Futile Efforts (47 page)

I looked Nicodemus over and wasn't sure what there was about him that I'd feared for so long.
 
Or what it was that I had once loved in him so much.
 
I thought about striking the
nasion
with enough force to cause death.
 
I wanted to attack his
philtrum
and induce mortal damage or give a sharp enough blow to his Adam's apple to make him asphyxiate.

I could imagine my father as a Russian Omelet, folded and pinned upside down while I sat on his legs until his spine broke.
 
Forcing him into a Brain Buster might be a hell of a lot of fun, and I started to laugh just thinking about it.
 
If I really wanted to torture him I could've given him some of that old-time brimstone preaching.
 
I could still do it if I wanted.

Lala
stood nibbling her tongue, her fists right at her sides.
 
The mewling woman held her arms out for the punk and Nicodemus just patted her leg and said, "There, sweet thing, there, it's all done now.
 
You gonna go on your way without any such burden as this to hold you down to the rock."
 
He kept drumming on her thigh, leaving crimson stripes against the pale flesh.

I thought of how he had stared between my mother's broken legs on the night I was born, watching me leave paradise to enter this ugly world inch by inch, minute after minute while the rains pounded over his battered face and nearly sucked him under.
 
How he must've chortled in that smashed truck, gathering his wrath to hurl back into the face of God.

"What do you see inside there, Nicodemus?" I asked.

"I ain't
tellin
' you."

"Are the angels calling to you again?
 
Are the tips of their gleaming strange wings brushing against your face?"

"Shut yer dirty mouth."

I wanted it to be over.
 
"Is that redemption?"

"About as close as it gets
most'a
the time."

"Yup," I said.
 
"Here, let me help you toward heaven."

"I been
waitin
'."

"I know you have."

I took the punk from him and gave it back to the woman.
 
She sighed and started talking at the jar, brushing her cheek against it.
 
Maybe it was hers, maybe it belonged to the Works, but for the moment she had something to coddle.

I wrapped my arms around my father and it was like hugging Nell before he
fried
her to death.
 
I grabbed him by the throat and hauled him down to the girl's pussy and pressed his face into her.

Nicodemus let loose with a ferocious yelp and I held him there, his nose and mouth deep inside where he could get even closer to his savior.
 
He struggled and moaned but he was sporting an erection, and I figured this would be the best way all around.
 
The woman enjoyed it too, I thought, and let out tiny growls of delight and disdain.
 
I shoved him farther down into that mysterious place we were all trying to back to until, at last, he went slack, stooped breathing and went on home.

16

C
hrist, I needed a drink.

Lala
freed the woman from the stirrups and watched her nuzzle the floating fetus, droning lullabies, making promises.
 
In an adjoining room we found the others.
 
I looked at the rows of jars, hundreds of them all carefully sealed and stacked.
 
The punks and their pale, indistinct bodies.
 
Some had been gaffed with tails or sewn together with kittens and fish and squirrel guts.

Of course some were natural freaks.
 
About what you might expect would be born into this environment, by these people in this place, with the city's weight of profane ages bearing down.
 
The drugs had done a lot of damage to their parents' heredity, along with the lack of sunlight and the chemicals in the film and ink, all the poisons.
 
The malignancy and mischief moving in and swirling about through the crowds.
 
These were the children of the Works.

Fishboy
Lenny peered into the containers, pressing his scaly forehead close to those unformed faces so much like his own.
 
I remembered now.
 
He hadn't been in the fire.
 
He'd been swimming in the dive tank safe beneath the water.
 
Now
Fishboy
Lenny tapped on the glasses with his flipper and the fetuses bobbed, turning slightly to stare at him.
 
He gaped and started talking excitedly to them, as if he'd finally be understood by someone.

Lala
inspected each face in every jar.
 
It took hours until she found the one she was looking for.
 
Some of the other women had begun milling about and gathering around by then.
 
Lala
and I spent the day handing out the punks to the mothers who had offered their sacrifices, willing or not.

Some had made their choice on their own.
 
Others had been influenced by the will of the Works.
 
I couldn't tell which was which, and held the jars up and waited for the women to either walk by or take back what had been left.
 
We returned dozens and still the stock of fetuses rose around us.

Lala
lifted her little girl up to the light, with the viscous amber liquid eddying, and she stared upon what she'd given birth to.
 
After a few minutes she put the jar down on the floor and walked away without a word.

The need for liquor grew overwhelming.
 
The punks had been pickled in grain alcohol.
 
I'd gotten drunk on it before.
 
I searched around and found a punk that was almost a complete gaff, mostly plastic doll parts and some rubber cement.
 
I shook so badly by then that I had to hold the jar in both hands, gripping it to my chest until I steadied enough to screw off the lid.
 
After a few swigs I felt much better and more in control.

I was afraid to find Jonah.
 
I could feel him staring at me from one of the rows and I wondered if Nicodemus had been right.

After a few more gulps I supposed it didn't matter.
 
We are driven by a human need, even us freaks.
 
I got up and started searching and when I uncovered my son his eyes were wide and glaring.

I opened the lid of the jar.
 
