Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Take off the specs, Kress.”

  “It’s inevitable, I suppose,” he muttered, reaching both hands up to them. He depressed a key, and the tiny red light on the opposite side went dark. The goggles came away in his hands.

  Involuntarily, Anoushka drew in a sharp breath.

  “They’re diseased,” he reminded her. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

  His ocular tendrils were as many as a normal Tikkihotto’s, and swarmed like the arms of a sea anemone...were stubby at first, retracted to better fit inside his eye gear, but extended into long filaments. Rather than being translucent, however, each strand was opaque; a gray deepening toward black.

  Tears began to film Anoushka’s own eyes. She had to look away. Now it was her turn to say, “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t blame you if you don’t want to see me anymore,” he told her. “In any way.” He began to replace his goggles.

  “Don’t,” she said. She forced herself to look at him again.

  “It isn’t just that they’re diseased,” he noted. “Even if they weren’t, they’d repulse you.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to get used to them.”

  She came around the edge of the counter. There was a second chair in case two cashiers needed to sit there, though that was seldom. She pulled it close to him.

  “I can’t see you as well without my glasses,” he said, as if in an excuse to hide behind them.

  “Leave them off for now.” She held up a volume that she had brought along with her this afternoon. “I want to read to you.”

  Kress smiled, and nodded his assent. “All right.” He closed his own book; she saw how he had to feel for it.

  “These are poems by Rabindranath Tagore. He was an Indian.”

  “So I would gather.”

  “Shh.”

  While she read, several customers approached the counter. Anoushka made the transactions for Kress; he talked her through it, still not replacing his goggles. Finally they were alone, the lowering evening sun extended long dimming bands across the honey colored floorboards, and Anoushka read to him:

  “Once you gave me

  as a loan to my eyes

  unlimited daylight.”

  THE LIBRARY OF SORROWS

  Nothing a murderer could tell MacDiaz in interview revealed as much as the decor of their apartment, he had found. Some proved dull, conventional, with nothing more unusual in their apartment than a pair or two of souvenir panties; their method of killing might be as blunt and to the point as a single bullet through the skull. Others proved far more imaginative, even whimsical, in their aesthetic tastes and in the dispatch of their prey. These people were both more fascinating to MacDiaz, and more frightening. They made the former seem merely like sharks, unthinkingly driven to glut a hunger. These others were like artists, surgeons, very black comedians all in one, and MacDiaz knew as soon as he entered the crime scene that this killer was one of the artistic types.

  The walls of the living room abounded with the mounted skulls of humans, animals and aliens (the animals and aliens somewhat difficult to differentiate from one-another, at times; more species intermingled in the colony city of Punktown than one might encounter in a lifetime as a citizen). The walls had then been entirely covered with black glossy sheets of plastic that had been snugly vacuum-formed over the skulls, giving them all the aspect of fossils in obsidian. Knickers, the uniform in charge when MacDiaz arrived, told him, “I didn’t think he could possibly be responsible for all the skulls...figured he got most of them from medical catalogs or the black market...until I went in his bedroom...”

  Well, MacDiaz took that as his cue to examine the bedroom. He need not dwell on the museum-like displays any longer, in any case; the images were recorded indelibly in his mind to be replayed at his leisure, later. His memory was photographic; indeed, it was a museum of photographs, in itself...and contained more skulls even than this collector had amassed.

  As Knickers led MacDiaz down the hall, he informed him how the killer had been taken into custody without a struggle, and that he was a thirty-three year old librarian at the Paxton Conservatory of Music and that he had the goddess Kali tattooed on his chest; the yellow ink used for her eyes glowed so brightly that he wore strips of dark tape over them, apparently so they wouldn’t show through his clothing at work. MacDiaz thought the tattoo sounded tacky after the austere beauty of the parlor, but maybe the killer had gotten the tattoo as a younger man. In any case, they had reached the bedroom.

