The Best of Lucius Shepard (53 page)

The
soldiers had told him they would return by dusk, and six of them were true to
their word—the captain, they said, had been held up in town. The old man could
see that they were eager to be at the women again, but he begged and cajoled,
and on beholding the sumptuous table he had laid, they could not reject his hospitality.
Loosening their belts, they set to with hearty appetites, washing down every
mouthful with liberal drafts of wine.

Oh,
the old man was happy, he was sad, he was beset by storms of emotion, knowing
that peace was soon to be his. Just as had happened in the kitchen, it was as
if everything were in sympathy with his poignant moods. The room was giddy with
light. The glaze on the veal shimmered, the varnished wood rippled like a
grainy dark river, the chandelier glittered, and the silver lightning bolts
twinkled on the collars of the doomed men as if accumulating the runoff of
their vital charge. Three of the men keeled over almost immediately; two others
managed to stagger to their feet, groping for their sidearms as they fell. The
sixth actually succeeded in drawing his weapon. He fired twice, but the bullets
ricocheted off the floor and he toppled facedown at the feet of the old man,
who finished him with a knife stroke across the throat, switched off the
lights, and went to wait for the captain.

Waiting
grew long, and several times he nearly decided to go ahead with his plan; but
at last he heard a motor, followed by footsteps in the foyer. “Uwe!” called the
captain. “Horst!” The old man flattened against the wall, saw a shadow moving
past, and swung his knife. Some sound must have given his presence away, for
the shadow turned and the knife penetrated the captain’s shoulder, not—as he
had intended—the back. There was a shriek, and then the scrabbling of the
captain trying to drag himself away. The old man eased along the wall, unable
to locate the captain, not daring to switch on the lights for fear of posing a
target. But darkness had always been his friend, and he was unconcerned. He
held still and heard the captain’s whistling breath and felt a joy so rich that
it seemed to tinge the darkness with a shade of crimson.

“Herr
Steigler?” said the captain. “Is that you?”

Ah!
The old man spotted a lump of shadow huddled by a chair.

The
captain fired at random—three distinct spearpoints of flame. “Why are you doing
this?” Voice atremble with desperation. “Who
are
you?”

I
am Red Jack, the old man said to himself. I am fear made flesh.

“Who
are you?” the captain repeated, and fired again.

The
old man inched closer; he could make out the shape of the gun in the captain’s
hand.

“For
God’s sake!” said the captain.

Moving
a step closer, the old man kicked the gun. Heard it skitter across the floor.
He kneeled beside the captain, who had slumped onto his back, and pricked his
throat with the knife.

“Please,”
said the captain.

With
his free hand, the old man felt for the pulse in the captain’s neck. It was
strong and rapid, and he kept his finger there, liking the heady sense of
potency it transmitted. “Evil, Captain,” he said. “Do you remember?”

“Herr
Steigler! Please! What are you doing?”

“Killing
you.”

“But
why? What have we done to you?” The captain tensed, and the old man pressed
harder with the knife.

“You
have a stringy neck, Captain,” he said. “Necks should be soft and smooth. I may
have to saw with the edge a little to do the job right.” He prolonged the
moment, exulting in the quiver transmitted along the blade by the man’s
straining muscles.

“Please,
Herr Steigler!”

“I
am not Herr Steigler,” said Red Jack. “I am mystery.” Then he nicked the
carotid artery and jerked his hand away before the first jet could escape the
wound. Male blood did not excite him.

*
* * *

The women rushed forward when
he opened the basement door, but on seeing the bloody knife, they shrank back,
their faces going slack in a most familiar way. He had waited upstairs for an
hour after killing the captain, letting the hungers of his demon subside; but
despite that, they looked so vulnerable with their rags and bruises, it took
all his self-control to keep from attacking them. “I have freed you,” he said
at last. “Now you must free me.”

He
led them to his room, lit the candelabra, and explained what must be done. To
the butcher’s daughter he handed his written instructions, detailing the depth
of each incision and the precise order in which they should be made. Then he
removed his clothing to display the bizarre template he had sketched on his
body. The women were horror-struck, and the butcher’s daughter flung down the
papers as if they were vile to the touch. “I cannot do this,” she said.

“You
swore,” he said to the schoolteacher.

She
said nothing, fixing him with her black stare.

“Do
you know who I am?” he asked them. “I am the Ripper! Red Jack!”

The
name was lost on them.

“I
have killed women!” He pointed to the papers. “Killed them exactly in the
manner I have described. You must give me justice.” They edged away. “You
swore!” he said, hearing the petulance in his voice.

They
turned to leave, and he clutched at the schoolteacher’s arm. “You must help
me!” he cried. Then he realized he was still holding the knife. He gripped it
more tightly. In his mind’s eye he saw her belly sliced open, its red fruit
spilling into his hands. But before he could strike, she reached out and took
the knife. Took it! Like a mother forbidding her child a dangerous toy. His
fingers uncurled from the hilt as if she had worked magic to calm him.

He
fell to his knees, eyes brimming with tears. “Please don’t abandon me,” he
said. “Help me, please!”

The
schoolteacher regarded him soberly, then looked to the butcher’s daughter. “Can
you manage it?” she said.

“No.”
The butcher’s daughter lowered her eyes.

