Which, at present, was not very much. Plughead futzed around with his camera and mics for a bit. I shivered as he inspected a .44 Opus Magnum and tucked it into the drawer of the night stand. He then settled onto the disgusting bed to watch reruns of “The Flunky” on his grainy television.
I kept reminding myself that it was really a very easy job. The prostitute would come to the room, they’d talk, and he would kill her. He’d probably casually go for the gun as if he needed a prop. As we were dealing with connoisseurs of the unholy, he’d let her contemplate the piece for a bit, allow the moment to stretch. She would beg and scream, and then she’d be blotted from life’s tapestry by the vengeful hand cannon toted by this plug-headed bastard. After that happened, there was a button that I was supposed to push, which would flood the room with knockout gas. Then I just had to get the tape and get the hell out. The Dry Men had something on Plug. If they twisted his arm and offered him protection, they could get him to dime on the Elephantine Disposal board. No one would trust scum like this murder pornographer, but even untraceable payments are traceable to the likes of the Dry Men. The film itself would be the last thing to complete the puzzle of the blackest of blackmails.
And so I waited, drumming my fingers as I watched the stupid enemy watch a stupid reality show, like some voyeur looking through three layers of reality. I later learned that I was only waiting for about half an hour, between 2:45 and 3:15 in the morning, but I came to understand the meaning of the word ‘interminable.’ It seemed like each second was tortured before it passed. I could not understand why I had such a bad feeling about all this, as grisly as it was. Then the door opened and things got even worse.
4
People say that time stops at certain moments, but it doesn’t really. The shock and the horror hit you all at once, and you’re like some confused and derided prophet who finds himself vindicated in all his crazy predictions. The meteors are illuminating the heavens and everything is burning and blowing up, but the words ‘I told you so,’ are dying on your lips. Because sometimes vindication is not sweet; it’s empty and terrifying. Your vows and plans and sleepless nights open up before you like a treasure chest, but there’s a huge Provisian python curled among the treasure, and he’s hissing “Go ahead, hossssssss: reach in and take what you dessssssssire…” And you freeze, because you know that time hasn’t stopped, but it’s like a filch parasite has rooted itself right into your temporal lobe, or whatever part gives you a sense of time, and seeded its tumors there.
Even watching on the grainy black and white television screen, I knew immediately that it was her. Plug’s reaction was almost as surprised as mine: Lauren Deadwood has that effect on people. You could tell that he thought at first that someone was fucking with him, that someone had dropped a display mannequin outside his room at this abominable hour, in this Gods-forsaken place. Then she bustled into the room, dropping her handbag.
“Cash first,” she said, and even the voice matched. It was like the whisper of wind through leaves in the autumn—whispery and sexy but bleak and creepy. Plug pulled a wad of money from his jeans, which Lauren counted and deposited in her handbag. “Porn is a miracle for whores,” she said “Those vice boys can’t touch it. Easy money, good exposure, and no risk.”
“Porn’s a miracle for everyone.” Plug said. “It makes the world turn. Has since the days of old Previsia.”
“Cave men chiseled ass and tits into stone, yeah?”
Plug shrugged. “Never lose their shape.” They might as well have been discussing contracting or auto-repair. It shocked me, though it really shouldn’t have. Everyone wants to feel normal, to feel like their choice of lifestyle and work is the only rational one; that everyone who chooses a different path walks in idiocy and illusion. Pornographers are no different. I got this much from what they were saying, though the words and sentences were gone as soon as they hit my mind.
This woman had knowingly taken my money and given me a hideously disfiguring sexually transmitted enchantment in return. I learned to live with it, because no one can stand a pussy who moans about losing his beautiful, beautiful face. Nevertheless, my bark-covered face was the first thing I saw when I looked in the mirror in the morning, and any woman I touched with desire would be deformed by the curse that she had given me. I had spent the better part of a decade searching flea markets and esoteric conventions for counter-spells and enchantment breakers. But mostly, I had thought of revenge.
