The Collected Short Fiction

  It was Lillian who looked into Harry's eyes, a lurid rainbow of glowing colors playing across her face, her mouth grinning wide. But it was my voice that answered Harry's question.

  'It's me, Harry,' I said. 'It's Domino.'

  I could have gone on gloating like that for some time if Harry's cell phone hadn't started chirping inside his coat pocket. This forced me to rush things, since I wanted to take that call. With lightning speed that surprised even me, I had the phone in my—that is, Lillian's—hand. By the time it was between its second and third rings, Harry was gone. The skin of his face was still bobbing up and down in the soup as it receded down into the darkness whence it came. The light in the little room switched back on.

  I flipped open Harry's phone and put it to my ear. 'Hoy-hoy,' I said, continuing to speak in my own voice.

  'What?' said the man on the other end, who was Richard.

  'I said "Hoy-hoy". That's the phrase first put forth by Alexander Graham Bell as the standard greeting to be spoken into his new invention. Well, it wasn't just his invention... but he ended up getting all the credit for it in the public mind. That's the old story, isn't it? Especially when we—meaning you and me—are talking about brilliant and profitable inventions.'

  'Is that what we're talking about?'

  'You know that it is.'

  'Where's Harry?' said Richard.

  'Work not done,' I replied.

  'I see,' said Richard. 'What happened exactly?'

  'Sorry, Richard, but I really can't say myself what happened... exactly. Nothing that Harry enjoyed very much, I'm pretty sure on that score. And while we're on the subject, you might want to look in on Sherry.'

  'I'll do that,' said Richard.

  As I stated earlier, in order to function with any effectiveness in this world you have to make some absurd assumptions. My assumption of the moment was that Richard should have sounded far more rattled by our conversation. But this wasn't the case at all.

  'That's three guys out,' I said, making the mistake of trying to get a rise out of my one-time boss. 'Four to go, not counting Chipman.'

  'You're really a very bad man,' said Richard.

  'Yes, I am,' I said. 'But you can take the credit for that.'

  'That's no more than false modesty coming from someone with such an enormous ego. Too bad you never recognized that in yourself. We could have worked very well together if you had. It must be quite painful to have such big plans without being able to admit what an ambitious swine you really are.'

  'Swine?' I said, my composure continuing to crack. I had never shared that epithet with anyone at the company.

  'Isn't that what you thought of the rest of us?'

  'More or less. It's a common term of derogation.'

  'I suppose it is. I must have heard it used around the office. Or maybe I just dreamed it. I believe that dreams can be quite helpful in our lives. How about you?'

  I was beginning to regret having answered Harry's phone. 'I think we've said about all we have to say to each other. Unless there's something you'd like to add.'

  'Like what?' said Richard.

  'I don't know. Something threatening. Like telling me I'm a dead man, for instance.'

  'No, not at all,' said Richard. 'As far as that goes, I already know that you're not a dead man. But neither are you alive, isn't that right, Domino?'

  Then Richard hung up, leaving me once again with a mind that was racing with incalculable doubts and questions and, above all, fear.

  8

  On Richard's orders, Chipman went to see what was what with Sherry. It was just after the close of the work day and the floor on which Sherry's office was located was quiet and empty, save for a few members of the cleaning staff who moved among the cubicles, emptying out each employee's trash containers and doing a bit of vacuuming. Knocking lightly on the door of Sherry's office, Chipman looked around for anyone who might be observing him before slipping into the room and closing himself inside.

  'What the hell,' said Chipman aloud.

  The ceiling light still illuminated the windowless office, but it was dim and flickered at strobe-like intervals. This was done strictly for effect on my part, as was the general disarray of the room, which appeared as if a miniature whirlwind had turned the place all higgledy-piggledy, with bookshelves knocked to the floor, a desk that leaned at a forty-five degree angle against the wall, and the contents of every file drawer and desk drawer scattered everywhere. While there was no sign of Sherry, her purse was among the disturbed contents within those four walls. Chipman saw it at the back of the room, its strap torn off and its leather outerskin crushed like a deflated football.

