by Lee, Edward
SHIFTERS
Edward Lee & John Pelan
Necro Publications
— 2010 —
First Digital Edition
Shifters © 1998 by Edward Lee & John Pelan
Cover art © 2005 Erik Wilson
This edition March 2010 © Necro Publications
Kindle Formatting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
ww.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Cover Design:
David G. Barnett
Copy Editors:
Amanda Baird
John Everson
Jeff Funk
C. Dennis Moore
Printing history:
Obsidian Press hardcover edition: March, 1998
Also available in a
Trade Paperback Edition
ISBN: 1-889186-55-4
Necro Publications
5139 Maxon Ter.
Sanford, FL 32771
www.necropublications.com
Though the authors are in debt to many, they would like to particularly thank the following:
The bald guy who drinks behind the 7-Eleven on 40th and Stone, The Brotherhood (they know who they are), Dave Barnett, Bob Brown, Doug, Wayne, P.G., Ryan, Brian and Dolly, Craig Jenkins (wherever the hell you are), Matt Johnson, Alex Johnston, R.K., Paul Legerski, Dallas, C.M., Tim McGinnis, Wilfred Owens (rest in peace), Mike Paduana, Michael Pearce, Kathy, Mary Pelan, Larry Roberts, Sergeant E-5 Sanders, Sarah and Dawn at Verotik (don’t know your last names), Eunice Seymour, Scott Siebert, Brian and Jan, Russ Snyder (for the cool nautical passages), Susan, Lucy, Terry Tidwell, Steven Wardlaw, t. Winter-Damon (for initial interest), Mark and Cindy, and lastly a heartfelt thanks to the respective staffs of Murphy’s Pub, The Ram’s Head Tavern, and the Mecca Café where much of this book was conceived and the staff of the Knarr Tavern, where all the signature pages were done.
When, by a decree of a greater power,
The poet makes his appearance in a bored world…
Who calls on a pitying God at whom these curses
Are hurled.
—BAUDELAIRE
PROLOGUE
Evil is relative. But so is blood.
Have you ever tasted blood—I mean really tasted it? No, not like when you bite your lip, or suck at a thistle scratch. I mean, have you ever cupped it in your hands and let it pour into your mouth? Have you ever gulped it down your throat like wine from a goblet? Have you?
Have you ever killed anyone?
Questions—yes! I can’t help it, I’m curious. Curiosity is a challenge, and challenges excite me. Have you ever slit open someone’s throat and watched the blood squirt out? Have you ever eaten human brains from a freshly cracked skull, or sucked out an eyeball? Hmm? Have you?
Have you ever bitten into a man’s heart while it’s still beating?
I have.
I’ve done lots of things.
Yes.
Blood. Flesh.
It’s all relative, like good, like evil, love and hate, and like anything born of humanity.
So where does that leave me?
««—»»
I can see the moon from here. It’s huge and bright. It’s beautiful. It seems to be following my eye along the water like a luminous spirit, a companion.
Or like a lover.
Love is all I’ve ever wanted. It’s also the only thing I’ve never really had. Love. Real love.
Is that so much to ask?
I’ve been on the water for days now, or perhaps weeks. Time, too, is relative. It scarcely matters. I feel like I’ve been standing on a ledge for a thousand years. I feel like I’m falling off a mountain. I don’t even know where I’m going.
Love sings to me; it beckons me like a siren, like something only half-real melting in my fingers. Love is all that leads me on, that fuels my pursuit. It’s all that gives me life. One day I will find it, but until then…
My days are dreams. My nights are black/red scraps of memory. The memories are hot, erotic. They taste like salt, like spicy metal on my lips. They’re as beautiful and as relative as the moon.
Their blood bursts hot from my mouth, runs quickly down my breasts and my belly. In the moonlight it looks gorgeous black on my white skin. Sometimes I stand naked beneath the moon, and I rub their evil blood like hot oil all over my body. Sometimes…
…it makes me come.
Right now I’m lying between wooden crates marked GLASS, USE NO HOOKS, ONITA BREWERIES, MUTO, HENNIG, & ANDERSON IMPORTERS, INC., SAN FRANCISCO, CA. I’m in the cargo hold of some ship. When I get bored, I touch myself. I just think back, and I go to sleep in the memories. I’m the beautiful tousled stowaway hiding in darkness from the rugged men above. If they only knew they were shipping more than beer! Some cargo.
The ship rocks back and forth, on and on and forever, like the time I first died.
When you made me. Then I loved you, now I just don’t know…
««—»»
You’ve brought me a long ways, do you ever wonder if there’s more? If there’s something more to feel, to touch, to maybe love? Do you?
When you close your eyes, do you see angels or devils? Do you see love or hate? That’s what it all burns down to in the end, if there really is an end. Blood and flesh. Time. Good and bad. It’s about what we really are in our hearts.
