Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  (Didn’t have any.)

  There could be countless reasons why she had no memory. She understood this was a big city with hosts of evildoers, capable of crimes extreme enough to traumatize any young girl into the need to forget everything. No, not countless reasons. How did the beginning to the old TV series go? She murmured, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City…”

  Not that she recalled how she happened to know that. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Myrtle caught movement. A shabby creature shuffled into that circle of weak light. He called to her with greasy fingers tweaked and bidding, “Come here, girlie.”

  His voice was thick with cheap booze, breath rancid. His skin was a liver-damage grayish-yellow. “Come here, girlie.”

  “Hey! I seen her first!” A second guy jumped out of another ragged shadow pile.

  “Ya did not!” the first protested, swinging away from her, directing that vile air in his mouth toward this other man. The second man launched into him, bending low, swooping in like a combination wrestler and cat. They began to fight. They bit and scratched and punched, rolling in the filth on the ground. They rolled toward a wall. One ended up on top with the other at an awkward position with back on the ground and neck bent to place the back of the head against that wall. The one on top commenced to repeatedly cracking the other’s skull against this wall. The muscles in the neck twisted and she heard the vertebrae pop, even as the man on the bottom managed to pull a sharp object from his pocket and stab it into the top man’s shoulder and side, once—twice—three times. The fourth time seemed to be on reflex only, but higher, into the top man’s face, skewering an already bloodshot eye.

  Myrtle hadn’t backed off much, she was too mesmerized. She didn’t move again until both men slumped, the top one tumbling sideways to the ground. She crept forward then, bending slowly in case one or both should show they’d only been playing possum and made a grab for her. She touched the neck of the top man. There was no pulse even though the body shuddered, causing her to jerk her fingers away. She noticed the object still embedded in the eye, not really deep but obviously far enough it had struck the brain. It was a fork.

  She checked the bottom man. He still had a pulse but it was weakening. His mouth worked as if he was trying to say something, to cry for help perhaps. She wouldn’t get close enough to listen. Whatever his last words were would never be recorded by anyone. They would enter the air as useless things, echoing down the tunnels forever in search of a confessor ear.

  Myrtle went through their pockets. The top man had 27 cents and a piece of paper with a bright dot on it. The bottom man’s wealth consisted of half a Payday candy bar and three quarters of a pint of rotgut gin. She ate the candy and the sugary dot, then drank down the gin.

  Within an hour or so—time in the dark was hard to guess without a clock—she was hallucinating. She imagined herself with wings flying up and down the tunnels.

  Myrtle found a pen somewhere and began to draw upon a concrete wall. Did she have any talent for it? No… But it was fun. It seemed to empty her mind out a little—even of things she didn’t think she understood at all.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 4

  SHEOL’S DITCH,

  1972

  Mr. and Mrs. Cave were both so high neither parent even knew that three-year-old Jason was in the room, concealed in the closet, watching them get it on in their bed of tie-dyed sheets. They had illustrated each other in non-toxic, washable body paints, obscene with finger monkeys and knuckle sodomite clowns. Darker shades were changed to watercolor pastels as they smeared and diluted with saliva, sweat and semen. The room stank of whiskey sours, musk, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and a stiffly unwashed pile of clothes in a corner reaching halfway to the cracking plaster ceiling. They grappled one another fiercely and languidly at turns, fingertips straying out to gesticulate dragons, to trace invisible gorgons into the air. They babbled sappy Aquarian Age endearments, Sumerian blasphemies, hippie homily idiocies as the L.S.D. rocked them through the night hours.

  The stereo blared out Arthur Brown (from The Crazy World of Author Brown). The record was scratched and skipping, the worn diamond needle playing over and over like a growling mantra, “I am the god of hellfire…”

  “I am the god of hellfire…”

  From time to time Jason would giggle, suppressing it behind his hand. Lord, wouldn’t want them to catch him in here, seeing all sorts of paisley scorpions and polka dotted humdinger cobras watusi-ing across the topsy turvy rumps of his humping progenitors. He’d snagged a precious square of their best acid test paper and was tripping the spider bite fandango. They’d actually given him the good stuff a few times, just to watch him go strange and try to eat the cat. But after he’d freaked out bad on the last jaunt, Mom and Dad had decreed no more lysergia for the tyke.

