“Oh…wish I could say, John. I suppose the police know, but they’re not telling the likes of us. Or maybe they don’t know.”
“Could be over the radios.”
“Well, could be. Or through computers. Directly to their brains, maybe, without using a parasite. The Bugs were talking directly to people’s brains for years, before they were ever able to figure out how to grow their instruments here. Telling people to kill. To fight wars…”
“But however they do it, they don’t control the Assassins. The Assassins aren’t puppets. They have free will.”
“Oh yes, right…I’m sure of that.”
Board turned to face his guest. “So…did you bring that gun for me to look at, Tom?”
“Sure. Hold on.” Brick returned to the other room, Board trailing after him. Out of a pocket in the coat draped over the manikin, Brick produced a slightly scuffed-looking dark pistol. “I really don’t want it around the house anymore. Grace and I are afraid the kids will get a hold of it one day. I’m glad you asked if I had one…I’d almost forgotten it was stowed away.” He handed the heavy object to his host.
It was a 1903 hammerless Colt automatic, .380 caliber. Board hefted it in his hand, turned and pointed it at the dressmaker’s dummy. “I like it,” he pronounced.
“All right, then…I have cartridges for it, as well.” Brick dug in another pocket.
“Let me offer you a trade for it, Tom. You take that camera I’m growing, in there. Take the tank and everything.”
“What?” Brick laughed, incredulous. “I can’t do that, John! That gear is worth more than that old gun of mine.”
“You said you were thinking of getting out of our line of work, Tom. Do you still plan on that?”
“Well,” Brick replied, sounding a little embarrassed, “I’d like to, but right now…” His words tapered off.
“I’m getting out of it, Tom,” Board said. “So I want you to trade me this gun and these bullets for my new camera.”
“Are you sure, John? I don’t want to take advantage of you…”
Board pointed his gun into the room with the slanted attic walls that served as his workspace. Specifically, he aimed it at the aquarium, as if waiting for its inhabitant to appear. “It’s a fair trade by me, Tom.”
-7-
Each rap on Board’s door was like a roofing nail being hammered into his skull.
“Mr. Board? Mr. Board?”
Lifting that multiple-pierced skull from the pillow of his narrow bed, Board squinted at the door to his attic apartment. Peripherally, he caught sight of an empty bourbon bottle and his newly acquired Colt resting on the floor beside him. Also resting on the floor, lying on its back, was his headless, limbless torso of a dressmaker’s dummy. Its bra was off and nowhere to be seen.
“Go away, Billy!” Board growled.
“There’s been a murder at 28 Pelvic Street, Mr. Board! Detective Shoe wants you to get right down there, sir!”
“Go away, Billy!” Board snarled again.
“Sir…”
“Go!” he bellowed, and it felt like he’d cracked every suture in his skull in the effort. His sundered head dropped back to his pillow. A few moments later, after having heard the child’s shoes clomping down the stairs, he heard the boy mount his bicycle and speed away back to the police station of Precinct 3.
Let Shoe come over here and harass him. Let Shoe find someone else to be their voyeur. Their ghoul, hyena, dirty little peephole peeker…
Maybe he’d catch up with Mick O’Tool in the Phalanges, he thought. Catch him in the act before he cut open another wife, strangled another little girl. Shoot out his peeper eyes and smirking teeth with that Colt .380.
Or maybe he’d just go ahead and put the Colt to his own head, he thought, seeing his mother’s blackening face in his mind’s eye, like a photograph he had shot and framed and mounted in a terrible museum with just one acquisition and no exit. Maybe he’d just join her in that museum, but this time, Tom Brick could take the picture. Brick could set up his tripod so that it stood directly above Board’s spread corpse, gazing down on yet another morsel for the Bugs’ jaded palates.
