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bringing hell

C. G. BANKS

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Bringing Hell

Published by C. G. Banks at Smashwords

Copyright © 2015 by C. G. Banks

All rights reserved. This includes the right to reproduce any portion of this book in any form.

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One

To Bring Hell

I know what you're thinking. Another lonely old Jew come in the hope of still belonging. And maybe you're right. I've been alone now for the better part of twelve years, dear Gerda gone with the cancer, and I have been adrift. But don't think the irony is lost on me. I am finally come to the end, as if I half-expected after escaping the Fire, we would have somehow made ourselves immune to death, but oh well.

There is another part of the mystery for me, too, the more incredible coincidence that two classmates sent to different camps: her to Madjanek and me to Sachsenhausen should have both lived, and then found each other. And then, unbelievingly, gone on to continue fruitful lives, or at least as fruitful as one can believe after the things we lived. But Gerda always had that little spark. Just enough to wrap ourselves tight around the other as desperately as two victims of a shipwreck loose on the sea. And I can see it in your eyes; you look at me and see only another old man, you feel only pity. You, a scholar, a Jewish scholar at that. That's why I've come. I understand you've attempted to dig through the shit of the Holocaust for knowledge, for some vestige of understanding. I can see it in your eyes just as well as the pity. It is a great, blossoming certainty in every line of your face.

But you look like a good man, despite your profession, and with every step I feel less and less of my life around me. As if I'm walking an infinite stretch of emptiness, vague shadowed tombs on either side. And the path between skinnier and skinnier, coming to a vanishing point somewhere close in the distance. But, of course, that has nothing to do with you. You wish simply to dismiss yourself, but the professor's urge is too strong to simply turn away from some poor old man with the telltale number still tattooed on his forearm. Don't fear. I won't be long, and I think this thing I have to say, this thing which I'll show you, will make you...see.

Please, step just over to the doorway, out of the general press of people. I'll breathe better, my thoughts become clearer. Because the claustrophobia is still pervasive, you see. I've never been able to escape the stink of the barracks, the ice-shard cold, all those shriveled, bug-ridden bodies constantly pressing in from all sides throughout the interminable nights. I still hear the groans, the cries, just like you intimated in the lecture. You are right, you have learned many things that go deeper than the simple truth.

But you haven't seen.

I know, I know. Grant me a moment. Please, just a moment. Remember I spoke of Gerda, of her little spark. Well, sir, I possess the Fire. Perhaps only we who have been through It can truly take possession of It, but nonetheless, it's true. Your hand, please, give me your hand. You said you seek the truth. You say it and I believe you. Maybe it's because I have reached the curtain of my life, and have this last thing of worth.

Please, take my hand, only for a moment.

*

Underneath the glare of the arc-lights we stand in razor sharp lines of ragged hopelessness. –3 degrees Celsius and daylight still more than an hour away. A rolling Polish storm front promising little relief, if any. Many of us are shoeless, bloodied feet frozen to the cobbled Appelplatz arena. Smoke from the ovens even now beginning to mix with the steel-gray sky as the SS snipers finger the triggers of their Mausers.

Adolf Hitler is due within the hour and this demon is known for punctuality, regardless of his bizarre schedule.

*

Tension hums in the officers' faces, inexorably turning over to violence in a place that breeds it like pestilence. One young gaunt gypsy boy is beaten and drowned in a filthy 6 centimeter latrine hole for being too slow to rise, even though his feet were a welter of ulcers. Another shaved and spiritless woman gang-raped by a contingent of SS guards. A staffer locks himself in his office, fiddling idly with the front of his trousers as he regards the skeleton mounted to the back wall beside the bookshelf. Crooked Charlie had been a Polish prisoner until his death several months back. Now he stares back hollowly from the holes of his skull, his spine a sinuous S against the wall. He had died from a combination of typhus and malnutrition a few months before and in death the Jew had achieved a notoriety he'd never possessed in life due to two circumstances he could have neither seen nor prevented. One, having contracted spinal meningitis in his youth, and two, having been unfortunate enough to be plucked from his garden near Warsaw two summers before. Reduced now to another hideous emblem of his tormentor's sadism.

*

Back outside, underneath the soul-white arc lights, we bear the brunt of the January wickedness and the SS commandant's harangue. Most of us have not eaten a substantial meal for over a year, some two. We drink fetid water, eat thin, meatless gruel sometimes spiked with piss, and just outside the main gates, across a neat gravel lot, we can just see, through the fence, the headquarters, a small drab appointment sitting amid the ruin of death.

*

Corporeal Josef Krause sits before the embers of his fire in the black pot-bellied stove, thumbing his copy of Mein Kampf to give the illusion of use, at the same time incessantly probing a sore molar with his tongue. His mind is on Maria, the adolescent daughter of one of the Jew scum. He'd not yet had the opportunity he so wanted, but patience, he feels sure, will finally see him out. He glances through the window at the drab, sheet metal sky, catching his own drab reflection on the cold pane of glass. Never again would he sweep another floor, swab another toilet. At night his dreams are of fire.

*

Another SS, Gerard Schmit, scrapes the crumbs of his breakfast into a garbage pail at the corner of his desk. Noticing a scuff mark on the toe of his boot, he bends to rub it away with his thumb. Attention to detail, cleanliness even among the filth, these are the rules of expectation. The officers are to be immaculate, worthy of the ever-growing Reich. It will not be long until the world melts before its sheer force. His stomach cramps and he suddenly stands, grabbing a paper from his desktop as he makes his way to the toilet, whistling Wagner down the short hallway.

*

Thirteen kilometers away, the French chauffeur, Erich Kempka, turns off the Autobahn and makes his way toward Oranienburg, Germany. A long line of equally black sedans snake behind the Duesenburg as it glides smoothly along the snow-lined streets. Hitler sits in back, alone, the window slightly cracked to give him a touch of the biting cold outside, a nostalgic touch. His mouth is drawn into a thin line below the dab of moustache, the face a dry knob of hate as he considers the progress of his work. The schedule, though slow, is acceptable.

The Austrian has had many hours in which to reflect. Sometimes the memories drive him to the anxious years at home with his botched artistic endeavors, his entry into politics, the first tumultuous rising of the Beer Hall Putsch, or even the humiliating low of his prison solitude with that beast Hess. It all comes back easily enough, but no effort, it seems, had been expended fruitlessly. He looks down at the thin pristine hands and visibly shivers in delight.

As each day passes the memories call their siren song: those lost kaleidoscopic landscapes and toxic environs, the many soft-bodied intelligences left to burn on incinerated planets, deluges of heavy metals and cold washes of nitrogen, the rending of bodies and slashing destruction of personalities. Cold red skies, lakes of lava and pits of radioactive waste. Glacial, creeping techtonic plates set loose from their moorings, angry primordial seas coughing up the detritus of vanquished civilizations, vast conflagrations and rains of a thousand years. Storms of blistering cyanide. All these things in the past, in the ache of the poisoned nights.

It only remains to finish.

The gates creep into view in the milky twilight, the gray dawn slipping into every niche of the buildings alongside the roadway. On the other side of the hamlet the Duesenburg idles alongside a stretch of brick containment wall and concertina wire while the sentries confirm the identity of its occupant. Hitler sits quietly, savoring the luxury of dominance. Other times it has not come so openly; sometimes it had not come at all. But the result has rarely been any different than what he could see now. Not in the end.

The guard, satisfied, mashes his jack-booted heels together and salutes. "Heil Hitler!" he bellows, the words punching out in a frigid burst of air. The Fuhrer can already imagine this one's skin aflame, peeling away from the bone in an orgy of chemical reaction. He enjoys the quick erection such images supply and lingers a moment on the face before ordering the giant, black auto down the icy drive.

The sleet has given way to snow by the time the Duesenburg pulls to a stop in the lot outside the Sachsenhausen entrance. Even in the thin light Hitler can easily read the motto scrawled across the camp's irongate: "Arbeit macht frei." Again, the humorless smile as he considers this exquisite irony. No one would be free when this was over. No one. But if the natives feel they should live and die by such edicts, well then, he will supply the architecture.

The French pawn kills the Duesenburg, thrusts open his door to the chill and turns to open the Fuhrer's. Hitler steps out into the savage morning, careful to pull the lapel of his uniform trench close about his diminutive body even though he could have walked the lines for hours unfazed. But a show was a show and he'd perfected every nuance. He'd already instructed the rest of his party to stay put in the cars that even then stretched down the long drive to the check-point at the first gate. From where he stands he can see two guard towers, the occupants pacing about like impatient monkey's aware of the keeper's return.

He wills animation to his features and his face flushes red. Already one officer is stepping from the ranks, his right arm extended in the Nazi salute. "Heil Hitler!" the beast coughs. "Guten Morgen, Her Fuhrer!"

"Ja," Hitler replies, half-heartedly returning the salute. He'd grown weary of these formalities but kept to the letter. For these meticulous Germans, it was the easiest way.

Krause descends on him then, the bitter smell of his perversity radiating off like a hot mug of coffee set on the hood of a running auto. Hitler acknowledges the pedophile with a curt nod, already halfway through his inventory of the other murderers standing before him. He scans the line, reading the faces and minds as the idiot blusters on. Young men, middle-aged, even a few older ones already going to seed, all stock still and attentive. As if a formidable but understanding teacher has just returned to the classroom, each pupil longing for his attention, his instruction.

The dictator's effeminate hands squeeze into tiny fists. His eyes sparkle blackly, constantly in motion as the goon babbles on—there, the youngest one, his skin so thin it is almost transparent, sending his parents in Koln half his monthly pay, stocking their dinner table in the blood of the dead; this major, Schmit, long distanced in his uniform and shiny boots from the hovels of Munchen, already dreaming of alcohol; an Austrian mug itching for any kill, ready to sacrifice his mother or father if Hitler even so much as suggests it.

At once, a thing clicks and Hitler silences the inane soliloquy with a piercing glance. "Genug!" he hisses. Krause swallows hard, trying to maintain composure in front of the line. After all, the Fuhrer will be gone soon and he wants no derogatory comments bandied around behind his back. "Zeigen Sie mir die Gefangenen," Hitler tells the pig, unmindful of his pathetic soap opera. He has other fires to stoke.

"Ja, ja!" Krause says excitedly, turning from the Fuhrer.

Ten minutes later they stand in the thick obliterating snow, the only emotion on Hitler's face one of immense satisfaction as the soon-to-be-dead fight to bear up. If only they could all be done at once, he thinks. In his mind's eye he sees great pyres smoking to the clouds above, all these bodies piled high atop the flames by his henchmen with their trucks and bulldozers, even crammed into the border reaches of the fires with the Duesenburg if that is what it takes. He reads defiance in some eyes, mere stupefaction and defeat in others. In the end it will not matter. He allows no heroes. Anywhere.

*

After the brief viewing of the newly-built infirmary (the essence of the rape still hanging ripe in the air) Hitler excuses himself from the dazzled officer corps on the excuse of the weather and a cup of coffee. In reality it is neither.

Inside the commandant's quarters he mills around, commenting briefly on news from France, the continued siege of London, the damnable Russians in the East. Krause all the while fluttering about him like an irksome fly in need of swatting, the others nothing but shuffle-stepped ghosts. He excuses himself to the toilet, locks the door and listens intently to make sure no one is waiting in the hallway on his return. These moments of privacy are becoming less and less frequent and that is a problem. He unbuttons the coat, shakes it free of his shoulders and hangs it from the nail on the wall. Such savage appointments, he thinks acidly. Such primitives. Of course he has no need for any toilet, untold millennia have brought him far past such foul necessity.

