IN OPPOSITION

TO LOGIC

by
DR. LARRY MITCHELL
Copyright © 2008 Dr. Larry Mitchell- Volvulus Press. All rights reserved.
 2

‘And in many degrees of heat,

The fire looked at the meat,
And said, ‘If I cook you,
The least you can do
Is lay there and be sweet.’
-CHRIS GOSS

2
 3

OSCULUM INFAME
Allicion Valpolichella trudged through the valley, rubbing her hands
together briskly, hoping for warmth and receiving none. The light up
ahead meant home, but home meant headaches for her. The earth
colors had come and gone. It was late in the year, and sun warmth
was still a season away.
She was more tired than she had ever felt before in her life. She
had grown accustomed to the daily fatigue- with five children, she’d
had no choice- but that didn’t mean that her body didn’t need the rest
that her life was depriving it of, daily. The reasons for her fatigue
were many- but none of them was likely to change anytime soon. The
moon had traveled beyond her sight and into the mountains; she knew
that sunrise would come soon.
Her day would begin again in a few hours, and she would not
have slept any more than a few hours, and that time would be spent
dozing on the floor of her hut while the children stepped on her
outstretched arms and legs and tumbled over her body. The
circumstances of her sleeplessness would vary, but she had a feeling
that there was something larger at work in her life, and she suspected
that this something larger meant to do her harm.
Once the men had wanted her. And while they still did, she
thought that the focus had shifted less from her beauty more towards
her sexual usefulness. She didn’t like the way that the men handled
her children, but the men were a necessary evil for a woman in her
position. It was difficult to provide for five children without slutting
herself out to this man or that.
As the men slept- and they would always sleep, afterward- the
coins at the bottom of their pinch-bags would find their way into the
hole that she had dug into the ground, underneath the stones in the
corner of her room. She was always careful to sprinkle the odd
handful of dust over the stones to preserve their authenticity, and she
was always quiet in doing it.
There were questions on occasion, of course, and a possible
beating in store for her or her children- but a bruised eye was better
than an empty belly, as her mama had always said, and everyone’s
tears would dry.
They liked the way she cried, they said, as they did what they
did.
They liked the way she howled.
And to tell the truth, she sometimes enjoyed it as well, but that
was more her doing than theirs. She knew how to take care of a man-
how to position her legs, where to lick their necks- to bring about their
mess. The combination that she used on herself was more mental

3
 4

than physical. The men really were not a part of what was happening
in her mind; if she remembered them, even for an instant, the effect
was lost. Seeing their faces or feeling what was happening inside of
her reminded her that her life was made of stolen moments like these-
moments that should belong to her and to her children- and not to
these men…not for the paltry coin they gave nor the larger amounts
she stole from them at the risk of her own flesh.

The minutes of her day felt as though they were etched in stone,
and as if they weighed as much as the rock down by the river where
she beat her washing. A few moments before dawn, the rare times
like now- when the men and her children were asleep, and the coin
was in the floor- these were the only times when her home was ever
quiet. During the day, her children were always running around- and
always needing something. At night, the men grabbed at her womb in
the same way. It was this needing- this constant, unabashed needing-
that was slowly driving her insane. Fulfilling these needs was how she
had gotten through the world, and these needs were the reason her
life had become like this. To lie down with a man meant to rise up
with a child, and she had always known that- she had even intended
for it to happen when she had done so the first time. Since then, each
successive child had been an accident- and her folly kept growing in
size.
And she was growing no wiser for it.
Her hair was blond, except when she was carrying a child; then
the hair would darken in those streaks that originated at the nape of
her neck. When she didn’t tie her hair up, it fell evenly with her
shoulder blades. No matter how she cut it, her hair always seemed to
return to this pattern, as if to say that how she looked was inevitable.
Her face- while pretty- was somehow plain, but it was very much the
face of a woman. People in the village longed to know what she was
thinking, but she never betray her thoughts. It had never been any
different for her, not in all her life.
The men had always endeavored to catch her eye, and this fact
she had used to her advantage as soon as she figured out that there
was one to be had. Many nights, her vagina had provided her and her
children with a warm place to sleep and a meal in their scrawny
bellies. The men had always tried to gain her attention and win her
favors, and her attractiveness was the one winning card that fate had
dealt to her.
One her first suitors, long before any of her babies, had lain
himself at her feet. He had begged her to love him. She was used to
things like that. But when she rejected him, the man simply walked
over to the wall in the pub where they were sitting and- pulling a

4
 5

musket down from that wall- proceeded to shoot himself in the face.
She hadn’t seen it happen, and the barkeep had whisked her out of
the pub before she could see anything of what remained. But she had
kept her ear to the ground, and she had heard of his progress. His
brain was pudding, and had been for a long time before he pulled the
trigger. His left hand over to rot, and she had hoped that he would
die, simple for her own peace of mind, and for his own as well.
But he didn’t die.
After a few years his scars had healed as well as they were going
to, and he had come through town as part of a festival, and she had
recognized him. She was holding the hand of one child and a few
moons away from giving birth to her second at the time. She
recognized him, but just barely.
His face was horribly knotted and twisted, and the powder burns
from the musket were livid and pink. The scar tissue had become that
shiny variety of skin that arises whenever burned flesh has not
properly healed.
One of his eyes was lost in a gossamer flap of skin and wispy
hair, but the other eye was hideously visible. She was trying to hold
her distance when he charged at the bars of his cage- snarling,
spitting, and ejaculating.
No one in town spoke about him to her, but she knew that other
people had seen him and figured that she was guilty of his ruination.
If he had wanted to fuck her, so went their reasoning, she should have
let him and gotten it over with. Now, a man who might otherwise
have been a useful member of the kingdom was now nothing more
than an oddity and she had been the one responsible for bringing him
to this lowly station in life.
But, all the while, the men wanted her. She was nothing more
than their nigger, and their lust for her physical form was her trigger.
That was where she got her power. The very thing that charmed them
was the fact that whatever it was within her that so captivated them
could not be touched, or fucked, or absorbed or possessed.
It was her gift, albeit a dark one.

She rubbed her eyes, and squinted out the window of her
cottage, its walls stained and scabbed with verdigris, as she warily
glanced at the impending sunrise. Her head was swimming too much
for her to sleep. There were too many things to think about. Sleep
was impossible, but at this point she would have been happy to lie
down and close her eyes for an hour, even if it was next to the scab
that was snoring in her bed right now.
She had to get him out before the land-boss came to inspect,
because it was not entirely paid for and she still owed for it. No

5
 6

matter how much money she earned, or stole, her children were
always needing for something. She was beginning to wonder if she
was going to have to offer her mouth to the land-boss, instead of her
coin- and if so, if her mouth would be enough to excuse her from the
twelve- moon’s tax as well.
She could barely move.
She could barely breathe.
The muscles in her stomach tightened imperceptibly. She felt it,
as she had been trained throughout the reeling circumstances of her
life to feel for these sorts of spasms, to feel around for the inner
sensation of her body revolting against itself. It was her turn of the
circle, and she had always consulted the stars before moving forward,
but despite every impulse not to believe her instincts, she thought that
she might have another baby on the way. Her head hurt whenever
she thought about another baby.
To her left, she heard the fluttering of an angel in descent, and a
colder, somehow icier version of herself whispered into her ear:
And this would be six, now wouldn’t it? Five of them already,
two of them still in shit-pants, and now another one on the way? Do
you really want this to happen? Will this be good for those already
alive? No. It will starve and they will starve and they will all hate you.
Those children that survive to adulthood will curse you for their fallen
siblings, curse you for the food that you stole out of their mouths,
curse you for polluting the world with your babies. The dead will curse
you from mouths that cannot speak, that you put to silence. Is that
what you want?
Of course not. But if there was one on the way, she would have
to allow it into the world. Taking care of the baby once it came was
the hard part. Prior to that- when a new baby is somehow like an idea
that has never quite taken shape- it was always easy. It required no
thought on her part at all- it was far away from her. But a baby was
reality.
She was seriously starting to doubt her ability to provide for her
children once they were outside of the womb, but while her babies
were inside of her, they ate well; they ate so well, that babies three
and four- born only ten months apart- had so thoroughly drained her
body of calcium that her own teeth were now starting to rot. The
youngest of them still drained her of calcium, because he still ate off
the tit. That was bad, but not as bad as having one baby cooking
inside of her at the same time that its older brother- and older by less
than a year- was still on the tit outside.
But Allicion, in 1142, didn’t understand any of that.
She just understood that babies took her teeth to make their
own.

6
 7

Her days were getting longer and longer it seemed, and her
energy was depleting itself faster and faster. By sundown, she was
usually exhausted, but there were still many hours of work yet to be
finished.
There were times when one of her older children would come out
to the barn and rouse her with a cup of milk that had leaked out of the
sow she’d been tending to before falling asleep. Twice now, she had
lost control of her mare by falling asleep while astride her back in the
potato field, and twice now she had come down hard on the back of
her skull, knocking her unconscious. The second time this had
happened- only a few days before- as she lay there in the field, with
blood coming from a gash in her head and the horse run off to the
next town, her babies had thoroughly fouled the house with marking
chalk and beer, electing to mix the two of them together to form a
rudimentary paste, which they then applied to the walls of her home,
using the hair on the head of her two-year old boy as a brush.
When she awoke, she was sunburned. Her cheeks were swollen,
and her lips were cracked and bleeding. Her mare had come back and
had started licking her face. The horse’s breath smelled rotten, but
she was grateful for the horse’s intrusion. It was disturbing to learn
that her youngest baby was becoming more the property of the
children as a group and less her property as the mother that had given
birth to him.

Without a man, her life was harder. There was nothing better
than having a man around to do the work for her, to ease her burden.
The father of her oldest two had died not three years after her first
baby had come, and the father of her next two had died almost three
years after that, barely days after his youngest had been conceived.
The man she had been with lately, Jym, had returned home to
his village, claiming that he was fatigued and too tired to remain the
season with her- at least, that was what she told the villagers. And
Jym had been the father of her fifth and final child- at least, that was
what she told him. In as much as she knew of herself, Allicion
Valpolichella was not exceptional.
Although many subsequent biographers would come to describe
her as beautiful, she would not have had the faintest idea of what they
meant by that- and her mind was nothing if not faint. She knew that
she was pretty, but her face and body were not proportionate to her
power over the smaller and weaker male of the species. She had
coupled with three men and these groupings had produced a total of
five children. There were other men, but with no children to serve as
a reminder it was almost as if those couplings had never taken place.
Over time, as she did what she did to get by, it became easier to

7
 8

forget the things that she did not wish to remember. She had tapped
into the hidden survival instinct of using her selective memory.
There were times when she was certain that her brain would
explode if she accommodated it with all the things that had been done
to her- every torture, every pleasure, every twisting of the iron spike.
And if you want bread, you have to fuck a baker.
Of course, in 1142, a woman could not have articulated such
thought.
As for her three fathers, each one of them (two of them twice)
had left a part of themselves with her, inside of her, a living reminder
of their time and presence here on earth. They had wanted to be
inside of her, and they had each gotten what they wanted, repeatedly.
Allicion wanted to live on in the blood of the village. She had lived in
the blood, and fed on the blood; she had given the blood and the
blood had been taken from her. Her future, she knew surely, lay not
in this existence and not in this tired body.
Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo of you.
And when her daughter’s daughters turned seven years old- and
there would be three of them; this she had foreseen- a streak of white
would appear in their hair, starting at the napes of their necks and
striking up toward their right ears, just as her own hair had gone black
in the same location when she was the same age.
This would be her hold on the world. And her essence would
become an earthly fear, within it and throughout it- surrounding it
exponentially, generation by generation, for decades yet to come. Or
so she thought.
A smile came to her lips without her wishing it there, and it
pleased her. Everything pleased her, and everything was made for her
pleasure. This was the only time that she would feel her body- she
had known that before she threw the stones and hexed herself- and
she wanted to enjoy her own flesh for all that it was worth.
Anything in this life was available, if one was willing to barter
with one’s body. If she craved a certain herb, one or more of her
suitors would fetch it for her. They would fill her pipe and bring it to
her lips to inhale.
Sometimes the couplings had been fun or even delightful, but
only with the men who made her laugh, and not the men who hurt
her- although, she had come to enjoy being hurt by the ones who
made her laugh. Jym had enjoyed the same night activities that she
did, and her lover paid- without first being asked- particular loving
attention to the parts of her body that were the most responsive to
being licked, and bitten, and burned.
In the cold of winter, it was quite another thing to take off one’s
covering than it was to do the same in the summer. The ceremony

8
 9

called for nudity, and she obeyed. The crops, as she pranced around
inside, were dying out in the cold, and soon, she and her children
would have nothing to eat.

Touching the flame to the wick of the candle, the room danced in
a bath of flame. She tried to picture specifically the deity she was
calling to, as she fixated upon this, she felt goose bumps pulled
themselves slowly out of her flesh. Her right hand reached up to pull
on her left nipple, and soon, it was bleeding between the tips of her
fingernails.
‘I will live forever.’
The room steeped in a black cloud, though she could hardly tell
that it was there. The light in the candle grew dim for a moment, then
brightened if only for an instant, then eased itself into a tone that was
just a little darker than that of a moment before. The cloud spoke to
her, and she seemed to hear her own voice outside of her body and
within it at the same time, both without opening her mouth. She was
possessed of a feeling of wanting to go be a part of this cloud,
however silly the thought may be.
‘Do you believe in me?’
This was a game, she had decided, but she was frightened. She
didn’t know who or what she was dealing with, and she didn’t trust the
darkness,
‘And who are you?’ she dared, curling the words into a brogue.
She heard a click, as if from the quick scrape of flint against
rock, and the smoke in the room suddenly seemed as if it were
illuminated from within. This new light made it a little bit easier for
her to see, but the face was still unclear. Was he smiling? Perhaps-
but the face was not.
‘I never was; I always am.’
The tone of the voice that spoke to her was timeless, nameless
and endless. The words had never been spoken, and they would never
be spoken, and yet they were. A man stepped forward. His clothes
she could not see, and his face was indistinct. Still, she felt drawn to
him.
She started walking across the floor. A vague hand went up in
front of her, halting her progress. The room seemed to length around
them, and soon the man was seated in a wooden chair.
‘I am Legion. You may call me a friend. I answer to every
name. What is between us is between us alone. You will be safe. I
will be what you want.’
‘But who are you?’

9
 10

‘Faint. My name is Faint. I come from always. Always comes

from me. I am all that you want. I am what you have been praying
for.’
‘What have I been praying for?’
‘You want to live forever,’ Faint sighed.
She closed her eyes for a second. ‘Yes.’
‘You want me to touch you, to place my mark upon you- even if
it hurts.’
Faint said this not inquisitively, but rather recited it as a
statement of fact. He knew more about her than she had suspected.
How could he-
‘Because I’ve always been there, Allicion.’
It was true, all of it. Inspiration took her only so far, but now it
was taking her over, every inch of her flesh. Faint now had her in his
grip, and she didn’t know if she should be afraid or ashamed, but the
truth was that she was getting excited. She could feel her nipples
hardening and her groin was moist. What had he asked of her? What
did he want? What was he willing to do for her- or to her?
There was a laugh in the air- an acrid, putrefying sound, and
then Faint spoke once more before his touch was upon her.
‘You want to taste my flame with every part of yourself.’
She brought herself before him and, kneeling, offered him her
mouth.
With no acknowledgement of this, Faint picked her up and sat
her on his lap, facing away from him. Her hands instinctively went for
his knees, to sturdy herself, and that was when she screamed. When
she grabbed his legs, the fabric and skin that had been covering him
broke away, and a film of scum- some sort of fungal tissue- appeared
beneath her body. It clamped blackly to the palms of her hands, and
the sense of suction was painful. It was as if this man was absorbing
something from her- something tucked away deep inside of her- and
he was ruining the tissues between here and there searching for what
he wanted- what everyone wanted. He was absorbing her, and she
was immersed in him. He was touching and polluting the essence of
her, the essence of who she was.
But in the next moment, all of that- everything- was just a
memory of a life that could never be lived again. Her revulsion melted
as her body responded in the way it had been conditioned to in the
presence of the male sex organ. The first moment of his penetration
was sheer delight for her to experience; after that, all was blackness-
and in her absence, it turned ugly.
His nails raked into her sides and the digits- once they were
within her cavity, they mingled with her intestines and kidneys. About
a thumb above his man-root was a second genital apparatus of vague

10
 11

proportion that seemed intent upon investigating the contents of her

stomach, via her anus.
His tongue had wrapped itself twice around her neck and the tip
of it was now teasing the tip of her own tongue, gagging her. As Faint
reached his peak, the touch of his violation felt so soothing to her that
it was almost as if her injuries had never occurred- but they had.
Faint was drenched in blood. He pulled her body off of him, and- with
one hand- tossed her to the floor. He’d watched this one for a long
time, and he wanted her to carry his unique gift into the world.
Allicion was without words- or the organs necessary for speech.
Her skin- where his tongue had touched her- was charred and
blackened and one of her eyelids had somehow come loose. When she
opened her other eye and willed the injured eye to see through the
muck of gore covering it, she saw a tiny man standing in front of her
again. He looked as if he might be half a foot shorter than she was,
but that hadn’t been the case, only moments before. He looked a little
bit like father, but then he changed.
Now she had a face to embody the voice, although it didn’t
match, it was somehow a final piece to the puzzle that her life had
become. She was only eleven years into her birthing cycle, and she
already had five children, all of them fatherless and soon to be
orphans. But none of that matter now, because she was dying for
knowing what she had needed to know. Now, she knew. She knew
that she shouldn’t be alive, but she was.
‘….I will forsake my body…’ her lips, bruised and slashed, now
revealed.
‘Say it,’ he instructed. ‘I…like to hear you say it.’
‘…I beg of you….the dark gift…I will live on forever…’
‘You’ve stolen the souls of men, and have offended me.’
‘…I didn’t know…’
‘You knew. That’s the sin. You will steal souls for me, and your
sin will make the sunlight a poison to your flesh.’ He then crumbled in
mid-sentence.
Looking down over the shards of her quivering, sexless body,
she saw gills in the hollows where her breasts had been- only the
metal ring remained, piercing a concave teat. She was a different
creature now. Faint had whispered a name to her in the moments
before he disappeared into a puff of dust, but she had forgotten it
now. Faint had laughed when he said that in his language it meant
the thief of souls. She had lost a finger on each of her hands, and
those fingers remaining had thickened considerably and increased in
their musculature.
Over the mountains, the sun was starting to rise.

11
 12

PRINCIPLE INFLICTION
Courtney Randlehaus had been hired on at the Matthias Bramble
Epidermal Disorder Clinic in 1982- and he had been employed there
longer than anyone else on his food staff- but the Clinic itself pre-
dated him by another seven years. He had been working there fully
eighteen months before he wriggled up the courage to ask for a raise
or some promotion in his responsibilities. Courtney didn’t care if he
was making more money, really- he just wanted to tell the world that
he was doing more than slinging mashes potatoes at invalids for a
living. To describe it that way was perhaps a simplification, but not by
much. He had never been keen to bite off a piece of life and trying to
strangle it down cold without a glass of water, and because of this
slight indisposition of his, he had overlooked or otherwise ignored a
good many opportunities in his lifetime, often unintentionally so.
He’d started at the Clinic when he was twenty-one years old.
That was also the year that he had gotten married and it took another
four years after that before he advanced his position within the
operation. The year he was promoted was also the year that Nona
had her miscarriage. The doctor had told them that there was a
possibility that she had been experiencing an ectopic pregnancy- that
is to say that the egg had been fertilized in one of her Fallopian tubes
and that it would have to be aborted. This, of course, was out of the
question before the words were out of the doctor’s mouth. ‘Now this is
serious, Courtney could remember the doctor saying. ‘We can never
be sure, not in a woman of such diminution.’
He’d always wondered what the doctor had meant when he’d
said that.

12
 13

EX QUIZZO NOBIUM
Some people weren’t so lucky that they had a job waiting for them
when they woke up in the morning. Some people weren’t so lucky as
to have slept at all during the night. And some people weren’t going
to live long enough to see four in the morning at the end of December.
Timothy Karacas was one of those lucky people who have no luck at
all. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept for longer than
three consecutive hours, and there was nothing to take his mind away
from this fact, because there was nothing- no one- to take his mind off
of it at all. He had never been or felt so alone.
With no noise to punctuate the silence, the silence in his
apartment had become deafening. How long had he been here- alone,
unattended and stinking of vegetable rot? How long had it really been
since Melanie left?
Since the beginning of this year- and his ever-mounting troubles
with his now ex-girlfriend Melanie- every time he looked in the mirror,
his face and body looked worse and worse. He had been sick for quite
some time but it wasn’t until the middle of January, three months ago,
that he had started showing the physical manifestations of his illness.
His mortis was nothing if not rigorous. He’d always been somehow
afraid of his own reflection in the mirror, and now he knew why. Now,
he looked on the outside much like he felt on the inside: gnarled,
twisted and putrefying.
At one time, he might have been considered to be handsome- by
a generous stretch of the beholder’s imagination- but that was no
more; he hadn’t looked like a human being for over a month. His lips
rode high upon his gums, exposing the rot that caked his teeth.
Because of this, he looked as though he was grinning all the time,
even though he wasn’t grinning at all. Why would he? Nothing could
ever make him smile again. But there were times, in his more serene
moments, when he thought that inside of himself, somewhere, he was
grinning. A part of him was happy that it was all over for him. He
found himself, at times, unwillingly ready and able to die. It was
peaceful, but it was also a sick and unholy feeling.
There was a name for what was happening to him, but he dare
not speak it aloud. His disease had a name more ancient than cancer,
a name older than melanoma, but that’s what these doctors had
diagnosed him with. The doctors, it seemed, could not pin it down,
precisely, but they couldn’t call it anything else, either. It seemed to
Timothy, who had spoken this concern aloud to his physicians, that
someone or something was messing around with his internal dials. No
one paid him any attention- or if they did, Timothy didn’t notice it. At
one point in his life, he might have had some good prospects- his

13
 14

grades had always been good, and he had never been quite so horribly
teased or anything like that. Timothy Karacas was just a
little…weaker. There was no better word or phrase for it. He had
never been able to properly cope with all of the elements that daily life
sucked out of him, and so he had turned inward.
Still, he had done alright. Getting out of his parents’ house was
the first thing he had done right, and once he’d accomplished that, he
knew that he was going to be okay. He’d never felt normal- he’d
never felt less than weak, and he was unusually susceptible to stress-
and Mom and Dad had been nothing if not a potent double-shot of
stress. Away from his parents and their wholly undue influence for the
very first time in his young life, his life got much better in a very short
period of time, and now- on the other side of thirty- he found himself
looking back upon the starving college days as having been the
happiest days of his life.
Well, then- perhaps the second happiest days.

But now, it was different- now, he was going to die, and whether
his death was finally achieved by an intentional and concentrated
overdose of prescription medications or from the illness itself, he
would inevitably die in a puddle of his own urine.
This was such a disgraceful way to go out. The chemotherapy
had caused him to lose some of his hair and the constant nausea had
caused him to eject involuntarily over twenty-five pounds of body
weight. His shit turned soupy, he couldn’t sleep anymore, and there
was nothing left.
His kidneys had stopped working properly- even though his
kidneys were one (two?)- of his organs that he felt he could trust, at
least marginally. His bladder was fucked up now too, and that had
never given him too many problems in the past, either, but here it
was. To sit for any period of time meant that he would be sitting in
piss-soaked jimmies.
This was his third time of dancing with the devil, but he knew in
his heart of hearts that this time it would kill him. Even the doctors at
the Ridgeline Clinic to whom he owed so much money agreed (and
doctors can never agree on anything): he had six months or less left
to live.
April was hell and gone from January, but here he was.

His own body had decided at an early age to betray him. It had
started fucking up on him in little ways; tiny, indiscriminate lapses in
decent health that kept him out of school for at least a month
cumulative each school year. He wasn’t faking it, either- he really was
sick. Any cold that flew around the school, he caught it; any viral

14
 15

infection that could be passed along on a water fountain would

immobilize him for two weeks or more.

The age of twenty-three had seen his eyesight and a regular

heartbeat both leave him within seven months of each other. His
friends made jokes about the old man falling apart, but he wasn’t so
sure that they were only joking. Their voices tittered and their eyes
cast away from his own whenever they spoke of his assorted maladies.
His glaucoma had been caught in time enough for medical prevention,
his ophthalmologist said. His regular doctor said that his heartbeat
could be regulated and controlled with proper medication as well.
Both doctors had been correct: he was only prescribed medicine for
both conditions. But those two incidences had been the precise
moment in time when he had to admit that what he was going
through- what his life was rapidly becoming- was not normal.
Everything prior to this he could bullshit himself about, saying that it
could happen to anyone, but this new shit could only have happened
to him and him alone.
Twenty-four had been a relatively kind year to him, but he had
missed three and a half weeks of work and school due to the flu, which
had nailed everyone he knew for a week at a time. He wrote his
papers, got his law degree, and started planning for the future. Then,
at twenty-five, just as he should have been in a position to reap the
benefits of his preparation and schooling, he found out that he had
cancer.
He had honestly never been so scared in all of his life. It had
been caught early enough that the lesion- located on his chest- could
be sliced off. He was declared to be in good health, although he was
told by several doctors that he needed to start watching things and
taking better care of himself. He radically changed his diet, and ever
after he was careful about everything he put into his body.
He started at Quillen and Timmendeguas nine months after the
complete tally of his cancer scare- Timothy 1: Cancer 0- and he was
feeling a bit timid, a bit weak, but things were looking up for him.
Timothy had almost in his mind ascribed it to another life he had lived,
in another part of the country. A year and a half after he started, he
met Melanie Cleaves, a paralegal. Timothy was immediately
bewitched, but he never thought that anything would become of it.
Melanie had been transferred to his floor, and in some vague way he
had her at his disposal.
He was scared, and so he didn’t dare to pursue her. That only
seemed to attract her even more, and once they knew each other a
little bit better, dating almost seemed superfluous; they discovered
that they really didn’t want to go out anywhere or do anything.

15
 16

Anytime that they were able to get together, they would usually wind
up at his apartment after eating dinner in some restaurant that was
more handy than chosen, and the sex was fantastic. Why wouldn’t it
be? Timothy realized that he was truly in love with somebody for the
first time in his life, and that these were the happiest days of his life.
About a year or so after he had started seeing Melanie outside of
work, he was diagnosed as having a small patch of cancerous tissue on
his left shoulder. The base location of his cancer was changing, and
that wasn’t good. It had moved over three inches and up by an inch
and a half. He had been out of the woods for something less than
three years. But being in love, he found, had deadened the pain, and
at that point he discovered how truly therapeutic love could be.
Melanie knew nothing, and there was no way he could tell her about
this. In her ignorance, she did more to get him through it than he
ever could have conveyed to her, even if she had known.
He lived, and there were a few more chapters to their story.
He had been smacked twice now by the god of weird tissue, and
about either incident he had mentioned nothing to Melanie. The two of
them weren’t living together, not yet, but it was getting close to that
season and they had both been talking about it. They had both been
wanting it. Cohabitation was only a matter of time, unless one of
them steered the vessel seriously off-course. When he was diagnosed
for the second time, it hadn’t been hard to hide, not when he thought
about it. It hadn’t been very difficult to hide things from Melanie at
all. To cover with Melanie and work, he merely scheduled his doctor
appointments during the day and claimed that he was working with his
client base. He could still recall the taste of those lies in his mouth,
like ashes.
All in all, it made sense, each event precipitating another, with
his health always threatening to abandon him. What was happening to
him now was really nothing more than the final card the old habeas
corpus had chosen to lay out for him; he’d been getting used to it for a
while now.
Habeus.
Corpus.
You may have the body.
He had thrown such rhetoric around so carelessly only months
before without ever giving a thought to the real meanings behind the
words he was saying. It occurred to him that now, at the end of the
day, there was no value in being a lawyer. Now that other lawyers
were coming after him in earnest- seeking payment on behalf of the
Ridgeline Clinic, the Metcalf Clinic, et al.- Timothy now viewed lawyers
as being nothing more than parasites that fed on other people’s
misery.

16
 17

Something definitely seemed to have marked him physically as a

member of the damned, smiting him with lesions and blemishes that
seemed to come at him straight out of the final pages of the B-I-B-L-E.
His skin had a sickly yellow hue to it and a bizarre-smelling film that
made him look and feel sticky and gross twenty-four hours a day.
He blinked his eyes; he distinctly remembered doing that. Of
any other action on that day, the blinking of his eyes was the most
certain in his memory. ‘I don’t understand,’ Timothy said- and truly,
he didn’t. Melanie then dropped a piece of paper onto the breakfast
table in between the two of them. He knew right away that it wasn’t a
note from another woman, because there hadn’t been anyone else.
He stretched his fingers out towards the paper, which smelled strongly
of mimeograph ink, when upon the turn of an imperceptible pivot, he
smelled that scent upon the paper, and fell short of response. He
knew what it was.
Melanie’s voice twisted in a high-pitched parody of its normal
self: ‘Why did you say it was pneumonia? Huh, fucker? How long did
you think that you could keep it away from me?’
‘I didn’t-‘
‘You didn’t what?’ she wanted to know. ‘How can there be any
trust between us if you’re willing to lie to me about something like
this?’
What lay on the breakfast table in front of them was a hospital
bill indicating a session of chemo on the twenty-fifth of the month
previous. How long indeed did he think he could get away with not
telling her the whole truth of what was going on with him, medically?
She was bound to find out sooner or later, and now she had. He
started to dig through his mind, trying to figure out the precise reason
why he hadn’t told her that he was as sick as he was, and every
answer that came back to him sounded false. He knew he hadn’t told
her because he hadn’t wanted to tell her.
Telling her would have been admitting it to himself, and he didn’t
want to do that. He also didn’t want to tell her because he was afraid
that she would leave. And now, she knew.
And now, here they were.
Melanie’s voice hitched. ‘Well, in all honesty…’
In all honesty, Timothy thought of saying to her, is just a little of
the lie that lays underneath every conversation we’ve ever had. Every
word of truth that you speak is done by weaving it through and around
the things that you know we can’t ever talk about. It’s like the two of
us standing together in the middle of a black-and-white tiled floor,
with both of us knowing all the time that we can only step on one color
or the other, but we can never step on both colors at the same time.

17
 18

Timothy had been paying the medical bills as they came in-
piecemeal, as soon as he got them out of his mailbox. He didn’t want
to leave a paper trail for Melanie to pick up later on, if there even was
a later on. It had been rather easy- almost surprisingly so- for him to
mask the effects of his illness and treatments with medication and
make-up, but in the end the bills left too many loose ends for him to
keep track of.
‘I’ll have my things out of here by tonight,’ she said, blinking
tears away from her eyes, a gesture that Timothy imagined she
practiced to produce that maximum emotional impact upon him. ‘I
would appreciate it if you were somehow not here when I got home
tonight. This is going to be hard enough for me to do without having
to face you while I’m doing it.’
The moment called for something to be said here, but no words
poured forth. Had all of their time together come down to this
awkward silence?
‘I don’t want you to go, Melanie,’ he said. It sounded impotent
and limp in his mouth, more so once it was expressed, and the words
he spoke hung there in the air between them like skeins of dead,
rotting meat.
‘Timothy…at this point, I’m pretty sure that I have to go.’
Once his reality started to fail him, as the object of his adoration
he started remembering her then as he loved her best: with her head
in her hands, her hair untethered and her feet folded beneath her
rump as she sat at their kitchen table, forever poring over obscure
legal documents.
He remembered miracles with her- driving through the
countryside, all the things Melanie would point out to him, seeing
them, as she always did, through a child’s eyes. There were such odd,
spare moments of luxury, things that had happened that only the two
of them knew about. Sometimes, there weren’t even that many
witnesses. He could recall spying on her while she washed her hair in
the shower- with her head under the spray of the water, she had been
totally unaware that he was watching her, constantly studying the
effortless oxen grace with which she carried herself through her life.
All these memories had seized his emotions, and his heartbeat had
started that old familiar beat-skip-beat again.
She had left his heart feeling as empty as a funeral shell. It felt
as though Melanie had removed one of his kidneys, one of his lungs
and both halves of his heart- not that he would be needing any of that
stuff anymore. She’d also left a few articles of clothing behind, not
wanting to take them with her because Timothy had purchased them
for her as gifts. In the closet off of the hallway hung various articles of
feminine clothing, bought for all the seasons in the year- clothes that

18
 19

would never again be worn. And the new herringbone and tweed
pantsuit he’d bought for her on his Visa card- just after Christmas and
given to her on January 4th, her birthday- now lay draped around his
ankles and feet, caked with food scraps and snot.

19
 20

HIGH ASCII
Kelly deRenzi looked like anyone: he talked like everyone else, in any
normal conversation. The only time he offered malice in his speech
was when he consciously chose to do so. His accent carried not a fleck
of the western curvature in its consonants, nor a trace of the standard
molestation of vowels the way most southerners enunciated. He was
nowhere at all.
If he gave off any smell it was vaporous, and it vanished before
its origin could be processed in the mind of the person detecting his
scent. The evidence of his existence always evaporated before the
police showed up, and ballistics failed to locate any trace of his
identity. He came, and he went, and nobody saw him do anything.
That’s the way it was everywhere.
It was easier to describe what he wasn’t as opposed to saying
what he actually was, because there were periods of time during which
he, Kelly- his own creation- had no idea of what he was. He wasn’t
average or pedestrian.
He wasn’t normal.
He no longer remembered his real name. His definition was
always changing. There were times when he could trance himself out
to the tiniest point where he thought he could actually feel the skin
dripping off of his bones, and there were other times still when he
could feel his bones as well as himself being slowly stitched together,
like cotton candy being woven into a blanket, all within his mind,
bounding out of the organic and into the ethereal. Kelly was
accustomed to sleeping mostly during the daylight hours, nodding on
and off all day, but on occasion he did awake in darkness, and it was
there that he felt the most comfortable. It was a bit like waking up
warm in the womb, only with no danger of immediate umbilical
strangulation.
The dark provided anonymity, so he moved at night.
In a small leather casing next to his mattress he kept two golf-
ball sized metal orbs that he had picked up at a flea market in Hazard,
Kentucky a few years back. He had been walking past the flea market
when something, some sound from within, called him over. He
casually looked up and down the aisles of folded T-shirts and broken
television sets and stereo components and there they were, the balls-
all polished and shining with a fierce light. In the seconds after he had
first seen the balls glow, they seemed to fade- as if they were satisfied
that he had found them- and he knew that he could make the balls do
that same trick again, if he wanted to. He could make them mean
something to him. According to the man hawking the goods, these

20
 21

balls were used as a meditation technique in the Orient and as a

placebo form of remedial relaxant here in the domestic United States.
Kelly had taken the balls everywhere with him from that day
forward, not really knowing why he did but doing so religiously all the
same. He had tried the spinning patterns that had been illustrated in
the tattered and ratty old booklet that had come with the balls when
he bought them. He knew that he needed them , or would need them,
but he hadn’t immediately known what for. Kelly slowly came around
to understanding that he was to use them to focus his ready-made
energies upon a single object. Or two of them, actually. Four years
had passed before he truly came to understand the why of it.
He would spin the silver balls through his hands, working them
through and around his fingers as they clicked metronomically against
one another. He would continue to do this, over and over and over
again until the balls crackled and sparkled. Kelly had not known why
he had purchased the balls, so long ago- had he really been only
nineteen years old at that time? Yes.
Kelly could remember buying the balls for thirteen dollars, along
with a copy of the I Ching for another seven. Twenty dollars, yet
twenty dollars that had changed his life. Philosophy was never what it
was, he reflected; philosophy was only capable of whatever vagaries
the pilgrim brought to it.
And the pilgrim, many years later, was now the grand master.
And all because he had some balls.
The balls clicked and whirled, and in this darkness the sight still
brought with it to his mind’s eye a faint tingle of discovery. In the
dark, surrounded on all sides by nothing, the balls started to glow a
dull blue-pink color. Tiny finger threads of electricity coursed over the
surface of the balls as he worked them slowly through his fingers,
faster and faster now, until he stopped. When he did stop, the light
within the balls throbbed for a moment or two longer, but then the
same dim light ebbed and within thirty seconds of him setting the balls
down upon the bedspread, the light was extinct. He picked them up
and put them on a velvet cloth on the table he kept next to his
mattress, his fingers lingering long enough to adjust the wheel on the
oil lamp that he kept there as well. He had to see the flame within the
shade.
He could hear the roar of the crowds, milling about him. Pushing
the table carefully with his right hand, he slid the table across the floor
so that it was now directly in front of the bed. Kelly steepled his
fingers and stared at the oil lamp for a long time, never moving.
There were questions within him that needed to be answered. He
would have to relocate soon. He had to move forward to wherever he
felt his mind leading his body, and his mind was forever leading him

21
 22

away from here. Down, down through the Midwest. Hmm. Maybe
that funny squiggly-looking state in the middle, the one next to the
one with that big lake? No?
North. He needed to go north. Somewhere North.
That’s what Kelly needed to know. Prior to now, he had been
almost afraid to move, and he didn’t want to take his leave without
being sure of the direction in which he traveled. Now, inexplicably, he
knew, and he had no reason now not to move forward. North. The
hours passed as slowly as he could imagine them. Their shape in
time, anything about them, was his decision. Rising slowly to a sitting
posture, he did one hundred quick crunches and one hundred sit-ups
in his bed and when he was done, he threw his legs over the edge of
the mattress. Where he was sitting right now. Right now, and right
there. So simple, but so complex. To bridge the gap between right
now and right there is to transcend. Where do you go, and how do
you get there? How do you travel? This you must-
‘Answer.’
What is your desire?
‘Calamity. Distortion. Ecstasy.’
For yourself?
Kelly thought about this for a moment. ‘No.’
Splaying his fingers against the darkness of the room, Kelly
could feel the draft from the open window on the opposite side of the
room against his ribcage. Gooseflesh had pulled itself out from him,
and now it stood out proudly, a cacophony of erect tissue. When the
flesh is hot, and packed with blood, it is then ready to receive. Closing
his eyes, Kelly saw himself dressed smartly in a red suit, a walking
cane by his side, eyes smudged with kohl and lips blackened with a
sickly paste that somehow steamed with his breath whenever he
exhaled. His eyes were perpetually looking up, but he got the
impression that he wasn’t seeing anything but himself. There was a
sad wisdom in those eyes, an undefiled wisdom that Kelly knew he had
already received. His lips had already tasted the wine.
His mind had already tested the flame.
The muscles in his neck had atrophied, almost to the point that
his head was levitating itself above his shoulders. His skin was faint to
the point of being translucently green, the sockets of his eyes looking
more truly hollow than even this heavy make-up could make them.
The creases in his forehead, older than age, cracked and peeling with
pancake make-up, almost as if there was some force behind his
forehead cracking the plaster he had been made of. His hair was
pulled back in a style that he would never have chosen for himself, but
he saw his head tipped at its usual angle and knew immediately that it
was himself. This was his vision, and it pleased him. Kelly could see

22
 23

his eyes in this vision, and they rotated slowly through a foggy series
of colors, occasionally matching the yellow mung on the teeth that
jutted out below them. He was grinning- the Antichrist Superfly.
He was only truly happy- if happy was even the proper word for
it- whenever he was practicing his craft. It was difficult, even for him,
to describe what he was doing, and what it was all about. It was
about the mental manipulation of people and situations- to a certain
visceral extent- but there was a deeper level of meaning to how he
spent his time. To put it this way was a simplification, but there it
was: people made choices for themselves and for their lives, based
either on ignorance, desperation of conscious decision. Kelly’s theory
was that there was a single thread running through any life he could
select- it didn’t matter who was involved. An uncommon thread, a
personal totem of importance that- once removed- could cause a
metapsychological breakdown. Any attachment to anyone or anything
in the physical world was futile- that was the Truth.
Kelly liked to see what happened when he snapped people’s
minds. He had once strapped a woman to a cardiac monitor interface
so that he could measure, in medical increments, the increase in her
heart rate as he ritualistically sodomized her daughter with a broom
peg. Of everything involved, he liked to witness their surprise the
most. That sharp intake of breath, the hold, the hitch, the splutter,
and then the widening of their eyes, the second hitch in their voice.
Hick! Hick! It was upon that crux that his pleasure rested. All was
funneled into the effort of making those moments happen, and that
effort kept him satisfied. People never liked to see themselves- close
up- in the mirror. It didn’t matter what results these actions
produced- those benefits were always secondary, next to the pure
pleasure of feeling it working through him, of every door being
opened. To feel- to taste!- the practitioning of the craft, to know
every curvature of the spoken word, to suck the moisture out of every
moment in the air- that was what it meant to truly be alive and
kicking, in the metaphysical sense.
At least, that’s what it meant to him.

23
 24

CITIVAS DEI
The stranger slipped his wings quietly beneath the folds of his coat.
He had traveled pretty much unnoticed, save for a nasty encounter
he’d had about thirty or forty miles back that had forced him to reveal
the full extent of his otherworldly powers- much to the grizzled dismay
of the bartender who’d had to mop up what was left. The stranger,
doing his bit to be unobtrusive and fit in, was wearing a red cotton
shirt and black jeans, with a black leather trench coat that certainly
looked good on him but fir him badly anyway because of the way the
coat restricted his shoulder movement. Knowing that such contrivance
was necessary in order to mingle with people, the outfit didn’t bother
him as much as it might have otherwise. Dying had helped him to
better establish his motives and priorities. His purpose now was to
observe, and to act when the time was right- in time, his soul would
be returned to him. He was blackly confident of this. And when he
got his soul back, then all bets would be off.
In the three years since he had died, he had followed the
Scent- and now, at last, it was getting stronger again. He was getting
closer. He was still amazed- almost daily it seemed- with the changes
within himself, and he felt as if everything he was going through was
leading him to a final confrontation. He pulled his hair- which was
growing wildly out of control- into a ponytail and tied it with a length
of broken athletic shoelace. In his death, he seemed to have found a
regenerative sort of healing. He was more alive than he’d ever been
before, and yet he was acutely aware that he was always surrounded
by the high, sweet stench of decay and rot.
He had mutated physically since he died, and it had been for
the better. It had left a few reproductive spores inside of his body,
and now those spores were coming back to life in all sorts of strange
new ways. Like these fingernails he was growing. He had needed to
clip them once a day when he first died, but now he had gone to doing
it six or seven times a day. Their growth seemed to retard when they
got to about two inches in length. Who was certain of anything
anymore? Who knew? Maybe his nails were simply supposed to be
that long and that was final.
He now watched Timothy Karacas with much interest in his
action and movements, and he occasionally licked at his black lips with
a speckled tongue, as if to tease water from them in a desert. If
anyone noticed him here, sitting on a bench in front of Timothy’s
apartment building, they didn’t say so.
His name in life had been Joshua Tauble; but he had left that life
behind a long time ago. Once he had made the switch over from the
physical world into that of the metaphysical, he’d gotten the feeling

24
 25

that he had done this several times before, and this knowledge- soon
confirmed- was a comfort to him. In life, all was forgotten- but in
death, the accumulated knowledge of his past incarnations flooded into
him. At times he traveled in the flesh, by foot or even by wing; other
times he was nothing more than spirit and the will to Be. His skin
alternated between being somewhat softer than that of a normal living
human being to being completely non-existent. At times, he appeared
translucent- the colors of his being becoming watery and indistinct, the
veins of the backs of his hands showing the only vestige of the human
being that had resided within this shell prior to Ixxir. Other times, it
was as though he wasn’t quite there at all, drifting without anchor in a
nether realm he could understand only partially, leaving only the
sound of the winds rushing past his ears to remind him of what a
breeze felt like, or the hearty warmth of good sunshine.
He wasn’t human. He was something else, now.
‘I am the conduit. I am the Escort Bisarro.’
Joshua noticed that he had no control over when and where
whichever state would choose to manifest itself. He likened death to
losing one’s first true love: it is not an experience that one expects to
survive, and yet that is exactly what happens. The old person that
used to be is gone- forever- and the needs of that person are never
satisfied again. The victim then becomes a new person with a new
schedule of needs and wants, and that is exactly the process as it
occurred to Joshua
The hatred he now felt for all living things caused his former
animosity to pale by way of comparison, but the curiosity lay in the
fact that these feelings left him whenever he was being diligent in his
search for the demon. It was a feeling ironically akin to having a
migraine headache for which the only cure was to watch television.
The longest he had been without the Scent so far was three
days, and it had caused him to panic, for without the Scent, he was
without the Way. It made itself known to him in subtle traces of
decay. It whispered to him on the winds, and sometimes it was faint,
and sometimes it was just a little blurry. Bitter vapors seeped into his
lungs from without. Even with the Scent in his nose, there was a new
set of sour emotions that flooded his spirit. What Joshua had no way
of knowing was that he was feeding off of Ixxir’s metaphysical traces,
and that they in turn carried something of the demon’s motive over
into Joshua’s being. Mingled in with those tides was the melancholy
that now seemed to seep out of Timothy Karacas’s life, much like
stagnant water leaking through the minute folds and hidden apertures
at the bottom of a cardboard box. Cancer had a taste all its own, and
Joshua recognized it from the horrid nights in his cell. He knew now
that he would have died within two or three months had Ixxir- how did

25
 26

he know its name?- not slayed him prematurely. Still, he was pissed.
The Scent came to him stronger now, and he wondered if he wasn’t
getting infinitely closer to its original source.
There was a sour breath in the air as he approached his target,
and it had made him gag from time to time as he followed it. It was
truly amazing, he mused, that he was still able to breathe and sniff out
the Scent despite the fact that he had lost a major capacity of both his
lungs in the attack. He had seen, with his dead eyes, his internal
assailant inhaling the wet organ. He was smelling the stink of
heartache, and he didn’t yet know the story of where it was coming
from, but subtle hints were slowly making themselves visible to him.
The mere act of putting one foot in front of the other had exhausted
him but it was not nearly as bad as being alive had been.
Nothing was as bad as that.
In death, he had located a new lease on life, however tenuous,
and a renewed sense of purpose that had been lacking in his living
existence for close to a decade now came back into his being. When
his mother died, his entire world had effectually ended. Joshua had
been hoping to make the old lady’s acquaintance after death, but thus
far he’d been robbed of that wish. His mother- God or whatever bless
her- had died long ago and with none of the torment of Joshua’s
current nether state. He felt that to find the demon that had gutted
him so efficiently would bring him closer to a state of being with his
mother and the life that led along the roads beyond that would
eventually lead to a state of total nothingness.
All he wanted was not to be anymore.

Joshua died at the age of twenty-seven. He had come close to

death many times prior to this- the two most notable occasions having
been when he’d almost bled to death (in the back of a police car after
getting part of his earlobe sliced off in a bar fight when he was only
twenty) and later on in life, when he was battling stomach cancer. But
once he was out of the stone walls that had held him in their embrace
for all but three years of his adult life and was running through the
desert towards his freedom, he thought he was safe.
He had never been so incorrect in his short life.
The sirens that sang to him had not been an hallucination. This
was the part he was certain of. As to what exactly these voices were,
and what they said, and why they had chosen him to be their
audience, he had no idea at all. But they were speaking, and they
were speaking to him.
What Joshua had no way of knowing was that the cancer in his
stomach had not been completely eradicated with his operation two

26
 27

years earlier. A small but significant percentage had remained inside

of him, and now it had spread out to his liver and his pancreas.

It knew that without a host, it would be subject to the physical

laws- such as gravity, hunger and vulnerability. As long as it stayed
inside of its host, it could perform miracles- such as walking straight
through solid walls. In the moistened coils of Joshua’s flesh- there, or
in the flesh of any other being unfortunate enough to have made its
acquaintance- it was invincible.
Just as Joshua had spent his time in this cell, waiting for a
release that would never come, it too had been biding its time, saving
its strength and plotting its escape from the drudgery of its
incarcerated existence. Once its reserves had been fully restores, it
began singing to its host to stir the man into action, and it sang the
song that Joshua most wanted to hear at the precise moment in time-
‘Jailbreak’ by Thin Lizzy.
Curled tightly into a salmon-colored ball inside of Joshua
Tauble’s stomach, it sang as though its life depended on it- which, in a
way, it did. There was an indeterminate amount of time that it could
spend inside of each host, and its instinct told it that the time to leave
was drawing near. To suck upon a dead creature was to bring on the
plague, and Ixxir didn’t need that shit, not right now. And so, Ixxir
sang.
At first, the voice Joshua heard was plaintive and faint, almost
sweet in its tone. In time, though, the song became more demanding
of Joshua’s attention. His incarceration kept him separated from the
other inmates in the prison- even lifers and other deathers such as
himself- but Joshua was sure that the other inmates could hear the
voices emanating from his body.
Whatever it was that was inside of him had promised him
freedom- with nothing more than a whisper- it was made abundantly
clear that all he had to do was to follow the directions. It would occur
to Joshua as he lay dying, less than two hundred miles away from
here, that he had never thought to question the voice in his head, but
he also supposed that to question it would have brought about the
utter evaporation of hope. Aside from killing him, the voice had come
through on its promises. He had gotten out and tasted the air once
again, and it was true enough that he had slipped his chain and made
a valiant effort in running for his life across the desert.
He could hear the muffled click of his lucky coins hitting the floor
in the pocket of his work pants. The coins were two 1976 American
Bicentennial silver dollars that his grandfather had given to him shortly
before he died. And if he heard that, back there, that meant that he

27
 28

was indeed out of his cell. It was true, all of it, and he couldn’t believe
his luck.
The next thing he knew after tasting the wall and its contents was
that he was standing- naked, wet, shivering and cold- in one of the
main corridors of the regular part of the prison. This corridor was not
on Death Row. He had done what no man in the state of Nevada had
ever done before- he had gotten away from the Row without having to
face the executioner. That still left the problem of escaping from the
grounds of the prison itself but Joshua now had great faith in whatever
it was that had gotten him this far. Surely, there was some divine
plan to all of this.
He figured that he was only a puppet for all the great things that
would happen, and he didn’t mind it at all. Joshua had thought-
foolishly- that striking a bargain with the demon would ensure his own
longevity. He would not live long enough to know how gravely
incorrect he had been in his way of thinking. He didn’t know that he
was dealing with a demon, but it would not have mattered anyway.
Walking through one wall lead to walking through another, and soon
he felt the marshy sway of the dead yellow grass in the prison yard as
it shifted beneath his bare feet.
He couldn’t believe it. He had never been a lover of nature,
but he was swept with an urge to kiss and fondle every blade of grass
as if each and every one of them contained a tiny fragment of his own
life- which, in a peculiar way Joshua would never fully understand-
they did.

Joshua did as he had been told and walked in the direction he

thought was the best- to the West. Beyond the desert lay California,
and that seemed to him as good a place to start off from as any other.
He didn’t have any particular need to go there or to be there, but an
agenda for a man in his position was a good thing to have. His days
would now be without structure, and without a firm goal in his mind
Joshua thought he might wander stupidly and do something to get
himself arrested and brought back to prison. And he wasn’t about to
be thrown back in there.
Travel was easier at night, but it would have been difficult to
sleep during the day, given the heat and his usual rest patterns, so he
slept here and there in cat-naps. There was no need for a second or
third option of escape from a robbery situation if he could simply walk
through walls.
There would be nothing to stop him, now.
It was at that point when he felt the wet ripping somewhere in
his chest. As it increased its size to facilitate its escape from the body
of its host, Ixxir had punctured the lining of Joshua’s visceral pleura,

28
 29

and now the lower portion of his left lung was taking on blood. His
throat tissue had been stretched to over three feet in diameter as
Ixxir’s body slowly re-knitted itself and yawned out from within.
Joshua’s head had started ripping at his mouth, and it went all the way
across his face.
Joshua Tauble never laid living eyes upon his assailant. He
never saw the freakish reptilian form as it worked its way out of his
lungs through his throat, bending his jaw down until it snapped and
shattered, sending slivery bone fragments into the roof of his mouth.
He never saw one horned leg touching the ground next to his corpse
and then steadying itself there before pulling the other leg free from
his esophagus. Joshua never saw the yellow teeth still gummed with
strips of his flesh, the nubbled skin still wet with his life juices, or the
taloned foot that shoved his body to one side while the demon then
shook itself dry in the moonlight.

29
 30

ABOVE, WITHIN, BELOW

Shelby Dunn had died at the age of seven. He was thirty-four years
old today- but, for the moment, he was lost in the memory of the day
his life had been snuffed out of him, and snuffed out in much the same
way that a candle might be extinguished. His first real memory of
being a living, conscious being that he recalled as an adult was the
memory of dying.
The block on which he grew up had been developed slowly over
a period of years, growing from a secluded village of single-family
homes to an outgrowth of simple single-family homes interspersed
with several large and ugly sets of town homes and apartment
buildings that now threatened to eat up the landscape surrounding
them. Shelby and his mother had been there since the first year and
when they moved in, the houses had been about two or three hundred
yards apart. No one was sure how far this little plot of land would go
as far as its development was concerned, and so they were initially
cautious about over-extending their desire to build upon the site.
After some time had passed, it was decided that more building was
indeed required to maximize the potential of the area, and whenever
the foundations for these new buildings were being dug out of the
earth, be they apartments or more single-family homes, a mountain of
dirt would accumulate next to the site; depending upon the depth and
the size in square footage of the foundation, these mountains could
sometimes rise to forty feet or taller in height, and they were as wide
as they were tall- the ideal place for kids to play. Dirt was soft, and it
was hard to fall off of a mountain as squat as these temporary
mountains were. By the time someone noticed them, they were gone.
If the mountains were in existence long enough, a series of paths
would form, with weeds and other assorted shrub spouting in a frame
around the children’s untrammeled footsteps.

One day, Shelby, and a smattering of the more industrious kids

in the neighborhood- Jimmy Latham, Mike Daniels, and Billy and
Tommy Coogan- had decided to dig a hole from the top of one of the
mountains. It was, by far, the largest of all the mountains, ever, and
they wanted to dig straight down into its base and after the main vein
had been established, various tributaries could then be worked out so
that they would have a system of tunnels in the mountain that they
could use to hide from other people as well as each other whenever
the need arose. They began at eight-thirty in the morning. It was a
Saturday, and Shelby’s mother had suffered a hard Friday night, so
she was more than eager to get him out of the house so that she
might acquire a few hours of decent sleep.

30
 31

It had been Shelby’s idea that they get shovels instead of using
their hands to dig with, and it had been his idea as well to assign Billy
to the task of carrying the buckets full of dirt down to the base of the
mountain so that the accumulated pile would not fall into the hole once
they had started to make progress. He had always had a bit of the
administrator in him, and this was one of its earliest demonstrations.
And from a far corner, Ixxir waited.
By noon, their little hole was three and a half feet deep, and by
two o’clock Shelby reckoned that it was almost six feet deep, and at
least as wide across in diameter. They had hit a vein of earth where
the dirt had been packed loosely and with a good deal of gravel mixed
in, so it had been easier than they thought to dig as deep as they had
to pull it all out. At two o’clock, the hole became two and a half feet
deeper.
At two o’clock, things changed for Shelby Dunn. At two o’clock,
Tommy Coogan had been in the hole for over an hour and had decided
that he’d had enough of being there.
‘It’s your turn, asshole,’ Tommy moaned. ‘I’m tired of doing
this.’
‘But I’m the foreman,’ Shelby whined in executorial protest. ‘I’m
supposed to tell you guys what to do and where to dig so this gets
done as s-‘
‘And all you do is tell other people what to do?’
‘That’s right, and the job’s getting done.’
‘But it’s your turn to do some digging.’
‘No, it’s not.’
Tommy came back stronger. ‘Yes, it is.’
Shelby stared him down. ‘It’s not my turn to dig.’
‘Fuck you.’
Tommy grabbed his knees, pulling him down. After two
punches, Shelby was out cold. But Ixxir certainly saw it, and thought
it delightful to see.
And his brother agreed when Tommy suggested that they bury
Shelby in the hole to see how he liked being covered head to toe in
freezing dirt.
The brothers Coogan, Tommy and Billy, were standing directly
behind him now, each of them with a full bucket of dirt in either one of
their hands and malevolent smiles on each of their faces.
‘Pour your bucket in, too.’
‘What are you doing?!’ Mike screamed, suddenly realizing with
utter revulsion what they now intended to do to Shelby. ‘You’ll kill
him!’
Tommy and Billy only grinned at him. There was nothing else to
do.

31
 32

Tommy was the first among them to dump his buckets. The one
in the left hand went first, and the one in his right hand followed hard
on the heels of the first one. By the time Tommy’s hand had drained
his first bucket and was starting to tip his second, Billy started to
dump his first bucket. All told, it was over and done with, eighteen
pounds of earth, in less than eleven seconds; shrugging fatalistically
Mike then poured his bucket in after theirs.
As soon as the first grains of earth started to sprinkle onto his
face Shelby knew that something was up. He tried to shift his feet into
a new and better position for climbing up the side walls of their little
hole, so that he could maybe see what games were being played when
he wasn’t watching over things- but his shoes were locked, the instep
of his right shoe wedged so tightly against the toe of his left that he
could feel his left foot begin the throb painfully. Then the sprinkles of
dirt became more than that, and upon looking up into the sky Shelby
Dunn was rewarded with a shocking mouthful of pale brown dirt, the
color of shit, clumped with a tad of moisture and packed solidly into
the shape of a plastic bucket.
His instinct was to recoil and spit out the dirt, but he couldn’t.
The earth had surrounded him completely. His legs felt as though
they were bound together, and his arms were locked into place at his
breast line.
The demon was on him in a matter of seconds, passing through
dirt and stone alike with equal efficiency. This had been the event it’d
been waiting for, and it was obliged to strike.

Mike Daniels was getting jittery, not knowing what to do with

himself while the two other boys scrunches down, trying desperately
to dig Shelby out of the premature grave that they had put him into.
‘Should we just leave him here, like this? Billy asked.
‘No,’ Tommy said, and admonished his brother to keep digging.
‘We’re murderers,’ Mike said matter-of-factly, as if he were
trying out the way it sounded. ‘You know that? That’s what we are-
murderers.’
By the time Tommy and Billy decided that Shelby had enough
and began to dig him out, Shelby Dunn had been clinically dead for
over seven seconds. By the time they were able to clear out the space
around his head, their friend Shelby had been dead for over two and a
half minutes.
‘I think I got the top of his head!’ Billy shrieked.
‘Hold it!’ Tommy said, clearing away the dirt from around the
strand of hair his brother was holding up. ‘I think I can get to his
mouth!’
‘If you do that,’ Mike said, excitedly, ‘That’ll buy us some time.’

32
 33

‘And that way we can take our time digging him out,’ Billy said.
‘Without hurting him.’
‘Any more than he already is.’
By the time they cleared the dirt away from his face and mouth,
the demon had already done its work and was well on its way to
fulfilling its mission directives. Always onward, never upward.
Tommy was the first to see that his lips were blue.
‘Holy shit,’ he muttered, leaning back and sitting on his rear end.
‘What?’ Mike asked.
‘We are in a hell of a lot of trouble. Look.’
Mike gave a moan and then put his face in his hands.
Billy just giggled and sensed that Tommy was getting angry with
him, rolling his left hand into a fist and pretended to be in the middle
of a coughing fit that lasted for several seconds and would have
continued a lot longer than that if Shelby hadn’t started to cough on
his own, too.
Tommy sprang to his feet and cleared away whatever dirt he
could.
‘Are you alright?’ Mike screamed, scooping the dirt around
Shelby out of the hole. ‘If we dig him out first, she’ll still believe that
the whole thing was just an accident. And then we won’t get into
trouble.’
‘Not too much trouble, anyway,’ Mike assented.
Shelby could faintly hear the voices above him, and then all
around him as he was hoisted out of his grave. The first real
recollection he had was of sitting with them in his mother’s house as
they cleaned him up with a dish rag soaked in ice cold water from the
tap in the kitchen.
‘Mouth, Shelby croaked, spitting out a blob of mud.
‘What?’ Billy said.
‘His mouth,’ Mike said, impatiently. ‘Squeeze it ion his mouth.’
‘Huh?’
‘He’s thirsty. His throat’s dry.’
Dirt and water spilled down his chin from a brown cup.
‘Are you okay?’ Mike asked, full of guilt.
‘I think so,’ Shelby said.
What none of them knew, not even Shelby, was that while
Shelby was under the dirt, he had perished. Dead- gone for good.
Now, with his body alive, his soul was gone- gone for good. This
left Shelby as an eternally empty vessel. There were a thousand
things that could not touch him now, because he was dead in so many
ways. But he wouldn’t get sick, and on the rare occasion when he did
his body didn’t have any trouble fighting off infection. He could still
breathe and his heart would continue to pump his blood throughout his

33
 34

body but all these things were now nothing more than a matter of
course. Emotions, love in particular, were lost on him, and they would
never affect him. The best part of him was gone and it would now
never take flower. But such things happened from time to time in this
realm, and Ixxir enjoyed the favors that such tasks earned for it. The
rift between heaven and hell had been breached, and there was a need
for fresh souls, to keep the machines and entities churning. Children
were the best targets usually, because they did not know how to fight
possession with any degree of vigor, and because their souls hadn’t
yet been stained with the soils of thirty or forty years in life existence.
All the time that Shelby Dunn was growing up, after that day in
the dirt, he felt different- different from anyone else and different from
his old self- as if some part of him was damaged or missing. There
was no way he could ever have put his finger on it by defining it in a
phrase, and he would never have associated any of his feelings of
temporal displacement with that day up (in?) the mountain next to his
house, but that was in fact where things had started getting all
different for him. There were times while he was growing up where
Shelby felt ill-equipped to deal with the events that were happening all
around him, and there were many times when he felt as if he were
somehow above it all, and only passing through life as opposed to
those who surrounded him, who were invariably stuck in it. The
feelings had all centered upon his lack of feeling, and his lack of feeling
would pull him and prod him onward throughout his life, leading him to
the place where he would give up his life. The soul he lost was just as
happy to be without him, because it had never been fully developed in
the first place. For a moment, he had bathed in the seas of those
being newly born, and those being made freshly dead.

34
 35

SALMON OVERCAST
The radio was jammed- in between a classical station and a snowy
bankful of sour broadcast static- and as a result, Georgina Chudwick
had a headache.
Welcome to a Thursday morning as it happened in this neck of
the woods. Sight of the forest that now lay on both sides of the road
was denied to motorists due to the fog creeping in from the ocean-
some seven or eight miles east of here. It allowed only the odd sprig
of dwarf pine to poke through the muck in the air. Even with the
driver’s side window open only an inch or two, the chill inside the car
was soon becoming intolerable for her. Her own breath frosted the
windshield in front of her chattering face with bizarre, spiraling fugues
of steam.
The girl dumped her lipstick stained cigarette out the window
and then rolled it up, cursing the winds outside. She slowed down
pensively after the next stoplight when she saw from out the corner of
her eye a police car pulling up behind her at an impolite cruising
altitude.
The sky danced an ominous gray- no sunlight or visible clouds.
Now with this traffic ticket, she’d have gotten three in less than eight
months, and with court supervision on the previous two, they would
screw her ass to the wall on this one. Maybe she’d even lose her
license.
But she saw that maybe she wouldn’t get this speeding ticket at
all; the cruiser now seemed to be wavering in the treads of its cause
and pulling back away from her rear bumper. The cop turned off on
Sunnyvale Road after following her for another two blocks. A sudden
chill ran through her.
Nothing of Susan Baker’s remains would be found for several
weeks-and when they were found, they wouldn’t be here in Oak’s
Bridge, but rather downstream in a small village named Rockton. By
that time, most of what remained of her would be unrecognizable.
The police would have to use her dental history to positively identify
her body. No one would know for sure, not for quite some time
afterward, but when she heard news that she as missing, somehow
she just knew that Susan Baker- her friend since the summer prior to
second grade- was already long dead.

35
 36

DEMONOMANIA
As it ran under the moonlight, its arms dangling between its legs, Ixxir
marveled at the way things had worked out just as it had planned.
Ixxir had tricked Joshua Tauble, and had done so with ease- just as
the beast had planned on doing from the start of their little game. A
soft mind was easy to deceive, but Joshua did have spirit- and that
same spirit would allow Ixxir to walk around free for at least a little
while before the decay that oxygen brought on would start to set in.
Joshua had never been within reach of eternal life, not even when he
was within direct contact with this beast. Ixxir would go on to live
many new lives, but Joshua Tauble's body would be left behind as
nothing more significant than a spent vessel. Ixxir didn't know how
long it would be able to walk before it had to re-insinuate itself into the
body of another host, so it wanted to leg it speedy for as long as was
demoniacally possible.
Ixxir had simply taken its leave of him, as it had done many
times before. It had stolen the life out of him without remorse, and
this it did because it had to- there was no other way for a demon of its
lowly class to survive in the physical world without a soul and that was
what Joshua Tauble had so thoughtfully provided for it. The soul it
had taken from Joshua Tauble would allow for greater mobility, but it
would still have to squeeze itself into something to gain nourishment.
Changing its size was not a problem- in fact, it was one of the
primary characteristics of this particular class of demon. Altering the
physical size was one of its main functions, and it facilitated the end of
being a parasite. Its job was to eat things from the inside out. It
occurred to Ixxir that to move passively might preserve some of its
energy, and so it decided to shut down, in a way.
It moved where the wind carried it- on a pollen grain, or perhaps
the petal of a flower. Its size varied according to its assignment and
its needs for the occasion, but one thing that never changed was the
fact that it was never really there. Ixxir spent its lifetimes trapped
between two worlds- those of the physical and spiritual.
The wind blew to the northwest today, and after it had morphed
into a pod seed-sized lichen, Ixxir landed on a cornstalk in a field of
many such and decided that this was as good a place as any for it to
take its rest. It would be able to suck off the nutrients of the plant
and make its escape shortly before the harvest if that's what it
wanted.
This malefic paramecium had slid its way into Joshua Tauble's
insides over two years earlier from across the corridor, where it had
resided in the innards of Philip 'Tarzan' Hackenbocker. Ixxir had been
able to sense another cancer present in Phillip's system, not of its own

36
 37

decoratum, and knew that it needed to escape. It moved itself down

into Phillip's bladder and allowed itself to be expelled with his urine
flow.
Sitting in a Folger's Crystals coffee can among a small pile of
fecal matter, Ixxir was allowed sufficient time to plot what its next
move might be. It knew it couldn't exist for more than a few hours
without a host of some sort, even if that host was a roach. Being self-
sufficient was a joy wasted on higher demons. The lower forms, such
as this parasitic infector, needed a bio-sustenance system so that it
could keep its hold on the physical world- however tenuous that hold
might be- and only after shooting down several other options did Ixxir
will itself into a vapor formation that floated across the corridor into
Joshua's lungs. Once Ixxir had been breathed in it could establish its
stronghold within the convict's body. Ixxir hadn't very much liked
being inside the bodies of prison inmates- they tended to be sicker, ill-
fed and drug-addled and it ruined the demon's fun in ruining their
bodies when they themselves had beaten it to the punch; there wasn't
as much for it to feed upon and sometimes the act of digestion made it
ill. How it had gotten itself incarcerated, it had no idea, but it knew
that it needed to get out. Two years of rest should have been enough
to prepare it for the effort, and it had been so- the break had been
successful, and the boy had followed its beautiful whims.

37
 38

THE VENETIAN EFFECT

His sunken cheeks had been kissed with a peppering of brown bits of
his beard, and whenever he sat still for too long, he thought he could
smell his cancer- not a pleasant sensation. It was a combination of
two parts of body odor, three parts diabetic sweat to three parts of
that nasty soap-scented antiseptic hospital cleanser. There was the
familiar spike of his own urine in the air, and the sweet tang of seminal
fluid seemed to surround him where he now sat, although he had no
idea why that would be; he hadn't been able to achieve an honest-to-
God erection in three or four months. Timothy found the thought of
sex with anyone- including sweet Melanie- to be distasteful and even
somewhat nauseating in that it would involve physical activity on his
part. Being almost constantly in this frame of mind made it hard for
him to romanticize the reality of seeing Melanie lying before him on
their bed, with her legs spread open, the greasy pink crevice of her
cunt widely splayed for him.
Melanie had noticed Timothy's lack of desire and subsequently
lousy performance- when he was too exhausted to finish himself off-
and it was only then that she began to make inquiries about his
health. Prior to this, she hadn't noticed his weight loss, or his lack of
appetite, or anything, even though they had lived together for over
two years at that point and had become accustomed to one another's
habitual proclivities; but once the sex failed, only then did Melanie sit
up and take notice. She insisted that he go to a doctor, to see why he
was so tired all the time- and why he couldn't fuck her anymore. That
was when Timothy first started trying to tell her the truth, and by this
time, of course, it was far too late for him to start.
Everything that came out of his mouth was, by now, suspect to
her and after a while, even the truth sounded like a lie to him when he
tried to speak it. There was a breakdown of sorts between the two of
them, and Timothy supposed it to be entirely of his own making, when
in fact that may or may not have been the case in this instance. When
they had been having their first intimate conversations, Timothy felt
like Melanie was already inside of him, on the inside looking out upon
the world through his visage. She obsessed on her own problems, and
he didn't mind that she didn't care about his problems. In fact, it was
kind of endearing to him. It allowed him to forget his own troubles, if
for a few hours.
But for all her ill usage and effect, there was a certain element to
her, carnal though it may have been, but their time together had been
filled with moments that he was at a loss to replace. Having Melanie
around had stuffed his life with more memories than he would have on
his own. In that respect, he owed his life to her- or at least, what his

38
 39

life used to be, because when she left, Melanie took every last
molecule of that life with her. It was the algebra of agony for Timothy
to assimilate all the tiny little betrayals and correlating trip-switches
that had led him to this day. To this desolation. The world still
throbbed on all around him, but Timothy was too numbed by the loss
of Melanie to endure it. Maybe it was only a dying man's reflection,
but he was grateful- if not for the lifetime with her that he had been
cheated of, then for the slice of her life that she had seen fit to bestow
upon him. She had created for him a life in many ways better than he
had ever thought possible....
And now that she was gone, that life was gone, and he was
dying.

He came back into himself and tried to piece together how he'd
spent his day. He hadn't done very much of anything since arising at
eleven o'clock two nights before, and he felt much too fatigued to
sweep up the mess he'd made on the living room floor or to wash the
dishes that were still collecting in the sink in the kitchenette since
before Melanie had left him. He hadn't been able to eat solid foods
comfortably for a few weeks now, but that didn't stop him from trying.
If it was possible for a man to will himself back into a state of relative
good health, Timothy Karacas would be that man.
And yet, at the same time, he thought in anticipation of what
rest he might have after he had died. There would be no more
nothing to agitate him, no further miscellaneous bullshit to draw him
asunder. If there was any peace to be found in death, he wanted to
find it- even if it was a cheap sort of peace- but if a black void was all
that was going to be offered to him, he would accept that as well, if
only to breathe again.
And dead or alive, all Timothy really wanted now was peace of
mind.
He was sitting alone in a bare apartment that had been
furnished, only weeks before, with the obscene clutterings of an
overgrown teenaged nymph- including the requisite inflatable palm
tree, a poster of two kittens cuddling in a field of overgrown grass, and
an upright Mickey Mouse push button telephone with six prerecorded
messages that could be used in place of a ringer to let you know that
someone was calling you. Now, in place of the inflatable palm tree
there was a thumb-sized potted cactus that had been given to him by
an old acquaintance from work- the cactus being, of course, the only
plant that Timothy couldn't kill.
The cactus being, of course, the last plant that Timothy did kill.
And now, Timothy was left with nothing except boxes of her
trash.

39
 40

The only things left hanging on the walls of the apartment in

place of the poster with the kittens on it were reproductions of works
by H.R. Giger and Robert Mapplethorpe that he'd purchased a long
time before he had even met Melanie, and which had been sitting in
the closet since the day she had moved in. Now, he saw what his life
had been reduced to without her. He was back to what he really was.
It was hard to lose one's intended life spouse- if that's what Melanie
was, and she always insisted that she was, even going so far as
putting a slip of paper with her beeper number on it into his wallet, so
that she could be contacted in case he were ever in some sort of
accident.
The key word in that sentence was ever.
Ever was a long time, or it used to be.
And now here he was. Who he was.
Nothing.
He had always been too old for his age, and Melanie had been
somewhat immature. Now, instead of the precious if precarious
balance they had achieved between the two of them, Timothy had
found himself living in the apartment of a seventy year-old man.
There was a print of Black Aria by Michael Wm. Kaluta hanging on the
wall next to the refrigerator, and once upon a time, it had been one of
his favorite pieces among those that he personally owned. It depicted
an angel's battle against a demon that had attacked him from behind,
and so Timothy could really relate to that, what with his cancer and all.
He felt as though he'd been unfairly blindsided by some
malignant genetic mutation. His parents had done this to him. The
same living sickness they had evinced throughout his years of knowing
them had now infected him, and his genetic association with them had
condemned him.
There was no point in getting out of bed, because there was no
point in him laying down in the first place. There was no point in
waking up, because there was no point in sleeping at all. Without his
daily work routine and the few nights a week that Melanie had been
home, his days had become elastic in the extreme. Mealtimes came
and went with no food being eaten and only his stool medication
served to punctuate his hours.
He could feel himself starting to hate her now, just a tiny bit
more with each paling breath; a process as insidious and as
unstoppable as the very process of aging. He was feeling things about
Melanie now that he had never wanted to feel before in his life. He
wanted her to die.
Timothy wanted her to pay for breaking his heart, and for taking
away his only happiness. Whatever he had once felt for her had now
inverted itself, and with the opposite effect it once had upon his heart.

40
 41

And if it were possible for a man to be dying from a broken

heart...
He remembered miracles with her, driving through the country,
looking for garage sales where they would stock up on odds and ends
to populate their nick-knack shelves at home, and he remembered
how such trips had caused them to discuss the house that they would
eventually buy together once she had graduated with her Master's and
he had started his ascent, and it was always going to be someday soon
but somehow it never was; but all these memories had seized up his
emotions. He was far too spent to ingest such thoughts comfortably,
because each good memory was accompanied by a negative emotion
equal in volume that also surpassed the memories in strength. There
was no way to even think about Melanie without feeling that sort of
slackening animosity for her.
Over and over, he was stricken with the fact that he had not
been ready to say goodbye to life with her, and to all that had gone
with it.
In addition to his cancer, Timothy Karacas was also the victim of
a degenerative disease that was slowly eating the skin from his face.
It was a new tissue-disintegrating group, a streptococcal strain known
as necrotizing fasciitis, and its rapid advancement had been aided by
the presence of his cancer. The virus had found a point of entry
through a pock-mark on Timothy's thigh and had soon manifestations
of the virus were reaching as far north as his face. He'd always had a
lot of weird problems with his skin- up through and including
malignant melanoma- but even his specialist saw no hope in Timothy's
recovery now. There were simply too many complications due to
Timothy's weakened state for the doctors to rehabilitate him.
Timothy's doctor admitted that the cheery diagnosis indicative of
remission that had been issued in December had been false and short-
sighted, and in fact the few months in between then and now had
allowed the disease a stronger foothold on their patient that would
further complicate any surgery or chemical treatments. Quite simply,
Timothy Karacas would be spending the rest of his life in various
shades of Hades, never seeing the light outside his window or feeling
the sunlight upon his face. He'd breached the known barriers of
medical science.
At the time, Timothy appreciated his honesty, but he wept
silently in the hallway outside the doctor's office, his fist screwed
violently into his mouth, when the news of his condition finally hit
home with him. It had been explained to him in painstaking detail
that, usually, this type of strep fasciitis was curable, but the melanoma
had created many upon many complications, not the least of which
was the patient's state of mental fatigue and emotional lethargy. Each

41
 42

aberration was feeding off of the others, and Timothy could feel them
collectively gathering strength within him, getting ready for their final
assault.
His cancer was circling the waters around him now, selecting the
moment of its final strike. Melanoma is nothing if not a notoriously
slippery beast, and it's nigh on impossible to wrangle, the skin being
the largest organ of the human body. If you think you have it under
control, the tumors will only turn around to bite you in the ass- quite
literally- when you least expect the disease to return. He had been
through two false remissions before now and cursed himself for
allowing his doctors to fool him with more medical guesswork, yet
again.
As he drove home- on side streets, and never at more than
twenty-five miles per hour- Timothy remembered the moments of his
first diagnosis. It had been almost four years ago now but the
memories were still fresh.
He'd been in his last year of law school when his usual adult
acne acted up something fierce the week before homecoming. If
Timothy hadn't been so vain as to see a doctor about it to prescribe
some medicine to clear him up in time for the floats and the parades,
his cancer might've gone undetected for quite some time. But he had.
And it hadn't.
Before the first touchdown was scored in the homecoming game,
Timothy had been to see two of the three leading cancer experts in the
state. They were all happy that it was caught as early as it had been,
but they also warned Timothy of the nature of melanoma, and how it's
never simply gotten rid of. There was a language endemic to the
world of bizarre skin diseases, and soon Timothy had memorized this
strange dialect.
There were words within the English language that Timothy
hadn't been able to even pronounce only two weeks prior to his
diagnosis, and now he had spoken those as many as seven or eight
times in any one of the three minute conversations he had on the
telephone with his doctor every day. Timothy was soon familiar with
the phrases of sympathy and pity that spewed from the lips of those
folks who would still be alive after his funeral.
But his funeral didn't come. By some quirk of fate, he was
allowed to glimpse a fragment of hope in his life. Cruelty came in all
forms, he was soon to learn, but one always hoped against hope that
past experiences would not prove to be correct. Temptation came not
only from hell but from above, because it was everywhere and all
around.
A sort of remission was achieved, but not without the requisite
paying of the piper. There was no peace- ever- in knowing you could

42
 43

die at any moment. It robbed you of the ability to make long-range

plans- for anything. He'd held off on proposing marriage to Melanie-
who had hinted strongly that it was an expected thing within the next
six months or so- for over a year because of the cancer thing he'd had
going on.
But that had been his third bout with cancer. The one he had to
hide from Melanie. It was funny how fucked things could get in three
months.
But he knew what it was like to be dying for months on end.
He had been to this place before, and he didn't like it.
Timothy knew just all too well what was going on. Its stink was
upon him, and he smelled ashes on his breath when he awoke in the
morning, his body tied amongst the sheets on his bed. Anyone in his
condition should have been in the hospital, but Timothy had no money
left to do what he knew should have been done. It was on principle
that he had not wanted to leave behind an insurmountable debt as his
living legacy to the planet Earth, and going into the hospital now would
only insure that his end would be viewed in exactly that way. His
health insurance had been cut off for a while by now- he was no longer
certain of exactly how long ago it had been- and with that same
termination came the news that his health and dental benefits through
his HMO at work had ceased a few weeks earlier. Not that it had ever
helped very much, but still.
It was something.
His medical bills were staggering; even with his medical
insurance picking up most of the tab, Timothy was responsible for
almost seventy-five thousand dollars in fees to his primary physician
alone. That was to leave unmentioned his various debts to all the
various specialists he had seen at various times over the past year. In
total, those amounted to a little less than two hundred thousand
dollars. Over a quarter of a million dollars in debt, when before his
illness he'd only been making thirty-seven five, and now he wasn't
working at all. It was more than just a little ridiculous- and sad, too,
when all things were considered. He was sure to die at some time in
the coming year, and Timothy knew that he would spend that time
pinching every penny he had, trying to stretch every dollar that came
in to him, hoping that he would die sooner so that his money didn't
totally run out and he would be evicted.
If he had to die- and he had to die, he could see this now.
Anyone who was ever this ill had to die to escape the pain. But if he
had to die- he wanted to die at home. He wanted to die without
worrying about how he looked to those around, so rosy and disturbed
with health.
His doctor had prescribed Phenobarbital for the pain, but it either

43
 44

wasn't working the way it was supposed to or else Timothy had built
up a tolerance to the medication. Diazepam was the clinical name for
a more purely-administered form of the drug, but his doctor had been
reluctant to over-prescribe such medicines, even in Timothy's case.
He had always been good about following doctor's orders when it came
to prescription drugs, but his doctor could just see Timothy keeling
over dead at home and the police finding all these prescriptions
littering the apartment.
Admittedly, some of the pills that were found and subsequently
bagged as evidence had only been placebos prescribed by Dr.
Alamackazine with the best of intentions. Alec argued the fact that
many patients had a habit of poisoning their bodies by overmedicating
themselves with prescription medicines. He had seen it happen from
time to time.
[He was brought in for questioning once the pills had tested out
as being placebo in their chemical makeup but he was released within
two hours when it was learned that he had been in Hawaii at the time
of Timothy's death. What was not known was that he had funded
himself with Blue Cross payment checks that Timothy had signed over
to him.]
But there was no way that Timothy could have known anything
of this.
Anything in between the parentheses happens after you’re dead.

He was living on placebos and legitimate pain pills, and the

fellow who had prescribed them under the table for him had a sad face
for Tim's plight, and he'd often prescribed the pills free of charge, off
of a pad of smudged doctor's stationery he'd purchased from a friend
of his who had broken into a local STD clinic and stolen some random
supplies. He'd made the man's acquaintance through Kraggess Feebes
from work, when Kraggess had asked Timothy if he wanted to go in on
an eight ball of cocaine. Timothy had said no, he didn't have the
money, but decided at the last minute to accompany Kraggess in the
car.
Once they were there, Kraggess signaled from the balcony for
Timothy to come up from the car, and he had followed Kraggess
inside. Kraggess said later that he was afraid of getting ripped off by
the guy and thought that by having a buddy with him the guy might
think twice about pulling a fast one. Timothy thought for sure that it
was just because Kraggess was scared, period. Kraggess was always
getting into habits far too dangerous for his normal temperament, and
coke had changed Kraggess in the last six or seven months that
Timothy had worked with him. It was time for downhill turnaround,
but Timothy had to admit that he was in the same place as he

44
 45

remembered Kraggess being when he'd last seen him. The pills,
especially the Percodan, did a lot to effectively mask his pain, but
nothing the doctors gave him, either legally or illegally, did anything to
alleviate his discomfort.
Timothy saw that he had no reason to fight addiction, be it
mental or physical, because there would be no life to return to in a
state of what most people would term sobriety. That's not what he
would have called it. Maybe it was nothing more than being regular, if
that's what one could call it. The pills, whether they actually worked
on his body or not- although he could usually feel if they weren't-
made him feel the way he used to, or rather, the way he thought he
remembered feeling.
But this new bout with the big C, being so recently acquired, was
associated in his mind with Melanie's departure and his own
subsequent demise, thus nullifying the effects of the pills, forcing him
to endure the pain of his death without any real pharmological
abatement.
After he died, two weeks from now, it would seem to him as if
the period of time from when Melanie had left him for good until his
death was the longest time in his life. Timothy passed his days in
psychic torment; he passed away in psychic torment. Having lost his
chosen twin, he wished desperately for either a merciful death or for
the safe return of the one person who had made this miserable fucking
life worth living. For the first time ever, he knew what love actually
meant, and in the fullness of time he discovered that it wasn't all
good. It was also damn hard to live without, once he'd tasted the true
species.
The Goddess of Love seemed to him to be a speckled beast, like
some sort of gargantuan, god-pounding destructive force that
obliterated any internal organs that trembled across her path. He
wasn't sure if this divine species called Love was personified in
Melanie, but that was the exact spot where his choice of companions
had worked wonders for his perception. He saw nothing bad in
Melanie, but if he thought about it, she had fucked him over several
times, and in ways that most people would have given up on her
altogether. She treated him like shit, but their times of reconciliation
made up for it. He didn't get off on the pain of their particular
situation, but the moments he could pass in her company sometimes
made him forget that the word pain even existed.
December had been the sweetest month, but only because he
hadn't known it would be the last month. Each memory grew in its
intensity as he relived them in his mind, trying to fill the days.
Thinking of her made him feel worse, but he couldn't avoid rolling it
over in his head.

45
 46

His time of living without her had lasted a mere three months
total, but in those weeks the concept of time crawled in a way that
Timothy had not been prepared for. He had nothing else to occupy his
mind but his loss. The last week he was alive had seemed to him
more like fifty-two weeks when it was brought under his scope of
wearied comparison.
But these thoughts would not come until later. This was nothing
he would realize until after he was dead, not until after the last of his
unfruitful life had been stolen from him, breath by agonizing breath.
Throughout the week before he died- and indeed for many
months prior to that- Timothy Karacas had been utterly absorbed by
the persistent thought of what would happen to his everlasting soul
after it had been discorporated. Each person must answer for
themselves the question what happens after you die? but since he had
no real religion nor any dogma to comfort his soul, Timothy found
himself utterly stumped. He had encountered lots of opinions on the
subject, and there were quite a few books on the subject of spiritual
re-assignment, but none of them, Timothy felt with a degree of self-
righteous certainty, had any real or appropriate feel for their topic of
discussion. Unless you were dead- or dying, or whatever- how could
you know how it feels? He had become acquainted with death only
just recently, and felt he knew enough now to write a book on the
subject- if only he had the time.
But that was just it- he had no time. There was no time to put
any number of things off until next week, because next week might
not be there. At the same time, there was no pressure to do anything,
because he was going to die anyway. That was why he had refused
any further treatment from the hospital where his personal doctor was
in residence. He owed his doctor money, but what the hell- he owed
everyone money, including the people he had never meant to put off.
If he were to die right now, at this moment, he would be two and a
half months behind in his rent. He wasn't working, and his insurance
had run out, forcing him to borrow and to go into his personal savings
to cover his medical and living expenses during the time of this, his
final convalescence.
But that was the least of his troubles.
The specter of death was staring him in the face, breathing its
foul reflection into his lungs and blackening them with catastrophic
illness. There was no pre-existing condition or situation of risk that
explained his cancer, only the sere knowledge that his body had
betrayed him once again. But it was not this betrayal that tortured
him the most. If it was possible for someone to be both alive and
dead at the same time, he was living proof of that perplexity. He'd
been hallucinating, seeing tiny angels dancing in the fabric of the

46
 47

curtains in the living room, his eyes strained to the point of tears,
seeking nothing more than some reassurance that he wasn't crazy,
that these things really existed.
Timothy sat on the couch by the window, remembering the
awkward last Christmas that he and Melanie had shared. In reflecting
on the refracted nature of such memories, he came to conclude that
the memories of one's past life were much like collector's plates from
the Franklin Mint- both of them increased exponentially in value once
it had been determined that there were to be no more of them
produced, ever. And even with the holidays feeling as weird as they
had, Timothy had started this year with an odd note of hopefulness in
his voice as he had asked Melanie to marry him about fifteen minutes
into the new year, setting a date for the Big Event exactly one year
later. Not many people would go to a wedding on New Year's Day- far
too many people on their proposed guest list would be hungover- so
they were going to get married on New Year's Eve, when everyone
would be primed and ready for a good party.
But it was now late in April, and a lot can change in just a few
short months. At the end of January, there was a new patch of
melanoma on his back. It was just a tiny one, but he knew what it
meant. It meant another trip to the hospital, which meant more lies
to Melanie. He'd been lying to Melanie (and the world, for that matter)
for so long about his condition that even when he wanted to stop, he
couldn't. He could see where his duplicities had been supporting the
house of cards that his life had become, and he saw no possible way to
come clean.
Timothy now writhed in a nether warp zone between anger,
guilt, and acute depression. He resented the loss of a person and a
life he had thought belonged to him- forever, if he was to believe the
words she had spoken to him in hushed bedtime whispers only a few
short weeks ago.
He now had all the time in the world in which to be alone. No
one in his life ever seemed to stay for very long. The women he'd met
all seemed to have an unusual attachment to the word forever, and for
the first few rounds, he usually believed them. But people never feel
the way they did before, and the bitter truth would always expose
itself.
In life, as in death, we are always alone.
To lose things and move forward is to live. There is a time to let
the seasons pass, even though you really don't want them to. They
will soon be coming around again, if you're willing to wait that long for
it.
His tears attacked him at odd intervals, circling him and biting
into his mind when he was at his absolute weakest. What Timothy

47
 48

needed most right now was for someone to put their arms around him
and take some of his pain away- and that someone should have been
Melanie. Even if she couldn't really take any of the pain away, just
having her near him would have made things a little easier to accept.
He might still be going out into the spiral void, but he would go out
serene in the knowledge that someone at some time or another had
loved him- and that, he felt, would make it easier for him to accept his
fate.
But now, he had nothing.
It was hard to believe that he had once been introduced at a
college party as a 'multi-motherfuckingly-talented and charming
individual', but he had. The last two and a half years of his life- up
until January or so- seemed to belong to someone else, they had felt
so good.
He was in love with a time in his life that he loved mostly
because it was over, but knowing that didn't calm him any. If she
wasn't quite domesticated in some ways, Melanie had surpassed him
in her hominess in others. Aside from the limited edition prints he had
purchased of his favorite artists over the years, Timothy had been
loathe to decorate the interior of his apartment- a couple of throw
pillows on the sofa were as far as he was willing to go- but he took joy
in watching Melanie throw herself at the task. Melanie took things to
new heights, and it was only after she had completed her make-over
of the apartment that their place felt like a home. He now recalled
having been stricken at the time with the realization that the reason it
had felt like home was because Melanie was there with him. It was
neither the silken scarves that she had draped so tediously over the
lamp shades, nor was it the hint of potpourri that still lingered in the
air that made it a home- it was Melanie. The scent that once caressed
his soul now tore through his nasal passages like tiny razors, slicing
deep into his lungs and robbing him of his life breath. Time can do so
much to truly alter one's way of thinking, he mused. There was
nothing he owned that he would not have given- gladly- if only he
could relive those first few precious weeks with Melanie, before the
heavy rains had started in on them. Looking back, even with these
rose-colored glasses, he now found it hard to locate a space in time
when there hadn't been some sort of trouble with Melanie. She was
just a difficult person to get along with, and the longer their
relationship endured the more he became slowly aware of Melanie's
need to dominate and possess him. But that was okay with him.
Did she keep me alive longer, hanging around here as long as
she did?
He hadn't wanted to believe that it was possible for any living
being to feel such an unmitigated and profound sense of loss but here

48
 49

he was, a living testimonial to the edifice of misery. It was possible to

miss someone so much that it was accompanied with a physical pain
even though the person you missed no longer cared whether you lived
or died.
When Melanie had been here, she had attached strings of bells
to each and every door knob in the apartment, and they jingled
incessantly every time they'd opened the windows in an attempt to get
a cross-breeze going through their place from end to end. For a while,
he had been sure that the bells would drive him absolutely crazy; now
he felt equally maddened by their absence- her absence. He had
never valued her as highly as he did now, and he had never loved her
before as much as he did right now.
He wiped absently at his eyes with a pair of Hanes underwear
that had been draped over the arm of the couch he was sitting on. He
had shut her out completely, without ever intending to do that at all.
He'd only wanted to spare her of the darkness growing within him- and
with his efforts to spare her further pain and damage, he'd allowed
that same darkness to overcome his feelings for her and consume her,
just as it was now consuming him. In that light, his cancer had taken
two lives instead of just one. His tears remained his only comfort and
company.

49
 50

WATER OFF A DUCK’S ASS

There is no sadness in this world or any other quite as profound and as
utterly unavoidable, Courtney now reflected as he leaned up against
the headboard and rubbed his face with his hands, as the innate
sadness that one feels when peering over the sleeping shoulder of a
wife spooning two to a drawer next to you and knowing that even
here, in the darkest of nights and the quietest of heartbeats, that it
will never work out.
There were so many ways, he had thought in the beginning, so
many ways in which they were complete opposites, and these opinions
and characteristics would stunt them. Courtney never felt like he was
starting out a life with someone, but rather that they were both just
choosing to carry on in what had gone before, and that might have
been intentional of her part. He never totally knew her- at least, not
in the way a woman's husband should.
But having said that, Courtney could also admit to himself that
he doubted whether he would be able to attract another partner.
Perhaps, he reasoned quite thoughtfully, he didn't even want one. His
time with Nona had been nothing if not emotionally draining. He really
couldn't see himself leaving Nona for someone else- no one else would
ever want him- but he could visualize himself leaving her just for the
sheer cruel sake of wanting to be left alone for once. But he knew that
would never be an option for him.
She could be quite cruel in her comments, but there was an
inverse softness, he supposed, that conversely validated her presence
in his life. Besides, it wasn't exactly as if anyone else wanted him.
Nona, for her part, knew what to say to people. She knew where to
go, and what to do. And this she would do knowing that people would
want to do it with her. Courtney was secure in no such knowledge
about himself.
It was that fact which served to fuel Courtney's ambivalence
regarding her. Sexual promiscuity among females is different than it
is with males, he reasoned, due to the sheer capacity for volume sales.
It is also different in that there is present the principle of sanctioned
invasion. It wasn't like a man settling down to one woman after
having placed his penis in half a dozen or so female conquests. These
men had been inside his wife before he had, and the numbers were
daunting. He and Nona had talked about this at odd times during the
course of their marriage, but somehow he'd never been able to convey
to her how greatly it wounded him. It was more than just sex, more
than plain intercourse. Much more. Her sexual activity, both in high
school and then later, in the bars, bespoke of a morally reprehensible
mutation in human ethics. Being inside of a woman is quite a heavy

50
 51

trip. There was once again the sensation of giving, saponaceous,

lubricious tissue being impaled and then chafed with the scourge of the
male penis.
She debased with the willful intent to go to Hell.
Therein lay the root of his unique psychosis.
He did not understand how women could just give themselves
over to such behavior so freely. What was it like to merely slut oneself
out to the nearest bidder? Nona had once told him something that
stayed with him for a long time afterward, but then again, all of it had
stayed with him: 'It's like, you and me, in the parking lot, and you go
with him. You just wait around until last call for alcohol and everyone
else has already paired off and then it's closing time and you go out
with whomever's left. That's just the way it works. Half the time, I
paid for my own drinks. Half the time, it was my car we fucked in.
Most of the time, I wasn't even afforded the luxury of a bed. And on
those rare occasions where there was a bed involved, when it wasn't in
a car or somewhere else, I was expected to leave...once the fucking
was over.'
How could she complain about that, Courtney wondered, if she
was the one who had instigated it, allowed it to happen, knowing for
the most part how badly it would turn out? But then, maybe it wasn't
that bad- not for her. She said that she had time and again confused
sex with love. Didn't she know that he was on his way to her? Didn't
she see somebody as good as Courtney in her future? And for his own
pathetic part, Courtney too had himself been periodically afforded
fleeting chances at carnal activity- even being as unattractive and as
shy as he was- but nothing had ever felt right. He was too timid to
turn the situation around so that it was something he would have
wanted. A rude proposal would be made or a hand would slip into his
crotch, but he had turned them all away- because it hadn't felt right.
This he took as a sign of his pristine virtue.
It didn't do much for him, getting hit on like this, aside from
half-heartedly inflating his ego. He wondered occasionally if his
condition was psychopathic in nature, and then he reasoned that the
only thing wrong with him was that he had morals. This was prior to
becoming a Christian, but it's worth taking a look at it. He saw
nothing lasting or worthwhile in casual sex, which was all that was
being offered to him (and even that was tenuous). That was what he
didn't want, but that was all that was offered because he didn't
actively pursue sex himself.
The way Nona did.
If he had given in to one of those girls- there had been three,
and even now he wasn't sure if it hadn't just been his imagination
working overtime- perhaps he would have gotten better at the human

51
 52

relations concept and gained some self-confidence out of the deal.

Maybe after a few bum encounters with women who didn't do all
that much for him on an emotional level, he would have built up
confidence in himself and gotten the courage to move on and go after
the women he really desired. He simply hated having to hang his
sexual shingle out to flap in the wind, because it made him feel lacking
more than anything else. He was painfully withdrawn around people,
and he had trouble with just having sex for the sake of it and nothing
else. It was simply wrong, in his eyes, and he would have felt like a
slut.
The way Nona did.
Only she didn't feel like a slut. She didn't see anything wrong
with what she had done. She had lost her virginity in an unpleasant
manner when she was fifteen years old; once that gateway was
passed, she promptly hopped upon the ever-loving hobby-horse for a
long, sustained ride lasting from the age of fifteen up through to about
a year before she met Courtney Randlehaus, the man who was to
become her husband.
All things are new through Christ.
Nona said that she had been celibate for that whole year, and
yet on two separate occasions, she admitted later, she had tried to
instigate intercourse with a former boyfriend of hers without any
success. It was Courtney's understanding that this man was a career
alcoholic who had given himself over to grain-induced impotency.
Courtney tried hard to understand Nona, but this didn't sound like
celibacy to him.
Perhaps what he regretted most was her lack of tact in the way
she told him about all of this. This same man had a few years before
had held her head down upon him while she was performing fellatio,
causing her to choke on her own vomit. The more he thought about it,
the more Courtney saw that it was preposterous, utterly insane, once
considered. Nona had seen more in the way of sexual relations while
supposedly being celibate than Courtney had seen in a lifetime of
trying to make it right, to make it perfect and meaningful. To have
tried to do it in any other way would have made him feel like he had
whored himself out.
The way Nona did.
He snuffed out the candle on the bedside table next to him,
using the tiny stick-mounted, bell-shaped apparatus that had
accompanied the candle holder they had received as their fifth
wedding anniversary present from Nona's friend, Jeannie. Courtney
had always quietly admired the wrought metal that fashioned the
handle, and he saw it as being a part of them.
There were a lot of things around the house that he had acquired

52
 53

during the years he'd been living with Nona. Now that he thought
about it, it was almost everything. There was little left of him
anymore. The years of being married to, of all women, Nona, had
flattened him, physically and emotionally. He not longer felt as if he
could run around the block without dropping down dead of a massive
coronary. he was feeling old, and that might have happened without
Nona's incessant interference, but Courtney seriously doubted that it
would have happened this fast. He was in his thirties, for God's sake.
Nona had taken a heavy hand over the contractor whenever they
remodeled any part of the house. So far, this little house- which her
parents had helped him to finance and then never let him forget their
generosity- had been totally made-over except for the laundry room,
the kitchenette, the smaller bathroom and the little bedroom.
They didn't go into the bedroom anymore. Neither one of them.
That was where they were going to put the baby's room once it
was born. No decorations had been made and no furniture had been
bought yet but that was the plan. At the time, when they had been
expecting, Nona had once remarked that she hoped it would be a little
girl. When he'd asked her why she felt that way, she responded by
telling him that she didn't know how to potty-train a boy. Courtney
had almost laughed out loud over that one, but he stifled it at the last
second. Nona had had plenty of experience showing little boys where
to put their pee-pees.
This had all been six or seven years earlier. Nona had
miscarried the baby in the first trimester. Initially, neither one of
them blamed the other for what had happened- on the surface-
indeed, both of them had handled the situation with a rational and
logical aplomb that surprised everyone involved, including themselves.
It was a time when they actually seemed to care about one another,
and Courtney became painfully aware of the history that had amassed
between them.
When she miscarried, Courtney had just come home from work-
he'd been selling shoes at the time- and he'd found her lying on the
couch, her feet up, sobbing softly in the darkness. It was the most
tender image he had of her, and he used it from time to time
whenever he felt like he had lost touch with the woman he'd fallen in
love with. Then his mind returned to the blood.
She'd been spotting steadily for about a week and a half, and
the doctor had been injecting her with hormones every three days
since it had started. She had called him up at work that day, but she
couldn't tell him what the problem was until he got home. Once again,
Courtney had been called upon to read her mind, and he had failed.
Here, with the loss of his child, was more hurt still on the way.
He had always associated the validation of his existence with the birth

53
 54

of his first child; the first occasion where he himself had done
something that no one else on earth could- created a child that was
the offspring of Courtney Randlehaus. That occasion had dripped
between them like hot melting wax. The moments of that time were
frozen pink and yet gelid, so fucking painfully slow to pass- and yet
beguilingly still in their complexity, as he remembered them. The
minutes it took him to drive her to the doctor's office were etched
deeply into his heart and his mind, as was his utter helplessness in
keeping those moments from passing.

54
 55

TOTEMIC PRESERVATIONS
On the shelf in the closet was a human head, severed from the body
and approximately six weeks postmortem. The high vanilla stench of
rot was most prevalent here, in the northwestern point in the
apartment- where the bricks showed through the plaster above the
closet jamb. Arranged ritualistically around the circumference of the
head were several baby food jars filled with what the police originally
thought of as human urine, when in fact the jars contained nothing
more putrescent than off-brand pine cleaner.
The head, in the final roundup, genetically matched none of the
other bodies- or body parts, if you so insist- that were found inside of
the apartment, and its true identity was never uncovered. In the
weeks and months to follow, extensive genetic re-tracing showed no
likely pool of family members and no relation to any of the other
bodies found.
There were sheets of human skin laid out on a painter's drying
rack on the cot lying along the western wall of the room; the blood
traces on the floor were negligible; there was an accumulation of gore
in the wash basin in a corner opposite from the closet area, but that
was it.
A sink had collected all their necessary fluids.
A pressed silk reproduction of William Rimmer's 1869 painting of
Apollo, entitled Evening: Fall of Day, was tacked to the wall next to the
toilet. The police had only discovered this after researching the phrase
because it had been hacked into the wall with a knife and then painted
in with human blood; and within that phrase, as their dude had so
thoughtfully hacked into the wall, each of the letters and each of the
dots in the colon had been filled in with a different person's blood, the
blood types being arranged in their proper medical order from the
beginning to the end, but going from right to left. The perp had gone
backwards through the spectrum of blood types.
The screws holding up the picture of Apollo by its bottom corners
had both traveled through washers composed of human fingers before
entering the plaster, and the corners of the tapestry had been stained
with two different types of human blood. The owner of the finger on
the left side of the tapestry had cut her fingernails short, but in a
rounded and sanded oval that had been well-maintained when she was
alive. The color of the nail polish that was immediately visible on the
fingernail itself was black; the nail polish underneath that coat was a
metallic green.
The other finger, as bisected by the other screw, was not painted
at all. The fingernail on the finger had been cut squarely, as if with a
pair of scissors, and showed no traces of emery board interference.

55
 56

On the bed in the apartment the police had found the body of a
female approximately twenty-three years of age lying on what had
been, at one point, her stomach. The woman's head had been turned
around, her neck bone and upper spine crushed into a sticky powder
as the act was being carried out. Her eyeballs had been scooped out
of her sockets and her sinuses had been surgically removed through
these openings. The girl's eyeballs had been found tossed casually
beside the bed. Oddly enough, the girl's sinuses were never
recovered.
On the bed, scrolled alongside her body, was a piece of butcher
paper approximately seven feet long and three feet high, and it was
covered with inch-high black-brown letters, spelling out the following:

She cannot believe what I am.

She cannot see what she sees.
The last fucker who did that,
He's dead between two thieves.

Each letter had been written by a different person.

Each letter had been written in a different person's shit.

The girl's body had been split perfunctorily at the abdomen, and
suds were still dribbling out of her vagina when the police took her
away. Originally, the hypothesis had been that the perp had scrubbed
her snatch clean before taking his exit to avoid a possible semen trace.
But it wasn't that at all. Her womb had been filled with Alka-Seltzer,
and the coroner said he couldn't imagine the pain she had endured.
He also stated that she had been alive when the perp had
started to turn her head around on its axis. The coroner didn't wish to
expand upon his theory, but at first it looked as though their man had
pulled her head around with some sort of mechanical device. The
coroner's report read as follows: This body was intentionally forced
beyond its limits of retention by means of chemical introduction of
antacid, which was then artificially activated with common battery
acid. Her suffering must have been excruciating.

'He played Aida every day,' the landlord said when interviewed.
'And I mean, I like Verdi, but it was every day. He always went
through it, front to back, every afternoon starting at three. I have the
loft below it, and every single day, rain or shine, I would hear him
starting up with his violin. He seemed very disciplined to me about
the way that he practiced his playing, and he lived his life in much the
same way as I would imagine a sincere monk would worship. His

56
 57

violin always went out of tune in exactly the same spot every day, and
for two months or so, I thought he might have been playing a tape
recording maybe of one of his practices. Then one day, I spoke to
him, and he went on and on about Giuseppe Verdi and about how this
was the greatest composer of all time. I rarely spoke to him, but I
don't think he was too much in this world. He was someplace you or I
could never get to. I think he was in communication with something
that you or I could never hope to glimpse.'

57
 58

NON COMPOS MENTIS

After climbing out of bed, Courtney got dressed as quietly as he could
and- without waking his wife- got himself cleaned up in the bathroom.
Not knowing what he craved yet knowing all too well, it was easy for
him to pull himself through his routine on mornings like this, mornings
that somehow began too early yet never left him enough time to get
to work; mornings that opened themselves backward, spilling into a
kaleidoscopic day filled with pestilence and shameful half-hidden
thoughts.
He tip-toed down the stairs and out the back door, past the key
rack, past the photographs of their wedding, past the ceramic thimble
he had given her for Christmas not last year or 1990 but two years
before that.
So long ago.
He opened the car door and closed it almost all the way but not
quite to avoid the inevitable slam. He then inserted the key to the
ignition and popped the car into neutral, letting it roll backward down
the incline of the driveway until he hit the street, whereupon he did
close the door all the way and started the car properly. After a few
false tries, the engine caught and he popped the car into reverse,
pulling out in a crescent arc onto Tossilberry Avenue.
When he shifted into Drive, he was facing west.
He was planning a run to one of the newer skin outlets that had
opened up on Route 70, near Marseille. It would be about a forty-five
mile trip, all told- he'd seen the place while he'd been commuting to a
business seminar that his company had sent him to in Winchester. He
stopped off for a moment once he was close to the edge of town and
bought a pack of cigarettes to keep him company on the trip.
Otherwise, he would have had nothing to do with his hands besides
pinching his nipples and running his knuckles over the tops of his legs.
While he paid for the smokes, he saw that they now sold Hustler
magazine here behind the counter, and he wondered for a moment if
he shouldn't just buy this here, go home, masturbate and go to sleep.
He did need to sleep. But if he went to the place up in Marseille, they
might still have the $5.99 twin-packs of Hustler back-issues, and those
tended to be raunchier and the two-pack deal brought the individual
price down to $3. Besides, he felt that he needed to walk through the
fire of his sins by going back into one of those places and surrounding
himself with the ambience he found there. Of course, at the very
same time he was beating back the demon, he would also be
satisfying his itch.
Make thyself as a machine, sang in his head.
Once he got back into the car, Courtney felt some of the iciness

58
 59

creep out of the gaps in his armpits and the cleft of his rib cage, but
he knew they'd return when he drove up and saw the place he was
headed. When it came time for him to get out of the car, Courtney
knew he'd be trembling, from past experience. Half of it, he knew,
would be the sheer anticipation of all that flesh laid out for him to
witness, but the other half of it was fear. Fear of being discovered,
and a fear of what he'd become, even after all this time. Why did he
feel this need to tap-dance on the edge of the abyss, and why was
there still this incessant compulsion to reveal the disordered version of
himself that he had successfully concealed from everybody for all
these years?
As soon as the neon sign pulled into view up at the left hand side
of his visage, he felt the trembling begin somewhere in his gut. There
was always this unspoken fear he had of someone following his car
into the parking lot- well, not following him, but somehow associating
his car and its driver with these acts. Courtney Randlehaus was a man
who didn't wish to be identified as himself.
Sell unto me the sight of your skin.
He drove past the place the first time; since there wasn't a break
in the median, he had to drive ahead and make a u-turn at the next
traffic light. As he drove back he watched in his rear-view mirror to
make sure that there weren't any cars following immediately behind
him as he pulled in. Once he was in the parking lot of The Gates of
Venus, he slowed his car down to a crawl, trying not to look too
obvious. As he pulled around to the back of the building he killed his
blinker and turned off his headlights because there was enough light
for him to see where he was going by the neon sign advertising the
name of this place. Before he got out of the car, he checked to make
sure that all the doors were locked, that he had both his wallet and his
car keys in his pocket.
After he had locked the driver's side door behind him, he made
sure that he had a loose dollar bill in his pocket as well- the one
without the car keys or his wallet- so that he could just pay the browse
fee and get inside without incident. There was a sign on the door, and
its wording was all too familiar to him: You must be twenty-one years
of age and have valid I.D. to prove it/ladies and couples admitted free.
He walked to the door, stepped through it, and after his eyes
adjusted the brightness of the interior he handed his dollar bill over to
the fellow behind the counter, a kid of about twenty who didn't even
look him in the face. Thank God, Courtney thought.
The place was enormous, and this was the first time he'd seen it
from the inside. It didn't look nearly as large when viewed from the
highway outside. Now it looked to be as voluminous as a bowling
alley. He would definitely have to spend some time in here.

