They leap and glide forward almost as if on wings, swinging the razors back and forth, the arcs of red light flashing across the sand. I duck and bring my knee up into one groin, turn and elbow the other in the face. They grunt with almost childlike wonder. They know pain but not this kind of pain. This is a mortal, human pain, something that's usually beneath them, except when they influence and come to be influenced by mutts like Ricky Kelso.
They both move across the graveyard sawgrass with a whuff of air that sounds like a cancer patient's final breath. My violent tendencies take over. With their own razors I do things that are imaginative and completely unnecessary. I'm probably laughing while I do it. Perhaps, on some level, so are they. We're all learning so much about the ridiculous nature of the universe.
I shout for Ricky again. In the heat of midnight I burn brightly. Down in her pit Gwen shouts again but her voice is nothing more than one long whining buzz.
By the time it's done, and I help her from the grave and unknot the ropes, and use the dirty bandages to tie off the worst of her new wounds, her flesh thick with new scars, Ricky's boys can do little more than shudder and jerk, enraptured by their own agony. Their shadowed faces seem to smile. They roll in the dark and mewl thank yous in a tongue that is heavy with venom. I've left them their eyes, but I've taken everything else.
Gwen is awed, as she should be. It all excites her. Her wounds don't weaken her sex drive. Ricky has run off. I shout and run up and down the beach, but Ricky is gone. Gwen drags me down on the dune and I decide what the hell. She wants me to cut off her tits. She wants me to chew out her throat. She wants me to help her transcend. I settle on a nibble. LaVey the charlatan said sex and blood were the two mightiest forces. Sometimes he got the simple things right.
11.
Life has tightened to a manageable level. I have a new function. I exist for one thing at a time now. I need to find Ricky.
It takes time. He's hidden himself well. In the meanwhile I do what he does. I live on the streets of Northport. It's a small, quaint town and they want to keep it that way. The cops patrol in high volume. I don't sleep much. I keep watch, but not closely enough.
I keep moving. The spiral shrinks. I think about him and I dream about him and I feel him in cemeteries playing with the dead. Three days pass and he still eludes me. Another kid has gone missing. I visit Linda in the ICU. She's mostly incoherent. Her fever spikes at 108 and she falls into a coma. Forty-eight hours later they're still not sure if she's brain damaged or if she'll ever wake up.
Ricky's crows circle above and follow the Mustang day and night. I slip into Aztakea Woods one afternoon and tell Gary Lowers my half-forgotten secrets. He might pass them on, but I risk it. He's decomposing but his presence hasn't diminished. He takes strength from his audience. There are hundreds of different tracks around his body. The entire graduating class must have stopped by.
Once the words begin to tumble from me there's no way to stop them.
Lowers's ruined face seems to stir subtly as if he's contemplating all I'm saying. He appears to be sympathetic and understanding. He knows where I'm coming from, knows where I'm going. The crows descend and pluck at the frayed muscle of his throat, as if to stop him from speaking. But his voice is clear and full of warmth.
As I sit there, a couple of junior high kids come trudging up the trail. A boy and a chick four or five years younger than me, mouths curled in barely contained exhilaration, eyes as old as the bottom of the desert.
They're surprised to see me, wondering if they're in trouble. They turn to bolt. I say nothing to them. There's nothing to say.
They decide to stay. They light a joint and pass it back and forth before offering it to me. They hold the roach by an alligator clip. I take a hit and can taste the oils from Ricky's fingers on the rolling papers. He's dealt them the weed.
The boy can't resist conversing.
"You think it's true?" he asks me. "You think he really said that he loved his mother?"
"Yes, I believe so."
He nods in his stoner way. The girl nods with him. The boy huffs smoke over the corpse. "They lit him on fire."
"Yes."
"They took his eyes. How could he stand that?"
"I think he was tough as the great iron door at the entrance to Hell."
"Hells yeah."
He carries a copy of the Satanic Bible the same way that Ricky does. It's halfway out his back pocket. Baphomet finds me again. He grins and winks at me. I wink back.
