Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

Dating Sally by M. E. Beckett

© 1994 by M. E. Beckett

Canadian M.E. Beckett began writing fiction four years ago, producing a number of stories in quick succession. Although this is his first published work, several other stories have already been sold and his career as a writer seems truly to have been launched...

Horror is in the mind of the victim. Make the victim think that he ought to be in terror, and he is in terror. There are no intrinsically horrifying things. Only the response of the victim makes them so.

When Luther Warrant decided to make a victim, he had no idea who she would be, or how he would frighten her. That she ended as she did was because of the ways in which she perceived him and the phantoms he raised in her. And in himself.

On the third day of March, nineteen hundred and thirty-one, Luther Warrant was born. His mother turned away from him even as she presented her breast to him, and from then on, nothing in his life arrived without a second, hidden message attached to it. There was no receiving without its price. No gift that did not have its string. No love untarnished by the hook of whatever the lover wanted him to feel. From the first breath to the last, he was a manipulated thing; a creature of others, a puppet.

On the third day of March, nineteen hundred and eighty-one, Luther Warrant broke the mold. He altered forever his patterns of behavior, he thought, when he chose his first victim randomly from the telephone book, and sent her the head of a dead rabbit in the mail.

It was not an act that heralded the unfolding of a devious plan; he had no plan at all. He just wanted, one time only, he thought, to make someone dance for him, as he had for others all of his life.

He was wrong. He never really broke the mold at all. The strings of the Luther-marionette were simply being pulled from farther away, and with increasingly jerky movements.

Sally Whitfield opened the package with a tiny thrill of delight. It wasn’t a really big or exciting-looking package. But it had arrived a full ten days after her birthday, and she was imagining that she was reliving, extending the pleasure of that day by a full week-and-a-half.

Her scream at the sight of the rabbit’s head was mostly reflexive. She had never had much feeling for animals, and little fear of blood, and so there was only the oddity of the rabbitless head, and the disappointment of not really having received a belated birthday present to arouse any feeling in her.

Later, she began to think about the meaning of it, and about who might have sent her such a thing, and it was then that she first felt the terror that Luther Warrant had intended her to feel. After the telephone call.

When the phone rang, she was still only mildly afraid, and she made no connection between the arrival of the grisly packet and the ringing of her telephone.

“Hello?”

“Did you enjoy your Easter rabbit?”

“Easter’s not until April nineteenth. You were six weeks early,” she replied, and, to Luther, her voice sounded cool, detached, almost calm. He hung up, intensely disappointed, and never again tried that experiment or any other. He had failed to master even a single moment of another human being’s life, and he slipped back into the dull routine of responding to jerks at his strings and pushings of his buttons until he died, a year later, on his fifty-first birthday, of walking under a moving van.

Sally, on the other hand, was touched more and more deeply by the event, and she was the one whose life was altered forever. She and those with whom she came into contact.

Nobody had wanted to hurt her before that. Not in so brutal a way, anyway. Nobody had ever really harmed her. There had been one fellow in high school who had pushed her much further than she wanted to go in the backseat of his car, but her father and brother had sorted him out the next day, and that, to her, had sealed that event. She had had minor difficulties with boys for a few months afterward, but the certainty that she would and could be protected, or at least avenged, by her male relations kept others from trying the same things.

She was self-assured, articulate, intelligent, and very attractive. And then the Easter bunny came early one year, and much of that was forever altered.

Not that she became less intelligent, or less beautiful. But she did seem to become less articulate. Her self-confidence was shattered after the nightmares began. Once she had experienced them for a period of some months, she went for help.

“Doctor Lawton, I have bad nightmares, and I want them to stop.” Her lip and her fingers were trembling, but Dr. Lawton was making notes, and only noticed the flatness of her tone when she spoke.

Some flattening of affect? he wrote, but later scratched that out, with a single line through the words, so that he would be able to tell that he had had and discarded that idea.

“How long have you been having them?”

“About six months.”

He stopped and glanced at the page-header he had just written.

“Just after your twenty-first birthday.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think triggered the nightmares?”

