Supernatural Noir

I got my hat and my gun and my car keys off the desk, went down to my car, and drove back to the cemetery.

——

I didn’t park down from the place this time. I drove through the horseshoe opening and drove down as close as I could get to the grave. I got out and looked around, hoping I wouldn’t see the man in the long coat, and hoping in another way I would.

I got my gun from my pocket and held it down by my side, and walked over to the grave. It was covered up, patted down. The air still held that stench from before. Less of it, but it still lingered, and I had this odd feeling it wasn’t the stink of Susan’s body after all. It was that man. It was his stink. I felt sure of it, but there was no reasoning as to why I thought that. Call it instinct. I looked down at the grave. It was closed up.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up like I had been shot with a quiverful of little arrows.

Looking every which way as I went, I made it back to the car and got inside and locked all the doors and started it up, and drove back to town and over to Cathy’s place.

——

We were in her little front room sitting on the couch. There was coffee in cups on saucers sitting on the coffee table. I sipped mine and tried to do it so my hand didn’t shake.

“So now you believe me,” she said.

“But I don’t know anyone else will. We tell the cops this, we’ll both be in the booby hatch.”

“He took her body?”

I nodded.

“Weren’t you supposed to stop him?”

“I actually didn’t think that was going to come up. But I couldn’t stop him. He didn’t look like much, but he was fast, and to leap like that, he had to be strong. He carried your sister’s body like it was nothing.”

“My heavens, what could he want with her?”

I had an idea, considering she only had on a slip. That meant he’d been there before, undressed her, and put her back without her burial clothes. But Cathy, she was on the same page.

“Now someone has her body,” she said, “and they’re doing who knows what to her . . . Oh, Jesus. This is like a nightmare. Listen, you’ve got to take me out there.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said.

“Yes I do, Mr. Taylor. That’s exactly what I want to do. And if you won’t do it, I’ll go anyway.”

She started to cry and leaned into me. I held her. I figured part of it was real and part of it was like the way she showed me her legs; she’d had practice getting her way with men.

——

I drove her over there.

It was just about daybreak when we arrived. I drove through the gate and parked near the grave again. I saw that fellow, even if he was carrying two dead blonds on his shoulders, I was going to take a shot at him. Maybe two. That didn’t work, I was going to try and run over him with my car.

Cathy stood over the grave. There was still a faint aroma of the stink from before.

Cathy said, “So he came back and filled it in while you were at your office, doing—what did you say—having a drink?”

“Two, actually.”

“If you hadn’t done that, he would have come back and you would have seen him.”

“No reason for me to think he’d come back. I just came to look again to make sure I wasn’t crazy.”

As the sun came up, we walked across the cemetery, me tracing the path the man had taken as he ran. When I got to the fence, I looked to see if there was anything he could have jumped up on or used as a springboard to get over. There wasn’t.

We went back to the car and I drove us around on the right side near the back of the cemetery. I had to park well before we got to the creek. It was muddy back there where the creek rose, and there were boot prints in the mud from the flooding. The flood had made everything a bog.

I looked at the fence. Six feet tall, and he had landed some ten feet from the fence on this side. That wasn’t possible, but I had seen him do it, and now I was looking at what had to be his boot tracks.

I followed the prints down to the creek, where he had jumped across. It was all I could do to stay on my feet, as it was such a slick path to follow, but he had gone over it as sure-footedly as a goat.

Cathy came with me. I told her to go back, but she wouldn’t listen. We walked along the edge of the creek until we found a narrow spot, and I helped her cross over. The tracks played out when the mud played out. As we went up a little rise, the trees thickened even more and the land became drier. Finally we came to a nearly open clearing. There were a few trees growing there, and they were growing up close to an old sawmill. One side of it had fallen down, and there was an ancient pile of blackened sawdust mounded up on the other where it had been dumped from the mill and rotted by the weather.

We went inside. The floorboards creaked, and the whole place, large as it was, shifted as we walked.

“Come on,” I said. “Before we fall all the way to hell.”

On the way back, as we crossed the creek, I saw something snagged on a little limb. I bent over and looked at it. It stank of that smell I had smelled in the graveyard. I got out my handkerchief and folded the handkerchief around it and put it in my pocket.

Back in the car, driving to town, Cathy said, “It isn’t just some kook, is it?”

“Some kook couldn’t have jumped a fence like that, especially with a body thrown over its shoulder. It couldn’t have gone across that mud and over that creek like it did. It has to be something else.”

“What does ‘something else’ mean?” Cathy said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We parked out near the edge of town, and I took the handkerchief out and unfolded it. The smell was intense.

“Throw it away,” Cathy said.

“I will, but first, you tell me what it is.”

She leaned over, wrinkled her pretty nose. “It’s a piece of cloth with meat on it.”

“Rotting flesh,” I said. “The cloth goes with the man’s jacket, the man I saw with Susan’s body. Nobody has flesh like this if they’re alive.”

“Could it be from Susan?” she asked.

“Anything is possible, but this is stuck to the inside of the cloth. I think it came off him.”

——

In town, I bought a shovel at the hardware store, and then we drove back to the cemetery. I parked so that I thought the car might block what I was doing a little, and I told Cathy to keep watch. It was broad daylight, and I hoped I looked like a gravedigger and not a grave robber.

She said, “You’re going to dig up the grave?”

“Dang tootin’,” I said, and I went at it.

Cathy didn’t like it much, but she didn’t stop me. She was as curious as I was. It didn’t take long because the dirt was soft, the digging was easy. I got down to the coffin, scraped the dirt off, and opened it with the tip of the shovel. It was a heavy lid, and it was hard to do. It made me think of how easily the man in the coat had lifted it.

Susan was in there. She looked very fresh and she didn’t smell. There was only that musty smell you get from slightly damp earth. She had on the slip, and the rest of her clothes were folded under her head. Her shoes were arranged at her feet.

“Jesus,” Cathy said. “She looks so alive. So fair. I understand why someone would dig her up, but why would they bring her back?”

“I’m not sure, but I think the best thing to do is go see my mother.”

——

My mother is the town librarian. She’s one of those that believe in astrology, ESP, little green men from Mars, ghosts, a balanced budget, you name it. And she knows about that stuff. I grew up with it, and it never appealed to me. Like my dad, I was a hardheaded realist. And at some point, my mother had been too much for him. They separated. He lives in Hoboken with a showgirl, far from East Texas. He’s been there so long he might as well be a Yankee himself.

The library was nearly empty, and as always, quiet as God’s own secrets. My mother ran a tight ship. She saw me when I came in and frowned. She’s no bigger than a minute, with overdyed hair and an expression on her face like she’s just eaten a sour persimmon.

I waved at her, and she waved me to follow her to the back, where her office was.

In the back, she made Cathy sit at a table near the religious literature.

“What am I supposed to do?” Cathy asked.

Mother looked around the room at all the books. “You do know how to read, don’t you, dear?”

Cathy gave Mother a hard look. “Until my lips get tired.”

“Know anything about the Hindu religion?”

“Yeah. They don’t eat cows.”

“There, you’re already off to a good start.”

“Here,” Mother said, and gave her a booklet on the Hindu religion, then guided me into her office, which was only a little larger than a janitor’s closet, and closed the door. She sat behind her cluttered desk, and I sat in front of it.

“So, you must need money,” she said.

“When have I asked you for any?”

“Never, but since I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays, and you live across town, I figured it had to be money. If it’s for that floozy out there, to buy her something—forget it. She looks cheap.”

“I don’t even know her that well,” I said.

She gave me a narrow-eyed look.

“No. It’s not like that. She’s a client.”

“I bet she is.”

“Listen, Mom, I’m going to jump right in. I have a situation. It has to do with the kind of things you know about.”

“That would be a long list.”

I nodded. “But this one is a very specialized thing.” And then I told her the story.

She sat silent for a while, processing the information.

“Cauldwell Hogson,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“The old graveyard, behind the fence. The one they don’t use anymore. He was buried there. Fact is, he was hanged in the graveyard from a tree limb. About where the old sawmill is now.”

“There are graves there?” I asked.

“Well, there were. The flood washed up a bunch of them. Hogson was one of the ones buried there, in an unmarked grave. Here—it’s in one of the books about the growth of the city, written in 1940.”

She got up and pulled a dusty-looking book off one of her shelves. The walls were lined with them. These were her personal collection. She put the book on her desk, sat back down, and started thumbing through the volume, then paused.

“Oh, what the heck. I know it by heart.” She closed the book, sat back down in her chair, and said, “Cauldwell Hogson was a grave robber. He stole bodies.”

“To sell to science?”

“No. To have . . . well, you know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

“He had relations with the bodies.”

“That’s nasty,” I said.

“I’ll say. He would take them and put them in his house and pose them and sketch them. Young women. Old women. Just as long as they were women.”

“Why?”

“Before daybreak, he would put them back. It was a kind of ritual. But he got caught and he got hung, right there in the graveyard. Preacher cursed him. Later they found his notebooks in his house, and his drawings of the dead women. Mostly nudes.”

“But Mom, I think I saw him. Or someone like him.”

“It could be him,” she said.

“You really think so?”

“I do. You used to laugh at my knowledge, thought I was a fool. What do you think now?”

“I think I’m confused. How could he come out of his grave after all these many years and start doing the things he did before? Could it be someone else? Someone imitating him?”

“Unlikely.”

“But he’s dead.”

“What we’re talking about here, it’s a different kind of dead. He’s a ghoul. Not in the normal use of the term—he’s a real ghoul. Back when he was caught, and that would be during the Great Depression, no one questioned that sort of thing. This town was settled by people from the old lands. They knew about ghouls. Ghouls are mentioned as far back as The Thousand and One Nights. And that’s just their first known mention. They love the dead. They gain power from the dead.”

“How can you gain power from something that’s dead?”

“Some experts believe we die in stages, and that when we are dead to this world, the brain is still functioning on a plane somewhere between life and death. There’s a gradual release of the soul.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Books. Try them sometime. The brain dies slowly, and a ghoul takes that slow dying, that gradual release of soul, and feasts on it.”

“He eats their flesh?”

“There are different kinds of ghouls. Some eat flesh. Some only attack men, and some are like Hogson. The corpses of women are his prey.”

“But how did he become a ghoul?”

“Anyone who has an unholy interest in the dead—no matter what religion, no matter if they have no religion—if they are killed violently, they may well become a ghoul. Hogson was certainly a prime candidate. He stole women’s bodies and sketched them, and he did other things. We’re talking about, you know—”

“Sex?”

“If you can call it that, with dead bodies. By this method he thought he could gain their souls and their youth. Being an old man, he wanted to live forever. Course, there were some spells involved, and some horrible stuff he had to drink, made from herbs and body parts. Sex with the bodies causes the remains of their souls to rise to the surface, and he absorbs them through his own body. That’s why he keeps coming back to a body until it’s drained. It all came out when he was caught replacing the body of Mary Lawrence in her grave. I went to school with her, so I remember all this very well. Anyway, when they caught him, he told them everything, and then there were his notebooks and sketches. He was quite proud of what he had done.”

“But why put the bodies back? And Susan, she looked like she was just sleeping. She looked fresh.”

“He returned the bodies before morning because for the black magic to work, they must lie at night in the resting place made for them by their loved ones. Once a ghoul begins to take the soul from a body, it will stay fresh until he’s finished, as long as he returns it to its grave before morning. When he drains the last of its soul, the body decays. What he gets out of all this, besides immortality, are powers he didn’t have as a man.”

“Like being strong and able to jump a six-foot fence flat footed,” I said.

“Things like that, yes.”

“But they hung the old man,” I said. “How in hell could he be around now?”

“They did more than hang him. They buried him in a deep grave filled with wet cement and allowed it to dry. That was a mistake. They should have completely destroyed the body. Still, that would have held him, except the flood opened the graves, and a bulldozer was sent in to push the old bones away. In the process, it must have broken open the cement and let him out.”

“What’s to be done?” I said.

“You have to stop it.”

“Me?”

“I’m too old. The cops won’t believe this. So it’s up to you. You don’t stop him, another woman dies, he’ll take her body. It could be me. He doesn’t care I’m old.”

“How would I stop him?”

“That part might prove to be difficult. First, you’ll need an ax, and you’ll need some fire . . .”

——

With Cathy riding with me, we went by the hardware store and bought an ax and a file to sharpen it up good. I got a can of paint thinner and a new lighter and a can of lighter fluid. I went home and got my twelve-gauge double barrel. I got a handful of shotgun shells. I explained to Cathy what I had to do.

“According to Mom, the ghoul doesn’t feel pain much. But they can be destroyed if you chop their head off, and then you got to burn the head. If you don’t, it either grows a new head, or a body out of the head, or some such thing. She was a little vague. All I know is she says it’s a way to kill mummys, ghouls, vampires, and assorted monsters.”

“My guess is she hasn’t tried any of this,” Cathy said.

“No, she hasn’t. But she’s well schooled in these matters. I always thought she was full of it, but turns out she isn’t. Who knew?”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Look for my remains.”

“I’m going with you,” she said.

“No you’re not.”

“Do you really think you can stop me? It’s my sister. I hired you.”

“Then let me do my job.”

“I just have your word for all this.”

“There you are. I wouldn’t tromp around in the dark based on my word.”

“I’m going.”

“It could get ugly.”

“Once again, it’s my sister. You don’t get to choose for me.”

——

I parked my car across the road from the cemetery under a willow. As it grew dark, shadows would hide it reasonably well. This was where Cathy was to sit. I, on the other hand, would go around to the rear, where the ghoul would most likely come en route to Susan’s grave.

Sitting in my jalopy talking, the sun starting to drop, I said, “I’ll try and stop him before he gets to the grave. But if he comes from some other angle, another route, hit the horn and I’ll come running.”

“There’s the problem of the six-foot fence,” Cathy said.

“I may have to run around the graveyard fence, but I’ll still come. You can keep honking the horn and turn on the lights and drive through the cemetery gate. But whatever you do, don’t get out of the car.”

I handed her my shotgun.

“Ever shot one of these?” I said.

“Daddy was a bird hunter. So, yes.”

“Good. Just in case it comes to it.”

“Will it kill him?”

“Mom says no, but it beats harsh language.”

I grabbed my canvas shoulder bag and ax and got out of the car and started walking. I made it around the fence and to the rear of the graveyard, near the creek and the mud, about fifteen minutes before dark.

I got behind a wide pine and waited. I didn’t know if I was in the right place, but if his grave had been near the sawmill this seemed like a likely spot. I got a piece of chewing gum and went to work on it.

The sun was setting.

I hoisted the ax in my hand, to test the weight. Heavy. I’d have to swing it pretty good to manage decapitation. I thought about that. Decapitation. What if it was just some nut, and not a ghoul?

Well, what the hell. He was still creepy.

I put the ax head on the ground and leaned on the ax handle.

I guess about an hour passed before I heard something crack. I looked out toward the creek where I had seen him jump with Susan’s body. I didn’t see anything but dark. I felt my skin prick, and I had a sick feeling in my stomach.

I heard another crack.

It wasn’t near the creek.

It wasn’t in front of me at all.

It was behind me.

——

I wheeled, and then I saw the ghoul. He hadn’t actually seen me, but he was moving behind me at a run, and boy could he run. He was heading straight for the cemetery fence.

I started after him, but I was too far behind and too slow. I slipped on the mud and fell. When I looked up, it was just in time to see the ghoul make a leap. For a moment, he seemed pinned against the moon, like a curious brooch on a golden breast. His long white hair trailed behind him and his coat was flying wide. He had easily leaped ten feet high.

He came down in the cemetery as light as a feather. By the time I was off my ass and had my feet under me, he was running across the cemetery toward Susan’s grave.

I ran around the edge of the fence, carrying the ax, the bag slung over my shoulder. As I ran, I saw him, moving fast. He was leaping gravestones again.

Before I reached the end of the fence, I heard my horn go off and saw lights come on. The car was moving. As I turned the corner of the fence, I could see the lights had pinned the ghoul for a moment, and the car was coming fast. The ghoul threw up its arm and the car hit him and knocked him back about twenty feet.

The ghoul got up as if nothing had happened. Its movements were puppetlike, as if it were being pulled by invisible strings.

Cathy, ignoring everything I told her, got out of the car. She had the shotgun.

The ghoul ignored her, and ran toward Susan’s grave, and started digging as if Cathy wasn’t there. As I came through the cemetery opening and passed my car, Cathy cut down on the thing with the shotgun. Both barrels.

It was a hell of a roar, and dust and cloth and flesh flew up from the thing. The blast knocked it down. It popped up like a jack-in-the-box and hissed like a cornered possum. It lunged at Cathy. She swung the shotgun by the barrel, hit the ghoul upside the head.

I was at Cathy’s side now, and without thinking I dropped the ax and the bag fell off my shoulder. Before the ghoul could reach her, I tackled the thing.

It was easy. There was nothing to Cauldwell Hogson. It was like grabbing a hollow reed. But the reed was surprisingly strong. Next thing I knew, I was thrown into the windshield of my car, and then Cathy was thrown on top of me.

When I had enough of my senses back, I tried to sit up. My back hurt. The back of my head ached, but otherwise, I seemed to be all in one piece.

The ghoul was digging furiously at the grave with its hands, throwing dirt like a dog searching for a bone. He was already deep into the earth.

Still stunned, I jumped off the car and grabbed the canvas bag, and pulled the lighter fluid and the lighter out of it. I got as close as I dared and sprayed a stream of lighter fluid at the creature. It soaked the back of its head. Hogson wheeled to look at me. I sprayed the stuff in his eyes and on his chest, drenching him. He swatted at the fluid as I squeezed the can.

I dropped the can. I had the lighter, and I was going to pop the top and hit the thumb wheel, when the next thing I knew the ghoul leaped at me and grabbed me and threw me at the cemetery fence. I hit hard against it and lay there stunned.

When I looked up, the ghoul was dragging the coffin from the grave, and without bothering to open it this time, threw it over his shoulder and took off running.

I scrambled to my feet, found the lighter, stuffed it in the canvas bag, swung the bag over my shoulder, and picked up the ax. I yelled for Cathy to get in the car. She was still dazed, but managed to get in.

Sliding behind the wheel, I gave her the ax and the bag, turned the key, popped the clutch, and backed out of the cemetery. I whipped onto the road, jerked the gear into position, and tore down the road.

“He’s over there!” Cathy said. “See!”

I glimpsed the ghoul running toward the creek with the coffin.

“I see,” I said. “And I think I know where he’s going.”

