The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

THE ONLY ENDING WE HAVE Kim Newman

The windshield wipers squeaked … like shrilling fiddles, scraped nerves, the ring of an unanswered phone. Another reason to trade in her ’57 Ford Custom. For 1960, she’d like something with fins. Not that she could afford next year’s showroom model.

Unless Hitch coughed up the ransom.

For the thing it was all about. The mcguffin.

The thing the audience doesn’t care about, but the characters do.

“Good eeeev-ning,” Hitch said, every goddamn morning … like in his TV show with that nursery/graveyard tune burbling in the background. “Funeral March of the Marionettes.” Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump …

“Good eeeev-ning, Jay-y-ne …”

His gargling-with-marbles accent was British. Not like David Niven or Peter Lawford, but British crawled out from under a rock. Hitch was a wattled toad in a grey-flannel suit, with inflating cheeks and jowls. His lower teeth stuck out like the Wolf Man’s. His loose, babyish lips got moist when she came on set. Even before she took off the bathrobe. When she unwrapped the goods, he was spellbound. After a half hour, he’d have to gulp down drool with a little death-rattle.

“Jayne Swallow? Do you swallow, Jayne … do you?”

Every morning the same routine. Even before the robe came off.

“Take a bird name, chickie,” her agent, Walter, had said … “bird names are good.”

So, goodbye Jana Wróbel … hello, Jayne Swallow.

She should have gone with Joan Sparrow or Junie Peacock. By the time she signed on for Hitch, it was too late. She’d heard all the lines.

The set was festooned with dead birds. They stank under the hot lights. Chemicals. The glass eyes of the mountain eagle perched above a doorway reminded her of Hitch’s watery ogling.

Hitchcock. That was a bird name, too. And a dirty meaning, which no one threw in the director’s face every morning.

“Good morning, Mr. Softcock … Good afternoon, Mr. Halfcock … Good eeev-ning, Mr. Cocksucker … how do you like it?”

He’d screech like a bird at that … Scree! Scree! Scree!

There was a bird name in his damn movie. Janet Leigh’s character. Jayne’s character. Crane. Marion Crane.

… which made Jayne and Janet Hitch’s Marion-ettes. The whole shoot was their funeral, scored with the slow, solemn, ridiculous tune. Jayne danced and strings cut into her wrists and neck.

In the end, the wires were snipped and she fell all in a heap, unstrung. Over and over. Like a sack of potatoes. Like a side of beef with arms and legs. Chocolate oozed from her wounds. Then she got up and died all over again.

Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump … Scree! Scree! Scree!

She drove North on the Pacific Coast Highway.

To disguise herself, in case anyone from the studio should be crossing the road in front of the car, she’d worn sunglasses and a headscarf. Marilyn’s famous I-don’t-want-to-be-recognized look. She’d taken off the disguise when she was safely out of Los Angeles and the rain got heavy.

Even without the shades, it was hard to see the road ahead. Short-lived, clear triangles were wiped in thick water on the windshield. A deluge. Mudslide weather. After months of California sun, you found out where the ceiling leaked. There wasn’t much traffic, which was a mercy. The car weaved from side to side as the wheel fought her grip. Her tires weren’t the newest. She struggled, as if she’d been force-fed booze by a spy ring and set loose on a twisty cliff road to meet an unsuspicious accident.

The squeak of the wipers. The beat of her heart.

The voices in her head. Hitch’s. Her agent’s. Hers.

“Do you swallow, Jayne…do you?”

Tony Perkins’s. “I like stuffing … birds.”

Scree! Scree! Scree!

The window-seals were blown. Water seeped into the car, pouring in rivulets over the dash and inside the doors. Droplets formed this side of the glass, too many to wipe away with her cuff. Her seat was damp. She shivered. She’d been fighting the flu since her first day in the shower. With all the water, no one noticed her nose was streaming … except Becca, the make up woman, and she kept secrets like a priest in a confessional.

She could still feel water on her body. For days, she’d been pounded by studio hoses. The temperature varied from lukewarm to icy. The pressure kept up. Extra steam was pumped in, to show on film. She’d been scalded and she’d been frozen, but most of all she’d been soaked. She thought she’d never be dry again.

Before Jayne got into the fake bathtub each morning, Becca had to apply three moleskin patches that transformed her into a sexless thing, like that new blonde doll her niece had, Barbie … or a dressmaker’s dummy with a head.

She might as well not have a head … her face would not be in the film. Janet Leigh’s would be. The most Jayne would show was a tangle of wet blonde hair, seen from behind, as the knife scored down her unrecognizable back.

… in the book, the girl in the shower had her head cut off with an axe. One chop. Too swift for Hitch. He preferred the death of a thousand cuts. A thousand stabs. A thousand edits.

She was the only person on the crew who’d read the novel — not especially, but just by coincidence, a few months ago. Something to read while a photographer got his lights set just so. The first rule of show business was always take a book to read. There was so much waiting while men fiddled before they could start proper work. On the average Western, you could read From Here to Eternity while the bar room mirror was being replaced between fights.

Hitch disapproved of Jayne’s book-learning. He intended to make a play of keeping the twist secret … not letting audiences into theaters after the movie started, appearing in jokey public service messages saying “Please don’t tell the ending, it’s the only one we have.” But the picture’s last reel wasn’t an atomic plan guarded by the FBI. The paperback was in every book-rack in America. If it were down to Hitch, he’d confiscate the whole run and have the books pulped. It wasn’t even his ending, really. It was Robert Bloch’s. The writer was seldom mentioned. Hitch pretended he’d made it all up. Jayne sympathised …. Bloch was the only participant getting a worse deal out of the movie than her.

