by Brian Hodge
"I want the same thing my wife got."
"Our records are strictly confidential."
"Hey." Joe grabbed an application form and wrote out a quick but binding promissory note on the back. He signed his name to it with a final flourish. Then he inked his thumb and printed that next to the signature. "See this, asshole? What more do you want from me?"
The young man stared at Joe, a silly expression on his lips, as if unable to decide whether to embrace him or bite his nose off and run for cover. Maintaining this expression he pulled out a drawer and riffled through the files. "What was the name?"
"The woman in the yellow blouse."
"Oh, Rosie! I know Rosie."
Rosie, he thought. Rosie, your ass.
"She's been coming here for three months. I remember. She took the Final Step this afternoon."
"That's what I want."
"I can't stay here while you wade through ten books. I've got to get home. What if the security tapes do a sweep, it gets to be midnight, I'm still sitting here…?"
"Then just give me the Final Step."
"Two hours and that's it."
The young man pushed aside the curtain and set a stack of nine volumes on the reading stand beside Joe's recliner chair.
"Do up as much as you can to prepare. Then, when you want to go all the way—" He pulled down a single-book-sized sealed carton from the storage shelf. "—Finish up with this. It's the big one. Volume X."
Joe adjusted the reading lamp over his head. "Why is that one brand-new?"
"Volume X's can only be used once. It's a specification of the manufacturer. The directions are on the cover. Follow them exactly."
"Why can't you give me the same one you gave my wife?"
"It's a personal directive from Dr. Flowers." The young man's eyes wandered to the storage shelf, where a used Volume X carton addressed back to Indects, Inc. headquarters lay open and waiting to be resealed.
Joe said nothing.
"I'll be over at the Weenie Wigwam for as long as I can stretch it. I wanted to catch the NBC Big Event, anyway. My VCR's jammed. I may as well watch it there. I'm going to lock the door behind me, so you'll have to wait here till I come back. And stay out of sight. Got it?"
"Got it," said Joe. "I'm on my own now."
"Right. And remember—two hours. Three hours absolutely max. It's the best I can do. Okay?"
"Okay."
He waited for the young man to leave him.
He lifted Volume I gingerly from the top of the stack. The book was broad but surprisingly thin, with only a few dozen hefty pages within. The washable imitation-leather cover was well used. Comfortable. Almost inviting.
A strange calm fell over him. He thought:
It's as if I've been waiting year after year for everything, including my life, to get underway. When I was twelve I was sure it would all happen once I finished high school. At eighteen, after college. Then Rose Marie came along. There seemed to be so much of it written there in her face and in her eyes, so many things worth knowing. Beautiful things. Things she never told me.
Once again, somehow, it got pushed back.
Thirty, thirty-five… I began to wonder whether it would ever happen. When? At fifty, sixty, seventy? When would I know? It's been a long, slow preparation. But that was the flaw in my thinking as long as I can remember. There will never come a day when the time is right for it to begin. I will never be ready. For this waiting, the dogged hours and decades of it, is in fact my life, the very stuff and substance of it. This is, in a word, It. The real McCoy and the genuine article. The which than which there is no whicher. It always has been. It always will be. That's all there is. There ain't no more.
He focused his attention. Time was passing even now, as inexorably as the falling of a scythe. He opened the book. He began to read.
What he experienced during the next few minutes was simple but exquisite, as unexpected as a kiss in the middle of a fight to the death. So pure and direct, such a pleasant escape that Joe only wished he had read it when he was a boy. It was exactly what he needed, though he could not have realized that until now. The more he read the more familiar it became. It contained all of his favorite story elements, arranged and combined in perfect proportion. There was even a timeless yet unpretentious moral for him to ponder at the end. By the time he finished he was almost certain he had read it before, a long time ago, just out of reach of memory. I would have thought of it myself, if it had occurred to me. If I were a writer, of course. He could not find the name of an author or copyright owner anywhere in the book. It was without a doubt one of the best stories he had ever read in his life.
