'Forty-five automatic. Five-inch barrel for superior accuracy. A real special forces weapon.'
'Did you say "special forces"?' I said.
He did.
'Do you have a couple of them in stock?'
He did, a blessing on his dwarfish head.
That left two more to complete my arsenal. And I knew just what I wanted. Their barrel lengths, it turned out, were only one inch and seven-eighths.
'Uncle Mike's Boot, they're called,' said the dwarf. 'Fits right into an ankle holster, just like you said you wanted.'
'And do you have such holsters readily available?' I asked.
'I can get them by the time the legal paperwork goes through on this merchandise.'
'Do the holsters come in black?' I asked.
'I can check. Do you want holsters for the rest?'
'Yes, I do. And make sure there's one left-side holster for my lefty friend Perry.'
The truth was that, among my other unusual traits, I was ambidexterous. And the cinematic image of a vengeful figure pulling out pistols with both hands at once suddenly flickered brightly in my brain.
'Holsters are important for safety reasons,' squeaked a voice from the shadows of the floor. 'I've also got the kind that clip onto your belt.'
'That's exactly what I was thinking,' I said as I laid my credit card down on the counter and began filling out the registration forms. 'By the way, is there possibly a place in the nearby area where I could get some instruction in the proper use of firearms?'
It so happened there was. So my schedule was set. I could pick the guns up on Friday and then spend some time working on my weapons technique. By Monday morning I would be ready.
As I was filling out the last of the registration forms I happened to glance at another section of the counter where a shining array of outdoor knives was laid out. One in particular caught my eye.
'Thirteen-inch Buck Skinner Hunting Knife,' the dwarf informed me.
'That is excellent,' I gasped, trying my hardest not to weep with gratitude at the magnificence of this implement.
Farewell to the humble charms of wabi, the morose pleasures of sabi. Greetings to the potent joy of cold-forged steel... to the harsh intoxications of temperature-resistant polymer components... and a special hello to pure ballistic stopping power.
'Your credit card is really taking a pounding today,' said the bearded little man, who had returned to his previous height.
'Oh, that's all right,' I said, picking up my bag containing my leather-sheathed Buck Skinner Hunting Knife. I had already made my last payment to those bloodsuckers who had issued me that particular piece of plastic, I thought as I stepped out of the gun shop and into the sunshine of a brilliant October afternoon. But I had a busy day ahead, and no time to waste.
10
I skipped lunch and went directly to the only halfway decent men's clothiers with a franchise still located downtown. There was a metal plaque flanking the entrance to the store which told me that the clothes company had been founded the same year that young Mary Shelley published the first edition of her novel Frankenstein (1818). What a glad coincidence that I happened to be looking for an outfit in the gothic style.
I purchased one light and loose-fitting raincoat (color: black), one mock turtleneck that was made mostly of Italian Merino wool (color: black), one pair of black denim pants that fit nicely over a pair of black leather boots and provided plenty of room to secrete those boot guns named for good old Uncle Mike. (And those holsters better be black, I thought.) I was wearing my new clothes when I walked out of the store, having abandoned my old ones in the dressing room. I asked to keep the box for the boots, since I would need it when I proceeded directly to my bank in order to empty my savings account.
'May I ask why you've decided to close your account with us?' asked the gray-suited man to whom the teller had sent me. He was sitting behind a desk in a corner of the great vaulted lobby of the bank.
'Because I despise you,' I replied, looking at him straight in the eye from behind amber-tinted eyeglasses.
'I beg your pardon?'
'I think you heard me. This is a bank. I'd rather carry my money around in my crotch than have it serve the purposes of this institution for another minute.'
The banker, somewhat petulantly, retrieved three forms from the top drawer of his desk and asked me to fill them out. Two of the forms he kept. The third he told me to take to the teller who had sent me to him. 'This is a waiver. You understand that the bank can't be held responsible for cash withdrawals once you've taken possession of your funds. Even while you're still on the bank's premises, our security guards will not be available for your protection.' As I rose to go back to the teller's window and have all my money loaded into the shoe box I had brought with me, the gray-suited man added, 'We sincerely have enjoyed serving you and hope to do so again in the future.' It occurred to me that all civilization was structured so that such people could make snide remarks like that and get away with it. They had been getting away with it for thousands of years and would continue to get away with it until the end of time.
After cashing out at the bank, I took the shoe box back to my apartment and wrapped it securely with packing tape. Then with a felt-tip pen I wrote across the top: 'For Lillian Hayes. Thank you.' I signed my name underneath these words, along with the day's date. Then I placed the box on my desk between my computing machine and printer.
Yes: I did own such a machine, despite the maledictions I routinely heaped upon them. (I told Richard I had worked on my new-product idea at home, and that was the truth. I only lied about having any part of it in hand-written form.)
No: I wasn't going to take an ax or a baseball bat to it.
Yes: I did plan to take an ax or a baseball bat to it when the time came.