“I got a rabbit’s head in the mail.”

When he looked at her in a concerned sort of way, she went on.

“It had blood on it. Somebody had cut off the head, and put it in the mail with my name on the package. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why.”

“Maybe you don’t know who, Sally, but you know a little bit about why.”

She looked at him blankly.

“What was the result of the incident?” he asked.

“I have these nightmares.” Her voice was a little more animated now, with the anger she felt at his emphasizing the obvious.

“And... so?”

“What do you mean, ‘and so’? And so what?”

“What does that tell you about the intent of the sender?”

“He intended to terrify me, that’s what he intended, and it’s working.”

“Why?”

“How the hell do I know why?”

“No, I mean why is it working?”

“You tell me. You’re the shrink.”

He did not reply, but waited quietly for her to go on.

“Well, tell me. Tell me why?”

Still, he waited.

“You want me to say that it’s because I’m making it all happen, don’t you. I’m the one with the nightmares, I’m generating them, and I’m playing his game, is that it?” Now her voice was ragged. She was still angry at him, but she was also fighting tears.

“Tell me a little about the dreams themselves.”

“It’s the same thing every time. I’m awake, in the dream, you know?” He nodded. “And there’s this guy following me. I can never see his face. I never do, but he’s there, following me. Usually it’s nighttime. Dark, in a deserted place, a street, I think. He follows me, and I wake up, but there’s something else... and I forget that part.”

“Every time?”

“Every time. Something about a head, something about a knife. That’s all I know.”

The interview went on, but the meat of it was already on the table. Sally began to be aware that she was still in charge of her own brain, and that she could allow the man (they were both sure that it was a man; in fact the question of gender never came up) to rule her nights, or she could run her own scenario.

She went to Dr. Lawton two or three times, but she didn’t want his medication, and she had had what she needed of his therapy. Sally Whitfield was very intelligent and very quick.

It was soon after that that Lawton began to receive male patients with symptoms similar to hers. He always wondered, but was never sure, if it was Sally who was behind the terror these men felt. Never sure enough to go to the police. Never sure he wanted to.

Andrew Weeks was the first in line at the post-office boxes every morning. Others cursed the post office for discontinuing home delivery in new developments, but not Andrew. This was his social life.

“ ’Morning, Mrs. Hendricks! How are you today?”

The rain was leaking through the rubberized hood of Mrs. Hendricks’s slicker, and the mascara was dripping with it from her left eye and running down her face, making a scar appear where she had never had a wound. Her boots had been too far away, off upstairs in the attic, she had thought, and so she was standing in the slush in her shoes, which also leaked. Her dog had died the week before, and she had never really been a happy lady anyway.

“How the hell do I look, Andrew? That’s how I feel.”

Andrew inspected her closely; he was not the quickest man in the world at picking up on irony. “You look okay to me, Mrs. Hendricks,” he announced happily. “Except for the runny black stuff. What is it? It’s not blood, is it?”

“No Andrew, it’s not blood,” she answered, struggling with the key to her little lockbox, one in several hundred at the comer of the street. They all looked as if somebody had dumped them there carelessly and temporarily, but they had been there for five years.

“Well then, you look just fine.” Andrew beamed.

Then Andrew screamed. He had just opened the package that somebody had sent him, and there was real blood all over his hands, coming out of the neck of the cat’s head he had received.

Andrew had been an impulsive and very callow boy in high school, and had once pushed a girl too far in the back of his father’s car. From today forward, he would live in fear of another such package, and he would never have the time away from his fear to push anybody anymore.

The fact that he had already changed — indeed, had never really been very evil in the first place — was of no concern to his correspondent, who had decided that, this time, that was to be for tit.

The next experiment was of another order entirely.

Sally felt quite penitent with regard to Andrew, and made a point of dating him a couple of times, to try to get his mind off his troubles. She even slept with him once, but he spent most of the night just clinging to her, moaning slightly in his sleep. His gratitude the next morning was pathetic, and she did not repeat the treatment. He had had his chance to work out his fears as she had hers. When he had recounted the horror story to her, she had even suggested that there could have been no real blood in the package, for it would all have clotted by the time the slow postal service got the head to him. He had been grateful, but had insisted on hanging onto his terror, and Sally Whitfield was no longer patient with fools.

