I got downstairs into my place and sat in front of the computer screen willing the words to come. They wouldn’t. Every time I thought of King Carver in Danish a flutter of nausea worked through my guts.
I shut my eyes. I let my fingers move across the keypad on their own. I started typing. Corben and I used to clown around with automatic writing back in college. I did it every now and again when I wanted to clear my mind. I forced my focus to some far corner of my brain and left it there. The typing grew louder.
My hands pounded away. I wondered who the hell was writing Mojo letters to me and why. There had been a craftiness to the note, a kind of witty petulance. It seemed a direct insult to the aluminium foil guy. Someone had done his online research on Dr Lauber. But to what end? And why send it my way? And why pose as the monkey? A thin shard of fear scraped inside me, and my hands seized for a moment. What if the note had come from the ice-pick killer? Who even used an ice-pick any more except for killers? This was the fucking age of refrigerator door ice-cube makers, baby. Sweat broke across my upper lip. What if the note had really come from Mojo? The paper was the size of the sheets on the chimp’s little pad. Why hadn’t I seen Gabriella in over a week? My focus snapped back into the keyboard and I felt my fingers type her name. GABRIELLA. What kind of a damn fool dedicates a book as a codicil to his wife, and does so by simply calling her My wife? My thoughts twisted to Corben’s book on Stark House. What had he learned about this place that I should know? How far along was he? Who would he dedicate this one to? What if the chimp were dancing up behind me right now with an awl in his little monkey fist?
I opened my eyes and turned around. I was alone. My face dripped sweat. I checked the clock. I’d written for twenty minutes. I scanned the computer screen. Much of it was gibberish with a few random whole sentences found in the muck. I spotted DEATH TO KING CARVER in there among a kind of repetitive bitter ranting about lack of royalties and stolen foreign translations. I’d fallen back into some of the same old traps. It was bound to happen. A few maudlin phrases cropped up. I wrote COME GET ME, FUCKER and had a partially completed scene of a disembowelling. A filleting blade eased through flesh. There were slithering intestines and someone trying to hold together his fish-white belly with his fingers. I was getting the feeling that my mental state might currently be a bit skewed. WHERE HAS HE HIDDEN MY LOVE? Deep among the mire stood out SHE SPEAKS.
It took some of the edge off but not nearly enough. I deleted the file and stared at the blank monitor willing some kind of answers that refused to appear. It didn’t matter much. I didn’t even know what questions I was asking. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to try writing another novel. There didn’t seem to be much point anymore. I wasn’t as wrecked about not giving a damn as I thought I would be.
I picked up the Mojo note and read it again. I wondered if a man made of aluminium foil might be preparing to step from my closet as well. Why should Dr Lauber command anybody’s soul?
I hadn’t talked to Corben on any kind of a significant level in fifteen years. If we passed each other in the halls we would nod and do no more. I had the phone numbers of everyone in the building. I grabbed the phone and called the apartment. I hoped Gabriella would answer. My back teeth hurt because I was clenching my jaws so tightly. Like a love-struck teenager, I thought I might hang up the moment she answered. The phone rang ten times, twelve, thirteen times. Maybe they really were in Monaco.
I hung up and then gave it another dozen rings.
Finally Corben picked up, and with an exasperated growl said, “Who is this?”
“I’m coming up,” I told him.
I tossed the phone down and moved out the door on a near-run.
I got to his apartment and we both took an extra moment for what was coming. I stood on one side listening at the door, and I knew he was standing on the other side, his eye to the peephole. We both waited. I had no idea what we were waiting for. I started forward and before I could knock he flung the door open so hard I heard the doorstop snap.
His face, once bordering handsome, had grown into a collision of sharp edges. His high cheekbones were barely covered with flesh. He looked like he’d been ill for days. His jaw line angled back severe as a hatchet. I hadn’t seen him for several weeks and I could tell he hadn’t been eating. His eyes were feverish, planted too deeply in his head, and he didn’t seem able to completely close his mouth. His upper canines prodded his lower lip. I could smell the sourness of his breath beneath the mint mouthwash. His rapid breathing rustled loudly from him.
A lot of the old pain and jealousy sped through my blood. My pulse stormed along. I could feel the veins in my wrists clattering. I wondered if I was as ugly to him as he was to me.
“Where’s Gabriella?” I asked.
The question hit him like a rabbit punch. I don’t know what he’d been expecting but it sure wasn’t that. His face folded into nine variations of anger, indignity, and confusion before it settled into outright surprise. It suited him just swell.
He couldn’t come up with anything better than, “What?” and he hated himself for it. He got grounded again and the peevish tone thrummed into his voice once more. “Who are you to ask that?”
“Who the hell would I have to be? Where is she?”
“She’s not here.”
“That doesn’t answer my damn question. Where is she?”
His resentful front began to fall apart even faster. He couldn’t maintain his outrage. I watched it crack to pieces and the sight startled me. We were getting down deep where the nerve clusters were always on fire for one reason or another. The venom began to seep from me but I held onto that desperate need to see her. He detected it in me and almost took a kind of pity as he said, “She’s gone.”
