GREGORY FROST is a writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades.

His latest work is the fantasy duology, Shadowbridge, published by Del Rey Books. His earlier novels include Fitcher’s Brides, a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award finalist for Best Novel; Tain, Lyrec, and Nebula-nominated SF work The Pure Cold Light. His short story collection, Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories, was called by Publishers Weekly “one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”

He is the one of two Fiction Writing Workshop Directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, PA, and has thrice taught the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop.

His web site is www.gregoryfrost.com; his blog, “Frostbites,” lurks at http://frostokovich.livejournal.com

The Final Act

By Gregory Frost

McGowren caught up with him in the lobby amid the end-of-the-day exodus. One moment Leonard was heading through the gray granite lobby by himself, the next the person he least wanted to see was striding along beside him as if no bad blood lay between them.

Leonard pulled away as if from a foul odor, then set his jaw and kept walking at the same pace, refusing to be rattled or to acknowledge the intrusion beyond a sidewise glance.

McGowren’s chinos were stained, his shirttail hung out on one side, he seemed to have lost his tie, and he had a heavy enough five o’clock shadow that he must have shaved the night before. Leonard, unconsciously smoothing down his own tie, wondered if the schmuck had met any clients like that. Had any of the partners on the fifth floor seen him in this shape? Maybe he’d been sacked already, he sure looked the part. But no, Len would have heard. Too many people knew he’d have liked nothing more than to hear that about McGowren, and someone would have called or even ridden up to tell him. Almost to himself he said, “You look like you slept under a bar.”

“Nice to see you, too, Len.”

“And unless you’re here to beg forgiveness, you can fuck off.” Then Leonard was in the revolving door, pushing his way to the sidewalk, ditching McGowren and merging into the departing throng. However, before he’d reached the corner, McGowren reappeared beside him. “Leonard, bro, I need to talk to you.”

“Don’t call me ‘bro.’ Or buddy or pal or anything else.”

“Len—”

“I don’t have time tonight. I have to pick up my car.” At least he didn’t have to fabricate an excuse.

“Geez, man, I was hoping you’d give me a ride.”

“You take the train, asshole,” he replied. He maneuvered around a light pole and then walked on the narrow strip outside the parking meters, passing most of the crowd and temporarily outstripping McGowren again. He heard behind him the words, “I don’t have my pass on me. I lost it. I need a ride, man.”

Leonard nodded his head. It might have meant he’d heard or it might have signaled that he would agree to help. He wasn’t sure which, either.

It had been five months since he’d spoken to Gary McGowren—not since the Christmas party where he’d caught McGowren and Laurel in the coat closet, about two items of clothing away from a full-on fuck. The closet was the size of a meat locker and could have contained an orgy, but there were just the two of them, his wife and Gary. Idiots. At least Laurel looked horrified as she snatched up her clothes and ran past him. Leonard stood his ground. McGowren raised a hand in pathetic imitation of an apology, shambled forward and slurred, “Don’ be mad, Len, ‘m sorry, just too much punch at the watering hole is all, ‘m sorry.” He pawed, clutched Len’s arm. “Listen, Laurel’s just—” was all he got to say before Leonard shoved him sprawling into the coats, that clutching hand grabbing for purchase, catching hold of the rod as his forehead hit it and he fell, his weight snapping it out of the wall and dragging coats and furs down on top of him. With a displaced calm, Leonard collected his own and Laurel’s coats from the other side of the closet. Why hadn’t he done something? Why hadn’t he stomped the bastard to death? But even there in that moment of fury he was afraid of violence, scared of acting out. He could stand in a courtroom and gloatingly reduce people to self-contradicting imbeciles, but he couldn’t deck McGowren. Just couldn’t touch him. He hated himself for it, and McGowren as the proof.

