by Paul Kane
Receding, the lights of Constantinople grew dim. Its churches and towers drowned in shadow. He knew the time had come to gaze on Byzantium no more. The boy closed his eyes and was gone.
WORDSWORTH
by neil GAIMAN and dave McKean
Wordsworth by neil GAiMAN and dave McKEAN
“Words are but pictures, true or false designed, To draw the lines and features of the mind.”
BUTLER - Upon the Abuse of Human Learning.
Examine please the writhing tapestries of choice violence implicit in every scratching and syllable. Smell the beast-blood trickling into each wound, spelling out new ways to violate sweet innocence.
Hooks rend. New blasphemies configurate upon the inside of my eyelids: tales worked in blood and bone and flesh and semen, traced in spittle; a dash of bile here, a slice of kidney there.
Gather round damned children, and together we shall lament and celebrate the configuration that made us what we are, today and forever.
So: do your writhe and shiver in the pangs of darling agonies undreamable, wriggling and gasping and giggling, anticipating the tumescent thrill of another’s damnation?
Good
Then I’ll begin…
His name is Wordsworth.
The final clue, 12 down:
Inferno.
He writes it down and sighs dustily.
Then, crossword completed (6 minutes, 12 seconds), Daily Telegraph abandoned, Wordsworth stares out of the carriage window at a parade of allotments, at the ugly backs of houses.
Unsatisfying
The train shudders into the city centre and a fly makes languorous love to the grimy window.
Half an hour to go before he arrives at the library.
Half an hour to kill.
Wordsworth gazes at the paper in dismay. No true crossword here. He scans the first clue, expects nothing of substance.
Wordsworth ponders. An anagram, perhaps? He Combines permutation of ‘you’, and ‘U’, ‘Rabbit’ and ‘hare’, and, as an afterthought, ‘lapin’
It isn’t coming.
But deep inside his dry soul something flutters. He knows he knows the answe…
he just doesn’t know what it is.
And then…
(Wordsworth was seven)
(His rabbit was called Flopsy.)
…he knew.
Wordsworth worked in the museum library, in the stacks of books, organising and classifying.
There were over 200,000 books and manuscripts in the museum. They were friends, albeit friends composed of words and stories.
True friends, unlike his workmates - creatures so incomprehensible to him as to be almost alien: Miss Watson; Miss Priddow; Mrs Kelly._
The second clue was this:
2. Miss Watson’s cry if book-borne pain (5, 7, 4).
Wordsworth doesn’t know where the puzzle comes from, nor does he care. The puzzle is all. The words are everything.
3. Thee gift of thee Scavenger’s Daughter? (5).
He finds out, and fills the answer on the puzzle in his precise, neat handwriting.
Blood
Answers.
Wordsworth discovers there is a specialised vocabulary in the more uncompromising realms of bondage and flagellation.
From that province he takes away a scarred back and expertly pierced genitalia; and more importantly, he fills another nine squares on the puzzle.
Wordsworth attends a meal, at which noble and affluent coprophiliacs dine for twelve courses on forty kinds of human shit.
He’s there for the last word on the menu: it turns out to be coffee. Someone gas a sense of humour…
The delights of reluctant perversion chill him, although each new experience has a specific end in view.
Words.
For a word he cuts a dog apart and casts its entrails upon his kitchen floor, seeking sense in the loops and whorls of its intestines.
For a word he violates a small child.
he could guess. But he had to know.
All his life he had loved words; now he found his love to be a demanding, meticulous mistress.
His job was abandoned, following the fire that destroyed the museum and almost claimed his life.
He no longer ate. His actions were solely define by the puzzle…
And, in the end, there were only four spaces to fill in. One word.
One clue.
And the thing that had once been Harrison Wordsworth grinned through messy, suppurating lips, and wrote:
Ohhh the sweetling pulsing joy, the coming through the pain, Wordsworth feels the probe slide down the throat, pierce the wrecked anus, puncture the skull…
The plasma ceases to pump through the arteries, the liver no longer secretes bile, the urine dries to salt in the bladder, but the blood washes over us all…
In the night of hell, that glows with its own black light, I remember the burning spasms and freezing pangs that beset me when our lord took me and terribly refashioned me according to his will.
Will it ever, can it ever, be that good again?
Ripped to shreds and patched together. I knew then consummately what I was. What I am. What I always will be…
See me.
Love me
Look at my words.
(Examine the writhing tapestries of choice delight implicit in each scratching and each syllable.)
I guard the words.
I keep them tenderly, express them with my tangled flesh and tattered tongue.
Words that form stories, or tales, or patterns.
Words that can but hint at the delights of damnation, of the ultimate pleasures that wait for them all on the beyondside of pain.
Stay with me, my shattered children. Stay and listen and stare and learn. Was that tale good?
I ’ll show you another
I’Ve got thousands of them. I hold the stories. I guard the words.
Love me.
A Little Piece of Hell
Steve Niles
I know bad people when I see them, and Gordon Fuller was a world-class, evil scumbag, son of a bitch. He also happened to be my best friend.
Funny how things work out.
