The Best of Lucius Shepard (51 page)

on a white train through some
egoless dimension,

taking the place of the poor
soul I’d pushed aside,

(although it may be he never
existed, that only

the women were real, or that
from those blood drops

dark and solid as rubies at the
corners of their mouths,

they bred new ranks of
insubstantial partners),

but I only stood there
jelly-kneed watching

the women board the train,
still smiling.

The scientists surrounded me,
asking questions,

offering great sums if I would
allow them to do tests

and follow-ups to determine
whether or not

I had contracted some sort of
astral social disease,

and Cardwell was supplicating
God to strike me down,

and the mayor was bawling at
the cops to take me

in for questioning, but I was
beyond the city limits

and they had no rights in the
matter, and I walked

away from Parma, bearing signed
contracts

from the scientists, and
another presented me

by a publisher who, disguised
as a tree stump,

had watched the entire
proceeding, and now

owned the rights to the lie of
my life story.

My future, it seemed, was
assured.

White trains, with no tracks

continue to appear on the
outskirts

of small anonymous towns,
places

whose reasons have dried up,
towns

upon which dusk settles

like a statement of intrinsic
greyness,

and some will tell you these
trains

signal an Apocalyptic doom, and

others will say they are
symptomatic

of mass hysteria, the reduction
of culture

to a fearful and obscure
whimsey, and

others yet will claim that the
vanishing men

are emblematic of the realities
of sexual politics

in this muddled, weak-muscled
age.

But I believe they are
expressions of a season

that occurs once every
millennium or so,

a cosmic leap year, that they
are merely

a kind of weather, as
unimportant and unique

as a sun shower or a spell of
warmth in mid-winter,

a brief white interruption of
the ordinary

into which we may walk and
emerge somewhat

refreshed, but nothing more.

I lecture frequently upon this
subject

in towns such as Parma, towns
whose lights

can be seen glittering in the
dark folds of lost America

like formless scatters of
stars, ruined constellations

whose mythic figure has
abdicated to a better sky,

and my purpose is neither to
illuminate nor confound,

but is rather to engage the
interest of those women

whose touch is generally
accompanied by

thirty days durance on
cornbread and cold beans,

a sentence against which I have
been immunized

by my elevated status, and
perhaps my usage

of the experience is a measure
of its truth,

or perhaps it is a measure of
mine.

Whatever the case, white trains
move silent as thought

through the empty fields,
voyaging from nowhere to nowhere,

taking on no passengers,
violating

no regulation other than the
idea of order,

and once they have passed we
shake our heads,

returning to the mild seasons
of our lives,

and perhaps for a while we
cling more avidly

to love and loves, realizing we
inhabit a medium

of small magical
transformations that like overcoats

can insulate us against the
onset of heartbreak weather,

hoping at best to end in a
thunder of agony

and prayer that will move us
down through

archipelagoes of silver light
to a morbid fairy tale

wherein we will labor like
dwarves at the question

of forever, and listen to a
grumbling static from above

that may or may not explain in
some mystic tongue

the passage of white trains.

<>

*
* * *

Jack’s
Decline

At first they strapped him to
the bed and let him howl, let him try to vomit out the red, raw thing inside
his hate. He would scream until his voice became a hoarse, scratchy chord, and
then he would lapse into a fugue, his mind gone as blank as the gray stone
walls. Often during these quiet times, the man who washed and fed him would
bring strangers into the room, charging them a fee to have a peek at the
greatest villain of the age, and they would stand beside the bed, shadows in
the half light, and say,
“That’s
the Ripper? Why, that poor sod couldn’t
butter his own toast, let alone do murder. I want me money back!” And their
disbelief would rankle the demon within him, and he would scream louder than
ever, shaking the bed and delighting in his visitors’ fearful attitudes.

Later,
after dozens of therapies—torments, really—and doctors whose manner was
unanimously neutral, years and years later when he began to suffer guilt and
wanted to atone, he realized there was no possibility of atonement, that his
demon was not accessible to moral remedies. For a while he tried to deny the
horrors of his past, to steep himself in the genteel associations of his
childhood, in memories of gracious estates and garden parties. But he found
that more vivid memories possessed him. Those five slatternly faces going slack
when they saw the blade, their scent of sweat and cheap perfume, and the hot
true perfume of their blood bubbling over his fingers. He yearned to engage
once again in those terrible
amours;
yet he was also repelled by that
yearning, and these contrary pressures drove him to consider suicide. But it
did not seem a sufficient punishment: death for him would be surcease, and he
could think of no means of extinction vile enough to earn him absolution. And
so, despairing, dulled by despair, he wandered the corridors of his family’s
keep, becoming—as the years passed and the century turned—a numb meat of a man
with graying hair and a gray pallor, whose fingers would sometimes clench
spasmodically, and whose eyes would sometimes appear to grow dark and lose
their animation, like pools in which the fish had long since ceased to spawn.

