Are You Loathsome Tonight?: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  The rest of the view was no more encouraging. To get to the house, he would have to walk past an ancient graveyard whose stone monuments looked as if they had frozen in the act of melting. In the distance, thinly forested hills arched their backs against a darkening sky. Cobb could see no other houses, no utility wires, no sign of human habitation at all except the empty road, which was really only a dirt track. He dimly remembered the limo pulling up at a chain stretched across the road several miles back, a sign that read private road, the driver getting out to unlock the chain and then again to fasten it behind them. This was all Matty's property, then, for God knows how many miles around. His property, now.

  What a fucking treat.

  He remembered Matty's map and took the creamy envelope out of his bag. Here was the map, here was the house, here was the graveyard represented by a scatter of crosses. And here, tucked inside the sheaf of papers, was the key.

  Cobb hoisted his bag and walked past the graveyard, across the yard, up the four front steps to an absurd little porch that looked as if it had been pasted onto the front of the house as an afterthought. He paused at the French doors—the glass in these was still intact, at any rate—and looked in. He couldn't see anything, so he inserted the key into the lock and pushed the doors open.

  The ruin inside was as great as he might have expected. A grand staircase swept upward just inside the doors, its elaborately carved newel post listing, its banister scarred, several of its risers gone. A tapestry of dust and cobwebs swathed the walls and ceiling. The floor looked solid enough, but he was damned if he was going to test it.

  I've found the most private place in the world, Matty had written. It wasn't enough to save me, but I think it might be just the thing for you.

  “Fuck you,” he muttered, and took the sheaf of papers out again, perhaps meaning to crumple or shred them, he wasn't sure. But something made him turn over the estate map, and there was a rough sketch of the inside of the house. He'd seen it before and it had meant nothing to him, but now he recognized the French doors, the sweeping staircase. There in Matty's handwriting, very small, was an arrow pointing to the staircase and the notation press the newel post, terry.

  He did.

  A gleaming steel elevator rose silently out of the floor. The door slid open. The interior of the elevator was streamlined and immaculate. Cobb looked at it for a moment, then sighed, shrugged, and stepped in.

  Four hours later, he lay sprawled in a sybaritic stupor. The place was fucking palatial, and it was all underground. Hewn right into the rock. He had no idea if anyone else was here, didn't think he'd explored even half of it. The epicenter of the place was clearly designed just for him: a huge bed (he had always loved to stay in bed), a great stereo system with his favorite music on CD, a television with over a hundred channels (and where the hell was the satellite dish?), a lacquered rolling tray full of fragrant sinsemilla. His guitars were here, the ones he'd last seen in his New York apartment the night of the plane crash. The kitchen was stocked with beer, vodka, tonic, and Cobb's favorite foods, including a whole box of Cadbury Flake, an English chocolate bar unavailable in the States. He'd always bought them at the candy store in Manchester where he and Matty used to go after school. One of the clerks would sell them cigarettes, too, even though they were only fourteen...

  If Matty was dead, there was no one in the world who knew him. The thought shocked Cobb out of his satiated doze, and he sat up in bed. He'd been close with the other two, of course, and with a number of women. But the intimacy of total collaboration, the sense of minds melding, had never been there with anyone else.

  He went into the kitchen and got the bottle of vodka out of the freezer.

  Many shots later, he slept.

  In his dream, he was standing atop one of the distant hills. He could see the house and the little graveyard behind him, but they did not look fearsome now.

  With the smooth suddenness of dreams, Matty was beside him, resting one elbow on Cobb's shoulder as he'd had a habit of doing since they were school friends. A breeze ruffled Matty's dark hair, lifted it from his face. There were streaks of gray in that hair, but Matty's face in profile was as serenely handsome as ever, if a shade more careworn. Afraid to speak first, Cobb watched Matty out of the corner of his eye, and Matty smiled.

  “I really am dead, you know."

  “Well...” Cobb's voice was rusty, but he would not let it crack, would not. “You look damn good for a man who's taken a shot in the mouth."

