by Farris, John
She wore tinted glasses and a fawn-colored pantsuit. Her red hair was loose and flowing. She carried a big purse like a saddlebag. She didn’t say hello. The odor of violets was chilly in the weather she brought with her, exhilarating as the bouquet of a great wine.
“Where are we going?” I asked her.
“Up the coast. To San Augustin.”
San Augustin. I hadn’t been back since resigning my teaching position at the college, shortly after the acceptance of my novel. My throat tightened.
“Why?”
“It’s been two years,” she replied, looking straight ahead. “We owe David a visit, don’t you think?”
I realized then why she’d asked me over the telephone if I knew what day it was. February 24. The day David Hallowell died.
“Is that necessary?”
She looked at me, two seconds, her expression neutral. “Yes.”
I could have refused. In traffic it would take more than three hours to drive to San Augustin. But the long drive would give me my chance to find out everything I wanted to know about Dierdre; the full story of her relationship with David Hallowell. It was even possible that—for her sake—I could persuade her not to take any action against me.
And if I couldn’t—
Unfortunately she was not talkative on the trip up the Pacific Coast Highway. She answered questions sparingly or not at all. She seemed to be under a strain, not the assured, tantalizing amateur blackmailer I had met three nights ago. Finally I gave up trying to talk to Dierdre, willing to wait her out. Without harming my perceptions the odor of violets had a beneficial, lulling effect on me. I drove north with the confidence that the situation ultimately would be resolved in my favor.
The fog was rolling in as we reached San Augustin. The cemetery in which David Hallowell was buried lay on the slope of a hill only two hundred yards from the sea. With the fog lights on I crept up the winding access road past drab and dimly seen monuments to small deeds and inconsequential passions. The fuming fog cut visibility to less than ten feet. I had forgotten where he was interred. Dierdre seemed to know exactly, as if she had made many visits, after dark.
“To the left up ahead. There’s a stand of oak trees and a crypt with a plinth. He’s just down the path from there, near a wall that’s parallel to the cliff.”
“Now I remember,” I said, my sense of well-being wearing a little thin. I wondered, for the first time, if Dierdre was in on this alone; if she was, then what was her real purpose in bringing me to a wayside cemetery under cover of the winter fog? The situation I had felt to be within my control was now unappealing.
Nevertheless, I stopped the small car by the trees, leaving the fog lights on. Dierdre got out immediately. The leafless branches dripped moisture onto the canvas cover. I heard the swish and boom of surf across the highway below. There was a flashlight in the glove compartment. Before getting out from behind the wheel I reached down and released the pistol from its hiding place, slipping it into my jacket pocket as I closed the door behind me.
I didn’t know what lay ahead, in the fog; but Dierdre looked back at me impatiently, waiting. Not as if she had devastating mischief in mind. Her blue eyes were wide and unwinking, like eyes in a portrait.
“This way.” She led me to David’s plot along a narrow path of stepping-stones, her essence—as she called it—sweetening the dismal, dripping air. I cast the flashlight beam on the little bronze marker, flush with the ground, that I had purchased. The sight of it brought back memories but prompted no remorse, if that’s what she expected. If not for me, Angels and Aborigines probably wouldn’t have been finished. And in what anonymous grave, crowded close to unwanted and unremarked men, would he now be lying? I was tired of indulging her fantasies of revenge, whatever they might be.
“What do you want, Dierdre?”
She looked up slowly from contemplation of the grave.
“I was hoping,” she said quietly, “by now you would know what you must do.”
“For a start, I want those pages you told me about. The earlier draft. Name your price.”
She frowned, then opened her purse. I tightened my grip on the pistol in my pocket. But all she brought out was another bundle of the familiar yellow pages.
“I have them here.”
“Just drop them on the ground.” She did so. “There are no more pages anywhere?”
“No.”
“I wonder why I don’t believe you.”
