Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Oh, sure. Pete Spoon...Ronny Shingle. Two of their top writers.”

  “What about photographers?”

  “Oh...ah...yeah. Mick Clay...Jacky Glass...”

  “Mick Clay. He Irish? A redhead?”

  “Oh, that he is. You can always tell when Mick’s been here...his hair stands out in this carpet.” Nail shuffled one foot through the layer of mostly dark hair that covered the floor around the chair Board sat in. “You know Mick?”

  “Maybe,” Board said. “Any idea where he lives?”

  “Mick? Oh, no...not offhand. Quiet, is Mick. Friendly, though. Want me to tell him you was asking about him, the next time he’s in?”

  “No thanks, Sam. Maybe I’ll run into him someday. It isn’t important,” Board said.

  Well, that would explain the redheaded man he had seen, wouldn’t it? After all, why would an Assassin chance hanging about a crime scene, even to gloat? It might also explain the strange, unpleasant little smile the man had given him. A newspaper photographer, smugly looking down his nose at the ghoul with his tripod under his arm. Board figured that Clay must use a mechanical camera instead of one like his own. Usually when one took photos of inorganic subject matter, the shots didn’t develop. Then again, maybe the poverty-stricken children and dog might be enough to arouse the interest of a living camera.

  Board had not seen a camera in the man’s hand. If he was indeed this Mick Clay, he had either already put it away, or hadn’t yet taken it out.

  Perhaps Officers Crate and Mattock had been right; he was reading too much into the killing, which might very well be as cut and dry as the murder/suicide case he had recorded before that.

  And yet Board kept seeing that smile on the face of the red-haired man. And the vague, vacant frown on the face of that woman, her nakedness not enough of an intimacy or enough of a revelation for her attacker, gutted like a fish on the floor of her sad little casket of a home.

  -6-

  Tom Brick draped his coat over Board’s brassiere-wearing dressmaker’s dummy, at Board’s invitation. “Cover yourself, madam!” Brick chided. “John, I didn’t know you were married. Looks like the ideal wife...not too talkative.”

  “That’s not kind, Tom.” Board handed him a glass of beer. “I’m sure your Grace is a fine woman.”

  “Oh she is, John, she really is.”

  “You’re a lucky man.” Board slurped the foam off his barely cool beer. The block of ice in his ice box was nearly melted away. “Thanks for coming, Tom.”

  “Oh, I’ve always wanted to drop in for a visit, old man!” Brick said brightly. “Let’s have a look at your gear.” He followed his nose past his colleague. “Must be in here, eh?”

  Board watched Brick as he peered into the tank of milky fluid in which the immature camera was growing. Board rolled up his sleeve and plucked it out for him to have a clear look at it. The thing’s fringe of legs swam in the air, and the mouth underneath the front end worked languidly as if it wanted a finger to chew on. The single ocellus rotated slightly.

  “Coming along nicely, pal!” Brick complimented him. “I only have my one camera at present...I really should get a seed to grow a new one, in case I find myself empty-handed unexpectedly.”

  “Tom, do you know any newspaper photographers personally? From the Times, for instance? A man named Mick Clay, in particular?”

  “Ahh...the name doesn’t ring a bell, John. But I have seen a few at crime scenes, now and again, as I’m sure you have. There were more than one at the scene of that last little girl’s murder, because of the increased public interest. It’s a top story, as you know.”

  “Yes. The public eats it up, I’m sure,” Board said, wiping the white fluid off his hand with the rag of an old undershirt. “Have any of the photographers you’ve seen been a redhead?”

  “A redhead? Ohh...you’re thinking of that fella whose smile didn’t sit well with you, the other day.” Brick gave a chuckle. “Well, come to think of it, I guess I did see a redheaded photographer on the rooftop, at that last scene. Maybe it was that one. Or maybe it was the one before, in the back lot.” Brick pursed his lips thoughtfully against the rim of his glass. “Or maybe it was at both.”

  Board didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He had set down his glass of beer to sprinkle bone chips in the tank housing the immature camera. There was a streaking dark blur as the camera shot itself forward to feed, but as the thick fluid settled there was again no sign of the aquarium’s sole occupant.