I switched off the volume on my monitor. I had to think, and they were still yapping. I hadn’t planned vengeance so much as vengeance had taken up residence in my mind, reconfigured everything. The architecture of my whole psyche was arranged to channel the Feng Shui of the Big Get Even. It had taken a backseat for a while as my career died and I was initiated into the Terrible Truth, into a chance to climb the crumbling ziggurat of power. But vengeance had shaped everything inside of me, just as bark had covered everything on my outside. Every child knows how much looks matter, and Lauren had cast my lot among the freaks and misfits for the duration of my life.
And here I was—it was my job to make sure that she got hers, to make sure that she ended up trapped forever in a violent and disgusting little film that officially didn’t exist. Her name would be forgotten and her spirit would be trapped there, in the snuff, as a novelty for sick and cruel men, and even the sick and cruel men would never see her again. Her death would be as pointless as her life was harmful, and it would be by my hand.
So why was I shaking? Why was I gripped by such a feverish chill? It was me or her. It was my job to make sure that she died. It…
She was taking her clothes off. She looked exactly as she did that night, the surgery-beveled sandalwood planes of her body hiding the fact that she was cursed like me. The amiable shoptalk and rapport-establishment had ended. Plug was tying her hands, binding her to an anchor point he had established using the broken molding near the bathroom door. Bondage. Was she this naïve? After everything that she must have done in her life to survive in her profession with her condition, did she think that she could just be tied up naked and filmed and paid, and that would be it?
Plug was checking the camera, checking the ropes. He started the film rolling. They were talking—perhaps he was going to establish some threadbare plot, ask her some personifying questions to bring forth her humanity before he snuffed it out forever with his hideous and gigantic weapon. They were done talking. He was going for the drawer now. The gun was in his hand.
On the monitor, Lauren Deadwood was screaming and writhing to get free of her ropes. Plug flipped open the gun’s cyllinder, just to verify that each chamber had a bullet. He casually levelled it at her head. And then things got even worse.
5
Right then, I felt my entire body being possessed by Reflexus, the God of fate. I am not speaking metaphorically; I could feel him bury his talons in my nervous system the way that I could sometimes see and converse with Dread. His beak was yanking on my strings like a marionette. And though I was a puppet, I understood then that there was no decision to agonize over—that everything that had ever happened up until this point in all of the universe made only this moment possible. Everything was an uncontrollable spasm, an involuntary twitch in eternity, and everyone could no more control his own actions than a typewriter could depress its own keys. Fate made me press the button that turned on the gas, about twenty seconds too early.
The images on the monitor were blurred by the sleeping gas, but I could see Lauren’s head sag and the gun fall from Plughead’s hand. There wasn’t much time. I grabbed the gas mask from my duffle and threw it on as I tore-ass as fast as I could to the Snuffbox. Some night-owl prowling the halls for ice or pixie heads or some damn thing yelled at me to stop. There was no time—I stiff armed him, leaving a crater in the cheap plaster as a permanent monument to my annoyance.
Plug hadn’t even locked the door. Clouds of glue-colored smoke poured out as I opened it, but it was clear that the gas was run
ning out. I didn’t have anything to cut the ropes with, so I grabbed Lauren around the waist and yanked her towards me, ripping the tattered molding from the door frame and nearly onto her head. The panic was starting to work its way through my body. It was time for some serious damage control. I knocked the camera from its tripod. The lens shattered, but then my mind scrambled back to Lauren, and I struggled awkwardly to dress her.
I pulled on her underwear and shorts for her, and tried to put both her arms through one sleeve of her blouse because they were still bound. This was not going to work. My mind swung on its vines of paranoia back over to the camera—I picked up Plug’s Opus Magnum and emptied it, concentrating fire at the part that had the film in it. Then I kicked Plug in nuts for no reason at all—mostly I was frustrated and confused and angry at myself, and I didn’t know where to begin working my way through everything that needed to be done. He scrunched in pain, but he did not wake. It was potent sleeping gas.
