Darker Than Noir

by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith

  **

  “Yeah, so that’s how it all started, at the baseball field. I think that sip of beer pushed a trigger inside my gray matter. By the time I was seven…or maybe it was eight…I was sneaking beers out of the fridge, and moving up the scale to wine. Ma always kept a few bottles of the white and red in the fridge. She was Catholic, though I don’t think she went to church more than twice, both times at Easter, when I was growing up. I’d steal a glass and replace the difference with tap water. She thought it went flat or stale or whatever wine does after it gets uncorked, and then she would dump the rest down the sink. Christ, that killed me.

  “On a sleepover, I raided a friend’s dad’s liquor cabinet and got my first taste of bourbon. Had this other friend named Tina whose dad had a bottle of melon liqueur sitting out on the counter, between the breadbox and the bananas. Drank the whole thing and skillfully filled it back up with green food coloring and water. To this day, I wonder if he ever found out.

  “Course, I puked green for the better part of a day. I think it goes without saying that by the time I was sixteen, I had a problem.

  “Tina knew this guy, he was in his twenties, a friend of her big brother. He was of legal age, even if he was doing illegal stuff, like Tina, and supplying us with hardcore booze. I placed an order with him and he delivered. Then, alone in my bedroom one Friday night in October, I knocked back boilermakers when I should have been working on my geometry homework. My grades were taking a hell of a tumble the more the wine and spirits consumed my brain cells. I must have swigged a dozen before I passed out. Get this – when I woke up, the first thing I remembered was the circumference of a circle. Or was it the measurement of a parallelogram? Or an Isosceles Triangle? Ha! Remind me never to tell that one again when I’m sober.

  “So yeah, I put myself in an alcohol coma. But I came out of it. Lucky, you say? Hold back on that sentiment until you hear the rest of it.

  “You see, I woke up hearing voices. Not just my ma, bitching and howling about all the wrong she’d done to lead me to the wrong I’d done; I was in the hospital. A lot of people die in hospitals, and not all of their spirits move on.

  “They thought it was the simple DTs…”

  **

  “Your name’s Helen? Helen Muldare. You go to Simms College? That’s the long brick doohickey along Route Seventeen, near the river? Yeah, I know the place. I got a shitty apartment in town, not too far from you. I drive past it all the time on my way to work. Hey, Bartender, another round my good man.

  “What are you studying?”

  “Liberal Arts.”

  “Liberal Arts? What exactly does that mean? Are you studying writing and poetry; string instruments and interpretive dance and pottery making and painting with acrylics? Ha! No wonder all those tight-ass Republican douchebags hate you. They’d prefer that you were learning to build better bombs while studying the Bible. ‘Take a letter to the Corinthians…or just dump some depleted uranium shells on their asses.’”

  “Not the same thing, and I think you’ve had enough.”

  “Jesus, if only. Enough? Ha! Helen, if that really is your name…”

  “It is.”

  “Well, Helen, it takes more than a few glasses of the house white to put me under the table. Now, I pretty much imbibe spirits to drown them out. Jennifer Love Hewitt’s got nothing on me.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “So real, it’s unreal.”

  “The dorm where I live at Simms College…we keep seeing this…thing. Dude with a limp, roaming through the halls. Scared the shit out of me last week while I was bent over the sink brushing my teeth. Can you come over, take a look…find out what he wants?”

  Her name was Helen. Long black hair. Ice-blue eyes. Hot little caboose in low-riding jeans. It wouldn’t surprise James if she had a tramp stamp under that pale pink sweater. A fine young lady, she was. He saw in her wounded eyes that Helen wasn’t hallucinating, or putting some of that Liberal Arts theater dabbling to use.

  “Sure,” he said. “But first, just one more glass of vino.”

  III. Pink Elephants

  Being an alcoholic is a lot like being possessed.

  Being haunted by the dead is a lot like being drunk, so it’s easy to confuse the two.

  I’m the sane little voice that lives inside an alcoholic’s head. His name is James, so I guess that’s my name, too. James is twenty-four going on a hundred and twenty-four. James has been drinking for a very long time; longer than he’s been visited by the dark things that started trying to corner him and get inside his head when he was still in high school.