  “How do the Bugs recruit the Assassins, Tom? How do they communicate with them?”

  “Huh? Oh...wish I could say, John. I suppose the police know, but they’re not telling the likes of us. Or maybe they don’t know. But I’m sure the government does. Must be the same way the Bugs communicate with the government. However that is.”

  “Maybe over the radios.”

  “Well, could be. Or maybe directly to their brains, some say. Some say they were talking directly to people’s brains for years, before they were ever able to figure out how to get their instruments here. Telling them to kill. To fight wars...”

  “But they don’t control the Assassins. The Assassins aren’t puppets. They have free will.”

  “Oh yes, right...I’m sure of that.”

  Board turned to face his guest. “So did you bring that gun for me to look at, Tom?”

  “Sure. Hold on.” Brick returned to the other room, Board trailing after him. Out of a pocket in the coat draped over the mannikin, Brick produced a slightly scuffed looking dark pistol. “I really don’t want it around the house anymore. Grace and I are afraid the kids will get a hold of it one day. I’m glad you asked if I had one...I’d almost forgotten it was stowed away.” He handed the heavy object to his host.

  It was a 1903 hammerless Colt automatic, .380 caliber. Board hefted it in his hand, turned and pointed it at the dressmaker’s dummy. “I like it,” he pronounced.

  “All right, then...I have cartridges for it, as well.” Brick dug in another pocket.

  “Let me offer you a trade for it, Tom. You take that camera I’m growing, in there. Take the tank and everything.”

  “What?” Brick laughed, incredulous. “I can’t do that, John! That gear is worth more than that old gun of mine.”

  “You said you were thinking of getting out of our line of work, Tom. Do you still plan on that?”

  “Well,” Brick replied, sounding a little embarrassed, “I’d like to, but right now...” His words tapered off.

  “I’m getting out of it, Tom,” Board said. “So I want you to trade me this gun and these bullets for my new camera.”

  “Are you sure, John? I don’t want to take advantage of you...”

  Board pointed his gun into the room with the slanted attic walls that served as his work space. Specifically, he aimed it at the aquarium, as if waiting for its inhabitant to appear. “It’s a fair trade by me, Tom.”

  -7-

  Each rap on Board’s door was like a roofing nail being hammered into his skull.

  “Mr. Board? Mr. Board?”

  Lifting that multiply pierced skull from the pillow of his sofa-bed, Board squinted at the door to his attic apartment. Peripherally, he caught sight of an empty bourbon bottle and his newly acquired Colt resting on the floor beside him. Also resting on the floor, lying on its back, was his headless, limbless torso of a dressmaker’s dummy. Its bra was off and nowhere to be seen.

  “Go away, Billy!” Board growled.

  “There’s been a murder at 28 Pelvic Street, Mr. Board! Detective Shoe wants you to get right down there, sir!”

  “Go away, Billy!” Board snarled again.

  “Sir...”

  “Go!” he bellowed, and it felt like he’d cracked every suture in his skull in the effort. His sundered head dropped back to his pillow. A few moments later, after having heard the child’s shoes clomping down the stairs, he heard the boy mount his bicycle and speed away back to the police station of Precinct 3.


  Let Shoe come over here and harass him. Let Shoe find someone else to be their voyeur. Their ghoul, hyena, dirty little peephole peeker...

  Maybe he’d catch up with Mick Clay in the Phalanxes, he thought. Catch him in the act before he cut open another wife, strangled another little girl. And then Tom Brick could use his new camera, if it were ready by then, to take pictures of Clay’s corpse. Its peeper eyes and smirking smile shot away with that new Colt .380. Brick could set up his tripod so that it stood directly above Clay’s spread corpse, gazing down on the ruin of his red-haired head.

  Thoughts of Brick’s tripod brought back to Board a scrap of memory like a rag of torn flesh, disconnected from its body. Painfully, he turned his head a little on his pillow to look toward his little work room. Though he couldn’t see directly into it from this angle, he could see the legs of his tripod lying on its side on the floor. He couldn’t see the camera, mounted to the top of it, but he could guess that it lay cracked like a white skull, lying in a pool of milky white blood. What he’d recalled, vaguely, was swinging that tripod by its legs last night. Swinging it like a bat against the doorjamb, again and again, until the camera was chittering loudly in pain, maybe in fear and anger, screeching almost fit to burst his eardrums until it made no more sound, its legs no longer flickering madly.

