As I shuffle out into the light, I see the rim of the pool as a black slash directly ahead of me. Beyond it, prismatic splinters of yellow and blue slice the air into ionic froth. The swimming pool is filled with razor blades, and the tiger is dying a few feet from the nearest edge: almost close enough to touch, but much, much too far to swim.
I sit by the side of the pool for a while, thinking. It seems that Mandelson has laid no further snares in this particular room, so I am undisturbed except by the tiger’s death throes. Taking stock of my situation, I realize for the first time that I am still dressed in the clothes that I was wearing before I was brought here. Is the Minim hand pistol still in my jacket pocket? No, it is not. Nothing else is either: cell phone, wallet, keys, all gone. Nothing to work with except what is here already. I need a base of operations, and for that I need a detailed plan of the building; for which, I imagine, I need the entrance hall.
I do not find the entrance hall. Apart from the brilliant spotlights above the pool, the building remains in darkness, and an understandable caution prevents me from turning on the lights. What I do find is tiger spoor: I tread in it. I infer that the second tiger has been released from its cage, which lends a certain urgency to these proceedings.
I come to another sign, read it with my fingers. It indicates the location of the fire exit, but the corridor towards which it points is hissing ominously. I have no wish to encounter a breeding pair of king cobras: some things ought to be private.
I am feeling a strong sense of trepidation and paranoia now, but I try to keep it from spiralling into panic: I cannot afford to panic. I feel that the second tiger is stalking me through the dark, and that my every step may bring me face-to-face with it. It would be easy, therefore, to stop moving and go to ground. Easy, but fatal, I tell myself, and I keep moving.
When, finally, I reach a door at the head of a long flight of stairs, I am beginning to feel the strain of all these melodramatic and over-coloured events. The sign on the door is shallowly embossed on shiny, varnished wood, so once again I can run my hand over it and read it by touch. This is the supervisor’s office. It will do as my base of operations. I open the door and enter.
It is Mandelson’s base of operations. He is sitting at a bank of CCTV monitors, but now he swivels his chair and we stare at one another, mildly embarrassed, like women who have come to a party in the same dress. Then he scrambles for his pistol and shoots at me again, splintering the door-post.
I turn tail and run back the way I’ve come, along nighted avenues, across great rooms that could be anything, could house anything. When I pause I hear running footsteps from somewhere that could be very close by or very far away: the darkness conceals and confuses. When I run I hear nothing but the beating of my own heart.
At last, I see a light up ahead of me, growing stronger as I approach. Turning a last corner, I am face-to-face with it. An open door. I step through and find myself in the building’s chapel - an odd thing to find in a sports centre, but I speak as a confirmed atheist. Others, clearly, treasure the sense of oneness with God that comes after an intense and sweaty workout.
I walk between rows of removable seating, noting the prayer books on shelves behind each one. The floor rings like a steel drum beneath my feet, and this is unsurprising because it is burnished metal. The points where the individual metal plates abut on to each other are clearly visible, though an attempt has been made to disguise them with some sort of resin.
Ahead of me is the altar, and behind it the handsomely carved mahogany cross in its recess. The recess, I see now, is semi-circular. The room is approximately twice as long as it is wide: I would not be at all surprised to learn that its exact dimensions are 75 by 150 feet.
I vault over the altar rather than walking around it. I step into the recess, ducking my head because its ceiling is low. There is no metal here: or rather, the metal is covered with a layer of springy, foam-rubber-like insulation. To one side of the recess there is a foot pedal at the end of a coiled length of electric flex. Aha.
I turn as Mandelson enters the room. He raises the gun. I say, “Goodbye, Mandelson,” and press my foot down on the pedal.
He fries. The smell is of burned bacon on a griddle. Gothic excess.
After he is thoroughly, unfragrantly dead I take my foot off the pedal, return to the supervisor’s office and lock myself in. I switch all the lights on and wait until I feel calm and composed, which takes a little more than five minutes. Then I call the police and wait a little longer.
By this time, the tips of my fingers are starting to prickle. The supervisor’s computer is already booted up, and though it’s mainly set up to monitor the feeds from the many CCTV cameras dotted around the building, it also has a version of Microsoft Word with which I am conversant.
I open a document, type in header and footer information and set line-spacing to double.
I begin to write, critiquing in reasoned and pithy prose everything that has happened to me since I first took Mandelson’s bullet. My usual word count is 4,000 and I bring the piece in at 3,889, not counting the title.
I despise the vernacular. It is the progenitor of sloppy thought and flabby argument.
But I own Mandelson. I fucking own him.
<
~ * ~
DAVID J. SCHOW
The Finger
I DIDN’T KNOW it at the time, but my personal monster had flown all the way to Minnesota to murder a woman I had never met, didn’t even know. Dead, just because she had phoned me to harass me on behalf of a bank, in dutiful pursuit of one of many outstanding loans. Her job had been working one of those soulless telephonic rat-runs as the voice of authority who “only wants to help you”, which is enough to cheese off any normal human.
