‘As the head of this family I must withhold from you, for your own good, mind you, the full details of this venture. For now let me just say that things are going to get a little rickety around here once Barry’s plan for restructuring the company is put in place – all of this having been done, of course, at the behest of the CEO and seconded by all of senior management. There just may be a period of declining profits visited on this house due to a chaotic work environment. Soon the stockholders will begin making sounds of discontent and start pawing the ground like a herd of unfed cattle looking for some new cowboys to run the ranch – people with fresh ideas and special plans. Before you know it . . . we will be the company.’
But one thing at a time, they agreed.
First things first, they agreed.
And that first thing was Domino, who could queer this whole business if they didn’t get to him before the cops did.
That was your cue, Harry. And I’d be keeping a special eye on you.
6
I HAVE TO confess that I was as much relieved as I was enraged by the revelations of infamy that the lunch-meeting of The Six had afforded my long-distance eyes and ears. Not that they proved themselves to be any more swinish than I had imagined them to be. They couldn’t possibly have done that. But my image of them had always been that of a pack of beasts whose deeds were performed somewhat haphazardly, directed by a low animal instinct that sniffed out creatures who were not of their breed and marked them for a mindless savaging. Given this conception of their brutish nature, I was naturally driven to respond in kind with plans for a very basic style of massacre, although one for which I had accessorized myself to the hilt with all the appropriate gear and suitably dark attire. Therefore, what a surprise – at once disturbing and delightful – to discover how well these beings knew what they were about.
Disturbing because they had schemes and strategies and an ambitious end in sight. They had turned out to be a tribe of true fiends, a devilish cabal, a Machiavellian mob with Richard as The Prince who commanded a court of hench-persons.
Delightful for the very same reasons. I found it so satisfying to have my worst suspicions about The Six, formerly Seven, finally, unequivocally confirmed. They were indeed a bad lot. My murder-filled mind – driven by an obsessive-compulsive engine of emotion which the nonafflicted cannot hope to comprehend, spinning itself on a carousel of Fear, Hate, Humiliation, and divers other riderless horses of my personal apocalypse – had not gone too far in its violent fantasies.
Yet fantasies were all they amounted to. Even when I began making preparations to behave in accordance with my raging impulses, which, I concede, were a bit overblown for having been planted so deeply within me and suppressed far too long – the situation was still at the stage of daydreams and play-acting. And the Day of Domino was destined never to arrive – not as I had originally conceived it as a bullet-fest on Monday morning. (Who can say if I would actually have gone through with it?) That day had not only been pushed back (due to circumstances beyond my control and still obscure to my mind, however much I sought them out); it had also been drastically altered in its possibilities.
Let’s step back for a moment. Frank Dominio was a man of hyper-charged and off-kilter imagination, no denying it; but he had always been held back by his fears and inner demons. Domino, on the other hand, was not only completely warped, he also belonged to a class of demon himself. Both of them did share many like qualities. Among these was an eagerness to get started on a project, if only to put it behind them as soon as possible. Thus, my work, our work, was not deferred until Monday but began as Wednesday passed into Thursday (EDT). And short work it was that we, ‘I’ for the sake of convenience, made of Mr Stokowski.
I giggled like a child on Christmas morning as I tackled each task with respect to Perry the Piano Player, Perry the Jazz-Creep (big deal if his penchant for music was deep and genuine, rather than the put-on I took it to be), and, as Harry called him, Perry the Worthless Drug Addict. The whole business of that night was, for me, therapeutic in a way that none of the pills or psychiatric services I had consumed over the years had ever been.
And that was exactly the problem: I was so satiated by the job I had done on Perry Stokowski that I feared I might lack the Will to follow through with the others on my gun-shop shopping list. So where would that have left me? What becomes of an ontological anomaly – that is, my own miracle-working self – when he begins to feel that his WORK, in fact, IS DONE? The dark constellations spread across the sky during the final hours of that night, along with the sooty stains that appeared when the sun rose, an hour late, the following day, did not strike me as happy portents of what lay in store for me once I had played out my purposes in the, so to speak, grand scheme of things.