He smiles into the small, cracked mirror hanging lopsided over the stained sink, thinks, someone will pay for that. And for one brief instant the alien shines clear in its reflective depths, a thing of little original substance, just winking tendrils of helium, argon, radon, other inert gasses bound up in a bald, unquenchable prism of hate. It originated in the cold, gravity-starved spaces beyond the known constellations, a place of sentient gasses having no predilection for physical form, but possessing mechanisms with which to achieve such mutations. If and when such time arose.

A time like now.

The dreams remind it of past triumphs, its rich history of plunder. The spoils of a million hospitable planets, these great heaving, living masses of organic matter which it occasionally happens upon in its path through the empty immensities of space. As its species has done for eons.

Its face splits wide for a moment (the air alive with the crackling and humming of electricity), and then gradually coalesces again into the slight Austrian's form. The smile remains though, human. Earthly. It nods. Though many have no thought or term for the purpose it steadfastly pursues, at times a race of Sentients will. Like this world with its laughable philosophy.

It wishes the hounds were here, those beautiful, unmerciful shepherds slavering over themselves to abide its every wish. From love. Nothing else. What a righteous tool. It will miss the creatures when their pitiful lives are done, but it will long remember their minds, those fine instruments of absolute willingness that the brute officers waiting outside can only touch. The hounds do its biding without qualm, without question. Without question. It is not a common characteristic among the many worlds, but it does help to define a simple facet of the strange religion it finds here, without all the trappings of dogma.

Simple, complete subservience. The alien likes that, will remember it in the vast ages to come.

And now, standing before the mirror, it reflects on what it has come to know, this enigma of control. How this thing called religion can be manipulated and plied, opened at the seams to serve whatever private purpose is deemed necessary. It is most assuredly uncommon, never before has this Form experienced nor even now fully come to understand such implications. But the alien is a quick study. It already knows these religions had many prophets, firebrands, messiahs and devils, an overwhelming pantheon each replete with its own heaven and hell. Of the former it knows nothing, but of the latter it is well-versed: the pit, the flames, the desolate damnation.

It turns on the water and shoves its hands underneath, wanting them to gleam wetly in the light when it leaves the room. Ach ja, it thinks in the tongue it is beginning to get used to. Hitler's mouth draws into a grimace even as the eyes remain graveyard dead.

It will bring Hell all right.

It will bring Hell the likes of which this world has never known nor believed possible...

*

The professor pulled back his hand sharply, the intake of breath causing the other to find his eyes. The survivor stood down a step, backed away from the doorway where they huddled. "But...you....How," the professor managed, his eyes wide, unable to continue. The thing still played in his mind.

The survivor held up the hand with which he'd touched him. The professor shrank away from it like some abhorrent relic. The survivor smiled thinly and put the hand in the pocket of his overcoat. "No," he said. "There is no real answer. As I said, Gerda had the spark but it was never a match for mine." The old man's eyes suddenly darkened, the irises dilating in the tenuous light.

"I was just inside the gate that morning, as I said. Standing, wavering at the Appleplatz, willing myself through one more roll call. Always one more, just one more. It was the only way to pass time so it didn't strangle or lead me back to the darkness. And I saw. The picture came as clearly as a reflection in the mirror of my own face, and that thing I saw, this thing I've shown you, has walked beside me to this day." He tried to hold the smile but it was an abomination.

"So when I hear people like you, all you Seekers of Truth, I find myself drawn back, ever backward. Once again I'm face to face with Whatever it was that came to destroy us. And I wonder..." he paused and licked his dry lips.

"I wonder where it is today."

Two

Late Night Phone Call

Bout ten minutes ago he called an I jus let it ring. But I called him back show nough cause I always do, 'cause it was Juice. Had somethin' ta show me, 'e said. So I sat down right here an waited, thinkin'. About all them ole days. Juice an Steam Roll, that's what we was in school. Juice 'cause he could run the skin like O.J. an me 'cause that's what I done. Six-foot-three, two hundred fifty-seven pounds a All-District Right Tackle. Muthafuckas got steam-rolled all year. Took District no sweat, finally lost in the play-offs, in gotdamn overtime, on a gotdamn fumble. Ohh yeah...but I still rememba, Juice sweepin' right, Juice sweepin' left, Juice poundin' up behin' me.

An then he dropped the fuckin' ball.

Ain't nobody said a word, not one. Hell...I don't know. Same reason I guess I tole 'im ta come on now. Just old habits. That, an the fact you doan tell 'im no.

But man, we'as goin' pro. Din't nobody doubt it. Nobody! Makes me wonda sometimes, 'bout how it coulda been, but ain't no mileage in that. An tha actual truth is, I doan think about it much if'n I doan hear from 'im, but I did. So I do. From the penthouse to the shithouse. Four years in Angola. Stuck up a liquor store the right same night we signed papers for Grambling. Jus' no sense...none. But one thing I do know. I wouldna done none of it witout Juice. On my brotha's grave man.

That's why I's so nervous. He called that night too. Late. My parents out like a light, drunk off they ass, thinkin' I was gonna be the first somebitch in the famly to go to college. Turned out there weren't no mileage in that neither.

Goddamn, he's gonna be here soon.

An drinkin'. Ain't no doubt. Only about five-foot ten and wiry as a junkyard dog but that somebitch got eyes at'll tame ya. Ain't neva seen no man yet they ain't. Not in the hood, not at school, not at mothafuckin' Angola. He kept them crazy niggas off me in the joint an he knows I owe 'im. Knows I know it too. But it's not that big a thing; I always comes when 'e calls. Always have.

So...there's 'is Chrysler comin' round the co'na. I gotta get out there or he gonna wake the whole gotdamn block, but I'm leavin' m'wallet. Goan tell 'im I forgot it. I can still lie that good.

Or I hope I can.

*

God All-Mighty, I thought I was done. An him the whole time jus grinnin', pointin', sayin' "Look at that there! I always tole the bitch! I ALWAYS TOLE THE BITCH!!" An me jus standin an noddin, fuckin' mind runnin' like a truck. Thank God they kids is at they granmaw's. God help me, but I cain't say nothin. He fin'lly killed 'er. Jus like he said he was gonna, an I cain't say shit. But I cain't b'lieve...

I knowed Lakeshia since we wuz eight, nine years old, man. Alwas been in the hood, ain't none a us eva leavin. No way, no how. Jus a skinny lil nigga gal back then but them eyes. I 'member once she come up ta me on the playground. Always by herself. Never did have no friends much, least not many girls. But that day she come up smiling. Said she done killed a bird jus by looking at it. Said it fell right out the tree, dead like a mothafucka. I laughed; kept right on till her face changed. "Get ova there, nigga, then," she said. "Goan see what I done." An it was. Jus a dead bird, an I seen plenty. But then she was behin me, standin, quiet. "Go on an touch it, nigga. Feel how warm it be?"

An I did. An I saw her real face then, like it weren't made outta skin a'tall, but some evil street-tar blackness, deep as a gotdamn coal mine, an goin' on an on. An jus like that she smiled even bigger an walked off. Ta her own lil co'na of the yard. Jus stood there lookin at me...

Doan rememba when it was Juice and her hooked up, but it be a long while. Gots two kids, even if'n they do stay wit her mutha more'n they do at they own house. But it's dang'rous ova there, always has been.

Always will be.

*

Juice was bad drunk. I knowed that soon's I crawled inta the car. Smelled like Hennessy strong, like that nigga'd been pourin' it down fat. Even by the dash lights I seed how red 'is eyes was, but that weren't what concerned me. Is eyes always been red, fucked up or not. No, what really got me was the .45 in 'is lap. Fuckin thing pointed my way. First thing he say was, "We always been friends, right, SE?"

I tole 'im show enough.

"Well 'at's all right but ya ain't gonna like what I gots ta show ya," he said. Hell, I shrugged. Since high school ain't neva been much he eva showed me I wanted ta see.

Took 'bout five minutes ta get ta his place an when we did it was pitch black. Not a light inside or out. He din't say nothin, just got out the car an headed for the front door, carryin his piece down at his knee, swingin it loose like he was ready ta go. I walked slow b'hind, tryin ta figure if there'as anything I done lately I was fixin ta pay for. I din't wanta catch a bullet at a quata ta three in the mo'nin ova sompin I din't remember.

But I followed 'im in.

Found 'im bent ova a table, strikin a match for a candle. Lit the first one an went on ta the next. An jus thin I realized what that smell was. Gasoline. Lucky enough I uz close enough ta the door to leave it open a lil bit, jus ta get a lil draft rollin through.

They'd been a fight, furniture an shit all broke up all ova the place, glass on the flow. Juice lightin candles while I stood there starin at them damn gas cans, knowin they was full to the brim.

I din't see the back wall till he pointed at it. An when I looked I heard 'im plop down hard in the only chair that was still in one piece.

I tried not ta, but I did. Not real loud, but I yelled. Lakeshia was nailed to the wall with big railroad spikes, her arms stretched out at the sides like one a them pictures a Jesus they gots in church. Musta pounded them damn things skraight inta the wall studs cause they wasn't havin any trouble holdin 'er up. Blood all ova the floor, naked, head hangin down skraight on her chest. I din't do nothing. Din't breathe even.

"You see that," I heard 'im say. "I always tole the bitch," and he stopped. Then, "I always tole that bitch," as I turned away from the wall.

"You done killed Lakeshia," I said cause I couldn't think a nothin' else.

"Yeah, that's right," he said, an laughed. "My savior."

I thought again about all those gas cans, about the candles goin full tilt.

"I jus wanted you ta see, SE," he said. He lit a cigarette an smiled again. "I jus wanted you ta see."

I wiped a hand across m'mouth. "Well I done seed," I said. "Now what?"

He smiled again, terrible. "Nothin," he said. "Ain't nothin no mo."

"OK Juice," I tole 'im. "OK," an I turned back ta the door, not lookin back, prayin that big ole .45 wasn't borin a hole in m'back. He din't say nothin. Din't get up or move cause I'd'a heard the chair creak. An man, I wuz listenin for everthing.

Walked across the poach, steppin as light as I could down them steps to the sidewalk, ever minute expectin ta see m'insides blow out the front from that gotdamn cannon he had inside. Ten foot further on an I wuz runnin like a spotted-ass ape.

Din't stop till I got back here...

Din't stop five minutes b'fore, eitha, when all that gas went up b'hind me. I jus kept on runnin, clearing that path to the end zone.

*

Now the sun's 'bout up an it's been hours since I heard the fire trucks. Musta been dozens of 'em from the sound. But I keep thinkin 'bout that room, 'bout all them candles an all that gasoline. Lakeshia nailed to the wall. But mostly I think about what he said: "My savior," flat, like there weren't nothin left.

An I wonder too what kinda Hell it was come ta take him...

Three

The Fuck-Nut's Crime

He felt the tight rubber straps across his forearms as the briny cap dripped around his ears. Very soon he would be history, another scratched statistic of the Louisiana penal system. The newspapers and television would follow his story tonight, but two days more and he'd be forgotten. There would be no name on his gravestone, only an insignificant number.

That in itself was part of the problem, the initial spark that fired the wheels into motion. And now the juice would flow and he'd be gone. In the few moments left, his mind turned endlessly on the life he was leaving. Everything was clear, and the cruelty of the situation was that he'd be suddenly aware here, at the end. The gears had turned and finally ground him up.