Was this the sort of establishment where one could run through the halls in the dead of night wearing a gas mask, with a half-clothed and unconscious hooker in your arms? It was time to find out. I flew back towards the old key room and left Lauren on the floor. It could not be this easy; there had to be other loose ends. I was back in Plug’s room again before I knew what I was doing. Plug seemed to be stirring, so I brained him with the butt of his gun. I needed paper. I ripped drawer after drawer out from every piece of cheap furniture in the whole damn room. It had to be here somewhere…it always was…
The New Provisian Bible tumbled out onto the floor, and I grabbed it. I shoved it into Lauren’s purse and made tracks back to the key room again. This was shaping out to be an incredibly sloppy aborted mission. I was going to be in a great deal of trouble with some very powerful people. But there was no time to worry about that now. I ripped a page from near the end, probably from The Book of End Game or one of the other eschatological scriptures. “THEY WILL NOT STOP TRYING TO KILL YOU!” I scrawled. I had to go over the writing several times with the nearly dry pen to get it dark enough to cover the prophecies of a more remote doom. “GET OUT NOW AND DON’T COME BACK!”
Was I done? Had I made this look like some sort of fuck-up rather than outright treason against the Order? Was the hidden camera in Plug’s room recording? How much had it seen after the smoke started? I left the gun in Lauren’s purse. Maybe that would help keep me from getting in any more trouble. Perhaps the Dry Men would think she had shot up the camera herself before she escaped. In any case, the rest was up to her. I bailed.
6
There were so many things that bothered me afterwards. If I had known from the outset that I could not go through with allowing her to be killed, it would have been so easy to stage a murder scene. You could buy heep brains on the cheap from at least three local markets, and heep brains look like human brains, since most people are about as smart as heeps. I could have easily obtained a dummy to serve as Lauren, especially since she looked like a mannequin already. I had just come from a fucking hospital, for Gods’ sakes—blood would not have been hard to come by. If I had known that I was going to save her, I could have done it in a way that wouldn’t put me up shit’s creek in a smuggler rig being eaten by Eye-Jaw-Kull.
For that matter, why had I saved her? This woman had ruined me. I had dreamed of exacting my revenge, and when I had my chance, I had just let her damage me even further. Now I may as well have been digging my own grave while she looked on and said in that whispery voice “Just a little deeper, love. Almost done.” I’ve always been impulsive, but it bothered me to no end that there was no way I could even begin to understand my own actions. I hadn’t even waited for her to come to so I could rub her face in the fact that I had saved her worthless life.
When I first got to the orphanage, Reverend Burstin had not started to drill into his rock bottom yet. In those early days before he capitulated fully to the joys of perversion and negligence, he used to sometimes tell us stories about the Saints before bed. We’d lie under those scratchy sheets on those rickety cots, but even tough-as-nails orphans like a good story of heroism and martyrdom. “The most noble thing anyone can do is to make a sacrifice that no one else can remember.” He used to say. “We remember the Saints, but you must be good children, even though none of you will ever be remembered and celebrated like the Saints are.” Well, as usual, what he was saying was heepshit. The most noble thing you could do would be to make a sacrifice that even you wouldn’t be able to remember. That way you would be weakened and diminished by your sacrifice and you wouldn’t be able to go around patting yourself on the back for being such a stand-up guy.
But I didn’t save her to raise my opinion of myself. It felt like someone else was acting in my place. It was as if I no longer controlled my body. It was like a weird superstitious line of thinking was taking root inside me. If Lauren deserved to die for giving me the bark, then I deserved to die for infecting the women that I had slept with over the last nine years. It was like changing the rules in that way would kill me too. The Dry Men and their absurd, ritual-infested worldview had contaminated me. I turned the key in the ignition and started heading for the Lodge. It was time to face the music.
“THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF COMMODORE CACTUS”
1
Mission Creep was fastening the straps of a straightjacket around me, securing the front and the back locks. I was supposed to enter the Plenty Burrows Lodge from a different door once Mission Creep was given a specific signal. I felt numb rather than nervous. I didn’t know what to expect or how much shit I was in, exactly, and the Creep wasn’t giving me much.