Laurel had cried all the way home except for the few moments she spent vomiting out the window. She hadn’t meant—hadn’t known—what she was doing. All the excuses failing to explain why, of all the people she could have drunkenly pursued, she’d picked McGowren. He was good looking, okay, but come on, the guy had the verbal skills of an ape. It was why he’d been passed over for promotions, never offered even a junior partnership, just maintained his position, handling work injury cases that he had next to no business pursuing, billing enough hours to get by but not much else. If they’d worked in the same department, crossed paths at all, Len would have had him fired. Instead, roiling in his own sense of inadequacy and failure, he’d just let him be, hoping McGowren would go away and die on his own. Laurel had seen a counselor and then she had insisted they see a counselor together, as if her indiscretion was somehow his fault as well, and he’d gone, he’d borne it. In five months they’d attained a kind of stability, forbearance moving toward acceptance, maybe some kind of forgiveness. Over and over she had told him how good he was, how kind, but he wasn’t sure kindness wasn’t just weakness. He doubted he would trust anything or anyone ever again.

At the corner of 12th and Locust, Leonard waited for the light and McGowren slid up beside him. The bastard did look pretty banged up. Maybe he had been sacked. Maybe he was sleeping under a bar. Good.

Leonard had told no one about the coat closet, but someone must have come upon McGowren, and it was only a few days before Debbie, his secretary, had stepped into his office and just said, “I’m really sorry.” He’d looked in her eyes and known what she was saying, known that his coworkers all knew. McGowren had stayed away, the one smart thing he’d done. So what was this appeal all about? What did he want, sympathy? Forgiveness? Those ships had sailed.

They had known each other since high school, and McGowren been an ape then, too, a running back on the football team who was always playing pranks: convincing someone to climb out on the cafeteria roof and then locking the windows to keep them out there till some outraged faculty or staff member let them back in; turning a firehose on the cheerleaders just before they ran outside, where it was 45 degrees; filling a water bottle in chemistry class with mustard and spraying his chem partner with it. Mostly he started fights. The trouble was, for some perverse reason he wanted to hang around with Leonard’s group. They weren’t nerds exactly, but they weren’t the popular kids, either, and they foolishly thought a football player in their midst could open a door into the world of girls. Instead, McGowren had only managed to get them in trouble by association so that they were drawn into every fracas, often in defense of the schmuck. Leonard had steered clear of him as much as possible. Even then he was petrified of confrontations, of violence, of being hit. So when McGowren had applied for a position at the law firm and given Leonard as a reference, it was an act of pure stupidity to have hoped he’d grown up.

Without looking at him, as if it was hard to express, McGowren said, “Listen, Len, we have history, okay? I just need a ride. I don’t want your forgiveness. I don’t expect it.” The light changed. He finally glanced cautiously at Leonard. “So, can you?”

“Fine, I’ll give you a ride, all right,” he replied, amazed to hear the words, as if his mouth had answered without consulting him. He knew he didn’t mean it, knew that he had reached the end with this jerk who’d followed him like a slug’s smear from high school to the law firm. He didn’t know what he was going to do yet, but it was time to get rid of Gary McGowren once and for all.

He paid the bill for the lube job and oil change, and got in. Then he remembered his passenger and unlocked the doors. Where had McGowren got to while he’d looked over the bill and paid up? Restroom probably. For an instant he considered driving off without him. Then the door opened and McGowren folded into the seat. He sat in a forward hunch as if intrigued by the Infiniti’s dashboard. “Put your seatbelt on, Gary.”

“I hate ‘em.”

“Yeah? Well do it anyway. I’m not going to be liable when you go through the windshield.”

As if with obvious reluctance and he clipped in, McGowren asked, “You remember that water balloon fight where I filled one with tempera paint and nailed you coming around the corner?”

Leonard pulled into traffic. “I caught hell for that prank. The red never came out of my shirt. My mom bleached it till the fabric disintegrated and it was still pink. So was one side of my face for like a week.”

“It was pretty damned amazing. You dripped like some kind of swamp thing.”

“Yeah, real fucking amazing. Thanks. What are you, still fifteen? You’re an idiot, McGowren. You always were. You want a ride, then shut up.”

In silence Leonard drove awhile, stuck in the jam to get onto the parkway. This was all a mistake. He wasn’t going to do anything to McGowren— what could he do, push him out of the car at eighty mph? It would be just one more thing for him to stew over, one more imagined act that wasn’t going to happen.

