Borderlands 3

by Thomas F. Monteleone (Ed. )

  "Now he's feeling sorry for himself. He's dying, and he's—"

  "No. I am not dying, not in the story. In the story I can still dream, and I can fly."

  "You gave up the typewriter, now somebody else is writing the story?"

  "Who?"

  "If we could figure that out, we'd be able to figure out how to get out of here, now wouldn't we chummie? Sheesh! You're dumber than Charlie!"

  "I don't know about you, Darin, but I'm getting some funny urges connected with this guy. I mean, this is the author. He's—"

  "Omnipotent. They say that the author is omnipotent."

  "Impotent. I want to, like, feel power over this guy. I want to do something totally obscene to him, or beat the shit out of him or make him eat shit or something."

  "If God came to me, I wouldn't do that to him!"

  "You are God, and I know it damn well. You're God walking the earth, and so the message I have for thee is, kiss my ass!"

  Charlie advanced on the author, and as he advanced he ripped open his trousers, revealing a bitter purple spike that was more a weapon than a penis.

  "My God, what degeneracy. An author who wants his characters to rape him. Well, I'll tell you something, Mr. Author, me and Charlie are too decent. You want rough stuff, you get back out to the Corona and create yourself some rough trade."

  Charlie stops, turns away from the author, who had been ready to receive him and now slumps forward against him, becoming his burden instead of his victim. Charlie cradles the stinking old man. "The cigar was a fake," he says, "this guy smells like he's been mainlining Listerine."

  "I worry about secondary infections."

  They take the writer to the couch, sit down with him. Darin gets the bottle of Jack and everybody has a pull. "You want to tell us about it," he asks. The writer, now in tears, nods. Charlie puts his arm around the thin old shoulders.

  "Doctor Warden told me that they couldn't operate because there was nothing to take out. 'This is a diffuse tumor,' was the way he said it. I told him the damn thing hurts! I felt like I was being benched for filing a ball or something. Like I was being punished! So I ask him, what do I do for the pain. Take aspirin. Now, that is fucking terminal, when they tell you it's cancer and take aspirin!"

  All of that world fades, to the tune of the Smith-Corona, which is chugging away yet again. The writer writes at a desk covered with ancient copies of Sporting News and old weathered literary magazines. He's literary as hell but he's cool because he wears a Pirates hat and follows sports. He can handicap horses. He knows who Joe Shilabotnik is.

  And he writes: Oh, Jesus, this is real, can't you understand that. I am here in this miserably dark room scared to fucking death in the middle of the night, sipping oxygen I bought mail order and drinking Jack Daniels because it makes me sick and maybe somehow vomiting will help, and my chest is burning and breathing doesn't work and suffocation hurts, I know because I put a bag over my head like Jerzy Kosinski and it was not a pleasant death, it was pure hell, it was the worst agony I've ever felt, I was never so glad in my life as when I got that bag off and breathed the sweet air and I am alone and I don't want to die, I'm only forty-seven!

  Darin, who has come out of the story and is now lying on a old bed in the writer's sleazy office paging through a October, 1953 Police Gazette reading the chewing tobacco and brilliantine ads, gives the writer a long, cool stare. "Whine, whine, whine. Nobody ever wants to die."

  "Come on, Dar, give the guy a break." Charlie is standing against the door, maybe guarding it, maybe just smoking the fictional cigar, which the writer has written into his mouth.

  "He just about had me torn apart by a crazed surgeon with a fuckin' ten year old nurse!"

  "He's trying to work out his fears. Give him a little space. I didn't tear you apart, did I? You're here, aren't you?"

  "Yeah, yeah that's true. But it was the fuckin' thought. I mean, this piece of shit thought that up!"

  "Charlie, could I tell you something? I know this guy. I mean, I'm more'n a hair smarter than you, am I right? I mean, no offense—"

  "None taken."

  "That's the spirit. Now, lemme tell you about this guy we got here writing this fuckin' thing, and why he is fucking with us so bad. The guy is dying—"

  "Awright awready! I'm bored."

  "But there's more to it than that."

  "Death, smeth. Ain't there always?"

  "A few years ago, this guy wakes up in the middle of the night—somebody flushes a toilet, a truck backfires out in the street, who knows why? But the guy—the dufus—thinks for some cockamamie reason that aliens are stuffing a fuckin' frozen banana up his tailpipe. No, you laugh, but this is true. This is what the guy thinks. Now, this fuckin' asshole, he doesn't just roll with it, let it go, you know. He fuckin' writes a book about it! Fuckin' jerk! He makes a dork out of himself on an international scale. I mean, it is amazing. He becomes known from Antarctica to goddamn Zanzibar as the guy who got his hole cored by little men from Neptune.

  "Then something else happens. After it's all over, the guy really does get visited by aliens. Only it ain't like you think. It ain't like nobody thinks. They tell this guy the secrets of the ages. Why? Because they know he's dying and discredited and a dufus and so they just fuckin' do it because they're mean bastards and they see a chance to really scare the turkey so bad his shit turns to powder and his entire body starts growing cancers so weird them babies ain't even got names!"

  Charlie had to admit it, he was kind of interested in the dufus with the secret of the ages. So that was who the story was about all right, the dork writing it, not the characters in it.

  The dork, and the fuckhead readers who were having their minds permanently drilled and thought it was all some kind of shit-ass game.