Thoughts of Brick’s tripod brought back to Board a scrap of memory like a rag of torn flesh, disconnected from its body. Painfully, he turned his head a little on his pillow to look toward his little workroom. Though he couldn’t see directly into it from this angle, he could see the legs of his tripod, lying on its side on the floor. He couldn’t see the camera, mounted to the top of it, but he could guess that it lay cracked like a white skull, lying in a pool of milky white blood. What he’d just recalled, vaguely, was swinging that tripod by its legs last night. Swinging it like a bat against the doorjamb, again and again, until the camera was chittering loudly in pain, maybe in fear and anger, screeching almost fit to burst his eardrums until it made no more sound, its legs no longer flickering madly.
Board let his head roll back on his old, flattened pillow, closing his eyes against poisonous black pain. Before he fell back into a sleep more like unconsciousness, he dimly recalled having poured some of his bourbon into the mouth of the crushed camera as it lay dead or dying. Sharing his poison with his partner in crime.
He dreamed of strolling along Lumbar Beach as a boy, but this time without his Aunt Marge. And the animals mating in the surf were not horseshoe crabs, but cameras like his camera, and the ocean was white like their amniotic bath, like their blood, like semen…
A new pain woke him sharply, dispersed the dream and the poisoned fumes.
Mick O’Tool smiled that familiar little smile down at him. Gazed down at him from above like a camera on a tripod. He had blood speckled across a black rubber apron like the kind Board sometimes used himself when working with his amniotic solutions and other chemicals. Board realized those flecks of blood were his own.
“I hear you’ve been asking around about me, Mr. Board,” said O’Tool.
Both his hands shot to O’Tool’s wrist, and gripped it before the newspaperman could pull the blade—driven to its hilt in his guts—back toward him to extend the wound.
O’Tool leaned over him a little more, and mock pouted. “Now don’t make this tougher, chum.”
From somewhere, Board heard a chittering sound. Either from some piece of equipment O’Tool had brought with him, or directly in his mind.
“You shouldn’t have been so cruel to your little friend,” O’Tool said, tossing his head in the direction of the other room. “You were trusted with a job. A good job…” O’Tool calmly, patiently started using his free hand to pry at the fingers restraining his wrist. “Come on now, old boy. I have work to do. Pictures to take of you for the Times, when I’m done…”
Board tried to sit up against the knife that pinned him to the bed, gagged, coughed up some bloody spittle onto his own chest. He fell back against the mattress, one of his hands dropping away from O’Tool’s wrist.
“That’s it,” O’Tool whispered like a lover. “Nice and easy.” He started to dislodge Board’s remaining hand on his wrist.
Board’s right hand had dropped off the side of the bed, his knuckles banging the floor. But he brought his hand back up again, and this time it held Tom Brick’s scuffed old semiautomatic.
“Hey,” O’Tool said, and then he walked backwards very fast away from the bed, somehow managing to stay on his feet. His hand that had gripped the knife was spotted with Board’s blood, but the other hand had touched his chest and come away slick with his own.
The haft of the knife jutting out of his belly like a lever waiting to be pulled, Board raised his heavy arm higher and fired the gun two more times before he lost consciousness. The first of these bullets hit the wall, but the last caught Mick O’Tool in the throat just as he was lurching toward the bed again, perhaps in an effort to retrieve his knife.
O’Tool’s chin dropped down on his chest as if to block a second shot to the neck, or as if the supporting column of his spine had been kicked away. He slumped f
orward onto the foot of the bed, then—as though liquefied by the foreign body’s intrusion—slithered bonelessly to the floor…
And that was how the Assassin lay when Tom Brick was called in later from a different precinct, in order to capture the scene on film.
Part Two: Unit 8
-1-
Maxillae Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, 1920
The prisoners spent twenty-three hours of each day in their two-man cells—twenty hours if they were on a work detail. Twice a week, those who weren’t in the hole were allowed two hours of recreation time. If the weather were good, most chose to spend that time outside in the exercise yard, but on a rainy day like this, the prisoners were cramped inside the recreation rooms in their respective units.
