ACT II

“At last the new moon had come. The night was pitch dark, and promises to the dead are sacred and must be kept.”

—Count Carl von Cosel (1877–1952)

radiologist, romantic, and necrophile

CHAPTER 8

Once upon a time, the child went missing. Every year the boy’s mother brought him to the hospital, so that he might see where his father performed cosmetic surgery and where he taught medical students his techniques. It was quite some time before the parents noticed that the quiet child was gone.

They looked up and down the halls, in storage rooms, in cabinets full of medical supplies, and the search party grew. Only one set of doors remained.

“No.”

“He can’t possibly be . . .”

After three hours, they found little Simon in the classroom, sitting among the severed heads, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard the child was amazed at the words that came from his mouth.

What had happened in those hours? Had the boy entered the room, found the dozens of heads—each resting in an aluminum roaster pan, to collect the drippings; each veiled with a white cloth; all laid out on tables covered in plastic sheets of lavender, knives and hooks set, neatly, like cutlery, everything arranged like a summer cookout? Had one of the cloths fallen away like a terrible curtain? Had Simon fled, hiding himself, only to tiptoe back out to meet his new friends? They could only speculate, as they looked on the child. He had arranged the heads in a circle on the floor. He sat in the middle, holding one head, an elderly woman’s, and whispered reassurances to her as he ran a comforting hand over her hair. His hands were caked and dirty, as a little boys’ hands often are, but also glistening and red.

When his parents saw him, they were speechless. His mother picked him up, saying, “Simon, what have you done?” She quickly explained to her son that the heads were donated and used by students to practice facial surgeries and there was nothing to be afraid of.

“But I’m not afraid, Mother,” the boy said. “They needed to talk to someone.”

His mother carried him from the room, and he hugged her, leaving little handprints of gore on her dress.

Later, Simon would write out elaborate stories in crayon—one for each severed head. But no one understood the meaning of the words. His father threw away all the stories. Something changed that day in the relationship between father and son. There would be half-hearted attempts to convince his boy to enter into the vocation of cosmetic surgery, but from then on, he distanced himself from Simon, spoke of him as little as possible, talked with him even less. He sometimes snuck a look at his child, the way a frustrated writer peaks at a locked drawer where he tossed an embarrassing rough draft, convinced that there is no salvaging the piece, no matter how many redrafts, convinced, in point of fact, that he should give up writing all together and never again create such a thing.

And Simon grew in strangeness and stature.

*   *   *   *   *

See the slipstream, the luminous river of souls flowing in light-particle currents. The silver wraiths. The sepia wraiths. The monochromatic wraiths.

Purgatories run in circles, sometimes rolling on old projector reels. Simon eats popped kettle corn, handfuls of autumnal memories trapped in the salty-sweet taste. He sips from his Thermos. “They’re all dead you know,” Simon says to the Corbies. They all nod silently in the ghost tree. The slipstream. The flicker-picture gateway to the underworld.

Sanctuary. Simon had to think. Reconnect. Simon’s tiny world had only a few safe havens, and the most sacred of them had been violated. So he came here, to his dark, burgundy-upholstered womb, with a pipe-organ heartbeat that soothed his troubled mind. Simon liked the Gateway Theater. It was built in the thirties with a huge auditorium, red curtains and carpeting, pillars, sculpted wall decor, gold and gilt, and that wonderful pipe organ—all semi-restored, slightly tattered, and endearing. Everything was charged with memory and nostalgia, like the treasures in the freezer units at the morgue.

It looks like a theater ought to look, Jane.

The huge, modern multiplexes are no place for our hero, with their crowds and their hyper-kinetic advertisements. All those logos and products, those symbols and signals floating in the air, thought-cancers and subliminal programming. All that media out there, signs and television and radio and the Internet—slogans—spreading, becoming viral, taking on life. Could these memes continue to evolve, these aggressive thoughts? Could they become self-aware? Soft drink jingles coming to life in the air and in our heads, from the constant bombardment of commercial radiation?

What mutations would follow?

Commercials and pop-up windows drove the glass shards into Simon’s brain. He was too sensitive for the blitzkrieg of input, his mind wired for much more subtle subjects, like the dead, like the slow-nuanced body language of rigor mortis.

The Gateway Theater had space and it had darkness. Tonight’s audience consisted of Simon in the back row and one elderly couple in the front. Sometimes there were larger crowds. The specialists would come out. The Silent Film Society held regular showings of ancient cinema, even provided live organ music and the occasional orchestra. Sometimes, they let Simon play the pipe organ.

Simon liked the meditative quality of silent film. These waking dreams rejuvenating his mind.

And what do you think, loveling? Would you find these cinematic relics boring? A cemetery is not an overly exciting place. Nothing much happens there. Still, we infuse it with meaning and emotion, even if we don’t know who’s buried there. We visit in the middle of the night on a dare. We vandalize, sneak about, and make-out. Tell ghost stories. Go apparition hunting. We walk those quiet places and we realize everyone is dead and so we invest an otherwise boring landscape with thrills and moods and a context of rot.