He wondered if anyone would live in the shack now that he was gone, or if his actions would finally doom the thing for demolition. Of course it had been a dump for a long time (long before he'd ever laid eyes on the place), but it was the closest thing to a home he'd managed in his whole wasted life. His books and magazines would probably turn to moldy pulp before the shack was brought down. There was nothing valuable there. No one would want to save the place, not before him out of disinterest, and not now because of the reputation he'd brought on it. It would finally get what it deserved, he thought acidly, trying to convince himself the crime had initially much to do with the shack's location.

The ad stuck to the phone pole had stated as much: 'on-site living,' but providence had seemed to provide.... What? But he knew. It was simple. A road to damnation chasing the simple inquiry:

How to pull off the master crime?

He'd considered it for years, well before he'd ever taken the job as gravedigger. The curiosity had always been inside him, as far back as his hazy memory would stretch. He'd worked the oilrigs; the construction circuit; he'd even been a civil servant for a while, but his fate had been writ large long before. He recalled his loneliness as a boy, how the neighborhood mothers refused to let their children near him. All those years alone he had plotted.

As the bands got tighter and time got shorter, everything was suddenly crystalline.

And what about 'Poor Mr. Griffin'? This description from a neighbor had made print days before, but had not reached his ears until this morning. His convictions and eventual obsession had foiled him as assuredly as death. And now the penalty was due.

His fingers gripped the cold metal tightly, trying to break the bonds, trying in vain to dispel everything around him. Only minutes from now the electricity would ride him to oblivion. He'd be gone and the hated newspapers would have their field day over his dead body. Then he'd be forgotten.

He tried hard to remember. At least having something was better than leaving bare...or so it seemed. When was the first time he'd gotten the idea to kill Griffin? It was hard to pinpoint. Perhaps it had actually risen from a story in one of the magazines, some cheap thriller no more than three pages long with a picture of a big-tittied girl in the middle column.

Regardless...

A quick rush revealed every nuance and misstep, slowing down to illuminate his downfall in intricate, clearly delineated pieces. First, seeing the ad and finding himself not far from the address fluttering in the breeze; next, getting hired on the spot the same day; the months of dutiful labor; moving into the shack with his promotion to groundskeeper. Then the idea; the plan; its execution; the arrogance; and now, the finish.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up as if seeking a last minute getaway. His toes curled in morbid anticipation. He could see nothing in the black hell of the hood, but his mind dutifully supplied other images, carefully offering up tidbits that told the whole story.

He had killed Griffin. Killed him just as dead as a poke, and the plan had seemed perfect. Even now, he recalled chuckling to himself in the deep night silence, huddled up to his neck beneath his one thin blanket, fighting the drafts that took over at nightfall. It had all been very simple.

Mr. Griffin often worked late. He usually left his car at home, preferring to walk the several blocks to work so that he could puff himself up with such an excuse of exercise to his subordinates. Oh yes, he'd always been sure to keep everyone abreast of his feeble athlete endeavors. That in itself had rankled the gravedigger.

Early on, he had known no one could reasonably suspect him if Griffin disappeared. The boss and he got along peacefully. There had never been any disagreements or any show of public disobedience. The gravedigger lived on site; the shack had been pushed off to a back corner fellowship with the equipment sheds. Sweet, easy.

The plan only required procuring a new shovel and scarring it at leisure. Of course, he'd paid cash for it at an Ace Hardware all the way across town, and had watched the ticket curl into ash in the gutter while he smoked a cigarette waiting for the cross-town bus. No trail at all. The gravedigger kept the shovel beneath his bed for eight months while his idea simmered.

All the rest had fallen into place like an old key striking home.

Digging graves made the idea irresistible. All those souls lining up unwillingly at the gate lent his mind to countless nights' consideration. Very soon, there was nothing else to think about: Mr. Griffin had fallen under a death sentence.

The gravedigger walked the empty cemetery many times after dark closed in, always amazed at the stillness, at the utter desolation that stretched the very seams of the thin reality around him. There were never any voices telling him to do this or that, only an unearthly silence that told no tales. He came to love the voicelessness, came to treasure its mute suggestions.

The night he did it was no different from any other. No tumultuous storm brewed angrily in the sky; no ominous portent appeared in the sun or among the clouds telling him what to do. Nothing like that, just a sudden knowledge that the deed had to be done. He'd seen the old man earlier, before retiring to the shack, and knew they were the only ones on the premises. There was a freshly mounded grave situated advantageously, and he knew inside no other time would prove better.

He'd pulled the shovel from underneath his bed, hoisted it onto his shoulder as he walked over to the main building, careful to hide the weapon in a massive shrub by the Garden of Memory. He'd left the second shovel hidden there off and on for the better part of a month. No one noticed misplaced tools when nothing was wrong, and the floodlight was out above the ivied archway. He didn't even have to unscrew it.

Mr. Griffin had not been startled by his presence; as usual, the man paid the gravedigger little mind. Griffin was a man of his station, willing to relay messages and bark orders, but seeing no more than shadows in those below him. He'd been an easy call from the first day, and the gravedigger had had to carefully control himself so as not to give off any indications. There could be no connections in a perfect crime. That was what all the magazines said and he believed it.

So he called the man out by using the ruse of a problem that needed attention. Hell, now he couldn't even remember what it'd been. They walked the short distance to the Garden of Memory, Mr. Griffin feeling not the slightest trepidation until he'd seen the gravedigger pull the shovel from the bush and move toward him. At no point did his face fully register the realization of what was about to happen. But the first strike brought him to his knees with a wet moan, and the second sliced most of his face away as he fell helpless across the fresh grave. The gravedigger had been careful to drop him there so his blood wouldn't stain the grass. The garbage bags were in his back pocket, and the bloodied soil would have to be turned anyway. It might as well have been a postcard.

Once convinced the man was dead, the gravedigger had stuffed his bleeding head into the bag and slipped it down as far as it would go. Then he double-bagged the body before balling it up and rolling it off the grave. It took no more than twenty minutes to displace almost four feet of loose dirt, after which he rolled the corpse over and dropped it into the new, double grave. Then he threw the murder weapon in on top of the body. The small pile of dirt left over was carted off with the shed shovel and scattered in the remnants of the mustard patch he'd started for just such purpose. At close to five o'clock in the morning he was still down on his knees, meticulously picking at the grass (even after a thorough raking), bending every blade into innocence of the act that'd been committed hours earlier.

There had been no hitch.

During the initial investigation of the disappearance, the gravedigger had actively participated. But that was not uncommon; they'd questioned everyone! Unfortunately there was not much to go on.

Griffin wasn't at work, and he wasn't at home. His car was not missing but he was so often seen walking this did not rule out that he hadn't left without it. However, these sojourns were usually brief and habitual. His frequent haunts were investigated. Then his maid was interviewed, his close relatives also, even though these were neither numerous nor overly friendly. The area was combed thoroughly, and the dogs had never even picked it up. That had been the trickiest part, the part of the Crime most difficult to control, but then again, the investigators had never taken the opportunity to play over the area of the actual crime. That in itself had been the planned perfection, the purloined letter set out in plain sight!

How many more nights had he laughed long after the last car pulled away, leaving him hours to contemplate their confused explanations, their unfulfilled want to lay blame? There was nothing missing from the tool shed (the shovel he'd used to pick up the pile and pat down the mound was back in its long-worn place), and no sign of foul play. Talk filtered through the air that maybe Mr. Griffin (with his known effeminate behavior) had formed a liaison that had proven ill-advised.

Of course, none of these speculations was on the public wire, if so, the Gravedigger would have never come abreast of them. His abhorrence of both newspapers and television was well known and observed. Those who knew him knew what not to mention, not out of fear of retribution for broaching such a subject, but for the endless diatribe that would follow.

After a while, the police visits slowed and then stopped entirely. Calls came in every week or two, but there was nothing substantial to report. Later still the tips merely degenerated to aggravating patter.

Months passed and the Gravedigger worked on.

He'd known while planning that he could not leave after the murder. So he stayed around, his work habits unchanged, willing to work anywhere on the cemetery grounds. In fact, he made it a point to pass by the site of his crime whenever possible. A very old Power surged through him when he got close to the grave, and he watched his gait and gestures carefully for several minutes before and after such a passing. But he was always up to it.

When a year finally passed he felt safe. There had been no visits from the police or detectives for over five months. Mr. Griffin's house had been on the market and then pulled off (the heirs, it was said, fighting over every square inch of bankable asset in the two-story villa), left to sit there like a flat wheel, the yard quickly growing up to hide it from its preened neighbors.

The Gravedigger began to plan his leave. Even so, he made no further move for another three months. There had been an uncomfortable nagging at the base of his spine, wringing him wet with perspiration when he thought of himself miles away, his crime lying unwatched.

The metal plate screwed to the top of his shaved head proved the truth of foreshadowing. The mystery magazines had used the word until he could no longer plod past it without looking it up in a dictionary. It was a shame only experience could teach a true lesson. Words on a page were for dreams only.

Surely, it would come at any minute.

He had left in the end. What he'd thought was the end. But of course, his leaving came as nothing as clandestine as disappearing in the dead of night, leaving a pile of dirty clothes and unopened mail scattered about. He'd wanted no mysteries and aroused no suspicions. The uncanny discomfort that'd nagged at him for the months of inaction before his resignation had seemingly warned him night and day to be careful, to look after himself. But wasn't that what he'd been doing all along? Why, the proof was in the careful planning, the long wait when most perpetrators would have been gone. Wasn't that why he'd been careful, so that no tiny mistake would leave itself to be crept up on? He listened carefully to any hint of danger from his co-workers as the bell warned unceasingly in his head. Surely he thought, mere proximity to those interested in the moldering crime would provide him with enough warning if any seam began to unravel. The only thing he would allow from the media was second hand news; he'd figured it was enough.

After all, the crime had been perfect.

There was no body, no murder weapon, no ransom note, no burglary. No evidence whatsoever that 'poor Mr. Griffin' had met with foul play. The man had simply vanished. People did that every day. One need look no further than a milk carton for proof. The Gravedigger had witnessed the investigation with his own eyes, heard all the conversations regarding the mystery with his own ears. He didn't need the newspapers or television to tell him falsehoods because he already knew the truth. It was buried safely in the back of the cemetery and that had been victory enough. That had been worth committing the crime in the first place.

So when he walked away from the grounds at the end of his two-weeks' notice, it had been with a somewhat easy conscious. He'd come to pin the worry he felt occasionally to a heightened sense of self-preservation, one that was obviously more advanced in him than in others. It made the rest more sensible: the perfect crime, his steady patience.

He hadn't gone far, only a short piece up the interstate to the next large town, taking a municipal job he'd said he already had.

The forwarding address he'd left at the cemetery was the coup de grace. It proved his innocence to anyone capable of still holding out any suspicion against him, another purloined letter hidden in plain sight.

Only his had proved his undoing.

They'd come for him while he ate lunch peacefully at the greasy spoon just around the corner from the City Yard. Two uniformed policemen had walked in with his supervisor in tow, and as the Gravedigger looked up munching thoughtfully, the thin, palsied, bald-headed man pointed him out and the Blue Coats came upon him with the warrant for his arrest. When he'd been booked into parish prison no more than two hours later, he was amazed to learn he'd been something of a celebrity for the last day. He'd been in every edition of the news, on the tube.

The crime, they said, had been that bizarre, that calculated.

But, and more importantly, it had gone awry.

The rotted body of the Director had been discovered. The shovel lying right on top of the mess that had become of 'poor Mr. Griffin.' This was the story.

