Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Pearly ignored the appraisal. “How many did you kill?”

  The man grimaced as he answered. “There were ten in London. Didn’t do Liz Stride though. That’s false as ’ell. She was done in by a short, rounded blade. Mine was long and pointed. Didn’t do Rose Mylett who was merely strangled. Did a few they never found. Then I did four in th’ States, right after I got ’ere. I ’aven’t so much as stepped on a spider in sixty years. Even got married and had kids. Used t’ whittle ’em toys from bones. Lost th’ ’ole family in th’ influenza epidemic of 1917 t’ 1919. Killed some twenty-five million people worldwide, it did. About th’ same figures as ’istorians give for th’ Black Plague in th’ fourteenth century. They all died while a poisonous berry like me squeaked through.”

  “My mother killed thirty-two, not counting animals,” Pearly admitted, never having told a soul about it before.

  “That a fact? Was she a good woman, your mother?”

  Tears came into the boy’s eyes. “Oh, yes, sir. She never killed anyone who wasn’t already suffering.”

  The man smiled at him slyly, a crinkle of a hole in his face. Surprisingly full of teeth. Maybe they were dentures. “That’s all I was doin’. Them ’ores suffered, too. And spread disease t’ make others suffer. What’s your name, son?”

  “Pearly.”

  “You know already mine’s Noom. Our names are rather alike, Pearly. Noom, which is Moon spelled backward. Th’ full moon’s a lunatic’s pearl. But my mother wasn’t daft when she put my name that way. She was callin’ me after th’ dark side o’ it. I’m just an ’armless old man now.”

  He seemed to shrink back into the wheelchair, closing his eyes. His lids were thin as dragonfly wings, almost transparent. Pearly had to wonder how he slept.

  “You were never harmless,” the kid said.

  The eyes clicked open. He could hear them do this, even above the roar of the ocean. The Pacific thunder was separate. Pearly heard very clearly everything having to do with this moment.

  “Is that poetry I heard you reading?” Pearly asked.

  “Yeah, wouldn’t think it o’ me, would you? I don’t normally go for love trash. But ol’ Devon’s work intrigues me—bein’ ’e was, first, a man what ’ad no arms or legs and, second, bein’ ’e was so frankly, erotically, anti-social. I met ’im in a carnival ’e was workin’ at in ’34.”

  Then he inquired of the boy, “Did you come ’ere t’ kill me?”

  The child reached out and touched the old man’s hand. With respect, with awe, and trying to make sure he didn’t just vanish as a strip of sunlight dazzled through tree branches to ripple along Chambers’ body. “I only came to see you. Wanted to know if I’d guessed right. I did. I can go now.”

  The old man grabbed the sleeve of the black coat. He leered, all those teeth showing. They were yellow as jaundice in the hole of the mouth, tainted but sharp. “No wait. Kids! Always in an ’urry! Don’t you want t’ prove you’re better? Like in th’ old American west when ’ot young toughs drew down on famous gunslingers. Test your mettle?”

  Pearly shook his head. He tried gently to disengage himself from Chambers’ clutch. He smiled nervously at the old man, still too impressed with being in a legend’s presence to just scratch him and run.

  “Please,” Chambers hissed, not grinning anymore. “I ’ate bein’ this frail. I used t’ be able t’ kill a full grown bullock wi’ a single ’ammer swing.”

  Pearly didn’t blink.

  “Want t’ be paid, is that it?” Chambers laughed softly. He took his hand off the coat’s sleeve and reached into his shirt, under the open collar. There, around his neck, was something on a chain. He removed it and handed it to the child. “Know what this ’ere is?”

  Pearly turned it over in his hand. “An old key.”

  “Probably a ’undred years old. Older than me. I wrote it in th’ book, remember?”

  “Mary Kelly’s missing key!”

  “Right you are.”

  “I can have this if…?”

  “That would be th’ deal, yeah.”

  Static popped along the boy’s arm. He believed he actually flashed on the image of #13 Miller’s Court. The body with its legs jerked far apart on the bed, disemboweled, partially flayed, mutilated until its human identity had been eradicated. It made him dizzy. It made him nauseous. He stood there shivering, embarrassed and confused. He hated that this old man saw him shake. Yeah, a baby boy introduced to genuine wickedness for the first time. Not just the petty shit folks did, random crimes and common killings. But real evil which history would remember forever.

