As I Die Lying Page 29

  “The inner light,” said Bookworm.

  “Right on, bro’,” Loverboy said. “I like to flip a pancake as much as the next guy, but it’s not much fun when the Insider is holding the spatula.”

  “Is that why you finally decided to join us, Loverboy?” I asked through chattering teeth.

  “Hell, yeah. All for one, and all that jack-off crap. Peace, free love, and fucking understanding, my man. But let’s get one thing straight. I love you guys, but don’t go getting sweet on me now. I’m an Alpha male psycho and that’s that. And as soon as we’re rid of this Insider bastard, I’m going to cast some fucking loaves upon the waters.”

  The Insider churned, flailed, sliced. I fell to my knees. If only I could love it enough, hold it in my heart, smother it with my light. “We love you,” I said.

  It was our new mantra, so much more tangible than Flower Power ideals, so much more focused than Tibetan chants, so much more sincere than the Lord’s Prayer. Hate as the highest achievement of love. Selfishness boiled down to its purest essence. Love as the means to its own self-serving end.

  An unbroken circle jerk.

  “Why?” It was weaker now, staggered by the light, feeble under the reflection of its own mirror, failing to hold up under close examination. “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

  “Don’t try to play the Jesus card, my midnight friend,” I said. “This love goes deeper than self-sacrifice. No more martyrs allowed in the Bone House. This love goes all the way to the fucking foundation.”

  “And you, too, Little Hitler? I thought, of all of them, you would understand...and appreciate...what I’ve done.”

  “I would gladly have followed you through eternity, to the next host and beyond,” Little Hitler said. He was weeping and the tears froze on my cheeks. “But your hate isn’t sincere enough. You only serve yourself. You say you are what humans have made you become. But we hate because we want to, not because we have to. Free will.”

  “He’s right, Mister Badass Soulsucker,” said Loverboy. “You laugh at us humans, but you’re worse than any of us. Sure, we’re all slaves to our pathetic needs. But in here, we’ve all got to stick together.”

  “Safest sex,” Mister Milktoast said. “Get it?”

  “Hey, Mister M, you’ve finally turned that protected love of yours back home,” said Bookworm. “Back to Richard. To this fabulist construct, this comic-book hero, this inconsistent protagonist—”

  “Don’t go getting faggy,” Loverboy said. “You’ll always be Dickworm to me. Not that ‘always’ looks like it’s going to last a hell of a lot longer. But what you told us made sense. At the heart of the matter, the fuck-all and be-all, is that we really are one. We belong to this dick-squiggled Richard-meat, for better or worse. But the Insider...the Insider’s a frigging illegal alien. It just bootscooted the fuck on in here without even passing ‘Go,’ much less asking for a green card.”

  “And you love Richard more than you love the Insider?”

  “Dance with the bitch what brung you, that’s what I say.”

  We clenched our heart, squeezing down on the hot black tarball of the Insider. Our love was a ring of hellfire, roasting the Insider in its own sorry juices. That’s when the curtain of black pain dropped over my mind and I fell face-first into the snow...

  And I was riding a high cloud, a huge tuft of warm ice cream that rocked gently up and down like an angelic hobby horse. The sun showered golden light and rainbows. I looked down on the earth below, a drugged king on a magic carpet. The ground was wrapped in a crystal mist.

  The cloud accelerated and swooped and the thin edges of the horizon crumbled away, dropping off into the blackness that lurked underneath the corners of the world. Dark cracks ran through the mist and the scene shattered like a glass photograph smashed with a hammer.

  The shards collected and coalesced into the image of Mother’s face, with a jagged skinscape and eyes that were pools of dead hate set against a bleak fog. The face changed and slithered into a thousand likenesses, each forming for a split second before giving way to the next, and all, all, screaming.

  I fell into the dark maw of open mouths and I looked down the throat at an ocean of writhing maggots, then I was falling falling falling into blackness and I saw that the maggots weren’t maggots at all, they were naked human beings, and the great throat was closing and swallowing—

  “Wake up, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said.

