The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

PETER ATKINS Dancing Like We’re Dumb

PUNK IN THE back seat didn’t look so tough, but the jittery eagerness with which he pressed the barrel of his Ruger against the back of my headrest talked me out of giving him the kind of shit I’d normally enjoy throwing his way.

I was in the front passenger seat — annoying to begin with because it was my fucking car — and Jumpy McHandgun back there was the monkey to Cody Garrity’s organ-grinder. Cody was driving. Not driving well, it has to be said, but certainly letting the State know what it could do with its posted speed limits.

I’d had the pleasure of their acquaintance a mere four minutes or so, and I knew Cody’s name only because he was the kind of tool that liked to introduce himself when he was car-jacking you.

“Hi, I’m Cody Garrity,” he’d said. “Slide over.” His Smith & Wesson.38 had been on display for me, but held flat against his stomach to avoid alarming anyone else in the Albertson’s parking lot.

I got to give them props for the smoothness of their work. Cody’d ambled schlub-like between the spots like some harmless stoner who’d forgotten where he’d parked, while his neck-tattooed catamite kept himself completely out of sight until Cody’d already got the drop on me.

I’d only been driving Ilsa, She-wolf of the SS, for a month or so and, while she may have been merely an entry-level Mercedes, she was still a Mercedes, so I should have been paying more fucking attention. It’s true that it was four o’clock in the afternoon of another perfect LA day and that seven years of driving third-hand Detroit may well have dulled my douchebags-who-want-your-stuff antenna, but I’m not going to make excuses. I’d been sitting there checking my mental shopping list with the driver door wide open like some middle-class moron who thinks crime only happens to other people, so I’ve got no one to blame but Mrs Donnelly’s youngest.

Cody, jumping lights and ignoring stop signs, was tearing down Griffith Park Boulevard now, pushing Ilsa like he had her on a Nascar track instead of a residential street, and her engine was purring pleasurably in response to his aggression. Little Kraut slut.

“What you got on your pre-sets?” Cody asked, but was already stabbing at the radio’s buttons. The speakers burst into life and the godlike genius known to an undeserving world as Ke$ha told us she had Jesus on her necklace.

Cody gave me a superior look. “Top forty,” he said, like I needed my channels explaining to me. His tone was derisive, and the epsilon in back snorted in agreement. Their disdain didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me — confused me, in fact — was that I was still in the damn car. I don’t know if Cody and his chimp had ever read Carjacking for Dummies but, if they had, I’m pretty sure they’d have learned that the place to say goodbye to their new vehicle’s previous owner was back at the point of purchase.

It’s never a good idea to point out examples of their own stupidity to boys who like to play with guns but I needed to let them know that, now that they had the car and all, it was time that they thought about ditching the unwanted baggage. I turned to look at Cody — always smarter to talk to the less-amped one — and pointed ahead to the next intersection.

“You could drop me at the corner of Hyperion,” I said, calm as a tween on Ritalin. “I can pick up a slice at Hard Times and—”

“Hey, lesbo-at-frontseat-dot-com,” his partner interrupted. “Shut the fuck up.”

Well, that was alarming. Not a single Melissa CD or Ellen bio in sight and me in my usual show-the-boys-what-they’re-missing drag, but still Antsy Von Rugerstein — who I’m guessing wasn’t the brightest bitch in his pack — had me down as a friend of Radclyffe Hall. Which meant he had to have come armed with prior knowledge. Which meant he and his alpha hadn’t been targeting Ilsa at all. They’d been targeting me.

Huh. And the day’d started off so quiet.

Started off nice, in fact. Coffee at my place with a pretty girl.

Anna was almost eighteen, exclusively and unfortunately hetero, and was part of a girl power trio called The Butchered Barbies. Anna had two jobs in the band — to play bass and to look hot — and was good at one of them. The Barbies — who were almost big in what remained of the Silverlake scene — were all buzzsaw guitar and Jenny Rotten snarls, like the last thirty years had never happened. I’d tried to point out to Anna on more than one occasion that their whole schtick was as charmingly antiquarian as crinolines and afternoon tea but she wasn’t having it. Fucking kids. No telling them.

