Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Board let himself out. “Till We Meet Again,” he said to Soup laconically, quoting another Campbell and Burr tune.

  As he descended to the dusty street, where his two-year-old 1916 Dodge waited for him, Board idly mused that Shoe would probably attend that meeting he’d mentioned before he fed one of the two complete sets of new photos into the computer on the opposite end of the desk from his radio – the computer being a large, white, almost spherical creature like an engorged tick with pulsing gills and a slit incised in its exoskeleton wide enough to accept each photo and document it was fed. Once these were absorbed into its memory, they could be accessed by the Bugs from their homeland at any time...and the now unneeded prints and accompanying police reports themselves would be digested and excreted, via a black rubber tube inserted into a rear orifice, into a bottle on Shoe’s floor – a black sludge which he poured out daily.

  -3-

  On his way to Scapula Street, a poor Italian section, John Board watched Metacarpus pass by along either side of him, like a gray river flowing around a rock he stood on in its very center. Seemingly unbroken trains of row houses, compressed together like frayed books in an overstuffed shelf. Flat-roofed tenements. Small brick warehouses and mills and factories. None of these buildings were more than a few stories high. Wives on the charred skeletons of fire escapes, hanging out laundry as bleached as their skin. Dirt lots walled in by high plank fences and filled with decades’ worth of debris thrown out the tenement windows and layered like geological strata. The city would suddenly open up, part like moth-eaten curtains to lay bare broad spaces where railroad tracks ran across the uniform flatness of the land in sutures, and telegraph poles were like rows of crucifixes from which the bodies had long rotted, before the squat buildings swallowed up those bleak voids again, to smother them. In the distance now, in the vicinity of Scapula Street as if to guide him, Board saw a looming black water tower on a tripod of scaffolding, pointing at the sky like a rocket that might have brought the Bugs here, except that the Bugs were not here, could not get themselves here; could only manage to send the seed of their instruments to be raised here as remote extensions of themselves. The water tower reared like a fat prison guard over the tenements that cowered around its legs, faceless but all the more stern for that.

  When he parked his Dodge, Board put his hand on the camera that rested in the seat beside him. Though it did not move at this contact, he sometimes thought he felt an imperceptible thrum of life through its inscrutable chitin. He never, ever touched the single eye purposely, except to wipe it occasionally with a soft rag.

  In the street, he screwed the camera’s mounting platform onto his telescoped tripod. Then, with this under his arm, he walked toward the house to which he’d been summoned by the police. It was more of a shack than a house, really. One story. Flat tar-papered roof. A scrap of dirt for a yard, and dubious looking alleys formed by the identical buildings that flanked it. A baby cried in one of those buildings, and a block or two away a dog was barking. The sky overhead was gray as ash, as if the air had long ago caught fire, and that fire had long ago burned itself cold. It was neither cool nor warm out today, but a breeze stirred the grit of the yard around Board’s legs. Board nodded at the cop who loitered outside the shanty’s crude plank door smoking a cigarette. They went in together.

  “Wife killing seems to be the national pastime, Board,” said Crate, the patrolman. “Well, I guess it’s something to do. But if we got all these wife killers together and sent them overseas, we’d win this war in no time.”

  Board gave an obligatory grunt meant as a chuckle.

  “Hope you haven’t eaten,” said Crate, squeezing into a room where the rusty smell of blood stung the sinuses. As he stepped to one side to make way, he asked, “Doesn’t this ever bother you?”

  Board said nothing as he set up his camera for the first shot. Crate’s partner, Mattock, snorted and joked, “Board loves this stuff. He’s a ghoul.”

  The walls were bare wood, with no insulation, no plaster. Folded newspapers had been wedged into gaps through which the wind might gain entry. In lieu of curtains, an old baby blanket and a half of a bed sheet were nailed up over the two windows. A cast-iron stove rested on tottering stacks of bricks, its pipe skewered up through the low ceiling. A few pictures from newspapers were stuck to the walls by way of decoration. Board thought that if this were only a hunting cabin, it might be cozy. Beyond the taint of blood, the room stank of a long unbathed dog that there was no sign of, of grease, of foot odor, of dust; an embarrassingly intimate combination that this woman must have been fully accustomed to, the atmosphere of her days.