  The metal in the key felt simultaneously hot and cold. It glowed pus yellow and rage red and a peculiar green. A talisman of a beastly power.

  Chambers whispered seductively, “’ere now, son. Turn my wheelchair so I’m sittin’ on th’ other side o’ this big tree…”

  Pearly did as he was instructed. Now they had some privacy. No attendants or other residents could see them.

  Noom tapped the side of his neck, low. “Right ’ere’s th’ carotid.”

  “I know that,” Pearly said, rather edgily.

  “Good! Now take your knife…”

  “What makes you think I have a knife?”

  Chambers rolled his eyes. “I can smell it, son. It ’as an odor just like that key I gave you. Smells like revenge, like midnight, like release. T’ me, leastwise. It might ’ave a totally different perfume t’ you.”

  Pearly managed a smile. He had brought a knife, concealed down in the deep pocket of his big coat. He’d wrapped the handle as he’d done with the one he used on Theo Gegax. Why had he carried it there? Truth was, he always carried one now. Just in case he happened upon any more of those bums who’d busted down their door at Christmas in 1956, when his mother fell.

  “You’ve only t’ open th’ artery. T’ slit my throat ear t’ ear would be unnecessary. Too showy for broad daylight and out in public, such as it is. Besides, that isn’t quite as easy as it looks. Perhaps you know this already?”

  The kid nodded, thinking of that first man in the park he’d had to stab several times with the broken bottle.

  “Take your coat off first. Right. Set it where it won’t get splashed when you do me. Then put your coat back on and button up. That’s ’ow I did it. Do it on this side. If they pass by, they might only see me slumped and think I’m sleepin’. Gives you time t’ get away.”

  Pearly removed the coat. He then cut Chambers as asked, right where the pulse tapped and begged for freedom. Not butter, no. The dried up flesh was more like a flaky pie crust. And he was Jack Horner poking a hole in it with his thumb. He was Jack, Jack…

  The old man didn’t flinch but he did close his eyes, the lids thin as dragonfly wings. There was no sound of haunting victims’ shrieks erupting from the past, trapped inside Chambers and abruptly let loose. No tattered spirits flapped away. And Mrs. Death failed to put in an appearance. Because the old man didn’t cry out. He merely released a final muted breath, completely lost in the rumble of the sea.

  No problem keeping the knife. It wasn’t lodged deep where he couldn’t retrieve it.

  But the book. Where had it gone? It was there only a moment ago. If the old man recommended it so highly, he wanted to read that.

  He got down on his hands and knees and looked around in the grass. Then he saw it, barely. The old man had put it under himself while Pearly was removing his coat. Figured the key was enough payment. Or maybe he just didn’t want it to get bloody.

  Damn. He’d never move the body enough to get it out. He’d have to hope he found another copy some day.

  I just killed Jack The Ripper, he thought to himself, pronouncing it with great fanfare and meaning inside his head as he walked away. Pearly felt the old key against his chest, heavy as an anvil, light as a skip.

  ««—»»

  Salem was picking on Unc when Pearly returned early in the evening. Dan had come down from the ladder. He’d sketched and then painted
a picture up in that corner of the ceiling where Pearly had seen him last. But Pearly didn’t really bother looking at it when he came in. Dan had his head bowed and he was crying. Mascara ran down his rouged cheeks like the black trails of mortally wounded spiders.

  “It was kind of kinky at first, your dressing up. But it’s wearing thin!” Salem shouted. “You’re a drag, no pun intended.”

  “I’m only trying to hide from the succubus!” Dan wailed. “You saw her, standing over the bed that time.”

  Salem sneered. “No, man, I didn’t. I was, like, humoring you.”

  “Well, Korvo saw her in the bathroom. She attacked him,” Dan insisted, whining. He sobbed so much he’d started to drool from his mouth, saliva threads reddened by his carmine lipstick. And his nose ran.

