Mr. Suicide Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Nicole Cushing

  Mr. Suicide

  © 2015 by Nicole Cushing

  To the memory of Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  Acknowledgments

  Titles Available from Word Horde

  About the Author

  Praise for Nicole Cushing’s Mr. Suicide

  “…a work of brutal and extreme horror… disturbingly graphic content…”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This tale of a damaged and murderous child is the most original horror novel I’ve read in years. Cushing’s prose is rapid-fire, grisly, and passionate.”

  —Poppy Z. Brite, author of Exquisite Corpse and Lost Souls

  “Novels don’t come much more transgressive than this one, folks. Got a taboo? Watch Nicole Cushing grin while she dances all over it. In other hands that might be reason enough for the witty Mr. Suicide to exist. But this is more and better than that—a truly nightmare world, richly imagined, told to us in a canny, subversive second-person voice that makes you, the reader, the hero of this tale, like it or not. That it also manages to be ultimately life-affirming is yet another wonder.”

  —Jack Ketchum, award-winning author of

  Off Season and The Girl Next Door

  “Nicole Cushing uses her sharp and confident prose like a surgical instrument to dissect both her characters and our emotions. Mr. Suicide is horrifying and harrowing, but just as much for the emotional devastation it causes in the reader as for the violence and depravity—as well as the twisted humor—it portrays. This is horror fiction that leaves marks.”

  —Ray Garton, author of

  Live Girls and Sex and Violence in Hollywood

  Praise for Nicole Cushing’s Children of No One

  “The confidence and expertise so blatantly evident in Nicole Cushing’s writing is astonishing.”

  —Thomas Ligotti

  “This is a superb novella, one in which Cushing tackles many different themes… symbolised in the antipathy between her two main characters… each of whom is brilliantly captured on the page and wonderfully larger than life, with dialogue that hums with power as you read.”

  —Peter Tennant of Black Static

  “Cushing ratchets the tension perfectly, and blends horrors both real and cosmic for one of the more disturbing reads of the past year. Children of No One will stay on your mind long after reading […] I, for one, would love to see more longer work from this author. Highly recommended.”

  —Arkham Digest

  Praise for Nicole Cushing’s I Am the New God

  “Audacious, original and gleefully offensive, a broadside against the entire notion of divinity, with an ending you’ll never see coming. Nicole Cushing is somebody to watch.”

  —Jack Ketchum

  “…a marvellous piece of gonzo storytelling, like Dunsany on drugs.”

  Mr. Suicide

  A Novel of the Great Dark Mouth

  Nicole Cushing

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  Mr. Suicide © 2015 by Nicole Cushing

  This edition of Mr. Suicide

  © 2015 by Word Horde

  Cover art and design © 2015 Zach McCain

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN 978-1-939905-11-6

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-939905-12-3

  A Word Horde Book

  To the memory of Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998)

  I

  Like everyone else in the world, you’ve wanted to do things people say you shouldn’t do.

  How many times in your life have you wanted to slap someone? Really, literally strike them? You can’t even begin to count the times. Hundreds. Thousands. You’re not exaggerating. You’re not engaging in… whatchamacallit? Hyperbole? You’re not engaging in hyperbole.

  Maybe the impulse flashed through your brain for only a moment, like lightning, when someone tried to skip ahead of you in line at the cafeteria. Then it was gone and replaced by the civilized thought: You can’t do that. Not out in public.

  But you’ve had the thought.

  It’s not just you, either. On TV, you hear about people in New York shoving each other out of the way for cabs. On TV, you see news stories about people stampeding over each other to get a much-prized, heavily-discounted Christmas gift. You imagine their teeth gritted in primal struggle as they compete for temporary control over things. Everyone wants to be top dog.

  Yes, you’ve wanted to slap the shit out of people. You’ve wanted to punch people, too.

  Hell, at more than one point in your life you’ve wanted to kill someone; really, literally kill someone. That’s not just an expression. Not hyperbole.

  No reason for shame. Everyone at least considers murder, at some point (though few would readily admit it). There’s a reason it’s illegal. Why would there be a universal prohibition against it, if there wasn’t a universal yearning that had to be reined in?

  To be more specific: the urge has arisen three times, so far, in your eighteen years.

  The first person you wanted to kill was your mother. You were ten at the time. She’d assigned you the chore of cleaning the bathtub. You looked at the cylinder-shaped box of Ajax, and noticed it said to call Poison Control if you ingested it. That’s when you realized you had a weapon. Actually, the first thought you had was to use it against yourself. (Yes, you contemplated suicide at age ten—you were precocious). But then you realized you needn’t off yourself, especially given that your mother was the one who deserved death.

  Why had you wanted to kill her?

  She was obnoxious. Yeah, sure, that’s not sufficient reason to kill someone, but it’s easier to explain it all if you start there. When you enrolled in elementary school and, naturally, made friends, she yammered on and on about how sternly she disapproved of them. You were her precious little boy, and she wanted you all to herself.

