“She doesn’t love us,” I said. The knife quivered with a life of its own, animated by the Insider’s raw hatred of the human race, by my own need for completion.
“Now, Richard. Rip the bitch. You know you want to. You know you will.”
“No light,” I said.
“Kill her.”
“Make me.”
My head was splitting open as if the tectonic plates of my skull were grinding against each other. Rusty nails probed my fingertips, painting silver strips of agony across my mind. My heart blazed with the sulfur of the Insider’s rage. But I couldn’t surrender yet. She was the mother of my child.
Besides, I loved her.
That L thing.
What can you do?
“Run,” I croaked, pointing toward Arlie’s cabin. Beth pulled the handle and the door opened. She kicked it wide against the snow and jumped into the meadow. I watched as she ran twenty feet away, struggling against the surf of whiteness. She took one look back, but I waved her away. Then she was gone, disappearing into the trees.
Richard, Richard, Richard. After all I’ve done for you. I was going to be all Mister Nice Guy, let you have a little fun, enjoy your misery a while longer, watch as you cut up your lover and your unborn child and then your mother. I was going to spare you the guilt. I was going to hang around so you could blame it on me.
But now.. .NOW. . .you’ve made me angry. Now I’ll just have to go ahead and join with Beth. Now I’ll just have to take my pleasure from the other side, as SHE cuts YOU into little pieces. A good host swings both ways and plots twists can always swallow their own tails and, besides, you’ve had no respect for any of us, despite paying lip service to trust.
The Insider’s voice was deep as tombs and dusty as crypts and bright as blood and sharp as bone. My blood vessels were electric wires, my skin was cellophane. The fucker had fooled me, played me for a patsy, made me insane, then was ready to cast me aside like a squishy rubber.
Come to think of it, that’s the kind of thing you do to the people you love.
So long, Richard. It’s been fun. But all good things must end. It’s a shame you won’t get to keep all these sweet memories, but that’s life, right? Oh, and say hello to Virginia for me.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “You begged me to take you into my heart, and now you’re stuck.”
The Little People had played possum, just like we had planned. We swarmed the Insider again. I joined them. Five against one. Pretty good odds.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I stumbled out of the car and fell in the snow. We lifted me to my feet, as if dangling from the strings of some high puppet master with palsy.
“It’s just like I said it would be,” Bookworm said.
“Classic three-act structure,” Mister Milktoast said. “Big deal. I saw it coming.”
“Yeah, what do you want, a fucking medal or something?” said Loverboy. He glanced wistfully at the tracks Beth had made in the snow. “I’m going to miss that little bounce-bunny.”
“Not now, guys,” I said. “The Insider’s not done yet. Can’t you feel it squirming in the crawlspace?”
I staggered in the opposite direction, away from Arlie’s cabin, toward the slopes of Widow’s Peak. It rose grand and white and pure, bristling with jack pine and stiff hickory and white ash and brittle laurel. The wind whipped around the mountain’s passive face. It would welcome us. It would open its granite heart to us, lock us in its frozen soul forever. It was older than the Insider, older than imagined heavens and gods and devils and the other toxic by-products of the human race.
My mind exploded with pain as the Insider rose. It punched me with its fist of razor blades. But I loved it. I loved the Insider more than anything in the world.
“Self-actualization,” said Mister Milktoast. “Egocide. A masochist’s massacre, masturbatory manslaughter.”
“All you knead is love,” Loverboy said.
“Hey, you’re catching on,” Mister Milktoast said. “Maybe next time I’ll give you more lines.”
“It was always love,” Bookworm said. “And don’t forget, I’m the writer here.”
“You’ve never loved, none of you,” the Insider rumbled, thunder in a teapot. “That’s why I could do anything I wanted. My power always came from you.”
“No dice, Insider. You can’t lay your little guilt trip on me anymore,” I said.
I said it. Me. Forget Bookworm. I was the writer here and I got to change things around to suit me before I mailed it off to my agent.
“You were always mine, Richard Coldiron,” the Insider said.
“And I have always loved you.”
