Futile Efforts

by Piccirilli, Tom

  Wes and I tossed Freddy in the trunk and everybody piled into the car. I drove away from the point slowly. It made me a little sad to leave, and I didn't quite know why.

  I was wide awake but a certain tightness had gripped me. The road curved and I didn't want to follow it. We drilled along on Ocean Parkway heading towards the bridges and the clubs, waiting for the police cars. The heater softly hummed as the headlights chopped twin channels through the darkness.

  Betty chewed her bottom lip and squirmed beside me. For the first time since seventh grade her presence didn't give me a sexual charge. It was so unfamiliar that I felt nearly weightless. I gripped the steering wheel harder just to keep hold of reality. She needed something all right, and I could see those questions running through her mind—what was it like, how did he feel to have him deep inside like that? How did the dead love?

  We hadn't gone ten minutes down the parkway when Jude said, "Let's go back."

  I didn't slam on the brakes, I was very proud about that, but I did let off the gas. The headlights ignited the saw grass and the empty road ahead. Dan grimaced and began to sob but the tears wouldn't come for him. His eyes snapped back open in fear as he stared out the window. He remained silent.

  Betty said, "Wha-" Her voice had become strained, but wasn't full of anger or even disbelief.

  "Let's go back. Maybe there are more. There should be more by now, the way the wind is blowing. The current ought to be taking them past the point. Those that don't wash up on Echo Island."

  Weakly, Dan said, "Oh no, Jesus Christ, no. We can't."

  Betty turned. "You're bleeding bad, Jude. You've got to see a doctor."

  "No, I'm fine."

  "You're not fine. You could bleed to death."

  "It's all terrific, Betts. We've got to get you one of your own."

  Wes let out that laugh again and Betty drew her palms to ears. "Oh, stop it, would you."

  But Wes couldn't stop, or didn't want to. Neither did Jude.

  Neither did I.

  I stepped down on the brake and made a U-turn across the shallow grass and gravel of the median. Freddy shifted and thumped against my spare.

  We pulled up back to the point and scoured the black shore. The fire had died down to only glowing embers that sizzled. The beer cans we'd tossed in were red hot and the metal was smoking. We gathered up more driftwood and laid it over the embers until the branches blazed. We used them like torches. I had a very definite impression I'd once witnessed this same scene in Lord of the Flies.

  The surf battered the rocks and gurgled up the beach as if vying for our attention. The moon was still high enough to offset the whitecaps and etch the rolling waves in silver.

  Jude had been right.

  There were more now.

  Not nearly the forty presumed missing, but another four corpses had washed aground like beached mermaids. You would think all the bodies would make this a place of horror and death, but instead there was an almost buoyant milieu, like other friends had arrived and joined us. I could feel myself wanting to talk aloud to them, and I had to press my lips together to make sure I didn't. I thought I heard Betty giggle in a sweet, bashful sort of fashion.

  Wes grabbed each corpse and pulled it from the foam by himself. He looked deeply into their faces as though he might recognize every one of them from out of his past.

  There was an elderly man with a massive head wound. Cerebral arteries splayed from his ruptured cranium and brain matter like egg yolk dribbled and hung in viscous strands. Fifty yards further down the beach two middle-aged women housefraus, who must've summered out on the island, lay sprawled over one another, mouths open and trickling sea water. On the other side of the butte was a guy about Freddy's age, who wore a gold chain with the letters SOL hanging from it. Whether that was his name or only his initials, it's what they called him.

  "Sol is kinda cute too, don't you think, Betts?"

  Betty could only nod.

  "I'm not greedy. I'm giving this one to you."

  "Jude, listen—"

  "No need to thank me."

  "Is that what you expect?"

  Jude tittered, but she sounded sleepy, insubstantial. She moved slowly, blood staining her jeans down to the knee. I knew she wasn't going to make it, that she didn't want to leave the point, and I didn't care much. But Betty—what did I feel about Betty, if anything?