  “Welfare will come haul your tiny pink ass away, Beast,” Mom had explained solemnly, using her nickname for her son, her eyes crinkling up to mere slits with lashes drawn around them in dayglo lime.

  “Too many nosy straights reported your screams to The Man,” Dad had added vehemently, remembering the humiliation of not being able to shut his own kid up.

  “They’ll put you in a foster home full of butt fuckers with coke bottle dicks. As soon as you’re eighteen, Beastie, they’ll pack what’s left of you off to Vietnam, to get your arms and legs blown off and your face turned to oatmeal,” Mom had offered as a further incentive, knowing he’d seen on the six o’clock news the sludge that soldiers became.

  They had found him in the bathroom, during that seizure, flushing the toilet endlessly and letting out a scrotum scrunching shriek each time. They’d tried to make him stop, short of actually physically pulling him out of the bathroom. Well, it was a weird kick, seeing him stand there like that, pushing down on the handle.

  Whoosh! Scream. Whooshsh! Scream. Eyes huge and dark as the centers to shit tornados. They’d pinched him black and blue, slapped him, tweaked his little dinger, pulled out some of his babysoft hair, getting no reaction from him but Whwhooooshsh! Scream. Not even looking at them, just at the swirl of disappearing water.

  Then it finally dawned on their own pharmaceutically enhanced mentalities that the child’s fits were likely to rouse the neighbors into telephoning the fuzz. Because Jason was usually such a quiet kid.

  Yeah, because they fed him downers so he’d sleep while they partied. Or stuffed him with speed so he’d play frantically in his own little dungeon, not wanting to eat and therefore not disturbing their own games.

  “What did you see in there?” Mom and Dad eventually asked him after the cops let them go, the hospital released the child, and a social worker threatened to drop by unannounced whenever she fucking well felt like it.

  Jason had just sucked his thumb. He hadn’t exactly been an easy kid to toilet train anyway. And after this incident he resolutely refused to sit on the porcelain donut at all, relieving himself in the cat’s litter box when he could hold it in no longer, which totally rankled the cat until it split.

  But they’d been guarding him, watching vigilantly for two whole boring weeks of him, them, and a TV fixed on monotonous animated comics. The kid seemed fine now. They were in desperate need of some funky R. and R., so they locked Jason in his room with a peanut butter sandwich, down the hall, newspapers spread on the floor in lieu (loo?) of a litter box, then dropped some white lightning and got nekkid. Three-year-olds were such a bummer. Didn’t know the little dufus had learned to pick locks with a paper clip. Had sneaked down the corridor lined with black light posters of cartoon characters improbably buggering each other, into their space, parental mutual distractions keeping their attentions elsewhere as Dad buried his yellow submarine in Mom’s juicy-in-the-sky smile. Never noticed Jason licking an iridescent spot off the page and then slipping himself into the closet where their few clean clothes jangled on hangers. He didn’t quite shut the door.

  “I am the god of
hellfire…”

  “I am the god of hellfire…”

  For hours of megacosmic thirty-one flavors screwing.

  And then the front door burst open, kicked in by a troll in pendulum-swinging raven fringe, seeming to own three sets of silver fangs, clutching an automatic assault motor that spit rockets. The thunder knocked Jason to the closet floor, sound concussion temporarily reducing his hearing to a roar of congealing sibilance.

  And it might have happened for any number of reasons.

  It might have happened because his parents had an outstanding balance due on their party favors.

  It might have happened because they’d sold some bad chems to somebody with no head for humor.

  It might have happened because some conscientious psycho prick who believed himself to be the archangel of justice had heard they were child abusers.

  It might have happened because the damned possessed stereo needle was stuck in the groove of “I am the god of hellfire…” and had repeated it so often in an arcane but powerfully numerological sequence that it had inadvertantly summoned a violent entity.

