1993

 

Mefisto in Onyx

Harlan Ellison

BEING AN EDITOR is a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Regrettably, as a full-time author, Ramsey decided that he could no longer devote so much of his energy to ploughing through the piles of submissions, and so he reluctantly decided that The Best New Horror Volume Five would be his last as co-editor.

I certainly enjoyed our five years of collaboration and, generously, he has remained an unofficial advisor and sounding board for this series over the subsequent years.

With the fifth volume, Robinson decided to give the book a total re-design. And thank goodness that they did. With a new, improved, logo, a split cover design, and Luis Rey’s superb artwork now highlighted in spot-varnish, the book finally achieved the impact it deserved. It also resulted in Carroll & Graf dropping its alternative hardcover edition in favour of the new-look trade paperback, finally bringing a sense of cohesion back to the series.

With the book’s total extent now more than 500 pages, the Introduction hit its stride at twenty-five pages, and the Necrology expanded to fourteen. For our final editorial together, Ramsey and I went on at some length about the current state of censorship on both sides of the Atlantic.

As we concluded: “So long as such controversy can be fanned by the cynical media, hypocritical politicians and misinformed public opinion, we should all be on our guard. It is all too easy to use horror fiction and films as a scapegoat for economic and social deprivation. As most intelligent people realize, fiction is only a reflection of life. The real problems exist elsewhere . . .”

Over the intervening fifteen years, nothing very much has happened to change that opinion.

Among the twenty-nine contributions was the first appearance in Best New Horror of the amazingly talented Terry Lamsley, along with Dennis Etchison’s British Fantasy Award-winning story “The Dog Park”. In fact, Ramsey and I dedicated the book to Dennis in recognition of our first visit to Mexico with him some years earlier, when he acted as our intrepid guide.

Choosing a representative story from this particular volume was easy.

Harlan Ellison has a reputation of sometimes being difficult to work with. Ye t in all my dealings with him over the years, I have never found him to be other than extremely pleasant and accommodating. In fact, when it comes to publishing his work, he is the consummate professional – something an editor always appreciates.

At the time, the Bram Stoker Award-winning novella “Mefisto in Onyx” was one of the longest pieces of fiction Harlan had written in some years. It was also, without any doubt, one of the most powerful . . .

ONCE. I ONLY WENT to bed with her once. Friends for eleven years – before and since – but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year’s Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn’t have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we’d be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants . . .

But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap sexual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other peoples’ minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.

It was always foul.

Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you’d think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out – take my word for it – you’d want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.

Trust me on this: I go into somebody’s landscape when there’s nothing else I can do, no other possible solution . . . or I forget and do it in a moment of human weakness. Such as, say, the IRS holds my feet to the fire; or I’m about to get myself mugged and robbed and maybe murdered; or I need to find out if some specific she that I’m dating has been using somebody else’s dirty needle or has been sleeping around without she’s taking some extra-heavy-duty AIDS precautions; or a co-worker’s got it in his head to set me up so I make a mistake and look bad to the boss and I find myself in the unemployment line again; or . . .

I’m a wreck for weeks after.

Go jaunting through a landscape trying to pick up a little insider arbitrage bric-a-brac, and come away no better heeled, but all muddy with the guy’s infidelities, and I can’t look a decent woman in the eye for days. Get told by a motel desk clerk that they’re all full up and he’s sorry as hell but I’ll just have to drive on for about another thirty miles to find the next vacancy, jaunt into his landscape and find him lit up with neon signs that got a lot of the word nigger in them, and I wind up hitting the sonofabitch so hard his grandmother has a bloody nose, and usually have to hide out for three or four weeks after. Just about to miss a bus, jaunt into the head of the driver to find his name so I can yell for him to hold it a minute Tom or George or Willie, and I get smacked in the mind with all the garlic he’s been eating for the past month because his doctor told him it was good for his system, and I start to dry-heave, and I wrench out of the landscape, and not only have I missed the bus, but I’m so sick to my stomach I have to sit down on the filthy curb to get my gorge submerged. Jaunt into a potential employer, to see if he’s trying to lowball me, and I learn he’s part of a massive cover-up of industrial malfeasance that’s caused hundreds of people to die when this or that cheaply-made grommet or tappet or gimbal mounting underperforms and fails, sending the poor souls falling thousands of feet to shrieking destruction. Then just try to accept the job, even if you haven’t paid your rent in a month. No way.

Absolutely: I listen in on the landscape only when my feet are being fried; when the shadow stalking me turns down alley after alley tracking me relentlessly; when the drywall guy I’ve hired to repair the damage done by my leaky shower presents me with a dopey smile and a bill three hundred and sixty bucks higher than the estimate. Or in a moment of human weakness.

But I’m a wreck for weeks after. For weeks.

Because you can’t, you simply can’t, you absolutely cannot know what people are truly and really like till you jaunt their landscape. If Aquinas had had my ability, he’d have very quickly gone off to be a hermit, only occasionally visiting the mind of a sheep or a hedgehog. In a moment of human weakness.

That’s why in my whole life – and, as best I can remember back, I’ve been doing it since I was five- or six-years-old, maybe even younger – there have only been eleven, maybe twelve people, of all those who know that I can “read minds”, that I’ve permitted myself to get close to. Three of them never used it against me, or tried to exploit me, or tried to kill me when I wasn’t looking. Two of those three were my mother and father, a pair of sweet old black folks who’d adopted me, a late-in-life baby, and were now dead (but probably still worried about me, even on the Other Side), and whom I missed very very much, particularly in moments like this. The other eight, nine were either so turned off by the knowledge that they made sure I never came within a mile of them – one moved to another entire country just to be on the safe side, although her thoughts were a helluva lot more boring and innocent than she thought they were – or they tried to brain me with something heavy when I was distracted – I still have a shoulder separation that kills me for two days before it rains – or they tried to use me to make a buck for them. Not having the common sense to figure it out, that if I was capable of using the ability to make vast sums of money, why the hell was I living hand-to-mouth like some overaged grad student who was afraid to desert the university and go become an adult?

Now they was some dumb-ass muthuhfugguhs.

Of the three who never used it against me – my mom and dad – the last was Allison Roche. Who sat on the stool next to me, in the middle of May, in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of Clanton, Alabama, squeezing ketchup onto her All-American Burger, imposing on the memory of that one damned New Year’s Eve sexual interlude, with Harpo and his sibs; the two of us all alone except for the fry-cook; and she waited for my reply.

“I’d sooner have a skunk spray my pants leg,” I replied.

She pulled a napkin from the chrome dispenser and swabbed up the red that had overshot the sesame-seed bun and redecorated the Formica countertop. She looked at me from under thick, lustrous eyelashes; a look of impatience and violet eyes that must have been a killer when she unbottled it at some truculent witness for the defence. Allison Roche was a Chief Deputy District Attorney in and for Jefferson County, with her office in Birmingham. Alabama. Where near we sat, in Clanton, having a secret meeting, having All-American Burgers; three years after having had quite a bit of champagne, 1930s black-and-white video rental comedy, and black-and-white sex. One extremely stupid New Year’s Eve.

Friends for eleven years. And once, just once; as a prime example of what happens in a moment of human weakness. Which is not to say that it wasn’t terrific, because it was; absolutely terrific; but we never did it again; and we never brought it up again after the next morning when we opened our eyes and looked at each other the way you look at an exploding can of sardines, and both of us said Oh Jeeezus at the same time. Never brought it up again until this memorable afternoon at the greasy spoon where I’d joined Ally, driving up from Montgomery to meet her halfway, after her peculiar telephone invitation.

Can’t say the fry-cook, Mr All-American, was particularly happy at the pigmentation arrangement at his counter. But I stayed out of his head and let him think what he wanted. Times change on the outside, but the inner landscape remains polluted.

“All I’m asking you to do is go have a chat with him,” she said. She gave me that look. I have a hard time with that look. It isn’t entirely honest, neither is it entirely disingenuous. It plays on my remembrance of that one night we spent in bed. And is just dishonest enough to play on the part of that night we spent on the floor, on the sofa, on the coffee counter between the dining room and the kitchenette, in the bathtub, and about nineteen minutes crammed among her endless pairs of shoes in a walk-in clothes closet that smelled strongly of cedar and virginity. She gave me that look, and wasted no part of the memory.

“I don’t want to go have a chat with him. Apart from he’s a piece of human shit, and I have better things to do with my time than to go on down to Atmore and take a jaunt through this crazy sonofabitch’s diseased mind, may I remind you that of the hundred and sixty, seventy men who have died in that electric chair, including the original ‘Yellow Mama’ they scrapped in 1990, about a hundred and thirty of them were gentlemen of colour, and I do not mean you to picture any colour of a shade much lighter than that cuppa coffee you got sittin’ by your left hand right this minute, which is to say that I, being an inordinately well-educated African-American who values the full measure of living negritude in his body, am not crazy enough to want to visit a racist ‘co-rectional centre’ like Holman Prison, thank you very much.”

“Are you finished?” she asked, wiping her mouth.

“Yeah. I’m finished. Case closed. Find somebody else.”

She didn’t like that. “There isn’t anybody else.”

“There has to be. Somewhere. Go check the research files at Duke University. Call the Fortean Society. Mensa. Jeopardy. Some 900 number astrology psychic hotline. Ain’t there some semi-senile Senator with a full-time paid assistant who’s been trying to get legislation through one of the statehouses for the last five years to fund this kind of bullshit research? What about the Russians . . . now that the Evil Empire’s fallen, you ought to be able to get some word about their success with Kirlian auras or whatever those assholes were working at. Or you could—”

She screamed at the top of her lungs. “Stop it, Rudy!”

The fry-cook dropped the spatula he’d been using to scrape off the grill. He picked it up, looking at us, and his face (I didn’t read his mind) said If that white bitch makes one more noise I’m callin’ the cops.

I gave him a look he didn’t want, and he went back to his chores, getting ready for the after-work crowd. But the stretch of his back and angle of his head told me he wasn’t going to let this pass.

I leaned in toward her, got as serious as I could, and just this quietly, just this softly, I said, “Ally, good pal, listen to me. You’ve been one of the few friends I could count on, for a long time now. We have history between us, and you’ve never, not once, made me feel like a freak. So okay, I trust you. I trust you with something about me that causes immeasurable goddam pain. A thing about me that could get me killed. You’ve never betrayed me, and you’ve never tried to use me.

“Till now. This is the first time. And you’ve got to admit that it’s not even as rational as you maybe saying to me that you’ve gambled away every cent you’ve got and you owe the mob a million bucks and would I mind taking a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City and taking a jaunt into the minds of some high-pocket poker players so I could win you enough to keep the goons from shooting you. Even that, as creepy as it would be if you said it to me, even that would be easier to understand than this!”

She looked forlorn. “There isn’t anybody else, Rudy. Please.”

“What the hell is this all about? Come on, tell me. You’re hiding something, or holding something back, or lying about—”

“I’m not lying!” For the second time she was suddenly, totally, extremely pissed at me. Her voice spattered off the white tile walls. The fry-cook spun around at the sound, took a step toward us, and I jaunted into his landscape, smoothed down the rippled Astro-Turf, drained away the storm clouds, and suggested in there that he go take a cigarette break out back. Fortunately, there were no other patrons at the elegant All-American Burger that late in the afternoon, and he went.

“Calm fer chrissakes down, will you?” I said.

She had squeezed the paper napkin into a ball.

She was lying, hiding, holding something back. Didn’t have to be a telepath to figure that out. I waited, looking at her with a slow, careful distrust, and finally she sighed, and I thought, Here it comes.

“Are you reading my mind?” she asked.

“Don’t insult me. We know each other too long.”

She looked chagrined. The violet of her eyes deepened. “Sorry.”

But she didn’t go on. I wasn’t going to be outflanked. I waited.

After a while she said, softly, very softly, “I think I’m in love with him. I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.”

I never expected that. I couldn’t even reply.

It was unbelievable. Unfuckingbelievable. She was the Chief Deputy D.A. who had prosecuted Henry Lake Spanning for murder. Not just one murder, one random slaying, a heat of the moment Saturday night killing regretted deeply on Sunday morning but punishable by electrocution in the Sovereign State of Alabama nonetheless, but a string of the vilest, most sickening serial slaughters in Alabama history, in the history of the Glorious South, in the history of the United States. Maybe even in the history of the entire wretched human universe that went wading hip-deep in the wasted spilled blood of innocent men, women and children.

Henry Lake Spanning was a monster, an ambulatory disease, a killing machine without conscience or any discernible resemblance to a thing we might call decently human. Henry Lake Spanning had butchered his way across a half-dozen states; and they had caught up to him in Huntsville, in a garbage dumpster behind a supermarket, doing something so vile and inhuman to what was left of a sixty-five-year-old cleaning woman that not even the tabloids would get more explicit than unspeakable; and somehow he got away from the cops; and somehow he evaded their dragnet; and somehow he found out where the police lieutenant in charge of the manhunt lived; and somehow he slipped into that neighbourhood when the lieutenant was out creating roadblocks – and he gutted the man’s wife and two kids. Also the family cat. And then he killed a couple of more times in Birmingham and Decatur, and by then had gone so completely out of his mind that they got him again, and the second time they hung onto him, and they brought him to trial. And Ally had prosecuted this bottom-feeding monstrosity.

And oh, what a circus it had been. Though he’d been caught, the second time, and this time for keeps, in Jefferson County, scene of three of his most sickening jobs, he’d murdered (with such a disgustingly similar m.o. that it was obvious he was the perp) in twenty-two of the sixty-seven counties; and every last one of them wanted him to stand trial in that venue. Then there were the other five states in which he had butchered, to a total body-count of fifty-six. Each of them wanted him extradited.

So, here’s how smart and quick and smooth an attorney Ally is: she somehow managed to coze up to the Attorney General, and somehow managed to unleash those violet eyes on him, and somehow managed to get and keep his ear long enough to con him into setting a legal precedent. Attorney General of the State of Alabama allowed Allison Roche to consolidate, to secure a multiple bill of indictment that forced Spanning to stand trial on all twenty-nine Alabama murder counts at once. She meticulously documented to the state’s highest courts that Henry Lake Spanning presented such a clear and present danger to society that the prosecution was willing to take a chance (big chance!) of trying in a winner-take-all consolidation of venues. Then she managed to smooth the feathers of all those other vote-hungry prosecuters in those twenty-one other counties, and she put on a case that dazzled everyone, including Spanning’s defence attorney, who had screamed about the legality of the multiple bill from the moment she’d suggested it.

And she won a fast jury verdict on all twenty-nine counts. Then she got really fancy in the penalty phase after the jury verdict, and proved up the other twenty-seven murders with their flagrantly identical trademarks, from those other five states, and there was nothing left but to sentence Spanning – essentially for all fifty-six – to the replacement for the “Yellow Mama”.

Even as pols and power brokers throughout the state were murmuring Ally’s name for higher office, Spanning was slated to sit in that new electric chair in Holman Prison, built by the Fred A. Leuchter Associates of Boston, Massachusetts, that delivers 2,640 volts of pure sparklin’ death in 1/240th of a second, six times faster than the 1/40th of a second that it takes for the brain to sense it, which is – if you ask me – much too humane an exit line, more than three times the 700 volt jolt lethal dose that destroys a brain, for a pusbag like Henry Lake Spanning.

But if we were lucky – and the scheduled day of departure was very nearly upon us – if we were lucky, if there was a God and Justice and Natural Order and all that good stuff, then Henry Lake Spanning, this foulness, this corruption, this thing that lived only to ruin . . . would end up as a pile of fucking ashes somebody might use to sprinkle over a flower garden, thereby providing this ghoul with his single opportunity to be of some use to the human race.

That was the guy that my pal Allison Roche wanted me to go and “chat” with, down to Holman Prison, in Atmore, Alabama. There, sitting on Death Row, waiting to get his demented head tonsured, his pants legs slit, his tongue fried black as the inside of a sheep’s belly . . . down there at Holman my pal Allison wanted me to go “chat” with one of the most awful creatures made for killing this side of a hammerhead shark, which creature had an infinitely greater measure of human decency than Henry Lake Spanning had ever demonstrated. Go chit-chat, and enter his landscape, and read his mind, Mr Telepath, and use the marvellous mythic power of extrasensory perception: this nifty swell ability that has made me a bum all my life, well, not exactly a bum: I do have a decent apartment, and I do earn a decent, if sporadic, living; and I try to follow Nelson Algren’s warning never to get involved with a woman whose troubles are bigger than my own; and sometimes I even have a car of my own, even though at that moment such was not the case, the Camaro having been repo’d, and not by Harry Dean Stanton or Emilio Estevez, lemme tell you; but a bum in the sense of – how does Ally put it? – oh yeah – I don’t “realize my full and forceful potential” – a bum in the sense that I can’t hold a job, and I get rotten breaks, and all of this despite a Rhodes scholarly education so far above what a poor nigrahlad such as myself could expect that even Rhodes hisownself would’ve been chest-out proud as hell of me. A bum, mostly, despite an outstanding Rhodes scholar education and a pair of kind, smart, loving parents – even for foster-parents – shit, especially for being foster-parents – who died knowing the certain sadness that their only child would spend his life as a wandering freak unable to make a comfortable living or consummate a normal marriage or raise children without the fear of passing on this special personal horror . . . this astonishing ability fabled in song and story that I possess . . . that no one else seems to possess, though I know there must have been others, somewhere, sometime, somehow! Go, Mr Wonder of Wonders, shining black Cagliostro of the modern world, go with this super nifty swell ability that gullible idiots and flying saucer assholes have been trying to prove exists for at least fifty years, that no one has been able to isolate the way I, me, the only one has been isolated, let me tell you about isolation, my brothers; and here I was, here was I, Rudy Pairis . . . just a guy, making a buck every now and then with nifty swell impossible ESP, resident of thirteen states and twice that many cities so far in his mere thirty years of landscape-jaunting life, here was I, Rudy Pairis, Mr I-Can-Read-Your-Mind, being asked to go and walk through the mind of a killer who scared half the people in the world. Being asked by the only living person, probably, to whom I could not say no. And, oh, take me at my word here: I wanted to say no. Was, in fact, saying no at every breath. What’s that? Will I do it? Sure, yeah sure, I’ll go on down to Holman and jaunt through this sick bastard’s mind landscape. Sure I will. You got two chances: slim, and none.