A clot of liquid earth splattered against the windshield, dislodged from the hillside above. The wipers smeared it into a blotch. She saw obscene shapes in the mud pattern, setting off bells at the Catholic Legion of Decency. Soon, the dirt was gone. Eventually, water got rid of all the disgusting messes in the world.

After a few hours in the movie shower, those patches would wash off Jayne’s censorable areas. It didn’t matter what spirit-gum Becca tried. Water would always win.

Then, spittle would rattle in Hitch’s mouth. He would observe, lugubriously, “I spy … with my little eye … something beginning wi-i-i-ith … N! Nipple!”

Always, the director would insist on pretending to help Becca re-apply the recalcitrant triangles … risking the wrath of the unions. The film’s credited make up men were already complaining about being gypped out of the chance to work with naked broads and stuck with be-wigging skeletons or filling John Gavin’s chin-dimple. There was an issue about whether the patches were make up or costume.

Jayne had posed for smut pictures. Walter said no one would ever know, the pay was better than extra work, and the skin game had been good enough for Marilyn. For Swank and Gent—she’d never made it into Playboy—they shot her as was and smoothed her to plasticity with an airbrush. For the movies, the transformation was managed on set.

“Have you shaved today, Jayne Swallow? Shaved down there?”

Unless she did, the crotch-patch was agony to get off. No matter how many times it washed free during the day, it was always stuck fast at the end of the shoot. She was raw from the ripping.

“I thought of becoming a barber,” Hitch said. “If you need a hand, I have my cut throat …”

At that, at the thought of a straight-razor on her pubes, he would flush with unconcealable excitement … and her guts would twist into knots.

“You’ll love Hitch,” Walter said. “And he’ll love you. He loves blondes. And bird names. Birds are in all his films.”

Sure, she was blonde. With a little help from a bottle. Another reason to shave down there.

We can’t all be Marilyn. We can’t all be Janet Leigh.

Being Janet Leigh was Jayne’s job on this film.

Body double. Stand-in. Stunt double. Torso dummy.

Oh, Janet did her time in the shower. From the neck up.

The rest of it, though … weeks of close-ups of tummy, hands, feet, ass, thighs, throat … that was Jayne.

“It’s a shower scene,” Walter said.

She’d thought she knew what that meant. She’d done shower scenes. Indoors, for sophisticated comedies. Outdoors, for Westerns. Show a shape behind a curtain or a waterfall, and then let Debra Paget or Dorothy Provine step out wrapped in a towel and smile.

They always joked about shooting a version “for France.” Without the curtain.

In France, Brigitte Bardot showed everything. Hitch would have loved to have BB in his sights. But Hollywood wasn’t ready yet …

So, a shower scene …

A Hitchcock shower scene.

Not a tease, not titillation — except for very specialized tastes (ie: his). Not a barber’s scene, but a butcher’s. Not for France, but for … well, for Transylvania or the Cannibal Islands or wherever women were meat to be carved …

There were caresses … the water, and the tip of the blade.

Not a single clean shocking chop but a frenzy of pizzicato stabs.

“This boy,” Hitch said, embarrassing Tony Perkins, “he has an eye for the ladies … no, a knife for the ladies.”

She’d been prodded, over and over. She’d been sliced, if only in illusion — the dull edge of the prop drawn over the soft skin of her stomach, again and again. After the fourth or fifth pass, it felt like a real knife … after the fourth or fifth day, she thought she was bleeding out, though it was only chocolate syrup, swirling around her dirty feet …

Some shower scene.

Her skin still burned with the rashes raised by the knife … with the little blisters made when the lights boiled the water on her shoulders. The sores scraped open and leaked as she was wrapped in a torn curtain, packaged like carved meat, suitable for dumping in a swamp.

She was uncomfortable in her clothes. She might never be comfortable in her clothes again.

If she kept driving North (by North-West?), she’d hit San Francisco … city of ups and downs … But before then, she’d need to sleep.

Not in a motel. Not after this week’s work.

Her blouse was soaked through. No amount of towelling would ever get her dry.

“Do you swallow, Jayne…do you?”

The soles of her feet were ridged, painful to stand on.

“I spy … with my little eye … something beginning wi-i-i-ith … P.”

Pigeon? Psychopath? Perkins?

“Pudenda!”

Every time the crotch-skin came off, Hitch sprung another letter on her … another word for vagina. F. C. T. Q. P. M.

M for Mousehole? Whoever said that?

Sometimes Hitch took the knife himself and got in close. He said Perkins wasn’t holding it right, was stabbing like a fairy …

Perkins’s eyes narrowed at that. They didn’t slide over Jayne’s body like Hitch’s, or any of the other guys on the crew.

… but it was an excuse.

The director just plain liked sticking it to a naked woman.

Any woman? Or just Jayne?

He’d have preferred doing it to Janet, because she was a Star. Really, he’d have wanted to stab Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman, who were more than Stars. But he’d make do with Jayne Swallow … or Jana Wróbel … or some blonde off the street.

Oh, he never touched her with anything that wasn’t sharp. Never even shook hands.

“How do you shake hands with a naked lady?” he’d asked, when they were introduced — she’d been cast from cheesecake 8 x 10s, without an audition — on set. How indeed? Or was that his way of avoiding physical contact with her? Did he not trust himself?