Light and shadow souls, fifteen feet tall, ghost-dance on revolving celluloid. Our hero eats his popcorn.

Not a bad underworld, as underworlds go. Eh, Jane?

Tonight the theater plays the 1920 film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Simon watches the walking dreams, the specter play that the dead actors must perform for eternity. Simon watches the story of the deranged Dr. Caligari and his faithful somnambulist, his sleepwalker. Caligari performs his carnival show, revealing his man in the box—Cesare, always in a trance—who answers the audience’s questions with prophecy, even predicting when audience members will die. Oh, but Dr. Caligari is a wicked creature, squat, even in his top hat, and he uses his hypnotized slave to murder and fulfill those sideshow prophecies. Simon watches as Cesare sleepwalks and kills. Lanky and pale, he’s the second cousin of Edward Scissorhands, stalking streets and sets created by German Expressionists: twisted alleys and impossible buildings, zigzagging lines, doors with no ninety-degree angles—prehistoric prelude to Tim Burton’s mindscape. But the strange somnambulist cannot kill the latest victim given to him by his master, a girl named Jane. The sleepwalker is enchanted with her beauty. The somnambulist carries Jane away, his obsession leading to a chase, a ledge, and a long fall. . . .

“Jane,” Simon whispers in the darkened theater dusty with memories, feeling a pang of empathy for the obsessions of a fellow misfit. Simon himself had been kept in a box, Autopsy Room 6, until his wicked master, the Doctor, demanded he make death predictions.

His Jane was gone, too. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. The charm in the story is in how old fashioned it is.

Jane, erased. The murderers walked free. Dr. Reeves walked free.

“What is Simon going to do about it?” whispers a Corbie.

“Simon-Simon does not do, Simon-Simon only broods,” says another.

“Quiet,” whispers Simon. “You’re only a construct of my imagination.”

“Low blow, dude! Low blow,” say the Corbies. “If we’re constructs, what does that make your friends, the slab-sleepers?”

“Shut up,” hisses Simon, a tear crawling down his cheek. “You’re not even real.”

But were they right?

The doubts and the fears, the fat corpse flies, buzz in Simon’s head and the Corbies do nothing. They are not committed. Simon, with no Dead Water and no Jane, feels the shakes and withdrawal of his preternatural addiction.

On the screen, the poor somnambulist falls, dying for his Jane.

Simon leans forward, arms curled on the seat on front of him, face buried in his arms. He watches the elderly couple. They must be in their late eighties.

They are necking. Not cute, geriatric pecks. They are sucking face—leathery hands and necks and lips and tongues all writhing against each other.

Simon stares.

“Beautiful,” he says, leaning forward. They were old, withered to husks by time, but they did not care. They still had so much passion. Had they always come to this theater? Had they come when it still shined, as children, sharing candy, watching the silent films when they’d just been released? All those decades between the then and the now, all those lost loved ones—maybe they were the only two left who knew what the partner was like when he or she was young, in the before. All those years and here they were, kissing with so much context!—pretext!—wrapped in on one another, two ancient, wrinkled pachyderms mating one last time before marching into the elephant graveyard. Two oceanic dinosaurs, swimming in misery for billions of years thinking they were alone, then finding each other in the calling glow of a lighthouse and embracing one last time before the release of extinction.

Simon’s frown inverts with a hiccup.

“You’re wrong,” he says to the Corbies. Then he reaches inside himself and shakes the ghost tree because it is his tree, his crows. “You’re wrong! Jane is real.”

Jane’s golden eyes had given him peace. She plucked out the glass shards. She smiled to him, squeezed his hand, sighed with his breath, and wrapped a protective arm around him when nasty visions attacked. She showed him the joy of romping in a playground after midnight. He knew her intimately, inside and out, and he loved every detail he exhumed.

“I love you, Jane Doe.”

Compulsion and obsession and passion and mania all fall into place, interlocking with a resounding click. Each element had always been there, disconnected and floating, hidden, in the awkward, passive stew that is Simon, but the skeleton key that is Jane has tripped all the tumblers into place. Something opens inside Simon, something escapes—something from the Dead Water he had been shooting up for years.

Simon smiles like a Jack O’Lantern full of burning opium. He stands in the shade-haunted theater and drains his Thermos empty. That was the last of his stock. On the morrow, he would have to call his contact and procure more absinthe. He would need it to find Jane. The movie turns green on the screen. The Corbies caw and fly from their branches, pecking and eating every fat, writhing doubt and buzzing fear. His tree. His Corbies.

There was little to go on. The records were gone. There were ways around that. Though things like the names of workmates slipped in one ear and out the other, the Corbies were packrats when it came to shiny factoids.

A crow hops up and whispers in Simon’s eardrum, whispers the address of the scene of the crime, where Jane was killed.

Simon rewards the corvid with a treat—a celluloid wraith through his eyes. He climbs up, standing on the back of the theater chairs, inebriated, but with perfect, slapstick balance. He stares at the screen until the silver membrane bursts and the wraiths escape their stage, take to the air, and float to Simon. He smiles and dances on the back of the chairs with the floating shades, and they enact their own stories.