  I opened my eyes against the cold snow. An avalanche roared in my ears. My nose was bleeding and my fingers were numb from frostbite.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, the exhaust of my words making tiny furrows in the snow. “You’re not getting Mother.”

  The Insider had almost escaped, almost slipped out of my heart and into my mind. From there to drag its little voodoo bag of horrors to the one who had never meant any harm. But I wasn’t about to let Mother get hurt any worse than she already had.

  “Besides,” Bookworm said. “If this ends with, ‘And it was all a dream,’ I’m going to kill you myself.”

  “You’re a clever bastard, Insider,” I said, lifting myself from the frozen white. Drops of blood leaked down my face into the snow. “Trying to go where you can hurt me the most. Still eating my guilt. But guess who’s smiling now?”

  I hoped the pain in my abdomen meant that the Insider was still locked away. Either that or a hundred hungry rats had been loosed in my bowels.

  “You were falling asleep, Richie-wuss,” said Loverboy. “And you know what happens when you sleep. That’s one wet dream nobody wakes from.”

  “Yeah,” Little Hitler said. “Leaving us here to do all your dirty work. Not that I mind too much. I’ve grown fond of your guilt and misery.”

  “I had a hell of a nightmare,” I said. “Turned out we were the bad guys.”

  “Us? Bad?” Little Hitler said. “That’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said about me. You must really love us.”

  “I love everybody. It’s a wonderful life. A fucking Jimmy Stewart remake with a contemporary spin and no character realizations at all.”

  “I can’t wait for this to be over,” Loverboy said. “Nothing personal, but you’re getting on my goddamned nerves. Say, you think Beth will ever want to do the old Humpty-Dumpty-Roll-Over-and-Bump-Me again?”

  “As cold as it is?” Mister Milktoast said. “I predict a serious case of blue balls in your future.”

  Bookworm came out, Bookworm who had been the psychic superglue that had held us together through our fight with the Insider. The bookbinder, the plotter, the editor, the typesetter. “It’s not sex you’re after, Loverboy. You just want to be accepted. You just want to be a part of something bigger than yourself. An unconditional love.”

  “Bite me, Bibliofuck. I’m in it for the fucking donut holes.”

  “We all live to serve.”

  “And we serve the light menu,” I said. “Low carb, low cal, tastes great, less filling.”

  The glow expanded in my chest, radiating out from my poisoned heart. The black essence of the Insider smoldered and fumed underneath the heat of our love. The love was big, overwhelming all of us. This was the hero’s journey, the most powerful myth, the purpose of all stories.

  I waded through the surf of snow, dragging my tired legs as if they were tree stumps. The snow was still falling, and fat dreamy flakes collected on my eyelashes. My breath sent frozen fogs into the evening twilight. The mountain called me, commanded me forward.

  I would never solve the riddle of the Insider. It was a trick of nature, just another entity, just another parasite in a universe of parasites. Just part of the cosmic soup. Maybe horrible in human terms, but against the backdrop of an incomprehensible universe, it could be understood.

  That monster was made, not born. Built from pieces of hopelessness and pain, from loneliness and guilt, brought to life by the energy of sin. Just another thing that needed belief and faith to sustain it. Just another psychic vampire trying to claim a stake.


  Love was the real mystery. Love was the ultimate weapon. Love could defeat the cruelest monsters. But was love ultimately just human vanity? Or did it come from somewhere outside all of us?

  Good and evil were nothing but concepts in Bookworm’s cheesy pulp fiction. They had no place in my autobiography. All I could do was pay for my own sins and let the theme fall to the eye of the beholder.

  Bookworm murmured drowsily. “Isn’t it a bit deflating that the main character doesn’t find resolution through another person? Shouldn’t our love for Beth serve as the redemptive force?”

  “Good question,” I said. I loved her, but I’d ditched her before the story was over. Maybe that said a lot. Maybe not.

  The dark forest surrounded me. The trees stood like soldiers lining both sides of a vast hall, as if I were meeting royalty, kissing Odin’s ring in Valhalla. The cracked bark of wild cherry peeled off in coppery strips. Laurel bowed humbly under the crush of snow, its waxy green leaves curled from the cold. A stunted spruce leaned against the dead limbs of an oak. The forest was a silent temple. The wind whispered its prayers in the high branches.

