Scare Tactics Read Online Free PDF

mind? I could no longer be certain. Perhaps she had prudently left the incriminating first draft with someone else for safekeeping. In that case, I was as good as cooked.
    I was too traumatized to do anything but put some distance between myself and the lonely cemetery. Back at the Beverly Hills Hotel I opened a bottle of scotch, drank from the bottle until I was dizzy, then swooned across the bed. I dreamed, ghoulishly, of executions. Dierdre’s. Mine.
    I awoke, in a fever of apprehension, to the odor of violets in the bungalow. I sat up, a sob in my throat. I heard the clink of a bottle neck against the rim of a glass, the soft gurgle of liquor poured over ice.
    She came toward me illuminated in her own pure radiance, holding the glass out to me.
    “Drink this,” she said. “You probably could use it.”
    “Killed you,” I said in a pitiful croaking voice; my heart was slowly squeezed to the size of a peanut by a fist of iron.
    She was wearing a simple white shift with a gold ceinture. One shoulder was bare. She had bound up her abundant, cedar-colored hair. Her forehead, where the bullet had smashed it, was now unblemished. Her expression was businesslike, as if she were there only to serve me.
    “I told you,” she said. “I’m immortal.”
    I took the whiskey from her hand—real flesh and blood to my own, stony fingers—and gulped it. The fist that gripped my heart relaxed and blood surged to my nearly comatose brain. I found that I could breathe.
    “I really hoped you wouldn’t fail me,” Dierdre said. “That you would want to do the right thing. But I guess it isn’t in you, Jack.”
    She spoke mildly, as if rebuking a puppy that had displeased her. I said nothing, only stared into her bright, strict eyes. Was I dreaming? Insane? If this was insanity, I was willing to make the most of it.
    “What do you want me to do now?” I asked, desiring nothing more than a smile of favor in return for my capitulation.
    She didn’t smile. “You’re strong. Healthy. Good for another twenty years, at least.”
    I nodded hopefully.
    “Now you will get the chance to earn the fame you’ve had so cheaply.”
    “How?”
    “You’re going to write. Jack. Write, and write, and write. As many as eighteen or twenty hours a day your muse will be with you, scarcely letting you rest.”
    “Doesn’t sound so bad,” I said, and reached out to pull her into bed with me.
    She drew back politely before I could touch her.
    “Oh, no, Jack, it won’t be me. I have another assignment. You’ll be getting a different muse.”
    “Who?”
    Dierdre looked away from me. “The muse you deserve,” she said. “The Association is adamant about that.”
    “That isn’t fair! I deserve you! I’m famous! I want—” Her celestial light dwindled to the size of a rubied ladybug in a corner of the dark room, turned scintillatingly and took wing, flew through the wall. I tumbled frenziedly out of bed and went to the spot where she had disappeared, standing on a chair to reach it. The spot was warm and glowing to my touch; an essence of fresh violets stung my eyes. And then the ravishing odor faded. I felt deserted, bereft. And a little frightened.
    I poured myself another three fingers of scotch. The clock on the mantel in the living room whirred and chimed, four times.
    A noisome odor was seeping into the bedroom, perhaps from outside the bungalow. An effluvium of Southern California’s patented smog, mixed with—oh, God—dead cat and overripe refuse and spoiled eggs, almost everything unpleasant and sickening that memory could recall. I had to soak a handkerchief in scotch and hold it to my nose as I went out to the living room, intending to ring the front desk and complain.
    It was sitting in a wing chair by the fireplace, facing me. If it could be said to have a face. Watching me. If it could be said to have eyes. It waved a hand—no, no, no, how could one call such a barbed and bloated thing a human hand!—leaving a