
BONELAND
Jeffrey Thomas
First Digital Edition
March 2010
Darkside Digital
A Horror Mall Company
P.O. Box 338
North Webster, IN 46555
www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital
Boneland © 2010 by Jeffrey Thomas
All Rights Reserved.
Special thanks to the following members of The Darkside Project:
David Dodd (aka GothicKnight)
Scott Tootle (aka Thrasher)
Paulo Monteiro (aka HugeHorrorFan)
Kurt M. Criscione (aka Dathar)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Prologue: Pandora's Box
Chicago, Illinois, 1893
It was oppressively hot in the attic, but from one of its small windows ten year old Johnny Board gazed out upon the city of Chicago. The city, like a living picture mounted on the wall before him, looked ready to burst out of its wooden frame...too immense and powerful to be so contained.
\*
Of Chicago, Rudyard Kipling said, "This place is the first American city I have encountered...Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again."
\*
The city hugged the shore of Lake Michigan for twenty-four miles, as if only the lake could halt its spread. Close to the lake reared a congestion of tall structures, but from the lake's edge the city spread inland for over ten miles with an almost uniform flatness of roofs. This was an urban wasteland of mills and factories, offices and dwellings, blending together into one homogenous concoction of sooty brick. Above it all hung a gray pall of smoke from a forest of chimneys, smoke that stank of burning coal.
\*
Of Chicago, German historian and economist Max Weber said that the "whole powerful city, more extensive than London---resembles, except for the better residential areas, a human being with his skin removed."
\*
Likes veins and tendons, telegraph wires and railroad lines were interwoven through the city, communicating thought and product to other cities elsewhere across this vast and burgeoning country. Along the Chicago River floated heavily loaded barges. And out there, there, Johnny recognized, lay the Union Stock Yard, where his father had worked up until two months ago, when he too had taken a train out of Chicago, perhaps headed for some other growing city. Johnny didn't know where that city might be.
In those stockyards, those slaughterhouses, how many animals at this very moment were having their throats cut, Johnny wondered. In the very streets of the city, strewn with uncollected horse droppings, animal carcasses lay bloated and rotting in the summer sun. Swarming with flies. So many flies that their buzzing was as oppressive as the heat.
\*
Of Chicago, French novelist Paul Bourget had the impression that it had been formed by "some impersonal power, irresistible, unconscious, like a force of nature."
\*
Johnny turned his head sharply. Had he heard a buzzing from the stairs behind him? A buzzing from his family's apartment, on the floor below?
No, just a train approaching near the house. Now rumbling past. The walls vibrated.
There weren't many flies down there, not clouds of them like there were over the animals left to putrefy in the gutters. But Johnny was still reluctant to go back downstairs. He had brought apples up here, their green skins turning brown in patches with their own encroaching decay. He had even peed in a mason jar that belonged to his mother.
His mother.
But he knew he must venture down there again. He knew he couldn't spend yet another day up here in the attic. He needed water again. He needed to...to...
Johnny crept away from the window, and around the corner to the stairs. He hesitated at their head, as if he expected to see some terrible figure awaiting him in the gloom at the bottom. But there was no one. No one. Stealthily, he began to descend.
The kitchen was silent and empty...empty except for the sound of a single fly, trapped buzzing against a windowpane. Bright dusty sunlight filled this room, but the parlor beyond was murky, all of its curtains drawn.
Johnny cupped his hand over nose and mouth as he neared its threshold. The summer swelter had made the stench so terrible that he had begun to smell it in the attic, and he was surprised the family on the floor below hadn't yet complained. He both dreaded and hoped for them to investigate its source.
He took just several steps inside the room. But through its duskiness, he could make out the form at its center.
Johnny Board's mother dangled there, a kicked-over stepladder lying on the floor below her bare feet. She wore a thin nightdress, her dark hair in disarray. Her head was tipped forward, her eyes closed, her tongue protruding from between her lips and the area around her jaw discolored where the blood had settled over the past few days. Likewise, her slender arms shaded from milky white at her shoulders to very dark at her forearms and hands, as though she wore sheer black gloves.
("I hear birds singing, Johnny," she had whispered to him before he left for school. "Or maybe it's bugs." She was sobbing and laughing at the same time, crouching down and gripping his shoulders hard, too hard. "Bugs in my head...")
This was the first time he'd looked at her that he didn't burst into sobs. His sobs had been scorched out of him, his tears evaporated as if from summer dehydration. But still, his chest yawned open like a trapdoor inside him over which his heart hung on its own noose string. He was angry, too. Angry at his mother for leaving him. Angry at his father for leaving her. And angry at himself for not being strong enough to leave the house to fetch help that couldn't help, angry at himself for not bringing himself to touch her hand or to cut her down (as if, even yet, he might still save her). Angry at himself for going to school on that day, and leaving her here alone...
He heard another train coming, shaking the house, roaring like an animal into this great city that impressed so many writers as the first truly American city, bringing more supplies so that it could grow and spread even more. Like a disease...a cancer of coal smoke, slaughtered animals and sweating, bleeding, rutting human flesh...
Johnny saw a fly skitter across his mother's forehead, as if it sought some entryway inside her skull.
Lumbar Beach, New Jersey, 1900
From The New Jersey Herald:
MYSTERIOUS RAIN OF BEETLES.
Local Authorities Believe Insects May Have Been Dropped By Storm.
LUMBAR BEACH, May 22 - Local families awoke here yesterday morning to discover thousands of insects covering their yards and roofs, so thick in some streets that they had to be shoveled into barrels and burned. Lumbar High School science teacher Donald Book tentatively identified the insects as stag beetles, of the family Scarabaeoidea. The beetles have very pronounced jaws, and some residents report having been bitten in disposing of the pests. Mr. Book suggests that a storm might have swept in the profusion of insects, though the weather last night was clear in this region. Mr. Book also notes that the beetles are a flying insect, and may have been engaged in a mating ritual or mass migration.
\*
For his seventeenth birthday, Johnny Board received a camera from his Aunt Marge, with whom he had been living for the past seven years in her cute little bungalow not far from Lumbar Beach.
The camera was a No. 2 Bull's-Eye, from Eastman Kodak. It was the first camera that could be loaded with film in daylight. Johnny would take this camera down to the beach to shoot the waves, and---often surreptitiously---those people drawn to the waves. On occasion he would succeed in getting some pretty teenage girl to pose on the sand with the ferris wheel of the boardwalk fairgrounds looming against the sky behind her.
On May 22, 1900, Johnny used his camera to take pictures of the stag beetles that carpeted the sand of the beach in rustling hordes, beetles in such abundance that the surf gathered them up until even the water became patchy with bobbing shoals of them. That day, a stag beetle bit the end of Johnny's shoe so that he had to pry it loose with a stick. The bizarre incident reminded Johnny of a newspaper story he had read the day after Easter. During the annual White House Easter egg hunt (originated in 1878 by James Madison's wife Dolley, the article added), stag beetles in great numbers on the White House lawn had caused the festivities to be broken up early. President McKinley himself was bitten by one of them on the thumb.
\*
From The Ocean County Observer:
STORM DROPS THOUSANDS OF SHRIMP.
Latest Episode of Unusual Animals Appearing.
LUMBAR BEACH, June 30 - In another of many similar incidents across the country, and reported in England and France as well, residents have found great numbers of tadpole shrimp in their yards following last night's torrential rains. Donald Book, a science instructor at Lumbar High School, says the freshwater tadpole shrimp, also called triops, are a "living fossil" and describes them as "three-eyed, hermaphroditic, and cannibalistic." He suggests that perhaps they were swept up and deposited by the violent storm that cut through this town. An alternative theory Mr. Book proposes is that these primitive shrimp were not dropped, but spawned in abundance as a direct result of the rain. The eggs of tadpole shrimp can survive for even centuries in a dried pond bed until rains refill the pond and cause them to hatch. Whereas tadpole shrimp are normally two inches in length, according to Mr. Book, some of those collected here have been nearly five inches long. Mr. Book could not draw any clear connection between this and numerous other strange appearances of insects and crustaceans that have occurred over the summer.
\*
In tidal pools near the ocean's edge, and even in a puddle behind his aunt's house, Johnny discovered several of these triops that the newspaper wrote about. The few stray specimens were too small to get a good shot of with his camera, but Johnny got down on his knees and actually scooped one of the odd, trilobite-like animals into his hand. Its centipede legs and forked tail against his palm gave him a shiver, but before he could sweep the animal off his hand it darted up his arm. Johnny leapt to his feet slapping at himself as though having a seizure. There was even a loud ringing or buzzing that he thought might be the little crustacean's angry voice, except that the sound seemed to originate inside Johnny's own head.
He didn't find the triops on him, could only assume that he had been successful in dislodging it. But he rushed down to the beach after that, tore off his shirt and socks and took a quick dip in the cold Atlantic.
\*
From Today's Sunbeam:
LUMBAR TEACHER KILLED BY GIANT TICK.
Teacher Had Been Collecting Unusual Insects in Region.
LUMBAR BEACH, August 26 - In a scene that shocked police, Lumbar High School science teacher Donald S. Book, 47, was found dead last night in the basement of his Ulna Road home, apparently the victim of an extremely large tick that had been in his possession. When Mr. Book did not appear for his classes for two days, Principal Emmet Window became concerned and urged police to go to the teacher's home, where he lived alone. Mr. Book had been consulted over the summer regarding uncanny appearances of insects in great numbers, and had collected many samples from these scenes. The tick that police believe caused Mr. Book's death had attached itself to the back of his neck and was ballooned like the so-called "soft ticks", or argasids, found on dogs and livestock. The parasite, killed by police in the process of its removal, was nearly a foot in length, and the officers reported that while being removed it emitted a sound so loud they were caused great discomfort. The specimen will be preserved pending closer study. Also taken from the scene were a number of other ticks up to six inches in length, which had apparently been gorged on the blood of several rabbits found in their cage.
\*
Accompanied by his Aunt Marge, Johnny Board attended the funeral of Donald Book, who before his graduation had been his favorite teacher at Lumbar High School. Mr. Book had been very supportive of Johnny's fondness for photography, and had been especially interested in the photographs Johnny had made of the plague of stag beetles back in May.
When it was Johnny's turn to kneel in front of the closed casket, he couldn't help but morbidly imagine Mr. Book in there with the remarkable tick still attached to the back of his neck, affixed so firmly to his spine that it couldn't be pried loose even by the undertaker, though he knew this wasn't the case.
Now that he had graduated, Johnny hoped to find employment with the Lumbar Woolen Mill where a friend of his already worked. His Aunt Marge wanted him to go on to college, but was unable to pay for this herself, and Johnny insisted on helping with her bills in return for all she had done for him since her sister had committed suicide. He was sure, however, that Mr. Book would have been disappointed with his decision, as well...
So in 1901, with a job and soon an apartment of his own, eighteen year old Johnny Board would become a man. America would enter the Twentieth Century, and---while waiting in line at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition---President William McKinley would be shot twice by Polish immigrant Leon Czolgosz, dying eight days later.
Czolgosz would be borne away beaten and bloody (to be executed in Old Sparky not even two months after the shooting). Throughout his brief incarceration, the assassin---apparently insane---would babble that insects inside his head had urged him to kill the president.
Metacarpus, Pennsylvania, 1918
John Board thought he had it pretty easy; once or twice a week he'd shoot a crime scene, and then the remaining days were spent on the developing of his photos and the care and feeding of his cameras.
Board had half an attic flat in an old tenement house on Sacrum Street. The other half was used for storage by the elderly owner of the house---shapely but headless dressmaker's dummies, moth-eaten baby outfits, heaps of roofing shingles and ceiling slats, buckets of rusted nails, a solitary shoe in a mote-swarmed ray of afternoon sunlight slanted across the worn floorboards, a fading cigarette package partly snared in an abandoned spider web on a window sill, the desiccated mummy of a bird which had found ingress somehow and starved to death. It all broke down to still life for him, but he had only ever taken a photo of that skeletal bird, which looked like a fragile construction of twigs and dust. His cameras weren't interested in the inorganic, though he personally sensed as much residual life in the cigarette package or sunlit shoe as he did the carcasses it was his profession to record.
When drunk one afternoon, he had ventured into the other half of the attic and dragged one of the headless dummies onto his side. It now stood beside his bed and wore a dingy bra he had later found in an old wicker baby carriage, also in that long-disused section. He would sometimes playfully cup one of the manikin's breasts through the bra and wonder how long shriveled or decayed was the flesh that had once filled that garment.
One morning he awoke feeling thoroughly poisoned by the amount of bourbon he had ingested the night before, to find the headless/limbless torso of the dressmaker's dummy lying in bed with him. He didn't question himself as to what might have transpired, though the fact that the bra had not been removed indicated that he might have been too drunk to perform.
Board slept on a cot-like bed in the largest of his three rooms, and thus used the small bedroom with its slanted walls and water-stained, peeling flowered wallpaper for his work.
The new camera wasn't mature yet; today he checked on its progress by rolling up his sleeve and immersing his arm into a glass tank full of milky fluid, sitting atop an old desk whose drawers were filled with bottles of solution and other supplies. As he groped in the cold, nearly gelatinous bath, he saw a fluttering dark shape skitter against the glass then recede again into the whiteness. After a few moments he had hold of it, and lifted it out, dripping, for inspection.
As a boy he had once wandered with his Aunt Marge along Lumbar Beach and discovered numerous horseshoe crabs seemingly washed up in the surf. He had tried picking one of these up, only to meet with resistance, and had found that it was a male copulating with a female, who was nearly buried in the mud beneath her lover. His aunt had laughingly told him it was their mating season, the whole beach being the site of a silently shameless orgy. Board had then let go of the crab, hoping he hadn't injured its crabhood in any way.
The cameras always reminded him of that horseshoe crab he had unknowingly tried to dislodge from its girlfriend. He held this camera by spreading his fingers over its smooth, white carapace, which had two horny ridges but no other features. Beneath the shell, a fringe of small boneless legs rippled in the air with a fluid rhythm as if it thought it were still whisking along the aquarium's bottom, feeding on the finely ground bone chips he sprinkled into the tank once a day.
The front of the creature was distinguished by a single, large and pearly eye without a pupil, which would ultimately reach the size of a cue ball. The mouth was hidden underneath the forward part of the shell. He had once had the tip of a finger bitten off by an old camera that was beginning to malfunction. He was glad when he was able to retire it, not long after. If he'd had his way, he'd have taken a hammer to the thing that same day. Though that, of course, would have been ill advised from a legal standpoint.
Lightly he touched an intact finger to a puckered orifice at the rear of the creature, and it pulsed slightly at his probing. Still too tight, but soon he'd be able to load a film cartridge in there.
Satisfied with this instrument's formation, Board returned it to its tank, watching its shadowy form descend and disappear into the liquid void.
Now it was time to check on how the latest batch of photographs was coming along.
A dozen photographs were clothes-pinned to a line strung across the end of the narrow room so that the light through the one bare window could tease the images out of their chemically coated surfaces. There had been twenty frames on the roll, but typically almost half of them hadn't been properly exposed. That was why Board always made sure to overshoot any given subject, taking repeated shots from each angle.
All of these photos illustrated the same crime scene, from two different angles and in a spectrum of grays ranging from nearly white to nearly black. The crime, as it turned out, had been committed by the victim himself. A man sat at a heavy, battered table, remarkably erect in posture despite having no head. What was left of it hung down in flaps about his shoulders like the half-peeled skin of a banana, the upper part of his shirt soaked black with the cascade of his blood. One hand had fallen to the tabletop, palm up like a dead spider with its legs curled, and the other had fallen limply down his side. The shotgun he had fired into his mouth---a 1903 John Browning auto-5---was also still erect, its butt having hit the floor and the barrel propped against one thigh. After taking the pictures, Board had looked over the policemen's shoulders as they examined the weapon. The victim, a Joseph Cup, had sawed off part of the barrel so as to make it easier to reach the trigger with his thumb. But, running his own thumb over the end, one cop noted that Cup had filed the abbreviated muzzle smooth, so no burs would painfully scrape his inner mouth as he blew his brains across the ceiling and walls in a widely distributed pattern that in the photos almost looked like a wallpaper design.
Again, after he'd shot the photos, Board had watched as an officer used two pencils to lift up Cup's face. It was fairly normal looking, if somewhat slack and rubbery, like a boneless mask. Until the officer had done this, it had appeared as if the head were entirely decimated, when in fact the blast had obliterated most of the interior but left the torn leaves of outer skin to flop down inside out. The cop removed the pencils to let the face slither back onto Cup's chest.
Board had already taken in all this at the scene, but now as he unclipped and studied the photos, he found himself focusing on the surroundings, the background details, rendered in ghostly ash tones by the orb of his camera.
The kitchen the man sat in was small, with a cast iron stove up against the wall behind him. The walls were somberly dark, with only a few faded lithographs hanging in frames, the barrenness accentuated by the high ceiling. Despite the spare orderliness, the floor looked dusty, gritty. Very subtly, each photo Board had taken was more uniformly bright in its center before shading out in a circular shape toward the darker edges, as if a softly glowing spotlight had illuminated the scene, though this was purely an effect of his camera's vision.
There were no close-ups of the victim, with or without his face held up for view. Another photographer, in the police mortuary, would take a few of those downtown with his own unblinking camera. Board did the crime scenes only, established the environment, the setting. His relationship with the dead ended there.
These prints had come from his first roll of film; the second must be ready to develop by now. Picking up a pair of forceps, he moved to the mature camera he had used yesterday to record this murder/suicide. It was still attached to its collapsible, telescoping tripod, which stood in the corner. Long bolts affixed the creature's shell on either side to the platform atop the tripod. When he swiveled the platform around to get at the rear of the camera, its legs---splayed out atop the platform like a decorative trim---wavered slightly. The one eye turned somewhat in its bony socket as if it were trying to look over a shoulder it didn't have, as he applied the forceps to the puckery orifice at its other end. He had to insert the instrument partway to catch hold of the second film cartridge, which he extracted slowly, drooling a few strands of mucus. An ever present fishy, somewhat diarrheic smell in the room intensified, but he was accustomed to it; he knew it even permeated his clothing. Board wiped the cartridge with a rag, pried off its lid and removed the rolled up negative strip, then turned to unfurl it in the light through his window.
Again, only about half of the twenty frames looked usable, the others either entirely clouded white or at least too vague to be worth viewing. This series, though shot second, had been devoted to the first of the two to die---Cup's wife, Josephine. She lay back on their small bed with its huge metal headboard and slightly smaller footboard like the barred walls of a cage. Her bare feet hung off one side almost to touch the dull planks of the floor, and she was in her nightgown. The wall behind her, also somberly dark with a repeating pattern of flowers in an ornate vase, was flecked generously with blood, and the sheets under her were a black tar pit that threatened to swallow her up eventually. Her husband had shot her in the chest. Her eyes were half-lidded as if frozen in a blink, and her lips parted in the subtlest of empty smiles. But all this Board remembered more so than discerned clearly now, since the negative images were so small, and reversed so that her face seemed prematurely black with rot and her pupils glowed uncannily white.
Because of the tiny area of the bedroom, dominated by the bed as if the room had in fact been built around it, Board had had to elevate his tripod to take in the whole of the scene as best he could, shooting directly down from above. The three long crutch-like tripod legs had been fully extended, one on one side of the bed and two on the other, then he had swiveled the platform vertically to tilt the camera's orb downward. As in all the photos Board shot in this manner, the tripod legs were clearly in the shot, foreshortened so that they looked huge, like columns supporting the ceiling of the room. It was an unavoidable intrusion in the composition, as if the tripod legs were his own (and wasn't he merely a kind of subordinate tripod for his living camera, anyway?), but he had grown used to it. It was the only element of himself in these pictures, which were otherwise such intimate portraits---still lifes---of the interior of houses, the interior of lives, the interior of brains both figuratively and literally. The framing tripod legs, distorted and tapering with false perspective, were like an unintentional artistic signature where he intended no artistry at all. A dispassionate device, a mere practicality, that was all his tripod and himself were meant to be.
Less dispassionate, however, the camera began making a chittering sound behind him. Glancing around, Board realized it was looking at the negatives over his shoulder. Its legs were fluctuating in an increased rhythm. Feeling a lurch of disgust, Board set down the roll and swiveled the camera around to face into the corner again. It was a fairly bold thing to do, denying it its mindless pleasure, but he had done his job yesterday recording these nakedly intimate scenes onto film and now he was inside his own intimate space, and he didn't feel like giving the thing an opportunity to relive that apartment's contents within the walls of his own.
"Well hello, chum," said Detective Robert Shoe of the Metacarpus Police Force, Precinct 3, looking up as Board entered his office. Board held his straw hat in one hand and an oversized envelope in the other. He watched as Shoe continued searching the stations on a radio at the end of his desk. He did this by positioning a heavy magnetic block like a paperweight on different spots atop a flat creature like a huge pill bug. There was a classical music station, but he bypassed that, sliding the magnet to another area of the segmented shell until he found a station tinnily playing "Your Lips Are No Man's Land But Mine," by Campbell and Burr. He then fine-tuned the station by adjusting the angle of the eyeless, albino creature's two forward antennae. In between the various stations, there had been a hissing static filled with cicada-like trilling. This was all the various creatures throughout the city of Metacarpus, communicating with one another. Board had once owned a radio, but had given it away because it chattered back and forth with his cameras all night, to the point where he couldn't find a clear station on it at all.
Finished, the jowly Shoe looked up at his guest and smiled. "Whew, my boy, you smell like a diseased whore. No wonder you don't have yourself a wife!"
"Thanks," Board said dryly, tossing the envelope onto the man's blotter.
Shoe slipped out two complete sets of photos of the murdered wife and suicidal husband, the Cups. He wrinkled his nose at the husband, but Board didn't know if that were the stink of the glossy prints or their subject matter. When he appraised the wife, he commented, "Pretty legs." Dropping the photos back to the blotter, he smiled up at Board again. "You ever touch any of these women, Johnny? When no one's looking? Feel a leg here, a posterior there? A nice soft titty before it gets too cold?"
"No, Bob, I don't. I've never frenched a woman with her face shot off, either, oddly enough."
"A lot of them are nude when you find them, aren't they? Even with blood on 'em, they still have nice figures sometimes, huh? Kind of a strange feeling, lookin' at that combination of ugly and nice...smooth and torn...isn't it? Be honest. I've seen enough dead women myself to know."
"Maybe that's what you look at, Bob, but I'm just there to take my pictures and go have a bourbon at the closest saloon."
"Ah, Johnny, you've got quite the moral character, don't you?" Shoe rose and stretched, wandered out from behind a desk as ponderous as his body. "Well, this is a closed case. Straight to the files. I'm still looking for the Assassin who knifed that whore down on Patella Ave, that you covered last Monday. Probably the same guy who cut that Italian girl on Femur Road two weeks before."
"I remember. I don't know, though. That girl was mutilated...her face cut up. The one last week was just stabbed. A different feel to them."
"Ohhh...hey...maybe I should hire you, huh, chum? Maybe you can solve all my open cases for me! Catch every Assassin in town so the Bugsies will have to recruit a whole new team, huh?"
Board bit back his anger, knowing that the seemingly jovial Shoe had a mean temper. "I can't help but get a feel for things in my line of work, Bob. Sometimes I get a sense of what's going on in the killer's mind. I can't help it."
"Well, that doesn't really concern you, though, does it?"
"It does, if I want to make sure I don't leave out an important clue in my shots."
"Evidence is one thing. Motive is my field---right, my boy?" He tugged up his drooping trousers with an indulgent grunt. Despite his taunting of Board, his office was ever permeated with flatulence. "Anyway, Johnny, yeah...a sick case might not vary his technique very much...but an Assassin might use a knife this time, a razor the next, a hatchet after that...just to keep the Bugsies entertained. Am I right?"
"Sure," Board conceded, sorry he'd ever given his opinion. "Well, there you go, anyway. Guess I'll be off for some lunch."
"I'd join you, but I have a meeting with Captain Soup about those Italian kiddies killed over in the Phalanges slums. Getting a lot of bad press; we need to find that one. Hey, what do you think, Inspector Board? Help me figure this one out. Sick case or Assassin?"
"Not my part of town. Didn't Tom Brick take those shots?"
"Don't know. All I know is they want my precinct to help find the killer so those fuckin' guineas will stop their noise."
