Then he stifled a scream.
There was a tattoo or something there, between his shoulder blades. Peter didn’t have any tats.
Black and white, shimmering, rippling.
He leaned as close as he could to the mirror, turning his head to see behind him, straining his neck.
He moaned. “I’m still flipping out.”
He whimpered. “It looks like the photo Dunk gave me.”
Except it moved. Rosaluna moved, as if still alive. On the brink of death, not quite pushed over it.
Pete wet a washcloth and reached backward, trying to clean the spot, coming at it down over first one shoulder, then the other. Trying to get to it by bending his arm backwards to come up around his ribcage, wishing he was double-jointed. He tried rubbing alcohol, next ammonia, then some of his wife’s oily mascara remover. He took a scalding shower. Could still see the image on the surface of the mirror, even through the hot mist.
He went back to his office. Took from its gift box the movie still Dunkel Friedhof had given him.
Maybe it couldn’t just come from any old made-up scene of death. Perhaps it had to be real to trigger whatever psychic weirdness he was getting.
Peter licked this photo again.
Fade in…
Black and White.
NOW his perspective altered, if only by one or two degrees. Just a layer of gauze ripped away. Plenty enough remaining between him and the ultimate scene of horror.
This time Peter wasn’t Rosaluna. He was the baby, alive for seconds, long enough to see intensely cruel light, to reach for the air for fueling a scream that never extended past a brief, pitiful wail.
Hearing in the distance growing ever dimmer: nonsense, incomprehensible intonations and percussion, might as well have been in a dead language as in a language for the dead.
“Shake, rattle and roll…”
««—»»
Fade out…
Colors.
Peter retched. What came out of his mouth was dry and strange. It unfolded into a thin webwork, imprinted with a baby’s face, sort of tissue-papery, Turin-ish. Very ‘ish’.
««—»»
He stumbled into the kitchen the next morning. The kids were eating a dusty health-food store cereal, sprinkled with skim milk. Each had precisely half of an organic banana—thinly sliced. Only the orange juice looked appetizing. Hey, this was California.
“Morning, Dad,” Ellis greeted him.
“Hi, Daddy,” his daughter seconded.
“Hey,” Peter managed, reaching for coffee. Going past his wife’s green-labeled, insipid-tasting decaf. To the real stuff, Hardcore Columbian. More or less. It was instant so how hardcore could it really be? He mixed some with the hot water from the kettle and drank it, relishing the scorch across his tongue. A lot better than the flavor of old pictures.
Diane was ready to go out the door, even though her own job at the bank didn’t start as early as his at the high school did. In a hurry so she wouldn’t have to speak to him? If the children sensed tension, they pretended not to notice.
The kids were shiny, perspiration on glowing faces. He vaguely recalled hearing the thud-thud through the walls of Hell. They’d both risen early, before dawn, to go outside for the trampoline. That must have annoyed a few of the uptights next door and across the alley.
Peter chuckled. “Looks as if today’s already had its ups and downs, huh?”
Their grins made him very happy. Made him feel more fulfilled than all the birthday lap dances and blow jobs he might have missed.
“And today’s Friday,” Ellis pointed out. “I know I’m gonna live out there on that thing Saturday and Sunday. I’m not comin’ inside at all.”
“You’ll have to bring us our meals out there,” Melody chimed in.
“Well, gee, how’re you going to go to the bathroom?” Pete wanted to know, going with it.
“Have to do it in a bucket and toss it over the fence,” Ellis said.
Melody giggled. “That’ll teach the neighbors to stand so close while they’re spying on us.”
“Children!” Diane snapped, wheeling around, her face mortified. Then she glared at Pete, because he was the cause of this corruption.
Peter laughed hard until coffee came out his nose in two dark brown streams, steaming. That stung.
He could see the serves you right in Diane’s expression. He didn’t care. His kids were happy; at the moment he was, too. Best three out of four.
