by Lee, Edward
Now we’re cookin’! Yes sir!
What sat on the table was a typewriter, a Smith-Premiere Bar-Lock series. More of Lethe’s high-class obsession: the machine was nearly a hundred years old but in mint condition, a fresh ribbon threaded through the type-guide. Locke’s host was a keenly thoughtful man. A stack of white bond paper filled a small drawer in the table. Locke cranked in a sheet and began to chase his muse.
He never saw the tiny yellowed tag on the back of the antique machine which read in tight cursive script:
Property of Robert E. Howard, Author, Cross Plains, Texas.
(ii)
“Yeah, I know, Central Commo already told me,” Cordesman griped into the phone. “The red hairs from the church matched red hairs found at sixteen other 64 sites.” But Cordesman had already figured that; bad luck often arrived in abundance. When it rains, it pours, he thought of the tired axiom. Or: When God takes a piss, He takes a BIG piss, generally right on my head. “Is that it?”
Kerr was calling from his car phone, obviously eating as he spoke. “Yeah, er, no, I mean—”
Cordesman winced. “Didn’t your mommy ever teach you it’s not polite to talk when your fuckin’ chops are full of fuckin’ food?”
Kerr’s lips kept on smacking. “Not exactly in those words, Captain.”
“Where are you, the O.K. Corral? Sounds like you’re eating out of a horse trough.”
“I’m at Ivar’s on Northgate. The halibut fish and chips are great. With the malt vinegar? Yes, sir!” Kerr crunched into another fillet.
“Fine. So that’s it?”
“We got joint photos of the homeless guys in the church. All their prints were on file with the W.C.I. database.”
“All ex-cons?”
“Yep…I mean yes, sir. Non-state charges, just county and city, and the only fells were knocked down on suspended sentences. But they all did a string of short-time, mostly small stuff—car-breaking, repeat shop-lifting, wallet-boosting. The bald guy—you’ll love this, Captain—he got busted by King County PD in ’91 for taking a shit on a 256 bus to Bellevue and pissing on the coinbox.”
Cordesman ran a disgruntled hand through his long hair. “You’re right, Kerr. I loved that.”
“So I’ve got a flatfoot squad running the pictures around the local shelters.”
“You thought of that all on your own?”
“Yes, sir. I’m pretty smart. Say…about that step-raise—”
“Just the shelters?”
“Sir?”
“You’d get the raise if you’d also thought to have the rubber-gun fellas tote those ident pix around all the bridges in, say, a five-mile circle from the church.”
“Bridges?”
“Yeah, Kerr. You know. Things that bums frequently sleep under.”
A stuffy pause. “Yes, sir, I already thought of that, and we’re on it.”
“Uh-huh. And the Yankees just dug up Mantle and gave him a new liver and a five-year contract.”
“I’m serious, sir. Oh, and one more thing. I’m also supposed to tell you that Brock’s on her way to see you.”
“Great,” Cordesman sputtered. “This case is hard enough. The last thing I need is that sour-puss pain in the ass in here again acting like she’s the fuckin’ queen of fuckin’ forensic examination. And when she’s not doing that, she’s bellyaching about my cigarette smoke. And if there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s these smug fuckers always yammering about second-hand smoke and fuckin’ cancer rates. Christ, I’ll bet she hasn’t been laid in twenty years, takes all her pent-up angst off on the whole world.”
“You’re a real nice guy, Captain,” Kerr said, munching more fish.
“I know. So why’s that poker-faced, dagger-glaring, bad-news bitch coming to my office?”
“Why don’t you just ask me?”
Cordesman’s cigarette fell out of his mouth when he heard the voice. You stupid horse’s ass… He hung the phone up without further word, then looked up to see that Jill Brock had been standing in his office doorway the whole time.
He held his hands up, shrugged. “I’m sorry, Jill. What can I say? I’m an asshole. Don’t really know why—I just am. Can’t help it, I guess.”
First he got the poker-face, then the dagger-glare. “Well, the bad-news bitch just thought you might be interested in some latents,” she said.
“Look, I said I was sorry.”
“I’d point out that second-hand cigarette smoke contributes to the premature deaths of at least 15,000 non-smokers per year, Captain, but you obviously don’t need some smug fucker like me insisting that I have the right not to be forced to inhale your carcinogens.”
“I apologize for what I said, Jill. Shit, I was just joking around, I didn’t mean—”
“So if you’ll pardon the intrusion of this sour-puss pain in the ass, you might be interested to know that while you were off smoking cigarettes, my crew worked their butts off taking apart that church, and we found something most unusual.”
Cordesman raised another cigarette to his lips, then put it back. “Are you going to tell me, or are you going to bust my chops a little more? Go ahead, make me feel worse. I deserve it.”
Brock opened a manila TSD folder and from it produced a second folder of clear acetate. Pressed between the rigid transparent sheets was what appeared to be an unfolded napkin or handkerchief full of orangish blotches that Cordesman knew to be residual iodine from a latent fuming processor. Along with anthracene, this was the method of choice for securing fingerprints from porous and soft paper.