“What?”
“It’s true.”
I took a lunging step toward him and caught hold of myself in time. I looked over his shoulder and hoped he was lying, but I couldn’t feel her presence in the slightest. I couldn’t smell her perfume, I got no sense of her at all.
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know, Will.”
The way he said my name tightened my chest. It was almost a whimper, an appeal to friendship. The sound of his own voice angered him and I watched his thin face harden further, his shoulders straightening. I took another step until we were toe to toe. “What the hell are you saying?”
“She hasn’t been home since the day the old man was killed in the lobby.”
“That was over two weeks ago!”
He steeled himself. “Yes.”
“Have you called the police? Filed a missing persons report?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes softened and he dropped his gaze. He fell back a few steps like he was aiming his ass for the rich leather wraparound sofa I saw in his living room, but he began to stumble. I actually had to reach out and grab his arm to keep him from going over. I shook him hard once but he still looked dazed. The cops should’ve been called in long before this, but I didn’t push the point because I’d lost just about all my confidence in the police anyway.
Corben said, “I can’t speak to you now.”
“You damn well better.”
“I can’t. Later. Why don’t you come up tonight for a drink? It’s been a while since we’ve talked.” He slowly closed the door in my face. I had no idea how I’d gotten out into the hall.
I had three cards from the three teams of cops. I picked up the one from the whiners and started to phone them, but before I tapped out all seven numbers I hung up. I was already a second-rate suspect in a cooling murder case. How smooth would it go down with the police if I called them about Gabriella? They’d question Corben and he was a New York celebrity, a personal friend of the mayor and the governor. He’d slick it over if he wanted, and they’d just have even more reason to presume me guilty of something. I couldn’t waste the time. I had to find her. I had to make him crack. I felt it was something I h
ad to do. Something only I could do. Audacity is sometimes its own reward.
Leave it to Corben to call a decade and a half “a while”. I decided to play along.
A few hours later we sat in his living room drinking bourbon. From the stink of his breath I could tell he’d been at it for a while before I got there. We skipped fifteen years and anything of substance. I wanted to let my gaze roam his apartment. I’d been in the place many times before. Whenever a toilet clogged. Whenever the garbage disposal backed up. I’d cleaned up Corben’s shit for two years, but I’d never been a guest and I’d never spent a minute taking in the personality of his apartment. I wanted to look at the photos with him and movie stars, on the sets of his films. I wanted to get up and hold all his rare nineteenth-century first editions. There were many paintings, mostly small originals done by artists who resided in the world’s greatest museums. His tastes were similar to mine and I knew I would find many wondrous, beautiful, awe-inspiring aspects to his home.
But I simply sat and looked at him and waited.
He started off with trivial matters. We discussed our latest works – I mentioned the last manuscript I’d finished and made enough misleading comments for him to think it was still under consideration at my publisher. This one was a grand family drama delving into such an assortment of relationships and secrets and personal mysteries that I had no idea what the hell the story was about. He mentioned his latest bestseller, the one I’d bought and left on the front stoop. He didn’t talk about the Stark House book.
He was splitting his attention between our conversation and writing in his head at the same time. He was letting his mind wander the building. The slightest noise made him snap his chin aside. The muscles in his legs jumped. He was trying to kill his interest with booze. He wouldn’t be able to stand it much longer.
I started in where I’d left off earlier. “Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
“We had argued that morning—”
“I know. I heard you.”
It did something to him. It got down beneath the layers of his created persona and dragged up his real self. I got a view of my old pal again, the kid he was back in the day before we blew our friendship. He was just a scared boy, alone without his mothering wife to lead him safely through the extent of his own life. He’d been coddled for so long that he’d lost any kind of veneer. His hard shell had cracked badly over the years of his success, and it had let in all his insecurities and reservations and doubts. No wonder he screamed out his titles when he was losing a fight. He couldn’t apologise and he couldn’t debate. It was all he could defend himself with.
It’s sometimes a curse to have an imagination that can draw up detailed visuals, and when you got down to it, he was better at it than me. He had a worse affliction to bear.
“Why are you writing about this building?” I asked.
He reared in his seat but the bravado wasn’t there anymore. “She told you that?”
“Not outright. We were talking that day and I got a hint of what you were doing. So why are you doing it?”
He poured himself more bourbon. His hands trembled badly but not out of fear. At least not merely out of fear. Gabriella had been his buffer between him and the rest of the world, and without her he was being rubbed raw. “You know why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do!” He sank back into his seat, all knife edges and points. If he moved too quickly he’d slash open a cushion. He frowned and his eyes were already so deep in his skull that they nearly disappeared altogether. He studied me, unsure of just how far to go. Finally his voice leaked words. They fell from his lips so softly I missed them.
“What?”
He said, “You’ve seen those who share the house with us.”
“Seen who?”
“Those who stalk these halls.”
“The toxic waste guy bothering you?”
He lashed out and sent a vase sailing across the room where it crashed against the far wall. “You know of whom I speak!”