The grave that had been innocuously picked simply out of convenience had contained a highway fatality. The initial cause of death had been ruled alcohol-related crash, but the young man's family had firmly denied any history of substance or alcohol abuse. The autopsy reports had been wrong, they said. Or perhaps, maliciously tampered with, they accused. Politics were involved; the boy's father had been running for DA against a three-decade incumbent. Said incumbent had been investigated four times by both the FBI and the CIA, indicted twice, all unsuccessfully. And at the ripe old age of sixty-seven this man had intended to hand over the reins to a younger designee. The dead boy's father went against this faction and it had looked for a time that he just might do it. The polls began shifting...and then the accident. That's where the race ended.

Only some recent information had suddenly come to light, all of which happened to be fully documented in every major newspaper from Franklinton to Pumpkin Center and even as far as the Covington area. The father's railing about a conspiracy at first was seen only as the ravings of a distraught father, but very soon his allegations came under closer scrutiny. He was by no means a poor man himself. Improprieties concerning the autopsy became public knowledge; witnesses previously quiet began voicing their claims. Tainted results were hinted in the papers, on the television. The ghostly conspiracy began to breathe in earnest.

The family worked tirelessly to secure the necessary court order to have the grave opened. Ethics' policies were bandied about and fought over. In the meantime, even that might have died off and the issue eventually dropped had it not been for the death of the incumbent and the subsequent unexplained vacation of his young lieutenant. Amid such circumstances, the judge ordered the body exhumed two months after the Gravedigger moved on.

So they had him, the perfect crime spoiled by outside contamination. The pieces had not been hard to piece together given the fact that all the searched-for evidence had been lying in a neat pile no more than four feet below ground level. The rest of the matter had been simple.

It was an end now fast approaching. The Gravedigger was oddly relaxed a moment before the switch was thrown. He gave up his mad grasp of the warmed, vacant metal. His feet ceased to drum nervously at the floor. A deep silence added to the darkness within the hood, and when the voltage surged he was strangely, almost contentedly, empty. No remorse, no fear, no hope, no real dissatisfaction.

The witnesses behind the mirrored-glass later remarked to the papers and television crews waiting anxiously outside that the condemned killer had died much the way his history had predicted: silently, unobtrusively. The chair had worked fine, and one savvy column reporter could not help but play upon the fact that it had been this last taking of 'an eye for an eye,' that had ultimately been the perfect crime.

Four

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

It never even began as something we agreed to. Many people have the mistaken belief that pacts with the devil have to be entered into knowingly. Our trouble began as nothing even remotely related to that. And it came in the innocuous guise of a ratty-looking alley cat. For the whole story, one has to go all the way back to the apartment and our neighbor. Christ, it's still hard to look at the calendar and believe that was several decades ago.

He was strange, that was readily observable from the first. He had a kind of high school geek aura that clung around him like cotton candy on a muggy night at the state fair. Upper thirties, unmarried, uncaring about his appearance. In short, he was a prototype for either an accountant or a serial killer. And he lived right downstairs. Lived there until he went to Canada, he said. Now I wonder where the hell it was he actually left for?

He never talked much; he seemed to be the grown-up version of the kid who always got his underwear pulled up the crack of his ass in junior high. The kinda guy who'd rather hide behind a cheap pocket protector brimming with pencils and pens and a twenty-cent protractor than cause anybody any bodily harm. And this would have been by roughly age twelve.

When I saw him staked out in the parking lot that night, standing about thirty feet away from a box he had rigged up to hover above a small pile of cat food, it made me think. The first impression hadn't lied. He was a to-the-wall loony.

After that I had to talk to him, and not because I wanted to sit around and drink beer or catch the latest flick at the movies. No, I just wanted to get a feel for the guy. So, as he ended up explaining to me several days later, he wasn't actually trapping cats. It turned out he was merely capturing them and then giving them free-rein in his one-bedroom apartment until they felt "sufficiently at home". I swear, those were his exact words. After that, up went the window and they were free to come and go as they pleased. I didn't ask him for the particulars, but I guessed he let their training ground be his bedroom. He fished cats out of the dumpster like a bass pro haunting his favorite stump.

After several months and no sounds of electric saws running in the rooms beneath us, I surmised that the less dangerous profile probably fit this character. He was an engineer, he said. That seemed to fit. He worked at one of the plants just over the river. Okay, there was really no need to pry further. He had all the boring characteristics of a man retrofitted for a lack of imagination and a passion for numbers. He even mentioned something about a daughter living in Canada or somewhere near the Great Lakes, but looking back after all this time it is amazingly clear that he never mentioned anything concrete. There were never any visitors except for the increasing number of those goddamned cats, and no real history besides a glassy-eyed spiel that was too boring to listen to if you'd cared in the first place. But hell, the world's full of lunatics and I didn't pay him all that much mind. As long as I didn't wake up in the night and find him standing over my bed with a meat cleaver, I thought: let sleeping dogs lie.

When he said he was leaving, that his 'job' was over we said "Okay, take care." He seemed sort of sad, or as sad as a guy who always looked a bit sad could progress to. He seemed worried also. What about his cats? Running into him coming back from the grocery store or late at night in the laundry room; that was the thing he was mulling about to anyone within hearing distance. He must have seen his exodus coming before he began making his comments, because it was clear to my wife and me he'd begun refusing several of his regulars house privileges. When the window was closed I swear they'd line up like school kids in an alley peering through a strip club window. But, of course, he did have his favorite. There was one ratty old bitch that he just couldn't forsake. But he did have a plan.

I wasn't present when his first morsel went out. He'd talked to my wife; he knew she loved cats. We had one of our own so the devil had already sighted us out without us even knowing it. That, I believe, is how he actually works, sneaking and filtering himself in so slyly that you never know he's there until it's too late.

Our engineer couldn't take the cat with him, you see. It was so far away and blah, blah, blah.... He suggested a solution and bugged out before I really agreed or even acknowledged a fucking word he'd said. He'd told my wife that C.L.A.W.S. (an animal adoption center halfway across town) would be happy to take the burden of placing this old rangy flea-bagger into a loving, and caring home. Of course, the fact that she was fully grown and had the personality of a rat behind sewer grating seemed to matter little. Only thing was (according to what he told my wife), we'd need to drop her off early on a Saturday morning and if the beautiful little rascal was not rushed into a child's loving arms by 3 p.m., then we'd have to pick her up ourselves or face paying a small penalty of some couple hundred dollars.

Now when I first heard this story after he'd made his dismal exit in the pathetic smoke-machine he treated with more contempt than his clothes, I practically laughed until my pants feel down. I couldn't even fathom the depths of illusion in his meticulous, although obviously clotted brain. I am much older now, and know that many tricks start off thusly.

The first week we never even saw her. Not upstairs anyway, where we were. Oh, she'd dash around the common area and hiding places around his old doorway and window- access, running like Hell would rip her ass off if anyone came near. Then she got hungry and a little slower. Then she got a lot hungrier and decided to come upstairs. For the next twelve months every time anyone walked up to our door that goddamn cat was sitting there like a complaining welcome mat.

To set everything straight: we don't hate animals. Never did, and the sight of a starving cat is not necessarily soothing. We started throwing a handful of food out every here and again. It goes without saying that soon we had an inside cat and an outside cat. I had several suggestions from friends of mine to bag her and send her off the side of a bridge, or to simply turn her loose miles away, but I never really paid serious mind to any of them. The cat was not my problem. An annoyance, sure, at times but not a problem. Not then.

My wife is from overseas. We had plans for Christmas. We would be at her parent's house in Pankow for the better part of a month. It seemed a good time to break ties with our unwelcome hanger-on. And we didn't have to feel bad about it either. Either the cat would slink off or float over to one of our neighbors. Her welcome had long worn thin with us.

We went and had the time of our lives. The thought of that damn cat never crossed my mind for one second during the whole trip. We saw all the sights, hung with the locals since she knew the streets, did all the things at least I'd never done before, and in the meantime learned what not to do also. All in all, a masterpiece.

Now I know how precious and rare true masterpieces are.

When we got back the cat was right there at our door like we'd just stepped out for a bite of dinner and were home a little late. She didn't even seem agitated or dangerously starved, just patient, like she'd known all along we'd return. It had been a hell of a flight; the jet-lag was a bitch. I remember kicking her aside as we entered, damning her not-so-quietly under my breath as I shoved my suitcases inside.

I wreaked the car the next day.

Just fell asleep at the wheel for the first time in my life and ran a red light. The cop didn't even give me a ticket because I looked so out of it. Said it was his discretion and decided to let it be, let the insurance company sort it out. I don't even remember if the cat was at the door waiting when I got home that night. I guess it really doesn't matter.

It was more of a bother than anything else: fresh off a European holiday and directly into a sustained inconvenience. But the car was finally fixed, not quite up to the standard it'd been, but fixed and shined up as if nothing had ever happened. It has become second nature over the years. I was never sued by the woman I hit, so I assume she was satisfied with her own repairs. Either that or she died herself a short time later; I don't know which one is easier to believe.

But bygones are bygones, right? We carried on and it didn't take things long to get back to normal. My wife and I considered the irony it would have been to fly 5,000 miles across depthless ocean to be killed less than twelve hours later scarcely a mile from our driveway. Yet we laughed it away nervously and thanked our lucky stars that twisted metal was all we had to worry about.

Of course, that was only true for a short time.

I had seen the cat no more than twice more since our homecoming when my wife came into our bedroom late one night with an otherworldly look in her eyes as she began mumbling a stop-and-go litany that had no meaning whatsoever. Just before she started convulsing and foaming at the mouth I knew that she was not kidding around, and thanks only to the many small wonders of the universe, she made it through that night with two hemorrhages in her brain. The doctors believed she would die. I thought she was dying when she had the seizures and her pupils fixed.

But she survived. The teams of doctors voiced their surprise time and time again during those lost days in Room 693 as time seemed to stand still. When we finally left the hospital the doctors were preparing a paper on her case to be published in JAMA, and we had the additional weight of $45,000 in unpaid hospital bills left to face. The insurance was...let me say, insufficient.

The cat was there when we walked up to the door. Just sitting there looking well fed and healthy, an old friend arrived in the nick of time to welcome his acquaintances home. I was so disgusted and drawn-out that I didn't feed the damn thing for a month or two after we returned. But after that, I tried never to miss.

My wife's recuperation lasted almost six months. We had to sell one of our cars to help pay the monstrous hospital bills. Our dreams of owning a home swirled down the drain amid a wild montage of paperwork and bills.

But that wasn't the worst part. You see, I was a teacher. Just a simple teacher at a simple middle school. I had never aspired to greatness nor expected to find it. I was content to be who I was. Many times I have looked back and tried to distinguish the finer points of my existence before the goddamned cat became a fixture. Without recognizing it at the time (a fault that many of us possess and less will confess in retrospect), I realize I was what the psychologist Abraham Maslow had defined as "self-actualized." In simple terms, I was content and satisfied with my station in life. I have learned since that this is precisely the moment when one can most expect things to go to hell.

Many times since, on the darkest of nights when I can practically hear my soul oozing around in the marrow of my bones, I have wondered if the kid would have been killed if the Fed Ex truck had not blown a rod. And I tell myself, even now, that he would have because nothing depended on that fucking truck.

