The two times he’d ever tried to change the channel—at ages five and six respectively, as for a brief second he’d been left alone in the living room—he’d had his hands slapped and then taped around the wrists behind him. After that, there was always at least one guardian there with him. He never heard anything about the space program or plane crashes or terrorists until he went to school. Of course, they usually only told you what they wanted you to hear.
So Jason learned about the world at the library. He could pick up the daily body counts by thumbing through the newspapers. He pored, fascinated, over photographs of fire and mayhem in the colorful news magazines, touching the slick pages like peels of enticing flesh. He found one older issue of Time, cover with children who had accidentally been napalmed in Vietnam running in agony up a road. It caused a peculiar tingle in him, so he stripped off the cover as quietly and unobtrusively as he could and ate it.
Eventually he began to prowl for books. It was cool in the library stacks, looking up anything he liked as long as he didn’t ask a librarian for it. And they were too busy to keep an eye on a kid to make sure he wasn’t reading material too adult for him. But he wouldn’t be stuck with the crap they forced him to read in class. As if all he had were two brain cells and one was being roasted by the other with a flamethrower. How did they expect any kid to be interested in school with this garbage?
But the hour always arrived when he had to be home. Ice and Bowtie enforced a curfew. He didn’t dare disobey them.
“You’re dependent on us,” Ice had drilled into him.
“You would end up in a foster home,” Bowtie had instilled.
“Beast like you would eventually go to juvie hall,” great auntie had furthered.
“And you know what’s at those places?” great unc would ask. Ice had whispered, “Cornholers!”
Jason hadn’t known what that was so Bowtie had defined it, “Screw you up the butt!”
Jason quivered at the idea of having to walk around with a corn cob wedged implacably up his tiny anus, twisted in savagely until he’d be quite bow-legged. So he always made sure he was home by seven for dinner. They locked him in his room by eight o’clock at night, and didn’t unlock it again until it was time for him to go to school the next day. “It’s time,” his unc would tell him and then escort him down the hall—unless Jason was already in his room. In which case the door simply closed and he heard the key in the lock: click-nick. No “Goodnight, Johnboy” for him. No “Pleasant dreams.” Not even “Sleep in fright, don’t let the fanged baby-brain eaters bite!” that his mother would sometimes tell him. Just the phantom movement of the door out of the corner of his eye and the telltale, soft click-nick, a noise in two subtle parts. One evening he sleepwalked into his closet, woke up when he heard someone crying on the other side of the wall. That wasn’t part of the Cursky apartment over there. He rapped his knuckles against the plaster and was surprised when a knock answered his.
“Hello?” he called out softly, not wanting to alert the aunt and unc to the fact he wasn’t in bed and dutifully unconscious. Besides, he sometimes suspected they perched outside his door and listened, expecting what? That they’d hear leather wings rustling out from his shoulder blades and breathed-out flames flashing through the keyhole as nightly he turned into the devil they suspected he was? Or were they wanting to hear little shrieks as some behemoth dragged him by his eyes out the window, at last freeing them of this onerous responsibility which had been thrust upon them in their golden years? He whispered to the knock on the other side of the closet wall, “Are you there?”
He heard a muffled sob and a “Yeah.”
The voice sounded young, another kid. But whether it was a boy or a girl, he couldn’t say.
“Are you okay?” he wanted to know. Not that he had the faintest idea what he could do about it. He had no power; he was locked in his room.
“No,” came the reply.
“Are you hurt?” was his third question.
It came through the material which separated the two rooms as a faint echo, tinny with distortion as a friend on the other end of a string linking two tin cans. “All the time.”
“How come I never heard you before?” Jason asked.
A snuffle? Cough. “Gate’s open right now.”
“What gate?”
“The one the red-headed man here says there is.”
This line wasn’t getting anywhere. It didn’t make any sense. These seedy apartments were in one of the worst areas of town. There were no yards and, thus, no fences and no gates.
“Is this some kind of joke or are you crazy?” Jason said with a sneer.
He listened but didn’t hear anything else. He went back to bed. The next day, key in the lock. Better than an alarm to tell him it was time to get up and dress. Eat his bowl of cereal drowned in milk which always seemed lumpy. See Ice and Bowtie rigid before the TV, watching Tic Tac Dough or Queen For A Day. Before he hurried off to catch the school bus, he listened at the neighboring front door. Had he seen anybody coming and going from there? He didn’t think he had. He paused at the row of mailboxes downstairs. There was no name listed for that apartment. Maybe they’d just moved in.
That night, led down the hall like he was walking the last mile to the electric chair. The closing of the door, the turning of the key. Click-nick! And not long after he heard the voice again, only it screamed instead of wept. It wasn’t a loud, shrill scream but came through the wall as if from a great distance. Poor kid’s getting the tar whaled outta him, Jason thought, sympathizing. It surprised him that he might feel any pity for another child. Usually his interactions with other kids were with him as aggressor. He could beat up any bully half again his size because he’d do absolutely anything to win, including trying to gouge out eyes or crush testicles into pudding—the last usually accomplished by grabbing hold with both hands and squeezing until he’d could hear ’em pop, audible even above the other boy’s screams. Most bullies were generally cowards anyway. Jason didn’t frighten easily. When you started off in life the way he had, it took a lot to push the panic button.
