Laughing Man

by Wright, T. M.

  She could hear him far behind her. Although he had told her more than once about his almost preternatural running abilities as a child, those abilities had apparently not stayed with him into adulthood and early middle age. She thought she could even hear him breathing heavily, though this had to be her imagination because he wasn't nearly close enough for that, and she knew that it would be difficult to hear anything above the sound of her own body crashing through the summer grass, and her own heavy breathing.

  And she thought it was good that she was not in a complete panic. She may or may not have been fleeing for her life from a man she thought she had known, but who, she realized, she had not known at all. But she was thinking. She was analyzing this situation as well as she could under the circumstances. She wasn't simply tearing her hair out and making a complete ass of herself. That, of course, was because of her training—Always keep your wits about you. Always assess the situation and react to it, not simply to your fear.

  She realized that something was running alongside her in the summer grass. She turned her head quickly. She saw a tall shadow not far off. Far behind her, she heard Erthmun call, "Patricia, stop running!" She thought for a moment that what she was seeing was her own shadow, dogging her footsteps. But this couldn't be true, she realized, because the sun was in front of her.

  And she knew at once that it was the tall shadow's heavy breathing, as well as her own, that she had heard, and was hearing now.

  She lurched sharply to her left, stumbled on a clod of earth, nearly fell, straightened, felt a hand on her back as she ran, felt it lower to her waist, screamed quickly, glanced around, saw a man's naked body, a face at her shoulder. The man was smiling—not in the way that a naked man might smile, but in a way that a man anticipating something tasty might smile, as if he were incredibly hungry and would soon be satiated.

  "Get away!" she screamed at him. "Get away!"

  "Patricia?" she heard. "Where are you?"

  She pitched forward head-first into the grass and earth, tasted the soil, rolled once, twice, came up quickly to her feet, looked right, left, behind, saw Erthmun running toward her.

  The naked man was gone.

  Chapter Twelve

  Erthmun said, "You're afraid of me, aren't you? I can see it in your eyes. Please, don't be. I am no more to be feared than an old basset hound."

  She gave him a questioning look. They were standing together at the spot where she had pitched and rolled and she had yet to tell him about the naked man. "I'll reserve judgment, okay, Jack?" she said stiffly, voice quaking. "Could I please have my weapon?" She extended her hand for it, saw that her hand was shaking. "Jesus," she whispered.

  He gave her the weapon; she put it in her shoulder holster and said, "The things you told me were very upsetting. More than upsetting . . ." She sighed. "There's someone else here, in this field. There's a naked man in this field. He . . . goddamnit, Jack, he attacked me!"

  "Yes," Jack said, "I saw the naked man. I saw him running with you. Running after you."

  She looked wide-eyed at him. "You saw him? You saw him, Jack? My God, you saw him and you didn't go after him?"

  He shook his head, as if in confusion. "I lost sight of him, Patricia. He was there one moment, he had his hands on you one moment, I think, and then he wasn't there. I thought I should tend to you first." He nodded once, twice. "But you're all right. I think you're all right. Are you all right?"

  "Yes. I think so. A little dirt in my mouth, but I'm okay." She spit.

  "Good," Erthmun said. "Good. So I'll go looking for him, now. I'll go looking for this naked man."

  "Yes," Patricia said. "We both will." She unholstered her weapon. "Jack?"

  "Yes?"

  "Stay where I can see you, okay?"

  He nodded.

  Williamson the Loon thought that he was a powerful son of a bitch, like his father, who had been a very powerful son of a bitch, whose father had been an even more powerful son of a bitch, who had been the product of a never-ending line of awesomely powerful sons of bitches.

  And it was altogether possible, and quite possibly even true that he, Williamson, was the most powerful son of a bitch who had ever sprung from the earth, penetrated its women, and eaten of its fruits.

  Oh, that was a chuckle deep inside, where chuckles had properly to reside and originate, within his gut somewhere, his lower intestine, no doubt, which was long and thick, red and blue and gray. Sunset and midday and twilight. Shit, shit—he was a poet, too. An awesomely powerful son-of-a-bitching poet!

