The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

aeons.

Across the whitewashed walls inside this overground tomb, there are scrawled indecipherable words and equations, each either haunted with antiquity or else pregnant with futurity.

Their meaning is lost, but their significance is not.

PETER ATKINS Dancing Like We’re Dumb

PETER ATKINS WAS BORN in Liverpool, England, and now lives in Los Angeles, California. He is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder and Moontown, and the screenplays Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Hellraiser IV: Bloodline, Wishmaster and Prisoners of the Sun.

His short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, Hellbound Hearts and the first two volumes of the “mosaic novel” series Zombie Apocalypse!. Magazines to which he has contributed include Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance and PostScripts.

“Dancing Like We’re Dumb” first appeared in the author’s short story collection Rumours of the Marvellous, and is the third story to feature his lesbian detective character Kitty Donnelly as first- person narrator.

“The real Kitty Donnelly,” Atkins says, “was my paternal grandmother, and I’m horribly aware of just how much that good Irish Catholic, born while Victoria was still on the throne, would want to wash her fictional namesake’s filthy mouth out with soap.

“I like to believe, though, that she might quietly approve of young Kitty’s take-no-prisoners attitude. ”

* * *

PUNK IN THE back seat didn’t look so tough, but the jittery eagerness with which he pressed the barrel of his Ruger against the back of my headrest talked me out of giving him the kind of shit I’d normally enjoy throwing his way.

I was in the front passenger seat — annoying to begin with because it was my fucking car — and Jumpy McHandgun back there was the monkey to Cody Garrity’s organ-grinder. Cody was driving. Not driving well, it has to be said, but certainly letting the State know what it could do with its posted speed limits.

I’d had the pleasure of their acquaintance a mere four minutes or so, and I knew Cody’s name only because he was the kind of tool that liked to introduce himself when he was car-jacking you.

“Hi, I’m Cody Garrity,” he’d said. “Slide over.” His Smith & Wesson.38 had been on display for me, but held flat against his stomach to avoid alarming anyone else in the Albertson’s parking lot.

I got to give them props for the smoothness of their work. Cody’d ambled schlub-like between the spots like some harmless stoner who’d forgotten where he’d parked, while his neck-tattooed catamite kept himself completely out of sight until Cody’d already got the drop on me.

I’d only been driving Ilsa, She-wolf of the SS, for a month or so and, while she may have been merely an entry-level Mercedes, she was still a Mercedes, so I should have been paying more fucking attention. It’s true that it was four o’clock in the afternoon of another perfect LA day and that seven years of driving third-hand Detroit may well have dulled my douchebags-who-want-your-stuff antenna, but I’m not going to make excuses. I’d been sitting there checking my mental shopping list with the driver door wide open like some middle-class moron who thinks crime only happens to other people, so I’ve got no one to blame but Mrs Donnelly’s youngest.

Cody, jumping lights and ignoring stop signs, was tearing down Griffith Park Boulevard now, pushing Ilsa like he had her on a Nascar track instead of a residential street, and her engine was purring pleasurably in response to his aggression. Little Kraut slut.

“What you got on your pre-sets?” Cody asked, but was already stabbing at the radio’s buttons. The speakers burst into life and the godlike genius known to an undeserving world as Ke$ha told us she had Jesus on her necklace.

Cody gave me a superior look. “Top forty,” he said, like I needed my channels explaining to me. His tone was derisive, and the epsilon in back snorted in agreement. Their disdain didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me — confused me, in fact — was that I was still in the damn car. I don’t know if Cody and his chimp had ever read Carjacking for Dummies but, if they had, I’m pretty sure they’d have learned that the place to say goodbye to their new vehicle’s previous owner was back at the point of purchase.

It’s never a good idea to point out examples of their own stupidity to boys who like to play with guns but I needed to let them know that, now that they had the car and all, it was time that they thought about ditching the unwanted baggage. I turned to look at Cody — always smarter to talk to the less-amped one — and pointed ahead to the next intersection.

“You could drop me at the corner of Hyperion,” I said, calm as a tween on Ritalin. “I can pick up a slice at Hard Times and—”

“Hey, lesbo-at-frontseat-dot-com,” his partner interrupted. “Shut the fuck up.”

Well, that was alarming. Not a single Melissa CD or Ellen bio in sight and me in my usual show-the-boys- what-they’re-missing drag, but still Antsy Von Rugerstein — who I’m guessing wasn’t the brightest bitch in his pack — had me down as a friend of Radclyffe Hall. Which meant he had to have come armed with prior knowledge. Which meant he and his alpha hadn’t been targeting Ilsa at all. They’d been targeting me.

Huh. And the day’d started off so quiet.

Started off nice, in fact. Coffee at my place with a pretty girl.

Anna was almost eighteen, exclusively and unfortunately hetero, and was part of a girl power trio called The Butchered Barbies. Anna had two jobs in the band — to play bass and to look hot — and was good at one of them. The Barbies — who were almost big in what remained of the Silverlake scene — were all buzzsaw guitar and Jenny Rotten snarls, like the last thirty years had never happened. I’d tried to point out to Anna on more than one occasion that their whole schtick was as charmingly antiquarian as crinolines and afternoon tea but she wasn’t having it. Fucking kids. No telling them.

Anyway, Anna had come calling this morning because she’d misplaced a piece of vinyl that meant a lot to her, and was flirting with the idea that it had been stolen and wanted me to flirt with the idea of making it my next case.

Next case. Jesus Christ. Truth is I feel weird even talking about cases. I mean, with my impressive juvenile resume of drug-running and related criminal activities, it wasn’t like the State was going to fucking license me any time soon. And, besides, most of the people who came to me with their little problems weren’t the sort of people who were likely to want the authorities anywhere within sniffing distance of their own shit. Nevertheless, for the last eighteen months or so, the Donnelly larder had been stocked pretty exclusively by the proceeds of a series of adventures in private investigation, so turns out — licensed or not — I’d sashayed my way into becoming Nancy Drew for the meh generation.

“It was that guy,” Anna said. “I’m pretty sure. Have you got any more coffee?” She looked around my kitchenette with a hopeful expression, like the coffee could perhaps be somewhere other than the auto-drip’s empty pitcher and waggled her mug on the counter-top like she might tempt it out of hiding.

“I’ll make some,” I said, getting up. “What guy?”

“The guy,” she said, giving me a look like what the fuck was wrong with me not keeping up with her tweets.

“Remind me,” I said, walking to the machine and swapping out the used filter.

“Took a stranger home after a gig,” she said. “Fucked him. Gone when I woke up. No name, no number. One of my 45s was missing.”

Come on. Of course that’s not what she said. What she said took the entire brew- cycle, but I’ve done you the courtesy of editing out the how-she-felt and the what-she-wore and the how-he- seemed-nice and the Emma’s-cool-but-she-can-be-so-jealous and all the rest of her