This is not the Dead Water, but neither are road-kill autopsies. It would have to do for now.

Through it all, the old couple in the front row does not notice, embraced in their twilight passions and heavy, heavy petting.

*   *   *   *   *

“Money?”

Simon hands Ziv the money.

Cold, torrential rain and mood provided by October.

“Okay,” says Ziv. “Let’s go get your stuff.”

As always, Ziv looks very serious about the transaction, a very serious ten-year-old boy, riding a skateboard, wearing a head-mounted flashlight in the night.

Ziv skateboards through the cold rain.

Simon follows on foot.

*   *   *   *   *

“This is good weather!” shouts Grandsnaps, in his Slavic accent. “Rain, like this, is happy omen. Falling like this before a new endeavor guarantees success.”

“This is bad weather, old man!” shouts back Baba, waving a soup ladle. “Anyone can see. You can catch your death in weather like this.”

I wonder, Jane, can one catch another’s death?

Simon sits silently, watching the back and forth.

Grandsnaps makes a grand gesture and marches to the apartment window. All his actions are big. He is a large man. Simon thought “barrel-chested” a good phrase, but deficient when referring to Grandsnaps in that it referred to “barrel” in the singular. His hair is iron and a little shaggy, and he wears a matching grand mustache like a symbol of station. His voice is always a boom, always a shout. Such a figure is jarring to Simon’s sensitive nature. Yet he always found the big man fascinating.

Grandsnaps slams open the window with both arms, with his whole body; takes a mighty breath; holds the copious amount of stormy air in the multiple barrels of his chest; and lets it out with a breath louder than Simon can shout.

“Ah! Fine weather!” he declares with thunder in his voice, in defiance of the gods in the sky—and even of Baba.

Ziv’s family were immigrants from “the Old Country,” though Simon did not know what country that was. Ziv lived with his grandparents: Baba and Grandsnaps. He’d met the boy by chance and had purchased absinthe from him for years. The absinthe was supplied by an uncle who often traveled back and forth from “the Old Country.” A very potent absinthe, the bottles featured no labels. It was all Simon drank anymore. For whatever reason, this brand affected him more than others, set his head on green fire. Simon did not know why the brand was so efficacious or the liquor even spoke to him so profoundly. Most modern studies indicated absinthe’s fabled hallucinogenic properties, the lucid madness, were largely exaggerated. All Simon knew was that absinthe—and the kind Ziv’s uncle delivered, in particular—affected him.

Maybe it has a chemical imbalance, like me. Eh, Jane?

There was a ritual to the purchase.

Simon met the boy, always on his skateboard, stone faced, serious when conducting the exchange. Then they came to the apartment. Grandsnaps would always take the money and then sit his guest down for a talk, while Ziv loaded his cart with Simon’s order. Baba would overfeed Simon, but Simon always ate. He found Baba to be an intimidating figure—though, as he got to know her, he decided that, in Slavic fairy tales, she would be the old woman to help a child, not the one who ate them. Probably.

“Ah, the Dead Water!” Grandsnaps says to a well-timed crack of thunder.

And always, always, Grandsnaps would tell Simon tales of Slavic folklore, while they waited in the living room.

“In the stories there is the heroic water, the water that heals and restores the hero. But, Simon, there are two types of heroic water. Two . . . eh . . . species.”

Grandsnaps stands in front of the open window, the rhythmic slap of the heavy rain and the roll of thunder accompanying his story.

“There is the Living Water: Zhivaya Voda.”

Grandsnaps reaches his right hand out the window and flicks his wrist, showering the room in chilled droplets.

“And, there is the Dead Water: Mertvaya Voda.”

Grandsnaps repeats the movement with his left hand, flicking water droplets into the room.

“The Dead Water, it does not bring with it death. No. The Dead Water heals the dead body, fixes it, knits it back together and washes away the mutilation. But Mertvaya Voda is not the Living Water. It can repair the body, but it cannot bring the dead to life. To . . . eh . . . vivify.”

It’s true, Jane. All my patients are dead. In the end, I can only sew their bodies back together.

“Spring rains melt the earth, Simon, purify her, make her whole after the death of winter. And the second rain, it vivifies her, brings her to life, makes her grow again. It is same with our hero. He is dead, but they sprinkle the Dead Water on him and it knits his body. Then they sprinkle the Living Water on him and he shudders, coughs, sits up, and he say, ‘How long have I been sleeping?’”

Grandsnaps laughs. Thunder echoes.

Simon lets his hand crawl into the noodle dish Baba served him. In the pause of the story, Simon closes his eyes, squeezes a handful of noodles. The greasy texture recalls the feel of his hands inside her Y-incision.

“Grandsnaps, where does the Dead Water come from?” Simon asks. He already knows the answer. He’s heard this story many times.

The old man smiles.