Hence my relief – and double-hence my delight – at having my sheer ferocity of Will renewed by the Gang of Six at their truly revelatory lunch-meeting on Thursday afternoon. The game would now go on, and my salvation, at least for a time, was assured.
The only consternation that remained had nothing to do with Richard’s foul family, with their degeneracies and devices, their sleazy comic-strip machinations, their hideous façades which hid faces that could not be countenanced. No, that was not the problem. The only source of shock left to me was that of my own lingering innocence and naiveté, the fondness I had for keeping my hot head in the cool sand. I had not given those swine nearly enough credit . . . and my credit card could not have ordered nearly enough firepower to obliterate the things that transpired in their closed-door sessions, not to mention the ever-hatching horrors which such meetings were designed to propagate, the monstrous things that popped up and hopped about, just waiting for those doors to open onto the world. This sort of thing had been going on since doors were invented . . . and they happened everywhere and at all times since the first hominids got together to ‘take a meeting’.
Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse.
More generally speaking: Whatever is born will ultimately grow into a nightmarish obscenity – in the grand scheme of things.
Speaking for myself: There are no angels unless they are Angels of Death . . . and I would never again doubt my place among them or lose my resolve to serve in their wild ranks.
7
IN ORDER TO function with any effectiveness in the world, you – and that includes you – are forced to make a number of absurd assumptions. Chief among these is the assumption that yours is a reasonably sound mind in a more or less sound body moving within a rock-solid reality. Even an alcoholic like Sherry Mercer could account for any glitches that occurred in her psycho-sensory apparatus by blaming it on the booze, something she had handled relatively well in the past and had every reason to expect she could handle just as well for many years to come. This situation had begun to change for her not long after the lunch-meeting, which was the last time she would ever know anything resembling mental or metaphysical stability.
‘Is everything okay, Sherry?’ said one of her female staff as they were talking over some minor matters in Sherry’s office.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Sherry replied. ‘But maybe we could finish this up tomorrow morning if you don’t mind.’
‘No problem,’ said the young woman as she got up from her chair. Sherry opened the door and showed her out of the office. Then she closed the door once again, her hand trembling as it held tight to the inside door knob.
Thanks to Barry’s restructuring of the company, Sherry was assigned a newly created position that came with a small private office. Previously this was a luxury and a convenience, enabling her to consume whatever quantity of alcohol she desired throughout the day and to do so in quietly dignified surroundings. Henceforth, however, that office might as well have been located deep in the heart of Hell (medieval, not modern, in the scheme of its decor).
After Sherry had closed the office door she closed her eyes. Then she halting
ly turned her head toward that part of the wall which had been momentarily concealed when she opened the door. Sherry’s eyelashes slowly parted, and her gaze was now directly fixed upon a place where the wall met the floor of her office.
There it was again. There it was still. It hadn’t gone away, as Sherry had hoped it would.
During their meeting, she had successfully drawn the young woman’s attention to that particular section of the wall. (‘Is that a bug or something over there?’ said Sherry, pointing right at the spot.) But she hadn’t seemed to notice anything unusual within that space. Of course neither had Sherry seen anything there until a few hours ago.
But there it was again.
Behind Sherry’s office door was another door. It was small and dark and ugly, a dwarf-sized portal that bulged from the wall like a scab. Its surface was coarse and irregular, as if it had been molded out of clay rather than cut from wood. Nonetheless, there did appear to be an intricate grain running through it, swirling into the door’s many grooves and gouges, curling into roughly circular knots. Sherry tried not to look too closely at the dense patterns of the door, in which she had already seen a variety of little faces and parts of faces, each of them as twisted and ugly as the door itself. But this time she did squat down so that she was at eye-level with the upper edge of the door, bringing herself nearer to the thing than she had previously dared to go. Then, as though attempting to verify the nature of this phenomenon – whether actual or hallucinatory – she poised a pointy-nailed finger very close to it, ready to make a few quick taps. That was when the trouble started. Because as soon as she made contact with the door . . . her fingernail became stuck there, caught like a fly in what seemed to be a kind of tight-knit webbing rather than wood or even clay. As she pulled to extricate herself from the grasp of the door, she found that her finger sunk only more deeply into it and was soon trapped up to the cuticle.
