Penny Dreadful

  What about Jimmy Sky, said McDaniel. Do you think Jimmy killed him?

  You, said Moon. You motherfucker. Jimmy is no killer.

  Jimmy Sky, said McDaniel. His voice dripping scorn. What kind of name is that?

  McDaniel stood up now and Moon glared at him for a long twisting moment and maybe his eyes played some kind of trick on him or maybe the clouds were shifting fast up there but something happened to McDaniel’s face. His nostrils were suddenly three sizes too big and there was a ridge across his forehead and his skin was like leather and those were fucking fangs jutting up over his lip. He looked like a dog, a dog-man. Then the shadows relaxed and his eyes went normal and McDaniel wore his own thin-lipped pale face.

  What do you know about Jimmy Sky? said Moon.

  Not much, said McDaniel. I know you won’t find him, though.

  Moon lunged at him with a vague idea of thumbing the bastard’s eyes out and McDaniel snorted, stepping sideways. Moon fell against a rack of garbage pails with an embarrassing crash. He lay there in a heap for two seconds, three. He gazed up at the sky and thought of poor old Charlie Brown and how often the round-headed kid had this very same view of the world. Moon shoved himself back to his feet, panting. McDaniel hopped forward with the dainty footwork of a ballet dancer and punched him in the throat with an elegant, blinding left-handed jab. And Moon went down again, easily.

  Take the day off, said McDaniel. You look like shit. You look a lot like our dead Fred, there.

  I walked in the heart of downtown. Where the tall, mirrored buildings gleamed. One of my friends was a lawyer of sorts, with an office in the labyrinth. Griffin, the smiler.

  I moodily kicked at a piece of broken glass, spinning it into the street. I wondered if the fucker was still my friend. Maybe not. The last time I saw him was two or three years ago. Griffin had dragged me to some very popular but hateful nightclub that was so packed with mad, happy people that the one unisex bathroom was like a furious game of Twister. People had been living in there, growing rapidly old as they exchanged drugs and money without pause. They had chatted on cell phones, smoking and drinking. And they had noisily fucked each other in the stalls. It was nothing out of the ordinary, right. But that shit gets pretty tedious, after a while. I had finally gone out to get some air, to urinate in peace behind an abandoned car. Griffin followed me, and I clearly remember asking Griffin in a sleepy voice what time it was and Griffin turning to face me, grinning. His eyes like wet black stones.

  What time is it, said Griffin.

  Menacing.

  What the fuck. The fuck.

  I had just stared at him, blank and probably smiling. And in a moment of universal weirdness, Griffin pissed all over my legs. He shook his dick at me, then breezily told me to fuck off and walked away. He hailed a cab and left me standing there in damp, stinking pants.

  And I had ended up going home with a drunk little bank teller who apparently was equipped with no sense of smell. I apparently collapsed on her kitchen floor without fucking her, which annoyed her. She called the cops on me, then herself went to sleep before they arrived. Two moody beat cops did show up, an hour or so later. They banged on the door until I woke up and let them in. They smirked when I identified myself. The bank teller was by then mostly naked and snoring on the couch. The uniforms looted her fridge and made a big show of checking out her body, cheerfully deriding my lack of taste.

  They gave me a ride home and I crawled like a rat into bed with my wife, Lucy. She wasn’t dead yet, then. But she was dying pretty efficiently. Cancer and depression were ganging up on her without a bit of mercy.

  And I had not seen Griffin again after that. I didn’t expect him to have changed much. Nobody changes, really. Griffin would literally pounce on this coke.

  Now traffic swelled around me. The noise and shock of overpopulation.

  Vertigo, nausea.

  It was boring to freak out all the time. If I could only remind myself to concentrate, nothing rattled me. I was a cool one at heart, really. Oh, yeah. If I was dead, maybe. Then I might relax. Downtown always troubled me. I was careful to avoid the pedestrian mall, the gauntlet of gift shops and juice huts along which senior citizens and random tourists gamely refused to buy ugly overpriced T-shirts while sullen kids reclined in the shade, begging for spare change.

  Griffin worked in a handsome brown slab of a building. It looked like a coffin standing on end.

