As I Die Lying Page 18

  All of those, I bring to you. All of that exquisite madness, I now give to you. These treasures of my memories are now invested in you.

  What’s that, Mister Milktoast? “May they bear interest.” Cute. Especially since this is a book and we need to keep the reader engaged.

  Now, where was I?

  Such amusing myths emerged over the years, whispered around campfires or issued as threats to children. Demons, werewolves, vampires, nightwalkers. Names not dared to be spoken in darkness, such as Lucifer, Lilith, Hecate, Black Annis, Shiva. All because the human imagination cannot accept such horrors being committed by their own kind. All because humans are unwilling to see the dark shadow in the face of a friend or neighbor or even their own mirror.

  But you have looked, haven't you? You are the mirror.

  So many years, so many rivers of blood, so many black oceans of despair. So many to kill, and so little time.

  And then I found Virginia. She was fertile, with her budding mental disorder and her flair for rebellion. She was tainted, vulnerable, self-pitying, full of hate. Thanks to her father's repeated rapes, which I coaxed into him by planting a thousand dream-whispers in his sleeping head.

  She was a fountain of pain. She quenched me. But I could never make her kill. She proved too strong in the end.

  I believe she knew I was there, and why. She knew what I had planned for her. And she almost took me with her.

  But her final thought—her final act of hatred in a long life's night of pain—her final thought was of you, Richard. And that thought set me free, just as it now further imprisons you.

  And you were begging for me. You drew me as surely as a corpse draws a fly. You, with all your little voices and puppet shows and mind games and self-delusions. You've been waiting for me all along.

  Don't twist the sheets so. Don't try to smother yourself with the pillow. Because this is your dream, Richard. This is your dream come true.

  You have made me what we are.

  Sometimes monsters are made, not born.

  Oh, Richard, do you really take me seriously? Are you so far gone that this makes sense to you? Do you accept the impossible? You’re actually leaving this in the story? An ancient soul-hopping entity that’s an excuse for whatever vile deeds you’ll commit in the chapters ahead?

  Wonderful. This truly is a match made in heaven and a wedding bell rung in hell. I knew I’d chosen well.

  I’ve got boots on. Let’s dance, shall we?

  (P.S. Me again. I told you he was a sucky writer, didn’t I?)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I mailed off the manuscript the next morning, hoping to be done with all, unable to face another page.

  At the Paper Paradise, I was pale and feverish, wearing my guilt like a shroud. Even the rows of books gave me no comfort. Miss Billingsly asked me if I was sick.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth. I was ready to bite it if something tried to take it over and make it say bad things. “I just had a long night, that’s all.”

  “Insomnia, huh? You should have tried a dose of Samuel Pepys. It always works for me. Three pages of his diary and I’m sailing away to dreamland.”

  She said “dreamland” as if it were a theme park. My theme park would be a house of horrors, with no exit signs, full of fanged clowns and a lifetime gig as Donald Trump’s hairdresser.

  I went to the bathroom every half hour. I kept looking in the mirror, unable to shake the feeling that Shelley had met a stranger. Or an alien. My face was a sickly shade of green under the fluorescent light. My hair was even more of a brown shock than usual. I saw Father’s small and sharp nose and his rounded chin, the only inheritance he had passed down besides the Coldiron curse.

  My bloodless face made my brown eyes seem darker. They swam like storm puddles polluted with algae scum. I looked in my eyes for signs of the Little People. I searched for the Insider, seeing if its shadow really haunted my pupils. I saw only my murderer’s eyes.

  “All protagonists eventually give a descriptive look at their reflection,” Bookworm said. “That’s a trite romance-novel gimmick, Richard.”

  I slammed my fist against the sink, the sparks of pain sending Little Hitler out with his hungry tongue. “Shut the fuck up, Bookworm,” I said, knowing I had hurt his feelings but taking a sick leap of pleasure in it. I left the bathroom with my knuckles bleeding.

  Even bland Brittany noticed my anxiety. “Say, Richard,” she said, flipping back her hair in that way that Loverboy so admired. “You don’t seem to be your usual self.”

  My usual self. A borrowed thing.