  Maybe I'd never find out, or maybe I would. Jude sluggishly undid Sol's pants, and drew them off. Sol wore boxer shorts with purple stripes on them. For some reason, this delighted her and she fell into a raving fit of laughter. When she'd finished, she looked over her shoulder at Betty and licked her lips.

  Firelight sent orange and yellow flashes scuttling across the surf. Sol appeared very young and innocent but also eager. There was an air of expectation about everything. Betty let loose with a passionate growl as she dropped beside Sol's corpse. She took his cock between her lips and sucked at him. She screwed up her face from the taste of salt on him, not because he was only rotting meat. She continued working at his prick as though he might actually respond and grow hard. Her tongue darted to his balls, swabbing them lovingly. It didn't affect me the way I thought it might. It didn't fill me with heat, I didn't want her, and even the familiar sadness and desire was gone.

  Jude let out with a caterwaul laugh and went to get another stick she could use to prop up his dick. She struggled off into the night still pouring blood.

  I wandered down the shore in the opposite direction. I couldn't figure out why the coast guard had given up searching the area, except that maybe the ferry had been close enough to Echo Island for most of the bodies to wash up there. The currents were odd in the channel. Bodies that were only a foot away in the water might have wound up drifting miles apart from each other.

  Sea spray blew into my face. Timbers of the lighthouse groaned and gasped in judgment. History and change streamed on the wind, no different than ever before. The downed ferry probably still hadn't completely settled into the silt at the bottom of the channel. I'd only by chance become a part of some much larger force. A process, an alchemy designed to take what was common and turn it into the extraordinary.

  The night wasn't done with me yet.

  I found the girl.

  She floated in the weeds like drowned Ophelia, buffeted by the softest edges of the dying, ebbing waves. She lay out before me like every heartache I'd ever suffered, each unfulfilled goal that had turned into hell. I swayed. She held a purity that I'd never seen in anybody before, a simplicity and naked depth that weakened my knees but drew me forward.

  I didn't want to touch her and ruin this grand image. Gradually, the waves brought her up to shore and released her into the sand at my feet.

  In life she'd had golden hair but now it was thick with seaweed and glowed a bitter bone white in the moonlight. Drops of water rolled off the muscles of her neck, shoulders, and thighs, leaving the lightest of salt trails behind. She wore a light cotton summer dress and the slap of the breakers had actually folded her hands across her belly. She looked healthy and melancholy.

  One freckle-spotted breast had worked free—the nipple small and pink, not entirely hard but just enough to give it a point. I moved to clench her and stopped, then gently placed her breast back inside her dress.

  Over my shoulder, Wes chuckled and hissed his hatred.

  "Watch this," he said. "I'm gonna fuck this dead bitch. Right here, in front of that other cunt."

  He still thought there was something left to be jealous about. He'd hold onto his wrath even when there was nobody left to be furious with. He found no solace and saw no beauty in this alchemist's dream occurring around us.

  "Leave her alone," I said, but he didn't hear me. We both planted our torches.

  "You're gonna see something now, man. Jude is gonna learn two can play at a game as sick as this."

  "Wes—"

  "What, she thinks cutting up her pussy on a dead kid is going to make me feel sorry for
her? Gonna make me love her more? Fuck no! I'm looking forward to this."

  I walked back over to where Freddy's pants lay and worked the belt loose. Betty and Jude were still busy with fixing up Sol's dick with a stick. I scanned the area for Dan and found him staggering out along the butte. I couldn't have rushed out there in time to save him from throwing himself down against the rocks, and I didn't want to. I watched him drop from sight.

  I raced back to Ophelia. Wes had gotten her dress off. Her arms lay over her head and she appeared to be scowling, the terror of rape written in the lines and shadows of her features. He'd forced her eyes open.

  "This frigid bitch is mine."

  "Leave her," I said again, even more softly, but this time he heard me.

  "What?"

  "Go away and let her alone."

  "So," he said, letting loose that crazed laugh. "You've got some rage of your own, don't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Let's see it."

