I can see Ricky going down his list, name by name, inviting his victims out to the woods, the thickets, the sawgrass, the dunes. He maims and kills and leaves his prey unburied. He takes their eyes and throws them into the fire. He takes their eyes and uses them in his dreams. He makes me bear witness.
9.
On Linda's porch I stand fast while her father works my midsection. Like her, he's got a lot of muscle to him. He hooks me twice more to the ribs while screaming what a filthy animal I am. I swallow my laughter. He should only know what his daughter is capable of. He should only see her in action.
Linda's eyes meet mine. She's having a hard time hiding her smile too. And her fear. The amusement plays there in her face. The terror rises and fades from one moment to the next. She loves me genuinely now. She loves me now because she knows Ricky is no longer the only boy who knows how to talk to demons.
Her old man says he's calling the cops. He says he's going to kill me. Her mother lets out a wail from the other side of the screen door, like a trapped animal seconds away from gnawing off its own trapped paw.
Despite his brawn he's not doing much damage. I resist striking him back. My father's done a lot worse to me. I know how to deflect and dodge and buckle just right. It keeps everyone happy. He's not hurting me and I have no need to kill him. Unlike the cop, whose rage can never be spent, Linda's father is already wearing himself out. I can take this in my sleep. I do take this in my sleep.
I understand his fury. Linda's covered in bruises, welts, bandages, butterfly Band-Aids and gauze. Some of it's my fault. Most of it is Gwen's. All of it was at Linda's own request and passionate need. No matter how bad she looks, Gwen is bound to look much worse.
He backhands me and I taste blood. The heady stink of it ruins what's left of my patience. What would daddy say if he knew his little girl got off fifteen times thanks to our minor agonies? I spit and my laughter comes out with the blood. He rushes in to try to pummel my belly again but I've had it. In one fluid motion I'm on him and he's down next to the barbeque grill, and I'm making sounds that I haven't made in a very long time.
So's he. It takes thirty seconds of using my hands in strange ways to make him sob and whine and mewl. My laughter gets louder inside of my head. Outside of my head, I am whispering in a harsh voice, describing just one small act that Linda and I performed last night. He squawks like a chicken about to meet the axe.
I kneel on his chest and enjoy his panic. My mouth waters. My mother's secret name is in my throat. My own secret name is bound in a box made of lead and leather and hidden under my heart.
I thrust him from me. He hits the side of the house and wood shingles splinter. I stand and the clouds move together and move apart, thunder murmuring distantly, and the night birds are signing in the morning.
Linda places her hands on either side of my face and draws me closer. She kisses me deeply and I follow her to the Mustang. We get in. We drive on to the next act of our Grand Guignol Theater that plays out beneath a very bad star, moving us along as it must.
"I wanted you to snap his neck," she tells me. "I know you could've done it. Why didn't you do it?"
All of our fathers want us dead, and we want all of them dead. Her mother's wail is the only bit of grace I've experienced in longer than I can remember.
"Next time, kill him," she says. "And her. Especially her. She deserves it even more than him. She deserves it the most, my fucking God, living the way she does, if you can call it life. So vague, so transparent. They disgust me. I'll help you plan how to do it. He's got a shotgun collection. He keeps them locked in cases in the den but I know where he keeps the key."
There's no need to point out that she sounds like a moron.
We drive around town, in rough concentric circles, with Aztakea Woods as a kind of central point. I weave around the streets keeping an eye out for Ricky. There's going to be more blood on his hands soon, if there isn't already. Someone else is going to have to say he loves Satan. Someone else might love his mother.
Linda feels it too. I glance at her and she's overjoyed. The Acid King's will is in the wind. She peels back her bandages and checks her wounds. They're infected too, of course. She has the start of a fever. Gwen's bites and burns and razor slashes have ushered her down the road of transcendence. She always knew there was another level to love and hate, one beyond normality, but now she's experienced it firsthand. It's left her gorged and wanting more.
