(She didn’t swallow…)
Do you lean forward, pit-stains cherry-rancid? Waiting to be reborn?
Boy, you’ll be a credit to your mama, yet.
Chick in self-made snippets, farming her crawling crops of maggots. Boy with most of his skull removed and a curved window installed, showing parasites slowly consuming his brain?
Those left in the wreckage whom even the angels couldn’t pull free—site devoted to the victims of landmines, suicide bombs, illegal interrogations. Couldn’t listen to the voices in his head anymore but he still wanted to howl and there wasn’t any age of consent for that savage gruesome need, was there? Are you under 18? Are you older than Methuselah who went mad after the first thousand years of this shit?
Yeah, boy! Needed to see what he didn’t see when he looked in the mirror. The fatal attractions between insatiable voyeuristic beasts who ate their own young and the endless, sadistic, moveable feasts.
Fade, stare, register hate crimes, war crimes, underground daily grinds, autopsy parties, flesh-eating facebooks. Took more than one to last him the week. Bored with fresh stars singing/dancing/ getting lost/networks braindead but not in a good way. Didn’t know what the hell real lost meant until they found themselves suddenly face down in their own vomit, self-starved until they were holocaust caricatures.
Burned up.
Reamed out.
Shrimp peeled.
All for the ‘Celebrity Catalogue’… and those collecting cancerous tumors or single-mindedly rendering entire species extinct for a place on the jungle resume, selling Indulgences for a deaf-blind creator, profane relics beneath black lace and completely crotchless.
Watching…
Watching…
Eyes catching fire.
Swallows inside his house, at his elbow, how much did he want it, crave it? The wire, the chip, freakishly moving in jackboot lockstep, joined at the hip, the lip. At the twisted chromosomes.
Nothing normal could be expected of him after everything he’d been witness to.
THE MYSTERIES
In 1857 the French courts put Charles Baudelaire on trial, charged with obscenity concerning his recently published poetry collection, ‘The Flowers Of Evil’… or ‘Les Fleur du Mal’. The result of this travesty of justice against art and free speech was that six of Baudelaire’s poems, including ‘The Metamorphosis of the Vampire’, were banned from the book.
The censorship did not persist. All of Europe was captivated by the bloodsuckers in both writing and theater. Current trends will have their way, as incubi and succubi do. As dreams will. And all of the erotic phantoms that never seem to completely disappear with the sunrise and the talismanic machinations of so-called protective religions and law.
“The woman with the strawberry mouth. … (“La femme cependant, de sa bouche de fraise”)… had her arms full of willing swooners with which to slake her thirst.
She is The Terrible Mother whose archetype occasionally devours more than it nurtures. She is the mother of psycho Ed Gein, the ghost of a murdered and vengeful Marilyn Monroe, the dream’s shocking revelation of Marilyn Manson, the first voice you hear in the distance as the sun sets, even if the last voice—your own—is audible upon the next dawn’s red center, sailing toward the rising sun, then becoming part of it… head-on-fire.
How do you convince a being of such supernatural strength and (unusurped and sipped) vitality that she may no longer exist? She will wait, as women have always had to, a martyr to your particular subscription to light, licking her tapered fingertips as a figurative way of licking the fingerling parts of you that so silently cry out to be freed from their hyper-orthodox restrictions.
You are her baby, cher. Her first love and the first hero to get her over the heartbreak of that same first love. You are the island between her two rivers: one of blood, the other a quarry filled Love- Lies-Bleeding Amaranth which has lain so long that the heat from a thousand throbbing veins has turned it into wine. You are the wolf at her loins and she your Lilith. Time wraps both of you in an ecstatic metaphor for immortality, impervious to truth.
If you survive the encounter, it is accidentally transcendental. If she does, it is because her image has been defaced, defamed, and otherwise erased, that she has come to see the benefits of a certain degree of anonymity.
But I could have told her that.
AWAY FROM THE RADIENT, DOWN AMONG THE BLIND
Mrs. Bearce was annoyed when the F.B.I. looked sideways at her and her husband.
