Dark Terrors 3 (31 page)

But he knew already. Spend a few weeks anywhere, and whispers inevitably churned like an undertow to draw out seekers of relief from the torments of existence. They came looking precisely like this Jared: miserable with hope, before the court of last resort.

“I take souls, gentlemen,” he began, sparing himself the need of listening to questions heard a hundred thousand times already. “I’m no devil, I wreak no sulphurous damnation. A humble peddler, am I, a tinker of flesh and spirit. A dying trade, but all I know to practice, and ironically, more needed today than ever before. I take souls. They’re never missed, for with them goes the capacity to miss them. It’s not unlike the snipping of a giant nerve that connects one to a gangrenous appendage. And just as the amputated limb may be burnt without bringing further suffering in the flames, so too will that troublesome soul wither quite on its own, unfelt. I take souls, and give peace in return.”

“And what do you do with them then?” asked the skeptic.

“None of your bloody business.”

Hieronymus Beadle sipped his wine, folded hands over belly, and watched them argue. Once he’d provided his services for kings and princes, sultans and emirs, who’d feared themselves in danger of attack by malign sorcery. They’d paid him fabulous sums for the safekeeping of the stuff of their hearts and dreams, until enemies could be rooted out and destroyed. Quite the comedown, this, for so few believed in true magic anymore, motivated only by hopes of an end to suffering. He refused to blame them. It had been a cruel century, overall.

The argument was over, and Jared unswayed.

“Can you...do it here?” he asked. “Now?”

“Good heavens, no. Don’t be absurd. Souls can’t be handed over like wallets. They can’t be stolen. They must be surrendered willingly, because they cling to the flesh they know, and must be coaxed and bullied into quitting the familiar. Rather exhausting, the process, but then, peace must often be preceded by a war.”

“And is there any other...cost?”

“To you? Oh no. The overhead’s already been paid.” Hieronymus Beadle now regarded the skeptic. “And you, sir? Is there naught I can do for you? Because if you’ll pardon my bluntness, I caught quite the potent whiff of soul’s gangrene from you, as well, a few minutes ago. Serge, was that the name? Indeed it was.”

Mr. Beadle watched him wriggle on temptation’s hook.

Some days he felt there to be no honor left in what he did, what had once been a noble trade, suffering no master but his own soul and the short-term dictates of royalty. Never had he dreamt back then that he would one day dance to corporate tunes played by wealthy pipers in their steel towers, overlooking kingdoms of rust and ruin. Serving the beasts they had created, this new generation of city fathers paid bounties in hopes of cleansing each malignant landscape of those who did not fit its dream of what it should be. Purity had always struck him as such a bland and petty goal, yet they worked so tirelessly to achieve it.

He told himself he was still providing a valuable service. In such an age as this, wasn’t one’s soul a liability, after all?

“Sweet peace, good sir?” he said to the skeptic.

“I don’t suppose you can...remove the gangrene, and leave the limb, can you?”

“I fear not. It’s to be all or nothing. Rather like severing one’s spinal cord.”

The man shook his head, as if it took some effort. So close; so very close. Still, Hieronymus Beadle was heartened to see one slip through his grasp. Hope for the future, and all.

“Go to hell,” the man said, then clung to his Jared in final appeal, which fell upon deaf ears and a heart already starting to scale.

The next morning was the first in more than two years that I woke up alone. Voodoo, curled in a black and white ball at the end of the bed, didn’t count. I’ve often envied the way cats can sleep with someone, yet still sleep alone.

I laid my hand on Jared’s side of the bed, then stood before the window, staring out at streets and signs, at other buildings and other people who stared in turn, all of us framed alone and dead-eyed in our windows like portraits left subtly incomplete.

Jared. He was out there somewhere. Or maybe he was now Jared in name only, no longer the real Jared who delighted in obscure movies and liked his chest bitten and drew apocalyptic anti-heroes making their ways through worlds that had been leveled around them by warheads or disease or neglect. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t yet come home, maybe never would. He’d become his own character.

I moved away from the window and lingered before a cluster of his sketches inspired by the title character of El Topo, the movie that had brought us together. Slim-legged, in black, wearing a rider coat that hit him above the knee, this was your archetypical wandering gunslinger, rendered in sharp, scratchy strokes of Jared’s pencil. Mostly he roamed the starkest deserts and canyons and blasted city streets. But in one he stood contorted in anguish as bullets splattered his blood onto a wall behind him, already shaded with stains from corrosive rain, while the shadow he cast upon it stood in contrast, the essence of balance and calm.

There was nothing like this in the movie, although I could guess what Jared had been drawing inspiration from: the scene in which El Topo has met the first of four Master Gunfighters, a man who can no longer be wounded because he’s learned to render his flesh impervious to gunfire.

“I hardly bleed,” he explains. “I do not resist the bullets. I let them pass through the emptiness of my heart.”

When Jared and I watched the movie, I suspect that each of us was too afraid to tell the other how deeply we connected with that line. Wishing we could learn such a trick, and teach it to friends and allies, and others whom we loved, so we could at least sharpen our edge against a city that had decided it could do without us.

Our only regret being that, for some, we’d still be too late.

