by Jerry eBooks
‘Live Wire’ is one of my earliest stories, written around 1989, and, like ‘Gerassimos Flamotas’, deals with physical transformation. Clearly, this was something that fascinated me twenty-plus years ago (I guess it still does) and ‘Live Wire’ can be seen as a companion piece as it shares a similar theme. With it being such an early work, I found myself tempted to make changes for this new edition. I had the same dilemma when I re-issued my first book, Blood Grit, as Blood & Grit 21 in 2011. Do I smooth out jagged sentences, change things around, remove Yorkshire slang words? But I realized that I should be true to the original stories. Okay, they can appear very raw and decidedly bloody in places, but these tales were my first steps on the road to becoming a writer. Readers said how much they enjoyed them, and how they crackled with energy. So here’s ‘Live Wire’—I’ve done my level best not to tinker with it too much, only correcting obvious errors. ‘Live Wire’ can be considered a real rarity, and I’m pleased that the good people of Cemetery Dance have given me the opportunity to make it available once more.
Simon Clark
Exhibit 1: Audio Disk
Case: Markham, John Stephen
I’ll do it.
I’ve just thought it through.
I’m just going to get up. And walk through that door.
At worst, I can only die.
They’re out there. They’re waiting. If I turn round I can see them pressed against the other side of the kitchen window.
Oh . . . she loved me once. Perhaps she’ll forgive me. She won’t hurt me, I know she . . . I know . . .
Right . . . I’m all right . . . I’ve got a mugful of vodka, I’m calm.
Now. I’ll tell you what happened.
Listen. My name is John Markham. Age: Thirty-four—no, thirty-five . . . see my nerves are on the fritz. And here I am. Alone. In a rail worker’s cottage slap in the middle of bloody nowhere, talking into the microphone of a damn computer. I’d have been able to upload this, what-you-call it? Monologue? I could have uploaded this monologue to a website but the telephone stopped working an hour ago. So, here I am in this cottage that’s miles from anywhere. I’m a signal man on the Leeds-London line. I pull the levers that make sure the express trains reach the right towns. What more do you need to know about me?
I’m six feet tall. I stopped believing in God when I was twenty. I can eat Marsbars until the come out of my ears. I once played electric guitar in a rock band.
Oh . . . And three weeks ago I murdered my wife.
Why?
Simple. Another woman. When men first commit adultery it makes them feel so bloody clever. Suddenly you cheat, you scheme, you’re the cleverest guy in the world.
Well, I conned myself, believing life with Suzie would be heaven on Earth. So I killed Louise.
It seemed so easy. I rigged the overhead power lines that feed the locos. In no time at all those railroad cables were pouring all their juice—twenty five thousand blinding volts—into the metal handle on the garden gate. You see, the railway runs by the garden. There are no other houses nearby, no sneaky neighbors to spy on me. So one evening, when Louise is pruning roses, I appear with two carrier bags crammed full of groceries and say quite casually, ‘Louise, these bags weigh a ton. Open the gate for me.’
Somehow I thought it would be clean. Just falling asleep.
I wasn’t ready for what happened.
Smiling at me, she reached out for the metal handle on the gate.
BANG!
Her entire body flickered like one of those old, silent films—that blue-white glare stung my eyes. She looked at me all the time. Looked, as her face blistered and bubbled and blackened. Her tongue came out stiff and purple, like a finger pointing at me, accusing me of every crime in creation, and all the time her teeth champing, biting down on the tongue until it split in two.
Well . . . the inquest’s verdict?
Suicide.
She’d climbed the pylon and touched the live cable. So they said.
Who am I, a failed musician, a piss-poor railway man to argue?
Yesterday, I started work for the first time again since my wife’s death. I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel bad. Just empty. Cold. I did my job, that’s all. Suzie? The woman I killed for? What had become of her? She found another love and flew south. Funny—I didn’t care in the slightest.
Well. A fine day. Hazy sunshine. Mild. I sat high in my signal box, king of my castle. The trains passed by, the contacts sparking against overhead wires. Sometimes drivers waved.
