The Informers - English Horror

Horror stories collection. All kind of thriller stories in English and hindi.
romantic_story
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Re: The Informers - English Horror

Unread post by romantic_story » 29 Sep 2015 16:55

I’m looking out a window, at a Spanish valet standing in front of a Rolls-Royce, staring into it, muttering. When Martin begins to complain about his BMW and how much the insurance is, I interrupt.

“Why did you call the house?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” he says. “I was going to cancel.”

“Don’t call the house.”

“Why?” he asks. “There’s someone there who cares?”

I light a cigarette.

He puts his fork down next to his plate and then looks away. “We’re eating at Le Dôme,” Martin says.

“I mean, Jesus.”

“Okay?” I ask.

“Yeah. Okay.”

I ask for the check and pay it and follow Martin back to his apartment in Westwood where we have sex and I give Martin a pith helmet as a gift.

I am lying on a chaise longue by the pool. Issues of Vogue and Los Angeles magazine and the Calendar section from the Times are stacked next to where I am lying but I can’t read them because the color of the pool takes my eyes away from the words and I stare longingly into thin aquamarine water. I want to go swimming but the heat of the sun has made the water too warm and Dr. Nova has warned about the dangers of taking Librium and swimming laps.

A poolboy is cleaning the pool. The poolboy is very young and tan and has blond hair and he is not wearing a shirt and he is wearing very tight white jeans and when he leans down to check the temperature of the water, muscles in his back ripple gently beneath smooth clean brown skin. The poolboy has brought a portable cassette player that sits by the edge of the jacuzzi and someone is singing “Our love’s in jeopardy” and I’m hoping the sound of palm fronds moving in warm wind will carry the music into the Suttons’ yard. I’m intrigued by how deep the poolboy’s concentration seems to be, at how gently the water moves when he skims a net across it, at how he empties the net, which catches leaves and multicolored dragonflies that seem to litter the water’s gleaming surface. He opens a drain, the muscles in his arm flexing, lightly, only for a moment. And I keep watching, transfixed, as he reaches into the round hole and his arm begins to lift something out of the hole, muscles momentarily flexing again, and his hair is blond and windblown, streaked by sun, and I shift my body in the lounge chair, not moving my eyes.

The poolboy begins to raise his arm out of the drain and he lifts two large gray rags up and drops them, dripping, onto concrete and stares at them. He stares at the rags for a long time. And then he makes his way toward me. I panic for a moment, adjusting my sunglasses, reaching for tanning oil. The poolboy is walking toward me slowly and the sun is beating down and I’m spreading my legs and rubbing oil on the inside of my thighs and then across my legs, knees, ankles. He is standing over me. Valium, taken earlier, disorients everything, makes backgrounds move in wavy slow motion. A shadow covers my face and it allows me to look up at the poolboy and I can hear from the portable stereo “Our love’s in jeopardy” and the poolboy opens his mouth, the lips full, the teeth white and clean and even, and I overwhelmingly need him to ask me to get into the white pickup truck parked at the bottom of the driveway and have him instruct me to go out to the desert with him. His hands, perfumed by chlorine, would rub oil over my back, across my stomach, my neck, and as he looks down at me with the rock music coming from the cassette deck and the palm trees shifting in a hot desert wind and the glare of the sun shining up off the surface of the blue water in the pool, I tense and wait for him to say something, anything, a sigh, a moan. I breathe in, stare up through my sunglasses, into the poolboy’s eyes, trembling.

“You have two dead rats in your drain.” I don’t say anything.

“Rats. Two dead ones. They got caught in the drain or maybe they fell in, who knows.” He looks at me blankly.

“Why … are you … telling me this?” I ask.

He stands there, expecting me to say something else. I lower my sunglasses and look over at the gray bundles near the jacuzzi.

“Take … them, away?” I manage to say, looking down.

“Yeah. Okay,” the poolboy says, hands in his pockets. “I just don’t know how they got trapped in there?”

The statement, really a question, is phrased in such a languid way that though it doesn’t warrant an answer I tell him, “I guess … we’ll never know?”

I am looking at the cover of an issue of Los Angeles magazine. A huge arc of water reaches for the sky, a fountain, blue and green and white, spraying upward.

