Vanishing acts, p.22
Vanishing Acts, page 22
Curson saw, in Janeway’s expression, the face he once used when complaining about his wife’s bizarre behavior and wild mood swings when she was carrying their daughter, Alicia. The crying jags, the flash-fire rages, the quasi-suicidal dips. It had been a World War of a pregnancy. Everything was diagnosed as “normal” … and blamed on hormones.
Normalcy was relative. Victor was proof.
“This guy Johnson thought his wife was going to kill herself, so he kept watch on her. He spied on her, without her knowing it. And that’s when he saw it happen. He says it was during the first full moon after his wife was diagnosed as pregnant.”
“That’s another intriguing turn of phrase,” Janeway put in, snidely.
“Like she was sick,” said Curson, “and the baby was the sickness?”
“Babies are parasites. They suck the mother’s blood, drain nutrients, and toxify the host metabolism with their waste. They self-eject in a shower of blood and afterbirth, and they continue to feed off both parents even when outside the womb. We drape the whole horror show in a socially approved blanket of warmth and nurturing, and we spend millions of dollars and people-hours reinforcing the idea that this is what human beings are supposed to do. Our media, our culture all present this enslavement as freedom, and people embrace it because they are incapable of grasping any other freedoms beyond their choice of beer or car or what’s on cable—the choices themselves being no real choices at all. Nobody has the right to pump out children unchecked anymore; it’s reckless endangerment of humanity. Even the Chinese have realized that. When most people have kids their excuse is that the children ‘just sort of happened’—as though they’re completely unaware of what caused the child. Or they have some religious dogma to fall back on that conveniently prohibits termination, and—what else?—encourages the idea of producing even more kids. It’s no blessed event, no miracle—it’s a fucking nightmare.”
“Maybe we should get you a podium to whack with your shoe,” said Janeway flatly. Before Curson could intercede, he leaned closer. “I’m an atheist. My kid was not an accident. And you’re one baby step away from a rant. Does any of this have a point?”
“What about Johnson, what about the signals his girlfriend sent out?” Curson’s interest in Victor’s apparently bottomless polemic was waning. He thought about calling Sondra. He wondered if Sondra had already called him, at the message station in the outer office.
“She went out one night about two in the morning. He followed her to a house with a FOR SALE sign in front. The fence was half-wrecked, the yard overgrown with weeds, all the windows were dark or shaded. He thought, here it comes, man. Some dude is banging my pregnant wife. He got to a window. He was very good at stealth. He saw his wife lay on a dining room table, hike up her skirt, and pull her own panties off like she was drugged. She lay there with her legs spread for half an hour. Johnson told me, he wanted to charge in and drag her away, all stiff and erect like a hero, but another part of him wanted to hang back and see what was up.”
“Or he was a coward, or he was just making all this shit up,” said Janeway. “Get to the gangbang, already.”
Curson, on the other hand, was listening raptly.
“Three men came in. At least, Johnson thought they were men at first. Very pale-skinned. Their faces were indistinct, as though seen through steam or heat shimmer. One minute, they had normal hands. The next, the hands elongated. You ever see an iguana’s foot—the super-long digits, four or five joints each, really slender? The hands were like that.
“Then Johnson said the faces changed too. All three men were utterly bland-looking. Crowd pedestrians. Pattern baldness, sandy hair, light eyes, the type you brush past a thousand times a week and never notice. The eyes went yellow around oblong black pupils like punctures. Their features blurred like hot wax running and re-formed into what Johnson said were long, narrow, needle-like beaks, ebony-colored. No teeth, but ridged gums of mottled brown-black. ‘You just knew those gums could cut like sharpened obsidian,’ Johnson told me.
“Two of the things held her arms while the third reached up inside her with its long fingers. Then it pierced her stomach with its beak like a hypodermic right where—you know, where the fetus was. After a minute it withdrew one little gob of meat. It swallowed it the way a gull swallows a fish. Then it inserted a different gob of meat.”
“Like a changeling, but in the womb?” said Curson.
“Yes, essentially.”
