Laughing Man

by Wright, T. M.

  LAUGHING MAN

  T.M. Wright

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2012 / T.M. Wright

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

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  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY T.M. WRIGHT

  NOVELS:

  The Strange Seed Series

  STRANGE SEED

  NURSERY TALE

  THE CHILDREN OF THE ISLAND

  THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK

  The Biergarten Series

  THE CHANGING

  THE DEVOURING

  GOODLOW'S GHOSTS

  THE ASCENDING

  SLEEPEASY

  The Manhattan Ghost Story Series

  THE WAITING ROOM

  A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE

  Standalone Novels

  BOUNDARIES

  NON FICTION:

  THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO FLYING SAUCERS

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

  THE CHANGING – NARRATED BY ANDREW RANDALL

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  Book One

  The House on Four Mile Creek

  Chapter One

  Jack Erthmun remembered being left alone in a cave when he was a child. He maintained that he was less than a year old when this happened, although everyone else in his large family told him that it was pure fantasy. Some of them even laughed, which Erthmun thought bordered on cruelty, because childhood memories were sacred, after all. Childhood itself was sacred. Adulthood wasn't. Adulthood was profane, violent, and perverse. Erthmun sometimes wondered why nature allowed human beings to grow beyond the purity of childhood.

  He remembered that, as a child, he had owned pets. This was fantasy, too, according to the other members of his family. They reminded him that Erthmun's father had harbored no particular fondness for animals, and was—according to family legend—not above shooting stray cats and dogs that happened onto the family property.

  The cave that Erthmun remembered was small and dark, and it smelled of newly mown grass. This memory was particularly strong for him, as memories of smells are for everyone. It haunted his nights and clouded his days, though not all of his nights, nor all of his days.

  "Do you remember if you were alone in the cave?" his sister Lila once asked.

  "Alone in the cave," Erthmun said; it was not a question. He was repeating what she had said.

  "Yes," Lila said, and grinned.

  "Yes," Erthmun said.

  "You were?" Lila said, still smiling. "Alone in the cave, I mean."

  "I was alone," Erthmun said. "Yes."

  "You know, of course," she told him, "that this memory is something you've concocted to take the place of another memory. One that's probably even worse."

  Erthmun nodded. "Even worse," he said.

  "Jack, it's a widely accepted concept," Lila told him. She smiled again, though Erthmun could not imagine why she was doing so much smiling. She finished, "Manufactured memories to take the place of other memories. It's a widely accepted concept."

  "A widely accepted concept," Erthmun said, and when she smiled yet again, he wanted suddenly to bash her head against a wall. The impulse came and went as quickly as a twitch; he found it very confusing—though it was far from the first time that such an impulse had come to him, in many situations—and he was ashamed of himself for it.

  Erthmun did not often see the other members of his family, though two of his sisters lived within an easy commute of Manhattan, and his mother lived in a comfortable Cape Cod in White Plains, also an easy commute. He got along with his sisters, and his mother, when he saw them on Christmas and Thanksgiving because, according to social convention, holidays are times when people should get along.

  The man that Erthmun had known as his father died when Erthmun was five years old. This had been the impetus for his mother to pack up their belongings and move him and sisters out of their house on Four Mile Creek, in the Adirondacks (the house near which Erthmun was born). It was a move she had been wanting desperately to make for a long time, but one which Erthmun's authoritarian father had denied her because the house on Four Mile Creek was, as he put it, "safely removed from the muck and mire and moral decay of the cities."

  Erthmun did not remember much about his father. He remembered only that there were many times that he saw himself in his mind's eye stealing into his parents' bedroom late at night, or stealing up behind his father while the man sprayed weed killer on his small, mannered garden, and reaching into the man's back and tearing his spine out. Then Erthmun saw himself running through the fields with the spine held high over his head, as if it were a great and dangerous snake and he had defeated it in battle.

  Erthmun did not feel connected to his surviving sisters, or to his mother. They clearly sensed this; his sister, Sylvia, once told him, "Molasses is thick, Jack, but blood is thicker, and if you ask me, families should be as thick as thieves."

  "Thick as thieves," Erthmun said, though he had not understood it. The whole concept of families was odd to him. He could sense how his sister felt when she talked about families. He sensed much. But he did not feel the same warmth that she obviously felt when she talked about families, and he told her so.

  "You're a strange duck," she said.

  "I'm not a duck at all," he said, and though she cracked a smile, she knew that Erthmun was not trying to be funny.

  Erthmun's impulses to violence were quick, and he rarely acted upon them. His own reflection—in a mirror, in a pond, in the polished metal surface of a car—often made his muscles tense, and made his hands ball up into fists. He had once hit a bathroom mirror with his fist, in response to his reflection. It made him feel foolish because, when he dwelt upon it, he could think of no good reason for having hit the mirror. His reflection had . . . excited him, or angered him, he guessed. It was as if it had been a stranger, and an enemy, not merely the reflection of his own square and essentially pleasant face, brown eyes, and thick, reddish hair.

