Blood Samples

by Bonansinga, Jay

  "There! – See?! – Straight ahead!" The boy was pointing at the crimson nothingness while continuing to squirm in Wickham's arms, and it took quite a bit of effort for the Ranger to brandish his .45-caliber Schofield with his free hand without breaking stride. It was impossible to see through the pink soup more than a cow's length ahead of him.

  "THERE!"

  Wickham raised a bead on the swirling dust-devils ahead of him, squinting through watery eyes. He could barely see the shadow of a spindly old coot about three stone-throws away, arms flailing, stumbling wildly back and forth, rushing headlong across the hard-pack.

  Meanwhile the little boy was pointing off in another direction like an English spaniel on the scent. He was pointing at the invisible pygmies of his dreams. "THEY GOT GUNS! — LOOK OUT MISTER! – DUCK! – DUCK!!"

  The ranger swung the muzzle of his Schofield at the area to his right –

  — and he started to squeeze off a shot, when the strangest sound rang out over the roar of the storm: It was a cross between a gigantic church bell being struck and a clap of dry thunder.

  The ranger flinched at the bang, and then felt a tremendous blow to his solar plexus. The impact nearly lifted the tall man out of his boots, taking his breath away, knocking off his Stetson hat, snapping the buckle of his Sam Browne belt, and flinging him backward through the storm with the gentle violence of a leaf on the wind.

  The Schofield spun free, and the orphan slipped from Wickham's grasp and landed in a drift of tumbleweed. Eyes blinking against the dust, the little boy gaped at what was transpiring in the flame-colored miasma in front of him.

  The two pygmies had converged predatorily on the Ranger, who was now blinking fitfully, trying to sit up, trying to see, trying to make sense of what had just happened. But oddly… the child could see the ranger wasn't hurt. In fact, the ranger looked eerily replenished, as if he'd just been baptized by a benevolent savior.

  No bullet hole riddled the ranger's body, no wound sullied his form.

  The orphan now saw the pygmies, unseen by the ranger, kneeling down on either side of the man. From their anxious, worried expressions it was clear that the little ones were making sure the ranger was okay.

  What the orphan didn't know was that elf-weapons don't shoot projectiles. Elf-guns operate on principals antithetical to mortal weaponry. Elf-weapons are designed to suck the bad from peoples' hearts. Like a bolt of rejuvenating tonic, the blast of an elf-pistol removes injury.

  At that moment, in fact, amidst the raging red storm, the little boy from Cleveland probably could have surmised as much, because he now saw the ranger sitting up with a beatific smile on his face, a smile that said volumes – here was a man who needed to tell his wife he loved her, who needed to visit the ocean.

  Like a blind man who had just been dipped in a miracle spring, the ranger could suddenly see everything clearly, and he seemed to fix his gaze on the pygmies, as he wiped a tear of joy from his wind-burned features and started to say, "Who the hell are yy —?"

  "Dooley!" The younger elf, the one with all the questions, interrupted the scene. "Pssssst!"

  "One moment, Shamus!" The elder elf did not take his fervid gaze off the ranger. He spoke above the noise of the storm. "Are ye all right then, Sir?"

  "Y-yes." Apparently the ranger could see fleeting glimpses of the ghostly elf. "Y-y-yes I am."

  "Dooley look!"

  At last, the elder sprite glanced up from the fallen lawman and saw that his comrade was indicating something off in the middle distance, in the vague halo of twilight a hundred yards off, made all the more ethereal by the last shreds of dust storm raking across the sunset.

  The storm was passing, the tail already departing, moving eastward, like the caboose of a demonic train receding into the dusk, leaving the landscape a sand-blasted shambles. And out there on the edge of a downtrodden little ranch – its modest corral void of life-stock, its ground seared by the relentless drought – lay a tangle of barbed-wire blown up against a split-rail gate.

  In the nucleus of that knotted mess – caught like a bug in a web — lay the dying amnesiac.

  "Come, Shamus," the elder one murmured with a reverence approaching prayer. "Time to finish it."