“Curious boy! Heh-heh. There is, Simon, a great tree, the World Tree. It grows at the center of all that is, was, and will be. On top of the World Tree is the Bird of Paradise and below, crawling in the roots, lies the Demon Snake. From under the tree flow two springs: Mertvaya Voda and Zhivaya Voda. And near the springs are the three women. They are fortunetellers. One sees the present. One sees the past. And one sees the future.”

The queen of clubs, the queen of spades, the queen of diamonds. Eh, Jane?

“But, Simon, the interesting part . . . to find the Living Water—”

“Old man!” shouts Baba.

“What is it, woman? My story.”

“Ziv is done loading his cart.”

“Ah. Ziv! Wodka!”

This was the next part of the ritual: to honor the transaction. Grandsnaps rubs his massive hands together eagerly. He selects a CD from the entertainment center, removing it from its case as through it were a holy wafer from the tabernacle. He slides it into the player; he is very proud of his stereo system. Ziv brings the bottle. The drinks are poured. Then, and only then, does Grandsnaps hit play.

Queen comes on, through the speakers, playing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The old man closes his eyes, holds his breath, absorbing the song in ecstatic joy. Dramatically, he raises a hand making a fist in front of his face.

“Freddy-fucking-Mercury!” says Grandsnaps. “The greatest singer in all of history! Listen, Simon, to this part—”

“Always, he goes on about Freddy Mercury,” calls Baba from the kitchen.

Grandsnaps’s face flares red and he stands, pointing a very serious finger toward the kitchen. “Woman! Do not dare impugn Freddy Mercury!”

A cackle emanates from the kitchen. Grandsnaps sits back in his chair. He and Simon watch the ferocious storm through the open window, feeling the wind gusts and stray raindrops, listening to the rest of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and then “Killer Queen,” while finishing their vodkas.

It was all part of the ritual.

*   *   *   *   *

They march back in the heavy rain—Ziv leading on his skateboard, flashlight beam swaying from his head, and Simon pulling an old Radio Flyer wagon, sounding its presence with clinking absinthe bottles and squeaky wheels.

Squeak—clink—squeak—clink.

The legalities of absinthe selling, purchasing, and ownership were complicated and ever-changing. Simon had not bothered to keep up with them.

It did not matter.

Even if the absinthe were not as valuable to him as it was, he might have continued to buy it anyway.

He enjoyed this ritual too much.

*   *   *   *   *

“Hello?”

“Hi, sweetie.”

“Hi, Mother.”

“Look, dear, I was just talking to your father and we’d like you to come out for dinner next Friday. You can bring that girl you’ve been talking about.”

“I . . . can’t . . .”

“Simon?”

“She’s gone.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. And you just met. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get her back.”

“That’s the spirit, dear. Oh, I like to hear you so determined. You fight for her now.”

“I will, Mom. Goodnight.”

INTERLUDE:

Phantom Limbs

They ask me how I can be so sure.

I tell them a mother knows. Flesh of the flesh. Amputees sometimes complain of phantom pains, the tingle and tickle where their arm or leg used to be. Sometimes I feel the tingle. Right here. Chubby, cold, dead, little fingers tickling my ribs from the inside.

They call me a murderer. They spit at me. My husband even called me a monster, on the stand.

Then they tell me, no-no-no. I’m not a monster. I’m just insane. They’re not going to put me to sleep. They’re just going to lock me away in the color of migraine. And they do. For a while.

I tell them I think there’s been some kind of horrible mistake. That is why you are crazy, they say. But “crazy” is a bad word, they say; we don’t use it anymore. Then they sing the same song over and over. I don’t like it. I tell them it’s all wrong. They’re mistaken.

They don’t like that.

For almost twenty years they sing the same song, over and over. I give up. I sing along. I know all the words by now. They like that. That’s just the song they wanted to hear. They let me go. “You’re cured,” they say. “Go do something worthwhile with your life.”

I’m supposed to be seeing someone about housing, about a job. I don’t. I go to the hardware store and buy a shovel.

For over twenty years they sang the same song, in the color of migraine, and I don’t know anymore. I have to be sure. It’s not a very big grave. Still, it’s hard work. My muscles cramp up. But I keep digging. I pull something in my shoulder. But I keep digging. I throw up. But I keep digging.

It starts raining and I can’t be sure I’m crying anymore, except the sobs shake my body. The shovel clangs on something hard. I think I’m screaming, except my teeth are clamped together. I must have dropped the shovel because I’m clawing at the dirt, fingernails breaking and tearing out.

I feel little fingers tickling the inside of my belly. I miss my baby boy. He was so fine. I knew every inch of him, his little hands, his little digits, every hair on his head. I used to spend hours lightly tracing my pinky across his little palms because it made him feel safe.

I flail at the tiny coffin with my bloody hands. I feel the tickle of dead little digits. They say I’m crazy, but they’re wrong. I felt the dead tickle long before the murder.

It was not my little boy—my sweet, sweet baby. Some horrible cuckoo took him away. I dunk its head under the warm bath water. I squeeze its little neck.

“Where’s my little boy?” I yell.