  He me that infected grin. It was abhorrent and gruesome, and how he must've hated seeing it scraped on his face every time he dared look into a mirror. I realized then that his knuckles weren't scarred from football or from hard work, but because he'd driven his fists into a hundred mirrors over the years. I looked into Wes' eyes and saw that he'd rested all his final hopes on me.

  He roared and drew his knife, a butterfly blade that he liked to snap open and shut but had never really become proficient with. I burst out laughing and it felt damn good. Freddy's belt held power. The property of dead men is holy. I held the ends of the leather belt and snapped it together. The sound of a whip-crack burst across the darkness.

  Wes halfheartedly jabbed with the blade twice but he didn't actually want to save himself. He'd been imploring someone to kill him for years. So I strangled him.

  He'd been far stronger than me once, but he'd given up his strength for pettiness and self-pity. I got behind him, looped the belt over his head, and let out all the rest of what I had howling inside me—seeing through only the bloody tint of rage—and pulling tighter. He barely fought back for a moment and then relaxed, mewling, reaching back to place his hands on my wrists. He patted me with a kind reassurance, urging me onward. I yanked harder and he dropped to his knees in a mockery of prayer before the dead girl. Wes wheezed and gurgled while she watched me with an affectionate gaze.

  My hands turned blue from the exertion but it felt so good, this relief, and we both grunted in time together. I felt his windpipe collapse and he let loose with a thankful hiss, patting me one last time.

  He fell forward onto his face between Ophelia's legs.

  We took death and made it into life, somehow. I held on to her as if my very heartbeat depended upon it, because it did. She would save me from the long bleakness of the world.

  I had at last fallen in love.

  "Ophelia," I said. I carried her up to a dune. She watched me closely as I curled up beside her and went to sleep.

  In the morning, as the sun seeped over the horizon, Betty was still on top of Sol and she was dead. She'd bled out across his corpse and hadn't cared enough about her own life to clamber off him. The sand around them had grown a deep red.

  Dan's body lay crumpled and broken on the rocks. He hadn't died immediately. From the looks of it his spine had shattered after he fell, and he lay there forced to look back towards shore. He couldn't get away from the sight even then. The tide was tugging at him and I decided to let him go.

  Jude had found Wes in the dark and decided to die beside him. But not before she evened the score a little. She'd bitten his lips off and chewed away a fair amount of his face. I left him where he was.

  It took hours to move the rest of them, but I was safe. I had never felt so protected and secure in my life. Usually the point was filled with beachcombers and tourists by this time of the morning, but today the beach would reject everyone but us.

  The Chevy's trunk easily held the two housefraus and Freddy, and I only had to break one of their ladies' legs to get them all in. I laid the old man with the crushed head in the back across the foot wells and sat Sol up in the seat between Betty and Jude. The three of them relaxed against each other, drowsy and cuddling, murmuring endearments. I envied their devotion and the tenderness they showed one another.

  They too had their dreams, and I realized that hope and longing and hunger don't die as easily as delicate flesh. I could see their faith and passions that continued to burn inside their peaceful faces.

  I checked the rearview mirror and saw that my own eyes were finally as alive as theirs.

  All you really had to do was open yourself up to love, and it would eventually find you. Ophelia sits next to me, whispering her encouragement and gratitude.

  Of all of us, I'm still the quietest one.

  Introduction for "Voice C"

  By Edward Lee

  Tom Pic is one of my most vital friends in this bizarre professional coterie known as the "horror" genre. But that friendship didn't come first. Personally, I didn't know Tom from Adam when I began reading him, but I sure as shit DID know his name as a writer. Over ten years ago, his stuff was all over the place, and he was one of the few writers I DIDN'T know personally whose fiction I'd always pursue. Why? Because it kicked ass. It wasn't just good, it was extraordinary good, a benchmark for the genre. Tremendous short stories that rose up above most of the field's material, novels that stepped out in ways that made me jealous, and poetry so good it makes me want to throw in the towel. The oddest thing is the fact that I’m friends with this paramount writer––it just seems weird to read his outstanding work or simply see it on the stands, and then realize, "Wait a minute––I KNOW this guy!" Read this to believe him. Everything Pic writes makes me feel honored to exist in the same field with him.

