Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  So he’d hand her a little flashlight along with the book, and then he’d close the door. Sometimes he went away for awhile. Most times he couldn’t stand to do that. He’d sit by the door, afraid that Jenny might see something on one of the pages that would upset her, afraid that she’d start crying. But always somewhere deep inside him there was a little bit of hope, the hope that instead of seeing something awful she’d instead discover something simple and beautiful, and a lot of times while he sat there listening to Jenny turn the pages he was hoping he might hear the sound of her delighted laughter.

  Sometimes he did. Sometimes.

  The further he drove, the better he liked it.

  He was still on a two-lane road, but there were no more burger stands in sight. Instead there were canyons, dusty and bloody in the afternoon sun, and ridges splashed with old oak and gnarled mesquite.

  The road was twisty, but there was something new to see around every bend. It was getting late, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull over. Everything was so beautiful. Kind of like the pictures in the library books he got for Jenny.

  He took a fork in the road, dipped into a canyon and followed it for five or six miles, heading west. The sun hung above on the horizon, a red ball easing down behind a ridge that waited just ahead.

  The sun sent a stream of light down the canyon like a heart pumping blood through a human vein. All of a sudden he wanted to get to that sun. It was dipping lower in the afternoon sky. Another hour and it would be gone.

  He hit the gas. The road started to rise, switchbacking over the ridge. He shifted into low and floored it. The old engine complained, but soon enough the car crested the ridge and he found himself driving through a forest of old oak.

  Thick trunks and branches painted his arms with shadows as he drove. He rolled down the window. The oak smell was wonderful in the late afternoon. It was a cool smell, like the promise of night coming on.

  He spotted a sign just ahead. No words. Just a little camera on it, and an arrow pointing toward the lip of the ridge. He took the road. It snaked through a clutch of trees, following the rim of a little lake.

  A couple minutes later he stood on the ridge, staring out at a green valley. The grass below was windblown by a breeze from the east, and for a second he thought he was looking at the waves of a gentle sea that could carry the old Ford all the way to the Pacific.

  He stood there a long time, just staring.

  He returned to the car, but he really didn’t want to leave. Not until the sunset was over. He closed the door. He’d just sit here awhile longer, in shadows cast by old oak trees, beside the still lake that held their reflections. He’d sit here and watch the sun drift down through the trees and into the valley, watch until it found the horizon and disappeared for good.

  Sounds behind him, in the trunk. The rustle of plastic. Pots and pans rattling in the box of kitchen stuff.

  Jenny’s voice. “And what did you see in the world?”

  They talked. It took a while to tell Jenny about the sunset, and then it took a while longer to sort things out.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, Jenny.” “You don’t have to open the trunk. I’ll just look through the hole. And I’ll only look for a minute.”

  “That might be a minute too long.” “But if it’s like you say... if it’s really that pretty. Well, I know I want to see it.” “But what if you see something else? Something I didn’t notice? What if something upsets you and—”

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “I know it will.”

  He sat there and didn’t say anything. The sun was dropping fast now. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen at the outside, the sunset would be over. He watched it sink, and he thought about all the things he’d seen since that day he first found Jenny huddled in a closet.

  That had been a long time ago. He wasn’t sure how long. It was hard to remember.

  A long time, though.

  Long enough to see plenty of things.

  He stared through the windshield.

  In all those years, not one of the things he’d seen could touch this sunset. He started the car, backed up. A three-point turn was what you called it, only this one was in reverse. Then he backed up to the edge of the ridge, so that the trunk faced the sinking red sun.

  “You can look for a minute,” he said over his shoulder, not turning around even though it was just the two of them alone in this place. “I don’t want anything bad to happen. I don’t want you to overdo it.”

  “I won’t.”

  He hesitated, swallowing hard. “You’d better hurry,” Jenny said. “The sunset won’t last forever. We don’t have much time.”

  He cut the ignition and walked around to the trunk. The wire coat hanger still held it closed, and the rag hung from the punched-out lock. He knelt by the bumper and reached for the rag with his fingers.

  He took hold of the rag and pulled it out. But just as quickly he covered the hole with his hand, because he wanted to be sure everything would be all right.

  “You promise to be careful?” he asked.

  The plastic bag rustled. “Yes... but let me see you first. It’s always so dark when I see you. It’s always night. I can’t really remember what you look like.”

  He glanced down, saw his reflection smeared on the chrome bumper. His reflection was flecked with rust. He looked old, and worse.

  “Oh, I haven’t changed,” he lied. “I still look the same.” “Just a peek?” “I don’t want to scare you.”

  Jenny laughed. He felt her finger then. She’d slipped it into the hole, and it pressed against his palm. The only thing separating them was the plastic bag.

  Her finger was warm. He didn’t want to move his palm away from it, but he did. The punched-out keyhole was rimmed with rust. He moved close to it, thinking of all those jokes about dirty old men peeping through keyholes.

  Inside the trunk, Jenny’s eye shone through filmy plastic.

  She saw his eye. She winked at him. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I know.” He put his hand over the hole again. He thought that maybe he might start crying. “But we’ll talk about that later. The sun’s almost down. We have to hurry or you’ll miss it.”