Others had auditioned, she learned … but turned him down. They’d found out what he wanted and preferred not to be a part of it. Blondes who did naked pin-ups, strippers, girls who did stag films…they didn’t want to be cut-up in a shower, even with Janet Leigh’s head on top of their bodies.

So, Jayne Swallow.

Scree! Scree! Scree!

Now, she really had what Hitch wanted … and he’d have to pay more than scale to get it back. But it wasn’t the money. That wasn’t her mcguffin. She wanted something else. What? Revenge? Retribution? To be treated like a person rather than a broken doll?

It wasn’t just Hitch. She stood in for Janet Leigh. He stood in for everyone who’d cut her.

Since driving off the Lot, she’d been seeing him everywhere. In the broken side-mirror, through the misted-over rear window. In every film, there he was, somewhere. If only in a photo on the wall. Unmistakable, of course. That fat, double bass-belly … that caricature silhouette … doleful, little boy eyes like raisins in uncooked dough … the loose cheeks, like Droopy in the cartoons … that comb-over wisp.

He was waiting for a bus. He was smoking a cigar. He was getting a shoe-shine. He was wearing a too-big cowboy hat. He was smirking in a billboard ad for an all-you-can-scoff restaurant. He was fussing with dogs. He was the odd, short, fat boy out in a police line-up of tall, thin, unshaven crooks. He was up on a bell-tower, with a high-powered rifle. He was in a closet, with a bag full of sharp, sharp knives. He was in the back seat with a rope. He wore white editors’ gloves to handle his murder weapons.

She looked at the mirror, and saw no one there.

Nothing beginning with H.

But there was a shape in the road, flapping. She swerved to avoid it.

A huge gull, one wing snapped. The storm had driven it ashore.

It was behind her now. Not road kill, but a road casualty. Suitable for stuffing and mounting.

Hitch said that about Marion Crane, too, in a line he’d wanted in the script but not snuck past the censors. They were Jesuits, used to playing word games with clever naughty schoolboys.

Birds … Crane, Swallow … suitable for stuffing and mounting.

Another dark shape came out of the rain and gained on the car. A man on a motorcycle. A wild one? Like Brando. No, a highway cop. He wore a helmet and a rain-slicker. Water poured in runnels off the back of his cape. It looked like a set of folded, see-through wings. His goggles were like big glass eyes.

Her heartrate raced.

…stop, thief!

Had the studio called the cops yet? Had Hitch denounced her sabotage?

“I’ll take it out of her fine sweet flesh” Hitch would say. “Every pound of meat, every inch of skin!”

She was a thief. Not like Cary Grant, suave and calculating … but a purse-snatcher, vindictive and desperate … taking something not because it was valuable to her but because it was valuable to the person she’d stolen from.

The cop signaled her to pull over.

He had a gun. She didn’t. She was terrified.

Cops weren’t your friends.

She’d found that out the minute she got off the bus in Los Angeles. She’d been young and innocent then, with a hometown photo studio portfolio and a notion to get into the movies. She learned fast. Cops locked you up when you hadn’t done anything. Cops squeezed the merchandise and extracted fines that didn’t involve money. They let the big crooks walk free and cracked down on the hustlers. They always busted the wrong man. Beat patrolmen, vice dicks, harness bulls, traffic cops. The enemy.

Her brakes weren’t good. It took maybe thirty yards to pull over. With a sound like a scream in the rain.

The wipers still ticked as the motor idled. The screech slowed.

In the rear-view, she saw the cop unstraddle his ride. The rain poured off his helmet, goggles, cape, boots. He strode through the storm towards her. He wasn’t like the city cops she’d met, bellies bulging over their belts, flab-rolls easing around their holstered guns. He was Jimmy Stewart lean, snake-hipped. A cowboy with an armored skullcap.

If she put on a burst of speed, would she leave him here?

No, he’d catch her. Or she’d go off the cliff into the Pacific.

The knuckle rap came at her window. The cop didn’t bend down. She saw the leather jacket through his transparent slicker. A wild one, after all.

She tried to roll the window down and the handle came off. It did sometimes, but there was a trick to fixing it back. She didn’t bother with the trick. She opened the door, first a crack, then halfway, using it to shield against the rain, and ducked her head out to look up at the cop. His goggles gave him the eyes of Death.

Two little television sets strapped to his face, playing the opening of that show. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump…there Hitch was, in a fright-wig, being funny, holding a noose or a big bottle with POISON stamped on it. A non-speaking woman boiling in a pot or strapped to a saw-horse.

“Good eeev-ning,” he said.

Not Hitch, the cop. And not with a British accent.

She waited for it. The come-on. Tonight’s stawww-ry.

“Going mighty fast?” “Where’s the fire, lady?” “The way you look, the things you do to a man … that ought to be against the law …” “See what you’ve done to my night-stick, ma’am …” “Swallow, huh? Well …?”

“License and registration?”

He was unreadable. Not a movie cop.

She didn’t ask what she’d done wrong. She knew enough not to open up that debate. She found her documents, sodden and fragile as used tissue, in the glove compartment.

Whenever she showed her papers, she was irrationally afraid they’d turn out to be false — or the cop would say they were. That blanket of guilt was impossible to shuck, even when she hadn’t had things to feel guilty about. She knew these papers were legit, but they weren’t in the name she was using. In the photo on her driver’s license, Jana wasn’t as blonde as Jayne.

Her papers got wetter as the cop looked them over.

“Wróbel,” he said, pronouncing it properly.

Then he asked her something in Polish. Which she didn’t speak.

She shrugged.

“Not from the Old Country, then?”