59
 60

I'm only coming here once, he told himself. Just this once.
It was that morbid carnival smell that most have attracted him
at first. Just a meek desire to stare at the underbelly of life itself. But
once inside, Courtney had discovered that there were things down in
this hole that he liked, that he actually enjoyed; strange images of
people locked in coitus that protested against every shred of decency.
Maybe just once.
He walked over to one of the magazine racks and picked up the
latest issue of Hustler magazine. As he flipped through its pages, he
paused to reflect that Hustler was the only monthly mainstream
magazine that went anywhere near the terrain that Courtney felt
himself attracted to.
In the Erotic Entertainment section of the magazine there were
reviews of Anal Nation and Racquel Untamed, as well as A Shot In The
Mouth, Wild Goose Chase and Anal Intruder 5. The first photo layout
was a standard single-female beach shot. Her name was Chrissie and
about all Courtney could say for her was that she had nice, smooth
nipples. She didn't look comfortable with this kind of work and so he
skipped on to the next feature, a male-female dump truck routine that
had a girl in it that looked a lot like the girl in the copy office that had
hit on him the year previous. Once her intentions were known,
Courtney ran out of the room and refused to speak to her ever again.
Something inside of him had simply locked up, not that he was talker
anyway. The magazine was a pretty tame issue. He put the Hustler
back with the others on the rack and picked up a photo-still booklet
from a film called Anal Commander.

60
 61

BEZIQUERE
Joshua's rib cage had been pulled apart from the fall he'd taken
from the Marlborough water viaduct in Tarnation, Nevada. It was
estimated that he had already been dead for six or seven days when
he was found, and they had looked all over Tarnation to locate his
body. His body was stained with earth and soaked in his own blood
juices, and his eyes bore a look of abject consternation and sheer
terror, as if something was trying to eat him alive, gnawing him from
the inside out.
He was a murderer, but he had been only twenty-seven years
old.
Gavin Garish- who had joined the coroner's office in 1975 and
had served as the county coroner for El Mohave county since he was
elected in 1986- would say that the official verdict on his manner of
death was that he had committed suicide, but he knew that it wasn't
one-hundred percent correct. It didn't look right for it to have been a
suicide.
For one thing, the angles on some of the final sweeps of the
razor would have required the bearer of the instrument- were Joshua
actually in the act of killing himself- to have arms about six feet in
length.
Gavin Garish had taken part in investigations on over 125 deaths
in El Mohave County in the last calendar year. El Mohave was the
second most populous county in Nevada, and the new morgue they
would be taking Joshua Tauble's body to had cost more than $2.1
million the year before. Only Kepis County had a larger, more
expensive morgue. Garish and his five deputy coroners had up until
last year been using rented facilities in the bottom floor of the county
courthouse in Sanders, Nevada.
The new morgue was over 14,500 feet and the freezer in the
new courthouse was larger than the old morgue in its entirety. The
inquests had always been done in a small antechamber off of
courtroom 101 on the first floor of the courthouse, which had since
been remodeled. The new morgue had been delayed six months in its
opening because of problems in installing the new freezer system,
which was digitally controlled. The sally port was underground and to
the west of the main building in the new morgue so that the bodies
could be carried inside out of the view of the public; they had thirty
carts available for use- enough for an epidemic- and a digital floor
scale where the bodies could be weighed while on the carts, where the
weight of the carts themselves would automatically be deducted from
the total. They had six autopsy bays- much improved over the old
conditions, where they could examine only one corpse at a time. The

61
 62

walk-in cooler could store up to 116 bodies- again, it was more than
enough room for the county coroners to hold an epidemic; the bodies
were stored at 19 degrees below true academic zero so as to retard
any obscene bodily decomposition.
Gavin Garish was so good at his job that he had received a
hands-off Dictaphone and telephone answering set-up for the
coroner's office. An array of implements like these helped to expedite
his processes.
Yet in spite of all his experience, in spite of all his toys, he was
not prepared for Joshua Tauble, or the confusion he left in his wake.

The already badly-decomposed Joshua Tauble was being stored

in an isolated examining room next to Toxicology, separated from the
rest of the bodies as a guard against rampant infection. Tauble's
corpse had been found almost a week after he had died; he'd rotted
pretty fast in the arid desert air with no protection from the sun's rays,
and there was little left of him. There'd been a small pack of wild dogs
picking at the body's right leg when the police finally located him, and
two of the officers had sustained serious lacerations in trying to pull
the body away from them, but the leg was all that was mauled.
As it turned out, the leg that the dogs had been gnawing on had
been the only part of Joshua Tauble's body that had not been etched
somehow with an evil-looking foreign script. The letters had been
hacked into this dude's flesh, and this had happened after his death,
because the letters weren't raised or infected, save but for the two big
words slashed into his forearms.
Just prior to his escape, Joshua had been removed from Death
Row and placed into solitary confinement for thirty days. His cell, once
the order had been given and the guards retrieved the prisoner, was a
horror in and of itself: excrement had been smeared on the walls, and
in blood prophesies of a great plague over mankind had been written
in letters almost six inches high. Tauble had been bothering the other
prisoners by crying in his sleep, and by begging some unseen person
to leave him alone, but none of this made it into the report.
When confronted about these outbursts Tauble affected to know
nothing about them, insisting that he had slept soundly through the
night. It was at this point that he was placed under a psychiatric
suicide watch. The inmate knew nothing of it, but Tauble under
constant surveillance. Even when he was returned to his home cell,
the cameras were on.
And then, he had vanished.
The video tapes of that night, so went the legend, were eaten by
the recorder as they were being ejected. None of this, again, made it
into the report of his escape, but the walls have ears and the news had

62
 63

traveled far- all the way to El Mohave, in fact. Gavin Garish had
traded a few words with the installation crew as they were setting up
another one of the twelve cameras that had been designed to monitor
the morgue. 'Cameras...in a morgue?' the man had asked.
'Oh, yes. Well, you never know when they'll-'
'Find another Joshua Tauble,' was the laughing reply.
For some reason, Gavin had shivered at the mention of that
name.
And now here he was.
Gavin Garish had spent long hours studying the corpse,
marveling over the intricate patchwork of lacerations that covered his
forearms so completely that the cobweb prison tattoos underneath
were almost wholly obliterated by the effort. Trippy spirals of pricked
flesh, pulled here and compressed there, told the tale of Joshua
Tauble, but no one would ever understand it. Only two of the phrases
were even remotely legible:
Isto‚ o que voc‚ teur que temer.
Was it French? Gavin wondered.
This phrase- French?- had been etched into the skin on Joshua's
chest in letters half an inch high. The second phrase, the one that
Gavin did not elect to risk writing down, was even more cryptic: on his
right arm, on the inner forearm was a single word Bisarro. Whatever
that meant.
On the inner left forearm was its companion: Escort.
As Gavin Garish drove home to his wife that night, he made a
mental note to look up the phrases in his French-English translation
dictionary, and without even noticing it, he had been wadding the
paper upon which Isto‚ o que voc‚ teur que temer was written into a
ball in his pocket.
But the note was forgotten, and only once- when he and his wife
were making love- did he remember it. But he didn't get up to
retrieve it.
In the morning, Gavin sifted through his pants and found a tiny
burn-hole in his pants pocket; only a sifting of ash were the note had
been.
Which was odd, because neither he nor his wife smoked.
And two seconds later, he got the page on his beeper:
Breach...Mislocated...
He dialed the morgue office- but there was no answer.
Gavin never learned who had paged him with this message, but
by the time he returned to the morgue, he'd forgotten about it.
Because Joshua Tauble was gone.
'What the fuck?' Gavin said. 'Maybe the cameras saw
something.'

63
 64

But the cameras were rolling, and had caught nothing.

There were no blank spots on the videotape when it was
reviewed.
While under this allegedly constant surveillance, the ravaged
corpse of Joshua Tauble had simply disappeared without a trace.
There was nothing amiss on the video cameras- all twelve were
operating without error- and there was no footage of whoever stole
Tauble's body. The only image they had was of an old man in a green
shirt- a shirt that was, oddly enough, the same shade of green as
Tauble's prison outfit.

Gavin Garish had read all of the facts pertaining to the legend
when Tauble's file had been faxed down from the prison. The warden
there had told Garish that he was surprised that Tauble had made it as
far as the other side of Nevada. He also told Garish that investigations
as to exactly how Joshua Tauble had escaped were still being
conducted by the state. It was out of the warden's hands, and it
looked as if he might be getting set up to take the blame for the whole
thing, which was exactly the sort of politics Gavin Garish didn't believe
in and the reason he'd never run for higher office. Examining bodies
was enough for him, just to avoid the games at the top end of the
bureaucratic scale, and each body could tell a tale.
But Gavin would never be able to decipher Joshua's tale.
Something had hit him sure and swiftly, and there had likely
been no time for retaliation. The longer that Gavin had studied the
corpse, the more it looked like the work of an animal than the results
of careful planning from a civilized human creature. It was his opinion
that Joshua had been put to death as surely as if it had been a warden
of the state who'd pulled the trigger. Prior to his second escape, it
was Gavin Garish's opinion that a jaguar or some other desert creature
had gotten to Joshua Tauble, and had decimated the state's star
prisoner so fast- and with such utter proficiency- that Joshua Tauble
hadn't any chance to defend himself. But after he just disappeared
from the morgue like this, without any indication as to how it had
come about- Gavin was no longer sure. He didn't know why a
disappearing body somehow would alter its cause of death, but this
feeling was instinctual.
Something killed Joshua Tauble...and he's not too very happy
about it.
The warden had insisted for his own reasons that the cause of
death be listed as suicide. Gavin Garish didn't question it, wanting to
be seen as a cooperative sort of fellow, and complied. After signing
Tauble's death certificate, Garish had slipped it into a huge manila
envelope tucked into a plastic containment unit at the foot of the cart

64
 65

as he rolled Tauble back into the freezer. Gavin Garish then turned off
the lights and closed the door to the freezer behind him, locking it.
But no one saw Joshua Tauble's corpse once it had been wheeled back
into the refrigeration compartment in the morgue. It had been
wheeled in there on a Friday night, and it was gone by Saturday
morning.
Vanished. From a sealed vault. From that point onward,
Joshua's disappearance was a black mystery for both Gavin Garish and
the entirety of El Mohave county. The newspapers in town speculated
that his corpse had been stolen by a group of radical militants, but
that story never quite panned out. The truth was stranger than
fiction, but the truth never would have been printed.
Gavin stood with his hands on his hips in the freezer, tapping his
foot impatiently, watching his breath frost the air in front of his face,
and trying to think logically about this- this, presented to him in
opposition to logic. If the man had escaped from death row, what was
a morgue vault located in the middle of what was, in essence, a one
horse town? Nothing. But there was one fundamental difference in
this case. To escape from Death Row was immersive enough, but a
living man pushed to extremes was capable of the unimaginable. That
much of the story he could buy- but that theory didn't hold water
down here in the morgue, now, as he viewed the evidence- because
Joshua was already dead.
Already dead. Already fucking dead.
He was already dead when they first found his body.
What had happened between his time of death and their arrival?
To escape from Death Row was unthinkable, and Joshua Tauble
would have had to literally walk through walls to get out of the hole
that the state had purposefully placed him in for the protection of
society.
Which is exactly what Ixxir had helped Joshua to do.
How does one simply walk out of a morgue, when they're
already dead?
However they do it, the rules had been changed for this man.
And isto‚ o que voc‚ teur que temer.

65
 66

FEEBLE THOUGHTS
Kraggess Feebes was feeling queasy about having to deal with Dr.
Thomas Gracey. The man had a foul reputation that had followed him
vaguely from wherever he had taught before he worked here at the
Clinic. Still, a tip is a tip and he had to follow this one wherever it
went- those were his orders. Q & T had been diversifying as any
company would into various stock privileges for quite some time, and
the old man had a bone on for this one. A friend of his had tipped him
off- some old stroke at the golf club, most likely- and now Quillen
wanted to root this one out.
Ibsenheit Industries had used Randolph Weintraub as an insider
consultant, seeking to take the company public sometime within the
next two or three years- once their formula for skin growth had
received the proper FDA approvals. The company's value was
predicted both inside and out to skyrocket- in the literal sense of the
word, and most deserving of italicization. Their collective worth, the
seven men who had owned and operated Ibsenheit since its inception
in 1978, was roughly twenty million dollars. Every dollar earned, more
or less, had been promptly reinvested. None of the seven men drew a
salary from 1978 until 1987, when three of them began to take five
dollars a year in personal salary for their efforts. In three years, it was
rumored that they would each see that number multiply for them into
one hundred million- a piece.
Everything rested upon FDA approval, of course, and that wasn't
going to come cheaply or efficiently for the company, which was
seeking out potential investors now, as opposed to dealing with the
rogue gallery in two or three years when they brought the company
public. The money they would receive after FDA approval had been
achieved was needed now to help them get through that hurdle. And
without FDA approval, there was no product for anyone to make
money off of. That was the point they had stressed whenever they
pitched their idea to prospective investors.
Before he invested any of the corporate holdings into Ibsenheit
Industries, the old man wanted to be absolutely certain that their skin
formula would perform as they had told him it would. That required a
little bit of inside work, but that wasn't a problem, seeing as Quillen
and Timmendeguas had handled the Clinic's formal incorporation work
nine years earlier. His mission was only to look over the documents at
the Clinic, and nothing more. 'Just look around,' the old man had
calmly recommended to him. 'Just gander about and tell me what you
see.'
And what he had seen- while waiting in Dr. Gracey's office for
him to make his appearance- was a list of test-patients for the E2D8

66
 67

skin graft formula. Wasn't it queer that Timothy Karacas should turn
up on their list of test patients? Timothy had left Q & T a few months
earlier, if he was recalling the scene correctly, under a cloud of
circumstances. Nothing important, or worth taking notes on. Timothy
was a nice enough guy, but the world was turning and there was no
time to mourn the living dead. Kraggess Feebes wasn't much for
hand-holding and he didn't want to get involved. Everyone else
throughout the office pretty much felt the same. The rumor, for a
while, had been that Timothy had cancer; his name showing up on this
list confirmed that suspicion, in his mind. The people at Q & T would
love to have known about this, but Feebes knew to keep it to himself
until he had a chance to discuss it with the old man.

'But does this crazy skin bullshit work?' the old man wanted to
know, and quite frankly, Feebes didn't have an answer for him. Once
he had discovered that their old crony Timothy Karacas was in the
Clinic, and being tested not only for cancer treatment but also for a
new skin-growth agent, Kraggess had lost his concentration and
wandered back out to his car without having accomplished the full
scope of his mission.
'It would seem very promising. It's still in the early
developmental stages, sir, and that's why you want to get in now. It
will be hard to keep news of this out of the ears of the private
investing sector, but this product's potential market hasn't become
word of mouth quite yet. You would have the jump on everyone. You
were right all along.'
'But does it work?'
'I don't know. We can't come up with a concrete answer for
that. I- that is, my team and I- have asked questions and we've
gotten answers that look official enough, but we don't know anything
more about genetic transmutation than they know about what we do
here during the day.'
'So you're telling me that you know nothing.' The old man said
it dejectedly, and as more of a statement than as a question. Feebes
knew that to admit fault in this instance would set him back five years
in his career advancement plan. He needed something good to tell
him.
All of a sudden, it was too obvious for him to ignore any longer.
'There is one interesting angle, sir.'
'Unh? And what might that be.'
'There is a patient, ahem, that is, we have located a patient
whom we have all been quite familiar with. We've approached- um,
we're thinking about perhaps approaching him with the idea of paying
him to track his progress within the program. The patient's credit is

67
 68

fucked, so we can come at him with a low figure that he'll be more
than happy to jump at.'
The old man looked up at Kraggess and, squinting his eyes,
winked his approval of his work. The old man then touched the
joystick on the arm of his wheelchair and buzzed himself into the next
room, where a small corporate breakfast was being served on the
twenty-man conference table.
Kraggess Feebes obligingly followed him.
The old man leaned forward and Leona, his secretary, tied a bib
around his neck, knotting the white plastic strips directly behind the
old man's head. This done, he waved her away and signaled for
Kraggess to accompany him in the seat directly to his left.
Kraggess shifted into his chair and cleared his throat.
'You spoke of us being familiar with him. You may as well come
out with it and tell me exactly how familiar we are with him, and why.'

68
 69

WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER?

Ixxir had gotten much better at this game as its decades had worn on
into plaintive centuries. Its host still had no conscious idea of what he
was up against in his fight to stay alive, and Ixxir now found that it
admired the ignorant stance of its host. Timothy Karacas would have
had cancer with or without Ixxir's presence, but the demon had
definitely helped to speed things along. If Timothy had died of natural
causes before the age of seventy, he might never have known the
horror of this biological betrayal, but in its haste to rid itself of its host,
the demon had prematurely thrown the bio-genetic switch that set the
cancer.
Now that it was getting close to the harvest, Ixxir was getting a
little impatient to move on with it. Timothy had two weeks to live at
this rate- maybe three- but certainly no more than that. For a minor
demon of Ixxir's status, time could not pass quickly enough to sate its
bloodless anticipation. They were renowned for their impatience with
these proceedings, which was part of why they were condemned to
this state of non-being.
Ixxir knew instinctively through its genetic programming that to
kill the host was its objective, but it also knew with its own
independently-thinking mind that killing its host would be tantamount
to committing suicide. So- while always maintaining its biogenetic
assault on Timothy's innards- it began to plot for a life beyond that
which it had been allotted. Ixxir had been through this procedure any
number of times before, and it would pull it off yet again this time as
well. All that has ever lived has wanted to extend its time of living,
and Ixxir was no different- but it was also a job to be done.
Its assault on its host involved nothing so personal as
professional pride for the demon. To die with its host would be an
embarrassment. That was something that sometimes happened to
first-timers, but never to something of Ixxir's caliber, and it knew that
each new host was something to be celebrated. Each new host was a
new lease on life.
And each spent vessel was an escape from the grave.

Timothy found himself, even in the days before he died,

possessed of a bizarre preternatural knowledge that encompassed
areas he hadn't been aware of. He was now seeing the day of his
death, and knew that it was coming soon. Exactly when, he had no
idea, but it would be soon.
Timothy had first met his cancer a few weeks earlier, and the
entire experience had left him feeling certain that he had lost his mind.
He'd had a conversation with a snaky lizard-looking thing that had

69
 70

walked unfettered around his apartment with an appalling sense of

ownership.
His head was feeling as if it was filled with cotton, and nothing
was as it seemed. It was possible that he had hallucinated the whole
thing, but lately Timothy had felt things within him- serene bits of
knowledge that floated to the top of his mind like fragments of
vegetable oil in water- that told him to believe everything he saw, no
matter how bizarre or impossible it might seem. His body was trying
to talk to him, and perhaps the demon that had introduced itself to
him so politely- if it was a demon after all- was merely a manifestation
of the cancer that was rotting him away from the inside. But to think
of it as that was like calling it an hallucination, which was what he was
trying to prevent.
Because it hadn't been any hallucination.
'I'm nothing more than a part of you, Smartass,' it had cooed, in
a filthy Irish brogue. The word Smartass had been pronounced as a
single, deadly syllable. Its breath frosted the air in front of it.
It took a few seconds to get over the shock of viewing this
ghastly apparition as it spoke to him, but Timothy soon rebounded.
Nothing was much of a surprise to him anymore.
Ixxir was enjoying the confusion its host was experiencing and
had always fed off of such pandemonium. Of all the hosts Ixxir had
known throughout its centuries here on earth, this one had provided it
with the greatest sense of pleasure. This, it surmised, stemmed from
the respect it had once felt for Timothy as he fought his disease, but
that emotion had given way to bedazzlement as Timothy began the
downward spiral into wretchedness. He had fought so hard for so
long, while he'd had no true idea of what he was up against. That was
always fun, but as the game now unwound itself to its final checkmate,
Ixxir was a little sad to be losing this play-mate. Its opponent, this
time out, had been a worthwhile foe and such were very hard to come
by in this day and age, because people these days were so willing to
give up hope, and that took all the sport out of Ixxir's contest.
'You're aren't worth as much as I am,' Timothy chided in protest.
'You've never loved anyone, and you've never lost. Of course
someone's life would have no meaning to you, because you've never
truly lived.'
'I was human, once,' the demon began, not exactly sure of how
much of a lie it was now telling, 'and I've seen that side of things.
There's only one path to where you're going, Timothy, and each being
needs to find that path on its own. There's no hope to be had in
redemption.'
'You're lying.'
'Loss,' it said. 'Tell me of the futility of emotional attachment.'

70
 71

Timothy drew in his breath and sighed deeply. 'You said it all
right there. Futility. You already understand what it is I would be
trying to explain. People are there in your life, and then suddenly,
they're not there anymore. It's almost like you can still feel them
touching your skin, but there's no joy received in the memory of the
senses.'
'Memory?'
'Yes. Your memory is what keeps things half-alive in your head-
real enough to taunt you with what used to be, but faint enough to
make you long passionately for the real thing. Loss is the one human
condition that all people share. Everyone has lost someone in their life
and suspect that it's their own fault. Everyone has to deal with the
middle of the night, and that's what makes us humans frail: we all
feel.'
'Is that so?' the demon had asked.
'Yes,' Timothy said, smiling wistfully. 'It's that same fragility,
that same vulnerability, is our greatest virtue: we all feel.'
Timothy's words had resounded inside of Ixxir's head, as if the
sick man was trying to perform a little haunting of his own. And if that
was what he was trying to do, it had worked admirably.
'Could you tell me one thing, though, before I go?'
'What?'
'What year is it?'
Timothy had to think about it. He hadn't eaten in
...72 hours...
Timothy's head snapped up. He had heard this thing's voice in
his head, and yet its mouth hadn't moved. It hadn't fucking moved!
He heard a low, far-off laugh that made him want to piss his
pants.
Yeah, ya know. I'm in yer head now. Now what fucking year is
it?
Timothy smiled at the thing, warming to the game.
If you're in my head, asshole- why don't you find it?
This time, the demon smiled back at him.
All at once, there was a terrible crunching sound in the air, and
he felt blood dripping down his cheeks, out of his ears and mouth.
Looking up, he saw that the demon was clenching one fist into the
approximate shape of a tiny pint-sized cauldron and stirring it with
what might have in one lifetime been an index finger, now all
blackened and gnarled with immense age. That finger, Timothy
reasoned, had probably outlived all of recorded or written history. It
made the physical world that he knew here in the late twentieth
century, with all its medicines and religions and foolish ritualania, look
like a shadow trying to outwit the sun.

71
 72

Ixxir had been able to feel Timothy's bio-system weakening as it

spoke to him, swirling its finger in its hand, and it was quite
encouraging, as if seeing the demon in the flesh was only serving to
confirm Timothy's worst fears. But now Ixxir knew that it was time to
rest, so that it could travel as long as was necessary in the physical
world until it found a new host.
The lizard-thing smiled at him, and Timothy knew he was going
to die.
'Not yet,' it said.
'What?'
'But there's just one thing you have to know, Timothy,' his
cancer had said as it faded into the din of the kitchen, leaving a
numbing silence in its wake. 'When I'm done with you, you'll think I
was being nice in warning you of your fate. When I'm done, you'll
know, 'cos you won't be alive.’

72
 73

PYSCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
When D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1927 he
referred to the human orgasm, both male and female, as being a
crisis. Perhaps this was a logical assessment, and Courtney had often
mulled it over.
As for himself, well- it certainly felt like a crisis to him. One's
own motives are brought into question, and- failing in the search for
security and warmth- one shivers, limp dick in hand, and retraces
one's steps; Courtney saw himself from above in a God's-eye view of
his last hour, the walk from his car in the parking lot, his coy and
sullen perusal of the communal browse-racks in the front part of the
building and then his descent here, to the back, where he always
found himself afterwards. This state of being for Courtney was getting
worse, despite signals to the effect that such a thing was impossible.
The faces he saw were familiar to him and the stench was quite the
same. Lost dreams always smelled like this. It got into the fabric of
one's clothes.
The fluorescent lights located on the ceiling beams inside the
skinhouse were perhaps just a bit too bright, but the overwhelming
smell of the place was what you usually noticed first. Disinfectant was
de rigueur, but there was also a heady aroma of rubber products in
the air. The sights available here were of various naked bodies
wrapped up in all manner of sexual diversion and aberrant copulation.
He felt a sharp involuntary inhalation of air on his part as he stepped
into the shop and walked toward the magazine racks. His insides
seemed about to lurch upon themselves. It was so familiar, and yet so
utterly disorienting at the same time. The influx of visual stimuli made
him feel dizzy and heated.
Courtney got three dollars worth of movie tokens, silently
cursing himself for not getting five dollars worth and getting an extra
four tokens in the bargain. This would have made sense because God
knew as well as Courtney did that he was gonna go back for at least
two or three dollars more once he finished his little trip here. He was
feeling a little depressed today, and he would surely want the
menagerie to last- this pornography bit was nothing short of a healing
element in his life.
Who here can say, I have made my heart clean…pure from my
sin?
He walked up and down, cruising, looking for a door decorated
with a movie poster for some sexual act he'd like to see. When he
found one that looked like something he wanted to see, and walked
into the booth, locked the latch, pulled down his pants, and pumped in
the tokens.

73
 74

The first scene had a girl with her wrists tied to the bedposts,
and this stirred something in Courtney that he had not know existed
for him before. She was topless, but she was wearing a pair of white
cotton underpants. A man came into the shot and placed clothes pins
upon her nipples- they were metal ones with rubber clamp-covers to
avoid chafing the skin. The skin of a person's nipple, depending upon
some certain factors present in various amounts in every human
being, can range from being just as downy and soft as a lamb's petal
or as blood-packed and hyper-sensitive to touch as it is when it
becomes completely erect. It will assume a million stages of perfect in
between these two extremes.

When he got home and was comfortably set up in the bathroom

Courtney took his dildo out of the sink and began to brush his teeth,
brushing until he saw blood when he spit. It was hard to believe he'd
grown up since he'd last played these potty games- he was a married
man, now, for Chrissakes. It didn't seem like it was compulsive
behavior, brushing his teeth at the same time- just indicative of his
cautious nature.
It was rare that he paused to brush his teeth, so when he
thought of it, he wanted to do a good job of it. The trouble was, he
just didn't think to do it very often. In fact, he only thought of it when
he was in the bathroom, usually. And usually, when he was in the
bathroom, he was masturbating.
The two concepts sort of melted together in his mind.
So long as Nona remained asleep, she would never know.
And Nona was nothing if not a sound sleeper.
It all came back to her, didn't it? Everything. The thoughts he
churned inside his head would have killed someone less prone to
enjoying self-inflected mental torture. The questions wouldn't leave
him alone.
What kinds of sex did Nona have with these men? What was she
willing to do with them on the first date? Did she even require a first
date before she would fuck them, or let them fuck her, or whatever it
was that the two of them did when she was with these men?
Why couldn't he stop these endless questions?
There had been a conversation last night, one that the sane half
of himself would rather forget. Courtney had pushed her, verbally,
into a corner, asking her where she had been the night before, and
Nona had come out swinging, spraying venom at him every chance
she got.
Here, now, in the movie booth, he discovered that he was
crying.
Nona smirked maliciously- as he had known she would- her mind

74
 75

coiled and itching to strike out at him. 'It happens in a lot of different
ways, depending on where you go and what the crowd there is like. I
had a friend- actually, a former friend- and she and I would sometimes
go to a bar and work as a team, although we never really did much of
anything together as far as I- can remember, she says she can
remember things a little bit differently, but whatever. We always said
that we were going to sleep with each other one of these days, but
nothing ever happened. She knew me then. The closest she and I
ever got was tongue-kissing each other while we were giving head to
some guy in the back seat of her car.'
Nona was slowly losing herself to this sense of dramatic reverie.
'Oh, yeah. Well, you sit there and drink and drink. We used to
do cola in the bathrooms, too. You just wait until someone strikes up
some lame conversation with you as an excuse to start talking to you,
or you go after someone by talking to them first, depending upon how
bad my itch to get fucked was on any particular night. Then you just
say yes when that someone asks you to dance- or whatever- and then
after you've danced with them for a little while, they'll ask you if they
can buy you a drink. There's a real natural flow to these things that
you pick up after a while. You then say yes to their offer of a drink
and when that's done, either the other person or you will suggest that
the two of you go for a walk, and it's always someplace...quiet. That's
one of the key phrases.'
A virtuous wife is a crown to her husband.
'And then what?' Courtney whimpered, almost in agony but
hungry to hear the outcome anyway. And why can't you stop thinking
like this?
'Then you leave together. It's usually all coy and stupid until
either you pounce on him or he pounces on you- it's really that
simple.'
So that's all it took to get inside of your body, huh?
'What if they- for whatever reason- refused you?' Courtney
asked.
Nona regarded him coolly. 'I never took no for an answer.'

75
 76

DÖPPLEGANGER
Shelby Dunn was what a lot of people thought they wanted to be when
they grew up: a doctor. It didn't mean much to him, this fact about
himself, or that is to say that it didn't mean as much as he might have
thought it would have meant to a person whose head was wired
normally.
Shelby Dunn was not that person.
He was becoming utterly obsessed with this idea- only a vague
notion at first- that he had gotten earlier in the year of using some
sort of advanced microscopic surgery to separate both halves of his
skin and then re-attach them, inversely, to give himself the image of
what he looked like in the mirror. To most people, this would have
been categorized as a daydream. For Shelby, though, it was the finger
pointing to the path.
He wasn't sure if it was a very practical idea, but he at least
wanted to talk to some people about it to see if he was only dreaming
of if what he wanted to do was actually possible. He'd tried every kind
of plastic surgery to change his appearance, but it all usually settled
back into its old familiar patterns- especially his right eye, which was
about two sizes smaller than the one on his left.
He always looked good in the mirror, but when his face was as it
appeared to people on the street he thought he looked ugly and
deformed, even though most people would have considered him
attractive.
He was good, but he was far from perfect, and perfection is what
we all- in one way or another, under one name or another- try to
achieve.
Being in the medical profession had only served to fuel these
ideas, and it put him in contact with some of the people who could
eventually help him towards his end of re-creating himself. He had
never been one hundred percent happy with his appearance and yet,
to the outside world, he supposed that he appeared to be the very
idea of vanity personified.
He was always seeking the approval of others and he was always
looking for reassurance that he was the best-looking doctor in the
hospital or the Bramble Clinic, depending upon where he was working
at any given point in time. Many times, especially when he was in his
twenties, he found himself in relationships with very beautiful women-
women who adored him and caused him to loathe himself at the same
time.
After a time, after sitting one too many times across a dinner
table from some woman he didn't know and didn't care to know,
Shelby came to the realization that in keeping company with these

76
 77

women, he was only seeking to take a piece of their glamour for

himself, performing a sort of psychic vampirism to fortify and nourish
himself. He always felt starved in these types of relationships,
however short-lived they might have been, and he supposed that this
starvation stemmed from the type of people he was with. Narcissism
steered one's attention away from the remainder of the world and onto
oneself. Anything that is not of the self is peripheral. And that was
how he felt, staring into a lovely and yet somehow latently empty face
as it blathered on about events that could never hold any importance
for him.
He knew that beauty had an extreme price, but he didn't care.
Which is to say that he didn't mind.
Because the beautiful ones were always ugly on the inside.

The idea to change his face into its mirror image had come to
him all at once it seemed, pouring forth in a burst of sudden
inspiration as he was criticizing his appearance in his rear view mirror
as he was driving home from work one day. Just like that- and his
world-view had changed.
He had always looked better in his reflection- his recent
experience notwithstanding- and he wanted to emulate that person.
That guy looked better than he knew he himself did. In the mirror he
looked as though he was in control of things- when in reality, he
wasn't. He decided that he wanted to become someone else, and that
was his real self- this other self being the digitally-refracted, better
half of himself.

He had thought about it at great length, that first night after

he'd dreamed it. That dream had kept him up on many other nights
since then, alone in bed before he went to sleep at night or in the car
while on his way either to or from the Bramble Clinic.
He thought that he might ask Thomas Gracey to perform the
surgery, were the idea even only theoretically possible. The divine
prospect of it seemed delicious.
Shelby Dunn felt as though he was the only person on earth in
the entire history of creation who had been assembled backward. This
sense had grown more keen the older he got, and being of his peculiar
temperament Shelby needed indisputable proof and the constant
reassurance of his peers that he was not only acceptable the way he
was, but that he was indeed better than those around him and
downright bee-yoo-tee-ful. What he was asking Basil now tied into
that; Basil would ask Dr. Gracey.
Gracey- as he liked to be called, according to Shelby's boss,
Basil Rochefoucauld- seemed to be the only one with a firm bead on

77
 78

what Shelby wanted to try doing with his face. It would be a radically
different type of plastic surgery. Basil had known Dr. Gracey going
back to almost 1970. They had first crossed roads at the Chicago
University of Health Sciences when Gracey was a teacher there, before
he starting his private researches in skin. Basil's roommate during his
first year had been the now-famous Whilomon Attaccus, who would in
the decades to come pull the epidermal industry almost single-
handedly with his Salaman skin re-agent product. The new Salaman
formula worked to increase the rate of regular post-trauma flesh
recovery from sixteen to thirty-seven and one-eighths percent, which
had been a breakthrough for the industry in general at the time; the
old one had brought that rate up by only eight to seventeen percent
only a year prior to the final Salaman experimental project product
formulation.
Attaccus had died only two years before, his last great project
left unfinished. The epidermal world could only speculate what his last
idea had been, because Attaccus' body and life's research had both
perished in the same bath of flame that had consumed his laboratory.
Shelby had seen Salaman's healing process first-hand at the
Carlton's annual medical exposition weekend over the first Saturday
and Sunday in March of the previous year. Witnessing the old formula
had made Shelby think to himself a little bit, but the second formula
had stricken him between the eyes with its possibilities for his
experimental operation. The idea to split himself and then reconstruct
his features as the mirrored opposite of what he had looked like had
been stewing in the back of his head for quite a while but only recently
had it taken shape.
After first hearing about him through Basil, he'd read of Gracey's
professional interest in the field of synthetic skin re-assignment and
immediately knew that Dr. Thomas Gracey was the man he wanted for
the job. There simply appeared to be no other choice. No one else
was that openly radical in their experimenting with skin in any
capacity. Gracey had gone out past the edge and tested the limb of
propriety and sanity in his experiments, and he was only now- twenty
years into the main body of his experimental work- coming to reap
what his research had sown for him throughout the length of his
career both as a doctor of general medicine and as a ground-breaking
research scientist by designing processes by which genetic skin
restoration might be attempted.
Might wasn't the case anymore.
What Shelby didn't know was how right he was in his thinking.
Gracey didn't always tell the people he was working for about the
wide-ranging applications of his work, but word was leaked through
the underground to those folks who were interested in hearing about

78
 79

it. What Gracey wanted to do was not to heal old skin but to create
new skin. He wanted to grow flesh on his own, without nature's
meddling intervention. This tied into what Shelby had in mind,
because he would need a whole new body of skin to cover him.
Gracey's new line of experimental work had led him to believe that
such a feat was indeed possible, and what he needed to do now was to
cross his formula with DNA that had been cloned from all types of
epidermal matter.
Fresh flesh was all that was needed to bring this gimmickry
about, and Gracey's good friends Lorne Cleal and Basil Rochefoucauld
had only been too willing to supply the goods he desired when he
needed it. Dr. Gracey had needed to blackmail Rochefoucauld into his
compliance but Cleal had been almost obscenely willing to help Gracey
locate his needed flesh strips. Shelby could imagine this Dr. Gracey as
a cross between the original Lon Gracey and some sort of skin-sewing
slug, but the idea intrigued him. He laughed- that would put his pal
Basil into the same category as movie-turds like Renfield and Igor. A
bug-eyed, pale-faced grave-robbing ghoul. Which is how Basil looked
in times of stress when Shelby had seen his eyelids peel back and the
veins exploding inside his forehead. It was enough to make Shelby
wince in sympathetic agony.
Basil had told him two weeks ago that he was helping Gracey.
Basil had met Gracey perhaps twenty times in his career, but each
occasion had been a guidance, and Shelby had never talked to anyone
else who had even seen the man, even though he worked in the
Bramble Clinic along with them. There were rumors among the more
ignorant folks on the staff that Gracey actually lived there, inside his
lab, or that he traveled inside through a lower level elevator that went
down to a tunnel that connected via a small roadway a seven-mile
tube between his house and the Clinic.
But Shelby knew that was bullshit.
No one saw Gracey because Gracey was smart enough not to be
seen.

The skin-transfer arrangement had been forged months ago. In

the time in between then and now, Basil said that Gracey had been
able to make leaps and bounds beyond what he or anyone else had
any right to think possible. He had been able to grow skin, but he had
also been able to create new life- minute microscopic beings that
floated in his Petri dish, doubling and tripling their sizes until they were
large enough to slink away from the harsh fluorescent lighting and into
the darkest corners of the laboratory, where they would cower,
trembling.
Gracey worked in flesh and in the realm of creating genetic

79
 80

mutations for the betterment of humankind as a whole. The things he

created were put to sleep as painlessly as possible, but it was still a
legal gray area for him to be doing what he was doing. There was
only so much that the government was willing to accept all at one
time, and so discretion was the best way for Gracey to go about
playing their game. But having made the discovery that it was
possible to geneticize new flesh had left him feeling empty. This had
been the culmination of so many years of research and
experimentation, and here it was. Over. His only horizon lay in
perfecting the formula, which would involve more testing and
experimentation on the skin samples he had created. What he needed
to do was to clone healthy and unhealthy tissue samples so that the
new skin would have within its genetic matrix a built-in antibody for
disease and infection. Even his best samples of the old E2D8-assisted
skin had remained viable for no longer than three days, and what
Gracey had in mind was a new perfect skin that would last forever.

80
 81

PREGNANCY IN THE COLOR OF SADNESS

There is no heartbreak too painful to cannibalize.
The air smelled heavily of fetid menses, almost as if bodily
wastes had been allowed to collect and exist and to thrive over a
period of months in scrimmets and grobblets along the cracks in the
bathroom floor, and running alongside the base work of the four walls.
Each woman has her own scent, and he knew the scent of his own
woman, in the same way a dog knows where it has pissed before.
Menstrual blood was bad magic, and that much was instinctual
knowledge. Courtney remembered a joke he had once heard at work
concerning menstruation. Actually, Courtney couldn't remember all of
it, but the punch line was something along the lines of: Trust nothing
that bleeds for a week and don't die.
Would he never find happiness and fidelity in this world? In his
heart, he doubted that Nona had ever cheated on him, but his head
and his gut told a truer, briefer tale. He had everything he needed to
convict her, save for the courage to face the consequences that such a
pronouncement would bring about. Was adultery really necessary?
No. All she needed to do was remember. But was she cheating? Had
she ever? If she was, did he want to know, for certain? That was the
question.
Was there room for both of them in her life? Was she one
person whenever he was around, and another person when she was by
herself, with other people? It was possible, he decided, because it was
his own truth that he was seeing reflected in her sighs and actions. All
the sideways glances, all the moments when he longed to ask her
what she was thinking about- did he really want the answers to these
questions that haunted him so? Probably not. His own mind could do
more to cripple him than anything else, and this he knew from bitter
past experience. And his own mind would lead him directly to that
which would wound him the most.
Will I ever learn this lesson, or am I addicted to my own misery?
Did she think of other men when they made love? Had it always
been that way? Was there no escape from these thoughts? He
wanted to believe the best in her, he truly did, but it was impossible
when her mouth was as foul as it was and she maintained her win-or-
die attitude about arguing. It was probably well past argument, one
way or the other, for a long time now. It had been decided by Nona
for him.
There were moments- eons, really- during which Courtney would
sit upon, awake in their bedroom, and watch her sleeping. As he
regarded Nona- her open mouth, her crooked teeth, her slightly
sighing form of snoring- he could not reconcile the knowledge of who
he thought she was with what he knew she had done, and the atrocity

81
 82

she was capable of.

You've been faithful...give or take a night or two.

He had vowed never to return to this sad, hollow place in his

head ever again. There were times when he actually felt hope. In the
past week, he had learned to appreciate Nona in a new light; whatever
kind of person she was, she was his woman, and he felt a surge of
pride in this fact. They had chosen one another, for better or for
worse, and he knew that he could certainly have done worse- he was
happy that she was here. He was content to be her husband, if she
were content to be his wife.
They belonged to one another, and this fact alone brought him
any comfort he was able to feel, however warped that comfort
might've been.
Until his mind- and subsequently, his fingers- started wandering.
I know you're fucking someone else.
Have you ever lived with the feeling that arises within oneself
from seeing your wife- your alleged life-spouse- shaving her pussy,
thinking all the while that it was perhaps not for your benefit? Do you
know how that feels- how it burns- the razor scraping against the
fibrous tissues of the heart? Have you ever in your life felt this way?
Have you lived within the embrace of the ultimate lie, tonguing this
serpentine jackal?
His wife Nona, who was supposedly barren, now carried condoms
in her purse- condoms that disappeared at exactly the rate she used
them. This much he knew- and Nona didn't know that he kept track of
the contents of her purse. But Courtney did keep track, and on this
sad occasion he had found, among the interstices and linings of her
purse, an unused condom, tucked neatly into a foil wrapping. He
remembered her once telling him that she had always kept a condom
in her purse, in the event that she was ever raped. That way, if she
were ever to be raped, she wouldn't be at risk for disease. Courtney
had smiled sickly at this explanation.
It's impossible to rape a whore.
He had to admit to himself that we all inhabit the same shitty
cell- we have to live here, asshole- and sometimes the living
conditions are a little too insane and crowded. Courtney was not a
woman- not outwardly, at least- and so he could not conceive of the
female intellect and all the duplicities of which it was capable. Perhaps
there was some truth to what she was saying, and perhaps not.
Maybe it was all bullshit.
Courtney had kept an eye on that condom, for the few weeks
that it traveled with her in her purse, and he had watched with semi-
detached interest as the condition of its foil wrapper had deteriorated.

82
 83

Such is life. A few days ago- no, it was week ago now- he had seen
something in her little bag of shit that had stopped his heart dead in
his chest.
Never ask a question without first knowing what the answer will
be.
There was a new condom in her purse. The smoking gun, so to
speak. Had the old condom merely rotted, and was it now ineffective?
Possible.
Possible, but not likely.
Two days after this discovery, he had searched through her
purse again. The new condom was gone, and replaced by a strip of
two new condoms of a different brand. So. Where had that new
condom gone?
And what about the third condom on this strip?
When had she used it? With whom had she used it?
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
And there it was, in his hand: the truest, simplest evidence that
she was not the person she claimed to be- in her mind, she was no
longer his wife. Nona had merely failed to inform Courtney of their
divorce.

83
 84

A DECENT CHRISTIAN BURIAL

Kraggess Feebes had stopped by the apartment early one afternoon a
few days after the demon had made its physical presence known to
Timothy, and these two events working in conjunction with each other
had amplified their total effect. If Timothy had been frazzled before
Kraggess' visit, he was doubly so after Kraggess had left. Each
episode had taught Timothy a great deal of what his convalescence
had cost him, but in a way, the bit with Kraggess Feebes had upset
him more than the demon did, because it had forced Timothy to open
his eyes- in opposition to logic-and in all ignorance, Kraggess Feebes
had provided Timothy with a yardstick by which to measure his own
deterioration.
It amazed Timothy to discover that life was still going on out
there, but it was. People were living, breathing, sucking and fucking.
For Timothy, there was to be none of this. No more living or
breathing. No more sucking; no more fucking. No more nothing. He
envied Kraggess his tanned skin, his healthy pallor and clickety step
upon the tile. He envied his smile, so much so that he imagined how
good it would feel to carve the smile off of Kraggess' face altogether
with a butcher knife.

Upon first seeing him, Kraggess had been taken back by

Timothy's physical appearance. Kraggess thought he could detect the
stink of long-stagnant urine and feces, but he cast his mind away from
such thoughts. His psychological background when coupled with his
college football history served to help him when he did things like this.
He could get through anything if he could only get himself to not dwell
upon it. He had some genuine concern for Timothy's well-being- which
was in truth merely a sliver when compared to the 2 x 4 of financial
interest he had in the E2D8 project- but that was just the way he was.
Kraggess had liked Timothy somewhat when they had worked
together on a few cases here and there at Quillen and Timmendeguas,
but he hadn't said goodbye to him when he left. For some reason, it
hadn't seemed important to him, either then or now. He hadn't even
signed the card that Gloria down in personnel had given him to sign
for Timothy.
Kraggess had heard about Timothy and Melanie breaking up, but
he didn't want to broach the topic with him. Frankly, he didn't care. If
anything, he was indifferent to this news, being unavailable to pursue
Melanie himself. There was a level of carnival interest, that was all.
Maybe, I'll just knock really softly. Then I can say that I tried. I
don't want to fuck this guy over, but I have to say that I tried to see
him. I'll just knock softly and then I'll go home.

84
 85

And that's what he did. He was almost ready to turn away when
he heard a noise on the other side of the door directly in front of him.
'Go away,' came the scrape of the voice from behind the door.
'Tim?' Kraggess said.
There was a silence. 'What do you want?'
'It's Kraggess Feebes. From work.'
'Go away.' Timothy's tone was threatening, but it didn't carry
well.
Kraggess swallowed hard, clicked his tongue against the roof of
his mouth and began again in earnest. 'Tim, c'mon, you gotta let me
in. We've all been worried about you. You promised us, that you
would call-'
'I can't do things like that anymore. I need to rest.'
'If you would please just-'
'I'm in a different place now, Kraggess.'
'Tim, just let me in.'
'My name isn't Tim, either.'
A slippery thought crossed Kraggess's mind.
'I have Melanie here with me. She says she wants to talk.'
Timothy slowly opened the door, his eyes squinting from the
light. Scrambling for the sight of her, he was soon blackly
disappointed. He was looking to Kraggess now, hoping for a sign,
some gesture that she was waiting in the elevator, or in the lobby, or
in the car outside. All he needed was some evidence that the lie was
not a lie.
'You're a fucking liar,' Timothy spat, closing the door.
It was nothing for Kraggess to arrest the progress of Timothy's
closing door. His holding the door open seemed like nothing much
more offensive than friendly concerned protest, but Timothy was
worried that he wouldn't be able to close the door and lock it again.
And even if he did get it locked, what would prevent Kraggess from
knocking on his door all day? 'Let me in, Timothy. Come on. We're
all worried about you.'
'There's nothing to worry about,' Timothy responded with a
smile.
'Look at you,' Kraggess gasped.
'Yeah, I know. I'm already dead. Didn't you know that? I don't
have any time for you people that are still alive. Fuck off! Go away
and live in your world. Just go away and leave me the fuck alo-'
'Timothy-'
'Didn't you hear me? I'm dead!'
He closed the door in Kraggess's face, with Kraggess almost
catching his fingers against the door jamb, his heart beating irregularly
as he fumbled to secure the lock. When he was done, he gingerly put

85
 86

his ear to the door to see if Kraggess had gone away yet, but he
hadn't. He was standing right outside the door, waiting for him.
Timothy knew that much. He also knew that Kraggess knew he would
relent and let him in.
You can't let him in.
'Timothy!'
Silence from behind the door. Then footsteps. Laughter.
'You might want to get to a doctor as soon as possible, Timothy,'
he called down the hallway as he waited for the elevator to arrive. 'It
smells as if something might have crawled up inside of you and died!'
Timothy cowered in silence behind the door.
'And Melanie...man! I forgot that she was such a great fuck!'
There was that familiar peal of laughter as Kraggess stepped into
the elevator car, and then it was gone, taking everything else with it.
'Fuck you! I hope you die!' Timothy shouted, as much at
Melanie and her memory as it was at Kraggess Feebes. None of these
three answered.
Returning to the bare floor in front of the couch, he lay down
and curled into a fetal position, the only way he could get comfortable.
Touching a button on a black Twix-sized remote control, Timothy was
able to start the disc in his CD player where it had left off- in middle of
Pink Floyd's The Final Cut. There was something so...mortal, so
humbled in the grooves to these songs, particularly those on the
second half of the disc. Whenever Timothy was feeling depressed, he
had been always able to listen to this album and have the music pull
him through his sorrow by dragging him downwards and through it,
and in this capacity, the record had become a chunk of time to him, a
piece of his life.
It occurred to him now that this might be the last time he heard
it.
It might be the last time he felt this way for the rest of his life.

86
 87

PERFECT SKIN
The formula for product E2D8 was discovered largely by accident as an
offshoot of another product called Znairaxe. Dr. Gracey had always
been searching for a way to do what he saw as being possible in the
way of skin, and it was only through routinely repeated miscalculations
that he found himself being able to reproduce the same sort of result
he'd once seen achieved earlier by a shaman on the streets in
Bombay, India in 1975. The idea hadn't been original, but the theories
involved were.
Its most common form was that of a salmon-colored paste,
although the liberal use of D&C Red #33 could alter its shading from a
faint pinkish tone to a deep dark menstrual hue of maroon. FD&C Blue
#1 could be used in place of the red to give it a slightly medicinal
coloring, but the color of the paste was arbitrary, to say the least. The
E2D8 paste had the same thick consistency as mucilage when it was
mixed properly.
It always looked active.
It always looked alive.
Which it was, actually. Dr. Thomas Gracey had come up with its
original formula by design. Its function as a live compound was to
keep the surrounding tissue active and meshing while the healing
process took place. The compound was breathable and exceptionally
porous by virtue of its original design, so that the growth of new skin
would be encouraged and further enabled by the presence of the E2D8
compound.
E2D8 smelled like plastic epoxy resin prior to having hardened
into its final form- a hot, stinging scent like that of Krazy Glue. In the
vial, it was like thick sludgy Mountain Dew, or maybe even a clog of
egg-drop soup. When it was laid out in a Petri dish overnight, skin
would grow- period. In a controlled setting, there would be some
spontaneous growth, but in an open-air setting- this was important- it
would grow as swiftly as does algae in a twenty-gallon fish tank.
And Thomas Gracey wanted to take it even farther beyond that.
In the vial, it was viscous. It slurped around like resin epoxy,
but it smelled like heaven to Thomas Gracey. It smelled like money
just waiting to pour in. It didn't really work until a mistake was made
and one of the lab techs had left a dish of the stuff laying out over a
holiday weekend. Prior to that, the E2D8 formula had only stagnated,
but all it had really needed to live and thrive was something Dr.
Gracey would eventually name as Blurvin- the formula's indeterminate
compound. Blurvin- which was only another name for the mixture of
breathable air and a touch of camphor- was so outrageously unstable
in its composition and combustion that it asked to be kept inside a

87
 88

locked storage cabinet with a refrigerator unit set at exactly 27.473

degrees below zero.
Salient among the list of ingredients was a chemical known as
Clonine Hydrochloride, although it made up less than 1.ooo65% of the
total mass. Benzel Hydrochloride was the next highest bidder and it
counted for less than .o35% of E2D8's total mixture. The compound
was highly antiseptic so as to prevent any infection that might hamper
the growth of new skin or perhaps damage the final graftings that had
been placed where they were with such care and proper mathematical
precision on the body of the patient in question. Hamamalis water-
known to laymen as Witch Hazel- was one of the minor items added to
their mixture in one of its final stages of development, ultimately
making up less than 1.oo572845663oo25% of the final tally. Other
ingredients included: isopropyl isosotearate; Glycerin; Collagen;
Chlotrimazole; Octyldodecanol; Dimethicone; Sorbitan Qioleate;
Tocoperal Acetate Chloride; a slightly secret Methylpylparaben fix;
Benzocaine; Triclosan; Petrolatum and Dibucaine. Hirudin was used
primarily as an anti-coagulant to keep the basic E2D8 formula flexible
after it had been applied to the areas intended, although it did add a
little something to the rest of what was going on; phosphoric acid was
used in later batches of E2D8 as a stabilizer. The whole chemical
process had been modified a little bit each time they rehearsed with
their new formula, each step of the way. Extract of Plumeria was also
included, although Dr. Gracey had indeed forgotten why he had
included it in the first place. They had tried to remove Plumeria from
the formula on ten times ten occasions, with each attempt falling
miserably flat. The extract of Plumeria was somehow integral to the
compound, in a way Gracey didn't quite understand, and so it
remained in the formula, mixed in from the first set of chemicals.
Extract of Manako- which came from the fruit of the mango tree- was
mixed with extract of Mikana- from the Passion fruit- in a separate
dish prior to being introduced to the rest of the mixture. This was
done in order to insure that the Manako and Mikana were given an
opportunity to truly bond with one another.

88
 89

SLIGHTLY WARPED
Joshua Tauble had first been convicted in the year of 1985 on three
separate counts of first-degree murder. He told the judge that he now
considered himself guilty on only two of those charges, but the State's
Attorney didn't want the court to linger on that jazz and Joshua ended
up taking the drop for all three killings. They had happened, one right
after the other, in the early morning hours of January 12th, 1984. The
first victim the authorities found- a female named Jessica Vae Sullich-
had been split from stem to sternum with a butcher knife. Jessica's
murder was salient among the list of charges filed against Mr. Tauble,
and it was on her silent testimony that he was convicted. The other
murders were treated as sort of an afterthought, and he received
twenty years apiece for them, but for Jessica, he received the death
penalty.
Joshua Tauble told the police that he didn't know what came
over him.
When he'd been in prison for twenty-two months of his sentence
Joshua was operated on in prison for a tumor- possibly malignant- that
had been detected inside of the lining of his stomach. He survived
against every slash from the blade but his luck in survival lasted
beyond that day and that particular brush with death, leaving him
alive so that he could die more painfully another day. The gods had
saved a special fate for him.
But prior to his operation, Joshua Tauble had no way of knowing
that. He had fully expected that he would die. The prison MDs
weren't exactly known for their skill of practice, and no one was going
to try very hard to preserve the life of a terminally ill Death Row
inmate. There were a lot of people who would pay to see Joshua
Tauble dead, and three armed guards had been posted within the
operating room to protect him while he was under the anesthetic.
While he was awake, Joshua had been swabbed down with a Povidone-
Iodine prep pad, and the amber fluid seeped into the fabric of his
prison greens. Joshua had been injected with a solution that would
enable the prison doctors to see any cancerous activity in his stomach,
and with that, they went in. Only a few cells were scraped away- from
the area his pancreas used to inhabit next to his stomach- and then he
was stitched up. The doctors told him later that there was nothing
more that they could do for him there. He was terminally ill.
Joshua Tauble obeyed the impulse of forces beyond his
comprehension. His crimes, in life, were numerous and bloody. Not
knowing that he was being driven by a centuries-old beast, he thought
that he was acting on impulse, when in fact he was little more than a
puppet. But by the time he realized this, the demon had taken total

89
 90

control of his life.

He had faced death many times before, if he only knew it. He
had first been executed in 1781, although it was a scene destined to
be repeated time and time again as he passed through the ages
unscathed. Joshua didn't know that his newfound memories of past
lives were being given to him, compliments of the un-discharged
electrical currents left over from Ixxir's possession of his body before
he died.
He lived on and on, and he perpetuated forever. Joshua knew at
the exact moment of his death that he had lived many times before,
because that was the first moment in his whole life that had made any
real sense to him. He knew that the name he had chosen for himself
was actually the name he had gone by in his other lifetimes. This
would only serve to bring things full-circle. In the act of dying, he
would come into his own, just as he'd known he would. Nothing could
stop him, then.
And there was just one other thing unique about him; he was
risen.
And better than risen; some of Ixxir's genetic make-up had
leaked into him, transforming his physical constitution. The changes
were subtle at first, then they became more pronounced.
He looked like every other man on the street, except perhaps for
the bitter gleam of mayhem that glittered in his eyes, even when it
was dark out. He needed to keep his cloak closed tightly across the
front of his body to avoid betraying the damage that Ixxir had done to
him. Ixxir. Joshua even knew its name now. Aside from the
irreparable damage to his torso, he looked fine. Better than fine,
actually. He looked healthy; he looked alive- more so than he had
ever looked in his human span of life. His skin seemed to glow, from
the inside. But his human span of life was over and a new age was
dawning, for both Joshua Tauble and the remainder of humankind. He
had seen things no living human being had seen before, and it had
changed him- miraculously. It made him dangerous. It was also
important to remember that beneath his coat, there were those folded
black wings.

90
 91

DASHBOARD PARADISE
Courtney had known Nona for maybe a week before they slept
together.
He had taken her out for dinner a few times, and she always said
yes whenever he proposed that they go out again. There were a few
moments of awkwardness when he dropped her off, when a kiss
seemed expected and he felt too weird about it to do it. He should
have simply thrown his caution to the wind- this he knew- but how to
do that he had no idea.
He was afraid to kiss her because in her he detected that it need
not stop at a kiss. She had opened up the floodgates for him, so to
speak, and she was willing to let him take her wherever he felt like. If
he didn't take her somewhere, preferably against her will, well, that
had not been taken into account whenever Nona Elise offered herself
to him. If she offered herself to him again and he refused, Courtney
thought that she would stop seeing him, and he was truly growing
fond of her company.
He was just starting to feel comfortable with her, and he thought
he might genuinely open up to her. He like to drive around with her in
the car. It was late spring, and Courtney felt as if all he needed was
Phil Collins on the radio and Nona Elise by his side and enough
highway to keep him busy for a lifetime. Sex was not necessarily what
he was after, and he was afraid to go after it. What if she initiated it
for him?
Unthinkable.
He was content to let it continue as a friendly situation- simply
because he was grateful for having one, and he had never expected it
to go beyond that. Whatever could she see in him? It was weird,
though, but when he was beside her he felt pure, and clean, like he'd
never seen any of the things he'd seen or done any of the things he'd
done. It was like having his life start again, just being normal, and
Courtney really appreciated that. Nona Elise was the one who insisted
that things get sexual right away; sex being her stock-in-trade
because that was all she knew how to offer a man, and it had
dominated all of her relationships.
...and, I swallow.
Nona Elise had tacked it onto the end of a sentence by way of
passing, putting the subject of sex into the conversation. That was the
last thing he wanted to know about her, or to hear her say. Absolutely
the last bit of information he desired to glean from her personality
makeup.
She must not have realized that such an inflammatory
statement- and it was indeed that, designed with only the idea of

91
 92

making his pee-pee hard- revealed everything she'd done in the past
with other men to him at a very sensitive juncture in his life. He was
just starting to feel normal again.
There was no way she could've understood his burning jealousy,
but it still showed a remarkable lack of common sense on her part, an
unforgivable faux pas that would linger and resound in his mind for
years to come. But that was how it all began; that was how he knew
she was sexually interested in him, or failing that, that she would put
out for him if he asked. And Courtney was expected to ask. Well,
what does one say? He'd certainly never been in a position like this
before. Courtney hadn't even instigated it. He never would have.

It kept ringing through Courtney's head, unbidden, over and

over and over again: ...and, I swallow. Over and over again, I
swallow.
How many men had she taken care of in this way? There was a
lot for Courtney to consider. How many different loads of personal
protein had she ingested before she met him? Most women would not
swallow cum. Some would retch at the mere thought of performing
fellatio. But Courtney's wife, blessed soul, was a true connoisseur in
the sack.
I swallow.
The East Wind motel was where a lot of it went down, he
supposed, there and in the parking lot of the bar she frequented.
Courtney found himself driving by the bar once every few weeks,
either running errands or just fooling around, looking for pain, and
there it would be. How many men had his wife serviced, right there in
the open, where anybody could walk by and see his wife-to-be, in
coitus? God alone knew what sort of degenerate goo had been
jettisoned inside of her.
What did she expect, when the opening salvo in their
relationship had been fired by her reaching across his lap to perform
fellatio upon him? She hadn't even bothered to kiss him first! Had
she been interested in love, then why had she done that? Why didn't
she kiss him? When he had pressed her on this issue, she hemmed
and hawed and finally told him that she wasn't sure if he was
interested in her, romantically.
His wife was the epitome of a bad locker-room joke. Hers was
the phone number scrawled on bathroom walls. Nona Elise could walk
into a place with the certain knowledge that if she wanted to, she
could walk out with someone who was intent upon sleeping with her.
Courtney could never say the same thing, and that knowledge affected
them, both.
How can flesh feel so familiar? He wondered what that felt like,

92
 93

to have it so easily accessible, so easily available, to just have it given

to you, to be sexually attractive. To be desired. She'd told him one
time that she never thought that she looked good, that all she'd ever
known was how it felt to be sexually desirable. He couldn't understand
that statement at all, since he'd never felt sexually desirable himself
and leaned heavily toward venomous envy when someone talked of it
as being a problem. He just couldn't relate to it at all. At least she
had that much going for her; he himself had nothing. He couldn't
relate to her situation any more than she could relate to his.
The peep-show booth that Courtney was sitting in was made out
of plywood, stained to a dark brown, and the monitor was located in a
box near the door. These were the biggest booths he'd ever seen in a
place like this- which was why he liked coming here. There was a
place to sit- which was to be expected- but it was a hollow wooden
bench-like contraption that extended all the way back to the wall
behind him, which was probably seven or eight feet back from the
monitor. There was more than enough room, he thought musingly,
that there was more than enough room for two people to roll around
and poke each other. The walls sometimes had holes in them, little
peep-holes that people had carved there, and sometimes Courtney had
been happily masturbating when he turned his head and saw a finger
or a tongue waggling through the hole, intent upon attracting his
attention. It made him feel sick inside.
It made him feel like this is what he really was.
There was a sheet of Plexiglas between him and the screen of
the monitor, and it was streaked with cum and other bodily fluids.
There was also a black metal panel that contained a dial to control the
volume of the movies being viewed, as well as two coin slots, two coin
returns, and a channel selector button that was lit up so that you could
see it in the dark. The time left in the booth was displayed on an LED
counter that went in increments of one hundred, each token being one
hundred and every hundred lasting perhaps a minute and a half.
Kelly Royce was sitting on Tom Byron, turning him into turgid
dick furniture. This was before Tom adopted the earrings and grew his
hair long. The red digital display read 2300. The moments passed in
steady increments of ten, and a quarter could buy an extra hundred.

93
 94

INAUSSRECHLICHEN KULTEN
Dr. Gracey sat behind his desk at the campus with a series of
hypobaric X-ray examination photographs spread out in array before
him. He looked at them patiently, culling them with the experience of
a professional whose very professionalism dominated his entire
personality. As he looked at the X-rays, he gave no sign that he even
knew that someone else was in the office.
Basil Rochefoucauld was pacing in the farthest corner of the
office from where Thomas and the photographs were. He was pissed
off at Gracey, but he was worried about Shelby Dunn.
Through all of this, he thought he could feel his hair turning
white.
Above all, though, he was curious.
'This one,' Gracey said, grinning wolfishly. 'This one. Here.
Necrotisizing fasciitis. Can you get me this one when he goes?'
'I suppose so,' Basil sighed. 'If that's the one you want.'
'Oh, it is. Look at this, Basil- you used to be a doctor. Do you
see the lesions here, at the top of the hairline on the facial shot?
That's indicative of a very rare form of lymphoma. Lymphoma is half
the reason why the patients I test are dying. Did you know that? I
need this to be present in the samples I test with for the antibodies to
develop naturally on their own. Injecting any sort of antibody clouds
the whole configuration.' Gracey looked a bit disgusted with Basil,
who affected not to notice. 'You used to know a lot about these sorts
of things, Basil,' Gracey admonished him in a soft voice that dripped
with sarcasm. 'You used to love to talk shop- here, with me.'
'Being around you,' Basil countered, 'has drained me of every
last drop of heartfelt desire I feel for my professional positionings.'
Gracey smiled.
'And this is somehow my fault?'
Basil hemmed and hawed.
'Well, uh, yes, it is.'
'I beg to differ.'
'You would. The fact is, you've got me over a barrel, and I'm the
one who's allowed you to keep me there.'
'We're all over a barrel, Basil, all of us- it's only a matter of to
what degree. You're afraid of what you are, and so-'
'So, you use it to fuck with me.'
'If you weren't gay- or else not so uptight about keeping quiet
about it- I wouldn't be able to make you do anything you didn't want
to. You were the one to make the decision that things needed to be
this way.'
Basil stood silent and stock-still, still taking it all in.

94
 95

'I want this one here, Basil. The one here in photo #A-103. It
says his name is Karacas. Keep me posted as he's going down.'
'Alright.'
'He will go down, won't he? This isn't another one of your
sudden-remission cases again, is it? Can you guarantee me that he'll
die?'
'Of course,' Basil said, picking up the photos and stuffing them
into a large leather envelope. 'If it's a case of my survival, that makes
any ethical questions I have much, much easier to become answered.'

95
 96

THE BURDEN OF BREATH

Timothy was so tired he couldn't sleep. He would drift in and out of
wakefulness, but he never really woke up. Sometimes, when he would
sit by the window and watch the traffic of the people out in the world,
he would literally shake with rage over the injustice of what had
happened between him and Melanie- other times Timothy merely
shook out of grief.
Both he and Melanie had been employed at the law firm of
Quillen and Timmendeguas when they met one another and it was
quite some time before they began dating. Maxwell Timmons- who
had always used a shortened version of the Timmendeguas name- had
made the introduction between the two of them. Timothy had met
Maxwell on his first day at the firm when Maxwell gave him the grand
tour of the place, and they had been friends ever since. Maxwell had
hired Melanie Cleaves himself as a paralegal, and was in the process of
showing her around the office when they ran into Timothy in the copy
machine room. The introduction was made, and for many weeks
afterward Timothy agonized over whether or not he should ask her out
to dinner. He thought that she had said something about being
engaged, but he wasn't sure. He didn't want to be rejected.
Old man Quillen disapproved of in-house romances, saying that
it had an adverse effect on the quality of work being produced, and so
they had needed to keep things under wraps for a while. But, in time,
everyone knew about it and out of respect for both Melanie and
Timothy, they had kept it to themselves. Random office flings came
and went but Timothy's relationship with Melanie seemed to have been
forged of something more concrete than that, and the weight of that
assessment carried over into how that relationship was viewed. When
it was made public knowledge, he had been called into Quillen's office
to answer for it. Old man Quillen quoted almost verbatim the strict
inter-office policy that regarded such involvements. One of them
would have to leave the firm, he said, and he would much prefer that
it be Melanie; she was not nearly as critical to the daily operations of
the firm. Timothy Karacas had only passed the bar exam a year
earlier and had worked his way patiently up through the ranks, as a
man from Quillen's generation would have expected him to.
He was limited in his trial experience, but Quillen said that he
saw the potential for growth in Timothy's form, particularly in the way
he was able to handle a twelve-member jury panel. Melanie on the
other hand was only a paralegal and would therefore not come to
flower for several more years; Quillen always looked at the long-term
prospects for people, and he saw that Melanie was quite adept at what
she did, but he didn't see her as being essential- and at the end of the

96
 97

working day, it was those people that he needed to take care of, as
best as he could.
Timothy felt warmed to have been included in that number, but
the complement that Quillen was paying to him by saying that did
nothing to negate the problem at hand- he would want Melanie to quit.
'I hope you don't feel that we're discriminating against you for
having a romantic life outside of work, Timothy. In fact, it's only
because I think as much of you as I do that I'm having this
conversation with you face-to-face instead of with an inter-office
memo. Rules are rules for a reason, and the rules have been
developed over time, as I've seen necessary to make them in order to
avoid problems that have come up in the past. If two members of our
team are getting it on after hours, Timothy, then one or both of you
has to go.'
The reason for this policy, he said, was that many relationships
had a habit of not lasting very long. Lawyers were habitually hard on
their mates, and two lawyers within one relationship was tempting
fate.
Such relationships, he said, could never last for very long, and
acrimony would settle in, causing a subtle disruption in the workplace.
Friends would choose sides and it wasn't worth it. The capriciousness
of most romantic unions warranted him to have such a view of things.
'What if I could convince you that it would last?' Timothy
queried.
Quillen looked at him doubtfully. 'How could you do that?' he
asked.
Timothy then smiled and showed Quillen the engagement ring
that he had been carrying in his coat pocket for a few weeks.
Producing it with a flourish, he smiled at the old man, and in his
eyes Timothy saw that he was winning his case.
'When are you going to ask her to marry you?'
'A few weeks from now, on her birthday.'
In the half-light, Quillen's hard eyes softened a little bit.
'You're serious about this, aren't you?'
'Yes, I am. I've felt bad about it, deceiving you like this. We've
been living together for quite some time. I'm surprised that it's taken
you this long to find out about it.'
Quillen shrugged. 'In all truthfulness, Timothy, I guess I've
known for a while. I just didn't want to hear what I was hearing
because then I would have to be a hard-ass and deal with the
problem. I was hoping that it would break up on its own and that she
would leave. I'm sorry, but I really was hoping not to have to deal
with this. In doing it that way, I suppose I was taking a chance that
you would leave as well.'

97
 98

Timothy nodded in mute assention. He resented that his

personal life was being thought of as a problem, but he tried to see
Quillen's side of things. He was only happy that he was talking with
Quillen and not Mr. Timmendeguas, although Timothy thought that
Maxwell might be able to buy him a little bit of leverage with his uncle.
Timothy had once discussed the possibility of putting a picture of
Melanie on his desk and Maxwell had talked him out of doing it by
saying that only his reputation would save him if anything were to be
found out about the two of them. He also question Melanie's intrinsic
value as being worth the risk. If anything was to be made public,
Maxwell told Timothy that he would be watched like a hawk and
summarily fired at the slightest indiscretion.
'I asked my wife to marry me on her birthday, back in 1947,'
Quillen said, trying to hold his emotion inside. 'I wish you all the
happiness I knew with my wife, God rest her soul. If you're serious
about this-'
'Oh sir, I am,' Timothy clamored. 'We're both very, very
serious.'
Quillen smiled at him, and it warmed his chest. 'Then, I think
we could stand to overlook some of our old office policy, just this
once.'

98
 99

ACCIDENTALLY SKIN
Gracey had gotten a pleasant and ground-breaking surprise when he
came into work on the morning of the eighth, about three weeks
before he finally examined the selected hypobaric X-rays of Timothy
Karacas.
When he took of his coat and draped it over the edge of the
couch for his secretary to hang up once she came in to work, he saw
what looked like a malformed mushroom cap head sitting on the
carpet by the wall underneath the window facing the parking lot. He'd
been standing there only yesterday, and what had he been doing just
then? It came to him.
He'd dropped a couple of pieces of his fingernails on the floor
when he clipped them waiting for Basil Rochefoucauld's automobile to
come around the circle of the campus to pick him up the night before.
They had been planning on having dinner together to discuss the
further projections of the E2D8 line of experimentations. While placing
the phone call, Gracey had noticed how dirty and unkempt his
fingernails looked. The long hours in the lab, removed from mirrors
and sunlight, had not done much to keep up his state of appearances.
He'd hung up the phone and looked through his desk drawer for his
nail-clippers, which he found in a small paper-clip compartment in his
desk drawer organizer.
He knew he needed to keep an eye out for Basil's car- a shiny
new Cadillac that did more to conform to his image on campus than
his old Hyundai- and so Gracey had stood by the window, ready to
throw his raincoat over his shoulders the second Basil pulled up,
leaving him waiting for no longer than the time it would take Gracey to
get into the elevator and down to the street. It was important not to
keep people waiting, but it was also important to keep them waiting
for just the right amount of time.
Punctuality would be frowned upon.
As he always did, Thomas started with the thumb on his right
hand and worked his way over each fingertip down to his pinkie, and
then repeated the process on his left hand, humming as he did so.
But more importantly than clipping his fingernails, he had cut
away a few shards of dead skin from the left side of his thumb, up at
the top of the nail- on the farther, more lateral surface of the thumb's
finger-print pad. These crescent-shaped dead skin cells dropped
noiselessly to the carpet, where Gracey pushed them with his shoe
into the corners, between the walls and the floor, where no one would
be able to see them.
And where some of the new E2D8 formula had been spilled that
day.

99
 100

Gracey saw the Cadillac pull up next to the building, its wipers
slashing angrily back and forth across the car's windshield, cutting the
rain as it fell. He tossed the nail-clippers onto the top of his desk and
thought no more of it until he came into work the next day.
Today.
To his utter amazement, there was a series of mushroom-sized
clumps of shriveled flesh lined all along the floor where he had been
standing clipping his fingernails the night before. They looked like
normal fungi, only they were comprised of human flesh. It took him a
second to put two and two together, but if his hypothesis was proven
correct, what he now saw on the floor where he was kneeling was an
extension of him.
Could it be possible that the E2D8 formula was able to
synthesize other tissues on its own? That was what the evidence
before his eyes now suggested. Either there had been some mutated
form of bio-synthesis going on, or the skin clippings themselves had
been prodded into growing larger than they had been originally. Either
way, whatever had happened in his absence had been pretty
incredible. The E2D8 formula had worked on dead skin, with no
existing bio-nutritive source, and without the hypo-vitamin injections
that usually accompanied it.
It was amazing.
So far, an epidermal component had been added to the E2D8
compound, to better facilitate the growth of skin. Was that even
necessary now?
The clumps were bloody and decayed- they looked as if they had
been dragged through a paper shredder- but he had no doubt that
they had been alive and jumping maybe only twelve or fourteen hours
earlier. As he had been eating his spinach salad, his office had been
teeming with new, mindless life. They had disintegrated biologically at
a rate that far out-stripped that of any known skin tissue- even the
deteriorated E2D8 samples they had done the year before- but that
was a problem that could be addressed at a later date. What was
dead now had once been alive, and that gave him new hope from
which he could proselytize his new theories. He picked up one of the
larger chunks- it was no larger than a baby's skull- and marveled over
the unchecked rate of growth. There were new problems presented by
this discovery- to be sure- but the leap in progress this clump of
human flesh represented meant more than the steps that had become
necessary to make this discovery work properly.
Now, at least, he had a direction in which to travel.
He sprinted over to his desk and grabbed his pocket voice-
recorder from one of the drawers on the left-hand side of the desk. 'I
had no idea at all that it would clone so...well...from such a meager

100
 101

amount of source tissue material. There was no precedent that would

have lead us to believe that something like this was possible. Lacking
only the DNA fiber from which the compound would take its genetic
lead,' he said, noisily clearing his throat for emphasis, 'we will now be
able to grow our own skin traces as fast if not faster than we can grow
a tomato under advanced laboratory lighting modules. We need to do
some further study on the hormones that alter cell
metabolism...deoxyribose...the building blocks for DNA synthesis- the
purine and pyrimidine nucleosides and nucleotides. The nucleotides of
thymine- T, adenine- A, cytosine- C, guanine- G...each one of them
joined to the deoxyribose sugar. Under a microscope I imagine we will
see an abnormality of white-blood-cell differentiation as opposed to
that of normal flesh. Allosterism refers to a property of some enzymes
to change dramatically their efficiency in catalyzing a chemical reaction
under certain circumstances and I believe that what I'm looking at
here would bear that theory out- uh, scratch that. I believe that a
new enzyme is present, but I'll be damned if I could even guess what
it is. There's too many variables, and it could be weeks before I find
out what I did right here today and last night.'

101
 102

THIS MORTAL COIL

Ixxir had found its way from El Mohave to Timothy Karacas on a piece
of corn that was later processed along with many others of its kind
into Jiminy Bop microwave popcorn. Timothy's death had cost him
$1.89- plus tax. The kicker of it was that he hadn't even been very
hungry when he walked into the convenience store. He had only
wanted a cup of coffee and maybe a small pack of gum to keep him
from chewing the insides of his cheeks at the office. Timothy saw the
popcorn suction-cupped to the inside of a cooler case window, held in
place by a dirty Plexiglas folder holder that said Three Musketeers
alongside of it.
That was the first time he had moved at another's impulse, and
he had never quite forgotten it. Since that moment at the cooler door,
he had never been the same, but none of this would he figure out until
after he died. Even then, when he had nothing but time to ruminate,
there were too many dead spots in his life for him to make sense out
of it all.
There were times when Timothy felt as though he could literally
feel the thing moving around inside of him, swimming amongst his
innards. It made him feel indignant and as though he had been
violated in one of the most personal ways possible. He couldn't get
over the sense of betrayal he had gotten from his body. His own cells
were turning against him and he was going to die now because the
molecules that he was made of were a little bit too wicked and
aggressively frisky for their own damned good.
He dropped two potassium tablets on his tongue and let them
dissolve.
Timothy had long been afflicted with low-potassium arrhythmia.
He'd had a weak heart since he'd been born, but only than its weak
beating there was nothing congenitally wrong with the organ itself. It
just wasn't very strong. Since his treatment began however, Dr.
Alamackazine had discovered that there was a pin-sized hole in his left
ventricle; he had used cardiac catheterization to verify that. One
patient in forty-five or fifty usually died from undergoing the
procedure, but Timothy had been made to feel that there was no other
choice to be made. Echo-cardiography was used to further enhance
the doctor's understanding of his condition, as was cardiomyopathy,
without much regard- Timothy felt- for how much weaker such
procedures rendered their patient.
Had Timothy been stronger, the doctor would have operated.
But he wasn't.
Melanoma was what his doctors said they were after, sure, but
Timothy knew just as well as the doctors did that his illness had to go

102
 103

deeper than that. Much more than just his skin was infected with this
disease. It was affecting his whole central nervous system by now,
rapidly eating down through his flesh to the dead core of his cerebral
cortex with all the ferocity of a rabid pit bull, or perhaps even a
Wendigo.
His cancer was here, and it was there, and it was everywhere,
and it perpetuated its existence by making its home in every nook and
cranny that Timothy's fractured immune system would be able to offer
up to it in a coward's sacrifice.
It was over before it had really even begun; his cancer made its
manifestations on the skin on his forearms and all along his belly,
because that was an easy way for it to make its presence known.
Timothy detected somewhere within his cancer a biting arrogance-
why, he couldn't say- and what his cancer's arrogance was biting away
at was his own internal organs. Carry on, my tired swan.
He resented this malignant presence as much as he welcomed it.
As weird as it may have sounded when it was said out loud, living with
this disease meant that he would no longer be alone. If the thing was
slowly eating him alive from the inside out, then it had been the one
part of himself with the ambition to be more than it already was, even
at the expense of the surrounding tissues. In a begrudging way,
Timothy could understand that sensibility when presented in that
frame of thought. Whatever it was that was living and pulsing inside
of him desperately wanted to live, and it wanted to live at any cost
even if it was forced into resorting to auto-cannibalism, which is what
his cancer was even now preparing to do.
There was a great deal of intimate knowledge between the
cancer and himself, but he knew that he didn't know everything his
cancer was up to. To know those details prior to their execution would
throw off the balance of the game and it would no longer be fair to
either participant. His cancer would hold out on him from time to time
in an effort to try and confuse him. But knowing all this didn't make it
hurt him any less when he went to the bathroom. The nausea and
cramps were to be expected with this sort of radical chemotherapy,
the doctors had told him at the beginning, and indeed it often felt as
though his intestines were being tied into knots. But tonight it was
different. His stomach was gurgly, and his bowels felt loose. Nothing
would come out when he went into the bathroom, but the feelings of
intestinal instability persisted.
There was no refuge from the idea; it occupied his every
thought, and when he closed his eyes he saw himself in the casket
he'd already picked out for himself a few weeks earlier. Timothy
thought that by purchasing the casket he was admitting defeat- and in
a lot of ways, that's exactly what he was doing. The only end to the

103
 104

nausea and night sweats would be when his body expired, and there
was a part of himself that was looking forward to being dead. It would
be his first real opportunity to rest himself since he was born. The act
of breathing oxygen in and then out of his lungs had worn away at
him, and the metaphysical processes that went into the maintenance
of the human body took more out of him than Timothy knew he had to
give. All of his effort towards the task of pushing forward with the
process of living, and even the simplest of activities, were painful to
him. He couldn't walk across the apartment without getting winded,
and his ribs had been bruised quite severely two or three days earlier
when he'd fallen down on one of the milk crates in the living room that
he used as end tables now that Melanie was gone.
All at once, Timothy jumped up from where he'd been sitting
near the window and ran into the bathroom while cupping his hands in
front of his mouth for protection. When he got into the john, there
was a moment of hesitation where he didn't know what he should do
next. Timothy felt like he had to vomit, but more properly, he felt
almost as though he had to explode. As he looked in the mirror the
image he saw there rippled in front of him, as in a sideshow carnival.
What he saw was a freak- a skinny, pathetic, emaciated freak with red
sores all over his face.
A convulsion overtook him, and Timothy was immediately and
almost involuntarily in front of the toilet on his hands and knees,
resting his head sideways on the institutional black U-ring seat of the
commode.
It seemed for a moment that things would stop there. The pain
abated somewhat and Timothy- all at once- wondered what he was
doing here on the floor in the bathroom. He almost couldn't remember
the pain he'd experienced only a few seconds earlier, but he was able
to remember enough of it that he stayed where he was on the rug in
the bathroom, afraid to move, afraid to make things worse for himself.
The flood came all at once, and without warning to the puker
himself. Timothy had sat back on his haunches and was rubbing his
chin when the first of it burst forward. Bile, various stomach acids and
globs of his medication peppered the U-ring of the toilet seat as well
as the tank behind it, but he still managed to funnel most of what was
coming out of him into the bowl with his hands. It was as much as
over once it had begun, only now Timothy needed to change his shirt,
and the bathroom needed to be scrubbed, the toilet at least. The stink
of his vomit rose high into the air in the bathroom, but he thought he
smelled something a little more bitter and rancid than ordinary puke in
what was in there.
Had he but known it then, he was smelling his own sour death.
The second convulsion took him by surprise, but not quite as

104
 105

much as it had the first time. He had gotten to be quite an adept at

throwing up his lunch, and he had even gotten so good at it that
before he left work he could puke while wearing a three-piece suit and
a tie without splashing any of it. Losing lunch had become a way of
life for him, and indeed there had been many days where he hadn't
felt quite right until after his morning puke. But nothing made him
feel right anymore.
He felt as though there was something caught in his throat, and
for a minute he toyed with the idea of sticking his finger down his
gullet and loosening it manually. He was here, he reasoned, and his
clothes were already soiled. What was to be lost by helping things
along?
As it so happened, it wouldn't be necessary. After five or six
ball-wracking convulsions- the last two of which had Timothy firmly
believing that he was going to die of strangulation- he benignly
coughed up a ball of something that was too coarse to be phlegm and
too slippery to be any sort of internal organ. He knew upon seeing it
for the first time that it was just another one of the malignant tumors
that lined the walls of his stomach. It had somehow lost its grip on his
interior while he had been coughing earlier in the day and he'd barfed
it up. Cute.
Floating in the blood in the toilet was something that looked like
a fist-sized Gummy bear, jellied in a black-purple intestinal candy.
There were streaks of gingival blood running through it, in
swirls.

105
 106

ROAD-TRIP
Kelly deRenzi had earlier in the year begun a nine-week trek through
the Midwest, starting in Plaintown, Illinois and continuing through Iowa
and then down into Kansas. There were approximately three to four
victims in every place he stayed. He brought pain whether he went.
It was a consuming impulse.
He didn't consider himself to be sick or even deviant, just free
and uninhibited. He just liked to kill. He wasn't going to allow the
cheap dogma of civilized society to cramp his wrath. Half the time
when he killed, he wasn't even specifically angry- hey, everyone has to
be good at something. Sometimes he knew the girls for a few days
before killing them, and sometimes it was on the spur of the moment.
Jane Pomwell, for instance, the one he'd offed in Joliet, was a good
example of this. Kelly had met her while cruising aimlessly for a
partner on the main street strip- there was a language to be spoken,
and such people could be found anywhere, in every big city. Jane
worked in a delicatessen and had noticed first and foremost his
piercing blue eyes.
'God, you're just so beautiful,' she told him. He'd responded in
kind. Whether or not she had any romantic designs upon him was
immaterial- to him, anyway. He arranged to take her out the next
night, picking her up at work and walking with her to a local restaurant
that specialized in Greek cuisine.
He couldn't stop looking at her.
'Can I use some of your lipstick?'
She smiled and acquiesced, handing it over to him.
His eyes met her eyes, and something was exchanged between
them.

Along the way, they stopped to sit underneath a bridge that

went over the river that divided the town into two separate districts,
Garfield and Brooks. Brooks was the well-to-do section where a good
deal of the city's taxable income was generated. Garfield,
concurrently, was the proverbial bad side of town, the rough side of
the tracks, the province that accounted for 78 percent of the city's
crime rate.
'Greek,' Kelly intoned, once they were alone. 'Ever tried it?'
'Oh, yes, yes,' she said. 'I love gyros.'
'No,' he said, inserting his index finger into a hole he'd created
with the other hand. 'I mean, you know, Greek. Taking it in the ass.'
'Oh,' she said, her eyes widening slightly, 'No, no, I-I can't I-'
'Relax,' he told her.
'I-I have to go now.'

106
 107

He fastened his hand to her wrist and pulled her a little closer to
him. 'Just calm down,' he breathed into her ear.
'You're scaring me!'
'No need to be scared,' he said. His calm was directly
proportional to her level of fear, His voice issued forth in a flat lifeless
monotone. 'I don't want you to start screaming.'
'You're hurting me!' she whimpered, and he could see right away
that no matter what else, she was fixing to scream her head off for
help.
'Everybody hurts,' he said, picking up a rock near his feet and
bringing it down awkwardly across her right temple. Her lights went
out without further event. He set her up in the crook of his arm and
carried her away. Once he was in the safety of his rented room, he
would be okay. There, he would remove her tongue to keep her from
screaming loudly enough to attract any attention. Then he would do
as he pleased to her body until she bled to death. All women deserved
such a fate. In Kelly's eyes, she was lucky to enjoy his company. So
lucky.
'Go on- smile, you cunt.'
Her body would then be opened by a median incision from the
top of the manubruim sterni and extending in the midline to the area
just above the mons veneris. There the cut would circle around the
external genitalia for the complete removal of her vulva, the lower
vagina, and the anus with the lower portion of the rectum. With a
little bit of fishing around he would be able to reach her adrenal gland,
and it was important to get it as fast as he could, because the buzz
from adrenochrome was only attainable from the gland of a freshly-
dead specimen. After that, the symphysis pubis would be split and the
pubic bones widely separated and held that way with a letter opener.
Oh, well. It was one way to kill a Saturday night.

His chest was shaved bare, and there was only a tiny pink flap of
skin where the right nipple ought to have been. There was a silver
loop about an inch in diameter intersecting the nipple on the left. As
he combed his hair in the truck mirror he kept in his knapsack, Kelly
deRenzi studied his body, frowning at it inexplicable perfections, and
pondering his next move. North was North, but where was it?
The silver medallion on his chest had supposedly been blessed
by a demon named Ixxir in 1613. According to de Scrabuchlia, it or
something very like it had been fashioned out of silver that had been
reinforced with a bright amber fluid that Ixxir had injected into it with
its bare finger while the medallion was still being cast.
There was never any specific record of what the amulet had
been used for, or if it had ever been used at all, but as soon as he had

107
 108

found it, Kelly felt closer to a part of himself whenever he wore it.
To him, it was even better than the real thing.
Kelly knew that what he had was only a cheap replica, but he
still felt ten feet taller whenever he wore the necklace, enjoying the
feel of the weights on the medallion as they beat up and down on the
front of his shirt. Kelly really didn't believe the story that he had been
told upon purchase, but he liked the way the merchant had told it to
him and Kelly thought that the design on the medallion was cool as all
hell.
Which- in fact- it was.
No matter how hot the temperature, the circle never lost its cool.
It always felt cold upon his skin, and Kelly found out long after he got
it that if he squeezed the medallion in his hands, the skin of his palms
would freeze to it, much like tongues to a flag pole in the winter time.
Its design was simple:

A quarter-size circle, intersect five sides round,

two points going up and three points going down;
Southernmost point said the holy ghost had frowned-
two more for Sunny and Pop, deep in the ground.
Two points went up, and so further went the tale;
two daggers in the sky of those guilty and frail;
those so blessed can hook their sins upon the sky,
those who never ask, and those who never know why.

There were two pendulum devices attached to the medallion at

four o'clock and eight o'clock. Hooked through minute key-ring circles
were two teardrop dollops, both of them as silver as the circle itself.
Both of them served to weight down the medallion, but each one of
the weights served to counteract the effect of the other, so that the
medallion always hung straight, no matter which way the wind was
blowing.
One of them supposedly represented the force of good- white
magic, or whatever. The other pendulum stood for the dark magic,
and the presence of both of them represented the balance of the
universe. There was good and there was bad. It was that simple,
really. Each one revolved around the other. Each one played off of
the other, sometimes so well that Kelly had to marvel at the divine
atrocities that such 'civilized' people were capable of if they felt
helpless or of being deprived of a very basic human addiction.
But human addictions were all so very basic, weren't they?
His hair was slicked back with hot oil treatment, and the goatee
on his chin hinted playfully at the parade of pudenda that must have
passed across those lips. He looked less like a man and more like a

108
 109

boy, and he looked less like a boy than like a boy who looked like a
woman.
Which is to say that Kelly deRenzi fell somewhere in between.
Somewhere in between...and yet nowhere at all.
He could make people look at and study him, by sheer force of
will. He could cause their minds to assimilate all that he had done in
his lifetime, and he could cause those same minds to feel his pain.
Kelly deRenzi would have been hard pressed, even at this late
date, to describe his actual talents. Could he bend spoons? Certainly,
if he did it with his bare hands. Could he transform lead into gold?
Nah... As for his mind, he never was very adept with any of the
heavier metals.
He could ignite tinsel on a Christmas tree in much the same way
that steel wool will incinerate when it comes into contact with a nine-
volt battery, but what effect these talents had upon the world- apart
from mass hysteria in the shopping mall- he had never been able to
catalog.
He was a little past his twelfth birthday when he first made the
lightning appear from his fingertips. Kelly had an idea even at that
early stage that the electricity couldn't create any sort of fire, that it
only passed a focusing of all the natural electrical current in his body,
but only to be directed- with some appreciable degree of initial
difficulty- at some target of his choice. If his fingertips were the
weapon, his mind was the trigger. He couldn't, for example, set fire to
the kitchen curtains in his house no matter how hard he tried, because
the material didn't react with the sort of current he produced.
He was being not being at all. Kelly had grow up here, there and
everywhere, and yet oddly little of it had make any lasting impressions
upon him. He merely was where he was at this moment, and nothing
more. He believed only in that which he could see with his eyes, and
feel with his hands. Other people- all the other people on the planet,
it seemed, counted their wealth in ways that didn't matter in the
ultimate end. As if they were the ones to judge, the beautiful people
never counted worth in terms of talent, or perception. They never
bothered to weigh any of the elements he himself would have been
interested in, and therefore...
They were his playthings.
Kelly deRenzi was the hole in the painting where the canvas had
been punctured. Pestilence was the name he had given to himself in
high school, and in four years- three and a half years, actually- the
time he spent out of school yet framed by that structure was the most
beneficial that he would ever know. He learned more about himself in
those years through the words of others by simply playing over and
over the first half of the White album than he had ever learned in a

109
 110

year of formal schooling. He made himself into his name, and he

made his name into what he was. Each edict that filled his head was
in direct opposition of what those above him would have him learn.
He preferred his own knowledge, and starting at the age of fifteen, his
own knowledge was what he actively sought. It was the Portrait of an
American family.
Quitting his schooling was no problem, and leaving home was
even less of an issue with his parents than he had anticipated. It was
almost as if-
Almost like they were happy to be rid of me.
And from that realization onward, Kelly became himself,
changing his name several times before landing on its current
incarnation- Kelly X. deRenzi, the X- of course dotted with another,
smaller x. The years had passed, slowly at first but then with a
rapidity that alarmed him, and the wisdom had seeped into him
whether he sought it out or not, but he usually did. His brains was
forced to coalesce, to vaporize, all that he saw around him. Were the
other people in this world simply ignorant of what was going on around
them, the basic and contrite hypocrisies upon which they had centered
their lives. They were afraid of him now.
What amazed him was that he no longer felt the slightest
inclination to talk them out of being afraid. If people wanted to be
spooked by what they saw of him in the light of the sun, so be it; that
was their choice, and he would always allow the other person his
choice because he wouldn't want his own choice to be censured. They
had known nothing of him before making their judgment, so he felt
nothing was owed in return.
Nothing but the Truth.
He put to death all their pretenses, all their illusions. There was
no wisdom to be seen in his features, only the secure knowledge that
all that they cared for was lost. There was nothing left for them.
Nothing but the Truth.
That was it. He was the practitioner of the deadliest form of
magic; he was the practitioner of Truth, and truth never failed to
amaze people whenever they were confronted with it. He would
endeavor for days- for weeks maybe, even months- all to the specific
end of tearing a hole in someone's sanity. The only way to achieve the
knowledge of the uncommon thread, he first had to insinuate himself.
Sometimes there was a bit more delicacy in this act than in others. He
liked to tease the nerve endings, pulling with assured tension upon the
fibers that held them together. There was an art to doing this, and in
his younger years, when he had been scrabbling and searching among
the features of the flesh, he had been more of a brute in his crude
efforts. The true artistry of his work failed to show through to him

110
 111

until he was almost twenty-three years old, but when it revealed itself
to him, he was a changed man. What was the manipulation of the
flesh- the slicing of the skin, the piercing of the epidermis, all for the
sake of exposing brain tendon- what was that, when compared with
the direct psychological tweak of situational confrontation? To lose a
loved one or even oneself in death was nothing when compared to the
knowledge that we all would live on, in perpetual revolution around
one another, all to no purpose? What was an immediate death when
compared to waking up with it forever, replicating itself like a virus?

There was another body found in the woods near Marseilles that
weekend. This unlucky girl, who was later identified as Amber Lansky,
had been decapitated. The head was still missing. In life, she had
been a waitress in Lascar and the mother of two infant children. In
death, one or both of her nipples had been chewed off, depending
upon which story you heard. The true version was that both of her
nipples had been bitten off, but they had been found in a plastic bag
stuffed into her anus. After he had cut them off, her killer had burned
her with a butane lighter, to cauterize her wounds. The areolas left
behind on her chest revealed extensive damage, and it was likely that
the girl had been bled to death through those two wounds.
It had happened while she was still alive.
The county-seat of Hampshire Grove was a pretty quiet town,
limited in population, and when a crime this grisly came their way, it
was rather impossible to keep a lid on all the gory details. The local
gossip hounds were quite happy with all the little tid-bits in this one:
Her adrenal gland had been surgically removed.
The bartholin glands from her vagina had also been removed.
One of her toes had been bitten off.
The ring finger on her left hand was missing.
Her wedding ring was found stuffed six inches up her rectum,
behind the bag containing what was left of her nipples.
The girl had been reported missing almost a week before being
found, but by the time a missing persons report could be filed she'd
been gone for almost three days. That had been Wednesday, and she
was found on a Saturday. A neighbor had come over to her mobile
home on Tuesday in order to return a pair of gardening shears when
she noticed that the door was wide open, in spite of the cold. The
woman's children were found sitting in a closet in the bedroom. The
door to the closet had been blocked with a chest of drawers from the
outside. The little boy, Johnny, was D.O.A. after two days of exposure
to the elements. The little girl, Jeannie, lost part of one foot to
frostbite. The closet was so small that the children had been laying on
top of each other when they were found. The woman's estranged

111
 112

husband, Jeffery, was nowhere to be found, and so he was therefore

made the prime suspect.
But why didn't he take the children?
The husband, once it was established that he had been out of
state for the first half of the week of her disappearance, was released
from police custody forty-eight hours after he had first been brought in
for questioning. Jeffery Lansing, upon his release from the county
lock-up, told reporters that he was planning on suing the county for
wrongful imprisonment. He made no mention of the children. The
surviving child was treated and released into the custody of her
maternal grandmother.
Amber's sister-in-law, Joanne Piofsky, had been called in to
identify the body after it was flown via helicopter to the deputy
coroner's office in Meadowbrook. Harry Tyler ruled that strangulation
was not the immediate cause of death and had rather only contributed
to it, but it was a difficult diagnosis to make. It was discovered that
part of a torn fingernail had been found embedded in the skin around
her throat, what was left of it. Blood and fiber tests were done to
determine more about the owner of the fingernail; it didn't belong to
the girl herself.
Or so they thought.
Adventavit asinus, pulcher et fortissimus.
Apparently, it had been broken off in the course of whatever
struggle the girl threw herself into in a futile attempt to save her own
life. But the girl's fingernails and toenails had been painted a deep
shade of tawny port, and this one fingernail had been painted black. It
was the nail from her right pinkie. Perhaps it was the unwritten
symbolism of membership in some bizarre satanic cult, the papers
said, but they lost the fundamental truth that someone had taken the
time to peel back the girl's fingernail and had painted it himself before
he placed it into a pre-sliced aperture in the back of her neck before
she died.
In life, she had been a wife and the mother of two.
In death, Amber Lanksy turned out to be little more than a
footnote.

112
 113

ROUND-TRIP
Melanie Cleaves had gone home to live with her parents after moving
out of Timothy's place. The first few days had been weird for her, not
only living without Timothy's presence, but also in the fact that she
was used to having her own place almost all to herself, and now she
was limited to her old bedroom, which she had vacated almost ten
years before. Under these circumstances, she found it hard to think of
the apartment as ever having been their place together, but it had,
and Melanie soon came to realize that she had lost a lot more than she
had initially recognized when she left Timothy. She had lost him.
Melanie had driven around aimlessly for several hours before
finally deciding between going to a hotel for the night to cool off or
actually taking the plunge and going back to Mommy and Daddy- or
Mommy's husband.
Her mother was more interested in what had happened than
Harold was. That was understandable, because Harold wasn't her real
father. They'd had an amicable relationship all her life- her mother
had married Harold when Melanie was three and a half years old- but
as she grew into being an adult, things had gotten somehow distant
between the two of them. It was almost as if Harold considered that
getting Melanie married and out of the house was his primary
objective, and having done that his job was completed. He was less
than thrilled to have Melanie living under their roof again after thinking
that he had finally gotten rid of her at last.
Harold had given her the smiling hug that she'd expected him to
and then retired into the den to finish reading that morning's
newspaper.
Melanie's mother came down from washing her hair upstairs and
gave her daughter the sort of warm welcome-home that Melanie
needed right then. She didn't know whether she was sad about what
had happened or if she was angry about it. Probably a little bit of
both, but when she tried to look at things from a distance, it was hard
for her to imagine exactly what had happened. It seemed to have
gone by too fast for her.
Her mother brought her into the kitchen in the back of the house
and sat her down while she made a pot of tea. Melanie had always
had a mild dislike of the taste of tea- especially Pennyroyal tea- but
this had long been a custom of her mother's whenever she came home
to visit, and so Melanie didn't want to do anything to talk her mother
out of it.
Her mother was a florid woman of fifty-two who seemed to have
become comfortable with her life and herself only once she had
entered middle age. Even Harold had been startled by her

113
 114

transformation, and he wasn't the type of person who ever noticed

much of anything at all. But it was remarkable. Gone were the
frumpy housedresses and ten-dollar dye-jobs on her hair that had
marked her time on the planet prior to this. Once the kids were out of
the house (Melanie had a younger brother who had just started boot
camp with the Marines in California when she started seeing Timothy
seriously), Camille finally felt the freedom to do what she wanted, no
longer fettered by her self-identification that labeled her as having
been nothing more than Jared and Melanie's mother.
Melanie supposed that her real father leaving them had
something to do with her mother's stagnation for the past twenty
years, but looking at her now- in the kitchen making tea, trying
conscientiously not to break any of her fingernails while doing it- it
was hard for Melanie to believe that anyone could hold this woman
down for long. But Camille had truly loved Melanie's father, and her
marriage to Harold was little more than a convenience. Camille had
told Melanie as much one time over breakfast in this very same
kitchen, with its copper Jell-O-molds lining the wall space above the
cabinets, outlined by wallpaper that Camille and Jared had put up by
themselves with no help almost ten years earlier.
It was hard to imagine all the time that went by silently when
you'd spent it with the same unchanging group of people, no matter
how bitter and acrimonious things could be at times. In the years
since she'd first met Timothy Karacas, her entire life had been pulled
inside out, and replaced- so she thought- with something better that
filled her up.
Melanie found that there was really no way that she could tell
her mother what had really happened between her and Timothy to
bring an end to their relationship, and this made her as much of a liar
as Timothy if not more, because she had no real reason to hide things
from her mother.
There were a few special memories that belonged to her that she
knew she would never be able to share with anyone else- they were
just too personal. For example, the time that Timothy had wrapped
her naked midsection tightly in clear Saran wrap and then pricked
open two tiny holes where her nipples were. It was an exclusive
sensation to have her upper erogenous zones isolated and
concentrated upon like that and Timothy had nearly brought her to
orgasm merely by stimulating them with his tongue.
These memories stood out for her, and Melanie felt a little guilty
in reliving the pleasure that they had originally brought to her.
Pathos, heartbreak, loss...all of these things served as sustenance to
the man that had followed the Scent here, to her old home, to where
she was sitting now, in her mother's kitchen sipping at lukewarm

114
 115

Pennyroyal tea.
Your agony is my meat and potatoes...so please- eat hearty.
The stranger sat outside on the curb smoking a Gauloise, the
smoke trickling through his lungs and wafting out again up through the
neck of his coat. Looking back up at the house, over one dirt-streaked
shoulder, he felt all the vibrations of the words being spoken inside.
Joshua fancied for a moment that he felt- no, tasted- their weight
upon the air as they were being spoken, enjoying the eddies of pain
that were flowing through Melanie. It was a guilty pleasure, but he
was gaining sustenance from the strangest things lately, like the blood
of locusts and the mental anguish of others. Things were falling nicely
into place for him.

115
 116

HOSPITAL WHITES
Timothy Karacas relayed his story of the Gummy Bear tumor to his
doctor as faithfully as he could without becoming emotional about the
whole episode. He was still shaking as he told him about the
convulsions, the nausea, and the cramping that had plagued him in
the days and hours prior to this episode. It seemed to Timothy that
his doctor didn't seem to take any of his suffering very seriously at all.
It seemed as though the doctor thought of Timothy as being
something of a old, bad joke.
Timothy had decided, rather immediately, that he would make
no mention of the demon that had talked to him in his kitchen three
days earlier. The doctor would laugh it off as being an hallucination-
which it wasn't. Whatever it was, whether it was the cancer talking to
him directly or merely his own mind seeking an audience with his
body, it had happened. It wasn't a dream. It was all a nightmare.
And this particular nightmare, he decided, he would keep to
himself.
Dr. Alec Alamackazine, who had served as Timothy's physician
for over two years, was drawing a sample of Timothy's blood into a
vial syringe when he noticed the first signs of melanoma on Timothy's
skin. The pink faded blotches, the clammy skin, the odor. It was
almost funny, wasn't it, that his girlfriend's name was almost the same
as the disease that would eventually kill him. Melanie. Melanoma.
It was enough to make you laugh.
Almost.
That had been almost three years ago, and in the time between
then and now he had met his death. It weighed one hundred and
fifteen pounds dripping wet and addressed him as 'honey.' Yes,
Melanie came along after he had been originally diagnosed, but well
before he got horribly ill. The irony of the textural connection between
Melanie's name and the name of his disease wasn't lost on him. In
fact he'd dwelled on it.
As time wore on, it seemed like everyone he had ever
encountered here always wanted just 'a little more blood.' Couldn't
they take all their tests from the same sample vial and leave him out
of it entirely? That would save him from a lot of pain. He had started
to resent being used like a human pin cushion, but he also saw where
there was really no way for them to avoid it. He was grateful for all
their efforts to ease his manner of death and to enhance his remaining
span of life, but there was something empty in their eyes whenever
they regarded him. They didn't think he noticed what was going on,
but he saw them looking at him as though he wasn't really there-
which in a way, was the truth.

116
 117

They glanced at him as if to shake their heads in disgust over his

situation, and an abundance of sympathy- very expensive sympathy-
was to be found in every corner of the clinic he attended.
What Timothy didn't know yet was that his time was running out
in a way that even the doctors could recognize visually. They had
opened him up the month before for exploratory surgery, and Dr.
Alamackazine had closed Timothy up just as soon as he had gotten a
good look at what was on the inside of his patient. After the first
incision was made and the blood pressure clamps had been set into
place to hold the incision open, Dr. Alamackazine glanced down at
Timothy's innards and gasped at what he saw. It was the first time he
had done such a thing in the operating room, and all the while he was
in med school Alec Alamackazine was known for having a stronger
stomach than most of his contemporaries, including the degreed
physicians on staff at the University. That had been one of the many
factors that figured in to his esteemed reputation on the staff here in
the hospital's cancer clinic. But now that quality was leaving him,
happening with such sudden irrevocability that Dr. Alamackazine was
almost certain he was going to lose his biscuits right there in the OR.
Timothy Karacas was so far gone that the doctor wasn't even
able to recognize his internal organs. What could have been his liver
was in reality a portion of his spleen that had migrated north towards
his heart. Alec found it hard to believe that Timothy was still alive,
being in this condition. His gizzards were like an acidic slush- and
indeed, some of the fluids collecting in his chest cavity had burned a
tiny hole in one of Dr. Alamackazine's rubber gloves. This he noticed
once he had calmed down a little in the post-op with a glass of water
and a few tablets of Rolaids. He hadn't noticed any of the burning at
the time, but the liquid from Timothy's body- unlike any cancerous by-
product he'd ever seen or heard about before- had actually burned all
the way through the glove on his left hand and had singed the hairs on
his knuckles, leaving a circle of small white blisters- each one of them
roughly the size of a pinhead- that burned and itched and woke him up
out of a sound sleep on more than one occasion in the weeks after the
operation. They eventually went away, but Alec would never forget
them.
The truth struck him like the proverbial tidal wave. There was
no way for a cancer that was this pervasive to be repelled or even held
at bay, even with the utilization of the latest medical technology
available. The first thing Alec needed to do was to say aloud that it
wasn't his fault, which it wasn't. The second thing he needed to do
was to prepare himself for the task of telling Timothy what he had
found. Alec tried to think of different ways he might try to mask the
truth, but they all sounded empty and shallow when he rehearsed

117
 118

them. He liked Timothy, more so now perhaps than he'd liked him
before, and he was really pulling for this guy to make it. Alec
Alamackazine had been a doctor long enough to know that he couldn't
take every fatality to heart, but he knew right away that this one was
going to stick with him for a long time yet to come. And now came
the task of telling his patient.
This wasn't what Alec had wanted to have to do when he first
decided to become an internist. He had wanted to help people, and
reporting bad news like this was more than enough to break his heart.
Alamackazine genuinely liked Timothy- even though he thought of him
as being a little bit of a whiner; he was really pulling for Timothy to
come through this, even as his prognosis kept getting worse and
worse.
Of course, Timothy Karacas probably knew what he was going to
say.
Timothy had gotten a staph infection from the last bit of
exploratory surgery that Dr. Alamackazine had performed on him, and
that had served to preclude any utilization of chemotherapy to ease
Timothy condition and perhaps break up and neutralize the cancerous
cells in his body. Although he whispered not a word of his suspicions
to anyone else, Dr. Alamackazine believed that the exploratory surgery
had a great deal to do with the rapid advancement of Timothy's
cancer. Air- specifically oxygen- when it comes into contact with
cancer cells causes them to reproduce themselves at a dramatically
accelerated rate, having roughly the same effect as starter fluid has
when combined with charcoal.
'I'm afraid that I have bad news for you, Timothy. It's in your
stomach now, too. It's not just your skin. It's spreading.'
Stomach, liver, intestines, Alec thought, there's not much
difference at all between them anymore. It's just one big pile of slush.
He wiped his eyes with the points of his knuckles and yawned- all
being a largely involuntary procedure on his part. At least he wasn't
crying. Not yet.
It took a moment for Timothy to digest what he had heard, even
though he could have predicted almost word-for-word what was going
to come out of Dr. Alamackazine's mouth before he himself said
anything about it. He- meaning Timothy- had expected this sort of
news, but it didn't make it any less intimidating for him to be hearing
it. A proclamation of having only so many months to live was
something to be said to a much older person-not a man in his earliest
thirties.
Here was an inescapable train of progression that his disease
would be following from now on. His stomach would lead to his
intestines, and they would in turn lead to his liver, and his pancreas

118
 119

would follow hard on the heels of that; nothing in his body-the Lord's
temple!-would be sacred. And perhaps more salient in his mind than
anything was the fact that before this time next year, he was going to
die. This would be the last Christmas he would be alive to witness-if
he made it that far.
It was a little too late to hope for any sort of a reprieve. He
knew that he would die and that would probably be that. The world
would move on, only it would now move on without him. He would be
forgotten. He would have left nothing behind of himself, except an
empty skin.
'I'm afraid that I'm even at a loss to explain why you've lived as
long as you have. If you would have been more cooperative about the
testing procedure, perhaps we might have been able to make things
more comfortable for you in the long run. But that was your choice.'
'There was nothing you could have done about it either way. I
was a dead man the first time I stepped into your office on Cleveland
Street.'
'I would never make such a pronouncement, Timothy. If there
wasn't any hope for you, I think I would have told you then. We tried
and we did the best that we could. We all did, Timothy-you included.
Having type o negative blood have only served to further complicate
treatment.'
'So what are you saying?'
'So, what I'm saying is that there's not much that we can do.
We can do another biopsy on this other tumor we've found but I'm
afraid that it would only re-confirm what we already know. I would
recommend that we cease all radiation treatments and concentrate our
efforts toward making you as comfortable as we can. Chemotherapy
would only decrease the overall quality of your remaining span of life
without significantly increasing its length. You want to go home and
just get comfortable.'
'So I can hurry up and die, right?'
'I'm afraid that-
'You're afraid of a lot of things, Doctor. You're afraid that my
insurance won't cover the cost of the procedure, and I'm afraid you're
right, and then you'll have to write it off. You're afraid that you're
gonna walk out into the parking lot and see that someone scratched
the side of your Mercedes. But I'm afraid of different things than you
are. I'm afraid that I'm gonna die before the next time I go to sleep.
I'm worried that I'm gonna fall asleep and never wake up again. I'm
afraid that I'm not gonna die and that I'm gonna stay in this putrid
condition for the next twenty or thirty or forty years of my life. If I do
die, I'm afraid that after I'm dead there won't be enough money left in
my estate to bury my carcass. Could you possibly know that? I'm

119
 120

afraid to die because I can't see where I can fucking afford to do it!'
'Now calm down, Timothy. We all knew that the chances were
good that the cancer would spread. There was no guarantee in
chemotherapy, and you knew that. Denial is part of the natural
process of-
'I'm not in denial, though! I know I'm gonna die! In a way, I've
known all along! I'm just not very fucking happy about it!'
'Timothy, c'mon, you're making this much worse than it-
'Yeah, except that you're gonna give me a death sentence and
go home and eat a good dinner. I'm gonna go home and wait to puke
up my vital organs. What's next? My colon? Yeah, I think I'll barf up
my colon!'
'Mr. Karacas-
'Yeah, that'll be fun! I'll just run right home and hock up
whatever I can and I'll bring the damn thing back for you in a plastic
bag! How does that one grab you? And when I bring it in, you can
put the fucking thing into a Petri dish and see if it can crawl around on
its own.'
More than anything right now, Timothy felt exhausted. He
wanted to go to sleep and give this battle over to someone who could
handle it, someone who would be a lot more competent than he was at
dealing with problems. He wanted to wake up and have this whole
thing over with.
Dr. Alamackazine wasn't paying attention to him anymore. He
was used to getting this type of reaction from terminal patients, but
coming from Timothy, it surprised him. Alec had always been proud of
how Timothy could take things on the chin, like a man, but every man
has a breaking point; he scratched his signature at the bottom of his
prescription pad.
'I'm going to prescribe Demerol to you, Timothy. Its generic
name is Hesperidins, and getting the generic should save you a couple
of bucks. It'll help you ease the pain a little more than what you're
taking now. What you need to do right now is go home and get
yourself some rest.'
But I can't go home, Timothy thought of saying to him. Home
doesn't exist. It isn't there anymore. I can go back to where I live,
but that is about all I can do right now. There's too many awful
memories in all the corners there, that frighten me whenever I'm
alone- which is all the time. I don't know who I'm crying for. I can't
eat, I can't sleep, I can't even shit. I don't think it's the cancer that's
doing this to me, either. I'm in love with a woman I hate. I'm in love
with a woman who found out how sick I was and then turned around
and left me for dead. I can't live without this woman, but if I ever see
her again I know that I am going to kill her. Does that aid you any in

120
 121

your diagnosis?
Will that help you to find a cure for what's killing me?
'I want you to stay here in the hospital-'
'No.'
'Just for a couple of days.'
'No,' Timothy repeated.
Alec turned a sly smile. 'There's ways that I can make you stay.'
'But you won't,' Timothy said. 'I really hope you won't.'
Alec could sense his agitation. 'Timothy, just relax.'
'Shit. You relax, man, if you can. I don't have that luxury.'

