by Steve Vernon
I screamed and Markie pulled free.
I lay there in the dirt and the bloodstained concrete, shaking pathetically. I watched helplessly as Markie bent Robert Bruce over, yanked his pants down and crawled inside the boy’s rectum. It was like watching smoke funneling down a drain hole. The tight pink meat seemed to suck the spirit in.
And then it was gone, and Robert Bruce was lying there naked and sobbing and grinning, all at the same time.
“Jesus Christ,” Briarchild said. “His freaking asshole is haunted.”
“Amen,” I whispered.
With enemas like that, who needed friends?
CHAPTER 8 – The Bowels of Hell are as Regular as a Case of Ex-Lax Flavored All-Bran
It is hard to know how to react to some events. Say you come home and find your wife in bed with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, shuddering through a rhythmic, pounding series of angelic orgasms. Do you jump up and shout “Hallelujah!” or do you just shoot her and yourself to death in perfect two barrel harmony?
“What the hell happened?” Briarchild asked, tipping the final body into the dumpster crematorium. We would have to get rid of the dumpster, but I had a friend in the sanitation department who owed me a very large favor.
“Do I look like I know what happened?” I answered. “One minute we’re comfortably cremating Sam Magee, and then all of a sudden we’re hip deep in the bowels of hell.”
“Bowels is right,” Briarchild said. “How in the hell are we going to get that thing out of that kid’s butt?”
That’s what I liked about Briarchild. He didn’t stop for a minute to think about saving his own ass – no pun intended. The kid needed help, and Briarchild was ready to give it to him, whatever the cost.
Robert Bruce looked up. He’d pulled his pants back on and somebody had given him a tattered gray blanket to wrap around himself. He looked like a hobbit friar who’d barely survived a mass mugging by orcs.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I can feel him moving inside of me, but he’s pretty quiet.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I was glad he was okay, but we’d just cremated three more bodies, not counting Montezuma.
“You let me know if he starts kicking,” I said. “We’ll give him the bum’s rush.”
“You figure that thing is still inside him?” Briarchild asked.
“He hasn’t left, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Robert Bruce said.
“You don’t think so? How’s that an answer? There are dead men in that dumpster. Men I knew. What’s to keep the spirit of old Markie from climbing back out of your bunghole and killing half a dozen more of us? What’s to keep him from killing us all?”
I was angry.
I was scared.
I needed to do something.
Even yelling was better than nothing.
Briarchild caught me gently by the arm.
“Simon.” He rarely called me by my first name. “It’s not the boy’s fault.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked. “How do you know for certain?”
He looked at me. He pointed down at Robert Bruce. “You figure it’s his fault he got fucked in the ass? You figure he brought it on himself?”
I looked away.
“What about us?” Briarchild asked. “You figure it’s our fault we’re living in a slaughterhouse? You figure it’s our fault we don’t have homes or jobs or family?”
I turned on him. “Who else’s fault is it? We do what we do. We fit in or we don’t. Did anybody force you to suffocate all those people? Are you going to Freud that onto your father, or maybe blame your faulty toilet training?”
Briarchild stepped back. I kept on going.
“I take responsibility for my own actions. I walked out of the church a long time ago and stepped into my life with both eyes open. This didn’t just happen to me.” I pointed around at The Shambles. “I laid it down and I lived it, just the way the cards fell. I built this hand, and I’ll play it out to the end.”
“That’s one seriously fucked-up metaphor,” Briarchild said. “Noah Webster is probably rolling around in his grave.”
“Are you going to pick on my grammar as well?” I straightened my shoulders. “How’s my posture, while you’re at it?”
“Not bad,” Briarchild said. “For someone who is carrying four dead men on his back.”
That was low.
I glared at Briarchild to let him know what I felt. He whipped his mouth organ from his pocket and he blew me a funeral march in reply. I had to admit it was pretty damn funny.
I looked back at Robert Bruce.
“You can’t stay here,” I said. “You don’t belong.”
I realized the hypocrisy of what I was saying. A homeless ex-priest mass murderer telling someone they don’t belong is about as fucked up as it gets, but I couldn’t let him stay.
I couldn’t take the risk of having any more deaths.
The Shambles was all I had left.
“I’m taking you home,” I said.
There is no place like home. Dorothy said it in the Wizard of Oz, and she wound up a dried up old maid withering to death in the heart of a Kansas cornfield, pleasuring herself with the occasional ripe cob. They don’t show you that in the sequel now do they?
Thomas Wolfe said you couldn’t go home again. He felt so strongly about that sentiment that he went and named a whole book after it.
I was going to find out.
* * *
The house looked dingier in the daylight. It had a lean to it, like it was falling into its own shadow. I felt it calling me like a lonely coastal foghorn.
“I don’t remember it looking this bad,” I said.
“We don’t have to go in,” Robert Bruce said. He wanted to be anywhere else but here.
“We’re here now.” I took his hand. “We might as well go on inside.”
We took another step, and every window blind closed simultaneously, as if something in the house didn’t want to see us coming.
