Keepers

by Gary A Braunbeck

  RING

  He tossed it aside to reveal the next:

  ANY

  Then the next:

  BELLS?

  “How did you know?” I shouted, my voice creating heavy ripples of gummy pain inside my skull. “How the fuck could you know? It’s been thirty goddamn years since—”

  He tossed aside the BELLS? placard to unveil a new one, then another, then another and another, until he’d said what he wanted to say:

  YOU KNOW DAMN

  WELL WHO

  TOLD US

  ABOUT IT

  I was shaking so violently I thought my internal organs were going to drop out through the legs of my pants. “No riddles—who told you?”

  Another card:

  GUESS.

  But I didn’t have to. I’d known the answer since WELL.

  I moved forward another step. The Mossberg felt like it had fused to my hand, flesh and steel becoming the organic tissue of a new limb.

  “Tell me,” I said to him. “I want you to say it. I want to hear your voice, if you’ve got one. If it’s going to be like this, I want for us to have spoken once as civilized men.” I aimed directly at his chest. “So you tell me what—”

  He pointed at the Mossberg, then waved his other hand to draw the Bowlers’ attention, as well; as he did this, he moved up to the second step and stood less than two feet away from the business end of the shotgun.

  The Bowlers clustered nearer the porch, some leaning their heads to the left, others to the right, all of them evidently fascinated by what they saw.

  Magritte-Man pointed to his right hand, then to mine, and that’s when I figured out he was drawing their attention to what I’d done with the duct tape.

  Again, the Bowlers began to applaud, except for a trio who moved to the side, conferred among themselves for a few moments, then held up more placards: 9.5, 10, 9.7.

  Magritte-Man gestured toward the judges’ scores and applauded soundlessly.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh, scream, or just sit down on my ass and cry, so I did the next best thing: I stepped forward and shoved the barrel of the Mossberg under Magritte-Man’s chin.

  “Speak to me, right now.”

  He shrugged and stepped back down onto the walk, lifting his hands into the air. He bent his fingers down against his palms and began to strike at nothing—no, not strike; paw. He was imitating an animal pawing at something.

  At the same time, two Bowlers took up places on either side of him and held up a small barred door taken from a cage. Magritte-Man pushed his arms through the bars and continued pawing while a third Pedestrian—the one who’d worn the wig before—held another placard over his head: SANCTIONED PERSONNEL ONLY. All of them began opening and closing their mouths as if trying to form words—

  —lips squirming in a mockery of communication, sounds that were a burlesque of language—

  —I shook the image of the old man on the highway out of my head and moved back into the front doorway, the Mossberg still at the ready.

  They were crowding around the bottom step, their hands pawing, their mouths working soundlessly, the thin bright red beams of their goggles creating laser-show patterns before my eyes. The mist became thicker, the faces of the countless animals within pressing outward like bas-relief masks. I couldn’t lift my left hand to shield my eyes because that would mean letting go of the shotgun and I wasn’t about to give them an opening to rush me—and what the fuck had I been thinking, coming out here like this?

  In perfect synchronization, all of them—Magritte-Man included—reached up to loosen their ties and unbutton the tops of their collars.

  Every last on of them had a curved scar that ran from one side of their neck to the other. They turned their “paws” toward themselves and began to claw at the scars, all the while still moving their mouths and—

  —when there’s this many, they cut out their vocal cords—

  —Magritte-Man flexed his fingers, and with an overly theatrical flourish reached up to remove the bowler from his head.

  Another placard: YOU GET USED TO THE SMELL.

