“I could make you do it.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Did you hear me up there, Mr. Brain? I said I could make you fucking do it.”
And then Grainger rose up. In the half-light his face looked like a nightmare moon. It was first time I’d seen him standing upright. He was enormous and as solid looking as oak. I bet he was no stranger in the prison gymnasium. I was a swimmer and a cyclist. I was strong, but I was also old and slow.
He punched me in the face. Worse than the pain of broken teeth, I remember thinking, was that he’d not washed his hand after masturbating and I could taste his semen. I was glad when my blood washed the flavor away.
“Where are your tools?”
I shook my head and he broke my nose. I covered my face with my hands, but he pried them away and pressed his thumbs lightly against my closed eyes. “I want you to imagine how unpleasant prison would be for a man with no eyes. For the last time, where are your balloons?”
“Pillowslip.”
Grainger put a fistful of them in my hand. “Now go to work.”
I told him that I was hurt and needed time to recover. “Make me a woman—a nice one—or I’ll pull out your eyes and eat them.”
I worked. I blew into balloons and tied knots in them. I lost control of one and it flew away farting. “Don’t do that again,” Grainger said.
I shaped the effigy whilst Grainger watched. I had to keep stopping to wipe tears from my eyes and blood from my mouth. The thing was indubitably human-shaped, but it looked badly drawn, as though by an inexperienced and indifferent artist.
“Think it’s ready?”
“No.”
Grainger was desperate for his woman. He spoke quickly, nervously. “But you’re an expert at this aren’t you? Professional, I mean. Your worst models are better than everyone else’s best efforts. Come on, is it ready?”
“Don’t do this.”
“What?”
“I know what you’re expecting to find when the model touches the floor and changes, but you’re not going to get it. Just look at the wretched thing. You’ve maimed me and you’ve forced me to work under duress. That’s going to be reflected in the product. It’s an abomination-in-waiting. Do yourself a favor: put a pencil through the balloons.”
“No,” he said, stroking the rubber arm of his girlfriend. “I’ve killed before. I’ll never do it again.”
“For the love of God, man, they’re still balloons. Bags of air.”
“Mr. Brain, I came into prison when I was twenty years old. The prime of my life. I’ve had to go without sex for fifteen years and it’s nearly killed me. Now that I’m finally on the brink of wetting my dick, I can’t back down. Sorry, Dad. Not possible.”
“Very well.”
“Don’t watch if you don’t want to.”
“Is that your best concession?”
Grainger held the effigy upright by its arm. It stood on the edge of my bunk, looking like a person about to jump into a swimming pool.
“How does it work? I just drop it, don’t I?”
“I have to do it.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m the magician, not you.”
I should have burst the head with my hands, but that didn’t occur to me until later.
Grainger stood aside and I pushed the balloon woman off the bed. It fell forwards and downwards in slow motion. I had enough time to roll away and face the wall. Grainger was right: this was something that I really didn’t want to watch.
I thought that if even if the thing was capable of living at all, it would expire very quickly. What then? Would Grainger, the consumer, demand some kind of compensation from me, the manufacturer?
But there was only that disgusting silence.
After a few moments I turned over and looked. Grainger had removed his bottoms and was between the things’ legs. Mercifully for me, its face was hidden beneath her rapist’s massive torso.
The legs looked disturbingly lifelike, as did the naked arms and the fingerless hands that lay on the floor. Grainger, by the sounds he was making, was enjoying her no doubt disturbingly real vagina.
“You filthy bastard.” I said lowering myself down from the bunk. Grainger, deep in the sex of our creation—my creation—didn’t know that I was approaching. I hit him hard on the soft bit at the top of his head. It was easy; I used that island of hair as a target. Grainger made a queasy sound and rolled off the supine thing. I looked at it. She was extremely plain in appearance, but not the monster I anticipated. I felt a guilty swell of professional pride. The eyes were open, but unseeing. With no mind she was certainly not conscious.