Then came a lull.
I looked out at the cables and the track that ran away toward the horizon.
Usually, the wires have a silver sheen.
Today, they turned pink.
I should have known.
Should have.
Didn’t.
‘A trick of light, John,’ I told myself. ‘Just a trick of the light.’
I made myself a coffee, using the electric kettle. An ancient thing furred up to the element.
Now the flex had become messed with some crap, too.
Stuck to the flex’s rubber coating, from end to end, were pink blobs. The size of rice grains, they were a moist pink, a wet pink, and for some reason, not at all pleasant to look at.
I don’t remember thinking, ‘What are they?’ My brain had been numb ever since I became a widower. Instead of wondering what they were I only checked if there were more of them.
There were.
They stuck to every bit of electrical equipment in the place. Light switches were sticky with tiny, pink blobs. They rashed along power cables; clustered around the mouth and earpiece of the telephone. Like those sea anemones glued to rocks on the beach.
And the more I looked, the more I felt I should be trying to work out what they were. I shivered. This wasn’t nice. My numb brain acknowledged that much.
And it acknowledged they were swelling. Now those blobs resembled tiny starfish: pink, moist with four legs, and—
Christ . . . you know the feeling that cracked through me?
That almost knowing. That half-understanding.
Like your swimming in the ocean. Out where it’s so deep the water turns black. And, treading water, you look down to see a pale shape torpedo beneath you.
You don’t know what it is . . . Scared? You are. You are shit your pants scared. Don’t think, you tell yourself, don’t think the word: SHARK.
Because if you do, you panic. You’re dead.
Outside. The live overhead wires that fed the motors of the electric trains were thickening up. I mean the entire cable was sheathed in thick, wet pink.
Shark.
SHARK.
This is it. I had to look. I had to know.
I searched out the lens old man Porter used to study the sports’ pages when he was on duty here in the signal box. Then I thumb-nailed a single pink blob off the telephone.
I looked hard. I looked until I was panting and sweating and my head was spinning. Oh, I swear to God, there in the palm of my hand.
It was her.
Louise.
Eyes closed. Still. A minute pair of breasts. Black pubic hair the size of a comma. She seemed asleep, like the hundreds of times I’d seen her before—flat on her back across our double bed.
My Louise. She’s coming back.
Then something gave way inside. I crashed on the chair unconscious—blissfully, sweetly, innocently unconscious.
You know, this world is bastard cruel. It wouldn’t let me die there in my sleep.
Instead, I woke to pinkness.
Pink blobbed the telephone. Pink signal controls. Everything electrical coated with this disgusting jelly—pink, wet. Trembling.
I’d slept two hours. Where were the trains? Alarms should be splitting my eardrums.
Only silence. That pink, pink silence. The electric clock had stopped at 12.14. I tried the pink jelly light switches. No light.
That’s it! That pink muck was sucking the juice right out of the ma
ins, feeding on it, growing into something I never wanted to see.
I knew I had to look outside. I had to see what had happened to the loco power lines that were alive with twenty-five thousand volts of pure power.
Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus . . .
While I’d slept, madmen had used the high voltage cables as washing lines.
Told myself that to stop the shock of what I saw there splitting my head apart like a chopped water melon.
They—the madmen, the madmen—had hung out pink jumpsuits. Mile after mile of them, stringing out in a neat line to the horizon. Legs swinging gently in the breeze the way laundry does on a line; the sleeves pinned to the wire. They were pink, a fleshy pink, the color you turn after a too-hot bath. And they were still moist, and wet, from the madman’s washing machine.
I went down to the track. There I finally accepted the truth.
The jumpsuits were bodies . . . thousands of bodies—picture them!—naked, pink female bodies, all identical, all hanging by their hands from the live wire like a Nazi massacre. All had their backs to me. I couldn’t see their faces.
Each bore a birthmark in the shape of a letter C on the left buttock.
Louise had one.
Each had dark hair.
Like Louise.
I didn’t scream or try and beat my skull against the ground. I just watched.
I was watching when they slowly turned their thousand heads and looked at me.