  “Anything in the bedroom I need to shoot?” asked Board as he made his adjustments. The cops replied in the negative.

  “The husband swears he didn’t do this,” Mattock told him idly, “says he came home and found her like this, but he was drunk as a skunk and had her blood on his hands.”

  “He seemed really shaken up,” Crate added, “but that’s probably just because he’s starting to realize what he did.”

  The victim lay on the floor, half under a bench that was pushed up against one wall to serve as a table. She was nude except for her socks, her legs looking forced apart, one knee cocked. Her face, broad and drably pretty, with a slight frown of disapproval, was turned to one side. Her throat had been cut with apparently one smooth incision, whereas Board often saw numerous, frenzied slashes. The woundings to her body he had witnessed many times. Her nipples had been excised, and she had been opened up from the slit of her vagina to just below her sternum. A soaked dark rag of something hung out of her like a huge tongue (the wet, apparent chaos of the human interior contrasted so disturbingly with the smooth order of the exterior). The killer was definitely a man; the hatred directed at her gender, at the specific icons of her sex. The orifice spitefully and mockingly enlarged, so that it dominated her, as it no doubt dominated the killer’s view of women. Yes, Board had seen these same mutilations perpetrated by a forgotten string of husbands, boyfriends, and strangers, far too many times. And yet, as he stepped back from his camera and pushed his thumb on the cable’s plunger – the other end of which he had plugged into a hole drilled in its shell just behind the eye – the wounds that weren’t present glared just as distinctly. Usually, it was his experience, there was some battering or disfiguring of the face. Blows from a fist or heavy object. There were often numerous stab wounds in addition to the slashing, these parted open in ellipses as the tight surrounding skin drew open their lips. Often there were defensive wounds on the hands; he’d seen fingers half hanging off backwards from trying to catch hold of a blade. But this woman seemed only to have suffered these few neat, precise strokes. And this from a passionately enraged, blurrily drunken husband?

  “It was an Assassin,” Board announced softly, more to himself than to the two patrolmen. He thumbed the plunger again. There was no flash, no click, no sounds from his camera but its legs were fluttering excitedly atop the platform it was bolted to.

  “Say what, Board?” Mattock replied. “An Assassin? Not...not this one. It was a crime of passion.”

  “It always is. But not by her husband. He’s telling the truth.”

  “Just shut your pie hole and do your work,” Crate chuckled, only half joking.

  “You’ll be sending the wrong man to the gallows,” Board argued quietly.

  “You’re just upset ‘cause you won’t get to photograph that, too.”

  “Now the ghoul’s a detective,” Mattock laughed.

  Finished with the photographs taken from the side, Board now moved in closer, for a direct downward angle. He splayed the tripod’s legs around the dead woman as if his camera were the gloating murderer, gazing down at his handiwork. He extended the skeletal legs to their full length, the top of the camera nearly touching the low ceiling. Later, when these shots were developed, he would curse himself to find that one of the legs of the tripod was positioned in such a way that it obscured half of t
he woman’s face. It wouldn’t matter to Detective Shoe, because there were no wounds on her face to be recorded, and it didn’t obscure the throat wound, but it bothered Board. Even though his intention was not to create art, it was a bit of artlessness, a bit of unprofessionalism, a more than usual intrusion of himself into the scene.

  As he finished up, shortening the length of the tripod’s legs, he muttered, “Whoever did this should be skinned alive and have his eyeballs burned with cigarettes.”

  “Whoa, Board, such barbarism!” laughed Officer Mattock. “You’re starting to frighten me! Maybe you’re the one who tore her all up!”

  “What do you mean, whoever did it?” Crate said. “We’ve already told you who did it. Don’t start on that again.”

  Board tucked the tripod under his arm. “Sure there was nothing in here?” he asked, peeking his head into the adjoining bedroom for the first time. There were only these two rooms in the shotgun shack.