“Stop fucking around,” I warned him. “We’re going inside.”
He looked up at me in surprise.
“I’m onto you,” I said. “I know what you are up to.”
The front door was locked, so we went around back. I noticed that his bedroom window was boarded over, but the back door looked easy enough. I jimmied the latch with my jackknife.
Murder. Breaking and entering.
I wondered if I was teaching the boy any GOOD habits.
I swung the door open.
Robert Bruce’s mother was standing in the doorway.
She had a pretty blue pale face, the color of snow on lonely marble tombstones.
I grabbed hold of my crucifix under my shirt. It hadn’t helped me before, but at least it was something good to hang onto.
“Hi there,” she said, holding a plateful of something out at me. “I’ve been busy baking cookies. I like cookies, don’t you? Robert Bruce loves cookies. These are triple chocolate surprise. The secret is in using the best chocolate chips.”
I felt a bit like the Big Bad Wolf, trying to put the moves on Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. I looked down at the plate. There were cookies, chocolate chip. The cookies reeked of dog shit. I looked closer. They were made of the stuff. One of the chips winked at me and blew me a kiss. Both kiss and wink made fat wet puckering sounds. The whole plate of cookies started singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”
I tasted last night’s soup coming up in the back of my mouth, and I barely held it down. I grinned and gritted my teeth.
“No thanks, Betty Crocker,” I said. “I’m on the Atkins. Low carbs, no fiber, and easy on the sin.”
“No shit,” Robert Bruce’s mother said. “It sounds like a penance march to me.”
I didn’t like the way she said it, like somebody was pulling her strings and making like Edgar Bergen. She had a flatness to her voice and her very presence, like she’d been painted on thin air.
“Damn right,” I said.
I was scared shitless. This woman was stone cold toe-tagged dead, and I knew it. And here she was standing in the doorway offering me dog shit cookies.
“Oh my,” she said, as one of the straps on her apron snapped loose. “I seem to be coming undone.”
Her breasts swelled up like something out of a bad porno cartoon. Her apron fell off, and the buttons of her blouse somehow unzipped themselves. I know that’s not what buttons usually do, but these ones did. I stood there, waiting for the canned porn music to erupt. None of this was real. It was a bad fairy tale with a comic book set-up.
I poked her with my finger, feeling her skin moving like wet plastic wrap, somehow real and not real.
“Oh you can do better than that,” she said.
The rest of her clothes fell off, like a pair of Jerry Lewis trousers. There were shadows and strange shapes where her breasts and pubis ought to have been, as if whoever had made her hadn’t known what a real woman looked like.
“Stop that,” I said to Robert Bruce.
He looked up at me, big innocent eyes, like one of those black velvet puppy pictures.
“You killed her, didn’t you?” I asked. “You killed them both.”
“He wouldn’t stop hurting me. Every night. He’d come into my bed and make me do things.”
“So why’d you kill your mother?”
“She wouldn’t stop him.”
Damn.
I should have known better.
Nobody in this world was truly innocent.
I looked back at the shape of his mother, twisting and gyrating in a sort of mid-air cartoon lap dance. He couldn’t even get that right.
“I told you to stop that. I know she isn’t real.”
Her skin began opening up. I could see cuts erupting on her flesh, as if someone had hacked at her with a carving knife. The wounds grinned and laughed and spat pus at me.
“Stop that,” I yelled.
She faded away, a bit at a time, like a sidewalk chalk painting fading in the rain.
Robert Bruce looked down at his shoes.
I could see that he had wet himself.
I heard the Woody Woodpecker laugh, and looked up just in time to see Markie rising up from somewhere under the floorboards. There were cockroaches crawling over his face. He swooped down toward me, an avenging angel in full flight.
I swung out fast and hard with a good right hook, catching Robert Bruce squarely under the chin. His teeth clicked together hard and then he crumpled like a child’s dropped rag doll.
Markie vanished, quicker than the mother-doll had.
The house held its breath and everything grew still.
I stood there feeling like seventeen kinds of stupid.
* * *
I carried Robert Bruce in my arms, like I was carrying him out of a burning tenement.
When I looked back, the house stood in abandoned darkness. The windows were boarded up, and there was a condemned sign nailed to the front door. I hadn’t seen any of that before, because he hadn’t let me.
“Are you lost?” a voice asked to the left of me.
I looked around. There was an old man standing by the streetlight. I tried to turn away, tried to hide Robert Bruce.
The old man didn’t even seem to notice him.
“That house over there,” I said, feeling like Jimmy Stewart searching for Zuzu’s lost petals. “Who lives there?”
“Why no one,” he said. “There hasn’t been anyone who lived there for a couple of years. It was in all the papers. A young boy killed his family. He smothered his dad with a plastic shopping bag, and then he hacked his mother up with a kitchen knife. He killed them both while they were sleeping.”
“This boy?” I nodded down at Robert Bruce.
The old man squinted as if he were searching for some form of vision.
“What boy?” He clearly couldn’t see Robert Bruce.
