by Nick Cutter
“Whiskey,” he said.
The tender was a God-fearing man named Clayton Suggs. He had bought the bar and its stock a year ago for a pittance—it took no time at all to discover he had been rooked, but by then, the bar’s old owner was miles clear of Old Ditch and surely laughing like a bastard. Suggs’s only hope of financial gain would be to sell the place for its wood, but there was nobody to buy it, seeing as the Paperworks had fucked off and left.
“Bit early for the hard stuff, wouldn’t you say?” said Suggs.
“I haven’t touched a drop in fifteen years. But time makes liars of us all, Mr. Suggs.” Gardener’s words held a trace of the English accent he’d carried across the Atlantic many years ago. “You need not trifle yourself over it.”
Suggs frowned. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for blacks in his establishment—beggars can’t be choosers, and if the man had folding money, he was welcome to a stool. But he knew Gardener only slightly, having seen him hunched over in yards around town, and the man had never looked entirely healthy. It wasn’t just his pronounced limp, the way he dragged that one gimpy leg behind him like a curse. His body was skeletal inside his overalls, his wrists and ankles birdlike and queerly feminine. Suggs suspected his ill health was a product of those pansy British genes. Englishmen always appeared cadaverous to Suggs. And Gardener looked particularly bloodless at the moment, as if vampire bats had been at him. More than that, he appeared . . . haunted. His eyes sank far into his sockets, as if they had witnessed an event of such horror that they had retreated into his skull.
Yet Suggs had always sensed a strength in the man, too—dormant, but bubbling just under the surface. A wrath, Suggs suspected, even a dangerous malignancy of character that the man struggled to keep bottled up. Old Ditch was a harder place now, populated by men who’d snatch the pennies off a corpse’s eyes . . . but nobody ever laid a hand on Gardener. There was this gut instinct that if any man were to do so, that man might draw back a stump.
Suggs set the whiskey bottle on the bar. “I’ll put it within reach, champ, but I am for damn sure not pouring it.”
“Good man. I shall administer the dose personally. Cura te ipsum.”
“Whuh?” Suggs said.
“Physician, heal thyself.”
Gardener poured a heroic measure. Suggs made a mental note to charge him double for it. His eyes fell upon the Deathstalker. The scorpion was eight inches long and dark as midnight. Its claws clicked upon the glass jar.
Suggs said, “I can’t imagine why in hell you’d bring that in here.”
“Well.” Gardener nodded. “It is here now, as I have brought it.”
“And you’ll keep it in the damned jar, too,” Suggs said.
“Fifteen years,” Gardener said, speaking more to himself than to Suggs. “It’s a very long time to go without a drink. And my life has been much improved for it.”
“Let me take the bottle away, then. Let that improvement continue.”
Gardener gave Suggs a look. The spit dried up in Suggs’s mouth—something in his spirit fled from the dark holes that sat at the center of the black man’s eyes.
“I’d be obliged were you to find it in your heart to leave it, Mr. Suggs. It will be a balm to my wounded spirit.”
Gardener took a sip of whiskey. He winced.
“Tell me, Mr. Suggs. Perchance, did you use this swill to strip the old paint off your car?”
“Don’t have a car anymore,” Suggs said woodenly. “Bank took it.”
Gardener unscrewed the jar’s lid. He set the jar on its side. The scorpion crept over the rim and hesitated two inches from Gardener’s hand, which lay palm-down on the bar.
“What the hell’s got into you?” said Suggs.
“Have you ever seen the face of the devil?” Gardener asked quietly.
Quite suddenly, Suggs felt a strong urge to urinate. He no longer wanted to be in this place with this man.
“It is my judgment that people believe they have seen the devil.” Gardener drummed his fingers on the bar. The Deathstalker reared back, poised to strike. “They have seen the devil in the faces of wicked men, and at the sight of murdered women and children. But they have no inkling of the real devil and the horrors he can bring.”
Gardener’s voice had gone breathless and dreamy. His fingers tap-tapped . . .