A new song started on the radio. It was Arthur Fields' jaunty war ditty "You Keep Sending 'em Over, and We'll Keep Knocking 'em Down." Shoe pretended to march in place, grotesquely, and sang, "'We'll drive 'em under the clover, six feet underground...'" He laughed. "You ever think of taking up a gun and making a few corpses of your own overseas, Johnny?"
"No," he answered, putting his hand on the doorknob. "I'll stick to being a hyena. Always makes me wonder, though...the war..."
"Wonder what?"
"With all that going on, why the Bugs still want us to play this game."
"Well...maybe 'cause the war is anonymous. All these men piled up in fields. Maybe they like it cozier, one on one. But for all we know they watch the war, too...I've heard rumors. Cameras in balloons, in airplanes. Anyway, I just think they can't get enough, my boy. Just can't get enough."
"I've heard rumors, too. That they even started the war..."
Detective Shoe put a finger to his lips, and glanced over at the radio meaningfully. Its antennae flicked subtly, but it went on playing a fresh war song, "I Wish I Had Someone to Say Goodbye To" by Henry Burr. Changing the subject, Shoe joked, "Here's your song, laddie."
Board let himself out. "Till We Meet Again," he said to Soup laconically, quoting another Campbell and Burr tune.
As he descended to the dusty street, where his two year old 1916 Dodge waited for him, Board idly mused that Shoe would probably attend that meeting he'd mentioned before he fed one of the two complete sets of new photos into the computer on the opposite end of the desk from his radio---this computer being a large, white, almost spherical creature like an engorged tick with pulsing gills and a slit incised in its exoskeleton wide enough to accept each photo and document it was fed. Once these were absorbed into its memory, they could be accessed by the Bugs from their homeland at any time. The now unneeded prints and accompanying police reports themselves would be digested and excreted, via a black rubber tube inserted into a rear orifice, into a bottle on Shoe's floor---a black sludge which he poured out daily.
On his way to Scapula Street, a poor Italian section, John Board watched Metacarpus pass by along either side of him, like a gray river flowing around a rock on which he stood in its very center. Seemingly unbroken trains of row houses, compressed together like frayed books in an overstuffed shelf. Flat-roofed tenements. Small brick warehouses and mills and factories. None of these buildings were more than a few stories high. Wives on the charred skeletons of fire escapes, hanging out laundry as bleached as their skin. Dirt lots walled in by high plank fences and filled with decades' worth of debris thrown out the tenement windows and layered like geological strata. The city would suddenly open up, part like moth-eaten curtains to lay bare broad spaces where railroad tracks ran across the uniform flatness of the land in sutures (telegraph poles like rows of crucifixes from which the bodies had long rotted), before the squat buildings swallowed up these bleak voids again, to smother them. In the distance now, in the vicinity of Scapula Street as if to guide him, Board saw a looming black water tower on a tripod of scaffolding, pointing at the sky like a rocket that might have brought the Bugs here, except that the Bugs were not here, could not get themselves here; could only manage to seed their living instruments here like remote extensions of themselves. The water tower reared like a fat prison guard over the tenements that cowered around its legs, faceless but all the more stern for that.
When he parked his Dodge, Board put his hand on the camera that rested on the seat beside him. Though it did not move at this contact, he sometimes thought he felt an imperceptible vibration of life through its inscrutable chitin. He never, ever touched the single eye purposely, except to wipe it occasionally with a soft rag.
In the street, he screwed the camera's mounting platform onto his telescoped tripod. Then, with this under his arm, he walked toward the house to which he'd been summoned by the police. It was more of a shack than a house, really. One story. Flat tar-papered roof. A scrap of dirt for a yard, and dubious looking alleys formed by the identical buildings that flanked it. A baby cried in one of those buildings, and a block or two away a dog was barking. The sky overhead was gray as ash, as if the air had long ago caught fire, and that fire had long ago burned itself cold. It was neither cool nor warm out today, but a breeze stirred the grit of the yard around Board's legs. Board nodded at the cop who loitered outside the shanty's crude plank door smoking a cigarette. They went in together.
"Wife killing seems to be the national pastime, Board," said Crate, the patrolman. "Well, I guess it's something to do. But if we got all these wife killers together and sent them overseas, we'd win this war in no time."
Board gave an obligatory grunt meant as a chuckle.
"Hope you haven't eaten," said Crate, squeezing into a room where the rusty smell of blood stung the sinuses. As he stepped to one side to make way, he asked, "Doesn't this ever bother you?"
Board said nothing as he set up his camera for the first shot. Crate's partner, Mattock, snorted and joked, "Board loves this stuff. He's a ghoul."
The walls were bare wood, with no insulation, no plaster. Folded newspapers had been wedged into gaps through which the wind might gain entry. In lieu of curtains, an old baby blanket and a half of a bed sheet were nailed up over the two windows. A cast iron stove rested on tottering stacks of bricks, its pipe skewered up through the low ceiling. A few pictures from newspapers were stuck to the walls by way of decoration. Board thought that if this were only a hunting cabin, it might be cozy. Beyond the taint of blood, the room stank of a long unbathed dog that there was no sign of, of grease, of foot odor, of dust; an embarrassingly intimate combination that this woman must have been fully accustomed to, the atmosphere of her days.
"Anything in the bedroom I need to shoot?" asked Board as he made his adjustments. The cops replied in the negative.
"The husband swears he didn't do this," Mattock told him idly, "says he came home and found her like this, but he was drunk as a skunk and had her blood on his hands."
"He seemed really shaken up," Crate added, "but that's probably just because he's starting to realize what he did."
The victim lay on the floor, half under a bench that was pushed up against one wall to serve as a table. She was nude except for her socks, her legs looking forced apart, one knee cocked. Her face, broad and drably pretty, with a slight frown of disapproval, was turned to one side. Her throat had been cut with apparently one smooth incision, whereas Board often saw numerous, frenzied slashes. The woundings to her body he had witnessed many times. Her nipples had been excised, and she had been opened up from the slit of her vagina to just below her sternum. A soaked dark rag of something hung out of her like a huge tongue (the wet, apparent chaos of the human interior contrasted so disturbingly with the smooth order of its exterior). The killer was definitely a man; the hatred directed at her gender, at the specific icons of her sex. The orifice spitefully and mockingly enlarged, so that it dominated her, as it no doubt dominated the killer's view of women. Yes, Board had seen these same mutilations perpetrated by a forgotten string of husbands, boyfriends, and strangers, far too many times. And yet, as he stepped back from his camera and pushed his thumb on the cable's plunger---the other end of which he had plugged into a hole drilled in its shell just behind the eye---the wounds that weren't present glared just as distinctly. Usually, in his experience, there was some battering or disfiguring of the face. Blows from a fist or heavy object. There were often numerous stab wounds in addition to the slashing, these parted into ellipsoids as the tight surrounding skin drew open their lips. Often there were defensive wounds on the hands; he'd seen fingers half hanging off backwards from trying to catch hold of a blade. But this woman seemed only to have suffered these few neat, precise strokes. And this from a passionately enraged, blurrily drunken husband?
"It was an Assassin," Board announced softly, more to himself than to the two patrolmen. He thumbed the plunger again. There was no flash, no click, no sounds from his camera but its legs were fluttering excitedly atop the platform it was bolted to.
"Say what, Board?" Mattock replied. "An Assassin? Not...not this one. It was a crime of passion."
"It always is. But not by her husband. He's telling the truth."
"Just shut your pie hole and do your work," Crate chuckled, only half joking.
"You'll be sending the wrong man to the gallows," Board argued quietly.
"You're just upset 'cause you won't get to photograph that, too."
"Now the ghoul's a detective," Mattock laughed.
Finished with the photographs taken from the side, Board now moved in closer, for a direct downward angle. He splayed the tripod's legs around the dead woman as if his camera were the gloating murderer, gazing down at his handiwork. He extended the skeletal legs to their full length, the top of the camera nearly touching the low ceiling. Later, when these shots were developed, he would curse himself to find that one of the legs of the tripod was positioned in such a way that it obscured half of the woman's face. It wouldn't matter to Detective Shoe, because there were no wounds on her face to be recorded, and it didn't obscure the throat wound, but it bothered Board. Even though his intention was not to create art, it was a bit of artlessness, a bit of unprofessionalism---a more than usual intrusion of himself into the scene.
As he finished up, shortening the length of the tripod's legs, he muttered, "Whoever did this should be skinned alive and have his eyeballs burned with cigarettes."
"Whoa, Board, such barbarism!" laughed Officer Mattock. "You're starting to frighten me! Maybe you're the one who tore her all up!"
"What do you mean, whoever did it?" Crate said. "We've already told you who did it. Don't start on that again."
Board tucked the tripod under his arm. "Sure there was nothing in here?" he asked, peeking his head into the adjoining bedroom for the first time. There were only these two rooms in the shotgun shack.
"Nothing," Crate snapped. "Do you think we don't know our jobs? Get your vulture ass out of here...you and your friend. Your dirty work is finished."
"Dirty work?" Board looked at the man. "I'm just doing a job."
"Yeah, you and the Assassins."
"Hey, I'm not like them. My relationship with the Bugs is not like theirs."
"No? It's all part of the same process, though, isn't it? The Assassins do the painting, so to speak, and you frame the picture, so to speak."
"I help you guys catch the Assassins!" Not that they usually were caught. That was a risk the Assassins took, when they went to work for the distant Bugs. If they were caught, they had to be punished like any common enraged husband or demented fiend.
"You don't help us catch them, Board. You keep the Bugs' peckers hard, is all you do. Don't make it sound like you're one of us." Crate was really steaming now. "You probably get as excited as they do. Fucking voyeur."
"You know that's not true."
"Do I?" Crate gestured at the rough plank door. "Get out, vulture...your work is done."
Board carried his camera outside, where scraps of curious spectators had gathered...a few dirty children, a few faces propped like jack-o'-lanterns in windows. A red-haired man with rolled up shirt sleeves leaned in the mouth of one of the alleys between the shacks, smoking a cigarette. A thin dog, maybe the one that had been barking earlier, maybe the one whose smell filled the shack, scampered past.
Peripherally, Board saw the eye of his camera swivel ever so slightly. He looked down at it and decided it was looking up at his face. That irritated him. He tossed his equipment a little too roughly into the back of his Dodge.
Something made him look up again abruptly at the man in the alley.
The man had bright red hair. But this was the Italian neighborhood of Scapula Street, on the border of the Phalanges, the Italian ghetto.
The redheaded man smiled at Board and tossed his half-smoked cigarette to the ground. He then turned and walked further into the little alley, out of Board's angle of view.
With their straw hats tilted back on their heads and mugs of beer in their hands, these purchased by John Board, he and Tom Brick wandered into the saloon's adjacent billiards room. The ceiling was high, the walls paneled with dark wood half the way up. The one billiards table had a decorative fringe all the way around it. There was a layer of laughter in the atmosphere like the cloud cover of cigar smoke. A pill-bug radio on a shelf was playing "I Don't Want to Get Well" by Van and Schenck.
Tom Brick was the police photographer for Precinct 4, which encompassed the Phalanges. Detective Shoe, Board had recalled, was now lending aid to Precinct 4 in capturing the murderer of several Italian children because of that neighborhood's demand for increased action.
"How's your wife?" Board asked, leaning his back against the tall baseboard to watch the game in progress. Brick told him that Grace was doing well, after having had a long bout with influenza. "And the kids? You have two, right?" Brick said he had four, in fact, and one of them had nearly died over the winter, again from influenza, but thank God had recovered. Board echoed the sentiment. This plague of influenza had taken many lives. An invasion of small living organisms, implacably bent on destruction.
"So you want to know about this thing with the murdered children," Brick said.
"Yeah. Shoe told me he was going to help in the investigation. I read a little about them in the papers when they happened, but I don't remember much..."
"Well, about a month and a half ago they found an eight year old girl dead in a tenement cellar. She'd been sexually assaulted and strangled. It was horrible, John. Her fingers were still curled in the cord around her neck. I have two daughters, was all I could think. It made me want to cry. All the horrible things I see, after a while I start to not think twice about it...and then suddenly seeing this was like the first body I'd ever seen."
"And then a few weeks later, wasn't it, another one just like it?"
"Yes. A seven year old. Same thing, except she was found in a back lot where she'd probably been dragged, whereas they think the first one was actually killed where she was found. This one had been dead a few days and was starting to decompose. I tell you, John, I really started seriously thinking about quitting..."
"And there's been a third..."
"Again, same thing. Strangulation, dress pulled up around the waist. This one's eyes open like she was surprised, like she was going to start bursting into tears at any second even though she was already dead. They found her on a tenement rooftop, where they think it took place. This was last week."
"Sounds like a sex fiend," Board mused, staring into the rising bubbles of his beer, "more so than an Assassin. Unless it's an Assassin trying to look like a sex fiend."
"Well, think about it, John. If I were a sex fiend, wouldn't I want to become an Assassin? Get paid for it? Have some small measure of protection, even at the risk of being caught, because I'd be risking that, anyway? It's not like men like you and me go volunteering to be Assassins, is it?"
Board nodded thoughtfully, gaze still submerged in the fizzing depths of his beer. Through it, he could see the finger that had been shortened by one of his former cameras. He thought of the Irving Kaufman war song "Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You." He asked Brick, "Have there been any witnesses? Any suspicious characters around? A man with red hair, maybe?"
"They've looked into a few local people, but I haven't heard anything about any real witness, or a man with red hair. Why do you ask?"
"Yesterday I shot a crime scene on Scapula Street...one street over from your territory...looks like a husband carved up his wife. But it seems too neat. And the husband was drunker than an Irishman. And when I went outside, I saw a redheaded man who smiled at me."
"So?"
"I guess I didn't like the way he smiled at me."
"Remind me never to smile at you."
"He was a redhead. On Scapula Street."
"It can happen. An Italian family lives on my street, for instance."
"I suppose," Board murmured.
"We need to get out of this work, you and I. Go to work for the newspapers instead."
"Not much difference there," Board said, then taking a long swallow of his beer.
As if afraid that Brick might look disapprovingly upon it, Board waited for the man to go home to his family before he switched from beer to bourbon. From bourbon he graduated to a woman named Grace (or maybe that was Brick's wife's name; he forgot) who had a room upstairs from the saloon. Grace was older than his thirty-five years and no doubt weighed more than him, too, but she had a pretty enough face, or so it seemed at the present. Board moaned and sweated more from effort than from pleasure.
Grace turned her face away on her greasy pillow. "You smell," she said.
"So do you," Board grunted. "We all do."
She didn't say anything to that, but he still felt like apologizing. He kept his eyes off her face, afraid to see revulsion or boredom there, and looked down at her breasts instead. But doing so, he imagined her nipples missing. Indented, open dark hollows there instead.
He rolled off her. Lay on his back panting, sweat trickling down from his armpits, his heart galloping blindly like a horse on a treadmill inside him.
"Not my fault if you can't do it, mister," grumbled Grace. "I still need my money."
"You'll get it," he said. And he'd get his own paycheck tomorrow. But he didn't know if he were a pimp, procuring pleasure for his clients, or a prostitute, the means to that pleasure himself.
Board stared at the woman's radio, on a table by the bed. Its feelers did not waver as it played the Peerless Quartet's "Somebody's Waiting for Someone", but a twittering static drifted in and out.
"There is No Death" by Lambert Murphy played on the radio as John Board sat in Sam Nail's barber chair, having his hair trimmed. He had just unfolded the morning newspaper in front of him. On the front page were war stories and on the second page he saw a photograph of a familiar location. The plank door, the patch of dirt for a front yard. The thin dog, looking at the camera. It was the outside of the shotgun shack in which he had photographed that murdered wife, two days ago. The headline read: "WIFE SLAIN, DRUNKEN HUSBAND HELD." Then, in a sub-heading of smaller type before the article itself began: "Investigating Officers Appalled By Killer's Savagery."
After reading the article quickly, Board returned his attention to the photograph. Not only was the dog there, but also he remembered several of the equally thin children who appeared at the edge of the frame, also staring glumly at the camera. But there was one feature missing. Included in the shot was the alley mouth where he had seen the red-haired man smoking his cigarette---but the alley was empty, in this photograph.
And who had taken the photograph, anyway?
The offices for the Metacarpus Times were just a few blocks over from Nail's barbershop. Board said to him, "Sam, you get some of the Times boys in here, don't you?"
"Oh, sure. Pete Spoon...Ronny Shingle. Two of their top writers."
"What about photographers?"
"Oh...ah...yeah. Mick O'Tool...Jacky Glass..."
"Mick O'Tool. He Irish? A redhead?"
"Oh, that he is. You can always tell when Mick's been here...his hair stands out in this carpet." Nail shuffled one foot through the layer of mostly dark hair that covered the floor around the chair Board sat in. "You know Mick?"
"Maybe," Board said. "Any idea where he lives?"
"Mick? Oh, no...not off hand. Quiet, is Mick. Friendly, though. Want me to tell him you was asking about him, the next time he's in?"
"No thanks, Sam. Maybe I'll run into him someday. It isn't important," Board said.
Well, that would explain the redheaded man he had seen, wouldn't it? After all, why would an Assassin chance hanging about a crime scene, even to gloat? It might also explain the strange, unpleasant little smile the man had given him. A newspaper photographer, smugly looking down his nose at the ghoul with his tripod under his arm. Since there was no corpse in the newspaper shot to have engaged the interest of a living camera, Board figured that O'Tool must use a mechanical camera instead. (Board himself had used a mechanical camera for most of his career, until five years ago when his superiors had given him his first live camera and insisted that he use it.) Usually when one took photos of inorganic subject matter with a live camera, the shots didn't develop. Then again, maybe the poverty-stricken children and bedraggled dog had been sufficient to arouse a living camera.
Board had not seen a camera in the man's hand at the time. If he were indeed this Mick O'Tool, he had either already put it away, or hadn't yet taken it out.
Perhaps Officers Crate and Mattock had been right; he was reading too much into the killing, which might very well be as cut and dry as the murder/suicide case he had recorded before that.
And yet Board kept seeing that smile on the face of the red-haired man. And the vague, vacant frown on the face of that woman---her nakedness not enough of an intimacy or enough of a revelation to have satisfied her attacker---gutted like a fish on the floor of her sad little casket of a home.
Tom Brick draped his coat over Board's brassiere-wearing dressmaker's dummy, at Board's invitation. "Cover yourself, madam!" Brick chided. "John, I didn't know you were married. Looks like the ideal wife...not too talkative."
"That's not kind, Tom." Board handed him a glass of beer. "I'm sure your Grace is a fine woman."
"Oh she is, John, she really is."
"You're a lucky man." Board slurped the foam off his barely cool beer. The block of ice in his icebox was nearly melted away. "Thanks for coming, Tom."
"Oh, I've always wanted to drop in for a visit, old man!" Brick said brightly. "Let's have a look at your gear." He followed his nose past his colleague. "Must be in here, eh?"
Board watched Brick as he peered into the tank of milky fluid in which the immature camera was growing. Board rolled up his sleeve and plucked it out for him to have a clear look at it. The thing's fringe of legs swam in the air, and the mouth underneath the front end worked languidly as if it wanted a finger to chew on. The single ocellus rotated slightly.
"Coming along nicely, pal!" Brick complimented him. "I only have my one camera at present...I really should get a larva to grow a new one, in case I find myself empty-handed unexpectedly."
"Tom, do you know any newspaper photographers personally? From the Times, for instance? A man named Mick O'Tool, in particular?"
"Ahh...the name doesn't ring a bell, John. But I have seen a few at crime scenes, now and again, as I'm sure you have. There was more than one at the scene of that last little girl's murder, because of the increased public interest. It's a top story, as you know."
"Yes. The public eats it up, I'm sure," Board said, wiping the white fluid off his hand with the rag of an old undershirt. "Have any of the photographers you've seen been a redhead?"
"A redhead? Ohh...you're thinking of that fella whose smile didn't sit well with you, the other day." Brick gave a chuckle. "Well, come to think of it, I guess I did see a redheaded photographer on the rooftop, at that last scene. Maybe it was that one. Or maybe it was the one before, in the back lot." Brick pursed his lips thoughtfully against the rim of his glass. "Or maybe it was at both."
Board didn't say anything for a few minutes. He had set down his glass of beer to sprinkle bone chips in the tank housing the immature camera. There was a streaking dark blur as the camera shot itself forward to feed, but as the thick fluid settled there was again no sign of the aquarium's sole occupant.
"How do the Bugs recruit the Assassins, Tom? I've never seen an Assassin who was host to a parasite, like a Medium is. An Assassin like that would stand out too much. So how do the Bugs communicate with them?"
"Oh...wish I could say, John. I suppose the police know, but they're not telling the likes of us. Or maybe they don't know."
"Could be over the radios."
"Well, could be. Or through computers. Directly to their brains, maybe, without using a parasite. The Bugs were talking directly to people's brains for years, before they were ever able to figure out how to grow their instruments here. Telling people to kill. To fight wars..."
"But however they do it, they don't control the Assassins. The Assassins aren't puppets. They have free will."
"Oh yes, right...I'm sure of that."
Board turned to face his guest. "So...did you bring that gun for me to look at, Tom?"
"Sure. Hold on." Brick returned to the other room, Board trailing after him. Out of a pocket in the coat draped over the manikin, Brick produced a slightly scuffed-looking dark pistol. "I really don't want it around the house anymore. Grace and I are afraid the kids will get a hold of it one day. I'm glad you asked if I had one...I'd almost forgotten it was stowed away." He handed the heavy object to his host.
It was a 1903 hammerless Colt automatic, .380 caliber. Board hefted it in his hand, turned and pointed it at the dressmaker's dummy. "I like it," he pronounced.
"All right, then...I have cartridges for it, as well." Brick dug in another pocket.
"Let me offer you a trade for it, Tom. You take that camera I'm growing, in there. Take the tank and everything."
"What?" Brick laughed, incredulous. "I can't do that, John! That gear is worth more than that old gun of mine."
"You said you were thinking of getting out of our line of work, Tom. Do you still plan on that?"
"Well," Brick replied, sounding a little embarrassed, "I'd like to, but right now..." His words tapered off.
"I'm getting out of it, Tom," Board said. "So I want you to trade me this gun and these bullets for my new camera."
"Are you sure, John? I don't want to take advantage of you..."
Board pointed his gun into the room with the slanted attic walls that served as his workspace. Specifically, he aimed it at the aquarium, as if waiting for its inhabitant to appear. "It's a fair trade by me, Tom."
Each rap on Board's door was like a roofing nail being hammered into his skull.
"Mr. Board? Mr. Board?"
Lifting that multiple-pierced skull from the pillow of his narrow bed, Board squinted at the door to his attic apartment. Peripherally, he caught sight of an empty bourbon bottle and his newly acquired Colt resting on the floor beside him. Also resting on the floor, lying on its back, was his headless, limbless torso of a dressmaker's dummy. Its bra was off and nowhere to be seen.
"Go away, Billy!" Board growled.
"There's been a murder at 28 Pelvic Street, Mr. Board! Detective Shoe wants you to get right down there, sir!"
"Go away, Billy!" Board snarled again.
"Sir..."
"Go!" he bellowed, and it felt like he'd cracked every suture in his skull in the effort. His sundered head dropped back to his pillow. A few moments later, after having heard the child's shoes clomping down the stairs, he heard the boy mount his bicycle and speed away back to the police station of Precinct 3.
Let Shoe come over here and harass him. Let Shoe find someone else to be their voyeur. Their ghoul, hyena, dirty little peephole peeker...
Maybe he'd catch up with Mick O'Tool in the Phalanges, he thought. Catch him in the act before he cut open another wife, strangled another little girl. Shoot out his peeper eyes and smirking teeth with that Colt .380.
Or maybe he'd just go ahead and put the Colt to his own head, he thought, seeing his mother's blackening face in his mind's eye, like a photograph he had shot and framed and mounted in a terrible museum with just one acquisition and no exit. Maybe he'd just join her in that museum, but this time, Tom Brick could take the picture. Brick could set up his tripod so that it stood directly above Board's spread corpse, gazing down on yet another morsel for the Bugs' jaded palates.
