by Jack Ketchum
He approached the house as he always did, carefully, soundlessly. By now it was his habit. An old woman had got Wayne Lovett with a shotgun as he walked through his own front door one night.
His letter had fallen through the mail slot.
He opened it.
Just above his own name was Henley’s. It amused him to think that such a dangerous world should also be so damn predictable. He read the letter through and then read it again.
The aforesigned pass on to you all responsibility for their actions, past, present and future. We deem this the highest honor, the highest challenge . . .
The colorless language disappointed him. There was nothing here either to inspire or elate. Was that exactly unexpected?
You may of course choose to accept or reject this responsibility . . .
He knew the contents. The contents were a matter of public record. It was the wording, the exact form and syntax which had fascinated him, which remained secret to any who had not already got the letter and now he found that they had no power to stir him.
To reject, merely add a new name to the space provided beneath your own. Be sure to check the list thoroughly to see that you do not repeat any name already entered above . . .
If this was the most important moment of his life he felt no resonance to it. Everything, everything was missing! He felt nothing. Only a great void in which a stranger who looked like himself held an odd but commonplace form letter. Who exactly dreamt this up? he wondered. And where? In what grey office building? At what grim bar?
Its conclusion was worst of all.
Declared by the will of God and the First Congress of Faith, Abraham White, founder. All bless.
His Gethsemane bored him.
I keep standing staring at the thing wondering who to send it on to. Someone in the family, maybe, some uncle or cousin. Maybe one of the kids. No point making them wait as long as I have, getting old waiting, getting more and more nervous. Besides, a lot of kids seem to enjoy themselves at this.
Maybe I should send it to Jamie. Not strange at all that we should talk about it today, as though it were understood between us—first Henley, then me, then Jamie. Or Jamie and then me. Whichever.
I wonder if I can do this. It’s as hard for me to choose freedom as it is to choose the other. I should not have got this letter. I’m not cut out for such decisions. Jamie would have been much more suitable. He’s smarter, tougher, more thoughtful.
Strange it doesn’t say what to do in order to end the chain. Everything else is so neatly and clinically spelled out for you. But I guess that’s understood. It’s the old, old concept of sin-eater again, only more extreme.
To end the chain you’d have to die. To accept responsibility for all these crimes nothing short of death makes sense. And a hideous death at that. The worst death imaginable. What’s needed is a martyr, a brand-new Christ. If it were me I’d start by putting out my eyes.
Do I send the letter to somebody I hate or somebody I love? Do I spare those I love the pain of waiting or take a chance that the letter might miss them entirely, as unlikely as that seems? Henley neither loved me nor hated me. He just knew me. Was it fair of him or even decent to involve me? I wonder what went through his mind, writing down my name.
But I shouldn’t try to decide through Henley.
A martyrdom I think is fascinating. I like the idea of putting out the eyes. Without the eyes there would be no going back, you couldn’t even see where to sign anymore even if you wanted to, you couldn’t see the list of names. The names, the writing, the ordinary symbols behind which all these people hide would be obliterated instantly. All that would remain is crime. Their crimes would enter you free and clear like breath through the nostrils to pollute you through and through.
Next you should break the eardrums. See no evil, hear no evil. That’s the ticket. A pencil should do it. Break it off in the ear itself. Two pencils, one for each ear. It would take great resolve but that’s the idea. A martyr’s gestures have got to be big gestures. All these actions would have great importance. Mythic importance. In years to come men would pour over the corpse to discover the hidden meaning to each nuance of the slaughter. A kind of divine autopsy. Every move had to leave a clue and point the way. The key to Paradise from the black mouth of the Savior.
Meat scissors at the root of the tongue. Speak no evil. A mouth filled with gore, with the hot brine of life. One’s own cup drunk dry. Be careful, Alfred. It would take a poet to see that one. And most of the poets are dead.
Maybe Jamie.
I really should pass it on to him. See if he follows through as he said he would. Probably he lied, though, or at least exaggerated. A liar under the gun.
I have no faith in anyone.
Let’s see. What’s next?
If only it were possible to extract the brain without destroying the body. It would be good to add think no evil to our new easy-step commandments. If you could tap the skull and drain it dry and then go on from there. But no, you have to stick to what’s possible so the brain and heart are out of the question until the very end because clearly it’s got to be slow, a death to last forever, a death commensurate with the crime, the one really emphatic death amid all these careless neutral ones.
One should break the legs and smash the bones of the feet with hammers, crush the fingertips and sever the thumbs. Especially important, the thumbs. But first the genitals should be torn away and the teeth smashed and swallowed, one should have to throw oneself against a wall or table until the backbone cracks and the skull is fractured, long sharp knives one should shove up one’s ass, the nose must be severed, the nipples burned black.
All this before my brains tumble free down my face and chest and puddle on the floorboards of this old dusty room.
It would be delightful to know before it is impossible to know what the mistake was, the error in composition, the failure of the glands or of the nervous system. I really don’t want to hurt anybody, least of all myself. But I think that’s asking too much.
I have to get busy.