I’m a killer, a murderer. I’ve eaten men’s flesh and drunk their blood. I’ve rived them open with my pretty, bare hands and drawn their innards out of their bellies like strings of yarn. I’ve watched the life go out of their eyes as I’ve grinned down, drooling in their mouths, and I’ve felt them twitch between my legs as they’ve died.
Oh, yes—a murderer. Me.
But when I close my eyes, I still see love.
««—»»
It’s a curse sometimes. It’s like lust.
I can smell the men above me on deck. Some stand watch, others idly run engines and boilers, or study charts. Many lay asleep in the bowels of the old ship. I can smell their dreams. Oh, what I could do to them! I could take them apart like dolls of clay, twist off their arms, their legs, their heads. I could bite open their skulls and suck their brains. I could burst their bellies and dress myself in their warm, steaming guts. I could gulp down their blood and swallow their hearts. I could, but I won’t.
Not yet…
ONE
Dissolution
(i)
“I don’t love you anymore.”
The words, her words, suffused beyond the wall of his sleep. They seemed like ghosts. Richard Locke shuddered in the darkness of his closed eyes. The bedsheets had somehow become entwined about his body and legs—they weren’t sheets as much as pale serpents come to feed on his dreams. Dreams, he thought. What had happened to his? He opened his eyes and stared.
“I don’t love you anymore,” she’d said on the last day of August. But that had been months ago. Months, yet he felt no closer to being over it today than he did then.
Locke moaned, staring at the ceiling. Somewhere, a clock was ticking.
Months…
The drear of autumn daylight which lay across his face seemed used, secondhand. He got out of bed as if rising from a coffin. Yes, he felt dead. Pale, gaunt, tacky. Sweat plastered his hair to his scalp. His joints ticked as he walked sullen across the room and looked blankly down at his desk. A piece of paper hung out of his typewriter platen.
CENOTAPH by Richard Locke
My love is now a cenotaph,
an extant, keening door
slammed shut on my heart
by her five little words:
I don’t love you anymore.
“What a bunch of shit,” he muttered. He ripped the sheet out of the machine and tore it up. Suddenly, he felt
maniacal; he tremored in place, eyes frozen open. He must look ludicrous: a pallid, skinny 33-year-old man standing in the middle of a disheveled room in baggy underpants with his hair sticking up. He rushed to the window, heaved it open, and leaned out. Several pedestrians looked up and laughed. Locke didn’t care. He let the torn-up poem slip from his fingers. He watched the pieces separate, then float dreamlike from the second-story window to the street.
(ii)
Locke was a poet. He may even have been an acclaimed poet in some vast local sense. The interest from the money his parents had left him was slightly less than enough to get by. He worked one day a week at the bookstore on Greenwood Avenue, and occasionally he filled in as a substitute teacher at Lincoln High, but that was all. He knew there were far more functional ways to live; instead of writing poetry six to ten hours a day, he could’ve pursued a more conventional career. That, however, seemed false to him. He felt obsessed with being true, whatever that meant. He was put on earth to write, and write he would. Poets made little or nothing from their work—when an editor did offer money, Locke turned it down—but he didn’t care. He wasn’t a materialist, he didn’t even own a television. To be real, all he needed was a roof, a typewriter, and his muse.
He’d been writing for ten years. By now, he’d had hundreds of poems published—he’d lost count years ago. His work appeared regularly in any number of college literary journals, small press magazines, newspapers, and poetry anthologies. He’d also gotten some into national magazines: The New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, even Cosmopolitan, but he had yet to establish himself on a national level. He didn’t really care if that ever happened; he didn’t need recognition to feel real about what he did. Perpetuation was all that mattered to him creatively—it need not be widespread. Locke figured that if only one other person read any given poem, then that poem, and the corms of its creation, was given truth.
Truth, he thought now.
He stared past his Smith-Corona, feeling like the displaced soothsayer of Shakespeare’s play. How can one define truth?
The question bid any poet’s quest. Locke had spent a decade pondering that, writing about it, even reveling in its premise. He wanted each of his poems, if only minutely, to touch the flesh of that question.
Locke wasn’t sure what truth was, but he was sure what it wasn’t. Truth was not any physical reality, it was not something you could see or hear. It was not solid. It was not tangible. Locke knew that truth existed somewhere between the lines of life, and exploring those spaces was what gave his muse power.
Or at least it had.
Until now.
His work desk was a big old black metal eyesore. Bookshelves surrounded him like ramparts. Pictures lined the wall facing him, the great poets: Keats, Shelley, Jarrell, Seymour, and a sullen kerchiefed Edgar Allan Poe. Locke liked the idea of being looked upon by these great men as he worked. The pictures enlivened him.
But there was one more picture, not on the wall, but right up close on the desk. A small photograph in a flat gold frame.
It seemed to radiate at him now, more than a photograph but a providence of some sort, a piece of his past and a piece of his future.
