The growth immediately put Board in mind of his high school science teacher, Mr. Book, because it was a fat, tick-like animal which had affixed itself to the back of File’s skull. It was, in fact, nearly the same size as the warden’s skull and Board wondered how his neck could support them both. The mandibles of the tick were not visible, no doubt buried in bone, but two black eyes stared emptily, like mere vestiges. It forelegs had been absorbed into the human as well, with just the two back pairs of legs hanging down uselessly under File’s ears. The two organisms had become so fused that the warden’s monk-like fringe of hair even grew sparsely across the tick’s body as the hair circled behind File’s head. His skin had apparently grown over it, since the creature’s body was the same pink color as his own.
“I have a job to offer you, Mr. Board,” Warden File intoned blandly, folding his hands like mating insects upon his red velvet blotter.
Board wanted to explain that he already had one, in the prison’s furniture factory, but he again said, “Yes, sir.”
“Before you came to Maxillae, you were a crime scene photographer in Metacarpus, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have experience with living cameras.”
“Yes, sir.”
File sat back a little in his own creaky red leather chair. “Do you know that all executions at Maxillae Penitentiary are filmed by a motion picture camera, Mr. Board?”
For several beats, Board did not answer. His eyes fixed themselves on those knotted hands with their skinny white fingers, their buffed nails like the blind faces of grubs. “I’ve heard that said, sir.”
“Last week, you may also have heard that our previous camera operator committed suicide. He drank one of the solutions in which he rears his replacement cameras. It burned his throat like lye.”
“I didn’t hear that, sir,” Board mumbled dreamily. Not wanting to hear.
“He had personal problems.” File shrugged. “A messy divorce, I understand. In any event, it leaves us in need, Mr. Board. Our previous operator was a civilian, and at first I thought to hire another civilian. But then…I remembered your case.”
“Yes, sir,” Board almost whispered.
“Now, another man might not consider you a candidate, Mr. Board. After all, you killed your last instrument, which is a serious matter. But in reviewing your case, I see that you were extremely inebriated at the time of that act. Also, you seemed to be under stress as a result of your job, which I can certainly understand.” File leaned forward again. “Here, there is no alcohol to cloud your judgment. And while you would of course be witness to unpleasant sights, you would not be witness to the bodies of murdered children and women; you would be viewing and recording the death of individuals who are paying for their crimes against society.”
Now that File was showing an actual need for Board, was conveying some importance to his existence, Board felt a little bolder and met the Medium’s eyes. “You would really trust me with this responsibility?”
“Yes…I would. But I would also trust you with the knowledge that should harm come to another valuable camera, you would never leave Maxillae Penitentiary again.” File spread his hands. “But cooperate, do your job diligently, and things will be in your favor. You still have eight years remaining to your sentence. We are prepared to cut your sentence in half if you should redeem yourself in this way, Mr. Board. And since you have already served two years, that means that you would have only three years remaining to serve. You would walk out of here at the age of forty. You would still have a life ahead of you. And in fact, we would encourage you to maintain your job as our camera operator once you become a civilian again.”
Board’s own hands mated like insects in his lap, but he had little else to do with them, his wrists manacled as they were. He rested them on one knee, though, and leaned back a little, as if he knotted his hands that way contemplatively, as if he chose to. “What if I’m released right now, with the agreement that I perform your camera-work as a civilian? What if I sign a contract stating that I’ll work for you for three years…for five years…without seeking employment anywhere else?”
File narrowed his eyes slightly, and gave a tight little smile. “I’m afraid we can’t commute your sentence altogether, Mr. Board. The terms are not negotiable. Are you unappreciative of my generous offer?”
Board’s eyes moved to the window behind the warden’s head. It had bars over it, but it was still a window, even had handsome red velvet curtains. From here, he could see one of the towers that rested at each of the prison’s four corners, looking both outside the walls and down into the prison yard. Still, even such a grim view was beautiful. The sky was the purest of blues, with barely a cloud marring it. A bird flew past, high up.
“I appreciate your offer, Warden File,” Board told him. “Of course I accept.”
“Ah—very good. For a moment there I feared differently. I feared that I might be wrong about you, after all—that you might have some moral objection to operating the camera. I feared that your destruction of your own camera might not just have been the result of too much drink and too many dead innocents. Again, I stress…these will not be innocents. These men are the type of people who murdered those children and women you used to photograph.”
“I’ll be filming the execution of Assassins, then?” Board said.
Again, that tight little smile, those narrowed eyes. “Not all murderers are hired Assassins, Mr. Board. Not by any means. But yes—some of the men you film will of course be Assassins.”
“It strikes me as ironic, seeing as how Mediums like you and Assassins like them are working for the same bosses.” With his skills and experience established as valuable, Board was beginning to feel a bit cheeky.
“I’m in the field of justice, Mr. Board. I see to it that those who commit crimes, be they Assassin or not, are punished. We all have our parts to play in society, do we not? I have no allegiance to the Assassins. They know the risks when they agree to…what they do. I have no compunction with seeing that they pay for their crimes.”