When his speech patterns grew more gentrified I knew he must be really upset. I tried not to let it get too good to me, but it did. I felt a warmth bloom in my guts. Corben was actually nervous, but not about losing his wife. He’d had dinner at the White House and given signings and speeches to crowds numbering in the thousands, but right here in his own living room he sat trembling before something he couldn’t even name.
“What congress have you had with them?” he asked.
I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing. I hadn’t laughed in so long that once I got rolling I had a difficult time stopping. Maybe if I’d had more recent congress it wouldn’t have been so funny. Corben stared at me in shock. It got me going even harder. Then I thought of Gabriella and the noise died in my throat.
“I came to talk about Gabriella, not any of your nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense and you know it!” He reached for something else to throw but there was nothing handy so he hurled his glass. It bounced off the sofa and landed right side up on the floor without breaking. “We heard the stories about this place when we were children.”
“We heard stories about every building in the city. The only reason you’re so scared of this one is because you live here now. If you were over in Trump Tower you’d be acting the same way.”
He shot to his feet, grabbed another glass, poured more bourbon and splashed some on the floor. He hadn’t been able to hold his liquor in college and wasn’t doing any better now. His voice was already losing its sharpness. “You mock me.”
“I ought to mock you just for saying ‘you mock me’, asshole. People really let you get away with talking like that?”
He ignored me. He’d started to slip away. “I can’t rest. They don’t let me sleep. They work their way into the pages and ruin whatever I’m writing. Isn’t it the same way with you? Tell the truth. How can you find clarity with all the noise? All the tension and weight of their bearing and closeness.”
Even if I had the pity to spare I wouldn’t throw any his way. “You’ve got a beach house out in Southampton, a mansion in Beverly Hills, and a villa in Italy, right? So why don’t you leave and go spend some time someplace else? Take a trip right after you tell me where your wife is.”
“I can’t leave, Will. I’m not sure I can ever leave here again. Stark House won’t let me go.”
“What happened to Gabriella?”
He dropped back into his chair and sat there blankly, withdrawing further into himself, gulping his drink. The ice rattled loudly. He snorted like a pig. A part of me wanted to beat the hell out of him and force him to talk, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I wasn’t going to get any answers from him. He was willing himself to shut down.
“Lay off the sauce,” I told him. “I want you clear-headed. I’ve got more questions and you’re going to answer them. We’ll talk again soon.”
“What was her name?” he asked.
“Who?”
“The one you took away from me in college. Mary? Maggie? Melanie?”
“I don’t remember.”
“She visits me too,” he said. “She’s dead but she asks about you. She doesn’t remember your name either.”
The next afternoon, on the second floor, I saw a young handsome man and a beautifully delicate woman walking up the corridor, holding hands. I’d never seen them before. He was in a tux and tails, and she wore a lace dress that looked straight out of the 1920s. They came toward me and the hair on the back of my next rose. A warm, comforting draft swept across my throat. They both smiled and nodded to me. I couldn’t quite get my lips to work but I managed to nod back. I wanted to ask if they’d seen Gabriella but the words wouldn’t form. They went to the stairway and began to move down it. I held myself in check for about three seconds and then started after them. I knew what I would see by the time I got there. No one would be on the staircase.
I was wrong. They were still slowly proceeding down it. They murmured bac
k and forth. He said something and she tittered mellifluously. It was a warm and enduring sound. They walked across the lobby floor and out the front door onto the street. Something touched my ankle and I nearly yelped.
Mojo stood at my foot and said, “Ook.” The chain that had connected him to Ferdi was gone. He held a piece of paper up to me. I took it.
It was blank.
He chittered and grinned and shoved his cup out against my shin. I tossed him a quarter and he danced back to Apartment 2C.
I went downstairs and stood out on the stoop listening to the world chase itself. Four rapes and two murders had happened in a five-block radius of the building in the last month. There were plenty of suspects but no leads.
I should be looking for Gabriella. I should be beating the piss out of Corben. But I went back to the screen and forced out more sentences. What I wasn’t making up I was dredging up. I called up my most shameful moments and laid them on my characters. They all loved Gabriella, they all wanted to smash her husband. I made apologies too late. It was a third-rate redemption at best. I waited for a man made of aluminium foil to climb out of the closet. When it happened I didn’t want to jump out of my skin.
I started awakening in the middle of the night to see my old man sitting at the foot of the bed. He always faced away from me, but I recognized his shape, the heft of his hand. When I dared to call to him he hitched his shoulders and began to turn to face me. It was a turn never completed.
Of course he couldn’t face me, he was dead. He’s been dead most of my life. He wouldn’t even recognize me now. I was nine the last time he saw me. Now I look just like the way he did. The heft of my hand is the same. Imagine him now, finding himself at the foot of a stranger’s bed, a man he’s never met before, who might call out to him, “Dad?” No wonder he vanishes. If it was me, looking back at me, seeing me, a live me facing me, plaintively urging some unknown request of me, I’d run too.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 19 Page 56