He knocked on the wall and called out, but there was no answer save for the buzzing he associated with the helicopter dream. It, too, sounded far away, sort of like the electric vibrator Bowtie used on Ice when they believed their charge was asleep. That sound always rumbled through another wall, less like a purr and more like a kitchen appliance—better living through technology. He knew what a vibrator was. There were books by Jacqueline Susann, Erica Jong, and Xaviera Hollander in the library. He’d even chewed a page from Fear Of Flying, simply to taste the word zipfuck. Jason continued to listen until he fell asleep, slumped in the closet. He dreamed about the kid, of breaking down the door and rescuing this boy. They would be best friends, especially since they’d both suffered. Jason would protect him and teach him how to be strong. He woke up in the morning with his back and neck very sore.
“Anything happen last night?” he asked his caretakers at breakfast.
“Like what?” Bowtie asked suspiciously. So maybe that drone had been the vibrator.
“I mean did you hear anything outside? I thought I heard a scream,” the boy explained, trying not to cringe at the mere notion of these two old scabs fumbling with one another’s secret places.
“This is Sheol’s Ditch. There’s always somebody screaming outside someplace,” Ice commented as she set down a plate of burnt toast and scrambled eggs for him. Ice never cooked the eggs right and they were always runny as snot.
“No murders in the building last night?” he pressed on. “Next door?”
They stared at him, their expressions unreadable.
“You had a nightmare,” Aunt Merrice said, her voice almost inaudible it was so low. And—was that a touch of disappointment? Because the nightmare hadn’t claimed him forever?
That was it. They thought he was flashing back on what happened to his folks. They didn’t want to have to speak of it. For that had been uns
peakable, hadn’t it? Therefore impossible to utter aloud. Forbidden, taboo. The kind of phrases which might conjure up green, squiggly-faced gods with rotten oyster-breath who’d suck your brain right out through your asshole.
Downstairs he checked the mailboxes again. Now there was a name on the slot for next door. GARTH LISTO. The next night, he left the closet door open. When he heard the crying he threw off the covers.
“You again?” he asked, straining against the wall, chill plaster against his shoulder and cheek.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Jason. You got a name?”
“I used to have one.”
“That’s stupid. What do you mean, used to have one? If you’ve been given a name, you always have it.”
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Names don’t pass through the gate.”
“Kid, what kind of gate is this?”
“There are lots of gates. This is the one names don’t pass through.”
“You know, if you don’t quit jerking me around, I’ll just go back to bed.”
There were no more responses from the other side of the closet wall so Jason did just that, slipping back between the dry cold sheets that somehow seemed unnatural to him. He went to school the next day, skipped the library after, and came straight home. Ate supper with Ice and Bowtie, then said he had some extra studying to do and left them with their My Son Jeep and I’m The Law reruns. He stole a knife from the kitchen but waited until he heard the key twitch in the lock before he went into the closet. Slowly he began to put the tip into the plaster, chipping away tiny pieces and flakes. He turned it on its edge and scraped as if the wall were a fresh hide.
A few hours later he heard the crying.
“I read in Greek mythology about Odysseus and his men when they met the Cyclops. And the Cyclops kept asking Odysseus what his name was. But all the hero would answer was ‘I am No Man’. I’m going to call you No Man, okay?” Jason told the weak little voice. “Sort of like No Man can pass through the gate.”
He laughed, but then thought of the helicopter dream. Except that wasn’t “Only No Man Gets Into That Place.’”
He continued to work with the knife, long since having destroyed the dry wall. He’d hit the edge of lumber between the two surfaces, that space rats and cockroaches ruled. “No Man,” the voice repeated.
“Hey, are you a kid? ’Cause you sound like one. I’m eight years old myself,” Jason persisted.
“I was.”
Jason groaned. “You mean you got older? Sure. Isn’t that the way it generally works?”
“Years don’t pass through the gate.”
“Not this again.”
“Don’t be mad. I can’t help it.”
Jason could hear more from the opposite side now. Voices he was certain must belong to other people in the next apartment. More weeping, and gutteral moans like he barely recalled his parents used to make when they got it on, the noise a wet sheet made when it flapped on a clothesline, and the buzz which reminded him of the helicopter in his dream.
“Listen, kid. I’m cutting a hole in the wall. We can talk easier then. Maybe I can see what’s going down with you and I can get help if you want.”
“Can’t help.”
“Let me guess. Help doesn’t pass through the fuckin’ gate.”
Suddenly the knife slipped, slid as if going through hot butter. Jason’s arm shot forward. He drew it back and stared at the knife. The blade dripped a mass both green and black and bloody.
“Oh, shit. Did I cut you, No Man?”
“No,” the voice whimpered.
Jason shifted position in the closet, put his eye to the hole. Saw an eye looking back at him.
Something didn’t seem right.
There was light all around the eye.
Jason put his hand into the plaster which crumbled more. He reached through the wall and touched the eyeball where it hovered in the air. “This is you?” Jason whispered, unbelieving. He had to have fallen asleep in the closet again. He must be dreaming this.