But until then I still had use for it. Before I did what I was going to do, I needed to make a statement, because I had no intention of being around for questioning when the smoke cleared. And there were definite issues that needed to be addressed.
First: The question of insanity. This would certainly be a discourse that would eat up quite a few pages. However ludicrous it now sounds to me, at the time I was quite concerned that in the aftermath of things I would not be dismissed as just another kook. A loner who took pictures of ruined places in his spare time. A burned-out weirdo. A guy who couldn't take the pressure and who finally 'snapped' like so many others before him. Even worse—to be perceived as a psychological casualty of the times, as if there were something special about any period, any place in which a particular body chanced to find itself in motion. I must have been crazy to have thought I could talk my way out of that one!
Second: The issue of evil. For many years, as I ran my mind's eye over the tiny print of the innumerable pages of history... or contemplated some great (or not so great) atrocity reported by the nightly news, I always said to myself: 'Better to be the one who is executed than the one who performs the execution.' I knew that I would have to come up with some fancy reasoning to maneuver myself from that position of armchair rectitude to a pile of bullet-shredded bodies, even if the last one on the heap was my own. Many, many words would have to be processed and many pages printed out to explicate such a dramatic moral turnaround. Or so it seemed to me as I walked the floor of my apartment, tapping out a rhythm on my black-denim-clad leg with the blade of my Buck Skinner Hunting Knife.
Third (and last): The problem of polemics. There was no way in the world that I wanted to be caught in a state of naked self-justification for what would undoubtedly be seen as an act of egregious overkill. After all, what crimes had been committed by The Seven to deserve such a judgment, and who was I to carry out that judgment with such severity... and with such style? Well, like it or not, there are no rules in these matters—only impulses, the exercise of power, and a convenient time and place (motive, means, and opportunity in the squinty eyes of the Law).
Question: Were there no other options that might have been
less violently explored?
Answer: None that presented themselves to my obsessive-compulsive brain.
Question: Couldn't I have sought professional aid to control my mania?
Answer: I had already swallowed a candy store of medications without appreciable results (except a constant cramp in my gut). And I had undergone a kaleidoscope of therapies which were not any more effective than the meds, although at least they didn't affect my digestive system.
Question (reprise): Wasn't there some other course of action I might have pursued?
Answer: If there had been, I would have; since I didn't, there wasn't.
So those were the matters that occupied my mind, along with a lot of other nonsense, as I made my final outing of the day to an office supply store. I would certainly need to buy plenty of paper and some extra cartridges of toner in order to bring forth an adequate declaration, an ultimate statement, of all the facts... my letter of resignation from the human race.
At the check-out counter my credit card finally breathed its last, and when I left the store I tossed it in the nearest trash container. Then it occurred to me that I wouldn't be needing any of the other documents I had collected in my wallet over the years, and so I tossed all of that junk away too, along with the wallet itself—that battered old pal of my back pocket. Freed of these encumbrances of official identity, I practically soared like a huge black crow through the October twilight back to my apartment.
Nonetheless, my mind was still spinning about, fretting over the precise form and phrasing of my Ultimate Statement. It seemed to me that there remained some issue that I had yet to face, some vague but fundamental question I had not regarded, some abysmal matter that I still could not approach, that possibly no human brain had ever approached.
Of course the simple answer to everything I was about to do was that I felt myself trapped in a maze of pain, and the only course of action that presented itself to my mortal faculties was to shoot my way out. I could always fall back on that as my closing line.
However, all of this mental exercise came to a skidding halt when I realized that, due to my state of distraction, I had left my goods back at the office supply store... and it was almost closing time. Spinning around on the sidewalk, I began racing back toward my point of purchase. But something happened that kept me from ever reaching that destination.
When it happened: I couldn't say.
Where it happened: I couldn't say.
What it was: That I could say.
It was the loudest sound I had ever heard in my life.
Part II
1
There was only darkness. It flowed like a black river that had no bottom. And it was unconfined by any shores, infinite and turbulent and moving without direction, without any source or destination. There was only darkness flowing in darkness.
Then something felt itself struggling in this black and bottomless and infinite river, something unformed and embryonic swirling within the darkness. It had no eyes, just as the darkness had none. It had no thoughts and no sensations, only the darkness flowing through it and around it in a blind chaos of thrashing agitation. It was something living, something restless and alive in the darkness that flowed relentlessly like a black river in a black world. Yet even without eyes or thoughts or sensations it moved toward the impossible surface of the darkness... and broke through.
I had always been afraid of the dark. Now it was all around me, a vicious and sinister presence without shape or name. And it was also inside me, so that I could not escape it by any means of flight and was paralyzed with fear. But slowly it began to withdraw—that nameless darkness, that vicious and sinister presence which is encountered only in the worst nightmares—hiding itself away once again and allowing forms to appear as if in a dull moonlight, letting in those thoughts and sensations required for the creation of a self. And as if I had been dreaming, it seemed that I had been gone forever. And as if I had been dreaming, it seemed I had been gone for no time at all.