——

The sawmill road was good for a short distance, but then the trees grew in close and the road was grown up with small brush. I had to stop the car. We started rushing along on foot. Cathy carried the canvas bag. I carried the ax.

“What’s in the bag,” she said.

“More lighter fluid.”

Trees dipped their limbs around us, and when an owl hooted, then fluttered through the pines, I nearly crapped my pants.

Eventually, the road played out, and there were only trees. We pushed through some limbs, scratching ourselves in the process, and finally broke out into a partial clearing. The sawmill was in the center of it, with its sagging roof and missing wall and trees growing up through and alongside it. The moonlight fell over it and colored it like thin yellow paint.

“You’re sure he’s here,” Cathy said.

“I’m not sure of much of anything anymore,” I said. “But his grave was near here. It’s about the only thing he can call home now.”

When we reached the sawmill, we took deep breaths, as if on cue, and went inside. The boards creaked under our feet. I looked toward a flight of open stairs and saw the ghoul moving up those, as swift and silent as a rat. The coffin was on his shoulder, held there as if it were nothing more than a shoebox.

I darted toward the stairs, and the minute my foot hit them, they creaked and swayed.

“Stay back,” I said, and Cathy actually listened to me. At least for a moment.

I climbed on up, and then there was a crack, and my foot went through. I felt a pain like an elephant had stepped on my leg. I nearly dropped the ax.

“Taylor,” Cathy yelled. “Are you all right?”

“Good as it gets,” I said.

Pulling my leg out, I limped up the rest of the steps with the ax, turned left at the top of the stairs—the direction I had seen it take. I guess I was probably thirty feet high by then.

I walked along the wooden walkway. To my right were walls and doorways without doors, and to my left was a sharp drop to the rotten floor below. I hobbled along for a few feet, glanced through one of the doorways. The floor on the other side was gone. Beyond that door was a long drop.

I looked down at Cathy.

She pointed at the door on the far end.

“He went in there,” she said.

Girding my loins, I came to the doorway and looked in. The roof of the room was broken open, and the floor was filled with moonlight. On the floor was the coffin, and the slip Susan had worn was on the edge of the coffin, along with the ghoul’s rotten black coat.

Cauldwell Hogson was in the coffin on top of her.

I rushed toward him just as his naked ass rose up, a bony thing that made him look like some sad concentration-camp survivor. As his butt came down, I brought the ax downward with all my might.

It caught him on the back of the neck, but the results were not as I expected. The ax cut a dry notch, but up he leaped, as if levitating, grabbed my ax handle, and would have had me, had his pants not been around his ankles. It caused him to fall. I staggered back through the doorway, and now he was out of his pants and on his feet, revealing that though he was emaciated, one part of him was not.

Backpedaling, I stumbled onto the landing. He sprang forward, grabbed my throat. His hands were like a combination of vise and ice tongs; they bit into my flesh and took my air. Up close, his breath was rancid as roadkill. His teeth were black and jagged, and the flesh hung from the bones of his face like cheap curtains. The way he had me, I couldn’t swing the ax and not hit myself.

In the next moment, the momentum of his rush carried us backward, along the little walkway, and then out into empty space.

——

Falling didn’t take any time. When I hit the ground my air was knocked out of me, and the boards of the floor sagged.

The ghoul was straddling me, choking me.

And then I heard a click, a snap. I looked. Cathy had gotten the lighter from the bag. She tossed it.

The lighter hit the ghoul, and the fluid I had soaked him with flared. His head flamed, and he jumped off of me and headed straight for Cathy.

I got up as quickly as I could, which was sort of like asking a dead hippo to roll over. On my feet, lumbering forward, finding that I still held the ax in my hand, I saw that the thing’s head was flaming like a match, and yet it had gripped Cathy by the throat and was lifting her off the ground.

I swung the ax from behind, caught its left leg just above the knee. The blade I had sharpened so severely did its work. It cut the ghoul off at the knee, and he dropped, letting go of Cathy. She moved back quickly, holding her throat, gasping for air.

The burning thing lay on its side. I brought the ax down on its neck. It took me two more chops before its rotten, burning head came loose. I chopped at the head, sending the wreckage of flaming skull in all directions.

I faltered a few steps, looked at Cathy, said, “You know, when you lit him up, I was under him.”

“Sorry.”

And then I saw her eyes go wide.

I turned.

The headless, one-legged corpse was crawling toward us, swift as a lizard. It grabbed my ankle.

I slammed the ax down, took off the hand at the wrist, then kicked it loose of my leg. That put me in a chopping frenzy. I brought the ax down time after time, snapping that dry stick of a creature into thousands of pieces.

By the time I finished that, I could hardly stand. I had to lean on the ax. Cathy took my arm, said, “Taylor.”

Looking up, I saw the fire from the ghoul had spread out in front of us, and the rotten lumber and old sawdust had caught like paper. The canvas bag with the lighter fluid in it caught too, and within a second, it blew, causing us to fall back.

The only way out was up the stairs, and in the long run, that would only prolong the roasting. Considering the alternative, however, we were both for prolonging our fiery death instead of embracing it.

Cathy helped me up the stairs, because by now my ankle had swollen up until it was only slightly smaller than a Civil War cannon. I used the ax like a cane. The fire licked the steps behind us, climbed up after us, as if playing tag.

When we made the upper landing, we went through the door where Susan’s body lay. I looked in the coffin. She was nude, looking a lot rougher than before. Perhaps the ghoul had gotten the last of her, or without him to keep her percolating with his magic, she had gone for the last roundup, passed on over into true, solid death. I hoped in the end her soul had been hers, and not that monster’s.

I let go of Cathy, and, using the ax for support, made it to the window. The dark sawdust was piled deep below.

Stumbling back to the coffin, I dropped the ax, got hold of the edge, and said, “Push.”

My thinking was maybe we could save Susan’s body for reburial. Keep it away from flames. I didn’t need to explain to Cathy. She got it right away. Together we shoved the coffin toward the window.

We pushed the coffin and Susan out the window. She fell free of the box and hit the sawdust. We jumped after her.

When we were on the pile, spitting sawdust, trying to work our way down the side of it, the sawmill wall started to fall. We rolled down the side of the piled sawdust and hit the ground.

The burning wall hit the sawdust. The mound was high enough we were protected from it. We crawled out from under it and managed to get about fifty feet away before we looked back.

The sawmill, the sawdust, and poor Susan’s body—which we had not been able to save—and whatever was left of Cauldwell Hogson was now nothing more than a raging mountain of sizzling, crackling flames.

——

Joe R. Lansdale has been a freelance writer since 1973, and a full-time writer since 1981. He is the author of thirty novels and eighteen short-story collections, and has received the Edgar Award, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, and Italy’s Grinzani Prize for Literature, among others.

“Bubba Ho-Tep,” his award-nominated novella, was filmed by Don Coscarelli and is now considered a cult classic, and his story “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” was filmed for Showtime’s Masters of Horror.

He has written for film, television, and comics, and is the author of numerous essays and columns. His most recent works are a collection from the University of Texas Press, Sanctified and Chicken Fried; The Portable Lansdale; and Vanilla Ride, his latest in the Hap Collins–Leonard Pine series. The series has recently been released in paperback from Vintage Books.

| COMFORTABLE IN HER SKIN |

Lee Thomas

—

Sylvian Newman strolls along the boulevard. She is already late for her rendezvous with Louis Towne, but the delay is calculated. The nights she makes Louis wait are always the most exciting, so she takes her time, stopping at brightly lit shop windows along the street to peer in at the teasing displays. At Genevieve’s a glittering stream of diamonds pulls her to the glass like a magnet. The necklace is draped over a black velvet bust, and the clear gems twinkle like tiny stars. At their center is a perfect ruby the size of a postage stamp. Sylvia has never seen anything so beautiful in her life, and though Louis is rich, she knows he will never be diamonds-and-rubies generous with her. Besides, the shop owners in this part of town know Louis well. They also know his wife.

Leaving behind the beautiful gems, she continues to the corner. Sylvia spots Louis standing by his car under a street lamp across the intersection. His angry expression is emphasized by the shadows, and the sight of his frown sends a thrill through her. He will complain about being made to wait in a neighborhood where he is so well known. He’ll sulk over dinner and threaten to dump Sylvia on her ass for being such a pain in his, and when he fucks her, it will be brutal without a hint of tenderness, and Louis will think he’s punishing her. Sylvia is more than happy to allow him the illusion.

Louis stands up straight and throws his shoulders back when he sees her across the street. He is an odd-looking man, with chipmunk cheeks and a perpetual coffee-ground stubble covering them. His ears are abnormally small and stick away from his head. He is not repellent to look at, but nearly so. For Sylvia, the attributes that make him attractive—his power and his money—sufficiently offset his passing resemblance to a rodent. Besides, he is a natty dresser, always wearing crisp Italian suits perfectly tailored to his stout form, so he looks sharp, if not handsome.

When she reaches the corner, Sylvia lifts her hand to wave. Louis shoves his hands in the pocket of his slacks in a gesture meant to show his irritation.

Behind Louis, a tall, burly man, wearing a black woolen overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low to hide his face, appears on the sidewalk. His stride is purposeful. With his left hand he draws a handgun from the pocket of his coat and swings it up in a smooth arc. Sylvia’s heart and lungs turn to ice water, and she opens her mouth to call a warning.

The muzzle of the gun flares. Then, in unison with the crack of the pistol’s report, a hole appears in Louis’s face, producing a spray of brain and blood and teeth to shower the sidewalk before he collapses. The giant of a man leans down and puts another bullet in the head of Sylvia Newman’s lover.

Sylvia pivots on her toes and hurries back the way she came.

——

Sylvia did not attend Louis Towne’s funeral, but I did. Being Towne’s lawyer, I felt a professional obligation to say farewell to my client; the decision certainly had nothing to do with respect or affection for the man.

The service was held at St. Michael’s Cathedral, an institution to which Towne had donated considerably over the years. A bishop presided over the ceremony, standing behind the altar and speaking exalted words above a polished mahogany coffin that contained the earthly remains of a base and violent man—a man I had come to see as evil in every possible way. The irony that the church should so laud such a monster seemed lost on the other mourners. Members of the congregation wept and held each other for comfort. Hard faces, streaked with tears, looked heavenward for answers. “Why?” a woman sobbed in the pew ahead of mine.

I, too, asked why. Why had it taken so long for God to rid the world of this filth? At least they’d kept the coffin closed for the mass, so I didn’t have to lay my eyes on him again.

Louis Towne had come to me fifteen years ago to hire my services. Despite ample clues—unheeded because of my naivetй and a certain level of professional denial—it took me a year to discover the nature of my client’s business, and I’d almost dropped him on the spot once I did. But the truth was Towne paid well. He paid on time. And Towne scared me. Part of the fear was rational; he was a gun-toting thug, whose curriculum vitae included maiming and murder and a hundred lesser crimes. In this, he was not unique. More than likely, dozens of men who had acquired the same level of brutal experience occupied the cathedral’s pews, but Towne’s intimidation did not end with the obvious. There was another level to his threat, one which I could only call mystical. Even before he entered a room I would feel the air thicken, grow dense with his detestable presence. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, Towne’s eyes would harden and he’d begin speaking phrases in Latin. Occasionally a familiar word would emerge from the babble, and though I could never put together exactly what he was saying, hearing him quote this dead language soon had the power to shrivel my skin into goose flesh.

Ahead of me and to the left, a man with broad shoulders bowed his head, revealing a scarred nape. I wondered if he had carried his gun into the cathedral, and then I wondered how many murderers shared the room with me, and the mockery of God and His house settled in my gut like writhing worms.

I didn’t buy into the macho glamour of the mobs. I saw nothing honorable in the rackets, and the lifestyle they promoted—easy wealth carried over the bodies of the ignorant and unfortunate. They talked about respect and brotherhood and family, but it was all grease for the cogs, making sure the greed machine didn’t break down. Friends were as expendable as rivals if it cleared the path to a buck.

At the altar, the bishop began a prayer in Latin. I shuddered.

——

Sylvia carries a photograph of her father in her purse. He is tall and wiry, and his flat nose and lipless mouth call to mind the face of a python.

Sylvia is nine years old. She is on the floor watching television when she hears her father shouting. Her body tenses, and a web of ice-cold filaments locks to the back of her skull. Matt, her older brother, shouts, and a great crash follows. Her father bellows, his voice shaking the thin walls of the house like an approaching train.

This scene is familiar to Sylvia. Her father is at turns sweet and doting and cruel and violent. Alcohol flicks the switch. At least once a week her father beats her siblings, laying them flat like a scythe moving through wheat. He has never raised his hand to Sylvia, but that fact does nothing to alleviate her fear. Even so young she understands the indiscretion of blind rage.

Matt comes charging into the living room and barrels into the kitchen. He throws open the back door and vanishes into the night.

Sylvia’s father stumbles into the room, growling deep in his throat like an angry dog. He swings his head from side to side and then his eyes lock on Sylvia, causing the icy web at her skull to spread over her entire body. She crawls away from the man and climbs to her feet as her father stomps forward. Confused and frightened, she follows Matt’s path, but she stops in the kitchen. She doesn’t want to run from her father, shouldn’t have to run from him.

“You brats ruined my life,” he says. Spit foams at the corner of his mouth. His eyes are hard as glass and burn hate as if lit from within. “I could have gone places.”

Backed to the stove, Sylvia pulls a saucepan of boiling water off the burner. She ignores the too-hot handle, and splashes her father’s crotch with the contents, and when he bends over, howling in pain, she cracks the saucepan across his skull. He drops to his knees, and she hits him again.

——

Sylvia checks her hair in the reflection of the glass door before pulling it open. She enters Club Barlow like a movie star walking the red carpet, wearing the awkward smile of grief she has spent hours practicing in front of a mirror—makes a show of waving at familiar faces, some of which aren’t even looking her way. She walks through the room, her steps landing in perfect time to the bossa nova track pouring from the club’s speakers. She takes a small booth on the far side of the dance floor with a gilt mirror at her back, and when the waitress comes for her order, she says, “Martini. Dry.”

The dance floor is empty. Nobody dances anymore. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame.

As she sips her drink a series of men come to her table. They do not sit beside her. Instead, they lean in close and tell Sylvia they are sorry for her loss, and if she ever needs anything—anything at all—she should call them. She promises to do so, though she never will. Their definition of “needing anything” goes no further than her crotch. Louis’s murder has left her a pretty shell, vacant on the sand, and every fucking hermit crab on the beach is trying to wriggle its way in. Sylvia expects this. In fact, she knows it will work to her advantage, but not with these men. None of them has what Sylvia needs. They run their numbers and sell their smack and boost electronics from the backs of trucks. Graceless. Useless. Before her first drink is gone, she has already tucked five business cards into her handbag.

Across the room she sees Mickey Rossini, the man she was hoping to find. He is a large man, with thick salt-and-pepper hair brushed back from his brow in a lush wave. His suit is ash gray and cheap. With his arm around a bleach job half his age, he looks as happy as a bear with a mouth full of honey. His overly broad grin and hooded eyes show he’s devoted much of his night to drinking. He has a reputation among the ladies—gentle, sweet, affectionate. Sylvia thinks that’s a shame, though she can live with it until she gets what she needs. She stands from the booth and smoothes the sides of her dress before lifting her handbag and crossing to Rossini’s table.

The blond is the first to notice Sylvia. She looks up with a bright, wide-eyed smile, which quickly vanishes. The girl recognizes the threat and immediately scowls, knowing she will have to defend her territory from another predator. Sylvia is unfazed.

When Rossini’s eyes fall on Sylvia, a noticeable amount of the intoxication clears from them. He’s wanted Sylvia for years, but she has shot him down at every turn. Rossini is a thief; he jacked locks and cracked safes for Louis, making a fraction of a fraction of the money the things he stole were worth. She’d never needed him before.

“Hello, Mickey,” she says.

Rossini straightens himself in the booth, removing his palm from the bottle job’s thigh. He leans back in the booth and says, “Sylvia, it’s good to see you.”

“Is this your wife?” the blond asks. She is sulking because Rossini’s expression tells her that she has already been subtracted from this equation.

“No,” he says.

“Then who the fuck is she?” the blond wants to know.

“She’s a friend. Don’t worry about it.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, playing demure. She locks eyes with Rossini and dips her chin bashfully, knowing the effect it will have on the man. “I’ll let you back to your evening.”

“Wait. Wait.” He nudges the blond and says, “Why don’t you go powder your nose. I need to have a word with Sylvia here.”

“Mickey,” the girl whines.

“It’s business,” he tells her. “Be a sweetheart and give us a couple of minutes, okay?”

He gives her a sloppy peck on the lips and produces a fifty-dollar bill and hands it to the young woman, who quickly drops the note into her purse. She scoots her butt across the booth, and as she stands, she fixes a glare on Sylvia, who pretends to ignore the girl’s attitude, but decides in that second to put a serious fuck you in the little cunt’s night.

These amateur bitches, Sylvia thinks. They didn’t understand the game, and that’s why it ate them alive, leaving them shaking their tits in low-rent knocker shops by the docks to feed the bastard brats of sailors and warehouse men, waiting for some disease to slowly snuff their candles. Over the years, Sylvia had seen a hundred similar pieces of trash blown into the gutter, and she didn’t pity a single one of them.

“I really didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sylvia says, sliding into the booth next to Rossini. “It’s just that since . . . well, you know . . . I’ve been a little lost.”

“I know,” Rossini says, placing his hand on Sylvia’s knee in a salacious move he masks as mere comfort. “It’s gotta be tough. How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” she says. Already she has managed to work tears into her eyes. She sniffs lightly and retrieves a napkin from the table to dab her cheeks.

“Oh now, Sylvia,” says Rossini, scooting closer to her. He puts his arm around her shoulders and slides his hand higher on her thigh, re-creating the pose he’d assumed with the bottle job before Sylvia’s arrival. In a handful of moments, Sylvia has replaced the blond in the booth, in Rossini’s thoughts, and in the thief’s plans for the night.

Rossini is typical, a man led by his ego and his cock who believes himself the cure-all for a woman’s pain. His need to rescue her is an evolutionary blindfold, and though she finds his predictability unsatisfying, it serves her purpose.

——

Sylvia is twenty years old. For two years she has enjoyed an affair with Joe Tocci, a handsome and sophisticated man who will soon be named boss of his own crew. He is her lover and her employer, sending her on trips across the city, muling drugs and cash. Sylvia takes pride in her work, feeling she is paying her dues and earning respect within the rackets, unlike the other women who satisfy themselves in the roles of whore, wife, or victim.

