She reached over and kissed me very deeply and very passionately and what happened next was fully flesh and blood. My wife noticed it, too.
“I think you’re gonna be fine,” she said, smiling.
Easy for her to say. She hugged me closer and gave me a kiss that was the golden, glowing, feathery tips of an angel’s wings.
“Chocolate pancakes are waiting,” she whispered.
I patted my belly button. Or maybe just my gut. “Heck. I believe I’ll have some bacon on the side.”
Live a little. Why not?
THE END
Table of Contents
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This book has been rejected 117 times. And it’s all the fault of that evil, soul-hopping spirit that took over Richard Coldiron’s head. Or maybe the other four people in there.
AS I DIE LYING
By Scott Nicholson
Writing as Richard Coldiron
Or Maybe the Evil Spirit That Possessed Them Both
Copyright © 2010 Scott Nicholson
www.hauntedcomputer.com
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Begin at the beginning.
In an autobiography, that means you have to relive your life. And that’s the last thing I want to do. Once was more than enough. And five times was far too many.
Unless it’s six, in which case all that follows was written by that other guy, the one trying to hitchhike my story and make me sound worse than I really am. If he wasn’t such a lousy writer, this would have been published long ago and we wouldn’t have gotten to the end. Some of us might have lived happily ever after.
Rest assured, anytime I look cruel, inept, or sociopathic in this story, it’s because he’s changed things around. He wants a fall guy so he can get away with murder. My murder. Maybe your murder, too.
So I look for evidence. Everything else is just metaphysical tourism.
Photographs and locks of hair, pressed flowers and postcards, teddy bears and blue ribbons. Memories, souvenirs, keepsakes, and your girlfriend’s big toe. Old love letters and other horrors, agonies, scars. Why do we hoard such things?
I’ve come to believe it’s because we need proof.
History, even revisionist history, is written by the winners. So if you want to tell the whole story, the true story, get it out there yourself and make everyone believe. With luck and a shrewd marketing push, it’s a bestseller. If you’re pathetic, you’re filed in Self-Help. If this book is published under the last name “Zwiecker” and ends up on the bottom shelf in the fantasy section, then you’ll know he’s won.
Publish or perish, they say. We plan to do both, though we’re not sure in which order.
So when I begin at the beginning, I’ll skip the part where Mother bled between her legs and Daddy was sitting on the couch with a bottle of Jack as I squirted into Ottaqua, Iowa, like a bloody watermelon seed.
Ray Bradbury claims to remember being born. He’s a great writer, but that’s total bullshit. Nobody remembers, but people treat it like it’s a big deal. You carry your birth date around all your life and it nails you to Social Security cards, party invitations, and all those forms you fill out in school. Then, on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels in a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy.
In the end, all you get is a few words.
This is all the proof I can offer:
I was on my hands and knees when memory cursed me, awareness laughed in my face, and ego slipped into my head like an ice cream ghost. Light streamed through the window, golden and warm. Light was good. Light was safe, even though it tasted like dust.
The brown thing was in the shadows. It was soft and smelled like Mother, all cigarettes and Ivory soap and things beyond my vocabulary like “senescence.” My arms and legs wriggled toward the brown thing, my belly skinning across the floor. I reached the shadow. My fingers closed on the fur and I was pulling it closer when the boot came down on my hand.
My hand was on fire and my eyes were sparks and my chest was a Play-Doh volcano. The boot stretched out and up into the dark, taller than a tree. It was a man built of midnight and stitches and thunder. He bent down and picked up the brown thing. His boots shook the floor as he stomped into the light but all I could see was the scuffed leather, worn laces, and cracked tongue of the boot near my face.
Then the boots danced. They licked me and painted me with bright strips of color. The thunder waltzed me away from my room to a land that light never reached.
But I wasn’t alone.
“Hello,” the boy said. Like the midnight man, the boy clung to the shadows. He might have been there the whole time and I hadn’t seen him.
“Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“I don’t like friends.” I put my hand in my mouth and tried to suck the sore away.
“Chin up, pup. He’s gone now.”
The boy sounded brave, plus I had nowhere else to run. “Did you send him away?”
“No, I dragged you in here where it’s safe.”
“Where are we?”
“I call it the Bone House.”
“It’s dark.”
“Here’s your teddy bear.” He held it out to me.
I grabbed it and brushed its soft fabric against my cheek until my tears were cold.
“Do you trust me?” my friend said.
I nodded, not sure if he could see me.
“Okay,” he said. “You have to leave the Bone House now, but I’ll be here to help whenever you need me.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
And he kept his promise, except that “hoping to die” part. The boy learned how to hide me when we heard the boots in the hallway. Into the closet, buried under broken toys and dirty blankets and a Big Bird poster. Under the bed, cuddling dust bunnies with my nose as the boots walked across the floor, inches from my face. Behind the desk, chewing my lip, afraid to breathe until the midnight man gave up and shambled off to find Mother instead.
When I heard the boots in the kitchen, the King Kong roar and shattering of glass, Mother’s high squeaking Godzilla cries, I knew I had escaped again. The boots stomped until they grew tired, until the thunder spent its fury. Then my friend and I would share a smile. We had lived to hide another day.