When Serge died, killing him might not have been the initial intent, but things like that so easily get out of hand, it may as well have been premeditated. He was cornered one evening near the mouth of an alley by some cock fascists, four of them, one for each of the cardinal points, so there was no direction to run. Their fun was strictly casual for the first few minutes, using only their fists. Then they got serious. Started in on him with a length of pipe that turned up in the alley.

Somebody who later watched the police inside the yellow-tape corral said that the homicides stood around with coffee, joking over Serge’s body. They already knew who he was; a couple of the uniforms on the scene had rousted him with some younger guy a few days earlier, after we’d had an argument. They’d been in a car near his favorite coffeehouse. Now one of the homicides squatted down, inspected Serge’s pipe-broken jaw, used a latex-gloved hand to waggle its huge, grotesque skew, and said, “Looks like this cocksucker just didn’t know when to say when.”

Four years later his murder remains unsolved. Infer from that what you will.

When newer friends, people who’d never met him, would chance across a picture of us together and ask whatever became of Serge, I usually said he’d moved back down to Tampa. Couldn’t stand the cold winters here, the way they seem to start in October and end in April. Used to be I could tell they knew I was lying, that they’d caught the throb of some raw nerve that had escaped cauterization.

Eventually, while I’d told Jared the truth, no one else suspected otherwise.

Sometimes I go scratching at the wound, to make sure I’ve not forgotten how to feel it. But I have to dig very far down, because only the most deeply concealed nerves still feel flayed and raw, like the tendrils of sea anemones scraped with a wire brush.

The rest, my public nerves, must’ve become as encrusted as the city.

I used to think this was something to aspire to.

Used to think it was what I wanted...so that somebody else would be forced to look me in the eye someday, and tell me how I’d changed, except he wouldn’t speak it like an accusation; rather, with admiration, for all I could withstand.

A few afternoons later I came home from the video store, and he was back. I’d had days to anticipate and dread and rehearse the moment, but had wasted them, too fearful of even contemplating it.

He must’ve heard me on the stairs, was there waiting as soon as I came through the door. He hadn’t forgotten how to smile, but it seemed a reflex, as if he might’ve forgotten why he’d want to.

“So, it’s...done?” I asked.

He nodded.

“What’s it like?”

“It’s...different. But different isn’t bad.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Hurt...pain...those really aren’t part of my vocabulary now. So I’ll just say no.” Jared seemed profoundly calm and thoughtful, and when I asked how Hieronymus Beadle had done this thing to him, he recounted it as if telling me about something that had happened to someone else that he’d heard about secondhand.

“He took me to a warehouse, I think it must’ve been. All you have to do, really, is look in his eye, but that’s where any sense of time falls apart. I know I walked around some afterward, but I still don’t know how long I’ve been gone.

“You just look in his eye, and he won’t let you look away, no matter how much you want to. He’s taking everything you hate most about yourself, and that scares you about whatever might be ahead, and turning it right back at you. Taking you through it all, but a hundred times worse than you dreamed it could be...until you just ...give up. Then he kisses you, and it feels like he could suck away every breath you ever breathed. And then you sleep. Or I did.

“But I think it’s solved a lot of the problems I was having. I think I’ll be easier to live with now.”

Jared shrugged, turned away to leave me wondering what life with him could possibly be like now. What life might’ve been like elsewhere, in a place that never existed but we’d spoken of just the same, where bigots were few and the diseases all had cures.

We used to joke about it, our own private Israel, a queer homeland.

But on second thought, that’d just make it easier for all the righteous fuckers, who brought picket signs to funerals, to raise their own air force and deploy bombers.

I followed Jared toward the bedroom, where he’d disappeared, and halfway down the hall I stooped to pick up a pair of feathers. Small and pale gray, they took me back to that day at the beanery when Jared had told me of the man he needed to find, and how he’d fed crumbs to pigeons, asking why they were so hated by so many.

The bedroom floor was dusted with them, so many feathers a pillow might have been ripped open. But pillows don’t bleed. Live birds do. Feathers and tatters of flesh lay clumped about the room. Wet pawprints were tracked everywhere, while here and there larger heaps of meat were still intact enough to recognize, with bent wings and scaly stick legs. The tiny strewn organs glistened bright red, the pocks of shit a chalky white.

Jared was sitting in the middle of the mess, before the open window, through which a cold autumn breeze was blowing, scattering feathers like chaff.

“Look what I can do,” Jared said, as he watched Voodoo burrow his fangs deeper into the cavity of a shredded abdomen. “Nothing. I can do nothing.”

One reason I’ve always enjoyed talking with Danielle at the video store is her accent. She originally came from Alabama, and there’s something about a Southern accent that can infuse sorrow with enough whimsy to make it tolerable. She once told me that lesbians didn’t get beaten up in her town, the same as boys were, because they presented too keen a challenge to most red-blooded hetero guys, who knew they had the proper cure between their legs.

“So I started carrying this big old dildo in my purse, about two sizes past horse,” she’d told me. “And whenever one of these guys’d tell me I didn’t know what I was missing, I’d pull out Mr. Ed and tell the guy if he could top this, he was on.”