One night she returns to the apartment Tocci has rented for her to find Joe and six of his friends three sheets to the completely fucked up, and before she can set down her handbag, a scrawny prick with buckteeth and the bumpy skin of a gourd by the name of Toady turns to Joe and says, “Mind if I take a ride?”

To her amusement, Joe replies, “I’d kinda like to see that.”

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Before she knows what is happening, the men approach her. They grab her arms painfully and hoist her from the floor. Then she is pinned to the dining-room table, men holding her arms and her legs while Toady rips away her clothes. Sylvia screams and Joe Tocci slaps her and tells her to keep her “whore mouth shut.” Toady climbs on her first and as he begins the rape, Sylvia spits in his face. Toady balls up his fist and punches her in the mouth. The violence so thrills him he hits her again and again. Dazed by concussion, Sylvia squeezes her eyes closed. She imagines herself in an ocean, except it is a sea of stones. She is batted this way and that by granite waves that stink of men. Opening her eyes, Sylvia sees a series of faces hovering above her, blurred and monstrous in their lust. One man kneels on the dining-room table and lifts her head by a fistful of hair before forcing his cock in her mouth, and the scents of urine and sweat fill her nose and she thinks she might drown in them. Hot spray lands on her face and thighs and belly, and they turn her over so that her burning cheek is momentarily soothed by the coolness of the polished wood, and then she is afloat again, tossed about like flotsam on fever-hot swells of stone. And later, so much later, as a dozen muffled aches throb across her body, she hears Tocci laughing. He says, “I guess I better get a new one. This one’s broken.”

Sylvia rarely thinks of this night. She tells herself the memories were scraped away with the brat one of those cocksuckers had put inside of her.

——

Morning light streams through thin curtains, bathing Sylvia’s face. She wipes her eyes and hears footsteps. Rossini enters the bedroom holding two mugs of coffee. He is naked and though he’s bulky, his added pounds are solid and intimidating, and she likes the way his body looks.

He hands her one of the mugs and sits on the edge of the bed beside her.

“So tell me what you’re doing here,” he says, taking her off guard.

She holds the mug in both hands, like a little girl sipping cocoa, and offers Rossini an innocent gaze, which makes him laugh like a mule. His reaction annoys her but she refuses to let the lie fall.

“Look, Syl,” Rossini says once his amusement is under control, “you think I’m a dumb wop fucker, but I’m not that dumb. I saw the way you twisted Louis around your finger. You drove him out of his fucking mind. I never saw anything like it. So while I can play along with some horseshit to get a roll, and maybe even believe you were lonely and needed a bit of hard to make it through the night, the fact you’re still here tells me you want more than my cock.”

“Maybe I like you,” Sylvia says over the lip of her coffee mug.

“And maybe I’ll sprout tits and be the happiest girl in the whole USA,” he says, still exhibiting great amusement at the game. “What do you think? You think I’m going to sprout tits?”

“Fine,” she says. She places her mug on the nightstand and leans back on the headboard. “I want you to help me with a job.”

“That’s more like it,” Rossini says. He drinks from his mug and looks out the window.

“Are you angry?”

“Relieved,” he says. “I like to know where I stand. What’s the job?”

She hesitates because Louis and Mickey had been close. She doesn’t know if the thief retains loyalty to his dead boss, but she cannot drop the subject now. If Rossini declines, she will find a way to convince him as she has convinced other men in the past.

“I want to hit Louis’s house,” she says.

——

The night after the funeral Mary Towne, Louis’s widow, called me to say she was in Miami with her two sons. I was sitting on the sofa with my arm around my wife, and we were watching an animated film about dogs, and when the phone rang I thought it might have been our daughter, who called frequently from her college dorm. To hear Mary Towne’s shrill voice instead of my daughter’s irritated the hell out of me.

“It’s those papers you gave me,” Mary said.

“About the estate?” I asked.

“Well, what other papers did you give me to sign?” Her voice was like a scalpel scraping bone.

Mary had insisted on reading Louis’s will the day after his murder. The fat widow had spent two hours in my office going over the details of Towne’s financial holdings, picking and pecking at the numbers like a starving bird, instead of staying home to comfort her children. At the funeral she’d put on a fine show of grief. Empty. Meaningless. I’d been appalled and wondered how a human being’s moral compass could waver so far from true north.

Not that Towne was a man who deserved authentic mourning from his wife. I’d told him a hundred times I had no interest in his sexual conquests, but Towne was a braggart and insisted I endure his tales of whoring and perversion. I’d always felt sorry for his cheated wife. And then I met her.

“What about the papers, Mary?”

“I signed them the way you said, but we were running late for our flight.”

“So you didn’t have them messengered to my office?”

“I told you, we were late for our flight. I didn’t have time. Just go by the house in the morning and pick them up.”

“Mary, that’s highly irregular.”

“Well, you’d better do something. I don’t want those papers sitting around for two weeks holding everything up. There’s a key in the planter on the back porch and the security code is Louis’s birthday—day and month. You can bill me for your precious time.”

Then she hung up, cutting off the protests climbing up my tongue.

——

Sylvia sits in the passenger seat of a stolen sedan. Rossini finishes a cigarette and grinds it out in the ashtray and turns in the seat to face her.

“He’s got no real security,” the thief says. “Obviously he’s not going to have cameras recording who comes and goes. He’s got a simple contact system that will take all of a minute to kill.”

“He wasn’t very cautious,” Sylvia says.

“He was scary enough that he didn’t have to be. No one was going to fuck Louis over—no one that wanted to stay alive, anyway. The guy was more than connected.”

“What does that mean?”

“You telling me you don’t know about Louis’s hobby?

“You mean his oogedy-boogedy mumbo jumbo?”

“It was a hell of a lot more than that,” Rossini says. “He put the fear of God, or the devil, or whatever he worshiped, into the whole crew. Guys that crossed Louis ended up dog food. You heard about Joe Tocci, right? Last year he disrespected Louis at a meeting and his men found Tocci shredded like barbecue pork in the john of his apartment. They said he wasn’t in there for more than a few minutes, and there was no other way into that crapper but the one door. Louis got to him anyway.”

“Tocci got what he deserved,” Sylvia mutters.

“We all get what we deserve,” Rossini says. “But the thing is, Louis Towne was not a made man. He was never going to be a made man because he didn’t have the blood, but Tocci was a made man. You hit a made man and you’re landfill, but no one retaliated on Tocci’s behalf. No one. Not his crew. Not the organization. They knew Louis did it, but they knew what Louis was capable of, so they let him alone.”

“Until someone put two in his head.”

“Over a year later,” Rossini says. “I’m just saying he didn’t have security because he knew he was scarier than anything that could get in his house.”

——

Sylvia follows the thief into the dining room and through an opulent living room. She feels anger, seeing the statuary and the silk-upholstered sofa and the crystal vases on marble tables. This should have been hers. She should have been sitting on that sofa with a glass of champagne, not prowling the house looking for scraps. She follows Rossini up the stairs and runs a hand along the ornately carved mahogany banister.

“His safe is in his study,” Rossini says.

After his words fade, Sylvia feels uneasy. The air grows thick and envelops her, and she believes she can feel it jostle, hitting her like ripples on the surface of a lake. Even the subtle movements of Rossini on the stairs ahead play over her skin, but there is another body at work, displacing the air. She remembers a similar sensation she had felt whenever Louis entered a room, a heaviness as if his presence curdled the atmosphere.

Uncertain, with her skin alit by anxiety, Sylvia follows the thief to the landing and down a black hallway. The sharp ray of a flashlight momentarily blinds her. Rossini offers a rapid apology and puts the cylinder in his mouth. At the center of the beam is a deadbolt lock. Rossini attacks it with his picks, and in a few moments he has the bolt retracted. Then he sets to work on the cheaper, less complicated lock recessed in the knob.

After opening the door, Rossini leaves Sylvia on the threshold and starts across the room, his silhouette playing against the bobbing disc of light from his lantern. She watches him open a closet door and is surprised to see a shining metal panel beyond, a panel with a combination dial and a three-pronged handle. Louis’s safe takes up an entire closet. Sylvia’s trepidation turns to excitement as she anticipates the sheer volume of wealth such a vault could hold.

“This is going to take some time,” he tells her. “I helped him pick this model, so I know what I’m up against. You might want to keep an eye on the window.”

Sylvia does. She pulls back the drapes and leans against the wall. The landscape beyond the window is carved of shadows. The only light comes from the far end of the drive, beyond the gate, where an arc lamp hangs over the street. Everything between this illumination and Sylvia is gloom. She looks into it and finds nothing. She looks back at Rossini and considers her choice of accomplice.

She decides he can’t be trusted. The thief is too eager. He hadn’t needed a bit of convincing to agree to this job, and as with all things that come too easy, Sylvia looks for an angle.

She slides her hand down the side of her jacket and is reassured when her fingers trace over the outline of the handgun in her pocket.

——

The shrill cry of Rossini’s drill startles her. Sylvia steps away from the window and crosses the den. Nervous, she lights a cigarette and stands by the door. She leans into the hall and is grateful to see the darkened corridor is empty.

Still, she cannot shake the feeling that she and the thief are not alone in the house. The air continues to move like an invisible beast, sidling past her. Drawing deeply on the cigarette, she holds the smoke in her lungs and then blows a cloud into the hall. Amid the whorls of smoke, she pictures Louis’s face and whispers, “Fuck you,” to the dissipating haze. He had lavished a fortune on his wife, had given her every damn thing she had ever whined about, including this house, and what had Sylvia seen for her time and effort?

Finishing the cigarette, she drops it on the carpet. She grinds the butt into the carved Berber and hopes an ember will smolder deep in the pile, causing a fire that levels the Towne mansion about five minutes after she and the thief have driven away with the contents of Louis’s safe.

She leaves the doorway and walks to where Mickey is kneeling. He wears goggles as he guides the barrel of a complicated drill rig. Sparks fly from the safe’s door, showering the carpet. The air around her shifts again, and Sylvia spins on her heels to check the room. Nothing. She hugs herself nervously and returns to the window.

Staring over the dark landscape, she rubs the back of her neck, trying to dislodge the feeling that something rests against it. She tries to convince herself that she’s being paranoid. If anyone else were in the house, they’d have shown themselves by now, or the drive would be thick with police cars, but logic does nothing to alleviate her fear. By the time the drill’s shriek dies, Sylvia is near panic with the certainty that someone prowls the house.

“That’s it,” Mickey says, throwing open the safe. He sets his drill rig on Louis’s desk and returns to the open closet door.

Sylvia races across the room to see the extent of the fortune Louis has locked away from the world and to begin its collection. She presses up against Rossini’s back and peers around him, only to find herself confused by the vault’s contents. She had expected to find stacks of hundred-dollar bills, stock certificates, a jewelry store’s inventory of gems, and though there is some cash—three small stacks on the third shelf of the safe—the bulk of the space is empty. The money sits on one shelf and another is devoted to a bizarre assortment of baubles.

The collection is comprised of six metallic statues. Each is no larger than Sylvia’s pinkie finger, and they are ugly like randomly shaped wads of iron with points and blobs.

“I don’t understand,” Sylvia whispers.

“Amazing,” Rossini replies.

“What is this shit?” Sylvia asks. She reaches around Rossini to retrieve one of the unattractive statues.

His hand shoots out and grabs her wrist painfully. “Don’t touch those,” he says. “You get the cash and the jewelry. That was the deal.”

“The cash? There’s only about ten grand there, and there isn’t any jewelry.”

Rossini squeezes her wrist until she feels the bones grinding. “That was the deal,” he repeats. “The icons are mine.”

A hot mask of rage falls over Sylvia’s face. The thief has played her, though she has yet to understand the extent or the intent of his game.

“Get away from there,” a rasping voice calls from the doorway.

Sylvia turns to the sound, her heart in her throat. A squat shadow stands at the threshold. The face is very pale, visible but ill defined. Mickey turns and knocks Sylvia aside. His flashlight falls squarely on the intruder, and he says, “Son of a bitch.” Sylvia only gets a glimpse of the man in the doorway, and, to her shock, he resembles Louis Towne. She recognizes chipmunk cheeks and small ears, but the view is momentary, and she is stumbling, so she doesn’t trust what she has seen.

Rossini lowers the flashlight so that the beam falls on the intruder’s feet. He then pulls a gun from his coat pocket and levels his left arm to aim the weapon.

Sylvia remembers the boulevard and the man who killed Louis, remembers his size and his posture and the way he held the gun, and she realizes it was Rossini. All along, she has underestimated the thief. His eagerness for the job, his satisfaction with the contents of the safe—this had been his plan all along. He’d only allowed Sylvia to believe it was hers.

Two muzzle flares light up the room. The reports are deafening. A body falls in the hallway and Rossini hisses, “Shit. Enough of this blackout crap.” He stomps to the door and turns on the light.

Awash in confusion, Sylvia looks around absently as if waking in a strange place with no understanding of how she’s gotten there. Rossini is in the doorway, kneeling beside a body on the floor. Sylvia approaches him and when she sees the face of the intruder, she gasps. It is Louis Towne.

His face is longer and misshapen. Tufts of hair stick out around his ears, but he is otherwise bald. Two ragged wounds show above his ear. He still wears the coffee-grounds stubble, but much of it has been torn away on the right side of his face, revealing a patch of darker skin beneath. His nose is longer, and his mouth is circled with odd ridges. His eyes are the worst. They stare at Sylvia, but they are the wrong color. Louis’s eyes were blue and these eyes are chocolate brown, and, even more unsettling, each eye is framed by two sets of eyelashes.

“What happened to him?” she asks.

“Mumbo jumbo,” Rossini says in a dry, earnest tone.

“His face . . .”

“Yeah,” the thief says.

Louis’s legs begin to kick and thrash on the carpet. Sylvia screams and leaps back, covering her mouth with a palm.

“Settle down,” Rossini says, rising to his feet. “It’s just a death dance. Muscle contractions.”

“How can you be so calm?” Sylvia wants to know.

“I got word that Louis’s body went missing from the funeral home. Considering the weird shit he was into, I kept my mind open. Now I think we need to get what we came for and get the hell out of here.”

“Is he really dead this time?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. I’ve got a full clip. That’ll keep him down long enough.”

“Are those little statues doing this?” Sylvia asks.

“Probably.” Rossini casts another glance at the corpse thrashing on the carpet in the hall. “Asshole there got drunk one night and started bragging about these things. He called them the Pellis Icons, and he’d spent about twenty years hunting them down. He said they helped him master the flesh, whatever the hell that means. I know he used them to tear apart Tocci, because I was sitting with him in this room when he did it. They do something, and I figure I’ve got plenty of time to figure out exactly what that is.”

“How much are they worth?”

Rossini laughs and shakes his head. “By your definition, not a damn thing. There isn’t a fence on the continent who would know what to do with them.”

He turns away from Sylvia to take another look at the thrashing man. Sylvia pulls her gun and shoots the thief in the shoulder, sending him sprawling against the wall. He drops his gun and slides to his knees and looks at Sylvia, an expression of pained surprise on his face.

“What the fuck, Syl?” he says. He grasps the wound on his shoulder. Blood spills between his fingers in thick rivulets.

She doesn’t reply. Instead she keeps the gun aimed on Rossini’s face as she crosses to him and retrieves his weapon from the floor. She slips it into her pocket and walks to the safe. On the floor is Rossini’s canvas bag. Sylvia retrieves it and waves the sack in the air until it’s opened. Without looking at the thief, she pulls the meager amount of cash into the bag and then scoops the Pellis Icons on top of the bills. The disappointing void of the safe still feels wrong to her, and she convinces herself that Louis must have kept more. She reaches in and presses against the back wall, expecting a panel to pop free. She does this on every shelf, but the back of the safe is solid and hides no additional treasures. She gives the empty shelves a final look and then turns to leave.

In the hall, the dead man’s convulsions have stopped, and she is grateful for this, but Rossini has crawled away. He no longer sits by the door. Sylvia approaches the hall cautiously, gun raised, fingers tensed and ready to fire. The weapon trembles in her hand. When she reaches the threshold, she is shocked to see the condition of the body in the hall.

It isn’t Louis at all. Sylvia recognizes the corpse’s face, and it belongs to a low-level bookie who went by the name of Tap. His cheeks are red as if deeply sunburned. The collar of his dress shirt is laid wide, and his tie has been torn away and lies across the expensive carpet like a crimson tongue. Blood continues to seep from the two well-placed holes Rossini shot in the man’s chest. Sylvia absorbs this oddity and wonders how she could have mistaken this insignificant creep for Louis Towne.

A crash in the hallway sends her back into the den. Glass shatters, and a great weight hits the floor. Sylvia puts the canvas sack and her purse down and holds the gun in both hands, trying unsuccessfully to steady the weapon, which suddenly feels as heavy as a block of lead. A quieter thump comes from the hallway, and Sylvia swallows a moan.

Movement in the doorway causes Sylvia to fire two shots in rapid succession, but the flashing motion is too brief, like a flag whipping in a sudden breeze. Her bullets punch through the wall.

Then a man steps into view. Sylvia cannot fire her weapon; the abomination in the doorway makes no sense and the sight of it puts a clamp on her mind, rendering her incapable of comprehension or action.

The body is Rossini’s. He is unstable, rocking from foot to foot. One broad hand clutches the door frame for support; the other slaps at a sheathed knife hooked to his belt. He wears Louis Towne’s face like a mask. The cheeks are shiny, stretched tightly over the thief’s features, with tiny ears jutting from the side of the massive head. The rest of Louis’s skin, a sheet of bloodless flesh the color of bacon fat, hangs from Rossini’s chin like an untied butcher’s apron and swings as the thief rocks from side to side. Bony thorns ring the dangling sheet of skin like teeth. The flesh billows and slaps against the thief’s body, attempting to gain greater purchase, but it seems unable to secure itself to the fabric. Sylvia takes in every detail of the unnatural union before her and then repeats the process in a futile attempt to understand it.

Louis’s lips move and a hoarse mumble escapes Rossini’s throat. The attempt is made again. “Put them back,” come the words, though Sylvia can’t be certain who has made the request.

The thief finally frees the knife from its sheath at his belt, and Sylvia waits breathlessly for him to carve through Louis’s flapping skin. Instead, the thief cocks back his arm and hurls the blade at Sylvia.

