Still

by Charlee Jacob

  On his body was told and retold their dreadful stories. Not in the way of wringing some confession from him but in petition.

  “What can I do?” he wanted to know.

  “You have our souls. Only you can heal us.”

  ««—»»

  Peter didn’t wake up until just past noon on Sunday. He was sore everywhere, not only from the stinging of his little skin-flicks but a serious jumble of aches. He felt as if he’d been picked up and thrown. Had he undergone some sort of seizure when he did the scrapbook’s first picture?

  That poor, innocent little girl. He found her image held in his left hand. As if she were a bit of rippling water he’d cupped from a pool to bring to his mouth.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her.

  He unlocked the door to Hell, peeped out into the hallway. Didn’t hear the television or noises from any of the bedrooms. Diane must still have the kids at church.

  He hurried to clean up—as clean as he could get. He didn’t think he’d ever feel washed again. He dressed. He called Dunkel Friedhof at his apartment. Sunday was the only day Staub’s was closed. Man had to have a day off sometime.

  “Pete!” Dunk said with his usual exuberance. “Vhat’s up? How are tinks?”

  “Hey, Dunk. I’m feeling a bit off today. Up all night with that cop’s scrapbook.”

  Wait…no, he’d slept. Remember? But he didn’t feel as if he’d slept. He wasn’t refreshed.

  “Really? Dat birthday prezzent really got you ahn duh road vit a real dead trip. Zhould I be happy awr azhamed?”

  “I don’t know. But, listen. Is it ethical for you to give me the address where you bought that scrapbook?”

  “Nawd a problem. I haff id here zomevheres.”

  It made Peter smile in spite of his mental anguish. Not to mention the pain he was in. It felt as if he’d been kicked by the devil’s mule. He loved Friedhof’s accent. It was so thick Pete sometimes suspected it must be fake. Like, Dunk exaggerated it to make a more colorful character of himself for Staub’s customers. And, well, that German pronunciation was Hollywood for classic villainy. Might it go hand in hand with selling horror?

  Ya! Vhy nawd?

  “Here id is. You got a pen?”

  “Uh huh. Go ahead. And thanks.”

  ««—»»

  Peter touched a yellowed ancient buzzer, heard movement inside. It took a while but finally the door opened. A man sat in the entrance, about Dunkel’s age or thereabouts—downsliding from the better half of his fifties. He was completely bald, in a wheelchair, blanket draped across frail legs.

  “Yes?” this fellow asked mildly, peering through rather thick glasses.

  “Uhm, you had an estate sale here two days ago?” Pete began clumsily, not sure how else to get this started.

  “Why, yes, sir. But it’s over. Most of the stuff sold yesterday. Was there something you’d seen you came back for? We could look at what I stuck in the garage…”

  “Actually, a friend bought the police scrapbook,” Peter faltered, turning pale. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to intrude. I don’t know how to ask this.”

  The man smiled with patient understanding. He wheeled the chair backwards. “Come inside, son. I’m Clay McFadden. My father was the detective who kept that record, disturbing as it was.

  The place was sparsely furnished, wide paths between everything in evidence, suitable for someone stuck in a wheelchair. There were no knickknacks, no collection of memories from a life lived. Probably sold over the last couple days.

  “Pretty empty right now, I’m afraid,” the older gentleman replied with sad good nature. “It was my mother’s estate. She divorced my dad early in 1949. A direct result of that scrapbook, by the way. She moved us to Virginia, about as far from California as possible so we’d never get to see our father again. She remarried but then our stepfather was bitten in the testicles by a horse he was trying to geld on the farm. He bled to death in the barn the same year our real father was murdered. Dad’s photo is the last one in the scrapbook. Mom moved us back to California, packed up Dad’s stuff and put it in the garage. She lived the rest of her life here until her diabetes caused gangrene to develop in her legs. That’s what killed her. She couldn’t get out of bed and I was on a trip to Spain. Got back and found her like that when I dropped by with trinkets from Barcelona.” He pronounced it with the customary lisp of the natives, Barthelona. “Not the way I’d have preferred to remember her. Couldn’t even sell her mattress. Shame, since it was one of those expensive sleep-number jobs. My older brother, Lou, passed away two years ago, bone cancer. Only weighed about sixty pounds at the end. So, I’m the only one left and I don’t get around too well. Had polio as a boy, before Jonas Salk saved the world on a sugar cube. Guess you noticed, huh? Anyway, now I’m going to stay probably, so I’ve had to kind of loosen up the obstacle course.”