Thoughts of Brick's tripod brought back to Board a scrap of memory like a rag of torn flesh, disconnected from its body. Painfully, he turned his head a little on his pillow to look toward his little workroom. Though he couldn't see directly into it from this angle, he could see the legs of his tripod, lying on its side on the floor. He couldn't see the camera, mounted to the top of it, but he could guess that it lay cracked like a white skull, lying in a pool of milky white blood. What he'd just recalled, vaguely, was swinging that tripod by its legs last night. Swinging it like a bat against the doorjamb, again and again, until the camera was chittering loudly in pain, maybe in fear and anger, screeching almost fit to burst his eardrums until it made no more sound, its legs no longer flickering madly.
Board let his head roll back on his old, flattened pillow, closing his eyes against poisonous black pain. Before he fell back into a sleep more like unconsciousness, he dimly recalled having poured some of his bourbon into the mouth of the crushed camera as it lay dead or dying. Sharing his poison with his partner in crime.
He dreamed of strolling along Lumbar Beach as a boy, but this time without his Aunt Marge. And the animals mating in the surf were not horseshoe crabs, but cameras like his camera, and the ocean was white like their amniotic bath, like their blood, like semen...
A new pain woke him sharply, dispersed the dream and the poisoned fumes.
Mick O'Tool smiled that familiar little smile down at him. Gazed down at him from above like a camera on a tripod. He had blood speckled across a black rubber apron like the kind Board sometimes used himself when working with his amniotic solutions and other chemicals. Board realized those flecks of blood were his own.
"I hear you've been asking around about me, Mr. Board," said O'Tool.
Both his hands shot to O'Tool's wrist, and gripped it before the newspaperman could pull the blade---driven to its hilt in his guts---back toward him to extend the wound.
O'Tool leaned over him a little more, and mock pouted. "Now don't make this tougher, chum."
From somewhere, Board heard a chittering sound. Either from some piece of equipment O'Tool had brought with him, or directly in his mind.
"You shouldn't have been so cruel to your little friend," O'Tool said, tossing his head in the direction of the other room. "You were trusted with a job. A good job..." O'Tool calmly, patiently started using his free hand to pry at the fingers restraining his wrist. "Come on now, old boy. I have work to do. Pictures to take of you for the Times, when I'm done..."
Board tried to sit up against the knife that pinned him to the bed, gagged, coughed up some bloody spittle onto his own chest. He fell back against the mattress, one of his hands dropping away from O'Tool's wrist.
"That's it," O'Tool whispered like a lover. "Nice and easy." He started to dislodge Board's remaining hand on his wrist.
Board's right hand had dropped off the side of the bed, his knuckles banging the floor. But he brought his hand back up again, and this time it held Tom Brick's scuffed old semiautomatic.
"Hey," O'Tool said, and then he walked backwards very fast away from the bed, somehow managing to stay on his feet. His hand that had gripped the knife was spotted with Board's blood, but the other hand had touched his chest and come away slick with his own.
The haft of the knife jutting out of his belly like a lever waiting to be pulled, Board raised his heavy arm higher and fired the gun two more times before he lost consciousness. The first of these bullets hit the wall, but the last caught Mick O'Tool in the throat just as he was lurching toward the bed again, perhaps in an effort to retrieve his knife.
O'Tool's chin dropped down on his chest as if to block a second shot to the neck, or as if the supporting column of his spine had been kicked away. He slumped forward onto the foot of the bed, then---as though liquefied by the foreign body's intrusion---slithered bonelessly to the floor...
And that was how the Assassin lay when Tom Brick was called in later from a different precinct, in order to capture the scene on film.
Maxillae Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, 1920
The prisoners spent twenty-three hours of each day in their two-man cells---twenty hours if they were on a work detail. Twice a week, those who weren't in the hole were allowed two hours of recreation time. If the weather were good, most chose to spend that time outside in the exercise yard, but on a rainy day like this, the prisoners were cramped inside the recreation rooms in their respective units.
The rec room in John Board's unit had the high brick walls of a warehouse, the clanking sound of barbells echoing off the distant ceiling. There was a single ping-pong table, and tables at which men played chess or checkers, these manufactured at the prison's own furniture factory.
More of these prison-produced chairs were clustered around the television.
The TV was attached to one of the white-painted brick walls, a huge beetle-like insect crucified there sideways as if it had been pinned to the wall in the process of crawling across it. In this way, its almost rectangular back was horizontal, and this was where the transmissions the living creature received were displayed. Most TVs were smaller, the size of a dog, but this one had attained twice that size so that a larger audience could sit and see its picture clearly (though more and more barrooms were getting these larger TVs, too, and they had even begun showing up in the private homes of wealthy families).
Most insects have two pairs of wings, but in beetles the outer pair has developed into shell-like protective wing covers (or "elytra"). Like a Japanese beetle, this creature's elytra were as iridescent as an oil slick, the rest of its body being metallic black. This complex iridescence was what was translated into the color images the animal displayed. Each cell of its elytra was a particle of rapidly changing color, these particles all adding up into one realistic moving image, the way painter Georges Seurat used points of color in his "pointilism". Like its legs, the animal's wing covers were also pinned in place, so that it could not spread them open and divide this image. As it received its signals, its antennae vibrated so violently they were a blur. And from its intricate mouthparts---labial palps, maxillary palps, mandibles, and labrum---came the string of sounds which formed the soundtrack of the TV's programs...sounds as subtle as the leg of a chair scraping against a kitchen floor, a prolonged violin note, a young woman's soft voice.
TVs were all the rage, though only having been made available to the public since early the previous year. Studios were working frantically on new films and serials in color and with sound, while TV audiences mainly contented themselves for now with existing motion pictures, like D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) and his 1916 epic Intolerance (with its themes of inhumanity, bigotry, religious hatred---all manner of social and political evil), and Griffith's 1919 film on child abuse and interracial love, Broken Blossoms, starring Lillian Gish.
Presently, the prisoners in Unit 8 were watching a chapter of 1914's silent, black and white serial The Perils of Pauline starring the suspiciously named Pearl White, who was at the moment tied to a railroad track while a train approached.
"Yeah, I like a bitch that way, all tied up," chuckled one of the men watching the episode. "I'll give her Pearl White...Pearl White all over her ass..."
"Shut up," hissed another man, leaning forward anxiously with hands clasped, fearing for Pauline's life. The first man didn't argue back with the second man, because the second man was bigger and was doing life for beating his unfaithful wife to death with a skillet.
John Board, in his ash gray uniform, sat close to one of the white-washed walls; not the best angle for viewing the TV, but he liked to keep his back covered whenever possible. Even now, he saw the group of five Assassins throwing him glances and smirks in turns. These men had learned that Board had killed an Assassin named Michael O'Tool (and had nearly died in the process, himself). That he had killed one of their kinds both attracted their animosity toward him, and kept them wary of him. Though he had received numerous threats, none of them had as yet made an open attempt to attack him. It helped, Board was sure, that he had put out the eye of another prisoner (not an Assassin) with the end of his toothbrush, when that prisoner tried to rape him in the showers during his first month in Max Pen. It was a good idea to kick someone's ass right off the bat, and there had been no further attempts at rape, only a few close calls with fistfights. Even though Board had once worked for the cops, he himself hadn't been a cop, and the other prisoners seemed more confused than anything else about how to peg him.
John Board wasn't here for killing Mick O'Tool---that had been self-defense. He was serving a ten-year sentence for destroying his camera, one of the instruments of the Bugs.
Board hadn't really aligned himself with any of Unit 8's gangs, but he often ate or played checkers with a group of blacks who seemed as mystified at his friendliness with them as the white prisoners were. Still, he preferred to spend most of his time alone. And while many prisoners, when they had access to the library, preferred to read legal volumes in the attempt to get a new trial, Board opted to sit quietly alone and read from works of fiction.
One of the Assassins, a short and broad Mexican named Linterna, flicked a black checker across the room at Board, but it fell short and skittered at his feet. Board glanced down at it with studied calm. One of the guards snapped, "Go pick that up, moron, before I put it up your farter."
Linterna seemed to welcome the opportunity to squat next to Board. He whispered, "Soon, wiso, very soon."
Board wanted to tell him fuck you, but ignored him, watching Pauline struggle against her bonds. Out of the corner of his eye, though, he made sure Linterna returned to his seat. The Assassins were all here for life, and despite the threat of solitary confinement, one of them might feel he had nothing to lose adding another victim to his list.
Peripherally, Board also noted another prisoner, this one a Chinese man of twenty who had once shared his cell with him. He thought he had noticed the young Chinese man throwing him a quick look earlier; a risky move. If it had been a signal, Board would not return it. When they had been cellmates, one night this man had finally persuaded Board to let him suck him off. Board could not reach climax, but in turn, he gave the man a hand job. Board and this man had masturbated each other on one other occasion (this time Board reaching orgasm), but he had never agreed to it again. One night, however, when the man slumbered in the bunk above him, Board couldn't sleep...lying there for hours fighting the urge to crawl up into the bunk with him, and to lie atop the man's smooth, almost hairless body. Though he felt badly for his cell mate, he was relieved when soon after that night, Henry Plough---the most powerful gang leader in Unit 8---pulled some strings to get the handsome young Chinese man bunked with him. Plough sat with Board's former cell mate right now, and that was why Board didn't want Plough catching them glancing at each other. Though Plough had had no reason to take note of Board to date, he feared Plough more than Unit 8's five Assassins combined.
Board suspected he'd simply masturbate himself tonight, while picturing the much-imperiled Pearl White on the movie screen behind his eyelids.
A bell over the door rang loudly, and the guards came forward, grumbling, "Come on, ladies, back to your cells." One of them went to the huge bug on the wall and gave it a rough tap on the center of its head. The antennae stopped vibrating, and the image on its back dissolved, replaced by random, slowly swirling clouds of color.
The inmates began filing out of the room, the others moving aside to let Henry Plough and his girl and his boys go first. Board lagged behind until he saw the Assassins go ahead of him (Linterna threw him a look and made kissy lips). When Board started forward, one of the last, a guard broke off and approached him, took him above the elbow.
"Warden File wants to see you," he said.
"Warden File?"
"That's what I said, moron." The guard shackled Board's wrists in front of him. "Come on."
Maxillae Penitentiary was a huge, thick-bordered open square with two units composing each of its four sides, at its center the courtyard where the men took their outdoors exercise and a tease of sun. Units 7 and 8 occupied the southern section of this square, with Units 3 and 4 to the north, 5 and 6 to the east. Units 1 and 2 occupied the western section of the square, these smaller units housing the death row inmates. This western side of the square also housed the administrative offices.
It was toward these offices that thirty-seven year old John Board was escorted by the black-uniformed guard. The many doors they had to pass through to reach their destination did not open electronically; each needed to be opened individually with a key by a guard on the opposite side.
They passed along the outer edge of the eerily quiet death row area, and on into the administration section. Clerks passing in the hall glanced at Board with disinterest. None of them were women. The doors were of wood, not metal, and not barred. They stopped at one of these, outside of which sat a guard reading a newspaper. He rose and knocked on the door for them, and a voice on the other side called, "Come in."
A balding, well--tailored man sat behind a desk of dark wood like the door. He gestured toward a chair upholstered in red leather. For a moment Board hesitated to sit on it, thinking the man meant for the guard to sit down, but the guard stood stationary at the door. Board sat.
"I'm Warden File," the man announced.
"Yes, sir," Board muttered.
In his almost two years at Max Pen, Board had only seen the man a few times at a distance, but even then he could tell that the man was a Medium. Now, up close, it was hard for him not to stare at the huge tumor-like form bulging from the back of his head.
The growth immediately put Board in mind of his high school science teacher, Mr. Book, because it was a fat, tick-like animal which had affixed itself to the back of File's skull. It was, in fact, nearly the same size as the warden's skull and Board wondered how his neck could support them both. The mandibles of the tick were not visible, no doubt buried in bone, but two black eyes stared emptily, like mere vestiges. It forelegs had been absorbed into the human as well, with just the two back pairs of legs hanging down uselessly under File's ears. The two organisms had become so fused that the warden's monk-like fringe of hair even grew sparsely across the tick's body as the hair circled behind File's head. His skin had apparently grown over it, since the creature's body was the same pink color as his own.
"I have a job to offer you, Mr. Board," Warden File intoned blandly, folding his hands like mating insects upon his red velvet blotter.
Board wanted to explain that he already had one, in the prison's furniture factory, but he again said, "Yes, sir."
"Before you came to Maxillae, you were a crime scene photographer in Metacarpus, correct?"
"Yes, sir."
"You have experience with living cameras."
"Yes, sir."
File sat back a little in his own creaky red leather chair. "Do you know that all executions at Maxillae Penitentiary are filmed by a motion picture camera, Mr. Board?"
For several beats, Board did not answer. His eyes fixed themselves on those knotted hands with their skinny white fingers, their buffed nails like the blind faces of grubs. "I've heard that said, sir."
"Last week, you may also have heard that our previous camera operator committed suicide. He drank one of the solutions in which he rears his replacement cameras. It burned his throat like lye."
"I didn't hear that, sir," Board mumbled dreamily. Not wanting to hear.
"He had personal problems." File shrugged. "A messy divorce, I understand. In any event, it leaves us in need, Mr. Board. Our previous operator was a civilian, and at first I thought to hire another civilian. But then...I remembered your case."
"Yes, sir," Board almost whispered.
"Now, another man might not consider you a candidate, Mr. Board. After all, you killed your last instrument, which is a serious matter. But in reviewing your case, I see that you were extremely inebriated at the time of that act. Also, you seemed to be under stress as a result of your job, which I can certainly understand." File leaned forward again. "Here, there is no alcohol to cloud your judgment. And while you would of course be witness to unpleasant sights, you would not be witness to the bodies of murdered children and women; you would be viewing and recording the death of individuals who are paying for their crimes against society."
Now that File was showing an actual need for Board, was conveying some importance to his existence, Board felt a little bolder and met the Medium's eyes. "You would really trust me with this responsibility?"
"Yes...I would. But I would also trust you with the knowledge that should harm come to another valuable camera, you would never leave Maxillae Penitentiary again." File spread his hands. "But cooperate, do your job diligently, and things will be in your favor. You still have eight years remaining to your sentence. We are prepared to cut your sentence in half if you should redeem yourself in this way, Mr. Board. And since you have already served two years, that means that you would have only three years remaining to serve. You would walk out of here at the age of forty. You would still have a life ahead of you. And in fact, we would encourage you to maintain your job as our camera operator once you become a civilian again."
Board's own hands mated like insects in his lap, but he had little else to do with them, his wrists manacled as they were. He rested them on one knee, though, and leaned back a little, as if he knotted his hands that way contemplatively, as if he chose to. "What if I'm released right now, with the agreement that I perform your camera-work as a civilian? What if I sign a contract stating that I'll work for you for three years...for five years...without seeking employment anywhere else?"
File narrowed his eyes slightly, and gave a tight little smile. "I'm afraid we can't commute your sentence altogether, Mr. Board. The terms are not negotiable. Are you unappreciative of my generous offer?"
Board's eyes moved to the window behind the warden's head. It had bars over it, but it was still a window, even had handsome red velvet curtains. From here, he could see one of the towers that rested at each of the prison's four corners, looking both outside the walls and down into the prison yard. Still, even such a grim view was beautiful. The sky was the purest of blues, with barely a cloud marring it. A bird flew past, high up.
"I appreciate your offer, Warden File," Board told him. "Of course I accept."
"Ah---very good. For a moment there I feared differently. I feared that I might be wrong about you, after all---that you might have some moral objection to operating the camera. I feared that your destruction of your own camera might not just have been the result of too much drink and too many dead innocents. Again, I stress...these will not be innocents. These men are the type of people who murdered those children and women you used to photograph."
"I'll be filming the execution of Assassins, then?" Board said.
Again, that tight little smile, those narrowed eyes. "Not all murderers are hired Assassins, Mr. Board. Not by any means. But yes---some of the men you film will of course be Assassins."
"It strikes me as ironic, seeing as how Mediums like you and Assassins like them are working for the same bosses." With his skills and experience established as valuable, Board was beginning to feel a bit cheeky.
"I'm in the field of justice, Mr. Board. I see to it that those who commit crimes, be they Assassin or not, are punished. We all have our parts to play in society, do we not? I have no allegiance to the Assassins. They know the risks when they agree to...what they do. I have no compunction with seeing that they pay for their crimes."
"They're sort of sacrificed, then. Like their victims are. For the entertainment of the Bugs."
Warden File rose from his creaking chair and Board worried then that he'd been far too cheeky. But File maintained his even tone as he said, "First of all, Mr. Board, they do not like to be called the Bugs. They prefer the Guests, as I'm sure you know. The Guests are not insects so they dislike being referred to as such. When they first attempted to contact our world---our plane of existence---the Guests tried to make direct contact through our minds, to inhabit certain human bodies so that they would have a physical form here through which to communicate with us."
Like my mother, Board wanted to say to the warden; your friends killed my mother. Or at least, they had turned her preexistent suffering self-destructive. Perhaps they had even added to his father's confusion, helped drive him away on that train to nowhere.
File came out from behind his desk and paced the room slowly, so that Board had to turn and look behind him as he passed. "Those early attempts ultimately proved futile. The human mind was too complex, too powerful; subjects were generally driven mad by the visits..."
The subjects they had tried to inhabit, back then, had been chosen primarily at random. Even children were driven to insanity by the voices in their heads.
"...and so, the Guests extended their consciousness to much simpler life forms instead. The hardy, industrious, and very adaptable insect. Insects proved important tools, instruments. But they did not and do not reflect the Guests' own forms..."
"What form do the Guests actually have?"
Warden File paused before him, gazing down blankly. "I haven't been privy to that. It is a common misconception that Mediums like myself are extensions of the Guests themselves. I can speak for the Guests, but they do not think through me. I'm really just as human as you are, Mr. Board."
"I see," Board said, hoping he didn't sound skeptical or sarcastic. Despite the feelings that thoughts of his mother stirred, he didn't want to lose this opportunity to shorten his sentence so radically. "Um, so...Mediums volunteer? Or..."
"Yes," File answered simply. "My present position is voluntary." He tapped the globular growth at the read of his head. His skull looked like a cell undergoing mitosis. "Smaller and smaller arthropod instruments are now being utilized for this direct link between us and the Guests. Soon, the arthropod will not be visible to the naked eye. And it is hoped that in the near future, the Guests' original intention will be possible, and they will be able to commune with us without the use of the arthropods at all."
"That thought frightens me, sir...to be frank."
File cocked his head. "Why?"
"I'm afraid they'll inhabit us...slip into us like shoes, sir. Come to live here, all of them..."
"Ah, see, another common misconception. This is not an invasion, Mr. Board. The Guests are just that---guests. They don't want to abandon their world. They like their own world. Have they made Woodrow Wilson a Medium? Any world leader? No. I'm not sure there's even a small town mayor who's a Medium. Generally, just advisors, lesser political figures and government administrators are Mediums. The Guests are not out to steal our bodies and conquer this world. I'm like you, Mr. Board---I wouldn't want to see that, either."
"That's reassuring, sir."
"The Guests want to minimize their actual influence over our society. They like it as it is."
"And how is that, sir? What is it that they like?"
Warden File paused, as if scrutinizing his guest, his prisoner. "They find us fascinating."
"Like animals? In a zoo?"
"No. Not like that. More like anthropologists."
"And they find us fascinating like actors, too, don't they, sir? Entertainers. In a play. In a motion picture. That's their main interest in us, isn't it? The human drama?"
"You make them sound petty, Mr. Board, and merely voyeuristic. It is far more complex than that. More complex than even I can fathom. They are a superior race, you see."
"I see."
"In exchange for what we give them, look at what they're sharing with us. Every year, new wonders. Radio. Television. Who knows what biotechnologies the future holds for mankind? And the little we give them in return..."
"The murdered women and children..." Board interrupted.
"Mr. Board---the Guests, as I'm trying to impress upon you, do not possess people like the Assassins. They merely recruit them. They recruit men who are already the way they are. They do not make them that way. They merely utilize them for the qualities they already have."
"But don't they encourage behaviors that might be latent? That might otherwise not develop?"
"No," File said flatly. Defensively.
A little alarmed at the warden's sharper tone, Board tried to rein in his own feelings and placate him. "I'm just trying to understand..."
"Well understand this. It is not an invasion. It is not about control. The Guests will never come to our world bodily...they are too distant from us. It is impossible. The Guests pose no threat to human society. They have more to give than they take. When Assassins are recruited, we are expected to stop them, catch them, incarcerate them, and execute them if we must. You yourself killed an Assassin in self-defense. You were not charged for doing so."
"I...appreciate that," Board said lamely.
The warden sat behind his desk again. He dragged a manila folder toward him, which Board knew was his own file. "You do want this job, don't you, Mr. Board? You will be grateful for it, and do it to the very best of your ability? Or do you have a problem with the duties you've been asked to perform?"
"No, sir. No problem. I just have...questions...like everybody else does."
File grunted. "Of course. Well, then...very good. The next step, then, is to have the equipment shown to you. You have sufficient time to become familiar with it, practice with it. The first execution you will be required to record will not be until the fifteenth of next month."
"How will I be able to practice with the camera, sir?" Board asked a little warily. "Will the camera film inorganic subject matter?"
"You will film a number of pigs being slaughtered," File said bluntly, no doubt gauging his reaction. "They're destined to be butchered at a local slaughterhouse anyway. And you do eat pork yourself, do you not, Mr. Board?"
"Yes, sir," Board admitted solemnly, as if ashamed of the fact, "I do."
The two men who brought in the first pig worked for the meat company that supplied the prison, though the animals usually didn't pass through its gates whole.
Before the animal was brought in from the truck, one of the men---with help from the prison's chief electrician---had hooked up a special apparatus they'd brought with them to the power source for the prison's electric chair, which ran on a circuit independent of the rest of the building's circuits. While setting up his camera, Board had watched some of the work, and had taken in the empty and now disconnected electric chair. It had been built in the prison's own furniture shop by a team of prisoners. Its fittings were copper.
Directly facing the chair with its dangling straps were four wooden church pews for witnesses. Between chair and pews rested a big metal tub that the meat men had brought with them. Over the door to the execution chamber was a sign that read: SILENCE. Board and two prison guards followed this exhortation, but the abattoir's men joked back and forth and with the electrician as they set up their equipment.
The men from the slaughterhouse called their apparatus "tongs", and said it was used at their place of work, proudly explaining that it was a state-of-the-art device which no other local butcher employed at this time.
At last the men went out to bring in the animal, leaving Board in the execution room with the two guards, one of them cradling a mean, compact-looking pump shotgun. Board ignored them as he tweaked the positioning of the camera he had been entrusted to use. It was much like the ones he had utilized while working as a police still photographer: This creature, a dark gray instead of white as his own had been, was also mounted securely to a tripod, its cilia-like legs rippling in waves. From above, it too looked to be a descendent of the horseshoe crab, or a throwback to the trilobite, though from the side it was not as flat as his old cameras, was more bulbous. Into its rear, anus-like opening (just as fishy-smelling as he remembered), a thick black canister like a phonograph's wax cylinder was inserted---this housing the film onto which the moving pictures would be impressed, encoded. It, too, had a single large eye up front, gray like its horny armor. Again, from a hole drilled behind the eye extended a cable with a plunger at its end, which Board could depress with his thumb to indicate to the living device when or when not to film.
Like his old cameras, this one subsisted on a diet of ground up bone...either from animals like pigs or even the bones of dead human indigents, mental patients, and executed prisoners.
The number of prisoners put to death was rising dramatically with each year, Board had read in a newspaper in the prison library.
Board looked up as the door opened and the two abattoir men reappeared, dragging along a squealing four-month-old pig with a rope knotted tightly around its neck, as if it were to be hanged rather than electrocuted. Its pink, bristly hide made Board oddly uneasy, as if it were a naked human that was being forced into the room. The pig resisted halfway through the threshold, and the man behind it said, "Oh, so you wanna test me, huh?" He gave it a sharp kick in its rear. With a louder squeal, the animal trotted forward a little on its delicate hooves. The man who had kicked it looked up at the prison electrician and laughed. "When we got cows that don't move along fast enough, sometimes I stab 'em in the eyes to blind them so they go where we want 'em to go...and if that isn't enough, I stick my knife right up their shitter."
"Ouch," chuckled the electrician uneasily.
Hauling on the rope, the other slaughterhouse man pointed to the sign above the door and commanded the pig, "Silence!"
"Dead pig walking," Board heard one guard say to the other, breaking their silence.