“No. You despise me. Because I am you.”
“And that’s why we love you,” Bookworm said. “Because you are us.”
I was deep in the trees now, in the hushed world of winter, the Subaru and Arlie’s cabin out of sight. The air was thin and cold and sweet. My lungs sucked it in and welcomed its harshness. Snowflakes fell in their endless whispers.
The Insider struggled, and I knew it was trying to escape me then. It sensed that it was trapped. We had built a prison with our love. Turned the Bone House into an improvised Alcatraz, with hope for barbed wire and self-esteem for bricks, surrounded by a gooey moat of sacrifice and topped with a weathervane that pointed away from ill winds.
“That’s it, big boy, come into my heart. Come on, Angel Baby. It’s open, a room with a view just for you,” I said. “Believe in me.”
“We all love you, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said.
I concentrated on the swirling thing in my chest. “You see, Insider,” I said, as my feet churned through the snow between the silent trees. “In your search for light, you forgot the brightest light of all.”
“The inner light,” said Bookworm.
“Right on, bro’,” Loverboy said. “I like to flip a pancake as much as the next guy, but it’s not much fun when the Insider is holding the spatula.”
“Is that why you finally decided to join us, Loverboy?” I asked through chattering teeth.
“Hell, yeah. All for one, and all that jack-off crap. Peace, free love, and fucking understanding, my man. But let’s get one thing straight. I love you guys, but don’t go getting sweet on me now. I’m an Alpha male psycho and that’s that. And as soon as we’re rid of this Insider bastard, I’m going to cast some fucking loaves upon the waters.”
The Insider churned, flailed, sliced. I fell to my knees. If only I could love it enough, hold it in my heart, smother it with my light. “We love you,” I said.
It was our new mantra, so much more tangible than Flower Power ideals, so much more focused than Tibetan chants, so much more sincere than the Lord’s Prayer. Hate as the highest achievement of love. Selfishness boiled down to its purest essence. Love as the means to its own self-serving end.
An unbroken circle jerk.
“Why?” It was weaker now, staggered by the light, feeble under the reflection of its own mirror, failing to hold up under close examination. “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
“Don’t try to play the Jesus card, my midnight friend,” I said. “This love goes deeper than self-sacrifice. No more martyrs allowed in the Bone House. This love goes all the way to the fucking foundation.”
“And you, too, Little Hitler? I thought, of all of them, you would understand...and appreciate...what I’ve done.”
“I would gladly have followed you through eternity, to the next host and beyond,” Little Hitler said. He was weeping and the tears froze on my cheeks. “But your hate isn’t sincere enough. You only serve yourself. You say you are what humans have made you become. But we hate because we want to, not because we have to. Free will.”
“He’s right, Mister Badass Soulsucker,” said Loverboy. “You laugh at us humans, but you’re worse than any of us. Sure, we’re all slaves to our pathetic needs. But in here, we’ve all got to stick together.”
“Safest sex,” Mister Milktoast said.
“Get it?”
“Hey, Mister M, you’ve finally turned that protected love of yours back home,” said Bookworm. “Back to Richard. To this fabulist construct, this comic-book hero, this inconsistent protagonist—”
“Don’t go getting faggy,” Loverboy said. “You’ll always be Dickworm to me. Not that ‘always’ looks like it’s going to last a hell of a lot longer. But what you told us made sense. At the heart of the matter, the fuck-all and be-all, is that we really are one. We belong to this dick-squiggled Richard-meat, for better or worse. But the Insider...the Insider’s a frigging illegal alien. It just bootscooted the fuck on in here without even passing ‘Go,’ much less asking for a green card.”
“And you love Richard more than you love the Insider?”
“Dance with the bitch what brung you, that’s what I say.”
We clenched our heart, squeezing down on the hot black tarball of the Insider. Our love was a ring of hellfire, roasting the Insider in its own sorry juices. That’s when the curtain of black pain dropped over my mind and I fell face-first into the snow...