It might as well have been Transylvania.

“Santa Rosa, originally,” she admitted.

“Hollywood, now,” he said, clocking her address.

She was too cold to give him a pin-up smile. Usually, cops asked if she was in pictures … she must be too bedraggled for that now.

“You must be in pictures … dirty pictures,” was the usual line. Said with a grin, and a hitch of the belt buckle into the gut.

“You must be in pictures … horror pictures,” was the new take. “You must be in pictures … Alfred Hitchcock pictures.”

“Watch your driving,” the cop actually said. “This is accident weather. How far have you got to go?”

She had no definite idea, but said “San Francisco.”

“You won’t make it by nightfall. I’d stop. Check into a motel.”

“That makes sense, sir.”

“No need for ‘sir.’ ‘Officer’ will do.”

The cop’s skin, under the rain, was grayish. This weather grayed everything out, like a black-and-white movie. The hillside mud should have been red, like blood … but it washed over the road like coffee grounds. Dark.

“Makes sense, officer.”

“Good girl,” he said, returning her license and registration.

A motel. Not likely. When Hitch’s film came out, people wouldn’t check into motels without thinking twice. People wouldn’t take showers. Or climb stairs. Or go into fruit cellars. Or trust young men with twitchy smiles who liked to stuff (and mount) birds.

If the film came out now. She might have scratched that.

The cop turned and walked back to his motorcycle. Rain on his back, pouring down his neck.

Why had he stopped her? Suspicion, of course. But of what?

The theft can’t have been reported yet. Might not be until Monday morning. Word couldn’t be out. This cop wasn’t rousting a woman motorist for kicks, like they usually did. Maybe he was just concerned? There had to be some cops like that …

While she had the door open, water rained in. Her shoes were soaked.

She pulled the door shut and tried to start the car. The motor seized up and died. Then choked, then drew out a death scene like Charles Laughton, then caught again … and she drove on.

Damn, December night fell quick.

Now, she was driving through dark and rain. The road ahead was as murky as a poverty-row back-projection plate. Her right headlight was on the fritz, winking like a lecher at a co-ed.

The cop was right. She had to pull over. If she slept in this leaky car, she’d drown. If she drove on, she’d end up in the sea. The Ford Custom did not come with an optional lifeboat. She wasn’t sure hers even had a usable spare tire.

Through blobby cascades on the windshield, she saw a flashing light.

VACANCY.

A motel. She remembered her vow. No motels, never again … she knew, really, there was little chance of being butchered by a homicidal maniac. That was just the movies. Still, there was every chance of running into a travelling salesman or an off-duty cop or an overage wild one, and being cajoled or strong-armed or blackmailed into a room with cheap liquor and “Que Sera Sera” on the radio. The ending to that story would surprise to no one.

She’d been photographed in motel rooms. She’d been interviewed in motel rooms. She’d auditioned for movie projects that didn’t really exist. If some dentist wanted to call himself a producer and play casting couch games, he hooked onto a script about giant leeches or dragstrip dolls just to set up his own private orgy. She’d checked into a motel with a young actor — not Tony Perkins, but someone a few steps behind him — and posed for bedroom candids leaked to the scandal sheets to squelch whispers that the rising stud preferred beach boys to bikini babes. In print, they put a black bar across her eyes.

She’d been abandoned in motels, too … left with bills for booze and damages. Some guys couldn’t have a party without breaking a lamp or knocking a picture off the wall. Or hurting someone, just to hear the squeal and see blood on their knuckles.

VACANCY.

The light flashed like a cliff-top lantern on a cliff in a three-cornered hat picture, luring storm-tossed ships onto the rocks to be looted.

She was more likely to die on the road than in this place.

So, she pulled off the highway and bumped downhill into a parking lot. There were other cars there. The lights were on in a single-storey building.

HACIENDA HAYSLIP.

Like every other place in California, this motel impersonated an Old Spanish Mission — protruding beams, fake adobe, concrete cactus, a neon sombrero over the name.

Once, the Pacific was the far edge of the world. The Jesuits got here first, even before the bandits. Jayne had been to Catholic school. She was more afraid of priests than outlaws. Priests were worse than cops. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. Cops just played the game by rules that favored them. Priests took the same liberties, but told you it was God’s will that you got robbed or rousted or raped.

She parked as near the office as possible and made a dash from her car to the lit-up shelter. By now, she couldn’t get much wetter.

Pushing through the front door, she was enveloped by heat. The office was built around an iron stove that radiated oppressive warmth. Windows were steamed up. Viennese waltz music came from an old-fashioned record player.

In a rocking chair by the stove sat a small thin woman, knitting. On a stool behind the front desk perched a fat young man, reading a comic book. They both turned to look at her. She must be a fright. Something the cat would drag in.

“Arthur,” said the woman, “see to the customer …”

Her voice was like a parrot’s, chirruping words it couldn’t understand. The thin woman had a grating, shrill tone and another British accent … a comedy fishwife or a slum harridan. Cockney. Jayne had heard other Englishmen say Hitch was a cockney. He went tight around the collar if it was said to his loose-jowelled face. It was a put-down, she guessed — like “polack” or “hunkie.” David Niven and Peter Lawford weren’t cockneys. Cary Grant for sure wasn’t a cockney. Hitch was, and so was this woman who had somehow fetched up on the far side of the world, in the country of Jesuits and outlaws and Indians and gold-diggers.

“In the fullness of time, Mahmah,” said the fat young man.

