The Best of Lucius Shepard

by The Best of Lucius Shepard (v5. 5) (epub)

  and they had no rights in the matter, and I walked

  away from Parma, bearing signed contracts

  from the scientists, and another presented me

  by a publisher who, disguised as a tree stump,

  had watched the entire proceeding, and now

  owned the rights to the lie of my life story.

  My future, it seemed, was assured.

  White trains, with no tracks

  continue to appear on the outskirts

  of small anonymous towns, places

  whose reasons have dried up, towns

  upon which dusk settles

  like a statement of intrinsic greyness,

  and some will tell you these trains

  signal an Apocalyptic doom, and

  others will say they are symptomatic

  of mass hysteria, the reduction of culture

  to a fearful and obscure whimsey, and

  others yet will claim that the vanishing men

  are emblematic of the realities of sexual politics

  in this muddled, weak-muscled age.

  But I believe they are expressions of a season

  that occurs once every millennium or so,

  a cosmic leap year, that they are merely

  a kind of weather, as unimportant and unique

  as a sun shower or a spell of warmth in mid-winter,

  a brief white interruption of the ordinary

  into which we may walk and emerge somewhat

  refreshed, but nothing more.

  I lecture frequently upon this subject

  in towns such as Parma, towns whose lights

  can be seen glittering in the dark folds of lost America

  like formless scatters of stars, ruined constellations

  whose mythic figure has abdicated to a better sky,

  and my purpose is neither to illuminate nor confound,

  but is rather to engage the interest of those women

  whose touch is generally accompanied by

  thirty days durance on cornbread and cold beans,

  a sentence against which I have been immunized

  by my elevated status, and perhaps my usage

  of the experience is a measure of its truth,

  or perhaps it is a measure of mine.

  Whatever the case, white trains move silent as thought

  through the empty fields, voyaging from nowhere to nowhere,

  taking on no passengers, violating

  no regulation other than the idea of order,

  and once they have passed we shake our heads,

  returning to the mild seasons of our lives,

  and perhaps for a while we cling more avidly

  to love and loves, realizing we inhabit a medium

  of small magical transformations that like overcoats

  can insulate us against the onset of heartbreak weather,

  hoping at best to end in a thunder of agony

  and prayer that will move us down through

  archipelagoes of silver light to a morbid fairy tale

  wherein we will labor like dwarves at the question

  of forever, and listen to a grumbling static from above

  that may or may not explain in some mystic tongue

  the passage of white trains.

  Jack’s Decline

  At first they strapped him to the bed and let him howl, let him try to vomit out the red, raw thing inside his hate. He would scream until his voice became a hoarse, scratchy chord, and then he would lapse into a fugue, his mind gone as blank as the gray stone walls. Often during these quiet times, the man who washed and fed him would bring strangers into the room, charging them a fee to have a peek at the greatest villain of the age, and they would stand beside the bed, shadows in the half light, and say, “That’s the Ripper? Why, that poor sod couldn’t butter his own toast, let alone do murder. I want me money back!” And their disbelief would rankle the demon within him, and he would scream louder than ever, shaking the bed and delighting in his visitors’ fearful attitudes.

  Later, after dozens of therapies—torments, really—and doctors whose manner was unanimously neutral, years and years later when he began to suffer guilt and wanted to atone, he realized there was no possibility of atonement, that his demon was not accessible to moral remedies. For a while he tried to deny the horrors of his past, to steep himself in the genteel associations of his childhood, in memories of gracious estates and garden parties. But he found that more vivid memories possessed him. Those five slatternly faces going slack when they saw the blade, their scent of sweat and cheap perfume, and the hot true perfume of their blood bubbling over his fingers. He yearned to engage once again in those terrible amours; yet he was also repelled by that yearning, and these contrary pressures drove him to consider suicide. But it did not seem a sufficient punishment: death for him would be surcease, and he could think of no means of extinction vile enough to earn him absolution. And so, despairing, dulled by despair, he wandered the corridors of his family’s keep, becoming—as the years passed and the century turned—a numb meat of a man with graying hair and a gray pallor, whose fingers would sometimes clench spasmodically, and whose eyes would sometimes appear to grow dark and lose their animation, like pools in which the fish had long since ceased to spawn.

  In 1903 there was a reawakening of interest in the murders, new clues and rumors that struck close to the bone, and his family—none of whom he had seen since the beginning of his confinement—gave orders that he be moved from England, fearing that their awful secret would be brought to light. He was issued a German passport under the name of Gerhard Steigler, and one night in the autumn of that year, along with his warders, his doctor of the moment, and a trunkful of the drugs that kept his demon tame, he crossed the English Channel to Calais, and there entrained for Krakow in Poland. From Krakow he was transported by coach to a hunting lodge in the northeast of the country, a rambling structure of whitewashed walls and pitch-coated beams, set among rumpled hills thicketed with chokecherry, forested with chestnuts and stunted water oaks. Travel had rekindled his spirits somewhat, and during his first year at the lodge, he came again to derive a mild pleasure from life. He liked the isolation of the place, and he would walk for hours through the woods, often winding up atop a hill from which he could look westward over a checkerboard of cultivated fields, of wheat and barley and sorghum. Here he would sit and watch cloud shadows rushing across the land, great shafts of light piercing down and fading, the golden fields dappling with an alternation of bright and dark, and it seemed to him that this constant shifting display was an airy machinery, immaterial clockwork that registered the inner processes of time. He realized that but for a brief, bloody season, his life had evinced this same insubstantiality, this same lack of true configuration, and as the years slipped away, he returned each afternoon to commune with that vast, complicated emblem of light and shade, believing that therein he could perceive the winnowing of his days.