  She was cruel. Okay, this is a bit closer to a justification. When you were in middle school and taking sex ed, she told you that you’d never grow into much of a man, because your father sure wasn’t one. She’d told you that your father couldn’t please her in bed, and so you’d never be able to please a woman, either. She’d said, “Those sorts of things run in families.”

  When she’d said “things”, she’d gestured toward your crotch.

  She was vile, that way. Offensive. Filthy-minded. And yet, by some bizarre twist, conservative Christian dogma managed to coexist with all the vulgarity in her head. She prevented you from going to the movies, saying they were a bad influence. She censored your reading material, weeding out anything she deemed too close to “demonic”. The Lord of the Rings was “demonic”. Zombie books were “demonic”. She went over your room with a fine-toothed comb for contraband. If she found what she was looking for, she confronted you about it. She screamed. She slapped.

  She never drank a drop of alcohol or, to your knowledge, indulged in drugs. No one in your family did such things, to your knowledge.

  But she was insane. Aggressively insane. She was drunk on rage, and when the bender could no longer sustain itself, she crashed and awoke the next morning with a hangover of depression. She bitched about her dissatisfaction with her lot in life (you, your father, and your brother were trotted out as prosecution exh
ibits A, B, and C). She never shut up. You were her youngest child, and as you went into the latter years of high school, she seemed to grow ever more morose and over-protective. Tried to keep you to herself. She frowned on you leaving the house for any reason not connected to school work. By then, your social skills were so rusty that, most of the time, you complied without argument.

  These are only a few of her crimes. What you’ve detailed so far is not frivolous, but even more will be revealed. After the totality of her transgressions are presented in detail, all will agree you were justified in wanting her dead. Hell, if the Pope had been aware of all her crimes, even he would’ve nodded his little beanied head with slow, grave resignation and declared: “Yes, that bitch has to die.”

  And yet, you decided to spare her.

  You wanted her dead, but didn’t want to get caught. Besides, there were other ways to be rid of her. Maybe, you told yourself, you could leave the day you turned eighteen. On April 22, 2015, you’d move as far away as you could. You counted down the years until adulthood, the way a prisoner counts down years on a sentence.

  Looking back, you’re not certain you made the right decision. Had you killed her when you were ten (and gotten away with it; done it in such a way that everyone thought it was an accident or sudden illness), then everyone would have been free.

  Your father would have spent the requisite year or two mourning, then started openly dating the coworker you’re pretty sure he’d had an affair with. You have three older siblings—a brother ten years older than you, a sister thirteen years older than you, and a brother fifteen years older than you. The brother ten years older than you never married, but your other siblings did. Had you slain your mother when you were ten, you would have saved them from the embarrassing scenes she made a few years later, at their weddings. And if your mother hadn’t been around to make embarrassing scenes at their weddings, they wouldn’t have stopped visiting. They would have called. They wouldn’t have seen you as nothing more than an appendage of her. They would’ve answered your emails, because they wouldn’t have thought their responses would be forwarded on to her. They wouldn’t have cut off all ties with you.

  The brother who’s ten years older than you (the one who didn’t marry) devolved to a state of idiocy. Your mother berated him until she broke him, and he was reduced from a man to a shard of one. He commuted to college, so he wouldn’t disappoint your mother by moving out. When college was done, he commuted to graduate school. Then after graduate school, he broke down.

  He graduated at the very worst point of the recession. He’d chosen an impractical master’s degree. He could find no work within easy driving distance. One day, he began sobbing and hid under his bed. You were there, looking into his room from the hallway. Through the open door. You tried talking to him, but he wouldn’t answer. So what could you do, except watch the whole thing with fascination? It is a fascinating thing, to be there the exact moment a mind crosses the threshold from precarious stability to full-blown madness. You imagine it’s like watching a butterfly emerge from a cocoon. The old, gray protective wrapping falls away to reveal the creature’s true, colorful nature.

  Or maybe it’s more like watching a woman give birth (you wouldn’t know, for sure, you’ve never seen a woman give birth; the closest thing you’ve watched were birth scenes on TV or films, but it seems like an apt metaphor). He was sweating and bawling and writhing under the bed. “Puuuuush,” you wanted to say. “Pushhhhhh and let the madness out. Let it out, and then let’s you and me do what we should have done a long, long time ago. Let’s go mad, together. Let’s commit the act of madness that would have stopped you from going mad. Let’s pussssh a steak knife into dear ol’ Mom’s throat!”

  But you didn’t say that. You didn’t say anything, for a long, long time. The scene took your breath away. It was a good five or ten minutes before you could tear your eyeballs away from it, before you could decide what to do.

  Even though your parents could plainly hear the crying and thrashing under the bed, you had to draw their attention to it. (“Look at the mad butterfly coming out of his cocoon,” you could have said. But you didn’t. You weren’t that poetic, in the moment. You said something along the lines of, “Hey, don’t you hear that?”)

  Your mother sat on the sofa in the living room and pretended that it wasn’t happening. Your father waddled over to the scene, fidgeted, and scratched his head. “He’s kind of a weird kid,” he said, “ain’t he?”

