“Heard about it, though, not read it.”
“That’s what I said. Why should it matter to you?”
He couldn’t miss her emphasis on the last word, and he felt that both her contempt and the question had wakened something in him. He’d thought he wanted to reassure himself that he hadn’t been alone in sensing Fishwick’s death, but suddenly he felt altogether more purposeful. “Because it’s part of us,” he said.
“It’s no part of me, I assure you. And I don’t think I was the only member of the jury who thought you were too concerned with that fiend for your own good.”
An unfamiliar expression took hold of Foulsham’s face. “Who else did?”
“If I were you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is, I’d seek help, and quick. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not about to let that monster spoil my Christmas.” She pursed her lips and said “I’m off to meet some normal people.”
Either she thought she’d said too much or his expression and his stillness were unnerving her. “Please leave,” she said more shrilly. “Leave now or I’ll call the police.”
She might have been heading for the door so as to open it for him. He only wanted to stay until he’d grasped why he was there. The sight of her striding to the door reminded him that speed was the one advantage she had over him. Pure instinct came to his aid, and all at once he seemed capable of anything. He saw himself opening the nearest cabinet, he felt his finger and thumb slip through the chilly rings of the handles of the scissors, and lunging at her was the completion of these movements. Even then he thought he meant only to drive her away from the door, but he was reckoning without his limp. As he floundered toward her, he lost his balance, and the points of the scissors entered her right leg behind the knee.
She gave an outraged scream and tried to hobble to the door, the scissors wagging in the patch of flesh and blood revealed by the growing hole in the leg of her patterned tights. The next moment she let out a wail so despairing that he almost felt sorry for her, and fell to her knees, well out of reach of the door. As she craned her head over her shoulder to see how badly she was injured, her eyes were the eyes of an animal caught in a trap. She extended one shaky hand to pull out the scissors, but he was too quick for her. “Let me,” he said, taking hold of her thin wrist.
He thought he was going to withdraw the scissors, but as soon as his finger and thumb were through the rings he experienced an overwhelming surge of power which reminded him of how he’d felt as the verdict of the jury was announced. He leaned on the scissors and exerted all the strength he could, and after a while the blades closed with a sound which, though muffled, seemed intensely satisfying.
Either the shock or her struggles and shrieks appeared to have exhausted her. He had time to lower the blinds over the door and windows and to put on one of the plastic aprons which she and her staff must wear. When she saw him returning with the scissors, however, she tried to fight him off while shoving herself with her uninjured leg toward the door. Since he didn’t like her watching him—it was his turn to watch—he stopped her doing so, and screaming. She continued moving for some time after he would have expected her to be incapable of movement, though she obviously didn’t realize that she was retreating from the door. By the time she finally subsided, he had to admit that the game had grown messy and even a little dull.
He washed his hands until they were clean as a baby’s, then he parceled up the apron and the scissors in the wrapping which had contained his present. He let himself out of the shop and limped towards the bus stop, the book under one arm, the tools of his secret under the other. It wasn’t until passersby smiled in response to him that he realised what his expression was, though it didn’t feel like his own smile, any more than he felt personally involved in the incident at the hairdresser’s. Even the memory of all the jurors’ names didn’t feel like his. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t be alone over Christmas, and in future he would try to be less hasty. After all, he and whoever he visited next would have more to discuss.
SHOTS DOWNED, OFFICER FIRED
by Wayne Allen Sallee
Wayne Allen Sallee has been in the previous nine volumes of The Year’s Best Horror Stories and has chosen this year to inform me that he was born on September 9, 1959, not September 19 as consistently reported here. He claims to have been born in Chicago and to live there still. Fans of his work might well wonder in which planetary system this Chicago might be.
Sallee is another of the small press demons, with hundreds of poems published nearly everywhere in addition to his short fiction. Since I discovered him under a flat rock, Sallee has been placing stories in major anthologies, publishing novels (The Holy Terror), thin volumes of verse (Pain Grin)—both of which are in European translation, and will soon have a chapbook from Tal Publications, Untold Stories of the Scarlet Sponge. His second novel, The Girl With the Concrete Hands, is making the rounds, and he is now at work on another, The Skull Carpenters. Not the singing group.
I. Epileptic Lines
I remember my father staring up at the ceiling. A young man back then, for I was in my single-digit years, he was lean and admirable in his policeman’s uniform. The shirt was almost the exact color as the blueberry Ice Pops we’d get at Buhler’s on the way back from the clinic. The ceiling was as white as the buttons on the shirt, buttoned with a strength I still do not have. The image comes back to me often, as sad a memory as words better left unsaid to a past lover, particularly when I see the weariness in his sixty-year-old eyes. Next March, he will be a police officer for thirty years. The longest job I have held, besides my writing, has been five years. The city-issued shirts for the department are still the same shade of young hope and blueberry Ice Pops.
I had assumed that I would one day visit the clinic, that I returned on an October Saturday two years ago was purely spur-of-the-moment. Like when I recalled my father staring at the ceiling simply because I was feeling guilty about having a good day with no stress.
There were black-and-white television shows on back then. We would sit in the waiting room and watch a man chasing another man with one arm. My mother often said that it was the saddest show on television. Outside the glass door, boys and girls were wheeled to the burn ward or the place where, to my young mind, blind people were kept. I had never seen a blind person on Crystal or on Washtenaw, the only world I was aware of outside of my father’s Chevrolet Biscayne and the trips to the Cook County Clinics.
The black-and-white television screen would be reflected in the glass window, the sad man with black hair like my father’s running toward the boys and girls in wheelchairs, intangible, looking back over his shoulder at me.
This is where I spent much of my first thirteen years. Illinois Research is how I recall its name. Division of Services for Crippled Children. Polk and Wood Streets. A building of rust-colored walls and epileptic lines on the floors directing visitors and patients where to go to look for hope. Thirteen years. I shut my eyes to avoid thinking about how many years it must have seemed for my father.
The lines I am referring to were as easy to recall as the lines marking the elevated tracks on a Chicago Transit Authority map. Yellow, red, blue, black. Running along the black margin of floor next to the right wall of each corridor. An ongoing YOU ARE HERE type of thing, I suppose it gave parents a sense of reassurance. Some paths were discernible, after all. I am certain my father had no idea whatsoever how I would turn out, what paths I might be pushed down or wander along of my own volition, and I have never asked him