  The way of some older folks, compulsive about relating the repulsive: medical complaints. T.M.I. Too Much Information.

  Pete just nodded, left hand kept in his coat pocket, curled into a fist. He didn’t understand why he didn’t tell Mr. McFadden that he now owned that book. (Sure he understood. He was embarrassed.)

  “But, say! You don’t want to be hearing all this sorrow! Young feller like yourself? Were you here to see if there were more pictures? Dad had a desk drawer full of loose ones. Mom stuck them in a shoe box. I’m trying to remember if they were in the sale or not. Not that I can begin to comprehend why anyone would want those—no offense. But this is La-La-Land, isn’t it? And my father did collect them himself. He wasn’t a bad man…”

  Peter interrupted him. “I don’t want any pictures. I just, really… I still don’t why I came here. The scrapbook really affected me.”

  (Infected me?)

  “You ever feel you’ve got a connection you can’t explain?” Pete was able to say at last.

  Clay’s eyebrows went up. “A sense of dèjá vu?

  Peter shrugged, self-conscious. “Yes, sir. I guess that would be it.”

  “Heck, kiddo. I’ve been everywhere on this earth. Lots of perfectly rational, intelligent people believe in those things. In a spiritual world, in intersections between dimensions, in reincarnation. It’s okay. I’d be the last person to laugh. See that old desk over there against the wall?”

  Peter blinked, drawn to that desk. Knew somehow there’d been a pot of glue in a drawer. It had been mixed with semen and applied to the back of crime scene pics.

  (Yes, that’s what he used to do, the voices breathed at his ears.)

  He couldn’t help glancing around. Looking for what?

  COP HATER, THE MUGGER, THE PUSHER, THE CON MAN, LADY KILLER.

  Just words though. Not linked to anything. He had no idea what they meant.

  Clay tilted his head. “That’s where Dad worked on that scrapbook. I sometimes think I see him there, when I’m rolling through here to the kitchen, needing to take a pill at 2 A.M.”

  ««—»»

  Arriving home again, it was about 3:00 P.M. It surprised him that Diane and the children weren’t back yet. Peter checked the answering machine, afraid he’d hear there’d been an accident.

  Beep. “Peter? It’s me. I’ve taken the kids. I won’t expose them to your problem anymore. I’ll be getting in touch with a lawyer in the next day or two to file for divorce. Don’t fight me. I’ve got a video record of your room. The three of us saw that book of murdered people. That’s beyond sick and into evil. We also saw all that—THAT—on your skin. What have you done to yourself? What have you done to us?”

  He couldn’t help recalling what Clay McFadden had told him earlier, about the scrapbook being the trigger for Zane’s wife leaving him.

  Peter was stunned, shaken by this latest development: abandonment and exile. Suddenly the house was too big. It echoed as if every stick of furniture had been removed. (Not yet but Pete was sure Diane would soon get around to it.)

  No, she wouldn’t. She’d take possession of the house
itself. After all, she made enough money as a bank exec to afford the payments. He sure as hell didn’t. And it had originally been financed by her father. This neighborhood was her kind of place.

  He’d be expected to move out. The only reason she hadn’t already kicked him out was so she’d have the advantage of being able to say in court that she and the children had fled the place in fear of him.

  “I’ll never see Ellis and Melody again,” Peter told himself, dejected.

  Could that be for the best?

  NO!

  On the Caller I.D. machine was the number she’d called from. But he wouldn’t telephone. No sense being accused of harrassment. No sense giving her ammunition for a restraining order. Whatever she had on that so-called video was probably sufficient anyway. Providing the judge was some candy-assed prude who didn’t even permit his/her own kids to trick or treat because that was so pagan.