121
 122

ANORGASMIC TRANSGENITALIS
She looked alternating enticing and repulsive- depending upon which
flick she was in and how much make-up she was wearing at the time-
and it was unnerving for Courtney to watch how differently she could
look from one feature to the next. It was never the same creature
twice, yet her notorious sexual proclivities were what linked the
performances together. There was absolutely nothing she wouldn't do.
And whatever she did, she did it while wearing a sinister smile.
This woman, Viper- who was indeed a sexual phenomenon- had
a tattoo that was as strangely beautiful as it was perverse: it was near
to being impossible to positively discern from very many angles, but it
was there nevertheless. It was green for the most part, the body of a
snake wrapping itself around the placid tiger on her abdomen, ready to
strike. The snake's unhinged jaw curled around her left nipple, setting
it off as a showplace. It was the central characteristic of her entire
body.
He wanted to get inside of her head and find out what she was,
to see if her motivations mirrored his own. That was the totality of his
fantasy- to emulate and to understand- to become a woman or
whatever it was she thought herself to be; to usurp and to conquer.
She always had the perfect attitude for what she did. When she
did a film, she fucked and sucked as if her very life depended upon it;
so much so that one wondered whether or not that was truly the case.
She fucked as though every day was her last day on earth, and she
was going to wrench- quite literally- every drop of pleasure that she
could from the dead and decaying flesh that encases us all before it
perished into dust. Viper never said 'Easy now, honey,' as the guy she
was performing with slid his greasy cock into her asshole. All she
wanted was to be fucked, as hard as possible, and she wasn't afraid to
yell for what she wanted- at the top of her lungs- impatiently bellowing
orders and insane exultations as she undulated beneath the throbbing
members of the degenerate species that so captivated her. Whereas
other porn sluts had operated in a world of requests, Alexa dwelled in
the realm of demands.
In a room without a door, a kiss is not enough.
Imagine! To have floated to the top of the scum pot by being
the nastiest, filthiest bitch in porn! Both of her nipples were pierced as
well as her clitoris, and that was a fact; Courtney had seen quite a few
pictures of her here and there in magazines where she'd had a single
length of gold chain connecting all three of them.
This woman was everything Courtney wanted to be, in his
imagination. If such a person could be emulated- that was the key-
they could be imitated. He could actually be her, doing all that she

122
 123

was capable of doing, but better than she herself could. Courtney
thought that he could match her desire and her determination, but he
felt that his own level of desperation surpassed hers. He needed to do
this more than she did, needed to get after from the sorry
circumstances of his real life.
Courtney knew exactly what it meant to be a slut- now.

Courtney dreamt that night. He was standing in front of a

familiar porn shop when a girl he'd seen on the street earlier that day
walked over to him and approached him. For some reason, the girl
had stayed in his mind. Maybe it was her face.
'Do you want to have sex?' she asked him, her breath as a
whisper, strange and slow.
'Yes.'
'You'll do,' she said quietly, rolling her eyes absently, and then
she insouciantly gestured for him to follow her toward a car parked in
the lot in front. He looked up at the sign, so sinfully bright on this of
all nights: Bachelor’s Paradise- Adult Video- Books- Movies- Rentals.
He'd seen this beacon many nights before this, but never before
tonight had it sung so strongly to him. Images of flames circled
through his mind. Her red hair, those trim taut ankles and rubied lips
of sin.
She got into the back seat of the car. The car was black, with
scratches all along the hood as if from a car wash. The windows were
tinted, and steam seemed to be pouring from underneath the car
itself. Her nylons were vented in little slits along the sides of her legs,
from her ankle to her hip, which was looking a little fatter today.
'There's nothing to be afraid of,' the girl said now, working her
stockings down her legs. All of this and nothing; she should have left
them on. 'Come here,' she demanded. The rolled-up nylons were in a
puddle at her feet. Her ankles were sweaty and bare and exposed to
his eyes. He could see them glimmer in the moonlight- a kiss is not
enough.
'I can't,' Courtney said in a dream. 'I just can't do this.'
'Why not?' The girl pouted bitterly with eager disappointment,
as if she had done something wrong. Something ghastly; nothing you
can touch.
'I-I don't know.'
'Are you married or something?' the girl asked petulantly.
Courtney looked at her. She seemed genuinely interested in his reply.
He really had to think about that one. He gave her question
some hard, earnest thought and somehow the answer he gave her was
more true than the truth. That was the truth. You can't give it away.
'No.'

123
 124

'Then what's the problem?'

'I told you, I don't know.'
'Are you a fag?'
'N-no.'
She's got it in for me.
'That's it, isn't it?' she taunted him cruelly. 'You're a faggot who
just doesn't know what to do with a girl.'
'No.'
'I'll forgive that much. Do you want to have sex anyhow?'
'Yes.'
'Do you want me to teach you, little boy?'
'Yes.'
'Then say that you're a faggot.'
'I'm a faggot.'
'I like to take it in the ass.'
'I like to take it in the ass.'
'Not you, stupid,' she said, rolling over with a smile and handing
him a small jar of cream, 'me.' All of a sudden, he got the meaning of
what she had just said. She rocked back and forth on her knees and
from side to side on the palms of her hands to try to steady herself
and get comfortable, preparing herself for whatever it was that she
wanted him to do. This had to be some sort of a trick, a joke. It took
him no further incentive than that. He threw the cream aside and took
her at that very moment, using only a dab of his own saliva to
facilitate his entry. She squirmed and tried to get away from him,
telling him he had to use the cream, but he got the feeling that she
was enjoying this.
'No, no! No, oh God, play nice. Play nice!'
This was what she'd led him up to doing.
This was what she had wanted.
Within a moment, he was all the way inside of her, her anus
wrenching the base of his cock as he slammed into her as hard as he
could.
'No, no!'
He got no joy out of it. Tearing into her rectum was no mean
feat, dry as she was, but he managed it. It felt the same as it always
does, man or woman. When she screamed, he merely tossed the heel
of his hand at the back of her head, and that seemed to shut her up.
She was urging him to finish up, to come his lot and be done with it,
but he was trying to fight off his own orgasm. When that failed, he
resolved to stay hard while he was still inside her and do it another
time. His swollen cock soon grew a little soft with the effort, but he
continued to work it in and out of her body with a consistent pace
nonetheless. The girl, whose face he had not really even seen, by now

124
 125

seemed to be totally out of it, lost in the rapture of the rape, hysterical
and nearly comatose at the same time. The jagged edges of his
dream seemed to be closing in on one another, folding in like the
corners of a well-used menu. Even in his dream, he felt hotly
ashamed of himself, his actions and his thoughts.
Such imagination. Such crisis. And even when he was cheating
in his dreams he couldn't win, not entirely. He could not make this go
away.
It's still getting worse, after everything.
His lovely and intelligently deducive wife Nona was quite
suspicious of him the next morning after they had both awakened,
because her ego had seen that he had woken up with a very insistent
erection.

It came down to a ring. A solid continuous golden hoop, this

sullen betrayal here; the two hearts connected viscerally from
underneath by the hoop, the etched length of the hearts themselves
sanguinated around, and through, each other; the forever interlocked
soul mates, through so bound for eternity. It signified a promise well-
kept, a pact beyond God and the stars his dominion, ne'er severed by
man, or beast, or so he had heard. He'd never been involved with
anyone on that deep a level. He couldn't conceive of it. He couldn't
conceive of any of it. But he had questions, questions that persisted in
his mind and tagged there like a joy-riding skateboarder unwantedly
hitching upon a semi-trailer truck.

The question was ridiculous.

'Do you want a lubricant with that?'
The packet the cashier handed him looked pretty much the same size
as the packet of hair gel that the girl in the barber shop had given him
to condition his hair with. It surprised him, what the dildo weighed.
Would he hear it, turning tight corners with it bouncing around in the
trunk of a hatchback that wasn't so securely manufactured in Sweden
not twelve years ago? The dildo was so large that the cashier didn't
even have a bag large enough to conceal it. She had to put one bag
over the bottom end and another bag over the top. When Courtney
got outside, the wind immediately tore the top bag from his parcel,
and rather than running and chasing after it, he decided to just keep
walking to his car. His phallic purchase was in plain sight of everyone
on the road in front of the parking lot. Thankfully, no one drove by.
Thus, Courtney walked the twenty-seven feet to his car with the head
and two and a half inches of the shaft of John Rambone's 15' latex
novelty monster cock hanging over his left shoulder, cradling it in his
arms like a newborn baby.

125
 126

FETID MENSES
For her own part, Melanie Cleaves was suffering through her own sort
of grief, one that was half-disguised with anger and an acute sense of
righteous betrayal. Her bedclothes became instruments of torture,
and all because Timothy Karacas no longer shared a bed with her. His
had always been the other body in the bed, for as long as she had
ever shared a bed with somebody. His shape under the sheets offered
her familiarity in the middle of the night, but now, nothing was
familiar.
Lying in a twin-sized bed in the guest room at her mother's
house, Melanie was able to fully reconstruct in her mind entire sections
of her life together with Timothy. This she did, as many people do,
with the intent of remembering all the reasons why their relationship
had failed. Instead, as so many do, she found that all she was able to
recall were the good memories. He may have lied to her on occasion,
but Melanie now realized that she felt more at home with Timothy than
she did with her own mother. Which meant that there was more of
herself in the company of a person she had known for less than three
years than with a person she had known all her life. He knew more
about her- the inner core of what Melanie considered to be her- than
the same people who had given birth to her.
In a way, he had given birth to her, because it had only been
under his tutelage that she had truly blossomed. Timothy had done all
that he could to encourage her, to push her forward, and that was one
of the things that she truly loved about him. He was always there for
her, and he was there for her even at times when she really thought
she didn't want him there. There were many times when she had
thought that his presence could only make things worse, but instead
his touch made everything alright. Melanie felt as if she had
discovered a secret source of power, a defense against the world that
only people in love can have.
This she had with Timothy.
This they had lost, together.
It happened all at once, and then it happened over a period of
time. In the six months between June of last year and January of this
year, Melanie had felt herself growing farther and farther apart from
him. She assured herself at the time that the distance was a
necessary mellowing of the connecting emotions between the two of
them.
This was necessary for them to make it in the long run.

The loss of trust when she'd found the chemotherapy statement

was the hardest for her to take. It make Melanie feel as if everything

126
 127

she was trying to build with Timothy- and for Timothy- had been
erected upon sand, and if that was the way she felt, there was no
reason to stay.
If she had sometimes not treated him as nicely as she should
have, or if she didn't express true depth in her feelings to him at the
proper times- well, all people do that. Some things could not be
helped.
And some things were better left unsaid.
It had taken more resolve that she thought she had within
herself to stay away from Timothy, to not call him at home directly, to
not drop by with a present, or maybe a bottle of wine. What had
happened between them felt so dirty to her and so foul that even
though she truly wanted to do these things for Timothy, her disgust
with him over having hidden the sickness from her prevented her from
acting upon these feelings.
She had told Timothy at the outset of their relationship that
there was only one thing she wouldn't put up with, and that was being
lied to. A lot of people said this, and a lot of people actually even
meant it, but Melanie Cleaves meant it more than most. It was a pet
peeve of hers not being able to trust someone, and it came into play in
her romantic life. She was unable to give the total trust that she was
demanding of Timothy, and look! If he hadn't been such a sneaky
little shit, there could have been a way to work things out. But now
she could never trust him again. If he hid having cancer from her,
what else would he hide?
And she was grieving, for God's sake. Melanie actually needed
this time alone with herself, all these late-night solitary drives through
the countryside, speeding past the gas stations and golf courses. This
was one of the few things they had done together that she could do
alone and come close to the same feeling, so she did it often.
Why hadn't he told her that he was sick? That was one part of it
she would never be able to understand; another thing she couldn't
understand was why she hadn't seen anything sooner. She must have
been oblivious to all that was around her, and yet she could pinpoint
here and there the places where Timothy's manner and gait had
betrayed his illness.

127
 128

ABYSS OF THE NINTH CHILD

Courtney Randlehaus had been hired at the Matthias Bramble
Epidermal Disorder Clinic in 1982, when he was twenty-one years old.
That was also the year he had gotten married, and it took another four
years after that before he advanced his position within the operation.
The year he was promoted was also the year his wife, Nona, had her
miscarriage. Each time he passed an anniversary on the job, Courtney
mentally subtracted one year from that number and figured out how
old their child would have been. A child would have made things
different.
Courtney was late for work perhaps one day out of every five,
but when he was, it was usually alright, because working the kitchen
was not exactly a high-pressure situation. There were thirty-five
people on staff, including the interns, and the number of patients they
were preparing meals for could vary anywhere from zero to twenty-
one in all. In the kitchen, there were four people in alternating shifts,
and each one of them knew which meals the doctors enjoyed the
most. Courtney chose most of the meal plans but that was largely by
default: it wasn't his job, but rather, his supervisor's job, and the boss
was never there.
No one in the kitchen had ever dealt with a patient directly, and
that kept the of the job pressure to a minimum. The patients were in
most instances forbidden movements, lest their skin treatments blister
or tear. Excessive peeling was also another problem for which mobility
needed to be limited or verboten altogether.
Courtney rubbed his eyes and started getting the lunches
prepared.

Thursday was Nona's usual day off, and she looked forward to it.
It was her only day off aside from Sunday and it was the only day of
the week that she didn't have Courtney to deal with in one way or
another. Their weekends together were becoming more and more
stressful and Nona was starting to receive pleasure in his absence.
On Thursday, two weeks prior to today, Nona had purchased a
vibrator for herself. She had been a little ashamed, almost
embarrassed to be going into a dirty book store to buy something for
herself, but the kink of it appealed to her base senses. It was a
translucent pink dildo, with a battery compartment in the shaft: two C
size batteries.
This is how we spend our time apart.
She had not experienced an orgasm with Courtney in well over a
year. She doubted that he had ever noticed, and his enthusiasm had
dwindled. If he was depressed over her inability to come with him, he

128
 129

never made mention of it- but then, Courtney had always been difficult
to read, sexually. He had never been very enthusiastic about sexual
activity, but now it was like pulling teeth. And she did it for him,
knowing that bad sex was better than no sex in the minds of most
men. She certainly could have lived without it, at least in this present
configuration; just knowing about his lack of desire had effectively
wiped hers out. And in the due course of time, Nona felt herself
getting...rusty.
Over the course of a few weeks, she talked herself into and out
of buying herself a toy- something to take away the whittles- but
finally she went through with it. In the adult bookstore her husband
had been in only hours before- unbeknownst to her- there was a wall
to the south that was lined with an amazing array of erotomechanical
devices, and Nona choose a small vibrating cock that was only two
spaces away from the Ballsy supercock that her husband had
purchased for himself.
When Nona returned home, she kept the cock in the package
she bought it in for a few minutes, just staring at it as it sat
incongruently on the table in the upstairs hallway, this violent phallic
symbol seemingly out of place with the serenity of the wallpaper
behind it. The rest of the area was pastoral, nineteenth-century
schlock. The vibrator was fully a product of the twentieth century.
Each individual item in this section represented a different modicum of
human experience. The towels in the linen closet reminded her of how
long she had shared her home with Courtney. Looking at the pleasant
scenes on the wallpaper- tiny women stoking tiny cannons in tiny
revolutionary war scenarios- was indeed pleasant, because the
wallpaper had been there for several years, and Nona drew comfort
from this knowledge.
If she were to slip out of herself for just a little while, the house
would still be standing when she came back, so to speak. Courtney
wasn't due to come home for another six hours or so, and she could
just-
It would be okay.
It would be alright.
Her mind and her eyes returned to the package on the waist-
high table in front of her. It was with trembling hands that Nona drew
the instrument out of its plastic and cardboard wrapping and slid its
length through the interlocking circle of her thumb and forefinger. The
tips of her fingers barely touched on the opposite side of the shaft.
Hmmm...impressive.
It was funny. Nona could remember saying that to Courtney
about his cock, some twelve years ago. And it was impressive- the
third largest cock she'd ever seen in real life. And speaking of real

129
 130

life-
Nona hefted the dildo from one hand to the next, testing its
weight.
This is gonna be....so....oh....
In an instant, her clothes were off, and she was touching herself.
Her pants were on the floor and her shirt was on the couch next to
her. Courtney had always liked to watch her masturbate in front of
him, and for a time earlier in their marriage Nona had worried-
needlessly- that Courtney would make her play every time before they
made love.
Her left hand was pulling at her nipple, tugging it and rolling it
back and forth under the weight of her fingertips. Her right hand- ah,
never let the other hand know!- was slowly peeling her vaginal lips
apart, and her middle finger entered the breach created by her ring
and index fingers. She was a little dry- a little!- but Nona knew that
there was always a little bit of sand before the oasis.
And, in a moment, the oasis was reached.
Nona endeavored to squeeze the moisture out of her pussy, to
better distribute the lubrication that nature had provided her with.
The first orgasm seemed only to thaw her out a little bit, to shake the
cobwebs out of the parts of her necessary for the act of sexual
intercourse.
She picked the vibrating cock up off the table and slid it inside of
herself. At first, it felt alien, but then that sensation melted over into
myriad others, and she was off in her own world.
Her second orgasm obliterated her sense of herself and left her
feeling powerless over her insatiable desire for more of the same.
Her third orgasm only served to heighten this feeling.
Raising a finger to her mouth, she slicked her bitter, grinning
lips.

130
 131

BONES HOWE
In the week before he died- immediately after his respective visits
from Ixxir and Kraggess Feebes- Timothy had tried going back to his
parents' house, only hoping to die in peace and quiet, but that was
obviously out of the question from the beginning. It was only with
much trepidation that Timothy made the decision to even contact his
parents in the first place. His father, Timothy well knew, wasn't going
to be very anxious to see him. Harold Karacas had long ago written
off his son as being an ineffectual dreamer, and even Timothy's job at
the firm had done nothing to alter his father's perception of him as a
total loser. Timothy knew that none of this was his fault and that his
father was not right in the head, but he still wanted to change what
was wrong.
Men were men, the elder Karacas believed, and so he had
brought that little bit of philosophy on down to his son from an early
age. Tim's distaste for football- indeed, for any activity even remotely
athletic- only served to further sour the relationship between father
and son. Harold saw himself as having been robbed of the chance to
cheer his son at football and basketball games, no matter what his
son's choices for his own life might have been. By virtue of being the
person he was, Tim had let his father down once and for all time. His
father had never hit him with his fists; he didn't have to. His words
were more than enough.
And yet lawyering was a strangely competitive profession in and
of itself. Timothy had many times wondered if he could change his
father's opinion by bringing him into court to witness his son in action.
And at the same time Timothy- who was called Tim by his father
alone- knew that he would lose his nerve in court if he knew that his
father was going to be right there watching him. All victory would
have been spoiled. The client would lose out, surely, but Tim's
greatest disappointment would stem from having failed in front of his
father yet one more time.
Our lives will be lived out, Timothy found himself thinking as he
quietly approached his old front door, but no one will know about it.
No one will document our histories, and furthermore, no one else will
care. We each get our one chance to live our lives, because that is all
we will ever get. That is nature's concept of fairness. Nature's
concept of fairness also allows for things like cancer, and these things-
like so many others- are statistically figured into the Big Equation.
He'd felt nervous as he walked up the concrete steps leading
from the lawn up to the front porch, but he kept telling himself over
and over again that this was home. He was dying, and they would
have to take him. They would want him here, and they would want to

131
 132

share his final days, however many of them he might still had left. He
had resolved that he was going to die, but he still wanted to tie up his
loose ends.
Some people just don't live long enough to see the end of the
movie.
He now heard strains of Wagner's Tannhauser filtering in his
head.
Timothy hadn't brought any clothes with him, and this act was a
way of feeding into the part of him that was given to fearing the worst.
If his parents would let him stay- and why on earth wouldn't they?-
Timothy figured that they could run home for his clothes and few
belongings and just let the lease on his apartment run out at the end
of the month; he would not be renewing his lease on the thirtieth and
his landlady would surely understand, once he had called her on the
telephone and talked to her in person in the hopes of straightening
everything out between them.
No; it would not be difficult to slip out of this life. There wasn't
very much here that he would be leaving, or that he would even miss.
He momentarily wondered what was going to happen to him next. So
far, this life had been out to mess with him from the beginning and
Timothy wasn't willing to wager that whatever was happening to him
wasn't over yet.
He pulled his inhaler out of his coat pocket and went through his
routine. He wasn't sure of what he was going to say to his parents
when they opened the door- if he said anything to them at all- but he
felt he was willing to gamble with his words tonight. The air was
balmy, and he was beginning to wish he hadn't worn this jacket
tonight; it was far too warm tonight to wear a coat like this one
comfortably. Wool is a dense fabric, Timothy reminded himself. But
he got cold so easily these days.
Timothy had inhaled sharply as he depressed the buzzer on the
door bell. He had not set foot on this stoop in well over two years, but
he thought that there was no better time than the present to patch
things up. In fact, there was no other time left to him in which to do
so.
For some reason it was important to Timothy that he set things
right, whether these wrongs were his doing, or that of another. It was
up to him to be the bigger man than his father- which wouldn't take
very much- and offer the handshake in friendship, in solace, and
familial embrace.
Thankfully, his mother answered the door.
'Mom?'
'Timothy?' Her arms were around him before he knew it, and it
felt good to be the victim of such an onrush of love. There was no

132
 133

pause for proctitude or propriety. Lillian Karacas had missed her son
and she wanted only to hold him, to kiss his forehead, to make him
better.
But when she did, Lillian was frightfully aware of the weight her
son had lost since she had last seen him. The folds of his jackets were
that and nothing more; there was only a rack of skin and bones on the
inside of his garments, and what stood before her now that she felt
both her hands on his frail shoulders was most certainly not the
product of fasting or any other sort of diet. Her son was terminal, and
Lillian had known it as intimately as she had known anything in her
life. The mere sight of her son scared her. His eyes were sunken
deep into his eye sockets. and he looked like one of the walking dead.
There was a twitch in Timothy's left eye, and it bothered her. She
wanted to press his eyelids shut with her fingertip- she would even
have liked to push the pad of her thumb straight through his eye
socket and into his brain, if it would only stop him from looking directly
at her the way he was.
The thought presented itself, but she then dismissed it
immediately.
Her voice failed when she spoke. 'What happened to you?'
Timothy was feeling faint again. 'I'm sick, Mom. Can I come
in?'
'Certainly,' Lillian said, holding the screen door open for him.
His father, Timothy was sure, would be sitting in his favorite
easy chair in the living room, and he would have heard everything that
he and his mother had said while they were standing there in the
foyer.
'Tim?'
'Yeah?'
'Is that you?'
'Yeah.'
'How are you?'
'I'm fine.'
There was a moment of silence between the three of them, and
this his parents interpreted as being shame on his part. He was
ashamed, but not of his disease. He was ashamed of not having come
here earlier.
He was ashamed of not having come here when he was alive.
'Are you on any prescription medicines?'
Timothy smiled. 'Only cocaine and Sudafed.'
Her eyes widened.
'Are you a...a junkie?' his mother asked, stammering painfully,
the words tasting like year-old cigarette ashes inside of her mouth.
'No, Mom. I have a disease that's eating away at my skin. I

133
 134

forget exactly what they call it. It one name one time and then it's
another name another time. I don't fucking get it.'
'He's got that faggot cancer, Lillian. That's his problem, see?'
Tim was livid. 'Dad, just shut up for once, will ya? My God.'
All at once, Lillian's hand was on his arm. The temperature of
her skin warmed his own. There was a higher recovery rate for
patients who convalesced at home instead of in the hospital, but he'd
never been able to take that route before now- and recuperation was
out of the question anyway. Lillian's face was now looking up into his,
and there was no way to avoid her stare. Her voice was softly out of
focus and full of concern for him. In spite of his father, it felt nice to
be here. Somebody- anybody- to be with him, to talk to, something.
'So,' his father sighed, 'How come we've never heard anything
about this illness of yours before now?'
'I didn't think that either one of you would care anything about
it. I've been sick with this three times now, and never once did I ask
f-'
'So what?'
'Timothy, is it serious, what you've got?' Lillian asked,
whispering as she spoke to him. 'Is it something as badly serious
as...AIDS?'
The lower half of Tim's face cracked into a smile. 'No, Mom. I
wish it was that trendy. What I have is called Karposi's sarcoma, and
that's sometimes been associated with AIDS cases as a secondary
symptom of it. It's not AIDS, but it's similar in some people's mind as
being like-'
'Karposi's sarcoma?' his father asked, leaning back in his easy
chair and sighing unsteadily. 'That's something to do with AIDS, isn't
it?'
'Yeah, in a way it is, Dad. But I'm not going to worry about what
you think. They've never seen a case like me. They say that I should
be studied. They say I could teach them a lot about how the human
immunological system operates. But I don't care.'
Timothy was shocked that he was crying already. He thought for
sure that he would have made it upstairs at least, into some unseen
bed and awake looking at the sky. He wanted so badly to sleep.
He wanted so badly for it all to be over with.
'Now, just try to calm yourself down,' his mother said.
Harold put his hands on Tim's shoulders and steadied him. Tim
now resented the touch when it was applied to him, the intimacy of it,
and the coldness of the bone of the fingers beneath the flesh on his
skin.
He felt only blackness when considering his father; there was
nothing to hope for, and Timothy grew up knowing only his mother

134
 135

most of the time. Harold occasionally rallied and took Timothy to a

baseball game and maybe a movie on a Saturday afternoon. They
didn't talk very much.
They had never talked very much.
'What's gotten into you, Tim? What the hell is going on with
you?'
'I don't want to be forgotten about after I'm dead.'
His father laughed deeply. 'Timothy, you're not going to die for
a long, long time. You've still got your whole life to be lived out now.'
Whenever he faced the prospect of failure, it was his father's
voice that Timothy would always hear ringing out inside of his head.
Timothy had always associated his father's voice with the grumble of a
cumulus thundercloud and it was that precise imagery that he used to
scare himself enough to go away to college instead of attending school
locally and working for his father on the weekends and during
summers and over the Christmas break. Whenever he talked to his
father it felt as though he was having the very life sucked right out of
him by some sort of puke stained psychological vacuum.
There were times when Timothy was able to tell himself that his
dad didn't know that he was acting this way, but that only went so far
when explaining his behavior toward his son. Timothy had always
resented the way his father talked to him, and he had for a long period
of time been envious of the other children in his class and the parents
those kids surely had waiting at home for them each and every
livelong day.
His childhood had been spent growing up alone in this big old
house. It had been almost seventy years old before Harold and Lillian
had moved into it, and that had been before Timothy had been born.
By the time he was old enough to walk, the house had been crumbling
down around him; in his later years Timothy had come to view the
house as being analogous to his parent's marital relationship. Things
were only as strong as their house, and that strength seemed to come
and go in fits and starts. It was all just another way of viewing the
fact that nothing in this world was solid anymore, or retained even any
semblance of physical integrity.
There were places were the walls were so thin that you could see
right through them with a flashlight from the other side, and the stairs
going up to the second level had always been treacherous to
undertake. Harold had viewed these petty betrayals with a mild
amusement, fixing things here or there if time allowed and it pleased
him to do it, more often just leaving it to repair itself if that's what it
wanted to do.
His body served as a memento mori of the time he'd spent living
in this house. There was still to this day a scar on his left knee from

135
 136

the time the porch had taken a bite out of it. Timothy, as clumsy as
he was frail, had been walking from the front stoop back into the
house to ask for a refill on the lemonade his mother had made for him
to drink when the toe of his shoe caught on an upended fragment of
flooring, and it sent Timothy ass over elbow flat onto his face. The
nick in his chin had recovered, but the scar on his knee had remained,
as bright and as pink and as livid as the day it had first been inflicted
upon him.
Timothy turned toward his mother and looked up into her eyes
for any solace those eyes might be willing to offer to him or at least a
parting smile before he closed this door on this part of his life forever.
'Timothy-'
He held up his hand to forestall any further argument from her.
With hardly even a glance in his father's direction Timothy kissed his
mother goodbye and walked steadily towards the front door, hoping
silently that he was exhibiting more macho than his father thought him
capable of.
'Timothy-' his mother called. Her voice sounded shallow and
tinny, as though it were being funneled through a bass drum without
the skins on either end of it. He was already three steps down into the
grass.
Timothy turned back once to look at her, but he couldn't think of
anything to say. There had never really been anything for them to
say.
Their eyes met for a moment, and it was then that Lillian felt a
part of her slip and run aground into failure. She had failed her son,
and now they both knew it. She had allowed Harold to treat Timothy
in his diffident way for all these years, only because their son had been
a little different, and now it had cost her his love forever.
That glance back over his left shoulder was the last Lillian
Karacas saw of her son until after Timothy was dead and had already
been placed in the satin-laced interior of a solidly-built pine box that
The Kinsman Brothers funeral home had specially ordered for
Timothy's way out of our world. It was the first step of many his soul
would take on its journey toward a final level of peaceful rest as the
time after death had always been intended to be in the first place.
Living wears a soul down and it happens much more rapidly when the
soul in question isn't used to the tasks of living in moderate propensity
with a normal human organism.

After seeing Timothy, Kraggess Feebes had called Gracey.

'I have good news.'
'Good news?'
'Yes. Photo #A-1o3. Your freak show.'

136
 137

'I'm a Doctor, you asshole. I make my living catering to freaks.'

Feebes laughed inwardly, trying not to let it sound off too loudly.
'There's complications, but if you want a slice of the pie they
refer as #A-1o3, I can get you a lowdown on him, if you so desire.'
Gracey picked up his mechanical pencil and began taking notes
on the paper desk blotter in front of him. 'I do so desire.'
'Good. Now I know this man on a personal level, and I know the
right people to contact. I can steer them, perhaps, but it will take
funds.'
'Funds are there. You already know that.' Gracey coughed into
his sleeve. He lit a cigar that he'd had tucked in his drawer for a
week.
'So, you are interested?'
'Very much so.'
'What do you want to know?'
'Is he on his way out?' the doctor had asked, thoughtfully picking
his nose while looking at a recitation of the Lord's prayer that had
been affixed to his office wall with two inch steel surgical tacks.
It had been hacked into a strip of skin approximately seven
inches wide by thirty inches long. This skin was also home to a full
back-piece tattoo depicting the album cover from Screaming For
Vengeance by Judas Priest. This skin sample had been procured from
his son's corpse.
'Yeah,' Kraggess whispered. 'You could say that.'
'How is his mental state? I'm curious most specifically about
minute mutations in his basic inner cell structure. We've tested- oh,
never mind. You wouldn't understand, or even want to. But I'm also
curious as to his mental state. Is the man hallucinatory?'
'I'd say that he always was. Whenever I saw him, he always
seemed to be stoned on something or another. Never could pin it
down, though.'
'It doesn't matter to you, really,' Gracey said, 'But I'm always
curious as to the mind-state of the dead and dying.'
'Fuck 'me. More meat for the chuck wagon.'
'You're a compassionate soul, Feebes. Nobel Prize
Humanitarian.'
'Thank you.'
'So he's distraught over his condition?'
'Well, I'm not an expert in these sort of things, but I'd say that
the ring on his toilet seat has been cracked for quite some time.'

In the time since his flesh started eating away at itself, Timothy
had slowly gotten used to the stares he got whenever he dared to
show his face in a public situation, even if he wasn't very trusting of

137
 138

the ease with which he sank into this new, vegetated society. He
pecked at the mealy food on his plastic tray much like an invalid on a
forty-eight hour shore leave. And even though he would have liked for
the people around him to have left him alone, Timothy Karacas was
happy that he hadn't faded away from the face of the earth entirely.
Amen. But there would come a day- and Timothy reasoned that it
might not be too far off- where he would leave this life behind, and
leave this rotted shell to return to its original place back within the
molecules of the earth.
There, in the earth, he would find his rest. Or so he thought.
Let he who is without sin within himself be the first to get
stoned.
He looked out the window over streets that no longer belonged
to him, peering through sheets of rain that no longer touched his face.
Timothy knew that he was sitting in his own apartment- where he had
lived for over three years, now- but he wanted to go home; all he
wanted was home.
Wherever that was.
A laughing voice echoed from the recesses of an unseen balcony.
Home isn't here anymore.
It was time to call the Matthias Bramble Clinic again. It angered
Timothy to be reduced to having to ask questions of other people. He
was used to having people ask him the questions, and not the other
way around. He had gotten used to a certain feeling of control in his
life, and now he had lost it for good; his body was holding him hostage
in an altogether hostile and unfamiliar terrain.

138
 139

A RINGING IN THE EARS

Basil Rochefoucauld was sitting alone in his office, and not paying
much attention to anything in particular, when the intercom unit on his
desktop buzzed and a tinny voice called his name. He was startled
into response, after a time, when he otherwise might have ignored it.
That was not the first of his many mistakes.
‘Dr. Rochefoucauld?’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a Timothy Karacas on the phone for you. He’s says it’s-‘
‘Timothy Karacas?’
‘Y-yes, that’s his name.’
‘Patch him through.’
Timothy and the doctor talked for about ten minutes before
Timothy had to excuse himself so that he could throw up. This he did
onto the floor of the telephone booth he was standing in, ignoring the
people around him. The world outside passed around him like a hellish
glaze, and for a moment, Timothy thought that he might pass out. It
had happened before. When he had returned to the phone receiver,
all he could manage to do was breathe shallowly, spit stringing off his
chin.
'Can you hear me?'
'Yes.'
'Are you there?'
'Yes. I really can't talk right now.'
'Are you lucid?' Basil asked, not quite should of how to properly
phrase his question to bring about the desired response. 'I mean, do
you want me to call a cab? An ambulance? Something?'
'No, really, I'm if-'
'Tomorrow, Timothy?'
'Tomorrow,' Timothy agreed, unsure of the depth of his
gratitude.
He was surrounded, even here in McDonald's, with the ordure of
rot.
For Timothy Karacas, it was almost impossible to comprehend
just how drastically his life had changed in the four months since he
had been diagnosed with malignant fasciitis. The cancer had been
much harder to notice, and so Timothy was often able to plow through
his daily routine without even a moment of thought as to the real
reason why he had been taking the medication prescribed to him by
his specialists- medication which only this minute was rattling and
shaking in his pocket against his thigh when he walked. It was easier
to forget that he was dying, before it had really started having to him.

139
 140

Whatever it was inside of him, it had gained and multiplied upon its
speed in the past six months.
It was hard to believe that only three months ago he had been
living what most people would have considered to have been a normal
life- less the notion of cancer; but again, that was easier to forget, at
the time. He was in possession of a live-in girlfriend whom he could
trick himself into thinking was actually in love with him, and up until a
month prior to that, a somewhat steadily-rising position within his
firm.
Timothy had a genius, an unspoken talent for being able to
manipulate all twelve members of the jury just so simply by adjusting
his walk so that his own limp was more pronounced. His reputation
had grown, even if the rest of his life had remained static and
unchangeable. He was known for his tenacity as well as for his
thoroughness, and he used his frailty to an advantage where others
would have let such circumstances defeat them. But then, that was
why he was a lawyer.
Being in court was his one chance to win, where only the mind
counted, where only he could dominate if he wanted to. For a while, he
actually believed it, but there was less fervor than that in what he had
always loosely referred to as his pre-senate days as a trial lawyer,
earning squat to better his position and his reputation, and now all of
that was gone. Forever. He had gone too far to ever be reached
again.
He had tried to convey to Dr. Rochefoucauld his state of mind,
but at the last minute, his circumstances defeated this impulse, every
one.
He wondered what Melanie was doing at precisely this moment.
Was she still at the office? He looked at his watch, regarded it grimly,
and shook his head. Time passed, and for a moment, he thought that
he might have said something infinitesimal, something maybe that he
muttered that had been incomprehensible even to himself. It was two
in the afternoon, and Melanie probably was still at work, and probably
still bad-mouthing him to the other staffers in the copy room on
twelve, spilling the beans about how he had lied to her- often and
repeatedly- about his medical history and about how sick he really
was. Was that such an unreasonable scenario for her? The fact of her
desertion was irreducible, now.

140
 141

MULTIPLICATION
The genesis of E2D8 was first given a boost by a man named Charles
Clarence, of Supler, Massachusetts. He wasn’t a doctor, and he wasn't
any sort of research chemist. He had been the very first full-fledged
test-patient used in these studies, and because of the unique Ph
balance of the oil on his skin, their studies were advanced by nearly
ten years- assuming that the same discovery would still have been
made on time without these initial breakthroughs with a freak named
Charles Clarence.
Prior to Mr. Clarence and all the information that his treatment
gave to Gracey, each attempt at perfecting and marketing a strain of
the E2D8 formula destined for failure, much as a lit match being held
in the hand of a man caught up in a coughing fit.
Charles had been the Alligator Man in one of the local traveling
circuses that ran in the summertime from the end of May through to
the middle of October, or for as long as the season lasted and the
weather cooperated with them. He had been located as a potential
candidate by a former employer of his that had heard about the
project accidentally, at a party. 'Have I got the guy for you! He looks
like a white alligator. I shit you not! Worked for me last season
picking apples. The sun on his skin, man, it was intense! In the sun,
there's these cracks and crevices, cracks and crevices that show off
the sun when there's a line of sweat glistening in between the sections
of raised skin. It was like he was glowing in translucent colors. I
swear to fucking God!'
Charles Clarence hadn't been an easy man to find. He traveled
with a circus for half the year, and he liked to visit his mother in
Roanoke at least once a week when he was home. Eventually, he was
located, and being in need of money, was easily convinced.
'We want to sample you- to sample a part of your skin, 'Dr.
Gracey explained, 'so that we may treat the whole of you with an
augmented edition of the formula we're testing, one that's designed to
eat up irrational skin tissues and replace them with healthy skin.'
'I'm game,' Charles had said.
And with that, the game was afoot.
The sampling of his skin was a trifling issue, taking all but three
minutes in the portable lab. Working the DNA structure of his skin into
the E2D8 formula- as a antibody retardant to that sort of skin growth-
took much longer- about six months longer. When it was ready, they
called Mr. Clarence back into their labs. The formula was applied to
sixty-five percent of his body, just to test it.
Charles's skin had reacted quite differently to the formula than
most skin did, and that was what Gracey had wanted to find out. Most

141
 142

test subjects reacted in one of two predictable ways if a few drops of

the rudimentary E2D8 paste came into contact with their skin.
Sometimes they acted calmly because they felt certain that nothing
was happening to them, and others screamed at the tops of their lungs
when the itching and burning started to become too much for them.
Even when it worked, the E2D8 formula possessed a few drawbacks.
One was the pain factor, and that could not be overlooked. In time,
Gracey had hoped to temper the formula a little bit so that reaction of
those receiving the treatments wasn't quite so severe as they were- at
this time.
When the individual skin cells started popping and snapping as
they began to multiply themselves genetically by the thousands,
patients would complain of chest-pains and shortness of breath; they
would feel faint, burning sensations all over their bodies as the skin
cells re-connected themselves to one another. This mixture had been
lightened and modified over the course of six months in between
Charles Clarence and the last man to have been tested prior to him,
and this modification seemed to eradicate some of the discomfort
experienced in test subjects.
Of which, Charles Clarence was the only one.
The newly-updated E2D8 formula, when squirted onto a swatch
of Charles's skin, had actually helped to reverse the process by which
his skin had become so dry and course in the first place. Gracey saw
it initially as being a sort of Armor All protectant for the outer human
skin, and it certainly seemed to work that way. It seemed to retard
the inception of new calluses and as well as restricting the growth of
the coarse brittle hair that went along with his odd condition.
Within two weeks of his first hypo-injected E2D8 treatments,
Charles reported the growth of new skin softer than any he had known
before. Within three weeks of the first treatment, Charles had been
able to walk unfettered by public scorn and ridicule through a busy
shopping mall during the peak of the Christmas shopping season.
Here, he was merely ugly. He felt like a new man. And at the end of
four weeks, he looked 'as God had intended' him to.
'All my life,' he said in his patient evaluation, 'I have wanted to
look like other people, and that is part of my joy- just to be normal.
Now, I look at myself and see who I might've been, the person I
might've become....its makes me happy to have seen it, only for the
one time. Half of me is filled with regret, because only now am I able
to truly glimpse the worlds of ordinary men and I have never known
this before. And yet half of me is looking towards the future. I'm just
hoping that my good luck holds.'
For a while, he almost felt normal.

142
 143

His injection schedule ran daily, starting on Monday and running

through to Saturday. Sunday was a day of rest for his system, and
Gracey had designed the treatment program this way, allowing for
fatigue and epidermal tissue damage to correct themselves on the
eighth day.
He would start to regress, and from Monday afternoon through
to Tuesday night would be spent repairing the damage from the lack of
proper dosage. He couldn't be fed too much of the stuff at once but
until the levels of E2D8 in his system straightened themselves out,
there was a very real danger of him dying from the chemical change-
over that was going on in the DNA molecular sub-structure of his
body.
It was soon understood that as long as he kept up with the
treatments the E2D8 formula would continue to beat back his disease.
But if he was to stop, however, for any reason, he would revert to his
original form, and there would be pain to go along with it as a
compensatory measure.
It wasn't always possible to get E2D8 and if he couldn't get
ahold of it, he would suffer the relapse over the course of a single
weekend. If he didn't get his Saturday treatment, his fast friends of
Friday night wouldn't be able to recognize him on Monday morning.
Charles Clarence had gotten his new skin- and hence a new lease on
life- and he was truly happy with it- ecstatically so- for about the first
five or six weeks.
Then something went terribly wrong.
The formula stopped working as well as it had in the very
beginning when they first started his treatments. Charles didn't
understand why it wasn't working any more, and Gracey tried
explaining it to him, without much success. They upped the dosage,
thinking that Charles had built up a tolerance to the stuff- but that
wasn't the case apparently, because Charles's deterioration was still
gaining speed. Even fresh batches of aesthetically pure formula
weren't able to bring about the same eye-popping results that a much
weaker batch had once wreaked upon Charles's skin not so long before
this latest bizarre episode.
Because both Christmas Day and New Year's Day fell on a
Monday during the year in which his treatment took place, Charles was
forced quite accidentally - to go from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday
morning with no treatments at all. Charles was a simple man, and for
some reason, no one involved with the experiment had foreseen this
eventuality. No one made the connection that Charles would run out
of his dosage until well after the offices had closed on Friday and
Gracey was on his way home.

143
 144

Because he didn't have a telephone, Mr. Clarence could not be

reached so that he might arrange for an alternate treatment plan. Dr.
Gracey doubted that the fool even had enough of his mega-vites at
home to aid in the resistance of tissue damage. And even if he did, he
would not have the brain capacity necessary to take them regularly.
As soon as he thought of it, Gracey punched the rear view mirror
of his car off of the windshield and onto the floor on the passenger
side, where it rest in a thousand brilliantly glittering fragments.
Charles Clarence was a notorious pain in the ass for Dr. Gracey to deal
with, because Charles had no telephone in his place- and he was
usually out of the house anyway, enjoying his new skin. No one had
heard from Charles Clarence that weekend, and by Monday morning,
Gracey knew that his new subject needed to be eliminated, to counter
any possible bad publicity.

Under the repeated process of changing his skin over from one
form of texture into another, his flesh had lost its elasticity and
resiliency, leaving him with nothing but a tangled gray mass of soupy
plastic matter to cover his bones. After missing his treatment, he
refused to leave his house, and those who tested him never had his
proper address.
The formula had unraveled him in the space of three days,
leaving him with the energy level of a bloodless vampire and skin that
was roughly the consistency of silly putty. He was forever leaving
pieces of his body throughout the house, and the longer that Charles
went without sticking them back on (his fingers, for instance) the
harder it was for them to re-adhere themselves. When he sat on the
toilet, a layer of epidermal residue nearly an eighth of an inch in
thickness would stay behind on the toilet seat, and when Charles tried
to wipe this residue away, it clung to the porcelain and plastic as if it
were the congealed grease left over from a spaghetti fire.
Charles hadn't left his house in a little more than two weeks by
the time he died, during which time he had taken to urinating and
defecating into a coffee can in the corner of the kitchen, so as to avoid
having to sit upon the toilet in the bathroom.
On January 1oth, his ex-wife Miriam had found Charles dead in
the bathtub of the house she had shared with him for eight years.
There was a gun in his hand and dried stalactites of brain matter on
the ceiling.
The Clinic had no idea of what had happened to Charles in the
final hours before he died. In the autopsy report, it was obliquely
mentioned that Charles's outer skin had 'split in many of its central
locations.'

144
 145

That was the best way Gracey could think of to describe the man
as he found him, squatting over a can of Folger's crystals with a scrap
of newspaper in one hand- presumably, for him to wipe with.
But Charles Clarence had died before his ass could smear the
ink.
The first batch of the E2D8 compound was highly changeable
and unreliable. The tones and textures of the skin it generated
variated wildly. Any given specimen could liberally apply the
compound as directly under Gracey's strict supervision, and even then
the results could not be predicted with any significant degree of
accuracy. There was a variable in the equation, and while Dr. Gracey
knew of its presence, he had no idea of how to control it, and so he
told no one.
Test cases such as Charles Clarence- and now Shelby Dunn,
whom Basil Rochefoucauld had suggested to him earlier this week-
would be necessary to sand off the rough bio-viralogical edges.

145
 146

TWO-TWENTY AM
The priest had entered the confessional after Courtney had been
waiting for only ten minutes, and Courtney was secretly happy at the
apostolic opportunity to get in and then out of here as fast as he could.
He did not want to be here, to be feeling this way, to be talking like
this- let alone to a total stranger. But is God a stranger to you?
Courtney noticed that he was shuffling his feet as he entered the
confessional, and this to him- had always been a sign of depression.
'My son.'
'Yes, Father. It's me.'
'How are your troubles coming along?' the priest inquired.
Courtney sighed. 'I've found no peace.'
'You had no...relations prior to her?'
'I was a virgin, yes.'
'Out of choice or circumstance?'
'Uh, both,' Courtney stuttered.
'Which one is it, then?'
'Circumstance, then. Nobody ever wanted me.'
'That cannot be true. The law of averages would say-'
'I know, and maybe it did happen, but never in the proper way,
shall we say. If someone ever wanted me- me, and not some
interpretation of me- I never felt it. I never felt loved. I've always felt
starved.'
'Starved?'
'Yes. That's the perfect word for it. I know the hole, I know the
way that these thoughts will make me feel, but I return to them.'
'What thoughts, may I ask?'
'My wife, with other men.'
'You see, this is very difficult for me. As far as I- can tell, and if
you're telling me the truth- which I assume you are-' the priest then
added, 'So far, no sin has yet been committed.'
Courtney smiled. 'That's the whole problem. It's all in my
head.'
'But these thoughts aren't a sin, you're going through a bad-'
'But I'm afraid I might act upon them.'
The priest inhaled and then exhaled slowly. 'You know that I
cannot sanctify you leaving your wife, the church doesn't go for that
sort of thing, not unless she's cheated on you. Did you know about
her sexual history before you married her? Was all of this a surprise
to you?'
'Yes, father, I did know. It was not a surprise.'
'Well then, as the saying goes, you've made your bed, and now-'
'I-'

146
 147

'You just have to learn the inner strength that will be necessary
to keep your thoughts from tearing you up inside and out. Faith will
play a large part in that. How is your faith prevailing these days?'
'I don't know what to believe anymore, father. Nothing I was
sure of is holding steady for me. I find I can only doubt what I used to
trust, trust what I used to doubt, without question. I see no mercy in
this.'
'God is not human, He is infallible. He will not leave you.'
'I know, father.'
'His footsteps reside behind yours until you need him-'
'Then He will carry me.'
'That's right. It is then that He will carry you.'
'I don't know if I even prefer salvation, father. Even the promise
of an eternal afterlife does not seem to ease the pain I feel today. I
love this woman, and she seems secretly intent upon slowly killing
me.'
'This too shall pass.'
'I hope you're right, father.'
What Courtney didn't hear the priest mutter was: 'So do I.'

Courtney dreamed again of the ring. He could not lose this

thought out of his head, either in the waking hours of the day or the
tortuous hours of the evening. It had seeped into his subconscious
against his will. The images would not leave him alone: the hearts
intertwined, the etchings of ages, the promises not kept. One had to
wonder. Would Nona have preferred for that relationship to have
worked out, knowing now what she didn't know then, instead of
finding herself involved with him? It was a question that needed
answering.
As he rolled the tiny bit of gold ore around in his fingertips, he
could taste its copper bile in his mouth, coating his teeth with acidic
slush. The walls swung in and out of focus around him, and they
seemed to be breathing, if that were even possible. Was it even
possible?
He didn't want to think about it.
Yet, there it was.
Was it a promise?
Why else would she keep it? She never wore the damn thing,
but it was always forefront in her pile of jewelry. Did she take it out
from time to time and think about it? Did she put it upon her finger
and admire it there, thinking about the man who'd given it to her?
Anything was possible. The bitterness and morbid jealousy ran
through his soul.

147
 148

His feelings were unavoidable. He had seen that ring every day
of his life for the past eleven years. He'd memorized it all: the etched
design of the hearts themselves, scratched over with time and wear;
the dented circle of eternity, warped and weaving through every
possible diversion and detour. His heart felt just as etched and
wrought as the ring. He wondered distractedly in his dream if the ring
was a promise going so deep as to the grave. No matter what, even if
there are other relationships involved, I will return for you, as I
promised.
This ring I give to thee in love and in truth.
But truth could always be taken back. That was the problem.

148
 149

GET-WELL CARD
The Matthias Bramble Clinic stood on a bluff overlooking the ocean; it
was actually that corny to behold. A great deal of money had been
put into the landscaping schematics and the upkeep had been
expensive, to say the least. Groundsman salaries alone totaled more
than thirteen thousand dollars each month, and the materials for basic
upkeep rounded that figure up closer to twenty thousand.
So this is what people spend their money on? Timothy thought
to himself as he approached the Clinic. Grass and trees? Grass and
fucking trees? Does any of this shit even matter to me anymore? Did
it ever?
From a distance, though, the place was pretty to look at, if you
were into that sort of thing. There was a symmetrical sort of feel to
the area, which- altogether not mathematically correct, he was sure-
lent the place the air of the Arlington National Cemetery. Every sight
as it was presented to the eye was exactly what somebody wanted you
to see.
Everything in this world was intended for effect.
Once he was on the grounds of the Clinic, Timothy Karacas
moved around like an old man, stumbling and feeble. The weather
was warming up, and it was actually starting to feel like spring, now,
almost a month and a half into the season proper.
There was a gasp from the reception desk when he actually
stepped into the building of the Clinic itself. Anywhere else, they
would have thought he was drunk, stoned, or crazy. Maybe all three.
But here, it was different. Here, they were used to this- here, they
had been expecting him.

And still, even though they were used to this sort of thing, his
condition was a frightening image to behold. To Timothy, it felt as
though he were wearing his inside on the outside. Again.
His skin was raw- red and irritated. It looked to the receptionist
as if he had tried too hard to shave a face that didn't want to be
shaved. How Timothy knew this, he did not know, but somehow the
image of himself was transferred into his head. He knew exactly how
she was seeing him. His cheeks had been well-scrubbed, rosy, but his
hair was lank and greasy. Shelby Dunn’s first reaction was to think of
him as being a lazy slob, but he immediately felt ashamed of thinking
that way, because it was easy for anyone to see that the patient
himself was uncomfortable with the way he looked. He was simply too
weak to take care of himself and had no one to help him to it. It was
a wonder that the man was still able to drive, let alone haul his ass in
and out of the shower three or four times a week. But when you were

149
 150

about to die in a couple of weeks anyway, who really cared if you

smelled like piss?
Still, some effort had been made to groom himself, however
lacking.
As he walked down the corridor to greet his patient- or soon-to-
be co-patient, as it were- Shelby felt an immediate empathy for this
man. The pain he was feeling was evident in his face, and it was
radiating outwards, to infect anyone within his line of sight. How can a
man live like that, when every moment is causing him anguish?
Shelby felt hotly ashamed of his own relative vitality when
looking at Timothy Karacas. He would've had a hard time trying to
picture himself ever being that infirm, but in fact he had less than two
months to live.
But Shelby knew none of this. Not yet, anyway.
He remembered talking to Basil that very morning. Dr.
Rochefoucauld had been wringing his hands nervously as they spoke,
and when Shelby said something about it, Basil used a sharper tone in
scolding him than Shelby would have believed necessary. For an hour
or so afterward, Shelby was angry that the exchange had happened
that way, but now he found himself wondering at what might the root
have been for such a seasoned response.
Why is Timothy Karacas so important to us, to the research?
At the Bramble Clinic, Basil Rochefoucauld's office was directly
next to the room utilized by Dr. Dunn. Rochefoucauld had known
Shelby from a school in Ohio where he had instructed, and Shelby had
sought to make the acquaintance of a top-drawer burn treatment
specialist who had no peers in his field, so highly was Dr.
Rochefoucauld valued among them. And oddly enough, in Shelby Dr.
Rochefoucauld had found a willing student, eager for what he could
teach him and ambitious enough to do something with the knowledge
that basil imparted to him. That had been years ago, and each of
them had settled into their respective roles, although now the line
between student and teacher had been blurred.
The idea of doing his internship at the Matthias Bramble Clinic
had belonged to Basil alone. Shelby would never have thought to
apply there, but old Basil had been owed a research grant by the
presidents of the Matthias Bramble board and he wanted to piss the
money away under the roof from which it came. It had proven to be a
serendipitous deal for Rochefoucauld. He had been able to make a
thirty thousand-dollar grant last for close to seven years now. The
research he contributed to the Clinic was invaluable and he soon
began to earn his keep, so to speak. He had only last year received
the offer of lifetime internship. Basil hadn't been sure whether or not
he should turn it down, but he had accepted it. He would always keep

150
 151

an active office at the Clinic, that was for sure, but he wasn't sure if he
wanted to feel obligated for it in the future.
Dunn had often referred cases to Rochefoucauld- and vice versa-
and it had been a mutual agreement between the two of them that
they slid a certain percentage to one another for second opinions, for
so closely related were their respective areas of specialization.
Where Shelby was of an easy temper, even somewhat lazy, Basil
was of the mind that there was no time to waste. Shelby had once
cracked that Basil seemed as though he was hoping to win the Nobel
Prize before the beginning of next week, and Basil had clapped him on
the shoulder after saying that, as if congratulating him on finally
getting the message.
Shelby walked forward and offered his hand to Timothy Karacas-
not only as a greeting, but also to offer support to help the man hold
his lanky frame upright. 'I'm Dr. Dunn. I'm associated with-'
'I need to sit down,' Timothy sighed, weakly. 'I'm feeling a little
weak, and I'm starting to see spots again if I breathe too deeply.'
Leading him to a bench in the reception area, Shelby offered to
fetch him a glass of water if he needed it. 'No thanks,' Timothy
protested. 'It's just...it's just the walking that's getting to me. The
incline-'
'The hills outside are pretty steep,' Shelby assented.
'My name is-'
'Timothy Karacas. I know. I'm with Dr. Rochefoucauld. I've
been working with him in preparation for your treatment. We’ve made
notes-'
'You have?'
'Yes. I think we could talk more comfortably in my office.'
And so they could. Timothy looked around him but found no
sign of the man behind the doctor in the decor of his office. It wasn't
just that the office was impersonal, it was a total lack of personality
that was emanated on behalf of the doctor from himself. In the days
before his death, these perceptions had become heightened. Now that
he smelled the stink of death upon him, he thought he possessed a
greater ability to peer into the human soul- and Shelby Dunn was a
blank slate.
The only hint of any human feeling was in his choice of wall
decor. Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights was
displayed most prominently on the west wall and there was a plaque
beneath it, although it was too far away for Timothy to read it clearly.
After a few minutes, Dr. Rochefoucauld came into the office, and
these thoughts fled from Timothy as suddenly as they had overtaken
him.

151
 152

An MRI was called for, as was a CT scan. All of these tests had
already been completed on Timothy, but Shelby explained that Dr.
Rochefoucauld was an unusual man who did not trust the opinions of
others very easily, so a new spate of tests was then ordered. 'We
want fresh data on you- our own data. Now your Doctor-'
'Dr. Alamackazine,' Timothy croaked.
'Yes, him, I'm sure he was alright, and in fact I can see that he's
done a lot to help you. But here, you and I are in the unique position
of being able to help each other out. We have new products we'd like-
'
'Products? You don't mean pills, do you?'
'Our pharmaceuticals speak for themselves, and we do employ
them. But when Dr. Rochefoucauld gets here, he can better explain
what I'm talking about. What we're looking for is people- people like
you, Mr. Karacas- that are willing to take the jump and put their faith
in the technologies we've been developing here over the past decade.'
'Technologies?'
'Dr. Rochefoucauld could explain it better than I can, I'm sure.'
Timothy had earlier in the month undergone an
electrocardiogram, as well as an electroencephalogram. All that
Timothy knew was that they were all various X-rays for the brain, and
that was more than he wanted to know. This was all much more than
he wanted to know.

The biopsy Rochefoucauld performed revealed something that

old Dr. Alamackazine had overlooked- a malignant teratoma of the
prostate gland metastatic to the bowels and the remainder of
Timothy's digestive system (a particularly horrible way to go, Basil
thought). This, he reasoned, was where Timothy's lymphoma had
originated, and Dr. Alamackazine had been so busy trying to put his
finger in the dyke that he hadn't seen that the ocean about to come
crashing over the lip of the wall above his head. If Timothy was going
to live longer than a few months- which Dr. Rochefoucauld didn't think
was possible- Timothy would have had one hell of a juicy malpractice
suit on his hands against his former physician.
It was decided that there was no point in telling Mr. Karacas
about this. He already had enough on his mind. He didn't need more
to think about. As he convalesced, in their hospital and under their
care, he came to feel that perhaps there was some hope. The visits
from Rochefoucauld and Dunn were every three hours, and in these
visits Timothy felt almost against his will a sense of trust being
developed.
'Why don't you have Miss Commisarre here take you down to the
cafeteria? Do you think you would be able to eat something for us?'

152
 153

Timothy looked up at Shelby and played with the loose flaps of

skin on his chest through the spaces in between the buttons on his
shirt. The flaps, when he had looked at them this morning, had been
black and pink.
'I don't know,' he answered, as honestly as he could.
'Well, why don't you try?'
'I could go for a piece of toast, maybe.'
'That's the spirit,' Shelby said, patting him lightly on the arm. 'I
want you to go with her and just tell her anything you want.'
Miss Commisarre proffered him a wheelchair and he accepted.
Settling into it, he smelled her perfume, and he realized that even
though it wasn't Melanie or her perfume, it was nice to smell a woman
again.
To smell a woman meant that there was hope, that there was
life to be lived. The scent of a woman meant that there was a day
after tomorrow.

153
 154

THE DISORDERED SELF

Courtney always made sure that he had his car keys at the ready, in
case he was approached, or attacked. Whenever he entered here, had
made sure to have a single dollar in his right hand, to pay the browse
fee- refundable upon purchase- and then cruise inside, perusing the
magazines, looking for images with which to stock his fevered
imagination. The photographs he consumed were both real and
imaginary, insane and photographed splayed flesh for eternity. Holes
pulled so wide that any wetness present evaporated before the first
shot was taken, their faces set just-so with ecstatic grimace.
This was the world he inhabited.
Moving from the magazine display area to the peep-reel section
in the back, his eyes darting from side to side, hoping not to be
recognized.
Courtney pulled the booth door shut behind him and slid the lock
into place. Looking around at the graffiti, he sat down and began to
deposit coins into the mechanism that ran the viewer. He tried to
adjust the volume with the black plastic knob that was provided and
found that it didn't work- he was stuck with sub-standard squealing
until his coins ran out. He then pushed the button that changed the
channel and found that out of the twelve movie channels that were
available in that particular booth, seven of them were either dead or
completely unintelligible, and of the remaining five, two of them were
gay-related features. Of the three straight channels, there was really
nothing he wanted to see. The girls were ugly and the guys were too.
This is not what I want.
Once the three coins he'd already deposited ran out, he opened
the door and moved to another booth, after first sliding another two
dollars into the change machine and getting himself another eight
coins worth of pleasure. He stepped inside the next booth, locked the
door and sat down gingerly upon the black plastic seat that was
provided after first making sure that it was dry. A woman he'd never
seen before was getting her pussy eaten by Jerry Butler. A load of
sphincter lavaging was to be found on the next channel, followed by a
bevy of sexually-liberated slave women (Janette Littledove, Siobahn
Hunter and Cara Lott, all done up in smooth leather and chains) after
that, followed by Elle Rio instigating a three-hole punch with F.M.
Bradley and two other dudes.
Jackpot.
It was always his greatest fear to be discovered in here. Either
his car wouldn't start, or maybe after the third orgasm in the space of
four dollars worth of movie coins would cause his heart to explode,
damning him to expire in a booth where men regularly ejaculated onto

154
 155

the floor. The booths always smelled of bleach- from both the semen
and the disinfectant they used to clean it with- and that caused
Courtney to sometimes get a head-rush, and he worried that he would
faint in here. Anything- absolutely anything- could happen to you
when you're in a place you wouldn't want to be caught dead in.
Still further through this bout of dementia, Victoria Paris was
seen in a picture on a box advertising a movie she had made with Biff
Malibu, who was dressed up as Beetlejuice, only they called him
Beaverjuice in this one. Courtney thought that people like Biff Malibu,
along with Ron Jeremy and Sikki Nixx were a dime a dozen, all
hopelessly calibrated to stroking their own egos while women writhed
preposterously beneath them pretending to enjoy it. All of them
heathens, and all of them friends.
Why was he here again? He'd already seen all the movies
currently in rotation in the booths in one form or another- he'd even
rented one or two of them previously, and could tell with a cursory
glance just how far along the action was. He knew that once he'd hit
orgasm all sense of reason would return to him, but not before then.
Courtney would probably masturbate at least once more before
leaving, trying to wring the most meaning from his pocketful of gold
coins, each one of them embossed with the likeness of a topless
woman. And when he came- or came to, as it were- he would wonder
why he was here. And then he’d remember. And begin again.

155
 156

MIGNIGHT’S ANGEL
Kelly deRenzi was at it again, and he was enjoying himself-
immensely.
Her vulva and its adjoining structures had been removed and
taken into another room while the body drained itself of fluid through
the force of gravity. Her intestines were placed in a wooden box that
Kelly had lined with a green plastic garbage bag and had then secured
around the perimeter of the box with a long thick rubber band.
Her toenails had been removed while the girl was still alive,
before the initial cut into her abdomen had been made. He usually let
them die from blood loss- either that or shock, same thing- and he
always watched for the look on their faces when he outlined where the
scalpel was going to cut them with a purple surgical pencil. He made a
practice of always looking directly into their eyes when he made the
primary incision. It was always a special thrill for him. He liked to see
the life in their eyes go out as they realized what he was doing to
them.
Most of his mutilations had been carried out after death, but the
line between the two- between life and death- was what fascinated
Kelly the most. Blurring those lines and stretching out that period of
time was a heady experience- pardon the pun. How long could one
ride it, and was there a point where a given specimen was in both
realms at once?
By now, Kelly was getting bored with the routine. Now it
seemed like he knew the moves the girls were going to make before
they made them. There was no sport in killing for him any more; not
very much sport, anyway. The world's most dangerous game had
become commonplace to him. There was never the fear of escape, or
imprisonment and prosecution. The initial rush had been stuffing his
own fear down inside of himself and then conquering that fear through
the sheer force of his own will.
That was no longer what he was looking to accomplish.
Dissecting and decimating the bodies was still a good deal of fun
for him, pulling their innards out, sticking his fingers inside them and
wriggling them around. The last girl must have been pregnant,
because when he slit open her uterus and started frolicking with what
remained inside, there was a shriveled clump of flesh, no larger than a
golf ball, in his fist when he brought his hand back out of the girl's
corpse. It was either a fetus or a small ovarian cancer, but he opted
for the former in his official opinion. As he turned it over and then
over again in his hands, he pondered everything that went into making
that little ball of skin; the sweat, love and toil, the coupling that
assured its nurture and birth. Kelly found himself wondering faintly if

156
 157

the girl was still in contact with the baby's father. Then he turned on
his heel and threw the fetus against the wall, where it landed with a
wet-sounding smack against the wainscoting above the light switch.

Kelly now felt a little hungry, but there really was nothing in the
apartment to eat aside from a few rice cakes (left behind by a previous
tenant) and a jar of stale peanut butter in one of the upper kitchen
cabinets. He decided to take a walk, pull some fresh air into his lungs,
and think of how he was going to remove the body from his place. He
put his clothes on from the day before, pulled his shoes over his feet,
and brought his nearly-rotten fringed black leather jacket about his
shoulders. Kelly patted the money softly in his front right pants
pocket and fondled it, gauging about how much money he had on him.
As he walked down the stairs, Kelly tried to decide what exactly
he had a taste for, after all of this. There were always the standard
greasy dogs and curly fries to be had in the student eateries, but Kelly
had an intuitive feeling that he would wind up buying something at the
grocery store on Mallory Drive and bringing it home and heating it up
on the stove there. It would be cheaper, but it also limited his
options.
As he walked through the electric doors leading into the
supermarket, he saw a girl he thought he recognized. If he didn't
know her by name exactly, he'd at least seen her before, more than
once, but he couldn't place her. She regarded him warily, and Kelly
passed her by without even a nod. But he acutely felt her eyes
walking all over his back as he traipsed down the aisles, looking for
something good to eat for his dinner. Kelly had a taste for something
sweet, maybe, a delicacy, but he kept in mind that he needed
something substantial because whatever he ate had to last him for a
while. His money was getting tight again.
As he walked down the frozen food aisles, eyeing everything and
seeing nothing. He swung the frosted doors open and then closed
again, having taken nothing of their contents. Kelly then shivered and
the taste in the back of his throat made him wonder faintly if he was
coming down with something. He simply couldn't afford to get sick
now.
Then he saw her eyes following him throughout the aisles, and if
she wasn't exactly following him, she was doing a damn fine job of
letting circumstance do it for her. He tried to look as though he didn't
notice her, and for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, he felt a
twinge of guilt- just that much- for what he'd done, was doing, would
do again.
It was a little like being a vampire, Kelly reasoned, only his own
obsession- if that's what one wanted to term it as being- ran deeper

157
 158

than the layman's bloodlust. For the first time he really felt what he
had taken from them- more than just the physical life; he felt those
who had been left behind as he guided the girls toward what lie
beyond.
There was magic in the blood, and menstrual blood was bad
magic. That's why he had always pursued it. There was sustenance in
the blood. It was another one of his talents, sniffing out the taint and
then drawing the taint to him, into him and through his veins.
He fondled the spaghetti boxes and jars of sauce and thought
about what he could make with that. Bread and butter might be his
only real option. Garlic bread might be a choice, but he looked around
and saw that they had no garlic butter so he'd have to make it from
scratch.
He could peel some meat from the girl's corpse and sauté it in
red sauce, but that seemed impractical. One could really work up a
fierce appetite trying to peel the flesh from a given set of bones and
then-
Then it occurred to him where he'd seen the girl before.
His second-to-last kill had been scored in a campus bar not very
far from here- maybe ten minutes on foot. It was only a few blocks
over.
Before Kelly had gotten the girl alone outside, he'd seen her
dancing with guys and talking to her friends while they were taking a
break and sitting at the table next to his. Kelly, of course, had been
sitting alone, but he brought his calculus textbook. The girl he'd seen
inside the grocery store had been at that table. She had probably
been questioned after the other girl had disappeared.
She'd probably warned her friend not to walk home alone. She'd
probably gone over a million little details of that night in her head
since her friend turned up missing, but she had most assuredly tried to
stop her. Friends were always like that. They always meant so well.

158
 159

CHITNOUS CARAPACE
Shelby Dunn loved nothing more than to take in the sight of his own
image, and yet he had from an early age felt a degree of acute
dissatisfaction with his physical appearance- even prior to his little
‘accident’ in college. He and his lab partner- a fellow whose name
Shelby now had difficulty in recalling- had been working their assigned
labs with acids when some of his lab mate’s had been knocked over
and splashed onto Shelby’s face. It was only a few droplets, but
enough to turn the trick. His eyeball had been seared, having caught
most of what came his way, and the right side of his face had been
pock-marked below it. Not severely, but enough to be a real concern.
He had contemplated suicide then, and later chided himself for
it.
The pain abated, but the ambivalence increased.
The details of his appearance often dovetailed into his personal
life.
If he felt good about himself, things were up. If his face broke
out, he would become morbidly depressed. The scars from college
only served to fuel this dissatisfaction, although he was able to
rationalize the fact that such peripherals didn't matter.
His mother, while pregnant with him, had been thoroughly
convinced- for her own strange reasons- that she was carrying a girl.
When Shelby Dunn was born, and it turned out that she'd really been
carrying a boy all this time, she never quite forgave her son for being
the gender that his DNA had presupposed him to be. To compensate
for her lack of a daughter, Shelby's mother Anita had- in time- taken
to the task of making him as pretty as she possibly could, and there
were indeed moments in their life together where Shelby's mom had
nearly given in to her own crazy- and yet somehow plausible- idea of
introducing her son Shelby to people for the first time and referring to
him as being Jessica- a girl.
His father was not around, and his mother never seemed to want
to talk about him. He grew up with a woman's influence and nothing
else. In some ways, this afforded him an advantage, but in other
ways, in held him back, especially in social situations, when he felt like
he wasn't sure exactly what he was. His vanity served to fill a void in
his life.
Shelby had inherited Anita's prissy attitude and self-absorption,
and after her death- when Shelby was twenty-three- Shelby got into
himself only that much more, to fill the gap her loss had created within
him. In this time, he went about establishing routines that followed
him from his college days through to professional life.

159
 160

Every morning upon arising, Shelby would walk straight into the
bathroom to inspect himself in the three-way mirror above the vanity.
He had begun losing his hair at around the age of twenty-five, and so
he had become meticulous about taking care of the hair he had left.
The hair that still remained on his head was only now slowly taking on
the bunt-cake doughnut-ring shape that so many men possess once
their hair starts falling out in earnest. The crown of Shelby's head was
bare and quite sensitive to the touch; he had long since given up on
shaving any stray hairs on the top of his head in favor of plucking
them out one by one with a pair of metal tweezers he kept in a drawer
next to the sink.
Shelby had once thought of getting a hair-weave to cover his
baldness, but he was still riding the fence on that decision. He wanted
to make himself over the best way possible. Wearing a toupee had
felt false for him and he couldn't imagine the exalted experience of
hair-weaving to be much of an improvement on that theme. He was
searching for some sort of compromise that would serve all his best
interests. Perhaps he wouldn't get anything done to him before the
year was out, anyway. Shelby was in no hurry to go under the
scalpel, if that's what it was going to take.
Was he good-looking? He supposed so, although he was certain
that at least some people in this world might want to disagree with
him on this point. His was an unassuming attractiveness that had
been borne out of corn-fed stock from the Midwestern United States.
His mother had come from Ohio, and there was nothing more plainly
American as that.
One of his eyes, the left one, was bigger than the other- he'd
hated the right half of his face, the evil half, since even before his
accident. He also had bad acne that threatened his peace of mind.
Shelby indeed thought he was a unique specimen but his
dissatisfaction lay in his perception of himself in the mirror. He had
never liked his true appearance but preferred rather his reflection.
Only when he had halved himself in front of a mirror could Shelby truly
say that he was happy with how he looked. Straight on, his face
looked almost comically asymmetrical, but in his reflection his
countenance was perfect. This was undoubtedly the way God had
wanted him to look in the first place.
And soon- Hell or high water, abstract fiction or scientific reality-
this was the way he was going to look in real life- permanently.

160
 161

HOOSHEE
It was different for Courtney here, at home, where he watched rented
movies as opposed to the peep-show reels that the porn houses
offered. Here at home, with Nona at work and the front and back
doors double-locked, he felt comfortable in his self-loathing. Here, he
could be himself, all spread out in the living room, with a beach towel
underneath him and a fake plastic phallus.
There was Tanya Foxx and Buffy Davis on the screen now, doing
a two-fer on Dick Rambone. Rachel Ryan had just wrapped up with
Marc Wallice. There was Sharon Mitchell taking a vibrator attachment
in her ass from Erica Boyer. Her legs were spread high and wide and
she was wearing black fishnet stockings and patent-leather shoes. It
was sex for the sake of sex, no emotional attachments. No strings.
Only memories remain.
I know you'll never be mine, but I just love to see you.
This was futile. He either wanted to be these women- the
sweating, snarling recipients of such long turgid members- or he
placed other people in their position. This is what he did whenever he
wanted to picture his wife having sex with someone else. Not that he
ever wanted to, it just came to his mind. He would use identifying
characteristics- like the mole on her back- and link them with an
actress who possessed the same. Then it was much easier to make
the transition. In his mind.
Now I'm nothing.
He could picture it. He could see it happening.

When Courtney saw these women, he saw his wife. He saw her
taking on two men at once. He saw her swallowing a man's load, then
playing with what was left over in her mouth, blowing bubbles and
spreading it out all over her lips, if only to achieve an erotic effect
upon her partner.
Nona wanted to prove to him- or her- that she was the hottest
fuck around. She allowed the flesh around her mouth to relax and the
cum spilled down from the gaps in the hollows of her cheeks to nestle
amongst the guy's ball sack. Courtney imagined that the song 'Caught
Up In You,' by .38 Special, was playing softly in the background as he
rolled over onto his back, the towel shifting slightly underneath him.
When strangers are introduced, there is a smile and an instant
kiss.
The girl allowed herself to be fucked by men she'd never seen
before, through the strains of a blindfold, allowing only the erotic
pleasure of exchanged flesh to take precedence over everything else,
everything that was moral and decent. All to prove that she was the

161
 162

best. The dirtiest woman available on the market. The nastiest. The
sluttiest. Her trick always worked. No man walked away from his wife
with anything less than a smile on his face and a limp, spent cock in
his pocket.
Close your eyes, imagine me there. Touch my scar. Let me die.
The images were almost nauseatingly familiar; he had been here
before, many times. Whenever he fought with his wife- which was a
lot these days- he fled to these sere images, these dire memories of
things long-gone. The pictures didn't hassle him. They didn't
demand. They only offered solace in their strange, silent way. The
women were also as memories, for if he saw them naked and heard
them cry and felt them come didn't that also meant he had been with
them? Courtney had no real memories aside from his wife, so these
would have to do. His wife had other memories, and she wanted
more, yet she begrudged him sleeping with anyone else. Why was his
sexuality to be limited only to her? Hers surely wasn't limited to him.
If she wanted to cheat, he once told her in the sullen despondency
argument, all she had to do was remember.
Kari Foxx was pretty hot. He'd seen her in Caught From Behind
6, the one he'd rented along with Anal Intruder 5, and to which he
masturbated upon the living room rug, dildo, anal lube, cum towel and
all. That same movie had also featured Penny Morgan- original name
being Serena Robinson- who would later transmutate into Ingrid Elliot,
a nasty blonde with a habit of getting stuffed full of thick black cocks.
This woman finally emerged as Rachel Ryan, the hottest anal queen to
hop out of the gutter. Kari had gotten speared in the first scene of the
movie, which had a plot to it, and in the final scene, the sex therapist
finds out that the reason she advocated anal sex to everyone who
comes into her tropical island practice is because she herself was
anally repressed. This, even after being reamed in the first ten
minutes of the flick.
This is not my best self. This is all that I am.

162
 163

TURNING TRICKS
As Timothy was being wheeled into his final surgery, Melanie felt a
sudden longing for him out of all proportion to the way she’d felt
before. She went through time, sure she did, where the ache to have
him near was so bad that she could almost taste it, but those usually
passed after a few days. Wednesdays were the worst day for that sort
of thing, and it was usually over by the time the weekend had arrived.
Now, this pain- this was something new for her.
She was filled with the sense that he needed her, that he was in
imminent danger. But how could that be? He was either at home or
at a doctor’s appointment- he never went anywhere else these days,
not that she was aware of. Still, it was the mere passing of a
moment- and it did pass- but throughout the day, the thought of
Timothy stayed with her.

Earlier in the day, before the operation, Timothy had felt pretty
good. He wasn’t too nervous about what was going to happen- he was
an old hand at this by now, no matter how experimental the procedure
was- and he had nothing to lose by this time anyway. He had even
been able to hold down three Oreo cookies for his breakfast meal.
‘This biopsy will tell us what we need to know to go about your
treatment,’ Dr. Rochefoucauld said to Timothy, only a few hours
before, when they had first met. He would go under in the evening,
and this was lunchtime. ‘This one’s on the house, so to speak. If you
disagree with our conclusions- diagnosis, prognosis, treatment- I
understand.’
‘There’s no obligation,’ Shelby added, smiling.
Shelby darted around to the other side of his desk.
‘There’s a few medical releases we need for you to sign,’ he said,
stepping forward. He’s already dead, Shelby remembered Basil saying
to him earlier in the day. Who would bat an eye if he died on the
table?
‘This is all just a formality, right?’ Timothy asked, not wanting an
elaborate answer. 'These are like what I signed with Dr. Alamacka-'
'Of course,' Basil said. 'We want you to feel safe with us.'
Timothy smiled weakly. 'In an odd way, I do.'
Hearing that make Shelby feel sick, but he spoke anyway. 'We
do this all the time. We can help you- help you significantly, I think-
but we also need to further our research. Like it or not, you are a
truly unique specimen of disease.'
Basil flashed Shelby a look that spoke murder.
'To put it more gently, Timothy,' Basil said, 'Would be to say that
we want to help people in your condition, but that's not possible

163
 164

without studying people in your condition. Most people at your stage

of the game would have given up hope, but not you, and you're to be
commended. But that bravery is rare, and we need- for all of us- to
capitalize upon it.'
A smile passed between Shelby and Basil as Timothy solemnly
signed the releases, but he didn't notice it. All he wanted was a warm
place- a warm place where he could curl up and die. 'We'll need to
prep you.'
'Okay.'
Basil cleared his throat. 'We'll rush the results on the biopsy,
but we can cross what we find with what we already know about you.'
'Already know about me?'
'Yes,' Basil said, aware he had taken a verbal misstep. 'We can
come up with a more comprehensive picture of what needs to be done
once we're inside. I've taken the liberty of accessing some of your old
files.'
'You have?' Timothy said, looking up for a moment with eyes
that were lidded, glazed, and that looked as if he'd been awake, crying
all night.
Which was true. He had dreamed of Melanie, and he had cried.
'Yes,' Shelby said, trying to cover their conspiracy as he best
could.
'I guess that's okay,' Timothy sighed. 'It's just unusual, is all.'
'I'll call one of the nurses to bring you down and get you ready.'

He was taken away on a wheeled cart and placed in a room that

was almost directly above Shelby Dunn’s office and given an injection
that started to loosen him up almost immediately. Within half an
hour, he almost felt well again, healthy- but he knew this to be false.
Just another deceiving opiate- like love.
Once the anesthesia set in, and Timothy counted backward from
two hundred, his mind was set free, never to return bodily to this
earth. His last conscious thought revolved around the number
seventy-three.
When he was brought into the operating room, Basil marked the
spot on Timothy's abdomen that he intended to cut away. It was a
surface of raised skin about the size of a dime- and nearly twice as
thick. The red dotted line followed the circumference of his melanoma,
tracing the outside edges of it and leaving a radius of about an eighth
of an inch all the way around it. The operation, he had been told,
should take no longer than forty-five minutes to an hour and ten
minutes to complete. After that, Timothy would spend the next five or
six hours in recovery sleeping off the effects of his anesthetic. He
might be admitted as a precaution, or he might be sent home to await

164
 165

the results; the decision would be made once he was awake again and
they had a better chance to assess his medical condition. But Basil
and Shelby both knew that he wouldn't leave the Clinic alive. They
knew he wouldn't wake up again.
Shelby Dunn’s sin against Timothy Karacas- if there was one-
was in announcing him dead prematurely when he knew that he might
be able to live for another two or three weeks in undying agony if he
got immediate attention. Shelby had hoped to spare him that, and he
had never liked working on hopeless cases anyway. Timothy Karacas
would never have had much of a life to return to anyway, and Shelby
thought he was just being charitable by making the humane decision
to terminate. Their patient had started to show signs of accelerated
and unexplained cardiac arrest only ten or fifteen minutes into the
projected biopsy lance, and when that happened, all plans for the
biopsy were jettisoned in favor of saving the life of their patient if it
was at all possible.
At least, that's what Basil told the attendants in the room.
There was a quick moment where the color returned to
Timothy's face, but it was fleeting and didn't lead to anything concrete.
Their patient was on his way out, being set free but only after what
must have been an excruciating interment. If their patient was dead,
it was likely that he was already a lot happier where he was now than
he had been at any time during the last six months he had been alive.
Looking at the man's chart was like looking at a walking corpse; the
patient's room here at the Clinic smelled like incipient death, and it
had a wet, humid smell to it so cloying that it proceeded to hang
heavily in one's nostrils for the rest of the day. It was a bitter-sweet
smell that walked hand-in-hand with industrial disinfectant in most
people's minds. The patient's skin was sallow, and jaundiced. The
doctors weren't sure if they should expect this but none of the doctors
were too surprised when it happened.
If I only keep my mind on my work, Shelby thought.
All at once, Timothy's flat greasy eyes widened as he looked
directly into Shelby's face. His hand shot up and grabbed Shelby's
wrist- in total defiance of the anesthetic that had been administered to
him- and before Shelby could pull away, a moment of communion was
felt by all present in the room. There was something being
communicated there, but he wasn't sure if he could interpret it
correctly. Shelby now remembered the fetid handshake Timothy had
given him upon meeting him earlier that day to discuss the parameters
of his treatment at the Matthias Bramble Clinic's cancer facilities. The
patient's grip with reality had already started to weaken considerably,
and Shelby felt blood passing warmly into his hand while letting go of
Timothy's handshake- it felt as though he was being slowly sucked

165
 166

down and out of his body through his wrist where his own flesh
pressed against Timothy's. That was the first time that Shelby Dunn
touched Timothy Karacas; the second time was when he died.
What was in that handshake?
He felt as though his would be emptied of blood if he didn't let
go.
There was a jump as Timothy's body stiffened; it straightened up
like a board and the patient was immediately stricken unconscious. He
didn't know it, but his body was preparing him to go over into the
void.
One of the nurses spoke. 'Shelby...'
He looked up at her and shrugged. 'What is it?'
'We're losing pressure on him...'
Basil Rochefoucauld looked up from where he was cutting into
Timothy, and when his eyes at last met Shelby's, Basil knew that they
were both remembering the same conversation.
The money is going to be great for both of us, Shelby. I'll get
what I want, and you'll get what you want. The E2D8 formula will get
what it needs, and people will benefit from it. We'll benefit from it.
Timothy felt a cool slime being applied to his skin, and a
thousand tiny, biting little hands that reminded him with their pinching
that a small part of him was still alive and human. When they did
what they did to him, trying to snatch him up just as viciously as they
possibly could, he felt it. It caused him pain. There was no quiet good
night. He could see now that it would be a struggle to die, but if he
wanted it badly enough he thought he could push himself through to
the other side. He might have described it as being a little like giving
birth to one's own soul. It was the last bit of metaphysical business
that he had to take care of before dying. He was glad to be rid of the
burden of life.
Gracey did his part in absentia, as his words rang through Basil's
mind, echoing off each corner and warping the original message in its
tone and clarity. The words had started to run together for Basil, and
he couldn't concentrate on what he was doing with the instruments in
his hands. His arms felt lifeless. His guilt as the catalyst was two-fold.
The lights in the OR faltered a bit, but then they righted
themselves happily as the back-up electrical generators started to
come on-line in a response to the emergency warning issued when the
surge came through. Somewhere, an alarm was buzzing- one of the
other nurses sprang from her position next to the table where Timothy
lay and switched it off before it could start to annoy the doctors and
destroy what precious little was still remaining of their shattered
concentration on Timothy's operation.
But was it supposed to have been like this?

166
 167

Timothy felt his soul being sucked out and tossed in many
different directions. He had come to the biggest fight of his life and he
wasn't physically able to affect the outcome either one way or another.
He had read scripture that hinted that it was possible to guide one's
path through the grid of death with agility and proper grace and
destination. He had come in here wanting to die, and he thought he
still did, but some part of him- some innate foolish self-preservationist
instinct- was telling him to hold on, that this wasn't his hour of death.
Timothy sensed every thought in the room, and where the
thoughts were scrambled, he was able to bleed them together, splicing
half-formed ideas and thoughts into words that could be cut and
pasted together in any number of patterns in a split-second. His spirit
thrashed madly above their heads, trying to slash at them with its new
found tail, one that sought to coil about and strangle the neck of
Shelby Dunn- he being that vain, prissy asshole of an MD who'd
helped him to hurry his manner of death here today in this our blessed
hail Mary goddamn room number 1o6, procedurals. Only it wasn't a
procedural that was going on here today, it was something that cut a
little bit more deeply than that if you could understand the idea of
descending into the claws of time.
Part of Timothy felt that no more time was to be wasted trying
to negotiate physically with these earth-bound fools, and yet there was
a new-found rage in his system that needed to be siphoned out before
he could complete any transition to the proper plane of existence. He
was not able to control what was happening to him now, and he hoped
that his latest encounter with the grim reaper would indeed prove to
be fatal.
He knew in his heart of hearts that he was already dead, and he
knew now that he'd wanted it this way for a long time. There was no
time left for him to fight, and indeed, he didn't want to; the song was
over.
We're losing him, Shelby thought, and I'm glad. This guy only
would have suffered for a few more weeks even with continuing the
treatments. There's nothing more to be done.
His mind idled in the land of free association for a few seconds.
Then he snapped back to attention, hotly ashamed of himself for
having spaced out like that just now, and he tried to focus on getting
through what he was supposed to be doing now.
The nurse on duty in the OR gasped, inhaling sharply. Her voice
was harried, as though she had a load of clothes in the washer that
she was afraid would get wrinkled if she didn't remove them as soon
as possible.
'Doctor, I think we're starting to lose him...'

167
 168

Timothy sensed a collective inhalation of breath as their minds

raced to find a way to re-ignite his body's claim over his free-floating
soul.
Don't do it. Leave me alone. Leave me alone, and let me die.
There was a sudden rush of commotion as everyone assigned in
the OR hurriedly assumed their pre-assigned crash-cart positions
around him. The winds that swirled near his face bit into his cheek,
leaving traces of what he might have once called blood in some other
lifetime.
The defibrillator was doing what it could to keep him alive, and
he found himself mutely and impotently hating the damned machine,
even as it solemnly performed its sacred and now resonantly holy duty
of jagging his heart muscles into the semblance of full-blooded life-
giving thing.
Hearing none of this, as there was no way for him to have heard
what was going on above and around him, Basil walked over and stood
quietly behind the defibrillator, waiting for a proper signal to be
proffered.
'He's going...'
'I know, I know.' He looked up at Basil. 'What can we-'
'Nothing.'
'Nothing?' It was an act.
'There's nothing we can do here. There's-'
We only need a few more skins before we can set ourselves up.
I can promise you that this whole thing will go off as smooth as cold
silk pie but you have to trust me, guy, just this once. The new skin
will put us into business. There's a market ready to be set up, and
people are willing to move our product- that product being, of course,
skin. His DNA will help the formula to produce its own antibodies
against what has already killed Mr. Karacas. The E2D8 will be ready
for the market, and for Shelby's operation. We can mold the skin into
whatever we want.
Basil then did his part to seal a three-way pact in the dissolution
of Timothy Karacas; he did his part by winding an electrical cord
around his ankle and pulling it from the wall. It was just as simple as
that.
Only a few more pieces of skin. That's all we need. After that,
when it's bigger, it'll really be out of our hands. That's when we'll rake
in the profits, because we were bright enough to have been there in
the first place and that we saw its potential in its proper margin.
But the cord didn't come all the way out of the wall. Basil could
see the bronze tines sticking into the outlet, but they wouldn't budge
past that point. He was standing on an odd angle to the wall, and the
defibrillator machine itself was blocking his path.

168
 169

'His blood pressure's dropping, Shelby.'

'I know, I know.'
'We're losing him,' someone pleaded.
This guy's dying, and I'm glad he's dying.
As Timothy died, he looked up into Dr. Dunn’s face, which was
now held in a delicate profile from the fluorescent OR lights. In the
profile, Shelby looked a lot better than he usually did, with his sliding
acne-pocked skin and those creepy oddly-sized eyeballs. Timothy's
stare felt hot and bitter upon his flesh, and it prickled his skin. This
guy brought disease with him, and it would eat you alive if you let it.
Timothy felt nothing but envy for Shelby Dunn. He was going to
live, now, wasn't he? He was going to have a chance to form his
future outside of a hospital room. The bed was falling out from
beneath him.
Shelby's eyes shut themselves instinctively. He felt as though
he knew what was going to happen next. This man would pass over,
and die.
The nurse sighed. 'It's too late, fellas...we've lost him.'

169
 170

COCK-TALES & JUICE

There were almost two many images to choose from. Almost.
Ray Victory was stuffing Tanya Foxx’s pretty pink asshole. She
was too little for him to get entirely inside of, so he compensated by
fucking her with only half his dick- there was maybe five inches of
leeway. Tanya Foxx had an admirably cheery I’ll-fuck-anything-
attitude. Victory finished the scene by spraying cum all over her torso.
And that wasn't all he did. The very same guy had also ruined Laurel
Canyon with a slam-bang butt-fuck that had left her in the hospital.
She retired from the business not long after.
Why do I know these things?
After he came, he zipped up and returned to the lobby, to peruse
the movie racks. Courtney located the designated anal section. This
was where it was at. There was the cheerfully-titled Up The Butt, and
next to it, Back Alley. Next to that was Anal Commander with Miss
Pomodoro. Next to that was Caught From Behind 4, with Keli
Richards, Buffy Davis and Patty Petite, whose scene with Ron Jeremy
was something you just had to see to believe. He continued to scan
the rack in a cursory manner.
All the titles began to look the same after you'd been looking at
them for a while. Overkill was a common theme here. Courtney
especially enjoyed the stupor that came over him when he
masturbated ten or twelve times right in a row, one right after the
other, whenever he rented a video and took it home. He would watch
it once the night before with his wife- assuming of course that it wasn't
too weird- and then the next day, after she left for work, he'd get
down on the living room rug and fill up a wash cloth with semen. It
was the only way he achieved peace.
Our lady Zara Whites was here, along with Nina Hartley, Jeanna
Fine and Chessie Moore. Erica Boyer and Alexis Storm, our dearly
departed Shauna Grant and Megan Leigh, Tiffany Storm and Buffy
Davis, Janette Littledove and Elle Rio- you get the picture. He knew
them all by name, intimately- and it was more than a little spooky.
Buffy Davis, Erica Boyer and Miss Pomodoro were his all-time favorite
anal queens, and it was his fondest wish to emulate them. The solidly-
built Erica Boyer, who was not particularly pretty, was more masculine
than feminine and she seemed like the type of woman who had been
born for this sort of work.
The other girls- Brandy Alexander, Aja, Racquel Darrien, Porsche
Lynn, Sharon Kane, Veronica Hart and Savannah- were all pretty hot
in their own right, but their scenes stuck too close to the rather boring
proclivities of the mainstream for Courtney's taste, although he was
inordinately fond of the tattoo that Savannah had on the top of her left

170
 171

foot. He tended to admire the way-out chicks, the sluts, the real cum-
guzzlers- the girls who seemed to have to have nothing to lose and no
respect for themselves or what they did with their tongues and bodies.
Julianne James was an insidious amalgamation of three holes
and pearly white buns and teeth. An asshole that was too tight for
belief. Alex Storm was a nasty fuck. He'd seen her in other movies,
like Racquel Unbound, where she stole the show. Her only flaw was
that she'd had a botched tit-job done on her and you could see the
thin tiny little scars below the lines of her breasts if you looked close
enough.
Just like your wife, his nasty little mind insisted.
It's just a matter of letting yourself get down in the pit,
becoming one with it. You give of yourself to become something else.
It is the way of the land. Nothing is pornographic in reality until the
observer's fantasies are added. To Courtney Randlehaus, then,
everything was pornographic. There was a theory promulgated
erroneously by some parties that pornography was a victimless crime;
it was not. Oftentimes, the victim is unseen, unheard of, but what
fascinated Courtney to no end was that a woman would volunteer for
this- the term is here used loosely- and there was the image of them
enjoying this, enjoying the concept of being the playthings of men.
Courtney didn't really like men, per se, in fact they repulsed him, but
total submission, total depravity, was what really got him off. This
was the only place to get it. One man's delight is another man's
boredom.
This shit had to make you laugh if you were sane at all. Then
again, if you were even remotely acquainted with the wounded
concept of sanity, what would you be doing in a place like this? It just
didn't make any sense, not unless you were caught up in studying the
sweet pain and the aura and the reverie of the female body, especially
its requisite holes.
'You here a lot?'
'Once in a while,' Courtney slumpered out of the corner of his
mouth, then added, somewhat flirtatiously, 'Enough.'
That had made Kelly smile.
It was a gruff, unstructured beginning, but neither saw it as
such.
I can't be here.
It was all Courtney could do not to gape. He looked more like a
woman than his wife did. The perfection of the boy's epidermis was
flawlessly obscene: nary a hair or protuberance here nor a trifle of fat-
packed age there. Immaculate- that's the word he'd been looking for.
It brought many things to mind. The effervescence and irreverence of
youth and folly was charming to share an existence with for only so

171
 172

long; after that, things fell into a basic pattern and were free to
deteriorate from there. The slogans he spewed forth would no longer
amuse Courtney, not as much as they might have at another time.
Was he actually regarding this man as a possible lover?
Courtney did not speak Eros fluently- and never had before this,
ever in his life. He dropped the magazine he'd been perusing- Brown
Boys Do Bad Things- and strolled over to the Toys, and once he was
next to him, inhaled the sweet fragrance that emanated from his
body- even more so now that the boy was squatting not three feet
away from him, lowering himself vertically to examine a dong of major
proportions. Its price tag said $22.95, although Courtney had seen it
priced three and a half dollars cheaper in other shops. The whole
damn hunk of rubber must have weighed at least five pounds.
Courtney noticed absently that the boy's fingernails had been painted
black. He had to get out of here.

Once inside the booth, after Courtney had reclined upon the
hardwood slab and box entanglement erected for purposes he could
only really try to accurately guess at, something happened that had
never happened to him before- or at least when it did happen, it had
not inflamed him to such a degree. Courtney himself had lain back
and had his cock in hand, as they say, in flagrante d'erecto when
Kelly's lacquered forefinger, middle finger and ringfinger wriggled
through the little three-inch hole in the booth's wall that had been
provided for purposes that Courtney had never fathomed
comprehensively before tonight.
Kelly continued to beat his meat as he squatted beside the wall,
angling his mouth toward the hole. He was losing his buzz fast. He
would have to pop an amyl out at the car- he figured he probably had
three of them left, which would not be nearly enough to party all
weekend- or at the very least a fistful of Percodan and some Valium.
Courtney brought his cock over to the opening and slid it into the
hand he felt present there. This was far too stressed-out for his blood.
He might be half-queer and into shoving things in places where they
don't really belong, but even he had some restraint. The hand in the
wall tugged gently at his penis and brought it in further, pulling
Courtney closer to the wall if he was to maintain his footing.
The hand itself then led to new vistas. The man's mouth was
quite warm whoever it was, and the sensations carried over him like a
moth-web of orgy and dissemination that made him feel weak in the
knees and utterly spent. His episiotomy brought him pleasure; his
orgasm brought him only pain and misery and he'd come to like it that
way.

172
 173

And then as soon as it began, the moistening hotness stopped.

For a moment, Courtney was dismayed, but then that feeling gave way
to relief.
'Are you in there, honey?'
Nona had said that to him, once.
Courtney suddenly found himself answering in a gravelly tone:
'Yes.'
'I thought so. Tell me something- can I come over there and
play with you? I'm clean, baby, I swear I am. Clean as three swims a
day.'
'Uh, I'm sure you are, but...'
'Can I play with you?'
'I can't, really, I-'
'I'm not a hustle, mister, I swear I'm not, it's just that I just find
you compelling and I don't know, it's strange...'
'Yeah.'
Kelly smiled behind the wall, trying not to laugh.
'Is that a 'yeah' for strangeness or a 'yeah' for sexual abandon?'
Courtney stuttered, suddenly terrified at his answer: 'Both.'
'That's good. I'm always open to new experiences. Anyway you
wanna take it, lover. I'm leaving the door unlocked, I've got ten
dollars worth of quarters in this booth with me, and I'm afraid and I
don't like to watch movies alone. Or do you want me to come over
there?'
'Y-yes. That would be good.'
'I'll be over in a minute, dearie. Just let me pull my pants up.
Will you let me taste you again, lover, or do you want my asshole
first? I'll tell you- before I came in here, I bought a five dollar tube of
purple motion lotion that I want you to massage into my asshole.'
Courtney stammered. 'Y-you mean it?'
'Of course, lover.'
Courtney weighed up everything and decided that he was
already lost. Without pulling his pants up or making any effort to
cover himself, he slid the lock away from the door jamb and waited for
the eyes to peek in. In a moment that seemed to last much longer
than that, they did.
The boy smiled serenely. 'Can I watch a movie with you?'
Courtney nodded mutely, shivering.
The boy sat down next to him and kept his hands at his sides.
'I like to watch movies with people.'
Courtney nodded again.
'You don't have to be shy with me,' the boy said, standing up to
lock the door. 'I don't want to hurt you, so don't be scared. This is
not wrong. We're all just here for a little bit of fun, aren't we?'

173
 174

'I guess so.'

'You're not into this, right?'
'No, no,' Courtney said, shaking his head, 'It's okay.'
'No, really, I insist. It's okay: I'll just leave. I didn't know you'd
be that uncomfortable with it. You must not be ready for this sort of
thing yet, but that's okay, that's fine. I understand.'
'No, please, I'm just a little tired, is all. I'm sorry.'
'It's okay.' He dug his hard bony little fingers into Courtney's
shoulders in a display of what Courtney was sure to be human
compassion.
'I forced myself on you. It's okay if you don't dig it.'
'Really,' Courtney said, not sure of why he was continuing but
not wanting to let this opportunity for human contact slip through his
fingers, 'I just need to get...warmed up.'
'That's the boy,' the other guy said with a smile. He leaned over
and switched the channel on the box to an all-gay movie. That was
when the kissing began. It was hard, yet soft and somehow insistent.
'I like to watch women,' Courtney said, around a mouthful of
tongue.
'Okay,' the boy said, pressing the button several times to switch
it back, scanning the scenes that were in between the two. 'But why?'
'I don't know. I guess it's...it's just, so stupid.'
'No, really- when you consider the surroundings, nothing is
stupid.'
'It's just that I like to pretend I'm them, that I'm actually in
there getting fucked. That I've got attractive breasts with nipples that
brush against the ground when I'm getting fucked doggie-style.'
Am I really saying this?
'Oh, I understand. That's your fantasy? That's your thing?'
'Uh, yeah.'
'That's cool, mister- I can help you with that scenario. Can I
touch you? Would you mind if I did that, made you feel good?'
Courtney felt his body clench up involuntarily. 'Could you go
down on me again?' he heard himself asking. 'It felt really good.'
'Surely,' the boy said, smiling amiably. 'No problem. By the
way, in case I don't have the chance to tell you again, my name is
Kelly.'
'I'm Courtney.'
'Pleased to meet you, Courtney,' said this Kelly person,
extending his hand as if this were a formal business meeting instead of
a chance homosexual encounter in a porno movie-booth.
'Likewise,' Courtney muttered, unsure of what was polite to say
in a situation like this. He supposed that he'd be better served by
being quiet and just trying to shut his mind to all the stimuli assaulting

174
 175

his brain at this moment. Trinity Loren was faking an onscreen

orgasm.
'Do you like dildos?' Kelly asked.
'Yes.'
'So do I,' Kelly said, licking Courtney's penis with abandon.
Again, that charge raced through Courtney's body. It was
something he'd never felt whenever Nona had done this to him.
Maybe he was a homosexual, and hey, if it felt like this, maybe that
wasn't all that bad. Whenever Nona did this for him, or to him-
however one chose to look at it- all Courtney was able to think about
was how many other guys she'd probably done that to. But not being
involved with this boy and not having any feelings for him- and thus
negating any proprietary feelings of ownership or exclusion- helped
him to disregard all that because it no longer mattered to him. This
was heaven, pure carnal buttery heaven, and he was going to enjoy it.
But can I?
If only his stomach would stop heaving.
'Are you enjoying this, lover?'
'Yeah,' Courtney sighed, and cradled the boy's head in his arms.
The boy- Kelly, he said his name was, which was an unusual name- for
his part suckled at Courtney's cock like it was a nipple and he a babe.
It was a strange sight to behold, but it was also deeply satisfying, in a
worldly, all-offensive way. For years he had been seeking to go too far
in this world, and now, he'd finally done it. Now he was truly lost.
And it felt great.
His sin was replete with all the taboos in Christendom. Illicit
sex- which was of course the best kind there was, now that he had
tasted it- homosexuality, sodomy- the whole list of events that will
land a man in Hell or in prison, where he's more than likely to practice
the same.
After a few minutes of this, the boy brought his lips up to
Courtney for him to kiss. They were huge and sweet. It was not
unlike how it was with a woman, although with different women, he
didn't know. Courtney thought that he could taste his own fluid on the
boy's lips-
It kind of reminded him of the lust he used to feel for Nona in
the old days, when they were both younger and a lot more patient
with one another. Love-making with her had been a slow, tortuous
process taking up several hours. This thing here might only last
fifteen minutes and Courtney was going to be upset if it only lasted
that long. He wanted to immerse himself in the experience, and that
just wasn't possible here. It was too restrained an atmosphere for
that jazz.
'Do you want to fuck me now?' Courtney timidly asked the boy.

175
 176

'Yes.' He shook his head as though he swooned with fever.

Let's get this over with.
Courtney assumed the position and waited for the boy to insert
his cock. Kelly then smiled thoughtfully, and brought out the motion
lotion. It was purple, as he had said it was. He dug his fingers into it
and worked out a hunk of the stuff, which clung like paste to his
fingers. The boy then lathered the jelly upon his cock and applied the
remainder of what was on his fingers to Courtney's dilated anus. The
sex was hot, fast, fun and slippery. Courtney wondered briefly if the
lubricant would stain his clothes when he put them back on.
'You gonna respect me in the morning?' Kelly asked as
Courtney's cock bleated inside of him. They were both slathered stem
to sternum in purple Motion Lotion. Courtney even got some in his
hair. He hoped that it would come out with soap and water.
'Of course, baby,' Courtney said.
'I'm inside of you, man...how does that feel for you?'
The women in skin flicks never asked questions like this.
'I don't understand- do you mean, what are the sensations like?'
'Yeah. I want breakfast, though.'
'How can you think of food-'
'Well, y'know, I'm hungry.'
'I'm sorry. I can give you a couple of dollars but I-'
Courtney just then noticed in the light that came down from
above that the boy had a tattoo like a snake- a viper, his mind
beckoned. It was just like in the movies! Sex with total strangers.
Just like Nona.
'What I'm saying is, I'm gonna make you my slave. And you're
going to love it. The best you've ever had. I'm going to become that
which you revere the most, lover,' Kelly whispered, then, returning
with a smile to his former persona of a happy high school cheerleader,
he continued as before- 'What I'm saying, mister, is that after I'm
done fucking your ass, I want you to buy me something to eat. Is that
really asking for all that much, considering what I have the power to
do to your cozy and safe little suburban bourgeois life?'
'You can't be serious in this, this is preposterous-'
'I want pancakes, too. I know a lovely little restaurant near
here.'

Nona was answering the phones at work because her boss was
out. She had to keep things under control and yet still celebrate her
power over her fellow workers somewhat, so she decided to go out
and get herself a personal-size pan pizza while she took a ninety-four
minute lunch. The drive took her north up near Zaravan- within a mile
or so. There was a Denny's up that way that had a decent inter-store

176
 177

business from Gracie's pizza- greasy, but a decent piece of pie

nonetheless.
That, coupled with the reality of her having only five dollars to
her name until Saturday led her to select a plain cheese five-minute
pan pizza. If Courtney had not said 'non-smoking' to the waitress two
minutes earlier and blocked Kelly from controverting his decision, his
wife- who was smoking again, now that you mention it- would have
been directed to a table right next to Kelly; and Kelly, having never
seen her before, would have thought nothing of it. Nice set of tits, but
nothing more.
Courtney would have come out of the bathroom and turned to
the right when he reached the cash register and looked his wife
directly in the face as he sat down opposite from Kelly- who had his
back to her. It would have been direct face-to-face contact. What
was he doing here?
But as it happened, Courtney said 'non-smoking, please' to the
blonde as she swirled around and whipped two menus from the slot
next to the register. And as it happened, he and Kelly had walked to
the left.
He and Nona never saw one another that day. Courtney and
Kelly had walked to the left of the cash register, then back farther until
they came to the non-smoking section. Nona and her pack of Camels
opted to go to the right, to a booth by the window, with none the
wiser.
But it's a small fuckin' world, isn't it?
The attraction had been mutual, although each had different
reasons for being there. For one, this represented nothing more than
psychotic Nautilus; he had no real preference, so long as it was
blasphemous. For the other, the habitual tempting of prophecy; he
tried to escape and it wasn't meant to be. Neither one really expected
or wanted to meet the other one and neither one of them was exactly
what you would call the picture of sanity. That's why they hit it off as
well as they did.