  James rarely listens to me. I’ve been telling him not to drink just to forget, but he refuses, which leaves me to face Oliver, the dead thing that dragged itself out of the closet at four in the morning and plunked itself in the old rocking chair beside the television, which James leaves on all night because he’s afraid of the dark.

  **

  He’s walking through the woods. Boy will never learn. These old woods have been around long enough to soak up some pretty nasty residue. Wars with the Indians. Sorry, Native Americans. Wars between the local blue collar families which, at times, got even bloodier. And one or more campus murders, unsolved to this day, like our good friend Toeless Todd. He should never take shortcuts through unfamiliar woods, but in his rage, which can at times be mighty, James seems to have forgotten this.

  “Hey, James, wait,” calls a voice from behind him/us. Mercifully, this voice hails from a warm body.

  James whips around, sees Helen, and barks, “What?”

  He continues his brisk march, probably lost but not caring where he parked his car. Simms is a fucking maze, laid out poorly, declares James’ inner-architect-slash-city planner, among big clumps of dark hemlocks, oaks, and skeletal paper-white birch trees that hover visibly in the darkness like picked-clean bones.

  “Will you slow down, for Chrissakes?”

  He digs in his heels awkwardly, thus breaking the illusion of a perfect performance. Arms akimbo, he shouts, “What, Helen, what?”

  She hurries over to him, her jacket on but unzipped, her hat with its pompom almost falling off her head. “That’s what I want to know. What do I do now? There’s a human body part in my fucking bedroom!”

  Her voice, verging on hysterical, carries in the cold air with a sharp echo. In its wake, the wind whispers, a sound more ghostly than when it howls.

  “What do you want to do?” James asks, his level dropping. He wipes his/our mouth and winces. “Fuck, that little The Real World: Walla Walla reject clocked me hard.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know he was gonna show up.”

  “One-nutted, low-hanging, dickless prick…”

  “He’s dating Donna. Nothing serious, though.”

  “Lucky her. You don’t have to do anything. Toeless Todd will take care of the details, now that the missing piece isn’t missing. You probably won’t see him anymore.”

  “But what about the toe? Shouldn’t we call the cops? I mean, there’s been a murder.”

  “There’s murders everywhere you turn, and plenty of pissed-off souls roaming the land. Lots of them cops, babe. Oliver used to be a cop, you know.”

  “Who the hell is Oliver?”

  Less than an hour later, at James’ shitty apartment, while he’s sweaty and grinding on top of Helen, Oliver creeps out of the closet. James hears the creak of the closet door, feels the chilly brush of a current stirring on his/my naked spine, the slow, wet, dragging sound. We catch a shimmer of movement in the brass lamp on the bedside table, hear the gurgle of the dead man’s voice, clotted and inhuman, because whoever cut him up took his tongue, and I/we try to ignore that he’s there in the room, making this horizontal moment an unintentional three-way in both the physical and metaphysical senses. An orgy of four when you factor in me, the voice in James’ thoughts, the one that goes insane just a little bit more every time the disfigured specter crawls into the room and deman
ds our mutual attention.

  “Who the hell is Oliver?” she grunts, pre-climax. Or maybe it’s post. James can never tell if a woman is faking it when she moans.

  “Oliver?” James parrots, grunting that sour name between thrusts.

  “You said something about Oliver again. He your cat?”

  “I don’t have a cat, just a hot li’l puss-puss.” He emphasizes with a deep plunge and by strumming a clockwise riff of air guitar over her clitoris with two fingers and his thumb.

  “So…who’s…Oliver?”

  The dead dude I live with, James thinks. His/my reanimated roommate. Or what’s left of him. They cut out his tongue, hacked off both ears. Whoever chopped Oliver up drilled a corkscrew into his left eye and popped it like a bottle of champagne, leaving the destroyed, liquid yolk running down his cheek. Sliced off his junk, too.