I’d destabilized Grainger when I hit him. He was sitting in a fashion, breathing laboriously through his mouth and mumbling. He was lost somewhere between two states of consciousness. “Life is a miracle wasted on you,” I said, and I kicked his large face with my bare foot. It was a good shot. His nose broke like a tomato. He fell onto his back. I straddled his chest and hit him. I felt his eye squash inside its orbit.
Grainger was crying. Someone had heard. Boots thundered along the metal landing. I heard several keychains. It sounded like a metallic rainstorm was taking place outside the door.
I put my hands around Grainger’s throat. I knew that I didn’t have time to asphyxiate him, but I hoped that I might cause some permanent damage. I put my thumbs against his windpipe and pressed down as hard as I could. The face that he pulled when did that was a memorable one.
Then the door opened and three big men entered. The first one tripped over the woman on the floor and hit his head on the steel bed frame. I heard that he never regained consciousness. The second officer wrestled me away from Grainger. The third pressed the general alarm button on the landing outside the cell door and siren sounds swept through the prison.
All that happened a long time ago. I was an old man then and I’m a much older man now. A few years ago my heart went into overdrive and I was admitted to hospital. I was there for 24 hours. Apart from that I’ve spent every moment of my life since that night with Grainger in Segregation—the prisons’ prison.
I don’t sleep very often. I just stare at the walls. Every now and then an officer brings me a paperback book from the prison library. I never read them.
Grainger? Someone told me that he was transferred to another prison after the incident and hanged himself there. Someone else said that he’d been paroled and was working for Asda as a trolley collector.
I refused to say where the woman came from and they would never tell me what became of her. I believe that she will have died shortly after birth—probably the same night—but I like to imagine that she’s still alive.
I like to think that she’s a resident of good nursing home somewhere and she spends her time sitting in a chair by a large window overlooking a garden. It’s nice to imagine that she even developed a mind and achieved a degree of consciousness. Just enough to be pleased by the sight of the sun rising and the sound of birdsong.
The way her father always used to be.
THE END
God of Blood by Chris Capps
Tuesday. That was the night Mylo noticed his motel waterbed was a little more stiff, a little more full than it should be. And as his eyelids closed on the painted bobcat poised on its hind legs in a state of frozen curiosity, he acknowledged it didn't yet matter. But he was certain, living in the world that he did, that there was someone skinny dipping in his bed, waiting to gas up and fill the mattress with decay until it was ready to blossom. And Mylo's last act before falling asleep was to grip the corner of the mattress, wrap his big hand around it to check the pressure. Two days, he guessed.
Two days he'd be gone.
Wednesday Mylo was walking across a bridge, six miles from the spot advertised in the newspaper. His bag had looked heavy so - after considering it on his way off the bus - he'd made the executive decision to leave it behind. He had many miles ahead of him today. And the bag had reached the terminat
ion of its usefulness.
It was March, and all around him the winter was starting to die. He walked the expanse with the cold wind whistling across his whiskers. A truck was coming down the highway toward his back.
The truck passed him, but then stopped and waited for three full minutes as Mylo caught up.
“Scuse me,” the driver said leaning out. He was an older man, hard-boiled nose and feathery dove eyebrows, “You want a ride mister?”
It was a refrigerator truck.
“Don't want to be caught out in the weather,” the man said nodding to himself as Mylo got in and slammed the door shut, “Storm's coming tonight. Big one.”
He eyed Mylo sideways as his hands drummed the steering wheel. This rhythm seemed to be a personal ritual to the driver, a means to generate conversation like the firing pistons within the truck itself. It was obvious that the driver hadn't had a meaningful conversation in some time. He seemed enthusiastic to be in Mylo's company. That was unusual.
“What's your name?” Mylo asked.
“Oscar,” the old man said, “Oscar Talbot. And what's your name, son?”
“Mylo.”
