Boneland

by Jeffrey Thomas

  When he was finally able to move again, it was away from the house with the porch. Back the way he had come. Still poisoned with his anger, like that man with the beard…but like him, he had let go of his rock.

  -7-

  Board had gone so far as to dial the first two digits of the number for the police before he replaced the receiver back in its cradle.

  Maybe the father of the bike-riding boys had called the police, himself. If he had, they still hadn’t come to speak to Board by the time night had fully descended.

  He poured himself a glass of merlot, and set it beside his Colt automatic on a little table beside his chair, in which he settled to watch a recording of The Street of Forgotten Men. His first picture. He waited for the appearance of the unnamed “moll”, played by Louise Brooks. He almost dreaded seeing her appear, however. Dreaded seeing her so buoyantly young.

  Sadie lay at his feet. On top of one of his feet, actually. Board looked down at her and said, “Matagiinu…”

  He ached. When he wanted to turn his head, he had to turn his whole upper body with it, stiff as Frankenstein’s monster. He had tried to lie down in his bed but it had been too uncomfortable. He was too tense to stretch out prone in his bed, anyway. He would sleep in his chair. He had bandaged his elbow after dabbing out the grit ground into its lacerated flesh. He had taken four aspirin. He had his wine bottle ready to refill his glass.

  Sadie lifted her head from her paws abruptly.

  Board looked down at her. The perked ears. The intense eyes focused on sound rather than sight. “What?” he began to say.

  She sprang to her feet, darted for the sofa…bounded up onto it, nosing the curtain to one side.

  Board didn’t scold her this time. His hand went to the table beside him, knocking over the glass of wine as his fingers closed around the checkered handle of the .45…

  Sadie let out one bark before the window exploded.

  Board spun out of his chair to the white chitin floor on hands and knees. Blood speckles sprayed across the floor in front of him, one drop glittering on his finger like a ruby ring.

  He had seen the white dog fly backwards, twisting in air, as if she had been filmed pouncing onto the couch and the film had just been run in reverse.

  From behind the dubious shelter of his armchair, Board poked up his head and aimed the gun at the window. The curtain had slipped back into place across the spider-webbed glass. He expected another shotgun blast. He expected himself to fire at the window, through the curtain, to keep his attacker at bay. No more shots were fired. His attacker had either fled, or was circling the house for a way in. As for himself, he had been afraid to strike the house directly across the street where an elderly widow lived.

  He saw Sadie’s four legs kicking horribly as though she were running, running, her nails skittering against the chitin; then the legs jolted as if she were leaping again—but she didn’t seem to land. By the time Board had scrambled over to her on all fours, she was merely giving electrified twitches, as he had seen her do in her sleep. Dog dreams of chasing cats, or maybe for the Akita, ancestral dreams of hunting deer and bear alongside Japanese royalty.

  He put his hand on her side. She was panting. Whining, as she had done on occasion when a cat was outside. Her eyes opened at his touch and rolled slowly to look up at him. He felt wetness under his hand as he ran it down the dog’s flank. She was only one year old, he thought. She was a 75 pound puppy.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered to her. “You’re a good girl, protecting daddy. You’re such a good girl.” He watched her eyes close dreamily, a child soothed to sleep, and he said in a croak, “Esteemed hunter.”

  He crouched beside her, stroking her, trying not to smear her blood across her beautiful coat, for uncounted minutes. If his attacker were testing windows, the back door, he didn’t care.

  His attacker had seen his curtain nudged aside. He was certain that whoever had fired into his house had thought they were shooting at him.

  After a long time, he rose, ignoring the pains grating in the bones of his back, his vertebrae gnashing like teeth. He stood over her, gazing down. Then he looked over at the door. With blood smudged across his left palm and the military sidearm in his right fist, he went to open it.

  The night was comfortably cool. No humidity. Yes, a good night for a walk. The heavy pistol dragged him onward like a white ghost dog straining at its leash.

