Masters of Horror (11 page)

For over an hour they laughed and laughed. Zacherly could not recall a high that had ever felt so good.

He invited Tuesday to spend the night.

Later she climbed into his bed again.

It was a whole lot better the second time.

Back to TOC

Having lived in Las Vegas for many years, I’d seen the lure of gambling seduce and destroy many normally decent people first-hand. In an effort to appeal to their logic, I’d tell them: “Look at the Strip. There’s a Castle, there’s a Pyramid, there are replicas of New York and Paris. Do you think they built those by GIVING MONEY AWAY?” When you hear the expression “Easy Money”, do yourself a favor and entertain the notion there may be no such thing.

Now, observe as Ryan Willox takes the phenomenon to another level altogether.

A Kiss for the Damned

By Ryan Willox

Martin had been running for the past fifteen minutes and his legs were tiring. If he stopped for a single breath they would be on him. He had evaded them for too long to simply let them overrun him, so he struggled on.

His legs felt heavier by the second and urged him to give up but if he looked back he would succumb because seeing them again, whatever they were, would break his resolve.

As Martin raced down King Street he recalled his last sighting of his hunters only minutes before and how inconspicuous they had looked in their bland, pale colored T-shirts and nerdy shorts.

A casual observer would have thought nothing of them, but then a casual observer wouldn’t have realized they weren’t—
right
. He hoped that his recent glance back at them would be the last time he would see them - the terror that it wouldn’t be kept him going.

Freewheeling down another steep gradient, distancing himself still further, he then leapt up the steps of the Central Station railway bridge in the heart of the town, taking then two at a time in order to finish this agonizing pursuit.

While running on the bridge, he looked up at the sky and saw one of the most beautiful sunsets he had ever witnessed. The sun was a brilliant blood red and the almost cloudless sky around it was an explosion of purples, deep crimson, and oranges all merging together.

As he ran, with his paisley tie flapping wildly and his white shirt sticking to him through perspiration, he supposed that, if this was to be the last sunset he would ever see, it would be the finest.

Soon the bridge was out of sight and he was running towards home. Despite a deep centered reservation about doing so, Martin glanced over his shoulder and was more relieved than he could ever hope to express when he didn’t see anyone giving chase.

After a chase that seemed endless, he got to the apartment block he called home.

Standing with his back to the door so that he could keep watch, he searched frantically in his pockets for his keys. He discovered them in the front left pocket of his trousers and, within seconds, he fell inside and lay on the cold stone hallway. Despite his aching limbs he forced himself to get up and go to his apartment because he would only be safe when he was inside. Battling exhaustion, Martin crawled up the stairs to his front door.

After kicking the door shut he lay in the cooling dark. His exhaustion was all-consuming and he found he had neither the will, nor the strength to get up; therefore he made only a cursory attempt at resistance as he slipped into unconsciousness on the floor.

The lamp by the sofa in the corner of the room went on and, although Martin did his best not to scream, he let out a little yelp. A surge in adrenaline compensated for his lack of energy.

Martin scrambled to his feet expecting to see the Big Man sitting on his sofa with his pearl handled revolver in his hand, waiting to kill him. But it wasn’t the Big Man who was sitting on the sofa, it was someone very different.

She sat at the end of his white velour sofa leaning forward and holding one of his few remaining glasses in her hand. On the coffee table in front of her sat a large bottle of champagne. The glare given off by the lamp to her right combined with the eerily deeply colored sky reflected off her skin, creating a combination of shades and light that any cinematographer would have been very proud of. She tilted her half empty champagne glass back and forth in her hand and then she raised her head to look straight at Martin.

It was now that, for the first time, Martin saw her clearly, since before half of her face had been submerged in shadow but now the light shone against her countenance and gave it a strange orange tint. His visitor’s peroxide blonde hair ran the length of her perfectly curved neck but stopped just short of her shoulders while her crystalline green eyes glistened and shimmered in the light of the setting sun.

Mesmerized, Martin let his gaze slip over her face much like the shadows had done only moments before and all the time he wondered if he had lost his mind. Her distinctively raised eyebrows arched even higher and then her full blooded red lips parted as she released a heart stopping smile. As that smile widened to reveal those perfect pearly whites, Martin could only wonder what the hell was going on. Then, just before she spoke that trademark mole on the curve of her right cheek moved in tandem with her smile.

“
So, are you just going to sit there looking dumb? Or are you going to say something?” said Marilyn Monroe as she raised her champagne glass to her mouth and a lock of hair flopped over her left eye.

Martin was struck dumb. He wondered if this was a hallucination he was experiencing due to the effects or exhaustion or, perhaps, it was the delayed effects of the many drugs he had ingested.

Then a more reasonable explanation resurfaced and he took a kind of reassurance in knowing he had finally gone crazy. It gave him hope that, when the Big Man’s minions caught him, and there was no doubt that was what they were, he wouldn’t notice the pain as much.
Could it just be a dream
, he wondered? Then his delusions received a blow.

