by Tim Curran
“Oh yes, I do! I got back there and…and she was gone! She had dragged herself around the side of the house! I followed the blood trail and when I found her, found her curled up and bleeding, I bashed her goddamn brains in! I kept swinging and swinging and I never wanted to stop! I liked it! I loved it!”
Louis was feeling sick to his stomach now. Yes, he’d seen his share, but this was so much worse. So intimate. A peak into the mind of a lunatic. He thought if he looked deep enough, he might see something in Earl’s eyes that would validate what was in his head. Something looking back at him and grinning.
Earl was kneeling on the floor, rocking back and forth, just devastated by what he had done. “But you don’t know the rest, Louis, you don’t know what it was like.”
“Please, Earl. Stop this.”
But Earl shook his head. “It got her too, Louis. It got in her head and she was just as loony as I was. When I found her there, around the side of the house, she laughed at me! She fucking laughed at me! Started saying all the terrible things she’d always wanted to say to me! And then, and then she…”
Earl broke down into tears and Louis went to him, tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but the old man just batted it away.
“I killed her because I had to! And because she wanted it!”
Louis sat back down. “What do you mean?”
Earl uttered that awful, bitter laugh again that maybe wasn’t insane, but was living right next door. “I mean she wanted me to! After she said those things, something snapped in her, Louis! Just snapped! It was a violation of everything that dear woman was! She couldn’t live with it! So…I killed her! I killed her because she begged me to do it! Begged me to smash her head in!”
Louis could say nothing to that.
He was speechless and simply worn out by all of this. Earl sobbed and shook and eventually the tears just went away and he was silent, just silent. Not even moving. Not doing anything but dying inside.
“When did you come out of it?” Louis finally asked.
“Before…earlier…I don’t know. It just fades away a little at a time. And now I’m sane, I’m perfectly fine, aren’t I?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Earl. Not really.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Louis. Please don’t do that.” He pulled himself up and sat back on the recliner. “Anything but that. I’m like the others now. A killer. I’m nothing but a killer…”
70
The pack waited patently on the hillside.
In the moonlight, their bodies reticulated with bands of mud-brown, blood-red, and midnight blue like jungle serpents, they were nearly invisible. Only their teeth gleamed in the moonlight, their staring eyes. A slight breeze was carrying the smell of prey, the delicious odor of live meat, and a ripple of excitement ran through the pack.
Down below, in a tree-lined hollow at the edge of what had once been known as Lower Fifth Street, a group of prey had hidden themselves away. They thought they were safe from the things that stalked the night. They were wrong.
The Baron examined the gleaming edges of his weapons-the K-Bar knife, his hatchet, his spear, and his machete which was really just the razor-sharp blade from a paper cutter with a handle at one end. They pleased him. Their edges caught the moonlight, held it. Touching the necklace of ears at his throat, he made a grunting sound under his breath.
The pack rose from the grass.
They were his children. They surrounded him, pressing up against him, smelling the raw blood-stench of brutality that he wielded like a weapon. It made them feel strong.
Without a word, the Baron slipped down the hillside with the others following him. He avoided the sparsely placed streetlights, haunting the shadows, becoming the shadows, sliding through their ebony depths like a snake skimming a pond.
There were three houses and he broke his pack into three hunting bands, each led by his fiercest warriors.
It was time.
Letting out the wild cry of a wolf, he charged through the first yard. He came to a locked door, but it was flimsy and he kicked it open, his band rushing in. Inside, there were lights and screams. His hunters had found a woman and two children cowering. They impaled them with their spears, hacking them with hatchets until patterns of blood were sprayed up the walls and spattering the ceiling.
A man lay dying on the carpeted floor in a pool of his own blood.
There was a hatched imbedded in his skull.
He had fought, fought hard for what was his, shattering the skull of one hunter with a baseball bat and beating another to a faceless wreck. But that was all he did. The hunters were fighting over the scraps of the woman and children, others slitting trophies from the dying man with their knives.
