“Of course there were armies of psychiatrists and child-psychologists after that, but I never let them inside me, not all the way, and they never knew my little secret. The incriminating photos must have been burned with the incriminators.
“My mother’s brother let me live with him. I’d inherited enough to get through college and art school, no sweat, and, you know, having come from such a background was an advantage in a way. Jeffrey Quilt was expected to be a little demented. Uncle Victor and Aunt Jane never said a word about my work, no matter how bizarre and disgusting it got. Such are the mysteries of an artist’s inspiration. Such is the secret of Jeffrey Quilt, murderer and genius.
“All this while I’ve felt nothing inside, just a void where I know emotion should be. I’m cold and dead and here I am telling you my story. That is the truly strange thing about it all.”
* * * *
The chair creaked, rocking back and forth. My very precious, treasured friend David Walton was crying like a little boy. He pounded the chair-arms with his fists.
“God…fucking…damn Quilt, I asked your help when I knew I couldn’t go to anyone else. You said you’d help me and all you’ve done is tell me a scary bedtime story! Well it’s not enough!”
I walked all the way around him three times. I placed my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t brush it off. I felt the tension melting into despair.
“David, you’re special to me. I have colleagues, clients, associates, but very few friends. You know I’d do anything for you.”
“Then what the—”
I took him by the hand and raised him to his feet.
“Come,” I said. “Walk with me.” We walked for what might have been minutes or hours beneath the still branches. The forest seemed to hold its breath. There were no sounds at all but for our footsteps, and no disturbances of the darkness, no lights from distant houses or highways.
Just the two of us.
He opened himself to me. He told me his secret.
“It’s Marie. Like in your story. I really want to kill her. Truly, I do.”
There. He had spoken it for the first time.
“Why must we kill those we love?” I said. I felt I was groping into that void within myself, for remorse or anger or shock, something I should have been feeling but could not. “Wouldn’t divorce be a lot simpler?”
“It’s beyond all that. Maybe I loved her once. But not now. No, I have never hated someone so much in all my life. She threw me out of the house, Jeff. Then she got my address from somewhere, probably one of the lawyers, and sent me all my old love-letters back, burnt to fragments, with just enough left so I could tell what they were.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad between you two,” I said. “I am truly sorry.”
“You can’t talk me out of this. I have to kill her. There is no other way.”
Spoken for the second time. There.
On and on we walked, and now the woods were filled with shapes: a snake-thing with a woman’s face, wriggling across the ground, hissing through needle-teeth; a bear that was simultaneously a filthy, enormously fat old man; a thing with claws; a conglomeration, spider-limbs terminating in dozens of bloody human hands, half machine; more. They parted before us like minnows before a shark. David did not seem to see them. The world has seen them many times, though, in the paintings of Jeffrey Quilt.
“She won’t let me visit the children,” David Walton said. “She’s starting a lawsuit to keep me away. I don’t know what the fuck she’s saying to the lawyers, to anyone who will listen. There’s an injunction. I love my little boy and girl, Jeffrey, more than anyone. I wouldn’t hurt them. It’s tearing me apart. That bitch wants to tear me apart and she’s doing a fucking fine job of it. When you hinted you could help in a way no one else could help…it seemed so fucking crazy I had to hope that you meant what you said.”
We emerged into a broader clearing, where a single split-level house floated on a darkened lawn, light pouring from the windows; like a white lily on the black surface of a pond at midnight.
David staggered back, amazed. “This cannot be happening,” he said. “We’re in Pennsylvania, Goddamnit. My house is in Princeton. That’s…what? Fifty miles from here? And where is the rest of the neighborhood? No, I must be dreaming. This can’t be.”
“I meant what I said, David.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, gripping me hard.
“I want the bitch dead,” he whispered so faintly, almost as if afraid I would hear.
Third time true.
I reached up into the sky and drew down what he needed and pressed it into his hand.
The long, silver blade gleamed in the light from the living-room window.
He went into the house.
* * * *
David Walton cut his own throat with that knife a month later. We’ve talked about it many times, he and I, when we walk in the forest at night, in the winter when only my footsteps break the ice that’s on the surface of the snow.
He is there with me, and his wife, and his children, and my brother Stevie, and so many others. All the monsters.
He is there, and he demands to know about the Outside Man. Was it just a story? Why didn’t he see him then?
No, it is not a story, David, I tell him, or, rather, it is many stories. To my Grandmother, the tale is of the Devil’s emissary, a unique demon of truth, who haunts of the Black Forest of Germany: Der Waldganger, sent to ensnare mankind. The Long Lost Friend may be invoked to keep him away, but the best defense is simply a clear and clean conscience, something so few of us can manage in this complex, modern age.
For Jeffrey Quilt, imaginative and morbid painter of celebrated etudes, he is a stalking spectre, bordering on cliché, but exactly what a frightened and despairing fourteen-year-old boy needed.
For David Walton, he may provide the comfort of a friend’s company. He may share a secret lifted gently from the heart and carefully spilled out, like dark wine.
The Outside Man takes many forms. He appears as we need him, perhaps even as we create him.
In the shape of, for instance, Jeffrey Quilt.
