The Death of Wendell Mackey

by C. T. Westing

  His gloved hand fumbled with the doorknob, but he got it open and rushed in, without even bothering to completely close the door behind him. He dropped his coat and gloves on a kitchen chair, reached up for the knife on top of the refrigerator, and pulled it down blade first.

  “Yeah, this’ll do,” Wendell said. “It’ll be perfect.”

  He was tempted to cut the t-shirt off too and just start digging, pulling out coils of viscera with fiendish abandon, but he couldn’t let the excitement overwhelm him. No, he had to start with them.

  “Cut ‘em off,” he whispered, feeling them pulsate under their membranes. When they were gone, then he would work on those hooves. Wendell walked into the bathroom, closed the door and turned on the light, pulling his t-shirt off and draping it over the edge of the tub. He turned his back to the mirror to inspect the wings. The muscles in his back looked like trails of ropes looping and twisting over each other. He saw the black bones of the wings under the semitransparent membranes, folded and trembling, like unborn chimeric arms. Looking closely, Wendell saw that they had deep roots fed by muscles flushed pink by blood flow and tendons stretched like bridge cables. It was surreal, and had he been a piece of artwork, he could have almost been beautiful.

  Don’t do it.

  He took a deep breath and watched both wings move.

  “Just do it,” he said, breathing quickly, “it’s gonna hurt like hell, so suck it up and just do it…do it do it do it …do—it!” And without a moment to hesitate and rethink it all, Wendell reached back with the blade, put its edge to the top of the membrane covering one of the black wings, and jammed it in.

  White fire.

  It was tsunamic pain, with every nerve ending in his body somehow relocated for that one instant to his back, exploding at once in a welder’s torch heat. His knees gave, and he crumpled onto the linoleum, too shocked to scream, his tongue cutting itself open on his own teeth. The knife lay next to him in little lily pads of blood.

  Finally his lungs opened, and he sucked in air, but instead of a scream came a moan, long and guttural and crescendoing until it collapsed into hitching sobs.

  After a few long minutes, the searing pain burned down to a throbbing ache, but Wendell stayed glued to the floor, watching the bathroom’s light reflect off the tip of the blade, its serrations peppered with blood.

  Can’t even do this, he thought. This is how it ends, with me doing nothing.

  “No,” Wendell moaned, struggling to his feet. There was one option left. He staggered out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. He picked up his coat, put it on over his bare shoulders, then went to the refrigerator. He reached up, first grabbing the first aid kit and tossing it onto the table. Then he found the gun.

  His claw would work it, but just barely. He had to manipulate one black finger into the trigger guard with the other hand. He held it awkwardly, but it was enough.

  “It’ll work,” he whispered.

  Wendell cinched the coat closed with his other hand, walked into his mother’s bedroom and grabbed the yellowed pillow from the bed, then exited and walked back into the bathroom.

  The bathroom light gave the drops of blood on the linoleum a fevered, almost neon color. A few drops of spray from his cut had splashed onto the mirror and were beginning to dry in short tears.

  Wendell closed the door and stepped over the blood and into the tub, where he sat down, pulled his knees up under his chin, and dropped the pillow onto his shoes. He squeezed the gun in his hand.

  There’s no forgiveness for suicides, he thought.

  The only trouble with this plan was that, wherever his mother was, he soon would be there too. It could all be an endless void, cold and black, but he feared he would see her. Still, it had to be done. And in an ideal universe, she would be stuck in a fiery and perpetual rot, while he would just blow out of existence like a candle’s flame.

  “She didn’t come for me,” he said. Agatha hadn’t put up a fight; she had just let him leave.

  But he couldn’t think about her, likely standing by her door, he thought, debating what she should do next, thumbing her rosary beads and crying out Hail Marys. She wanted to help, but an open door and a brief hesitation on her part had allowed Wendell the chance he needed to bolt. And even if she wanted to, she couldn’t be around for this. This was not for her. This was his end. His alone.

