Easy for Frank Porteous to say sitting in an office counting his twelve-and-a-half percents. He wondered how Frank was. He hadn’t seen him for years. Having an agent was one of the things that had given him up.
Evidently, Frank had been right, because the ratio of time in the voice sessions to time in the pub began to tilt in the pub’s favour. Come on, fair dos, he thought, we all like a drink occasionally.
At that moment, sitting there listening to his career, his life, being dissected, the thought of a drink reminded him that there was the bottle of scotch in the bag at his feet under the table in the voice booth, and he’d give anything to be able to reach down and take a belt. Just to liven him up or calm him down. Or something. Perhaps he could make some excuse and go to the men’s room?
No, wait a minute, Beattie had turned to him. At last. They were going to talk to him directly. Tony flicked the talk-back switch, glanced at it again, and then looked at Victor oddly. He knows, thought Victor. He knows I was listening. Well, sod him.
Beattie said brightly, too brightly, “Victor, love, we’ve got a bit of a problem with the script. Harry’s not entirely happy with some aspects. So I’m going to wrap it for tonight, if that’s all right by you. We’d almost done the two hours anyway” — she glanced at the clock which now stood at five to twelve, midnight — “so we wouldn’t get much more done. Okay, love? And I’ll be in touch for the next booking.”
I’ll bet. Victor thrust the script into his bag and stood up creakily. He went through the double-door air lock into the control room. Beattie smiled at him, and Harry nodded in a friendly way, the hypocritical little bastard.
“All right, Victor?” he said. “Plenty of work coming in?”
“Oh, you know, keeping the wolf from the door,” said Victor.
“That’s the way,” said Harry. Victor wanted to go across and say to him, “Why don’t you either shave or grow a proper beard, you horrible little sod?” But he didn’t.
As he was leaving, Harry and Beattie had already turned back to each other. Now it begins, he thought, the real battle. This was going to go on for a long time. But Beattie would lose. Beattie would always lose against Harry, because Harry gave out the work. And so, he had trudged down the darkened stairs to reception, with the only encouraging thing the bottle in his bag.
And that was where he still was, trying to work out the perfect, foolproof way of killing Harry Phoenix, getting absolutely nowhere and facing a future as black as the night outside the glass doors. Now, to cap everything, outside those glass doors there was this giant insect, peering in with its feet cupped around the great single eye. He sat up. No there wasn’t. What there was, was a motorcycle courier outside in a black crash helmet and black leathers.
The Creature stamped its feet and pressed the buzzer on the auto-porter as though it was something he’d done too many times already.
Victor stepped across unsteadily, in the dark, to the receptionist’s desk. He looked at the entryphone with its single light blinking at him.
Without even thinking, he picked it up, and said, in his best receptionist’s voice, right out of the Essex borders, fluty but with a snap in it, “Ye-es?”
“Chrissake, how long am I supposed to keep standing out here? Got some stuff for a Beattie someone.”
Beattie, Victor thought. Then he thought again.
Then he trilled, “Just leave it on the doorstep, heart. Someone’ll be out in a tick.”
“Need a signature.”
“No you don’t. Sign it yourself. You’ve done it before. Just put Beattie Ransom. We’re all a bit tied up at the mo, heart. Do us a favour.”
The insect shrugged its shoulders and hauled out several large film cans from its panniers, placed them on the doorstep, and, with a 750cc roar, was gone.
Victor crossed to the door, pressed the button to open the electric lock, and went outside. He gave a quick look up and down the street. No one. He let the door close quietly, put his bag on top of the film cans, picked up the whole lot, and walked unsteadily to his car, where he threw everything into the backseat. Then he went home, wondering, as he drove to Fulham, what exactly he had.
At the flat, he soon found out.
After that he sat in his sparsely furnished lounge for a long, long time with a large glass of scotch in his hand, looking out over the darkness of Fulham, listening to the faint traffic sounds become fainter as the town went home. Finally, with a heave, he got up and pulled down from the cluttered shelves the portable cassette recorder he had used for rehearsing his lines, once upon a time, when he was Victor the Voice and not just a washed-up old voice merchant.
He put in a brand-new cassette and sat at his desk with the recorder in front of him. Right. Let’s see. He pressed REC and said, “This is—” He pressed PAUSE and thought for a moment. Yes, why not? It kind of summed the whole thing up, didn’t it? Harry wouldn’t get it, ignorant little bastard, but then what the hell. He rewound and began recording again: “This is The Turtle with a message for Harry Phoenix. We’ve got something that belongs to you. We’ve got the A and B rolls. We’ve got the music and effects tracks. We’ve got the work print and we’ve got every single foot of negative. If you want Through a Killer’s Eyes to go out, you’ll get fifty thousand ready in small bills. If not, it’ll all go up in smoke. We’ll be in touch. Be ready, or your baby dies. And so do you.”
The thing was that the voice was one he had never used, couldn’t even remember developing. He didn’t know where he dragged it up from. It was a horrible voice, was the voice of The Turtle. It was low, rasping, and guttural, churning up from somewhere deep, deep in his throat, but with a weird sort of chilly nasal whistle running under and through it. He wasn’t sure how he was doing that, but it was dreadful to listen to. There was murder in there, and sheer, stark evil. It sounded, even to him, like the breath of Hell. God knows what it would sound like to Harry Phoenix.
Victor listened to it once. And a second time. Then he sat back and smiled. Well now, there’s a Voice for you, Mr. Phoenix, and pick the bones out of that.
He thought he’d let it stew for thirty-six hours. So when the cassette finally arrived through the post, Harry would be good and ready. In the meantime, he would have to work out a foolproof way to collect. But, given the situation, that shouldn’t be too difficult.
Sound bites. Wasn’t that what Harry had said? Give the sodden old has-been some sound bites, if you like.
Victor leaned back, sipped some more scotch, smiled some more, and thought about that.
Sound bites.
Yes, he thought. Yes, it does, doesn’t it?
Copyright © 2002 by Neil Schofield.
Victimless Crime
Holmes Verse
by Stephen D. Rogers
— Stephen D. Rogers
The Faraway Quilters
by Edward D. Hoch
Simon Ark, a dabbler in the occult who claims to be two thousand years old, is a more aloof sort of sleuth than most of Edward D. Hoch’s other series characters, but he allows the author occasionally to treat offbeat subjects and plots. Ark was the protagonist of the first published Hoch short story. Given his claims to longevity, it isn’t surprising that he hasn’t changed much over the nearly fifty years since that first case.