It strikes her high on the right breast, sending her stumbling back. The air is knocked from her body, and she nearly drops her gun, but the attack brings clarity, supersedes the paralyzing awe. Desperate to keep her footing, Sylvia regains her balance and assumes a firing stance with the gun clamped in her hands, and she squeezes the trigger. A hole punches in the flapping belly of Louis’s skin and passes through to rip its way into Rossini’s gut. She squeezes again and again, every shot hitting home. The thief stumbles back to the corridor wall and slides to the carpet. Sylvia continues firing, and her final bullet pierces Louis Towne’s forehead and that of the man who wears him.

She drops to her knees and sobs. Grasping the hilt of the knife, she pulls it from her chest, and it feels like she’s ripping a bone from her body. She nearly faints from the sight of so much blood following the blade from the wound, and though she manages to remain conscious, her head spins with sickening speed. She collapses to the side and grinds her teeth against the pain, and she closes her eyes and inhales shallowly because she needs oxygen but the jabbing pain cuts off her respiration in midbreath. Sweat slathers her brow, chilling it. Her body shivers from the cold. She thinks if she can just rest for a few minutes, she will conquer the pain and make her escape. People had survived worse. A moment to recover from the shock and then downstairs and out the door and into Rossini’s car. At the emergency room she will make up a story about muggers, and the doctor will tell her she’s lucky to be alive, and she’ll thank him before painkillers carry her into comfortable sleep.

But she is not at the hospital yet, and she doesn’t feel safe. Sylvia fights to open her eyes.

Louis Towne’s skin slides over the carpet toward her. His head is raised like the hood of a cobra and Sylvia sees Mickey Rossini’s bloodstained corpse through the bullet holes and the empty eye sockets of the face.

Sylvia cries out and a burst of adrenaline provides sufficient fuel for her to rise to her knees. The knife is within her reach and she snatches it up, as the mask of Louis’s face bears down on her. Sylvia strikes out. The blade slices into Louis’s cheek, and she guides the weapon down with all of her force, nailing the flesh to the floor, and refusing to allow Louis to escape again, Sylvia crawls forward and kneels on the spongy sheet. She yanks the blade free, sending bolts of agony across her chest, and begins to slash at the rippling tissues. Chunks of skin come free and wriggle about on the floor like worms dropped on an electrified plate, and Sylvia slices and stabs and tears until Louis Towne’s remains amount to nothing more than a confetti of jittering meat.

Sylvia drops the knife and looks around the room, alert for any new threat that might target her, and her gaze lands on the canvas sack, and she considers what Rossini has told her about the mastery of flesh, and then she looks to the trembling tissue about her for confirmation. She crawls to the bag and empties its contents. In desperation she gathers up the ugly iron icons and holds them tightly in her hands, clutches them to her breast. She lies down on the carpet and lets her eyes close, and falls unconscious. She dies twenty minutes later.

——

I met Sylvia Newman some hours after her death. Louis had told me about the woman—went on in some detail about their affair—but to the best of my knowledge, I’d never set eyes on her before.

Needled by annoyance, I went to his house that morning to pick up the documents his wife had failed to messenger me before leaving for Miami, and upon finding the alarm system deactivated, decided to search the house for signs of burglary. Upstairs, I was met by the sight of Mickey Rossini sitting upright with seven holes in his body. Manny “Tap” Tappert lay on his back with two holes in his chest and a startled expression on his face. But the worst sight awaited me in Louis’s den. In the center of the room was a shifting mass that resembled a loose congregation of mealworms writhing excitedly, and next to this grotesque display was a skinless corpse.

Even partially clad in a black jacket and slacks, it seemed too small, too delicate to have been the remains of an adult. Eyes whiter than paper lay nestled in a field of deep red. Here and there, ridges of white bone showed through the crimson tissue of muscle and ligament. My stomach clenched, wondering who could perform such an atrocity on another human being and wondering what a victim might do to deserve such a desecration.

While I was absorbed by the grotesquerie, what I thought was a hood dropped over my head, startling me back, but my reflexes were no match for Sylvia. She must have been waiting on the ceiling, descending upon me as I stood rapt by the repulsive scene. Her face stretched over mine, and the thorny teeth ringing her skin bit into the back of my head like fingernails working their way into an orange rind. As the skin pulled across my brow and chin and those thorns tore their way in, her memories began flooding me, drowning my own thoughts with scenes from this woman’s life:

Sylvia Newman strolls along the boulevard.

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Sylvia is dead but alive in her skin, which she feels ripping like fabric, peeling in a single sheet from her muscles and bones.

A thousand such scenes play simultaneously in my mind. Amid this torrent of information I was lost: I was Sylvia.

Overwhelmed, I ceased what little struggles I’d engaged in and resigned myself to this mental infestation, viewing the torments and triumphs and carnal excesses that had molded Sylvia Newman. The skin of her neck stretched tightly around my throat, restricting my breath, and the tiny bones punctured the nape of my neck and scraped across my spine, and more information flooded in, so dense it cascaded through my head like photographs printed on raindrops.

When this downpour ceased, I remained standing in Louis Towne’s study. My clothes had been removed and Sylvia busied herself, stretching and wrapping and securing her flesh over mine. Her skin buckled my knees, and we stumbled forward and I grasped the drape for support, but fell nonetheless. The curtain rod snapped under my weight, bringing the window treatment down in a wave. We scurried back on my hands and knees, and then, with great effort, we regained our footing and stood, only to be startled by the sight greeting us.

With night as a backdrop, the window had become a perfect mirror. Sylvia’s face, still thick with makeup, had fused to mine; her full red lips formed a grotesque O around my own mouth. Her breasts sagged emptily against the skin of her stomach, which shined from such tension it looked as though it might rip at any moment, and the tip of my penis showed through the labial lips between her legs. It was this last that so enthralled me. Sylvia must have sensed my fascination because the skin there began to ripple and pull, caressing the head of my cock until it began to grow, and soon a library of erotic images—Towne fucking her and Rossini fucking her and Tocci and a dozen others—crowded my awestruck mind.

The rippling and pulling intensified. The reflection of this unnatural intercourse filled my eyes as I watched her skin creep along my shaft and then drag backward revealing the entirety of my erection. Soon I became aware of another sensation—I felt what Sylvia felt, an intense tingling in the lips of skin that eagerly stroked my cock. She willed my hands to her nipples, forced them to squeeze and pinch, dragging the empty sacks of her breasts away from our body. Sparks of pleasure shot like dry lightning through a desert, alighting the tissues and skipping off to some equally sensitive destination. The act repulsed me, and it excited me. Climax burst on us so quickly I cried out, or she did.

After, we stood breathless, staring at ourselves in the window. She spoke to me, moving my lips and forcing air from my lungs through the vocal cords and over my tongue.

“We’re very good together,” she said. “We can accomplish so much.”

I asked her what it was she hoped to accomplish, and she showed me the face of a bucktoothed man named Toady. His expression was tense and hateful. He drew back his fist and punched us in the cheek, and Sylvia’s loathing of the cretin became mine.

“There are others,” she said. “So many others. All we need are the icons.”

“And each other,” I said.

“Of course.”

——

We stand at the window, observing the crude bumps and tightly stretched planes of skin, and we whisper back and forth—plans and dreams and longings so deep we have never spoken them aloud to another soul. The words spill quietly from my lips and I observe their formation in the pane, and in one heart-stopping moment we fall silent.

I find us so beautiful I can’t speak another word.

——

Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary Award– and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the novels Stained, Damage, and The Dust of Wonderland, and the short-story collection In the Closet, under the Bed. In addition to numerous magazines, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge, Dead Set, Horror Library Volume 4, and Inferno, among others. Current and forthcoming titles include the novellas The Black Sun Set, Crisis, and Focus (cowritten with Nate Southard). His latest novel, The German, was released by Lethe Press in April 2011.

| BUT FOR SCARS |

Tom Piccirilli

—

I woke up at four a.m. to a whistling, icy draft and found a teenage girl downstairs feeding my goldfish, Cecil. She’d been at it for a while. The box of fish food was empty, Cecil was dead, and she was scratching at her temple with an S&W popgun .22.

October rain slid against the living-room windows and brown, wet leaves clung thickly to the bottom of the open front door. There was a rusted key in the lock and an overturned rock at the foot of the porch steps. I hadn’t known about the hiding spot. I shut the door.

Emily Wright didn’t glance up.

I knew who she was even though I hadn’t seen her in six years. The chubby little girl had turned a delicate sixteen, with the pale and inviting face of a freshly sculpted young woman. Her once-vibrant blue eyes had grown smoky and muted. Seams around her mouth added a kind of evocative maturity that was already provocative. Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she’d be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn’t aged well.

She looked a lot like her mother, without the cruel lips and shamelessness.

I shivered at the bottom of the staircase, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only baggy sweatpants. Wisps of my breath curled through the air. I checked the thermostat. Emily had turned off the heat. I snapped it back on.

She wore wet Sojourner State pajamas and the tatters of ward slippers. Her feet were mucked with grime. The hospital was eight miles out of town, and she looked like she’d walked the whole way here in the rain. She kept tapping the empty box of fish food against the side of the aquarium with her left hand. In her right she now held the .22 loosely in her lap.

Her lips moved but she made no sound. She nodded, shook her head, and even shrugged as if deep in conversation.

I’d seen a few unstable teens in my time. I’d been one myself. I’d hit a bad patch during puberty after my parents died, and skidded into the wall. I’d stolen cars and driven all over the state trying to escape myself. I’d climbed water towers out of my head and broke into houses just to page through photo albums and pretend I was a part of the family. They used to find me curled under the blankets, holding dolls, wasted on crank and muttering, “Mommy.”

I was shopped around from one foster family to the next until they finally packed me off to the juvie detention wing of Sojourner State Psychiatric Facility. I spent two years in hell fighting my way out of gang rapes and forced body modification with broken razor blades. You had to be on your toes to avoid hydrotherapy, where more than a few kids drowned. The orderlies used to stage ward matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bipolars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives. The only reason I ever got my shit together was because I possessed an unholy amount of survival instinct that I never realized I had.

Cecil floated in a tight circle on his side. Emily had finally put down the empty box and was dangling her fingers in the water, making ripples that kept Cecil chugging along. The hand in her lap danced nervously, the .22 swaying left and right, angled at my chest. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was holding it.

“You’ve got scars,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Where’d you get them?”

“Lots of places.”

“Like where?”

“In juvie detention, alley fights, poker games gone sour.”

“They’re cool.”

Mottled pink and white scars, some of them as thick as a finger, might be considered a lot of things, but I’d never found them to be cool. I felt self-conscious being half-naked in front of this kid. I was also freezing. I went to the closet and put on a sweatshirt. When I turned back to her the gun had quit prancing and the barrel was pointed in the direction of my belly.

I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.

“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.

I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”

“My parents were murdered in this house.”

“I know.”

“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”

I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”

No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ronnie, eight times. Katy’s face had been beaten in so badly that she’d choked on her own broken teeth before being gutted. Ron had been a towering, powerful man, but his hamstrings had been cut, along with the tendons in his forearms and wrists, so that he’d been left crawling on his belly in his own filth until he and his wife had died down there in the dark in the root cellar together.

I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.

She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”

She sounded like John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—the realtor who’d sold me the place.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of house.”

She removed her hand from the aquarium, and Cecil slowly quit spinning. She wiped her fingers on my couch and I felt an odd flush of anger. “But you live here alone.”

“I was engaged when I bought the place.”

“But you never got married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

The muscles in the hinges of my jaw bunched. “She didn’t love me.”

“How do you know?”

“I found out.”

I knew that she’d been unfaithful to me. I knew that she’d been sleeping with a number of men in town. Including John Acton. While he was showing me the half-finished attic, scuffing the rat droppings aside while he shunted the flashlight beam across the wide, empty expanse, I thought about breaking his collarbone. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. She kept on stepping out, and Acton still worked the deal for me. Realtors, they never let anything get in the way of going to contract.

“Emily, you need to go back.”

“I’m home,” she said, and her voice lightened a bit. “Did you know my parents?”

“Yes. Everyone in town knew them.”

She nodded and smiled like she was remembering good times. I couldn’t imagine that she’d had many of them with Ron and Katy. “Did you work with them?”

“I was what was known as a ‘friend of the club.’ ”

“So you’re a criminal.”

Ronnie Wright had been the leader of the Brothers of Bedlam, the local motorcycle club. Mostly they’d controlled chop shops, run guns, and grown and distributed high-quality weed. That’s how it was at first. After the money started to pour in, so did trouble from the other clubs, crank dealers, syndicates, and greedy cops. More than a few of my scars had come from helping Ron out of jams.

Rain throbbed against the windows, sounding like small hands tapping at the glass, seeking attention. The breeze picked up and the timbers in the attic groaned and settled. The girl glanced at the ceiling like she thought her parents might be showering, getting ready to come down and sit with her.

She asked, “Tell me. Did you love or hate the brotherhood? Everybody in this town seems to have felt one way or the other.”

“I went back and forth.”

That got a giggle from her. It wasn’t a happy teenage-girl laugh but something that sounded like it was coming from an old woman getting ready for the inevitable lonely end. Emily’s chin came up, and she eyed me coolly. “Did you ever fuck my mother?”

I had. A lot. But most guys had. A lot.

I didn’t answer. I held my hand out. “Give me the gun.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

“Who are you going to shoot?”

“The person or people who murdered my parents.”

By implication that meant she figured I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how she’d come to that conclusion, but I was glad regardless.

“Where did you get the piece, Emily?”

She ignored the question. “It’s getting hot in here. It’s hard to breathe. I like it cold.”

“We have to get you back now.”

She met my eyes. The anguish I saw there was something I knew well. The house was still freezing but she was sweating. I knew feverish times like this, when your head is racing and you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. The windows clattered as branches gestured and drummed, and she shifted her gaze.

Sweat dripped from her upper lip. “She talks to me, you know. My mother. She lives under my bed at the hospital. She scratches at the springs. She crawls around in circles, saying my name.”

“Give me the gun, Emily.”

She checked the revolver and reared back like it was the first time she’d seen it in a very long time. “I can’t. I need it. I’ve got to use it. I think I’m going to kill someone.”

“Who?”

“I’m not sure.”

A scraping noise broke from the attic, followed by the skittering sounds of scampering feet, as if children were playing hide-and-seek.

“You’ve got rats in your walls,” she said.

“They’re squirrels,” I told her. “I got rid of the rats a long time ago.”

“If you say so.”

My cell phone was on my nightstand. “Emily, I’m going upstairs for a minute, okay? I just want to get my phone. We need to call the hospital.”

“I’ve been there for six years. I’ll be there the rest of my life if they have their way. They can’t help me. But my mother said you might be able to.”

Every time she mentioned her mother I flashed on Katy’s face: the dark burning-ember eyes, the arrogant grin. I was cold but a creeping warmth worked through my chest as I thought of her body. I heard her voice in my ear, telling me to be rougher, to leave marks. I would try to kiss her neck, and she’d huff in frustration and rake my chest and tear at my back. Two of my worst scars were from her gouges.

Emily was right about the doctors at Sojourner never being able to help her. Hospitals fed on the ill, making them sicker, draining their lives and will to leave. She’d grown up in the facility, had become a part of it, lived in its system like so much blood in its veins. If you couldn’t break out within a year or two, you never would.

The girl seemed lost in reflection, her eyes flitting from the root-cellar door to the staircase to the window. Her lips moved. I saw her mouth the word “Mommy.” It’s the word most of us would die with in our throats. I didn’t want to leave Emily alone down here in case she decided to run again, but I didn’t want to brace her and try to force her to give up the gun. I figured I could grab my phone, make the call, and return before she fully realized I’d been gone.

I moved to the staircase and took the steps three at a time. I turned into my bedroom and grabbed my cell and wondered who I should dial. Sending her back to Sojourner would be sending her back to hell. I started to tap out Dell’s number.

I turned and Emily was behind me, naked. I could see a trail of her clothes leading up the hall, the dirty slippers in the doorway. She was so cold that her skin was tinged with blue.

The curves were all in the right places, and she couldn’t help displaying herself for me. She stepped closer and her breasts jiggled. Her meaty thighs were soft but covered in muscle. Scars, bruises and scratches marbled her knees, belly, and back. Some marks appeared to be self-inflicted, others I couldn’t tell. I thought of the kind of self-hatred a ten-year-old girl must go through when her parents are torn from her and the natural, overwhelming grief that is somehow considered an insane thing.

She swept a hand through her hair and drew the damp bangs out of her eyes. The empowerment of her own sexuality was still a mostly unknown quality for her. She was trying to be seductive. She didn’t have to put so much effort into it.

“You can fuck me if you want,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m almost seventeen.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

It got her grinning. It was her mother’s knowing smile. She put a hand on my belly and ran it up my chest. She tightened her fist in my chest hair and drew herself even closer. She ground against my groin and got the reaction she was after. She laughed. It was her father’s laugh. Heavy, low, and full of potential violence.

“Come on,” she said. “Take me to bed.”

I could have given her a sharp backhand and probably knocked her out, but her index finger was tight against the trigger and the gun still might fire. The time I’d been shot with a .22 had been from across a poker table. I’d been hit in the thigh, and it had barely bled. Gunrunners like the brotherhood laughed at pipsqueak weapons like this, but, up close, getting hit in the face or the chest would kill you just as dead as a magnum .44.

“You want me,” she said.

She was a kid, but she was a beautiful and alluring one, and she had the added draw of being her mother’s daughter. I heard a strange, moaning lament and realized it was coming from my throat. She laughed at me again. She kissed my throat and placed the gun under my ear. It made me groan louder. I had been helpless in the hands of her mother, and now it was happening all over again. Except this time instead of a crazed, adult carnal bitch I was being manipulated by a lonely, insecure girl. A part of me cared about the difference, and a part of me didn’t. I wasn’t a good man. I’d done a lot of things that I’d one day have to pay for, but I’d never done anything like this. I waited on the edge of the razor to see which half of myself would win.

She made the choice for me. She climbed into bed and laid across the sheets, trying to bewitch me, the laughter in her throat as ugly as her mother’s. I’d made love to Katy in this room, in her and Ronnie’s bed, wasted on coke and wine, with M-16s stacked in the closet. Katy had never brought a gun to bed with her, but she did like knives. She used to dig grooves and half-moon gashes along my ribs. Afterward the sheets would look like someone had been butchered.

Even as my erection grew my stomach tumbled. I laid beside her and pulled her to me. The pistol wavered between us. She kissed my chin and attempted some dirty talk, but I shushed her and held her, and kept holding her, until a wild sob welled inside her and finally broke free. She cried for twenty minutes straight while I rubbed her back. I took the gun away from her and put it in my nightstand drawer.