All of this was going on in the space of one greasy double cheeseburger and two cups of coffee.

The worst part of it was that Ally had somehow gotten involved with him. Ally! Not some bimbo bitch . . . but Ally. I couldn’t believe it.

Not that it was unusual for women to become mixed up with guys in the joint, to fall under their “magic spell”, and to start corresponding with them, visiting them, taking them candy and cigarettes, having conjugal visits, playing mule for them and smuggling in dope where the tampon never shine, writing them letters that got steadily more exotic, steadily more intimate, steamier and increasingly dependent emotionally. It wasn’t that big a deal; there exist entire psychiatric treatises on the phenomenon; right alongside the papers about women who go stud-crazy for cops. No big deal indeed: hundreds of women every year find themselves writing to these guys, visiting these guys, building dream castles with these guys, fucking these guys, pretending that even the worst of these guys, rapists and woman-beaters and child molesters, repeat paedophiles of the lowest pustule sort, and murderers and stick-up punks who crush old ladies’ skulls for food stamps, and terrorists and bunco barons . . . that one sunny might-be, gonna-happen pink cloud day these demented creeps will emerge from behind the walls, get back in the wind, become upstanding nine-to-five Brooks Bros. Galahads. Every year hundreds of women marry these guys, finding themselves in a hot second snookered by the wily, duplicitous, motherfuckin’ lying greaseball addictive behaviour of guys who had spent their sporadic years, their intermittent freedom on the outside, doing just that: roping people in, ripping people off, bleeding people dry, conning them into being tools, taking them for their every last cent, their happy home, their sanity, their ability to trust or love ever again.

But this wasn’t some poor illiterate naïve woman-child. This was Ally. She had damned near pulled off a legal impossibility, come that close to Bizarro Jurisprudence by putting the Attorneys General of five other states in a maybe frame of mind where she’d have been able to consolidate a multiple bill of indictment across state lines! Never been done; and now, probably, never ever would be. But she could have possibly pulled off such a thing. Unless you’re a stone court-bird, you can’t know what a mountaintop that is!

So, now, here’s Ally, saying this shit to me. Ally, my best pal, stood up for me a hundred times; not some dip, but the steely-eyed Sheriff of Suicide Gulch, the over-forty, past the age of innocence, no-nonsense woman who had seen it all and come away tough but not cynical, hard but not mean.

“I think I’m in love with him.” She had said.

“I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.” She had said.

I looked at her. No time had passed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, “So if you’re certain this paragon of the virtues isn’t responsible for fifty-six murders – that we know about – and who the hell knows how many more we don’t know about, since he’s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old – remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this shit about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember? – then if you’re so damned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet – then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?

“Doesn’t your ‘woman’s intuition’ tell you he’s squeaky clean? Don’t ‘true love’ walk yo’ sweet young ass down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?”

“Don’t be a smartass!” she said.

“Say again?” I replied, with disfuckingbelief.

“I said: don’t be such a high-verbal goddamned smart aleck!”

Now I was steamed. “No, I shouldn’t be a smartass: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind-reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from Hell; sit your ass down on Death Row with the rest of the niggers and have a chat with the one white boy who’s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sit down nicely with the king of the fucking vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain – and what a joy that’s gonna be, I can’t believe you’d ask me to do this – and read whatever piece of boiled shit in there he calls a brain, and see if he’s jerking you around. That’s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smartass. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?”

She stood up. She didn’t even say Screw you, Pairis!

She just slapped me as hard as she could.

She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.

I felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip. I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I’d fall off the goddam stool.

When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as hell, and worried that she’d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I’d broken her choo-choo train.

“Okay,” I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. “Okay, calm down. I’ll see him. I’ll do it. Take it easy.”

She didn’t sit down. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, of course not,” I said, unable to form the smile I was trying to put on my face. “How could you possibly hurt someone by knocking his brains into his lap?”

She stood over me as I clung precariously to the counter, turned halfway around on the stool by the blow. Stood over me, the balled-up paper napkin in her fist, a look on her face that said she was nobody’s fool, that we’d known each other a long time, that she hadn’t asked this kind of favour before, that if we were buddies and I loved her, that I would see she was in deep pain, that she was conflicted, that she needed to know, really needed to know without a doubt, and in the name of God – in which she believed, though I didn’t, but either way what the hell – that I do this thing for her, that I just do it and not give her any more crap about it.

So I shrugged, and spread my hands like a man with no place to go, and I said, “How’d you get into this?”

She told me the first fifteen minutes of her tragic, heartwarming, never-to-be-ridiculed story still standing. After fifteen minutes I said, “Fer chrissakes, Ally, at least sit down! You look like a damned fool standing there with a greasy napkin in your mitt.”

A couple of teenagers had come in. The four-star chef had finished his cigarette out back and was reassuringly in place, walking the duckboards and dishing up All-American arterial cloggage.

She picked up her elegant attaché case and without a word, with only a nod that said let’s get as far from them as we can, she and I moved to a double against the window to resume our discussion of the varieties of social suicide available to an unwary and foolhardy gentleman of the coloured persuasion if he allowed himself to be swayed by a cagey and cogent, clever and concupiscent female of another colour entirely.

See, what it is, is this:

Look at that attaché case. You want to know what kind of an Ally this Allison Roche is? Pay heed, now.

In New York, when some wannabe junior ad exec has smooched enough butt to get tossed a bone account, and he wants to walk his colours, has a need to signify, has got to demonstrate to everyone that he’s got the juice, first thing he does, he hies his ass downtown to Barney’s, West 17th and Seventh, buys hisself a Burberry, loops the belt casually behind, leaving the coat open to suhwing, and he circumnavigates the office.

In Dallas, when the wife of the CEO has those six or eight upper-management husbands and wives over for an intime, faux-casual dinner, sans placecards, sans entrée fork, sans cérémonie, and we’re talking the kind of woman who flies Virgin Air instead of the Concorde, she’s so in charge she don’t got to use the Orrefors, she can put out the Kosta Boda and say give a fuck.

What it is, kind of person so in charge, so easy with they own self, they don’t have to laugh at your poor dumb struttin’ Armani suit, or your bedroom done in Laura Ashley, or that you got a gig writing articles for TV Guide. You see what I’m sayin’ here? The sort of person Ally Roche is, you take a look at that attaché case, and it’ll tell you everything you need to know about how strong she is, because it’s an Atlas. Not a Hartmann. Understand: she could afford a Hartmann, that gorgeous imported Canadian belting leather, top of the line, somewhere around nine hundred and fifty bucks maybe, equivalent of Orrefors, a Burberry, breast of guinea hen and Mouton Rothschild 1492 or 1066 or whatever year is the most expensive, drive a Rolls instead of a Bentley and the only difference is the grille . . . but she doesn’t need to signify, doesn’t need to suhwing, so she gets herself this Atlas. Not some dumb chickenshit Louis Vuitton or Mark Cross all the divorcée real estate ladies carry, but an Atlas. Irish hand leather. Custom tanned cowhide. Hand tanned in Ireland by out of work IRA bombers. Very classy. Just a state understated. See that attaché case? That tell you why I said I’d do it?

She picked it up from where she’d stashed it, right up against the counter wall by her feet, and we went to the double over by the window, away from the chef and the teenagers, and she stared at me till she was sure I was in a right frame of mind, and she picked up where she’d left off.

The next twenty-three minutes by the big greasy clock on the wall she related from a sitting position. Actually, a series of sitting positions. She kept shifting in her chair like someone who didn’t appreciate the view of the world from that window, someone hoping for a sweeter horizon. The story started with a gang-rape at the age of thirteen, and moved right along: two broken foster-home families, a little casual fondling by surrogate poppas, intense studying for perfect school grades as a substitute for happiness, working her way through John Jay College of Law, a truncated attempt at wedded bliss in her late twenties, and the long miserable road of legal success that had brought her to Alabama. There could have been worse places.

I’d known Ally for a long time, and we’d spent totals of weeks and months in each other’s company. Not to mention the New Year’s Eve of the Marx Brothers. But I hadn’t heard much of this. Not much at all.

Funny how that goes. Eleven years. You’d think I’d’ve guessed or suspected or something. What the hell makes us think we’re friends with anybody, when we don’t know the first thing about them, not really?

What are we, walking around in a dream? That is to say: what the fuck are we thinking!?!

And there might never have been a reason to hear any of it, all this Ally that was the real Ally, but now she was asking me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go, to do something that scared the shit out of me; and she wanted me to be as fully informed as possible.

It dawned on me that those same eleven years between us hadn’t really given her a full, laser-clean insight into the why and wherefore of Rudy Pairis, either. I hated myself for it. The concealing, the holding-back, the giving up only fragments, the evil misuse of charm when honesty would have hurt. I was facile, and a very quick study; and I had buried all the equivalents to Ally’s pains and travails. I could’ve matched her, in spades; or blacks, or just plain nigras. But I remained frightened of losing her friendship. I’ve never been able to believe in the myth of unqualified friendship. To o much like standing hip-high in a fast-running, freezing river. Standing on slippery stones.

Her story came forward to the point at which she had prosecuted Spanning; had amassed and winnowed and categorized the evidence so thoroughly, so deliberately, so flawlessly; had orchestrated the case so brilliantly; that the jury had come in with guilty on all twenty-nine, soon – in the penalty phase – fifty-six. Murder in the first. Premeditated murder in the first. Premeditated murder with special ugly circumstances in the first. On each and every of the twenty-nine. Less than an hour it took them. There wasn’t even time for a lunch break. Fifty-one minutes it took them to come back with the verdict guilty on all charges. Less than a minute per killing. Ally had done that.

His attorney had argued that no direct link had been established between the fifty-sixth killing (actually, only his 29th in Alabama) and Henry Lake Spanning. No, they had not caught him down on his knees eviscerating the shredded body of his final victim – ten-year-old Gunilla Ascher, a parochial school girl who had missed her bus and been picked up by Spanning just about a mile from her home in Decatur – no, not down on his knees with the can opener still in his sticky red hands, but the m.o. was the same, and he was there in Decatur, on the run from what he had done in Huntsville, what they had caught him doing in Huntsville, in that dumpster, to that old woman. So they couldn’t place him with his smooth, slim hands inside dead Gunilla Ascher’s still-steaming body. So what? They could not have been surer he was the serial killer, the monster, the ravaging nightmare whose methods were so vile the newspapers hadn’t even tried to cobble up some smart-aleck name for him like The Strangler or The Backyard Butcher. The jury had come back in fifty-one minutes, looking sick, looking as if they’d try and try to get everything they’d seen and heard out of their minds, but knew they never would, and wishing to God they could’ve managed to get out of their civic duty on this one.

They came shuffling back in and told the numbed court: hey, put this slimy excuse for a maggot in the chair and cook his ass till he’s fit only to be served for breakfast on cinnamon toast. This was the guy my friend Ally told me she had fallen in love with. The guy she now believed to be innocent.

This was seriously crazy stuff.

“So how did you get, er, uh, how did you . . .?”

“How did I fall in love with him?”

“Yeah. That.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and pursed her lips as if she had lost a flock of wayward words and didn’t know where to find them. I’d always known she was a private person, kept the really important history to herself – hell, until now I’d never known about the rape, the ice mountain between her mother and father, the specifics of the seven-month marriage – I’d known there’d been a husband briefly; but not what had happened; and I’d known about the foster homes; but again, not how lousy it had been for her – even so, getting this slice of steaming craziness out of her was like using your teeth to pry the spikes out of Jesus’s wrists.

Finally, she said, “I took over the case when Charlie Whilborg had his stroke . . .”

“I remember.”

‘He was the best litigator in the office, and if he hadn’t gone down two days before they caught . . .” she paused, had trouble with the name, went on, “. . . before they caught Spanning in Decatur, and if Morgan County hadn’t been so worried about a case this size, and bound Spanning over to us in Birmingham . . . all of it so fast nobody really had a chance to talk to him . . . I was the first one even got near him, everyone was so damned scared of him, of what they thought he was . . .”

“Hallucinating, were they?” I said, being a smartass.

“Shut up.

“The office did most of the donkeywork after that first interview I had with him. It was a big break for me in the office; and I got obsessed by it. So after the first interview, I never spent much actual time with Spanky, never got too close, to see what kind of a man he really . . .”

I said: “Spanky? Who the hell’s ‘Spanky’?”

She blushed. It started from the sides of her nostrils and went out both ways toward her ears, then climbed to the hairline. I’d seen that happen only a couple of times in eleven years, and one of those times had been when she’d farted at the opera. Lucia di Lammermoor.

I said it again: “Spanky? You’re putting me on, right? You call him Spanky?” The blush deepened. “Like the fat kid in The Little Rascals . . . c’mon, I don’t fuckin’ believe this!”

She just glared at me.

I felt the laughter coming.

My face started twitching.

She stood up again. “Forget it. Just forget it, okay?” She took two steps away from the table, toward the street exit. I grabbed her hand and pulled her back, trying not to fall apart with laughter, and I said, “Okay okay okay . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m really and truly, honest to goodness, may I be struck by a falling space lab no kidding 100 per cent absolutely sorry . . . but you gotta admit . . . catching me unawares like that . . . I mean, come on, Ally . . . Spanky!?! You call this guy who murdered at least fifty-six people Spanky? Why not Mickey, or Froggy, or Alfalfa . . .? I can understand not calling him Buckwheat, you can save that one for me, but Spanky???”

And in a moment her face started to twitch; and in another moment she was starting to smile, fighting it every micron of the way; and in another moment she was laughing and swatting at me with her free hand; and then she pulled her hand loose and stood there falling apart with laughter; and in about a minute she was sitting down again. She threw the balled-up napkin at me.

“It’s from when he was a kid,” she said. “He was a fat kid, and they made fun of him. You know the way kids are . . . they corrupted Spanning into ‘Spanky’ because The Little Rascals were on television and . . . oh, shut up, Rudy!”

I finally quieted down, and made conciliatory gestures.

She watched me with an exasperated wariness till she was sure I wasn’t going to run any more dumb gags on her, and then she resumed. “After Judge Fay sentenced him, I handled Spa . . . Henry’s case from our office, all the way up to the appeals stage. I was the one who did the pleading against clemency when Henry’s lawyers took their appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta.

“When he was denied a stay by the appellate, three-to-nothing, I helped prepare the brief when Henry’s counsel went to the Alabama Supreme Court; then when the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, I thought it was all over. I knew they’d run out of moves for him, except maybe the Governor; but that wasn’t ever going to happen. So I thought: that’s that.

“When the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it three weeks ago, I got a letter from him. He’d been set for execution next Saturday, and I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to see me.”

I asked, “The letter . . . it got to you how?”

“One of his attorneys.”

“I thought they’d given up on him.”

“So did I. The evidence was so overwhelming; half a dozen counselors found ways to get themselves excused; it wasn’t the kind of case that would bring any litigator good publicity. Just the number of eyewitnesses in the parking lot of that Winn-Dixie in Huntsville . . . must have been fifty of them, Rudy. And they all saw the same thing, and they all identified Henry in lineup after lineup, twenty, thirty, could have been fifty of them if we’d needed that long a parade. And all the rest of it . . .”

I held up a hand. I know, the flat hand against the air said. She had told me all of this. Every grisly detail, till I wanted to puke. It was as if I’d done it all myself, she was so vivid in her telling. Made my jaunting nausea pleasurable by comparison. Made me so sick I couldn’t even think about it. Not even in a moment of human weakness.

“So the letter comes to you from the attorney . . .”

“I think you know this lawyer. Larry Borlan; used to be with the ACLU; before that he was senior counsel for the Alabama Legislature down to Montgomery; stood up, what was it, twice, three times, before the Supreme Court? Excellent guy. And not easily fooled.”

“And what’s he think about all this?”

“He thinks Henry’s absolutely innocent.”

“Of all of it?”

“Of everything.”