“They’re sort of sacrificed, then. Like their victims are. For the entertainment of the Bugs.”
Warden File rose from his creaking chair and Board worried then that he’d been far too cheeky. But File maintained his even tone as he said, “First of all, Mr. Board, they do not like to be called the Bugs. They prefer the Guests, as I’m sure you know. The Guests are not insects so they dislike being referred to as such. When they first attempted to contact our world—our plane of existence—the Guests tried to make direct contact through our minds, to inhabit certain human bodies so that they would have a physical form here through which to communicate with us.”
Like my mother, Board wanted to say to the warden; your friends killed my mother. Or at least, they had turned her preexistent suffering self-destructive. Perhaps they had even added to his father’s confusion, helped drive him away on that train to nowhere.
File came out from behind his desk and paced the room slowly, so that Board had to turn and look behind him as he passed. “Those early attempts ultimately proved futile. The human mind was too complex, too powerful; subjects were generally driven mad by the visits…”
The subjects they had tried to inhabit, back then, had been chosen primarily at random. Even children were driven to insanity by the voices in their heads.
“…and so, the Guests extended their consciousness to much simpler life forms instead. The hardy, industrious, and very adaptable insect. Insects proved important tools, instruments. But they did not and do not reflect the Guests’ own forms…”
“What form do the Guests actually have?”
Warden File paused before him, gazing down blankly. “I haven’t been privy to that. It is a common misconception that Mediums like myself are extensions of the Guests themselves. I can speak for the Guests, but they do not think through me. I’m really just as human as you are, Mr. Board.”
“I see,” Board said, hoping he didn�
��t sound skeptical or sarcastic. Despite the feelings that thoughts of his mother stirred, he didn’t want to lose this opportunity to shorten his sentence so radically. “Um, so…Mediums volunteer? Or…”
“Yes,” File answered simply. “My present position is voluntary.” He tapped the globular growth at the read of his head. His skull looked like a cell undergoing mitosis. “Smaller and smaller arthropod instruments are now being utilized for this direct link between us and the Guests. Soon, the arthropod will not be visible to the naked eye. And it is hoped that in the near future, the Guests’ original intention will be possible, and they will be able to commune with us without the use of the arthropods at all.”
“That thought frightens me, sir…to be frank.”
File cocked his head. “Why?”
“I’m afraid they’ll inhabit us…slip into us like shoes, sir. Come to live here, all of them…”
“Ah, see, another common misconception. This is not an invasion, Mr. Board. The Guests are just that—guests. They don’t want to abandon their world. They like their own world. Have they made Woodrow Wilson a Medium? Any world leader? No. I’m not sure there’s even a small town mayor who’s a Medium. Generally, just advisors, lesser political figures and government administrators are Mediums. The Guests are not out to steal our bodies and conquer this world. I’m like you, Mr. Board—I wouldn’t want to see that, either.”
“That’s reassuring, sir.”
“The Guests want to minimize their actual influence over our society. They like it as it is.”
“And how is that, sir? What is it that they like?”
Warden File paused, as if scrutinizing his guest, his prisoner. “They find us fascinating.”
“Like animals? In a zoo?”
“No. Not like that. More like anthropologists.”
“And they find us fascinating like actors, too, don’t they, sir? Entertainers. In a play. In a motion picture. That’s their main interest in us, isn’t it? The human drama?”
“You make them sound petty, Mr. Board, and merely voyeuristic. It is far more complex than that. More complex than even I can fathom. They are a superior race, you see.”
“I see.”
“In exchange for what we give them, look at what they’re sharing with us. Every year, new wonders. Radio. Television. Who knows what biotechnologies the future holds for mankind? And the little we give them in return…”
“The murdered women and children…” Board interrupted.
“Mr. Board—the Guests, as I’m trying to impress upon you, do not possess people like the Assassins. They merely recruit them. They recruit men who are already the way they are. They do not make them that way. They merely utilize them for the qualities they already have.”
“But don’t they encourage behaviors that might be latent? That might otherwise not develop?”
“No,” File said flatly. Defensively.
A little alarmed at the warden’s sharper tone, Board tried to rein in his own feelings and placate him. “I’m just trying to understand…”
“Well understand this. It is not an invasion. It is not about control. The Guests will never come to our world bodily…they are too distant from us. It is impossible. The Guests pose no threat to human society. They have more to give than they take. When Assassins are recruited, we are expected to stop them, catch them, incarcerate them, and execute them if we must. You yourself killed an Assassin in self-defense. You were not charged for doing so.”
“I…appreciate that,” Board said lamely.
The warden sat behind his desk again. He dragged a manila folder toward him, which Board knew was his own file. “You do want this job, don’t you, Mr. Board? You will be grateful for it, and do it to the very best of your ability? Or do you have a problem with the duties you’ve been asked to perform?”
“No, sir. No problem. I just have…questions…like everybody else does.”
File grunted. “Of course. Well, then…very good. The next step, then, is to have the equipment shown to you. You have sufficient time to become familiar with it, practice with it. The first execution you will be required to record will not be until the fifteenth of next month.”
