Butch took Boyle by the legs, hoisted him up, lifted him up so the top of his bagged head just brushed the bottom of the tub. The Mad Hatter, whistling merrily, tied his ankles together with rope, then roped him to the shower curtain rod. The rod bent down, but held. Already blood was running from the bag around Boyle’s head. The Mad Hatter pulled it free, set it aside.
When Slaughter stared at him he said in a singsong voice:
The Mad Hatter took out a carving knife. He slit Boyle’s throat and the blood really started to run. “This will drain our pig a lot faster,” he said. “About five, ten minutes and we can commence work on him.”
Butch and the Mad Hatter lit cigarettes, chatted about the weather, all the rain they’d been getting.
Slaughter felt a greasy, heaving sludge crawl up his throat. Felt his mouth go hot, wet, and sweet. He pushed past the Hatter and Butch, vomiting into the toilet with great shaking spasms until there was nothing left and he was just coughing and gagging and spitting.
Butch patted him on the shoulder. “It’s always tough the first time,” he said. “You’ll be okay. Now your cherry is popped. Ain’t that right, Sean?”
The Mad Hatter laughed and then sang:
Butch and the Hatter tossed their cigarettes into the toilet, flushed them, along with what Slaughter had deposited in there.
What came next was even worse.
Butch, who was now Dirty Mary with jiggling bared breasts, untied the tool bundle and rolled it out flat. In little pockets there were meat cleavers, butcher knives, steak knives, medical instruments, hammers, hacksaws, bone snips. He/she told Slaughter to strip off Boyle’s bathrobe.
It wasn’t hard with him hung up like that, but to do so he had to come in close proximity with the corpse. He pulled one arm out, then another. The robe dropped. He reached down to retrieve it, needing badly to be sick again, and one of Boyle’s tangling arms brushed his face. The feel of the flesh was cool and moist. It was almost too much. He pulled out the bathrobe and bagged it.
The Mad Hatter cut the ropes and Boyle fell into the tub, the bag coming off his head. His skull had pretty much come apart now. Plates of bone with tufts of hair sprouting from them were connected only by gristle. The tub was red with blood. The Hatter turned on the faucet, splashed some water around, helped clean it up a bit.
“Okay,” he said. “Tweedledee.”
Dirty Mary took a cleaver and started chopping through Boyle’s left ankle. Did so, and set the foot aside. The Mad Hatter took the hacksaw and, lining up his cut with the gash made by the knife, started sawing through the neck. As he sawed he said, “Don’t worry, John. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
Slaughter stood there with a butcher knife in his hand. His face was bloodless, his legs like putty.
“Grab a wing,” Dirty Mary laughed. “Plenty for everyone.”
The Mad Hatter was watching him now through the slits of his pink eyes. Slaughter did not look at those eyes, not for long, because whenever he did they began to run like pink tallow, flowing from the puckered sockets in rivers of pink slime.
Licking his sticky lips, Slaughter sucked in a breath, took one of Boyle’s hands and started cutting through the wrist. His guts throbbed in his throat and an itching madness tickled at his brain. Like cutting through a chicken leg, except it was so very fleshy.
“You have trouble with the bones and cartilage, asshole, use the bone snips,” Dirty Mary instructed, working Boyle’s left leg free. The pale globes of her tattooed breasts were speckled red. “Just cut and twist his hand. It’ll pop.”
“Now you know,” said the Mad Hatter, “why a raven is like a writing-desk.”
When Slaughter came out of that he was still in the park, crawling madly in ever-widening circles as his brain told him to just go with it, just ride it out because in its unreality was its very reality. Dirty Mary was his oracle that had become mixed up with the 158 Crew and a book from his childhood. He knew better than to reason it out. He knew that something was coming, whether revelation or stark insanity or perhaps both, he could not know.
You make everything so difficult, John.
Dirty Mary again, fondling herself.
You make no sense, he told her.
I make all the sense in the world. Pay attention now: why is a raven like a writing-desk? C’mon, John, answer the riddle. If you don’t I’ll toss you down the rabbit hole.
Slaughter’s mind was very clear and sharpened, it turned back upon itself, seeking and probing, opening doors that had long been closed. It looked in the dusty back corridors of his brain, found something. A place. Like some wellspring of childhood terrors opening before him and he knew it was where Black Hat had come from.
A city.
It was a city.
Yes, a city of the dead and the damned, those unliving and those undead and those that were never really born. A blasted urban gutter of nightmare.
The city was a shrouded, evil place of cyclopean buildings and crumbling streets that were mazes leading everywhere and nowhere. There were rivers and stagnant pools of refuse and broken bodies. The shadows had textures, physical presence; colors had odors; the ground heaved tears and flame; the sky rained blood and filth. There were great empty spaces, blackened and blasted, dismembered bodies spread in every direction as if some terrible battle had taken place there. The lanes were flanked with crucified children and adults impaled on stakes and set aflame. The flickering illumination intended to guide strangers to valleys of punishment they were better off not seeing. And everywhere, the hot, nauseating stench of cremated flesh and the cries of the damned.
It was Hell.
Maybe not literally, but something very much like Hell.
And this is where his tripping brain had dumped him, marooned him: the city with no name.
There was no time here or no sense of the same. Slaughter ran through black mists, from one street to the next, feeling something behind him. Something or someone. Always following. Footsteps coming through the darkness, slow and methodical and stalking. They were patient and relentless. No matter how far he ran, they only edged in closer and closer. Now and again, he’d see a face peering from the shadows. The face of Black Hat. Always watching, always waiting.
Slaughter kept running, passing through the rotting thoroughfares of the deserted city, looking for somewhere to hide or someone with warm blood in their veins to help him. But there was nothing and nobody. Just the breath of ghosts and the whisper of shadows.