  Providing she’d made the video in question before he brought home the scrapbook full of savage slaughter. If afterward…

  And if he were queried in court about this, how would he respond? Would he be apologetic? “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I’m just a bird in a jaded cage. The devil made me do it. Burn me at the stake because Geraldo Rivera was right.”

  Or would he stand up for his rights to enjoy a few archetypal vampires, zombies, werewolves, and the symbollic square inches of their virgin prey?

  Blow by blow, no holds barred, utterly tasteless revelry in sociopathic behavior, without conscience or remorse, not responsible to any recognizable set of traditional values, rabidly blood-simple and damnation-complicated, wanna hunt kill fuck everything in sight, wanna snort skulldust and smoke fetal tissue doobies, and rut in perfumed sucking-wounds, wanna feel like I’m gonna live forever in each resulting rush as I fist a guitar TWANG TWANG TWANG! playing the anthem of the rampaging Hun while head-butting in eyeball-high five the nearest black-clad Goth of either sex. Yeah, we’re on this planet to die. Get your licks in TWANG TWANG TWANG! or realize at the moment of death that you blew the wad on boredom!

  “Screw it. For now let me just fuck it. I have to finish what I began,” he said outloud as he climbed the stairs, trying to energize his legs, attempting to sound determined. At this point, resolution and willpower might be all which might save him from a killer funk.

  No rampaging Hun stormed up to Hell. Pete more or less crawled into his office.

  He’d been avoiding the last page. Now he stared at Zane McFadden’s picture. Just a still with cheap glue turned yellow as amber at the four corners. De(pic)ting a man’s body, stabbed several times. The injuries most readily visible were at the throat and the eye. The corpse lay on the floor in several pools of blood so black, it might have been ink.

  Peter felt loathe to do this. His legs spasmed until he nearly collapsed to the floor. He made himself sit in his chair. A few tears slipped down his cheeks, combination of fear and the anticipation of sorrow. The tastes he’d experienced from every previous photo burned up from his belly, through his esophagus: trauma’s bile. The flavor of rotting flesh itself couldn’t be much worse.

  Actually, he was already familiar with that flavor. One of these portraits in Zane’s book had taught him. A man had caught his wife with a lover. He’d beaten to death the paramour, then kept his wife prisoner for a month as he fed her the guy’s steadily decomposing pieces. Eventually she’d succumbed to food poisoning. Softer and softer it was, mealy as rain-soaked soil which earthworms have chewed into a kind of loamy myrrh. A scent half sugar-coated shit/half moldy apricots.

  Pete would know exactly what sort of man McFadden had been. Sick fucker or tormented, thwarted Samaritan? Twisted voyeur or martyred public servant? He’d feel the man or the demon in the neurons where only the basics mattered.

  Pete bent his body forward across the desk, chin pointing down, a physical question mark. He stuck out his tongue for the oral cabal, flinching with preconceived regrets.

  ««—»»

  Zane didn’t hear, didn’t see his assassin at first. He’d been overwhelmed with grief, his damaged heart—just recovering from a massive occlusion—hammered with darkly poetic beat linked to shadow rhythms, compounded by midnight’s countless sins. He’d pasted in Caroline Palmer’s photo, the one he’d snapped with his own Land Camera.

  He’d accepted he’d never apprehend any more of the perpetrators of these crimes. He was a failure…not Superman, not his favorite McBain character—Steve Carillo, not even Joe Friday. He’d disappointed his family, himself, and every ghost who attended him.

  And then he’d had that revelation, silver at the edges. A boy on an apartment house stoop in the rain. A boy walking through Miss Palmer’s neighborhood with blood on his knee.

  Baby-killers and baby killers.

  When he’d felt the blade’s weight at the back of his neck (a fucking sharp ANVIL), he’d had as much relief as pain. If he could have turned, he probably wouldn’t have fought for himself.

  His body twisted in the chair, beginning a slow fall.