  James tries to ignore this last bit of intelligence, not easy when his erection is at a point that isn’t entirely hard, but only moderately. Another curse levied on the alcoholic, the old malfunctioning jackhammer. If Helen’s one of those chicks that likes a man to go the distance, James likely won’t disappoint, and it’s a very good chance she’ll get off before he fills the condom’s reservoir. He gets relatively hard, just takes a long time to come.

  Hacked off Oliver’s junk, fingers, and toes, just like—

  The lightning bolt strikes, blindingly-white and powerful, the legendary Eureka! In that legendary too-hot ancient Greek bath. Whoever cut off Oliver’s toes…could there be a connection with the dead thing clanking its chains around the college?

  James’ pace begins to falter. Maintaining his stiffy is no longer an easy thing to pull off. Less than a minute later, it has reduced to the consistency of hot, bendable rubber. It plops out of her, the flag no longer planted.

  “What-?” she begs.

  Hearing the disappointment in her voice makes it worse. Limp as boiled spaghetti now, James makes one last attempt to resume, but this is how it goes when you’re a booze hound and there’s an apparition leaning in your ear, bellowing in a slurred, tongue-less tone. Eventually, these things have an adverse effect on a man’s love life.

  “Huh?” James babbles, still on top of her, Oliver on top of him/us.

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” says Helen. But it isn’t her that James is questioning. It’s Oliver.

  “Shalla?” James repeats. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Shalla? Is he trying to say ‘shower’ without his tongue? Living with a dead man is sometimes like sharing space with a stroke victim who can’t speak clearly, gets pissed off easily, and knocks things over. The lamp takes a tumble and the bulb shorts out.

  “Why the fuck did you do that?” Helen shrieks.

  I didn’t, James starts to say, but holds his tongue—pun intended.

  She pushes him off her, unaware that she’s also forcing Oliver away in the deal. A two-fer.

  “Shalla,” James repeats.

  Helen angrily yanks on her jeans. In her haste to put distance between them, she forgets the lacy triangle of her thong. She pulls on her top, sans bra, and grabs for her shoes.

  “Shalla…”

  The phantom blows out an angry breath, and the two halves of the word collide, part James, part Oliver, like that old Electric Company syllables skit.

  Han.

  “Shallahan?” James asks.

  Suddenly, Helen’s anger isn’t so burning. She repeats the word.

  “That mean anything to you?” James asks, his limp dick swinging, sweat cooling on his flesh.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a name. Shallahan.”

  “Okay,” James says. “You know anyone named Shallahan?”

  Helen nods. “And so do you. Pete Shallahan’s the dude who knocked you on your ass at the dorm tonight, you pathetic ober.”

  She shoots a look at his manhood, gives a flick of her talons and, clutching her bra and panties, storms out of the bedroom, leaving him/me alone with Oliver, and more questions as a result of this one glaring answer.

  IV: Shadow Puppets

  James worked a shitty job washing dishes at a family-style seafood restaurant to pay for his shitty car and his shittier apartment. So far as he knew, nobody had ever died at the Bib and Butter from eating off the claw-and-slaw menu, which was a blessing he rarely got to appreciate. The B and B didn’t need specters whose ectoplasmic bodies showed bugged-out, unblinking eyes thanks to necks that had bones or other foodstuffs lodged in them, or swollen visages due to allergic reactions, because the restaurant had Earl. Even alive, Earl was more terrifying than just about anything deceased that James had yet encountered.

  “Hey, Earl.”

  “Hey yourself. Get cracking on those lunch dishes, before I crack you with my backhand,” said the rotund kitchen manager, not making eye contact.

  James donned an apron and got to work spraying down plastic tumblers and stacking them in crates, then sliding them into the industrial dishwasher. Plates and bowls, cheap silverware, the whole she-bang.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Something wrong with your ears, kid? How about I give ’em a twist, yank ’em off, light ’em on fire, shove ’em up your ass, and fry a cheeseburger on your face?”

  The image of Oliver—earless, along with other-lesses—materialized in James’ mind’s eye, more clear and more ugly than Earl’s threat.