Then down the ramp and merging onto the faster parkway, he reached for the radio knob, and McGowren spoke up. “You never did get the dynamic, did you, Len?”

“What dynamic?”

“Us. You and me. Even in high school. You got this image of it being like we were buddies or something. Like I was the person you’d call if you wanted to do something.”

“I don’t think so.” Where was this coming from?

“Oh, yes you do, and it was never like that. You didn’t want me joining the firm, you don’t want me in the car now—”

“Gee, I can’t imagine why I don’t feel much like doing you favors anymore.”

“Anymore? When did you do me favors?”

“I could have shit-canned you when you put me down as a reference. I should have. But I thought, ‘Hey, maybe he’s grown up, maybe he turned into an adult.’“

“You’re a snob, Len. You and your little pals, all you wanted from me was to score some girls, you didn’t give a rat’s ass about me otherwise.”

Leonard looked out his side window. The driver passing stared back at him. “Jesus, it was high school, Gary.” He turned to face him. “And you know, I’ll tell you what I remember. I remember a dumbass jock who pissed off even the other jocks. Who managed to implicate everybody he was with so that they either had to fight on his behalf or else got hauled into the vice principal’s office along with him. A guy who is so terminally fucked in the head he doesn’t even know why maybe I’m less than enthused to be in his company right now, even though he’s tried to screw my wife. Christ. Why am I trying to talk to you?”

“Maybe you want to know.”

“What do I want to know?”

“Everything. Why you’re the way you are. Why I’m talking to you, despite your rejecting—”

“We’re not in high school, you asshole. What, you’ve been waiting for twelve years to get back at me for trying to convince the rest of our crew to get rid of you?”

McGowren glanced at him and smiled.

Leonard couldn’t stop the laugh of disdain. “Are you serious? Never mind that this is all in your head, how long can you maintain a grudge? You put me down on your job application! And I let you pass when I could easily have told them not to hire you. God.”

McGowren said nothing.

“So, what, the thing in the coat closet was just you getting back at me through Laurel?”

“That was the first part of it.”

“The first part? How many parts will we have? Two acts or three? I can stop at a bar so you can get tanked and recreate the night in the coats.” He pushed his hand through his thinning hair. “Man, here I am, giving you a ride home because you lost your pass. And I’m the bad guy because I didn’t like you in high school. You’re really a piece of work.”

Everything had changed now. Leonard could see that so long as McGowren was around, there would always be another prank, another act of eternal escalation. He had to get rid of him, there was no choice. The question was how? How to make him disappear for good and not pay for it? He flipped through scenarios: sledge-hammer McGowren’s skull and then the floor in the basement and stick the body under that, except he didn’t have the concrete; okay, in the back yard then, hit him with a shovel and then dig a hole in the garden and plant the bastard under the roses; or better still, drive twenty miles to the state park and dump his corpse in the woods. Let him rot outdoors where nobody would ever connect them.

“You know what, Gary. I should just bring you to my place. We’ll have a drink or two and straighten this out between us once and for all. You can even talk to Laurel if she can stomach being in the same room with you.”

“Fine. That’s where I need to go, anyway.”

The way he said it, Leonard knew even through the heat of his own anger that something had already happened. The second act of the revenge fantasy had already begun. The train pass, the ride home—he reached into his suit and drew out his cell phone, flipped it open. Before he could even thumb a number he saw that the battery was out of juice. The car charger was dangling out of the cigarette lighter but he couldn’t plug the phone in on the parkway. He flipped it closed.

“Change your mind?” McGowren asked.

It seemed that maybe he didn’t know the phone was dead. Leonard saw no reason to disabuse him of this idea. “Yeah. That’s what you want me to do—call home.”

He closed his eyes, still smiling carelessly. “Right.” He brushed the hair down the back of his head, in the process pushing his collar down. Leonard saw scratch marks on the back of his neck. He forgot himself momentarily, and his foot backed off the gas pedal until the BMW behind him honked. He jerked up as if he’d fallen asleep, and accelerated. The next exit was his anyway, and he hit his blinker and edged off to the right. The BMW zoomed past, honking again to make sure he got the message. McGowren snorted.