  “Oh, that.” Matty turned to face Cobb. “I don't have to look like that to convince you, do I?"

  “No,” Cobb said hastily. “Look, do we have to stand out here?"

  “Of course not, nature boy,” said Matty, and at once they were back in the house, lying in bed. Cobb wasn't embarrassed, though he was naked and Matty appeared to be also; they had shared plenty of beds and bathrooms out of necessity.

  Matty propped himself up on one elbow and lit a half-joint Cobb had left in the tray. Before Cobb had time to wonder whether the joint would be smoked when he woke up, Matty said, “I didn't die in New York, though. I died here, in this bed."

  Then he passed the joint over, as if he knew Cobb would need it.

  “It was cancer,” he went on. “Bet you never thought of that, did you? No one has. No one can imagine why happy old Matty Matthew would suddenly up and blow his brains out, not even you. Am I right?"

  “Fucker, you know you are."

  Matty acknowledged this with a nod. “Well, no one knows happy old Matty had about three months to live, either. With a prognosis of drooling dementia followed by coma followed by death. I decided not to let them know. There's no dignity in it, you see. Better to go out as a tortured artist."

  “What about the autopsy?"

  Matty got one of his looks. Cobb hadn't seen that look for twenty years, but he remembered it perfectly. “The autopsy, Terry, consisted of a pathologist inking my fingertips and snapping a few Polaroids. How much d'you suppose those will fetch on the collector's market?"

  “Hard to say. If the reports were right, they could be pictures of just anyone who'd blown his brains out."

  “That's true.” Matty grimaced. “But I had to do it that way. That's where the cancer was."

  “In your brain?"

  “Right in the center. Inoperable. I saw it on the X ray, as big as a plum, and I had to have my files stolen from the hospital, and the X-rays too—"

  Now he sounded as if he were bragging, and Cobb interrupted him. “What do you mean, you died in this bed?"

  Matty went right on. “The doctor may leak it to the press anyway, but there'll be no proof, and he'll look as if he's just trying to make a buck—"

  Cobb said it again, more loudly.

  “Oh.” Matty blinked. “Well, so that I could be here when you came. I didn't know if it would work. Looks like it did."

  “How did you know I'd come?” Cobb asked, and got the look again for his trouble.

  “Actually,” Matty said, “I thought you'd be here sooner."

  “You thought?"

  “I suppose ... I hoped."

  “Why?"

  “Because it's quite lonely,” Matty whispered, and that was all they could say for a while.

  “I arranged to have someone come to the house after I did it,” Matty continued later. “To transport my body to New York and make it look good, make it look like I'd died there, so no one would know about this place."

  “Then one person knows about it."

  "Knew."

  Cobb decided not to pursue this. His own cynicism was a point of pride, but somehow he had never wanted to know just how cold-blooded his partner could be.

  He thought of something else. “No one could have gathered up all the mess you must have made."

  “Ever heard of a rubber sheet, genius? I didn't want the bed to reek when you got here. Although I imagine you're used to reeking beds by now."

  “I've seen a fair bit of the world,” Cobb
conceded.

  “And some unfair bits too. I mean, Terry, Gabon? What kept you there?"

  “Good weed, cheap beer, people left me alone. And really, Matty, how can you talk ... I mean, North Carolina?"

  They laughed, and it felt better than anything had in twenty years.

  Cobb woke up alone. The sheets were twined around his body like an old lover. He looked over at the rolling tray and saw that the half-joint was gone. He experienced an instant of total mind-silence, and then tunes burst into his head like a psychedelic waterfall. Hooks, bridges, bass lines, lyrics, a clawing cascade of music, more than he could process. He scrambled for his guitars, grabbed one at random, switched on the stereo's directional mike and hit record. There was already a tape in the machine. Of course.

  Hours later, he rewound the tapes and listened to them in dismay. His guitar playing was terribly rusty, his voice out of practice, but through all that he could hear that this was easily the best music he and Matty had ever made. The only catch: they were both supposed to be dead, so what the hell was he going to do with it? Cobb addressed the problem in his habitual manner, by curling up in bed and going to sleep.

