Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Get on it with.

  The book was occult for him, the way a psychic might detect through psychometry the suffering of those who’d worn a ring. More bizarre, it seemed familiar. Which was why, when he’d spied it in that box at Staub’s, he’d felt the overpowering urge to hold it, to open it.

  It was full of secrets Peter knew he was decades and nanoseconds away from.

  Get on with it.

  The book sat, closed, on the desk. Peter shut his eyes, put out his hand. Opened it—oh, anywhere at all.

  He forced himself to open his eyes and look. He put his tongue down to the picture revealed. Just the briefest contact of the tip of that tongue to the surface.

  The still was of an explosion that killed two kids. He felt nothing. Surprised, since he’d been positive this would revolutionize everything he’d ever believed about darkness and the senses.

  He went to another.

  Nothing again.

  As it had happened in the classroom. Except these were most definitely pics of dead bodies. Black and white. Old.

  Three times was supposed to be the charm.

  He tried again.

  This was the next level.

  Fade in…

  Black and white.

  Streaks/Hollows/Partial Double Exposure Ghosts.

  Fuzzy Atrocity:

  If a body was thrown down hard enough, turning it into a bag of broken bones like shattered glass in a sock, and surface capillaries erupted with uniform blunt force and bone edges pushing out tektonic to sever veins and arteries, and then that body was dragged—say 20 feet—quite a path of blood could be laid down similar to a speeding car’s peeled and burned rubber. The stench stamped into the air would be similarly redolent, full of heat and dark rubber ruin.

  Ed Fletcher and Alice Baxter, strangers to one another, had been run off the road by a truck driver who got pissed off because they’d passed him. He was forced to drive slow since he had all these crates of moonshine in the back and he’d been ordered not to break any. Unfortunately he’d been sampling some and he now lead-footed over the crest of the hill. Bad shit, cooked in an outside still, dead coon and three dead birds floating in its scum before it was strained and bottled.

  Practically white-lightnin’-blinded, he came down that hill after both cars, coming up alongside one at a time and turning toward them without warning, forcing them to swerve off the road or get hit. Each had been thrown from their vehicles just that hard, rocketed onto the asphalt, skidding a full half minute after they were already dead, hurled out of sprung suicide doors, then impacted on blacktop. The driver lost control of his truck shortly afterward. It rolled, smashing bottles everywhere. He managed to crawl out, wander through the canyon woods, maybe finding somebody to help him. Maybe sitting under a tree to die from the crude thunderbolt in his head, his body feasted on and bones scattered by various wildlife, nothing of him ever found.

  Problem was, the cops couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose—because some guys when they got blotto on stuff like this turned into complete assholes—or if his brakes had failed. Or if the accidents had been the fault of the other two drivers. Had to be listed as WITHOUT RESOLUTION.

  (Cops didn’t know, but Peter did. It was murder. And the detective who’d pasted this photo here had guessed as much, too.)

  One could only pray that no trace of mind lingered, that there really was such a mercy as sudden death.

  Except there was no such thing, no mercy.

  Fade out…

  A noise like an exhale from a projector, a kiss like pain resting a moment upon a single frame.

  Always consigned to ending in nothing.

  White and black.

  Black.

  He itched and that alone almost drove him mad. Not like tat needles buzzing over him but flies buzzing. Fleas. What it must feel like to have maggots chewing at you. (Doctors did that, nowadays. Used maggots on the living to clean some wounds. Hard to believe the little ickies were sanitary. The very idea grossed him out.)

  Pete didn’t bother to adjourn to the bathroom. He’d disrobed before the exploratory mission, sitting nude on a towel draped across his chair. He could plainly see Ed Fletcher and Alice Baxter curling around his ankles, ragdoll limp and jigsaw bloody. The images moved, beginning as if slung—alive at this point—out those notorious 1930s suicide car doors, opening the opposite direction from the way car doors were manufactured later. They were fuzzy torpedos, doing agitated dances simulating the landing and subsequent grisly slide—no longer alive. A little blood actually oozed from his pores as ink and blood would from a freshly needled tattoo. He knew because he touched it, sniffed, didn’t smell ink or photographic developer or anything…but rust and iron.

  Closed the book. Closed his eyes. Selected another. French kissed the horror he found there.

  Did this all night. Some gave him abominable shocks, others left him with only that alkaline taste. He’d get so sick of it, he tried scraping his tongue with a handful of paper towels he kept in his office to clean the picture glass in frames with. He’d spit into the trashcan. God, what had these been developed with: toxic waste?

  Had there been toxic waste in the forties and fifties?

  Sure. Radioactivity, too. From all those atom bomb testings. Better living through chemistry and electricity and X Rays of souls left flash-burned in gardens of tall cactus.

  Did it until about four in the morning. The pictures that turned out to be—how he thought of it—positive with death residue, became savage microcosmologies on Peter’s skin, barbarities replayed inch by graphic inch, possessed of refractory beasts and every conceivable stripe of victim.

