Savage Beasts

by John F. D. Taff

  All stories contained in this collection remain the copyright © of their respective authors. All bands, band names, performers and/or their songs mentioned by authors as inspiration are the copyright of the individual artists, songwriters and/or performers. References to musical work does not imply performer endorsement of author fiction. Additional artist credit and copyright information is located in the Copyright Declarations section.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This collection is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imaginations, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SAVAGE BEASTS

  ISBN 978-1-940658-56-8

  First Grey Matter Press Electronic Edition

  August 2015

  Anthology Copyright © Grey Matter Press

  Design Copyright © Grey Matter Press

  All rights reserved.

  Grey Matter Press

  greymatterpress.com

  Grey Matter Press on Facebook

  facebook.com/greymatterpress

  Grey Matter Press on Twitter

  twitter.com/greymatterpress

  For Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and all the other members of the 27 Club. You are missed. Your inspiration is eternal.

  TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BEAST

  Edward Morris

  GOING HOME

  Karen Runge

  THAT SONG YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD

  John F.D. Taff

  PESTILENCE BY BEEMAHR

  Shawn Macomber

  KILLING NOISE

  Konstantine Paradias

  WHEN DEATH WALKS THE FIELD OF BATTLE

  J. C. Michael

  AN AMERICAN GHOST IN ZURICH

  Daniel Braum

  POOR MAL

  Maxwell Price

  EIDOLON

  E. Michael Lewis

  CRAWLING BACK TO YOU

  Paul Michael Anderson

  DIE MUSIK DES TEUFELS

  T. Fox Dunham

  About the Authors

  Copyright Declarations

  More from Grey Matter Press

  On the first afternoon I trained at my new security gig, Eli, the senior officer on-site, explained the principle of it.

  “Batman don’t work here no more. We are a presence. We call stuff in. We do not pre-emptively do anything except de-escalate. What’s that in your pocket?”

  Ha. My new joke, my new “permanent post”—like there really was such a thing at our company, or ever could be—at the North Portland office of the Satan County Department of Human Misery, I mean Services, way out on MLK and Lombard.

  “Nothing,” I replied. His rheumy, off-kilter eyes became a lot less rheumy and off-kilter all of a sudden, and the flat pegs of his teeth bared under his upper lip in a snarl I was beginning to seriously dislike. I quickly switched tacks. “It’s three. I gotta go do the do.”

  “Do so,” Eli replied wearily through his pencil-line mustache, and headed back out for the parking lot to redirect the open sewer of road rage that funneled through it. Eli had to call all that in. I didn’t envy him. I rarely did. However, I found out every detail of every issue not from him, but from listening and piecing the issue together. Eli might be known to yell, “Fire!” if he spontaneously combusted, but only on the off chance that he misplaced the extinguisher. And he’d been working that site for twelve years. He never misplaced anything.

  Capernaum Dining Hall, Eli’s side of the house, was awash with a ferocious waft of fried fish. The old 46” Sony TV, with duct-tape on every switch and instruction cards on every kludged knob, blared Pat Robertson at arena volume loud enough to ring the big metal racks of day-old bread and donated periodicals which stood against the back wall.

  Apart from the TV, the post-lunch silence was oddly funerary on that side of the building, up the ramp from the little desk where they had me directing traffic and pretending to look busy in front of the huddled masses of aging and disabled yearning for common sense from their government. That government shoved its employees between that common sense and the viral replication of offices just like this one. Even we guards, nominally independent contractors, weren’t immune, since we, too, were shoved into the face of trouble with no statutory authority to do anything but stand around and de-escalate the problem by eating shit from every side of it.

  It felt like I’d worked in every DHS office in the state that summer, with no idea what my schedule was going to be from one week to the next, or if they’d even see fit to throw me a bone that week at all. Up and down the chain, the story was the same. I went back to the break room, reached in my pocket and put the can of police-grade oleoresin capsicum spray I wasn’t supposed to have back into my satchel to take home.

  People were so nosey at these county offices. I supposed that came with the gig. But I decided I didn’t want to be sore at Eli about it. He was just an idiot like me and everyone else, just a man, with his own ticks and grimaces. He was trying. We all were.

  Just then, one of the volunteers—I was sure his name was Sly—walked over and sat down at the old cherrywood piano on the Capernaum side while I ruminated at the bottom of the ramp. His voice pulled me up short when the keys started doing the walking and the music socked us all in the face like a tsunami of light, a haunting number that was either original or a cut-up of too many other songs to name.

  "I seen some things…

  Oh, Willie seen some things…"

  I was listening with half an ear, putting the period on the end of an incident report.

  "I…RRR…HAAAAH… I feel my blues,"

  Sly’s voice changed just then, losing its rasp, thudding down to a washtub-bass baritone register. I was impressed.

  "Just because I gotta understand

  The thing that eat me alive

  Each night, grind me through its guts to

  Dust, and the priest make a cross

  On your forehead in the Church

  Of Hard Knocks…"

  “I’m still learning everyone’s names,” I said in Sly’s ear when that haunting song was done. “I…I thought they said they called you Sly…not…Willie?”