  Here, the decor and the prey were one and the same. MacDiaz was put in mind of a dark cave with a ceiling dense with stalactites. He counted thirteen naked male bodies, all with their backs to him, hanging from the ceiling. At first he thought they were hanging in the conventional sense, their heads lost in shadow, until he saw that the ceiling was composed of some heavy dark fluid which gently rippled and lapped, perhaps because of the subtle swaying of the pensile bodies...or vice versa. The heads and necks of the bodies had been inserted into this ceiling of fluid, and thus suspended. Either the fluid or some other property of the room preserved the bodies, so that none looked to be in advanced decay; the most MacDiaz noted was some bloating, and discoloration in the lower portions where blood had settled, but the flesh and limbs appeared supple. He didn’t touch any of this strange crop, however.

  MacDiaz walked amongst them, slipped between them, ducking his head and doing his best not even to brush the pendulous cadavers. He observed them from the fronts, took in tattoos and rings, trendy ritual scars and brands that told him some of the victims were college kids, maybe from the conservatory. His eyes photographed it all, and when he was satisfied, he instructed Knickers and his men to take down one of the bodies.

  There was some difficulty; in fact, when the body came suddenly free at last the officers tumbled to the floor with it splayed across them. It was headless, and for an irrational moment MaDiaz thought they might have tugged too hard at the body, dislodging the head and leaving it in the weird ceiling. But the bodies were all found to be headless, just their necks holding them securely in the inky liquid. MacDiaz would learn later that many of the skulls in the living room were indeed those of the victims.

  Several hours later, when the last of the young men had been removed, MacDiaz again stood in the parlor. He noticed a violin case on the coffee table. Was the killer a frustrated musician, who played before the skulls of his captured audience, perhaps naked, tears running down his face at the beauty of his music, at the appreciative locked gaze of his fossilized admirers? The detective went abruptly to a window, drew aside the heavy black drapes. The light of day was refreshing, and he opened the window to let in the cool air and let out some of the poison in him. The city stretched before him in layers of paling gray, dense stalagmites to the stalactites of the bedroom, a tainted coral reef teeming with life, hovercars floating like swarms of fish. Like swarms of flies above the great misty carcass of Punktown.

  He forced himself to submerge the image of the killer playing his violin, but he couldn’t drown it; not only did he remember everything he saw via the sliver of a chip wired into his brain, but everything he thought or imagined. He could file the image away and leave it there. In theory, leave it there, and never have to see it again unless he sent fingers paging through his mental files for that folder. But in reality, the images seemed to swim up of their own volition. When he lay in bed, they were projected on his inner eyelids, and when he opened his eyes, they were projected on his dark bedroom ceiling. It was the imp of the perverse. His subconscious mind drew them out when his conscious mind wanted to turn away. It was like biting a nail until it bled; not something one consciously chose to do. When he had been a boy, he had picked at his scabs, and eaten the dead skin that came off, and been dismayed at the sudden welling of blood and had sucked at that, too, as if to drink it away. Summoning the pictures was like the need to kill a person. It was a call that one was compelled to obey, almost without hope of disobeying.

&
nbsp; * * *

  The Columbarium was the name of the full-care housing center where MacDiaz went once a week to see his mother. He called her, additionally, once or twice a week. On birthdays or holidays he took his wife and two young children to see her. Once his youngest daughter had awakened screaming in the night, and explained tearfully that she had dreamed she was trapped inside Nana’s bed with her, and Nana was dead and she couldn’t get out. She had asked to sleep with her parents, and MacDiaz had held her, staring at the dark ceiling while watching the pictures that came unbidden. His mother, younger, smiling, so pretty...her thick red hair which he had almost obsessively played with as a small boy, twirling the strands around and around his fingers in rings...

