Unger House Radicals

by Chris Kelso

  So why don't I kill myself? Well, you might find this a conceited statement, but who would spearhead the Neo-Realists if I’m gone? Just like all healthy civilisations, every apocalypse needs its prophet.

  These days I suppose I act at a grassroots level—making copy upon copy of the execution video and dispensing it to young artists and filmmakers who I believe could contribute to the genre. Believe it or not I have found a lot of newblood and I will continue to show the video to as many willing and responsive people as I’m able. It is my ambition to start an underground course in the basic principles of Ultra-Realism.

  During my months of talent scouting, I have even managed to find a woman who shares my views. She is 4 months pregnant and we have agreed to raise our son as an Ultra-Realist who can lead the next generation into The Great Isolation. The end of us. The end of art. Let’s make ourselves a Rothko painting. Designs for our own wall-pillar church are also underway. Architects have laid out a barrel-vaulted nave with large open chapels separated by wall-pillars, like something put together by the master Masons of Bavaria. It will be quite stunning. It will outlive us all.

  Now, I know what you're thinking—you must think that by having a child we are being counter-intuitive to the cause, am I right? A movement based solely on the annihilation of mankind does not run parallel with that of procreation. I understand this. But at this stage we must be practical and act only with posterity in mind, because we will not see The Great Isolation in my lifetime. It will be a slow building process. It makes sense to have at least one person you can trust to carry on the work started by Swarthy and Bittacker...

  If the blue meanies are going to get me they’d better get off their asses and do something.

  We have to be brave. Seal the nail in our own coffin. Like Matisse said, ‘art takes courage…’

  Do I hear Sam and Dave on a car radio somewhere?

  We are all vampires, even on a cellular level

  You should consider dead tissue

  Fibrinous and pus-filled

  This is a key component of our meat suit

  Epithelial, muscular, connective and nervous

  It needs blood or it will die

  There is a mutual parasitic contract between our bodies and the world around us.

  We feed from ourselves too

  Cannibalising everything

  If creating life is art, then living and dying must be poetry

  Mika. S – (Queen of the Last True Hope)

  I don’t think the Ultra-Realists represent the end of art. I believe Auguste Rodin when he said “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.”

  Before I led the line with Shane Swank and Dwight Priest, I was a much different person. My first experience with the Radicals came when I was sixteen years old.

  So, my friend Brian Kowalski had this tape. I don't know how he got it, he always seemed to dig up these weird and wonderful artefacts from somewhere—but this tape... it was the most fucked up thing I’d ever seen. There's this girl, who looked kind of like an older version of me, getting her head sawn off by a naked, pale looking lunatic. I always avoided those online videos, you know, the ones of Islamic state militants cutting off people’s heads and stuff. But Brian was insistent that I watch this—as if I’d be enlightened by it or something.

  First he choked her out. Brian explained it all—manual obstruction of blood flow to the brain (caused by compressing the arteries and veins of the neck) was a classic bare-knuckle fighting tactic, apparently. I had never seen someone killed before, yano, not in real life... like, never an ACTUAL unsimulated murder. My friend Brian seemed to really enjoy it, or he was amused by it at least. I was appalled—and it had nothing to do with my being a girl by the way. But then, I guess, Brian was amused by all manner of grotesquery—we once watched this video of a man having sex with a severed goat’s head and Brian thought it was hilarious. Obviously I didn't. He almost tricked me into watching the Dnipro killings by saying he found a leaked trailer for the latest Batman movie. You'd have to be sick in the head to enjoy watching that shit. It's weird, he was always accusing me of being too uptight. Maybe he was right, but I just couldn’t shake the image out of my head. Truth be told, I was a little offended that he enjoyed a video portraying a woman, not dissimilar in appearance to yours truly, being carved up like a Christmas turkey. Apparently there had been a few other kids with copies of the execution. I'm certain Brian was responsible for spreading the product as far and wide as it got. Just don't blow my brains out! The Japanese want to buy them! – he’d beg in faux surrender when accused of taking one of his creepy little obsessions too far.