I wait for the kids to pull the book like pulling a gun, like drawing an athame, a witch's blade. When they finally do, they read a false and hollow incantation. They draw a pentagram around Lowers's body with a stick. There are outlines of other pentagrams in the dirt too, partially erased by the rain and nearly obliterated by leaves crushed by couples making awful love.
"What about the guy who did it?" the boy asks.
"What about him?"
"You think...you know...that he was possessed? That demons told him to do it? That crows talked to him and the trees bowed down?"
"No."
The girl whispers in the boy's ear. Gary Lowers's knows what they're saying. So do I. So do the crows. So do the bugs in Gary's dead, toothless mouth.
This gets boring. This gets tiring. I've enjoyed my talk with Gary, but now it's over. I stand just as the boy rushes me, tugging his mother's stolen butcher knife from the small of his back. He swings the point toward my heart. I snap my forearm across the inside of his wrist and he drops the knife as his hand goes numb. I give him a short chop in the throat and he collapses to his knees, gagging.
I pick up the knife and remember my mother cooking dinner, cutting fat from my father's steak, showing me at length how to slice meat. I picture the boy's flayed flesh wrapped neatly and laid out on a reliquary. The girl runs up the trail, screaming. "Don't rape me! Please don't rape me!"
Compared to Linda and Gwen she's not even pretty enough to fuck, much less rape. It's insulting that she thinks I would.
I grab her by her dirty blonde hair and yank her head back, exposing her throat. I place the dull edge of the blade to her carotid and hug her to me like every person in my life that I hate but want to love. Like everyone I love who's dead. Because of me or for any other reason. There's not that many but they cling and grow heavier and heavier the farther on you go.
I kiss her under the ear and her boyfriend has enough breath to cry out, "No!"
"Do you love her?" I ask.
"Yes!"
"Would you die for her?"
There's no hesitation. "Yes!"
It's easy to say when you're stoned. I check his eyes. Beneath the setting sun they're pinpoints lit by molten gold.
"You love him?" I ask her. "And think about it carefully before you answer. Because one of you has to die."
She bursts into tears. "We were only messing around. We didn't mean anything!"
"He tried to stab me in the heart."
"No no, it was just a...a game. We were playing. It...it..."
"You wanted to screw while my hot blood pumped across your tits, didn't you?"
"No!"
"Don't lie to me. I'm the king of lies, I'm the master of lies. I'm Black Shuck."
"I don't know what you're talking about!"
"And you, you're the one who gets to choose. So, shall it be him or you?"
"Him!" she shouts. "Kill him! Cut his dick off, cut his throat, I don't care. Him! Do it to him."
"Sure, but then you have to fuck me while his blood jets over us."
"I want to!"
It's all so dramatic. That's really all that they want. To be on a human stage full of pith and tragedy, so long as it's not their own. Ricky understands the truth. So did Gary, even before they took his eyes from him.
I kick her in the ass and she goes flying into the brush. The boy attacks and I slash him across the forehead so blood runs down his face in a death mask. "You bastard!" he moans. He holds his arms out in front of hi
m, blindly staggering, searching for the girl. She yelps and he trips over her, and they both sprawl into the weeds. They find each other on their knees and kiss and groan and weep. It'll keep them happy for a while.
I stare at myself in the side of the shining blade. The birds chitter and squawk, laughing. So do the angels of death hovering high in the trees. It's all right. I have to admit that it's a ridiculous story bound to become myth. Somehow I've become a part of it, though no one will ever know in the retelling.
I spin and hurl the knife upward and pierce the heart of a crow. Or perhaps it's a black angel simply posing as a crow. The blade sails down with the impaled bird and lands a few inches from Gary Lowers's head. The point of the knife thunks within the defined lines of the latest pentagram. Let the next group of curious children think on it.
12.
I wake up behind the steering wheel, in the lot of Cow Harbor Park. Ricky is laying out on the hood of the Coupe, covered in blood, staring in at me through the windshield.