He didn’t think about last night. That had been an aberration. It was a nightmare better left unpondered. He’d avoided looking at his back as he’d dressed for work—even if it did still itch.
««—»»
“How ya doin’, Bob?” Peter said to the biology teacher as he strolled into the teacher’s lounge before going on to the morning homeroom class.
“Great. How’s ’bout you?” Bob smoked a cigarette, standing near an open window to let the smoke trail out. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be smoking in the building.
Natalie, the chemistry teacher, and Gary, the tennis coach, sat together in a corner. Natalie was quickly eating a small cup of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt as Gary told her in furtive whispers about the latest sighting of one of the school’s ghosts.
“Out on the court in broad daylight.”
“You the only one…?”
“No, two of my students saw it, too. Neither fainted. But, really, since that History Channel special…”
“On the most haunted schools in America? I swear, the stuff they show for the month of October, just because it ends with Halloween. Still, I taped it and sent it to all my relatives. Since they interviewed me…”
Across from them was Jerry Fu-Schaech, one of those Ellis Island hyphenated names probably not even remotely close to the original, from some immigrant ancestor half Chinese, half German, pronounced Foo-Shy when people were being accurate and generous. He was the art teacher, slouched in his own chair which he’d bought and had delivered to the lounge. He had a bad back and needed special lumbar support. He raised hell if anybody else sat there. Even labeled it with a handsewn tag with his name on it.
Jerry didn’t get along with Bob, mostly because Jerry had a habit of wandering into the biology lab when Bob wasn’t there—helping himself to little things he thought he could use in his art class. Sharp instruments, pins, special paper. Even beakers for mixing colors. Bob complained to the principal but to no avail. He hadn’t actually seen the arrogant man steal from him.
“Well, I have a question I hope you can answer.” Peter produced the object he’d coughed up the night before.
Bob took it and his eyebrows went up. “What’s this?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Hmm. Come by my classroom at four o’clock. Maybe I can tell you by then.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Natalie sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. Without finishing her yogurt, she threw the cup in the trash and left for her homeroom. She gave Jerry a funny look as she passed him.
Bob and Pete exchanged looks, trying not to laugh.
««—»»
Peter’s third period class had done a collective project, each supplying a photograph (or a moment snipped from a home video) taken by themselves or any family member. The single criterion dictated that it have something to do with history. It couldn’t simply be from Aunt Kay and Uncle Jo-Jo’s S & M wedding or Cousin Julio’s voodoo barmitzvah. It couldn’t come from when their dog, Mephistopheles, got run over by the church bus and the guts that squooshed out resembled the Virgin Mary—historic as such an event might be to their personal experience.
Some interesting work came in. There were several photos from Vietnam, the Gulf War and Iraq. One girl brought in a Death Row snapshot of her own father, taken hours before he walked the last mile in Florida, two years before she and her mother moved to California. There was one of a crowd of young, anxious, tear-streaked faces at the hotel
where Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. Another, taken in 1964, was donated by a grandmother who’d been an Assembly of God missionary as the Simbas overran Stanleyville in the Congo. It was a simple portrait of a black politician, smiling openly for her camera. Written on the back were the words:
Sylvere Bondeweke
Later killed by a mob
who ate his liver.
May God Forgive Them.
Included in the project was a decades old photo of People’s Park, turned into such on a neglected piece of land in Berkeley, owned by the university. A nice place, until the college decided to reclaim it and had an eight foot fence erected. The hood folks, from all ages and races—who’d worked hard to make the eyesore their oasis—protested. They were beaten down and tear-gased by The National Guard.
There was a photo of a long line waiting to get into a 1977 showing of the original Star Wars.
“Can’t tell me this isn’t history,” argued the kid who brought it in, descended from a major Star Wars fan descended from a Trekkie.
Peter had thought about it and agreed.