“Rats are afraid of water,” the poolboy is telling me.

romantic_story
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Joined: 17 Aug 2015 17:28

Re: The Informers - English Horror

Unread post by romantic_story » 29 Sep 2015 16:55

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve heard. I know.”

The poolboy walks back to the two drowned rats and picks them up by their tails which should be pink but even from where I sit I can see are now pale blue and he puts them into what I thought was his toolbox and then to erase the notion of the poolboy keeping the rats I open the Los Angeles magazine and search for the article about the fountain on the cover.

I am sitting in a restaurant on Melrose with Anne and Eve and Faith. I am drinking my second Bloody Mary and Anne and Eve have had too many kirs and Faith orders what I believe to be a fourth vodka gimlet. I light a cigarette. Faith is talking about how her son, Dirk, had his driver’s license revoked for speeding down Pacific Coast Highway, drunk. Faith is driving his Porsche now. I wonder if Faith knows that Dirk sells cocaine to tenth graders at Beverly Hills High. Graham told me this one afternoon last week in the kitchen even though I had asked for no information about Dirk. Faith’s Audi is in the shop for the third time this year. She wants to sell it, yet she’s confused about which kind of car to buy. Anne tells her that ever since the new engine replaced the old engine in the XJ6, it has been running well. Anne turns to me and asks me about my car, about William’s. On the verge of weeping, I tell her that it is running smoothly.

Eve does not say too much. Her daughter is in a psychiatric hospital in Camarillo. Eve’s daughter tried to kill herself with a gun by shooting herself in the stomach. I cannot understand why Eve’s daughter did not shoot herself in the head. I cannot understand why she lay down on the floor of her mother’s walk-in closet and pointed her stepfather’s gun at her stomach. I try to imagine the sequence of events that afternoon leading up to the shooting. But Faith begins to talk about how her daughter’s therapy is progressing. Sheila is an anorexic. My own daughter has met Sheila and may also be an anorexic.

Finally, an uneasy silence falls across the table in the restaurant on Melrose and I stare at Anne, who has forgotten to cover the outline of scars from the face-lift she had in Palm Springs three months ago by the same surgeon who did mine and William’s. I consider telling them about the rats in the drain or the way the poolboy floated into my eyes before turning away but instead I light another cigarette and the sound of Anne’s voice breaking the silence startles me and I burn a finger.

On Wednesday morning, after William gets out of bed and asks where the Valium is and after I stumble out of bed to retrieve it from my purse and after he reminds me that the family has reservations at Spago at eight and after I hear the wheels on the Mercedes screech out of the driveway and after Susan tells me that she is going to Westwood with Alana and Blair after school and will meet us at Spago and after I fall back asleep and dream of rats drowning, crawling desperately over each other in a steaming, bubbling jacuzzi, and dozens of poolboys, nude, standing over the jacuzzi, laughing, pointing at the drowning rats, their heads nodding in unison to the beat of the music coming from portable stereos they hold in golden arms, I wake up and walk downstairs and take a Tab out of the refrigerator and find twenty milligrams of Valium in a pillbox in another purse in the alcove by the refrigerator and take ten milligrams. From the kitchen I can hear the maid vacuuming in the living room and it moves me to get dressed and I drive to a Thrifty drugstore in Beverly Hills and walk toward the pharmacy, the empty bottle that used to be filled with black-and-green capsules clenched tightly in my fist. But the store is air conditioned and cool and the glare from the fluorescent lighting and the Muzak playing somewhere above me as background noise have a pronounced anesthetic effect and my grip on the brown plastic bottle relaxes, loosens.

At the counter I hand the empty bottle to the pharmacist. He puts glasses on and looks at the plastic container. I study my fingernails and uselessly try to remember the name of the song that is floating through the store’s sound system.

“Miss?” the pharmacist begins awkwardly.

“Yes?” I lower my sunglasses.

“It says here ‘no refills.’ “

“What?” I ask, startled. “Where?”

The pharmacist points to two typed words at the bottom of the piece of paper taped to the bottle, next to my psychiatrist’s name and, next to that, the date 10/10/83.

“I think Dr. Nova made some kind of … mistake,” I say slowly, lamely, glancing at the bottle again.

“Well.” The pharmacist sighs. “There’s nothing I can do.”

