In Heaven, Everything Is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch

by Thomas Ligotti

  KHHKR: From now on I want you to fuck me through the open zipper on my pants. Because I don’t want to be naked in front of you.

  They are quiet for the remainder of the haircut. After, they leave the bathroom and go to Satan’s room, adjoining. Khhkr looks at herself in the window as a mirror. Behind her, Satan wipes the hair off the scissors, onto the ground.

  KHHKR: I like my haircut. Thank you very much. I wouldn’t have been able to do this myself.

  SATAN: Good. You’re welcome [looks up at her] You look like a little boy.

  Satan rubs the hair into the carpet threads with his toes, still shaking the scissors off.

  KHHKR: [looks at him in window mirror] We always have fun together.

  Satan sets the scissors on the floor. Then he lies down on a pile of clothing he uses for a bed, in the corner of the small room.

  SATAN: When you are not here I sleep on the couch downstairs. And I like to keep the television on. I can feel it against my neck when I turn my back. It feels good. I wake up when it’s still dark out and sit on the tile floor in front of my TV, flipping the channels and pretty much just looking at things.

  KHHKR: [makes a kissy face to herself] I am a failure and so are you.

  SATAN: You look pretty though. Yeah. You do.

  Khhkr goes to walk over to him but she steps on the scissors. The scissors cut her foot deep. She hisses. The ball of her left foot drips blood, and she holds it up knee-high for inspection. Satan takes her to the shower and cleans her foot off with cupped-handfuls, using the other hand to balance her at the hip.

  KHHKR: [hands on the showerwall] Is it good?

  SATAN: [shuts faucet] It’s good yeah.

  He dries her foot off with his shirt and puts a bandaid over the cut.

  KHHKR: [turning her head] What’s that on the bandaid?

  SATAN: It’s a duck giving a thumb’s up.

  Khhkr turns her head to the showerwall again.

  KHHKR: [flatly] Does the duck look happy?

  SATAN: Yes [massaging her foot] Yes I feel that this duck is happy. To be touching your blood, this duck is happy. Thumbs up.

  KHHKR: [puts foot down carefully] Ok.

  They go to bed. Khhkr falls asleep. Satan does not. He spends the first few minutes of the night sticking his tongue in and out at her. In between he quietly repeats, “This should hurt your feelings.” But he never seems convinced it actually hurts her feelings. Keeps checking her face. Different angles. He takes the top blanket and goes downstairs to the kitchen. The kitchen is dark. Satan leans his elbows on the counter and looks outside. The moon is a toenail clipping in the sky.

  SATAN: This kitchen is small and it is cold. Very cold. And I don’t want to be here. That is all I need to know about this kitchen.

  He sits on his couch in the next room. Stares at the television on the floor, not turned on.

  SATAN: Maybe the roof will fall on me and kill me.

  He looks up at the ceiling. He sits there waiting. Then he gets up and kneels on the tile. He turns the TV on and changes the channels, listless, finally landing on a high school basketball game. Each time the One Too-Loud Broadcaster says something, the Other Too-Loud Broadcaster says, “What?” Then there is static. Eventually, the first one says, “Jesus, nothing Jerry—forget it.” Satan changes to the news. He imagines himself as the cloud he sees on the weather forecast, the one the meteorologist shows looming over the Midwest, wearing sunglasses and a smile. He imagines himself roaming low over the states, decimating everything. Trees uproot and fly into livingrooms, killing entire families, their dogs, destroying pictures, furniture, work-out equipment, and whatever else. Fathers outside with their sons, together they feel the opening drafts. “What is it father?” And with a stern look to the sky, the father says, “Nothing son—Goddamn it—it’s nothing.” Right before coalescing with other clouds wearing sunglasses. Smiling through the onslaught. Blowing entire states off the map like shingles, into the ocean without hesitation.

  SATAN: [yawning, watery-eyed] Days are the worst thing ever made.

  He goes to the refrigerator and opens it and looks at the brownies at the back of the fridge.

