Renae opened the door, flushed, verging on tears.
“Ren?” Tom Larson began, looking worried. “Ed here?”
“He isn’t with you?” she asked.
Tom tiredly shut his eyes, slumping against the door.
“He hasn’t been home for three days,” she told him, stepping aside to let him in.
“Has he called?” Tom pressed, hopeful.
She shook her head.
“You don’t know he quit the force day before yesterday?”
Renae’s lips felt dry. She nervously licked them. “No. Did he say why?”
“I wasn’t there when he resigned. We’d followed two suspects to The Cove. They’d kidnapped a woman from a mall. Ed shot one before the suspect could snuff ’er. Other ran up to a roof. I went up to get him but Ed just stood in the street—watching. Like his feet were in cement.”
Renae thought she’d faint. The apartment seemed really hot. “Then what happened?”
“He’d left the scene by the time I reached the street again. Haven’t seen him since.” Tom shrugged, clearly uncomfortable. “One more thing I gotta ask. Do you know if Ed ever called a service, X-IS-THE-DARK?”
Renae couldn’t even speak. How could she answer? Yes, he did. I started it. Or maybe he was phoning before I began the game. Actually the bill showed the calls, then the charges vanished. I called, too. I’d tell you all this, but I can’t say a damn word right now. It sticks in my throat.
“Don’t worry,” Tom told her. He didn’t say why he thought the calls were important. But the flicker in his eyes spoke volumes. “I’ll find him. I think he’s sick. The way he’s acted lately, sweating buckets, distracted as hell. I mean some guys just up and lose their nerve one day. I don’t believe that of Ed. For all I know, he checked himself into a hospital. You sit tight, let me do the legwork. I’ll call soon as I know anything. Hell. Ed’ll probably be home by then. If he is, page me, okay?”
She nodded and Tom left.
««—»»
In The Cove three days ago, Tom had looked up and down the street for Ed Poe. Maybe his partner’d gone to radio for back-up and an ambulance. But there’d been no sign of him. The car was gone, too.
It creeped Tom out, those people in the street. So… still. They didn’t gather around the suspect’s shattered body, a mess from the four story swan dive. No one ran to help the wounded woman and horse. The witnesses stood exactly—as far as he could guess—right where they’d been as they’d waited for the skinhead to jump. Some of them still stood there, days later, grinning that goofy third stage-syphilitic smile, as if on Ecstasy, perspiring in oceanic waves of solar saltwater.
Tom got angry when none moved as he tried reaching the female vic. “What’s the matter with you? Stand aside!”
Nobody hindered him, yet they didn’t back off either. Belligerence, physical interference, and gesticulating banter he might’ve expected. There was none of that.
The city was a disturbing stillness, too. Eyes glittered from inside a building, some human wolf pack crouched there. Down the street, a door fell off its hinges. At the road’s opposite end, glass cracked loudly, smoking, reminding Tom of old time powder muskets. A fissure popped in the sidewalk, zigzagging through the concrete right before his eyes.
He refused to look at the castle. Nor the bell tower. He wouldn’t even let himself think about the room he’d seen, filled with victims of a black plague. He couldn’t help them. They weren’t here; they weren’t now.
Tom almost drew his weapon to force his way to the woman, but he thought better of it. An instinct suggested this spell might break and they’d tear him to pieces.
“Lady, how you doing there?”
“Got the situation under control,” she reported. “I’m a Major in the Armed Forces. I know how to field-treat a couple scratches. You just call a limo for us, a vet rescue for the horse, and a meatwagon for the two Nazis.”
Tom almost grinned, even as he cursed himself for leaving his cell phone home.
He turned to a group of young deathers lined up like a black picket fence. “Don’t suppose you could tell me where I might make a call?”
They pointed.
Tom spied the luminous building down the block. “The shuttered place?”
“That’s X-IS-THE-DARK,” they told him. “The phone-death place.”