He didn’t sound cockney. He had a James Mason or George Sanders voice. A suave secret agent, a bit of a rogue … but coming out of a bloated, cherubic face, that accent was all wrong. Jayne wondered if Arthur was another fairy. Was that why mother and son—“Mahmah” must mean “Mother”—had said goodbye Piccadilly and farewell Leicester Square?

She stood there, dripping and steaming.

Arthur finished reading to the end of the page, lips moving as he mouthed the balloons. Then he neatly folded over the top corner and shut the comic. Journey Into Mystery. He tidied it away with a stack of similar publications, shuffling so the edges were straight as if he had just finished an exam and wanted his desk neat.

“What might the Hacienda Hayslip do for you, madame?”

“A room, for the night.”

“Nocturnal refuge? Most fortuitous. We do indeed rent rooms, nightly. Have you a reservation?”

Before she could answer, his mother piped up … “A reservation! What does she look like, a squaw? Who ever has a reservation, Arthur?”

“Formalities must be observed, Mahmah. Did you, madame, have the foresight to contact us by telephone or telegram … or is this more in the manner of an impromptu stopover?”

“The second thing,” she said.

“Spur of the moment? Fortunate for you, then, that one or two of our luxury cabins are unoccupied at present and can therefore be put at your disposal … are you of a superstitious or numerological bent?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t give her Thirteen,” said the old woman.

Arthur sucked his cupid’s bow lips between his teeth, making his mouth into a puckered slit. He was thoughtful or annoyed.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

So far as she could recall, none of the rooms she’d been groped or duped or roughed up in had had the unlucky number. Ordinary numbers were bad enough.

“It’s too close to the edge, Arthur,” said the old woman. “Be the next to go.”

“How would you like a cabin on the beach?” Arthur asked Jayne.

“Normally, that would sound nice. Just now, dry and warm is all I want.”

“It’s not nice,” shrilled Arthur’s mother. “Not nice at all. My son is trying to be funny. We sit on the cliff here and it’s crumbling away. The dirt’s no good. The rain gets in, loosens it up. The far cabins have gone over the edge. They tumble onto the beach. In pieces. You should hear the fearful racket that makes.”

Arthur blew out his lips and smiled.

“Indeed, madame. We are in a somewhat precarious position. Some might opine that my mother made a poor investment. Others might rule this our just lot. For we have incurred the ire of the Almighty, by our many, many sins. My mother, though you’d not think it of her now, was once a very great harlot. A woman of easy virtue, baptized in champagne. Powdered and painted and primped and pimped and porked and poked and prodded and paid. Showered with gifts of opal and topaz and red, red rubies. She dragged fine men to ruin. Duels were fought. Balconies jumped from. Revolvers discharged into despairing brains. Foolish, feckless, and fickle were her many, many admirers. All dead now, though their sins remain.”

At this speech, the old woman cackled and grinned.

Jayne looked again at Arthur’s mother. Her skin had shriveled onto her bones. Her face was a pattern of wrinkles and her hands were vulture claws. She smiled and showed yellow teeth. She wore a black, feathery wig that matched her dress.

“Did you think, madame, to find the notorious Birdie Hayslip sat by the stove at this stop on your journey through life? Knitting her own shroud?”

“Shut up, Arthur, you’re making her blush!”

Birdie! There was a bird name and no mistake. Walter would have loved it.

“Just sign her in, boy. Sign her in. Don’t let her get away. We can’t afford to lose customers. Not in these trying times. Income tax and the Bomb.”

Arthur took the registration book from beneath the desk. It was bound in fleshy red leather.

She hesitated before signing. She was a thief in flight, she remembered. She wouldn’t want to be tracked and traced. Her situation couldn’t be unusual. Couples who stayed in joints like this mostly passed themselves off as Mr. and Mrs. Smith. She wrote Jana Wróbel, but with a scribble — so it couldn’t be read, let alone pronounced — and gave her address as Century City, California.

“Madame Wobble,” said Arthur, without irony, “you shall have Cabin Number Seventeen…. Come this way …”

Reaching behind him, he took a key from a board. It was attached to a fist-sized plaster cactus.

He slipped off his high stool and came out from behind the desk.

Arthur Hayslip was not a dwarf but was well under five feet in height and balloon-bellied. His hair was thinning, though she thought him not much more than twenty. He wore a velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy jacket and child’s slacks. He was a plump, aging baby — but precise and delicate, as if performing all his gestures for television cameras.

“Galoshes, Arthur,” Birdie reminded her son.

He slipped on his waterproof overshoes, and took down a big yellow fisherman’s slicker with attached hood. The protective clothing was made for a hardy six-footer and he disappeared into it. He looked like a fairy tale character, but she wished she had a more rainproof topcoat too.

“Shall we venture out, Madame Wobble? Into the storm?”

“It’s Miss Wobble,” she corrected.

“You hear that, Arthur! Miss. I saw straight away. No wedding band. She’s available!”

Birdie cackled again and the laughter turned into a coughing fit. She did not sound like a well person.

“I have to fetch some things from the trunk of my car.”

“The boot, Arthur,” said Birdie. “She means the boot.”

“You always misremember, Mahmah … you took steps in 1939, dragged me from our native shores. When I was but a babe, the Jerries started dropping whizz-bangs. There was something in the newspapers about a War. There was a term for British subjects who fled to safer climes for the duration. Gone With the Wind Up. I am a naturalized American, a real-life nephew of my Uncle Sam …”

He didn’t sound it.

