The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  What Linus had been doing at Suzy’s house had not been discovered. Speculation had been voiced in some quarters that he had been staking out her place preliminary to assaulting her, which sounded plausible unless you had seen Linus. Suzy’s motivations were considered self-evident: at the sight of the man who had bedeviled her this past year, she finally had snapped—which also sounded as if it made more sense than it did. There was nothing in her history to indicate that she would lose her mind, or that she would do so in so spectacular a fashion. Yes, that was the point to saying she had snapped, but Smythe judged such reasoning flimsy, weak.

  And now, here was Linus’s manuscript, which further muddied the waters. Smythe supposed you would have to call it a collection; although Linus had attempted to knit the stories within it (which included the Lovecraft’s piece) into something approaching a larger narrative. The result was a study in resentment and paranoia, threaded through with gnostic mysticism. Punishingly candid, beautifully-written sections about the breakup of his marriage, his descent into self-loathing and depression, his envy of and anger at Suzanne Kowalczyk’s success, alternated with shorter, more elliptical and ornate sections concerning a fragment of gnostic writing on which Linus had become fixated. Supposedly discovered as part of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, this sheet of papyrus had been included with the Gospel of Thomas until certain inconsistencies of grammar and syntax had caused other differences of content to become apparent. Debate continued as to whether the text to which the selection belonged had been part of the original library of early Christian texts, or if its origins lay with another sect. What was known as the demiurgic fragment began with the maxim Linus had chosen for the epigraph to his book: “And as God, turning within Himself, found a world to bring forth, so might man, turning within himself, find a world to bring forth.” It moved on to a discussion of the word through which the Deity had accomplished His act of creation, a sample of the divine speech that was represented pictographically, as a pair of ovals, one contained within the other, the outer oval open on the left side, the inner on the right. With this word, the passage concluded, a man might give rise to that which was within him.

  The conceit of this ancient text formed the basis for a brief parable about a man who came to the court of the great caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, before whose assembled courtiers the man declared he would replace the ruler this very night. When the court guards went to slay the man, the caliph stayed their hands and asked him what cause he had to speak so boldly. He had learned, the man replied, the word that is known as the egg, against whose power the messengers of paradise dared not contend. Ah, the caliph said, truly, that was a powerful weapon to have at one’s disposal. But, he went on, it seemed to him that its possession was like gripping a sword by the blade, of no less danger to the one holding it than to those he faces. For who could say all that a man might find in himself? What man but he who was utterly at peace with himself would dare to grant exit to the residents of his soul? Nonetheless, the man said—albeit, with a tremor in his voice that had not been there, before—this night is your last upon this earth. If it be God’s will, the caliph said, then so be it, and he gestured for his guards to allow the man to depart the court unmolested. Nor did Haroun al-Rashid speak of the matter again. However, a number of the caliph’s most trusted advisors, disturbed by so blatant a threat to their ruler, gave orders that the man should be followed. This proved more difficult than those advisors anticipated, with the result that the man’s lodgings in one of the poorer quarters of the city were not discovered until early the next morning. The guards who broke open the door were greeted by a scene of horror–– the man torn to shreds as if by a pack of wild dogs. What had done so crouched in the middle of the room, licking the blood pooled on the floor. None of the guards would describe it, but when they slew it with their swords, the neighbors heard the sound of an infant shrieking. Those advisors who were summoned to view the thing ordered it burnt and its ashes scattered. To no man who was part of these events did sleep ever come easily, again.