How I came to have a personal monster is preamble.
In Los Angeles, very few people are pedestrians by choice. But when you walk the avenues and side streets as traffic whizzes past, you notice things on the ground the speed demons will never see, and thus never even consider. Like found objects, for example.
I have a collection.
Stray, random items out in the wilds of the world have always fascinated me. Discards, junk, oddments, lost possessions. A deadbolt, all by itself with no door. A wristwatch with no band, which has ceased to function, cast away not into a bin, but stranded in the world, on the street. Mostly small things - not trash-heaped computer monitors or old furniture, but discoveries you can hold in your hand. A broken porcelain satyr missing a leg. Half a string of fake, formerly flashy costume jewels. Pirate booty at ground level.
Once this object had been new. It rolled off an assembly line or craftsman’s table and was packaged to sparkle and attract the consumer eye. Yeah, I need one of those. Someone desired it. It appealed to a purpose. It got unwrapped and used. Then it failed, or was replaced by something better, or became lost by accident to end its days in the wilderness, the realm outside of the comfort of a speeding automobile. Forsaken, forgotten by all except those who had learned to watch the ground with a treasure-hunter’s eye.
You could make up stories about found objects. Like the enigmatic single shoe, perched on the traffic island, or swept to the kerb, or just sitting there on the sidewalk begging the question, What happened to the other shoe? Everybody has seen that single shoe at one time or another in their life. There are more shoes on Earth than people, right? Even the least imaginative of us concoct, in passing, a narrative for that single shoe, because it just seems so odd.
The weirdest part is that when you inevitably see two abandoned shoes together, it seems even stranger.
More often than not, the attraction was a cheat - a shard of cigarette foil crumpled just so as to suggest a more interesting shape, or a broken bottleneck catching the light. Then, next to the useless junk, you’d find a key. Where was the lock? The key had a purpose and was ready to perform its function, but the lock was gone or irrelevant. What if the key had been los
t inadvertently? Then it would still unlock something. What did it no longer protect?
A spent brass shell casing, head stamped Federal .38 Special. A story there, for sure.
I got the Valley Village house when Samantha left me. She took the more expensive place way out in Agoura, halfway to Santa Barbara. She took the more expensive car. Hers was the bigger bank account, so she saw this as equitable. Her deadbeat children were still living with her, as far as I knew, way out in that suburban purgatory. I like being close enough to the city to feel its rhythms and pulse. Samantha hated the traffic. I would walk a mile for groceries and she detested having to drive a block and a half just for extra milk. The lesson seemed to be not to get involved with a partner who has a previous life, but how often is that going to come your way? Friends and lovers all arrive with baggage and damage, and the challenge of human relationships is the quest to find a cooperative compromise whereby their “ins” fit your “outs”.
For example, the offspring from her previous marriage did not seem like a deal-breaker at the time. They bailed early. Minors when we married, they were now adults by definition (if not in practice), supposed grown-ups who only manifested around birthdays, holidays, or any other period that provided a good excuse to ask for more money. When Samantha and I split, they had simply moved back in with her. Not my headache, not any more.
I had the cheaper car, the back-up house, and an aborted career as a software developer and website designer, which is the twenty-first-century nomenclature for “unemployed”, the way Hollywood screenwriters who are “between projects” are accepted as jobless. They make up their stories, and I make up mine, and neither of us, it seems, is getting paid for anything these days.
The housing crash flipped the mortgage on my modest home, but banks could not foreclose the entire country all at once, even if they preferred the neatness of such a coup. It seemed unfair that the nation could raise its debt ceiling but I couldn’t. The government wasn’t paying its bills, so why should I? The tension had stretched out to three years and counting, and while know-nothings nattered about things “getting better”, I saw no physical evidence of such an optimistic rally.
Walking allowed mindspace, a vent, a chance to air out my head.
I found the finger right at the corner of Ventura and Whitsett, a stone’s throw from the LA River, poking up from a clump of stubborn weed. The lot had been cleared by the demolition of yet another brick-and-mortar bookstore, and was engirded by the usual sagging chain-link fence and plywood construction signs heralding the imminent arrival of something better than a bookstore. The dirt had remained unturned long enough for tendrils of green kyllinga to take hold and break surface, and the finger had been lifted from horizontal by the growth until it was nearly upright, as though it was giving me the finger, personally, because no one else would ever notice it.
Hey. Fuck you!
