Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  She took no money for the boxes, for her work; she never had. Hardly anyone could understand that: the woman who had sold hers to the gallery had gotten a surprising price but money was so far beside the point there was no point in even discussing it, if you had to ask, and so on. She had money enough to live on, the damages had bought the house, and besides she was paid already, wasn’t she? Paid by the doing, in the doing, paid by peace and silence and the certain knowledge of help. The boxes helped them, always: sometimes the help of comfort, sometimes the turning knife but sometimes the knife was what they needed; she never judged, she only did the work.

  Right now she was working on a new box, a clean steel frame to enclose the life inside: her life: she was making a box for herself. Why? and why now? but she didn’t ask that, why was the one question she never asked, not of the ones who came to her, not now of herself. It was enough to do it, to gather the items, let her hand choose between this one and that: a hair clip shaped like a feather, a tube of desert dirt, a grimy nail saved from the wrecked garage; a photo of her mother, her own name in newsprint, a hospital bracelet snipped neatly in two. A life was a mosaic, a picture made from scraps: her boxes were only pictures of that picture and whatever else they might be or become––totems, altars, fetish objects––they were lives first, a human arc in miniature, a precis of pain and wonder made of homely odds and ends.

  Her head ached from the smell of varnish, from squinting in the sawdust flume, from the heat; she didn’t notice. From the fragments on the table before her, the box was coming into life.

  He thought about her as he drove. The Fentanyl seemed to relax him, stretch his memories like taffy, warm and ropy, pull at his brain without tearing it, as the pain so often did. Sometimes the pain made him do strange things: once he had tried to drink boiling water, once he had flung himself out of a moving cab. Once he woke blinking on a restaurant floor, something hard jammed in his mouth, an EMS tech above him: ‘Bout swallowed his tongue, the tech said to the restaurant manager, who stood watching with sweat on his face. People think that’s just a figure of speech, you know, but they wrong.

  He had been wrong himself, a time or two: about his own stamina, the state of his health; about her, certainly. He had thought she would die easily; she had not died at all. He had thought she could not see him, but even with one eye she picked him out of a line-up, identified him in the courtroom, that long finger pointing, accusing, dismissing all in one gesture, wrist arched like a bullfighter’s before he places the killing blade, like a dancer’s en pointe, poised to force truth out of air and bone: with that finger she said who he was and everything he was not, mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. It was possible to admire such certainty.

  And she spared herself nothing; he admired her for that, too. Every day in the courtroom, before the pictures the prosecutor displayed: terrible Polaroids, all gristle and ooze, police tape and matted hair but she looked, she listened carefully to everything that was said and when the foreman said guilty she listened to that, too; by then the rest of her hair had come in, just dark brown down at first but it grew back as lush as before. Beautiful hair…it was what he had noticed first about her, in the bar, the Blue Monkey filled with art school students and smoke, the smell of cheap lager, he had tried to buy her a drink but No thanks,she had said, and turned away. Not one of the students, one of his usual prey, she was there and not-there at the same time, just as she was in his workshop later, there to the wire and the scalping knife, not-there to the need in his eyes.

  In the end he had gotten nothing from her; and he admired her for that, too. When he saw the article in the magazine––pure chance, really, just a half-hour’s numb distraction, Bright Horizons in the doctor’s office, one of the doctors, he could no longer tell them apart––he felt in his heart an unaccustomed emotion: gratitude. Cleaved from him as the others had been, relegated to the jail of memory but there she was, alive and working in the desert, in a workshop filled with tools that––did she realize?!—he himself might have used, working in silence and diligence on that which brought peace to herself and pure release to others; they were practically colleagues, though he knew she would have resisted the comparison, she was a good one for resisting. The one who got away.

  He took the magazine home with him; the next day he bought a map of New Mexico and a new recording of Glenn Gould.

  She would have been afraid if it were possible, but fear was not something she carried; it had been stripped from her, scalped from her, in that room with the stuttering overheads, the loud piano music and the wire. Once the worst has happened, you lose the place where the fear begins; what’s left is only scar tissue, like old surgery, like the dead pink socket of her eye. She did not wait for him, check the roads anxiously for him, call the police on him; the police had done her precious little good last time, they were only good for cleaning up and she could clean up on her own, now, here in the workshop, here where the light fell empty, hard and perfect, where she cut with her X-Acto knife a tiny scrolling segment from a brand-new Gideon Bible: blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

  Her hand did not shake as she used the knife; the light made her brown hair glow.

  The man at the Stop-N-Go gave good directions: already he could see the workshop building, the place where the garage had been. He wondered how many people had driven up this road as he did, heart high, carrying what they needed, what they wanted her to use; he wondered how many had been in pain as he was in pain; he wondered what she said to them, what she might say to him now. Again he felt that wash of gratitude, that odd embodied glee; then the pain stirred in him like a serpent, and he had to clench his teeth to hold the road.

  When he had pulled up beside her workshop, he paused in the dust his car had raised to peel off the used patch and apply a fresh one; a small one, one of the 25 mgs. He did not want to be drowsy, or distracted; he did not want sedation to dilute what they would do.