“But there were fifty disinterested random eyewitnesses at one of those slaughters. Fifty, you just said it. Fifty, you could’ve had a parade. All of them nailed him cold, without a doubt. Same kind of kill as all the other fifty-five, including that schoolkid in Decatur when they finally got him. And Larry Borlan thinks he’s not the guy, right?”

She nodded. Made one of those sort of comic pursings of the lips, shrugged, and nodded. “Not the guy.”

“So the killer’s still out there?”

“That’s what Borlan thinks.”

“And what do you think?”

“I agree with him.”

“Oh, jeezus, Ally, my aching boots and saddle! You got to be workin’ some kind of off-time! The killer is still out here in the mix, but there hasn’t been a killing like those Spanning slaughters for the three years that he’s been in the joint. Now what do that say to you?”

“It says whoever the guy is, the one who killed all those people, he’s days smarter than all the rest of us, and he set up the perfect freefloater to take the fall for him, and he’s either long far gone in some other state, working his way, or he’s sitting quietly right here in Alabama, waiting and watching. And smiling.” Her face seemed to sag with misery. She started to tear up, and said, “In four days he can stop smiling.”

Saturday night.

“Okay, take it easy. Go on, tell me the rest of it. Borlan comes to you, and he begs you to read Spanning’s letter and . . .?”

“He didn’t beg. He just gave me the letter, told me he had no idea what Henry had written, but he said he’d known me a long time, that he thought I was a decent, fair-minded person, and he’d appreciate it in the name of our friendship if I’d read it.”

“So you read it.”

“I read it.”

“Friendship. Sounds like you an’ him was good friends. Like maybe you and I were good friends?”

She looked at me with astonishment.

I think I looked at me with astonishment.

“Where the hell did that come from?” I said.

“Yeah, really,” she said, right back at me, “where the hell did that come from?” My ears were hot, and I almost started to say something about how if it was okay for her to use our Marx Brothers indiscretion for a lever, why wasn’t it okay for me to get cranky about it? But I kept my mouth shut; and for once knew enough to move along. “Must’ve been some letter,” I said.

There was a long moment of silence during which she weighed the degree of shit she’d put me through for my stupid remark, after all this was settled; and having struck a balance in her head, she told me about the letter.

It was perfect. It was the only sort of come-on that could lure the avenger who’d put you in the chair to pay attention. The letter had said that fifty-six was not the magic number of death. That there were many, many more unsolved cases, in many, many different states; lost children, runaways, unexplained disappearances, old people, college students hitchhiking to Sarasota for Spring Break, shopkeepers who’d carried their day’s take to the night deposit drawer and never gone home for dinner, hookers left in pieces in Hefty bags all over town, and death death death unnumbered and unnamed. Fifty-six, the letter had said, was just the start. And if she, her, no one else, Allison Roche, my pal Ally, would come on down to Holman, and talk to him, Henry Lake Spanning would help her close all those open files. National rep. Avenger of the unsolved. Big time mysteries revealed. “So you read the letter, and you went . . .”

“Not at first. Not immediately. I was sure he was guilty, and I was pretty certain at that moment, three years and more, dealing with the case, I was pretty sure if he said he could fill in all the blank spaces, that he could do it. But I just didn’t like the idea. In court, I was always twitchy when I got near him at the defense table. His eyes, he never took them off me. They’re blue, Rudy, did I tell you that . . .?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember. Go on.”

“Bluest blue you’ve ever seen . . . well, to tell the truth, he just plain scared me. I wanted to win that case so badly, Rudy, you can never know . . . not just for me or the career or for the idea of justice or to avenge all those people he’d killed, but just the thought of him out there on the street, with those blue eyes, so blue, never stopped looking at me from the moment the trial began . . . the thought of him on the loose drove me to whip that case like a howling dog. I had to put him away!”

“But you overcame your fear.”

She didn’t like the edge of ridicule on the blade of that remark. “That’s right. I finally ‘overcame my fear’ and I agreed to go see him.”

“And you saw him.”

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t know shit about no other killings, right?”

“Yes.”

“But he talked a good talk. And his eyes was blue, so blue.”

“Yes, you asshole.”

I chuckled. Everybody is somebody’s fool.

“Now let me ask you this – very carefully – so you don’t hit me again: the moment you discovered he’d been shuckin’ you, lyin’, that he didn’t have this long, unsolved crime roster to tick off, why didn’t you get up, load your attaché case, and hit the bricks?”

Her answer was simple. “He begged me to stay a while.”

“That’s it? He begged you?”

“Rudy, he has no one. He’s never had anyone.” She looked at me as if I were made of stone, some basalt thing, an onyx statue, a figure carved out of melanite, soot and ashes fused into a monolith. She feared she could not, in no way, no matter how piteously or bravely she phrased it, penetrate my rocky surface.

Then she said a thing that I never wanted to hear.

“Rudy . . .”

Then she said a thing I could never have imagined she’d say. Never in a million years.

“Rudy . . .”

Then she said the most awful thing she could say to me, even more awful than that she was in love with a serial killer.

“Rudy . . . go inside . . . read my mind . . . I need you to know, I need you to understand . . . Rudy . . .”

The look on her face killed my heart.

I tried to say no, oh god no, not that, please, no, not that, don’t ask me to do that, please please I don’t want to go inside, we mean so much to each other, I don’t want to know your landscape. Don’t make me feel filthy, I’m no peeping-tom, I’ve never spied on you, never stolen a look when you were coming out of the shower, or undressing, or when you were being sexy . . . I never invaded your privacy, I wouldn’t do a thing like that . . . we’re friends, I don’t need to know it all, I don’t want to go in there. I can go inside anyone, and it’s always awful . . . please don’t make me see things in there I might not like, you’re my friend, please don’t steal that from me . . .

“Rudy, please. Do it.”

Oh jeezusjeezusjeezus, again, she said it again!

We sat there. And we sat there. And we sat there longer. I said, hoarsely, in fear, “Can’t you just . . . just tell me?”

Her eyes looked at stone. A man of stone. And she tempted me to do what I could do casually, tempted me the way Faust was tempted by Mefisto, Mephistopheles, Mefistofele, Mephostopilis. Black rock Dr Faustus, possessor of magical mind-reading powers, tempted by thick, lustrous eyelashes and violet eyes and a break in the voice and an imploring movement of hand to face and a tilt of the head that was pitiable and the begging word please and all the guilt that lay between us that was mine alone. The seven chief demons. Of whom Mefisto was the one “not loving the light”.

I knew it was the end of our friendship. But she left me nowhere to run. Mefisto in onyx.

So I jaunted into her landscape.

I stayed in there less than ten seconds. I didn’t want to know everything I could know; and I definitely wanted to know nothing about how she really thought of me. I couldn’t have borne seeing a caricature of a bug-eyed, shuffling, thick-lipped darkie in there. Mandingo man. Steppin Porchmonkey Rudy Pair . . .

Oh god, what was I thinking!

Nothing in there like that. Nothing! Ally wouldn’t have anything like that in there. I was going nuts, going absolutely fucking crazy, in there, back out in less than ten seconds. I want to block it, kill it, void it, waste it, empty it, reject it, squeeze it, darken it, obscure it, wipe it, do away with it like it never happened. Like the moment you walk in on your momma and poppa and catch them fucking, and you want never to have known that.

But at least I understood.

In there, in Allison Roche’s landscape, I saw how her heart had responded to this man she called Spanky, not Henry Lake Spanning. She did not call him, in there, by the name of a monster; she called him a honey’s name. I didn’t know if he was innocent or not, but she knew he was innocent. At first she had responded to just talking with him, about being brought up in an orphanage, and she was able to relate to his stories of being used and treated like chattel, and how they had stripped him of his dignity, and made him afraid all the time. She knew what that was like. And how he’d always been on his own. The running-away. The being captured like a wild thing, and put in this home or that lockup or the orphanage “for his own good”. Washing stone steps with a tin bucket full of grey water, with a horsehair brush and a bar of lye soap, till the tender folds of skin between the fingers were furiously red and hurt so much you couldn’t make a fist.

She tried to tell me how her heart had responded, with a language that has never been invented to do the job. I saw as much as I needed, there in that secret landscape, to know that Spanning had led a miserable life, but that somehow he’d managed to become a decent human being. And it showed through enough when she was face to face with him, talking to him without the witness box between them, without the adversarial thing, without the tension of the courtroom and the gallery and those parasite creeps from the tabloids sneaking around taking pictures of him, that she identified with his pain. Hers had been not the same, but similar; of a kind, if not of identical intensity.

She came to know him a little.

And came back to see him again. Human compassion. In a moment of human weakness.

Until, finally, she began examining everything she had worked up as evidence, trying to see it from his point of view, using his explanations of circumstantiality. And there were inconsistencies. Now she saw them. Now she did not turn her prosecuting attorney’s mind from them, recasting them in a way that would railroad Spanning; now she gave him just the barest possibility of truth. And the case did not seem as incontestable.

By that time, she had to admit to herself, she had fallen in love with him. The gentle quality could not be faked; she’d known fraudulent kindness in her time.

I left her mind gratefully. But at least I understood.

“Now?” she asked.

Yes, now. Now I understood. And the fractured glass in her voice told me. Her face told me. The way she parted her lips in expectation, waiting for me to reveal what my magic journey had conveyed by way of truth. Her palm against her cheek. All that told me. And I said, “Yes.”

Then, silence, between us.

After a while she said, “I didn’t feel anything.”

I shrugged. “Nothing to feel. I was in for a few seconds, that’s all.”

“You didn’t see everything?”

“No.”

“Because you didn’t want to?”

“Because . . .”

She smiled. “I understand, Rudy.”

Oh, do you? Do you really? That’s just fine. And I heard me say, “You made it with him yet?”

I could have torn off her arm; it would’ve hurt less.

“That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that kind of question. I didn’t like it much the first time, and I like it less this time.”

“You’re the one wanted me to go into your head. I didn’t buy no ticket for the trip.”

“Well, you were in there. Didn’t you look around enough to find out?”

“I didn’t look for that.”

“What a chickenshit, wheedling, lousy and cowardly . . .”

“I haven’t heard an answer, Counsellor. Kindly restrict your answers to a simple yes or no.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! He’s on Death Row!”

“There are ways.”

“How would you know?”

“I had a friend. Up at San Rafael. What they call Tamal. Across the bridge from Richmond, a little north of San Francisco.”

“That’s San Quentin.”

“That’s what it is, all right.”

“I thought that friend of yours was at Pelican Bay?”

“Different friend.”

“You seem to have a lot of old chums in the joint in California.”

“It’s a racist nation.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“But Q ain’t Pelican Bay. Two different states of being. As hard time as they pull at Tamal, it’s worse up to Crescent City. In the Shoe.”

“You never mentioned ‘a friend’ at San Quentin.”

“I never mentioned a lotta shit. That don’t mean I don’t know it. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

We sat silently, the three of us: me, her, and Walt Whitman. We’re fighting, I thought. Not make-believe, dissin’ some movie we’d seen and disagreed about; this was nasty. Bone nasty and memorable. No one ever forgets this kind of fight. Can turn dirty in a second, say some trash you can never take back, never forgive, put a canker on the rose of friendship for all time, never be the same look again.

I waited. She didn’t say anything more; and I got no straight answer; but I was pretty sure Henry Lake Spanning had gone all the way with her. I felt a twinge of emotion I didn’t even want to look at, much less analyse, dissect, and name. Let it be, I thought. Eleven years. Once, just once. Let it just lie there and get old and withered and die a proper death like all ugly thoughts.

“Okay. So I go on down to Atmore,” I said. “I suppose you mean in the very near future, since he’s supposed to bake in four days. Sometime very soon: like today.”

She nodded.

I said, “And how do I get in? Law student? Reporter? Tag along as Larry Borlan’s new law clerk? Or do I go in with you? What am I, friend of the family, representative of the Alabama State Department of Corrections; maybe you could set me up as an inmate’s rep from ‘Project Hope’.”

“I can do better than that,” she said. The smile. “Much.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you can. Why does that worry me?”

Still with the smile, she hoisted the Atlas onto her lap. She unlocked it, took out a small manila envelope, unsealed but clasped, and slid it across the table to me. I pried open the clasp and shook out the contents.

Clever. Very clever. And already made up, with my photo where necessary, admission dates stamped for tomorrow morning, Thursday, absolutely authentic and foolproof.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Thursday mornings, the inmates of Death Row have access to their attorneys?”

“On Death Row, family visitation Monday and Friday. Henry has no family. Attorney visitations Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I couldn’t count on today. It took me a couple of days to get through to you . . .”

“I’ve been busy.”

“. . . but inmates consult with their counsel on Wednesday and Thursday mornings.”

I tapped the papers and plastic cards. “This is very sharp. I notice my name and my handsome visage already here, already sealed in plastic. How long have you had these ready?”

“Couple of days.”

“What if I’d continued to say no?”

She didn’t answer. She just got that look again.

“One last thing,” I said. And I leaned in very close, so she would make no mistake that I was dead serious. “Time grows short. Today’s Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thursday. They throw those computer-controlled twin switches Saturday night midnight. What if I jaunt into him and find out you’re right, that he’s absolutely innocent? What then? They going to listen to me? Fiercely high-verbal black boy with the magic mind-read power?

“I don’t think so. Then what happens, Ally?”

“Leave that to me.” Her face was hard. “As you said: there are ways. There are roads and routes and even lightning bolts, if you know where to shop. The power of the judiciary. An election year coming up. Favours to be called in.”

I said, “And secrets to be wafted under sensitive noses?”

“You just come back and tell me Spanky’s telling the truth,” and she smiled as I started to laugh, “and I’ll worry about the world one minute after midnight Sunday morning.”

I got up and slid the papers back into the envelope, and put the envelope under my arm. I looked down at her and I smiled as gently as I could, and I said, “Assure me that you haven’t stacked the deck by telling Spanning I can read minds.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Tell me.”

“I haven’t told him you can read minds.”

“You’re lying.”

“Did you . . .?”

“Didn’t have to. I can see it in your face, Ally.”

“Would it matter if he knew?”

“Not a bit. I can read the sonofabitch cold or hot, with or without. Three seconds inside and I’ll know if he did it all, if he did part of it, if he did none of it.”

“I think I love him, Rudy.”

“You told me that.”

“But I wouldn’t set you up. I need to know . . . that’s why I’m asking you to do it.”

I didn’t answer. I just smiled at her. She’d told him. He’d know I was coming. But that was terrific. If she hadn’t alerted him, I’d have asked her to call and let him know. The more aware he’d be, the easier to scorch his landscape.

I’m a fast study, king of the quick learners: vulgate Latin in a week; standard apothecary’s pharmacopoeia in three days; Fender bass on a weekend; Atlanta Falcons’ play book in an hour; and, in a moment of human weakness, what it feels like to have a very crampy, heavy-flow menstrual period, two minutes flat.

So fast, in fact, that the more somebody tries to hide the boiling pits of guilt and the crucified bodies of shame, the faster I adapt to their landscape. Like a man taking a polygraph test gets nervous, starts to sweat, ups the galvanic skin response, tries to duck and dodge, gets himself hinky and more hinky and hinkyer till his upper lip could water a truck garden, the more he tries to hide from me . . . the more he reveals . . . the deeper inside I can go.

There is an African saying: Death comes without the thumping of drums.

I have no idea why that one came back to me just then.

Last thing you expect from a prison administration is a fine sense of humour. But they got one at the Holman facility.

They had the bloody monster dressed like a virgin.

White duck pants, white short sleeve shirt buttoned up to the neck, white socks. Pair of brown ankle-high brogans with crepe soles, probably neoprene, but they didn’t clash with the pale, virginal apparition that came through the security door with a large, black brother in Alabama Prison Authority uniform holding onto his right elbow.

Didn’t clash, those work shoes, and didn’t make much of a tap on the white tile floor. It was as if he floated. Oh yes, I said to myself, oh yes indeed: I could see how this messianic figure could wow even as tough a cookie as Ally. Oh my, yes.

Fortunately, it was raining outside.

Otherwise, sunlight streaming through the glass, he’d no doubt have a halo. I’d have lost it. Right there, a laughing jag would not have ceased. Fortunately, it was raining like a sonofabitch.

Which hadn’t made the drive down from Clanton a possible entry on any deathbed list of Greatest Terrific Moments in My Life. Sheets of aluminum water, thick as misery, like a neverending shower curtain that I could drive through for an eternity and never really penetrate. I went into the ditch off the I-65 half a dozen times. Why I never ploughed down and buried myself up to the axles in the sucking goo running those furrows, never be something I’ll understand.

But each time I skidded off the Interstate, even the twice I did a complete three-sixty and nearly rolled the old Fairlane I’d borrowed from John the C Hepworth, even then I just kept digging, slewed like an epileptic seizure, went sideways and climbed right up the slippery grass and weeds and running, sucking red Alabama goo, right back onto that long black anvil pounded by rain as hard as roofing nails. I took it then, as I take it now, to be a sign that Destiny was determined the mere heavens and earth would not be permitted to fuck me around. I had a date to keep, and Destiny was on top of things.

