My Work Is Not Yet Done

by Thomas Ligotti

  The only hint of what might have become of Barry Edwins was an item that appeared the next day in the city’s major newspaper and was reprinted in several other publications in outstate regions. The facts were these:

  First: Someone reported to the police who were keeping order at the state fair that she had seen a naked man trying to couple with a prize pig featured at a livestock exhibition.

  Second: When the police arrived at the exhibition, that nasty, naked man was nowhere to be found. What they did find, however, was a rape in progress . . . but it was the act of a pinkish hog upon a blue-ribbon sow.

  Third: No one could be found who would claim the offending hog as theirs. One old livestock breeder did note that the genitalia of the hog, while quite small, were still intact. That is, this was an animal that had not been properly fixed for its breed and ultimate purpose.

  Last: Granted permission by the police to do what needed to be done (in exchange for taking ownership of this rather fine specimen of its type), the old livestock breeder castrated the animal on the spot in order to bring it under control and promised that, by and by, this handsome hog would find a home at a good slaughterhouse.

  To commemorate this turn of events I directed a – blech! – email message to Richard’s computer under the subject line of, what else, WORK NOT DONE. But I was denied the satisfaction of seeing Richard read this message. In fact, I seemed to have lost the ability to locate him altogether. This was something that threw a scare into me. Because there was only one place that he could have hidden himself from my view. Somehow Richard had gone into a dark spot, but I couldn’t be sure why or how this had happened. Hadn’t I always been given free rein to do my work? Never mind, I told myself, there was other work to be done. And there she was –

  Mary

  After the mess that the cleaning staff found in Sherry Mercer’s office, Mary tried to spend as little time as possible in her own . . . or anywhere else in the company’s office space if she could help it. Her heels were now clicking upon the sidewalks of downtown toward her favorite lunch spot, which would be filled with a crowd of people among whom she would feel relatively safe.

  However, as – not luck but I – would have it, Mary walked right by her destination. And she kept on walking toward the outskirts of the business section of the city, wandering through rundown neighborhoods and past many of my once favorite ruined buildings (including an old place that still had a sign in the window that read: ‘Rooms for Men’). But my feeling for these places was a thing of the past for me. The soothingness of sabi, with its mind-clearing desolation and soul-calming decrepitude, had now been replaced by my taste for the Grotesque. Nothing but the Grotesque would gratify my howling mind and poisoned soul. Only the Grotesque.

  So I took Mary out of the range of vast empty fields and beautifully gutted buildings, dropping her off at a place known as The Mechanic Street Museum. This nominal ‘museum’ was spread out along a block of abandoned houses not far from a railroad overpass and across the road from a dumping ground for old sofas and chairs, old tires, old medicine cabinets, and any other expired object you cared to name. The exhibits of the museum consisted entirely of old dolls and mannikins, or the various parts of same. These human simulations inhabited both the interior spaces of each abandoned house as well as populating their front yards. Behind any given window, often shattered, of the houses along this section of Mechanic Street, one might see an entire mannikin – sometimes clothed or partially clothed and sometimes not – or at least part of a mannikin, such as a slim forearm and hand held in place by some putty on the inside window sill. Additionally, these windows might display a doll hanging by its neck as if from a gibbet, or simply the head of a doll dangling at the end of a wire.

  This community of dolls and mannikins also lounged upon the wooden porches, or the steps leading up to these porches, and sometimes peered out from the exposed crawlspaces beneath a number of the abandoned houses. Most interesting were the dolls and mannikins that had been set up in old chairs or sofas taken from the dumping ground across the street. The dolls leaned crookedly in chairs that were invariably too large for them, while the mannikins lay in twisted postures upon sofas without cushions. No one had ever claimed credit for creating this museum, which had attained modest renown in both local publications and nationally distributed art journals. Nor had anyone ever been caught, though many had tried, in the act of augmenting its exhibitions, filling the Mechanic Street houses and their yards with still more dolls and mannikins and replacing the ones that had become too damaged, either by vandals or the elements, to remain on display.

