Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse.
More generally speaking: Whatever is born will ultimately grow into a nightmarish obscenity—in the grand scheme of things.
Speaking for myself: There are no angels unless they are Angels of Death... and I would never again doubt my place among them or lose my resolve to serve in their wild ranks.
7
In order to function with any effectiveness in the world, you—and that includes you—are forced to make a number of absurd assumptions. Chief among these is the assumption that yours is a reasonably sound mind in a more or less sound body moving within a rock-solid reality. Even an alcoholic like Sherry Mercer could account for any glitches that occurred in her psycho-sensory apparatus by blaming it on the booze, something she had handled relatively well in the past and had every reason to expect she could handle just as well for many years to come. This situation had begun to change for her not long after the lunch-meeting, which was the last time she would ever know anything resembling mental or metaphysical stability.
'Is everything okay, Sherry?' said one of her female staff as they were talking over some minor matters in Sherry's office.
'Everything's fine,' Sherry replied. 'But maybe we could finish this up tomorrow morning if you don't mind.'
'No problem,' said the young woman as she got up from her chair. Sherry opened the door and showed her out of the office. Then she closed the door once again, her hand trembling as it held tight to the inside door knob.
Thanks to Barry's restructuring of the company, Sherry was assigned a newly created position that came with a small private office. Previously this was a luxury and a convenience, enabling her to consume whatever quantity of alcohol she desired throughout the day and to do so in quietly dignified surroundings. Henceforth, however, that office might as well have been located deep in the heart of Hell (medieval, not modern, in the scheme of its decor).
After Sherry had closed the office door she closed her eyes. Then she haltingly turned her head toward that part of the wall which had been momentarily concealed when she opened the door. Sherry's eyelashes slowly parted, and her gaze was now directly fixed upon a place where the wall met the floor of her office.
There it was again. There it was still. It hadn't gone away, as Sherry had hoped it would.
During their meeting, she had successfully drawn the young woman's attention to that particular section of the wall. ('Is that a bug or something over there?' said Sherry, pointing right at the spot.) But she hadn't seemed to notice anything unusual within that space. Of course neither had Sherry seen anything there until a few hours ago.
But there it was again.
Behind Sherry's office door was another door. It was small and dark and ugly, a dwarf-sized portal that bulged from the wall like a scab. Its surface was coarse and irregular, as if it had been molded out of clay rather than cut from wood. Nonetheless, there did appear to be an intricate grain running through it, swirling into the door's many grooves and gouges, curling into roughly circular knots. Sherry tried not to look too closely at the dense patterns of the door, in which she had already seen a variety of little faces and parts of faces, each of them as twisted and ugly as the door itself. But this time she did squat down so that she was at eye-level with the upper edge of the door, bringing herself nearer to the thing than she had previously dared to go. Then, as though attempting to verify the nature of this phenomenon—whether actual or hallucinatory—she poised a pointy-nailed finger very close to it, ready to make a few quick taps. That was when the trouble started. Because as soon as she made contact with the door... her fingernail became stuck there, caught like a fly in what seemed to be a kind of tight-knit webbing rather than wood or even clay. As she pulled to extricate herself from the grasp of the door, she found that her finger sunk only more deeply into it and was soon trapped up to the cuticle.
Of course she might have called for any number of people who sat in the cubicles outside her office... and maybe that would have made things all right for her once more. (She had no way of knowing otherwise.) However, being the Sherry-thing that she was, she wouldn't want to be seen in her presently ridiculous—perhaps even certifiably deranged—posture. She was now seated on the floor, her short shirt riding up her rear end as she struggled to free herself, her fingertip stuck in something that no one else could see. Then—
Knock-knock-knock.
