Still

by Charlee Jacob

  The boy laughed lightly, trying to keep his voice down, following the rules. Obviously such a well-behaved, handsome lad. “I’ll prove I can read them. Listen… The examples of the degenerate Caesars (Nero, Tiberius) are also instructive. They took delight in having youths and maidens slaughtered before their eyes. Not less so is the history of that monster, Marschalls Gilles de Rays (Jacob, ‘Curiosités de l’histoire de France, Paris, 1858), who was executed in 1440 on account of mutilation and murder, which he had practiced for eight years on more than 800 children. As the monster confessed it, it was from reading Seutonius and the descriptions of the orgies of Tiberius, Caracalla, etc., that the idea was gained of locking children in his castles, torturing them, and then killing them. This inhuman wretch confessed that in the commission of these acts he enjoyed inexpressible pleasure…”

  Aster stood there with her jaw dropped almost to her flat chest. If anyone knew. If anyone saw… That she was merely standing by as this child read from such an atrocious account.

  The boy continued, “The bodies of the unfortunate children were burned, and only a number of heads of particularly beautiful children were preserved—as memorials.”

  Her head swam. She reached over and lightly touched the top of the book, as if to tell him he’d read enough, thank you.

  “Well, it doesn’t really say that, now does it?” she asked, trying to get him to confess he’d made it up to shock her. Very clever little brat. He must have started on those sinful horror comics a few years ago. Why, in 1954, there were about 20 million being sold for a dime apiece. Kids were buying them used for 1 to 3 cents. They showed graphic depictions of dismemberment and other forms of carnage. Warping impressionable minds.

  Aster had never read this book (PSYCHO-something OOO-UALIS, her thoughts deleting the horrible -s-, -e-, -x- letters), so she, of course, wouldn’t know. No decent, God-fearing woman would.

  “Yes, it does say that,” he insisted, sticking out his lower lip preciously. “Here, see for yourself.”

  He let her take the book.

  She scanned it. Recognized words like Nero, Tiberius. Marschalls Gilles de Rays (Jacob, Curiosités de l’histoire de France, Paris…

  But this was all she could read. The rest was in some other language entirely.

  “Did you know that when this book was first published, in 1886, Dr. von Krafft-Ebing thought only the medical community would be interested? So he published it in Latin, which was the scholastic norm for the time.”

  He blinked these golden lashes. An imp.

  He’d translated it into English as he read it to her.

  (Yes, Katrin had been good at languages once. Such traits might be inherited.)

  Aster suddenly believed the book weighed a ton. It had grown very hot in her fingers, too. She dropped it. It made a sound as it hit the floor which was so loud the gentleman at the nearby table almost gave himself whiplash turning his head to see what was the matter.

  She pressed the back of a hand to her forehead.

  “How clumsy of me,” she managed to say quietly. She even picked the book up and handed it back to him.

  Then she stumbled out of the room to find a telephone to call—well, who? The police…child services?

  A priest?

  An exorcist?

  She went instead to fetch her superior. Together they returned to this reading room.

  The boy was gone. He’d taken the stack of books with him.

  But wouldn’t he have been stopped at the desk near the entrance? Couldn’t very well take them without checking them out, could he? And Ocie Caudill was on duty down there. She’d have caught that he was trying to slip out books from the special lock-up.

  They went down and checked with Ocie. Yes, a little blond boy had left but had been carrying no books.

  They hurried back to the reading room.

  A window was open. He’d thrown the books through it, left, then picked them up outside. Must have been awkward for him to carry them all.

  ««—»»

  Pearly was irritated. He knew he’d never be able to go back to the Central Library—at least not until he was older and didn’t look the same. He’d have to choose another, not quite as well stocked.

  What if he couldn’t go to any of them now because that bitch gave them his description and they would be watching out for him? A big coat. He’d get himself a big coat. Then he could go into stores where books were sold and steal them.

  He couldn’t help grinning, recalling the look on that dumb woman’s face when he translated the Latin text for her. Hell, it was no big deal. Most of modern speech came from what were called Romance languages. Not that they were that crappy lovey dovey schmutz. The term meant they had been derived from the Roman. Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, much of English. If you could see the patterns in the words, you could figure it out pretty fast.