She turned her face toward the sea, livelier than this boneyard, but invisible. “I’m going away tonight. I won’t be back. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe me. What matters is that you make restitution, in David’s memory.”
“I’m afraid that would mean the end of my career.”
“You might try writing something of your own,” she said sharply.
The night breathed mistily on my brow, its chill sinking to the roots of my heart. I suffered a momentary pang of self-loathing, and I hated her for judging me. She was very young; how could she know what it felt like, to be out of the running all of your life?
I took a step toward her. Our eyes met in a dead heat. I was shaking from anger, and desire. Goaded by her essence, repelled by the setting of death in which my lust was manifest.
“If I had the right muse—” I said, now throwing her own joke back in her face. “Why don’t you consider taking the job? I’ll treat you better than David Hallowell ever could.”
She shook her head slightly. “I’m not the muse you deserve. But one will be provided—once you’ve admitted that you stole David’s novel, then done everything in your power to ensure him full credit. That is the will of the Association.”
“Goddamn you! What difference does it make to David now?”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
I knew then that she would never let me touch her. That she meant what she had said. She was going away. But I couldn’t bear the thought that Dierdre would be forever beyond my reach—the one who knew, unforgiving.
I took the pistol from my pocket and shone the beam of the flashlight full in her face. She looked steadily at me, not blinking, bold eyes with no appreciation of danger in them, no fear.
“That doesn’t mean a thing,” Dierdre said. “You can’t hurt me. I’m immortal.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Or we both are.” I raised the pistol a little higher and shot her between the eyes.
Something seemed to uncurl from the fog like the lash of a whip and snatch the flashlight from my hand. Dierdre disappeared without a sound; I was blind in the fog. Moments after I fired the shot I was seized by a clonus—a series of violent muscular spasms. Involuntarily I dropped the gun, then went to my knees beside David Hallowell’s grave crying incoherently, anticipating some lethal, otherworldly blow that would end my own life.
But nothing happened. No one was there. I had no company but the disinterested dead, who now included Dierdre among their number. The flashlight, still in working order, lay a few feet from where I was kneeling. Perhaps, unable to bear the sight of murder, I had flung it there myself just after pulling the trigger.
I picked up the gun again and crawled to the flashlight. I looked through the fog for Dierdre’s body. The purse she had brought to the cemetery lay near the low brick wall at the edge of the cliff. Gasping for air, I went to the wall and looked over it. The beam of light, diffused by fog, afforded me a glimpse of her tumbled body fifty feet below.
I wanted to search her purse, find out who she really was; but I couldn’t chance leaving a fingerprint behind. I gathered up all of the loose yellow sheets of the draft manuscript, frantic that I might miss one, thus leaving behind a clue that eventually would point the bird dogs of the law in my direction. When I was sure I had them all I returned in a deathly cold sweat to the Mercedes and climbed inside. The pistol was in my pocket. I planned to pull off the highway on my return to the City of Angels and fling it well out to sea.
Before starting the car I loo
ked through the legal pad pages I had carefully gathered up. David had written nothing on them; they were blank. Dierdre had been bluffing. She had no evidence of theft on my part. A pathetic attempt at blackmail had cost her her life.
But was it blackmail that she had in mind? I could no longer be certain. Perhaps she had prudently left the incriminating first draft with someone else for safekeeping. In that case, I was as good as cooked.
I was too traumatized to do anything but put some distance between myself and the lonely cemetery. Back at the Beverly Hills Hotel I opened a bottle of scotch, drank from the bottle until I was dizzy, then swooned across the bed. I dreamed, ghoulishly, of executions. Dierdre’s. Mine.
I awoke, in a fever of apprehension, to the odor of violets in the bungalow. I sat up, a sob in my throat. I heard the clink of a bottle neck against the rim of a glass, the soft gurgle of liquor poured over ice.
She came toward me illuminated in her own pure radiance, holding the glass out to me.
“Drink this,” she said. “You probably could use it.”