“Do you suspect us of having done something to our own little boy?” she asked. “Simply because we have no photographs of him?”
Six year old Wade had been gone for three long days and nights. His abductor demanded half a million dollars for his safe return. He’d also warned of unthinkable consequences should the parents contact the authorities.
“It’s just unusual, Mrs. Bearce,” replied the senior agent. “You’ve never taken…? Most parents… class pics, student I.D…. We need...”
“Nothing,” she insisted.
Tork tried to keep his square jaw from dropping. “What of Wade’s friends? Think any of their parents took a snapshot?”
“Wade has no friends. And he’s home-schooled.”
Agent Tork glanced around the living room. Among the expensive furnishings were many framed pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Bearce: the Bearces’ wedding, the Bearces enjoying domestic tranquility, the Bearces on vacation. Never smiling, posing stiffly like subjects in daguerreotypes. Not one included their only child. And despite Mr. Bearce gradually falling apart in front of the investigators, Mrs. Bearce remained stoic.
“What do you mean?” Tork wanted to know.
“A picture is a mirror, reflecting an image which may erupt in self-destructive narcissism. It’s unhealthy for a developing psyche and should be reserved for adults whose egos have been awakened past vanity and into the maturely radiant. There are, by the way, no mirrors in this house,” she explained. “I fail to see a problem.”
“Parents usually keep photographs as a record of their child’s development. As loving keepsakes to replace him as time takes childhood away,” Tork suggested.
“Very prosaic. Why do I need a paper likeness to remind me of how he looks? Mr. Bearce and I have Wade permanently etched on our retinas.”
Mr. Bearce sobbed in his chair by the fireplace, useless to anyone. The agent gestured to the Bearce Gallery. “You have plenty of yourselves, I guess your egos can take it.”
Mrs. Bearce replied, “This is how I was raised. It isn’t conceit. We have the places we’ve earned.”
“How are we to recognize the boy if we do find him?” Tork demanded, thinking to himself : You poor kid!
She countered, “You have the description.”
“Average height and weight. Brown hair and eyes. No scars. Like about a third of all the kids his age in this state. Everything just average.” Tork made these remarks as he headed for the door, disgusted.
Mr. Bearce took the agent’s arm, his voice husky with tears as he said, “There’s nothing about our son that is average. He’s so talented, so bright… We would never have done anything to harm Wade. It’s what you do, isn’t it? When you have a child needing help. Do you have any children?”
Tork pulled his wallet out, flipped it open, and let loose past his badge a long line of photographs showing a boy and twin girls at various ages.
Another agent who had been part of searching the house for clues about the person or persons who had taken Wade Bearce now entered the living room.
“Sir, found this in the kid’s room.”
He held out a small-sized, feather-festooned mask.
Tork turned it over in his hands. “Why is there blood in this?”
“Wade has nose bleeds a couple times a day. Has ever since he was a baby. He was born without bones there so there’s little support for the sinuses,” Mr. Bearce explained.
Mrs. Bearce glared at him. “Keep still…”
&n
bsp; “Is there something about your son we ought to know?” Tork asked.
Mrs. Bearce seemed to sag into the floor, as if being stuck with some invisible needle had let all the strength out of her. “People can be so cruel, you see. Wade is Death’s child and he looks it.”
The man arrested was the one who demanded the ransom. He’d been caught at the money drop. It didn’t take much to find out that he hadn’t grabbed the kid. He was only an unconnected entrepreneur. But he knew who had.
“It was that beautiful beautiful man who lives across the alley from me,” he told the agents. “I saw him bringing that ugly little demon in Saturday night. Said this sacrifice would help—with the others he’d already done and those he’d do soon—to usher in Armageddon. Well, at first I believed him when he showed me the boy’s face. I actually got convinced the guy was some sort of angel, that’s how perfect HE looked. But then I knew he couldn’t be an angel.”
“How’s that?” Tork asked.
“Because of what he did to that poor little boy.”