Then one snapped at the Altamont Raceway rock festival in the winter of…’69? ’70? The Rolling Stones had hired the Hell’s Angels as security, paying them $500 worth of beer. A young man was beaten and stabbed to death on stage as Jagger looked on in horror. When one of the musicians tried to stop the atrocity, he was knocked unconscious. But this wasn’t the moment captured in the picture. A very fat fellow had stripped butt naked, in rapture. So Woodstock P.C. A group of the Angels took offense and set upon him swinging pool cues. Notes scribbled on the back of this one, too.
$500 worth of beer on the wall,
$500 worth of beer.
You take one down, beat it into the ground and never shed a tear on the wall.
There were at least three pics of Ronald Reagan as governor, and one of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell doing wet cement gigs at the Chinese Theater.
There was a shot of an L.A. train wreck, January 1956. Obviously not an official document as there were too many bodies, close-up. Media didn’t usually do that then, not of Americans.
There were local earthquake pics that made Peter think, uncontrollably, Shake, Rattle and Roll.
He took his lunchbreak in the classroom, eating a burger he picked up across the street. Staring at the project as he chewed, his mouth got drier and drier. He tried to wash it away with cherry limeade.
Back itching, shifting to rub it on the chair.
He finally got up and walked over to the bulletin board where the photos were tacked into cork.
Why not? No students around. Who was to see? And the door was closed.
But which one?
He tried the Ronnie Rayguns and then the hypermammarous spongecakes. And the fat man beset by mad angels. Nothing. The last one though, he did burp and thought he tasted stale beer. But it was just the soybeans the burger joint cut its meat with.
Peter tried the photo of the smiling Stanleyville politico.
Nothing.
He tasted the Death Row portrait.
Nada, dude.
The Star Wars hopefuls.
Nix. Well, duh.
The crowd at Kennedy’s hotel…zip.
The crowd in People’s Park…zero.
No one dead in any of those. Was that a requirement for psychic backwash in the saliva?
(Son, the ride you took’s over. You’ve crashed and burned. Now stop before someone sees you, okay?)
Puh-lease?
Dead. There were bodies in the war pics. He licked, shivering, disgusted with himself. Did Peter actually want to have another gut-wrenching, brain-pistoning vision? (It’s a hallucination, asshole. Do you believe you’re Nostradamus? Or the Mighty Cresskin?)
Not a fuckin’ thing.
It made him smile, relieved.
Unless he only forced himself to smile, commanding his conscious mind to declare he didn’t crave this.
The train wreck. Do ’em all, Petey. Get this over with so you can get on with your so-called life. This happened less than two years after Rosaluna’s murder—if the date for her snuff film was accurate.
Oooooooooo. Yuch. It tasted of dozens—at least—of sets of fingers, sweaty, grimy, hot-dog scented and sticky with cheap Neopolitan ice cream and little kids’ snot, passing it back and forth at family reunions for generations. He’d catch a bug for sure. Like sucking on a nickel you found wrapped in a gummy kleenex in the trashcan of a gas station toilet.
But there was nothing else.
Peter had been surprised at how many of the pics in the class exhibit were from meaningful events. A larger percentage than he’d expected. Witnesses to history and what “history” (complete with gratuitous bunny ears) usually implied: carnage to a greater or lesser extent.
Gee, he’d never been anywhere or done anything or seen anything of note.
One last photo. Didn’t look like it had much potential, not at first. Old, from the 1940s. A granddad or great-granddad took it back in ’47. Two men carrying a stretcher with a blanket over it. Grand- or greatgrand- told the kid he lived nearby when they found the body of the Black Dahlia. Couldn’t get close enough darnit for a proper looksee at either half, too many cops around, on foot and sitting in Studebakers. He couldn’t even get near enough to see the outline of body parts marked in quicklime. This was all he could get. Shucks.
Peter got close, stuck out his tongue which had become a withering leaf.
Snap of static.
And a Fade In. In. Into…
Black and White.
