“For fuck’s sake,” I said, “I only just met the woman this afternoon. She drugs and rapes me, and you think that means she’s my sheba?”
“Like I told you, I think there are gray areas,” Auntie H. replied. She grinned, and I looked away again.
“Fine. You tell me what it’s gonna take to make this right with you, and I’ll do it.”
“Always so eager to please,” Auntie H. laughed, and the mirror in front of me rippled. “But, since you’ve asked, and as I do not doubt your present sincerity, I will tell you. I want her dead, Natalie. Kill her, and all will be . . . forgiven.”
“Sure,” I said, because what the hell else was I going to say. “But if she’s with Szabу—”
“I have spoken already with Magdalena Szabу, and we have agreed to set aside our differences long enough to deal with Miss Andrews. After all, she has attempted to cheat us both, in equal measure.”
“How do I find her?”
“You’re a resourceful young lady, Natalie,” she said. “I have faith in you. Now . . . if you will excuse me,” and, before I could get in another word, the mirrored room dissolved around me. There was a flash, not of light, but of the deepest abyssal darkness, and I found myself back at the Yellow Dragon, watching through the bookshop’s grimy windows as the sun rose over the Bowery.
——
There you go, the dope on just how it was I found myself holding a gun on Ellen Andrews, and just how it was she found herself wondering if I was angry enough or scared enough or desperate enough to pull the trigger. And like I said, I chambered a round, but she just stood there. She didn’t even flinch.
“I wanted to give you a gift, Nat,” she said.
“Even if I believed that—and I don’t—all I got to show for this gift of yours is a nagging yen for something I’m never going to get back. We lose our innocence, it stays lost. That’s the way it works. So, all I got from you, Ellen, is a thirst can’t ever be slaked. That and Harpootlian figuring me for a clip artist.”
She looked hard at the gun, then looked harder at me.
“So what? You thought I was gonna plead for my life? You thought maybe I was gonna get down on my knees for you and beg? Is that how you like it? Maybe you’re just steamed cause I was on top—”
“Shut up, Ellen. You don’t get to talk yourself out of this mess. It’s a done deal. You tried to give Auntie H. the high hat.”
“And you honestly think she’s on the level? You think you pop me and she lets you off the hook, like nothing happened?”
“I do,” I said. And maybe it wasn’t as simple as that, but I wasn’t exactly lying, either. I needed to believe Harpootlian, the same way old women need to believe in the infinite compassion of the little baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Same way poor kids need to believe in the inexplicable generosity of Popeye the Sailor and Santa Claus.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” she said.
“I didn’t dig your grave, Ellen. I’m just the sap left holding the shovel.”
And she smiled that smug smile of hers and said, “I get it now, what Auntie H. sees in you. And it’s not your knack for finding shit that doesn’t want to be found. It’s not that at all.”
“Is this a guessing game,” I asked, “or do you have something to say?”
“No, I think I’m finished,” she replied. “In fact, I think I’m done for. So let’s get this over with. By the way, how many women have you killed?”
“You played me,” I said again.
“Takes two to make a sucker, Nat,” she smiled.
Me, I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the gunshot, louder than thunder.
——
Caitlнn R. Kiernan is the author of seven novels, including the award-winning Threshold and, most recently, Daughter of Hounds and The Red Tree. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A Is for Alien; and, most recently, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Her erotica has been collected in two volumes, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. She is currently beginning work on her eighth novel. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Nick Mamatas
—
Hallway, just narrow enough for two. Tin ceiling, haze in the air. It’s a railroad apartment, three floors up. A pile of old toys and junk—half a bicycle, plastic playhouse all stained and grimy Day-Glo, empty wrinkled cardboard boxes, coils of cable—blocks the back door. By the front door, a small table littered with envelopes. Bills, looks like. Cellophane windows and a name over and over, in all caps.
So you pick a bill, Paul says.
Any one? Lil asks.
That’s the fee. Pick a bill and pay it. This operator, he doesn’t leave the house, he’s not on anyone’s payroll. He puts his bills out here. You want to hire him, you pick out a bill and pay it. This is how he lives.
Yeah, but . . . She bites her lower lip. Licks it. She’s a real lip licker. So what if I take this one?
She taps a Verizon envelope. Her finger is fat on it, like crushing a bit.
Maybe it’s fifty bucks. Maybe he calls lots of 900 numbers, she says. Is that enough, though? If he’s as good as you say he is—
He’s the best.
It’ll look like an accident?
No.
The finger comes off the envelope. No?
It’ll be an accident, he says.
Eyes roll. Whatever, she says. How can he live like this? I mean, if people can pick any bill they like and pay it, why would anyone bother to pay his rent when they could pay some fifty-dollar phone bill? The West Village, I mean. Jesus.
Rent control. It’s not that bad. He’s been here for a long time, Paul says. Then he puts his hands to his mouth, cupping them. Woom woommm wommm he plays, like a sad trumpet. Then he sings two words. Twi-light time. You know it? Paul asks.
She looks at him.
Glenn Miller, Paul says. Plain as day.
A cheek inches up, dragging her lips into a smirk. Another lick.
“Stardust.” Google it or something. Glenn Miller vanished over the English Channel. He and his army band were flying into liberated Paris to play and . . . He lifts his palms in a shrug.
And they crashed and drowned?
No, just vanished. Not a trace of him, or the band, or the plane. That was his first hit, they say, Paul says. That’s how old this guy is.
I thought you said this guy makes his hits look like accidents, not like episodes of The X-Files, she says.
We can leave right now, if you like. If you’re not impressed. If you don’t want to pick up a bill and take it downstairs to the check-cashing place and pay his electricity or his cable or whatever the hell else, Paul says. If you don’t want to give him three hundred bucks for his rent this month. If you want to try somebody else who might cut your husband’s brakes or shoot him in the fucking face for twenty times the money. Yeah, that won’t be traced back to you. Have you even practiced crying in the mirror, Merry Widow?
Tears well up in her eyes. She stands up straight, then her spine wilts. Waterworks. The man makes to reach out for her, not thinking. All autonomic nerves, limbs jerking toward the brunette Lil like she needs saving.