  “A wild night with what’s-her-name? Your girlfriend, Beth?” she teased. Her eyes sparkled, eyes that reminded me of Beth’s. Something stirred to life inside me at the rush of pain.

  “I think I’m just coming down with the flu,” I mumbled. Even Bookworm couldn’t keep my mind on my work. He was off sulking in his room, somewhere up the stairs. To hell with him. The story was done, and I no longer needed him.

  “Maybe so,” Brittany said. “You don’t look so hot.”

  But you do, senorita, Loverboy said. Hotter than a two-dollar tamale and tighter than a Mexican mouse’s ear. Let me go south of your border and do a little cha-cha-cha.

  “I think I’d better go home,” I said, forcing myself to turn from her, trying not to dwell on the soft secrets under her clothes.

  Miss Billingsly let me leave early since it was Tuesday, one of the low-traffic days. Pulling my Subaru into my driveway, I wondered what my neighbors had been doing two nights ago. I wondered what I was doing two nights ago.

  No one saw us, Mister Milktoast said. Nor ax us. Not at awl.

  “Sharp,” I replied. “What were we doing that no one saw?”

  The thing that didn’t happen.

  Shelley.

  I opened the door. A faint rich smell in the air, ripe with the promise of dirt. It reminded me of the dead cat I had poked with a stick when I was a kid. I opened the door to the basement and stood for a minute, looking down the dark stairs. I knew terrible truths waited there. I needed to find out for myself. There could be no trusting the Little People on this one.

  Why was “truth” so sacrosanct? Why was it held above all, with nations built on its principle and lives lost in its pursuit?

  “Because you need to understand,” came that deep, chilling voice I hoped I’d never hear again. The voice that I wasn’t sure I had heard the first time.

  It commanded me down the stairs. I would have gone anyway. Bookworm’s curiosity throbbed bright and velvety behind my forehead, Little Hitler perched on my shoulder like a drug monkey.

  The Insider taunted me with each step.

  “You need to know, Richard…the plot thickens…see what I can make you do…if you don’t tell my story…so I can live forever.”

  On the bottom step, I was struck with a vision of such intensity that I was nearly driven to my knees.

  Shelley is looking through an aquarium, and I watch her face from the other side. Her features are swollen by refraction, her gray eyes wide and watery, her cheeks bulging in a distorted smile. A few faint freckles lay in sprinkles on her cheeks, but they are somehow obscene. Her eyes follow a yellow angelfish that is floating on its side at the top of the tank. Its fins are ragged and mossy. She laughs, coughing blue smoke into the room.

  Behind her head, a Magritte print hangs on the wall. A faceless man in a suit holds an umbrella.

  “I can give you all the flashbacks you need,” said the Insider, and I was back in the basement, sweat drying beneath my eyes.

  I stepped into the cool stale air. I felt the Little People morphing and dissipating. I felt...Shelley’s hair, soft and reddish brown, maddeningly fine. We are on my sofa. A Talking Heads CD is playing, and David Byrne’s panicky voice fills the room, singing something about babies. Shelley is giggling, a quiet, intimate sound. My hands are on her knees. Her dress has been pulled down a little at one shoulder, and the sigh
t of alabaster skin brings Loverboy out, with Little Hitler right behind, and we reach up and caress the smooth gleaming moon of flesh...

  The darkness surrounded and swirled, a threat and comfort.

  ...the flesh is everything you’ve wanted, Richard. Everything I’ve MADE you want.

  I turned on the basement light, but still the darkness swarmed, the shadows crept, the eternal night held its breath in waiting. Across the cold concrete my feet moved, feet that marched to an odd and evil drum, the sound echoing off the cinder block walls. A cobweb that Mister Milktoast had overlooked hung in a corner of the ceiling. The trash can beckoned.

  I had to know, I needed to see if I’d finally lost, if what I’d suspected all along was really true: that there was nothing left of Richard Coldiron, that others had finally won, that Little Hitler and Mister Milktoast and Bookworm and Loverboy and the Insider were all real, and I was just some dream they had suffered on a feverish winter’s night, just some bit of metafiction crammed in the crumpled, handwritten pages of a yellow legal pad...