  He looked like her memories, the old bad dreams, yet he did not; in the end he could have been anyone, any aging tourist with false new sunglasses and a sick man’s careful gait, come in hope and sorrow to her door; in his hand he held a red string bag, she could see some of what was inside. She stood in the doorway waiting, the X–Acto knife in her palm; she did not wish he would go away, or that he had not come, wishing was a vice she had abandoned long ago and anyway the light here could burn any wish to powder, it was one of the desert’s greatest gifts. The other one was solitude; and now they were alone.

  “Alison,” he said. “You’re looking good.”

  She said nothing. A dry breeze took the dust his car had conjured; the air was clear again. She said nothing.

  “I brought some things,” he said, raising the bag so she could see: the wires, the bottle, the hair; her hair. “For the box, I mean.…I read about it in a magazine, about you, I mean.”

  Those magazines: like a breadcrumb trail, would he have found her without one? wanted to find her, made the effort on his own? Like the past to the present, one step leading always to another and the past rose in her now, another kind of cloud: she did not fight it but let it rise, knew it would settle again as the dust had settled; and it did. He was still watching her. He still had both his eyes, but other things were wrong with him, his voice for one, and the way he walked, as if stepping directly onto broken glass and “You don’t ask me,” he said, “how I got out.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “You can’t do anything to me.” “I don’t want to. What I want,” gesturing with the bag, his shadow reaching for her as he moved, “is for you to make a box for me. Like you do for other people. Make a box of my life, Alison.”

  No answer; she stood watching him as she had watched him in the courtroom. The breeze lifted her hair, as if in reassurance; he came closer; she did not move.

  “I’m dying,” he said. “I should have been dead already. I have to wear this,” touching the patch on his arm, “to even stand here talking, you can’t imagine
the pain I’m in.”

  Yes I can, she thought. “Make me a box,” as he raised the bag to eye-level: fruit, tumor, sack of gold, she saw its weight in the way he held it, saw him start as she took the bag from him, red string damp with sweat from his grip and “I told you on the phone,” she said. “I can’t do anything for you.” She set the bag on the ground; her voice was tired. “You’d better go away now. Go home, or wherever you live. Just go away.”

  “Remember my workshop?” he said; now there was glass in his voice, glass and the sound of the pain, whatever was in that patch wasn’t working anymore: grotesque, that sound, like a gargoyle’s voice, like the voice of whatever was eating him up. “Remember what I told you there? Because of me you can do this, Alison, because of what I did, what I gaveyou.…Now it’s your turn to give to me.”

  “I can’t give you anything,” she said. Behind her her workshop stood solid, door frame like a box frame, holding, enclosing her life: the life she had made, piece by piece, scrap by scrap, pain and love and wonder, the boxes, the desert and he before her now was just the bad-dream man, less real than a dream, than the shadow he made on the ground: he was nothing to her, nothing and “I can’t make something from nothing,” she said, “don’t you get it? All you have is what you took from other people, you don’t have anything I can use.”

  His mouth moved, jaw up and down like a ventriloquist dummy’s: because he wanted to speak, but couldn’t? because of the pain? which pain? and “Here,” she said: not because she was merciful, not because she wanted to do good for him but because she was making a box, because it was her box she reached out with her long strong fingers, reached with the X–Acto knife and cut some threads from the bag, red string, thin and sinuous as veins and “I’ll keep these,” she said, and closed her hand around them, said nothing as he looked at her, kept looking through the sunglasses, he took the sunglasses off and “I’m dying,” he said finally, his voice all glass now, a glass organ pressed to a shuddering chord but she was already turning, red threads in her palm, closing the door between them so he was left in the sun, the dying sun; night comes quickly in the desert; she wondered if he knew that.

  He banged on the door, not long or fiercely; a little later she heard the truck start up again, saw its headlights, heard it leave but by then she had already called the state police: a sober courtesy, a good citizen’s compunction because her mind was busy elsewhere, was on the table with the bracelet and the varnish, the Gideon Bible and the red strings from the bag. She worked until a trooper came out to question her, then worked again when he had gone: her fingers calm on the knife and the glue gun, on the strong steel frame of the box. When she slept that night she dreamed of the desert, of long roads and empty skies, her workshop in its center lit up like a burning jewel; as she dreamed her good eye roved beneath its lid, like a moon behind the clouds.

  In the morning paper it explained how, and where, they had found him, and what had happened to him when they did, but she didn’t see it, she was too far even from Eventide to get the paper anymore. The trooper stopped by that afternoon, to check on how she was doing; she told him she was doing fine.

  “That man’s dead,” he said, “stone dead. You don’t have to worry about him.” “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for coming.” In the box the red strings stretched from top to bottom, from the bent garage nail to the hospital bracelet, the Bible verse to the Polaroid, like roads marked on a map to show the way.

  Psychos and You!

