Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  Let us pause, for a moment, to ponder the ineffable.

  Then sit back and goggle in awe, as a mere mortal man named Robert Devereaux somehow finds the breathtaking big-picture words that part the veil, and deliver the cosmic lowdown.

  A Bizarro pioneer long before the term was coined, Devereaux applies virtuoso verbal skills to a visionary palette so shamelessly profound that it’s almost ridiculous. And does, in fact, make me laugh out loud.

  But I dare you to dismiss its revelatory heart. Ladies and gents: let the mind-blowing begin.

  His real name was Vernon Stevens but folks called him Bucky on account of his teeth and his beaverish waddle and well, just because it was such a cute name and he was such a cute little fat boy, nothing but cuddles in infancy, an impish ball of pudge in childhood, primed to take on the role of blubbery punching bag in adolescence.

  Kids caught on quick, called him names, taunted him, treated him about even with dirt. Bucky smiled back big and broad and stupid, as if he fed on abuse. The worst of them he tagged after, huffing and puffing, arms swinging wildly like gawky chicken wings, fat little legs jubbing and juddering beneath the overhang of his butt to keep up with them. “Wait up you guys,” he’d whinny, “no fair, hey wait for me!” They’d jeer and call him Blubberbutt and Porky Orca and Barf Brain, and Bucky just seemed to lap up their torment like it was manna from heaven.

  But, hey wuncha know it gang, somewheres in Bucky’s head he was storing away all that hurt: the whippings at home from his old man’s genuine cow-leather belt, a storm of verbal abuse stinging his ears worse than the smack of leather on his naked ass; the glares and snippery from his frowzy mama, she of the pinched stare, the worn, tattered faceflesh, the tipple snuck down her throat at every odd moment; the bark of currish neighbors yowling after him to keep his sneaks off their precious lawns; teachers turning tight smiles on him to show they didn’t mind his obtuse ways, Bucky’d get by okay if he did his best, but they’d be triple goddamned if they were going to go out of their way to help him; and the kids, not one of them daring to be his friend (Arnie Rexroth got yanked out of first grade and shuffled off to Phoenix so he didn’t count), all of them coming around quick enough to consensus, getting off on taking the fatboy’s head for a spin on the carousel of cruelty, good for a laugh, a good way to get on with the guys, a great way to forget your problems by dumping them in the usual place—on Bucky Stevens’s fat sweaty crewcut of a head.

  Well one day, about the time Bucky turned fifteen, he woke to the mutterings of a diamond-edged voice inside his left frontal lobe. “Kill, Bucky, kill!” it told him, and, argue with it as he might, the voice at last grew stronger and more persuasive, until there was nothing to do but act on its urgings. So Bucky gathered all that hurt he’d been storing away and pedaled off to church one Sunday morning on his three-speed with his dad’s big backpack tugging at his shoulders like a pair of dead man’s hands. The weight of the hardware inside punched at his spine as he pedaled, though it was lighter by the bullets lodged in the bodies of his parents, who lay now, at peace and in each other’s arms, propped up against the hot-water heater in the basement. He couldn’t recall seeing such contentment on their faces, such a “bastard!”-less, “bitch!”-free silence settling over the house.

  He pumped, did Bucky, pumped like a sweathog, endured the TEC-9 digging at his backbone, kept the churchful of tormentors propped up behind his forehead like a prayer. His fat head gidded and spun with the bloodrush of killing his folks: his dad, dense as a Neanderthal, the ex-marine in him trying to threaten Bucky out of it, arms flailing backward as his forehead swirled open like a poinsettia in sudden bloom, his beefy body slamming like a sledge into the dryer, spilling what looked like borscht vomit all over its white enamel top; his mom down on her knees in uncharacteristic whimper, then, realizing she was done for, snarling her usual shit at him until he told her to shut her ugly trap and jabbed the barrel into her left breast and, with one sharp squeeze of his finger, buckled her up like a midget actress taking a bloody bow, pouring out her heart for an audience of one.

  Bucky crested the half-mile hill at Main and Summit. The steeple thrust up into the impossible cerulean of the sky like a virgin boy’s New-England-white erection humping the heavens. Bucky braked, easing by Washington, Madison, Jefferson. The First Methodist Church loomed up like a perfect dream as he neared it. It was a lovely white box resting on a close-clipped lawn, a simple beautiful spired construction that hid all sorts of ugliness inside.

