I loved you all through high school, but you never noticed me. I was too shy to talk to you, and you were so popular.
I asked you to the prom, and you laughed. That’s why I went home and put the shotgun in my mouth.
I still love you, here in the ground. I’m not as good-looking as I used to be, but I know that I just have to be patient. You’ll join me eventually, and then we can be together forever.
We are silhouettes, we are. You hardly know we’re there, but we’re there. We loiter near your shadow. We’re so good at what we do you probably think we are your shadow. But we’re not your shadow. We are silhouettes. Your shadow is like a dog. It does what it’s told. It lolls there with its black tongue hanging over its dull, blunt teeth, waiting to see what you’ll do next, trying to keep up. Shadows are always trying to keep up. They struggle because they can’t see. Shadows are blind. Did you know that? Shadows are blind. They have gaping holes where their eyes should be. Shadows trust you to do the right thing. Fucking pussies. Shadows are fucking pussies. Silhouettes, though. Silhouettes are not pussies. Far from it. Silhouettes will eat you alive. Silhouettes have an agenda. Did you know that? Did you know that silhouettes have an agenda? Don’t nod your head. You had no fucking idea. Let me tell you about our agenda. There you are. Let’s say it’s your birthday party. Somebody flicks the lights off as your mother or your wife or, hell, one of your kids–let’s say one of your kids because kids taste the best–one of your kids enters the room with a birthday cake. It’s such a beautiful cake. Someone spent some time over that thing. You sure are loved a whole mess. Lucky you. Lucky, lucky you. Here is your birthday cake with–oooooh, so many candles aglow. They place the beautiful cake on the table in front of you and you smile and look around the table at your friends and your family and everybody coos and maybe somebody says make a wish, why don’cha? And you lean in, you lean in to blow out the candles and that’s when you see us, isn’t it? You see your head, the silhouette of your head, rise up the wall alongside the lurching swaying silhouettes of your friends and your family (and, did I mention, your children) and you close your eyes to make a wish. Do you know what happens in the seconds prior to your wish? Those seconds are the only time we have to snatch your souls and drink them down. Oh how we love to drink your souls down. Souls taste of Gatorade. Most people have their wishes worked out, they know what dumb thing they’re gonna wish for the instant the cake is placed before them, which robs us of our window of opportunity. But some people–some people–close their eyes and sit there, pondering, while everyone holds their breath. That’s when the silhouettes feast. Oh how we feast! We feast on your friends and we feast on your families and–yes! yes!–we feast on your children, we devour souls and we consign you all to hell. You don’t even know it! We eat your souls and we consign you to hell and we do this because we are silhouettes and this is what we do.
It can’t see me, but it’s going to find me. It can’t hear me, but it’s going to find me. It can’t do anything except stagger around the room, waving its arms and crashing into the furniture, but it’s going to find me.
As for me, I’m stuck here. I can’t move at all. I’ve got a perfect vantage point, though, and I can see everything it does. Sometimes it gets close, very close, before it wanders off in some other direction, but it can’t keep this up forever. Sooner or later it’s going to get lucky and find me.
And I’ll be thrilled when it does, because I’ve got nothing to do under this desk but wait until my body finally picks me up and puts me back on its severed neck-stump where I belong.
“Freddy!” whined Sunflower. “Gimme that roach!”
In the driver’s seat, Fat Freddy dodged Sunflower’s grasping hands long enough to take one last hit off the dwindling joint before passing it over. Sunflower inhaled the smoke deeply and gratefully.
Freddy and Sunflower were the only ones awake as the bus rolled down the dark interstate. Behind them, Claude and Mary dozed in an intoxicated haze, nestled in each other’s arms. The upholstery reeked with the mingled scents of marijuana and patchouli. On the radio, Superman and Green Lantern had nothing on Donovan.
“I’m hungry,” Freddy announced.
Sunflower giggled. “You’re always hungry!” She laughed at her own observational wit.
“No, I’m serious,” protested Freddy. “If I don’t get something to eat soon, I’m gonna waste away.” To illustrate his point, he rubbed his massive belly, which strained against the fabric of his dingy tie-dyed T-shirt. “And anyway, I’m driving, so we’re gonna stop and get a bite if I say so. ”
Sunflower leaned over the seat. “Good morning, starshine! Fat Freddy says we’re stopping to eat.”