One of the slaughterhouse workers tied the end of the pig's rope around one leg of the electric chair while the other helped restrain it, punching it in the side of the face once when it made a bolt for it. "Hold still, you cunt!" Finally they stepped back, and the pig pulled a few times at the end of its tether but seemed to calm slightly when their hands were off it. One of the men observed, "It might have been worth just tying it in the chair itself, y'know? We probably could've strapped it in there somehow."
"Maybe they didn't want it shitting in the chair," the other joked. "Can't have prisoners sitting in a chair that was shat on."
"As if they don't shit in it themselves?" A wink over at the guards. "Am I right? I bet you could cut a hole in that chair and put a bowl underneath, eh? Electric potty chair..."
"I'm ready," Board spoke up loudly. All five other men turned to look at him. Board gestured at the camera. "It's ready to roll."
"Got somewhere to be?" one of the workers chuckled.
"A date with a cell mate," the other said in his friend's ear, but Board heard him.
"We're ready for this," the electrician said, after looking over at the guards and getting a nod from the one with the shotgun.
"Okay...here we go." The older of the abattoir men picked up the electric tongs, which resembled a huge pair of pliers hooked up to a cable. "In our jargon, this is called a stunner," the man explained, opening the tongs and then closing them on the pig's head at the base of its flared, fur-fringed ears. "And so am I."
With that, the stunner applied current. The pig became a resistance load in a high-voltage electrical circuit.
"Whew!" the stunner cried, feeling the quiver in the tong's handles.
"Anyone for bacon?" said the electrician, not without a hint of distaste, Board liked to believe.
Mucus and blood sprayed from the pig's nostrils, spattering the floor. Its eyes went shut, its front legs stiff, and after only several beats, the stunner released the grip of his pliers. The pig thumped heavily onto its side, but its hind legs went on twitching violently.
"God damn," panted the stunner, "that was a lot of juice! Normally we're supposed to stun 'em for about seven seconds. That was more like four. Of course...when we need to hurry, sometimes I only give 'em two..."
"Give me a hand," said his partner, and after cutting the rope from around the electric chair's leg with an awful-looking knife, they hefted the animal into the big metal tub. "Can you see into this?" Board was asked.
The camera's tripod was moved closer, the camera's view angled down. It was jittery, uneven camera-work that for a cinematic release would have required a cut and edit.
"Okay," said the man with the knife, and then he punched it into the stunned animal's throat, and tugged the blade along its neck. Jetting blood pinged against the metal, and the back hooves skittered across it as well. The metallic sound was like a screeching protest.
John Board lowered his eyes from the television's folded wings, but he knew that Warden File went right on watching until the tub began to fill with blood, as if to swallow the dying animal from view.
The film came to an end. Now Board looked up, and File was nodding. "Hm. Nice work," he said, but Board didn't know if he meant the film or the butchery. He rose from his chair and went to the television on the wall of the guards' break room. The end of Board's film canister protruded from an opening in the tail of the great beetle affixed to the wall. File gripped the canister's end, pulled it free, and wiped it with a hand towel before setting it down.
The picture had come out crystal clear, and even in color. There was no shaded circle around the edges of the frame, as with the old still cameras Board had used only a couple of years ago. And the sound, mimicked by the mounted insect, had been as crisp as when he had witnessed the event---the shrieks of the pig just as piercing. Technology had come so far.
"Well, that will go down to the kitchen and show up on breakfast plates tomorrow," File noted, as if to placate Board. "So...do you think you need to do another pig or two? Or do you..."
"No," Board said. "I get the idea. Piece of cake."
"Well, don't get too cocky about it. There's no viewfinder. I've seen camera angles botched before."
"I'll be fine, sir. I have my background."
"So you do." File lit up a cigar. Apparently his parasitic second skull didn't mind the inhalations. "So, that's easy enough work, isn't it? An execution or two a week...no more sweating in the furniture shop."
"Yes, sir."
"And when your three years are up, you'll have your freedom...and you can continue your employment with us but this time on the payroll," the warden reminded him.
"Yes, sir."
"Of course, the main test still awaits. Do you think you can watch a man die in that room?"
I sure can, thought Board. Those two slaughterhouse men, for starts. "Yes, sir."
"Of course you can." File narrowed his eyes appraisingly, "You killed a man once, yourself."
"Yes, sir."
The next morning, there was indeed a thin strip of ham on his breakfast plate. Board gave it to the man beside him, who accepted it enthusiastically. He had vowed never to eat pork again.
Later that day, they had library time. When not reading fiction, Board liked to flip through art books, and in one he returned to a painting he remembered seeing some months earlier. It was one of the still lifes of Joachim Beuckelaer, a Flemish painter who had died in 1574. It showed a slaughtered pig, suspended and spread open like some horrible kite that might take to air. In the background, some wine was being fetched. The accompanying text pointed out that the artist had often mixed Biblical scenes and symbolism with market scenes, for the contrast between concerns of the spirit and of the flesh. This picture of the spread-open pig was said to symbolize the crucifixion of Christ, with the wine in the background representing the Eucharist.
"Take ye, and eat," Board said softly to the open book. "This is my body."
That night, in his lower bunk while his cell mate alternated between snoring and passing gas above him, Board dreamed he was again in his family's Chicago apartment. He was in the attic, bottled up with giddying summer heat. Afraid to go downstairs, but at last he willed himself. He descended the creaking steps, entered the murk of the living room with its drawn shades and curtains. And there, hanging from its neck by the very same rope it had been led in with, dangled the four-month-old pig. Flies crawled over its body, in and out of its blood-crusted snout. And yet as small as they were, the flies had wings that flickered and glowed brightly. Their wings were miniature TV screens...but one would have had to group them all together and assemble the puzzle of the image they conveyed, to see it in its entirety.
In Unit 8, word had it that some were mocking gang leader Henry Plough behind his back for taking on a "yellow kid" as his bunkmate. Board found it somewhat ironic that it was the Chinese man's color and not his sex that these mockers found worthy of their contempt. But word also had it that Plough was not going to discard the kid because of the controversy. To bend to the opinions of others might be a sign of weakness. And besides that---though Plough was never openly affectionate to the young man in view of others---Board suspected that Plough was simply too fond of the man to trade him in for another new "fish".
More prison gossip had begun to spread: this, that John Board had been recruited as the cameraman who would record executions so that these films could be entered into computers and thus accessed by the Bugs from their home world. Board had had his sentence radically reduced as a result of this arrangement. Board was sorry to hear this rumor bounce back to him, though he knew it had been inevitable.
One prisoner came up to him in the outdoors exercise yard, in the center of the prison, and spat at him, "Heard you sucked off the warden to get your term cut down, Bones." (Board had never been a bulky man, and had grown even leaner in prison.)
He ignored the man, turned away. But a few days later, in the Unit 8 rec room, one prisoner said loudly to a friend, "Hey, there's the ghoul. Bones, you gonna to be filming Old Sparky, there, eh? When do you get your guard uniform?"
"Fucking traitor," said the other man. "You got no shame, huh?"
A guard came over and tapped this second man on the knee with his truncheon. "Shut your cake hole." But Board thought that the guard's intervention on his behalf just made things look all the worse.
Board was counting the days to the fifteenth of June. The day of the first execution he would film for the Guests. Only nine more days. Eight...
One day after Board and his cell mate, Mike Rake, had been locked in for the night, Rake sat down next to Board on his lower bunk and whispered, "Bones, keep your eyes peeled. Today Tommy Bench told me he saw Abe Jug hand Linterna two packs of cigarettes..."
Abraham Jug was the man who had attempted to rape Board in the showers almost two years ago, when Board was himself a "fish" or new inmate waiting to be broken in. Board had stabbed Jug in the eye with the end of his toothbrush, causing the orb to be dislodged from its socket, hanging on his cheek. It had had to be removed altogether in the prison infirmary. And Linterna, of course, was one of Unit 8's incarcerated Assassins.
"That doesn't sound good," Rake went on.
"No," Board admitted, looking down at his overly-worn shoes, "it doesn't."
"Now that you're in with the warden, Bones, I'd try to get switched to another unit if I were you."
Board looked up at the man's face. "I'm not in with the warden, Mike."
"I didn't mean it that way...it's not like you're a snitch or anything. But what I'm saying is, people are looking at you harder, now. And maybe the ones who have a grudge against you will want to act on it, because your term has been reduced...and they have less time to get to you."
"I appreciate your concern, Mike. Thanks for the information."
Rake glanced at the thick black bars that caged them in, then whispered, "Just don't tell anyone you heard it from me..."
The next day, in the cafeteria, the twenty-year-old Chinese man with whom Board had once bunked gave him a smile when they were lined up for their chow. Board just nodded almost imperceptibly in return. He had made enough enemies without adding Henry Plough to the list. The Chinese man looked away quickly, as if embarrassed or a little bit hurt. Board felt somewhat guilty, but he was finding that guilt was a luxury one could not afford in prison.
Seven more days. Six.
Five more days. Four.
It was overcast, the air in the open courtyard misted with an imminent drizzle. Too cool for June; Board almost wished he had his winter pea coat on, hugged his arms as he strolled around the edges of the courtyard where it was hemmed in by towering brick walls. A football, missed by the prisoner who leapt to catch it, thudded against the wall a few feet in front of Board. For a moment he stared down at it as if befuddled, then slowly knelt to pick it up.
"Right here, vulture!" the one who'd missed it snarled, as if he thought Board might walk away with the thing. He started advancing with his shoulders squared menacingly.
Board tossed it to him underhand, continued on his walk around and around the perimeter.
After his second lap around the exercise yard, Board realized he was being followed at a discreet distance, though not discreet enough. The man was balding, as thickly set as a stevedore, and his sleeves were halfway rolled up despite the chill, revealing that his arms were black with tattoos. Board knew only his first name---Harry, nicknamed Hairy as if to spoof his naked dome. Board also knew that he was one of Henry Plough's gang.
So someone had seen him nod at the Chinese inmate, or seen that man smile at him, after all.
Trying not to appear obvious, Board sought out Plough in the center of the courtyard. He sat playing chess with another of his gang. The young Chinese man sat somewhat behind Plough. If Plough wanted to punish Board, why wasn't he punishing his bunkmate, too? Did he think Board was flirting but his "yellow kid" was innocent? Or did he hope to make an example of Board in front of the youth, to dissuade him from ever smiling at another man again?
Board stopped walking, leaned back against the wall with crossed arms, and looked directly at the man called Hairy as he approached. Nonchalantly, not once making eye contact with Board, Hairy stopped walking along the inner perimeter, as well---cut diagonally toward the center of the courtyard to take a seat not far from Plough...who did not look up at him.
Board kept leaning against the bricks, calm on the exterior but his heart still walking rapidly in his chest and fighting the urge to break into a mad dash. If Plough wanted him, Plough would get him; somehow he had an arrangement with some of the guards. They looked the other way when he had an inmate beaten, or when booze and other contraband was smuggled in.
He would have to appeal to Warden File directly, insist that he needed to be removed to another unit. He'd even agree to be housed on death row, where in a few days more he'd begin performing his duties. He'd be almost as safe there as he would be in solitary, and even that was looking preferable to remaining in Unit 8.
Just as in the Unit 8 rec room, a bell sounded when their two-hour exercise period was over; time to return to their cells. Board was relieved. He worked his way into the line that was forming at the arched doorway on the southern side of the huge square. Another unit would disgorge its inmates into the courtyard as soon as this group had been removed.
A commotion ahead in the line drew Board's attention, and he craned his neck to see. Two men spilled out of the queue, their bodies tangled, one gripping the other in a headlock. Board recognized them as two of the unit's five Assassins. Why two comrades should have come to violence he had no idea, but they could kill each other for all he cared. In fact, he'd be that much better off if they did, though he didn't think they'd have the opportunity. Already, several guards were rushing toward them, raising their batons for use.
There was another shuffling of feet behind Board, his instincts telling him to whirl toward it. When he was half turned, he saw that other men in the line behind him had parted to let the Assassin named Linterna through. And when he had spun three quarters of the way around, Board saw the feral grin on the Assassin's face, the handmade knife he held in his fist.
Board tried to spin back in the other direction, though the men ahead of him didn't seem in a hurry to let him through. He shoved one of them with force, but it slowed him down. He felt rather than saw or heard Linterna rushing up behind him.
But the knife didn't crunch into his lower back as he expected. Instead, peripherally he saw a figure lunge to the ground as though he'd flung himself there. When Board looked over his shoulder, he saw that Linterna lay on his face on the ground, jolting with spasms as if electrocuted. The handle of a carpenter's awl jutted up from the back of his neck, its ice pick-like spike obviously buried to the hilt in his spine.
Board then looked at the men in back of him in the line. His eyes directly met those of the man they called Hairy. And Hairy nodded at him meaningfully.
The guards had hold of the two Assassins who had been scuffling, were pulling them apart without too much resistance, but now other guards came running to see to this wounded Assassin, who lay scrabbling at the ground in agonized convulsions.
Board then looked for Henry Plough in the line, finally found him up toward the front. Plough was not looking Board's way, but the Chinese youth darted him a quick glance. No smile, but Board now understood what had happened. He nodded his thanks to his former cellmate, who he was sure had heard about the danger Board was in...who he was sure had asked Plough to keep a watchful eye over him.
The Assassin named Linterna died in the infirmary that night.
Board never spoke to Plough directly, though he did manage to pass his gratitude along through one of his boys. Still, Board didn't press his luck by speaking with his former cellmate again, for the remainder of his incarceration.
And for the three years that remained of his sentence---no matter what they thought of his new employment---no one ever made an attempt to attack John Board again.
There'd been a change in plan. In the eleventh hour, the first man whose execution Board would record had insisted on being hung instead of electrocuted.
When Warden File had told Board this, he had only been able to gape at the man a moment or two before stammering, "But...I haven't tested the camera...with hanging..."
"It's a pain in the ass, but that's what he wants, and he has that option, so that's what we're going to do. It doesn't really matter that you tested with electrocution. You positioned the camera perfectly, you got everything nicely in the shot. All you have to do is adjust for this positioning instead..."
"But," Board started. He didn't go on.
"We don't have time for a pig at this point." The warden sighed. "I don't know why the change, except maybe he heard stories about bleeding eyes and such. I'm sure he thinks this will be quicker, or cleaner. In any case, this is his option---so be it. Now, before the execution we'll test the trapdoor by dropping a sandbag a dozen times. That's the procedure. The camera won't record inorganic subjects, so it won't do to film the sandbag tests, but at least you can watch and gauge your distance before they bring the prisoner out..."
This prisoner's name was Charles Zipper and he was a repeat sex offender who had been sentenced to death for two convictions of child rape, with a girl of six and another of nine years. Besides the prison chaplain, Warden File would be in attendance during his execution, as would the parents of both children and the prisoner's wife, who File told Board was still supportive of her husband. She claimed that her husband was a sensitive and intelligent man---a piano instructor---who had suffered a miserable childhood, physically abused by his father and even more so by his mother. One time his father had slapped him across the face because his son had given him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. Men didn't kiss each other, the father had yelled. Another time his mother had beaten him severely for having an erection while he was curled up behind her in bed for a nap. File wore a faint smile as he related these stories to Board, as if he found them pathetically amusing. Board asked the warden if Zipper had murdered or harmed the girls after he'd raped them, and File said he hadn't. Zipper's attempts to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment had been denied, despite a psychiatrist's protest that Zipper was sick and incapable of resisting his impulses.
Wearing the cheap suit he'd had on at the time he was first brought to the prison, Board had set up his camera squarely facing the gallows. He tried not to look directly at any of the people who filed silently into the brick-walled, windowless chamber to take their seats in three rows of folding metal chairs, the legs of which made painful scraping sounds across the concrete floor. The prisoner's wife sat in the front row, the families of his victims in the last, separated by a row occupied by several newspaper reporters---already scribbling madly as if producing spirit writing. File would also sit up front, as would a prison physician who would check for vital signs after the fact and pronounce Zipper dead. Board heard sniffling---he was sure from the soon-to-be widow.
The prisoner was escorted into the chamber, the high ceiling of which echoed with the sound of the door being closed again. His hands were bound in front of him to a restraining strap he wore around his waist. To Board the man looked thin, weak, half-starved though he knew he wasn't. Zipper was allowed to go to his wife, who embraced him for almost a minute, whispering tearfully to him, until they were urged apart. Only now, after that intimacy was over, did Board thumb the button on the end of his plunger, to indicate to the camera that it should begin shooting. He saw tears in Zipper's eyes but the man's face was otherwise stunned immobile as he was walked up the steps of the scaffold by a guard who held his elbow.
"Rot in hell," he heard a woman mutter in the back, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
His bible already opened before him, the chaplain stood atop the platform, as did the executioner, whose only function was to throw the lever that would release the two bolts holding the trapdoor in place. The rope would be fitted over the prisoner's neck by a man File had referred to as a Certified Hanging Technician. The prison's executioner, Theodore Rasp, stood ready by the lever, jutting up as conspicuously as an erect phallus. Rasp was sixty-five, his white hair neatly parted, his suit that of a businessman. He smelled of pipe tobacco. No black hood, no crossed muscular axe man's arms. An executioner of the modern age. He looked like a judge or a doctor.
Now that Zipper was centered on the trapdoor, his ankles bound together by a restraining strap that gave an awful creak as it was tightened, the Certified Hanging Technician poised a black denim hood above the prisoner's head, causing Mrs. Zipper to sob, "I love you, Charlie!" while he could still see her.
Board glanced at his camera. He could tell by the extra-excited rippling of its many legs that it was filming. Drinking it all in with the expectation of a tiger flicking its tail in the underbrush, tensed up to spring. Board had a perverse urge to cheat it, just as the executioner threw his lever...to cover that lidless cyclopean eye with his palm.
The chaplain began to softly read aloud. Warden File asked, "Do you have any last words, Mr. Zipper?"
"I'm sorry," Zipper simply blurted. Either to his wife, or the families of his victims. Or to the chaplain, and his God?
Board fought another urge; to look away. Why should he watch, so long as his camera watched? He knew this man had done wrong. And he doubted seriously than any one incident like a father slapping his face for kissing him had made him the deviant that he was. Still, Board's guts squirmed at the man's helplessness...squirmed with empathy for a fear so great that even the survival instinct to flee was blotted out. He couldn't really blame the families of the raped children for wanting to see, with their own eyes, as this man was punished. So why did he hate them at this moment?
The elderly CHT lowered the hood into place over Zipper's head, and followed that by slipping a heavy noose of paraffin-lubricated hemp over the shrouded lump. Board almost expected the technician to hum to himself as if puttering in a garden, as he positioned the knot behind Zipper's left ear, then tightened the noose snugly.
Board imagined that Zipper's heart was pumping extra fast, trying to fit a cheated future of beats into a single minute. But could the prisoner's heart be beating any faster than his own did? Could Zipper's dread be any greater? Board felt as though it was his own life that was seconds away from being snipped free of its single, flimsy marionette's string.
Theodore Rasp put his hand around his lever, and while the chaplain droned on---and with no special fanfare or final decisive proclamation from any of the assembled---calmly pulled it toward him...
Earlier that day, Charles Zipper had been measured from his chin to the floor, in order for the CHT to gauge the length of rope needed. He had been weighed. All moving parts of the scaffold had been oiled. Things were very advanced here at Maxillae Penitentiary. As a result, everything went smoothly when the trapdoor dropped out from beneath Zipper's feet, and his body fell.
He did not kick bare feet; his feet were shod. If his tongue was thrust out of his mouth, it wasn't seen behind that mask. He was like a neat cocoon in his restraints and hood. A chrysalis from which nothing would emerge, unless the chaplain's words proved true...which Board held little hope for.
When his sudden drop was halted by the rope, several bones of Zipper's neck were broken, his spinal cord severed. Had the drop been too little, he would have remained conscious as he choked. Had the drop been too great, his head might have been torn from his body. As it was, Zipper immediately lost consciousness. He did not squirm, did not writhe like Harry Houdini in his bonds, as Board had feared he would. Almost more horribly---he just dangled. Hung there, an unmoving pendulum that had stopped measuring time.
Board threw a look over at Zipper's wife, who was sobbing outright and---thank God---covering her eyes with her palms. Couldn't some relative, a sister, a mother, even a friend, have accompanied her? Beside her she had only the warden, who watched the proceedings with a fixed expression, as if enraptured. Whether involuntarily or not, the legs of the tick fused to the back of his skull was stroking the sides of his neck, as though playing the strings of a harp.
Looking back to his fellow prisoner, Board saw that the front of Zipper's uniform had darkened with urine. He smelled shit. He glanced at the clock high on the brick wall like a shining impassive eye. Though unconscious and in medical shock, though unmoving, Zipper was strangling even as Board and the others watched.
Board would witness much more grisly executions---most of them electrocutions, death by technology seeming more appropriate for the times---in the months and years ahead. During one electrocution, an improperly affixed head electrode would result in foot-long blue flames shooting out both sides of one man's skull. Smoke would pour from the heads of other men. If they were too sweaty, sometimes they caught fire. Eyes might burst from their sockets. Often, in the case of a botched electrocution, the physician would find that the man's heart was still beating. Sometimes Board would hear a soft moan or a wheeze. The man might live on for several, to nearly fifteen, minutes. Sometimes a second round of electrocution was called for.
Board did not always feel great sympathy for these men. Some of them had murdered honest fathers and mothers with multiple children. Some had raped and sadistically murdered women. They were not good men. But it didn't make Board feel like a good man watching their skin turn vividly red as thousands of volts coursed through them, seeing them vomit blood onto their chests. Watching them struggle, just as their victims had struggled. And just as bad as watching their contortions was watching the fluttering of his camera's legs, as if it fought to swim closer to them.
Board was grateful that Mrs. Zipper kept her eyes covered. But as the minutes began to tick by (despite that stilled pendulum), and no one spoke or moved, she inevitably lowered her own improvised blindfold. Her sobbing rose to a higher pitch. Had she expected to see her husband gone, the scaffold again empty when she looked at it?
The minutes ticked by.
Though Charles Zipper's neck and spine had given way in less than a second, it took six minutes for him to go into brain death. It took eight minutes for his heart to give its last, faint throb.
The attending physician had ascended the stairs. The steps creaked as the rope had creaked when the trapdoor had swung wide, as the ankle strap had creaked. He was elderly like the executioner, like the technician, like generals who sent young soldiers to war, and his very body seemed to creak. He bent beside the chrysalis and pressed his stethoscope to it.
A minute ticked by. Straightening, the physician wheezed, "The prisoner has expired."
Board heard one gasping sob, so loud that it startled him. But it wasn't so much its loudness as its origin that had startled him...because the sound had issued from his own mouth. As tears, inexplicably, issued from his own eyes.
Los Huesos, California, 1926
Some cinematographers nicknamed their cameras to distinguish one from the other. Hal Rosson, whom John Board had replaced on the set of The Street of Forgotten Men when Rosson became ill halfway through shooting, had called his three cameras Krazy, Ignatz and Pupp, after the primary characters in the popular Krazy Kat comic strip by George Herriman. Board simply referred to his cameras as 1, 2 and 3. To him, they differed sufficiently in appearance and function to preclude any need for pet names. 1 was for long shots, 2 for medium, 3 for close-ups. He often had all three cameras set up and running, so that the footage could be edited together for visual variety and impact. 1 was the smallest, black and glossy as obsidian. 2 was somewhat larger and gray in color. 3 was a bit larger still and was bone white, reminding him of his cameras back in his crime photographer days, when all the instruments of the Bugs had been that color for whatever unknown reasons.
The cameras were stored in another room right now, the door closed against their stink. 2 was getting a bit older, so Board had purchased a replacement larva from a dealer in Guest biotechnology and this immature creature currently resided in a chemical bath. Also on the workbench in Board's "lab" was a new computer, with iridescent wing covers like a small TV's so that he could view his dailies in them, and a posterior orifice like his cameras so that the rolls of motion picture film he produced could be inserted and transmitted directly to the computer in the particular Paramount editing lab that was being used to assemble the picture he was just wrapping up, The American Venus.
One of the lesser players in The American Venus sneaked up behind Board as he sat at a window in his apartment, gazing out at a city street bleached with the glare of California sunlight off all that white stucco. She was dressed only in his white pajama top, and he wore the pajama bottoms. "Mm," she purred against his neck, her hands sliding around him, a finger teasing along the scar that looped his belly like a railroad track, where a knife had nearly gutted him eight years earlier. She had traced it with her tongue, last night.