  At precisely 6:59 PM, as the man who killed Santa Claus lay snarled and spent in the tangle of barbed-wire, the small dark assassins approached cautiously from the east. To the amnesiac they looked like evil spirits emerging from the dwindling extremities of the dust storm, and he considered struggling, but he realized almost simultaneously with that innate impulse that the running was over, and it was time to surrender to Fate, and it was time die for his sins.

  He tried to hold his head up as the tiny ones loomed in the wan, filtered twilight. As they drew near, the dusky light shimmered on the tulip-shaped muzzles of their infernal weapons. "Easy there, Captain," the old man thought he heard one of them say. "Go easy there, Sir."

  The old man started to weep. "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry I didn't mean to I didn't mean to do it…."

  The bounty hunters paused on either side of the knotted mess of wire coated with bloody dust, each one kneeling with musket cradled. The storm had almost completely diminished now, and the silence that fell upon that wasted terrain seemed to stretch all the way to the Rio Grande. Within that alien hush, the sound of voices softly droning, far off in the ether, could be heard.

  "Be still now, be still," muttered the older one. He gently loosened the tangle. The old man felt the pressure ease off his skeletal limbs, his bony hip-points and his scourged bare feet.

  "I didn't mean to kill him." The old man's dust-clogged voice was barely a ragged croak. The distant voices were more discernible now, they were singing, singing "The Carol of the Bells." The sound wafted over the barrens like a salve on the wounded land.

  "You didn't kill 'im, Captain," the younger one said as he gently cradled the old man's shoulders and helped him sit up in the dust.

  All at once the land seemed to go still, the very air calming as though a switch had been thrown.

  "I didn't?" Confused, dazed, the amnesiac glanced over his shoulder and saw the ramshackle ranch house fifty yards away on the edge of a rotten, wind-scarred fence. It rose out of the gloom like an apparition – the hand-hewn logs and timbers frosted with dust – a single window burning with candle-light. The silhouettes of a poor migrant family were visible inside that window, singing around a meager Christmas tree.

  The realization washed over the old amnesiac like a warm wave. It was December 24th, 1932. Christmas Eve. "Is this a dream?" the old man wanted to know.

  The elves sat down in the dirt next to him. "I surely wish it was," the older elf said with weary sigh, brushing the dust from his Jodhpur pants. "Ye gave us all quite a scare, Captain."

  "I didn't kill Santa?"

  Shamus the Elf smiled at him then, the warmest smile ever proffered in the mortal world. "You didn't kill Santa, Sir – you are Santa."

  The old man froze. Before another word was spoken, the synapses deep inside his brain fired like a barely smoldering ember coming to life: a memory of a midair collision, Christmas morning, four long years ago, swooping down off the frozen Pacific, the reindeers blind in the blizzard, navigating by instinct over British Columbia.

  "Way it happened, Sir," chimed in the one named Dooley, "was you didn't see the new radio tower they put in north of Prince George – they call it progress – but the world ain't ready for such progress, you ask me."

  "Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord," the old man uttered, remembering how the tower had come out of nowhere, striking the front flank of his team that terrible morning, and how the sleigh had fallen out of the sky, engulfed in sparks and fire, and how the old man had hit his head on the great iron struts, thrown senseless into a drift, the impact wiping away his memory, leaving behind only the crumb of a false impression: that he had somehow brought about the accident. "I remember now oh God I remember," he moaned, the carol warbled on the wind around him.

  S
hamus the elf spoke up. "Sir, I don't mean to be presum – presummp –"

  "Presumptuous is what yer trying to say, ya Git," the older elf corrected.

  Shamus nodded. "Right, it's just that – that – that —"

  "Captain, what the lad is trying to say in his awkward manner is ya probably best be comin' along with us, seein' how it's the sacred evenin' and all, and we still got time to do some good."

  The old man stared at the elf for a good long time, then took in a deep breath and stretched his tired, depleted limbs. Already his body was transforming, replenishing itself with fat. His face seemed to soften in the half-light of the dusk as he rose on creaking joints. "God bless ya, boys, both of ya," he murmured, using Shamuses shoulder for balance as the elves escorted him away. "God bless ya for finding me, now and forever more."

