The Collected Short Fiction

  Yet if my life was all delusion, it was an inescapable delusion that I—and, alas, even you—could not fail to follow wherever it might lead. And I still had four more beings to blow away from this creepy existence. Until that was accomplished my work was not yet done, and my life (or non-life, as it were) seemed undeniably worth living. Somehow I had been given the power to finish the work I had begun when I entered that downtown gun shop to purchase a load of firearms and a Buck Skinner Hunting Knife.

  I—and you—now understood: We were brought into this world out of nothing.

  I—and you—now understood: We were kept alive in some form, any form, as long as we were viciously thrashing about, acting out our most intensely vital impulses, never allowed to become still and silent until every drop had been drained of the blackness flowing inside us.

  I—and you—now understood: We would be pulled back into the flowing blackness only when we had done all the damage we were allowed to do, only when our work was done. The work of you against me... and me against you.

  2

  On Friday morning the homicide detectives were sitting in their unmarked car just down the street from the gun shop where once upon a time I had planned to pick up a few things. The store was supposed to open at ten o'clock, but they arrived a half-hour early. There they were, sipping coffees and lackadaisically eyeing whatever came into their field of vision. I was sitting—unseeable—in the back seat, thinking to myself, 'Do you really think that I'm going to make an appearance to pick up my order? You guys are either very thorough or very stupid.'

  Then Detective White said something that put me in my place. 'You know we're wasting our time here, don't you?'

  'Yup,' said Detective Black. 'No way he's going to show up.'

  'You know why the lieutenant ordered this stakeout, don't you?'

  'Yup. It's not like this is the first time.'

  'But it still stinks.'

  'Take it easy. Here, have a bagel,' said Detective Black as he reached into a paper bag.

  Detective White took the bagel and tore into it like an angry dog. 'This isn't the place we should be. We should be questioning those execs at the company, with or without their lawyers.'

  'That's not what the lieutenant wants.'

  'That not what he wants because he got the word.'

  'The word from the man who got the word from the man,' said Detective Black.

  'You know how many people have stopped showing up for work at that place?'

  'I know.'

  'I'd like to have a talk with the ones that are still left,' said Detective White as his full set of remarkably square teeth tore off another hunk of bagel, and he continued to talk with his mouth full. 'They're the ones who know what's going on. I don't like it when people tell me that I shouldn't try to find out what's really going on.'

  'You know the score,' said Detective Black. 'That's a big company. What's going on there is probably not good for their business.'

  'They should let us do our job.'

  'I agree.'

  'People should know what really goes on in this city,' said Detective White.

  'I'd like to know myself sometimes. But what can you do?'

  'Nothing.'

  'Want another bagel?' said Detective Black as he helped himself to one of the poppy-seed variety.

  Detective White waved off seconds on the bagels and continued gazing lackadaisically through the windshield of the unmarked car.

  If I hadn't already known what I knew about certain things, I might have thought to myself, 'You guys are...'

  'All right, then,' said Richard to his gathered underlings in the usual meeting place. He had already tried to contact Chipman, both at home and at work, but he didn't seem surprised at the young man's absence. But what could he say to the others about Chipman, not to mention the empty chairs once occupied by Sherry and Harry? Come on, Richard, tell them what you know about Domino. Tell me what you know. Like Detective White, I wanted to know what was going on.

  Mary and Kerrie were sitting to the left and right of Richard, while Barry had positioned himself at the far end of the table.

  'Why don't you move in a little closer, Barry boy?' said Richard.

  Covering her mouth, Mary whispered, 'He smells really bad, Richard. I think he's sick.'

  'I'm, uh, fine where I am,' said Barry. And that ended the issue.

  'So where do we go from here, Rich?' said a cocky Kerrie.

  Richard eyed Kerrie as if she were a talking whippet, which in fact she resembled, and then spoke softly to her. 'You should probably be taking this situation more seriously, Kerrie.'

  'I have no fear whatever of Frank Dominio. I just wish he'd try something with me. I'm ready,' she said, patting a slight bulge in the pocket of the sport coat she wore every day with a T-shirt, jeans, and athletic shoes.

  'I'm afraid I can't say the same,' said Mary. 'Is there any point in bringing up the others who couldn't be with us today?'

  'None at all, Mary,' said Richard with a business-like finality. 'What about you, Barry? Any apprehensions at your end of the table?'

  Barry just stared without any focus like a lobotomy case. Then he sniffed, actually snorted, very loudly and scratched his armpit. He was clearly having a hard time following the proceedings. One—and that one would be me—might say that Barry was no longer his old brilliant self.

  'Then what's the point of this meeting?' said Mary, her mask of make-up shining with perspiration. 'Everything, all our plans... what I mean to say is, it's over... isn't it?'

  'It's not over until it's over,' spoke Richard. 'The important thing is to maintain appearances. None of us has anything to hide.'