Of course she might have called for any number of people who sat in the cubicles outside her office . . . and maybe that would have made things all right for her once more. (She had no way of knowing otherwise.) However, being the Sherry-thing that she was, she wouldn’t want to be seen in her presently ridiculous – perhaps even certifiably deranged – posture. She was now seated on the floor, her short shirt riding up her rear end as she struggled to free herself, her fingertip stuck in something that no one else could see. Then –
Knock-knock-knock.
But the knocking wasn’t for Sherry, it was for me. Detectives White and Black were standing outside the door that led to the backstairs of my apartment. Through the parted curtains on the door’s window I stared out at the two men, who looked right through me, peering as far as they could inside. Perhaps they had a warrant to search the place for my Buck Skinner Hunting Knife, which, depending on the judge they petitioned, might be considered as the deadly tool used to sever the hands of Perry Stokowski. I hadn’t been following very closely the activities of these workmanlike sleuths, so I didn’t know what to expect.
In any case, I thought that even if they did bust into my apartment, with or without a warrant, they wouldn’t have found the knife, because somehow I had taken it with me when I entered into that spooky state of being I now enjoyed: it only took solid form when I did, and, like my black clothes and amber-tinted eyeglasses, it dissolved into thin air or moved through solid objects whenever it suited me to do so. What could be more silly than a set of clothes walking around with a pair of eyeglasses hovering over them? Or an unheld knife with a thirteen-inch blade floating down the street? So I was ready for anything the homicide detectives might have had in mind, which was something beyond my powers to know. Whatever miraculous feats I was able to perform, I still seemed to be bound by certain rules, just like anything else in this stinking world, be it animal, vegetable, mineral, vapor-form, human, superhuman, or whatever else – with all your imagination – you might be able to conceive. Everything that exists is subject to limitations imposed upon it by forces within and forces without. There are no exceptions or exemptions, although there may be some striking transformations.
Just witness what my bulked-up being was now able to do with Sherry, whose finger was sinking deeper and deeper into that ugly door. It was all my idea, my plan – at least to the extent that anyone can lay claim to an idea or plan as his very own. But how did I know I could do it? I had never done such a thing before. My original intent, way back when, was to send a bullet or two from the barrel of my Glock 17, or perhaps my Firestar, into the brain of a hated enemy, someone who had conspired to drop me into the deep end of a hell from which I did not have the power to drag myself out.
By what power, though, would my finger have pulled the trigger of that Glock, or Firestar? I knew that my Brain would ultimately give the command to shoot, shouting out, in so many words, ‘OK, Finger – ready, set, fire.’ But I also knew that my Brain took its orders from my Body, while at the same time functioning as an integrated part of my Body. In addition, both my Body and my Brain (as an integrated part of my Body) were reacting to pressures placed upon them by other Bodies and other Brains, such as that of Sherry in her capacity as an individual Body-Brain unit, or those of The Seven acting as a group of Bodies and Brains . . . not to mention the sundry other pressures exerted by objects and events that were without a human Body or a human Brain, including the weather, Daylight Savings Time, insects – the entire nonhuman world in general.