  Salem laughed. “Man, Korvo was shit-faced. He couldn’t even take a piss and fell down on the tile. He’d heard you talking about it so he just used that as an excuse. We laughed about it later when he sobered. You’re making a fool of yourself. I don’t care to be hanging around no fool.”

  Pearly almost backed right out the front door. He didn’t want to be a witness to Unc’s humiliation. But he felt bad just ducking out on him. He’d personally always detested Salem. Well, maybe the creep was going to split and never return. Danny would get over it. Maybe he’d find somebody nicer.

  The boy went in the apartment and quietly closed the door. He slipped across to the couch and sat down. He didn’t take off the coat, just in case he decided to beat a hasty retreat after all. Say, if Salem and Dan suddenly started to make up.

  He noticed there were several empty decks of H on the coffee table, likely scored that day and now percolating in veins, sacrificed to the White God. There was red paint on the floor near the ladder that Dan now knelt beside, skirt carefully folded around his legs which were drawn up under him.

  The kid sniffed the air. Not all of it was paint. That red drool coming out of Unc’s mouth was because the jerk had hit him in the teeth. Pearly didn’t think Salem had ever beat on Dan before. He wouldn’t have dared. Salem was a weasly guy and Unc had always been bigger. But Uncle Dan had lost weight lately. What was the expression? He was a shadow of his former self?

  “Oh, look, lover. There’s your succubus,” Salem hissed. “She’s standing over by the window and looking at you.”

  Unc cried out, hysterical. “Don’t!”

  The other man clucked. “Uh uhh! What’s that? She says she thinks you’re pretty and she wants to suck your dick. With those lips she ought to be able to suck you right down into the bowels of the earth.”

  “Leave him alone,” Pearly snapped. “Why don’t you go peddle your ass on Sunset?”

  Salem turned around so fast, he almost lost his footing. He hadn’t noticed the kid had come in. “How long you been here?”

  The boy glared at him. “Long enough to tell the landlord we have a rat problem again.”

  Dan had picked up a stray packet of junk. He spotted a paint tarp on the floor and was crawling under it, taking that deck with him. Pearly didn’t know when he’d last shot up.

  Salem shook his head, the ugly thing swaying on his scrawny neck. “Hey, you know you might need somebody else to look after you soon. Seeing as how your Uncle Dan is coming unglued. See what he painted up there? He’s running from that even now.”

  Pearly finally looked up at the portrait. There were several faces emerging at different angles from a central point.

  He froze. One of them was clearly Katrin Soloway, someone Dan had never met.

  The child seemed to petrify, a fossil with blond hair and blue eyes, not that unlike this face on the ceiling.

  It was his mother. It was also several Mrs. Deaths. The baglady in the park from when he’d killed the bum in revenge. The one with the black stiletto heels and black gator purse when Emily Kaplan was run down. The one in bone white from the hospital when he did the hit on Gegax.

  Pearly heard a terrible, oscillating moan. It took him a moment to understand he was making this noise himself. He wanted to crawl under that tarp with Unc. He wanted to be held by Danny and tell the man, “She’s real. Don’t cry. Neither of us cry, okay? She won’t hurt you but she’s real. “

  Yet someone did hold him. Arms had encircled him. A weight crushed against his back.

  Salem was trying to pull the big coat off the kid. And the boy had no doubts as to what would follow that. He’d seen the way the man looked at him, the same way he stared at everything that had two legs and an ass.

  Pearly yelled, snapped from paralysis. He dug down in the coat and grasped the handle of the knife he’d used earlier on Noom Chambers. But he couldn’t pull it out. The man attacking him jerked on the coat and Pearly’s hand was stuck in both the sleeve and the pocket.

  “Let me go!” he howled. “You fuckin’ felcher! Unc, help!”

  He fought to move the hand, to turn the blade. The pocket in the full coat bulged outward as Pearly used an advantage of suddenly being thrust halfway out of the coat, on the opposite side from where he kept his weapon hidden. He swung around on the ball of one sneakered foot, spun a pirouette until he faced his attacker. He brought the knife across, through the pocket, through the fabric of the coat, with more strength and force than he’d ever felt in his life. The material tore as the blade ripped through it, then went right into Salem’s stomach.