  People who smiled surreptitiously when he repeated their words also made him angry. He had been told by many that he had the annoying habit of repeating the words and sentences of those to whom he was speaking, but he could never remember doing it. Consequently, when people smiled at him because of it, he had no idea why they were smiling—he thought they were amused by him, or that they harbored a secret they weren't sharing with him. So he got angry, and saw himself doing some quick and bloody act of violence to them. But this was an impulse he had never acted upon because he was almost religiously concerned with being a civilized man, and with reacting in a civilized way to all that went on around him.

  "It's called echolalia," Sylvia told him. "Jack, you have echolalia."

  "Echolalia," he said.

  She smiled. "See there, that's what I mean. You repeated what I said."

  "No, I didn't."

  "But you did, Jack."

  "No, I didn't
," he said, which was another facet of the problem; sometimes he repeated his own words.

  Now, at the age of thirty-seven, his echolalia seemed to be fading, he thought. Or maybe people had gotten used to it, because there were fewer surreptitious smiles.

  He also felt an impulse to violence when he ate. His sister Lila noticed one Thanksgiving—and not for the first time—that he seemed very tense as he ate his turkey, cranberries, and mashed potatoes, and she told him later that he looked like he was protecting his food.

  "Protecting my food?" he said.

  "Sure," she said. "So no one will steal it."

  "Who's going to steal it?" he said.

  She said, "How often do you eat out?"

  "Eat out?"

  "With friends."

  He thought a moment. "What friends?"

  "I know you have friends, Jack. Everyone has friends."

  "They do?"

  "Of course. What about the people you work with?"

  He thought a moment, and said, "They're just people at work, Lila."

  "But don't you . . . go out to lunch with your buddies? Don't all men do that? Don't you go to a bar and have lunch?"

  "No."

  "That's very sad," she said.

  "Sad?" Erthmun said. "I don't know. Is it?"

  She assured him that it was sad.

  He said no, it wasn't.

  Chapter Two

  Erthmun lived alone in a three-room, fourth-floor apartment in Manhattan's West Village. His building was sturdy, old, and dreary, and the other people who shared the building with him were of various ages and occupations. One was an assistant editor at Elle Magazine, another was a postal worker, another a retired professor of biochemistry. Several were self-proclaimed artists and writers looking for their big break in the city that had given more than a few big breaks to others like them. All of these people nodded at one another in the hallways and on the elevators, but none of them had developed friendships with anyone else in the building.

  Erthmun had no pets. He had long ago found that he possessed a strange ambivalence toward animals, and that they apparently possessed the same sort of ambivalence toward him. He looked with awe at the stray cats that roamed his neighborhood, and he thought of them as survivors. He respected them for this, and felt an uneasy kinship with them, but they eyed him warily, as if unsure if he was friend or foe.

  Erthmun had been named after a maternal uncle who was a favorite of his and of his siblings. Uncle Jack had been a bear of a man who did a lot of hearty laughing and had brought presents whenever he'd visited. He had been partial to Erthmun, but he'd hidden it well.

  As an adult, Erthmun was haunted by the memory of Uncle Jack's death. The man's last words, heard only by Erthmun himself, were, "Oh, shit!" Uncle Jack said this as if at a fleeting annoyance—a missed turn while driving, a name forgotten, a passing rain shower on a sunny day. Erthmun thought that it was a strange attitude in the face of death—annoyance—and found himself ashamed of Uncle Jack for it. He would have preferred that the man died kicking and screaming in anger because his life was coming to an end. What else was there, after all, but life?

  Uncle Jack was also a man who told stories that made his young nieces and his nephew huddle together in delicious fright. These stories also caused Erthmun to stand at his bedroom window for hours and hours in search of the marvelous, misty, and dangerous creatures that, according to Uncle Jack, inhabited the hills and fields around the house on Four Mile Creek.

  "It's like this," Uncle Jack said. "You can't see them if you're actually looking at them. You won't see them that way. That would be too easy, wouldn't it?" He laughed. "You can only see them if you're not looking at them."

  Eight-year-old Lila said, "But Uncle Jack, how can you see them if you're not looking at them?"

  "Yeah, how can you see them?" asked six-year-old Jocelyn.

  Uncle Jack laughed again and explained, "Well, try this one night. Go out and look up at the starry sky and then find a patch of sky where there doesn't appear to be any stars. Look hard into this patch of black sky, and if you look long enough, after a while, very, very faint stars will appear, but not exactly where you're looking. They'll appear only where you're not looking."

  Lila smiled. "I did that once, Uncle Jack."

  "Of course you did," he said. "And that's how you see these creatures I'm talking about, too. Because they're so fast, because they run so fast—faster than anything you've ever seen, faster than the wind—and because they can look like the things around them. They can look like the grass, or the trees, or the sky and the clouds. You can't see them unless you look just ahead of them or just behind them."

