Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1

by Vernon, Steve

  I looked back at Robert Bruce.

  "You can't stay here," I said. "You don't belong."

  I realized the hypocrisy of what I was saying. A homeless ex-priest mass murderer telling someone they don't belong is about as fucked up as it gets, but I couldn't let him stay. I couldn't take the risk of having any more deaths.

  The Shambles was all I had left.

  "I'm taking you home," I said.

  There's no place like home. Dorothy said it in The Wizard of Oz, and she wound up a dried up old maid withering to death in the heart of a Kansas cornfield, pleasuring herself with the occasional ripe cob. They don't show you that in the sequel, do they?

  Thomas Wolfe said you couldn't go home again. He felt so strongly about that sentiment that he went and named a whole book after it.

  I was going to find out.

  The house looked dingier in the daylight. It had a lean to it, like it was falling into its own shadow. I felt it calling me like a lonely coastal foghorn.

  "I don't remember it looking this bad," I said.

  "We don't have to go in," Robert Bruce said. He wanted to be anywhere else but here.

  "We're here now." I took his hand. "We might as well go on inside."

  We took another step, and every window blind closed simultaneously, as if something in the house didn't want to see us coming.

  "Stop fucking around," I warned him. "We're going inside."

  He looked up at me in surprise.

  "I'm onto you," I said.

  The front door was locked, so we went around back. I noticed that his bedroom window was boarded over, but the back door looked easy enough. I jimmied the latch with my jackknife.

  Murder. Breaking and entering. I wondered if I was teaching the boy any bad habits.

  I swung the door open.

  Robert Bruce's mother was standing in the doorway.

  She had a pretty blue pale face, the color of snow on lonely marble tombstones.

  I grabbed hold of my crucifix under my shirt. It hadn't helped me before, but at least it was something good to hang onto.

  "Hi there," she said, holding a plateful of something out at me. "I've been busy baking cookies. I like cookies, don't you? Robert Bruce loves cookies. These are triple chocolate surprise. The secret is in using the best chocolate chips."

  I felt a bit like the Big Bad Wolf, trying to put the moves on Red Riding Hood's grandmother. I looked down at the plate. There were cookies, chocolate chip. The cookies reeked of dog shit. I looked closer. They were made of the stuff. One of the chips winked at me and blew me a kiss. Both kiss and wink made fat wet puckering sounds. The whole plate of cookies started singing "Nearer My God to Thee."

  I tasted last night's soup coming up in the back of my mouth, and I barely held it down. I grinned and gritted my teeth.

  "No thanks, Betty Crocker," I said. "I'm on the Atkins. Low carbs, no fiber."

  "No shit," Robert Bruce's mother said.

  I didn't like the way she said it, like somebody was pulling her strings and making like Edgar Bergen. She had a flatness to her, like she'd been painted on thin air.

  "Damn right," I said.

  I was scared shitless. This woman was stone-cold, toe-tagged dead, and I knew it. And here she was standing in the doorway offering me dog shit cookies.

  "Oh my," she said, as one of the straps on her apron snapped loose. "I seem to be coming undone."

  Her breasts swelled up like something out of a bad porno cartoon. Her apron fell off, and the buttons of her blouse somehow undid themselves. I know that's not what buttons usually do, but these ones did. I stood there, waiting for the canned porn music to erupt. None of this was real. It was a bad fairy tale with a comic book set-up.

  I poked her with my finger, feeling her skin moving like wet plastic wrap, somehow real and not real.

  "Oh you can do better than that," she said.

  The rest of her clothes fell off, like a pair of Jerry Lewis trousers. There were shadows and strange shapes where her breasts and pubis ought to have been, as if whoever had made her hadn't known what a real woman looked like.

  "Stop that," I said to Robert Bruce.

  He looked up at me, big innocent eyes, like one of those black velvet puppy pictures.

  "You killed her, didn't you?" I asked. "You killed them both."

  "He wouldn't stop hurting me. Every night. He'd come into my bed and make me do things."