  He walked past lawns glowing a dark indigo blue in the night. Past flowers whitely luminous against the darkness, fungoid and phosphorescent. His footsteps were boldly loud against the sidewalk, and he found himself glancing up at the cameras spaced atop telephone poles and street lamps. He wanted to lift his arm and shoot each one of them as he passed below it. He counted three along his way, like his old movie cameras he’d simply dubbed 1,2,3…

  He took the corner at the white wooden fence. He walked until ahead of him he saw metallic glimmers against another ominous lawn; cold stars in black space. The vaguely insectoid bodies of drowsing bicycles. Board strode past them, up the brick walk, up the front steps of the porch. The screen door opened outward but the knob of the inner door wouldn’t turn, of course, so he stabbed that tattooed black circle with the muzzle of his gun. The living house buzzed loudly inside. Board buzzed again. He kept the gun jammed against the circle so the buzzing wouldn’t stop.

  “What the fuck?” he heard a furious voice rasp, and then the inner door opened and standing before him was the man who’d hurled him down the steps, wearing baggy striped pajamas. He looked down at the pistol pointed at his belly. When the pistol thundered, he made a comical sound like “oof” and his body half folded at the waist but he held onto the door frame. It was impressive that he remained on his feet; the .45 was a fat, heavy cartridge. Board raised his arm and saw the man’s confused eyes track its progress until the gun and the man were eye to eye and then a second .45 bullet hammered the man in the face and this time he was blown back out of the threshold.

  When the man dropped, beyond him Board saw that a second figure had appeared at the end of the hallway. It was a boy of about twelve, but instead of pajamas he wore jeans and a striped t-shirt. His sneakers were slicked green and sparkled with night dew. He hefted a big shotgun that no doubt belonged to his father, that undoubtedly had a lot of kick for his skinny frame. He pointed the gun at Board. Board’s arm was still loosely extended from having killed the boy’s father. He lifted it a little higher and pulled the trigger again. The boy was struck squarely in the front of his neck. The impact lifted him off his feet as if he’d been hauled violently upward by a rope.

  Board heard a woman screaming somewhere within the house, and another child’s voice, yelling at the woman to call the police. Board hated the loud, adult power in that young voice.

  He stepped into the house, and moved toward it.

  Epilogue: I Am a Camera

  -1-

  Coccyx, Illinois, 1957

  She had come to him before in dreams. Now, she was more vivid, more beautiful, than she had ever been before.

  He assumed the huge butterfly was a she. The first time she had appeared to him, there had seemed nothing anthropomorphic about the giant insect, but she had been softly out of focus then. On one occasion, when he had thought he could make out a naked female figure between the vast, slowly beating wings, it had been his impression that the angel wore her hair in a short, Dutch Bob. But this time, above her foggy glowing body, her hair appeared very long and dark, like that of the Asian woman whose nude body he had found by an abandoned parking lot twelve years ago. Her hair had been spread on the ground then, but it swam against a void of blackness now.

  As on her previous visits, the insect angel whispered to him in a soft buzzing hum. Whispered directly into his mind, like a spirit communicating through a medium.

  Colors swirled, churned, reconfigured their patterns on the wings that made her hover before his inner eye. Each scale in her wings was like a pixel, and the pixel
s coalesced into pictures that would dissolve and reform. Many of these pictures were dark and dreadful. Others, scintillating with color, and lovely, and calming. He tried to focus more intently upon her wings, and found that he could control what he saw in them. They weren’t changing; it was his own perception that made the images shift.

  The insect angel was growing larger, floating closer, her wings starting to fill his vision utterly. Then, just one of her wings eclipsed all else.

  He wasn’t afraid of the hybrid creature. He welcomed her. He held out his arms to her. He became part of her picture.

  * * *

  From The Coccyx Sun Times:

  JOHN BOARD, 74; was Academy Award nominated cinematographer

  COCCYX.—John Orrin Board, 74, of 15 Meniscus Street, was found dead in his home July 19, in what police have declared a suicide. Mr. Board was discovered in his bed with a cloth tied around his throat, tightened with a section of broom handle slipped through it. A neighbor, Allan Faucet, told police that Mr. Board had been suffering severe back pains for many years, and this is suggested as a reason for the suicide.

  Mr. Board was never married and leaves no children.

  Between the 20's and 40's, Mr. Board was a cinematographer in Los Huesos, California, working on such films as The Public Enemy with James Cagney, Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant, and Cab Driver, for which he earned an Oscar nomination in 1941. Mr. Board retired to Coccyx, where he was born, in the early 40's.