  I walked into the lobby and was immediately surrounded by mirrors. A security guard leered at me while I patiently checked out my reflection. I wanted to tell him how fucking pitiful it was, how tiresome, this irrational urge to confirm my existence in one mirror after another.

  The guard eyeballed me as I walked to the elevators but that was all.

  I was obviously no one to worry about.

  The elevator was empty and way too big. There was room enough to spare, I reckoned cheerfully, for a dozen commuters plus a nice herd of actual sheep. I stood in the middle and looked at my feet as the box rose slowly, endlessly to the sixteenth floor.

  A female receptionist coldly told me to wait.

  I waited. I sat on a blue leather loveseat as the woman whispered to Griffin through her headset. There were no magazines in the waiting area. There was one gloomy painting on the wall that could be anything: a gray-and-black landscape of a Scottish moor, a chemically altered examination of a rain cloud. After a few brief moments of study, I concluded that it could only be a giant human brain, floating in a sea of alcohol. I asked the receptionist how much the piece might cost. She looked me carefully up and down, and I knew what she saw. A skinny drifter with ragged clothes and a desert tan, uncombed hair and gray lips still numb from the wind. A paranoid, lonely fucker who badly needed new shoes and who kept rubbing his nose as if it were numb and dripping. A person of dubious means. Not someone who could begin to pay Griffin what must be a very handsome retainer.

  Eve:

  She lay flat on her back, still wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. No concept of time. She was like a child and a few minutes could mean anything. Hours were arbitrary. They weren’t real. She sighed. It was maybe nine o’clock, or ten. The light had that flat, midmorning quality that she usually hated. She hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours and she wasn’t really tired. She felt a little bit jet lagged, really. Day was night and so on. Boring. Her body was just confused by the sudden shift between worlds. The night before was hazy in her mind.

  Adore leaned over her.

  The swing and flash of the razor. The frantic wings, the swelling orange light. A Redeemer with the lips of a monkey and now the touch of anxiety when she tried to remember everything that happened and it’s only a game, she told herself. It’s a game.

  She turned her head to look at Christian. He was curled naked on his side, facing her. His limbs were too stiff, unyielding. He was pretending to sleep.

  There was a spot of dried blood on his cheek, a splash of rust. She had cut him pretty good. He now had a nasty jagged scratch across the bridge of his nose and one eyelid, like he had tangled with a cat. That eyelid might permanently droop, she thought. Which would either make him look very stupid, insane or sleepy. He wouldn’t like it at all. He had blubbered a few meaningless French phrases and accused her of trying to maim him, to blind him. Eve had merely shrugged and reminded him that she didn’t like people to grab her. And that she enjoyed fucking with him, with his mind. She couldn’t help it.

  Christian was sexy, very sexy. Beyond sexy. He was one of those guys that sucked people into his wake, male and female. It was nice to be near him. He smelled good and he was talented in bed. But he was melodramatic when it came to the game of tongues and his face had turned fairly purple when she mentioned that she might just quit. A lovely shade of purple.

  But she did feel a little sorry for him, and so she had calmly made up a bed for Mingus on the couch, her heart fluttering foolishly at the sight of an indentation in the crushed velvet that might have been left by Phineas.
His head, his bent elbow. His foot. Jesus Christ. She was such a simple girl and all she wanted was a big brother. Mingus thanked her silently and laid himself down, pale as a monk.

  Then she had allowed Christian into her bed.

  He shed his clothes in a hurry, like she might change her mind.

  But there wasn’t going to be any sex, she told him.

  Oh please, Goo. Give us a break.

  She wondered if he was aware that he constantly referred to himself as a collective. If this was merely a peculiar side effect of the game. This apparent splitting, this fragmentation of selves. Because she often thought of herself and Goo as separate but equal.

  Meanwhile, Christian had fiddled with his penis until it became hard and red. He showed it to her with creepy, boyish pride, as if he thought she couldn’t possibly say no to such a handsome sight. Manifest destiny, or something.

  I am not Goo today, she said.

  This made him whine.

  Eve finally told him to jerk off, if he must. But not to come on her. And not to poke her or prod her with it, or casually try to slip it in while she was asleep. She wasn’t kidding. Christian had played with himself for a while, sulking. Then pretended to fall asleep.

