But the Grand Duke of Hell beneath stood for another instant, throwing his luminescent head back to give a silent howl of hatred, denial, or triumph.
Wynne walked outside and, in a fit of the rage that had never left him and still felt so familiar, dropped to his knees, closed his eyes, and pressed the burning swords into himself hoping to destroy the hell within him.
It didn't hurt quite as much as he thought. When he looked down he saw he was jabbing the busted plastic fork and knife into his ribs.
It didn't matter though. He knew something about truth and beauty. Of what he was, and what he would be bringing with him to the gates of heaven.
Understanding this now as he began to rise above the city streets and ascended to paradise, sane and beloved in the all-consuming nature of the Lord's purest love.
Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell
The tortures of that inward hell.
Byron–The Giaour
Introduction for "Traveling"
By Michael Laimo
Tom Piccirilli was my Mentor.
Ten years ago I was an aspiring writer…no, correct that. I was still a reader, but a voracious one enthusiastically delving into the small presses. I'd already partied with the Kings and the Koontzes and the McCammons of the horror world and was in search of a new, fresh voice--someone I'd never heard of before but could keep me turning the pages well into beauty-sleep hours. So I sent away for copies of magazines like Dead Of Night and Not One Of Us and Terminal Fright, and read them from cover to cover, quite soon noticing that all these little 'zines' had a single common attribute: they contained short fiction by a guy named Tom Piccirilli.
Quite soon thereafter, I realized something: I wanted to write.
To me, now an aspiring writer, I began to pick up many other small press zines, and to no surprise (and much delight), saw that most contained Tom's fiction. Man, his stories just blew me away. They were deliberate, powerful, shocking, introducing me to nightmarish territories I'd never known to exist. And yet, at the same time, they were real enough to make me wonder: could this really happen?
As it turned out, Tom lived a mere stone's throw away from me. So I contacted him, and we hooked up. Me, aspiring writer, and he, my newly self-appointed mentor. At the time Tom didn't realize that he had a zealous protégé on his hands, but he went with the flow anyway like the great guy that he is, and for the next five years I listened and learned and did my best to watch Tom as he worked his way up the ranks of the horror community hierarchy.
Tom Piccirilli is my mentor.
Tom has the uncanny ability to alter a familiar theme into something horridly twisted. Here we have a brand new tale entitled "Traveling", a title as innocent as the blank piece of paper it was first typed on. But, below the title, the story commences, and we soon discover that there is something intriguingly odd within: the underlying madness that creeps into the main character's thoughts also tempts the reader with a bit of psychological second-guessing. Why? Because when braving this story, you won't recognize that things are terribly wrong until you've committed yourself to an optimistic outcome. Then Tom does what he does best: he winds up and smacks you in the face with a horror so unexpected that it forces you to go back and figure out just how in the hell he pulled it off. See, Tom has a way of fucking with his readers like that. How can you not admire that? (Tom still doesn't know it, but I am his protégé. I've read almost every damn thing he's published, and truth be told, I've learned something every single time out, as I did after reading this marvelous story.)
Tom Piccirilli will always be my mentor.
I suppose Tom will eventually find out that I admire his work to no end, and that he is my mentor, whether he likes it or not. One thing is for certain: if he keeps on writing stories like "Traveling", then I'll always read them with rampant enthusiasm, and I'll always smirk with delight. And, perhaps, with a bit of purpose. You see, with stories so well-written, so imaginative, and so brilliantly original, I'll find no choice but to continue labeling myself as an aspiring horror writer. Which is just fine by me.
–Michael Laimo, author of THE DEMONOLOGIST and DEEP INTO THE DARKNESS
Traveling
When in doubt, set everything on fire.
That's all it takes, apparently. You see it in every movie you happen to catch on cable at 2am. Some dumbass horror flick where you've got a wimpy guy being chased through a small town full of inbred killers or trundling fish-men. The hero is trapped in a warehouse and 52 murderers are closing in on him, brandishing their scythes and axes, waving their tentacles. He backs up to the far wall and has nowhere left to go, finally turns frantically to the left and the right and sees, what else?…ten drums of gasoline. Kicks one over, flicks his Zippo off his ass cheek, and the place goes up.
All the gurgling fish-folk maniacs-almost all of them-squeal and burst into flame, run around bouncing into walls, setting the rest of the place up. Hero jumps out the window and falls three stories into a little puddle. He's safe and limps off to watch the whole town burn from afar. Maybe one of the chainsaw freaks makes it out too, giving us a ten minute showdown on the screen. How's the wimp get out of that one? He kicks the killer in the nuts, grabs up the chainsaw, and rams it home.
Maybe it works, or maybe the savage mass-murdering dude comes back in a sequel with a tiny scar on his belly.
Where are you?
Someplace with stalks of corn waving in the breeze, a burst of crows rising and circling before settling again. Out on the farm there's a scarecrow with a sackcloth face with a livelier grin than you're capable of now.