  As he stepped cautiously through the debris, Chipman saw something glinting on the floor, something that blinked in sequence with the ceiling light and which animated the scene around him. Bending down, he picked up the object, which to all appearances was a hand mirror that had been dumped, along with everything else, from Sherry's purse. Light and shadow skittered across the reflecting surface of the mirror. This was all that Chipman could see at first. But as he inspected the object more closely he noticed that there was also a face in that mirror... and the face was not his own. Nor was it Sherry's face, exactly. But it was the face of something, some Sherry-like thing, some creature from which almost every vestige of Sherry had been distilled and only the Thing part remained. And it seemed to be screaming with what seemed to be a mouth full of craggy teeth that, seemingly, were trying to eat their way out of the mirror.

  Chipman dropped the mirror to the floor immediately, instinctively. Then he started crushing it underfoot, stomping on it with the heel of his shoe until the mirror was only a collection of sharp, glittering fragments which he frantically kicked into every corner of the room, thereby dispersing the image of something that had quickened his breathing and made his eyes stare as if they could still see the face in the mirror.

  Standing amid the tremulous shadows of that office—its furnishings all atilt, little slivers of a funhouse mirror still shining among the debris about him—Chipman appeared lost within the narrow corridors of dark reverie. But he was brought back to himself when, from somewhere in the chaos of Sherry Mercer's old office, the telephone began to ring. Chipman scrambled toward the source of that mad warbling sound, which was not at all like the friendly twitter he was used to hearing from the modern phones in the company's offices. He finally tracked the noise to its hiding place beneath a mound of file folders that littered the floor.

  'Yeah,' said Chipman, abandoning the formal salutations of the workplace.

  'Chipman?' asked the voice on the phone.

  'Yes, this is he,' he said, laughing a little.

  'Where's Sherry?'

  'She's... I don't know, Richard. She's not in her office. Something's wrong here. The place looks like it's been ransacked and... well, her purse is here but... maybe you should see it for yourself.'

  'All right, settle down.'

  'I am settled down,' said Chipman.

  'You don't sound like it.'

  'Well, it's just that... there was something.'

  'Listen to me, Chipman. I'm going to ask you a question, and you're going to answer with a simple yes or no. Besides the condition of Sherry's office and the fact that her purse is still there—'

  'It's practically ripped apart. Someone must have—'

  'Let me finish. Besides what you've told me, the ransacking and so forth, have you seen, or perhaps heard, anything else, anything... that might seem out of the ordinary?'

  'Yes,' answered Chipman as instructed. 'I saw something.'

  'That's good, you're doing fine. One more question—yes or no answer. What you saw, was it something that made you feel as if—'

  'Richard, I thought I was losing my mind,' Chipman interjected.

  'All right, that's good.'

  'It's good that I thought I was losing my mind?' Chipman said almost belligerently.

  'No. It's good that you told me the truth. Now, I w
ant you to go home. Leave the building right away. Tomorrow morning there's going to be a meeting, and I want you to be there. Just watch yourself until then. Can you do that?'

  'I think I can do that,' said Chipman without a hint of conviction.

  'All right, then,' said Richard. 'One more thing—'

  Then the phone went dead. Chipman tried to bring it back to life to call Richard back, but it was gone. Tossing the defunct receiver to the floor, Chipman said to himself, 'I'm going to go home now. Richard said I should go home.' Then he turned and saw what was written on the door of the office. The words were scored into the wood in precise block lettering, carved quite deeply. And they hadn't been there before, those words—

  WORK NOT DONE.

  Chipman suddenly charged the door and opened it, as if any hesitation might result in a loss of nerve that might keep him trapped in that office—looking at those words—forever. But on the other side of the door there was only another door.

  WORK NOT DONE.

  And behind him there was only a dark wall illuminated by a flickering light.

  Chipman now seemed to be listening for something, perhaps the comforting sound of the vacuum cleaners being pushed across the carpeted hallways and among the cubicles of the company offices. He called for help, but there was no one who could hear him. Because he wasn't in the company offices any more. He really wasn't anywhere. Nevertheless, he kept calling for help... and he kept opening door after door: WORK NOT DONE, WORK NOT DONE, WORK NOT DONE...