“Good name,” Oscar said, “Where are we heading? I've got some time to spare, so I can take you anywhere you want. I'll take you right up to the front door, assuming it's in the county. Least I can do for a fellow traveler like myself.”
“Unification Hill,” Mylo said.
The cab was silent for a bit, with Oscar smiling, eyes scanning the road ahead of them as they rode. He'd stopped drumming the steering wheel by this point, the arrhythmic pattern of his fingertips giving way to the creak of whole hands gripping and twisting over old leather. After a moment, with the smile never leaving his face, Oscar pivoted his head once, and said,
“Unification Hill. I know it. Why'd a guy like you want to go there? You know something I don't? That place is next to Sessel.” He stopped talking for a moment, letting the ambient thrum of the engine flood the air like mud seeping back into a fresh footprint, “Serendipity is what it is, though. Serendipity. I'm heading to a place by that name later today. What do you suppose the chances...?”
The sentence ended itself before Oscar was done, turned into a worrisome chuckle.
Mylo didn't do much of the talking on the road. Mostly it was Oscar, who had enough conversation stowed away for both of them. And as they crossed through Sessel, he shook his head sadly at the walled up windows and the barricaded hollow doorways.
“What on Earth could compel a man to come to a place like this anyway?”
“Responding to an ad in the paper,” Mylo said.
“An ad, huh? About the Hill?” Oscar paused, waiting for Mylo to respond. When he didn't, the old man leaned in sideways, his ear up as he said, “You said it was an ad? What kind of ad would someone put out for that place? No one's been on the boardwalk in nearly ten years. What did it say?”
“It said Mylo, go to Unification Hill in Missouri.”
There was that hum again. It gibbered from the engine quietly as they closed in on the back road. When they reached the half-mile stretch leading up toward the boardwalk, even in the distance Mylo could see the Ferris wheel, reclaimed as it was by thick trees. As the truck stopped in front of a padlocked iron gate, Oscar drummed his hands on the steering wheel again.
“The ad said you would have a key to open this gate up,” Mylo said, “So go ahead.”
Oscar looked sideways at Mylo, chewing his lip and placing his hand in his coat pocket. And he pulled out a ring of keys. He seemed to know which one he needed as he got out, like he and these keys were old friends. He walked up to the gate, ring in hand and that smile on his face. He unlocked the chain and pulled it open all at once, eyes with a magician's humor now tracking Mylo as if searching for a well-deserved look of surprise. But Mylo didn't move. When he got back into the truck, Oscar leaned on the steering wheel, saying,
“Alright. It's open. What else did this ad say about me?”
“You're the old mosquito man,” Mylo said.
“Old mosquito man?” Oscar said, his eyebrows now dovetailing up, “I think you're having fun with me, mister. What's that supposed to mean anyway?”
“That's what it said.”
Oscar shook his head as the engine engaged again, pulling gravel under the truck's old treads and nudging it up the road,
“Old mosquito man. You look at me, I'm maybe fifty. That's not old by my count. And mosquito man – I don't even know what that means.”
All around them the truck's engine roared with a sound like thunder across the natural caverns and the rocks embedded in the hills. Grass shuddered with the wind, bowing deeply to the truck and its occupants and sharing whispers as it writhed. The sun was already hanging low in the sky, blinking behind clouds and turning impossibly away from the rotting boardwalk ahead of them.
When they reached the apex of the hill, Mylo saw broken glass laying across it, sown into the earth like an ancient garden of precious jewels that happened to be encrusted with the labels of cheap domestic breweries. The chaotic grassland below scattered in waves, and Mylo watched it – even then realizing that the boardwalk had grown uncontrollably calm with the patience of vines and moss.
What did it look like? That gray roiling field, smothering itself with every movement. It looked like libel, like smoke coming out of an incinerator – brought out from something that had never been put there – something that had never once died.
“Well, we're here,” Oscar said rounding the front of the truck, “Now let me ask what you want here. You know what this place is?”
“I do,” Mylo said.