  At last, like butter.

  The man let go abruptly, clutched his belly, flopped to the floor. His face contorted in agony.

  Pearly fell down beside him, still wound up in the big coat. He struggled to get the rest of the way out, knife still in his small fist. He crawled over to the tarp, calling, “Dan? Uncle Dan? I had to do it…”

  He pulled the tarp back. Unc’s face was slack, eyes rolled up to zeros. He no longer drooled red. His nose no longer ran. He’d shot the last packet up and OD’d.

  Pearly blinked, wondered if he should say a prayer. Then was yanked backward across the floor before he could decide.

  Salem had him by the ankles, managing to climb to his feet, blood pouring out of the gash in his gut. He grunted and began to swing Pearly back and forth, hanging upside-down in the man’s grasp as the guy stumbled toward the window. “Fitting, isn’t it? If you go out the window? If you meet your murdering bitch of a mama down there, say hi for me.”

  But there was this soft pop. A noise of a cork coming out of champagne, the sound mixed with a fart. And Pearly was let go. Before reaching the open window and the stories fall below. He hit the floor, rolling. Looked over his shoulder and saw Salem’s blood, skull bits, and brains going in slow motion through the air. Spinning outward, then descending in clotty drops like an explosion in a snot factory. Salem sprawled across the fold-out couch, the top of his head gone. He still twitched, spasming like an electric eel out of water. With nothing above the bridge of his nose, his mouth opened and shut, opened and shut, as if he were trying to remember how to shriek. Or did he shriek?

  And there was a guy in the room, lowering a pillow taken from the couch. He’d just fired a gun through it.

  It was the man with the cross-shaped scar. The one from the hospital. Right now the shape of that cross reminded the kid of Mary Kelly’s key, cold and hot against his chest, underneath his shirt.

  “You okay, kid?” this fellow wanted to know, half-smiling.

  “My uncle’s dead,” Pearly told him.

  “Lousy deal, ain’t it? You got other family?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “I happen to be a member of a family. My name’s Larry Gauzy. Since you got no place else to go, how’s about you come with me?”

  Pearly looked at him with contempt.

  “No, I’m not like this meat,” Larry said, kicking Salem’s dead body. “I know what you did to Gegax. Nice work, kid. I was there to do him myself but couldn’t get past the cops. You, young sir, are a marketable property. I’ve been bragging about you to my boss. Interested in a job? Great benefits.”

>   Pearly didn’t answer at first. He’d just seen a shadow. Mrs. Death, resplendent in bruised purple veils, crossed the room for Salem’s scream which she put into a sparkling amythest bag. She looked at the boy, waiting for him to speak (but he couldn’t), then she went out through the door into the hallway.

  The man with the scar hadn’t seen her. This didn’t surprise Pearly. But he sighed, wishing this one had been his mother. Would he never see her again?

  “Jesus on a pogo stick!” Larry cracked. “Can’t believe he could let out a yelp that loud with no brain. Maybe nobody heard the muffled shot but I’ll bet somebody heard that. If we’re going, it better be quick.”

  “I won’t leave without my books,” the child replied quietly. He hustled to the kitchen table where a good sized stack sat.

  “All those’re yours?” Larry asked, helping him by grabbing some of them.

  “A child prodigy. I couldn’t be a marketable property without them,” Pearly told him.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 9

  “they are so bloody real

  it is as if they really still existed”

  —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  In Goya’s Greatest Scenes

  November 12, 1958

  Zane believed he could safely assume Caroline Palmer would be a willing witness. She’d given a statement less than two weeks ago. He’d visited her in the hospital and she’d always been willing to talk to him. Zarembo—his indictment for organized crime activity in L.A. about to be dropped due to the murder of Theo Gegax—was out of town, reputedly out of state. New York? Chicago? Vegas? Havana? No one was quite sure. (Of course, he might have just been holed up in town.) But Larry Gauzy turned up at a grocery store, cart full of cereal, hot dogs, cookies, soda pop.

  So Zane called Caroline who was home, recuperating from the attack, having been given vacation time from her job.