I know it's Linda's blood. I understand that he's murdered her in her coma. Maybe it was an act of love or one of faith.
His lunatic eyes whirl with the knowledge of himself, the PCP and LSD ravaging his system. It opens doors for him that should stay closed. He weighs no more than a hundred pounds. The bones of his face are trying to squeeze past his skin. His skeletal rictus grin explains nothing and everything at the same time.
He scratches at the windshield as if he wants in. I stare at him. My expression, I'm guessing, is inviting.
There's no sun but shadows of bars across his face. He laughs and thrashes, writhing on the hood of the Mustang, then breaks into a low mewling. Eventually he's weeping. His tears fleck the glass like a summer rain. The other Knights of the Black Circle sit in his car, unmoving, weak, ineffectual, already fading away.
"I called in an anonymous tip," Ricky sobs. "I told them where Gary's body was. I told them who murdered him."
Ricky raises his chin and the insanity drains from him, drop by drop, until he's the most lucid I've ever seen him. The shadows run over him like black paint. They reshape themselves. The bars become something else. I watch them and hunch over the wheel more closely. Soon I see there's a noose around his neck.
He says, "I'm going to hang, aren't I? You know it, don't you, Black Shuck? You see it."
I don't bother to respond. He stares out at the trees as the wind moves through them. They wave, billow, beckon, and bow. The tips of Ricky's fingers are discolored from dirt, weed, pills, and infection. He draws arcane symbols on my windshield before me and they burn for an instant before they disappear like he will soon disappear. He spells his name for me. He spells mine as well. He kisses the windshield as if he's making love to me with his lips. He bites down on his tongue until he chews off the end of it. Then he spits blood across the glass. I nod to him through the red streams.
He chuckles, runs to his car, and drives off, alone. His knights have abandoned him, as he must've known they would. They've returned from where they came. The sky is full of black wings.
That evening Ricky Kelso is arrested for the murder of Gary Lowers.
Two days later he hangs himself in jail.
PART II
CLOWN IN THE MOONLIGHT
1.
They think it's cute, talking about all the secret ways they can cut someone's throat.
Jenx keeps a razor blade in his mouth wedged between his lower lip and cheek. He wears a beard because he's fucked up a couple of times and slashed open the side of his face.
Kip has a butterfly knife hidden in a hidden pocket in his black trench coat. You can frisk him and you won't find it. But then, snap, he can whirl it out and stick it under your chin. He presses it hard but not too hard. Just hard enough to get a single bead of blood rolling.
Mercy wears a wreath of razor wire tying back her savage curls. She can reach up, draw the wire out, and unknot it a special way so it won't catch in her hair. It's a very slick move. She's practiced it for weeks, for months, for millennia. I watch as she gets a two-handed grip and whips the garrote around a mannequin's neck to show how she can tighten her hold and take off somebody's head in thirty seconds. She puts real muscle into it, the wire cutting deep into the plastic as she saws back and forth. I suspect the White Queen won't be happy that someone's ruined her dummy. Jenks and Kip urge Mercy on as chips fly through the air. When she's done she tosses the garroted dummy's head into my lap and they all giggle and yawp.
They call themselves the New Knights of the Black Circle.
A half hour goes by. In the living room the White Queen, in her white muumuu, with daffodils in her hair, now holds court with her coven, all thirteen of them sitting on divans and loveseats. In the den her husband, Grimm, shows videos of Japornimation to a group of nerdy fat asses. Grimm talks about side arms, rifles, and machine guns whenever the TV screen isn't filled with little Asian girls in school uniforms turning into cyborgs or getting raped by tentacles from another dimension. He pops one tape out of the VCR and slaps in another.
He's heavily tattooed. A ring of M-16 shells creep around his left calf. The kraken destroying an 18th century three-mast shipping vessel covers over most of his right arm from elbow to wrist. He goes shirtless, showing off the autopsy scars and stitches tattooed on his chest.
I glance around wondering what I'm doing here.