* * * *
Sit down. Here, in this rusty old chair. I must tell you a story. It is only a story, from start to finish, but it is also true. Listen!
SAVAGES
To Oliver, he was always Billy, never Bill or William, much less Mr. Porter, even after the two of them grew up. To Oliver, Billy was perpetually nine years old, crawling down the embankment behind the old Drake house, under the thick tangle of honeysuckle and briar, completely at his ease under the vaulted arches of the forsythias like something used to all-fours.
“Come on,” Billy would say. “I’ll show you something neat.” And the ritual would begin. Oliver followed him always, breathless with expectation, and sometimes he let his three-years-younger brother Daniel tag along, and maybe Howard Gilmore who lived across the street and down two.
Billy led the way. He was a natural bush-rat, a burrower, able to slip with ease through the tightest hedges, the one who always found the way for the others through the thorn bushes. Down the embankment they went, where their parents had so often forbidden them to go, along the railroad tracks that ran behind the whole neighborhood, then down again, where the hill was so steep they had to take to the trees and lower themselves into a cool, secret place where a stream emerged from a tunnel beneath the tracks.
They had to do it just right, touching all these special places, never revealing themselves to the eyes of others, creeping like Wild Indians through the undergrowth along the edge of the St. David’s Golf Course when it would be so much easier just to walk across the grass. If they did it right, if they all ran like startled deer across Lancaster Pike when there were no cars coming and quickly regained the safety of the shrubbery on the other side; if they made their way from there deep into Cabbage Creek Woods with its soapy-smelling skunk cabbages, braving the mud and mosquitoes and stinging nettles that grew by the edge of the
stream there; if they did all these things as Billy directed, they would come to a path where the land rose into a gravel heap near the abandoned track bed of the P&W line and reach Billy’s fort: a kind of cave supported by logs, dug deep under the old rail ties.
You could never get there without him. No one else could find the way. And, if by chance you did, there would be Billy’s anger to contend with, and he was just too strange, too wild. Even from the beginning, everyone was just a little bit afraid of Billy.
Oliver would always remember Billy that way, his incongruously tubby form able to squeeze through the tightest opening with natural ease, almost always barefoot and shirtless, smeared with dirt, his hands and feet almost black from the cinders along the railroad embankment.
Billy would take the others into his confidence and show them something “really neat,” which might really be neat: a Nazi dagger somebody’s father had brought home from the war, an amazing collection of firecrackers, baseball cards, a golf ball he’d sawed in half with no apparent ill effects, monster magazines, what seemed to be a real revolver, several pet snakes he swore were poisonous and only Billy would touch—
For long afternoons every summer they’d sit there around a smoldering fire—there always had to be a fire inside the fort; it was part of the magic—and as shadows lengthened and evening came on, Billy would tell them the stories of the Blood Goblin who had been a medicine man, centuries ago, with the disconcerting habit of lifting his head from his shoulders, till his spine and his guts dangled in the air. Then he would fly through the night, shrieking, his eyes burning red, his teeth distended into enormous fangs with which to rip out the throats and drink the blood of passers-by.
He was still here, too, Billy said. His body had been stolen and burned while he was away, so he couldn’t leave. Once in a great while a kid would disappear. You’d hear he’d been kidnapped. The police would search and search, but never find him because the Blood Goblin had found him first.
Only Billy had seen him and lived to tell about it, because Billy was magic. He was at home there in those woods, clad only in a ragged pair of shorts, so dirty he looked more like an animal than a human. Everyone’s parents went on about how poor Billy was, how neglected, but that was precisely why Oliver, Daniel, and the rest envied, all but worshipped him. Billy didn’t have to wash up or dress right or go home when his mother said he had to. He was free. He lived in the woods like a savage, something all of them aspired to become but knew, deep inside, that they never would.
* * * *
Sometimes Billy’s idea of what was “really neat” could be distressing, like the dead cat he insisted on cutting into fine pieces with a long, incredibly sharp knife while Oliver and the others looked on in disgust and fascination—both at the insides of the cat and at the spectacle of Billy flaying it with such obvious relish, muttering all the while as if carrying on some obscure argument with himself. One hand would seize the other and force the knife away, and the blade would weave back and forth in the air in front of all their wide-eyed faces. Then, suddenly it jerked down and Billy stabbed himself in his round stomach. Daniel screamed. Oliver forced Billy’s arms aside and had a look, but it was just a scratch. Blood trickled through the grime.
But Billy remained oblivious to them all and completed his operation, meticulously saving the cat’s heart, lungs, liver, intestines, and even its penis in plastic jars.
Oliver watched with a terrible, breathless expectancy he couldn’t even put into words.
Then Billy yanked the remaining hide off the carcass and held the bare skull up, his hands slimy with blood.
“Isn’t that neat?” he said.
“No!” Oliver said. “It’s horrible…”
“Maybe you’re lying,” Billy said softly. “Just maybe you like it.”
“No!”
“Maybe it’s not enough for you. I think you want more. Wouldn’t it be neat to do this to people? Wouldn’t that really be something?”
