Dread in the Beast

by Charlee Jacob

  — | — | —

  Chapter 8

  SHEOL’S DITCH,

  1977

  The cheapskate landlord didn’t actually repair the wall in Jason’s closet where the boy had punched the hole with the knife. All the fellow did was cover the gape with a section of plywood. Big Garth and Jason worked together to make this removable without being obvious about it, enlargening the aperture so Jason could slip into Garth Listo’s place while Ice and Bowtie believed he was yet locked in his room.

  “You orient the plant in space,” the young man explained to his neighbor, Garth’s large frame in a silk robe of Japanese style.

  Jason was so fascinated with those tiny trees! He moved all the way around a fully matured pine which was no more than three feet high. It even had fragrant, miniscule cones. He wanted to observe it from all angles, as if it were a trick of sleight of hand, performed by a magician with a talent for illusion.

  “But why?” Jason asked. “Or is it just because they look cool this way?”

  Big Garth laughed. “Beauty is always merely a secondary motive. It’s really about power. I control the direction, shape, and size. I train it to do my bidding, contrary to its nature.”

  “So how long does it take to grow them like this?” the kid wanted to know.

  “It takes several decades to really get them going. I acquired some of these about five years ago, already in progress. The others—the ones that aren’t magnificent yet—I started about that same time,” the man said with obvious pride, happy for the chance to show off his work.

  Jason didn’t have to feign interest. For weeks it was practically all they talked about. Trees so intricate, normally forty to fifty feet high maybe—why you’d have to be a giant to tower over them so. You’d have to be a god.

  He showed the kid how to use the clippers. Where to put supports which aided in the bending of a plant. How it might be fastened to twist to his desires. “Bending it,” Garth would say whimsically, “like a passive slave. Yet a cherished one, never to be abused.”

  Slipping nightly into Garth’s apartment, Jason worked on the art of bonsai. He learned light utilization and the proper way to restrict nutrition, even as he pruned both roots and tops judiciously. Garth actually put him in sole charge of a tree. Nobody had ever trusted him with anything before.

  B.G. peered through his glasses and pointed. “Train at the spot on the primary stem from which the branches grow. Look at the trunk as the tree’s central axis, branches growing laterally up and down and around this stem. If you end the progress of the main stem, you force the growth through certain branches that originate near the upper end of the trunk. If we could film it for years and then speed it up, it would resemble a kind of tortuous ballet.”

  Jason learned delicacy this way—rather difficult for a child’s immature, manic hands. He adopted patience he didn’t think he had in him. And the result was so satisfying, even if many years had to pass before what essentially was a microcosmic sapling would become an artistic accomplishment, a personal definition of beauty laid upon a form usually only God had any say in. Yes, this felt like power. Not the brute force kind. Different, subtle, patient.

  “Wow,” Jason commented after about a year. “Imagine going further. Making them grow into anything you want. The shapes of demons maybe.”

  “Yeah, that’s called topiary. The ancient Romans did that,” Big Garth told him. “They had entire grotesque gardens, suitable for enjoyment by the most jaded patricians. Sometimes they had slaves that had also been twisted loping through these gardens like freakish fawns or crawling like mutated serpents.”

  Garth had only just moved into the place the night Jason cut through the closet wall. Since then, of course, the big man had finished unpacking. There were hundreds of books. He had samurai swords on display. And framed woodblock artwork from Japan he called muzan-e. These consisted of atrocity prints from the 1800s, of high-foreheaded Japanese men, usually in the process of torturing and cutting up Japanese women.

  “This selection over here is rare. Yoshitoshi Tsukioka and Yoshiiku Ochiai,” Garth explained. “See this one, with the woman trussed up in the air? He looks as if he’s making a bonsai of her, doesn’t he? He takes what might ordinarily be considered an outrage and deftly converts it into an artform.”

  Big Garth made these comments so naturally, without pretention or maniacal eye-gleaming, that Jason couldn’t fail to be impressed. It was most amazing, being exposed to this viewpoint from an obviously intelligent adult: could this be evil? Was there a third category outside of good and bad where you could be exempt from the usual moral dictates, based on education and a higher esthetic competence? Sure, that’s why wealthy people and movie stars so often got away with things the law threw lesser mortals in jail for. How often had Jason heard it said that the rich were different?

  “Have you ever done that?” Jason asked, ogling the atrocity print that Garth had compared with bonsai. He’d never thought of a woman and a plant as interchangeable before.

  Garth slowly shook his head, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he, too, stared at the piece.

  He also had one of those newfangled video recorders. Invented in Japan! He seemed to have a thing for Japanese movies but not the Godzilla type Jason was familiar with. The boy saw titles on Sony Beta tapes. They were usually in Japanese first, then with the English version of the title. Kyoso Joshiko (Death Of A Madman). Niku No Hyotek Tobo (Screaming Flesh Target). Gendai Sei Hanza: Zekkyohen: Ryu Naki Boko (Modern Sex Crimes: Fierce Screams, Wild Rape).

