New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird by Kim Newman, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Charles Stross, Cherie Priest, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Sarah Monette, Michael Marshall Smith, Paula Guran Read Free Book Online

through half a dozen increasingly disreputable and uncooperative contacts. Two I’d had to bribe, and one I’d had to coerce with a number of hollow threats involving nonexistent contacts in the Boston Police Department. But, when all was said and done, my diligence had paid off, because here she sat before me, the two of us, alone, just me and the woman who’d been a movie star and who had played some role in Thurber’s breakdown, who’d posed for Pickman and almost certainly done murder on a spring night in Hollywood. Here was the woman who could answer questions I did not have the nerve to ask, who knew what had cast the shadow I’d seen in that dingy pornographic film. Or, at least, here was all that remained of her.
    “There aren’t many left who would have bothered,” she said, gazing down at the smoldering tip-end of her Gitane.
    “Well, I have always been a somewhat persistent sort of fellow,” I told her, and she smiled again. It was an oddly bestial smile that reminded me of one of my earliest impressions of her—that oppressive summer’s day, now more than two months past, studying a handful of old clippings in the Hope Street boarding house. That her human face was nothing more than a mask or fairy glamour conjured to hide the truth of her from the world.
    “How did you meet him?” I asked, and she stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.
    “Who? How did I meet who ?” She furrowed her brow and glanced nervously towards the parlor window, which faces east, towards the harbor.
    “I’m sorry,” I replied. “Pickman. How is it that you came to know Richard Pickman?”
    “Some people would say that you have very unhealthy interests, Mr. Blackman,” she said, her peculiarly carnivorous smile quickly fading, taking with it any implied menace. In its stead, there was only this destitute, used-up husk of a woman.
    “And surely they’ve said the same of you, many, many times, Lily. I’ve read all about Durand Drive and the Delgado woman.”
    “Of course, you have,” she sighed, not taking her eyes from the window. “I’d have expected nothing less from a persistent fellow such as you.”
    “How did you meet Richard Pickman?” I asked for the third time.
    “Does it make a difference? That was so very long ago. Years and years ago. He’s dead—”
    “No body was ever found.”
    And, here, she looked from the window to me, and all those unexpected lines on her face seemed to have abruptly deepened; she might well have been twenty-seven, by birth, but no one would have argued if she laid claim to forty.
    “The man is dead,” she said flatly. “And if by chance he’s not , well, we should all be fortunate enough to find our heart’s desire, whatever it might be.” Then she went back to staring at the window, and, for a minute or two, neither of us said anything more.
    “You told me that you have the sketches,” she said, finally. “Was that a lie, just to get me up here?”
    “No, I have them. Two of them, anyway,” and I reached for the folio beside my chair and untied the string holding it closed. “I don’t know, of course, how many you might have posed for. There were more?”
    “More than two,” she replied, almost whispering now.
    “Lily, you still haven’t answered my question.”
    “And you are a persistent fellow.”
    “Yes,” I assured her, taking the two nudes from the stack and holding them up for her to see, but not yet touch. She studied them a moment, her face remaining slack and dispassionate, as if the sight of them elicited no memories at all.
    “He needed a model,” she said, turning back to the window and the blue October sky. “I was up from New York, staying with a friend who’d met him at a gallery or lecture or something of the sort. My friend knew that he was looking for models, and I needed the money.”
    I glanced at the two charcoal sketches again, at the curve of those full hips, the round, firm buttocks, and the tail—a crooked, malformed