  4:00 A.M. Give or take. There was something extra sick about watching a tiny, hallucinatory tattoo play out a scenario of a rape/slaughter on his dick. He couldn’t help but stare, compelled to do it, mouth agape, taste of sour copper in the saliva which flooded there and then achingly dried up. Skin tight and prickling at the back of his neck, scalp positively scooching by bristly centimeters across his skull that was filled with resounding, mocking heart-thunder.

  He recognized the woman from the latest photo he tasted, except she was alive. It was fall in the park and it looked as if there’d been a light frost. Actually a truck had overturned on a nearby roadway, spilling an enormous load of salt, spread further by wind coming off the ocean. He thought he smelled somebody curing slabs of pork, sweet and smoky. But it was only some starving hobo, toasting over a fire a package of cheap hotdogs he’d shoplifted from a grocery. He also scented where a wino who didn’t have such nimble fingers had pissed out a very cheap red dinner.

  The killer had used the discarded bottle on her. Her whimpers rattled about in Peter’s own throat. The guy broke the bottle inside her, then pulled it out by the jagged glass neck of it and used this to cut her eyes from her face.

  Pete threw up, vomit getting on his penis which stubbornly maintained the erection despite the contents of his disgusted stomach being spattered on it. And he could tell—by itch and by scrotal squirm—that her story was ending, starting over, replaying in a loop…even if he couldn’t see it through the stew which blotted it out.

  Was there a theological statement in this? Something about outraged morality only provided a superficial veneer to cover up our nervous fascination with evil?

  And then the next…did this never end? Was he in a movie strung into another movie looped into another? His office had really become Hell.

  Beasts and corpses from framed stills on his walls leered at him—a real trick for those without faces—seeming to say, “Bet you can’t eat just one!”

  Pete’s right buttock showed a castrated priest strangled with his rosary, an altar candle shoved up his ass with the wick end sticking out of the rectum, burning. The killer, revealed in Peter’s vision as an irate parent, had in his coat pocket a snapshot of his small son…an altar boy: a picture within a picture.

  On his other butt cheek, a bisected prostitute. Not Elizabeth
Short but a hapless victim of some unknown and never apprehended guy tagged the Panther Man. Her legs had been severed at the knees to make it easier to fit the body parts into a trunk for shipping from Florida to San Bernadino. Opening the trunk showed the upper and lower halves set together with the legs under the arms. The lower half had been turned backward and lipstick spots drawn upon each chubby ham to resemble nipples. So if you squinted, she seemed to have two sets of full pendulous breasts. A hole had been gouged between the actual tits and the autopsy revealed the victim had been sexually assaulted in this heart wound as well as up the rectum. Shit from the first assault had been found compacted into the chest injury. An unstable and spurned man’s statement about the sump of love?

  In the space surrounding and entering Pete’s asshole, the vic was a fifteen-year-old boy, put into county jail overnight because his father believed it would scare him out of his wild streak for good. Two inmates had gone to the gas chamber for it, but the scene revealed to Pete that the perps were two guards.

  These last three drove Peter into the bathroom, doubled up on the toilet, forcing a washcloth into his mouth so he wouldn’t wake the family as his entire intestines poured out their contents in ferocious colonic. He also began throwing up again. Since he couldn’t move off the toilet, he puked into a small white trashcan Diane usually used for disposing of Q-Tips and cotton balls she’d removed her make-up and nail polish with.

  He was emptied out about seven o’clock. He was grateful it was Saturday and he didn’t have to work. He was glad there was another bathroom in the house so no one would wait for him to come out. He studied himself in the mirror, dismayed at just how many little images played out on his skin. He was pretty much covered with them from just below his throat to his feet. There were even tiny atrocities on his toes.

  Eventually he sneaked back to Hell. Knew from the nagging voice—or voices—near his ears that there were two left.

  TWO LEFT, PETER. YOU MUST HELP THEM/US. ONLY YOU CAN.

  The first one in the book and the last one.

  He couldn’t, simply couldn’t. Not yet, if ever. Last night had been his major trip from one end of a nightmare to the other. There almost wasn’t any part of him left to squeeze more horror into.

  (I’m full.)

  Yet, not every still had affected him, nor left him with its memento which—the closer he studied—actually more resembled a tiny black and white movie instead of any kind of tattoo he’d ever seen before. Not even flicker tats had this much detail.

  The notes to the stills turned out to be prophetic in their way. He noticed that any bearing the words WITHOUT RESOLUTION were usually pics that gave him visions—and those tatty mementos of visions. (The explosion which blew up the two nameless kids being one of the exceptions.) Those with no effect were generally not cases of homicide or were solved cases.

  There was another, striking photo which proved elusive. Third to last in the book. Of a lady who’d fallen from a window. The caption underneath said WITHOUT RESOLUTION BUT PROBABLE SUICIDE.

  Since Peter suffered no reaction, he guessed she must have jumped.

  There was a page right after this one of a very puffed up, infested female corpse. The page bore dark spots. He realized they were old blood stains when he put his tongue to it. Not the blood of the victim in the pic.

  He didn’t have any psychic reaction to the blood. No, this wasn’t his medium, was it?

  One more page. Get on with it.

  Actually: one more page at either end. The extremes…he could feel that. Maybe it was because he’d just been erupting at both ends that he couldn’t face this. Psychblocked.

