Clown in the Moonlight (7 page)

Linda feels it too.
 
I glance at her and she's overjoyed.
 
The Acid King's will is in the wind.
 
She peels back her bandages and checks her wounds.
 
They're infected too, of course.
 
She has the start of a fever.
 
Gwen's bites and burns and razor slashes have ushered her down the road of transcendence.
 
She always knew there was another level to love and hate, one beyond normality, but now she's experienced it firsthand. It's left her gorged and wanting more.
  

We ride up and down Jericho Turnpike and stop and have brunch at the Majestic Diner on Old Country Road.
 
We eat in silence.
 
The buzzing, banal conversations of the other patrons are painful to hear.
 
Linda tilts her head like she's got an earache.
 
My chin is cocked at the same angle.

We skip out on the check.
 
Back in the car she talks about murder like it's a new team cheer.
 
Something to practice after classes until you get it just right.
 
Something to do in front of a crowd to get them all applauding.
 
She acts like it's an important part of school spirit.
 
She wants to butcher old lovers, gut cheerleaders who don't pull their weight, cut the school custodian's throat.
 
She says he lurks around in the girls' locker room hoping to catch a flash of naked teenage ass.
 
She's got kill fantasies about the team mascot, the QB who got sacked three times at last year's homecoming, the assistant principal who put his sweaty hand on her knee.
 
She wants to throw acid in the face of the science teacher who gave her detention in the ninth grade.
 

Her rage calls to my rage.
 
I try hard not to writhe in my seat, clutching the wheel tighter.
 
I light a cigarette and lean my elbow out the window.
  

"I want to fuck you in the middle of Times Square," she purrs.
 
It's a pretty dramatic jump from all her kill fantasies.
 
She tells me to get on the LIE and rip towards the mid-town tunnel.
 

One of her old boyfriends used to bring over cheap porn films, the kind shot in somebody's basement.
 
They'd hang a sheet on the wall in her bedroom and use it as a screen. Then he'd run the projector and they'd watch nasty flicks until her father got home from work and her mother got back from PTA meetings and shopping at Klein's.
 
She wants to kill him too, and the thought of his death has got her horny to see whores in action.
 
She wants to invite a streetwalker into the backseat with us, then park down an alley on Forty-Second Street.
 
She wants us to get arrested.
 
She imagines the look on her father's face when he hears the news.
 
She imagines the look on his face when she slices off his dick with a box-cutter.

"Gwen's going to die," she tells me, pinching her ruined nipples through her sweater.
 
"She's next.
 
I don't know when it's going to happen, but that's what Ricky's been saying.
 
He hates her too.
 
And don't say that he hates everyone.
 
He doesn't.
 
He's just–"

She searches for the right word.
 
She can't come up with it.
 
She gestures meaninglessly, which has more meaning than anything else she's said today.
 
Ricky's not
just
anything.
 
He's not just in pain.
 
He's not just losing his mind.
 
He's not just being toyed with by powers and influences beyond his understanding.
 
He's seated at the eye of the hurricane, and he's drawn me into the storm.

I don't head towards the city.
 
Linda doesn't care.
 
She spouts off more things we should do.
 
Some boring, some lethal.
 
It's all the same to her.
 

Instead, I run a search pattern all over town, waiting for the Knights of the Black Circle to turn up.
 
I send my will into the wind.
 
I picture Ricky's shadow men pulling away from strip malls and hole-in-the-wall bar parking lots, hitting the streets, following.
 
I steel myself and wait for the Mustang to go skidding in fresh puddles of blood spread out across the road.

By the time the moon rises, Linda is burning up and in need of serious antibiotics.
 
She's hallucinating and keeps crawling down into the footwell, screaming that crows are stuffing their beaks into her ears and pecking at her brain.
 
She's not lying.

I sit her up, roll down both windows, and turn the fan up high trying to cool her down a little.

She whimpers the names of witches' familiars.
 
"Pommerance, Tico-Tico...Bathal, Bathei, Winter's Leg..."

I take her to the emergency room but she won't get out of the car until we fuck.
 
She climbs on top of me in the driver's seat, her sickly sweat pouring off her, hot as a furnace about to blow.
 
To touch her is to burn.
 
Good, I'm glad, I prefer it this way.
 
Her infection is the only true thing about her.
 
She whimpers for Gwen.
 
She loves and hates Gwen as she loves and hates herself.
 
She rides me hard, slamming her back against the steering wheel, sounding the horn.
 
She grabs the sides of my face and holds my head in place.
 
She tries to kiss me as we struggle against each other, she seems to think it's very important that she kisses me.
 
I check her mouth for hidden razor blades.
 
I know that I'm an offering to the next dark god.
 

Linda giggles as she thrusts down on me, harder and harder, louder and louder, her nostrils flecked with yellow crust, blisters forming at the corners of her mouth.
 
On her belly are growing red lines of blood poisoning.
 
She smiles without humor, mercy, or sexuality.
 

I know the next move.
 
I see it clearly.
 

She lets loose with a ghastly laugh she can't control, can't hold inside anymore.
 
It goes on and on.
 

