by Don Webb
Mr. Pound told me that he was unable to find any references to my one-man show five years ago. He said he was hoping to see some photos of my previous work. He seemed genuinely sad when I told him that it had all been purchased by Japanese investors.
Did I have unsold pieces that I might consider parting with?
Of course I had to tell him that I sold everything a few years ago when devastating poverty took hold of my life.
We all have our ups and downs, he said. He is truly a wise man for a cop.
I asked him when he would come sit for me and he became agitated. I guess the thought of sitting for eternity is frightening to some. It brings out that fear that their flaws, that one tiny flaw that everybody has, might bemagnified through the ages. After awhile all they would be would be the flaw.
My name is Vincent van Gogh and I’m one hundred and thirty-eight years old. Just kidding.
Day 16. I dreamt I was a child again. It must’ve been when I was in the sixth grade. We had an art teacher who we went to see twice a week. She gave us the assignment of drawing something on the school yard, so I drew the blue portable toilets that had been placed on the football field. I could see them from my desk if I craned my neck over. The bell rings and class is over and I was supposed to have the picture finished by the end of the period. Mrs. Elgood came over and told me to give it to her. That I could work on it Thursday. I said just a minute I could finish it and then it was done and I handed it to her, and she said, “Tyrone, there is nothing like this outside.” I told her to look and she wouldn’t look and I told her to look and she wouldn’t look so I took hold of her head and tried to make her look and I pushed her face through the glass and she bled.
Then I woke up and all I can say is you should have looked.
I re-read my entry for yesterday. I am really mad that the newspaper files have been tampered with. Maybe I’ll go paint all of them. I’ll paint every fucking critic into a corner. I was too mad to open the shop today. I heard some people knocking and the damn phone kept ringing. Ring a ding a ding until I took it off the hook. Probably the damn owner. I’ll take care of her too. You shouldn’t disturb a genius at work. There should be a law. I painted a bright red and orange painting today Angry Sun Bites Man. I’ll open up tomorrow.
Day 17. Depressed and mad.
Day 18. The police banged and banged on my door. Mr. Pound wasn’t with them. They wanted to know if I knew that Ms. Roberta Sais, who owned the Book Cellar (and who in theory is my employer) had died. No, I said, I didn’t know. Murdered, they said. No, I said, I didn’t know. I was very busy. I had to work on my paintings. I thanked them for the news. She had heirs, they said. I said I always thought she put on airs. Heirs, they said, I should close the shop until the heirs came. And I said good. I made a “Closed on Account of Death” sign and hung it in the door.
In the afternoon Mr. Pound came by and pounded on my door until I answered it. I told him we were closed.
He said he was here to pose.
I let him in to do some sketches. He started to go up stairs to my studio. I told him I do my sketches in the shop. He wasn’t easy to sketch because he kept talking. He hinted that he was a vigilante going after criminals the system might let off on some technicality—like no Miranda rights. Lots of stories of cars in the nights. For some reason I pictured them as moving silently and without headlights. “Dark of night doesn’t stop you, eh?” I asked.
He reacted violently, then chuckled, and said, “No dark of night doesn’t stop me.”
He talked a lot about criminals who made their confessions got off easily. With his pull down at the station he could help such a criminal. If the criminal doing the murders now were, say, to confess to him, he could make it very easy on the guy.
If on the other hand the current murderer were to try to weasel out—to escape from the long arm of the law—he would make it very difficult for him. He would track the murderer down and strike when the killer least expected it.
He didn’t ask to see my sketches, which was good, because I wasn’t pleased with them. When I left I tore them all up in little pieces.
I am going to sleep in the studio tonight—to protect my paintings. I am worried about them somehow.
Day 19. Today I painted The Last Innocent Man. The picture is full of big blue eyes looking everywhere. In the lower right corner is a single yellow square—representing a window. Inside an artist can be seen painting a flowery peaceful landscape. I may change the title to This Is My Skull.
Day 20. This morning I came to my senses and took my medicine. I realized I must have done some pretty bad things. I figured I’d wait for Mr. Pound, and when he came I’d confess to him. He could make it easy for me. He was my friend. I waited all day, but he didn’t show.
About six I called the downtown police station. Mr. Pound had told me that he still had friends on the force. I figured I could ask around and they could put me in touch with him. It took forever to get in touch with homicide. While I waited I cursed myself for not having got his number. Then I got Detective Blick. I asked if he knew Mr. Pound.
“Mr. Clarence Pound?” he asked.
“I’m not sure of his first name. He is a retired policeman. He had told me he still had friends on the force.”
“Let me guess, he told you that he tried to make detective but ‘political’ forces kept him from making the grade. He also said that he was a vigilante, bringing criminals to justice who had escaped their just desserts.”
“Well, yes,” I said.
“I am sorry to tell you this, sir, but Clarence Pound is a retired postal worker with some severe personality problems. Every few months he stops his medication for awhile and gets to thinking he’s some super-cop. If he’s been bothering you, let me know and we’ll pick him up and take him to his doctor.”