Board took her hand off his scar self-consciously, raised it to his lips instead and kissed it, eyes still fixed on the street. He was watching workmen string telephones lines, wound on great spools on their truck. These rubbery white cables were organic, being a kind of blind, mindless worm that could be grown to great lengths, one end pretty much indistinguishable from the other. Impulses sent along their nervous systems conveyed telephone messages better than inorganic lines did, the public had been told, and these lines could also better connect computers for clearer, more distant transmissions to one another. There was talk that TVs, too, would soon be hooked up to such lines, again to benefit from sharper signals broadcast over a wider range. Like radios, a gift to the humans for accommodating the Guests. But Board thought of these gifts of technology as more of a careful diversion. Pretty distractions. Plus, the Guests themselves benefited from telephone lines and radio signals. They, too, used these things so that their own intercommunication was made easier; for the sake of their instruments, in which they were fractionally embodied, and for the sake of their Mediums, spread across this wide country...
"I didn't even hear you get up, Jaby," the woman behind him said, kissing his shoulder. She had started out calling him J.B. but the nickname had mutated slightly to sound like "baby".
Board finally tilted back his head to smile up at her. Her name was Mary Brooks but she used her middle name, Louise, instead. They had met on the set of The Street of Forgotten Men, in which she had had an uncredited role playing a "moll". Now, they were working on the comedy The American Venus together. Louise Brooks had a somewhat larger role this time, playing "Miss Bayport". She would be the lead actress in another comedy, A Social Celebrity, soon; her star was definitely on the rise. Board would not be the cinematographer on that one, however. He hoped that man, Lee Garmes, wasn't good-looking.
But he had no illusions about hanging onto this woman. If he allowed himself that foolishness, that vulnerability, he would be putting his heart on the anvil for sure. The only way for him to survive this was to know it would end, probably soon. Again, she was a star approaching meteoric speeds, and at forty-three he was old enough to be the twenty-year-old's father. She had recently been seeing a businessman named George Marshall, and there were substantial rumors going around that at nineteen she had had a fling with Charlie Chaplain (she'd been a bit old for him, Board thought to himself with an indulgent dab of bitterness).
She was beautiful, of course, with her wide-set eyes that dipped down at the corners, her brows straight and thin above them, her thin lips quick to spread in a grin. Most distinctive was her glossy black helmet of hair, a beetle-like "Dutch Bob" with wings that curled up against her cheekbones (or hung down over him now as she rubbed his shoulders). The low bangs of her shimmering dome of hair hid a surprisingly broad forehead. When she wore her hair parted she looked much older, more intelligent. And she was intelligent. Witty. Sophisticated. Maybe that was her attraction to an older man like himself. When they had met on their last picture, they had found they were both reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's new novel American Psychopath, a hideously violent (but they thought, scathing and hilarious) satire on the shallowness and avarice of the wealthy young men of the decadent jazz age. Finding out Board had once been a still photographer, Louise had invited him to her place to have a peek at some risqué, carefully draped nudes she had done at the age of eighteen for pin-up magazines like Artist and Models. He'd ended up staying the night, and saw the real thing, carelessly undraped.
"Want to get dressed and go out for breakfast?" he asked her, extending his arms behind him to cup the backs of her bare legs.
"Sure thing. Then you want to drive me to Paramount? I've got a meeting with Malcolm at ten." Malcolm was the director of her next film, A Social Celebrity. Again, Board felt an ill-advised pang of jealous possessiveness.
"On Sunday?"
"I have lots to do, Jaby!" She pretended to strangle him from behind, shaking his head to emphasize her words: "I've got...two...more...movies...to do...this...year...so far..."
"Okay, okay," he told her, slapping her calves and then rising from his chair with a small morning groan. Board had filled out a little from his days at Max Pen, which he had only recently told Louise about. He had also taken on the perhaps self-consciously artistic affectation of a mustache and goatee, but Louise said she loved them ("You look European!") and so he kept them.
They headed for a diner they liked on Costilla Street, overlooked by the rugged Los Huesos Hills. Rearing up from these hills were the fifty-foot-tall letters that spelled out BONELAND, loosely nicknamed after Los Huesos' English translation. The sign, lit at night by 4,000 bulbs, had been erected three years earlier by the Los Huesos Real Estate Group. As he drove, Board threw a few glances at the looming white letters. One time, while driving to Paramount, he had seen a centipede that must have been longer than a man skitter up over one of the letters.
There was nothing marring the vast blankness of the letters today, but before they could reach the diner they hit a snarl in traffic. Slipping out of her window to perch her rump on its edge, Louise reported what the problem was. Ahead of them, a fat white beetle nearly as big as an automobile had lumbered out into the street, making its way along with mindless nonchalance.
It must have come down from the thick scrub of the hills. More and more, such mutations were making their presence known, some of them having grown very large very slowly over a period of up to ten years, others apparently having been bred more quickly through generations of mutations, each larger than the last. Rather than being failed instruments of the Guests, they were insects that had, nonetheless, been inadvertently effected by the Guests' influence.
Cars honked at the thing crawling slowly in the road, but Board just sat back and enjoyed the sweet, ephemeral moment, as Louise slipped back into the car and snuggled close to him, resting her Dutch Bobbed head against his shoulder.
Louise had begun filming A Social Celebrity, her first starring role, and Board---who had sent all his footage for The American Venus via computer to the Paramount labs---found himself between jobs.
As with the two movies for which he'd been the cinematographer (his first and only two thus far), Louise's new movie would be filmed by a living camera. Once, the arthropod instruments would only have been interested in scenes of blood and suffering. Now, though the creatures were no doubt less enthusiastic, less stimulated, they put up with filming light comedies like The American Venus. They would even allow themselves to record inorganic subject matter these days...landscapes and such without a human or even animal visible in them. Mechanical cameras were being used less and less. After all, they couldn't film in color or record sound like the living cameras did. If not for them, Louise's movies might be in black and white, and silent.
Board felt a bit lost without another shoot lined up, a bit left out, as Louise's magic would now be captured by another man. But, he lectured himself, that he could not expect to film his girlfriend in every movie she appeared in. And he reminded himself that to even think of Louise as his long term girlfriend was masochistic, madness. He chided himself for what his brain called childishness, what his heart---and loins---called longing.
Bored today, and with the stark California sun burrowing into his throbbing brain, Board decided to duck into a cool movie theater to catch a flick. In the lobby of the brand new Mandible's Chinese Theater, with its green copper pagoda-like roof, he scanned what the multiple screens had to offer. Of the eight films, there were six movies for general consumption, but also two that were rated XX, these being the horror film Night of the Undead and the thriller Silencing the Lambs. The latter was about a deranged mass murderer; Board saw too many of those in the newspapers (mass murderers were seemingly being mass produced in a factory somewhere). He was in no mood for a comedy. He wanted something dark, and chose the horror movie. He heard it had special effects by Lon Chaney, who was also one of Board's favorite actors (he'd enjoyed Chaney, surprisingly without grotesque makeup, in this year's Tell It To the Marines, a fairly lighthearted flick about a green recruit who ended up saving his tough drill instructor, Chaney, when they came under fire in Baghdad).
Watching the zombie flick, Board found Chaney's gore effects inventive and fairly realistic, but the most ghastly scenes of horror were the result of the use of actual cadavers. Hence, the XX rating. For the past couple of years, humans had been acquiring a taste for some of the entertainments (though the Guests protested that they be referred to as such) that the Guests themselves enjoyed. More graphic, shocking action and horror films were available to the public, but since these were by no means to the tastes of all, such motion pictures were designated by a rating system according to the intensity of the images. A film rated X contained strong imagery, XX stronger, while XXX warned of extremely graphic scenes, perhaps even some brief nudity. Personally, Mandible's would not screen XXX films. Few of the larger, more reputable movie palaces did, though out of curiosity, Board had seen several XXX movies in small, one-screen theaters. He had had to walk out of one of those movies, in which a sideshow performer had bitten into the belly of a living German Shepherd puppy.
Board wondered how desperate had been the drunks or addicts, or how hungry the homeless people, or how sadly disturbed the insane people, who in Night of the Undead had been hired to play zombies and rend with their teeth the flesh of real cadavers. It was the most sickening display Board had yet seen in an XX movie, and yet he watched, transfixed, as if he were dreaming. He had seen movies in which a shirtless cowboy was walking along, and then in a close-up of his chest (actually a cadaver's), an arrow or a tomahawk or rifle slug had thudded into the flesh. Cut back to the face of the actual living actor, screaming in pain with fake blood spattered on his neck. He had seen one thriller where a woman undressing, down to her bra and slip, was approached from behind by a maniac with an axe (not an Assassin; the movies never portrayed the murderers as Assassins). When the axe crunched into her spine, it was actually a close-up of a corpse in the same bra. Sometimes actors were even chosen specifically to match up closely with the cadaver on hand. These bodies were usually those of indigents, though some people were willing their bodies to the movie studios as a way to achieve a kind of posthumous celebrity; pseudo immortality.
In this movie, the arms reaching through a partially boarded window were living arms until an axe was swung, at which point the limbs of cadavers were hacked off. Two corpses, representing a young couple, were set on fire and Board watched them burn. He could almost smell the meat...recalled the stink of men frying while being electrocuted in Old Sparky...
He had seen one film where a gangster tossed a traitorous underling off the top of a tall building. The camera had been set up to catch the body splatting to the street. It was, of course, best if the cadavers had not been embalmed or even had their blood drained, if they were fresh. The one that was thrown off the roof burst like a water balloon.
Board left the nighted movie, the subterranean feel of the movie palace, to squint at the agonizing brightness of the street, his headache worse than ever, the heat lying on his skin like quicklime. He felt sickened. But he had also found the movie involving and well made, so he felt confused. He felt guilty. It was like more masochism.
When Board got back to his apartment building, carrying a sack of soft drinks and the makings for sandwiches (not sure if Louise would be staying with him tonight), he found a white 1926 Hudson Limousine sitting out front at the curb. He glanced at it as he passed, and saw a passenger seated behind the driver lean out and gesture to him. "John Board?"
A little wary, for no particular reason (had the movie made him jumpy?), Board only took a single step closer to the beautiful vehicle. The sun off its surface spiked his eyes. "Yeah?"
"Hi." The passenger held his hand out the window to be shaken. "I'm Anthony Pugnale. I work for Dominic Coltello, of Dreamland Pictures?"
Board had heard of them, of course. A smaller, newer studio. Grade C stars. XX ratings. They made mainly cops and robbers flicks, and probably would have made more action movies, top-heavy with propaganda, about the Iraq War had the war lasted longer. Board shook Pugnale's hand. "Nice to meet you."
"How'd you like to take a ride over to the studio right now, John? Mr. Coltello's heard about you, and thinks he could give you some work at his studio if you're not contracted to Paramount."
"I'm not. Not exclusively." Shading his eyes with his hand, Board squinted in at Pugnale, cleared his throat, and looked behind him at his apartment door. When he looked back to Pugnale, he had decided. "Sure. Okay. Just let me run in with my groceries."
"Great." Pugnale gave a handsome grin; he could be a movie star himself. "We'll be right here."
The main reason Board knew about Dreamland Studios was because of their unique head offices, just beyond the main gates. Atop the flat roof of this building was a dome-shaped insect which dwarfed the one that had recently blocked traffic in downtown L.H.. It resembled nothing so much as a titanic black beetle fringed with countless small legs, and with no apparent head. Board wondered if it was pinned down somehow, or if it had simply been trained---or incapacitated/decapitated---so as to remain still (despite the rhythmic undulations of its cilia). "Was that thing caught or grown?" he asked Pugnale once they were inside the iron gates.
"Grown. The Guests are devising living structures for us. They'd be more than shelters; we could interact with them. They could do all kinds of things for us."
Outside the front doors to the main office the two men passed a group of men made up as Iraqis in white robes splashed with blood. One of them, smoking a cigarette, gave Board a friendly nod.
There was an elevator in the main lobby, where a pretty young woman behind the reception desk gave Board a flirty smile, as if part of a conspiracy to charm him. They rode this to its top floor, and when Pugnale rolled the folding barred door aside, Board saw that the top floor was the inside of that gigantic arthropod. Its body must be largely hollowed out inside, its inner walls of chitin forming a rotunda, and its translucent wings forming a vast skylight. At a desk seemingly made from plates of the same black exoskeleton, set in the very center of this living (undead? thought Board) room, sat a man with thinning, graying hair, dressed in an expensive black suit. The man rose to shake Board's hand when Pugnale brought him near.
"Mr. Board, a pleasure. Please sit down. I'm Dom Coltello, head of Dreamland Pictures."
"I'm honored." Board sat.
"Would you care for a coffee?" Coltello waved a hand at a bar up against one of the concave walls. "Something stronger?"
"No thanks...I don't drink anymore."
"No? Is that a personal choice, or because of Prohibition?"
"Both, I guess."
Pugnale took a seat in a chair upholstered in bright red leather, like the one Board had settled into. "I told John, here, that you'd seen his work in Street of Forgotten Men, and had it in mind to hire him, Dom."
"Exactly, John," said Coltello, clasping his hands on his red velvet blotter and leaning across his desk earnestly. "I'm always looking for new talent here at Dreamland, and I'll be frank...I'm especially interested in you because of your background before you came out here to Los Huesos."
Dominic Coltello was a Medium. He had a tumor-like growth on the back of his head, low near his nape. Board had seen few Mediums up close since the last time he had seen Warden File, at Max Pen, several years ago on the day of his release. Coltello's parasite was smaller than the warden's, and if it possessed a head or any legs, they were entirely buried within the studio chief's skull. The lump was also overgrown with neatly slicked graying hair. As File had predicted, the Guests' parasites were becoming smaller and smaller. Some day soon, one would never know if one were talking to a Medium or not.
"My background?" Board asked, not without a twinge of dread.
"Yes." Coltello smiled awkwardly. "Your work with the Metacrapus, Pennsylvania police force..."
"Metacarpus," Board corrected him politely.
"What did I say?"
"Crapus. Metacrapus."
Coltello and Pugnale laughed, and Board chuckled uneasily himself. Coltello went on, "Anyway, your work as a police photographer, and later as a photographic witness at the executions in Maxillae Penitentiary..."
"You heard about that?" Board cut in, a little distressed.
Coltello smiled apologetically. "No need to be ashamed, John. I have contacts. I certainly don't hold your prison term against you. I heard you were a cooperative, model prisoner."
"Well, Mr. Coltello, if you're looking for more cinematographers, why are you interested in my background, which doesn't involve cinematography?"
"Because it involves photography, which is much the same thing, you know that. And...because of the things you used to photograph. The subject matter of your photographs. You have experience with that. You...wouldn't be so shocked, so uncomfortable, seeing it again...would you?"
Board almost stood up there and then. "Yes, sir, I would. I would be uncomfortable seeing it again."
Pugnale looked from Board to his boss uneasily. Coltello made a pained face and motioned for Board to remain seated. "John, hear me out here, please. I'm willing to pay you a very handsome sum of money to do this work for us."
"What work?" Board sighed. "XX stuff? Close-ups of a shotgun blast to the back of a skull? Filming a body tossed out of an airplane? Sideshow geeks playing zombies munching on a cadaver's ass?"
"Not XX films." Coltello, clasping his hands again, sat back in his own red leather seat. "XXX films, John."
"XXX films," he echoed. But for several beats it just didn't sink in, then he remembered the few, only a merciful few, XXX movies he had seen himself. That geek who chomped into the belly of a kicking, yelping puppy. And there was one film told from the camera's point of view, about a psychopath who murdered women in public parks. The special effects had been very convincing. Board was sure that the partly dismembered victim hanging from a hook in the killer's basement was a real cadaver. But the most disturbing scene in that picture had been when the killer clubbed one woman to death in a prolonged sequence, and tore at her blouse until one breast became shockingly exposed. Even now, Board was not convinced that that particular scene had been faked. The contact of the blows had looked too real, the skin opening up over the woman's eyebrow and jetting blood, with no cutaways to a cadaver...the damaging blows falling one after another, again with no edits, until there were more wounds than even Lon Chaney at his best could make mysteriously appear. Of course such an act---a murder in the course of a motion picture, a murder performed purely for entertainment---would be illegal. Punishable by execution, surely. If it could be proven it had been an actual murder. If the body were not disposed of. If the person wielding the hammer had been seen as anything more than an arm. If the Guests, thought Board, didn't enjoy these films even more than their human audiences did.
"Are you asking me...to film people being killed?" Board asked. "To film murders? For movies?"
"John." Coltello rose from his chair and wandered to the farther end of his office, where the inner surfaces of the wings curved down almost low enough for him to reach up and touch their quartz-like material. "I've heard how you killed an Assassin named Michael O'Tool in self-defense. And how, in prison, you indirectly caused the death of a second Assassin, Pablo Linterna..."
"And?" Board said.
"I thought, here is a man who is worldly. Who is toughened by life, and strong. A man who must have no delusions, who will not shy away from hard work..."
"What hard work, Mr. Coltello?"
From across the room, Coltello faced him, looking grim. But it was Pugnale who answered Board, in a soft voice, leaning close. "We want you to not just film an XXX movie, John, but to play the lead. Don't worry---you'll be behind the camera, a small hand-held camera we'll give you, and..."
Board stood up so fast he almost lost his balance, and grasped the studded backrest of his chair to catch himself. "You want me to kill people? Kill them myself, for your fucking movies?"
"John..." Pugnale stood up too, appearing close to a panic. Coltello was not joining in. He stood distant, only watching now.
"No, listen, you have the wrong man! Even if I just filmed such a thing it would be sick and illegal...but to ask me to kill people myself...are you insane? How did you ever think I would do such a thing?"
"Your background, John! Sure you worked for the cops...but you killed a man. You have blood on your hands. You went to jail. You befriended some gang, apparently, and they killed another man for your benefit. You filmed dozens of men cooking in their own skins! But you're talking like a virgin schoolboy, here."
"I killed a guy who opened me up like a fish! And I didn't ask for that other man to be killed." Board moved closer to the elevator cage. "And I only filmed those men in the chair so I could get out of that hell hole." A low humming distracted him from his words. Not a humming, but a buzzing. He realized that the insect they were inside of was becoming agitated, or excited, by the discord within its shell...
"John---we can give you a ton of money!" Pugnale blurted. "Yes, we want some...extra special footage. But most of it will be faked. Just effects. We can..."
"You're Assassins yourselves," Board muttered, in an awed kind of revelation. "Aren't you?"
In the early years, it seemed even the police couldn't determine how Assassins were recruited by the Guests. Whether it was directly, as the Mediums were contacted, or if they had leaders. This latter had proved to be the case. Now, some of the names of the largest, most powerful Assassin leaders were known to the press, the American public, though the police usually had a hard time gathering enough evidence to link them to the crimes committed by the men they enlisted. It was the price one paid for playing the game of Assassin, that the Guests would not protect them from the law. Their efforts to elude the law made the drama so much richer. But that didn't mean there weren't corrupt policemen and judges, paid to shield them. Back in Metacarpus, it was now well known that a man named Joseph Martello was the head of one of the country's largest Assassin families. In Board's childhood home of Coccyx, Illinois---formerly known as Chicago---the head of the most powerful army of psychopathic Assassins was Scarface Al Capone. Both Martello and Capone were said to be Mediums.
"John, John, John." Dom Coltello finally resumed speaking, and returned to join the other two men. "You're getting too worked up here." He spread his hands like the most reasonable of men. "I can see we made a terrible mistake, and I apologize for wasting your time."
"Maybe we can offer him some more conventional work, Dom," Pugnale put in. He patted Board on the shoulder. Board could see Pugnale was trying to placate him, lest he go out in the streets shouting at the top of his lungs about the terrible acts it had been assumed he'd be willing to consider.
"No, no," Coltello said, "we've upset John enough for one day. Again, accept my apologies, John. Take John home, Tony. But take him out to lunch, first..."
"That won't be necessary," Board murmured. He was trying to remember if that other XXX film he had recalled, with an approach so similar to the one Coltello had proposed, had been a Dreamland film as well. And why not ask that cinematographer to play the "lead" again? Unless he'd be captured by the police. Unless he'd been uncooperative, and Dreamland Pictures had...terminated his contract.
"Very well, John...as you wish. You take care, and all best to you."
They entered the elevator, which lowered them out of the insect's belly. Board felt like Jonah coughed out onto the waves, when at last he and Pugnale stepped out into the blaze of the sun. By now, Board's headache was nearly crippling. That buzzing inside Coltello's office still seemed to ring in his ears.
Pugnale returned him to the spot where they had met, and as Board disembarked, the handsome man leaned out the limousine's window and said, "John...sorry this didn't work out. I apologize for misjudging you. But you understand, of course, that it would be in both of our best interests if you didn't talk to anyone about this meeting of ours."
Board nodded. "Yes. I understand perfectly. You don't need to threaten me."
"John, hey, I'm not threatening! I'm just saying..."
"Thanks anyway." Board turned his back on the man, and headed to the front door of his apartment building. He didn't hear the limousine start behind him, but when he peeked out from his window at the street below, it was gone.
Board found it hard to sleep that night. It was hot, so he had his windows open, but from the Los Huesos hills came a loud and constant trilling, metallic cicada-like sirens. It was the mutant bugs that dwelt in the scrub. Sometimes locals shot at them, but for the most part they were afraid to harm the creatures, thinking that the Guests might object even though the animals were not directly instruments of the Guests. Mostly they were left free to roam the hills and through people's yards like sacred cows.
Louise had not come to him tonight.
He got up from bed, went to the window, stared out at the distant glowing letters that spelled BONELAND, rippled across the hills like a bioluminescent caterpillar.
Could Coltello really have thought that he would join his ranks as an Assassin? And film his crimes, besides? After knowing he had once worked for the police and cooperated with a prison warden? Or did they recruit from policemen themselves, for all he knew? Coltello was just so fearless, Board figured, that he could risk trying to recruit a man off the street like himself, a man he didn't truly know much about. Coltello didn't fear the authorities. And he didn't fear John Board.
He had only the Guests to answer to. And to satisfy. The Guests' needs must be met, and Coltello could not be shy about fulfilling his responsibilities.
Board wondered if he should have declined Coltello's offer more politely, and asked the man for conventional work instead. But he knew that he could not live with himself if he worked for such a man. This man would have filmed Board's mother's hanging corpse and inserted it into a horror movie, so the audience could be repelled by her face (but ogle her nightgowned figure).
His disgust, his disapproval, meant nothing, he knew. An empty protest. He continued to refrain from pork, but pigs went on being killed. And cows died just as horribly as pigs but still he ate steak. He thought of all the men he had watched die at Max Pen, marched to slaughter like animals themselves. He felt many of those men had indeed deserved to die...so why should it be a problem if he had to watch that death take place? Did he think suffering wouldn't occur if he didn't personally witness it? He had followed the Iraq War in the newspaper as if it had been sports reports. If he saw a war in print instead of from a trench-eye view, did that make it clean? Okay? Soldiers marching into battle like cows along a ramp. It all blurred together in his mind...
Board finally dozed off for three hours on his sofa. In the morning, after forcing himself to shave and shower, he headed out for breakfast in his small 1924 Ford with its spoked wheels and dusty black paint. After breakfast at the diner he and Louise favored, he drove over to Espinal Boulevard where he had passed a pawnshop many times without stopping in. Today, he stopped in.
From the shop's less than impressive offering of handguns, Board settled on a ten year old Colt Police Positive Special, a .38 revolver with a four inch barrel. Board was pleased that half a box of ammo came with it, so he wouldn't have to venture to a gun shop for that. He also bought a scuffed shoulder holster, and the proprietor let him try the rig on so he could pose in front of a tarnished mirror to see how the pistol looked under his jacket.
Board felt foolish walking back out onto the street with the gun on him. It was too heavy, and he was still afraid that in the naked sunlight the gun's parasitic bulge would be noticed, a strap of the shoulder holster would be seen if the breeze stirred his jacket's flaps (he kept his hands in his pockets, tight to his sides). What if a cop stopped him? What would Louise think?
He was sure Coltello was not too concerned about him. With his power, why should he be? If he'd been worried about the cinematographer, he'd never have boldly offered him the job in the first place...
