Charlie swallowed and his throat clicked. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m going to dinner with my new friend from Wisconsin.”
“Yes,” she said. “You are.”
The sound of a car bumping up over the sidewalk outside the entrance caught their attention and yanked their eyes off one another. A yellow cab lurched to a halt just shy of a concrete support pillar with a shriek of tires and a grind of the undercarriage against the curb. The driver’s side door banged open and a profusion of limbs and colored fabrics tumbled out. Charlie and Emily stood as the woman gained her feet and fumbled toward the entrance. The glass doors sighed out of her way. Minus the glare, the details of her state resolved.
Her skirt was torn and half-turned around on her waist. One of her high heeled shoes was gone. Emily noticed the sexy crimson polish on her toes, popping through the ripped-out stockings. Her blouse was shredded and bruises marched across the promontories of her cheek-bones and forehead. A platinum wig was trying to edge off her scalp. She reached up and clutched the left side of her chest with a strong, angular hand. Emily blinked and got it: she was a man.
Martie Jenny locked her eyes on Emily. The left one was bloodshot all the way through the white making it look like a smooth red stone. The right was huge, imploring. Pain jabbed Martie like a pike and she winced. “Ohmigod, help me,” she gasped through gritted teeth and collapsed forward.
Charlie and Emily caught her in the basket of their arms.
~~~~~~~~
Chapter 6
THE ANCIENT RAT stole across the warehouse floor. Time is relative, and so the age of this rat must be judged against the age of other rodintia of his order, his kingdom. It could be said that this clever assembly of spiky fur and oiled muscle was a king of sorts. Like kings he had enjoyed the attentions of scores of female admirers and had generated hordes of glint-eyed progeny. He had entered combat with a host of enemies. Other rats for the most part, but in his time the old one had taken down a few stray cats and even blinded an inquisitive Labrador. He had endured famine, counting long winter days off his ribcage; and plenty, feasting on all manner of garbage and prey.
When the smells of blood and terror filtered through the wall, he followed his nose from a dark corner of the warehouse. He inched forward, rolling his claws inward to mute his passage; a trick learned long ago that had advanced him up the chain.
It took him the better part of an hour, moving along the edge of wall. The shrieks of pain from the one who smelled like perfume and sweat froze the rat in his paces. There was some defect in that one. Had he had smelled it in one of his own children the king would have eaten the pup, lest that mistake imprint on his line and pass down. He waited for the screams to silence before scuttling along once more, straightening to match an angled shadow, flattening to slide under a box like a wisp of smoke. Then the other’s voice came, low and questioning. He too had a difference in his scent, an anomaly the king would leave alone were it to appear in one of his own, abandoning the pup to the fates. To sink his mouth-knives into flesh thus scented ran the risk of ingesting whatever caused it. After a time, the screaming stopped and the rat risked turning his reflective eyes to the scene in the middle of the floor.
The Poison One stood over the Perfumed One, head inclined. The Perfumed One muttered, rolling his bleeding head back and forth. The Poison One leaned in. The king twitched his whiskers. The Perfumed One was feigning, he could smell it. The rat knew what was coming next, even if the Poison One did not. It was an old trick. His claws flexed as the Perfumed One whispered. The Poison One leaned in to hear and the Perfumed One lashed out, butting his captor in face.
The rat’s senses were keen but his understanding of space and action were not. Shouts and impacts. The scrape and yell of metal and the tearing of tape and cloth. The odor of tears and perfume retreating with the sound of uneven footsteps, clocking and thumping into the gloom. The cough and roar, the stink of one of their damnable metal beasts as it screeched away.
The king extended his neck and sampled the air, cocked his ears and caught the thud and whoosh of blood sounds. The Poison One was alive, but he was down. The rat’s mind stuttered: danger versus food. There was something in the man’s pocket, something sweet. Sugar meant strength and speed for fighting and fucking, fat for leaner times. The Poison One moaned, his scent shifted. He would wake soon and the opportunity would pass. The ancient king threw himself from the shadows and skittered over the warehouse floor.