  As I earlier explained, Mary Dreller had been led astray into the region of The Mechanic Street Museum while on her way to an out-of-office lunch. No one at the company noticed that she had not logged off her computer, and it was assumed that she, not unlike Barry Edwins, had left work early that Friday. It wasn’t until later the same night that her husband reported her to the police as a missing person. The police, of course, would never find Mary but I will tell you – whoever you are or think you are – just who did find her and where she was found.

  It was a few hours after sunset (EDT) that a couple of derelicts, both of them drunken and deranged, were passing through The Mechanic Street Museum. They had covered this ground before and were not daunted by its peculiar aspects. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pausing in front of a house where a doll’s head stared from a high attic window, the derelicts parked themselves on either side of a sofa near the sidewalk. Between them was a fully clothed mannikin sitting up with fair posture, although her head was twisted over the back of the sofa. Out of all the mannikins these derelicts had ever seen loitering in the vicinity, this one came closest to something that could be mistaken for a human being.

  ‘Must be a new one,’ said the first derelict.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the other. ‘But – uuurrp – look it her face.’

  As drunken and deranged as the derelicts were, even they could not overlook the flaw in this window dummy. Specifically, its face did not display the requisite expression of bland beatitude but, on the contrary, was severely contorted – the face of something that was frozen in a moment of panic.

  ‘I bet we could get something for these clothes,’ said the first derelict, running his dirty hands from top to bottom over the mannikin’s body. ‘It’s got stockings even.’

  ‘Let’s take off her clothes,’ said the other.

  As the derelicts proceeded to undress the mannikin, they were further amazed that it was outfitted with underclothing. The first derelict started talking to the dummy, calling her Daisy, and then the other derelict joined in the fantasy. One thing led to another . . . and by the time Daisy was fully rid of her clothes, the derelicts had laid this fake lady of the evening across the sofa and began taking turns on top of her. That night there was a full moon over Mechanic Street and these derelicts were evidently in the mood for a little messing around, even if their object of desire was merely a mannikin, although one that might be easily mistaken, as she had been for years, for a human being.

  Then one of the derelicts suddenly jumped off the dummy, stumbling backward with his pants around his ankles. ‘Her eyes,’ he said. ‘They . . . they were looking back at me.’

  The other derelict, zipping himself up, stepped closer to the thing spread out on the cushionless sofa. ‘Oh, my god,’ he groaned.

  Then both of the derelicts, having pushed the mannikin onto the sidewalk, began stomping on her face and assaulting her body with a piece of metal pipe that was lying on the ground nearby. What they found inside the mannikin turned out to be even more distressing to them than her contorted face or her eyes that looked back into theirs. For beneath its plaster exterior was an anatomically correct set of bodily organs, even if they too seemed to be made of artificial materials. If the derelicts had had the presence of mind, or any useful minds at all, they might have rationalized this horrific figure as a construct intended for use in the medical scho
ol at the university, which was only a few miles away. Instead they kept pummeling away at the unnatural thing, especially its face, until nothing remained but a heap of shattered plaster. They even left its clothes behind as they broke into a breathless, stumbling flight from The Mechanic Street Museum.

  While the episode with Mary was quite a success, if somewhat lacking in imagination (I had already used the mannikin theme in dispatching Perry Stokowski), the satisfaction I derived from its grotesquerie was undermined by my continuing failure to locate Richard. I had always intended him to be the last of The Seven upon whom I would visit my wrath. Now I was beginning to worry that something was wrong. Visions of a doctor with great white gloves were beginning to disturb my – let’s admit it – hopelessly disturbed mind. I left a message of WORK NOT DONE on the voice mail of both his home phone and his cell phone. But Richard was not picking up my communications, I could tell. Forget it, I told myself. You – and you was me – should be turning your attention to the penultimate person on the list –

  Kerrie

  I found her sometime after midnight. She was parking her car in front of a club that – big surprise – catered to patrons of sadomasochistic impulses.