“
What are you looking at me like that for? I’m not a dream, well…not in that sense, and I’m not a hallucination. I’m Marilyn, hmm?”

“
Marilyn
?! What the hell? How did you get here?” Martin asked, bemused and with all thoughts of the ordeal he had experienced being shunted unwillingly from his brain.

“
Yeah, yeah I know. Let’s just say that a mutual acquaintance sent me. Found yourself some trouble, sugar?” She asked in that bright, airy and enthusiastic tone she always seemed to use.

Should he start talking to this ghost, hallucination or whatever it was? Then a thought occurred to him; even if he was just hallucinating, and she wasn’t a ghost, hadn’t he always dreamed of meeting Marilyn Monroe? And wasn’t this just one of the most amazing visions he had ever had?

“
I got in with the wrong people, Marilyn. Now they’ve come looking for me,” Martin explained. But instead of feeling strange, he felt at ease…and he was glad he had someone to talk to, to confess to.

“
Go on,” replied Marilyn as she took another sip, gazing out of the window so that her face was now illuminated by a mauve glow.

* * *

Martin knew the shit was about to hit the fan the instant the dealer had hit him with the King of Hearts. He needed no worse than a nine and almost at the moment the dealer had turned the card face up, two burly men had each taken an arm and unceremoniously dragged him from the table. They hadn’t needed to tell him to come quietly.

A couple of minutes later he was at the door of the Big Man’s office. He felt a chill in his bladder. Maybe if he pissed his pants while he begged for his life, the Big Man might show him some mercy. He might just get out of this with a couple broken legs.

That seemed less likely when the thugs bundled him into the office and the first thing he saw was another heavy dragging the limp body of a ‘client’ by his arm out a back entrance. The man was whimpering and his face was bloodied mush…but at least he wasn’t dead.

The office was a shrine to the arcane. There were ancient looking books stacked everywhere, a gold pentangle on the right wall, and a cabinet full of jars containing everything from a monkey’s paw to a shrunken head and a silver skull. Martin’s legs went from under him but the thugs held him up easily. They were deceptively strong, and their hands felt strange on his skin, cold and claw-like.

“
I offered you way out of your debt, spotted you a marker to be retrieved at a later date, and gave you an unlimited credit line in my club.” The Big Man was wearing a grey pinstripe suit, near to bursting at the seams. His was a well-earned moniker. He took his sunglasses off, unnecessary in the gloom of his office, to reveal bright red eyes.

“
This is that later date.” The Big Man smiled and his teeth were all sharp points.

Martin turned to the thugs holding his arms and saw the same features. The ensuing moments contained much high pitched begging and pleading on Martin’s part until he hit upon an idea that had, temporarily at least, prolonged his life.

“
Oh God! I gotta piss.
Please
let me take a piss. I don’t want to die with piss all over my pants. Please! Give me that. Oh God, at least give me that,” Martin pleaded in a voice that sounded pathetic even to him.

The Big Man looked dubiously, pursed his lips in a ‘what harm can it do,’ gesture and waved a hand to direct Martin to a mahogany door by the cabinet of jars.

The private bathroom was nice, well decorated. The kind of thing you would expect in the office of the manager of an upscale casino. And it had a ventilation window with a latch.

* * *

“
Money,” Marilyn said thoughtfully. “I am not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.”

Martin let his feelings of
deja vu
slip. By now he had become composed enough to pull himself over the floor to the coffee table and take a drink of champagne straight from the bottle.

“
What are you going to do?” she asked.

“
I don’t know. There’s nothing I can do anymore. I’ve no money and I’ve nowhere else to go. I can only keep running. Those that I owe have made it clear that they will not accept monetary recompense. I owe them something else. I’m dead the minute they find me, maybe worse.”

“
I think I know what you could do. I know what could make you a winner. I know how you could be better than them...”

“
How?” Martin pleaded with tears beginning to well.

“
You’re going to die, aren’t you? So why give them the satisfaction of killing you?”

Martin’s addled brain couldn’t cope with the implications of what Marilyn said but from somewhere deep inside, some place important, he felt compelled to hear her out.

Martin looked at the empty champagne bottle in his hand and was relieved when Marilyn leaned over the arm of the sofa and pulled out another bottle from what he assumed must be her handbag. Somewhat shakily she poured herself another glass before handing the bottle to Martin who wiped his sleeve across his face and then began gulping.

After he decided he’d had enough for the moment, he wondered about her last suggestion. Looking into her lucid, sharp eyes from his own tear blurred ones he asked: “You’ll know. Is that the way? There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you Marilyn; why did you do it?”

“
Oh! I see you’re not one of these conspiracy theorists. I’ve heard a lot of those. I liked the one about it being the CIA the best though. Imagine all that fuss over little old me. Why did I do it? Maybe it was because sometimes I thought it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know yourself. But it’s too late now, and I’m thinking it’s too late for you too.”

Martin had known for some time that there was only one way out of this. He had neither the will or the initiative, nor the money, to go doing things like trying to change his identity or running to foreign places.