As I Die Lying (28 page)

“
Hey, Diddledick, I don’t
need no help with the ladies. You’re the pasta-prick who pretends
to care. I doubt you could even get it up, unless it’s with Mommy
dearest.”

“
If I could get my hands on
you—”

“
Don’t tease me like that,
sweetie. You wouldn’t know how to handle this biscuit.”

Bookworm stepped in. “Gentlemen, let’s be
reasonable. We’re all in this together.”

“
Glad I have you around to
edit my feelings,” I told him.

Bookworm rang up a purchase. The elderly
couple bought a Benjamin Franklin biography and a book on dealing
with death. After taking care of business, Bookworm rubbed his
hands together. “I’ve been thinking, Richard.”

“
News-fucking-flash,” said
Loverboy. “Dickworm cuts a brain fart.”

“
No. I’m serious. I know how
to beat the Insider.”

Here was hope, thrown in my face, a razor of
light cutting into the safe darkness. But was it real, or just
another of the possessor’s tricks? If the Insider really knew what
all of us were thinking, how could we even dream of outsmarting
it?

“
Trust me,
Richard.”

Trust. The ultimate trick. But what choice
did I have?

“
Okay,” I said. “I’m
waiting.”

“
Curiosity killed the cat
nine times,” warned Mister Milktoast. “And he had a rat in his
belly.”

“
Good things are worth a
little risk,” I said, a corny line I’d picked up somewhere and
tucked away for just the right moment, just to let everyone know
I’d been paying attention all along despite the whims of multiple
narrators. “Tell me, Bookworm.”

“
It’s like the answer to its
own riddle. An inside joke. Get it? The Insider.”

“
Tell me more.”

“
Yes,” said the Insider,
coming out, all black brass and barbed wire and pissed at being
dragged away from his typewriter. “I’m dying to hear how you’re
planning to get rid of me.”

It laughed for half an hour. Every door in
the Bone House shook on its hinges.

Those next few days, I was a sleepwalker with
dreams of blown glass. I hovered just behind the surface of my own
eyes, stoned on the emotional pain that nourished the Insider.
Sometimes Miss Billingsly would look at me over the top of her
glasses and frown. The local poets haunted their corners,
outspooking each other with stage-garb nihilism. Speed readers made
their mindless trips to the bestseller racks, genre freaks scoured
the meager offerings and muttered. I avoided Brittany as much as I
could because Loverboy’s attraction was becoming a deeper hunger.
He thought she smelled like cinnamon rolls.

Seven rejection slips showed up in the
mailbox. Someone had been making multiple submissions.

Worst of all, the rejections said things like
“Your fantasy novel does not meet our needs at this time,” when the
book had been submitted as non-fiction.

The Insider grew stronger, spinning its bleak
lullabies, its voice a molten volcano that oozed cold black lava.
It was feeding on my guilt over what I had done to Shelley. But now
it wanted more. More pain, more death, more hate, more pages. I
fought to keep it down, like a sideshow geek who knows he will be
beaten if he vomits the live snake he has swallowed.

My vociferous friends haunted my every step,
twittering like puzzle birds, filling in the blanks as I became an
outline. They were the parts that didn’t quite make a whole.

Loverboy was the lupine eyes, mistaking
appetite for attraction, visually groping the tired curves of
grandmothers as eagerly as he did the nubs of prepubescent
girls.

Mister Milktoast was the polite mouth, always
ready to make a witty comment to the stranger in the checkout
line.

The nose was Bookworm, sniffing for danger
and spoilt meat.

Little Hitler ruled the ears, hearing
conspiratorial whispers in the slipstream of passing cars and
autumn winds.

The Insider was the hands that itched to
reach, to touch, to caress, to crush, to type.

The many were becoming the one. They were me,
and my point of view shifted to third person plural.

The end of October brought its cold
rains.

Halloween arrived, brown and dead and damp. I
recycled a dozen rejection slips. I checked the outline of my life
story to ensure I wasn’t leaving a hole in the plot.

