Psychomania: Killer Stories

by Stephen Jones

  It’s not even your fault. You’ve got the walk light at the corner. It’s yours. Anyone can see that. Even knowing you as I do, there’s nothing in me that believes you have any other idea than that you’re going to cross from one side of the street to the other, without incident, the same as the hundred thousand times you’ve done it before.

  The thing is, I know what’s going to happen even before it does. Look over and see the car, and the hair on the back of my neck prickles up and I just know, know that the car’s going too fast, that it can’t stop in time, and I’m running along the sidewalk, and if I’d been closer I would’ve pushed you or pulled you, whatever it took to get you clear. Because this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

  You were meant for so much more than this.

  The driver is aware, at least, for all the good that does, the brake lights smearing red and the car fishtailing on the wet pavement. But you don’t know any of this. You never even see it coming, and I wonder if you had, if there was time, even just a moment to react, if looking at the genuine prospect of your mortality, would it have made a difference where nothing else has?

  Instead, lost inside that hood, you’re blindsided. One devastating impact and there you go, tumbling into the air in the rain and the brown fan of coffee. It’s not enough that you’re hit the once, is it? No, you have to land on the windshield of the car passing by in the opposite lane, and bounce spinning off that one, too.

  Even I have to wince, and shut my eyes for a moment.

  And does it verify your worst suspicions about the world and everyone in it, that nobody seems to want to touch you now? They’ll crowd around, they’ll look, but you’re used to that. But I’m used to things they’re not, so it doesn’t bother me, not in the way it bothers them. I don’t mind joining you on the pavement. I don’t mind touching you. I don’t mind holding you. I don’t mind the parts of you that leak on to me.

  Or are you even aware of anything at all?

  I’ve never seen anybody breathe that way. This can’t be good. A sharp little gulp of breath every few seconds, like a fish drowning in the air. The way your eyes are roving around, they’re like a baby’s, trying to find something to focus on, and it would surprise me if you have much of any idea what’s happened. If you don’t, that’s okay, and I don’t want to tell you.

  “Stay with us, Deborah.”

  Right, that’s me saying that. And I think it’s me you’re seeing now. At least your eyes don’t leave me, but in a way, that’s even worse, because I can see the million questions behind them and I don’t know how to begin to answer them. Not here, not now, not this.

  I can’t even begin to answer my own.

  This would’ve happened whether I was here or not.

  I haven’t changed anything. I haven’t affected anything. I haven’t had the chance to make one single point to you.

  So I was brought here to what? To witness? That’s it? That’s it?

  Sometimes all you can do is kneel in the rain and ask what it is that the universe is trying to tell you. But me, I’m supposed to be way beyond that by now.

  ~ * ~

  You don’t mind that I’ve let myself into your apartment, do you? It’s almost like the keys crawled out of your pocket and into my hand.

  I thought I’d be seeing the place under such different circumstances. Thought you’d be seeing it anew for yourself, the way it goes when we’re with someone seeing something for the first time, and we imagine what it must look like through their eyes.

  That’s all gone now. The today that never happened.

  I have to admit, never in my wildest imaginings did I expect lemon yellow walls.

  Maybe you were trying, in your way.

  I’m talking to you like you’re still alive, but right now, I don’t even know. I just don’t know. It didn’t look good, down on the street. The state you were in, it didn’t look like there was much reason to hope. That’s funny, coming from me, isn’t it? I always find a reason to hope. I’m the quintessential hope-springs-eternal guy. So if you don’t mind, I’ll keep the dialogue open for now.

  Lemon yellow walls. Bugger me sideways. You really had me fooled.

  But it’s the posters that are the illuminating part.

  It takes a while to sink in. At first I wasn’t grasping what it is you’ve really been doing here in the main room, what these posters mean together. I didn’t see them as related at first. At the west end of the room, the one of some forest, either early morning or late evening, everything foggy, that one lone figure standing in the middle. And at the east end, the poster looking out on the opening of some enormous cavern, with a tiny boat sailing out into the slanted beams of sunlight coming through. At first glance, who would think these had anything to do with each other?

  But it’s the one in the middle of the north wall that ties them together, isn’t it? That’s the link. Except for the crescent moon, it’s so dark and indistinct I can’t even tell where the person kneeling in the middle is supposed to be. What is that? Is it a prison cell? A dungeon? A storm drain? A log fucking cabin? I’d really like to know.

  The title, well, that makes sense. The Dark Night of the Soul. If you’re going to give the thing a title, that’s as good a name as any. And the quote, too, what’s that for, just to rub it in? The mystic heart senses that suffering and sorrow can be the portal to finding the light of what is genuine. Run not from the darkness, for in time it ushers in the light.

  Look. Don’t you dare talk to me about the dark night of the soul.

  Honestly, this is why I’m here? What kind of joke is this?