But there was…something…disturbingly familiar here.
“May I see that, please, Ms. Brock?”
Brock handed it over. Yes, it was a napkin fully unfolded, and Cordesman could see the ridges and whorls of a number of fingerprints amid the orange stains. The corner of the napkin read: CONCANNON’S IRISH PUB, and then he noticed something else that made his stomach tighten. Scribbling in ballpoint, and the words: Evil kisses, or angelic sendings, I want to be in the vale of beginnings, not endings.
“The city MAC matched the prints to a resident on the 1300-block of North 45th Street in Wallingford,” Brock told him.
“Not Richard Locke,” Cordesman pleaded.
“Yes,” Brock countered. “Richard Locke.”
(iii)
Circles.
Squares.
Triangles.
Planes.
Me, he thinks in the dark.
««—»»
The curtains move in a sudden fresh breeze, then the breeze brings a stench of decay, and the curtains rot. In the great bow window, he looks at the sun.
Then the sun turns black.
Everything he looks at changes now. Everything he looks at dies.
And in this darkness—this reality—that he’s summoned with his own mind, he sees it all, his destiny.
Squares roving the orbiculoid. Triangles churning oblique circles and lunettes and napiform pinnates.
Me, me…
Nonogons scaping the pentahedron, with spatulate quadrilateral septagons on the prowl. Volute styliforms flux between the bicillary acilars. Decussated cuspidates cut down the meek and meager bolus crescents and globose fungiforms in a whirring, terrifying ensiformic helix.
All the weak unishapes and passive globoforms waiting for him somewhere inside this radiant black plane of the world.
From the rive in the chevron he hears a voice—
Malefactor. Curse thee… But he laughs at the voice, the god he short-changed. I am greater than you, he says back. You think you own the world? If so, why is it that I’m the one who’s standing on it and not you?
You used to serve me.
Now I serve myself, so go back to your brimstone and your eons and your kingdom of excrement.
He waited for a response but none came. Lucifer wasn’t much at conversation.
The hell-light, like encrimsoned scalloped scrolls, shined in the rhomboid of the window panes. A septagon
al black onyx glittered in an ovate gold ring.
It was too funny…
Pyramidic dentiforms sparkled behind his eyes. His prismoid face smiled through a scarlet moline grin.
««—»»
Back to the trochoid present. Back to the plane of obcorated fodder. He gets up, strays to the fine corner cabinet on which sits a 240-year-old Vincennes vase containing a single long-stemmed rose.
He touches the rose with a fingertip. First it wilts, then dies. The water inside reverts to phlegm while the vase has reformed into a desiccated heart, the aortal opening of which now displays the dead rose. But even the rose changes, to a strand of pulsing nerves.
««—»»
Circles.
Squares.
Planes.
Triangles.
Geometry—the first wisdom of this plague called mankind. But the plague could revel in its filth—he didn’t care. He only cared about one thing.
And I’m going to get it.
It was time. His first hook had failed, hadn’t it? The seed of corruption had been spat back in his face. No matter. Even his guest had figured it out without ever really knowing it.
She was not of his world, not of his reality.
Only a figment of mind…
Or a figment of some other reality?
“It’s time to bring forth my reality,” Lethe muttered aloud.
(iv)
Hours passed in Locke’s engrossment. Many hours. The typewriter was his clock, its rapidly tapping keys the minute and the hour hands. Last thing he remembered was finishing the poem, the scattered wads of paper about the floor proof of his redrafting.
All of writing is rewriting, Clark Ashton Smith had said. Or…was it Michener?
Locke looked at the final draft:
THE ANGEL OF THE EGRESS
by Richard Locke.
Spun tousles
in spiriferous
red
for so long he’s felt
so dead
until now.
Flesh of midnight
sable blood
and the simple, subtle
kiss has pulled him back
from the abyss.
What more truth
can his muse prehend?
Every beginning
begins at an end.
So here am I
emboldened to enter.
Good or bad, that was it, that was his muse. His mind felt spent yet vibrant. This would be the first poem in the book. The angel, the dream woman, was of course a symbol, and now Locke was beginning to understand what it was. She was the final intercession of the catastrophe that was the last several months of his life, and the epiphany of things to come. Fine. That’s what he’d needed to put into words, however few.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
The series of loud knocks pounded on the door; Locke nearly shrieked at the start. But only then, at this shattering of his concentration, did he nearly shriek again when he looked around.
He wasn’t in the same room. It…well, it looked like the same cottage but…
A dead room in the dead of night, laved in twilight. Just a bare mattress, bare walls streaked by dust and discolor. Bare wood floors. Behind him, where a headboard might be, a small window framed the moon.
I’m either insane or I’m asleep, he thought. This was the same room from last night’s dream. Barren, dilapidated, unentered for so long, dust lay an inch deep on the termite ridden floor. Then a glance out the window showed him, yes, the moon, but ringed by scarlet light like luminous blood…
This is…not too good.
BAM! BAM! BAM BAM!.
