Deep Cuts

by Angel Leigh McCoy

The man’s eyes were wide. He didn’t blink. It was like looking at a terrified animal—no comprehension, no recognition. His features were hidden behind a mask of Egg Fu Young and gravy, smeared like war paint across his screaming face. Foam and bits of food flew from his lips as he shrieked. One of the cops handed me the perp’s wallet. The man continued to howl like a wounded dog.

  “Malcolm Karchai,” I said, reading the name off his driver’s license and comparing the smiling young professional in the photo to the lunatic a few feet from me.

  “Mr. Karchai, can you understand me?” I asked, leaning close to his face, half mashed against the car’s trunk.

  “More, more! All, all!” The rest was animalistic growls as he was wrestled into the back of the car. “No! No prison! No cell! No! No! Death! Let me die here! They’ll come for me!”

  The door slammed shut, and Karchai went back to making sounds and thrashing about.

  I found the first officer on the scene.

  “That one of the guys that went missing on that subway car yesterday morning?” he asked as he wiped his brow with his sleeve.

  “Yeah, what happened in there?”

  “He comes in for the buffet. The cashier said he acted he didn’t understand how to pay, and she had to talk him through how to use the credit card in his wallet. She thought he was high or something. Anyway, he starts cutting the line, grabbing handfuls of food off the buffet, acting like a wild man, like he’s starving or something. The owner called 911. What happened to him?”

  I stared at Karchai’s calm, sane likeness on the license and shook my head.

  ◙

  Malcolm Karchai died on the way to be interrogated. He spasmed in the back of the police car. The cops hit the rollers and rushed to the hospital, but before they got there, he “just stopped living,” as one patrolman described it to me.

  I waited alone outside the Medical Examiner’s office for the District. A few times I thought I was falling asleep. Suddenly I felt cold hands that smelled like ash clamp over my mouth and nose. I jumped bolt-upright in my uncomfortable plastic chair, wiped my eyes and looked at the clock.

  How many hours of my life had I spent like this? Waiting. Sitting. Watching a clock. Emergency rooms, courtrooms, interrogation rooms, traffic jams. Wasted time.

  How long had I hated this? For a long, long time.

  Any illusions about saving the world were long dead for me. I was a record keeper, a census taker, and sometimes night watchman; the clerk keeping score of the number and variety of inhumanities people could chalk up. Seventeen years of my life spent mopping up other people’s messy, broken lives. Their empty lives sucking dry the marrow of mine.

  Do you like being a policeman?

  How do you change the inertia your life has accumulated?

  Whenever I had to wait a long time I wanted to start smoking again. I was just starting to go around the corner to bum a cigarette from a morgue attendant when Dr. Gaffney, the M.E., ambled through the swinging doors of the morgue, a brown folder wrapped with rubber bands cradled under his arm.

  “Well, Ben, this one was truly worth the wait,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what exactly happened to that poor joker but his insides are a mess.”

  “What have you got?”

  “Well for starters, he is positively identified as your missing subway passenger, Malcolm Karchai. Dental and fingerprints confirm that.

  “His stomach contents show the breakfast he had yesterday before he left to take the subway. He has beard stubble consistent with someone who hasn’t shaved for a day.”

  “Cause of death?” I asked as I scribbled. What Gaffney said stopped me from writing.

  “From examination of the lungs and airway, I would say affixation caused by suffocation.”

  “Doc,” I said, putting away my notepad and pen, “those cops didn’t lay a hand on him in the car.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t, Ben,” Gaffney said. “The hemorrhaging and condition of the lungs I saw were consistent with death sometime in the last twelve to eighteen hours, no sooner than that.”

  “You’re saying he’s been dead for half a day or more? Doc, he was the liveliest dead man I’ve ever seen a few hours ago.”