Somebody had gaffed a pair of plastic devil's horns to his head.
 
I sat and waited.

A man came wandering in.
 
He couldn't have been thirty yet, but his hair was entirely white.
 
His eyes were separate abysses, something like my father's had been.
 
He stared at me with the gaze of a sane man caught up in a madness he never wanted, but who'd learned to feed on it until he could live on nothing else.
 
He was in a place much worse than hell.
 
He was stuck down in purgatory, and he'd made it himself.
 
I knew it was
Paynes
.

"You look like you might make it out again," he said.

"I'm not so sure I want to."

An unpleasant sound escaped him.
 
Maybe it was laughter.
 
"Not many of us do."

"I suppose I know why."

He nodded.
 
If his own fate didn't matter to him, then mine certainly wouldn't.
 
"Hope you make the right decision."

"Guess we'll know in a little while."

"Good luck."

"Yeah, you too."

About a half hour later Lester slithered in and slowly curled himself up in my lap.
 
I patted his head and a small patch of scales scraped off and his dark eyes brimmed.
 
Fishboy
Lenny was still going on, paddling around the room.

The
Fedex
guy walked by and looked just as miserable as he had before, but at least he was comfortable in this brand of misery.
 
His kids could never knife him in the kidneys now and his wife would never get his hefty insurance policy.
 
After a minute he strayed off and headed even deeper inside what he took to be damnation, and he was happy with that.

The lights dimmed and came up again, and in the following silence, with the dead out of my head, I could hear the rain still coming down.

Jonah arose.

My son drew himself from the liquid and tore the fake horns from his head.

Dripping, he sat before me and hissed, then whispered, and finally preached in a golden voice given to him by a furious yet all-forgiving God.

by Michael A.
Arnzen

I
sat on a poetry panel with Tom Piccirilli once, back in 2000 at the World Horror Convention in Seattle. There were a bunch of us
weirdos
who write this stuff there, including Mark McLaughlin, Jessica Amanda
Salmonson
,
Charlee
Jacob, Chad Hensley, and some freak who dressed like a pirate that joined us uninvited from the audience. The powers that be thought it would be a good idea if we had something of a "poetry slam" rather than prattle on about this bastard stepchild of the horror genre, and so we each took turns reading from our work until the hour was exhausted.

It was the first time I heard Tom Piccirilli read.

And while all of us gave it our all, reading some top-notch stuff, Pic's poetry stood out from the pack. It was gritty and realistic, scraping at the pain beneath the scabs we build up on our day-to-day existence. Compared to the more
splattery
writers of the group, it was more soul-scathing. Compared to the more humorous of us, it was more depressing. Compared to the more supernatural fantasists among us, it was more gritty and real and emotionally true.

Although his delivery was straightforward -- unadorned, if not humble -- it really stood out.

Because he was doing something really original. Really literary. And totally unexpected.

He'd read excerpts from his new chapbook, A Student of Hell. It went on to win the Bram Stoker that year for Outstanding Achievement in a Poetry Collection. I was on the final ballot that year too, for
Paratabloids
, but I'm not jealous of his victory at all. He totally deserved it. And A Student of Hell "schooled" us, all right. It trumpeted a writer of distinction. We all already know Pic's so damned prolific and so damned good when it comes to his fiction (just try picking up Deep into that Darkness, Peering without straining a muscle -- it's a huge tome that testifies to his massive work ethic in addition to his skill)...but a POET of talent, to boot?

Yes, a poet of talent. You'll see that once you lay eyes on the poems included in this section.

And yes, even if you don't like poetry, I know you'll read them. Because of the titles.

I remember when I first cracked open Pic's book, This Cape is Red Because I've Been Bleeding, with an eye toward reviewing it in my e-
zine
, The
Goreletter
. The first thing I read was "My First Groupie and How Much I Love Her Despite the Failed Assassination Attempt" -- and I thought, man, what a long-ass title. Quirky, though. Hilarious, even... and he had me hooked. So I read the poem. And it didn't only make good on the promise of that title; it blew me away. It connected with my memory of Pic's poetry reading, because it's about a poetry reading, and it spoke a lot of truth. As a writer, I could identify with what he was saying, captured in the poem's allegory about the relationship between writers and readers. But it's also a poem about poetry. And these particular lines jumped out and stayed with me, because they told me a lot about Tom's approach to verse, if not his quest as a writer:

[me, there...reading] a little poetry—the terse verse doing its thing, the way it's supposed to do, like oil, replete, until a few of the self deprecating jokes started to work. And the rhythm of my voice became the cadence of the room, our heartbeats—for a second there—all in synch, the circuit complete.

This passage says it all. Everything he does seeks to establish that bond that reminds us that we're all the same at root, all victims and villains, all human and horrifying, all suffering and sufferable. You feel sorry for his narrators, who are universally traumatized by their very real pasts or suffering deeply from the existential horrors of everyday life. You'll empathize with the murderers and sinners and sad sacks. He writes with a voice so introspective that one can't deny its honesty; it feels confessional at times as Piccirilli muses about everything from anger to love. He struggles with the limits of the body, the pains that come part and parcel with being alive, and you can't help but identify.