By the same token, Coltello might not be worried about insuring his silence, either. Board was sure he was a chief of Assassins, and Assassins assassinated. And Board had run afoul of them before. It was a pattern he seemed unable to avoid...as if fated to him, like a preordained history.
Things were progressing quickly on Louise's movie A Social Celebrity (in which she was playing a flapper named Kitty Laverne). After that, she had lined up It's the Old Army Game and The Show-Off. Every time Board saw her, it seemed she had another movie scheduled for this year. As a result of her activity, Board saw her only two or three times a week. He, on the other hand, had plenty of time to himself...still not having picked up another job with Paramount.
He had begun to feel insecure about it. Had they disliked his work on his first two pictures (one and a half, really, since he'd come into the first as a replacement)? Had he stepped on someone's toes at Paramount, this someone making sure he didn't get any further assignments?
What if this someone hadn't been at Paramount? Board thought again of his meeting with Dominic Coltello at Dreamland Pictures, almost a month ago now. Though his studio and Paramount were rivals, could Coltello still use his influence to see to it that John Board went unemployed?
Board decided this idea was ludicrous. He could realistically imagine Coltello wanting to silence him after the offer he had made, but he couldn't picture the man trying to ruin his career out of sheer, petty vindictiveness. No, Board had to lay the blame on himself. Either his work hadn't been that good, or else he simply needed to be less passive about picking up new assignments. He had to go to Paramount and grab some lapels, make some people look at him in the face.
He decided to drive over there today, and try to meet one or two people by surprise. Maybe the directors of his first two movies (Herbert Brenon, Frank Tuttle), or the producers of both films (Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky). When he had phoned for these people recently, they were either said to be out or busy. Board dressed nicely, and of course he didn't strap on his gun. In fact, lately he felt foolish for ever having purchased the tarnished old thing at all.
He was taking a right onto Clavicula Boulevard when he became aware of the gleaming white vehicle behind him. One other car separated them, but when Board looked over his shoulder more directly, he decided that his first impression had been correct.
It was a brand new Hudson Limousine. Just like the one Anthony Pugnale had been sitting in three weeks ago, when he was parked out in front of Board's apartment building.
He waited for a bit before he glanced back at the automobile again, trying not to be too obvious about it. The interior was too shaded for him to tell for sure, but there appeared to be a passenger in back of the capped driver. The driver of Pugnale's limo had also been wearing a cap and smart chauffeur's uniform that day. But Board tried to calm his nerves. This was Boneland---there were more limos here than bicycles. Why would Coltello want him followed? What was there to gain? He already knew where he lived, didn't he?
Nevertheless, Board decided to experiment, to take a more circuitous route to Paramount Studios. He turned right onto Rotula Avenue, lined with palms like the many scaled legs of some vast creature lost in the sky beyond his car's roof. The white Hudson followed, and this time there was no intervening car between them. Board's heart began racing on ahead of his vehicle. He tried to moderate the speed of both. In fact, he slowed his little Ford considerably. Rather than shorten the distance between them, the limo still hung back. Also taking its time...
He took another right, this one into Metacarpo Boulevard. He didn't need to be Spanish to translate that one.
The white limo, too, turned onto Metacarpo.
Board picked up speed. So did the limousine. It began to close the gap between them, finally.
Ahead, he could see the Paramount water tower looming like a giant camera on a tripod, watching his approach. He had worked himself back onto the path to the studio, more by accident than anything. He decided to drive up to its gates, where there would be a guard to admit him, to put bars between himself and his pursuer.
He silently berated himself for not bringing the Colt revolver.
Paramount Pictures came into view, its archway topped with red Mexican-style tiles, the gate itself of beautiful wrought iron design, sound stage 4 seen just beyond. A car was already being admitted passage. Board accelerated. Maybe he could zip through after the car---before the gate could be closed---and explain himself to the guard after the fact.
The limo accelerated, too. In fact, it zoomed up behind the Ford with such a surge that Board cringed, expecting the heavier vehicle to plow into the back of his own. Instead, it swerved and came up parallel to his left...so close that it began to scrape its flank along the black Ford's with a metallic shriek. Instinctively, Board spun his wheel to the right...flying directly toward the scrolled iron gate...but now he saw that the gate had already closed.
He stomped his brake, his spoked tires squealed as if he'd run over some living thing. Board kept trying to turn to the right to avoid a head-on collision with the fortress-like barrier.
Board managed to slam sideways into the gates instead of nose-first---in so doing, clipping the front of another auto just as it began to pull up for admittance. Board was jolted across his passenger seat, glass from his shattered windshield tinkling over him. The flowery gates rang, rising up like a spider web he'd been caught in. He heard a woman screaming (from fear instead of injury, as it would turn out) from the other car, accompanied by a man cursing. Board sat up, and looked out his broken windshield at the steam billowing from his hood's side grills, then out the passenger's window at the white Hudson Limousine as it receded.
He caught a glimpse of a man in the back seat, pointing something out his own window back in Board's direction. For a moment, Board almost ducked down, thinking it was a Thompson submachine gun like the bootleggers and some Assassins were fond of using in Capone's Coccyx. But then Board recognized it for what it was.
A hand-held, living camera.
"Everyone says you were drinking, but I keep telling them you don't drink," Louise Brooks said, laying her head in his lap as if it were she who needed comforting. Absent-mindedly, Board stroked his palm over her sleek hair, along her exposed and graceful neck.
"I just lost control," he murmured. "The sun in my eyes, I guess." He was watching a news broadcast on the small TV mounted on the opposite wall. It looked like the United States was gearing up for a war with North Korea. His TV was an early model, already obsolete; its closed wing covers were divided by the mildly distracting center seam, not fused into one smooth shell like current models; plus, one of the aging scarab-like beetle's barbed legs twitched with spasms every few minutes.
Louise sat up, her face mournful, an expression to break the hearts of a thousand movie-goers. "Of all the things to hit, Jaby. Why that?"
"You sound like Zukor, now." Adolph Zukor, producer of the two movies Board had shot. Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures. Zukor, who had told Board he'd never shoot a third picture for Paramount, even though the gates had only been scratched, only needed to be repainted black. His car, on the other hand, looked like it might require more work than his dwindling finances could support.
"You should go to Europe, Jaby, you know?"
"Why? Because I have a European goatee? Or so I'll be out of your hair?"
"Out of my hair? I'd want to go with you, silly!" She scooted closer to pull at his earlobe with her teeth. "Besides, I like you in my hair. If you get what I mean."
"Maybe I will. Maybe I'll go on ahead of you...wait for you while you finish your movies." And so she wouldn't be caught in the crossfire, he thought. So no one would try to hurt her, to get at him.
"If you want to," she said, exaggerating a pout. "But I'd miss you."
He faced her. "I'd miss you, too."
They embraced. Kissed deeply. She drifted back, and he down atop her. His lips pressed below the hard edge of her jaw, strayed along her arched neck, down to the bone-smooth ball of her shoulder. Her dress, as he helped her pull up its hem, was impregnated with the smell of cigar smoke. Board didn't smoke. As he pierced her body, he felt pierced as well.
She was already gone when he woke the next morning. He read her note but barely took in the words. He thought the scrap of paper itself reeked of cigar smoke, but then he realized he was being childish, maybe even cruel.
The note in his lap, he turned his gaze to the window. The new telephone lines were strung out there, white and disturbingly soft-looking. And there were two birds sitting on one of them. As he watched, one of the birds pecked at the line, seemed to tear free a tiny nibble of meat. Board smiled faintly.
He ran several errands that morning, all by cab. At the dealer in Guest instruments where he had acquired it, he returned his immature number 2 camera in its nutrient bath, and the remainder of his unused chemistry. He tried to sell his TV as a second-hand piece, but when the dealer saw its condition he only offered to take it for free and humanely "put it down". A dealer could do this, and an animal could expire of natural causes such as old age or disease, but as Board well knew, to do away with a healthy animal oneself (especially one designed more for the purposes of the Guests than the entertainment of humans) was a grave matter.
After that, a trip to the pawnbroker where he'd acquired his pistol. Though he was able to sell some of his possessions, he hung onto the gun. Then, with his somewhat padded resources, Board called a cab to take him out to Los Huesos International Airport. There, he'd buy a ticket on the first flight to France, which Louise had numerous times expressed interest in visiting. He had tried calling her at the studio from a pay phone outside the pawnshop, but had been told she was already on the sound stage and unavailable. He would try her again from the airport. If he couldn't speak to her personally, he would insist that a message be conveyed: that he had taken her advice. That he would write to her with an address as soon as he was settled. That he would explain all this to her as soon as he was able. And that he hoped she would even come join him, as she'd promised.
He knew there was little chance of this. Her career was taking off. His had crashed into a barrier. She was young. It was better that he put distance between them, before she did. He might just save her life this way. And save his heart from being wrung dry. But despite all this, still he entertained an ember of hope that she would care enough to follow across the ocean to be beside him. A fantasy, maybe, but such was the food of the masses.
With his three suitcases waiting on the sidewalk beside him, Board watched his glossy little cab turn into the street, drive up to where he stood. The driver didn't offer to help him wrangle his luggage into the backseat, which Board squeezed into afterwards.
"Where to?" the driver asked, starting the vehicle moving again.
"LH Airport," Board said in a dead sort of voice.
Perched on the dashboard was a small radio, a dark gray pill-bug that was playing George Gershwin's "Someone to Watch Over Me." The reception hissed with static, so the cabbie reached up to slightly adjust the magnet block on its back. "Fucking thing," he mumbled, trying to tweak its antennae now. He gave up on it.
Board numbly watched palms swoosh by, columns holding up a bright blue sky like the fake ceiling of a movie set. He heard a scuttling sound, then a louder burst of static, and looked up front again. The radio bug had actually spun on the dash to face him more directly, its feelers flickering erratically. Its attention to him seemed almost accusatory, and made Board feel defensive. "What?" he almost wanted to snap at it.
A whiteness slid up to eclipse the window to his left. A fraction of a second after that, the world seemed to detonate, a sound so loud that for a moment Board thought he'd been shot in the head. Instead, he peripherally saw it was the cab driver's skull that exploded like a clay pigeon. Almost everything was taken off above the man's top lip, the missing material smacking across the ceiling of the vehicle, the dashboard, the seats, and spattering Board's own face. Splashed with blood and gobs of pulped brain that slid off its chitin, the radio hissed its static at a piercing volume, its antennae blurring. Resting on the dash rather than being attached to it, the animal began to scurry back and forth madly, smearing the gore further.
The cabbie's speckled hands slid like gloves off the wheel, and the automobile abruptly drifted to the right. One of those scaled, bordering palms loomed closer into view...
Board ducked down, both to avoid a second shotgun blast and to protect his head against the cab's front seat as the vehicle crunched into the trunk of that palm. The car rocked on its wheels and Board grunted as the car's violent jolt was communicated through his own frame.
He wore the pistol he'd bought in town, and he fumbled at the holster, under his jacket, at the same time that he scrambled frantically to exit the vehicle before he could become boxed inside it.
He emerged into the baking summer sun just as the white Hudson Limousine (its flank, he was sure, scratched and marred with embedded black paint) pulled up alongside the steaming taxi.
Board had dry-fired the gun in his apartment. Despite its age, the revolver had a very stiff trigger, so Board had already thumbed back the hammer before he pointed the gun at the end of his outstretched arm. This made the trigger too sensitive, however, and the pistol went off a fraction of a second prematurely. As a result, the bullet whizzed past the head of the man who aimed a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun out the front passenger window. Instead, the lead capsule zoomed straight into the ear of the neatly attired chauffeur, behind the Assassin.
The driver was slammed hard against his door. He seemed to hang over his steering wheel, merely dazed for several beats. Then, a veritable waterfall of blackish blood poured from his slack mouth and his nostrils as though a faucet had been twisted fully open. The man sank slowly back against his seat, eyes still staring, enraptured as if he watched his own death on TV.
At that moment, Board expected the Assassin to discharge the second barrel of the shotgun into him. A fraction of a moment later, Board realized the man had already fired both barrels simultaneously. He also realized that the Assassin hadn't expected him to be armed.
If he was going to reload, or draw another weapon, he would first have to put down the camera he had been holding in his left hand as he braced the shotgun across the window frame with his right.
Despite the resistance of the Colt's trigger, Board began squeezing off one blast after another, the recoil of the gun and its noise jarring.
Glass shattered. The car door thunked metallically as one stray bullet bored into it. The man with the gun and camera let out a kind of high yelp or whoop, though Board couldn't tell if it were from pain or shocked alarm. He kept firing. He saw the hand-held camera drop out of the window to the street, rocking on its concave back. He kept on shooting. The gun seemed inexhaustible. But then it was empty, and he didn't see the man in the window anymore.
Still holding the empty pistol out ahead of him, Board stole up on the car. Keeping low, he poked up fast for a look inside. The Assassin, a man he didn't recognize, who could be any man, lay with his head in the driver's lap, moaning very softly. He had a hole in his chest, just below his sternum; the man had torn open his shirt, popping its buttons, either in a reflex action or to have a look at it. Though his eyes were open, he didn't appear to be seeing Board. His wheezing moans seemed to issue out of the wound itself.
A fury borne on adrenalin infused Board's entire body. For one second, he had to fight the urge to press the gun's muzzle against that black hole (barely leaking one thin red ribbon) and shove the barrel deeply into the wound, into his gut like a knife or a penis and leave the gun hanging out of him. He wanted to reverse the gun in his fist, hold it by the barrel and club the man in the face with the checkered handle, so he could watch his nose break and mash, so that he could splinter his teeth into his gums and lips. He wanted to thrust the barrel into one eye, skewering the brain behind it.
Instead, he withdrew from the limo, leaving the man to die more slowly. That was better, anyway.
Looking up from the two dead men, Board saw that cars were passing by slowly, heads turning to watch the scene, but no one stopping. He raised his spent gun to waist level so no one would be brave enough to stop and investigate. Then his eyes fell on the camera, still helpless on its back, its many legs wavering. He wished he had one bullet left to put into its belly, where a handle had been affixed. He had no time to go through his luggage in search of his spare ammo. He contemplated stomping the thing under his shoe, or bludgeoning it with the gun, but he should be leaving the scene of his crime, like any smart Assassin.
Still, he had one final impulse and this one he heeded. After holstering his pistol, Board picked up the camera, righted it in his hands, and reached into the limo with it...resting it on the Assassin's chest so that its single orb stared directly into his face.
"Enjoy it," he said to the camera.
Board dragged his three bags out of the cab, and began struggling down the street with them. Los Huesos International Airport wasn't too much further on foot...
He didn't see the movie until he returned from Europe, several years later. It was no longer in the theaters, but you could now rent movies prerecorded onto cylinders, and insert them into your TV at home (or, if you had an older model, there was a second creature you could add to your TV so that they seemed to be copulating). The movie was called Road Rage, a Dreamland Pictures release. In it, a maniac liked to drive around shooting people at random from his vehicle. The film was told largely from his point of view. In some scenes, rather than shoot at other cars or pedestrians, he simply drove their vehicle off the road, jumped out of his own vehicle, and attacked them with something more intimate like a knife or claw hammer. Some of these killings were faked. Board was certain that some of them weren't.
He wasn't sure how they had intended the movie to end, originally. No doubt, the character he played had been planned to be just another victim. But the victim had turned the tables on the psychopathic lead character. On his TV screen, Board watched himself shooting almost directly at the camera. The view became disorienting as the camera began to fall, but then the angle cut away to a close-up of the road killer's dying face. His rasping, gurgling death rattle that Board hadn't hung around to witness personally.
The following scene showed the road killer on a morgue slab, with the film's detective hero thanking the potential victim for putting a stop to the rampage. The victim in this scene (supposedly an off-duty security guard) was a man who bore a superficial resemblance to Board (crepe hair goatee glued on with spirit gum).
John Board received no mention in the credits, either for his brief acting or camera work. He wasn't incensed by this. He wouldn't be going over to Dreamland to demand that Dominic Coltello pay him for his screen time. Anyway, a few months ago Dom Coltello had been gunned down in a restaurant with his mouth full of pasta, apparently by an Assassin from a big West Coast gang. Hence, Board's return to the States. It might seem unusual that one Assassin chief might want another dead (especially where Coltello had been a Medium, besides), but it made for good crime scene photos. Good human drama. Of course, there was always the possibility that the hit had been ordered by a rival movie studio.
Board wondered if Louise Brooks had ever seen the movie Road Rage. If she had recognized him from a distance, in it. If so, he never saw her again to ask her.
She did make it to Europe eventually...but to Germany, to play Lulu in G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box.
And while Board was still in France, she had married Eddie Sutherland, director of her movie It's the Old Army Game.
Coccyx, Illinois, 1945
"Turn my window toward the sun," John Board said to the empty room, the walls, the ceiling. He was sixty-two years old and he dwelt alone in this house at the suburban surf's edge of the great city Coccyx, where he had lived in his boyhood---when it had still been called Chicago, before the Guests had come.
Board put out a hand to steady himself against the slight inward curve of the cool, glossy white wall. His house was fifteen years old, and around the age of twenty they tended to die. The older houses and buildings did, anyway; naturally, technology was improving all the time in grasshopper leaps and bounds, and the new living structures that were being rapidly grown in situ were promised to have life-spans in the decades if not centuries. These hosts would outlive their parasitic inhabitants, it was said.
But Board's house, an older model, was aging, and where once it would have rotated its entire body smoothly, now it moved in irregular jerks that sometimes made the windows rattle in frames cut into the walls of chitin, and Board had almost tumbled over one time when the great insect gave a particularly violent lurch. Now he made sure to prepare himself before giving a command such as this.
The huge, mindless animal he lived inside dutifully repositioned itself until the window he stood at did indeed face toward the morning sun. Board gazed out. He was on the second story; his house, his creature, loomed upward as if the insect aspired to become bipedal. Its upper pair of legs was folded to its shell-like sides, the two lower pairs spread out at wide angles to support the animal and to enable it to turn in its shallow socket of a foundation. At the summit of the house, the insect's head was tiny, eyeless, all but brainless, but its immense feelers helped with radio reception. For TV and computer feeds, of course, Board was linked up to an underground, living worm cable entering through his house's anus, through which his water and sewerage were also conveyed via inorganic plumbing. For electricity, the insect possessed a battery-like organ up in the attic, close to the posterior portion of its head. Its white armor absorbed sunlight and converted it to energy stored in this organ. But although Board owned this house, and his house was self-sufficient, he still had to pay the town for the sunlight.
Unsatisfied or bored with his view of the dawn---or because he sometimes liked to tease the house, as if to assert his mastery over it---Board commanded it to move again. "Face toward the city," he said loudly. As the house aged, it heard him less well; where once he need only have whispered, now he had to practically shout. But other times Board might pat the wall sympathetically. This creature had not asked to be born, or to be born in such a form. To be born a slave. No more than a pig asked to be made into bacon. And both of them were aging together.
The house shifted again until the same window gave Board a view toward the heart of Coccyx.
Not all the buildings were organic. About a third of the tallest buildings were still comprised of stone and metal. But the expanse extending before Board's gaze glistened as the rising sun sparked reflections off a frozen sea of chitin. Exoskeletons of obsidian black, ash gray, and bone white. The domes of gigantic beetles perched atop older, more traditional buildings of concrete or mortared brick. Vaster domed beetles, resting on street level. Skyscraper minarets that were losing their resemblance to insects, their hundreds of legs as useless as the vestigial heads, these myriad limbs half-fused against the flanks until they were little more than a decorative trim between the many rows of glass windows pocked in their soaring, vaguely segmented bodies.
There was an ever-present shimmer of summer sound, even in winter. The sound of grasshoppers. The occasional rising buzz-saw of cicada noise. Even at night, but one grew accustomed to it, forgot to hear it. The near-brainless structures still communicating, interacting in their zombie-like way---for reasons that Board was certain the city's multitudes didn't fully understand. Weren't meant to.
A small plane hummed over the glittering cityscape like a dragonfly, but Board knew it wasn't one. No insect of that size could beat its wings sufficiently to keep itself aloft. But one day, despite the laws of nature, he had little doubt it would be done, regardless. Humans would be borne along inside those bodies. Maybe there would be ships made from titanic pill-bugs with their fringe of legs fluttering in the water. But he had never been much of a visionary. Progress outdistanced his imaginings. For decades, he had dully, fatalistically watched the future race past his eyes at a speed that felt unnatural in the very cells of his bones.
There was a dull silvery haze over the city, as if Lake Michigan's cold waters were reflected on the bottom of the clouds. It was pollution from vehicles and from the methane exhalations of the buildings, small and large. Living factories, organic mills. Exhaust fumes from barely sentient abattoirs where pig-sized beetles were herded to slaughter to feed the masses.
Food was cheap; no one really went hungry (at least no one starved). The sunlight, though taxed, was affordable. Everyone seemed to have a place to live. Some columnists enthused that Coccyx was the model American city---the height of progress and efficiency, they gushed. Others held a violently opposing view. Not that their opposition mattered a bit. Other cities here and abroad would continue to emulate it as they grew. In a purely functional sense, Coccyx was as close to a Utopia as human history could lay claim to.
"Turn 180 degrees," Board said loudly, as if to some senile grandfather.
The house grated in its crater foundation until, at last, the window faced away from the sun. Away from the city.
Still dissatisfied, Board turned his back on the lens-like glass and his view of the world.
"Slow down, Goddamnit," Board hissed, his arm jerking out taut ahead of him as his dog---a year-old, 75 pound Japanese Akita---launched its stocky, muscular body forward, perhaps having caught a whiff of another neighborhood dog. She was dragging him along, panting with her effort but also seemingly unaware of him. He tugged back on the choke chain; she hacked once and slowed a little. "Fucking dummy," he growled.
The dog had already been named Sada when he'd acquired her from a Japanese neighbor three months ago, but he called her Sadie most times. Once, the Akitas had been owned exclusively by Japanese royalty, then called Matagiinu---the "esteemed hunter". Over the centuries, they had been used to hunt bear (their own broad faces making them appear bear-like), been fighting dogs, been eaten (especially during the last World War) and been used for their pelts. Since that war, they had been brought home by a lot of servicemen and had begun to become something of a popular breed.
Sadie was a "pinto", primarily white but with a black mask that obscured her small, slanted eyes. A large black triangle on her back, a smaller black splash behind that, and then a black band around her bushy, curled tail. With her large pointed ears and regal carriage, she was a striking animal, and on four or five occasions while Board had been walking her cars had literally stopped in the road (one had even made a U-turn) so that the drivers might get a better look at her or even ask him what kind of breed she was.
There was an abandoned abrasives factory at the end of Board's quiet little side street, and he liked to walk Sadie through its empty parking lot, though he tried to keep her from plunging into the tall grass that grew along its far border. She'd picked up ticks there on two occasions. The last time he's found it in her armpit, and it was just a little black disk. But the first one, right between her shoulder blades in that black triangle, had been gorged into a small green grape by the time he discovered it. He'd pulled both of them off her with tweezers, and flushed them down the toilet, smiling as he watched their legs paddle futilely.
Today Board wore a big Colt .45 semiautomatic in a shoulder holster, as he did every time he ventured outside his house. It held eight bullets (seven in the clip, one in the chamber)---which, plump as they were, reminded him of the atomic bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" that a Japanese kamikaze plane had dropped on Pearl Harbor years ago---and in his jacket's pocket he carried a spare magazine.
A person was allowed one kill a year, but you could carry that kill over into the next year. A lot of people never used their kills, so they accumulated them. With the proper forms, you could even give away or sell your allocation to another. Since the law had been passed ten years ago---in an effort to control crime, in an effort to give the public a therapeutic way to vent, to channel their aggression---Board had not used his allocation once.
He had ten kills available to him. Anyone he chose, excluding a Medium or politician. Any man, woman, or child. Any policeman, priest, or spouse. He had not taken advantage of this freedom, this right. But he always made sure he had ten bullets with him. More, in case he ever wanted to shoot someone multiple times. He had saved his kills for self-defense from other killers, other of his fellow citizens, but to date he had never been chosen as anyone else's victim. He tried to be an invisible man. Nondescript, a nonentity. Nobody's target.
As Board half-stumbled along the street after his dog, approaching the grounds of the derelict factory, a bicycle came zipping past on his right. Sadie gave a half-hearted lunge after it, grinning foolishly, tongue lolling. It was a boy of about twelve.
Behind him, Board heard another child's voice bellow, "Running home to your Daddy, pussy?"
