In This Skin (4 page)

    The perfect crime, Benedict thought with a sudden wicked surge of excitement. He'd done it. He'd found a way home after what had to be the ultimate crappo evening of the year. Sliding over the top of the sink, he put his hand into cold water where the grill pan lay soaking. Even that didn't dampen the triumph over at least one portion of adversity.

    Of course, there were still a few shitty problems. There was his car that he'd have to report stolen to the police. It still unsettled him to have found the youth with the stammer scrambling like some wild animal over the steps of the Luxor. And as always, his mind kept returning to Mariah Lee. She'd walked up those same marble steps ten years ago…

    As he headed for the bathroom, ready to soak the blues away in a tub of hot water with a shot of whisky, he noticed the message light winking on the answering machine. He hit the replay button.

    Two messages. ”Hi, Benedict. It's Linda. You're needed in the L.A. office. Can you give me a call Tuesday?”Then came the second, which made his eyes roll into his head.

    ”Benedict. It's Jessica. The girl who's name you can't remember.

    Remember?”She gave a nervous laugh, then took a deep breath as if confessing. ”Sorry about freaking out like that. But I thought you might have had some buddies lying in wait for me out there at the Luxor. These things happen, you know. Anyway Sorry for taking your car. I haven't bent it or anything. I found your address in the glove compartment, so I've parked the car on the street outside your apartment… oh, and I've left the keys inside your mailbox. I wish I hadn't shitted you. You're nice and I… well, it's down to me being more nervous than I look.

    Bye.”

    Benedict thought about the blind shuffle like Goddamn Spiderman across the face of the building, with a bone-breaking plunge just waiting for him to place a foot wrong. And all the time his keys nestled snugly in his mailbox at the foot of the staircase that he'd strolled by ten minutes before. Hell, life's full of surprises.

    First, come what may, he was going to swill whisky and soak chin deep in hot water. He emptied the change from his pockets, along with something he'd forgotten. He stared at the kid's wallet in his hand. In the bright lights of the apartment he flipped it open and found an address printed on an adhesive label stuck onto the back of a library card.

    Life treated some people worse than it did Benedict West. That guy with the stammer had taken a hell of a beating earlier. A doctor really should check him out. Benedict would ease his conscience a hell of a lot by returning the wallet to the guy in the morning. What's more, he could satisfy himself the man hadn't suffered any life-threatening injuries.

    But first… sweet Jesus… he needed that hot soak.

    

    

    Robyn Vincent's sleep was a restless one. The hot breeze tugged at the blind, swinging the weighted chord so it tapped the glass. With the window open, street sounds were louder than usual. Cars, trucks, the rumble of distant goods trains, a sighing whine of aircraft far away Somewhere down on the sidewalk a man laughed. Maybe a prowling madman, because he gave a burst of chuckling laughter every twenty minutes.

    Earlier she'd been afraid that he was down there on the lawn. Only if there were a madcap intruder, he'd have triggered the security lights that guarded the large house. He must be outside the fence. Drunk, drugged or simply high on mania.

    She rolled around on the bed. Perspiration dampened her hair. The weight on the cord rapped the window like tapping fingers trying to attract her attention or drive her insane-or both.

    Robyn swooped in and out of sleep. One minute she'd be staring at the play of shadows roaming across her ceiling and trying not to match mental images to the spanking sounds from the next room, while no doubt… Ugh. Don't go there, Robyn, she told herself. The next minute she'd be asleep. Then dreams erupted with a blazing ferocity. They were as unsettling as the night sounds that tormented her. She dreamt she ran along a river that vanished into a wood. There, trees were twisted, ugly things where toadstools formed weird growths on the branches. She saw the toadstools swell with lumps that split open to reveal glistening eyes that watched her as she ran past.

    Deep in the wood she found a clearing. In it were dozens of figures.

    They were waiting for her, she knew it. She paused at the edge of the clearing, staring at the people assembled there. Her first thought was:

    They're all dead. But they were staring at her with bulging eyes. Their mouths were open as if frozen in screams of pain or terror. Even though they were still, as if carved from stone, she knew they were alive somehow. Only they couldn't move.