He closed the book, amazed.
No wonder the reading room is so popular, he thought. If everything is as perfectly written as that. So this is why Rose fell for their line. How could she not? If all the books
are this good—if the introductory book in the lobby is half as good—then it's inconceivable that anyone could resist.
He reached for the second volume, opened it and scanned a few lines.
Unbelievably, it was even better than the first. Richer, more detailed, more psychological in its approach. It cut closer and closer to what was truly on his mind. The answers seemed to have been laid out for him in a neat progression, one step ahead of his own thinking.
But there was no time.
He flipped ahead through the laminated pages.
Well, he thought, either my problems are more universal than I supposed, or else Mason Flowers has achieved a level of insight into the human condition that Freud only strived for. If this pseudo-scientific religion—or pseudo-religious science—is being franchised in every mall in every city across the country, there's no stopping it. The potential is awesome.
But hold on. Hold on a minute.
He closed the book and set it back on the stand. He leaned away from it. He watched as it appeared to flatten and become thinner, as the padded cover settled back into place.
He counted off a few seconds to be sure. Then he reached for the third volume, flicking its cover open with his fingernail and quickly withdrawing his hand.
The print inside was moving.
It could have been an optical illusion, a trick of the lighting.
But no.
As he leaned out of its field the lines froze, half-formed, and then slowly proceeded to melt back into the center of the page.
These books, he realized, are reading me.
That's it. The books in the lobby are teasers, able to provide just enough of what you want to know in the middle of a hot afternoon to make you feel refreshed and renewed. And to be sure you come back for more.
Of course you would want to go on to the first Step. How could you resist? The books are picking your brain, taking their cues from your own mind, replicating and mimicking and giving back what you want to hear but can't formulate consciously for yourself. Each person who handles Volume I thinks it's the best book he or she has ever read. How could it be otherwise? The volumes become progressively more sophisticated, and you're hooked. The ink, whatever it is—telepathic bacteria, if that can be believed; have mercy—is produced in strains of increasing sensitivity, so that the Final Step…
He grabbed the carton and took out Volume X.
I want to go all the way, he thought. I want the Big One, the full treatment, same as Rose. So I can know. So I can understand what's happened to her.
Telepathic bacteria. What a concept. From where? From space, the kid said. From somewhere in orbit. How long have they been there? If that's the case, they could be out there forming and re-forming themselves into anything the world wants to see. Flying saucers. Invaders from Mars. Spurious television signals, maybe. Who knows? Escapees from Uranus. A message from the archetypal God of our dreams. The Living Word.
That, he thought, is the Way of the Wach.
The final volume was bound on a grand scale, huge and ribbed and weighty. To befit that last, Really Big Donation. Of cours
e. He scanned the instructions on the cover.
Do not hold in hands until ready to use.
Place fingers in hand grips before opening.
Wait ten seconds.
Do not set book down until you are finished.
Wait ten seconds before closing cover.
You may feel slightly drowsy. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery.
Thank you.
His hands were shaking.
He balanced the heavy book. The hand grips were two sets of finger moldings embossed into the front and back covers. In order to use it, you had to insert your hands into the spaces. It was the only way you could get the book open without losing your grip.
With difficulty he tipped the edge to the light and examined the openings. There was a tiny silver point at the end of each thumb space.
He drew up his legs and supported the book on his knees. Touching only a corner, he raised the front cover an inch, two inches.
The small silver point within, a needle, flashed in the lamplight as it extended a few millimeters.
Enough to break the skin, he realized, and get inside you, into your bloodstream and so into your brain, to get to the thoughts that are most deeply hidden. The pain, the repressed memories. To seek them out and absorb them and take them away. To eat them, like bacteria. Yes. That is why each Volume X can only be used once. It feeds; it fills up. After it has cleansed you and made you free.
I'm ready, he thought. Oh God, am I. Lift the scales from my eyes and the burden from my soul. Do it.