  "So why'd you kill your mother?"

  "She wouldn't stop him."

  Damn.

  I should have known better.

  Nobody in this world was truly innocent.

  I looked back at the shape of his mother, twisting and gyrating in a sort of mid-air cartoon lap dance. He couldn't even get that right.

  "I told you to stop that. I know she isn't real."

  Her skin began opening up. I could see cuts erupting on her flesh, as if someone had hacked at her with a carving knife. The wounds grinned and laughed and spat pus at me.

  "Stop that," I yelled.

  She faded away, a bit at a time, like a sidewalk chalk painting fading in the rain.

  Robert Bruce looked down at his shoes. I could see he'd wet himself.

  I heard the Woody Woodpecker laugh, and looked up just in time to see Markie rising up from somewhere under the floorboards. There were cockroaches crawling over his face. He swooped down toward me, an avenging angel in full flight.

  I swung out fast and hard with a good right hook, catching Robert Bruce squarely under the chin. His teeth clicked together hard and then he crumpled like a child's dropped rag doll.

  Markie vanished, quicker than the mother-doll had.

  The house held its breath and everything grew still.

  I carried Robert Bruce in my arms, like I was carrying him out of a burning tenement.

  When I looked back, the house stood in abandoned darkness. The windows were boarded up, and there was a condemned sign nailed to the front door. I hadn't seen any of that before, because he hadn't let me.

  "Are you lost?" a voice asked to the left of me.

  I looked around. There was an old man standing by the streetlight. I tried to turn away, tried to hide Robert Bruce.

  The old man didn't even seem to notice him.

  "That house over there," I said, feeling like Jimmy Stewart searching for Zuzu's petals. "Who lives there?"

  "Why no one," he said. "There hasn't been anyone who lived there for a couple of years. It was in all the papers. A young boy killed his family. He smothered his dad with a plastic shopping bag, and then hacked his mother up with a kitchen knife. He killed them both while they were sleeping."

  "This boy?" I nodded down at Robert Bruce.

  The old man squinted as if he were searching for some form of vision.

  "What boy?" He clearly couldn't see Robert Bruce.

  I did a quick double check, making certain the old man wasn't carrying a white cane, or that his seeing-eye dog wasn't irrigating a nearby weeping willow with a sprinkle of warm lemonade.

  No sunglasses, either.

  Fuck.

  Thomas Wolfe was dead right.

  CHAPTER 9

  * Shambles, Shambles, all fall down *

  "He isn't real," I said.

  Briarchild stared at Robert Bruce.

  "He looks real enough to me."

  "That's the point," I explained. "We can see him the same way we can see each other. We're a part of the same world."

  Briarchild was confused.

  "So how come you're talking another language?" Briarchild asked.

  "How's that?"

  "I don't get what you're saying," Briarchild explained. "You're talking in Turkish and I'm listening East Bronx."

  "Look." I tried doing my best to explain. "Supposing you sit down on a park bench and enjoy the sunshine for a while. Who sees you?"

  Briarchild shrugged. "You mean aside from the park police?"

  "That's right," I said. "They see us, because they're lo
oking for us. We see each other because we know we're here. The rest of the world just looks past us. They know if they make eye contact we're going to hit them up for a hand-out or just make them feel uncomfortable about their own comfort."

  "That almost makes sense."

  "Right. Robert Bruce came here because we're the same as him. We're killers, and we're the ignored. He was ignored and he killed."

  "Yeah, but you said he's dead."

  "He is dead. But enough of him is left over to come and seek us out."

  "So, he's a ghost?"

  "Sort of. He's a memory. He believes he's real. He believes hard enough to keep breathing. And because he believes that hard, Markie sticks around too."

  "It's hard to lose a father. Even if the father has fucked you up."

  "You're damned right," I said.

  "So is he dead?"

  Briarchild wasn't getting it. I wasn't sure I did either.

  "He is and he isn't. He's what's left over. It's kind of like a memory remembering itself, like an echo of an echo."

