Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/10 Read online

  And there we were. The top drawer was devoted to Harris Modeling, the second to Madison Music and the third to Blenheim Publishing.

  After we had spent half an hour flipping through the files, we sat back and looked at each other.

  “So,” I said, “Harris Modeling sucks in young would-be models, takes two hundred and fifty off them, and they never hear another thing. I’ll bet there’s no film in that camera down in Chelsea, either. Madison Music invites young would-be composers to send their song lyrics to be set to music by our in-house music staff, or their music to have words written by our talented lyric writers. For a hefty fee. And Blenheim Publishing is doing the same for would-be novelists. Send in your manuscript with a large check and we’ll find you a publisher. And no one ever hears a thing. And if you turn up, as some people must, Jackie is never in. At least he is, but it’s always next door.”

  “You mean, he’s dodging about between these three offices?”

  “Dodging is the word. Life must be pretty sweaty for little Mr. Harris. I have to say, I admire his energy.”

  “But how can it work? I mean, what if people turn up at all three?”

  “He doesn’t answer any of them. Or he bolts down the fire stairs. And I imagine, to make things easier on himself, I think he must go in cycles. He does a month of interviewing models. Then he moves into Madison Music the time it takes all you girls to give it up as a bad job, and so on and so on. And if the worst comes to the worst, he’s got his bolt-hole, and a discreet way in.” I jerked a thumb at the door onto the stairwell.

  “The rotten little—so-and-so.” she said. I admired her restraint.

  “It’s a shell game,” I said. She didn’t seem to understand my analogy, and I wasn’t going to explain about walnut shells and a pea. “Find the Lady,” I said, “at least you know about Find the Lady?” She nodded doubtfully. “Only in this case, it’s Find the Jackie.”

  “What can I do? I’d really like to tell this nasty little snake what I think of him.”

  “Well,” I said, “you could complain to the management company. But that might take some time, and you never know, his brother-in-law might be the managing director.”

  “I could go to the police,” she said.

  “Yes, you could. Worst case he’d smell trouble and disappear, or best case he’d be up in court, and you can wave good-bye to your money.”

  “So, there’s nothing to do.”

  “Do you know any large persons?” I asked her.

  “Large?”

  “Yes, large. As in big. As in well built.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “There’s my brother,” she said.

  “He’s big?”

  “He plays rugby. Tighthead Prop,” she said.

  I bent my nose sideways. “Few missing teeth?” She nodded and chuckled slightly.

  “And does he have some large friends?”

  “The whole front row,” she said simply.

  I nodded. “That should do it,” I said. “All right, what you do, on Monday you come round with your large persons, and you get one large person to hammer on each door. And, you station a large person on the stairwell. That should get him. And you don’t leave without your money.”

  She was staring at the wall.

  “I’d like that,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”

  “And,” I said, “just to add a bit of spice, you could take some telephone numbers from those files, get a few other would-be models to turn up and make some noise. That’ll rattle him. What Jackie likes least, I imagine, is noise.”

  After we’d finished, I locked all the doors after us. We stood on the landing.

  “I’d like to pay you something,” she said, “I don’t have a lot, but I could pay you for your time.”

  I shook my head.

  “On the house,” I said. “It was a pleasure to do business with you, Brenda.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll come up to the office on Monday. I must give you something.”

  “Brenda,” I said, “it’s really not necessary. And they might not like me doing private work.”

  She nodded. “All right, I understand.”

  We shook hands in the half light. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me gently on the cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said. I watched her walk down the stairs. At the bottom, she turned and gave me a wave. I waved back. It was the least I could do. Or rather it was the most I could do, lacking that hat-to-thumb back.

  Hat or not, I consoled myself, whatever happened, we would always have Harris.

  Back in the office, I had a number of things to finish off. It was late, and I should be on my way. First, I put the whisky back in the drawer. No point in causing alarm and scandal, after all. Then I put the hard drive in my gym bag. I don’t do gym, but I do do gym bags. The files went in with the hard drive. All the files, photographs, and what-have-you the client had asked for.

  And that seemed to be that. I looked round the office one last time. I could still detect just the faintest trace of Brenda’s perfume.

  I locked the door carefully behind me this time. As I walked down the stairs, I tossed a glance at Jackie’s triple setup. Weird: All these people could work from home, I thought. What is this pathological urge to have an office, a place to work? Jackie Harris, for example, had to have three. Some people just need offices.

  Not me, that goes without saying. Burglars don’t.

  What a burglar definitely does need, and what I promised myself I was going to buy the next day, was a hat.

  Copyright © 2010 Neil Schofield

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  Fiction

  3 FUNVENTIONS

  ABDÓN UBIDIA

  WATCHES

  When the first digital watches appeared, I hurried to buy one at Hans Maurer’s store. Scarcely was it mine when I grasped the real importance of my decision. I was not surprised by the absence of little toothed wheels, winding pins, and springs. I was not surprised by the flow of current through the labyrinth of integrated circuits and quartz crystals, or by the loss of the ticktock, which for centuries was the true music of time.