But the knocking wasn't for Sherry, it was for me. Detectives White and Black were standing outside the door that led to the backstairs of my apartment. Through the parted curtains on the door's window I stared out at the two men, who looked right through me, peering as far as they could inside. Perhaps they had a warrant to search the place for my Buck Skinner Hunting Knife, which, depending on the judge they petitioned, might be considered as the deadly tool used to sever the hands of Perry Stokowski. I hadn't been following very closely the activities of these workmanlike sleuths, so I didn't know what to expect.
In any case, I thought that even if they did bust into my apartment, with or without a warrant, they wouldn't have found the knife, because somehow I had taken it with me when I entered into that spooky state of being I now enjoyed: it only took solid form when I did, and, like my black clothes and amber-tinted eyeglasses, it dissolved into thin air or moved through solid objects whenever it suited me to do so. What could be more silly than a set of clothes walking around with a pair of eyeglasses hovering over them? Or an unheld knife with a thirteen-inch blade floating down the street? So I was ready for anything the homicide detectives might have had in mind, which was something beyond my powers to know. Whatever miraculous feats I was able to perform, I still seemed to be bound by certain rules, just like anything else in this stinking world, be it animal, vegetable, mineral, vapor-form, human, superhuman, or whatever else—with all your imagination—you might be able to conceive. Everything that exists is subject to limitations imposed upon it by forces within and forces without. There are no exceptions or exemptions, although there may be some striking transformations.
Just witness what my bulked-up being was now able to do with Sherry, whose finger was sinking deeper and deeper into that ugly door. It was all my idea, my plan—at least to the extent that anyone can lay claim to an idea or plan as his very own. But how did I know I could do it? I had never done such a thing before. My original intent, way back when, was to send a bullet or two from the barrel of my Glock 17, or perhaps my Firestar, into the brain of a hated enemy, someone who had conspired to drop me into the deep end of a hell from which I did not have the power to drag myself out.
By what power, though, would my finger have pulled the trigger of that Glock, or Firestar? I knew that my Brain would ultimately give the command to shoot, shouting out, in so many words, 'OK, Finger—ready, set, fire.' But I also knew that my Brain took its orders from my Body, while at the same time functioning as an integrated part of my Body. In addition, both my Body and my Brain (as an integrated part of my Body) were reacting to pressures placed upon them by other Bodies and other Brains, such as that of Sherry in her capacity as an individual Body-Brain unit, or those of The Seven acting as a group of Bodies and Brains... not to mention the sundry other pressures exerted by objects and events that were without a human Body or a human Brain, including the weather, Daylight Savings Time, insects—the entire nonhuman world in general.
So how was it that all these Bodies and Brains, including my own, along with countless other nonhuman factors, such as the cockroaches that infested my apartment, could all coordinate in order to force my finger to pull the trigger of a Glock, or a Firestar, and pump some fragments of metal into Sherry Mercer's worthless Brain and well-formed Body? How could this task, or any other in this crying-shame of a world, ever be accomplished? What precisely was the chain of command—the source of this whole mess, the line of historical phenomena which along the way included my overwhelming urge to purch
ase a selection of handguns and a Buck Skinner Hunting Knife, and then later inspired me with the notion of creating this ugly little door which only Sherry, and of course I, could see... and that Sherry was now stuck in up to her slender wrist?
Answer: No answer, obviously.
Question: Withdrawn at the request of my dizzied Brain.
Orders to the Troops: Keep focused and continue the assault until all traces of the Sherry-pain, like that of the Perry-pain, had been neutralized.
And now the ugly little doorknob on that ugly little door began to jiggle back and forth, squeaking in Sherry's ears. It was shaped something like the head of a small monkey, but Sherry grabbed the knob without flinching, her fear of what might be trying to come through the door overcoming the loathsome look and weblike feel of all those whorls and knotholes, those little faces and parts of faces. She tried to use her hold on the knob as leverage to pull her other hand free. With this action, unfortunately, she only sank deeper into the thing, which worked in the same manner as a mind trapped in a web of obsessive thoughts: the more that you—and definitely me—struggled to pry loose, the more tightly we would be held.