What that makes me, I do not know.
Since meeting him back in 1996, I’d personally witnessed him beat the shit out of several individuals, and at least one woman (Debbie . . . Donna . . . ? Can’t remember anymore). Granted she stabbed him about two inches from his dick, but that doesn’t make up for the beating he gave her in return.
I’ve seen Gordon steal people’s money and drugs, usually from right under their noses (with drugs, that was especially the case). I’ve seen him con his way in and out of some of the most fucked-up situations and lie like it was an Olympic event.
Gordon was a prick. No doubt. But he was also one hell of a stand-up guy when the shit came down hard. I will give him that. And seeing as I had a knack for getting in some tight spots, he proved to be a decent friend.
I almost feel sorry that I personally led him to Hell, but whatever. That’s where he was headed anyway.
It was the middle of March and Los Angeles was having a strange spell of mixed weather days. One second it would rain, the next the sun would come out. The nights were cold, and the constant wind made it all raw, uncomfortable.
I was living in an apartment off Franklin. A scuzzy, roach-infested little dump, but it was cheap and times were tough, so it suited me fine. Not like I ever threw dinner parties or anything.
The last time I scored was six weeks prior and only because I’d walked into a bar that looked like it had been hit by an alcohol bomb. It was closing time and mating standards had dropped for the remaining bar hags, so one of them came home with me.
Julie was her name, I think. She was about as homely as I am, and I remember she sounded like a rattle when she walked. I later found out it was because she carried Tic Tacs in her purse, but I’ll always remember her as the Rattle Girl. The last woman who’d even touched me.
<
br /> Julie was the first person I’d ever heard speak about that stupid box, as well. She talked a lot but all I was thinking about was getting in her pants. Somewhere between foreplay and whatever passed for actual penetration, she told me about a friend, some shitbag named Andy Getz, who recently found a strange little box in an alley. Sold it to a pawnshop for a couple bucks, only to discover later that the pawnshop had turned around and sold it for, get this, ten thousand dollars.
That got my attention.
Ten grand for a fucking box?
I told Gordon about it later on and amazingly he knew Andy. He said Andy used to be the go-between for a guy he bought weed from. Gordon’s hunch was that the box was full of drugs or something—that it was the contents that made it valuable, not the box itself.
We decided to check it out. It had all the elements of interest for Gordon: easy money and the chance to screw someone over.
We found Andy Getz at a dive bar in Hollywood, just past the cleaned-up touristy section. It wasn’t even noon and he was already drunk.
I slid up next to him on the right and Gordon flanked him on the left.
Gordon spoke first.
“Andy,” Gordon said in a mildly threatening manner. “This is my buddy, Ed.”
Andy looked at me with glazed eyes.
I nodded. “We hear you had some kind of box that you sold.”
Andy’s shoulders slumped like he was revisiting his biggest regret. “Aw, man,” he whined. “Everybody in town know about that shit?”
Gordon said, “Some bitch named Julie told Ed here about it.” Andy looked at Gordon and then back to me. “Yeah, I fucked her, too.”
I rolled my tongue in my mouth and tried to remember if I’d used a condom.
Gordon ordered a round of beers to make the situation friendlier. After a few, Andy spoke freely about the box and the deal he lost out on.
“It was about so big,” he said, indicating what seemed to be a drunken, palm-sized square. “And it had these grooves with metal and shit. I tried to open the fucking thing but all that happened was a little static spark.”
I looked at Gordon. “Spark?” I asked. “That’s fucking weird.”
Andy drunkenly nodded, swinging his head side to side depending on which one of us was talking. “And I’ll tell you something. That box freaked me out. Honest. It was weird. Stupid little box and it gave me the creeps.”
He was getting sloppy. It was time to get the key info. Gordon took the ball and ran. “So what pawnshop was it again?”
Andy thumbed back over his shoulder and almost fell off the stool. “Iz that place over by, what the hell’s it called, the Scientist Building?”
“Scientology?” I corrected.
“Yeah, thaz it. The shop in the strip mall across the street.”
Gordon and I exchanged another glance. The pawnshop was called Dexter’s. It was four blocks from my apartment in a strip mall behind some trendy restaurants. We thanked drunken Andy, slapped him on the back, and slipped out of the darkness of the dive bar into the blinding light of day.
We headed over to Dexter’s Pawn Shop. Neither of us had a car, so we had to take the bus, of all things, from Hollywood a few dozen blocks north back to my neck of the woods. I got off the bus behind Gordon, and as he stepped off onto the sidewalk I noticed the angular bulge under his shirt.
I grabbed him by the shoulder as the bus pulled away. “You carrying a piece, man?”
“Yeah,” Gordon said like it was the dumbest question in the world. “Of course I am.”
“Why?”
Gordon rubbed his chin mockingly. “Let me see,” he said. “To shoot someone in the fucking face if they mess with me. How’s that sound?”
I didn’t reply. I just shook my head and walked toward the strip mall where Dexter’s Pawn Shop sat between a Korean barbecue and a dry cleaner’s that had gone out of business. We approached the shop. Gordon grabbed the door, but despite the OPEN sign hanging crooked in the window, it didn’t budge.