  In the moments and hours and days that followed, the eyewitnesses present that night – the Ranger and the orphan and the orderly from Eldritch Asylum – found themselves victims of their own amnesia, the sight of the old man being ushered away into the night by elves fading into half-formed memories as in those of a dream. The Ranger even tried to capture what had happened that night in the pages of a personal journal, but over the years even that documentation was lost. He was never supposed to see what he had seen, and the hidden world eventually obliterated the images from his consciousness. In time the events of 1932 melded into the bland stew of history – that amorphous cauldron of recriminations and subjective analysis that always lands on some outer orbit of the actual truth. But one thing remains steadfast and inexorable in the history of the Great Depression: a mere six and a half weeks before the uncanny rendezvous in the dust storm, the governor of New York, a complex man who suffered from a paralytic disease, managed to rise through the ranks of national politics and get elected as the 32nd president – a number strangely synchronous with the year itself – announcing in his acceptance speech, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had help with his New Deal, which would eventually awaken the country from the ghastly slumber of the Depression.

  Christmas had returned, and Santa Claus now wore protective headgear each time he ventured out on that magic night of nights.

  NOTES

  On "Animal Rites"

  Some short stories I write in a fever, in one sitting, without taking a breath. There is no rhyme or reason for this technique, it merely depends upon the story or the state of mind I'm in, or sometimes the physical location in which I'm composing it. There's also no guarantee that this approach will yield anything interesting. Sometimes it does, usually it doesn't.

  They say that Kerouac wrote ON THE ROAD while buzzed out of his gourd on Benzedrine, pounding out the first draft on one gigantic continuous toll of teletype paper so that he wouldn't have to pause to reload the paper into his old Smith Corona (which may have prompted the irrepressible wag, Truman Capote, to quip: "That's not writing, that's typing!"). I don't know if this teletype story is apocryphal or not, but I empathize with Old Jackie Boy, because I get in that zone sometimes.

  I got into it with "Animal Rites."

  You see, I have this terrible fear of flying. And the only way I can deal with plane trips is by doing two things: 1) Taking a sedative such as Xanax or Valium, and 2) Writing furiously so that I lose myself in a story and forget where I am. I've written quite a few of these "distraction" stories on board airliners. Most of them are garbage. But occasionally I'll produce something like "Animal Rites."

  "Animal Rites" may very well be most successful short story I've ever written. It's been reprinted the most times. It's been translated into French. And it's been performed in public countless times to fairly appreciative audiences.

  It was written at 30 thousand feet over the states of Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

  On "Black Celebration"

  I was weaned on punk rock. I always wanted to incorporate punk rock into my horror fiction but could not solve the conundrum of blending those two mutually exclusive and almost adversarial mediums. Rock and roll is a hot medium – sweaty, loud, immediate, tribal, felt in the solar plexus – while literature is a cold medium. Literature is solitary, intellectual, passive, and felt in the cerebral cortex. Never the twain shall meet. And yet… I thought it might be interesting to meld punk rock with the Lovecraftian mythos. Somehow the awesome unease conjured by the best of H.P. Lovecraft – those unnamable horrors from other dimensions – seemed just as ethereal and hard to grasp as the inscrutable power of four junkies banging on instruments, screaming about sex, drugs, and injustice.

  On "Steagal's Barber Shop"

  It probably is no surprise that I consider myself a died-in-the-wool Democrat politically... but at times I can fall somewhere to the left of Timothy Leary. Take war. What is it good for? As the man says: absolutely nothing. Except maybe two things: Destroying humans, and generating lies. It never helps, it never triumphs over anything. Maybe the second world war was the last necessary one. I don't know. All I do know is that I hate the idea of hypocritical fat cats in suits sitting in Washington, sending people like the characters in this tale into hell. I suppose that's why I wrote this story – which is also, in its own weird way, a gentle tribute to another soldier name Rod Serling.

  On "The Panic Switch"

  Not too long ago, I filled out a renewal form for a pugnacious little writer's group called The Horror Writers Association, of which I've been a member for nearly a decade. It's a letter-size document tri-folded into a display-window envelope. Black and white. Single-sided. No frills. It looks like something that was perhaps mimeographed at my kid's kindergarten.

