“They’ve come for their invention.” She threw him a smug look and reached across the console to flip a switch. Just that one unmarked, unremarkable switch, just the click of it and the studio began to fill with the smell of smoke. The bitter stink after a million birthday candles are blown out.
Whether the street camera had been blacked out with paint or busted off, the monitor showed nothing. Something slammed against the outside of the street door, that metal door that looked stronger than the concrete walls surrounding it.
Mitzi’s plan wasn’t a plan. Not really. Not until she stood up and walked to the door of the prop room. There among the machetes and sabers she found a length of steel chain and a padlock. There she found the Carvingware knife.
The screams of everyone layered and overlapping, they blared. Smoke, acrid, stink-smelling, black and poisonous, it seeped from the boxes and the file drawers. Behind the smoke the first orange suggestions of flame. The pounding at the door almost lost in the din.
Mitzi carried the chain and her glass of wine to the table in the center of the room and lay down across it. The stranger inside of her fought to escape. As she wrapped the chain around her legs, binding her thighs tight together and snapping the padlock, she asked this Gates Foster, “Would you be so kind as to bring me my pills? The ones next to the knife.” The ones on the cloisonné plate she indicated with a trembling finger. She lay back and told him, “I don’t want to be here when this happens.”
His face so pale he almost glowed against the dark smoke, he asked, “Are you in labor?”
Mitzi tumbled the pills into her mouth and chewed them. Choked them down with wine. Said, “I killed your child. Lucinda.”
He looked at the knife on the mixing console and said, “I can’t.”
Mitzi reached out and clutched at the microphones, drawing them close like old friends. She reached up and pulled the hanging mics until they hovered in her face. She said, “Lucinda. Your Lucy was lost in a building, downtown.” Her words smearing and dissolving. “I found her. She’d always wanted an older sister.” She lifted her head to meet his eyes as she said, “I stabbed her to death on this very table.” The needles on the meters jumped in unison.
Gates Foster, this father who’d waited all these years to come here, his face begged her for a different truth. Then he picked up the knife.
Foster listened. She’d done one thing wrong, she said. She explained that it only takes one prick, one slice of a knife to start someone screaming but a hundred more to make it stop. She’d spent her whole life trying to resolve the afternoon she’d brought one little girl home.
He couldn’t. Not at first. He said, “You’re lying.” He said Lucinda wasn’t dead. This Mitzi person was his last link to her. He’d arrived here after seventeen years of slogging through the underworld where people fucked children and murdered them. He only picked up the knife to threaten her, but now the images hit him. The inventory of brutalized children. The hurricane of screams and smoke churned around him until one scream began to loop, screaming, “Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!”
The Mitzi person looked up at him, and he knew it was true. He had nothing more to discover. Nothing was worth more asking. She wore a loose-fitting smock, and he worried the knife might ruin it. An absurd thought. It was a movie. He told himself he was in a movie. And Foster swung his arm like planting a flag.
The knife drove into Mitzi’s chest with steady thuds. Withdrew and drove in. Withdrew with the perfect sucking sound she was so careful to include in jobs. A peace, the peace of shock and trauma had settled over her body and mind. Something more profound than the oblivion of wine and Ambien.
Now would come the hundred wounds to resolve the first, and he stabbed her again. He was sobbing. Her blood and his own tears mixed with soot on his face, a mask of red and black.
A small girl stood off to one side of the table and said, “Mitzi, I’m here. I’m going to help you get home.”
The girl cast pitiful eyes on her father, and Mitzi told her, “He can’t see you.” Her voice jumped as the Foster person yanked the knife out and stood ready to plunge it in again.
The girl, Lucinda, Lucy, her little sister for just one day, said, “Tell him about the pot roast. Tell him about cutting the end off with a big knife.”
As the knife came down, Mitzi stammered the strange message, and the blade stopped short of entering her chest.
Lucinda cried out, “Tell him that Grandma Linda is here with me.”
Mitzi gasped out the message.
“Tell him,” Lucinda cried, “that this wasn’t his fault.”
Mitzi tasted blood. Blood bubbling up from her lungs, and as she coughed and gasped to speak, specks of this blood peppered the microphones that clustered close to hear her. The needles jumped on the meters, but only faintly, before settling back to rest. She couldn’t speak, but she could hear. She could no longer feel the chains binding her legs together. She could no longer see, not out of her own eyes, but she could feel a small hand close around hers and hear Lucinda’s voice say, “Come with me. I know you’re lost. I’ll take you home.”
A second figure stepped out of the smoke. A dumpy man wearing a tuxedo. Malachite cuff links he had on. A Timex watch he wore around one hairy wrist and a sweet-smelling gardenia in his lapel. With him was a woman Mitzi had only seen in photographs. Mitzi’s bloodless face smiled. “Schlo. You look good…”
Schlo smiled in return. “Baby girl, I wish I could say the same for you.” He beckoned for her to get up and come along with him. He glanced fondly at the woman accompanying him. A blonde. He said, “Your mother would very much like to meet you.”
Foster continued to stab. The recorded screams continued, but she was dead. She was dead, but Foster couldn’t stop. He’d no idea how to do what needed to be done, so he sliced and hacked. He was chopping open a rosewood coffin. He tore aside the shredded, sodden clothes and dug into her and felt among the sticky, cooling organs of her.
He entered her. Entered and defiled. Defiled and destroyed as he rummaged through her the way he’d hunted through so many miles of tape, through so many websites, scrambling through the slippery contents of her body. With his bare hands he clawed with fingernails rimed in gore, and his fingers found what he’d hoped.