“Ghosts walk these rooms,” she said.

“That’s true of every house,” I said. “Not just this one.”

“But mine are here. They have been for years. They’re with us now. I can hear my mom.”

“Emily, you—”

“Can you hear her? She’s saying thank you. For helping me. She’s under your bed right now. She says you were always the nicest one of the guys she used to fuck.”

I gripped her by her shoulders and gave her one vicious shake. “Enough of that shit, all right?”

“I need to find who killed my parents,” she said.

It was generally believed that Dell Bishop, the number-two guy of the Brothers of Bedlam, had murdered Emily’s parents in order to take over the club. No one held it against him. Ron and Katy had been branching farther and farther out, making deals with the mob, the pushers, other clubs considered to be enemies of the brotherhood. The feds caught wind of the gunrunning. They were all over town for months, questioning the civilians, but they never found any hard evidence. The chop shops were raided and marijuana crops burned. There was no connection back to the brothers, but it stirred a lot of misery. The townsfolk, who’d once considered the club to be vigilantes protecting their borders, worried that even more problems were bound to come down on them.

A lot of people believed Dell had iced Katy and Ron to ensure the future of both the town and the MC, but I never did. Dell always proclaimed his innocence, even when we were alone and drunk. He’d been loyal, bound by deed and blood. He also said that he believed he was Emily’s biological dad, and I couldn’t see him killing Katy no matter how much trouble she brought the club. I thought he loved her, the way I had, the way we all had.

“Let that go, Emily,” I whispered. “You’ve wasted enough of your life to grief. Give it up. Do whatever the doctors at Sojourner tell you to do. Play the game. Pretend if you have to. But get out. I can help you with that. I did it myself. I can show you how.”

“I can’t go back there,” she said. “Not right now. Please.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, shushing her again. I hummed to her the way I thought I remembered my mother humming to me. I held her, but the way that a friend would. It had been a long time since I’d held anyone that way.

“Can I sleep here?” she asked. “I’m tired.”

“Yes, of course.”

I watched over her for a couple of hours. The sun started to come up. It bathed her face in a rosy golden light that washed away all the distress and anxiety. She curled up under my arm and I shut my eyes.

——

The dead have a way of waking up along with you. I listened to their hisses. The weight of nightmare was still on me. I couldn’t move yet. The whispering grew louder. It might’ve been Katy’s voice. She smiled at me with a mouth full of blood as she flicked open a switchblade. I was snoring. I made an effort to rear off the bed but I couldn’t. I tried to open my eyes but I wasn’t quite there yet. I heard scratching and the ringing chimes of the box spring. I was asleep and I knew it. I snorted and sipped air. Emily spoke to me.

I’m pregnant, she said.

My eyes snapped open.

I asked, “What? What did you say?”

I checked beside me. She wasn’t there. I touched the outline of her body in the blankets. There was no warmth.

“Emily?”

I got out of bed. Her clothes were still on the floor where she’d left them. The bathroom was empty. The pistol was in my nightstand drawer where I’d put it.

I sniffed and gagged. I raised the back of my hand to cover my nose. I knew the smell. It was coming from under my bed.

I crouched down and peered underneath and saw Emily wedged there with her eyes and mouth open. She’d cut her wrists with the pocketknife I kept in an ashtray on my dresser. It hadn’t been very sharp and she’d really had to saw into herself. I counted four vertical slashes on each wrist. She’d had to start over and over as the wounds crusted. Ron and Katy’s shitty shag carpet had soaked her blood up thirstily. She’d bled out beneath me while I’d slept and dreamed of her mother.

I disturbed the scene by reaching for Emily and touching her cheek. She was still warm. She’d been dead no more than an hour.

She’d said she was pregnant. But when had she told me? It felt like she’d woken me with those words. Her lips were drawn back, not so much into a grimace as a real, true smile. She looked much happier than she had while talking with me. She seemed more lively as well. Her eyes hadn’t turned dull and hard yet. Amusement played there.

It took me a minute to get my bearings and find my cell. I called 911. When I was asked for my name it took me three tries before I could say it. I told them what had happened, gave my address, and disconnected.

I threw water on my face and regained my footing. I found her PJs and the ragged slippers and went through it all. The only thing I found of note was a small plastic purple house that looked like it belonged to a board game. I tried to imagine what significance it held for her. Did it remind her of her childhood? Was it a symbol of a perfect family and home life?

I laid on the floor and stared at the suicided girl under my bed and wondered just how I could have failed her so miserably.

——

I told the story seven times from start to finish, beginning with Cecil’s fatal overfeeding and ending when I phoned 911. I left out Emily’s attempt at seduction and my near enticement. The cops tried to shake me and couldn’t. They didn’t bother starting off acting friendly. They went straight to threats and shouted in my face and tried to get me to drink coffee so they could withhold bathroom privileges. They said they knew I’d killed Emily. They knew I’d tried to hide her body under my own bed. They knew I’d knocked off her parents and was perverted enough to move into the house afterward. They said she’d probably seen me do it and that’s why, all these years later, I’d felt the sudden burning compulsion to murder the only eyewitness.

After four hours they phoned my boss at the garage, told him about my past as a car thief, and had me fired. They got a little rough but didn’t seem to know how to go about it. One detective smacked me with a sloppy open palm. His hand was soft and smelled of aloe. Afterward, he looked like he wanted to apologize. Another cop tried to work my kidneys but he couldn’t find them. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or disgusted.

After nine hours they cut me loose. It was eight p.m. and I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in more than a day. I hadn’t even made it to the curb before I heard the roar of motorcycle engines heading up the street. I lit a cigarette and got in a nice, long drag before Dell and a half dozen of his men pulled up. He waved me over. If the brotherhood decided to play rough, they’d have no trouble working my kidneys. Their hands weren’t soft. I hesitated a moment and decided, fuck it, got on the back of his bike and held on as the pack moved as one back to the clubhouse.

——

They had warehouses all around town under false-front corporations and did most of their dirty dealings there, but they still had a nice security setup at the MC base. It was a converted barroom where they partied and schemed and got laid. It’s also where they got a little bloody when they had to. There was a back room with a stained concrete floor and a drain in the center. If it even looked like they were planning to corral me there, I was going to have to do something stupid and desperate.

Instead Dell led me to the bar while the other brothers went to shoot pool. On the far wall were photos of all the current members and all the ones who were in jail or dead. I was a little shocked to see that the dead now outnumbered the living.

Dell grabbed a bottle of Glenlivet off the top shelf and poured us each three fingers.

“Okay,” he said. “So tell me what happened.”

There was nothing inherently threatening in his attitude, but I knew better than to lie to him. I gave it to him pretty much the same way I gave it to the cops, except I also mentioned how she’d come on to me. I didn’t tell him I had nearly accepted the offer. I didn’t have to. I also didn’t tell him that I’d heard her say she was pregnant. That her voice had woken me—or Katy’s whispers had—an hour after the girl was dead.

I watched him closely. He went 220 of near-solid muscle, and his knuckles had been flattened from all the times he’d broken his hands in brawls. I couldn’t see any guns on him, but I knew he had to be packing at least two. There was no chance I’d get out alive if he decided this situation should go nuclear, but I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. I pulled the bottle closer to me and poured myself another two fingers. I kept the bottle within easy reach.

Dell said, “Thank you.”

It surprised me so much I asked, “For what?”

“For not kicking her out. For not calling the white wagon to come get her.”

A pause lengthened between us. I let it roll on and on until I felt it was time to ask, “Were you really her father?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t know. Probably not. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“It might have to her.”

“I kept in touch,” he said. “I visited her a couple times a year. Sent care packages. Cards on holidays, her birthday. It wasn’t much but it was something. I thought it was important.” He finished his drink and stared at himself in the mirror behind the bar for a minute. “Did she look in the root cellar?”

“No. At least I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know about that part of it.”

“That’s good.”

We kept drinking. The liquor was hitting me hard since I’d had no food for so long. I flashed on the idea that this might have been his intention all along, to catch me with my defenses down. Except he didn’t need me to have my defenses down. He had six men across the room who’d shotgun me to death if he gave the word.

“Where did she get the piece?” He wasn’t really asking me. “And what the hell was that about her parents under the bed?”

“She was a sick girl,” I said.

He pawed at his face and shook his head. “That image, it’s sticking with me. That she would dream that kind of stuff, man. She never told me anything like that. I can picture her trying to drop off, awake in the dark, thinking her parents were whispering under her bed. Jesus Christ, the poor kid. That fucking hospital. More than six years she was there, and this is the best they could do for her?”

The wind kicked up again. The bar rafters rasped and complained. The sound made me flinch. I finished another glass.

With my throat burning I said, “She needs me to find out who did it.”

As soon as it was out I knew I’d made a mistake. I spoke in the present tense. It was stupid. I sounded a little unhinged. The MC had more than enough crazy to go around; Dell didn’t need even more. But I couldn’t seem to stop. “I failed her. That’s going to hang with me unless I do something about it.”

“It’s not your burden.”

“I think it is.”

His heavy brow knit into a frown. “You’re not gonna find an answer. I’ve been trying for years and I haven’t found it. You think I haven’t looked into it? Just to clear my name?”

“Was that important to you?”

“It was to the brotherhood. I didn’t want any doubts. I couldn’t have my men thinking I would go rogue and kill our leader, even if it was for the good of the MC. It still crosses me up to this day. The original members, they forget what Ron and Katy were like at the time, the kind of trouble they hammered down on us. They just remember how much money he brought in and how good she could suck dick.”

He didn’t know about Emily being pregnant. He wouldn’t until the autopsy results came back. Then he’d understand why I was so adamant on trying to help her, and he’d be pissed at me for not telling him the whole truth. My gut clenched in expectation for a real beating, but that was for later.

“You’re not going to find an answer,” he repeated. “I don’t think there is one.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

The bottle was empty. Dell staggered to his feet, crossed behind the bar, and dug around on the shelf until he found a bottle of Glenfiddich. “You know the kind of life the brotherhood lives. Running guns, hijacking trucks, giving kickbacks to the cops, fighting the wops and the wetbacks and the Koreans and the skinheads. We have a lot of enemies. Ron brought most of that down on us before we managed to contain it. Katy, she had her own bad wiring. She screwed a lot of guys, right? There is no answer because it’s too small to see. It’s . . .” He had to steel himself to say the word properly.

“. . . inconsequential. Some greaser put out the call on them, or some cop who wanted more of a cut, or maybe some white-collar citizen blew his gasket.”

“Ron’s hamstrings were cut. Katy’s face was bashed to pieces. What average citizen is going to do that? Has the capacity for doing that?”

“Anyone,” Dell said, “is capable of anything, if they hate somebody enough. Ron was probably drunk, as usual, and couldn’t fight back. Katy zonked on crank. Anyone could have done it.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe one of the brothers had a beef. It’s been six years. You know how many of us are in the ground right along beside them now? More than a dozen. Whoever did it had their reasons, and we’ll never know what they were. There are questions we’ll never know the answer to.”

I thought he was right. I glanced at the photos of the brothers on the wall. A lot of them were on death row or dying of emphysema or cancer or failing livers or kidneys. Ron and Katy lived the MC life and died because of it. I knew I’d never find out who had murdered them. Not only had too much time passed, but the truth was that I really didn’t give a shit about them.

But I felt I owed Emily something. I had never said I would help her, and I should’ve. It might have made all the difference.

——

Dell let me take one of the MC’s drop cars home. It would have clean plates and a clean registration, but if they ever needed to abandon it for whatever reason, it couldn’t be traced back to the brotherhood. I drove to an all-night diner, wolfed down a couple of burgers and a jug of coffee, and stared out the plate-glass window up the highway in the direction of Sojourner.

The story of Emily’s escape and suicide hadn’t broken nationwide yet, but it would by morning. It would stir up all the bad news about Katy and Ron’s unsolved murder, and the cops would be buzzing like hornets while trying to dodge news crews. The hospital directors and chairpersons would be holed up in an all-night board meeting someplace. They’d be gearing up for reporters and potential lawsuits. They’d be plotting with attorneys for hours, shoring up their stories, preparing their pretexts. In another day or two nobody would be able to break through their line of defense. I had to go in now.

I drove over to Sojourner and parked off one of the back roads at the far side of the hospital, along a wide field bordered by the high safety fence. I walked along the fence until I came to a spot where the links had been cut low to the ground so it could be peeled up a few inches and someone could crawl through. No matter how many times they repaired it there’d always be a place like this somewhere along the perimeter. Orderlies brought in contraband this way. I was certain it was how Emily Wright had managed to escape the ward. I’d seen the scratches along her back from the loose fence wire.

I’d made a break from Sojourner this way myself many years ago. Standing here now, staring up at the building with its hundreds of cube windows, its harsh white lights burning across time and memory, knowing the kinds of things that went on in there, a sudden rush of rage surged through my chest. I crawled under the fencing and made my way to the employee exit.

I crept along the side of the building, just out of range of the bright security lights. I stood in the shadows and waited. Twenty minutes later an orderly stepped out the door, propped it open with a folding chair, leaned against the jamb, and lit a joint. You could see why they’d hired him. He was tall and massive, with thick arms and wrists covered in twisting black veins. I kept hoping he’d sit and relax, but he wouldn’t. He just smoked his J and stared out at the night looking mean.

Had he been the one? Had he been the one who had crept into bed with her one night and climbed on top of her while she stared over his shoulder and listened to her mother and father talking to her from the other end of hell?

I moved fast, came up on him from the left and hooked him twice under the heart. It was like punching welded steel plating. His breath exploded from his lungs and the sweet scent of marijuana blew into my face. He bounced off the jamb and recovered almost instantly. This wasn’t going to be easy. I worked his short ribs with rapid-fire jabs. He said, “The fuck . . . ?” and swept out one of those tremendous fists. I ducked and he tried again. I dodged and brought a roundhouse up from my knees directly onto the point of his chin. It rocked him. He threw his arms out like he was trying to keep balance on a high wire. It didn’t help. He fell over on his ass with a puzzled expression. He grunted a threat and tried to lumber to his feet. I kicked him once in the throat and twice in the face, and he was out.

I checked his belt and found his keys, then I stepped inside and shut the door.

The sound of the lock engaging put the shits up me. I walked along the empty halls, glancing into the community day room, the group-discussion room, the work room. I could smell the clay they were using to make ashtrays and potholders. The floorboards were thick with shreds of wicker from their weaving of baskets and mats. It’s really what they gave the lunatics to do in order to keep their hands busy.

I unlocked each security door I came to and slid through. Normally there would be three other orderlies on duty, a couple of night nurses, maybe a doctor. I suspected the staff would be light tonight. I eased up the hall and peered around the corner at the nurse’s station. I could hear the soft, fast padding of footsteps far up the corridor. Sounded like a young, heavy woman with an austere purpose. She’d be checking rooms and giving out midnight medication and sedatives to whoever needed it. I stepped toward the nurse’s station thinking maybe I’d get lucky and have time to check through their computer files. I was almost there when an orderly stepped out of the men’s room and turned towards me.

I didn’t give him time to react. I clutched the heavy key ring tightly in my fist and broke his nose. He doubled over, gagging on blood, and I swept his feet out from under him. He went down hard but not hard enough to quit struggling. I gripped him by his hair and banged his head twice on the tile floor until his eyes rolled back into his skull. I dragged him into the nurse’s station and stuffed him halfway behind a filing cabinet.

There were only five possibilities, so far as I could see, of who might have gotten Emily pregnant. A doctor, an orderly, some other staff member, a patient, or a visitor.

The computer system was simple. I did a search and came up with Emily’s file. I went through her list of visitors. There hadn’t been any in six months. Before that, on her birthday, Dell had signed in. He stayed for twenty minutes. I went back further. He’d done the same thing last year, and the year before.

I kept scrolling through the pages reading reports. It all seemed like the same thing. Emily would have moments of lucidity, then fall back into a dissociative state where she was delusional. She’d escaped once before, three months ago, and they put her on a suicide watch.

They tried some serious drugs on her. I thought of her frail frame with all those chemicals punching through her veins. I reached down and gripped the edge of the desk and tightened my hold, the impotent fury heavy in me.

The nurse stepped back in. She had a face like an iron frying pan and arms nearly as thick as mine. She rushed over to me with her hands up like she wanted to box. I jumped to my feet and got in her face. She didn’t intimidate easily and raised her chin to meet me.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

I said, “Someone who spent some time here, which means you definitely shouldn’t fuck with me.”

“I’m calling security.”

I blocked her as she went for the phone. “The two orderlies covering the ward tonight are sleeping. Let’s leave them that way, right?”

Her eyes darted to the pair of feet jutting from behind the filing cabinet.

Even that didn’t spook her much. Everyone who worked at Sojourner was hard. “What do you want?”

“I want to know about Emily Wright.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t give out any information. Leave now, or I’ll call the police.”

I looked at her. She held my gaze for thirty seconds and then turned aside. I chucked her under the chin and stared deep into her face. “You know she’s dead, don’t you? They told you that. A hurricane of shit is about to sweep through this place. I can either make it better or worse. Now, show me her room.”

She led me down the twining corridors, past the dwellings of the other patients. Some would be on the floor lying in shredded sheets like nests. Others managed to sleep standing up. I listened in and heard the same kind of nightly whines, whimpers, cries, chatter, and grousing that I’d listened to when I’d been locked up here.

“This is her room,” the nurse said.

It was smaller than a jail cell. I knew. I’d lived in both. This was worse. I went through her two-drawer dresser and checked her clothing. What they called “visitor’s-day wear.” You had to put on a show for the family or anybody else who came by. The rest of the time you walked around in loose-fitting garments, pajamas or sweats or scrubs or nighties. I didn’t find anything. I went through her personal effects. She didn’t have many. Some state-made jewelry, makeup, brushes, hair clips, toothbrush. I checked under her pillow and went through the blankets.

“Check under the bed,” I told the nurse.

“Why?”

I kept my voice steady. “Just do it, all right?”

“Why don’t you?”

I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and got up close and braced her. “Remember what I said about not fucking with me, lady?”

She got on her hands and knees and peered under the bed. “There’s nothing here.”

When she stood again I showed her the tiny purple plastic house. “This looks like it goes to a board game. Any idea what?”

“No, I’ve never seen that before.”

“Was she close to any of the other patients?”

“No.”

I reared on her. “Think for a goddamn minute before you answer, right? Now, mull it over. Was she close to anyone?”

