by Del Howison
This raised the possibility that Aldridge had submitted The Pyre—the book—as his own funeral opera. Franklin’s perception was that the entire volume was sequenced as preparation steps toward death. First was the review of a life—its fulfillments, tragedies, conquests, recreations, regrets, and pleasures. Then the weighing of success versus failure. Then, ritual preparations for an end to the suffering.
But to touch such heights, along the way …!
Franklin suddenly saw how easily the legend about the book had begun. It was the bibliophile’s version of “Gloomy Sunday”—the Hungarian song written in 1933 and credited with a rash of suicides due to the bottomless depression the tune supposedly inspired, especially among jazz fans who heard Billie Holiday’s version. Myth had it that the composer, Rezso Seress, penned the song for an ex-girlfriend with whom he believed “he could finally be happy, in death.” The girlfriend killed herself, leaving behind a note reading “Gloomy Sunday,” and Seress himself committed suicide by jumping from a building in Budapest in 1968—ironically, in despair over his inability to produce another song as famous.
Typically, Franklin knew, people knew the rumor, but could never name any of the individuals responsible for its creation. J. Arthur Aldridge had become a similar lost footnote, lost to history, condemned to deeper oblivion the moment university libraries reshuffled their card catalogs to a computer database. One misstroke of one key was all it took to make a career totally impossible to locate, or referenced wrongly by some crepuscular search engine that guaranteed it would never be found again, let alone corrected, for decades, if ever. Franklin liked to use the analogy of the hand. Draw a human hand, he’d say. Sounds easy. (Hand someone a pencil and ask them to draw a human hand that looks like a hand, and no cheating—only kindergarteners outline their real hand on the paper.) It is amazingly difficult, yet everyone thinks they can do it.
The same held true for all those low-wage earners dutifully attempting to retype catalog card entries with no mistakes. Looks easy; misfires all the time. And if you’re J. Arthur Aldridge, your existence as a writer is abruptly terminated. All the systems needed time to improve. There was no quick path to knowledge. That was why there was a need for people like Jonah Siritis, and Franklin Bryant.
Impatient, Franklin worked up more notes and dispatched more e-mails to Siritis, on an average of two or three per day. After July bled into August, he received a surprise answer, at last:
Please pardon the impersonal nature of this bulk mailing, but it is my sad obligation to tell you that Jonah Siritis passed away at 7:40 P.M. GST, on Tuesday, 10 August, at Frimley Park Hospital here in Surrey. He was 57 years old. Many of you knew of Jonah’s epilepsy. In late July he contracted influenza, running a fever of 104° and vomiting. After an MRI, blood tests, and a lumbar puncture, he was subsequently diagnosed with Acute Viral Encephalitis (AVE) and our neurologist immediately put him on Acyclovir and anticonvulsants. This took over one week, as encephalitis is one of the “most misdiagnosed” afflictions, and Jonah quickly became significantly impaired. Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain that, in serious cases, rarely offers the option of full recovery and has a number of physical, behavioral, and cognitive side effects. On 5 August the fever subsided and Jonah experienced seizures and sporadic loss of consciousness. On 6 August he lapsed into coma and remained comatose until he died. A nondenominational service will be held 15 August, in Camberley. Jonah requested cremation.
My name is Kenneth Nuffield and it was my privilege to be Jonah’s partner for the past twenty years. I am sending this message to Jonah’s e-mail list in the hope of imparting this very sad news to his friends in America and others who may not be able to attend the service. In lieu of flowers, I have a number of organizations (appended below) to which Jonah requested donations be sent.
I trust in your sympathy and love during this bereavement, and shall answer any and all questions in detail or provide further information if you contact me at the address below …
Siritis was dead. His brain had burned up.
Mere days now, before the new semester began.