Anyway, Anna had come calling this morning because she’d misplaced a piece of vinyl that meant a lot to her, and was flirting with the idea that it had been stolen and wanted me to flirt with the idea of making it my next case.

Next case. Jesus Christ. Truth is I feel weird even talking about cases. I mean, with my impressive juvenile resumé of drug-running and related criminal activities, it wasn’t like the State was going to fucking license me any time soon. And, besides, most of the people who came to me with their little problems weren’t the sort of people who were likely to want the authorities anywhere within sniffing distance of their own shit. Nevertheless, for the last eighteen months or so, the Donnelly larder had been stocked pretty exclusively by the proceeds of a series of adventures in private investigation, so turns out — licensed or not — I’d sashayed my way into becoming Nancy Drew for the meh generation.

“It was that guy,” Anna said. “I’m pretty sure. Have you got any more coffee?” She looked around my kitchenette with a hopeful expression, like the coffee could perhaps be somewhere other than the auto-drip’s empty pitcher and waggled her mug on the counter-top like she might tempt it out of hiding.

“I’ll make some,” I said, getting up. “What guy?”

“The guy,” she said, giving me a look like what the fuck was wrong with me not keeping up with her tweets.

“Remind me,” I said, walking to the machine and swapping out the used filter.

“Took a stranger home after a gig,” she said. “Fucked him. Gone when I woke up. No name, no number. One of my 45s was missing.”

Come on. Of course that’s not what she said. What she said took the entire brew-cycle, but I’ve done you the courtesy of editing out the how-she-felt and the what-she-wore and the how-he-seemed-nice and the Emma’s-cool-but-she-can-be-so-jealous and all the rest of her Proustian-level-of-detail shit. Trust me, you owe me big.

I’d press her later for more clues to the identity of the gentle and sensitive young poet with whom she’d shared those brief idyllic moments, but first I wanted to know if what might have been stolen was something actually worth stealing. I asked her the name of the missing single.

“You probably haven’t heard of it, Kitty,” she said gently — you know, me being twenty-five and such a fucking square and all. “It’s called ‘The Devil Rides Shotgun’, by Guest Eagleton.”

Bless her. Everything’s new to seventeen-year-olds, even history. The record in question was certainly a rarity, but the story behind it was hardly obscure. They even made a bad TV movie about it in the early eighties, something I resisted telling Anna for fear it would break her hip little heart. Rockabilly legend Eagleton — not a legend at the time, of course, just another redneck punk lucky enough to be making a third single because his second had crossed over from the regional charts to the lower reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 — recorded ‘The Devil Rides Shotgun’ in 1957. By all accounts, the recording itself went fine — single hanging mike, three-piece band, two takes and off to the cathouse, those were the days — but between the day of the recording and the release of the single Guest finally got around to reading his contract.

Discovering that the label’s owner — a scurrilous one, imagine that — had put himself up as co-writer of the song, young Guest, still fresh from the Kentucky hills and not one to wait for lawyers when there’s a sawn-off handy, broke into the record plant to personally stop the pressing of the 45.

Here’s the part of the story where fact shades into legend. It’s a fact Guest was shot by the first cop on the scene. It’s a fact that he fell from the gantry into the production line below. I don’t know for a fact he was dead before his face landed in the hot wax vat, but I sure hope so. It’s a fact that twenty-seven copies of the 45 were pressed before they could shut the line down. And the legend, of course, is that each of those twenty-seven copies contains microscopic remnants of their late creator because the flesh that was stripped from his skull by the molten vinyl was swirled away with it and stamped into the records themselves. You can believe it if you like. Snopes gives it a cautious “hasn’t actually been disproved” kind of rating.