By now Sherry could feel the knob-thing pulsing with a squirmy sort of life in her one hand, while her other was lost in a place where it was being caressed by something nameless, which nevertheless might still be described as a wriggling darkness, a black world of worms slithering around her hand and between her fingers. Her eyes had opened so very wide—those Sherry-thing eyes. And now her mouth, which had once talked so much Sherry-thing talk, tried to scream. But no sound came out of that mouth. There were also other effects worked upon Sherry's body and brain, but it's better that some things be carried out behind closed doors... and my attention was being called elsewhere.
Apparently the homicide detectives had indeed been unable to secure a warrant to search my apartment. Detective White did rattle my doorknob rather vigorously in hopes that the wormeaten wood around the lock might give way and allow him and his partner illegal access to the suspect's residence. If I hadn't been otherwise occupied, I would have allowed them entry, purely out of politeness. Instead, the detectives had to march back down the stairs behind the diner and were now in the process of interviewing Lillian across her counter.
The place was all but empty of customers, with the exception of Harry, who was sipping coffee at the other end of the counter from Lillian and the homicide detectives.
'I do wish I could help you,' said Lillian softly. 'But I feel I must respect the privacy of my tenant.'
'We could come back with a warrant,' said Detective Black.
'That would be another matter,' said Lillian.
As the detectives continued to question Lillian, Harry was now mumbling into his cell phone out of anyone's earshot... except my own.
'Yeah, she's the landlord,' Harry, head down, said to Richard on the other end of the line, or rather the frequency, to Harry's phone.
'What is she saying?' said Richard.
'It's what she's not saying. She's lying her head off to the cops, that much I can tell.'
Detective White was trying to conceal his exasperation with the soft-spoken and flawlessly evasive responses of the diner's proprietor.
'So when was the last time you saw him?' he asked.
'I couldn't say,' said Lillian.
'Does he ever come into the diner?' asked Detective Black.
'Sometimes he does.'
Harry was able to tell that Lillian was lying to the homicide detectives because he himself must have done the same thing over and again during his career, as I inferred from my intrusions into the files of various agencies of law enforcement. Previous to Richard's hiring him ('scouting' would be a more apt term), the man I once regarded as Harry the Enigma was also known as Hank the Plumber, Joe the Roofer, and Bob the Encyclopedia Salesman, among other aliases he used for both profit (home invasion, confidence artistry; five prison years served over the course of ten life years) and pleasure (several charges of molestation involving minors, majors, and some truly aged persons when he worked as Ken the Orderly at a nursing home; no convictions).
'She's very good,' said Harry to Richard. 'I'm fairly sure she could tell us something.'
'Then find out what that something might be,' said Richard.
'It might be messy,' warned Harry.
'So be it. Messy is fine. It's sloppy I don't need.'
All right, then, Richard the Ringleader!
The homicide detectives now seemed absolutely stymied by the fact that this old woman in a waitress's uniform was getting the best of them.
'How did he seem to you when you last saw him?' asked Detective White.
'I already said that I couldn't say when I last saw him,' said Lillian.
'Does he usually come home at a particular time?' asked Detective Black.
'Maybe he does, I don't know. I really don't follow his comings and goings. I've got a business to run.'
'Did you know that he was recently forced to resign from his job?' asked Detective White.
'That wouldn't be any of my business,' said Lillian.
Having been subjected long enough to Lillian's dazzling song-and-dance, which almost moved me to tears of thanks for her protectiveness in my favor, the detectives left their card and then left the diner with two coffees to go, compliments of the house. Soon afterward Harry paid for his coffee and took his leave, only to return a few hours later as Lillian was locking up for the day.
Before Lillian had turned the key in the door, Harry came up behind her.
