Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The authorities had good reason to believe that these nine women had been the victims of one man. All of them had had their eyes removed.

  As Jonatha read this, she had to grip the cold, hard edge of the desk – of reality – to keep from plummeting into the glaring white vortex that the book had become in front of her face. Pennies, she thought. They would now mention the pennies...

  But as she read on, there was no mention of pennies.

  She looked through the other books. Another one summarized the killings, but did not indicate that one of the victims had lived in Eastborough. And this book, also, made no mention of pennies being left in the eyes of the corpses. Just that their eyes had been cut out.

  Maybe, Jonatha considered, it was one of those details that investigators liked to keep secret, in order to weed out those who might give false confessions...

  Or, she thought, maybe the murderer hadn’t left the pennies in their eyes. Maybe, after he had fashioned each gratifying, mystifying tableau, he had taken the pennies back before he left. Rinsed them clean, perhaps. Kept them for souvenirs...

  * * *

  An angry hammering. A knife driving into a rib cage. A half-rotted fist slamming the inside of a coffin lid. Jonatha’s eyes snapped open in the dark and she grappled for the bedside lamp.

  It was her mother, of course...her cane against the bedroom wall. At – Jonatha turned the clock-radio to face her – at two-thirty in the morning? What could she have been doing to upset her? Snoring? Crying out in her sleep as the naked body of a young woman loped along after her through the blackened, smoking ruins of a burned house, dragging her entrails after her?

  Had Jonatha been making that drawn-out whining noise that her mother claimed she had been making the night before?

  “That’s it,” Jonatha hissed to herself, swinging her legs out of bed. She threw on a flannel robe over her comfortably baggy men’s pajamas. “I’ve had enough of her. I’ve had enough.” She stepped into her slippers, and scuffed purposefully through her apartment, snapping up the key along the way.

  It was snowing lightly outside. Like drifting ash from a distant pyre.

  In her mother’s apartment now, and she had every intention of telling her off this time...telling her off at last...

  Before she hit the light switch, Jonatha swore she saw a figure standing over her mother’s bed, bare skin awash in pale street-lamp glow coming in through the curtains. But when she hit the wall switch, there was only her mother there, sprawled unconscious in a knotted tangle of blankets, froth about her lips and chin and her cane fallen to the floor.

  * * *

  The elderly woman in the next bed – so frail she was ethereal -- would occasionally reach her skeletal arms toward the ceiling as if imploring angels to take her away. They must have been taking their time in doing so. Jonatha mused that they were too busy collecting the souls of younger women throughout the world, who did not live to become frail. How many women, she wondered, right now, right this very second, were having their lives stolen to fuel some man’s brief and petty fantasy? Hundreds. Thousands. This very second. The second before, and the second that followed. Moaning out their last, fatalistic breath.

  She returned her gaze to her mother, frail in her own hospital bed, and jolted. For a moment, it seemed as if two bright coins had been laid upon her eyelids to weigh them down. But it was only that her eyes had come open at last.

  “Jonathan,” her mother said to her.

  “I’m Jonatha,” her daughter corrected her. She shuddered. Did her mother think it was her husband, long dead, who kept vigil beside her?

  “I know,” she wheezed, closing her eyes again. “I was having a dream about him.”

  She didn’t elaborate. In her dreams, did Jonathan come with charred face, smoking clothing, as in her daughter’s? Or as the handsome grinning man she had married? Jonatha hovered closer, like a predatory angel of Death herself, sniffing for a confession.

  “Mother...tell me...tell me about my father.” The eyes did not open. “Tell me how he died. How he really died.” Now the eyes did open. “He killed himself, didn’t he? It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t him smoking in bed. He set himself and the house on fire, didn’t he?”

  “Why are you asking me this?” her mother hissed. Once, Jonatha would have been too afraid to go on. But she went on.

  “I’ve...looked at books. Books about murder, mother. I’ve seen...I’ve...” How could she tell her about the visions, the ghosts, whatever they might be? The information encoded in her very own genes, perhaps, inherited like race memories?

