The dark stains hovered in the sky above the old buildings of the downtown area and extended into the distance across the river, creating a cityscape that was so evenly overcast that it took on the phony look of a stage-setting or a day-for-night scene in a low-budget movie. Furthermore, sometime after I sent Chipman to his doom, there was a definite moment when things took on a still darker tint, as if to mark the precise time when the Young Supervisor could no longer deny to himself the heart-stopping fact that he would never find his way to the end of that infinite series of doors.
Clearly a pattern was discernable in these darkenings that came upon the heels of each act of uncanny mayhem that I worked upon my former colleagues. I wondered if this was a sign of one of those stupid rules that encumbered us all, living or non-living, a law of limitation that read: ‘This far and no farther,’ or possibly, ‘This many and no more.’ Anyhow, after a rather busy day of putting down bad beasts, I decided to pause that evening to reflect upon this pattern I had observed. As I lay, in bodily form, on the sofa in the living room of my apartment – that wonderfully bleak penthouse above Lillian’s downtown diner – I roughly estimated that at the rate that these darkenings were encroaching on my world, I would be able to eliminate my remaining coworkers, that is my erstwhile coworkers, just before I myself was plunged into a realm of permanent and total darkness, sinking back into that metaphorical river of blackness from which I had, by means unknown to me, somehow escaped before I had become entirely submerged into its greasy waters.
This realization (if it wasn’t purely a matter of imagination, I thought) was a disheartening one. Because as satisfying as I found my work of exterminating these vermin in whatever bizarre manner I could conceive, my mind had already begun turning toward bigger things, more elaborate schemes on a far greater scale. After all, the planet that I inhabited, the reality in which I was captured, was brimming with all kinds of potential victims, all of whom, to some degree, were swine that I dearly wanted to lead into my house of slaughter.
This feeling of mine, this passion, was absolutely confirmed and bolstered during those moments when I had occupied the body of Lillian Hayes for the purpose of liquidating, in a literal sense, Harry the Robber and Rapist. Now here was a woman who, I believed, was as decent as anyone could be, as close to being a non-swine as any human being could get. And yet all the time that I inhabited her physical body, I could feel how intimately that body – in both its physical and metaphysical aspects – was connected to that now familiar darkness, that sinister presence . . . a presence that might well have been named The Great Black Swine – a grunting, bestial force that animated, that used our bodies to frolic in whatever mucky thing came its way, lasciviously agitating itself in that black river in which the human species only bobbed about like hunks of excrement. Indeed, after inhabiting the body of another – in this case the body of Lillian Hayes – it seemed to me that the idea of a human species, of anything like a ‘person’ (or persons known or unknown) was only a figure of speech, a convenient delusion.
Then, sometime between dumping Harry in the soup and sending Chipman into a maddening oblivion, it occurred to me: All of them must be done away with . . . everyone must go!
And as I lay on the sofa in the living room of my apartment I could only lament that I would not be able to continue my work beyond The Seven (Chipman notwithstanding). A limit had been placed on my labors before the blackness would close in on me entirely. I was still being manipulated, I was still being crowded and conspired against by something beyond my control and frustrating to my Will. But then something happened, right in the living room of my apartment, that served to reconcile me to this situation, or at least instill in my soul a sense of grim resignation.
It took the form of a cockroach scuttling across the carpet. I jumped up from the sofa and, with a rapidity and precision that came along with my peculiar state of existence, I trapped the creature beneath my heavy black boot without killing it. Even through the thick sole of that boot I could feel the bug scuttling in place. At this point I was merely in physical connection with it. Next, I established a deeper communion with this vermin, letting a little bit of myself flow into its body, linking me to its life in the same manner that I had joined myself to Lillian Hayes. Although my immersion into the roach was not as complete as it had been with Lillian, I nonetheless felt the exact same sensation: there was nothing especially ‘roachy’ inside the roach any more than there was anything of a distinct ‘person’ inside of Lillian – once the dark interior of each had been penetrated, there was only that buzz of swinish agitation and turbulent blackness. The Great Black Swine was thrashing about inside the cockroach just as it had within Lillian Hayes, the only difference being that any sense of delusion about being some kind of thing-in-the-world was missing from the insect, or perhaps it was only so faint that I could not detect it.
Was it simply a matter of degree? Between the cockroach and the proprietor of the Metro Diner there spread quite a spectrum of organic life. Was there a corresponding spectrum of delusion about being things-in-the-world? For instance, I’ve noticed – and who hasn’t? – that cats seem to regard themselves in a way very similar to that of humans . . . and vice versa. ‘Cats are people,’ I heard the voice of an old woman speak from somewhere in my memory. And, from a feline perspective, people might very well seem to be cats. And inside of all of them – the thrashing agitation of the Devouring Swine, the Conspiratorial Swine, and, yes, the Murdering Swine. This was the only Thing-in-the-World. The rest of it was only costumes and masks, the inventory of an ancient and still flourishing theatrical supply company.
And they would all have to go – people, cats, roaches, plants, all of it had to go.
