Clown in the Moonlight (8 page)

The dead have their grievances.
 
They tug for my attention.
 
They pack decades-dead names into my head.
 
Above it all I hear Gwen's voice, asking to be fucked.

I park and get out.
 
The graveyard is nothing more than a few scattered stones.
 
The area's been eroded, the graveyard buried by sand and sawgrass and snow fencing.
 
I drift past the headstones, waiting for Ricky and his circle to fall down on me from the dunes.
 
I light a cigarette and smoke, leaning back against the side of the Mustang.
 
I give myself up to them.
 
My headlights offer a dim illumination.
 
The clouds of night birds have followed me to the shore, and they fill the infinitely forbidding sky.

Gwen's screams are muffled into moans.
 
A part of me loves the noise of it, the honest and true depth of despair and pain.
 
I'm human.
 
I crave human anguish.
 
My own or anyone else's.

It's probably a trap but I rush across the beach hunting for her.
 
The moon wants to see, so it finally appears and turns its face down to us.
 
I stumble over seashells and detritus hidden in the sand.
 
My mother appears in the dark, pointing out where I must go.

I come to Gwen huddled inside a dug-out hole behind the dunes. Gwen is naked, bound by rope, covered in blood, a gag firmly placed in her mouth.
 
The bandages binding her many cuts and scratches from last night's love- and hate-making have unfurled in the wind.
 
There are fresh razor slashes on her belly, breasts, and thighs.
 
The trails of pulsing blood have run together, but I know the cuts spell out words, covenants, pledges.
 
The waves continue to crash, foam and seaweed rushing towards my feet.
 

Maybe he's left her here to show that he owns all of my women.
 
Maybe it's meant to infuriate me, or to turn me on.

Gwen weeps and whines at me.
 
She kicks at the bottom of the pit.
 
The words on her burn so brightly that I have to shade my eyes.

Breaking from the dark, two members of the Knights of the Black Circle snarl curses at me in their language of desecration.
 
They're each holding a straight razor.
 
I'm surprised they've become so banal, but the longer they stick with Ricky the worse it will become.
 
As they claim and reshape him, he is doing the same to them.
 
They walk toward me, slow and cool and casual as the front line of grunts in Lucifer's army.
  

Gwen's moaning is a contrapuntal to the quick breathing and occasional bursts of laughter coming from Ricky's boys.
 
The music of it fills me.
 
I stand my ground and wonder if Linda is dead yet.
 
If Gwen will even care now, one way or the other.
  

She's managed to work the gag loose.
 
She has a very powerful tongue.
 

Regardless of the fact that she's probably bleeding to death at the bottom of a pit, Gwen still gives orders.
 
She tells me to murder them.
 
She demands that I do it slowly.
 
She promises to fuck me righteously if I kill these two bastards.
 
She burns with hellish radiance.

I search for Ricky.
 
I can feel him, watching, those demented, savage eyes are on me.
 

I call to him.
 
I do it silently and I do it loudly.
 
"Ricky!"

The knights raise their blades and slash at the air.
 
Streaks of fiery red hang the air.
 
The whistling razors make me think of my father teaching me to shave when I was a kid.
 
It's one of the few memories of him that make me grin.
 
My face covered in shaving cream and my old man bonding with me, weapon in hand, passing on yet another ritual of manhood.
 
This one about power too.
 
A nick at the jugular could bleed you out in minutes.
 
My mother watched closely.
 
My mother stood guard, in the bathroom door.
 
He was afraid of her.
 
He had every right to be.
 

Ricky's boys know how to invoke even greater evils than themselves.
 
Their recitations and invocations draw more and more energy from the world.
 
Ricky's fire dims, the moon dulls, and Gwen weakens in her struggles.
 
My knees tremble but I keep on my feet.

They leap and glide forward almost as if on wings, swinging the razors back and forth, the arcs of red light flashing across the sand.
 
I duck and bring my knee up into one groin, turn and elbow the other in the face.
 
They grunt with almost childlike wonder.
 
They know pain but not this kind of pain.
 
This is a mortal, human pain, something that's usually beneath them, except when they influence and come to be influenced by mutts like Ricky Kelso.
 

They both move across the graveyard sawgrass with a whuff of air that sounds like a cancer patient's final breath.
 
My violent tendencies take over.
 
With their own razors I do things that are imaginative and completely unnecessary.
 
I'm probably laughing while I do it.
 
Perhaps, on some level, so are they.
 
We're all learning so much about the ridiculous nature of the universe.
 

I shout for Ricky again.
 
In the heat of midnight I burn brightly.
 
Down in her pit Gwen shouts again but her voice is nothing more than one long whining buzz.
 

By the time it's done, and I help her from the grave and unknot the ropes, and use the dirty bandages to tie off the worst of her new wounds, her flesh thick with new scars, Ricky's boys can do little more than shudder and jerk, enraptured by their own agony.
 
Their shadowed faces seem to smile.
 
They roll in the dark and mewl thank yous in a tongue that is heavy with venom.
 
I've left them their eyes, but I've taken everything else.

Gwen is awed, as she should be.
 