  He was bald. Not a stunning revelation, I know, but for a moment that was the only thing I would allow to register. He was bald. He wore the bowler because he was bald underneath. I suspected that all of them were bald underneath. But the old man on the highway, he hadn’t been bald—hair extremely thin and sparse, sure, but not bald. I remembered that. I remembered that clearly. I remembered the way he’d grabbed my shirt pulled me toward him; I remembered his blood seeping into the cotton of my shirt as I lifted the bowler and showed him that it was undamaged; I remembered the way he looked into my eyes, lips squirming in a mockery of communication because his vocal cords had been cut out long ago—

  —no, no, that didn’t belong there, that wasn’t right, it couldn’t be, there hadn’t been any scar running across his neck and throat, right? Right—I was getting confused, the Bowlers’ little vaudeville had thrown me a curve, that was all. The old man on the highway did have some hair—not much, not shining, gleaming, glowing, flowing, waxen, flaxen, wear it down to there hair—but he’d had some. Magritte-Man was bald; shiny, shiny skin covered his head, except for the spots where matchbox-sized rectangles with electrical wires were implanted in his skull. The shiny, shiny skin of his bare scalp was crusty and red where it joined the metal.

  Another Bowler began flipping through another series of placards:

  CARE ENOUGH ABOUT

  SOMEONE AND YOU’LL

  FIND A WAY TO

  HELP THEM

  NO

  MATTER

  WHAT.

  He waited a moment, then flipped through three more.

  NO

  MATTER

  WHAT!

  He wasn’t repeating anything with this—he was issuing a threat.

  He tossed away the third placard to reveal one more:

  THERE OUGHT TO BE A PLACE

  I felt my stomach tighten.

  Magritte-Man turned his head to offer his profile, then used his index finger to bend forward his ear and give me a good look at the blue plastic tag attached to it. I didn’t have to be close enough to read what was printed on it to know what it said because at that moment all the tumblers fell into place and the door of the safe swung open and out came everything from all those years ago I’d been forcing myself to forget every second of every day of every week, month, and year of my stale existence … until now.

  Until this

  (You’re getting awfully close to leaving me with no choice, pal …)

  moment.

  Until this moment

  (You did the wrong routine …)

  of this day.

  Until this moment of

  (Dammit, I’ve helped people, you know? I’ve cared for them when no one else wanted to …)

  this day where I’d watched an old man die on the highway for want of hat and crawled in blood-soaked clothes under the porch to comfort a dying dog as my nephew who wasn’t really my nephew but an angel of Long-Lost because I had no sister Jesus God I had no sister, she was just a trick of Long-Lost’s, something to ensure that I would be the guardian of his little special agent, his angel of the pencil and paper, but that hadn’t stopped Carson from changing into what he should have been all along while Magritte-Man and his troop of players surrounded me and a mist crowded with bas-relief ghost-animals formed an impenetrable dome over my house and shrunk the boundaries of what I laughingly thought of as my world until I

  (… might say they’re not from around here …)

  had to come out and watch my own private production of Godspell On Crack just so these bastards could rattle my cage and jar everything loose and I didn’t want to remember these things about Beth and her aunt Mabel and their Its and what happened to all of them and to me during that terrible sick-making three-hour period the year I turned twenty-one and I only had a few moments to try and shove it all back inside and slam the door before it took over and swal
lowed me whole but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do because I was hurt and frightened and my house was under siege and so much of it was already out and right there in my face and suddenly I thought

  (There ought to be a place)

  of something I’d read about Nietzsche who’d said there are times when things get so horrible that you have only two choices laugh or go crazy so I opted for the former and barked out a single laugh that sounded berserk even to me and then I did the only other thing I could think of to keep the memories from engulfing me again, like the jaws of some mythic beast—

  —I opened fire.

  FIVE

  The first shot hit one of the Bowlers right in the center of his chest, opening a fist-sized hole that blew him back into the mist and almost knocked me on my ass, but I managed to stay upright, plowing off another shot into the next Bowler, and it was with this second shot I realized that I couldn’t hear anything. It wasn’t that the first shot had deafened me or that the makeshift earplugs were working wonders, it was that all sound had been sucked from the world; all I could hear was my own breathing echoing from within, and everything without was a silent movie.