“And the beaks were long and thin, like a … a humming-bird’s?”
“Yes, like a green hermit or a sicklebill.”
Neither Curson nor Janeway could appreciate the distinctions. Both refixed their vision on Victor as if he’d just grown multiple heads.
“They have a library at Fordmill,” he offered. “I looked it up.”
Victor might even have supplied Johnson Howard with bird books, thought Curson. If there was such a convict at all. Now he and Janeway regarded each other, dourly.
“I’m telling you what you asked me to tell you. The things you came to hear.”
“You’re asking us to buy that this guy Johnson just stood there while all this was going on, while his wife was being—” Janeway was trying to find the words in mid-air. He failed.
“Violated?” said Curson.
“He said he was paralyzed, that he couldn’t move. Once he started watching, he was frozen to the spot.”
“That’s touchingly convenient.” Janeway snorted.
“He said he couldn’t even make a sound with his voice.”
“Fucking enough.” Janeway’s voice cut through the acoustics of the room; even the distant hum of the air unit seemed to shut up. “Enough. I’ve heard as much of this horseshit as my brain can tolerate.” He spaced his words like hammer blows. “What the fuck do big fucking storks from outer space have to do with you hacking your girlfriend into a casserole?” When he finished, he was almost yelling, so abrim with pent-up anger and the need to lash out that his hand sideswiped the stack of crime scene photos, which fanned like dropped playing cards toward Victor.
“I didn’t say they were from outer space,” Victor said contritely. His eyes locked on to one of the photos and did not stray.
“Not to mention this bullshit doesn’t hold an ounce of water! Even a dummy like me knows about X rays and ultrasound! You think a doctor wouldn’t be able to tell it was a bird or an alien or a mutant or whatever the fuck you claim it is through even the most incompetent examination?!”
“They’re like chameleons,” said Victor. “They can change. It’s automatic, a protective reaction. Even the fetuses can do it.”
“Oh, thank you very much!” Janeway had had his limit, and that usually signaled the end of any exchange—hostile, interrogative, or otherwise.
Curson spoke very softly. “I think we’re almost done, Victor, if you could tell me a little bit about Marisole.”
Curson was relieved when the demon of burden leapt from him to Victor; the prisoner’s shoulders visibly sagged. Gotcha.
“She told me on the phone she was pregnant.”
“So you weren’t so sterile after all.”
“No way. I had myself checked out by the doctor the minute I heard. Double zeros.”
“And you concluded that Marisole was stepping out on you.”
“Yeah, basically. Like I said—I was shooting blanks.”
“How’d you bust out?”
“Johnson told me about how erosion had screwed up the west fence. He heard it from a convict who dug post holes on the work crew until he got into a fight with another prisoner and split his skull with a shovel. Guy wound up in the cell next to Johnson’s.”
“So you wormed out and went after Marisole?”
“I told myself the whole time that she was just cheating on me, you know? Good pure, clean, macho rage. Some free man had tried to make my woman a puta and me a cuckold. I said that to myself all the way in. But I was thinking about what Johnson had told me. And further back in my mind, I was hoping that I could be in time to prevent something if Johnson was even a little bit right.”
“What’d Marisole have to say about it?” Curson’s voice was down to a whisper.
Victor was still staring at one of the photos as his expression finally broke. Tears began to stream freely from his hollow and haunted eyes. “She tried to lie. She fucked someone else and tried to lie. Because her pheromones changed. Because I was too late. I saw the puncture scar on her stomach—”
“Well, there sure as hell’s no scar there now,” Janeway said, more or less closing the case for all of them.
It had been a sleepless few hours for Sondra, and when Curson went to phone her there was already a message waiting for him. In a sense, they would fall in love all over again tonight … only to have that love jeopardized the next time they restaged the argument. The difference now was that Curson felt stronger. He and Sondra would fight a lot during their coming years together, but the bottom line was that they loved each other.
“I fished up the data on Victor’s Death Row buddy,” said Janeway, chugging half a styro cup of cold coffee. “There really is a guy named Johnson Howard in Fordmill, and as far as I can tell, he did kill his wife almost the same way as Victor did his lady. Ready for the big punchline of the night?”