  'Oh, come on,' said Kerrie. 'Frank's out there doing us one by one. But we did him first.'

  'We certainly didn't do any violence to him,' said Richard. 'We just wanted something that he had.'

  'And once we got that—what? You're The Doctor, Richard. We know what that means.'

  Richard sighed with infinite boredom. 'Is anyone here going to back Kerrie up in her accusations?'

  Mary bit her lower lip, smearing her upper teeth with a layer of lipstick. Barry continued to scratch and sniff-snort. I still wanted Richard to tell them what he knew about Domino, but it was now obvious that this was not going to happen. The whole point of that meeting was damage control for Richard. And he knew, as I did, that the damage wasn't over.

  3

  My taste for the Grotesque was neither an inborn nor a longstanding trait of my character. Rather, it was conceived and developed over the period of time encompassed by this document, my Ultimate Statement. By Friday—the last Friday of October—this taste, which was already as ripe as the fruits of an autumn harvest, had finally gone thoroughly rotten. It was now an unslakeable hunger for unheard-of horrors, for all the derangements bred by the most morbid fevers, and for the stuff of nightmares so twisted, so aberrant, that they were beyond the comprehension or recall of the waking mind. Please let me show you—all of you—what I did that day. It began with—

  Barry

  Actually I had intended Barry, rather than Perry, as my first project, given that this waddling wretch had been Richard's primary tool in my decline and fall at the company. However, good sense overcame vengeful rage, and I decided to begin practicing on the piano player—whose annihilation may now be seen to have been a simple finger exercise compared to my later work—while saving the more choice subjects for later, when I had reached the height of my monstrous powers. Nevertheless, Barry remained a side-project for me from the beginning. His slow wit and strong odor at the meeting on Friday were merely superficial signs that this swine was ready for the market.

  Barry left the office well before lunch. He no longer felt comfortable in such structured—correction, restructured—surroundings. All he wanted was to get back to his brick house (no house of straw or clay for this piggy), where things were just the way he now liked them.

  As he drove his car through a winding rout
e of city streets—he was no longer mentally competent to handle the high speeds and quick thinking required to maneuver on the expressway—the only thoughts in his head were images of home. (This place, to describe it with a minimum of foul details, was a sty... literally.) These images which now filled Barry's beasty brain, since his ability to think in words and concepts had almost entirely atrophied, consisted wholly of wallowing in filth, which included the remains of the filth that he heaped into his body as well as the filth that emanated out of that same body and was spread over every inch of his floor and furnishings. Barry's brick bungalow was truly hog heaven. And he could hardly wait to strip off his human clothes and roll his flabby, naked flesh around in the slop, snorting and squealing all the while.

  But Barry's mind was not yet so intellectually impaired that he couldn't make a few stops at the drive-though windows of several fast-food joints on his way home, filling both the front and back seats of his car with bags and bags of burgers, tacos, and crusty hunks of fried chicken. It was at his last stop (a rib shack!) that Barry caught the scent of something else that tantalized his tastes, although it was not something he could eat.

  It so happened that Barry's drive home led him directly past the state fairgrounds, which were now in the full swing of a fall exhibition that included a midway of concession stands bursting with corn dogs and cotton candy, an amphitheater that filled the air with country music, and the usual showing of agricultural products from both field and barnyard. This was Barry's lucky day... and mine. Without thinking twice, or even once, Barry pulled his car into the fairground's parking lot, and, after gobbling a bag or so of sustenance, he wandered into the festive world of the fair. He was following that overpowering scent and, in his blind search, he disappeared into the crowd... disappeared forever.

  The only hint of what might have become of Barry Edwins was an item that appeared the next day in the city's major newspaper and was reprinted in several other publications in outstate regions. The facts were these:

  First: Someone reported to the police who were keeping order at the state fair that she had seen a naked man trying to couple with a prize pig featured at a livestock exhibition.

  Second: When the police arrived at the exhibition, that nasty, naked man was nowhere to be found. What they did find, however, was a rape in progress... but it was the act of a pinkish hog upon a blue-ribbon sow.

  Third: No one could be found who would claim the offending hog as theirs. One old livestock breeder did note that the genitalia of the hog, while quite small, were still intact. That is, this was an animal that had not been properly fixed for its breed and ultimate purpose.

  Last: Granted permission by the police to do what needed to be done (in exchange for taking ownership of this rather fine specimen of its type), the old livestock breeder castrated the animal on the spot in order to bring it under control and promised that, by and by, this handsome hog would find a home at a good slaughterhouse.

  To commemorate this turn of events I directed a—blech!—email message to Richard's computer under the subject line of, what else, WORK NOT DONE. But I was denied the satisfaction of seeing Richard read this message. In fact, I seemed to have lost the ability to locate him altogether. This was something that threw a scare into me. Because there was only one place that he could have hidden himself from my view. Somehow Richard had gone into a dark spot, but I couldn't be sure why or how this had happened. Hadn't I always been given free rein to do my work? Never mind, I told myself, there was other work to be done. And there she was—

  Mary

  After the mess that the cleaning staff found in Sherry Mercer's office, Mary tried to spend as little time as possible in her own... or anywhere else in the company's office space if she could help it. Her heels were now clicking upon the sidewalks of downtown toward her favorite lunch spot, which would be filled with a crowd of people among whom she would feel relatively safe.

