Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  When I see Suzy come out of her house later on in the day, as I’m hoping she will, to go to the market or go visit her mother or what have you, that’s when I’ll call her over to my car, parked on the other side of the street. I’ll have the engine idling already.

  That will be tomorrow. Today is Friday. I’m in my cubicle, working at my computer. Joan walks by, in the aisle. Cold, hard; I picture her as a naked animated cadaver, smelling of sour vomit. She smokes, too. Glad I gave that up.

  I hear Suzy’s laugh, from another aisle. Deep and throaty, coming from inside her bountiful chest. I love her laugh. Rich and full of life. Her body is a vessel large enough to contain the love she’ll need for my twenty little tykes.

  Tomorrow, mamma. Tomorrow.

  I hope Suzy will like to read aloud. I could use a break. It will be our favorite book, of course; A Child’s Garden of Verses. And she will read it from the first poem, which Stevenson dedicated to his nurse – his “second mother” and “first wife,” as he called her – all the way to the final poem, “To Any Reader,” which concludes the book with these lines:

  “He has grown up and gone away,

  And it is but a child of air

  That lingers in the garden there.”

  The End

  The Tripod

  -1-

  Metacarpus, Pennsylvania, 1918

  John Board thought he had it pretty easy; once or twice a week he’d shoot a crime scene, and then the remaining days were spent on the developing of his photos and the care and feeding of his cameras.

  Board had half an attic flat in an old tenement house on Coccyx Street. The other half was used for storage by the elderly owner of the house; shapely but headless dressmaker’s dummies, moth-eaten baby outfits, heaps of roofing shingles and ceiling slats, buckets of rusted nails, a solitary shoe in a mote-swarmed ray of afternoon sunlight slanted across the worn floorboards, a crumpled cigarette pack partly snared in an abandoned spiderweb on a windowsill, the desiccated mummy of a bird which had found ingress somehow and starved to death. It all broke down to still lifes for him, but he had only ever taken a photo of that skeletal bird, which looked like a fragile construction of twigs and dust. His cameras weren’t interested in the inorganic, though he personally sensed as much residual life in the crumpled cigarette pack or sunlit shoe as he did the carcasses it was his profession to record.

  When drunk one afternoon, he had ventured into the other half of the attic and dragged one of the headless dummies onto his side. It now stood beside his bed and wore a dingy bra he had later found in an old wicker baby carriage, also in that long disused section. He would sometimes playfully cup one of the mannikin’s breasts through the bra and wonder how long shriveled or decayed was the flesh that had once filled that garment.

  One morning he awoke feeling thoroughly poisoned by the amount of bourbon he had ingested the night before, to find the headless/limbless torso of the dressmaker’s dummy lying in bed with him. He didn’t question himself as to what might have happened, though the fact that the bra had not been removed indicated that he might have been too drunk to perform.

  Board slept on a fold-out sofa in the largest of his three rooms, and thus used the small bedroom with its slanted walls and water stained, peeling flowered wallpaper for his work.

  The new camera wasn’t mature yet; today he checked on its progress by rolling up his sleeve and immersing his arm into a glass tank full of milky fluid sitting atop an old desk whose drawers were filled with bottles of solution and other supplies. As he groped in the cold, nearly gelatinous bath, he saw a fluttering dark shape skitter against the glass then recede again into the whiteness. After a few moments he had hold of it, and lifted it out, dripping, for inspection.

  As a boy he had once wandered with his Aunt Marge along Lumbar Beach, and seen numerous horseshoe crabs seemingly washed up in the surf. He had tried picking one of these up, only to meet with resistance, and had found that it was a male copulating with a female, who was nearly buried in the mud beneath him. His aunt had laughingly told him it was their mating season, the whole beach being the site of a silently shameless orgy. Board had then let go of the crab, hoping he hadn’t injured its crabhood in any way.