What frightened Oliver more than anything else was the realization that deep inside a part of him thought doing it to people would be neat. Somehow, the way Billy said it, or just the fact that Billy and not, say, Howard Gilmore had made such a suggestion overwhelmed all objections, enchanted him, and an inner voice said, Yes, that would be neat, and for just the barest instant he agreed with all his heart and soul—before his sanity returned and he recoiled from what he was thinking. But the thought remained, like a stain.
Nobody said anything more. Daniel went home crying that day. Oliver was silent for a long time.
* * * *
Billy was the first one to figure out how to masturbate. He showed the others. He set up a bull’s-eye target on the wall of the fort and he was the only one who could hit it. But he never got any further than that. He never developed any interest in girls.
The boys were older by then; but that was the odd thing: they were changing and Billy was not. Oliver read more and more books. He wanted to talk about rocketships and explorers and outer space. Billy preferred dead animals he could take apart. By now the inside of his fort stank like a garbage bin, and skulls and skins and wings decorated the walls.
“Come and see something neat,” he still said, but the others didn’t always come. When they were with girls they pretended they didn’t know him. The girls held their noses with exaggerated gestures and whine, “Eeew! Gross!” And Billy would scream at them and vanish back into his woods and everyone would laugh.
Nobody saw Billy passing from grade to grade like the rest. He went to some other school somewhere. Rumor had it that it was a place for retarded kids. That brought more laughter.
Only Oliver knew that couldn’t be true, that Billy had chosen some secret, magical path which kept him apart, which changed him and wouldn’t let him change again. Oliver didn’t laugh.
But certainly Billy was losing whatever charm he had. What was fascinating at nine is okay at eleven and a bit boring at thirteen, and when the human body stays that dirty and gets older, it starts to stink. After puberty you learn about B.O. Billy had it in epic proportions.
“Come on!” he pleaded. “I know something neat! What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”
Not even Daniel visited the fort much anymore.
* * * *
Oliver went one last time when he was fourteen. It was one of those growing-up things, like the last time you play with your electric trains. He somehow knew it would be the last.
He had been a freshman at Cardinal O’Hara for two months now. It was October, but almost as warm as summer. In the evening, after he’d finished delivering his newspapers, Oliver stood among the fallen leaves behind the Drake house, at the top of the embankment, waiting, remembering; and suddenly Billy was there, as he had always been, clad in dirt and a pair of cut-offs that were ripped up both sides almost to the waist so that he looked like a jungle cannibal in a loin-cloth. He wore a necklace like one too, of dried snakeskins and animal bones.
“Hello, Billy.”
The other said nothing, and Oliver followed him down the embankment under the thorn-bushes and vines, trying very hard not to soil or tear the new jacket he’d gotten for his birthday a week before.
The golf course was being dug up to build a Sears, but the construction area was deserted, and skulking among the huge piles of earth and among the idle machines was an acceptable substitute for the bushes that were no longer there.
He sat with Billy on the threshold of the fort for what must have been an hour. The woods grew dark. The first stars appeared and the rising full-moon shone fleetingly among the tree trunks. Oliver zipped up his jacket, but Billy didn’t seem cold.
Billy talked about bats, his latest fascination.
“I like bats too,” Oliver said. “Did you see The Kiss of the Vampire, where all the bats killed the vampires at the end—?”
But, no, Billy meant real bats, soft, warm, sharp-clawed things like mice with wings. Sometimes he would lie in his fort at night listening to th
e distant howling of the Blood Goblin still angrily searching for its stolen body, and the bats came to cover him up like a living, chirping blanket. He really liked that. It was neat. The bats told him all their secrets. He had learned their language.
He made a chittering, whistling sound.
Oliver shivered, then laughed nervously. “You’re making this up…”
“No!” Billy leapt to his feet, towering over Oliver, his fists bunched up, his belly wriggling. “Don’t be a asshole!”
That was how he said it, Oliver would always remember. Not an asshole but a asshole.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Billy. I mean it.”
Billy spat and sat down, his chin on his grubby fists.
“If you’re really sorry, you’ll look at the neat thing I got to show you.”
“Okay, Billy…” Oliver was more than uneasy then, definitely afraid. He could sense the magic in Billy, the power which wanted to anchor him here, to drag him back from fourteen to nine again and keep him that way forever.
“It’s something the bats showed me,” Billy said. “They can do it with their wings. I always wanted to see the insides of things. They showed me how.”
“Huh?”
“Just watch. You promised.”
“Yeah. I promised.”
Oliver had no idea what was to follow. He sat there, watching as Billy sat very still, his hands folded, eyes closed, head down. That was the strangest thing of all. Oliver had to control his impulse to laugh. It was impossible to imagine Billy praying.
Then Billy lowered his folded hands until the edges touched the dirt floor of the fort; and he parted them, brushing a little dirt aside. Suddenly there was an opening. Not a hole. No. He hadn’t scooped out that much dirt. It was as if the earth were scum on the surface of a pond, and Billy’s hands had broken it. The blackness suggested an infinite depth.
“Jesus!”
“Now look down there,” Billy said. “You promised. Just look and see what the insides of the world are filled up with.”
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack Page 17