Futile Efforts (19 page)

He closes the window, looks over at the words on the wall and tries to decipher them.
 
This is an equation with theme and substance but no context.
 
His father used to do this all the time.
 
The man, a part-time poet, would wake up in the middle of the night and scrawl on a notepad beside his bed.
 
In the morning asking Lash, Can you make this out?
 
Is this an L or a K?
 
This say recitation or resuscitation?

He opens the window once more, tries again.
 
"Hey, if you want me to help you, just tell me, all right?"

She turns towards him but all that hair still flies wildly around her head, a miasma of her own delirium.
 
The kid continues making faces, maybe at Lash, maybe at his mama.
 
The church clamors with blaring pipe organ hymns, prayers reaching over the drenched spires and steeples.
 
You finally have your soundtrack.
 
Iwuvyou
is digging the music, hopping along on his back legs.

Lash is tempted to go out there, show her how it's really done.
 
Think about it.
 
The savior, giving her his hand, reaching while she flinches and shrinks away.
 
This could be one of those really whacked-out lovers' moments here, like a suicide pact between strangers.
 
So you go, Okay, how about this?
 
We'll try it pretty much together.
 
Me first.
 
Taking that step over the big edge, giving her a nice smile, demonstrating to her how there's nothing to it.
 
Now that would be a change.
 
That would be something.
 
She follows maybe a second behind you, the both of you twisting in mid-air, fighting and clawing towards each other as you fall, until you embrace a fraction before you hit.

He shuts the window.

Perhaps this is a chance to get back to the work.
 
WOMAN ON LEDGE: SERIES FOUR;
In Varying Shades of Blue
.
  
She can wait there posing for him while he paints, going, Don't move now.
 
Try not to shiver so much.
 
The light is fading.
 
Come inside, we'll hump each other into the dust bunnies under the bed, and then we'll resume tomorrow.

There are priests down on the street now.
 
Folks in robes.
 
Lash always thought they dressed in black, but there they are
in vestments
of red, blue, brown, gold, and white.
 
Several are hooded, with their arms folded across their stomachs, hands hidden within their oversized sleeves.
 
The restless souls of Benedictine monks float from the chapel, passing harsh judgment on all of humanity.
 
Other children are dressed like the kid in the window, unwavering and stoic.
 
A doorway filled with pre-teen ghosts.

Nuns gape and wave.
 
Not even frantic waving, but the Hey, how're you
doin
' type.
 
Lash nods back, gives a Come on up gesture.
 
They all frown and move away.

Lightning seizes the sky and ignites the world.
 
You're tapped into the elemental design of the universe, with your hand on the lever that works the turbine of the abominable engine, and you've got about nine bucks in your pocket. Your jeans don't fit right around your hips.
 
Your elbows are covered in dead skin. The heavens shake their fists in your face, promising further pain.
 
You are tied to the fountain of souls by your endless common dread.
 
There have always been heinous wraiths under your bed, at the back of your closet.
 
Incantations and maledictions are scrawled in your high school yearbook.
 
Your friends were set in place by the infernal arch-dukes to trick and deceive you.
 
You recall your father's poetry and realize he was trying to warn you about this.

The woman is at the window.

She's crouched there, pressed against the glass, staring at him through all her hair.
 
She snorts water.
 
Fingers clawing, she's perched and gawking.
 
He leans closer.
 
The nuns and monks and kids are all screaming up at him now, shouting words that might've held meaning once but no longer contain enough humanity for him to understand.
 
There are tongues not meant for a mortal mouth.

"You want me to let you in?" Lash asks her.

She shakes her head, body as solid as the gurgling stone spitting up beside her.
 
He still can't see her eyes.
 
She has weight, this lady, intent and function.
 
If she's got a message for him she's certainly taking her time delivering it.
 
He maneuvers against the pane, trying to be as fluid as the downpour on the other side.

So, she doesn't want to go over and doesn't want to come back inside.
 
Then what?

From one moment to the next we make our moves.
 
Even if you're only thrashing in your nightmares, you're still on the go.
 
What's he supposed to do now?
 
Paint her that way, hunched over and about to be washed off the rim of the world?

They're chanting below, and there's enough of them now on the street to be heard over the madhouse thunder.
 
He really doesn't want to see how many maniacs that might take, but he looks anyway.
 
Christ.
 
If it's sacrifice they need from him, they won't get it.
 
He can just imagine.
 
He's God's right hand, the avenger, the bearer of the flaming sword.
 
He spins and the woman is actually the embodiment of hell taking over the city, with a heart of pure eternal darkness made reality.
 
The sword is tied across his back and he snakes it free, bears up beneath the hideous weight of righteousness.
 
The point is perfect blue fire, holy and eternal, and he rams it through the window into the center of the abomination.
 
Poison spurts and gushes, scalding his hands as he hangs on.
 
She opens her enormous, fanged mouth and lets loose with a screech made up of all mankind's sins.
 
The sword is torn from his grasp.
 
The tempest sweeps her up into the merciless ashen sky and suddenly a ray of warm sunlight slices through the oppressive darkness.
 
