A Stark and Wormy Knight

by Tad Williams

  “Don’t you dare turn your back on me, Karl Eggar, you ignorant pig! Don’t you dare! Don’t you…!”

  And suddenly something just expands inside him, a great, hot plume like the blast that leveled Hiroshima. He can feel it blaze up through the whole length of his upper body, out of his guts and up his spine and out the top of his head, rising like a mushroom cloud. He has the ax in his hand and suddenly everything has turned hot, the very air is blazing like an oven. Everything is flow, and noise, and movement, and all of it is glowing red — a single hot, moving, expanding thing with him helpless in its midst, helpless but laughing as the ax rises and falls, over and over again. Each time it strikes it makes a sound — skutch, skutch, skutch – as satisfying as sinking a steak knife into a thick porterhouse. He can’t stop laughing. Heat and the glorious pounding – the pounding! He feels like he is hammering the world in half.

  * * *

  For a long time after he has finished swinging Karl only stands, the ax now hanging in his hands, heavy as an iron girder. His limbs tingle, even his scalp prickles. He is drained, as bonelessly weary as if he has just had a ten-minute orgasm. But there is a…thing…on the floor. No, many things, one big and the rest in all kinds of sizes and shapes. It’s hard to make out details because the kitchen is very messy. The walls are spattered and dripping red. Red everywhere.

  The exhilaration is beginning to wear off. He sinks into a crouch in the middle of one of the larger scarlet puddles. The strangest, thickest, saltiest smell is in his nose. He’s trying to think, staring at what’s left of his wife. Call an ambulance? No point. No ambulance in the world is going to do any good. All the kings horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put…that…

  He wretches up what is in his stomach, a slurry of beer and less identifiable components. The smell combines with the blood and suddenly he is on his side in the warm red goo, unable to do anything further until he has emptied his stomach to its lining, until he is gagging out air and streams of mucus. Then, numb and unable to think about much of anything, he staggers to his feet, drops his shoes and clothes where he stands, then steps carefully over the abstract red splatters as he leaves the kitchen.

  He stands under the shower for what seems like hours, hoping in a hopeless kind of way, like a superstitious child, that if he waits long enough and lets enough water run over him, when he goes back to the kitchen things will be…different.

  But, of course, they are not. He stands shivering, looking down at the bloody meat and bone, the scatter of pieces that had seemed so inevitably connected once, but now seem as random as an emptied bowl of stew. His stomach lurches again but there is no longer anything in it to throw up.

  Think, he tells himself. Think. Don’t panic. That’s when people make mistakes. Don’t think with your emotions. Be a man. Be…logical.

  First things first. The shower was a mistake. He shouldn’t have left the room. The police, they have all this equipment now, special lights and chemicals to detect blood stains, even stains that are so small or so old you can hardly see them. He’ll put his shoes back on and stay in the kitchen, and if he has to go anywhere else, he’ll leave the shoes here so he doesn’t track any blood.

  But he has to leave the room almost at once because the blood is pooled everywhere across the floor, right to the baseboards. He doesn’t think it will soak through the vinyl flooring, but at the edge of the floor it will definitely get into the gaps between the flooring and the walls and that will be that. So he goes to the garage and gets a big plastic tarp left over from camping and then, back in the kitchen, gingerly lifts the largest piece up onto it – it is surprisingly heavy for only part of a person — then begins piling the other decent-sized chunks onto the plastic as well. He has to stop several times to gag again, but after a while he gets used to the smell and a sort of gray haze covers his thoughts and he can work without thinking too much about what he’s doing. Still, the discovery of a finger with a wedding ring still on it makes him pause for a moment. It’s not that he loved her, or even gave a damn about her, but this…this is so…final. Not to mention the fact that he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail if he gets caught, and that’s if he’s lucky. And now he’s cleaning up. He’s trying to hide what he did. That could get him the death penalty.

  Karl pauses for a moment, then gives a sort of shrug. Too late now. The bitch drove him to it. Admitting that he did it, calling the police, going to jail – that would be giving her the last word. That would be Norah having the last laugh as he spends the rest of his life, maybe fifty years or more, suffering for what she did to him.