In
1903 there was a reawakening of interest in the murders, new clues and rumors
that struck close to the bone, and his family—none of whom he had seen since
the beginning of his confinement—gave orders that he be moved from England,
fearing that their awful secret would be brought to light. He was issued a
German passport under the name of Gerhard Steigler, and one night in the autumn
of that year, along with his warders, his doctor of the moment, and a trunkful
of the drugs that kept his demon tame, he crossed the English Channel to
Calais, and there entrained for Krakow in Poland. From Krakow he was
transported by coach to a hunting lodge in the northeast of the country, a
rambling structure of whitewashed walls and pitch-coated beams, set among
rumpled hills thicketed with chokecherry, forested with chestnuts and stunted
water oaks. Travel had rekindled his spirits somewhat, and during his first
year at the lodge, he came again to derive a mild pleasure from life. He liked
the isolation of the place, and he would walk for hours through the woods,
often winding up atop a hill from which he could look westward over a
checkerboard of cultivated fields, of wheat and barley and sorghum. Here he would
sit and watch cloud shadows rushing across the land, great shafts of light
piercing down and fading, the golden fields dappling with an alternation of
bright and dark, and it seemed to him that this constant shifting display was
an airy machinery, immaterial clockwork that registered the inner processes of
time. He realized that but for a brief, bloody season, his life had evinced
this same insubstantiality, this same lack of true configuration, and as the
years slipped away, he returned each afternoon to commune with that vast,
complicated emblem of light and shade, believing that therein he could perceive
the winnowing of his days.

If
he were to look eastward from the hilltop—something he rarely permitted himself
to do—his eye would encounter a smallish town of thatch and whitewash and
curling chimney smokes, its church steeple poking up like a rifle sight. There,
he knew, would be women of the sort he fancied. The thought of their bellies
gleaming pale, the neatly packaged meats of their sex awaited a knife to reveal
their mysteries, that would start him trembling, and for days thereafter he
would be overborne by his demon’s urges and have to be restrained.

During
that first winter, in order to perfect his role as a member of the German
aristocracy, he immersed himself in the study of the language. He had always
been adept at learning, and by the time the spring thaw had arrived, he had
become fluent in the spoken tongue and was capable of reading even the most
difficult of texts. He enjoyed the works of Schiller and Nietzsche, but when he
came to
Faustus
and its humanistic depiction of evil, he was so nettled
by the author’s dearth of understanding that he hurled the book out the window.
Demons were not nearly as personable as Goethe had described them. They were
parasites, less creatures unto themselves than the seepage of a dark force that
underlay all creation, that—presented with an opening—would pour inside you,
seducing not your soul but your blood, your cells, feeding upon you and growing
to assume hideous shapes. He had seen the nesting places of such demons in the
bodies of the women he had slain, had caught brief glimpses of them as they
scurried for cover deeper into their bloody caves.

Turning
from literature, he developed an interest in gardening, and would work from
dawn until dusk in his plot, exerting himself so strenuously that his sleep was
free of nightmares. But in the end this, too, failed him. Things grew to
obscenely feminine proportions in that rich soil. Beneath heart-shaped leaves,
the snap beans dangled like a bawd’s earrings, and he would unearth strange
hairy roots that with their puckered surfaces bore an uncanny resemblance to
the female genitalia. Once again he despaired, considered suicide, and sank
into a torpor.

In
December of 1915, when he was fifty-six years old, a new doctor came to the
lodge: a dapper little man in his forties, brimming with energy and good humor
and talk of subconscious drives, neuroses, and the libido. The doctor treated
him as if he were a man and not an aberration, and through hypnosis, several
childhood traumas were revealed, notable among them a humiliating evening spent
at a brothel when he was twelve, brought there by the family coachman and left
alone in the common room, a target for the taunts of the whores. The doctor
believed these incidents were seeds that had grown to fruition and inspired his
murderous acts; but he rejected this theory.

“You
claim, Doctor,” he said, “that once I accept the connection between my
childhood pain and the murders, a cure will be forthcoming. But those
experiences only weakened me, made me susceptible to the demon and allowed him
to enter and take possession of my body. There were supernatural forces in
play. Witness the arrangements I made of the viscera...like some sort of
cabalistic sign. I was driven to create that arrangement by my demon. It was
the mark of his triumph over the demons encysted within the women.”

The
doctor sighed. “It seems to me you have invented this demon in order to shift
blame to its shoulders.”

“You
think I am denying guilt?”

“Not
entirely, but...”

“Believe
me, Doctor,” he said, “despite my inability to exorcise the demon, I am expert
at guilt.”

He
enjoyed these exchanges not for their intellectual content, but because he felt
the doctor liked him. He had been self-absorbed for so long that he had
forgotten even the concept of friendship, and the hope that he could actually
have a friend caused him no end of excitement. He had become a decent chef over
the years, and he would prepare the doctor special dinners accompanied by fine
wines and venerable brandies. He honed his chess game so as to provide worthy
opposition for the doctor, who had been a schoolboy champion; he took renewed
interest in worldly affairs in order to make better conversation. Things, he
believed, were going swimmingly. But one afternoon as they walked along the
crest of a wooded hill, in a companionable moment he threw his arm about the
doctor’s shoulder and felt the man stiffen and shrink away from his touch. He
withdrew his arm, looked into the doctor’s eyes, and saw there fear and
revulsion. What he had taken for friendship, he realized, had merely been a
superior form of bedside manner.