The scorpion darted forward and jabbed its stinger in the back of his hand. If Gardener’s features twitched, Suggs did not notice it. The Deathstalker’s body flexed as it pumped in poison. Gardener picked up the whiskey glass with his other hand and drained it at a go.
“Mr. Suggs, the quality of your whiskey is poor, and so truly, I cannot tell you what is worse. Drinking this”—he held up the empty glass—“or enduring this.” He tapped the glass on the scorpion’s exoskeleton. It made a sound like champagne glasses clinking during a toast.
Gardener sloshed more whiskey into his glass, pouring with his free hand. The scorpion gripped his other hand in its pincers. It was beginning to draw blood.
“You have been envenomed,” Suggs said hoarsely.
Gardener closed his eyes. He raised the glass to his lips. The gutrot washed down his throat with a fiery itch. The scorpion’s stinger was embedded in his skin. The creature struggled to pull itself free but could not—Gardener’s flesh was swollen tight, trapping it.
A miscalculation evident in men just as it is in beasts, he reflected. The urge to kill can be so great that a creature overextends itself, and in so doing threatens its own life.
Gardener had served the citizenry of Old Ditch faithfully for many years. He had served it in clandestine ways, too. Four years ago, a pair of petty drifters and brothers named Horace and Eldred Bilks had raped a prostitute at the old Fairfax motel. They had been hell-raising around town a few days by then. Evidently the girl had made some offhand remark about Eldred Bilks’s harelip, about which he was sensitive. The younger and more sadistic of the two brothers, Eldred had lashed the woman to the hitch of his pickup and dragged her five hundred yards down a gravel road, busting her elbows and one kneecap. She was twenty-two and considered a looker before the incident.
Gardener had been planting pansies at a house a block or so from the Fairfax when the screams broke out. A few minutes later came the screech of tires as the brothers laid tracks. Next, an ambulance screamed past. What Gardener didn’t see, and knew he would not see, was a police car. Not anytime soon. The sheriff, a sniveling wretch named Gorse Ellson, had no taste for the kind of violence those brothers could bring. It’s just some whore, Ellson would tell himself. No use getting hurt over it.
Knowing this, Gardener fell to grim musings. The woman worshipped regularly at the Mission Church. Her soul was clean, if not her body.
Gardener walked to his small home and lifted a loose floorboard under his bed. Underneath were three pistols: two German Mausers in a beechwood box, plus a smaller Paterson model. He had arrived in Old Ditch with these and little else years ago. The sole tether to his old life. He would take them out to clean and oil them every year, only to rest them back beneath the boards. But that day he holstered one of the Mausers and hung the Paterson on a length of wire descending from his left armpit. He pulled on his felt coat and set off.
He did not own a car. But he was adept at hot-wiring them—a trick learned in the sad old, bad old days. He found an unlocked Dodge Dart behind the coin laundromat. Easy as pie, as the Yanks say.
That evening he found the Bilks brothers along the creek ten miles outside Old Ditch. Their car was parked at the end of a rutted wash under the sweeping limbs of an oak tree. Gardener waited until nightfall before creeping up on them. By the light of a harvest moon he could make out a body curled by a guttering fire. He tensed, reaching for his pistol—
He caught a noise in his blind spot—the clicking sound a rider makes to urge a stubborn horse forward. Gardener turned to spy Eldred Bilks sitting in the crotch of a tree with a revolver trained on his chest.
“Lookee
, lookee,” he said. “If it isn’t Hopalong Nigger.”
Gardener cursed himself; as a younger man he would not have been so easily ambushed. The second brother awoke and joined his sibling. Their eyes shone with bright avidity, two cruel boys who had come across a crippled bird.
“I seen you around town,” said Horace, the more observant of the two. “Mowing lawns for nickels, huh?”
“I do that, yes,” Gardener said in his smooth British lilt, which took the brothers by surprise. “But I do not come to you under that guise.”
“What the hell—what guys?” said Eldred.
“Hush,” Horace told his brother. His gaze was sharper now. “What guise do we entertain you under, pray tell?”
“I come as a death angel, Horace Bilks. Yes,” he went on, seeing their startled looks, “I know your names. But they will be unattached to you soon enough. I’ve come to kill you, Horace. You and Eldred both.”