Even so, even living charmed, which was clear to me, even so: when I got about five miles north of Atmore, I took the 57 exit off the I-65 and a left onto 21, and pulled in at the Best Western. It wasn’t my intention to stay overnight that far south – though I knew a young woman with excellent teeth down in Mobile – but the rain was just hammering and all I wanted was to get this thing done and go fall asleep. A drive that long, humping something as lame as that Fairlane, hunched forward to scope the rain . . . with Spanning in front of me . . . all I desired was surcease. A touch of the old oblivion.

I checked in, stood under the shower for half an hour, changed into the three-piece suit I’d brought along, and phoned the front desk for directions to the Holman facility.

Driving there, a sweet moment happened for me. It was the last sweet moment for a long time thereafter, and I remember it now as if it were still happening. I cling to it.

In May, and on into early June, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper blossoms. In the forests and the woodland bogs, and often on some otherwise undistinguished slope or hillside, the yellow and purple orchids suddenly appear.

I was driving. There was a brief stop in the rain. Like the eye of the hurricane. One moment sheets of water, and the next, absolute silence before the crickets and frogs and birds started complaining; and darkness on all sides, just the idiot staring beams of my headlights poking into nothingness; and cool as a well between the drops of rain; and I was driving. And suddenly, the window rolled down so I wouldn’t fall asleep, so I could stick my head out when my eyes started to close, suddenly I smelled the delicate perfume of the sweet May-blossoming Lady’s Slipper. Off to my left, off in the dark somewhere on a patch of hilly ground, or deep in a stand of invisible trees, Cypripedium calceolus was making the night world beautiful with its fragrance.

I neither slowed, nor tried to hold back the tears.

I just drove, feeling sorry for myself; for no good reason I could name.

Way, way down – almost to the corner of the Florida Panhandle, about three hours south of the last truly imperial barbeque in that part of the world, in Birmingham – I made my way to Holman. If you’ve never been inside the joint, what I’m about to say will resonate about as clearly as Chaucer to one of the gentle Tasaday.

The stones call out.

That institution for the betterment of the human race, the Organized Church, has a name for it. From the fine folks at Catholicism, Lutheranism, Baptism, Judaism, Islamism, Druidism . . . Ismism . . . the ones who brought you Torquemada, several spicy varieties of Inquisition, original sin, holy war, sectarian violence, and something called “pro-lifers” who bomb and maim and kill . . . comes the catchy phrase Damned Places.

Rolls off the tongue like God’s On Our Side, don’t it?

Damned Places.

As we say in Latin, the situs of malevolent shit. The venue of evil happenings. Locations forever existing under a black cloud, like residing in a rooming house run by Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond. The big slams are like that. Joliet, Dannemora, Attica, Rahway State in Jersey, that hellhole down in Louisiana called Angola, old Folsom – not the new one, the old Folsom – Q, and Ossining. Only people who read about it call it “Sing Sing”. Inside, the cons call it Ossining. The Ohio State pen in Columbus. Leavenworth, Kansas. The ones they talk about among themselves when they talk about doing hard time. The Shoe at Pelican Bay State Prison. In there, in those ancient structures mortared with guilt and depravity and no respect for human life and just plain meanness on both sides, cons and screws, in there where the walls and floors have absorbed all the pain and loneliness of a million men and women for decades . . . in there, the stones call out.

Damned places. You can feel it when you walk through the gates and go through the metal detectors and empty your pockets on counters and open your briefcase so that thick fingers can rumple the papers. You feel it. The moaning and thrashing, and men biting holes in their own wrists so they’ll bleed to death.

And I felt it worse than anyone else.

I blocked out as much as I could. I tried to hold on to the memory of the scent of orchids in the night. The last thing I wanted was to jaunt into somebody’s landscape at random. Go inside and find out what he had done, what had really put him here, not just what they’d got him for. And I’m not talking about Spanning; I’m talking about every one of them. Every guy who had kicked to death his girl friend because she brought him Bratwurst instead of spicy Cajun sausage. Every pale, wormy Bible-reciting psycho who had stolen, buttfucked, and sliced up an altar boy in the name of secret voices that “tole him to g’wan do it!” Every amoral druggie who’d shot a pensioner for her food stamps. If I let down for a second, if I didn’t keep that shield up, I’d be tempted to send out a scintilla and touch one of them. In a moment of human weakness.

So I followed the trusty to the Warden’s office, where his secretary checked my papers, and the little plastic cards with my face encased in them, and she kept looking down at the face, and up at my face, and down at my face, and up at the face in front of her, and when she couldn’t restrain herself a second longer she said, “We’ve been expecting you, Mr Pairis. Uh. Do you really work for the President of the United States?”

I smiled at her. “We go bowling together.”

She took that highly, and offered to walk me to the conference room where I’d meet Henry Lake Spanning. I thanked her the way a well-mannered gentleman of colour thanks a Civil Servant who can make life easier or more difficult, and I followed her along corridors and in and out of guarded steel-riveted doorways, through Administration and the segregation room and the main hall to the brown-panelled, stained walnut, white tile over cement floored, roll-out security windowed, white draperied, drop ceiling with 2-inch acoustical Celotex squared conference room, where a Security Officer met us. She bid me fond adieu, not yet fully satisfied that such a one as I had come, that morning, on Air Force One, straight from a 7–10 split with the President of the United States.

It was a big room.

I sat down at the conference table; about twelve feet long and four feet wide; highly polished walnut, maybe oak. Straight back chairs: metal tubing with a light yellow upholstered cushion. Everything quiet, except for the sound of matrimonial rice being dumped on a connubial tin roof. The rain had not slacked off. Out there on the I-65 some luck-lost bastard was being sucked down into red death.

“He’ll be here,” the Security Officer said.

“That’s good,” I replied. I had no idea why he’d tell me that, seeing as how it was the reason I was there in the first place. I imagined him to be the kind of guy you dread sitting in front of, at the movies, because he always explains everything to his date. Like a bracero labourer with a valid green card interpreting a Woody Allen movie line-by-line to his illegal-alien cousin Humberto, three weeks under the wire from Matamoros. Like one of a pair of Beltone-wearing octogenarians on the loose from a rest home for a wild Saturday afternoon at the mall, plonked down in the third level multiplex, one of them describing whose ass Clint Eastwood is about to kick, and why. All at the top of her voice.

“Seen any good movies lately?” I asked him.

He didn’t get a chance to answer, and I didn’t jaunt inside to find out, because at that moment the steel door at the far end of the conference room opened, and another Security Officer poked his head in, and called across to Officer Let-Me-State-the-Obvious, “Dead man walking!”

Officer Self-Evident nodded to him, the other head poked back out, the door slammed, and my companion said, “When we bring one down from Death Row, he’s gotta walk through the Ad Building and Segregation and the Main Hall. So everything’s locked down. Every man’s inside. It takes some time, y’know.”

I thanked him.

“Is it true you work for the President, yeah?” He asked it so politely, I decided to give him a straight answer; and to hell with all the phony credentials Ally had worked up. “Yeah,” I said, “we’re on the same bocce ball team.”

“Izzat so?” he said, fascinated by sports stats.

I was on the verge of explaining that the President was, in actuality, of Italian descent, when I heard the sound of the key turning in the security door, and it opened outward, and in came this messianic apparition in white, being led by a guard who was seven feet in any direction.

Henry Lake Spanning, sans halo, hands and feet shackled, with the chains cold-welded into a wide anodized steel belt, shuffled toward me; and his neoprene soles made no disturbing cacophony on the white tiles.

I watched him come the long way across the room, and he watched me right back. I thought to myself, Yeah, she told him I can read minds. Well, let’s see which method you use to try and keep me out of the landscape. But I couldn’t tell from the outside of him, not just by the way he shuffled and looked, if he had fucked Ally. But I knew it had to’ve been. Somehow. Even in the big lockup. Even here.

He stopped right across from me, with his hands on the back of the chair, and he didn’t say a word, just gave me the nicest smile I’d ever gotten from anyone, even my momma. Oh, yes, I thought, oh my goodness, yes. Henry Lake Spanning was either the most masterfully charismatic person I’d ever met, or so good at the charm con that he could sell a slashed throat to a stranger.

“You can leave him,” I said to the great black behemoth brother.

“Can’t do that, sir.”

“I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Sorry, sir; I was told someone had to be right here in the room with you and him, all the time.”

I looked at the one who had waited with me. “That mean you, too?”

He shook his head. “Just one of us, I guess.”

I frowned. “I need absolute privacy. What would happen if I were this man’s attorney of record? Wouldn’t you have to leave us alone? Privileged communication, right?”

They looked at each other, this pair of Security Officers, and they looked back at me, and they said nothing. All of sudden Mr Plain-as-the-Nose-on-Your-Face had nothing valuable to offer; and the sequoia with biceps “had his orders”.

“They tell you who I work for? They tell you who it was sent me here to talk to this man?” Recourse to authority often works. They mumbled yessir yessir a couple of times each, but their faces stayed right on the mark of sorry, sir, but we’re not supposed to leave anybody alone with this man. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d believed I’d flown in on Jehovah One.

So I said to myself fuckit I said to myself, and I slipped into their thoughts, and it didn’t take much rearranging to get the phone wires restrung and the underground cables rerouted and the pressure on their bladders something fierce.

“On the other hand . . .” the first one said.

“I suppose we could . . .” the giant said.

And in a matter of maybe a minute and a half one of them was entirely gone, and the great one was standing outside the steel door, his back filling the double-pane chickenwire-imbedded security window. He effectively sealed off the one entrance or exit to or from the conference room; like the three hundred Spartans facing the tens of thousands of Xerxes’s army at the Hot Gates.

Henry Lake Spanning stood silently watching me.

“Sit down,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He pulled out the chair, came around, and sat down.

“Pull it closer to the table,” I said.

He had some difficulty, hands shackled that way, but he grabbed the leading edge of the seat and scraped forward till his stomach was touching the table.

He was a handsome guy, even for a white man. Nice nose, strong cheek-bones, eyes the colour of that water in your toilet when you toss in a tablet of 2000 Flushes. Very nice looking man. He gave me the creeps.

If Dracula had looked like Shirley Temple, no one would’ve driven a stake through his heart. If Harry Truman had looked like Freddy Krueger, he would never have beaten Tom Dewey at the polls. Joe Stalin and Saddam Hussein looked like sweet, avuncular friends of the family, really nice looking, kindly guys – who just incidentally happened to slaughter millions of men, women, and children. Abe Lincoln looked like an axe murderer, but he had a heart as big as Guatemala.

Henry Lake Spanning had the sort of face you’d trust immediately if you saw it in a TV commercial. Men would like to go fishing with him, women would like to squeeze his buns. Grannies would hug him on sight; kids would follow him straight into the mouth of an open oven. If he could play the piccolo, rats would gavotte around his shoes.

What saps we are. Beauty is only skin deep. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Dress for success. What saps we are.

So what did that make my pal, Allison Roche?

And why the hell didn’t I just slip into his thoughts and check out the landscape? Why was I stalling?

Because I was scared of him.

This was fifty-six verified, gruesome, disgusting murders sitting forty-eight inches away from me, looking straight at me with blue eyes and soft, gently blond hair. Neither Harry nor Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

So why was I scared of him? Because; that’s why.

This was damned foolishness. I had all the weaponry, he was shackled, and I didn’t for a second believe he was what Ally thought he was: innocent. Hell, they’d caught him, literally, redhanded. Bloody to the armpits, fer chrissakes. Innocent, my ass! Okay, Rudy, I thought, get in there and take a look around. But I didn’t. I waited for him to say something.

He smiled tentatively, a gentle and nervous little smile, and he said, “Ally asked me to see you. Thank you for coming.”

I looked at him, but not into him.

He seemed upset that he’d inconvenienced me. “But I don’t think you can do me any good, not in just three days.”

“You scared, Spanning?”

His lips trembled. “Yes I am, Mr Pairis. I’m about as scared as a man can be.” His eyes were moist.

“Probably gives you some insight into how your victims felt, whaddaya think?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes were moist.

After a moment just looking at me, he scraped back his chair and stood up. “Thank you for coming, sir. I’m sorry Ally imposed on your time.” He turned and started to walk away. I jaunted into his landscape.

Oh my god, I thought. He was innocent.

Never done any of it. None of it. Absolutely no doubt, not a shadow of a doubt. Ally had been right. I saw every bit of that landscape in there, every fold and crease; every bolt hole and rat run; every gully and arroyo; all of his past, back and back and back to his birth in Lewistown, Montana, near Great Falls, thirty-six years ago; every day of his life right up to the minute they arrested him leaning over that disemboweled cleaning woman the real killer had tossed into the dumpster.

I saw every second of his landscape; and I saw him coming out of the Winn-Dixie in Huntsville; pushing a cart filled with grocery bags of food for the weekend. And I saw him wheeling it around the parking lot toward the dumpster area overflowing with broken-down cardboard boxes and fruit crates. And I heard the cry for help from one of those dumpsters; and I saw Henry Lake Spanning stop and look around, not sure he’d heard anything at all. Then I saw him start to go to his car, parked right there at the edge of the lot beside the wall because it was a Friday evening and everyone was stocking up for the weekend, and there weren’t any spaces out front; and the cry for help, weaker this time, as pathetic as a crippled kitten; and Henry Lake Spanning stopped cold, and he looked around; and we both saw the bloody hand raise itself above the level of the open dumpster’s filthy green steel side. And I saw him desert his groceries without a thought to their cost, or that someone might run off with them if he left them unattended, or that he only had eleven dollars left in his checking account, so if those groceries were snagged by someone he wouldn’t be eating for the next few days . . . and I watched him rush to the dumpster and look into the crap filling it . . . and I felt his nausea at the sight of that poor old woman, what was left of her . . . and I was with him as he crawled up onto the dumpster and dropped inside to do what he could for that mass of shredded and pulped flesh.

And I cried with him as she gasped, with a bubble of blood that burst in the open ruin of her throat, and she died. But though I heard the scream of someone coming around the corner, Spanning did not; and so he was still there, holding the poor mass of stripped skin and black bloody clothing, when the cops screeched into the parking lot. And only then, innocent of anything but decency and rare human compassion, did Henry Lake Spanning begin to understand what it must look like to middle-aged hausfraus, sneaking around dumpsters to pilfer cardboard boxes, who see what they think is a man murdering an old woman.

I was with him, there in that landscape within his mind, as he ran and ran and dodged and dodged. Until they caught him in Decatur, seven miles from the body of Gunilla Ascher. But they had him, and they had positive identification, from the dumpster in Huntsville; and all the rest of it was circumstantial, gussied up by bedridden, recovering Charlie Whilborg and the staff in Ally’s office. It looked good on paper – so good that Ally had brought him down on twenty-nine-cum-fifty-six counts of murder in the vilest extreme.

But it was all bullshit.

The killer was still out there.

Henry Lake Spanning, who looked like a nice, decent guy, was exactly that. A nice, decent, goodhearted, but most of all innocent guy.

You could fool juries and polygraphs and judges and social workers and psychiatrists and your mommy and your daddy, but you could not fool Rudy Pairis, who travels regularly to the place of dark where you can go but not return.

They were going to burn an innocent man in three days.

I had to do something about it.

Not just for Ally, though that was reason enough; but for this man who thought he was doomed, and was frightened, but didn’t have to take no shit from a wiseguy like me.

“Mr Spanning,” I called after him.

He didn’t stop.

“Please,” I said. He stopped shuffling, the chains making their little charm bracelet sounds, but he didn’t turn around.

“I believe Ally is right, sir,” I said. “I believe they caught the wrong man; and I believe all the time you’ve served is wrong; and I believe you ought not die.”

Then he turned slowly, and stared at me with the look of a dog that has been taunted with a bone. His voice was barely a whisper. “And why is that, Mr Pairis? Why is it that you believe me when nobody else but Ally and my attorney believed me?”

I didn’t say what I was thinking. What I was thinking was that I’d been in there, and I knew he was innocent. And more than that, I knew that he truly loved my pal Allison Roche.

And there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for Ally.

So what I said was: “I know you’re innocent, because I know who’s guilty.”

His lips parted. It wasn’t one of those big moves where someone’s mouth flops open in astonishment; it was just a parting of the lips. But he was startled; I knew that as I knew the poor sonofabitch had suffered too long already.

He came shuffling back to me, and sat down.

“Don’t make fun, Mr Pairis. Please. I’m what you said, I’m scared. I don’t want to die, and I surely don’t want to die with the world thinking I did those . . . those things.”

“Makin’ no fun, captain. I know who ought to burn for all those murders. Not six states, but eleven. Not fifty-six dead, but an even seventy. Three of them little girls in a day nursery, and the woman watching them, too.”

He stared at me. There was horror on his face. I know that look real good. I’ve seen it at least seventy times.

“I know you’re innocent, cap’n because I’m the man they want. I’m the guy who put your ass in here.”

In a moment of human weakness. I saw it all. What I had packed off to live in that place of dark where you can go but not return. The wall-safe in my drawing-room. The four-foot-thick walled crypt encased in concrete and sunk a mile deep into solid granite. The vault whose composite laminate walls of judiciously sloped extremely thick blends of steel and plastic, the equivalent of six hundred to seven hundred mm of homogenous depth protection approached the maximum toughness and hardness of crystaliron, that iron grown with perfect crystal structure and carefully controlled quantities of impurities that in a modern combat tank can shrug off a hollow charge warhead like a spaniel shaking himself dry. The Chinese puzzle box. The hidden chamber. The labyrinth. The maze of the mind where I’d sent all seventy to die, over and over and over, so I wouldn’t hear their screams, or see the ropes of bloody tendon, or stare into the pulped sockets where their pleading eyes had been.