  The first Bowler stumbled out of the mist, frantically patting at the smoking hole made by the shell as it tore through his clothing and into his flesh. He wasn’t bleeding at all. Neither was the second one. Oh, they were moving kind of slow like Uncle Joe at the Junction, were obviously dazed and in pain, but they weren’t even close to dead. It was absurd that they should still be alive and moving, and to emphasize this point I shot each of them a second time. It slowed them down even more, but that was about it.

  I backed into the house and kicked the door closed, locking it. The loud echo of the deadbolt slamming into place was reassuring. In here, there was still sound, I could hear them coming. It was only outside that they could steal the noise. So I’d take them on in here.

  I looked out the window. They were scattering around the house, readying to come at me from all sides simultaneously. I might not be able to kill them, but I could hurt them, of that much at least I was certain. They weren’t going to get her, absolutely not.

  I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a large saucepan that I threw onto the stove and filled with a quart of cooking oil before igniting the burner and turning the flame up to high. Then it was back into the junk portion of the bathroom cabinet for a screwdriver and the large can of lighter fluid and a second lighter. In the linen closet I yanked down one of the wooden shelves and began scattering the towels and dish rags and other shelves all over the floor, dousing each of them in lighter fluid as I made a trail through the downstairs.

  Some of the Bowlers were scrabbling up the trellis on the side of the house, heading for the roof, while another threw his weight against the back door over and over again. I grabbed the antique oil lamp from the end table and ran to the top of the stairs, emptying the oil on the carpeting all the way, then throwing the whole thing against the far wall where it exploded against my bedroom door with a loud, satisfying crash of glass and tin. One match, that’s all it would take. One match and the whole house would be swallowed by fire within a few minutes.

  “Go away!” I screamed. “Leave us alone, goddammit!”

  Back down the stairs and into the kitchen where the oil was bubbling up over the side of the pan and the Bowler on the back porch was about to break the door off its hinges. I grabbed the handle of the pan in the same instant that the back door splintered inward with the crack of wood and the shattering of glass. The Bowler was halfway through when I threw the scalding contents of the pan at his head. It sizzled as it splattered over his exposed skin, creating dozens of bubbles of boiling flesh. He grabbed at his face and body with wild hands, opening his mouth to scream but of course he didn’t scream because he couldn’t scream—when there are that many of them they cut out their vocal cords—and as he thrashed and flailed about I leveled the shotgun and emptied a round into his chest but still he didn’t go down and I thought that was a bit rude, so I reached into my pocket for a lighter, realized I’d soon need it elsewhere, so instead pulled a kitchen match from the shelf over the stove, lit it, and tossed it at him.

  He burst into flames, his arms pinwheeling as he stumbled back and fell down the stairs into the yard. As soon as he hit the ground he began to roll but the fire was out of control now, snapping and spitting and sizzling (though you couldn’t hear it out there, out there the mist swallowed the sound, but I’d heard the deep hungry belch of the flames when he’d gone up inside and it made me smile), then he was on his feet once more, spinning around, arms raised, scattering smoky bits of charred material and meat in all directions as others gathered around him, pointing, nodding but not helping, and it was only then I realized that the burning figure was swaying side to side in perfect rhythm along with the other Bowlers, doing the Wave, mocking me—

  —distracting me.

  An upstairs window shattered. Then another. A pair of feet ran heavily across the roof. Something came through a window in the living room. The dog howled under the porch.

