The Voices in Our Heads (28 page)

“I wrote the journal, Mr. M. I wrote it just now in the bathroom. Will y’all read it? It ain’t as good as the Derrida paper, but there’s still some fumes left over like you said there’d be.”

He handed Ben the paper. It read,

“Write about someone who has influenced you. Keep it real.”

Mr. M.

That funny motherfucker

That is all-ways doing some thing or

Saying some thing off the wall

But the transformation of his virgin

eye’s of seen thing that I have seen

supported me in time when no one did

But the loyalty, and kindness suddenly

Take over me

Because I am grateful for having

Him in my life

He help me see things in writing that

I have not thought I can see

The combination of him and my life

Is creating a meaning for living

The consumption of my error and

Mistakes make me try harder

If I was not reading or writing for

Him I’ll be in the hood

He make me try harder when I give

Up

Mr. M. to me is like my older-brother

That never fucked me over

Being in his class give me the

Satisfaction of happiness in my dark

Heart, and give me the motivation to go on in life.

A lump formed in Ben’s throat and his eyes welled up. Those last five lines, God, they were killer. He fought it a bit. You weren’t supposed to cry in front of your students, he’d read that somewhere. He looked up, about to mumble a sheepish “thanks,” and he noticed something was different. Stephen had moved closer, right to the edge of the other side of the desk, and there was more. In a flash Ben was reminded of that old card trick where the guy dealt them down in a vertical line, like dominoes on top of one another, and while you were distracted, turning up the front one for a look-see, he was palming a card. It felt exactly like that, in fact, but the distraction had been the poem.

And Stephen wasn’t palming any card. He had taken off his gloves.

He reached across the table, grabbed both sides of Ben’s head, and rubbed off the tears at the outer corners of both eyes with his thumbs. Then he jumped back a few steps and reached into his pocket.

He pulled out the half-pill with Ben’s tooth grooves running down its center.

It took a full second for it to compute.

“So you’ve always been literate,” Ben gasped. He was trying not to hyperventilate, and not quite succeeding.

“Of course,” Stephen said. “But in my neighborhood, you get beat up for having a brain. And with Daddy gone and Mommy locked up, I got no one to protect me.”

He raised the pill to his lips.

“No!” Ben said. “Please, God, no!”

“You didn’t even come close to beating these first thirty seconds, Marcus. Still sitting behind that desk, thinking the world is going to somehow take care of you. Snooze, you lose.”

He put the pill in his mouth, and swallowed it whole. A convulsion shook him. Another, and then there was a nearly imperceptible crackling sound, like butter in a hot skillet. It was Stephen’s eyes, filling with blood beneath their surfaces. They went ruby red, and he looked off to the side a bit, fingers splayed out. His voice was velvety, and there was an echo behind it.

“Oh, yes. This will be easier than I had imagined.”

“Stephen!”

He slowly turned and observed Ben Marcus as if he were a spec of dust.

“Yes, Marcus. You have your new thirty seconds. Also your last. What do you want to know before you become a part of the new history?”

Ben was crying again, heavier, all wet breath and dread.

“Why me?”

“Because you are the only one who knows.”

“So why didn’t you kill me Friday afternoon?”

Stephen smiled softly.

“No witnesses. Everyone was gone.”

“I don’t get it. You
want
to take the blame for my murder? You’ll go to jail.”

“Exactly. Where else do you think I can so quickly amass an army?”

Ben slammed the table with his fists, and spittle flew out of his mouth when he spoke.

“An army? I gave you life, a chance, what do you need an army for, goddammit?”

Stephen threw back his head and laughed. Then he raised his arms, palms up, fingers aimed at the east and west walls. To Ben’s horror, Stephen wasn’t just making his voice echo and double like a god, he was also levitating about an inch off the floor. His arms were still raised and he lowered his deep red gaze down to Ben.

“I need an army, Mr. Marcus, to take on this.” He slowly looked side to side. “This broken, damaged lie, this prison in poor disguise, the Tanners of the world, the Marcuses.”

Ben pounded the table again, this time so hard the bottom of his body reacted with it, bringing his knees crashing against the bottom of the metal drawer.

“You lump me in with the Tanners? What the fuck, Stephen, how dare you!”

Stephen stopped levitating, and his voice lost its double, making his words that much more venomous.