  “I’m ready.”

  So was he.

  That was when he heard the other car coming toward him. Through the trees, along the lake.

  It was a police cruiser.

  He didn’t say a word. He couldn’t afford to—what would it look like if the cop saw him talking to the trunk of his car? So he kept quiet, and he jammed the rag back into the hole.

  Jenny said something, but he couldn’t quite hear it. He stepped away from the car as fast as he could. The cop had pulled to a stop at the edge of the road, blocking off the little parking area. There was no way out of there now.

  And now the sun was going down, sinking through the trees, going down for good. He felt it on his back. He smelled the oaks around him. That hot, late afternoon smell was fading. A cool twilight scent was coming on.

  The cop opened the cruiser door and stepped out onto the blacktop. The man knew how it would go. The cop would tell him that the little park closed at sundown, that there wasn’t any camping allowed here.

  Maybe it would end there. But maybe it wouldn’t. The Ford’s registration was expired. The man had needed the money for moving, for the next cleaning deposit and first and last month’s rent that waited for him somewhere down the line. The cop wouldn’t understand that, though. He might get suspicious. He might decide that an expired registration was a good excuse to take a peek inside the Ford.

  Or inside its trunk.

  Worry clawed the man. What would happen to Jenny? How would she react if a cop popped the trunk, stared down at her? What would that do to her, when all she was expecting to see was a beautiful sunset?

  And what about him? What would happen to a guy who kept a woman in the trunk of his car once the cops got hold of him?

  He glanced over his shoulder, at the Ford.
He couldn’t help himself. He thought he heard plastic rustling. And then he saw the rag. It wasn’t jammed in the trunk anymore. Jenny must have pushed it out. The rag was blowing across the parking lot, driven by the same wind that sent waves of grass rolling toward the green Pacific.

  The sun was going down.

  It was going down fast.

  The cop stepped toward him. The cop didn’t even know it yet, but he was coming to take Jenny away. The man was sure of it. Cut this any way you wanted, and that was how it would work out.

  He started toward the cop. The cop smiled at him, said hello. He smiled back, but he didn’t mean it. When he was close he charged the cop, piled into him with all the strength he could muster and together they went down hard on the blacktop, and the cop’s head struck against the pavement and then the man found himself straddling the cop, cradling the bigger man’s head in his hands, and he bashed it against the pavement time and time again, as hard as he could.

  He didn’t know how long he did that. But when he finally stopped, he knew that he’d done it for far too long.

  Because Jenny couldn’t wait any longer.

  A twisted coat hanger rang against the pavement.

  The trunk’s rusting hinges complained as it sprang open.

  Plastic rustled as Jenny climbed free.

  But she hadn’t seen him yet. No. He could tell. It had to be she was looking at something else, something simple and beautiful like a sunset, because she laughed.

  The man listened to the sound. He stood up. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t look at Jenny. The last of the sunset filtered through the trees, washing his hands. But the sunlight didn’t do any good. There was blood on his hands, and it wouldn’t go away. He knew that it was there for good. He saw it. There was no missing it, the way you might miss a stray dog banging around your garbage can, or some kid shivering in the cold without a coat, or the smell of a hospital corridor.

  He saw it.

  And when the sun disappeared behind the horizon, Jenny saw it too. She saw everything.

  Life with Father

  BY BENTLEY LITTLE

  There’s nothing like taking a perfectly good idea and beating it into the ground so hard that even the ground starts screaming.

  But that’s what you get when you take something nice and innocuous—like recycling, for example—and hand it over to Bentley Little. Suddenly, what seemed like a harmless suggestion becomes the most revolting home experiment ever. Proving once again that nothing succeeds like excess.

  This is a story so wickedly horrible that it makes me laugh in self-defense, and earns the first of this anthology’s warning labels. If you read it, it will fuck you up. You have been warned.

  Enjoy!

  I wrote “Life with Father” and “The Pond” for an ecological horror anthology titled The Earth Strikes Back. Both were rejected. Judging by the title of the book, I figured that most if not all of the stories would deal with the negative effects of pollution, overpopulation, deforestation, etc.

  So I thought I’d do something a little different.

  My wife is a hard-core recycler. Cans, bottles, newspapers, grocery bags—she saves them all. Even on trips, she brings along plastic bags in which to collect our soda cans.

  I exaggerated her compulsion for this story. Anything can be taken to extremes.

  Shari has never seen a working toilet. She will—she goes to nursery school next year and I know they have toilets there—but right now she’s only seen our toilets. Or what used to be our toilets before Father turned them into stationary storage containers for soybean chicken.

  I don’t know why I thought of that. I guess it’s because Shari’s squatting now over the biodegradable waste receptacle that Father makes us pee in. There are two receptacles for our waste. The blue one for urine. The red one for excrement.

  I don’t know how Shari’ll do in school. She’s slow, I think. Father’s never said anything about it, but I know that he’s noticed, too. Shari doesn’t catch on to things the way she’s supposed to, the way I did. She was three before she could even figure out the difference between the red and blue receptacles. She was four before she said her first word.