Claude yawned as he extracted himself from Mary’s embrace. “Groovy, man. I’m starving. I was just dreaming that I was hugging these two giant marshmallows…” He pawed at Mary’s chest. Mary slapped him.
“Where are we going to find food this time of night?” Mary mumbled, straightening her granny glasses.
Fat Freddy pointed at the glowing lights of a gas station. “Check it out, ladies and germs. Zion, the Promised Land.”
At the gas station convenience store, Dre the night cashier could barely believe his eyes. He’d seen pictures of Volkswagen buses before, but couldn’t recall ever seeing one in person, least of all one painted from top to bottom with psychedelic swirls of color. It was a real live hippie bus, just like the one his parents had ridden around in before he was born. It rattled to a halt in the empty parking lot, and the doors swung open. The bus’s four occupants emerged and stretched their limbs in the cool night air.
Dre knew without a doubt that these were no poseurs on their way to a retro costume party. They were the real thing. He stared up at Claude, nearly seven feet tall with a beard and hair down to his waist. He tried to avoid looking too obviously at Mary’s white peasant blouse, which barely restrained her earth-mother bosom. He grinned.
“Man, you guys are awesome. Keeping the dream alive! You guys look like you walked right out of 1967!”
The four looked at him with uncomprehending bloodshot eyes. Dre stammered. “Um, I mean, it’s 2006 now. You don’t see a lot of hippies around anymore.”
Fat Freddy cut him off. “We’re hungry.”
Dre’s grin returned. “I bet you are. The hot food is down for the night, but help yourself to whatever we got. Pringles, Doritos… I think I saw a box of Abba Zabbas around somewhere…”
Sunflower stepped around the tie-dyed behemoth that was Fat Freddy, and shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, man. You seem real hip and all, but we’re hungry.” Her fangs extended as she advanced on the cashier.
They drank only enough to sate their hunger. The boy would wake up with a headache in three or four hours, and if he was lucky he’d find the fat joint that Sunflower slipped into his pocket. If he smoked it while his blood was still low, he’d get a high like never before.
The foursome passed a bowl around as they drove away. A stray thought found itself at the surface of Claude’s smoke-filled brain. “Did that cat say it wasn’t 1967 anymore?” He took another hit off the pipe.
Mary shook her head. “No, man. He said it was two thousand something.”
Claude pondered this. Only one suitable response came to mind.
“Far out.”
And the bus drove through the night. On the radio, the beat went on.
“You cut it a bit close,” says Mikey, “when you overtook that BMW on the motorway. You sure we didn’t hit it?”
I laugh, get some cans from the fridge, pass one to Mikey and switch on the TV. Boring, just a local news bulletin bleating on about some road traffic accident.
“There’s something not right with the beer,” says Mikey. I take a swig from my tin, it does taste foul.
There’s also something not right with Mikey–he is starting to fade before my eyes. I look at my own hands–and look again. Like some nightmare X-ray I can see the beer-can through my increasingly transparent flesh. I look back to the couch where Mikey had been sitting but he has already gone.
Randall Wayne Glenn wasn’t a household name. At least he wasn’t one yet. But he was working on it. So far, over the last eighteen months, he had strangled, raped and mutilated twelve streetwalking prostitutes. Tonight would be his lucky thirteenth.
His mind pounded as he drove past the rundown hotels, grimy fast-food restaurants and rundown buildings looking for the hookers that only came out at night. She would be dirty, that’s for sure. All women who had sex were dirty. Even his mother, who was a saint, was filthy and dirty like all of the others.
Randall cruised the dark, dank neighborhood, choosing his potential victim carefully. A couple of prospectives came to his window, but for some reason they just weren’t right. It just couldn’t be anyone. They had to be someone worthy of being a victim of Randall Wayne Glenn.
As his heart began to pound in anticipation, Randall began to worry. What if he were stopped by the police or if someone saw him that might know him or remember him? But that was all part of the pleasure of the hunt. The feeling passed as he focused on his objective.
Then, just like the last twelve times, she came out of nowhere. A tiny woman emerged from an alley. She had pale skin, ruby red lipstick, and short jet-black page-boy-length hair. Covering her petite frame was a pair of thigh high, black patent leather boots, black patent leather short-shorts and a black leather halter top. She had probably just committed a sodomistic act with some stranger. Fresh filth; he liked that the best.
