I sat in my recliner. An old lamp rested on a desk against the far wall of the living room, illuminating just a quarter of the space. There were electric lights that ran across the ceiling, but they hadn’t worked for months, and I was always too distracted to get around to fixing them.
On the trunk in front of the recliner was my naked-lady ashtray, and the remote control for a television that picked up three or four stations, depending on the weather and the time of day.
The beating of my blood was like getting punched from somewhere deep inside. The heart pounded so furiously, so continuously, I almost felt like I was vibrating. I smoked my cigarette, and the carbon monoxide that those fuckers pack in there only made the pounding in my ears that much stronger. Someone could’ve gone at my door with a battering ram, but I wouldn’t have heard it over my own frantic heart. It was time.
I put the cigarette out in the naked-lady ashtray and went over to my front door. I unlocked the four locks. After that, I checked all the windows. Then I went to the bedroom.
I rolled up the old piss-colored rug that covered the floor and dragged it into the corner. From one of the dresser drawers, I took out a plastic tarp and laid it out on the floor. I pushed my bed into the corner, and had forgotten that I had put the gun under the bed when Pearce came over. I slid the gun back under the bed with my foot. I was, after all, Mr. Safety.
I took off my nasty white T-shirt and threw it onto the stack of dirty clothes I had in the corner. I unfastened my brown leather belt with the silver skull-and-crossbones buckle and rested it on a chair. I took off my jeans and put those on the bed. They weren’t dirty enough to warrant getting put in the wash. My socks and undies, however, had earned their place in the laundry bin.
There was a night-light with a clown’s face plugged into the outlet in the corner. I flipped the small switch on it, and the night-light came to life. It glowed just above the floorboards. The clown had a white face, which was made a sickly yellow with age. It had black makeup around the eyes which made it look like it was sad, even though the mouth was frozen in a maniacal grin. The hair was orange, the nose was red, and the lips were red. It had on a green hat with a black band. There was a little yellow flower sticking out of the band.
That night-light meant more to me than anything else I had. It once belonged to Doris. She’d had it since she was a little girl, because no matter how old she got, there was something about the dark that scared her. I used to tease her that it was a wonder she was never afraid of clowns, but she loved clowns. For some reason, I was her clown.
The night-light had the job of guarding the house while no one was home.
I took the rubber band from my hair, and ran my fingers through my mane. I looked at myself in the mirror. Every once in a while, it was hard for me to believe I was forty fucking years old.
Up on the wall, the numerous articles I had put back glowed in the faint yellow light the clown gave off. Each was a cry from the public, a plea from the world at large for restitution; only the law wasn’t going to be the one dishing out the justice. Not that night.
Standing at the bedroom window, the moon yearning on the other side of the curtains, I felt that buried pain roll up my nerves, felt it lick my ribs. I breathed in deeply through my nose with my eyes closed, and then I opened the curtain.
Hard white light hit the glass and came through silver, bathing me. A spasm flared through my body from my ankles, up my spine, to the back of my neck. My head shot back, and the veins in my throat became engorged, thick blue, with burning blood. I hit the floor hard just as the milky, white froth began to bubble up from my insides. I forced myself to crawl over to the tarp.
Tears leaked from my eyes from the pain, and snot ran down my face in a rivulet. In a moment’s time, my body would no longer belong to me at all. It would be the vessel of a ghastlier, more terrible entity.
Lying on my side on the plastic sheet, I saw the nails fall off my fingertips, replaced by thick, cedar-colored talons. Black hair oozed out from every pore. New muscles bulged and flexed under tearing skin, and where I ripped, smoke billowed and blood spurted out like children spitting up food.
I thought of the Rose Killer. Through the pain, I smiled.
It was the last act of the evening I would be able to will my body to make, because from that point on, my mind was on the back burner. Marlowe Higgins was going someplace farther than sleep, a place that was too deep for even the sandman to tread lightly. As I fell away, I heard my scream turn into a howl, and then I was gone.
ELEVEN
I woke up on the bedroom floor the next morning, right in the same spot where I had blacked out the night before. A lot of the blood on the tarp had dried black, and it was as sticky as sin. It felt like there were a million grains of sand mixed into the slush that had been my body, but it wasn’t sand. It was pulverized bone. I stretched and spit the thick muck that lined the walls of my mouth out onto the tarp.
It was a workday, and the alarm clock was going off. “Magic Carpet Ride” blared from KBTO. I could hear birds chirping outside, just like everything was hunky-dory according to them.
I would always set the clock a little earlier than usual the morning after—that way I’d have the chance to do some tidying up before heading in. I hated leaving the place looking like an abattoir while I was off whipping up Louisiana Burgers for the general public.
I was naked, of course, and covered in a thick layer of dried blood. As I wiped the sleep from my eyes and began to rise, the dried blood flaked off of me like flower petals and fell to the hardwood floor. All about me were hairs, sinews, and short lengths of muscle—some of them mine, some of them not mine. A row of teeth rested by my foot, attached to a brittle piece of jawbone. A handful of fragments of my victim’s skin rested in a constellation all about the floor, and drips of blood dotted themselves all along the floors of my house.
I’d pull the piss-colored rug back later, once I cleaned.
I limped to the living room—still not comfortable in my own skin—and lit myself a smoke. My lungs felt new and clean. Everything was as I’d left it. All in all, I felt fine, maybe even a little happy. I felt like I’d done someone a really big favor when I didn’t have to. Like I was a Good Samaritan. That kind of feeling.
After a brief inspection of the house to make sure I still had all my windows and there wasn’t anything horrible out in front—some eviscerated remnant of a human being, a stack of dead bodies, claw marks along the outside of the house—I made a pot of coffee. As that was going, I took the all-important shower.
It never ceased to amaze me how much effort it took to get all the blood out from around my fingernails. It was always a pain in the ass. That, and my hair. On skin, I’d often resort to using steel wool on myself, like I did that day. It hurt, but it worked, and any cuts I received would be gone by the end of the day. On hair, like the hair on my chest and around my happy place, I used one of those back-scrubber brushes. It worked well enough, but there were always little bits of blood I’d have to pick off hairs with my fingertips.
I shampooed twice, then conditioned twice. As the second bout of conditioner went to work, I got out of the shower and went over to the cabinet above the sink. I pulled out my razor, my comb, and some shaving cream, then went back in the shower. I shaved in there with the use of a small mirror fixed into the wall, and combed the dried blood flakes out that had eluded the washings. The water going down the drain was pink.