  "Behind them," Erthmun repeated.

  "Behind them," Uncle Jack repeated. "Or above them, even."

  Lila said, wide-eyed, "What do they look like, Uncle Jack?"

  "They look like you"—he touched her nose gently—"and you"—Sylvia's nose. Then he looked hard at Erthmun and continued, "And they look like you especially, Jack." He touched Erthmun's nose. He lingered with his finger on Erthmun's nose. Then he gave him a small, secretive smile, as if the two of them shared a secret, although Erthmun had no idea what that secret might be. Uncle Jack laughed again and added, "And some of them even look like me!"

  Lila, still wide-eyed, asked, "Where do they come from, Uncle Jack?"

  "Well, Lila," Uncle Jack said, "where does anything come from?"

  "Where does anything come from?" Erthmun said.

  "I don't know," Lila said, clearly perplexed.

  "From heaven," Sylvia offered.

  "From heaven," Erthmun said.

  Uncle Jack said, "Where do the plants come from, and the cows, and the fish in the sea?"

  The three children looked in wonderment and confusion at him.

  And Uncle Jack declared, "Why from here, of course. From the earth itself."

  "The earth itself," Erthmun repeated.

  "From everywhere!" Lila said, as if in awe.

  Erthmun was a homicide detective in Manhattan's 20th Precinct. He was almost preternaturally good at his work, but his methods had aroused suspicion among the powers that be because, as far as everyone else was concerned, Erthmun's ideas of "probable cause" for search and arrest often amounted to no more than hunches.

  PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF CRIMINAL TRIAL HELD AT RICHMOND COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT, STATEN ISLAND, 1993:

  C.E. (Counsel for the Defense): "Could you describe what you saw there, Detective Erthmun, at the end of the driveway, that morning, when you arrived at 18 Morningside Lane?"

  Jack Erthmun: "18 Morningside Lane? Yes, sir. I saw the body of a very obese Caucasian male dressed in a white shirt, black pants, and black shoes. He was lying on his stomach, and there appeared to be a bullet wound at the base of his neck—"

  C.E.: "Did you do a direct examination of this wound, Detective, to determine if it was an exit wound or an entrance wound?"

  J.E.: "Not as such. No, sir."

  C.E.: "Why not?"

  J.E.: "Because only the medical examiner is allowed to touch the body."

  C.E.: "Which would not have precluded you from doing a visual examination, isn't that right?"

  J.E.: "I didn't think it was necessary."

  C.E.: "You didn't think it was necessary?"

  J.E.: "Yes, sir."

  C.E.: "You didn't think it was necessary to try and determine whether this wound, which was apparently the victim's cause of death, occurred as the result of a bullet fired from in front of the victim, or from behind the victim?"

  J.E.: "No, I didn't."

  C.E.: "Could you tell the court why, Detective?"

  J.E.: "Because I knew that the victim had been killed by a bullet that entered his body from the front."

  C.E.: "You knew [emphasis] that the bullet had entered from the front before [emphasis] you actually did a close visual examination of the body?"

  J.E.: "Yes."

  C.E.: "How did you know this, Detective?"

&nbs
p; J.E.: "I knew because of the victim's [witness hesitates] demeanor."

  C.E.: "His demeanor? Could you explain that?"

  J.E.: (hesitates) "Yes. I would say that it was in the nature of . . . instinct or intuition."

  C.E.: "I'm still unclear as to what you mean. Could you try to be a little more forthcoming, Detective?"

  J.E.: "I'm not sure. I mean [witness hesitates], I mean that the victim, within the crime scene, was [witness hesitates] expressive."

  J.K.: "In what way, Detective?"

  J.E.: "I think in a holistic way. The victim at the crime scene was expressive in a holistic way."

  J.K.: "Detective, are you trying to be confrontational?"

  J.E.: "No."

  C.E.: "Isn't it true, Detective, that your methods of investigation have been described as unusual?"

  Erthmun thought that dead bodies were exquisite. They were so articulate, so passionless, and so passionate. They spoke volumes, not only about the victim, but about the perpetrator, too—all in shades of red and pink and white and brown.

  Chapter Three

  Early Winter

  The snow was deep in Manhattan, and the air was cold, still, and dense. It smelled of exhaust fumes, deli sandwiches, urine. Erthmun's joints hurt on days as cold as this. He had thought often of moving south, and as often as he had thought of it, he had wondered why he simply didn't do it.

  He was in a dreary little park at East 7th Street and Avenue C, and he was looking at a body lying in the snow. The body was that of a white male, about thirty-five years old, clean-shaven, black-haired. It was dressed for winter, in a bright blue parka, heavy pants, orange mittens, and a red cap with a tassel. It lay face-up, arms wide, left leg bent. The body wore black buckle boots, and had a rictus grin that had snow in it. The eyes were open, and they were muddy gray and green. There were no obvious signs of violence, and no clear indication as to the cause of the man's death. He looked like he had simply fallen asleep in the snow.