He hesitated. He stopped himself. He put the book down.
He climbed out of the chair and went to the shelf. There. Another recently-used Volume X lying in its carton, waiting to be resealed and returned for purging. Was it the one administered to Rose Marie this afternoon?
It has to be, he thought. What it took from her is still trapped there between its bloated covers. I need to know what it was. The suffering she carried with her so quietly for so long until it became too much for her to bear. The pain of the last fifteen years. The pain of her life with me, which I never knew anything about, which I was too blind to see. Let me take it into myself, all of it, and if need be let it do to me what it did to her, if that is the only way. But let me know it before the last evidence of our life together is erased forever from the universe.
He took the used copy of Volume X down from the shelf. He leaned back. He inserted his fingers. Into these poor hands, he thought. With a rush he opened the cover.
His eyelids feathered shut. Darkness swirled around him.
It was so easy and yet so hard to let go. Going away, he thought. Going. Gone.
As this comes in, so much pain will go anywhere.
Good-by to all I loved. Good-by to my years of idle dreaming, the minutiae which adds up to the definition of a human life. Good-by to those I never forgot.
Good-by, at last, Julie London. You might as well go now. Good-by, Shirley MacLaine in Artists and Models, Patricia Smith in The Bachelor Party and Beatrice Pearson in Force of Evil and Barbara Ruick in Carousel… Good-by, Pat Crowley in Money From Home and Marge Champion in Showboat and Janet Leigh in Houdini and Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide. Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and Leslie Caron in Lili, Kay Kendall in Genevieve and Joan Collins in Sea Wife and Terry Moore in Beneath the 12-Mile Reef and Sophia Loren in Houseboat and Gloria Grahame in The Man Who Never Was… you lived on unchanged for a time in me. Debra Paget in Birds of Paradise and little Debbie Reynolds Singin' In the Rain, Sherry Jackson in Come Next Spring and Susannah York in The Greengage Summer. Sarah Miles in Time Lost and Time Remembered. Luanna Anders and Daria Halprin. Janet Margolin. Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun. Young Lana Turner. Ingrid Bergman in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Claire Bloom in Limelight. Jean Simmons in The Blue Lagoon. Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief and Ida Lupino and Marilyn Monroe, and Brenda Scott and Annie Helm and Annie Ditchburn. Brenda Vacarro in Summertree. Jean Seberg and Jeanne Crain and Jessica Harper and Jessica Lange, Donna Mills and Donna Loren, Susan Penhaligon and Susan George, Barbara Carrera and Barbara Steele. Joan Goodfellow in Buster and Billie. Mariette Hartley. Senta Berger. Maria Schneider and Maria Schell. Catherine Deneuve. Monica Vitti. Joanna Pettet and Joanna Cameron and Joanna Lumley and Joanna Cassidy. Ursula Andress. Margot Kidder. Jane Seymour. Caroline Munro. Kathleen Beller and Kathleen Quinlan, Roseanna Arquette and Pamela Ludwig and Pamela Franklin and Bonnie Bedelia and P.J. Soles… Too many to name. And to the frame I never found, the most beautiful I've ever seen from a movie I can't remember, a girl surrounded by flowers with the sun at her back, burning her image into my brain, whose face I cannot see. Good-by to you all.
He felt a cool jet of antiseptic spray on his thumbs, and then the images flowed in.
His life—or was it Rose Marie's—flashed before his eyes, moments that became feelings, summers that went on forever, instants that flew past in the blinking of an eye. Days longer than any nights, nights that never ended. Every bit, every scrap and every second and the shadow of every move and the shape of every feature and the whorls of her skin and the contour of every touch, and the whispering away and the squandering of it all, second by second, the good and the bad thrown out together, as if none of it had mattered more than the flickering of a wing across the sun. All speeding backwards to the first, the second in time when it began, every breath of it back to the beginning.
He felt it eddy around him, and clear.