When I had walked into that prison, I’d been buttoned up totally. I was safe and secure, I knew nothing, remembered nothing, suspected nothing.

But when I walked into Henry Lake Spanning’s landscape, and I could not lie to myself that he was the one, I felt the earth crack. I felt the tremors and the upheavals, and the fissures started at my feet and ran to the horizon; and the lava boiled up and began to flow. And the steel walls melted, and the concrete turned to dust, and the barriers dissolved; and I looked at the face of the monster.

No wonder I had such nausea when Ally had told me about this or that slaughter ostensibly perpetrated by Henry Lake Spanning, the man she was prosecuting on twenty-nine counts of murders I had committed. No wonder I could picture all the details when she would talk to me about the barest description of the murder site. No wonder I fought so hard against coming to Holman.

In there, in his mind, his landscape open to me, I saw the love he had for Allison Roche, for my pal and buddy with whom I had once, just once . . .

Don’t try tellin’ me that the Power of Love can open the fissures. I don’t want to hear that shit. I’m telling you that it was a combination, a buncha things that split me open, and possibly maybe one of those things was what I saw between them.

I don’t know that much. I’m a quick study, but this was in an instant. A crack of fate. A moment of human weakness. That’s what I told myself in the part of me that ventured to the place of dark: that I’d done what I’d done in moments of human weakness.

And it was those moments, not my “gift”, and not my blackness, that had made me the loser, the monster, the liar that I am.

In the first moment of realization, I couldn’t believe it. Not me, not good old Rudy. Not likeable Rudy Pairis never done no one but hisself wrong his whole life.

In the next second I went wild with anger, furious at the disgusting thing that lived on one side of my split brain. Wanted to tear a hole through my face and yank the killing thing out, wet and putrescent, and squeeze it into pulp.

In the next second I was nauseated, actually wanted to fall down and puke, seeing every moment of what I had done, unshaded, unhidden, naked to this Rudy Pairis who was decent and reasonable and law-abiding, even if such a Rudy was little better than a well-educated fuckup. But not a killer . . . I wanted to puke.

Then, finally, I accepted what I could not deny.

For me, never again, would I slide through the night with the scent of the blossoming Yellow Lady’s Slipper. I recognized that perfume now.

It was the odour that rises from a human body cut wide open, like a mouth making a big, dark yawn.

The other Rudy Pairis had come home at last.

They didn’t have half a minute’s worry. I sat down at a little wooden writing table in an interrogation room in the Jefferson County D.A.’s offices, and I made up a graph with the names and dates and locations. Names of as many of the seventy as I actually knew. (A lot of them had just been on the road, or in a men’s toilet, or taking a bath, or lounging in the back row of a movie, or getting some cash from an ATM, or just sitting around doing nothing but waiting for me to come along and open them up, and maybe have a drink off them, or maybe just something to snack on . . . down the road.) Dates were easy, because I’ve got a good memory for dates. And the places where they’d find the ones they didn’t know about, the fourteen with exactly the same m.o. as the other fifty-six, not to mention the old-style rip-and-pull can opener I’d used on that little Catholic bead-counter Gunilla Whatsername, who did Hail Mary this and Sweet Blessed Jesus that all the time I was opening her up, even at the last, when I held up parts of her insides for her to look at, and tried to get her to lick them, but she died first. Not half a minute’s worry for the State of Alabama. All in one swell foop they corrected a tragic miscarriage of justice, nobbled a maniac killer, solved fourteen more murders than they’d counted on (in five additional states, which made the police departments of those five additional states extremely pleased with the law enforcement agencies of the Sovereign State of Alabama), and made first spot on the evening news on all three major networks, not to mention CNN, for the better part of a week. Knocked the Middle East right out of the box. Neither Harry Truman nor Tom Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

Ally went into seclusion, of course. Took off and went somewhere down on the Florida coast, I heard. But after the trial, and the verdict, and Spanning being released, and me going inside, and all like that, well, oo-poppadow as they used to say, it was all reordered properly. Sat cito si sat bene, in Latin: “It is done quickly enough if it is done well.” A favourite saying of Cato. The Elder Cato.

And all I asked, all I begged for, was that Ally and Henry Lake Spanning, who loved each other and deserved each other, and whom I had almost fucked up royally, that the two of them would be there when they jammed my weary black butt into that new electric chair at Holman.

Please come, I begged them.

Don’t let me die alone. Not even a shit like me. Don’t make me cross over into that place of dark, where you can go, but not return – without the face of a friend. Even a former friend. And as for you, captain, well, hell didn’t I save your life so you could enjoy the company of the woman you love? Least you can do. Come on now; be there or be square!

I don’t know if Spanning talked her into accepting the invite, or if it was the other way around; but one day about a week prior to the event of cooking up a mess of fried Rudy Pairis, the Warden stopped by my commodious accommodations on Death Row and gave me to understand that it would be SRO for the barbeque, which meant Ally my pal, and her boy friend, the former resident of the Row where now I dwelt in durance vile.

The things a guy’ll do for love.

Yeah, that was the key. Why would a very smart operator who had gotten away with it, all the way free and clear, why would such a smart operator suddenly pull one of those hokey courtroom “I did it, I did it!” routines, and as good as strap himself into the electric chair?

Once. I only went to bed with her once.

The things a guy’ll do for love.

When they brought me into the death chamber from the holding cell where I’d spent the night before and all that day, where I’d had my last meal (which had been a hot roast beef sandwich, double meat, on white toast, with very crisp french fries, and hot brown country gravy poured over the whole thing, apple sauce, and a bowl of Concord grapes), where a representative of the Holy Roman Empire had tried to make amends for destroying most of the gods, beliefs, and cultures of my black forebears, they held me between Security Officers, neither one of whom had been in attendance when I’d visited Henry Lake Spanning at this very same correctional facility slightly more than a year before.

It hadn’t been a bad year. Lots of rest; caught up on my reading, finally got around to Proust and Langston Hughes, I’m ashamed to admit, so late in the game; lost some weight; worked out regularly; gave up cheese and dropped my cholesterol count. Ain’t nothin’ to it, just to do it.

Even took a jaunt or two or ten, every now and awhile. It didn’t matter none. I wasn’t going anywhere, neither were they. I’d done worse than the worst of them; hadn’t I confessed to it? So there wasn’t a lot that could ice me, after I’d copped to it and released all seventy of them out of my unconscious, where they’d been rotting in shallow graves for years. No big thang, Cuz.

Brought me in, strapped me in, plugged me in.

I looked through the glass at the witnesses.

There sat Ally and Spanning, front row centre. Best seats in the house. All eyes and crying, watching, not believing everything had come to this, trying to figure out when and how and in what way it had all gone down without her knowing anything at all about it. And Henry Lake Spanning sitting close beside her, their hands locked in her lap. True love.

I locked eyes with Spanning.

I jaunted into his landscape.

No, I didn’t.

I tried to, and couldn’t squirm through. Thirty years, or less, since I was five or six, I’d been doing it; without hindrance, all alone in the world the only person who could do this listen in on the landscape trick; and for the first time I was stopped. Absolutely no fuckin’ entrance. I went wild! I tried running at it full-tilt, and hit something khaki-coloured, like beach sand, and only slightly giving, not hard, but resilient. Exactly like being inside a ten-foot-high, fifty-foot-diameter paper bag, like a big shopping bag from a supermarket, that stiff butcher’s paper kind of bag, and that colour, like being inside a bag that size, running straight at it, thinking you’re going to bust through . . . and being thrown back. Not hard, not like bouncing on a trampoline, just shunted aside like the fuzz from a dandelion hitting a glass door. Unimportant. Khaki-coloured and not particularly bothered.

I tried hitting it with a bolt of pure blue lightning mental power, like someone out of a Marvel comic, but that wasn’t how mixing in other people’s minds works. You don’t think yourself in with a psychic battering-ram. That’s the kind of arrant foolishness you hear spouted by unattractive people on public access cable channels, talking about The Power of Love and The Power of the Mind and the ever-popular toe-tapping Power of a Positive Thought. Bullshit; I don’t be home to that folly!

I tried picturing myself in there, but that didn’t work, either. I tried blanking my mind and drifting across, but it was pointless. And at that moment it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how I jaunted. I just . . . did it. One moment I was snug in the privacy of my own head, and the next I was over there in someone else’s landscape. It was instantaneous, like teleportation, which also is an impossibility, like telepathy.

But now, strapped into the chair, and them getting ready to put the leather mask over my face so the witnesses wouldn’t have to see the smoke coming out of my eye-sockets and the little sparks as my nose hairs burned, when it was urgent that I get into the thoughts and landscape of Henry Lake Spanning, I was shut out completely. And right then, that moment, I was scared!

Presto, without my even opening up to him, there he was: inside my head.

He had jaunted into my landscape.

“You had a nice roast beef sandwich, I see.”

His voice was a lot stronger than it had been when I’d come down to see him a year ago. A lot stronger inside my mind.

“Yes, Rudy, I’m what you knew probably existed somewhere. Another one. A shrike.” He paused. “I see you call it ‘jaunting in the landscape’. I just called myself a shrike. A butcherbird. One name’s as good as another. Strange, isn’t it; all these years; and we never met anyone else? There must be others, but I think – now I can’t prove this, I have no real data, it’s just a wild idea I’ve had for years and years – I think they don’t know they can do it.”

He stared at me across the landscape, those wonderful blue eyes of his, the ones Ally had fallen in love with, hardly blinking.

“Why didn’t you let me know before this?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, Rudy. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy; you poor benighted pickaninny.

“Because I needed to suck you in, kid. I needed to put out a bear trap, and let it snap closed on your scrawny leg, and send you over. Here, let me clear the atmosphere in here . . .” And he wiped away all the manipulation he had worked on me, way back a year ago, when he had so easily covered his own true thoughts his past, his life, the real panorama of what went on inside his landscape – like bypassing a surveillance camera with a continuous-loop tape that continues to show a placid scene while the joint is being actively burgled – and when he convinced me not only that he was innocent, but that the real killer was someone who had blocked the hideous slaughters from his conscious mind and had lived an otherwise exemplary life. He wandered around my landscape – and all of this in a second or two, because time has no duration in the landscape, like the hours you can spend in a dream that are just thirty seconds long in the real world, just before you wake up – and he swept away all the false memories and suggestions, the logical structure of sequential events that he had planted that would dovetail with my actual existence, my true memories, altered and warped and rearranged so I would believe that I had done all seventy of those ghastly murders . . . so that I’d believe, in a moment of horrible realization, that I was the demented psychopath who had ranged state to state to state, leaving piles of ripped flesh at every stop. Blocked it all, submerged it all, sublimated it all, me. Good old Rudy Pairis, who never killed anybody. I’d been the patsy he was waiting for.

“There, now, kiddo. See what it’s really like?

“You didn’t do a thing.

“Pure as the driven snow, nigger. That’s the truth. And what a find you were. Never even suspected there was another like me, till Ally came to interview me after Decatur. But there you were, big and black as a Great White Hope, right there in her mind. Isn’t she fine, Pairis? Isn’t she something to take a knife to? Something to split open like a nice piece of fruit warmed in a summer sunshine field, let all the steam rise off her . . . maybe have a picnic . . .”

He stopped.

“I wanted her right from the first moment I saw her.

“Now, you know, I could’ve done it sloppy, just been a shrike to Ally, that first time she came to the holding cell to interview me; just jump into her, that was my plan. But what a noise that Spanning in the cell would’ve made, yelling it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, not Spanning, but Deputy D.A. Allison Roche . . . too much noise, too many complications. But I could have done it, jumped into her. Or a guard, and then slice her at my leisure, stalk her, find her, let her steam . . .

“You look distressed, Mr Rudy Pairis. Why’s that? Because you’re going to die in my place? Because I could have taken you over at any time, and didn’t? Because after all this time of your miserable, wasted, lousy life you finally find someone like you, and we don’t even have the convenience of a chat? Well, that’s sad, that’s really sad, kiddo. But you didn’t have a chance.”

“You’re stronger than me, you kept me out,” I said.

He chuckled.

“Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don’t get it, do you?” His face, then, grew terrible. “You don’t even understand now, right now that I’ve cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?

“Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn’t do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you.”

I cringed. “And you waited . . .? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me . . .?”

“At the moment when you couldn’t do anything about it, at the moment you couldn’t shout ‘I’ve been taken over by someone else, I’m Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!’ Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you.”

I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. “You can . . . leave the mind . . . leave the body . . . go out . . . jaunt, jump permanently . . .”

Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.

“You stayed in jail three years just to get me?”

He smirked. Smarter than thou.

“Three years? You think that’s some big deal to me? You don’t think I could have someone like you running around, do you? Someone who can ‘jaunt’ as I do? The only other shrike I’ve ever encountered. You think I wouldn’t sit in here and wait for you to come to me?”

“But three years . . .”

“You’re what, Rudy . . . thirty-one, is it? Yes, I can see that. Thirty-one. You’ve never jumped like a shrike. You’ve just entered, jaunted, gone into the landscapes, and never understood that it’s more than reading minds. You can change domiciles, black boy. You can move out of a house in a bad neighbourhood – such as strapped into the electric chair – and take up residence in a brand, spanking, new housing complex of million-and-a-half-buck condos, like Ally.”

“But you have to have a place for the other one to go, don’t you?” I said it just flat, no tone, no colour to it at all. I didn’t even think of the place of dark, where you can go . . .

“Who do you think I am, Rudy? Just who the hell do you think I was when I started, when I learned to shrike, how to jaunt, what I’m telling you now about changing residences? You wouldn’t know my first address. I go a long way back.

“But I can give you a few of my more famous addresses. Gilles de Rais, France, 1440; Vlad Tepes, Romania, 1462; Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary, 1611; Catherine DeShayes, France, 1680; Jack the Ripper, London, 1888; Henri Désiré Landru, France, 1915; Albert Fish, New York City, 1934; Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954; Myra Hindley, Manchester, 1963; Albert DeSalvo, Boston, 1964; Charles Manson, Los Angeles, 1969; John Wayne Gacy, Norwood Park Township, Illinois, 1977.

“Oh, but how I do go on. And on. And on and on and on, Rudy, my little porch monkey. That’s what I do. I go on. And on and on. Shrike will nest where it chooses. If not in your beloved Allison Roche, then in the cheesy fucked-up black boy, Rudy Pairis. But don’t you think that’s a waste, kiddo? Spending however much time I might have to spend in your socially unacceptable body, when Henry Lake Spanning is such a handsome devil? Why should I have just switched with you when Ally lured you to me, because all it would’ve done is get you screeching and howling that you weren’t Spanning, you were this nigger son who’d had his head stolen . . . and then you might have manipulated some guards or the Warden . . .

“Well, you see what I mean, don’t you?

“But now that the mask is securely in place, and now that the electrodes are attached to your head and your left leg, and now that the Warden has his hand on the switch, well, you’d better get ready to do a lot of drooling.”

And he turned around to jaunt back out of me, and I closed the perimeter. He tried to jaunt, tried to leap back to his own mind, but I had him in a fist. Just that easy. Materialized a fist, and turned him to face me.

“Fuck you, Jack the Ripper. And fuck you twice, Bluebeard. And on and on and on fuck you Manson and Boston Strangler and any other dipshit warped piece of sick crap you been in your years. You sure got some muddy-shoes credentials there, boy.

“What I care about all those names, Spanky my brother? You really think I don’t know those names? I’m an educated fellah, Mistuh Rippuh, Mistuh Mad Bomber. You missed a few. Were you also, did you inhabit, hast thou possessed Winnie Ruth Judd and Charlie Starkweather and Mad Dog Coll and Richard Speck and Sirhan Sirhan and Jeffrey Dahmer? You the boogieman responsible for every bad number the human race ever played? You ruin Sodom and Gomorrah, burned the Great Library of Alexandria, orchestrated the Reign of Terror dans Paree, set up the Inquisition, stoned and drowned the Salem witches, slaughtered unarmed women and kids at Wounded Knee, bumped off John Kennedy?

“I don’t think so.

“I don’t even think you got so close as to share a pint with Jack the Ripper. And even if you did, even if you were all those maniacs, you were small potatoes, Spanky. The least of us human beings outdoes you, three times a day. How many lynch ropes you pulled tight, M’sieur Landru?

“What colossal egotism you got, makes you blind, makes you think you’re the only one, even when you find out there’s someone else, you can’t get past it. What makes you think I didn’t know what you can do? What makes you think I didn’t let you do it, and sit here waiting for you like you sat there waiting for me, till this moment when you can’t do shit about it?

“You so goddam stuck on yourself, Spankyhead, you never give it the barest that someone else is a faster draw than you.

“Know what your trouble is, Captain? You’re old, you’re real old, maybe hundreds of years who gives a damn old. That don’t count for shit, old man. You’re old, but you never got smart. You’re just mediocre at what you do.

