Reg sipped his fair trade
coffee quietly, thinking his bloodshot eyes and stiff
muscles to be a comfort compared to the guilt gnawing at his
soul. He wanted to have a good opinion of himself, but the only
self-image he could entertain was dark -- corpse black-and-blue.
Something had rotted inside, either weakness of personality or
weakness of the flesh. He wasn't sure what it was; but he knew
that the vision of what he'd become was a sluggish nightmare and
he would carry on with it.
Beyond the
burger joint's steamy window a field of weeds shook with wind
and rain. It was rain that never ended and it had dampened his
action this summer … like everywhere he went he got mud in his
eye as an increasingly smaller pool of potential victims
disappeared like fluttering raincoats into the gloom. Most of
this stretch of Scarborough was suburban in appearance but this
was a dead-end where high-rises and some weeds trespassed over
the borderline to grow tall and unwanted. Scarborough was a sort
of faceless place of mixed races; people that seemed to blend
together into uniform blandness. Reg
liked to blend into the scenery in faceless places, like part of
their null history. He‘d drift on the streets until he did what
he had to do, then he’d disappear into bone-white oblivion,
waiting for inner darkness to wake him again.
His favorite
oldie floated moodily from the radio, but it wasn't really a
good day to think about Scarborough Fair. He got up, dumped his
tray and left, banging the door. The wind and slashing rain tore
at his hunting outfit. Waves of rain whipped across his dented
Ford. His mind was becoming a dismal blank, it always did after
a killing; an image of the little boy's battered body in his
trunk flashed in his thoughts, then things went blank again.
Bleached
white sky illumined the lake as black clouds drifted on the
horizon. The narrow gravel road he turned down rested in misty
gloom. The road ran along a lonely mostly hidden stretch of the
bluffs, and the heavy rains had made the area a sudden swamp. He
looked for familiar landmarks in the fields of bland mud, but
could find none. The feeling was that this place existed in the
bowels of Scarborough and every other windy lakeside city in the
world.
With
disappointment curling his lips, he stopped by a row of dead oak
trees near the edge of the bluffs. Exposed roots gripped the mud
like the talons of a griffin. Behind the trees a pond lay like
melted chocolate. The pond's bottom would digest a body well; he
decided to dispose of it there and got out.
A warm moist
wind blew off the water, but it was an ill wind, like the breath
of a zombie. Since the mud was soft, dragging the body would be
the easy way. As he did the work he noticed that Lake Ontario
was stained and rolling with muck for quite a ways out.
His spade cut
into the mud, knifing too deep. He halted for a moment; the
body's gory face was causing his breakfast to leap so he took a
moment and turned it. The mud was heavy and the hole immediately
filled back in when he lifted the shovel, so he decided it would
be better to get some rocks and sink the body out under a few
inches of water.
"Damn!" he
said as he noticed that his rubbers had gone down a couple
inches in the mud. Reaching down he held his right rubber as he
lifted his foot. The suction power of the ooze made for a loud
pop as his foot came out.
Thrown off
balance, he nearly fell, and he found himself unable to regain
his footing. Suddenly and silently his whole world began to
shake. Looking up he saw the oak tree in front of him tilt and
pull a section of earth with it as it began to slide down the
bluff. It was a mudslide, and a shift of the mud knocked his
feet free. He fell on his butt.
Jabbing his
hands into the mud, he used them as an anchor and rode the slide
like it was a giant toboggan. As he screamed vile names at the
gods, he could see that the slide was headed for a flat span
that topped a second steep wall of the bluffs. The frothy lake
and certain death were beyond the wall.
With a
jolt and an incredible blubbering of ooze the slide halted
on the second wall of the bluffs. The oak tree tilted out over
the water, swinging roots and branches like dripping tentacles.
Reg turned over to his knees and
looked up the slide. A big swell of softer ooze was flowing over
the top edge. To save himself he turned to face the lake and dug
in up to his knees. He stood up and the ooze flowed around him,
slowly rising up his ribs, touching him like a filthy molester.