And I was riding a high cloud, a huge tuft of warm ice cream that rocked gently up and down like an angelic hobby horse. The sun showered golden light and rainbows. I looked down on the earth below, a drugged king on a magic carpet. The ground was wrapped in a crystal mist.
The cloud accelerated and swooped and the thin edges of the horizon crumbled away, dropping off into the blackness that lurked underneath the corners of the world. Dark cracks ran through the mist and the scene shattered like a glass photograph smashed with a hammer.
The shards collected and coalesced into the image of Mother’s face, with a jagged skinscape and eyes that were pools of dead hate set against a bleak fog. The face changed and slithered into a thousand likenesses, each forming for a split second before giving way to the next, and all, all, screaming.
I fell into the dark maw of open mouths and I looked down the throat at an ocean of writhing maggots, then I was falling falling falling into blackness and I saw that the maggots weren’t maggots at all, they were naked human beings, and the great throat was closing and swallowing—
“Wake up, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said.
I opened my eyes against the cold snow. An avalanche roared in my ears. My nose was bleeding and my fingers were numb from frostbite.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, the exhaust of my words making tiny furrows in the snow. “You’re not getting Mother.”
The Insider had almost escaped, almost slipped out of my heart and into my mind. From there to drag its little voodoo bag of horrors to the one who had never meant any harm. But I wasn’t about to let Mother get hurt any worse than she already had.
“Besides,” Bookworm said. “If this ends with, ‘And it was all a dream,’ I’m going to kill you myself.”
“You’re a clever bastard, Insider,” I said, lifting myself from the frozen white. Drops of blood leaked down my face into the snow. “Trying to go where you can hurt me the most. Still eating my guilt. But guess who’s smiling now?”
I hoped the pain in my abdomen meant that the Insider was still locked away. Either that or a hundred hungry rats had been loosed in my bowels.
“You were falling asleep, Richie-wuss,” said Loverboy. “And you know what happens when you sleep. That’s one wet dream nobody wakes from.”
“Yeah,” Little Hitler said. “Leaving us here to do all your dirty work. Not that I mind too much. I’ve grown fond of your guilt and misery.”
“I had a hell of a nightmare,” I said. “Turned out we were the bad guys.”
“Us? Bad?” Little Hitler said. “That’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said about me. You must really love us.”
“I love everybody. It’s a wonderful life. A fucking Jimmy Stewart remake with a contemporary spin and no character realizations at all.”
“I can’t wait for this to be over,” Loverboy said. “Nothing personal, but you’re getting on my goddamned nerves. Say, you think Beth will ever want to do the old Humpty-Dumpty-Roll-Over-and-Bump-Me again?”
“As cold as it is?” Mister Milktoast said. “I predict a serious case of blue balls in your future.”
Bookworm came out, Bookworm who had been the psychic superglue that had held us together through our fight with the Insider. The bookbinder, the plotter, the editor, the typesetter. “It’s not sex you’re after, Loverboy. You just want to be accepted. You just want to be a part of something bigger than yourself. An unconditional love.”
“Bite me, Bibliofuck. I’m in it for the fucking donut holes.”
“We all live to serve.”
“And we serve the light menu,” I said. “Low carb, low cal, tastes great, less filling.”
The glow expanded in my chest, radiating out from my poisoned heart. The black essence of the Insider smoldered and fumed underneath the heat of our love. The love was big, overwhelming all of us. This was the hero’s journey, the most powerful myth, the purpose of all stories.
I waded through the surf of snow, dragging my tired legs as if they were tree stumps. The snow was still falling, and fat dreamy flakes collected on my eyelashes. My breath sent frozen fogs into the evening twilight. The mountain called me, commanded me forward.
I would never solve the riddle of the Insider. It was a trick of nature, just another entity, just another parasite in a universe of parasites. Just part of the cosmic soup. Maybe horrible in human terms, but against the backdrop of an incomprehensible universe, it could be understood.
That monster was made, not born. Built from pieces of hopelessness and pain, from loneliness and guilt, brought to life by the energy of sin. Just another thing that needed belief and faith to sustain it. Just another psychic vampire trying to claim a stake.