  It might have happened because Jason’s mother was once married to another guy. A dealer named Rosh who gave free acid to young girls just arriving in the Ditch. Several thousand mikes until they damned near went comatose. And he’d ball them while Mom took pictures. He’d take the girls out of the apartment, saying, “Gonna go dump ’em in an alley to freak it off.” And she’d just assumed it was what he did. Until she found the shoe box Rosh stashed under a floorboard, with a favorite hash pipe in it and some Thai sticks and a necklace. It looked like a row of pink to brown nut meats dried and strung on a shoe string. She’d made an anonymous call to tip the cops when she figured out they were nipples, leaving the scene until he was packed off to prison. Rosh had been paroled, or had escaped, and now fired off a barrage of lead protests to loyalty’s demise in the twentieth century.

  Yes, she was missing a nipple. Jason could see that when he finally crawled from the closet for a tremulous look-see. But it might have just been blown off. There was no way to tell if it had been carried away. The room was too much of a mess. The blasts had caught the couple in full loin-fused coitus, ripping through both abdomens and turning sets of upper and lower intestines to gruel, virtually severing the two at the hips. The bed had been turned into a feculent cul-de-sac, the mosh of flesh and waste cooling into rippled curds of shadowy wax. A pair of legs dangled over the edge of the mattress. The still intact asshole (with nothing above it but a grimace of bony ham) squeezed out a final squirt, unfolding as loose brown parachutes.

  The boy slowly crept forward, hearing Whoosh! Whwhooooshsh! inside his buzzing head. The toilet on acid had truly terrified him, its mystic undertow seeming to pull him down with it, to some terrible subterranean place into which kids went when they turned up missing.

  But this…fascinated him. As if they’d started mud wrestling and pulled each other apart. Their upper halves, arms outflung, twitched in the drugged corrugations of his swampy vision, oscillating, doing a jellied breast stroke in the blood and manure gumbo, waving him closer. The smell of burnt almond and pig-day-at-the-abattoir destruction lifted him off the floor by his nostrils, bearing him forward, trapped in some von Krafft-Ebing nightmare. Psychopathia Sexualis hallucinations in a language Jason’s brain didn’t comprehend but which his miniature penis apparently responded to, erecting as if to bury itself in a sodden Babylon earth, in a darkly swirling river of ruin.

  He couldn’t stop staring at it, somehow knowing beyond his years that this was the menudo of regeneration. The same atoms that in another arrangement had created him. He watched, expecting something to stir in it, to assume an alchemical shape. Surely it would tell him what to do. Or might it simply lure him nearer? And if he did get closer, then what would happen?

  “I’ve lost them, lost it,” he lisped.

  But what did that mean? No one learned a damned thing from what they owned and kept. It was what they lost that educated them. Innocence equated with ignorance. Innocence gone meant knowledge, and by that the means to survival.

  And they weren’t really gone for there they were, spread out before him, radically transformed, but not bitching at him or pinching him livid or doping him up to keep him entertained by himself. And there was something so compelling in that transformation, as if pining for its original form gave passion back to what had become a numbing hell.

  It was so bizarre that he’d felt empty before this and now could barely contain himself with the excitement inside him.

  Lagoon. La Brea Tar Pit.

  Space as the point of genesis.

  Warm rain at midnight.

  His first Halloween as ghouls bayed beyond the door.

  Mystery Meat.

  Abyss.

  Jason put his hand into it, finding it wet. What was touching this substance if not touching the proxie of oblivion, coming back to life with its stench in your sinuses and its secret madness yours to flaunt?

  He mashed it between his fingers, experiencing a roll of cold nausea in his stomach and a heated rhythm in his loins. He had witnessed sex in diverse positions but still didn’t really know what it was, what mechanics made up the primordial rut, had no instinct for that spellbinding epiphany. He only felt inexorably drawn as if to an intuition of postdiluvian evolution. So he climbed onto the bed and into the swill. Not simply as a child enters his parents’ room, asking for permission to sleep with them because he’s had a nightmare.

