For the first time I deserted my post and went to see your handiwork. The pitiless white moon shone down on her. I marked myself with her blood and went back to work. I watched a police patrol car pass by without knowing she lay a few feet from the road.
I returned at the end of my shift. I took your sacrifice to the churchyard and buried it in my father’s grave. No one will find it. My mother never visits the grave and it is in an overgrown corner of the churchyard.
I know that I have found someone worthy of my worship.
The woods are almost gone but I have left sacrifices in a belt of scruffy sycamores beside the ring road. I broke into my mother’s bungalow and took back what was mine. I dug up the caches of my precious comics and books. They were swollen by water and mould but burned easily once they had been soaked with petrol.
I have sacrificed my childhood to you.
Now it is full moon again. I have left signs. Only you will know their import.
My mother’s head lies at the site of your sacrifice. In the last moment of her life she knew who I was. I have had revenge for her failure to protect me from my father.
I buried her body with your sacrifice.
My father’s decomposed body lies amongst the faded poppy wreaths on the steps of the war memorial. He is dressed in my security officer’s uniform. I dug him up a few days after I took up my post here and I kept him in my flat. Now I know that everything was meant to be.
I have been purified.
I have cast off my past.
I wait for you. I switch from camera to camera. Moonlight gleams on the windows of the shops along the high street. The supermarket at the edge of town burns with a fever light. The trees in front of the churchyard are restless. A group of teenagers are drinking by the side of the town hall. I should report them to the police. Instead I think that they will be the first sacrifice we make together.
I know that I am worthy. I know that you will come to me. I know that we will achieve a glorious synthesis.
Together we will change the world.
<
~ * ~
MIKE CAREY
Reflections on the Critical Process
MANDELSON AND ME arguing across a table.
I tell him he has to up his game, and he shoots me.
I wake up in hospital, groggy but healing. It’s three days later: three days since I last sat down and wrote. Over the whining protests of the doctor, who belongs to a type I despise, I sign the releases and discharge myself on my own recognizance.
Outside, on the street, I flag down a taxi. It swerves in my direction, but doesn’t slow. As I bounce off the front bumper, I catch a glimpse of Mandelson at the wheel, grinning like a maniac.
This time it’s only two days before I wake up, and it’s a nicer ward with a south-facing window. But Mandelson has sent me flowers, which bring me out in a hideous allergic rash when I touch them. I go into anaphylactic shock, and it’s another week before I surface.
Is the man disturbed? I wonder. This seems a disproportionate response to a negative review. But as my bloated, blood-swollen face deflates towards its normal proportions, some of my natural indignation drains away too. This is surely nothing that can’t be settled over a hearty meal and a selection of fine wines.
I walk home - it seems safer than hailing a cab. When I get there, I find that the door of my apartment has been booby-trapped: I can quite clearly see the scrape marks in the wood of the jamb where Mandelson - for I assume it is he - has been meddling with the hinges. Were I to insert my key in the lock, it seems probable that some very unfortunate consequences would result. Explosives? Poison gas? Discretion, plainly, is the better part of valour.
The elevator doesn’t come when I call it, so I take the stairs. The loose board has been more expertly camouflaged than the tampering with my door, so I come down the last three flights arse-over-tip, with gathering momentum. That turns out to be a blessing in disguise, because I sail right over the bamboo stakes and am only brought to a (somewhat painful) halt by the street door.
Limping down the steps into the street, I narrowly escape being run over for a second time. This time Mandelson is driving a truck, and things seem set to go very badly for me, but with great presence of mind I dive behind a potted palm. Mandelson is a keen gardener and fervent conservationist, who favours the re-wilding of urban habitats: he swerves to miss me.
What can I do? My revolver (which I purchased a long while ago, and have never used) is up in my apartment, and therefore inaccessible. In any event, I don’t believe I ever acquired any ammunition for it.
I retire to a coffee bar further down the block to consider my options, and while I’m brooding over a lemon tea, the phone behind the counter rings. The waiter who picks up shouts my name, but as I stand to take the call there is a screech of brakes from outside. I have time to drop to the floor before the street window shatters and - to the accompaniment of a sound like a typewriter shod in pig-iron - a hail of machine-gun bullets chews up the counter, the waiter and the people and fittings at the front three tables.
Surely, now, we are beyond the limits of normal hurt feelings.
I lie low for a week, in a repulsive rented room in a dockside hovel, tended to by an obese Armenian woman whose three words of English are “pay”, “eat” and “cockroach”.
Then, when I judge that the time is right, I begin to stalk my prey.
I buy a Minim .14 hand pistol - small, and probably inaccurate over long distances, but still serviceable at close quarters.
I visit a theatrical costumier’s, where a bowler hat, blond wig and Fu Manchu moustache render me entirely unrecognizable.
I go to Mandelson’s apartment on 28th Street, and gain entrance by telling the concierge that I am Mandelson’s homosexual lover. He is out, and so I steal his mail from the pigeonhole in the building’s lobby. There is a fat wodge of letters, which I take out into the street and then stop to examine at a bus stop a few blocks down.