My preparation period was third hour, still very early in the morning, and I happened to have gone to the teacher's lounge to check my cubicle for any "important" messages that might be waiting. None were. However, on leaving the lounge the principal hailed me, asking if I could step outside and bring some equipment in from a Fed Ex delivery. I was one of only five men on the staff and the only one present who'd be considered safe to walk in a mile Fun Run without having a coronary halfway through. I didn't understand the request until I took a look outside. There was the truck with the back doors open, sitting across the empty street with a blown tire. Luckily for the driver the morning was cool. As I went to help with the package one of my students came walking up to check-in and I asked if he would give me a hand. Of course, he was happy to. We were walking across the grass when I happened to glance over at my truck in the parking lot. Something skittered in the gravel near my back wheel and I swear it looked like that cat. To this day I remember how strange I felt for no good reason, other than the fact that I was ten miles from home and I thought I'd seen her before I left.

I told the kid to go ahead, that I'd be right with him to give a hand. I had to check something out at my truck. There was no sign of any animal when I got there, living or dead, and certainly not that cat. When I heard the car's brakes lock up my heart dropped to my feet. Before I could get around good there was a sickening thump and a wild bray of honking that still seems to echo in my head on the nights I lay awake, remembering.

Even before the ambulance arrived I knew the kid was dead. There was a faint pulse but I knew it. It was only after the paramedics had taken him away to the hospital that I found out what the package was we were going to retrieve from the broken down Fed Ex truck. Three fresh, full-sized CPR dummies to be used in the P.E. classes in the fall.

When I got home hours later, with the sun only a light bruise through the trees, I mounted the steps to our door. The cat was sitting right near the fern, close to the spot where her food bowl used to be. When she saw me I swear she licked her chops as if she'd just finished the most delicious thing she'd ever eaten. I approached quietly, being very careful to step around her when I opened the door.

As I sit here writing this I realize almost thirty-five years have passed, although it never seems that far away in my mind. That moment is frozen and embedded inside me. We moved out of those apartments shortly after the boy was killed. We'd begun to understand the uneasy nervousness of superstition. The last time I drove past the old address a strip-mall had been screwed into the slight undulations of the hills instead of the red-brick buildings that were decades old even before we moved in. However, it's still strange to see where it started, almost as if there shouldn't be such a place, as if I shouldn't have such access.

I'm sure you've probably guessed. The goddamned cat followed us; she showed up at our new doorstep looking just as pleasantly plump as an old English castle tom. We felt the clouds circling above us, readying themselves to dump their torrent, but my resistance held for a while longer, even though my wife pleaded against my behavior.

It almost cost my brother his life.

Within days of our renewed acquaintance with the cat and my refusal of offerings, he was blind-sided by a drunk in the early hours of a wet Monday morning and damn near killed. The truck had to be cut from around him, although he stepped free with only small bruises and the shock of his life. I knew then that it was the final warning.

We began to feed the cat regularly.

The little house we live in now is comfortably nestled into the sharp L-shaped angle of a man-made pond that practically breathes with fresh water sport fish. It's not big but it's ours and it has proven a good place to while away the years and read a lot of good books. Through the window of the small study I have here, I can see the sparkling rim of the lake until long after dusk. A whole family of Canadian geese chose this spot as a nesting area last season and I anxiously await to see if they'll repeat their pattern this year. It really is a restful place, a peaceful place.

Except for the shadow that crosses the yard at least twice a day with the persistency of a grandfather clock ticking endlessly away in a long hallway. She's never changed. Never gotten any bigger or looked any older than when we left the apartment all those years ago. Sometimes at night she shrieks like a woman and I can hear my wife crying softly next to me, but there is nothing I can do. Nothing that is, except to get up and pour more food out.

She can never get enough.

Five

Making a Statement

The plan was simple: when they finally came in and were seated he'd let the motherfucker's have it.

Late the previous night, sweating alone in bed and listening to the sound of his mother's rattling breath through the thin wall, he had decided. It was finished; there would be no more insults. He had borne his last. And with this sudden revelation he had calmed. No longer did his mother's incessant death rattle draw a knife-edge along his spine. In fact, for the first time in a long time, he had actually smiled, lying there in the oppressive darkness with his hands folded neatly upon his chest. He had been just so when the sun finally leaked in through the tattered, filthy comforter he'd used for ages as a curtain. Strangely, considering his lack of sleep, he'd been refreshed, wide-awake. It was time to make a difference.

It was time to send a statement.

He shook himself free of the twin bed in one fluid movement. One of his three remaining shirts was right where it had landed the day before yesterday, lying in a wadded bundle atop the bureau he'd not opened in over ten years. He shuffled through a miasma of yellowed newspapers as he retrieved it and slid it over his head. He could smell his shoes on the other side of the doorjamb and already wore his slacks. Getting dressed was no ceremony.

In the bathroom, he slipped his feet into the open-toed shoes and pissed in the tub. The toilet had not worked in six months, and luckily they lived at the end of a gravel road. There were no neighbors and few visitors. His mother allowed only two showers a month due to some vague edict she'd discovered somewhere in the Bible years before. The only reason she'd bent to the satellite dish was the 700 Club, but the Artist scarcely watched television at all. The sex channels disturbed him and everything else made him tired.

He patted his hair into form standing before the filthy mirror, running a thumb through the smeared mess so he could get a bearing on his appearance. Not that he much cared, but he would want to look presentable for the photographers. There was no doubt, many pictures would be taken before the day was done. He used no deodorant under the false premise that he didn't smell. His nose was dead, squashed to his face during his own high school days by a boy he'd never known. For a transgression he'd never placed. He'd never told anyone of this handicap. Not even his mother; her exaggerated anguish would have proved unbearable.

He rubbed his hands together, reaching for his toothbrush. The brand new tube of Crest Whitener lay in a puddle of water and razor stubble next to the sink. The toothbrush was in his back pocket and he flipped it out expertly. It was the one vanity he permitted himself: his teeth. Despite his forty-three years on the planet, he'd never had a solitary cavity. And in an unfair, chastising world, any little bit helped. He scrubbed religiously for ten minutes, applying the paste three times before he felt sufficiently clean.

However, his eyes darkened as he went about his business, bunching up underneath his bushy eyebrows until they became two hard knots embedded in his plump face. As he slid the toothbrush into his pocket his lip curled and then pulled away from the teeth. And there it was: his perfect sheet of white marred by the chipped incisor. That had been a large part of his sleeplessness, the constant awareness as his tongue tested the tooth over and over. The tip had been knocked away.

Its replay had grown monstrous in his mind's eye. The berserk 1st period (Introduction to Art), his hell class. The others weren't much better but they were bearable at least. To an increasingly shrinking degree. The thugs and gangsters knew he was afraid of them, their collective, obscene mass.

Of course, it was impossible to prove the foot had consciously tripped him; he didn't even know whose foot it had been. He'd been too busy shaking the stars from his eyes after his head hit the filing cabinet. But he could still plainly hear the roar of laughter that had erupted, and the humiliation that had filled him from shoes to hairline. Thank God he hadn't broken down and cried. For several shaken minutes he'd thought he would.

But finally he'd shook it off, clenching his teeth so tightly that even now he couldn't be sure the chip had been caused by the filing cabinet, or simply his own bottled rage. It made no difference. The chip was finally reason enough.

In disgust at the scowling visage peering back through the sludge, he spit into the filthy sink. He closed his lips, shutting his teeth out of sight. Today old habits would be broken. He cracked his knuckles and turned to cut a swath to the door and around the corner. Very quietly, he slogged past his growling mother's bedroom doorway, both hands on either wall of the thin, trailer hallway so he wouldn't trip and wake her. He dared not because he was earlier this morning than usual, and nothing peculiar, or out-of-character happened within his mother's walls that she didn't take an interest in. Her questions could be merciless, unrelenting. She would discover his purpose before her bedroom door was open.

Luckily, there was a faint glow to lead him among the strewn rubbish. At the other end of the short hallway, in what passed for a living room (it was really nothing more than a cluttered storage area for the two), sat the twenty-five year old Zenith with its much younger (though hardly as resilient) VCR perched on top. The Fast Forward button had ceased working after only three months, but the clock still kept perfect time. It plainly, silently, read 3:21. He was very early indeed.

But today there was no way to stop the avalanche; there were too many lessons to teach.

He opened the front door with his foot firmly against the bottom so it wouldn't squeak, and after he'd stepped outside into the damp, croaking stillness hunched around the mildewed trailer, he shut it with the same stealth. His skin had worked itself into gooseflesh along his spine. It was chilly and the shirt was too damned threadbare. He pulled lightly on the cheap doorknob, convincing himself the latch had caught. There was no way he was going back inside now. His resolve was strong and to go back would kill the animal that tensed there, equally capable of slinking back to its fetid cave or ripping someone a new asshole. Too many times in his life he'd ventured back to the cave; this day he would not.

His car was a heap, had been since the raccoon crossed in front of him three years back. The crumpled left fender had all but rusted away; the headlight still sat uneasily in its busted housing. No doubt it looked like hell, but it still ran. He didn't figure he'd need it anyway, after today.

By the time he got to the driver's side door, his pants were wet below the knee. The lawn mower had coughed its last toward the end of the previous summer, and he'd been left with a Sears Weed-Wacker to handle their property to the wood line. Said line having since marched forward, causing his mother to complain more vehemently about her "blasted ragweed and pollen allergies." She refused to understand the basic premise he'd tried numerous times to convey: the Wacker had come with only two spools of fishing line. Those were used up now; more would have to be purchased. He simply had not gotten around to the errand. He had more important things to do than worry about ragweed and allergies. As far as his senseless nose was concerned, it was all in the old woman's head anyway.

He pulled up hard on the handle and the door groaned open. He dove inside, suddenly wishing he'd remembered socks because now the wet pant legs clung to his skinny shins, sending chills into his bones. However, this was also no large matter; the heap's A/C-heater miraculously still worked, and by the time he pulled up to his Art trailer at the first-year alternative school where he taught (or attempted to, he reminded himself bitterly), the pants would be dry. He'd be as ready as he'd get.

In the darkness inside the car, he felt with his right hand, searching out his laptop among the piled mess of papers, clothing, and assorted refuse piled to the windowsill on the passenger side. He felt its reassuring coolness and smiled. He hoped they would let him keep that at least; if not, oh well. He let it be and bent around the steering wheel so that his other hand slid beneath his seat. The .38 was much colder than the laptop had been. It caused another shiver to race along his spine and he straightened up abruptly, afraid his mother would somehow see him hunched down in the darkness.

The gun was a funny story. He'd not bought it or stolen it, it had not been passed down by some lost uncle far gone in alcohol and World War II stories. Nothing of the sort. He'd simply discovered it one day while walking in the woods behind the trailer. There was an old highway pit located not far from the trailer, and on more than one occasion he'd actually pulled a bass or two from its shallow depths. It had been cold that morning and if he'd not had his dead father's steel-toed work boots on that just so happened to be a size and a half too big, he would have never found it. But he had. As he'd pushed through the undergrowth between two gigantic oak trees, only the slight vibration slipping through the steel at the tip of his toe warned him he'd touched anything. He'd stopped, setting the cane pole and small tackle box into the crotch between two perpendicular branches, and squatted down. He'd had to dig even then, and when he finally came upon it, he was not completely sure of what it was at all. The gun was all rusted and caked with dirt, the chambers and barrel stuffed with it, but there it was all the same. He'd picked it up only after looking over both shoulders to make sure no one had followed him, was watching him at that moment commit the vague crime of discovery. He hadn't fished that day, but he had gone to the pit, perching on its thin bank as he carefully washed the mud away. It had a wooden, pistol-grip handle that felt good in his hand. He wondered if it had been used in a murder, and pictured the killer slinking through the woods in the dark of midnight to hide it from prying eyes. And now it was his. He'd spent the rest of the day pretending to fire it even though the trigger was frozen and the thing seemed as incapable of violence as an infant mewling in its crib.