The beautiful beautiful man was nowhere to be found when agents swarmed the house across the alley. But Wade Bearce was the raggedy icon of such ferocity that Tork couldn’t even look at his own children for weeks. The torture had been so extensive that it was difficult to initially make out the curious shadows that spread across the boy’s small frame. The images of flowers on his skull— red amaranth, white oleander, black rose—had at first been listed as tattoos. Later the coroner revised these to be part of a strange birthmark.
The parents were called in to identify the body. The mother arrived alone, Mr. Bearce apparently still too overcome to stand this.
“I’d like a few minutes alone with my boy,” Mrs. Bearce said.
“Certainly,” she was told.
She emerged from the room with her face gone to ice-white.
She nodded, yes. It was Wade. She went home. Tork didn’t see her again for almost two weeks. By then the nightmares had almost stopped altogether.
He paused at the entrance to their living room. Mr. Bearce no longer wept. He only moaned softly as the agent stared at the new photos on the mantle. Where formerly there had been a gallery of pictures of the parents were now photographs of Wade, lingering attention given to every angle of the child’s vandalized body. Photos as gut-churning as any necessarily detailed and explicit crime scene photo in Wade Bearce’s case file. Gruesomely intimate, genitalia— complete with teeth marks—in a petri dish. The complete lengths of intestine (lower and upper bowels), which had been drawn from the living victim. The ends had been forced into the nostrils to emerge from the mouth. The scrotum had been removed along with the penis, scraped and stretched so flat that it had been possible to write on it: DEATH’S CHILD.
Tork walked past the father, not yet noticing the man’s eye sockets were filled with blood and there was blood on his fingers. The agent wandered from room to room as Mrs. Bearce followed, smiling too widely. In a bedroom was her open purse, inside it the camera she’d slipped past the M.E. In every room of the house were pictures of Wade.
“That angel… he exorcized him,” she prattled. “He’s ours now… all ours. And now I have pictures of him. A record, Agent Tork, despite keepsakes and time. I can see him anytime I choose.”
SLUMBER
“He’s asleep again,” drawled the first lawyer.
“During the best part of Victim #7’s testimony, too.” The second lawyer tsked.
Wes ‘The Dreamer’ Cecere snored. His cheeks bulged, eyes popping open. He choked.
“There’s something in his mouth,” noted the first.
Since Wes was manacled, lawyer #2 gripped the obstruction’s edge, drawing it out. It was a pair of especially soiled panties. The Dreamer had allegedly kept warehoused prisoners caged and/or strung up for weeks without so much as a hosing down.
How could he have done this? He’d been thoroughly searched before entering court.
“Do you recognize these?” lawyer #1 asked victim #7 during cross.
She faded even paler. “They’re mine. He burned them along with the rest of my clothes last winter.”
She fainted. Cecere nodded off again.
“When first meeting him, I couldn’t tell if he suffered from Adult Attention Deficit Disorder or had a previously undiscovered form of narcolepsy. Now he just scares me,” Lawyer #2 admitted.
“A guy who kept nineteen women—and one child—in an old warehouse, raping and drugging them—except the kid—to induce what he himself freely described as night terrors and out- of-body experiences, wasn’t sufficient to frighten you to braindeath before?” asked lawyer #1.
“Cecere’s an original, Ted. But he didn’t manifest pissy lingerie. Not until now anyway.” #2 made a face, adding, “Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a wet nappy, would you?”
“What do I look like? The Nanny to Hell?”
The parade of crawling and wheelchair-bound wounded continued.
“He claimed to be like a guru from another world. There the only way to experience wisdom was to despair,” recounted victim #8. “When we dreamed of that place, we’d wake up back in the warehouse, drooling, bleeding down chains that pierced our nether regions. We threw up on ourselves and each other when he’d make us eat raven’s eyes… ravens sacrificed is communion for those who dream of the dead. The only one who didn’t care was that little girl.”
Wes woke up again, this time foaming at the mouth as he muttered, “Beel-Casuub—Zebub—Meph—Glasya—Isto— Bolus—Pheles!”