  The cameras always reminded him of that horseshoe crab he had unknowingly tried to dislodge from its girlfriend. He held this camera by spreading his fingers over its smooth white carapace, which had two horny ridges but no other features. Beneath the shell, a fringe of small boneless legs rippled in the air with a fluid rhythm as if it thought it was still whisking along the aquarium’s bottom, feeding on the finely ground bone chips he sprinkled into the tank once a day.

  The front of the creature was distinguished by a single, large and pearly eye without a pupil, which would ultimately reach the size of a cue ball. The mouth was hidden underneath the forward part of the shell. He had once had the tip of a finger bitten off by an old camera that was beginning to malfunction. He was glad when he was able to retire it, not long after. If he’d had his way, he’d have taken a hammer to the thing that same day. That, of course, would have been suicidal, though.

  Lightly he touched an intact finger to a puckered orifice at the rear of the creature, and it pulsed slightly at his probing. Still too tight, but soon he’d be able to load a film cartridge in there.

  Satisfied with this instrument’s formation, Board returned it to its tank, watching its shadowy form descend and disappear into the liquid void.

  Now it was time to check on how the latest batch of photographs were coming along.

  A dozen photographs were clothes pinned to a line strung at the end of the narrow room so that the light through the one bare window could tease the images out of their chemically coated surfaces. There had been twenty frames on the roll, but typically almost half of them hadn’t been properly exposed. That was why Board always made sure to overshoot any given subject, taking repeated shots from each angle.

  All of these photos illustrated the same crime scene, from two different angles and in a spectrum of grays ranging from nearly white to nearly black. The crime, as it turned out, had been committed by the victim himself. A man sat at a heavy, battered table, remarkably erect in posture despite having no head. What was left of it hung down in flaps about his shoulders like the half-peeled skin of a banana, the upper part of his shirt soaked black with the cascade of his blood. One hand had fallen to the table top, palm up like a dead spider with its legs curled, and the other had fallen limply down his side. The shotgun he had fired into his mouth – a 1903 John Browning auto-5 – was also still erect, its butt having hit the floor and the barrel propped against one thigh. After taking the pictures, Board had looked over the policemen’s shoulders as they examined the weapon. The victim, a Joseph Cup, had sawed off part of the barrel so as to make it easier to reach the trigger with his thumb. But, running his own thumb over the end, one cop noted that Cup had filed the abbreviated muzzle smooth, so no burs would painfully scrape his inner mouth as he blew his brains across the ceiling and walls in a widely distributed pattern that in the photos almost looked like a wallpaper design.

  Again, after he shot the photos, Board watched as an officer used two pencils to lift up Cup’s face. It was fairly normal looking, if somewhat slack and rubbery, like a boneless mask. Until the officer had done this, it had appeared as if the head were entirely decimated, when in fact the blast had obliterated most of the interior but left the torn leaves of outer skin to flop down inside-out. The cop removed the pencils to let the face slither back onto Cup’s chest.

  Board had already taken in all this at the scene, but now as he unclipped and studied the photos, he found himself focusing on the surroundings, the background details, rendered in ghostly ash tones by the orb of his camera.

  The kitchen the man sat in was small, with a cast-iron stove up against the wall behind him. The walls were somberly dark, with only a few faded lithographs hanging in frames, the barrenness accentuated by the high ceiling. Despit
e the spare orderliness, the floor looked dusty, gritty. Very subtly, each photo was more uniformly bright in its center before shading out in a circular shape toward the darker edges, as if a softly glowing spotlight had illuminated the scene, though this was an effect of his camera’s vision.

  There were no close-ups of the victim, with or without his face held up for view. Another photographer, in the police mortuary, would take a few of those downtown with his own unblinking camera. Board did the crime scenes only, established the environment, the setting. His relationship with the dead ended there.