“I swear, she wasn’t.”

“Any sexual deviants in this wing? Masturbators? Rapists? Flashers, perverts, pedophiles?”

“No. No mental abnormalities or sexual proclivities of that sort. They’re kept in the C wing, where there’s more security. We don’t allow those patients to mix with the rest. Especially not with young girls like Emily.”

“Okay. Any escapees in the last few months?”

She hesitated. “No, not in years.”

“Before her, you mean. She cut out three months ago.”

“Yes, before her.”

“How’d she get out?”

“We don’t know. Maybe the same way you got in.”

I tightened one fist on the keys and the other on the little house. “Was there someone who could have had a sexual relationship with her? A staff member? One of these no-neck attendant fuckers?”

“She was only sixteen.”

“I know how old she was. Answer the question.”

“No. We have strict protocol. There are always several orderlies on hand, and nurses, and doctors. Tonight is—”

“Right, a special case.” I looked through the little cube window of Emily’s cell. You could barely see the glimmer of the moon. “She had a gun with her. Any idea where she could have gotten it?”

“No, none at all.”

“Who was her primary therapist?”

“Dr. Wilkins.”

I remembered that prick. He was old school. A sucker for hydrotherapy back in the day who used to keep the patients in lukewarm bathtubs with canvas covers to force us to stay down. He was the only psychiatrist still performing shock treatment anywhere in the country. I wondered if he was still at it. I wondered how many times Emily had had her pubescent brain singed.

“Is Wilkins here?”

“No.”

He didn’t know how lucky he was. The mood I was in, I wasn’t sure what I might do to him.

I sat on Emily’s bed and laid back and thought about what it might have been like for her to imagine her parents under her small bed, scratching and whispering. I could see Emily doing the same kind of thing that I had done in my time. Curling up in a ball and begging for Mommy.

I walked out past the nurse and let her go rushing back to her station where she’d hit the panic button and get the cops down here. Guards from other wards and wings would come running, but I’d be gone by the time anyone got close.

I walked the halls, unlocked the security doors as I came to them, and slipped out the back door past the orderly I’d knocked out. He was starting to come around. I stepped past him and stuck to the shadows. More lights flashed on across the grounds but I knew my way around them. I made my way back to Dell’s drop car, got in, and drove towards town.

I’d been stupid. I should’ve started with the thing that had caught my attention right at the beginning, a moment after I set eyes on Cecil’s corpse.

The popgun .22.

——

Dell had friends of the club inside the police department. He’d have the autopsy report and paperwork on the gun probably before the sheriff did. I showed up at the clubhouse for three days straight waiting for him to get the call.

When it came I was having a beer with him in the clubhouse, watching the Friday-night town girls playing strip nine-ball with a couple of the brothers.

Dell answered his cell. I watched his eyes darken and knew he was getting the word. His responses were terse. He disconnected. He said nothing for a long time.

“Was she pregnant?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “How’d you know? Did she tell you?”

“How far along?”

“Three months.”

It was time to tell him about my visit to the ward. “She had no visitors, not since the last time you showed up on her birthday. But she slipped out of Sojourner at least once that they knew about. Three months ago. She could have gotten out plenty of other times before she showed up at my place.”

I watched him. He sipped his beer and stared into the scarred wood of the bar top. His blunt features hardened and twitched through a few subtle expressions before his face became stony again.

“She did, didn’t she, Dell? She came to see you.”

He chuckled sadly but with some relief. He wanted to talk about it. “Kid walked here. Can you believe that? About a month ago. Shows up at two in the morning, barefoot and bleeding. She tried the same thing on me that she tried with you.” He gripped his beer mug so hard that he put a hairline crack in it.

“It’s why you thanked me,” I said. “You thanked me for not sending her back. Is it because you did?”

The crack grew larger and beer started to seep out of the side of the mug. “I was ashamed. She laid in the back like one of our weekend whores and tried to make me. And I watched her get undressed, man. Christ, she looked just like Katy. I watched her for longer than I should have before I finally told her no. And then I proved what a worthless piece of shit I am. I drove her back to the hospital. Some of those fucking orderlies buy crank from us, and I shelled out some cash and had her slipped inside again. I’ve heard stories of what goes on there, and I sent her right back to that asylum.”

I nodded and couldn’t seem to stop. It was like my neck muscles had been cut. My heart slammed at my ribs. This prick had always said he thought he was her father, but when she came to him for help he dodged his responsibility. He’d never know just what he’d done. Unless he’d been inside, he’d never realize.

“Did you give her the gun?” I asked.

“No.”

We continued to drink. I decided that Dell and I would have to throw down one of these nights.

“If she came to see us she might’ve gone to visit others,” I said. “She must’ve met with someone three months ago. Who?”

“Whoever he is,” Dell said, “he’s dead.”

I kept running names and faces of my neighbors through my head. Who would a disturbed teenage girl listening to the veil-choked whispers of her dead parents go to in order to find out who killed them? Who else would she think might help her? Who had fallen off the razor’s edge into bed with her?

“You think it might be one of yours?” I asked. “The .22?”

“Our friend in the sheriff’s department said the serial numbers were filed and burned out with acid. That probably makes it one of mine.”

“You sell any recently?”

“The last six months?” He scoffed. “Dozens. They’re not worth shit to us. They’re not worth shit to anybody. You know that. No firepower.”

I nodded. “Unless you were going to swallow the barrel. She probably stole it from him.”

“So did she get it from him three months ago? Could she have hidden it that long?”

“No,” I said.

I’d failed again. I was being stupid, again. I feared I’d never smarten up no matter what was on the line. I was still going at this all wrong.

“She got it from him right before she came to see me. She stopped at his place first.”

I held up the little plastic purple house that looked like it belonged to a board game. I showed it to Dell.

“You ever seen something like this before?”

He had. He had a lot of contacts. He was involved with a lot of crooked deals and a few legit ones. He told me he’d seen this in a shop window on Main Street. It went along with a raffle. You fill out the paperwork and your name goes into a box for a drawing. He couldn’t remember what you won and he couldn’t remember the name of the business.

It didn’t matter. I thought I knew. I drove up Main Street until I found the right storefront. I parked and walked around back to the separate apartment behind the shop. Two windows bordered the back door. One to the left and one to the right. The left was new, with a plastic-frame screen instead of wood like the others.

Emily hadn’t known about any secret key stashed under a rock in the family yard. She’d visited here three months ago and smashed a window in. She’d come back before seeing me and gotten the gun. This is where she’d gotten the little house. It’s where she found a small gun and thought its power might help her to discover the answer to the question that haunted and tainted her life. It’s where she fell into bed with a man and whispered in his ear that her dead mother was asking for his help. It’s where the father of her baby lived.

——

I’d never been much of a burglar but I didn’t have to be. The new window was open. I slid it open and climbed inside.

John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—lay naked in his bathtub with an X-Acto blade pressed to his wrists. He glanced up at me as I entered but said nothing. Emily’s death had given him the idea. There were hesitation cuts all up and down his forearms. It looked like he’d been trying to slash his wrists for days, but he wasn’t nearly as strong or single-minded as she had been.

He let the blade slip from his fingers and started to cry.

I closed the toilet lid and sat and listened to him weep. I lit a cigarette and smoked and stared at him, noting the half-moon scars on his chest and back made by a fierce woman who liked to cause her men to bleed.

He bawled like a colicky newborn. I couldn’t take the sound anymore. I stood and walked around his apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. Old takeout-food containers littered the kitchen table and counter. A sweat-stained pillow and some balled blankets at the foot of the couch showed me where he’d been sleeping. His soiled bed still bore the signs of feverish lovemaking from months ago.

I thought about what could have led Emily here. I wondered how she had known John Acton had been one of her mother’s lovers. It couldn’t have been difficult. The ward is full of men who mutter and hiss about the women who had destroyed them.

I wondered how many of Katy’s lovers stalked the white halls of Sojourner in their slippers, and hid themselves away in the corners of the work room fondling wet clay like they were still touching her body.

I stood in the bathroom doorway.

“What were you going to do with the .22, John? Kill yourself?”

He responded with a whisper.

I leaned in. “What?”

“I want to die,” he whimpered, “but she won’t let me. They’re under my bed—”

“Stop it.”

“—right now. All three of them. The whole family. Look if you don’t believe me. Go look!”

My pulse beat furiously in my wrists. My hands became fists. I wanted to wreck something. I wanted to hurt someone. An icy shiver worked through me and I had to cross my arms over my chest to keep from shuddering. “Did you do it, John? Did you murder Katy and Ron?”

His features shifted as if invisible thumbs were working themselves into the muscles of his face. His eyes widened as his cheeks sagged. “Christ, no! Don’t you understand? I loved her! I always loved her! I still love her! Nothing else works. No other woman means anything to me. Why do you think I’m still alone all these years later?” His eyes found mine. “You know, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“You know because you’re marked too.”

“Yes.”

“You know because you’re exactly the same way! You’re just like me!”

I didn’t know what to do with him. The cops could do a DNA test to discover he was the father, but there wasn’t enough evidence to lead them from there to here. I could kill him but there didn’t seem to be much point. He was either going to eventually dig into his wrists deep enough to do the job right or he’d wind up in Sojourner himself.

But I had to do something with my hands. I worked him over until his nose was broken and he was spitting teeth, but watching his blood pour off his chin onto the dirty tile floor did nothing to empty me of the rage, sorrow, and fear that continued to swell inside me.

Because he was right. I was just like him.

——

There was too much space under my bed. My fiancйe forced me to buy a king size and never spent a night in it as my bride. She had screwed around, but it wasn’t her fault. I’d pushed her away because, deep where it counted, I hadn’t needed or wanted her as much as I’d once craved Katy Wright. Once you’ve enjoyed something so wild, vicious, and bitter, no one else could ever matter again. I’d been marked. I bore scars.

There was more than enough room for four or five or even more bodies beneath the bed. For them to lie there, contorted, swollen, black faced, and crawling over each other, mewling and brooding and conversing. I spent a lot of nights on the couch downstairs now, looking up the steps and listening to the noise of the squirrels in the attic, the wind in the trees, the soft whispers and sighs that might be angry voices or only the sound of my next anxious breath.

——

“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.” —Elbert Hubbard, Epigrams

——

Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels, including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.

| THE BLISTERS ON MY HEART |

Nate Southard

—

Shelly keeps her eyes glued to the scorched two-lane as she reaches for the radio. With frantic fingers, she twists the dial, finds Jack and Squat with a whole mess of Not-a-Damn-Thing in between. It’s the quiet radio that scares me the most. Whoever said silence is golden was a goddamn liar. Silence is terrifying, and don’t ever let nobody tell you different.

Shelly whines a split second before she hits the only pothole for miles. I brace myself, but it’s too late. The Mercury jolts up and down, and the hole in my gut tears a little, ripping a barking scream out of me. When I look down, blood weeps between my fingers. That can’t be good, not that anything good is coming down the pike.

“You okay?” she asks.

“No.”

“What do you need?”

“A . . . bed. Just get me a bed.”

Her face pinches, and she shakes her head without once tearing her eyes from the road. “If we stop—”

“I know. Just get me a bed.”

She nods, biting her lip. We both know there’s no outrunning the thing behind us. Best we can do is get ahead of it for a little while. Sometimes the small victories are just so damn hollow.

After a moment of road noise, I spot a motel on the left, a squat, dirt-caked building that would probably be ringed with buzzing neon if it were night. I point with a bloody finger. Shelly gives me another one of those nods and eases onto the brakes.

“Careful entering the lot,” I say. “Please.”

We enter the lot at a speed that wouldn’t even count as a crawl, and still my gut burns liquid fire. I hiss out my pain as tears leak from Shelly’s eyes.

“I’m okay,” I tell her. “Just park . . . by the rooms.”

“But you’re bleeding!”

“Been bleeding a long time. Blisters must’ve popped.”

“Stop it.”

“Wish I could. Just . . . Just not that easy.”

The Mercury groans to a stop, splitting a pair of parking spaces. Shelly turns to me, her face lined with worry, black hair a tangle.

“What do we do?”

I almost grin at the question, but everything hurts too much. Instead, I nod toward the first motel room. “See if it’ll open.”

“But—”

“Just check, baby. Please.”

Her teeth work that lip again, her eyes shifting toward the motel room, and then she shoulders open her door and climbs out. As she walks toward the door, pale denim sheathing legs I know all too well, I grab the flask from the dash and swallow a belt. The bourbon rips down my throat and sends warmth through my insides, drowning some of the pain. Not nearly enough, but some.

Shelly reaches the door—a number three hanging crooked on it—and tries the handle. It jiggles but won’t turn. The door to room two gives her the same deal. When she turns back to the car, her face looks panicked for a second, but then it goes hard, and I can see the resolve deep in those brown eyes. She stalks back to the car, and I know what she’s coming to get even before she opens my door and reaches over my lap. Her eyes don’t so much as tick my way as she opens the glove compartment and snatches the .38 snub nose from inside. She pops the cylinder, and I see four bullets inside. With ruthless efficiency, she slaps the pistol shut again, and then she stomps away, leaving my door wide open.

My vision dims as I watch her walk to the office, her fingers tight around the pistol and her entire body tick-ticking back and forth with each step. The fire in my belly’s getting colder, and I know that’s not a good thing. How she can walk like that in her condition beats the hell out of me.

Maybe I can just slip away, just be cold by the time Shelly returns. Then she can keep running. Then she can—

Two cracking shots snap me out of my daze. I jump, and a new jolt of pure goddamn torture kicks another scream out of me. Flashbulbs pop in my eyes. They don’t clear until Shelly tosses the gun at my feet and puts a warm palm on my face.

“Look, baby,” she says. She jangles a room key.

I force a smile. The pain makes it hard, but the whiskey helps. “Did good, babe.” I try to ignore the flecks of blood on her cheek. They almost match her lipstick.

“I love you.”

“Come here.” She pushes toward me, and I grab the back of her head, mash her warm lips to mine.

“Let’s get you inside,” she says, and then she slips an arm under my shoulder and lifts.

The world goes electric hot as she gets me on my feet. I feel another rip and press hard against my gut. Don’t want anything slipping through and slapping the concrete. Shelly gets her weight under me. She feels so small, but she supports this idiot better than any crutch.

As she walks me toward the room, telling me to watch the curb, I lift my head and look west. The sky looms black. Most folks would say it looks like a bank of fat storm clouds, but I know better. It’s something much worse—even from here, I can see the fire inside it—and it’s my fault.

Least I did it for love.

——

“Babe, you’re gonna break my heart, you keep that up.”

Shelly chuckles a little—giggling doesn’t suit her—and leans her head back, sending black curls to break like angry waves against her pale shoulders. She wriggles on top of me, sending tiny jolts of pleasure from my lap through my entire body, and my hands find her hips, make her grind a little slower so I don’t explode then and there.

We sit in a darkened corner of the club, draped in shadows, out of reach of the black lights and televisions tuned to sports, like any guy in here is watching something other than the latest dancer to take the stage.

“That sounds funny?” I ask. I hope it sounds playful, but everything that comes out of my mouth sounds cold. Just the way it goes.

“A little.” Her voice makes me picture honey, pouring slow and smooth.

“Why’s that?”

She leans in close. Her breasts press against me, and her hot breath finds my ear. She smells like soap, not the cheap, stinging perfume all the other dancers use. Somehow, I manage not to shudder.

“Because hearts don’t break, baby,” she says. “They scrape against the inside of your chest until they blister. Then they pop and leak and blister all over again until they get tired and give up.” She arches her back and sets her hips going harder.

“Speaking of popping, better slow it down.”

A pout appears on her red lips. Then, it breaks into a wicked grin. “Don’t you want me to get you off?”

“Not my game.”

Shelly—she says that’s her real name, that she only goes by Ivy onstage—slides back until she’s sitting on my knee. She arches one smooth leg the color of milk and plants her foot dangerously close to my crotch. I’m trailing my eyes from her shin down to her ankle when both her hands close around me and squeeze.

“This feel like a game, baby?”

No, it doesn’t. It feels amazing, and my cock jumps in response. She slides her hands up, down, working me through my jeans, and my entire body feels alive. My eyes slip shut, and my breath comes in ragged bursts. If it’s a game, it’s the best one I’ve ever played.

Pressure builds. My vision crackles red. I hear Shelly chuckle again, and I grab her wrists in my hands, move them to my shoulders.

“Babe, I didn’t show up for a rub and tug.”

She jerks away, and the look on her face makes me think I really wounded her. I figure it’s a practiced expression. A woman like her can use a look like that better than guys back in the yard can use a shiv. You never see it coming; you’re just bleeding all of a sudden.

The wounded look goes razor hostile. Another good trick. “If you’re not worth my time—”

I grab her hips and pull her close, press her hard against the bulge in my lap. She squirms, her lips slipping from a firm line to a smile, and a sigh breezes out of her.

My eyes lock with hers. “Maybe I just want a little company.”

She presses her weight down on me. Her chest rises and falls, a black bra mashing her breasts into a shelf of flesh.

“If I’m worth your while or not is for you to decide, babe. I just know I ain’t paying for your hand.”

“You know how to use it?”

“Yeah.”

She climbs off of me and starts to walk away. I reach for my drink, sure she’s decided to move onto another worm she can hook, when she looks over her shoulder.

“C’mon.”

——

She drives a beat-up Mercury, but it looks real nice with her stretched across the hood behind the club. The night’s sticky hot, but Shelly doesn’t care. Everything’s given way to animal lust, me included. I try to be gentle, tender, but her eyes keep finding mine. She arches her back and digs her nails into my naked chest, and it’s like a whip across a thoroughbred’s flank. My groans become grunts. Her moans become screams.

When it’s done—when Shelly stretches her arms over her head and a smile fills her face—I button myself up and stand there with my hands in my pockets like some schoolkid. Shelly climbs off the hood and touches her hand to my face, kisses me.

“Amazing,” she says. “You better come back for me.”

I nod. She can tell I’m not lying. By now, she’s probably used to hooking guys like this. Give them the first one free, and then make them pay hand over fist. I know the game by heart, but her hand on my face feels so soft, so cool. I can almost feel the hook enter my skin, and I don’t think I care.

Maybe Shelly can see my thoughts tumbling around, because she pulls me close to her and plants a hard kiss on my mouth.

“You ain’t paying me a thing, baby. This is just you and me.”

My heart accelerates, and I can feel it start to scrape.