  “Nothing,” Crate snapped. “Do you think we don’t know our jobs? Get your vulture ass out of here...you and your friend. Your dirty work is finished.”

  “Dirty work?” Board looked at the man. “I’m just doing a job.”

  “Yeah, you and the Assassins.”

  “Hey, I’m not like them. My relationship with the Bugs is not like theirs.”

  “No? It’s all part of the same process, though, isn’t it? The Assassins do the painting, so to speak, and you frame the picture, so to speak.”

  “I help you guys catch the Assassins!” Not that they usually were caught. That was a risk the Assassins took, when they went to work for the distant Bugs. If they were caught, they had to be punished like any common enraged husband or demented fiend.

  “You don’t help us catch them, Board. You keep the Bugs hard, is all you do. Don’t make it sound like you’re one of us.” Crate was really steaming now. “You probably get as excited as they do. Fucking voyeur.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “Do I?” Crate gestured at the rough plank door. “Get out, vulture...your work is done.”

  Board carried his camera outside, where scraps of curious spectators had gathered...a few dirty children, a few faces propped like jack-o’-lanterns in windows. A red-haired man with rolled up shirt sleeves leaned in the mouth of one of the alleys between the shacks, smoking a cigarette. A thin dog, maybe the one that had been barking earlier, maybe the one whose smell filled the shack, scampered past.

  Peripherally, Board saw the eye of his camera swivel ever so slightly. He looked down at it and decided it was looking up at his face. That irritated him. He tossed his equipment a little too roughly into the back of his Dodge.

  Something made him look up again abruptly at the man in the alley.

  The man had bright red hair. But this was the Italian neighborhood of Scapula Street, on the border of the Phalanges, the Italian ghetto.

  The redheaded man smiled at Board and tossed his half-smoked cigarette to the ground. He then turned and walked further into the little alley, out of Board’s angle of view.

  -4-

  With their straw hats tilted back on their heads and mugs of beer in their hands, these purchased by John Board, he and Tom Brick wandered into the saloon’s adjacent billiards room. The ceiling was high, the walls paneled with dark wood half the way up. The one billiards table had a decorative fringe all the way around it. There was a layer of laughter in the atmosphere like the cloud cover of cigar smoke. A pill-bug radio on a shelf was playing “I Don’t Want to Get Well” by Van and Schenck.

  Tom Brick was the police photographer for Precinct 4, which encompassed the Phalanges. Detective Shoe, Board had recalled, was now lending aid to Precinct 4 in capturing the murderer of several Italian children because of that neighborhood’s demand for increased action.

  “How’s your wife?” Board asked, leaning his back against the tall baseboard to watch the game in progress. Brick told him that Grace was doing well, after having had a long bout with influenza. “And the kids? You have two, right?” Brick said he had four, in fact, and one of them had nearly died over the winter but thank God had recovered. Board agreed.

  “So you want to know about this thing with the murdered children,” Brick said.

  “Yeah. Shoe told me he was going to help in the investigation. I read a little about them in the papers when they happened, but I don’t remember much...”

  “Well, about a month and a half ago they found an eight-year-old girl dead in a tenement cellar. She’d been sexually assaulted and strangled. It was horrible, John. Her hands were both still curled in the cord around her neck. I have two daughters, was all I could think. It made me want to cry. All the horrible things I see, and after a while I start to not think twice about it, and then suddenly seeing this was like the first body I’d ever seen.”

  “And then a few weeks later, wasn’t it, another one like it?”

  “Yes. A seven-year-old. Same thing, except she was found in a back lot where she’d probably been dragged, whereas they think the first one was actually killed where she was found. This one had been dead a few days and was starting to decompose. I tell you, John, I really started seriously thinking about quitting...”

  “And there’s been a third...”

  “Again, same thing. Strangulation, dress pulled up around the waist. This one’s eyes open like she was surprised, like she was going to start bursting into tears at any second even though she was already dead. They found her on a tenement rooftop, where they think it took place. This was last week.”