  In turn, this parable was succeeded by the Lovecraft’s story, which Linus had positioned between a pair of lengthy expository paragraphs in which he did his best to explain his fiction as a means of representing the truth behind Suzanne Kowalczyk’s lies. The second paragraph led into a kind of prose-poem in which Linus portrayed himself meditating ceaselessly on the double-ovals, what the man in his story had called the egg. If this was the avenue by which creation had come to be, then might there not be some trace of it remaining in that creation? For a long time, he searched for such a trace. And then, one day, while he was sitting at his local diner prolonging a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie, the accidental flash of sunlight on a serving platter had caught his eye, and like Jacob Böhme, he had seen through to the center of things. Before he understood what his lips and tongue were doing, they were uttering that word, the egg, whose sound was almost silent. He looked down, and found his mug filed to the steaming brim with fine, strong coffee, not the watery mix he’d been sipping for the last half-hour. On the plate next to it sat a thick slice of apple pie, the buttery taste of whose flaky crust blended perfectly with the crisp sweetness of its filling. Unable to believe fully what had happened—what he had made happen—Linus left the diner and went straight home. There, he had locked the door, drawn the blinds, and commenced experimenting with the word. He was somewhat vague as to exactly what uses he had put his discovery; although he mentioned causing a tank full of half a dozen white and orange goldfish to appear on his kitchen counter. At the end of his session, Linus had been convinced of the authenticity of his breakthrough. Granted such an ability, Linus wrote, it would have been easy enough to indulge in more venal pursuits, to make himself rich, to surround himself with women beside whom Dominika would appear the slattern he had found her to be. To do so, as he saw it, would be to admit a kind of defeat. His life’s goal had been nothing more and nothing less than to earn a modest living through his writing, and he still deemed it a worthy ambition. What the word could give him was a means to make the world see the truth in what he had been saying about Suzanne Kowalczyk, namely, that she was a manipulative, talentless fraud.

  How like Linus, Smythe thought. He writes a fantasy in which he grants himself ultimate power, and the best use he can think of putting it to is settling a score. The section concluded with Linus turning off all the lights in his apartment, seating himself cross-legged on the living room floor, and commencing the process of opening the door to what was inside him. The manuscript ended with a narrative written in the form of a journal. Its style, Smythe judged, was Poe filtered through Beckett, terse paranoia. There were no proper names, only pronouns and generic descriptions. Its action was disjointed. Its narrator received a visit from a beautiful woman with whom he had immediate and ferocious sex. Later, he wandered streets whose names were familiar but whose houses were strange. He felt feverish. He found a park and sat on one of its benches. The woman reappeared beside him. They had some kind of sex on the bench. When they were done, he saw a figure watching them across the park. It was short, dressed in a winter coat with the hood up. He could not see its face. Later, he saw the figure at the end of a street he could not remember walking to. It ran down an alley between two houses. The way it moved made him feel sick. He approached the end of the street. The door of the second-to-last house on the left was open. The woman was standing in it. She was naked. The small figure in its coat slouched behind her. He turned up the walk towards them. That was the end of the manuscript.

  Jesus. Smythe pushed himself up off the couch. As a rule, he was leery of psychoanalytic readings of a writer’s work, but in this case… He shook his head, deposited Linus’s manuscript on the work table. No doubt, the thing was publishable—the sensation value would probably move more copies of it than anything else Linus had written. But as a last book, a summation of his career, it cast a light over his body of work that was, to put it mildly, less than flattering. Perhaps there w
as something else, another collection of stories that might better serve as Linus’s final publication. He would have to ask Dominika about it when he saw her tonight, at Linus’s wake.

  III

  Smythe had expected Linus’s sendoff to be a somber affair, but he was unprepared for the full, depressing extent of it. For one thing, both the funeral parlor Dominika had selected and the neighborhood in which it was located had, to put it mildly, seen better days. Which one of us hasn’t? Smythe thought as he steered up the potholed street to the tall old house. Especially Linus. Aside from a wire garbage can whose side bore a long, jagged gouge, the curb before the funeral parlor was empty. Smythe parked his Metro directly in front of the place, and before he left the car, locked all its doors. He could not conceive of even the most desperate of criminals finding anything of value in or inside his vehicle, but the prospect of being proved wrong and having to walk the blocks to the nearest bus stop was sufficiently unpleasant for him to secure the car. A scrape on the pavement behind him jerked his head around. A scrap of newspaper was being hustled along the sidewalk by a breeze too slight for him to notice. There was nothing in the shape of the paper to remind him of a large, pale crab scuttling over the concrete. He hurried up wooden stairs that announced his climb in a series of dull booms, into the funeral parlor.

