Children of No One
Page 6
The walls.
He looks down at the filthy hand that hit the wall. Looks at the long, chipped nails. Looks at the tiny cuts and bruises. My hand.
Light.
He begins to ponder. Is this what he thought he remembered from before? What he’d yearned for? It burns. He cowers. Puts his hands over his eyes. Too bright. Too bright. Why must it intrude now? He wishes someone would make it go away.
* * *
The lights went on and Krieg was giggling and Mr. No One was tearing off his vestments and mask and running over with his fists clenched and Kitterman came down the rope ladder and took a gun out of his ankle holster and pulled it on Mr. No One.
“Did you really think,” Krieg said, “I’d let you foist your primitive superstitions here in my exhibit? Did you really think that fucking home brew you concocted would disable me? I did ’shrooms in the ’70s that took me on harsher trips than that! Did you really think I’d let you declare the victory of nihilism over sadism, right here in my exhibit? You’re not only crazy, No One, you’re gullible as all hell.”
“You ’ad fucking lights installed?” He looked up and saw the bright bulbs on the ceiling. “Installed and fucking concealed.”
“Just over top of a retractable, false ceiling. I owe you thanks, by the way. I wouldn’t have been able to afford it without your funding. You see, this is the actual artistic activity I wanted Mr. MacPherson to come and see. The triumph of sadism over nihilism! What do you think of this artistic endeavor, MacPherson?”
MacPherson felt cold sweat trickle down his forehead. Words began to reattach themselves to his brain, but he hadn’t yet regained the use of them. The Presence still lingered. It was looking at him now, out of the eyeholes of Mr. No One’s discarded mask. There were shadows inside of there, and he knew the Great Dark Mouth had retreated into them. It was watching him. Watching to see if MacPherson would betray it by siding with Krieg. MacPherson looked at the mask until it was too horrible to look at, and then covered his eyes. He said nothing.
“Oh dear, it seems like all of this has shaken up MacPherson. Alas, let’s hope he snaps out of it. You see, he’s been the witness to it all. He’ll be the man who spreads news of your defeat to all the other connoisseurs of behavioral art! I’ll ask him to tell the story far and wide, of the night sadism triumphed over nihilism, perhaps because nihilism was represented by the dumbest of champions!”
Mr. No One looked at Kitterman. “This ’as all been an interestin’ night now, ’adn’t it? But you really don’t want to use that gun, now, do you, Kitterman? I mean, you’re up to your elbows in trouble already, with ’elpin’ the little fellow in the beret torture kids all of these years. Do you really want to add cold-blooded murder to the list of your offenses?”
Krieg grinned his eroded-teeth grin. “This is rich. The so-called nihilist begging for his life! Making appeals to morality. ‘Cold-blooded murder,’ indeed. ‘…the list of offenses.’ Ha! That’s the sign of your final defeat…your retreat into hypocrisy. Even you don’t believe your own propaganda! Shoot him, Kitterman. But not in the head or the chest or the stomach. Shoot him, if you can, in the kneecaps. Make him suffer. Make him bleed.”
Mr. No One took two steps toward Kitterman. “Put down the gun, man. If Krieg wants to shoot me, then let ’im do it ’imself, you know? Remember the contempt ’e showed for you not that long ago? The way ’e mocked you? Is ’e really worth shooting a man for?”
Mr. No One was just about four feet in front of him. He had his arms extended out in front of him, making the distance even closer. MacPherson thought he looked like Frankenstein marching out of the laboratory, that way.
“Now, Kitterman. Shoot him fucking now!”
Shots rang out. MacPherson had never before appreciated how mechanical the act of firing a gun was. A click of trigger, a pump from the barrel. The propulsion. Then blood and bone, of course. But what made an impression on him, at least initially, were the shots themselves. Three of them. Mr. No One fell to the ground. Kitterman stood over him. “My wife has cancer and we’re uninsured, fuckwad! We need the money so I’ll shoot whoever the hell Mr. Krieg tells me to shoot.”
The scene unfolded with Krieg kicking Mr. No One in the ribs and Kitterman whipping out a pair of handcuffs. Before tonight, MacPherson would have looked upon this with interest. He would have listened intently to Krieg’s explanation of Mr. No One’s fate. As it was, he felt distracted. The Great Dark Mouth still watched him, from out of the eyeholes of the mask.
He heard Krieg mumble something about leaving Mr. No One there, crippled and in the bright light, to starve along with the Wild Children of Darkness. But he didn’t care about any of that. So while they were all busy, screaming and scratching and flailing against one another, MacPherson grabbed Mr. No One’s discarded vestments and mask. And, when he’d climbed to the very top of the rope ladder, he put them on.
* * *
He hears three sudden, loud noises and jumps. Then he sees the bright light and he winces. He jogs a few feet away and curls up against the wall. How I wish I were just this wall, the boy says to himself. If I were just this wall, then I wouldn’t need food. I wouldn’t have eyes that could get hurt by the light. I wouldn’t be a prophet if I were just a wall.
He thinks this for a very long time. Mutters prayers that the Angels will take the burden of eating and seeing and prophesying away from him. “Just make me a wall,” he says. “Please, just make me a wall.”