“You moved from address to address. You didn’t have to be Son of Sam or Cain slayin’ Abel, or whoever the fuck you been . . . you could’ve been Moses or Galileo or George Washington Carver or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Mark Twain or Joe Louis. You could’ve been Alexander Hamilton and helped found the Manumission Society in New York. You could’ve discovered radium, carved Mount Rushmore, carried a baby out of a burning building. But you got old real fast, and you never got any smarter. You didn’t need to, did you, Spanky? You had it all to yourself, all this ‘shrike’ shit, just jaunt here and jaunt there, and bite off someone’s hand or face like the old, tired, boring, repetitious, no-imagination stupid shit that you are.

“Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it . . . you must’ve looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m’man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I’d killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.

“Because . . . and here’s the big difference ’tween us, dummy:

“I unravelled what was going on . . . it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don’t.

“There’s an old Japanese saying – I got lots of these, Henry m’man – I read a whole lot – and what it says is, ‘Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience – twenty times’.” Then I grinned back at him.

“Fuck you, sucker,” I said, just as the Warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.

I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I’d done more than a jaunt . . . this was . . . shrike; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal, Rudy Pairis, who was baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind . . . and then gone . . . and I came up from Ally’s shoulder, and I could barely speak.

“Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” I murmured. “He’s gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark.”

I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult – not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than anybody could imagine – I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.

And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.

Because – get on this now – all my wasted years didn’t have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my “gift” of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:

I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn’t get out of his own way.

Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.

This story, for Bob Bloch, because I promised.

 

1994

 

The Temptation of Dr Stein

Paul J. McAuley

AS A TRIBUTE TO RAMSEY’S inestimable contribution to the series, for the 1994 edition I asked Luis Rey to add a little joke into his atmospheric cover painting.

At a launch party (those were the days!) for the book at the annual British Fantasy Convention, the publisher recreated the cover as, literally, the icing on the cake.

The sixth edition of The Best New Horror won the International Horror Guild Award and was the first of two volumes to appear under the Raven Books imprint in the UK. This was a new genre list that I launched and edited for Robinson for a couple of years, until I was reluctantly forced to come to the conclusion that it was not worth all the hard work.

For my first volume as solo editor, the Introduction grew to thirty-one pages and the Necrology was now up to eighteen. In my editorial I warned against the law of diminishing returns as the genre was swamped with “ . . . sequels, inferior copies, share-cropped worlds, media novelizations and role-playing tie-ins, most of them written and published with little or no thought given to their intrinsic value of lasting worth.”

It was advice that the authors and publishers of many so-called “paranormal romances” would do well to heed today . . .

The twenty-two contributions included the welcome return of Ellison and Lamsley, along with such “regulars” as Charles L. Grant, Joel Lane, Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, Michael Marshall Smith and Kim Newman (with a marvellous contemporary re-imagining of the Zorro mythology that was nominated for a World Fantasy Award).

Esther M. Friesner contributed the only verse we have run in the series so far, but this sixth compilation was also touched with personal sadness.

Also in this edition were stories by two old friends – Karl Edward Wagner’s hallucinatory “In the Middle of a Snow Dream” and Robert Bloch’s Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Scent of Vinegar”. Both authors had died within a month of each other the previous year, and the book was dedicated to their memory.

Paul J. McAuley is another old friend and also one of the UK’s most respected science fiction writers. His British Fantasy Award-winning “The Temptation of Dr Stein” may have been set in the same alternate history as his novel Pasquale’s Angel, but it involved a certain mad scientist memorably portrayed by eccentric English actor Ernest Thesiger in James Whale’s classic movie Bride of Frankenstein.

In fact, Paul returned to the character with “The True History of Doctor Pretorius”, which I selected for the following year’s Best New Horror, and “Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple”, which appeared in Volume Fourteen.

DR STEIN PRIDED HIMSELF on being a rational man. When, in the months following his arrival in Venice, it became his habit to spend his free time wandering the city, he could not admit that it was because he believed that his daughter might still live, and that he might see her amongst the cosmopolitan throng. For he harboured the small, secret hope that when Landsknechts had pillaged the houses of the Jews of Lodz, perhaps his daughter had not been carried off to be despoiled and murdered, but had instead been forced to become a servant of some Prussian family. It was no more impossible that she had been brought here, for the Council of Ten had hired many Landsknechts to defend the city and the terraferma hinterlands of its empire.

Dr Stein’s wife would no longer talk to him about it. Indeed, they hardly talked about anything these days. She had pleaded that the memory of their daughter should be laid to rest in a week of mourning, just as if they had interred her body. They were living in rooms rented from a cousin of Dr Stein’s wife, a banker called Abraham Soncino, and Dr Stein was convinced that she had been put up to this by the women of Soncino’s family. Who knew what the women talked about when locked in the bathhouse overnight, while they were being purified of their menses? No good, Dr Stein was certain. Even Soncino, a genial, uxorious man, had urged that Dr Stein mourn his daughter. Soncino had said that his family would bring the requisite food to begin the mourning; after a week all the community would commiserate with Dr Stein and his wife before the main Sabbath service, and with God’s help this terrible wound would be healed. It had taken all of Dr Stein’s powers to refuse this generous offer courteously. Soncino was a good man, but this was none of his business.

As winter came on, driven out by his wife’s silent recriminations, or so he told himself, Dr Stein walked the crowded streets almost every afternoon. Sometimes he was accompanied by an English captain of the Night Guard, Henry Gorrall, to whom Dr Stein had become an unofficial assistant, helping identify the cause of death of one or another of the bodies found floating in the backwaters of the city.

There had been more murders than usual that summer, and several well-bred young women had disappeared. Dr Stein had been urged to help Gorrall by the Elders of the Beth Din; already there were rumours that the Jews were murdering Christian virgins and using their blood to animate a Golem. It was good that a Jew – moreover, a Jew who worked at the city hospital, and taught new surgical techniques at the school of medicine – was involved in attempting to solve this mystery.

Besides, Dr Stein enjoyed Gorrall’s company. He was sympathetic to Gorrall’s belief that everything, no matter how unlikely, had at base a rational explanation. Gorrall was a humanist, and did not mind being seen in the company of a man who must wear a yellow star on his coat. On their walks through the city, they often talked on the new philosophies of nature compounded in the University of Florence’s Great Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, quite oblivious to the brawling bustle all around them.

Ships from twenty nations crowded the quay in the long shadow of the Campanile, and their sailors washed through the streets. Hawkers cried their wares from flotillas of small boats that rocked on the wakes of barges or galleys. Gondoliers shouted vivid curses as skiffs crossing from one side of the Grand Canal to the other got in the way of their long, swift craft. Sometimes a screw-driven Florentine ship made its way up the Grand Canal, its Hero’s engine laying a trail of black smoke, and everyone stopped to watch this marvel. Bankers in fur coats and tall felt hats conducted the business of the world in the piazza before San Giacometto, amid the rattle of the new clockwork abacuses and the subdued murmur of transactions.

Gorrall, a bluff muscular man with a bristling black beard and a habit of spitting sideways and often, because of the plug of tobacco he habitually chewed, seemed to know most of the bankers by name, and the most of the merchants, too – the silk and cloth-of-gold mercers and sellers of fustian and velvet along the Mercerie, the druggists, goldsmiths and silversmiths, the makers of white wax, the ironmongers, coopers and perfumers who had stalls and shops in the crowded little streets off the Rialto. He knew the names of many of the yellow-scarved prostitutes, too, although Dr Stein wasn’t surprised at this, since he had first met Gorrall when the captain had come to the hospital for mercury treatment of his syphilis. Gorrall even knew, or pretended to know, the names of the cats that stalked between the feet of the crowds or lazed on cold stone in the brittle winter sunshine, the true rulers of Venice.

It was outside the cabinet of one of the perfumers of the Mercerie that Dr Stein for a moment thought he saw his daughter. A grey-haired man was standing in the doorway of the shop, shouting at a younger man who was backing away and protesting that there was no blame that could be fixed to his name.

“You are his friend!”

“Sir, I did not know what it was he wrote, and I do not know and I do not care why your daughter cries so!”

The young man had his hand on his long knife, and Gorrall pushed through the gathering crowd and told both men to calm down. The wronged father dashed inside and came out again, dragging a girl of about fourteen, with the same long black hair, the same white, high forehead, as Dr Stein’s daughter.

“Hannah,” Dr Stein said helplessly, but then she turned, and it was not her. Not his daughter. The girl was crying, and clasped a sheet of paper to her bosom – wronged by a suitor, Dr Stein supposed, and Gorrall said that it was precisely that. The young man had run off to sea, something so common these days that the Council of Ten had decreed that convicted criminals might be used on the galleys of the navy because of the shortage of free oarsmen. Soon the whole city might be scattered between Corfu and Crete, or even further, now that Florence had destroyed the fleet of Cortés, and opened the American shore.

Dr Stein did not tell his wife what he had seen. He sat in the kitchen long into the evening, and was still there, warmed by the embers of the fire and reading in Leonardo’s Treatise on the Replication of Motion by the poor light of a tallow candle, when the knock at the door came. It was just after midnight. Dr Stein picked up the candle and went out, and saw his wife standing in the door to the bedroom.

“Don’t answer it,” she said. With one hand she clutched her shift to her throat; with the other she held a candle. Her long black hair, streaked with grey, was down to her shoulders.

“This isn’t Lodz, Belita,” Dr Stein said, perhaps with unnecessary sharpness. “Go back to bed. I will deal with this.”

“There are plenty of Prussians here, even so. One spat at me the other day. Abraham says that they blame us for the body-snatching, and it’s the doctors they’ll come for first.”

The knocking started again. Husband and wife both looked at the door. “It may be a patient,” Dr Stein said, and pulled back the bolts.

The rooms were on the ground floor of a rambling house that faced onto a narrow canal. An icy wind was blowing along the canal, and it blew out Dr Stein’s candle when he opened the heavy door. Two city guards stood there, flanking their captain, Henry Gorrall.

“There’s been a body found,” Gorrall said in his blunt, direct manner. “A woman we both saw this very day, as it happens. You’ll come along and tell me if it’s murder.”

The woman’s body had been found floating in the Rio di Noale. “An hour later,” Gorrall said, as they were rowed through the dark city, “and the tide would have turned and taken her out to sea, and neither you or I would have to chill our bones.”

It was a cold night indeed, just after St Agnes’ Eve. An insistent wind off the land blew a dusting of snow above the roofs and prickly spires of Venice. Fresh ice crackled as the gondola broke through it, and larger pieces knocked against its planking. The few lights showing in the facades of the palazzi that lined the Grand Canal seemed bleary and dim. Dr Stein wrapped his ragged loden cloak around himself and asked, “Do you think it murder?”

Gorrall spat into the black, icy water. “She died for love. That part is easy, as we witnessed the quarrel this very afternoon. She wasn’t in the water long, and still reeks of booze. Drank to get her courage up, jumped. But we have to be sure. It could be a bungled kidnapping, or some cruel sport gone from bad to worse. There are too many soldiers with nothing to do but patrol the defences and wait for a posting in Cyprus.”

The drowned girl had been laid out on the pavement by the canal, and covered with a blanket. Even at this late hour, a small crowd had gathered, and when a guard twitched the blanket aside at Dr Stein’s request, some of the watchers gasped.

It was the girl he had seen that afternoon, the perfumer’s daughter. The soaked dress which clung to her body was white against the wet flags of the pavement. Her long black hair twisted in ropes about her face. There was a little froth at her mouth, and blue touched her lips. Dead, there was nothing about her that reminded Dr Stein of his daughter.

Dr Stein manipulated the skin over the bones of her hand, pressed one of her fingernails, closed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Tenderly, he covered her with the blanket again. “She’s been dead less than an hour,” he told Gorrall. “There’s no sign of a struggle, and from the flux at her mouth I’d say it’s clear she drowned.”

“Killed herself most likely, unless someone pushed her in. The usual reason, I’d guess, which is why her boyfriend ran off to sea. Care to make a wager?”

“We both know her story. I can find out if she was with child, but not here.”

Gorrall smiled. “I forget that you people don’t bet.”

“On the contrary. But in this case I fear you’re right.”

Gorrall ordered his men to take the body to the city hospital. As they lifted it into the gondola, he said to Dr Stein, “She drank to get courage, then gave herself to the water, but not in this little canal. Suicides favour places where their last sight is a view, often of a place they love. We’ll search the bridge at the Rialto – it is the only bridge crossing the Grand Canal, and the tide is running from that direction – but all the world crosses there, and if we’re not quick, some beggar will have carried away her bottle and any note she may have left. Come on, doctor. We need to find out how she died before her parents turn up and start asking questions. I must have something to tell them, or they will go out looking for revenge.”

If the girl had jumped from the Rialto bridge, she had left no note there – or it had been stolen, as Gorrall had predicted. Gorrall and Dr Stein hurried on to the city hospital, but the body had not arrived. Nor did it. An hour later, a patrol found the gondola tied up in a backwater. One guard was dead from a single sword-cut to his neck. The other was stunned, and remembered nothing. The drowned girl was gone.

Gorrall was furious, and sent out every man he had to look for the body-snatchers. They had balls to attack two guards of the night watch, he said, but when he had finished with them they’d sing falsetto under the lash on the galleys. Nothing came of his enquiries. The weather turned colder, and an outbreak of pleurisy meant that Dr Stein had much work in the hospital. He thought no more about it until a week later, when Gorrall came to see him.

“She’s alive,” Gorrall said. “I’ve seen her.”

“A girl like her, perhaps.” For a moment, Dr Stein saw his daughter, running towards him, arms widespread. He said, “I don’t make mistakes. There was no pulse, her lungs were congested with fluid, and she was as cold as the stones on which she lay.”

Gorrall spat. “She’s walking around dead, then. Do you remember what she looked like?”

“Vividly.”

“She was the daughter of a perfumer, one Filippo Rompiasi. A member of the Great Council, although of the 2,500 who have that honour, I’d say he has about the least influence. A noble family so long fallen on hard times that they have had to learn a trade.”

Gorrall had little time for the numerous aristocracy of Venice, who, in his opinion, spent more time scheming to obtain support from the Republic than playing their part in governing it.

“Still,” he said, scratching at his beard and looking sidelong at Dr Stein, “it’ll look very bad that the daughter of a patrician family walks around after having been pronounced dead by the doctor in charge of her case.”

“I don’t recall being paid,” Dr Stein said.

Gorrall spat again. “Would I pay someone who can’t tell the quick from the dead? Come and prove me wrong and I’ll pay you from my own pocket. With a distinguished surgeon as witness, I can draw up a docket to end this matter.”

The girl was under the spell of a mountebank who called himself Dr Pretorious, although Gorrall was certain that it wasn’t the man’s real name. “He was thrown out of Padua last year for practising medicine without a licence, and was in jail in Milan before that. I’ve had my eye on him since he came ashore on a Prussian coal barge this summer. He vanished a month ago, and I thought he’d become some other city’s problem. Instead, he went to ground. Now he proclaims this girl to be a miraculous example of a new kind of treatment.”

There were many mountebanks in Venice. Every morning and afternoon there were five or six stages erected in the Piazza San Marco for their performances and convoluted orations, in which they praised the virtues of their peculiar instruments, powders, elixirs and other concoctions. Venice tolerated these madmen, in Dr Stein’s opinion, because the miasma of the nearby marshes befuddled the minds of her citizens, who besides were the most vain people he had ever met, eager to believe any promise of enhanced beauty and longer life.

Unlike the other mountebanks, Dr Pretorious was holding a secret court. He had rented a disused wine store at the edge of the Prussian Fondaco, a quarter of Venice where ships were packed tightly in the narrow canals and every other building was a merchant’s warehouse. Even walking beside a captain of the city guard, Dr Stein was deeply uneasy there, feeling that all eyes were drawn to the yellow star he must by law wear, pinned to the breast of his surcoat. There had been an attack on the synagogue just the other day, and pigshit had been smeared on the mezuzah fixed to the doorpost of a prominent Jewish banker. Sooner or later, if the body-snatchers were not caught, a mob would sack the houses of the wealthiest Jews on the excuse of searching out and destroying the fabled Golem which existed nowhere but in their inflamed imaginations.

Along with some fifty others, mostly rich old women and their servants, Gorrall and Dr Stein crossed a high arched bridge over a dark, silently running canal, and, after paying a ruffian a soldo each for the privilege, entered through a gate into a courtyard lit by smoky torches. Once the ruffian had closed and locked the gate, two figures appeared at a tall open door that was framed with swags of red cloth.

One was a man dressed all in black, with a mop of white hair. Behind him a woman in white lay half-submerged in a kind of tub packed full of broken ice. Her head was bowed, and her face hidden by a fall of black hair. Gorrall nudged Dr Stein and said that this was the girl.

“She looks dead to me. Anyone who could sit in a tub of ice and not burst to bits through shivering must be dead.”

“Let’s watch and see,” Gorrall said, and lit a foul-smelling cigarillo.