  From what garbage pit did you dredge these deceptions, anyway? Who told you you had to go through these things? They’re just illusions. What garden of lies did you pick from to settle for the notion that pain and sadness are anything other than unnatural states of being that it’s our duty to repel? What malfunction sent you on this detour, and convinced you that this shadow path you’re on was remotely normal?

  Me, I was raised better than that. I was promised better than that. I was promised.

  That is my birthright. That is my due. And I will have the happiness I deserve.

  But you? No, you fell for the worst sort of propaganda.

  And look at you now.

  It didn’t have to be that way. It’s not supposed to be that way. Not for you, not for me, not for anybody, and all of you who think you’re going to convince me otherwise, you all find out that the light fights back, don’t you? The light doesn’t want to go out.

  It’s so clear now. I was giving you credit for being way more dangerous than you really are, when all you are is another empty puppet. You’re a casualty of endless failures of imagination, and your own savage torpor. You just couldn’t conceive that you live in a world so generous that everything was yours from the beginning and all you had to do was say “yes”. You had to make it so much harder than it really is.

  If you can’t deal with my exceptionalism, fine, but that doesn’t mean you get to try to rob me, or drag me down to your level.

  You will not rob me.

  Not. Not. Not. Not. Do you hear me? Not.

  You know, I really should leave here, because you’ve got nothing to teach me and this whole thing’s been nothing more than a clerical error, so yes, I should just turn around and leave, but then again, you should take it as a back-handed compliment that it’s so hard to turn away.

  Because it’s not just the posters. No, it’s the fine print. My God, what kind of obsessive-compulsive are you? Until this moment I’d been wondering if you’d even seen the comments people left for you during your escapades in starvation, and now it’s obvious that you did. And have, every day since.

  I’ll hand it to you, it’s impressive, the patience it must’ve taken to print out every single hateful thing anyone had to say to you, and tape it to the wall around the forest poster. And then do the same thing with every kind thing someone had
to say, and tape those around the cavern picture. Hundreds of them. That’s patience.

  You know, before, I suspected you hadn’t read a word of any of it because I had you pegged for such a narcissist that you wouldn’t even bother taking someone else’s opinion under advisement.

  And I was absolutely right, you are a narcissist, just a bigger one than I even dared imagine you could be. Every time your printer spit out some hate mail or a love note, and you tore off a little strip of tape, that’s somebody telling you you matter, even the ones who wished you’d just die already, because at least you got a reaction.

  Well, you don’t. You don’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter. Your deluded sense of identity doesn’t matter.

  Really, I should leave now, but I’ve just got to read these first, and laugh.

  Because I haven’t had a laugh this good in a long time. I should be thanking you.

  And I really should leave. But I need you to know that no matter what you do, now and for ever, you can’t rob me.

  And what’s the rush, anyway? I can read these and read these, up and down, across, they’re all the same, empty empty empty, and it still feels like I just got here.

  And I really should leave. But not until I know how you did it, how you got the walls to start changing colour, from lemon yellow to ... to ... to whatever the opposite of that is called.

  And I really. Should. Leave.

  Only your windows are all covered with bars.

  And the doors are nowhere to be found any more.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  SCOTT EDELMAN

  The Trembling Living Wire

  IZ SLOWLY TIGHTENED his grip around Mozart’s pulsing neck, savouring the last moments of life that remained. He paused, offering to the dog the gift of several final panting breaths. The beagle had earned that. After all, Mozart had been the key to unlocking Juliet’s heart.

  Yet what difference did one breath more or one breath less really make? Iz thought. All lives, however short their sputter, however long their flame, still seemed ridiculously brief. And except for the lives of a very special few, poignantly pointless as well. Rare those were, extremely rare, but rarer still the ones who could be shepherded to ripeness under his tutelage. One of those was young Juliet, and as soon as he accomplished this final step, all he’d need to do was pluck her.

  As the eyes of the dog whom he had trained to trust him widened in response to the narrowing circle of his fingers, Iz became aware of a second, more human, gaze upon him. He dropped his hands from the animal and moved back, suddenly both alert and confused. It had been decades since he had last felt off balance like that - or had it been centuries? - and the unfamiliar emotion prickled.

  He had trained himself to leave no witnesses behind to the sort of action that he was about to take, yet... how could there even be any? He considered the unfolding of his previous hours, perfect and tantalizing.

  The evening’s plans had proceeded smoothly. Juliet was now innocently asleep down the hall, slightly drugged, resting that beautiful, budding instrument of hers, and she would not rise until the timing was right, a timing Iz alone would control. Her parents, at the foot of whose bed he had been ready to act, were more deeply drugged, and would be unconscious at least until morning, if not beyond.