Don’t answer it. He looked down at the antique typewriter; it shined in mint-condition when he’d first removed its cover, but now it stood as a spindly contraption formed of rust. Blood dripped off the rotten platen, the cotton ribbon blood-soaked. Beside the ruined machine lay an equally rusted Smith & Wesson .38 ACP semi-automatic pistol, with fingerprints further rusted into its grip, and beside that a spent cartridge, its brass finish long turned black.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
The room—the entire cottage was changing; it was aging as he watched, and worse, corroding, becoming fouled. A noxious odor rose, and Locke began to gag as if in a tear-gas chamber. Just a dream, just another dream, he tried to convince himself. And I’m not—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
—going to answer the door!
With his dreams of late? A garbage dump of hallucinatory, alcoholic detritus? But in a second the stench rose to choke him, like a corpse-pit in high sun. Locke couldn’t make it; he jumped up, ran for the door and swung it open—
No one stood on the other side of the door, which was fine with Locke.
No one. But—
He stumbled out in nauseous shock.
The cottage had changed, yes, and so had the back yard. Once a sweetly-scented and opened-air cloister full of flowers and autumn-turning greenery—now it was a miasma. Ruins of spoiled weeds poked above a top of viscid, ill-colored fog. The perimeter fence seemed to be rotting in places, its bricks and mortar decomposed so to sag in place. Viscous fluids glimmered amongst the bricks, and amongst that, tiny insectoid larvae seemed to twitch. The air felt hot as a sauna, not like late autumn in Seattle but mid-August in Vietnam. Locke could scarcely breathe; when he did though, no air seemed to fill his lungs, just moist, stinking heat. Locke imagined the air of Dachau or Andersonville, or the fields of Verdun full of more than a million dead.
He staggered and gagged, then staggered further without conscious notion of direction. The foot-deep ground fog glowed dully, a milky broth. Things—Locke didn’t know what, just…things—seemed to stare at him an inch beneath the pallid surface. Severed heads? Sloughed faces? And with each blind step, he heard as well as felt a crisp, spindly crunching as though he were stepping on racks of rib bones or small animal carcasses. Locke tromped out of the morass, and when he caught what little breath he could, he found himself teetering beneath the front enclosure of the third cottage. Gasping from the death-stench, he crashed open the front door—
Little relief as he stood in the middle of the room. What he breathed was not air; it was loathsomeness, it was death distilled down to its thickest constituent. Locke tripped over his own feet in these noxious fumes, thumped against a bare-wood wall stained brown with old blood. His eyes fell on sights in flashlike increments: a long sewing needle stained brown, multitudinous crusts of discharged semen, great washes of urine cooked brown by the heat, and larger, plume-like shapes of red, finely flecked vomit.
Aghast, he stepped back out on the porch as the horrific garden shuddered before him.
Everything’s changing. It’s prolapsing. Even the rear face of the mansion seemed to rot before his eyes, a house of dead, termite-ridden wood somehow turning mucoid. The high gunslit windows looked filmed in blood.
Then he heard a scream.
To his right… The second cottage, where the painter was staying. He tramped over through the sickly mist, more things crunching beneath his steps. Again, he played the voyeur, peeking into a window…
He looked in at a vision of hell that might’ve appalled Bosch…
Martin the mohawked painter stood intently, wearing only a pair of blue jockey shorts and a black T-shirt that read WHITE TRASH COMPACTOR, DEBUT CD BY YOUR KID’S ON FIRE. He was running a pizza-cutter briskly up and down the back of his red-headed “assistant” who hung stark naked from lashed wrists propped over a ceiling hook. “Not too much, just enough,” Martin remarked. He stepped back to review his deed. The hanging redhead’s body shuddered like electrocution; she was still very much alive, and a bit more than the “trashy looking chick” Locke had first dismissed her as. Clot-like masses of intravenous needlemarks crusted the insides of her elbows. Stretched out like that she seemed little more than a skeleton covered by white, bruised skin, gut-sucked, slat-ribbed. Her emaciation shone as plain as her profession: a street prostitute.
&nb
sp; Martin’s profession, however, was more enigmatic.
A few more peppy strokes of the pizza-cutter right over the knobs of the spine (each stroke brought a shrill scream, like bad brakes), and then Martin looked to his left. “Think that sparked her up, Darlie?”
The blonde—Darlie—lolled on a couch, naked, a foot tapping as if desperate for something. She looked malnourished as the redhead, a death-camp whore with breasts reduced to tiny nippled flaps. Hollow eyes gave a dull glint behind strings of dirty, dishwater-blonde hair.
“Do the front now,” she said. “That’ll really get her screaming. Do her like you did that one-eyed bitch we picked up on Pacific Ave. last week.”
Martin poised, touching his chin, as he considered the recommendation. Then he pulled off the T-shirt. One side facing the window now, Locke could see the tapestry of tattoos on the torturer’s chest—Munch-like suggestions of thin, screaming faces, not particularly original—not to mention nipples and navel aglitter with multiple chrome piercings. The rack-thin redhead heaved tiny gusts of breath in the pause, then Martin swirled her around to face him.