It doesn’t answer, just looks up at me with my little boy’s face. Pleads through a mask that shreds my heart. I hold it under and squeeze.

“Where’s my little boy?”

The mask turns blue and purple. Still I squeeze and scream.

“Where’s my little boy?”

Then my husband is there, yelling at me to let go, and I don’t, and he hits me in the face until I black out.

I open the coffin. I feel dead little fingers, because inside the coffin, the tiny coffin, inside the little suit and tie, is a tiny scarecrow made of cornstalks, straw, and candy wrappers strung together with rusty barbed wire, topped with a mummified rabbit’s head impaled on a twig.

CHAPTER 9

Do not cross.

The wind blows again and what is left of the crime scene tape snaps, yellow and angry, with its final warning.

Do not cross.

Simon yanks the tape down and steps into darkness.

The flashlight clicks on. Wooden groans and rickety steps take Simon up and away in an emptied, partially demolished building.

“Used to be a pub,” Simon says into his digital recorder. “An old pub. Just across the street from where John Dillinger was shot.”

Do not cross, murmurs the stifled wad of tape in Simon’s hand. Complaining steps take him farther up—only the upside-down crows, from their peculiar perch, can see the descent. Darkness and pipes and exposed bits of the building’s skeleton. Every bit of wood moans plaintively, trying to tell Simon something in their mildew-pillbug speak.

Past the creak-speaking steps and out of the wet dark and Simon is above and outside, on a raised wooden deck that stands between the buildings, an outdoor beer garden. Through the center of the deck, seeming to grow inexplicably out from the middle of the buildings and the concrete, is a large tree, the centerpiece of the beer garden.

The tree, and much of the railing, is strung with curling coils of unlit Christmas lights, like plastic ivy overgrown. An old picnic table decays stoically in the corner. Likely there were tables and chairs strewn about, once upon a time.

Simon touches the tree.

After placing his crime scene case on the picnic table, he takes out a now-refilled Thermos. He starts his second dose of absinthe for the night with a chug and the Corbies grow giddy, the hollow of the ghost tree forming a face in his head. Crunch-crunch go the fallen leaves under Simon’s tipsy feet as he paces around and around the beer garden tree.

Crunch-crunch.

There.

Crunch-crunch.

“This is the tree—and that’s the limb—that grew the branch—that they dangled the rope—that hung Jane,” says Simon into the recorder.

“And the crisp leaves hiss all around, all around. The crisp leaves hiss all around,” sing the Corbies in refrain.

Crunch-crunch.

“The slight scarring on the branch is consistent with the cutting action of a coarse rope, sliding up and down, as they raised and lowered Jane multiple times.”

“Climb up to the jingle branch!” the Corbies caw. “We want to see from there.”

Inebriated but nimble, Simon climbs the tree and crawls out to the hanging branch, finds the scar in the bark.

“Jane’s scar.”

Simon caresses the mark. Closes his eyes and memorizes every contour. Rubs a pale cheek over the wound . . .

“To work, boy, to work,” the Corbies call.

He snaps to attention, notices the October sky. A bit of cloud catches the moonglow and ignites in a cool burn, and Simon sees Jane’s pale hair tossing in the stratosphere. He was beginning to see her everywhere—in reflections and indefinite shapes and random sense stimuli. We have, all of us, done this—the mental dissection of those endearing body parts in the ones we love: a cute nose, a smile, a delectable ear. We cut them off in our minds, carry them with us as portable keepsakes. Then we place them, like puzzle pieces, in any fitting shape we find in the wide world, and we remember our loved ones with these foci. Simon is no different. He sees her hair in a cloud, her golden eyes whenever he closes his and an afterimage lingers, her playful mouth on the horizon, her ridiculously orange nails in lit Jack O’Lanterns, her elfin ears, delicate neck, the peculiar shape of her liver, the exact texture of her intestines, the delicate motion of her opening chest cavity in the unfolding of his own hands, the coolness of her touch in the opening of a fridge, the exact weight of her heart in a held grapefruit. He sees Jane in everything.

“To work!” the Corbies call.

Simon takes the crime scene in from above. Individual clues had already been taken, but he wanted the feel, the tactile all of the place. It was enclosed by the surrounding buildings. No view from the street . . . but there were a few windows and nothing to mask any sounds.

“The murderers planned to question Jane,” Simon says to the recorder. “This location . . . it was impromptu for some reason.”

Our silent film hero removes his black bowler hat and spins it in the air, accurately landing it on his case below. He turns on the branch, sitting up, then leaning back, locking the backs of his knees on the branch and tumbling backward—flopping upside down, hands dangling like those of a boy at play, hair hanging. The motion of the drop causes his glasses to fall away from his face—but his hand shoots out in gecko-tongue speed, catching them and returning them to his face. Simon often drops things, but always catches them. The Corbies cock their heads in curiosity at their changed perspective as Simon hangs upside down from the tree branch, dangling in the wind, hanging like a reversed Jane.

Simon pushes his dangling necktie from his face, tucking it under his shirt. He sways, arms hanging down, taking in the moment.