Anyway, the final fact is that — whether the story of their extra ingredient was true or not — those copies of the single, though never officially released, have become Grail-like to serious vinyl junkies over the years. Springsteen paid nearly twenty grand for his copy back in his glory days, the nerd from Coldplay almost twice as much at a Sotheby’s auction three years ago. Anna got hers as a gift. Like I said, pretty girl.

It wasn’t even lunchtime before I was cooling my heels in the lobby of a mid-level talent agency on Beverly waiting to see the douche who’d picked Anna up and ask him nicely for the return of her property.

Here’s the thing about detecting that my more invested-in-the-myth colleagues don’t want you to know: like every other job, it’s really easy except for those rare but annoying times when it’s not. This thing of Anna’s took me one phone call to a barman I knew at the club where the Barbies had played, another to a customer he knew who’d spent time talking to the aforementioned douche, and a quick Internet search of employment records.

I’d given my name to the pretty young man at the reception desk and told him I needed to see Andy Velasco on a personal matter of some urgency. He’d told me he’d do what he could, but that Mr Velasco was very busy, and I’d bit my tongue and sat down to wait. But by the time I’d read Variety from cover to cover I figured I’d waited long enough and, in the next brief gap in the endless phone calls the receptionist was fielding, walked back over to his desk and said, “Where’s his office?”

The receptionist pulled a face. “I’m going to need you to sit down and be patient.”

“When?” I asked him.

“Excuse me?”

“When are you going to need me to do that?”

He hesitated, because — how the hell would he know — maybe I actually was that stupid.

“Now,” he said, with that weary politeness that’s supposed to let you know you’re dealing with a trained professional.

“Now?” I said. “So what’s with all the ‘I’m going to’ crap? Present tense. Future tense. They’re different for a reason.” Poor bastard. Wasn’t like he was the only idiot to talk that way but, you know, millionth customer gets the confetti and the coupon-book. Luck of the draw.

“I need you to sit down,” he said. “Now.” Giving it his best firm and authoritative, just like the manual must’ve told him. Adorable.

“Well, I need Scarlett Johansson and a fistful of Rohypnol,” I said. “So that’s two of us that are shit out of luck.”

“I have no problem with calling the police,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said. “But I can guarantee you your Mr Velasco would.” He came up short on the snappy comeback front so I pressed on. “Tell him I’ve got a pitch for him. Re-imagining of an old classic. Statutory Rape and the Single Rockchick. Pretty sure he’ll want to hear it.”

Five minutes later, I was driving the single back to Anna’s place in Echo Park.

And five hours later, after a breakneck jaunt up and around the curves of Mulholland, I was about to be ushered in to a mansion on a hill by my new friend, Cody Garrity.

His little helper had clambered into Ilsa’s driver seat when Cody and I’d got out and, as he slipped her back into drive and started out of the courtyard roundabout, he dropped the window, grinned at me, and pantomimed a shot to my head. Charm. It’s just something you’re born with.

I returned the smile and nodded. “Catch you later,” I said.

He didn’t much care for the way I’d said it, I guess, because he slammed back into park like he was ready to get out and teach the bitch some manners.

“Scott. ” Cody said. Not much spin on it, but apparently enough to get the little tyke back in his cage. He drove off, and I watched him exit through the big wrought-iron gates. Neck tattoo, five-foot-six, name of Scott. Should be enough. And it’s always nice to have something to look forward to.

“Long walk back,” I said to Cody. “But at least it’s downhill.”

“I got a ride,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of a late model Cadillac parked outside a separate Carriage House. “And you’re not going to need one.”

“Ominous,” I said. “I’m all a-tremble.”

“Comedienne,” he said — yeah, four syllables, gender-specific and everything, who knew? — and waved me toward the front door of the main house with his gun.

Quite a place. And it sure as hell didn’t belong to Cody. Nor did it belong to a pissant junior agent like Andy Velasco — to whom I should perhaps have paid more attention when he told me that he was just a middleman and that his client was not going to be happy — because this place was money. Real money.