  Sometimes I want to tell Father that maybe his seed shouldn’t be recycled, that there’s something wrong with it. Look at Shari, I want to say, look at The Pets. But I love Shari, and I even love The Pets in a way, and I don’t want to hurt any of their feelings.

  I don’t want to get Father mad, either. So I say nothing.

  My period ended a few days ago, and I know I was supposed to wash out my maxi pads in this week’s bathwater and then use the water on the outside plants and hang the maxi pads out to dry, but the thought of my blood makes me sick, and I just haven’t been able to do it.

  I’ve been saving the maxi pads beneath my mattress, and tomorrow I’m going to stuff them in my underwear and take them to school. I will throw them away in the girl’s bathroom, just like everyone else.

  I feel wicked and nasty.

  I hope Father doesn’t find out.

  But I know he will when he takes Inventory.

  I try to tell Father that we can donate my old clothes to Goodwill or the Salvation Army, that they will recycle my clothes and give them to other people. I hint that I can buy pants and blouses that have been worn by others at those same thrift stores and that this will contribute to the recycling process and allow me to have some new clothes, but he will not hear of it. The clothes we have are the clothes we will always have, he tells me, and only after death will they be passed on to someone else.

  So he cuts up the material, takes out old stitches, and refashions the cloth into new blouses and pants.

  I attend school dressed as a clown, laughed at by my classmates.

  When I come home, I feed The Pets. They are kept in an enclosure in the center of the back yard, the low fence surrounding their habitat made from refashioned cans and cardboard. I feed them the crumbs and leftovers from yesterday’s meal, mixed in with the compost of our own waste. I think this is wrong, but Father says that our bodies are not as efficient as they should be and that both our solid and liquid waste contain unused nutrients that can be fully utilized by The Pets.

  I stand outside their enclosure and I watch them eat and I watch them play. When I am sure that Father is not around, I pick them up and hold them. Their bodies are cold, their skin slimy, their wings rough. I gave them names at one time, and sometimes I can still call out those names, but I’m ashamed to admit that I no longer know to whom they belong. Like everyone else, I can’t tell The Pets apart.

  I do not know why Father keeps The Pets and why he insists that they be fed, and that frightens me. Father never does anything without a reason or a purpose.

  Every so often, when I’m standing there feeding them, I think to myself that their habitat looks like a pen.

  Sometimes I try to tell the kids in my class the horrors of recycling, but I can never seem to find the words to describe what I mean, and they always tell me that they enjoy accompanying their parents to the recycling center on Saturday and dropping off their cans, bottles, and newspapers.

  Cans, bottles, and newspapers.

  Once, during ecology week, I told my teacher that anything can be carried too far, even recycling. She tried to explain to me that recycling is important, that it will help us preserve the planet for future generations. I said that instead of recycling everything, maybe it would be better if we used things that didn’t have to be recycled. She said that I didn’t understand the concept of environmentalism but that at the end of the week, after I had completed my worksheet and seen all the videotapes, she was certain that I would.

  That night I went home and urinated into the blue bucket and defecated into the red.

  It is Thursday again, and I know what that means.

  I sit quietly on the couch, tearing the sections of today’s newspaper into the strips that we will wash and screen and turn into my homework paper. I say nothing
as Father enters the living room, but out of the corner of my eye I can see his dark bulk blocking the light from the kitchen.

  He walks toward me. “I feel The Need,” he says.

  My stomach knots up and I can’t hardly breathe, but I force myself to smile because I know that if he can’t have me he’ll start in on Shari. His seed can’t really be recycled (although he tried it once with frozen jars and the microwave, using his semen first as a skin lotion and then as a toothpaste), but he does not want it to go to waste, so when he feels The Need he makes sure that he finds a receptacle where it might do some good. In his mind, impregnating me is better than letting his seed go unused.

  That’s how we got The Pets.

  I take down my pants and panties and bend over the back of the couch, and I try not to cry as he positions himself behind me and shoves it in.

  “Oh God,” I say, recycling the words he taught me. “You’re so good!” And he moans.

  It has been four days since Shari last spoke and I am worried. Father is not worried, but he is unhappy with me. He felt The Need yesterday, and I let him have me, but I could not pretend that I enjoyed it, the way I usually do. He got angry at me because my unhappiness meant that his emotion was not recycled. He does not want anything to go unrecycled. He feels that, in sex, the pleasure that he feels should be transmitted to me. I am supposed to be happy after he takes me and to utilize that transmitted pleasure, to stay happy for at least a day afterward (although usually I’m miserable and sore and feel dirty), and to do something nice for Shari. Shari is supposed to recycle that pleasure again and do something nice for one of The Pets.

  But I don’t feel happy, and I can’t fake it this time. I tell Shari to lock her door when she goes to bed.

  When I come home from school, Shari is crying and strapped to a chair at the dinner table and Father is in the kitchen preparing our meal. I know something is not right, but I say nothing and I wash my hands in last week’s dishwater and sit down at the table next to my sister. Already I can smell the food. It is meat of some sort, and I hope Father has not decided to recycle a cat or dog that’s passed away.