Guises

by Charlee Jacob

  “How…?” she stammers.

  Somehow I have stripped myself of the cumbersome restraint they fitted me with some hours before. I am naked and glorious, smeared in gore from head to foot as if I crawled inside the deer, swam in its salty waters under sheens of lake-ice until I found the frost-smoke heart and then emerged again shaking ephemeral ice flowers from my whiskers. My hair is red. I don’t even remember what color my hair usually is.

  But there is more. The reindeer’s coat is covered with snow. There are damp paw prints with snow still bunched between the claw-marks. On the floor, up the walls, across the ceiling. Snow is melting from between the bloody prints of toes and fingers. A film of snow coats my eyelashes. I see the doctor and the stupid orderly through a silver haze.

  “This is a hallucination,” Dr. Carson says firmly.

  “Yours or mine?” I ask, posing prettily. The orderly ogles as I spread my legs. I close them again and growl at him.

  “Robert, get some help in here and remove this deer,” she orders.

  “This is mine,” I tell her. “Get your own.”

  I lift my head and howl, uncannily, throaty, a music of spheres of the moon, a ballad to its phases.

  The hospital walls begin shaking as the patients in other rooms scream with the echo of my voice. Some are even howling too. Warning buzzers are going off at all the nurses’ stations and Dr. Carson’s beeper goes off at her hip. The spot of hot, white light on my ceiling goes out.

  They don’t call it bedlam for nothing.

  I hear the doctor gasp.

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s only an eclipse,” I explain. “Simulate the moon and you may get her idiosyncrasies. It will pass.”

  But I never said I wouldn’t touch her, thinking in my mind that this was not anything the doctor need fear. I rub blood across her cheeks, down her chin with an icy finger, a line of it down her throat gently, under her coat and between her pearly breasts.

  “Please step back, Lisia,” she commands, but her voice quavers. The smell of blood may have this effect.

  The noise all over the hospital is tremendous. Voices from every room—even from the catatonics—rise in a manic chant that can only be described as painfully ancient. The cave people and the hunter/gatherers made such sounds as they watched the glaciers come in and sail away in placid harbors, watching the ice crumble, watching it climb to the stars.

  “There really is a full moon tonight, isn’t there?” I ask, not having been near a window in more than three weeks.

  She admits it.

  “Take me to it,” I whisper seductively. “If you really want to know, then take me to any opening, door or window. You will have no more questions. Not about anything.”

  Dr. Carson leads me in the dark from my cell, from the sanctum that can no longer fool me. I have fooled it. Her light green eyes with their yellow flecks almost glow.

  People in those lackluster white uniforms are running pell-mell, shouting orders to shut down this and that ward, demanding more ultrashort-acting barbiturates, restraint belts, even the old-style straightjackets and wire muzzles that institutions don’t use anymore but are still kept in the cellar. I see a nurse sitting in a corner, pounding out a curious rhythm on a bed pan, her hair pulled from the starched cap and tight bun to hang in her face like a shaman’s greasy locks. Another has a tray of ice and is inserting the cubes into her vagina one at a time.

  “I’m afraid I must take you back to your room, Lisia. I am needed here, it seems,” Dr. Carson says, seeing the misrule that has erupted.

  I grab her arm.

  “There are seldom moments of truth for any of us, Doctor. Here is one. You’ve locked me up as insane, but I know you’ve wondered. Certainty is the gift of night, Doctor, of this night. Let it pass and it will be gone forever.”

  She steers me to a door that leads to the garden where on sunny days certain ambulatory patients are allowed to vegetate among the rose bushes. Sometimes they read tarot cards or play chess with figures carved from terra cotta to resemble the creatures painted on prehistoric cave walls. There is no one out there now, of course. It is dark; it is black. She shuts the door behind us.

  There is an eclipse. The moon-lover is an ebony disk. She is hiding and playing lovers’ games. I still smell her, though, for no darkness can secret her musk. I feel a rumble building in the back of my throat, husky and aroused.