  It's a far cry from the endless stream of glossy propaganda with which the Writers Guild inundates its members. But I guess that's the point. Unlike the Mercedes-driving, espresso-swilling screenwriters of the Guild, we poor schmos and schmo-ettes who proudly call ourselves "horror writers" are mired in the ghetto of the publishing world... and nowadays resources are scarce.

  As a mass-market literary category, horror enjoys a reputation a few rungs below Afghan cook books. Some believe this is because of the glut of cheesy slasher novels that came out in the 1980s in the wake of Stephen King's success. Others believe it's due to that cinematic high watermark, FRIDAY THE 13TH, and all the brilliant, poignant, feel-good sequels it has spawned. My personal theory is that horror fiction is currently on the down-slide — at least commercially — because of its name.

  THE OXFORD AMERICAN DICTIONARY defines horror as "a feeling of loathing and fear, an intense dislike or dismay." This is not what HWA folks write. Nor is it what name brands like King and Straub and Barker and Rice do. Nor is it the product of lesser known but equally brilliant practitioners such as Joe Lansdale or David Schow. Horror is what September 11th was. Horror is what passes as government nowadays. Horror is your nightly news. Horror is CNN.

  The myths and metaphors of the HWA are more like dark wonders... or supernatural suspense... or psychological fantasy... or whatever.

  In fact, what I set out to do in this tale, "The Panic Switch," is combine all the elements of what have come to be collectively called "horror" into one story. The lonely, noir, pulp hero. The darkly fantastic surrealism of Lovecraft, King, and Barker. The disturbing Freudian subtext. And I worked and worked on this thing you're about to read. When I was done, I had no idea where to send it. That's the problem with this writing business, you have to sell your stuff to a market in order to enable readers access to it.

  I hate that part.

  Thank God, Rich Chizmar at CEMETERY DANCE is as twisted as I am.

  On "Deal Memo"

  Let me get something straight. For the record, I love Walt Disney. The guy, I'm talking about. The genius who invented the modern cell-animated feature. With that said: the corporation that Hollywood accountants created after Uncle Walt's death…? Not so much. The genetically modified monster conjured up in the sleazy laboratories of the modern blockbuster
movie industry… not so much. Not crazy about the business model. The way they keep product locked up for years and then release it like it's the crown… oh never mind. One other thing: I once got a call from my agent about a possible job "novelizing" Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. Let us pause for a moment and consider the absurdity here. In the words of the Christ himself: "Oy ve."

  On "Mole"

  I was baptized as a Catholic, and grew up as a Catholic, and received my first communion at my Aunt Jane's house in St. Louis with Welch's grape juice and Wonder Bread serving as the blood and body of Christ. By the time I was old enough to drive, I had become a card-carrying "lapsed" Catholic… but the power of all the rituals never left the fecund soil of my subconscious. All of which is why the whole idea of tangible evil – i.e. demonic entities that come from somewhere and go back to somewhere – has always fascinated, frightened, tickled, obsessed and amused me.

  On "Necrotica"

  "Name something you believe in, something that nobody could ever talk you out of." The voice crackled in my ear, and I just froze like a lawn ornament. The year was 1997, and my first hardcover novel, The Killer's Game, had just been published. It was a rainy morning in March, and I was on Simon & Schuster's dime in a dilapidated roadside motel in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At that time, I still fancied myself as this up-and-coming wunderkind author. I figured it was only a matter of time until I broke big, and then it was going to be lamb chops and Jaguars the rest of my life. Little did I know the vagaries of the book biz... but that's another story for another book. The voice crackling on the phone was a producer for "Politically Incorrect," a woman with the personality of a railroad spike. I presume it was her job to weed out the stiffs and find the next feisty pseudo-celebrity to chew Bill Maher's ear off. (Important aside: I adored "Politically Incorrect" when it was on the air; I think Bill Maher is brilliant and the true successor to Johnny Carson; but that didn't make this "pre-interview" any easier.) My publicist had set up the call, and it was going fairly well until the producer asked me this bombshell of a question.