So how was it that all these Bodies and Brains, including my own, along with countless other nonhuman factors, such as the cockroaches that infested my apartment, could all coordinate in order to force my finger to pull the trigger of a Glock, or a Firestar, and pump some fragments of metal into Sherry Mercer’s worthless Brain and well-formed Body? How could this task, or any other in this crying-shame of a world, ever be accomplished? What precisely was the chain of command – the source of this whole mess, the line of historical phenomena which along the way included my overwhelming urge to purchase a selection of handguns and a Buck Skinner Hunting Knife, and then later inspired me with the notion of creating this ugly little door which only Sherry, and of course I, could see . . . and that Sherry was now stuck in up to her slender wrist?
Answer: No answer, obviously.
Question: Withdrawn at the request of my dizzied Brain.
Orders to the Troops: Keep focused and continue the assault until all traces of the Sherry-pain, like that of the Perry-pain, had been neutralized.
And now the ugly little doorknob on that ugly little door began to jiggle back and forth, squeaking in Sherry’s ears. It was shaped something like the head of a small monkey, but Sherry grabbed the knob without flinching, her fear of what might be trying to come through the door overcoming the loathsome look and weblike feel of all those whorls and knotholes, those little faces and parts of faces. She tried to use her hold on the knob as leverage to pull her other hand free. With this action, unfortunately, she only sank deeper into the thing, which worked in the same manner as a mind trapped in a web of obsessive thoughts: the more that you – and definitely me – struggled to pry loose, the more tightly we would be held.
By now Sherry could feel the knob-thing pulsing with a squirmy sort of life in her one hand, while her other was lost in a place where it was being caressed by something nameless, which nevertheless might still be described as a wriggling darkness, a black world of worms slithering around her hand and between her fingers. Her eyes had opened so very wide – those Sherry-thing eyes. And now her mouth, which had once talked so much Sherry-thing talk, tried to scream. But no sound came out of that mouth. There were also other effects worked upon Sherry’s body and brain, but it’s better that some things be carried out behind closed doors . . . and my attention was being called elsewhere.
Apparently the homicide detectives had indeed been unable to secure a warrant to search my apartment. Detective White did rattle my doorknob rather vigorously in hopes that the wormeaten wood around the lock might give way and allow him
and his partner illegal access to the suspect’s residence. If I hadn’t been otherwise occupied, I would have allowed them entry, purely out of politeness. Instead, the detectives had to march back down the stairs behind the diner and were now in the process of interviewing Lillian across her counter.
The place was all but empty of customers, with the exception of Harry, who was sipping coffee at the other end of the counter from Lillian and the homicide detectives.
‘I do wish I could help you,’ said Lillian softly. ‘But I feel I must respect the privacy of my tenant.’
‘We could come back with a warrant,’ said Detective Black.
‘That would be another matter,’ said Lillian.
As the detectives continued to question Lillian, Harry was now mumbling into his cell phone out of anyone’s earshot . . . except my own.
‘Yeah, she’s the landlord,’ Harry, head down, said to Richard on the other end of the line, or rather the frequency, to Harry’s phone.
‘What is she saying?’ said Richard.
‘It’s what she’s not saying. She’s lying her head off to the cops, that much I can tell.’
Detective White was trying to conceal his exasperation with the soft-spoken and flawlessly evasive responses of the diner’s proprietor.
‘So when was the last time you saw him?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t say,’ said Lillian.
‘Does he ever come into the diner?’ asked Detective Black.
‘Sometimes he does.’
Harry was able to tell that Lillian was lying to the homicide detectives because he himself must have done the same thing over and again during his career, as I inferred from my intrusions into the files of various agencies of law enforcement. Previous to Richard’s hiring him (‘scouting’ would be a more apt term), the man I once regarded as Harry the Enigma was also known as Hank the Plumber, Joe the Roofer, and Bob the Encyclopedia Salesman, among other aliases he used for both profit (home invasion, confidence artistry; five prison years served over the course of ten life years) and pleasure (several charges of molestation involving minors, majors, and some truly aged persons when he worked as Ken the Orderly at a nursing home; no convictions).
My Work Is Not Yet Done Page 9