  Inside, the air was clotted with yellow light that made the narrow hallway more, rather than less, difficult to distinguish. A podium whose carver had doubtless intended its sinuous leg as a vine, and not the tentacle it actually resembled, held aloft a marble composition book whose repurposing as a Book of Remembrance was announced by the spiky handwriting on its cover. Opening the book, Smythe was more surprised than he would have expected to find the first page empty. Perhaps the entries began further in…? No: the rest of the pages were equally blank. Granted, Linus had made his fair share of enemies, but surely, at a moment such as this, a flag of truce could be raised over old battlefields, the scars of old wounds covered over? Apparently not, if the pristine pages, the silent hallway, were to be believed. A surge of emotion that was equal parts pity and outrage rose in his throat. He seized the Bic lying beside the notebook and wrote his name in large, jagged letters that crossed a half-dozen of the page’s pale blue lines. Beside it, he wrote, “Into the Darkness, Fearlessly!” It was the phrase with which he had titled his laudatory review of Linus’s first collection of stories, and if it did not quite fit the manner of Linus’s death, Smythe intended it to evoke that earlier, happier time.

  Spurred by indignation, he strode down the hall to the viewing room. A piece of paper with the word, “Prise,” magic-markered on it had been taped to the wall to the right of the doorway. Smythe paused at the threshold, confronted by one end of Linus’s coffin, which crowded most of the doorway. Its lid closed, the coffin was plain, unvarnished wood, no railing along its side for pallbearers to grip. A small, potted cactus rested on its opposite end. There was no point to the sour taste that filled Smythe’s mouth. Linus had been possessed of, at most, minimal resources; what he was looking at was what Linus’s bank account would cover. In fact, it was probably more than he would have expected Linus to afford. The cactus was a bit much, even if he could imagine Linus snorting at it. He squeezed around the coffin, noting as he did that there was no kneeler in front of it. Already, he had seen Dominika at the other end of the small room, seated in one of the folding chairs lining the back wall, something on the chairs to either side of her. He ran his hand over the coffin’s smooth surface, wishing he could think of a remark that didn’t reek of sentimentalism. He had attended the wakes of a number of writers, most of them figures he had grown up reading, met, and occasionally published at the ends of their careers. A few had been his contemporaries, the victims of accidents or aggressive cancers. Linus was the only writer—the only person—Smythe had known who had been murdered, and so horribly, at that. A weight seemed to pull down the center of his chest. He supposed he should speak to Dominika, offer his condolences, maybe discuss Linus’s manuscript with her. He turned towards her, and what he saw made him jump back into Linus’s coffin, which gave a muffled thud and rocked on its supports. On the chair to his widow’s left sat Linus’s head, resting on its truncated neck. The eyes were closed, the mouth was closed, the expression slack. Smythe struggled for breath. “You,” he managed. “You.”

  Dominika laughed, that same, bray she’d visited upon him years ago, coarsened by the wine she’d consumed from the bottles open on the chair to her right. “Oh, Smythe,” she said. “You think—?” She nodded at Linus’s head. “This—?” More laughter. She rested her hand on top of Linus’s head in a gesture almost tender. “It’s a model,” she said in a stage whisper.

  “Wha—a what?” Smythe said.

  “A model,” Dominika said, “you know, like a mannequin. I had it made when the police could not find the real thing. Actually, it was after they looked and looked, and it was still missing. I waited to have the funeral, because I wanted to bury all of him, you know? Who wants to be buried without his head? But then the detective says to me, ‘I don’t know if we are going to find your late husband’s head.’ He thought the woman ran away with it. So, I decided not to wait, anymore. I went on the Internet, found a man who could do this, and here it is.” She slapped the head. “It was not cheap, either. Of course, the minute, the second after I hung up the phone with the man telling me the thing is done, who calls but the police? I couldn’t tell them I didn’t need their head, I had one of my own, so I decided this one would keep me company while I sit here. Linus would approve, I think.”