Love was the real mystery. Love was the ultimate weapon. Love could defeat the cruelest monsters. But was love ultimately just human vanity? Or did it come from somewhere outside all of us?
Good and evil were nothing but concepts in Bookworm’s cheesy pulp fiction. They had no place in my autobiography. All I could do was pay for my own sins and let the theme fall to the eye of the beholder.
Bookworm murmured drowsily. “Isn’t it a bit deflating that the main character doesn’t find resolution through another person? Shouldn’t our love for Beth serve as the redemptive force?”
“Good question,” I said. I loved her, but I’d ditched her before the story was over. Maybe that said a lot. Maybe not.
The dark forest surrounded me. The trees stood like soldiers lining both sides of a vast hall, as if I were meeting royalty, kissing Odin’s ring in Valhalla. The cracked bark of wild cherry peeled off in coppery strips. Laurel bowed humbly under the crush of snow, its waxy green leaves curled from the cold. A stunted spruce leaned against the dead limbs of an oak. The forest was a silent temple. The wind whispered its prayers in the high branches.
Bookworm called out, weak and chilled. “Richard, I think...I used too much of myself...spelled it all out...”
“Alphabetical ardor,” Mister Milktoast said.
“Hang in there,” I said, comforting my discerning proofreader. “We’ve almost won.”
“No, I served my role. Last in, first out, the aesthetic cycle. Aristotle said the end was in the beginning, after all. Now I’m writing myself out of the story. Keep the faith...roomie.”
And Bookworm was gone, adrift like invisible smoke, with scarcely a twinge to mark his passing. The Insider scrambled toward the sudden void, seeking to consume some of the psychic residue and inhabit the empty room. We kicked his ass back into the crawlspace of my heart. A sewer pipe must have broken in the Bone House, because something smelled awfully ripe down there.
The cold settled into my marrow like dull fire and carved its pockets of pain in my fingers and toes. The snow fell even faster, a foot thick and skirling. The world was being buried, succumbing to the virginal suffocating whiteness. I looked behind me at my tracks and saw that they were already f
illed and swept smooth, as if I had never been. Hot bile rose in my trachea and boots rattled my rib cage. The Insider was summoning its strength for a final run at the back door.
“Allow me,” said Little Hitler. “I could use a good hurt.”
He swallowed, ten-penny nails and fishhooks, charcoal and blood, stardust and comet ice, a dollar’s worth of candy, acid tears all sliding away. He absorbed it and relished the pain, then scurried down whatever dark corridor of my mind he had come from. He turned a corner and disappeared forever.
“So long, old pal,” I said, but my words died in the snowscape. He might have been the first serial killer in history who’d never actually killed anyone. But let him have his delusions.
“First Dickworm, now Little Diddler. What the fuck is going on here, Richie?” Loverboy said. He was flapping like a buzzard in a canary cage, rolling like a fifth wheel, dangling like an imperfect participle.
“Ultimately, we are each responsible for ourselves,” I said. “All of them. That’s one of the problems with being human and having free will.”
My legs kept moving, plowing toward the mountaintop that was always just out of sight. I was a ghost hovering beyond my meat. Now I knew how my Little People felt, indentured servants to a mass of dust and energy. No wonder they had always fought so hard for face time. No one likes to share a house with selfish roommates who air dirty laundry all over the place.
“But I thought we were supposed to be winning.” Loverboy sounded weak. “No fair. This wet dream is frozen. My meat missile is an icicle.”
“If you can’t stand the cold, get out of the refrigerator,” said Mister Milktoast.
“Hey, fuck both of you and the busted condoms you rode in on,” said Loverboy.
“That’s the way the donut crumbles, Biscuit Dick,” answered Mister Milktoast.
“Bookfart set me up. When he was getting us to join, he didn’t say anything about this part of the deal. This dying part.”
I fell to my knees. My limbs were leaden, painted with snow, sopped in the gravy of dusk. Night was falling hard, a true night, with sharp edges and thick skin. White snow, black night. I wished Bookworm were around to sort out the symbolism.
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 91