  He looked over to the closed bathroom door, and then grabbed the pillow with his left hand, put it to his right temple, pressed the gun into it, and squeezed the trigger.

  The huntress Diane had caught her prey, cornered it, towering above it with the muscles in her arm tensed, a fraction of a second left before it would plunge down…

  And then came a voice.

  “Well, Mr. Mackey, Mr. Dream Man with your train of cars,” said Scotia, only a disembodied voice, “do you know who I am?”

  Wendell couldn’t see anything.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Am I Saint Peter?”

  “Saint…”

  “Saint Peter, Wendell. He greets you at the entrance to heaven. It’s funny, really. Ivory staircase, the endless backdrop of clouds, the long line of the forgiven, and they have the man who rejected his master three times in charge of those pearly gates? Even as a boy, I always thought that was a bit much.” The disembodied Scotia snickered. “But don’t worry. For you, there is something far greater.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “Do you think you are?”

  “Yes.”

  “I bet you wish you were.”

  Wendell’s eyes opened, and he thought he heard his grandmother’s singing voice fading in the distance. The right side of his head felt like it had been caved in with a sledge hammer.

  Don’t move, he thought. It’s not real. You’re really dead.

  He looked up at the white bathtub tiles, and the first thing into his mind was a memory, of that first bath in that tub, the evening after they had unpacked everything. The movers were gone, the dishes were in the cupboards, and the old liquor store boxes used to move the little odds and ends were stacked by the front door. The tub still smelled of bleach, because that was the easiest way to clean a tub for new tenants: slosh some bleach around with a sponge, rinse it all with water, and call it a day. Wendell remembered his father sitting on the toilet with the lid down, telling him for the nine-hundred forty-seventh time why Captain Hook crossed the road: “To get to the second-hand shop. Get it? Get it, Wendell?” He gave Wendell that toothy, pre-guffaw smile. But even with that Wendell remembered seeing in his father’s face a hint of uncertainty; even Mr. Consummate Optimist needed some convincing that things would be okay.

  Wendell shifted in the tub, trying to sit up, the pain in his right temple making his jaw ache. Dizziness caused him to slip back down, but he persevered and finally laced his fingers together around his knees and shimmied up onto his butt.

  He caught something in his eye, and looked down at the bottom of the tub to see the bullet. He reached down and picked it up.

  It was mushroomed, so it did make contact. And the ferocious headache told him that it hit the right spot. The pillow had fallen out of the tub and lay on the floor, a tiny exit wound at its center ringed with bits of stuffing. Everything went as planned. It was perfect.

  Except that it wasn’t. The dead don’t sit up in tubs.

  Wendell grabbed the edge of the tub and pulled himself up shakily. He stepped out, wobbled, then righted himself and shuffled over to the mirror and sink. He looked up into the yellow eyes looking back at him in the mirror, and then saw on the side of his head a hole, a little volcano complete with red splatter and lines of blood meandering down his cheek like lava flows. Below the skin, and even below what looked like the new darker skin, which also had split and peeled back, was the skull, revealed in a hole no larger than a centimeter in diameter. It was black and very hard, Wendell noted, as he tapped it with the tip of a finger. Hard like metal.

  Steel claw touching steel skull. />
  He was indestructible.

  If what he was seeing was actually what he was seeing, which, with the advantage of touch was now beyond doubt, then he could do something. He couldn’t kill himself but he could kill them. He had to kill them. And now he knew that they couldn’t stop him.

  You’re God’s child, he heard Agatha say, distant, almost from a different life.

  God’s child. It was a tender notion, Wendell thought. That man on the cross died for his own kind, which was obvious to Wendell, and thus was irrelevant to someone like him, on the outside looking in. But now, there were bigger things to deal with. There was suffering to be dispensed. It would be horrifying, visceral, the animal Wendell finally ready to do what he was built to do. And it would be soon.