I put on my costume. Then I drove to Beth’s
apartment.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The party pounded the flat stones of the
house. Three Draculas on the porch held beer and cigarettes,
blowing smoke between their fangs. Princess Leia danced by herself,
white and virginal and with eyes clouded by some secret, illegal
pleasure. A Viking couple shook their rag fur boots and waved
plastic axes. The band was dressed like zombies, with pale makeup
and black lipstick and Medusa hair. The lead singer kept falling
into the crowd and knocking beer out of people’s hands. Xandria
strutted like a Zulu queen, thumping the strings of her bass
guitar.

The night swelled and pulsed. Restless energy
hung over the house like a thunderstorm. A hundred people throbbed
under one roof, all looking out from their masks, all tapping into
their primitive ancestral memories. Halloween. Samhain. All Saints
Day. But the night belonged to the sinners.

I had rented a top hat, cane, and coat and
tails. My white gloves were stained with red dye. Mister Milktoast
had enjoyed putting the costume together. He loved dress-up and
make-believe.

“
Jack the Ripper,” Beth had
said when I picked her up. She bought me a white carnation to put
in my lapel.

Hell, I was the Ripper. Or rather, I had
been. The Insider had walked those dark foggy Whitechapel streets
in 1888. The newspapers had theorized the killer must have been a
surgeon, so skilled were the eviscerations. It was a skill that was
the result of thousands of years of practice. Or so the Insider
said.

Beth had found a plush velvet dress, royal
purple with a laced bodice and frilly neckline. Her breasts
strained to pop free, and more than one Frankenstein monster dipped
his heavy forehead for a closer look at the pretty flesh. Her
golden-brown hair was pulled up into a tower, showing off the
enticing slope of her neck. She was the perfect harlot, delectable
and trashy, utterly disposable.

She leaned against me, squeezed by the crowd.
I felt the heat of her breasts even through our layered clothes.
The carnation gave off sweetness as its petals were crushed.

“
Oil be yer lady for two bob
ten,” she said in a bad Cockney accent.

“
Oil not rip yer too bloody
bloody,” I said back.

The band, billed as The Half-Watts, was
cranking out a syncopated version of “All Along the Watchtower.”
Aliens and pumpkinheads swayed drunkenly. The singer kept switching
his impersonations between Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix during the
few lyrics he could remember, while the frizzy-haired lead
guitarist was all diddle and no bop. The junkie-faced drummer
sweated behind his kit, raising his arms high, making up in show
what he lacked in technique.

Xandria’s glistening black muscles flexed as
she pounded her fat strings. The whiteface made her look
frightening, like a veldt goddess come to demand retribution for
Colonial crimes. Beth yelled at her but Xandria’s eyes were fixed
on her bass strings.

“
I think I’ll have a beer,”
Little Hitler shouted over the music.

Beth’s mouth opened in feigned shock. “I
thought you were too pure for that.”

“
I’m the Ripper, not
Richard. And the Ripper’s thirsty.”

“
Would you get me another
while you’re at it?”

“
Sure. If I can fight my way
to the keg.” I left Beth and pushed past a guy dressed as a beer
can. He had Princess Leia pressed against a wall, trying to kiss
her, but she was in a galaxy far, far away. Her wide pupils stared
at the sagging ceiling tiles.

The keg was on a tiny back porch that had
once been screened in, but the wire mesh was more holes than
screen. The air smelled of sweat and piss and reefer.

A boy of about fourteen was pumping the keg,
a goofy grin plastered across his face. He was wearing an oversized
diaper and nothing else. “Hit you up, man?”

“
Sure. I need
two.”

As he filled the plastic cups, he said, “Cool
costume. What are you supposed to be, an undertaker or
something?”

“
Just another ordinary
killer,” I said.

“
Heavy duty. Is that knife
real?” he asked, pointing at the prop tucked in my belt.

“
Sure.” Confession was good
for the soul, especially when nobody believed you.

“
Cool,” he said, and filled
his face with beer foam.

When I got back to the living room, Beth was
gone. I looked for her, spilling beer on my rented jacket as the
dancers bumped my elbows. I reached the far side of the room just
as the band finished its first set. Beth’s roommate Monique was in
the hallway smoking a cigarette.