“Anyway,” he muttered, his eyes still closed, “you’d just get a busy signal.”

“Really, how do you know that?”

“Because it’s off the hook. The way I left it.”

Leonard’s desire to dispense with McGowren evaporated, replaced by sickening uncertainty. “You left it?”

“Yeah. Right after I killed Laurel.”

He heard the words, so impossible they didn’t make sense, like he’d heard them out of order and needed to rearrange them to make a sentence he understood. But McGowren wouldn’t give him time.

“No, you know, we had quite a thing going. That night in the coats, that wasn’t exactly the first, and, man, she wanted more than just a taste. I thought it was over the second you walked in, you know, but she called me—I mean, right at the office, right underneath you. Said you were none too spectacular in the sack and that she was gonna stay on the prowl and I could either get it on or get lost. How’s your sex life been since Christmas, Len, hmm?”

Leonard’s brain ran through images, memories, doubts: guilty red-eyed looks from Laurel, withheld responses in therapy—even the therapist had complained that she wasn’t engaged—dinners shared in unbroken silences as she made eye-contact only with her plate. Silences were gaps and he could fill them with anything he chose. He sought and created hidden meanings everywhere. At the same time his body drove on auto-pilot, zooming past the speed limit, braking, turning, the car’s air gone stale, dead. He needed to open a window. His mouth said, “No.”

McGowren now looked straight at him and all but sneered. There was a bruise over McGowren’s right eye now that hadn’t been obvious before. It must have been recent, forming, hours old.

“You’re bound to say no, Len. But it’s yes. Yes, you’ve seen the signs. We’ve been meeting for months. Remember when they sent you to Boston? Oh, that was a night. Didn’t know she liked that kinky shit. Did you?”

“We were… she was seeing a counselor because of you,” he answered, but his mind had flown away back to a night last winter where she’d bound him with his ties and then teased him, tormented him, made him beg for her to sit on him. He’d loved it. Kinky shit.

“Counseling, yeah, right. She needed counseling.” Laughing.

He swallowed the metallic thickness in his mouth. “Get out of my car.”

“You kidding?”

“Get out—out of my car, out of my life, out of my head!”

“See what I mean, Len? Total prick. Here I am confessing to you, turning myself in to you and you’re telling me to get lost. I’m filling in the blanks for you, dude. But if you want me out—” He started to open the door.

Leonard grabbed at him, but swung the wheel at the same time and the car veered. He screamed and slapped both hands on the wheel again, and narrowly failed to smack into the car in the right lane. Horns blared around him.

McGowren chuckled. He hadn’t opened the door, hadn’t gotten out. He was looking straight at the road. “You should have taken care of me at the Christmas party, Len. You should have kicked my head in through the coats. Shoulda woulda coulda. Now you won’t ever know, will you? Am I lying or telling the truth about Laurel? You just won’t ever be sure because a little worm’s gone crawling right up inside your head. The night in the closet—oh, that’s real. You can still feel the moment, it’s so raw. You can box it off, put police tape around it. Isolate it. Sure, but the rest is going to run around and around the squeaky hamster wheel in your head, eeky-eeky.” He laughed again.

Even as he made the final frenzied turn onto his street, Leonard saw the police cars—two on his front lawn—and the EMT wagon backed into the driveway. Neighbors outside, Monroe, the stockbroker across the street, standing idiotically beside his mailbox, envelopes in his hand.

McGowren leaned back and let go a deep sigh as if finally drained of all taunts.

Leonard slammed the car against the curb. The tire thumped, bounced. He fumbled, flung the door open before the car had stopped, snatching the keys, staring at his apparently dozing passenger one last time, then running, up the sidewalk, across the lawn. A cop at the front door put out a hand, but responded to the look of him and drew aside, saying, “Husband?”

He nodded as he pushed past, into his house, calling over his shoulder, “He’s in the car, I left him in the car.”