  Providing you were some sort of genius maybe. Pearly suspected he might be something like that. It explained why he was so bored in school.

  Now it was night out and likely around eight, maybe eight-thirty. He’d taken the books on the bus with him, setting them on the seat beside him. Then he’d gotten off at the park, cutting across one corner of it, lugging those books, sure he’d have about a million muscles (sore ones!) by the time he got back to Unc’s in The Vagabonds. But he hadn’t been willing to leave behind any of the books he’d had on the table tonight.

  Some cop saw him and squinted under the street light. “Boy, what ya doin’ out this late?”

  “Been studying at a friend’s,” Pearly told him.

  “Where’d you get all those?”

  Pearly flashed an innocent smile. “My teacher gave me a ton of homework. I’ve been sick so now I gotta catch up. See?”

  He said the part, “I’ve been sick…” cartoonishly, with a squeak in it and managed to shiver so he’d look really pitiful. The policeman chuckled and nodded. Couldn’t see any of the titles. “Yeah, nowadays they expect ya to be a rocket scientist.”

  “Yes, sir. Maybe.”

  It was crossing the park that Pearly saw one of the hobos. One of the crudniks that had followed his mother and him home that December in 1956. The night…

  …she died.

  At first he stopped, shocked, unable to move. Something alive and with claws moved up and down his throat. He wanted to shout yet all the power of speech had fled him, like it had that night, right before Christmas.

  Don’t let him get away!

  Pearly set the books behind some trees and followed. The man weaved and stumbled, drunk and stinking. The kid watched him pick out a park bench and stretch out on it. He drained a few drops from a bottle, all the moisture which remained. Then he dropped it, letting it break on the sidewalk.

  In minutes, the guy had passed out.

  Pearly crept up, looking right and left. It had been maybe five minutes since he’d seen that cop, and the officer had been sauntering the other direction. He didn’t see anybody else. He listened, intently. Didn’t hear anyone either.

  Pearly picked up the broken bottle.

  He thought about what he’d read recently, that night, in two of the books he’d stolen. One was a medical text.

  It had taught him that the left carotid artery, longer than the right, was contained within the thorax, ascending obliquely outward, from the curve of the aorta to the base of the neck.

  (How many kids his age could read this and comprehend it? He figured not too many. Hell, some of the kids on his block had trouble with the some of the bigger words in Bugs Bunny cartoons.)

  Was this what he wanted?

  This medical text and the second book, the one about Jack The Ripper, had said that the heart corresponded to the space between the fifth and sixth ribs, three-quarters of an inch to the inner side, and an inch and a half below the left nipple.

  Of course, he could just perform a lobotomy, bring the point of one of the longer glass shards down between the eye and the higher bridge of the nose
. Give it a twist.

  (Was he strong enough to do that? How strong did one have to be?)

  He doubted he could find the fifth and sixth ribs easily without waking the bum up. This was his first. And he was excited because he was so pissed off about these hobos busting down their door and scaring his mama. All she’d ever tried to do was help them.

  “Easy, easy,” Pearly said softly to himself.

  The man stirred, snorted a raspy clod of phlegm which rattled in his chest wetly enough to make Pearly nauseous. The boy stepped back, bottle behind him. If the bum woke up, would he recognize him?

  The man didn’t wake up. Pearly decided on his course of action. He stepped forward again, leaned in, then slashed the man’s throat with what appeared to be the sharpest part of the broken bottle. Not quite from ear to ear and certainly not deeply enough to nearly decapitate him as Jack The Ripper had with Polly Nichols. (He didn’t know about The Ripper’s other victims because he hadn’t gotten that far into the book yet.)

  Actually it wasn’t deep. The guy’s eyes opened wide. He saw Pearly and tried to grab him. Didn’t he feel his throat was cut? Obviously not…too numbed on drink.