“No. He hasn’t been bothering me at all. Thank you.”
I hung up as he was asking “Who are—”
Mr. Pound is some kind of nut. I’ll have to be ready for him.
Day 21. I slept in the studio and he broke in. I woke up and saw him looking at my paintings. He had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“They’re blank,” he said. “All of these canvasses just painted white.”
“No,” I said, “They’re very subtle. You must study them carefully.”
“They’re blank. You’re some kind of nut.”
“No, you’re the nut. You’re an ex-postal employee. You’re not a cop. You’ve never been a cop.”
“That’s not true.” He pointed the gun at me.
“It is true. You’re not a cop.”
Suddenly he sat down. Just sort of collapsed. He didn’t say anything for a long time. I thought about going over and taking his gun away.
Then he began to talk in a low monotone. He explained who he really was and everything became clear to me.
He is Mr. Carlos Pound, owner of a very important gallery in New York. Today we are putting my paintings into a U-Haul van. We will drive up to New York, where he’ll host a one-man show for me.
I bet we make quite a splash.
THE THIRTYERS
When the world didn’t end in the Year 2000, the Reverend Jessie Cancun was among the first people to proclaim the idea of the “Babylon Calendar.” According to Rev. Cancun, the evil forces of the Whore of Babylon had stolen the right and true calendar of the pious and replaced it in the year 1066, which was actually 1096. It was unclear to the general public why Rev. Cancun had taken the year of the Norman Conquest as the pivotal moment for the calendar hoax by the forces of Darkness. His own explanation that “1096 adds up to 16, whereas 1066 adds up to 13,” while numerically true (if there is some reason for such addition of constitute digits), seemed at best a bit odd. The same could be said of 904 and 934 for example. But Rev. Cancun did little to woo the public.
Yet his church, the Grand Convocation of the Missing Thirty, otherwise known as the Thirtyers, did not lack for members. Many, many
people had been involved in one belief system or another that had seen great change as likely in 2000, if not indeed the very End of the World. And the great Psychic Depression of the Oughties contributed to his membership.
The basic tenets of the faith were five. First, the real End of the World would happen in 2030 (or, as they reckoned it, 2000). Second, the faithful needed to gather in a community that banned the evil Babylon calendar. Third, the consumption of fast foods was evil. Fourth, the taking of new names after tourist paradises was necessary—the Rev. Cancun’s birth name had been Trexler. Fifth, the avoidance of the World Wide Web, which had distracted all of us by promoting the myth of Babylon 2000, and thus tricking people out of the real End of the World. The odd nature of the beliefs (especially the tourist name-taking) gave the cult a good deal of publicity in the early Oughties. Both Rev. Cancun and his sister the Rev. Waikiki were interviewed great deal in those days, and although they avoided the WWW with great fear and loathing, a number of pages were kept about them.
But as the Psychic Renaissance of the Teens started such oddball faiths were usually forgotten, since by and large mankind had better things to do. The lure of the weird is always with us however and as the Babylon Calendar approached 2029, my editor wanted me to research the Thirtyers—see if any of them still hung on to the faith, how did they live, what were their fears at the coming millennium.
Information on the sect was very limited. The older pieces written decades before were easy to find in the GreatData Snowball, but nothing appeared after 2012. They had bought a small town in Oklahoma, the site of a bankrupt ashram. They had renamed their community 2X15, pronounced “Two ex Fifteen” apparently a private joke on Y2K, which my readers may remember as the buzzword used to describe the Millennium. Their desire to be cut off from the increasingly integrated WWW meant that didn’t even have phones or cable television. They didn’t even allow cars into their town, according to the 2012 article. I couldn’t rightly think of any appliance that wasn’t connected to the WWW. Could you imagine not being able to ask your refrigerator if it had ordered those carrots you like? They must live in a weird pre-animist world, thoroughly unlike the one we live in.
I decided to go there.
I had to find a horse, a real unmodified horse. But it was Oklahoma, after all.
The nearest town was Gilliam, Oklahoma, and nobody there knew anything about 2X15. “Nobody goes there. I think they all died or moved out a long time ago.”
I had to fully insure the horse. I was, after all, leaving to a new and unknown realm where people might keep time with knotted cords and slay one another with stone axes. I hoped that the folks of 2X15 hadn’t kept up with the ways of Babylon so they wouldn’t know that I had been modified, as at least half the world was.
I had downloaded some files on horse riding, and I setoff for the West. I had assumed that my satellite links would be active all the way there. I mean, the satellite net covers Africa and Asia and Antarctica—so I figured that Oklahoma was a sure thing.
So when the comforting voices began to fade out a few miles from the village, I was scared. I was going to be alone. I hadn’t been alone since I was seven or eight years old. I started to panic, and the horse, a chestnut gelding, felt my fear.