  SATAN: There is no way I can throw them out. They’re too pretty. Really though [hesitates, then shuts door]

  He goes outside and stands on the sidewalk with the blanket wrapped around him, over his head. And he holds the blanket closed underneath his chin. It is freezing out. There’s a sock near the gate of the apartment complex fence, frosted and stiffened to the ground.

  SATAN: See you in the spring you lost sock. Who lost you, sock? You are lost. No one will want you again. Goodbye. See you in the spring, lost sock. I have nothing else to say. Lost sock, I can’t help you. I’ll see you later.

  There are no construction workers in sight.

  PORTENTS OF PAST FUTURES

  JEFFREY THOMAS

  The vacant lot was positioned at a street corner, so it was open to the sidewalk along two sides. Its left-hand border was demarcated by a chain link fence, while the rear of the lot was shadowed by a high concrete wall covered in artwork. Dill didn’t know whether to classify this art as a mural, despite its consisting of a row of unrelated images, or graffiti. Since the painting was composed of images rather than gang-style tagging, he was leaning toward mural. The images included: a fish bowl occupied by a goldfish skeleton, which regardless of being picked clean sported big blue eyes with curly lashes and puckered crimson lips . . . a dark-skinned old woman in an armchair with a TV for her head, its screen shattered . . . a sandwich lying on the ground being dismantled by cranes and steam shovels, the ant construction workers wearing yellow hardhats . . . and a little red devil in diapers pointing his pitchfork and announcing in a word balloon: “Art is dead!”

  Perusing the wall with hands on hips and wagging his head in disgust, Dill’s partner Sloane remarked, “I wish.”

  “Different,” was all Dill opined.

  “Doesn’t look like gang art. Must be druggies.” Sloane shambled his bulk around in a little circle, scowling at the buildings that flanked this convergence of sun-blanched streets, as if he might catch glimpse of the artists peeking down at them around the edges of window curtains.

  “There’s a high school just a block over,” Dill said in his laconic tone, pointing with his chin. “Maybe students did that. Art students.”

  “Druggie art students.”

  Dill gestured at the body splayed in an X at their feet, as if they had been putting off this part. “What about her?”

  The uniformed cops who had been the first to respond now deferred to the two plainclothes detectives, having withdrawn from the crime scene to regroup in front of their cars, which lined the curb as if to block the scene from the public. Nevertheless, people had been drawn to the scene, hanging back in little knots and clusters behind the yellow tape that had been strung like party bunting. The locals seemed to know the drill, as if they had been through this as many times as the police officers. They were all assuming their roles, right down to the forensic team as they unpacked equipment from their own vehicle. Even the spread-eagled victim played her part, the focal point, X marks the spot.

  The hair of the young Jane Doe was long, black, and soaked wet— plastered to her pallid face like streamers of seaweed. Her lips were parted slightly, and bluish. The lid of her right eye was at half-mast, open just enough for Dill to see that the iris of her glazed eye was a pretty blue. Her left eye was swollen nearly shut, however, obviously from a blow.

  The body lay immodestly with all four limbs flung wide, completely unclothed, the woman’s grayish nipples looking hard as if she were cold despite the sun’s hard glare. Dill’s gaze tracked the progress of two ants as they scampered along the woman’s paper-white thigh, making a run for cover in her sodden mass of pubic hair.

  When he lost sight of the insects in the glistening underbrush, he lifted his eyes to the mural on the wall at the back of the lot. The ants wearing hardhats, demolishing a gi
gantic sandwich, carting tasty morsels toward the opening of their underground lair.

  “It sure as hell hasn’t rained lately,” Sloane stated. “Killer must have given her a bath to wash away evidence. Or blood.”

  “I don’t see any wounds,” Dill said. “Aside from the contused eye.”

  “Maybe on her back. We’ll see when Ken flips her over.” As he said this Sloane nodded in greeting to Asamatsu, the lead forensic identification specialist, as he approached them carrying his field gear.