Now. Now, it's time to think of this: You're walking across the parking lot with Mariel towards the Planned Parenthood building. The protesters are shrieking, pumping their signs in the air. They're screaming about Jesus and damnation and the death of innocence. One woman really lets loose from the bottom of her diaphragm, the well of her soul, her voice traveling in a straight line like a bullet, telling Mariel not to kill her baby. You actually agree, in your heart, but the course has been set and there's no way to back out. Mariel is sobbing and suffering, the circles under her eyes like four-day old bruises. Anybody who didn't know better would think you've been beating her for months, punching her in the face.
There are fields going by. For a second you have the startling notion that you're actually asleep at the wheel and about to drive off the road. Your hands flash out and you whimper in fear, awakening the child in the seat in front of you. That's right, you're on a bus. You've been on a bus for most of your life, it seems. This is just another cliché story about hell where the man in the tale doesn't realize he's already dead and in hell until the very end, which is exactly the same as the beginning of the story. Badump-bump. It's the same dumbass movie that your father took you to see when you were seven, and somehow you're stuck in the center of it.
The kid peers over his headrest and says something designed to anger or annoy you. Children are supposed to be the bastion of purity but this kid's got a pair of steel cajones, glaring and really making an effort to get under your skin and make you feel him seething. Is this what you really would've wanted? One of these critters ruling your household? His mother snores softly beside him and eventually the kid gives a self-satisfied grimace and sits again.
Leaning your head against the window you witness the crows following for a time before veering off. Acres of cabbage and melons whiz by and the muffled noises of tractors and trucks accompany the bus driver's downshifting as he smoothly sails through an empty intersection. The sun's only been up for about a quarter hour and the sloping redness of dawn is beginning to retreat.
You've gone through your closet and realized, with remorse, that you don't even own a decent suit. Your mother used to crack wise about that, asking what you were going to wear to her funeral. A T-shirt and sneakers? And sure as hell, the night you got the call you wound up having to run your ass off around town to find something off the rack that fit. Jacket didn't match the pant
s and the ninety dollar JC Penney shoes were a half-size too big, but at least it got you over. The rest of the family stared in embarrassment, and you stared right back. If she could've, Ma would've leaned up out of the coffin and rapped you in the back of the head.
Maybe she did. You feel as if she did, and you've been feeling that way every day since.
The miles rush past as you gaze out the dirty window, sitting in the next to last seat, directly across from the small rest room. The stink of shit and piss wafts by, the familiar and nauseating smell somehow calming you. It reminds you of your grandfather's colostomy bag, the last days of your father as he sat in the middle of a hospital bed, wearing the little blue patient's gown, weeping in shame.
We all need to get back to the sewage of our pasts eventually.
It's been five days since you've last eaten or slept. Your heart rate is up around 120, pulse hammering in your throat and wrists. Life is toxic and you need to flush your system. Just being awake will kill you, and that's not quite as ironic as it sounds.
Mariel's only twenty-two, slim-hipped and weighing ninety-five pounds, a tiger in bed but fragile as love. She's willing to go through with it, have the kid, for your sake because she knows how much you want to be a father. It's one of the very few natural instincts you had never questioned, but Christ, you should've. What is it about holding a blanketed bundle of your own lineage that means so much? Is it really nothing more than ego? Or are you tapping into the generations of myth that have descended through the ages from the deserts of your people?
Do you just dream too much? That's probably it.
So you sit in the waiting room while a sharp-faced nurse steals Mariel away in a cloud of secrecy and regret. You do penance in a plastic bucket chair with the insipid smiles of celebrities beaming at you from the magazine rack.
There's crying going on but you're not certain if it's yours or Mariel's. Or your father's or your son's or the guy sitting three seats over. You take another look and the soft, colorless never-to-be-father is sniffling into a blue bandanna. He glances up and catches your eye, leans forward a touch, and you can sense he's asking for forgiveness and understanding.
Perhaps you hate him only a fraction less than you hate yourself. The two of you are, after all, conspirators scheming against your own sons and daughters. You've sent the knives of your paid lackeys against your children.
How can you be expected to excuse or acquit him? If this was a DVD you know the commentary would have the director explaining this as an establishing shot, discussing how he framed the scene: Going on at length about the expression on your face, and how many takes it took you to get right.
The pale pudge turns away in sorrow, and a heavy silence slices between the two of you like a guillotine. You've had friends who used to come through these doors every six months with a different girl, and they never had anything but grins to show for it. Like it was a badge of honor. Some of them would offer you a beer and say that you're making too much of it. Maybe you are. But that doesn't change anything. You still want to kill the pudge, and then of course yourself.
Doors open and click shut. Employees drift by like oblivious wraiths. Mariel eventually finds you again. She looks stronger and more stable than she has in weeks, but a little tearful too. A straight-backed older woman with a skull-cap of white hair takes your credit card and makes you fill out more paperwork. She smiles with dull gray dentures and you have to grab hold of the wall before you go over. You sign your name to your deed.
The glare slashes through the window and strikes like a scalpel. Mariel actually smiles. You take her hand and usher her back to the car, roaming past the protesters who are still doing their thing. They've all got nice tans from standing so long in the sun without any shade. You wonder if any of them ever hurl bombs.