“How will I be able to practice with the camera, sir?” Board asked a little warily. “Will the camera film inorganic subject matter?”
“You will film a number of pigs being slaughtered,” File said bluntly, no doubt gauging his reaction. “They’re destined to be butchered at a local slaughterhouse anyway. And you do eat pork yourself, do you not, Mr. Board?”
“Yes, sir,” Board admitted solemnly, as if ashamed of the fact, “I do.”
-3-
The two men who brought in the first pig worked for the meat company that supplied the prison, though the animals usually didn’t pass through its gates whole.
Before the animal was brought in from the truck, one of the men—with help from the prison’s chief electrician—had hooked up a special apparatus they’d brought with them to the power source for the prison’s electric chair, which ran on a circuit independent of the rest of the building’s circuits. While setting up his camera, Board had watched some of the work, and had taken in the empty and now disconnected electric chair. It had been built in the prison’s own furniture shop by a team of prisoners. Its fittings were copper.
Directly facing the chair with its dangling straps were four wooden church pews for witnesses. Between chair and pews rested a big metal tub that the meat men had brought with them. Over the door to the execution chamber was a sign that read: SILENCE. Board and two prison guards followed this exhortation, but the abattoir’s men joked back and forth and with the electrician as they set up their equipment.
The men from the slaughterhouse called their apparatus “tongs”, and said it was used at their place of work, proudly explaining that it was a state-of-the-art device which no other local butcher employed at this time.
At last the men went out to bring in the animal, leaving Board in the execution room with the two guards, one of them cradling a mean, compact-looking pump shotgun. Board ignored them as he tweaked the positioning of the camera he had been entrusted to use. It was much like the ones he had utilized while working as a police still photographer: This creature, a dark gray instead of white as his own had been, was also mounted securely to a tripod, its cilia-like legs rippling in waves. From above, it too looked to be a descendent of the horseshoe crab, or a throwback to the trilobite, though from the side it was not as flat as his old cameras, was more bulbous. Into its rear, anus-like opening (just as fishy-smelling as he remembered), a thick black canister like a phonograph’s wax cylinder was inserted—this housing the film onto which the moving pictures would be impressed, encoded. It, too, had a single large eye up front, gray like its horny armor. Again, from a hole drilled behind the eye extended a cable with a plunger at its end, which Board could depress with his thumb to indicate to the living device when or when not to film.
Like his old cameras, this one subsisted on a diet of ground up bone…either from animals like pigs or even the bones of dead human indigents, mental patients, and executed prisoners.
The number of prisoners put to death was rising dramatically with each year, Board had read in a newspaper in the prison library.
Board looked up as the door opened and the two abattoir men reappeared, dragging along a squealing four-month-old pig with a rope knotted tightly around its neck, as if it were to be hanged rather than electrocuted. Its pink, bristly hide made Board oddly uneasy, as if it were a naked human that was being forced into the room. The pig resisted halfway through the threshold, and the man behind it said, “Oh, so you wanna test me, huh?” He gave it a sharp kick in its rear. With a louder squeal, the animal trotted forward a little on its delicate hooves. The man who had kicked it looked up at the prison electrician and laughed. “When we got cows that don’t move along fast enough, sometimes I stab ‘em in the eyes to blind them so they go where we want ‘em to go…and if that i
sn’t enough, I stick my knife right up their shitter.”
“Ouch,” chuckled the electrician uneasily.
Hauling on the rope, the other slaughterhouse man pointed to the sign above the door and commanded the pig, “Silence!”
“Dead pig walking,” Board heard one guard say to the other, breaking their silence.
One of the slaughterhouse workers tied the end of the pig’s rope around one leg of the electric chair while the other helped restrain it, punching it in the side of the face once when it made a bolt for it. “Hold still, you cunt!” Finally they stepped back, and the pig pulled a few times at the end of its tether but seemed to calm slightly when their hands were off it. One of the men observed, “It might have been worth just tying it in the chair itself, y’know? We probably could’ve strapped it in there somehow.”
“Maybe they didn’t want it shitting in the chair,” the other joked. “Can’t have prisoners sitting in a chair that was shat on.”
“As if they don’t shit in it themselves?” A wink over at the guards. “Am I right? I bet you could cut a hole in that chair and put a bowl underneath, eh? Electric potty chair…”
“I’m ready,” Board spoke up loudly. All five other men turned to look at him. Board gestured at the camera. “It’s ready to roll.”
“Got somewhere to be?” one of the workers chuckled.
“A date with a cell mate,” the other said in his friend’s ear, but Board heard him.
“We’re ready for this,” the electrician said, after looking over at the guards and getting a nod from the one with the shotgun.
“Okay…here we go.” The older of the abattoir men picked up the electric tongs, which resembled a huge pair of pliers hooked up to a cable. “In our jargon, this is called a stunner,” the man explained, opening the tongs and then closing them on the pig’s head at the base of its flared, fur-fringed ears. “And so am I.”
With that, the stunner applied current. The pig became a resistance load in a high-voltage electrical circuit.
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