A moment later, his snout buried deep in the man’s hip pocket, he swam in the scent of sugar and something foul even to his tastes. It was a scent that spanned his olfactory organ and his instinct, plucking at the part of his mind shared with all rats down the spiral of genetic time. It was wrong, toxic, outside of nature. He sank his teeth into the edge of a foil wrapper and began to jerk backward, perhaps too violently in his haste to escape that odor. Warm clamps encircled his ribs and stopped his breathing. He bit and squirmed, but only got a mouthful of expensive chocolate for his trouble.
A world of scent and shadow revolved like a spinning starfield as the man yanked the rat from his pocket and held him to his face. The rat’s mind began to darken with the asphyxiation, his struggling slowed. The man squeezed harder and several of the king’s calcified bones splintered, savaging his warm insides. His mouth filled with the taste of his own blood and mixed with the chocolate. It had been a long, hard life—a good reign.
Drummond Fine stared into eyes of the biggest fucking rat he had ever seen. His own eyes flashed black and orange, reflecting the crime lights from outside and the gloom from the warehouse. The damn thing had to be the size of a small tabby cat. Had a tail like a two-foot garden snake. With a last convulsion, the tail slithered around his wrist, warm and gentle. Drum’s lower lip pushed out. The rat had experienced a brief surge of panic, automatic to a struggling animal, but that was it. It hadn’t really been afraid of him at all.
He slung the dead rat across the warehouse floor with a casual overhand toss. The dark swallowed it with a wet fwap and hissing slide. The motion forged a band of pain around his skull, starting at the forehead where that sick little faggot had butted him. Drum got to his feet and wobbled. He grabbed the old metal office chair to which he’d duct-taped the queen and sat down. How had that little skirt-wearing piece of sub-human deviance gotten away from him? Drum’s head swam for a moment. He stuck his feet out straight and blew a slow muddy sound. The chair rolled a bit. Ah, that was it. The chair had wheels. The little fucker had been able to push around with those slutty high-heels of his…hers…whatever. Must have pushed himself just close enough to get better leverage than Drum thought he was capable.
“Next time,” he said, his voice spinning out in the gloom and slicking around corners, into hidden crannies, “no wheels.”
But would there be a next time? The faggot knew him, could identify him. Drum could deny the word of an unbalanced and confused young man like Michael McCafferty easily enough, but there might be evidence, DNA, minute particles of himself stuck to the person of that…
“Little. Piece. Of. Shit,” he growled, his fingers digging at the vinyl cushion of the seat then punching through into the desiccated foam rubber guts.
The cab was gone as well. The cab and its late driver. The faggot had escaped him and would now be driving the body of Drum’s latest victim to the police. Drum was as screwed as was possible. But how? How had the faggot gotten up the raw courage to lash out like that? No one understood fear as well as Dr. Drummond Fine. His book sales on phobia therapy and his psychiatric practice alone could testify to that. And the faggot had been afraid, terrified.
Drum had pushed his mental fingers deep into Michael’s quaking psyche as he did now with his fingers into the seat cushion. He had asked questions, massaging Michael’s deepest terrors to the surface. Drum was an artist. Using a mix of traditional psychotherapy and his own special ability, he’d raced young Michael’s weakened heart to the edge and dangled it. At the mo
ment of his greatest terror (Drum had convinced Michael that his mother really had taken her own life because of her son’s sexual orientation), instead of releasing the electric geyser of grief and horror on which the good doctor fed, the little faggot had somehow drawn inward and found strength—a strength he then used to bolster and attack.
Drum gingerly probed the growing lump on his brow. Should he run? Should he just give it all up and get on a plane? It might already be too late. By the time he reached the airport and had a ticket, airport security would already have been notified to keep an eye out for him. The train would be no better, the ports were too slow, and he didn’t own a car. Could he rent a car and just drive? No, they would have put a stop on his credit cards. Dammit, it was like 1984 in this fucking country. Goddamn terrorists. Crash a few planes and screw up the party for anyone else who wanted to do a little killing here and there. It was just un-American.
