Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

The Girl Next Door (34 page)

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

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Yet three years later he felt no anger anymore. He could only wonder where it had gone. Because back then
you’ll get over it in time
along with
making
a ckan break of it
and
speeding up the healing process
had seemed the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of useless psychobabble. They disgusted and infuriated him.

But maybe in the long run they’d obtained after all.
Victory through inanity.

Because here he was.

Curious in a passive sort of way about what if anything could possibly wake his dead ass up again, ressurect his sense of engagement in Life After Annabel. But the operative word was still
passive.
Confrontation? Three years ago, in a minute. But now he wasn’t even sure he had the energy anymore. It was possible that the time for explanation and understanding and that most odious of all suspender-and-bowtied words
closure
had simply come and gone.

He’d never thrown out his own photos.

So he went through them for the first time in a long time over a corned beef on rye for lunch the following day. He felt a brief twinge looking at them. The pinch of a muscle you could stretch a moment later and be rid of.

Still it was something.

He decided to search her out on the Internet. He’d thought of doing that before but resisted it, wary of any further humiliation.

He punched in her maiden name and got nothing. Then tried her married name. What came back was a single photo. A wedding picture two and a half years old—Annabel and her husband, Gerard, standing smiling beneath a canopy of healthy green palm fronds in front of some old New Orleans hotel. Annabel looking lovely in a pale green shoulderless gown, her husband slightly shorter than she and balding, wearing a white silk short-sleeved shirt, lopsided grin and a crisp new panama hat. She gazed not at the camera but into the sky. And that was exactly like her. Annabel was a painter and the sky was her true north, her canvas.

It was the only thing familiar.

The caption read INTRODUCING MR. AND MRS. GERARD POPE AT MARDI GRAS. LOOK WHAT WE WENT AND DID!

The photo was off her husband’s Web site. Bass had no reason to think he even had one. No idea that what he did for a living was write detective novels—fairly successful ones from the look of it. He roamed the site. Book covers and reviews and a bibliography and message board and quotes from
Publishers Weekly
and Lawrence Block. Not too shabby at all. He had a series character who’d appeared first in six paperback originals and then more recently in two hardcovers, presumably with paperbacks forthcoming.

There was that twinge again.

Possibly the twinge was jealousy. Bass had seriously hoped to write one day himself—the bartending was supposed to have been temporary.

Or perhaps it was the fact that she and Bass had talked about New Orleans together too, while the farthest south they’d ever gotten was Cape May in the spring their very first year.

But more likely he was beginning to experience what Gary had talked about.

Context.

Here she was, Annabel embraced within the photo. Another, different Annabel. Far beyond the scope or influence of that entity which had once been Annabel and Bass together. With a man he barely recognized, to all purposes a total stranger. And in this man’s presence—on that day at least—she was happy.

So it seemed that she could be perfectly happy without him.

He’d known that of course. Any cerebrum worth its salt could fire up that conclusion. But he thought the twinge came not from there but from some less apollonian area of the brain. The part men shared with snakes and birds and dinosaurs. That part which holds a single thing above all self-evident—
eat or be eaten
. Take or be taken.

Just a twinge.

But enough so that when a few days later Laura smiled and kissed him good-bye at the door to their apartment and lugged her bags downstairs to the taxi headed for LaGuardia, it began—unexpectedly—to move from twinge to throb. To leak through into this brand-new
second
void in his life created by her absence like a beaver dam broken slowly apart by a heavy upstream rain.

Its immediate focus was Gerard, not Annabel. Which seemed strange to him because, Web site aside, he had no idea who Gerard even was. Bass bought one of his paperbacks but he hated thrillers so beyond reading the first few pages to ascertain that the man was capable of handling line and paragraph with more than meager skill he delved no further. So how could he feel such a growing
animus
—because that’s what it was—toward somebody he’d never shaken hands with? Whose habits, tastes, voice, wit
or lack of wit
he knew nothing of?

How could you begin to dislike what amounted to a human abstraction?

Good question, he thought...

But his dream life wasn’t asking.

And Gerard was beginning to show up there on a pretty regular basis.

In one dream he and Gerard were trying to decipher blurred-out cooking directions printed on a bag of frozen food—some kind of stuffed Italian bread. They needed to know the oven time and couldn’t read the damn thing. It was very frustrating.

In another they were playing chess. Pieces kept disappearing. A pawn here, a bishop there. Bass suspected himself of cheating.

In yet another they were seated beneath a shade tree in Central Park watching a little girl play on the monkey bars and the little girl was Annabel. This did not seem strange to either of them. Bass lit a Winston and inhaled and Gerard leaned over smiling and plucked it from his lips and tossed it. Annabel laughed and jumped off the monkey bars and crushed it underfoot. Bass was furious with both of them.

Then there was the really bad one.

There’s Gerard, seated in front of an old bare country-style oak table, massive, and he’s tied to a heavy wooden armchair. His legs are tied to the chair legs and his arms are tied to the chair arms. Annabel is nowhere to be seen. Gerard stares at Bass, his brow furrowed with anxiety. Bass asks him, do you love your wife? He nods in the affirmative.

Then suddenly there’s Annabel, similarly tied to a similar chair at the other end of the table. Behind her is a screen door open to the starry night. Moths drift through the doorway, attracted by the light. A luna moth, the color of her wedding dress, settles on the knuckles of her right hand where it grips the chair. Bass brushes it away and his carving knife immediately replaces it, big and sharp and elegant in its way and poised to sever all four fingers and maybe the thumb too for good measure.