  Matty was there. “You're going to release it,” he said.

  “Under what name?"

  “Matthew and Cobb, of course.” Matty said this patiently, as if Cobb were a slow child. God, he hated it when Matty talked to him like that. Only now ... now it felt kind of good, too.

  He even knew his next line. “Why not Cobb and Matthew?"

  “Because I wrote more of it."

  'How do you figure that?'

  Matty rolled his eyes. “You're just getting started again. I've been saving this stuff up!"

  “And the other little matter?"

  “Well, obviously you can prove you're you. You can tell the whole story of how you faked your death and went traveling around the world, it's a great yarn, and you can say I left these tapes behind when I died, and you've reworked them, and I know some musicians you can use, and a terrific studio—"

  “Fuck, Matty, that's what I died to get away from."

  Matty's eyes narrowed. Cobb thought of daggers ripping through velvet. “No you didn't,” Matty said. “You died because you couldn't do it anymore. With me, you can."

  Cobb wrenched himself awake.

  Matty was still there.

  "Praise the Lord, I'll have a new body!" he sang in a passable Hank Williams voice. “Hey, Terry, look what I can do now! The longer you're here, the better I get! Oh Terry, old mate, it's so damn good to see you..."

  He leaned over and kissed Cobb on the lips, open-mouthed, hungrily. Cobb could not make himself pull back, even when he felt a bitter liquid flowing from Matty's mouth into his own. After a while, he began to like the taste.

  The studio was top of the line, the musicians crackerjack one and all: of course. Cobb finished the album in just under a month, living in Matty's New York apartment and laying down tracks every day. When it was done, everyone wanted to take him out on the town, throw him a party, get him laid, show him the time of his life. Everyone was astounded that he had a life. The world was giddy with the news of Terry Cobb's resurrection from the dead and his posthumous collaboration with Matty. It was as good as a new Kydds’ album. It was rock and roll history.

  “You gonna spend some time in the city?” the soundman asked him on his last night in the studio. He'd come in to do some last-minute tweaking on a couple of tracks, perfectionist shit, the kind of stuff he'd never bothered with in the past because Matty always took care of it.

  “No,” Cobb answered. “Got to get back out to my house in the country. Lots more writing to do."

  “Man, you're on fire, huh? Bein’ dead for a while must really get the old creative juices flowing."

  Cobb gave the man a sharp look. Then he took a step backward, throwing his eyes into shadow. When he smiled, his gaunt face took on a skullish look that made the soundman shudder.

  “It's like having a whole new life,” Cobb said.

  Saved

  Poppy and I met in a boy-brothel in Thailand in 1936. We found we had a lot in common and decided to take over the world. Poppy and I are very different in the way we use language and construct stories, but our writing styles turned out to be weirdly complementary. We could see around each other's corners.

  —Christa Faust

  Christa and I wrote this story for Young Blood, an anthology of horror writers under thirty edited by the late Mike Baker. I guess it's our “minor” collaboration, the novella “Triads” in Doug Winter's Revelations being our “major” one. A bicoastal dominatrix, expert swing dancer, and Mexican wrestling valet, Christa has since published the ultraviolent-erotic debut novel Control Freak (Masquerade Books).

  Saved

  by Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust

  “You see,” Billy told the hooker, “I've always wanted..."

  Words failed him. He reached into his flight bag and laid the Luger on the scarred Formica tabletop. The pistol was inert as the brittle drift of dead insects in the corner of the room—but this was an insect of machined steel and chitinous blue-black sheen, ready to click to life at his touch. And its sting...

  Its sting could rule the world.

  “I want...” he managed to say again, but his voice was a wraith, a dying ghost.

  The girl raised bruise-colored eyes to meet his. Ever so slowly, she nodded. And ever so sadly, she smiled.