“
Richard,” she said. “How ya
doing?”

Her pale face glowed. She looked like she’d
gotten an early start on the beer. Rosy spots of pleasure colored
her cheeks. She was dressed in ragged black, a green wart attached
to her nose, a pointy hat on her head.

“
Which witch is which?”
Mister Milktoast asked.

“
Just the plain old ‘wicked’
variety.”

“
You seen Beth?” I asked,
but Loverboy was looking, looking, looking.

“
I think she went upstairs,”
Monique said, tilting her head in that direction. “Party
room.”

Bookworm pursed my lips as his heart turned
savage flips, wishing her were in a Jane Austen novel instead.

“
Listen, Richard,” she said,
putting a hand on my arm before I walked away. “I’ve got to tell
you something.”

“
What?” I said. Mister
Milktoast was sending off warning flares but Loverboy shoved him
into his closet.

Monique’s face grew serious, her features
becoming even darker than usual. “You seem like a nice guy,
Richard. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

Hurt? Richard Allen Coldiron, feel pain?
You’ve got to be kidding. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“
I mean, maybe it’s not my
place to say,” she said, as I watched her beautiful lips form the
words. “And I love Beth to death, I really do. She’s a really
pleasant person at heart, but she’s totally faithless.”

Pleasant. Fucking pleasant. I drank from one
of the beers, half at one gulp. My hand trembled, making frog-eye
foam.

“
It’s nothing against you,
Richard. She’s been that way since I’ve known her, and we’ve roomed
together for four years. I’ve seen them come and go.
Literally.”

I finished the beer and started on the other
one. The two Vikings staggered past, with Baby Louie in tow. Over
in the corner, a Tin Man was feeling up Princess Leia. He might as
well have been seducing a log.

“
She told me she was a
player,” I said.

“
Well, she is honest. But
never true.”

“
What about Ted? Does he
care?”

“
He’s just a number. He’s in
and out faster than a door-to-door coke dealer.”

Both cups were empty now, and I looked across
the room, searching the crowd for Beth’s sweet oval face. The
singer with the Edward Scissorhands hair was sitting on a speaker,
nodding to the imagined beat. It was as if he didn’t exist when the
band was offstage. I watched him a full thirty seconds before I saw
him blink.

“
What do you care?” Little
Hitler asked Monique, wanting to add the word “bitch,” but I
stifled him.

“
You probably think I’m a
bitch. I just thought...I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to do
you a favor.”

I wondered if she was jealous. The Insider
said that all humans had their games, everybody played, everybody
followed their own rules. But if she was jealous, that meant
Loverboy’s instinct was dead-on. She was lying to get what she
wanted.

“
Listen,” I said, leaning
toward her so I could whisper. But what I was really doing was
letting Loverboy sniff the clean ocean of her neck. “I could use
another beer. Want to join me?”

Monique smiled. “I’m on my sixth or seventh.
But, hey, the night is young, right?”

“
Is it kosher for a witch to
hang with a Ripper?”

“
You might think I’m weird.
I mean, I hope you think I’m weird. But I really am a
witch.”

“
A real witch?”

“
Yeah. A Wiccan. Earth
worshipper, pagan, sort of a roll-your-own brand. This is a
religious holiday.”

“
Are you casting a spell on
me?” Loverboy asked, already forgetting Beth. But I
couldn’t.

Monique’s eyes sparkled, a diamond glint on
onyx. “We believe in white magic. Whatever we give, we believe it
comes back three times.”

“
Give me an orgasm and lucky
you,” Loverboy said.

She giggled, and her sleek dress shimmered
around her long frame. We filled our cups at the keg. I now
understood what Father liked about alcohol, the same dulling ether
that Mother discovered. If I drank enough, if I numbed my brain,
then there would be nothing for the Insider to probe and poke and
sting. He’d be cheated of my feelings. Plus I might have a blackout
and miss an important chunk of my own autobiography, which I could
fill in as I wished later.