  "Come again?" Briarchild asked.

  "Exactly."

  "I still don't think I understand."

  "Do you trust me?"

  Briarchild just looked at me, like I'd asked a stupid question.

  "Gather everybody up," I said. "It's going to be a long night, and I want to make sure everyone is on the same page."

  Briarchild went off to talk to the others.

  I looked up toward the ceiling. The meager sunlight that slanted down through the gun slit windows of The Shambles offered a small bit of illumination.

  "Are you up there old man?" I asked. "Are you watching down on me, even now?"

  I smiled. God or whoever else might have been up there might have been accidentally listening, but they gave no sign.

  Fuck it.

  I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I had faith.

  "Then watch this," I whispered.

  It can be a long night when you're waiting for the world to end.

  We knelt on the concrete floor of The Shambles, forming a rough circle with Robert Bruce lying asleep in the middle of it, tucked in a fresh white sheet and fat feather pillow and a stolen mattress and a pair of SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas.

  We all held hands. None of them seemed the least bit nervous or embarrassed. We had nothing to lose.

  I prayed out loud.

  "St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in our day of battle; protect us against the deceit and wickedness of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray."

  It was a warrior's prayer, written for a battlefield.

  I figured we were going to need it.

  "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, guess who?"

  Markie eeled out from beneath Robert Bruce's pajama bottoms, like a runaway smoke signal, a long, winding strand that linked the two of them. The strand alternated between an amalgamation of rope and chain and snake and a long, twisted phallus.

  "Hold fast," I yelled. "Hang on tight. Ignore the bastard."

  I had a theory, a plan, and a whole lot of faith.

  Markie swooped in fast and low and took out two of us, tearing through each of them like a heat seeking multi-auger.

  "Hang onto them!" I shouted. "Nobody break the line."

  "He's killing us!" Briarchild hollered.

  "Ignore him," I shouted. "He isn't there. He's just something the kid made up."

  "Dad," Robert Bruce said.

  "Don't pay any attention to him," I shouted at Robert Bruce. "He isn't real. You made him up. He can't hurt us if you just forget about him."

  It was beautiful.

  We snubbed him, all of us. We fucked him up the ass with our utter and complete ignorance. He howled around us impotently. It would have worked, but Robert Bruce refused to stop believing.

  "Dad!" Robert Bruce called out.

  "He's not your father. He's lost that right long before you ever killed him. Let him go."

  But Robert Bruce wasn't listening to me. He was watching his father and trying to hang on.

  "Dad," the boy shouted. "Stay with me."

  It shouldn't have made sense. How could the boy love someone who'd used him so badly?

  "Dad," Robert Bruce shouted. "I love you."

  And because a boy believed, Markie became that much stronger. He gutted us, one by one. Tearing the heart out of this bum, and the head off of that one. Only bums are harder to kill than cockroaches.

  The bastard was beating us.

  I pulled free and stepped into the circle.

  "Come on, you boy-fucking bastard. It's me you want, isn't it? I'm a virgin. I've never been fucked."

  That wasn't quite true. The nuns had definitely seen to that. Not in any physical sense, but they'd sure as hell fucked me up for good and all. It was a wonder what wonders they had accomplished with their rules and their rulers.

  "Come on down," I yelled out.

  Markie turned in midair, and poured himself down at me. I didn't know what I could do, so I just screamed like a little girl. I screamed and Markie shot into my mouth like I was King Cocksucker at the blow job ball.

  I felt his spirit cramming deep inside of me, filling every one of my pores.

  The world spun out of control, the darkness dizzied all around me. I could feel my pulse screaming in my brain, trying to break free.

  I was truly fucked.

  And then all at once it stopped. I felt Markie yanked out of me, like a disconnected Christmas tree cord. I knelt on the concrete floor, gasping for my breath. Sucking in broken glass and exhaling barbed wire. Tiny spots of light polka danced in the beer hall of my brain.

  Then I looked and saw who had saved me, and how he'd saved me.