It was night, and I was in my apartment above Lillian's diner. (How had I gotten there? Where was I before the darkness blinded my mind?) One certainty: I did not inhabit the space around me in the same way I had before. I could move throughout the rooms of my apartment, yet I did not use or need to use a human form to do so. (How could this be happening? What had been done with my body?) By force of will alone I found myself rising from the floor and floating like a cobweb in a corner of the ceiling. I could see the moonlight beaming through the old curtains of the window by my desk.
Another mystery: I could now see beyond the curtains and through the window into a dizzying maze of rooms and hallways and streets and alleys, my mind spinning in a thousand directions until I was forced to make it stop. Following this exercise, I opened my ears—just for a moment—to an incoherent choir of voices, cutting them off before I became lost in their senseless babble.
There were so many frightening things, so many questions and conundrums during this dream-like phase of an experience that I knew was no dream at all. But any answers were evasive and fled into opaque regions where my mind could not pursue them. Every time I tried to penetrate into these areas I found myself trapped in a dead-end thick with shadows, what I came to think of as 'dark spots' where that black river flowed bubbling and viscous. These dark spots were a source of both fear and frustration for me. They suggested the presence of an unknown player in a game I was only beginning to learn.
I was still my same obsessive-compulsive self—that was a further certainty—and I did not like the feeling that schemes and strategies were being carried out around me... that secret meetings had taken place behind my back... that I had been condemned for something I did not do... that I had been manipulated and humiliated... that my competence had been questioned by buffoons, my messages ignored by morons... that I had been railroaded into the status of a non-person in an organization I had served so long and so well... and ultimately dismissed from even that lick-spittle job.
Work not done! Work not done!
Their faces now crowded everything else from my thoughts. It was my final wish, my very special plan, to see those faces screaming and bloody and finally laid lifeless at my feet—how well I recalled all of that. But the Monday-morning ballistic blowout had been cancelled. In my present state I couldn't even hold a piece of paper. (Paper, paper—why did this word echo in my mind for a moment, only to fade and die in the grip of those dark spots?) How then could I wield a head-shattering USP Tactical or a kneecapping Glock 17? I couldn't even see my own face as I hovered before my bathroom mirror. I would never be able to present that face as the last thing those swine would ever see on the day of their slaughter.
And then it happened. The machinery of my murderous rage was grinding its gears, burning its oil into toxic vapors, shooting out sparks right and left, shooting and shooting... until the mirror before me began to glow with an eerie incandescence. There it was, at the center of that infernal aura. There was my face, radiant with obsessive hate. There were my eyes, pitching daggers from behind amber-tinted lenses. There I stood in the full blackness of my form. And in my left hand was my Buck Skinner Hunting Knife. I raised it up and pressed the side of that blade lightly against my cheek, nearly swooning with a black joy.
After this first manifestation I let myself fade back into the shadows. I now had the ability to control the substance of myself. I would later learn to control the powers of my sight and my hearing. And there were other things, forces and faculties unheard of and marvelous, that I would soon discover.
My work would not be left undone. My work was only beginning.
2
Two homicide detectives—one black, one white, both gray—got off the elevator at an old downtown office building and entered the reception area of a company that was the building's oldest and most prosperous lessee. They noted the soft lighting and expensive decor (with grand piano) but did not seem intimidated in the least. Both of them had visited the old building many
times over the years.
As Detective White said to Detective Black in the elevator, 'There used to be a soda fountain on the ground floor of this place. Best hot-fudge sundaes I ever had in my life. My parents used to take me there when we lived in the city.'
'Long time ago,' commented Detective Black.
'Yup,' said Detective White with only the vaguest hint of sentimental reflection in his voice.
From the reception area they were shuttled up to the twentieth (twenty-first?) floor, where they were greeted by another receptionist slash administrative assistant who was awaiting their arrival. Marsha Linstrom, according to the brass name-plate on her desk, ushered the homicide detectives into the office of the company's CEO, who had no personal knowledge that could aid them in this police matter but who gave them carte blanche to move about the company offices with the guidance of a woman that Marsha called up from Human Resources. As they began descending the stairway that shot like a spine through the ten floors of the company'soffice space, Marsha Linstrom—a factotum of superior efficiency—was already on the phone instructing someone to find out the 'where and when' of the funeral and to order the customary arrangement of flowers which the company always sent on the occasion of an employee's demise.
Down in HR, the homicide detectives asked to see the company's file on the deceased, as well as the files of persons who worked closely with the deceased, along with the files of any employees who had recently left the company 'not in good standing'. Earlier that day the homicide detectives, to their satisfaction, had determined the friends and family members of the deceased to be poor suspects. An investigation at the victim's workplace was simply the next step in a fairly mechanical process. The two men each took notes based on the information provided by the employee files they examined.
'Why don't we work this Frank Dominio guy first. Talk to his supervisor,' said Detective Black.
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