  Dill conjured a mental image of a man with an indistinct face washing Jane Doe’s slack, dead body in a bathtub. It wasn’t his method, though, to limit his thinking to the obvious. What alternative causes might there be for the woman’s drenched state? He began turning slowly in a circle, as his older partner had done, but not so much looking at the drab buildings as through and beyond them. The Pacific Ocean was close, but not that close, and would a blighted neighborhood like this feature any community swimming pools? And if it did, how easily could a body be brought here from there, even under cover of darkness—let alone the killer having access to that pool off-hours?

  Dissatisfied, he returned to Sloane’s suggestion of a bathtub. But this time he pictured that faceless figure holding the young woman’s thrashing, living body under the water.

  He didn’t have to voice his opinion on the manner of Jane Doe’s death, however, because the moment Asamatsu stood over the naked corpse he remarked, “This woman was drowned.”

  “Well, ain’t you young and good-looking for a policeman,” the elderly black woman noted after opening her door.

  “Thanks,” said Sloane, squeezing into the apartment ahead of Dill.

  “Wasn’t talking to you,” the woman muttered.

  “I know that,” Sloane said.

  She motioned for them to enter her dark, cluttered parlor. Atop tables and bureaus, potted plants abounded. Half of these were brittle and brown, long-dead, though she seemed not to have noticed. Her TV was on, playing a soap opera. The reception was terrible. Dill figured she didn’t even have cable.

  After introducing himself and his partner, Dill said, “Mrs. Otis, you called our office and said you had something to tell us about the girl they found in the lot across the street?”

  “Yes sir I do,” the old woman said. “Can I get you boys some coffee? You policemen sure do like your coffee, don’t you?”

  “We’re all set with the coffee,” Sloane said, glancing around dubiously at the apartment’s dusty, grimy state. The chairs had thick layers of newspapers spread across their seat cushions as if to absorb stains. Sloane opted to remain standing.

  “Please sit down, Mrs. Otis,” Dill prompted, “and tell us what you know about that girl.”

  Mrs. Otis lowered herself onto one of the yellowed mats of newspaper, her arms shaking as she gripped the chair’s armrests. “Don’t know nothing about the girl,” she told them. “I never seen her before.” She looked up at one man, then the other. “Do you know the poor girl’s name yet?”

  “No ma’am,” Sloane replied, “we don’t. She’s still unidentified.”

  Dill stepped nearer to a window with dingy lace curtains, and brushed one aside with the back of his hand, gazing down into the street. On the corner: the vacant lot, strewn with the flotsam and jetsam he and Sloane had poked through extensively yesterday. Used condoms like shed snake skins, cigarette cartons, candy wrappers, iridescent shards of CDs. Like an archaeological dig, and these the items that had been unearthed, to represent some extinct and poorly-understood culture.

  “Did you see the men from here, Mrs. Otis?”

  “Men?” she said.

  “They told us you said you saw men . . . leaving the girl’s body in the lot.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Sloane told her. “Remember?”

  She glared at Sloane. “I remember why you’re here, detective. But I didn’t see those . . . people from my window. I saw them there.”

  The investigators both followed the woman’s pointing finger. She was indicating her outdated television set.

  “Come again?” Sloane said.

  “I can only get a few channels, and they don’t come in so good,” she explained. “Some nights I’m seeing two shows at once . . . one on top of the other. But last night I lost my show entirely, right in the middle . . . got more and more snow ’til I couldn’t see or hear nothing. But then I started to see people moving around behind the snow.”

  “Snow . . . on the screen.”

  “Yes, on the screen! You think I mean snow for real in L.A.? You think I got Oldtimer’s Disease or something?”

  “No, ma’am,” Sloane sighed patiently. “Please go on.”

  “Well . . . the picture eventually got clearer, so I could see it better, but I still couldn’t hear nothing.”

  “And you saw . . .”

  “Three people all dressed in black. They were carrying a woman’s body, and she didn’t have a stitch on. They laid her down on the ground in that lot . . . and I knew it was the same lot across the street, ’cause I could see that wall behind them, with the crazy paintings on it. It was only a few seconds, then the snow came back and everything disappeared . . . but my damn show didn’t come back for a whole half hour, and by then it was at the end!”