The Baron heard gunshots.
Shattering glass.
More screams.
He ran outside and to the house next door. One of his hunters lay on the porch, a bullet hole in his temple. A window was smashed. Inside another hunter was dead. Then the Baron saw that three of his own were busy gutting a woman and another was feeding the body of an old woman into the fireplace. She screamed as the flames engulfed her. Another hunter was gut-shot on the stairs, a trail of blood marking his progress.
Two more gunshots from above.
Then the howling of hunters. Thrashing noises and a screech of pain. The Baron smiled. Whoever had been doing the shooting had been overwhelmed now. He could hear them shrieking just above the noise of blades hacking into flesh and splintering bone.
Outside again.
The next house. A back door opened as the Baron came around the side. A woman was trying to escape. She got one look at the Baron and tried to slam the door shut. He shouldered it open. She screamed and slashed at him with a steak knife. He beat her down, kicked her until she was nothing but a sobbing heap, and then yanked up her head and slit her throat.
He came across three more of his hunters who had cornered a boy. They were jabbing him with their spears. And in the living room, a sight which even gave the Baron a moment’s hesitation as some shred of humanity kicked in his head.
His hunters had a pregnant woman on the floor. She was dead, slit open from throat to crotch. One of the boys was urinating on her. A group of girls had torn her unborn child from the womb.
They were eating it, the umbilical still attached to its mother.
The Baron slit the woman’s ears off and threaded them onto his necklace as his children devoured, their eyes black and staring, their faces smeared with gore.
He went out onto the porch. There was a man out there, bleeding from spear wounds, hobbled by axe cuts, but not dead just yet. Letting out a cry of victory, the Baron scalped him…
71
The girl was refusing so the Huntress knew she had to be broken much as a young colt must be broken by whatever means necessary. What must come now must not be crude or low in nature, but ceremonial, for it was a rite. And it would be carried out as such.
The Huntress looked down on the girl. “Hunt with us, as us.”
The girl looked up at her. There were tears in her eyes. “Michelle, please-”
The Huntress was taken aback by that name. It was what the man had called her. She feared that name for it was a name of power that made her feel helpless, uncertain. She could not have the clan seeing this. That name. Michelle. It was a magic name, a spell of power. The others must never learn of it or they would break her with it.
The girl opened her mouth again and the Huntress slapped her.
She reached out and took the girl by the throat, squeezing while she trembled and gasped and fought weakly in her grip. The Huntress slammed her up against the wall again and again until there was no fight left.
“Now,” she said, “ready her.”
Macy was suddenly gripped by hands, so many white reaching hands they were like the ensnaring tentacles of a squid, grabbing her, fondling her, pinching her and scratching her leaving deep welts. There was no fight left. Everything had drained out of her and s
he was limp there on the cool flagstone floor, naked, exposed, vulnerable. They pressed in, savage faces, primordial things from a nightmare, sharpened teeth gleaming and fat-greased faces grinning. The Huntress stood over her, dark and cruel, her eyes cold glistening jewels. Macy looked up at her, but there was no pity. The woman she had known as Michelle was a savage warrior queen now, her face painted white and black like a skull, things knotted in her hair, a necklace of tiny bones at her throat. There was no sympathy, no pity, for Michelle was now from a time of long ago. A dark, misty time where men were little better than the beasts of the forest.
The clan pressed in, stealing her light and her air.
There was nothing but the greasy feel of them, the stink of the pelts they wore and the marrow-grease they coated themselves with, rancid, revolting, meaty-smelling stuff. They were all touching her, feeling her. Nails scratched blood and teeth tore her skin even as tongues licked the sweat from her breasts and moist blubbery lips suckled her wounds and were pressed to her own lips. Clammy hands forced her legs apart and there was no air to scream with, not a single muscle would obey as more hands pushed in, rubbing her down with fats and oils until she glistened as they glistened and then, and then Then she did scream with a raw, shrieking sound that echoed through the church as her head thrashed from side to side with the horror of what was happening. The scream was silenced by many mouths and many tongues covering her face.