Then water came pouring down and he held his breath as the
contents of the shallow pond raced over him.
Waves lifted,
broke into silted foam and seethed against the bluff wall.
Reg was up to his armpits in mud,
and the stuff stank like an outhouse. The pressure on his torso
hurt like a gut punch. He tried to squirm, but found that he
couldn't lift himself out. Panic and slime turned his dirty hair
to hog bristles. He hollered for help, and found that hollering
caused the mud to close and cut off his air. It left him
choking, taking shallow breaths.
The slop
began to percolate and splatter in his face; some sort of swamp
gas was bubbling up, sour and rancid. A blob shot in his right
eye and his hands fought in vain to reach it. He was afraid the
gross gas would cause him to vomit and choke to death.
A torrent
began, rain showered down, cleansing his eyes and face. When the
downpour eased his eyes began to dart about, looking for hope
like a trapped animal might look for hope. A buzzing sound
circled his head and he went cross-eyed. A fat mosquito had
lighted on his nose. He watched full of misery as the bug grew
even fatter, and he felt like one of the kids he'd killed --
twisted in the clutches of something as abominable as it was
unbelievable.
The mosquito
flew off and he found himself staring straight ahead at an
object rising out of the mud. Belching gas lifted it higher and
higher. Mud streamed from it and Reg
saw that it was a corpse. It had been in the slop a while and
was badly bloated, swelling with pus and rot -- a mass of raw
maggoty flesh and exploded veins. And it stank so bad that
Reg choked and grimaced as he tried
to hold his gorge down.
It rose to
its hips and had a belly that had fattened to enormous size
and was splitting like a rotten vegetable. Violet intestines
emerged from the tear, hatching out on the mud like snakes. They
were connected to a football-sized spleen gone slime green. Gobs
of congealed gore, a slab of brown liver and a big red tongue of
heart muscle followed; the whole thing a gross chimera of death
and its ugliest decay.
Reg felt ill. All of his life he'd
been an admirer of human organs, but this was incredibly
different and disgusting. He'd always kept his body parts in
locked sanitized containers, where he had power over them.
Organs on the loose were one his worst fears.
Terror showed
in his dilated eyes as the spleen and intestines slid toward
him, but the spleen never reached him -- instead it exploded,
throwing a wad of rotten tissue against his lips. Vomit rose and
he choked horribly, certain that it was over, but after a few
moments of flaming lungs and long rasps he was still alive.
A staring
eyeball poked out of the mud in front of him and a heavy weight
was pressing on his stomach. More swamp gas rose. As the eyeball
continued to stare, the pressure rose up to his chest, then he
was rising slowly, propelled by the gas. He floated to his hips,
his arms came free and he grinned hopefully.
Then another
object began to rise in front of him and he tried to hold it
down in case it was something foul. He failed and it continued
to rise until ooze flowed off of it, revealing it to be the dead
little boy.
"Why can't
you stay buried, you rotten kid!" he shouted, shaking the corpse
violently, then he saw the tree moving and knew the slide was
loose again. The oak tree slipped over the wall and the boy's
corpse pressed against him as the slide slopped forward.
Reg had the corpse by the shoulders,
and it was jabbing at him with stiff limbs as he tried to shove
it away. He continued struggling with it as the slide took him
down the bluff wall and on to the bottom of the lake.
Reg managed to hold his breath as he
went under and he saw air bubbles and the boy's corpse floating
in the cloudy water above. He pumped his legs, trying to speed
the melting of the mud at his feet, then waves of blindness hit
him and he was rising. His lungs were a balloon about to burst.
He expected to see his life pass before him, but instead he saw
that old self-image again; himself as a corpse. This time he was
swollen and splitting to slime in the algae at the shore. And
this time it was the kids who were alive, dancing and skipping
on the rocks as they poked him with sticks of driftwood.
---The End---
