Still

by Charlee Jacob

  He shivered but stripped down to his underwear.

  She wiped off an upper arm, took his blood pressure, finding it elevated…naturally. Took the temperature inside his mouth. That was normal. Yet the surface of his skin was hot to the touch. Took his pulse. Racing.

  The bleeding slowed. Stopped. She’d left and come back with a variety of things. Rubbing alcohol, oils, brillo.

  “They don’t come off,” she stated after some efforts.

  “No.”

  “Not stick-on temps.”

  “‘Fraid not.”

  “I want to take some scrapings and blood samples.”

  “Okay.”

  She crossed her arms. “I’d like to take you to my office. It’s only about five or six miles from here. You game?”

  He nodded. Didn’t think twice about calling Diane to say where he’d be. She’d just assume he was still in Hell.

  He got dressed again and Dr. Noll lent him a big coat to put over his clothes so no one would notice the blood. She drove them to an upscale medical professionals’ building, closed because it was Saturday. He noticed as they went to her office that the door identified her as a psychiatrist. He hadn’t known that. Here he’d thought she was an M.D. or something.

  But didn’t psychiatrists have to have regular degrees before they moved on into specialization? He assured himself this was all right. She’d know what to do. Or would figure something out.

  Noll ran tests the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. Found nothing organically wrong with him yet. Although the images on samples of skin she removed continued to swirl.

  “It isn’t ink,” she told him, totally perplexed. “It isn’t anything. It comes across as undetectable to everything but being seen.”

  “But…” he protested feebly, gesturing down at himself.

  “There could be a psychogenic cause. Similar to stigmata, ‘psychogenic purpura’. Would possibly explain the bleeding you had earlier. The mind is capable of producing effects upon the body. You’ve heard of false pregnancy? Couvade in men and Pseudocyesis in women?”

  He nodded. “You think this is psychosomatic?”

  He wished this could be true. Then maybe she might dope him up with something to make these terrible things disappear. He’d willingly live on a psycho ward, drugged and smiling silly for the rest of his life if these would go away.

  “Pretty much. I can’t find any other basis for a cause that’s arising from your physiology. You’re a healthy man. I need to do a really extensive battery of blood tests and DNA. Might find something unique…”

  “Will you do that?”

  He watched her eyes. They absolutely glittered. He could tell she was thinking, Gad, could this man make me famous! He didn’t mind that. He just wanted it fixed.

  She smiled tightly. “Yes, I will. How can I refuse? It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve witnessed some truly unusual phenomena.”

  He blinked, trying not to look down at his body, trying not to feel the images moving. The itch, the tingle. “What about drugs? Something to suppress my ability—if I’m doing this to myself?”

  “I’d rather wait until I know more, just in case there’s some organic condition that drugs might worsen. Let me make a visual record of this first. Is this all right with you?”

  He agreed and she took an expensive little video camera from the closet. Filmed every gut-shot, scragged, claw-hammered, blackjacked, throttled, jugulated, defiled and sodomized, decapitated, burned, and lynched inch of him.

  “I want you back here on Tuesday morning. 8:00 A.M. I should have a few test results back by then,” she instructed him. “And I want you to sign this form, granting me permission to check your medical records.”

  He sighed. “That’ll give the school where I teach time to get a sub for my class. Thanks, Dr. Noll.”

  She smiled again, less clinically. “Call me Nika. Because we’re going to really get to know each other from here on out.”

  ««—»»

  He didn’t have dinner with his family that night either. He heard the television downstairs as Ellis and Melody watched movies. Heard Diane come in to yell at them for having some horror flick on. They didn’t have cable (she wouldn’t allow it), so it must have been a pretty harmless scare at that.

  Heard both kids stomp up the stairs. Ellis yelled down at his mother, “Yeah? Well did you know that Dracula’s the most filmed movie character EVER?”

  Pete couldn’t hear Diane’s response, but he did hear the children slam their respective bedroom doors.

  That’s my boy.

  His wife never knocked on his door to see if he was okay or wanted something to eat. Certainly never offered to cuddle or kiss and make up. When he put his ear to the floor—which was the ceiling for the den—he heard a soft click click. She was on her computer, probably doing banking work. What she often did on her days off.

  What exactly did they ever do as a couple—or as a family? They used to go to the beach but it had been at least two years since the last time. They used to go to the zoo and to films (weepy, angst-ridden, chick flicks mostly, or Pixar cutishness for the kids). They went out to eat maybe two or three times a month. Diane went with Peter to all the PTA meetings and to school functions of whatever sports or academic events Ellis and Melody took part in, their biggest claim to a social life. But Diane always took the kids shopping by herself and Pete visited the memorabilia places alone, never the twain shall meet. She took the kids to church on Sunday. He didn’t go. Couldn’t stand the hypocrisy of all those jerks acting holy, floating a saintly foot off the floor (like levitating demons, if you asked him) until they got back into the outside’s worldly sewer, returning faster-than-light-speed to their regular gossip, bigotries, and back-stabbing. He purely had no patience with organized religion. Too many just had their hands in your pockets and were in the business of selling you forgiveness for your wicked ways.