  However, as—not luck but I—would have it, Mary walked right by her destination. And she kept on walking toward the outskirts of the business section of the city, wandering through rundown neighborhoods and past many of my once favorite ruined buildings (including an old place that still had a sign in the window that read: 'Rooms for Men'). But my feeling for these places was a thing of the past for me. The soothingness of sabi, with its mind-clearing desolation and soul-calming decrepitude, had now been replaced by my taste for the Grotesque. Nothing but the Grotesque would gratify my howling mind and poisoned soul. Only the Grotesque.

  So I took Mary out of the range of vast empty fields and beautifully gutted buildings, dropping her off at a place known as The Mechanic Street Museum. This nominal 'museum' was spread out along a block of abandoned houses not far from a railroad overpass and across the road from a dumping ground for old sofas and chairs, old tires, old medicine cabinets, and any other expired object you cared to name. The exhibits of the museum consisted entirely of old dolls and mannikins, or the various parts of same. These human simulations inhabited both the interior spaces of each abandoned house as well as populating their front yards. Behind any given window, often shattered, of the houses along this section of Mechanic Street, one might see an entire mannikin—sometimes clothed or partially clothed and sometimes not—or at least part of a mannikin, such as a slim forearm and hand held in place by some putty on the inside window sill. Additionally, these windows might display a doll hanging by its neck as if from a gibbet, or simply the head of a doll dangling at the end of a wire.

  This community of dolls and mannikins also lounged upon the wooden porches, or the steps leading up to these porches, and sometimes peered out from the exposed crawlspaces beneath a number of the abandoned houses. Most interesting were the dolls and mannikins that had been set up in old chairs or sofas taken from the dumping ground across the street. The dolls leaned crookedly in chairs that were invariably too large for them, while the mannikins lay in twisted postures upon sofas without cushions. No one had ever claimed credit for creating this museum, which had attained modest renown in both local publications and nationally distributed art journals. Nor had anyone ever been caught, though many had tried, in the act of augmenting its exhibitions, filling the Mechanic Street houses and their yards with still more dolls and mannikins and replacing the ones that had become too damaged, either by vandals or the elements, to remain on display.

  As I earlier explained, Mary Dreller had been led astray into the region of The Mechanic Street Museum while on her way to an out-of-office lunch. No one at the company noticed that she had not logged off her computer, and it was assumed that she, not unlike Barry Edwins, had left work early that Friday. It wasn't until later the same night that her husband reported her to the police as a missing person. The police, of course, would never find Mary but I will tell you—whoever you are or think you are—just who did find her and where she was found.

  It was a few hours after sunset (EDT) that a couple of derelicts, both of them drunken and deranged, were passing through The Mechanic Street Museum. They had covered this ground before and were not daunted by its peculiar aspects. Quite the opposite, in fact. Pausing in front of a house where a doll's head stared from a high attic window, the derelicts parked themselves on either side of a sofa near the sidewalk. Between them was a fully clothed mannikin sitting up with fair posture, although her head was twisted over the back of the sofa. Out of all the mannikins these derelicts had ever seen loitering in the vicinity, this one came closest to something that could be mistaken for a human being.

  'Must be a new one,' said the first derelict.

  'Yeah,' said the other. 'But—uuurrp—look it her face.'

  As drunken and deranged as the derelicts were, even they could not overlook the flaw in this window dummy. Specifically, its face did not display the requisite expression of bland beatitude but, on the contrary, was severely contorted—the face of something that was frozen in a moment of panic.

  'I bet we could get something for these clothes,' said
the first derelict, running his dirty hands from top to bottom over the mannikin's body. 'It's got stockings even.'

  'Let's take off her clothes,' said the other.

  As the derelicts proceeded to undress the mannikin, they were further amazed that it was outfitted with underclothing. The first derelict started talking to the dummy, calling her Daisy, and then the other derelict joined in the fantasy. One thing led to another... and by the time Daisy was fully rid of her clothes, the derelicts had laid this fake lady of the evening across the sofa and began taking turns on top of her. That night there was a full moon over Mechanic Street and these derelicts were evidently in the mood for a little messing around, even if their object of desire was merely a mannikin, although one that might be easily mistaken, as she had been for years, for a human being.

  Then one of the derelicts suddenly jumped off the dummy, stumbling backward with his pants around his ankles. 'Her eyes,' he said. 'They... they were looking back at me.'

  The other derelict, zipping himself up, stepped closer to the thing spread out on the cushionless sofa. 'Oh, my god,' he groaned.