  Board let his head roll back on his old, flattened pillow, closing his eyes against poisonous black pain. Before he fell back into a sleep more like unconsciousness, he dimly recalled having poured some of his bourbon into the mouth of the crushed camera as it lay dead or dying. Sharing his poison with his partner in crime.

  He dreamed of strolling along Lumbar Beach as a boy, but this time without his Aunt Marge. And the animals mating in the surf were not horseshoe crabs, but cameras like his camera, and the ocean was white like their amniotic bath, like their blood, like semen...

  A new pain woke him sharply, dispersed the dream and the poisoned fumes.

  Mick Clay smiled that familiar little smile down at him. Gazed down at him from above like a camera on a tripod. He had blood speckled across a black rubber apron like the kind Board sometimes used himself when working with his amniotic solutions and other chemicals. Board realized he himself had spat that blood onto Clay’s chest when he was jolted awake so abruptly.

  “I hear you’ve been asking around about me, Mr. Board,” said Clay.

  Somewhere, Board heard a chittering sound. Either from some piece of equipment Clay had brought with him, or directly in his mind.

  And as Clay slowly, lovingly opened him up for a second time, Board wondered who else would soon stand over him, this time taking his photograph.

  The End

  300,000 Moments of Pain

  Eastborough, Massachusetts has a population of 15,649. That breaks down to about 743 people per square mile. And when at work we produce a batch of the dental anesthesia Eastocaine, typically consisting of 300,000 injectable cartridges, that works out to be about 20 painful shots of pain killer per citizen. A hurtful bit of numbness, like the burn of heroin in a vein, cocaine in a nose, whiskey in a throat.

  Not to say, of course, that the magical solutions we produce are used in our town alone. EastCoast Pharmaceuticals is the fourth largest pharmaceutical company in the United States. In employee meetings, profits are referred to in the matter of billions. I remember being a new employee and marveling at talk, during these meetings, that the company owned this or that molecule. (One imagines a microscopic flag planted on such a molecule. Though I suppose I own my own molecules.) I was even more in awe of the building that housed the administrative offices, seeing it up close for the first time, though as a resident of Eastborough I had driven by it on countless occasions. The sprawling complex of buildings – either utterly windowless or else made entirely of windows – is dominated by an immense glass pyramid, a striking sight, looming against the sky behind it and mirroring that sky whether it be brilliantly blue or midnight black. On days when thick fog comes in off nearby Lake Pometacomet, the pyramid is only a vague but still towering mystery against its paler gray background, like an ethereal echo of itself.

  As a lifelong townie, I could tell you a lot about the reputation Eastborough has for weirdness. Maybe it’s something in the water, or the magnetic ley lines in the earth itself. There are certain spots, certain places, that seem to have generated more tales of hauntings and murder and unexplained events than others. The print shop Rosen Thermographers, where I also worked for a time, comes quickly to mind...though the scariest thing I personally encountered there were the wages and the management. There was that employee who came to work with a gun, for instance (fortunately, before my stint), and the mysterious fire that ultimately gutted the place. Another seemingly psychically polluted spot would of course be Eastborough Swamp. Less known as such a place, unless you work there yourself, is EastCoast Pharmaceuticals.

  * * *

  EastCoast is a melting pot. I recall the very rewarding feeling I had one night, riding to a local doughnut shop during our 1:15 AM third shift “lunch,” sitting in the backseat with my Laotian group leader Patty, while Fazal, an Indian Muslim, and Ufuk, a Turkish Muslim, sat up front...Fazal and Patty singing, “Ooh baby I love your way,” along with Peter Frampton on the radio. If only we could all ride along together in such harmony on this fast-spinning globe of ours as it hurtles us to that great doughnut shop in the sky! Most of my co-workers are from Ghana, and are generally very polite, very articulate, very nice to work with; in my immediate team there are Ama, Daniel, and Frederick. But last year the new guy in our department, Chris, was just a boring old native-born Anglo-Saxon white boy like me. Well, we were immigrants, too...we’d simply got here several generations before the likes of Ufuk and Ama.