  Because if I did breathe and walk and hope and ache, then I would never...

  “...never make you do anything you don’t want to do,” I say to Shelley. Even though I’m drugged on passion, I know something is wrong. Beth’s face keeps flashing in my mind, Beth’s words keep repeating themselves, Beth’s laughter plays its music.

  “I’m not looking for a prince,” Shelley says, her breath hot and close and moist on my neck.

  Her arms are around me, pulling me hungrily toward her, but I am being pulled by my own hungers. Loverboy? He throbs impatiently. Little Hitler? Peering from the dark with squinted eyes. Bookworm? Curiously aware, analyzing sense and senses. Mister Milktoast? Watching the darkness behind, guarding against—

  Against the Insider.

  “I’m not usually like this,” I say, but my words are thick and distant, muffled in my own ears.

  “Shut up and kiss me,” Shelley says, and I am lost, I am Loverboy, then we’re both gone, swept away by a black current, and we watch as the new thing we’ve become...

  “Present tense for present tension,” said the Insider, as I reached my fingers toward the trash can lid. The stench was stronger now, overripe and corrosively sweet.

  I muttered through tight teeth, “No. That wasn’t me, that—”

  “—that couldn’t have been you. Yes, yes, I’ve heard it all before, a thousand times. I’ve been in here, Richard. I know. Do you honestly believe this is your only heap of garbage? I’ve rummaged through your life, kicked through the closets of your memories, dusted off your broken toys, flipped through the ragged pages of your scrapbook. It’s never been you, has it? You’ve always been lucky enough to have someone to blame. And here I am. Your savior.”

  I wondered whose hand would lift the lid. The Insider answered my unspoken question.

  “Knowledge is power, my loyal host. You need to know. Bookworm wants to know. And Little Hitler wants you to see.”

  “And you? What about you, you black-hearted bastard?” I screamed. Mister Milktoast tried to hush me, but I didn’t care if the neighbors heard. “You’re the one who talks the big game, who says humans are the ones who brought evil into the world. You’re the one who sits back there all smug and superior, like some great dice jockey in the sky, telling me I deserve exactly what I roll in this life. You’re the one who needs to judge guilt or innocence, as if you’re beyond judgment. Ancient psychic predator, my ass.”

  The Insider laughed, a booming, rolling thunder of mirth that rumbled through the labyrinth of my back rooms.

  “Oh, Richard,” it said, its laughter finally dying away, leaving a dull ache in my temples. “Richard. Richard. Richard. You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “I only get what I deserve, right, Shit For Brains?”

  I touched the lid handle, my fingers tingling. I tried to lower my arm, but the muscles were locked and beyond my control. The Insider continued filling my brain with its slithery voice. “Let’s reason this out, Richard. You trust your Mister Milktoast, don’t you?”

  “How do I know it’s him, and not another one of your tricks? I mean, how do I know I’m not just fooling myself? You might have gone back to the beginning, mixed things around, made him up from scratch for your own plot purposes.”

  “Some things you have to take on faith, Richard. You humans put such stock in your faith.”

  My head throbbed, as if a bucket of hot ball bearings had been dumped in the veins of my temple and rolled through my cerebral cortex. Or like cold dice in a cup. Or—fuck, I wish this book would sell so I wouldn’t have to keep coming up with this stuff.

  “Richard?” said Mister Milktoast.

  “Is that you, Mister Milktoast? What’s happening? Is it true?”

  “I tried to warn you, Richard. I tried, but it’s so strong. And it knows how to hurt us.”

  My hand was on the lid handle, its cold hard plastic miles away beneath my fingers. Whose hand, whose meat mitten, whose raggedy-man phalanges?

  “Then it’s no joke,” I said, and the last scraps of hope fell away like rotted cloth, as if I were extending the scarecrow metaphor. I was naked in the deepest night, staked in a field of fallow earth.

  “It hurts us, Richard. In here, while you’re away. The Insider has little punishments for each of us.”

  “Don’t cry, Mister Milktoast. Remember, we’re survivors. We can get through anything—”

  “—b-but the boots, Richard. The Insider wears the boots. It knows about Father, it knows about those bad memories. It finds them in here and makes me watch, over and over. It makes me feel the boots again. And all the fear that came with them.”