I have a message to send. A personal message. From the end of the chain.
You’re full of shit, every one of you. I’m about to prove it.
Forever
It was many years ago over what was probably a little too much Almaden white wine and marijuana that my wife Rita, my old lady in those days, remember? said to me that to her way of thinking the real goal of life was simple—it was life, more and more of it, moments to days to years down a long winding path through eternity. That the ultimate goal, obviously, was to live forever. She believed that someday we’d master that trick too and was mildly pissed off that ours did not look like the generation who were going to manage it.
I remember she cited our ever-increasing lifespan, our extended years of health and vigor. We were moving, she said, in baby steps in that direction. In the Middle Ages you were lucky to hit thirty. Our parents could probably count on seventy. And then the urge toward procreation. A pretty poor substitute for any single organism’s struggle toward eternity but as yet the best we had. Because at least it begged the gene-pool foward, it gave us time, as a species, to get the hang of it.
I said I didn’t want to live forever. It would get boring.
No it wouldn’t, she said. Think of all there is to learn, all the books you could read, the people you’d get to meet, the places you could travel. Moons and planets maybe. The only limit would be your own imagination.
She had me there. Hell, I prided myself in my imagination. What young would-be writer didn’t?
So let me get this right, I said. Nobody would ever die?
Sure they would. An accident could get you. A natural disaster.
But aside from that we’d all live forever? Even all those right-wing assholes out there? Kissinger and Nixon?
It seemed to me there were flaws here.
The way I remember it now she sort of sighed and smiled at me like you just don’t get it, dummy, do you
and said something about time, about time being on our side in this. Because if you had all eternity ahead of you, why would you grasp at things and fight for money and fame and land and position, for protection, it was all about protection, wasn’t it? Why would you feel all this hate and rage toward the other guy? Time would sort that out because it would take away the fear. And it was fear that drove you. Fear of a poverty you could never get out of because you didn’t have the time to figure out how, of never having accomplished anything worthwhile because life was too damn short and your daily needs too pressing for you to try to find out exactly what it was you could do. Fear of failing health and an ugly painful death surrounded by strangers and tubes and wires in some antiseptic hospital.
Limitless time would stop wars. Global and personal. Time would gut all the purses and distribute the wealth. Time would empty hospitals.
She got pretty passionate, I recall.
We did in those days.
I miss them.
And I miss her passion too.
Until recently I took a lot of walks. Rita and I lived in small two-bedroom hundred-and-fifty-year-old house in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, in our souls die-hard hippies to the end though we’d long since given up on soy and sprouts and brown rice. Our acre plot of land lay between the State Park on one side and ten more acres of forest owned by a pair of New Yorkers, brothers by the name of Kaltsas, who bought it in the ’60s for tax purposes. They’d never intended to build. So there was plenty of space to meander.
There’s a place on the Kaltsas property I always found myself going back to. Especially in summer. It’s a ledge, a high outcropping of bare rock up a trail thirty feet or so from a fast-running stream. But it’s a gradual, easy climb up the eastern slope. Once you’re up there you’re standing beside a waterfall on the western side which pours down over the rocks into a pool you can wade in up to your waist if we’ve had a little rain. You can drink the water. It’s cold and clean. Beyond the stream is thick forestland, cool even in summer. Turn to the east and you’re looking beyond some tall oak and birch trees to the mountains far away across a wide sloping field of grass. No thicket, no scrub, just tall waving grass. Until the treeline at the foot of the mountains halts its gentle march.
Stand here on a hot sunny day and the shade-trees above your head, the breeze and the cool stream comprise a kind of natural air-conditioning.
The smells are wonderful.
Wet rock and sediment. Grass and trees.
And roses.
From up out of the grasslands on the eastern side wild roses creep the rock. I don’t know how they got there. You see them more often along the roadsides here.
But roses are hardy. They’ll grow practically anywhere. And they’ll keep growing. They’re hellish to unroot.
These are not the kind of roses you’d be likely to send your mom on Valentine’s Day. They’re prickly as porcupines for starters. The flowers are much smaller than the ones you see in the florist shops and many fail to open. But as I say, roses are a hardy species and these always seemed to want my ledge, my rock. Maybe it’s the scent of water that draws them. Maybe they want over the rock to the waterfall and the stream. I don’t know. But the smell that drifts back and forth on the breeze up here puts most store-bought varieties to shame.
Roses were Aphrodite’s flowers.
When Rita started to fail on me I came here quite a lot.
Bed sores bloom too. They open from the center outwards. Pressure ulcers the doctors call them. Across the bony areas of the body especially—the spine, pelvis, heels—they appear first as abrasions and then blister up white and then slowly become shallow and then deep craters that need to be drained and packed and peel back healthy skin along with the dead and dying, opening across the flesh like wet red flowers. Their scent is foul. You clean them with saline, moisturize them with corn starch and try to keep the ulcer moist and the surrounding skin dry. And still they spread.
Bone-cancer patients like Rita see a lot of them.