  I fired another shot directly into the dancing flame, then turned just as another one of them leapt at me from behind, slamming us against the stove where the ignited burner still roared. I smashed against the side of his head with the barrel of the shotgun but I might as well have been bitch-slapping a medicine ball for all the effect it had. He grabbed hold of my head and began twisting my face toward the open flame. The dog’s howl rose in pitch and volume, becoming a shriek of fury; I knew it wouldn’t be long before they figured out she was in the crawl-space and went after her and I was not was not, repeat, was not going to let that happen, I’d known all my life that this day would arrive, that someday they’d come for me, I’d planned out my actions long ago, so if she and I were going down I was going to make damn sure I took as many of them with us as possible, but now the flames licked at my nose, I breathed them, felt the hairs inside my nostrils curl and singe and fill me with smoke and the smell of my own burned flesh, so I pushed up against his body with all I had and brought my knee up into his crotch and that seemed to surprise him because for just a second his grip on me loosened, but just a second was all I needed to snake my free hand down to my side, yank the screwdriver from my belt, and bury it all the way to the handle through one of his goggle lenses. He snapped up, his back bowing, hands grabbing at the thing jammed where his eye used to be as I lifted the shotgun and shoved the barrel right against his face and fired. Bone and tissue blossomed outward, hitting the walls, sliding moistly toward the floor, making wet trails on the way down.

  His body crumpled onto the table, shuddered, kicked, then lay still.

  So they could be killed.

  Good to know.

  I heard footsteps upstairs pounding toward the landing. I jumped over the Bowler’s body and ran through the house, lighter at the ready. I looked up the stairway and saw the first shadow bleed across the wall as they neared the top. I struck up the flame and tossed the lighter upward. As soon as it hit the carpet a bright blue-orange line of flame vomited out in both directions; it fizzled out before getting down to the living room—I hadn’t spread the fluid out as well as I’d thought—but it chewed its way up the stairs and around the corner so fast I knew they didn’t stand a chance. I rammed the door closed, locked it, and spun around just in time to see a smoking, charred tower of meat come at me with outstretched arms. I lifted the shotgun but he was on top of me before I could get off a shot. He weighed as much an elephant, and when we hit the floor every breath I’d ever taken since I’d been born blew out of my lungs and I went numb. He grabbed at my throat with deep-fried hands and began to squeeze, pushing up and down to increase the pressure. I felt the world slipping away from me, felt my body handing in its formal resignation, my legs kicking out in uncontrollable spasms as I wet myself, but then he pulled up again and one of my legs jerked back, its knee bending, and I saw the handle of the dagger jutting out from the sheath strapped to the a
nkle. Take me, it cried out. I’m right here, so take me, fer chrissakes. I knew that I should but my arm wasn’t cooperating—at least, that’s what I thought, but then I heard the echo of Whitey’s voice in my head saying keepers gotta keep the kept kept, know what I’m saying and I remembered the way he’d looked the last time I saw him and some beast composed of equal parts anger and sadness snarled to life in my chest; the next thing I knew there was my arm shooting out and my hand grabbing the handle and then the dagger was free; I looked up into the scorched ruins of the Bowler’s still-smoking face and I did what I was taught to do with a roast when you had a knife—I began to carve. First a cheek, then the lump that had once been his nose, the charred meat searing my own skin as it fell off in blackened, dripping chunks, but I kept at it, burying the dagger to its hilt and then swiping sideways before pulling it out and hacking away until his grip loosened and he fell to the side, shuddering. I shoved the gristle-covered dagger into my belt, staggered to my feet, and disintegrated the rest of his head with a single shot.

  Across the room, another window exploded in a shower of glass and wood. One of them was throwing rocks through all the downstairs windows in order to let in the mist. The mist swallowed sound. The mist obscured perspective. The mist had terrible faces in it, both animal and human, and they wanted to talk to me, make me listen, make me understand that it had to be this way and I really had no choice in the matter, it was an ancient thing when you got right down to it, a way for nature to make perpetual use of its organic systems, hadn’t I figured that out yet?

  I stepped over the broiled mass on the floor and made my way into the kitchen, grabbing the step stool and putting it to good use. Then I started back toward the guest bedroom. Underneath the house, the dog’s shrieks of fury had become something so loud and primal and frenzied they sounded like the screams of a waking dragon. I knew there was a chance she might come after me once I was down there but I had to risk it. She’d come here for a reason; even if she wasn’t completely aware of it, I was.