  He was in the grimy men's room of a grimy gas station southwest of Albany. He'd gotten here with the help of friendly people who had, they'd told him, hitchhiked, too, when they were young; "You don't see many people like you, anymore," one said. "Hitchhikers, I mean."

  "That as well," said Williamson.

  There was a knock at the rest room door. It was a soft knock, not urgent, and Williamson ignored it.

  He was looking at himself in the restroom mirror. He worshipped what he saw in that mirror. It was perfection, the perfection of mathematics and poetry and biology and fucking madly, madly fucking, fucking in anger and retribution and . . .

  There was another knock, not as soft.

  Williamson looked away from the mirror and quickly around at the door. "Be patient," he called. "You'll live longer!"

  "I'm sorry," a female voice called back. "I'll wait."

  "Damn fucking straight you'll wait!" he called, and felt that chuckle again in his lower intestine; Damn fucking straight you'll wait! Poet, poet! Poet, poet! He was a fucking, all-powerful, son-of-a-bitching—

  His hearing was so acute that the crash of the door being kicked open made him wince and cover his ears with his hands, which was enough time for the two state troopers who'd been outside the restroom door to wrestle him to the floor and throw handcuffs on him.

  "You have the goddamned right to stay good and goddamned silent," one of the troopers said as they hauled him to his feet, "and if you give up this goddamned right. . ."

  Erthmun called across the dozen yards that separated him from Patricia, "He's not here. I know he's not here. I can feel it."

  She called back, "You're wrong. He is here. I can feel it!"

  "But why would he stick around, Patricia?" Erthmun called. "He's got both of us looking for him now."

  "That wouldn't scare him, Jack."

  He hadn't heard her, so he shouted to her to repeat herself.

  "I said, the fact that we're both looking for him wouldn't scare him."

  "How do you know that?"

  "It was in his eyes. I don't think he was scared of anything. I could see it in his eyes!"

  Erthmun sighed. Naked men with fearless looks in their eyes running around in a field of summer grass and attacking police detectives. It was ludicrous.

  He called back, "I know of such men."

  She looked silently at him.

  He repeated, "I know of such men. My father warned us about them, so long ago."

  She walked toward him, asked him to repeat himself.

  "I said, the person who called himself my father warned us often about naked men in the fields." She was only a dozen yards from him, now, and was keeping her eyes locked on his, as if she were wary of him. "He said there were naked men running about in the fields around the house."

  Patricia said, "And were there?"

  "And were there? I think there were." She was within arm's reach, now. Her eyes were trained on his. He said, "I think that I was one of them. One of those naked men in the fields." He grinned. "But I was a boy, then. I wasn't a man. I was a boy."

  Vetris Gambol thought he was dysfunctional. Why else would he be living with an honest-to-goodness killer? A very small killer, certainly; a killer who purred and kneaded and acted, at times (all the wrong times, he thought), like ... a pussycat, but a killer nonetheless. A creature that was born to be a killer and lived its life as a killer (though Vetris had to admit to the dearth of dead mice
or moles in and around the house: but perhaps those creatures knew about the killer who dwelt within the house and gave it a wide berth). And now he—Vetris was, damnit, afraid to go to bed and leave the killer loose in the house. Jesus, he had to get rid of the animal. But he knew he wouldn't. In a loopy way, Villain taught him something about human killers, about their predilections and habits and obsessions. Because the predatory nature was as much a part of Villain as it was a part of any human killer. Jeez, it was an interesting theory, wasn't it? But it was bullshit. He knew that he kept Villain around because he respected him. Because he loved him—predatory nature and all. Because Villain represented purity. Vetris sighed. God, he really was dysfunctional!

  Erthmun saw a naked man on a low hill a quarter of a mile from where he and Patricia were standing. The man was looking at them, Erthmun guessed. The man's hands were flat against his ears and his legs were spread wide. Erthmun started to tell Patricia about the man, but then she saw the man, too, and said, "Good Lord, there he is!"