    She walked toward them.

    Oh, God. She swallowed down a ball of vomit that had suddenly pushed up into her throat. What was wrong with those people? They'd all been twisted out of shape. Their necks were too long, their torsos were elongated, then twisted. Arms were longer than bodies. Faces were wrangled into monstrous shapes. Bottom lips became swollen red dripping things that hung down onto their chests…

    Her instinct had been to turn and get away from there. But as she ran she found herself running toward them. A desperate, headlong run. As if the most important thing in the world was for her to reach them and…

    The snap of the blind woke her with a start. The breeze must have been strong enough to spring the mechanism and the whole thing had rattled furiously up onto the roller. Outside the madman laughed. A train sounded its horn on the track; a forlorn sound, so mournful and tragic that Robyn felt a wave of sadness rise through her so powerfully tears sprang in her eyes.

    My God. For some reason I can't stomach the idea of Noel making love to me. Now I'm having nightmares and crying without knowing why. Had she lost her mind? Was that it? Had madness taken root inside her brain?

    

    

    Benedict woke at three in the morning, just as on the other side of the city Robyn Vincent lay perspiring on her bed. He opened his eyes, running the hypnotic line through his head: We are nothing. Less than nothing and dreams. We are only what might have been.

    Didn't that have to be the most melancholic statement ever? We are nothing.. Less than nothing… no wonder the kid with the stammer had copied the statement onto a card that he kept in his wallet. If you're unable to speak in a world that oils its whole educational, financial and social mechanism with the lubrication of communication, then the stammerers and the voiceless could wind up suffering beneath a profound handicap. Hell, these days if you don't have a cell phone and an email address you're looked down on as if you're the last granddaddy of Stone Age Man.

    ”And shit, I should be sleeping… not pontificating.”Benedict sat up in bed to rub his eyes. They were gritty with rust, due to his acrobatic swings from the satellite dish. Hell, Buster Keaton he was not.

    Benedict guessed he found it hard to sleep because of that nagging concern for the guy he'd seen bleeding all over the Luxor steps. He'd drive over to the address he found in the wallet first thing. Just check that the guy was okay. Already his imagination supplied him with graphic images of the kid lying unconscious with internal bleeding. But he'd been lively enough running away from the Luxor. So maybe the wounds were just skin deep. But then he might have been harboring a ruptured kidney…

    ”Shut up, Benedict,”he hissed. ”Get some sleep.”He settled on the bed.

    Outside, down in the yard, Butch gave a single deep woof. Benedict's imagination roved too freely at night. Maybe he was lonely. How about going down to see the old man in the morning and offering to buy Butch? He liked the dog. He'd be good company. This apartment had become a limitless cache of loneliness. A dog pattering around on the wood floors would make a pleasant change from wall-to-wall silence.

    Good God, you are lonely, old buddy, he told himself. You're getting forgetful, too. It's time you put a woman in your life. Not a dog (even though dogs are fun, funny and loyal). You need love.

    But then he'd had love. For three years he had been blissfully happy with Mariah Lee. Then one day she got cranky like you wouldn't believe.

    He'd never seen her like that before. The next day she'd left their home in Atlantic City where they both worked on web design, back in the good old days when corporate bosses were both terrified of the Internet and yet knew at all costs their companies needed big sparkling web sites.

    Back when he was twenty-four, Benedict had been stuck working the mailroom. He'd pinned a card on the canteen noticeboard that announced to colleagues that he'd build web sites for them. His intention was to put together family web sites so his peers could post wedding photographs and hobby stuff on the Internet. Then one day he'd been called to a meeting with the president and vice-president of the company, alongside a whole bunch of marketing and accounting people.

    Back then there'd been a Bernard West in accountancy Benedict West had been ready to tell them that they'd confused the names and called him by mistake. Instead the vice-president had looked him up and down, studying the lowly mailroom assistant, no doubt wondering if he was an E-popping punk, then cleared his throat uneasily and said, ”Benedict. I hear that you know something about…”He checked the unfamiliar wording on a memo… Web site design?”