We ride up and down Jericho Turnpike and stop and have brunch at the Majestic Diner on Old Country Road. We eat in silence. The buzzing, banal conversations of the other patrons are painful to hear. Linda tilts her head like she's got an earache. My chin is cocked at the same angle.
We skip out on the check. Back in the car she talks about murder like it's a new team cheer. Something to practice after classes until you get it just right. Something to do in front of a crowd to get them all applauding. She acts like it's an important part of school spirit. She wants to butcher old lovers, gut cheerleaders who don't pull their weight, cut the school custodian's throat. She says he lurks around in the girls' locker room hoping to catch a flash of naked teenage ass. She's got kill fantasies about the team mascot, the QB who got sacked three times at last year's homecoming, the assistant principal who put his sweaty hand on her knee. She wants to throw acid in the face of the science teacher who gave her detention in the ninth grade.
Her rage calls to my rage. I try hard not to writhe in my seat, clutching the wheel tighter. I light a cigarette and lean my elbow out the window.
"I want to fuck you in the middle of Times Square," she purrs. It's a pretty dramatic jump from all her kill fantasies. She tells me to get on the LIE and rip towards the mid-town tunnel.
One of her old boyfriends used to bring over cheap porn films, the kind shot in somebody's basement. They'd hang a sheet on the wall in her bedroom and use it as a screen. Then he'd run the projector and they'd watch nasty flicks until her father got home from work and her mother got back from PTA meetings and shopping at Klein's. She wants to kill him too, and the thought of his death has got her horny to see whores in action. She wants to invite a streetwalker into the backseat with us, then park down an alley on Forty-Second Street. She wants us to get arrested. She imagines the look on her father's face when he hears the news. She imagines the look on his face when she slices off his dick with a box-cutter.
"Gwen's going to die," she tells me, pinching her ruined nipples through her sweater. "She's next. I don't know when it's going to happen, but that's what Ricky's been saying. He hates her too. And don't say that he hates everyone. He doesn't. He's just–"
She searches for the right word. She can't come up with it. She gestures meaninglessly, which has more meaning than anything else she's said today. Ricky's not just anything. He's not just in pain. He's not just losing his mind. He's not just being toyed with by powers and influences beyond his understanding. He's seated at the eye of the hurricane, and he's drawn me into the storm.
I don't head towards the city. Linda doesn't care. She spouts off more things we should do. Some boring, some lethal. It's all the same to her.
Instead, I run a search pattern all over town, waiting for the Knights of the Black Circle to turn up. I send my will into the wind. I picture Ricky's shadow men pulling away from strip malls and hole-in-the-wall bar parking lots, hitting the streets, following. I steel myself and wait for the Mustang to go skidding in fresh puddles of blood spread out across the road.
By the time the moon rises, Linda is burning up and in need of serious antibiotics. She's hallucinating and keeps crawling down into the footwell, screaming that crows are stuffing their beaks into her ears and pecking at her brain. She's not lying.
I sit her up, roll down both windows, and turn the fan up high trying to cool her down a little.
She whimpers the names of witches' familiars. "Pommerance, Tico-Tico...Bathal, Bathei, Winter's Leg..."
I take her to the emergency room but she wo
n't get out of the car until we fuck. She climbs on top of me in the driver's seat, her sickly sweat pouring off her, hot as a furnace about to blow. To touch her is to burn. Good, I'm glad, I prefer it this way. Her infection is the only true thing about her. She whimpers for Gwen. She loves and hates Gwen as she loves and hates herself. She rides me hard, slamming her back against the steering wheel, sounding the horn. She grabs the sides of my face and holds my head in place. She tries to kiss me as we struggle against each other, she seems to think it's very important that she kisses me. I check her mouth for hidden razor blades. I know that I'm an offering to the next dark god.
Linda giggles as she thrusts down on me, harder and harder, louder and louder, her nostrils flecked with yellow crust, blisters forming at the corners of her mouth. On her belly are growing red lines of blood poisoning. She smiles without humor, mercy, or sexuality.
I know the next move. I see it clearly.