  That was a half hour ago. Maybe he really was asleep. Eve blew on his eyelids and he didn’t flinch. She squeezed his soft penis like it was a peach and she couldn’t decide if it was ripe. His penis was pretty long, when hard. About nine inches, he had told her once. He mentioned it casually, as if he were bored by the subject. But he had measured it, of course. Nine thrilling inches. It was too skinny and curved, however. It was what she imagined a dog’s penis might be. The way it stabbed painfully into her uterus, sharp and bony.

  Christian now began to snore.

  She hesitated, then reached out and touched his hair. It was very confusing, this relationship. She didn’t know if she liked him at all. But when she was Goo, she loved him. She wanted his children. It was a game, okay. She was playing a character. Eve stroked his fine black hair and her fingers caught in a funny tangle. His hair was matted with something. She worked her fingers through it and they came away sticky and brown. This was dried blood.

  Eve closed her eyes.

  Griffin appeared through wide sliding doors that literally purred open, cool and silent. It wasn’t bad but a really sinister whooshing noise would have been much more effective. He wore a glossy Italian suit the color of bloodwine and it seemed he had begun shaving his head since I last saw him as his skull was now the same pale creamy pink as my own bare ass.

  Are you going bald? I said.

  I am bald.

  Yes. I can see that.

  Griffin extended his hand. There was a small tattoo on the inside of his wrist, like a black coin.

  Was your hair falling out, though?

  Yes, he said. It was like plucking feathers from a dead chicken. He shrugged. I decided to shave it instead. The girls seem to like it.

  I’m sure.

  Griffin stood there, unbending. His hand still hanging between us like a knife and a knife given as a gift will always bring bad luck. I stood up and shook his hand and the contact was cold but weirdly lacking pressure. Griffin’s eyes drifted to focus on my eyebrows and I wondered if that was just a lawyer thing. Or did he truly want to avoid the eyes. I stared back at him, smiling with some reluctance.

  Griffin bowed his head slightly and I hesitated, then touched the man’s scalp. Oily and hot, almost feverish.

  What do you want? said Griffin.

  Oh, well. I’m back in town. Thought I would say hello.

  Griffin smiled the smile of a gorilla, a chimp. He showed way too many teeth and a ridge of pale gray gums. That’s funny, he said. That’s a killer.

  I shrugged, uneasy. Why is it funny?

  Because you don’t like me, said Griffin.

  No. Not at all.

  The receptionist was staring at us throughout this exchange, her lips parted. A bright glow of sweat in the thin blond fuzz along her cheekbones. Eyes glazed and blue, she chewed on her tongue and she looked mesmerized, as if she was home alone, watching a little soft porn on cable. Griffin flicked a finger at her and she abruptly began to type.

  Nice, I said.

  Let’s go in my office, Griffin said. I have champagne, of a kind.

  Moon:

  Moon was parked on a swiveling stool at Lulu’s Dough-nut Shoppe. His throat was killing him, literally. It felt like he had swallowed a mouthful of glass and what the hell happened back there.

  He had provoked McDaniel, apparently. The motherfucker had a tight little ass, an irritating accent. Bad teeth. And very fast hands. Moon sighed and shifted his own ass around, trying to get comfortable. His hefty buttocks fairly melted over the sides of his stool. Moon knew what his father would say. Old man Moon would suck on his false teeth and swear that McDaniel would be speaking German right about now if it wasn’t for us. And learning to like it. Maybe so, but that does me no good. He wondered if McDaniel was up to something nefarious or just fucking with him. Moon realized he was an easy target these days, what with his poor work habits and his body odor problems. Anyway. Jimmy Sky was nobody’s favorite cop, but he didn’t kill people. He especially didn’t kill other cops.

  Moon had a headache. He would worry about it later. And he would watch and wait for a chance to pay McDaniel back for this sore throat. He would wait years, if he had to. One day the motherfucker would fall asleep in the wrong place and wake up with his hat on fire and his hands cuffed to his feet.