  A claw-like hand fell upon her arm and squeezed. Tears filmed the old woman’s faded eyes. “I did it, Jonatha...”

  “You did...what?” she whispered.

  “I set the house on fire.” She met her daughter’s gaze more directly, and her tone became a kind of urgent pleading. “He wanted to stop himself, but he couldn’t. And as much as I loved him, I prayed that he...that he would end it...even if he had to end himself. But he couldn’t control himself. It was a sickness. And I had to help him, the only way I was able.” She gasped a jagged sob. “I set your father on fire.”

  “Oh my God,” Jonatha barely exhaled.

  “There were twelve. It hurt me so. I wasn’t enough for him. I never denied him...but I wasn’t enough. There were twelve. No one ever knew it was him, never even questioned him. Only one girl was from Eastborough. He was smart about it. Once a year...like an anniversary. Like our anniversary. Once a year...and the first time, I found out later, the first time was in 1962. Then once a year after that, without fail. I don’t know what that meant to him. Maybe he didn’t understand it himself. He was sick, your poor father, like I say...”

  “Mother...” Tears now formed in Jonatha’s eyes as well.

  “He kept their underclothes. I found them one time. Blood on them. He kept them and I confronted him. He confessed to me, he broke down and told me. It was 1973. Twelve sets of underclothes. If I had only found them sooner...so much sooner.” Again, a ragged sob. “But I forced him to tell me the truth. I wasn’t afraid of him – he would never have hurt me. He loved me, your father, and I loved him. I worshiped him, Jonatha. He was so good to me, and your sisters...he loved us dearly. He couldn’t help what he was. He loved us and he would have loved you, too. He was excited about you...he was waiting for you. Though – though of course – he was hoping it would be a boy this time...”

  “You should have gone to the police!” Jonatha cried.

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t betray him. But I had to stop him, and I had to help him, and it was the only way. I had to burn him...burn those clothes...burn everything I could. They never discovered him. And they never discovered me.”

  Jonatha covered her eyes with one hand, bucking with silent sobs.

  “Forgive me, dear,” her mother pleaded, her voice that of a soul in limbo. Her grip on Jonatha’s arm tightened. “Forgive me for killing your father...”

  “I forgive you, mother.”

  “And please try...please forgive your father.”

  Jonatha made no reply.

  Her mother withdrew her hand and lay back, closing her eyes again against the tears streaming like blood. “He’s been coming to me in dreams. Him, and...and...” She let the second thought go. “I don’t know why, suddenly – but I think it’s because he knows I’m dying. And he wants us to be together again.”

  * * *

  Not everything had turned to ash. The underclothes, perhaps. But the truth hadn’t burned. Nor had the vial with the pennies.

  Jonatha held the vial in her hand. She stood in Pine Grove Cemetery, which bordered Eastborough Swamp. Her mother would be buried here soon. Her father already was. She stood before the glossy monument, inscribed with dates like the date on a penny. Two for each woman, two for each year. One for each eye.

  But Jonatha remembered something. She had added a penny of her own, to make the amount a nice rounded twenty-five cents. She unca
pped the vial, and found her new penny resting on top. She pocketed it, and recapped the bottle as if to trap a genie once more. Maybe it wasn’t the decline of her mother that had summoned the visions, she considered, but the fact that she had added a penny to the others, disrupting their meaning, clouding the message they had ached so long to impart. That one penny made all the difference, perhaps – as one “n” made the difference between Jonatha and Jonathan...

  She had a trowel with her, and after glancing about to be certain no one saw her, she squatted down, moved a plastic tray of flowers, and dug a secret hole beneath it. Into this she deposited the vial, and she scooped the cold winter earth back into the hole. She hid the raw spot under the tray of flowers, so it would not be noticed when the new grave was dug.

  Jonatha took in the monument once more before leaving.

  She had loved her mother. And she thought that she might still love her father.

  But however similar their names were, she had no intention of ever allowing hers to be carved into that gravestone beside his.