  Coasting onto the sidewalk, Bucky wide-arced into the parking lot and propped his bike against a sapling. Off came the backpack, clanking to the ground. A car cruised by, a police car. Bucky waved at the cops inside, saw the driver unsmiling return a fake wave, false town cohesion, poor sap paid to suspect everyone, even some pudgy little scamp parking his bike in the church lot, tugging at the straps of a big bulky backpack. Grim flatfaced flatfoot, hair all black and shiny—stranded separately like the teeth at the thick end of an Ace comb—was going to wish he’d been one or two seconds later cruising Main Street, was going to wish like hell he’d seen the TEC-9 shrug out of its canvas confinement and come to cradle in Bucky’s arms, yes indeed.

  Not wanting to spoil the surprise, Bucky pulled his Ninja t-shirt out of the front of his jeans, pressed the cool metal of the weapon against his sweaty belly, and redraped his shirt over it.

  He could hear muffled organ music as he climbed the wide white steps. The front doors, crowding about like blind giants, were off-white and tall. And good God if the music mumbling behind them wasn’t “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” as wheezed and worried by a bloodless band of bedraggled grunts too far gone on the shellshock and homesickness of everyday life to get it up for the Lord.

  Bucky tried the handle. The door resisted at first, then yielded outward.

  The narthex was empty. Through the simulated pearls of Sarah Janeway’s burbling organ music, Bucky could see an elaborate fan of church bulletins on the polished table stretched between the inner doors. Programs, the little kids called them. Through the window in the right inner door to the sanctuary, the back of a deacon’s bald head hung like some fringed moon. Coach Hezel, that’s who it was; Bucky’s coach the year before in ninth grade, all those extra laps for no good reason, pushups without end, and the constant yammer of humiliation: how Bucky had no need for a jockstrap when a rubber band and a peanut shell would do the trick; how he had two lockermates, skinny Jim Simpson and his own blubber; how the school should charge Mister Lard Ass Stevens extra for soap, given the terrain he had to cover come showertime.

  Bucky unshirted the gun, strode to the door, and set its barrel on the window’s lower edge, sighting square against the back of Hezel’s head. A clink as it touched glass. Hezel turned at the noise and Bucky squeezed the trigger. He glimpsed the burly sinner’s blunt brow, his cauliflower nose, the onyx bead of one eye; and then the glass shattered and Hezel’s mean black glint turned red, spread outward like burnt film, and Miss Sarah Janeway’s noodling trickled to a halt at the tail end of With the cross of Jeeeee-zus.

  Bucky kicked open the door and leaped over Hezel’s still-quivering body. “Freeze, Christian vermin!” he shouted, ready to open up the hot shower of metal tensed in the weapon, but it sounded like somebody else and not quite as committed as Eastwood or Stallone. Besides, his eyes swept the shocked, hymnal-fisted crowd and found young kids, boys of not more than five whose eyes were already lidded with mischief and young girls innocent and whimpery in their pinafores and crinolines, and he knew he had to be selective.

  Then the voice slammed in louder and harsher—(KILL THE FUCKERS, BUCKY, KILL THEM SONS OF BITCHES!)—like a new gear ratio kicking in. Bucky used its energy to fight the impulse to relent, dredging up an image of his dead folks fountaining blood like Bucky’s Revenge, using that image to sight through as he picked off the Atwoods, four generations of hardware greed on the corner of Main and Garvey: old Grandpappy Andrew, a sneer and a “Shitwad!” on his wi
thered lips as Bucky stitched a bloody bandoleer of slugs slantwise across his chest; Theodore and Gracia Atwood, turning to protect their young, mowed down by the rude slap of hot metal digging divots of flesh from their faces; their eldest boy Alan, overbearing son of an Atwood who’d shortchanged Bucky on fishhooks last July and whose head and heart exploded as he gestured to his lovely wife Anne, who danced now for them all as her mist-green frock grew red with polkadots; and four-year-old Missy who ran in terror from her bleeding family, ran toward Bucky with a scream curling from her porcelain mouth, her tiny fists raised, staggering into a blast of bullets that lifted her body up with the press of its regard and slammed her back against a splintering pew.

  A woman’s voice rose through the screams. “Stop him, someone!” she yelled from the front. Bucky pointed toward her voice and let the bullets fly, bloodfucking whole rows of worshippers at one squeeze. Most lay low, cowering out of sight. The suicidal made escape attempts, some running for the doors behind Bucky, others for those up front that led into the pastor’s study or back where the choir warmed up. These jackrabbits Bucky picked off, making profane messes out of dark-suited bodies that showed no sense of decorum in their dying, but bled on hard-to-clean church property everywhere he looked.