He'd managed to clean it up, first nonchalantly and then with a surprising burst of urgency as things began deteriorating at school. It was easy to remember the date when he'd discovered the pistol; it was August 11, one week to the day before his teaching assignment began. Almost nine months ago now. Nine long months with the hooligans; nine long months of their trash talk and disrespect; nine long months of bullshit. He turned the key in the ignition and eased the old ride into Reverse. With practice he'd learned to avoid the grinding protest of the transmission, and thankfully, this morning the car let him off easy. No backfires of warning, no metallic screams issuing from beneath the hood. It was as if the two were in conspiracy. He backed to the turnaround and bumped to the asphalt road farther down the way.

His mind played in the past as if attempting to file and relish memories that would soon be gone. His palms were sweaty but his grip was strong on the wheel. To each his time and purpose, he tried to convince himself. That much felt right at least, it was just a shock to find a purpose at this stage of life to be such at odds with the nature he'd always presumed of himself. Regardless, a strong man stood up when the door was pushed open while a weak man retreated to the shadows. And although he knew the twilight areas very well, he was sure to the depths of his soul that he had been sequestered there long enough.

He pulled to a stop at the intersection of Highway 51 and 44. He glanced at his watch; another thirty minutes to the school, and forty-five minutes before the hoods came pounding at his door. As he jumped out to the highway his mind took him back to the past, almost as if protecting him from the fast-approaching future.

And what started as benign shadows gradually morphed into images that made it hard to breathe.

He saw himself as the helpless boy, playing with his father before the night of the Accident. Even though he'd only been four years old when his father was killed cleaning his brother's rifle, he could still look back on many times as if they'd never ceased to be. He could still smell his father's breath and the hint of whiskey that always hung around his face like a lace veil. The fact remained: that was the only smell the Artist could remember, the only thing capable of stirring his other feelings. There were thoughts of his mother then too, young and pretty, laughing with her hair blowing about her head, until she bound and lashed it to the nape of her neck so tightly her eyes bugged and he feared she would scream. Now, after the passage of years, it seemed that image-woman had been someone different, a phantom left behind to guile a young man into believing things that had never existed at all. And maybe it was true; perhaps his mind had concocted such fragments in the hopes these shadows would lend comfort to someone as sad as---

The thought shattered when he realized he was grinding his teeth again. He wanted no excuses for his behavior even though his life was wrought with them. His squashed nose was only one example; his life thus far had placed him as the shit that got wiped off everyone else's shoes.

There were the boys and men who'd pushed him around all the way from the playground to the faculty lounge. There were the girls who'd bound him up so tightly inside that he'd been reduced to spilling his seed with his own free hand clamped tightly to his mouth in hopes his mother would not hear and come to investigate. And it didn't stop there, not hardly.

Through his life had rolled all manner of persecutor and fiend. He had no friends he trusted, no friends at all actually. Acquaintances, fellow students, professors, co-workers, and now colleagues, but never once anyone he could trust. That meant his mother too. Perhaps she did love him, but how was he to know? Her suspicion and close-minded isolation made her as little desirable for companionship as he knew others considered him to be. The Artist had read philosophy; he knew Kant, Hume, Satre, and Russell. He knew history and sociology; he'd studied all these disciplines in college and on his own in hopes of one day finding the key to the "strangeness" that somehow everyone saw or felt in him, but that he was unable to do anything about. Every day he continued to wipe the sand off his shoulders, scrape the shit from his shoes.

After today there would be no more sand, no more shit. Of course, he knew the rumors of jail, the lonely and violent men caged safely away from society. It would be like walking purposefully into a room filled with hungry lions. He was still a virgin and didn't want to lose this in any of the many fashions he'd heard described when talk of incarceration came up. But there were solutions to that problem too. He just didn't like to think of them. He'd had the oiled .38 planted firmly in his mouth weeks ago, just as an experiment and didn't think himself capable of that.

At an uncharacteristic sixty miles an hour he reached below the seat and pulled the .38 out again. It was warm now from riding the bare floorboard and bits of finger nails, dust, and flecks of paper clung to its oiled surface. He ran it up and down his pant leg until its former luster was apparent once more. He cared less about the pants.

From the mile marker he had fifteen minutes more driving. The sun was just beginning to bruise the ragged, treed horizon. He pushed the pistol into a niche in the mess piled high in the passenger seat and unconsciously ground his teeth together until he pulled up alongside his trailer at the high school.

He'd had to lock up every piece of art he'd created during his Bachelor's degree in the back closet. All that painstaking work simply pushed into the dim recesses of a closet along with a rotten mop and a broken projector. He slowly got out of the car and went up the three short steps. He slid his key home. Seconds later he was inside, flipping the light switch. In his mind's eye he could still see where everything had been before classes started. The ideas he'd had about explaining certain techniques, discoveries he'd made in charcoal, pencil, and pen. Clay figures he'd been especially pleased over. They were all back there in the closet. He'd tried all right, but even in the first few days it was clear things were not going as planned. The kids (and he laughed bitterly now, recalling how many times they'd been referred to as such in Theory classroom management courses) had never cared for a single moment. The monsters had no discipline, no respect for anyone or anything. Two pieces of his artwork had actually been stolen before he was completely onto their intention to hound him. Later, he'd found them broken in a garbage can situated near the main common's area.

These hoodlums were just like the classmates he'd endured twelve years of public school with. Only these were criminals and thugs, rapists, robbers...goddamned thieves. And they believed him laughable. Just like the all the ones disappearing down the trail of years, only these were covered in different skins and were infinitely more callous in their pranks.

The Artist carefully set down his bag and walked back to his car.

He looked over his shoulder to assure himself no one would see. The only other cars were parked at the Administration building, and that was on the other side of the P.E. field. Squatting inside the car, he reached into the niche and extracted the .38. He pulled his shirt out and stuck the gun into his waistband. Then he walked back inside.

He wouldn't wait at the door again. When they came in they would find him sitting at his desk. He glanced at this watch. Seventeen minutes until the statement began.

A full eight minutes after the last tardy bell rang most of the class had made it inside. There were still several, loud, shuffling groups filtering in, and as they made their way to their tables they were resolute in getting the rest of the others going again as well. The Artist had his roll book out, looking up amid the loud clamoring to match the present faces to the names. It took him five minutes just to get the lunch count; they were especially vocal and abusive today. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he'd changed the routine. He'd not been waiting outside as he usually did, and any break in routine was enough to throw these monsters off track. There was really only one lesson they could learn and he was finally ready to teach it.

He closed the roll book and set it aside. He wiped his dry mouth and stood up. "Listen up! Listen up!" he said, trying to get above the tumult. It was no use. A couple had already waved him off with smirks on their faces, and the Artist had distinctly heard the term 'asshole' issued from somewhere in the back of the room. What finally got them quieted down was the response from a smart-ass question about why "the Chronic's shirt gets to be out, if'n we gots to wears ours in?"

The Artist smiled savagely enough to catch a few eyes before he whipped the .38 into sight. A gigantic hush descended as he waved it slowly in front of his face, smiling and shaking his head 'yes'. By God, they'd listen now.

"I'm glad you asked that, Denisha. Now that I've got everyone's attention I'm going to tell you why." Surprisingly, for the first time in his life, he heard actual confidence in his voice. His gun hand seemed not to have noticed though, because it shook very slightly. He tried to hide the tremor by bringing the pistol down to his side. He still had it aimed at everyone.

The school day was not yet fifteen minutes old.

"Yeah, I'm going to tell you all why," he said a little louder.

Then Jerome spoke. His hard, black face showed neither fear nor respect. If anything, he looked merely disgusted. He sat at the third table back from the left. No one else ever sat at his table, unless it was one of the girls he'd enlisted for the day. No one was there today. "You crazy muthafucka," Jerome said dangerously. "You betta be cool and put dat goddamn toy down." He was getting to his feet amid the claustrophobic silence inside the trailer when the Artist shot him in the throat. Jerome's eyes showed surprise for the briefest instant after a spray of blood painted the students and walls behind him, and then he simply went down taking his table with him. It flipped on its side as if erecting a barrier between the back of the class and the front. The Artist thought it fortunate that he couldn't see the body lying over there. Of course, he could plainly see the stain of blood washing out to pool near the floor A/C vents, but he could handle that.

Finally, he had their attention.

"I feel this class is in need of a statement, students" (and the word was like sugar on his tongue); "I feel this whole school is in dire need of one, but I cannot control that. What I can control is this classroom, my classroom, and by God, today I will do Just That!" He walked from around his desk, coming into full view. He scanned the faces and saw none fixed like Jerome's before he'd given the thug his due. Everybody looked very attentive now, their eyes were wide open; they appeared finally ready to learn something. Thankfully, no one was banging on his door yet. Through the window he could scan the entire area around the P.E. field clear to the Admin. Building. He saw only one student walking, and she was carrying a clipboard, probably bringing the lunch count to the office. There would be no lunch count today from the Artist's room. The only thing to come out of here would be a body count.

He set his jaw and began speaking. "Since your first day you have shown me little to no respect. None of you has applied yourself to anything except making my life miserable. You see, none of you understand. I went to school so that I could help people like you. If you would only listen sometimes..." He felt himself beginning to lose his thread and held the gun up high again. Cheryl, a girl sitting in the second table, right, screamed before clapping her hand over her mouth. Her eyes looked as if they'd explode. The Artist paused for a curious moment and then he shot her in the left breast. She fell away from the chair as if she'd been poured off and the class threatened to erupt in a stampede. Two more shots through the ceiling canceled any such thing from happening.

"Shut Up! Shut Up! Goddammit, Everyone Shut the Fuck Up!" The Artist slammed his free hand into the flimsy bookshelf he had perched across his desk, and sent the thing flying. He noticed the computer stand and printer went with it. He stood there in the shocking silence hardly able to believe that he'd uttered such profanity. The kids looked more surprised that he'd cursed than the fact that he'd just shot two people in the last several minutes.

There was no mistaking the growing activity outside now. People were starting to pour across the field, some running closer, some running away. The one common thing was the running. Nobody was lollygagging now out there. The Artist could make out a knot of teachers talking frantically to the new security guard. The guy was no more than nineteen, wore a bullet-proof jacket habitually, and was a hundred pounds overweight. There was no way he was coming in here.

Unbelievably, the trailer door swung open and the Foreign Language teacher poked her head inside. She looked directly down the barrel of the Artist's .38 and before she could say a word he told her to politely leave or he would kill her. "I don't have anything against you, Ms. Breckenridge, but you have to get out." The woman went screaming, her hands high above her head.

It was a small town; it would not take long for the small contingent of police to arrive. After that, the Big Boys would be here: State Troopers, probably a SWAT team.

There was a boy (the Artist never could remember his name) hunched near the dying girl he'd shot for screaming. He had his shirt off and was attempting some frantic first aid with the feebly moaning girl lying on the floor. The sound caused the Artist to swallow hard.

"I never wanted anything like this to happen," he began explaining as the other twenty students in the classroom stared wildly about, wondering what it was they should do. They decided to listen to whatever it was the lunatic had to say.

*

He seemed to be stumbling around in a room hung floor to ceiling with black curtains. He was very weak and disoriented; when he tried to call out, nothing came. With a great will he concentrated on his eyes, and opened them to the light, and a weird, droning lecture that appeared to be going on.