  “So just to clarify again . . . you saw this on TV. Not from the window.”

  “Yes! But let me finish! There was something wrong with the people’s heads . . . all three of them. Looked like . . . well, when my kids were little they used to play with that Play-Doh, and my son used to tease my poor daughter by putting the Play-Doh on her dolls’ heads and shaping scary faces on them, then he’d leave the dolls around for her to find.”

  Sloane barked a single, loud laugh. “Oh wow . . . that’s sick!”

  Seeing the old woman glower at Sloane again, Dill urged her, “Yes, Mrs. Otis?”

  “Well, these people looked like that. Like somebody covered their heads in white Play-Doh, with just some holes for their eyes . . . maybe the mouth, too.”

  “So they were wearing masks, then. To prevent people from recognizing them when they left the girl in the lot.”

  “Weren’t no masks!” Mrs. Otis blurted, squeezing the armrests of her chair. “That was their faces!”

  Sloane shuffled a little closer toward the doorway to the next room, and thus the apartment’s exit. “Okay, Mrs. Otis, then we’ll be on the lookout for three deformed men in the neighborhood. Maybe someone else has seen them; they should be easy to remember.”

  “Do you boys believe in devils?” the old woman asked, her ivory-stained eyes gone wide and unblinking. “I bet you don’t! That’ll be the downfall of this world . . . that’s what makes them strong! The less we believe, the more real they get! And nobody thinks about it, but Hell is down there deeper than the oceans . . . and if the devils ever want to come up here, they’d have to come through all that water! So it’s no wonder that girl they brought with them was all wet—is it?”

  Dill and Sloane turned to face each other silently.

  Outside, on the hot skillet of the sidewalk—across the street from the vacant lot—Sloane said, “Well that was a waste of time. Loony old lady.”

  “Fred, I think she did see something,” Dill said. “She’s just confused about where she really saw it, and the details.”

  “Yeah—details like three mutants with Play-Doh heads?”

  “Masks.”

  “Maybe they were aliens, huh? Getting rid of their abducted experiment? Dressed all in black, too . . . so maybe they were Men in Black.”

  “You heard what she said as well as I did. She said the girl was all wet. We haven’t released that detail to the public, so how could she know?”

  Sloane chuckled. “Daaamn . . . come on. Yeah, at first that gave me pause, too, but think about it—how many people saw her body lying there yesterday? A bunch. And if you were up close it was clear she was wet . . . just seeing her hair alone. So this old lady obvio
usly just heard it through neighborhood gossip. Either she’s getting that mixed up with her delusions, or she’s just pulling our leg for a little attention.”

  Dill sighed, opened his mouth to protest, but found that he couldn’t defend his intuition that the old woman had seen something legitimate.

  As if he felt his partner looked dejected, Sloane stepped forward and slapped him on the arm. “Come on; let’s get our asses over to Bob’s Big Boy for some lunch, huh? I always think better on a sugar rush, and I need my daily shake.”

  Dill sat with a black coffee in front of him, watching Sloane talk on his radio and jot notes in his spiral pad. Beside that, Sloane’s chocolate milkshake stood half finished. Or half unfinished, Dill thought.

  When Sloane set down the radio, he grinned proudly at the younger detective—as if he himself had uncovered what he was about to reveal—and said, “We have an ID on our girl who drowned in a vacant lot. Angela Renee Turner . . . a runaway from Philadelphia. Arrested at seventeen-years-old for drugs and theft, then ran away from the rehab center they had her in.”

  “Ran away when?”

  “Four years ago.”

  “Whoa; four years. Well, looks like we better talk to people in Philly . . . see if anybody knew she was heading to Los Angeles, and if so, where she might have been staying. Who she knew out here.”

  “Too bad for the parents, when they hear about this.”

  Dill lifted his coffee mug for a sip. “Yup.”

  “But we’ll need to contact her folks, see what they might tell us.”