  There, in the middle of the broken and scattered circle, knelt Amos Briarchild, his lips placed securely over Robert Bruce's mouth and nostrils like the god of Baywatch life savers, sucking the boy's airways clean out.

  He looked like a cowboy in an old western, sucking out a freshly fanged rattlesnake bite. He was drawing the poison, drawing the breath and the memories and the bad dreams that festered deep within the young boy's heart and soul, but not without a cost.

  I watched as Briarchild swelled up, like a balloon left too long on the helium pump. I could see Markie moving inside Briarchild's skin, forcing his way free. And then Briarchild burst like a piñata full of blood. He soaked each and every one of us, not missing a single soul, his blood touching all.

  I looked around, the last survivor of an all-you-can-eat-spaghetti-sauce shower. I could see what was left of Markie trying to pull himself back together. I could see what was left of Briarchild, sticking to the walls of The Shambles.

  And I could see Robert Bruce, lying there on his stolen mattress sleeping like a silent dream. I knew what I had to do. I kicked my shoes off. I stepped over in my socked feet. I didn't want to wake him up while he was still dreaming.

  I picked up the pillow and held it down over Robert Bruce's unlucky thirteen-year-old face. He resisted a little.

  "Shh," I said.

  I held the pillow down for a very long time.

  At the end of it, I almost let go. A small voice inside my skull reminded me that the boy wasn't the victim here. That this had happened to him, and all I was dealing with was what was left over from a very unforgivable chain of circumstances.

  Chains are awfully hard to break.

  I didn't let go. Not even after I felt his breathing stop. Not even after whatever was left of Markie faded away into a dead boy's left over dreams.

  I didn't let go.

  There was something in my eyes, but I'm certain it was only blood.

  I told you I wasn't one of the good guys.

  STATISTIC

  I live in the city. I live alone. Any family I've got is a long way from here. It's Christmas, and it's cold.

  It's snowing tonight. Heavy wet flakes that clump up quickly, burying all hope. Traffic doesn't have much of a chance tonight, and I haven't seen a living
soul.

  I think I'm just going to stand here for a while, alone on this bridge.

  I have always enjoyed the sight of this bridge, arcing high across the harbour, like an inverted smile. Usually the view from here is breathtaking, but tonight you can't see much of anything. The night spreads out below me like a snowbound chasm.

  I lean against the rail and watch the snowflakes drift into their watery bed. A dark wind whispers about my ears, echoing into the blackness of my brain. A foghorn wails, lonely in the night. A chain of snowflakes hang about my neck and shoulders. My breath is a trailing wisp of smoke, vanishing into the chill night air.

  I can't even guess how far down it is to the ocean's surface. From this height a person would hit the water like it was a wet brick wall. That'd be that. A quick drop to a quick burial.

  Burial at sea. Kind of poetic. The tide would carry you. Drag you to a far away grave, far from this stinking city.

  I wonder how far I could get.

  Just that quickly the thought is born. I step over the rail, out on to the catwalk. Just to see, you know? I'm curious.

  Hell. I'm more than curious. It would be so damn easy. Just another step and an end to all pain. I wonder if it would hurt, falling through the air like that? In my imagination I can picture the wind whistling past my ears, flapping my cheeks like sails on a stormy day.

  One more step. That's as far as I'll go. I don't really want to kill myself. Too damn curious. Keep waiting to see what's coming next.

  "Hell of a long way down, isn't it?"

  The sudden voice in the night is nearly all it takes. I am so startled I almost jump. Instead, I turn slowly to face the voice, keeping a white-knuckled grip on the guy line.

  There's an old man in a faded blue parka, standing there watching me like I was some kind of unique specimen. Bridge police. I recognize the uniform.

  Is he going to arrest me?

  I stare at him.

  He doesn't speak. Just stares right back.

  Is he here to watch?

  "You figure on jumping?"

  "You startled me. I didn't see you coming."

  He nodded like he understood.

  "Fella gets too busy looking down, he's bound to forget the world around him."

  "I was just looking at the water."