She lets loose with a ghastly laugh she can't control, can't hold inside anymore. It goes on and on.
"Three-Together-in-the-Blind-Eye, Hildegrance...come for me, Black Shuck!"
As we reach our peak her thumbs begin to slide across my beard stubble and she goes for my eyes.
This is what she needs as her orgasm tears through her. I grip her wrists in my fists and hold her tightly while she wails in ecstasy, hysteria, and madness.
"I love you!" she moans. It almost sounds like I wuv you. "Let me!" she demands. "Let me! Please!"
"No."
"Say you love Satan!"
"No."
"Say you love Satan!"
I clip her on the chin and she almost goes out, but not quite. Her head lolls and she starts sobbing, even while she murmurs and begs. Her fever is critical, waves of heat brushing against me like a brushfire. I finish ejaculating inside her and zip up. I carry her to the emergency room entrance. She presses her face into my chest and keeps crying while I shush her and kiss her forehead. An intern spots us and raises a clamor. They take her from me and place her on a gurney. Linda's eyes stay focused on mine as they wheel her up an overly lit white corridor.
A nurse at the ER desk questions me and demands I fill out papers. I turn away and a passing security guard places a hand on my chest in the same spot where Linda's tears have soaked into my T-shirt. He tells me to stop. He tells me I'm not going anywhere. He's as bald as Anton LaVey.
I can feel Ricky's frenetic presence looming. He's like a swarm of gnats, a murder of crows, rising up against the building and finding a million ways in towards me. I push against the guard's hand while he orders me, "Stop. Stop right there, buddy."
He reaches for his walkie-talkie and spits out some code numbers. I push against him again and he shoves me back harder this time. The rage wants me to lash out. Ricky wants me to kill.
It's almost unbelievable that the guard can't feel the forces of the cosmic game swirling around us, moving us, presenting us as opposing pieces. How dim can someone be?
"Hold it, buddy, just stay there. We need you to answer some questions about your girlfriend. It'll only take a few minutes."
The windows rattle. The storm has found me again.
I check my rage and perform the way I did in prison, with a cold and crystalline vision and efficiency. I don't get angry. I don't want to hurt this man.
But I do. I swing my forearm around and strike him in the jaw under the ear with my elbow. There's a large cluster of nerve ganglia there, and I know what it feels like to have it struck. The guard sees nothing but solar wheels as the inside of his skull ignites. He flails backward, unconscious.
More guards appear at the far end of the hall. The ER nurse starts screaming. Other patients, despite their illnesses and wounds, back away to the wall as one. A twelve-year-old with a broken nose flinches from me. His mother moves in front of him in a display of maternal protection. She's breathing heavily, pale in the muted light, her breasts heaving. She waits for me to rape her. The glass keeps shaking.
I stomp through the automatic doors. I climb into the Coupe, buckle up, rev the engine until it's shrieking, throw it into gear, and burn out.
I light up. I check the rearview. The front of the hospital is full of brash action and motion and shadows.
Linda wasn't even on Ricky's list but she might as well be counted a victim.
His, her father's, Satan's, or mine.
10.
The moon goes into hiding. The dark squall circles and dives and breaks against the side of the Mustang. The night is blacker than the back of the Devil's eyelids. I can feel Ricky and his circle out there performing their death celebrations. I send myself to him. I let him lead me there. I drive blind for a while, eyes shut, letting my other senses guide me.
I turn left, I turn right, I hit it on the straightaway. I spin out in gravel and branches of swaying trees scrape the hood. I don't let it dissuade me. I keep my eyes closed tightly. I listen to the oncoming traffic blaring, speeding past. I head south for the bay. I burn rubber, I take wide curves. The magnetic pull of the earth carries me. I drift for a half hour, blind as Gary Lowers.
When I open my eyes, I'm skidding on a beach lane covered by sand.
He's close. I picture him clearly. He's got a little campfire going and he's practicing moves with his knife, deciding on what he's going to do to the next kid. It looks like he's going for the internal organs. He's drilling on how to cut out the kidneys, the liver. He's going to make haggis and feed it to everybody at the next party.