  “Fear,” said the Insider. “I am what you feed me.”

  Mister Milktoast was gone, pushed away inside.

  “And I’d like to share my dinner,” it said. “Just like a polite host should.”

  Damn. Here comes another flashback.

  I look over Shelley’s shoulder as we embrace, I press my nose into the meadow of her hair, I inhale the vapor off her clean skin. My eyes are far away, watching the angelfish’s corpse as it circles and circles the top of the tank like a dead moon chained to a lost planet. No hope of escape. It has been too long, too many years.

  Shelley’s lips are on my cheek, her hands in my hair, then down lower. I loom over Shelley, impatient, urgent, hungry. I reach under the sofa and pull out the long kitchen knife, I grip its wooden handle and I shudder with pleasure. At long last I live again.

  “Lift the lid, Richard,” it commanded, and I trembled with tears stinging the corners of my eyes.

  “Yessssss,” it whispered, voice low and dark and ecstatic and sounding so much like me. “Knowledge is power.”

  I raised the lid and the Insider made me look, smell, hear. I vomited and collapsed onto the cold hard floor.

  I should do laundry more often.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The telephone rang, its electronic gargle breaking the night. I had been almost asleep, or as close as I dared get to dreams. I fumbled for the receiver on the nightstand, and my hand brushed against soft nylon.

  Shelley’s tights.

  Once filled with warm, moving flesh. Now lying shed like a snakeskin. Awareness rushed in on a red tide.

  I picked up the phone and pressed it to my ear. The night sky outside the window was clear and studded with starlight, little dots of hope in a black abyss. The room smelled of soapy steam from the shower I had taken, hoping to wash the self-loathing from my skin.

  “Hello?”

  “Richard?”

  A female voice, slightly slurred, as if the speaker’s tongue were swathed in cotton. Cracked like an old cup. Or maybe like a Jesus plate.

  “Mother, why are you calling at this time of night?”

  As if I had to ask. In Iowa, her private pity party was probably not yet at the midway point. She was probably still on her first pint, because she could still punch the big buttons
on the phone.

  “Just wanted to talk to my only son,” she said, breathing heavily in the mouthpiece. The last word came out as “shun.”

  “How are you, Mother?” I felt as stretched and empty as the tights I gripped in my left hand.

  “Okay, I guess. I got your letter.”

  “Letter?”

  “Yeah. Telling me about this new girl, Shelley. You really think it might get serious?”

  Who had written that letter?

  “Uh. . . sure, Mother. But who knows?”

  “Sounds like she’s really something special.”

  “She’s okay.”

  “She must be more than okay, since you took the trouble of sending me a lock of her hair.”

  No.

  That couldn’t have been me. Never me.

  “I miss you, Richard.”

  I miss you, too. I almost said it without thinking, the way you do when you’re supposed to love someone but don’t. I swallowed the words. They burned like miniature suns. I couldn’t lie to my own mother, could I? Or was it Loverboy who wanted to blurt out that needy confession.

  “What’s going on back home?” I asked, hoping, praying that she wouldn’t mention Father, wondering if the letter the Insider had sent was stained. Or, worse, sealed with a kiss.

  “They’re tearing down the garage next door. Been hauling off them old junk cars. Gonna put in a row of shops, I hear.” Her voice fell, wistful. “Remember when you used to play back there?”

  The past. She should have known better. Neither of us wanted that, but the past was like genital rash. Even though we knew that handling it would only slow the healing, our fingers couldn’t stay away.

  “How’s the weather there?” I asked. “Had a frost yet?”

  “It’s been laying on the corn, I hear. But by the time I get up of a morning, it’s melted away. I used to like that, looking over them sparkly green fields. Like magic, it was.”

  “Any luck finding a job?”

  She coughed, an empty rattling sound. “Who wants an old woman without a high school diploma? Especially the way they talk about me. I still hear them, even after all these years, whispering behind their hands at the Gas-N-Go. Got quite a reputation. You’d think people would forget after a while, that they’d let bygones be bygones.”