The Bilks brothers laughed . . . until something in Gardener’s eyes rendered their mirth stillborn. They thought they had been dealing with a middle-aged gimp. But it was dawning that they were in the presence of something else—something that had learned to hide its true face.
“You are poor representatives of our species,” Gardener went on. “I do not know how you came to be as such. A man cares not if the mad dog was once a good dog. He cares only that the dog has gone mad and that it must be dispatched.”
Dispatched. This was how Gardener had once viewed his bloody work. Dispassionately, as a mailman viewed his job. The mailman delivered letters into mailboxes. Gardener had once delivered men into coffins.
“You do us a grave disfavor,” said Horace mockingly.
Gardener opened his coat to show them the Mauser holstered on his right side. Horace Bilks angled his head to that same side, the cartilage cracking in his neck, eyes wolfishly set.
“Tell me, nigger,” Eldred said with casual venom, “do you stick up Texaco stations with that lump of pig iron? A-cause we ain’t no Texaco.”
“You joke to cover your fear,” Gardener said. “But I can smell it.”
Eldred’s pistol hand came up, pinning Gardener between the eyes. “I will kill you,” he said bluntly.
“Ah. But will you act honorably?” Gardener asked. “Shall you be sporting, as your forefathers were? The great men who first colonized these empty lands?”
“Wait, are you . . . are you challenging me to draw?” Eldred barked laughter. “What year do you think this is, y’old fart?”
“How old-fashioned,” said Horace. “But you have to understand, my brother and me, we do everything together.”
“Including raping and mutilating women,” said Gardener.
“Oh hell yeah, especially that,” Horace said. “So what I’m saying is, you’d have to be faster than both Eldred ’n’ me.”
Gardener kept his peace.
“Okeydokey.” Horace cracked his knuckles, enjoying this game.
“You mowed your last blade of grass, jig,” said Eldred.
“Are you square with your creator?” Gardener asked them both. “I can give you some time to make that peace.”
“No need,” said Horace. “It’s you who’s gonna stop breathing.”
Gardener nodded evenly. “Shall we settle on a count of three?”
Eldred holstered his gun. The brothers stood side by side, fingers twitching near the butts of their pistols. The sweat shone on their foreheads like diamond dust.
Gardener’s right hand hovered over his Mauser . . .
. . . while his left slipped slyly through a vent on the opposite side of his coat for his hidden gun.
“Who will count?” Gardener said.
“You do the honors there, old man,” Eldred said. “Can you count that high?”
Gardener began. “One . . .”
He fired the Paterson twice. The slugs ripped through his coat and slammed into the brothers a split second apart. The men staggered and fell into each other, their skulls knocking together. Gardener unholstered the Mauser swiftly and emptied its clip, for he was lethal with either hand. One bullet tore Eldred Bilks’s jaw off, spinning it across the dirt. The man toppled and fell with his tongue hanging out of the fresh hole in his face, purple-rooted and unsettlingly long, like a skinned snake. His brother died with a little more dignity, but he died.
Gardener had used this trick in his old life. It wasn’t sporting, but then neither was dragging young girls down gravel roads by a trailer hitch.
It was this night—the night he’d killed the Bilks brothers—that Gardener mused upon as he sat in Clayton Suggs’s bar with a scorpion’s stinger buried in his hand. He had killed many men in his lifetime, both deserving and less so. The fact rested uneasily within him, yet he could do nothing to dislodge those acts from his past.
“There is a sect of monks who make an art of the act of self-flagellation.” Gardener squinted at Suggs, the venom and liquor blurring his sight. “Do you know this word, Mr. Suggs? Flagellation?”
Suggs swallowed with great effort. “I do not.”
Gardener poured himself another drink. He gripped the glass with his scorpioned hand this time, raising that hand to his mouth. The Deathstalker thrashed, pincers snapping. Gardener drank. His hand did not shake.