  Mr. Board was reclusive, and only Mr. Faucet, who saw his body through a window after having had no contact with the deceased for several days, had any acquaintance with him. In 1945, Mr. Board shot and killed another neighboring family, Mr. and Mrs. Warren Knob and their two children, and although these were legal kills, his other neighbors shunned Mr. Board, according to Mr. Faucet.

  Funeral services will be held 11:00 AM, Tuesday, July 23rd, at the Sieve Brothers Funeral Home, 288 Humerus Avenue, Coccyx. Burial will be in Bone Orchard Cemetery. There are no calling hours.

  -2-

  USA, 1982

  From American Cinematographer Magazine, the article I Am A Camera: The Life and Work of John Board by Wayne Dowel:

  In his waning years, Board was befriended (one assumes reluctantly on Board’s part) by a gregarious if sensitive neighbor, one Allan Faucet. Board would screen recordings of some of his films for the much younger Faucet, and share anecdotes on the making of classics such as The Public Enemy (camera hit with grapefruit juice) and Cab Driver (camera hit with artificial blood).

  One would be tempted to say that an aging, addled Board may have been emulating the title character in the latter film (his personal favorite, according to Faucet) when in 1945—annual legal killings still being in effect—Board shot to death his neighbor Warren Knob and Knob’s wife and children, apparently as a result of an escalating feud that resulted in Board sustaining injuries that would plague him for his remaining years. Faucet speculated that Board may have later felt remorse over the killings, though when he suggested this to Board on one occasion, Board told him, “The guilt I feel is that I don’t feel guilty.” Whatever the case, he seemed to dwell on the murders morbidly, his feelings at not being punished for them perhaps feeding some strange ideas he expressed to Faucet regarding the Guests. According to Faucet, Board claimed that he had been experiencing visions or epiphanies in his dreams, from which he concluded that there never had been any Guests—that is to say, that the Guests were not an alien race in another plane. Board’s own theory was that the Guests were a future version of ourselves, our own collective unconscious from a time yet to come, influencing the past so that we would evolve and progress in the direction that was preordained or destined for us.

  Whether Board harbored such paranoid suspicions in his working years remains unknown, though it is easy to believe he may have, when one watches Travis Bickle’s eyes reflected in his rearview mirror, his cab slithering through the dark and haunted labyrinth of city streets. In movies like Bringing Up Baby, Board was the clear-headed professional, connecting slot A into slot B. In films like Cab Driver, with its murky colors and blood-splashed walls, and The Elephant Man, with its glowing and glistening, radiant black and white, John Board was free to paint from a palette, to capture on the canvas of screen the anxieties, fears, anger and alienation of modern man and man eternal.

  * * *

  From Lulu in Boneland by Louise Brooks, 1982, Lacuna Press:

  Bogey wasn’t the only friend I lost in 1957, though by the time I learned of this other friend’s demise it was too late for me to attend his funeral, and too late for me to tell him how important he had been to me in my youth, and always.

  John Board was the cinematographer on two of my early films, The Street of Forgotten Men, replacing Hal Rosson when Hal became too sick during the filming to continue, and The American Venus shortly thereafter, in 1926, when I was a worldly two decades old. J. B., as I called him, immediately appealed to me and we hit it off right away. Before you knew it, we were romantically involved. I have to admit, I had to give the guy a push; there was a sweet shyness about him. I was charmed by his awkwardness with me, because he seemed both guilty for being with a woman less than half his age, and breathless with how lucky he felt.

  John had a background as a crime photographer for the Metacarpus, Pennsylvania police force, and I think this solemn experience lent a melancholy beauty to his later movies like The Elephant Man and Cab Driver. Without use of a viewfinder, as with inorganic cameras, John Board had to imagine what his camera was seeing. Through trial and error, he knew how and where to position his living cameras, but besides that, he seemed able to get inside the hybrids’ heads. I think this empathy he felt translated to the screen, and made the audience empathize as well.