He was sitting. Only it was not he. It was she, Rose Marie. Someone was walking this way across the grass, an expanse of electric green spread like a bright carpet as far as the eye could see. A man, a young man, the sun flashing his hair into the brilliance of flames, behind him the forgotten buildings of a college campus.
He looked down at his hands. She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap against the sparkling yellow dress. It was the first of May and there were flowers everywhere. He stopped in front of her. She looked up. In his eyes she saw herself reflected, beautiful for the first time. The flowers were all around, trembling behind her, the blazing sun coruscating through them and through her with a great and mighty light.
He was, she thought, the most handsome boy she had ever seen.
"Hello," he said, his voice vibrating the air.
"Hello," she said, afraid that her own voice would not be heard for the pounding. "W-who are you?"
Joe Ivy held to this image for as long as he could, until it flared out and burned through his eyelids. Then there was only the marking of his own pulse, alone in darkness.
And:
OFF.
THE SHADOWS, KITH & KIN
By Joe R. Lansdale
Contents
A Quick Author’s Note
The Shadows, Kith and Kin
Deadman’s Road
The Long Dead Day
White Mule, Spotted Pig
Bill, the Little Steam Shovel
Alone (With Melissa Mia Hall)
The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance
The Gentleman’s Hotel
A Quick Author’s Note
When I was a child, very early on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Pretty much from the beginning, having paper and pencil in hand, I knew it was my calling. The more I read, the more the need to write was fueled. The more I saw stories on TV or in the movies, and especially in comic books, which at that time could do things movies couldn’t do—it’s a toss-up now—the more I wanted to make my living as a freelance writer.
I didn’t know what a freelance writer was then, but I knew I wanted to make my living making up stories. So many things influenced me. DC Comics had a tremendous impact. The Iliad and The Odyssey. Fairy tales. Stories of King Arthur’s knights. Robin Hood. Folk tales.
The Jungle Book by Kipling dropped on me like an anvil. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels bumped up against me so hard I’m still bruised. Robert E. Howard tossed a kind of gory glitter in my hair. Edgar Allen Poe creeped me. Bradbu
ry astonished me. Robert Bloch made me wonderfully nervous, and Richard Matheson made me deliciously paranoid. Hemingway sounded neat. Steinbeck touched on things I knew about. He wrote about my people, my parents, their past. Fitzgerald painted beautiful pictures. So many writers. So many different kinds of magic. I also read stories from the Bible, which frankly I don’t take as a divine word from anyone, but it has lots of good tales full of horror and murder and rapes and incest and heroic deeds. In fact, it’s a lot like The Iliad, in that it is an adventure story mixed with history and legends and divine intervention. I’ve always thought it odd that people can’t see the connection between the two, or realize that if you can believe in God interacting with man in the Bible, then what makes The Iliad just an adventure story and the Bible divine? They found Troy didn’t they, but does that mean the rest of The Iliad is true? Does it mean Zeus and Hera are real, the other Greek gods? In the case of the Bible they can’t even prove the Hebrews were ever held captive in Egypt, let alone that they escaped by parting the Red Sea.
The bottom line is this, telling stories, writing stories, is about telling convincing lies.
Here are my lies. I hope they are convincing. Some of them contain elements of truth, just like The Iliad and the Bible. I owned mules and I plowed them instead of racing them, but it gave me affection for them, so it’s only natural that I would write about them. And I have. Twice. Once in a story called “The Mule Rustlers,” a best of the year pick for Otto Penzler’s Best Mystery Stories and part of the contents for my last collection Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories. And now there’s “White Mule, Spotted Pig,” one of the best stories I’ve ever written.
“The Shadows, Kith and Kin,” which gives the book its title, is based on fact, but is not a factual story. It is about someone not too unlike Charles Whitman, who, when I
was young, climbed up in The University of Texas tower in Austin and shot a large number of people with a high powered rifle. I went to school there some years later,