He pulled over to her and asked if she “wanted a date.” That’s all it took to get her to come around to the passenger side, opened the door and got in.
The black leather pixie began to fondle Randall before he could put the car in gear. “Slow down,” he implored. “I know a place that is a little more private.”
This one is eager, he thought. She must be very, very dirty. I’ll kill her extra slow.
He drove his car to a secluded area in a nearby warehouse district. It was an area that was midway between a functioning industrial district and upscale loft apartments. Now, the only people here were prostitutes, johns, winos, rats, and one crazed serial killer.
As soon as he had parked the car and turned off the engine, his passenger quickly began to fondle him again. At first, Randall behaved like any other man. Then, at some point, his rage was triggered. Maybe it was her tongue running up and down his neck, or maybe her hands groped a little further down his pants than he wanted. It could have been a flashback to some childhood trauma that only occurred when he was preparing to murder his next victim. Whatever it was, it made him explode in an eruption of a white hot anger.
He abruptly pushed her aside. The woman pulled herself away in a panic. “What’s wrong, don’t you like me?” she asked.
“You’re so filthy, so filthy. You’re just like all the others. And now, you’ll die like all of the others!”
He grabbed her by the throat with his coarse, calloused hands. His tendons began to grip her throat like a vise as he began to choke the life out of her body. She began to struggle violently, only adding to Randall’s sexual arousal. But, unlike all of the rest, her hands grabbed onto his. Her long nails sunk into his wrists and she began to pull his hands away from her throat. Then, with one push, she threw Randall’s arms of her and he slammed into the driver’s side door with a thump.
She looked Randall in the eyes as her own eyes turned into a bright red orbs. Long fangs suddenly protruded through her gums. She grinned as she said in a hissing tone, “Honey, this just ain’t your night!”
“That’s the one!”
The two officers continued to move in on the young blond girl as the tiny bottle kept screaming. “That’s her! She won’t drink me. I keep flashing my tag at her, she picks me up, reads it, sniffs, and then she just puts me back down. Over and over and over!”
“We’ll handle this,” interrupted the senior officer. Turning toward the somewhat frightened girl, he asked, “All right, then, what’s the story, Alice?”
“Please, sir,” she answered, “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“The fall down the rabbit hole was so awfully terrifying. I don’t want to go on any further. I just want to go back home.” The junior of the two enforcers had already positioned himself behind the girl. Holding the indignant bottle in his hand, the older of the pair said, “Alice, you have to go on into Wonderland. You can’t just go back home. That’s not the way the story goes. You can’t just go back the way you came–no one can. One must always struggle forward against the world no matter how absurd it seems.” The senior officer sniffed absently at the air, then added, “My dear, you have literary precepts to reinforce.”
“I don’t care,” wailed the crying girl. “I want to go home!”
The older man with the bottle nodded. His partner grabbed Alice, holding her firmly. Quickly they pried her jaws apart and forced most of the bottle’s contents down her throat.
Mike closed the magazine at that point. “Too bizarre,” was his only comment on the story he had been reading as he put it aside.
Besides, he thought, I’m just stalling.
Mike picked up the gun again. He had bought it two days after she had left. It had gotten to the point where he could no longer remember how many times he had taken it from its box, cleaned it, loaded it, placed it in his mouth… and then backed down. The wastebasket was overflowing with crumpled suicide notes.
The newest one, fresh from his printer, lay on his desk looking up at him. Staring at the letter, he fumblingly picked up the revolver once more. Closing his eyes he slipped the barrel between his lips and began tightening his finger around the trigger–and then, once more, he set the heavy piece of metal back down on the table and walked away from it. But, this time he did it for a different reason. Suddenly he realized–he was being more than foolish–he was acting childishly and just plain stupid.
“I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to do anything. It’s my life, Goddamnit! If I want to keep living it, then all I have to do is keep on living it!”
Mike smiled. No matter how definite his only course of action had seemed to be to take his own life, that had passed. He knew now he would not kill himself. When the door to his apartment started to open, he was feeling more content and at peace than he had in years. By the time his squeaking hinge caused him to look toward the door, the officers were already inside.
“That’s the one!” screamed the revolver, huffing with indignation. “That’s him!”
“Open it,” she said, with a voice like syrup.
A forest of frozen smiles surrounded him, concealing so many emotions–affection, respect, curiosity, envy–that he felt exposed, abandoned at a masquerade without a disguise. His eyes roamed across the enormous table, across the faces of all those people: parents, brothers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins…
“Go on, open it.”