Drum giggled. The sound was ragged, just out of his control. He had needed that last one. He got by on those infusions of terror, they calmed him, sterilized him. Bolts of feeling as powerful as the psychic death-cry of a person frightened into a cardiac arrest were the only way he could clean his mind. And it was so dirty. All those trash feelings from all those trash people teeming in this trash city. Without his victims he would go mad. He knew this as sure as he knew the sun would yank itself over the horizon come morning. After all, it had happened before.
* * *
THE PRESIDENT RESIGNED after a major newspaper reported his connection with a politically motivated break-in at a well-known Washington, D.C. hotel. The Sovereign nation of India conducted a successful test of its first nuclear bomb. Turkish commandos flooded into Cyprus. Drummond Fine was losing his mind at the tender age of fifteen. It was 1974.
Drum sat on the front steps of his parents’ brownstone on a summer evening, his splayed arms propped on his knees. His elbows dug into knee-patches his mother had sewn on for him: big yellow smiley faces. In his left hand he clutched his thick black glasses, in his right a tuft of his own hair. Some matter that may have been a small part of his scalp garnished the end. His singular eyes were clenched shut. Drummond Fine sat still as stone and fought a losing battle against a rising tide of alien emotion.
At his back, his parents sat in the living room and played at civility. His mother was working on one of her needle points. She would be scrunching up her piggy features and whimpering when the project frustrated her. His father was reading the business section, ticking off the NYSE listings with his eyes. He would be holding a lit cigarette. He only held them. Drum had never seen him actually smoke except for the initial drag to light up. If one or the other of his parents happened to glance up and make eye contact, they would smile and go back to their respective amusements. Perhaps Drum’s mother would ask about his father’s day at the office. Perhaps his father would grunt a short complaint about a co-worker, a cab ride. Mother was thrashing against her lust for Mr. Trudeau, her tango instructor. Father lolled in the mire of a suffocating depression born of dissatisfaction with his family.
Drum could feel everything as if the emotions were his own. Had this overlap of feeling been confined to his parents he might have found a way to cope, but it was more, so much more. As he had aged the range of his ability had expanded like an enormous soap bubble, pulsing out from his skull. With every smoking birthday candle, the bubble engulfed more of the city, transmitting thousands more emotions into Drum’s mind. He used to be able to tune them out, but soon after the first strong twinges from what his mother referred to as, “Drummy’s little tinkler”, the boundaries between himself and others blurred out.
Every day was a soup of violent mood swings. He would be hurrying to school, consumed with his own thoughts (had he studied hard enough for today’s math test?), and his heart would wrench as a stranger who’d just lost their job, child, spouse, rushed by. Drum would find himself doubled over on the sidewalk, staring at the tops of his penny loafers as the sobs shook through him.
One day he’d been watching a cartoon after school—an old Bugs Bunny where Bugs has special carrots that make him a superhero—when his mother came home from a dance lesson. She swirled into the house in her red dress, humming a tango under her breath and threw a “Hi, Drummy” over her bare shoulder before breezing up the stairs. Suddenly, Drum’s pants had been so full of hard-on he was sure he’d bust a seam. His heart had raced and he hadn’t been able to stop sighing for a half an hour.
And in the last few weeks of his fifteenth summer, Drum’s secret power had grown beyond his control. No one could know that as he sat on his front steps, the heavy July evening simmering around him, he could feel his mother’s, his father’s, his neighbor’s, and everyone else’s emotions as surely as if he lived in their heads. If his parents found out it would mean a beating from his father and tears from his mother. Eventually, it would lead to a prolonged stay at one of those special schools. He knew what those schools were about. They were really hospitals, but the patients didn’t get any better. They just stayed and got quieter and quieter. So Drum sat on the porch, drowning, the last of his sense of self-diluting away into nothing.