Nona ordered her pizza and then sat down at the bar on the far
end and decided to get a cup of coffee to go with it. A vanilla shake
would sit too heavily in her stomach and then she would surely wind
up with heartburn. That was for the birds. The Cokes here were too
watery, so she didn't order that either. As Courtney came out of the
bathroom, she bent at the waist to kick her shoes off on the lower
spine of the chair. Otherwise she might have seen him, right there.
There is an underground thriving in every suburbanality that
most people never heard of- most normal people, anyway. Yet it
needed to exist. Who would these people prey upon, if not each

177
 178

other? It is always there, this world, although it thrives especially at

night.
They swam deeper in the murk than the other fishies.
'I like to look at desolate things,' Kelly had said at last.
'Me too,' Courtney replied timidly and with much depth of
thought, once it was over with and couldn't be helped. 'This is weird,
I've never been able to speak this freely with anyone about these
things-'
'Then you are long overdue for a friend, Courtney,' Kelly replied.
'I've interrupted you. I'm sorry, please continue.'
'Well,' Courtney said, not knowing where he was or why he was
spilling this all to a total stranger, 'There's something in what I see
that tears all of this,' here he gestured towards the lush shrubbery and
manicured medians strips of parking lot, 'there's something in what I
see, in what I witness, that tears all of this down, just reduces it to
rubble. There's so many pretensions here, but when I'm alone, when
I'm watching movies and jacking off, there's an alternate reality there.'
Kelly nodded in assention. 'I agree. There's much that is false
in the world, and you're right: certain sights and actions call to mind
how false and ephemeral all of this is. In the end, we too are rubble.
We will be nothing but ash, and nothing follows that. There is no
eternal life, and this is all we have. We can waste our life with
pretensions, or we can chase our pleasures. I choose the latter. And
you?'
Courtney swallowed. 'I suppose I do as well.'
'Well, we have that much in common.'
'What?'
'I prefer a man's caress,' said Kelly, 'largely because the
enjoyment and pleasure received just happens to coincide with the
enjoyment and pleasure given. I prefer it. It offers me satisfaction. I
just happen to enjoy having a cock in my asshole. A man knows how
to fuck a man.'
Courtney couldn't speak. How could this man speak like this?
What made him so free?
'Also, I crave romance. And not the romance you're thinking of,
flowers and candy and all that. I'm talking about the romance that
develops between you and a strange cock you've just brought home
for the night, a pickup in a bar. It's a study, is what it is. You've got
to make that cock your friend, Courtney. I swear to God you do.'
'I can't handle this,' Courtney stated mutely to himself.
Kelly went on, paying him no attention whatsoever. 'And it's no
sin, really. It gives me the most intense pleasure, with no psycho-
philio-socio-sophical explanations needed. I am a good-looking man.
If I want love in my life there is no reason why I should not have it.

178
 179

And society has no right to dictate what form such love takes. It
makes, or should make, no difference that I prefer men. You know,
some men smell sweeter than most women. I know I've been told
that.'
'I understand. Remember, I'm gay too.' Courtney rendered this
fallacy with the air of a political announcement. He didn't believe it.
'Ah, but I don't think you are. I saw your eyes, Courtney, in the
magazine rack. Yes, you were looking at pictures of men together, but
your eyes sometimes averted to see who was watching you. I believe
you weren't comfortable in your role there. This is the nineties, man.
If the people who run that bookstore didn't want you to look at a
picture of a man who was masturbating with an artificial penis up his
rear end and a butt-plug dangling from his mouth, they wouldn't stock
such material.'
Courtney smiled, wanly. 'You saw that one, too, huh?'
'I have a couple of friends and we trade pictures like that. Also,
such a singular episode is common nowadays. It's called a Double
Rubber Plug with a side of Beef. There's some industry slang for you.
I've seen a man take a larger cock, though, than the one in that
magazine.'
Courtney blinked and sipped his drink. He was simply
incredulous of what exactly he was hearing. Could it really be
possible? The one in the magazine, according to the photos prior to
insertion, was at least eight or nine inches long and nearly as thick as
his fisted arm. He'd stared at it in the magazine, amazed and
thirsting.
'When?'
Nona got up, paid her tip, and walked out.
Kelly appeared to tweak his left nipple through his shirt, as
though it itched or otherwise irritated him. His fingers twisted and
strained at it. It lasted a second or so, but Courtney noticed it
nonetheless.
'Not too long ago,' Kelly said, smiling. He rubbed his knee
against Courtney's. This was minimal flirtation; Kelly could tell that
Courtney was making up his mind, but some sort of overt move had to
be made.
'Where did you see it? A magazine?' Courtney asked.
'God, no. Heaven forbid. You can't get stuff like that in a mag.'
What else was there? Courtney's eyes raised. It couldn't be.
'In real life?' A slick drooled grin of mouth-watering awe struck him.
Kelly smiled again. He knew Courtney was dangling on the
hook.
Courtney tried to get him to a nodding commitment in order to
verify this, in vain. He had to know if that was what he meant. Could

179
 180

it be? Kelly just smiled at him, eyebrows raised, noncommittal in

repose.
'Yes, dear, I saw it in real life. Fifteen inches. Fifteen inches.
Remember the Rambone cock, the really big one, on the dildo wall?'
Courtney tried to recall- 'Oh, dear Christ, yes.'
'That one. Hilted. All the way up this guy's ass. It practically
tore him apart. I loved it. Seen it with m'own eyes, Mistah Jackson.'
Courtney could not see how it was true. It would probably kill a
man. It would have to push organs out of the way that were generally
considered to be stationary and vital. He'd only glanced at the thing
but he instantly retained the fact that it was, quite literally, as long as
his arm, and that was not including the strange lopsided balls and
malformed latex suction-cup at the base. Before deciding quickly upon
the pathetically limp six-incher with the clit-stimulating bumps on the
shaft, he'd been wondering if he'd be able to take such a cock. Upon
later insertion in the movie booth, the one he got had proven to
somehow disappoint him with its lack of grandeur and presence as well
as overall thickness and was now lying soiled beneath the front seat of
his car.
At last, Courtney said, 'No way. You've got to be lying.'
Kelly fixed him with a grin. 'Do I look like I'm lying?'
'I don't know you well enough to tell if you are.'
'We could change that, you know.' It was out now, out in the
open, although everything had really been settled, Courtney supposed,
when he gave Kelly a lift. 'Come on. Let's go back to my apartment
and play.'
'I'd...I'd really like that,' Courtney said, trying desperately to
monitor the enthusiasm in his voice. He was trembling.
Hesitancy, Kelly mused to himself, even in this one. It was
sweet to witness and hell to disperse with. He knew he would have to
go slow.
'If you're good, I'll even let you see the guy who does that huge
cock. You gotta see it, Courtney. He shoves this thing up inside him
and the dude smiles. He actually smiles. About two thirds in, see, he
always drips a little pre-cum, but nobody cares about that. I've seen
him do some specialized motel-parties, man, gay ones, and people pay
to see this shit. And they love it. They say it's better than the donkey
fucking in Tijuana. It'll blow your mind, so to speak. Finally, he gets it
all the way in, and I swear, the guy winked once, grimaced, and then
started to ram it harder in and out of himself. He does this for about
five minutes, and we're still trying to believe it. Then, his back got
tired and he needed someone to ram it for him. So somebody gets up
and does it for him, you know, about two thirds out and ram it down,
right? The guy starts to go nuts and gets another guy to suck him off,

180
 181

dig, and this guy fuckin' comes a stream that goes from the foot of the
bed to the headboard. The guy didn't swallow, and stepped away.
The other guy, the one with the dildo, asks to pull it out and the guy
says to wait. He grabs the thing, pulls it out about half way, and then
fucks himself again for about thirty seconds, jacks himself off, and
comes again, only this time he licks his fingers. He smiles, pulls out
the cock, and holds it over his head, like the Statue of Liberty.'
'Holy shit.' Courtney sensed that this was an understatement.
'Yeah,' said Kelly. 'The thing was trickling blood. No shit- on the
dildo, I mean- but just the tiniest trace of blood. Just a little, around
and underneath the corona, and the guy licked it off, just enough to
let you know what kind of a freak this dude was. He looked like he
was only about twenty or so. I'm all for people shoving things up their
asses, if that’s what they want to do, but this was a little too much. I
mean, this guy was sick. All the same, I enjoyed it. I think you will
too.' He put his hand upon top of Courtney's, and he saw Courtney's
head dash in order to see if anyone was watching. No one was.
'Come on. Let's go play and I'll give you a treat. And it's not a
treat that just anyone can give.'
The hailed for the check and were at the cash register inside of
two minutes. Kelly had reached for his wallet, but then Courtney
stopped him, proffering his own cash with slightly trembling hands.
'Are you alright?'
'I think I need a little fresh air,' Courtney told him.
'We'll be outside in a moment,' Kelly said, pocketing the change.
They walked out into the vestibule when Courtney felt dizzy.
'Can I sit down for a moment?' There was a small wooden bench next
to the newspaper machines, a bench that was brought inside the
vestibule during the colder winter months. 'I just need a minute.'
A flash of concern made its way across Kelly's face. 'Are you
alright? No one knows what we're talking about. No one knows-'
'I know.'
'Then why are you so freaked out? Courtney, we're entitled.'
Courtney stood up, a little weak-kneed, and he realized for the
first time since leaving the bookstore that his ass was hurting him.
And yet it was a good sort of pain, and he felt himself becoming ready
for more.
They walked to his car and Kelly then smiled pleasantly over the
hood of the car at Courtney. 'I really wasn't kidding about that,' he
said.
Courtney said nothing; didn't look up, even.
'I can prove it to you- tonight, if I can arrange it.'
This time, Courtney looked up.
Kelly smiled sweetly at him.

181
 182

'This guy and I are pretty good friends, you know.'

‘Really?’
Kelly smiled and held up his index finger.
'In fact, we're just like this.'

Giving themselves over to abject fornication and going after

strange flesh, they are set forth for an example, suffering the
vengeance of eternal fire. That's from the Bible. That's what this is all
about. It was about vengeance and petty shit like that. He was used
to only having sex in his home with his wife and now he was in
another man's living quarters. The boy's apartment- which Courtney
noticed carried the peculiar body scent of its occupant- was sparsely
decorated, with only a single black wicker chair in the living room,
situated in front of the television set. Several black candles were
arranged throughout the room as if in some kind of pattern visible only
from above.
Or below.
The candles, in their way, hypnotized him, the bizarre patterns
of melted wax dripping over whatever they touched- over the top of
the TV, on the hardwood floor, on the milk cartons scattered in the
corners- frozen forever in the moment in which they last felt any heat.
Much like Courtney.
The candles- those that he could see in this dim light were all
burnt down to their holders, their wicks blackened with age and
repeated use. This was all part of something else he didn't want to be
a part of. The candles were just part of all that was screaming at him
to leave, to run, to get out of there while he still could.
Bible verses were spiraling themselves through Courtney's head.
He could think of no word, no phrase or collection of words, that could
accurately cover what he was feeling at this precise moment in time.
For a few moments, Courtney was lost in his panic. He didn't
know what to do here. He didn't know what he was doing here in the
first place. Was this what he wanted? Was this the place that all his
weird fantasies had finally taken him? Was this the end of the line for
him?
I wanna be your little girl.
The boy looked up with a thoughtful expression. Although
Courtney hadn't notice him do it, he had picked up a book and now
looked as though he'd had his nose buried there for some time. His
eyes hung over the edge of the book's cover, and they settled on
Courtney after a time during which Courtney almost did run out of the
apartment; to where, anywhere, anywhere but here. He should go to
church right n-
'Have you ever read any Crowley?' Kelly asked him.

182
 183

Courtney swallowed hard. The name seemed to ring a faint bell

for him, although he couldn't place it exactly. He had never been very
esoteric in his reading habits. 'That's Aleister Crowley, you mean?'
'Yeah,' Kelly said, not going any further.
I want you.
After a few moments, Courtney caught on to the question that
remained lingering in the air. 'Uh, no, I haven't. Why do you ask?'
'Oh,' Kelly shrugged, offering Courtney a sip, 'no reason. Only
banter and conversational rig-a-rag. You know how it goes.'
I want to love you.
Why were these thoughts swimming around inside of his head?
Why was this scene continuing to progress, when in the sane world the
film would have been slapping the side of the projector a long time
ago?
Because we're not in the sane world anymore, Courtney.
He looked up with a start, and saw Kelly leering evilly at him
from behind the book he was reading. 'Did you say something?'
Kelly only smiled at him, betraying no answer that would satisfy.
'There was a further reason for asking me that, wasn't there?'
'Oh, of course, Courtney, of course. There is no room for
periphery in my life. There's always a further reason for everything I
do.'
'Then why did you ask me that?'
'Well, in a few of his writings he promulgates the theory that
sodomy is a key to a higher astral plane- no pun intended there,
Courtney. But that's what the man said. In a book called The Paris
Working, Crowley assumed the female and was taken out of his body
by the experience.'
'Oh.'
I never wanted this.
'I've always been fascinated by that theory. I first read about
that when I was, I don't know, seventeen or eighteen, and ever since
then, I've been trying to achieve it. I think I've been close, but I don't
know. When I saw you, I got the feeling that we could take each other
there. That's the real reason why I started talking to you.'
'That's crazy,' Courtney sighed at last.
'Yeah. I guess it went on for quite a while, without orgasm, like
a couple of weeks. A month maybe, I dunno. Makes you think,
doesn't it? Anyway, it's only fodder for discussion, and paltry fodder
at that.'
'I don't think it's paltry, exactly, I just-'
'Relax and make yourself at home. I'm gonna go change.'
And with that he disappeared.

183
 184

Courtney looked around the place a bit more. There was a book
of matches from the Manhole Club downtown. Courtney had heard of
it, only in joking manner, of course, and then, only in passing. There
was also a box of wood matches from Paradise, and another from
Rookie's. It was hard for him to believe that he was actually
associating with someone who frequented these places. Frequented?
How many matchbooks did he himself had from places he didn't
frequent, places he'd only visited maybe once or twice. John Casey's
restaurant, for example, or even Tessie's Coffee Shop in Aberdeen. He
wasn't exactly what you would call a regular there. He'd only gone
there once or twice.
And he'd eaten a hearty meal when he was there.
Kelly came out of the other room. He was stripped completely
naked, oblivious to the windows that were facing the street. A golden
hoop danced around his areola. His erection was only at half mast,
but Courtney could tell, even in this state and in this light, that its size
was inherently impressive. It jutted straight out in front of him and
swaggered from side to side as he walked. Part of Courtney thought
that this display was ridiculous, but part of him wanted to wrap his
mouth around that cock. In fact, a goodly part of him felt him doing
it, what it would feel like, what it would smell like, what it would taste
like.
And no one would know about it.
I'll do anything for you.
Was sex with a man different? Truthfully, there were ways
where Courtney didn't think it would really be all that different, for he
still didn't know despite the scene in the movie booth earlier today,
and there were ways where it couldn't conceivably be anything close to
being the same. The gender gap was blurred. The genitalia displayed
here was definitely male (swaddled and dripping angrily upon the
carpet) but the epidermis was soft, almost baby-like. By accident,
Courtney had brushed his hand over Kelly's back when they were in
the movie booth, and it felt surprisingly like a woman's skin- what he
knew of women's skin, anyway, having felt only one variety of it. Only
now, after all this, did he contemplate the fact that he was cheating on
his wife.
I wanna go down on you.
But was it really cheating, in the truest sense? If he was with
another woman the question would have answered itself, but he
wasn't with another woman- this was a man. Nona could not provide
this sort of inverse stimulation even if she was made aware of
Courtney's desires- which she most assuredly had not. Courtney
himself had not realized that they existed up until this afternoon, and
perhaps they didn't exist prior to then. He had fucked himself before

184
 185

marrying Nona- which he had probably done to cure himself of this, he

now admitted to himself- and in the past few months he had started to
sodomize himself again. But was it the same? No. Now, there was a
person attached to the cock that would be splitting him in two. Now it
was different.
Maybe those desires were born this afternoon, but either way,
they were here now and now he had to deal with them the best he
could. And he had eager help to scratch that particular itch. Kelly
took a small step toward him, moving out of shadow. Courtney
recoiled.
'Oh, we're not going to go through that again, are we?' Kelly
asked in mock annoyance. He tapped his naked foot upon the carpet.
Once he saw this boy's naked body, it was really something to
see. He had an all-torso body tattoo from the area surrounding his left
nipple, a black and green dragon extending to his penis, his shaved
pussy. His left nipple was pierced with a thick golden loop; the right
nipple had been mutilated when the hoop's twin had been ripped out
by the jealous father of one of his first female tricks, a trick who just
happened to be his twenty-two year old virgin nymphomaniacal
cousin.
This, Courtney would find out in later conversation.
The tattoo was circumvented from top to bottom by a colorful
Bengal tiger. At the tiger's front claws was what appeared to be a
large man-eating Venus fly trap. There was a section of the plant's
leaf that fell diagonally across the boy's groin. His groin was shaved to
pink baldness. Courtney felt himself to be possessed of a strange
desire to trace it with the tip of his tongue. He debated for a few
delicate moments about whether or not he should give in to these
feelings or to simply just leave them alone in the hopes that they
would subside.

The first film they watched together that day showed first a
scene of a man and a woman having intercourse in the hyphenated
missionary position. Kelly and Courtney approximated this, at Kelly's
insistence. Courtney assumed the female, again, as was his wont in
life. He had his flanks up against Kelly's midsection and he noticed
now that he was trembling. In the film, the girl- Champagne- was
yelping and clawing at the edge of the bed- something that was a just
little bit overplayed for a straight-ahead vaginal fuck. What was going
on? It was hard to tell. Wait a minute- she was blindfolded. Kelly
thought that was a simply splendid idea. They were playing the strip
music from Body Double.

185
 186

Kelly began to lick Courtney's asshole- and Courtney knew what

came after that. He felt the nervousness ebb out of his body like
tidewater.
Where was all this depravity leading to, anyway?
Sometimes, when Courtney was at work just spacing out staring
at the wall opposite from his desk or listening to the news on the radio
as he drove home, he found that he could switch to a new channel
inside his head and see violent hardcore pornography twenty-four
hours a day.
Kelly was biting into his asshole now, massaging it with the tip of
his tongue, tenderly licking it and then nipping at it with his teeth.
There were times when Courtney thought that all this exposure to XXX
cinema had heightened his perceptions, because he could be barely
exposed to someone- say, standing next to them on an elevator or on
a line at the bank on payday- and somehow he was able to reasonably
pick up a vibe of that person's sexual tastes- what they liked to see.
Old men in taxi cabs liked watching young eighteen year-old blondes
getting their toes sucked- but then, so did Courtney. The girl at the
perfume counter at Melle's drug store wanted to get fucked in the ass
by a total stranger in the dark- but then, so did Courtney.
Although he'd masturbated with a rubber cock in his ass before,
this was somehow a little bit different in that he wasn't alone for this.
There was the controlled rhythm of his partner's thrusts, not allowing
him to take a break for either breath or composure. His raw
enthusiasm ebbed and flowed, and he soon discovered that the more it
hurt the less it hurt and the more it sort of melted into something else
entirely.
'Do you want me to strap on something bigger? I can, you
know.'
'No, this is fine for now.'
Was there something more he needed to know? Did he have to
go much further? There were several things that could have soured
his love for the thrill of it all- including this little episode, had it not
worked out so splendidly- but Courtney looked too deep inside the
thrill for his love for such a travesty to occur. 'Let's take the back-
door.'
His one foray into straight sex- with Nona- had not counted,
really, in that he had sort of fallen into it and had no idea what to do
when it all came down. Even now, Courtney saw, he really didn't
know what he was doing. He knew nothing of normalcy, so he saw no
use in maintaining the pretense. He was a freak, so he saw no use in
fighting was he really was anymore. This world held no rewards for
him.

186
 187

Now I'm nothing, he intoned slowly, over and over again, in his
mind.
Now I'm nothing.
Rachel Ryan was now on the screen, nodding approvingly from
the bathroom door at the action taking place in the master bedroom.
She liked to watch, and she enjoyed having dictated the present scene
going on. Courtney imagined her operating the same scene on him,
offering his ass up to any stranger who wanted it. For a brief second,
that was Courtney writhing upon those baby-blue satin sheets. That
was his anus being wrenched open for the sins of man. There was
nothing weird or kinky about it. This was what it was about. This was
the way it would be. And Courtney Randlehaus didn't mind at all.
Nobody listens anymore.
The next scene was from a compilation video tape. It wasn't
threaded properly in the videocassette shell or something, and so it
was viewed as a split screen, half of the picture on the bottom and half
on the top. The result was somewhat frustrating and somewhat
arousing. Elle Rio and Ron Jeremy went at it next. Elle was all
dressed up as an Egyptian harlot or something, and him as a sheik.
Courtney discovered that he was yelping, but then again, this wasn't
just your everyday garden-variety ass-fuck. Kelly had unleashed the
heavy artillery. Courtney then felt a throbbing length of rubber enter
his body.
Suddenly, it all came clear to him as if it were released from the
gossamer web of a waking dream: to be a female was to open oneself
up- both figuratively and literally- to victimization and misuse.
And he loved it.
Sexual acquiescence was the main avenue women used to get
ahead in this world, how they got what they wanted, by offering up
their most delicate tissues to the rogue society of men. And what they
wanted was always money or power. Sometimes, he reasoned, as
Nona had claimed, all they wanted was love. Perhaps there was a
little sympathy in what he felt, but not very much, as Nona had been
one of them.
He was doing this for sexual gratification, not in the hopes that
this man would love him. He wasn't doing it to give; he was doing it
to take. But then, hadn't that been exactly what he'd accused his wife
of doing? Love had nothing to do with what was going on here. He
felt for a moment a tiny sliver of remorse for having cheated on her
like this- but only for a very brief moment that was very soon passed-
and then Courtney remembered instead the burning hatred he felt for
her and what she had done, the sleep it had cost him, and the
heightening of distance that it had put between them unheeded by her
interminable consequence.

187
 188

He saw his wife's mouth opening for strange cocks, her tongue
curling and cascading over unfamiliar members only for wont of
entertainment, because it was expected. Were the men his wife
fucked as ugly as the ones now upon the screen? No, he thought;
they were probably uglier.
'Have you ever tried candle wax on the nipples, Courtney?'
'N-no, I haven't. Why, what's it like?'
'Oh, it's just delicious. It's the sweetest pain you'll ever know.'
'You mean it?'
'Of course I do, Courtney.'
'Are we going to do that today?' Courtney asked him, with his
breath redolent with the stink of cowardice and terminal excitement.
'Do what?'
'What you talked about,' Courtney mumbled, with his head
down.
'What in particular, Courtney? I want to hear you say it.'
'I can't.'
'I want to hear you say that you want it, and to call me by
name.'
'Kelly, please...I can't do this.'
'I dislike this hesitation on your part, and you will pay for it later,
believe me, but I think you'll enjoy that part of things.'
'I want you to drip candle wax on me.'
'Will you be naked?'
'Yes.'
'Say it.'
'I- I will be naked.'
Kelly shrugged and continued to do what he had been doing
before. 'I don't know, dear Courtney. It all depends on you. If you're
a good boy, then yes, we can do candle wax for you. But if not, I've
got other things in mind. I guess we'll just have to wait and see, I
suppose.'
It looked as if the red candles were leaking pools of blood.

188
 189

WHERE HE WAS
Caballas zhro, nihil sub sole novum. Isto e que voce que temer.
Beziquere una la Joshu-a. Voce‚ une conduite Bisarro.
Where were these voices coming from? Was it all just one voice,
a single voice being pinched and prodded into sounding like many, or
was it all in his head? Was it only a dream, or a nightmare in waiting?
And was this really happening at all?
Here is no why are you still here?
Timothy didn't know how to answer whatever had spoken,
whatever had inquired, and he didn't even know what the question had
originally been.
Oo lay-swah, lay-bwus‚e, la-pi la-Lou, zschniing-me: bong-bong.
His first sense was of being in a more absolute realm than he'd
been in before. There was no blinding oneself to the truth over here.
He'd had his eyes wrenched open, but he was in a dark world. He was
alone- he was sure of this- and he soon divined that the maze would
be of his own doing. If he got out, he would hopefully then be able to
go on to the next level. If he didn't get out, Timothy figured out that
he could easily wind up wandering the confines of his self-constructed
maze for the remaining part of however long this eternity thing turned
out to be.
And there was something in here with him.
There are many things I know, no matter which way which
things go, arise you rise upon another day, not knowing which things
to say.
He knew he wasn't where he was supposed to be, or had hoped
to go.
And at once, the voice was gone, and he knew that he was here-
in whatever limbo this was- and that he was alone. All at once, he
felt in his spine the finger of excitement that he would feel when the
lights dimmed in a movie theatre and the flick was about to start.
Only he wasn't in a movie theatre. This was his life.
An indistinct pressure raised itself against his back, and his
knees were bent back gently and held into place, so that he felt as if
he were kneeling in outer space- not knowing which way to fall but
knowing that he was going to fall forward on his face anyway.
He thought he saw what you see on the movie screen when a
thread of film gets caught inside of the film projector, pressed up
against the red-hot projector bulb and the celluloid starts to smoke
and sizzle. He even thought he smelled the faint sting of burning
celluloid in the air. But all too soon, even that petty sensation was
taken away from him.

189
 190

The stars were dark and lifeless, and everything dripped with
cruelty and grave sentiment; a look cast about him retrieved no new
information, and he now thought that the feeling was one of forever
falling downward.
And nothing forever to look at, but the stars, illusions or no.
He was above the earth and yet within it. He was a part of
every brick, every flower, every cell of life on earth- none of them his
own.
Don't let me go, I'm afraid to go, I want to go, I don't want to
go-
He could hear audibly the last conversation he'd had with
Melanie. Was this remembrance or death? He'd called her at her
mother's house, deducing that she had gone there. He'd tried to get
her to come back. None of the words that tripped out of his mouth
would do anything to sway her judgment, and it was like he was trying
to hold an intimate conversation with a new person, and this new
person was a total stranger to him. The aural landscapes of her
conversational patterns had been completely altered, and he no longer
felt he knew how to ride the ebbs and tides in her moods. Whenever
he did get her to say something to him in reply, leaving him holding no
more than an empty line of the telephone- Timothy found that he
didn't really know her anymore. She was gone.
In less than four hours.
This was how he had felt that day- totally hopeless, lifeless, and
completely powerless to do anything to stop it from happening again.
He had been speaking for what seemed to him like an eternity.
'Melanie?'
Her voice went instantly cold. 'Timothy, don't.'
'Just listen to me.'
'I don't know what to say to you. There's nothing between us.
If we thought it meant something once, we were wrong. It's nothing
personal.'
'Melanie, come home. Please.'
Her words stumbled clumsily out of her mouth. 'I can't.'
'Why not?'
'I can't.' It was all final- all at once.
Those were the last words she had spoken to him before he
died. I can't, over and over again, like some insane mantra created by
and for the self-defeated. I can't I can't I can't- until it became one
word.

190
 191

BARNACLES
The corpse of Joshua Tauble was smiling. Different things were
happening to him each day, and each event had shown him just how
deep his instinctual understanding of things had become. He now saw
into corners of the living, breathing universe that no other man had
ever seen before. He had finally sniffed across some evidence that
Ixxir was where it had been rumored to be located, at least for the
moment. North, his nose told him.
North. I've gotta go North.
What did it mean? He didn't know, but he had been dead for a
while and still walking- his ribs splintered between scraps of flesh that
had once stitched his chest together- and all he figured was this: his
own darkest feelings- when coupled harmoniously with this new
instinct- now stirred in him the intimate knowledge of all those who
surrounded him. He got off on sucking water from the deepest depths
of their obolgatas, and even though some of the secrets were harmless
My kid got hit in the head with a baseball today, and it's gonna
run-
some of them were not.
My wife fucked around on me last night. She told me about it,
to my face. I'm still with her, and my deepest fear is that I might lose
her. I wouldn't know how to live without her, it's been so long- half
my life actually, if you count forwards the time from when I started
living-
Some of the visions- could he call them haunting?- stirred him
from his slumber, lying dead in a field in Nebraska, or wherever the
fuck he was now. There was nothing but the night sky. And it wasn't
enough.
But what he saw, what he felt- all the pain in the world-
somehow nourished him. And if something creates nourishment, it
soon becomes pleasurable, no matter how initially repulsive it is to the
consumer.
Some folks would argue that love could be viewed in the same
light.
Some of the elders that swirled in his brain claimed they had not
heard from Ixxir in damn near a millennium, but they weren't worried
about it. The low demon was resourceful, even if it wasn't very well-
liked, and it had always been able to take care not to flaw itself
metaphysically, adapting perfectly in each incarnation.
Ixxir is really quite a one to watch, one of them had said to him.
It pleases us, and we return favor. Ixxir is the oldest, and we admire
it.
Joshua heard distant laughing.

191
 192

You will know new things, you will see new sights. You will see
what people carry underneath themselves. You will see what is swept
under the rug. You will see things that people will not admit to others.
You will see things that they will not admit to themselves.
Under their world, Joshua, we can see underneath what people
are.
It's our curse, said another voice, deeper, that Joshua hadn't
heard before. We hear their blood pumping, and we know where the
blood goes.
Had people been reduced to this, or had it always been this way,
and he just hadn't noticed it? Sluts in tank tops, straining to find a
beat in a song lacking such as one beefy dude after another tried
desperately, willingly and foolishly, to charm their favors. It was sex
as currency- being bartered back and forth- and it was worse now,
somehow, than he had remembered it being when he was alive.
I am the settler of scores. I know why you're here, and I know
where your women are when you're here, and I know who they go to,
he thought.
'Verbera quandoque dabat amor non furor, gratia non ira, quae
omnium unguentorum suavitatem transcenderunt.'
Finding the warmest path of the demon was easy, and that path
had led directly to Timothy. The Scent was still strong. But following
a path and then ascertaining that the demon was still where he
thought it was- lying dormant- was a whole new matter. So, this was
where the Scent had ultimately led him. He could taste his demon on
the stink of the wind.
De nuptiis deorum cum hominibus, una Escortinium.

192
 193

RENUMBER
The OR fell respectfully silent as the life-support machineries were
each disengaged, one by one. Of the nine people immediately present
at Timothy’s death, seven of them didn’t like to see this sort of thing
happen. The defibrillator had flat lined Karacas at exactly 6:29 pm.
The various facts about the death of Timothy Karacas were recorded
so that the proper reports could be filed once all the pertinent
information had been collated and disseminated. As with all
therapeutic misadventures, there were three separate sets of books to
be kept. One would reflect the true circumstances surrounding it; the
second ledger would be the one handed over to the authorities, should
the need arise, and would absolve Basil and his assistants of any and
all wrongdoing in the event in question. The third report would be an
analysis of the attending physician's reports.
And from behind his mask, Basil Rochefoucauld was breathing a
sigh of relief. He had needed Timothy Karacas in a way that no one
could have known how. Timothy was the final piece, and he had
imparted this knowledge to Shelby before they prepped for surgery.
He had allowed Shelby to come out with his idea for total epidermal
re-assignment, and when he thought he had enough leverage to work
with, presented Gracey with his idea towards E2D8's applications in
the field of reconstructive plastic surgery. Gracey had been delighted
to hear about it.
'Shelby, this is the final step.'
'This is it?'
'Yes. I've taken a look at the pattern for this particular strain of
the E2D8 formula- the one that his research had centered on for the
past three years- and I noticed an angle that I don't think Gracey had
considered. He hadn't anticipated the proper antibodies, so the skin
was prone to outside infection, which is even worse in this instance
than outright cellular rejection.'
'What I was talking about before, can it really be accomplished,
now that the formula has been improved? Can it be done?'
Basil closed his eyes in wonderment. 'That, and so much more
lying beyond that, your mind could not assimilate all the
repercussions, not at once. If you understood what this meant, your
head would explode.'

Behind the glass in the observation booth, sitting on a chair lined

with a fabric the color of a Tuscany wineskin, Dr. Gracey was grinning
like an undertaker. Timothy Karacas had represented an unknown
quantity to the E2D8 processes, an undetermined essential quotient,

193
 194

and now they would be able to put the awesome destructive power of
melanoma into use to fight off staph infections in the epidermis itself.
The new skin would be healthy. It would be perfect.
With these epidermal samples the cloning of skin could be
radically altered to include those specific qualities present in damaged
tissue, such as the alligator skin of Clarence Charles. The genetic
codes replicated from these samples taken from Timothy Karacas
would help to alleviate some of the tissue-related rejection of the
newer skin growth.
The first experiments had been random gropings in the dark;
now, with a fresh and decidedly more confident approach to the
research of their new product, such gropings could be tempered and
controlled.

194
 195

NECURATULATA
Ixxir also found release that evening at 6:29, but it had been ready for
what it knew would happen; it had an easier time slipping back into
the world of the living because it had done this several times before,
the first time it could remember having been in 1348 in what was then
called Persia. Today it was either Iran or Iraq, one of the two, and
Ixxir hoped to hell it didn't pull another assignment out there in that
region. Sometimes it was allowed to float for decades and other times
it was required to report to the elders at the very moment of its
release. So far, it had heard nothing, and it was likely that it wouldn't.
Ixxir wasn't much in demand these days and there was a feeling
circulating the lower pits that Ixxir was inept. It made its horned flesh
bubble and crack in anguish, knowing that they thought this about it,
but without a difficult assignment there was no way it could go about
proving them wrong. It would amount to another waiting game.
The details of its many lifetimes blurred whenever it tried to call
them into focus, so many of these lives were forgotten about as soon
as the living and eating was done. It had gone through the procedures
of changing over so many times that it was no longer even the
slightest bit frightened about going through from one level to the next.
It could get cynical about these matters and let its guard drop down,
but surely the overlords would let him hear about his bad judgment in
a matter such as that. It was a slave to their whims- and it knew that
it had to listen to them, no matter what they were saying to do- and it
was all much like mortal employment that to laugh about it was like
wasting one's breath.
Ixxir smiled the sickly grin of a wounded angel.
It felt a certain affinity for its host that was most uncommon,
and now that Timothy was gone, it missed him. It would certainly
miss the daily tunneling through the folds of Timothy's puckered
mortal flesh, racing from one lung to another to avoid its detection.
Once- just for grins and giggles- Ixxir had worked its way upwards
through Timothy's esophagus and past his epiglottis from its safe
positioning in a bronchial passage in Timothy's right lung. From his
lower esophagus, it moved ever upward through the oropharynx and
then the nasopharynx as nothing more than a tickle in the throat,
exiting through the host's nasal air passage. Ixxir got himself stuck
but good in Timothy's left nostril because- in its excitement over finally
being able to stretch its legs- it had started to revert to its preferred
size prematurely.
Timothy had experienced all this as nothing more than a chunky
booger that needed to be blown through his nose in the middle of the
night- and it was only through quick thinking that the demon had been

195
 196

able to alter its natural coloring from fiery black to a wan greenish-
brown hue- but Ixxir had seen for a sorry moment having to explain to
its elders that both the parasite and its host had met their respective
cessations of life because it had ascended in size inside the guy's nose.
Ixxir would be drummed out of service and left alive only for the sake
of breaking entrants into hell without any possibility of ever being
released from that state again.
Eternal life was hell.
Once it had been sure that both the man and the woman were
safely asleep, Ixxir pushed its way through the folds of the Kleenex
and dropped over the lip of the wastebasket onto the floor, landing
with such force on the hardwood flooring in their bedroom that it
feared that it had sustained a mortal injury in the physical world-
which would be yet another cause for immortal punishment. The
demon got to its feet and stretched out, in much the same way that a
human being does in the morning after a good night's rest- only this
was Ixxir's first wake-up call in nearly a year and a half. It saw part of
its body in a silhouetted outline as its size doubled and then re-
doubled itself.
A phone number, written in a woman's flowery script, lay on the
bedside table, scrawled onto a piece of pink stationery: 573-o3o3.
A candle that the woman had laid out on the dresser guttered
and spluttered as Ixxir's skin soaked up all the available oxygen in the
air surrounding it. The man snored for a moment and it sounded as
though he was having trouble breathing. Ixxir was quite momentarily
alarmed, because it didn't want Timothy Karacas to wake up while it
was outside of his body, stretching its metaphysical legs. That would
be catastrophic to its mission objective. It considered itself to be a
master of the realm between here and there- and here, in the physical
world, was where it had always felt the most vulnerable.
Its knowledge of human languages and customs was
superfluous, and it had found Timothy Karacas out of blind luck and
chance. With humans the rules were a little different but it enjoyed
infesting them nonetheless. Ixxir had needed a time of hibernation
before it started its infestation of Timothy's body, and it had enjoyed
that rest gratefully. It felt it owed Timothy a little consideration for
that if for nothing else at all. His bowels had sustained it,
unknowingly, turning into a black tissue the intestinal placenta from
which it had been feeding.
When Ixxir awoke, a year after it had seeded itself within its
host, it had grown to seven times its intended size. It was being
choked on all sides by fecal matter and digestive juices that burned its
skin. Its first movements had brought about an intestinal rupture that

196
 197

had landed Timothy in the hospital for a week and a half, before it had
magically healed itself. It had not been ready for Timothy to die yet.
The horn-like nubs lining its forehead glowed a dull yellow, as
they did whenever Ixxir was in a state of repose. As it uncurled itself
on the bedroom floor, a plethora of bizarre images- both past and
present- flooded though its mind.
It stood to its full unblemished height of four and a half feet,
then wickedly squinting its eye-slits, checked itself out in the reflection
of the polished glass. Perhaps in anticipation of its next haunting,
Ixxir stood in front of the mirror and admired itself for perhaps twenty
minutes or half an hour, posing athletically in the pitch darkness.
When it heard the woman start snoring again- and it loved to hear her
protestations to Timothy that she didn't snore, that she had never had
snored, that there was no chance that she would ever snore at all-
Ixxir walked around to her side of the bed, staring down at her
sleeping figure lying naked and supine beneath the sheets. With its
mind, Ixxir was able to taste and enjoy her most delicate folds of
flesh, wantonly soiling with its seed the woman's most secret, most
intimate tissues as it caressed her. In its fashion. For a moment,
Ixxir thought that it could remember its own life, in its own fashion.

Such joys were short-lived.

Thank God it had been able to get the woman to leave, although
it had enjoying playing with her mind for the few hours a day that she
was home with Timothy. Ixxir could make Timothy twitch or belch or
fart or scratch himself or say things that even he wouldn't remember
having said only minutes after his mouth had pushed forth the
syllables, and before the cancer treatments had been discovered, Ixxir
thought that it could get the woman to leave simply with Timothy's
behavior. More than once, Melanie had tried to get Timothy to see a
psychiatrist, and more than once, had accused him outright of having
a split personality.
But for those few sweet, short moments, there it was in the
mirror.
It looked like something that might result from a cross between
a stork and some black-skinned angelic form of reptile. There was
nothing short of a divine grace with which it handled itself in the few
moments it could live without a host. Its arms were reverse-jointed,
making it possible for the demon to climb up a wall without even
looking at it.

The moments of physical actuality were the most dangerous,

and on a few occasions over the millennium- no more than a handful,

197
 198

but each one of them equally mortal in their potential for its eternal
extinction.
Once, in Egypt, an old man had seen it changing into this form
from what it had been prior to the killing of its host- an egg-like tumor
in the belly of an asp kept in a wicker basket in a market fair about
sixty kilometers outside of Qattara. It had chosen to implode the
snake from within- this had been when Ixxir had enjoyed being vicious
more often than was absolutely necessary- and the snake had literally
choked on itself, splitting open from stem to sternum with a tearing
sound that brought harsh light into Ixxir's eyes for a blinding moment
before the lower demon had been properly able to recognize the
source of this light for what it really was: unblemished, unspoiled
sunshine.
The old man, fascinated by the sight of the snake exploding, had
time to call three or four of his friends over to witness what he was
seeing. Ixxir pulled itself to it full height in double-time, and it felt its
skins stretching before they'd been ready to do so. With its pointed
beak, and teeth, and scaly skin, and hand-sized blinking eyes, they
started to mention the name of Osiris, the god of the Dead.
'It is an abomination,' said one of the men, in a language that
Ixxir understood almost instantly, out of pure intuition.
'Daimon- Qiyamat, qiyamat a tawil! Qiyamat, qiyamat insan al
kamel!'
Again, the names and images of Horus and Osiris were invoked.
These were the first unfiltered human words the Ixxir had heard
in ages, and all it could to was laugh in response before speaking:
'No, friends,' it had said to them in their native tongue, 'I have
feasted upon the likes of your gods, and ejected their bones from me.'
The four or five of them- Ixxir couldn't remember how many
there had been, only the efficiency with which it had dispatched them-
had turned on their heels to run, but it had been on them in an
instant. One of the men, Ixxir had figured, had been felled by heart
failure: he lay limply at the demon's feet. That left only three or four
of them, and those he had decimated with a single sweep of its claw in
a semi-circle, effectively slicing open their backs from the napes of
their necks to the tops of their wriggling buttocks; even in death, they
still looked scared. Their eyes stared brightly and sightlessly into the
mid-morning sun, these eyes having brought death to their owners by
viewing something that no mortal being could have digested in a realm
of acceptable sanity. They would have run off screaming of demons,
warning their brethren of plagues, of bastards of nature that had come
back to life to return to their rightful places as Lords of this world.
As their corpses stopped twitching, as their blood cooled into tiny
fragmented rivers on the sand, Ixxir poked a tentative finger through

198
 199

the sheer opacity of time and resistance, and pulled forth a name as
old as any other, but with more meaning for the demon.
Nona.
The demon blinked in unstaring confusion.
Nona. My mother's name was Nona. She was the ninth child- of
ten.
Where did that name come from? What did that name mean to
me?
A daughter?
My daughter. I have a daughter, named after my mother, Nona.
And all at once, such memories were years ago, impossible to
trace.
Blinking its eye-slits, unable to remember what had just seared
its brain, Ixxir tried to decide its next action. Into the sand at its feet,
Ixxir scratched a simple picture as it squatted, pissing a blackly
trickling rivulet of urine, next to the dead it had so recently
dispatched. In its design was a woman, a woman drawn with the head
of a jackal and the heart of a viper, her eyes distant, her heart
somehow bleeding, as she stared hard into an unseen sunset. This
woman wanted to run for the sunset- all but invisible in the distance-
all the while knowing in her heart that she would never be able to run
at all. All of this, all these memories, now years ago, past any recall.

199
 200

STREGA NATORI
After talking to Courtney, Kelly hung up the phone and walked easily
over to the refrigerator, from which he removed a see-through
Tupperware container that contained the esophagus and nipples of a
girl from Matherson township. She had been hitch-hiking up Sands
Mountain in the rain and Kelly had given her a lift. The girl was quite
grateful, and after a few minutes of polite conversation the girl had
tearfully told Kelly that she had not eaten for over two days and would
gladly fuck him in exchange for money enough to buy a sandwich.
Smiling, he said that he too felt like eating.

Courtney arrived at Kelly's place a little bit before six o'clock in

the evening, in the light, right in the middle of the traditional dinner
hour and bare seconds after Nona had pulled out of the driveway.
Nona was at some meeting- Courtney never knew exactly what for-
and so she was sure to be out of the house until at least quarter after
ten. That schematic left him a little less than four hours to do
whatever he was here to do and get home to bathe, less travel time.
He always had to be conscious of the travel time. It could make or
break a husband's alibi.
Courtney had stopped off at the Bachelor's Paradise and rented
two films. One was an anal sex best-of compilation called Ream-
Rammers that starred Viper, Champagne, Kari Foxx, Keli Richards,
Rachel Ryan, April Rayne, Cassie Nova and Brigette Aime. The box in
the shop said that the running time was approximately two hours, but
now that he was able to look the tape itself through the clear windows
on the cassette shell, Courtney would truly be surprised if it ran much
longer than an hour and a half. He was slowly becoming
knowledgeable about such things again.
The second tape was titled Analogy, and this one starred the
single name slut, the ubiquitous Cameo. The guys included Cal
Jammer, Buddy Love and Randy West. Second-billed was Paulina
Peters, also known as Zara Whites- a Dutch twat who looked too good
for this kind of work, thus increasing her erotic appeal. Also on board
was the one and only Bionca in a lesbian asshole-stuffing scene with
Ona Zee, touchy-fucky-perky Bridgette Monroe, Rocco Siffredi and a
broad who was referred to as being the sadly-named Gidget. It was
alright, as far as these things went, but Courtney, when picking them
out, had looked only for the names of the performers and not really at
the content.
There was a cheesy phone sex advertisement for 'tight anal
action' at the beginning the tape, and Courtney had felt Kelly's
massive cock throb within the severed region of his anal tract and the

200
 201

boy's movements had been directly in time to the touch-tone digits of

the girl's phone number- which, incidentally, was 1-976-BUN-GOLE.
Deep ass. Wet pussy. Bitch goddesses want you.
After that, Ginger Lynn was begging us to Go Deep- that was the
title of her next flick. Kelly kept stroking his width methodically back
and forth, but only to the extent that it was necessary. Cody Nicole-
at least he thought it was her- came on the screen next with a pitch
for another sex fantasy hotline, jiggling her fingers inside her pussy.
'You could put that big cock of yours in her ass and fuck it for a
while and then let me suck on it while you come, couldn't you?'
'I think I could do that, Courtney.'
'I'd much prefer that you call me something else.'
'What would you like to be called, Courtney?'
The use of his name would reinforce the idea.
'Call me Terri,' he decided.
'Then Terri it is- only it sounds an awful lot like a fag's name
than a girl, and that is what you want to be, right?'
'You're right, Kelly. Call me, uh, call me...Britney.'
'Britney?'
'Yes; Britney. I'm a spoiled little slut who didn't get enough of
my daddy's cock in my ass this morning, so I'm a little uptight.'
'Well,' Kelly said, his stroking unabated, 'I think I've got just the
tool to loosen you up, right here in my pocket, honeybuns.'
It sounded weird, coming from a man. Coming from anybody at
all.

Nona was busy marking her page in the book when a smallish
gentleman dressed in grey flannels who'd been watching her reading
from the back of the room approached her and asked if she knew what
time it was. She answered him on the way to the coffee set-up that
Pat Krieger- the head librarian- had put out in the hallway at five-
thirty, when the first of the parents would arrive with their children.
His name was Bob Cassian- he was Ruby's father. Nona told him, with
much use of facial expression and flourishes of undertone, that Ruby
was an absolute darling to have in the readings. Ruby Cassian, in
point of fact, was a booger-eating little shit-mouth who seemed to
need nothing more in life than a sudden shove against a brick wall.
The girl was no more than five and already Nona had heard the word
fuck escape her lips on at least three separate occasions. But Bob
looked nice enough- Nona found herself sizing him up, below the belt,
almost against her will. She was doing it again.
And again.
Nona found that she couldn't drive the thought from her mind
with sheer persistence so she stared alternately at the floor and the

201
 202

ceiling as Bob rattled off to her about what he did for a living, about
how he was a single father finding it hard to exist in the world without
a wife and that loneliness was the hardest thing to face as a widower.
All the right symptoms.
Don't do this, she thought to herself.
Just don't do this.
Nona fought hard to stay faithful to Courtney, but then most of
the time, it wasn't a fight at all. She knew that he adored her and that
was invariably that. She didn't care anymore about being pretty- she
knew that she was good person and that quality shone through her
skin like rays of light off a diamond: there was no way you could
possibly have missed it. She possessed what you might want to call
loud virtue.
Like the prophet says, 'forever is definitely a long fucking time.'

The sex had been going on for quite some time. Courtney found
that his anal cavity was by now really quite numb and that the fleeting
sensations that did come through from there to his brain were mostly
loose and pleasant. He'd given himself over to it, and he at once
thought he understood the erotic possibilities of Chinese water torture.
The entire point was to leave your mind, to hover, to give yourself
over totally to the experience and the sensations it offered you.
Suddenly all this imagery and activity repelled him. Had he
finally seen and done enough? Was the demon sated? He doubted it.
He had thought before that he was through with this, but it always
called him back. And now that he'd slept with a man- in effect,
breaking the taboos, going too far- he had nothing to lose. he also
had nothing to gain. He knew that peace of mind was not to be found
here, yet he persisted anyway. Why? He believed that the reason he
was chasing his own tail (so to speak) was rooted somewhere in the
basic principle of anal sex. The people who practiced it as the
recipient did not do it wholly from sexual desire. There had to be
something more to it than that, some deep-seated primal urge to
mutilate oneself beyond repair, physically and psychologically.
Masochism to the Nth degree. Kelly had by now adopted a quick sort
of hop-stroke that seemed to satisfy his needs. He thought that they
boy was trying to stave off his orgasm, but he didn't really care. He
didn't want this to go on and yet he didn't want it to stop. All he
wanted was to be it. He wanted just to be the experience, to leave
himself and become the actions he was feeling below his belt. He was
now weaving, transitorily pitching forward and back, when he realized
this feeling for what it was: a screaming anal orgasm.
He bucked and squeezed at that which was embedded inside
him. He needed to get it out of him, yet he wanted it to plunge deeper

202
 203

inside of him at the same time. Kelly must have noticed it because he
picked up his pace. He seemed now to be intent upon achieving a
mutual orgasm. He got what he was after, and they both sprawled out
across the floor, with Kelly on top, as they were both too physically
spent to move.
'Oh my fucking God.'
'What?'
'I just-'
'Are you hurt?'
'No. I just...I've never known anything like that.'
'Kinda rearranges your whole view of the world, doesn't it?'
His hair was sweaty, and various locks of it clung to the very top
of his forehead. It was hard not to be attracted to him in this light.
Kelly didn't represent the epitome of female sexuality, but rather, a
slice of genderless physical beauty that had chosen to take him home
from the dance.
He had been chosen.
'Uh-huh,' said Courtney, huffing, nodding his head breathlessly.
'Do you want to do it again?'
He had to be kidding.
Kelly's breath was too loud, too intimate. Right in his ear, with
no avoidance. Had he really been looking for love, or perhaps again
maybe just a way to fill the void inside of him via his asshole? Either
way, Courtney could not deny what had just happened here. Even if
he ignored the fact of his heightened deviant sexuality, he had to
acknowledge the fact that he had just had sex with someone besides
his wife. It felt good, but it would have felt one hundred times better
had it been a girl, had he been the one to dominate the proceedings.
Still, the fact remained: he had strayed. He had a secret his wife
knew nothing about.
He had bathed in raw carnality, and he had loved it. He had
found something that felt better than what his wife offered him. It
didn't take much to achieve that, but his mind had been thrown for a
loop.
This changed everything. He didn't know what he was now.
Was he homosexual or just bisexual? He wasn't attracted to the male
form per se, but what he felt in his body while Kelly was inside him
surpassed anything Nona had ever offered him, in the bedroom or out
of it.
'Do you want to do it again?' Kelly repeated.
Such a rhetorical question from such a young boy. He was gay,
but he had so much to learn about the pain and misery incipient with
sexual dissatisfaction in this world. At least what this boy was had a

203
 204

name. The name of Courtney's disease would probably never be

revealed to him- for he was the only one in the world who had it.
'Do you want to do it again?' the boy persisted.
What a laugh.
He felt nothing at all right now. Courtney didn't want to have
sex again. Courtney didn't even want to breathe anymore. He didn't
want to even be alive. The reality of the situation crashed in upon
him.
'Stay here,' Kelly instructed him. So he did. He looked around
the apartment, drinking the visual of it all in. Kelly came back holding
a lit candle, and his beautifully depraved face had the look of a
teenaged matinee idol lost in the throws of a hallucinatory drug.
Courtney could tell by the look in the boy's face and the subtle shift of
psyche that had occurred over his entire person that this was the
highlight of his life, the sexual act. No guilt, no attachments. Not in
touch with reality at all, just centered in his own little universe,
concerned only with his own little creation. Finally he found the nerve
to speak.
'You were going to tell me about you and Mr. Rambone.'
'Yeah,' Kelly seemed distracted, then he perked right up.
'How were you able to take such a huge cock?'
'It's easy. I hate to sound so utterly one-dimensional, but I just
love to fuck. When I was a little kid, 14-15, I used to want to pierce
my ear. Hemmed and hawwed and finally put ice on my ear for about
three hours and pierced the damn thing. And it hurt like hell. I didn't
want anybody to think I was a sissy or a fag (this is junior high school,
eighth grade, so I was still 'in the closet,' so to speak), so I took it out.
Then I decided I wanted an earring again. So I did it again, with ice.
I did this a couple times and I found it got me off; the piercing, I
mean. I'd pierce my ears, left and right by now- with no ice, mind
you- and I'd masturbate, no pain, just that basic...oomph, you know.
It's still pain y'know, but different, the type you get off on. After I
came, I'd pull out the safety pins in my earlobes; there was simply no
desire left in me by that point, but I'd learned a lot about myself.'
'Yeah?' Courtney sighed patiently, enraptured with every
syllable.
'Yeah. That's how it was for me. Eventually, I'd do two or
maybe three safety pins in each ear; it was just the most exquisite
pain.'
'How did that lead you to the other?' Courtney wanted to know.
'Then I saw an article on tattooing in an issue of Gallery
magazine. It had ladies who were tattooed all over, tits and all, and
one of them showed a close up of a girl who had pierced her nipples. I
mean, they were really, really close up. It blew my mind, totally.

204
 205

They were, so to speak, aesthetically pleasing to my palette. I dug

them. Then I got to thinking, because I wanted them for my own- I
wanted to be that woman. I wondered if a guy could do that, you
know, was there enough nipple-meat, or whatever, to do it? I tried to
do it. I tried, ice and all, but I just couldn't do it. It just seemed like it
would be far too painful- of course, I didn't know it at the time,
though, but pain was what I really wanted more than anything else.'
'But you didn't give up on trying to do it?'
'No. That, and a lot of other things.'
Courtney smirked. 'That's an insane kind of quest, isn't it?'
'Tell me about it. But it was also quite liberating, as well. It
sealed me off forever from the rest of normal society. I felt things
that no other man had ever felt before, at least, not to my knowledge.
But the juxtaposition between pain and pleasure was what really
interested me the most. By forcing a safety pin through one of the
most sensitive areas of my body, and getting off on it, I was seeing
things you wouldn't believe. It's all a bundle of nerve-endings,
centered for pleasure, and when those poles are reversed by their own
order, that's when the sky melts. I wish I had a clitoris, so that I
could pierce it. I was a lone sexual pioneer. After about six months,
finally, I did it. Then, I did the other one, and I had 'em both pierced,
vertically. It was the only way I could get the safety pin to go in. I
jacked off, I came, I pulled the safety pins out of my nipples. Then, I
did it with no ice. Then, horizontally, twisting them when I came.
Then, the skin around my nipple, my nose...everything I could get my
hands on, really.'
'What are you driving at?' asked Courtney, suddenly exasperated
with this line of testimony. He was starting to feel quite ill in the gills.
'I was afraid to pierce myself, right? But I did it. It hurt, then I
got used to it. I overcame it. Then, I got off on it. Finally, I left the
safety pins in my nipples and let them heal. It took them a whole year
to heal. But I'm glad. Now I like them. I wouldn't give them up for
the world- the one that's left, anyway. I love to twist and pull on my
good nipple when I come, especially when I'm being ass-fucked,
Courtney. But it hurt at first. It always hurts at first- like anything
good in life. Anything good in life begins with pain. I'll start by using
my cock, but then, I'll get into dildos with you, bigger than the one I
used today, and you'll do the Rambone dong, 15 incher. Your asshole
will feel like I'm trying to shove my fisted arm up your ass, but then, it
all melts away, I guess, it becomes something else and then it starts
to feel good. Then it starts to feel great! I think you already know
what it is that I'm really talking about here. As you are now, so once
was I. Man, I used to rub a whole tube of Orajel into my asshole and
onto my dildo when I fucked myself. It was a little messy, and sticky,

205
 206

but after a while, it feels extraordinary! You're just numb, and it's so
great! You just lose all sense of yourself.'
'So who finally popped your butt cherry?'
'Well, I guess I- did. I guess I did, at least. When I was still a
kid, around seventeen, eighteen, I got into dildos. Bigger and bigger.
L.A. Special, hilted. Rambone, all the way up, spit-lubed. The famous
Ballsy Supercock ten-incher, all the way up to the balls. I doubt if I
ever really had an anal cherry, to tell you the truth. I started off with
maybe a mascara case, thin metal, and got to those toothpaste pumps
that Crest came out with about a year after that. But it was never
enough. It's like I was born to take rubber cock all the way up to my
gall bladder. It's just the way I am; no one taught me to do it.'
'Wow.'
'Yeah, but that's ancient history. Let's fuck again, big man. But
this time, I want you to do me. Turn about is fore-play. I want you to
cum in my mouth, Courtney. I lust for it. I wanna feel you spurt in
my mouth. I'm quite serious about this, Courtney. I wanna taste your
spunk, lover. Feel it quiver down my shivering ass crack.'
Kelly forced Courtney to lay down with a gesture of his hand and
then brought the candle around to where it was just over Courtney's
chest. Courtney's eyes wavered from the hand over him and he saw
that his own nipples were pert and erect. The first drop of candle wax
burned for only a moment, and then it moved into a slightly painful
mutation, and he was a little sorry that it wasn't that painful for very
long. The first splash of wax dried and then all the other layers went
on top of that and the first layer protected it, but the part that burned
was the areas around his nipples, which got splashed and without that
first layer protecting it burned quite painfully for a moment longer.
That part of it felt nice, too. When Courtney was done Kelly
waited for the candle to burn some more and then dripped it slowly
over his own chest, letting it fall upon the twisted mutilated one and
the one with the ring through it as well, allowing it to harden and
crease up the ring, which he would then fondle to crumble the wax off.
The strings of dried wax were hanging off his fingertips. It was a
game for him by now, and Kelly took his time in pulling the wax off his
own body in thin, stringy, cum-like strips.
Courtney shivered himself; there was a sudden and very cold
draft that seemed to penetrate his very being, and he wrapped his
arms around himself to stave off a creeping sense of mortality that
he'd had lingering within him ever since the commencement of this
whole morbid episode. 'What about your tattoo?'
'What about it?' Kelly asked, looking up from his activity.
'Well, what does it mean?'

206
 207

'Those sort of tattoos give one the connotation of ownership, but

I'm the only one who owns me. The ones that violate personal areas
of your body- the ones that fall into the categorization of defilement-
have always excited me the most. I wondered, why would someone
ever do something to their bodies to make them look like that? Why
would they willingly make themselves look like a side-show freak. The
willingly was the part that always got to me. I mean, Courtney, that
was for life. I wanted to see, I wanted to know- and so, I found out. I
did it myself. I fucked the guy who gave it to me- it took three
months and over thirty hours of work, but it's done. And he got his
money's worth out of me- he didn't feel cheated at all. There is no
greater teacher, Courtney, than experience. And I learned about the
things I wanted to learn about. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm not
going to lie.'
'Go on,' is what he finally said. 'I appreciate your candor in
discussing this with me.' He actually did. It was sick of him to draw a
parallel between the two, but he was better able to converse with Kelly
than he was with his own wife, after ten years of marriage. At least
with Kelly, the truth came out, no matter how twisted it was. And of
course, with Kelly, the truth didn't hurt because he didn't care.
'You just can't understand these things, Courtney, unless you
yourself are actually there doing them. You just couldn't understand
what was going through my head, at the time.'
Courtney heard tones of Nona in his reply.
'The secret to what we're doing, Courtney, is in the prostate
gland. It's a place men can go where women can't- that's part of what
makes it almost sacred. All the great thinkers, down through time-
this is what they were doing. This is what set them apart. I'm not
going to lie to you: you'll come back bleeding- but you'll be begging
for more.'
'I think I've been there, once,' Courtney sighed.
'I can take you there. You can take me there.'
Courtney closed his eyes and counted silently to ten before
speaking further. 'We need each other.'
'I suppose we do, Courtney.'
The night outside Kelly's apartment had darkened considerably.
Kelly wished silently that Courtney would go home, and soon enough,
he did.
The gutted torso of a fifteen year old girl was rotting in his
closet, and Kelly wanted desperately to remove her remains from the
apartment as soon as it was possible for him to do so, before the
stench of decay had permeated the entire loft. Once, in Cleveland,
Kelly had needed to bail out of his former apartment and his weeks-old
identity when some of his neighbors had gotten a little too curious

207
 208

about the stomach-wrenching odors emanating from his abode. The

trouble was, Kelly himself could no longer smell it; he had become
immune, with no need to be human anymore.

208
 209

NIHIL SUB SOLE NOVUM

Melanie had spent about half an hour the previous night tearing up all
of the blank checks that she still had from when she lived with Timothy
in the apartment on Townsend Avenue. She’d opened the account
about six months before she broke up with him, and she was still only
on check #117. Timothy had paid most of the bills and all she had to
pay was her car payment and insurance. #117 was all ratty around
the edges, it had been face-up in her wallet so long, and she wanted
to purge herself of anything associated with Timothy. She started by
ripping up the nine checks still remaining in the book, just because she
was bored and angry and needed something to do with her hands, but
she soon found herself digging through the boxes she hadn't yet
unpacked since moving out of her mother's place in search of the box
that contained the rest of the checks imprinted with their address on
Townshend Ave. She had already ordered new checks from the bank,
and the lady at the counter said that they would arrive in about ten or
twelve working days, two weeks at the most. It took her about ten or
fifteen minutes to find the box that contained the other books of
checks- but when she did, Melanie shredded book after book in rapid
fashion, going through checks 126 to 15o, 151 to 175, 176 to 2oo, 2o1
to 225 and on through to check 45o, which she made sure was the last
check she tore up, preferring to do that one individually for emphasis
instead of en masse like the rest of them. This she did with a flourish
of her wrists that felt petty and a little ridiculous in her empty
apartment, surrounded by packing crates, and she had a pile of paper
strips around her feet that was nearly ankle deep. When she was
done, a burden had lifted, somewhat, and she found herself crying
uncontrollably, all at once, without explanation.
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
Just making two packs of cigarettes last for a whole day was
now a major accomplishment for her. Every thought seemed to circle
around Timothy, and she was starting to doubt her actions. Which is
not to say that she saw no justification in what she had done- she only
questioned the wisdom of her execution. She had a thing about being
lied to, and she had told Timothy of this phobia time and time again,
and yet he'd done his best to violate this sacrament. There was no
way that she could live with a man who lied to her, and Timothy's
whole existence seemed to revolve around lies. Melanie wondered if
he even knew what the difference between the truth and his version of
things was anymore.
Torture comes, and torture goes.
It sickened her to feel Timothy's hold upon her memory, but
Melanie wondered how much of this was her own doing. The human

209
 210

mind is nothing if not a sad, slippery mechanism, and by dwelling upon

him so much, she thought that this might just be her way of keeping
Timothy in her life without actually having him there. Anything was
possible. She still cared about a man who was no longer in her life, in
opposition to logic.
You were an alien, but you were always my only choice.
There were times when she really felt sorry for him, for the fact
that he didn't know how to trust people the way he wanted to be
trusted himself. It was sad, really. Timothy, the man she wanted to
marry once upon a time and spend the rest of her life with, had
towards the last transmutated into the sort of person who lied so much
that he accepted his words as being the gospel, and Timothy had
started to believe his own bullshit. He only resorted to the truth when
he was caught and there was no other way out of it except for him to
come clean, and even then the truth could only be dragged out of him
by wild horses.
Melanie thought about it for a few minutes before confronting
him with the chemo bill. They loved each other, yes. That much was
true. Were they each truthful to one another, at least truthful enough
to facilitate a successful marriage- forever and ever, and all that jazz?
No. Probably not.
That had to be her decision right there. She loved him, and he
loved her, and she could see some sort of future on the bleak horizon
with him, but if they were incapable of telling each other the truth,
that was no way for a man and woman in love to live. No way at all.
There was no way she could stay, no way she could live with
that.

Melanie was trying not to think about Timothy, but nonetheless

she still found herself wondering about how he was doing. Once she
had almost called him at home, just to see how he was doing, and
twice she'd had the phone in her hand and had the operator on the
line ready to give her the telephone number for Timothy's primary
physician, who had a hand in prescribing Timothy's chemotherapy, just
to see how he was doing. It was her philosophy that even a chronic
liar deserved some sympathy.
A noise from out of her line of vision startled her, and she looked
up to see Kraggess Feebes stooped down into the doorway of her
office. His forehead was wet with perspiration- Melanie could see that,
even in this dim lighting. He looked as if he had just seen a ghost.
She didn't know what to make of this, or how to respond to him.
'Yes.' It was a flat monotone she spoke in; neither a question
nor an opening for conversation, merely an anticipated reflex she
could do nothing to keep inside. She could have welcomed the devil

210
 211

himself into her office today without thinking very much about what
she was doing.
Somewhere, someone is enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine.
'Timothy died,' Kraggess said, looking at the tops of his shoes.
There was a glimmer of lifelessness in his voice, echoing this sad
news. Kraggess was usually a cold, callous sort of person, but Melanie
could tell that this news had affected him deeply. She couldn't
remember him ever displaying much interest in Timothy's condition,
even when it would have been the appropriate thing for him to have
done, and yet here he was- in her office, telling her that Timothy was
dead.
Timothy was dead.
'Who told you?' Melanie demanded. Her stomach was roiling.
She now wished she had kept a bottle of Rolaids in her office the way
Timothy had kept a bottle in his. Melanie had done the shopping, and
she remembered how when his stomach was acting up he would chew
through two hundred of them, all of them cherry-flavored, in the space
of a week. Once she thought to mention this consumption to him, but
then decided to leave it alone. Two hundred a week he would eat, one
right after the other like they were candy, and then Melanie would go
out and buy more.
And I was happy to do it for him.
'Who told you?' she repeated, her tone more demanding.
'Nobody.'
Melanie had already forgotten her question by the time Feebes
offered his reply. Then it came to her.
'What do you mean, nobody told you?'
'Nobody. Nobody told me.'
'Then how do you know?' Her voice had gotten imperceptibly
higher.
'I just do. Don't ask me how I know, but I just know, okay?'
'This is bullshit.'
'Melanie, c'mon, I wouldn't- I can't-'
'Is it just a feeling?' she asked, blinking both her eyes, which
were getting moist in spite of her attempts to arrest the flow of her
tears.
'No,' Kraggess said, wagging his head back and forth like a dog.
His eyes were bulging in their sockets. 'It's more than just a feeling I
have inside of me. It's real. I felt it. I felt him. I know. He put his
hand on my head and he squeezed it- I know that squeeze was for
me.'
'You're crazy.'
'It's crazy, sure- but I know what I know, and I know what
happened.'

211
 212

'What makes you so certain?'

'I don't know why I'm so sure of this, Melanie. I just am. I was
always over his shoulder, and I know him well. There were areas here
in the firm where Timothy and I were, uh, independently co-assigned.'
'Independently co-assigned?'
'Yeah. That means, I monitored his work. I wrote reports.
Common procedure. When they wanted to know why Timothy was
retiring, they all assumed that it was because he had finally siphoned
off enough money for himself to live on until he got some other
position or set himself up in business. When we found out that he had
cancer, and how bad it was-'
'You knew about that?'
'For quite some time.' Kraggess smiled, grinning as though he
was quite pleased with both himself and the efficiency of his staff.
'And you didn't tell me?'
'Melanie- I, I couldn't. They would have erased me. They go
beyond firing executive attorneys these days. I know too much to let
me go but if they can't trust me being there, they won't want me to
come to work every day to remind them of that. So, I didn't say
anything. Capice?'
None of this surprised her. Not really.
Melanie was now realizing that she had felt Timothy's passing as
well, only she had been less able to recognize this for what it was. It
was only a subtle hint, she supposed, as opposed to the knock across
the skull that Kraggess had received. What she had received was
tantamount to a caress, whereas he had been belted with a clenched
fist. But she had felt it all the same, just as he himself had felt it.
And if she had felt it, Kraggess thought, then it must be true.
Melanie looked at Kraggess and saw nothing in his face. He was
only reporting what he had been told, but he had more fear of the
messenger than of the message itself; Death was now spreading its
blackened wings.
Pray all you want, but your prayers will crack the sky in two.
And somewhere in the world, a Gargoyle was yawning.

212
 213

LILY CACHE
As the physical form of Timothy Karacas found its final resting place-
even though his spirit wouldn't soon find release- Shelby Dunn was
looking at himself in the rear view mirror in his car as he drove from
the Matthias Bramble Clinic back to his loaner office at the hospital.
As he was making his preparations to leave the Clinic, a black mood
had come over him, and Shelby was at a loss to explain it. Things- for
today at least- were looking pretty good in a non-specific way that
assured him that he could pass through the hours in between waking
and sleep without encountering a major catastrophe. None of this
enabled Shelby to talk himself out of the way he felt. He was looking
for flaws within his character and psyche, and someone who was that
determined would not be disappointed in finding what he sought after.
Some crack, some sadly overlooked fissure, was the only finger hold
he needed in tearing himself down piece by piece, as was his habit
when alone in the car by himself.
When he looked in the mirror when he was at home, he looked
fine- but when he was in the bathroom and looked at his straight-on
reflection by opening the medicine chest on the side of the vanity so
that its mirror could be seen in the main mirror over the sink, his right
eye looked atrophied in comparison to his left, and when Shelby stared
at it long enough with both mirrors angled so that he saw his own face
in the same way that the rest of the world saw it, indeed it looked as
though the entire right side of his face might be sliding off his skull.
There was an average of twenty square feet of skin on a human being,
and Shelby's fascination with his own skin had caused him- indirectly-
to pursue the study of it. But the thought of a career as being strictly
a plastic surgeon bored him to tears. He liked to manipulate the flesh,
the nips and tucks and what all that went into a facial reconstruction-
to give an instance- thrilled him immensely, to feel its inner workings
as he would pinch and tone it, charting the return of natural color to
the flesh.
And it had all started with his ambivalence about his own face.

Shelby had once heard his mother speaking about the good half
and the evil half of one's face. He had listened to her ramble about
this while holding one half of the vanity mirror from the bathroom
against her own nose, effectively dissecting her face from her forehead
to her chin. As she held the mirror with it facing the right hand
portion of her face, she looked just like Mom- he thought that perhaps
one side of one's face was dominant over the other- but when she
showed only the left side of her face, doubling it in the mirror, she
looked a little angry; crazy, even. It was made even worse whenever

213
 214

she wrinkled her nose and giggled at him. Shelby had nightmares
about seeing her this way for the next few nights. There was nothing
specifically wrong about the way she looked- nothing Shelby could
immediately put his finger on- but after considering it for a long period
of time, it was still somehow wrong all the same.
And each person, Shelby learned, was in reality two people.
The effect was dramatic when Anita showed him the reflected
halves of his own face. While his mother's left half had been the one
to look out of place, his right was his evil half. With his mother it
seemed to be only a trifle peculiarity, even with the occurrence being
as traumatic as it was for Shelby. But in viewing himself like this,
Shelby saw that there was something within himself that needed to be
feared, for when his mother's back was turned, Shelby looked straight
into the mirror with the hand mirror in his hand at his side and studied
the rippling fasciitis of his reflection. There was the little boy he
wanted to be, with his sly eyebrows and sullenly concave cheekiness.
This moment of self-satisfaction led to a destructive impulse to raise
the hand mirror to the larger vanity mirror and show his reflection its
own reflection.
All that Shelby had really wanted to do was to see how he looked
to other people, instead of how he looked to himself in the mirror. His
arm rose unbidden to hold the mirror in front of his chest, and for a
brief moment he thought he had seen some sort of horror show
monster in the mirror he held balanced between the palms of his
hands. It looked a little bit like a little boy, but it was no little boy he
wanted to be anything like. The boy had looked sad, maliciously gray-
faced and dead.
He'd never felt the impulse to try that trick with the mirrors
again. Yet in all the time he'd spent considering himself in the mirror,
he was able to remember the way he had looked that day, and how his
right half was the part of himself that he had to watch out for. In that
one trick with the mirror, Shelby had tasted something of his own self-
destruction.

214
 215

INTERMEZZANINE
Shelby had actually helped Timothy's soul in its discorporation at the
time of his death; the force of his will served to help channel his soul
in the direction it needed to go, and if Shelby hadn't been there at the
time of his death Timothy might've floated around forever before he
had figured out what he was doing. Time was of the essence, because
Timothy could already feel his energy being sapped away by the air
surrounding him. Timothy's spirit might have found its way home, but
it also might not have. He had come through the first experience
feeling exhilarated, almost refreshed, but this superciliousness was
premature. If a soul is ready for the true, intended form of the
afterlife, there's nothing that soul can do to reverse the spiritual pull
that has a hold on it; but a soul without an anchor- no reference to
Jesus meant here- is subject to the winds and whims of a dimension
halfway between bliss and insanity in the area overlapped by the two.
Usually a feeling of helplessness has been reported by people who
have died and come back to life, and these people- it is likely- would
have been forced to haunt the earth until it could all be put to right, if
that was really ever to be done.
There was a moment of instant transfer. Spirits usually came
back as older people because it was a little easier to explain it away if
it was necessary; old people died all the time, and if the spirits only
needed to use their bodies for a short while. A stroke was easy to
explain and that was an instance where the soul merely left the body.
When a lot of relatively young people started dying off in a local
province- like with the vampires in the outer parts of unincorporated
France- there were a lot of questions that needed to be answered, and
it made it just that much harder to do commerce with those people
still among the living. A dead person coming back to life tended to
spook the greater populace and so the newly dead sought new ways to
ease their entry. It was certainly a peculiar enough situation for a
freshly upset soul to be going back into the realm of life without the
onus of a lynch mob to be dealt with.
A heart attack was plausible as well. Doing it that way was a
little like doing a stroke, only it was a little faster in the manner of its
execution in being carried out. There was less of a problem with static
and traffic when traveling out of a heart attack victim, for some weird
reason, and that was the officially preferred method of doing it. Heart
attacks were often not fatal, but they certainly ended the lives of more
people than most folks thought, because the victims were not coming
back as who they had been before. They were something altogether
different.
All of this, Timothy had known before diving into Shelby Dunn.

215
 216

He felt as though a vial of solid knowledge had been inserted

through a slot in the side of his head and was only now filtering
through to his fingertips. His ears were screaming at him with a litany
of sounds. As Shelby combed what was left of the hair on his head,
the huge swooping of the plastic Goody comb filled the entirety of
Timothy's consciousness. As his reflection, Timothy felt a superiority
over Shelby Dunn that aided his darkest thoughts pertaining to his
own spiritual survival.
In this new form of existence, Timothy felt as though he might
be able to procure Shelby's skin from him. To get out of being
Shelby's own reflection he would need a new skin, and that meant that
Shelby was going to die. Timothy knew that in another life he might
have agonized over such a decision, but he didn't have time for such
sentimentality today.
How this transfer was to be executed, Timothy had no clue
whatsoever.
A trade was to be arranged. His life on earth would be
exchanged for Shelby's soul. They would both simply change places
from where they were when the time was right. Timothy would wake
up in Shelby's new skin, and Shelby's soul would find itself trapped
within the rotting carcass it had been only a few weeks earlier.
Timothy knew that he would have to be the one to force both of them
into switching with one another. Shelby certainly wasn't going to put
much effort into leaving his body, so Timothy would have to help him
along with it. His desire would give way to obsession, and obsession
would then in turn give way to his ability.
Shelby Dunn and Timothy Karacas were each one part of a
larger and specific puzzle now being constructed in Dr. Gracey's
laboratory. Each one of them was feeding off one another, thereby
designing what was to be a uniform personality, interlocking and
fragmented at the same time. There was a force being created that
Timothy felt himself to be a distinct part of, and he was unsure of
exactly what role he had played in its creation, or how much control he
would have over its actions.
But more important than perhaps anything else, he wasn't dead.

216
 217

REMEMBRANCES
Nona had a little jar, a small sort of dish, sitting upon the top of that
piano of hers that they kept in the living room. She'd had the dish
since before he'd known her. On the lid it said, Let's do it... in fancy
red slatternly cursive script. The message was accompanied by two
thumb-sized ceramic hearts glued to the top. On the inside of the
dish, it read, in block letters: Let's fall in love. Courtney knew what it
was for. It was a dish to store one's condoms. When he first saw it he
wondered absent-mindedly about how many rubbers you could fit into
one of those things with the lid still fitting flush with the base. He
couldn't remember where he'd seen one of these things before, but
he'd known right away what it was- it literally chilled him.
What did the possession of such an item symbolize? Was she
really advertising herself as being that free and easy in her sexual
relations? It was then sitting upon a coffee table in the corner of the
room, next to the Christmas tree. Even if you did have one, why keep
it in the living room? It belonged in the bedroom, perhaps upon the
nightstand, maybe on the dresser or even in a dresser drawer, but not
out in the living room where just anyone could see it. If it was out in
the living room, did that mean that everyone who saw it would have a
need for its contents? When Nona and he had cleaned out the spare
room a few weeks earlier, he had gotten a head start on the job while
she was downstairs finishing up the lunchtime dishes. He regretted
that he had done that now.
Under the first box he picked up was a picture of her dancing
with an old boyfriend of hers. Her left leg was wrapped around his
waist, and she was smiling from ear to ear. The guy she was with
looked like a hapless twit who had just gotten his first lay from a
hooker that his older brother had purchased for him. Who knew?
Maybe that was the case.
With Nona, he could never tell. In that very same box he also
found a Koin-Pack Latex prophylactic. He and Nona had never used
prophylaxes, not since the first night they were together, and those
he'd bought on his own. They were not this type. He knew that she
wasn't cheating on him but he hated always being reminded of what
she'd done with other men. The signs were all over, and he couldn't
escape them wherever he turned his eyes. When he opened it, the
condom inside was still wet.
They didn't stay good for that long, did they? No, of course they
didn't. They would dry out. They must have been purchased later
than she said. So many things of hers that should have been for him
had been given to- or taken by- other people. Her virginity, for
instance, and things such as the sweetness of love that has just begun

217
 218

to bloom. When Nona did things with Courtney, she always made him
feel as if she were just going through the paces, like it was all the
same thing all over again except with a different person. With a
different dick.
She already spent the best parts of herself on other people, and
like all men who find out that the woman they love was or is a slut, he
lived in a self-inflicted cocoon of bullshit and illogical nepenthe.
Courtney was enjoying it again, enjoying feeling sour and
doubtful over Nona. But she was one more dirty-bird, trying to
unravel his tiny ball of string at every possible opportunity. He needed
to keep her at an arm's length- for his sanity's sake. He couldn't get
on top of his own problems and take care of them if his mate was just
as unstable as he was. There were times when he feared that she was
getting even more neurotic than he was. But in here, of all places, we
shall try to achieve that which is made possible only when dogma is
dispensed with, and the baser things in life are made bare; when
honesty may barely overtake hunger, and we may be considered
mighty, primarily because of our ability to withstand the demon within
and his sway over our temptation, and for having lived with the
gnawing pain of questions that are borne out of our own individual
insecurities.
No one had ever loved him. That was what did it to him. No
one ever said he looked good, although to have said so would certainly
have been a lie. He had not gone through high school not only
dateless, he went through high school completely friendless. Even in
later years, he wondered how he got through it at all, and then he
reasoned that he'd only learned to numb himself from that pain. Being
alone didn't bother him all the time, but when he did get the blues, it
was rough.

Pornography offered him a choice of women that he didn't have

access to in real life. He wanted to leave work right then, leave and
go to a movie booth and masturbate, but he couldn't. He had to hide
his increasingly-insistent erection beneath the desk. That morning,
he'd noticed a small cut-like flesh wound on the lateral side of his
penis. It was no bigger than a thumbnail, and it didn't hurt save for
when he put his hand on it. His thumb, it turned out, rested right on
that spot when he tried to masturbate. There was no other place for
him to put it. If he moved his hand even a fraction of an inch toward
his abdomen, he couldn't get the same movement that was necessary
for ejaculation. If he moved his hand further out toward the tip of his
penis he had the same problem.
Courtney was feeling rabid and Kelly didn't answer when he
paged him, so Courtney resorted to renting an adult film and watching

218
 219

alone at home all by himself. It was about nine o'clock in the morning
on his day off so he had to use a twenty-four hour video vender, one
that was supplied with a limited number of films to begin with, and
there was only one X-rated mature title left on the menu. It was
called All Hands On Dick.
The menu screen for the film selector was quite filthy, and the
sun was shining as well, forcing Courtney to cup his hands around his
eyes so that he would be able to see what he was choosing. After
completing the menu circuit three times, forward and back, he chose
the above title.
It was nothing new for him.
Once he finally got it home and cued the movie to the first sex
scene while he was douching his ass out so he could fuck himself,
Courtney was immediately able to tell by the screen credits that All
Hands On Dick was a bi-sexual feature. In all his travails, including all
the times he'd spent over at Kelly's apartment and in the movie booths
in Zaravan and Bachelor's Paradise, Courtney had to admit that this
was a first. He'd never seen a film of two men having sex. Maybe it
would tell him something. Maybe he was bi-sexual after all.
At Kelly's, the two of them usually watched straight videos while
Courtney assumed the female, and Kelly would do his part by reaming
him out, alternating between his own penis and a dildo, swapping back
and forth between the two for the sake of a pleasant variety.
Courtney now found that he missed his usual partner in these weird
escapades.
The male names came first in the credits, and that was
Courtney's first tip-off that this was a bi-sexual feature. Samantha
Strong got top billing among the women, and that was a second clue
to the likeliness of the film's content- even before the first couple even
appeared on the screen. Courtney noticed that the guys had trouble
staying hard with the women, and that his own cock went completely
limp whenever there were two guys fucking onscreen, even if there
was a decent-looking girl up there with them, helping things along.
He discovered that it disgusted him to see two men having sex
together, and when the two guys in the third scene kissed each other
full upon the lips, tongue and all, Courtney had to turn the tape off
and rewind it to the beginning. While it was rewinding, Courtney
fucked himself in the ass with his favorite dildo- the ten-inch
Wallybanger- and put all his stuff away immediately after he had
ejaculated. That would hold him. But it told him one thing: he was
not gay at all.
Courtney instead chose to get himself off by poring over the
ever-growing cache of pornographic magazines that he had stashed
behind his record collection in the living room, under the TV and VCR.

219
 220

The records themselves were arranged so that the spines were visible
from without, and at the back of the albums, Courtney had installed a
false wooden plank that made it seem as though the back wall was
only twelve a half inches deep- just deep enough to hold a standard LP
record jacket- but it was really fifteen inches deep, and that last three
inches was cover to cover smut. These mags were where Courtney
would spend his lonely hours.
Once the visual supply had been assured, Courtney grabbed a
favorite magazine of his- favorites were so hard to come by, as the
pictures soon became overly-familiar- and headed into the bathroom,
using a squeezable bottle to rinse out his innards and deposit the tarry
residuals into the toilet. While he was doing this little act, repeatedly
squeezing and injecting himself with water until he was full and then
squatting upon the basin to expel any foreign matter from his anal
tract, Courtney forced a pair of thin hoop earrings through each one of
his nipples. They hadn't been done in a while and the holes had closed
up somewhat, so they were extra sensitive today. Courtney then
stuffed a few bent paper clips in through his nipples using the space
left in between the walls of his nipples and the other two rings already
present there until they were both throbbing and there was absolutely
no more he could take.
When Courtney was done with this procedure he noticed with a
sullen amusement that his nipples now looked like little silver spiders.

220
 221

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

Weird things had begun to happen to Shelby Dunn before his reflection
came to life. He started his day with the same routine, always: he
would brush his teeth, and then rinse with a pharmaceutical grade
mouthwash before flossing his teeth with camel's hair purchased from
the health food store in the South Allenbury shopping mall. His face
had a slightly feral appearance, and whenever he walked past a mirror
the first thing he did was to bear his teeth like a rabid dog.
He fancied that he could see the air frosting as it tumbled forth
from his snout, and viewed himself as a predator among women. He
had a monthly quota for the number of women he had slept with, and
he was in the habit of being merciless with himself if he failed to live
up to his own internal reputation as a stud. His quota enumerated
new conquests only, because in Shelby's mind, any of his sleazy
repeaters didn't count.
It didn't hurt that he was a doctor. This kept him social, and an
available doctor was never without female companionship, it seemed.
One married down sooner or later. Shelby had come close a few
times- most notably with a woman named Antoinette LaRochelle- but
Shelby had thus far avoided the taint of any serious romantic
attachment that might take him off the market for any major amount
of time and sully his reputation.
And it was a reputation- point of fact- that he did his best to
discourage. Shelby was often the first person to downplay any hint of
his extracurricular activities, usually by saying that he must have been
misquoted or misunderstood somewhere along the line, and attributing
any factual discrepancy to this action.
Secretly, though, Shelby loved the fact that his peers often
talked about him when he wasn't around. He wasn't out to make any
friends- in fact, his modus operandi was to stomp on any fucker that
got in his way- and Shelby viewed women as his only vice. In truth,
the women he bedded were nothing more than flesh-and-blood
sacrifices to his ego, which he tended to worship nightly. Once he got
them into his lair, he noticed that he usually spent more time fixing his
hair in preparation for going to bed than he actually spent in bed with
them performing the act.
It was only once that he would copulate with any given
specimen, and he usually failed to achieve his own orgasm. This
Shelby faked, usually, unless he felt like being honest by saying that
he didn't really want to come. If he did wish to achieve his own
orgasm he would then masturbate after the girl left his place, while
thinking of her at the same time.
Unbeknownst to him, Shelby's vanity was often a topic of

221
 222

conversation in the women's lavatory. Women who loved him for his
personality and medical skill often loathed him simultaneously because
he was so full of himself. But still had he known this, Shelby would
have thought that any press is still good press, and it was good to be
talked about like that.

One day in late April- about a week and a half after Timothy
Karacas had been planted firmly under the earth- Shelby was brushing
his teeth in the mirror on the vanity in his bathroom suite, the same
way he did every morning upon arising. His teeth, in the mirror, were
stained with maroon blood and gray scum. He rubbed at the stains
with the tail of his T-shirt, and that was when he saw that his
reflection was starting to move independently of him in the mirror. It
was slow at first, but in time his reflection had gotten progressively
bolder as it deviated from the path of movement Shelby had intended
for it to follow. Shelby tried his best to remain stock-still while
witnessing this spectacle.
At first, Shelby noticed that the index finger on what would have
been his right hand was twitching almost spasmodically, like a
hummingbird. It was faint, and quite subtle, and nearly impossible for
him to detect.
Next he noticed in the mirror that his jaws were working
themselves back and forth from side to side, in such a movement that
would have had the tops of his teeth grinding against one another.
When Shelby placed his hand upon his jaw, it was still. But the
reflection stared straight at him and continued with what it was doing,
apparently oblivious to the distress this revelation had caused for
Shelby. When Shelby saw that his jaw was still moving, even with his
hand on his chin, he knew that something peculiar was happening. It
was only a moment after this that Shelby noticed that while his own
left hand was cupping his chin in a maniacal grip in an effort to keep
his reflection from chewing, the left hand of his reflection was down at
its side.
Shelby, in a panic, turned on the water as hot as he could
possibly get it, allowing the steam to drift upward and fog the mirror;
in thirty seconds or so, his reflection was all but obliterated by the
steam.
For a moment, Shelby was pleased. Undoubtedly, he was under
a lot of stress professionally, because that's just that way it was.
Personally, he was preoccupied with the operation he'd discussed with
Basil and Dr. Gracey.
What he saw in the mirror-
what I thought I saw
was clearly nothing more than a trick his mind was playing on

222
 223

him. He had been burning his candle at both ends for quite some time
and now it was catching up to him. There was a reasonable
explanation for
what I thought I saw
things not appearing as they actually were.
His glee was short-lived, because just as suddenly as the steam
had eradicated his reflection, a streak of clarity began to emerge in the
upper left hand corner of the mirror. It was a clean, clear downward
stroke, about three inches in length. Then it stopped.
What the fuck is going on? Shelby wondered.
A second line now made itself apparent, starting at the middle of
the first and skimming upwards on a diagonal slant. A third line
started where the second one had begun, only this one slanted
downward at the same angle, stopping in the smear of a fingerprint.
His fingerprint.
It was the letter K.
Presently, another line was being drawn next to the K. A single
line the same in length as the first. Shelby waited for it to continue.
KI.
'Shelby?' he said aloud.
In the back of his mind, Shelby thought he heard someone
laugh.
Another letter was being drawn next to the I.
L.
Another letter. Another L.
KILL.
The remainder of the message was scrawled itself in a matter of
seconds, and when it was completed, Shelby was aghast at what he
saw:
KILL YOU DEAD.
All at once, in defiance of the heat of the water being run into
the sink, the steam was gone. Nothing remained except for his
reflection as it had been prior to Shelby turning on the tap. The air
around him now carried the scent of fetid menses and dog shit. More
than anything else though, what Shelby thought he smelled was the
stink of an open grave.
His face, in the mirror, subtly took on the features of a dragon;
his brows arched themselves upwards until they almost became
synonymous with his hairline, and his nostrils flared themselves in the
same way they had done that one time with his mother, in the
bathroom with the mirror.
Timothy's senses screamed and crackled as he felt himself being
literally sucked out of the molecules in the air surrounding the two of
them. Where once there had only been Shelby Dunn- a single person-

223
 224

there would now be two people occupying the same breadth of space.
It was a deadly way to exist, and Timothy found this chaos distracting.
Slowly, it dawned upon Shelby what was really happening here,
and the idea at first would not allow itself to come to its complete
fruition as easily as Shelby might otherwise have thought it to have
been. There was a rational and logical system of reason in this world,
and what Shelby now found himself having to deal with refused any
association with that sort of logic. What now stood before him defied
all prior balance of reason.
His own reflection had now come to life. And it wanted to kill
him.
And for a moment, Shelby thought he might not run.
Such a thought could last only a moment, and then the heat
would run down into his legs and he would be off like a shot. Fear was
always a wonderful motivational device, and his fear would help him
find a way to relocate himself even if he himself didn't have the brains
to do so on his own. He would have to run, because if he didn't, he
would have to confront the thing now smiling at him blackly from
inside the mirror.
'Hello, Shelby,' it said, tendrils of smoke pluming from its
mouth.
There was a flash instant after the image spoke in which Shelby
could already feel himself wetting his pants, but then the moment was
gone just as quickly. There he was, talking to his reflection in the
mirror; a reflection that spoke of its own accord and moved
independently of its owner. This moment would now proceed forward,
as it had been destined to do so for thirty years, and from that point
the future would be cast.
Shelby stumbled backwards. He couldn't believe what he saw
standing directly in front of him. His own perfect image, profile and
all, had come miraculously to life. There wasn't a flaw to be seen
anywhere on the doppelganger’s skin. Its flawless epidermis was
without equal. It had the sort of skin tone that Shelby used to have
before his accident.
'I understand that you like me better than yourself,' it now said.
It was a sight not to be believed. His mirror-self was loping
toward him, larger than life and infinitely more frightening. But in the
few seconds between fear and flight, Shelby found himself admiring
this man, this thing, whatever the fuck it was. Because whatever it
was- the fact was inescapable- the thing here in the mirror was only
just himself.
'Jesus,' escaped Shelby's lips, unintended.
'I'm not sure if there ever was such a person,' his reflection said,
adding, 'By the way, I like your taste in art. That's a good picture.'

224
 225

Shelby followed the direction in which its finger was pointing.

This apparition was indicating a 64 x 38 inch reprint of a painting
by John Leamy that depicted a dilapidated mansion in the moonlight,
overlooked by a starry night, with cherubic statues guarding the gate
leading up to the house. In life, Timothy had never laid eyes upon the
picture- in death, he seemed to know everything about it. Looking on
it made it a part of his mind, and the two were irreparably fused
together.
'Thank you,' Shelby stuttered, unsure of what to say next. 'I got
it for a song at an auction by Dunbury Park wood about this time last
year.'
'I like that one, too,' the reflection said, pointing at a sun-faded
reproduction of The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke by Richard Dodd.
'Really? I think my favorite one is Little Eygpt, by Turback.'
His reflection surveyed the room, lingering over Porte De L'Enfir
by Auguste Rodin. 'Interesting. Auguste Rodin died in the year 1917.'
'So?'
'I didn't know that until after I died.'
Am I really talking to this guy in the mirror? Shelby thought.
Of course you are. I can whisper in your ear from the inside out.
Shelby's eyes widened in spite of himself. 'Fuck me.'
Next to the Rodin piece was a credible re-print of A Cotton
Candy Autopsy by David Loupre and Dan Sweetman. The clowns in
the picture- a nightmare in and of themselves- seemed to mock the
mood in the room, while at the same time they embodied the chaos
that was now building.
'What that blue one called?'
'I think it's called exotic physics meets exotic biology. It's a
high-power photograph of human nerve cells grown on a microchip.'
Shelby reached blindly behind the small of his back, groping
madly on the top of a small dressing table, looking for a straight-razor
he had kept there since time out of mind. His father had given him
the straight razor when he was only a kid, and even though he never
shaved with it, Shelby kept it in the bathroom as a keepsake of him.
His fingers found the etched wooden handle of the switch, and
he then clicked it open as quietly as he could while keeping it
concealed behind his back. The weight of the razor felt hefty and
secure as he rolled its length over the tips of his fingers, searching for
a better grip.
'I can't read your mind, Shelby,' the reflection said, ‘but I’m not
that stupid, either. I don’t think you want to try what I think you’re-‘
The blade swept diagonally across the length of the reflection
before Shelby’s carry-through brought the very tip of the blade in
contact with the porcelain on the wall to the left. For a scant moment,

225
 226

Shelby thought he saw the image of his reflection ripple in front of

him, the colors swimming in a swirling whorl of reds, pinks and blues
as the air realigned itself to its original position before the arc of the
blade had fallen through the air.
‘That…hurt,’ his reflection said, obviously surprised at what had
happened to it, but seeming to smile a little at the thought of still
being able to feel pain. ‘Don’t do that again.’
It wasn’t a threat, Shelby noticed, but a polite- and reasonable
request.
‘You felt that?’ Shelby asked, literally dumbfounded. He wasn’t
sure if this was a sign of weakness in his opponent or if it was
something he should start to be afraid of. If it could feel pain, perhaps
it could also inflict pain as well. There was no certainty to be seen,
here.
‘Yes, I felt it, but probably not in the exact same way you would
have felt it. What I experienced was something a little more transitory
than your human nerve-endings could register. My pain- while harsh-
was rather brief, whereas what you would experience had I cleaved
you with that razor would have been- by your standards- interminable.
Your mind would snap before you really even felt a strong majority of
the pain, and then…it would be wasted.’
‘Wasted?’ Shelby asked.
‘The dead never rest easy,’ the reflection went on to say,
ignoring the previous thrust of their conversation. ‘This is especially
true if they were not given an adequate chance to live their lives while
they were still…shall we say, viable? I won’t say alive- because what
am I now, if not alive? More alive, in fact, than I had ever been
allowed to be in real life. And I’m no longer hampered by your own
human frailty.’
With a start, Shelby decided that it was time to take action.
What he knew he needed was in the second drawer, next to the
microwave oven in the kitchen. He had to get there and retrieve his
instrument before he was accosted or impeded in some other way
from attaining his goal.
And his goal, Shelby decided, was to stay alive.
He dashed for the kitchen, found what he was looking for, and
then ran through the condominium, smashing every mirror he could
find with a swift blow from a carpenter’s ball peen hammer, trying to
get away from his reflection. Damn it!- if it was nothing more than his
reflection, then it couldn’t get to him if there were suddenly no
mirrors!
Being as vain as he was, Shelby had lots of mirrors in his home.
He smashed first the bathroom vanity, quietly relishing the pained
expression on his reflection’s face as it shattered into a shock-wave of

226
 227

glittering fragments. Next came the mirror in the hallway by the front
door, and then the mirror over the kitchen sink.
There was a wall of mirrors in the living room, foot-square tiles
of reflecting glass that he had installed the first week after he’d moved
in. He smashed every one of them, with his reflection running
alongside of him in some parallel dimension. Having done that, Shelby
then gathered the larger fragments and smashed them as well.
Exhausted from this brief bout of exorcism, Shelby dropped
down onto the couch and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. The ball
peen hammer slipped from his hand onto the carpet, landing with a
soft thud-thud as both the handle and the hammer head struck the
floor, The air was filled with a post-war din of silence only dreamed of
in movies.
It was only after a few minutes of this silence that he heard
laughter.
There was only one last mirror in the condo that he could think
of, and he had thought of it only in the last minute before falling onto
the couch, figuring that smaller mirrors might not matter. It was part
of a make-up compact that his last girlfriend had left in one of the
drawers in the vanity in the bathroom. As much as he hated the idea
of going back in there, he knew that he had to go back into the
bathroom and break that one, too.
He picked the hammer up off of the floor and walked to the back
of the condo, where the bathroom was waiting for him, the last door
on the right. In spite of the fact that he was wearing shoes, he was
extraordinarily cautious not to step on any of the mirror fragments.
He wasn’t worried about cutting himself- as it was, the skin on his left
forearm was already sliced to ribbons and there was a nasty-looking
gash across his forehead- but he was worried, however irrationally,
that whatever he had seen- or thought he saw- in the mirror could
manifest itself from any fragment.
Once he was in the bathroom- instinctually sniffing the air for he
knew not what- he pulled the drawer open and saw that the compact
was indeed exactly where he thought he would find it, lying on top of a
pile of combs, brushes and old cigarette wrappers. Lost for a moment
in remembering the girl who had left her debris here, Shelby did not
consciously recall taking the compact out and placing it on the
countertop, but he had. He held the hammer high above his head,
ready to strike, when he realized that perhaps his hallucination was
gone. If not exactly defeated, then shamed away, in fright. Against
his better judgment, he opened the compact gingerly and looked down
into the mirror, where he saw…nothing. Nothing at all. His mind shut
down, and he picked up the compact to examine it more closely. He
was looking at the ceiling, and part of the wall behind him. He wasn’t

227
 228

in the mirror, in either his usual reflective self or this other malevolent
manifestation that he had just been dealing with.
In evidence, Shelby wasn’t there at all.
In the flash of a moment, he found himself remembering his
first-year physics teacher, Dr. Verdigris Phlogiston, and something he
had said the first day of class, almost thirteen years ago now.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
He was brought back to the present moment when he looked at
the compact again and saw the curve of his delicately feminine face
curled around the corner of one side of the mirror to glare at him. His
reflection was now grimacing with hatred. It reached a hand up out of
the mirror and throttled Shelby by squeezing its fingers into the fleshy
folds of his throat.
‘You’re eager to avoid me, Shelby,’ it said, speaking as though
its voice was coated in oil, ‘and I simply won’t be avoided.’
There was a moment in which Shelby was certain that he would
die, and he didn’t know what to do. But then, it was over. He slapped
the arm aside and threw the compact to the ground, upon which the
arm simply vanished.
Shelby then turned on his heel and bolted for the door, running
out of his apartment, not even bothering to lock the front door behind
him as he fled down the hall towards a safety he was no longer sure
existed.

And sitting perched on the highest cornerstone of the same

building was a tiny face, no larger than a Frisbee, that had been
etched there as an added touch of brilliance by the architect who had
designed the place. He had been fond of gargoyles and so he had
sought to have one placed here, on his final project. The architect had
died not longer after the building was erected, and following his death
the owners of the building had tried to have the face removed. But
nothing could erase its sorrowful grimace from the building’s surface.
The owners had their reasons for wanting the face removed- it was
ugly, for one, and its constant frowning dampened the festive
cheerfulness that they had sought to imbue upon their little project.
But had any of them lived to this day, and if any one of them had
chosen at this precise moment to look upwards at the face that they
had loathed in years past, they would see that it was now smiling.

228
 229

IN OPPOSITION TO LOGIC
As Joshua walked across the flat Illinois plains, unsure of his specific
destination and yet sure in the unerring knowledge that he must get
there, there was a ripple- call it an ebb- in the flow of what he was
trying to follow.
Does it know I’m coming? Can it feel my presence in the same
way that I can feel its own? Does it know my Scent as well?
He walked on for a time, and then a while later, lay down in a
field to rest. Random samplings of words and images coursed through
his head, the sources of which were not immediately discernable.
Something- or someone- wanted to hear what he was hearing, and
perhaps it was himself.
The bottom line was, he didn’t know. Joshua could only listen.
The Scent returned, and this time around, it was different. The
earlier Scent had been plain, sometimes wafting but always
uncomplicated. Now, there were complications. Others were now
involved. The Scent was not singular, now; it was instead a miasma of
other Scents, yet all of them were leading to the same trace. We are,
none of us, what we make ourselves appear to be. We all crave the
illusion, all the while knowing that nothing is as it seems. None of us
gives without wanting something, We all want, all of us, but we want
different things. When all your wishes are granted, many of your
dreams will be destroyed. That is the order of everything.
To his right, a skunk lifted its tail and sprayed in defense.
Every moment, every sliver of time, is beaded upon a single
thread. None of these beads can be removed without everything else
coming with it. Everything is connected. If I push to my right, what is
to my right will push further in the same direction. Nothing in the
world happens without cause or effect, or without consequences.
When one man loves love, another man finds happiness- however
ephemeral- and so the cycle continues. The only way to achieve
harmony is to insure that what is yours is truly yours, not belonging to
someone else, or retribution will soak you. Everything comes back to
you in this world; everything.

229
 230

RECOLLECTIONS OF A NEW FEAR

When Shelby got home, a few of his neighbors were inside the
apartment cleaning up the debris from the mirrors that he had
smashed earlier. There were about six or seven people in his
apartment, some of whom he was able to recognize at once and some
of whom he couldn’t recognize at all- and all but one of them were
stooped over or on their hands and knees.
Bob Georgianos was among the ones cleaning up, and Shelby
felt almost obscenely grateful to have Bob around to sort of glide him
through this embarrassing and all-invasive situation. Bob was here for
him, he knew, to make sure that he was okay. Bob stood about six
feet tall and had hair the same color as Shelby’s, only he had more of
it. He was muscular where Shelby tended to lean more towards
obesity, and he was well thought of.
The other people in the apartment- well, they were just trying to
be helpful. They didn’t know that Shelby was still trying to overcome
the shock of what had happened to him earlier that morning. Shelby
had always liked Bob, even though he could be a little cryptic in the
things that he said and talked about. Shelby knew that he was a cop,
and thought it likely that Bob would be asking most of the questions.
What on earth could he tell him, or them? What plausible explanation
could there be for all this destruction?
A set of nervous glances were exchanged and a moment of
awkward silence was observed before anyone dared to speak their
thoughts.
‘We heard an awful racket a while ago,’ Mrs. Tompkins said. I
wasn’t sure if someone was trying to break in here or what, and for a
while, I have to admit, I stayed in my apartment, too afraid to do
anything.’
Mr. Tompkins looked up from his duties and assented.
‘I hope you’re alright, Mr. Dunn.’
‘Dr. Dunn,’ Bob corrected him.
Shelby hedged. Telling them the truth wasn’t a viable option.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Shelby sighed, stalling for enough time to
compose himself and to think of a way to explain what all had gone on
here today. What had gone on here today? Did it really even happen?
It must have, for all this glass to be lying around on the floor, piled
together in tiny mounds.
‘I’m gonna go get some aspirin,’ he said. ‘Does anyone else
want some?’
‘I’ll take some,’ Mrs. Tompkins said, rubbing the knuckles on her
hands. ‘It’s coming up on the season, you know, and my arthritis….’

230
 231

Shelby laughed, and then felt horrible about having done so.
Mrs. Tompkins was only in her late forties, and the thought of her
having arthritis already at such a relatively young age was comical.
But then, it was also very sad that she should be cut down that soon in
life. If it could happen to someone her age, Shelby reasoned, how
soon until it happened to him? The thought of him getting old, to him,
was verboten.
Shelby had forgotten a mirror on the inside of the medicine
chest.
Without really even pausing to give thought to what he was
doing, Shelby winked at his reflection, just to see what would happen
if he did.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then- suddenly- something
did happen. His reflection winked at him, a second after he had
winked at it.
He winked again, looking for some hint of weakness, whatever.
Shelby did his best to remain absolutely still. If his fear could be
eradicated, then perhaps this apparition could be gotten rid of as well.
His reflection waited, smirked as he frowned, and the winked
again.
‘I know they’re out there, Shelby, so go make them at home,’ it
said.
‘I’ll be right here waiting for you. I really think that we need to talk.’

231
 232

EVIDENCE
The two of them sat together at a small table near the end of the bar,
but they didn't sit as close together as Courtney thought Kelly would
have wanted them to, and it made him curious. After a moment,
Courtney looked at him, and when he did, Kelly smiled back at him.
Finally, he spoke:
'I think that guy on the end likes you, Courtney,' Kelly said.
'Do you think so?'
'I've seen the look a thousand times, Courtney. It's there.'
'Should we move to another table?' Courtney asked.
'No.'
Courtney studied Kelly's face for a second and then realized
what he was driving at. 'You're kidding. Kelly, I can't just-'
'I want you to pick him up. I want you to fuck him- for me.'
'I can't.'
'Go for it.'
'But how, Kelly? I've never done this sort of thing before.'
'Well, it's the same as with women, even a little easier, because
here, all they wanna do is fuck you. There's no strings attached at all.
It's not like these guys are here just looking for a life-long relationship.
They don't want to take you home with them afterwards to meet their
mother. All they want is some hard cock in their holes.'
'Oh, that's nice.'
The same as with women. Didn't he know that he couldn't pull it
off with women, that his inability with women was the reason why he
was here now? If he knew how to talk to women, how to make his
presence known, he probably wouldn't have married Nona. In fact, he
was sure of it. Maybe he'd have been a little more aggressive. But
this wasn't years ago; this was now. Here it was different. It was all
about lust.
Be aggressive, he scolded himself. All he had to do was go in
there- so to speak- and just take charge of the situation. It would be
good practice. If he could do this, then he might be able to do it with
a woman. He could lead. If he pulled this off and made whomever do
what he wanted them to do, then that would change everything. He
would be sexually potent, not just in being physically capable of
carrying out the act, but in being able to force his will upon others. He
might get a promotion- he could probably even get another job, a
better job.
He told himself to be aggressive.
Just like Nona.
The world was truly your oyster if you weren't afraid of it. He
could leave Nona and embark upon a fucking spree, learning to simply

232
 233

take the woman of his choice. He'd often heard it said that the crime
of rape had absolutely nothing to do with sex. It had to do with
power. Courtney now saw the logical foundation in this, but he sought
to carry it one step further. He saw that almost all acts of physical
intercourse were power-based. Sex is always about something else.

'Hi,' said Courtney, stepped up to the man. He looked about two

inches shy of six feet. He was handsome, in his way, but not in a way
that made Courtney want him. In fact, he found men repulsive, and
aside from the feeling that anal intercourse provided for him, he didn't
understand what women saw in men, either. He liked Kelly- liked him
quite a bit, actually- but more because he was like a woman than for
any other single reason. More like a woman than his wife, actually.
'Hi.'
For a moment, Courtney forgot what he was doing here.
Then, he remembered.
Courtney decided to approach the matter as if he were asking for
change for the pay phone, real clammed-up and too-polite. 'Come
here for some fun?' he intoned. He was doing a lot of intoning these
days.
'Oh, yes.'
'What're you drinking?'
'Right now? Bloody Mary, Tabasco. And you?'
'Draft.'
'Let me get this round,' said the man. 'Please.'
'Sure.' So it was to be. Courtney wasn't sure that if by
accepting this drink he was content to play the female. Did the drink
mean he had agreed to anything? Was it not so in the straight world,
but a matter of course in a place like this? What was signified by the
act?
What does this all mean?
The guy was slimy, not so much in nature than in tone, and
Courtney knew he wasn't deeply attracted to him. But then again, he
was also not here to fall in deep-deep heads over heels into ten-
minute love, either. He was here to accomplish one singular specific
task.
He was here to play the Viper.
And over yonder, sitting in a corner reading from a singles
magazine, was Kelly, looking proudly over the exploits of his wayward
progeny. The very tip of his nose peeked over the top fold of the gay
newspaper. Kelly wasn't really reading it anyway. He tossed it
carelessly aside and it landed on the seat of the chair opposite him.
He sat alone.
'Here you go,' the bartender said, dropping Courtney from his

233
 234

swoon.
'So,' his seat-mate offered by way of conversational patter, 'do
you come here often?' It was a statement more than anything else.
Saying this was a matter of course; nothing more than an ice-breaker.
Courtney eyed Kelly from out the corner of his eye. 'No.'
'Oh.'
'Yeah, I'm not...social.'
'So you're never anywhere else?
'Uh, usually not. Why?'
'I was just asking.'
Courtney put his hand on the man's knee to assure him quietly.
'I'm sorry, I've had a very long day.' Was he actually flirting with him?
This seemed to perk the man up tremendously. 'So what is it
that you do?' he asked, at length, batting his eyelashes in a self-
conscious way.
'I'm in...management,' Courtney said, knowing what was to be
done.
'That's good,' the man said. His drink was half-empty.
'...and, I swallow.'
The man raised his eyebrows. 'Well, in that case, I'm in.'
Courtney breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't sure if he was
going to be able to get through this next part, but at least the bridge
of placidity had been crossed. Indecent proposals had been made and
seconded. The breach was solidified. He hoped that the guy didn't
want him to fuck in a car outside, although that would allow for
Courtney to replicate the exact experiences his wife had. Then again,
he wasn't really up for the intimacy of going over to someone's house.
There, he would not feel safe. He would not be in control of the
situation. He would not be able to dictate what happened. Was it this
easy? Was this what it was like? Was this how Nona had done her
thing, so long ago? 'Where do you wanna go?' Courtney asked the
man.
'Come with me,' he said, letting the glass from his drink lie
empty upon the surface of the bar, slicked with bitter sweat and
saliva.
I swallow.
He had said it. He was the one that had been said about.
And this man really wanted him.
Courtney followed him up the stairs to a landing, and then up
three stairs more. He could smell the man's sweaty sex in his pocket.
The walls were dingy and pale up here, with paint and plaster peeling
from the ceiling. Would fellatio be the first choice upon the menu?
Would the choice even be his? This he didn't know. What he did know
was that he was breaking the rules, going beyond, breaking through to

234
 235

the other side. He didn't know what was waiting there for him on the
other side, so he wasn't sure if he should be scared or not. At the last
second, the man he was with turned into the ladies bathroom.
'Wait a minute,' Courtney protested. 'You can't go in there.'
'Why not?' he truly looked confused, as if there was something
he had forgotten but sought to remember. His eyebrows knitted in
contempt.
'That's the ladies room,' Courtney reminded him.
'Oh,' the man said, giggling like a girl. 'Is that all?'
Courtney chuckled nervously. 'What else is there?'
'You can go into the ladies room here,' the guy said, as though
he were speaking to an extremely stupid child. ‘Look around- there’s
no women in here to use it.’ The man propped open the door with his
fingertips. Courtney heard what he knew to be exclusively male
moaning in the back.
He inhaled sharply. He wanted this over with.
‘Shall we?’