  Okay, then. He wanted to get drunk and concentrate on his breakfast. He had been coming to Lulu’s every morning without fail for years. Lulu was long dead, or never existed. Wiley, a man who claimed to be her husband or stepbrother, ran the place now. He was a grumpy little man who was deadly serious about doughnuts. He wasn’t interested in anything else. Wiley always wore strangely colorful clothes. He was a peacock. Today he wore a purple T-Shirt with black-and-white pants and yellow shoes. He was a freak, maybe. But he made the best doughnuts in the city. And he spoke very elegant English in a snotty voice, like a college professor.

  Moon had once asked him about the inexplicable hyphen in the word “doughnut.”

  Wiley had merely shrugged. He said that Lulu had always been too liberal with punctuation, as if this had been an irreversible condition, something he had learned to live with.

  Moon stared down at his place. Four fat doughnuts, arranged like the face of a clock. Blueberry at twelve o’clock. Maple swirl at three. Cinnamon at six and honey glazed at nine, to clean the palate. He drank coffee with a splash of bourbon and chased it with concentrated orange juice. He didn’t smoke before noon, or he tried not to.

  Dead cop with throat ripped out. Like a wolf had done it, a wild dog.

  Moon finished his coffee and took a pull of bourbon straight from the pint. He lit a cigarette and noticed that his palms were sweating, they were dripping. It had been quite a while since he had been drunk like this, in public. He felt a stab of something like guilt. What the hell. He had no wife, no therapist to answer to. He was a cop, by God. And he was the only cop in the place. His fellow officers didn’t care much for Wiley and his fruity clothes.

  Black eyes and crooked nose and a face forgotten already. Hands in his fucking pockets.

  Moon wiped his hands with a napkin and fought down a mouthful of bile and he knew he was out of shape, okay. It took a little strength, a little staying power to get drunk so early in the day. Intestinal fortitude. Moon swabbed out his mouth and tongue with the sweaty napkin and tossed it aside in disgust. He had the intestines of a little old lady. He was irregular. He had maybe one successful bowel movement a week, and it was pretty painful. It was rough. The bathroom was his personal torture chamber, lately. It was like he was passing a fucking stone in there.

  This was a lot of bullshit, though.

  Moon wasn’t worried about his bowels, or his own guilt. He could shake off guilt like it was nothing, like a coat of
morning dew. Moon would rather have a belly full of guilt than a touch of the flu, any day. But now he was distracting himself from the truth. And the truth was, he was a little worried about Poe. The guy was his friend, yeah. But he was a freak. He was purely section eight. Poe was a delusional fuckup, okay. He had been bounced off the cops for being too schizophrenic and was suspected but never implicated, never charged in connection with the shooting death of his wife.

  And most recently he somehow got himself mixed up in the alleged transportation and sale of his own illegally harvested organ. That was a good one, wasn’t it. That was a humdinger.

  There were sixteen motherfuckers just like Phineas Poe, hanging around the methadone clinic and the homeless shelter right now. Sixteen guys with no money, no cigarettes. Sixteen guys with their brains spilling out of their skulls one teaspoon at a time.

  And what did he do first thing this A.M.

  Moon rubbed his belly and thought about it.

  Oh, well. Nothing much. He gave the bastard a handful of false identities and a lump of confiscated coke and turned him loose on a missing persons case that didn’t officially exist. He could only wonder what sort of mayhem would come of that.

  Wiley glanced up from his crossword. He cleared his throat politely and licked his lips, as if it was a great effort to speak. What ails you, Sheriff? he said.

  Nothing, said Moon. I feel just like a king.

  You have hardly touched your doughnuts.

  Moon stubbed out his cigarette and plucked the blueberry doughnut from his plate. His stomach heaved momentarily, but he ate the thing in three quick bites.

  Jimmy Sky, where was Jimmy Sky.

  And five minutes later Moon crashed out of Lulu’s, the glass door bending before his bulk and splashing onto the sidewalk. He broke the fucking door, shattered it. He was probably bleeding. There were tiny white fragments of glass on his arms and shoulders. It was in his patch of hair. Fucking hell. He inspected himself for cuts and scratches, cursing the door. The thing must have been defective. He turned to look at Wiley. And Wiley was nonplussed. In fact, he was turning orange about the ears and neck. He looked like one unhappy tangerine.