  A MODESTLY INFORMATIVE AFTERWORD BY JOHN SKIPP

  Just so you know, I’m not a scholar. I’m not a cop, a forensic pathologist, or a behavioral psychologist. I’ve also never killed someone, so I’m not speaking from experience here.

  The closest I’ve ever come to a psychotic killer of any stripe, insofar as I know, was holding in my hands the actual letter that Albert Fish sent to the parents of Grace Budd, the twelve-year-old girl he killed on June 3, 1928, and then ate over the course of the following nine days. (The full excruciating text, for those who can stomach it, is included as Appendix B.)

  And shortly before I was born, in 1957, my mom and dad spent a Wisconsin summer night in a broken-down car less than a mile from the house of Ed Gein (left), when he was in the midst of his legendary killing spree. So maybe I picked up a little psychic residue there.

  That’s closer than a lot of people get to horror history. But it certainly doesn’t make me an authority.

  So for those of you hoping for more fact with your fiction, the simple fact is this: there is more information out there than I could possibly catalog. Compiling a Greatest Hits would be a book in itself (and, in fact, has been, numerous times over).

  The Internet can take you pretty far, in any and every direction you might seek. Serial killers? Spree killers? Crimes of passion? Crimes of war? Gangsters? Gangstas? You name it, we got it. We are obsessed with our crimes, our justice and injustice. You can’t turn around without somebody slapping you in the face with the latest atrocity or the latest revelation about some atrocity from the past.

  It’s endless. It’s the definition of infinity.

  Because there’s just so much.

  If you want to know about John Wayne Gacy, I point you directly toward Tim Cahill’s staggeringly incisive Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer (1986). It is, to me, the Red Dragon of nonfiction accounts. Brilliantly written, drawing on extensive interviews and research by investigative journalist Russ Ewing, it goes to astonishing lengths to decipher the pathological lies Gacy routinely draped over the hideous events of his life.

  Likewise, you can’t go wrong with Ann Rule, the legitimate queen of true crime writing, whose Ted Bundy asskicker, The Stranger Beside Me (1980), is as personal an account as you’re likely to get, given that she worked beside him on a suicide hotline, and totally missed the cues until far too late. Because—as a psychotic poster child—he was just that good.

  If you want some Charles Manson, you head straight for Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry’s Helter Skelter (1974) for the definitive account.

  Past that, my friend, you and your search engine of choice are on your own. Searching is easy to do. I was amazed, for example, by how thorough a site like Trutv.com—its tagline being “Not Reality. Actuality.”—is (as of this writing), in terms of keeping up-to-date on every little revelation regarding people who go out of their minds and kill, all over the world. In every kind of way.

  There are doubtless a trillion others, who’d be more than delighted to fill you in on the gruesome details.

  In compiling Psychos, my goal was to pass on the kinds of insights that great dark fiction seems to best provide: connecting the psychological dots in ways that all but the best nonfiction is as yet unable to do.

  Because as many facts as are lobbed at us, every time things go horribly wrong—as many dates and places and forensic details and evidence trails as we can map—we are still ultimately left guessing as to what it’s like, on the inside, when somebody finds themself dragged to the Bad Place.

  And just in case you weren’t clear on this, horror’s a lot more fun when it isn’t happening to you.

  APPENDIX A

  A Devil in My View: Psychos in Popular Culture

  BY CODY GOODFELLOW

  I am evil

  Because I am a man.

  ––Iago, “The Creed” from Act 2 of Otello

  by Giuseppe Verdi (1604)

  It’s strange that we made up the great monsters to try to understand the causes and consequences of human evil and madness, and yet the depiction of madness itself has always been marred by the need to distort or dress up mental illness. This dressed-up distortion changes the madman into a cipher, at once more dangerous and far less disturbing than the real thing.

  From their earliest incarnations, drama and literature have cast the madman as the one who entertains and speaks uncomfortable truths, not to arrive at any sincere explanation of madness. Behind the rather extravagant fear that we
will be the victims of an ingenious or simply relentless psychopath lies the real fear of madness: that it is catching.

  In ancient Greek drama, hysteria and madness ensue when the mainspring of reason is broken by the tragic machinations of fate––Medea is infuriated by her husband’s infidelity and so murders their children, while Oedipus gouges out his eyes and renounces his hard-won crown when he learns of his unwitting patricide and incest.

  But the natural passions, the innate savagery only thinly painted over by civilization, could also be brought out by strong wine or music. The Greeks drew a bold line between Apollonian and Dionysian qualities in all works. The former represented all that was male, rational, and orderly, while the latter embraced the female, the passionate and chaotic. The Maenads, women driven to orgiastic fervor by the rites of the god of wine, were said to rend to bloody shreds any who would not join their revels, as they did with Orpheus.

  Even in Shakespeare, this naïve depiction of madness persists: insanity and nonsense are the natural and harmless state of the fool and the simpleton, while reasonable people snap and succumb to madness when their hearts or will are broken by the world (Hamlet, King Lear), or when evil catches up to them (Macbeth). But in his most psychologically astute tragedy, Othello, we see behind the traditional depiction of madness to a true portrait of psychopathy.