Franklin ventured a couple of delicate messages to Kenneth Nuffield. It was painfully clear that Siritis and Nuffield had been deeply in love. Franklin wondered what that felt like. All the inspiration for his new research seemed to evaporate just as the fact-finding had reached a boil. Concentration became difficult; derailment easy. He scrutinized the stories again—the whole canon of Aldridge’s work—but there seemed to be nothing more to unearth between lines. He needed an encouragement, a jump-start over the void left by the loss of Siritis, and exactly one week before classes were to commence, Franklin found what he wanted.
It was a small package from Kenneth Nuffield, festooned with UK postage and a customs slip, half-torn away. The note from Nuffield read, in part: Your interest in this Author was a source of great pleasure to Jonah. As he said, “it validated him,” and I am certain he would have wanted you to have this. Wrapped in a tape-sealed inner envelope was Siritis’ own copy of The Pyre and Others, precisely as described, floppy pages, creeping Broadart and all.
Now Franklin had within his tremulous grasp (he shook, he knew, with barely leashed excitement) the means by which to experiment. He considered the spooky proposition of attempting that which Siritis had never dared, but with a slight modification, a new angle. What if, Franklin thought, one were to open the book to a specific story, and place it beneath the pillow that way? Might that countermand the random-dream bliss (or terror) by adding an element of determinism? Or was it all still a mythic crapshoot?
That was what real writers did, thought Franklin: They burned with passion, and sought to solve desire.
Franklin wanted to know what Herman Banks knew about the unquantifiable lure of women. What that fictional character, a projection of some facet of Aldridge, understood, but which was not incorporated into specific lines of text. The unspoken part of “The Pyre.” This knowledge, won at great cost, could not only satisfy his academic yearnings, but possibly improve his life.
Love, it seemed, always lurked just beyond the boundaries of perception.
* * *
When Franklin was discovered, he resembled a knickknack carved of soapstone, or mahogany, burnished to a deep ebony and curled into a fetal position, because he had been asleep when he burned. No gas leak, no unattended candles, no cigarettes, no suicide. The composed calm on his expression had been captured and rendered durable, as clay fired to luster in a kiln. His bed had cooked down to half-melted toaster coils and the timbers inside the walls had combusted with fantastic, destroying heat, yet Franklin’s body was found unblemished by soot, ashes, or char. The temperatures kindled inside his flaming bungalow were so intense that nothing made of paper could have survived.
ALL MY BLOODY THINGS
A Cal McDonald Crime Story
STEVE NILES
BY THE TIME I came to, fuckhead El Beardo De Psycho was already trying to take a chunk out of my leg with a rusty scalpel. He had my pant leg ripped and my juicy thigh exposed.
The scalpel was pressed right into my flesh when he paused and saw my eyes were open.
He was so fucking dead.
Stupid cannibals.
* * *
It all began a couple days ago when I got a call from a guy who talked to a guy who knew this lady who mentioned her brother’s family went missing on a lonely stretch of California highway.
I heard about it because the guy—the first guy—got attacked by some weird vampire freak-thing, I saved his ass, and he was calling me to thank me for shooting the beast before it shredded him.
“I still can’t believe it happened.” He had a high whiny voice that made me want to pop his skull with a hammer.
“Well, believe it!” I said, trying to get off the phone. I wasn’t much for follow-up friendships. I save you. Thank you and fuck you. We’re done.
“Well, Mr. McDonald, I can’t thank you enough for saving me.”
> “Glad I could help.” I went silent. If this conversation was continuing, I wasn’t going to be the one keeping it alive. I had shit do to. I had a bag of painkillers just waiting to enter my bloodstream.
“There’s something else …”
Fuck. Here it comes.
“I have a friend who’s dating this lady and she mentioned that her brother’s family never showed up driving from Vegas to Los Angeles.”
I put my head facedown on the desk blotter. “Call the police. That’s missing persons. I only do weird shit.”
“The way the lady tells it, it might be … weird shit.”
I just wanted to get rid of him. “What’s this lady’s name and number?”
