“My sister lives there,” said a third. “She is understanding and will make a good wife.”
“You have nothing to fear,” said a fourth. “You are amongst friends. We will always help you.”
And then the oldest man, the one I had sat with on the sea wall, looked up, his hard dark eyes transfixing me.
“The old woman was getting beyond her years. She wanted peace with her maker. I thought you knew this.” He looked back to the quayside, to Marjory. “You thought the gift would be her?” he said, looking back at me.
Marjory’s voice screamed out into the darkness. “Jack, you bastard. You wait until you get back. I’ll have the police here waiting for you and your murderous friends. You just wait, I’ll have you in jail and divorce you. You won’t get away with this.” Her voice took too long to recede into the distance.
“She’ll get the police,” I muttered.
“It doesn’t matter,” replied the oldest man.
“Doesn’t matter? Doesn’t matter? She’s a witness. Maybe one of many. The restaurant on the other side; the owners probably live in it. The buildings along the road. Someone could have looked out of the—”
“Do not worry yourself.”
The other men started to chuckle.
“What do you mean—don’t worry? When she calls the—”
“It will be no problem for us.”
“Why?”
“Because I own the restaurant,” said one of the men.
“And I own the buildings on the road,” said another. “They are offices and always empty at night.”
“And I am the Chief Administrator for the island,” said a third.
“And I am the Harbor Master,” said the fourth.
I looked at the oldest man. “And I suppose you’re a policeman?” I said.
His face lit up with a warm smile. “We have not been formally introduced,” and he held out his hand. “My name is Vicente Montero. I am the Chief of Police for Lanzarote, and I see no problems for us. No problems at all.”
And he was right. And so was Marjory, in part. She spent the rest of her holiday in a police cell on a trumped-up charge, conveniently dropped two hours before her plane was due to take off. I saw her once before she left, at a time when the darkness is as comforting as the deeper depths of the sea.
When I removed my sunglasses, the dull light in her cell screamed into my eyes. (They say my eyes will slowly adapt to light, but it will take time). When Marjory started to scream I put my sunglasses back on, but her screaming continued. I left, unable to bear her noise. Besides, I had nothing to say. My eyes said it all, though I doubt she would ever be able to understand. Anyway, I really only wanted one last look at her.
When she returned to England, she divorced me. My children flew out to see me, but my new friends took me to a small fishing village in Tenerife until they had returned home. They write, and I reply, but never with an invitation. They wouldn’t understand either. And they certainly wouldn’t understand my new wife.
I don’t miss them, for I have other children now. Sometimes at night I lie in bed and swim with them. Their life is a free life, and what they give me is so much more than what I can give them. Which is to be expected, for they are older than the oceans and have never been caught by net or hook, and the blackest depths they inhabit are so much more illuminating than the harsh glare of the other world, your world.
God-fish; their name was not ill-chosen.
RIDI BOBO
by Robert Devereaux
“Ridi Bobo” is a very strange story from that great bastion of the unnerving, Weird Tales. I read this in manuscript form last year and would have included it in that year’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories, but the story was bumped to a 1993 issue, making it ineligible for the 1992 harvest of horrors. Ellen Datlow had the same problem with the story for her year’s best anthology. Fortunately, we solved the problem for 1993.
Robert Devereaux was coy when asked to furnish the usual biographical notes, and I’m tempted to make some of them up just to serve as warning to others. He did admit to living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and having had a first horror novel, Deadweight, published this past March by Dell/Abyss. Since the end of 1990 he has had about a dozen stories published in the small press and in anthologies. And he is at work on his next novel.
Devereaux also was once changed into a herring, eats paper clips and eight-track tapes, feeds expresso to pigeons, and has twice been seen with Elvis atop Boulder Dam.
At first little things niggled at Bobo’s mind: the forced quality of Kiki’s mimed chuckle when he went into his daily pratfall getting out of bed; the great care she began to take painting in the teardrop below her left eye; the way she idly fingered a pink puffball halfway down her shiny green suit. Then more blatant signals: the creases in her crimson tent; the bored arcs her floppy shoes described when she walked the ruff-necked piglets; a wistful shake of the head when he brought out their favorite set of shiny steel rings and invited her, with the artful pleas of his expressive white gloves, to juggle with them.
But Bobo knew it was time to seek professional help when he whipped out his rubber chicken and held it aloft in a stranglehold—its eyes X’d shut in fake death, its pitiful head lolled against the back of his glove—and all Kiki could offer was a soundless yawn, a fatigued cock of her conical nightcap, and the curve of her back, one lazy hand waving bye-bye before collapsing languidly beside her head on the pillow. No honker would be brought forth that evening from her deep hip pocket, though he could discern its outline there beneath the cloth, a coy maddening shape that almost made him hop from toe to toe on his own. But he stopped himself, stared forlornly at the flaccid fowl in his hand, and shoved it back inside his trousers.
He went to check on the twins, their little gloved hands hugging the blankets to their chins, their perfect snowflake-white faces vacant with sleep. People said they looked more like Kiki than him, with their lime-green hair and the markings around their eyes. Beautiful boys, Jojo and Juju. He kissed their warm round red noses and softly closed the door.
In the morning, Bobo, wearing a tangerine apron over his bright blue suit, watched Kiki drive off in their new rattletrap Weezo, thick puffs of exhaust exploding out its tailpipe. Back in the kitchen, he reached for the Buy-Me Pages. Nervously rubbing his pate with his left palm, he slalomed his right index finger down the Snooper listings. Lots of flashy razz-ma-tazz ads, lots of zingers to catch a poor clown’s attention. He needed simple. He needed quick. Ah! His finger thocked the entry short and solid as a raindrop on a roof; he noted the address and slammed the book shut.
Bobo hesitated, his fingers on his apron bow. For a moment the energy drained from him and he saw his beloved Kiki as she’d been when he married her, honker out bold as brass, doing toe hops in tandem with him, the shuff-shuff-shuff of her shiny green pants legs, the ecstatic ripples that passed through his rubber chicken as he moved it in and out of her honker and she bulbed honks around it. He longed to mimic sobbing, but the inspiration drained from him. His shoulders rose and fell once only; his sweep of orange hair canted to one side like a smart hat.
Then he whipped the apron off in a tangerine flurry, checked that the boys were okay playing with the piglets in the backyard, and was out the front door, floppy shoes flapping toward downtown.
Momo the Dick had droopy eyes, baggy pants, a shuffle to his walk, and an office filled to brimming with towers of blank paper, precariously tilted—like gaunt placarded and stilted clowns come to dine—over his splintered desk. Momo wore a battered old derby and mock-sighed a lot, like a bloodhound waiting to die.