  “I saved the best for last,” Gaffney said, his grin widening. “Tox screen shows no drugs in his system. He was clean as a whistle. Examination of his brain tissue showed massive decay, however. His gray matter looked like something you’d see in a corpse dead for months, Ben.”

  ◙

  My brain felt half rotted away too as I drove home from the morgue. After all the years, all the things I’ve witnessed, you’d think I’d have developed enough calluses on my eyes that nothing could surprise me anymore. Gotcha.

  I felt a sharp sadness for James Debois and Mrs. Jetter. Whatever they imagined had happened to their loved ones, I was beginning to suspect it would turn out to be worse.

  I glanced at my watch; it was still early enough to swing by Louise Jetter’s home. William Jetter had seen the Wall People coming, and maybe, somewhere in his personal effects would be something I could use, like a good cop, to make sense of all this.

  It was a thin lead, but it was better than going home to an empty apartment and trying to sleep.

  As I pulled into her cul-de-sac, I saw Louise Jetter standing under the streetlight at the bottom of her driveway, gesturing franticly to a uniformed officer in a dark unmarked police car, who had obviously just arrived.

  “Detective Pang,” Mrs. Jetter cried, “there’s someone in my kitchen. He looks like William, but it isn’t my husband. He…he scared me the way he was talking…his eyes…”

  “It’s alright, Mrs. Jetter. Stay here with the officer.”

  Fifteen years on the job and I never had to use my gun for real. I snapped it out of its holster, jacked a round into the pipe, and trotted up the drive toward the front door. My heart, made of lead, was thudding heavily against my breast.

  Inside, the house was dark. A faint blue illumination came from a night-light plugged into a hallway outlet. I held my flashlight away from my body and tried not to think how badly my hands were sweating as I moved down the hall. Everything seemed disjointed, jerky, like a film stuttering off the reel.

  I heard a tinkling sound, like glass, and some scuffling coming from the kitchen. I held my breath and stepped into the kitchen, my flashlight and gun sweeping the room.

  William Jetter sat hunched over a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table. He looked up at me and milk drooled down his chin, like he forgot how to close his mouth. He had thin, white hair that swirled in wild wisps around his gaunt face. His eyes reflected yellow pinpoints in the beam of my flashlight, like a cat’s.

  “Want…a…bowl? It’s good,” he said.

  I switched on the kitchen lights. He didn’t blink.

  “Mr. Jetter?” I asked, keeping the gun leveled at him.

  “Yes. I am…William Jetter,” he said.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”

  “Very good,” he said. “You are an enforcer?”

  “I’m a cop,” I said softly.

  “Cop,” he said, rolling the word around in his mouth like a newly discovered wine.

  “I want you to stand up and clasp your hands behind your head,” I ordered.

  Jetter, or whatever this was, stood and did as I asked. I moved slowly towards him.

  “Where is Mr. Jetter?” I asked as I cuffed him.

  “Dead,” he said.

  I heard the front door crash open and the thump of boots on the hall carpet.

  “Freeze, police!” the SWAT commander shouted from behind his AR-15.

  His expression was stone. No fear, no surprise—nothing. “Cop” was the only thing he said to me before he was dragged away into a sea of black fatigues and Kevlar armor.

  ◙

  Of fifteen detectives, two-dozen uniforms, twenty feds, the Mayor, the Chief of Police, and more politicians than you could kill
with a term limit bill, I was the one they sent into the box with Jetter.

  “Why him?” A guy from Homeland Security asked with obvious contempt in his voice. “This is an issue of national security. The president is getting updates on this. I think someone who has—”

  “Pang goes in,” Chief Glasse interrupted. “Because I say he does. He’s good with the crazies.”

  The fed obviously wasn’t used to being cut off.

  “Fine Chief, it’s your ass.”

  The rest of the parade stayed behind the two-way glass. I walked in alone with my notebook and a mug of coffee.

  Jetter was sitting at a stainless steel table, running his fingers along the scratches and the graffiti on the surface. He looked up at me and made an attempt at a smile, reminding me of a stroke victim.