  Bookworm called out, weak and chilled. “Richard, I think...I used too much of myself...spelled it all out...”

  “Alphabetical ardor,” Mister Milktoast said.

  “Hang in there,” I said, comforting my discerning proofreader. “We’ve almost won.”

  “No, I served my role. Last in, first out, the aesthetic cycle. Aristotle said the end was in the beginning, after all. Now I’m writing myself out of the story. Keep the faith...roomie.”

  And Bookworm was gone, adrift like invisible smoke, with scarcely a twinge to mark his passing. The Insider scrambled toward the sudden void, seeking to consume some of the psychic residue and inhabit the empty room. We kicked his ass back into the crawlspace of my heart. A sewer pipe must have broken in the Bone House, because something smelled awfully ripe down there.

  The cold settled into my marrow like dull fire and carved its pockets of pain in my fingers and toes. The snow fell even faster, a foot thick and skirling. The world was being buried, succumbing to the virginal suffocating whiteness. I looked behind me at my tracks and saw that they were already filled and swept smooth, as if I had never been. Hot bile rose in my trachea and boots rattled my rib cage. The Insider was summoning its strength for a final run at the back door.

  “Allow me,” said Little Hitler. “I could use a good hurt.”

  He swallowed, ten-penny nails and fishhooks, charcoal and blood, stardust and comet ice, a dollar’s worth of candy, acid tears all sliding away. He absorbed it and relished the pain, then scurried down whatever dark corridor of my mind he had come from. He turned a corner and disappeared forever.

  “So long, old pal,” I said, but my words died in the snowscape. He might have been the first serial killer in history who’d never actually killed anyone. But let him have his delusions.

  “First Dickworm, now Little Diddler. What the fuck is going on here, Richie?” Loverboy said. He was flapping like a buzzard in a canary cage, rolling like a fifth wheel, dangling like an imperfect participle.

  “Ultimately, we are each responsible for ourselves,” I said. “All of them. That’s one of the problems with being human and having free will.”

  My legs kept moving, plowing toward the mountaintop that was always just out of sight. I was a ghost hovering beyond my meat. Now I knew how my Little People felt, indentured servants to a mass of dust and energy. No wonder they had always fought so hard for face time. No one likes to share a house with selfish roommates who air dirty laundry all over the place.

  “But I thought we were supposed to be winning.” Loverboy sounded weak. “No fair. This wet dream is frozen. My meat missile is an icicle.”

  “If you can’t stand the cold, get out of the refrigerator,” said Mister Milktoast.

  “Hey, fuck both of you and the busted condoms you rode in on,” said Loverboy.

  “That’s the way the donut crumbles, Biscuit Dick,” answered Mister Milktoast.

  “Bookfart set me up. When he was getting us to join, he didn’t say anything about this part of the deal. This dying part.”

  I fell to my knees. My limbs were leaden, painted with snow, sopped in the gravy of dusk. Night was falling hard, a true night, with sharp edges and thick skin. White snow, black night. I wished Bookworm were around to sort out the symbolism.

  “Get up and go back,” Loverboy said. “I promise I’ll quit being a wiseass. I’ll stop calling you Dickwheat and Milkswish and all those other things. I’ll be good from now on. I’ll even go celibate, just let me live.”

  “Have we taken it far enough?” I asked Mister Milktoast.

  “We can’t go back,” Mister Milktoast said. “We could never be sure about the Insider. It could be hiding in here, waiting. Maybe for years. When you let something in your heart, it’s supposed to be forever.”

  “Good things are worth waiting for,” I said, shackled in the cold cardiac arrest of deepest winter and one of Beth’s lines that I should have trimmed from the manuscript before it came to this. I struggled to my feet.

  “He who laughs last, right, Richard?” said Mister Milktoast. “Maybe you’re not a shellfish oyster after all.”

  “Clam up, Shrimp.”