It has something to do with Ricky. It has something to do with Mercy. I was standing at the fridge door at the back of the Shake-n-Shop on Old Country Road, checking prices on milk, when she appeared at my elbow, slick and dark with a wicked smile. She reminded me of Linda. She reminded me of Gwen. She didn't look like either of them, but that smile came from the same place.
Her hair is dyed so black that it had a faint blue tinge to it. A hint of a tattoo peeks from beneath the collar of her black leather trench coat. I can't make out what it is. I'm not supposed to. My gaze is hung up on it like a squirrel stuck in catclaw briar.
I see a trace of a lace top too, the shadowed bulge of her pert right breast. She wears short-short blue jeans, thigh-high boots, and the store lights flash on shining metal that might be chains or studs. She has pouty, bee-stung lips that she purses for my benefit, knowing they will kill me. My breathing hitches and my chest grows tight. I want her. I envy her. I hate her at first sight, the way I hated Ricky.
We're miles from Aztakea Woods but I can still feel that same heavy sense of fate in the air. It makes me grin. I twist the cap off the gallon of milk and take a long pull. I get a nasty look from the guy working the register, like he thinks I might make a run without paying.
I haven't thought about Gary Lowers for a long time. I hold the plastic bottle up in a kind of salute to him.
Mercy hits me with a black-lipped smile, amusement playing in her eyes. She strikes a pose, showing off her slim, well-muscled legs. She checks the kill spots on my body. My eyes, temple, throat, chest, groin.
She puts a hand to the pulse in my neck and says, "Your heart's racing."
"Yes it is," I admit.
"Are you nervous?"
"Always."
She reaches out and grips me by the chin and smooshes my lips together. She bends forward and kisses me hard, without heat, without hate, without desire, tasting me the way you'd check a piece of chicken to see if it was fully cooked yet. She pulls away and tightens her grip. It hurts. She tests me. She wants to know the limits of my pain. She wants to control me into taking a swing at her, or backing off. I do nothing but wait for her to kiss me again.
"I'm with two of my friends," she tells me. "We're wiccan. We're members of the New Knights of the Black Circle."
She waits for me to respond. I don't. Her eyes narrow. She leans forward and tries to read me. I hold my secrets tightly and allow her to see all the rest of me. She sees that my mother is dead, that my father is gone, that I work a bum job. She's met a hundred men like me, a thousand. She hunts men like me. She leaves them in the fields, she leaves them in
the alleys.
I'm still waiting for another kiss. She eases to me and plants one.
This time I feel her wanting. She shoves hard, her tongue licks my teeth. She laughs into my mouth. I like the sweet flavor of it.
She breaks off with a final twisted giggle and asks, "Want to come to a party?"
Ricky's been in the ground for almost two years. On the anniversary of his death someone tried to dig up his body but they were scared off by patrolling cops. Somebody else tried to set fire to Aztakea Woods, but it poured that night. They settled for carving a commandment in the gazebo bench.
SAY YOU LOVE RICKY.
I say, "I do."
2.
The house squats along a poisoned canal, set back on some dying wetland that fades into the pines of the surrounding local community college to the north. To the south is Pioneer State Mental Hospital, one of the few nuthatches on the island I haven't been locked up in yet. Its fencing has been clipped and bent aside, its manicured lawns shredded. It's become one of those areas where teenagers tear things up, rutting in the ravines, drinking six-packs on the grounds and hurling the empties at the highest windows they can reach, screaming at the sickos inside.
Grimm and I are in the same age bracket, about five years older than everyone else at the gathering. I have a small thatch of white hair in front now that makes me a little extra sensitive around so many kids in their teens. The last party I went to was Gwen's. I still bear the scars. The teeth marks still itch.
I stand in my leather jacket, white T-shirt, and black jeans, watching, waiting, checking the corners for Ricky.
"You okay, man?" Grimm asks.
"Yeah, sure."
"Why don't you get yourself a drink?"
"No, thanks."
"We got some weed too, if you want. Good stuff. A little coke is going around too, if that's your thing."
Clown in the Moonlight Page 5