  “You see well in the dark, Doctor,” I say.

  We listen as the people inside shriek and bay in turns, as the glass in what few windows there are begins to crack. There is a spray of rose petals, arterial red. The moon of unending fimbulvetr and voracious snow maiden returns.

  The garden changes abruptly. It is an ice-floe, a great glacier projecting up beneath us, carrying us upward, inexorably forward. Dr. Carson staggers and I catch her in my arms, helping her get her footing as the iceberg roars with radiant showers of crystals all around us. The temperature has dropped forty, fifty, sixty degrees and she is shivering. Our breath as we exhale forms fantasy archipelagoes that drift through the air. The ice crackles as if electric, hums from the hollows being created and then filled by its bulk.

  Dr. Carson turns to me, terror in her eyes. I open my mouth and she sees the icicles. She feels them in her mouth, growing from her fingertips.

  I hold up my hands to show her the deep, rich silver fur.

  “Soon we will be warm enough, as long as we begin to run and keep on running,” I tell her. She starts to scream, but all that comes out is a feral yowl. She extends it, singing to the moon.

  “Where has the moon gone?” she asks, ears flattening back with alarm against her vulpine skull. I gesture to the sere luna desert all around, the icy dust in this tranquil valley of high white.

  “We are riding her,” I reply, my smile brimming with permafrost.

  | — | — |

  THE PIPER

  As a cop, John Piper had seen the child like a rag doll. He’d thrown up in a corner of the grimy tenement, then busted the father over his thick, brutal skull for what he did to that poor baby’s head. Then John had knelt down over the kid and wept like a baby himself. Never really able to save anyone, not in time. And this was just one stupid abusing parent, not like the serial killer he was trailing…

  As an ambulance driver, staring at another windshield, too many victims were always kids. No one really had a chance, did they?

  As a fireman, the hardest memory of all for John, striding through the flames, hearing the voices of the kids in some unreachable back bedroom on the second floor. He was relatively safe in his asbestos suit, but he could hear them screaming and oh my god he couldn’t stop the panic because the smoke was confusing. Those poor kids, he had to hurry before it was too late. It was his job, saving folks was. And then he saw a face, scarred and horrible, and staring at him through the smoke…

  It was only George, cigarette dangling from his lipless, sixteen-year-old mouth. He was the janitor at the bar and was sweeping slowly with the broom taped to his gloved palms, fingers gone. He smiled crookedly at John. John had gotten him this job after he was let out of the burn ward. John had leapt through a ceiling of flames to rescue George after the teenager had fallen asleep in bed, smoking.

  John shook his head, realizing where he was now. Getting drunk in his favorite saloon with a bunch of other people in-between jobs who preferred beer for lunch.

  John stared up at the face of the killer on the TV screen suspended above the bar. It was a distant shot taken by an action news team from the parking lot of the market across from the school. The edges were only slightly blurred as the gunman moved, darting from window to window. The panes had been decorated with pages of crayon stick figures, flat October pumpkin faces, other first grade stuff. They flapped weakly as his body stirred the air. He must have been crouching down at every other window because from time to time the killer appeared to be stunted, as though the weight of today’s sins had squashed him into a troll.

  “Damn, yo
u can hear them kids screaming in there,” the bartender said. He stuffed a dish towel into a stein to dry its insides. He left a trail of lint in a coil.

  John saw bits if this lint floating in his beer. It coated his tongue until it felt hairy.

  “What makes a guy wanna blow away a bunch of kiddies like that for?” some laid-off trucker asked rhetorically.

  Caroline nodded grimly as she licked brew foam from her lips. She replied, “Hope them swats get his butt real soon. You ever on a S.W.A.T. team, Johnny?”

  He shook his head. “Homicide Department.”

  “Weird, ain’t it, John? How he looks like you?” Dabney pointed out, screwing up his already beady eyes to watch the killer’s image bob. He had his elbows on the want-ads from the morning paper. “If you weren’t sitting here drinking with us, I’d have to swear it was you.”