  If there was any gaze upon him, it should only be that of the pet itself, and nothing more. But as Mozart lay there, one ear twitching eagerly as it anticipated what it mistakenly thought would be a comforting caress, it looked off toward a dark window on the far wall, eyes narrowing as if making a connection with the eyes of another.

  Iz stood, and moved carefully, quietly, to the window outside of which something had apparently captured Mozart’s attention. With long, delicate fingers, he slowly widened a gap in the curtains by a few inches so he could peer out from the darkness of the room to the darkness of the street. As he searched the night for a hypothetical unknown observer, his heart was the darkest of all.

  The streets were empty, as they should have been in the town he had chosen, at least for this decade, to call home. It must have just been nerves, nothing more. Ever since the local paper had sewn together seemingly random incidents over the years into a string and called it a pattern, tensions had emerged in the town. No one had yet deciphered what it all meant (how could they?), but there was just enough unease floating freely there that Iz had begun to have his own fleeting moments of worry.

  Perhaps it was now time for him to move on, to choose a new feeding ground, as he had been forced to do countless times before. But those intermittent feelings were quickly suppressed, for who would suspect him, kindly Mr I, apparently old, outwardly frail, wanting nothing more each day than to pluck the heartstrings of his students until a bolder note might swell?

  He closed the curtains more completely this time, leaving no gap to be used by a potential prowler. As he turned back to the bed, he momentarily considered Juliet’s parents. If he could only explain to them what this sacrifice would buy, they would understand, he knew, in their hearts and souls, if not their minds. He was certain of that. But he could never share that piece of information, for his voice was not up to the telling. That task was beyond him. Though vocal gifts were his to be given, they were never his to possess.

  And so best be done with it, and done with it quickly. He could already see through the blackness of the deed to Juliet’s shining future. The short, sharp sound of a snapped neck would inevitably be followed in the days ahead - as so many other snappings and smotherings and shortenings had been followed - by the most beautiful sounds of all.

  But Mozart was no longer atop the folded blanket at the foot of the bed. Which was itself as much an impossibility as any witness, for if the creature had moved, Iz would surely have heard the scratching of its nails on the hardwood flooring. No sounds escaped his ancient ears, which was both his blessing and his curse. He searched the rest of the house for the wandering beagle, but Mozart was nowhere to be found.

  It was a puzzling absence, which Iz did not like, but what was more distressing than that oddity was what it meant - he would need to end his mission. He supposed he could suddenly and spontaneously escalate things, shift his attack from animal to man, but it was not yet time for him to move on like that. His life’s work must not be rushed. For Juliet’s sake, this composition was to be performed con adagietto, not con affrettando.

  Never con affrettando.

  He took one long, last look at Juliet asleep in her bed, tucked in by his hand. Not that she would remember. If he had calculated the dosage correctly (and he always did), that moment would be gone, now possessed by him alone, though if he had been especially precise she might still dimly remember the dinner which had preceded it. He curled over her, a question mark awaiting its answer. He caressed her throat, and leaned forward even more deeply to listen to the shallow breaths emanating from her lips, out of which such wonders were meant to spring.

  That evening’s music lesson would have to wait.

  But not for long.

  ~ * ~

  As Iz took attendance the next morning at Helen Keller Middle School, the faces which ringed his own filled him with nothing but disappointment. That day, they failed to remind him, as they so often did, of the possibilities held out by the hours ahead. Instead, they only brought him back to the fact that his previous night had not gone as planned.

  The classroom left him with no way to avoid that conclusion, for all of the faces which had been there the day before were with him still. Juliet, one foot tucked beneath her while she twirled this way and that in her seat and chatted with her neighbours, should have been missing. She should have been at home stewing in her pain and growing more flavourful for the private concert to come, but instead, there she was, her eyes offering no sign that she remembered his hands on her from the night before. Her presence - poignantly tender, intensely innocent, little knowing of the shadow which had almost passed across her
face - distracted him as he tried to remain casual while taking the head count, but none of the students seemed to notice his estranged mood.

  Not that they ever noticed much of anything, even on those rare occasions when he managed to prod them into more elevated and focused conditions.

  He moved behind his podium and tapped his baton, attempting to rouse them from their electronics-induced fugue states. Their relationship didn’t have to be this way, which Iz knew better than anyone living could, because it hadn’t always been this way. Unlike once upon a time, students and teachers seemed to exist these days in separate worlds, a hard, unyielding membrane keeping them artificially apart, and though the two groups could occasionally peer across at each other, they usually could not touch, and having any sort of impact was nearly impossible.

  But luckily, Iz had found a way to continue affecting change. As the text messaging and gum chewing gave way to the first tentative notes, each student seeking to find the proper key, he was grateful for his discovery, that such a way existed. For there were times that the music each produced was so excruciating that he saw not children, but merely many broken instruments in need of his expert repair, and in the absence of such an answer ... well. Then there would have only been despair.