He almost went that way, until he glanced into the skinhead’s car and spied their cell phone.
– | – | –
Chapter 24
Doug Moren rubbed his nose, bothered by an itch, pollution in his sinuses. He looked out the broad glass windows of Stahl’s Grocery, right at the edge of Euphalia Heights. He’d taken allergy medicine a scant two hours ago. He couldn’t take more until 4:00 A.M. He plucked a handkerchief from a pocket and vigorously wiggled it across his nostrils until they chapped.
It was bad enough working a day shift at the grocery, the smog so bad you couldn’t see across the street into Nubbing Cove—even if you could see fairly well the other direction. Maybe it was because the area used to be a swamp. Perhaps that’s why the city’s bad air collected above it. Like some urban swamp gas.
Stahl’s day shoppers were basically normal folks, mothers with kids in minivans out to buy cereal and hamburger, or dads in need of beer and cigs. The night shift was a different story: gangs emerging from poisoned fog that bisected the parking lot. Their dark clothes dripped from heat, plastering the material until it generated a second skin. When stared at, they made faces at the employees. They purchased or stole family packs of raw pork chops, bottles of generic red wine, anything chocolate. Black hair dye, red lipstick, white powder. Then they disappeared again into the roiling smog clouds.
What were these kids? Goths? Were they always like that? Doug recalled Goths were always different, but had they been criminal? He’d always thought of them as metaphysically-lifestyled, latterday beatniks. Maybe for the extreme, the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari came to mind.
A group came in last week, all wearing contact lenses with holograms on them. Looked like tiny moving pictures of a moon rising over a crackling bonfire. Doug knew because they’d marched single-file past him, each arrogantly thrusting his or her face right up against his, forcing on Doug a good look into their screwed-up eyes. He’d sworn he’d heard the hiss of flames.
As Stahl’s night manager for two months, Doug wanted a transfer. There was another store on the city’s opposite side. Away from the night freaks. He’d even considered moving out of state and shopped his résumé around.
A couple nights ago, there’d been this bunch in, buying all the gauze bandages and boxes of black dye (for clothes, not hair) that Stahl’s had on its well-stocked shelves. Next night they returned, swathed in black wrappings like formal mummies. Creatures from movies. Not the recent Mummy ventures, but the old Universal and Hammer Films whose mummified Egyptian living dead limped and dragged. Goths didn’t move that way. Eerily graceful, unencumbered by any cerement, they’d made a stately procession past end-cap displays of cupcakes, paper towels, canned peaches.
They were naked underneath. Doug spied a girl’s nipple and the tip of a guy’s uncircumcised penis peeking out from where wraps had slipped. But what frightened him most was that these skin bits were moldy.
How they’d stunk up the place. Doug’d ordered the stock boys to crank air conditioners to full blast and open doors. They mopped the floors with ammonia to clean anywhere the mummies walked. He looked down every aisle, seeing where they’d been. Yet instead of greening fungal footprints, there were tiny hand drawn X’s… probably in ink marker.
Working there, Doug never knew what he’d see next. Tonight he heard a strange sound coming from the back of the store. What now, dammit.
Splat.
SPLAT!
SPLATTT!
Doug rubbed his nose. His eyes burned, damn pollution. He went to the source of the noise and found, not Goths, but a white-haired man in a rumpled suit, short hair s
ticking from his head in disorderly spikes. He had grizzled white whiskers, probably making him appear older than he was. There was hair on the backs of his hands the same colorless color. He was removing cartons of eggs from the dairy case. The fellow opened the cartons, took out an egg at a time, then held it up to his ear.
What was he listening for?
Then he’d shake his head, throwing the egg to the floor. He’d pick up another, gently leaning his ear against it in the pose of an eavesdropper. Then…splattt!
There were three or four dozen eggs on the floor.
Christ, what a mess. “Hey!” Doug shouted, frowning, hands on his hips. “What the hell are you doing? Are you drunk or on so much crack that your brain cells can’t find each other? Stop it!”