Curson was ready for almost anything.
“Guess what Johnson Howard got arrested for prior to turning pro murderer?”
“Thrill me.”
“Fraud and forgery. He forged autographs. Celebrity signatures. You know those documents signed by old presidents or dead astronauts or pop stars or movie people? Johnson was the Monet of his particular form of Impressionism. When he was nailed, a fake John Lennon was grabbing five to six grand, blind. He also helped forge those so-called “vintage” movie posters in a year where a big King Kong sheet could snare sixty thousand dollars at a perfectly reputable auction at Christie’s.”
“Point being?”
“A guy like that could make up anything in the world and a suggestable nutcase like Victor would buy it—at least so far as using it as an excuse.”
Curson shook his head. “Jeez. Would you prefer to just execute him in the cell right now?”
“That would be illegal. Like smoking in the building.”
“You don’t think your feelings about Michelina helped, uh, contour your attack in there?”
“Sure it did. I’ll admit that to you because I love you, and you’re my partner, and I don’t want you to eat two fights in one night. I’m entitled to be angry when fucksticks desecrate the memory of my dead wife. Now he just gets flushed into the system that’ll ultimately execute him for murder. So I don’t have to kill him right now, because he’ll suffer more this way.”
Curson tried to imagine Victor telling his tale to another convict, infecting someone new with the fiction. “Why did you say to Victor that his little monsters were from outer space?”
Janeway shrugged. “I was pissed off. It just jumped into my mouth. It was no less reasonable than the sewage Victor was excreting.” He collected the crime scene photos, noticing that Victor’s cigarettes had been left behind. But for two mangled smokes, the killer had pretty much killed the pack, which was headed for the personal effects box. “Why are you hanging around, Dion? Isn’t it safe for you to go home yet?”
“It’s okay. New day and all that.” Curson slung his jacket.
“See if you can knock up Sondra when you two make up.”
“Is that your way of wrapping on a lighter note? I still have one more question.”
“I am gravid with expectation.” Janeway’s “deadpan face” was truly a hoot.
“Leo, do you have any idea what getting a vasectomy involves?”
Janeway cracked a smile. “Whoa—don’t tell me that fucker’s got you going, now.”
“No, I was thinking maybe Victor had one, it didn’t take, and maybe he concocted this whole thing to set himself up for an insanity plea for murdering his girlfriend in a crime of passion.”
“Works for me. Want me to check it out?”
“No. I will.”
“Kiss Sondra and tell her I’ll see her soon.”
Curson bid his partner good night and left, feeling bad about lying to Leo. He wanted to know about the vasectomy for himself.
Oddly, Janeway also felt bad, about lying. But it was late, and no one was watching, and a sniff of curiosity could safely be indulged right now. With much the same queer thrill he had experienced upon tasting Marisole’s unborn child, Janeway retrieved Victor’s smokes, and with long, multi-jointed, black-taloned fingers, lit up his very first cigarette.
David J. Schow is a multiple–award-winning American writer of ten novels, ten short story collections, comics (John Carpenter’s Tales of Science Fiction—“The Standoff” and “HELL”), movies (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red), television (Masters of Horror, Mob City, Creepshow), and nonfiction (The Outer Limits Companion, The Art of Drew Struzan). He can be seen on various DVDs as expert witness or documentarian on everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon to Psycho to I, Robot. Thanks to him, the word “splatterpunk” has been in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2002. Google him.
FADED ROSES
KAREN JOY FOWLER
Thirty-two sixth graders from Holmes Elementary lined the rails that protected the glass of the Gorilla Room from fingerprints. Two of them were eating their lunches. Sixteen had removed some item from their lunch bags and were throwing them instead of eating them: their teacher paid no attention. Five were whispering about a sixth who fiddled with the locked knob on the workroom as if she didn’t hear. Five were discussing the fabulous Michael K.’s eighty-two-point game last night, and three were looking at the gorillas. Anders approached one of these three. It was part of his job. He was better at the other parts.