  Dad was overwhelmed by it all. He’d spent too many years under your mother’s thumb. He wasn’t sure how to proceed without her permission. She’d decided to ignore the scene, and to do otherwise would contradict her. He didn’t have the balls to contradict her. He was a softie.

  You wouldn’t think he’d be that way, given his background. Blue-collar hick, all the way. Worked on the assembly line at the Ford plant. But he was a blue-collar hick who happened to find his mother dead of a heart attack when he was thirteen. He’d told you about it once—how she was all blue and shit when he found her. You think that probably made him the way he is—all sensitive, when it comes to women. Kind of a doormat. Probably traumatized by the whole thing. Scared that if he ever had cross words with a woman, she’d keel over on him.

  So he became a wimp. When he was in his early twenties, in the army, his buddies used to call him “Ajax” because your mother had gotten so pissed at him that she’d flung an Ajax container at him and nailed him in the forehead. That cut made a scar. But he never left her.

  He wasn’t much of a role model for you, now, was he? When he wasn’t busy being a doormat, he was busy packing on the pounds with ice cream and candy. Or living vicariously through the younger, more athletic men playing baseball on TV.

  Your brothers would have been better off if you’d killed your mother. Your sister would have been better off if you’d killed your mother. Your father would have been better off if you’d killed your mother.

  And yet, you failed to follow through with the murder. Which makes it all the more funny, when you think about how things sorted themselves out.

  But more about that later. You’ve gotten a little ahead of yourself. Jumped from one year to another, to suggest the general flavor of your troubles. People have always said you’re jittery, and you think they say that because you try to tell them everything in one frantic breath. Better to slow down, if you can. Take things step by step.

  II

  Of course, you didn’t earn good grades in high school. Ten-year-olds who plot homicide and contemplate suicide rarely grow into teens who make the Honor Roll.

  Of course, you had no friends in high school. Those friends you’d acquired almost effortlessly in first grade became acquaintances you only spent time around sporadically in fifth grade. Those acquaintances became virtual strangers by high school. Oh, on the first day of high school they said hello to you when you said hello to them. But after the first week, they stopped saying hello to you when you said hello to them. They only nodded politely. By December of ninth grade, you’d say hello to them and they wouldn’t even acknowledge your presence.

  It ached when that happened. It really did. Your efforts to connect with them invariably led to aching.

  So you stopped trying to connect with them.

  So you became something… other. Something… different. Alone and apart, a creature whose mind had gone places his peers’ minds couldn’t even imagine. Didn’t you, in a way, stop being a child when you began to plot homicide and contemplate suicide? The most intense moments of your life, up to that point—those moments when you’d engaged in such plotting and contemplation—defined you, changed you, burned whatever bridges existed between you and others your own age. Yes, everybody considers murder, even if just in a fleeting thought. But few do so, in any serious way, before puberty! (And as for suicide—most people serve at least two decades of their incarceration in flesh before they consider the option of shuffling off their mortal coil).

  So, at
ten, the most interesting conversations you had were internal ones; those conversations between you and your suicidal thoughts. You had so many of these conversations, it was like suicide was a person. (“Why not today?” Mr. Suicide asked you. “It’s summer, and there’s no school and you’re stuck at home with your bitchy mother and a carton of Ajax.”)

  ***

  It would be that way for the next several years. It’s hard to explain, but you weren’t sure if Mr. Suicide was just in your head, or if you’d actually heard him. You only know that he hung around you. Frequently.

  When you were eleven, Mr. Suicide asked you: “Why not today? Everyone made fun of you when you were chewing on a pen so nervously that ink gushed out and stained your mouth. This is surely the sort of fuck up from which there is no recovering. Do the honorable thing and let’s put an end to your life now. Fall on your sword. People will respect you for admitting you are without value. Well, maybe they won’t respect you. I guess what I mean is they’ll respect the honesty, you know? Why not now? Why not now?”

  Because I’d get it wrong, you thought. With my luck, I’d just hurt myself real bad, instead of killing myself. I might put myself into a coma instead of dying.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing!” Mr. Suicide said. “Comas have a bad reputation, but I bet you’d dig it. You’d exist, but you wouldn’t exist. If you went into a coma, you wouldn’t know you were in a coma. It would be pretty much like death, I think, except you’d still be breathing. Consider the advantages: you’d get to stop thinking and feeling. Your parents would get to avoid all the hysterics of a funeral. It’s a win-win!”

  You asked Mr. Suicide where he got his information. I wouldn’t be aware I was in a coma, huh? Do you know that for sure, or is this more of a guess on your part?

  He had nothing to say in response to that. Dead silence. You had a hunch that meant Mr. Suicide was making the whole thing up. So you didn’t kill yourself. Because, what if this was a prank Mr. Suicide was playing on you? (Lots of people pulled pranks on you. Just the week before this conversation, Terry Whitlock—one of your old friends from elementary school—swore up and down that Tracy Rosenswie had a crush on you and wanted you to hold her hand. When you tried, she hit you in the stomach.)