“This, right—here—is where you dangled, Jane,” Simon says into the recorder, hugging the empty air next to him. “You danced on the wind,” he says to the recorder—says, retroactively, to the empty space that once contained Jane. “The little boy saw you from—” Simon points “—that window.

“There were four of them. One of them hung you; he was big. One of them asked you questions. One of them laughed while you choked. And one of them cried. You knew them already. They wanted something from you. You scratched one of them, the big one.”

Simon listens to the hiss of the leaves.

He feels it—the sensation of the lost keys, the lost math homework.

“Click-clack-crack, Simon,” murmur the crows. “Something’s here!”

Simon’s eyes dart about, upside down. He’s not sure if he’s safer in the tree or if that makes him just a dangling, flesh piñata for boogeymen. Simon sits up, pushes off and back, and lands lightly on the ground in a backflip.

“You’re my shadow,” Simon says. “I know you’re there. What do you know about Jane?”

Silence.

The leaves hiss years of gathered secrets and beer garden eavesdroppings.

Thump.

Something tossed lands at Simon’s feet. Then a blur. Then a cloud of kicked-up leaves. Then nothing. Simon looks down. A dead rat. Why?

At first all he sees is the dead vermin. But the Corbies warble hungrily, and Simon sees what they see: a dead body, a tiny window to the Dead Water. Simon’s mouth waters.

Yes.

Just a taste.

Just one hit.

Simon guzzles the absinthe, slips on latex gloves, and produces a scalpel.

“Subject: fat rat.”

*   *   *   *   *

Where are we?

Sleep has no place to call its own.

*   *   *   *   *

The dead love tickles, even just the little taste of it. Simon giggles. His mouth is a graveyard of shiny new tombstones curled up in a crescent. He smiles like he’s been told a secret.

Simon sits on the wooden floor, back to the beer garden tree, slumped forward, head down. His blue latex hands raise to shoulder level; one hand displays a bloody scalpel, the other a dead rat dripping viscera from its Y-incision. His glasses sit crooked, hanging half off his face. Simon’s body bobs up and down. The scalpel dances in the air, conducting the music that plays only for him.

“Cause of death: poison,” Simon says. “The victim lived under the beer garden.”

Neatly situated in front of Simon are the rat’s individual organs, each displayed on its own leaf on the floor. Simon reverently puts the rat and the scalpel down. Wind blows and now Simon can understand what the leaves say when they hiss, what the wood answers when it creaks.

That place, Jane—the pub and beer garden. It wasn’t so very different from a corpse—a set of physical remains, a reliquary for invested memories and nostalgia.

This had been a happy hearth. Many libations were poured here, many friends made, many laughs freed. They had read stories here, under the twinkling lights of the hearth tree—poetry and ghost stories. They’d performed theatre here. All those nights in this place that creaks and speaks, under the twinkling tree, over a congress of very fat, very literary rats—and all those ghost tales and rhymes and lines of Shakespeare trapped in the rings of the tree—memories hidden in the leaf litter.

Simon snatches a leaf in his bloody, blue latex hand, lifts it to his ear and crumbles it, listening to the haunting memories in the dry crunch-crackle.

“Action!” yell the Corbies.

Simon rises drunkenly to his feet, hair wild like black straw; arms hanging loose; bloody, blue, latex hands splayed at the sides. He lurches like the zombified Voodoo-doll emperor of the fallen leaves. His grin is a moon-kissed graveyard.

You helped me realize it, Jane. I could take the Dead Water from my world within to the world without.

The pathologist sifts through the memories of the hearth corpse. The most recent: traumatic. Simon bows and the Corbies clap their wings. The show is about to begin.

Simon looks to the scar on the tree branch. Jane’s scar. Never taking his eyes away, he walks to a very specific place. With the exaggerations of a mime he hauls the rope—macabre-comedy, the Charlie Chaplin hangman.

“He is the man who did the hanging and his name is Hector,” says Simon, into his bloody, blue hand, even though his audio recorder is still in his pocket. “He’s very big. Hector hauled Jane all by himself. And, Jane—you scratched Hector’s face and he got mad. You made him mad on purpose, didn’t you? So mad, he killed you. Hector, in his rage, killed you before they could get what they wanted. You did it on purpose.”

Leaves hiss and Corbies clap.

Simon’s spindly legs take him, a drunken spider, to another specific place. Simon puts a ridiculously mean face on, vaudevillian villain, then shouts a few silent orations before he begins speaking again.

“He is the man who asked the questions and his name is Gabe,” Simon says to his empty, dripping hand. “This was his plan, scheming man. He asked you questions. Hector raised and lowered you. Gabe asked. And then Hector raised you. Gabe wanted something. He was angry when Hector killed you before he was done. Hector is strong. Gabe is dangerous.”

Leaves hiss and Corbies clap.

Simon creeps to another spot. He mimes a laugh, a mad-cackle laugh.