“Or was it Uncle Irving, Uncle Montmorency, Uncle Yasujiro, Uncle Fedor, Uncle Harry, or Auntie Margaret. Mahmah has never confided which, if any, of my many uncles might also have been my …”

“Arthur, don’t be vulgar. She’s not interested. Can’t you tell?”

He took an umbrella from a rack by the desk and pushed open the door with it. The storm roared, and the waltz record stuttered after the music stopped. He opened the umbrella to shield them as they stepped outside. He had to stretch his arm like the Statue of Liberty’s to get above her head. They still got soaked.

They trudged across muddy asphalt to her car and she popped the trunk.

In the dark, in the cold, in the wet, her face still burned.

There it was. In a sack, tied like a post-bag.

Arthur reached into the trunk with his free hand and took … not the sack, but her overnight bag. He ignored the mcguffin.

“I’ll just bring this along,” she said, picking it up casually.

“That is your right and privilege, my dear.”

The trunk wouldn’t catch the first time she slammed it down, nor the second. Arthur had both hands full, so he couldn’t help. Finally, she wrestled it and locked it. The sack started to get wet. What was inside might be dangerous when wet.

A covered walkway kept some of the rain off. They went past the main building.

Lights were strung up, but several of the bulbs were dead. Darkness encroached. The cabins were originally in a square around a swimming pool, but — as Birdie had said — the cabins at the far edge were gone, leaving only stumps. Beyond, unseen, was the cliff. A crack ran through the concrete bottom of the pool. It could no longer hold water, though temporary puddles collected, swirling and eddying into the fissure. This was an empty pool you could drown in.

The hacienda would eventually wind up on the beach.

Her cabin was well away from the crumbling edge of the property. No immediate danger.

Arthur put her overnight bag down and unlocked Cabin Seventeen. He reached in and turned on the lights, holding the door open for her. She took her bag and walked across a squelching WELCOME mat. Arthur let his umbrella down and followed.

There were twin beds. No, two beds. One a single for a giant, the other a cot for a circus midget. Between them was a low table with a two-headed bedside lamp, a crystal ashtray that fit the definition of blunt instrument and a Gideon Bible open to the Flood.

Above the table was a picture in a heavy gilt frame. A chubby naked woman was being bothered from behind by a giant swan with human eyes.

“A classical subject,” Arthur commented. “Leda and Zeus. So earthy, the Gods of Greece.”

Other pictures hung around the room, less ornately framed, less immediately eye-catching. Slim, big-eyed women dressed in the style of the Roaring Twenties. Fringes and feathers.

“Do you recognize Mahmah? She was always photographed, at the height of her infamy.”

Jayne wasn’t even sure the pictures were all of the same woman. She couldn’t fit them over the Birdie who sat by the stove.

“The cabin has the full amenities, Miss Wobble. Through there …”

He indicated a closed door.

“Modern plumbing, a flush toilet, washbasins, a bathtub …”

“Shower?”

Arthur shrugged, non-committally.

“I could do with a long soak in a hot tub, after the rain and the drive …”

“I regret to inform you that … temporarily, there is no hot water. It seems one can have light but no hot water or hot water but no light, and after dark the need for illumination takes primacy … tomorrow morning, perhaps, after sun-up, something warm can be arranged.”

Jayne tried to live with the disappointment.

She wanted at least to get out of her wet clothes and towel off.

Arthur showed no sign of leaving. Did he expect a tip? His waterproof dripped on the rug. He strolled about, looking at the pictures.

“Once, Mahmah was a nymph, a naiad … now, she is a gorgon, a harpie … time can be so cruel, don’t you think, Miss Wobble? Though it is no more than she deserves, for was Mahmah not cruel when she had the chance … is she not still cruel, when she gets the opportunity?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course not. You are an innocent party in this situation … my m-m-mother deserves to die, don’t you think? And not naturally. No, that would not be just. She is a most exquisitely m-m-m-murderable personage.”

He had worked hard to overcome a stutter, but it slipped back.

“Shootable? Poisonable? Throttlable? Bludgeonable?”

Arthur’s fat-wreathed eyes came alive. He reminded Jayne of …

“Stabbable? Slashable? Beheadable? Deadable?”

His recitative was almost a tune. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump…

He broke off.

“Happy thoughts, Miss Wobble.”

“But morbid,” she ventured.

“Practical. What do you do for a living, Miss Wobble? Presuming that you do live …?”

Normally, she would say she was an actress — which was partially true. But that always prompted the same response. “Have I seen you in anything?” And that lead, if the enquirer was at all interesting, to “If you’ve watched most of my pictures, you’ve seen me in not much of anything at all …” Then, smiles, drinks, and a happy ending.

Now, she was a thief, a saboteur. She had to be careful. Arthur was not interesting, not in that way.

“I’m in motion pictures. Makeup girl.”

“An interesting expression. Makeup girl? What do you make up for?”

“Hard nights, mostly. Filling in the cracks so the camera doesn’t see.”

Arthur unbuttoned his slicker. He took it off and hung it on a coat-tree, as if it belonged there. She hadn’t invited him to stay.

“The camera sees all, though,” he said, pointing at one of the portrait pictures. A dramatic, Satanic pose — a big-eyed vamp resting her chin on her crossed wrists, under a stuffed goat head on a pentacle. Jayne thought she could see Birdie in this jazz-age sinner. The eyes were the same.

“The laughter is frozen and the rot shows through,” said Arthur. “The pleasure garden in spring is a family plot in autumn. Photography makes corpses of us all. Snatches little dead moments and pins them down for all eternity. You apply makeup to the dead, too.”