The three rooms and a hallway we walked through to get where we were going were high-end SoCal class. Impressive and imposing, but nothing you haven’t seen in the glossies. The room we ended up in, though, was something quite different. Black marble and red lacquer and display cases full of books, artefacts, and impedimenta of a very specific nature.

Shit.

Magic. I hate magic.

LA’s just full of Satanists. Always has been. I don’t know if it’s some kind of yin — yang natural balance thing — all that sun, surf, and simplicity needing to be contrasted by some really dark shit — but it certainly seems that way. Into every Brian Wilson’s life, a little Charlie Manson must fall.

Most of the Golden State’s followers of the left-hand path are of course idiot dilettantes chasing tail and money, but every now and then something real fucking ugly breaks surface. Something that knows what it’s doing.

It was hard to think of the seventy-year-old guy who’d been waiting for us in the room as someone who knew what he was doing, though, at least when it came to raising demons and the like. Getting into pickles with pretty sitcom moms, sure, or raising exasperated eyebrows at the antics of adorable juvenile leads maybe. I recognised him immediately, and you would’ve too. I doubt you could watch four hours of TV Land without seeing him at least twice. Never had his own show, but from the late sixties through the mid-eighties he was very solidly employed. You’d have as hard a time as I did remembering the name — Frankie Metcalfe, I eventually recalled — but you’d know the face in a heartbeat. Still worked now and then; he did one of those standard Emmy-baiting loveable-old-curmudgeon-with-Cancer bits on Grey’s Anatomy couple of seasons back.

“Really?” I said. “There Goes the Neighborhood residuals can get you a place like this?”

“Hardly,” he said. “Bequest from an acolyte. So you’re the interfering little cunt who decided she’d piss on my parade?”

Whoa. Quite a mouth. And from this guy? It was like hearing Howie Cunningham tell you to go fuck your mother.

“Why didn’t you just make Anna an offer?” I said. “You probably could have got the damn single for less than a month’s worth of property tax.”

“Not an option,” he said. “The ritual has its rules.”

Christ almighty. Always with the rules and rituals, these dickheads. Flying the flag for transgression and the dark arts, but as prissy about it as a chapter of the fucking DAR.

“Esoteric as all get out, I’m sure,” I said. “Can I give you a piece of friendly advice? Payback for all those hours of televisual pleasure? If you have a gun handy, you might want to get it now.”

“Because?”

“Because sometime in the next five or ten minutes I’m going to relieve Cody of his and blow the top of his fucking head off, and I’d hate for you to be caught at a disadvantage.”

Cody bristled at that — big fucking deal, I’ve been bristled at before — but Frankie laughed. I think he was starting to like me.

I wondered why he’d sent his boys to grab me instead of just having them snatch the single again, and asked him.

“Your friend was apparently so moved by its safe return that she’s keeping it about her person,” Frankie said. “Which wouldn’t be a problem, but her group is currently travelling.” He looked to Cody for details.

“They got a gig in Bakersfield tonight,” Cody said.

“Bakersfield?” I said. “Seriously, the Barbies? Buck Owens must be turning over in his grave.”

Frankie ignored the sidebar. “So, no memento mori of the unfortunate Mister Eagleton,” he said. “Still, not to worry. We’ve got you instead.”

“I’m a girl of many talents,” I said. “But singing isn’t one of them.”

“Then how lucky we are that all you’ll be required to do is die. Let’s move the party down below, shall we?”

We were on the ground floor, in case I haven’t made that clear. “Down below,” I said. “That’s quite unusual for Los Angeles.” Look at me, being all up on my building codes and shit.

“What’s unusual?” Frankie asked.

“Having a basement.”

“Oh, I don’t have a basement,” he said.

He was right. He didn’t have a basement. What he had was a cavern. I’d have made the requisite Bruce Wayne jokes, except the sight of it didn’t really inspire humour.