  In this day and age, America loves buzzwords and acronyms, and today the business in question is called "EVP" which, if you watch Sci-Fi Channel, you know stands for electronic voice phenomena. It used to be called "remote recording," however, and it's been around for a long time. Sort of like the Atkins Diet...Anyway, it's kind of a big deal now, popping up on all these new ghost-hunter shows and Hollywood extravaganzas like WHITE NOISE. Tom Piccirilli was kind enough to include a selection of my verse in his poetry anthology THE DEVIL'S WINE, and one of my pieces wasn't a poem at all but an oddment of sorts that I thought appropriate, called "Four Female Voices in an Empty Room." It's merely a transcription of a remote recording––an EVP––that I made with some friends on, of all nights, the Eve of Beltane (April 30, 1981), at a house in Maryland that was supposedly haunted. To me, though, there's no "supposedly" about it. The place is haunted. Period.

  I won't say the name of the house because that would be potentially libelous; it still stands and is now a recreation center at a very upscale and high-buck residential community in Maryland. (Yeah, that would really do wonders for the property values, huh? "Who's this fucking horror writer who just defamed our beautiful rec center? Sue him!") To make a long story short, my "poem" is true. It really happened, and those voices really were recorded. I was the night watchman for this rec center; hence, I had full access, and on the given night in 1981, I let my friends in, then we began our little ghost-hunt. It was me and another guy and two girls. (The "house," by the way, wasn't really a house; it was a big-ass mansion––which I borrowed from in my novels THE CHOSEN and FLESH GOTHIC.

  Seriously, the place looked like the joint in HELL HOUSE: sprawling, garrets, high arched doorways, narrow windows, and old brick walls with ivy growing in the seams. Cool. I’m not sure what it used to be, but I think it was some sort of seminary or religious school.) Back to the story: my friends and I brought three tape recorders. Two were cassettes and one was a big reel to reel with, like, four hours of tape on it. Were merely placed the recorders in strategic locations, turned them on, and retreated to a back room and fooled around with an Ouija Board for a few hours. (The mystical oracle yielded no results.) Then, later on, we collected the tapes and
recorders and left the house. The reel to reel and one of the cassettes had absolutely nothing on them but the second cassette did indeed record some voices. These are the voices in my poem, and one of them, the one we labeled "Voice C," is what gave Tom the idea for his excellent story. It was a wan female voice that sounded distant yet somehow very close up at the same time. The voice uttered these two words: "I’m dead."

  I'm not bullshitting, I swear! And anyway, that's the story. And I'm delighted that Tom found this little oddment interesting enough to write a story about, a superb story to say the least. The house is still there, by the way, and anytime I revisit Maryland, I toy with the idea of sneaking a tape recorder inside and making another remote recording. I’m certain, in fact, that one day I will.

  –Edward Lee, author of FLESH GOTHIC and MESSENGER

  VOICE C

  For Edward Lee

  Jenks averted the cold spot in front of the foyer closet as he stepped into the house where his sister had been murdered.

  He hadn't expected a media frenzy and there wasn't one. Two reporters from the yellow journal city papers, a small crew from the local cable station, and that was it. The girl's mother, Mrs. Mallory, was doing all the talking, trying to nail down her moment in the spotlight. Her hair had been done up in a carefully constructed tower of braids and tails that threatened to topple starboard. The new dye job hadn't completely taken at her temples and it appeared that she'd tried to trim out the offending grays.

  She sat on a worn couch which was clearly set for the trash, large boxes stacked up before her being used as a coffee table. Paper cups and plates with half eaten slices of pizza littered the top. A couple of fold-out chairs encircled her and the two reporters were sitting, scribbling haphazard notes, looking weary as hell.

  The girl, Tracy, sat silently beside her mother with the micro-cassette tape recorder in her lap, eyeing the device with a mixture of disinterest and loathing. It was an odd fusion but she pulled it off.