  DO IT!

  Yet he couldn’t.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 17

  “Just like old portraits, lumbering in the dark.”

  —John Hookham Frere

  The Rovers

  Peter wanted to ask for help. He came that close to knocking on the bedroom door and begging Diane to let him in. He needed to be held. He’d fucked up, delved into the forbidden. Hey, the morality in those films (the supernaturals as opposed to the slashers which were pretty much devoid of proverbial/proverb mystery) he’d always loved wasn’t so far from the truth. Don’t mess with the unknown.

  Except the unknown wasn’t supposed to be real.

  He was swollen, puffed as a leach, having binged on the pernicious until he might just explode—like that character in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. He was something fastened by suckers to the skin of the world which ought to be pinched off and flicked away into space. He even found himself, dressed in his robe, leaving bloody footprints in the hallway, standing before the bedroom door, whimpering like a kicked puppy.

  I can’t let Diane see me this way. She’ll freak, he told himself.

  There was a woman he’d met at neighborhood block parties. Yeah, a doctor. Veronika Noll. Petite woman but built like they used to be before Twiggy drew the pederasts out of hiding and into the fashion world. (Now be nice, Petey. Diane’s tall and what they call athletic when they don’t want to say words like bony.) Nika Noll was a redhead with big breasts, wide hips, drunk with curves. Why he’d noticed her to begin with, even though they’d hardly ever spoken beyond, “Nice day for this. Not too hot. Pass the mustard.”

  She looked like the sort of damsel a 1950s creature would carry off, to be rescued in the final reel.

  She just lived a few doors down.

  Peter showered, dressed in the clothes he’d removed the night before which were still in his office, then hurried out of the house. Blood was already seeping through his shirt. He could feel it in the crotch of his underwear, in the seat of his jeans, and inside his socks. Would it stop soon? The oozings from the first ones—with Rosaluna, Rosaluna’s baby, and the Black Dahlia—had ceased after mere minutes. But those were only three. Now he had dozens from last night’s rashness. Marks of Cain? Marks of the Beast?

  He kept his head down as Tim Warner from next door was out mowing his lawn. Don’t speak to me. Don’t look at me. I’m invisible here.

  (Don’t like you anyway, you stiffnecked prick.)

  Pete rushed down the sidewalk, trying to seem as if he wasn’t running at all. Not an easy trick to manage. Saw Mrs. Gladly driving up in her Lexus, having just had it to the car wash. (He didn’t know her first name. At the block parties she only ever introduced herself, quite formally, as Mrs. Gladly. Either her first name was atrocious or she didn’t believe anyone else present was on her social and/or intellectual level.)

  She had her car’s stereo on. He could faintly hear strains of early rock and roll. What those who perpetually waxed nostalgic referred to fondly as ‘Golden’.

  He then heard repeated, practically inaudible, “Axeman, Axeman, Axeman.”

  She took the car out every three days to a place seven blocks away to have it sponged and waxed. See, you also couldn’t wash your wheels in your driveway, not according to The Neighborhood Association. No kids or grown-ups acting like kids running around in cut-offs and squirting each other with the hose.

  He turned onto the doctor’s property, feeling blood squish in his shoes as he went up the sidewalk. Shit, look at him. What was he supposed to say when she opened the door?

  She might insist on calling an ambulance. No way. No way.

  Perhaps she wasn’t even home and he’d have to go back, vulnerable to both Tim and Mrs. Gladly really taking a good look at him. Having to enter his own house and risking his family seeing him this way, in bloody clothes. He could grin and say, “Halloween’s in three weeks. Just a prank.” Of course, this would still piss off Diane who saw Halloween as a heathen celebration.

  But he made it to the door, rang the bell, and clenched his fists. Waiting.

  “Hi, Mr…Beta, isn’t it?” She seemed surprised to see him. Of course, they’d only met casually at a couple barbecues.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Noll,” he began.

  She gasped. “What happened?
Has there been an accident?”

  “Could I please come in? I’ll stand on the foyer tile so I don’t mess up your carpets.”

  She quickly stepped aside to allow him past her.

  “I, uhm, have no way to describe this before you see it so I’ll just open my shirt,” Peter muttered, fumbling with the buttons. “I didn’t know who else to go to.”

  He began to cry.

  Her mouth opened as she got a look at flowing abominations. She glanced up, scrutinizing him. Suspecting a trick. Then she turned her attention back to the fiendish pictures. She reached out and gingerly touched him with the tip of a single finger.

  “It’s all over me, except for my face and neck,” he admitted.

  “How…?” she began, unable to tear her eyes away now. Carnage, cruelty, outrage.

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” he tried to explain. “Nobody would. I got this scrapbook of death scene photos some LAPD homicide detective used to keep, and somehow they transferred to me.”

  (Somehow?)

  Well, how was he supposed to tell her he’d been licking those stills? To experience some sickeningly voyeuristic paranormal flashback into the tragedies of these poor people?

  “Come in here,” she commanded, leading him toward a room she used as an office. She closed the curtains and turned on a light. “Will you show me the rest?”