It was white and desiccated. Middle finger, definitely. Both knuckles intact. Nicotine-coloured nail, chipped. Humanoid if not human. Sawn off right at the base of the metacarpal bone. Shreds of decomposed flesh, there, but long deprived of moisture. It presented no biological threat; it was dead and dry, almost mummified. Deactivated. I wrapped it up in a shred of newspaper - another common trash item we would soon forget altogether.
Twenty or thirty possible stories there, no doubt. Maybe I could frame it in a light-box for display. People might ask what the story was and would believe anything I’d care to invent.
Except as soon as I got it home, the damned thing started growing.
~ * ~
The morning ritual went something like this: put on sweats. Acquire coffee. Activate monitors. Delete spam, skip blather. Note how few, if any, messages relate to fresh work, then click directly to the latest news of my own imminent job doom. Reconsider smoking. Troll uselessly around the Internet for a stray hour or so in an attempt to feel better about the fact that I was becoming obsolete while I watched, within my own lifetime.
Dither over the spec projects for another hour. Check snail mail.
Go for a walk.
In the time it took to accomplish this well-meaning yet empty industry, the severed finger I had found the day before had changed. Before, it resembled a sad little cartoon penis. Now it had a thumb-like extension of jaundice-coloured flesh and looked more akin to a crab claw.
It had also gained a smell - not unpleasant, but the arid, spicy aroma of something alive.
I put it in the refrigerator, inside the hinged transparent hatch for the butter, since I didn’t have any butter.
By the following morning - and I’ll admit I checked it about a thousand times - the mesh of flesh between the finger and “thumb” had marshalled itself to present the stub of an index finger. A digit, I should say, since it in no way resembled an ordinary human hand. This was more like the talon from a marble statue, bloodless and alabaster, still with that yellow tinge.
Lucerno phoned, leaving a message about some bread-and-butter work helping several digitally challenged clients zip up fresh formats for their antiquated blogs. Lucerno, who works for some big company I can never remember the name of, had always been kind that way, while my wealthier and more accomplished friends forgot about my existence (or utility) until they needed me to do something for them, like right now.
The finger - the thing - had mustered into an entire hand by Thursday. I took pictures of its progress until one morning it vanished from the fridge.
I found it in the living room, soaking up sunlight like a cat near the sliding glass door to the back yard. It now had a palm, a wrist and part of a forearm. Either I had completely lost my marbles and put it there, or it had shoved its way out of the refrigerator and spider-walked to the nearest heat source. I picked it up and the new fingers, now three plus the thumb, closed gently on my own thumb with no force or threat. It was not a horror-movie moment. It was just... odd.
Odd enough that I stuck it into the freezer, in the garage. It did not try to escape, and nestled contentedly among a few frozen steaks and bags of microwave mung. The freezer was large but not huge - you could not have stashed a corpse in there - left to me because it wasn’t modern enough for Samantha to claim dibs on it.
I could enumerate all the ways I tried to distract myself, but let’s face it: the hand kept regenerating, even while frosted with ice crystals. It grew a shoulder. I installed a padlock on the freezer.
This was news. I had to keep taking pictures.
From the new shoulder, a wing began to bud.
A new sense of urgency filled my day-to-day life. It had become a project with up-to-the-minute developments that needed to be monitored - a reason, in fact, to get out of bed in the face of a new day that could only offer renewed disappointment on the job front as the calendar eroded in fast-forward and the bills continued to pile up. It worked just fine for me.
Until the morning when I checked the freezer and found the lock hasp broken, and the occupant gone.
~ * ~
I had spent my entire life avoiding this kind of pain. The stress of having your child kidnapped, or seeing your yard suddenly vacant of your favourite pet. You know the million questions already, the ones you use to torture or blame yourself; the journalist’s credo. How? Why? When?
I searched the house. Scoured the yard. Crawled under the pilings with a flashlight. Disturbed junk that had a year of dust layered atop it.
The hasp had not merely broken. It had been sundered in two with enough force to dent the freezer lid. The padlock lay twisted, on the floor, useless now except as someone else’s found object. In another life I would find such a thing and wonder what its story had been.
The crank-style garage window was broken, its metal interstices bent outward.
My internal commotion ate the day, and when the day was over sleep was an impossibility. There was no authority to whistle up, nobody in a uniform that could be called. This was all mine.
In any house, you
grow attuned to the ambient noise. How traffic outside sounds on the inside. How heat or cold makes beams and joists sound off. Which sounds belong, and which don’t. So at two a.m., I knew instantly that something was going on in the garage. Clunk, thud.
I bolted up, flashlight at hand, a gun unboxed from my closet at the ready. It was a little eight-round .380 Bersa Thunder, one of the few legacies from my late dad. It looked like a purse gun, a toy gun, but at least it was a firearm. It was totally illegal and I had last fired it on a range over a decade ago, back when Samantha and I were still together and both of us were wondering when the social contract of marriage would reveal unto us its secret plan to make us whole.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 22