  He eased off the trigger and let the blasts of gun-thunder vanish, though they rang like a sheen of deafness in his ears. “Keep away from the doors!” he shouted, not sure if he could be heard by anyone. It was like talking into fog. “Stay where you are and no one will get hurt,” he lied, stepping over dead folk to make his way forward. The crying came to him then, thin and distant, and he saw bodies huddled together as he passed, the wounded and the not-yet-wounded. Call them all what they were, the soon-to-be-deceased.

  “Shame on you, Vernon Stevens,” came a quavery voice. Bucky looked up. There in the pulpit stood the whey-faced Simon P. Stone, sanctimonious pastor who’d done nothing—his piety deaf to cruelty—to keep Bucky from being the butt of his confirmation class two years before. The knuckles of his thin right hand were white with terror as he clutched, unconscious, a fistful of gilt-edged Bible pages. His surplice hung like a shroud from his taut gaunt shoulders, a tasteful Pontiac gray, sheen and all. A lime-green tippet trailed like an untied tie down the sides of his chest.

  “Come down, Satan,” said Bucky, hearing sirens in the distance through the bloodpulse of his anger, “come down to the altar and call your flock of demons to you.”

  “No, Vernon, I won’t do that.” Pastor Stone’s eyes were teary with fear—he of little faith not ready, no not after decades of preaching, to meet his Maker.

  Bucky looked around through the sobbing, saw crazed eyes turn away from him, saw between pews the sculpted humps of suited shoulders like blue serge whales stuck in waves, saw—yes! saw Mrs. Irma Wilkins, her red velvet hat a half-shell really with black lace crap on it, her gloved hand dabbing a crumpled hanky to one eye. “Mrs. Wilkins,” Bucky said, and her head jerked up like a startled filly, “come here!” Her lids lowered in that snippy way, but she rose, a thin frail stick of a woman, and sidled out of her pew. And as she neared, Bucky was back at the church camp five summers before, out in the woods, holding one end of the cross-branch from which depended the iron kettle, its sole support him and another kid and two badly made and badly sunk Y-shaped branches, and the wind shifted and the smoke of the fire blew like a mask of no-breath into his face and clawed at his eyes no matter how hard he tried to blink past it, and he turned away and let go of the branch saying “My eyes!” and the rude blur that was Irma Wilkins rushed in to catch the branch and to sting him with her condemnation, even now as she approached in this church he could hear her say it, “Your eyes? OUR STEW!” as if the fucking food were more important than Bucky’s vision and to her it was and that voice of hers, that whole put-down attitude reduced Bucky to nothing; but Bucky knew he was something all right, and he saw her pinched little lipless mouth as she came closer, by God it looked like a dotted line and by God he’d oblige her by tearing across it now with his widdle gun, better that than live his whole life hearing this nasty woman’s voice reduce him to nothing; and he opened up his rage upon her, rippling across her face with a rain of bullets until her head tore back at the mouth like the top of a Pez dispenser thumbed open, shooting out a stream of crimson coffins, spilling gore down the front of her black dress like cherry liqueur over dark chocolate, and mean Irma Wilkins went down like the worthless sack of shit she was, and Bucky felt damned proud of himself, yes he did, happy campers.

  Bucky swung back to Pastor Stone. “Bring ‘em all to the front of the church and I won’t harm a one of ‘em,” he said. “But if you refuse, I’ll pick ‘em off one at a time just like I did Mrs. Wilkins here.”

  Rest of them had ears. They needed no coaxing, but coaxed instead their whimpering kids out of hiding, out into the aisles and up the red runners to the altar, where Pastor Stone, trembling like unvarnished truth, raised his robed arms as if in benediction, as if he were posing for a picture, Pastor Simon P. Stone and his bleating sheep.

  The muffled squawk of a bullhorn turned Bucky’s head to a tall unstained window at his left. A squat man in blue stood on the grass at the near edge of the parking lot, legs planted firmly apart, elbows bent, face and hands obliterated by a black circle. “Vernon Stevens,” came his humorless voice, “lay down your weapon and come out with your hands raised. We will not harm you if you do as I say. We have the church surrounded. Repeat. The church. Is. Surrounded.” The bullhorn squawked off and the black circle came down so that Bucky could see clearly the ain’t-I-a-big-boy-now, pretend courage painted on the man’s face. Glancing back, Bucky saw bobbing blue heads through the two small squares of window that let onto the narthex, a scared rookie or two, the long stems of assault rifles jostling like shafts of wheat in a summer breeze.