  Sooner than he thought. He didn’t realize that the front door to the apartment was still open. He opened the bathroom door, looked down at the floor and absently kicked at the knife, which spun out of the bathroom and stopped under the wooden table. Wendell turned off the light, and walked into the kitchen, still unsteady. But he saw the apartment’s door, now yawning open.

  Outside the building, a church bell tolled midnight.

  DAY NINE

  12:01 A.M. SUNDAY

  WENDELL STOOD NEXT TO THE kitchen table, tapping on it with his claw.

  Inside the apartment hung the smell of mildew and eggs, dank and heavy. The smell of rot, Wendell thought. Piss and vomit, pieces of dead flesh, and years of dust and mold keeping their old woman stink, that shut-in stink, little bits of Diane Mackey collected into dust bunnies in the corners and coating the spider webs. She was there without being there.

  Outside, the fog crept into the city, like it had a mind and knew where it was going.

  In the hallway, the men’s shadows would soon be visible, stretched into thin black scarecrows by the white neon lights above. Wendell heard the door from the stairwell open. Their shadows would be next.

  Wendell kept tapping, harder, leaving an indentation in the wood.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Footsteps. Soon, the rounded tops of the shadows would appear outside the doorway.

  “Come on.”

  In his head, it wasn’t as much a headache now as it was a great pressure, something expanding in his forehead. Growing. But it was enough to cause him to bow his head momentarily and close his eyes, where he saw his mother again, her face now frenzied and dark, her mouth open and her red tongue jetting out like a dagger, the faux pearl necklace no longer a necklace but a chain of skulls, her eyes white moons. Her arm was coming down, and finally he saw what was in it: the metal pipe, the one used to kill his father. The police had never taken it, and now it was hers.

  He opened his eyes, shook his head, and turned to the open door where he saw them, one moment not there and the next there. Dr. Scotia and four other men. One of the four was familiar:

  Connor Darby.

  If Laughlin was an act and was in on it from the beginning, with his name on Wendell’s power of attorney, then Darby wasn’t the least surprising. The part-time grad student—all a ruse, it appeared—would have sold his mother into slavery for a job at the institution, a lab coat job, the three groundskeepers had called them. Connor had the drive to work there, and had the mind for it, and would spend his lunch hours schmoozing with the lab coats, sucking up Wendell had always thought. But now he knew that Connor was just reporting back to his peers about their soon-to-be patient. His typical jocular attitude and smile were an act too, as he now stared at Wendell with an unnerving austerity.

  “So,” said Scotia, “how shall we proceed?”

  No one moved for the next few seconds, and then Connor broke the stalemate, stepping through the open doorway into the apartment, followed by Scotia and one of the other men. The last two men, thick-shouldered and stern, stood just outside the doorway. Scotia’s and Connor’s clothing looked strange to Wendell, Scotia’s because anything deviating from his white coat—presently khaki slacks and blue blazer over open-necked white button shirt—made him oddly normal, and Connor’s because his clothes, similar to Scotia’s in all but a blue instead of a white shirt, aged him and bled him of anything that Wendell once knew. The three other men wore polo shirts, polo shirts like the men on the street the day before, and thin spring jackets. Wendell knew that, in such heat, the jackets served only one purpose: hiding their weapons.

  “I won’t run,” Wendell said.

  “Of course you won’t,” responded Scotia. “It wouldn’t do any good. Dr. Thane is in one of the vans downstairs, with more of our associates.” He nodded to the men in the spring jackets. “It’s best just to make this easy, Mr. Mackey.”

  “I won’t run, but it’s not gonna be easy for you.”

  Scotia looked at Darby, then back at Wendell, confused. But he smiled, masking the confusion. “I’m sure we can all come to a quick resolution.” He squinted at Wendell, now curious. “I do believe a lot has happened to you.”

  “Near full transformation,” said Darby. “Look at his face. It won’t take much longer. And his hands look quite nice.”

  Scotia and Darby stood and regarded Wendell, examined him from a distance, like they were the first astronauts to see an alien life form.

  “What does it feel like?” Scotia asked. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I always forget to ask.”