It was huge, for starters, like the hill beneath his house and those of his neighbours lower down on the slope was absolutely hollow. And the hollowness was new. I don’t mean man-made new — there’d been no excavation here, at least not by natural means — but alarmingly, preternaturally new, like the hill was eating itself hollow in preparation for something. The hill was being rewritten, I thought, though I’d have preferred not to.

The cavern walls weren’t of rock, but of whatever primordial clay once hardened into rock. They were pale brown, and wet. Oozing wet, like the whole thing was sweating feverishly. The floor was the same, sucking at our feet with every step. That I could handle. It was the breathing that freaked me the fuck out.

It was slow and laboured and, apart from being a hundred times as loud and coming from everywhere at once, sounded like the melancholy and heartbreaking sound of someone on their deathbed. But this wasn’t the sound of something dying. It was the sound of something being born. And it bothered me. A lot.

But not as much as it bothered Cody.

We’d descended by rope ladder from a trapdoor in Frankie’ souvenir shop — the descent being, too bad for me, textbook smart; guy with gun first, unarmed chick second, creepy old guy third — and ever since we’d got here, Cody’d evidenced increasing signs of having got himself into something that wasn’t what he thought he’d signed up for.

Yeah, well too damn bad, Gangsta.

Once his awestruck and unhappy glances at his surroundings started to occupy more of each of his last minutes on earth than his glances at me did, I figured it was time to put him out of his misery.

I couldn’t even feel smug about it, guy was so out of his comfort zone. A slight hesitation, as if I was mesmerised by one of the clay-like excrescences that bloomed from the dripping walls like attempts at imitating local flora, a misdirecting glance back behind him, and then a well-placed heel and elbow, and he was on his knees, gasping for breath, and his gun was in my unforgiving hand.

“Say goodnight, Cody,” I said, and put one through the centre of his forehead.

I was swinging back towards where I’d last seen Frankie when I heard the click of his safety and felt his barrel at the back of my neck. Cargo pants don’t look that great on guys his age, but they do have a lot of pocket space.

“Leave it with him,” Frankie said, and I dropped the.38 on Cody’s dead chest.

“Watch,” Frankie said, trying for dispassionate but failing to completely mask the fascination and excitement.

So I watched. Partly because information is power, and partly because Mom always told me it’s a bad idea to piss off a crazy old fucker with a gun.

The blood jetting out of Cody’s shattered skull was being sucked into the liquid sheen of the clay like mother’s milk into the mouth of a greedy newborn. And it was a two-way street. Cody’s flesh was invaded by the faecal brown of the mud he’d died on until, inside of a minute, he looked like something somebody’d moulded from the wet and alien earth itself.

So much for any lingering hope that this could all be explained away by sedimentary settlement.

“It accepts the offering,” Frankie said, more out there by the fucking minute. “But don’t entertain any hope that this can replace your own sacrifice. There was no gravitas here. No ceremony. The unfortunate news for you is that your death needs to be both slow and somewhat spectacular.”

Fuck me. With the exception of his charming opening gambit with the C-word back in his trophy room, everything this guy said sounded like he’d lifted it from his back catalogue of crappy scripts. Case in point, his subsequent lurid description of what I had to look forward to before the day was much older.

“I’m going to blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, Kitty, blah blah blah.” On and fucking on. Use your imagination. I assure you it’s at least as good as his.

“That how you get it up?” I said, when he was finally done. “Telling girls what you’re going to do to them?”

“No, Ms Donnelly,” he said. “I get it up watching people’s eyes turn glassy with dread as they feel all hope of escape disappear.” TV’s Frankie Metcalfe, Ladies and Gentlemen. A real fucking sweetheart. “Now, let’s move on to the central chamber.”

We moved ahead through a curving anterior walkway. Only then, within its lower ceiling and narrower walls, did I pause to wonder where the hell the light was coming from. But it was a meaningless question. I could see perfectly well. And I had no idea how or why.