Oh, that expression. The hurt,
Louise.
Then, one by one, they dropped from the wire, just like soft, ripe fruit falling from a branch.
Somehow I made it home, locked the doors and tried to build an impregnable fortress around me out of vodka. Ha, stupid twat.
All murderers confess. So they say.
I’m confessing this into the laptop. The battery’s holding out, so it seems okay.
So, here I am. A rat in a trap. Without God, without so much as a fucking two-bit saint to save me. Shit . . .
Outside . . . Well, the fields are pink with Louise. She’s followed me home. I’ve nowhere to run.
Even as I talk, those pink blobs are rashing over the fridge, cooker, microwave—a dozen pink hands are squeezing out of the ceiling strip-light. They look like swollen cows’s udders. Yeah, Louise is coming into the house. Bit by bit.
Right . . .
I’ve come to the end. There’s nothing more to say.
I’m standing.
I’m opening the door.
I’m here, Louise.
I’m—
(Recording continues a further thirty-two minutes. Identifiable sounds: None.)
Exhibit 2: Torn Brown Envelope Bearing Penciled Message.
SHE HELD ME TO THE WIRE
NOW I AM THOUSANDS
SHE WILL TORTURE US FOREVER
I’M SO SORRY GOD
PLEASE GOD
LET US DIE
Jack pushed through the costumed thrill-seekers, clutching his prize tightly. It was Halloween and the French Quarter was packed tighter than a fisherman’s net drawn up from a feeding frenzy. Costumed revelers drank and shouted and danced. Wild abandon scented the air like musk, creating a nearly-solid wall of human flesh, fabric, feathers and jewelry.
Jack, by contrast, was dressed in a simple suit with a gambler’s hat, and he was anything but merry. His red-rimmed eyes darted side to side, and backward glances made him collide with gyrating dancers. There, a peacock; here, a man dressed as a female rock star; next, a giant rabbit, complete with whiskers that flashed on and off, green and purple.
He was lost. He’d gotten turned around by the crowds, even though he’d walked these New Orleans streets a hundred times, a thousand times. He tried to peer above the bouncing heads surrounding him, hoping to spot a landmark, anything that might help him orient himself, but everything looked the same—three-story structures with elegant wrought-iron or wooden balcony railings draped with garlands and lit from behind by glowing pumpkins.
Planting his feet, Jack stopped in the middle of the mob, forcing it to part and flow around him. He was buffeted on all sides, and he had to draw his burden up to his body and cradle it there tightly, for fear that it would be plucked or knocked from his grasp and lost forever. It was all he had now. He couldn’t afford to lose it, not here, where it would either become part of the crowd or be trampled beneath its unrelenting motion, ground to nothingness by the buoyant but careless hordes.
He reversed his position and felt panic freeze him:
Behind him stood a devil. It was at least seven feet tall, with red skin, white horns and black satin cape. But then Jack realized this devil was bouncing, and that the oversized head was a mask, perched atop its wearer’s shoulders. The devil danced past him, as uncaring as all the rest, and Jack’s tension eased slightly.
Not yet. He hasn’t found me yet.
There might still be a chance, then. A chance for escape. If he could just free himself from this madness, find his way to a long, empty street where he could run, run . . .
He staggered forward again, letting the bodies propel him along, but he saw no exit, no path out of this madness. His energy was waning, vision spinning. He needed time to stop, think, collect himself—
He staggered through an open doorway and found himself in a famous bar; the bar was slightly less crowded than the street, and Jack pushed his way through the front of the bar to the open courtyard, where there were actually a few empty chairs. He reached one and shrank against it, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.
If he was found here, he’d be trapped.
But, he reasoned, he was just as likely to be trapped out on the street, with the mad Halloween celebrants. Here, at least, he could sit undisturbed, for a few minutes, maybe longer. He could sit and think. Maybe if he thought back, remembered why he was here—on the run, with his prize, fleeing through the orgiastic insanity of a New Orleans Halloween—maybe then he’d find something he’d missed. Something he could use to help him escape.