  I was surprised by the diminutive screen that had come to replace the watch face.

  I explained it to the wizened, enigmatic, reticent Maurer:

  “The marked circle makes us think of a protective, and in some way happy, concept of the world: Time goes round and round. Each end is a new beginning. There is no rupture between departures and arrivals. The past, the present, and even the future are displayed before our eyes in a circular continuity. The little hands abandon with antlike steps that which no longer is, and continue in pursuit of that which ineluctably will be. You can see your path and indicate your return. When you see the hands of a watch, you can tell yourself that the days will always repeat themselves with their mornings and nights. That cycles exist. That we will repeat ourselves in our children as our parents have repeated themselves in us. That we will endure.

  “And suddenly, along comes this damned digital screen to change all that. The numbers appear and mark a punctual present. Each instant is distinct from the one that preceded it. The numbers emerge and sink into nothingness without a trace. There is no continuity, only replacement. Time seems wide open. It has lost its circular path; it lacks limits. It’s barely an instantaneous present. The future is a white and frozen desert. The past fades away. It is a white abyss that opens, then dissolves behind our heels with every step we take. I don’t know whether others see what I see there: an infinite solitude. Abandonment. Total vulnerability. These watches have come to teach us that we are orphans. The great round table, that joined so many things, is no more.”

  Hans Maurer smiles. But I insist:

  “It’s possible that each age invents instruments for measuring itself. It’s possible that each era chooses its own methods for understanding itself, according to what suits it.
The circular forms of gears and dials, and the movements of mechanical watches with their obligatory axis would, then, be neither a random occurrence nor the fruit of purely physical necessity. It would be, then, in addition to what I’ve said already, the end of a search for a center of order, a central meaning that arranges everything in due place around it.

  “I fear, then, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, that digital watches, besides measuring time, are also measuring another continent, which I cannot comprehend well. Perhaps it is a great, white desert, empty, centerless, and meaningless.”

  From time to time I visit Maurer’s shop in the afternoons, despite our mutual repulsion. I examine every model he shows me. My hope is fading that I will find something qualitatively different that can replace the digital watch he sold me.

  Recently, Maurer played a dirty trick on me: He offered me the only watch I didn’t want. Some macabre demon had invented it a short time before. Perhaps it was a sign that the end of time itself was drawing near. It was equipped with sensors for detecting the vital signs of its owner. Because of this it did have hands. But they went in reverse, counterclockwise. And they sped up as the user’s death approached.

  Maurer’s smile opened like a black hole in his whitish face as he offered it to me.

  But between the one subtler, more psychological horror that palpitated silently in my digital wristwatch, and the other, grossly physical, that he held in his outstretched hand, I could not choose.

  SILENT MUSIC

  The End, one of many music halls where silent music is played, is neither large nor luxurious. Some people say it looks more like the auditorium of a provincial high school. But its public is faithful and sometimes fanatical. The sessions begin at eight P.M. and last two or three hours.

  Afterwards there are fierce debates that divide the audience into enemy camps.

  Each concert happens like this. The musicians take their places, the conductor walks to the podium and bows, and the audience members allow themselves to be carried away by the movements of the conductor’s baton. None of the musicians has an instrument, though at the beginning, years before, they mimed playing instruments. Now they limit themselves to opening musical scores and following, with their eyes, a number of circles marked along the length of a single black line, like drops of rain on a telephone wire. The scores are untrustworthy guides because after a few minutes, the lights fade out, and the rest of the concert takes place in darkness. In this way, each attendee knows that his or her concentration will be absolute, and it becomes possible to imagine with great clarity the sounds the orchestra has suggested.

  When the concert is over, the lights are switched on, confirming to the audience members that what has ended in their minds has ended in the room as a whole.

  These concerts have been denounced to the police. An investigator has alleged that the organizers belong to a sect bent on completely obliterating Western music, which they consider totalitarian and responsible for the disappearance of other music of the world—unrecorded, savage music, music of cultures that have sunk beneath the seas of time.

  But none of the patrons of The End gives any credibility to the allegations, or believes that the gentle virtuosos and their languid conductor have anything to do with those extremists who are known to be responsible for, among other atrocities, the theft of the organ from St. Thomas’s Cathedral, the murder of Herbert Von Karajan (boiled in linseed oil), and the detonation of a small atomic bomb in the laboratories of Deutsche Grammaphon.

  CAR SECURITY

  The system works in the following way. When the thief manages to get into the car—which, itself, isn’t hard to do—and sits behind the steering wheel, an electronic mechanism locks the doors and windows. This action can either be silent or not.

  The second step comes when the intruder tries to start the motor. At this point, a red light starts blinking on the dashboard, and a recorded voice repeats three times, at thirty-second intervals, “There is no escape.” It has been demonstrated that three repetitions are enough because after trying repeatedly to start the car, the thief will then try to get out. But the doors and windows are secured.