  He sat at his desk, wondering if it was possible that Dr. Noll—Nika—might be right. That it was a matter of his mind creating this havoc. He prayed (yeah, that’s right, the guy who wouldn’t attend church was praying) that she found something, anything. Cancer even. An explanation. He’d accept insanity, sure he would.

  Pete picked up the phone, called his mother’s number back home in Texas. Considered it was rather disgusting of him to sit naked while calling her but he wasn’t doing it to be kinky.

  He heard it ring several times. He knew she moved slower these days. Since Dad had died and she’d developed arthritis.

  Give her time.

  “Hello?”

  “Momma?”

  “Pete? How are you, son?”

  “Uh, fine, I guess. How about yourself?”

  “Kind of stiff today. But they changed my medicine. Should take a little while to adjust. How are Diane and the kids?”

  “Super. The reason I called, Momma. I have a question. It’s sort of a weird one.”

  “Okay. You were always weird, honey. Don’t start apologizing now for it. What can I answer?”

  “Was there anything strange when I was born?”

  “Strange how?”

  “Was I normal?”

  “As a baby? Well, of course you were normal. Ten fingers, ten toes. You were born with a caul, but that’s not so unusual.”

  Then she chuckled. “You know folks used to believe that children born with cauls had second sight?”

  ««—»»

  He paced the floor, trying to get a grip. This wasn’t prophecy. It was seeing everything ex post facto, after the event.

  “It’s a haunting,” he told himself.

  Hey, guy. You’re The Illustrated Man.

  “No, I’m not. No twenty colors and pics which remain motionless until after dark. These are black and white, shades of all grays in-between. Always moving, from photos of dead bodies into portraits of final death throes and terror.”

  Though he wondered why he saw killers in his visions and didn
’t see any in either the scrapbook’s pictures or in the scenes on his flesh.

  From time to time he heard the faintest whispers, Only you can save us, yet no one else seemed to hear anything. Nika didn’t mention hearing anything.

  “I’m not The Illustrated Man. I just live in a haunted palace. I am the haunted palace.”

  Not an art gallery but a cinema. One with double features, triple features ad nauseum. A hundred screens all showing only a clip apiece. Midnight flicks. The most heinous of the ghoul cult faves.

  He’d taken down the long mirror from the bathroom door and brought it into Hell, propping it up beside the futon. He appraised himself. Black and white. But not the chic quicksilver and shiny, if impenetrable, noir of classy classic films.

  Instead, grainy as a mosaic rendered in chips of poor quality tesserae, everyone comprised of minute bits of cemetery stone.

  He shut his eyes tight and tried to will something to appear in the mirror. Some psychics used such items for scrying, didn’t they? And it wasn’t as if he had a crystal ball. He tensed every muscle, even trying to squeeze his brain inside his skull. This made him very dizzy.

  He opened his eyes. For a split second he saw himself standing there, holding a baby in his arms. There had been a lot of murdered babies in that book, but he knew this one was Rosaluna’s baby. It had the umbilical cord around its neck and also the scrap of amnion visible between its lips, where the killer had stripped off its caul and stuffed it into its mouth.

  It scared Peter so bad, he quickly shut his eyes again. When he looked a second time, this was gone. It was only just naked, crazy Peter Beta, covered in deathscapes.

  Get on with it.

  Two remained in the scrapbook, two he hadn’t checked out. First one? Last one? Which would he lick?

  Because he had to do them all. He’d gone into this—stupid as it was—and become involved full throttle. There were answers in those final two stills. Pete had been intended to get this book. He’d spit up the caul.

  Shit be damned, he’d been BORN with a caul. What kind of fluke was that?

  “If I’ve got second sight—providing this is what this is—then why did it take forty years to show itself? I’ve never had any kind of psychic experience before.”

  He chose the scrapbook’s first photograph. Because the last by rights ought to be last, right?

  He went to his desk and opened the scrapbook to the first page. Saw a picture of a little girl who broke his heart. How could anybody do something like that?

  (A question he’d been asking himself a lot over the last couple of days. How could anyone do something so terrible? How messed up did you have to be? How despicable? How cursed?)

  “Uh oh. I don’t want to do this. Nuh uh.”

  The images on his skin began to move very fast, manic replays that stung him everywhere, down his arms, up his legs, withering his penis and scorching up his ass, assaulting him in flame over the length and width of his torso. Peter stifled a scream from the pain.

  He picked up the book, stuck out his tongue with the greatest reluctance, and touched it to the picture of the child murdered almost seventy years ago.

  ««—»»

  Ellis and Melody ran from their rooms, having awakened very frightened in their beds. Both in pajamas went to the forbidden door, listening.

  “Is that Daddy?” Melody whispered.

  Ellis didn’t even raise his voice to the quiet tone he used in church. “Yeah, I guess.”

  The moaning was eerie, low, sobbing, then high-pitched as an infant jabbed with a pin. It raised the downy hairs on the backs of their necks. It froze the saliva in their mouths. If that was their father in there, sounding like this, he must be dying.

  Making himself bold, Ellis knocked on the door.

  “Dad? You okay in there?”