"Fuck you, homo!" the boy ahead of Board shouted back over his shoulder.
"Queer!" came the nearing voice.
"Fairy!" barked the retreating voice.
"Fucking fudge-packer!" yelled the voice that now coasted up alongside Board. Another boy on a bike, and with him the brother or friend who always rode this neighborhood with him. Board tensed up, and Sadie flicked her head toward them with interest. Several times these two had made whistling or howling sounds at Sadie as he walked her, and he expected more of it now. Maybe even mocking statements directed at him; if they were afraid of him then they never would have teased his dog in his presence.
But as Board looked their way, hoping he appeared surly without being challenging, the boy who had just been roaring obscenities cried out, "Your dog is so beautiful! I love that dog!"
Board gave an uneasy smile, a bit surprised but still wary. "Thanks. She is beautiful, isn't she?"
The friends/brothers picked up speed again, resumed chasing after the first boy. Maybe they did have some respect for him, after all. Because he was an adult...because he was an aging adult...or maybe because of the Colt .45 he plainly wore? Not that guns were a rarity.
Did they intend to beat up that other boy? They couldn't legally kill him---they weren't eighteen yet. Unsanctioned murders were treated with the utmost severity. Those found guilty were set free within fenced areas of woodland where others who were sanctioned would hunt them down. There, the condemned could only hope for a quick, clean kill. Once in a while, a prisoner might wrestle a gun or crossbow or axe or what have you away from one of the hunters, but there were plenty of guards on hand to watch out for things like that...
When Board was a child, even saying "damn" or "hell" in front of his mother would have been unthinkable. His mother had been a demure woman who abhorred crudity, which had made the eye-stabbing, silently shrieking horror of her appearance in death all the more surreal, disturbing. Strangely, too intimate---like seeing her naked inadvertently. Embarrassing, in a way. Like hearing one's mother moan in pleasure behind her bedroom door. Like hearing his father cry late at night, as Board once had before the man disappeared on that train to oblivion.
He and the dog had entered the desolate parking lot now. He could imagine that this was what the city would look like if there were ever an Apocalypse. Or if all the citizens finally killed each other off...except for him. It was a half-welcome fantasy.
Wild grasses bristled up from cracks that snaked through the asphalt; nature reclaiming her ground, like vines growing through skull sockets. In the center of this lot was a small brick warehouse, an outer structure of the sprawling factory, with two arched loading docks along one flank...but these had since been filled in with cinder blocks. They reminded Board of two huge, blinded eyes.
They crossed the lot under the stark tarnished sky, and reached the grassy fringe of the parking lot's rear border. There were a few scattered birch trees here, their bark peeling white and black as if the trunks and branches had been covered all in newspapers. In the tall weeds lay two long rusted train rails without the ties to connect them. Beyond the factory, Board frequently heard trains moaning by, even late at night. The most haunting, mournful of sounds; when their whistles called, he imagined dinosaurs might have bleated such sounds to each other, perhaps not so unaware of their impending annihilation.
Sadie squatted, urinated next to a magazine warped from recent rains, splayed open to its center. Board kicked it over with his toe; the title was Alarma! He'd seen the original Spanish version and lately the English version of it, as well, on newsstands. Each issue was full of lurid photos of shotgunned Mexican dope peddlers and sundered auto accident victims.
There was a condom close by, dried out from the sun and looking brittle, a dead thing in the surf. Sadie sniffed it but Board jerked her along...past glinting shards of broken beer bottles, and an intact whiskey bottle further back in the underbrush.
At the corner of the lot, a street lamp rose up. Its own trunk was streaked with rust like splatters of dried, flaking blood. Board tilted his head back to squint up at it.
At its summit, a camera was mounted. Its single, milky eye gazed down at him in turn with seeming blankness. Its kind could survive for nearly a year without nourishment until a maintenance worker from the town would climb up on a ladder to feed it some bone grit. At night, when the post's lamp automatically came on, its beam would draw clouds of moths and beetles, as if they had come to pay homage to this proud sentinel. This solemn, remote witness.
Board was almost jolted forward off his feet, as Sadie abruptly surged into the grass. He caught his balance and snarled, "You stupid damn dog...I'll send you back where I got you, I swear to God!" He'd probably been a fool taking on such a boisterous young animal at his age. He had thought she'd be good company after Judy---his live-in girlfriend of eight years---had succumbed to smallpox (which had been released from an Italian bomb in the most recent war). That had been two years ago now. Well...the dog was good company. The dog worshipped him, even tried to park her seventy-five pounds in his lap when he sat before his TV. He supposed the problem wasn't so much with her, as it was with himself...
Reining in his temper, fighting to rein her in, he pulled back on her leash once more. "Come on...you're going to get another tick, you moron."
But it wasn't a choice spot to stack a mound of turds that she was sniffing for. Not the territorial markings of an earlier dog she was investigating. Board finally saw the bare feet poking out from behind a particularly thick and tall clump of grass. Riding on that visual, a scent made itself known to his conscious mind at last. And a sound that had been subliminal, as if only imagined. The low humming of flies.
Board wrapped Sadie's leash around and around his hand to bring her in close. Then, trying his best to keep her beside him as he advanced, he gingerly moved nearer to those jutting naked feet. He found himself holding his breath.
The woman's legs were spread out but bent inward at the knees in a frog-like posture. Board felt she might have been posed that way. She was nude, and her skin was a light brown. Smooth, tight, youthful. There were no stab wounds peppered across her vulnerable breasts, yawning open in her elastic skin, as he might have thought. Instead, she was more or less pristine except that her head had been run over by an automobile's tire (or two). Board could see the markings of its tread a little further along, where red-streaked weeds had been crushed into a patch of dirt. The young woman's head had been flattened into something like a discarded rubber mask, its gaping expression almost comically unreal. Its contents had been squeezed out in a paste. It couldn't be her tongue alone that protruded from her wide, dismayed mouth---it looked like she'd vomited out a raw steak.
She couldn't have been killed this way; she must have been strangled first. Or beaten over the head with a chunk of cinder block; there were a few of those in the grass here and there. Then, then she had been disfigured so contemptuously. It couldn't have been an accident. Intentional, Board was sure, like her splayed legs.
Because of her skin tone, and her apparently slanted eyes (it was hard to be certain about that), Board figured her to be Asian. For a vertiginous moment, he took the woman to be his neighbor Kei, from whom he had obtained Sadie when the woman decided the dog was too wild for her home, played too rough with her small children. But Board concluded that was not the case; this woman was too young.
A drop of liquid splattered against his forehead. Board touched it, looked at his fingers, then at the sky, as if he expected to see blood dripping down from a second body in the crotch of a bone-white birch. But no, the sky had gone a darker shade of silver, and a light rain had begun to patter down.
With his eyes still turned upward, Board again took in the camera mounted at the top of the lamp post. He shifted his gaze to the right, swiveling until he spotted another camera atop a distant telephone pole.
Board returned his attention to the woman, whose head and thus identity had been obliterated. He saw no clothing, no purse in the vicinity. Debased before and then even after her death---ground into the dirt like a cigarette under a heel. Stripped down to nothing but this mass of cells. The ruined head making the smooth prettiness of the rest of her grotesque in its contrast. Like his mother's pretty dark hair, hanging down around her discolored face...her bare feet, pointed downward like a ballerina's, fine in form but black as overripe bananas.
Board felt oddly more embarrassed for this anonymous woman than mournful. He wanted to throw something over her legs, her gaping crotch, but had nothing to cover her with but his own jacket. And what good would that do, anyway, except get him wet from the rain on his walk back home?
"Stop it," he hissed to Sadie, who had been snuffling at the girl's pretty feet and even gave one sole a lick before he wrenched her away. "Let's go," he told her. "Come on, idiot, let's get back home."
He threw another look at the dead woman before he left her there. He saw flies crawling across what had once been her mind. Another fly picked its way across the wires of her pubic hair as if playing a game, trying not to fall into the crevice of her vagina. No other region of the human body---not even the brain, it seemed---had inspired so much killing as the one that gave birth.
When he got home, Board immediately called the police. He told the detective he'd been transferred to that he had stumbled upon a murdered woman on the property of the old abrasives factory.
"Right there at the corner of the warehouse parking lot?" the detective asked him.
"Yeah, yeah, that's it." Someone else had already reported it, then?
"We know about it. There's a camera right there. We just haven't had a chance to pick up the body yet."
"Well...so...did you see who did it, then? On the camera?"
"It was a legal kill, sir, don't worry about it. The man's already been checked out. We'll try to get down there tomorrow."
"But..." Board began to stammer now "...kids play down there..."
"I said we'd get to it. Kids shouldn't be playing around there, anyway...it's private property. And you shouldn't be walking your dog there, either."
"Sorry," Board mumbled, hanging up.
Later he fed Sadie her supper, and then tried to find something he could watch on TV. When he saw that the popular "reality show" Rape Island was on, he quickly changed to another channel before his bile began to rise. Even the newspapers reported on each weekly episode with the same fervor that workers gushed about it around the water cooler. As much as he tried not to hear anything about the program, even Board knew that it looked like Elizabeth would be the last woman to be raped on Rape Island, and thus would win the ten thousand dollars. The first woman who'd been raped, he'd heard people cynically joke, had been caught after only an hour on the island---proving that she'd wanted to be raped.
Turning off the TV after coasting through its several hundred channels in two full, restless loops, Board looked toward the window he had stood before when it had still been light. Out there in the dark, in the now drumming rain---just at the end of his little suburban street---that young Asian woman lay in the street lamp's glow. Only that camera watching over her. The lonely rushing vibration of a passing train might have been the moan of her spirit, struggling to free itself from the chaos of her head. Emptied, flattened, like that discarded condom. Just like a tossed condom, to the man who'd killed her; something he'd briefly put his dick inside.
Am I insane? Board wondered. Is it me?
Was he too old, too traumatized maybe from events of his boyhood, to just loosen up and sit back and watch Rape Island? To go outside tomorrow at six o'clock, after coffee and bug eggs, and shoot his neighbor in the head for playing his radio so loud when Board was still trying to rest his aging bones? He could shoot the man's entire family and still have five or six kills saved up.
Was there something wrong with him? Was he simply unable to blend in with society like the majority? He the mutant? He the misfit, the outcast, like a murderer who couldn't ask a woman for a date and thus stabbed her, who couldn't interact with his coworkers and shot them instead?
Judy had been the longest relationship of his life. She hadn't wanted to marry him; she was a divorcee who after twenty-plus years with an alcoholic harbored a dark view of marriage. A rather dark temper, too. She'd slapped him across the face on several occasions. But she'd died with eight kills accumulated, unused. Gone to waste, some would say, because she hadn't willed them to Board or anyone else.
He'd waited all his life for Judy. He was grateful he'd had her for the eight years he had.
Young men would often make a kill in front of girls they wanted to date, to impress them. So many young men had it easy...had no problem meeting women, dating, marrying, (cheating).
Yes, he was thankful for the eight years. But that didn't erase the bitterness that his girlfriend had been murdered. By tiny organisms too many, too distant from him, to count. By humans too many, too distant from him, to count. Before her death, her face had become discolored and disfigured by the virulence. He was lucky, he supposed, that he hadn't caught it from her. Hadn't died, too. Lucky, he supposed.
In war, you could kill as many people as you wished. No limits. And there was never a shortage of volunteers.
Judy had liked his mustache and goatee, silvered these days. He stroked his bristled chin now, but instead of Judy he briefly thought of Louise. He hadn't heard from her since she'd sent him a Christmas card in 1938, the same year that her last movie, Overland Stage Riders, had come out. He'd listened to her in radio plays several times, but he'd never seen her on any of the countless TV police dramas and sitcoms. Just movie late shows. Not young enough to appeal to casting directors, he supposed. He had even heard a rumor that she'd taken a sales position at Saks Fifth Avenue.
The rain increased to a pounding downpour. Biblical torrents that threatened to drown the world. Board went to the window but could barely see through the glass, which seemed made of some unstable, rippling black matter. He wanted to go out there, nonetheless, into the drowning world. To bring a blanket or a tarp with him, and cover that woman lying there alone in the night. Her smooth belly, that once a mother might have nuzzled and kissed as his own mother had kissed his, was being hammered mercilessly.
But again, as with his jacket, the urge was a pointless gesture, and he turned it away. He pulled the shade, shut off the living room light, and went to his bed. Sadie followed him, to sleep at its foot. Before climbing in, he stroked her head and said, "Good girl, good girl," to her in baby talk. He always felt badly, later, when he'd lost his temper with her. But she always forgave him. Her loyalty didn't swerve. He admired her for that. Despite her savage fangs, her simplicity, she was---to him---as fine a creature as nature could ever conceive. "Esteemed hunter," he cooed to her as he slipped under his blanket.
When Board walked Sadie down to the parking lot again in the morning, the rain had stopped and even dried up for the most part, and the sky over Coccyx was as bright as it got, and those two brothers/friends had laid their bicycles down and were throwing chunks of cinder block against the body of the dead Asian woman. A birch branch poked up out of her vagina.
"Get away from her!" Board shouted at them. "Go!"
"Calm down...jeesh," said the boy who'd complimented him on Sadie. He gave the corpse a kick in the side. "She's dead, seeee?" The other boy spluttered into laughter.
"I said leave her alone!" Board rasped, his heart beating so maniacally that he was feeling light-headed.
"Fuck you," said the other boy, and he jabbed another branch into the curdled pudding of the woman's brain.
Board was restraining Sadie with one hand---she was rising up on her hind legs, trying to get to the rank body to sniff it, or the boys to play---when he reached under his jacket and pulled out the .45 with the other. There was already a round in the chamber. He thumbed off the safety, raised the gun into the air, and fired it.
"Christ sakes!" the first boy yelped, scrambling to his bike and jumping aboard. He skidded on the dirt-filmed lot and almost lost his balance as he pedaled away.
"Fucking old homo!" the other fleeing boy yelled over his shoulder.
"Faggot!" the first boy called back.
Sadie had practically gone down on her belly at the explosion of sound, disoriented and terrified. Board didn't feel much better than she as he slid the pistol back into its holster. It was a heavy, powerful thing---the sidearm of American servicemen through all four World Wars---and his slender wrist had been jolted by the recoil.
He looked up at the camera atop the lamp post. For a moment, he had wondered if his shot into the air might have hit it by mistake. Lucky it hadn't. Lucky, he supposed.
Board approached the woman, having to drag Sadie back to her feet, soothing her impatiently, his heart still jack hammering. Now with his free hand, he took hold of the protruding birch branch and pulled it out of the woman, then tossing it into the grass. He kicked away a hunk of stone that lay across the woman's ankle.
Her long black hair, clotted with macerated brain tissue, was still wet from last night's rain, here in the gently rippling lattice of birch shadows. Flies had been joined by tiny ants. Her slack mask was swarming with thousands of them. In and out of nostrils, across the slab of meat that passed for her tongue. Like smallpox organisms---or soldiers---busy at work.
He hated to leave her this way, but what was he to do? Drag her home, store her in his house until the police could come for her? Bury her nearby in a shallow, temporary grave? He was too old to be digging graves. Too horrified to have her in his house. He didn't want to touch her at all.
After Sadie had calmed down and concluded her business, he called the local police precinct again and asked for that same officer, Detective Chisel. He told Chisel what he had seen some local kids doing to the body near the old abrasives plant.
"Look, Mr. Board, I told you...we'll get her, okay? We're busy down here, ya know? She isn't the only stiff in this city, in case you couldn't guess."
"But children are playing with her!"
"Tell their parents about it, then. It's not a crime scene; we don't have to preserve evidence. If she didn't die of smallpox then there's no threat of contagion. If it bothers you so much, Mr. Board, don't go down there. I told you---you shouldn't be on that property anyway. I could cite you for trespassing, ya know?"
"Sorry," Board snapped, and hung up the phone.
Shortly after his return from Europe in the late 20's, Board had begun to drink again. Heavily, at some points. But because of Judy's painful relationship with her alcoholic husband, for a good many years Board hadn't had more than an occasional, single glass of wine with dinner, or a handful of beers spread over the whole of a summer. But this evening, he poured himself a glass of merlot even though he hadn't yet eaten, even though he knew it would go straight to his head.
He had bought the bottle of wine at the supermarket today after seeing a man murdered there, not even ten feet from him.
Someone had told him afterwards, that one man had cut the other man off for a parking space in the lot. Apparently, the man who had been cheated of what he felt was his rightful spot had followed the other man into the market after fetching a shotgun out of his trunk. The man who'd won the parking place was standing with his son, who Board gauged to be about ten, looking over canned vegetables when the man with the shotgun appeared in the aisle.
Board didn't know about the man with the gun, though, until he heard its booming report.
Remembering the incident, though he didn't welcome the images, Board stood before a framed movie poster on the wall of his living room, seeing his ghostly reflection in its glass. The movie was William Wellman's 1931 film The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney as Tom Powers. Though his credit wasn't on the poster, Board had been the cinematographer on that film. It had taken almost a year for him to get work in Boneland after his return from Europe, but by 1931 he had been getting work with regularity.
Though Cagney's leering face tried to dominate his mind's eye, instead Board saw again the bared teeth of the man with the shotgun when the deafening blast caused him to whirl around.
Board tried to think of Mae Clarke's face as Cagney smashed a grapefruit into it. Instead, he saw the man who'd been hit with the shotgun discharge, as the man was still slithering down the shelves of canned vegetables, some of these cans tumbling to the floor, some of them trickling salty water from where they had been punctured with buckshot. It looked as though someone had dug out most of the man's face and the top of his skull with a trowel. You could put your arm in the front of his head and out the other side.
Glass in hand, Board drifted to another poster, this one for Howard Hawk's 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby, with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. The poster showed a cartoon of the stars feeding the film's three-year-old leopard, "Baby", in a high chair. Board's favorite scene had been in a museum, when Grant---a small dinosaur bone in his hand---sat before a huge, cage-like brontosaurus skeleton trying to determine where the bone should fit. With unconscious sexual suggestiveness, Grant's character said, "I think this one must belong in the tail." His character's fiancée, Alice Swallow, retorted, "Nonsense, you tried it in the tail yesterday and it didn't fit." Board hadn't been able to keep a straight face while shooting the scene.
"Fuck you," the man with the shotgun spat, then he lowered the gun, pivoted around to address the other shoppers in the aisle, and announced, "It's a legitimate kill!"
"Daddy!" shrieked the ten year old, dropping down beside the slumped, nearly headless man, whose mouth nevertheless spasmed and whose legs gave electrified kicks. "Daddy! Daddy!" the boy took one of his father's hands and pulled at it, tugged at it, as if to hoist him to his feet, as if to hoist him out of the present, back into the past. It would only take a single brief minute of time travel to restore him to life.
Board had strayed to a third framed poster. This one, from 1941, was for Hawks' Cab Driver, about a lonely and alienated WW IV vet who takes to driving a taxi at night. Though it ended with an extremely violent shootout, the film was unusually artistic rather than exploitative, and had been Board's favorite movie to work on, not to mention the Oscar nomination it had garnered for him. It was also one of his last films, before he returned---retired---to the Windy City of Coccyx, taking Judy with him. Filming the cab as it coasted shark-like through hellish mists of steam on back lot city streets had been a rewarding challenge for him. Hawks had allowed him to employ the use of eerie slow motion in some of these shots, and had been so impressed with the effect that he had encouraged Board to use it in other sequences of the film.
In the end of that film, a procurer had his brains splashed across a wall, while a child prostitute hunkered down and wailed. But those brains had been an effect, jetted from an air cannon hidden behind a sofa. That child had been acting. This child was sobbing, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy." And Board saw blood speckled all over his face, a gob of brain stuck in the boy's soaked hair.
Board had reached up a hand to his own face and felt a bead of blood trickling down his cheek.
He had stayed until the police arrived, but no one questioned him as a witness. The gunman showed a paper he had kept folded in his wallet, proving that the murder was his annual allotment. The boy was taken away, and tried to kick the man but the man stepped back and the child was restrained. The man was handed back his shotgun, but he was told he would have to pay for damages to the supermarket's merchandise. "Sure," he said.
Before Board had left the blood-sprayed aisle, he had found himself glancing up at the ceiling, turning in a little circle until he located a living camera mounted to a bracket. It was one of several suspended from the large market's ceiling. Perhaps its footage would appear on the nightly news. But maybe not; it was not so noteworthy a killing. The main thing was that the camera had witnessed the killing as it happened. Modern cameras like this one did not have to record events onto a cylinder, to be downloaded via computer so as to be accessed by the Guests. The Guests could now watch events in real time. Death had gone live.
Before leaving the aisle, Board had raised his middle finger to the unblinking creature.
Now he had poured himself a fresh glass of wine, and had inserted a small cylinder into the orifice of his television. He sat back and watched as the opening credits of the recorded film, 1929's Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks, came on. Sadie drifted over, drowsily, to plunk herself down beside his feet, and was almost instantly asleep.
He wished that, right in front of the police officers, he had pulled the .45 auto out of its holster, crossed over to the man with the shotgun, raised the pistol so that it practically touched the man's nose, and blown wide the back of his head. He would then say, "It's a legitimate kill!" And he would offer, "I'll pay for merchandise damages!" He would want to do it before the boy was taken away. Although the boy was already traumatized enough, still he would want the boy to see.
Why hadn't he done that? Why?
He had ten kills, going to waste. Ten kills, like a kid with ten dollars in a toy store. They were his. No one would question him.
He wished he had used one of them. He was vaguely surprised at how disappointed, how angry with himself, he was that he hadn't. That he hadn't killed a man for the first time in nineteen years.
Sadie's barking awakened him, and nudged a coiled headache out of its slumber as well. Board groaned. If she wasn't waking him by pouncing on the bed and chewing on his forearms, often leaving patterns of dark bruises that looked like some disease symptom, it was this: standing on the sofa, nosing aside the curtain at her favorite window (he'd had to throw away the Venetian blinds she'd ruined), and barking at some neighbor's cat that taunted her by strutting slowly past on the sidewalk. The chewing and wrestling in bed he tolerated, until it just began to hurt too much, but the barking at the window often startled him, set his nerves on edge. From his bed, he yelled, "Sadie! Get away from that window!"
When the barking didn't subside, and he heard her begin to scratch at the glass, Board instead called out, "House...turn 180 degrees."
After several moments, the house still hadn't begun to pivot in its socket. Board called out the same command, louder this time, thinking that maybe the insect he dwelt inside couldn't hear him over the dog's din. Again, the house did not respond. Grumbling a curse under his breath, Board sat up on the edge of his bed and groaned again as his hangover uncoiled fully, like a poisonous cobra, or maybe a python unhinging its jaws to slowly swallow his brain whole.
In the bathroom, he did his best to avoid his haggard reflection as he positioned himself in front of the sink and commanded, "House...run cold water." No water, cold or hot, appeared from the faucets, which were fed by pipelines threaded through the animal's flesh, behind its shell of chitin. "Damn it," Board hissed, and turned the faucet manually instead, cupping cold water into his hands and splashing it onto his face several times.
Had it happened, then, just like that? Had his house died a few years prematurely? They should lower his mortgage payment for that, he thought bitterly. Or was the house still alive but stubbornly resisting his orders? Had its mind become sick? The other day, in a newspaper, he had read that a much larger city building had reached down with one of its claws, which a second earlier had been hanging uselessly at its side, and plucked up a pedestrian from the sidewalk. It raised him aloft, screaming, and a fire truck was summoned to get the thrashing man down. Before the truck could round the corner, however, the pincers had closed tighter and crushed the man to death, his blood raining down to the street.
Not a command of the Guests, Board was sure, but a kind of malfunction. The Guests never killed anyone, themselves.
Dragging his slippered feet across the floor, Board entered the living room bellowing. "Get away from that damn window!" As he had known, the white and black Akita had taken a noble, almost bipedal stance on the sofa, her front legs braced on its backrest, her nose to the saliva-smeared pane. She was snorting out air threateningly, turning her massive head this way and that, but no longer barking. Just one half-growl rumbled in her throat.
"What?" Board demanded. "What is it, stupid?" He didn't try hauling her off the couch by her collar; despite her adoration for him, she'd snapped at his hand once when he'd done that. Instead, on the chance that she had been barking at the mail man instead, Board went to his front door to look out at the street. More than once he'd shooed one of those insolent neighborhood cats away.