She pointed him in the direction of Dr. Lawton (indeed, Lawton’s practice was augmented considerably by referrals from Sally over the next few years) and told him to call her back when his night-terrors had gone. He never did telephone her, and soon he was forgotten.

There were bigger fish to fry.

In the next county but one, somebody had been taking girls out for rides and frightening them into having sex in the back of a pickup truck. Frightening them to such an extent that none of the eight victims had yet told the police who it was that had committed the crimes.

The police were not very interested in solving the incidents anyway. The women were all unharmed, in the cops’ eyes, and that, for most of them, was that. Their main strategy in dealing with the victims was to scare them further by pointing out that it never could have happened had the girls not been present at the scene. Nobody pointed out to the cops that that was a tautology, not a demonstration of how the girls had caused their own downfalls, and most of them never made a second complaint, or even called to remind the police that their cases had not yet been solved. For Bligh County, the phantom dater became simply a fact of life, like rain, or the taxman, about which nothing could be done, since the girls obviously brought it upon themselves.

And then, the story goes, the chief suspect in the cases (that is, the residents’ chief suspect; the police never really had one) got himself a girlfriend, and the problem went away.

She was a new girl, from the “big city” two counties over, and she didn’t ever complain about the back of Eddie Phaneuf’s pickup truck. She and Eddie became something of an item, riding all over the place in his truck and parking anywhere they liked, as long as it was dark enough not to be seen too clearly in the back of the truck.

One night, nobody knows how, Eddie was found tied in the back of his own truck, screaming for help. He wasn’t tied up very much. His wrists were bound behind him, and his ankles were loosely shackled with a length of rope between them, but he could easily have gotten himself out of the knots. He could have, that is, had his nose not been securely fastened to the steering wheel by a tight thread that ran through the crack in the back window of the cab. It was looped rather tightly through a tiny hole in the nasal septum (the only blood in the whole case was a drop of it that had dried on the very tip of the nose), and there was another, not very visible thread that may have ended somewhere near his fly. Nobody could be sure, because he was wearing dark clothing. Of his nose, he said he had pins and needles in it for days after the giggling police managed to keep their fingers from trembling enough to unfasten him. Actually, it wasn’t the police themselves who did it. Their fingers were too bulky and blunt to manage to undo or cut the tiny thread of the loop with any certainty of not removing the organ altogether, so they asked old Madame Cleroux, who lived right on the town square, where Eddie was conveniently parked, and who was a seamstress of considerable local note, to help them.

With the friendly advice of several of the dozen or so onlookers who had gathered when Eddie started screaming, she managed to cut him loose without much more than superficial bleeding.

The news team never aired the tape, saying it was too unpleasant for the early news and not a big enough story for the late. Or maybe it was too violent. But the talk is, you can see that tape for a couple of bottles of good Scotch whisky.

If you see the tape, you can see the thing that really prevented its airing on TV. Eddie’s truck had been decorated for him. Around the low walls of the pickup were hanging carefully framed photos. Each was of a woman or girl who had been terrorized in the area within the last few years. Each was hung with carefully arranged black satin, like the photos of dead heroes. Each showed a victim just after she had been interviewed by police. Nobody ever discovered where the leak was; these were the private police photos, and theoretically, nobody had access to them but the cops and the victims, and none of those was talking.

Nobody has seen Eddie with a girl for a very long while.

Sally Whitfield lives alone, now, in the house she inherited when her parents died. She often dates; and is known as a friendly person who never has a bad word to say about anybody. Lately they call her a little eccentric, especially since she’s taken to walking about in her house without clothing, carrying a gigantic black cat and singing to it in Welsh, with a shotgun under her other arm. But everybody likes her.

And the odd thing is that even though it’s well known that she never wears clothing at home, there aren’t any cases of peeping Toms, either. None that are reported, anyhow.

I like her, too. Sometimes we take in a movie together.