——

The days and nights blur, twist, and combine. Shelly burns everything down and builds it back up again. Her skin becomes my home, her touch the electric spark that keeps my pulse racing. Our time together is spent in a world of teeth and lips and sweat. Whiskey and cigarettes. Our eyes lock as our bodies buck against each other, only slipping shut when our passion explodes.

If it ain’t love, it’s the purest lust I’ve ever experienced.

——

Months pass blissfully, and then this guy, this total asshole, appears. Walks right into the club like he owns the joint. Maybe he does. Not like I know things like that. I just come to see Shelly, and I can feel her bristle the second he enters the place.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” she says, but her voice is flat, far away.

I fix my eyes on the guy and try to burn holes through him. He wears a leather jacket that shines in the dim light. Long, black hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and the only thing distracting from his deep, shadowed eyes is a scar that travels a jagged path from his hairline to his chin. When he jabs a cigar into his teeth and lights it, I see fire dance off a collection of silver rings. The musky smoke from his cigar fills the club, and it smells like money. The kind of cash that comes with a whole lot of power.

I feel Shelly’s hands tighten around my arm as I watch the man sit. A drink appears at his hand the instant his ass hits leather, a nervous-looking waitress giving him her best smile. He waves her off with two fingers and then knocks back the entire drink in a single swallow. The smile his eyes give me over the rim of the glass makes me want to crush his throat. One by one, my muscles harden.

“Don’t,” Shelly whispers in my ear, and for the first time I can remember, she sounds scared. “He’s dangerous.”

“Who is he?”

“His name’s Michael.”

“Who is he?”

“I’m not sure. Deals art or something. I just know he’s dangerous.”

“So am I, babe.”

“Not like he is.”

I shoot Shelly a glance, and I see her watching Michael, her eyes narrow and worried. Another blister rises, and I know I hate this man. This man I don’t even know, I despise him with everything I have.

A waitress I know as Liz approaches. She looks scared, like a child afraid to tell her parents about the awful thing she’s done. Shelly’s hands ratchet tighter on my arm.

“Michael wants to see you, Ivy,” Liz says.

“I’m with somebody,” Shelly replies.

“He wants to see you now.”

“She doesn’t want to see him,” I say, standing before I even realize I’m doing it. Shelly pulls at my arm, dragging me back to my seat.

“Don’t.” There’s a begging note in her voice, and one of the blisters deep inside my chest pops.

“Who the hell is that guy? He bad news? Has he hurt you or something?”

She shakes her head. “Just go home. I’ll call you later.”

I stare at her for what feels like forever. Really? Like I can’t handle it? I know what she does here. My brain twists and tumbles, and I try to sort out what the hell’s going on, but eventually all I can say is, “I’m staying. Do what you have to.”

“Baby . . .”

“Just do what you need,” I say, making sure to phrase it in a way that hurts. Petty, but I don’t really care. My leaking heart wants me to be a child for a moment.

“Okay.” Shelly nods, and the look on her face is more than a shiv. It’s a Christmas tree, a jagged, barbed hunk of metal that rips out your guts when a con yanks it out of you. Without another word, she kisses me on the cheek and then leaves, the sex absent from her walk. She looks defeated, lost. Looking past her, I catch Michael smiling at me.

“Let me grab you a beer,” Liz says. Then she’s gone, and I’m left to sit there and stew.

Michael kisses Shelly’s hand when she greets him, and I see the shiver run through her body. She’s sad and terrified, and he doesn’t even care. Another wave of his fingers, and a fresh drink appears at the table, along with a flute of champagne. Michael lets Shelly take a single, faltering sip, and then he makes a great show of reaching down and unzipping his pants.

Shelly shoots another look my way, an apology. I don’t give any sign that I’ve noticed. Instead, as Liz places a cold bottle on my table, I tell myself this is all part of the game. I’ve seen Shelly tug on men before. This is just another Joe, another dollar. He’s an asshole, but he doesn’t mean a damn thing to her. She loves me.

Then, Shelly’s head disappears under the table, and Michael leans his head back and gives me the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.

Rage flares inside me like a black fire. It surrounds my heart, helping it to blister faster, and I pour beer down my throat as though it might douse the flames.

Michael sees this, and somehow his grin widens. I want to walk over there and rip his face off with my nails, but the sight of Shelly’s head cresting the plane of the table and diving back down again reminds me I’m not the only person involved.

My eyes flick back to Michael’s face, to that grin. It’s still spreading, and I wonder if the guy’s face is made out of rubber. But then the skin splits at the corners of his mouth. It cracks and peels away like old leather or something, blood trickling past exposed teeth. His eyes don’t leave mine, and I sense a terrible glee in them, and still the guy’s mug is splitting in half, the bleeding ruptures in his skin almost back to his ears, the tendons of his jaw now visible. The club’s lights flicker. No, they vibrate, everything feeling like an earthquake for a few seconds. I can’t tell if anybody else notices. Shelly doesn’t stop, so maybe it’s just me. Right now, I’m not sure I care if anybody else feels it. Michael has my attention. Blood trickles from his ears; a tear of red leaves his eye and traces his scar down to the rip in his face.

Then, the world blinks, and he’s just Michael again. Sitting there. Smiling at me. My woman’s head in his lap.

Liz appears. “You okay?”

“You see any of that?”

“Any of what?”

“That shit with Michael.”

“Not . . . No, I didn’t.” Her voice is thick with terror.

“Somebody needs to shut that guy down.”

Her hand touches my shoulder. “You should go.”

The words finally pull my eyes away from Michael. “What? Like hell.”

“You’ll make things worse for her, if you stay. He likes to make examples.”

No shit.

“I’ll make sure she calls as soon as she can.”

“Fine.” I climb out of my seat and start walking, but I keep my eyes on Michael’s, letting him know I’m not backing down. I’ve told more obvious lies. Hell, I even believe this one right up until I hear the man’s laughter chase me out of the club.

——

Shelly doesn’t call. Instead, she comes by late, just after I put the sixth hole through my wall. Her eyes are red and wet, and she breaks into sobs when she sees the blood on my knuckles.

I wrap her in my arms and tell her it will be all right, even as I hope she can’t feel the hate inside me. As she weeps against my chest, I imagine my hands around Michael’s neck. I wonder if he’d smile as his face turned from red to purple.

“I’m so sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.” I press my lips to hers and taste mouthwash alongside cigarettes. It makes me feel a little sick. Then she kisses me with more force, with a desperate hunger, and I’m hooked again. I want her and need her. She’s everything in the world to this big idiot.

Before I realize it, my own hunger’s kicked in, hard. My arms tighten around her, my hands roaming. Shelly moans. I slide my kisses down to her neck, and soon my fingers pull at her clothes.

Her moans stop. Her hands grab at mine. “No.”

“What?”

“Just . . . not now. Not for a few days.”

I stare at her for a moment, and shame clouds her eyes.

“What did he do?” I ask.

Instead of answering, she turns away, her hands rubbing at her arms.

“Michael, right? What did he do to you?”

“Leave it.”

“Tell me!”

She sobs again, and my heart scrapes hard against my ribs. Shelly doesn’t say anything, but instead peels off her clothes.

My breath catches in my throat like a cork in a dusty bottle.

Bruises cover her body, a canvas of browns and blues and blacks. Red welts serve as accents. I know who the artist is, and I can tell he’s a master. Looking at the damage, I’m amazed Shelly can even walk, let alone act like she’s okay. As she returns to my arms, however, she pulls the curtain aside and shows how much she’s hurting.

I realize I’m going to kill Michael.

“Does he always do this?” I ask.

“When he wants.”

“And the club allows it.”

“He throws enough money their way, it doesn’t matter.”

I take a deep breath, wondering if I’m willing to go back inside for this. Yeah, I am.

“Have you been to his house?”

——

I don’t know who Michael is, and Shelly doesn’t have much of an idea past him being rich, powerful, and mean to the core, but his house looks like it belongs to somebody important. Parked down the street from this thing that can only be called a mansion, I ask Shelly about security. I hate that she can tell me she’s never seen any. She speaks with the confidence of somebody who’s visited more than once or twice.

My fingers tighten around the tire iron in my lap. I picture my plans, how I plan to use the tool, and my body burns cold. Shelly must feel it, because she shivers behind the wheel.

“I’ll be back soon.”

“I have to come with you,” she says.

“No you don’t. You stay here, and I’ll be back when it’s over.”

Her eyes shift to razor focus. “I’m not helpless.”

“I know, babe.”

“And you don’t have to do this. Please. Michael’s dangerous. He’s scary.”

“I can be scary, too.”

And I climb out of the Mercury.

——

Getting over the fence ain’t so hard. I’ve pulled off tougher jobs, and getting across the prick’s giant, lit-up yard and finding an unlocked window is almost a walk in the goddamn park. Did a six-year stretch on a B&E once, but that was just one screwup compared to dozens of successful jobs. I know how to get into a house.

I ease the window open slowly, listening for dogs. Michael strikes me as the breed of rich bastard to keep a few dogs around. He has to feel so secure for some reason, and I haven’t spotted so much as a lick of security.

What I hear drifting from the window sure as hell ain’t dogs, though. Not unless Michael taught a pack to moan like a gaggle of pros. My teeth grind as I think about Shelly sitting in the car, bruised and marked, while this bastard entertains himself with even more women. I take a deep breath, steeling the last of my nerves, and then I climb through the window.

Something’s wrong. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that much.

I find myself in a study, thick books lining shelves made of dark wood. A leather sofa sits in the middle of the floor, facing two armchairs. It looks so normal, but the light’s all wrong. It vibrates, just like it did in the club. A new sound has sprung up to match the women. It’s a low, threatening moan. Somebody singing deep and full at the end of a long tunnel. Everything rushes right to my skull and throbs. Dizziness grabs me and almost sends me to my knees. The iron feels slick in my hand, and I realize I’m sweating tin pails.

Everything dims. I shove my fingers into my mouth and bite down, hard. Pain races up my arm to my brain, and suddenly I’m awake again. The light’s still weird, and that moan is still there, but they’ve backed off a little. I can function.

I leave the room cautiously, fingers on the door’s edge, feet heel-toeing it when I walk. As I leave the study, I take in the bastard’s impressive home. Everything’s marble, polished and white. If the lights would stop their fluttering, it would be perfect.

No. Nothing will ever be perfect here.

That low, moaning sound is more of a rumble, now. It lays underneath everything, threatening to break loose. I have to search to find which direction all that pleasure’s coming from, but it doesn’t take long. Michael really has the women with him singing. I wonder what he’s doing to them, and if Shelly had to make those noises when he was beating her five different shades of awful.

By the time I find the door I want, the one with all the moaning and screaming on the other side, the tire iron is almost a part of my hand. My fingers burn against the cool metal. My knuckles shine white.

I close my eyes and picture Michael’s smile. I see Shelly’s head bobbing up and down. Before Michael’s face begins to split, I open my eyes again. I’m ready for blood.

I kick open the door. Wood splinters and women scream. As I step into the room, iron cocked and ready to swing, I see naked flesh scatter. Half a dozen women run in half a dozen different directions. Some are bruised already. A redhead has a quartet of bleeding gashes in her neck.

There’s more white marble in here, only this is laced with blood. Red splatters draw my eyes downward. I spot more red at the back of the room and raise my eyes to see a curtain. Elsewhere, I see immaculate lounges and rotting wooden racks. Nothing matches, here. Everything is chaos.

Michael stands in the middle, an epicenter in black pants and nothing else. His hair is a wild tangle. A whip occupies one hand, and a bottle of whiskey fills the other. That grin sits just how I expected it, and I can already see myself knocking it in with the iron.

“White knight?” Michael asks. His voice is silky, that kind of smooth that has a layer of pure rot underneath.

The tire iron shakes in my fist. I want to say something, but my throat is full of anger. The lights are vibrating more, that rumble is starting to shake the floor. What on earth . . . ?

“Not exactly, huh?” He tosses the whip to the floor and takes a long pull of the bottle. His confidence is a living thing. He doesn’t even care that I’m here.

“Shelly said she had a fella. Told her I didn’t give a damn. She tell you to stay away?” As if putting a period on the end, his skin ripples, a quick wave that could almost be imagination.

I answer by taking a step forward. Can’t be scary just standing there.

“She never told you? Maybe she doesn’t know. Here.”

His flesh moves again as he walks away from me. I want to rush him, want to crack his skull wide open, but my feet refuse to move. As Michael reaches for a golden rope, I can only watch.

He pulls, and the curtain glides open.

I look at a storm in a large glass jar. A roiling mass of pure black fills the glass that’s almost waist high. Fire twists with the black clouds. Lightning traces patterns along its outer shape. Together, the three—I don’t know, are they elements?—move like a living thing. I try to think of another time I might have seen something so amazing, and all I can think of is Michael’s face-splitting grin.

“Pretty, ain’t it?” Michael asks. “That’s Hell for ya. Looks great until it busts loose. Lucky for you and Shelly and everybody else on this rock, I’m here.”

He steps to the jar and traces a finger along it. Lightning and fire follow his touch.

“See, white knight? I keep Hell right where it belongs. It’s not easy work, but I have my appetites to keep me sane.”

One of the girls whimpers. I’d almost forgotten about them.

“Sane?” Not the first word I’d planned on speaking.

“More or less.” His grin starts to split along the edges again. He walks back to the curtain, reaches behind it. My body tenses.

“How about you stop moving?”

He pulls off the bottle. There’s a shrug, so casual I barely notice it, and then his other arm appears, the snub nose tight in his fist.

I rush him. You run at a guy with a gun, he panics. His reaction time drops to nothing, and any shots will be wild ones.

Michael fires twice, but only the first misses. The second punches right into my belly. Everything becomes fire, but I keep moving. A growl scratches out of my throat as I reach Michael and swing.

The first strike drops him. I feel the crunch of his skull all the way up my arm. He doesn’t make a sound, just collapses to the marble floor. I hear more screams, followed by the sound of one of the women running for her life.

I raise the tire iron and bring it down again. It smashes through Michael’s face. Something tears in my gut, and then pain is almost blinding.

The rumbling becomes a roar. The lights strobe faster and faster.

I grab the snub nose and press it to Michael’s chest. Somehow, it continues to rise and fall. Not much, but enough that I have to be sure. When I jab the barrel against his sternum, something pushes back. Black veins travel across his flesh and then disappear.

I hold my breath and pull the trigger.

His body bucks hard beneath the blast and then lies still. I stagger backward, trying to figure my next move. Five women stare at me. This many witnesses can’t be good; I know that. Before I can make a decision, however, I hear glass cracking.

My eyes flash to the jar, to the fracture making its way from top to bottom. Tendrils of flame and blackness snake out from the crack, testing the air.

I drop the tire iron and push the hand to my bleeding gut. The women scream and scream, and I back toward the door, wanting to tell them to run, but unable to do a damn thing but hiss through bared teeth.

I make four stumbling steps toward the door before the jar shatters. Black clouds veined with fire and lightning roll forward, growing. The redhead with the gashes shrieks and hits her knees, and as I reach the door I can only watch as the cloud rears back like a snake and then strikes her, a tendril of black and red wrapping around her skull.

Her reaction is awful and instantaneous. Her body jitterbugs for a terrible, violent second, and then something flashes through her. When it’s done, she falls apart, ashes scattering across blood-spattered marble.

I run. More screams follow me, but they die one by one. Afraid of getting lost in Michael’s gigantic home, I return to the window and crawl out.

By the time I reach the Mercury, the snub nose still clenched in my fist and my lap slick with blood, the cloud has started billowing out of the mansion’s windows. Shelly tries to examine my wounds, but I yell at her to drive, just drive, goddamn it.

She speeds away from Michael’s home, and Hell follows.

——

Shelly walks me into the motel room—a flop worse than my place back in the city—and I sink onto the bed. I’m cold, freezing, and the only warm things in the room are Shelly’s hands against my face.

“It’ll be all right,” she tells me, and I’m happy she cares enough to lie.

“Maybe . . . for you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ll say a lot more, babe.”

Her hands leave my face, and suddenly she’s busy ripping up sheets that have probably seen more sex than soap. “We just have to get you bandaged up,” she says.

“No!” The shout runs a spike of hot iron straight through me, and I scream.

Shelly freezes. “Baby?”

“You gotta go.”

Her lips tremble. I know what she wants to say.

“I can’t let . . . you die with me,” I tell her. “I’m not gonna make it, anyway. Besides, I . . . I did this so you could get free.”

Shelly stands there, tears running down her face, and I can tell she’s full of love. When she mashes her lips to mine, it’s the most welcome kiss I’ve ever received.

“I love you, baby.”

“I love you. Now go.”

She kisses me again and disappears out the door.

So that’s it. I listen for the Mercury’s engine, for the sound of tires peeling away over hot asphalt. When I hear it, when I know she’s safe, I close my eyes and listen for the other sound, that rumble that turns into a roar.

Soon, the light begins to flicker, only this time it’s nothing in the room. It’s the sun. Everything shudders.

As I wait for Hell to arrive, I think of Shelly, of her pale skin and dark curves. I think of what I’ve done for her, and I think of everything I’d do if I could, and the last blister on my heart breaks.

——

Nate Southard’s books include Red Sky, Just Like Hell, Broken Skin, He Stepped Through, This Little Light of Mine, and Focus, which was co-written with Lee Thomas. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Cemetery Dance, Thuglit, and the Bruce Springsteen–inspired anthology Darkness on the Edge. Nate lives in Austin, Texas, with his girlfriend and numerous pets. He loves food, cigars, and muttering under his breath. Look him up at NateSouthard.com.

| THE ABSENT EYE |

Brian Evenson

—

I

I lost my eye back when I was a child, running through the forest as part of some game or other. At the time I was with two other children, a boy and a girl, a brother and a sister, neither of whom I knew, or, indeed, had even seen before. It was one of them, the skinny shoeless boy, who suggested the game. I cannot now remember much about it, only that when I lost the eye I had been giggling and chasing the girl, and was also being pursued by the boy. In my flight, a thin, barbed branch snapped back and lashed like a wire, slashing a deep scar across my nose and tearing the eye itself free of the socket to leave it unseeing and ruptured on my cheek.

I do not remember exactly how I got home. Perhaps the boy and girl took me, perhaps they carefully led me home and rang the bell before fleeing, but nobody had seen them do so and this was not, in any case, what I remembered. All I remembered was standing stunned in the forest, feeling what was left of my face, and then suddenly and without transition being home again, standing just before my front door.