  No answer. Just a chilling treble of a man’s voice running notes from baritone to soprano and then down almost all the way to basso profundo. It might have even been comical, like he was playing a trick on his kids, creating Halloween noises. Yeah, could’ve been that, horseplay, if it hadn’t been for the way it actually made Ellis’s teeth ache and ears twitch—as when one of his teachers screeched chalk down the blackboard to get the attention of misbehaving students.

  Ellis knocked louder. “Dad? You need help? Want me to get Mom?”

  Because if this was a joke, just mentioning bringing Mom up would sober their father out of horseplay in a moment. The kids were aware that Dad had a hobby Mom didn’t approve of. That Dad enjoyed scary stuff, but that their mother equated this with Satan worship and burning in Hell and not being on par with the boring people that lived around here.

  The sound didn’t stop. Instead it progressed to a phlegmy rattle as of the biggest canyon puma cat in the world trying to cough up a mondo hairball, propelled out while attached to a German Shepherd sized-cave rat it had swallowed whole.

  Melody hurried to the bedroom where Diane slept, apparently not having heard any of this. She banged on the door. “Mommie! Daddy’s hurt! Come quick!”

  Diane emerged, pulling her robe around her with one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other. The curl which normally rested across the middle of her forehead stuck straight up, a question mark.

  “What?”

  Ellis pointed to the door of Hell. “Dad’s hurt. Listen!”

  Diane did just that.

  She beat her fist against the door. “Pete? What’s going on in there? You’ve got these children scared to death.”

  Weird, weird, weird vibrations passed through the door. Sickening sibilation and pig-squeal. The puling of a cornered baby animal. The jangled twitter of a bird being crushed when a sudden gust of wind broke its tree apart.

  Diane shivered, ran her hands along her arms. She made haste down the stairs, grabbed her key ring from the dining room table, next to her purse, and raced back. Her hand shook as she used her key to Pete’s office.

  Pete didn’t know that she came in sometimes, stood there, scowling at the prints from Roadkill and Hellraiser and some Japanese film called Abnormal Ward: Torture of White Dresses.

  That she’d chant the Lord’s Prayer before leaving again. That she’d even brought in a video camera to create a formal record of this room to be used in court, should she ever need it—which she fully believed she would. Either to divorce him or have him committed or even have him exorcized. Which meant she’d been through every book (except for the scrapbook he’d recently acquired), recorded every picture of twisted ungodliness, touching—actually having to touch—every one and saying to the camera, “See? See? This is depraved. This is Satan.”

  He’d been out with that German creep, to the movies. So she’d known he be gone awhile. She’d been able to linger in that room for hours, making her testimonial. Getting her proof. Fighting the taint as she studied every degenerate part of this collection. Afterward hiding the film deep in her closet, then taking an icy shower for another hour until she shook herself into some martyred revelation of the flesh the like of which she’d never experienced.

  Now she unlocked his door. She found him naked on the floor. Yet, at first, she didn’t realize he was nude. Because of the way his skin was covered in black and white. The movement of it, too. As if he swarmed with insects. Except when she bent down and looked closer, she could see the little movies of people in the most grotesque of circumstances. Butchery, rape, devastation to make the mind reel.

  And what was that on the floor next to him?

  Another book, one she hadn’t seen before. Not a publication filled with glossy cinematic reprobation. A scrapbook, photos pasted in it. Some freak’s privately infernal collection. She saw the first one, a dead child and some mother’s worst nightmare.

  Peter curled up, fetal. His left hand was stretched out and up as if trying to push something away, to ward someone back.

  (Yes, the angel who’d come to punish him. Of this Diane was certain.)

  On the palm of that hand she could
see this same little girl screaming silently, arching her back, trying to fight some otherwise unseen threat.

  Diane made that scream real as she snapped. She kicked her fallen husband, shrieking curses at him. Furious with what he’d done to her life, her concept of what a righteous life should be. This wasn’t what she’d signed on for. Her vows had never included a contract with this.

  “Mom’s lost it,” she heard Ellis mutter.

  That was when she stopped, understanding her kids were watching. They wept, panicked, yet also mesmerized by the violence they saw her capable of—not to mention their first peek ever into Pete’s special room. Their eyes bugged out.

  Diane pulled herself together with difficulty, casting off a madness she knew was a contagion she’d caught from her psycho husband.

  She began whispering, trying to keep her voice down lest she end up hysterical again. “The Lord is my Shepherd…”

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 18

  “The picture appeared a vast and dim scene of

  evil, and I foresaw obscurely that I was

  destined to become the most wretched of human

  beings.”

  —Mary Shelley

  Frankenstein

  Dreams. He hadn’t slept in a couple of nights. Thursday and Friday. But he slept the rest of Saturday night and all of Sunday morning. Highly disturbed. Nightmares where he was surrounded by these dead people, not just characters in photographs or icons trapped on his skin. Standing if they could, others in animated pieces gathered together in some fractious semblance of who they’d been, some burned into crusts that didn’t seem capable of looking at him but did. Men and women, adults and children, all lost yet somehow dependent upon Peter. A single mirror sat upright in their midst. In it he saw himself, cradling Rosaluna’s infant in his arms.