  “Sounds like a sex fiend,” Board mused, staring into the rising bubbles of his beer, “more so than an Assassin. Unless it’s an Assassin trying to look like a sex fiend.”

  “Well, think about it, John. If I was a sex fiend, wouldn’t I want to become an Assassin? Get paid for it? Have some small measure of protection, even at the risk of being caught, because I’d be risking that, anyway? It’s not like men like you and me go volunteering to be Assassins, is it?”

  Board nodded thoughtfully, gaze still submerged in the fizzing depths of his beer. Through it, he could see the finger which had been shortened by one of his former cameras. He thought of the Irving Kaufman war song “Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You.” He asked Brick, “Have there been any witnesses? Any suspicious characters around? A man with red hair, maybe?”

  “They’ve looked into a few local people, but I haven’t heard anything about any real witness, or a man with red hair. Why do you ask?”

  “Yesterday I shot a crime scene on Scapula Street...one street over from your territory...looks like a husband carved up his wife. But it seems too neat. And the husband was drunker than an Irishman. And when I went outside, I saw a redheaded man who smiled at me.”

  “So?”

  “I guess I didn’t like the way he smiled at me.”

  “Remind me never to smile at you.”

  “He was a redhead. On Scapula Street.”

  “It can happen. An Italian family lives on my street, for instance.”

  “I suppose,” Board murmured.

  “We need to get out of this work, you and I. Go to work for the newspapers instead.”

  “Not much difference there,” Board said, then taking a long swallow of his beer.

  As if afraid that Brick might look disapprovingly upon it, Board waited for the man to go home to his family before he switched from beer to bourbon. From bourbon he graduated to a woman named Grace (or maybe that was Brick’s wife’s name; he forgot) who had a room upstairs from the saloon. Grace was older than he and no doubt weighed more, but she had a pretty enough face, or so it seemed at the present. Board moaned and sweated more from effort than from pleasure.

  Grace turned her face away on her greasy pillow. “You smell,” she said.

  “So do you,” Board grunted. “We all do.”

  She didn’t say anything to that, but he still felt like apologizing. He kept his eyes off her face, afraid to see revulsion or bored
om there, and looked down at her breasts instead. But doing so, he imagined her nipples missing. Indented, open dark hollows there instead.

  He rolled off her. Lay on his back panting, sweat trickling down from his armpits, his heart galloping blindly like a horse on a treadmill inside him.

  “Not my fault if you can’t do it, mister,” grumbled Grace. “I still need my money.”

  “You’ll get it,” he said. And he’d get his paycheck tomorrow, himself. But he didn’t know if he were a pimp, procuring pleasure for his clients...or a prostitute, the means to that pleasure himself.

  Board stared at the woman’s radio, on a table by the bed. Its feelers did not waver as it played the Peerless Quartet’s “Somebody’s Waiting for Someone,” but a chittering static drifted in and out.

  -5-

  “There is No Death” by Lambert Murphy played on the radio as John Board sat in Sam Nail’s barber chair, having his hair trimmed. He had just unfolded the morning newspaper in front of him. On the front page were war stories...and on the second page he saw a photograph of a familiar location. The plank door, the patch of dirt for a front yard. The thin dog, looking at the camera. It was the outside of the shotgun shack in which he had photographed that murdered wife, two days ago. The headline read: “WIFE SLAIN, DRUNKEN HUSBAND HELD.” Then, in a sub-heading of smaller type before the article itself began: “INVESTIGATING OFFICERS APPALLED BY KILLER’S SAVAGERY.”

  After reading the article quickly, Board returned his attention to the photograph. Not only was the dog there, but he remembered several of the equally thin children at the edge of the frame, also staring glumly at the camera. But there was one feature missing. Included in the shot was the alley mouth where he had seen the red-haired man smoking his cigarette. The alley was empty, in this photograph.

  The offices for the Metacarpus Times were just a few blocks over from Nail’s barber shop. Board said to him, “Sam, you get some of the Times boys in here, don’t you?”