“Not me. I work with actresses.”

“Actresses should be dead, don’t you think? Mahmah once called herself an ‘actress,’ though she never set her dainty foot on a the boards. Stage fright, would you believe? Who would you wish dead, Miss Wobble?”

Men. Hitch.

“Me? Oh, no one. I say live and let live, you know. I like love stories. Not stories with murders.”

“All great love stories end in murder, though. Or could end in murder …”

He sat down in a cane armchair, crossing his stubby legs and settling his stomach into his lap.

His torso was like a big egg, with another big egg — his head — set on top of it. Soft-boiled, unshelled. If she had a knife, like the movie prop knife, could she cut into those eggs? Find the yolks still molten and trickling.

Arthur’s murder talk was getting to her.

“How would you like to murder my mother, Miss Scribble?”

That was like a stab to the chest.

“You couldn’t be traced. Not with your signature, your phony address …”

Phony. That stood out. A wrong word. American, not consistent with Arthur’s British manner of speaking.

“I can be counted on to give a most misleading description. You wouldn’t even be a woman. You’d be a man … a swarthy, horny-handed man … the type my mother is attracted to, but who are no good for her, no good for anyone … a man’s man, a man from the Isle of Man … a man with big hands, workman’s hands, neck-snapping, larynx-crushing hands. Afterwards, we would both be free …”

“Free?”

“Yes. I would be free of Mahmah, of this place. You would be freer, free of … of the constraints of petty Protestant morality.”

“I’m Catholic.”

“Well, easy to do it then! You sin on Saturday night and are washed clean Sunday morning … just take care not to die unshriven between the two sacraments. The sacraments of murder and confessional.”

“I don’t really like this, Mr. Hayslip. I’m not comfortable.”

“We’re just talking, Miss Alias … shooting the breeze, yarning away the night hours while the storm rages without … without what, I always think, without what?”

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” she said.

“A bold, sweeping statement. Would you kill to protect yourself from, say, a vile ravisher?”

Too late for that.

“Or to secure an inheritance, a fortune that you could use on good works if it were liberated from a miser who makes no use of it?”

“Is your mother rich?”

“No, she’s strange. She hasn’t a bean, Miss Alibi. Just this place. Half on the cliff. Half on the beach. She has only her memories. Her disgusting memories.”

“I’m sure she’s not as bad as that. She’s just a woman.”

Arthur leaned forwards, eyes shining. “Just a woman? Just? Maybe … maybe, at that … but it’s no excuse, is it? It’s no reason she should be spared from God’s judgment. Quite the opposite. It was Eve, was it not, who lead mankind into Sin? Eve, the femme fatale and the farmer’s wife. Eve who brought about the Fall. Should not Eve be punished, over and over and over…?”

A thin line of spit, like spider-silk, descended from Arthur’s wet mouth. He repeatedly slammed a pudgy, soft, tiny fist into the palm of his other hand.

It struck Jayne that Arthur Hayslip was hateful, but harmless.

If she killed this stranger’s mother, what would he do for her? What wouldn’t he do for her? Rain rattled the windows. The cabin shook, like a train compartment on an express.

“You don’t know how to do it to a woman, do you?” she said. “You blame her, your mother, but it’s your weakness.”

He drew back. “I am a man of the world, my dear,” he said. “Your sex holds no mystery for me. I know too much for that.”

She tittered. He flushed, red.

“You couldn’t hurt a fly, if you wanted to. You don’t want to murder your mother, you want someone else to murder your mother. But that would be the end for you, the ending you didn’t guess was coming. The twist in the last reel. There would be nothing. Without her, you’d be a dummy without a ventriloquist …”

“Mummy,” he murmured, “mummy’s dummy …”

All at once, she didn’t want to press on. There was no point in it, in making an unhappy wretch more wretched. That wasn’t heroic, that was bullying. She’d been bullied enough herself to hate that.

How many times had she been stripped and stabbed this week? In play, in fun, for entertainment? She had been murdered, over and over …

“Has he asked you to top me?” shrilled a voice from the door. “He asks all the lodgers to top me. All the ones he fancies, at least. Girlies and boysies, he’s not too particular …”

Birdie flapped into the room, trailing a soaked shawl. Her wig shone with rainwater.

She pinched her son’s pendulous earlobe and yanked.

“Naughty Arthur, bothering the girlies …”

Arthur’s face screwed up with pain.

“Lord knows I’ve tried, ducks … but my boy’s just a nasty little shit. No other words for it. I’ll get him out of your hair and you can turn in. He tell you about the hot water?”

“There isn’t any?”

“That’s right. Pity, but there it is. Come on, Arthur … time to say nighty-night.”

Birdie pulled Arthur out of the chair. She was taller than him.

“Be polite,” she insisted, twisting the earlobe.

“Nighty-night, Miss,” he said, through tears. “Nighty-night, Aphrodite in a nightie …”

Birdie took the umbrella and dragged her son back through the cabin door. They disappeared into the rain and darkness.

Jayne shut the door.

Her heart was pounding and her face burned. She was more embarrassed than afraid. She would leave early tomorrow.

For where? They’d be after her, by then. Hitch’s agents. Paramount and Universal. Walter.

Think of that later. After sleep.

The door blew open again and Arthur was there, breathing heavily. He had broken free of his mother.

“What’s in the sack?” he asked.

The question knifed into her heart.

Birdie came up behind Arthur, fingers hooked into talons, screeching …

Scree! Scree! Scree!

Jayne backed away and clutched the sack.