  One of the attendants at the counter asked if he wanted her to accompany him. He told her he was all set, but she offered to buzz Mrs. MacDiaz just to let her know her son was here to see her. That done, MacDiaz grunted his thanks and walked the familiar halls hung with bland artworks, his shoes squeaking against the too bright floor. His mother’s number was 3-33, easy enough to remember but he knew the way by heart. His implant had recorded every minute stain on the floor or wall, every interchangeable mock-Impressionistic landscape framed on the walls, the scuffs or chipped paint on every one of the drawers set into the walls in rows of three. He came to the drawer stenciled 3-33, and stood staring at it, hesitating. It was in the uppermost row. He didn’t bother selecting a folding chair from one of the receptacles spaced along the walls between each group of drawers, as he could seldom bring himself to remain long. He needn’t worry that others would be impatient for him to move out of the way of the drawer they sought, however, since he was the only person in this lonely stretch of hallway.

  At last he pushed a keypad, and said, “Hi, Mama, it’s me.” Then he lifted a latch, and pulled the drawer smoothly out of its niche in the wall, swinging it down on its arms to about the level of his waist.

  He smiled down at her, and she smiled weakly through her bubble up at him. Her headset, on which she spoke with him when he called and on which she and the other tenants of this nursing home spent their days watching movies, soaps, talk and game shows, lifted out of her way so that she could see him with her naked eyes. She had to squint them to adjust. She was a skeleton which he doubt could have taken two steps, were it freed from its glass sarcophagus. Her face was a skull’s, barely sheathed in skin. He thought of the skulls in the apartment he had just left. Her white hair was a few mere wisps like the smoky tendrils of her spirit, struggling to be free of her but trapped inside this bubble.

  “What were you watching?” he asked, knowing her love of movies, a passion they had always shared.

  “A gardening show,” she told him, her voice creaky over the speaker.

  “Don’t you ever go on-net any more, Mama? It would be good for you. Talk to people...”

  “Lie to some young man that I’m a sexy curvy redhead?” she joked. “I’m too tired to talk. I’d rather watch my movies...watch those people talk. I tried some of the VR channels, but I’m too tired even as a ghost in the machine. I just want to watch, not do. I’m just so tired...forever tired...”

  MacDiaz would often imagine how it was for his mother when she was slid back into the wall, alone in her life-support cylinder, her womb, lost in her video dreams. Unable to escape. He thought he understood her prison. But in a way, she had inflicted his upon him. She and his father had wanted him to have that chip implanted in his boyhood. It would give him a better chance in life, a better job, give him more capabilities in a competitive world where such technology was equally accessible to every single person...who could afford it. He had had no choice; a parental decision, like circumcision of old. But he did not leave her alive in her prison as a vengeance. Her present condition was imposed upon them both by the laws he served; if he could, he would open her bubble right now and cut her snaking support cables so that she might pass at last into true rest.

  “How are the girls?” she asked him, her favorite topic, and he told her. Sometimes he brought vid chips of them at play or on vacation for her to watch. Luckily, she did not ask him how his work was. His parents hadn’t really approved of his becoming a policeman, and he didn’t want to tell her now the pain it brought him. Tell her that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could do it...how it wasn’t getting better with time, but worse, as he saw more and more horror, until his mind seemed ready to burst with its burden, those images that never dissipated, only jockeyed for position. That the interior of his skull was one crime scene, limitless, stretching in all directions to a bloody infinity.

  * * *

  He sat at the kitchen table, glass of orange juice before him. His wife had come scuffing out from the bedroom a few minutes ago to see if he was all right; he had gently sent her back to bed. They had made love tonight. How could he ever tell her that more often than not these days while they were making love, he was dredging up the memory of another night of love-making, ten years ago, when she had been more slender, prettier, more in her bloom? It was as though he were cheating on her with an earlier version of herself. And then there were those times when he recollected a night spent with his old college girlfriend. Or recalled—as if she stood before him then and there—some nameless teen age girl who had stood in line in front of him when he was thirteen years old...waiting to get on a carnival ride...and he staring at her long legs, smooth as those of a plastic doll, and the tight shorts that gripped her buttocks.