  The applause was dying down. “They do.” Sly shrugged eloquently. “Who said they don’t?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Ain’t nothin’,” Sly answered affably. Then the building PA cut out, every speaker in every room awash in a shearing, feral roar of feedback that sounded like something nailed down and in torment. The lights began to flicker, and that damn noise in the wall that I didn’t understand started up again.

  “Shit. Second time today, and they were just here.” I scooted outside to call Facilities Management again, this time in a spot where I could get decent reception for the entire call. I’d come to find whatever was going off-line in the walls had a nasty tendency to knock stuff off shelves in straight rows up and down the length of the building.

  Like the can of lye Travis the dish-dog took in both eyes in the kitchen, just before a long ordeal with the Board of Workers’ Compensation. Needless to say, if the checks ever came, he’d have to trust his caseworker as to their amount.


  Something in the pipes, maybe. I didn’t know enough about the building to hazard a guess, or do anything else but document each such hair-raising incident. All the caseworkers thought we were having little earthquakes, but each time the disturbance would stop as soon as…

  As soon as it started. As soon as it started, Sly would start to play the piano, and then it would…

  “Stop,” I told myself.

  No one has as many tools when they’re tired. Sitting that post was so goddamn boring. I made up stories about the place after I’d read through all that week’s newspapers and they didn’t have any new Smithsonians or National Geographics up in the dining hall.

  But my mind wouldn’t come back from the edge of the cliff from which it had just bungee-jumped. There were things swimming out past that edge, suppositions that looked insanely sane, maddeningly insoluble, yet not without a certain kind of sense to them.

  An old lady walked past me as I dialed, shaking her head. “Child, you need to get to bed, tonight,” she informed me. I nodded. The understanding I’d just had was gone. “You know that’s right.”

  Something told me she’d been up a lot longer than me. Like since about 1979. When I came back in, Sly was still merrily playing the piano. It was a Cab Calloway song this time, “The Reefer Man.” I knew every word, but held my tongue. Eli would bark.

  * * *

  Sly would be hard to get to know, I assumed at first, but I was dead wrong. He was merely a man of few words. He was homeless, or semi-homeless, and always left Capernaum just before the manager did, at five, after taking a nap and the rest of what he did for us. What he gave to me.

  The first time we spoke, I asked him why he worked like someone had a gun pointed at him. The question was meant as a joke to break the ice, but it fell flat. Sly looked at me funny, out of those Magic 8-Ball eyes, like he wanted to laugh but couldn’t.

  “I don’t come here to do no work,” he said in that cormorant croak that sang like Satchmo and coughed over the keys when the floor was mopped and it wasn’t four o’clock any more but it was nowhere near five. ”I come here to give back. Some of us got a lot to, Security. And some of us takes a lot on. You’ll learn. Work here long enough. None of ‘em do, none of you do.”

  He flapped one spatulate-fingered, heavily callused hand, smiling sadly. “But hang out here long enough,” our piano man admonished after a bluesy pause pregnant with an even creepier feeling that was starting to make the base of my skull feel very cold, “come in the morning, do the night shift, you gonna meet Willie. And when you meet Willie, you got to make friends with him right away.”

  Sly chuckled to himself, cold and dry as wind through corn shocks on Halloween. “Willie make or break you, here. Don’t matter if the boss like you, or Eli. Well, Eli don’t like nobody. Mr. Leonard, the property manager, not even him either. For reel-to-real.”

  “Okay.” He’d broken the ice. I chuckled. “I feel you. Nobody’s opinion matters here but Willie’s. Duly noted. Thanks for the warning. Just one question.”

  Sly turned back to the keys, cutting me off in mid-sentence. “You bring him somethin’, Security. You make friends with that old hustler, you ain’t got nothin’ else to worry about. You don’t—”

  “Fair enough,” I acquiesced. “Soooo, who the hell is this Willie? Have I met him yet? Is he that guy that always nods out sitting in the ashtray?”

  In no answer at all, one hand came out, palm up, in a gesture I knew from out east as the junkie shrug. But Sly looked well-fed, well-rested, free from the clammy gray film of filth that clings to the aura of every opiate addict. He looked alive.

  Over at his desk, Eli was still writing some incident report of his own, paying no attention to us whatsoever. He’d heard it all before. There’d been many of our guards working my side of the house. At twenty hours a week, they never stayed. But for twenty hours a week, I couldn’t leave. I sighed and went back to my desk.

  Sly was already playing again, “Roun’ Midnight” with the proverbial pedal to the floor. I gave up, supposing I’d meet this Willie character soon enough and judge for myself.

  Back at my post, sitting perpendicular to the glass reception booth and watching the front door, I remembered something else I was going to ask Eli, then promptly forgot it on my way back up the ramp.

  I stopped where I was. The gray carpet made a static shock spark through the fingers of my right hand when they touched the rail. At my hip, my phone rang.