The white-haired man, Dr Pretorious, welcomed his audience, and began a long rambling speech. Dr Stein paid only a little attention, being more interested in the speaker. Dr Pretorious was a gaunt, bird-like man with a clever, lined face and dark eyes under shaggy brows which knitted together when he made a point. He had a habit of stabbing a finger at his audience, of shrugging and laughing immodestly at his own boasts. He did not, Dr Stein was convinced, much believe his speech, a curious failing for a mountebank.

Dr Pretorious had the honour, it appeared, of introducing the true Bride of the Sea, one recently dead but now animated by an ancient Egyptian science. There was much on the long quest he had made in search of the secret of this ancient science, and the dangers he had faced in bringing it here, and in perfecting it. He assured his audience that as it had conquered death, the science he had perfected would also conquer old age, for was that not the slow victory of death over life? He snapped his fingers, and, as the tub seemed to slide forward of its own accord into the torchlight, invited his audience to see for themselves that this Bride of the Sea was not alive.

Strands of kelp had been woven into the drowned girl’s thick black hair. Necklaces layered at her breast were of seashells of the kind that anyone could pick from the beach at the mouth of the lagoon.

Dr Pretorious pointed to Dr Stein, called him out. “I see we have here a physician. I recognize you, sir. I know the good work that you do at the Pietà, and the wonderful new surgical techniques you have brought to the city. As a man of science, would you do me the honour of certifying that this poor girl is at present not living?”

“Go on,” Gorrall said, and Dr Stein stepped forward, feeling both foolish and eager.

“Please, your opinion,” Dr Pretorious said with an ingratiating bow. He added, sotto voce, “This is a true marvel, doctor. Believe in me.” He held a little mirror before the girl’s red lips, and asked Dr Stein if he saw any evidence of breath.

Dr Stein was aware of an intense sweet, cloying odour: a mixture of brandy and attar of roses. He said, “I see none.”

“Louder, for the good people here.”

Dr Stein repeated his answer.

“A good answer. Now, hold her wrist. Does her heart beat?”

The girl’s hand was as cold as the ice from which Dr Pretorious lifted it. If there was a pulse, it was so slow and faint that Dr Stein was not allowed enough time to find it. He was dismissed, and Dr Pretorious held up the girl’s arm by the wrist and, with a grimace of effort, pushed a long nail though her hand.

“You see,” he said with indecent excitement, giving the wrist a little shake so that the pierced hand flopped to and fro. “You see! No blood! No blood! Eh? What living person could endure such a cruel mutilation?”

He seemed excited by his demonstration. He dashed inside the doorway, and brought forward a curious device, a glass bowl inverted on a stalk of glass almost as tall as he, with a band of red silk twisted inside the bowl and around a spindle at the bottom of the stalk. He began to work a treadle, and the band of silk spun around and around.

“A moment,” Dr Pretorious said, as the crowd began to murmur. He glared at them from beneath his shaggy eyebrows as his foot pumped the treadle. “A moment, if you please. The apparatus must receive a sufficient charge.”

He sounded flustered and out of breath. Any mountebank worth his salt would have had a naked boy painted in gilt and adorned with cherub wings to work the treadle, Dr Stein reflected, and a drum roll besides. Yet the curious amateurism of this performance was more compelling than the polished theatricality of the mountebanks of the Piazza San Marco.

Gold threads trailed from the top of the glass bowl to a big glass jar half-filled with water and sealed with a cork. At last, Dr Pretorious finished working the treadle, sketched a bow to the audience – his face shiny with sweat – and used a stave to sweep the gold threads from the top of the glass bowl onto the girl’s face.

There was a faint snap, as of an old glass broken underfoot at a wedding. The girl’s eyes opened and she looked about her, seeming dazed and confused.

“She lives, but only for a few precious minutes,” Dr Pretorious said. “Speak to me, my darling. You are a willing bride to the sea, perhaps?”

Gorrall whispered to Dr Stein, “That’s definitely the girl who drowned herself?” and Dr Stein nodded. Gorrall drew out a long silver whistle and blew on it, three quick blasts. At once, a full squad of men-at-arms swarmed over the high walls. Some of the old women in the audience started to scream. The ruffian in charge of the gate charged at Gorrall, who drew a repeating pistol with a notched wheel over its stock. He shot three times, the wheel ratcheting around as it delivered fresh charges of powder and shot to the chamber. The ruffian was thrown onto his back, already dead as the noise of the shots echoed in the courtyard. Gorrall turned and levelled the pistol at the red-cloaked doorway, but it was on fire, and Dr Pretorious and the dead girl in her tub of ice were gone.

Gorrall and his troops put out the fire and ransacked the empty wine store. It was Dr Stein who found the only clue, a single broken seashell by a hatch that, when lifted, showed black water a few braccia below, a passage that Gorrall soon determined led out into the canal.

Dr Stein could not forget the dead girl, the icy touch of her skin, her sudden start into life, the confusion in her eyes. Gorrall thought that she only seemed alive, that her body had been preserved perhaps by tanning, that the shine in her eyes was glycerine, the bloom on her lips pigment of the kind the apothecaries made of powdered beetles.

“The audience wanted to believe it would see a living woman, and the flickering candles would make her seem to move. You’ll be a witness, I hope.”

“I touched her,” Dr Stein said. “She was not preserved. The process hardens the skin.”

“We keep meat by packing it in snow, in winter,” Gorrall said. “Also, I have heard that there are magicians in the far Indies who can fall into so deep a trance that they do not need to breathe.”

“We know she is not from the Indies. I would ask why so much fuss was made of the apparatus. It was so clumsy that it seemed to me to be real.”

“I’ll find him,” Gorrall said, “and we will have answers to all these questions.”

But when Dr Stein saw Gorrall two days later, and asked about his enquiries into the Pretorious affair, the English captain shook his head and said, “I have been told not to pursue the matter. It seems the girl’s father wrote too many begging letters to the Great Council, and he has no friends there. Further than that, I’m not allowed to say.” Gorrall spat and said with sudden bitterness, “You can work here twenty-five years, Stein, and perhaps they’ll make you a citizen, but they will never make you privy to their secrets.”

“Someone in power believes Dr Pretorious’s claims, then.”

“I wish I could say. Do you believe him?”

“Of course not.”

But it was not true, and Dr Stein immediately made his own enquiries. He wanted to know the truth, and not, he told himself, because he had mistaken the girl for his daughter. His interest was that of a doctor, for if death could be reversed, then surely that was the greatest gift a doctor could possess. He was not thinking of his daughter at all.

His enquiries were first made amongst his colleagues at the city hospital, and then in the guild hospitals and the new hospital of the Arsenal. Only the director of the last was willing to say anything, and warned Dr Stein that the man he was seeking had powerful allies.

“So I have heard,” Dr Stein said. He added recklessly, “I wish I knew who they were.”

The director was a pompous man, placed in his position through politics rather than merit. Dr Stein could see that he was tempted to divulge what he knew, but in the end he merely said, “Knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you would know anything, start from a low rather than a high place. Don’t overreach yourself, doctor.”

Dr Stein bridled at this, but said nothing. He sat up through the night, thinking the matter over. This was a city of secrets, and he was a stranger, and a Jew from Prussia to boot. His actions could easily be mistaken for those of a spy, and he was not sure that Gorrall could help him if he was accused. Gorrall’s precipitate attempt to arrest Dr Pretorious had not endeared him to his superiors, after all.

Yet Dr Stein could not get the drowned girl’s face from his mind, the way she had given a little start and her eyes had opened under the tangle of gold threads. Tormented by fantasies in which he found his daughter’s grave and raised her up, he paced the kitchen, and in the small hours of the night it came to him that the director of the Arsenal hospital had spoken the truth even if he had not known it.

In the morning, Dr Stein set out again, saying nothing to his wife of what he was doing. He had realized that Dr Pretorious must need simples and other necessaries for his trade, and now he went from apothecary to apothecary with the mountebank’s description. Dr Stein found his man late in the afternoon, in a mean little shop in a calle that led off a square dominated by the brightly painted facade of the new church of Santa Maria de Miracoli.

The apothecary was a young man with a handsome face but small, greedy eyes. He peered at Dr Stein from beneath a fringe of greasy black hair, and denied knowing Dr Pretorious with such vehemence that Dr Stein did not doubt he was lying.

A soldo soon loosened his tongue. He admitted that he might have such a customer as Dr Stein described, and Dr Stein asked at once, “Does he buy alum and oil?”

The apothecary expressed surprise. “He is a physician, not a tanner.”

“Of course,” Dr Stein said, hope rising in him. A second soldo bought Dr Stein the privilege of delivering the mountebank’s latest order, a jar of sulphuric acid nested in a straw cradle.

The directions given by the apothecary led Dr Stein through an intricate maze of calli and squares, ending in a courtyard no bigger than a closet, with tall buildings soaring on either side, and no way out but the narrow passage by which he had entered. Dr Stein knew he was lost, but before he could turn to begin to retrace his steps, someone seized him from behind. An arm clamped across his throat. He struggled and dropped the jar of acid, which by great good luck, and the straw padding, did not break. Then he was on his back, looking up at a patch of grey sky which seemed to rush away from him at great speed, dwindling to a speck no bigger than a star.

Dr Stein was woken by the solemn tolling of the curfew bells. He was lying on a mouldering bed in a room muffled by dusty tapestries and lit by a tall tallow candle. His throat hurt and his head ached. There was a tender swelling above his right ear, but he had no double vision or dizziness. Whoever had hit him had known what they were about.

The door was locked, and the windows were closed by wooden shutters nailed tightly shut. Dr Stein was prying at the shutters when the door was unlocked and an old man came in. He was a shrivelled gnome in a velvet tunic and doublet more suited to a young gallant. His creviced face was drenched with powder, and there were hectic spots of rouge on his sunken cheeks.

“My master will talk with you,” this ridiculous creature said.

Dr Stein asked where he was, and the old man said that it was his master’s house. “Once it was mine, but I gave it to him. It was his fee.”

“Ah. You were sick, and he cured you.”

“I was cured of life. He killed me and brought me back, so that I will live forever in the life beyond death. He’s a great man.”

“What’s your name?”

The old man laughed. He had only one tooth in his head, and that a blackened stump. “I’ve yet to be christened in this new life. Come with me.”

Dr Stein followed the old man up a wide marble stair that wound through the middle of what must be a great palazzo. Two stories below was a floor tiled black and white like a chessboard; they climbed past two more floors to the top.

The long room had once been a library, but the shelves of the dark bays set off the main passage were empty now; only the chains which had secured the books were left. It was lit by a scattering of candles whose restless flames cast a confusion of flickering light that hid more than it revealed. One bay was penned off with a hurdle, and a pig moved in the shadows there. Dr Stein had enough of a glimpse of it to see that there was something on the pig’s back, but it was too dark to be sure quite what it was. Then something the size of a mouse scuttled straight in front of him – Dr Stein saw with a shock that it ran on its hind legs, with a stumbling, crooked gait.

“One of my children,” Dr Pretorious said.

He was seated at a plain table scattered with books and papers. Bits of glassware and jars of acids and salts cluttered the shelves that rose behind him. The drowned girl sat beside him in a high-backed chair. Her head was held up by a leather band around her forehead; her eyes were closed and seemed bruised and sunken. Behind the chair was the same apparatus that Dr Stein had seen used in the wine store. The smell of attar of roses was very strong.

Dr Stein said, “It was only a mouse, or a small rat.”

“You believe what you must, doctor,” Dr Pretorious said, “but I hope to open your eyes to the wonders I have performed.” He told the old man, “Fetch food.”

The old man started to complain that he wanted to stay, and Dr Pretorious immediately jumped up in a sudden fit of anger and threw a pot of ink at his servant. The old man sputtered, smearing the black ink across his powdered face, and at once Dr Pretorious burst into laughter. “You’re a poor book,” he said. “Fetch our guest meat and wine. It’s the least I can do,” he told Dr Stein. “Did you come here of your own will, by the way?”

“I suppose the apothecary told you that I asked for you. That is, if he was an apothecary.”

Dr Pretorious said, with a quick smile, “You wanted to see the girl, I suppose, and here she is. I saw the tender look you gave her, before we were interrupted, and see that same look again.”

“I knew nothing of my colleague’s plans.”

Dr Pretorious made a steeple with his hands, touched the tip of the steeple to his bloodless lips. His fingers were long and white, and seemed to have an extra joint in them. He said, “Don’t hope he’ll find you.”

“I’m not afraid. You brought me here because you wanted me here.”

“But you should be afraid. I have power of life and death here.”

“The old man said you gave him life everlasting.”

Dr Pretorious said carelessly, “Oh, so he believes. Perhaps that’s enough.”

“Did he die? Did you bring him back to life?”

Dr Pretorious said, “That depends what you mean by life. The trick is not raising the dead, but making sure that death does not reclaim them.”

Dr Stein had seen a panther two days after he had arrived in Venice, brought from the Friendly Isles along with a great number of parrots. So starved that the bones of its shoulders and pelvis were clearly visible under its sleek black pelt, the panther ceaselessly padded back and forth inside its little cage, its eyes like green lamps. It had been driven mad by the voyage, and Dr Stein thought that Dr Pretorious was as mad as that panther, his sensibility quite lost on the long voyage into the unknown regions which he claimed to have conquered. In truth, they had conquered him.

“I have kept her on ice for much of the time,” Dr Pretorious said. “Even so, she is beginning to deteriorate.” He twitched the hem of the girl’s gown, and Dr Stein saw on her right foot a black mark as big as his hand, like a sunken bruise. Despite the attar of roses, the reek of gangrene was suddenly overpowering.

He said, “The girl is dead. I saw it for myself, when she was pulled from the canal. No wonder she rots.”

“It depends what you mean by death. Have you ever seen fish in a pond, under ice? They can become so sluggish that they no longer move. And yet they live, and when warmed will move again. I was once in Gotland. In winter, the nights last all day, and your breath freezes in your beard. A man was found alive after two days lying in a drift of snow. He had drunk too much, and had passed out; the liquor had saved him from freezing to death, although he lost his ears and his fingers and toes. This girl was dead when she was pulled from the icy water, but she had drunk enough to prevent death from placing an irreversible claim on her body. I returned her to life. Would you like to see how it is done?”

“Master?”

It was the old man. With cringing deference, he offered a tray bearing a tarnished silver wine decanter, a plate of beef, heavily salted and greenish at the edges, and a loaf of black bread.

Dr Pretorious was on him in an instant. The food and wine flew into the air; Dr Pretorious lifted the old man by his neck, dropped him to the floor. “We are busy,” he said, quite calmly.

Dr Stein started to help the old man to gather the food together, but Dr Pretorious aimed a kick at the old man, who scuttled away on all fours.

“No need for that,” Dr Pretorious said impatiently. “I shall show you, doctor, that she lives.” The glass bowl sang under his long fingernails; he smoothed the belt of frayed red silk with tender care. He looked sidelong at Dr Stein and said, “There is a tribe in the far south of Egypt who have been metalworkers for three thousand years. They apply a fine coat of silver to ornaments of base metal by immersing the ornaments in a solution of nitrate of silver and connecting them to tanks containing plates of lead and zinc in salt water. Split by the two metals, the opposing essences of the salt water flow in different directions, and when they join in the ornaments draw the silver from solution. I have experimented with that process, and will experiment more, but even when I substitute salt water with acid, the flow of essences is as yet too weak for my purpose. This—” he rapped the glass bowl, which rang like a bell “—is based on a toy that their children played with, harnessing that same essence to give each other little frights. I have greatly enlarged it, and developed a way of storing the essence it generates. For this essence lives within us, too, and is sympathetic to the flow from this apparatus. By its passage through the glass the silk generates that essence, which is stored here, in this jar. Look closely if you will. It is only ordinary glass, and ordinary water, sealed by a cork, but it contains the essence of life.”

“What do you want of me?”

“I have done much alone. But, doctor, we can do so much more together. Your reputation is great.”

“I have the good fortune to be allowed to teach the physicians here some of the techniques I learned in Prussia. But no surgeon would operate on a corpse.”

“You are too modest. I have heard the stories of the man of clay your people can make to defend themselves. I know it is based on truth. Clay cannot live, even if bathed in blood, but a champion buried in the clay of the earth might be made to live again, might he not?”

Dr Stein understood that the mountebank believed his own legerdemain. He said, “I see that you have great need of money. A man of learning would only sell books in the most desperate circumstances, but all the books in this library have gone. Perhaps your sponsors are disappointed, and do not pay what they have promised, but it is no business of mine.”

Dr Pretorious said sharply, “The fancies in those books were a thousand years old. I have no need of them. And it might be said that you owe me money. Interruption of my little demonstration cost me at least twenty soldi, for there were at least that many dowagers eager to taste the revitalizing essence of life. So I think that you are obliged to help me, eh? Now watch, and wonder.”

Dr Pretorious began to work the treadles of his apparatus. The sound of his laboured breathing and the soft tearing sound made by the silk belt as it revolved around and around filled the long room. At last, Dr Pretorious twitched the gold wires from the top of the glass bowl so that they fell across the girl’s face. In the dim light, Dr Stein saw the snap of a fat blue flame that for a moment jumped amongst the ends of the wires. The girl’s whole body shuddered. Her eyes opened.

“A marvel!” Dr Pretorious said, panting from his exercise. “Each day she dies. Each night I bring her to life.”