  "There he is!" Erthmun echoed.

  "What in the hell's he doing, do you think?"

  "He's holding his hands on his ears."

  "Yes, I see that. But why?"

  "I don't know."

  She glanced at him, said dryly, "Rhetorical question, Jack," and hollered to the naked man, "Stay where you are! We're police detectives and we're armed." Then she started sprinting toward him.

  Erthmun called after her, "Patricia, you won't catch him, you can't catch him!"

  "Watch me," she hollered back.

  He went after her.

  Williamson the Loon did not like handcuffs. It wasn't simply that they were confining; he was used to confinement, had been born of the warm, liquid, and confining belly of the earth itself, so he had grown to accept confinement—the confinement of his skin, the confinement of his years (which equaled a slow but implacable disintegration), the confinement of his strength (which was considerable but not invincible), the confinement imposed by his probing but necessarily inefficient intellect, and by his unquenchable desires. But handcuffs did not simply represent confinement, they represented the cold, hard imprint of human authority, too, which Williamson could not accept or bear, because, by their very nature, humans exercised authority unfairly and without authority—from the earth, or from him.

  And now that the imminent end of his existence was pulling the magic from within his gut, he knew that he no longer needed to accept confinement of any kind.

  The two state troopers—one male, one female—who had thrown him into handcuffs, and then into the back of their patrol car, were talking outside the car while they waited for backup. They needed backup, Williamson had decided, because the stories about him were clearly approaching the stuff of legend—stories that said he was a man of daunting power and even more daunting ferocity, especially when it came to handing out necessary pain and death to those whose continued existence would be an affront to the earth.

  He could hear the troopers talking; they were very animated, and every few moments, one of them glanced warily at him, as if at a caged tiger. He loved catching their eye. Loved grinning at them as if he hadn't a care in the world. He knew that such grins were very upsetting because they spoke either of madness, an overarching self-confidence, or both, which were things that sparked fear in many humans.

  Just then, the male trooper bent over, so his angular, handsome face was almost pressed against the car window, and he growled, "You wanna just look somewhere else, buddy!"

  Williamson shrugged. It was the kind of shrug that was neither submissive nor acquiescing; it was the kind of shrug that said clearly that he didn't give two shits about anything the person speaking—in this case, the trooper—was saying and that the speaker could go piss in a hurricane, for all he cared.

  It was a shrug that was simply too much for the trooper, who had seen one too many such shrugs in his ten years as a law enforcement professional, so he threw the door open, reached madly into the car, grabbed Williamson by the collar, pulled him close enough that Williamson was repelled by the man's breath, and growled through clenched teeth, "You know what I want, asshole! You know what I want?"

  Williamson grinned.

  The trooper brought him an inch closer. "I want you to be as quiet as a dead man! You got that!"

  Williamson grinned again.

  "You got that!"

  Williamson leaned forward and bit the man's nose clean off below the nostrils. This caused the man to lurch backward, screaming, which made the back of the man's head hit the door frame very hard, which knocked the man out and sent him sprawling and bleeding into Williamson's lap. Williamson looked questioningly down at him (Williamson had already spit the man's nose out, and it lay white and red and ragged between the man's shoulder blades), then at the female trooper, who was leaning over, into the car with her .45 pointed directly at Williamson's temple. "What the fuck did you do?" she demanded. "What the fuck did you do? Get outta there, now!"

  Williamson shook his head. "How can I?" he asked with a little catch of innocence and incredulity in his voice; he inclined his head toward the trooper sprawled out on his lap, and gave her a charming, boyish grin. "I'm not a miracle worker."

  "Goddamn you!" the female trooper shouted, spittle flying, reached in, hauled her partner by the back of his shirt collar off Williamson's lap, and tried to set him down gently on his back outside the car, but the effort of keeping her eye on Williamson and dealing with her partner's limp body at the same time was too much for her, and she dropped her partner face-first into the asphalt. He hit with a soft whump, a groan, and a fart.