  But how will he get it all clean? He’s seen it all on television cop shows. Eventually, they’ll come, and he’ll be the first suspect.

  Karl surprises even himself by laughing. Of course he should be the first suspect. Because he did it! He’s sitting naked in his kitchen in a pool of his wife’s blood!

  No, think, he tells himself. Look. There are red splatters everywhere, and dozens of pieces flung all over the room still to find. And on top of everything else, ants, hundreds of the little bastards still crawling everywhere, oblivious, and if they aren’t already doing it, they’ll soon be tracking thousands of little bloody ant footprints everywhere. The ants are searching for food – they’ll head right for the blood and bone chips and bits of meat. And even if he keeps them off the body, how will he find all the pieces of Norah and get this kitchen clean?

  The idea, when it finally comes, is so good that he begins to laugh again.

  You dumb bitch, he thinks. You could have watched Oprah for a hundred years and you’d still never have an idea as good as this!

  He gets to work.

  * * *

  Once he has every visible piece collected on the plastic tarp, some of them already crawling with tiny black insect bodies, Karl begins to scrub. He concentrates on soaking up blood first, as quickly and thoroughly as possible, using paper towels and rags from the garage. It takes a couple of hours, and after a while he realizes he is dizzy with exhaustion and hunger, so he stops to stand naked in the middle of the kitchen and eat corn chips from the cuPRETTY BOYoard. While he is getting them out he notices a few random droplets of red on the cuPRETTY BOYoard door, six feet above the ground. There must be hundreds like that, he knows. Still, he has a plan.

  When he has finally mopped up all the blood he can see and mopped the whole floor with rubbing alcohol to kill the traces, he takes the red rags and the ruined torso and the forlorn, bloody pieces, even the ants climbing on them, and wraps them all together in the plastic tarp and tapes it shut. Then he sits down on the floor to wait. He has blotted up every ant he could find, mashing them into the bloody rags now wrapped inside the tarp, and for the first time today the kitchen is antless. Norah would be pleased, if she wasn’t dead.

  The sky is darkening outside and the sounds of the empty house give him the strangest feeling that he should finish up soon because his wife will be coming home from work soon – but, of course, she won’t. Besides, it’s Saturday. The weekend. Tomorrow’s Sunday. He stares at the huge tarp swathed in duct tape. Day of rest.

  His laugh, this time, is raspy and hoarse.

  He opens a beer, but doesn’t have to wait long. Within ten minutes the first scouts of the ant army return to the kitchen. Karl sits, sipping on his beer, and lets them walk past him – hell, they can walk over him for all he cares. He’s smeared in blood again, so why wouldn’t they? But he’s waiting for something else. At last he sees a trail beginning, leading from the entry point in the sink cabinet, out to the wall beside the trash can, then looping back again. The trail becomes an orderly line. The ants are at work in earnest now. After a few more minutes, Karl moves the trash can. There, stuck to the wall down by the baseboard, is a sliver of something pale – bone, fat, it doesn’t really matter. He wipes it up with a piece of alcohol-soaked tissue and throws the tissue into a trash bag, then goes back to watch some more.

  It becomes a weird sort of spo
rt, following the busy ants as they do his work for him, locating with their ant-senses all the body pieces and bloodspots too small or too well-hidden for him to have found on his own. They find what looks like a tiny slice of eyelid and eyelash stuck to the refrigerator door handle – how did he miss that? More shockingly, they locate an entire toe that has bounced out of the kitchen into the hallway. That would have been a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t it? Karl laughs again. He’s beginning to enjoy this, despite the mute presence of the bundled tarp.

  It goes on throughout the night. The blood gets sticky, dries, and when he finds hidden spots he has to scrub harder and harder to get them clean. He brings his spotlight out of the garage to help him see better. The ants themselves are repaid for their searching by being wiped up along with whatever they have found. It doesn’t quite seem fair, but hell, they’re only ants.