But I knew that I – whatever ‘I’ was – would not be the one to do it. The work was too immense, the scale of slaughter impossible to attain. The assurance that every speck of living matter had been swept from this world – and what about all the other worlds? – would have to remain in the realm of Never-To-Be . . . the beatific dream of an obsessive-compulsive life form.
However, it was all over for the roach. When I pressed my boot down to the floor I could feel everything go still and silent within that little body where before there had been only a vicious thrashing in blackness. I even felt a little part of myself – the part of me I had allowed to leak into the bug – grow still and silent. It felt good. Very good, however fleeting the feeling had been. I can truly say that it was the only moment of real well-being I had ever experienced in my life, if my present state of existence could in fact be considered part of that fabrication I called my life.
And at that moment I was sure that I was still living in some way – that even if I was not entirely alive, neither was I wholly dead. Somehow I was caught in between these two worlds – caught in a place where I had made a rare connection with that Great Black Swine, that thrashing and vicious blackness which flowed like a river through every living thing, and possibly in the spaces around everything that lived, allowing me to be wherever the blackness flowed, to become one with this agitated force that was everywhere and inside everything, that moved and manipulated all the created life of this world and gave me the power to move and manipulate things according to my will, which was nevertheless only the lower-case will of an isolated being – a cockroach elevated to human form, a small swirling of that flowing blackness that was as great and enduring as the world itself, that was the secret face of the living world, the shadow within all life, the thing that would live on and on as each one of us died our deaths alone. Because whatever life we had was only its life, and when our bodies, our cockroach bodies, became too damaged to accommodate it . . . this blackness flowed away, leaving behind it a dead vine, a bug’s crushed carapace, or a human corpse – things that had no life of their own, nothing real at all about them.
Yet if my life was all delusion, it was an inescapable delusion that I – and, alas, even you – could not fail to follow wherever it might lead
. And I still had four more beings to blow away from this creepy existence. Until that was accomplished my work was not yet done, and my life (or non-life, as it were) seemed undeniably worth living. Somehow I had been given the power to finish the work I had begun when I entered that downtown gun shop to purchase a load of firearms and a Buck Skinner Hunting Knife.
I – and you – now understood: We were brought into this world out of nothing.
I – and you – now understood: We were kept alive in some form, any form, as long as we were viciously thrashing about, acting out our most intensely vital impulses, never allowed to become still and silent until every drop had been drained of the blackness flowing inside us.
I – and you – now understood: We would be pulled back into the flowing blackness only when we had done all the damage we were allowed to do, only when our work was done. The work of you against me . . . and me against you.
2
ON FRIDAY MORNING the homicide detectives were sitting in their unmarked car just down the street from the gun shop where once upon a time I had planned to pick up a few things. The store was supposed to open at ten o’clock, but they arrived a half-hour early. There they were, sipping coffees and lackadaisically eyeing whatever came into their field of vision. I was sitting – unseeable – in the back seat, thinking to myself, ‘Do you really think that I’m going to make an appearance to pick up my order? You guys are either very thorough or very stupid.’
Then Detective White said something that put me in my place. ‘You know we’re wasting our time here, don’t you?’
‘Yup,’ said Detective Black. ‘No way he’s going to show up.’
‘You know why the lieutenant ordered this stakeout, don’t you?’
‘Yup. It’s not like this is the first time.’
‘But it still stinks.’
‘Take it easy. Here, have a bagel,’ said Detective Black as he reached into a paper bag.
Detective White took the bagel and tore into it like an angry dog. ‘This isn’t the place we should be. We should be questioning those execs at the company, with or without their lawyers.’
‘That’s not what the lieutenant wants.’
‘That not what he wants because he got the word.’
‘The word from the man who got the word from the man,’ said Detective Black.
‘You know how many people have stopped showing up for work at that place?’
‘I know.’
‘I’d like to have a talk with the ones that are still left,’ said Detective White as his full set of remarkably square teeth tore off another hunk of bagel, and he continued to talk with his mouth full. ‘They’re the ones who know what’s going on. I don’t like it when people tell me that I shouldn’t try to find out what’s really going on.’
‘You know the score,’ said Detective Black. ‘That’s a big company. What’s going on there is probably not good for their business.’
‘They should let us do our job.’
‘I agree.’
‘People should know what really goes on in this city,’ said Detective White.
‘I’d like to know myself sometimes. But what can you do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Want another bagel?’ said Detective Black as he helped himself to one of the poppy-seed variety.
Detective White waved off seconds on the bagels and continued gazing lackadaisically through the windshield of the unmarked car.
If I hadn’t already known what I knew about certain things, I might have thought to myself, ‘You guys are . . .’
‘All right, then,’ said Richard to his gathered underlings in the usual meeting place. He had already tried to contact Chipman, both at home and at work, but he didn’t seem surprised at the young man’s absence. But what could he say to the others about Chipman, not to mention the empty chairs once occupied by Sherry and Harry? Come on, Richard, tell them what you know about Domino. Tell me what you know. Like Detective White, I wanted to know what was going on.
Mary and Kerrie were sitting to the left and right of Richard, while Barry had positioned himself at the far end of the table.