“Um … let me see here.”
His squealing whine of a voice was shredding my last good nerve.
“Kelly Hughes. She’s in Glendale.”
He gave me her number, thanked me again. I told him to have a good life and hung up the phone. What a dink.
Ninety percent of what I do is gut feeling. That’s why I took the whiny man’s lead. People have an inner sense of the strange and supernatural. They tend to believe subconsciously what their conscious minds won’t allow them to comprehend.
People always ask me why I’m the only one who sees the freaks and monsters crawling in the dark corners of the world and I tell them it’s because I trust my gut. My gut and the fact that I’ve had my ass smeared across the city by some freak or another enough times to know there’s shit out there that just defies logic, plain and simple.
I arrived at Kelly Hughes’s house in Glendale. It was one of those Spanish pillbox numbers like I had, but hers was painted and clean, the fence was white picket, and there were flowers planted in window boxes. The whole thing made me sick.
The woman was pleasant enough. She told me how she’d never heard from her brother Andre and his wife Debra and their kid, an eight-year-old boy named Doug, after they were supposed to have arrived a couple days ago. They were driving a 2004 Volvo wagon, silver. Calls had gone unanswered. She tried the police, but they turned up a big doughnut, and frankly, she told me, she thought the worst.
I had nothing to go on but my aforementioned gut, and it told me something was wrong. Families just don’t disappear off highways in the middle of the night. I asked her for all the info I’d need, phone numbers, descriptions. All that crap. I figured I’d start by tracing the cell calls and credit-card charges to figure out where they disappeared.
* * *
The police are retarded. The last credit-card charge by Andre Hughes was made from a remote spot on Highway 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. What makes the charge interesting is that the amount, some forty bucks, was posted but never charged. Either something happened during the exchange or the merchant decided they didn’t want the money. I smelled trouble.
I drove the Nova out that way the same night. I didn’t bring Mo’Lock with me because he was meeting with some ghouls who had recently moved from Europe to L.A. In the last few months there had been a large influx of the friendly undead to L.A. It had something to do with me, but frankly, I didn’t give a rat’s ass as long as they didn’t eat anybody.
The drive was long and boring. There were few other cars on the road. It was late and midweek, not the busiest time for Vegas traffic. I popped a few blues to keep sharp, and some codeine to take the edge off, then I put the finishing touches on my buzz with a joint and whiskey pint chaser.
The barb cocktail made my head tingle and the desert night, the hills in the distance, the wide flat of nothing near began to trail brilliant colors until I came up on a small shock of a business next to a run-down gas station with old-fashioned gas pumps straight out of The Grapes of Wrath.
There was a silver Volvo station wagon parked around back. It was partially hidden by a wreck of a pickup, but I could see the California plates and luggage still secured to the roof rack.
Follow my gut. Connect the dots. That’s what I do that the cops can’t seem to. It takes them days to even track leads, people die. It’s really a shame.
I parked the car right in front of the place. There was a poorly painted sign that read JUNIORS PULLED MEAT BBQ in crooked red and white letters. Beneath that, in chilly type, it said AIR CONDITIONED.
I entered through a screen door and immediately the smell of blood and BBQ sauce hit my nostrils. There was a counter, old, stained, and disgusting. There were a few tables, just as stained, with broken, rusty chairs. It was dead quiet. I looked toward the counter. Behind the stained Formica I saw a door to the kitchen.
I walked forward. I also removed my gun. All I could smell was blood and all I could hear was the buzz of flies.
I saw two things as I entered; two people, a young boy and an older woman—the Hughes family I assumed—bound to a gas pipe. The other was what was left of the father, Andre Hughes, naked and tied to a table. He had been stripped of skin from the chest down to his feet and several large sections of meat from the buttocks and thigh were cut away.
But worst of all, he was being kept alive. Tubes ran air to his exposed lungs through his nose, and IVs numbed him to the pain.