  These prints had come from his first roll of film; the second must be ready to develop by now. Picking up a pair of forceps, he moved to the mature camera he had used yesterday to record this murder/suicide. It was still attached to its collapsible, telescoping tripod, which stood in the corner. Long bolts affixed the creature’s shell on either side to the platform atop the tripod. When he swivelled the platform around to get at the rear of the camera, its legs – splayed out atop the platform like a decorative trim – wavered slightly. The one eye turned somewhat in its bony socket as if it were trying to look over a shoulder it didn’t have, as he applied the forceps to the puckery orifice at its other end. He had to insert the instrument partly to catch hold of the second film cartridge, which he extracted slowly, drooling a few strands of mucus. An ever present fishy, somewhat diarrhetic smell in the room intensified, but he was accustomed to it; he knew it even permeated his clothing. Board wiped the cartridge with a rag, pried off its lid and removed the rolled up negative strip, then turning to unfurl it in the light through his window.

  Again, only about half of the twenty frames looked usable, the others either entirely clouded white or at least too vague to be worth viewing. This series, though shot second, had been devoted to the first of the two to die – Cup’s wife Josephine. She lay back on their small bed with its huge metal headboard and slightly smaller footboard like the barred walls of a cage. Her bare feet hung off one side almost to touch the dull planks of the floor, and she was in her nightgown. The wall behind her, also somberly dark with a repeating pattern of flowers in an ornate vase, was flecked generously with blood, and the sheets under her were a black tar pit that threatened to swallow her up eventually. Her husband had shot her in the chest. Her eyes were half-lidded as if frozen in a blink, and her lips parted in the subtlest of empty smiles. But all this Board remembered more so than discerned clearly now, since the negative images were so small, and reversed so that her face seemed prematurely black with rot and her pupils glowed uncannily white.

  Because of the tininess of the bedroom, dominated by the bed as if the room had in fact been built around it, Board had had to elevate his tripod to take in the whole of the scene as best he could, shooting directly down from above. The three crutch-like tripod legs had been fully extended, one on one side of the bed and two on the other...then he had swivelled the platform vertically to tilt the camera’s orb downward. As in all the photos Board shot in this manner, the legs were clearly in the shot, foreshortened so that they looked huge, like columns supporting the ceiling of the room. It was an unavoidable intrusion in the composition, but he had grown used to it...even though it was the only element of himself in these pictures, which were otherwise so intimate: portraits – still lifes – of the interior of houses, the interior of lives, the interior of brains both figuratively and literally. The framing tripod legs, distorted and tapering with false perspective, were like an unintentional artistic signature where he intended no artistry at all. A dispassionate device, a mere practicality.

  Less dispassionate, however, the camera began making a chittering sound behind him. Glancing around, Board realized it was looking at the negatives over his shoulder. Its legs were fluctuating in an increased rhythm. Feeling a lurch of disgust, Board set down the roll and swivelled the camera around to face into the corner again. It was a fairly bold thing to do, denying it its mindless pleasure, but he had done his job yesterday recording these nakedly intimate scenes onto film and now he was inside his own intimate space, and he didn’t feel like giving the thing the chance to relive that apartment’s contents within the walls of his own.

  -2-

  “Well hello, chum,” said Detective Robert Shoe of the Metacarpus Police Force, Precinct 3, looking up as Board entered his office. Board held his straw hat in one hand and an oversized envelope in the other. He watched as Shoe continued searching the stations on a radio at the end of his desk. He did this by positioning a heavy magnetic block like a paperweight on different spots atop a flat creature like a huge pill-bug. There was a classical music station, but he bypassed that, sliding the magnet to another area of the segmented shell until he found a station tinnily playing “Your Lips Are No Man’s Land But Mine,” by Campbell and Burr. He then fine-tuned the station by adjusting the angle of the eyeless, albino creature’s two forward antennae. In between the various stations, there had been a hissing static filled with cicada-like chittering. It was all the various creatures throughout the city of Metacarpus, communicating with one another. Board had once owned a radio, but had given it away because it chattered back and forth with his cameras all night, to the point where he couldn’t find a clear station on it at all.

  Finished, the jowly Shoe looked up at his guest and smiled. “Whew, my boy, you smell like a diseased whore. No wonder you don’t have yourself a wife!”

  “Thanks,” Board said drily, tossing the envelope onto the man’s blotter.