The girl looked around at his voice. The pupils of her eyes were of different sizes. Dr Pretorious slapped her face until a faint bloom appeared on her cheeks.

“You see! She lives! Ask her a question. Anything. She has returned from death, and there is more in her head than in yours or mine. Ask!”

“I have nothing to ask,” Dr Stein said.

“She knows the future. Tell him about the future,” he hissed into the girl’s ear.

The girl’s mouth worked. Her chest heaved as if she was pumping up something inside herself, then she said in a low whisper, “It is the Jews that will be blamed.”

Dr Stein said, “That’s always been true.”

“But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Dr Stein met Dr Pretorious’s black gaze. “How many have you killed, in your studies?”

“Oh, most of them were already dead. They gave themselves for science, just as in the ancient days young girls were sacrificed for the pagan gods.”

“Those days are gone.”

“Greater days are to come. You will help. I know you will. Let me show you how we will save her. You will save her, won’t you?”

The girl’s head was beside Dr Pretorious’. They were both looking at Dr Stein. The girl’s lips moved, mumbling over two words. A cold mantle crept across Dr Stein’s skin. He had picked up a knife when he had stooped to help the old man, and now, if he could, he had a use for it.

Dr Pretorious led Dr Stein to the pen where the pig snuffled in its straw. He held up a candle, and Dr Stein saw clearly, for an instant, the hand on the pig’s back. Then the creature bolted into shadow.

It was a human hand, severed at the wrist and poking out of the pink skin of the pig’s back as if from a sleeve. It looked alive: the nails were suffused, and the skin was as pink as the pig’s skin.

“They don’t last long,” Dr Pretorious said. He seemed pleased by Dr Stein’s shock. “Either the pig dies, or the limb begins to rot. There is some incompatibility between the two kinds of blood. I have tried giving pigs human blood before the operation, but they die even more quickly. Perhaps with your help I can perfect the process. I will perform the operation on the girl, replace her rotten foot with a healthy one. I will not have her imperfect. I will do better. I will improve her, piece by piece. I will make her a true Bride of the Sea, a wonder that all the world will worship. Will you help me, doctor? It is difficult to get bodies. Your friend is causing me a great deal of nuisance . . . but you can bring me bodies, why, almost every day. So many die in winter. A piece here, a piece there. I do not need the whole corpse. What could be simpler?”

He jumped back as Dr Stein grabbed his arm, but Dr Stein was quicker, and knocked the candle into the pen. The straw was aflame in an instant, and the pig charged out as soon as Dr Stein pulled back the hurdle. It barged at Dr Pretorious as if it remembered the torments he had inflicted upon it, and knocked him down. The hand flopped to and fro on its back, as if waving.

The girl could have been asleep, but her eyes opened as soon as Dr Stein touched her cold brow. She tried to speak, but she had very little strength now, and Dr Stein had to lay his head on her cold breast to hear her mumble the two words she had mouthed to him earlier.

“Kill me.”

Behind them, the fire had taken hold in the shelving and floor, casting a lurid light down the length of the room. Dr Pretorious ran to and fro, pursued by the pig. He was trying to capture the scampering mice-things which had been driven from their hiding places by the fire, but even with their staggering bipedal gait they were faster than he was. The old man ran into the room, and Dr Pretorious shouted, “Help me, you fool!”

But the old man ran past him, ran through the wall of flames that now divided the room, and jumped onto Dr Stein as he bent over the drowned girl. He was as weak as a child, but when Dr Stein tried to push him away he bit into Dr Stein’s wrist and the knife fell to the floor. They reeled backwards and knocked over a jar of acid. Instantly, acrid white fumes rose up as the acid burnt into the wood floor. The old man rolled on the floor, beating at his smoking, acid-drenched costume.

Dr Stein found the knife and drew its sharp point down the length of the blue veins of the drowned girl’s forearms. The blood flowed surprisingly quickly. Dr Stein stroked the girl’s hair, and her eyes focused on his. For a moment it seemed as if she might say something, but with the heat of the fire beating at his back he could not stay any longer.

Dr Stein knocked out a shutter with a bench, hauled himself onto the window-ledge. As he had hoped, there was black water directly below: like all palazzi, this one rose straight up from the Grand Canal. Smoke rolled around him. He heard Dr Pretorious shout at him and he let himself go, and gave himself to air, and then water.

Dr Pretorious was caught at dawn the next day, as he tried to leave the city in a hired skiff. The fire set by Dr Stein had burnt out the top floor of the palazzo, no more, but the old man had died there. He had been the last in the line of a patrician family that had fallen on hard times: the palazzo and an entry in the Libro d’Oro was all that was left of their wealth and fame.

Henry Gorrall told Dr Stein that no mention need be made of his part in this tragedy. “Let the dead lay as they will. There’s no need to disturb them with fantastic stories.”

“Yes,” Dr Stein said, “the dead should stay dead.”

He was lying in his own bed, recovering from a rheumatic fever brought about by the cold waters into which he had plunged on his escape. Winter sunlight pried at the shutters of the white bedroom, streaked the fresh rushes on the floor.

“It seems that Pretorious has influential friends,” Gorrall said. “There won’t be a trial and an execution, much as he deserves both. He’s going straight to the galleys, and no doubt after a little while he will contrive, with some help, to escape. That’s the way of things here. His name wasn’t really Pretorious, of course. I doubt if we’ll ever know where he came from. Unless he told you something of himself.”

Outside the bedroom there was a clamour of voices as Dr Stein’s wife welcomed in Abraham Soncino and his family, and the omelettes and other egg dishes they had brought to begin the week of mourning.

Dr Stein said, “Pretorious claimed that he was in Egypt, before he came here.”

“Yes, but what adventurer was not, after the Florentines conquered it and let it go? Besides, I understand that he stole the apparatus not from any savage tribe, but from the Great Engineer of Florence himself. What else did he say? I’d know all, not for the official report, but my peace of mind.”

“There aren’t always answers to mysteries,” Dr Stein told his friend. The dead should stay dead. Yes. He knew now that his daughter had died. He had released her memory when he had released the poor girl that Dr Pretorious had called back from the dead. Tears stood in his eyes, and Gorrall clumsily tried to comfort him, mistaking them for tears of grief.

 

1995

 

Queen of Knives

Neil Gaiman

FOR THE SEVENTH VOLUME of The Best New Horror, Luis Rey contributed, in my opinion, his finest cover to the series, ably showcased by Robinson’s classy design.

Once again issued under the soon-to-be-defunct Raven Books imprint, the Introduction leapt to forty-three pages while the Necrology crept up to nineteen. I also added a section of “Useful Addresses”, which I thought might function as a helpful reference source for readers and authors alike. At almost 600 pages, this was one of the biggest volumes we have ever published in the series.

This time I got to sound off about a personal irritation at avaricious writers and others who actively solicit awards in our genre. Not only is it debasing to them and their work, but it also dilutes the worth of any prize that is cynically canvassed for in this way. Unfortunately, many of today’s awards in the field continue to be diminished by active campaigning and manipulation by those desperate to win them at any price.

Volume Seven contained twenty-six stories, including a posthumously published tale by the great pulp writer Manly Wade Wellman (who died in 1986), and another belated contribution by writer Jane Rice, who regularly appeared in John W. Campbell’s pulp magazine Unknown in the 1940s.

Brian Stableford’s genre-bending novella “The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires” was certainly the longest contribution in the book, but this time I’ve selected one of the shortest – Neil Gaiman’s “Queen of Knives”.

Neil has never been scared to take chances with his fiction, and this creepy prose poem is another example of one of our most creative writers once again pushing the boundaries of the genre. A view of the adult world as seen through the perspective of a child, like Christopher Fowler’s story earlier in this volume, it also stands as a tribute to another almost-forgotten British comedian – Harry Worth.

“The re-appearance of the lady is a matter of individual taste.”

– Will Goldston, Tricks and Illusions

WHEN I WAS A BOY, from time to time,

I stayed with my grandparents

(old people: I knew they were old –

chocolates in their house

remained uneaten until I came to stay,

this, then, was ageing).

My grandfather always made breakfast at sun-up:

A pot of tea, for her and him and me,

some toast and marmalade

(the Silver Shred and the Gold). Lunch and dinner,

those were my grandmother’s to make, the kitchen

was again her domain, all the pans and spoons,

the mincer, all the whisks and knives, her loyal subjects.

She would prepare the food with them, singing her little songs:

Daisy Daisy give me your answer do,

or sometimes,

You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it,

I didn’t want to do it.

She had no voice, not one to speak of.

Business was very slow.

My grandfather spent his days at the top of the house,

in his tiny darkroom where I was not permitted to go,

bringing out paper faces from the darkness,

the cheerless smiles of other people’s holidays.

My grandmother would take me for grey walks along the promenade.

Mostly I would explore

the small wet grassy space behind the house,

the blackberry brambles and the garden shed.

It was a hard week for my grandparents

forced to entertain a wide-eyed boy-child, so

one night they took me to the King’s Theatre. The King’s . . .

Variety!

The lights went down, red curtains rose.

A popular comedian of the day,

came on, stammered out his name (his catchphrase),

pulled out a sheet of glass, and stood half-behind it,

raising the arm and leg that we could see;

reflected

he seemed to fly – it was his trademark,

so we all laughed and cheered. He told a joke or two,

quite badly. His haplessness, his awkwardness,

these were what we had come to see.

Bemused and balding and bespectacled,

he reminded me a little of my grandfather.

And then the comedian was done.

Some ladies danced all legs across the stage.

A singer sang a song I didn’t know.

The audience were old people,

like my grandparents, tired and retired,

all of them laughing and applauding.

In the interval my grandfather

queued for a choc-ice and a couple of tubs.

We ate our ices as the lights went down.

The “SAFETY CURTAIN” rose, and then the real curtain.

The ladies danced across the stage again,

and then the thunder rolled, the smoke went puff,

a conjurer appeared and bowed. We clapped.

The lady walked on, smiling from the wings:

glittered. Shimmered. Smiled.

We looked at her, and in that moment flowers grew,

and silks and pennants tumbled from his fingertips.

The flags of all nations, said my grandfather, nudging me.

They were up his sleeve.

Since he was a young man,

(I could not imagine him as a child)

my grandfather had been, by his own admission,

one of the people who knew how things worked.

He had built his own television,

my grandmother told me, when they were first married,

it was enormous, though the screen was small.

This was in the days before television programmes;

they watched it, though,

unsure whether it was people or ghosts they were seeing.

He had a patent, too, for something he invented,

but it was never manufactured.

Stood for the local council, but he came in third.

He could repair a shaver or a wireless,

develop your film, or build a house for dolls.

(The doll’s house was my mother’s. We still had it at my house,

shabby and old it sat out in the grass, all rained-on and forgot.)

The glitter lady wheeled on a box.

The box was tall: grown-up-person-sized, and black.

She opened up the front.

They turned it round and banged upon the back.

The lady stepped inside, still smiling,

The magician closed the door on her.

When it was opened she had gone.

He bowed.

Mirrors, explained my grandfather. She’s really still inside.

At a gesture, the box collapsed to matchwood.

A trapdoor, assured my grandfather;

Grandma hissed him silent.

The magician smiled, his teeth were small and crowded;

he walked, slowly, out into the audience.

He pointed to my grandmother, he bowed,

a Middle-European bow,

and invited her to join him on the stage.

The other people clapped and cheered.

My grandmother demurred. I was so close

to the magician, that I could smell his aftershave,

and whispered “Me, oh, me . . .” But still,

he reached his long fingers for my grandmother.

Pearl, go on up, said my grandfather. Go with the man.

My grandmother must have been, what? Sixty, then?

She had just stopped smoking,

was trying to lose some weight. She was proudest

of her teeth, which, though tobacco-stained were all her own.

My grandfather had lost his, as a youth,

riding his bicycle; he had the bright idea

to hold on to a bus to pick up speed.

The bus had turned,

and Grandpa kissed the road.

She chewed hard liquorice, watching TV at night,

or sucked hard caramels, perhaps to make him wrong.

She stood up, then, a little slowly.

Put down the paper tub half-full of ice cream,

the little wooden spoon—

went down the aisle, and up the steps.

And on the stage.

The conjurer applauded her once more—

A good sport. That was what she was. A sport.

Another glittering woman came from the wings,

bringing another box—

this one was red.

That’s her, nodded my grandfather, the one

who vanished off before. You see? That’s her.

Perhaps it was. All I could see

was a woman who sparkled, standing next to my grandmother,

(who fiddled with her pearls, and looked embarrassed.)

The lady smiled and faced us, then she froze,

a statue, or a window mannequin.

The magician pulled the box,

with ease,

down to the front of stage, where my grandmother waited.

A moment or so of chitchat:

where she was from, her name, that kind of thing.

They’d never met before? She shook her head.

The magician opened the door,

my grandmother stepped in.

Perhaps it’s not the same one, admitted my grandfather,

on reflection,

I think she had darker hair, the other girl.

I didn’t know.

I was proud of my grandmother, but also embarrassed,

hoping she’d do nothing to make me squirm,

that she wouldn’t sing one of her songs.

She walked into the box. They shut the door.

He opened a compartment at the top, a little door. We saw

my grandmother’s face. Pearl? Are you all right Pearl?

My grandmother smiled and nodded.

The magician closed the door.

The lady gave him a long thin case,

so he opened it. Took out a sword

and rammed it through the box.

And then another, and another

And my grandfather chuckled and explained

The blade slides in the hilt, and then a fake

slides out the other side.

Then he produced a sheet of metal, which

he slid into the box half the way up.

It cut the thing in half. The two of them,

the woman and the man, lifted the top

half of the box up and off, and put it on the stage,

with half my grandma in.

The top half.

He opened up the little door again, for a moment,

My grandmother’s face beamed at us, trustingly.

When he closed the door before,

she went down a trapdoor,

And now she’s standing halfway up,

my grandfather confided.

She’ll tell us how it’s done, when it’s all over.

I wanted him to stop talking: I needed the magic.

Two knives now, through the half-a-box,

at neck-height.

Are you there, Pearl? asked the magician. Let us know

– do you know any songs?

My grandmother sang Daisy Daisy.

He picked up the part of the box,

with the little door in it – the head part –

and he walked about, and she sang

Daisy Daisy first at one side of the stage,

and at the other.

That’s him, said my grandfather, and he’s throwing his voice.

It sounds like Grandma, I said.

Of course it does, he said. Of course it does.

He’s good, he said. He’s good. He’s very good.

The conjuror opened up the box again,

now hatbox-sized. My grandmother had finished Daisy Daisy,

and was on a song which went

My my here we go the driver’s drunk and the horse won’t go

now we’re going back now we’re going back

back back back to London Town.

She had been born in London. Told me ominous tales

from time to time to time

of her childhood. Of the children who ran into her father’s shop

shouting shonky shonky sheeny, running away;

she would not let me wear a black shirt because,

she said, she remembered the marches through the East End.

Mosley’s black-shirts. Her sister got an eye blackened.

The conjurer took a kitchen knife,

pushed it slowly through the red hatbox.

And then the singing stopped.

He put the boxes back together,

pulled out the knives and swords, one by one by one.

He opened the compartment in the top: my grandmother smiled,

embarrassed, at us, displaying her own old teeth.

He closed the compartment, hiding her from view.

Pulled out the last knife.

Opened the main door again,

and she was gone.

A gesture, and the red box vanished too.

It’s up his sleeve, my grandfather explained, but seemed unsure.

The conjurer made two doves fly from a burning plate.

A puff of smoke, and he was gone as well.

She’ll be under the stage now, or back-stage,

said my grandfather,

having a cup of tea. She’ll come back to us with flowers,

or with chocolates. I hoped for chocolates.

The dancing girls again.

The comedian, for the last time.

And all of them came on together at the end.

The grand finale, said my grandfather. Look sharp,

perhaps she’ll be back on now.

But no. They sang

when you’re riding along

on the crest of the wave

and the sun is in the sky.

The curtain went down, and we shuffled out into the lobby.

We loitered for a while.

Then we went down to the stage door,

and waited for my grandmother to come out.

The conjurer came out in street clothes;

the glitter woman looked so different in a mac.

My grandfather went to speak to him. He shrugged,

told us he spoke no English and produced

a half-a-crown from behind my ear,

and vanished off into the dark and rain.

I never saw my grandmother again.

We went back to their house, and carried on.

My grandfather now had to cook for us.

And so for breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea

we had golden toast, and silver marmalade

and cups of tea.

Till I went home.

He got so old after that night

as if the years took him all in a rush.

Daisy Daisy, he’d sing, give me your answer do.

If you were the only girl in the world and I were the only boy.

My old man said follow the van.

My grandfather had the voice in the family,

they said he could have been a cantor,

but there were snapshots to develop,

radios and razors to repair . . .

his brothers were a singing duo: the Nightingales,

had been on television in the early days.

He bore it well. Although, quite late one night,

I woke, remembering the liquorice sticks in the pantry,

I walked downstairs:

my grandfather stood there in his bare feet.

And, in the kitchen, all alone,

I saw him stab a knife into a box.

You made me love you.

I didn’t want to do it.