  If he were to look eastward from the hilltop—something he rarely permitted himself to do—his eye would encounter a smallish town of thatch and whitewash and curling chimney smokes, its church steeple poking up like a rifle sight. There, he knew, would be women of the sort he fancied. The thought of their bellies gleaming pale, the neatly packaged meats of their sex awaited a knife to reveal their mysteries, that would start him trembling, and for days thereafter he would be overborne by his demon’s urges and have to be restrained.

  During that first winter, in order to perfect his role as a member of the German aristocracy, he immersed himself in the study of the language. He had always been adept at learning, and by the time the spring thaw had arrived, he had become fluent in the spoken tongue and was capable of reading even the most difficult of texts. He enjoyed the works of Schiller and Nietzsche, but when he came to Faustus and its humanistic depiction of evil, he was so nettled by the author’s dearth of understanding that he hurled the book out the window. Demons were not nearl
y as personable as Goethe had described them. They were parasites, less creatures unto themselves than the seepage of a dark force that underlay all creation, that—presented with an opening—would pour inside you, seducing not your soul but your blood, your cells, feeding upon you and growing to assume hideous shapes. He had seen the nesting places of such demons in the bodies of the women he had slain, had caught brief glimpses of them as they scurried for cover deeper into their bloody caves.

  Turning from literature, he developed an interest in gardening, and would work from dawn until dusk in his plot, exerting himself so strenuously that his sleep was free of nightmares. But in the end this, too, failed him. Things grew to obscenely feminine proportions in that rich soil. Beneath heart-shaped leaves, the snap beans dangled like a bawd’s earrings, and he would unearth strange hairy roots that with their puckered surfaces bore an uncanny resemblance to the female genitalia. Once again he despaired, considered suicide, and sank into a torpor.

  In December of 1915, when he was fifty-six years old, a new doctor came to the lodge: a dapper little man in his forties, brimming with energy and good humor and talk of subconscious drives, neuroses, and the libido. The doctor treated him as if he were a man and not an aberration, and through hypnosis, several childhood traumas were revealed, notable among them a humiliating evening spent at a brothel when he was twelve, brought there by the family coachman and left alone in the common room, a target for the taunts of the whores. The doctor believed these incidents were seeds that had grown to fruition and inspired his murderous acts; but he rejected this theory.

  “You claim, Doctor,” he said, “that once I accept the connection between my childhood pain and the murders, a cure will be forthcoming. But those experiences only weakened me, made me susceptible to the demon and allowed him to enter and take possession of my body. There were supernatural forces in play. Witness the arrangements I made of the viscera…like some sort of cabalistic sign. I was driven to create that arrangement by my demon. It was the mark of his triumph over the demons encysted within the women.”

  The doctor sighed. “It seems to me you have invented this demon in order to shift blame to its shoulders.”

  “You think I am denying guilt?”

  “Not entirely, but…”

  “Believe me, Doctor,” he said, “despite my inability to exorcise the demon, I am expert at guilt.”

  He enjoyed these exchanges not for their intellectual content, but because he felt the doctor liked him. He had been self-absorbed for so long that he had forgotten even the concept of friendship, and the hope that he could actually have a friend caused him no end of excitement. He had become a decent chef over the years, and he would prepare the doctor special dinners accompanied by fine wines and venerable brandies. He honed his chess game so as to provide worthy opposition for the doctor, who had been a schoolboy champion; he took renewed interest in worldly affairs in order to make better conversation. Things, he believed, were going swimmingly. But one afternoon as they walked along the crest of a wooded hill, in a companionable moment he threw his arm about the doctor’s shoulder and felt the man stiffen and shrink away from his touch. He withdrew his arm, looked into the doctor’s eyes, and saw there fear and revulsion. What he had taken for friendship, he realized, had merely been a superior form of bedside manner.

  “I…” The doctor came a step toward him, contempt, and pity vying for control of his expression. “I’m sorry. It’s just…”

  The eviscerated flesh, the severed organs, the blood.

  “I understand, Doctor,” he said. “It’s quite all right.” He spun on his heel and walked back to the lodge alone, back to despair. It was, he knew, no less than he deserved. But he could not help feeling betrayed.

  His seventieth birthday passed, his seventy-fifth, and with the decline of his flesh, it seemed his menace also declined, for his family stopped sending doctors and he came to believe the men who cared for him were no longer warders but merely servants. This slackening of concern unsettled him, and like a good madman he continued to take his drugs and sleep in a bed with leather restraints. He had hoped senility would erode his memories, but he retained an uncommon clarity of mind and his body remained hale, albeit prone to aches and pains. It was, he thought, his demon that kept him strong, that refused to permit a collapse into peaceful decay. He still felt the violent urges that had destroyed his life and others, and to quell them he would spend hours each day maintaining a surgical sharpness to the edges of the kitchen knives, thinking that this pretense would convince the demon that its bloodlust would soon be sated.