  But that video…

  I mean, I literally couldn’t stop thinking about it. This guy chopped her head right off! And there wasn't a glimmer of remorse in him; you could really see it in his eyes. He totally believed that what he was doing was a noble act. He had this inner peace about it all. The most disturbing part was the cult following this tape gathered. Apparently there were already kids making copycat footage by this stage—what’s THAT about? A couple of the arty kids in the year above me even had this secret club where they got together after school and discussed the tape. Fuck knows what they spoke about all evening, interpretation or something, but it couldn’t have been healthy to sit and watch it over and over again.

  Everyone had these...’theories’ about the footage too. Some folk said the guy who decapitated the woman was the demonic spirit of a serial killer who died just before the recording was made. I'm not a big believer in ghosts. It makes more sense to me that the guy on the film is just a crazed and vicious human being. People always feel the need to conjure up these ugly spirits as a way of rationalising the bad things that happen in the world and the awful things human beings do to each other. What people don't realise is that we usually carry out the most heinous acts unprompted. There's no demonic possession happening, we're already impregnated with this ugly spirit.

  Other people think that the killer is some guy called Bittacker from New York. Some pretentious movie-geek who wanted to shock all the people who ever laughed at him in high-school into reverence. He used to stay around these parts, apparently he still has family in New York. That seems kind of farfetched too.

  Some of the kids were getting downright fanatical about the film. Everyone had their own analysis. Everyone except me. Tell me, do you think twice about a terrorist’s mindless violence when you watch a beheading video? Do you ever believe he's making a statement beyond the act itself and the effect it'll have upon his enemies? What about when you read in the news that a maniac has gone around and murdered a bunch of innocents? Are his motivations artistic? No! So what I didn’t get is why everyone and their grandma seemed to think there was more to this video than the others? Why couldn’t it just have been another senseless, misogynistic slaying without rhyme or reason? I never got the hype at all. It was shocking, sure ok, but that's it. It had no substance, not to me at least. And let me tell you, if the filmmakers behind this horrible piece of cinema DID have an ulterior motive then they completely failed to communicate it to me. Hell, maybe I’m just not that cerebral a gal, but it smacked of effort. It was a terrible act conducted in an overly deliberate manner.

  The video was bullshit.

  The filmmakers were murderers, misogynists and pretentious hacks. If a sixteen-year-old girl could see that then why couldn’t everyone else?

  It’s not that I wasn’t ever interested in serial killers or anything, I was. I also loved horror movies, but when people started trying to find lame artistic excuses to kill each other, well I kind of don’t have any patience for that.

  The Greensboro Gutter, now THAT’S an interesting serial killer! He travelled around the southern states killing people of no specific description, gutting them and always getting away with it. Folks thought he originally came from some part of Greensboro because that’s where the majority of the gutted bodies were found, but others have been discovered scatt
ered around the country—two of the victims' bodies were found at the Whiskey Bay boat launch 30 miles west of Baton Rouge and another just off Interstate 10. Bodies were found in a rented boat shed, some woodland near Lake Sam Rayburn, a beach in Jefferson County and others were dumped in various ditches and sugarcane fields across the country. They even found another one on another beach on the Bolivar Peninsula. Same deal—gutted like a fish. Brian’s dad used to be part of the FBI Behavioural Analysis Unit, before he lost his cool, and he’d swear blind that serial killers usually target strangers with no ties to themselves, but the Gutter seemed to know so much about his victims.

  Even with police constantly surveying the Greensboro area they still haven’t found a single shred of evidence. CCTV footage always came up completely blank. Case in point—the Gutter killed this one guy in a gas station toilet WHILE the cops were parked just outside!

  He gets around too. Everyone on the news seems to be dying the same way. A Jane Doe was found in Crestview, Florida and a month later, in Turlock, California, the body of Cynthia Lyn Rose was discovered—gutted.