  At last, sometime around ten the next morning, his eyes red and his head ringing with exhaustion, he sees that the ants are all walking aimlessly. There is nothing left to find. No pieces, no spatters, nothing. The tiny, mindless creatures have done their work. They have saved his life.

  Logic, he thinks as he drags the tarp to the garage. He’ll deal with the rest tonight, when it’s dark. Cold, hard, logic, that’s how to do things. Mr. Spock? Damn right.

  * * *

  Sunday has its share of struggles, too. He empties her car trunk and glove compartment, files the vehicle identification number off the engine, removes the plates, then puts what’s left of its former owner in the trunk and, when night-time comes, drives it down to the salvage yard where he used to work. He certainly hadn’t imagined anything like this when he copied the old man’s keys before they got rid of him, but it just goes to show the quality of ideas Karl Eggar has.

  As he closes the gate the dogs come at him, growling, hackles raised, but he knows them both, calls them by name, gives them the remains of his lunchtime cold pizza. They wag their tales happily as he drives the car into the crusher. The salvage yard is out by the bay, and the landfill next door is closed. Nobody to hear when he fires up the crusher except for maybe a few migrant fishermen out in their boats. No car lights coming down the bay road, either, so with rising confidence he gets into the crane and pulls out Norah’s car, which looks like a wad of metal gum, then after swinging it over onto one of the piles of wrecks, drops a few of the other smashed cars on top of it so as much of her car as possible is buried. It’ll all be gone to the smelters on Monday night. If not…well, since they’re right beside the landfill, it’s not like the place doesn’t already smell like wet garbage.

  He walks home, careful to keep to the shadows and enter the house through the back door. No, he thinks, we don’t want surprise witnesses telling how he went out with Norah’s car and came back on foot.

  You the man, Mr. Spock, he thinks as takes a well-deserved beer out of the refrigerator. He’s suddenly single, the house is quiet, and with all this cleaning he’s managed to drive the ants out of the kitchen, too.

  Oh, yeah, you the man.

  * * *

  He calls them himself, of course – it doesn’t make any sense to wait. Waiting is like a little kid covering his eyes and hoping he’s turned invisible. Karl calls them Tuesday morning, tells them his wife hasn’t come back since she drove away on Sunday night.

  When he opens the door he’s immediately reassured to see two young officers, the kind of square-jawed, just-out-of-the-academy types that always say “Sir,” and “Ma’am,” even to half-naked lunatics they’re arresting for drunk and disorderly. Probably neither of these fellows has even seen a dead body.

  “Come in, please.” He tries to sound both pleased to see them and properly worried. “Thanks for coming so soon.”

  “No problem, Mr. Eggar,” says the shorter of the two. He’s freckled and has the wide-eyed look of one of those born-again Christian kids in Karl’s old high school, the ones who always studied and never cheated. “Please tell us when you realized your wife was missing.”

  “Well,” he says with a humble sort of laugh, “I’m not sure she is missing. To tell the truth, she was pretty pissed off at me when she left. Argument, ya know. I called her sister in Trent to see if she was there, but she hasn’t heard from her.” Of course she hasn’t, unless she can hear all the way to the scrap heap at the salvage yard, but he called her late the previous night to make the timeline look good. Thinking, always thinking. “Hey, come on into the kitchen. I’m just making some coffee.”

  He leads them in, holding his breath as he does, although he knows there’s nothing to see. Even a county forensics team wouldn’t find anything, he’s been that thorough, so what are these two bowling-leaguers from the sherrif’s department going to see except a clean kitchen? And not even too clean: he’s given it a bit of a temporary-batchelor look, cereal out, bowls unwashed. He gestures them to two of the chairs at the small table, then lifts the pitcher out of the coffee maker and pours himself a hot, black cup full. “Can I get you some?” he asks. They shake their heads.

  “Tell us more about what happened Sunday,” the one who hasn’t spoken before says. He’s tall, mustached, slightly familiar. Maybe he worked in the Safeway or something when he was a kid. That’s one of the funny thing about small towns, the way you keep seeing faces and features. Karl has never liked the idea of other people knowing his business, but Norah, well, you’d have thought it was her own soap opera to hear her go on all the time about everybody else’s private lives.