  The club, which displayed no sign to betray its name or nature, was located in the warehouse district not far from the river and was set up in a battered old building that I once might have looked upon as a ruin suitable for my meditations and my camera. But this building was alight with a hazy red glow, a private place halfway along a pitted road without streetlamps and under a sky that, for me in any case, was filled only with those dark constellations which put a black-out on all the stars above. And after my self-designed run-in with Kerrie, the sky would become even darker.

  Despite the sadomasochistic rationale for the club’s existence, its decor had nothing of the oubliette about it, nothing at all to distinguish it as a palace of pain and humiliation. Some paper pumpkins and skulls had been strung over a small bar in anticipation of the upcoming All Hallows, although in every other respect it resembled an old-fashioned neighborhood saloon. Like the company where I was once employed, the owner of this operation was obviously dedicated to the standard business principle of offering his clientele the least (a few tables and chairs, some wobbly stools along the bar) for the most (a sky-high cover charge and outrageously priced drinks from the bottom of their respective barrels). Even this purported haven for the deviant, the outsider, functioned along the mainstream goal of commerce, always aiming for the fiscal ideal of everything for them, the sellers and sellers-out of the world, and zero for . . . well, everyone was ‘them’ to me now, at least in the sense that neither corporate nor even corporeal dealings were any longer my business.

  Or so I told myself, even though the whole picture was not mine to see . . . and somewhere in the darkness of that October night, Richard was still hiding from me in some dark spot where I could not find him, as I had so easily tracked down Kerrie to this hole-in-the-wall hangout. And I needed to find him – to finish up my work – before everything became for me one great world of darkness. Yet I continued to believe that my calculations were correct – the damage that was given to me to do was compounded at a fixed rate. And there remained enough principal in my account of worldly existence for me to complete the task I had started – none of The Seven (or myself) would ever see another sunrise; none of us would reclaim that hour which had been stolen by the daylight savings of the previous spring and was not scheduled to be returned for approximately another twenty-four hours or so. But what was an hour . . . a day . . . a year or ten? There’s always plenty of time for the worst. Everyone is old enough to face their fate.

  And so was Kerrie Keene.

  She had just walked in the door, carrying in one hand a leather bag that was not a purse. Wearing her usual outfit, she swaggered toward the far end of the bar and leaned over to ask the barman, ‘Is The Can here yet?’

  ‘He’s waiting for you downstairs,’ said the barman as he tossed Kerrie a key dangling at the end of a red plastic disc.

  Kerrie immediately strode toward a curtained doorway that led downstairs, which was a complex of rooms set up like a subterranean motel . . . and a very cheap motel at that. After moving down several hallways, turning left here and right there without the least hesitation, she stopped at a certain door and let herself in.

  On the other side was a small bare room that appeared in the same light of garish red that illuminated the bar upstairs and the corridors below. In the shadows of one corner of the room a short, flabby man was on his knees with lowered head, as if he were praying. He didn’t even look up when Kerrie stormed into the room and slammed the door behind her. And he didn’t look up when Kerrie threw her leather bag on the floor and stripped off her sport coat, revealing two skinny arms springing forth from a sleeveless T-shirt.

  ‘Hello, Can,’ she said to the man in the corner, who still did not raise his eyes to her. ‘I’ve brought something special for you tonight.’

  ‘Can,’ I already knew from previous research (I had always been thorough in my work), was a pseudonym that to Kerrie, and to most of those around the SM scene, was short for Human Garbage Can. But before Kerrie could begin making use of this living receptacle, packing it full of that special sort of offal she had brought with her this night, she realized something was wrong: The Can seemed to have gone stiff as a statue. None of the usual words of worship and submission that Kerrie was accustomed to hearing at this point in the ritual were uttered by the short, flabby, and naked man. She walked across the floor and laid several slaps, both backhand and forehand, on The Can’s pudgy face. But there was no response from the figure still postured as though in silent prayer.

  Then the door opened, and I walked into the room in all my black attire, including a zippered leather mask over my face.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong room, Masked Man. Take a walk.’