Spreadeagled, loosely tied up with rope which ground into her wrists and ankles every time she writhed and thrashed. Didn’t hardly even remember her own name anymore. The damned had no names. Small knife stabbed her for eternity, over and over, The Chinese Death (or close to it) By A Thousand Cuts. Must be more like a million, crucified on the mattress, pierced through every nerve-ending. Perfect circles of cigarette burns incinerating the -O- from the center of GOD into her flesh, an obscene prayer for her salvation, a righteous curse very old Testament.
-O- burns, puckering the skin until they were more like tight rosebuds, virginal ones grown too soon before all the winter frosts had ended. These blossoms were destined never to open, would remain perfect and pink.
Her mouth kept widening to shriek, forming an enormous -O-, similar to the center of GOD’s name which she tried to articulate. Very like that virgin place once it was debauched: wide, sloppy. Shouldn’t be permitted to cry GOD from such a harlot spot. So he made her mouth incapable of forming the sacred circle -O-.
He bent down and with his little blade cut the corners of her lips, severely back across both cheeks, tip of the knife nicking the enamel on a couple molars and striking lightning into the nerves in her jaw. Presto, ragged as the whorish cunt of a Jezebel.
“Bloody Babylon Biblical!” he pronounced.
-O- over and over. A series of them she felt vibrating in the beat of angelic wings. The Orbit of the Ophanim, the region where form and substance start to materialize, the realm of matter.
Did he tell her these things? Wheels, and wheels within wheels. Many-eyed ones.
She saw him occasionally as an angel, composed of flame. Sometimes, during the terrible days which comprised the infinitude of her torture, she glimpsed him as being many angels, their mouths of flawless exquisite roundness, lit all the way down their throats. They ran around the room, or flew, screwing her in every wound and natural orifice, cornholing one another, babbling, “The -O- in the center of GOD is a zero. It signifies the end. The -O- in the center of GOD is a zero. It signifies the end.”
(And then, solitary moments of reality, numbness and shock bringing her to the barest edge of sanity, glimpsing this dirty oaf of a man. Oaf not Ophanim. A putrid, Old Testament scarlet drenched him head to foot. Flies wiggled their asses into his pockets and crawled through his hair.)
How long does dying take? As long as necessary. To the end of blackest spa
ce and back, and long enough to report there was no heaven out there.
“I have defeated your particular component for Armageddon,” he told her on the final day. “The end won’t happen for some time now.”
Then he cut her throat ear to ear, the gash resembling the ruin of her mouth. She knew this because she was partway outside herself, overhead and looking down to witness. But also still part inside and drowning in her own blood.
Fade Out…
Peter gasped, air a piercing frost which burned his sinuses. He almost fell down, hyperventilating. He thought he sounded like that locomotive back in 1956 must have as it hurled itself off the tracks.
Weak, drained. Fuck me seven ways from Black Sabbath.
Itchy sensation on his left thigh. First he thought it was the baby, but that was on his right thigh.
He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw he still had plenty of time left on his lunch break.
How long does dying take…?
He tried to scratch but it didn’t help. He unbuckled his trousers and slid them down, leaving his boxers up. He squeaked with terror, seeing the flickering image of a woman being brutalized beyond anyone’s comprehension. Nothing the photo showed, this was from what he’d hallucinated.
And also, there on his left thigh, next to this hologramic blasphemy, was the tattoo of a rose.
He’d read once about what had been done to this poor girl. One of the things the books always mentioned was that a rose tattoo had been gouged out of her left thigh and buried deep within the cavity of her corpse.
He heard, “Oh, Jesus!”
Gasps and chortles. Looked up to see a pair of his bottle-blonde female students standing in the doorway, clutching books to their teenaged chests. How long had they been standing there?
(How long had this vision lasted?)
Giggle-snorts. “Gross, you see that? He licked…”
Peter quickly jerked his pants back up, zipped, closed his belt. Didn’t know if he blushed a victim’s blood red or if he’d gone white as a ghost.
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