I did a quick double check, making certain the old man wasn’t carrying a white cane, or that his seeing eye dog wasn’t irrigating a nearby weeping willow with a sprinkle of warm lemonade.
No sunglasses, either.
Fuck.
Thomas Wolfe was dead right.
CHAPTER 9 – Shambles, Shambles All Fall Down
“He isn’t real,” I said.
Briarchild stared at Robert Bruce.
“He looks real enough to me.”
“That’s the point,” I explained. “We can see him the same way we can see each other. We are all a part of the same world.”
Briarchild was deeply confused.
“So how come you are talking another language?” Briarchild asked.
“How’s that?”
“I don’t get what you’re saying,” Briarchild explained. “You’re talking in Turkish and I’m listening in East Bronx.”
“Look.” I tried doing my best to explain. “Supposing you sit down on a park bench and enjoy the sunshine for a while. Who sees you?”
Briarchild shrugged. “You mean aside from the park police?”
“That’s right,” I said. “They see us, because they’re looking for us. We see each other because we know we’re here. The rest of the world just looks past us. They know if they make eye contact we’re going to hit them up for a hand-out or just make them feel uncomfortable about their own comfort.”
“That almost makes sense.”
“Right,” I said. “Robert Bruce came here because we’re the same as him. We’re killers, and we’re the ignored. He was ignored and he killed.”
“Yeah, but you said that he was dead.”
“He is dead. But enough of him is left over to come and seek us out.”
“So, he’s a ghost?”
“Sort of a ghost, I guess. He is more of a walking memory. He believes he is real. He believes hard enough to keep breathing. And because he believes that hard, Markie sticks around too.”
“It’s hard to lose a father,” Briarchild agreed. “Even if the father that you have lost has seriously fucked you up.”
“You’re damned right,” I said.
“So is he dead?”
Briarchild wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t sure I did either.
“He is and he isn’t. He’s what’s left over. It’s kind of like a memory remembering itself, like an echo of an echo.”
“Come again?” Briarchild asked.
“Exactly.”
“I still don’t think I understand.”
“Do you trust me?”
Briarchild just looked at me, like I’d asked a stupid question.
“Gather everybody up,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night, and I want to make sure everyone is on the same page.”
Briarchild went off to talk to the others.
I looked up toward the ceiling. The meager sunlight that slanted down through the gun slit windows of The Shambles offered a small bit of illumination.
“Are you up there old man?” I asked. “Are you watching down on me, even now?”
I smiled.
God or whoever else might have been up there might have been accidentally listening, but they gave no sign.
Fuck it.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but I had faith.
“Then watch this,” I whispered.
* * *
It can be a long night when you are waiting for the world to end.
We knelt on the concrete floor of The Shambles, forming a rough circle with Robert Bruce lying asleep in the middle of it, tucked in a fresh white sheet and fat feather pillow and a stolen mattress and a pair of Sponge Bob Square Pants pajamas.
We all held hands.
None of them seemed the least bit nervous or embarrassed.
Why should we?
We had nothing to lose.
I prayed out loud.
“St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in our day of battle; protect us against the deceit and wickedness of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.”
It was a warr
ior’s prayer, written for a battlefield.
I figured we were going to need it.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, guess who?”
Markie eeled out from beneath Robert Bruce’s pajama bottoms, like a runaway smoke signal, a long winding strand that linked the two of them. The strand alternated between an amalgamation of rope and chain and snake and a long, twisted phallus.
“Hold fast,” I yelled. “Hang on tight. Ignore the bastard.”
I had a theory, a plan, and a whole lot of faith.
Markie swooped in fast and low and took out two of us, tearing through each of them like a heat seeking multi-auger.
“Hang onto them!” I shouted. “Nobody break the line.”
“He’s killing us!” Briarchild hollered.
“Ignore him,” I shouted. “He isn’t there. He’s just something the kid made up.”
“Dad,” Robert Bruce said.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” I shouted at Robert Bruce. “He isn’t real. You made him up. He can’t hurt us if you just forget about him.”
It was beautiful.
We snubbed him, all of us. We fucked him up the ass with our utter and complete ignorance. He howled around us impotently. It would have worked, but Robert Bruce refused to stop believing.
“Dad!” Robert Bruce called out.
“He’s not your father. He’s lost that right long before you ever killed him. Let him go.”
But Robert Bruce wasn’t listening to me. He was watching his father and trying to hang on.
“Dad,” the boy shouted. “Stay with me.”
It shouldn’t have made sense. How could the boy love someone who’d used him so badly?
“Dad,” Robert Bruce shouted. “I love you.”
And because a boy believed, Markie became that much stronger. He gutted us, one by one. Tearing the heart out of this bum, and the head off of that one. Only bums are harder to kill than cockroaches.
The bastard was beating us.
I pulled free and stepped into the circle.
“Come on, you boy-fucking bastard. It’s me you want, isn’t it? I’m a virgin. I’ve never been fucked.”
That wasn’t quite true. The nuns had definitely seen to that. Not in any physical sense, but they’d sure as hell fucked me up for good and all. It was a wonder what wonders they had accomplished with their rules and their rulers.