He drops to one knee and his mother–golden and forgiving–wafts down on iridescent wings and blesses him.
 
She heals his blistered hands.

He stares at the woman and says, "It's time for you to make a decision, lady.
 
Today you must make a change."

But she's set in grim determination and hunkers down on the ledge, watching him without eyes, the coiling hair writhing in the rain.
 
Her kid, multi-colored and outlined in the stained glass across the way, a martyr who doesn't shave yet, glares at Lash and sticks his tongue out again.

"Fine," Lash says.
 
"See if I give a damn.
 
What, like this is my fault?
 
You think I'm to blame?
 
Is that it?
 
You've got it wrong.
 
We're just alike."

The pane rattles viciously in its frame.
 
Cracks appear but the window holds.
 
Maybe it's merely another test of wills.
 
The things out there being forced in, and him trying to hold up under the barrage.
 
No different than yesterday.
 
He waits for her to crash into his arms.
 
Two minutes go by, seven, nineteen, but it doesn't happen.
 
Iwuvyou
curls up beneath the radiator and gnaws a chew toy.
 
The cracks divide, scuttle in other directions, and abruptly stop.

A meeting is inevitable but his patience is beginning to lag.

He clenches his teeth, trembling with anxiety, and swings to the canvas.
 
The paints splashed on it are still fresh, and he uses a brush to swirl them together, slowly urging a pattern from bedlam.
 
He lets his subconscious ride the wave of anguish that's been building since his dog tore out his heart.
 
Lash shuts his eyes, turns his head up, loosens his shoulders so his arms flop this way and that, just close enough that he can touch the canvas while he
sways
.

After an hour, he opens one eye and squints at what's there.
 
It's a self-portrait of a sad man trying desperately to smile.

A hand clasps his shoulder and Lash spins to face himself.
 
He's standing there with his tongue out, facial muscles contorted, giggling like a moron.
 
Lash punches himself in the mouth and knocks himself down.
 
He sits on the floor pouting, starts whimpering and sobbing, looks over and holds his hand up, like
Iwuvyou
.
 
Look at me, I'm so cute.
 
No wonder the girls in the bars think he's an asshole.

There's a storm inside.
 
The woman is in the same position, but the cracks have grown more jagged, and they're beginning to take the form of his father's handwriting.
 
Is that a D or a V?
 
Is she spelling redemption or revulsion?
 
He listens to himself weeping.

Lash lies on the bed prepared to dream with a new and luminous intensity.
 
He gets up off the floor and struggles to the easel, stares at the bed and wants to kill himself.
 
Perhaps a little later, as soon as he finishes making this face.
 
Next time that Lash wakes up thinking, This is it, you're finally dead, maybe the sorry son of a bitch will be.

by Joseph Nassise

T
he question of faith has consumed man as long as he has been telling tales.
 
From Milton's descriptions of the war in Heaven in
PARADISE LOST
to Shelley's examination of the roles of creator and created in
FRANKENSTEIN
, we have sought to know the unknowable, to explain the unexplainable.
 
It is a search that, fittingly enough, has roots in our very souls, and as such is impossible to ignore.

In the same manner, tales of horror have long been a part of our literary tradition as well.
 
Ever since primitive man first gathered around the campfire, hoping its light would hold back the darkness and whatever it might also be hiding, we have told stories designed to soothe our fears.
 
In them the theme of good versus evil manifests itself repeatedly, for it is this struggle that most fascinates us as a race.
 
Horror fiction appeals to us because it reflects—both symbolically and in broad strokes—the real horror of the world in which we live, while simultaneously hinting toward the redemption that is found by struggling against the evil and despair that surrounds us.

For as long as I've known him, Tom Piccirilli's fiction has combined the religious and the fantastic, never once failing to take our expectations and give them a good twist when we aren't looking.
 
He forces us to examine beliefs we've long held sacrosanct, to consider them from other angles, other viewpoints, and to make decisions of our own rather than to simply accept the status quo.
 
In his latest effort, "The Thief of Golgotha," Tom does it again, this time with perhaps one of the most notorious criminals in all history.

–Joe Nassise, author of
RIVERWATCH
and
HERETIC

M
ills got word that his daughter was dead about three months after she was already in the ground. It had taken his cousin Floyd that long to track him down.

Floyd found him in a bar on West 71
^st
, in the back sitting with a gorgeous Latino prostitute named Candida Barr. She only had one tit, the left, and some men were consumed and obsessed with the heavy layers of scar tissue where she'd lost the other one. Her junkie mother had taken it with an electric knife back when
Candi
was thirteen, threw it in a frying pan and burned it down to gristle. Said there was evil in there, a black knot that would bring despair on every man and child that suckled it. Mills knew it was true.

He and
Candi
were nearly friends and discussing the possibility of going to bed together without ruining a good thing and somebody getting pissed off. Mills understood there was a little more to it.
Candi
kept smoothing herself against his chest, hoping that Mills would help her kill a pimp called Fresco, who was roughing up girls in the trade working too close to his side of the block. It was pretty cut and dry and Mills was considering the benefits and possible drawbacks of doing it. The tit was gone but there was always a vein of evil that remained behind, too deep to completely dig out.