“Huh?” said the cop, but Leonard was already crossing the living room toward the hall. A flash went off in the kitchen, past the wall of live bodies. It seemed like a crowd, but it was no more than five: uniforms, plain clothes, medical, standing, gathered, starting to turn at his approach.

Between them as they parted, creating a sliver of an opening, he finally glimpsed his wife.

She was in the tall chair at the breakfast bar, her head hanging down. He thought again of the dinner plate. He should have made her talk, demanded to know why she wouldn’t look at him. Below her now on the floor was a little card with a metallic strip across it. Her blouse was torn at the shoulder, the bra strap broken beneath it, her shoulder red, cut with parallel gashes—fingernails had done that. What had McGowren’s fingertips looked like? Then, ever so slightly, she raised her bruised and swollen face, and saw him as he froze. She burst into tears. She sprang from the chair, reaching, reaching with red fingers. Everyone looked his way now, and he felt the impact of her against him, heard her wail, but he had come unmoored from the moment, from the world. The card on the floor, it was a train pass. And beside it… He stared into the half-lidded eyes watching him—the body on its back, scratched, battered, one arm flung out, fingers curled into a claw, the brown belt undone and chinos half down. The black handle of a German carving knife stuck out of the center of his chest like a flag planted on a hill. McGowren’s head rested on its Crown. His mouth was open as if in the middle of a word, a sentence, a laugh.

You won’t ever know, will you?

Laurel had stepped back, sensing the wrongness of him, the immobility and hardness. He gazed from McGowren’s dead eyes into hers. Was there guilt there? Something more than relief? Leonard could hear her story already—she would tell him McGowren had shown up drunk and attacked, wanting to finish what they’d started in the closet, would never let it go because there was so much more to destroy yet, the same as in high school, and even in the car. He wouldn’t stop until he’d pulled everyone down along with him, that was McGowren. She was only act two. What was the last?

He pushed Laurel away, backed and then turned from the hall and ran out of the house, down the drive behind the EMT van. His car, parked askew with one wheel up over the curb. Empty. Empty. He’d told the cop, he’d said…

He shuffled his feet, unable to go in any direction, unable to get away to anywhere. He heard his name, and sure it was McGowren, he spun around. Two officers had pursued him, and the nearer one spoke his name again.

Up past the drive, Laurel stood at the front door, a million miles away across the lawn. She was calling to him, too, but her voice, his name, seemed to break apart beneath a crackling in his brain, the noise of something awful burrowing in for a long, long stay.

THE FIRST STORY of mine that was published, in The Twilight Zone Magazine a long time ago, was about Edgar Allan Poe, and I feel as if I loop back upon him now and again. When Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories was being put together for Golden Gryphon Press, the illustrator, Jason Van Hollander, made an illustration of Poe central to the design of that book. Poe, the self-destructive genius, will forever fascinate me.

If anyone lived a life exemplary of “The Imp of the Perverse” it was Poe. His is the biography of a man who undermined himself at every opportunity, unleashing a demon of pettiness and jealousy. He would gratefully accept jobs and then, tiring of them, sabotage the position either via vituperative reviews upon writers who weren’t measuring up to Poe’s notions of literature—after which he had to be let go—or else by direct abuse heaped upon on the people who’d—more often than not, kindly—given him a job in the first place. It’s remarkable that he could write such a story and then continue living it as if unaware of his part in it. Maybe we’re all blind sailors to some degree, but Poe’s imp sabotaged him even after his death. It would be hard to top that.

For “The Final Act” I began with Poe’s man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut about his crime. I’d been teaching a lot, and one of the exercises that I’d given my students that really seemed to catch fire is called “Two people come out of a building,” an exercise by Alice Mattison from the book Now Write! that I like a great deal. And so mostly as an experiment, I decided to take Poe’s character and write my own “two people come out of a building” story. That’s all I started with, and the story coalesced from there as it was written. I did not know, going in, who was alive and who was dead. That rather key element emerged as I wrote, surprising me as much as I hope it does the reader.

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