  Sometimes when Jason slipped through the hole in the closet wall, he found Garth—in a kimono—watching these movies with intense fascination. Some contained violent sex acts but with a blurred grid so the viewer couldn’t see any actual penetration. Yet Garth wore over his own glasses this funky looking pair that reminded Jason of the 3-D specs that movies handed out. With these he could see through the grid. (As if into another, forbidden, dimension.)

  Seeing Garth do this was actually a relief. Jason knew what pedophiles were and had suspected this might be why the man had befriended him. Well, really, the big guy often wore those long silk robes that looked like dresses.

  But Garth never laid a hand on him nor asked him to do anything threatening, not in the year since he and Jason had become friends. The man apparently preferred women—just not quite in the traditional sense. (Unless this was traditional for Japan. Jason didn’t know. He’d seen enough brutality in his own neighborhood that this might just be normal everywhere.)

  Often, outside Jason’s door at night—on the occasions when he was there in bed—he’d hear that buzzing. Sometimes Ice would moan, a freaky sound like a fire engine’s siren being strangled on qualudes. A morning after this, he saw a bright red circle all the way around her wrist as she set his cereal in front of him. She quickly pulled down her sweater sleeve to cover it up.

  “I was a samurai, you know. In Nanking,” Garth told him one night.

  “You were?” The kid didn’t know what he was talking about. How could he be that if he was an American?

  “In my last life. It’s why I’m so interested in Japan,” he replied, serious as he could be. “I started to remember stuff when I was your age. I didn’t even have to learn bonsai. I just knew how. Man, were my folks pissed. My dad served in the Philippines in WW2. He knew guys on the Bataan Death March.”

  That’s how he said it: WW2.

  He showed the boy tapes from 1938, taken by the Japanese after they invaded that Chinese city. A history lesson, yes. The Japanese soldiers grinned and held their cameras just like the tourists the boy saw around town.

  There was film about these two sublieutenants who indulged in a beheading contest to see who could chop off a hundred heads first. Garth even had a copy of a newspaper, The Japanese Advertiser, which showed the photos of these guys on the front page.

  He pointed to script and said, “This translates out to ‘Contest To Kill First 100 Chinese With Sword Exte
nded When Both Fighters Exceed Mark—Mukai Scores 106 And Noda 105.’”

  Garth pointed to the guy on the left and said proudly, “That was me. I was him, right there. You can tell when you see a picture sometimes. Your eyes look into theirs and you feel a spark, like what it takes to continue a fire from Point A to Point B.”

  Jason had never heard of this. The Nazi concentration camps were covered in his school’s history class. And Pearl Harbor when the Japanese sneak-attacked. But not one word about wholesale terrors done on the men, women, and children of Nanking where murder and rape were turned into a nonstop sport. Jason watched the atrocities as if it was just the movies. His memories of the murders of his parents were that way, like recalling a particularly grisly movie he’d seen. Like The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. If it stirred anything in him, it wasn’t fear or revulsion. A yearning maybe, one he couldn’t quite place. Why would he want to crawl into the carnage piles and lie down? Why did he expect comfort there?

  ««—»»

  SHEOL’S DITCH, 1979

  Jason just sat up one night, remembered what Garth had said when he first pounded on his door and demanded to be let in. Big Garth was seated on this very short wooden stool, paging through catalogs advertising women offering themselves as foreign brides. This was what passed for chairs in Garth’s place. He’d explained they were traditional, classic Japanese. Jason found them uncomfortable and usually just sat on the floor when he visited.

  Through the wall, Jason could hear that noise which he’d never heard before except for right outside his bedroom door. It was the buzzing sound which reminded him of the helicopter dream. And of the chainsaw penis of the red-headed man beyond the gate.

  “Oh, no” Jason sobbed. “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!”

  “What’s ‘Must Shake Zza Zza Krishna?’”

  Garth glanced up, hearing something, too. Except he looked back toward his own bedroom door first. But there was no sound coming from that direction. He frowned momentarily and ground his teeth. Did he even hear the buzzing coming from the Cursky place?

  “Excuse me?” asked Garth, clearly perplexed and distracted. Yet he didn’t act at all as if he minded Jason being there.

  “You said that once,” Jason told him, and then reiterated the event which had brought them together.

  “Oh! Existentialism. It was Nietzsche and Thus Spake Zarathustra.” And then Big Garth quoted, “…my secret laughter: I suspect ye would call my Superman—a devil!”

  Jason snickered. “Ye?”

  “He often used archaic words.” Garth shrugged as he marked his place in the catalog. Then he got up from the stool, padded barefoot over to a large bookcase, and pulled a volume. It was small, yet he hefted it in his hands as if it were an encyclopedia. “You get used to it. Just because it’s stilted doesn’t make it any less true.”

  He handed the book to the boy. “Verily, there is still a future even for evil!”

  B.G. had believed him completely when the kid recounted what he’d seen through the hole in his closet: the eye that spoke, the landscape with no horizon, the brutality like a forbidden candy store.

  “I felt sorry for No Man—that kid, I mean—and wanted to help him. But then, when I saw this place, all I wanted was to be there. I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”

  Garth nodded sagely. “Did you know that the Tibetans believe that when you dream you actually go to real places? Some shamanic religions see two forms of reality, the waking and the other. Each one is considered to be real only as long as you’re there.”