“Yes.”
But where did the voice come from? It was just an eye. And how had the kid knocked on the wall the first night?
He pushed it slightly with a finger and it floated out of the way. Behind it he saw a broken landscape stretching back toward—what? There was no horizon. Just rocks, cliffs, slabs and steeples of stone.
How could there not be a point in perspective where land and sky crashed together?
A half a woman crawled past not ten feet from where he’d touched the eye-child. He could see the jerking end where her spine had been severed. She dragged entrails like an assortment of rusted chains. To the left a pair of mismatched legs curled around one another like mating worms. Someone in a black jacket—swinging fringe like a conga line of shadowy spider Rockettes—had his face buried between the cheeks of an ass without upper torso or legs. To the right, a naked, red-headed man with something like a bone saw for a penis rammed himself in and out of the rectum of another man, whose own dick was long and thin as a string and tied around the neck of a furious cat. The saw buzzed like a helicopter, lost without up or down in a negative space.
The red-headed man wasn’t just a man with red hair. The entire head was crimson as a massive pimple. He saw Jason and, while continuing to thrust into this bloody chocolate buggershake of a victim, he grinned and beckoned with a free hand…someone else’s, jaggedly removed just at the wrist.
“You come right along. Don’t have to be like them. Be like me. But hurry. The gate’s about to close.”
Jason gasped, jumped up, left the closet, slamming its door behind him. He dove underneath his bed, screwing his eyes shut, bringing his hands over his ears. The mattress began to squeak above him, old springs full of rust. The blankets hanging nearly to the floor dripped red/black/brown. It trickled across the floor, sticky as treacle.
He heard very softly, “I am the god of hellfire…”
“I am the god of hellfire…”
He felt it, smelled it rotting back through his sinuses. He pulled one hand away from an ear and put it into the pool growing around him. Wet, the proxie of oblivion.
A secret madness. Would he let it take him or would he flaunt it?
He mashed it between his fingers.
Suddenly he was crawling out from under the bed, running back to the closet, picking up the knife, and stabbing at the wall trying to make the hole larger as fast as possible, to make it big enough he could fit himself through it. Harder and harder he plunged the tip of the blade into the plaster. He grunted, he screamed. He didn’t care when the knife handle slipped and he sliced open his palm. He grasped the handle again and stabbed.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jason hadn’t heard the door of his room being unlocked, nor Bowtie and Ice running in their slippers. His great unc grabbed him firmly by the shoulders and shook him until his teeth rattled. The man—stronger than he looked after all—grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the knife, snapped it to make the boy let go of the weapon.
“Jeez-Louise, will you look at that? The landlord’s going to have our heads,” he exclaimed.
“What were you thinking? Are you nuts?” Jason’s great aunt demanded. A curl of disgust on her thin lips suggested who she was comparing him with at that moment. “Bowie, I told you one day those drugs they gave the little beast would eat out his brain.”
She didn’t add right through his asshole… More of the unspeakable, the forbidden. People in ’50s TV didn’t say asshole.
Jason kicked the old man in the knee, hard as he could, hearing cartilage crackle as it ruptured. He jerked out of the guy’s fists and rushed past the old lady. He fled into the living room and then swung open the door to run into the hallway outside the apartment. He began pounding on the unit next door.
“Let me in!” he bellowed. “I’ve had the intuition. I’ve seen the mechanics. I’m not afraid anymore! I’m not afraid…”
T
he front door there opened and a really big, yet young man with glasses poised on the bridge of a very narrow nose peered out at him. He wasn’t really fat, just tall and fleshy. He wore a silky robe of oriental design.
“What do you want? Do you know what time it is?”
Jason pushed at the door until the guy stumbled back, silk material swishing around his legs. He ran inside the neighbor’s place and stared at the dingy walls, the second-hand furniture. There was a table with very small trees in pots. They looked just like regular trees, gnarled branches and knotted, whorled trunks—except they were miniature. Like giant oaks and cypresses reduced in a magic machine. Next to these sat an assortment of scissors and pruning shears.
“Oh, no,” Jason sobbed. He was too late. “The gate’s closed.”
“Huh?”
Jason shrugged his shoulders, mournfully shaking his head. “I didn’t have a chance anyway. The pilot said only Superman gets inside.”
The big man laughed. “Cool! Thus Spake Zarathustra!”
««—»»
There was a belief held by the Pythagoreans that animals living upon the moon neither ate nor shit. They existed solely upon diluted heat, air and vaporized moisture. They were considered the better for it, as opposed to animals on earth.
—Sacred Sepsis
Dr. Louis Godard and Dr. James Singer
— | — | —
Chapter 5
MOENJO-DARO,
2300 B.C.
Moonlight on the baked mud avenue lit up her footprints, making a pathway running between the brick-lined gutters which ran on both sides. A cloud falling across the moon like a lank of hair turned the boulevard and her footprints dark, black as the shit that bobbed in the ditch water. Only the lighter stuff floated on, the rest landing in catch basins created underneath to capture detritus which might have otherwise interrupted the proper flow.
Dread in the Beast Page 5