  Shoe slipped out two complete sets of photos of the murdered wife and suicidal husband, the Cups. He wrinkled his nose at the husband, but Board didn’t know if that were the stink of the glossy prints or their subject matter. When he appraised the wife, he commented, “Pretty legs.” Dropping the photos back to the blotter, he smiled up at Board again. “You ever touch any of these women, Johnny? When no one’s looking? Feel a leg here, a posterior there? A nice soft titty before it gets too cold?”

  “No, Bob, I don’t. I’ve never frenched a woman with her face shot off, either, oddly enough.”

  “A lot of them are nude when you find them, aren’t they? Even with blood on ‘em, they still have nice figures sometimes, huh? Kind of a strange feeling, lookin’ at that combination of ugly and nice...smooth and torn...isn’t it? Be honest; I’ve seen enough dead women myself to know.”

  “Maybe that’s what you look at, Bob, but I’m just there to take my pictures and go have a bourbon at the closest saloon.”

  “Ah, Johnny, you’ve got quite the moral character, don’t you?” Shoe rose and stretched, wandered out from behind the desk as ponderous as his body. “Well, this is a closed case. Straight to the files. I’m still looking for the Assassin who knifed that whore down on Patella Ave, that you did last Monday. Probably the same guy who cut that Italian girl on Femur Road two weeks before.”

  “I remember. I don’t know, though. That girl was mutilated...her face cut up. The one last week was just stabbed. A different feel to them.”

  “Ohhh...hey...maybe I should hire you, huh, chum? Maybe you can solve all my open cases for me! Catch every Assassin in town so the Bugsies’ll have to recruit a whole new team, huh?”

  Board bit back his anger, knowing that the seemingly jovial Shoe had a mean temper. “I can’t help but get a feel for things in my line of work, Bob. Sometimes I get a sense of what’s going on in the killer’s mind. I can’t help it.”

  “Well, that doesn’t really concern you, though, does it?”

  “It does, if I want to make sure I don’t leave out an important clue in my shots.”

  “Evidence is one thing. Motive is my field – right, my boy?” He tugged up his drooping trousers with an indulgent grunt. Despite his taunting of Board, his office was ever permeated with flatulence. “Anyway, Johnny, yeah...a sick case might not vary his technique very much...but an Assassin might use a knife this time, a razor the next, a hatchet after that...just to keep the Bugsies entertained. Am I right?”

  “S
ure,” Board conceded, sorry he’d ever given his opinion. “Well, there you go, anyway. Guess I’ll be off for some lunch.”

  “I’d join you, but I have a meeting with Captain Soup about those Italian kiddies killed over in the Phalanges slums. Getting a lot of bad press; we need to find that one. Hey, what do you think, Inspector Board? Help me figure this one out. Sick case or Assassin?”

  “Not my part of town. Didn’t Tom Brick take those shots?”

  “Don’t know. All I know is they want my precinct to help find the killer so those fuckin’ guineas will stop their noise.”

  A new song started on the radio. It was Arthur Fields’ jaunty war ditty “You Keep Sending em Over, and We’ll Keep Knocking em Down.” Shoe pretended to march in place, grotesquely, and sang, “‘We’ll drive em under the clover, six feet underground...’” He laughed. “You ever think of taking up a gun and making a few corpses of your own, Johnny?”

  “No,” he answered, putting his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll stick to being a hyena. Always makes me wonder, though...the war...”

  “Wonder what?”

  “With all that going on, why the Bugs still want us to play this game.”

  “Well...maybe ‘cause the war is anonymous. All these men piled up in fields. Maybe they like it more cozy, one on one. But for all we know they watch the war, too...I’ve heard rumors. Cameras in balloons, in airplanes. Anyway, I just think they can’t get enough, my boy. Just can’t get enough.”

  “I’ve heard rumors, too. That they even started the war...”

  Detective Shoe put a finger to his lips, and glanced over at the radio meaningfully. Its antennae flicked subtly, but it went on playing a fresh war song, “I Wish I Had Someone to Say Goodbye To” by Henry Burr. Changing the subject, Shoe joked, “Here’s your song, laddie.”