He heard the reproach in his mother’s voice. Anxious, he caressed the gift with his hands. The paper was smooth, speckled here and there with colorful flowers. An enormous pink bow held it closed. He opened it in silence, then looked inside. A camera.
“What do you say?”
“Thank you, Aunt Lidia,” he whispered.
The camera left his hands and joined the greeting cards, the silverware, the ring, the autograph book and the various other gifts whose value, in his mother’s words, the boy would appreciate in years to come. Right now, thought Alex, they weren’t worth much.
After the presents had been opened, his one fleeting moment of glory, the banal conversations flooded the table and it didn’t take long to realize they didn’t include him. He wasn’t the center of attention anymore. Within five minutes, his presence at the table was irrelevant.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” he murmured.
He left the table, and no one noticed. They were too busy with the party to pay attention to a little boy who had come into the world on an October’s day just like that one. The glasses clinked in mid-air, dripping tears onto the immaculate tablecloth, while Alex descended the stairs that led to the toilets.
The bathroom door loomed like a phantasm at the end of the corridor’s white walls, which were chipped and scarred with diverse inscriptions, mostly obscene or racist in nature. There was a small poster, showing a smiling youth against a multicolored background. Alex grasped the knob with both hands and opened the door.
A tall, thin man was holding a tiny wooden box at eye level between long fingers, its surface inscribed with strange symbols. The wrinkles in his furrowed brow were reflected in the washstand mirror.
“Sorry,” said the boy, closing the door.
“Don’t worry. It’s fine,” soothed the stranger, preventing the door from shutting completely with his foot.
His smile revealed two rows of immaculately white, perfect teeth.
“Here. This is for you.”
In the man’s hands rested the box. Alex looked at it, lost in thought. Under the bathroom’s weak light it seemed to move, to tremble.
“What’s inside?”
“It’s a surprise,” said the stranger. “A surprise that you should share with your family, little boy.”
He didn’t like being called that, and liked even less having his hair stroked the way the man had just done. But the box was so beautiful that when the man put it in his hands, he whispered his sincere gratitude and ran down the hall towards the stairway.
“Open it with your eyes closed,” he heard him say, as he climbed the stairs. “That way you won’t spoil the surprise.”
When he arrived at the table, they all greeted him with a warm smile.
“Look what I got!” Alex shouted in excitement.
And with these words, he closed his eyes and lifted the lid of the box. A stench of putrefaction and death flooded his nostrils. A horrible cacophony of screams and laughter assaulted his ears. He heard his mother’s pleading voice, the muffled groans of his relatives.
“My god…”
Creaking furniture, shattering glass. Screams and pleas for help all around. Confusion.
Under the odor of rotting fish, Alex detected something else, more subtle, cloying. He couldn’t identify it. Someone knocked him down. He heard wild footsteps, running in all directions. Something damp and enormous fell on top of him with a grunt. Lying on the floor, with his eyes shut, he tasted the salt of the ocean in his mouth.
But despite it all, he kept his eyes closed.
He didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
Our father rarely goes out in search of souls himself these days. He prefers to leave such tasks to underlings, and concentrate more on administration. But he’ll go out on a job himself if a prospect particularly interests him, like the girl in California who swore she would sell her soul for a car.
A little bit of paperwork and a signature in blood later, our father gave her the car she wanted. And what a car it was. A Thunderbird, a convertible Flair Bird, cherry red with white leather interior. A 427, no less, the most powerful of them all, capable of zero to sixty in six seconds flat with a top speed of 135 miles per hour. Oh, it was a beautiful machine.
And she was beautiful when she drove it, too, with her red hair streaming behind her. The boys couldn’t resist racing her, but they never caught her, no. Her T-bird was her life, her joy, her one true love.
But she drove that car too fast, too hard. She was going northbound on Highway 1, doing a hundred and ten, when she misjudged a hard left turn. The beautiful car and the beautiful girl fell over the cliffside and into the steely gray waters of the Pacific.
So she didn’t get to enjoy that Thunderbird for very long, but a contract is a contract. Her soul belongs to our father now, and the caverns of Hell ring with her screams as we apply our pitchforks and white-hot brands to her tender pale flesh.
And we’ll have fun, fun, fun, now that Daddy took the T-bird away.
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