The bulk of Mandelson’s mail consists of bills, which I am about to discard until I see that one of them, from a disreputable shipping and forwarding agency, is for two female Bengal tigers. These beasts have cost Mandelson SI5,000 and some odd change, inclusive of a $22 handling charge. A sizeable sum for a man whose last three novels have struggled to make the bottom of the moderate sellers list. Does that sound harsh? I say what must be said.
I look at the remaining bills a little more closely. I see that Mandelson has rented the Andreas Capellano sports centre on 12th Street for a month, which adds another ten thousand buckaroos to his burgeoning expenses. He has also cornered the market in stainless-steel razor blades. This intrigues me, for Mandelson has a beard as dense as a hawthorn thicket.
There is also a letter which is not a bill. It is a request from an engineering firm for further specifications. I am not surprised that further specifications are required: what Mandelson has apparently asked for is a layout of interlocking iron plates making up into a rectangle 75 by 150 feet, with an insulated semi-circular area of radius five feet on one of the shorter sides.
I resolve not to go within a dozen blocks of the Andreas Capellano sports centre until Mandelson’s lease expires.
My stalking has come to a dead halt, more or less. I visit Mandelson’s apartment again later in the day, find nothing more. The next day I call for a third time, with the same result. I question the concierge. She is abusive. She hasn’t seen Mandelson for almost a week: moreover, people keep coming around and demanding money for things she’s never seen and knows nothing about. What sort of things? I ask. Things like five thousand gross of stainless-steel razor blades. Things like steel plates, and breeding pairs of king cobras. I sympathize. She tells me that she doesn’t need my damn’ sympathy, and that I’m a sodomite son-of-a-whore who (on that sweet day when God reigns on Earth) will surely be stricken with leprosy and hysterical blindness. I leave with my dignity intact.
&n
bsp; I am by nature phlegmatic and slow to wrath, but by this time I am experiencing something akin to perturbation. My choice is this: I can either go to Andreas Capellano and confront my tormentor, or I can roam the city, exiled from my own apartment and from the life I knew, until he picks me off with a combine harvester, a garbage wagon or a snow plough.
Over a cup of coffee in a less than salubrious diner near my less than salubrious dockside rooms, I brood over this conundrum for a long time without bringing it to a solution. But then, as luck would have it, the decision is taken out of my hands. As I stand up to leave, something hard and cold and rounded in cross-section - an aluminium baseball bat, perhaps, although I’m far from being an expert in such things - hits me on the back of the skull and sends me into sudden and complete oblivion.
Mandelson has anticipated me again, the frothing lunatic. How do you even argue with someone like that?
It is dark when I wake up. It remains dark even when I remember to open my eyes. My head is hurting, but when I sit up and probe it anxiously with trembling fingertips I discover that it has been bandaged. As I squint into the darkness, the lights come on. Raw: far too bright. Arc-lighting, as though for a stage.
What I see is this: a long room, the floor of varnished wood and marked out with white lines. The markings are consistent with a five-a-side football court, and I am sitting on the centre line. Around me, the walls are draped in black, except at the far end of the room where there are two doors. There are many things about this set-up that I do not like.
Mandelson says hello over a crackly PA system. I ignore him. I know that he cannot resist the urge to explain the situation, and that he will do it badly, heavy on the bombast. I probably already know more than he intends to tell me, so I can afford to let my attention wander, as you do on a plane when the stewardess delivers the safety demonstration.
“Are you comfortable, Peasey?” he crackles.
“I survive, Mandelson,” I reply coolly. I throw my coolness in his teeth. Let him chew on it and take what nourishment he can.
“How did you describe my novel again?”
Two doors. That’s interesting. And the drapes draw attention to them by concealing everything else.
“I believe I said that it was a Gothic cock-up, Mandelson.”
‘“A prime Gothic cock-up; a puerile resurrection of a literary form that should have been allowed to die with Lewis and Shelley.’”
“I never write middle-of-the-road reviews, Mandelson. You know that.”
“And yet you may still get to be roadkill.”
Bwa ha ha! No, he doesn’t go quite that far, but a bwa ha ha is strongly implied. Sitting there on the basketball court, I think of those who have suffered in the name of art. Many of them I tortured myself, for that is a reviewer’s task in life.
“Well, if you disliked House of Blood, Peasey, you’re going to hate the sequel. I call it Sports Centre of No Return.”
“I should work on the title, Mandelson. It sounds a little ... dare I say it... jejune.”
“At the end of the chamber,” he snarls, “there are two doors. Do you see them?”
“I see the doors, Mandelson.”
“They mean life or death to you, according to how you choose. Behind one is the back staircase leading out of this place. Behind the other is a Bengal tiger, starved and savage. Decide quickly which door you will open. In a minute’s time, if you haven’t made a choice, the floor will open beneath your feet and pitch you into oblivion!”
