside Earl’s Court Station with forty million U.S. dollars’ worth of blue-white diamonds in the inside pockets of my mackintosh. Specifically, and to be exact, Mr. Alice’s interest in sex is confined to relations with attractive young men. No, don’t get me wrong here: I don’t want you thinking Mr. Alice’s some kind of woofter. He’s not a nancy or anything. He’s a proper man, Mr. Alice. He’s just a proper man who likes to fuck other men, that’s all. Takes all sorts to make a world, I say, and leaves a lot more of what I like for me. Like at restaurants, where everyone gets to order something different from the menu. Chacun a son goût, if you’ll pardon my French. So everybody’s happy.