  This is when a hypodermic needle comes out of the seat and injects a special preparation that paralyzes the thief’s legs and vocal cords. It has been found that in a very high percentage of cases, the thief, under the influence of the drug, believes that what he is experiencing is a nightmare. To correct this error, the recorded voice explains to him the details of what is going to happen. Then all is ready for the final step, which, unfortunately, is quite disagreeable but, without a doubt, necessary.

  The seat slides to the right (to the left in British models), revealing a system of pistons and gears where the thief is completely ground up, compressed, and dissolved in a powerful, odorless acid whose composition is a secret of the manufacturer. Then the seat returns to its former position, so that when the owner gets in and turns on the car, he or she will find no trace at all of what has happened.

  The manufacturer guarantees that in only one percent of the cases will the mechanism mistake the owner for a thief.

  Copyright © 2010 Abdón Ubidia

  These three short pieces are taken from Funventions: A Book of Fantasies and Utopias, translated from the Spanish by Nathan Horowitz.

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  Fiction

  TEN THOUSAND COLD NIGHTS

  JAMES LINCOLN WARREN

  Art by Robyn Hyzy

  Elaine sat upright in the dimness and uttered a single choked word.

  “Uragiri!”

  It was barely above a whisper, but it was enough to wake Andy Lockhart from a restless slumber. He shook the sleep from his fogged-up brain, and tentatively reached out to touch his wife. Her body was beaded with sweat, the muscles beneath her skin as taut as piano strings. He took her hand and her fingers were icy, unnaturally cold in the warm night.

  “Elaine?”

  She blinked slowly and relaxed, sighing, releasing what remained of the pent up breath that had partially escaped to emit only that one, strange sound.

  “God, what a nightmare,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. A nightmare, that’s all. He relaxed a little himself. “Well, it’s all over now. Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

  “Sleep? It was so real. I was running in a dark forest on the side of a mountain. The ground was muddy and slippery. It was hard to see through the heavy mist. My breath steamed as I ran, and then—then I saw this—this face.”

  She shuddered. “It was horrible. Like a—like a demon, or a devil, grimacing in excruciating pain. It was flat black, like cast iron, except for the eyes. The eyes were—I don’t know, they were alive, alive with malice. I raised my arms to strike . . . and that’s when I woke up.” She hugged herself and shuddered once.

  “Hey. It was just a bad dream,” he said, his weak words of comfort sounding hopelessly banal to his own ears. “It will fade in no time at all. I know. Let me get you a glass of water, and then we can get back to sleep.”

  He slid into his slippers and padded off to kitchen. The glass was half full when the phone rang.

  Elaine heard him say, “Give me half an hour.”

  When he got back to the bedroom, he went straight into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He stuck his head back into the bedroom just long enough to say the unavoidable.

  “That was the precinct. I’ve got to go.”

  She slumped back in the bed. Somehow she knew that it was going to be a long, long night.

  The car doors thumped shut almost in unison as Lockhart and Ericson got out. Ericson was still babbling like some handsome but brainless talking head on TV as they flashed their badges, blithely regurgitating more boring crap from that correspondence course in ethics he had signed up for. They ducked under the crime scene tape and stepped on to the freshmown lawn, the grass wet with predawn dew.

  “Look, you got me wrong, Andy,�
�� he said, “I didn’t say evil doesn’t exist, only that it’s an abstraction. Like Christmas, for example. That’s real, too—but it’s an abstraction, see? Retailers do something like, what, forty percent of their business during the holidays? So, take away Christmas, and whammo, the economy goes in the toilet. There’s your reality. Follow me? If you think about it, Christmas doesn’t have an objective existence, not like this car, or a pair of shoes. We only act like Christmas is real because long ago somebody decided that December twenty-fifth was Jesus’ birthday, and then sometime later, somebody else figured it was good for business for everybody to spend tons of money on toys for the kids every year, and now everybody buys into it, even the Chinese, for God’s sake, and it has the force of something that actually exists. Get it?”

  By that time they’d come to the front door.

  The criminalists were still at work, so the two detectives were told to stand on a paper mat that had been laid down in the foyer to prevent contamination of the scene. Standing there they had a complete view of the living room.

  Long streaks of blood spattered the walls and furniture, and more blood was smeared on the floor. The woman had been neatly decapitated, her trim brown body still sitting on the sofa, and her fat brother, lying on the floor, had been eviscerated with a long single slash deep across the abdomen.

  “Merry Christmas,” Lockhart muttered under his breath.

  They passed through the doorway into the living room itself, careful not to step off the paper strip that extended into it.

  “Whoa.” Ericson had turned and was staring at the wall behind them. “What the hell is that?”

  Someone had painted something that looked like large Chinese characters on the wall. In blood. Below the writing rested the severed head of the woman, her wide eyes staring up at them, her face a rictus of terror. The murderer had used her hair as a paintbrush.

  Lockhart rushed out, looking for the toilet.

  “I’d say a long knife or bayonet, maybe a sword,” Dr. Guerra said, staring into the abdominal cavity. “Very sharp, and wielded with considerable force.”