  “You ever hear of any local dude or dudes, go by the name of Shallahan?”

  The strainer full of clams clanked against the sink. The clams themselves made a hideous clacking sound around Earl’s meaty hands. Bile bubbled up James’ throat.

  “What did you say?”

  “Shallahan.”

  “Kid, you are even dumber than I already took you for. You stagger in this joint with that fucked-up face, and I can smell the booze leeching out of your pores…smell it over this crap.” He gave the clams another shake. The sound, when intentional, was twice as bad as the first accidental chorus. “That’s just plain stupidity. But you start messing around with that bunch of goons, you just might be one of the dumbest numbskulls on the planet.”

  “So you have?”

  “A’course I have, you puss-faced putz,” Earl snapped. “Everybody with more than two brain cells in this town knows about them Shallahans, the dirty sons-a-bitches. They got their sweaty fingers in every wallet and up every asshole in the county. What kind of moron—”

  James did the unthinkable and interrupted. “How so?”

  “What-?”

  “How do they have fingers in wallets and up assholes?”

  “Gambling, sports betting,” Earl said, his voice curiously calm. That unnerved James worse, the cold sanity of the exchange. “There ain’t no such thing as a friendly little bet, kid, no matter what your dumb jock boyfriends tell you. And every bet in this town leads back to one place: old George Shallahan and the rest of his rotten clan!”

  “An addiction is an addiction, whether it’s booze or hard drugs or pornography or chocolate cake or picking up a colored pencil to sketch a bucolic landscape,” James slurred over his beer. “It’s that one thing we just can’t live without.”

  The bartender, a Nordic-looking giant with a thick blonde beard, shot him a tired look. “Thanks for the enlightenment, Einstein.”

  “Lama,” James said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your insult would have carried more weight if you’d called me ‘Gandhi’ or ‘Dalai Lama.’ They were about enlightenment. Einstein was more your time travel, nuclear bombardment sort of visionary,” James chuckled, but the laughter fell on deaf ears.

  “It’s getting late. You want another?”

  The buzz was on. James knew that if he knocked down another, he’d pay for it in the morning. “Nope, but I would like a little 4-1-1.”

  “Come again?”

  “Info. This is a sports bar. Where can a guy, you know, place a friendly little bet on
Sunday’s football game?”

  And so it began.

  ***

  James tailed the little fuck from the sports bar to the massive Victorian-style house in the city’s affluent King’s Hill neighborhood, where the Shallahans gathered every Sunday afternoon for dinner and whatever game was on the tube, and from there to the Simms campus. Pete Shallahan entered the computer hall. James followed. Over the next twenty minutes while Peacock Pete checked emails, James researched the Shallahans, digging up quite a few dubious facts. For instance, how the family’s top nut had made his money, a sizeable chunk, in the restaurant and sports bar business. How one of those watering holes, Third Base, had been raided in a gambling sting. George Shallahan was held for questioning on suspicion of running an illegal gambling ring, but later released due to a lack of credible evidence.

  The officer in charge of the raid, Oliver Rivas, went missing soon after.

  **

  Heart galloping, James tracked the little prick from the corner of a newspaper he’d pulled out of the trash barrel. Briefly, he wondered why any student in this era of text messages and online editions would be walking around the campus with a newspaper, and then the little voice in his thoughts reminded him they wouldn’t. It was a teacher’s, one who hadn’t yet gotten hip to the whole recycling phenomenon.

  The little puke strutted past, only James noted—above, appropriately, the top of the sports page—his gait wasn’t so much a strut as a shuffle. A pop or two to the nuts will do that to a man. James hoped Pete Shallahan had the worst case of blue balls ever suffered through his twenty-two years, that his wounded manhood had made him a laughing stock among his posse of fellow peacocks and, worse, his Uncle George’s men.

  His pulse drumming in his ears, James waited and observed the best he could, convinced the prick would notice him at any second. However, the old baseball cap and newspaper trick worked, and James recorded two things: the first, that Pete Shallahan looked seriously pissed off, and the second that, far across the courtyard, his path intersected with a pretty girl with long, dark hair.