  “But I was awake when I saw this,” Jason argued politely.

  “There are lots of accounts all through history of people who’ve glimpsed into other times and worlds. There was a teenaged girl who saw an ancient army on the coast of England. There are all those disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle that some say are due to a rift between the dimensions. Others conclude that sightings of spaceships and aliens are really seeing into the future, or maybe they’re coming from the sea or from within the earth. There are the stories of Atlantis and Mu. And how about ghosts? Are we only glimpsing a part of the past, like a glitch in a record? You never know. You might have been seeing into the hollow earth, a popular theory for centuries. Might explain why there were no horizons. And just a few years ago, at the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, Ohio for chrissakes!, some sociologist saw the leaves sneaking up on him, coming up and going down just like feet, then swirling around him like witches in a moon dance. Dude! This wasn’t some ignorant trailer trash redneck with a chaw between the tooth and gum, and his finger at the crack of his ass. This was a guy with a college degree. Hell, shit falls from the sky: frogs, beans, fish… Where does it come from?”

  How great was this guy? Jason wondered as he grinned, interested in everything that came out of Garth’s mouth. In two years, this man had never bored him.

  Garth took the Nietzsche volume away. “That’s for a little later, I think. Tell you what, let’s give you this one first.” He bent to a lower shelf to retrieve a different volume. “This might be a good one to start with.”

  Jason read the title and knew Garth must be right. How could a boy such as he not be enraptured by something named, The Book Of The Damned?

  He’d taken it home through the hole in the closet. Hadn’t taken it to school with him for fear he’d lose it. He wasn’t worried that his guardians would find it for he was sure they never went into his room at all. If they did, they would have questioned him about all the unusual things he kept in his dresser, under the bed, stuffed into the closet. Radios, cameras, wallets with cash, knives, a couple of guns (one broken, one not), expensive boots too big for him, silver/gold/maybe platinum jewelry and watches. Items he stole as he taught himself a valuable trade.

  He salivated just thinking about that book as he sat in his classes, fidgeting, putting up with the mindless drivel his teachers thought it suitable for him to learn. Got into a fight right after the last bell—as he was trying to leave for home—with some hold-back from two grades who’d just moved into the neighborhood and wanted to establish dominance. Jason had felt the kid grab him from behind by the scruff of the neck and actually lift him an inch from the floor. Saying quite a lot since Jason was big for his age.

  “You the necro feeler slept with his dead folks, right?” the Frankenstein-foreheaded boy demanded with a grin, showing a crooked line of lower teeth and practically no upper ones at all.

  Jason hadn’t answered but swung about, letting the collar of his shirt wring a raw-red corrugated crease in his neck as he punched his attacker right in the throat. Pop! Crack! He could actually feel the area fill with blood while his fist was still against the spot. An ambulance was called and, even though the attendants finally got the kid breathing again, he was still going to need emergency surgery for the tracheal injury. Jason spent two hours in the principal’s office, wondering what might be in that book waiting for him under his pillow. The police went away after a school bus driver said he’d seen the other kid start it.

  “Why do you suppose these guys jump you?” the principal asked him, weary circles under the man’s eyes. “Been happening to you for years, hasn’t it?”

  “My parents were murdered. I was there. Everybody knows it. Children can be so cruel,” Jason said, parodying some tragic little face he’d seen somewhere or other. Stuck out his lower lip and faked a sniffle. Come on, come on! He wanted to get home to that book. He wasn’t some dumb-assed, oxygen-starved braindead punk who would never learn to tie his shoes much less read. This man was holding up the furtherance of his education.

  “You don’t exactly make yourself an unworthy target. You’ve got a hefty reputation for someone so young. Any kid out to make a na
me for himself finds out right away he’s got to go through you first. Fastest gun in the west always had to prove it, usually died young.” Was this old guy, like, trying to be paternal?

  Jason chuckled. “You’re right. Next one, I’ll lick his asshole and let him be the alpha male. Okay? Can I go now? Because unless you’re willing to actually start protecting me, then I have to protect myself. You said it yourself—they jump me.”

  The principal’s shoulders sagged. He knew he couldn’t protect anybody. Pelan Elementary in Sheol’s Ditch was the most violent school for grades one through six in the city. There was no death row in the state anymore, but children graduating there would likely become the adults responsible for having the death penalty reinstated.

  “Get out of here,” he told Jason. “Thank God you haven’t killed anyone yet.”

  Jason didn’t contradict him. Only fools bragged.

  He got home barely in time for supper. Meatloaf like a small red brick. Covered in catsup too rusty-tasting to be trusted. The TV played on with its parade of squeaky-clean families and cities without trash.

  He excused himself and rushed to his room, taking out the wondrous book.

  Book of the Damned

  By Charles Fort

  Jason’s hands were clammy. He opened it to the beginning of the first chapter.

  ‘1

  ‘A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded.’

  That was Jason, definitely. The excluded. He touched the yellowish-brown flesh of the pages.

  ‘Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags: they’ll go by like Euclid arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices…’