Afterwards, Courtney felt sick and nauseated. He wasn’t quite

sick to his stomach, in that he wasn’t vomiting, but he was feeling
pretty close to it.
Did it feel this way for Nona? Was being the one desired, and
hence, having the rights of refusal, what made it different? He wasn’t
sure, now.

235
 236

LOKI ASMOEDEUS
Timothy’s funeral was the next Tuesday. Due to the condition of his
body, it was a closed-casket service- but had the lid been raised on his
coffin, someone would surely have noticed a triangle of skin missing
from his left cheek. It was no more than an inch squared- just enough
skin from which a sample could be cloned and manufactured. Dr.
Gracey had specifically requested that a sample of Timothy’s skin
lesions be taken from their source immediately following his death.
Although it was a legal gray area, Timothy’s contract with the Matthias
Bramble Clinic allowed for such provisions to be made, were one to
read and digest the fine print.
Still, it was better for all involved that it be kept a secret.
Basil Rochefoucauld had been the one to do the primary cutting
of the specimen tissue because Basil had, of course, been the one
person used to getting everything together in time to facilitate the
whole deal; Gracey had been quite happy to receive the specimen
once it had been extracted, but prior to that he wanted no part of the
dirty work to reach his corner of the campus. Thomas Gracey didn’t
need to see where the skin came from, but he did sometimes
investigate his sources, as he had done earlier on this same account.
Not that he didn’t trust Basil- Gracey just wanted to keep everything
under wraps until the necessary time and wasn’t sure if he could
continue to hold Basil’s homosexuality over his head very much longer,
what with the culture being so free about people coming out on this
issue. Gracey had always known that his hold over Rochefoucauld was
weak but still Basil acquiesced to his every demand. In spite of
appearances, Gracey felt he could push Basil, and was always testing
his loyalty to him.
Gracey had sent the sample to the cloning lab as soon as it had
come into his own private facilities. An uneasy look had passed
between the manipulator and the manipulated- a look that told all
concerned that both parties were well aware of what was going on
here between them, and that they both knew it to be wrong. Thomas
Gracey, as always, had made his superficial inquiries about Basil’s
daughter, Katrina, and Basil to his credit suffered him with an
expansive treatise on his only daughter’s collegiate misfortune, which
Gracey had listened to politely and without interruption during the
twenty minutes that Basil had spent talking.
Basil had learned through independent outside sources that
children were Gracey’s soft-spot, and Basil was willing to play up to
that. He knew from his own research involvement that the treatment
of children was high upon Dr. Gracey’s list of priorities, and was to be
one of the primary applications of their new E2D8 formula once it was

236
 237

marketed. Children were ten times more resilient than most adults,
and therefore would take more readily to the treatments. Their skin,
Gracey had often commented, would adhere much better to the E2D8
formula, even though the E2D8 liquid had been designed to work with
all ages of human epidermal matter.
Basil went home soon after and Thomas Gracey spent that night
in his private facilities analyzing the Karacas sample over and over
again, all the while cross-referencing what he found with Timothy’s
medical history as well as the reports from the OR when Karacas
floated on the table.
At seven the next morning, he paged Shelby Dunn and asked
him to report not to his office at eight but rather to the special
processes lab in the basement of the Matthias Bramble Clinic at eight-
thirty.
There Dr. Gracey had Shelby pore over the results of his night’s
work.
Timothy Karacas had died of a mixture of bone and cartilage
cancer. He had some facial abrasions, but those were only bubbles
rippling up to the surface of the lake. The lesions on his skin were
negligible when compared to the illness that suddenly and completely
blackened his intestines. Shelby Dunn knew all of this from reading
his volunteer report; he had brought Timothy’s file home with him the
night that he died, the same night that he’d had that conversation with
Basil about E2D8. More than anything other single contributing factor,
Timothy’s body had been exhausted by its continuous battle with the
cancer that ravaged it and it no longer had the strength to continue its
functions and maintenance. Living had ultimately been what caused
the death of Timothy Karacas.
Since the pallor of Timothy’s skin tone was common amongst the
people that Thomas was in the market to help. His pallid complexion
would someday be the key to marketing the procedure to ill folks who
wanted to take one final stab at preserving their own vanity for as long
as possible. If those people wanted to grow themselves a new face,
Thomas Gracey would then sell them the technology to do so. Basil
saw that he was only one small cog in a giant machine that was now
becoming much larger than the sum of its component parts, but in
removing that piece of skin from Timothy’s cheek he’d provided the
final puzzle piece. Cutting the skin had sealed him inside.
The E2D8 was supposed to allow for more ephemeral
applications, but so far the testing officers were having problems with
both cohesion and dexterity in their case samples. The liquid simply
didn’t work as well as the paste, but the paste still posed several
problems in its basic chemical make-up. There were factors that still
eluded Gracey, no matter how close he was getting to his original

237
 238

visions for the E2D8 formula product. Early on, it was deemed
necessary for them to divide the various applications into separate and
distinct categories so that their individual successes and failures might
be more accurately assuaged.
The Karacas sample, while its magical properties were still
untested, had been brought into none of these individual labs. It was
taken into Dr. Gracey’s own private stockpile and used to alter that
sample’s make-up. From there, the chemical adjustments would be
filtered down to the other sample department as he saw fit. There
were rules, Gracey saw, but there were ways to filter the real work
through and around those rules, in much the same way water will pass
through a sack of marbles.
The E2D8 paste would still be used to cement the cloned skin
pieces together, but understanding Timothy’s genetic make-up would
allow him to broaden his horizons. With this final missing element,
Gracey could see where his original visions might have been a bit
limited. Now he could create new perfect skin without having to clone
it the old fashioned way. He would be able to produce the skin, and
sell it to the highest bidder.
The oncogene gives the virus a rare property: the ability to
quickly and completely convert a normal cell into one with all the
properties of a cancerous cell. This is where Ixxir had resided most of
the time it had been waiting for the proper moment to infect Timothy.
The oncogene is the parent of cancer-causing proteins in all
organisms- and it may well be the key to cancer itself. In that
oncogene was the answer he had been looking for all along- and out of
cancer would new skin be born.

238
 239

SEQUENCES
Melanie could forgive everything except for the memories.
There were little things that had passed between her and
Timothy that could never be relived or reproduced with any other
person. Timothy had a silly side to him that not many people were
allowed to see, but with Melanie he had on occasion given this facet
full reign. Once, when doing the laundry- a rare occasion in and of
itself- Timothy had wrapped her naked body in a flat flannel bed sheet,
straight from the dryer, rolling it around her the way paper towels are
wrapped around a cardboard tube. It had been a cold day outside, she
remembered, and there was frost upon the window panes of their
apartment. The warmth felt good, but there was a deeper warmth
going on as well. When he was done wrapping her up, he hugged her,
looked into her eyes, and then bent her neck forward so that he could
kiss the crown of her head. It was a beautiful moment, more so in
memory.
Lillian was sitting only three rows in front of her, and Melanie
now recognized her from the picture of his parents that Tim had kept
on his bedside table. The picture was always turned away towards the
far wall, but it remained in the bedroom where she could see it while
undressing. She had often wondered about his parents, what they
were like, but Timothy refused to acknowledge them by talking about
them, and so, yet another part of his life was closed off to her. Again.
The time had come for her to speak. Nothing else was left to do.
'Mrs. Karacas? I was a friend of...you could say I knew your
son.'
The older woman turned around to face her. Slowly. 'Yes?'
Melanie felt suddenly flushed. 'You don't know me, but my
name-'
'Your name is Melanie,' Lillian said, finishing her sentence for
her. 'Timothy told me a lot about you. He loved you very much, you
know.'
'I know, Mrs. Karacas. I loved him very much as well.'
'He was very upset that you left him, Melanie, but he said that
he could understand, given the circumstances. He was very sorry for
what had happened. He said that it was all his fault, and while I think
he might have been too hard on himself, I could see his point. And
yours.'
'I regret not being there to comfort your son, Mrs. Karacas,'
Melanie said, blinking away a fresh spate of tears. 'I was very much in
love with Timothy.' And love sometimes has all the symptoms of a
terminal illness, Mrs. Karacas. Did you know that? Of course you do.
The other person eats you alive, piece by piece, consuming the very

239
 240

heart of you until there is absolutely nothing left of you to give. Still,
you love them, and would give them another piece of yourself, gladly,
if only to keep them happy so that you can stay alive. It always wants
more and more to eat, but in the end, the parasite kills its host and
moves on.
That's the truth, isn't it?
'But you were selfish. You worried about what people would
think.'
'I was,' Melanie admitted.
'You were ashamed of him.'
'Is that what Timothy told you? Mrs. Karacas, I loved your son
more deeply than I had ever thought possible. But when Timothy
didn't tell me that he had cancer, I felt as though I'd been shut out of
his life completely. Intentionally. And he had been the person to do
it. I might have stayed if he had been straight with me, but he wasn't.
It was as if I was his entire life one second, and the next second, he
couldn’t be bothered to tell me what was going on in his life. I felt
secluded, and I felt cheated. I loved him and I wanted to be there for
him, but- in his way- he wouldn’t allow that to be.’
‘We didn’t know that he had cancer, either,’ Lillian said, dabbing
her eyes. ‘We knew about what happened before, but not this last
time.’
Melanie’s eyes widened instinctively, stretching to their absolute
limit. There was no precedent for what she had just heard.
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’
Lillian shook her head dolefully. ‘I’m afraid I’m not. There was a
lot of things that Timothy didn’t tell us, because he was afraid to. We
never knew about you, not until after we were called to clean out his
apartment.’
‘But you said he’d told you about-‘
‘It was in a note, sweetie. Never in person. He left a note for
you.’
‘Oh, my god. Mrs. Karacas-‘
‘Call me Lillian, Melanie. We have my son in common.’
‘Alright, Lillian. He didn’t talk about you very much.’
‘I don’t blame him. Not at all. Today they’re burying my boy,
and my husband didn’t want to come. So just stay home, I tell him,
and he does. He’s not the man I married, and I’ve helped Timothy to
pay for my mistakes. In a way, I’m here to ask his forgiveness.’
Melanie put her arm around Timothy’s mother, who shrank back
a little from the touch. ‘I’m sure that he does. I’m sure that he
understood.’
‘Are you sure? You knew him better than I did.’
There are times, Lillian, when I feel like I never knew him at all.

240
 241

There was a cold, stiff corpse lying only ten feet away from
them, and both of them had loved the person inside that shell, each in
their own way.

241
 242

conSEQUENCES
Lillian sat down in her easy chair, next to the one that her husband
had occupied for over thirty years, and unscrewed the metal cap from
a pint bottle of gin that she had found in her husband’s jacket in the
closet.
She had never been very much of a drinker- in fact, she had
never taken more than two consecutive drinks back-to-back in her
entire life- but now she felt like she needed one, just to steady her
hands. She had been through a lot of pain lately, with Timothy’s
illness and passing, and Harold being the way he was- the way he’d
always been, really- wasn’t helping any.
Their life together had been grim, to say the least. Harold had
started hitting her even while they were courting, and after they got
married it only got worse over time. By the time that Timothy was
two years old, she was certain that he would kill her one day. That
was the way of the times, and silence was golden. It was hard for her
to believe that the world had changed so much in only the past thirty
years.
Harold had punched her while she was pregnant with Timothy.
Lillian, when she could be alone with her thoughts, from time to time
wondered if perhaps that blow hadn't brought on some sort of
congenital deformity in Timothy's genealogical make-up. The thought
was a little absurd, but it sometimes woke her up- feeling cold and
hateful- in the middle of the night, with Harold snoozing blissfully in
his ignorance beside her.
Harold had also punched her in the stomach one other time,
causing her to miscarry what could have been Timothy's older brother
or sister. Neither Timothy nor Harold were ever aware of her second
pregnancy. She hadn’t gone to the doctor and when she came upon
the tiny, dried bloody fetus while wiping herself one morning shortly
afterward, she simply folded the toilet paper over, and wiped again,
flushing all of the evidence. These memories had been sublimated
forever, but now they came rising to the surface. She couldn't
remember a time when she had ever really smiled.
As she walked through the house, pacing the upstairs hallway
with a glass of gin in her hands, Lillian began to see a pattern tracing
its way indelibly across the grain of her life. It all came back to
Harold.
There was a second small bedroom upstairs besides Timothy's
old room, and in the years since he went away to college it had been
serving as a storage facility for all the things that were no longer of
use to either one of them but that neither one of them could bear to
part with. Many old Christmas and birthday gifts languished up here,

242
 243

gathering dust year after year and contributing to the feeling of inertia
that came to dwell within any home after a chronic occupancy of
several years. There were skinny, flimsy boxes of sweaters that Lillian
knew she would never wear- but she could never throw them away or
give them to the Salvation Army, because Harold didn't believe in
charity, for his family or anyone else, and he would have had a
veritable fit if he were to find out about it.
On the shelf in the closet, behind a round canister containing
bags of stale caramel and butter popcorn and beneath a box of used
paperback books, was a carton from Jim Cabot's Hobby Shop- still
covered in shards of its original wrapping paper. It had been yet
another one of Harold's attempts to make a man out of his son. The
box contained a 3o.6 hunting rifle with a long sight barrel and a
cylindrical container of shells.
This had been one fight Lillian had won. She had forbidden
Timothy to touch the thing, and contrary to most boys that age,
Timothy didn't even want to go near it. He was afraid of guns, always
had been, and this had grated on Harold's nerves. His boy wasn't a
man.
Harold had looked up once from the can of Olympia beer he had
been drinking in front of the television set and he immediately
registered the fact that she had a shotgun in her hand. It occurred to
him to ask her where she had gotten such a thing when he
remembered having bought the gun for Tim's ninth birthday. He
recognized it, and saw the gleam in her eyes as she wielded it in his
specific direction.
To his knowledge, it had never been fired.
Until now.
Harold Karacas had known Jim Cabot for over fifteen years when
he bought the gun, and Jim- knowing full well what Timothy's
temperament was- had advised him against the purchase. He'd
suggested that perhaps Harold would do better to buy a train set,
maybe, or a couple of model cars. But Harold would not be
persuaded. He'd had his heart set on getting Timothy a gun, and on
taking him hunting the following winter.
And now look where it had gotten him.
His wife's finger had rested uneasily on the trigger. Harold's
eyes passed from her eyes to her trigger hand and back again. The
stock of the gun was propped against her right shoulder, her eyes
lining down the sights on the barrel. If she fires it like that, Harold
thought, she'll break her shoulder with the impact. There was no way
for her to avoid splintering the bones beneath her skin when the gun
discharged itself. Of course, Harold knew he would be dead before
any of this happened.

243
 244

If she had the gun in her hand, Lillian was obviously resolved to
doing whatever it was she had planned to do to him. But why?
Suddenly, his voice came to him, and it sounded meek to his
ears.
'Lillian, put that damn thing down right-'
The sound of the rifle as it discharged cut him off in mid-
sentence. Lillian had prepared herself mentally for the kick of the gun,
and the sound- but what had caught her off-guard was the sight it
brought about.
Harold Karacas may have been a stupid, confused, brute of a
man, but he had still been the father of their son, and she supposed
that she had still loved him, in spite of everything. It had never been
in the cards that she would kill him- here, in the living room of the
house they had shared for more than thirty years. The house where
she had witnessed her husband gut-punching their only child when he
hadn't washed the dishes properly. The house where she'd been
thrown down a flight of stairs for insisting that they spend Christmas
with both her side of the family as well as his. Lillian stopped at the
mantle over the fireplace and screwed two candles into the
candelabra- one for her, and one for Harold. She paused for a
moment, reaching into the drawer beside the fireplace, and retrieved a
third candle- for Timothy. Dipping into a box of wooden matches next
to the candle box, she lit each one of them with a degree of reverence
reserved for the commission of final acts.
Her soul screamed silently as she blew the match out.
The candles burned brightly, flickering their light across the gore
staining the walls in the room. The sticker surrounding the base of the
candelabra was peeled away in thin little strips, and Lillian Karacas
could picture her son's nimble little fingers picking away at it when he
was perhaps six of seven years old. The adhesive backing to the
sticker was blackened with the oils from their hands as they'd handled
it during holiday times down through the years. There was something
permanent and reassuringly constant about such family heirlooms.
They represented a starting place for everyone in the house- a
beginning and an ending- and Lillian treasured any semblance of
stability within the Karacas home.
It was a disparate thought to the others circling swimmingly
through her mind right now, but the image of Timothy's fingers stuck
with her. Before Harold had objected so strongly to the idea Lillian
had wanted Timothy to study playing the piano- an idea shot down
right away. He'd wanted his son to study something that would be a
little better suited towards boys and men than playing the piano.
Lillian could have pushed the issue, but she didn't, and that episode
had been added to the list of sacrifices that she had piled up during

244
 245

the years of their marriage.

Two splinters from Harold's teeth were sitting, rather gleamingly,
in the lap of his tan trousers. The obscene beauty of the scene filled
her with an indignant self-righteousness about what she had just
done- and what she was about to do. She found her glass, hefted the
drink in both her hands and swallowed a bitter mouthful of gin. Lillian
was convinced that she had just done the right thing, but the house
was awfully silent now without Harold's incessant bellowing every five
minutes or so over the football scores on the TV, or the news of
marching demonstrators in Detroit or what the weather was going to
be like the day after tomorrow.
But suddenly, even the silence didn't matter anymore.
Her legs were feeling a trifle unsteady as she walked to her
chair, the one she had occupied for almost twenty years that sat next
to her husband's chair, and let her bottom drop down heavily on the
soft foam cushion on the seat. Some of Harold's arterial spray had
stained the sides of her own chair, and for a blindly panicked moment
she fretted over how she would go about getting the bloodstains out of
the fabric. Laughing quietly to herself, she realized that she was past
such petty catastrophes.
She had originally loaded two cartridges into the barrel of the
rifle- one bullet on each side- and the one beneath the left hammer
had just been spent on Harold. ‘Maybe this is all for the best,’ she said
aloud to the abject emptiness surrounding their vigil, her voice
softening with the effort of speaking. She pulled the rifle around the
long way that that the very tip of the barrel was resting on her
forehead, and digging insistently into the soft flesh directly above the
space between her eyes. She then latched her thumb through the
trigger guard, pulled her feet beneath the chair, and closed her eyes
before firing.

245
 246

EXPECTED
The first encounter was followed by six days of studied silence. To say
studied is to say that Shelby Dunn examined the silence, as the silence
examined him. He analyzed the contents of every lapse of noise or
activity that passed between his ears. Whatever it was that had
targeted him was now waiting for him to let his guard down. He was
certain of this.
And Shelby wasn’t about to give whatever it was that
satisfaction.
The episode was almost as forgotten as it could be under these
weird circumstances- and yes, when it happened, it had caught him off
guard.
He was walking into his office and glanced at the mirror behind
the credenza in the walkway when his reflection stuck his tongue out
at him.
Shelby wanted to run from what he knew was following him.
Could it really be possible that his reflection, or whatever was
possessing it, was inside of his body, instead of just being in his head?
Perish the very thought! And yet this all-pervasive thought was with
him every instant. The voice resounding against the walls inside his
head sounded something like that guy who had died on the table a
week before. What was his name? Why had it been so strange?
Karacas. He was haunting him.
Because of his vanity, Shelby couldn’t help but look at a mirror
whenever he passed one, even though he knew what he would see
when he looked into it. There would be his own reflection, leering at
him, licking its lips blackly and whispering to him in a papery voice:
Every time you pass a mirror, Shelby.
It would be looking right at him. Desiring his skin.
Waiting for you.
The voice was in his head and there was no way
Every time you pass a mirror, Shelby.
For him to stop it and keep his thoughts straight. Could this
unholy Manitou read his thoughts- already being in his head- or could
it only damage him from the depths of the mirror in which it solely
existed?
Every time you look at yourself I’ll be there to smile at you,
Shelby.
And he knew that it would always be there, always waiting for
him.
‘Stop saying my name!’
I’m everywhere, Shelby- and I want your skin.

246
 247

The chiaroscuro in its appearance startled Shelby, and he could

see that its hold on the physical world was getting stronger. Its colors
were brighter and more startling to behold, and the glowy sheen on its
forehead told Shelby that this thing was now blossoming, its features
rippling back and forth as it established itself. If he tried to run,
Shelby would have turned to look behind himself; he would always
have the feeling that it had just been there, peering over his shoulder,
reading his mind and screwing with him. It made him nervous and
frightened, not being able to see his opponent. The rules of this were
very unfair. He had no solid weapons with which to rid himself of this
manifestation- and even if he did, he wouldn’t know how to wield
them. They would each be trying to outwit one another if it was
possible and he couldn’t see any possible way to defeat this
abomination.
He decided that perhaps it was only a mental aberration, some
sort of hallucination, and that it was best for him to just ignore it.
It’ll go away soon enough, he reasoned. It was his only defense.
And so it did- for about three days. There weren’t any sneers
from the mirror behind the credenza at work or in his office, either out
in the public light or here by himself at home. Incipient madness
brings bizarre messages to its bearer, and Shelby had no prior
experience with losing his mind. Aside from the occasional
hallucination- because it couldn’t be anything more complicated and
unexplainable than that- the process of losing one’s mind wasn’t
wholly unpleasant when considered.

The shadow was the next to come.

Shelby had been sitting in the dark, in his apartment, goofing
around with the beam and making little bunny rabbits with his hands
in the beam of a flashlight. But even as Shelby's hands continued
their charade, the ears of the rabbit snaked around its own neck and
began to strangle it.
The gruesome scene continued even as Shelby lowered his own
hands in order to watch what was going on with his shadow. The
mouth of the rabbit twitched in real pain and Shelby felt a dull ache
creeping up his forearm from his hand, almost as though he had
smashed all five of his fingers in the door of a car or something equally
as traumatic.
The shadow as it turned out was weaker- even almost
powerless- in naked sunlight and it couldn't verbalize under such
circumstances. This sunlight would become a crucial point in Shelby's
attempt to exorcise it.
'I will serve you,' it said, willfully giving him a false impression.
The shadow stepped gingerly around Shelby, prancing the way a

247
 248

child might under the same circumstances and gawking at the

extremity of his features. It licked its lips, and a black tongue slid out
of its mouth to wet them. Shelby didn't think the thing could speak-
at least not in any way he would be able to understand- but he wasn't
eager to have that theory tested right away. If it couldn't talk, the
chances were pretty good that it would communicate on a much more
primitive level.
'Can you speak?' Shelby asked.
'Of course I can. Do you know what I am?' the shadow taunted.
'No, I don't.'
'I'm the refracted particles of you reversed and re-assembled
again.'
'I don't believe that you exist,' Shelby said, screwing his eyes
shut.
The shadow grabbed ineffectually at the top of Shelby's head in
order to make him snap up and pay attention to him, but Shelby's
eyes had been glued to it since the moment of its original
manifestation. There was no rational way to explain was he was
witnessing here. His shadow had developed its own personality, and it
didn't much care for its master.
'Are you the same, uh, person, that talked to me before?'
'From the mirror?'
'Yes,' Shelby assented.
'No.'
'Who was that?'
'It's not important. What is important is that it wasn't me. I've
come here to help you, and I know for a fact that you need my help.'
Its words came on a whisper, slithering through the canals of his
ears and into his head, clouding over everything they touched.
'True enough.'
'Why should you trust me?' it said, almost reading his mind.
'Yeah, why?' Shelby now wanted to know.
'Because I'm a part of all this, what's happening to you, and I
know what's going on. The man you see in the mirror is named
Timothy Karacas and he's been dead for quite some time now...'
'Eighteen days,' Shelby said.
'Whatever. He's upset because he can't go back to his own
body, as wracked as it was by the time you guys got through with it.'
'So now he wants mine?'
'You could say that.'
The shadow continued to speak and it seemed to Shelby that its
voice was only now starting to find itself among the torrents of timbre
that could possibly be issued forth from what passed for being its lips.
The natural laws of matter as he knew them didn't apply here, but

248
 249

some basic laws of physics had to approach an explanation of this.

This apparition had to exist in some gray area of the scientific world he
had studied to become a doctor, but Shelby was at a total loss to
explain why the rules were able to bend for the creature that stood
before him now, drawing a little closer and then pulling itself away, as
if it would be fatal for the shadow to touch its namesake. Its neck
curled like a snake when it walked towards him, craning back and
forth, and it looked and felt more dangerous and threatening than he
had originally supposed it to be.
It smiled as if it sensed that it was getting close to its victory.
'Your eyes might deny me, Shelby, but I know that you've
already been visited by another of my kind in the recent past. You
assaulted him and he left you. But the spirits always return to you
whether you want them to or not, and they will always return to you
tenfold worse when they do come back. You're becoming quite a
popular figure in the afterlife, and it's only gotten worse for you after
what you did to your reflection...'
'It was a mis-'
'It doesn't matter,' the shadow hissed calmly, as though it was
now exhaling the smoke from some unseen cigarette. 'I have now
offered my services to you, and I lay that decision at your feet. Your
choice.'
'What if I take it into my mind that I can beat you as well?’
The shadow swelled and rippled, becoming incensed. ‘Bad
move, Shelby. I see that you need a demonstration of what you’re
dealing with.’
‘I don’t think you’ve come here to help me, Shelby sighed to
himself.
‘You may be right.’
‘What are you going to do? Kill me?’
The shadow- as far as Shelby could tell- was shaking its
misshapen head dolefully from side to side. ‘I’m not going to do
anything at all, Shelby.’The shadow’s eyes flashed malevolently. ‘And
you know I won’t even touch you.’
The shadow reared back like a baseball pitcher and threw a tiny
ball of light that looked as if it would smack Shelby in the face, but it
went lower and struck him in the abdomen and the light spread itself
outward.
All at once, blisters began to raise themselves out of the smooth
flesh of Shelby’s forearms. Flashing back and forth from his arms to
where the shadow had been standing only a moment earlier, Shelby
saw that he’d been left alone. A sticky fluid now covered the pads of
his fingertips. After a moment, Shelby realized that it was his own
blood. The flesh bubbled and raised itself up painfully from the

249
 250

surface. The tops of the blisters began to harden and crack open; the
blackened skin was peeling away from the splittings and fissures
across the tops of the blisters themselves, and a thick, gangly white
pus started spilling out.

250
 251

QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM

Shelby was showing his arms to Bob Georgianos in Bob’s apartment.
Bob whistled shallowly as Shelby rolled up his sleeves, and he sucked
in his cheeks as Shelby turned his arms over to show him how
complete the damage was.
‘This happened just yesterday. I couldn’t go to work today, it
was so sore. They crackle when I sleep and I roll over on them, they
bleed like a mother. I’m surprised that they don’t hurt more than they
do.’
‘Me too,’ Bob sighed, shaking his head dolefully from side to
side. The skin on Shelby’s arms reminded him of chicken that had
been left on the grill for too long until the breading had been burned
away and the skin had been charred so badly that its color was the
hue of smoked plastic.
The man standing in Bob’s foyer was visibly shaking, rotating his
visage up towards the ceiling and then back down to the floor. ‘I must
be losing my mind, Bob. Stuff like this isn’t supposed to happen.’
‘It happens a lot more often than you’d think, Shelby.’ Bob put
a light hand on Shelby’s shoulder and led him towards the living room.
‘I’ve seen a man lifted from the place where he stood and vaulted
through a second-story window like he was nothing more than a rag
doll. I saw it happen right in front of me. I saw a woman being split
into several small pieces by demonic possession. None of it will stand
up in court but anyone who’s seen it will testify that they truly believe
in it. A way of looking at this sort of phenomenon is to say that, in
your eyes- what you see, what you’re able to process mentally- is
controlled by your experience. You can’t deal with it, because you
haven’t had to deal with it yet. But it’s there. The truth is always
there, around the corner, just waiting to bite you in the ass. What you
feel now is that bite.’
‘Why me?’
‘That,’ Bob said, shrugging, ‘I can’t answer. Maybe there is a
reason for this, and maybe not. Sometimes it’s arbitrary, who the
spirits choose to fuck with, and other times, it might not have anything
to do with you personally, or your physical location, or your family
line. Was your mother involved with the occult?’
‘My mother was a whore. She worked as a call girl. She got two
hundred and twenty for an hour, three-thirty for an hour and a half,
and four hundred and forty for two hours. Five-fifty for two and a half.
That’s the extent of what I know about her- more than I want to know,
frankly.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. But did she dabble-‘

251
 252

‘Yeah, she dabbled. Wiccan religions, but nothing dark, I don’t

think. Not really. Are you asking me if she sold her soul to the devil?’
‘In a roundabout way, Shelby,’ Bob said, ‘Yes, I am.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, have you ever heard of karmic retribution?’
‘No.’
‘Have you done anything, anything that might be misconstrued
as, well, harmful to others? You don’t need to get personal, and I’m
not asking for details, but have you ever really fucked someone over,
bad?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Shelby said, the image of Timothy
Karacas at the front of his mind, the last of his life dripping out of him.
‘No.’
Bob inhaled slowly. ‘Then I don’t know why. But this is
happening.’
Shelby was emphatic ‘That makes no sense to me. I just want
my old life back, the way it was before an of this started happening to
me.’
‘If you think about it, it really doesn’t make any sense at all. But
it really makes sense when you stop and you really think about it.’
‘You know what gets me,’ Shelby asked rhetorically, ‘is that I
was told that this was only a warning. Things worse than this wait for
me.’
Shelby’s face was haggard and unwashed, and he looked as
though he had not gotten any sleep at all last night. Then again, Bob
didn’t see how anyone could be getting much rest under Shelby’s
recent circumstances.
Shelby was sitting in Bob’s living room now, with a glass of ice
water waiting for him on the coffee table, should Shelby elect to drink
any.
‘This could get a little weird,’ Bob said.
His voice sounded thick and craggy with debris. ‘What do you
mean?’
‘I’ll show you. Did you bring what I wanted you to?’
‘Yeah.’
Shelby pulled a manila envelope out of his jacket pocket and
handed it to Bob, limply, who withdrew three sheets of paper from its
folds. Bob looked them over, turning them over and twisting them
from side to side, taking no more than fifteen seconds to examine
each sheet of paper.
‘Here’s that sample of Timothy’s handwriting, Bob said, laying
out a piece of paper that had obviously been copied from Timothy’s
release form from the Bramble Clinic. The letterhead was evident, and
Shelby had done the photocopying- illegally- himself. It had been the

252
 253

first one to be pulled out of the envelope, and Shelby’s eyes had
followed it from the envelope to Bob’s hand, and now again down onto
the coffee table. He’d violated the ethics code in doing what he had
done, but he was now in a more absolute place where silly thing such
as the ethics code no longer applied to his actions. Shelby was
fighting for his life and his sanity, and neither one of them meant
much without the other. Bob’s finger traced the delicate outline of
Timothy’s signature scrawl.
‘Do you see how his script loops and curls around like that?’
Shelby nodded He was seeing what Bob wanted him to.
‘Your name starts with a K, and so does the name Karacas. K is
a good letter to start with, because it’s one of the letters that lets the
most of your personality through. K is the type of letter that cops pray
for. Your K matches his exactly. I can tell you that right now without
me even taking a closer look at it.’
‘Is it really that evident to you? His signature looks a little like
my left-handed sample, but it doesn’t look anything like my usual
business-sized right-handed sample.’
Bob smiled at him. ‘That’s where I’m getting to.’
‘But these samples weren’t the same.’
Bob nodded. ‘But you weren’t looking for the same things that I
was. You were looking for what’s there on the paper, whereas I was
looking for the forces that impel the pen to leave the kind of mark that
it made.’
’What does that mean?’
Bob affected not to have heard his question and simply pressed
onward with his presentation. He put the second and third sheets of
paper onto the table, each on lying on either side of the first sheet.
‘Now here’s your samples. This one on the left is the sample I
had you make with your left hand, and the right hand is on the right.’
Shelby looked both of them over again, just as he had done
earlier.
He saw no coincidence.
‘I’m not ambidextrous, so I don’t know what that would do.’
‘Not many people are ambidextrous, in proportion to the
remainder of society. But look at the sample you did under hypnosis:
this was done with your left hand. See those loops there, on the
letters K, T, R and D? The other piece of paper is what you did with
your right hand, and it seems to bear no specific relation to the other
samples I’ve gathered here, not even to the writing samples from your
left hand.’
‘What does all this bullshit mean to me?’
Bob wadded up the right-hand sample and tossed it behind the
couch.

253
 254

‘Timothy Karacas was left-handed, my friend. I would wager

that he couldn’t write with his right hand, and now, neither can you.’
Shelby felt the blood draining from his face, but he couldn’t
ignore what Bob was saying. It meant that he wasn’t losing his mind,
but at least insanity was a real thing, a relatively known quantity.
Demonic possession was a whole different proposal. The input his
senses were now registering was wholly accurate and had been
throughout this whole ordeal. None of the shit he’d seen or heard
lately was making any sense to him, and he got a feeling that told him
that this wasn’t going to change anytime soon.
He also got the feeling that the shadow would return.
‘Now that we’ve established what I suspected,’ Bob said, ‘there’s
a few other small things I think we need to go over before long.’
‘Like what?’ Shelby asked. He was still feeling a little stupefied.
‘Follow me,’ Bob said, gesturing for him to go down the hall.
Shelby walked ahead of Bob, uncertain of what he should
expect.
‘Go into the bathroom,’ Bob said.
‘Huh?’
‘Just trust me on this one.’
‘What for?’
Bob smiled wanly. He had been badly scared for some time now
and his usual good spirits were failing him. Just trust me.’
Shelby extended his arm cautiously around the door jamb and
felt for a light switch, all the while trying to avoid looking at the mirror.
'Keep the light off for right now,' Bob told him.
Shelby swallowed hard. 'Is there a mirror in there?'
Bob nodded. 'Yes.'
'Then I don't want to go in there alone.'
'It won't show up if there's other people around. I'm sure of it.'
'Are you positive?'
'It's been my experience that this type is a cowardly sort.'
There was a subtle rattle from above them, but they ignored it.
The two of them stepped from the hallway into the relative
darkness of the bathroom, the feeble light from the hallway spilling
into the john as they talked. 'I just wanted you to see something,'
Bob said.
There was a small night light plugged into the wall socket, the
kind with a light sensor to indicate when it was necessary to ignite
itself.
The night light was on, bathing the bathroom in pink striped
light.
'Do you see that nightlight? Now watch.'
Bob turned on the overhead lights in the bathroom and the night

254
 255

light extinguished itself. He cupped his hand over the sensor, and the
light came on again. He pulled his hand away and the light died again.
'Now, I want to see you to try and do that, the same as I did.'
Shelby swallowed hard and did as he was told. He cupped his
hand and put it over the sensor on the night light. He then closed his
eyes.
When Shelby opened his eyes, the night light was still off.
'Christ,' Shelby muttered. His voice was weak and tremulous.
Bob shook his head in agreement.
'They've definitely taken something from you, Shelby.'
'They want my body, I think. For a safe passage into our world.'
'That's entirely plausible. They might even want your soul.'
Shelby's face went white; he felt the blood rushing in its escape
from his extremities, and his feet went numb. His hands were getting
cold.
His voice was tremulous when he spoke. 'Why aren't they here
now?'
Bob scratched the top of his head, causing his hair to fly in
several different directions. Shelby thought he looked over-tired and
crabby.
'Probably because I'm here. Who knows what they're up to
now?'
'Do you think the two of them are working in conjunction?'
'I don't know, Shelby. They could be, but I doubt it. They could
both be manifestations of the same Para psychological entity. They
could be in cahoots, or maybe they're fighting one another. I don't
know.'
They walked back down the hallway towards the living room.
Shelby sighed. 'I don't know. What should I do next?'
'Talk to him and spell it out. To Timothy, not the other one.
Wait for the reflection and say what you feel. I've never heard of a
contact this specific and direct but Timothy Karacas obviously feels as
if he has some sort of connection with you, so that might afford you
some sort of an advantage. Maybe. Tell him how miserable he's
making you, and ask him to leave. I would advise you to be extremely
polite when you ask.'
'How do I do that?'
'You need to draw him out of hiding, at your time and on your
terms.'
'How do I do that?'
'Have you ever, even as a joke, gotten your palms read?'
'No.'
'Well, a psychic might be able to help you on that score,' Bob
said.

255
 256

'A psychic?'
'They're shysters, but they could go through the motions with
you and just maybe they can breach the reach and get it so you can
talk to him.'
'He might already be gone, Bob.'
Georgianos considered it for a moment. 'I don't think so,
Shelby.'
'Why not?'
'If he was really gone already, then where is your shadow? If
he's really gone, where is your reflection?' Bob pointed to the floor,
where the overhead track lighting should have thrown the shadow cast
by Shelby. 'Do you see anything there indicating that things have
returned to their previous state?' He touched Shelby's arm as lightly
as he could. 'Do you remember these blisters you were showing me?
He's still there.'
There was a moment of silence between the two of them.
‘Do you really think that would work?’ Shelby asked.
‘Well, it’s either that or you’d have to get an exorcist, and I don’t
know of too many of those. The movies gave them a lot of bad
publicity, tons of it, and it ran them out of business.’ He laughed, and
then stopped.
‘Is this some sort of sick joke, Bob?’
Bob’s expression told him that it wasn’t.
Shelby dug into his right front pocket and pulled forth a three-
carat diamond engagement ring- the one he’d taken from Timothy’s
pocket on the day he died. ‘There’s something else. There’s this to
consider.’
‘What is it?’ Bob asked.
‘What does it look like? What’s important is that I stole it from a
dead man- the dead man. I think it’s the ring his girl gave back to
him when she left him, and I think it’s part of what he wants from me.’
‘Christ,’ Bob sighed. ‘You’re fucked. You need to get rid of it.’
‘I need someone to help me, Bob. I need an exorcist.’
‘If it’s all the same to you, Shelby, I’d rather not have anything
more to do with this. I’d like to help you, really I would, but to tell
you the truth, I’m getting really scared. About all of this shit.’
Shelby’s reply was incredulous. ‘Well, so am I!’
‘I’ve been through a lot of shit lately with this sort of thing,’ Bob
said. ‘I’ve seen a lot of shit in my lifetime, and in the time I’ve spent
on the police force, and I know how horribly vengeful these things can
get whenever they’re pushed into a corner. I don’t wanna be there
when and if that happens. I’ll pray for you, Shelby- but that’s about
all that I can do.’

256
 257

COCKSUCKER BLUES
It could be that this was God's way of testing him, the way He tested
Job. Some test. He would feel better about it were that the case if
he'd been passing this test, but he knew he had not. He'd given in to
all that was around him. Was a wife you did not respect at all the
equivalent to festering boils, or was the test then in having him go to
these sort of places and not do these sort of things? Was the test in
turning away?
Courtney had never come to any sort of sound answer on
whether or not God actually controlled people and what they did and
their destinies and all that, or if it was all just a matter of free will,
human folly and making the right mistakes. Certainly, he had made
all the wrong ones.
If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
'Are you done, sir?' asked someone from behind him.
Courtney turned around and saw that the person speaking was a
priest. It was a priest much younger than the one he'd talked to-
about twenty years younger than the other priest, by Courtney's
estimate, and with no immediate cardiac condition here. The priest
had a Bible in his hand and appeared ready to take his post in the
confessional.
'I'm sorry,' Courtney said, tripping all over himself. 'I was just-'
'Waiting to get in, I know, I'm sorry, I just got here- my car
broke down on the way- and confessions don't start until four o'clock
anyway.'
Courtney mind was spinning, and he was a little slow on the
uptake.
'But I just finished talking to someone,' Courtney insisted.
'There's no one been in there, sir. I'm the first shift.'
'But I just saw him,' Courtney said, raising his voice a little. He
was trying hard not to sound crazy. Priests could have a person
locked up, couldn't they? 'He went out that door over there, on the
other end of the stage thing.' He pointed after the direction which he
supposed he’d gone out, even though he hadn't heard a sound. 'Didn't
you see him?'
'That door has been locked since last Christmas, sir. That's
where we keep the tables and benches and the spare pews. We
usually have two extras, you know. Most people don't know that, but
we do. We put them in the back behind the last row, if we need, but
we haven't needed to-'
'Since Christmas,' Courtney finished for him, eyeballing the
priest.
'Yeah, since Christmas,' the priest replied, looking at him.

257
 258

Courtney peeked his head back inside the confession booth with
his feet just outside, and looked through the wrought-iron grating to
where the other priest had been sitting only moments earlier.
Nothing.
Courtney turned around and assumed a more apologetic air.
'Could I talk to you for a moment, Father? It'll take no longer
than a moment, I assure you. I have a question- it's not a confession,
more theoretical than anything else, I suppose, but you've been
schooled in this sort of thing and maybe you can help me, so could
you? Please?'
'I'll certainly try, but please, do sit down.' He gestured toward a
pew in the front row, down off the stage thing, and as the descended,
he offered Courtney his hand. 'I'm Father Samuel Burns,' he said.
'Courtney Randlehaus.' He shook the man's hand and sat down
next to him on the church pew. Father Bernstein struck Courtney as
being a very kindly person who only wanted to be of help to whomever
he could, a guy who truly believed in the righteousness of his faith-
the way Courtney himself had once believed and wanted to believe
again, if he could.
If I could, I would- but I don't know how.
'Now, how can I help you?' Samuel wanted to know.
'Well, I...I already spilled it to the padre in there.' Courtney
again pointed in the direction of the confessional he had just vacated.
'I told you, Mister Randlehaus, there was nobody in there. You
think that maybe you were talking to an empty chair? It can help, you
know.'
'But, I swear, I was talking to someone. He talked back to me.'
Samuel laughed. 'I'm sorry, but I find that very hard to believe.'
'It's the truth. Questions and answers- the whole shot.'
Samuel fixed him with a strange look. 'Do you believe, sir?'
'It depends, I suppose. Believe in what?'
'In what most people would call divine intervention?'
'Possibly,' Courtney said, although he had to admit to himself
that this was a lie on his part. He believed no more in divine
intervention than he did in the bogeyman or in extra-terrestrials.
Which is to say, Courtney didn't believe in it any more than anyone
else, and maybe less.
'Do you think that perhaps the Lord our God had heard your call
and in answering your prayers ministered to you in a physical way?'
In a physical way. 'But usually he would have preferred to have
spoken through somebody, right? I mean, I'm a little ignorant in
these matters, but isn't that usually the way it works with these
things?'
'Usually. But maybe,' Samuel opined, 'just maybe, he couldn't

258
 259

wait for me to get here and opted instead to manifest himself out of
thin air. It sometimes happens, you know. I've seen stranger things.'
'So have I-,' said Courtney with a sigh, and remembered them.
'Maybe God thinks that you're important enough to him to make
an exception. It's in His blessing. Only God knows the answers to
things like this. We are not to say what is and what is not impossible,
you see, as we know nothing of such matters. Which is why He's the
boss.'
'Yes, I suppose that could be true.'
'Having disposed of that, what is it you were seeking to confess?'
'Don't we have to go into the booth first?'
'God is everywhere.'
This God thing is getting to be like a rash, Courtney mused
silently, and within an instant, a wrenching pain in his stomach
shamed him.
‘Alright,' he said. 'I'll level with you. I cheated on my wife.'
'You did? When did this happen?'
'Just last night, before I went home from work.'
'That's an awfully quick turnaround. Has it happened before?'
'Once or twice, not much more often than that.'
You're lying again, Courtney.
'The same person each time?' Samuel asked him.
Courtney paused for thought as to what would be the wisest
thing to say here. The scales tipped toward prudence and he decided
to value that initial response. 'Yes, father, the same person every
time.'
'And do you love this other person?'
Courtney had to think about it, but not for very long. 'No,
Father.'
'You're that sure of it? You must think before you answer me,
now.'
'Absolutely.'
'Well, with it being a physical thing rather than an emotional
one, it might be a little easier to conquer and remedy, don't you
think?'
There was a strain of logic in his words.
‘Perhaps,’ Courtney sighed.

259
 260

LIBER IVONIS
Shelby found three listings for psychics in his area. Only one of them
picked up the phone. His hands were shaking as he pushed the
buttons, and when the other end of the line was picked up, he found it
hard to speak clearly. His tongue felt thick and dry in his mouth, and
his teeth wouldn’t or couldn’t cooperate with him. He felt like he was
falling apart.
‘Hello, this is Rosie.’
‘Hello?’ It didn’t sound like his own voice, in his head.
‘Yes?’ She sounded as though she were getting impatient with
him.
‘I need to book an appointment.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes.’ His forehead felt like a wad of crushed glass.
’Well,' the warm voice coaxed him, 'C'mon down.'
'I might need to make arrangements, beforehand. I don't know.'
'What you say?'
'It probably sounds melodramatic, but I'm afraid that I might
die.'
The laughter on the phone sounded hollow and guttural.
'Booshit!'
'I'm really quite serious.' Shelby could hear this conversation
going on in his head, could feel the words resonating within his skull,
but he didn't dare believe it. Couldn't believe it. This is not
happening.
'I assume that you've got my address?'

In his head, Shelby Dunn knew what the truth was from the very
beginning. The human mind is a frail but capricious instrument, and
even after the scene with the mirror- even after the blisters on his
arms- even after knowing in his head what had been the truth all
along. He was still searching for one person who would tell him that
none of this was happening, that this was all in his imagination, that
his life would return to normal- happy as pie- just as soon as he woke
up.
Which was why he went to see the psychic.
Bob had suggested this as a way of drawing Karacas out, a way
of confronting him, but that was only a last ditch option riding in the
back of his head. Shelby didn't want any sort of confrontation at all.
He only wanted to reach a happy ending.
The medium Shelby had called did business three streets over
from the hospital, so she was relatively easy to locate. To his way of
thinking, as long as there was a possibility that he was possessed,

260
 261

there was no way he could trust his driving. He decided that he would
do it anyway, but he would have to keep himself aware- very aware-
and he have to pull over at the slightest sign of trouble. If there was a
sign.
Rosie had a degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
She was a light-skinned black woman with bristly hair that came down
to her shoulder blades, and she regarded him with a fierce
determination to steer clear of any unnecessary physical contact.
'Hello,' she said, with no sign of pretense.
'Hello. My name is Shelby.'
'I know. We spoke on the phone.'
Upon meeting him, she had touched his hand and declared to
herself that he was already dead- or at least, tainted with death,
marked for the Big Exit.
Rosie touched his arm. 'Please- sit down. You look a mess.'
'I feel a mess.'
Rosie smiled warmly. 'Tell me what the problem is.'
'Well, it's hard to say- hard to say without you thinking I'm-'
Rosie held up a hand to forestall him. 'I'm sure I've heard
worse.'
'Okay,' Shelby said, beginning again and drawing in a deep
breath. 'A few days ago, I...I was...I think I was attacked.'
'You think you were attacked?'
'Well, something happened, and I'm not sure how to refer to it.
Yes, I was attacked. I was attacked by the ghost of a man who died
on the operating table when I was present. I...did things, I made sure
that he never left the OR alive, and I think he knows this. This man
was terminal anyway, but I think he knows what I did. Who knows?
Maybe he did have some hope, some will to live, but I didn't really see
it at the time. Now, I wish I had. Every time I pass a mirror, I'm
afraid I'll see the same thing, the same hand reaching out for me. And
every time it reaches, I can feel it getting closer. Closer to...closer to
me.'
Her hand covered his in sympathy. ‘Is it really that bad?'
'I'm sorry, I don't meant to cry on your shoulder-'
'It's okay.'
'Is it? Then I can tell you that it's even worse than I described.'
On a table, he saw several unopened packs of Tarot cards. He
was passingly familiar with them because an old girlfriend had once
tried to turn him on to some New Age astrological garbage. On a
bookshelf in the foyer there were several tomes on necromancy and
astrology and the art of the Tarot, such as The Encyclopedia of Tarot,
Volumes One and Two, and the Tarot Classic translation edition that

261
 262

had been written and then signed by Ralph Carrolton, he being a

popular author in these circles.
Rosie now pulled out a deck of sealed cards and began to
ceremoniously shuffle them. Then, she handed the cards to Shelby for
him to shuffle. When he was done, she started to arrange the cards
on the table between the two of them. The cards formed a large letter
H, with one side shorter than the other.
Of the regular Tarot, he saw packages of Aquarian, Cagliostro
and Tavaglione. Of the facsimile line, there was Bologna
Gumppenberg and Vandenborre Bacchus. The names themselves
were familiar to him, but that didn't mean that they actually meant
anything to him. The other Tarot lines were represented by Belline
Grand and Ravenswoode, and the Cartomancy line had Belline Oracle,
Mah-Jongg, I Ching and the Secret Dakini Oracle, which were the type
of cards that his girlfriend had tried to use to give him a reading.
Shelby hadn't wanted to concentrate on the cards while he was
shuffling them, and the girl, Sandra was her name, had gotten upset
with him for sabotaging her readings. Sandra wanted to know if the
two of them- meaning Shelby and Sandra- were going to get married
before the end of the year. He had given her the answer to that
question without having to consult the cards in front of them at all.
But that was all a joke that belonged to a distant past Shelby
could no longer feel any sort of connection with. The past three weeks
had changed him drastically, and it was too soon for him to tell if it
had been for the better or for the worse. Time would tell on that
one...if he lived long enough to gauge the parameters of his success.
Rosie now laid out the Tarot cards- taken from a standard deck-
on the red vinyl-lined table between the two of them; Shelby had
shuffled the cards as sincerely as he could, and had given every ounce
of his being over to the task of concentrating on the questions at hand.
He wanted to show respect for the process of the Tarot, even if he
wasn't sure he believed in it. He wanted to do everything according to
Hoyle to ensure that the results were as accurate as they could
possible be in these bizarre circumstances. 'I know what it's like to be
dead,' Shelby muttered, to the air more than to the medium, or even
to himself.
The standard ten-card H design began with the first card crossed
beneath the second card, which was surrounded by the third card to
the north, the fourth card to the east, the fifth card to the south and
the sixth card to the west. There was a reason that it was this way-
Shelby had heard it once and forgot- and now he wanted to remember
what it was and couldn't. Shelby thought about asking her the
reasons for this particular ten-card layout, being set up the way it was
before she got into his reading, but even now it seemed to him as

262
 263

though she was concentrating heavily and he didn't want to disturb her
or make her angry in any way; he wanted answers, damn it- and he
wanted the real truth...no matter how horrible it could possibly be.
Rosie flipped the first card over. It was the card of Death, but
Shelby had somehow known that this card would emerge before any
others. That was the only card that made sense in this instance.
'The first card as Death is not always bad,' Rosie said, trying to
calm his shivers. 'There's an inverse meaning to the cards that will
become clear to you and me when the full cycle is revealed to us.'
The second card was Death as well.
But this was impossible. Wasn't it? How could such a thing
happen? Was it even mathematically and geometrically possible that a
bogus deck had been used for his reading today or could someone
have been asleep at the wheel on the printing press when this
particular deck was rolling through? The psychic glanced up at Shelby
and met his eyes. Shelby gave a nod that told the gypsy that he felt
willing to take his chances with the deck they were already using.
Rosie shrugged ineffectually and turned over the third card in the
series. It was Death again.
'This isn't happening!' Shelby screeched. 'I swear it's not!'
He had needed to bring with himself something personal of
Timothy's, and he had been able to do that. In the dead man's
pockets, Shelby had found a three-carat diamond engagement ring
that was just a little too tight for Shelby to be able to wear it on his
pinkie. He had simply put the ring into his pocket and forgotten all
about it until he had seen it on his dresser that morning after getting
out of the shower. How it glistened in the sunlight at that hour of the
day! The ring had felt warm to the touch when he'd palmed it on his
way out the door, uncertain of why he was taking the ring with him
but even more certain of the true depth of its purpose to him today.
There was something to that ring that meant-
'It means that he wants the ring back,' Shelby sighed to himself.
'What?'
'Nothing. Go on with it.'
'Are you sure?' she asked.
'I guess so.'
Rosie had been honest with Shelby and told him that there really
was nothing she could do to combat the possession- he alone might or
might not have the power within him necessary to drive his demons
out. He was feeling worn out enough as it was without hearing this
sort of lackey schmear.
He'd gotten a shiver when she had said, 'Strong emotion is far
more conducive to spiritual contact of this sort than the usual rote of
metaphysical proximity. Electrical storms help to conduct dead souls.

263
 264

It's a known fact. The transfer you've been speaking of so much

tonight seems to have been almost instantaneous, and that factor
alone ranks it as being an unusual set of circumstances. Souls for a
long time have been regarded as being nothing more than carefully
encrypted and encoded electronic pulsations in the biosphere. What
that means to people like you and me is anyone's guess, but I would
suggest to you that if it was able to find a doorway into this world and
into your life, then you must be able to find that same door or another
one like it to send them back to wherever it is that they belong. You
have to think of their feelings as well. That's why they're here with
you now. Because they're not at peace, either. That's why this is
happening to you. I'm sure that they're quite haunted, just like you.'

264
 265

FOOTNOTE
Bob Georgianos had come home late from work on Tuesday. Not that
there was a preponderance of ghosts in the town of Drury, but there
had been a murder over the weekend, and in a town with a population
count of less than ten thousand people, that was a big deal. The force
had needed each one of their detectives putting in extra man-hours for
at least the first week or so, until public furor abated and died down a
bit.
The man who had been killed was named Chester Robinson, an
itinerant farmer who had lived his entire life on the unincorporated
northern side of Drury. He had been found with his throat slashed
from one side to the other, and so far it looked as though one of his
farm hands, Jethro Lucas, had done it with a scythe or a machete in
the barn. But the bloodstains on the machete couldn’t be properly
analyzed, seeing as it had been Chester’s weapon of choice when
slaughtering animals in season.
Bob locked the dead bolt on the door of his apartment and
dropped his keys into a dish on the coffee table in front of the
television set that he had put aside specifically for this purpose. He
was a relatively organized man, but he did have a devil of a time
locating his keys in the morning, and the dish- which his mother had
given him and Sophie, as a part of their wedding present- solved the
problem of finding his keys in the morning.
He and Sophie had been married in 1975, at the end of July.
They had divorced in 1987 and now he lived alone. It was the life he
preferred, but he arrived at this preference only after getting used to
it, slowly, over a period of time that frequently saw him depressed and
moody.
His last girlfriend, Cherie, had been pressuring him off and on
that they should start living together, and that unheeded pressure-
along with a host of other problems, such as her periodic and habitual
cocaine binges- had brought about the end of their short-lived
relationship.
In the end Bob hadn't been sure if they could work things out,
but her last binge- disappearing for three days and sleeping with an
ex-boyfriend- a man who had been supplying her with coke- had been
the final straw for him. It had taken a feather to break Bob's back, but
once he'd made up his mind, it was over for them.
Bob slid open the patio door window to let it some fresh air. The
apartment had taken on a rotten, musty odor as of late- a cloying
scent that lay somewhere between freshly-baked croissants and moldy
bread that seemed to permeate the carpeting in each one of his four
rooms. The screen on the patio window had been ripped since the

265
 266

summer before, and so opening the window meant that he was almost
guaranteed to be spending his evening fighting off the flies and
mosquitoes that collected in his apartment whenever the weather was
nice. What the hell. Nightfall was coming on, and the colors in the
distance melted into one another as the sun disappeared behind the
apartment building next to his. Bob wished momentarily that he was
still living in the mountains, in the same place he had right after his
divorce, because then there would be no other buildings to destroy his
enjoyment of the sunset. Such was his life.
He stepped into the kitchen and turned on the light. Before the
last of the fluorescent tubes had stopped flickering, he'd felt a
presence in the apartment with him, and it made the stubble on the
back of his neck stand straight up. It was something like latent
electrical currents.
Bob couldn't see what was happening, but he felt a force of wind
or some other current of air being swirled around his body, especially
his lower extremities. The muscles in his calves were being squeezed.
His legs were brought out from under him and he was bundled
up in a fetal position, and he was then being carried out towards the
balcony.
And the empty sky that lay beyond the railing.
Georgianos wriggled free from the binds he couldn't see and
landed with a thud on the cement flooring of the balcony. His head
had slammed harshly with the floor and he was still seeing stars when
the creature stepped from the shadows into the light where Bob could
see it.
What he saw defied living description, save to say that Bob now
knew where the royal sculptors of old had gotten their ideas when they
set about carving gargoyles for the parapets surrounding the castle. It
was no longer a shadow. It was no longer interested in fucking
around.
Ixxir had delivered the nightmares, just as it'd promised.
The demon stomped on Bob's throat with malice. For a ghost, it
had carried quite a lot of weight behind his assault on the physical
world.
'And that's for calling me a coward.'
The whirlwind began again and this time Bob knew he wasn't
going to get away from it. The railing of the balcony drew ever closer
to him, and he knew now that he was powerless to arrest his
impending descent.
Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo of you.
When it was over and he landed, sixty feet below his point of
origin, Bob Georgianos had landed on his head with a wet-sounding
splat.

266
 267

Five stories above this grim scene, Ixxir hooted with its grim
victory, pumping its fist high into the air and woofing like a dog.

Later, as Harris Robinson was looking over Bob's apartment,

searching for any hint of what might have happened the night before,
Harris was confident that Bob hadn't committed suicide. About this he
was as sure as a co-worker can be under such unreasonable
circumstances.
No one seemed too concerned that something had taken his life
away.
Harris walked around the living room with his hands tucked
snugly into the folds of his raincoat while the homicide dicks scurried
around doing their job of gathering evidence. What evidence there
was, there wasn't much of. There were no signs of any struggle-
ruling out the assertion of there having been a second party involved
in the death.
Bob had landed head-first on the pavement below his living
room window at an angle that had driven his head upwards into the
hollow between his shoulders. He still had his wallet in the back
pocket of his jeans and that was how he had been identified.
Harris hadn't been intimately involved with Bob Georgianos in
the way he had sometimes seen partners get but he had cared for the
man and felt his passing as deeply as he felt that of any other fellow
human being.
Being a cop didn't make it any easier to care for other people.
He'd been partnered with a lot of people over his seven years in
law enforcement, and he'd liked some of them better than others, but
he had liked Bob Georgianos the most, and for reasons he couldn't
quite spell out, even to himself. They never talked about personal
matters- he had been surprised when the subsequent police report
mentioned an ex-wife, because Harris had always assumed that Bob
had never been married. The report also neglected to mention the
bizarre animal tracks on the rug.

267
 268

HOME-BOUND
Melanie only had a couple of minutes in which to get what she needed
from her office at Quillen, Timmendeguas, and get back out on the
road again. She had a preliminary hearing for a client who resided out
in Venison Attic who had gotten himself a D.U.I. while driving through
Andover Township- meaning that the hearing would be held in the
Andover Courthouse in Drury- over half an hour away from where she
was right now and the hearing was in exactly thirty-five minutes.
She'd gotten up late with the alarm, hitting the snooze button
six or seven times before arising and then running slapdash through
her morning make-up routine. She should have gotten the papers she
needed the night before, but she'd forgotten. She had a lot on her
mind lately.
As she rifled through her desk, looking for the court summons
for her client, Melanie happened to look up and saw the most gorgeous
man she'd ever seen in her life staring directly, unashamedly, at her.
His hair looked dirty, but somehow that didn't seem to matter right
now. She was getting wet, truly wet, for the first time in a long time.
Since Timothy.
She was at an immediate loss for words. 'Can I help you?'
'I don't know. Can you?'
The man didn't move, he just stood in the doorway with his
hands locked on the upper portion of the frame, over his head. The
black trench coat he wore hung loosely upon his frame, as if he had
shrunken considerably since purchasing it. Again, none of this
mattered.
'I'm very busy, sir; perhaps I can refer you to someone-'
'I think you're the person I need to talk to.'
She didn't know what to say. 'Did someone refer you to me?'
Her curiosity piqued, she had forgotten all about Allen Sanders and his
D.U.I. in Andover Township. Now she wanted to know this guy's story.
'Not really,' the man said. 'But is was important that I find you.'
'Are you in some sort of legal trouble? A D.U.I., perhaps?'
The man raised his eyebrows as if he felt he'd been slighted.
'Meaning no offense, sir,' Melanie amended.
'None taken. No, I'm not in trouble, but someone else is.'
'Are you here to secure legal counsel on behalf of someone else?'
'No, I'm not.'
She was getting exasperated with this line of questioning. 'Then
I'd appreciate it if you tell me just what you are doing here in my
office?'
Joshua Tanner then snickered to himself and coughed into his
fist.

268
 269

'There are many reasons why I'm here, Melanie, and I'm not
sure that you would understand any of them at all. Sometimes, even
I don't. I just go where the wind tells me to go. It's an ancient
method of travel, but it survives for a very good reason. And there's
no point in resisting the wind. Therein lies the discipline. All I can tell
you was that I was hired to relay a message to you from someone
very far away, Melanie.'
Her name struck her like a slap in the face. There was
something very wrong about this situation, and she now wanted to call
security on this son of a bitch. 'Wait- how do you know my name?'
'The message is: I love you, Cluck-Cluck.'

Melanie stood on her mother's doorstep, afraid to ring the bell.

She hated having to be back here and yet it was a creature comfort to
tromp around on familiar familial terrain. It was good to see that the
flower beds were growing as they should. It was good to see
something normal.
The event of yesterday morning had jarred her so much that she
had needed to call an associate to cover for her with Allen Sanders'
D.U.I. hearing. Her nerves were so badly jangled that- after her
obligations for the day had been delegated- Melanie then went straight
back home and cowered behind locked doors, not opening those doors
for anyone, fearful that she was losing her mind in light of Tim's
passing away. Driving home had been a frightful experience for her,
with each passing vehicle representing to her the sort of happy, sloppy
and utterly careless death that happened to some people- the blind
Minotaur of chance. To die the way that Timothy had died, though- it
troubled her to think about it, because it wasn't random. He had been
specifically selected for death.
The loss of a someone so close to you could sometimes bring on
strange hallucinations, Melanie knew, but what happened to her the
day before had been no hallucination- she was sure of that much.
After that weird man had turned around and left, and when Melanie
had recovered herself sufficiently to move to where he'd been
standing, she could feel the sweat that his fingertips had left on the
doorjamb by running her own fingers over the wood on the door
frame. He had been there, and he had said what he said, which was a
phrasing only she and Timothy- sweet, dead Timothy- had used
between one another. There was no way that dear Timothy would
have told anyone about that, because the joke had been one made in
reference to his timid manner- the Cluck-Cluck being, of course, the
sound that a chicken makes. It was affectionate but cruel, and the art
of cruelty- it now seemed- had been the cornerstone of their whole

269
 270

relationship; every insult between them was borne out of dread

intimacy.
To hear of Timothy like this was the same as having him around,
and that brought on a whole new set of feelings that Melanie didn't
want to deal with right now. Right now was a time for panic. Right
now was a good time to go stark raving mad, leaving any hope for
recovery behind. There was no way she could go back to work-
tomorrow or any other day- and sit day after day in the office where
she had talked to whomever had spoken to her; there was no way she
could consider it. Things like this didn't happen to normal people- they
happened to those who were haunted.
What could she say? If she were to say exactly what was on her
mind, her mother would think that she was crazy. But her mother had
been the only person she could think of to talk about what had
happened to her.
Perhaps the distance she felt there had helped Melanie to prop
open the door of common experience. 'Mom? Do you believe in
ghosts?'
Her mother's eyes fluttered, as if Melanie had made a joke. 'You
are kidding me, right? That's not why you came over, is it?'
Camille's daughter bowed her head. 'It is.'
The expression of concern on her mother's face surprised her
utterly. Her mother's hand- absent twenty years from the skin of her
child- came fluttering home to roost upon the back of Melanie's hand;
it felt good.
'What on earth happened to you?'
'I don't know if I'm ready to tell you, or anyone else.'
'Does it have anything to do with that boy who died?'
'I think I've heard something from Timothy.'
'I tell you what, honey. You're just stressed out, and that's
really okay for you, now. Now is the time to feel your pain, because
this is this only time that God will give you to get over what has
happened to you. I'll take you to my own doctor tomorrow during
your lunch hour and he'll prescribe something that will make most of
the pain go away.'
'I don't want that.'
Her mother's hand snatched back like a bony, feathered
appendage.
'Then what do you want?'
'I don't know. A little compassion, maybe?'
Camille regarded her daughter coolly. 'I'm doing what I can to
keep your relative state of mind an active part of your treatment. If
you can't treat the cause you can't cure the problem, Melanie, now can
you?'

270
 271

'I want to know why all this is happening. I...owe Timothy,

Mom. I owe him a lot. I was talking to his mother at the funeral, and
it all makes sense. I was all he had, and he clung to me. Of course he
was afraid I would leave. In his family, you had to cover up your
weakness in order to survive. It must have been like hiding
underneath a rock while some huge predatory bird flapped overhead,
looking for the injured as they ran behind the pack.'
A lot like it was in our family- huh, Mom?
'What's the point to all of this?' Camille asked.
'I need to find out why this is happening.'
'And you're coming to me?' Camille asked incredulously.
'I don't know where else I can go,' Melanie said. 'I'm coming to
you because this is where I wound up coming, after driving around
hour after hour with no destination in mind, after I decided to leave
my apartment. I don't know if I can go back. I think it's haunted, or
I'm haunted.'
'You should go back home and confront this. You'll come out
stronger for it. I guarantee it. You'll be alright. I'm sure of it.'
Melanie's mouth dropped open. She literally could not believe
what she was hearing. She didn't want to go back, knew that she
couldn't go back. But in her heart of hearts, she knew her mother was
right.

271
 272

A BLOODY MARY, WITH LOTS OF ICE

There was another corpse found that week, only it was more than
seventy miles to the west of where all this other extraneous activity
was taking place. In the Seggausset Woods, which was located just
off of the turnpike leading into Pastille, the decapitated remains of
Mary Antoinette LaRochelle were stumbled upon by the proverbial
jogger.
The Seggausset Woods were renowned for their twisting bike
paths, and the joggers liked to use them, rain or shine. Joggers were
a masochistic bunch in that sense, and the old joke proved to be
legitimate: ‘You show me a jogger- and I’ll show you a skinny person
with a thing for pain.’
Claudia Louis had only recently taken up jogging, wanting to lose
weight for a friend’s wedding in July, and she had heard about the
trails of Seggausset in conversation from a few friends at work. She
went on Tuesday, the seventh, and she developed a cramp in her calf,
and so she dropped out, just shy of a half-mile. Claudia cried out and
tried again and again to rouse herself to the task, but it became
painfully apparent to her that she wasn't going to be able to jog
anywhere- until she rested her leg.
So she came back on Thursday, the ninth, and her jog was a
little more successful. She was still experiencing quite a bit of pain,
despite having performed an extra set of warm-ups before starting
out, but she completed her goal of three miles. She knew that
because she had a tiny odometer that she attached to her ankle that
counted the number of times her foot hit the ground. Claudia had
accidentally worn the thing to work one day- she was a dental
hygienist- and left it on just as a lark, and she was pleasantly
surprised to learn that she'd walked a little over five miles in the
course of her normal work day. That was cool, she thought, musing
upon it, but it wouldn't help her lose weight, now would it? Of course
not. So she came back on Friday to jog some more.
That was when she found the body.
The trails were all divided up into directional main routes, and
they were all christened after the first five U.S. presidents. And so
named, the George Washington trail was deemed justifiably to be an
easy trail among the hard-core jogger nuts. 'Pussy,' as one of them
had once said.
The headless corpse of Ms. LaRochelle was found on the pussy
trail.
As soon as she caught her breath and realized what she had
found, Claudia raced back to the state-run log house, where there
were two sets of bathrooms, mens and ladies, as well as a telephone.

272
 273

Claudia had even gone so far as to pump a quarter into the phone
before she realized that emergency police calls were free. Of course,
one department led into yet another department, and nobody seemed
able to handle the call in an official capacity until an officer came on
the line and demanded to know her name. Claudia told him, pausing
surreptitiously for breath, and then she told him precisely where she'd
seen the body.
The cops arrived close to fifteen or twenty minutes later.
The head of the girl's corpse was nearly severed from the main
torso cavity, but not quite all the way. Whoever had done this had
done quite a sloppy job of it, not good at all, and the evidence
betrayed in the blood spill showed that the woman- it was undoubtedly
a woman- had been killed elsewhere and then dropped off here, most
likely from a fast-moving car on north Clout Street, which curved to an
embankment directly overhead. Before the guard rail had gone up in
the late sixties, anyone who lost their brakes on Clout Street's
infamous Deadman's curve- it was quite a notorious locale by this
time- usually wound up in a twisted and flaming heap of scraped auto-
metal on approximately this very same spot.
The dirt itself seemed to be imbued with violent death.
Only twenty percent of the body's total blood capacity remained,
and her limbs were still bound behind her back. The dog-rope that
had been used to tie her wrists together had been applied after the
woman had died, because there was no sign of scuffle, or even of a
loss of blood circulation in her hands. What blood was left in her body
settled in the anterior chest wall, pooled in the cavity where her lungs
and heart should have been. It was clearly the work of a sadistic
butcher.
A sadistic butcher who thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing.
The woman's genitalia had been completely removed- in fact,
some of the boys from the mobile pathology unit had just now found a
sandwich bag located about sixty feet to the east that contained
something that looked to be the woman's Fallopian tubes. As it was
now shaping up, her entire sexual area had been mutilated. Nothing
was where it should have been, and many of her components were
totally unaccounted for. The vagus, meaning the entirety of the
vaginal lips as well as the fleshy innards, were gone; the rectum had
been slit straight up the back, to the right of the spinal cord, and such
work must have required- among many psychological requisites- a
late-model Davis-Perlemutter bone saw.
The woman's breasts had been removed in much the same
fashion.
And the way it looked from the tissue samples they were taking
of the woman, their perpetrator was likely to be a secretor as well.

273
 274

He'd left them a ribbon-like liquescent substance in the woman's

mouth as a clue.
Judias Allan Hackney, the local M.E., was rather unused to this
sort of blatant debauchery but kept his wits about him nonetheless,
made a note to one of his assistants to check the sales of all such bone
saws within the state in the past three years. He would also want a
listing of all medical school applications in the same period of time.
Hackney was willing to bet quite a lot that this guy had only recently
acquired this knowledge, searching to satisfy a lifelong itch, and was
now very eager- and even somewhat impatient- to put such
knowledge to good use.

Nona and Courtney were watching TV a few nights later, and the
heat of his moment had passed; he felt a little healthier, a little closer
to reality. His arm was around her, and Courtney felt- not without
reason- that they were enjoying a bit of a resuscitation in their
relationship and their feelings for one another. Things were still tense,
but it was slowly fading away underneath the ashes of what they now
threw upon it.
It was a bittersweet time; he knew that the immediate future
would have a great bearing on their time together. The news came on
and they turned it off after the weather, since neither one of them
cared at all for sports. Courtney wondered if Nona had noticed the
extra attention he was paying to her tonight- and of course she had
noticed- and if she truly suspected the reasons why he was being so
attentive to her now.
He'd instructed Kelly that he would not contact him for a period
of time. He said that he understood Courtney's need for distance-
sensing his embarrassment and crippling shame over what had
happened the night before- but said that they needed to keep in
contact with one another.
Courtney signed and quietly told Kelly that he would let him
know.
It was funny how, now that he had strayed, even the most petty
and relatively insignificant things that passed between himself and his
wife stood out to greet him. The way Nona would cuddle next to him,
her hand casually stroking his thigh, not with even the most remotely
sexual of intentions; the candy dish that rested upon the top of the
television set which had been a wedding gift from some friend of
Nona's that she'd long since lost contact with; the rows of book
shelves they had made together in the garage the winter they had first
moved into this house, the ones they'd made using their own ideas
after chucking the blueprints he'd bought himself at the hardware
store on Woodland street downtown.

274
 275

Every individual nook and cranny of the house held its own
pocket of memory and association. One could not simply remove one
part of it and expect the remaining pieces to flow continuously in the
same line; each piece was necessary to the others in picturing a puzzle
of two lives lived together for such a long time that any time that
passed before it now seemed trivial, and bare.
Taking the two bowls that had held the ice cream they had eaten
after dinner, Courtney got up and padded his way into the kitchen.
Stopping at the metal carpet-liners they'd installed less than two years
ago, he turned to his right and felt for where he knew the wall switch
for the overhead light would be. After he turned it on- which he really
didn't need to do, he knew the lay-out of the house so well- he
stepped up to the sink and deposited the bowls there, taking care to
then rinse the bowls with the hose-sprayer and cleaning any residual
chocolate from the ceramic before placing them in the dish drainer so
that they could dry. Courtney then turned around quietly and, with his
hands resting behind his back on the lip of the sink, surveyed the
kitchen.
There were a million little memories all crying out to be
numbered and inventoried, each one trying to scream louder than the
others for his most immediate attention. Nona had bought a small
wooden-framed shelving unit that was comprised of tiny little
compartments; Courtney supposed, quite rightly, when she first
brought it home that its original use was to store some sort of
miniature typing elements like block-letters for newspaper print or
some such article. Nona and Courtney had then taken care and
patience to stock this garbage-picked shadowbox with only pieces that
deserved to be there, and after a while, it slowly developed the status
of a coat-of-arms for their union. There were tiny bits and pieces here
and there that would appear to be largely inconsequential to the naked
eye, but it wasn't really that way at all.
Each formed a link in a chain, even if at times that chain was
merely indicative of the chronology involved in their relationship, that
marked only the passage of time and not specific events, per se, The
chain, Courtney now saw clearly as winding counterclockwise inward
from the outside, the most recent acquisitions of course holding
mantle in the middle of the block. The first few items they purchased
for it- a miniaturized tea kettle, a thimble from the state of Kentucky,
a thumbnail-sized Bible- all seemed arbitrary at first, but after a while
a pattern began to emerge, and Courtney saw that Nona had noticed it
too. Courtney had once wondered if by filling the shelf that would
signal the end of their marriage, but of course, there are always more
shelves to fill. Any dolt knows that. If he left her, he would forfeit
this. This and so much more. He would sacrifice it forever.

275
 276

I'm starting to scare myself. How much deeper do I have to go?

No; he would not do that. He might continue to fool around with
Kelly, but that would run its course, he hoped. There might be other
women, but that was healthy as far as he was concerned. But Nona
must never know of his actions in this area. She was beginning to
trust him as implicitly as she once had in the early years of their
marriage and he didn't want to blow that; it was in the interest of self-
preservation more than anything else. Every marriage has its tiny
little secrets, tiny moments of attrition that each partner kept from the
other. It might not be the most honest thing in the world but that was
the way it worked. Courtney was starting to learn the tricks to
keeping this thing moving, and the more tricks one knew, the easier it
was.
But, of course, such shadowboxes are a dime a dozen.
And so are the memories that go with them.

276
 277

IN THE HALLWAY
Shelby Dunn had taken to drinking beyond his usual tolerance in order
to help him sleep better. Most nights since this thing had started
happening, he stayed at home with a bottle of brown whiskey, but
when an old friend of his from school was leaving the hospital to
transfer to a new facility upstate, Shelby found that he couldn’t pass
up the opportunity to be out in public with other people- normal
people- even for a few hours. The demons weren’t likely to bring
themselves about in public, and he would have needed to take on the
fluid anyway, whether he was at home awaiting and dreading the fall
of night while clutching a small bottle of Jack Daniel's, or perhaps out
in a bar somewhere, sipping empty-headedly at a stale glass of flat
lager, completely out of touch with the waning sunlight filtering in
through the windows from outside. It would start to get dark later
outside than before now in a couple of weeks and that would make the
night longer- and darker.
And infinitely more dangerous.
He'd been very careful to avoid looking at any of the mirrors
when he used the bathroom in the restaurant. There had been no
problems in the past few days, and he wanted to keep it that way. If
Timothy and the other one wanted to go, then Shelby wanted them to
stay gone. Shelby was still needing help to go to sleep, but once he
was asleep his dreams had allowed him a restful slumber, for the most
part; only one nightmare had haunted him in the past week or so. It
had been pretty much the same as all the others- he had been running
for his life over uncertain terrain, making no ground as Timothy
Karacas and another blurry animal-like thing scampered after him on
stunted legs that moved faster than his own.
It would be better if he didn't think about such things.
Perajemo's was a local college hang-out that some of the
younger interns had turned them on to, and now that the interns were
gone they'd claimed the place as their own. The main crowd- Cecil,
Bebe, Maria and Shelby, with old Basil tagging along from time to
time- had been coming here for almost five years. Lately their
entourage had fallen away- Maria was now engaged to Robert
Holbrook from the hospital's X-ray staff and Bebe had just had her
second child- but tonight they had rallied together and made it there
en masse. There was a spirit in the air that Shelby hadn't felt for a
long time; a spirit of camaraderie, a spirit of good-feeling that
pervaded every passage of his flesh. These were people he had
something in common with- people who had been through the same
training and procedures he had surrounded his life with; it was good to
be with people who had shared at least a part of his daily life, even if

277
 278

they weren't going through exactly the same things he was going
through right then. It gave him a sense of belonging and place.
He didn't yet know about Bob's death.
After his third glass of beer, Shelby felt his pain leaving him, bit
by bit over the course of the next several drinks. Each pitcher of beer
came hard on the heels of the last, as was their style whenever they
went out as a group, and the evening had taken on a blurred sense of
nostalgia. Shelby would have given anything to take away the last
couple of weeks from his life, but even that thought faded away as the
night wore on. Maria left at around eleven o'clock, and Shelby now
dreaded the inevitable task of going home to be alone with his
thoughts in the dark.
He drove in silence, once he'd gone through the ritualistic good-
byes with the ones who stayed as late as he did, meaning Cecil and
Bebe, who were always the last ones to leave any party, whether it
was in public or in private. He envied them their carefree attitudes
and lifestyles.
He felt a nervous trepidation as he approached the building
where he lived. He was almost convinced that the building was
somehow a central figure in the haunting he'd experiences as of late.
Was the building an antenna of sorts, conducing Timothy's spirit into
his apartment and into his life, day after day? If that was possible,
Shelby reasoned, it would also be possible that the current could be
temporarily interrupted or silenced altogether. And that thought, as
remote as it was, gave him comfort and hope and he stepped onto the
elevator and began his ascent.
The elevator gave a lurch as he depressed the button for his
floor and the doors shut in front of him. For a split second, Shelby felt
sure that they would fly open again and that Timothy Karacas would
be upon him in an instant crying his incessant screech: All I want is
your skin.
But the lift righted itself and he could feel the pull on the
bottoms of his shoes as he rose into the sky. Being alone was the
worst thing on his nerves lately, but being alone in an enclosed place
like this was ten times worse, because anything could happen. His
body might not be found until the next morning, when Mrs. Fischer on
the fourth floor got on the elevator to go down to the street below and
do her daily grocery shopping. And there Shelby would be, waiting for
her, strung up to the ceiling with strips of his intestines wrapped
around his neck.
Stop this, Shelby. You really have to stop thinking like this.
The elevator doors opened and he saw a safe passage to his
door.
And the funny thing was, he almost made it there in one piece.

278
 279

'Mr. Dunn?'
Shelby turned around from where he was fumbling with his key
in the bottom lock on his door. The dead-bolt had slid easily, but the
lock inside the door knob was sticking. He had checked to make sure
he was using the proper key- he was. He was just a little drunker than
usual.
The past two and a half weeks he had spent waiting for the other
shoe to drop. He didn't expect that he had heard the last of Timothy,
or of his shadow. It was only a matter of time before they showed up
again. His nights were filled with a certain dread of what he knew
would come.
He turned to his left and saw a little girl in a white nightie
coming down the hall towards him. Judging from the graceful,
effortless way she was carrying herself, Shelby originally had thought
she was a ghost. Her hair was tied back in a black ribbon and her skin
was sepulchral white. Upon closer inspection, he thought he
recognized her as being the daughter of John and Elizabeth Quinas,
who occupied the apartment directly below his own. It was a little
after one in the morning.
'Honey, what are you doing up at this hour?'
The little girl shrugged. She shyly scraped the tops of her bare
toes across the nap of the rug, and refused to meet Shelby's eyes. He
didn't want to frighten the child, but after all he'd been through, he
wasn't sure what he should expect. He thought that her name was
Jennifer, or Jenny, or perhaps even Ginny, but he didn't know for sure.
'I don't know,' the girl finally sighed, squinting slightly under the
fluorescent lighting fixtures that lined the ceiling in the hallway. 'I
wasn't sleepy, and knew that I really needed to talk to you.'
'About what?' Shelby asked, squatting down on his haunches.
His head throbbed fiercely as he lowered himself, and he had to squint
so that he could focus on her. 'What can it be that couldn't wait until
morning?'
'It's not something I can say when it's sunny,' she murmured. 'I
don't hear it when it's sunny. I dreamed it. I dreamed him. He told
me...he told me that he would hurt me if I told. He told me not to tell
anyone about him...not to tell nobody but you about what he said.'
'Then what is it?' Shelby insisted.
'It's something I dreamed,' she said again. She sounded coy,
like she wasn't going to tell him at all unless he asked her again,
nicely.
'Isn't it something you should be talking to your parents about?'
She shook her head emphatically. 'No.'
'Why not?'

279
 280

'Too scary. I can't say anything about nothing to anyone but

you.'
He thought he heard her wrong. Maybe he needed to re-phrase
his line of questioning. He was starting to get a low, sickening yellow
feeling in the pit of his stomach. 'You can surely tell your parents
about th-'
'I can't!'
'Why not?'
'I just can't!' The girl was almost shrieking by now, and Shelby
was worried that one of his neighbors might hear her carrying on,
come out into the hallway to investigate, see the two of them huddled
together, and then proceed to get the wrong idea all the way around.
'Why don't you think you can tell anyone else?'
'Because he told me not to!' The girl was close to tears.
Shelby was very conscious of a need to find out what was going
on, and he thought that perhaps he should talk to her parents
tomorrow morning before going to work. No; not tomorrow morning.
If he was going to do something about it, it had to be done tonight.
Where were these strange voices coming from? Maybe she was being
molested by the boogeyman.
He decided at once that he was far too drunk to deal with this.
His tone became overtly condescending, and he tried to talk on
her level, even as a thousand questions were racing through his mind.
'Who told you not to tell anyone? Was it a bad person?'
She shook her head from side to side. 'I don't know if he's bad.'
'You just know that he scares you.'
She shook her head up and down, but didn't speak, as if her
silence was earned out of her fear of some sort of reprisal from the
dead man.
'What did he...did he tell you something bad?'
The girl shrugged. 'I don't know.' Her manner had loosened.
Shelby felt himself beginning to lose patience with her, but
struggled to hold himself in check. 'Then what in the world did he say
to you?'
The girl inhaled sharply, and all of a sudden, her black eyes
locked fixedly onto his own, and she began to breath in a monotonous
flutter.
'I have a message from Timothy.'
Shelby swallowed. Somehow, he had known what she would say
before she had even said it. These words, even from a child, made
perfect sense.
He noticed that he was shivering involuntarily, while the child
stood stock-still. He wondered where she was right now; she certainly

280
 281

wasn't here with him. She was in another, more absolute place in
time.
Maybe, he thought sickly, she was dead.
'What did he say?' Shelby asked.
The girl lingered over the first syllable for a moment or two, and
then her eyes seemed to turn themselves inside out, leaving only a
sick-looking silvery hue over the irises that chilled the marrow in
Shelby's bones. He fought off an urge to slap her face to bring her
back around.
'What did he say?' Shelby insisted, aware of the tension in his
voice.
There were sounds in the wind, and a whistle of fear rolled
through his lungs. It was one thing to be haunted, but it was
something else entirely to be hunted. Some opportunities to retaliate
came his way and passed without execution because Shelby didn't
want to get nasty and fuck around with the spirits. He didn't want to
go to metaphysical war with a damned puff of smoke. Shelby would
have preferred to keep it detached and limited in terms of the amount
of bodily damage sustained to him.
'We were in this hallway, and I don't remember what time it
was, or maybe he was familiar or maybe I forgot, but it never hurt me
so much to be alone in this world as it did on that night when I last
spoke to you. You tried to forget about me. You tried to forget and
pretended that I wasn't really there. But I'm here, Shelby. I'm
dancing in this kid's throat. I can smell your breath, and I'll tell you a
thing or two, I can tell you what you've been drinking. I'm a world-
class motherfucker when it comes to pink elephants, and you're gonna
see me every time you close your eyes. I know a lot about possession
my friend, because I was possessed by the best and the rest is just
the rest, my head's in such a mess I don't think I'll pass the test. It's
a lot like being a lawyer. You just bug the shit out of people and never
leave them alone. I never leave your side, Shelby- I sleep on your
chest. Did I already say that?'
Right before she collapsed, Shelby remembered that the girl's
name was Ginger- not Ginny, or Jenny, or Jennifer- and that she had
liked to skip rope in the meadow down by Rodgers park on the east
side of Tellbourne Avenue. He had seen her not quite a week ago,
jumping double-Dutch in a plaid Tartan dress with a pocket on the
hem of the skirt. He had seen a rope of red licorice fall out of the
pocket and onto the ground even as he drove by the meadow. He'd
wanted to buy her another rope of licorice but was too preoccupied
with himself to stop long enough to do it. For some reason, that
episode had permeated his mind- even last night, in the midst of his
haunting, he had been thinking about it- and her.

281
 282

Now her eyes seemed to be working to concentrate their focus.

Shelby thought that he saw a bit of anger in them that was directed at
himself. She was bitter with him because she felt that he had dragged
her into this- which in a way, he had. She would never be the same
person again because of what had just lived in her head for a total of
perhaps eight minutes. It had been a struggle for the girl to get the
words out.
The girl spoke. 'He says: he won't even touch you.'

282
 283

SPOOKS
Kelly now had his evenings all to himself and he didn’t quite know how
to fill them. Random homicide was no longer an option- he now found
that mind-rape was insanely more satisfying, and he couldn’t wait to
get back to it. It was a silent crime. You didn't see it happening so
much as you felt it instead, and that is what he loved about it, the
intangibility of it all.
It was a subtle form of psychic vampirism. He could see
Courtney's mind almost, now, in the back of his head, his mind being
twisted and scorched with the information, data and photos that Kelly
himself had supplied. Maybe they were happy before he showed up,
but here he was, nonetheless, messing with people's lives from afar.
This was fun.
It could be reasoned that such a person had low self-esteem, but
that was not the case. Kelly deRenzi was a megalomaniacal
personality of the first order. People were his playthings. He could
not understand, simply, the importance of anything that went on in
the world that did not concern him. It didn’t touch him. It didn't
touch him at all. Why did they care? he would ask himself. Without
him giving to the proceedings the initial spark of life, how did these
things flicker, and survive?
You just had to love the game.
That was why he had liked killing as much as he did. It was
forbidden to the remainder of the population, but it was open to any
man brave enough to consciously cross the threshold. He did not lend
much credence to the common street-thugs and accidental killers who
had no appreciation for the sanctity of the act itself. It was almost a
sort of a religious experience. Aside from the forced removal of
human life from its inherent possessors, it was one of the very few
acts in this world both instigated and controlled totally by him. There
was no should. There was no one to tell him that it could not be done;
that he was wrong; that he was ill. 'That's the way the cookie
crumbles,' Kelly said, almost under his breath.
There was excrement in the bathtub as well as the kitchen sink.
He'd have to scrub long and hard to find that fresh clean smell
again.
Kelly draped his cloak about him and debated upon whether or
not he should go out tonight. As he walked over to the window that
faced the street and looked down, he saw that the skies were
darkening, becoming almost pregnant with the need to douse the
people below. He thought that if he absolutely had to put it into words
like those that it must be sometimes how he felt. The symbol felt too
warm to be a hoax. It wasn't something he instigated, but it also

283
 284

wasn't something he chose to fight. Whenever he felt at one with the

night, these things would happen. He wondered faintly if the images
and pictures weren't slightly lycanthropic in nature. It would be cool if
they were. What he needed was some cocaine. That would do the
trick of calming him down while at the same time lighting him up.
Then all would seem clear; all would come to him. He could forget
about Courtney for a few sweet, short hours and devise new angles
upon working his mind around to his own point of view.
He couldn't quite answer what he was training Courtney for, if
there was anything at all, but he felt as though there was something
he was trying to teach the old boy. What sort of knowledge was he
trying desperately to pass on to him? He didn't know. Perhaps the
knowledge of the sickness of the self. He wanted Courtney to get
inside and ask himself questions- questions Kelly himself knew would
drive him insane. It wasn't very hard to instill guilt in Catholics.
Kelly's first real girlfriend had only been a reformed Catholic, having
then gone Baptist.
Or was it Methodist?
She was one of the easiest marks he ever seen in his life. Kelly
thought that maybe their propensity toward acquiring guilt was inbred,
but he paused for thought and supposed that, like anything,
conditioned responses could be taught in almost any atmosphere. He
went with her for nearly six months and he would lay guilt trips on her
all the time- all the way up until the time he killed her, when he
massaged her clitoris with a heated soldering iron. It began when
they were fooling around and he had accidentally bitten her nipple off.
He had to kill her, and that was exactly what he did.
What he was doing with Courtney could then be looked upon as
merely an extreme form of sociological experimentation, …, Kelly now
had some company, it seemed: somebody else had strangled a girl
near the Ducas-McGill county line in Suffolk. Sloppy work, and none of
it done well- this guy would probably be caught within forty-eight
hours. The police were looking for the girl's steady on-again-off-again
boyfriend, and that was that. Kelly wished him well in a half-assed
kind of way- but, he reasoned, if you really did enjoy killing people, it
was best to keep it without motive. That's why what Kelly did, he did
for the most part without passion.
Kelly twisted his nipples beneath the torn pocket of his blue red
and gray checked flannel shirt as he continued to read the police
blotter in the town newspaper during his cocaine breakfast. These
country people were so rarely confronted by the underside of life that
when it came to roost in their own hometown they seldom knew what
to do about it except maybe to pray that this scourge would soon fly
on to other skies.

284
 285

Courtney and Nona were again playing backgammon in the living

room on Tossilberry. It was a little bit after eight o'clock and both of
them had to get to bed pretty soon- Nona because she had a business
meeting at seven am the next day, and Courtney because, even
though he had the next day off from work, had been up since four
o'clock the previous day and hadn't been able to sleep at all since
then.
Nona saw Courtney's eyes start to droop, and its effect was
highly contagious, for she started to yawn as well. They were both of
them drinking from a two-liter bottle of Diet 7UP, even though
Courtney and Nona both knew instinctively that drinking carbonated
soda this late before going to bed would invariably irritate his stomach
and would most likely prevent him from being able to sleep very well.
It was a good, cozy night for just cuddling and being together
and keeping quiet. The less said here to ruin things, Courtney
reasoned, the better it will be for all of us. Nona was winning again,
and this was their third game. Nona had won a game and so had
Courtney; were it not for this best-of-three rally, Courtney and Nona
would have both been in bed well over an hour ago. To Courtney,
sometimes, it seemed as though he had never really even looked at
his wife, or that if he had, the look was fleeting and he needed to
reappraise it.
Courtney just always saw her as being a part of his life- and he'd
made that assumption from day one. Everything about her, as corny
as it sounded, now seemed completely new to him, and he viewed
every aspect of his wife's physical presence as though he was now
seeing it for the first time: the way her shoulders slid effortlessly into
the crook of her neck, and how the skin there blended so perfectly
with the flesh of her jawline; the slim pentancular ovules of her ankles,
and how now, so suddenly bare, he realized that she was his
possession alone. It made his head list to one side only thinking about
all this. Fatigue.
'Honey, why don't you just go to bed? You really look tired.'
'I will, I will. I'm dragging my ass.'
There was nothing that happened between them that couldn't be
solved with a few simple words. Courtney supposed that they were a
good couple in that respect. There were a couple of exceptions to that
rule, but by and large, that was the way it was- most people spent
their entire lives searching for such a state, and here he was, taking it
for granted.
It made him feel guilty to feel the way he sometimes felt about
her- the segue of feelings that had led him erroneously into this thing
with Kelly- and to at the same time witness how good she was to him,

285
 286

how much she seemed to care. Why wasn't he able to just be content
with that?
There were a lot of questions he couldn't answer these days.

Ted Price had borrowed a pair of hedge clippers from Courtney

over three weeks earlier and in all that time, he hadn't seen Courtney
to be able to return them to him. Ted noticed that Courtney would
stop home for about half an hour- in between the time when Nona got
home from work and when she left again for wherever it was that she
went; the time in which they were probably eating dinner, as most
people ate early in the summertime when the whether was good, and
Ted hadn't wanted to intrude- and then Courtney would zoom out not
ten seconds after she did. Where was he going? Ted wondered with
bemusement if Courtney was having an affair. It just didn't seem very
possible to him. Courtney was much too timid, Ted thought, to go for
that sort of thing. Even if he knew for sure that Nona wouldn't ever
find out about it, the guy was simply too introverted for that sort of
thing- too goody-goody and up-front.
But where was he after work? Courtney had never mentioned a
second job, or of any profligate hobbies that might eat up his after
dinner hours. And whatever Courtney did, Ted had noticed with a
neighbor's well-meaning nosiness, was done whenever that wife of his
Nona was not around, as though he didn't want to be called upon to
account for his whereabouts. That fact and the surrounding
unanswered questions was what had made it all the more intriguing for
him to consider.
Ted reverently and with shame paused to look at himself- to
really look at himself- gossiping within about what the neighbors may
or may not be doing with their spare time. Could he be asked to
account for the same? Of course not. What struck Ted more than
anything- more so than even the concept of wanting to pry into
somebody else's life- was the fact that such dilemmas were so
suburban in nature, so pedestrian as to be laughable. This sort of
cloistered what-are-the-neighbors-up-to? thought was the precise
reason he had left home as early as he did. He hadn't wanted to
succumb to those petty surroundings, and as he turned back toward
the credenza for a third cup of coffee, he silently made a vow to
himself that he would not succumb to them now, either.

Courtney was asleep on the sofa and Nona didn't want to wake
him, so she turned off the TV and headed upstairs. She was alone in
the bedroom for probably the first time in a year. Shaking unsteadily
from side to side, she took off her shoes, her stockings, and her skirt
as well. The skirt was a new one that she had bought recently- and

286
 287

rather expensive- so she folded it carefully over a cardboard-lined

hanger in their closet and made sure that the creases were lined up, to
avoid any hard wrinkles in the material. Her ankles cracked as she
crossed the floor in just her underwear to turn on the television. Once
she had tonight's modal entertainment securely in place, she walked
into the bathroom and began to remove her makeup, also taking the
time necessary to brush all the extra hairspray out of her hair. Before
coming home, she'd done story-hour at the local public library. She
had a very good reading tonight, and one of the little boys, Jeremy
Sunders, hugged her around the neck before going off to find his
mommy after story time, and she had wept in the car on her way
home. The boy's comment had made her feel very good.
Nona's legs were inordinately sore from her having to stand all
day at work- it seemed that she was either standing or running around
all day, one or the other- and her rump was just a little bit numb and
tingly from sitting for close to two hours on that hard little library stool
they had provided for her while she read the final third of Prince
Caspian by C.S. Lewis. Next week they'd begin The Voyage of The
Dawn Treader. That was as far as they would go with the seven
chronicles of Narnia; the children were easily bored with abstract
fantasy, Nona had discovered, and since she had directorial control
over the library's free reading program- within reason, of course- she
decided that the next book after that would be Fahrenheit 451 by Ray
Bradbury. She had always enjoyed that story and wondered what
their reaction would be.

What was it with women and screaming, anyway?

Kelly deRenzi brought Lynn Knight home and offered her a glass
of water. Of course, having already gagged her, Kelly was unable to
garner any sort of a response from her, and so he gleefully discarded
the question from the pile of further consideration, and if the bitch got
thirsty later on, he would enjoy the visual of her terminal parchment.
She was a doe-eyed brunette, and just a little too lusty in her
response to him, which is why Kelly felt the sudden urge to take her.
He hadn't even planned upon killing anyone tonight, but the mood had
overtaken him. Most people might've tried to actively hold themselves
back from such a whim, but Kelly had learned to trust this extra-
sensory development of his. It had gotten him this far in things, and
he had faith that it would see him through. Nothing's shocking.
The girl looked scared, and rightfully so. Her eyes flittered this
way and that, and Kelly could see now that she was trying in vain to
gather up an accurate description of this place that she could give to
the police to help them find him when he let her go.
Sometimes they really could be that stupid.

287
 288

The doe-eyed girl was trying rather pathetically to rock back and
forth to tip herself to one side, for what purpose Kelly had no idea, and
after he tired of watching her do this- she hadn't see him watching her
the whole time she was doing it- Kelly righted her with a violent shove,
sending her sprawling out awkwardly in the opposite direction.
There was at that moment a silent knock at the door. Both of
them heard it- he saw it in her eyes- a trip-trappy two half-beat three.
'Who is it?' Kelly shouted, distractedly.
'It's Courtney.'
Shit. 'Uh, Courtney baby, this is a bad time. I'm with a friend
right now.' Kelly glanced over at the girl's naked body. Her head
would require another ten or fifteen minutes of serrated effort before
coming loose- and after that, he still had the limbs to do.
'Well, Kelly, I mean, I'm here and all-'
'Courtney, I can't. Please understand. I'll call you later.'
'Alright. But when?'
'About ten or so. Maybe later, I don't know for sure right now.
Two rings and then I'll just hang up. Just like always.'
The girl tittered nervously from beneath the duct tape that Kelly
had wound around her jawline and he had to smile himself. He didn't
know why she was laughing- perhaps in an attempt to disarm him- but
he knew why he was: he was contemplating what he wanted to do to
her now that they were both here in his apartment, alone, and the
doors were securely bolted. If his neighbor Reggie Fox in the unit
below wasn't home, Kelly would have preferred to turn the girl loose
and let her run around the apartment and yell a little bit- Kelly had
always enjoyed the thrill of the chase, and the prospect of physically
capturing her before he cut her up was especially appealing to him
tonight. Kelly would sometimes think, in his idle moments, that he
would someday like to secure an expansive piece of property
somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, a place of his own where he
could allow the girls to run free so that he could hunt them down.
What was it? The Most Dangerous Game. Yeah.
Only Kelly deRenzi wouldn't use a musket. It was beautiful, the
way he pictured it: he would let them run naked through a plain
grassy field and let them get until they were almost out of sight and
let them think that they had a chance of really escaping and then he
would set off after them- on foot, probably- and bring them down just
as savagely as possible. He even thought just now of an added bonus
to this scenario: he would leave the bodies of the prior contestants
right where he nailed them- their guts strewn about the area
immediately around them, the flies picking at their exposed ribs, his
semen leaking from every one of their bodily orifices. It was a
beautiful scene, he had to admit.

288
 289

Then his attention turned toward Lynn once more.

Kelly crossed over to the kitchen cabinets that stretched out over
the counter that was common to both the living room area and the
dining area, and there he extracted from a redwood cloth-lined case a
silver pair of nail scissors, as well as an extra-sharp serrated edge
blade. Lynn's eyes went wide when he came back.
Under his scalpel's eye, her body was exquisite; her legs rode
smoothly up to her ass, her arms hung ever-so effortlessly at her
sides, the curves each meeting one another in a bouquet of teased
flesh- a perfect specimen, to say the least. The personality he usually
looked for was here as well, embodied in the girl's physical features-
the slatternly hook of the eyebrows, knitting the girl's forehead in a
way that while being far from unflattering lowered her status to the
level of a common bar patron. The voices all clamored for an
audience, but Kelly had by then made his own decision about what he
wanted to do, about what he felt needed to be done. It was all in a tip
of her head.
That was why he had taken her.
Her eyes studied him in fear, and Kelly reasoned that it was
probably time to get down in it. There was only so much that could be
done with any one of these women, and some of them, once
restrained, held less appeal than they had originally, and this girl-
Lynn Knight- was just such a person. It wasn't a personal judgment
on his part, only a fact of this existence. Sometimes it happened and
sometimes it didn't. Kelly usually liked to draw this part of it out, the
anticipation of it, in order to tweak their nervous systems into a fever
pitch, but he felt rather anti-climactic about this whole episode- after
Courtney almost barged in on them it kind of popped the whole bubble
for him.
After making doubly sure that the duct tape was secure around
her face, Kelly took the steak knife and placidly slit her arm's hollow
from her wrist to her elbow, pausing but once just to put the knife into
his other hand and dip his finger into the gore, after which he dotted
the very tip of her nose with a drop of blood. She was in shock, Kelly
figured, she had to be, because she didn't look like she could even feel
it yet. Not at all- he had seen it before- like it was all happening to
somebody else apart from her entirely. Lynn looked quizzically at him,
trying to puzzle this out in spite of the pain signals her arm was now
sending her, not knowing for sure what he meant or what he was
doing.
It was the last such impression she would have in this world.

289
 290

AVALON
Melanie had been dreaming, and in her dream, she was being buried-
but she was still alive. The entire montage- from the first fistful of dirt
being thrown onto her grave to the look on her mother’s face at her
funeral- had all been silent before now. All at once, a knocking sound
accompanied her screams, and as Melanie began to pound on the door
of her casket the illusion became real, the silk lining of her coffin then
being given in exchange for equally silky bed sheets, and the sounds
of her own fists replaced with a somehow more insistent tapping at her
own front door.
Melanie looked quickly at the clock and then looked away just as
quickly, and as she walked from her bedroom to the door she realized
that she still had no idea at all what time it was. She had looked at
the clock full-out and she had forgotten what the clock had said now,
not even thirty seconds later.
Her fingers fumbled for a switch that she thought she
remembered seeing on the left hand side of the foyer, but it was
actually on the right, and lower down on the wall than Melanie had
pictured it being. She was reluctant to call this place home, because
no place could ever be home for her unless Timothy was there. She
finally knew that, now.
You were right, she thought. I never listened to you, but you
were right. Home is a person and love is a place. I never really knew
what you meant by that, but I think I've got a better idea of it now.
How can you miss something that isn't there anymore, something that
could never be the same way ever again? You can't, because it's not
there to remind you of what you left behind. Would you want it to be
like that? To do that would be like re-animating the dead. When
something is over, you have to let go of it, before the gangrene creeps
up your arm like a junkie tattoo. The fingertips will feel the most pain,
because they used to touch whatever or whomever you used to have
in your life.
But I feel sorry for you, Timothy- because now you have no life.
Her eyes had a hard time adjusting to the light from the hallway,
but in a moment it came to her that Kraggess Feebes was standing in
front of her. His shoes were muddy and wet and his facial pores gave
off a ruddy aspiration- one that threatened to steam all the windows if
they weren't opened immediately. There was a moment, certainly no
longer than that, when their eyes met. Each one of them pretended
that it didn't happen.
Kraggess was the first to speak. There was a quivering quality
to his voice, and for a moment, Melanie wondered if either of them
would ever speak. 'May I come in?'

290
 291

At first, she wasn't certain about how she should respond.

'Sure,' she said, and gestured vaguely at the furniture behind
her.
'Why are you out so late?'
'I work late. you know that as well as-'
'Ah, you always worked late before, but you usually knocked off
at seven- religiously. Those were your hours, for years. I never
planned anything around dinner for anytime prior to eight o'clock,
because I couldn't. If I did, I could knew you wouldn't be home until
after you'd served until seven and did the hour rolling home. But it's
not eight o'clock, Kraggess, it's much later. It's two o'clock in the
morning.'
'I know.' He seemed agitated. 'I work until twelve or twelve
thirty every night because it keeps me out of the house during the
day.'
'Well,' she said, 'I want to know what's going on.'
'I don't know,' Kraggess sighed.
'Has your life been the same, since you told me that Timothy-'
'No. I hear him everywhere. I think I'm imagining it, but I can't
be sure. There's this faint tickle of his voice, and it's everywhere.'
'I know. What time do you go into the office, these days?'
'The same time as before. I'm not getting up early to get this
damn exhausted- I just never get to sleep. I'm haunted. That's how I
feel.'
'You're not still going in at six, are you?'
'Yes.'
'Eighteen-hour days?'
'Yes. All of it. I shave in the bathroom. I sometimes get a hotel
room for a few hours in the middle of the day and pretend I'm going
out to lunch with a client. It keeps my billable hours up, and I just go
and catch a few hours of sleep. I logged one hundred and twenty
hours last week alone. By the time they promote me, I'll be dead.'
Melanie was starting to wake up now. 'Do you have a cigarette?'
Kraggess threw a pack of Camels onto the coffee table between
them.
'It's been a long time since the two of us have been alone
together. I mean, I see you at work, but what's been going on
lately...I just felt like I'd feel better if I was able to talk to you- outside
of work.'
She lit her cigarette and was dizzy all at once. 'Thanks.'
'I'm not happy. Nobody's happy. Nobody's parents are
especially unhappy, and they let their little son-in-law Nobody Nothing
know what a complete fucking asshole they think him to be. It's rude,
you know?'

291
 292

'I know what you mean,' said Melanie, trying desperately to keep
her eyes open. 'I don't know what's going on, but Timothy's near.'
'She nags me like you wouldn't fuckin' believe. It's unreal, what
that woman tries to do to me. But I'm married to her, and I can't-'
Melanie was ignoring his prattle, listening to the fibers in the
baseboards as they spoke to her. There was a vibration here that had
not been present before. 'I'm telling you, Kay, Timothy is near.'
Kraggess smiled condescendingly. 'You haven't called me that-'
'It doesn't matter. It not the point. I called you that because I
need to get through to you on that level we had before, underneath
the place where our words only fuck everything up. I'm trying to tell
you something, and you're choosing not to hear me. Or you do hear
me and choose not to listen? Is that it? Is that what's going on now?'
'He's dead. I loved you but you wanted something I couldn't
give you, and then you were with him and now I'm with somebody
else. Well, fuck you, but that's not a happy ending. If Timothy's near,
it's only because he's pissed off at us. I think, in some weird way, that
he knows about us, from the beginning. But that's him, so fuck him.'
Tears began welling in the corners of his eyes.
'You just about ruined my life, and all I was trying to do was to
enjoy what I was left with, but I couldn't enjoy it. So I got married.'
Melanie could feel herself becoming oddly affected by what he
was saying to her, and she decided then to let herself be carried over
into whatever would come next. There was another purpose to
tonight, and she knew she was not at the center of it. 'Why couldn't
you enjoy it?'
'Because you weren't around. Because- with that being the
case- my heart was never in my own house. I was constantly
wondering, wanting-'
'Stop it.'
'I was always thinking of you.'
'No.'
'Why not? And why not now? Timothy's dead, and we can't fix
that. It a bad thing that happened. but maybe it happened for a
reason. You understand me? Timothy's dead, but you're alive. I'm
alive.'
'No.'
'We're alive.'
'So?'
'We're alive.'
'So?'
'That means a lot.'
'Why?'
'Because it means that there's hope.'