  “Cop,” he said.

  “I’m Detective Pang. You understand you can have a lawyer present with you if you would like Mister…” I paused and sat down in the chair across the table from him. “What is your name?”

  “We are not allowed to have names, only work designations.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not allowed’?”

  “If you are caught using a name, you are punished. You receive less nourishment. Less sleep,” he said as he ran his hands along the table. “This surface is exquisite. The way the light reflects off it, the texture, what is it?”

  “It’s just a table. Not a very nice one either,” I said.

  “This would be a treasure beyond compare where I come from.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  He seemed to have difficulty with the question. When he responded it was like the words were sharp and painful in his mouth.

  “Sometimes we see you, your world,” he said. “You are like wind to us, bringing warmth and color and then you are gone. They say you are imaginary, a product of our minds not functioning properly, but I think that our worlds are side-by-side and that sometimes they slip into each other. Either that or I am mad. If your world is madness, then I welcome it.”

  He stopped playing with the tabletop and looked at me with hunted animal eyes.

  “Our existence is work and sleep, shadow and dust. The food has no taste—something you eat before you return to your tasks. The sky has no sun or rain or clouds or that beautiful thing you call a moon. We work to maintain a sleeping cube and to receive our portion of food. The only pleasure in my world, the only hope, is in death.

  “They punish those who do not conform. They are locked away where there is not even the toil of labor to distract them. They sit and they rot in the darkness, first inside, then out.”

  “Are you saying you come from Hell?” I asked.

  “We are not allowed the luxury of believing in Hell.”

  He tilted his head at a strange angle as he looked at me.

  “Do you enjoy being a…cop?”

  “No,” I said, “I hate my job.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “It’s…my job. I started out doing it because of my father. He wanted me to be in the family business – big-shot, just like him. What I wanted didn’t matter, so to piss him off I became something I knew he would hate.”

  “You have spent your life doing something you hate to punish your father?”

  “Yeah, I guess I have. When he died we hadn’t talked for twelve years.”

  I tried to find the words to explain, but they weren’t there.

  “It’s my job. It’s a living.”

  “It does not sound like…living,” the shadow man said, “In our world, they give you the illusion of choice. Here, you have real choices; you can do or not do whatever you want. There is no one watching over your shoulder, but so many of you Window People act as if there were. You do what is…expected of you.

  “I don’t understand how someone could not be happy here.”

  “Window People?” I said.

  “The ones like this body. They open themselves to us. This Jetter slipped between your world and ours, and I caught him. I was very fortunate. Only one of us can fit in your skin. There have been so many Window People lately, so many of you falling. So many of you spend more time in our world than yours.”

  “The people on the subway, in the elevator. They were windows for you.”

  “Yes, they were hollow inside. We use them as our means of escape.

  “You can’t do this,” I said. “Those people had lives. You and the others have stolen them.”

  “Lives?” he replied. “This is what I do not understand. They hated so much. They were so empty. They had become more of our world than yours. They called to us. We ended their pain.”

  “You don’t have that right. At what point is a life irredeemable?”

  The shadow man nodded in agreement, “We will suffer punishment for what we have done here.”

  “What punishment?”

  “They will find us and take us back. Whatever they do to us, it will be worth it. To have played with children, to smell flowers, and taste the sweetness of lips. The suffering will be worth a day here.”

  “I think we’re done for now,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I stood and walked towards the door.

  “Cop?”

  I turned.

  “Live,” he said. He smiled again. This time he got it right.

  ◙

  We found them the next morning, during rush hour on a muddy section of underpass that was part of the 495 Beltway, near the Maryland border.

  Bodies everywhere.

  They were covered with white sheets while the technicians processed the crime scene. News and traffic helicopters circled in the sky over the scene like vultures preparing for a feast. The scene, from above, was being shown live on networks across the planet, analyzed and talked about over and over again to dead-eyed, vapid faces basking in a phosphor dot light and shadow.