  John shivered, appalled that the man who had calmly walked into the Tormus J. Ferman Elementary with an Intratec closed bolt blowback semiautomatic was virtually his spitting image.

  “You know I heard it said once—some old movie or something—that we all got a twin somewhere. Someplace there’s someone walkin’ around who ain’t related to us but who has the same face we got,” said the bartender. “Still, it’s weird. He just killed a dozen kids and you used to be a cop. Both alike and totally different.”

  John felt where the badge used to press over his heart. The pressure hurt. Those poor children.

  There was a resounding boom which visibly shook the school windows, another which blew out the panes in a bright shower. A body came out next in the third explosion of gunfire. It catapulted through a hole, not in any slow motion but in a rude flop.

  “The police have killed the gunman!” the reported exclaimed.

  “Thank god for that, huh, Johnny?” Caroline asked. “If he’d escaped, you might have been busted by mistake.”

  “Yeah,” chuckled the trucker, “or blown to smithereens.”

  John stood up, still quaking. He laid money on the bar without finishing his beer and tiptoed out without comment.

  “…eye-on,” George mouthed around his mouth scars and the omnipresent cigarette, unable to properly say bye, John.

  As John stepped out and peered up at the bar’s sign blinking G ACY’S, he wondered when they were going to fix the burned out letter so it read GRACY’S again. He began to walk down the street, the noonday sun toasting the round bald spot in his fifty-year-old head. People passed him with no concern for the fact that there was a new demon in cruelty’s hierarchy who resembled him to an uncanny tee. No one made the sign of the cross or uttered a Latin prayer in case this grisly coincidence shoulder transfer the power of the evil eye to John Piper. Cars rumbling by on the asphalt smelled not like sulfur and brimstone but like carbon and gasoline, oil and blood.

  John’s nose twitched, startled by the last odor. It was a smell he knew well from his many jobs, before his shock at seeing innocents torn by the casual violence of the city had forced him to quit every one.

  “Weak stomach,” his co-workers had whispered. “Tsk-tsk.”

  He never could understand how they hardened themselves.

  It seemed that everything John had ever tried was something to do with helping people. But it always boiled down to the inescapable fact that people who needed help were people in trouble. John’s feelings always got the best of him no matter how hard he tried. He was too empathic. He’d wanted to ease suffering and ended up feeling too much of it himself. Did that make him weak? Was he a wimp because he cried every time he saw what happened to some kid whose mother hadn’t buckled him in right and then hadn’t stopped for a red light? He couldn’t even make it as a maintenance man in a retirement home, all those old folks somebody’s abandoned grandmother. He couldn’t even work in a kitchen at a mental hospital. All those people in torment.

  But now on the street was a reek of carnage. The type the cops, firemen and ambulance drivers saw the worst of at or about midnights on weekends. Which was where it belonged: perpetrated in the dark, meant to be hidden by some assassin, or run from by a drunk driver so he wouldn’t have to account for it as it was scraped from the pavement. It was broad daylight now with no shadows for such slaughter to steam in. It made John sick with the Lager in his stomach fighting with the marshmallow cereal he’d had for breakfast. He spun on is heels on the sidewalk trying to see where it was coming from.

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all until the children trooped around the corner past the drug store. Looking lost and frightened.

  They were a pitiful sight. John clutched his chest and yelled. Nobody else did the same. People stared at him and then quickly looked away to go about their business.

  “Don’t you see them?” John cried, trying to grab some lady’s arm. She jerked away, hitting him on the shoulder with her purse before she scurried. John pleaded. “Please, lady, call the police!”

  But no one else could see these children.

  The kids saw him. They screamed and jostled into one another, dangling gay red ribbons that dripped.

  One cried. “The Bad Man.”

  “Boogie man!” another shouted.

