The thoughts in her mind were spiraling now from lack of oxygen. They were spinning around and around, faster and faster. There was no focus or cohesion. She trembled on the edge of consciousness.
She opened her eyes. She had blacked out, but just for a moment or two. The wire was still around her throat. Cherry had her face very close. Lisa could feel her hot breath in her ear. “I love your hair, Dr. Lisa. It’s soft. It’s the color of wheat. I want to shave your head. I want to wear your scalp and dance in the rain.”
The wire had loosened. “What do you want, Cherry?” Lisa said, her voice dry and gritty. “Tell me.”
The wire tightened and tightened.
A thousand thoughts and memories converged on her drifting, oxygen-starved mind as she saw static, gray glittering specks, and everything was washed away and she fell into darkness.
And a coo of a voice said, “Not yet, Doctor. It won’t be that easy for you…”
THE CONFESSIONS OF DR. BLOOD-AND-BONES (1)
There are places death goes.
A multitude of dead-ends and vacant quarters that it inhabits and calls its own. Abandoned cemeteries and forgotten crossroads where the night winds play and whisper in the tongues of lost souls. Dusty crematoria and dank crypt, prison, madhouse, and morgue. Cancer wards and slaughterhouses where the reek and scream of tortured life cling like grave mold or a child’s echoing cry. Death lives on the razored edges of knives and surgical equipment. On the tips of fingers and tongues, in concentration camps and marriage beds, in cribs and mausoleums alike. Death is everywhere, sewn into the tattered, unwoven fabric of reality.
There is nowhere Death doesn’t go, no hole too deep or altar too sanctified. And it is most at home in the twisted dreams and anguished thoughts of men and women.
It has a special place here.
It moves without check, in places where the living and dead mingle. Where the insane and the sane wear the same brooding faces. It lives in the dreamscapes where men deflower a thousand lovers, their children, and ultimately themselves. Where women mate and kill and destroy everything but their own vanity.
And sometimes death visits the same houses and buildings and thoroughfares that these same men and women call their own. This time it chose an old and crumbling house of filthy brick and here it looked for answers.
The aura of decay and depravity and human suffering was nearly overwhelming. Droplets of rain entered through the sagging, patched roof and fell into the attic. The air was pungent with the stink of rotting plaster and mice-gnawed wallpaper, the windows grimy, the floors uneven, and the walls bowed.
Death had heard things about this place, tales of madness and horror. Stories of unspeakable atrocities and blatant perversities committed behind these graying, powdery walls. So it came, hungry to learn more, looking for something, anything to call its own in this lifeless place that was untenanted by even rats or spiders or termites or silverfish.
Within the walls, reality and unreality were evenly balanced, like light and shadow at twilight or madness and sanity in the mind of a desperate man.
There are places death goes.
I know these places, for they are mine.
BLOOD BATH
The house stood high above the others on the street, set on a lurching hill covered with stunted grasses and denuded trees. Its neighbors crowded in to either side, dwarfed by the rambling, gothic monolith. It was desolate and weathered a uniform gray. Black turrets and crooked spires jutted from its sagging roof into a sky of rolling, moon-washed clouds.
Eddy stood before it, head bowed.
If houses had voices, then this one was calling to him. It went far beyond what he’d heard of the place—those were tales, true maybe, but just tales and this was reality. He didn’t go in alone. He took Cassandra along. She had a hunger for heroin and sexual excess. She was a whore and a junkie and that’s why he loved her. Like him, she was not whole. She was damaged and he understood damaged.
Holding hands, Cassandra and Eddy went in.
He wasn’t sure what he expected. Perhaps a rush of demon wind; a rattling chandelier; clanking chains or ghostly laughter. None of these things were in evidence. Instead, there was singular neutrality suspended in the air like a flat and distant memory. To some, it would have been nothing— merely a feeling of desolation and destitution common to all old and empty houses; but to the truly sensitive, it was a huge and morose sound, a scream of nothingness, a chorus from the void.
Eddy heard it and stopped dead in his tracks, a feeling of elation and rumbling confusion in his head.
“Why so many mirrors?” Cassandra said.
Eddy shrugged. He wondered this himself. There were mirrors of every size and shape crowding the walls. Many were broken, many were not. All were covered in grime and dust.
He cocked his head as if he were listening.
“What is it?” Cassandra asked. She was used to his sensing things that she could not.
“Did you hear it?”
She shook her head.
He thought as much. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t as disturbed as all those doctors said, hearing the things he did. But no, there was a rhyme and reason for everything and the sounds and voices he heard also fit into that pattern. All he had to do was make sense of it all, fit together the puzzle.
He and Cassandra had been together for six weeks now and he supposed it was the longest he’d ever spent with one woman. But she wasn’t like the others. She understood why he had to find his father even if, at times, he didn’t.
She gladly, willingly traveled from city to city with him, through ghetto and slum and desperation, as he searched, listened for the faint psychic echo that would lead him to the man who’d fathered him. Their travels had brought them here, to a desolate and shunned section at the edge of the Excelsior District. To this house in particular. A house his father had once called his own.
They moved quietly from room to room as Eddy smoked and listened to the wall of indecipherable noise he encountered everywhere. Close, so very close. They went upstairs and the noise thinned.
Cassandra was nervous. Was she, too, beginning to feel something? Or was it just her imagination toying with her? She decided it was probably neither and nothing that a syringe couldn’t fix up.
“Anything?” she said after a time. She was beginning to sweat.
“He’s been here,” Eddy said in a breathless voice.
“Recently?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes were bright and expectant. She was shaking and wiping her nose almost continually.
Eddy turned to her, stroking her cheek. “You don’t look well. Do you need a little something?”
Cassandra nodded. “Yes, just a little.”
He slipped a plastic bag into her hand. “Take as much as you like. Only go downstairs and do it. I need to be alone.”
She thanked him and left.
Eddy listened to the thud of her feet on the stairs until she was gone.
Then he fell to his knees. He was alone in this crowded room. He had to think, to make sense of it all, to keep in mind that he was the catalyst here and without him, nothing would or could happen. He stared off through the dust and grime and tried to empty his mind, tried to let the quiet noise of the voices fill his head.
Just let it happen, he told himself.
But it wasn’t that easy.
He kept seeing his father in his mind. The man he remembered from boyhood, a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who rarely spoke. A man who spent his days locked in a room full of books, his nights out on the streets practicing his art. William Zero considered himself an artist, they said, and his canvas was the human body. His admirers were few. It took a special mind to appreciate what he did to human flesh with his knives. Yet, an artist he was. And his son, Eddy, never saw him as anything else.