  No doubt he would have; though I’m not so sure about your outfit. Dominika’s clothes were mourning-black, but her high-necked blouse, short skirt, and thigh-high boots lent her the appearance of a dominatrix. Scratch that—he would have loved it. Smythe seated himself on the other side of the wine bottles. A scattering of plastic cups surrounded them. Smythe selected a cup. “Do you mind?”

  Dominika waved the hand holding her own cup. “Go ahead.”

  The bottle was tall, heavy, the label one Smythe did not recognize. A vineyard in Bulgaria, apparently. The liquid that poured out of it was thick, ruby bordering on black. Its nose was the grape of children’s fruit juice. Smythe raised his cup and said, “To Linus.” He waited for Dominika to join his toast; when she did not, he put his cup to his lips. The wine was cloyingly sweet, more like cough syrup than alcohol. Nonetheless, he served himself a second cup of it. If he was going to be sitting here with Dominika, he fancied he would need all the assistance he could get. After he consumed that cup, and set himself up with a third, he said, “Before, you mentioned the police. Has there been any more news—”

  “Nothing.” Dominika shook her head. “The woman is gone, vanished.”

  “I assume they told you—”

  “Oh yes, I know everything. They were fucking, and this is what happened.”

  “They were—what?” Smythe thought of Linus’s book, that final story.

  “But Linus was Linus, and you know…”

  “Wait—who said they were—the police told you this?”

  “No,” Dominika said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Certainly not,” Smythe said. “Linus hated that woman. He detested her. He thought she was a fraud.”

  “And such things don’t make sparks?” Dominika said. “What we detest, we also desire. I thought you would know that.”

  Smythe ignored the implications of her axiom. Instead, he refilled his cup. “Linus was not involved with that woman.”

  “He told you this?”

  “He didn’t have to,” Smythe said. “I read the manuscript.”

  Dominika frowned. “The manuscript?”

  “The book—Linus’s book.”

  “Ah. What did it say?”

  “That he despised Suzanne Kowalczyk.”

  “Which would have made the fucking better.”

  “Linus was not having sex with her.”

&nbs
p; “Why is this so upsetting to you?”

  “Because it isn’t true,” Smythe said. “This isn’t some relationship gone horribly wrong. This is murder.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” Dominika said. “It does not bother me to think that Linus was fucking another woman. Good for him, you know? Except when it wasn’t.”

  “I’m not worried about you. I’m concerned with my friend.”

  Dominika patted the head. “Your friend doesn’t need your concern.” She listed towards Smythe. “Actually, his cock wasn’t bad. I’m sure she enjoyed it.”

  Was the bottle empty, already? Smythe hardly felt the effects of the wine at all. He replaced the empty, selected one mostly full.

  Dominika continued. “That was why I turned you down all those years ago, my husband’s cock.”

  Smythe’s cheeks flushed. “This is hardly the place—”

  “Linus doesn’t care,” Dominika said. “He wouldn’t care if I fucked you right now. Would you?” she asked the head, whose features seemed to have taken on an appearance of distaste. “You see,” she said, “nothing.”

  “I was wondering if I could speak to you about Linus’s book,” Smythe said.

  “His book?”

  “The manuscript—what was it? A Grammar of Dread, A Catechism of Terror.”

  “What a title!” Dominika said, slapping her leg. “He was very good with titles.”

  “He was. I’m not sure if you’ve read the collection—”

  “None of it. I never read any of Linus’s things.”

  “You never—”

  Dominika shrugged. “Linus’s stories were difficult. He told me so, himself. He was proud of it. ‘Not just anyone can understand my stories:’ that was what he said. I said it was more like, ‘Not anyone can understand any of your stories.’ He didn’t think that was so funny. But come on! You read them. You know what I’m talking about. The long sentences. The strange words. The people in them no one could like. Sometimes, he would tell me his stories—that only made me glad I hadn’t read them.”