As the power failed, the lights failed. In a scene lit only by the crackling, flashing, orange flames, the screams grew quiet as reels slowed to stop. And as the last scream faded, Foster lifted his dripping prize from the dead woman. It took its first breath from the toxic air and began to wail. And the scream of that child brought into this sweltering, polluted, dark world, its voice surpassed all the screams of those people leaving it.
The slamming against the front door had stopped. But as the child cried in his arms, a new sound began. A buzzing. The buzzer that meant someone at the street door. If he’d die here or die at the hands of those outside, he’d little choice. Blinded by the fire, Foster carried the blood-sticky, shivering infant boy up the stairs to where he fumbled with the locks and threw the door open.
On the street stood a solitary figure. No army. No police. Only a woman with a limousine parked near her. In the lapse between the retreating mercenaries and the approaching fire engines, there was just this woman. She said, “You have a baby.”
She wore a gleaming double strand of natural pearls around her neck.
He offered the child, and Blush Gentry took it into her arms.
As if just by joining forces, every Pomeranian and Chihuahua in the neighborhood, every corgi and dachshund in the city, they howled to manifest a siren. The siren created the flashing strobes of red and blue. The lights brought the first fire engine. Their combined voices conjured a second, a third, and a fourth, but it was too late. Flames exploded through the roof of Ives Foley Arts. Flames roared from the street door left ajar.
Inside, flaming microphones drooped on their stands. Suspended mics dropped from the ceiling. In the prop room the axes burned, the ice picks a
nd Bowie knives and bludgeons burned. The flames, fed by the endless lengths of magnetic tape. Wires melted. Meters ticked as if monitoring their own death.
In this, these final moments, a reel found the power to turn. A tape began to play and the sound issued from the last small speaker. A little girl said, “Close your eyes. Listen and guess.”
A gentle sound followed, a soft pattering noise.
Another girl cried out, “Rain!”
The older girl said, “Now tell me what you had for breakfast, Lucy.”
The younger said, “Cheerios. Scrambled egg. A glass of milk.”
A door opened and closed, footsteps. A man’s voice said, “Mitzi, who’s your new friend?”
The older girl said, “Lucy, I’d like you to meet my father.”
And at this, the last tape began to melt and burn.
On the television a young woman was tied to an elaborate brass bed in a dingy log cabin. A mob of Confederate soldiers crowded into the room, one among them holding a carving knife. Another asked, “Are you going to tell us where them slaves is hid, Tammie Belle, or are we gonna have to execution you?”
Gates sat on a sofa eating popcorn from a bowl in his lap. Beside him Blush held their son, Lawton.
The soldiers attacked the woman, and she screamed. At least a scream occurred, clearly dubbed in. Gates Foster clicked to another channel. There, there was not-Lucinda. She was television’s newest discovery, Meredith Marshall, playing the lead in a sitcom about a wisecracking father and daughter who ran a detective agency. The man playing her father was not-Robb Laurence. Just two of the entirely new generation of film and television stars, their ratings were stellar.
A laugh track roared after every line of dialogue.
As he chewed popcorn, Foster asked himself if anything was real in the world. Anything or anyone. Even the popcorn didn’t taste right. He clicked back to the Civil War flick. He said, “This movie is terrible.”
The baby woke and began to fuss. Blush hushed the child, saying, “The scream was good.”
Her husband didn’t reply. He checked his emails, holding the phone so his wife couldn’t see. And opened the one from the Idaho Department of Statistics, reading it not for the first time that day. Not even the tenth time. He’d learned it by heart. In summary, the state records showed that no Lawton Koestler had ever been registered in any Idaho school. No birth certificate had ever been issued for a child with that name. No boy had ever died of a peanut allergy, died clutching the hand of a future movie star atop a chilly mountain while menaced by wild cats.
Idaho didn’t even have a fucking Beech Mountain.
Blush Gentry, or whoever she was, she’d made it up. Played him like a fish and reeled him in. Or the story had been taught to her by whoever had trained Robb, the same party who’d staged the fake support group and taunted Foster at the fake funeral they’d held. Whatever deep state operation, it had funneled the child abuse pictures to him. To stoke his rage for their own purpose.
When he’d been mired in despair, the operation had sent him the video of Lucinda’s scream.
Foster crammed his mouth with popcorn and wiped his greasy fingers on the sofa cushion. His rage wasn’t gone.
It only needed a refresh.
For this he scrolled through his gallery of monsters. If his guess was correct, he could have his pick, now. The people he chose from the dark web, they would be delivered to him like pizzas for him to do with as he pleased. Like meat to be bled or carved or burned.
It would be healing.
Granted, his methods weren’t perfect. Mistakes would be made. But even the innocent dead wouldn’t suffer in vain. There was that. Foster could conduct his interrogations and vent his frustrations. And, if nothing else, motion pictures would see an improvement.
Foster looked at his beautiful wife—whoever she was. He looked at their baby—the offspring of strangers. One day this boy, his own son would follow in his footsteps.
Gates Foster would never be stopped because he worked for the people who did the stopping. Likewise, he would never be caught.
His future looked simple. Simple and bright. Bright and bottomless.
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About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk has been a nationally bestselling author since his first novel, 1996’s Fight Club, was made into the acclaimed David Fincher film of the same name. Palahniuk’s work has sold millions of copies worldwide. He lives outside Portland, Oregon.
Also by Chuck Palahniuk
Consider This
Adjustment Day
Fight Club 3
Legacy: An Off-Color Novella for You to Color
Bait: Off-Color Stories for You to Color
Fight Club 2
Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread
Beautiful You
Doomed
Phoenix (ebook original)
Invisible Monsters Remix
Damned
Tell-All
Pygmy
Snuff
Rant
Haunted
Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories
Diary
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon
Lullaby
Choke
Invisible Monsters
Survivor
Fight Club
The Invention of Sound Page 17