He hears a rustling and the clip-clop of footsteps. Opens a gap in between his fingers, so he can see—but not see too much. It is a Thing in Black. It has a head that isn’t like his. It has big teeth. It’s coming toward him.
“I’ve heard your prayer,” a muffled voice says. “I cannot make you a wall, but I can bring back the dark.”
The boy’s heart races in his chest. A question’s resting on his lips, waiting to be spoken—but he is not sure he has the courage to speak it. Finally, he spits it out. “A-are you an Angel?”
The Black-Toothy-Thing laughs. “Better than an Angel,” it says. “I am God. You wish to be delivered from sight and light, is this true?”
The boy hesitates. Trembles. Then nods.
“Then I shall deliver you from it. Let me see your eyes.”
And God puts Its hands over his eyes, and there’s a jumbling around, and in a matter of moments all’s black.
“There, now that was painless, wasn’t it?”
The boy nods and smiles, thankful for the blessing of darkness.
* * *
The sun hung high overhead when MacPherson came to, and the wind whipped his back like a scourge. He was sweaty and, with those penny loafers on, his feet ached more than they’d ever ached before. How long had he been walking? He vaguely recognized the landscape. Behind him, an expanse of pasture. Ahead of him, the small town. He must have begun walking in this direction, from Nowhere. But why? What could possibly be left for him here? What could possibly be left for him anywhere? He had the sense that nonexistence awaited him in those crumbling small-town sidewalks, and he had a sense he’d welcome it.
A gust came along and scooted him forward, almost involuntarily. A gust like something in a hurricane, even though it was sunny. Yesterday he would have found this strange, but today his threshold for “strange” had been elevated to such a height that the freakish weather seemed positively mundane.
It was hot and he couldn’t breathe well. He had the mask on. He had the robes on, which flapped madly against him in the gale. And he had something squishy clinched in each fist. He looked down. Opened his right hand slowly, carefully, so the wind wouldn’t steal away what he had. He saw a glob of white flesh with red and pink tendrils trailing from it. He opened his left hand and saw the same, only this one was positioned in such a way that an iris was visible. Brown. With a contracted black pupil.
He didn’t want them in his hands. Even more importantly, the Great Dark Mouth inside of him didn’t want them in his hands. I
t wanted them someplace else. He lifted up the mask just enough to slip the flesh past his lips, onto his tongue. When he swallowed, it was like the Holy Communion he’d last taken as a teenager. It was, admittedly, an imperfect comparison. The flesh he was eating wasn’t the flesh of God. But still, the act of consuming the lad’s eyeballs would make him one with the Reality of Blackness. He would become, perhaps for only a moment, an incarnation of the Great Dark Mouth. And then, if the Great Dark Mouth had an ounce of anything like mercy, it would devour him, too.
As he approached the town, cars passed. Bystanders slowed and gawked. He didn’t bother gawking back. More walking. More aching. More grunting and sweating and being. How he wanted to shed them all. There were a few cars parked on Main Street. One or two people strolling across it, on some errand or other. Apparently undaunted by the high winds. Doing something they imagined had some purpose. They noticed him, too. One stared. The other seemed to try to pretend she hadn’t seen him.
When he reached the corner of Main and Willow streets, MacPherson saw a woman wearing sunglasses and dressed in dark slacks and a coat the color of Pepto-Bismol. She was leaning against a shopping cart half-filled with an assortment of garish garments—apparently her entire wardrobe—along with about a half dozen aluminum cans. Her short, thin hair was combed backward, like a man’s. She was pointing at him and laughing like a loon.
He stopped in front of her. “You know things, don’t you?” he said.
She nodded and laughed.
“This is the end, isn’t it?”
She nodded and laughed.
“Then so be it.”
And then the vertigo came again. A sense of shrinking and falling, shrinking and falling and tumbling through gulfs of cold, empty space. Perception and certainties and words and past and present and up and down and left and right and here and there all gobbled up until there was nothing left.
* * *
The cackling old lady looked at her latest find, nodding and laughing, nodding and laughing. Oh, how it seemed like it had been meant for her—the way it drifted over the sidewalk and gutter and right toward her on the gentle breeze! Oh, what fun to hoard the world’s junk! She’d use the robe for a light blanket on autumn nights. The perfectly good papier-mâché mask lay a few feet away from it, dented but still wearable. She’d go down to the pawn store and hock it. It wouldn’t be worth much, maybe five bucks. Enough to treat herself to a small cheeseburger and drink at McDonald’s.
This is how she lived—off refuse. She cobbled together an existence this way. And oh, how good, how very, very good the world was to her, to give her all the somethings in her cart for nothing. She nodded and laughed. Yes, the world was plentiful with blessings.
About the Author
Nicole Cushing is the author of over twenty short stories published in the U.S. and U.K. Her fiction has appeared alongside stories by Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin, and Chuck Palahniuk in the anthology Werewolves and Shape Shifters: Encounters with the Beast Within and also in the Cemetery Dance Richard Laymon tribute anthology In Laymon’s Terms. Several of her stories have been (or are currently being) adapted for audio presentation on podcasts such as Tales to Terrify and Pseudopod.
Children of No One is her first novella. She lives with her husband in Indiana.
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