Are You Loathsome Tonight?

by Poppy Z. Brite

  Eventually he looked down at himself and found that he was wearing only a filthy pair of trousers. He stripped them off, sponged himself to a semblance of cleanliness with the stale water in the basin, slicked his hair back, and dressed in fresh clothes. He left his apartment without locking the door and set off in a random direction.

  D'Antonio wandered hatless in the August sun for an hour or more. When he arrived at the States newspaper office, his face was streaming with sweat, red as a boiled crawfish. He introduced himself to the editor as a retired police detective, an expert on both Italians and murderers, and gave the following statement:

  “The Axeman is a modern Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A criminal of this type may be a respectable, law-abiding citizen when he is his normal self. Compelled by an impulse to kill, he must obey this urge. Like Jack the Ripper, this sadist may go on with his periodic outbreaks until his death. For months, even for years, he may be normal, then go on another rampage. It is a mistake to blame the Mafia. The Mafia never attacks women as this murderer has done."

  He left the States office with several people staring bemusedly after him, but they printed the interview in its entirety.

  After that, he lived his life much as he had been doing before the wraith's first visit. Armistice Day brought throngs of joyous revelers into the streets, as well as a blessed wave of cool weather; it had stayed sweltering through October. The war was over, and surely the wraith would never come back and make him do those things again.

  He could not forget the organic vibration that ran up his arms as blade buried itself in bone.

  In fact, he dreamed about it almost every night.

  Francis Ferdinand returned in the spring of 1919.

  He did not muck about with appearances this time, but simply materialized inside D'Antonio's head. D'Antonio collapsed, clawing at his temples.

  "He deceived me for a time, but now I know he still walks this earth," said the wraith. "We will find him."

  D'Antonio lay curled on his side, blinded by tears of agony, wishing for the comforts of the womb or the grave.

  Giacomo Lastanza was a powerful man, but he had been no match for the fiend in his bedroom. Now he lay on the floor with his head split as cleanly as a melon, and his wife Rosalia cowered in a corner of the room clutching her two-year-old daughter, Mary. Mary was screaming, clutching at her mother's long black hair. As the Axeman turned away from her husband's body, Rosalia began to scream too.

  “Not my baby! Please, Holy Mother of God, not my baby!"

  The axe fell. Mary's little face seemed to crack open like an egg. Rosalia was unconscious before her skull felt the blade's first kiss.

  D'Antonio lay naked on the floor. The apartment was a wasteland of dirty clothes and empty wine bottles. But his body was relatively sober for once—they'd run out of money—and as a result he was sharp enough to be carrying on an argument with the wraith.

  “Why in hell do we have to kill the women? You can't be worried one of them is Cagliostro."

  “He has consorted with a number of dangerous women. When we find him, his wife will bear killing also."

  “And until then, you don't mind killing a few innocent ones?"

  “It is necessary."

  “What about that little baby?"

  “If it had been Cagliostro's daughter, he would have raised her to be as wicked as himself."

  D'Antonio got control of one fist and weakly pounded the floor with it.

  “You goddamn monster—you're just gonna keep killing people, and sooner or later I'll get caught and rot in prison. Or fry in the chair. And you'll go on your merry way and find some other poor sap to chase down that shadow of yours."

  “The next one must be him! He is the last one on the list!"

  “Fuck the list."

  A bolt of excruciating pain shot through D'Antonio's head, and he decided to drop the argument.

  Cagliostro was reading by candlelight when he heard the chisel scraping at his door. He smiled and turned a page.

  The creature crept into his room, saw him in his chair with his head bent over a book. When it was ten feet away, Cagliostro looked up. When it was five feet away, it froze in midmotion, restrained by the protective circle he had drawn.

  From looking into its eyes, he knew everything about Joseph D'Antonio and the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. But the creature upon which he gazed now was neither D'Antonio nor the Archduke; this was a twisted amalgamation of the two, and it could only be called the Axeman.

  He smiled at the creature, though its eyes blazed with murderous rage. “Yes, poor Archduke, it is I. And you will not harm me. In fact, I fear I must harm you yet again. If only you had accepted the necessity of your death the first time, you would be Beyond with your beloved Sophie now.

  “No, don't think you can desert your stolen body as it lies dying. You'll stay in there, my boy. My magic circle will see to that!” Cagliostro beamed; he was enjoying this immensely. “Yes, yes, I know about unfortunate ex-Detective D'Antonio trapped in there. But why do you think it was so easy for the Duke to take hold of your body, Mr. D'Antonio, and make it do the terrible things it did? Perhaps because you care not at all for your fellow human beings? ‘When they came for the Jews, I did nothing, for I was not a Jew’ ... ah, forgive me. An obscure reference to a future that may never be. And you will both die to help prevent it."

  He reached beneath the cushion of his armchair, removed a silver revolver with elaborate engraving on the butt and barrel, aimed it carefully, and put a ball in the Axeman's tortured brain.