  He’d somehow expected it to be bottomless and that he would sink, sink into another existence far from Sheol’s Ditch and the poverty and the infuriating helplessness. But the morass was only shallow.

  ««—»»

  Why did the cops come? The neighbors hadn’t reported the shots—even though they were the same folks who had called when they heard Jason shrieking during the bathroom bummer. When did the cops come?

  The killer had left the front door ajar. Perhaps the postman had alerted them, smelling the carnage—because that much feculent bloodshed stank, steamed out onto the porch in waves ridden by flies. A mailman might have been an army veteran, back from the jungles, recognizing in a shuddering flashback this stench. He might have staggered off the porch to sprawl on the unmowed lawn amid the dandelions which exploded like native huts, sending ghostly wisps to haunt the air. He might have begun screaming, an old—but not too old—wound seeming to bleed afresh, full of shrapnel and bone splinters doing a crimson-spattered ivory boogie through olive-drab uniform material. The neighbors may have noticed him and called the cops. Or maybe he’d stuck his head in the door and gotten a red/brown/black eyefull to match the snootfull of ruin.

  The cops entered. One of them shook his head, clearly sick. “I know these two were lowlifes, but whoever this butcher was, did he have to do the kid, too?” Then Jason sat up, awakened by this comment. The policeman who’d spoken cried out, perceiving what he thought was a dead toddler covered in brains and guts doing a zombie jack-in-the-box. He was already retreating, halfway out the door before his partner shouted, “Get back in here, you piss-pants rookie!”

  Then this one stepped toward the bed, a hand outstretched. “Son? Are you okay?”

  “I had a dream I was there,” the child told him.

  “Where?” the officer asked, looking him over for signs of injury. It was difficult to tell without lifting him out of the swamp. There was so much gore on him but close inspection revealed it wasn’t his. He didn’t appear to be wounded but he had to be suffering from shock.

  “The place where Mom and Dad are now.”

  The cop nodded. “In a better place, yeah. Whole again, not like this.”

  “Yeah, a better place. ’Cept they’re just like this. Over and over,” answered the little boy, smiling. He then curled up in the murder bed again, hoping sleep would return him there.

  ««—»»

  Five years later. Jason dreamed he flew in a helicopter. He’d seen helicopters on TV
and in the movies. It was the same blade-slashing drone except it surrounded him, threatening to buzz his brain into wrinkled, pink, tutti-frutti bubblegum-flavored ice cream. It moved through night, starless, linear. He managed to get to the doorway and look out, down.

  Now there were some lights, far below. Or was he flying upside-down? The illuminated points might be overhead. There were cliffs and peaks and tortured rocky pinnacles. Everywhere bodies, parts of bodies. And creatures with silver jaws and flesh that hung in raven fringe who were free to rip anything at will.

  “Take me there,” he told the pilot who sat at the controls with his back to Jason. “I want to go there.”

  “Only Superman gets into that place,” replied the pilot.

  It was later that Jason realized the guy didn’t mean the one from the comics.

  ««—»»

  He lived now with an old couple, a great aunt and great uncle—although he was never quite sure whether they were related to his late mother or his late father. Merrice and Bowie Cursky didn’t talk about the Caves, ever. Jason called them Ice and Bowtie behind their backs. Boring folks, creakers, retired and living in a ratty old apartment building not four blocks from the house where his parents had been slaughtered. Yet he’d never met them before child services hunted them down to get them to take him in. Flesh and blood. Their flesh and blood. But he’d only ever seen their flesh. He wasn’t convinced either of them had blood.

  When not in school, he went to the library to read. No sense going home where Ice and Bowtie only had the television tuned to one channel. The city had designated some channels for public access for several years—since the late ’60s—and this station always ran old ’50s shows ad nauseum. Not just the usual suspects either, such as I Love Lucy or Leave It To Beaver. Obscure stuff: Bachelor Father and The Life Of Riley. Weird that the station never let the shows creep into the 1960s. For example, they showed only Perry Mason episodes that were originally run from the show’s debut in 1957 to 1959, leaving out anything from 1960 onward—which was another six or seven years for the series! Talk about being lost in a time warp.