  This is not a game.

  As a matter of fact, he and Darin were actually the writers, and the writer was the character. So they could do anything they pleased to him. "Make him suck his own dick!"

  "He's got a bad back."

  "So it's cured, shazam! Now he's into yoga. Why do guys go in for that? So they can suck themselves off instead of use a vacuum cleaner. Ok, the dufus is now plug naked on the floor of his office bent up like a pretzel and sucking his own dick. Suppose he can give himself AIDS to add to the cancer?"

  Darin was rather put out by his friend. Here he was, about to reveal the secret of the ages and this guy was only interested in playing mind games with some goddam writer who probably doesn't even exist as a character, let alone a real person.

  "Listen up, asshole."

  "The dufus, he sucks and chews, and he bites it—"

  "Shaddap. He's not like that. He's a very nice man, and he has a closet full of five thousand dollar suits and he flies on the Concorde and drives an S-Class."

  "Man, I wanta kill this piece of shit slow."

  "He's gonna die slow, all right. You don't need to worry about that. This is the part of the story that's real. The guy is telling people, like, I'm dying, and I'm gonna tell you the truth before I go. 'These creatures I saw,' he tells you, 'they ain't aliens. They were here before us. They built the place. And as for us, we're—wrong-uns would be one way to put it. Or we're an experiment. Or a toy. Anyway, what has happened to us is that we have been condemned to hell, as a species. We were given a chance and we fucked up. Royally. The Garden of Eden is a species memory of some really bad shit we did a long time ago. They aren't interested in petty sins. Our lives are entirely meaningless to them. They care about just two things: our fear, and our suffering.'

  "'They call this place DEAD FOREVER, because we just keep coming round again and again. We're born, we go through the hell of life, we die. Then we're judged. Do we make it? We never make it. So we're born again, we go through hell, we die.

  "'The thing is, it'll never end. Folks, this is hell! You're in it! We all are! And the worst part of it is this particular moment in history, that comes every ten thousand years or so. This moment is called THE SKULL OF TIME.
It's all theatre, do you understand that? When we see, each of us in his heart, the SKULL OF TIME, we will realize exactly who we are and what we are. We will remember our whole agonizing past. We will see the bars on the windows of the world, and hear our eternal jailer rattling his eternal keys. Then they bring the world to an end by smacking it with a fucking big meteor, or a pollution disaster or earthquakes or whatever gooses their fucking saint alien behinds. We die in horrible agony, in our billions, in the fire and the dark of the cave of all-knowing. You experience mass death in total darkness and you will know something about fear. Hell, they took Jews outa the gas chambers covered with blood all the fucking time! They sweated blood in there! And Jesus? He can't save anybody! It's a fucking joke. Earth has only been here since we went to hell, which happened a few thousand years ago. The dinosaur tracks and such, the fossils? Planted. It's a fucking trap and we're in it, brother!'"

  Charlie and Darin were standing at the far side of the apartment. Beyond the window, the sun set in golden glory. A meteor crossed the purple heights of the sky.

  "Oh, Christ, Darin, if this is all true, then why?"

  "Who the fuck knows? What's the use of remembering sins that aren't gonna be forgiven? Fuckit."

  "You know, Darin, don't pretend you don't!"

  Darin gave him a sidelong look. "He knows."

  "So let him tell us! Tell us, dufus!"

  It's not that we sinned. The worst part is, we didn't do anything wrong to be here. The Jews of Europe were punished to extinction, not because they were evil but because they were there. Cattle die mass in agony and terror, and they are totally innocent. We're not here because we've done something wrong, but our agony is food.

  There are people who warm their hands at the fire of our burning. We're a plaything and a source of energy. And there will be no escape, not for any of us.

  Charlie wished to hell that the cancerous writer would die.

  "Darin," he said, "I hate him."

  "You're not alone, buddy. You're not alone."

  "If only he'd die—" Darin took Charlie's hand, and they stood watching the writer gag and suffocate on the couch, watched him claw at his throat, struggle and start breathing again.

  "If only he'd die," Charlie whispered, "if only..." Then he could close his own eyes and let the warm, soft world of the writer's dream-time envelop him, and he would dream the golden night away... and the golden day to follow, and golden months and years, and the great cycles of years... he would dream on and on, forever and ever and ever...

  Dream on.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Brazo de Dios by Elizabeth Massie

  Witch Hunt by Andrew Vachss

  The Owen Street Monster by J. L. Comeau

  The Man Who Was Made of Money by Avram Davidson

  The Brotherhood by John Alfred Taylor

  The Sixth Sentinel by Poppy Z. Brite

  The Man In The Passenger Seat by Bentley Little

  Ghosts of Christmas Present by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The Ugly File by Ed Gorman

  Midnight Grinding by Ronald Kelly

  Multiple Dwelling by Kathleen Jurgens

  Night Life by Michael Cassutt

  A Stain Upon Her Honor by John Edward Ames

  Leavings by Kathe Koja

  Traumatic Descent by Lawrence C. Connolly

  Baby Sue, We Love You! by Marthayn Pelegrimas

  High Concept by David Bischoff

  Just A Closer Walk With Thee by John Maclay

  The Banshee by Thomas Tessier

  Hungry by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Horror Story by Whitley Strieber