Something to trick the Devil one last time.
* * * *
Hell had first sought Jack when he’d been sprawled in an alley near a notorious Baton Rouge bar. Jack had slumped in the filth, his last empty bottle of cheap whiskey rolled a few inches from his fingers, and he’d known he was dying. He was only 32, but his liver had endured several lifetimes’ worth of hard, cheap liquor, and was now poisoning him in return.
Aside from the empty bottle, Jack had only two possessions to his name: A small amount of money he hadn’t yet drunk up, and the Holy Bible that he’d once read to his parish from. It was a large volume, with stiff leather covers and a crucifix emblazoned in gold on the cover, and it had been difficult to carry, but somehow Jack had kept it on his long ride down.
He’d started life as the son of a thief and a whore, who’d kicked him out at 13. He’d fought a hard-scrabble existence on the back streets of Atlanta, where he’d learned how to pick pockets, fence stolen goods, pull off a convincing shell game, and—once he’d put on a few pounds and years—seduce lonely spinsters with money. At 21, he’d had the bad luck of dallying with a lady who turned out to be nearly as dishonest as he was, which fact he didn’t discover until her husband appeared in the bedroom doorway. Jack had collected some buckshot in his fleeing ass, and had fled Atlanta for Louisville, where he’d been caught a year later writing bad checks and had done three years in prison. At 25, he’d found his way to a small town near Baton Rouge, where he’d been mistaken for the new preacher they were expecting any day; he’d taken the identity mistake as a gift from God and had settled in as the town’s new religious authority. When the real preacher had arrived, Jack had intercepted him, dropped a sedative into his apple cider, and allowed the man of God to awaken in the local bordello, with three prostitutes draped across him. Jack had promised to remain mum on the incident, and the real preacher had left town quietly.
Jack took to preaching like a duck to orange sauce. Turne
d out he had a natural flair for it, and he enjoyed making flamboyant gestures and shouts that left folks quivering in fear and admiration. He didn’t have much religious schooling, but found a bible in his new church and tutored himself quickly.
The vices were harder to disguise.
He married—a fine young lady of 18 named Annabel—and they soon had two young sons, but Jack was starting to grow bored. He was 30 now, and had no desire to spend the rest of his life wearing the moral straitjacket of a good Christian. He started paying secret visits to the town’s prostitutes—all under the guise of redeeming their souls, of course—but his visits to the bars weren’t so clandestine. He beat Annabel and the boys, and his sermons began to grow increasingly disordered, as did his appearance. As his followers faded away, his façade crumbled, until finally one day, consumed by outrage and alcohol, he hit Annabel a little too hard. It took his befogged mind several moments to realize that she was dead, her blood splattered across his hands and face, and that he would surely pay with his own life when the crime was discovered.
That night he fled. He made no arrangements for his sons other than keeping them out of the bedroom, where their mother lay dead. He took everything of value that he could carry in one case, and left around midnight. Since the nearest city was Baton Rouge, he went there, sought out the section of town so crime-ridden and impoverished that the law avoided it, and settled in to lose himself
His plan worked . . . in more ways than one. He was never found, but he gave himself over completely to the pleasures of drink. His health began to diminish, and his money vanished (occasionally replaced by a small gambling win). When his skin started to turn yellow, he knew his liver was failing, and he was almost glad.
It was October 31st when he finally found himself alone in the alley, his body growing cold around him, his memories trailing off like smoke. He still felt the bulk of the old Bible under his jacket, and it puzzled him.
Out of everything I could have saved . . . why this thing?
He was almost sorry he wouldn’t live to see tomorrow—All Saints Day was a major holiday here in Louisiana. He wished he could have gone to New Orleans, where they made a festival of the day; he’d heard about how families gathered and visited graveyards where loved ones rested so they could clean and decorate the distinctive local tombs that stood above ground, keeping their residents from rotting in the damp soil. He imagined the fathers afterword, gathering to toast the memories of their ancestors and dancing into the night. It made him melancholy to think that no one would tend to the pauper’s grave where he’d be laid to rest soon enough.