He started to push his door outward, but there was resistance as if someone were leaning against it from the other side, though he saw no one's face in the small square window. Board gave it a more forceful push, and the pressure fell away. He heard a soft thump. Much more noticeable was the invasion of stench which immediately billowed through the opening crack like a cloud of poison gas.
Slumped across his front step was the murdered Asian woman, her empty sleeve of a head having smacked down against the ground, her bare legs looking boneless the way they were folded beneath her. Settling blood, and internal rot as her guts began to liquefy, had discolored the nude body that had formerly rendered a disturbingly sensual contrast to the rubbery smear of the head.
Like Sadie, now sniffing furiously at the door he held mostly closed behind him, Board jerked his head this way and that, but his quiet back street was empty even of traffic. Still, he could imagine two boys of about twelve crouching behind a hedge nearby, stifling their sniggers.
"Oh yeah, that's very funny!" Board shouted at the street. "That's very funny!"
For a moment, he considered rolling the corpse into a bed sheet and dragging her into his house until he could summon the police. He decided to just leave her there, however. Who cared what the neighbors thought? The boys who had done this belonged to one of his neighbors. He had nothing to be ashamed of; he hadn't killed this woman...
"Haven't you called us about this body before?" Detective Chisel asked wearily on the other end of the line.
"Yes, exactly, I have. And if the body had been collected before, then it wouldn't be on my front step now! I can't leave my house without tripping over this thing! I...I need to take my dog out, and..."
"All right, hey, calm yourself down, sir...we'll send someone right over..."
"And I want something done about these kids. These monsters..."
A sigh. "Do you know their names, sir? Where they live?"
"No. Not exactly. But it has to be on this block, somewhere..."
"Okay, look---the next time you see them around your house, call us and we'll talk to them."
"They're always on bikes; it's not like they stay in one place, you know?"
"Then what do you suggest we do to find out about them, sir? Listen...if you see them outside, take a picture of them, and then we can look at the photo and we'll know who we're looking for..."
After a couple of seconds, Board mumbled, "I don't own a camera anymore."
When he heard Sadie barking and clawing at the living room window, his first thought---because he was still groggy from dozing off in front of his TV (he had been watching a recording of Cab Driver)---was that the police had finally come to take away the body lying at his doorstep. But then he remembered that they had already come. His next thought, even more irrational, was that the boys had stolen back the body again somehow, to leave it at his door a second time. Or was it another body entirely (third irrational thought)? As Board got up to shush the dog, he finally settled on the idea that it must be a cat she was looking out at, this time.
Then over Sadie's barking, he heard the screaming at last.
It was the voice of a child, in terror or pain. Board tried to nudge his dog aside but she was rigid in her stance, so he pressed in beside her instead. He saw no one out there in his short, desolate street---not even a passing car, as usual---but then he heard the voices.
"Get out of here!" a man bellowed.
"Go on, throw it, you old fart!" roared a familiar voice, though Board didn't know which of the two bike-riding neighborhood boys it issued from. It was amazing, frightening, how the boy could make his voice rasp like that to increase its fury and to compensate for its youth.
"Come here and I'll blow your head off!" shouted the adult voice in response, trying to summon the same level of bravado, but sounding just a touch shaken.
Board left the window, moving toward his door. Sadie jerked her head in his direction and realized what he was doing too late; by the time she leapt from the sofa he was already out in front of his house without her, slamming the door behind him.
One boy flashed by on his bike then, from left to right. The other whizzed past a moment later. They were both so fast that their faces were a blur to him, so fast that they didn't see him, either. They had to have already noted earlier that the corpse had been removed, or they certainly would have glanced over at his dead house now.
Board looked off to his left and saw a disheveled man with a silvery beard standing on the corner of the street from which the bikes had emerged. The bearded man was glaring after them, clearly the adult with whom the kids had been arguing. Board could only assume the rest. That the child he'd heard screaming was this man's child. That he had stopped the two boys on the bikes from hurting his child---or worse. That the man had threatened to throw a rock from his garden or some other heavy object after the boys. He had either done so already (Board saw nothing in his hands) or had dropped the object, his threat an empty one.
Board turned his attention back in the direction the boys had gone off in, then. And he made an impulsive choice. One option had been going over to the bearded man and asking him what had happened; if he thought that maybe they could join forces, go to the police together about these two kids. The other option was to follow after the boys immediately, to see if he could find out where they lived. And though Board was on foot, and had little realistic chance of tracking them down, that was the option he went with. His feet were already moving briskly beneath him by the time he realized he'd made the decision. He didn't take his dog to lead him as she might well lead him astray). He didn't take his car; it might save him time, ultimately, but his only thought at the moment was that going back inside to retrieve his keys and coming out again to start his vehicle would cause him to lose the scent. And also, he didn't bring the gun he always wore for protection when he ventured out into the open. There just wasn't time...
Board's shoes smacked the sidewalk decisively. He walked smartly past lawns shorter and greener than his own, Technicolor flowers planted in front of insect houses that were painted aqua and pink and robin's egg blue. At the corner where the boys had vanished, where a white-painted picket fence half-drowned in vines or ivy formed a right angle, he turned. He walked through the restless blue shadows of oak trees. He heard a church bell ringing the hour, but though he wasn't listening to it closely he could swear it rang too many times.
As he walked, he had begun to fear the obvious: that the boys had outdistanced him long ago. That they would fly and fly, down this street and that, without returning to their house until supper time, hours from now. But in fact, he didn't end up walking far. He was only just beginning to feel the sweat running down his sides, trickling in the small of his back, and only just beginning to experience shortness of breath when he saw the two bikes lying on their sides on one of the plastic-green lawns.
Board strode up its brick path, bordered by flowers. A porch had been affixed to the front of this insect (obviously one which didn't rotate in its foundation, not that his did anymore). Board mounted the front steps, entered the shade of the porch. His footsteps clumping across it sounded hollow, disturbing, as if it were a high wooden scaffold. There was a black circle tattooed next to the front door, and when he prodded it with his finger, the huge insect made a buzzing noise inside its body that Board could even hear out here.
After a few moments, a man approached. Board could see him through a screen door that made him look staticky like a poor TV image. The man pushed it open on squealing hinges and looked out at him. "Yeah?"
"Do you have two sons?" Board panted. His heart was chugging from the sheer exhaustion of the walk. Not fear. His voice had been firm, like a policeman's.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Your kids...those boys..." What? Had just beaten or even tried to murder another child? He hadn't witnessed it. But he knew what they'd done to him. The Asian woman. "Your boys found a corpse over in the abrasive factory's parking lot..."
"Yeah, I know...they told me they saw one."
"Well, they not only saw it...they were playing with it. Doing...bad things to it. And when I told them to stop, they left it on my..."
"That was you?" the man cut in, taking a step across his threshold. "You're that crazy old man who shot a gun at them?"
"I didn't shoot it at them...I just shot it in the air to get their..."
The man moved forward again, but this time followed through with his momentum, had a hold of Board's polo shirt, still kept moving forward, driving Board backwards across the wooden porch, back to its front steps.
"You ever shoot at my kids again I'll fucking kill you, you hear me you old fart? I'll fucking blow your head off!" So saying, the father of the bike-riding boys let go of Board with a final thrust forward. Board half-flailed in empty space for a split-second, a comic pratfall from some movie, and then was falling backwards, down the porch's steps. When he landed, it was sprawled on his back, almost upside-down on the stairs, his head on the sidewalk and his feet propped above him. "Get out of here!" the man bellowed down at him, and then he stomped back to the screen door and slammed it behind him. Board heard more roaring inside, raspy and furious, though whether the man was berating his sons or complaining to the police on the phone Board didn't know.
He was in too much pain for clear thought. His back had struck against the edges of the steps, and though he had reflexively tried to draw his head forward, he had still managed to crack the back of his skull against the pavement.
First he rolled his legs to the left, off the steps. Then he rolled onto his side, curled in a partial fetal position. The movement caused him to suck in his breath sharply. It felt as though a railroad spike had been driven between his shoulder blades. His lower right back, just above his hip, felt bruised to the bone. His right elbow was wet; bleeding, he realized. Rolling onto his knees, now, made him feel like his whole spinal column was being pulled through his mouth along with the sound of his groan. But he rose to his feet, staggering back a step. Straightened. And turned his head toward the cloudy metal web of the screened door.
It still sounded as though a monster were raging inside. Had the boys' two voices joined in? It was a hellish, horrifying sound. A cacophony from Cerberus' three heads...
For almost a minute, Board stood at the foot of the steps, clutching his gouged elbow in his hand, paralyzed with anger too great to articulate or even act upon. But there was also a fear he had to admit to. It made the anger worse.
When he was finally able to move again, it was away from the house with the porch. Back the way he had come. Still poisoned with his anger, like that man with the beard...but like him, he had let go of his rock.
Board had gone so far as to dial the first two digits of the number for the police before he replaced the receiver back in its cradle.
Maybe the father of the bike-riding boys had called the police, himself. If he had, they still hadn't come to speak to Board by the time night had fully descended.
He poured himself a glass of merlot, and set it beside his Colt automatic on a little table beside his chair, in which he settled to watch a recording of The Street of Forgotten Men. His first picture. He waited for the appearance of the unnamed "moll", played by Louise Brooks. He almost dreaded seeing her appear, however. Dreaded seeing her so buoyantly young.
Sadie lay at his feet. On top of one of his feet, actually. Board looked down at her and said, "Matagiinu..."
He ached. When he wanted to turn his head, he had to turn his whole upper body with it, stiff as Frankenstein's monster. He had tried to lie down in his bed but it had been too uncomfortable. He was too tense to stretch out prone in his bed, anyway. He would sleep in his chair. He had bandaged his elbow after dabbing out the grit ground into its lacerated flesh. He had taken four aspirin. He had his wine bottle ready to refill his glass.
Sadie lifted her head from her paws abruptly.
Board looked down at her. The perked ears. The intense eyes focused on sound rather than sight. "What?" he began to say.
She sprang to her feet, darted for the sofa...bounded up onto it, nosing the curtain to one side.
Board didn't scold her this time. His hand went to the table beside him, knocking over the glass of wine as his fingers closed around the checkered handle of the .45...
Sadie let out one bark before the window exploded.
Board spun out of his chair to the white chitin floor on hands and knees. Blood speckles sprayed across the floor in front of him, one drop glittering on his finger like a ruby ring.
He had seen the white dog fly backwards, twisting in air, as if she had been filmed pouncing onto the couch and the film had just been run in reverse.
From behind the dubious shelter of his armchair, Board poked up his head and aimed the gun at the window. The curtain had slipped back into place across the spider-webbed glass. He expected another shotgun blast. He expected himself to fire at the window, through the curtain, to keep his attacker at bay. No more shots were fired. His attacker had either fled, or was circling the house for a way in. As for himself, he had been afraid to strike the house directly across the street where an elderly widow lived.
He saw Sadie's four legs kicking horribly as though she were running, running, her nails skittering against the chitin; then the legs jolted as if she were leaping again---but she didn't seem to land. By the time Board had scrambled over to her on all fours, she was merely giving electrified twitches, as he had seen her do in her sleep. Dog dreams of chasing cats, or maybe for the Akita, ancestral dreams of hunting deer and bear alongside Japanese royalty.
He put his hand on her side. She was panting. Whining, as she had done on occasion when a cat was outside. Her eyes opened at his touch and rolled slowly to look up at him. He felt wetness under his hand as he ran it down the dog's flank. She was only one year old, he thought. She was a 75 pound puppy.
"I'm sorry, honey," he whispered to her. "You're a good girl, protecting daddy. You're such a good girl." He watched her eyes close dreamily, a child soothed to sleep, and he said in a croak, "Esteemed hunter."
He crouched beside her, stroking her, trying not to smear her blood across her beautiful coat, for uncounted minutes. If his attacker were testing windows, the back door, he didn't care.
His attacker had seen his curtain nudged aside. He was certain that whoever had fired into his house had thought they were shooting at him.
After a long time, he rose, ignoring the pains grating in the bones of his back, his vertebrae gnashing like teeth. He stood over her, gazing down. Then he looked over at the door. With blood smudged across his left palm and the military sidearm in his right fist, he went to open it.
The night was comfortably cool. No humidity. Yes, a good night for a walk. The heavy pistol dragged him onward like a white ghost dog straining at its leash.
He walked past lawns glowing a dark indigo blue in the night. Past flowers whitely luminous against the darkness, fungoid and phosphorescent. His footsteps were boldly loud against the sidewalk, and he found himself glancing up at the cameras spaced atop telephone poles and street lamps. He wanted to lift his arm and shoot each one of them as he passed below it. He counted three along his way, like his old movie cameras he'd simply dubbed 1,2,3...
He took the corner at the white wooden fence. He walked until ahead of him he saw metallic glimmers against another ominous lawn; cold stars in black space. The vaguely insectoid bodies of drowsing bicycles. Board strode past them, up the brick walk, up the front steps of the porch. The screen door opened outward but the knob of the inner door wouldn't turn, of course, so he stabbed that tattooed black circle with the muzzle of his gun. The living house buzzed loudly inside. Board buzzed again. He kept the gun jammed against the circle so the buzzing wouldn't stop.
"What the fuck?" he heard a furious voice rasp, and then the inner door opened and standing before him was the man who'd hurled him down the steps, wearing baggy striped pajamas. He looked down at the pistol pointed at his belly. When the pistol thundered, he made a comical sound like "oof" and his body half folded at the waist but he held onto the door frame. It was impressive that he remained on his feet; the .45 was a fat, heavy cartridge. Board raised his arm and saw the man's confused eyes track its progress until the gun and the man were eye to eye and then a second .45 bullet hammered the man in the face and this time he was blown back out of the threshold.
When the man dropped, beyond him Board saw that a second figure had appeared at the end of the hallway. It was a boy of about twelve, but instead of pajamas he wore jeans and a striped t-shirt. His sneakers were slicked green and sparkled with night dew. He hefted a big shotgun that no doubt belonged to his father, that undoubtedly had a lot of kick for his skinny frame. He pointed the gun at Board. Board's arm was still loosely extended from having killed the boy's father. He lifted it a little higher and pulled the trigger again. The boy was struck squarely in the front of his neck. The impact lifted him off his feet as if he'd been hauled violently upward by a rope.
Board heard a woman screaming somewhere within the house, and another child's voice, yelling at the woman to call the police. Board hated the loud, adult power in that young voice.
He stepped into the house, and moved toward it.
Epilogue: I Am a Camera
Coccyx, Illinois, 1957
She had come to him before in dreams. Now, she was more vivid, more beautiful, than she had ever been before.
He assumed the huge butterfly was a she. The first time she had appeared to him, there had seemed nothing anthropomorphic about the giant insect, but she had been softly out of focus then. On one occasion, when he had thought he could make out a naked female figure between the vast, slowly beating wings, it had been his impression that the angel wore her hair in a short, Dutch Bob. But this time, above her foggy glowing body, her hair appeared very long and dark, like that of the Asian woman whose nude body he had found by an abandoned parking lot twelve years ago. Her hair had been spread on the ground then, but it swam against a void of blackness now.
As on her previous visits, the insect angel whispered to him in a soft buzzing hum. Whispered directly into his mind, like a spirit communicating through a medium.
Colors swirled, churned, reconfigured their patterns on the wings that made her hover before his inner eye. Each scale in her wings was like a pixel, and the pixels coalesced into pictures that would dissolve and reform. Many of these pictures were dark and dreadful. Others, scintillating with color, and lovely, and calming. He tried to focus more intently upon her wings, and found that he could control what he saw in them. They weren't changing; it was his own perception that made the images shift.
The insect angel was growing larger, floating closer, her wings starting to fill his vision utterly. Then, just one of her wings eclipsed all else.
He wasn't afraid of the hybrid creature. He welcomed her. He held out his arms to her. He became part of her picture.
\*
From The Coccyx Sun Times:
JOHN BOARD, 74; was Academy Award nominated cinematographer
COCCYX.---John Orrin Board, 74, of 15 Meniscus Street, was found dead in his home July 19, in what police have declared a suicide. Mr. Board was discovered in his bed with a cloth tied around his throat, tightened with a section of broom handle slipped through it. A neighbor, Allan Faucet, told police that Mr. Board had been suffering severe back pains for many years, and this is suggested as a reason for the suicide.
Mr. Board was never married and leaves no children.
Between the 20's and 40's, Mr. Board was a cinematographer in Los Huesos, California, working on such films as The Public Enemy with James Cagney, Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant, and Cab Driver, for which he earned an Oscar nomination in 1941. Mr. Board retired to Coccyx, where he was born, in the early 40's.
Mr. Board was reclusive, and only Mr. Faucet, who saw his body through a window after having had no contact with the deceased for several days, had any acquaintance with him. In 1945, Mr. Board shot and killed another neighboring family, Mr. and Mrs. Warren Knob and their two children, and although these were legal kills, his other neighbors shunned Mr. Board, according to Mr. Faucet.
Funeral services will be held 11:00 AM, Tuesday, July 23rd, at the Sieve Brothers Funeral Home, 288 Humerus Avenue, Coccyx. Burial will be in Bone Orchard Cemetery. There are no calling hours.
USA, 1982
From American Cinematographer Magazine, the article I Am A Camera: The Life and Work of John Board by Wayne Dowel:
In his waning years, Board was befriended (one assumes reluctantly on Board's part) by a gregarious if sensitive neighbor, one Allan Faucet. Board would screen recordings of some of his films for the much younger Faucet, and share anecdotes on the making of classics such as The Public Enemy (camera hit with grapefruit juice) and Cab Driver (camera hit with artificial blood).
One would be tempted to say that an aging, addled Board may have been emulating the title character in the latter film (his personal favorite, according to Faucet) when in 1945---annual legal killings still being in effect---Board shot to death his neighbor Warren Knob and Knob's wife and children, apparently as a result of an escalating feud that resulted in Board sustaining injuries that would plague him for his remaining years. Faucet speculated that Board may have later felt remorse over the killings, though when he suggested this to Board on one occasion, Board told him, "The guilt I feel is that I don't feel guilty." Whatever the case, he seemed to dwell on the murders morbidly, his feelings at not being punished for them perhaps feeding some strange ideas he expressed to Faucet regarding the Guests. According to Faucet, Board claimed that he had been experiencing visions or epiphanies in his dreams, from which he concluded that there never had been any Guests---that is to say, that the Guests were not an alien race in another plane. Board's own theory was that the Guests were a future version of ourselves, our own collective unconscious from a time yet to come, influencing the past so that we would evolve and progress in the direction that was preordained or destined for us.
Whether Board harbored such paranoid suspicions in his working years remains unknown, though it is easy to believe he may have, when one watches Travis Bickle's eyes reflected in his rearview mirror, his cab slithering through the dark and haunted labyrinth of city streets. In movies like Bringing Up Baby, Board was the clear-headed professional, connecting slot A into slot B. In films like Cab Driver, with its murky colors and blood-splashed walls, and The Elephant Man, with its glowing and glistening, radiant black and white, John Board was free to paint from a palette, to capture on the canvas of screen the anxieties, fears, anger and alienation of modern man and man eternal.
\*
From Lulu in Boneland by Louise Brooks, 1982, Lacuna Press:
Bogey wasn't the only friend I lost in 1957, though by the time I learned of this other friend's demise it was too late for me to attend his funeral, and too late for me to tell him how important he had been to me in my youth, and always.
John Board was the cinematographer on two of my early films, The Street of Forgotten Men, replacing Hal Rosson when Hal became too sick during the filming to continue, and The American Venus shortly thereafter, in 1926, when I was a worldly two decades old. J. B., as I called him, immediately appealed to me and we hit it off right away. Before you knew it, we were romantically involved. I have to admit, I had to give the guy a push; there was a sweet shyness about him. I was charmed by his awkwardness with me, because he seemed both guilty for being with a woman less than half his age, and breathless with how lucky he felt.
John had a background as a crime photographer for the Metacarpus, Pennsylvania police force, and I think this solemn experience lent a melancholy beauty to his later movies like The Elephant Man and Cab Driver. Without use of a viewfinder, as with inorganic cameras, John Board had to imagine what his camera was seeing. Through trial and error, he knew how and where to position his living cameras, but besides that, he seemed able to get inside the hybrids' heads. I think this empathy he felt translated to the screen, and made the audience empathize as well.
Our work took us in different directions, and new romances did as well; later in 1926 I married director Eddie Sutherland. We managed a scanty correspondence but I gravely regret having fully lost contact with J. B. by the late 30's. When I read about his death, one article mentioned my relationship with him and pointed out that recordings of some of my movies were found in his home, and that he also owned a copy of Image 5, containing the first published article I wrote, Mr. Pabst, which appeared the year before J. B.'s death. I was moved that he had still been thinking of me, and became all the guiltier for not having contacted him for so long.
Reading about the manner in which J. B. died crushed me. Like some ghastly photograph, even now I can't expunge the image he conjures to my mind. I can't say I understand that J. B. would commit suicide, particularly in such a horrible manner (though he owned a gun, he strangled himself to death with a scrap of bed sheet wound around his neck and secured around a post in his headboard, this cruel garotte made tight by inserting and twisting a lever he fashioned from a mop handle). But I can't say I don't understand it, either.
We were unlikely lovers. I was seen, in my screen years, as the unrepentant hedonist. J. B. was serious, intense, and troubled. Maybe we sought to balance each other out in some way that just wasn't possible.
Though I'm certain that J. B. did find gratification in his film work---and not to belittle the field that gave me my own employment---sometimes I think that he missed his true calling. I can visualize J. B. as an explorer of humanity like Diane Arbus, a wartime photojournalist like Carl Mydans. But then, I think this would have also brought J. B. too much pain. Sometimes I believe he was trying to escape into work that was more frivolous. Other times I think he was just trying to pay the bills any way he could, and that dictated his choices more than anything else. But whether he chose to be or not, John Board was a professional witness. A chronicler of our culture, and our crimes.
The most ironic thing about J. B. was that I knew he hated the Guests, though he wasn't one to say it flat out like that. While I'm sure that, had the Guests never involved themselves in our world, J. B. would still have been a successful cameraman, there's no doubt that the Guests provided his livelihood, were his bread and butter. It was a symbiotic relationship, like a shark with a remora, though which would be the shark and which the remora is a matter of perspective.
J. B. did not live to see the mysterious decline of the Guests in the mid-to-late 60's, the unexplained wisping away of their influence, until not even the Mediums could "hear" them anymore...until the Mediums carried only mute, decomposing animals inside their heads. He didn't see the hybrid buildings stop responding to commands, and their subsequent break down and rot. He didn't see the huge insects we'd raised for food turn and eat their butchers. Didn't witness the telephone lines stop conveying signals...televisions stop broadcasting, opening their wings in crazed attempts to fly away, to liberate themselves from their enslavement, instead. For hadn't the insects been the slaves, where we had not? We had never rebelled against the Guests. We had welcomed them.
J. B. didn't see us scrambling to adapt and translate these technologies into mechanics, electronics. He wasn't here to observe, with the piercing lens of his gaze, when we were abandoned to our own devices...as if God had slipped into a coma and then death when we weren't paying attention. But I'm sure J. B. would have been pleased, even in those dark years when we had to regain the steps we had lost.
And yet, whether he would be proud of where we are at this moment, I can't truly guess. Because things are really not any different, and I'm sure he'd be the first to note that. Of course, there is no longer a ration of legal killings. There are no longer cameras watching us from corners, rooftops, telephone poles. But murders go on. Wars break out.
Cameras still record them.
The Guests are gone. The Hosts remain.
About The Author
Jeffrey Thomas is the creator of the popular Punktown universe, in which he has set the novels Blue War, Deadstock, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Monstrocity, and the short story collections Punktown, Punktown: Shades Of Grey (with Scott Thomas) and Voices From Punktown. His Hades series includes the novel Letters From Hades, the sequel The Fall Of Hades, and the collection Voices From Hades. His Delirium Books titles have included Terror Incognita, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Aaaiiieee!!!, Thirteen Specimens and Ugly Heaven, Beautiful Hell (with Carlton Mellick III). Other notable books from Thomas are the novel Boneland, the original A Nightmare Of Elm Street novel The Dream Dealers, and the Cthulhu Mythos collection Unholy Dimensions. Thomas lives in Massachusetts with his gorgeous wife Hong, adorable daughter Jade, and handsome son Colin.
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Part Three: A Social Celebrity