The other Knights of the Black Circle flicker in and out of being, by the light of the fire. They provoke him, they drape themselves around him, full of love, full of hate. The blade swerves, slashes, and severs. Ricky's breathing heavily. He dances on the sand as the waves crash behind him.
I see him stabbing down, slashing, sneaking up, pulling hair, tonguing, nipping. I crack the window an inch, and I can hear him singing another heavy metal song, the trite lyrics almost laughable.
A half-mile away I tumble to an old south shore graveyard. I drive slowly, keeping an eye out. Ricky's flames ought to lead me right to him, unless he's caught on. He might've kicked the fire out by now.
The dead have their grievances. They tug for my attention. They pack decades-dead names into my head. Above it all I hear Gwen's voice, asking to be fucked.
I park and get out. The graveyard is nothing more than a few scattered stones. The area's been eroded, the graveyard buried by sand and sawgrass and snow fencing. I drift past the headstones, waiting for Ricky and his circle to fall down on me from the dunes. I light a cigarette and smoke, leaning back against the side of the Mustang. I give myself up to them. My headlights offer a dim illumination. The clouds of night birds have followed me to the shore, and they fill the infinitely forbidding sky.
Gwen's screams are muffled into moans. A part of me loves the noise of it, the honest and true depth of despair and pain. I'm human. I crave human anguish. My own or anyone else's.
It's probably a trap but I rush across the beach hunting for her. The moon wants to see, so it finally appears and turns its face down to us. I stumble over seashells and detritus hidden in the sand. My mother appears in the dark, pointing out where I must go.
I come to Gwen huddled inside a dug-out hole behind the dunes. Gwen is naked, bound by rope, covered in blood, a gag firmly placed in her mouth. The bandages binding her many cuts and scratches from last night's love- and hate-making have unfurled in the wind. There are fresh razor slashes on her belly, breasts, and thighs. The trails of pulsing blood have run together, but I know the cuts spell out words, covenants, pledges. The waves continue to crash, foam and seaweed rushing towards my feet.
Maybe he's left her here to show that he owns all of my women. Maybe it's meant to infuriate me, or to turn me on.
Gwen weeps and whines at me. She kicks at the bottom of the pit. The words on her burn so brightly that I have to shade my eyes.
Breaking from the dark, two members of the Knights of the Black Circle
snarl curses at me in their language of desecration. They're each holding a straight razor. I'm surprised they've become so banal, but the longer they stick with Ricky the worse it will become. As they claim and reshape him, he is doing the same to them. They walk toward me, slow and cool and casual as the front line of grunts in Lucifer's army.
Gwen's moaning is a contrapuntal to the quick breathing and occasional bursts of laughter coming from Ricky's boys. The music of it fills me. I stand my ground and wonder if Linda is dead yet. If Gwen will even care now, one way or the other.
She's managed to work the gag loose. She has a very powerful tongue.
Regardless of the fact that she's probably bleeding to death at the bottom of a pit, Gwen still gives orders. She tells me to murder them. She demands that I do it slowly. She promises to fuck me righteously if I kill these two bastards. She burns with hellish radiance.
I search for Ricky. I can feel him, watching, those demented, savage eyes are on me.
I call to him. I do it silently and I do it loudly. "Ricky!"
The knights raise their blades and slash at the air. Streaks of fiery red hang the air. The whistling razors make me think of my father teaching me to shave when I was a kid. It's one of the few memories of him that make me grin. My face covered in shaving cream and my old man bonding with me, weapon in hand, passing on yet another ritual of manhood. This one about power too. A nick at the jugular could bleed you out in minutes. My mother watched closely. My mother stood guard, in the bathroom door. He was afraid of her. He had every right to be.
Ricky's boys know how to invoke even greater evils than themselves. Their recitations and invocations draw more and more energy from the world. Ricky's fire dims, the moon dulls, and Gwen weakens in her struggles. My knees tremble but I keep on my feet.
Clown in the Moonlight Page 4