  The Gutter, now he’s a real ghost! Still going strong a decade on. What a champ! All evidence points to one man committing all the crimes. I mean, how incredible is that? I’m not condoning what he’s doing or what he’s done, but…come on!

  Back when I was a young girl, police administered thousands of DNA tests to men in and around the general area of the murders, but with no leads, they had to allow DNAPrint Genomics access to DNA left at the crime scenes. They generated an ancestry profile indicating that the suspect was Caucasian and had a history of melanoma. Obviously this doesn’t narrow down the search much.

  Maybe he’s dying? Maybe that’s why he’s been inflicting such brutal and bloody suffering on these folks. He’s like a stereotype of pure evil, a cross between Genghis Khan and Pablo Escobar, Freddy Krueger and The Slender Man… Pyramid Head and Grendel, Pogo the Clown—Baba Goya. One final misguided act of absolution? I doubt anyone could be terminal for over 10 years, but I could be wrong. Maybe he’s the grim reaper reincarnated as a post-modern monster? Is he god? Maybe he's the executioner in the video everyone was raving about? Unlikely, but who knows…

  Only one woman has ever claimed to’ve met the Greensboro Gutter in the flesh—a hitchhiker originally from Oregon who travelled from Spokane to Indiana as his cabin mate. Halfway through the journey, he apparently tried to gut her right there and then but the woman managed to prize open the passenger’s door, roll out onto the freeway and run into the nearby thickets. Police did a background check on the woman and it turns out she was on the run herself after killing her boyfriend. There’s no guaranteeing exactly how many psychotic truck drivers there’s been out there throughout the years, but I imagine there couldn’t have been too many…

  What it really boils down to is that there are two types of people in the world—people who do things for the right reasons and people who do things for the wrong reasons.

  The Greensboro Gutter is a smart serial killer—actually, I guess he’s more like a vigilante because all his victims seem to be loathsome characters that deserved to die. He isn’t doing it for the attention and even then he’s making ten times more pertinent a statement than those morons that killed the girl on that film. They figure he must be a trucker to travel up and down the southern states so quickly—police also found what appeared to be a giant tyre thumper at one of the crime scenes. I admit this was sloppy, uncharacteristic even, but he hasn’t turned himself in or tried to get any limelight. He’s content working away in the shadows, doing his business quietly and efficiently. A labour of love and, in a perverse way, of justice. All the artists and musicians I respected worked like that. People appreciate a real artist who strives only to achieve better art, who leaves the ego at the front door. You have to, if nothing else, respect that about the Greensboro Gutter.

  I know I’d like to get my own back on the kids who made my life a misery. I used to have terrible skin you see and had to use this topical steroid cream to treat my acne. I was resigned to the fact that I probably wouldn’t ever have a boyfriend in high-school. Obviously I was subject to vigorous ridicule on an hourly basis.

  You see, I also had a strong disdain for human life. I was asocial, unattractive with a 2.5 grade point average. All the ingredients were there. It’s funny, my dad would’ve loved me to have been a bully. He was a bully when he was younger and he was a bully as an adult. I admit that I’d fantasised about the Greensboro Gutter catching my father and teaching him a lesson. My dada eventually OD’d on Nembutal while I was at college. I thanked the Gutter for giving my father a soul virus, gutting his innards of the human need to survive. The Gutter was like a superhero to me. He’d say to my father – Leo Johnson, your reign of tyranny is well and truly up – before disappearing into the shadows again. I’m convinced to this day that’s exactly what happened.

  *

  I’m not ruling out the Louisiana sheriff Department either. Did you know there are over 100 unsolved murders in that part of the country? They’ve been treading on thin ice ever since the way they dealt with the slaying of those women in Jefferson Davis Parish a few years ago. Hell, maybe the cops are just taking out the trash? Somehow I doubt their intentions would be that noble, nor are they smart enough to actually get away with it. Brian’s dad said the sheriff department regularly got embroiled in drug trafficking, tampered with crime scenes and were no strangers to conducting illegal highway stops. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division had to intervene on several occasions due to improper police procedures.