  Williamson said, "Listen to that. He has no class. Your partner has no class, ma'am."

  "Shut the fuck up!" she shouted. "Just shut the fuck up!" Her gaze fixed on something on the seat between Williamson and the door. "Oh, my God!" she breathed, and leaned over to get a better view. "Oh my heavenly God," she said, "you bit his goddamned nose off!" She straightened abruptly, deftly avoiding the door frame, and pointed her .45 stiffly at Williamson's temple again. "Don't even think of moving!" she commanded, and slammed the door.

  "Clichés, clichés," Williamson muttered.

  The naked man watched as Erthmun and Patricia closed on him. His hands were still clasped to his ears, his legs were spread, and he sported an incredible erection.

  Patricia said to Erthmun, who was only an arm's length away, walking quickly—as she was—though not running, so they were less likely to spook the naked man, "Jesus, look at that! That's damned unnatural!"

  "Is it?" Erthmun said.

  She glanced at him, saw a little grin play on his mouth, sighed at the chutzpah of the male animal, and shouted to the naked man, who was no more than a hundred feet away, "I want you to get down on your stomach, and I want you to do it now! If you don't do it, then I will be forced to fire on you." She had her weapon drawn, but she was holding it so it pointed upward.

  The naked man made no response.

  "Maybe he can't hear us," Erthmun suggested.

  "He can hear us!" Patricia said.

  "But he's got his hands on his ears."

  "He can hear us, Jack. Look at him."

  Erthmun looked closely at the naked man. He saw a face that was as unremarkable as chewing gum, a face no more remarkable—Erthmun thought—than his own. Except for the eyes, which were strangely distant and as opaque as stone, despite the man's libidinous grin. Yes, Erthmun realized all at once, the man could indeed hear everything that was being said, had heard everything ever since he and Patricia had come after him. Because this man, Erthmun knew, was one of those his father had warned him about decades ago. One of those who had moved with such exquisite and supernatural grace through the fields that surrounded the house Erthmun had lived in as a child. One of those who'd found Erthmun's mother and had had his way with her.

  In a flash, Erthmun took his .45 from his shoulder holster, aimed it at the naked man, and fired.

  "My God!" Patricia sh
outed.

  The naked man clutched his chest, looked alarmed, fearful, fell backward down the little hill, and was gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Vetris Gambol could not believe that Villain was dead. But there he was, in the closet in the upstairs bedroom, on his side, not breathing, mouth open, tongue lolling out. Very dead. Vetris realized that he had always believed that Villain—as odd as he was—was simply not capable of being dead. Even now he could not believe it. He believed he'd bury Villain and that sometime in the night he'd feel Villain kneading his chest, and hear Villain's furious purring, and when he opened his eyes, he'd see Villain's golden eyes staring with great hunger at him. This was not altogether an impossibility for a cat who had been possessed by all the feline predators that had lived throughout history.

  Vetris bent over and gingerly touched the dead cat's rib cage, found it cold and stiff. What in the hell killed him? Vetris wondered. Old age? Not possible. Villain was barely five. Cats lived a good long time—much longer than dogs. Poison, then? But from where? Villain never went outside, and there was no poison in the house. Heart attack? A chronic illness that had masked itself all this time in Villain's fearsome and bizarre behavior? Distemper? Feline leukemia?

  Shit, what did it matter? Villain was dead, and he, Vetris, certainly wasn't planning on getting another cat to take his place because, simply, no other cat could take Villain's place. No other cat would be as interesting as Villain.

  Vetris realized something, then, that unnerved him. He realized that he had seen Villain—or a creature he had thought was Villain—dash between the refrigerator and cupboards not even a half hour earlier. And here was Villain lying cold and stiff, now, in the closet in the bedroom. Clearly, Villain had been dead for more than a half hour. So what had he seen below, in the kitchen? Another cat? Obviously.