The Mirrors Page 13

  “But you’ve no probable cause. On what grounds am I being arrested?”

  “On the grounds of having reported a crime! A crime implies a criminal, and the only criminal the laws of nature allow us to identify in this case is either you or your wife. My choice of you, in particular, was admittedly arbitrary—c’est la vie. Now, if you’d rather skip the tedium of incarceration and trial, I suggest you recant immediately. If you tell me that you made a gigantic blunder, perhaps mistaking your dog’s vomit for the remains of a child, I’ll forget that all this ever happened and merely issue you a citation for making a false report. In most cases they’ll plea bargain that down to a lesser charge. You’ll pay a fine, perhaps perform some community service.”

  My wife sobbed and shook me by the shoulder. “J-just do as he says. Just make it stop! Just make it all stop! Recant, for God’s sake, just as the good officer asks, sweetheart.”

  “But what about our son?”

  The policeman answered. “If you recant (which I strongly suggest that you do), then you must never again speak of him. For all intents and purposes, he never existed. The same goes for that clown and his promoter. For the sake of your very sanity, you must convince yourself that they were just nightmares. This may sound harsh, but it’s the way everyone else in Hanswurst has dealt with this kind of thing. It would be snobbery, on your part, to expect anything better.”

  I looked at the cop. I looked at my wife. “Then that’s what I’ll do. I-I’m sorry. I was mistaken, officer. Please forgive me.” I trembled.

  Maybe I was a snob. Maybe that’s what led me to expect better answers than those offered by the authorities. Maybe that’s what led me to defy the conditions of my arrangement with the police and investigate the grocery store parking lot by day, looking for any sign of the clown and his handler. Maybe that’s why I took my pistol along.

  Sunlight bleached the eeriness out of the place. Active commerce made it feel less haunted. Nevertheless, my pulse raced. I couldn’t imagine that they would have traveled far, given the advanced stage of the clown’s cancer. I discovered that, in fact, their minivan was still parked in the same space it had been the night before.

  By daylight, the vehicle looked old and decrepit. Its blue paint peeled. A handful of dents (some incidental, others disfiguring) suggested it might be ready for the junkyard. Rust afflicted its wheel wells.

  Looking over a broader swath of parking lot, I saw that rust afflicted every car and truck within a six-foot radius of König the Clown’s minivan. All the vehicles outside that perimeter were newer, or, at least, had been spared that particular state of decay.

  The sun cast a glare on Butch’s windshield. To catch a peek inside, I had to squat down to just the right angle. A gaudy, beaded curtain separated the front seats from the rear. Butch reclined in a tilted-back passenger seat. His fat stomach and legs were visible, his upper torso and head hidden behind the beads.

  I knocked on the windshield. Butch scrambled his hands through the beads, then tilted his chair into a sitting position. He rubbed his eyes with his fists, getting the sleep out. Then he turned a crank and his window lowered. An odd smell wafted out—a nauseating mix of the artificial scent of clown makeup and all-too-natural body odor.

  “Still think we cheated you last night?”

  I hunched farther down so I could look him in the eye.

  “What did you do with my son!”

  “Son? You have a son? I’m afraid I can’t help you out there, mister. When I met you last night, you were alone.”

  “You filthy liar! What the fuck did you do?”

  He sighed. “Me? I didn’t do anything. Now König, on the other hand …” He ran stubby fingers through long, unwashed hair.

  “What did he do?”

  “Look, mister, I think you’d do a lot better for yourself in life if you just took things on faith instead of asking so many questions. I’m sure that if there were really any foul play involved, the cops would have been on it like white on rice!”

  “They won’t do anything. I don’t know what your angle is with them. Maybe you’re second cousin to the police chief, or maybe you have photos of him in a compromising position. I don’t know what game it is you’re playing that lets you murder preschoolers, but I promise you I’ll find out!”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Where’s König? He’s in there with you, isn’t he?”

  Butch grabbed a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. Took out a zippo and lit up. “There are some things better left unknown.”

  I leaned forward, grabbed Butch’s shirt collar with my left hand, and put my pistol to his temple with the right. “Look at me, you little two-bit clown promoter, you’re going to show me where König is right now, or else he’ll be required to seek out new representation.”

  “You don’t want to know, not really. You don’t need to know.”

  I applied pressure with the pistol, pushing it harder against his temple. “And maybe you don’t need to live.”

  Butch sighed. “You’re doing it. You’re really making me show you König in the morning. Do you have any idea how many parents have shoved guns in my face? Do you know how many of them take those very same guns and stick ’em in their own mouths, once they see König the morning after a show?”

  “Enough yapping,” I said. “Show me the clown. Now.”

  He reached back and pulled up a small nob, unlocking the door. “You asked for it.”

  Yes, he was only a frail, sick clown—but I nonetheless found it necessary to brace myself for the need to shoot. At least, what I expected was a frail, sick clown. When the door opened, this is what I saw in the backseat: a bald, buttery man. Heavier than Butch, even. He wore the same yellow silk suit König had worn the night before. It billowed out at odd intervals, as though there were small animals racing around underneath, climbing around his torso. A series of muffled squeaks and high-pitched growls seemed to confirm this observation. The buttery man looked unperturbed by the ruckus. He sat with his legs folded underneath him, his eyes closed. Meditating.