"Three-Together-in-the-Blind-Eye, Hildegrance...come for me, Black Shuck!"

As we reach our peak her thumbs begin to slide across my beard stubble and she goes for my eyes.

This is what she needs as her orgasm tears through her.
 
I grip her wrists in my fists and hold her tightly while she wails in ecstasy, hysteria, and madness.
 

"I love you!" she moans.
 
It almost sounds like
I wuv you
.
 
"Let me!" she demands.
 
"Let me!
 
Please!"
 

"No."

"Say you love Satan!"

"No."

"Say you love Satan!"

I clip her on the chin and she almost goes out, but not quite.
 
Her head lolls and she starts sobbing, even while she murmurs and begs.
 
Her fever is critical, waves of heat brushing against me like a brushfire.
 
I finish ejaculating inside her and zip up.
 
I carry her to the emergency room entrance.
 
She presses her face into my chest and keeps crying while I shush her and kiss her forehead.
 
An intern spots us and raises a clamor.
 
They take her from me and place her on a gurney.
 
Linda's eyes stay focused on mine as they wheel her up an overly lit white corridor.
 

A nurse at the ER desk questions me and demands I fill out papers.
 
I turn away and a passing security guard places a hand on my chest in the same spot where Linda's tears have soaked into my T-shirt.
 
He tells me to stop.
 
He tells me I'm not going anywhere.
 
He's as bald as Anton LaVey.

I can feel Ricky's frenetic presence looming.
 
He's like a swarm of gnats, a murder of crows, rising up against the building and finding a million ways in towards me.
 
I push against the guard's hand while he orders me, "Stop.
 
Stop right there, buddy."

He reaches for his walkie-talkie and spits out some code numbers.
 
I push against him again and he shoves me back harder this time. The rage wants me to lash out.
 
Ricky wants me to kill.
 

It's almost unbelievable that the guard can't feel the forces of the cosmic game swirling around us, moving us, presenting us as opposing pieces.
 
How dim can someone be?

"Hold it, buddy, just stay there.
 
We need you to answer some questions about your girlfriend.
 
It'll only take a few minutes."

The windows rattle.
 
The storm has found me again.

I check my rage and perform the way I did in prison, with a cold and crystalline vision and efficiency.
 
I don't get angry.
 
I don't want to hurt this man.

But I do.
 
I swing my forearm around and strike him in the jaw under the ear with my elbow.
 
There's a large cluster of nerve ganglia there, and I know what it feels like to have it struck.
 
The guard sees nothing but solar wheels as the inside of his skull ignites.
 
He flails backward, unconscious.

More guards appear at the far end of the hall.
 
The ER nurse starts screaming. Other patients, despite their illnesses and wounds, back away to the wall as one.
 
A twelve-year-old with a broken nose flinches from me.
 
His mother moves in front of him in a display of maternal protection. She's breathing heavily, pale in the muted light, her breasts heaving.
 
She waits for me to rape her.
 
The glass keeps shaking.

I stomp through the automatic doors.
 
I climb into the Coupe, buckle up, rev the engine until it's shrieking, throw it into gear, and burn out.

I light up.
 
I check the rearview.
 
The front of the hospital is full of brash action and motion and shadows.
 

Linda wasn't even on Ricky's list but she might as well be counted a victim.

His, her father's, Satan's, or mine.
 

T
he moon goes into hiding.
 
The dark squall circles and dives and breaks against the side of the Mustang.
 
The night is blacker than the back of the Devil's eyelids.
 
I can feel Ricky and his circle out there performing their death celebrations.
 
I send myself to him.
 
I let him lead me there.
 
I drive blind for a while, eyes shut, letting my other senses guide me.
 

I turn left, I turn right, I hit it on the straightaway.
 
I spin out in gravel and branches of swaying trees scrape the hood.
 
I don't let it dissuade me.
 
I keep my eyes closed tightly.
 
I listen to the oncoming traffic blaring, speeding past.
 
I head south for the bay.
 
I burn rubber, I take wide curves.
 
The magnetic pull of the earth carries me.
 
I drift for a half hour, blind as Gary Lowers.

When I open my eyes, I'm skidding on a beach lane covered by sand.
 

He's close.
 
I picture him clearly.
 
He's got a little campfire going and he's practicing moves with his knife, deciding on what he's going to do to the next kid.
 
It looks like he's going for the internal organs.
 
He's drilling on how to cut out the kidneys, the liver.
 
He's going to make haggis and feed it to everybody at the next party.

The other Knights of the Black Circle flicker in and out of being, by the light of the fire.
 
They provoke him, they drape themselves around him, full of love, full of hate. The blade swerves, slashes, and severs.
 
Ricky's breathing heavily.
 
He dances on the sand as the waves crash behind him.

I see him stabbing down, slashing, sneaking up, pulling hair, tonguing, nipping.
 
I crack the window an inch, and I can hear him singing another heavy metal song, the trite lyrics almost laughable.

A half-mile away I tumble to an old south shore graveyard.
 
I drive slowly, keeping an eye out.
 
Ricky's flames ought to lead me right to him, unless he's caught on.
 
He might've kicked the fire out by now.