“What would you do for what’s in the sack?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing. Nothing. A negative.”

Arthur smiled wickedly as Birdie dragged him away again, kicking the door shut.

Jayne sat down on the big bed and hugged the sack. It was heavy, lumpy, hard. Useless, yet beyond value. A measure of her suffering, but just deadweight. She threw it away and it lay like an extra pillow.

She would sleep on the other bed, the small one.

If she could sleep …

She went into the bathroom and turned on the light. It was tile-floored. The mirror had a scrollwork border etched into the glass. The claw-foot bathtub bled rust into the cracks between the tiles. There was no shower attachment.

She ran the tap, just to make sure. Icy cold bit her fingers.

At least there were towels.

She breathed mist on the mirror and wrote JANA in it, then watched her name vanish as the exhalation evaporated.

She undressed, not like she did for pictures. Not for show, but to get out of her heavy, sodden clothes. She unpeeled damp, sticky layers — cardigan, skirt, blouse, slip, brassiere, shoes, stockings, panties. She would have to wear most of these again tomorrow, since she’d not thought to bring more than a change of underthings. They wouldn’t dry completely by then.

What was she doing?

The towels weren’t wet but they weren’t warm. The rough nap rubbed her skin the wrong way. She saw herself naked in the mirror. Without moleskin patches. She didn’t look the way she did on film. She looked already dead. Her next makeup artist would be a mortician.

There was a bathrobe. She pulled it on, wrapping it tight over her stabbable breasts, her slashable back, her sliceable limbs.

She turbaned her dried, scraggly hair with another towel.

Turning out the bathroom light, she stepped back into the bedroom.

Arthur was sitting on the big bed, the sack open. He had scratches down one side of his face. His velvet jacket was soaked. His slicker still hung in the cabin.

“What is this?” he asked.

The pie-shaped can lay on the bed, sealed with tape.

“Negative.”

“Answer me,” he insisted, angry. “No word games.”

“Negative,” she said. “Film negative.”

Arthur smiled, the penny dropping.

“Motion pictures,” he said. “Dirty pictures?”

“I’m naked in them,” she admitted. “And dead, like you said. Snatched dead moments. Useless moments.”

He ran his fat fingers over the can. She knew he wanted to see… but it was hopeless: he’d need to make a positive print, run it on a projector …

“It’s the thing you’re chasing after, Arthur. A woman, me, being cut up. It’s the only evidence it happened. The only evidence it happened to me….”

She had stolen weeks from Hitch. Weeks it would take to stage again, with Janet or some other stand-in … if he could ever get it just so, just the way he wanted, which she doubted was possible, or hoped wasn’t possible.

The studio would pay, if Hitch wouldn’t.

Arthur scratched at the tape seal with his fingernails.

Jayne heard Hitch in her skull, ranting at her, raving at his loss … swearing vengeance and retribution and blood … impotent fury. “I shall make sure the chit will never work in this town again!” She’d heard that before … so had everyone. Sure, she could be blacklisted, but blacklists were broken all the time. Being dead to one producer just bumped you up on another’s books. Plenty would hire her because she’d pissed off High and Mighty Cocky Mr. Hitch. Directors without TV shows, who no one would recognize in the street … David Selznick, William Castle, William Wyler … the giant leech and dragstrip doll guys. She’d do all right.

The tape tore away in Arthur’s fingers and the can popped open. A coil of 35mm negative came loose, like guts spilling from a wound. Arthur tried to grasp it, but the edges scored his palms.

He saw the reverse image of her naked in the shower — a thin black body bleeding white — repeated over and over.

He smiled and she saw Hitch’s slobbering leer imposed briefly over the fat boy’s face.

M-m-m-murder!

She grabbed the film and looped it around and around his fat neck.

Arthur yelped.

She wound it tighter. The edges bit into his soft throat. There was blood, which made the film slick, tough to hold.

Jayne didn’t say anything. She just tried to kill a man. Any Hitch with a cock would have done.

The murder weapon was a murder. A negative murder.

“Good eeeev-ning, Jay-y-ne … do you swallow? Do you, do you?”

Shootable? Poisonable? Throttlable? Bludgeonable?

Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump…

Stabbable? Slashable? Beheadable? Deadable?

She made a noise in the back of her throat. More a croak than a screech.

Scree! Scree! Scree!

His fat hands flapped against the sleeves of her bathrobe. His sausage fingers couldn’t get a grip on the flannel.

Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump…

It was like wrestling a marionette, strangling it with its own strings.

Doo-doo-doo … Doo-doo-doo…

The door opened again and Birdie came in — wig gone, showing a mummy-like scalp, scaled with the last wisps of white hair — an umbrella raised like a dagger.

“Get your hands off my boy,” she screamed. “My precious, precious boy …”

“Mummy,” Arthur gargled, tears flowing freely, “mummy! She’s hurting me.”

The umbrella blows were feeble, hurt less than a prop knife, but the words — the panic, the love, the desperation! — cut through Jayne’s hot fury, dashed cold water over her homicidal impulse.

She let go of the film. She let go of her rage.

The old woman hugged her son and stroked his wounds. The fat young man shoved his face against his mother’s shrunken breast. They held each other, locked together in an embrace tighter than death. They rocked together, crone and baby, crying away the pain, all the pain …

“I didn’t mean any harm,” Jayne said.

… she wouldn’t kill, after all … she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

This was it, she realized, looking at mother and son, monsters both, bound by a ferocious love that seemed so much like murderous hate it was hard to recognize until the last moment.

This was it. The only ending they had.