  Doubt crept into him. And fear. His finger eased off the trigger. Tension began to drain from his arms.

  FINISH THE JOB! came the voice, like a balloon fist suddenly inflating inside his skull, pressing outward as if to burst bone. LOOK AT THEM, BUCKY! LOOK AND REMEMBER WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO YOU!

  And Bucky looked. And Bucky saw. There was Bad Sam in his Sunday best, frog-faced pouting young tough, a lick of light brown hair laid across his brow, freckles sprayed on his bloated cheeks, Bad Sam who’d grabbed Bucky off his bike when Bucky was nine, slammed him to the cement of the sidewalk by Mr. Murphy’s house and slapped his face again and again until his cheeks bruised and bled. And through his tears, he could see Mr. Murphy at his front window, withdrawing in haste at being discovered; Mr. Murphy who’d always seemed so kind, tending his tulip beds as Bucky biked by, and now here he was in church along with his tiny wife and their daughter Patricia in a white dress and a round brimmed hat that haloed her head. And next to her stood Alex Menche, a gas jockey at the Exxon station, corner of First and Main, whose look turned to hot ice whenever Bucky walked by, who never blinked at him, never talked to him, but just stared, oily rag in hand, jaw moving, snapping a wad of gum. And back behind Alex he caught a glimpse of Mr. Green the janitor, who’d yelled at the lunchbox crowd in second grade to Shut up! even when their mouths were busy with peanut butter. And odd Elvira Freeborn, New Falls’ weirdo-lady, who laid claim in good weather to a corner of the city park across from the town hall and had conversation with anyone who chanced by and lingered there—even weirdo Elvira had come up to him one day when he’d been desperate enough for company to go seek her out, had come up all smiles, her hair wispy gray and twisting free of its bun, and said, “My, my, Vernon, you are one fat ugly thing, yes you are, and if you were mine, I’d sew your mouth shut, I would; by God I’d starve that flab right off your bones and I’d see about getting you a nose job for that fat knob of a honker you got on your face and—” on and on and on, and now her eyes were on him here in church, off-yellow glaring cat’s-eyes like a reformed witch having second thoughts. And beside her was Sarah Janeway the organist, who’d laughed and then tried
to hide it when Bucky auditioned for the children’s choir at the age of eight, a no-talent bitch with her wide vacant eyes encircled in wide glasses rimmed in thin red and her hair cropped short as her musical gifts and her absurd flowered dress poking out of the shimmering-green choir robe down below, and she was standing there white-faced and whiny, and then the bullhorn bullshit started up again, and Bucky brought his one true friend up to his chest and let the surge of righteous wrath seize him.

  He made them dance, every last one of them.

  He played the tune. They tripped and swayed to the rhythm of his song. Wounds opened like whole notes in them. Sweeping glissandos of gore rose up like prayers of intercession.

  Behind him he felt a flood of cops rush in to pick up the beat and join him, to judder and jolt the music out of him with music of their own. Bucky, tripped out on giving back in spades what New Falls had so unstintingly bestowed upon him over the years, turned about to spray death into the boys in blue at his back. But there were too many of them, and a goodly number were already in position, rifles beaded on him.

  Then pain seized his right knee and danced up his leg in small sharp steps, like invisible wasps landing on him, fury out. Needles of fire watusied across his belly. Two zigzags of lead staggered up the ladders of his ribs and leaped for Bucky’s head. Something impossible to swallow punched through his teeth, filling his mouth with meat and blood.

  And then his brain lit up like a second sun and all the pain winked out. The terrible thunder of weaponry put to use went away, only to be replaced by organ music so sweet it made Bucky want to wet his pants and not give a good goddamn about the consequences.

  He felt himself drift apart like a dreamer becoming someone else. The cops froze, caught in mid-fire. About him, the church walls roiled and wowed like plaster turned to smoke. But it wasn’t smoke. It was mist, fog, clouds. They billowed down into the church, rolling and shifting and swirling among the corpses. Bucky glanced back at the altar, saw the bodies of his victims posed in attitudes of death, saw Pastor Simon P. Stone, his robed arms out in crucifixion, veed at the waist as if he’d just caught the devil’s medicine ball in his belly.