  Not long after his eightieth birthday, he received a visitor from the town: a doddering priest older than himself, who had come to warn him of imminent danger. The Nazis were massing on the border, and rumor had it an invasion was near. He invited the priest into the main hall, a high-ceilinged room centered by a long table and lorded over by a chandelier of iron and crystal, and he asked who these Nazis were, explaining that it had been years since he had paid any attention to politics.

  “Evil men,” the priest told him. “An army of monsters ruled by a madman.”

  Intrigued, he asked to hear more and listened intently to tales of outrage and excess, of Hitler and his bloody friends. He thought it would be interesting to meet these men, to learn if their demons were akin to his.

  “I sense in you a troubled soul,” said the priest as he made to leave. “If you wish I will hear your confession.”

  “Thank you, Father,” he said. “But I have spent these past fifty years in confession and it has served no good purpose.”

  “Is there anything else I might do?”

  He considered asking for the rite of exorcism, but the notion of this frail old man contending with the fierce horror inhabiting his flesh was ludicrous in the extreme. “No, Father,” he said. “I fear my sins are beyond your precinct. I’m more likely to receive comfort from the Nazis.”

  One morning a month or so after the priest’s visit, he waked to find himself alone. He went through the house, calling the names of his servants, to no avail; then, more puzzled than alarmed, he walked to his hilltop vantage and looked east. Dozens and dozens of tanks were cutting dusty swaths across the fields, rumbling, clanking, at that distance resembling toys run wild on a golden game board. Black smoke billowed from the little town, and the church steeple was no longer in evidence. When dusk began to gather, he returned to the lodge, half expecting to find it reduced to rubble. But it was intact, and though he waited up most of the night to greet them, no soldiers came to disrupt the peace and quiet.

  The next afternoon, however, a touring car pulled up to the lodge and disgorged seven young men, all wearing shiny boots and black uniforms with silver emblems on the collars shaped like twin lightning bolts. They were suspicious of him at first, but on seeing his proof of German citizenship, they treated him as if he were a fine old gentleman, addressing him as “Herr Steigler” and asking permission to billet in the lodge. “My home is yours,” he told them, and he set before them his finest wines, which they proceeded to swill down with not the least appreciation for their nose or bouquet.

  They propped their feet on the table, scarring its varnish, and they told crude jokes, hooting and slapping their thighs, spilling the wines and breaking glasses, offering profane toasts to their venerable host. Watching them, he found it difficult to believe that these louts were creatures of evil; if they were possessed, it must be by demons of the lowest order, ones that would quail before his own. Still, he withheld final judgment, partly because their captain, who remained aloof from the carousing, was of a different cut. He was a thin, black-haired man with pale, pocked skin and a slit of a mouth…Indeed, all his features seemed products of a minimalist creator, being barely raised upon his face, lending it an aspect both cruel and disinterested. His behavior, too, was governed by this minimalism. He sipped his wine, conversed in a monotone, and displayed an economy of gesture that—to his host’s mind—appeared to signa
l a pathological measure of self-discipline.

  “What do you de here, Herr Steigler?” he asked at one point. “I assume, of course, that you are retired, but I have seen no evidence of previous occupation.”

  “Poor health,” said the old man, “has precluded my taking up a profession. I read, I walk in the woods and meditate.”

  “And what do you meditate upon?”

  “The past, mostly. That, and the nature of evil.”

  The rigor of the captain’s expression was disordered by a tick of a smile. “Evil,” he said, savoring the word. “And have you arrived at any conclusions?”

  The old man gave thought to bringing up the subject of demons, but instead said, “No, only that it exists.”

  “Perhaps,” said the captain, with a superior smile, “you believe we are evil.”

  “Are you?”

  “If I were, I would hardly admit to it.”

  “Why not? Even were I disposed against evil, I am old and feeble. I could do nothing to menace you.”

  “True,” said the captain, running his finger around the mouth of his glass. “Then I will tell you that I may well be evil. Evil is a judgment made by history, and history may judge us as such.”

  “That is a fool’s definition,” said the old man. “To think that evil is not self-aware is foolish to the point of being evil. But you are not evil, Captain. You merely wish to be.”

  The captain dismissed this comment with a haughty laugh. “I am a soldier, Herr Steigler. A good one, I believe. This may call for a repression of one’s conscience at times, but I would scarcely deem that evil. And as for my wishing to be so, my only wish is to win the war. Nothing more.”

  The old man made a gesture that directed the captain’s attention toward his uniform. “Black cloth and patent leather and silver arcana. These are not the lineaments of a good soldier, Captain. They are designed to inspire dread. But apart from being psychological weapons, they are ritual expressions. Invocations of evil. You had best beware. Your invocations may prove effective and allow evil to possess you. Should that occur, you will have no joy in it. Take my word.”