It all excites her.
 
Her wounds don't weaken her sex drive.
 
Ricky has run off.
 
I shout and run up and down the beach, but Ricky is gone.
 
Gwen drags me down on the dune and I decide what the hell.
 
She wants me to cut off her tits.
 
She wants me to chew out her throat.
 
She wants me to help her transcend.
 
I settle on a nibble.
 
LaVey the charlatan said sex and blood were the two mightiest forces.
 
Sometimes he got the simple things right.

L
ife has tightened to a manageable level.
 
I have a new function.
 
I exist for one thing at a time now.
 
I need to find Ricky.
 

It takes time.
 
He's hidden himself well.
 
In the meanwhile I do what he does.
 
I live on the streets of Northport.
 
It's a small, quaint town and they want to keep it that way.
 
The cops patrol in high volume.
 
I don't sleep much.
 
I keep watch, but not closely enough.
 

 
I keep moving.
 
The spiral shrinks.
 
I think about him and I dream about him and I feel him in cemeteries playing with the dead.
 
Three days pass and he still eludes me.
 
Another kid has gone missing.
 
I visit Linda in the ICU.
 
She's mostly incoherent.
 
Her fever spikes at 108 and she falls into a coma.
 
Forty-eight hours later they're still not sure if she's brain damaged or if she'll ever wake up.

Ricky's crows circle above and follow the Mustang day and night.
 
I slip into Aztakea Woods one afternoon and tell Gary Lowers my half-forgotten secrets. He might pass them on, but I risk it.
 
He's decomposing but his presence hasn't diminished.
 
He takes strength from his audience.
 
There are hundreds of different tracks around his body.
 
The entire graduating class must have stopped by.

Once the words begin to tumble from me there's no way to stop them.
 

Lowers's ruined face seems to stir subtly as if he's contemplating all I'm saying.
 
He appears to be sympathetic and understanding.
 
He knows where I'm coming from, knows where I'm going.
 
The crows descend and pluck at the frayed muscle of his throat, as if to stop him from speaking.
 
But his voice is clear and full of warmth.
 

As I sit there, a couple of junior high kids come trudging up the trail.
 
A boy and a chick four or five years younger than me, mouths curled in barely contained exhilaration, eyes as old as the bottom of the desert.
 

They're surprised to see me, wondering if they're in trouble.
 
They turn to bolt.
 
I say nothing to them.
 
There's nothing to say.

They decide to stay.
 
They light a joint and pass it back and forth before offering it to me.
 
They hold the roach by an alligator clip.
 
I take a hit and can taste the oils from Ricky's fingers on the rolling papers.
 
He's dealt them the weed.

The boy can't resist conversing.
 

"You think it's true?" he asks me.
 
"You think he really said that he loved his mother?"

"Yes, I believe so."

He nods in his stoner way.
 
The girl nods with him.
 
The boy huffs smoke over the corpse.
 
"They lit him on fire."

"Yes."

"They took his eyes.
 
How could he stand that?"

"I think he was tough as the great iron door at the entrance to Hell."

"Hells yeah."

He carries a copy of the Satanic Bible the same way that Ricky does.
 
It's halfway out his back pocket.
 
Baphomet finds me again.
 
He grins and winks at me.
 
I wink back.

I wait for the kids to pull the book like pulling a gun, like drawing an athame, a witch's blade.
 
When they finally do, they read a false and hollow incantation.
 
They draw a pentagram around Lowers's body with a stick.
 
There are outlines of other pentagrams in the dirt too, partially erased by the rain and nearly obliterated by leaves crushed by couples making awful love.

"What about the guy who did it?" the boy asks.

"What about him?"

"You think...you know...that he was possessed?
 
That demons told him to do it?
 
That crows talked to him and the trees bowed down?"

"No."

The girl whispers in the boy's ear.
 
Gary Lowers's knows what they're saying.
 
So do I.
 
So do the crows.
 
So do the bugs in Gary's dead, toothless mouth.

This gets boring.
 
This gets tiring.
 
I've enjoyed my talk with Gary, but now it's over.
 
I stand just as the boy rushes me, tugging his mother's stolen butcher knife from the small of his back.
 
He swings the point toward my heart.
 
I snap my forearm across the inside of his wrist and he drops the knife as his hand goes numb.
 
I give him a short chop in the throat and he collapses to his knees, gagging.
 

I pick up the knife and remember my mother cooking dinner, cutting fat from my father's steak, showing me at length how to slice meat.
 
I picture the boy's flayed flesh wrapped neatly and laid out on a reliquary.
 
The girl runs up the trail, screaming.
 
"Don't rape me!
 
Please don't rape me!"

Compared to Linda and Gwen she's not even pretty enough to fuck, much less rape.
 
It's insulting that she thinks I would.
  

I grab her by her dirty blonde hair and yank her head back, exposing her throat.
 
I place the dull edge of the blade to her carotid and hug her to me like every person in my life that I hate but want to love.
 
Like everyone I love who's dead.
 
Because of me or for any other reason.
 
There's not that many but they cling and grow heavier and heavier the farther on you go.