“Killed you,” I said in a pitiful croaking voice; my heart was slowly squeezed to the size of a peanut by a fist of iron.
She was wearing a simple white shift with a gold ceinture. One shoulder was bare. She had bound up her abundant, cedar-colored hair. Her forehead, where the bullet had smashed it, was now unblemished. Her expression was businesslike, as if she were there only to serve me.
“I told you,” she said. “I’m immortal.”
I took the whiskey from her hand—real flesh and blood to my own, stony fingers—and gulped it. The fist that gripped my heart relaxed and blood surged to my nearly comatose brain. I found that I could breathe.
“I really hoped you wouldn’t fail me,” Dierdre said. “That you would want to do the right thing. But I guess it isn’t in you, Jack.”
She spoke mildly, as if rebuking a puppy that had displeased her. I said nothing, only stared into her bright, strict eyes. Was I dreaming? Insane? If this was insanity, I was willing to make the most of it.
“What do you want me to do now?” I asked, desiring nothing more than a smile of favor in return for my capitulation.
She didn’t smile. “You’re strong. Healthy. Good for another twenty years, at least.”
I nodded hopefully.
“Now you will get the chance to earn the fame you’ve had so cheaply.”
“How?”
“You’re going to write. Jack. Write, and write, and write. As many as eighteen or twenty hours a day your muse will be with you, scarcely letting you rest.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” I said, and reached out to pull her into bed with me.
She drew back politely before I could touch her.
“Oh, no, Jack, it won’t be me. I have another assignment. You’ll be getting a different muse.”
“Who?”
Dierdre looked away from me. “The muse you deserve,” she said. “The Association is adamant about that.”
“That isn’t fair! I deserve you! I’m famous! I want—” Her celestial light dwindled to the size of a rubied ladybug in a corner of the dark room, turned scintillatingly and took wing, flew through the wall. I tumbled frenziedly out of bed and went to the spot where she had disappeared, standing on a chair to reach it. The spot was warm and glowing to my touch; an essence of fresh violets stung my eyes. And then the ravishing odor faded. I felt deserted, bereft. And a little frightened.
I poured myself another three fingers of scotch. The clock on the mantel in the living room whirred and chimed, four times.
A noisome odor was seeping into the bedroom, perhaps from outside the bungalow. An effluvium of Southern California’s patented smog, mixed with—oh, God—dead cat and overripe refuse and spoiled eggs, almost everything unpleasant and sickening that memory could recall. I had to soak a handkerchief in scotch and hold it to my nose as I went out to the living room, intending to ring the front desk and complain.
It was sitting in a wing chair by the fireplace, facing me. If it could be said to have a face. Watching me. If it could be said to have eyes. It waved a hand—no, no, no, how could one call such a barbed and bloated thing a human hand!—leaving a phosphorescent wake of putrefaction in the air. There was a seething corona, as of tainted, primordial gas, all around it. The thing belched more gases and rumbled and laughed at me. Yes, that sound could be interpreted as a laugh, though it was so dreadful I knew I was condemned to hear it repeated even in those few hours of exhausted sleep I would be entitled to for the rest of my natural life.
“Long as you’re up, pal,” my muse said to me, “why don’t we get to work?”
horrorshow
• 1 •
The Star-Light Drive-In
Nealy Bazemore stopped on the way to his shift at Lockheed for breakfast at the All-Niter Trucker’s Haven, which he did whenever his wife overslept or was out of town visiting relatives. The waitress he’d been casually hitting on, Taryn Melwood, was talking to some freak at the other end of the counter: young guy, tall and gaunt, but who could tell for sure about his age the way he wore his hair, and there was some gray showing in his straggly beard. He looked well-traveled. Taryn smiled as if she were really interested in whatever line the guy was handing her; but that was part of her job. Nealy fidgeted until he was able to catch her eye. Taryn came down to his end of the counter after drawing a mug of coffee for him.
“Running late this morning,” she commented.