  A jab into his throat, another into his eye. Instants of white-hot piercing. He didn’t see his attacker, only the spirits drizzling from the walls in black and white mist. They rushed toward him in blurs like the double-exposures on film. For a moment they merged into him, their spectral blood running with his own through his veins and arteries, memories of final thoughts combined with his in a brain shuddering to a stop without oxygen.

  Their collective voices no longer whispered to him, Only you can heal us…

  They screamed in desperation and helplessness.

  Now truly lost. Even the pitiful excuse for a champion, such as he’d been, was all they’d had. If they couldn’t cling to him as their only hope for retribution, they would cling to him in death.

  Beat…beat…beat.

  Connected by consanguinity, mutual damage. Part of a universe’s ongoing outrage.

  Zane only saw his murderer after he was dead. Legendary silver cord snapped, no longer linking physical with metaphysical. His soul floated up in a stew of many others.

  He looked backwards (they looked backwards) and glimpsed the little fair-haired cherub.

  The detective had been executed by an angel.

  See? God did punish losers.

  ««—»»

  Peter didn’t go fetal as he had after reliving Agnes Mathewkitty’s experience. He did try heaving, only to realize with each shallow and unproductively dry convulsion that he’d had nothing whatever to eat since Friday.

  Or had it been Thursday? Did a person have hallucinations on the third day of fasting? Addled prophet in the desert wasteland looking up and seeing the face of his lord’s suffering—finding it then etched onto his circumsized wanger. Oh, the revelations which might have been spared him had he just eaten a cookie.

  (Two days. He’d had that burger at school on Friday.)

  Zane’s soul had gone up—but there’d been no sign of a tunnel with a light at its end. There’d been no passage into heaven, hell or limbo. He’d been tucked away someplace, the others in similar yet separate locations.

  Tucked. As if between pages. In a nothing zone that bore a tiny hole in it he had to find.

  And he’d found it, looking for only a few years…as earth measured time.

  ««—»»

  Peter spat. A tissue-thin piece of the same thing he’d coughed up after his second time with Rosaluna’s snuff photo.

  Caul.

  Peter had that full length mirror in his office, the one he’d taken from the bathroom door. He stood naked in front of it. Saw the balding detective looking back, cradling Rosaluna’s baby in his arms. He saw them clearly. Less clearly behind them were dozens of others. Maybe a hundred. More. In such indistinct cloud-shapes, how could he count them?

  Vague noises… Only you… only you…

  Was it possible that Peter had been reincarnated from Zane McFadden? Or from ‘Baby’ Pasolini?

  From both?

  Could
one body hold two souls?

  Zane and the baby stared from the mirror, reflecting Peter’s own eyes. As he watched with theirs.

  One dead at the beginning, the other dead at the end.

  Pete wiped his right hand on his bare hip. Itchy.

  On the palm was Zane’s murder movie.

  Except it displayed the killer in it. Coming up behind the detective, stabbing him three times fast as lightning.

  None of the other tableaus showed their killers.

  Wait.

  They did.

  Peter’s body was no longer covered merely with victims in lonely death throes but in complete acts of slaughter.

  ««—»»

  What was he supposed to say this time? He hadn’t really explained himself too well on the first visit. He shuffled his feet, waiting after he pressed the doorbell. Managing a goofy smile when Clay McFadden opened up again.

  “Well, hello,” the man said. “Change your mind about helping me look for that box of loose pictures? Because I found ’em already. Not thirty minutes ago, in the garage in a cabinet which should’ve been full of nuts and bolts.”

  Pete admitted, “I’m pretty much full up to here with death photos.”

  He realized he’d leveled his hand just below his neck. Which was, coincidentally, exactly where his body coverage started.

  He put his hand back down. “No disrespect intended, sir.”

  “None taken,” Clay replied, puzzled. “What can I do you for then?”

  Pete shrugged. “I’ve been having these strange episodes.”

  Clay squinted as if he hadn’t heard him right. “What?”

  Pete raised his voice a little, but not too much. As if afraid neighbors would hear and call out the men with the butterfly nets. “Psychic reactions.”