The rec room in John Board’s unit had the high brick walls of a warehouse, the clanking sound of barbells echoing off the distant ceiling. There was a single ping-pong table, and tables at which men played chess or checkers, these manufactured at the prison’s own furniture factory.
More of these prison-produced chairs were clustered around the television.
The TV was attached to one of the white-painted brick walls, a huge beetle-like insect crucified there sideways as if it had been pinned to the wall in the process of crawling across it. In this way, its almost rectangular back was horizontal, and this was where the transmissions the living creature received were displayed. Most TVs were smaller, the size of a dog, but this one had attained twice that size so that a larger audience could sit and see its picture clearly (though more and more barrooms were getting these larger TVs, too, and they had even begun showing up in the private homes of wealthy families).
Most insects have two pairs of wings, but in beetles the outer pair has developed into shell-like protective wing covers (or “elytra”). Like a Japanese beetle, this creature’s elytra were as iridescent as an oil slick, the rest of its body being metallic black. This complex iridescence was what was translated into the color images the animal displayed. Each cell of its elytra was a particle of rapidly changing color, these particles all adding up into one realistic moving image, the way painter Georges Seurat used points of color in his “pointilism”. Like its legs, the animal’s wing covers were also pinned in place, so that it could not spread them open and divide this image. As it received its signals, its antennae vibrated so violently they were a blur. And from its intricate mouthparts—labial palps, maxillary palps, mandibles, and labrum—came the string of sounds which formed the soundtrack of the TV’s programs…sounds as subtle as the leg of a chair scraping against a kitchen floor, a prolonged violin note, a young woman’s soft voice.
TVs were all the rage, though only having been made available to the public since early the previous year. Studios were working frantically on new films and serials in color and with sound, while TV audiences mainly contented themselves for now with existing motion pictures, like D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and his 1916 epic Intolerance (with its themes of inhumanity, bigotry, religious hatred—all manner of social and political evil), and Griffith’s 1919 film on child abuse and interracial love, Broken Blossoms, starring Lillian Gish.
Presently, the prisoners in Unit 8 were watching a chapter of 1914's silent, black and white serial The Perils of Pauline starring the suspiciously named Pearl White, who was at the moment tied to a railroad track while a train approached.
“Yeah, I like a bitch that way, all tied up,” chuckled one of the men watching the episode. “I’ll give her Pearl White…Pearl White all over her ass…”
“Shut up,” hissed another man, leaning forward anxiously with hands clasped, fearing for Pauline’s life. The first man didn’t argue back with the second man, because the second man was bigger and was doing life for beating his unfaithful wife to death with a skillet.
John Board, in his ash gray uniform, sat close to one of the white-washed walls; not the best angle for viewing the TV, but he liked to keep his back covered whenever possible. Even now, he saw the group of five Assassins throwing him glances and smirks in turns. These men had learned that Board had killed an Assassin named Michael O’Tool (and had nearly died in the process, himself). That he had killed one of their kinds both attracted their animosity toward him, and kept them wary of him. Though he had received numerous threats, none of them had as yet made an open attempt to attack him. It helped, Board was sure, that he had put out the eye of another prisoner (not an Assassin) with the end of his toothbrush, when that prisoner tried to rape him in the showers during his first month in Max Pen. It was a good idea to kick someone’s ass right off the bat, and there had been no further attempts at rape, only a few close calls with fistfights. Even though Board had once worked for the cops, he himself hadn’t been a cop, and the other prisoners seemed more confused than anything else about how to peg him.
John Board wasn’t here for killing Mick O’Tool—that had been self-defense. He was serving a ten-year sentence for destroying his camera, one of the instruments of the Bugs.
Board hadn’t really aligned himself with any of Unit 8's gangs, but he often ate or played checkers with a group of blacks who seemed as mystified at his friendliness with them as the white prisoners were. Still, he preferred to spend most of his time alone. And while many prisoners, when they had access to the library, preferred to read legal volumes in the attempt to get a new trial, Board opted to sit quietly alone and read from works of fiction.