I look at my fingernails again and try to think of something to say, which, finally, is “But I … need it refilled.”

romantic_story
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Re: The Informers - English Horror

Unread post by romantic_story » 29 Sep 2015 16:56

“I’m sorry,” the pharmacist says, clearly uncomfortable, shifting from one foot to the other nervously. He hands me the bottle and when I try to hand it back to him he shrugs.

“There are reasons why your doctor did not want the prescription refilled,” he offers kindly, as if speaking to a child.

I try to laugh, wipe my face and gaily say, “Oh, he’s always playing jokes on me.”

I think about the way the pharmacist looked at me after I said this as I drive home, and I walk past the maid, the smell of marijuana drifting past me for an instant, and up in the bedroom I lock the door and close the shades and take off my clothes and put a movie in the Betamax and get into washed, cool sheets and cry for an hour and try to watch the movie and I take some more Valium and then I ransack the bathroom looking for an old prescription of Nembutal and then I rearrange my shoes in the closet and then I put another movie in the Betamax and then I open the windows and the smell of bougainvillea drifts through the partially closed shades and I smoke a cigarette and wash my face.

I call Martin.

“Hello?” another boy answers.

“Martin?” I ask anyway.

“Uh, no.”

I pause. “Is Martin there?”

“Uh, let me check.”

I can hear the phone being set down and I want to laugh at the idea of someone, some boy, probably tan, young, blond, like Martin, standing in Martin’s apartment, putting the phone down and going to look for him, for anyone, in the small three-room studio but it does not seem that funny after a while. The boy comes back on the line.

“I think he’s at the, um, beach.” The boy doesn’t seem too sure.

I say nothing.

“Would you like to leave a message?” he asks, slyly for some reason, and then, after a pause, “Wait a minute, is this Julie? The girl Mike and I met at 385 North? With the Rabbit?”

I don’t say anything.

“You guys had about three grams on you and a white VW Rabbit.”

I do not say anything.

“Like, hello?”

“No.”

“You don’t have a VW Rabbit?”

“I’ll call back.”

“Whatever.”

I hang up, wondering who the boy is and if he knows about me and Martin, and I wonder if Martin is lying on the sand, drinking a beer, smoking a clove cigarette beneath a striped umbrella at the beach club, wearing Wayfarer sunglasses, his hair slicked back, staring out into where the land ends and merges with water, or if he instead is actually on his bed in his room, lying beneath a poster of the Go-Go’s, studying for a chemistry exam and at the same time looking through the car advertisements for a new BMW. I’m sleeping until the tape in the Betamax ends and there’s static.

I am sitting with my son and daughter at a table in a restaurant on Sunset. Susan is wearing a miniskirt that she bought at a store called Flip on Melrose, a store situated not too far from where I burned my finger at lunch with Eve and Faith and Anne. Susan is also wearing a white T-shirt with the words LOS ANGELES written on it in red handwriting that looks like blood that hasn’t quite dried, dripping. Susan is also wearing an old Levi’s jacket with a Stray Cats button pinned to one of the faded lapels and Wayfarer sunglasses. She takes the slice of lemon from her glass of water and chews on it, biting at the rind. I cannot even remember if we have ordered or not. I wonder what a Stray Cat is.

Graham is sitting next to Susan and I am fairly sure that he is stoned. He gazes out past the windows and into the headlights of passing cars. William is making a phone call to the studio. He is in the process of tying up a deal, which is not a bad thing. William has not been specific about the movie or the people in it or who is financing it. Through the trades I have heard rumors that it is a sequel to a very successful in movie that came out during the summer of 1982, about a wisecracking Martian who looks like a big, sad grape. William has been to the phone in the back of the restaurant four times since we arrived and I have the feeling that William leaves the table and just stands in the back of the restaurant, because at the table next to ours is an actress who is sitting with a very young surfer and the actress keeps glaring at William whenever William is at the table and I know that the actress has slept with William and the actress knows I know and when our eyes meet for a moment, an accident, we both turn away abruptly.

Susan begins to hum some song to herself, as she drums her fingers on the table. Graham lights a cigarette, not caring if we say anything about it, and his eyes, red and half closed, water for a moment.

“There’s this, like, funny sound in my car,” Susan says. “I think I better take it in.” She fingers the rim of her sunglasses.

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