I consider. First of all, he is lying about the doors. Possibly he is also lying about the floor, and the time limit. I glance down and inspect the perfecdy polished wood, find a thin line running up the centre of the room which has been recently cut and sanded and indifferently varnished. No, he isn’t bluffing. The floor will open. There will be some sort of gesture towards oblivion.
Back at Mandelson’s apartment, I assume, the bills must be piling up and up and up.
Fifteen seconds have now gone, and I have no intention of choosing a door because I believe, doubter and cynic though I am, that you don’t buy two Bengal tigers if you’re only planning to use one.
I straighten up - slowly, because my headache persists - and walk across to one side of the court. I take a fold of the black drapes in my hand and pull them aside. Behind them there are nets, and behind the nets, climbing bars: Andreas Capellano doubles up, as most sports centres do, and the main arena is furnished for pretty much every sport there is.
It’s possible to put my feet on the climbing bars, even through the nets. It’s possible to take my full weight off the floor and wait there, like a monkey in the rigging, for further developments to eventuate.
The floor pivots on its unseen hinges, breaks open at the centre and falls away into black nothingness below me. I allow myself to feel a little smug: the clean logic of the enlightenment has cut through Mandelson’s welter of Gothic excesses.
I swarm along the nets, surprising myself with my skill. Crab-scuttling from one set of bars to the next, I arrive at length at the nearer of the two doors. Once there, I lean out over the black gulf, turn the handle, and pull the door open.
There is another darkness beyond: a narrower space, which stinks of musk and urine. Something stirs in the gloom, gathers itself, and whips past me almost before I’m aware of it. A flash of light on sleekly muscled flesh, sheathed in dark fur, is the limit of what I perceive. It drops out of sight, beyond line or plummet, sending up from the depths below a tinny whisper and a sudden roar of rage or pain.
The next bit is complicated. Since the door opened outwards, I am forced to climb around it before I can actually gain entrance to the room it leads to. This takes me some minutes, and Mandelson makes another “Hello, campers” broadcast over the PA system before I’m done.
“You didn’t play by the rules, Peasey.”
“Didn’t I, Mandelson? That must be because the rules are asinine and arbitrary. But in any case, I did choose a door.”
“You can’t escape me. Every square inch of this building is a trap, and there’s no escape.”
“Every square inch? That would be one hundred and forty-four traps per square foot, Mandelson. Surely you exaggerate.”
Scrambling in through the doorway, I enter the musky darkness. Within it there are faint glimmers of light, which take the form of lines drawn on the air. Straw rustles under my feet: my outstretched arm touches a metal bar, traces it up and down. The vertical glimmers resolve themselves into further bars, extending before me on both sides. I am in a cage: semi-circular recesses at the corners tell me that it is on wheels. A sort of animal transporter.
At its further end there is a door which is bolted, but since the cage was only ever intended to contain animals the bolt is easily reachable from the inside, through the bars. I slide the bolt, push the door wide and step down into - what? A wide, empty space. A floor of ceramic tiles, visible in the light from a skylight over my head, and a white-painted pillar very close to me on which there is a sign I can’t read.
Again, I wait for my eyes to adjust. I find that the sign bears no words, only a stick figure walking down some stairs, and an arrow pointing off to my left. I follow the arrow and, yes, there are the stairs. They only lead down, so that is where I go, skirting the sprung bear traps with which the landing is littered. Every square inch! There are only a couple of dozen bear traps at most, and one has already been sprung by a luckless janitor. He has passed out from the pain, so I skirt around him and continue.
The stairwell is much darker than the room above. I grip the banister rail very firmly as I descend now into near-unrelieved blackness, losing the faint glow from the skylight after the first turn. There is a light switch, but even in the dark I can see the supernumerary wires trailing away from it, up and to the left. Mandelson has rigged an axe to swing down when the switch is pressed, positioning it so that it will embed itself in the skull of anyone standing on that particular st
ep. I could pull the wires loose, but that might trigger a further unwanted sequence of events. I choose instead to go on in the dark.
Two floors down and I can go no further. There are no more stairs. I hope that I’ve reached ground level: it’s always possible, of course, that this is a basement, in which case I’ll have to memorize the position of the stairs and retrace my steps.
I am walking along a corridor now. There are more tiles under my feet, and - I ascertain - on the walls. The corridor slopes down a little, and there is a faint smell of chlorine from up ahead of me. Abruptly I step into a narrow well in the floor and find that it’s filled with water to a depth of four or five inches. This is a footbath, and therefore I’m about to enter the pool area.
The larger darkness ahead of me talks to itself in metallic whispers; in hollow scratches and clicks like the claws of tin crabs on the bed of a dry ocean. Turning a corner, I find the light: it’s fierce, but it’s high overhead and angled so that very little of it reaches me down here in these nether regions. I am once again in a very wide, very high-ceilinged space. The massive trapdoors from the basketball court two storeys above hang down to either side of me, and something in front of me smells of straw and musk and bodily fluids.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 21