  The man’s fist clutched at the boy’s arm. Pearly gasped. This wasn’t going according to plan. He slashed at the fingers and wrist with the broken bottle. The bum gurgled, a muffled cry, too drunk to manage the effort of a full shriek of rage. He snatched his hand back as the boy lashed out again at the man’s throat, jabbing once, twice, three times. Maybe he got the carotid, maybe the jugular. Possibly both? He hadn’t realized how tough all those layers of skin, muscle and fat were. Far more solid than he’d considered. At any rate, that throat was a mess now.

  There was quite a spray and Pearly ran off a few feet. Did it splash him? Yes, it did. He prayed his Unc was so stoned he wouldn’t notice when Pearly got home. It was all on the front of his shirt. When he went back for the books, the stack would cover it up so no one else he passed in the dark would see. At least he hoped this.

  Now the man’s mouth stretched wide, his chest heaving, both fists (including the cut one) clamped onto the gashes in his neck. He spurted like a shook-up root beer. The mouth stretched wide but there were no screams. The man wasn’t acting drunk anymore. Could such an attack and subsequent shock sober a person so fast? Pearly didn’t hear him shriek and this was a let down, even as he knew he was better off without the guy sounding a noisy alarm. For all the fellow’s thrashing and gouting, it didn’t seem as if he’d been hurt badly enough if he didn’t cry out. And Pearly had wanted him to hurt. With all that blood, it must hurt.

  Pearly frowned, puzzled, watching the man roll off the bench, only manage to clabber to the posts of his knees to crawl, still trying to close the wounds with his hands, greasy blood squirting between his fingers. His mother had protected him, keeping him close at home. And when she took him out with her on her mercy missions, folks simply went to sleep. But after she was gone, he’d seen people die in other ways. In The Vagabonds where gangs fought over turf and spouses beat and shot and stabbed one another as well as their own children to death sometimes. Yet he hadn’t heard a dying scream.

  What would Dr. von Krafft-Ebing have made of that?

  Then suddenly this woman came out from some bougainvillea bushes. He’d noticed her seconds before, knew she’d seen what he’d done. A bag lady heading straight for the man who had either just expired or was about to—considering his eyes had rolled up to blanks and he’d pitched onto his face with a splat. Doubtless she was going to rob the body, hoping for a dollar or two, maybe half a pint in his pocket. Even just chewing gum or a cigarette.

  She carried a big cloth purse as she leaned down.

  Pearly saw it hanging open. It had been open as she stood watching him cut the man. Now she snapped it shut. He hadn’t seen her actually go through the bum’s pocket’s. Hadn’t seen her take anything.

  Yet she’d put the dead man’s scream in it, hadn’t she?

  She gave the child a sly, slow look. Then she strolled away, back into the flowering trees and bushes, back into the fragrant night.

  Pearly realized she must be Mrs. Death.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 5

  “She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn… We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad.”

  —Jack Kerouac

  On the Road

  July 28, 1958

  (Crash.)

  Zane sat in his living room, pack of Lucky Strikes running low, ashtray piling high, Jack Daniels sitting about half full. There was also coffee, made so strong his eyeballs were turning black. He was making a list from his scrapbook. Only the unsolved cases.

  He’d already thumbed through the book. No anniversaries tonight so nothing new had been added. But he couldn’t leave it alone. It was the only family he had.

  “My own Necronomicon in pictures. A dark magic chanted there I try to understand. Have to be able to grasp evil’s message before you can defeat it. Only problem is, the message changes each time. So there you are. Never able to decipher it. But trying, going over it again and again until its curse becomes your curse.”

  Agnes Mathewkitty’s was the first. Always.

  He made himself look at her photograph, not blinking until his eyes watered and he tasted salt at the back of his throat.

  He slowly turned the pages, noted painstakingly every remark added—even though he knew them by heart. Printed by hand every name on a sheet of paper from a childish Big Chief writing tablet he’d picked up that afternoon at a dime store. The sort kids in first and second grade used to practice their faultering penmanship in and do their numbers in, trying to find sums which didn’t always come together easily.

  Agnes. Then a few he wrote down. Not always pausing to peruse each in detail. He’d be sitting there all night and half the next day if he did that.