“He is the laughing man and his name is Joe. Tag-along-Joe. He is only there because of Gabe. He has no other purpose. He laughed while you chocked, Jane. His sides hurt when you turned blue. Joe likes pain and perversion, especially the ones that make party-favor sounds. He has no other dimensions.”

Leaves hiss and Corbies clap.

Simon dances to a final spot. He puts on a sad cartoon face.

“He is the crying man and his name is Alex. Tears of rage, tears of sadness. He cried while they hanged you. He . . . he kissed you before slipping on the noose—”

Simon stops. Interrupted. Uncomfortable.

“Why did he kiss you?”

Leaves hiss and Corbies clap.

Simon snaps back and recalls. He falls to his hands and knees and crawls to a far corner of the beer garden’s corpse. He finds a hole chewed into a wooden plank, just large enough for him to reach inside . . .

Arm shoved in to the shoulder, Simon finds the nest, with its hoard of shiny treasures: a bottle cap, a fishhook, coins, a watch, and a key. Simon removes the key.

“Thank you,” he says, suddenly serious, to the dead rat. He strokes its fur. Simon picks up the dry leaf with the rats withered stomach contents.

Lifting the leaf, he says, “This is the poison—that killed the rat—that snatched the key—that was dropped by Jane—that opens the door—that contains more answers.”

“And the crisp leaves hiss all around, all around. The crisp leaves hiss all around,” sing the Corbies in refrain.

*   *   *   *   *

A wind kicks up, sweeps the now-empty space. The tree and the corpse of the beer garden wait for their demolition, with only the hissing leaves to protest. All that is left of their last, strange visitor is a dissected rat and letters carved into the bark of a limb:

J.D.

+

S.M.

*   *   *   *   *

The second cab driver recognizes the symbol on the keychain.

Sometimes, Jane, a place can have bad memories.

“That’s the Tanzler Motel.”

It was a narrow building, popping up, improbably, between two larger buildings. The space it occupied could have been a very large, very ostentatious alley, but instead chose to be a narrow motel. It was a two-story building squished into three thin stories.

The neon sign blinks: TA ZL R OTEL.

Inside, everything is held together by green tiles and mildew. The front desk, a barred-in cage, is empty. A handwritten sign reads: Ring bell. But no bell is present. Simon quietly walks to Room 303, as per the key, and—

The key fits.

Another doorway opens.

*   *   *   *   *

Simon looks through a pamphlet hawking a series of self-help audiotapes—and then he’s running through the streets, waving a blood-encrusted sledgehammer named Bob.

Bob is the most statistically common name for an imaginary friend. Did you know that, Jane?

He does not remember when it all went bad. That is to say, he does not recall any transition, any slide between the moments he was looking through Jane’s personal effects and when the world was drowned in dread and pseudopod screams.

There are 6,704,845,726 people in the world and twenty-seven percent of them are under fifteen years of age and two thirds of them have imaginary friends. Did you know that, Jane?

He’s been running for a long time; he doesn’t know how long. His body is battery acid. He can’t hear anything; the deafeningly silent screams drown out all. He’s been mutely screaming for a long time. His face hurts from the contortions. His brain is raw. Bob is heavy with blood, rust, and memory.

We can only conclude, Jane, that there could be as many as 603,436,115 invisible Bobs walking the world.

He can’t remember all the things he saw. It’s like trying to recall dream logic or drunkenly navigate a maze, impossibly lost. The doors don’t make sense: the empty room with the bathtub, the old kind with clawed feet, a naked old man splashing and laughing manically, like a toddler, his throat and wrists cut, hyper-laughing, splashing the red, red water, mouth smiling, gashed throat smiling. The doors. The thousands of eyes. The amniotic smell. The sound of a trillion scared animals wailing under an ocean of shit and blood. Bob shattering the glass and Simon jumping out the window and no sound, after the glass shatter, but Simon’s silent screams.

Where was the transition? Simon imbibed too much absinthe after he stumbled into Room 303. The Corbies useless, too drunk, had fallen out of the wormwood branches, fallen up in Simon’s head. But our hero grinned. This was a holy place. Jane had been here, in life.

He pressed his body into the indent in the moldering mattress. The pillow still smelled like her. He put it in a duffel bag. He walked around the room, listening for echoes of Jane. He drank more absinthe, then angrily guzzled the rest.

“Too much,” said the last Corbie as it fell out of the now-bare ghost tree. The crows littered the ground in his head like fallen leaves.

The rest of the room was empty except for cigarette smells and the table. On the table Simon found a pamphlet for self-help guru Arthur Drake’s self-actualization program, Apex Consumers.

“Be at the top of your food chain, in business and in life!”

An endless river of late-night infomercials echoed in Simon’s memory. Third shift brought one into a dimension of infomercials. Arthur Drake’s promise of a better, more powerful life, through his program and products.

Next to the pamphlet was a flier, a red sheet of paper that said Club Wendigo. The wild script informed that a meeting was to take place Saturday at 9:00 P.M. but no address was given.