292
 293

'There is no hope,' Melanie moaned, trying to catch his libido

with the curl of her voice. He slackened his facial features on purpose,
to throw her off. Kraggess pleaded with her by blinking his eyes.
Melanie smiled, warming to the debate. 'No, I'm disputing
where you're taking this. You've meant a lot to me in the time I've
known you, Kraggess, more than I think a person of your
temperament can comprehend or appreciate. But I- know what you've
meant to me, and I would always want that to exist, but us as a
couple is kaput. I don't have it in me to love somebody again, and
Timothy inspired a totally different feeling in me than you do. Timothy
made me think of love, and home, and the rest of my life. You make
me think of my friend, Kay. Let me have at least that much, and then
you can take what you want. As much as I loved Timothy, he wasn't
my friend. He and I would never have become friends outside of a
relationship, because we were too different. Friends are hard to come
by. You can ask things of a friend that you would never ask of your
mate, and you can ask things of a friend that you would be afraid of
asking of yourself. You're my friend, and I'm your friend. I know,
that's not your intended outcome, and I'm not totally yours. That's a
lovely idea, Kraggess. A beautiful concept.'
Melanie took a final drag on her cigarette and snuffed it out.
'But the world is bigger than that. Everything is connected. And
we are not the only ones who need representation. We are not all
there is. We are not the only ones who need to be happy. And so that
blurs the boundaries a little bit, but that's what I'm asking of you,
tonight.'
'I want you.'
'You do?'
'I want you to blur the boundaries for me.'
'You do, huh?'
'Yes. There's a way we can help, a way we can be of service,
and a way for everyone to have what they need, and what they want.
Friendship is never without sin, and you can almost always assume
forgiveness.'
'How happy would he have been to know what really happened
between you and me? Would he know that I was always there, that I
was always over his shoulder and looking at you? I would have been
happier alone, but it would have underscored just how empty my life
was without you. When you left, I couldn't eat for three weeks. You
don't know what I went through. I thought that I could get married
and not have my choice of a wife ever interfere in my life. I was
wrong. I tried to block the only door in life through which you could
attack me. But I was hurt. So, yes, to answer your question, I

293
 294

remember exactly what it was like to live with Timothy's presence. I

know it more intimately than you do.'
'But you felt it as well, Kraggess. You knew it before I- did,
didn't you? You came in and told me that he was dead. Do you
remember that?'
He shook his head dolefully. 'Yeah. I remember. It's just that-
I now know what I'm missing without you being in my life. I have a
better appreciation for you now, and I still don't see very many flaws
in your character. God, how he used to bitch about you! I used to
day-dream about the day you'd call me and ask me to kill him.
Remember? Do you remember asking me to do that for you?'
'Kraggess, I was drunk, I was stoned, we had just had a fight,
Tim and I, and I was throwing words around with my mouth. I'm
sorry. I shouldn't have done it, but oh well. Shit happens, so to
speak.'
'There's times when I absolutely cannot remember what the hell
you look like, and then there's weeks where I can't sleep if only for the
thought of you. I still pull down your picture, and I look at it. And
then there's times I can't believe that it- that we- ever happened.'
The walls surrounding them were bare, just as it had been in the
apartment Kraggess had rented in his first year out of law school. His
mind wandered away from the conversation, and soon he noticed that
they were laying together, in a position that was not unfamiliar and
not uncomfortable, and the hour was growing later still. Kraggess
Feebes was feeling quite mellow and even slightly drunk, and even so
he was silently appreciative of the patterns of light that the candles
and their waxes threw across the cracked plaster of the ceiling.
He wanted a cigarette of his own, but getting up to fetch it would
mean breaking this moment forever, and this was probably the last
time he would have with her. Things would never be the same again.
Seeing his best friend break up with him had been hard, and Kraggess
had a hard time getting over the fact that Melanie had gotten over him
and was living with, of all people, Timothy Karacas from the fourth
floor.
There had been nothing in the living room of the apartment,
save for a nasty old puke-green futon that had been left there by the
previous tenant. Kraggess had been quite poor at the time, and he
needed all the help he could in decorating the place, so he had
scrubbed the futon pad in the bathtub with Lysol and Dawn
dishwashing detergent, and once it was clean, he and Melanie had lain
on it together many times.
That's where his mind was tonight.
Why did such thought seem dangerous?

294
 295

'We know too much about each other to ever be enemies. That's
why I tried to be happy for you and Timothy, and it was sometimes
easy to do, as long as I thought that you were happy being with him.'
'For a while, I was. It's hard to pinpoint where it went wrong.'
'Where it went wrong,' Kraggess echoed, unsure of her meaning.
'And there's times when I think I was too much of a bitch to
Timothy, in an effort to keep him in line. And if that's the case, I'm
sure it dates back to you and me, when I always wanted you home at
seven, instead of eight o'clock. How many times did we fight over that
hour, so much so that it ruined the next three hours after you got
home?'
Kraggess smiled in the memory of it. 'Oh, we fought plenty.'
'We never got along, Kraggess, because we were too close. We
always knew what was on each other's minds. There was no room for
bullshit. I knew how to read you back then, and I knew how you read
me. Any feeling of power I might feel because of this is eliminated by
the fact that you can read me as well. I know what you want and I
want something as well. Tonight, I need to go someplace and to be
with somebody, and I need you to take me there. I think you know
what I'm talking about, and if that's alright.... I mean, you and I are
friends, and I'm being honest with you, hoping that you will
understand why I'm asking what I'm going to ask from you. I think
you know what I mean, and that makes me feel exposed. But it's only
in moments like that, when we're naked and totally exposed, that you
feel really alive. That's the only time that reason and chance swoop
down from the heavens and throw for a roll of the dice. Timothy told
me that once, and I was so in love with him, I cried for two hours
afterward. Now, it sounds like bullshit to me.'
Her hand tapped impatiently against her knee until she was no
longer aware she was doing it. The tiny pattern of noise- a thin
slapping that was more annoying than it was erotic- was drifting
throughout the empty hollows of the apartment, the sounds ringing
down the hallway with an echo that belied the drab off-white paint
staining the walls.
'It's okay.'
It was at that moment that Kraggess felt something blocking
between them, and he'd never felt that with Melanie before. They
were always able to speak their minds with one another, but now there
was something preventing them from touching. Was it what she'd said
just now, about being in love with Timothy? Or was it something
heavier than that?
His thoughts hung heavily in the air, and Kraggess fancied he
could see them turning over on invisible tendrils of dragon smoke.
There were a million hallucinations to be had, if you made your eyes

295
 296

available for them to dance in. This apartment- God!- this apartment
was horrible. The floor-plan was an exact replica of the one he had
lived in when he and Melanie had been together. The light was
disconcerting, because the furniture was all in the wrong place. He
wanted his illusion intact. A memory was no good unless its image
was so pristine and so clear that it obliterated any notion of the
present. Half the shock of a memory was coming out of it and seeing
where you were now. Comparison was crucial.
'Shall I get the lights?'
Melanie said nothing more, merely lifted herself mechanically off
of the chair she had been sitting in. As she wandered down the
hallway, she paused to pinch a piece of fabric out of the crack of her
ass.
She was already halfway to wherever she wanted to go-
mentally speaking- and Kraggess knew the routine. He had become
practiced at such a course. From here on out, it was up to him, and
she would profess to remember nothing about it afterward. These
little lies and duplicities were essential to her for some reason, and
each time they went through this charade it became a little easier for
both of them. They had slept together six times since they had
terminated their engagement and she had started seeing Timothy.
The first few times had shocked her, because there seemed to be no
direct correlation between her infidelity and how things were going
with Timothy at home. He bought all her excuses with the
guilelessness of an angel, and this caused her sense of guilt to double.
Melanie tried to put it behind her and for a time she even succeeded,
but sooner or later Kraggess would infiltrate her mind. It almost
seemed as though he was doing this to her on purpose, but that, of
course, was ridiculous.
And here they were again, and of course it felt familiar. Once
upon a time, Kraggess had felt more comfortable inside of Melanie
Cleaves than he'd ever felt inside of his own skin.
But that was a long time ago.
As he had half-expected, Melanie was unresponsive to him once
he was inside of her. She had told him the truth when she said that
she was going to go someplace, and he wondered if- for only a
moment- it had anything to do with him. It had hurt both of them
when they decided not to get married, and to have rotted out of each
other's lives like that was horrible. Yet it had been inevitable. Like
abscessed teeth they had rotted out of each other's lives, hot in the
wake of a broken engagement that had leached their good feelings
toward one another. God only knew what kind of an asshole she
though he was today, but here he was, where he wanted to be. If
only something to make him feel he was still alive.

296
 297

There was a comfort zone that emanated out of being in her

company, even if other people were around. She had this way of
fixing Kraggess with a look that made his knees turn to ketchup, but
he doubted that she had any idea that she was doing it. It wasn't
uncommon for him to hear calliope music in his head whenever she
was around. The effect she had upon his central nervous system had
continued to linger long after they had broken up and she had moved
in with Timothy. Perhaps she had fallen out of love with him and into
love with Timothy, but if he was able to be in there somewhere, he
thought it was all he was able to ask for.

297
 298

TOWN OF DEER MEAT AND DEEP GRIEF

Thomas Gracey had chosen to settle himself and base his operations in
the town of Rhentsworth, fifteen miles south of Venison Attic, with an
eye toward its seclusive properties. There was a certain logic inherent
within his lunacy. In his beliefs, statues would be erected were once
he had stood. The people he came into daily contact would be graced,
if only to know his presence for a few brief moments, to feel his
intellect in their residual domain, and the town would claim him as one
of their own.
It would be a place for him to belong.
Rhentsworth, with the proper financial greasing, could provide
him with a layer of protection from the law. In a world of legal
absolutes, Rhentsworth seemed to be the proven exception. Gracey
had been privy to the inner workings of Alberto-Culver (UK) LTD
Basingstoke, Hampshire, England- and theirs was the only operation
that rivaled what he had going here, in terms of official cooperation
with the local authorities. The proper pockets were greased and
everyone involved on both sides went home happy, well-paid and well-
fed. Thomas Gracey had known this life- the overt, political side of
science- for too long not to manipulate it to his own specific
advantage.
Still, without his son, it would all be incomplete. He toiled in the
shadows, keeping himself content to run his tongue over the glory that
would one day be his. Men in his profession would speak his name as
a reference to the cutting edge in their field of medicine, and this
cheap immortality would be something to fill in the gaps life had taken
away.
The town was about half an hour's drive from the Matthias
Bramble Clinic for Skin Research in Westhill- Drury's polysyllabic sister
city- and so that placed them about fifteen or eighteen miles apart
from one another on the highway- about half an hour apart, depending
upon how fast one traveled. Much of each clinic's territory would
overlap from case to case, and many cross-cooperative deals had been
solicited between the two over the years. It was in each organization's
mutual interest to keep their relationship friendly. There were little
secrets that each one of them kept from the other, but Dr. Thomas
Gracey had always been very deeply into his own line of
experimentation, and so he had learned to keep his ideas pretty much
to himself. He showed his superiors what they needed to see in order
to continue his funding, but that was the extent to which Gracey
communicated with them. Most everyone at the Matthias Bramble
Clinic didn't know that a doctor by the name of Thomas Gracey served
on the committee for the Clinic. He was invisible, and he liked things

298
 299

that way- it kept his professional life from getting too complicated, and
it allowed him to remove himself from the internal and external
politicking that went on around him every day of his life. If he was
concerned with overt power and position he wouldn't be able to do
what he did every day, which was to push forth with the
experimentation.
Working for the competition as well as himself gave Thomas
Gracey an edge the other research personnel knew nothing about.
There was a definite conflict of interest. But Gracey himself wasn't
going to say anything, and the board at Matthias Bramble was happy
just to have his name stenciled alongside theirs on the plaque on the
boardroom door.
He enjoyed being a mole in two separate camps. There was a
price to be paid for limiting one's societal circle, but he knew what was
being done throughout every inch of the Bramble's campus. Celebrity
exposure- except for that tiny bit which he won through the frenzied
gossiping of his fellow proles- didn't reach Gracey very easily, if it did
at all, and this kept him far enough away from the main game that he
was in a better position to view it from the outside on his schedule and
to his advantage. He knew who the movers and shakers were, and
due to this proclivity he had for knowing each one of the board
members, he knew who the right people were to hide behind at the
board meetings. He was able to see his own place as a piece on the
game board, and this kept Gracey humble, unlike the stars who
blinded people with their brilliance at first but then subsided into
nothing inside of three years, and even then possessing none of the
brains necessary to forestall or to avoid altogether a career on the
verge of a short-circuit.
Gracey as usual wrapped up his day's work at Matthias Bramble
at around eight-thirty in the evening- after a final trip to both the
bathroom and the water cooler down the hall- and within twenty
minutes he was pulling into his driveway on the Culpepper cul-de-sac.
The house had been his wedding present to his second wife, Amelia-
now deceased.
John had been fond of his stepmother- that was how utterly
blessed Thomas Gracey's life had been, once upon a time. The days
had been safe for him then. It seemed as though no one else in his
circle of friends had been able to successfully locate any lasting sense
of redemption or satisfaction in their wedded relations, and so in
finding Amelia he had counted himself as being among the luckiest of
men. She had passed away in 1985- yet another loss he couldn't
prevent. His life seemed to be gathering more and more of them the
older he became.

299
 300

The loss of his second wife had been the first clicking of a trigger
mechanism that had ruined his life. The next part hadn't come along
until last year, when his John had died, but prior to that he had
already been experiencing a personal decline. John had been cruising
around with his buddies on the highway that ran the circuit around the
town of Drury, and maybe they were liquored up. The driver of the
car, Daniel Thurman, had certainly been drunk, but the only reason
that much was known was because he'd been the only one of the five
people in the car who survived the crash. They hadn't really hit
anything, save for a tree that finally brought the car to a halt after it
had flipped itself over any number of times. The three kids in the
backseat had all been thrown from the car, suffering extensive internal
and external wounds. One of the kids had even gotten his head torn
off from the rest of his body.
That left John and Daniel inside the vehicle when it came to its
final stop. After taking a second or two to get his bearings, Daniel
looked over at John Gracey and thought that he was dead. There was
a frightful slash across his forehead and he was bleeding from his
mouth. Daniel knew that bleeding from the mouth was a usual
indication of a fatal injury, because his own father was a physician in
his own private practice. After kicking the driver's side door open,
Daniel crawled to his own safety while leaving John in the car. The
explosion came later.
After the rescue squads had come on the scene and had
dispersed the bodies of the victims to the various local hospitals,
Thomas Gracey had received the call that his son had been in the
wreck. He rushed to the hospital and was forcibly held back from the
ER where John was treated. Over eighty percent of his body was
covered with second- and third-degree burns, and the doctors told
Thomas Gracey that his son wouldn't live through the night. The elder
Gracey vowed to stay by his son's bedside until one of two things
happened: either John died, or he was released from the hospital ICU
ward. John was never released from the hospital- and he had never
made a full return to consciousness- but Dr. Gracey made good on his
promise to stay by his son's side. It was widely presumed that, since
Dr. Gracey couldn't protect his son from life, that he would see him
through to a comfortable death. Some of his colleagues harbored a
belief that Dr. Gracey would commit suicide if and when his son died.
It was the sort of vicious, wounded gossip that made one feel uneasy
in uttering it, and they had nothing upon which to base this
supposition, but had they been able to see inside Gracey's mind, they
would have found sufficient proof that they weren't very far off.
John Gracey clung to life for much longer than anyone
anticipated he would- twenty-one days- and when he finally gave up

300
 301

the ghost, John had been only a week away from his nineteenth
birthday. It was determined that the injuries John received in the
crash were not fatal, in and of themselves. It was the burns from the
fire that had caused the most damage, and it was agreed upon
unanimously that a death from burn wounds was by far the most
horrible sort of death that anyone present could think of. If he had
been pulled from the wreck prior to the explosion, it was more than
likely that John Gracey would had survived the crash. He would have
had considerable facial scarring from the lacerations he'd suffered
when the windshield shattered in his face, but he still would have
lived. Now, because of the burns he'd suffered needlessly when the
fire broke out from the puncture in the gas tank, John Gracey had
died.
To all those surrounding him at this juncture- his sister Billie, his
brother Joey, and his nephew Peter- it seemed as though he had
finally come to terms with the loss he'd known he was going to suffer
sooner or later. Thomas Gracey seemed resolved to not losing his
composure. Even when he'd been hustled out of the room a few
moments after John finally died, Thomas looked somehow relieved
that his son's suffering had ended.
It's important to remember that there is no specific sound attendant to
a psychotic break. Most of them usually come in total silence, and
only the person suffering the event knows anything about it. Thomas
Gracey was probably even smiling when it happened, even though he
might not have been aware of what was happening within himself at
the time. he now saw where he had failed. Maybe if he had been able
to perfect the E2D8 solution, his son would be alive today. He wasn't
seeking to end other people's suffering by pushing forward with his
experiments; he was only performing his own peculiar method of
penance.
Daniel Thurman was in a private room at another hospital when
Thomas Gracey came to give him the news that John was dead. He
then started ranting and raving about how all of this was Daniel's fault,
and before hospital security pulled him off Thomas Gracey had
succeeded in breaking Daniel Thurman's jaw a second time. For a
time, it seemed as though his parents were intent upon suing Gracey
for criminal assault, but Daniel was able to talk them out of it once his
jaw had healed itself properly.
In the months that followed, Thomas Gracey became bitter and
turned his darkest thoughts inward. His self-hatred was
magnanimous. He began to drink heavily for the first time in almost a
decade, and severed his professional ties with the Matthias Bramble
Clinic. He spent nearly six months in a deep blue funk, and even his

301
 302

most ardent supporters soon began to give up on him altogether,

shaking their heads with regret.
At home, he began to chemically re-tool the E2D8 formula he
had been working on prior to John's accident. He took chances and
cut corners where he otherwise would not have. He had copies of the
notes he had made while working at the Bramble Clinic, and using
these notes he was able to see where his original vision had been a
little short-sighted.
Had he been able to come up with this missing element before-
which he had taken to calling Blurvin- there was a chance that it might
have saved John's life. When Blurvin was introduced to the E2D8
formula, it was able to not only enhance the rate of regenerative
growth of the skin the was already present, it was also able to grow
new skin at a rate far exceeding Dr. Gracey wildest aspirations.
Taking his findings back to the Matthias Bramble Clinic, Dr. Gracey
was able to have himself re-instated with full benefits and
authorization. He didn't tell them about the formula's ability to grow
new skin, but rather only about its ability to enhance the skin that was
already there. Matthias Bramble wanted to market the E2D8 product
line- it was by this stage no longer simply a formula- as an aid in skin-
grafting techniques, with an eye toward later development of the
teenage acne-cream market, where the real money was to be made.
Dollars signs danced in their eyes when he ran the idea past the board
of directors, of which Thomas was a member.
Getting back to work had imbued him with a new purpose, and
soon he was testing his new product in earnest. He was trying to
make up for lost time, and with the work he'd been doing at home all
along he wasn't too far behind where he wanted to be here at the lab.
In fact, he was well ahead of any progress he'd made prior to the
Blurvin discoveries.
Today he had spent the day holding shards of skin over an open
flame, seeing how it burned, why it burned. While he was watching
the flesh twist and char, he was also thinking of his son, and what
John must have felt like, going through what he had gone through.
And so needlessly.
Most of all, the eldest Gracey male blamed himself for not being
able to be there and protect his son from what waited out there for
him that night it was an ex post facto variation of every parent's
nightmare.
He'd been able to throw all sorts of money John's way- for
tuition, for beer, for parties with his friends- but most of all that
money was supposed to buy him a force field to keep the real world of
automobile crashes and drugged-out hippy acquaintances at bay. It
hadn't worked.

302
 303

After Dr. Gracey had a chance to sit and think about it, it was in
his interest for him to perform the procedure Shelby suggested.
Anyhow, Thomas always liked to explore the thrill of uncharted
medical waters if he was ever able to do it with the Clinic's blessings.
On this one, the project Doppelganger, he'd already received that
blessing in not so many words whenever the possibilities were being
discussed in their meetings.

303
 304

HOLY SHIT
Courtney saw himself at a crossroads, as he entered the church, just
prior to the start of the service. On one hand there was the right way
for him to go. It might not make sense right now, but if he turned his
back on this wicked lifestyle right now he would undoubtedly be
grateful for having done so later. But the word undoubtedly covers a
lot of territory. He'd already gone too far. Were he to believe in this
world of spirituality again, he would once again feel the pain of the lost
soul. Never again would he feel the freedom and ecstasy that he felt
when Kelly was inside him, either in effigy as he rammed him with the
dildo or in reality when it was himself prodding Courtney on to new
soaring heights of awareness.
'Hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without
measure: and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth,
shall descend into it. God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast
them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness.'
The left hand path also beckoned to him. In that world, no
impulse was ever wrong. The only crime in that world was
suppressing one's desires, not giving in to what you felt yourself being
led to. But could he withstand having been in that world for so very
long? Was there really the option of it being a life-long choice? Did he
want to commit to this inverted lifestyle full-time, forsaking all else in
pursuit of the ephemeral, or was this just a weekend thing? And if he
did decide to make it that, would he be able to confine it to weekends?
The sermon today seemed to speak right to him.
'Turn now to Proverbs 5:3. For the lips of an adulteress drip
honey,'
Courtney now saw Kelly dribbling his cum from the edge of his
lips, spilling it over from out of the corners of his mouth, smacking and
reeling at the sight of it. He saw also his wife, the devout one,
dribbling the same hoping for the same effect. Whatever she had
done to him, whatever physical joys he had known of her in the course
of their marriage, he knew she had done with someone else. It was
no longer special to her, even the deepest of sins. How could it be?
Once you've been to the beach, it's hard to get all that excited about a
tiny sandbox; and once you've seen the ocean, feeling its salt and its
warmth on your body, it's hard to be satisfied with only a glass of its
water.
'-and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is
bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to
death; her steps lead straight to the grave. She gives no thought to
the way of life; her paths are crooked, but she knows it not.'

304
 305

What did this tell him? It lead to no answers, no answers that

he wanted to hear, anyway. If he was looking toward God, He was
choosing not to look down today. If Courtney offered up a plea, He
would not hear it. He begged agony from a God that was too dense to
hear him. There was no peace here, not here nor anywhere else. He
was forever being judged. The only peace he'd ever known was
when...
When he was with Kelly. Only then was he not living a lie. Only
then was he allowed to be as he truly was. Only then was he not cast
aside in word as a sinner but rather enveloped into the fold as one of
many. The faceless many. His wife had found solace in the arms of
strange men. God did not account to him for this. God, in this way,
had not offered him any comfort whatsoever in this respect. The
concept of God had only reinforced Courtney's original feelings of
judgment that had gotten in the way of his relations with his wife.
Courtney had gotten no real answers here, only more questions, and
there was no oblivion to be found here, only penitent suffering and
contemplation.
This person was poison to his soul, and yet he pursued it,
pursued him, because he had always scratched after poison, snatching
his fingers at those fleeting moments of transcendence, only in the
quest to see too much. Had he finally gotten whatever the fuck it was
that he'd wanted, those years of numbing himself, abusing himself,
only to later want some claim to a state of innocence. Innocence was
bullshit, especially after you saw what the world was like.
If anonymity worked for her, he thought, it would work for him
as well. He would play the slut. He would revel in his role. There
would be no more pretending; he knew what he felt he had to do. He
walked straight outside, slid into a pay phone and, after closing the
door shut behind him, dialed the pager number that Kelly had given
him the last time the two of them had been together- 695-1o68- and
when he did, he followed his phone number with the secret code Kelly
had given him: o69.

305
 306

SPOOKY ELECTRIC
Kelly invited Courtney over to his apartment the very next night; he
had already rented the movies, he informed Courtney, so all he had to
do was to bring his sweet tender ass over the pad for a little bit of
hypnotherapy.
When he arrived, Courtney was in no mood for small talk
‘Can we just get on with it?’
Kelly preferred to be the one making the demands, but he let it
pass. His pigeon had come home to roost, if only temporarily, and
that alone served to make him happy. 'I guess so. But why, dear, are
you so impatient today? Are you really sure that you don't want to
talk about it? Does it have anything to do with what we've been doing
here?' Kelly had turned around silently and walked into the kitchen
area, which he'd been scrubbing when Courtney knocked.
From underneath a waxed apple in a basket on the counter next
to the stove, Kelly grabbed a 12 ounce tube of KY jelly and began
rolling the tube's contents up towards the cap as if it were a tube of
toothpaste that had been left unattended. 'I might be able to offer
you counsel, if you allow me. Please let me help- if I can.'
It occurred to Kelly, vaguely, in the back of his mind, that he
would soon have to dispose of the bodies in his closet. They were
really starting to smell pretty bad, and someone was bound to notice.
Kelly didn't need that sort of attention, or any kind of attention at all.
He came, he went, and nobody saw him. Courtney's fragile little mind
was unraveling. Kelly could almost see it happening.
It was beautiful.
Murder was such an instant thrill, but as anyone knows, a slow-
roasted steak beats the shit out of a hamburger for taste and aesthetic
flavor every day of the week. With physical death, it was all over
much to quickly, unless he secluded them and dragged it out, but even
then, it was all built up to one moment, and that moment was
sometimes anti-climactic. There was no way to enjoy the process,
really. The holy creator, as Courtney's type would have seen it, could
bring about a man from the soils and dusts of the earth in a day, but
Kelly, a mere mortal as far as those things went, would destroy the
same organism in less than a few months without really even lifting a
finger. The destruction and ritualistic abuse involved, Kelly felt, was
truly self-induced. The justice involved in it was quite poetic. His
patron deity and alter-ego, Damon, who was a self-created being, was
viewed by Kelly as being something along the lines of an angel of
vengeance, if there even was such a thing, and he supposed that there
was. The Bible spoke of it, and it was the only verse he knew by
heart, for it was the only one that ever spoke to him in any way:

306
 307

Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Anything was that

he wished it to be. He felt a moral need to puncture fallacy and
hypocrisy in the world around him. It was the only thing he felt moral
about- his pagan honesty.
At least he never lied about what he was.
'I don't wanna talk about it,' Courtney said, stripping off his
jeans with a callous air that would have sent him reeling had he
noticed it in himself only a few weeks earlier. 'I went to church, and I
kind of...I. I guess I kind of had a run-in with it all.'
'And what did you decide?' Kelly wanted to know.
'Well, I'm here, aren't I?'
'That's true. But you feel something else?'
'Yes, now can we please get on with it?'
'You're a Christian, aren't you, Courtney?'
Courtney stuttered a bit. 'Yes. Why do you ask?'
Kelly face crinkled at the corners, and he started laughing.
‘Why did you ask me that?’
'Because that denotes that you would choose blindness over
sight.'
Kelly had lain out a bath towel lengthwise from the television
set, so that the cum wouldn't stain the rug. Courtney was strapped to
the rack with his eyes glowing with a peculiar look of green-eyed evil
that gave even a jaded old cynic like Kelly the big-time willies. His
body was completely bare; not a stitch of clothing remained. His feet
curled up and his hairy toes turned inward toward his genitals, and
there was something oddly fetal about his appearance in this position.
Perhaps Kelly had never noticed it before because he himself had been
caught in the throes of misspent lust as well, but it was subtly
unnerving, too. Courtney was ass-end up, knees slightly apart to
afford him comfort, with his forearms and head resting upon a pillow
on the floor. There were two more pillows underneath his heaving
stomach to support him.
'Are you ready?' Kelly deRenzi asked him. Courtney said that he
was.
Insertion was a little painful this time, and came accompanied by
an unexpected slap to the ass. It made Courtney's eyes positively
glow. It was all a little bit corny, a little bit of what they'd both seen a
million times before in the movies, only now, they were the ones
inside the box. There was for Courtney none of the unpleasantness
here that was attendant upon his scene in the gay bar Kelly had taken
him to, and he was at a loss to rationalize it or to explain it to himself.
'Oh, yes! Fuck me! Fuck me! Make it hurt!'
Kelly deRenzi was always eager to please. He wanted to make it
hurt.

307
 308

'Courtney, by the time I'm done with your ass, you'll never need
it to be filled again. Do you want for me to fuck you harder,
Courtney?'
'Yes! Harder! I love it! I love it!'
'What?'
'Harder! I said, fuck me harder!'
'You're not afraid of giving yourself over to this? That's very
good indeed. The first part is that you have to be willing to let it go.'
When Kelly's ejaculate burst forth, Courtney ran his tongue
beneath the ridge of the corona of Kelly's penis where he'd been
waiting for it. He played with it, letting Kelly's white, stringy seed
collect in the hollows of his wrist and the corners of his mouth. There
were some gobs here and there that were thicker in consistency than
what else came out, and Courtney tongued these particles with
reckless abandon such as he had never approached anything else in
the total span of his life so far.
Apply and lather. Rinse thoroughly. Repeat if desired.
It tasted not unlike his own semen, and he had come to
recognize the taste of sperm in his mouth before it even landed there.
He was capable of anticipating the scent of it, begging every last drop,
his oral digit flipping and salivating in the dim light.
Finally, after much ado, Courtney's own orgasm was now
reached, about three minutes after Kelly's own had stopped spurting.
They proceeded to lay still for a short while and regarded one another
with unseen eyes.
When Courtney got up, he felt his legs give way underneath him
from being in the bent position for so long. He was getting far too old
physically for this sort of thing- to say nothing of the mental effects of
this kind of activity. The orgasm- or whatever else you might want to
call what he had just experienced now with Kelly inside of him- had
left him completely drained, and for the moment, his greatest fear was
falling asleep here at Kelly's place, thus negating his alibi to Nona were
he to stay past a certain time. If he passed out or transcended out in
the car and got into an accident and killed himself, that was at least
another story- nothing could trace him here. Keeping this little thing
secret now formed the focus of his entire life.
The video was still playing on the VCR; Kelly was laying
prostrate upon the rug in front of the television set. Courtney sat up
on one hand and felt around for a pack of matches to light the black
candle on top of the TV, since in the time they had been doing this the
sun had gone down outside. Tanya Foxx was getting her ass reamed
by some non-descript half-breed with a three-day growth of beard.
Once again when Courtney saw these women, doing what they did, he
saw his wife. His wife would have done this sort of thing in her day,

308
 309

certainly she would have, and probably been a better squealer at the
same time. Could she have taken on two guys at once? No problem.
Of course. Nona was a professional.

Even when Courtney felt good, there were always those shadows
lurking in the background, just waiting for him to let down his guard.
In fact, the only time he felt alive, the only time his troubles didn't
overwhelm him, was when he gave himself over to them completely.
He couldn't trust in anything he felt, for it could fall through at any
moment. He couldn't trust in it. Anything good that came out of his
marriage had to be kept a secret from his wife because if she knew
about it she would then hold it over his head. Concurrently, anything
she got out of the marriage was subsequently denied because she felt
she needed to maintain her image as a martyr within the relationship,
always giving but never receiving in kind. Were the truth to be
exposed, both of them would see it as a scam all the way around- and
a scam is exactly what it was. Such things are difficult to maintain
with any level of success. It's all a matter of balance, and balance is a
relative thing. When one partner starts lying it throws the whole
mechanism out of whack.
'There just comes a point, I think, when you stop caring
anymore,' he found himself saying to her, after the opening salvos in
their nightly argument had been issued. Now, the objective was to
cause the other party as much damage in as short a time as possible,
and Courtney saw his target.
'Things haven't been the same between us for a long, long time.'
'To tell you the truth, Courtney, I'm surprised that you even
noticed it. You haven't noticed much of anything around here lately.
You just come and go and we circle each other like ships passing in the
night.'
Whenever she used his name like that she always put a spin on
it.
'I can't really help that, Nona.'
'Yes, you can.'
Courtney hated it when she adopted that smug, self-satisfied, I-
know-more-than-you attitude, telling him that nothing he told her now
was going to change his mind. 'You know the crazy kinds of hours
they make me work, and all the management seminars and shit that's
required.'
'I know.'
Of course she did. It was those crazy hours and management
seminars that put food on their table. 'I can't help it that I'm a zombie
half of the time. I never get to sleep for much more than four hours in
a row, and even if you get eight hours of sleep a day it doesn't mean

309
 310

anything if it's all broken up like that. And when you're ragging at me
all the time, I just wanna sleep my way through it. I don’t wanna deal
with it. Wake me when it's over. There's no point in me staying up in
the evenings to be with you if all we do is argue. There are times I
just don't want to.'
'Then why are you bitching about us not being as close any
more?'
'I wasn't saying that so much as noticing how much we've grown
apart. It seems like just yesterday that I met you, and now we have a
life, a whole history, tied up between us. It just amazes me
sometimes all we've been through. I can't remember what my life was
before you.'
Nona began to get weepy. Whenever he saw her like this, it
brought some of the old feelings back. There were times if she would
just drop all her grudges against him, he'd gladly relinquish any claim
he had upon his, only wanting to move forward into a new and normal
life. He still held that dim hope from time to time. If they was a way
to make it better, he was all for it. But that didn't seem possible.
'I never thought I'd ever hear you say that about us ever again.
Sometimes, I think all I have is what's between us, and in a way, it is.
Other times I just worry that you don't feel the same, that you feel
somehow separate from me. Sometimes you seem so distant, like
you're somewhere else. I don't know. I thought you didn't want for
there to be a history between us. I thought you thought you'd already
wasted too much time here with me.'
So she was in one of her apologetic moods. Great.
Truth be known, that was exactly how he felt. A total waste of
time that went nowhere. Yet he couldn't bear to give her up. Despite
all of the drawbacks of being involved with Nona- and there were
several rather glaring examples- she was at least safe. He could take
her for granted; she was always there. If he didn't have such hang-
ups about her past sexuality, he probably wouldn't be nearly as
mismatched with her as he sometimes made it seem. 'I don't feel that
way at all,' he told her, lying through his teeth. He didn't want to
burst her bubble now. When he finally left her, he wanted it to come
as a total surprise.
'It's okay,' he said, patting her shoulder lightly. He tentatively
pinched her bra strap through the thin fabric of her blouse.
'I can't help it I'm so...so...fucking emotional.'
He would never have picked a word like emotional to describe
his wife, except maybe out of a hat. No one held things in like she
did. She was a master at the art of suppressed feelings. This
unattractive facet of her personality had caused him to mirror her in
this fashion. He hadn't always been like that, but now, they were even

310
 311

starting to look alike. He'd lost about twenty pounds or so since this
whole thing started and his hair had gotten darker with the onset of
the winter months. There were a lot of ways he was beginning to
resemble his wife.
He wondered if she was pregnant.
It happened again; the sudden flashes in his mind. His wife
drank something that came out of another man's body. Now, tit for
tat, so had he. Did that make it any better? Did that make them
equal? It led only to new problems. What if he'd caught a venereal
disease, or worse? What if Nona ever found out what he'd done, or
what he'd been doing? He had to end this involvement with Kelly as
soon as possible. But this was the first relationship he had where he
felt like he was enough all by himself. He even sometimes felt
moderately talented at what he did. He couldn't give it up altogether
so soon after he had first tasted it.
'It's okay,' he repeated without emotion, making an effort to
twist and contort his words to make them as cool and as soothing as
possible, embalming her exposed tissues with his flesh. All he did to
fill the fissures in her personality makeup would be torn away if she
left him. It went a long way toward uniting them. He needed to make
himself indispensable to her, but without any effort on his part to give
him away. She had to think that she was opening up to him, instead
of feeling him intruding upon her emotions. She had to feel like she
was in control before she willingly gave anything over to him.
Courtney now had trouble being aroused by normal sexual
relations with his wife; even if he wasn't exhausted by his liaisons with
Kelly and had an erection, normal sex, or rather, just the concept of it,
bored him silly. There were only two choices; either he could narrow
his tastes and continue to be as bored as he was with Nona- although
he did enjoy the increase in feeling between the two of them- or he
could swing to the pendulum's other extreme and risk the
consequences. His sexuality was like a favorite toy, and like that toy,
he would mess with it until it broke. But once it was gone, it was
gone; sex would never again be normal for him- assuming, of course,
that it ever was- and only because sex was so disproportionately
important to him in the first place would such activity be verboten to
maintain his mental health.
It was just a matter of his mind moving in too many directions at
the same time, and never being content with a single one of them.
Almost all of them were barbarous, and he endeavored to keep them
in check.
But somehow even that wasn't enough. Nothing would suffice.
He needed to possess her in a way that no other human being
could.

311
 312

But too many men had possessed her for that to be possible for
him.
Even after orgasm it still wasn't enough- his mind was never
still, never content- not even for a moment. The thoughts- and the
requisite disgust he felt that went along with those thoughts- persisted
as soon as he settled down to normal. Even if he wasn't erect, he
wanted to go again. But to what end? The orgasm no longer was the
end of the road for him. He was never satisfied. It was never
permanent. He felt like he was chasing his tail, forever intent upon
the final outcome, not caring for anything that came in between.
In his mind he had the understanding that all sex was 'normal' in
the respect that it was something that could be had between any two
living human beings and was therefore not aberrant in the least, but a
remnant of his wife's sensibilities and those of his wife had carried
over into his current way of thinking, sans inhibitions, and he felt
guilty. Would Nona receive this bit of subliminal data as a rejection of
her? Part of him felt bad, but part of him- a deeper, truer and
somehow more vindictive part of him- felt that she deserved whatever
she got from it.
He spoke, but no one had heard. He really could not be blamed
for what he had done, for it had been done out of his own desperation.
What he did was borne out of the silence of others, and the silence of
his own heart. Nona would probably suspect him, but she would
never, ever confront. She did not know the totality of his story, and
she was best kept in the dark. It did not take a lot to keep her in the
dark. All it took was a bare minimum of deception and a bit of quiet
indifference.
His wife seemed as eager to forget all about him as he was to
forget all about her. There was, he believed, an unspoken agreement
between the two of them, one that went roughly along the lines of, I'll
mind my business, and you mind yours. In Courtney's mind, however,
there was a different, less subtle context to it: you got yours, I'll get
mine.
'Take my cock in your mouth,' he instructed her.
She obeyed, closing her eyes, making on with the act that she
was actually enjoying this part of their love-making routine. He'd seen
her do it a thousand times, and never once was it believable, not even
the first time, never once did he assume that she wasn't begrudging
him this simplest of all pleasures. God knows, she certainly liked it
enough when he did it to her. Then again, God also knew that his lack
of patience with the female orgasm precluded him from achieving any
sort of apprenticeship in this arena. He was far too timid. In this
world, things were done for other people- not for the pleasure it

312
 313

brought them, but rather, for what they would then feel obligated to
do in return.
I'm so dirty on the inside.
She sucked at his penis- inhaling it almost completely- closing
her eyes as if she was concentrating her whole being upon just the
region her mouth occupied, the same region it now shared with his
swollen lower digit. How many men had she done this for? How often
had she made love to other men with her mouth, pausing for delicacy
and obliquity and oral strength? How many times had she then dipped
into the nether region, there, for a tongue swirl of puckered delights?
How many individual testicles had penetrated the elastic folds of her
oral cavity? She with the divine gift of lechery is a superior sexual
partner.
He would never know peace. He instructed her to stop.
Even though she would swallow his semen, he only rarely
allowed her to do this. The thought of her doing that to someone else
disgusted him utterly. It was the final step. It was the crowning
achievement, the supreme sacrifice of eating cum. It was something
she liked to do, the capping off of an act performed entirely for the
benefit of her partner. Martyrdom appealed greatly to her. She
specialized in it. When he met her, she had told him that. I swallow.
She hadn't yet gone to bed with him, so there it was. She once asked
him if he wanted to come on her face. What all would she do for a
man, should he ask for it? What wouldn't she do? Where was that
line drawn? He saw that she had no shame. It was all around him, in
everything she did. She would do whatever he asked when they were
in bed, as her performance in bed- in her mind- was her true
measurement of worth. She would do whatever he asked. She would
do whatever her partner desired. It was only boring for her now
because he was her husband. What had her other partners desired?
The proof, offered up by her own lips. Those lips.
Those lips- what all had those lips seen?
She looked hurt. Rejected. She seemed to believe that
Courtney was blocking the natural power of reconciliation by doing
this, and maybe he was. He never allowed her to finish him this way,
no matter how much or how often she pleaded. She would
masturbate him and jack him off and tell him to fill her up, to let her
swallow it, but he could never come that way. To him, even the most
pleasurable sensations involved in fellatio seemed somehow derived
from the process of urination, which would then preclude him from
having an orgasm, no matter how much his wife sucked and sucked.
Courtney always felt like he had to piss, and this inhibited him. Nona
would encourage him, almost begging for the pleasure of doing it for

313
 314

him, but it would never bring him any closer. He hated it when she
went down on him, for it only sent his mind racing.
I swallow.
That's why he was so surprised at his favorable response when
Kelly did this to him. He hadn't expected to enjoy it, not nearly as
much as he had, and had actually tried to discourage the boy from
doing it. Of course, once he started doing it he didn't want him to
stop. There were truths he would never escape, that he was doomed
to learn over and over and yet over again, with no let-up, no break in
the action, only more regret and displeasure. His mind raced like a rat
in a tiny boxed-in cage. He was probably a homosexual, or at the very
least a bisexual. he liked girls- perhaps too much so- but they
frightened him, and he found it much easier to control himself in
situations with another male- situations that allowed for him to assert
himself disproportionately to what was called for. He was a control
freak. He never should have married Nona. They both would have
been a lot happier apart.

314
 315

STAPHLOCOCCUS AUREUS
Shelby was starting to look at the E2D8 process as being some sort of
exorcism. His vanity had created this vacuum, his reflection had said,
and to eradicate that vanity- which was tempered in his deep
dissatisfaction- would be like eradicating the vacuum itself. If his own
desire to be different than he originally was had caused this breach
into which the spirits had flown, then logic would dictate that removing
that desire would close off the portal that had allowed this to happen
in the first place. If he survived this, then, perhaps he would be sane
again.
The problem being, logic doesn't dictate very much in this world.
He had spent almost every waking moment staring into a two by
three foot mirror that he had bought to replace the ones he had
broken after the first visit. Staring into it, Shelby had been almost
willing them to show themselves once more, if only to provide himself
with evidence that he was not losing his mind entirely, that he was
being fucked with by some outside force, natural or not. That was all
he wanted.
He never even saw the shadow slinking up behind him on the
floor.
'But there's just one problem,' his shadow told him.
'What is it?'
'Bob's dead.'
'What?!'
'He went splat!'
'No.'
'Yes,' the shadow hissed. 'And Timothy Karacas is still out there,
in here. He still wants your skin. Timothy will persist in his pursuit
until one of you or both of you are dead. You can bet on that.'
With that, the shadow dissolved into a mist of vapor.

Shelby had been on the phone to Gracey almost immediately,

wanting only to reach for something that would take his mind away
from what was happening. As he fumbled with the glowing numbers
on the telephone, Shelby had only a few seconds to ruminate about
whether or not he was making the right decision. After he spoke, he
knew that there would be no turning back for him. 'Let's do this as
soon as we possibly can,' Shelby said. 'I don't want to wait any
longer. I can't wait, actually.'

Shelby saw with alarm that his entire body was shaking,
convulsing. And as he held his hand in between the light and the desk

315
 316

in front of him, he saw no shadow being cast as he waved his hand in

a slow arc-like pattern above the desk blotter. Nothing. Nada.
'We can do it as soon as you want, Shelby,' Gracey said, almost
obscenely willing to comply with his request. At last, the worm was
wriggling on the hook, opening its tiny mouth to swallow the fish.
Shelby's voice faltered. 'I do have one question, Dr. Gracey.'
'What is it?'
'How will you ensure that I will look like me? I mean, like the
way I want? How are you able to manipulate-'
'Leave all the manipulation to me.'
'But, I was just curious-'
'We're working on that as we speak. I will need to sample your
DNA and place it in the hierarchy of the determining factors that will
influence how you look. This is a new part of our procedure- we allow
your DNA to actively influence how you will look. The DNA gives us a
starting point. This we will alter so that you come out looking like your
mirrored image; it's complicated, but we've got a bead on it.'

In truth, the technology was years away from being fully

developed.
Thomas Gracey had begged Basil several times over the course
of a few weeks if he would please come forth with a freshly-deceased
cadaver for him to experiment with. When Basil remembered Shelby's
description of a dream he'd had once about replacing the features on
his face with their own mirrored counterparts, he started thinking of
how what Shelby had said that day now mirrored what crazy Tom
Gracey was describing to him.
Gracey knew what was missing, but he was unsure as to how he
should go about procuring the necessary adjustments that would allow
him to totally influence the outcome of any post-genetic skin re-
assignment.
The new proper E2D8 formula needed more study subjects, and
it was hard to find people who were willing to stay quiet about
undergoing such radical epidermal experimentation; a degree of
desperation was what they needed to look for when they started
casting their net for human guinea pigs. If it was successful, the
formula and application sessions could mean a ray of hope to millions
of people across the world, and it needed to be shared with every one
of the folks who could afford to pay for it.
Shelby wanted to do what had never been done before. The
field of synthetic skin sample reproduction research was still
considered to be experimental- and dangerous and perhaps even
unnecessary within medical circles that were not directly involved with
the profit-tallying end of things. Skin was where you either made a

316
 317

fortune hand over fist or you closed up within a year or so of hanging

your shingle out in the street.
And the key to any such experiment was a willing guinea pig.
Could a patient even survive such a procedure? Dr. Gracey
initially doubted it, but he changed his mind after a few days. The skin
was so easy to come by with the new Bramble connection that Gracey
felt an urge to try out some new ideas he'd been toying with in the
back of his mind during his idle hours. Perhaps Shelby could get help
from Doppelganger, and he could get help from Shelby. It was a win-
win situation.
But he also knew that Shelby would be the living example, and
that he would get the lion’s share of media attention- and that was
where a good deal of history went down, in the public forum. They
would probably do the talk-show circuit together, the doctor and his
patient, but Shelby wouldn't be totally under his control, and he could
then throw everything overboard if that was what he really wanted to
do about it.
There was just one thing that bothered Gracey.
Dr. Gracey would become little more than an historical footnote
while Shelby's name and image was being burned into the minds of
people all over the world. He would be remembered long after
Gracey's ashes had been sifted through and had been
unceremoniously shifted into the dust.

317
 318

HIS NEWLY-CRIPPLED ASS

Shelby was being wheeled into the surgery clinic at the Selena Hospital
about five and a half miles from Dr. Gracey’s offices in Rhentsworth.
He had argued from time to time about the operation with Gracey,
seeking to clarify matters only a little bit before proceeding.
Now, moving forward with the operation was essential.
It was upsetting, because the answers he got to his questions
were vague in the extreme, but he chose to push ahead with the idea.
Nothing was worse than the way he was living right now. The little
encounters he had experienced with his opposite selves had done quite
a bit to unnerve him. He wanted the procedure to be over and done
with as soon as was humanly possible. Then things would get better,
he was convinced. He didn’t tell Gracey anything about the reflection,
because he didn’t want the good doctor to think that he was even the
slightest bit insane. That might jinx the whole deal. Shelby knew that
the things he was seeing were real, but he doubted that anyone else
would believe him if he told them. So he played possum. He wasn’t
sure what part his reflection and his shadow played in the deal, he
only knew that the three of them were inextricably linked.
Shelby had originally thought that the reflection was sent to him
as some sort of warning, a portent that he ought not go through with
the operation as he had planned it. But the more he thought about it,
the less sense this supposition made to him. The reflection kept
saying that it wanted his skin; well, as long as he had new skin to
crawl into, that ghastly apparition in the mirror could have the leftover
scraps and make do with whatever it was able to salvage of the life
Shelby had lived before his surgery. As the first medical physician to
have experienced an E2D8-assisted facial re-assignment procedure, he
would have a world-exclusive. His name would be touted in the
papers, once he leaked the story. Once he leaked the story, he would
become more famous than the man who had originally invented the
stuff. The recent politicization of biomedical science research had led
to fierce competition, and Shelby Dunn wanted in on the action. The
Albert Lasker prize was not out of the question. Dr. Gracey had done
a majority of the research on his own time and out of his own pocket,
and because of this he would surely be receiving the Lion's share of
the industry-related praise.
But that wasn't enough for him. If he could have had it his way,
Thomas Gracey would have been both doctor and patient. This was
something that Shelby knew innately, as well as the fact that Gracey's
ambition might prove fatal to both of them if it went wrong somehow.

318
 319

The tendons in Dr. Gracey's neck seemed exaggerated to

Shelby, who knew that his observation may or may not be influenced
by the stress the Doctor had been under lately. Shelby and Basil both
knew that Gracey had been putting in 2o-hour days in order to
complete the preparations for the operation. To Shelby it seemed
almost reckless to proceed with his operation in consideration of all
that was going on in his life lately. If Timothy Karacas wanted his
skin- so be it. Shelby wasn't going to wait for the mirror corpse to
come peel him like some sort of grape at lunchtime. That was one
way to fix the ghoul haunting his mirror.
But what if it didn't work?
He remembered the first conversation he'd had with Gracey on
the subject of the operation. 'There's a way to get what you want to
achieve, Shelby. It's a new process by which we actually grow new
skin for you- perfect, unblemished skin- and we're then able to attach
it to your own existing skin. It's a stop-gap measure for covering
warts and acne scars, but we've been making a great deal of progress
whenever we've tried to expand the applications beyond that limited
margin. According to the data we've compiled, there's no limit to the
amount of skin we can grow, or to the number of square inches we'll
be able to cover with the E2D8 treatment schedule. It all takes time,
of course, and money- but it's worth it. What you're willing to undergo
with the experimentation means a lot to me, Shelby- and it will do a
lot for the project.'
'E2D8?'
'E2D8. I'd like to tell you that we purposefully chose that name
because it sounded a lot like a real word, but that's not the whole of
the truth. What etudiate might mean in the dictionary, I haven't the
slightest idea, but it sounded good and that's the way we kept it. The
name itself comes from the way we labeled our lab experiments. We
had originally started at A1B1, and worked all the way down to E2D8.'
'How long did that take?'
'I don't know. A couple of years? Maybe a decade? In the field
of medical research, particularly an experimental branch like this one,
you could easily lose your stamina- as well as your mind- if you or
even one your colleagues were to keep track of the time being
invested into it.'
'No, no,' Shelby protested. 'How long until it was E2D8?'
'Oh,' Dr. Gracey said, rubbing his chin. 'We took the number
after each letter and extrapolated it to nine-hundred and ninety-nine
before we went to the next letter. E2 means just over four thousand
batches.'
'And what does the D8 stand for?'

319
 320

'The final two characters were used to denote a variation upon

the lettered formula. And even we'd hit E2D8, there were still a
number of minor adjustments that needed to be made, but we decided
that we liked the name and wanted to market our product under that
moniker.'
'Is what you're talking about even legal?' Shelby asked him.
'I'm in the same field you are- even though we're in vastly different
areas within that field- and I've never even heard of such a thing being
possible. That's why I was so excited to meet you. But I ask you:
aren't there laws on the books that prohibit what you're doing here?'
'Well, we have to define our terminology when you ask what's
legal.'
'How exactly do we go about doing that?' Shelby asked.
'How do you decide what is and what is not legal? It's all so very
subjective. It's called the Project Doppelganger. We duplicate skin.'
'Oh? How come I've never heard of it outside of Basil?'
'If you'll forgive me for saying this, Shelby, you're so far down
the chute in terms of what's going on that I'm surprised that your
people are actually allowed to use electric lighting in your labs. I've
heard a lot about you, Mr. Dunn, and not much of it is very good. It's
all just the wagging of idle tongues. That's just how far ahead this
thing is compared to what you've been used to. There has been quite
a lot of disinformation and outright lies in this sector of our research
and development, and I can't rightly say I understand why. Imagine
the ways this could help burn victims! But no, they want to keep this
all under wraps. They want us to keep experimenting, keep pushing
forward to see what we can come up with. Between you and me,
Shelby, I've got a monkey downstairs that's got a humanoid facial cast
that wouldn't shame a Hollywood starlet. You could look at it and you
would swear to God that it was sewn onto a monkey's body, but it's
actually the monkey's own skin, just re-gelled and formatted to
replicate the facial features and expressions of an upright mammal-
which is, of course, most of what a monkey truly is. He's been living
down there for three years, and most of that time he's been doing it
with the face of a human being.'
Shelby's jaw dropped. 'You're kidding.'
'Of course,' Dr. Gracey said, grinning amicably. 'This is what you
might want to call elective surgery, you know, and you are free to do
whatever you want. I want you to think it over, and see if it's what
you want to do. Being a man of the same profession I'm sure that you
understand my statement of nomenclature regarding disclosure of
what I have told you today. This is between us, if you want me to
help you.'
'I think I understand what it is that you're trying to say to me.'

320
 321

'I'm glad. The less we have to say about this, the better.'
'What's the compound made of?'
'Lots of elements, but only in amounts fitting a certain ratio- if
it's not mixed properly, or gets stored at an improper temperature, it
won't work. Diethylstilliobesterol figures in prominently, along with
gerascim, psilocybin, polysorbate 8o, and a whole lot of other things.
It's much more complicated than it sounds.'
Shelby told the doctor that he would need some time to think
about it, and the doctor said that he understood. Shelby was provided
with a video tape as well as a business card and a couple of brightly-
colored pastel brochures. His old skin, Dr. Gracey said, would be
incinerated.
After Shelby Dunn had left his offices, Thomas Gracey reflected
upon the factors that had led to him being in this place, at this time.
Dr. Gracey's tax-dodge cover firm, Ibsenheit Industries, had
been paid in bulk for a shipment of fourteen skins that had resulted as
waste from seventeen different skin-grafting experiments. The first
two skins had been in unsaleable condition when the people came in-
both of these seven-year-old girls were burn victims- and one skin had
gotten lost; it had gotten up and walked away on its own, if Gracey
was to believe the testimony of the sentry guard on duty in that wing
of the hospital that night. Shelby was planning to volunteer as a
guinea pig for them, and he in turn would receive his own perfect skin.
That was all that would be required to make him whole again- into
somebody else, in fact. He would simply dry up in the end and cease
to be Shelby Dunn anymore.
Dr. Gracey knew that his experimentation would be forever
limited in scope if he were only allowed to work with animals and dead
human beings. But now, that all would change, and for the better.
The performance of biotechnology stock shares had declined steadily
over the past couple of years- due largely to liability and a lack of
progress throughout the industry. With this compound that he now
held in his hands in a series of sequentially-numbered 6 dram vials, he
could make Ibsenheit Industries the Home Shopping Network of the
nineties!

321
 322

GLOWING
The night before Shelby’s initial operation, he received another visit
from Timothy Karacas, who had learned to travel outside of the
mirrored reflection- even though such processes weakened him
considerably. He could make himself be felt, physically, and his
spiritual form assumed dramatically malevolent proportions whenever
he traveled outside of his usual state. When he pulled himself out of
the scraps of mirror in the drawer next to Shelby’s bed, he found that
the man was sleeping. Was this what it was like for his demon when it
was haunting him? It was possible, and now Timothy thought that he
could see some of the attraction that lay in a lifestyle that revolved
around tormenting people. When one was totally lost to the benefits
of the physical world, there almost nothing to do except to plot and
execute one's revenge.
As he walked onto the surface of the floor, his legs felt weak. he
wandered over to the bed and regarded his prey almost lovingly.
Putting a foot on either side of Shelby's torso, he hoisted himself up
onto the bed and lowered himself down onto Shelby's body, doing it
slowly, inch by inch, until the full weight of his being was able to be
felt.
Shelby awoke with a start, and realized there was no way to
escape.
Timothy leaned down and jutted his own chin into Shelby's; its
stink was in his face. 'Whenever you try to sleep, asshole, I'm sitting
on your chest. I'm the one who makes it hard to breathe. I'm the
why when you phrased that one sentence from earlier- namely, why
am I dying?-'
'I don't believe you,' Shelby cried, not knowing what else could
be said. 'You're full of shit. What you're saying cannot be true.'
It felt as if his lungs were filled with asbestos fibers.
'I'm nothing more than what you used to be- before you died-
and what you'll become when I'm done. And I won't even touch you
to do it.'

Shelby's surgery was scheduled for June 12 at eleven thirty,

taking approximately fifteen hours to complete. He was doing his best
to keep his mind off of his reflection, and his shadow. He now spent
his days doing the best he could to curb his eyes from viewing the
atrocities that surrounded him on either side. The encounter last
night- with Timothy speaking his prophecy and then vanishing- had
spooked him deeply and irrevocably. The operation now provided him
with his only source of escape. He would not be left alone, not for
many moons, and Shelby felt that Timothy and the shadow- what had

322
 323

it called itself?- would be forced to leave him alone, at least for the
time being. If Mr. Karacas truly wanted his skin, he would have to
fight for it.
The OR nurse swabbed the crook of Shelby's forearm with a
Benzalkonium Chloride antiseptic towelette before injecting him with
his preoperative muscle relaxant. This was only the first part of the
anesthetic routine he had been scheduled for. Being a doctor himself
did nothing to allay his fear as he began to count backwards from
sixty, waiting for the muscle relaxant to ignite in his spinal cord. He
had seen the sort of careless mistakes that people made in a hospital
and he had once or twice been guilty of making those same mistakes
himself. Once a given patient was 'under the glass,' the arresting
element the surgeons felt of being on token display suddenly
evaporated with the same sudden irrevocability as when it had come
upon them in the scrub room. Things became loose, and people
became relaxed. The people who orchestrated the exchange of
oxygen with ether and then administered the sedatives while the
patients were under to keep them under sometimes loosened their
restraint to the point of being lethal. He'd seen it happen.
And sometimes, the people on the operating table- while 'under
the glass,' in other words- died on the operating table due to
negligence.
The details were vague as Shelby tried to recall his involvement
in a fiasco involving the facelift of a woman named Carmen Rickets
about two years earlier. Basil had been in London, and it was a
routine procedure to say the least. The chance for complications
appeared negligible to everyone involved, and there would be a
supervising surgeon on duty....
Was there?
And with that thought, Shelby Dunn was soon asleep.
While he slept, Shelby was given an epidural anesthetic,
administered through his back, that made his entire body as numb as
if it had been frozen in ice. Even in his dream state, he could feel a
little bit of what was going on. He fancied that- if he tried- that he
would be able to move somewhat, but he couldn't feel anything from
his brain on down.

The reflection stole into the electrical supply room through an air
vent and floated amongst the boxes marked PDI and ABX and
Excelsior APM. After finding exactly the switches he wanted, he pulled
the wires on the OR. Somehow he had instinctively known which of
the green and red plastic-coated wires he would need to pull in order
to affect a life-support shut-down in room OR 5. The lack of oxygen
that would be going to Shelby's brain would cause him to take on brain

323
 324

damage as well as lungsful of de-oxygenated air backing up in his

respiratory system.
He would die, but his skin would then be vacated, freeing up
space for his reflection to assume the role of being him. There would
be stares, and there would be questions, but at this point, Timothy
didn't care. He knew that his time of physical effectiveness was
drawing to a close.
The reflection ran its mind over the seams of a box of alcohol
prep pads. Separate from himself, the soul of Ixxir- while on that
particular subject- would soon come to possess Shelby Dunn’s shadow
in the daylight hours. Timothy's soul was migrating from one old
person to another, trying to lay low and not kill anyone by giving them
a stroke in the process of jumping onboard their bodies. There was no
particular explanation given for Shelby's popularity as a target for the
minor demons when the question was asked, and the two of them-
Timothy and his cancer- would switch places on the odd occasion but
only for the mutual sake of their own individual conveniences.
It was trying to sabotage Shelby's operation so that it might
project itself into his new skin; it knew that a good strong batch of
E2D8 would probably last ten times longer than real skin would, and it
wanted to capitalize on that fact. Timothy was unsure of what life he
could live within such a circumstance, but he was willing to try.
Besides, Shelby had been partially responsible for his own death.

324
 325

NO MAN’S LAND
Courtney’s puckered red asshole was leaking bloody cum-swirled,
cock-churned liquid shit. It looked like some sort of scatological ice
cream topping- and there were equal parts feces and blood on his
hands when he wiped himself.
Courtney found that he was out of breath. It was a total head-
rush; he'd fallen to the carpet, face down, still impaled upon Kelly's
strap-on Rambone dong, his knees on either side of him and his hairy
ass up high in the air. He was smiling deliriously. Courtney had
experienced nothing like this before. He'd gotten off on such
stimulation, even achieved an anal orgasm from time to time, but the
singular intensity of this experience banished all others to the darkest
recesses of his mind.
Courtney was now for the first time experiencing the warm
afterglow, the silent contentedness that Kelly had spoken about
earlier. He no longer felt as though his mind was racing. In fact, it
almost felt as though he was wrapped in a sheet of soft cotton flannel.
Serene.
All he remembered was emptiness. Total emptiness, filling him
to the brim, overspilling him with the secrets he had been yearning to
unravel.
It had sent him over to the other side at last. When he finally
experienced his orgasm after almost half an hour of this sort of vicious
stimulation, his eyes had fluttered like those of a doe and he heard
himself making the most incredible sounds- he had been almost
howling with it, reeling back with its intensity. He hoped momentarily
that Kelly had been too far gone in his own orgasm to have noticed.
Failing that, he hoped that Kelly had found it to be beneficial to
what he himself was experiencing and wouldn't laugh at him for
carrying on like that. He felt almost like being- the phrase rose
unbidden to his lips, but there it was; for the grace of God- born again,
because surely that was what this experience most easily likened itself
to.

325
 326

SHELBY ON ICE
The operation had taken thirteen hours for the first part- the skinning,
as Dr. Gracey insisted upon calling it. There had been a moment of
power failure, however temporary, and this had given them all cause
for alarm. This was nothing if not delicate surgery, and total
compliance was necessary if they were to pull this off successfully.
As each piece was lifted off of him, clamps were brought in to
reduce the swelling. After that, a 2” x 2” section of E2D8-treated flesh
was laid down to replace the missing skin. This was only one layer,
and not what would be shown to the outside world. This was only for
maintenance, as no human being could survive any length of time
without their skin.
Basil Rochefoucauld came in for the second part of the
operation, which involved the manipulation of the vat-generated E2D8-
treated skin tissues. This was where particular attention was paid to
detail, because Shelby was out of danger, physically. Dr. Gracey was
resting as Basil began the procedures that would ultimately affix and
meld the E2D8 skin to Shelby’s own innate physical framing. Gracey
would come back at the twenty-hour mark to complete the molding,
and to make him look the way he wanted.
While he was under the anesthetic and his skin was being peeled
from his body in two-inch thin strips, Shelby dreamed of two beings
that now chased each other- but there was a third figure in the
distance, getting closer all the time, and this third figure worried
Shelby immensely. It seemed to Shelby that this figure represented
the doom that was coming.
But other than that, his recollections were nil.

326
 327

LAYERS
The next step in Courtney’s immolation was a stroke of pure genius.
Kelly had gotten the idea while they were fucking and once it
came to him, it dogged him even after his own orgasm had obliterated
almost everything else. Getting Nona involved with their shenanigans
was pretty easy once it came down to actually doing it- she was every
bit as dopey as Courtney had described her- all he had to do was call
her. It was like plucking fish out of a very small barrel.

‘Yes, hello, I’m a friend of Courtney’s.’

‘Yes?’
‘I’m trying to organize a class reunion, and our information is
woefully out-of-date. Could I stop over and talk with you. It must be
a surprise, you know.’
‘Of course.’ She was making this too easy. 'That would be
splendid.'
'What did you say your name was again?'
'I didn't. I'm sorry. My name is Ramsey Lucas.' Kelly had just
pulled the name out of thin air. He was holding a Ramses foil-packet
condom in his hand and had just seen Star Wars the night before
when it was on television. 'Courtney and I used to play chess together
after school all the time. We were rather close but I've lost track of
him.'
'Oh, yeah! Yeah! He's talked about you from time to time
whenever he gets wistful of his high school days,' said Nona, lying
through her teeth. Courtney was no more prone to reminiscent
reflection than he was to walking on hot coals. In truth, Nona had no
such recollection of Courtney telling her about this person but she
listened so infrequently whenever Courtney opened his mouth that
such a remembrance could likely have occurred without her having
taken any notice of it whatsoever.

'Hello,' the boy said when she answered the door three hours
later. 'I'm Ramsey Lucas. I'm the one who talked to you on the
phone.'
'Hello. Come in,' Nona said.
'Thank you.'
Such pleasantries grated upon his nerves, but they had needed
to be dispensed with. His wife was certainly pretty enough. If this
boy Courtney was chasing after the root of his sex, he definitely wasn't
running from a hideous old bag to do it. 'I'm grateful that you were
able to see me on such short notice,' he said, as he followed her in
stepping into the foyer. She offered him a hanger and he hung up his

327
 328

coat, although he didn't think he would be staying very long. All he

really expected to do today was to get a layout of the place, and a
visual confirmation of dear Courtney's home environment.
'It's okay, no problem at all. Can I get you something to drink?'
'If it's no trouble.'
'I offered, did I not?'
'True. Ginger ale, if you have it.'
'7 UP?'
'Fine.’
‘I'll be right back.'
He surveyed the layout of their home as she disappeared into
the kitchen for his drink. His eyes rolled from left to right in his head,
taking in the scenery. The place was much, much nicer than Kelly
would have pictured Courtney being able to do for himself. Maybe
somewhere along the way they had inherited some money.
'Here you go,' Nona said, handing the drink to Kelly.
'Thank you,' he said politely.
'Now,' Nona said in a smooth, velvety tone, leaning back
somewhat into the plush of the sofa. 'What can I- do to help you?'

Had he not stopped off at Bachelor's Paradise on his way home

from work, Courtney almost would have almost certainly walked in on
Kelly and Nona having sex in their bedroom. And not just normal sex,
which would have been bad enough. Nona had reverted to her old
ways, the ones that allowed anything to pass between two horny
consenting adults behind the bedroom doors. Anything to be different.
There was very little, Kelly found, that she had not done before, in one
form or another. The lady had lived quite a life. This he found out as
he got to know her better.
I can't help thinking Christ never had it like this.

Fucking Nona was like fucking a pro; as soon as she had steered
him into the bedroom and told him to make himself 'comfortable,'
Nona had click-locked the door behind them. As he lay back on the
bed, Nona retreated to the high chest of drawers and opened the top
drawer, taking something out of it before she turned around to face
him again. There was an evil look in her eyes as she crossed the room
to the foot of the bed where he lay, and when she got to the bed she
began crawling on all fours until her head was even with the waistline
of his jeans.
Nona dug her incisors into the denim flap near the top button
and tugged roughly to one side with her head, popping the rivet open.
After that was done, she flicked her tongue and caught the tab of his
zipper between her teeth, turning her head and pulling it down,

328
 329

slatternly gazing up into his eyes all the while she was doing this. As
he was wearing nothing underneath his jeans, his cock flopped out of
his pants and strode just underneath her chin. Nona licked him up the
length of his shaft and took the head of his cock into her mouth with a
soft groan that caused Kelly to shiver.
Nona worked her mouth as if she was chewing bubble gum and
was preparing to blow a bubble. I know what she's doing, Kelly
thought disjointedly, and sure enough, he was right. Nona had
stopped at the dresser to grab a condom, and she had secreted it in
her mouth- underneath her tongue, probably, and she was practiced at
such a course.
She worked it down over his cock, pursing her lips and rolling it
down using her tongue as a sort of guide. Were he a john and she the
whore, he probably wouldn't even have noticed that she had put the
condom on him- that was the whole point. Kelly thought he could
hear synovial fluid cracking in her jawbone as she inhaled his cock; the
woman who was known before her marriage as Nona Asenath was a
real sexual wonder horse.

That was the first time. After that, she demanded to see him
again, almost immediately. She had paged him the next afternoon,
wanting the full-on treatment he had alluded to the previous
afternoon.
'Why do you act so ashamed of your body?' Kelly asked Nona,
once they were on the bed, half-undressed.
'I don't know.'
'But why, then?'
'I don't like my body, okay?' Her tone said that she was hotly
animate about the subject. 'Why do you keeping asking me about it?'
'Because I love your body. The curves, the ellipses as you roll
over to lie face-down on the bed, so that you can pull yourself open
and offer me your ass. Oh, Nona. Sometimes I do feel a little bit
guilty. There are so many angles to worship, and I'll show them all to
you.'
The woman blushed fiercely as he ran his hands over her body.
'Some people don't know what they're talking about, and I'm
afraid that I do. I mean it,' Kelly insisted. 'I love to watch your body.'
'Oh, stop it,' she said.
'I won't. Pinch your nipples, for me.'
'They're very sore.'
Kelly groaned, and then his head swung around to meet hers.
Their eyes connected for a moment, and Nona knew what he
would do.

329
 330

'I said,' and all of a sudden he was twisting his fingers roughly
inside of her vagina as he bit deeply into her neck.
'I said, pinch your nipples for me, bitch.'
His voice thickened.
'Now.'
There was a moment where neither of them did anything, and
then she began to play; Nona did as she was told, and she winced with
discomfort.
But there was a sudden flood of wetness in her crotch.
'Okay, okay!' she cried, wondering how to get out of this.
'Okay, what?'
'Please...play nice.' She smiled pathetically at him.
I can make anyone come for me, Kelly thought, if only for a
while.
His body was pinioning hers against the wall. Her toes were
spread against the plaster and her hands were behind her knees,
holding herself open for him. For his part, Kelly had positioned his
arms so that every single one of his thrusts increased the pressure on
her legs to buckle, and her knees to give. When he fucked Nona, Kelly
wanted to leave her in a transcendent yet physically-damaged state of
ecstasy. The bitter sweat from his forehead was dripping onto her
breasts and into her eyes whenever Kelly thrust forward. Not that
Nona seemed to mind very much.
'I want you to play with yourself for me. I want for you to show
me how you get yourself off. What do you like best, sticking your
fingers inside yourself all the way, part way, or do you only like to rub
your clit? Which one hits you deeper? Which one drives you mad?'
'I like it both ways,' said Nona, arching her back flat on the bed
and spreading her legs. 'I like to lick my fingers once they've been
inside me. God, I can't believe I'm doing this in front of you.'
'I just want you to admire your body in the same way that I am.'
'I know that, honey, but it's just that I'm usually alone for this.'
'Do you feel self-conscious about it?'
'Well, in a way, yes I do,' she admitted, but Kelly could tell that
she was getting lost in what she was doing; her eyes began to flutter.
'Then suck my cock again. Then it won't all be just for you.'
'Okay.' Her mouth moved toward his groin and clamped on.
The lady did give a good head-job, he had to give her that much.
There was a sort of internal peace to be found here in this
context that most straight people could not fathom. As Nona sucked
him off while masturbating herself, Kelly reclined and allowed his free
self to enter the domain and take root; he would leave this house as a
new man. The best of sex did that to you, and only people who made
more out of it than was absolutely necessary- people like Courtney, for

330
 331

instance- got themselves all caught up in the emotional aspect of it. If

you were smart, like Kelly, you knew when to leave it alone, and never
to leave more of yourself at the scene of the crime than could easily be
wiped up with a moistened wash cloth.
That was the smart way to consider it.
It took more will power and restraint than Kelly knew he
possessed-and admittedly, self-restraint was not his long suit- to keep
him from spilling the beans to Courtney about what he and his wife
were doing, because the usurpation of his marital partner would have
caused him to become unhinged, and Kelly didn't want that- at least,
not just yet.
He merely wanted the satisfaction of knowing that he could have
her whenever he wanted, and that he could get her to do whatever he
desired, only because he was more forceful than Courtney, and his
lovely wife Nona, it appeared, always had a thing for big, strong,
forceful men. Kelly was amazed to discover that she also had a
surprising marked penchant for kink. Anything went, because even
that wouldn't suffice.
The wicked shall not be unpunished.
She forced her fingers bluntly into his mouth. Kelly then sucked
at them, tasting the juices from her vagina. 'Do you like that as much
as I- do, huh?' Nona was looking for his approval more than anything
else.
'Um-hm,' he answered. He had to admit she did taste pretty
good.
At this rate, he reflected, Nona should be catching up with
Courtney in about three or four weeks; that's when the three-way
begins. That's when the mind-fuck really starts. He reached
underneath her and twisted her nipples, without malice, but with
enough pain to tell her that, yes, something new was going on. Kelly
reached around her and licked his index and middle fingers and
grabbing both of her butt-cheeks, spreading them to frig her clit-
which indeed, needed and deserved more than a little frigging at this
point; after the butt-fuck, she was almost totally dry- and manually
located her anus with them.
Having found it, he seemed to insist upon humiliating her
further- she claimed to love it, even the butt-fucking- by stretching
and massaging the gaping orifice of her asshole. Her degradation was
essential to his satisfaction. He noticed that unless she was
whimpering in pain, his erection had a tendency to subside. The pink
meat of her vagina surrounding his cock did not excite him in the
least. It did, but not sexually. It was being able to conquer her, to
get her to do things almost against her will- it was that exchange of
power that excited him far more than anything else.

331
 332

ORGY OF THE SPIRITS

Timothy entered Melanie's apartment through an open sliding patio
door. He had mistakenly- at first- tried passing through walls the way
ghosts did it in the movies, but he could never get quite all the way
through, and he had once gotten himself stuck inside of a wall he had
been trying to breach. His newest observation was this: the longer he
was dead, the less he was able to control his path in the physical
world. If he once enjoyed new faculties in this state, he was now
seeing a almost daily deterioration of his ability to control and harness
these new strengths.
He had lost control over the physical world when he died, and
now it required every ounce of his concentration of will and all the
effort he could muster to turn a simple doorknob or pop a button on a
lock. For a time there, he had been getting slowly better at these
things, however rudimentary, but this progress had inverted itself.
His days were now filled with a nostalgia for a life he hadn't
really enjoyed that much the first time around and this inertia bogged
him down more than he had ever thought possible. Timothy somehow
seemed to know that Melanie wasn't living with her parents anymore.
He also seemed to know why she had fought so bitterly with her
mother's husband, and exactly where she was living now. There were
other things he knew about Melanie now, too. For as perfect as she
was, and as flawed as she was, their relationship was over for a long
time before either one of them was able to admit it. There were
images of her that he could recall, oddly out-of-frame pictures of her,
and these served as a reminder to what he had lost. But they had lost
each other more than anything. They had come together, but it was
Melanie who kept on going. Timothy had known about her
transgressions- with Kraggess as well as other people at work- and
after a time Timothy just deduced that Melanie couldn't help the way
she acted. Her compulsions were not her own, and she was
treacherous to herself, as well as to Timothy. He knew this as well.
But he loved her; he had tried to hold onto her, despite her serial
infidelities.
To get here- to feel this pain- he had merely slipped out of his
old assignment with Shelby, and within seconds found himself being
drawn to a part of town he'd never visited before in his life. It was
nothing if not a very sloppy act of his concentration, but he even saw
the street address of her apartment building when he closed his eyes.
Such grim victories seemed to do violence within his head and they
caused him agony, coming in the form of tiny silver flashes of pain
that blurred his vision that would gradually recede into a low ache that
in one's lifetime might have been referred to as a migraine- only here,

332
 333

in this deathly sphere, such fatigue could be lethal. He had no idea of

what had happened to his hard-won skin, and indeed at this point he
no longer cared. Some innate sense told him that his future-
ephemeral as it was- had nothing to do with the world of flesh.
It was the world of After.
It was only because he had come in as the reflection that he was
able to get in here to be this close to her. If he had tried to come as
the shadow, the light outside would have rendered him useless,
leaving him immobilized until the sun had set, which it was now doing.
There would have been no time to prepare himself for the task which
now lay at hand.
The reflection was also the most emotional of the three states of
possession and he was feeling every jab as though he had experienced
it all on his own. When he acted as the reflection he seemed to be
swept over by an ocean of melancholy, and he had enough experience
with that particular and indiscriminate emotion to know its debilitating
effects. He felt his heartbreak when he became what was in the
mirror.
His spirit wasn't prepared for what he felt when he first saw her.
She looked just as he had remembered from life, and why should she
look any different? Real life had been only five months ago, in spite of
how long it might actually have seemed to him. Her life had indeed
moved on.
There was decoration, mementoes of times without him. A party
invitation; a set of unfamiliar earrings; a cigar. Love was pure, as
purely as it begins, as pure as the poets say it is, save for what people
did to stain it.
There was a sudden flood of remorse and feelings that now
threatened to overwhelm him as he watched her from where he was.
Timothy wasn't sure, but he thought he might be floating, and sure
enough, he was. His field of vision was steadily raising toward the
ceiling. Was he being called back to heaven? Timothy tried to stop his
ascension toward the ceiling, but he was trying to flex metaphysical
muscles he'd never used.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, he stopped raising upwards
and dropped back down to where he had been before. Height was
relative when one was no longer in the physical body, and Timothy
wondered if perhaps his emotions had carried him. Seeing Melanie
had, in the most literal sense, lifted his spirit. He knew he wouldn't be
able to kill her after all.
That wasn't why he was here, was it? It wasn't cowardice that
would prevent him from doing it and it wasn't fear of reprisal- it was
his love for her that would prevent him from doing it. He loved her
more now than he had when she was in his life. It felt as though he

333
 334

had left something of his living self inside of her, and he wanted to do
what he could to protect that part of him that lived in her, because it
was the only part of him left. He owed her that protection, at least.

What Timothy could never have known was that the candle she
was now lighting on her kitchen counter was for him. She did this
every day as soon as she got home from work and kept the candle
burning until she went to bed. It was a ritual that had insinuated itself
into her life without her having noticed it. It comforted her, just
having the candle lighting her steps as she walked barefoot through
the house. It made her feel that Timothy was still around, just around
the corner with his nose buried inside of a book. As strange as that
might have sounded if she'd spoken the sentiment aloud, it was true.
His voice still echoed in her head from time to time, only now it
happened less frequently. The pain sometimes wasn't as fresh. What
else could she do but remember him fondly? There had been a lot of
good times between the two of them, but towards the last part of their
time together, she had lost sight of that fact. Now, their presence
overwhelmed her. Christmas. New Year's Eve. His proposal. The
time that she had been naked, fresh from the shower, and he had
wrapped those warm flannel bed sheets around her.
And I will burn a candle for you, and for your memory.
She was not afraid of what the night contained, save for
memories.
Nothing caused more fear and pain for her than the good
memories.
Timothy, for his own part, was remembering the same images,
caught in the fog her mind now provided for him. He could see the
two of them in bed together, watching TV or perhaps making love,
enjoying one another's company, enjoying one another's bodies,
blissfully ignorant of what was yet to come in their lives. They had
shared a world without end, and it stopped dead in its tracks before
either of them could appreciate it.

Timothy was so wrapped up in this reverie that he hadn't seen

the shadow passing lightly along the wall behind him. It had slipped
along like so much oil from one end of the room to the other, having
entered through the same breach that Timothy had used, only with
less hassle. It did so without making the slightest mistake that might
give away its positioning to Timothy, who stood in silence as he
watched Melanie go over her bags of groceries- sorting them on the
counter, bag by bag.
'Hello, Timothy,' his cancer sighed breathily. 'Sorry, if I'm late.'
If he was still wearing his skin, he would have jumped out of it.

334
 335

A skinny finger of ill sensation crept up his spine, like a night prowler.
'Old friend, what are you looking for? Are you looking for
Heaven? Is that what you want? If it exists, friend, you're already
there, and I don't think that it's all of what you'd thought or hoped it
would be.'
While he'd been watching Melanie, it was possible for him to
believe that everything was still the same, that nothing had ever
changed.
Now it was harder to maintain that illusion.
Now it was harder to understand what was real.
'I just want to go home,' Timothy sighed. 'That's all I really
want now. A warm place. I just don't know where home is for me
anymore.'
Ixxir shrugged as if none of this was really either here or there.
Both of them felt an oddly confessional mood attending this
conversation, and neither one of them felt very comfortable with it.
Ixxir was jolted by a memory, something that had happened a
few weeks before Timothy's rift, when he had still been alive. It had
been the first time that Ixxir had squeezed the tiny man's tender brain
interior, much to the tiny man's chagrin. Ixxir had only asked Timothy
what year it was, and he had done it as politely as the lame little fuck
could have wanted. Ixxir felt that it had been taunted without
provocation.
While Timothy lay writhing in agony, Ixxir took a few moments
to probe around in his brain, and it had found what year it was. Ixxir
scrolled the digits inside of Timothy's cranium as if they were a
speedometer that was running too fast and threatening to seize.
1992. It was 1992.
What had happened in 1992?
1992. 1142. Two from two...four from nine...nine minus one
is...
A horrible number crossed its eyes as it rimmed Timothy's
haloes: Eight.
For a second, it felt like a pawn, instead of a player.
I've been like this for...eight hundred and...fifty years?
Timothy looked over at his torment and for a moment, it had
shivered.
'Are you cold?'
Ixxir affected not to have heard him. There was an odd moment
in which neither one of them spoke or moved. Ixxir could tell that the
thought of reciprocal movement hadn't crossed Timothy's mind.
'If I kill her, I think I'll pass on to whatever comes next. I'm not
afraid of hell. I'm not ashamed of the life I've led. But I am afraid,
because I won't kill her. If I don't go through with this, I'm going to

335
 336

stay on this fucked-up side street in the cosmos for an eternity. There
are echoes of life. Sometimes, at night, I can hear my own heartbeat.'
'We call that Hallucinagenica ex Mortis, Timothy. It's false. It's
not real. It's nothing more than a trick of your own frail human mind.'
'No,' Timothy said. 'It's more than that. I was a human being.
You know nothing of what you describe. Frailty is the beauty of
humanity. The very thing that makes us vulnerable brings our
inherent divinity.'
'How would you know that, Timothy?'
'I know.'
'Was life that good to you? Go on to your death, Timothy.
There is nothing more you can perform in the living world. Do this,
and be done with it. Go and be with your Love in Heaven, Timothy,'
and it was here that Ixxir actually seemed to pronounce to Timothy's
ear both syllables as well as both capitalizations. ‘I've done what
you're doing countless times and returned. I've lain down with the
snakes and collected my fee in the morning. That's what you always
seem to forget, on these cheery occasions when we talk. I know your
state. As you are, I once was; as I am you shall become. Go on to
your death now, Timothy, and eliminate those people who would see
you dead, and keep you from eternal life. Earn your way into the
outer circle. Get out of the Loop. Yours is a one-way trip, as it
stands, but I've done it and come back to be reborn. It's my job. But
I can tell you- there's nothing after death when you're what I am; I
can see death in every beam of a new sunrise.'
'I don't know,' Timothy said, choosing his words carefully.
'Maybe death means different things to different...people. Different
beings.'
'Maybe it does,' the demon conceded ineffectually, stepping from
one foot to another. 'There is something of Heaven in death. I
understand some of your anger with me, with your situation, but not
all of it. You were never happy, except for the girl, and that was
already out the door. Melanie was already out of your reach, and you
knew that. Most living people's souls, well, they feel like a bucket of
water- to me, at least. The soul I took away from you was nothing but
mist. It decayed because you never used it before you met Melanie,
only you missed the trap. Melanie was one of those women who takes
without giving- rule or ruin- and there was no way for your soul to
replenish itself- you had mortgaged your soul to a woman you didn't
know. You trusted her, and when she cheated on you, whatever
emotion you had injected into her was twisted off at the root and lost
to you forever. I'm just being honest with you, Timothy- that's why
you were an easy target. She did it.'
'It was my soul, and whatever you might think of Melanie, I still

336
 337

wanted my soul and the rest of my life to be with her. I still want-'
'That may be true, but the slut never loved you. None of what
she told you would ever have happened. Every word of her speech
was a lie. Beware the thorns of the black rose of love, lest your soul
they prick. Anger be now your song, immortal one- and so you must
sing it well.'
'What are you doing here?' Timothy asked, trying to keep quiet,
also trying to change the subject. Seeing Melanie here was bad, but
talking about her, intimately, with this creature- that felt obscene. He
also had the diarrheic sensation that this piece of lower-level demon
shit was trying to fuck him over- and to fuck him over, once and for
all.
'I'm here to help you,' his cancer replied. The voice came out of
darkness, but it sounded more organic than ever. Timothy couldn't
see his cancer, but the words carried on the air betrayed an
inescapable truth: it was getting steadily better even as Timothy was
getting worse.
'You're lying,' Timothy said. 'I know it.'
His cancer sounded hurt and offended. 'Why would I lie to you?'
'You've never helped anyone before in your life.'
'But you're my host,' it said, as if it were speaking to a child. 'I
have to honor you. You need to kill her in order to pass on, right?'
'Right,' Timothy replied, seeing now what the cancer was driving
at.
'Well, I'm here to help you do what needs to be done so that you
can achieve your peace. You don't have to watch, if you don't want
to.'
Timothy was aghast. 'You're going to kill her?'
'Yes. For you. I have no truck with the woman, but you do.
Believe me, it's in your best interest and mine to move on to the next
level.'
'Why? To sever your allegiance to your host?'
'Partly. But mostly because we both want the same thing.'
Timothy was confused, seeing no common link.
'What do we both want?'
'A second chance to live.'
'Yeah, so?'
The cancer was petulant in its reply. 'So, I want to help you.'
'But why do you want to help me? Why is it in your interest?'
'You want to die, once and for all, and I'm going to help you do
just that. I want you to die for reasons of my own. You'll thank me
later.'
'I wasn't going to kill her,' Timothy heard himself say. 'I'm only
here to look at her. There's no way that I could ever kill her.'

337
 338

'No way, you say?'

Timothy shook his head.
'What if I told you that your beloved Melanie was the one who
turned you in? Huh? How does that grab you? She turned you in out
of spite and now look at you- you're a corpse, standing there, drooling
over her like a sap! It might have looked as though you went to
Matthias Bramble of your own free will, but it wasn't like that. Believe
me, if you had not gone there by your own choice, they would have
come and taken you away to do what they wanted to your body,
because Melanie had told them exactly where you were! And how sick
you had gotten. They had the score on you, they sliced the life out of
you, and the person who gave them your story was the person who
had free reign over your head and heart. Only you saved them the
time, and you came to them- you pussy.'
The demon smiled sickly, and farted, filling the air with sulphur.
Melanie Cleaves heard none of this exchange, even though
Timothy had twice needed to move himself out of her way. She simply
went about her business of putting away the groceries she had bought
on her way home from work; Timothy noticed that it was mostly
vegetables she was putting away, stashing the bananas in a wire-
mesh net that hung suspended from the ceiling and putting the
tomatoes and celery in the crisper at the bottom of the refrigerator.
Melanie had always been a bit of a health nut, but even Timothy
couldn't remember her as having been this extreme in her purchases
and behavior while she'd been living with him.
Perhaps being in his proximity had given her a little taste of
death.
Under the fluorescent lighting, Timothy could see Ixxir dipping
and swirling itself around her ankles, watching helplessly as it playfully
licked at her calves with its slithery, blackened presence.
It was agony for him to witness this, but he could do nothing.
The game went on unabated. Ixxir- acting as the shadow-
would linger close to Melanie, close enough to smell her perfume, and
its depths would pool around her while she stared off into the
distance- thinking about Timothy, probably. Her head would dip
occasionally, but never low enough for her to perceive the shadow
moving incandescently.
Timothy saw all of this, but he wasn't wholly convinced that the
cancer would strike. Somehow, he knew that he alone was supposed
to be the one to dispatch her into the skies. If he didn't make a move
on her she might not be harmed at all. Was that possible? Would the
demon do it for him, to hasten his celestial departure? Timothy found
that to look upon Melanie was to remind him of everything that his life
should have been, but all of that was once upon a time. The air

338
 339

around them was whistling, buzzing and brimming with molecular

activity, but Melanie seemed immune to it all, almost as if she were
consciously ignoring it.
Her eyes looked glassy and she appeared to be in some sort of
trance. Her thoughts were obviously on things outside of this tiny
apartment, classy though it may be. Timothy was proud of what she
had done for herself- proud of the fact that she was still alive. It hurt,
though.
Goddamn, did it hurt.
Ixxir slipped back towards Timothy and sidled up next to him.
There wasn't a mirror within his sight, and so Timothy had no real idea
of his orientation within the room, but he saw that he was probably
less than ten feet away from where Melanie was now standing.
'How long are you going to tease her like that?'
'As long as I wish, until you do what needs to be done.'
'I'm not going to kill her. Even if it means I get to walk around
in mirrors and darkened bedrooms for the rest of forever I won't kill
her.'
'Yes, you will.'
'I won't. I can't.'
'You can do it too, Timothy. It's easy, once you know how.'
He was snapped out of his reverie. 'What's easy? Killing
people?'
His cancer was slowly losing patience with him. 'The song,
Timothy. See how she hearkens to hear it? She's listening for a tune
that even the neighborhood dogs can't hear. But she hears it. I just
put forth the desire to make such a sound, and it comes out of me-
there are no muscles involved. If I can do it as a shadow, then you
should be able to do it just as well as a reflection. All you have to do
is whistle.'
Timothy tried it, and at first it didn't work. His cancer had
merely stopped its own song and soon the flight of Timothy's whistle
took over, emanating from everywhere and nowhere at once. Melanie
looked up and tried to follow it with her ears, never moving from the
spot to which she had rooted herself. She impelled herself toward a
sound she did not know she was hearing. It was as though the song
touched a deeper part of her than her conscious mind could fathom,
and it slipped inside of her with little or no effort. She didn't hear the
song, but it worked anyway- Timothy could feel it happening, feel it
working inside of him. All he was doing was blowing air through what
felt like his lungs, but his thoughts were what carried the song to her
ears.
Melanie, I loved you. I really, really loved you. I still do.
His song sounded different from the one the cancer had made as

339
 340

the shadow. That song had sounded bitter and reproachful- carrying
much of the personality of the source from which it had originated and
sounding very much the product of the fifteenth century. Timothy's
own song was plaintive and full of reverence for his subject. Timothy
still retained the knowledge that it was Melanie who had turned him in,
but he loved her anyway and was more than powerless to feel
otherwise. He supposed for a moment that love was about
transcending all earthy emotions, and hate was just such an emotion.
Love was the only emotion that carried over into death. Love was the
only emotion that truly lasted forever.
I was wrong to have hidden everything from you. I'm so sorry.
His cancer heard what was being projected, and decoded it. It
saw that Timothy was going to bail out, that he wouldn't go through
with it. Killing her would be killing himself, and Ixxir knew instinctively
that something drastic had to be done on its own part to actively
accelerate the situation into kinetic action.
I'm so sorry, Melanie.... I never wanted to hurt you, not at all.
Melanie heard a commotion coming from somewhere off to her
left, from down the hallway to her bedroom by the washer and dryer
closet- it was a tortured, muffled sort of sound, as though something
was flailing itself against the confines of the closet door. It might have
been a bird or some other small animal- she had accidentally left the
patio doors open today- and she was feeling a little apprehensive
about having to go and let it loose. She thought for a moment that
perhaps she should get the landlord to come up here and let it out, but
she then thought better of it and figured fatalistically that such action
would be pretty foolish.
Besides, what was in the closet that could possibly hurt her,
anyway?
Melanie turned on one heel and walked slowly down the hall.
Timothy followed her down the hallway, lingering after every
touch she unconsciously provided, savoring every moment of contact
with her.
When Melanie reached the closet, she saw that the light had
been left on inside, and light was escaping through the slats in the
door in thin, dusty white beams that crosshatched her face,
temporarily threatening to expose Timothy's positioning if he was to
move to either the left or the right. He had to stand where he was.
She then threw open the doors.
All at once, Timothy realized the game that was being played.
He could almost have seen it coming.
Timothy was powerless to stop what was happening. A chain of
events had been put into play that he had no understanding of at all,
but he could see it all happening. Yes, he would be seeing it up close.

340
 341

Ixxir had seen to that.

Melanie!
Once the doors were all the way open, neither of Melanie nor
Timothy could believe what they were seeing. They were each in
mutual ignorance of the other one's horror, but the degree to which
the emotion was felt was equal on all sides. Ixxir, having
transmogrified into this new form, was now dancing on top of her
washing machine, kicking up its salmon-colored jelly-blob heels in
mock celebration as it sang an accapella, samba-influenced ditty and
hummed more than it strolled.

It's two in the morning, I hope you feel better

It's time to talk of a real go-getter.
His heart was cold, save for but one place
and he lost the toss, all just to save face.
He hears that she's leaving, half her house,
half her drawers of chester.
He fears that he's losing her.
She fears his fears are accurate.
And she came by and she took the air.
He gave his heart to her. He held her dear.
What do you hold dear?

The demon twirled on one clawed foot, scratching the enameled

surface on the top of the washer with its blackened toenails. A
tattered top hat roughly the size of a teacup rolled down from the top
of its head to its fingertips, where the hat was slapped back on top of
its head again, in a subtle maneuver that Timothy found himself in
mute admiration of.

The last time he saw her, he felt so much older,

nasty-nag cough wracking his shoulders,
She'd been irritation, she'd kept them at bay,
and she left him alone, with no sun's feeble ray.

She treated his problems, with the care of a wife,

and then when he blinked, she was out of his life.
He sees her there with the keys in her teeth,
one more escaping freak.
She had all she'd take.
She'll send him cards.

If nothing else, this abomination had a physical dexterity the

likes of which Timothy had never before now witnessed in the flesh. It

341
 342

seemed to have an almost innate ability to manipulate the molecules

in the air around it to make itself look good as it leaped through its
pacings.

What can I tell you, my hostage, my captor?

What can I hope to convey?
I guess that he missed her
I guess that she missed him
His disease stood in their way.
If you ever feel this, or taste this disease,
I urge you to run, and I urge you to flee.

Timothy rushed forward, cruising gently over Melanie's shoulder

as well as through it at the same time, and knocked his cancer from its
perch. All Melanie saw was that it had been swept backwards behind
the washer and out of sight. And that was all she wanted or needed to
know.
She decided immediately that she had been hallucinating and
walked as calmly as she could- given the circumstances- back down
the hallway and into the kitchen and retrieved a glass tumbler from
the cabinet above the stove. After running the water for a few
seconds, she tested its temperature with the tip of her finger and filled
the glass halfway.
It went down smooth and cold, but nothing would be able to
erase the image of what she had just seen from the folds of her mind;
usually when people saw apparitions like what she had just seen, it
was just prior to their being committed to a nut-hatch. Melanie wasn't
prepared for that eventuality, and she certainly didn't want that to be
her final outcome.
And that's when she saw the rotting corpse in the sink mirror.
A name rose unbidden in her mind.
'Timothy.'
It certainly looked a little bit like him, but she couldn't believe
what she was seeing. She could only see his head. His throat was
almost completely gutted of its internal matter, and his eyes rolled to
their whites in his eye sockets. He had been trying to reach across the
void to contact her, just as his cancer had done a few moments ago,
but it was no use. It was all he could do to just look at her, and every
second he spent gazing upon her form was one filled with a certain
dread that she would turn around and see him standing there.
And now it had happened.
Her eyes tearfully searched his features, but found no purchase
in an image she once might have known. What appeared before her
now was an abomination of a man she loved more now than when he

342
 343

had been alive.

And death had a funny way of festering one's regrets.
I'm so sorry.
The shadow pooled around her and slowly rose up behind her,
snaking its way up into an arc of deadly proportions, spooling upon it
base like a grinning cobra just before it prepared its fatal strike.
Timothy then felt a scream coming to his lips, but its sound
barely penetrated the veil around them. 'No!' he shouted, but the
word seemed to fall short of what he'd intended. No words would
have been enough.
The shadow had by now reached around her, and had pulled her
into the folds of its killing blackness. The light from the fluorescent
fixture in the kitchen was weakening it, so it pulled Melanie out into
the more welcoming shadows of the living room, when Ixxir became at
one with its brethren. The darkness strengthened it, and increased its
mass exponentially. Where in the kitchen it had seemed as though the
woman might get away, it seemed now that there was no question of
its victory. The woman's face was turning various shades of blue, red
and purple, and in this lack of light she already looked dead.
Timothy felt powerless to stop it, feeling powerless to even
move.
But he knew he had to act quickly if he was going to save her.
Even if keeping Melanie alive meant that he would float around in this
state of damned existence for the rest of eternity, so be it. It would
make him feel better knowing that she was alive in his misery, rather
than knowing that he had helped to bring about her demise for his
own selfish reasons. Timothy then took a tentative step forward
towards them both.
'She's almost gone, Timothy- make the switch.'
'No. I won't do it. And I won't allow you to do it either.'
'Suit yourself,' the cancer said and stepping back, vanished into
the shadows that surrounded them. A certain physical presence was
felt, and then for a moment it ebbed, and then it simply was no longer
there.
Go on to your death.
Timothy felt himself being sucked out of the place where he
stood, and he could even feel himself passing through Ixxir as he flew
through the air. It was a slimy feeling that left him feeling ill. The raw
sensation of being transported negated some of what he felt when the
demon slipped out of the room. Ixxir was gone, and here he was, so
close to Melanie. A split image of fear flickered across her eyes as she
darted around, looking for a way to bypass him. He didn't know what
she was seeing, or what she sensed of him, or if Melanie even noticed
that it was him after all, but none of that mattered to him now.

343
 344

And then he was upon her. Touching her. Caressing her. His
hands were around her throat, as they had been many times in their
lovemaking, and the squeezing he felt in his hands slowly mutated into
a scream when Timothy felt with a sickening certainty that Melanie
was already dead.
'Timothy....'
Her eyes met his one last time- she knew who he was. And she
knew what he was doing to her. Timothy had come back to kill her,
just as she had killed him. It was an act of simple retribution, and
Melanie thought she could forgive him for it. She could understand.
She lay at his feet, the edges of his shadowy form licking at the
big toe on her left foot. She was laying flat on her back, with her
waist twisted into such a position that her legs had been thrown to one
side. There was a way he could taste her, with every sensation he
could gather from her being available in every molecule present in the
room. It was this cheap, disposable matter that psychics occasionally
picked up, not the real stuff Timothy now sought to drink of her now.
There were other things she had given him, the intangibles, the items
of importance that even she was unaware she had given to him.
When she'd pulled out of his life- and death- she took these intangibles
with her, such as the way he felt when she was around. Even in his
death, he was able to feel this.
And as she died, these things also died with her.
In an instant, all his memories took on a new, acid-like clarity.
Her life drained in flowing eddies from the pulse in her neck
through to the throb in his outstretching fingers. Her skin was still
warm to his touch, but the flesh would soon be losing that quality to
the chill present in the air tonight. His breath frosted as he exhaled,
and it was the first true sign he had seen regarding his own re-
incorporation.
But none of that really mattered now, because she was gone.

Joshua had enjoyed feeding off of the terror emanating from unit
#2o3 in the 18th building of the Sandusky apartments, just as he had
overseen the catatonic hysterics at the psychic medium's storefront
office. He felt no personal affiliation with the man who had carried the
demon that he had carried within himself when he escaped from the
prison. He could recall with absolute clarity the conversation that Ixxir
had been having with this man Timothy in his apartment just before
he died. There were many strange facets to this phenomenon of
dying, and one of them that spooked Joshua the most was that death
opened the door for a lot of strange, half-formed malignancies to get
through to the physical world. It had surprised Joshua that the demon
hadn't been able to sniff out that it was being followed by another of

344
 345

its kind, but he supposed that Ixxir had its mind on other things and
had lost track of its self-focus. Now it was easier to swim in its
peripheral vision.

345
 346

NO THOUGHT
Having sex with Courtney had been a chore for Nona long before Kelly
deRenzi entered the picture, but now that Kelly was here, Nona
marveled at how out-of-tune she and Courtney had always been in the
bedroom; he always zigged when she would have preferred him to
zag. Even though she would have otherwise thought of Courtney as a
pretty decent fuck, sex with him was nothing if not perfunctory. It
was routine. It was expected. And it was boring. How much of it
could be blamed on him? She couldn't say.
Maybe none of it was his fault- perhaps this was just the way
people that have been married for over a decade look at one another,
with loathing and an ill-fitting contempt for one another, with neither
party entirely sure as to why that contempt was there.
But there were so many little reasons, and not all of them bad.
But they were reasons nonetheless.
She knew what moves Courtney was going to make long before
he made them. She could know whether or not they were going to
fuck any given night, simply from the way his eyes looked when he
walked in the door at the end of his shift. Nona knew before he made
his swift moves what words he would whisper into her ear, the way he
would touch her face and the back of her neck, the way he would try
to arouse her by licking her in between her toes- like a retarded
mongrel dog- as she slept.
And he was such a sloppy fuck. The word sloppy had applied
from her days in the bar, and it usually denoted a lack of grace, or- at
the very least- a pronounced lack of chemistry. Sex for the sake of
sex, and not very good. She knew that the reason she felt this way
about Courtney- that is to say, bored and over-familiar- was because
Nona felt overly comfortable with him. No matter how horrible things
got between them, Courtney, her husband- such a funny word,
husband- was a known quantity.
There was no mystery, and in that she received comfort, comfort
that she was no longer certain that she deserved. Part of her craved
mystery and the romance and excitement that a different man would
bring to her, but part of her- a deeper, truer part- needed Courtney in
her life. He was a clod, God knew, but there were things he was
capable of- such tiny inconsequential moments, oddly transcendental
in their way, that he made possible, in his way. So many ways in
which he did make her feel happy.
And therein lay her impending sense of guilt.
Kelly on the other hand- or should we say, in the other hole- was
chock full of surprises. From the second he slid his index finger oh so
effortlessly into her asshole when she was straddling him on the

346
 347

couch, Nona had known from instinct and experience that she had
found a unique combination of the male and female sexuality all in one
bizarre package. She could tell simply from the way he had walked
into the house on that first day that he would be an amazing and
incredible fuck. And he was.
And fucking him took her to a planet she had always wanted to
visit.
His tattoo was usually the first thing she thought of whenever
she found herself thinking of him. It thrilled her to run her fingertips
lightly over the flesh where it appeared, watched the goose bumps
rising slightly on the skin of Kelly's chest. Kelly was usually wet from
the shower whenever she did this, and the water worked in
combination with the cold to produce a state of arousal in him. Once,
he had even taken her in the bathroom, with her knees on the floor
and her elbows in the bathtub, her head caught underneath the splash
and sizzle of the shower spray. Courtney would never have done
something like that, but she had never had it before so she hadn't
missed it. But now she would. She would think of his tattoo first
whenever she thought about him. But sometimes she thought of his
eyes.
That bothered her. If she was concentrating on some aspect of
his physicality that played no part in the sex act, that meant that it
was turning into something different for her. She knew the signs of
falling in love with someone and she had felt none with Kelly; she still
didn't. His eyes were cold and unromantic, and that was half the
attraction.
But he touched her as a master would caress a student.
Her favorite these days was the one he called twister.
Twister consisted of Kelly lying on his back in her marital bed,
his cock- as well as his pinkie, ring and middle fingers- rummaging
around inside of her pussy. His index finger went into her ass, and
that was half of what would send her off and running on the road to an
orgasm.
Or several orgasms, as the case may have been.
His left arm would press down against her back while his left
hand would pull the hair at the nape of her neck. Her right leg would
be curled around the muscled thigh of his left leg, and her left leg
would be hiked up over his shoulder, making the whole encounter
resemble a badly-executed female superior with a naturally sloppy
dismount.
And this is how he would fuck her.
His skill was something out of this world. It was impossible to
explain to someone who hadn't experienced him, but Nona would have
tried to explain it, if she had any friends close enough to talk about

347
 348

such matters. She might even recommend him to them. Nona

thought she could arrange it- hell, she could maybe even baby-sit their
kids while her neighbors tasted some of his-
And there was a stirring in her stomach she found hard to
ignore.
Jealousy.
It was better not think about it.
Some far-off part of her libido wanted Kelly deRenzi to possess
her, utterly. The outside world ceased to exist when his cock was
inside of her, and his breath was in her ear, and his fingers were
knotted in her hair. Sometimes, when she changed the sheets after
Kelly left- before Courtney got home- Nona would find fistfuls of hair
on the mattress.
And this is how he would fuck her.
The lingering scent of his body- somewhere between Polo and
Drakkar- stimulated her so intensely that she had thought of rhyming
a few lines and printing them on some of that gorgeous baby-blue
watermarked paper they stocked in the supplies room down at the
public library.
She could give it to him the next time he came over to the
house.
And God, it was becoming the only thing that she lived for.
It was so deliciously evil that nobody could have talked her out
of it, would she even have listened. There were voices inside of her
that told her to end it immediately, to take the situation for what it
was- a truly great and awe-inspiring fuck- and run like hell. But, so
what?
The trouble was, a good fuck was hard to come by. A hard man
was good to find, and she knew all too ruefully how rare a species he
was. Courtney wanted- and had always wanted- sex to be a more
spiritual thing than it actually was. Courtney simply wasn't wired in
the head so that he could enjoy and appreciate the more bestial,
hedonistic and mechanical aspects of fucking, and so he suffered for
this.
His loss, she thought, not knowing what else to think.
But Nona knew that this was not herself speaking.
It was someone else.
Amanda.
Amanda Evans.
It was a name she had not heard in a very long time indeed, this
Amanda. Amanda Evans. That was the name she had used in the
bars, to keep her conquests from following her home. Amanda Evans,
Nona now discovered, was not just a name but an entirely different
persona, and a separate aspect of her own personality make-up that

348
 349

she had not heard from since before she had met Courtney. Amanda
was a colder- somehow icier- version of herself, and Amanda could
always be counted on to get the job done. Just hearing the name
Amanda in passing conversation, or even on the TV news, had always
sent a jolt through her spine, and now she was starting to get some
idea as to why she had reacted this way.
For to hear that name was to call upon her powers- to request
her presence, and many times it was unintentional. This Amanda
Evans was an separate person, altogether, but at the same time she
was a part of Nona and as such, she was undeniable in the extreme.
Sometimes this Amanda had manifested herself in Nona while she was
in bed with Courtney, at odd intervals over the years, and whenever it
happened, Nona knew with the gluey sort of post-partum knowledge
that accompanies amnesia that Amanda had been there. Amanda's
voice had spoken. Again.
And she knew, however faintly, that Courtney had felt Amanda
as well.
The name alone reminded her of a time in her life that, at one
point, she would rather have forgotten all about. Now, she wasn't so
sure. Sense memories and long-forgotten impulses now rose to the
surface of her mind, like smoldering depth-charges that had only been
waiting for their detonators to become activated.
She found herself thinking of names- names like Dwight Morris,
Lindsey Whitehead, and Scott Knowles- faces and bodies she had not
felt in ages. She could not remember their faces, she could not
remember their bodies- even if at one point she had kept a special
journal of her activities that listed each man's physical attributes as
well as each one of their cock sizes. Yet here they were, inside her
mind, and there were times that Nona would come out of these fugue-
states- she could think of no other word for them- feeling as if she had
just been with these men, only moments before.
Although she herself had no recollection of the acts in question,
she could remember some of the petty details- the men lying on the
bed, her hands running up between their legs to arouse them through
their trousers, her head swimming with their booze and her own
inverted ecstasy. These things she could recall, even now, years later,
but never in total clarity. She would awaken from these fugue states
feeling violated, intruded and invaded, It was as if each one of these
encounters had just happened the night before. Invariably, her
genitals would feel pleasantly mangled, her neck, back, and lower
forearms would be chewed raw, and her pussy would feel moist.
Perhaps just a little medicinal tasting, sure, but basically moist. And
she could always tell her husband it was nothing more than a yeast
infection; he was stupid enough to trust her.