  Therefore, some deaths later: stopped at Hulet Waris, aged 32. Died 1937. Found castrated with his jewels so far down his throat, it had been hard to tell if he’d died bleeding to death or choking to death. Jealous girlfriend maybe. No, too much force applied. A few of the teeth had actually been broken as the genitalia were pushed into the esophagus. More than likely a pissed-off husband.

  A few more, his gut clenching on nicotine, caffeine, alcohol. Paused on Clayton and Marcia Holmquist, ages 68 and 66 respectively. Died 1939. Old couple. Clayton was discovered in the driveway, robbed and shot through the head. Marcia was found in the kitchen, slumped over the stove, stripped to the waist and partially burned, shot through the heart. A drifter hired to do yard work was suspected but never apprehended.

  Onward. Tina Gaona, aged 27. Died 1940. Her chopped up limbs had been on the beach, figments of driftwood not quite overcome by the tide.

  Mayhem and on. Beatrice Oswald, four-months-old. Died 1941. Someone had laid her on a bathroom counter and cut off her head with a straightrazor. In the nearby bathtub, Timmy Oswald, three-years-old, drowned with his four-year-old brother, Bruce. The six-year-old sister, Dory, had been found partially under the bed in her room where she’d crawled under it to hide. She’d been pulled out by her hair. Her throat was cut with the same razor. There was a popsicle stick in her hand, the flavored ice melted to nothing. The mother was catatonic and ended up in an asylum, silent and stone until her death in 1955. Maybe she did it; maybe she didn’t. The neighbors had heard an argument, then saw the father drive off that morning. Police never located him. So many people had a habit of just up and vanishing when a notion came into their heads.

  Tomoko Negishi and Hidetaka Ueda, she aged 23 and he aged 24. Dead 1942. Suicide pact, poison. But racial slurs were found scrawled on the porch of their home. They had raised chickens and all were hanging by their necks from the clothesline, gutted. It was only a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. The house was stripped bare of trinkets, things which had left patterns in the dust. Or squares of unyellowed wall where t
he rest was discolored by time and sunlight. Zane had suspected murder but couldn’t get a warrant to search any of the neighbors’ places. Because of December 7, 1941 and passions running high.

  On and on, already filled up two pages on that tablet. He especially wanted to skip over this one. Unidentified boy and girl, ages unknown but appeared to be early-teens. Died 1944. Apparently found some dynamite while exploring around a construction site during the weekend. It went off while they were holding it. (But how could that be murder? Zane argued with himself about responsibility. Someone had left it out. It ought to have been locked up. A worker in charge of the explosives had been fired for insubordination a couple days before. He might have intended mischief—just not toward these kids. Probably hoped the boss would get his ass blown off. Premeditation or even carelessness couldn’t be determined. The worker split town, never to be caught.)

  The detective remembered being at the scene. Didn’t he always? There had only been the upper half of the girl and the lower half of the boy. No one reported them missing. None ever showed up to claim them. Throwaway children, apparently. Maybe they were runaways. Maybe their folks were migrant workers there to pick grapes or lettuce. Didn’t know what became of their kids and were afraid to go to the police because they distrusted authorities of any stripe.

  Maybe they only had one parent and that one was serving overseas, World War 2. Or maybe their parent (could be plural) was on a long drunk, an indefinite Lost Weekend.

  Sometimes Zane really hated people.

  “These two,” he said out loud to himself, “were butterflies in a storm, torn to pieces inside rain like tears.”

  God. Policeman’s poetry, waxing elegiac in cop-verse. More and more.

  Elizabeth Short, aged 22. Died 1947. Her body had been discovered in a weedy vacant lot between 39th and Coliseum Streets. She’d been tortured for days as she lay spreadeagled and bound wherever her abductor had taken her. Stabbed repeatedly with a short blade, then burned on her breasts with cigarettes. The perp had slashed the corners of her mouth to widen it, then cut her throat from ear to ear. A rose tattoo on her left thigh had been gouged out, the letters B.D. carved on the other thigh. Her body had been bisected at the waist, and each half drained completely of blood, then scrupulously bathed. Her hair and eyebrows had been dyed a deep—harlot’s—red.