It took him several more minutes to get a grasp on where he was. A memory of a school bus hinted that he was probably at school. That would fit in with the voice he was hearing, but who the hell was it? He tried to turn his head and almost screamed. There was a violent ripping at his throat. He made out what appeared to be an up-ended table lying close by. And surely those overhead lights were the ones in the 'Chronic's classroom.

The pain began to clear up his foggy memory. Suddenly, he remembered the gun, the set of the Chronic's mouth right before he'd pulled the trigger. The fuckin Cracker had shot him! Goddammit, he couldn't believe it! He laid there several more minutes trying to assimilate the tattered information that was flooding his brain.

He didn't move, scarcely breathed. He needed some time to get his thoughts together. Oddly enough, the thing that had hold of him the hardest was shame. He could not believe the Chronic had shot him. And from the looks of things, it was pretty bad. Jerome knew he was dying; he could feel it. But this belief did not cause him any fear. If anything, it made him more pissed off. He'd never saw this shit coming; he'd been Jerome the Killa since twelve years old, the day he'd knifed the dope dealer. And now he could feel his life draining out of him because he'd missed-guessed a fucking Cracker weirdo. Muthafuck, what a way to go.

He tried to move his fingers and found that he could. So he wasn't paralyzed.

The lecture continued, its range wild, coming in fits and starts. It even sounded like the Chronic was crying. Jerome heard the wail of approaching sirens. Police on the way to save him; it was so ridiculous.

He managed to turn his head a little to the left. He found himself staring into the bug-eyed, blood-spattered face of Jermaine Wilson. Tasha was sitting right next to him, but she wasn't looking down. She was staring straight into where the voice was coming from. Jerome played out his right hand and found the cool surface of the up-ended table. That would provide his barricade, hopefully. He had one thing left to do. He began pulling in his left foot, getting it closer so he could fish the 9mm. out of his sock.

The Chronic was gonna die. And it wouldn't be by any goddamn cops either. Jerome was gonna kill him, and then Jerome was gonna die himself. And then he would chase that motherfucker all the way to hell.

There it was, right where he knew it would be. He pulled it free and winced as it knocked off the floor. He was sure the Chronic heard that; he knew the lecture would stop and he'd see the gray head peering over the top of the table. But the voice never stopped; the nut just kept on talking.

Jerome rolled over onto his side. He didn't care what Jermaine did or saw now. He wouldn't figure in this anyway, Jerome knew. It hadn't been in the vision. He got the gun right in his hand, fighting every second to hold the pain at arm's length. He was appalled at the amount of blood. He knew he'd never make it to his feet, but that really wasn't the plan anyway.

*

When the bloody figure spilled out from behind the overturned table, the Artist stopped his diatribe abruptly. There were tears in his eyes so he wasn't absolutely sure at first if what he thought he was seeing was real or not. He let the gun fall down straight at his side and his voice trailed weakly. The sounds of sirens and screaming people were suddenly much louder in the trailer, but the Artist didn't look out the window to see how things were going. "Jerome," he said, taking a half-step forward. "What are you doing? I killed you..."

It was at this moment that the Artist saw exactly what it was Jerome had in his hand. And even the Artist had to admit, the damn things didn't look that dangerous. "Killed me awright, muthafucka," Jerome tried, although everything he said was lost to the others in the classroom. "Show 'nough. But I'm gonna kill ya again when we get ta hell..." and he pulled the trigger.

Seven of the twelve rounds struck the Artist, finally driving him back to the wall. Then, as he leaned there as if stuck, the classroom suddenly erupted. Everyone making for the doors. People screaming. Jerome was dead. Cheryl was dead.

The Artist was dying. He could feel it coming for him and slid down the wall to hide from it. There was no use; he could see it very plainly now. He wondered how long it would take him to get to hell, and once there, if Jerome would indeed be waiting for him. It wasn't exactly the change he'd been looking for.

By the time it was safe for the paramedics to enter there was no one left to save.

Six

Consumption

The sun shone down through the haze, hanging wet sheets of fog on everything. A light rain had peppered the ground the night before and the dawn teased the steam from the mud, first in little whispers from tiny bubbling holes and then in increasing folds that blanketed the air.

The fog hugged up against a dense lagoon. Creatures grazed and rolled in the mud along the grassy rim; scaly tails ran angel fans in the glutted mud; carnivorous eyes eagerly slit in wait. Dragonflies the size of crows hopped and jittered with a nervous agitation that would serve them well for millions of years to come, and the noises that riddled the air were guttural and indistinct: a wild endless droning cacophony only pierced periodically by a shrill, larking call or the belch of a water-logged vegetarian regulating itself.

Morning ended the half-truce of night, allowing some to creep forward and claim what they would as many of their nocturnal counterparts took their turn as bait. As the sun rolled higher, the lagoon blossomed with new thirsty arrivals.

Suddenly throaty wails and a chorus of answering returns broke out. All ears pricked to the sounds. The lagoon was the only source of water for miles; the sodden land around its thin banks quickly gave way to knottier ground, extending to a stretch of sand that drove toward the coastline of an area now submerged and lost in a mountain of salt water and fossilized coral.

To all gathered in the lush sanctuary, the chorus of trumpets could not be mistaken. A band of roving mastodons plodded their way forward to the watering hole. Heeding their monstrous warning, most of the smaller reptiles moved to the borders, unwilling to give up the watering hole completely, but preparing themselves for the gigantic beasts on the way. Soon the area would be destroyed, the foliage consumed, the water clotted with hair, the ground and moist bed foul with the ordure of shit. There were no predators sufficient to spoil this unplanned homecoming. Soon the herd was rolling and splashing, trumpeting, some rutting in the now ragged mouth of the lagoon. Their dominance complete, awesome...

As their pounding feet slid lower in the mire.

In fact, so extreme was their joy none took notice as the first thin rivulets of steam began hissing a few paces back from the perimeter. Steady increasing gouts of steam suddenly sprouted from some hole, or blew off the covering of a rotting frond. One next to another on a fixed curve, duplicated by its twin a few feet farther over until there was an unbroken circle of leaking smoke trailing a ghostly perimeter around the lagoon.

Only when the smell of decay became too strong to ignore did the herd pause in its revelry.

But by that time the story was almost done.

The bottom went out of the lagoon with a great sucking rent and the mass of the troupe was immediately taken. The few bank-dawdlers tried to beat a retreat, but the wall of red-hot steam blowing away now at full force steered them back to the torn crater in the earth. Pathetic, bubbling screams were soon suffocated in the avalanche of sand that funneled down from the wall of hot steam until the only thing left was a suicide decline to a hole no larger than a human skull.

Early morning, 18 July, 1797, Scottish moors

Jacob Seaton stood ankle-deep in the dawn-sprinkled peat bog. A flint-lock rested against his shoulder. At his feet, stiff in attention, stood two coal black deerhounds, snuffling out gusts of cold, morning air. Each waited as if corked, ready for the first sight or sound to pursue.

Suddenly Totem bolted a few paces to the left. After a quick, frantic glance at the other two, the female dog pawed at the ground and just as suddenly tore off through the loose underbrush, baying at the top of her lungs. In disbelief, Jacob watched helplessly as Bitter charged off on the trail of his bitch. Their escape was complete in mere seconds.

"Gaet da 'ell back! Ya crazy, scalded ba'stads!" he yelled after the pair, but to no avail. They were out of sight; all he could hear was their howling. "Goddamn," he muttered as he picked his way through the thorns and burrs, following the wild sounds. He'd have Bitter's balls for this, he considered momentarily before the barking stopped. He pulled up sharply and scratched his head through the thick cap. All was silence. The skin crawled along the nape of his neck. He walked ten more yards and stopped.

Over to his left, scarcely visible in the thin morning light, a small hillock rose like a tombstone behind two squatting, sentinel oaks. Their scabby limbs stretched out ominously. In the hollow between them an indention sunk backward into the peat bog. The dogs were nowhere in sight. No sound of them either. He peered irresistibly back to the hollow. Coming on, he noticed the darkness low down between the trees was actually the entrance to a cavern of sorts. A wild, terror-filled yowl echoed suddenly from the hole.

Jacob plunged within, sparing no second. The gun would be a disadvantage in such confines but he knew his knife would serve up a bloody death just the same. His eyes danced about, fighting for focus in the gloom. To the right and left he could see tunnels leaking farther back. Another watery, strangled yelp from the closest sent him charging toward hell, damnation, or revenge. He leant no time to such philosophies.

Moments later he crashed face first into an earthen wall, breaking his nose and sending lightning streaks of pain blasting before his eyes. After stumbling backward and gradually regaining his senses, he found himself lost in utter blackness. Pressing up tight all around him. He attempted to back farther away but met a hitherto unknown obstacle at his back. With a cold sweat building, he reached behind and felt only cool earth. And then as if by magic, pressure closed against both shoulders, rending it impossible for him to raise his hands to his face.

The marred hillock outside squatted suddenly deeper into the soil. An earthen coffin sealed around the trapped man, carefully worming a hole from the cool outside air through the ground to a slight opening around his head. And even though the air supplied to this gasping, screaming soul buried somewhere below the surface was enough for a time, it could no more nourish his body than his mind.

He died alone, completely mad, amid the darkness and unfathomable silence that surrounded him.

Late evening, 3 March, 1942, south of Echo, Mississippi

Greg Toon steered the battered Ford slowly down the dusty gravel lane while Billy and the creepy fucker they called Duster bounced around uneasily in the bed. The family had been warned but they'd held fast. The cross-burning hadn't been enough. Well, he thought, tonight would finish this shit. The white capes in the back pitched around in the wind as they got closer.

For five months now the family had refused to budge.

The three men in the Ford had no fear of retribution because Duster was a lawman. Or at least that's what Billy had told Toon the day before. As it was he didn't care if the motherfucker was Santa Claus. He just wanted to get this shit done.

A thin light peeked through the trees and he shut off the running lights and eased the truck to a stop. They wouldn't have to worry about dogs, no sir. They'd hung up those two fuckers on the nigger's fence less than a week before. The third warning. Toon cut the engine. Got out of the truck and joined the other two in the dusty roadway.

"Remember," Duster said through his bandana. "No guns. Jus get the bitch and go!" His voice was slurred from the fifth of rot-gut they'd shared on the ride over but you worked with what you had. They began to creep down the lonely road and within minutes were standing within five feet of the back stoop.

And that's when the shit went bad.

"DOAN MOVE YOU WHITE MUTHAFUCKAS!!" a voice came tearing over their shoulders and as they spun toward the sound Billy's chest exploded in a spray of red, pitching him backward, punching him through the rotten stoop like a rag-doll. But Duster had always been good on the wing, regardless if the others knew it or not, and steady when it came to killing. He fired off a shot at the spot the flash had come from and saw a large shadow fly back and heard when it hit the ground. Then, in a steady advance of footsteps, he marched forward pumping round after round into the man lying there. Screams started from inside the shack.

Duster turned from the dead man in one fluid motion and ran back to the door, stepping over Billy. Toon stood gape-mouthed and frozen in place. This no longer seemed such a good idea. But by that time Duster was inside. Gunshots blazing, rapidly one after the other, ripping through the house, silencing the screams, until they suddenly stopped. Dead silence. Toon finally managed the courage to step over Billy and pushed inside, finding the floor littered with bodies. One, and he couldn't take his eyes off it, a child, plastered against the wall. Its eyes staring off blankly to some spot in eternity. Toon puked between his legs. Duster turned from the carnage and stared him down.