The witness vanished from the stand. People screamed.
“We’ll take a short recess,” said the judge.
Guards strip-searched Wes. Body cavities squeaked. All they found were pinworms in his ass. And he’d slept through the entire procedure.
The child was sworn in next. Her parents dabbed tissues at tearful eyes. For eight years old, she was underweight, face and arms scarred.
“Did Wesley Cecere abuse you?” the prosecutor asked.
“No,” she replied softly, smiling, front teeth missing.
The prosecutor jumped. “What?”
She lisped, “My parents did. They kept me in a pet carrier since I was four. I can almost walk upright now. You heal faster when you dream it.”
She closed her eyes, like Wes Cecere did, appearing to put herself into a trance. The lights went out. All around the darkened courtroom people screamed again. The bailiff imagined a raven- headed child passing him, walking on four dog legs, naked, previously broken bones tweaking through cigarette burns. A fragment of a section revealed the warehouse of horrors as the S.W.A.T. team had found it. Blood spattered walls and rafters, pools of red/yellow/ brown under swaying meat hooks, angled chains providing hellish musical accompaniment to chained women, singing as their eyes rolled up to the whites, breaths frosted.
Lights on. Kid looking so small in the witness box. Wes between his two lawyers.
Mr. and Mrs. Child-Vic sat askew, throats ravaged, bellies burrowed into until their spines had sprung, twisted toy railroad tracks.
A wicked silence settled over court officials and witnesses alike. Wes and the girl woke up, rested, benign. As if no horror had occurred anytime, anywhere.
Someone in the back made a break for the door.
“It’s locked!” she cried, then vomited raven’s eyes and a single black wing feather.
Averting his eyes from the kid’s snake-sweet gaze, the judge called through the intercom system that linked his courtroom with the rest of the courthouse.
BUZZ. “Hello. This is Judge Weintraub.”
BUZZ. “This is Judge Weintraub. We have an emergency.” BUZZ. “We’re in trouble here. Please pick up.”
BUZZ. “Where is everyone?”
The child replied, “Dreaming the great gray spectral dream.”
“She was never one of us,” whispered victim #4, unable to sit due to hallucinogens and sleep-inducing narcotics being injected into her rectum for a month.
<
br /> “He’s my mystic crush,” explained the girl. “He’d never hurt me. He saved me.”
“Sure the fuck didn’t save us,” declared victim #18. Vertigo spun her brains, hidden in the groins of angels, good or fallen.
“Yes, he saved all of you,” the kid gently corrected. Then she said in his voice, “Our moppet muse will take every sleeper to the next level. Somnambulists, watch as she reveals.”
The girl closed her eyes, head rolling, lolling on the neck. Window blinds fell to the floor, moldy brick walls beyond.
“Rhapsodic. Gossamer is the veil to illusory,” she murmured, both the child and Cecere.
Police drew their weapons, pointing first at The Dreamer, then at the child. The lights burst. Shrieks were earsplitting as those who swore they never dreamed now circled the drain toward the fantastic. There was no courtroom, only perversion’s warehouse.
Wes cast off his shackles, listening to crackling frost in freezing gizzards. The jury had burned, melting together into a semi-conscious blob. Victims 2 through 19 creaked on restraints, turning 180 degrees in the choir’s bloody figment.
Wes left the warehouse nightmare, the shadowy courthouse. He walked to the world’s edge and stepped out. The path of scrubbed-raw dusk was only the final deception. He laughed, his own boundless terror released, multiplying as hysteria does before it dies, fractured in all the wounded details.
(Nothing is ever finished… just passed down.) Theconnection to oblivion had been forged. It forked a senseless lightning. Looking behind him, Cecere saw that dimension of beliefs and solid creation melting like wax heads in a surgical museum.
The little girl waved to him as he vanished—formerly “The Dreamer.” Now a twisted personification of fear in a world governed by its legends. She turned to wave at her kingdom as it melted in her mouth.
THE NETHER NETWORK
The Myth of Falling Page 5