“Sure you do,” Oscar said, “It's a goddamn miracle.”
“A goddamned miracle,” Mylo said,
The old man was deep in thought, picking candy wrappers and receipts out of his tan coat. He had a pistol in his pocket. Ordinarily it would be enough to keep him safe from the coyotes beyond the entropied boardwalk if they got too close. And it’d scare off the damn kids that still occasionally dared one another to touch the door of the wax museum or the ice cream shop or whatever toothless storefront they had decided had ghosts in it this season. He was still deep in thought, mournfully excited as he licked his lips against the wind and felt the snubbed nose of the gun safely tucked in his pocket,
“I'm the blood man. I just collect the blood. I send it out on the truck. Hell, most of what I do is filling out the paperwork. County needs it. Whole country needs it. You know where it comes from?”
“No,” Mylo said, “Neither do you.”
Oscar reached into his pocket again, pulling out a pack of spearmint chewing gum. He twisted off the wrapper around it and curled the stick onto his tongue. And he handed out the rest of the gum to Mylo, offering it out with a shaking hand.
“I'm the blood man,” Oscar said again, “Take the blood down to the county bank where people need it. You understand.”
“Show me.”
When they reached the Ferris wheel, Mylo understood. Those thirty-nine words from the newspaper ad, sixteen of them meaningless, all as clear now as a raindrop made invisible with age. There was more here. Not words, but a deep vibration seductively stroking at the soles of his shoes. And on his mind was abandon. Hollow abandon. It smelled septic, like a slaughterhouse. Flies buzzed here, itched Mylo's lips with electric wings and microscopic but somehow unmistakably wet feet.
“You and I may not know why it happened, where it came from,” Oscar said as he pulled back the chains. They were cosmetically altered, no doubt to look older than they really were, to match the rust flaking off the stained handle of the door. He waited for the rushing clank of chains to fall silent before continuing, “But that doesn't matter. Not to everyone.”
Discarding the chain, Oscar tugged the door open, and it swung with barely a sound. It had been oiled, prepped for fresh visitors by the men Oscar worked for. They were the men who didn't see the mystery of the Ferris wheel, only its utility.
Mylo could have waited in that moment, lived in the tension and the uncertainty of what would come next. But Oscar didn't like tension, and he didn't have the patience for uncertainty. As soon as he entered the small booth beside the Ferris wheel, his hand found the control panel. And he activated the old ride, derelict as it was, on the abandoned boardwalk.
What followed was a sound like a shotgun going off in a small room. It was so deafening that it occupied the ears long after it had been replaced by the tortured squeal of metal, so that you didn't quite feel when one ended and the other began. The bang happened, and then the sound that followed must have always been.
The Ferris wheel had no music, and no lights. But it did the dance that Ferris wheels are made to do, expertly rotating around its axle as loose carriages swung noisily, each one a unique voice of metal and age. Inside the carriages there was nothing at first. But as the Ferris wheel continued to spin, impossibly the carriages wept.
It was subtle at first. Hairline cracks behind what was left of the paint opened, dribbling a thick ruddy ooze that fell across the lonely surfaces of the carriages, collected in pools on the benches, and on the floor beneath them. The red pools grew, vibrating and sloshing back and forth as the carriages rocked, each one cradling the Ferris wheel's unnatural effluent. It rained on itself from above, dripping and spilling the blood, letting it collect at the bottom, either to be caught by the lowest carriages or patter onto the dead grass growing through the base of the machine.
“It's blood,” Oscar shouted to Mylo, both men now breathing through their noses as the unmistakable smell wafted up from the hidden ground beneath them, “Like I said. A goddamn miracle.”
The machine was still moving, the gory pinwheel slaking some unknowable thirst that the Earth below readily drank. Only the carriages seemed to bleed directly, but it wicked into the axle at the machine's center. It seeped into every hinge. And soon the Ferris wheel was well enough oiled that it grew silent, save for its own gentle whir and the falling of red rain all around.
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