My friend taught me a simple game.
Dodge the boots.
Run and hide.
Become invisible when you could, hold your breath when you couldn’t.
But nobody wins the game every time. And the odds favored the midnight man. He seemed to grow taller and stronger and darker the better we got at hiding. When he found me, plucked me out of my corners and nooks, held me up with a thick trembling arm, then I knew it was time to let my friend have this body. My friend would take the punishment while I went away to the Bone House. I hate to say it, but I think he even liked it a little.
I’d watch from the window as the boots did their dance, crushed a minuet across my friend’s legs, waltzed over his kidneys, and jitterbugged up his spine. I knew it was me being beaten, my bruised flesh that I would eventually revisit, but at least I didn’t have to suffer. My friend did that for me. That’s how much my friend loved me.
We would talk, after. He would give me back my body, with its red welts and pink scrapes, and go into his hidden room in the Bone House. Since it hurt to move, I would huddle in my squeaky bed with my teddy bear. I tasted salt and sometimes blood. My friend would whisper soothing words inside my head.
“You’re okay now, Richard. Midnight is over.”
I trembled. For both of us.
“Did you hear the front door slam?” he said.
I nodded, hugging the raw meat of my legs to my chest as the plains wind banged against the windows. Any storm was welcome as long as it hid the sound of boots.
“He’s gone. You can breathe a
gain.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
My friend didn’t have a name back then. There was only us. He didn’t need a name until later, when things got more complicated and the Bone House became crowded. But I can tell you the teddy bear was named Wee Willie Winky because one of his eyes was stitched too tightly. And my name was Richard. I forgot to tell you that, but you can see it on the cover of the book, unless that other guy changed it.
“Did he hurt you bad?” Secretly, I was glad it was him instead of me.
“Not so bad, this time. Not like the time when the two teeth got loose and I bit my tongue. That time, even your mother got scared.”
“Yeah, remember how she pushed the midnight man away and picked you up?” I said. “With your arm bent out at that funny angle, like you had an extra elbow? That was the only time she ever tried to stop him.”
“They were nice to me at the hospital. They gave me a lollipop, and that pretty nurse said she’d never seen such a brave young man.”
I wished I’d been around for that lollipop. Maybe he’d tricked me so he could have the lollipop instead of me. “What does ‘brave’ mean?”
“It’s when bad things happen and you don’t cry.” He’d probably learned that from a book in school, or maybe church, or that one time we went to a Boy Scout meeting.
“Are you brave?”
“I don’t know. But when they asked me how it happened, I said it just the way Mother told me. She made me keep saying it over and over in the car. ‘I fell down the steps, and put out my arm to stop.’“
“Why did she want you to make up a story like that?” I didn’t care why, but this was my friend and I liked the way he talked. Plus he was sharing a very important lesson in how to lie, and what boy could resist such a thing?
“It wasn’t a story. You know how she says if you believe something hard enough, you can make it true? Well, she wanted that story to be true. She believed it more.”
I pulled the blankets tight under my chin. The fabric was scratchy, like Father’s cheeks. “Do you remember what really happened?”
“I didn’t hide good enough, that’s all.”
“Sometimes, just before he goes to sleep, or when he’s on the couch watching TV, he makes me take the boots off his feet. They’re not so scary when they’re off.”
“Tongues hanging out. Tired dogs. But they sure are stinky. Wee willie stinky.”
I looked up at the ceiling, at the shadows of trees dancing in front of the streetlights. The room smelled of purple Kool-Aid and old socks and rats behind the walls, and sometimes I prayed to Jesus for clean laundry. If my friend wasn’t around, I’d sometimes throw in a prayer for candy or a Matchbox car. But the ceiling was in the way, so I couldn’t see the sky or heaven. “Maybe one night we could hide the boots after he’s asleep.”
“Then he’d really be mad,” the voice said. Sometimes my friend spoke out loud instead of just thinking it, and that was a little scary until I got used to it. I’m glad it didn’t happen when other people were around. Not often, anyway.
“Maybe it’s the boots that make him mad.”
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s stupid to be brave.”
“Does Mother hate the boots?” I asked questions I was afraid to answer. He never minded when I tricked him into telling the truth once in a while.
“I don’t know. She keeps telling the midnight man ‘I love you.’“
“Maybe there are different kinds of love. She likes to hold me and sing to me. She says she loves me and kisses me on the forehead and tucks me under the blankets even when she knows the midnight man is coming. Even when she knows he’s got his boots on.”
“Maybe he would hurt her more if she didn’t love him, so she’s afraid to stop.”
I swallowed hard. Darkness crawled in from the corners, its edges sharp. I put my head under the pillow. Love was easy when it was just some invisible person in your head, but when you had to pretend to love in the real world, who wouldn’t be a little crazy and afraid? “Love means you have to be brave?”
“Sometimes your mother cries when she says she loves you. That means she’s either lying or she’s not brave.”
My friend was clever but I usually came up with a comeback, because in your own autobiography you don’t want anybody to think you’re playing second fiddle or fifth harmonica or ninth penny whistle. “But how can she love me and the midnight man at the same time?”