That’s what I saw. What I felt as I walked deeper into the room was a burning pain across the back of my skull. I’d felt it before. It was probably a wrench being hammered against my head. I reeled forward. The gun fell from my hand, and I managed to half-turn my head and see a large man with long blond hair, a mustache, and a Hawaiian print shirt. He had the wrench.
I remember thinking, My God I’m going to die at the hands of a giant retard, and then the wrench came down again and caught my brow. I hit the floor and fell into a buzzing pool of total darkness.
* * *
That brings us back to the beginning.
I don’t know how long I was out cold, but when I started to come back, my pant leg had been ripped up the leg and the big guy in the Hawaiian print shirt was making ready to cut into my thigh. He only stopped because he noticed I was awake.
My hands were bound behind my back. I was tied on the pipe about four feet from Momma Hughes and son. Dad was passed out or dead on the bleeding table.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I grunted.
El Beardo looked up. His eyes were yellow; his teeth were rotten and brown, black along the gum line.
“You didn’t stay out long,” he commented, almost too relaxed.
He paused the cutting, but kept the blade pressed to my leg. If I struggled, he would only cut me. I decided to play it out.
“So … how long you been eating people?”
He seemed taken aback by the question, like nobody had ever asked.
He pulled the blade back slightly. I felt a wave of relief and dizziness. I’d taken way too much shit in the car. I could hardly see straight.
“All my life,” he said softly. He had a speech impediment, a sloppy lisp. “My paw taught me how to cook.”
When he spoke, the grizzled cannibal looked like a stupid five-year-old, not sure what he was supposed to do. He stared off sadly, then seemed to come back around and looked me in the eyes.
“Eating peoples makes me strong. Eating peoples gives me their soul. That’s what Paw said. He ate Maw and said her soul loved me forever inside him.”
“No shit?”
The cannibal in the Hawaiian print shirt nodded shyly. I glanced over at the captives. Mom was out cold. She’d probably fainted watching her husband get skinned alive. The kid was awake and aware. His eyes were wide and staring not at his dying father, but at the killer. The kid was staring at him, memorizing him, planning vengeance he might never have.
“Why not let the family go?” I suggested. “You can feast on me. I got enough meat on me to keep you in meat for a month.”
He didn’t like the idea. The killer shook his head furiously and squeezed the scalpel in his hand. “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
I nodded. “You sure?”
“I said no!”
Okay,
I needed a new approach. This nut bag was teetering. I had to play my cards right. I had to keep him talking.
“Okay, sorry,” I said quietly. “I just never met a guy who sold human-meat sandwiches.”
El Beardo had been squatting. He had this round body with no discernible distinction between his upper and lower torso, like a squishy melon with arms and legs, wearing a pineapple print shirt. As he sat down crossing his legs, I saw his sandals and socks were caked with dried blood, dirt, and hair.
He wanted to talk. I wished I wasn’t so fucking wasted. On top of the serious concussion I probably suffered, the pills and whiskey didn’t mix very friendly-like, and I was feeling beyond screwy.
“I don’t sell the people meat.”
He spoke very matter-of-factly. His blond hair was thick and wavy, knotted with clots of congealed blood and grease. He had that beach-bum look, the leather-tanned skin, and light facial hair. His hands were like mitts with thick, overworked sausages for fingers. I tried not to think what those hands had done.
“What ya mean you don’t sell it?” I asked, buying time.
Psycho Beardo shook his head. “People meats for personal use,” he said proudly. “Customers get pork and beef BBQ.”
“Why is that? People meat too special for customers? They might like it, too, you know?”
“Paw said people meat’s for just us, just us special folks who know the truth.”
He didn’t sound so sure about that last part. He spoke like a parakeet repeating a hard-learned phrase.
My head was spinning. I could barely stay awake. I didn’t have a clue what to say to the cannibal. I just wanted to bash his head in with a hammer. Hand out a little payback for the bleeding knots on my head.