The guy blinked at him, then listened to the next egg.
“I’ll call the cops if you don’t scram.”
This loony frightened Doug, but he decided it best to not back down. He took several determined steps forward. That was when the guy fled, dropping a carton of eggs. The manager ran after him, yelling, “Not that way!” when the man rushed for the stockroom’s double doors. His eyes widened as the fellow veered and broadjumped a six by six display for detergent, without touching a single 100 load box.
At the front, the man leaped onto the checkout counter, dodging a bagboy who made a grab for him. His feet set off the scanner as he ran down the counter’s length, register spewing a long ticket of charges all in X’s and O’s. Then he jumped back down, racing out to the parking lot. The bagboy started to pursue.
“Nah nah,” Doug sputtered as he came up. “Let him go. We’ll call the cops and file a report. For the good it’ll do. Yeah, and there’s a clean-up at the dairy case.”
The manager’s eyes tracked the man running across the lot until he disappeared into the pollution wall.
««—»»
The white-haired man only stopped when he smelled the girl. He inhaled, looking right and left, eyes piercing the foggy clouds. Sheer perfume. The scent of the threshold, unopened at the groove of her sex. It was of freshly baked cookies and unlet blood. All her little eggs still in the basket. The first part of Maiden, Mother, Crone—the incarnation before either the laughter or tears. And the receptacle prior to being either womb of birth or tomb of death. Here was she as She-X-The-Unknown. Ah, little bird not yet having flown.
He spied a car. It had three flat tires, having rolled across a path of broken glass and stone. A man stood just outside the driver’s opened door, punching buttons on a cell phone.
“Don’t worry, honey. I’ll get the auto club,” the man said to a young girl in the passenger seat.
“I’m scared, Daddy,” she replied. “This place isn’t right.”
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “We’re near a church. Didn’t you see those nuns back there?”
She seemed unconvinced.
Her father smiled. “If I can’t get a call through, we’ll go there. They’ll let us phone for a tow.”
“Can I be of some assistance?”
The father was startled as he came up, obviously alarmed when he saw the rumpled suit. The white-haired man pulled a wallet from his coat. It showed a gold shield. The father squinted, studying the ID. He pointed out, “The man in this photo has dark hair.”
The stranger started to say, Yeah, my hair went white overnight. Instead he explained, “I had to dye it for an undercover assignment. I’m compromising cover to help you. The Cove is a dangerous place at this hour. Bad things going down.”
God, she smells good. Milk and a squeeze of hormones like warm pollen in the June breeze.
“The face does look the same,” the father admitted. “Still, the name—especially with the photo—is hard to believe.”
“What can I say? My mother was a reader and a romantic. And with my father’s last name already being what it was… Edgar Allan Poe.”
The father laughed with relief. He leaned into the car again, speaking to the girl. “Honey, look who’s here to help…”
He never should’ve turned his back.
««—»»
I’ve arrested men for this. For even less.
Get out of my head!
This is simple. Ancient. Steps taken by feral ancestors before the formation of formal prayer.
Only in modern man is this evil.
After the howl(ing).
Not evil before?
What then?
Ask yourself.
Does the maniac have a soul?
Then is that soul insane?
Can a soul be insane?
Can that integral part, closest to God, the factual piece, referred to when it is said ‘made in God’s image’, ever be insane?
And if the soul must always be the rational director of the self on its journey, then how does it permit the maniac to enclose it?
How is that blood-drenched, nightmare-engorged shrieking thing on a specific vision quest intended to teach it necessary lessons by a soul close to God/in God’s image/yea verily you mean to tell me Christ died on the cross for the monstrous sodomy this slavering degenerate committed and the blood he drank from sinking in to the hilt his filthy rotten yellow teeth?
This isn’t me.
It isn’t me anymore.