Another of those misshapen flowers was growing from the weeping wall to our left. This one was vanguard minded, attempting an impression of colour, its stalk and leaves blood red, its petals an eerie and bilious yellow. Frankie’s left hand plucked it from the wall with a flourish.

“Here,” he said, shaking some of its slime from his fingers and flinging it at me. “Pretend it’s Prom Night.”

“Thanks,” I said, catching it and pretending to sniff it before holding it to my wrist like a corsage. “Every time I smell it, I’ll think of you.”

He gave me a look that told me he was smart enough to know I’d stolen the line, but not sharp enough to remember from whom — let me save you the Google; it was my fellow Irish deviant, Oscar Wilde — and then, all done with our little time-out flirtation, waved me ahead impatiently, waggling the gun like a signalling device.

“Got it,” he said. “You’re un-fucking-flappable. Now get moving, or I’ll drag you there by the short-and-curlies.”

Sad old bastard. Like anybody has pubic hair anymore. I dropped the nasty little flower — wet and rubbery and pulsing unpleasantly like it hadn’t yet decided its final shape — and moved ahead of him, conceding reluctantly to myself as I walked on that things were not looking good for our plucky girl detective. Fact, I could feel The Adventure of the Hollow Hill lobbying to give itself a real fucking downer of an ending as I stepped out from the walkway into what he’d called the central chamber. There was a bubbling quicksand-like pool at its heart, surrounded by several ill-defined shapes that put me in mind of the grotesque statue that Cody’s body had become. More formal offerings, I thought. The place was a compost heap, a mulch pit, and Frankie’s ode to its insane splendour confirmed as much.

“You’ve doubtless seen all that pentagram and puff of smoke nonsense in the movies,” he said. “But the truth is it takes time and effort to actually effect a materialisation. The ground must be prepared. I’ve been seeding it for years, Kitty. Seeding it with frozen pain, with artefacts that contain the captured essence of human suffering. I’ve brought such treasures here. The skulls of slaughtered children, a letter to the media that one of our most celebrated serial killers wrote in the blood of a victim, a copy of the De Vermis Mysteriis bound in human skin. ‘The Devil Rides Shotgun’ would have been a beautiful addition, but alas. ”

He let his voice trail off theatrically. Prime fucking ham.

I’d have asked him the obvious question — why the hell are you doing this? — but I knew there was no point. He wouldn’t have an answer because he wasn’t really here anymore. He was as hollow as his hill, and just as much in the process of transformation. Whatever the human motivations that had kicked him off — curiosity, excitement, thrill of the forbidden, whatever — he was now merely a vessel of the Other’s desire to manifest itself. He had nothing to do with it. He was long gone. Whatever was blossoming in his cavern had eaten Frankie Metcalfe from the inside too.

So why leave the crust?

He was staring at the bubbling pool at the heart of it all and, for a second or two, hardly paying attention to me. I’d think later that perhaps either outcome was equally acceptable to what was left of the man he used to be, but I wouldn’t think about it much because it allowed for too much human ambiguity in the monster he’d become. I sure as shit didn’t think about it in the moment. I was younger and faster, and all his meditative pause in the proceedings meant to me was this: forget the gun, close the gap, get one hand on his skull and the other on his chin, and snap his wretched ancient neck like a fucking twig.

I’d have run anyway, but the terrifying re-ossification of the whole cavern lent my legs a whole new level of motivation. Killing Frankie had been like flipping a power-down switch on whatever he’d been ushering in to our world. It made sense, I suppose. Any other death down here — like, you know, mine — would have been just more mulch on the shit-pile of its becoming, but the death of its possessed summoner threw everything into reverse. Whatever had been coming was now retreating, and the hill was reclaiming its solidity. Reclaiming it, thank fuck, not quite as fast as I reclaimed the rope ladder and clambered my way back up into the house.

By the time I let myself out of the front door and headed for the Cadillac, the sun was just starting to set. California perfect. Orange and blue and purple and beautiful.

But I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was thinking about this:

Neck tattoo, five-foot-six, name of Scott.

Catch you later.