  My phone, that is. The work phone that would only call walkie-talkie numbers was silent in my pocket. The number calling me wouldn’t come up on my phone. I shrugged, hit GO and spoke, still walking up the ramp.

  “Hello?”

  RRHHHHAAAAAAAHHHH.

  “…Delta-2 DHS Office, right? I’m usin’ an old phone book here, this is Patsy Byrd down’t the Main Office, we...”

  RRRHHHHAH.

  I stood still.

  RHAAAAAAAH.

  Headed up the ramp and to the left.

  RHAAAAH shot up to a gut-wrenching scream, a veritable tornado of interference, when I moved back toward the old cherrywood piano.

  I came back down the ramp. The scream cycled back down in turn, into, “Oh, well, he probably hung up. I knew it wasn’t—“

  “Patsy,” I said quietly. “No, it’s me. This building’s terrible for reception. What’s on your mind?”

  Part of me really was listening, but a gigantic lightbulb had just gone on over my head, bathing me in a long, fine Blinding Flash of the Obvious.

  I looked at the tiny bargain-basement phone in my dumb left hand with new respect, remembering a game my big sister and I used to play when we were hunting for Easter eggs, or trying to find where the folks hid the Christmas presents.

  That game was called Hot and Cold. I decided to test a hypothesis that swam up out of the swamp of my own head like an improbable alligator grown to a strange and terrible age, all unannounced, savage and perfectly formed.

  “I was wondering what your Sunday looked like,” Patsy, the swing-shift supervisor, asked me, half a world away. “Yeah, that area is terrible for phones,” she giggled. “I hear they have ghosts.”

  EEEHAAAAAH RRRRHHAAAAAAH HAAAAAAH.

  I stood over the piano as the static between signal and noise, sender and receiver, white keys and black, swelled again.

  Superstitiously touching middle C for good luck, my finger carpet-shocked once more. My eyebrows and nose hairs did something alarming for a hot second, and my ears began ringing. In my hand, the phone howled like one of Dante Alighieri’s clients.

  I hoofed it back into the lobby—Hot and Cold Hypothesis validated—and apologized my way into turning down Sunday on-call hours at another site.

  “Religious observance.”

  The phone cut out again. RRRR RHAAAAAHHH was all it said.

  * * *

  There was no night shift scheduled at this site on Sunday, but my “religious observance” would have a guest list of one, possibly two, and take place right in Capernaum.

  I knew I was just a superstitious kid in a grownup skin. But if I took Sly’s meaning correctly, I’d be very interested to meet this Willie, even ask him some questions, if such a thing were possible. I thought about that for a long while. My crew-cut began to stand at attention.

  I wanted to kick off my Docs, and walk instead in Dante’s sandals down that shadowed ramp where the right road was wholly lost and gone. I wanted to sing the ugliness I saw there every day to sleep for as long as humanly possible, play down the whips and scorns of every level of the welfare state, cleanse the stuffed building of its perilous stuff that weighed upon the heart, light up every corner with song, and make them laugh and sing along.

  I wanted to teach them to climb up backward out of Hell for themselves, reclaim the slope, and escape to the upper air. I wanted to set all the prisoners free; the quick and the dead, the aged and the infirm, the addicted and the insane. I wanted to make myself unemployed by the wretched ref
use of this teeming asphalt shore.

  I wanted Willie to tell me his story, to pour out his heart to me in that fearless, nothing-left-to-lose way so many of the clients did, to tell me who he was and what he had done in life, to answer me without fear of dishonor from the crackling flames of that block-long Inferno that no one ever really left.

  I betrayed that desire for a while, anyway. But sometimes, the real work can’t wait. For the moment, I decided to play along.

  * * *

  I brought Willie a black cat bone from the grave of my poor departed yard kitty who never really had a name. I brought Willie a white candle I lit in Capernaum that Sunday afternoon with the rainy gray light falling long and cool through some of the windows, a bag of sweet orange gumdrops I placed in a bowl, a stick of incense, and the fervent prayer to never, ever break anything again on my shift that could possibly come out of my check.

  And would you believe nothing happened? I was permitted to finish. I was permitted to wash my hands and leave. The light on the main floor seemed more relaxed and incandescent, almost mellow. The doors didn’t bark. The banging was stilled in the walls. My prayer appeared to be unanimous. I had to hope it really was.

  I had to hope against hope that I’d broken up the logjam and that, as Bullwinkle the moose used to say on some beloved old cartoons of my Mom’s, the spirits were about to speak.

  * * *

  At the end of my next actual shift the following evening, which was a Monday, I was flying the plane all by myself, as far as uniformed guards were concerned. Shae and Kathy, two of the caseworkers, were soon departing. The only person over in Capernaum was Sly, who’d stayed late to put a coat of wax on the floor, a coat which he was currently cussing out in-process with some of the richest superlatives I'd ever heard in my life.

  Around 7:00 p.m., I looked up. Shae and Kathy were back from break. “The way that front door was creakin’,” Shae bellowed for all to hear, “I swear to god, Kathy, it was like someone was bangin’ to get out. I’m never stayin’ here late again.”