Before Harry came up behind her, I stepped into Lillian's body and took over its workings, placing her mind in a state of pleasant unconsciousness while I went about my business. This was another new idea of mine that came to me on the spur of the moment. I had no special plan except to keep Lillian safe. I would just have to play the rest of it by ear, and when it was over, assuming all went well, send Lillian on her way home without any alarm in her heart or memories in her head.
'Please move back inside, Ma'am,' said Harry, shoving a gun barrel into Lillian's back and nearly causing her to drop the brown carry-out bag she was juggling along with her purse while she was locking up. 'And I'll take those keys if it's all the same to you.'
Lillian had securely folded and stapled the carry-out bag, so Harry couldn't have guessed that it contained the life savings of Frank Dominio. As he maneuvered her away from the front window, Lillian said (or rather I said using Lillian's vocal cords), 'What is it you want, young man?'
Harry smiled at the casual tone of the question. 'I would like to rape and rob you,' he replied.
'Anything else?'
'Yes. I would like your key to the apartment upstairs. I assume you have one.'
'I surely do,' said Lillian. 'Would you mind if I set these things down on the counter?'
'Not at all.'
'Thank you. Now you said you wanted to rob me. Let me see how much I've got in my handbag.'
'Cut it out,' Harry yelled as he knocked Lillian's purse to the other side of the counter.
'No reason to act so rude,' said Lillian. 'Just a joke. I know you're not looking for some small change from this old handbag. I can see you're not just some worthless drug addict. Not like some people.'
Immediately Harry's attention became divided between the words he had used earlier that day to describe Perry Stokowski and the business of the moment. For a second he froze into the pose of a classic, gun-pointing hood, not even noticing that Lillian had already turned away and was headed down a hallway into the shadows of the closed diner.
'What you're looking for,' she called out from the darkness. 'It's back here.'
'Hold it,' shouted Harry.
'You hold it,' said Lillian as she opened a creaky door and switched on a light, causing a little room to appear at the end of the hallway.
When Harry entered the little room he saw Lillian standing in the corner and leaning over an old safe that opened from the top. Afte
r tuning in the combination she pulled at a metal handle and exposed the contents of the safe. 'Lots of money in here, boy,' she said. 'I was going to bring it to the bank tomorrow, just like I do every Friday.'
'Take it out,' Harry ordered.
'What do you think I'm doing?' said Lillian. After she had brought out the heavy cloth bag that contained the cash taken in at the diner, Lillian reached into the depths of the old safe and pulled up something else. 'I imagine you'd be interested in this too,' she said as she held out a stack of papers secured by a single rubber band. Harry read the words printed on the first page: 'New Product', and below these—'Frank Dominio'.
'I knew you were lying to those cops,' Harry said in a self-satisfied voice.
'And aren't you the smart boy for taking note of that. It's too bad, though, that you won't be able to walk away with any of this loot, never mind the papers.'
'What's stopping me?' said Harry.
'Well, for one thing,' said Lillian, 'you can't open that door.'
Harry quickly turned around and realized that the door which had creaked open so loudly had somehow closed behind him without making a sound. When he swiveled back toward Lillian, she said, 'And for another thing, your gun won't work any more.'
Harry pulled the trigger of his weapon (not a Glock). But the only thing that emerged from it was a molten blob of metal, which trickled out of the cylindrical barrel like water dripping from a leaky faucet. Then the light bulb in the ceiling began to fade until the room was submerged in blackness.
These were strange phenomena in their own right. But the thing that really unsettled Harry was the sound of something bubbling up from inside the safe, illuminating the room with strangely jittering colors as it rose to the rim and emitted a vaporous stench. Harry gagged and covered his mouth with his free hand. Speaking through his fingers, he said, 'What's going on? What is that?'
'Soup of the day, boy—Cream of Mucous Membrane. I thought it might be something you'd like, you being a sexual offender and all. It does smell some.'
Harry was now choking and gagging at the same time. Finally he managed to cough out a few words. 'Who are you?' he said.