  After a while even I could no longer follow him into that place of endless doors and darkness.

  Part III

  1

  MEMO TO: You

  FROM: Me

  DATE: Thursday Evening

  SUBJECT: The Darkness

  As many of you have already realized, I did not give up my intentions of crafting a document that, in an earlier section, I described as my Ultimate Statement. This document, or statement, had merely mutated into a different format—from a ranting declaration into what might be categorized as a paranormal memoir: a work-in-progress of uncertain form, very much like its creator. Among the principal elements to emerge in this latter form was that sinister presence whose sign and symbol had appeared to me as (1) a river of blackness; (2) a constellation of dark stars which filled the darkness behind the darkness of the night sky; (3) 'dark spots' that, despite my enhanced perception of the world around me, still obscured certain crucial things from my view, most prominently any knowledge concerning the peculiar—'non-living'– state in which I now existed; and (4) stains or smudges of darkness which spread across the sky at all hours and grew increasingly prominent each time I knocked the living daylights out of one of The Seven (plus Chipman).

  At the time specified above, it was the last of these four phenomena that most preoccupied me, given that I had eliminated no fewer than three persons before sundown (which, of course, was still an hour behind on the clocks in my time zone and would remain so for one more October day). Even during the later hours of Thursday afternoon, following my annihilation of Sherry Mercer and the man I knew as Harry Smith-Jones, the world outside my apartment windows was stuck in a shade of deep twilight as far as I could see.

  The dark stains hovered in the sky above the old buildings of the downtown area and extended into the distance across the river, creating a cityscape that was so evenly overcast that it took on the phony look of a stage-setting or a day-for-night scene in a low-budget movie. Furthermore, sometime after I sent Chipman to his doom, there was a definite moment when things took on a still darker tint, as if to mark the precise time when the Young Supervisor could no longer deny to himself the heart-stopping fact that he would never find his way to the end of that infinite series of doors.

  Clearly a pattern was discernable in these darkenings that came upon the heels of each act of uncanny mayhem that I worked upon my former colleagues. I wondered if this was a sign of one of those stupid rules that encumbered us all, living or non-living, a law of limitation that read: 'This far and no farther,' or possibly, 'This many and no more.' Anyhow, after a rather busy day of putting down bad beasts, I decided to pause that evening to reflect upon this pattern I had observed. As I lay, in bodily form, on the sofa in the living room of my apartment—that wonderfully bleak penthouse above Lillian's downtown diner—I roughly estimated that at the rate that these darkenings were encroaching on my world, I would be able to eliminate my remaining coworkers, that is my erstwhile coworkers, just before I myself was plunged into a realm of permanent and total darkness, sinking back into that metaphorical river of blackness from which I had, by means unknown to me, somehow escaped before I had become entirely submerged into its greasy waters.

  This realization (if it wasn't purely a matter of imagination, I thought) was a disheartening one. Because as satisfying as I found my work of exterminating these vermin in whatever bizarre manner I could conceive, my mind had already begun turning toward bigger things, more elaborate schemes on a far greater scale. After all, the planet that I inhabited, the reality in which I was captured, was brimming with all kinds of potential victims, all of whom, to some degree, were swine that I dearly wanted to lead into my house of slaughter.

  This feeling of mine, this passion, was absolutely confirmed and bolstered during those moments when I had occupied the body of Lillian Hayes for the purpose of liquidating, in a literal sense, Harry the Robber and Rapist. Now here was a woman who, I believed, was as decent as anyone could be, as close to being a non-swine as any human being could get. And yet all the time that I inhabited her physical body, I could feel how intimately that body—in both its physical and metaphysical aspects—was connected to that now familiar darkness, that sinister presence... a presence that might well have been named The Great Black Swine—a grunting, bestial force that animated, that used our bodies to frolic in whatever mucky thing came its way, lasciviously agitating itself in that black river in which the human species only bobbed about like hunks of excrement. Indeed, after inhabiting the body of another—in this case the body of Lillian Hayes—it seemed to me that the idea of a human species, of anything like a 'person' (or persons known or unknown) was only a figure of speech, a convenient delusion.