There was, a doctor informed me, no choice but to remove the eye, which was, for all intents and purposes, already removed. At first they left my socket exposed—to allow the wound to heal, I suppose. The optic nerve, confused, continued to collect information, sending my brain random, broken flashes of light.

Later, I was issued a patch, a cheap cotton affair dyed black and affixed with an elastic band. If the patch got wet, its dye would bleed, staining a black circle around my eye and, when wet enough to seep through, within the socket itself. I wore this patch for several months, continuing to see flashes of light when I removed it. At times these cohered into something that gave the semblance of an image. Through my remaining eye I would see the real world around me—would see, for instance, the solitary and spare confines of my bedroom, the even line of the top of my dresser and, above it, the even line of the ceiling. But the optic nerve would impose upon this other, twisting shapes, initially incomprehensible in form and aspect but, as the weeks and months went on, slowly becoming more articulated.

When I told the doctor what I saw, he just shook his head at me as if I were a fool. And yet even as he did so, I could see a smoky and blurred figure congealing around him. A floating figure which, as I watched, resolved into clarity and revealed itself to be his bloated double. It looked not unlike the doctor, though its legs faded into the air as indistinct smoke. It floated there, for a moment clear, and then hard to discern, and then clear again. It had something like an arm wrapped tight around the doctor’s shoulder. Its other hand, I saw, was at his throat. As I watched, the hand tightened.

The doctor, unaware of the creature itself, touched his throat and coughed. I watched his double smile and let go. I threw up my hands in surprise, much to the doctor’s puzzlement, and that was when the creature clinging to him turned and stared. It saw me, and knew it was seen by me. Both of us remained motionless, waiting for what the other would do. And then, very slowly, I watched its blurred mouth stretch into a grin.

——

A few months later, my parents were surprised when I declined to have a false eye fitted into my empty socket. What I had understood, what they would never understand, was that there was still an eye of sorts there, one that saw exceedingly well, but just not in the fashion other eyes saw.

At first, I kept my socket blinkered, covered by the patch, hoping not to see the creature I had seen before. But one night, afflicted with curiosity, I lifted the patch.

I was alone in my room, one lamp burning fitfully in the corner, shadows dancing along the wall. I wanted to see if the shadows themselves were something more, thinking that if they were I would turn the lamp up and drive them away. There was nothing there. Or nothing in the shadows, rather. But when I looked down, I saw a thin, smoky, long arm grasping my waist. A face that was a parody of my own floated just inches away, staring into my empty socket.

I shuddered. A gleam came into the creature’s eye, but just as quickly faded, though it continued to regard me with what might be described as curiosity. It opened its mouth and I watched its lips and tongue, such as they were, operate in a semblance of speech.

I could not hear words, but I tried to follow the movements of its lips. “You can see me,” I believe it must have said, or else it was, “You can’t be me,” unless it was something else. I quickly lowered the patch so as to blot it out. There immediately followed a tightness in my throat that I tried to see as natural, that I tried to ignore, and then I found myself briefly choking. I ignored this until I felt a stabbing pain in my chest, and lifted the patch to find the creature had insinuated its hand beneath my ribs, had its fingers apparently wrapped around my heart. When it saw that I was looking, it let go and smiled.

“What is it?” I asked. “What do you want?”

It pointed languidly to its ear, then pointed to my own, then said something that I could not hear. When I did not respond, it did this again, and again, until finally, not knowing what else to do, I nodded as if I had understood. Its smile grew wider. Slowly it wriggled its way up my torso until its head was just beside my own. And then it stabbed its finger deep into my ear again and again until I screamed in pain and lost consciousness.

—

II

For fifteen years they kept me confined—for my own protection, they claimed. My parents, alerted by my screams, had climbed the stairs to find me writhing on the floor, blood leaking from one of my ears. Though they could not find the needle or pencil or other implement that I had used to pierce my own eardrum, they did not doubt that I had done this to myself. I only worsened matters by trying to be honest first with them and then with the medical profession, but after all I was young. At the time I hardly knew that the world does not operate through directness and honesty but by way of falsehood and deception. Thus I remained adamant and insistent about what had happened, describing the creature and what it had done to me, not realizing how I was tightening the noose around my own neck.

In the place of my ruined eardrum there grew another sort of ear, one that could hear that which could not, properly speaking, be heard. The creature that clung to me began to speak to me as well, its voice not a voice exactly, but a kind of whispery echo, not always easy to make out, more a suggestion of a voice than a voice itself.

At first I resisted the creature, tried to ignore it, tried to pay no attention as it squeezed my heart or upset my belly or bore down on my lungs. I would hold out as long as I dared, keeping the patch over my eye and stopping my ear with whatever came to hand—a scrap of wet fabric, chewed paper, bits and scraps of food—but it persisted. Eventually I could feel its fingers stroke the fibers of my brain, exciting them into a kind of panic that brought the orderlies running, and like as not got me straitjacketed or sedated. Once I was subdued, they cleaned me up, picked the bits out of my ear, and then the creature could speak to me while I, restrained, could do nothing to resist. What did it want of me? It could not hear me, but it knew I could hear it and seemed to have a need to communicate. You will be of use, friend, it most often said. “Of use how?” I asked, raising pained looks among the orderlies who saw this as nothing but a man speaking to himself. You must not fight, it said. You must give yourself over, friend. Listen and watch and wait, and later on you shall know.

With the additional confusion of the injections and shock treatments and straitjacketings, it took the creature and me years to settle into an uneasy sort of truce. For one thing I learned that though it could cause me pain, though it could excite me, it could not do much more, could not kill or damage me permanently without my permission, and as time went on I learned to control my responses to it. For another, I realized that when my ear was unplugged I could hear not only its whispers, but beneath them, lower and farther away, other sounds humans could not hear.

It was this that finally got me spending a few hours of the day with my patch rolled higher up on my forehead, peering through my empty socket. What I saw at first surprised me, though it should not have. I had long assumed that the smoky creature that had come to me had been the same creature I had seen torturing the doctor, that it was one of a kind, and that it had, by leaving the doctor and coming to me, begun to take on my own characteristics. But what I saw now was a similar creature clinging to each person around me, a whole world of trailing ghosts. They assumed all postures, some of them simply clinging loosely to the bodies of their hosts, others coiled murkily around them. With some of the mad, the creatures seemed malicious, their smiles unholy and their fingers wedged deep into their host’s brains. With others, the creatures seemed to be wailing and crying, trying as well as they could to extricate themselves from the person to whom they were attached. But as they worked one part of themselves free, another smoky strand would form and attach. The orderlies had them as well, though their creatures were generally calmer, though perhaps more inclined to enjoy violence when it did happen. The doctors had them too. Indeed, I began to realize, these creatures perhaps had no choice but to be with us. They were in some sense imprisoned. We were part of them and they were part of us.

This was a terrible thing to know and I fought it as long as I could. I finally got used to it because there was no other choice, at least not one that I could see. I was like everyone else, with one exception: I knew.

—

III

And then, late in my confinement, I found myself awoken by a slow, steady whispering. Friend, it said. Get up, friend. Friend, get up. It repeated the same words over and over again, and kept at it until, finally, I arose.

“What is it?” I asked, but in the dark my double could not read lips. And so I stood and switched on the light, then lifted my eye patch and repeated my question.

The creature curling around me seemed anxious, though I could not understand why. It regarded me as I spoke again and then nodded curtly. Out the door, it said. When I stood waiting, it repeated its command again, adding, in a more gentle whisper, Friend, I will lead you.

And indeed it did. The door, I was surprised to find, was unlocked. We went out the door, and then down the hall and past a sleeping orderly whose own creature had its fumid hands plunged deep within the man’s skull, and who nodded and broke into a saurian smile as we passed. Another turning and then another, and then to the door of another inmate’s room. This too, I was surprised to discover, was unlocked.

I went inside and closed the door behind me. Turn on the light, my creature said to me, and so I did. Sit in the chair, my creature said, and so I did, further drawing it close to the bed when he so commanded.

The man in the bed was an older inmate, a man who had been old even when I had first arrived. The little hair he had left was like a haze around his skull, the flesh liver-spotted and his forehead pale. Uncover him, my creature said, and I did, and saw that he lay there with his skin loose and unhealthy, looking all but dead. His creature was wound around him but losing shape, resembling him less and less. And when I leaned closer to the man his creature hissed, more like the double of a snake than that of a man.

I turned toward the creature wrapped around me, regarded it questioningly. Watch, it suggested. And so I turned back and watched.

With my physical eye alone I would have missed the transition. There was little to tell me physically when the man died. But with the other eye, the missing one, I could see his death happen. Not because of the man himself, but rather because of his creature, for as he approached death he grew smaller, less and less distinct, until he was little more than a shadow. And then, suddenly, he dropped out of existence altogether.

Where does he go? my creature wanted to know. Why does he leave? What becomes of him? I thought at first he meant the man himself, as I would have meant, but as he continued to speak on, whispering away in a susurrating language that seemed at once identical to and absolutely distinct from my own, I realized that it was the man’s creature he was asking about. To him the man meant nothing, but the disappearance of the creature meant everything, for in it he foresaw the disappearance of himself.

I tried to talk to my creature, tried to console it with the so-called wisdom we humans use when facing the knowledge of our own death. But my words were too complex for it to be able to read them well from my lips and the creature grew quickly frustrated and dissatisfied. So I took pencil and paper and began to write words out for it, but when I blinked my human eye I realized that what I saw as words the creature saw as much less, as hardly marks as all. Indeed, to make words it could understand, I had to trace the words over again and again, and flourish them. Only then, once the paper seemed to my good eye an inextricable maze of lines, did it read to my absent eye as words.

What the creature had gained from its proximity to my mind that allowed it to read my tongue I don’t know, but when I first started to trace, it became interested and I saw it startle with recognition when at last the words were revealed. Yet it took me long enough to do my trace work that by the time I finished, my purpose was no longer the same as when I had begun. Rather than telling the creature something along the lines of It is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided or Take consolation in the fact that he lives on in your memory or Surely there is a life beyond this one, I found myself laboriously creating through my words—first over the course of hours, then over the course of days, and finally over the course of a lifetime—a lie that would allow me to lead a different sort of life.

—

IV

What did I write? It hardly matters now. I wrote what I had to write to convince my creature to aid me in shaking my way free of the institution, and then engraved my lie over and over again with stroke after stroke of the pencil until the creature too could read it.

What I wrote was in essence an offer of help. I did not know where the other creature had gone, I claimed, but if anyone could find out, I said, it was I, someone with a foot in both worlds. I was willing to search, willing to try to find out. I was, I lied, a sort of detective. If he would only agree to aid and assist me, he had my promise that I would dedicate my life to finding the answer to his questions, questions that I privately figured from the very beginning to be unanswerable.

And thus it was that we entered into a kind of compact in which, by pretending to be a detective, I in fact became one. We agreed that for me to be able to answer his questions, I would have to have a free hand, so to speak. Arrangements were made among the various creatures attached to those confined to the asylum, such that at the end of another month I found the right doors left open to me and a series of sleeping guards along my path. With the help of my creature, I walked unimpeded out of the sanitarium and never looked back.

In the years that followed I traveled the earth, looking, searching, for any sign of what might become of a creature when its host died. I have learned little, perhaps nothing. I have played the role of detective, and have gotten my hands dirty. I have stood among the tombs of the dead looking for wisps of smoke to arise or fall that might be the remnants of the creatures. I have lain on my back wrapped deep in furs, staring up at the northern lights and wondering if the glow might not be their unearthly remains. I have stood late at night in the wards of the comatose, watching drowsy figures swaying gently above motionless bodies. I have shot a man in order to witness the moment of his death. I have poisoned a man and attempted to capture the creature wound around him in a bottle before it could disappear. All to no avail.

But the majority of my life has not been spent nearly so romantically. These moments are the exceptions rather than the rule. What I most often do, day after day, is await the moment when my creature begins to direct my footsteps, leading me to a new corpse. Once there, I make notes of the scene and then interview, with the help of my creature, any others close enough to have seen the moment of death. Name? I used to begin, but came quickly to realize that this is not a word they understood. So instead it became, What happened? What did you see? Was there any hint of where he went? And so on. And then I search for clues, strangenesses in the scene of the crime, disturbances visible only to my missing eye. I write down the responses and record whatever clues I find or pretend to find all in the overlapped script that they can read, and then I take the pages and I leave them pinned to trees and pasted to walls, crumpled beneath bridges, secured in trash bins. What becomes of them then, I do not know.

The irony is through this process, unearthly though it is, I might learn enough to know if a man has been murdered, and even have some sense of who his killer is. I often acquire sufficient information to make a call to the police, give them a nudge or two in the right direction. I do not know how many crimes, in how many countries, have been solved by me, how many criminals brought to justice, but I suspect there have been many.

But as to the matter of where our creatures go upon our death, I find myself no closer to having an answer than I was when I first began. My investigation, admittedly, began as a ruse, but as time has gone on I find I cannot help but go from miming the detective to taking on this investigation in earnest. I grow older and more discouraged, but my creature remains hopeful, optimistic. It insists that I keep on, that I continue to drag my way across the earth, and no doubt it will so insist until I am dead, until all that remains of me are the words I have written here.

——

I am writing this not in the overlapped and baroque letters that have become second nature to me, but in the normal human way, as ordinary letters on an ordinary page. Mostly I feel there is no point writing this. Nothing will come of it, I know, and any who read it can only think me mad. But I do not know what else to do.

My creature curls in the air beside me, regarding me with curiosity but saying nothing, at least not yet. Soon it will demand to know what I have inscribed on the paper and why it cannot read it; I hope to have finished before then.

Soon I must move on. But until then, I will finish my account and then sit here, hand idly moving, pretending to write. Until I feel my creature’s hand tight on my throat and its words forming in my ear, and know that I must once again haul myself to my feet. And then I will continue my wandering, a lone and failed detective in the employ of someone not quite myself, but not quite other, either.

—

—for Michael Cisco

——

Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the story collection Fugue State and the novel Last Days, which received the American Library Association’s Award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award and was among Time Out New York’s top books of 2006. Other books include The Wavering Knife (winner of the IHG Award for best story collection) and the tie-in novels Aliens: No Exit and Dead Space: Martyr. He has received an O. Henry Award, as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s creative-writing program.

| THE MALTESE UNICORN |

Caitlнn R. Kiernan

—

New York City (May 1935)

It wasn’t hard to find her. Sure, she had run. After Szabу let her walk like that, I knew Ellen would get wise that something was rotten, and she’d run like a scared rabbit with the dogs hot on its heels. She’d have it in her head to skip town, and she’d probably keep right on skipping until she was out of the country. Odds were pretty good she wouldn’t stop until she was altogether free and clear of this particular plane of existence. There are plenty enough fetid little hidey holes in the universe, if you don’t mind the heat and the smell and the company you keep. You only have to know how to find them, and the way I saw it, Ellen Andrews was good as Rand and McNally when it came to knowing her way around.

But first, she’d go back to that apartment of hers, the whole eleventh floor of the Colosseum, with its bleak westward view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. I figured there would be those two or three little things she couldn’t leave the city without, even if it meant risking her skin to collect them. Only she hadn’t expected me to get there before her. Word on the street was Harpootlian still had me locked up tight, so Ellen hadn’t expected me to get there at all.

From the hall came the buzz of the elevator, then I heard her key in the lock, the front door, and her footsteps as she hurried through the foyer and the dining room. Then she came dashing into that French rococo nightmare of a library, and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw me sitting at the reading table with al-Jaldaki’s grimoire open in front of me.

For a second, she didn’t say anything. She just stood there, staring at me. Then she managed a forced sort of laugh and said, “I knew they’d send someone, Nat. I just didn’t think it’d be you.”

“After that gyp you pulled with the dingus, they didn’t really leave me much choice,” I told her, which was the truth, or all the truth I felt like sharing. “You shouldn’t have come back here. It’s the first place anyone would think to check.”

Ellen sat down in the armchair by the door. She looked beat, like whatever comes after exhausted, and I could tell Szabу’s gunsels had made sure all the fight was gone before they’d turned her loose. They weren’t taking any chances, and we were just going through the motions now, me and her. All our lines had been written.

“You played me for a sucker,” I said, and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire. My hand was shaking, and I tried to steady it by bracing my elbow against the table. “You played me, then you tried to play Harpootlian and Szabу both. Then you got caught. It was a bonehead move all the way round, Ellen.”

“So, how’s it gonna be, Natalie? You gonna shoot me for being stupid?”

“No, I’m going to shoot you because it’s the only way I can square things with Auntie H., and the only thing that’s gonna keep Szabу from going on the warpath. And because you played me.”

“In my shoes, you’d have done the same thing,” she said. And the way she said it, I could tell she believed what she was saying. It’s the sort of self-righteous bushwa so many grifters hide behind. They might stab their own mothers in the back if they see an angle in it, but that’s jake, ’cause so would anyone else.

“Is that really all you have to say for yourself?” I asked, and pulled back the slide on the Colt, chambering the first round. She didn’t even flinch . . . But, wait . . . I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I ought to begin nearer the beginning.

——

As it happens, I didn’t go and name the place Yellow Dragon Books. It came with that moniker, and I just never saw any reason to change it. I’d only have had to pay for a new sign. Late in ’28— right after Arnie “The Brain” Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel—I accidentally found myself on the sunny side of the proprietress of one of Manhattan’s more infernal brothels. I say accidentally because I hadn’t even heard of Madam Yeksabet Harpootlian when I began trying to dig up a buyer for an antique manuscript, a collection of necromantic erotica purportedly written by John Dee and Edward Kelley sometime in the sixteenth century. Turns out, Harpootlian had been looking to get her mitts on it for decades.

Now, just how I came into possession of said manuscript, that’s another story entirely, one for some other time and place. One that, with luck, I’ll never get around to putting down on paper. Let’s just say a couple of years earlier, I’d been living in Paris. Truthfully, I’d been doing my best, in a sloppy, irresolute way, to die in Paris. I was holed up in a fleabag Montmartre boarding house, busy squandering the last of a dwindling inheritance. I had in mind how maybe I could drown myself in cheap wine, bad poetry, Pernod, and prostitutes before the money ran out. But somewhere along the way, I lost my nerve, failed at my slow suicide, and bought a ticket back to the States. And the manuscript in question was one of the many strange and unsavory things I brought back with me. I’ve always had a nose for the macabre, and had dabbled—on and off—in the black arts since college. At Radcliffe, I’d fallen in with a circle of lesbyterians who fancied themselves witches. Mostly, I was in it for the sex . . . But I’m digressing.