  The End

  A Naming of Puppets

  The borders of the kingdom are the borders of the galaxy, and the universe beyond is a hugeness of steel giants that hurtle past in gleaming streams by day, and by night they are fewer but their unblinking eyes blaze light like twin comets, and however removed these metal beasts may be, they occasionally rain gifts and treasures upon the many peoples of the kingdom with its multiple kings.

  Sometimes these gifts themselves become more citizens to inhabit the kingdom.

  On October the 9th, in a year known by some as 2002, two oversized green trash bags normally used to collect leaves and other yard debris were cast over the top of a rusting metal fence surrounding a long-unused lot filled with trees and bushes, located beside a brick factory which had seen several owners and several uses over the past few decades. These were not the first bags of trash to be dumped over this fence, though they were two of the biggest to have been deposited there in some years. Occasionally, a motorist too lazy to journey to an official town dump, or who did not even possess a dumping permit sticker on their vehicle, pulled up alongside the vine-choked fence. This had been one such vehicle, which drove away now...toward a shopping mall where the vehicle’s owner would purchase more material things to replace the ones he had disposed of today. Though he hadn’t really disposed of them – he had merely shifted them from one place to another. From one side of a fence to the other. From one universe to another.

  Eventually, the mouths of the bags fell open, permitting the entry of rain, snow, fallen leaves. Rips were inflicted on the skins of the bags, by animals and other denizens of the kingdom, curious about what lay within these vast wombs. By the time a year had passed, rips were also being inflicted on the bags from within.

  A dweller of the universe beyond the rusted fence of the kingdom might not expect to see life come forth from earth steeped in motor oil, chemicals leaked from the plant next door, and generation upon generation of decayed leaf and mouse. But to be fair, the denizens of the kingdom would not readily believe that the giant beings beyond the fence had evolved from creatures so small they were essentially invisible, spawned in chemical baths and steaming gases which in that raw state would choke and poison those very giants today.

  By the time it was October the 9th, of the year dubbed 2003, on the eve of a full moon, the first of a new race of sentient creatures clawed its way out of one of the green plastic wombs...followed closely by another, then others. Over the past year, some of the contents of the bags had tumbled out of them and had become buried under moldering leaves. From these leaves, heads and bodies now started to poke themselves up. Those heads began to turn, eyes to take in their surroundings with a mute and dazed wonder.

  Orienting themselves to their surroundings was the first instinct of these newly spawned entities – though they didn’t stray far, at first, merely circling the area of the two torn wombs. Their second instinct was to assign themselves identities, identities in the form of names, so that each would know what kind of person they were as they ventured out into these new surroundings. They did not assign each other names, as a parent does a child. They were all children, all parents of themselves.

  At least they had much raw material from which to formulate these names. They constructed themselves from words the way their bodies had been unconsciously constructed by them while they still slumbered like seeds and bulbs. One creature took his name from a letter neatly hand-printed on lined notebook paper. Another, from the wedding column of a rotting newspaper. An obituary. An electric bill. A love note. A birth announcement (appropriately enough). They instinctively knew what words were names and which were not. Those who had formed a female identity while they slept took female names, and some consciously chose male names, though for others the issue of gender was of no consequence in terms of their mind or their body.

  There was a being who had named himself Terry Tidwell, and this one possessed a torso made from an empty bottle of prescribed antibiotics (he had taken his name from its blurred label), from which branched oversized limbs: stilted legs made from windshield wipers and long, long dragging jumper cable tentacle-arms that ended in formidable pincers. His head was a souvenir Mexican Day of the Dead sugar skull, all crystal white with brittle pink frosting and green sequin eyes, saved from melting by the cellophane which still wrapped it.

  Another of these newborns dubbed himself Ron Wallen, his form consisting of a plastic spring water bottle for a body (clear but with the dregs of muddy water and a drowned snail sloshing around inside it), arms and legs that were sticks bound together with wire twist ties from bags of bread, and for a head, a cream-colored and spiny sea shell that looked like a miniature conch, though none of them had of course ever seen a conch, another souvenir from some past vacation or honeymoon. He tried to blow a deep voice out of this miniature conch but only produced a faint hiss.