  He works his way slowly into his story about the argument, although now it’s a story about a guy who just wants to drink a beer and his wife who keeps nagging him to chop some firewood.

  “I told her, Jeez, it’s the middle of summer, Norah, but she’s all, ‘It’s going to be a cold winter, Karl. You always put things off to the last minute.’ All I wanted to do was watch the ballgame. Anyway, I guess I sorta called her a name. – the “b” word, if you know what I mean – and went off to do it. Better than having her riding my back all day, I figured. But when I came back in the house she was gone. Figured she was just letting off some steam, but then she didn’t come back. When I got up the next morning and saw she’d never been home, well, I called you guys. Do you think she’s all right? I hope she’s all right. It was just a stupid argument.”

  He can tell from their expressions, which are already glazing over, that they think this is a waste of their time. A fight, they’re thinking, maybe a bit worse than he’s telling. She’s got a boyfriend – that’s what they’re also thinking – and now she’s shacked up with him, deciding whether to come back to ol’ Karl or not.

  Oh yeah, he thinks, and almost laughs. She’s shacked up, all right. But it’s kind of a small apartment…

  “Look,” he says to Officer Born-Again while the tall one is writing the report, “you sure you won’t have some coffee? I just made it.”

  The small, freckled one shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Been a long morning already.”

  “There you go.” He pours it out, hands the officer a steaming cup. “How about you?” he asks the other. “Change your mind?”

  The one writing the report shakes his head. “No, thanks, I’m off caffeine. Doctor’s orders.”

  Karl nods sagely. “Yeah, it’s probably not good for any of us, but I figure, hey, what’s life without a few risks?” He’s ready to have a good long chat, actually. He’s all but in the clear and it feels good. His new life starts now. Maybe there’s even a way he can collect Norah’s insurance…

  The smaller cop looks around absently. “Uh, sorry to bother you, but you got cream and sugar?”

  “Milk, hope that’s okay. It’s not expired or anything.” He takes it from the fridge. The sugar he can’t immediately find. “Never use it myself,” he explains, but just then he spots the edge of the sugar bowl. It’s sitting, for some reason, up on top of the refrigerator.

  It is only as he grabs it and something wet slops onto his wrist that he realizes it is still sitting in the
dish of water he placed it in to keep the ants out of the sugar. The bowl has been sitting up there all this time, ever since…since…

  That day. The day he was right about everything – even the sugar.

  Because the moat around the sugar bowl has definitely worked. The ants never got near it. Karl can see that clearly as he sets it down on the table in front of the freckled cop, because there in full view, perched on a mound that is snowy white except for the crusted bit of sugar at the top that has gone brown with dried blood, lies the severed tip of one of Norah’s fingers, nail and all.

  Other Books By Tad Williams

  THE MEMORY, SORROW & THORN SERIES

  The Dragonbone Chair/ Stone of Farewell/ To Green Angel Tower Part 1/ To Green Angel Tower Part 2

  “It’s easily the best in the genre—if you want to read a classic epic fantasy series that is not the Lord of the Rings, start here.” —The New Yorker

  THE OTHERLAND SERIES

  City of Golden Shadow/ River of Blue Fire/ Mountain of Black Glass/ Sea of Silver Light

  “One of the most impressive virtual-reality landscapes ever created. Otherland, a gigantic realm consisting of untold numbers of virtual universes… Williams is an exciting and endlessly inventive writer whose character development is particularly strong.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Settle in for a long, enjoyable ride” —Amazon.com

  SOON TO BE A GLOBAL MMO GAME FROM REALU/dtp – a vast new venture coming 2012

  THE SHADOWMARCH SERIES

  Shadowmarch/ Shadowplay/ Shadowrise/ Shadowheart

  “Williams opens another of the intricate, intriguing sagas that are his stock-in-trade… A page-turner” — Booklist