"Aww man... the kid, man. Look at this...what the fuck..." Toon managed.

Duster stepped closer. "Doan mean nothing," he said. "Billy's dead as a goddamn rock outside. Go get the fuckin truck."

Minutes later they were throwing the last body into the truck bed. All wrapped up in the Klan sheets. "What about Billy?" Toon whispered, finding it hard to look the lawman in the eye. "Him too," Duster said and they went over and manhandled his body to the Ford. Duster climbed in on the passenger side. Toon, moving slower and questioning what seemed so good about being here in the first place, got in behind the wheel.

They were alone in the silence like two doomed souls in hell. "Jus drive where I tell ya and everythin will be alright. No bodies, no murder," Duster said and laughed.

After a bumping thirty minute nightmare, the lawman called them to a halt next to a small clump of trees hidden in a curve. Toon pulled over to the side. "What now?" he said, unable to mask his pleading. He wanted to go home; that was it. He'd only wanted to make a point, not...all this.

Duster bent low and sparked his lighter to flame. He talked through his teeth as he lit the cigarette. "There's a big hole just over there," the lawman said, pointing. "Deep as the devil's asshole, 'swhat I hear. That's where they're goin."

The next little while proved to be rough work, mentally as well as physically, pulling and dragging the bodies through the tall grass and vines, humping them one by one to the hole. But after an eternity it was done. And as they tipped the last one over the rim, Toon stood and stared down into the pit and listened hard to nothing. Maybe it was as deep as the devil's asshole.

They'd turned from the hole and begun walking back to the truck when Toon felt a hand on his shoulder. Duster turned him around in the next second. "Whoa, dere buddy," he said, and Toon felt his balls draw up tight. "We ain't finished."

"What d'you mean, we ain't finished?" Toon blustered. "They're all in. Everymotherfuckinone of em. Billy too, just like you said. Let's get the hell outta here."

"No, that ain't it," Duster said. He raised the .45 and pointed it at Toon.

"No?!" Toon cried, taking a step back and slipping in the mud. He went down on one knee, hands up in the attempt to placate the lawman. But he saw no give in this figure. "Please, man, don't do it," he whispered and Duster pumped two precise rounds through his head.

Shortly thereafter, Duster climbed into the cab and fired up the old engine. It didn't sound too great but then again he didn't have to take it far. By the time he stumbled into his bedroom in the tiny hours of the morning he was far too tired and hung over to notice his wife shaking uncontrollably beside him in the bed for the better part of an hour, fighting back the panic her husband always brought home with him in the midnight hours. And there was good reason. She, of course, had taken many lessons from the man.

In the darkness, under a ragged moon cut by endless banks of fleeting clouds, the walls of the cave pulsed and dripped blood in its many wet corridors and recesses.

Interlude

In time the cave branched deeper and wider, acquiring particular tastes to accommodate its growing appetite. Missing children found their way into its embrace. Ill-fated expeditions also. It learned to bait as well as an experienced fisherman. And the animals who sought shelter inside its domain were all fodder for extensive experimentation, desire, development.

At certain points in its depths the moist earth seemed to breath, heaving in and out among the artifacts it had secured over the passage of millennia. Bones and thick matted hair clogged, blocked whole passages. Hideous stalagmitic shafts of bone gleaming with fine serration sprouted from the knotted floor. Not even insects and worms were permitted sanctuary within its confines. Sometimes they were saved up in great numbers for rupturous, squeezing explosions far beneath the surface, then left in liquid pools to decay and bubble in the formative darkness.

With its infantile learning spurred, it escalated its activities. Thought processes were slow and agonizing but time and experience inevitably produced them. Soon, hypnotic means of calling were in its grasp.

Dusk, 20 February, 1964, thirteen miles east of Interstate 86, outskirts of Pocatello, Idaho

The girl walked briskly, pulling her threadbare coat tight around her skinny body. Snow was predicted for the night (she didn't need a weatherman to tell her this), and although she tried to pretend her scenario was not bleak, that was just wishful thinking. Either she found shelter or she'd probably be dead by morning. Frozen solid.

She stopped walking and put a hand into one of her almost empty pockets, pulled out the pack of Salem's. She lit one and stared down the empty highway. Nothing; no headlights, nothing. The road stretched on endlessly into the twilight.

Sandra was eighteen with a long history of fuck-ups. An alcoholic father, a bucolic mother fat on sugar and daytime soaps, and of course, her, the rebellious only child. A tragedy of three characters in one act. She'd left home in Mininglott, Wyoming several weeks back with a hundred and sixty dollars in her pocket with the intention of whiling away the coming summer on the beaches of San Mateo, California. She'd figured on making it there hitch-hiking but her first ride had almost cost her life. The image of the two teenage boys who'd raped her still haunted her every hour, whether sleeping or awake.

In fact, the whole idea had gotten steadily worse. She'd stayed in a motel no more than forty miles from her home the second night and had easily calculated (as the lump of cash changed hands at the front desk) that this would be the end of such extravagance. The next night she'd slept in a deserted shed full of sluggish rats and a tomb-like cold. Reality began taking frightening bites.

But up until now Reality had not seemed deadly, even while the boys were taking their turns she'd known they wouldn't kill her. She'd let them have what they wanted and be on her way. Then. Tonight looked to test the hypothesis.

She knew the dangers of hitchhiking, had firsthand knowledge of them as that went, but what else could she do? The few cars that had passed had found her seemingly invisible; only one car had taken any notice at all, in fact, pulling over far ahead of her outstretched thumb and then zooming off when she'd gotten close enough for a good laugh. And although she screamed and rained curses down on the rotten sonofabitches, the tail lights had continued to get smaller in the distance until they were lost entirely.

In the middle of these morose thoughts and the coming of full night, her mind was suddenly quieted by a sweet, lilting melody that came at her all at once. She stopped walking, mystified. Even the snow which had begun to fall faster seemed to fall around her rather than on her. She thought she heard actual music now, although it was so thin and ethereal it was impossible to tell its source. She stood and listened hard and when she turned slightly to the left she could have sworn it emanated from the snow-shrouded woods lining the roadway.

She walked to the forest boundary and saw the opening.

Shelter, she thought.

And as the gentle melody strengthened, she moved forward, paying no particular attention as the snow-shrouded foliage parted as she came. Forget California, she thought with an erratic, drugged dreaminess. This is where I need to be.

She stepped inside and the cave led her down with fleshless arms.

Interlude

It grew and refined itself on the essence of all it consumed, combining many traits and personalities, twisting any to suit a particular need. Power began to formulate meaning and yearning, stoking an opiate for more. It used old tricks and new-found wisdom until its hunting evolved to sentient brilliance.

It spread everywhere.

Jungles of Bolivia, 200 miles from Trinidad

It smelled the primitive band of Indians as they filed to the banks to bathe. Some were slow and enfeebled, left to come more slowly. Those were the lucky ones. Shortly, they would watch in horror as the lake boiled, frying the flesh that screamed and bloodied the rolling water.

One by one the cooked slid slowly beneath the surface as the survivors, standing aghast on the banks shielded their eyes from the massacre and prayed to whatever gods they deemed necessary to ward off this invisible evil.

3 March, 1998, trouble spot of the Metro, Paris

Jean Brilliot had worked in darkness for the better part of his adult life. Now, at thirty-six, it was as commonplace as coffee in the morning. Maintenance of his beloved Metro was his chosen profession, he would remind anyone who cared to ask. He had sought it out; it had not been forced upon him by anyone at any time. He took pride in his role as one of the many who kept the famous subway on schedule. He was not in charge of a crew as of yet (though his name had already come up twice), but he knew it was only a matter of time. Patience would pay in the end.

He made his way through the dark passageways, walking carefully along the thin catwalks that ran the length of every tunnel. The day before, a power outage in Section 14 had caused three trains to be delayed. The problem circuit board lay just ahead in the gloom, and as he made his way along, playing his flashlight beam off the rounded walls, he thought about his date with Claire set for that evening. He could not wait to get his hands around those big beautiful breasts.

A curious grinding, the sound of bricks scraping together, caused him to stop in his tracks.

From somewhere just ahead, around the next bend, and he went curiously. Even from ten meters away (amid the penetrating darkness enclosing everything outside his flashlight beam) he could see a ragged, yawning crack in the dirty tiles. "Pourquoi?" he muttered, stepping in closer to examine the black maw. He shined the flashlight beam inside, surprised to find the light swallowed up in the rift.

He squeezed through the crack in the wall for reasons undetermined. Perhaps the strange, coy lilting in his head drove him on; he didn't know, didn't take the time to ponder. It was suddenly hard to think clearly. Oppressive size and silence welcomed him within, and then he was moving forward fast, one foot in front of the next until the light inexplicably vanished, and fingered tentacles reached out and sped him toward oblivion.

Claire sat home alone that night.

Aberdeen, South Dakota-- (AP) News Release, 7 June 2011

Local residents report a sinkhole opened and took an entire house, located at 44367 Fairway View Ave early this morning. Eyewitness Doug Frecot was awakened by a noise just before sunrise. He reported looking out his bedroom window in time to see the house slide out of view. "By the time I got my clothes on and ran outside, all I could see was the roof." EMS units were dispatched and even though the roof was found virtually intact fifteen feet below ground level, after cutting through the shingles and attic, the house was found unoccupied. The search continues for the missing family and the Aberdeen Sewage Department along with the State Police have been called in to conduct an investigation.

Michael Childress (Reporter)

Interlude

Over the centuries it became proliferate at reproduction. Raw energy cut passages and tunnels in sentient determination. Earth melted and evaporated before its fury, and at last, tiring of scouring the surface, it turned its attention downward, seeking out the greater power it could feel emanating from the center of the earth.

Toward the end, the cave had no need for the physical residue it had stuffed down deeply in its recesses for countless millennia. It began to purge itself of these burdens, cleaning out its hideous dungeons and feral pits. Large numbers of unaccountable bones began surfacing everywhere. In fields, yards, playgrounds, and alleyways. In 2028 paleontologists were amazed and puzzled as to how the almost complete skeleton of a large Anatosaurus came to surface in a burgeoning crack within the Chase Manhattan Bank's vault complex in New York City. Fatalists and religious fanatics alike began stoking their sermons with warnings of Revelation, twenty-eight years late but here nonetheless. Collection plates filled to overflowing with the money from scared sinners attempting to buy redemption. A wild feeling of disaster grew more ominous with each passing day.

Even the television preachers, wrapped up neatly in their expensive Italian suits, did not know how right they were, having peddled themselves out for so long they wouldn't have recognized the truth had it stared them in the face.

Finale, 23 June, 2057

The cave finally broke through to the inner core of the planet, unleashing hellish nuclear forces. A violent series of eruptions rocked eons of stability, causing a massive underground Armageddon. Oceans and streams reeked with poisonous suppurations; dark green mists oozed out of giant cracks along regions of the San Andres Fault and the Hawaiian volcanoes. Small and large sea atolls suddenly vanished beneath typhoon waves. Huge caustic cloudbanks, welling up from the diseased earth, blotted out the sun.

In the end the Biblical prediction of a thousand years of hell on earth proved to be vastly understated.

Eons later

A once lively planet, now barren and dead, sits still in a small corner of a dying solar system. Huge openings pock the surface. Nothing moves or breathes. The cave festers and waits as it has forever...waiting on another chance.

Its hunger grown insatiable.