  It was a sweet memory, not just carnal—he remembered the sparkle of sun on her long, rare blond hair as much as he remembered the flesh of her legs and the sparkle of gold down on them—but it seemed too real, too immediate, so that it competed with the reality he was living now, the time he was living now, and made him feel displaced. Lost within himself. He should be accustomed to his memories; he had worn his chip for over thirty years. But as a boy, his mind had been spacious. He had had the room to move in it, to hold memories at arm’s length and regard them properly. But the house was now full, a storage room, a warehouse, the windows obscured with piled debris and the pictures far more horrifying than any he had imagined as a child, or even as a novice policeman. The more time went on, and the more his life experiences accumulated to become immediately accessible to him, the more his life-long condition felt alien to him.

  Even now, that picture of the golden girl rose up in him, simply because of the train of thought he was in. Angrily, he clubbed the image back down, and to replace it sent his mind scanning through his case files. He plucked one out, threw it open on the desk of his forward mind.

  He thought it sad that he had to chase away the ghost of a blond, smooth-skinned girl with this ghost of a gang member whose eyes had been ritually shot out, but he sat there nevertheless sipping his orange juice and slowly taking in every detail of the scene in which the boy lay. He even saw again his own face, darkly reflected in the pool of blood widening and widening out from the kid’s exploded head.

  * * *

  MacDiaz arrived at this crime scene only moments after the uniforms, and consequently all the bodies had not yet been discovered. He caught just a glimpse of one denuded, sprawled skeleton on the living room carpet before pressing deeper into the old apartment with its large rooms and high ceilings, his drawn handgun like a dog to lead him. He took note that all the shades were down and curtains drawn so that the place had a sepulchral feel and stink. While a uniform plunged into one bedroom, MacDiaz turned the knob of another.

  The door budged but a few inches. Was someone leaning their weight against it, or barricading it shut? He ducked to one side, lest he be shot through the panel, trying to dart a glance through the crack. Only gloom beyond. Well...what was he to do? He had enough protective mesh woven into his coat and vest to stop half of the projectiles and rays one might encounter, so he backed up a bit to gather momentum and then was hurtling shoulder-first against the door. It gave half-way with a loud crackling and splintering sound before jamming again, and M
acDiaz made himself a moving target, barreling through the opening with gun thrust blindly.

  His feet crunched on an uneven surface and he nearly lost his balance. There was a body on the floor just in front of the door, nearly as skeletal as the one in the other room but still with the dregs of skin to it. He found no one else in the room, under the bed or in the closet. Putting on a light, he turned his attention back to the corpse, now anxious to find out if its head was really as large as it seemed in the murk...for it was this that he had shattered with the door and under his shoes.

  The burst of light sent a swarm of insects scurrying. Startled and revolted, MacDiaz felt an irrational urge to point his pistol at them. But at the same time he saw that it wasn’t the corpse’s head he had shattered, he realized the scattering creatures weren’t insects. “Oh great,” he hissed, seeing that he had inadvertently squashed a good number of the tiny beings to death.

  They were a race called the Mee’hi, and they knew better than to kill other intelligent species so as to feed off them and build their nests...they had been warned several times, and threatened with total expulsion from this world. The head of the wasted human had been turned into a nest like a sand castle made of some black extruded matter, a miniature city like a microcosm of Punktown, its rough but delicate spires and minarets now mostly crushed and toppled. The face of the cadaver was engulfed but for the mouth, its lips curled back to expose a terrible yellow grin.

  “Damn you,” MacDiaz growled at the darting creatures. No doubt they would raise a fuss about those he had trampled, claiming he had done it on purpose in retribution. Well, his eyes had recorded all, and if need be his memories could be extracted to show a jury that the killings had been accidental. Still, he knew he had just killed more beings in one step than had his last several murderers combined.