One of the Assassins, a short and broad Mexican named Linterna, flicked a black checker across the room at Board, but it fell short and skittered at his feet. Board glanced down at it with studied calm. One of the guards snapped, “Go pick that up, moron, before I put it up your farter.”
Linterna seemed to welcome the opportunity to squat next to Board. He whispered, “Soon, wiso, very soon.”
Board wanted to tell him fuck you, but ignored him, watching Pauline struggle against her bonds. Out of the corner of his eye, though, he made sure Linterna returned to his seat. The Assassins were all here for life, and despite the threat of solitary confinement, one of them might feel he had nothing to lose adding another victim to his list.
Peripherally, Board also noted another prisoner, this one a Chinese man of twenty who had once shared his cell with him. He thought he had noticed the young Chinese man throwing him a quick look earlier; a risky move. If it had been a signal, Board would not return it. When they had been cellmates, one night this man had finally persuaded Board to let him suck him off. Board could not reach climax, but in turn, he gave the man a hand job. Board and this man had masturbated each other on one other occasion (this time Board reaching orgasm), but he had never agreed to it again. One night, however, when the man slumbered in the bunk above him, Board couldn’t sleep…lying there for hours fighting the urge to crawl up into the bunk with him, and to lie atop the man’s smooth, almost hairless body. Though he felt badly for his cell mate, he was relieved when soon after that night, Henry Plough—the most powerful gang leader in Unit 8—pulled some strings to get the handsome young Chinese man bunked with him. Plough sat with Board’s former cell mate right now, and that was why Board didn’t want Plough catching them glancing at each other. Though Plough had had no reason to take note of Board to date, he feared Plough more than Unit 8's five Assassins combined.
Board suspected he’d simply masturbate himself tonight, while picturing the much-imperiled Pearl White on the movie screen behind his eyelids.
A bell over the door rang loudly, and the guards came forward, grumbling, “Come on, ladies, back to your cells.” One of them went to the huge bug on the wall and gave it a rough tap on the center of its head. The antennae stopped vibrating, and the image on its back dissolved, replaced by random, slowly swirling clouds of color.
The inmates began filing out of the room, the others moving aside to let Henry Plough and his girl and his boys go first. Board lagged behind until he saw the Assassins go ahead of him (Linterna threw him a look and made kissy lips). When Board started
forward, one of the last, a guard broke off and approached him, took him above the elbow.
“Warden File wants to see you,” he said.
“Warden File?”
“That’s what I said, moron.” The guard shackled Board’s wrists in front of him. “Come on.”
-2-
Maxillae Penitentiary was a huge, thick-bordered open square with two units composing each of its four sides, at its center the courtyard where the men took their outdoors exercise and a tease of sun. Units 7 and 8 occupied the southern section of this square, with Units 3 and 4 to the north, 5 and 6 to the east. Units 1 and 2 occupied the western section of the square, these smaller units housing the death row inmates. This western side of the square also housed the administrative offices.
It was toward these offices that thirty-seven year old John Board was escorted by the black-uniformed guard. The many doors they had to pass through to reach their destination did not open electronically; each needed to be opened individually with a key by a guard on the opposite side.
They passed along the outer edge of the eerily quiet death row area, and on into the administration section. Clerks passing in the hall glanced at Board with disinterest. None of them were women. The doors were of wood, not metal, and not barred. They stopped at one of these, outside of which sat a guard reading a newspaper. He rose and knocked on the door for them, and a voice on the other side called, “Come in.”
A balding, well–tailored man sat behind a desk of dark wood like the door. He gestured toward a chair upholstered in red leather. For a moment Board hesitated to sit on it, thinking the man meant for the guard to sit down, but the guard stood stationary at the door. Board sat.
“I’m Warden File,” the man announced.
“Yes, sir,” Board muttered.
In his almost two years at Max Pen, Board had only seen the man a few times at a distance, but even then he could tell that the man was a Medium. Now, up close, it was hard for him not to stare at the huge tumor-like form bulging from the back of his head.
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