So Macy did not see.
Did not see the painted, grease-shining man who wore the bloody, ragged pelts of men and animals, the leering snarling-mouthed headpiece of a slaughtered dog. She did not see him or the hands that pressed him down on her, but she felt his penis as it slid along her inner thigh like an engorged snake, pushing higher and higher, sliding into her as she shuddered and kicked and called out the name of the only man she thought would protect her.
Please, please, please, Louis, please don’t let them, don’t let them, don’t let them do this to me, don’t let them destroy me like this But there was only the clan, clutching and feeling and holding her, gripping her with dirty fingers until her flesh bruised, kissing her and sucking on her and nibbling her with the serrated edges of their teeth. She was buried alive in their bodies which stank of blood, excrement, and peeled hides as the man on top of her, the one chosen by the Huntress, pushed in and out of her, bringing pain, riding her, grunting like a hog, drool hanging from his mouth in fetid ribbons.
When his seed flowed into her, his body stiff and jerking, she let out a final rending screaming that tore her open inside, ripped her soul wide open in a vicious, bleeding chasm that swallowed everything she had been, ever was, or could be into the black seething nothingness of prehistory…
72
Louis watched the darkness outside the window. He knew he should have run as far away as he could before they came back. But he just didn’t seem to care. Everything was collapsing, both within and without, and he had lost focus. In his mind he could see Earl that afternoon, out by the hedges:
We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and everyone of us there is a loaded gun and radical population explosion has pulled the trigger! God help us, Louis, but we will exterminate ourselves! Beasts of the jungle! Killing, slaughtering, raping, pillaging! An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild!
It sounded crazy then; now it simply sounded practical.
“You still sticking to the gene theory?”
Earl buried his face in his hands. “Yes, absolutely. Let me indulge in some Darwinism here, Louis. For if the survival of the fittest is a true thing, then what we have locked up inside each and everyone of us is a genetic propensity towards hunting and killing, taking down prey and destroying our human rivals. I’m talking about the beast inside. The beast that is the very core of who and what we are. That’s what’s causing all this: the beast. The primal, ravenous other inside us all, the dawn-child, the shadow-hunter, the savagery and cruelty that forms the framework of the human animal.”
“The beast,” Louis said. “I’ve seen it. I’ve looked in its eyes.”
Earl nodded. “Yes, and what a disturbing sight it is, eh? At our roots, animals, nothing but animals. Beasts. We crawled from the immortal slime of creation with the will to kill and that will is still upon us. Upright animals with savage instincts and an inheritance of acquired, barbaric characteristics. We can write poetry and make music, build cities and microcomputers and send probes to Mars, but in our hearts, our black beating little hearts, still Miocene apes and pithecanthropoid hunters. Love, hate, greed, want, violence, war. Love is a romanticized adaptation of the breeding/brooding impulse. Materialism is simply an expression of the animal instinct to covet. Nationalism, our flag-waving patriotism, nothing more than the ancient animal drive to maintain and defend a territory and war…yes, even war, nothing but an overblown, exaggeration of the territorial impulse to raid, to kill, to take what belongs to another and make it our own.”
What Louis wanted to know was: what activated this monstrous gene? What set this regression, this primordial memory-or whatever you wanted to call it-into action? “What was the mechanism, Earl? What was the machine or influence that set it all free and on such a massive scale? Just overpopulation? Stress?”
“We’ll never really know, Louis. Anymore than any other herd animal will know. It’s inside us, though, my friend. These impulses, this sadism, it’s inborn and inbred. We’re the product of our ancestors. No more, no less. Why do people murder each other? Why do they kill their own children? Their neighbors? Their wives? Why do they allow genocide to happen? Why do they lynch people of a different skin color? Why do they hate those with more or with less than them or with different religious affiliations? The beast, Louis, the beast inside. The imperatives to descend into our prehistory, into our savage past, are locked up in all of us.