Inside I could see a mountain of a man with a beard, perched behind the counter, on a stool that looked like it grew from his ass. I waved and the man mountain reached under the counter and released the door lock.
I entered first with Gordon trailing. The dude at the counter kept his hand underneath it. I assumed that’s where he kept his gun.
“How can I help you, gentlemen?” he said, removing his hand, evidently deciding we were safe.
“Are you Dexter?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Dexter died years ago. I’m Jerry. Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Gordon stepped up. “Name’s Gordon. This is Ed. We’re looking for some information.”
Jerry eyeballed us hard. “You guys cops?”
Gordon laughed out loud and I just smiled. “Good Lord, no,” Gordon said. “We’re anything but cops.”
“What kind of information you looking for?” Jerry asked, and I noticed his hand inching under the counter again.
“We’re looking for somebody who bought something from you,” Gordon said.
Jerry shook his head. “That’s not being very specific. Besides, we don’t give out that kind of information.”
My heart almost stopped as I saw Gordon reach for something behind him and relaxed when he came back with his wallet and not the gun. He pulled out a twenty and laid it on the counter.
“Somebody bought a small box for a lot of dough.”
Jerry took the twenty, then wrote a name on a scrap of paper and slid it back.
“Thanks, Jerry,” Gordon said and abruptly turned and went for the exit.
I nodded at the man mountain named Jerry. He nodded back, and I saw the corner of his mouth curl slightly, and his eyes narrow like he knew something we didn’t. A chill snaked down my spine and I almost ran into Gordon as he waited for the smirking man mountain to buzz the door.
The name on the paper scrap was Thomas Harden. Anybody who lived in Los Angeles or watched a movie knew who he was. I sure did. He was a producer known for spending very little money on movies and making millions back.
He specialized in horror movies, the films that teens flocked to on weekends. Harden knew how to snag the kids. He put in lots of violence, graphic and horrible torture and mutilation, and added just enough sex and nudity to keep the censors at bay.
Even Gordon thought Harden was a sick fuck. That’s saying a lot.
In one film I saw, there was a scene where a nude girl was skinned alive on camera. It lasted ten minutes without cutting away, and just the sounds of the girl’s shrieks would have been enough to turn my stomach. That was the last time I watched a Harden-produced movie.
And this was the guy who had spent ten thousand dollars on a stupid little box.
Gordon and I took buses all the way to the base of the Hollywood Hills, where the bus lines stopped on Ventura Boulevard.
From there we walked it because Gordon didn’t want to take a cab. I went along with it, in active denial of what was really happening. We actually didn’t take a cab because we didn’t want any record of where we went or what we were doing.
Strange the way crimes start sometimes, no? Most people think it’s all planning, premeditation. The scary thing is, it can be unspoken right up to the point of break-in or murder, just a silent agreement between two nasty bastards like me and Gordon.
As we approached the gates of Thomas Harden’s mansion perched in the hills we both knew, without so much as speaking a word of it, we were going to break in and get that box, one way or another.
Something about the very idea of the mystery box had, and I know this sounds odd, possessed us both. Maybe it was the ten grand Harden had paid. Maybe it was the loss in that loser Andy’s eyes or the dangerous smirk on the man mountain’s lips, the look on his face; but something beyond simple greed drove us up those long, winding roads.
We stopped just short of the paved driveway and the black iron gates flanked by security cameras. The house
was tucked inside high walls and thick foliage planted to deter unwanted fans and intruders.
I flinched and backed away when I saw the cameras, but Gordon squinted and raised his hands.
“They’re not on,” he said. “Look.”
I looked up. He was right. The red indicator lights below the lenses were off, and the cameras hung at a sort of dead level. Even if they were on, they would only catch our feet at best.
Curious, I gave the gate a push, and to both our surprise, it creaked open. Nothing was on or locked. As I pushed the gate open wider, I got the sense that the whole place was shut down. Something wasn’t right.
Even Gordon felt it, and that prick never felt anything. He pointed ahead, up the shoehorn driveway. The arc peaked at a huge, modern/Spanish-style mansion. It was the oddest house I’d ever fucking seen—instead of sections, it just looked like stacked stucco squares with way too many windows offset at different levels.
“Is that his house?” I asked.
Gordon took the gun, some kind of semi-automatic, from his waistband as he walked ahead. “Sure looks like it. Come on. Let’s make this a quick in-and-out.”
We walked fast and steady up the driveway to the front door, which we found open a sliver.
Gordon looked at me. I shrugged.
“We’re just getting the box and then splitting, right?” I asked. I felt a quiver in my voice.
And Gordon heard it.
He grinned at me and lowered his head. “Let’s see what there is to see.”
The tone in his voice screamed trouble, and if I’d had a lick of sense I would have turned around right then, but I didn’t. Instead I followed Gordon as he pushed open the front door of the odd mansion, and the smell of sulfur and urine hit us both like an unexpected wave.
“Fucking hell,” I said, throwing my hand over my nose and mouth. “Stinks!”