I don’t love you anymore, the picture seemed to say.
It was Clare.
The picture had been taken at Concannon’s, on her birthday. She smiled brokenly into the lens after having just downed one of the barkeep’s notorious “Birthday Shooters.” And sitting right next to her, with his arm around her, was Locke.
She was beautiful—she was resplendent. She was the only woman Locke had ever loved in his life.
And now she was gone.
(iii)
Who knew what love was? How could it be defined? Locke didn’t know. He’d been infatuated in the past, many times. He’d even been involved a couple of times. But he’d never felt strongly enough about a girl to voice the cryptic words I love you.
Until he’d met Clare. It was a strange rapport, an instantaneous one. He’d walked into Concannon’s one night last October to have a beer and shoot the shit with Carl, the barkeep. The night felt funny: mild, warm, when it should be chilly. 45th Street was desolate when traffic should have been backed up to the freeway. And Concannon’s, when ordinarily it would be packed at this time of night, was empty. Except for her.
She sat up at the bar chatting with Carl and drinking a shandy. A little lemon wedge floated in her glass. Her pose stunned Locke in the entrance. Who was this beautiful, beautifully dressed woman all by herself in the bar? She looked opulent, regal: a long dark-jade organdy dress, Ferraganno high heels, big bright gold earrings. She had short tapered blonde hair with perfect bangs, which gently sifted each time she tossed her head to laugh at one of Carl’s notorious jokes.
“What’s the difference between a rooster and a lawyer? A rooster clucks defiance.”
Of course she laughed; she worked for a law firm.
But what was it about her, outwardly? Locke remained seized in the vision of her. She looked classy without looking overdone. Where most beauty in this town was fake, she looked real. Had providence put her there, just for him? Locke considered this—he believed in providence.
He walked up. “Hi,” he said, rather stupidly. “My name’s Locke.”
Her head turned. Huge blue eyes beamed. Locke nearly swooned at the scent of her perfume.
“My name’s Clare,” she said, and smiled at him. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
(iv)
Good conversation commenced instantaneously. Locke, of course, told her that he was a poet. Her response had surprised him. “What are your themes?” she’d asked. Usually girls in bars replied, Oh, really? or I wrote poetry in high school. “Societal naturalism,” Locke answered. “I try to do with words what Munch and Ryder did with paint.” That’s when things really got going; Clare had minored in art, she even did a little painting herself. Through their discourse he discovered that they shared many of the same views, tastes, and ideals. He was also happy to learn that she was here to meet some friends, (girls who hung out in bars by themselves were usually bad news in the long run). She was a paralegal for one of the firms in Queene Ann, one of the big ones.
They’d talked for a solid hour; Locke’s enthusiasm never lapsed. She fascinated him, not topically, but in some more oblique, deeper way. She was far more than just some attractive girl he’d met in a tavern. She was scintillating, diverse, abstract and intelligent. She was cool. Eventually her friends arrived, they were cool too, and even though the initial introductions had been quick, Locke could tell that her friends liked him, which made him feel even better. Later, Clare and her friends had left; Locke didn’t want to push anything. “Do you hang out here much?” she asked before departing.
“Most nights I stop in for a few.”
“I’d really like to see some of your poetry. Why don’t you bring some in? I could meet you tomorrow night after work.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be here.”
Her friends waved. Clare smiled again, donned her coat, and bid, “Goodnight, Locke.”
“Goodnight. See you tomorrow.”
She left the bar. Locke stared after her. Her perfume lingered about him like an aura. His beer got warm as he sat, thinking. His thoughts seemed to carry him away.
Carl snapped his fingers in front of Locke’s face. “Locke, Locke. You check out to the Twilight Zone, or what?”
Locke roused, looked around. “Clare,” he muttered.
Carl poured him a cold McEwans. “I didn’t think you had it in you, buddy.”
“What?”
“Clare,” Carl said. He flipped a Marlboro Light in the air and caught it perfectly in his mouth. “She likes you.”
“Oh, yeah? How do you know?”
“She’s in here three or four nights a week after work. Guys hit on her right and left, but she always gives them the brush-off. Every time, Locke. You’re the first guy I’ve seen her talk to for more than two minutes.”
“Is that a fact?” Locke pondered this. “You say she’s in here three or four nights a week? I’ve been hanging out in this john of yours for five years, and I’ve never seen her.”
“That’s because you’re a denizen,” Carl informed him. “You come in too late. She’s here a lot. She’s a nice girl.”
You’re telling me. “And she’s never with a guy?”
“Nope. Never. I’m a barkeep, I know everything. If she was dating anyone, I’d have heard about it.”
“But guys hit on her a lot?”
Carl laughed. “As good-looking as she is, what do you think? She’s got guys trying to pick her up all the time, but she shoots ’em down like Sopwith Camels. Until tonight, that is. Until she meets Concannon’s renowned resident poet.”