  Then they ran to him, eyes beseeching why? why? Earnest, pinched faces with skin that once must have smelled of milk and cookies. Some had greenish grass stains on their knees from what must have been their final recess period. They reached out doll hands to gather miniature fistfuls of his clothes. They tugged relentlessly.

  John tried to back away, to return to the direction from which he’d come. They held on and followed, sobbing wetly. The few who hadn’t directly latched onto him held onto one another so that no one was separated to get left behind.

  “Guy’s got the fidgets,” the postman observed as John stumbled by trying to shake them off.

  “It’s the delirium tremens,” said the lady who owned the gift shop, standing in her doorway. “Thinks he’s covered with spiders.”

  The kids wailed—pulling a horrid, derailed train behind him.

  “I want my momma,” a dark-haired girl whimpered, the right side of her face gone. The rosebud lips puckered and parted, the left eye streaming pink tears.

  “The bad man hurt us,” an angelic boy with soft auburn hair and long red lashes whispered gently, as if afraid he’d be harmed further if it was known he’d told. One of his arms had been blown off, and he limped behind John while grasping John’s little finger.

  They think I’m him, John realized. These are the ghosts of the kids that man-who-looked-like-me killed.

  He twirled and blurted, “I’m not him!” He tried not to look into their ghastly faces but he couldn’t help it. “The police shot the guy. He can’t hurt you anymore. But I’m not him. Please, kids, go away now!”

  John knew he had to look loony to everybody who saw him but didn’t see the collection of tiny spirits gathered around him.

  “Please, sweetie,” John said, even going so far as to touch the pale cheek of a girl in yarned pigtails who had a wound gaping across the embroidered top of her pinafore. “It wasn’t me. I’d never harm anyone.”

  Her look of profound betrayal broke his heart. They were so fragile. They’d been swept into this nightmare without warning and without any comprehension of what death was. The most they had likely experienced of it was a peck on a maiden aunt’s cheek as she lay rouged at the funeral home, or the stiff body of a pet cat that had gone to sleep in a shoe box, never to awaken.

  They stared at him as if they needed explanations, as if John would take them home where all their boo-boos would be kissed and patched. How could he tell them this wasn’t possible?

  He nimbly snapped his fingers. “I got an idea.”

  He took off down the sidewalk, lurching, gritting his teeth as his little attachments clung to his coat tails.

  ««—»»

  John had visited the city morgue many times as a cop doing reports, a fireman having to I.D. remains charred beyond recognition, a driver delivering dead who
hadn’t made it to the hospital. It was one service-oriented job he’d never considered since people in the morgue were beyond his help.

  He went through the back’s swinging doors.

  “Hi, Todd.”

  He tried not to wobble as if he was being off-balanced by a ragtag parade of juvenile corpses.

  The coroner glanced up from paperwork, his eyebrows tilting.

  “Johnny! Long time no see. What brings you here?”

  John scratched his head, a kid dangling not quite lightly from his sleeve. “Well, I heard about this guy that did that business at the school today. Everyone says he looked like me.”

  “Damn, John, we thought it was you on the TV,” Todd replied gustily. “Then his green card turned him up as some immigrant from the Ukraine. Go figure, huh?”

  John managed an uncomfortable laugh. It rose hysterically in his throat as he attempted to drown out the incessant crying. If he could just collect his thoughts for one rational QUIET second…

  “Actually I didn’t see it. I came here hoping you’d-ahem—let me see the body. I know it’s a strange request, Todd, but this twin thing is freaking me out,” John rattled.

  “I’ll bet. Come on back. We’re going to be doing the autopsy on what’s left of him pretty soon. See if he was hopped up on drugs or had a brain lesion. Anything to account for the rampage. Those poor kids.” The coroner sighed as he led John down the hall.

  The kids followed as if they were going through a shadowy forest with wolves howling on every side. What remained of their eyes was round with terror, faces flat as dinner plates webbed with porcelain cracks.

  John tried to reassure them. “It’s okay.”