He heard the screen door open behind him. His father’s disappointment rolled over him along with the fumes from his unsmoked cigarette. Drum could feel him standing behind him, looking down at his son’s boney back, shaking his head, regretting. A thin man with black tortoise-shell glasses and a short-sleeved button down shirt, armpits yellow with stress and coffee sweat. His voice was deep but at the same time thin like he was. It was like he was always whispering. Drum thought that if a shadow could talk, it would sound just like his father.
“What’re you up to, boy?”
For a horrible moment, Drum couldn’t answer, his speech center caught in a stutter of emotional overload. His father’s regret burned over into disgust, and after what seemed like forever, Drum managed a whispered, “Nothing.”
The sound of folding paper scratched his ears and two wrinkled one-dollar bills floated down over his shoulder. “Go catch a flick,” his father said. “Something.” His shoes scraped as he turned and walked back into the house. Drum’s eyes popped open, bright and charcoal in the low light, some quick night animal. As overwhelmed as he already was, he didn’t want to hang around for what was coming. He could feel it. His father was about to do something bad. Drum grabbed the money and got moving.
As he rounded the corner, a spike of feminine surprise almost tripped him. Drum stumbled on the sidewalk and caught himself on a streetlamp; its broken bulb cast a puddle of gloom. His face twisted and the urine in his bladder burned. The panic rose, crested. A ragged shriek ran around the corner. Drum couldn’t be sure if it was in the air or just his mind.
His mother’s terror ate through him like acid, burning away everything else. The other hearts in the neighborhood, his father’s, even his own—every single emotion was cleaned away in the wake of his mother’s fear.
Silence.
His eyes shifted left, right. He cocked his psychic ears and got nothing. His head was clean. In the umbrella of darkness his eyes went pitch black. But his smile was very bright. He had an idea. He knew just what movie he would go see.
A few hours later, Drum walked back from the Orpheus on 12th and Newton Avenue with a glide in his step. He’d sat in the theater before the picture started, surrounded by the usual susurrus mish-mash of feeling: horny kids made his cock pulse, distant couples made him feel gray, lonely singles out for a night on their own gave him a taste of defiance overlaying resignation. When the lights went down and the screen filled with shifting stains of light all those separate feelings were wiped away. The movie had been a little story of backwater carpentry called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
After the movie, Drum walked into his house and could already sense the stink of terror lingering in the air like his mother’s lust after her dance lessons. His parents were in their usual places—his mother in her chair, his father in his.
Mother worked a needlepoint, but with something less than her usual concentration. She stared off to the side and hardly noticed when she pricked her finger. A drop of blood stained the work and still she went on. Her face was cobbled with dark bruises, her left eye swollen shut. Behind his newspaper wall, father radiated a deep calm, like the warmth from a gulp of good whiskey.
Drum, of course, could feel it all, but it didn’t get to him anymore. He held onto the fear from the movie theatre. He even drank some of stale stuff off from his mother, and it worked its tonic. He could still feel the countless others pressing their fingers into his chest, but it was distant now. He was clean and easy.
He walked over and stood next to his mother. She registered his presence with a dissociated wince, never looking away from her needlepoint, but flooding him with fresh fear. Drum took a great gulp of air through his nose.
Father’s newspaper rattled. “How was the movie?” He even sounded drunk.
“Good, dad,” Drum said, dropping a hand on his mother’s shoulder. She tensed beneath his touch. “Thanks for treating me.”
“Anytime.”
Drum smiled. He hoped so.
* * *
DRUM TOOK HIS first victim a few years later during his second year of medical school at Columbia. She was in his gross anatomy class. Patricia Mills-Hansen had been her name and she made damn sure you never forgot the Mills part.
Patricia picked up a scalpel and offered it to the gangly young man with whom she had been forced to partner. She might have deemed him worthy of a lay were he not so darn freaky. Those tinfoil eyes, the way he would sometimes squint behind his heavy glasses as if he expected a sucker punch at any moment, or was surprised by a shout only he could hear. His intellect seemed keen enough; he was nearly as intelligent as she. It was just… She looked at him over the cadaver, across an open digestive cavity, intestines looping in a gush of shiny rope. “Fine,” she said. “It’s your turn to cut.”
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