“How dare I? You once gave a lesson to us on slavery, trying to get us riled up with the transparent purpose of rallying us behind you for a cheap liberal’s moment with your claim that it was amazing the white masters could allow their own children to be breast-fed by black mammies only then to beat those same women that very evening. But then you have the brazen audacity to simultaneously say to our faces without batting an eye,
to our faces,
that you moved to a suburb so Max could get a better education. You teach in the ’hood, Mr. Marcus, taking black money to reinforce an uneven distribution of knowledge only the wealthy can benefit from. Charter school to suburb, breast milk to whip. Or is the analogy too difficult for you to fathom?”

Ben spoke through his teeth.

“So you’re calling me a racist?”

“No, Marcus, I’m calling you ‘dead’ in about ten more seconds.”

“But why this way? Why not tear open my chest to get to my body fluids? Rip out my fucking heart?”

Stephen laughed again.

“How pedestrian of you. The Human Candle is much more effective in this paradigm, and you should know that. It looks a lot more religious.”

Ben reached out both his hands.

“But you’ll die, Stephen.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “In one year. Really, it’s almost too long a time period for what must be accomplished, but an extra month or so of human sacrifice won’t damage the vision.” He grinned an accordion of teeth under those slanted red eyes. “Oh, Marcus. I don’t think you could even begin to imagine how many I’m willing to kill. The tally will be staggering, my death the final stanza. It’s the only effective way to be remembered. Goodbye, Mr. Marcus.”

The new Stephen Wagner put his palm up next to his cheek like a stop sign and brought the fingers down in a little one-two, bye-bye.

A stink rose into the air, burning hair and torched skin, bad rubber mixed with candied pork, and the pain was immeasurable. Ben pressed both hands to the top of his scalp, and liquefied skin squelched and bubbled up around his fingers, dripping down over his wrists in steaming rivulets. Both ears curled down, scrolling to the jaw in little ringlet spirals as if some invisible jackknife was stripping off tree bark, and Stephen started jumping up and down, in his ghetto voice, yelling at the top of his lungs, “I kilt ’im, I gots ’im, mutherfucker, mutherfucker, ha, ha!” and students poured in from the hallway and the law academy next door, and they made a loose ring at the edges of the room, hands up at their mouths in disbelief, and they watched Stephen Wagner jumping up and down flicking on and off the lighter he’d brought out of his pocket.

Ben’s elbows had steam-jelled, then hardened to solidified pools of human wax, locking him in place, nodules and drip runners spread and dried in rough circles on the desk surrounding the contact points, and his terrified gaze sagged inward. When the lower rims gave, his left eyeball erupted in a burst of meaty stringy fluid that sprayed onto the desk, beading and hardening, the right orb fusing and dissolving to a bloody tar, oozing sidesaddle along the deteriorating cheek sagging down in a gradation of marbled ridges.

And when the run-off had worked its way down to the mouth area, Ben’s jowls folding, lips drawn down in a clownish pout, nose disintegrating and swimming off to both sides, Stephen brought his dance closer to his victim, not for the sake of intimidation, but rather, to fit better in the “shot.” He danced and whooped and hooted and howled, flicking the lighter on and off as proof of the first miracle of the new age: the teacher who melted right before your eyes, the candle that burned with no visible flames.

None of the students jumped in. None of them thought to grab a hoodie off a hook and throw it over Ben’s head, get water, call an administrator.

But five of them got it on their cell phones.

“The Falcon,” first published in
Kaleidotrope
, Winter Issue 2012 (www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/winter-2012/the-falcon-by-michael-aronovitz/).

“The Echo,” first published in Nameless (Spring 2013).

“The Green-Eyed Breath Vampire with the Cheap Striped Tuxedo and Monocle Tattoo,” first published in
Polluto Magazine
, Witchfinders vs. the Evil Red Issue (Dog Horn Publishing, 2012).

“The Puddles,” first published in
Weird Fiction Review
#1 (Fall 2010) as “Puddles”.

“The Rain Barrel,” previously unpublished.

“Prequel,” previously unpublished.

“The Sculptor,” first published in
Weird Fiction Review
#2 (Fall 2011).

“The Gravekeeper,” first published in
Schlock Webzine,
30 January 2013 (as “Grave Talk”) (www.schlock.co.uk/pb/wp_5f6591f1/wp_5f6591f1.html).

“The Soldier,” first published in
Turks Head Review
, January 2011 (turksheadreview.tumbler.com/post/2917821262/the-soldier).

“The Addict,” first published in
Black Petals
#55 (April 2011) (blackpetalsks.tripod.com/blackpetalsissue55/id14.html).

“The Shape,” first published in
Black Petals
#56 (July 2011) (blackpetalsks.tripod.com/blackpetalsissue56/id17.html).

“The Trickster,” previously unpublished.