“Why did yuh do it? Whyja let her go?” I had at first tried to maintain that the whole thing had been an accident, that I had just pressed the button too early and panicked, but he wouldn’t go for it. I had screwed the pooch on the mission before this one too, accidentally shooting a rocket too early and missing the target on top of that. It had been the Creep who fished that one out of the septic tank, and I had still been promoted. But it seemed that the Dry Men didn’t care about blunders as long as you got results, as long as you got the mission itself accomplished. And I hadn’t.
“I recognized her.” I admitted. “I bought her services once, a long time ago.”
“Yuh still sweet on her, boy?”
“It’s not like that.” He pulled at the straps, testing them. “It seemed cowardly to kill a woman like that. I couldn’t make myself do it.”
“I don’t hold with no women’s mercy.” He said disgustedly.
“I didn’t see you on that job either,” I shot back.
“Docs tol’ me I’d lost mo’ blood than they thought a body could s’vive. Earned me a break, Forrest. Didn’t break no rules.”
I doubted that things could get very much worse, so I decided to finish levelling with him and just shoot straight. “Creep, how bad is this? Am I out of the Order? Are they going to kill me?” He didn’t answer. A dull banging sounded on the other side of the door, which opened from within, and he shoved me through. A Dry Man in an apron and gloves over a fancy suit had opened it. He was holding a fat and bloated maul that looked so cartoonish that I almost smiled. The maul man made no eye contact with me, and he hastily skittered to the other side of the door, as if he might contaminate himself if he got too close to me. The slam of the door left me in darkness.
You can wander around the dark expanse of a secret society’s empty lodge alone while wearing a straightjacket, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are, after all, better ways to get your kicks. It was much the way I remembered it, but sometimes familiarity can’t blunt the edge of terror. The dark curtains had been pulled over the supernaturally illuminated stained glass, and the only light came from a non-source hovering somewhere between the ceiling and the floor, with no torch or bulb to produce it. Sometimes you can tune the atmosphere of a place so that you can taste its evil on the back of your tongue and feel it behind your eyeballs. Such was the home of my employers.
>
I approached the light. Just like last time, the proportions of the place felt all wrong, like you could walk for a long time and get no closer to where you were heading. And then time seemed to skip a beat, and I was in the light. Three puppet men fell from above and hovered before me. They were different from before. Their robes were thick and black and intricately morbid, like heaps of spider webs that had been scorched by hellfire. Their hands were ungloved, revealing spindly pointed fingers with obvious puppet hinges at the joints. The faces were different, frozen in soap opera expressions of excessive anguish. And yet I knew that these three were the same ones I had met on my first day in the lodge. How was that possible? Were these entities or just some theatrical construct? Did they have detachable faces? I shuddered in the cold mystic light.
“May we speak to you for a moment?” One of them asked. I stood frozen where I was. Somehow this delicately phrased and awkward query was much worse than the vitriolic excoriation I was prepared for. I stood silently, trying to form a response.
“…Sure.” I said at last. Two of the puppet men rose and receded, though they remained visible; the third hovered closer to me, almost in the light. “We don’t want you to feel that you have made an irredeemable mistake. The history of our Order is long, and many brothers have fallen into brief disfavor because of momentary failings.”
At this point I felt like demanding to know why, if this were the case, I was standing before a hovering tribunal wearing a straightjacket. “When this happens, a period of penance is required before a brother is allowed to resume his climb through the glorious ranks of our system. Penance is difficult and laborious, but not dangerous.” I sensed motion beneath me, and looked at the ground. The zigzag pattern of the floor was zipping below my feet, as if someone was pulling the floor itself out from under me, but the floor was endless. It looked like the bar does after you’ve pounded down the better part of a bottle of Elven vodka. How were they doing this? It wasn’t just the visual pattern that was shifting—the floor itself was moving in random directions, shifting back and forth and diagonally under my confused feet. I was suddenly terrified that I would fall down. With my arms bound, I would be like a tipped cow.
Fables of Failure Page 13