  They looked serious. Wendell didn’t know how to respond.

  “Is it at all painful?” asked Darby. “It shouldn’t be painful. It’s not, is it?”

  “You want to know…”

  “Yes Mr. Mackey, how it feels. It’s not like we want to publish a paper on this, for obvious reasons. It’s mere curiosity.” Scotia’s weight shifted to his heels, and he had the look of an observer taking in a painting at a gallery. He wanted to see it all, feel immersed in it while still detached enough to appreciate it as something distinct. “It’s all quite striking, you have to admit.”

  “It’s painful, all of it,” Wendell said.

  “But a sort of birthing pain, I’d venture to guess,” responded Scotia, only half listening and making mental notes on Wendell’s presentation as he tapped his lip with his index finger. “It will pass. After all, all is being made new. Which is why we’re here.”

  “What you want,” Wendell said, feeling his heart speed up in his chest, “you’re not gonna get.”

  “Do you think you have options?” asked Darby, smiling incredulously. He nodded to the two men in the doorway who, as if on cue, pulled back their jackets to reveal tranq guns with their long black barrels pushing down through the openings at the bottoms of their holsters. “This isn’t a negotiation.”

  “I know that,” Wendell said.

  Wendell tapped his finger quicker into the table, hoping one of the armed men would be foolish enough to make the first move. His mind was already processing six moves ahead: one body lay torn open on the floor, as one claw separated a pistoled hand from its arm and the other reached out for someone’s throat. Wendell imagined himself launching his full frame into a man more perplexed than afraid, seeing the man’s thoughts of mortgages and vacations slip across his face like water off a roof as he tried to reconcile such workaday banalities with the horror chattering its fangs a mere inches from his face.

  “So how does this all end in your mind?” asked Scotia.

  The man to Darby’s right, conspicuously to his right and thus a step closer to Wendell, kept his eyes on Wendell’s hand, tapping into the table. His own hand was flexed and his thumb hooked into his pants pocket, close to his own holster.

  I’ll split that guy open like a banana, thought Wendell.

  “It doesn’t end well,” Wendell said, dropping his claw one last time into the table. The tip stuck into it like a dropped knife. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

  “We know. We’ve been watching you,” said Darby, “and we know what you’ve done.”

  “Cutting yourself quite the path of destruction, aren’t y
ou?” said Scotia with a smile.

  “But any more,” said Darby, “and it will be impossible to deflect attention from what we’re trying to do.”

  “So, it’s time for you to come home, Mr. Mackey.”

  “Bad choice,” Wendell said.

  “It’s the only choice.”

  “Bad choice, you coming here.”

  Wendell was ready to step forward and let it all begin, to not think but feel, to let it all snowball into something appalling but necessary, when they were all surprised by a noise in the hallway, a door opening.

  If she does this then she’s gonna die.

  If she emerged slowly, Wendell thought, like a turtle peeking out from its shell, she might have a chance. She might see the men, see what she was up against, clutch her rosary in trembling hands, pull her head back into her shell and leave it all alone. If she was only smart, he thought, if she only thought this through. But the door opened and before Wendell’s eyes could register the bright lights of her apartment—brighter than the hallway, it seemed—the little nun was in the hallway, stepping across it with steps larger than her short legs should have allowed, and pushing past the two surprised men in Wendell’s doorway. She paused to survey the room, then walked past Scotia and Darby, stared at Wendell and stopped.

  “Wendell, your face…”

  “It’s too late Sister.”

  “Wendell, what have they…what’s happening to your face?”

  “Who is this?” asked Scotia, now frustrated.

  Agatha turned to him. “Who are you?” she barked. “What do you want with him?”

  “Ma’am, please, just—”

  “So it’s true, what Wendell’s been telling me. It’s actually true. You’ve been following him. And you’re the ones who have done all of those things that—”

  “What has Mr. Mackey told you?” asked Darby.

  “All about you, about your building, your secrecy. I know what you’ve done.”