    The move from denim and sneakers in the mailroom to a business suit in his own office with web-design manager on the door took less than forty-eight hours. His bosses were as ignorant of designing corporate web sites as they were afraid that a rival might lure their longhaired whiz kid away, so they went into a panicky huddle on the top floor before dispatching the head of personnel to ask tentatively if Benedict would be happy with a fifty-percent raise.

    Yesterday Benedict had been ready to accept with the naive eagerness that comes when you're twenty-three. Instead, he laid down the newspaper he'd been reading on the bus that morning. There was a page of advertisements of vacant situations clamoring for web designers. ”Mr.

    Ryde, a fifty-percent raise would put me at a salary of thirty thousand a year. There's a dozen companies here willing to recruit web site designers at salaries of forty thousand a year”

    ”Come on, West, that would be out of the question. Last week you were sorting mail in the basement.”

    Benedict said nothing, merely looked Ryde in the eye.

    Ryde had let out a breath of air that said all too clearly: I'm an important man, West, and you're wasting my time. Irritably, Ryde had snapped, ”It's not for me to agree to that kind of raise. I'll have to refer your demands upward. But you might regret it.”

    Ten minutes later came one of the moments that only happen a few times in life. Ryde returned red-faced but wearing a fixed smile. ”I've put your request to the vice-president himself. You'll need to sign a new contract of employment with a clause prohibiting you from working for any of our competitors.”He cleared his throat. ”We're prepared to offer you a salary of forty thousand dollars a year, plus bonuses, plus a company car. Ahm… how does that sound, Benedict?”

    This sounded sweet. The silver BMW added an extra spoonful of honey to the deal, too.

    That embarrassed climb-down by Ryde fanfared the start of a very happy time. Within months he was dating Mariah. By Christmas she'd moved into a new apartment with him that overlooked the ocean. Then one day in the spring of ten years ago Mariah upped and left. She didn't say where she was going or why she'd left. He'd simply returned home bursting with news of a promotion to the head office in New York and she wasn't there anymore. She'd taken most of her clothes, her car and transferred her savings to a checking account.

    The police, figuring a spat between lovers, did nothing. It took him three weeks to learn through her sisters that she'd moved to a bed and breakfast hostel in Chicago. Why Chicago? That question had haunted him long enough. She didn't have family or friends there. The last time he saw her was when he tracked her down to an old dance hall called the Luxor. On placards flanking the entrance to the parking lot were signs announcing: The Luxor bids you goodnight and good-bye. Farewell concert season March-June. He'd parked the car facing a flight of marble steps that led up to an Egyptian-style facade, complete with columns and carvings that could have come right out of a pharaoh's tomb. Tonight a tribute band was playing Motown hits.

    He'd watched Mariah walk up the steps and into the Luxor alone. She'd been wearing a short black dress; her long pale blond hair had hung loose down her back. She'd paused at the top of the steps, then glanced back as if sensing he'd been there. Only she hadn't seen him. Then she'd turned and walked through the colossal doors.

    Benedict waited all night, long after the crowds had streamed out of the Luxor and the lot had emptied of cars. Mariah never left the building.

    

    

    Ellery got out of his head. He didn't need vodka or drugs or solvent adhesives, or any of the shit others used to get wasted. Ellery Hann got out of his head by sitting in this old armchair in the middle of the Luxor dance floor and just… just letting go. That's the only way he could describe it. It came naturally. Always had. He didn't have to force it. When he used to seek refuge as a child from the street kids in his grandfather's cigar store, he'd sit and stare at the carved Apache chief that stood in the doorway and ”let go.”Then he'd be whoever he wanted to be. In any place he wanted to be. An astronaut on the moon. An explorer in a jungle. A diver in a drowned city at the bottom of the ocean. He'd found it easy to daydream. Later he found it a vital component of his survival mechanism, especially at school when the stammer marked him as an outcast. Now here, ten years later in the Luxor, his mind really took flight. There was a potent quality here in the atmosphere that fueled his imagination on mind-blowing journeys. So he sat there alone in the abandoned building in total darkness. And night after night, Ellery Hann got comprehensively out of his head.