“They thrash themselves, yes?” he said. “Using short, many-tongued whips tipped with metal spurs. They walk the streets, uttering psalms and rending their flesh. The gutters run red with blood. It’s penance, Mr. Suggs. They do so to alleviate the stain of sin from their corporeal body, letting those sins escape through the flesh.”
“Your neck, man,” Suggs said queasily. “It is plainly bloated. I’m thinking it’ll make breathing a chore.”
“Penance is a very human need, Mr. Suggs. Yet I fear it is useless. A man does things in his life. Things he cannot repay or outrun. That man can spend the rest of his life paying and running, but he can never quite find the required distance. The toll is too high, because that man set it that way.”
Gardener reached over the bar and coiled his fingers around Suggs’s wrist. Suggs stared down at the man’s fingers, hard as obsidian, digging into him. It was all he could do not to cry out.
“Do you understand, Mr. Suggs? Do you share my view on this matter?”
When Gardener released him, Clayton Suggs fled the Glory. Gardener let him go. Perhaps he would run to the pharmacy and return with antivenom. But the sting of a scorpion wasn’t nearly enough to kill Gardener. There were some things, terrible things, that preferred to kill you slowly—over a lifetime, or perhaps even longer.
He wished Suggs had not left. He wanted to tell him of the dream he’d had just last night. It was the same one he had dreamed every night for the past fifteen years. He awoke each morning with his skin screaming as the terror fled from his veins.
In this dream, he saw the face of God. For this had been his wish—the deal he’d made with that thing that lurked in the black rock.
Show me the face of God.
And Gardener saw it. Every time he closed his goddamn eyes.
God’s face was vile. The first few times, Gardener had suspected trickery—the black thing invading his head and twisting his thoughts. But in time, his soul moved against this proposition. He had been granted his wish fairly. And now he had to live with it.
God’s face was that of an idiot. The moronic, drooling, palsied face of an enormous infant. A face covered in seeping boils and a-crawl with insects not to be found anywhere in nature. God’s eyes stared with malicious cruelty—and there was vast power in that gaze, yes, although it was witlessly applied. That gaze took aim at anyone, disregarding goodness or worth. It ruined people chaotically, without wisdom or just cause. This was the purest terror Gardener felt each time he shut his eyes: at the fact that the universe was lorded over by an infant of incalculable wrath and directionless evil who had not the slightest sense of right or wrong, guilt or innocence, or the hope of a better life.
And all of
humanity worshipped that mindless, gibbering thing.
When he awoke this very morning, Gardener had found the scorpion sunning itself on the front steps of his home. As if it had been waiting for him. And Gardener had known, with a certainty that lived someplace outside his flesh, that his old friend was coming. With that, he understood that the days marking his existence could perhaps be counted on the fingers of two hands. Perhaps only one.
Pinching with his fingers, he finally released the scorpion’s stinger from his flesh.
“Go on, now,” he said to it, setting it on the floor. “You have had an eventful day.”
1
THE ENGLISHMAN’S CAR was in atrocious shape, but he had been tasked with killing a man that day, that very day without delay, if possible, so there was nothing to be done about it—the car and its driver would both have to cope.
He had stolen the car, a Ford Galaxie 500 with red leatherette upholstery and faux-marble door panels, from a traveling salesman working the southern territory. The salesman picked the Englishman up on the side of the road, where he’d been thumbing a ride. After a half hour of polite chit-chat, the Englishman drew a pistol and ordered the man to pull over and get out.
“But,” the salesman sputtered, “I did you a favor, for God’s sake!”
The Englishman said: “Yes, and that’s irony for you, chum.”
“I didn’t have to, you know,” the salesman said, getting out of the car. “A lot of people wouldn’t pick up a man of your coloration.”
“You are a gentleman and a prince,” said the Englishman, and drove away.
The salesman trafficked in encyclopedias. The trunk was packed with them. The Englishman stopped and tossed them into the weeds. After a hard afternoon’s driving, the car developed a persistent knock. The Englishman drove on and a few hours later ran over some debris strewn across the road that tore the fender molding half off. The loosened metal flapped against the frame, which, in addition to the engine knock, created a din that he could not alleviate even by cranking the radio up and blasting “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes.