“Look
at him.” The schoolteacher forced the butcher’s daughter to face the old man.
“This is what he most desires. What he needs. We owe him our lives, and if you
can find the strength, you must do as he asks...no matter what toll it takes.”

“I
can’t!” cried the butcher’s daughter, turning away; but the schoolteacher
grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her, and said, “Do you see his pain? He is
an old, mad creature torn by some cancer, one you must excise. If we deny him
release, we condemn him to far worse than the knife.”

The
butcher’s daughter stared at him for long seconds, and her face hardened as if
she had seen therein some blameful thing that would make the chore endurable.
“I will try,” she said.

Babbling
his thanks, he lay down upon the bed and told them to fasten the straps about
his wrists and ankles. As they cinched them tight, he felt a trickle of fear,
but when they had done, he knew a vast sense of relief.

“Stand
at the foot of the bed,” he said to the schoolteacher. “And you”—he nodded at
one of the farm wives—”stand beside her”—he nodded at the butchers
daughter—”and hold the instructions in a good light.” He positioned the two
remaining women on the other side of the bed.

“Do
you wish to pray?” asked the schoolteacher.

“No
god would hear me,” he said; then, to the butcher’s daughter, “I will scream,
but you must not heed the screams. They will be merely reflex and no signal of
a desire for you to stop.” He gazed up at the women ringing the bed. In the
flickering light, with their widened eyes and parted lips, their secret flesh
gleaming through rents in their dresses, they looked like the souls of his
victims beatified by death, yet still sensual and sullied after years of
phantom life. Eerie wings of shadow played across their faces. He drew a deep
breath and said, “I am ready.”

He
had steeled himself against the pain of the first incision, but even so he was
astonished by its enormity. His body arched, his tendons corded, and hearing
himself scream, he was further astonished by how shrill and feminine was the
voice of his agony. Pain became a medium in which he floated, too large to
understand, and he knew only that it contained him, that he had gone forever
inside it. Biting her lower lip, the butcher’s daughter wielded the knife with
marvelous deftness, and he could tell by the thin, hot trickles down his thighs
that she was cutting neither too deeply nor too haphazardly, that he would
survive the completion of the design. Once his eyes filmed over with redness
and he nearly lost consciousness, but the schoolteacher’s unswerving gaze
centered him and pulled him back from oblivion. Reflected in her eyes, he saw
the crimson light of his dying, and—growing numb to pain, able again to conjure
whole thoughts—he reckoned her stern beauty a gift, a beacon set to guide him
through the act.

Finally
the butcher’s daughter straightened and let fall the knife; on beholding the
full extent of her work, she covered her face with her stained hands. Two of
the farm wives had averted their eyes, and the other stood agape, her hand
outstretched as if in a gesture of gentle restraint. Only the schoolteacher was
unmoved. She engaged his stare unflinchingly, her voluptuous mouth firmed into
cruel lines: the image of judgment.

“Lift
my head!” he gasped as their lovely faces began to waver and recede, like
angels passing ahead of him into the accumulating dark. It seemed he could feel
an evacuation taking place, a lightening, a lessening of perverse cravings and
violent urges, and he wanted to learn what manner of demon, what beast or
wraith, was crawling from his guts. He needed sight of it to validate the
fullness of his atonement, to assure himself that he would have a niche not in
heaven, but in some less terrifying corner of hell, where he might from time to
time secure a few moments’ grace from the process of damnation. But his
demon—if it existed—must have been invisible or otherwise proof against the
eye, for when he looked down into the great cavity of the wound, he felt only
the sick despair with which his every attempt to seek salvation had been met,
and saw there nothing more demonic than his red, wrong life pulsing quick to
the last.

<>

*
* * *

BEAST
OF THE HEARTLAND

Mears has a dream the night
after he fought the Alligator Man. The dream begins with words: “In the
beginning was a dark little god with glowing red eyes . . .” And then, there it
stands, hovering in the blackness of Mears’ hotel room, a twisted mandrake root
of a god, evil and African, with ember eyes and limbs like twists of leaf
tobacco. Even after it vanishes, waking Mears, he can feel those eyes burning
inside his head, merged into a single red pain that seems as if it will go on
throbbing forever. He wonders if he should tell Leon about the pain—maybe he
could give Mears something to ease it—but he figures this might be a bad idea.
Leon might cut and run, not wanting to be held responsible should Mears keel
over, and there Mears would be: without a trainer, without anyone to coach him
for the eye exams, without an accomplice in his blindness. It’s not a priority,
he decides.

To
distract himself, he lies back and thinks about the fight. He’d been doing
pretty well until the ninth. Staying right on the Cuban’s chest, mauling him in
the corners, working the body. The Cuban didn’t like it to the body. He was a
honey-colored kid a couple of shades lighter than Mears and he punched like a
kid, punches that stung but that didn’t take your heart like the punches of a
man. Fast, though. Jesus, he was fast! As the fight passed into the middle
rounds, as Mears tired, the Cuban began to slip away, to circle out of the haze
of ring light and vanish into the darkness at the corners of Mears’ eyes, so
that Mears saw the punches coming only at the last second, the wet-looking red
blobs of the gloves looping in over his guard. Then, in the ninth, a left he
never saw drove him into the turnbuckle, a flurry of shots under the ribs
popped his mouthpiece halfway out and another left to the temple made him
clinch, pinning the Cuban’s gloves against his sides.