“Maybe she only loves the midnight man when his boots are off. Maybe they’re sole mates. Get it, s-o-l-e?”
“Funny, ha ha. Love shouldn’t go on and off like that. I love you all the time. And I don’t want to die like Jesus had to before He could get people to love Him,” I said to the person in my head. Throwing in the Jesus bit was a little melodramatic, seeing as how we’d only been to church three times, and only one of them didn’t involve food. You can sure get the best coconut cakes at church.
“I love you, Richard,” he said. “I’ll never leave you. I won’t let you get hurt.”
I tucked Wee under my bruised arm. Wads of cotton spilled from the rips in its neck and leg. The midnight man had done that, but Wee didn’t have an invisible friend to hide him, and I wasn’t sharing mine. “It’s not so bad hiding. Inside, where it’s dark. I wish we could stay there all the time.”
“We can’t both go into the Bone House.”
“Why not?”
“Who would watch Wee? Wee can never be alone.”
My friend loved double meanings and playing with words. It helped pass the time when he was stuck in the Bone House. And maybe he wanted to be a writer when he grew up, just like everybody else. But first he’d have to live long enough to grow up.
Thump thump.
Our eyes opened, our shared heart boomed like the storm rolling down the hallway, but only one of us got to flee for the hidden room inside my skull.
Me first. Always me.
“Up the stairs, away, away, away,” whispered my friend. “Sounds like someone’s putting his foot down.”
And off I’d go.
CHAPTER TWO
Later I learned that the midnight man was only my father. The boots visited less often as I got older, and the friend inside my head didn’t come out much. Rather, I didn’t go inside the Bone House to see him.
I found other playmates at school, ones you could see and who talked with real voices. I learned the world was much bigger than the nightmares trapped between the walls of my bedroom. Life smelled of chalk and Hope Hill’s perfume and burning leaves and strawberry milkshake. My childish fears seemed silly out under the sunshine, where boys and girls played kick ball and pain was farther away than Jesus or the clouds in the blue sky or other insubstantial, amorphous objects.
Father preserved his boot leather but discovered other ways to torture. He attacked with words, and maybe that’s where I get my literary talent. Not that I want to give that bastard any credit at all for this book, since the byline is up for debate. But he could really pour it on.
He invented a dozen fresh insults, doused acid on my psyche, and dubbed me “Dumbbell.” This seemed to give him more pleasure than the physical abuse. Mother had begun her descent from youth into old age without slowing down for the middle years. She was weary from lifting her forearms to fend off the blows, beaten down by the sight of her own emaciated and battered flesh, worn from clinging to the spidery threads of black hope. Father, however, seemed to grow younger, as if he’d tapped a perverted fountain of youth, Narcissus at a whiskey vat.
Father worked at the John Deere plant, spot welding harrow joints and tractor wheels. He helped make the machines for the slaves of the soil, those who turned the dark drift and loess of the Iowa tableland. He was chained to the dirt without even the pleasure of holding it in his hand, kicking at it with his scuffed boots, or checking the sky for portents. He had wanted to be a crop duster, but never had the time and money to get his pilot’s license.
> Perhaps the air could have stolen his anger. Perhaps his frustration was in being earthbound, because he was particularly venomous after returning from weekend air shows in Cedar Falls or Des Moines. On the Christmas I was nine, he gave me a model kit for a Northrop P-61 Black Widow fighter, and we spent the snowy afternoon carefully putting it together. He let me glue the fuselage myself and guided my hands as I joined the propeller and engine parts.
His mouth watered as he concentrated on the more tedious attachments, and he sucked in his drool with a whistling sound before it could dribble down his chin. He had not even been drinking that day, or at least his breath didn’t smell like vinegar and shoe polish yet. He made engine noises with his mouth, as if he were imagining a scale model of himself at the controls. We applied the decals just as Mother pulled the steaming golden turkey from the oven.
Never had so much laughter filled that usually sullen apartment. My stocking was bloated with peppermints, walnuts, and lemon drops, and I shared the bounty with my parents. We huddled around the skeleton of the turkey, its alabaster bones a silent centerpiece to the gathering. We even sang “White Christmas” together, at least the few lines we knew. Father sang in a bassy parody of Bing Crosby, Mother bleated half-heartedly, and I croaked in an atonal barrage of sound that was more percussion than harmony.
The model plane crash-landed under the heel of Father’s boot two days later, after his first day back at the plant. It was my fault, I admit. I just didn’t hide it good enough. Christmas was over, and none of us were making any resolutions for the new year. Father renewed his verbal assaults, calling me “Little bastard” and “Fuckwit,” stringing together seventeen dirty words in fits of misplaced poetic genius, but his pet name for me was “Shit For Brains.”
One day I brought home my report card, and he looked down the neat rows of A’s until he found my C in citizenship.
“Hey, Shit For Brains, what’s this C for?” he bellowed, spittle and bourbon mist spraying out of his mouth. The cruel muscles of his forearms bulged under the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt, the toes of his boots flexing. “Your teacher says here, ‘Richard doesn’t get along well with the other students. He fails to participate in class activities.’ Now what kind of horseshit is that?”
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