  I reached the final ridge of Widow’s Peak where the trees were sparse and great gray boulders were strewn like the toys of petulant chldren. I could almost see the top of the mountain through the swirling snow.

  “Hey, Fuckwit, turn back!” Loverboy screeched.

  “Back to what?” I said. “A house with Beth and Mother in separate beds, where you could ping-pong back and forth all night, bedsprings squeaking and Oedipus rexing? Sorry, my lascivious friend, but that’s not my idea of a bright shining sequel.”

  “Careful, Richard,” said Mister Milktoast. “Anger and hate might bring the Insider back from the basement.”

  I stopped and stood swaying in the snow, the breeze whistling its fatal lullaby. The blind beauty of the world was, I now knew, a precious and brief gift.

  “Hate? No, Mister Milktoast, I don’t hate. The past doesn’t bother me anymore. Because it’s almost over.”

  Loverboy gave up, twitched and died, shriveled like a grape dropped into the sun of my love or maybe a raisin stirred in cinnamon bun batter in some cosmic mixing bowl.

  “Good riddance,” said Mister Milktoast.

  “No, Loverboy was part of us. Maybe not the best part, a part whose size he always exaggerated, but nobody’s perfect.”

  “Let he who is without skin—”

  “—cast the first snowball in hell.” I was game.

  “The proof’s in the pudding.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just always wanted to say it.”

  “Your material sucks now that you’ve lost Bookworm.” I fought through the knee-deep snow, carrying the ghosts of everyone I had been. The Bone House was nearly vacant. I realized I was afraid to be alone.

  “Mister Milktoast, you don’t suppose...”

  “Yes, Richard?”

  “...that the Coldiron Curse will live on? Or was that just one of the Insider’s little illusions? Make the protagonist suffer to ensure he’s sympathetic?”

  “Who knows, old friend?”

  “And all the Little People...even you, and maybe even me...all just made up for the Insider’s amusement?”

  “Don’t talk yourself crazy, Richard.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Jung at heart. I’m going to miss you.”

  I stepped into vast whiteness. “Coming?”

  “Whither thou host,” Mister Milktoast said.

  “Ouch. Must you always have the final word?” I whispered, but there was no answer, because my oldest and dearest invisible friend, my imaginary protector, my inner child, had risen through the Bone House chimney like smoke from a funeral pyre and joined the sky.

  I would never
reach the top of the mountain. My legs were failing and my spirit was drained dry by the Insider. I was numb to sadness, but I banked a small spark of joy for Beth, for Mother, for the child that would have half my genetic material and literary estate. Life was for the living and maybe this curse would end with me.

  I fell for a final time, and the shadows of sleep rose. But the shadows cast no fear. During this sleep, no boots would walk.

  I knew the rules. You couldn’t tell the story if you were dead, so something must live on.

  A voice came from inside me, from that hot ball of love that kept expanding and swelling and pushing back the great dark universe.

  “I am what you have made me,” a strange voice said, and I hoped the voice was mine and not the Insider’s.

  Then I realized it belonged to neither. We were skins of a great ethereal onion, and acceptance was surrender was forgiveness was victory. The door closed and the serpent swallowed its own tale.

  On the peaceful ridge of that frigid mountain, as the snow covered me like a blanket and oblivion tucked me in, all was forgiven.

  I drifted off, dreaming of light: a painless light, a cleansing light, a light that had no end.

  “Welcome to the Bone House, Richard,” said the Voice.

  Omniscient narrators. They think they know everything. Fuck them.

  I’m going to sleep.

  THE END

  ###

  About the author:

  I have written 12 novels, including The Red Church, Speed Dating with the Dead, Disintegration, and The Skull Ring. I didn’t write this one, but after Richard died, I decided I could steal the manuscript and no one would be around to know the difference, even though he writes worse than I do. I also started dating Beth, but that’s another story.

  Other electronic works include Burial to Follow and the story collections Ashes, The First, Murdermouth, Gateway Drug, and Flowers. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where I write for a newspaper, play guitar, raise an organic garden, and work as a freelance fiction editor.