349
 350

Through her head, Nona could hear Courtney's blithe accusations

of two nights before. He had not been very far off the mark, had he
but known it. Courtney was only aiming blindly, firing misshapen
arrows into the deafening darkness, but he had hit his target
nonetheless.
I know what you did.
There were words he spoke that Nona could not understand- had
never been able to understand. What more did he want from her,
anyway? For months now- years, really, were she to be honest with
herself- Courtney had ignored her, and he had never sought to
develop and bring to flower that which she held to be the innermost
part of herself. It was a facet of his wife that Courtney Randlehaus
had chosen- albeit in ignorance- to ignore entirely, and the two of
them had respectively withered for it.
You know what you are.
Nona knew how to open doors with a smile. Was that how it
went? Was that the way of the world, and curse those born without
such faculties- people like Courtney? People for whom there was no
value in that which the world values most; beauty and its attendant
acquiescence?
You would never admit it, even to yourself.
But she could admit it, even to herself, knowing that this was
something that Courtney would never be able to understand.
Courtney seemed to function in a realm of moralist absolutes, and
Nona didn't see that the world could continue in such a way without
tripping on itself.
But I know.
'You've told me, told me in so many little ways that I would have
picked up on a long time ago, were I as used-up and as jaded as you
are. I've known you for so long, and I can tell when something is
wrong, when something is...different. I know how you talk and I know
how you fuck, and you've changed in that department. I hear the
things that you say to me in bed, even when you aren't able or willing
to hear it yourself.'
You know what you are. Now I condemn you to live with it.
Kelly was reading the paper that very same morning and he
pictured the scene as he had remembered seeing it- or, at least, the
way he thought he remembered seeing it. He fought hard to preserve
these facts in his head. The news papers always left out so much in
squalid detail.
After the initial photography of the intact cabin and the parts of
the body that were visible from the outside was completed, the roof of
the cabin and the wall that it was leaning onto were removed and

350
 351

further photography and examination of the body were performed. Oh

well.
The body was resting on its right side with the left thigh and
knee drawn up close and the right leg resting on the left thigh with the
hip and knee joints at approximately right angles. The left arm was
stretched out straight and resting underneath the right thin parallel to
the long axis of the torso and protruding underneath both thighs being
parallel to the right lower leg. The abdomen and chest were resting as
follows: the abdomen partially resting on its right and right posterior
aspects, and the chest and upper hip area being flat on the back.
And there were seven slashes hacked into her flesh, above her
hip.
The right arm was stretched straight up with a slight bend in the
elbow joint going past and slightly encircling the head. The head was
resting on its right side facing the upper right arm immediately
adjacent to it. The only item of clothing to be found on the victim's
body was a blood-soaked chemise of the type that could be purchased
in a department store for twelve or fifteen dollars.
The skin of the right side of her face and scalp was absent and
completely skeletonized. Dental charts would have to be used to
determine a positive identification. The remaining portions of her
scalp, including the right ear and the skin of the right side of her face,
was mummified and relatively intact, showing her orbital openings,
nostrils, and an oral opening, presumably her mouth.
The skin of the entire neck area, anterior and posterior, was
absent. It was all bones and sinew. This skin loss extended into the
upper chest area to approximately the level of the sternoclavicular
joint. Everything had been ripped out. The edges of this skin defect
were rounded and somewhat weathered, hence no determination of
the exact nature of the injury was possible. There was really nothing
for the medical examiner to work with. Everything was damaged. And
perfect.
There was a large area of missing skin and internal organs
starting at the pubic mound about three inches below the navel and
proceeding through the inguinal regions, bilaterally, the inner thighs,
and up to the level of the coccyx. This was indicative of some sort of
perverse worship, some sort of need for physical domination and
eradication.
Nihil humanum mihi alienum est.
People were going to be looking for him, now that this had hit
the streets. It was obvious that he couldn't just dump the bodies
anywhere. He might be seen doing it, necessitating further killing or
possibly risking his being identified in a police line-up, or he might
leave certain physical evidence at the site which could be used to

351
 352

convict him. He needed to become a ghost right now, but he had to

find a place to put the bodies. That was the important thing, right
now.
The telephone rang. He let the machine get it.
'Kelly? This is Courtney. I...I need to make an appointment.'

352
 353

LUCERNE
These walls were white, from what he could see of them, and there
was something pulling him along by one hand as he floated past vague
rooms and gathering areas. In some places, he saw several souls
gathering in conflagration, trying to decide what to do next. Some of
them seemed oblivious to the others- those spirits were here, but not
really here on this level. Some souls seemed to burn brighter than
others, and some souls seemed utterly black, stained to opacity with
the tar of sin. He couldn't see anything, but a few of them as he
passed close by them felt somehow familiar to him. If he knew them,
Timothy decided, he did not want to know who they were. The scene
he was experiencing reminded him now of the few times when he had
gotten seriously, rippingly drunk.
It was strange, what one remembered at the end of one's life.
He could feel his- would you call it a body?- being pulled back
and over into a prone position. He was being dragged face-down feet-
first through his own hell. After what seemed like an eternity, his
position was righted and he felt the pulling force gripping each of his
ankles.
The things he saw were blurred and never came into proper
focus, as if some unseen force could sense that he was trying to make
them out as soon as his vision cleared. All the objects within his line
of sight were being systematically rearranged as he passed them, as if
to prevent his use of them in retracing his way back in fugue to the
real world.
And nothing was normal for him anymore.
Nothing.
Who are you? Where am I?
This is how you died. This is what you have to witness.
This is not what I want.
This is how is was written, Timothy. There is nothing lost, here.
I...I can't think...I can't think what I want to...
Timothy...You will live your agonies again.
...I can't think...what I want to say...
There is nothing left of you, now.
Timothy felt himself being wheeled down the same corridor on
the same cart into the room where he would die. There was no way to
stop this or to keep his mind from seeing what would happen. He had
seen this all before, and he would see it again now. He could even feel
the jolts of the cart as it clicked and whizzed on its metal rollers along
the tiles on the floor. As he was being wheeled into the OR, the lights
Timothy had seen earlier- the lights of ever before- suddenly glared
ever more brightly than they had only a moment earlier. For a

353
 354

moment, the light seemed as if it might consume him utterly, and then
that moment passed.
There were moments of comfort, but they were brief.
He had been staring at her for quite some time before he
realized he was looking at Melanie. She was on the phone, and he
could barely make out what she was saying. Her hair was worn
differently than the last time he had seen her. In fact, this was
something new entirely.
It looked like some fancy sort of French curl, if that's what one
would call such a style. There were braids, he could see that much,
but the rest of her head was indistinct.
One syllable slid noiselessly into another, but her voice sounded
a bit clearer to him: 'He's been sick for a while, now. I don't know
what it's from. I've asked him time and time again but he won't tell
me. He lied to me about being sick. No, I don't know how far back.
He never admitted it to me. I found out on my own. I've lived with
him, and I don't think his illness is just physical- if you know what I
mean.'
There were no words in his knowledge of existence to properly
convey how Timothy felt as he heard this. There was no way to touch
yesterday. One could only feel it, in the extremities, and miss what is
lost.
'I found a bill for some sort of treatment he received. I couldn't
understand it and I didn't ask him to explain it to me. There had been
something wrong between us for quite some time, but I didn't know
what it was. There were times, I don't know how many, where I
thought it was another woman. For a time, I had almost accepted it
as being that- if only to keep him in my life. But when he lied to me,
lied about not being sick...it was as if he had denied me the chance to
be there for him- to help him, if I could. Knowing that about him
somehow changed the rules and there was no way for me to feel the
same about him again.'
She had known. She'd known that there was something screwy
between the two of them all along, but she'd never let on, not even
once. He'd known about her screwing around, and that she
sometimes took money for it. That much he had learned to live with,
kind of. But this newer betrayal, this one was different. This cut went
much deeper than that.
And it truly was the final cut.
'I don't know how long he has. I never knew and I haven't
found out. I've kept in touch with the one doctor, but he doesn't know
anything. Anyone who does know anything about it won't return my
phone calls, and I don't have the strength to pursue any of this any
further. I don't know how I should feel about this, but in reality I just

354
 355

feel empty.'
Well, Timothy thought. That says it all, doesn't it?
'I can tell you where he lives.'
Timothy thought he had heard the sound of a bolt sliding into
place when Melanie uttered these words. He would see this scene
many times, but each time it still came as a shock to him to know that
the arrow that killed him- the same arrow he had supposed to have
come out of the blue- had really come from Melanie's bow. She had
killed him, too.
Everyone had killed him, at one time or another in his life.
And in seeing that, his emotional plebotomy was complete.
He felt as if he was being wheeled around inside a personal
funhouse, only there was no fun to be had here. His soul ached with
the calliope of heartbreak and disease. Every painful moment of his
life, it seemed, was destined to be re-visited by him, now and forever.
Again and again.
Even the ones he hadn't known about before.
There is nothing left of you, now.
Even when he wasn't being led down the corridors of memory-
and these weird visits, which were thankfully brief, seemed to be
dictated by the whim of some celestial prankster intent upon searing
his psyche- Timothy was having a pretty tough time of it physically as
well. His vision was becoming blurred a great deal of the time, and his
sense of hearing had become somewhat less acute than it had been
originally when he first came through from being dead. Timothy
thought that perhaps his repeated nocturnal passages had something
to do with it- influencing his manual deterioration in one way or
another- but Timothy wasn't an alchemist so he would leave that
question alone. It was easier to be dead than it was for him in just
staying alive, but it was all at such cost to him.
He would slip into the dream standing in one place and reappear
in another place- often another place in time- with Timothy having
little or no control over what happened. He could try to lean his being
to one side or the other, to direct his flight, but it seemed to be of
pitiable influence over his perceived trajectory. To plead with whoever
or whatever the fuck was doing this to him as to why this was
happening seemed to do him no good either. If there was someone or
something out there, laughing in the darkness, they weren't listening
to him.
The more he screamed, the more Timothy's skin felt like cheap
thrift-store parchment paper. His throat was starting to feel all raspy
and scraped from the inside out, and he didn't want to imagine what
sordid scenes might be taking place down in there. What he had
covering him now was skin, but it was skin only in the loosest sense of

355
 356

the word.
If what the demon said was true, and the only way for him to
get from where he was now to where he ought to be was through
killing the people who were directly responsible and involved in his
death, that would mean setting aside his moral convictions about
killing these people just long enough to do what it seemed needed to
be done to get him to wherever he was going. There was a games to
be played here, but Timothy didn't have enough time to truly observe
how it was being played in order to better comprehend the nature of
this contest. But what if it was all just a trick? Had the demon been
sent to him as a deceiver, as opposed to the principle player it made
itself out to be? What if murder really was a mortal sin, as it had first
been described in the Bible, whether its perpetrator was dead or alive
himself? Would he then be condemned to Hell? Was this a test of
some sort, to uncover what really lay in the chambers of his heart?
And even if the murders themselves was justified in the eyes of God
Himself, how could he actually go through with them?
Then he thought of Melanie lying dead in his arms, her hands
grasping and clawing at the air around her, and thought that he might
find a way. She wasn't here- she was somewhere, staring blindly at
some distant sun.
Timothy wanted to float beside her, and to feel the heat and the
rain of that sunrise upon his face as he breathed in the scent of her.
Soft cotton, that's what she had always smelled like to him, ever since
the episode of wrapping her in those flannel bed sheets, straight out of
the dryer. To his horror, Timothy discovered that he could still feel-
with fingers much too dead to feel anything- the curve of her
shoulders, the rounded skin and sharp bone of her collar, the dark
ellipses of her body folded beneath the sheet, crosshatched with thin
and fat lines of hunter green, cranberry, and navy blue: all of her
absolutely favorite colors.

356
 357

A WHORE A USER & A LYING PIECE OF SHIT

There was a trace of the festival in the air, and Courtney began to feel
a little more comfortable here. The bed was soft and firm, the sheets
were clean, and there were two tiny mints on the pillow. The hotel
that Kelly had chosen for this little debacle was considerably more
expensive than what Courtney would have picked, if he traveled. But
he didn't.
He never went anywhere.
But tonight he would. Kelly had promised him that.
Kelly had alluded to 'something special,' and when he did, there
was a sleazy gleam in his eyes that both excited and frightened
Courtney at the same time, these sensations threading themselves
sickly into a single emotion that was located just to the left of
tantalization.
Something special.
Kelly had made this proposal with the air of a man who was in
love, and Courtney had felt an odd leaping in his heart as Kelly's words
had poured forth. He wasn't sure how he felt about this part of things.
He could recall such a tone of voice, and his memory could reveal the
woman he married regarding him with the same peculiar light. Was
this what it was all about? Was this love? And if so- was this really
that bad? Of course it wasn't. Only this lubricious melting of his heart
concerned him, and even so, it was a faraway voice in a landscape of
deepening shadows. Nothing was calling to him, and he was
beckoning to it.
Oh, but the mania! As soon as Kelly told him of his plan,
Courtney could think of nothing else but tonight. They had planned
this over a week ago, and it had taken Kelly up until Tuesday night to
procure a woman to donate her third of the night's festivities. All Kelly
could tell Courtney about the woman was that he had acquired her-
Kelly's word for it- from an advertisement in a local swinger's
magazine. She was a professional, and she had said that she liked to
do this sort of thing.
Something special.
And only Kelly knew how special it would be.
If I've timed this right, Kelly thought to himself, she should be in
the lobby right about now. I should start getting him ready for her.
This is going to be something special.
And only Kelly knew how special it would be. For both of them.
'When does it-'
Kelly hushed Courtney with an open palm extended. He was
listening for something, but whatever it was, Courtney couldn't hear it.
His eyes kept themselves busy during this moment, searching
throughout the room for some small thing, some detail, that his mind

357
 358

could grasp onto.

He found nothing.
Kelly then picked up the phone, only two heartbeats after it had
begun to ring. His ease, his accuracy, had always intimidated
Courtney, but tonight these qualities of Kelly's seemed heightened-
exaggerated somehow- and it made Courtney very nervous to be
around him.
But it was fun.
'Hello? Yeah, we're here. Come on up. Room two-oh-
seventeen.'
Supposedly, this woman Kelly had contacted had no moral or
ethical qualms regarding anal penetration for the males she did her
scenes with.
According to Kelly, her favorite way of buggering a guy was by using a
double-headed dong with the other end up her own ass.
This gave Courtney pause. This would be the first woman he'd
ever slept with besides his wife, and maybe the stars were lining up
for him. Maybe there was a way out of this. Maybe he wasn’t gay-
this could be just the tonic he'd been looking for. This could be just
what he needed to cure him. Courtney was never attracted to other
men in the first place, and aside from the pleasures afforded him in
anal sex, they held no promise for him. Men were just what was
available. Maybe it was women that he preferred. Every time that he
and Kelly had fucked in the boy's apartment, they had been watching
heterosexual videos depicting anal sex between a man- or men- and a
woman- or women. But it was always straight, as they viewed it.
Courtney always imagined that he was the woman, that he was in that
tiny little box having those things done to him, that he looked that
beautiful, that he was that desired.
Courtney found it hard to believe that such depravity was going
to happen here- here, in a $155.oo a night hotel room with
monogrammed lavender soaps in the dish on the vanity in the
bathroom, and both a commode and a Jacuzzi in the bathroom. Don't
forget the sun lamp.
The room was a little more expensive than Courtney had
bargained for, but Kelly said that he'd paid for it all in advance and all
he wanted from Courtney was half of the basic room fee, which would
amount to $78.oo with tax. The rest of the evening- the dinner
downtown, the drinks in the Quinine bar, the Quaaludes in the
bathroom- were all on Kelly.
Think of this as my gift to you, Kelly had said. My little gift.
Courtney had deduced rather slowly that Kelly had a hidden
source of extra income- it was funny now that Courtney thought about
it, because he'd never heard Kelly say anything at all about where he

358
 359

worked or what he did for a living. Most people had daytime lives, but
not Kelly. His days were a total mystery to Courtney, save for the
afternoon sessions they usually enjoyed on Tuesdays. Kelly
apparently didn't need very much sleep- it was either that or he kept
himself running with chemical assistance. Cocaine, Courtney would
have guessed, although he had to admit he was rather ignorant on the
topic of illegal pharmacology.
Courtney, who was now too physically tired and mentally goosed
to think properly, just decided to let things ride as they were. If the
room was paid for, fine. So what? He owed Kelly eighty bucks. Big
deal. Was the other half of the evening not earned, over slow, painful
weeks of sodomization? And if this little overnight package was his
reward for services rendered- Nona was staying at her mother's house
for the weekend- why shouldn't he accept it gracefully at face value?
Kelly then stripped himself with a smile and got into bed with
him.
The two of them played a little game of footsie while waiting for
the girl to walk in. Kelly could tell that Courtney was excited- there
was a cold dribble of come somewhere under the covers- and that
was just what he wanted him to be. This was to be a big occasion for
them, an event, and he wanted them both to be up for it. This was
important.
Kelly got up suddenly and got out of bed. 'I almost forgot!'
Courtney leaned up on one elbow, the sheets pooling around his
body as he rolled around to see what Kelly was doing. 'What did you
forget?'
'You need to get ready.'
'Ready?' Courtney asked, blinking, not knowing exactly what he
meant.
'This is going to be a treat for both of us,' Kelly now said. 'This
girl, Court, her thing is to do to men what I do to you whenever we get
together.' Kelly started digging through a small black suitcase next to
the bed. After a moment, he came out with an elastic waist-support in
one hand and an eight-inch dildo in another. He was smiling broadly.
With an emotion resembling horror, Courtney realized he was as
well.
'I'll fit her up with this. I can suck you off while she's fucking
you. Whatever you want, but it's gonna flip you out of your mind. I
want you to get on your knees, face-down in the bed, because she
likes to surprise people. I've done her a few times before, and I know
her. She saw it in a movie once and now she loves to do it this way.'
'Bury my face in the covers?'
Kelly smiled again. 'Yeah. That's how she'd like it. She likes
the element of surprise to heighten the tension. It's simple. Just

359
 360

don't look up at her when she comes in. Let me handle everything.'
Courtney did as he was told, getting up on his elbows and his
knees, and a cold, greasy sort of lubricant was applied lovingly to his
anus by Kelly's practiced fingers. He curled his head into the
bedspread and made sure that even the most severe twist of his head
would not uncover his eyes before the proper moment; he wanted this
to be all it could be.
Then Courtney heard a noise outside in the hallway: a woman's
voice. There was no way for him to distinguish one syllable from
another or in trying to piece together what she was saying, so he
didn't even try to. He wondered what she looked like. He pictured her
as being tall, for some reason- maybe it was Kelly's description of her-
and he'd already learned that she was a dark-haired woman. He
imagined this woman wearing high heels and garter stockings, like in
all the good movies.
All the really good whores wore lingerie.
He wondered if he would feel strange having homosexual
relations with Kelly while there was a woman there to watch him, but
then, she would also be participating in the act as well. Courtney
decided that he was just going to close his eyes when the time came,
and simply accept the sensations he would feel coming his way. It did
not matter to him if the lips upon his cock were male or female- that
was part of being a slut, not caring about who you're sleeping with.
Women felt good, he reasoned, so there would be a relatively small
aspect of disgust to it- assuming that portion of Nona's description of it
was true- but there would still be a giving over of the senses, much
like when he and Kelly had first had sex with one another- the loss of
the personality and uniqueness to extrapolate the physical nature of it
all. When Courtney totally lost himself with Kelly, the personage of
Courtney Randlehaus ceased to exist. He became just another object
in the room. Tonight it would be the same, only two people would be
going over the edge with him. He would not be alone, as he had for
the rest of his life. All would melt over into what he was feeling, and
he would not discern between right and wrong. In the moment of
orgasm, all was then and all was pursued in the quest for pleasure.
Love and gluttony justify everything. Everything is permitted.
Well, maybe.
At least these sheets smelled good. And what were they made
out of? Was it flannel? Did they even have flannel sheets in a hotel
like this?
The door to the hotel room opened and, following the graceful
hand and the jaunty swing of her hip, in walked Nona, who greeted
Kelly with her tongue and a playful caress of his genitals with her

360
 361

hands. Her eyes scanned the room, and for a moment or two she was
taken with the surroundings.
There was a vase of fresh flowers on the table next to the
window, two mints in the ashtray next to the bed- probably, the
bathroom had those little lavender soaps she liked so much. She
made a mental note to put a few of them into her purse when she
freshened up.
She pointed toward the figure on the bed. 'Is that-'
Kelly shushed her with an index finger touched to her lips.
His voice was unusually subdued, even for him. 'He's ready.'
Kelly lead Nona to the bureau, where the dildo and its
strapparatus were waiting for her to put them on. She removed her
clothes gingerly and hitched the strap around her waist, tugging it
down in the front. Kelly then worked the snap-buttons on the front
and wriggled the dildo through the proper channels, so that when he
was done, the rubber cock stood proudly out in front of Nona, wagging
ridiculously in the air at an angle that was hilariously perpendicular to
the rest of her body.
Kelly smeared the same lubricant he'd used on Courtney all over
the dildo, being careful to see where it was shining in the light so that
there weren't any dry spots. He wanted Courtney to experience all
that tonight had to offer, and when he was done, Kelly stood up,
tongued Courtney's wife, and gestured expansively to the bed.
'Bon appetit,' he said, moving to the side and kicking a pile of
shoes out of the way. He could feel his own stomach fluttering.
As Nona approached the bed, the plastic cock dripping and
shining in front of her, a weird thought pierced through her mind so
fast that it harder had time to register before she propelled herself
toward the bed:
That ass looks familiar.
Courtney moaned excitedly as he felt the woman kneeling
behind him and kicking his knees out to either side with her own as
she positioned herself up against his crotch. He wiggled with
anticipation, and in the moments prior to penetration, he remembered
Nona once asking him if he wanted her to this to him. She made it
sound as if it was all for his pleasure- if he should so desire it- but he
had always suspected that it was something she would have gotten off
on as well. She had no clue as to his alternate sexuality, and for her
to suggest fucking him with a strap-on dildo came too close to colliding
those two distinctly separate worlds. What if he had shown too much
enthusiasm for the act? What if she suspected? If Nona did do
something like that- for him, it would always be for him- she would
give him a guilt-trip about it whenever she could, lording it over her
head as yet another instance where she had sacrificed for him.

361
 362

Courtney knew how she operated.

Deciding that prudence was the proper course, Courtney had
merely shaken his head no whenever Nona made this particular offer
and rolled over to his side of the bed to go to sleep without saying
another word.
'Ooohwn!'
Courtney had not properly prepared himself for the sudden
invasion of his sphincters, so lost was he in his reverie of Nona. It was
better to pop that particular balloon and file it away for further
contemplation.
Carpe diem, motherfucker.
He soon adjusted his positioning by shifting his weight forward
and angling his posterior up toward the ceiling. His squinting eyes
caught the faintest glimpse of light as he did this, and he quickly
buried his head again in the bedspread, remembering Kelly's
instructions. Courtney puckered his anus and his asshole gaped at the
air. She had to do it soon-
Nona's own excitement had grown nearly unmanageable as Kelly
had slathered up the dildo, but it had exceeded even those boundaries
as she worked the tip of the cock into the anus present in front of her.
She had always wanted to do this- had even tried to talk Courtney into
it- but this was nothing she would have been able to pursue in real
life.
At least, not before she'd met Kelly, and he had made all this
possible. He had bought the lingerie she was wearing, he had paid for
the room, he had even paid for her to be there.
Kelly had purchased her body- her holes- and this excited her.
It excited her immensely.
A giggle, and a smile in the dark. 'Are you afraid?'
Below her, in its ignorance, Courtney's mind was a swirl of
ecstasy.
The pain soon broke away into pleasure, and within a moment,
he was sailing, so far away from his life, so far away from everything
he had professed to care about. His wife no longer existed. His wife,
his-
That perfume, he thought. I know that perfume.
Their tussle became decidedly more violent, and Courtney's head
was suddenly wrenched from beneath its cloak of cover. He found
himself lying face to face with Kelly, who was propped up on one
elbow, lying on his side next to Courtney on the bed, smiling wickedly
in the darkness.
'I believe you know our guest,' he said, getting up and walking
to the other end of the room. Courtney angled his head around and
saw a face that was all at once too familiar and yet totally alien to him.

362
 363

It was the face of his wife. And she was in her own ecstasy.
Her eyes were closed, her breaths timed perfectly with each one
of her thrusts. Her heavy breasts heaved and swayed, glistening with
sweat and exertion. She was obviously lost in the moment and
enjoying herself immensely. Her respiration had reached an insane
pitch. Where did she think she was, and what on earth did she think
she was doing?
She has to open her eyes soon, Courtney thought. What
happens then?
Her eyes opened, and within two seconds, their minds had
connected.
Nona fell backwards onto the bed, the rubber cock flopping out
of Courtney's anus like a dead fish. She lost her balance and tumbled
off the edge, the dildo smearing the bedspread with Vaseline and
feces.
Crestfallen, her eyes passed predictably between Kelly, who
merely shrugged and smiled at her, and Courtney, who could only look
confused.
Confused and guilty.
He took all this in with a twinge of regret. Her presence here- in
addition to all that Kelly had said to him in preface to her arrival-
confirmed all the worst thoughts he'd ever had about her, and it told
her the extent of his own sin, because after all, here he was in bed
with another man. Then again, this was what his own wife was doing
behind his back all this time. She wouldn't say no. Couldn't say no.
She could never say no.
'Courtney!' she shrieked.
'Nona, honey, I can explain!'
Kelly sidled in between them and sat on the bed, still smiling.
'There's no way you can explain this! I could understand if you
were fooling around on me because you're no longer attracted to me-
if it was with a woman- but this I can't...I can't comprehend. This
simply isn't happening,' she said, hoping that her denial of it would
make it true. 'There's no fucking way this is happening, not to me, not
to us.'
'Nona...'
'Shut up.'
'Nona, please...'
Kelly smiled at her again. 'Come on, honey, why don't you just
get into bed with us and we'll...discuss it. You know, the way we
always-'
She did not get into bed, but merely cried silently amidst idle
talk of divorce and attorney's fees, and Kelly decided to sneak out,
leaving Courtney to deal with his hysterical wife. He almost got to the

363
 364

door before the shouting began in earnest. 'You...you...I can't

believe...'
Kelly smiled up at Nona. 'Your money's on the dresser, hon.'
'Nona! You don't understand!'
'Oh, I understand everything, Courtney. For years now I've put
up with finding pornography all over the house! I've cleaned the
house for guests, and there it would be. You don't hide things very
well, do you know that, Courtney? Pages and pages of other women's
bodies I've had to endure. I've had to put up with your moods, your
bitchiness, your weirdness. I've been married for eleven, almost
twelve years to a man who has absolutely no friends. But I
persevered, hoping that you'd get better. That's why whenever you
got that crazy feeling again I told you to see a counselor. I was
hoping that you'd be truthful and tell them why you were in the
process of losing your mind- truly losing your mind- but I guess if you
don't want help, you're not going to get it.'
I am what I've done.
'Honey, it's not like that at all! Please just let me explain!'
'I'm sorry, but you've talked enough. I'm talked out. Too late.'
Nona left without saying another word to either one of them.
Rumor does not always lie.
Kelly stepped forward. 'Man, I didn't know she was your wife.'
The boy sounded so sincere.
All of a sudden, Courtney felt possessed by a swirling, crushing
headache. He needed to take some aspirin. Ah, that was bullshit. He
needed something more than aspirin. He needed total oblivion.

364
 365

HERE LIES LOVE

Several members of the mourning party lingered on, staring fixedly at
the casket, and none of them seemed to know the proper moment to
give up this stance and the penitent colleague, lover or bereaved
friend. They were each separately examining their history with the
dead woman. How well had they really known her? Did they even
know how little of the reflection the mirror allowed itself to betray?
Did they see the abyss beneath her vanity, and had they fallen inside
of her as well?
Kraggess Feebes wondered about himself, and he wondered for
others. Their voices were hushed, and some folks found difficulty in
making syllables at all, but there seemed to emanate from every
throat a sound common to all who witness or feel that they've
witnessed the passing of a life in which not all of the components fit
together. The family of the dead woman particularly looked ill-at-ease
with one another and drew no simple comfort from the presence of
those other people in attendance.
Flowers were gathered for the dead woman, but not many
people knew to make of it. People had come and gone to this
woman's funeral, and yet, there was no hint of pain. It was as if she
had merely outlived her usefulness to them and therefore needed to
be committed to the ground.
But, God, how those flowers stank in the air.
Now, hours after the last weeper had gone home, the paper
coffee cups and cake-crusts needed to be gathered and disposed of.
With Suite 1 of Georg Philipp Telemann's Tafelmusik creaking through
the feeble sound system, the cleaning crew went wordlessly about
their various tasks, shining and polishing the day-view room for the
next cheerful flock of dearly-beloveds. To a man of Teddy's
sensuality, there was always too much beige used in decorating a
place like this. The staff looked like cheap hotel waiters and the
director lacked the precise verbal finesse to make his clients sound like
better people than they actually were.
Not that any of that matters now. Dead is dead, right?
Teddy scratched at his earlobe and pushed his sunglasses up on
his forehead, using the strength of his glance to force the others from
the viewing chapel. Teddy knew most of these people- he'd even done
time with some of them- but Teddy didn't like people to be around
when he handled the corpses. In the time he had worked in this
capacity, Teddy had acquired a certain respect for the dead. He was
here to help them into a better life. He was here to make them happy.
So happy.
So goddamn happy.

365
 366

Her dress had been pretty, and there had been a delightful flush
in her cheeks, but this was the end of the line for her. The mortician
had done his best to make her look good, because this was indeed her
final social situation. The people here would go home and eat dinner,
perhaps watch a movie and go to bed. She wasn't going anywhere.
Dead was dead and the dead didn't get to go home and eat dinner,
perhaps watch a movie and go to bed. These particular dead were
robbed of their valuables and perhaps- if they were female- even
finger-raped by Teddy Villimous, the local consensual sex-offender
who had joined the Toonka public works on a prison work-release
program late in the season, three years before, just prior to the final
ground freeze of the year that made the dirt impossible to dig through.
Since the spring thaw this year, Teddy's had put in seven consecutive
Saturdays of digging, and his shoulders muscles still were not wholly
used to the exertion he was called on to put upon them every day. It
wasn't unusual for him to be called across town to pick up a stiff, but
he had his own pick-up truck- even if it was a few years old- and the
only time he saw his boss was when he handed in his time-cards down
in personnel at the end of every two-week governmental pay cycle.
Other than that, Teddy Villimous was totally left alone.
Getting the casket onto the hand-truck was no problem, but
Teddy had to hold the door to the receiving bay open with the heel of
his boot while at the same time wheeling though a casket that was too
large for this particular hand-truck. Once, Teddy had been certain that
it would fall over, and that was always pretty fucking gross when that
happened.
Teddy Villimous- a man who had taped Faces of Death 1, 2, 3
and 4- onto the same videocassette for easy access- had discovered
the hard way that real-life life-and-death was a different ball of wax.
He had been transporting a gunshot victim from the morgue to the
landfill when the casket tipped and what was left of the guy just kind
of slid out of the dark crack of the open door. Once Teddy saw what
had happened to him, he had re-discovered a childish fear of dark
places and things unknown.
It was a bitch-kitty trying to load her into the bed of the pick-up-
again, because he had to do it alone- but he did it, and within a
minute of strapping her down to the bed, he was lighting a joint as he
ascended the ramp for the bypass. He crossed over and through the
stinking guts of the city, and on the lower stretches the air inside the
car actually turned green from all the pollution that collected in the
underpasses.
All of a sudden it occurred to Teddy that something bright was
going on in the darkness behind him. He looked in his rear-view
mirror and

366
 367

Cherries.
shit.
Did I cover her up?
He didn't have time to think this through properly. Was he
here?
But the cop passed him, accelerating as Teddy pulled his truck to
a stop and tucked the joint underneath the floor mat at his feet.
Waiting a minute before rolling around, Teddy signaled to the car
behind him, using a hand signal to tell him to pass by Teddy's truck.

It took him five minutes to finish the joint, and he took another
ten minutes inside of the 7-11 on Belmont, trying in vain to cure his
munchies. From the 7-11, it was exactly a five-minute cruise over to
the bone yard.
Time enough for a quick package of Zingers.
He flashed his card at the sentry working in the gatehouse and
pulled his truck onto the narrow, sandy drive that led through the
cemetery.
The crickets were already out, and Teddy was grateful for them
and their irksome company when it felt as if he was the last soul left
alive on earth. The man who had shown him the ropes here had been
digging graves for seventeen years, and as he showed Teddy around
the Main St. shop where most of the supplies were stored, he had
made some faint allusion to a brain malady that sometimes overcame
undertakers:
The dead have a way of taking you with them. Some go sooner
than others, and some never go at all. If you think it's going to
happen, get out. I'll understand. But if you think it's going to happen,
go immediately. Because if it starts to happen, then, it's too late.
At the time, Teddy hadn't really cared for what he was saying.
But now he wished he had taken the time to study what the man said.
He left the casket in the back of the pickup until after he had
lowered the plate sections for the grave-liner. They were made out of
a tough poly-styrene combination that had recently come onto the
market. Each section was six feet tall and two feet across and
weighed forty-three and a half pounds apiece. Teddy had learned that
it was easier to lower them in by hand and then position them properly
than it was to use a rope and pulley. Once he got the plates into
position- all twelve of them, and it was the work of ten minutes- he
was ready to put her in the ground. Digging this hole had taken the
better part of an afternoon, and as he was digging it, Teddy had spied
in the skies above two birds that looked suspiciously like vultures to
his untrained eye.
Did they even have vultures in this part of the country?

367
 368

Two sets of eyes had witnessed these last few moments that
Melanie was above ground level. Each of them sought to memorize
each detail of her body, albeit for much different reasons. Timothy
had found that emotion made him weak when he tried to affect the
physical world, and this was certainly no exception. Otherwise, this
fucker in front of him would be eating his own testicles in a bloody
consumee.
Teddy had been there, the essence of Timothy Karacas
surrounding him and passing through him at the same time, and
Teddy had his fingers dripping with juices that he would never be able
to coax from a girl with a pulse. He wiped his fingers under his nose
and on his chin and inhaled out of an ingrained impulse that he had
developed since taking this job, but as he did this he felt another
presence that made him shiver to the very marrow of his bones.
It was somewhere close. Somewhere around here. His eyes
traced the perimeter of the room, but he saw nothing that was out of
place.
He turned around, but whatever it was had fallen away.

368
 369

XERODERMA PIGMENTOSUM
Their words always sounded the same to him. A little like...jelly.
'How's our little patient doing today?' Dr. Gracey asked, leering
over Shelby's bed with a degree of cheer that seemed false. The light
from the windows cut harshly across his face on an angle, and Shelby
had come to despise the condescension in his voice. It might have
been a little different if Shelby wasn't a doctor himself, but he was,
and deserved to be talked to the way one would converse with an
adult.
'I guess I'm fine,' Shelby said, each successive word taking more
effort to speak than the last, 'but I'm getting a little impatient to see
exactly what I'm going to look like once the bandages come off.'
We all are, Gracey thought. Don't you just fucking well know it.
Shelby made a gesture of throwing up his arms gently as if to
somehow underscore the futility of playing the waiting game. 'I just
want it to be over with, the feeling of insecurity, of worrying that my
skin might slip off my face if I were to smile or laugh out loud or
something.'
His words were muffled, coming through the bandages as they
were, but Gracey understood full well what Shelby was saying: he
wanted out, now.
'Well, I wouldn't worry about that happening so much as I would
see to it that I was getting enough rest, if I were you. And you've
done a pretty good job of taking care of yourself with the dietary
restrictions I delineated for you, am I correct?'
'For the most part.'
Dr. Gracey smiled. 'So you're telling me that you weren't
exactly one hundred percent utilizing the diet that I gave to you?'
'I tried it, and for the most part I stuck to it, but I did sneak the
occasional candy bar. I was good about eating all that lettuce- fuck-
and I filled out my veggie card every day, but I'm afraid I've got a
weakness for chocolate. I'm sorry, it's just the that diet is so-'
'Strict,' Gracey interjected. 'And it needs to be. This is a very
delicate procedure that we're trying to perfect here and the presence
of the various elements necessary in your system and in the proper
amounts is essential. If we were to deviate from that, I don't know
what might-'
'Well,' Shelby offered limply. 'I'm sorry. I did the best I-'
'Oh, don't be,' the doctor brightened. 'It's quite understandable,
and I expected people to balk at the diet that goes with it, so I upped
the dosages in your daily preparatory medications. I made sure, quite
independently of you, that what I needed was in your system, even if
you were only sticking to the diet for one meal out of every three or

369
 370

four.'
'How will it look? I mean, when it's done?'
'It depends. I don't know.'
Shelby eyes widened. 'That isn't what you were saying before.'
'And what is it that I'm meant to have said?'
'Well, you showed me those pictures of my face after the
surgery! What about those? Or was that all bullshit, too?'
'Those were only computer projections of the probable outcome
of what we programmed. The computers tell us what we need them
to. What we- as the directors of this project- needed was a test case
to see how well this batch of the formula worked. Such an active
experiment would also tell us what adjustments we might need to
make. You wanted to look like a male model out of some fashion
magazine and I opted to help you toward that end. But I needed your
data more than you needed me to operate on you, and we both knew
that going in. I'm a diagnostician and a chemical scientist. I had to
be here, to finish my experiments. You- on the other hand- didn't
have to be here. You were here because you wanted to be here.
When you commit to do something out of your own desire, it tends to
lessen your right to complain. You knew what you were doing.'
'So.' Shelby closed his eyes. 'What do you think I'll look like?'
'I already showed you that on the computer projections we did
that one day in my office. That's as close as we can predict now. I
could tell you the specifics, but that would be doing you and I a major
disservice. Only time will tell, and I would say that you have about as
much of an idea how this might turn out as I do. It's up to the gods,
now.'
Shelby stared him down. 'But how could you promise those
results? You told me that I could look the way I wanted, that I-'
'I never promised a man anything unless he wanted to be sold a
bill of goods before I even laid eyes upon him. That's always been my
rule, and it's served me well. I didn't have to lie to you, because you
would have filled my mouth with your own lies so that you would hear
whatever it was that you wanted me to say. The older man smiled
maliciously. 'But that's our secret.'

Shelby had awakened with a start. He was alone, he was pretty

sure of that, but he could never be sure. He waited a moment, dozed,
and came back to consciousness with a nagging and renewed suspicion
that he was being fucked with...and that it was happening from
beyond the grave.
There was a dull tapping going on beneath the bone in his
forehead, and something- some force- was pulling him towards the
mirror in the bathroom on the opposite side of the room. His body

370
 371

was listening to commands that were coming from outside of him, and
he was powerless to intervene. he was being led, and he had no
choice but to follow.
He fought it for as long as he could, trying to will his feet to
stop the pain was so intense - but the tapping became more and
more insistent the closer he got to the bathroom. Whatever it was
wanted to get him alone, so that it could talk to him up close.
Shelby's head was still wrapped in bandages that had been soaked in
Gracey's special Oxy-Bacitracin Zinc-polymyxin ointment, and both his
eyes had been blackened with the after-effects of his operation. That
had been just about all he could see of himself while looking in the
mirror in the john. He was still standing in the room, looking at the
mirror in the half-light, trying to hold himself in the door jamb with his
arms extended in front of him. It wasn't working, wouldn't work, but
for a second he thought it might work. When the strength in his arms
gave away into pain and ripping sinews, he flew forward- but his
propulsion was arrested by a force that reminded him of the way it felt
when you put two polarized magnets together, the resistance to
pressure that kept them separated.
He started to fall forward, and Shelby was sure that he would hit
the floor face-first and shatter like porcelain, and then he was stopped
by the magnet-pull, and his legs were brought gently underneath him,
and he was carried in by a breeze that flowed even though the window
was shut.
Now, as Shelby floated into the bathroom, uncertain of who he
would disturb or what he might encounter, he saw no real reflection at
all- at least, not of the world behind him as he had seen it while lying
in the hospital bed. The things he saw in the mirror reflected a real
and true image of what was behind him, but it still had a cartoonish
effect on all that it touched, because he was studying it so hard now,
looking for proof of more subtle trickery. What the fuck was going on?
Everything was still, because it seemed that Shelby couldn't
even hallucinate any movements into his surroundings. Whatever was
happening to him was happening to him alone. He found himself
wanting something to happen, actively wishing for that needle in the
haystack to reveal itself and for something somewhere to look out of
place.
He found that he now desired the next inevitable confrontation
with whatever it was that was haunting him. Shelby guessed that it
would not strike again so soon after the last few attacks, in order to
recuperate and further toy with its intended prey. It would want to
wait for a while, and either let Shelby develop a false sense of security
or allow the constant tension of being followed slowly erode at his
cranium.

371
 372

He was feeling disappointed. He wanted to face-off as best he

could under these circumstances. He had lost face by freaking out the
last time this had happened- understandably so- and he now wanted
to score those points back. Shelby had already crossed some line
somewhere that now placed him in a shadowy realm just outside the
farthest suburbs of sanity. He needed to fear his only salvation, and
his salvation was exactly this: there were no rules to this game
anymore.
This game had gone too far for rules to affect the outcome.
Until one of the shadows behind him in the mirror started to
move, he thought he might have imagined the entire scenario- he was
dosed up with some pretty potent painkillers, and he was unusually
susceptible to the effects of downers. He had found this out the hard
way in high school.
The mirror-shadow seemed to be in a continuous state of blackly
rapturous self-glorification, morphing itself from one indistinct image
to another without ever settling on one continual state of appearance.
Clearly, Timothy Karacas now marveled at that which he had become,
and he had indeed grown quite masterful in the short time he had
been dead.
He had put the experience of being dead to good use.
'Hello, Shelby,' his reflection said, finally acknowledging its own
presence. 'It's been a while for the two of us, hasn't it, now?'
'Hello.'
'You look- a little...different.'
His darkened reflection looked to him exactly as Shelby had
before his operation, except without all the imperfections that Shelby
had seen in his face before. His skin, in the reflection, was flawless.
Now, he could see the face of his reflection knotting up with stitches
and scar tissue, even as the apparition continued to speak. 'You
always wanted more, didn't you? You were always willing to trade
your body, always willing to trade yourself, to gain the things that you
weren't willing to work for. All ambition borne of pride stinks of the
grave.'
'Is that how I'm going to look when all these bandages come off?
I mean, will I look the way you look right now? Is that what I'll be?'
'I can't say,' his reflection replied. 'I don't know these things.'
Shelby became incensed. 'Then what the fuck do you want with
me?'
'There's something I need you to do for me, Shelby,' the
reflection said, its voice cracking a little. 'And then I'll leave you
alone.'
'What more can I do? I've allowed you to take over my life!'
His reflection lowered its head. 'This is serious. After this last

372
 373

thing, I promise you- on my fucking grave- that I'll leave you alone.'
Shelby tossed his bangs to one side. 'What?' he asked, irritably.
'After you recover from whatever it is that happened to you, if...'
Shelby was stricken by the thought of an instant.
'You mean, you don't know?' Shelby blurted, without thinking
about it.
'No, I don't.'
'Well, fuck, why can't you?'
'There are certain things I can't see- I don't know if it's the same
for everyone in my condition, but there are spots, sections that I can't
see no matter how hard I might try to do it. Whatever happened to
you, or is happening to you, or how your life relates to mine- all of
that is kept from me. I don't see why, because it might help me to
know why...'
At first, Shelby thought that the ghost might go on speaking,
when it became obvious that he wasn't going to, not for a long while,
Shelby then tried to lead Timothy back into his own question, not
knowing how afraid of that question he should be. 'You were saying,
when I recover...'
'If you recover...'
'Yeah?'
'I want you to go to my grave and dig it up.'
Shelby giggled involuntarily. 'You're fuckin' crazy.'
'I'm absolutely dead serious. No pun. Ex communicado, I was
buried with something that was very important to me, and I want it
back.'
Shelby's curiosity had been peaked. 'What did you get buried
with?'
The reflection waffled a little bit. 'I don't think I can tell you.'
'I'm supposed to listen to the soul of a dead man and break into
his own goddamn coffin, in order to get back something he was buried
with?'
'If you want your life back, I suppose that's what you have to
do.'
'And you're not even gonna tell me what it is you need?'
The air in Shelby's room was getting thick with humidity,
although it had been quite chilly outside. The thick windows leading to
the patio- a feature afforded in only seven of the room suites in this
hospital- had fogged over with moisture. Shelby felt sweat running
down his face.
'Is this your idea of a joke?'
'Not at all. I'm buried in lot K237. It's on the left hand side as
you're facing my tombstone, if I'm not mistaken. K238 is on the right,
but that one's not empty anymore. Don't dig up the wrong grave or

373
 374

else it'll take you twice as long as it needs to. This is nothing more
than a grotesque act of retrieval. Once you've broken the seal on the
coffin, just look inside my breast coat pocket. It should be there.'
'Should be there...' Shelby echoed hollowly.
'I’d do it myself, but it seems as if I'm previously indisposed.'
'What if I get caught doing it?' Shelby asked. 'What if I'm not
able to retrieve whatever it is that you want me to get?' The words
were hurting his mouth as he spoke them, and he tried to shut himself
up.
'Then we're both fucked,' the reflection replied in earnest. 'So
the simplest answer to your question would be: don't get caught at
all.'
'What if I don't do what you want me to?'
'Then you have to live with my presence. I haven't really
decided what I would do to you if you refused, because I haven't
wanted to consider that possibility and I do consider myself civilized,
so despite my tragic end I wish to avoid barbarous events. But I'm
sure that I could whip up something in a big fucking hurry, if you
pushed me to it. Either I'll take your skin from you- and when I say
that, I mean that I would peel it from you as if you were a grape- or
I'll drive you to suicide and possess your corpse. If you retrieve what
I want you to, then I might be able to die once and for all. I might be
able to find some peace. You would be rid of me, and I would be rid of
you.'
Timothy hoped that his cancer wasn't listening to any of this. It
might try to capitalize upon Timothy's distress by deliberately keeping
Shelby away from the cemetery where he had been buried. That little
fucker was always around at the worst moments, but you never knew
when it would be gone, so when it was one tried to sneak what one
could.
'If I can't live again,' Timothy now said, 'then I want to die. It's
one way or the other because I can't exist in this nether region
between the two states of being. It's too disruptive, and it's too
exhausting.'
Shelby cracked a weary grin. 'Haunting is hard work, huh?'
Timothy remained steadfast. 'This is very important to me,
Shelby. I think this just might be more important to me than my life
itself. Then again death may have soured me a little on the thought of
being alive.'
Shelby tittered uneasily and tried to think of a way out of this.
There wasn't. This wasn't what anyone would call a normal
situation.
Timothy thought about the engagement ring he had intended
upon giving to Melanie on her birthday. He remembered how it

374
 375

started. It came down to a ring. A solid continuous golden hoop, this

sullen betrayal here.
The two golden hearts connected viscerally from underneath by
the hoop signified a promise well-kept, a pact beyond God and the
stars his dominion, ne'er severed by man nor beast- or so he had
heard; the etched lengths of each heart sanguinated around and
through its mate. Timothy had never been involved with anyone on
this deep a level before- due to frequent illnesses that kept him
unsocial throughout his young twenties- and he didn't how to keep the
feelings from dying between two people who were in love with each
other. He wondered how on earth she could love the person he really
was, because Melanie knew next to nothing about his real life. He
supposed that deep down it was his fault- and why not?
Everything else certainly was.
And suddenly, Shelby found himself thinking the same thing.
'Is it...a ring?'
Timothy's face looked up at him in the mirror.
Shelby stepped gingerly over to the bedside table and he picked
through the contents of the drawer there with fingers that seemed to
be three times their normal size. Finding what he wanted, he rolled
the ring into the palm of his hand and held it out for Timothy to see.
'I...I didn't know that you had this.'
'I didn't think so,' Shelby said, enjoying at least a moment of
power in this little exchange. 'Tell you what.'
'Give it to me,' Timothy said, snatching at it with a glowing fist.
'Not yet.' Shelby smiled. 'First, I want a promise.'
'What?'
'Leave me alone. Now, and forever. I never want to see you
again. Then I'll let you have this. But not before you promise what I
want.'
'I want nothing more from you. Now give that to-'
'Do you renounce this mojo you've got going on my skin?'
'Hey, I could give a fuck. Give me the ring!'
'Let me ask you something, asshole, before we do our business.'
'What?!'
'Why? I mean, why are you after me? What did I do to you?'
'You're part of something larger- something you don't see, not
yet. You are but a single note in a millennium-long fugue. That's all
that any one of us ever are in the first place. What happens to you
from now on is essential to the order of the universe, but only as a
single tile in a galaxy-wide mosaic. As you are, I once was; as I am
you shall become.'
'I repeat, what does all that have to do with me?
'Because we're all the same. Because I want what you want.'

375
 376

'And what do we all want?'

'We all want that single note to sustain forever.'
'And it doesn't.'
'It doesn't. You and I are no more related than a couple of
poker players sitting at the same table. I might...beat you, but don't
take that personally. You aren't the hero of the day. You're not the
one I'm after. There's a deeper purpose here, because I'm trying to
find out who's been dealing these fucking cards to us in the first place.'

376
 377

SECRET UNDERSTANDINGS
Courtney thought he was losing his mind. He had to be. After
securing this motel room, he laid down upon the bed before he even
took his shoes off. He didn't even look on the sign. He just pulled into
the parking lot without noticing anything about the place besides
$26.95 a nite.
This was the first time he'd ever rented a motel room alone.
It was the first time he'd even slept alone in eleven years. He
missed the physical presence of another body more than anything
else. So long as it was warm. But warmth wasn't what he wanted.
He would never land on that. He was going to have to bring someone
here to this hotel room tonight. The Westwind Motel, after all, was
where she had done some of it, wasn't it? He would sleep in the
shadow of her plague.
He'd have to go to that bar where she went. What was the
name of it? She said that it had been a dive and that it had gone
through a dozen owners and a dozen names in as many years. She
said that it was a little place, a small shack of a bar 'with a big parking
lot. You know, get those semi guys in, get 'em fed and drunk and
send 'em out again kind of deals,' according to Nona's colorful
verbatim description. It shouldn't be that hard to find. That was the
end of the circle- the place from which his entire morbid obsession
emanated.
Courtney felt that he needed to visit it- it was a shrine, was it
not?- as in it was his wife in her young, before he'd watched her age
and wither, even as little as she had in the time he'd known her. He'd
watched her grow old, caught the tail-end of things, while his wife had
willingly doled out chunks of her life to men who regarded her as being
nothing more than an available piece of ass. Her youth had soaked
other men's pubic hair. Her life before she met him involved
intercourse with men whose names she didn't even know, and all the
co-workers she fucked.
'Waiters are pretty interesting. I've slept with a couple of them
myself,' she said enthusiastically, later denying it when he brought it
up again. Was this what it felt like to be a slut? Was this what he
wanted to know? I’ve gone too far in this blue world, he told himself.
He touched his eyes and saw that he was crying again. Lately, he was
always crying.
He pictured his wife having sex with a semi-truck driver,
stopping in for three or four bottles of Stroh's before heading on out
again for the night. He wasn't even interested in getting laid- wasn't
even gonna try- but this puppy-eyed, chubby little girl with the cute
little chin and nice ass was real friendly. She seemed desperate. She

377
 378

wanted love and would spread her legs to anyone who would hold her
for ten minutes.
Everybody hides some kind of scar.
His hands were getting cold, numb even, even though the
thermostat said that it was registering over seventy degrees in here.
This did not feel the way he wanted it to. Courtney did not enjoy this
part of the emulation. He wondered if it was like this for her. Did her
hands freeze like this as she walked out to the car with a virtual
stranger?
And half of the time, it was my car we fucked in.
Did her hands freeze like this? Did she feel ready to vomit? He
wasn't even at the bar yet, he was just thinking about it and wasn't
even approaching the physical possibility of sexual contact and already
he felt sick. Disgusted with himself. Of course, Nona had not been
crossing the gender establishment of her times by doing what she did-
the way he was doing- she had only bruised the garter of good taste.
I feel so strong, sometimes- I'm only lonely occasionally.
He wasn't sure if he would be able to pick someone up so he
only went to watch the social posturing to see firsthand how it was
done. When he walked in, he wasn't at all prepared for the physical
realness of the place. It really existed, and after all this time of
thinking about it that blew his mind. There were a number of neon
beer signs and Miller High Life clocks, but nothing out of the ordinary.
There were three people, two boys and a girl, all alone at the bar.
There was a minimum of two stools intersecting each one of them.
The girl looked easy and she probably was. She didn't look exactly
like Nona, but it was close.
I know you're never gonna be mine, but I just love to see you.
The place even smelled familiar to him, as though by dreaming
of it he'd been there many times before. Had he picked it up from her
through osmosis? Weirder things have happened but he didn't think
that was the case. It was familiar because there were a million such
places in every corner of the earth, with people doing much the same
thing in every one of them that his wife was doing before they
married. He'd figured out a good deal of that knowledge before he
even walked in here.
It hurt him that he wasn't able to even talk to Nona to try and
square things away between the two of them- although the use of the
word hurt paled when placed next to the unnamable emotion he felt
regarding this subject. Nona didn't say a damn thing to him that gave
him any impression of how she felt, or if she was suffering at all like
he was. He wondered if she had yet to make the connection between
her behavior in the past and what he had been doing lately, or that her
personality and her attitude towards him had led him straight to what

378
 379

he was.
A little bit later the jukebox was playing 'Greased Lightning' and
everyone at the bar- including the bartender- was doing the hand jive.
Courtney declined to join in, even when expressly invited by the girl
sitting next to him to do so. But Courtney had bad intentions at the
bottom of his heart. He wanted to create violence. He'd lost his wife-
the only person in the whole fucking world who ever cared the
slightest bit about him- through events brought about by the sins she
committed here. Where was his commitment to civility? Nowhere that
he could see. Decency could shred for all he fucking cared.
Nothing mattered now- it shouldn't bother me.
His nakedness will be exposed, and his inner shame uncovered.
'I will take vengeance,' said the Lord; 'I will spare no one.'

379
 380

MUCH LATER
Shelby flexed his new, perfect skin. It felt smooth and unsteady, a lot
like candle wax. And like candle wax, it was also warm and yielding.
He was afraid to flex his fingers, which felt as if they had been dipped
into boiling water without the aid of bandaging afterwards. This
insane itching caused by the E2D8 treatment seemed almost unholy
when compared to the promises Gracey had made. Nothing even
remotely like this had been mentioned when Shelby asked Gracey
about the after-effects.
Everything seemed to itch, and everything seemed to cause him
pain.
But it would all be worth it, if it worked.
If.

380
 381

IHVH
Courtney returned to meet the priest as scheduled, and he was
nervous about it. He wasn't quite sure what to expect, and now, after
such time had passed, he was no longer sure that what happened the
last time he was here wasn't all just an hallucination after all, the way
that Samuel had suggested it might have been. Or maybe it was the
other thing he had mentioned, divine intervention. He had been living
out of his car for two days, driving around the city with a bottle of
vodka riding up inside his crotch. Courtney had a hard time seeing
himself as being so important as to warrant a personal appearance by
the man upstairs.
'Are you the one I talked to last time?' he asked.
'I am.'
'Do you work here?'
'It is the Lord's work we do here.'
'I understand, but I wasn't sure that I had talked to anyone the
last time I was here.'
'How do you say that?'
'Well, I just talked to a priest and he said there was nobody in
here when I was making my confession the last time I talked to you.'
'Then he is a fool. He has no faith. Be careful who you listen
to.'
'Why?' Courtney wanted to know.
'They can steer you wrong.'
'Alright.'
'Have you done what I asked you to do?'
'I have, sir, I have tried. My wife discovered it. She found out.'
'You did not do what I asked you to do?'
'I tried.'
Courtney heard a derisive snort. 'How hard were you trying?'
'I'm sorry. I came to ask forgiveness. True forgiveness.'
'True forgiveness, as you so choose to distinguish it, begins first
with a true confession, does it not? Are you ready to take that step?'
The priest's voice sounded deep and threatening. Courtney
thought about it and decided that he didn't like its tone.
'I-I beg your pardon?'
'Don't think of me as being a human liaison for the Lord. A lie to
me is a lie to Him. I can tell by your face that you're trembling.'
'I have told you everything.'
'You haven't. I can tell.'
Stop it, motherfucker, stop it, I'll say everything, I'll say
everything, I'll confess, but not to another human being. I’ve been in
places that no human being can relate to. I've gone too far, and I

381
 382

know it. I can't stop, but I can chronicle my descent. I'll talk, I'll talk,
I'll talk, but I wanna talk to you, Lord. Straight to the top.
'But I'm already here, Courtney.'
Courtney dashed his fingers at the cage and it fell through, onto
the empty plastic chair inside the other side of the confessional.
Courtney stood up and, lacing his fingers through the broken metal
coil of the window frame, peered through to the other side. There was
no one there.
A second passed, and then perhaps it was a little longer than
that, and then the same voice he'd heard before made its way to his
ears, one last time, and he was never sure what the voice had meant
when it said:
'And I'm proud of you.'
There was no one inside the booth with him. He was alone.

382
 383

SHELBY II
The surgery was now complete, including a nightmare host of
unrelated minor surgeries, but within about two and a half weeks- as
Shelby was being discharged- the entire process was privately
pronounced as having been an unqualified success in their eyes. The
time of his in-hospital convalescence had gone by pretty swiftly;
Shelby spent most of this time drugged out of his mind and
consequently, he'd slept a lot. He couldn't tell for sure what was going
on. The river of life floated around him, touching the shores of those
people too alive to appreciate it.
He hadn't seen Timothy Karacas since he'd last talked to him-
almost a week and a half prior to now- not even in his dreams. For a
time, it seemed like he was gone. And of the shadow, there was now
no sign that it had ever existed. The first week at home had gone
smoothly as well- almost too smoothly for Shelby's taste. The E2D8-
treated skin now clung to him as securely as his own skin had, and as
the bandages came off, a little bit more of his new flesh was being
revealed every day- Shelby started to feel hope for the first time in
what seemed a very long time.
If his new skin looked a little pale from time to time when he
looked at it in the bathroom mirror or if to his own eyes the skin was
starting to looked jaundiced, he'd assured himself that such factors
would change in the weeks and months to come. After a few days at
home, he allowed himself to relax, and to plot- with the blurry infinite
majesty of a drug-stained mind- the possible courses that his career
might take, both inside and outside of the Bramble Clinic, if Shelby
elected to stay on the paid staff here.
Now, it seemed a little farfetched to him.
Before this operation, Shelby would have sworn that he had at
least another four or five years of work left to do here at Bramble, but
Shelby also wanted to see a piece more of the world than this tiny
pissed-upon corner of Massachusetts they inhabited. The entire
process had left a bad taste in his mouth- but Shelby vowed to himself
that he was going to pursue his fortunes with a greater degree of vigor
than he had in the years previous. True living was about going
forward and not looking back- whatever the cost may be personally.
Moving on is easy, and one must forget what is left behind in forfeit for
this new freedom.
He was trying to think of a cheap tampon joke, but then
couldn't.

Shelby had seen the first signs of accelerated aging in the mirror
when he brushed his teeth on his fifth morning home from the

383
 384

hospital. His face- puffy and numbed with painkillers- was starting to
assume its true shape and intended dimension, and Shelby couldn't
say that he was disappointed with it.
He was admiring himself in the mirror and inspecting his gums
for blood-spots when he noticed the web of wrinkles that was
surrounding his right eye where the new skin was bunching up. He
tried to push the skin back into its proper positioning with his fingers,
but the skin wasn't as malleable as he'd remembered it being in
Gracey's lab facilities, and it had started to harden and set. It looked
to Shelby as if the lower corner of his right eye was being pulled askew
by tiny unseen fish hooks.
'Will this work?' Shelby asked.
'We hope so,' Gracey had said.
There was a glaze in his eyes.
And that was that.
The E2D8 compound in its original formulation was supposed to
eat unhealthy, damaged flesh and leave fresh, perfect skin in its place.
In a few instances the skin had been eaten away with nothing being
left to replace it; one witness said that it was like watching a piranha
attack, only without seeing any of the water or the fish as they
attacked him.
E2D8 functioned in many ways as a biomechanically engineered
virus, and as such it was subject to easy mutation. It would blob in
the vial, and it would harden, with the air bubbles passing through its
sludge-like mass and thin scraps of flesh growing in the glass
chamber; but it had a limited lifespan prior to injection, and the rate of
infection was high. His looks, his surgically-enhanced state-of-the-art
good looks, were fading. There were creases at the corners of his
mouth within forty-eight hours after he first noticed the bad patch of
skin around his eye and there were now wrinkles- wrinkles!- around
both of his eyes, which now looked like poisonous little raisins that had
been pushed into a sheet of cookie dough by someone's thumbs. He
might have once been satisfied with this, but his E2D8 skin treatment
wasn't going to last.

On the eighth day he was home from the hospital, Shelby

decided to call Gracey and confront the issue head-on. The good
Doctor was not an easy man to get ahold of- with a wall of secretaries
that shielded him from the outside world- but time and patience
provided the voice he sought on the other end of the line. 'You have
to do me again, Gracey,' Shelby begged. 'I've gotta go all the way
through with this. I gave you what you wanted- a guinea pig- and I
need you to come through for me.'
Gracey inhaled and then sighed, choosing his words carefully.

384
 385

'It's much, much too soon to risk a second application, Shelby,

you know that as well as I do. We both understood the risks of this
first procedure before we attempted it. There's nothing I can say
except to-'
'You owe me a second chance, goddamn it!'
Shelby's skin was peeling off of his arms in thin plastic strips. In
the past two days, if felt as if his entire skin had slid down a solid
three inches all over his body from where it had been originally placed.
Would it be worth it to him to get this surgery redone? Shelby
knew that he had been down this road before, but would he be in a
position to make a better choice if a new surgery failed again? What
could he do without skin? The part of Shelby's face that had been
grown from the basic cells of Timothy's flesh had begun to deteriorate
rapidly. The skin disease that had claimed the other test-subjects had
not been eradicated- but rather enhanced- by the presence of
Timothy's DNA clone structure. Cheek had become cheek, the
fundamental properties of the flesh remaining the same, cloning the
disease as well as the skin which carried it. Gracey had not planned
on this, nor was he immediately able to remedy the situation.
It would take time to regrow another fragment of flesh to
replace the one taken from Timothy Karacas and purify the home
batch of E2D8 from which all his experiments had originated. In
addition to that, the good doctor didn't not want to complicate the
healing process by further traumatizing the skin with a quick patch-up
job that might take away from the perfection of the entire piece as a
whole, however laughable such a thought might have been at the
time. If more work was what was needed to be done, Gracey told
Shelby, then it was to be done right. They could fix it. There would
be no rush-job.

385
 386

OCCAM’S RAZOR
The wind blew bitter and silent as Courtney saw her hands closing the
shutters in their bedroom window- shutters that he had worked to pay
for. He was cold and shivering, and he was slowly getting the feeling
that he'd had last night- the feeling that this wasn't going to work.
Nona had indeed kept her promise to him- the locks on all the
doors had been changed. He could see that the deadbolts were all
shiny and new without going any closer to the house than he was right
now. The windows were jammed shut and wired to reinforce their
security. He had not doubted her for a second when Nona said that
she was going to change the locks- he couldn't afford to. There was
no way he was going to be able to get in unless he convinced her to let
him in, and he couldn't convince her unless he got in to talk to her.
What was there to do?
If he threw a rock, she would call the police.
Chances were also good that one of the neighbors would hear.
Neighbors! Maybe Ted Price still had a key to the downstairs
cellar! Courtney had given it to him last summer when he wanted to
borrow the lawnmower when his own riding mower died out last
summer.
He might still have it.
And Nona might have forgotten to change that one.
Courtney raced around to the back of the house and took a good
look at the lock. It was unchanged. Nona had forgotten. Courtney's
copy of the key, he was sure, was hanging upon a hook right by the
door to the basement, right before the paneling stopped. He ran over
to Price's house from in between the hedges and almost got hit by
Ted's car as he was pulling out.
'Hey, what the hell's the hurry?' Ted yelled, 'I almost nailed you.
Fuck! You ought to be a little more careful where you're running.'
'No time, Ted. I need the key to my basement. Do you have it?'
'Uh- right now?'
'Yeah, if you can.'
Ted then leaned down with a grunt and fiddled with the keys in
his automobile's ignition. He then handed the key to Courtney. 'I put
it on my key ring last week. I've been trying to remind myself to give
it back to you. Otherwise I'd probably forget or something.'
'Ted, you're marvelous,' Courtney exclaimed.
'You really think so?' Ted primed himself in the mirror.
'Yeah, uh- how's the new mower running?'
'Fine.'
'Hey, that's great,' Courtney said.
This was stalling his will to power.

386
 387

'So,' Ted said, feeling uncomfortable. 'When are you coming

over for pool again? I've got a new set of tips for the stick in the
basement.'
'Cool. We'll call it Tuesday. Well, I gotta split.'
'Me too. Say hi to Nona for me.'
'Oh, man, I intend to.'
Courtney got into the house and tried to creep through the
darkened basement as silently as he possibly could. As messy as the
basement was, this wasn't as easy task. Finally, he accessed the
basement door, the one that led into the kitchen. The light was on.
He tried hard to remember. Was that her habit? Was that the light
she always left on in case burglars came to call? Was it the kitchen or
the hallway?
He decided to risk it and pushed open the door.
Good news. He looked all over, and Nona wasn't there.
All their memories were soured. Courtney remembered
everything that he and his wife had done together in that living room.
They had painted the walls in this rooms, painted them and then
fucked on the floor with the windows still all covered with newspaper.
Words could not express his feelings over seeing her at the hotel.
There was shame, certainly, but also included was a righteous fury at
a wife who would do such a thing. Didn't she see that she would lose
everything they had between them, or did she just not care? Were the
memories that cheap?
Didn't the life that filled this house matter to her anymore?

Nona was getting herself a glass of water. She was going to

take two of the 10mg Valium tablets the doctor had prescribed to her
yesterday. She had been in a total state of hysterics when she made
the appointment, but two hours later, when she went, she found
herself to be remarkably composed. She didn't elaborate on what was
upsetting her, only promising to come in for a counseling session early
next week.
Her doctor said to take only one pill at a time, twelve hours
apart, but she knew from past experience that one pill wasn't going to
do her any good. Nona took the glass from the nightstand and
crossing in front of the TV, walked around the bed to the bedroom
door. She just couldn't bring herself to sleep upon Courtney's side of
the bed. Not last night or the night before. She wasn't about to roll
over to his side of the bed and get out that way. It was too...spooky.
Too similar. Everything in this house haunted her by leading her mind
to him.
Where had she gone wrong? She did everything a man could've
wanted her to do. She took it in the ass for him, and she swallowed

387
 388

his cum. What else was left? Even if Courtney did have homosexual
tendencies- which she herself didn't quite see happening to him- her
techniques should have staved off any feelings he might have had in
that area. She endeavored to keep him sexually exhausted, so that
even if another woman did come onto him, he wouldn't be interested.
I've got better waiting at home in bed, he'd say to them. She rimmed
his asshole, if that's what he was after. She slobbered her tongue all
over his testicles.
What more could a man want?
Nona even once asked him if he wanted her to get a strap-on
dildo so that she could fuck him in the ass. His face when she asked
that question had turned ashen white. What else could she have
done? She was only trying to keep him happy and more than satisfied
with her.
Keep thyself pure- 1 Timothy 5:22.
She saw him as he touched the top step. Her head turned.
'Nona, listen to me.'
'Get out of here.'
Why was she shaking so badly?
'Nona...'
For a moment, he thought she would shriek at him.
A moment later, he knew she would.
'Just get the fuck out of here!' She threw the glass at him and it
shattered against the wall in the hallway, at the top of the door jamb,
just above his head. 'Just get the fuck out! Out! Out!'
'Nona!'
'I just can't believe it, Courtney. What the hell were you doing
there? Did you show up for the gang-bang and just get turned on to
another man for a change, or it that what you really are? Huh?'
'I- What about you, you hypocrite? I always knew you were
weird and moody and a little bit fucked up in the head, but my God-
you're nothing but the shell of someone I used to love very dearly.
You have been for a long time. It took an awful lot of pain for us to
deteriorate into this, and you caused most of it. You're the reason I
couldn't sleep at night. You're the reason. You broke my heart in
seventeen places.'
Against his will, Courtney's eyes went temporarily out of focus.
The room and its contents swam around him, and he thought for a
moment that he might faint away altogether. These walls, these
joists...was this where their little road together ended? Would he be
alone forever?
The flash of a moment returned him to his argument.
'What was that, huh? Is that a common practice for you? How
long has it been this way? What was the pull for you, huh? I just

388
 389

wanna know? Was it a rush? A playback of your high school days?

Were you getting paid for it? Did it get you off, just knowing how
many men wanted to fuck you? I wanna know- was it worth
everything it cost you?'
'Fuck you. Get out of my house.'
'My house. It's my name on the mortgage. you fuckin' slut.'
'Fuck you, you twerp, you fuckin' bastard. It's in both our
names, always has been, and I need to have you barred from the
house for my own safety. Now leave here before I call the police.'
'No.'
'I'm warning you, Courtney- you'd really better leave.'
Courtney smiled. 'I'm not going anywhere. This is my house,
too.'
He didn't even see it coming.
Nona's fist, so hammy and manicured, had pulled back without
either one of them realizing it, and in an instant, Courtney was on the
floor. He had not been knocked out- not yet, baby- but his head was
swimming as the knowledge of what had just happened. His wife had
punched him.
And it was a sucker-punch at that.
Courtney and Nona had come to blows many times before-
which is to say that Courtney had been hit quite a bit but he never
retaliated for fear of what Nona would tell the police. The cops always
believed the women, and they ignored whatever the woman had done
in provocation. It was part of her querulous and antagonistic nature to
goad him into a brawl, but he never reciprocated. No matter how
tempting the thought might have been from time to time, he never,
ever hit her back.
He knew that he wouldn't now, either. He never would hit her
back.
Nona's engagement ring, so long unregarded and almost
forgotten about, had caught itself in the flesh on Courtney's face and
some of the skin had come away when she pulled her fist back. A tiny
three-pointed partial star, indicative of the four-cornered diamond
setting, had been imprinted upon the tender pink bulb of Courtney's
right cheek.
Pulling himself to his feet, Courtney started to smile.
'I just want you to know,' Courtney began, wielding his verbal
knife like a man with all the intent but no skill with which to inflict
harm, 'I just want you to know that I never thought of you as anything
but a whore, and that conclusion has been borne out by what you've
become.'
Nona smiled. 'If that's the case, then why'd you marry me?'
Courtney smiled now too. 'Because I've noticed that after a few

389
 390

years of marriage, most men start going to whores, and I figured that
marrying a whore would save me the trouble of looking for one later.'
Nona's eyes welled with tears.
For the first time in his marriage, Courtney knew that he had
scored. It was a dirty, sick feeling, and it didn't sit well with him.
'Nona, listen...I'm sorry, I...'
'Leave. Just leave.'
'I-'
He knew it was over. There was no turning back from this. The
whole marriage- this whole life- it would be dissolved. Nona would
probably get the house, the better car, everything. He hoped she
wouldn't bring up the hotel when it came time to go to court. He
didn't think he could withstand that sort of public ridicule. There was
no way that he could.
And his worst fears had been realized.
She knew about him. What he was.
'One thing before you go, though. Courtney?'
'What?'
'Are you a...a faggot?' Her mouth choked upon these words.
He didn't turn back to answer her. He knew where he was
going.
There was only one thing in the world that gave him pleasure
now.

390
 391

FOLLOW
The old, dead skin that had been cut off of Shelby Dunn during his first
operation had been placed in one of several hydraulically-cooled
chambers in the hospital that were used to store human epidermal
matter for later disposal. Each chamber had a three-cubic-foot
storage space in which dead skin could be stored at -3o1 degrees
without sustaining the damage that might occur with the usage of
mere refrigeration.
His skin rested there for three days before it got picked up, and
transferred via truck to the Dauble fuel storage facility on Fawnsforth
Street in the city. Gracey had arranged to have Shelby's old skin
transported there to keep it safe. He wanted to examine it, later.
He was getting weird signals from his people, from both above
and below, and he didn't know who he could trust. If the E2D8 project
were exposed now, it would die much like undeveloped camera film
would perish in the naked light of day, so Gracey had taken pains to
ensure that his baby was kept safe. He wanted to keep any and all
evidence far away from here.
He was sure that no other human being on earth knew of the
specific whereabouts of Shelby Dunn’s old skin- and technically,
Gracey was correct in that assessment. But Timothy Karacas was no
longer human. Timothy found that he held some certain advantages
over the living competition. He could read minds, and he could
partake of thoughts riding upon the wind. Even so, he had been
having a bitch of a time trying to locate this particular hide.
But here it was, cooled to -3o1 degrees in an electronically-
cooled and monitored barrel that had been wrapped in a clear orange
plastic sheeting, striped with the death's-head logo of Ibsenheit
Industries. The eyes in the legend had been burned out with what
might have been a soldering iron.
Timothy didn't know why, and he didn't care.
He slipped into the skin, and he couldn't help but to be reminded
of every condom he had ever wrapped around his dick in his young
life. It was a little like that- that bizarre pseudo-fleshy feel- but this
time it was all over his body, or where his body had been, or would be.
He didn't know anymore. But he was receiving trace sensations
as he rippled his molecules into, around and through Shelby's old skin.
As he stood up, Timothy felt much the way he had felt when he was a
kid if his Halloween costume didn't fit properly. Timothy had always
been thin and slight in stature but he had inherited his mother's
caboose, and on at least two occasions, he had run home from trick or
treating- tears in his eyes and screams in his throat- because he had
split out the ass of his plastic Batman costume. That's what this felt

391
 392

like to him now: it felt like inadequate coverage. It felt as if every

moment threatened him with a fatal exposure, only this time, he had
no home to run to.
He tried to stand as stock-still as possible, allowing and mentally
encouraging the skin to permeate each orifice, sewing the skin back
together as best he could, just trying to get this useless lump of flesh
to work. He felt like a living abortion. It was a distasteful task,
making him question every new kernel of knowledge he had acquired
about being a ghost. There was a sense of having gone too far, but
going too far was the only direction in which he felt comfortable
traveling. It was a strange process to undergo, being dead all the
time, and dying again and again. Was it his fate to engage himself in
the same way Ixxir had infested him? Was he now a parasite? Was
he now the one to fear, laden with a fear of his own immortality?
His force of will seemed to be enough to sew the strips together
so that he could wear the piece as a whole instead of as several
sequential strips of dead human skin- which is all it was. But the
process of putting on the skin had taught him things, things that he
hadn't really wanted to know about. There was a certain false feeling
to these proceedings.
He now knew a lot more about pain than he had ever wanted to
know.
As a reflection, Timothy had been relatively immobile at night,
but as a shadow he seemed able to drink up the darkness that
surrounded him. The lack of light inundating him seemed to feed him
and give him more strength. But he was drawing his sustenance from
the very things which extinguished life instead of enhancing it.
He'd left Ixxir in the mirror at Shelby's house while the lower
demon was snoozing. The escape had seemed simple enough- then.
He hadn't been too sure of how far he could've traveled at night
as the reflection. His choice had caught up with him- his cancer was in
here with him now. He could almost feel it even right now, crawling
up the inside of his right leg. And it wasn't his imagination.
Thought you had gotten rid of me, huh?
Timothy felt no desire to communicate with it right now. Any
argument that Timothy got into with his old body would only drain him
physically and damage his chances for success in his upcoming bout.
I'm always gonna be here to fuck with you- just like flies on shit.
Timothy wanted to say something witty in reply, but he didn't
feel capable of telecasting his thoughts to this creature who had lived
in his bowels, snuggling up nightly with fecal matter in his intestines.
And it was just like the old days, when he had still been alive.
Just beneath his skin, Timothy's nerve-endings were slowly
trying to re-attach themselves to the underlying infrastructure of the

392
 393

epidermal surface, meeting with a moderate degree of success. He

could feel about thirty-five percent, he estimated, of what he had been
able to feel when he was alive the first time. It hurt him to feel
physical sensations again. It was almost as it had been for him
before, but only now it had gotten a little worse with the crossing-over
he had facilitated. Pain was one area in which both his times of being
alive matched one another exactly. Even the ion molecules that made
up the air in the atmosphere around him seemed genetically
predisposed to continually assault the integrity of his physical
constitution. There was no let-up, and no escape. Timothy had to act
fast- if he wanted to save himself properly.
In time, the demon left him, without uttering another syllable.

393
 394

A POST-MORTEM HOLIDAY
The air was blue, as if from cigarette smoke, but it was only the late
spring sun filtering through the dust that was natural in places like
this. Dirty. Unkempt. What am I doing in a place like this?
He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew exactly where
he was going. As to why- well, that was another question entirely.
The total reason for his immolation was kept hidden from him, but he
knew he must return to the scene of his crimes. There was solace to
be found here. Another body. Another frame of mind as seriously
distorted as his own.
Courtney passed by an old man on the stairs who was carrying a
bag of newspapers down to the basement. As they passed one
another- 'Hello' on the stairs, he felt a charge of electricity pass
between himself and the old man. When he got to the upper landing,
he turned around and saw the old man staring at him from below.
Then he was gone.
Courtney was having a lot of experiences like that lately.
The last flight of stairs seemed the longest he'd ever had to
climb.
He had lost his wife- the person he had spent the last twelve
years of his life with- and would never return that relationship to the
point it was at prior to being severed the way it was. Everything
seemed to be happening too fast, and with far too much dramatic flair
than what was called for. His time, these days, was a fluid- thick and
sludgy at some points, clear and free running at others, all of it out of
his control. When and if it had ever been within his control, he could
not say. If he had controlled time, he certainly hadn't felt such power.
All he had wanted was a bit of guiltless sexual pleasure- what he
had considered to be his rightful renumerance for the injuries his wife
had caused him to suffer with her earlier actions. He certainly
deserved his come-uppance, and if that involved taking a purple
plastic penis and shoving it up his ass, that was his choice and no one
else's.
These were half of his thoughts.
The other half of his thoughts were not so pretty.
Not by a half.
What panicked him most was that the person who knew him the
best- his wife- had now seen him for what he really was, and she had
fled in utter disgust and terror. He felt he'd have the same reaction
the next time he looked into a mirror. But thankfully, Kelly's place
only had a mirror in the bathroom, and that one was quite easily
avoided if you turned your head in the other direction. He was trying
to decide if he'd ask to spend the night here- although sleeping in a

394
 395

bed with a man was a bit too much for him to contemplate, but he
knew he would need a place to stay tonight.
Tonight and ever after.
Nona.
All he had ever wanted was peace. And love. And a little bit of
understanding. Knocking on Kelly's door, he knew that he would not
be able to find those things were. Only slavery. But it made him
happy.
However ephemeral that slave's happiness might be.
Kelly's eyes were ashen and pale, and it looked as if he were
wearing silver make-up. All told, the effect was not unflattering. Not
at all.

'I've left my wife.'

This was beautiful. Just perfect. He could not have set things
up better if he had tried. If he could keep him here, that would
complete his alibi. Only last night had Kelly fully decided upon what
he wanted to happen, and once he did, he was still at a loss as how he
should orchestrate it. Now, this was perfect. Kelly could, in his mind,
see point A leading directly to point B as he cleansed his own mortuary
and slammed Courtney further down into the pit.
And- God!- wouldn't it be beautiful when it happened.
Once the wife was dead, then the others would be brought in,
and it would all go back to him. Picture perfect. Too perfect. End of
story, and Kelly's out of the picture. There would be no need for burial
grounds, no need for shallow graves, nor vivisection, or decapitation.
No spare body parts lying around where he'd find them months later.
Not that he would be anywhere in the vicinity.
'Okay, but I thought you were just so...ambivalent about the
whole thing, I mean, so unsure of what it was that you wanted.' This
latest bit did not fit in with his plans at all. He needed Courtney to be
cool with Nona, for just a little while longer. Just a little while longer.
Kelly bade him entry with a subtle wave of his hand, and
Courtney followed him inside. The door was closed. And locked.
Kelly put his arms around Courtney, who initially resisted.
But his resistance was false.
'I thought it out-' Courtney began.
'Yeah?'
'And, well, I changed my mind.'
'I guess you did.'
'I have nothing, now.'
And they embraced again, as equals.

'The body is incidental. It is nothing. It dies. The mind is where

395
 396

everything will take place. That just fits into my perception of all
things. I like to see that day as it dies, not as it's being born.'
Courtney gave a nod, giving every impression that he felt the
same.
Courtney's nipples were pierced again, this time each one was
done through with an inch and a half section of cut hanger wire, like
that of a clothes hanger, straight through the meat of his teat. His
nipples were swollen and infected, but at this point that only made
them more sensitive to abuse. The power of piercing one's own flesh
paralleled the innate power of flesh over pain. Flesh- in whatever
form, be it his own skin or that of others- was specifically
manufactured for manipulation. To manipulate the flesh of another
was merely flattery- it was only grazing the flank of the beast. One
felt none of the pain in such a situation, and consequently, one
conquered none of it. It was a vicarious experience. The discipline lay
in feeling the sting of the needle in your body and yet still keep
working it into the skin, deeper and deeper. To manipulate and abuse
one's own flesh was power.
And it was the only power Courtney had ever felt in his life.
If I can't have everything, just give me a taste.
Courtney turned around suddenly, and saw himself.
There was a new mirror opposite from them, so that Courtney
might see what Kelly was going to do to him. Kelly wanted him to see
it coming, and he also wanted to see the look on Courtney's face when
it first went in, the relief mingled with sorrow. Kelly himself had felt it
many times, but he was usually alone, and too wrapped up in his
pleasure to notice it, even if he was masturbating in front of a mirror.
The mirror was something new, as if Kelly sensed his terror.
As if he sensed his terror- sensed it, and wished to play upon it.
The tools were laid out on the coffee table. On it, there were
four separate vibe sleeves on the head of an L.A. Special model dildo.
There was, again, a technique that Kelly had used to get the sleeves
over the dildo itself, to customize it to his own peculiar tastes, because
it was rubber on rubber and there was too much fiction for movement.
Kelly told him how he did this. It was horror beyond sight and mind.
I'm starting to scare myself.
'Courtney?' Kelly asked.
Courtney looked up. 'What?'
'There's another part to these proceedings. I've been...when
I've been with you, I've been...how do I say this?'
'Thinking of someone else? Big deal. So do I.'
'No, no, it's not that, but, when I'm inside of you, I...go places
you wouldn't believe. It's just not within my speech to tell you-'
'I like fucking you too, Kelly. Can we just-'

396
 397

'No! I want to do something for you.'

'What?' Courtney asked, suddenly taking interest in the
conversation.
'There's places, I'm able to travel, I'm escorted to another place-
and I want to take you with me. I told you about Crowley, and all that
is true, but there's something...something deeper...that I need to
convey to you. I want you to come with me.'
'Great,' Courtney said, unbuttoning his shirt. 'When do we
leave?'

'No part of your body may be touching another,' Kelly said. 'You
need to separate your limbs, put your legs apart, your arms away from
your torso- spread your fingers, spread your toes- whatever. You
need to focus on what's going on here, or you won't make it through
to the other side with me. And I...and I want you there, with me.'
Kelly was preparing the dildo for insertion into Courtney's body,
which shook with anticipation and anxiety. The cock was slick with
grease and shone eerily in the light that was available overhead.
From this angle, Courtney mused, realizing the insanity of it,
that looks not unlike a peanut. An oversized rubberized sexual
peanut.
Kelly pulled back upon his hair, tilting Courtney's head back so
far and stretching the muscles in his neck so taut that Kelly could
smell the old man's fetid breath intermixed with his own.
Kelly positioned himself below Courtney, hands on his knees in a
squatting crouch, and examined the visage. Then he leaned over
toward the couch and grasped the cock with his right hand. The
fingers of his hand could not complete the circuit of the dildo- it was
simply too big for them to go around. He paused for the memories the
cock had given him. So many nights alone, so many quenched fires.
It was almost transcendental, what it did to you when you were on the
cock. You went, literally, out of your mind. It was like speaking in
tongues, being directly tapped to the source like that. It was so pure.
Courtney knew no such peace and had reconciled himself to the
fact that he would never know it, no matter how much he needed it or
longed for it. He had called to his God and met with an empty black
sky.
Now, there was nothing.
Nothing but this.
And this gave him peace.
Kelly began by placing clothespins horizontally upon Courtney's
nipples, which had been pierced as well, and wrapped a thin, white-
gold length of chain around Courtney's waist. This was for aesthetic
effect only- it was what Kelly liked to see, and the shining, tinkling

397
 398

loop of silver was what he'd wrapped around the waists of all his
victims. His wrists were bound by restraints to the deck below him,
metal loops about his wrists. Courtney was on all fours now. Kelly
was oiling him up, slathering that which dripped all over Courtney's
shaven stomach, his testicles, his anus and perineum. Kelly lingered
around Courtney's anus, diddling his finger shallowly in and out, in and
out, turning it upon its second knuckle and rotating the hand proper to
probe around inside. 'You see, it's really all about trust, Courtney. It's
a very giving thing. It's about giving oneself over totally to another,
about giving oneself totally to the experience, getting lost in yourself,
feeling pain and then seeing the sights only we can see. Together.'
'What will I see?'
'You've been there before, Courtney; don't you remember? In
dreams. In dreams that I- alone have given you. Your sweet
hallucinations are what bring you there. The dreams which torment
you are not there- they are only a pathway to there. There is another
state, a state beyond that which you've known, one that is most
transcendental, beyond that which normal men can attain. You will go
there- with me- tonight.'
Kelly turned the cock upside down, from Courtney's view, balls
to the gods, and firmly grasped its suction base. He rested the head-
which was considerably wider than a three-knuckled fist- against
Courtney's asshole, spit into his hand, and then wiped the saliva on
the cock.
He spit again after that, and massaged it into Courtney's anus.
He next attempted penetration. He was being quite gingerly about it
all.
He slid his hands up and down on the cock, slathering saliva to
every extremity. One dry spot would literally rip the shit out of
Courtney. That was something he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy,
and he'd come to like Courtney quite a bit, despite his original
intentions for him. Of course, he'd done it several times to his other
victims, but he didn't want them alive much longer so it was no big
loss. Kelly wanted to see what happened to Courtney when he saw
the hole in the sky. He wanted to see insanity drip into his life from a
crack in the ceiling. This was all an experiment for him, to see what
all was available to him.
'Are you going to fuck me with that thing, or what?' Courtney
asked him impatiently, rocking on his elbows, his pimpled ass in the
air.
'Just a moment,' Kelly said, his eyes closed. 'This is sacred.'
Kelly smiled, pressing the tip of his middle finger to the base of
Courtney's urethra to induce coitus saxonus. This was his little trick.
When I do it, I think only of you.

398
 399

Kelly's daintily insistent fingers pried into Courtney's asshole,

pulling and stretching, diddling him with the effort, readying him for
the final plunge of the cock. The air smelled strongly of perfume,
Courtney noticed just now, that and sandalwood incense. Or was it
Jasmine? Courtney never could tell the difference between the two
scents, and it was starting to drive him nuts not knowing what it was.
I am what I've done.
Courtney was usually good at this, learned in the technique. A
slight exhalation of air, the tightened-release of his sphincters, the
whole shebang. It was second-nature to him. But he wasn't doing it.
He was panicking. But this felt so good. He had to give himself over
to it. He had to become one with it, he had to know, to feel the pain.
'Do I need to remind you that it's all got to do with submersing
yourself in irreality, Courtney?' Kelly asked rhetorically.
Courtney chose to say absolutely nothing in reply.
'Courtney? Don't make me ask you twice!'
'Y-yes. Yeah, I guess it is-'
'You guess? What the fuck do you mean, you guess?'
'I suppose so...it is.'
Kelly kissed his cheek. 'So it is, love. That's all I wanted, was to
break your spirit and pride. It elevates me, so you see.'
'What-ever.'
'Where do you want to go with this, Courtney?'
'I don't know,' Courtney replied.
'Are you serious? Are you willing to throw yourself into a life?'
'I am willing to throw myself into a life. I have nothing else.'
Kelly paused. 'I need to hear you say it, Courtney.'
'I have nothing else!'
'That's good, Courtney, very good, because now I think you're
starting to understand the desperation that goes on here. The
outskirts are no place for anyone of sanity to dwell. A lot of things
here are just commonplace, but I'm glad to hear you orate things like
this. It makes me feel as if I've broken you. And the force of will is
one of the strongest things you'll encounter on this earth, homeboy.
Believe it.'
'I understand that.'
Courtney was feeling a little afraid of the proceedings, in much
the same way a senior feels on graduation day; every thought- every
sin- had led him unerringly to this moment. 'What will it be like?'
'In the other world, we become what we're supposed to become.
What we were originally supposed to be- what we really are. Only in
losing ourselves are we then allowed to steal a glimpse of our true
selves.'
I'm so dirty on the inside.

399
 400

For a moment it was normal, what he had done to himself and

with Kelly on any number of occasions...and then, it was different.
The first thing he noticed was a sagging weight attached to his
chest that swayed forward and back in time each of the thrusts from
the demon squatting behind him. There was a loose syncopation with
all of his own movements, and it was with a touch of bemused
astonishment that Courtney observed that what he felt were female
breasts; perfect, supple, rounded breasts, with their nipples tipped
through with heavy pewter pagan rings that were at least half a
centimeter thick in their radius. The savage clawing sensation that
encompassed his bowels was becoming more familiar to him, and he
was beginning to see his place in this new world. His entire body
weight had shifted preternaturally and re-distributed itself in a pattern
following after that of the women he'd admired in movies and
magazines, causing his center of balance to alter itself. He felt the
urge to throw himself forward, involuntarily, but to do that- to give
into the forces of gravity that now so piquantly reminded him of his
new-found mammaries- would be to lose the cock inside of him, and
that cock was everything. What he now felt he owed to that cock. He
had become the cock. The cock had become him. Courtney was no
more.
He had become.
As soon as Courtney realized where he was he realized he wasn't
where he had been when he'd closed his eyes. The silence stared back
at him: immaculate. He called out to it, not to hear a response so
much as to only hear his own voice, but the beast betrayed no answer
at all.
'Kelly? Can you hear me?'
The pressure in his bowels was delicious to experience as it
sawed back and forth, in and out of him, of what he was...and what he
was was simply beautiful. He was curvaceous in all the proper places,
and only marginally plump where it was acceptable for a woman to
carry baby fat. He touched his palm tentatively against his bare flank
and reveled in its smoothness of texture. His skin had adapted to his
new state. He felt hot in every sense of the word. Every inch of his
flesh had been taken to the task of producing an extremity of sense
perception. This was the way he had wanted it to be. He could feel
his heart traveling rhythmically in his chest, his internal organs still
unsure of how to process and then decode all this sensory overload
that was pouring in.
He had been trying to become a different creature, and here he
was.
And he was all alone, except for the divisive pain in his prostate.
Nona was a million miles away from here, or could he even remember

400
 401

her? The world outside held nothing but pain for him to experience,
but here- with the fiery red clay walls and the flambeaux in their
sconces- pain melted into pleasure, and the two states, being in
themselves quite to one another, excited the same response from his
fevered psyche, and the knowledge that he was being raped by a
creature he could not see did not faze him in the least. He was here.
This place, these feelings, would be forever sandwiched between what
Courtney would refer as having been before and after. There was no
point comparing these periods of time, because they were each a slice
of two distinctly different lives, each one of them belonging to two
different people of two different sexes.
The pain in his nipples was exquisite, and he reminded himself to
focus. Kelly was only a fleeting image, and seemed unattached to the
fleshy width dividing him. He didn't know if this was where he was
supposed to be or if he was somehow routed off-course, but being
here filled him with a sense of pre-divine purpose- among other
things. In his half of their ceremonial experience was able to catch a
glimpse of the rift in between Heaven and Hell, and for those brief
moments, he was able to occupy that rift as well, and see proof of
God's existence. God was watching this, Courtney was sure, but here-
in this world- it was alright, because here was a place where what he
felt wasn't wrong. It merely was. For this moment and many
afterward, he was truly dead.
The words came in a blurred cacophony of sound and yet, they
came:
'Kelly?'
'Mmm...yes?'
'I think I can see it!'
'Yes, and what can you see?'
'I can see tomorrow...I can see what silence looks like.'
'These are the last seconds of life for both of us.'
Dead to any and all sense traces from the external world. Here,
in this new place, Nona didn't exist. Those problems were all removed
from him. Nona hadn't been born yet, or else she would never be
born. She had no place in this world, and that made him happy.
Here, she didn't exist. Here, he didn't exist; this fact was key to his
pleasure.
He longed to inhale the essence of female, to ingest the bare
scent of who she was. It was the one facet of femininity that could not
be replicated. He recalled three separate pictures from movies he had
seen lately with Kelly, and all three images were being stored in his
head, one right after the other, in preparation for some future nirvana.
When would it come? Was this it?
He wanted to saturate his senses irrevocably, and in the process

401
 402

scar his psyche beyond repair; the secret, he'd decided, was in taking
things too far, and that was exactly what he now intended to do.
There was nothing left for him in this world, so he wanted to be in
another world.
Nothing is next.
He could finally be a woman in every mythological sense of the
word- permanently, and in some real place other than his own feeble
mind. This was his final chance to be what he really was. If he had to
die in the process, what price would that have been? There was
nothing left of himself that he was willing to give, so he might as well
resign himself to giving it all away to whatever forces would take a
role in re-shaping who and what he was in the physical world. Death
would only be a new beginning- there was surely no heaven awaiting a
person like himself, who had done all the things he had done in search
of what he really was.

The sounds he was hearing weren't human and yet they came
from within him. It sounded as if he were howling, or baying at the
moon like a wolf or some kind of demon. His forehead beat in time
with the thrusts of the Centaur behind him. His nipple rings were
scraping noisily on the ground, throwing sparks that leapt up and
sizzled against the skin of his abdomen. His need to be filled- to be
made whole- Some of this he felt, but some of it was merely
observation. His skin was smooth as he ran his hands feverishly over
his body, to the extent that he could, when his knuckles rapped
against something that sounded like a piece of hollow plastic being
beaten upon with a wooden spoon.
The shadows around him were nothing but whispers, and it
seemed as if the lack of oxygen would cause the flambeaux the
extinguish themselves, but they did not. They burned on defiantly,
and Courtney took in the sight all around him- seeing enough in the
flash of an instant for him to realize that coming here was a mistake,
and that he had seen too much, too soon. These sights are not meant
for living eyes.
That’s so odd, he thought. Heaven has a floor.

Courtney's first thought upon arrival was that he was floating

again- either floating or falling, it didn't matter which. He was alone,
and he knew finally that all the good journeys in life were indeed taken
alone.
He had married Nona wanting a hand to hold as he went through
life, someone to reign him in and make him happy. Only he had never
been happy. He had sought to gain a sense of contentment and a
glimmer of common memory as he dwarfed into old age and he had

402
 403

sought this blindly.

After a while, he had to give up on that version of happiness.
He looked to what surrounded him to make him happy.
The things that surrounded him had led him here.
Here is where he was, and he was happy.
Now, he was happy.
Now, he knew how to do it.
All the answers one was given in life, those gifts were given to
him in absolute secrecy, in confidence, when no one was around that
would've believed him anyhow if he did try to convey these feelings.
He had prostrated himself before the altar, and that's the only
time the gods will condescend to speak to humans. They purposefully
choose to do it when no one's around who will believe you if you told
them. The gods do this as a joke. And the gods had spoken, in
laughter.
The gods think this is funny.
They say it's a little like a waitress asking you about the quality
of the food when the customer's mouth is full of piping hot food. The
waitresses think it’s especially funny if the customers burn the insides
of their mouth. The waitresses laugh when the customer begs for
water, and the humor is doubled if the customer swallows hard and
chokes.

403
 404

A NICKEL BAG OF GIBLETS

As the skin in its larynx rubbed against itself in the mucus-lining of its
throat, Ixxir was forced to recognize the stamina of most human
beings. They were a far more resilient sub-set of creations than it
remembered them being.
Gracey wasn't going to enjoy this humanoid resiliency much
longer, because he was scheduled to die. The time had come to settle
his check.
If there was solace to be taken, it was that he wasn't the only
one.

There was, unmentionable yet present within the squalid fabric

of human existence, a basic responsibility to keeping up the physical
body, and Ixxir had not been prepared to expect that effort. Ixxir was
used to being a parasite. If it had known how hard it was to be alive it
might not have ventured forth into this episode with such willful
blindness. It was considerably less stressful to be nothing more
extravagant than a free-floating spirit, and being a human being was
leaving it exhausted at the end of each day. Being nothing more than
a shadow took effort.
Most of Ixxir's efforts these days had been put into trying to
convince Timothy Karacas to go after those souls wholly or partially
responsible for winding him up in his final state. This would send him
on out to the other side, Ixxir promised. What Ixxir was trying to do
was to eliminate one of its opposition. With Timothy hanging around,
there was always the danger that its plans for physical entry would be
thrown off-course. Ixxir couldn't risk that happening, and so, it began
to plot towards a different end. Something fairly serious had to be
done about Timothy, something irretractable- something final- but
exactly what that was to be, Ixxir couldn't answer. Not yet, anyway.
Its time was limited, so it had to make good use of what time it did
have. Time was an elastic concept, and Ixxir knew that it needed to
make this factor work to its advantage. These fucking humans were
getting more tenacious with each passing generation of organic
patheticism.
There were loose ends to be tied up, and Ixxir didn't wish to lose
out on their meaning. There was an algebra here, if only for it to be
solved.
When did a meal taste better: as one ate it, or in the
remembrance?

Ixxir had slipped noiselessly into Shelby's apartment. His death

seemed almost a foregone conclusion- an inevitability- and Ixxir knew

404
 405

that Timothy would never raise a metaphysical hand to a man in such

a wretched condition as Shelby Dunn.
The living room of the apartment was bare. Ixxir couldn't see
what was located around it, per se, but there were trace sensations of
recent physical activity here. The floor was warmer in certain spots
than in others, and the room stank of incipient death. It wasn't any
better in the bedroom. The man was sleeping, and Ixxir could tell
simply from looking at him that Shelby did not have long to live. The
E2D8 process had been an utter failure. He had risked his life in an
effort to preserve his vanity, and that roll had come up snake-eyes.
There were the odd assortment of pictures on the man's night
table, but no real sense of a life connection to the people around him.
Shelby's eyes opened. Ixxir actually heard them click.
And then it ignited the overhead light fixture, with its mind.
Shelby eyes squinted and teared. Ixxir almost felt sorry.
Almost.
The voice register on the table next to the bed whirred into life:
Hello?
There was no answer, and Shelby pressed the repeat response.
Hello?
Since the operation, Shelby's eyes had lost some of their innate
ability to adjust to either light or darkness- sudden changes in the
lighting, either way, blinded him temporarily. During which time he
was-
Helpless?
Ixxir smiled blackly. Its telepathic abilities were dicey at best,
but when they came through, it was always amazed.
Darkness to light, eh?
Ixxir picked up the pillow laying next to Shelby's head and held
it aloft, regarding the man soundlessly and hoping that he would find
peace in the new world to where he was about to be dispatched.
Shelby felt the pillow coming over his face and felt the breath
being crushed out of his body. Whatever Shelby had once thought
death to be, this was definitely not it. Death was more of a nothing
than it was anything else. It was a void, a black hole that swallowed
everything it came into contact with. Death was a number line,
suddenly cut in half, then into quarters, and again into eighths, until
there was only one number left, and that number- But I'm here,
Shelby thought. Could I feel- could I think like this, if I'm dead?
Would I care, or would my soul know where I need to-
The whistling stopped his thought process.
A black angel appeared before him, its arms stretched out at its
sides. There was no face, but Shelby hadn't expected to see one,
either.

405
 406

There are two paths, it said.

Shelby protested. I don't know what the paths are for…
There are two paths.
Shelby didn't know how to exert himself in this new place. His
body felt...waxen. That was the word. He felt like a candle that has
burned itself out, in the moment before it topples wetly over upon
itself.
The figure in front of him was unsympathetic.
Shelby found himself humming a few bars from an old Led
Zeppelin song- a group he'd never liked, and a song he'd always
detested- but hey, when you croaked, you couldn't be picky about
where your wisdom came from.
But in the long run...
Whatever had turned on the lights and then suffocated him had
already left his apartment- unless this was only a memory. Had the
afterlife and all its attendant antechambers been assimilated with
state-of-the-art videotape technology, or was his own memory only
jacking him off?
Are you happy?
Was this what it was like to die, the distortion of emotions and
physical senses? It was like watching TV and seeing something
horrible that was happening to someone other than himself, and even
as the pain was being fired through the sensors in his brain along to
that part of his cerebellum that handled the reception of physical
stimulus, his mind continued to reject what it had ultimately known
was the truth.
Shelby felt himself slipping away and the bed beneath his body
was slowly getting farther and farther away from him.
He had felt himself starting to die.

406
 407

FEUILLE DE ROSE
Kelly was in his own world. He saw Courtney, and could in fact feel
the old boy's innards gripping around his cock- pulling at it and pulling
at him, at his soul- but any attempt at pleading communication was
met with an assailing wall of winds unseen. It seemed to Kelly that he
was being separated from Courtney by a wall of thin air that allowed
him neither physical egress nor any form of psychological trespass.
The other person who should have been here with him, wasn't. And
he needed him. That was the plan.
Where are you now?
Kelly realized with equal parts revulsion and unutterable shock
that he was alone here- utterly fucking alone- and it frightened him.
He had read about this place, this state of mind, and part of him had
actually believed it; but now- being here- was something entirely
different. He saw with so small sense of irony that his missing nipple
had grown back. He pulled on the pins in his nipples and realized that
they had tripled in their width. There was a leaden thickness in each
nipple that caused his chest to fill with a physical ache, but that was
why he was here. He had been in search of unendurable agony, and
now, in his bliss, he had found it. All that was left now was for him to
be pulled apart and devoured by the demons he'd harbored all these
years.
What do you see?
The interstitial fissures in the walls that surrounded him seemed
to gape and widen with each one of his thrusts. Surely, to reach an
orgasm would bring about the destruction of all he saw- which was
nothingness. Utter emptiness. Kelly couldn't believe that this was the
place so many others- Crowley included- had written about with such
fervor. Maybe they had done it wrong, prepared it in error. The rites
were a century old. Maybe the time had changed, and the old recipes
no longer worked.
What have you learned?
Maybe they had gone someplace else. Maybe he had tripped
incorrectly and wound up overshooting his intended trajectory.
Courtney had heard it too, and the knowledge of this place- or
dimension or whatever the fuck it was- had been given to Courtney
from himself.
While he had held onto this information- before he gave it to
Courtney- he should have studied it more thoroughly.

To continue their coupling seemed an internecine dispute that

would disengage them from their chosen paths here. Kelly felt ragged,
sweaty and insane, and although he could feel what was going on

407
 408

around him, he was able to pick up some sense of the passage of

time. He had to stop fucking or he would bring the roof down on their
heads. But it wasn't his choice any longer; to stop fucking here was
sacrilege, and it was not allowed. One fucked because one fucked,
and it was this hell that sentenced you to your pleasure. It was
anything forever, and if his nerve endings became immune to
whatever was happening to him, some new torture would be devised
to ensure the maximum effect. This was not a place where sinners
were rewarded for their sins, exactly the opposite- this was a place
where sinners were sentenced to an eternal repetition of their sins.
There was a queer irony to dread one's own insatiable
happiness, because that was to admit that happiness was a bottomless
pit. There were limits, both good and bad, and they existed for a
reason. The limits keep us from going too far, whether we are ready
to accept those boundaries or not. All those who go beyond had to
actively chose to deviate from their course. Anyone who would will
themselves to go beyond the limits could not turn around and claim
their ignorance.
'It feels good to hurt yourself, doesn't it?'
Kelly found he could not speak.
'All you have to do is want it badly enough, right?'
Is this-
'The road of Questions?'
Oh, Christ.
'Is that who you're looking for?'
The voice came from behind him. It was tinny, and sounded as
though it were coming out of an AM car radio- it was not the type of
voice one would expect to hear in a time and place such as this. The
voice came from somewhere behind him, but he found himself unable
to turn around. Although he was the aggressor in this particular act,
Kelly felt at one with it, unable to concentrate for even a few seconds
on anything other than the bizarre sense-memories filling his head;
he'd been here before.
And he shouted the only word he could remember: 'Gravity!'

Bringing himself back had been a tremendous effort of will, but

Kelly had succeeded in disengaging himself from the fervor long
enough to cry out, and hearing his own voice had shaken the rest of
his mind from the webs of his delirium. As he opened his eyes, he
wasn't sure of what he would see. There had been a lot of screaming
both before and after they had traveled- he was able to remember
that much, but as he experienced it, there was a time when the
physical sensations were paramount for him. The physical excitement
was a way of producing the spiritual excitement that they had both

408
 409

achieved at once. By touching, stroking, piercing, splitting or

caressing the flesh, it could be willed to act as a Para psychological
conduit- however tuned for each person's tastes- and to harness the
coils of its energy was to hold in one's hands the ability to
transubstantiate their humankind entirely.
That was why the church had always been so against any form
of non-populating sexual intercourse- and especially homosexual
intercourse- the old popes all knew that getting fucked in the ass was
a means of spiritual space-travel, but they kept it a secret to
themselves.
He found it necessary to horse-train himself out of his trance. It
was not unlike undoing a yoga spell on oneself while lying lopped
along the bottom of a wall. So many times in college had he twisted
his body up into knots on the floor of his dorm room in the dark and so
many times he had to think himself through the knots, coaching
himself, like a calf helping itself through the birthing process.
Some knots were better left untied.
Kelly had been quietly grateful for Courtney's own ear-splitting
retaliatory scream, because that had been enough to bring him at
least partway back to reality. He had to make an active decision to
come back, and he didn't think that Courtney was going to make the
same decision. That was fine with Kelly. The longer he stays in here,
he thought as he pulled himself backward through the sinuous
membrane of his psyche, the better it will be for me. I'll need time
more than anything to do this, and if he has no concept of time, this
will take care of everything. The clock hasn't even started ticking yet.

Once he was on the road, the will to return was enough to

provide him with the momentum he needed to get all the way back.
There was nothing for him to come back to- but he had plans, plans
that couldn't wait, plans that needed to be executed as soon as
possible. Repeating his intentions over and over again gave him
purpose, and it gave his soul something external to pursue.
Kelly awoke covered in sweat, caked in vomit and snot. Every
orifice of his body had become erupted at the point of entry. Kelly
tested his nostrils and concluded that he must have been laying face-
down for some time on Courtney's shoulder after he came, just trying
to regulate his breathing after his orgasm had tied his spinal column
into a sailor's knot. Kelly no longer had feeling in two of the toes on
his left foot. His left hand was paralyzed, the five fingers fused into
two to create the image of a cloven hoof. I've never seen anything
like this.
But he hadn't seen anything yet.
Kelly realized that he could hear Courtney's heartbeat, and then

409
 410

he realized that it was all going on inside his head! There was a pulse
in his eardrums, a scent that did not belong to him. Alien fluids were
now sluicing through his veins, and he could do nothing about it.
There was a patch of skin, a face-sized merger of sticky,
gelatinous, somehow vital membrane gluing the two of them together.
It was pink, and the finger-thick rope veins pulsing inside the damn
thing seemed to connect him to Courtney. From what Kelly was able
to tell, it was a melting together of the skin on his chest- from his right
nipple to his navel- to the skin on Courtney's back.
Kelly's first attempt to pull away was futile, because he didn't
notice the membrane at first, because any attachment always starts
out feeling natural- it's only when separation is desired that it pulls the
skin. Kelly's attachment to Courtney was going to keep him here,
lying on top of him, his cock half in Courtney's ass and the job not
being done. He didn't want his attachment to Courtney to strengthen,
and as it pulsed- and hissed- Kelly could see that this manifestation of
the emotional membrane was only preparing to grow more vital to his
being.
He had to sever it, even if it meant that he died. It was better
to die than to be separated from the true version of himself.
The scabs will never heal, but who cares?
Courtney, Kelly had to tell himself, he did not care about. If he
died when Kelly cut through this melding of skin that kept him bound
to Courtney- body, mind and soul- oh, well. He would deal with it.
The first cut went the deepest, and all that followed was numb.

With Courtney secured and bound, unconscious and utterly

ecstatic, Kelly was free to roam about the loft as he wished. Kelly was
bleeding slightly from a vague wound on his abdomen, but that was
all, and the wound was healing at an amazing rate- it was little more
than a scratch.
Courtney still smiled dimly, although he had been put under a
good ten minutes ago- the Benzedrine Kelly had injected him with
would mingle nicely with the two Quaaludes he'd dropped into
Courtney's Pepsi. He was now safely asleep, content and happy in his
little world at last.
Kelly decided that he would take the time to take a few quick
tokes off of the specially-devised one-hitter he kept hidden in his
jacket before driving over to Courtney's house. He got the feeling that
if he wasn't immaculately stoned when he pulled it all off, the
experience would not have its total effect, And that was what he
craved the most.
This was the crux. Everything he'd done to Courtney had
brought him to create this, and this was the final moment- this was

410
 411

the mad rush he had worked for months- years, maybe- to orchestrate
to his satisfaction.
He could hear his own breath thickening in his throat.
'Oh, FUCK yeah!'
Cursing himself, Kelly crouched down in a feline curl and peered
over his shoulders to see if Courtney had stirred with his own
unintentional utterances. He smiled to himself. Silence was not
necessary here.
Nona, Kelly reasoned, would probably be very surprised to see
him. He was half-hoping that they could have sex again tonight before
he killed her. It was very important to him. He wanted to be inside
her as it happened and feel the life oozing out of her. He'd only been
able to achieve this effect twice before, but it was heavenly. It was
like kissing God. And Nona, good soul that she was, would simply
have to get over any disgruntlement she might feel with him over
being dead.

411
 412

WISDOM
A few blocks away, just outside of Ixxir's range of hearing, Joshua
Tauble was walking slowly, keeping Timothy Karacas within his limited
eye-sight. There was a catch. Here, in the end, Joshua found that he
couldn't fly and follow, as he had been directed to do. When he flew,
he was cut off from his sight, as if he had given one faculty for another
in some sick bargain. All his walking had led him here, and he still
wasn't sure of where here was. He had the impression that he was
walking into something that was much larger than the settling of
scores- there was something larger at work here, steadily drawing him
here over the passage of years, and he was anxious to know why. He
knew various names- Melanie, Gracey, Basil, Shelby- but none of them
quite made sense. None of these people were people that he knew.
He knew that he was looking for a demon- more precisely, that he was
trying to locate the demon that had robbed him of his soul. One dead
body always leads to another, so went the whispers, and Joshua
smelled the meat-like tang of death in the air, and it gagged him, even
though he had long since given up on the concept of breathing.
I breathe through lungs I do not have, he observed about
himself. How can I smell this world around me, and taste its life and
its death on my tongue? How might I feel the sun in my eyes and the
rain on my face...I must be…alive!' The word had never meant so
much. He could feel the breath of the wind on his cheek, and he could
hear it as the wind whistled through. Oh, to be alive again! Well, he
knew it wasn't alive, not really, but he wasn't nearly as dead as he
used to be.