  I trained Chris on the cartridge washer in Bay Three, and we hit it off right away, both being avid readers who would generally prefer to crack a book on our break time than hobnob with our co-workers, however pleasant they were. Like me, Chris tended to get philosophical about the thousands upon thousands of 1.8 ml dental cartridges we produced of such patented solutions as Eastocaine Hydrochloride in water. Chris and I were struck by the irony of the night Ama was suffering intensely from an impacted wisdom tooth, at the same time being surrounded by countless gallons of medicine which might have relieved her agony.

  Our job was to operate the washer, which rinsed the empty glass cartridges and lubricated them with silicone (for smooth delivery of their contents, when the cartridges were inserted into a dentist’s steel syringe) before sending them into a long tunnel to be sanitized with hellish heat, and then on through the wall into the sterile core to be filled. When they reemerged, we would load the filled product into trays and onto wagons.

  Like me, Chris marveled at the dumpster in Bay One, filled with fully constructed but chipped or defective morphine sulfate syringes. Only empty rejects were trashed there, however; they were a lot more careful about accounting for and locking up even the waste from a product containing a controlled substance. But Chris and I joked that if these syringes had been full it would have been a junkie’s vision of heaven; we imagined an addict diving headfirst into such a dumpster to die in unparalleled bliss. We knew these particular syringes, imposingly large, were for delivering morphine into an IV bag rather than directly into a body, but it still made your skin crawl to look at so many needles bristling in that dumpster. All the pain needles bring before the comfort that follows. People fear needles. We manufacture fear here at EastCoast Pharmaceuticals, as if mass-producing sacrificial knives inside a great Aztec ziggurat.

  Chris was a divorcee, and didn’t seem to want to get into the subject much further than that fact, but we would trade sexually-themed jokes at times, as males will do to bond. When we were caught up on our work and sat in the SOP room reading from the numerous volumes of Standard Operating Procedures (crenulated impressions across our foreheads, left by our hair coverings, looking like scars where the top of our skulls had been sawed off and our brain
s removed – or so it felt, working on third shift), we would joke about the lists of terms that defined defective products. I’d read the term, and Chris would supply his suggestive interpretation. There was “poor self support structure” (“Better use Viagra!” Chris would quip), “non/slow function” (“More Viagra!”), “crooked plunger” (“Ouch!”), “no orifice” (“Bummer!”), “finger grip slippage” (“Hold onto that thing!”), “needle sheath can not be removed” (“My condom’s caught in my pubic hair!”), “protruding plunger” (“Down, boy!”), “plunger motion exceeds limits” (“She’s had enough, already!”), “sloppy fill” (“No comment!”), “soiled unit” (“Sorry, wrong hole...”), “discolored needle sheath” (“...but at least I used a rubber!”), “scuffed/scratched tube” (“Watch those teeth!”), “loose plunger rod” (“You promiscuous stud, you!”), “poor rod formation,” “channel leaker,” “blocked orifice,” “invaginated stopper” (?!) and so on.

  We are haunted by ourselves. There was something haunted – distantly morose – in Chris that I couldn’t pick up on, though it may have had to do with his ex-wife, or his general sensitivity. He seemed to have a half-formed crush on a pretty East Indian woman who sat at another table during break, and maybe also on a Vietnamese woman who used the easy-for-Anglos name of Lee (but then every guy, myself included, liked long-haired Lee). Chris admitted he found foreign-born women exotic. But he never approached any of these co-workers, that I was aware of.

  When one night during lunch one of the solution prep workers joined us at our table and mentioned that she’d received some more mysterious phone calls upstairs last Friday night, Chris’s interest was really piqued. He asked us what that was in reference to, and the rest of us were only too quick to launch into the stories of EastCoast’s alleged hauntings. Most of these tales were recounted by Ama in her dark and musical Ghanian accent (with a touch of British from the four years she’d lived in London).

  Ama explained how on Friday nights, when third shift was a mere skeleton crew, there were occasionally phone calls to solution prep which, when answered, resulted in only empty silence.