  I worried about Brian. Not just because he was the only boy in my year who would actually talk to me, which makes me question his motives in hind sight… He was already showing signs of the unholy triad—voluntary urination, cruelty to animals and sexual arousal by fire. If we’re to take anything from psychological profiling seriously, we might safely deduce that Brian exhibited early psychopathic tendencies.

  I’d known him practically my whole life and his dad was a well-respected former-FBI officer, I’m sure it was just a phase he went through.

  *

  It was midnight when the front doorbell rang. My dad was really pissed off—he had work at the factory early the next day and because he detested his job and his family he usually wanted to spend as much time in bed as possible. This was when his stomach cramps started. I remember him storming downstairs rubbing his belly and carrying a half-empty bottle of Pepto Bismol in his left hand. Anyway, when he opened the door there was nobody there; just this old VHS tape lying on the mat. My dad picked it up and dropped it when he realised it was slathered in some kind of fluid. Course, this got him even madder. He yelled at me, raised the hard edge of his hand—kept it quivering over my left cheek for a moment—then retracted into a balled fist which he proceeded to railroad through the drywall instead. I was now looking down the barrel of his pointer finger, blood oozing over the knuckle and onto the carpet.

  - Tell your fuckin’ friends NEVER to call at this hour again you little ingrate bitch, do you hear?

  I nodded but in my head I thought – what friends do I have?

  Dad had beads of spittle on his impotent moustache. He stormed back upstairs and I heard a lamp getting hurled off a wall and my mother squealing. I got a pair of gardening gloves, retrieved the tape and closed the door over.

  The spine of the box read ‘ISOLATION FOOTAGE’. I didn’t have a VHS player and I didn’t know anyone who had one either. I don’t know why but I called Brian’s cell.

  - Bryan, were you at my house tonight?

  - No. Why?

  - Are you sure? Someone left a tape.

  - A tape?

  Bryan sounded genuinely surprised.

  - It says ‘ISOLATION FOOTAGE’ on it. What does that mean?

  - How am I supposed to know? Sometimes I feel like a vampire. Sometimes I want to eat the heart of darkest America…

  I hung up the phone and that was tha
t. Or so I thought.

  I had no idea I’d be one of the last true hopes….

  CBS SEATTLE

  Gayle Cotten - Ok Mr Dummit do you want to start the interview?

  DI Dummit - Oh, sure.

  Gayle Cotten - We’re here today by a roadside in Oklahoma where police have stumbled upon a shocking and gruesome discovery, believed to be the handiwork of the infamous Greensboro Gutter. Detective Inspector Lyle Dummit Criminal Investigation Branch was among the first people at the scene. Detective Dummit, can you talk us through your findings?

  DI Dummit - Um, yeah. As you mentioned, we found a van belonging to a long-haul driver at the roadside in Interstate 40 corridor in Oklahoma. Both long combination containers were initially locked vice-tight. When we eventually managed to prize it open we discovered a travelling torture chamber inside.

  Gayle Cotten - What was going through your mind at this time?

  DI Dummit - Well, there were over 30 bodies piled up on top of each other in various stages of decay. As you can imagine it was pretty horrible. The most recent cadaver appeared to be only a day old.

  Gayle Cotten - Can you describe this ‘chamber of death’ for the viewers at home?

  DI Dummit - The interior layout was elaborate with stained mattress and hooks on the wall where victims appear to have been chained and spread-eagled by the killer. Among the identified bodies there were only 4 men—Clarence Hirchhauser, a recently dismissed councilman from Dallas, a young pornographic actor by the name of Chandler West and a man called Brandon Swarthy, who is also known to the police. There has also been a positive ID on a man from Aschaffenburg in Germany who had affiliations with Neo-Nazi organisation the National Front. His victims mostly appear to be women, mostly notorious lot lizards.