CRUSHED BASIL
It had taken Basil the better part of his week off to decompress and

412
 413

pull his mind together. He was so used to the day-in, day-out

pressures of the Clinic that his body still responded when he still went
to sleep with his tired mind running over the same faceless projections
and figures in his head. The mornings came and went, but they
seldom left him feeling refreshed or even well-rested. Now that he
wasn't working, he had no outlet for the energy that he had. He was
running his battery off pure adrenaline, and he now found it impossible
to shut it off completely. He still arose at four-thirty in the morning
without wanting to, and if he tried to sleep until six or so, he was
rewarded for this effort with a headache that lasted until the early
afternoon. He was able to catch up on some of his correspondence,
and that was some small form of relief in that he found his new
membership card for MESA and his Visa bills for the months of March,
April and May. This was good news. There had been a mistake in
March's billing and it had taken the better part of Tuesday afternoon to
untangle the whole mess with Visa over the phone, but that mistake-
two months ago- had cost him in excess of $18o.oo in lost credit
funding and this error had caused his card to be rejected on more than
one occasion. Someone had used his card number with an inner-city
escort service, but Basil had bona-fide charges of his own, ten minutes
earlier and twelve minutes later, and they were each two hundred
miles away. Humorous, but a pain in the ass nevertheless. Fixable.
So, that much of his life he had straightened out.
Basil was trying to enjoy at least the last part of his week off,
and in the course of that week he had almost succeeded in making
himself forget the strange business surrounding Shelby at the hospital
and the weird events that seemed to be surrounding him lately. Not
much had changed in that department, he supposed- he hadn't talked
to Shelby in almost a week- but it was truly amazing what a week of
halfway decent sleep could do for a human being that had been
starved of it.
Even if it was in fits and starts at first.
He found that he could block out the weirdness at the Clinic if he
kept his mind cluttered with busywork, and that was exactly what he
had sought to do. As was the case with Visa, other areas of his
financial and domestic life had unraveled without his attention. His
phone bill, for instance, which had not been paid since March 22 of this
year. No wonder he wasn't getting any messages on his voice
recorder anymore. He seldom dialed out, and he would not have
noticed that his phone service had been disconnected for probably six
months. Basil had been spending all of his waking hours down at the
Bramble Clinic, trying to perfect the formula, trying to pull all that he
could out of this assignment.
His hours were no longer his own to assign. When that had been

413
 414

the case, Basil had been able to do his banking and non-perishable
grocery shopping on his lunch break. But that luxury was no more.
He had been living on fast food for the past six or seven weeks without
cessation, and the first thing he did on Friday night was to go grocery
shopping so that he would not have to leave the house until Tuesday
at the earliest. As it was, his bowels still hadn't straightened
themselves out yet, and as it was, he didn't go outside for the first
time until early Thursday afternoon- and only then out of an inbred
automated sense of needing to go outside, than an actual desire to
ever again see the light of day.

He hadn't been in to see Shelby at the hospital, and he felt very

guilty about it. Basil had tried to go there in his mind, tried to imagine
it, but the visit never constructed itself properly and so he never got
himself together to go and see him. It would have felt too weird,
especially knowing that he had set Shelby up as the guinea pig and
had- in fact- seeded the idea in his mind, making it seem like Shelby's
idea all along. And once Basil had discovered Shelby's vanity, getting
Shelby to commit to his end of the bargain was easy work indeed.
That's what made him feel so bad, that flooding sadness for his friend-
the friend that he had fucked over. Shelby had been his friend-
Don't think of him in the past tense. Thinking of him like that is
only the mind's way of preparing for his death, and for thinking of that
death as being inevitable. What is unthinkable is undoable, what am
I-
and being Shelby's friend had been what made it so easy to set
him up. The money that he had gotten from Gracey for research-
blood money
would help their project prospectus considerably. Certainly
Shelby would have seen the wisdom of such an arrangement, had he
known of it.
Then why didn't you tell him? Why was it a secret?
The money he had gotten from Gracey- which was basically
nothing more than a finder's fee- he had given over to his department
willingly. Gracey was not known for being generous to other directors
or to the projects that came under their supervision and not his. Any
opportunity to enrich the coffers in their division needed to be
exploited.
Then why didn't you tell him, and let him go under knife
informed?
Basil knew he needed to keep the proper universal perspective
on this. He had simply known a man with new skin to grow and no
one stupid enough to let him do it to them within his vicinity. He also
knew a man who wanted to change the way he looked- promises or

414
 415

no- and simply made the connection for both of them. Basil had
facilitated the connection between two people that had been destined
to meet anyhow, and he had merely provided one's Yin to the other
one's Yang and he had turned a handsome profit, for himself as well as
for his own line of research. He had furthered his own goals. If only it
felt that good.

Basil had spent the earlier part of the day shopping in the thrift
stores on Bemis Avenue in the downtown section of Drury- right across
from the police station where Bob Georgianos had worked once upon a
time. The days were opening up like buds into summer but the heat
and humidity of summer had not yet arrived. It seemed to Basil that
he walked with the unsteady gait of a person unaccustomed to the
idea of personal time, suddenly burdened with a few hours to kill. He
tried to keep his mind on the task at hand- the task of enjoying
himself- but his mind kept returning to Shelby Dunn, strapped up like
the world's funkiest mummy down there in the Clinic. Sure, he was
drugged- he was doped up to the eyeballs, at his own request, and
both Gracey and Basil had upped his dosage, doing this in ignorance
and independently of one another. But being stoned out of one's
gourd in a hospital lost its charm after a few days, and Shelby didn't
really have family that could visit him. And even if he did have a
single family member who was worth a tin shit, they would not have
been able to see him at the Clinic anyway. All of this activity was
clandestine, and Shelby had needed to sign a waiver for Gracey before
the operation that bound him from speaking with anyone about the
procedure for ten years after the first series of operations was
complete, and thereafter only in Dr. Gracey's celestial presence.
This exclusivity clause had been drawn into the contract at
Gracey's insistence, although Basil doubted that Shelby knew anything
about the clause being there. There was so little about the contract
Shelby had signed that he knew anything about, because he was in
such a hurry to sign it. Gracey had been thinking well into the future
here, and he had sought to savagely constrict the basic rights of his
test subjects while further expanding his own rights over them and
their possible actions. If he needed them to sell the E2D8 product as
testimonials, his subjects would need to acquiesce to his demands. If
Gracey was to use their likenesses or words to further promote the
formula, they would be paid scale- the minimum- for their efforts. But
if he didn't need them, they had absolutely no right to expect any
residuals or dividends from the product's promotion. They would be
performers, but Gracey was the Man.
This policy of non-involvement carried over to Basil's end of the
agreement. He was a rider on the coattails of history, and Gracey

415
 416

never passed up an opportunity to remind Basil of the favor he was

doing for him by employing his technical services. That was the rub-
employing him. Basil was an employee, and even though he'd been
well-paid for his contributions, his efforts had not provided him with an
open-jawed ticket into the profit margin. His finder's fee- or however
they had phrased it- was all he would receive. Yes, he was rich now,
but what about in five years? What would happen to him in five
years?
Where will I be in five years? Where will Shelby be in five years?
What if this is the limit to our earning potential? What if this is the
most money we'll ever be able to make? Will Shelby even be able to
earn a living, or will he be in a sanitarium somewhere, on a twenty-
four-hour suicide watch since his mind snapped, unable to deal with
the fact that his skin sometimes turned soupy on him if he missed his
daily inject?
Basil tried to fritter away his time picking up items he didn't
need, enjoying the exchange of cash from his pockets as it became
physicalized into frivolous material possessions. He found a mother-
of-pearl spoon-holder for only eleven dollars in a junk shop, and when
he bought it he knew that he would want to put it on the cracker shelf
in his kitchen, right next to a pewter rendering of Abraham Lincoln
that his mother had given to him while he was still an undergraduate.
Basil might have passed it up a day or two earlier, but for some
reason, possessing it meant something to him, now. He found himself
looking for omens on the shelves of the vendors as he strolled through
the streets- never really intending to do anything of the sort- culling
these items for inspection and making the odd numismatic purchase
whenever something in his hands felt as though it might fit as a piece
into a larger puzzle.
There were odd curls of words and fragments of syllables on the
wind, and he felt connected to them. Basil felt connected to
everything, if the truth were to be told, and this sensation was all-
pervasive. There was a presence with him- or within him, he didn't
know- and it was making the fillings in his teeth rattle and hum with
electrical activity. He heard the winds around him and felt the heat of
the conversations of others with more acuity than he could ever recall
having experienced before in his life. This hyper-sensitivity- while
seeming divine- left his mind free at its uppermost extremity to assess
the situation, and it didn't look good. Something somewhere was
screwing around with the dials inside his mind, in much the same way
a truck driver will ride the radius of the squelch control on his C.B.
radio in search of a stronger channel of current. Whatever that
something was, whatever was screwing around with the vertical hold
inside of his head, it was doing a good job of keeping him disoriented.

416
 417

His best deduction was that he was hearing the words of angels.
Basil didn't know for sure where it was or what it was, but there
it was, peering over his shoulder, sifting through the contents of his
mind, gurgling blackly in his intestines, every step of the way. If there
were moments when it seemed as if anything were possible and that
he should rule out no explanation for what was happening to him
simply because it was irrational, there were other moments still when
he fought the knowledge of what he had gotten himself into. On a gut
level, Basil had known from the very beginning that getting involved
with the E2D8 testing was bad news. It had felt that way from the
start. Gracey had a reputation that had followed him like a vague
mist, and Basil knew oh so well that Gracey was an absolute bastard
to deal with on paper.
Where does that leave us now?
And this- whatever this was- had come from Gracey as well.
This feeling- this presence- wasn't going to kill him, but it was enough
to trouble him. Well, not exactly. At times, this presence menaced
Basil, and at other times, it was strangely comforting for him to feel it
there. Which was precisely the fluctuation of calm and calamity that
Timothy had been seeking to affect on Basil, to throw him off guard.
And it had worked, up until now.
Throughout the afternoon, Basil had purposefully kept his eyes
off of his watch. For a man who lives and operates under constant
deadlines, this was no mean feat. He had lived around his wrist for
better than twenty-five years, but such a lifestyle required a break
every so often.
After using the bathroom at the corner of Park Street and
Napoleon, Basil checked his watch. It was five o'clock.
Immediately, he turned on his heel and began to run.

He had wanted to catch the five-oh-nine train as it passed

between the city and Allen's Corners, but he'd missed it by a margin of
less than three and a half minutes by the time he'd legged it to the
station.
There was a slick of rain on the fading streets and the soles of
his shoes sometimes lost their precarious purchase on the asphalt.
Had he paid attention to the weather report on the news the night
before, Basil might have taken the time to select a pair of shoes with
better traction than the ones he was wearing right now. As it so
happened, Basil hadn't seen the news, and so he was slipping around
in the sidewalk in his day-off shoes, the shoes that were so worn on
the soles that Basil could no longer wear them to work without feeling
self-conscious and embarrassed about the way his shoes looked. But
they were the most comfortable pair of shoes he had ever bought in

417
 418

his goddamned life. So Basil wore them when he knew that no one
would care what kind of shoes he wore, and he had worn them today.
He had thought the weather was going to be nice today.
And that, so soon as it had happened, had been his first mistake.
His second mistake had been having three glasses of ale at
lunch. It was his day off, so what the hell and let him have his booze.
The ale had left him feeling bloated and vaguely ill immediately
following the meal- before he'd even left the restaurant, really- but he
had sobered up quickly once he stepped out into the cool air outside.
Sober, but stale.
Basil hadn't gotten very buzzed in the first place, but the ale-
and it had been bitter, dark ale- now left him feeling tired and
bleached out on the inside, as if he had drunk much more of it than
just those three glasses. He knew this would happen, sort of, and he
thought he would be able to successfully cope with its effects.
His feet moved slowly now and he lurched when he walked. His
was the gait of and old man- and yet, every time he belched or farted,
he felt better. This pleased him. He was not going to die; not today
at least.
Had Basil Rochefoucauld been able to keep a brisk pace, he
might have made that train at nine after the hour and avoided his fate
for another few minutes. Once his mind had ascertained that the five-
oh-nine train had passed him by, Basil was sunk into the torpor of
confusion.
Am I fucked, or can I call someone?
It occurred to him that he knew almost no one in this neck of the
woods, and he didn't know anyone that lived close enough to Drury
that he could call them for a ride. There didn't seem to be any cabs
roaming the streets once it had gotten reasonably dark. There was a
moist humidity in the air that he could feel in his nostrils- much like
the sensation that cocaine had given to him on the occasions that he
and Gracey had inhaled Gracey's secret supply of pharmaceutical
grade.
Basil started weighing his options. He could call for a cab, but it
would take close to twenty minutes or even half an hour before the
cab showed up, and even then there was always the likelihood of some
sort of miscommunication between the dispatcher and the driver. It
seemed imperative that he get out of here, now, as soon as humanly
possible.
He didn't know what it was, but all of a sudden, the little
snippets of conversations he'd overheard from Shelby- especially when
Shelby was standing in front of the mirror in his office- started to
appear more important than Basil had originally estimated.
What had he been saying? What had Shelby been trying to tell

418
 419

him?
Basil now felt a burning need to talk to Shelby- to confront him
about what was going on- because somehow, what was happening
now had something to do with what had been happening to Shelby in
the past couple of weeks surrounding the operation with Gracey. This
fucking feeling-
It was sometime in there that the first of the footsteps started.
His head snapped on its axis as he turned to hear whatever it
was. Small, scrabbling, scratching footsteps were behind him,
somewhere in the dust and soot and fog and memory. Basil thought
he had heard a growl, but that had perhaps been a trick of the dark.
But the footfalls had been very, very real.
They were slow at first, oddly paced, but they quickened with
each passing second. They started off quiet, but their reverberations
became more and more impossible for Basil to ignore, no matter how
he tried to.
The air and dark and the ground was dark around him, and Basil
knew he would have to rely upon his luck to get him out of this. He
had heard rumors, wildly bizarre rumors at work, such as the
suggestion that Gracey had removed Shelby's soul. It was also said
that perhaps Gracey had removed Shelby's soul and placed it into
another creature, this one made completely of the E2D8 skin formula
sealant. This complete nonsense made Basil shake his head. He
couldn't believe his ears when he heard such drivel coming from the
mouths of his colleagues.
He quickened his step, and when he did, he heard whatever it
was that was behind him increase its pace as well. Something was
coming after him, something that sounded huge. Black and huge.
Maybe the rumors were right, Basil.
Sometimes it sounded as if it were running, and other times, he
was hearing the flapping of its wings, but whichever method of
conveyance it was, it happened like a chime or a heartbeat, with
sickening regularity.
I'm fucked, he thought.
Above him, Timothy smiled.
Never so true, asshole.
It became obvious to Basil that he was running from a phantom-
running from something that was there and wasn't there all at the
same time- and the input of the knowledge that such things actually
exist in the world slowed his step considerably. Still, he tried to live.
He tried to survive. Basil could hear his shoes clapping harshly on the
pavement with a firm crack every time his foot slapped the pavement.
And he feet were starting to hurt.
Basil didn't give a shit what anyone said- ghosts made a

419
 420

crackling noise whenever they moved through the air, and when they
did it sounded almost as if the ghosts themselves were threatening to
break through the void between waking and sleep at any moment- and
in doing so, they were actually heightening the molecular tension in
this scenario.
Timothy felt a game being made of the situation, and a smile
crossed his lips. He'd found it almost easy to mutate his form into the
sort of apparitions favored by Ixxir. The minor demon had been right
about several things- including Melanie. Basil was the only person that
was directly involved with his death that Timothy didn't feel at least a
little sorry for; his involvement had come purely out of his own choice.
Timothy was losing his hold on this world but it was getting
markedly easier for him to float through the physical world in spite of
his lack of actual acceptance in it. This planet no longer belonged to
him, but that didn't seem to also mean that he couldn't manipulate
this realm as he wished. Perhaps he was only just now discovering the
full extent of his powers in this condition, or maybe he was actually
growing stronger, and would grow stronger still were he to stay like
this.
Basil was running as fast as he could- which naturally, wasn't
very fast- and Timothy was only toying with him anyway. He wanted
to tire Basil out before he snuffed him, in an effort to minimize the
actual contact between them. As long as this was the path he was
meant to follow, Timothy wanted this part to be over with as soon as
he could.
There was a flapping of unseen wind as the shadow descended
upon him, clawing at his back and trying to gain a frontal assault on
the doctor. Its chitinous carapace sounded brittle and dry against its
own wings- they beat furiously on the fuselage of whatever was
attacking him.
Suddenly, Timothy had swirled himself around his victim so that
he faced Dr. Basil. Do you remember me? Timothy whispered.
'N-no,' Basil stammered. 'I-I-I've never seen you before in my-'
Yes, you have.
All at once, it came to Basil, what Shelby had said the last time
he saw him before the operation: This is the only way I can get away
from it, and away from myself. This is what I have to. This is what I
have to become in order to survive what is happening to me. Life is
killing me, and I need to.
Had Shelby really believed that?
Had Basil really forced him to believe it?
Three separate forms came upon him at once, and yet it was
with the fury of a single man that they sought to nullify his cerebral
memory encasement. For his own part of the experience, in the

420
 421

middle of his assault on Basil, Timothy felt himself slipping to where

the demon was and the world as a whole seemed to melt around him.
As soon as he had ascertained his surroundings, Timothy dug his
teeth into Basil's heel as hard and as deeply as he could and hung on
as Basil thrashed about malefically, trying to shake him off. Basil
mused that it must appear to the people across the street from him
that he was now working out a new twist on the old Funky Chicken
dance step, but in all truthfulness, he was trying to kill something that
simply wasn't there, not in a way that he, Basil, could do anything
about.
He felt the reflection creeping closer to him, and the first pain he
felt when it overcame him was a sharp throbbing in his Achilles'
tendon. Blood started soaking into his shoes and he heard a squealing
sound that reminded him of a mechanical engine about to seize its
parts- and that wrenching sound, he supposed, had originated from
within his own person.
He glanced down and saw a small tear in the hem of his pants
leg that was now smeared with blood. His blood. Basil pushed his
fists out and down into the shadowy mass as it floated now directly in
front of him, but all he caught ahold of was thin, vicious air. His
grappling fingers didn't rip even the tiniest shred into the fabric of this
hallucination, not even for a fraction of a second.
He felt an inhalation of cool, stale air in his chest and dropped to
his knees- cracking both his kneecaps on the cold cement sidewalk in
the process- clutching at his chest with hands that refused to
acknowledge what they were feeling: a gaping, breathing wound
almost a foot in width that stretched from his left clavicle to his
esophagus and down his body to his costal arch. There was a smaller
gouge a few inches below that, but by now, that wound seemed
somehow peripheral to him.
Gauging his wounds with his fingertips, Basil was scarcely able
to believe what his digits were describing to him. There was simply no
way he could be wounded like this and still be running, and running for
his life at that. But it was happening, and he knew that if he fell dead
of a heart attack, or bled to death, or was ripped to shreds by
whatever was following him, he knew he was not going to make it
home tonight.
Not in one piece.
I should already be dead.
After gnawing on Basil's shoulder for a moment or two, trying to
inflict as much damage as was inhumanly possible, Timothy staggered
back to better view the carnage he had created. It surprised him, as
he hung back and regarded Basil, that he was excited to see this man
dying in front of his eyes. To get off on this sort of thing was surely

421
 422

heresy.
Therapy, but heresy.
Blood gouted out of the holes in his chest and stomach every
time the man coughed or breathed in and out, dripping in satiny
rivulets down his torso. His skin appeared to be breathing shallowly-
rippling somewhat hallucinogenically- with a glimmer of skin like that
of a gutted fish.
He watched as Basil Rochefoucauld thrashed aimlessly,
struggling to throw off a being with no shape or face as it insinuated
itself into the very fibers of his flesh, threading itself between strips of
his skin and then pulling itself away from its prey, separating flesh
from bone in a way that reminded Timothy of bacon laying in strips in
a package.
And in a moment, it was over. Basil's head had neatly been torn
from his body, the wound leaving a gaping hole in the side of his neck
that looked as though it had been inflicted by a maniac who had been
wielding- among other objects- a serrated steak knife. Basil's
decapitated body dropped from the folds of the shadow that had been
holding it aloft. The shadow then turned towards the sky with an air of
unchecked malice, readying to do whatever it would take to remove
himself from this plane of semi-existence. Basil's head landed where it
rolled after Timothy threw it- in a playground.

TWELVE TIMES PAYS FOR ALL

Gaining entry to the house was simple- the silly bitch had left the door
unlocked, or perhaps in the insane hope that Courtney would come

422
 423

home to her tonight. He had been clumsy in the living room, and he
wasn't too sorry that it happened. Doing it in the living room had
always given him and Nona more room to thrash about when they
were fucking. But as he regarded her now- haggard, teary, her eyes
ringed with the lack of sleep- he doubted more and more that they
would tussle.
As the seconds leading up to this confrontation ticked away,
Kelly had in vain tried to envision how this would go. Truth was, he
couldn't.
Nona had been the one part of things he couldn't be sure of.
She had been the only wild card, and that had been the salient fact in
Kelly's mind when he'd concocted this whole scheme. There was no
way for him to gauge her response. Dead was dead, but there was
something about this woman that frightened him. There was
something oddly alive about her, something vital and somehow larger
than life. Kelly had thought, at the first and however abstractly, that
when he slept with her that he could acquire that magic, or somehow
come to within mere inches of being able to touch and perhaps to
understand it. He had not been satisfied.
Now, here was the final act, and he found himself no closer to it.
This troubled him. In his brief, secret history, Kelly deRenzi had
never failed to assimilate all that with which he had come into contact.
Now here it was, the secret denied, and it was pissing him off. What
was it that curled itself through hers sinews, that caused her walk the
way she walked? Where was the liquid drip of her female essence?
He could not afford to underestimate her physically, but this
elusive quality of hers had caused him to back himself up into a
painted corner that his fear of her had created. In a lot of ways, Kelly
was the sort of person who had never known the Oxford definition of
fear, not in the way that normal people felt it. Fear was the emotion
that triggered the survival instinct, and that instinct had saved his life
on ten times ten occasions, but it had never been like this. Fear was
usually an ally.
As his eyes searched the contents of the house, Kelly wondered
for a moment what sorry excuse for a life had filled these walls before
he had come along. Had Courtney and Nona ever been happy? There
was certainly enough physical evidence to support this. Their house
was filled with the sort of oddities and crap that pointed only to
sentimentalia.
The odds and ends, the knick-knacks, the coffee tables- all these
things pointed toward a life lived together, sometimes in animosity,
most times in harmony. Courtney had been making too much of his
troubles at home- Kelly was certain of this. Nona was a bitch, sure-
but she was his bitch, and that made all the difference in the world.

423
 424

Courtney should have paid more attention to this fact. Nona would
never have strayed from him, had she not already sensed that he was
gone.
And in all the crevices of life, there was theatre.
Nona had called to him, as had Courtney. Now all that remained
was the execution of the final act. Kelly had learned in drama class
that every truly great tragedy had to include a moment of relampago-
a self-crushing realization- in order to end the piece properly.

'So, I reckon that the sequence is complete,' Kelly said to Nona,

who unwillingly shrank terrified from his touch. Her arms were
crossed in front of her, and Kelly had almost gotten his grip around
one of her forearms, enough to pull them both free. 'This is what it's
all come down to,' he said menacingly, 'and this is where it all ends.'
Kelly wanted a sense of closure to this, and he seemed to be
failing with it. He wanted the upper hand, but there seemed no truly
secure way to ascertain that advantage. He was so close, so fucking
close-
And now it was her move.
'Leave me alone. I swear to God, I'll kill you.'
'Ah- but I don't think so, Nona dear. And if you try to do
anything to me in retaliation, I'll guarantee the outcome no matter
what you do.'
Nona was insouciant and fruity in her retort. 'And that is what?'
'You won't be alive.'
'Leave me alone,' she pleaded again, her eyebrows raised in thin
black arches. Her temples throbbed and the side of her face hurt as
she gingerly rubbed her palm across it. 'Why have you done this to
us?'
'You did it to yourselves. I have no pity for you and your kind.'
'We were happy before you came into our lives.'
'No, Nona, you weren't- you invited me in. You told me these
things yourself, with your own lips, while I fucked you like he never
could. He could never fuck you in the way you liked because you
disgusted him. When he spoke of you, he called you the slut, the
swallower. You were not much kinder to him- I was there, and I heard
you curse his name.'
'Shut up.'
'I heard you curse his existence, his presence in your life.'
'Shut up!'
'I heard you say you wished that he was dead.'
'Shut up!' she shrieked, hurling herself lengthwise at him. Her
venom was now directed at Kelly instead of her husband, and she was
shocked to feel the anger surge within her when he had talked against

424
 425

her husband just now. She did love him, and once this was over,
would find him and tell him just that. Whatever their individual
problems and hang-ups were, they belonged together. Who else
would take them?
Kelly easily sidestepped her, still agile and nimble from his days
on the stage, and she lunged straight toward the brick fireplace.
Nona's head struck the corner of the fireplace with a resounding thud
and Kelly knew instinctively that she was dead. He was quite angry
that he wasn't inside her at the moment of impact, but she'd given
him no chance to be.
The truth of death was always hard to swallow, like acidic
semen.
Her head was swollen by the temple but she hadn't bled very
much- just a few drops, precious and purple, that had been cut short
on its way back to her heart to be oxygenated. Also present on her
face was a small, tight patch of purple bruise on her forehead, and it
was spreading. The blood would stagnate and clot inside the flesh of
her face and she would look at the moment of discovery like Al Jolson.
That struck him as being so funny that he turned away from her
and laughed for what seemed to him like several interminable minutes.
When he composed himself- he had to be aware of his time here- he
tried to figure out the logistics of where he was going to put her body.
He had passed through the Circle of Necessity to the Circle of
Blessedness.
He rolled her stockings off her legs and caressed her calves,
licking them and luxuriating in their sweaty slickness, tickling his
fingers down to the sores on her Achilles tendons, where her work
shoes rubbed too tight against the backs of her feet. They were puffy
and pink-red, and he could feel that she'd rubbed some lotion on them
within the past twelve hours or so. Silicon Glove, most likely. That or
Skin-So-Soft. He brought her foot up to his mouth and tasted her
there.
Yes, it was Silicon Glove. He'd know it in the dark.

Once he was done raping her corpse- pulling her left eye from its
socket and stuffing it inside her anus, swiftly following the bloody orb
with the head and shaft of his swollen cock- Kelly stashed her body
back in the living room. He wanted the exposure to be as public as
possible.
Courtney would be branded publicly as a psychopath.
Kelly then, under cover of the night, carried the fragments
of Lynn Knight, et al. out of Courtney's station wagon and into
the basement where he placed them next to Nona's corpse all in
a row. The decimated bodies of the other girls- those mere than

425
 426

in life had answered to the names of Saber Crystal, Cassandra

Dare and Lori Lauren- were soon to take up their final residence
in the cellar, from where they would each re-emerge as
footnotes in forensic medical history.
There was a certain camaraderie amongst the dead, Kelly
mused. They seemed at ease with each other, as Kelly lined
their bodies next to one another on the bare cement floor, and
their bare arms mingled nicely, the tones of skin on skin on skin
connecting them in cold eternity.

Back in the living room, Nona's head seemed to loll upon

its base, and Kelly- who was growing annoyed with all the little
duties that went into concealing his crimes- righted it with a
shove from his elbow. Her tiny little nose, when it pressed up
against the support beam beneath the stairs, crinkled in upon
itself, making her look as though at the moment she was
overwhelmingly disgusted with something. Indignant. It was a
familiar look that she wore with an underwritten authority- she
was forever the injured party, just as Courtney had said- only
now, her complaint was truly legitimate. After he was done
here, all he needed to do was fetch Courtney from his place, and
Courtney would still be out cold for another four or six hours. It
was a fifteen-minute drive.
And all would be put paid. Absolvo te.

426
 427

A CIRCLE OF PENNIES
Gracey lay upon a bedspread composed entirely of human skin grown
from the E2D8 compound. He was the only person on earth who knew
the fabric of the sheets on his bed. He had hit upon this idea only two
weeks earlier, just after Shelby's initial surgery. Since then, there had
been two nip and tuck procedures. Gracey had told Shelby that he
had expected this, but in truth it had startled him. Gracey had
genuinely expected the skin to adhere perfectly, whatever experiments
still needed to be made, and it troubled him to have been wrong in his
estimation.
The fabric created artificially by the texture of the skin was
warm- almost hot, but not quite- to the touch, and by using a tiny
temperature control knob he had mounted onto the side of the bed,
Gracey was able to modify the skin's basic temperature to his own
personal liking, tipping it by a few degrees in one direction or another.
There was a good deal to be admired in the way that Gracey had
gone about the task of losing his mind: the cross-sectionings of human
organs he had encased in glass; the blown-up photo of his son playing
soccer that adorned the north and northwest walls in what could have
been the family room, taken only three or four weeks before he died.
The house stank of sadly haunted memories- so much so that even
Ixxir was given sufficient cause to gag at such a sight. Taking this all
in gave it a sense of amazement that it had never felt before.
Gracey had obviously surrounded himself with nothing but his
work for fifteen years, and it was only now- now that his family was
gone and nothing could be done about it- did he dedicate his life to
worshipping them as another man might have while they were still
around. His was the guilt of time gone by, and Ixxir through its years
had seen scores upon scores of sad people who had become
imprisoned by their shame over actions in the past that they could no
longer do anything to correct.
Thomas Gracey fell unceremoniously into this category.

Ixxir had been sending out feelers in order to better gauge the
man and how he might best be dealt with. Ixxir knew that it had any
number of means by which he might dispatch the good doctor, but
that was the crux of its dilemma; it needed to be choosy in how it
went about its business, as to derive all the more satisfaction.
It slipped up the spiral staircase and smelled its way to the man
as he lay prostrate upon the mattress. The television set was on, but
the air was filled with static, leaving the room bathed in a sickly shade
of blue-black. An occasional sparkle of white crossed the screen when
Ixxir walked too close to it, and once it had scared itself when this

427
 428

happened because it had seen itself in the reflection off the TV.
Nothing scared a demon more than the presence of yet another
demon.

Timothy had found his way to Gracey's residence as well, and he

was surprised- to say the least- when he approached the front door of
the dwelling and saw that it was standing wide open. He didn't know
it yet, but he was running only a few minutes behind the demon.
Timothy sniffed the air and thought he smelled Ixxir's presence. There
was no other rational explanation that would bear up to such nasal
scrutiny. Being able to pick up scents like this now made him wonder
why he hadn't been able to do so while he was alive. The demons
were literally everywhere. It smelled a little bit like a bad hamburger
and left a coppery taste in one's mouth- somewhat akin to the taste of
blood but much more intimate.
He wasn't sure how he felt about Ixxir being here. If the demon
could help him, fine- but what if it suddenly changed its mind and now
wanted to keep him from killing Gracey, for its own weird reasons?
Anything was possible, and the only thing Timothy was sure of as far
as the demon was concerned was that he didn't trust it- not for a
second.
Timothy knew that he wouldn't be able to defeat Ixxir if a direct
physical confrontation was what it had in mind. It had been through
the many states of metaphysical existence numerous times, and it
would have the advantage in any situation- unless he could outsmart
it.
Timothy didn't have the slightest idea of how to go about
grappling with the demon if neither he nor it had any physical
substance to their bodies. Ixxir would know what to do- but Timothy
wouldn't.
And the battle would be fought- and lost- in an instant.
His only hope was to sneak up on it, and to always be thinking
three steps ahead of the demon; this wouldn't be easy because Ixxir
was nothing if not slick in the head. It had always known what to say
to hurt Timothy the most, knowing instinctly the words that would cut
the deepest, and it always knew exactly what buttons to push in order
to get him flustered and fuck up his concentration when he was trying
to wish the damned thing away- not that it had worked.
He surmised that Ixxir had been just as crafty weeks earlier,
when it had been inside his body the first time. How much did the
demon know about him? Had it left some sort of subliminal garrison
within his body for use at a later date? No answers were forthcoming,
and nothing changed what needed to be done. Gracey was the final
piece to his puzzle and he couldn't fail.

428
 429

All of a sudden, Timothy felt filled with a righteous indignation.

His life had been stolen from him by this creature- a creature who, by
its own admission, would do anything to keep him dead so that it
might move forward in its pursuit of the afterlife here on earth. It had
referred to the land of the living as being a 'metaphysical ghetto,' and
perhaps it had been right in saying that. But Timothy also knew that
he had more of a right to be here than Ixxir, and knowing this gave
him the strength to push onward even while knowing he might not
win. But how important was winning or losing once you were already
dead? What else was there that the demon could take away from
him?
The answer came to Timothy in an instant.
His soul.
This thought racked itself into his conscious mind with the sort of
unceremonious thunder one usually associated with the death of a
loved one- except that in this case, the loved one was himself. In life
he'd had nothing to fight for- not even with Melanie, and her slightly
stale breath that had always reminded him of an Egg McMuffin- but
now that he was dead, and consequently had less than nothing to lose,
he found that he wanted to fight for that little something which was
rightfully his.
His soul. And his soul was all he had left.
But if Ixxir wanted his soul, why hadn't it taken his soul before?
That was another quick answer. Because it was full. But now it's
getting hungry again- the demon had said so itself. It was working up
its hunger again. How many souls could old Ixxir consume?
He didn't want to find out. The answer could be quite
intimidating.

Timothy entered the house cautiously, expecting an ambush to

be set up and waiting for him around every corner. When he reached
the bottom step of the staircase, he saw white light flickering from one
of the upstairs bedrooms- he had counted four on the ground floor-
and decided to tiptoe upstairs to investigate. What would he do if he
saw the demon in the act of killing Gracey? What if it was already
done? What if when he approached the doctor, he was alone? What
would he do then?
He had no idea at all.
The demon hovered over its prey, smelling his breath as it left
his body and floated up towards the ceiling. Timothy felt the warm
spread of malevolence coming over him in a swoon as he
contemplated the ways in which Gracey would suffer before reaching
his final death.
The grin that was now spreading across his face made him feel

429
 430

sick.
The shadow swept from one side of the room to the other,
actually passing through Timothy at one point as it descended upon
Thomas Gracey. It grinned blackly as it sank its teeth into the anterior
portion of Gracey's head. Bright red blood- fresh, arterial blood-
rained forward, splashing the sheets. His throat had been ripped wide
open, exposing the tendons in his neck as they peeked through a
revolting confetti of flesh. The part that made Timothy's metaphysical
stomach turn was the fact that Gracey was still alive. It was becoming
obvious that he was not going to give up the ghost easily. For a tense
moment, Timothy was sure that Ixxir was going to strike Gracey
again, and if that was what it wanted to do Timothy wished it would
hurry the hell up.
But instead of speeding things up, Ixxir seemed intent on
studying the manner of Gracey's death; every expression, every
nuance of the pain being experienced. The notion of death had always
fascinated it, because death was something it would never experience
for itself- not first-hand- not totally or in the properly intended way
that it had been meant to be experienced. It had from time to time
envied these humans their ability to experience the total cessation of
life, because the end of life was the final portion of a totally different
existence that it would never be able to transcend. It would never
know where they were going. And when they went, there was peace
in their eyes.
There was such peace in their eyes.
Gracey's interior remains were now being scattered across the
room by the demon, who obviously relished its task. Random jolts of
Gracey's anguish flurried throughout his body, causing it to jump and
twitch, in spite of its apparent lifelessness. Ixxir moued as it looked
toward Timothy for approval, doing so with the air of a spoiled child.
Angelic by turns, it had transmogrified itself into a grotesquery by
choice. This it did, Timothy had noticed, whenever it didn't receive the
response it had elicited. It bowed its head in an obsequious manner
and tried to look sheepish, like a bad dog that had befouled its
masters rug- and it didn't work. Thankfully, it kept its twitching mouth
shut.
Somewhere, a seraph was weeping.
For its own part, Ixxir knew the rules. Timothy's status as its
host made him sacrosanct and untouchable. It would be so easy to
wring the pathetic little bastard's neck, it thought. I can reach into his
mind and misfire a synapse or something, if I really wanted to. It
craned its neck and looked around the room; something wasn't right
here.
Ixxir didn't see anything out of the ordinary, aside from the

430
 431

splashes of blood and intestinal fluid covering the walls near the bed
and so it went back to entertaining its thoughts of killing Timothy. But
still... there was a scent in the air, one it hadn't smelt since-
It was over.
Timothy watched the shadow slink along the sheets, and saw
where the skin actually raised itself up to touch the shadow as it glided
from the foot of the bed up to the headboard, where Gracey's nearly-
severed head now rolled to one side, lolling bonelessly on the axis of
its neck.
This shadow stood over the corpse of Thomas Gracey and
inhaled the death-breath as it expelled itself from Gracey's depleted
lungs.
It worked its shoulders, spreading upon its haunches, and
preened its features. It worked the gill-like protrusions that swept
back away from its face, flexing them in liquid syncopation with its
breathing patterns and blood flow. It looked at Timothy with a deadly
reptilian grin.
There was a moment of deafening silence.
'I don't think so,' said a voice from behind Timothy. It scraped
the fibers in Timothy's spine like a blade of serrated ice and what
startled Timothy more than the voice itself was the look on the
demon's face.
And its skin was turning pink.
It was frightened, looking at whatever was behind Timothy.
Timothy had been too wrapped up in staring at Gracey's corpse
to notice that a man- a real, living man- had followed them up the
stairs and into the bedroom to watch them kill the good doctor; he
was wearing a long black trench coat that would have covered him
from neck to ankle had it been buttoned. As it was, the cloak hung
loosely about his frame in flaps of stained black leather. Joshua
Tauble was inside of it. His lack of innards was noticeable, to say the
least. He stank of rot.
'I'm here for what's mine.'
Ixxir was flipping back and forth between states, trying to be
both shadow and substance at the same time. Its demonic demeanor
was fluttering rapidly, but Timothy thought he could pick up a sense of
bewilderment and indecision coming from the demon. First it was a
shadow, then it tried for a mist, but it was unable to attain or maintain
either state. The man behind Timothy spoke again, in a tongue that
Timothy was not able to follow or understand even slightly.
'Sie ich de abscheulich schwarze Teaschen Kunst, de
Astigmaticus.'
The demon shook its head, like a child denying its own guilt.
The man spoke again, pointing at Gracey's corpse.

431
 432

'Er lebt doch noch, nicht wahr?'

Timothy wondered, Is he speaking German?
Isto ‚ o que voc‚ teur que temer.
The stranger regarded Timothy with a sneering smile that
seemed to cut right through him, and then Timothy heard his voice
rippling through him, as if to say, It's none of your business. You're
nothing in here.
Then he returned his gaze to Ixxir.
'You are what all men must fear.'
The demon cowered on the bed, saying nothing.
'I am the Escort Bisarro.'
Nothing.
'Je t'aime porteur vous. Je t'aime tu transport, escorte Bisarro.'
Nothing.
'Eicken Zie?'
Still nothing.
'Eicken Zie, Mezzabeacollabia?'
That seemed to shake the demon up. Its blood-red eyes
dimmed for a moment, and then the eyes glowed faintly pink as it
inhaled and exhaled. Had its eyes grown two shades lighter they
would have been its skin.
'You know...' it croaked, in its voice, 'You know...my name?'
'Nemo me impune lacessit. Ah, Mahdur Ad-damm. Aum mani
padme hum.'
The demon was silent. Then, a precocious leer shaped like a
scythe ran across the upper face as the eyes glowed once more; it was
thinking. Was there a way out of here? Was there a compromise,
some way to escape-
'Sprechen wenn man den Teufel an die Wand malt, dann kommt
er.'
Ixxir was shaken into speech. 'You have come for me?'
'I have.'
'Then you must understand the walking curse, wandlende
Leiche.'
'Indeed, I do. I live it every day of my life.'
The stranger tugged lightly on the cuff-strap of his trench coat,
and in an instant, a silver blade had slid down his sleeve and into the
palm of his hand- as far as Timothy could see, the knife was somehow
surgical in its origin and he could see that the stranger took great
pleasure in wielding it. The blade was perhaps three inches long, and
the weight of the handle would make it an odd choice for throwing, but
perhaps that wasn't what the stranger intended to do. There was
something odd about the blade as the stranger wielded it, something
ceremonial that Timothy could not understand. He felt right now a

432
 433

little like the time that he and Melanie had crashed a distant cousin's
wedding. They had only gone because they knew where it was,
without any real invitation and without knowing a single soul present.
No one had noticed them, assuming that they were there with
someone else, but the feeling remained nonetheless.
He was a witness to something intimate, something not meant
for him.
The handle of the knife was a tapered length of thick polished
steel. Timothy was surprised to find that he was able to taste the
knife and its sharpness; he inhaled the stale air of fresh metal
shavings from when the knife had been sharpened. It had been
sharpened since the last time this stranger had killed with it. And it
would be sharpened again.
But he wasn't a part of the world in which this was now
happening.
'Sie eiben de innenleben ruber, Mezzabeah.'
The stranger smiled once more at the demon, and that was all
he did.
'In pace requeiscat.'
Timothy saw a look of unbridled horror pass over the shadow's
face. Its eyes sank in upon themselves, the features seemed to
dissolve, and it looked as though the shadow might begin to grovel at
any moment. It curled its eyebrows and flared its nostrils. A dollop of
its fetid snot landed on Gracey's bedspread, the skin of which recoiled
instinctively.
Timothy shook his head from side to side, aware now that there
was no weight behind it. 'Who are you?' he asked the stranger. There
was a moment of pregnant silence as the two of them each sized one
another up.
Joshua pointed at the shadow, who was trying to put Timothy
between the two of them. 'We two are one, but it's got my soul. We
belong together. I have traveled for years, so that I may rid the world
of this foulness, and so that others will not walk, as I have. It is my
sacred responsibility to do this. My days have led me to this destiny.'
Ixxir hunched up its shoulders and tittered nervously, looking to
Timothy for a back-up. 'I sure that I don't know what it is you're
talking about, but this is a private matter, and I suggest that-'
'Shut up.'
The shadow received these words as a slap in the face. It wet
the bed, piddling intermittently against its will. The urine, which stank
of stale incense and dead flowers, puddled red and purple on the
sheets before the skin soaked it up a few seconds later. It cursed
shallowly in the brogue tongue of a minor demon. The tiny nubbled
horns on its forehead glowed a shallow orange, dulling whenever it

433
 434

took a breath.
Joshua took a step toward the bed. 'We've got unfinished
business.'
He smiled as he said it.
Ixxir regrouped and smiled at Joshua. 'Now, is that any way to
talk to a friend as old as I am? We go back a long way, Joshua, you
and I, and I was counting on you showing up here. It was only a
feeling.'
Timothy was confused. 'So you do know this guy?'
The demon shrugged. It had never been caught in a lie before.
Not really.
More than once.
'If that thing told you that it would help you,' Joshua began, 'or
that it could help you to live an eternal life, then it lied to you. I never
called to it, and I never begged its intervention. It is nothing but a
parasite, and it came to me. It made promises it couldn't keep.'
Ixxir was incredulous. 'I got you out of jail, didn't I?'
'Yeah, and then you ripped me open- when you couldn't feed
anymore.'
The minor demon shrugged for a second time that evening. Its
eyes searched the walls, the tiny irises drinking in the details of the
room.
'I'm not looking for eternal life,' Timothy said. 'I want to die.'
Ixxir quizzically shifted its sightless gaze to Timothy.
'Do you want to die?' Joshua intoned. 'Well, then. I guess that
I'm looking for much the same thing that you are: relief and release.'
Those words exemplified what Timothy wanted out of this
menagerie.
I killed him once, the demon thought, and I can kill him again
It pondered.
Both of them. I killed both of them.
As if in a direct response to Ixxir's mental assertion, Joshua
picked up an 8 dram vial of E2D8 solution from Gracey's bedside table.
Regarding it as he turned it end over end in his grasp, he thumbed
open the vial and sniffed at its contents. He screwed the lid back on
and placed the vial in between his teeth, clamping his jaws and
crunching the glass as he moved the pieces of the vial around in his
mouth with his tongue. 'Nothing can hurt me, y'see? Because I'm
already dead.'
Joshua raised the hem of his Tshirt and showed the hole where
his rib cage had once protected his heart and his other vital organs,
which now worked dryly inside his chest cavity. Stumps of splintered
bone and withered tissue outlined the hole provided by Ixxir's escape.
Timothy was becoming increasingly confused by all this

434
 435

surreptitious activity, but the more he witnessed, the more he

understood that it had nothing to do with him. He was only the poor
fool caught in the middle.
'If I'm dead too, then why do I- feel so much pain?' Timothy
asked pleadingly, not entirely sure that he wanted to hear Joshua's
answer.
'Because you're not all the way dead,' Joshua said. 'I was
supposed to die, but I can't. You were supposed to have lived another
sixty or seventy years, but had your life stolen from you by
this...parasite. If you were truly dead you wouldn't feel anything.
Your pain tells you the most important thing, Timothy: it tells you that
you are alive.'
Joshua took a sturdy step forward and stared the demon down.
'Si c'e un inferno non c'e anche un paradiso, eh?'
Ixxir cowered behind Timothy. His horns were now glowing red,
and its stubby, perked-up ears attuned themselves to every thought.
It remembered defeats and banishments it had experienced in 1699,
1746 and 1842, and each one of them had given Ixxir the same
feeling it was having now. Each banishment, sequentially, took one
out of the circle for a longer period of time. Ixxir wasn't bright enough
to fear death, but a season of banishment could last upwards of two
hundred years.
'You owe me a great deal, Timothy. I've been involved in your
life in ways I don't think you could ever even begin to comprehend.'
'Like how?'
Without a moment's hesitation, Melanie's voice poured forth
from Joshua's lips. 'I loved you, Timothy. I would have crossed Death
and Time just to be with you. I don't think you know how much I
loved you.'
I know.
'Then why, Timothy? Why did you have to lie to me again and
again?'
Because I thought I had to. I was wrong, but I thought I had to.
'There's no time for regret when you're alive,' Joshua said now in
his own voice, which was somehow softer and more human than
Timothy had remembered it being only a few scant seconds before,
'but when you're dead, there's all the time in the world to wish things
were different.'
'So we are,' Timothy admitted.
'We're all dead, Timothy,' Joshua sighed. 'Just in different
ways.'
Melanie's voice was in the air again, but this time it wasn't just
an approximation. Joshua's larynx bubbled and coiled as the words
poured themselves forth effortlessly from his unmoving lips. The

435
 436

timbre and pitch of her voice instantly took Timothy back six months,
a year ago, two years ago when they had first met. That was how she
sounded now. It was clear that her voice was reaching Timothy in
spite of Joshua's efforts to rescind her passage through the remains of
his flesh.
'It's okay, Timothy,' she said. 'I'm alright.'
His eyes misted over and he fought an urge to take Joshua into
his arms. It was clear to all that Melanie was now in control of this
situation rather than Joshua, and that somehow changed everything.
Joshua's face became contorted and reddened with anger and a
lack of control over this situation. He was trying to fight what was
happening, as it wasn't a part of his plan, and Timothy knew that time
was short.
'Are you still angry with me?' Timothy asked.
'No, Timothy. I'm not angry anymore. I need to see you, but
now is not the time for that to happen. There's things you still need to
do.'
'What are those things?' he asked.
'I don't know right now,' she said. ‘I can't tell you.'
'Will I ever see you again?'
'Yes.'
'Will we be together?'
'Yes.'
'When will that be?'
'Soon.'
'I love you, Melanie. I-'
But he sensed that she was gone, and she was. Joshua's eyes
rolled from the whites that had been exposed back to the green irises
that had been there before. He felt a plethora of emotions, none of
them with a name he could recognize. The stranger smiled in the red
morning light.
Timothy looked back at the demon that had once festering inside
his body, feeding on his innards. He felt no pity for Ixxir now, and the
lower of the two forms tried not to meet his eyes.
'Our business is finished here,' Joshua sighed. 'After this, there
is nothing between us that you have to worry about. You go your
way, and I'll go mine. I have no quarrel with you, and I wish you
well.'
'Thank you. I appreciate that.'
'This one will stay with me. It is mine, and we are tied
together.'
Ixxir pleaded silently with Timothy, who felt nothing. The demon
was actually putting the palms of its hands together in the classic
praying motion. A demon praying! Was that the best laugh he was

436
 437

going to get out of this whole fucking thing?

As he turned on his heel and walked out of the room, Timothy
thought it heard the demon yelp in pain. Once again, he felt no pity
for it.

437
 438

A NATIVITY IN BLOOD
For Courtney, the sun was rising on an entirely different day, because
he had seen and felt what he had been meant to be originally. In the
last seconds of his life- before he saw what lay on the other side of
things- he had been fixated upon loosening himself up for the
onslaught of what he hoped would be coming. He hadn't been let
down in his quest.
If he had gone to heaven, it wasn't what he thought it was.
And what if heaven had been bliss- well then, what comes after
bliss?
But bliss it had not been.
Courtney recognized that he had unintentionally achieved some
sort of inverted divinity while he was wherever he had gone. For all he
knew, he had never left Kelly's apartment. But that not what it felt
like. He had gone to a place that was not where his body was. Where
his body was, he found, was no longer mattered at that moment,
because he was not in occupacion, as they say. He was someplace
else, and he hadn't been there long enough to be able to chart his way
back to reality. The real world came on to him in fits and starts: first,
the walls started to swim and he saw odd snatches of the interior of
his own home out of the corners of his eyes. In the middle of a pool of
watery blood, he saw a cellular telephone laying dead and beepless on
the deep pile shag; he had been to Heaven, and he knew that he
would not be going back there when he died. Seeing the end before
the end would only deny him access.
And there was nothing there, anyway.
This all seemed plastic to him now. What was around him now
that he was awake didn't matter to him as much as where he had
been. And yet, somehow he had to carry on in this world, solely in
this world, for the rest of his life. He couldn't go back a second time.
In falling from grace, he had somehow breached the heavens.
You do not believe although you have seen.... John 6: 36-37.
His knees were sore, and his anus was bleeding, but these
complaints seemed peripheral when viewed against the knowledge he
had gained while he had lost himself in that other place. He now had
the answers to all the questions that had haunted and plagued him
over the years. He now saw that the conflicts he had with Nona were
sometimes self-created, and that both he and she had gotten the
marriage they deserved.
But it made no sense to be thinking about his marriage, because
he was no longer the same person. How could he explain this to
Nona? He still hadn't opened his eyes yet. It was harder than he'd
expected to re-acquaint himself with himself; reality was a difficult

438
 439

concept for him to flush through his system. When he could last
recall, he and Kelly had been in Kelly's living room, watching their
movies and going through the motions. Kelly had said something
about knowing 'how to get there,' and he had certainly been right.
This last session with him was definitely a before-and-after sort of
experience. He was not the same.
Was he cured now? Would he need to return to that place, now
that he knew that it existed? He didn't think so. He had seen enough
to last him a lifetime, and what he had seen had frightened him.
But now, at least he had seen it.
And did any of it matter anyway?
His nose tasted of his eyes, as if he'd been crying. As it
happened, he had been crying. There was a knot on the side of his
head that would pulse white light whenever he squeezed his eyelids
too tightly and there was a number of indistinct figures dancing on his
eyeballs. Some of the people he was able to recognize as having been
people that they- meaning Nona- had invited to their wedding. He had
always wondered how many of Nona's former conquests had been at
their wedding, and he wanted to stop these thoughts. To return to
consciousness was to return to the torture of his daily life. Any relief
was welcome, but any relief was also temporary. To live was to feel
pain, and his own mind could hurt him better than any external force,
except for Nona. He supposed he liked the pain, but now Courtney
wanted these thoughts to stop. At any cost.
His sphincters were still loose, bloody and wobbly; he had shit all
over himself since being brought back home. Was that where he was
now?
Home?
All he needed was a single concrete detail of what had transpired
between Nona and Kelly. That would be enough to set him off. He
needed his anger now, if only to inspire him to move. Anything, even
the urge-
A drop of fluid- a warm, violet-tasting fluid- touched his lips, and
he savored it. He could picture Kelly standing over him, wringing a
wet washcloth into his mouth to revive him. Maybe he'd been under
so long he'd given Kelly a scare. It was possible. Anything was
possible.
Anything.
Courtney opened his eyes and stared upwards at the source of
his wet nourishment. His legs were bound, but his arms were free and
he tried with his knuckles to rub some of the blurriness out of his eyes.
That's when he looked up and saw his wife, posed reverently in the
upper corner of their living room as a triptych, steeped in her own
blood and gore.

439
 440

Courtney was still caught in the throes of his trance, and he

ached with the passing of each fragment of his reverie. To view his
wife like this- her beefy corpse flayed, and stripped of most of its
meat- was the ultimate grotesquerie. Kelly had wanted to break
Courtney's mind and he had done just that. It was done. It would be
easier to curse Kelly had he not thought of killing her himself. So
many nights he'd lain next to her, in their marital domicile, and so
many times he had dreamed his way through to the conclusion of this
very act. So many times he did this, and yet, it was never him to take
the journey. He didn't get there.
Or did he?
What had he seen? Why was he now afraid, for the first time in
many years. What couldn't he remember, that had him so scared?
Nona's body had been tacked to the upper half of the southwest
corner of their living room with a series of nine-inch metal spikes that
had been driven ceremoniously through the palms of her hands, the
bones of her forearms, the meat of her abdomen, her thighs and her
throat. Her entrails had been ripped from their respective sockets and
draped about her, as if in some obscene act of Christmas decoration,
pulled from their source to their outermost radius, the organs
themselves tacked to the wall with the same metal spikes- an intaglio
of savagely distended, distorted, broken human flesh. He recognized
the spikes as having come from their garage. Nona had bought them
for repairing the deck in back of the house, and together they had
pounded about three of the spikes into the wood where it was needed
to secure it and then the remaining 21 spikes went into the kitchen's
junk drawer, where they had waited in rusty anticipation of their final
purpose. Here, and now. Put paid.
A single, living twist of meat.
Now that she was dead, Courtney felt flooded with emotions that
were the opposite of what he'd felt for her when she was alive. No
matter how painful his marriage was, it was at least familiar terrain,
routed with the roads and valleys they had mapped out together. In
her death, Courtney was able to remember the good times they had
shared, the times when it didn't all seem like an uphill battle every
step of the way. He could remember that there had been laughter.
Not consistently, not as often as he would've hoped for, but it had
been there. Now it was gone.
There was a machete lying on the carpet next to him, coated in
blood. It was probably the one Kelly had used to slit her from crotch
to chin.
The thought of another man laying hands on his wife made him
shake with illness and rage. Even in death, she was the property of
another.

440
 441

You said you wanted her dead, right?

'But not like this,' Courtney croaked. 'I never wanted this. Oh,
my God. I didn't want this. Not this. I never wanted any of this.'
His voice was swallowed by the nothingness that surrounded
him. He was agonized to see the suburban paraphernalia of their lives
together- the Christmas snapshots they'd posed for only last year, for
example- all splattered with blood. He remembered the argument
they'd had before he allowed himself to be browbeaten into going with
Nona to pick out the frames these photos were encased in. None of it
seemed important, now. The presence of Nona's blood seemed only to
underscore their happiness.
And his own gibbering hysteria.
All was silent in their house. The light of early-to-late morning
was creeping in stealthily through the kitchen. He heard the wet slap
of the morning newspaper hitting the wet concrete of their driveway as
the rest of the normal world outside their home began and then would
continue on with its day. Moments later, the voices came back to him.
'C…c…Courtney,' the head hissed, pivoted up on its spike in the
wall to face him from a better angle. There were holes through her
cheeks and the bruise on her forehead had sent blood into her hair.
Her eyes clicked as they opened, and Courtney could see that there
was still red wetness in those eyes. How could that be? Had he killed
her just now?
'I’m so glad you're here, Courtney, with me.'
He refused to believe the information his eyes were receiving.
Yet there she was, all brilliance and postmortem glory, and when he
closed his eyes, trying to block out the sight of it, he opened them
again to see that she was still there, that this horrible thing was
happening.
'It's not all bad, Courtney.'
It occurred to him that his wife had used his name to punish
him, more so than anyone else had had in the span of his life. She
enjoyed doing it, and that had caused her to feed more on its pursuit.
'It was good sometimes, Courtney, wasn't it?' It was a question,
rhetorical though it was, but it had been posed as the rendering of a
fact. Courtney nodded at whatever Nona said, emptily, as was his own
foolish habit. His marriage had been a foolish habit, yet comfortable.
Nona was nodding her head, as if she understood what he felt.
And she was alive.
'Our lives are composed of such inconsequential moments.
Nothing means anything anymore. We live, and we die. And we-
being these mere strands of fragile thread- are the only thing that
strings those moments of inconsequence together. When we're gone,
those moments split apart, and they are lost forever. But we can

441
 442

remember, if we try. We really can. And there are so many good

things to remember, like the trees...'
He looked up at her, even though he didn't want to do it.
'What?'
'The trees,' she said slowing, speaking to her idiot. 'The trees,
down in Humboldt Park. Do you remember the way they looked that
Spring, when we first met? When they took on water- oh Courtney, it
was so beautiful! The leaves would get so heavy, and they'd stick
together, side by side, and we were huddled together under your old
tiny Snoopy umbrella when you first told me about the leaves. Those
tiny droplets of water belonged to us. Tell me, do you remember the
trees?'
'I remember the trees,' he admitted.
'You shared that with me, Courtney,' the head said, and both
their eyes were growing moist. 'You made that happen, for me.
Thank you.'
He looked at her head- at what she had become now.
'There are so many moments like that, things that you don't
notice- until they're gone. Those moments belong to us, and to us
alone. There are moments in your life that are so pure, and so
genuine, so primal and delicious that you simply can't possibly
appreciate them at the time because life continues to roll on all around
you. Life is nothing if not distracting. Time takes time, it takes time
away and gives nothing but what we are able to take from it. Demons
devour our time in paradise, but we can defeat them. If our life
should cease, then we can feel what has happened- all that has
happened- over the silent passages of our years.'
Courtney's head and face was down in his hands.
'I'm so, so sorry, Nona.' His breath was a whisper. 'I never
wanted this...I never wanted any of this. I'm the reason this
happened. I have brought this...pestilence...into our house. I let this
happen. I didn't know this was what he was going to do. I never said
anything!'
Nona's head was oblivious to whatever Courtney said to her.
'I only remembered the trees after I...after I…I…died.'
Her face seemed to wither up and shrivel in upon itself.
'That's right,' she said, laughing. 'I'm dead now- aren't I?'
Courtney couldn't say anything. He couldn't believe what he
saw.
'I'm dead, Courtney,' she whined.
He nodded at her again.
'Where were you, Courtney?' his wife asked, her torn voice
literally dripping with the weight of her accusation. 'Where were you
when I needed you? Where were you when he was doing this to me?

442
 443

Can you answer me? Where were you when he was killing me, you
bastard?'
'I don't know,' he admitted. 'I don't know where I was.'
And he truly didn't. Was Heaven really Heaven or was Heaven
not what it was in the first place? Bliss was a lie. It had always been
a lie.
His words came to him as a sob: 'I'm sorry, Nona. I'm so sorry.'
Nona made it clear that she wasn't going to be placated so
easily.
'Sorry?! You say you're sorry?!'
'Nona....' His words were failing him. He turned away from her.
'Courtney, just look at me!'
'I know.'
'Do you know what he did to me?'
'I...'
'Do you?'
'Honey, I can't-'
'Look at me! I'll never be alive again.'
'Nona, I can't-'
'Look at me!'
'Shut up, Nona. Just-'
'Look at me!'
'Shut up!' he shrieked, and with that he pulled the machete up
from where it was stuck to the mat of the carpet and swung it as hard
as he could at her face, seeking only to silence what he knew was
already dead. His swing- even being as awkward as it was-
connected, and her head- what was left of it- fell soundlessly into his
lap.
Inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
Any sound he could have made at that point would not have
begun to convey the sense of loss and utter revulsion he was feeling.
He swatted the head away and for the first time since coming out of
his trance, gave some serious thought to fleeing the scene and
disappearing. But there was no place to go, no one to go to. When he
married Nona, he'd told her that their futures were now inextricably
linked, and he had meant this, right up to the last. He needed to be
dead right now. Even were he not tied up, he would still have been
unable to take flight.
He put his face in his hands and wept. His face had been coated
in a sticky red glaze that had originally flowed from his dead wife's
heart.
And it was all he had left of her. All he would ever have of her.
Blood continued to ooze periodically from the gaping wound in
her neck, suspended directly above him, splashing him with the final

443
 444

liquid remnants of Nona's living life. Courtney cupped his hands

together under this trickle and, when he'd gathered enough, placed
the heels of his hands against his chin and drank deeply of her.
...And, I swallow.
Courtney glanced down at her severed head, silent at his feet.
'Nona...oh, Christ, I loved you. Why did all of this have to
happen? Why was any of this necessary?' He realized after a time, of
course, that any words spoken at this point would be meaningless.
Yet there was so much to be communicated to her. She would never
know what he knew, or have a chance to see what he had seen. He
wanted to take her there.
And now, Nona was there. Permanently.
The machete was only a few feet away from him, leaning against
the wall where he had thrown it earlier. He regarded it with a twinge
of anticipation, and wondered how it had gotten there. There were a
lot of questions in his head- there always would be- and each question
seemed to swim through his head, like a series of oceanic eels all
seeking to plug themselves into the same light socket, none of them
connecting.
A man in a blue hat was knocking at the door.
But that wasn't important right now.
Nothing else was.
There was one last thing he had to do. Courtney knew he owed
his wife nothing less than total surrender, and he wanted nothing more
than to be with her now, anyway. There was one last act of this
sacrament to be performed. It was total. He needed to be here with
her. Alone.

444
 445

HEAVEN’S ACHE AND THE RAISIN DEBT

Timothy's mind told him which streets to follow- which directions to
turn, which ways to float- and he soon found himself standing airlessly
in front of the emergency room entrance of the St. Stephen Memorial
Hospital. The feeling of the atmosphere inside the hospital was that of
buzzing activity. Nurses and orderlies swished through the air around
him, causing his head to vibrate fearfully. Being close to humans had
done this to him- ever since he had first died- but this was yet another
aspect of this new existence that was deteriorating with the
progression of time. The memories and emotions- if Timothy could
properly call them that- were rapidly getting more extreme. If he did
succeed with his intent, would these thoughts- this knowledge- recede
from him?
Probably not. But he thought he was willing to risk it. To live
again- and again and again, if necessary- was all there was to look
forward to, even if to live it again was past all endeavor. Timothy did
not know how to proceed with his intentions, but he knew he had to
try.
It is our desire to cheat our fate that makes us all most human.
Timothy waited for an opportunity, and when it presented itself,
he acted on it. The sliding doors leading into the emergency ward
operated on a touch-sensitive foot-pad, much like the local Kmart.
Timothy tried it once, then again, and then yet again one more time,
and each time he tried to open the door he saw that he couldn't get it
open. He was at a loss to exert any pressure at all upon the touch-
pad. He was losing his hold, and it wouldn't be long before the
inevitable would happen. There would come an instance where he was
called upon to utilize the physical, and he would be unable- utterly
unable- to do anything about it.
This desire to cheat our fate usually hastens its arrival.
He was alert enough that he was just barely able to skip through
the door into the hospital as a patient was being wheeled in from the
ambulance bay. Once he was inside, the lights burned into his eyes.
One corridor without character led him into another, and soon he
was in the pathology wing of St. Stephen's, where a good deal of the
dirty work was done. Gracey had gotten some of his test subjects
from here.
Somehow, Timothy was certain of this. There were trace sensations of
treacherous activity here, and Timothy breathed in their filthy hues.

Shelby's body had been laid out on ice in the morgue, and
Timothy was able to find it easily. His skin was starting to decay
rapidly, and he was losing cohesion. It wouldn't be long before the

445
 446

impulse of movement literally wrenched him limb from limb. The skin
was separating from itself. Timothy walked into the morgue unsure of
what exactly it was that he planned to do. He doubted that the skin
was even worth anything to him. The E2D8-treated skin had a finite
time-limit on how long it would keep before it started to rot without
the usual regimen of protein and vitamin injections, working against
its own constitution. All of this was dependant upon an already-
existing circulatory system to properly distribute the proteins to where
they were needed the most.
Now, that circulatory system had been stopped off- for good.
The body- or what was left of it- would retire into becoming the lifeless
heap of chemicals it had been before it had been applied to the living
tissue of Shelby Dunn. So little of Shelby's original epidermis
remained that there never really was any chance for his recovery.
Gracey had only wished to test the extremes of skin
replacement, and had wanted to see how little skin could be left on the
body before the E2D8 cells were no longer able to read and replicate
the DNA structure of the natural skin cells. Gracey found that the was
a mathematical formula- an invisible curve, he had called it in his
head- was needed in order for him to know the proper amount of skin
to strip away. Shelby's example was needed to tell Gracey that he
needed to leave at least twelve percent of the original skin on the body
frame for the morphing properties in the E2D8-treated skin swatches
to best adhere and do their work. Shelby had helped him in
establishing this morbid figure; not that this information was going to
do either of them a goddamn bit of good.

Timothy took a tentative step toward the table where the body
lay.
'Hey!'
On the table directly opposite from the one were Shelby now lay,
the sheet rose up and unraveled itself. 'Where do you think you’re
going with MY body?’
Timothy froze. He wasn't sure if the demon could still cause him
physical damage or if it had been neutered, but he remained afraid of
it nonetheless. The damned thing. 'But I saw...I thought you were
dead.'
Ixxir shrugged ineffectually. 'I guess you were wrong.'
It slid off the table and sauntered over to within five feet of
where Timothy's spirit now stood. Having no legs had left Timothy
with the constant sense of having lost his equilibrium. He felt lost and
alone.
'Where's Joshua?'
'Dead. For good. I made short work of him.'

446
 447

'How is that?'
'He didn't have what it takes. Let's leave it at that. The man
put a lot of effort in trying to emulate what he sees me as being, but
he didn't understand the true nature of the business he aspired to.'
'And what business is that?' Timothy inquired.
'Oh, let's call it....for our purposes, we'll call it reassignment.'
'Reassignment,' Timothy echoed. 'Why don't I believe you?'
'Because you're inclined to mistrust me, which is natural. But all
I do is take a nameless, faceless quantity, and I transport it- just as
Joshua had sought to 'escort' me to some realm off of this earth. He'd
followed me for years, and it was all for nothing. Please try to learn
the lesson here, Timothy. Life is for nothing, so go on to your death.'
Timothy was entranced with the odd yellow gleam of recognition
in the demon's eyes as it stood peering directly into his own phantom
eyes.
'We have a small problem here,' Ixxir sighed. You and I are
vying for possession of the same body. It's nothing more than a
metaphysical game of musical chairs. Of course, one of us with have
to lose, bow out, and leave gracefully. I'll be damned if that one of us
will be me. But I have a way we can settle this schism quite fairly.'
'How?'
Ixxir smiled maliciously. 'With a riddle.'
'I don't trust you,' Timothy said.
'Nor do I trust you,' Ixxir countered, grinning. 'But that's neither
here nor there. You still don't understand, do you? You're over-
you're finished. You're a dead spirit trying to inhabit a living human
body- which is all you ever were, anyway. It seems to me to be a
waste, aspiring only to be what you once were, but you were that way
about Melanie before you died- for the first time. Humans just never
fail to see the lack of value in traveling backwards in time, and I need
this body much more than you do- I was designed to infest and inhabit
corpses, after all- but I like you, Timothy, and that's why I'm willing to
give you a final chance to win our game.'
Timothy sighed resignedly. 'Fine. Who asks who what riddle?'
'We'll take turns until someone loses. As a demonstration of my
good faith, I think I'll be the better one and offer you the first go
round.'
'Why don't you just kill me outright?'
The demon sighed, as if to remove hair for its forehead, which
was a ridiculous thought. 'It's not in the rules, Timothy. There's an
etiquette that I must follow- I must be fair and square, Fraulein.'
'Fine. I'll go first.'
Timothy silently contemplated his first move- which, in a way, he
knew would be his last move here on earth. The only thing holding

447
 448

him in this world was his desire to inhabit a new body, but he saw now
where that would be pointless. He had vacillated so often over the
question of whether or not he could pull off another run at earthly
existence that he'd never stopped to ask himself the question whether
or not he should. And somehow, that made all the difference in the
world, now.
In another life, Melanie would be waiting for him. But she wasn't
here, not in this world, and she never would be; his love lay
elsewhere.
And he would be with her.
'I want to give you a gift,' Timothy said, without a trace of irony
on his face. There was an uneasy moment between them before Ixxir
spoke.
'Is this your riddle?' it asked.
'There is no riddle,' Timothy said, knowing what he was doing
more now than at any time in his life. 'There's no riddle at all to what
you're asking me. Life- and death- cannot be cheated. Neither state
will stand for it. Each state of existence demands its own price. To
live on in a body that wasn't my own body originally would be wrong.
You only live once, as it goes, and that's the truth. That's why each
singular moment means as much as it does, and no moment is to be
wasted. It's not what was meant to be, and I've decided to accept
that. There's nothing better than living life to the fullest, but it has to
be your own life. I'm not interested in something that's been stolen,
just so that I might live another thirty or forty years. That would
make it so meaningless. That, and-'
'You miss Melanie,' it hissed, as if this betrayed weakness.
'Yes, I do. And what I want more than anything is to be with-'
and all at once, without sound or light, he was gone. Ixxir sniffed at
the air, but he was completely gone. He was nowhere on this earth.
So old man Timothy had gone home. The thought made Ixxir
tremble- the thought that there were things in the physical world that
actually could transcend the importance of being alive. It would never
know any of these things for itself, and for the first time in close to a
thousand years, it felt this loss. All rest must lie in the grave.
Against its will, Ixxir noticed the red tears issuing forth from the
corners of its eyes. It was happy for Timothy, for fuck's sake, happy
that he was free, and happy that something like life existed, even if it
was something it could never experience. Unless...
It was too impossible to consider, but Ixxir dipped its claw, and
then its whole arm, into the vaguely-human mess congealed on the
cold steel of the morgue examination table.

448
 449

XEPERING
Not too far away from where Ixxir was enjoying its new skin, Shelby
Dunn had just crossed over into the physical world after having been
dead for over three days. His hands and wrists were stiff, as if they
had been tied behind his back at the time of his interment. He had
learned something of the pain carried over from one life to the next,
and he saw where some of it was psychic pain carried without its
bearer's knowledge. In this, he saw the reason why so many people
were fucked up without them ever even having known it. They were
reacting to surroundings that were no longer there, and by the time
they figured out that the shit they were doing was self-destructive, it
was already too late for anyone to do anything about it. The
circumstances were always changing in life, but this was a big
adjustment for him to be making.
He spent his first three solid days as a living being sitting in an
all-ay movie theater that had a movie starting at 1:1o, 3:25 and 5:35
pm, then switched to another movie at 7:45 and 1o:3o. The second
film was some foreign affair Shelby had heard people talking about
when he was alive the first time but he didn't pay much attention. He
was tired, as it happened, and he slept during these later shows, when
he shared the theater with other drunks and bums looking for a place
to be for awhile.
Forty-eight hours was the usual outside figure for the possibility
of re-entry into the physical part of things, but some evil sort of
special dispensation had been granted in his case. It was officially
preferred that candidates be freshly dead if they were to go back, but
he'd beaten that rap. He had heard a snatch of conversation about
something called the Dramastic Diffscrepancies. Shelby wasn't made
aware of every detail involved in his own case as it appeared before
those who decide, but the feeling he had gotten while he was dead
was that those Higher Up had a specific reason in their minds as to
why they wanted him to return to the physical world. Which was just
fine with Shelby. By this point, he really didn't give a shit about the
particulars. There was nothing left for him to lose, by his way of
assessing the situation. He just didn't want to be dead anymore. It
was understandable to anyone in his same situation. Shelby had quite
a bit of unfinished business to take care of before he did anything else
to further his status in this new place.
It is our desire to cheat our fate that makes us all most human.
The body he now occupied was that of William Homer
Richardson, a septuagenarian who had suffered a massive coronary
while walking through a back alley with his groceries. Richardson's
pulmonary overthrow had been ordered from the highest possible

449
 450

authority, and Shelby had barely gotten himself together before he

was told to go through the portal into his new life. He was reticent at
first and didn't want to go, but when he learned of his assignment, he
warmed to the idea considerably. This was something that he felt he
could do, after all. This seemed perfect.
His new body felt sluggish and weak. He found that he knew all
the personal details of Richardson's life, so that he might carry on with
a greater ease the task of fulfilling Richardson's life until he found his
way to where he was going. He was confident that he wouldn't be
inside this old man for long. It was a shock to witness the white hair
in the mirror when he looked at himself, and Shelby had promised
himself that he wouldn't look at himself in a mirror until he was well
ensconced in his new habitat, and even then, that he would view
himself only from time to time. After having been haunted by Timothy
Karacas and the spirit of Joshua Tauble, Shelby had lost a good deal of
his appetite for seeing himself in the mirror, out of a mortal fear that
those things would all start happening to him again- was it possible for
a ghost to be haunted?
Shelby thought about it for a moment and he smilingly supposed
that it was. There was a grimace of evil in his eyes now, and he felt
paranoid about having to mask it successfully, because he wanted to
give it full reign over his new existence. What Shelby now wanted
more than anything was to unleash the force within him and then let it
take him wherever it may; he knew instinctively that he had to trust
this thing within him if it was going to help him complete his agenda.
Shelby absolutely had to complete the agenda he'd been given if he
wanted to get on with things- and he most certainly wanted to do
that- all else became diversion until Shelby fulfilled the promise he had
made while still dead. He had been charged with a task that he alone
was uniquely qualified to carry out.
Shelby had a personal interest in his subject. After all, his
subject had stolen his body from him in a double-cross that had been
engineered with a lower-level regenerative possessive demon. Shelby
was now after revenge, and come Hell or high water he was going to
get what he wanted.
This desire to cheat our fate usually hastens its arrival.
A flock of birds passed over his head, causing Shelby to
instinctively cover his hair with his arms to protect it from being
dropped upon. He realized that this reaction was a little silly, and
looking up at where the birds had been, he saw that only one of them-
a white dove- had stayed behind the pack. It stood solitary standing
on a thin branch of a maple tree perhaps twenty feet from the ground.
Shelby thought that it was unusual for a flock of birds to be flying that
low to the ground but then, he didn't know much at all about these

450
 451

things in the first place.

The dove- which Shelby somehow knew was a female- had
dropped out of the race of her peers to wait on this branch. For
what?- he didn't know. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, and
craned her neck downwards in a way that might have suggested she
was checking her watch.
What was she waiting for? Was there some rendezvous
scheduled for her and another of her kind? Could birds make plans
like that, or was it all just the fictional interplay of fateful serendipity?
Shelby's answer flew from the west- a solitary white dove
winging in from behind an office tower two streets down. In life,
Shelby would have been oblivious to such events, but now these
events stood out in an aura of significance than stunned him into
speechlessness, had he even been able to talk at all. He hadn't known
much of anything until it was well beyond his own capacity. Scenes of
unimportance now flashed brilliantly in front of his eyes, and he ached
to preserve each one of them, knowing that to forget any one of them
was to lose it- not just then but forever.
He no longer felt the cutting wind as the two birds struggled
against it to keep their position on the branch. He watched in awe as
the two of them nuzzled at each other's necks, the white down of their
feathers working feverishly in unison. What species of affection was
this?
The birds seemed to notice nothing unusual that surrounded
them, but he was continually overwhelmed by it. Somewhere quite
near, someone was baking bread. Then, as soon as the sensation had
overtaken him utterly, it began to dissipate. Not the sensation, but his
own perception of it.
He was losing his hold on the physical world, and he needed to find a
new place to cool his heels while he plotted his next move in the
game.
There seemed to be no point in the incessant inhalation of
breath as he now observed it taking place around him, never stopping
for a moment.
Being dead was dead, and being alive had never been much
different from what he was experiencing right now. But somehow,
being alive now meant more to him than it did before- more than it
had ever meant. The very air itself now burned his lips, in much the
same way a mentholated cigarette will, even when it goes unlit; such
was the price of reprieve.
Seeing the birds had unnerved him, but he had been glad to see
them. There was something life-affirming about two birds cuddling in
a tree branch. Shelby wondered why they did it. Was it for comfort or
solace?

451
 452

It was late in the month of June, but it felt like the first day of
spring, and Shelby felt it more acutely now than he did before he died
because now he couldn't feel it at all. He was now numb to any
sensory perception his being might be experiencing.
It was like floating.
It was as if only his mind remained and that it was able to
transport its core wherever it wanted. Time had lost a little bit of its
importance to him. There were things he had missed while being
alive- things he'd never again have the time to complete. Being dead-
in whatever state, whether you were waiting to go back or tromping
the planet's surface in a borrowed body- meant that it was over for
you, and that there was no going back to being what you'd been
before you died in the first place.
Looking to the sky, he was able to see now that one of the doves
he'd noticed before now flew east, while the other one flew back again
to the west, out of his line of sight. A patch of heaven had shown
through.

452
 453

BROKEN WINGS FLY

Joshua Tauble, free from what he had known in life and in death, flew
in another direction entirely. There was nothing calling to him now,
and no place that he needed to go. At first, he was in total shock- the
motivation that had carried him through his lifeless years had become
all-consuming, and it had provided him with a purpose for continuing.
The leaves surrounding him smelled of the dampness one
associates with late spring, and it was hard for him to believe that it
was all truly over. As time had passed, Joshua had slowly started to
admire and not fear his new state, filling himself with the blackness he
tasted in the people around him. Now, that blackness no longer fed
him. Even though he could still sense its presence, their anguish no
longer whet his appetite, and Joshua saw that he needed to become a
new thing- a changed creature- and he anticipated his rebirth, not
knowing when it would come to him, or what this rebirth would make
him into.
Weeks had passed with no sign that this would ever really
happen.
All his crimes, every word that had ever issued forth from his
lips, returned to haunt him. There was no rhyme or reason to the
random order in which he now found himself compromised. One
minute, he was swaddled in cotton, sucking on his mother's tit and
reaching for the sky above her head; the next minute, he was hearing
the lock-down during his first night in an adult prison, and listening to
the heavy, labored breathing of his new cell-mate. Was this his
punishment? Was this what he was to receive, after he had chased
the demon across the country to this waste?
Was this what his time on earth had amounted to?
But maybe, he thought, maybe that's the lesson as to what my
time on earth has amounted to. Scenes of unimportance, the events
that mattered to no one else but me. Only I can feel my pain, and it is
my pain, I have lived it; I was the one who created it. There is no
tomorrow, only the sordid remnants of what we have done today.
The only redemption in life was to try harder to live as one
should, and each day was a new chance not to fuck it up again. Some
people took the opportunity to improve themselves, while other people
didn't. The people that took the time and energy to live toward the
better usually did alright, whereas the fools who continued in their
follies did not.

Time came and went for him, with the same speed with which it
had approached. He couldn't even count the sunrises anymore,
although he witnessed every one. There were times when he thought

453
 454

that his leafy enclosure might lose its adhesion, but this did not
happen.
What had the demon said as it put him up here?
'We may meet again, or we may not. If we do, please
remember that I gave you the gift of a second life. Enjoy it as you
will, although I can promise you nothing of the outcome. I will try to
heal you. I will try to conceal you...I will keep you safe from the
world. Eyes will not glance here. You will be safe, and your skin will
become smooth. You will be returned to yourself. You can become
the self you need to be.'

One day, in late June perhaps, he felt the spreading of his wings.
They were not the wings that had carried him before, the wings
he had shed after finding Ixxir. As he felt his hands and fingertips
over the surface of his body, he found that his wounds had been made
whole. There was no longer the gaping hole in his chest, where his
lungs ought to have been. There was no longer the sense of not being
complete. The only wounds that remained- and Joshua felt that he
could live with them- were tiny pin-sized holes in the palms of his
hands, and he imagined, the soles of his feet as well, judging from the
blood he could feel squishing inside his boots, between his toes.
But, above all else, he was alive- and that made all the
difference.
And being alive put him so much ahead of the game.
The tree into which he had sequestered himself was so
thoroughly foliated by early May that no one had seen him up here,
shivering with cold, lapsing between tortured sleep and a waking
forgetfulness; nothing called to him. No voice interrupted the wind
with his name.
And then it happened. Without meaning to, Joshua had rolled
over in his perch, safely hidden away from the world, and when he did,
he discovered his new wings. They were there, and yet they weren't,
but Joshua could feel them, and he knew instinctively that their arrival
signaled the end of his convalescence. He was free. To step down
from this cocoon was the first step towards something new; whatever
it was.
He regarded the ground around him as an alien might, his neck
crooked and his back bent to examine the soil. It was June. How long
had he been out? He felt as if he'd been sleeping on a prison cot once
again. His back was stiff and sore, and Joshua felt as if he needed
someone to throw their arms around him to crack his backbone. The
ache went all the way down into his shoes, which felt squishy, so he
decided to take them off. When he did, Joshua rubbed his feet on the
grass and saw that his injuries had healed. The blood was only the

454
 455

membrane from some old and ancient healing methodology and this
methodology had saved his life, for lack of a better way of phrasing it.
To say that it saved his life implied that he had been alive in the first
place, which he hadn't been.
And the demon, so foul for so long, had gifted him with life.
The thought to sprint along the highway didn't come to him for a
few moments. Once the idea seized him, however, it was the only
thing he felt he must do. The wings on his back felt stronger than the
ones he
had carried there before, and he wanted to try these new wings out.
Joshua didn't know or care if the traffic pealing by on the
highway next to him saw his antics or not, but he reared up and
sprinted about twenty feet before an amazing thing happening. His
wings- working independently of his mind, he was pretty sure- had
sprouted out to their full span and he was thirty, forty, seventy feet in
the air. His flight was instinctive, and his flight was ever upward.
He was finally free of this earth- free from this life- and Joshua
wanted to enjoy it for as long as it was meant to last. As he ascended,
he saw that there were other birds in the sky, and he knew what that
meant, but what did it matter to him? The moment was here, and his
life was now. The ground was in the past for him, and he would never
touch it again. The higher he flew into the sky, the farther away it
became.
At one point, Joshua looked back- and he remembered nothing.

455
 456

THE BACK OF BEYOND

Once Ixxir had assumed possession of the corpse, the skin seemed to
be reversing its pattern of self-immolation. Supple contours now
appeared where only moments before there had been nothing but a
sad, peeling, flaking mass of human epidermal matter. The skin was
growing tough and thick and fat with veins and capillaries in order to
better facilitate the flow of blood. As Ixxir raised its new hand to his
face, it found that it was able to see almost completely through its new
skin, as though it had been forged from cellophane plastic. It felt faint
as the blood drained into its elbow and so it placed its arm back down
by his side. Having the blood rush to its hands felt alright, and after a
moment it saw the reason why; its hands were still forming
themselves. This was good, Ixxir thought. Very good.
Timothy had spoken of things that were borrowed, or stolen, and
how they held no value in this world. But something that had been
given to you- like a chance to live- was precious in a way that Ixxir
had never encountered before. Not yet, anyway. Life was truly a gift.
And no one, anywhere, had ever given Ixxir anything.
That made all the difference in the world.
There was a clot of black, tarry pus that seemed to stem the
flow of progress. Wherever Ixxir felt that blob of whatever coursing
through its body, there followed immediately after it a sensation of
renewal. There was a hot, itchy, crawly sensation just beneath the
surface of its new skin, and Ixxir was hesitant to scratch at it for fear
of ripping open the flesh before it had gotten a chance to set properly
upon its frame. There was a long thin black clot on the back of its
forearm, but it dare not scratch it; it might permanently disfigure its
perfect new flesh.
It felt the skin fill in around its fingers, and there was an almost
odorless, faceless sort of thickening of flesh where the joints in its
fingers met the rest of its hand, and Ixxir could feel the differential in
the weight of its body as its outline was slowly being colored in.
That's what it felt like: being colored in. There were so many
sense memories flooded its head right now, it made it hard to
concentrate on the wonder of what was happening. I've done this
before- so why does this seem so important, so permanent? Is this
the last time?
Ixxir clenched its fist as a way of testing it out. Its brand new
skin was cooperating in perfect sympathy with its desires. Ixxir
pinched its fingers lightly over the corners of its cheeks and tugged its
mouth into a hackles grin and ambled off on its way, foot after foot,
pinwheeling like a dead body with its looseness.
With the way his skin felt- tight but a little loose, solid yet not to

456
 457

be trusted- it took Ixxir two days to work up the courage to look at

itself. This would be the final proof, whatever it was.
It wasn't afraid, at least not in the conventional sense of what
most people would understand. Looking in a mirror, trying to see at
least some remote resemblance to humanity in its features. A
resemblance, thought, it had seen, but nothing more than that. On
the surface, it was the same as any other human on the planet, but
there was a subtle apprehension beneath the surface, certainly. Ixxir
thought he sensed something a little more wooden below the
apprehension. The toes of its shoes were wet from walking through
the early morning grass, and the chill in the air around it made Ixxir
feel almost ill. But to live once again in the flesh- however
fraudulently- as it had never lived before brought the full weight of
existence down around its weary head. Still, it felt good merely to be.
Even the pain of its skin slowly congealing around his unmolded form
felt good.

It stopped in front of a mirror on the side of a portable wooden

hot dog stand and took in the view it offered. There was a pleasant-
looking man staring back at him with a world-weary smile upon his
face. The weariness was perhaps suggested by the eyes, which were
bloodshot. The skin around the eyes was cracked and wrinkled, as if
due to some obscene hyper-annuated aging process. Ixxir daubed at
the corner of one eye with the tip of its index finger when it saw the
fingerprints evaporating from the pad as if they had never been there.
A tiny seam opened itself up along the side of one finger, splitting the
skin all the way up to the fingernail. And it hurt. Goddamn, did it
hurt.
I have to get out of here, it thought, meaning not its locale, but
the body itself. If this body disintegrates with me inside of it, I won't
be able to escape, and here I'll be, not dead, but unable to live.
Looking up, Ixxir saw a 7-11 across the street from a Chevron
gas station. The sign next to the traffic signal read Belmont.

457
 458

TO ONE IN PARADISE
Poor dear, dead Courtney. Kelly deRenzi remembered the grim trail of
optical mechanics that had dangled from Nona's anus after he had
shoved her eyeball and its attendant accoutrement up her asshole.
She'd been dead for only a few minutes when he did this, but to have
done it while she was still alive would have tripled the thrill he felt with
the completion of their act together. It was to be their last act, the
last of many, but it was the one Kelly remembered most fondly. Her
death-fuck had been the very pinnacle of the entire scenario, and to
be returning to the scene of the crime- 2 S. 635 Tossilberry Avenue-
had created in him an erection so persistent that Kelly wished he could
masturbate before talking to the police at the house. Today the task
at hand was to pull on the mask of professional psychic Damon Lee
Mackler- an alias Kelly liked to use from time to time. This man
Mackler had volunteered to help the police to find serial murderers
many times in the past, but this particular time he was only being
asked to re-create the psychodrama that had preceded Courtney's
arrest. All the police wanted, they said, was a feel for what had been
happening in the house prior to the murder, as well as a glimpse into
the warped mental state of a self-professed born-again Christian man
who had been found covered in blood and skull-fucking his dead wife.
Poor dear, dead Courtney, who in another four days would be
found dead in his holding cell, but only after having smeared himself
from head to toe in his own fecal matter, as if from some bizarre
cleansing ritual. He would slit his own throat from earlobe to earlobe,
the exposed tissues forming a sick grin that mocked the horror it
attended. Courtney would use one of the springs from underneath the
bed he sat upon while soporifically awaiting news of his indictment for
eight counts of first degree homicide. He'd been appointed a public
defender because his marital assets were still frozen by court order,
but Courtney Randlehaus would perish before ever speaking a word to
his own attorney. His death would create a brief if predictably
inconsequential flurry in the newspapers about the safety of prisoners
from themselves, but his suicide would be taken as proof of his guilt.
If they only knew, Kelly thought to himself with a smile.
Poor dear, dead Courtney, who couldn't stomach the knowledge
that his wife hadn't been a sexual leper like himself. Nona had, in
fact, acted Christ-like towards the sexual lepers of the world, taking on
all comers- which was probably the reason the two of them had met
and married in the first place. They'd each been two pieces of the
same puzzle, and each one of them mirrored the deficiencies of the
other. Ah, the duplicities of the suburbs!
Poor dear, dead Courtney, who thought that God existed and

458
 459

that He gave a shit about His world.

Kelly wanted to get a pack of cigarettes and a few pencil leads

before making his way over to the house. These items were necessary
for the job. He also needed something to drink. This was thirsty
work. Acting always was. There was a perverse pleasure in getting
just so close to the investigation, and this was one he wanted to see.
Kelly wanted to hear what the cops had to say about Courtney. How
did they try to explain away the sick truth of this world? How did they
view these atrocities, and then return to a normal life? How could a
cop look inside of someone else's head and not come away infested
with its contents? The answer to that question was simple enough;
they couldn't.

There was a gas station on the corner of Feldman and Belmont-

near the Layne-Truro Technical College in Fleetly- and Kelly was
figuring that the drive from where he was now to where he was going
would give him enough time to smoke three cigarettes before he got
to the house- four if he took the side streets. Cigarettes somehow
seemed to pinch and tune his voice so that it sounded larger than the
room it was occupying, and that helped to convince his audience of the
reality of what they were witnessing. If they were menthol, it gave
just the right effect.
Because he didn't need gas and the entrance to the gas station
was blocked by a rusted-out minivan full of senior citizens anyway,
Kelly wound up pulling into the 7-11 across the street from the gas
station.
What difference could it make in the long run?
His mind wandered and landed on the perfectly-shaped ass on
the woman in front of him in line. She was wearing black pumps with
the kind of fancy stockings with the bows at the ankles, and the hem
of her skirt came to perhaps the uppermost crease on the back of her
knee. She was a perfect specimen, to say the least, and at this hour,
such perfection was a welcome sight. It was good to see that the
random collision of genes could still induce and produce beauty in the
dead, dirty, dreary world. There was an insouciant curl to her upper
lip and a certain plumpness to her body that caused Kelly to fantasize
about how it would feel to process her, hold her corpse over a bathtub,
bleeding her fluids and faith into the drain, along with the piss, tears,
blood and hair.
Up from the skies, he heard Aida, Verdi cries.
The clerk was carding people for cigarettes and the girl in front
of Kelly was now looking for her driver's license, noisily digging
through her purse. The muscles in the backs of her calves worked

459
 460

themselves elliptically and effortlessly, and it dawned on Kelly that he

had no legal I.D. If he didn't look- what was it now, twenty-five or
twenty-six?- he might not get the cigarettes he needed for his
performance.
Kelly leaned forward a bit to see if he could read her name off of
her driver's license. He couldn't see the last name because her thumb
was covering it, but her first name was kind of easy to see: Georgina.
Did he have everything?
Cigarettes? Well, we'll see here in a moment.
Ah....
Something to drink!
He turned on his heel and went back into the store, farther away
from the sunlight that warmed the ceramic floor, and Kelly found what
he was looking for- what he'd really been looking for all along- in the
third cooler door along the cooler wall, the third one down from the
left.
A twenty-ounce Pepsi.
Kelly's hand had pulled open the door and he was leaning inside
when he felt a sudden warmth on the back of his hand. After a second
or two, Kelly perceived the warmth to be human in origin and he
looked through the glass of the door to see if he might know who was
touching his hand.
Peering from behind a fog of frosted glass that prevented direct
sight, someone was looking at him. And he was smiling, like a reptile.
Kelly stood up to meet him, but he didn't remove the hand that was
now resting on top of his own. That was part of his mistake, because
that skin-to-skin contact had formed the first circuit link Ixxir wanted.
The whole exchange happened in less than seven and a half
seconds.
As Kelly looked him over, the guy's eyes were all wide and loopy
and he looked like he'd been sniffing super glue- and not just on a
weekend joy-popping basis, either. There was the constant snort as
he breathed through his nose, almost a guttural roar- like an alligator,
Kelly mused to himself- and the dude was sweating profusely. There
was blood collected in the corner of one of his eyes, and the guy didn't
look to be too steady on his feet- but still, there was that smile.
And that smile suggested knowledge.
I know you.
Kelly had felt the words rather than heard them, and it wasn't
even a sense of hearing; there was a swelling of rushing blood in his
ears and a rushing sound that removed everything else from his head.
The words had come from inside of himself. And he did know this guy.
A doctor.
He was a doctor. More than this, he was the doctor.

460
 461

In the newspaper.
You don't remember?
The doctor who had died in that skin operation or whatever. His
body was missing from the morgue. Had been on the nightly news for
days now maybe even a week. There were rumors that it was going
to be buried in secret under a different name to prevent anyone from
exhuming it. There were insane rumors that the body had needed to
be buried because it was radioactive or some such bullshit. Kelly
didn't believe any of it.
There were rumors that the guy was still alive, somewhere.
Kelly was just about to say something when the doctor's hand
shot out and grabbed his cock. As it happened, it went down so fast
he couldn't even react, and to tell you the truth, it didn't feel bad at
all. Not physically. But it sickened Kelly to feel himself becoming even
marginally aroused by the heat of this monstrosity's hand through the
flimsy material of his sweat pants. He remembered that there was a
small hole in the crotch of this particular pair of sweat pants, and he
wasn't wearing any underwear. Which meant that the skin of this
thing was really touching his dick, and that formed the second circuit
link.
The squeeze was gentle, but firm, and suddenly the eyes on the
face in front of him came into hideously clear focus. The pupils
weren't as vague anymore, and they had become slitted, like those of
a Viper. The pattern of speckles in the irises were a hellish patchwork
of orange.
The world around him- the store he was standing in, everything
but the fist massaging his cock- melted away, much the same way it
had the last time he'd fucked Courtney. Only the hand remained.
Only the hand.
This is what you know after; this is what you knew before.
And it was over. Kelly felt a sudden suction at the back of his
head and the next thing he knew, he was struggling to maintain his
stance. His skin was dripping off of him, as if he'd been
boiled in a kettle of fat. Someone leaned over him, pointed at his
face, and he screamed something he couldn't hear. His world was a
mass of bloody bubbles.
Kelly willed the muscles in his neck to twitch, and they did
twitch.
His head rolled slightly to one side and he saw his own shoes,
that he had just laced up while bent over on the sidewalk in front of
the 7-11.
If I'm looking at my shoes, then where the fuck am I?
'You're where I used to be,' his own voice said, from inside
another body. He was hearing his own voice but it wasn't being

461
 462

filtered through the blood and the bones in his head. He was hearing
his voice the way it sounded on an answering machine message. It
sounds like you, and you know for certain that it's your voice, but it's
not what you sound like.
Why can I only turn my eyes? Why can't I turn my head?
'Because your precious little head is turning into slush.'
Looking up from there, Kelly deRenzi then saw his own leg.
There was a splash of orange paint, it looked like, all over his shoes.
He tried to turn his head further, but his vision was suddenly cut in
half. His own face then leaned down and looked him in the eye- and
there was only one eye, because as soon as the doctor's body hit the
floor, his right eye had sunken completely back into its socket. Kelly
had, in his last few seconds of worldly sight, seen a certain malicious
knowledge in the eyes of the face he had formerly occupied. He saw
now that his life as Kelly deRenzi was over.
That is, of course, assuming that it ever had really begun. And,
even with only one eye, he saw the inconsequence of it all.

Now it could relax; it was safely inside of its host- its final host.
It sniffed at the air; nope- no one else was in here. The cells in the
boy's brain had the clean-swept appearance that humans would
associate with the way people clean their homes around Thanksgiving
or Christmas Day or some other big holiday get-up, but for Ixxir it was
simply perfect. It could feel the electrical welcome of the grey cells
and this body had something different- this body had the smell of
home.
This bothered the demon greatly. It was tired and mentally
beaten and didn't have time for any of the bullshit of a changeover
sickness.
There was something weird, something oddly familiar about the
fibers in the tissue it inhabited. The skin on its body felt more like skin
than any had in what seemed like a million years. But for how long?
How long have I-
-and it stopped short of completing the thought, for just so
suddenly and so clearly in its ears could it hear the sound of a baby
crying. It wasn't far. It was here, in these woods. Close. The child
was close.
All at once: Where are my children? Are my babies safe?
Ixxir closed its eyes, and it heard a thousand voices:
We are here, Mama. We are safe. We are where you've kept us
for our safety. Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo
of you.
The thousand was cut down to a solo, and Ixxir heard Kelly's
voice- he heard the voice of the boy whose body it was now inhabiting.

462
 463

It was only after Ixxir had heard it three times that it knew what this
insane jabbering really meant: I am here, Mama…I am here, Mama...I
am here....
Looking down upon its body, Ixxir noticed something shiny that
it had not seen in ages. Picking up Kelly's necklace, Ixxir stood in
silence, turning the medallion over and over in its hand obliviously.
This Ixxir did as the store personnel- and a nearby cop- attended to
the man laying in a pool of orange liquid skin, spreading on the tile by
the cooler, just behind the deli sandwich counter, who had just
grabbed his cock and then melted in front of everyone's open eyes.
Ixxir didn't notice them at all.
It felt an odd chill pricking its way slowly down its spine. The
design of the amulet was familiar, but what the fuck- I've been alive a
long time; there is nothing new under the sun, is there? Of course
not.
But was there?
Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo of you.
The necklace had been badly bent and restored with a pair of
pliers, but Ixxir was able to recognize the translucent V- created by
the venom it had injected into the two lines that came together to
make the Southern-most point in the circle. How long ago has that
been? Where was I when I did that? Could it have been Marrakech?
What had it stood for? Why was I in Marrakech? Oh, yes, I remember
now, Ixxir now thought, its head glowing with regained wisdom. Am
I…am I…where I am? I...I can hear in my head again, but there's
something I have to remember, something I could never lose. I was
something before. I used to have my own skin, and my own soul, and
the biggest part of my earthly existence was always my name my
name and my name was, was-
Valpolichella! Allicion Valpolichella! Deyvd! My father's name-
'Do you want to press charges?' the cop asked.
Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo of you.
The cop had almost ruined her moment of attainment. She
tested her voice box, which felt ashen and craggy and as if Kelly
deRenzi had been in dire need of a lung-brush before she had taken
over.
She laughed. 'Do I wanna press charges? Against what?'
The cop realized the non-sequitor he had just slipped into and
simply shut the hell up. There was nothing to be said. Why would
anyone in their right frame of mind bother to file charges against a
pool of skin?
There was the screeching tire-cry of an ambulance pulling up
fast in the parking lot, but that was a little like using a First Aid kit and
a few Band-Aids after a bad sky-dive when what one needed was

463
 464

prayer and a mop.

Walking back to the girl that Kelly had been eying before he
came back to pick out a drink- there were about two minutes worth of
trace impressions from Kelly's mind still floating around in his head-
and she was stricken at once. The physical resemblance was
remarkable.
Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo of you.
Had the spell worked, from so many years ago?
How wide has my blood been spread? Why do so many great
men bite their lips in the middle of the night? Is it me? Am I why?
I'm not just in the village anymore, am I? I'm in the world outside. I
have made this world.
Allicion could feel her newly-formed vagina moistening as she
looked at the girl from behind. Her tongue touched her lips and for
the first time in centuries her saliva tasted sweet to her- so sweet- so
full of potential life. Touching her fingertips to her face, Allicion
marveled at the tiny fine blonde hairs that lined the backs of her
fingers and at the scabs and wounds that quietly died along the length
of her body, the same infirmities then replacing themselves with new
unblemished tissues.
Even the former roughness of Kelly's knuckles- the red, clotted
scabs and scrapes that had circled the backs of his hands- they were
stitching themselves up nicely now, and in a minute there was no trace
of them.
There were other changes as well.
Her nipples- both of them, now- were stiffening, suffused with
blood.
Blood! I have my blood again!
The girl standing in front of her was pretty- almost ethereally so,
if people still used that sort of language anymore- and her eyes were a
shade of brown uncommon to those without at least a fractional
mixture of Middle Indian and Native American.
Allicion chuckled to consider- it was a crazy, husky-throated
giggle.
Approaching the girl, Allicion licked her lips- oh, for the taste of
it!- and cleared her throat. Georgina- her name was Georgina- turned
her head with only the slightest movement, her hair drifting back over
the shoulders of her black leather jacket. The jacket had seen better
days. Georgina's eyes twitched, and suddenly they felt very watery
and reddened, as if she had just smoked an excess of tasty but gamey
pot.
'Don't I know you? From the college?'
'We know each other from farther back than that,' Allicion said.

464
 465

Georgina Chudwick's eyes began smarting fiercely, all at once,

and her head was starting to feel thick, and she felt as if she was
getting ready to-
Faint.
Your name was Faint, at least it was when I met you, and I've
been waiting to cross your path again. I have a debt to repay, and to
live in peace I will need to eject you from the earth. You made me
what I've been, so goddamn long ago, and you're in there. You're
hiding. I know you're in there even if you don't. I know that you
would have kept your mind from activating you until your body was
twenty-five years of age, to protect yourself before you're reborn into
your most potent form. But I won't allow it. I know where the soul
nigger lives, and I wanna see him. I wanna see the soul nigger dance.
You made me slither the earth of your abeyance and I hate you
for that. I'm walking out of here free and clear. I'm not leaving you
to roam the earth as someone who knows me intimately- someone
who will track me down to destroy me at some future date. I cannot
travel back to where I'm from, because you will follow me there if I
allow you to live.
You will try to kill me, if I allow you to live.
I cannot allow you to live.
Go home, Georgina. Go home and kill yourself. Your friend is
dead, and I'm in your head. How will you perceive the next nine
words to come out of my mouth? Will you go home, and do exactly as
I ask you to? Will you go kill yourself for me? Because, even though
you don't remember Faint- my dear, sweet Georgina- I smell him on
you. I will save you from his presence, and I will spare you the pain of
his birth.
Here's a hint: sleeping pills are quick, easy and pretty painless.
'We know each other, then?' Georgina persisted.
'In a way,' Allicion said, smiling, trying not to crinkle the newly-
unscabbed flesh at the corners of her eyes. With a giggle, she realized
that she had been battling with Crow's feet for eight hundred and fifty
years, and only now was she starting to make any real progress. 'We
had a friend in common. A good friend indeed. Her name was...Susan
Baker.'
For a moment, all was silence. But not for long.
Georgina's eyes widened with shock and tender recognition. 'Did
you know Susan? Where did you know her from? Were you a friend
of hers?'
'We met a while ago. We've kept in touch, you might say.'
'Did I see you at the funeral? Was that where I saw you?'
'Perhaps, but I can't say for sure, because I wasn't there.'
'You weren't?' Georgina asked.

465
 466

'No. I had practically forgotten the cunt by then.'

Your blood sings with our echoes- our blood is the echo of you.
Allicion held her open hand out in front of Georgina so that the
girl could see the curl of bloody tissue that was resting in her palm. It
looked like the beginning of a child. Georgina could barely see it at
first, but the tissue continued to grow and it quadrupled its size in a
matter of seconds until Georgina thought she could see something
moving around inside the verboten membrane- something that was
vaguely fetal.
'Then I remembered her. She was very pretty. For such a cunt.'
Georgina Chudwick discovered that she could no longer speak.
She couldn't feel any part of her body at all.
'You have the same color eyes, Georgina, and that was what
gave you away to me. I called to you- I sought you out, and you
came to me. I wanted you, and here you are. Your eyes betrayed
you, but they are still quite beautiful. There is one crucial difference
between the two specimens. Your eyes are always so dark, so luscious
and brooding, and I would never seek to alter that. I see pain in your
eyes, and so it pleases me. Pain is a beautiful emotion. But there was
a different element in Susan's eyes- something I didn't like...a little
too jovial.'
Allicion smiled at her, now knowing what the response would be.
Georgina stared at Allicion, who now looked more female than
she had when this conversation had started, only thirty ancient
seconds ago.
'So I fixed the problem. I fixed what was wrong with her, but
like all tragic flaws it was still present in her character up until the end,
and there was nothing I could do to prevent what happened. Your
friend Susan died with a very silly look in her eyes, I'm afraid to say. I
ate her pain as she died, and the more she fought it, the sweeter her
death tasted.'
Georgina looked at him, not knowing what he meant.
And then, suddenly, she knew. Not all of it, but she knew.
There was something in his eyes- didn't he look like a girl?- something
that looked a little...gleeful. Looking into Allicion’s eyes, Georgina saw
the skin being flayed from Susan's back; in her ears she heard Susan's
mewlings as Kelly had stripped the muscle and fat from her ribs. She
saw the point of the blade spreading a gaping hole in Susan's throat.
Her will must have been strong, because she broke free of the
hold Allicion had put upon her. The cop was in between them inside of
two seconds- confused, yet useful- and Kelly blinked away his
surprise.
Georgina stared at him. There was nothing she could do.
He smiled at her. If she could have moved, Georgina would

466
 467

have stricken the man in front of her. But she couldn't. Of course not.
Turning towards her, willing Georgina's eyes toward her own so
that she might see, Allicion ran her tongue over her lips and curled her
eyebrows at the girl, if only for effect. With that, Kelly deRenzi's
former body turned on its booted heel and left the store, never once
looking back.

To encounter, conquer and not die is to absorb that experience.

We are one thing before, and we are another thing afterward. What
are we, in that moment of transitional status; what are we, in the
nanoseconds of Becoming? Do our memories offer us comfort and do
memories speak the Truth anyway? What are we- between what we
were, and what we will be?
Are we animals?
Are we gods?
Are we ourselves?
Are we anything?
Perhaps not.
But to paraphrase a man named John Belushi, whom Ixxir had
once occupied for a few short months some years earlier, To Be sure
beat the shit out of Not To Be. Simple enough.
Logic in and of itself was quite admirable- even if one had spent
decades and centuries toiling in opposition to logic. The sky above
was filled with low, dank tones of ominous separation, and peering out
from behind a glittery fogbank of scattered identities, terminal decades
and fortuitous centuries- swirled safely deep within the tainted hollows
of Kelly deRenzi's skull- Allicion Valpolichella smiled.

467
 468

A great many ideas and inspirations- from both within and without- go into
the writing of any book of fiction. I’ve written eight of them so far, and
each one of them has been a vastly different experience, with respect to
which ideas hit me when and so on and so forth- and so I would like to thank,
without naming, all the different little chapters in my life. Neither the
journey, nor the words, would ever have been quite the same without you.
Even if you were not noticing these individual and beguiling moments of
beauty, clarity and striking definition- I was rhyming and cataloguing them,
al the same. Beauty comes in many strange disguises, culminating in many
glorious aberrations, and most time we only recognize it later, after the
fact. If not noticing these things at the time was my sin, then I hope that
my salvation lies in the telling of the tale. Everyone will see flashes of
themselves, but please- in the spirit of fair judgment- pull back and take in
the entire picture. If there is any blame, it is mine. I did the best I could.

Beauty is both harsh and terrible in its blinding swiftness. Sometimes it

hurts- and sometimes it doesn’t. By the time that it occurs to you to cling to
it- it’s already gone. It is a lesson always known but never learned. Some of
you aided me, while others impeded me- but in any instance, you invaded my
processes, and for this I swear that I am eternally grateful to you.

It is a difficult and dicey business, at best, to attempt to measure the

beauty in the spaces between the spaces, but that’s exactly the task at hand
when you’re trying to create a work of truth, beauty and timelessness. Some
people helped, and some people helped with hindrance. These myriad
interruptions came in many forms, and sometimes they were a blessing.

Sometimes, though, they were a curse, and those are the people I’m thinking
of as I write these last few lines. It has been said that hate is a wasted
emotion and is the equivalent of letting people live rent-free inside of your
head. I try to not act out this scenario, and I try to not look back in anger.
It does no one any good in the long run. But I DO remember. If I’m being
purposefully vague here, those of you who are curious know why. And those
of you that I’m speaking of know exactly who the fuck you are.

-DR. LARRY MITCHELL

468
 469

DR. LARRY MITCHELL

drlarrymitchell@gmail.com

http://www.myspace.com/drlarrymitchell
http://twitter.com/drlarrymitchell
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1262303142

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=3536392

Copyright © 2008 Dr. Larry Mitchell- Volvulus Press. All rights reserved.

469