“We have a mixture of lowland and mountain gorillas,” he told the boy in the baseball cap. The boy did not respond. That suited Anders fine. “I know which is which,” he continued, “because they’re my gorillas. Now, some experts argue the noses are different or the mountain gorilla’s hair is longer, but I’ve studied the matter and never seen that.”
There were thirteen gorillas inside the exhibit. Five sat on rocks at the back. One baby played with a tire swing, batting it with her feet and turning an occasional somersault through the center. One stared in contemplative concentration at nothing. Four alternated through a variety of grooming arrangements. One nibbled on the peeled end of a stick. One surveyed all the others. It was a dignified scene. Sullen. Reserved. Moody. Shy. These were some of the words commonly applied over the years to gorillas. They had none of the joie de vivre of chimps. Gorillas were not clowns. It took a dignified, reserved person to appreciate them. Perhaps it took a little loneliness. And Anders had that.
The boy pointed over the rail. “That one looks really mean.” Anders did not have to follow the finger to know which gorilla the boy meant.
A lowland gorilla. Gargantua the Great. “Paul du Chaillu was probably the first white man to see gorillas,” Anders told the boy. “He tracked them and shot them and came back to France and told stories about their ferocity. Made him look brave. Made his books sell. Barnum did the same thing with his circus gorillas. He knew people would pay more to be scared than to be moved.” Beyond the glass, Gargantua swiveled his huge head. The teeth were permanently exposed, but the eyes, directed obliquely left, said something else. Anders was proud of those eyes.
“That gorilla there, well, an angry sailor poured nitric acid on him. The sailor’d lost his job and wanted to get even with the importer. The acid damaged the muscles on the gorilla’s face, so he always looks like he’s snarling. It’s the only expression he can make.”
A storm of peanut shells hit the glass. Anders identified the culprit and took him by the arm. Anders did not raise his voice. “I was telling a story about the big gorilla in the corner,” he said to the second boy. “This will interest you. He was raised by Mrs. Lintz, an Englishwoman, and he lived in her house in Brooklyn until he got too big. He may look fierce, but he was always terrified of thunder. One night there was a thunderstorm. Mrs. Lintz woke up to find a four-hundred-pound gorilla huddled on the foot of her bed, sobbing.”
There were perhaps six children paying attention to Anders now. Somewhere an elephant trumpeted. “They don’t look at us,” one boy complained, and a girl in a plaid shirt asked if they had names.
“Actually we have three gorillas who were raised as pets by Englishwomen,” Anders said. “John Daniel. And Toto, too, the fat one there looking for fleas. And Gargantua, whose real name is Buddy. Gorillas don’t look at anyone directly and they don’t like to be stared at themselves. Very unsuited to zoo life. The first gorillas brought to this country died within weeks. The gorillas who lived in private homes with mothers instead of keepers did better.”
Toto yawned. Her eyes closed as her mouth opened. She smacked her lips when the yawn was over. She was the newest of the gorillas. Anders had added her last year. It was harder to love Toto, but Anders did. Anders had learned everything he could about his gorillas and he knew that Toto was used to being loved. Spoiled and prone to five-hundred-pound tantrums, Toto had terrorized her way out of her first home. When her mother, a Mrs. Hoyt, saw that she could no longer control Toto, Toto was sold to a zoo, but Mrs. Hoyt came along also. “Toto was bought as a bride for Buddy,” Anders said. “She was raised in Cuba, where she had her own pet. A cat.”
Anders had ten children listening now. Did any of them have cats? Anders doubted it. And there were other indulgences. “When Toto came to the U.S. she brought along a trousseau. Sweaters, dresses, and socks,” Anders said, “all with the name Totito in embroidery. The papers loved it. The future Mrs. Gargantua. But Toto threw her bed at Buddy when they first met, and her attitude never softened.”
The prospective mother-in-law had done much to sabotage the union. “She’s only a nine-year-old child,” Mrs. Hoyt had said. “What do you expect?”