  ***

  The Luger was a family heirloom, a keepsake from his grandfather's war, an artifact from Billy's own claustrophobic Georgia childhood. It was a semi-automatic pistol with a six-inch sighted barrel and a checkered grip of heavy rubber, nearly three pounds of sleek steel filled with little silver-jacketed bullets like seeds in a deadly fruit. Granddad took it down once a week to clean and oil, not minding Billy's solemn five-year-old face hovering beside the armchair, Billy's wide eyes following every move of Granddad's gnarled fingers as they performed the intricate ritual dance of ramrod and soft cloth, thick unguent that smelled of metal and mysterious manhood.

  “You see this?” Granddad had asked him once, cradling the pistol in both giant blue-veined hands. Even at five, Billy knew it was a dumb question: the gun was right in front of his face, wasn't it? If it had been Momma asking, he would have told her so, and watched her mouth prim up with the dislike she always tried to hide. He had his father's logical mind, she said, and hippiegirl Momma didn't believe in logic. Or guns, for that matter. But Billy loved his grandfather, so he just nodded.

  “You don't touch this,” Granddad told him. “Leastways not till you're grown. Then it's yours."

  Six months later Granddad was dead of an embolism, a fat gobstopper of useless tissue invading his steadfast soldier's heart. Billy understood none of this at the time, did not even properly understand that his grandfather had died. No one had told him. “Do you want to see Granddad?” Momma asked him when he came running into the house one day, knees scraped raw from the big girls pushing him into the grit and gravel of the vacant lot next door. He wiped the dirty tears off his face—Momma would never notice them anyway—and nodded. Of course he wanted to see Granddad. He always wanted to see Granddad.

  Momma lifted him up and up, through the warm viscid air of Grammaw's parlor, past the shelves of fragile knickknacks and figurines Grammaw always told him not to touch, even though Billy didn't want to touch them; they were useless, not like Granddad's gun. The gun could blow them into a million razor-edged smithereens. Momma lifted Billy until it seemed his head was nearly brushing the cobwebbed crystal teardrops of the antique chandelier.

  And there was Granddad, looking more enormous than ever because he was so still, his best-suited body long and narrow and somehow flat in the confines of the wooden box that cradled him. Billy felt his heart rocketing in his chest, a strange and fearful excitement building there, trickling down through his ribs and into his groin. Dead; this was what the grownups meant by that short, inflectionless, utterly
final word.

  Then he remembered that it was his grandfather who was dead, and it felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach harder than the big girls ever could. The air in his lungs went hot and searing.

  Granddad's cheeks were so sunken that Billy could see the outlines of his false teeth in his mouth, big and horsey. Granddad's eyelids were stained pale blue, webbed with tiny threads of purple and scarlet. Granddad's nostrils were huge and black like holes in the earth; Billy could see tiny yellow hairs bristling at their edges, and deep inside the left one, a delicate scrim of snot. How could you be dead and still have a booger in your nose?

  “He's just sleeping, honey,” Momma whispered as if hearing his thoughts. Looking back now, that seemed the cruelest thing of all. She had made him think Granddad would wake up, would come back somehow, someday. But Granddad never did.

  Within the year, Momma was gone too. This was the Summer of Love, and she heard the siren song of San Francisco, of men who had never seen a Georgia dawn and never wanted to, who thought of her pussy as the gateway to the Goddess, not a combination sperm receptacle and baby dispenser. She wanted flowers in her hair, music and orange sunshine swirling in her brain, not the endless dull trap of motherhood.

  She never found any of it. Hitching on I-95, she got in the wrong car somewhere outside Las Vegas, a haunted part of the desert just south of the Nevada Test Range. A skull turned up a year later in a dry lakebed, bearing the toothmarks of coyotes, bleached to a brittle sheen; flesh and hair long since stripped away. The remaining teeth matched her dental records, and they shipped it back to Georgia in a cardboard box. Grammaw had it buried in the church cemetery next to Granddad. Standing at the grave, Billy felt a dull vindication. He hoped she had known fear and pain. He hoped she had thought of him when she realized she was going to die.

  Billy's father, he of the logical mind, was long gone. Billy remained with his faded belle of a grandmother, who always smelled of sickly-sweet dusting powder and lost time, who was kind to him but so vague that she could barely carry on a conversation with an intelligent six-year-old.