  “It’s them,” Whitehurst said. “Looks like all our missing from Car 23 and the Crystal City elevator. Working on cause of death right now, but it could be a while.”

  “Suicide,” I said. The words didn’t fit in my mouth very well and they sounded alien in their lack of inflection. “This was suicide.”

  Virgil stared at me strangely, but I really didn’t care. I took out my notebook and pen and started doing my job.

  It was afternoon by the time I got to the city jail to see the shadow man who’d replaced Jetter. A deputy looked up from a mound of paperwork long enough to tell me the guy was dead, found this morning in his cell, about the same time as the others at the underpass.

  “Sorry,” the jailer said with a dry sound that might have been a chuckle, “you just missed him.”

  Outside the jail there was traffic on the street as far as the eye could see.

  Exhaust swirled in the hot air and settled in the back of my throat. The rumble of car engines was interspersed with the bleat of horns.

  I got in my car and put the key in the ignition. I didn’t turn it.

  Everything was gray. Gray buildings, gray sky, gray exhaust, gray faces drifting past my car window.

  For a moment, my eye jumped to the rearview mirror—a flash of movement in the back seat, like smoke. But nothing was there.

  The sky rumbled and the downpour began.

  I climbed out of the car. I tossed my notebook in the gutter and walked down the sidewalk towards home. People ran for doorways or their cars. I raised my face to the storm and opened my eyes.

  The traffic edged by. Dead people in rolling coffins, hurrying toward the meaningless ends of desperate lives. Sealed up against the rain and the dirt and the heat by glass and air conditioning, preserved like mummies.

  I passed a shop window and saw the shadow step between the curtain of raindrops and umbrellas on the sidewalk, reflected in the glass. Always there, always longing, with eager grips that choke like stale cigarette smoke.

  I remembered playing in the rain. I was nine. My father was yelling at me to come inside, to stop being a fool. I had lau
ghed at him and embraced the storm.

  The memory drenched me all the way down to the dry crevasses in my soul.

  Stephen Woodworth on

  Roberta Lannes's

  “Good-bye, Dark Love”

  When I first read Dennis Etchison’s Cutting Edge anthology back in 1988, one of the tales that impacted me the most was not by a superstar contributor such as Peter Straub or Clive Barker, but rather by an author of whom I’d never heard before. That story was “Good-bye, Dark Love,” the writer Roberta Lannes. While the graphic depiction of necrophilia in “Good-bye, Dark Love” is more stomach-churning than the grossest Hollywood gore-fest, the emotional violence really gives the story its punch-to-the-gut potency. As in all of Lannes’s superlative short fiction, the damage that her characters do to each other’s minds and souls proves far more horrific than wounds inflicted on mere flesh. With the ice-pick incisiveness of its vivid prose and psychological insight, “Good-bye, Dark Love” introduced me to the work of an artist whose talents transcend both genre and gender.

  ◙◙◙

  Mr. Casey is in the House

  Stephen Woodworth

  Martin swirled the cockroach around in the popcorn cup, watching it skitter in circles, and slowly tilted the cup upside down. The insect scrambled for purchase as it slid down the slick-coated wall of the container, then dropped into the sizzling oil of the popper with the crackle of frying bacon.

  Another thrilling Saturday night at the glorious Royale Cinema, the city’s last remaining second-run movie theater.

  Charlene snapped her gum. “That is so gross.”

  “Just doing my part for pest control.” Martin peered down at his test subject, which, amazingly, still scuttled around the circumference of the popper’s metal tub, seeking a way out.

  Charlene leaned against the candy case and went back to daubing puce polish on her fingernails. “I read that torturing small animals is one of the tell-tale signs of a serial killer. You wet your bed, too, Martin?”

  He bugged his eyes and leered at her. “Only when I dream about keeping your head in my fridge.”