  Avery Duarte’s body was a broken camera, scuttling along on four legs that were actually the looped ends of two bent coat hangers. The hooks of these coat hangers were thrust out ahead of him like the arms of a scorpion. The lens in the front of his body looked like a flashing cyclops eye, but he also had a head perched atop the camera: a white, perforated wiffle ball like a skull with too many eye sockets but no mouth.

  Her body a shapely 20 ounce diet cola bottle, Shannon Wuller sported a feather duster head (the feathers neon pink), its broken white handle inserted into the bottle for support, showing through like a spinal column. Her legs were translucent emerald-colored swizzle sticks, stiff so that she walked like a haughty but tipsy model, her feathered hair looking like the pink flower at the top of double green stems, and she also carried a little pink paper parasol from a long-drunk rum drink.

  Shane Ryan Staley’s mouth was a big gold-colored woman’s hair clip, positioned horizontally, which opened and closed its wide fanged jaws with ominous little clicks. His eyes, which could move independently of each other, were two D-size batteries, the pupils at their positive ends being raised and rusted. He had taken his name from an invoice for a company called Camelot Books. He had also slipped a business card for this place (did its building, off in the fabled realm beyond the vine-strangled fence, truly look like the company’s castle logo?) into the peanut butter jar of his torso so that the card could be glimpsed through the streaked smears of the former contents.

  Ellen Schillig was an ingenious concoction of pepper shaker (now filled with the rich black soil her essence had fermented in), an empty ink cartridge from a discarded printer, intricate multiple-jointed limbs made from ball point pens, and a chattering head that was a stapler (she spat out a few last staples as if coughing up amniotic solution) with a green plastic shell...all of this sinewed and tendoned with rubber bands and the little elastic circles, prettily colored, that women used to bind their hair in ponytails – these elastic circles still sprouting long twisted hairs from those awesome, mystical giants.

 
If Ellen’s head was the stapler, then Alexander Duarte’s head was the staple remover, also with a green plastic shell but with four lethal fangs like those of an eyeless cobra. Like a lobster with asymmetrical claws, he had a medium-sized wrench for one arm and a very small wrench for the other, and he half-strutted, half-limped about on two different legs as well...one being a man’s smoking pipe, the caked bowl of his foot still aromatic, the other leg being a little pen knife with a rusting blade that opened and closed somewhat as he walked, like the stiff knee joint of an old, wounded soldier, or a pirate with a peg leg which speared the earth and thus threatened to topple him from time to time.

  There was Helen, with her almost fleshless chipmunk skull for a head, dried flower arrangements bursting from its eyes, and black wings taken from a dead crow jutting from her back as though she were some junkyard angel; Tommy with his bulky yellow flashlight legs (one of them, when he lifted it, could still emit a wan suggestion of light) but his arms merely floppy shoelaces; the majestically named Prince Albert Scott, with his broad and swaggering cigar box torso (inside of which he stored trinkets to tempt the pretty ladies), limbs a tangle of lightless Christmas bulbs and a sparking disposable cigarette lighter for a head, whose royalty none of the other new citizens (not even the pretty ladies) acknowledged.

  They were all named now, the newcomers, just in time for a third instinct to become manifest among them. The instinct to hate those who were not like themselves. And since no one is entirely like any other, they began to resent or envy the body or head or clever composition of this one or that one of their brothers and sisters. But such small hatreds can still be roughly grouped into tribal hatred, and within several days the newcomers had broken down into two camps. One of them nested in the remnants of one trash bag, the other in the twin trash bag. They had all found their origin in one or the other of these respective wombs, so it was easy for them to decide which side to show allegiance to. In another few days – with the older inhabitants of the kingdom watching from the sidelines, refusing to get involved, and frankly hoping that this invasion of immigrants wiped themselves out utterly – the two camps went to war.