“Yeah.” Nealy glanced at the bearded guy and the greasy blue backpack beside his stool. “Get all kinds off the road, don’t you?”
“Hero? He’s not so bad. He’s from England, how about that? Been in here off and on the last couple weeks.”
“Say what? ‘Hero’?”
“That’s what he says to call him. I can’t pronounce his regular name. He’s into all kinds of interesting stuff: astrology, and, you know, reads palms. Anyway, what are you having this morning, Nealy?”
“What do I always have, darlin’?”
“Coming right up.” Taryn bustled off to relay his breakfast order to the kitchen.
Nealy only had a few minutes, and Taryn was always busy at this time of the day, so when she served him his eggs over easy and sausage links he said, “Gaynell’s gone on down to Columbus to help out while her sister-in-law’s sick from her gallbladder, and Gaynell’s mama has the kids. I got me two tickets for George Strait at Six Flags which I hate to see go to waste, so like I was wondering—”
Taryn didn’t say anything, just glanced at him in a lively way before picking up another order and hustling it down near where the bearded Englishman was getting up from his stool. Taryn gave the shabby traveler a quick smile and a shrug to indicate she didn’t have the time to talk or get her palm read.
Nealy watched them, his lip curling. Well, tough luck, pardner. You’re just not that little gal’s type.
Nealy had known Taryn, his wife’s third cousin, most of her life, and had coveted her since she was a ripe fourteen. She was coarsely blond with brown roots, kept her hair that way on purpose, and it didn’t look tacky because she was young enough to get away with anything. She had big dark brown eyes and made them appear bigger with a lot of eye makeup, but she never bothered with lipstick. Her lips were naturally red and so well-shaped it gave him palpitations when he thought about kissing her.
The bearded guy passed behind Nealy with his backpack, and Nealy smelled him: not dirty, exactly, but pungent, an outdoorsman’s taint as if he slept in the woods. Nealy’s eggs got a little cold because he couldn’t concentrate on anything but Taryn and her teasing non-response. She took her time getting back to him.
“You’re not through with that?” she said, looking at his plate.
Nealy nodded and reached for a toothpick. Their eyes met. Taryn gave a little what-the-hell shake of her head and shoulders and smiled and said, “What time?”
“Six-thirty?”
“I’m in love with George Stra
it,” Taryn said severely, as if that let Nealy out. But Nealy felt close to bursting just the same.
“You living over at the Walking Ford Trailer Park?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. Don’t come in, though. Place is chockful of double-wides, and they all look alike. I’ll meet you out by the main entrance. Still driving that silver-and-black Subaru?”
“Best damn truck I ever owned,” Nealy bragged.
Nealy made it through the day without much on his mind but Taryn Melwood. He showered and shaved again when he got off work, polished his boots and put on a string tie. He bought a case of chilled Bud Lights and headed on down 41 to the trailer park, arriving promptly at six-thirty. Taryn was waiting for him, wearing a cute skirt that showed all of her kneecaps. With trick-or-treat eyes and her hair standing out from her head in a calculated tizzy, she looked, the way most of them looked at eighteen, like all of those hard-boiled female rock stars on MTV.
“That hat you got on is just like George Strait’s!” Taryn exclaimed, getting into the cab beside him.
“Yeah, well, does it look as good on me as it does on ol’ Texas George?”
Taryn was in a generous mood. “Nearly as good.”
“That’s okay, honey, I’ll take second place in your heart anytime.” Nealy reached behind him for a beer. “Want one?”
“No, and you don’t neither. Drinking and driving don’t mix, Nealy.”
“Honey, I’m gonna have just this one, then I won’t pop another top until after the concert.”
Taryn sat close to the door with her arms folded.
“I hope not. My best friend Marlene’s just a damn vegetable after what Ollie did to their Torino. Not to mention the kid who went through the windshield.”
“I’ll get rid of this one right now if it bothers you all that much.”
“I just figure I got too much to lose, Nealy. No bout a’ doubt it.”