Turning, you tighten your arms and face them, waiting for a Molotov cocktail to hit you squarely in the chest. You close your eyes, lost in the fantasy of your execution, your willingness to follow your own flesh into death. Light it up. When in doubt, set everything on fire.
Mariel calls and the moment passes. A couple of the protesters have seen your kind before and almost show a hint of pity. You get in the car and drop it into fourth, burning rubber, the front lurching forward like the horsepower of your hatred, barely missing a priest holding a dolly covered in red syrup.
Mariel has regrets but assures you this is the right thing to do. Now that it's over she's put it behind her, at least for the time being. She's stronger than you ever will be. She'll make a wonderful mother, because when she's ready to bring a child into this life she'll love it totally, without any ego.
You, however, are wrapped up in the images of your Dad's war photos, the man strong and handsome and a hero. Perhaps there's no other reason to exist except to somehow make a dead man proud.
On some days you feel so alone that you can't accept the reality of other people. They're tricks of illusion you play on yourself. They're no more than wisps of daydreams fading as you awaken back into the world. Could you ever have gotten off the barge at Anzio the way your old man did? The answer is clear: You would have shot yourself in the head the second day of boot camp. You have a tendency towards depression.
Sure. They make medication for sensitive types like you. A couple of pills in the morning and suddenly the day fills with beautiful prospects and possibilities. They also make funny cigarettes for you. Alcohol for you. Dirty magazines. Whatever it takes.
You drop Mariel off at her mother's house and watch her nearly sashay up the walkway, the burden gone from her life but left in your lap. It's the way it should be, really. You're the one who forgot to get a pack of rubbers and decided you never liked the damn things anyhow. Diving into bed and drawing your teeth across her throat and pummeling home-giggling at first and then laughing, and then actually guffawing as you rode between her legs. You starting to get the picture?
You soothe your febrile mind in Asian martial arts flicks. There's a certain hypnotic intimacy to the measured action and motion. You watch them up their doing their wire-fu in mid-air, kicking and swinging like dancers, spinning, diving, rolling, so enigmatic and exquisite in their precision that you start gasping in the middle of the night and hyperventilate until you pass out. Sometimes you've just got to thank Christ for the small favors.
When you wake up you throw another DVD in. The master has been poisoned by his favorite student and now the second-rater has to get revenge for the honor of the school. He's got to raise the tablets. You don't know what the tablets are or why they have to be raised, but you go with it. He's got to learn new skills and there's nobody who can teach him except the drunken bad-tempered monk, and he won't just come out and do it, he's got to train the kid by duping him. Getting him to wash the pots and pans a certain way, carry these bigass jugs of wine, fix the roof with bamboo poles, cook dinner with big vats of rice and stirring the soup with a big oar that looks suspiciously like a sword. Little by little the kid becomes a master fighter without even knowing it, and eventually throws down against the traitor and kicks his ass across Buddha's holy temple. All these guys covered in oil and no chest hair and their shaved heads shining angelically.
The final move is always out-thrust fingers into the throat or eyes. It's not as easy as kicking over the drum of gasoline and tossing the Zippo, but when it comes down to it, sometimes you've just got to crush somebody's esophagus or poke their eyes out.
It gets you pumped. You figure maybe somebody's been teaching you kung fu but you've been unaware of it. You clean pots and pans, you wax your car, you paint the fence. So now you start running around the apartment and doing this pretend karate, making all the right grunts and screeches, imagining yourself breaking boulders with your fists. If you didn't have a television you wouldn't be able to do a damn thing.
The bus pulls into the station and you realize you've arrived. Again. The name of the city flashes by and people are talking about restaurants, tourist spots, juke joints, the civi
l war cannon in the park. You listen intensely for a few minutes and still can't figure out where you are. It doesn't matter. It hasn't for the last five days and won't tomorrow, either.
You get off and follow an overweight man with flickering eyes and wearing dude clothes down the steps into the station. He's got the walk of someone who needs to take a serious shit, sort of hopping along, skipping, tugging his baggage behind him. Must have bashful bowels and couldn't go on the bus.
The brown painted door to the men's room is chipped and peeling, and the hinges squeal as he grabs the handle and pulls. The bathroom is filthy and you revel in it as you slip inside. You can't quite remember but you get the feeling that maybe, when you were a pre-teen, you played some kind of toilet games with the little girl next door. There should be a reason for the sudden intoxicating arousal that's slipping over you. Or maybe you're just sick.
The fat man rushes into the closest stall and jerks his luggage inside with him. He bangs around in there for a minute trying to situate himself, shuts the door and, within seconds, lets out a sigh of relief.
A couple of other travelers enter and exit, washing their hands quickly as if only going through the motions because you're leaning up against the tiled wall, watching. In a minute you feel the tension in the small confines leave and you know the station traffic has eased and nobody else is going to enter for a while. You move to the stall door.
There's a shine to it but the metal is warped, dented, and your face is distinct yet unknown. You've forgotten your name. Again. You're not sure what's brought you here but you realize the memory is awful and terrifying and, momentarily, obscured by the force of your willpower. You decide to let it ride.
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