  Then he put his book aside, went to his desk, and took up his pen.

  The letter was published in the Times-Picayune the next day.

  Hell, March 13, 1919

  Editor of the Times-Picayune

  New Orleans, La.

  Esteemed Mortal:

  They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.

  When I see fit, I shall come again and claim other victims.

  I alone know whom they shall be. I shall leave no clue except my bloody axe, besmeared with the blood and brains of he who I have sent below to keep me company.

  If you wish, you may tell the police to be careful not to rile me. Of course, I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way they have conducted their investigations in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid as to amuse not only me, but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Joseph, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they were never born than to incur the wrath of the Axeman. I don't think there is any need for such a warning, for I feel sure the police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.

  Undoubtedly, you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished, I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens, for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.

  Now, to be exact, at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to you people. Here it is:

  I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether region that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of those people who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.

  Well, I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and as it is about time that I leave your earthly home, I will cease my discourse. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, that it may go well with thee, I have been, am, and will be the worst
spirit that ever existed either in fact or realm of fancy.

  THE AXEMAN

  Tuesday was Saint Joseph's Night, always a time of great excitement among Italians in New Orleans. This year it reached a fever pitch. The traditional altars made of a hundred or more kinds of food were built, admired, dismantled, and distributed to the poor; lucky fava beans were handed out by the fistful; the saint was petitioned and praised. Still, St. Joseph's Night of 1919 would remain indelibly fixed in New Orleans memory as “The Axeman's Jazz Night."

  Cafés and mansions on St. Charles blazed with the melodies of live jazz bands. Those who could not afford to pay musicians fed pennies into player pianos. A popular composer had written a song called “The Mysterious Axeman's Jazz, or, Don't Scare Me, Papa.” Banjo, guitar, and mandolin players gathered on the levees to send jazz music into the sky, so the Axeman would be sure to hear it as he passed over. By midnight, New Orleans was a cacophony of sounds, all of them swinging.

  Cagliostro walked the streets for most of the night, marveling (if not actively congratulating himself) at how completely he had brought the city together, and how gay he had made it in the process. No one so much as glanced at him: few people were on the streets, and Cagliostro had a talent for making himself invisible.

  He had left the Axeman's corpse locked in the back of the house where it wouldn't spoil the groceries. First, of course, he had bludgeoned the face into unrecognizable mush with the Axeman's own axe. Everything that suggested the murdered man might be someone other than “Mike Pepitone,” simple Italian grocer, was in the satchel Cagliostro carried with him.

  On the turntable of his phonograph, as a final touch, he had left a recording of “Nearer My God to Thee."

  When the jazz finally began to die down, he walked to the docks and signed onto a freighter headed for Egypt. There were any number of wonderful things he hadn't gotten around to learning last time.

  Italy, 1945

  Toward the end, Mussolini lived in an elaborate fantasy world constructed by the loyal sycophants who still surrounded him. Whole cities in Italy were sanitized for his inspection, the cheering crowds along his parade routes supplemented by paid extras. When Hitler visited Rome, he too was deceived by the coat of sparkle on the decay, the handpicked Aryan soldiers, the sheer bravado of Il Duce.

  He believed he had cost Hitler the war. Germany lost its crucial Russian campaign after stopping to rescue the incompetent Italian army in Albania. Hitler had believed in the power and glory of Italy, and Mussolini had failed him.

  Now he had been forced into exile on Lake Garda. He was a failure, his brilliant regime was a failure, and there were no more flunkies to hide these painful truths. He kept voluminous diaries in which he fantasized that his position in history would be comparable to Napoleon or Christ. His mistress Claretta lived nearby in a little villa, his only comfort.

  On 25 April, Germany caved in to the Allies. The Italian people, the ones he had counted on to save him with their loyalty, turned against him. Mussolini and Claretta fled, making for Switzerland.

  A few last fanatical companions attempted to help them escape by subterfuge, but they were arrested by partisans on the north shore of Lake Como, discovered hiding in a German truck, cringing inside German coats and helmets. They were shot against the iron gate of an exquisite villa, and their bodies were taken to Milan and strung up by the heels to demonstrate the evils of Fascism.

  All in service of the brotherhood of man.

  Are You Loathsome Tonight?

  Intrigued by Caitlín R. Kiernan's deliberate use of words to create painterly mood rather than straight narrative in “A Story for Edward Gorey” (Wetbones #2), I tried it with extremely different results.

  Are You Loathsome Tonight?

  When Elvis was first cutting records in Memphis, back before pills and Colonel Parker really got their hooks into him, he used to shop at a black men's clothing store on Beale Street. The store was owned by a black man, and the clothes were aimed at young jiveass black men: ruffled shirts in painful colors, wide-legged pants with glittery stripes, jackets decorated with a king's ransom of rhinestones. Blue suede shoes.