“How many times have you read that somebody killed another and they really weren’t sure why? The Devil made me do it…except, we all carry the devil inside of us. Our animal past is why. We all have terrible buried impulses, but most of us don’t act upon them. But now and again, a select few or even a mob does. It’s a combination of our brutal heredity acting in accordance with deep-seated, repressed wants and desires. That’s what you’re seeing here: all the awful, dirty, hateful, and twisted things growing in the underbelly of this world, this town, in its collective mind, have been unleashed. All the terrible things festering inside these people have been released. It was genetically preordained, I suppose. The conditions were right and it just happened. That’s no answer. Not really. But the potential was there and has been in every human population since we evolved from a lesser primate. God help us, but the world is now a great living laboratory of the human condition and the mechanics of violence, primal instinct, purge and atavism. The evil is here, Louis, and the evil is us. We made the Devil in our own image.”
“But what about the animals, Earl?”
“Animals?”
Louis swallowed thickly as he told Earl about the police station. The dogs there. How they had died fighting men or fighting with them.
“Hmm, interesting.” Earl considered it. “Well, there’s only one logical explanation. Hormones.”
“Hormones?”
Earl nodded. “Yes, hormones, pheromones. It was long thought that pheromones were the province of insects. Not so. Recent biochemical studies tell a different story. All species have them. Most are species-specific, but certain kinds can be read by other species. There are aggregation pheromones which function to herd species in defense against predators or for mating purposes. Primer pheromones which trigger behavioral changes in reaction to environment. Releaser or attractant pheromones which attract mates for miles. Territorial pheromones which are carried in the urine to mark territorial boundaries or lairs or to warn off intruders. Sex pheromones which indicate the female is re
ady for breeding. All sorts of chemical signatures. And then there are alarm pheromones which alert a species when one of their own is under attack. Studies have shown that these pheromones, in mammals, trigger the fight or flee instinct. They make animals quite aggressive. A harmless tomcat becomes a beast. Prey animals will tend to flee, predators will generally fight. Those primitives out there-that’s a kind word for them-must be letting off alarm pheromones of absolute aggression and the dogs are responding in kind. It’s a chemical thing. The dogs cannot help themselves. They fight. If directed against a common enemy, they fight with our primitives. Lacking the same, they fight against them.”
Louis hated Earl at that moment. He was reducing man to a laboratory rat. Maybe that’s all any species was, a victim of their own chemistry, but he still hated it. It was so…dehumanizing.
“The regression, Earl. Can it be stopped?”
Earl didn’t even attempt to answer that one. “Have you ever heard of a man named Raymond Dart?”
Louis told him he hadn’t.
“Raymond Dart was an Australian anthropologist and comparative anatomist. A true giant in the field. In 1924 he discovered the fossil remains of Australopithecus in a South African limestone quarry. In time, he also discovered more fossils of this extinct hominid, along with great heaps of fossilized bones that were the prey of the Australopithecine. He also discovered crude weapons such as clubs made from antelope bones and knives fashioned from jawbones, as well as heaps of animal bones and baboon skulls which bore the marks of death blows from these very weapons. As did the skulls of other Australopithecines. Evidence that was supported by forensic experts who examined the remains. The dawn of organized murder, Louis! A quarter of a million years before man! From this Dart theorized that we evolved not from a gentle vegetarian ape as established paleoanthropology would have it, but from a savage, predatory ape with a lust for killing. It was called the “Killer Ape” theory. He perpetuated it in his paper, ‘The Predatory Transition from Man to Ape.’ In the paper he said and I quote verbatim: ‘The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalized religions and with world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator-this predacious habit, this mark of Cain-that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora.’ Well, don’t you see, Louis? Don’t you grasp it?”