He asks Gerard again,
Do you love your wife?
and presses the knife gently to her flesh.

He nods yes and Bass sees that he is gagged now, as is she.

Bass lifts the knife off her fingers and transfers it to Gerard’s right hand and asks him a third time,
Do you love your wife?
and he nods again slowly, sadly it seems, almost a polite bow to him and full of understanding. He reaches over to place his free hand on top of the knife and push suddenly down and the screams behind the gag and the sound and feel of knife breaking through bone are what wake him.

He replayed the dream off and on all night long at the
Gates of Hell.
He didn’t court it. It just wouldn’t go away. Should Gary have asked him even so much as a how’s it going? he’d have told him about the dream in an instant in as much detail as he could muster but he didn’t ask and Bass couldn’t very well blurt it out between banana daiquiris and bijou cocktails.

It was the dream though and dwelling on the dream that goaded him into action the next day.

The Official Gerard Pope Web Site carried no e-mail address but it did have a message board where readers could discuss his work, swap observations and opinions and Bass noted at first visit that Gerard tended to log on once a week over the weekend and answer whatever questions had been put to him. He was regular about it.

His style in these messages was encouragingly open and unaffected. He was even funny. Approachable. Bass reflected that though Annabel had forbidden him any contact with her she’d said nothing about Gerard.

Bass sat down, lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and dropped him a line Thursday night after work.

Good photo. She looks great in green. I like the far-away sky-look, of course. Know it well. Care to catch up on old times we never bad? If you’re curious, e-mail’s above. Bass

By Sunday he had a reply.

She’d probably kill me for doing this but yeab, I guess I am curious. You still on the West Side? If so, bow about 1:00 Tuesday, lunch at the Aegean? Best, Pope

So he used his last name too. Interesting.

He e-mailed back saying Tuesday was fine.

Monday night he dreamed about something else entirely. At least he thought it was about something else entirely. It was a bright beautiful day and he was driving along a highway when another car pulled up alongside him and Bass and the driver glanced at one another. The driver was a woman, a blonde, slightly overweight he thought, but she gave him a gap-tooth smile that simply beckoned.

The next thing he knew he was in her car, in the passenger seat, and the next thing after
that
they were parked along the roadside and the car had become a trailer and they were naked on her bed making love and even though her body had a fleshy quality it was pretty good, really—not bad at all. It got even better when she morphed into a slim beautiful brunette, the model Paulina Porizkova, who Bass had wanted since he first laid eyes on her. And she kept doing that—morphing from Paulina to the blonde with the gap in her teeth and back again.

“I think maybe you should stay the night,” she said as the blonde.

He said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

He woke with barely enough time to shower and shave and grab a cup of coffee along the way.

The Aegean was doing a moderate lunch business and there were plenty of open tables but Pope was at the bar at the corner facing the door. He immediately smiled and offered his hand. “Gerard Pope,” he said.

“John Bass. How’d you know it was me?”

“What? Oh, the photos.”

“Photos?”

“Yeah.”

“She kept the photos?”

“Some, I guess. I don’t know how many. I just know you from the ones she showed me. Cape May, mostly. You know how it is with the ladies—the ones
she
looked really good in.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Damn.”

“What’ll you have?” said the bartender. Pope was drinking an O’Doul’s non-alcoholic.

“Amstel Lite.”

“Coming right up.”

“I thought she destroyed them all.”

“Annabel? Annabel can’t throw away a burned-out light bulb.”

His beer arrived complete with frosted mug and they asked for menus and talked trivia, about his Web site for the most part, which Bass said he admired and which was handled for him by a fan in Colorado in exchange for collectables, first editions and such and they ordered and then gradually the conversation began to get more personal and Bass learned that they had moved twice in three years into larger better apartments from Hell’s Kitchen to the West Side and finally to Soho. He learned two of Pope’s books had movie options but that Pope wasn’t necessarily counting on anything to come of them. He learned that Annabel was working in mixed-media now, seascapes like stylized beachcombings and that they were selling fairly well out of their Soho loft. They were currently working on a Web site to promote her stuff too.

By the time he’d finished his broiled squid and calamari salad and Pope his chicken
lemoni
Bass realized something that didn’t make him happy at all. He kind of liked the guy. What a pain in the ass. And he guessed that Pope could see it on his face because he laughed.

“Disappointed? That I’m not some prick you could just keep on hating?”

“I never....”

“Come on. If you didn’t hate me you were sure working on it. Look, I’m a writer. I’m good at body language. There was a definite poker up your ass when you walked in. You only just relieved yourself of it a while ago.”

He thought of the dream, Gerard’s sad nod to him that was almost a bow. He was pretty good at body language himself. But he only now realized what the nod was telling him. Not resignation to the knife, which was what he’d thought it to be the following morning.
Recognition
. Recognition of the Other.

In his mind he spoke the dream words
do you love your wife?
but what came out of him was “You love her, don’t you.”

“Of course I do. She’s pretty damn easy to love. Which you of all people ought to know. She was trying to do you a favor, Bass.”

“Oh yeah? How so?” He hoped it didn’t come out as bitter as it sounded.

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

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