  Our work took us in different directions, and new romances did as well; later in 1926 I married director Eddie Sutherland. We managed a scanty correspondence but I gravely regret having fully lost contact with J. B. by the late 30's. When I read about his death, one article mentioned my relationship with him and pointed out that recordings of some of my movies were found in his home, and that he also owned a copy of Image 5, containing the first published article I wrote, Mr. Pabst, which appeared the year before J. B.’s death. I was moved that he had still been thinking of me, and became all the guiltier for not having contacted him for so long.

  Reading about the manner in which J. B. died crushed me. Like some ghastly photograph, even now I can’t expunge the image he conjures to my mind. I can’t say I understand that J. B. would commit suicide, particularly in such a horrible manner (though he owned a gun, he strangled himself to death with a scrap of bed sheet wound around his neck and secured around a post in his headboard, this cruel garotte made tight by inserting and twisting a lever he fashioned from a mop handle). But I can’t say I don’t understand it, either.

  We were unlikely lovers. I was seen, in my screen years, as the unrepentant hedonist. J. B. was serious, intense, and troubled. Maybe we sought to balance each other out in some way that just wasn’t possible.

  Though I’m certain that J. B. did find gratification in his film work—and not to belittle the field that gave me my own employment—sometimes I think that he missed his true calling. I can visualize J. B. as an explorer of humanity like Diane Arbus, a wartime photojournalist like Carl Mydans. But then, I think this would have also brought J. B. too much pain. Sometimes I believe he was trying to escape into work that was more frivolous. Other times I think he was just trying to pay the bills any way he could, and that dictated his choices more than anything else. But whether he chose to be or not, John Board was a professional witness. A chronicler of our culture, and our crimes.

  The most ironic thing about J. B. was that I knew he hated the Guests, though he wasn’t one to say it flat out like that. While I’m sure that, had the Guests never involved themselves in our world, J. B. would still have been a successful cameraman, there’s no doubt that the Guests provided his livelihood
, were his bread and butter. It was a symbiotic relationship, like a shark with a remora, though which would be the shark and which the remora is a matter of perspective.

  J. B. did not live to see the mysterious decline of the Guests in the mid-to-late 60's, the unexplained wisping away of their influence, until not even the Mediums could “hear” them anymore…until the Mediums carried only mute, decomposing animals inside their heads. He didn’t see the hybrid buildings stop responding to commands, and their subsequent break down and rot. He didn’t see the huge insects we’d raised for food turn and eat their butchers. Didn’t witness the telephone lines stop conveying signals…televisions stop broadcasting, opening their wings in crazed attempts to fly away, to liberate themselves from their enslavement, instead. For hadn’t the insects been the slaves, where we had not? We had never rebelled against the Guests. We had welcomed them.

  J. B. didn’t see us scrambling to adapt and translate these technologies into mechanics, electronics. He wasn’t here to observe, with the piercing lens of his gaze, when we were abandoned to our own devices…as if God had slipped into a coma and then death when we weren’t paying attention. But I’m sure J. B. would have been pleased, even in those dark years when we had to regain the steps we had lost.

  And yet, whether he would be proud of where we are at this moment, I can’t truly guess. Because things are really not any different, and I’m sure he’d be the first to note that. Of course, there is no longer a ration of legal killings. There are no longer cameras watching us from corners, rooftops, telephone poles. But murders go on. Wars break out.

  Cameras still record them.

  The Guests are gone. The Hosts remain.

  About The Author

  Jeffrey Thomas is the creator of the popular Punktown universe, in which he has set the novels Blue War, Deadstock, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Monstrocity, and the short story collections Punktown, Punktown: Shades Of Grey (with Scott Thomas) and Voices From Punktown. His Hades series includes the novel Letters From Hades, the sequel The Fall Of Hades, and the collection Voices From Hades. His Delirium Books titles have included Terror Incognita, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Aaaiiieee!!!, Thirteen Specimens and Ugly Heaven, Beautiful Hell (with Carlton Mellick III). Other notable books from Thomas are the novel Boneland, the original A Nightmare Of Elm Street novel The Dream Dealers, and the Cthulhu Mythos collection Unholy Dimensions. Thomas lives in Massachusetts with his gorgeous wife Hong, adorable daughter Jade, and handsome son Colin.