‘Why don’t you move in a little closer, Barry boy?’ said Richard.
Covering her mouth, Mary whispered, ‘He smells really bad, Richard. I think he’s sick.’
‘I’m, uh, fine where I am,’ said Barry. And that ended the issue.
‘So where do we go from here, Rich?’ said a cocky Kerrie.
Richard eyed Kerrie as if she were a talking whippet, which in fact she resembled, and then spoke softly to her. ‘You should probably be taking this situation more seriously, Kerrie.’
‘I have no fear whatever of Frank Dominio. I just wish he’d try something with me. I’m ready,’ she said, patting a slight bulge in the pocket of the sport coat she wore every day with a T-shirt, jeans, and athletic shoes.
‘I’m afraid I can’t say the same,’ said Mary. ‘Is there any point in bringing up the others who couldn’t be with us today?’
‘None at all, Mary,’ said Richard with a business-like finality. ‘What about you, Barry? Any apprehensions at your end of the table?’
Barry just stared without any focus like a lobotomy case. Then he sniffed, actually snorted, very loudly and scratched his armpit. He was clearly having a hard time following the proceedings. One – and that one would be me – might say that Barry was no longer his old brilliant self.
‘Then what’s the point of this meeting?’ said Mary, her mask of make-up shining with perspiration. ‘Everything, all our plans . . . what I mean to say is, it’s over . . . isn’t it?’
‘It’s not over until it’s over,’ spoke Richard. ‘The important thing is to maintain appearances. None of us has anything to hide.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Kerrie. ‘Frank’s out there doing us one by one. But we did him first.’
‘We certainly didn’t do any violence to him,’ said Richard. ‘We just wanted something that he had.’
‘And once we got that – what? You’re The Doctor, Richard. We know what that means.’
Richard sighed with infinite boredom. ‘Is anyone here going to back Kerrie up in her accusations?’
Mary bit her lower lip, smearing her upper teeth with a layer of lipstick. Barry continued to scratch and sniff-snort. I still wanted Richard to tell them what he knew about Domino, but it was now obvious that this was not going to happen. The whole point of that meeting was damage control for Richard. And he knew, as I did, that the damage wasn’t over.
3
MY TASTE FOR the Grotesque was neither an inborn nor a longstanding trait of my character. Rather, it was conceived and developed over the period of time encompassed by this document, my Ultimate Statement. By Friday – the last Friday of October – this taste, which was already as ripe as the fruits of an autumn harvest, had finally gone thoroughly rotten. It was now an unslakeable hunger for unheard-of horrors, for all the derangements bred by the most morbid fevers, and for the stuff of nightmares so twisted, so aberrant, that they were beyond the comprehension or recall of the waking mind. Please let me show you – all of you – what I did that day. It began with –
Barry
Actually I had intended Barry, rather than Perry, as my first project, given that this waddling wretch had been Richard’s primary tool in my decline and fall at the company. However, good sense overcame vengeful rage, and I decided to begin practicing on the piano player – whose annihilation may now be seen to have been a simple finger exercise compared to my later work – while saving the more choice subjects for later, when I had reached the height of my monstrous powers. Nevertheless, Barry remained a side-project for me from the beginning. His slow wit and strong odor at the meeting on Friday were merely superficial signs that this swine was ready for the market.
Barry left the office well before lunch. He no longer felt comfortable in such structured – correction, restructured – surroundings. All he wanted was to get back to his brick house (no
house of straw or clay for this piggy), where things were just the way he now liked them.
As he drove his car through a winding route of city streets – he was no longer mentally competent to handle the high speeds and quick thinking required to maneuver on the expressway – the only thoughts in his head were images of home. (This place, to describe it with a minimum of foul details, was a sty . . . literally.) These images which now filled Barry’s beasty brain, since his ability to think in words and concepts had almost entirely atrophied, consisted wholly of wallowing in filth, which included the remains of the filth that he heaped into his body as well as the filth that emanated out of that same body and was spread over every inch of his floor and furnishings. Barry’s brick bungalow was truly hog heaven. And he could hardly wait to strip off his human clothes and roll his flabby, naked flesh around in the slop, snorting and squealing all the while.
But Barry’s mind was not yet so intellectually impaired that he couldn’t make a few stops at the drive-though windows of several fast-food joints on his way home, filling both the front and back seats of his car with bags and bags of burgers, tacos, and crusty hunks of fried chicken. It was at his last stop (a rib shack!) that Barry caught the scent of something else that tantalized his tastes, although it was not something he could eat.
It so happened that Barry’s drive home led him directly past the state fairgrounds, which were now in the full swing of a fall exhibition that included a midway of concession stands bursting with corn dogs and cotton candy, an amphitheater that filled the air with country music, and the usual showing of agricultural products from both field and barnyard. This was Barry’s lucky day . . . and mine. Without thinking twice, or even once, Barry pulled his car into the fairground’s parking lot, and, after gobbling a bag or so of sustenance, he wandered into the festive world of the fair. He was following that overpowering scent and, in his blind search, he disappeared into the crowd . . . disappeared forever.
My Work Is Not Yet Done Page 11