  Then, sometime between dumping Harry in the soup and sending Chipman into a maddening oblivion, it occurred to me: All of them must be done away with... everyone must go!

  And as I lay on the sofa in the living room of my apartment I could only lament that I would not be able to continue my work beyond The Seven (Chipman notwithstanding). A limit had been placed on my labors before the blackness would close in on me entirely. I was still being manipulated, I was still being crowded and conspired against by something beyond my control and frustrating to my Will. But then something happened, right in the living room of my apartment, that served to reconcile me to this situation, or at least instill in my soul a sense of grim resignation.

  It took the form of a cockroach scuttling across the carpet. I jumped up from the sofa and, with a rapidity and precision that came along with my peculiar state of existence, I trapped the creature beneath my heavy black boot without killing it. Even through the thick sole of that boot I could feel the bug scuttling in place. At this point I was merely in physical connection with it. Next, I established a deeper communion with this vermin, letting a little bit of myself flow into its body, linking me to its life in the same manner that I had joined myself to Lillian Hayes. Although my immersion into the roach was not as complete as it had been with Lillian, I nonetheless felt the exact same sensation: there was nothing especially 'roachy' inside the roach any more than there was anything of a distinct 'person' inside of Lillian—once the dark interior of each had been penetrated, there was only that buzz of swinish agitation and turbulent blackness. The Great Black Swine was thrashing about inside the cockroach just as it had within Lillian Hayes, the only difference being that any sense of delusion about being some kind of thing-in-the-world was missing from the insect, or per
haps it was only so faint that I could not detect it.

  Was it simply a matter of degree? Between the cockroach and the proprietor of the Metro Diner there spread quite a spectrum of organic life. Was there a corresponding spectrum of delusion about being things-in-the-world? For instance, I've noticed—and who hasn't?—that cats seem to regard themselves in a way very similar to that of humans... and vice versa. 'Cats are people,' I heard the voice of an old woman speak from somewhere in my memory. And, from a feline perspective, people might very well seem to be cats. And inside of all of them—the thrashing agitation of the Devouring Swine, the Conspiratorial Swine, and, yes, the Murdering Swine. This was the only Thing-in-the-World. The rest of it was only costumes and masks, the inventory of an ancient and still flourishing theatrical supply company.

  And they would all have to go—people, cats, roaches, plants, all of it had to go.

  But I knew that I—whatever 'I' was—would not be the one to do it. The work was too immense, the scale of slaughter impossible to attain. The assurance that every speck of living matter had been swept from this world—and what about all the other worlds?—would have to remain in the realm of Never-To-Be... the beatific dream of an obsessive-compulsive life form.

  However, it was all over for the roach. When I pressed my boot down to the floor I could feel everything go still and silent within that little body where before there had been only a vicious thrashing in blackness. I even felt a little part of myself—the part of me I had allowed to leak into the bug—grow still and silent. It felt good. Very good, however fleeting the feeling had been. I can truly say that it was the only moment of real well-being I had ever experienced in my life, if my present state of existence could in fact be considered part of that fabrication I called my life.

  And at that moment I was sure that I was still living in some way—that even if I was not entirely alive, neither was I wholly dead. Somehow I was caught in between these two worlds—caught in a place where I had made a rare connection with that Great Black Swine, that thrashing and vicious blackness which flowed like a river through every living thing, and possibly in the spaces around everything that lived, allowing me to be wherever the blackness flowed, to become one with this agitated force that was everywhere and inside everything, that moved and manipulated all the created life of this world and gave me the power to move and manipulate things according to my will, which was nevertheless only the lower-case will of an isolated being—a cockroach elevated to human form, a small swirling of that flowing blackness that was as great and enduring as the world itself, that was the secret face of the living world, the shadow within all life, the thing that would live on and on as each one of us died our deaths alone. Because whatever life we had was only its life, and when our bodies, our cockroach bodies, became too damaged to accommodate it... this blackness flowed away, leaving behind it a dead vine, a bug's crushed carapace, or a human corpse—things that had no life of their own, nothing real at all about them.