People like me who suddenly find themselves caregivers see a lot of gauze pads and disposable rubber gloves and wet-to-dry dressings and foam wedge mattresses—trying to fight off the twin enemies of bacteria and the sheer press of gravity. Sometimes we win. Sometimes the patient goes into remission, can get out of bed and walk around again and if the ulcers aren’t too bad and have been carefully attended-to they disappear with time. The bloom fades, shrivels into scarred puckered flesh.
That first time I mostly remember turning her every two hours, even at night, even in her sleep and I remember waiting for the nurse to arrive in the morning so I could get some sleep myself. I remember changing her bedclothes and dressing the wounds which weren’t too bad this time and washing her with warm water and collecting her dry fallen hair off the pillow when she wasn’t looking.
Days into weeks. Weeks into months. Scoring dope for her in Plymouth against the nausea, feeling slightly old to be buying pot but determined. Riding with her in the ambulance for her chemo treatments in the city until finally they took and I had some semblance of my Rita back again, a brave pale wife who could walk with the aid of a walker and then later with a cane and who insisted on doing the cooking and light housekeeping even though I’d gotten pretty good at both by then.
I’d be writing in the study—the spare bedroom, never used except by the occasional guest—working on yet another of the Jack Pace mystery novels which were our sole bread and butter now that Rita wasn’t up to teaching a mob of third-graders anymore, writing yet one more slim paperback which would earn us fifteen grand if we were lucky, maybe another fifteen abroad and I’d hear her out in the living room, the Electrolux roaring, knowing she was vacuuming the damn rug with one hand while she clung to the walker with the other. I couldn’t stop her. The only time we’d fight was when I’d try to stop her.
I lived in dread of her falling. I dreaded it constantly.
But she didn’t fall. And I suppose the excercise and the familiar feeling of usefulness were good for her because she got better. Once she switched to the cane we started going for walks together, ranging farther and farther afield until one bright hot August morning she asked me to take her up to the rocks on the Kaltsas property. You remember the place, she said. Of course I did. I’d come there so often during her illness I’d practically worn a track there. The ledge always seemed to comfort me.
“You sure you’re up to the climb?”
“No.” She smiled. “But I’m pretty sure I can make it along the stream. Even just a wade in the pool would be nice. Come on. Let’s see what I’m up to.”
She was wearing jeans and a faded denim workshirt and a red scarf wrapped and tied around her head. Her hair hadn’t come back the way we’d hoped it would. Her face was still drawn and the lines around her mouth and eyes cut deep. I thought she was beautiful. My hippie-chick at forty-seven.
“Lead the way,” I told her.
She was right. She made it upstream slowly but without much difficulty and about an hour later, around ten or so, we were standing by the pool.
“I’m beat,” she said. “Let’s sit a while.”
“Still want to go up top there?”
“Sure. In a while.”
We sat down at the edge of the pool and she slipped off her canvas U.S. Keds—no Nikes or Adidas for us—rolled up her jeans and slid her feet into the water. She smiled.
“Mmmmm.”
“Cold?”
“A little. Feels good, though.”
I did the same. The water was icy at first but you got used to it. We splashed our feet a little and leaned back on our elbows into the dappling morning sunlight and watched it play over the water and talked about my latest book. I was having plot-points problems and Rita was always fine at helping. Once we were satisfied that we’d gotten Jack Pace out of his latest jam somewhat realistically she sat up and said, know what? I’m going in.
“You are?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ll freeze to death.”
She smiled and started unbuttoning her shirt. “No I won’t.”
She slipped it off her shoulders. Old habits die hard. She still refused to wear a bra. She unzipped the jeans.
“Well hell, if you can I can.”
“There you go.”
She got hold of the cane and stood and used it for balance while she slid one leg and then the other out of the jeans and then pulled her panties down over her hips which were still bony from weight-loss. You could count her ribs and along her backbone were a few pink scars. I got out of my own clothes and she stepped into the water cane and all and turned to me smiling and then glanced up and said hey.
“What?”
“Look at that.”
I turned to where she was pointing, to the ledge above—my ledge—and saw a small white cat looking down at us. Wide-eyed, curious. Two naked humans about to purposely freeze themselves half to death in cold water. What’s that all about? I laughed.
“That’s Lily,” I said.
“Who?”
“Lily. Liz Jackson’s cat. Liz had her along the day she stopped by with that casserole for us, remember?”
“I don’t. . . .”
“Yeah, I guess you were pretty out of it. She jumped up onto the bed with you. You petted her for a while. Got her purring. Then you fell asleep.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She’s just your basic mutt. Liz got her from the shelter. But you’re right, she is.”
And perched there high on the lip of rock like some animate Egyptian stone statue, a small white shorthair, poised and slim, she was beautiful. Utterly still except for her eyes moving over us, alert to whatever the hell it was we were doing down there.
I stepped into the water. Rita went into a crouch, the waterline sliding up over her breastbone so I did too. We laughed and shivered and then did the only thing reasonable in that sudden cold—held onto one another for dear life, passing body-heat back and forth until finally the temperature was tolerable. I kissed her and stroked her back and she stroked mine and we listened to the stream tumble down off the rocks.