Therefore, nothing with the word ‘me’ in its mouth need come to the door of my soul to apply.
For the job.
Of maniac.
I’ve arrested guys like this.
I remember the first one, back when I was a rookie.
I say ‘arrest’, but that’s not how it went down.
I found him with that child’s body, hardly believing at first glance that it was A Child’s Body… and I simply started shooting him. Kneecaps first. So he couldn’t walk. Specifically so he couldn’t run.
(Because, freaky as it turned out to be, he did it on all fours.)
So I was forced to eliminate both elbows as well.
I blew off his hands for having touched her with them.
He whimpered, kept trying to bite me.
I blew off his cock because he’d…
I gave her the best burial I could. I couldn’t report it. I’ve always heard a family needs closure, but no family ever needs to know their baby died that way.
It was frozen outside, where I let him bleed out. It took him hours to die. Better part of that night and the next day.
The sun shone fully in his opened eyes as he gasped his last breath. Shaggy.
Was this what that monster had been?
Or had he just been rabid? Son of rabid? A creature so wounded from a childhood Ed knew nothing about that he’d had no choice because there had never been any help for him?
Motivation. How many sides to evil are there?
And what would you think, do, rave, if I told you to ask the right question: how many sides to GOOD are there?
What makes you think you’re competent enough to conceive of how many angles, curves, edens and wormholes there are to what crawled out after the spark of Creation?
If I were to pare it down to one truth and one truth only, let’s see, I’d make it: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
It is written that none of us is without sin.
It is original, of the Father’s, and the stain we are born with, like a stain under whose banner we serve.
Sacrifice was invented to protect us from the dark.
Yet without the darkness, we’d have no place to hide.
So many of us have need of a good place to hide.
Darkness, open your arms for me and press me close to cry.
Open your shadow, your skin, hollowed out for me to crawl inside.
««—»»
Marty sat in the car, parked at a strip mall. There for half an hour, watching the older cargo van a few spaces down and over.
He’d brought necrOmania seXualis, open in his lap, photo-and-line drawing of a naked pale girl with black lipstick—or was her mouth that color? It exhi
larated him, making him erect as one of the dark gods in the book. The weight against his groin was almost painful. He wanted to reach down and adjust it, but he knew he needed it right where it was.
He devoured the text:
…riding the phallic hot keloid to chronic climax, sodomized by an ancient bung-holy race. This was the bruised asshole of midnight violet, douche-violated by incubi swinging I.V.s.
Oh, brilliant star at the entrance to the prison behind morning, seven veils hath she, all gilded. Back arching, spinal Egypt, dance a bit slowed by the profusion of uncommon ejaculation in her ports, fueling her to tears of peccant water and pain-sweet rain.
She lowered herself to sit astride his struggling mood, his complexion dark and pebbled with sores, as his cheeks billowed to lap at her shimmering gangrenia. Goddess of purpura spores, emaciated.
Strung out on cheesecum and sputum pickles, she bore her silent babies in the deathcamp trench, atrophied, hard and faceless as bricks, the glazed sweets tumbling out mauve-gray as certain pigeons. Flippertygiblets and fuggetygibbets, midwife demons out with platters to offer on the tables of deities with steaming tongues her gimcracks of offspring…
Marty eyed the van. Rita was there, waiting for Zeke. Lysette’d gone with a hunky in a black Firebird. The stores in the strip closed twenty minutes ago. The last of shopping stragglers shambled out to their cars.
Marty’d watched Rita since her last john—some Goth kid—left. After sunset, it was worse than hot. She didn’t have keys to the cab to run the air conditioner, her only access the ‘cargo’ part of the van, so she stood outside. At least some air moved, skin glistening under parking lot lights. Even the shiny cheap metal bracelets on her arms couldn’t match the sheen of her body.
Marty could walk right up and she’d think nothing of it. She’d figure he was another customer waiting to rock the van.
Why wait any longer?
Season of the Witch Page 32