With these lay a black envelope of heavy, perfumed paper. Simon pulled out an invitation on matching paper and gold-gilt letters: a cordial invitation to a dinner party of the Gastronome Irregulars.

And finally, on the table, Simon found ticket stubs to an outdoor drive-in theater out somewhere in the suburbs. The bill was a double feature of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

You treated yourself, when you could, to your little anachronism, didn’t you, Jane? The more I exhumed, the more I loved.

Then, of course, there was Bob . . .

Simon runs, now, though he does not know where he is. He does not know where the absinthe high ends and the real horrors begin. So he runs from everything.

I ran deeper inside, Jane, deeper down. No geography, just following you deeper into the dark. No way back now.

Simon found the sledgehammer in the bathtub, wrapped in oily rags. He disliked it immediately. Bad vibrations. But he unwrapped it and found himself, in horror, slipping into monomania at the thing, losing time examining its every detail. This ancient hammer, crusted with old blood, layers of it. The letters B-O-B were scratched deep into the rusted metal of the head.

They used to use hammers like that at the slaughterhouses, Jane. They’d sing lullabies into the heads of cattle.

Madness slipped in at some point.

Simon stops running.

He falls to his knees, trying to breathe, and when he can’t do that he vomits up aborted Dead Water. His system, too late, tries to purge the poison. The world melts and rebuilds itself. How far had he run from the Tanzler Motel?

Simon wraps the hammer in its rags, stuffs it into the duffel bag, with the other artifacts of Jane. Where was he? Simon finds his glasses in a pocket and puts them on, to discover a hideous clown face about to bite his head off.

“Ah!”

Simon tumbles back.

The Corbies hiccup in his brainpan.

Simon looks again and sees a grotesque clown face giving a plastic, gargoyle grin—the kind of grin that scares evil spirits away from Gothic turrets; the kind of grin Arthur Drake gives in his infomercials—painted truly grotesque under the green-alchemy trip.

It is a fast food order board.

The speaker is in the mouth. The face is dark, unlit, as is the fast food restaurant. The place is closed down, boarded up. A shell containing a kingdom of vermin seeking ancient grease. Simon had seen these closed-down clown-burger restaurants dotting the city.

No one seems to remember, Jane, just when they closed down or when they were ever open. I don’t remember them ever being in business.

Simon shivers. He’s never liked clowns, never understood why parents shoved their children to such universally frightening symbols. Then those children grow up and throw the next generation to the creatures.

“Go squeeze its nose, honey!”

We throw our children to monsters on their birthdays. Suppose, just for a moment, that these birthday parties contain the vestigial elements of ancient rites enacted in the days when we still competed with the Neanderthal. Mayhap, Paleolithic shaman covered their faces in grotesque paints, attacked children with strange pratfalls, hyena laughter, and feats of freakish dexterity. The children that stood their ground became the men and women and warriors of the tribe; triumphantly, they blew out the fire of their childhood. The children who cried or ran were slaughtered, sacrificed to dark entities and ritualistically eaten at the birthday celebration. Maybe some modern children—only a handful of winters away from the womb and that pumping, squishy hardline to the communal memory—remember, and the sight of that hideous greasepaint face vivifies the antediluvian remembrance, a genetic impression of those savage celebrations: the blood, the howls, the obsidian glass daggers. And the little darling sobs, lets go of his balloon, pees in his pants.

Simon stares at the clown face in drunken awe.

A staring competition.

The clown face wins.

Then the clown lips move, mouthing odd profanities. Simon knows—or at least suspects—that this is just a byproduct of wormwood chemistry. He slumps to a wino squat, in front of the plastic face.

“Do you know where Jane is?” he asks the clown head.

Quiet. A wind slopes through the streets. A plastic bag dances in the air but fails to be beautiful. Then, a buzzing. A vibration. Geocentric cicada tuning. Simon digs into his ear with a finger but the anti-sound does not abate.

The clown face lights up, blinding in the dark, glaring down at Simon from on high. Distorted laughter plays from its mouth—too slow—too fast—low pitched—high. Bad electronic circus music revs up, then dies out, drowned in the waves of warped laughter.

Finally, static.

Hissing static.

There are lost sounds in the static, something below the register of rational thought. Demon static. Louder. Louder!

Simon grabs his ears, teeth vibrating. Slivers of voices and meanings, scrambled, slice his eardrums open.

Feedback blasts Simon in the face. A flash of light. As he blacks out he almost has it—past the laughter and pandemonium music, inside the code of the static is the signal, gaining syntax and cadence and purpose.

Simon falls into bad unconsciousness metaphors.

The demon static follows.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH once built a flesh golem out of grave-robbed parts and leftover Halloween candy. By strange chance, this golem is fueled by rejection slips. Every day it begs and it pleads, “Please, kind sir, keep me alive!” And so Joshua writes. You can thank White Wolf for making the poor golem go hungry for another day.

Joshua is from October Country, Illinois, but currently writes video game dialogue in Montreal. He has a fondness for fedoras, does a mean Christopher Walken impersonation, and, once upon a road trip dreary, wrote a blues song about necrophilia.