He galloped a little wildly, and I let out a scream. I almost fell, but grabbing the reins and concentrating on bringing the beast under control calmed me. When my horse stopped, all was quiet. I couldn’t will a message to anyone. I couldn’t ask for a map. I didn’t even know what time it was.
Have you ever not known what time it was?
Even unmodified humans have only to ask that question out loud, and something will answer—whether it is a coffee pot or their shoes.
I was in a different world. The primitive world.
This would make a great story.
I imagined billions of people downloading it.
I spurred my horse and we headed for the village of 2X15. It took me a moment to realize that the outer world was quiet as well. There were birds and insects, but no machines. As I approached the village, there were no animals. This puzzled me. I had read Rev. Waikiki’s diatribes against fast food, which any sane person would agree with now after the Burger Wars of the Twenties, but I had never seen any avocation of vegetarianism. Perhaps the cult had left the area—but how did they jam the satellite system? It could be that they had some arrangements with the folks running the system, but surely I would have found that in my researches.
When the village came in view, there was no movement on the streets, but the hanging corpses swayed in the wind.
Most light posts, trees, and flagpoles held a corpse. In other places the ropes had rotted or frayed and dumped their cargo at the base of the pole. My horse didn’t like this and whinnied with fear. I didn’t like it either, but I tied him to a tree outside of the village limits.
The road sign still stood. 2X15 No Babylon Time, No Babylon Channels Under Penalty of Death.
My first and biggest concern was that whoever had done the hangings was still around, but I saw that most of them had been hanged a long time. I immediately asked for information about corpses, and chills ran up my spine when no voice filled my head. I was truly in the Land of the Dead.
Some of the corpses were small. Children.
I walked into the town. There was a little square parking the center, overgrown and full of the oldest corpses—all mere skeletons at the base of trees, grass growing lush in their rib cages. Here is where the hangings must have started. The asphalt in the streets was rubble, and time (or some other mischievous agent) had broken many windows in the buildings.
Nothing was clearly the center of government, but there was an old post office on one side of the square. I went unhopefully, looking for some sign of what madness had over-taken the village.
The post office smelled very, very foul when I opened the doors. I realized then, that I hadn’t smelled anything from the corpses.
There wasn’t any light. I didn’t see any torches or kerosene lanterns, so I surmised that the Thirtyers had used electricity that they had generated somehow, but no one maintained the power plants any longer.
The windows were dirty, but there was enough light to see a strange statue behind the counter of an old man standing as though he were Atlas holding up the world. In front of the statue was a big book, a ledger of some sort filled with entries too cribbed to read in the dim light. I picked it up and took it outside.
They were names.
And crimes.
Randolph Riviera. Television.
Susan Las Vegas. Telephone.
Sharon Aspen. Data Download.
The first entries were written in a very legible handwriting, with dates (all thirty years too soon). But the handwriting got too large and more than a little shaky.
On the last page, I read the following.
Mary Waikiki. Vanity Search on Web 1999.
I am alone now. I can’t fight the urge to hold off my desire to speak. It is only a few months. I must be stronger. I must hold the world at bay. I must see in the Millennium.
I realized what the statue was, and I ran in.
“Rev. Cancun?” I asked.
The weird figure stirred a little.
“Can’t talk to anyone,” he said.
Than it/he tumbled forward. Suddenly my mind was filled with quiet prompts from the world-wide information system. I sent off a request for a medic, but they were too late. The Rev. Cancun had held off the world by will alone, stronger, in the end, than his flock, who had to turn to TV, and WWW, and other news. He came within two months of his 2000, and now he lives on as the most popular story of 2029.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DON WEBB was born in 1960 in Amarillo, Texas. His works range from a St. Martin Press mystery series, to poetry, and fiction and nonfiction books on the occult. He attended Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin. Don is the poster child of literary ADHD. He’s written a rock-’n’-roll song fo
r French radio, the I-phone App “Office Ching,” and has done game design for FASA and TSR. He’s also penned a lot of horror stories. His mom says that Don is her favorite horror writer—after Ramsey Campbell! He’s been translated into twelve languages; ten of his poems have been published in Chinese in Selected Poems of Post-Beat Poets.
He lives in Austin, Texas, with his lovely wife Guiniviere and their cats Big Pig and Sascha. He cries at the sight of bluebonnets in the spring, the ending of the Whole Wide World, and losses of the Longhorn football team.
Table of Contents
ALSO BY DON WEBB
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE DIVORCE
THE ICE PALACE
SHRIMP ANARCHY
THE GAME
YOGA FOR BOLSHEVIKS
WHAT ARE BEST FRIENDS FOR?
RING OF THE RED KNIGHT
THE SYRINGE
MY HEART SHIFTING AS SAND
THE JOY OF COLA
OUR NOVEL
DIARY FOUND IN AN ABANDONED STUDIO
THE THIRTYERS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Don Webb
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