  No other white people ever shopped there. Elvis never forgot the fact that the owner had let him take clothes on credit back when his tastes outstripped the size of his wallet, and he patronized the store until it closed in 1968. Bought the owner a Cadillac too.

  Of course Elvis loved the clothes at this store, but there was another thing that fascinated him: an eight-foot albino python the owner kept in a tank near the shoe display. Elvis could never quite get it through his head that the snake wasn't poisonous. “Looks just like a big ole worm,” he'd say. “But if it bit you you'd fall down dead in two seconds."

  “Naw, Elvis,” the owner kept telling him, “only way that snake could hurt you is to get ‘round your neck and squeeeeeeeeeeze."

  Elvis never listened. Well, maybe he did just a little. He'd always had a taste for things that made him feel endangered without truly being dangerous, movies with plenty of blood and guts, books by men who'd traveled through deserts or to the North Pole and written down every awful detail, snakes that weren't really poisonous but could still squeeze you to death.

  After his Momma died, though, Elvis no longer cared so much whether things just seemed dangerous. For years now he has been edging closer to real danger in ways he can still deny from day to day. Pounds, kilos of bacon. Peanut butter and banana sandwiches fried in butter. Dilaudids and Seconals and Nembutals and Placidyls and Quaaludes ... the names themselves are soporific to him now, making the back of his brain seem to lubricate with anticipation, much as his mouth waters when he smells food.

  There was never a time in his life when Elvis couldn't get all the drugs he wanted. But sometimes even he has to level off a little in order to enjoy the next ride down. When that happens, when he begins to crave his handful of pills, the desire is like a big white snake moving slowly in his gut.

  He loves the pills so much that the man who supplies them, Dr. Nick, was recently able to talk him into lending the Presley name—previously unsullied by product endorsement—to a chain of racquetball courts. Even in his fog, Elvis can see the pathetic humor in that idea, which fortunately never came to fruition. He loves the pills so much that once, when a doctor tried to talk him into cutting down, he threatened to go out and buy his own damn drugstore.

  ***

  Onstage in Vegas in 1974, Elvis told his audience, “In this day and time you can't even get sick—you're strung out! Well, by God, I'll tell you something, friends: I have never been strung out in my life except on music. When I got sick here in the hotel, from three different sources I heard I was strung out on heroin. I swear to God. Hotel employees, Jack! Bellboys! Freaks who carry your luggage! Maids! If I find, or hear, the individual that has said that about me—I'm gonna break your neck, you sonofabitch! That is dangerous, that is damaging to myself, to my little daughter, to my father, to my friends, to my doctor. I will pull your goddamn tongue out by the roots! Thank you very much."

  Then he sang “Hawaiian Wedding Song."

  ***

  These days Elvis spends most of his time in his bedroom and adjoining bath. When maids come in to clean these rooms, Elvis sits awkwardly in the chintz- and doll-filled chamber that is always kept ready for Lisa Marie's visits. The maid has to open Lisa Marie's windows afterward to get the lingering smell of him out of the pale pink room: a heavy smell of hair oil and sweat, for Elvis has a lifelong fear of water and hates to bathe. Often there is a faint chemical edge to his odor, the excess nostrums and toxins coming right out of his pores.

  He is supposed to leave on tour tomorrow, twelve days, twelve shows without a night off. The list of cities alone would be enough to kill a lesser man: Utica, Syracuse, Hartford, Uniondale, Lexington. Fayetteville, Tennessee. And more. He doesn't want to be anywhere but this bathroom. He's told everybody he's not going, but nobody believes him. The Colonel says he can't afford not to go, and
the hell of it is that this is true: Elvis spends so much, and his money has been so poorly managed, that he'll be broke within the year.

  By the mid-seventies, the snarling voice that ripped through “Heartbreak Hotel” was gone, and there was only a touch left of the “Love Me Tender” croon. Now he has lost it all completely: no control of his breathing, a strain to hit the notes, a thick druggy glaze over the emotions that used to seethe just below the surface. He performs songs like “Unchained Melody,” songs he can just belt out from deep in his considerable gut. He talks to the audience, particularly when they are unresponsive, trying to win them over. He has given away thousands of dollars’ worth of diamond rings and guitars to strangers in Vegas nightclubs, just trying to rekindle that look of unconditional love he used to see in all their eyes.

  It's all Elvis has ever wanted, really, unconditional love from everybody in the world.

  ***

  Sam Phillips had Elvis's first Sun records pressed at Plastic Products, a vinyl plant and warehouse in a bleak part of Memphis. “That's All Right” was pressed there, backed with “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Thousands of black circles dripping with sex, menace, and magic rolled out of Plastic Products and into the clamoring world. Today the building stands vacant and derelict, humpbacked like a giant barrel half buried in cement, a footnote of corrugated steel behind high chain link.

  ***

  When rattlesnakes convene for denning, they

  first form a bolus—a ball-shaped cluster,

  like a collection of rubber bands. Every