  The Masked Man stood heroically mute and perfectly rigid, staring at Kerrie through a pair of eye-holes with thick, almost surgical, stitching around them. Then he reached into his coat pocket and took out something small and circular, tossing it into Kerrie’s hands. The second she realized it was a fresh roll of stamps, she moved toward her sport coat that had made a clunk when she first threw it on the floor. The Masked Man was quicker than Kerrie and pushed her against the wall, being careful not to push too hard, before she could retrieve her weapon. Then The Masked Man moved with all speed and pulled the firearm from Kerrie’s jacket.

  It was a Glock.

  And it felt so fine in my fingers as I clicked off the safety and aimed the barrel at Kerrie’s head. She had pressed her body flush against the cinder-block wall, standing as if before a firing squad. This was how I had originally imagined my work would be done. If it hadn’t been for . . . paper? I was sick of having my mind harassed by paper moons and paper plates, paper products of all kinds both figurative and literal. Why couldn’t I break through those dark spots and remember? Everything could have been so much easier, so much quicker, and far less grotesque for everyone concerned if things had only gone according to plan. Even now I was tempted to install the full magazine of the gun into Kerrie’s body and leave it at that. But I already had other plans in place. I had been thorough, as always, in my research.

  ‘Do you know why he’s called The Can?’ I asked Kerrie.

  ‘Go to hell. Why don’t you just shoot?’

  ‘I asked you if you knew, really knew, why he’s called The Can?’

  ‘He pretends he’s a garbage can. He eats . . . he eats whatever you put in his mouth. He swallows it and begs for more.’

  ‘Do me a favor and move a little closer to Mr Can,’ I said, directing her toward the paralyzed figure in the corner. ‘Closer still, Kerrie. Right up against his body, as if you were riding him piggy-back. There, that’s close enough.’

  ‘Close enough for what?’ she asked, a satisfying quiver of fear in her voice.

  Then I set my plans in motion . . . and
her body began to sink down into his. She struggled. She even screamed. But this was not a place where screams were taken seriously at first. Besides, the door was heavy, and it was locked. I continued my conversation with Kerrie as a monologue, since she was sinking fast into the flabby man’s flesh and had begun choking on her own horror.

  ‘You’re right about Mr Can. He does eat whatever you, or someone like you, puts in his mouth. But he also eats other things. He’s not just a garbage can, Kerrie. What you never knew about Mr Can is that not only does he have a secret life that he lives out in places like this. He also has a secret secret life that he would never have told you about. By night he’s the human garbage can you know but probably do not love. In an even darker night of his soul, Mr Can is . . . he’s, well there’s just no subtle way I can say this. He’s a cannibal. And soon you’re going to be made one with him – your brain buried inside of his brain, your nervous system integrated into his, and your desires bound to his desires. Unfortunately you will be denied all muscular control. You’ll exist something like a parasitic organism inside him. A tapeworm if you like. But he won’t be bothered by you. He’ll continue to eat as you’ve always known him to eat. And you will know that you are eating the same things. He will also eat as you never knew him to eat. There are others like him, and he is in league with them. Mostly they consume homeless persons who have fallen unnoticed by the wayside. Sometimes they give them a little help in their going. On rare occasions they eat living food. Are you aware of the word that cannibals who once occupied islands in the South Pacific used for “human being?” It translates as “the food that talks”. Mr Can and others of his kind live to eat. I know that was never your style, Kerrie, but from now on it will be . . . as long as Mr Can lives. And you know what: he’s even made special preparations with his fellow cannibals for the day when he will be too dead to chew his food. It seems to be their desire, don’t ask me why, that after their demise they be buried naked in secret ground. After their life of eating is over, their final wish is to become food for other forms of life. It’s rather spiritual, don’t you think? The great circle of being and all that. Of course, just because Mr Can is dead doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll join him. You’re so much younger, so much healthier – even given your anorexic mania – than he is. I’m guessing that the little parasite inside him will outlive his body by a certain term, although I can’t say how long that will be. Can you still hear me, Kerrie? You’re sliding down into him so fast. It’s almost as if you can’t wait to get inside. Prick up your ears if you’d like to hear more.’