  “Where’s König?”

  The man fluttered his eyelids, as if waking. Then he spoke in a voice that was more than one voice. “Everywhere.

  In rising mountains and sinking islands, new worlds and dead ones. In any place that comes and ceases to be. Which is (if I may repeat myself) everywhere.”

  Not human. Not only human.

  I began to feel my pulse in my jugular. “Who are you?”

  “Everyone,” said one hundred-voices-in-one.

  Not one discrete human.

  No merciful dark night or face paint obscured the hideous sight of the buttery man’s skull rearranging itself. Bones flexed and contracted, and his buttery skin flexed with them. They made popping and cracking and clicking sounds. The buttery man’s head transformed from the thick, broad noggin I’d first seen to something more slender—but by no means emaciated. “Anyone or anything that is born and dies. Even you.”

  I studied the visage of the buttery man in the back seat until I discovered that his new face was my own. But the buttery man’s body was still fat—far fatter than mine. “Not exactly to scale, is it? Hey, you like comedy? I do impressions. No charge, since you’ve come all this way.”

  I whimpered.

  The buttery man was enjoying himself. “Abra Cadaver,” he shrieked (intentionally, I think, twisting the magic words into morbid ones). His face stayed as my face, but grew thinner. Bony. Likewise, the barks and howls under his clown suit quieted as the girth of his body dissolved. When he finished his metamorphosis, I was sitting across from myself, in a clown suit several sizes too big for me. My frame—the frame I was looking at—was frail. I could not have tipped the scale at three digits.

  “Here’s my impression of you dying from cancer ten years from now!”

  “Stop it,” I said, backing away from the minivan.

  “Awww,” Buttery-König-Cancer-Patient-Me-Man sa
id in his voice that was more than one voice. “Don’t leave. You haven’t even asked me about your boy. Don’t you want to see him?” He tucked his withered hands at his costume’s collar and stretched it out from his body so he could see inside. “I know he’s in here somewhere. He might be that melanoma that just showed up today on my tummy tum-tum.”

  As if to verify the clown’s claim, I heard a squeaky, lisping voice coming from his (my) belly. “Help me, Dad. Please, Dad. Pleeeeassssee! It’s dark in here!”

  I took a step back, took a deep breath, and said the words that damned me. What other choice did I have? Who among us has resisted the urge to give up asking questions and just go with the flow? Who among us hasn’t painted a surrendering smile over an inquisitive smirk? We’ve all volunteered for the part of the fool, going along with the conspiracy of happy delusion that keeps all Hanswurst (and if König was to be believed, much beyond our little town) in its grip. It would be snobbery to expect anything better.

  “I’m sorry to have troubled you, sir. There’s no need to show me your anthropomorphic melanoma. It turns out I was mistaken. You and I have never met before. Perhaps that’s someone else’s boy. I have no son.”

  FUNHOUSE MIRRORS

  Eulogy to Be Given by Whoever’s Still Sober

  Mervyn Guestwhaite wasn’t dead yet, but that didn’t stop him from sitting behind a table just outside The Electric Lady Gentleman’s Club in Corbin, Kentucky, and taking money from those of us about to attend his funeral.

  I avoided strip clubs for all the reasons good feminists did, but, of course, I made an exception for Mervyn’s funeral. After all, this wasn’t about me; it was about him. If this was the way he wanted his colleagues, fans, and hangers-on to remember him, I was powerless to stop it. No one could dissuade him once he had an idea planted firmly in his head. Especially if he thought it’d earn him headlines in Publishers Weekly, or maybe even a place in horror history.

  I avoided bars, in general, for all the reasons good recovering alcoholics did. A.A. had hammered a billion slogans into my head about the dangers of going to places that served liquor, even if my intention was to abstain. (“If you stay long enough in a barber shop, you’re going to get a haircut”; “We avoid slips by staying out of slippery places.”) I’d been sober for about six years at that point. Six years.

  Question: Why did I risk getting drunk again by venturing out to the Electric Lady in the first place?

  Answer: My old friend Mervyn Guestwhaite was going to die that very night. I could white-knuckle it through any stray gin or rum cravings that might stir once I found myself assaulted with the smell of the stuff. Or, at the very least, I could try to. And if I couldn’t take it, I could just leave. And if it got to that point, I would. Whether Mervyn had died yet or not.

  But I had to try. I owed the man that much.

  Two thin, breast-implanted girls wearing white ghoul makeup, pasties, G-strings, and a few strategically placed fake scars took my twenty and gave me change. I took the resulting cash and paid Mervyn himself five bucks for the right to sign the guest register.

  Of course, like everyone else in the horror genre, I’d heard that the funeral was going to be something of a circus. The rumor mill had been working overtime ever since Guestwhaite’s first cryptic tweet about planning his own services a fortnight ago. Supposed portents of the author’s imminent demise passed from Twitter to Facebook to message boards and back again.

  The gossip proved inescapable. I’d heard that he planned to sell books and sign them all “Dead Man Walking, Mervyn Guestwhaite.” I’d heard about the raunchy locale, and about the guest book. Had I not been besieged with anticipatory grief, I would have taken the time to conjure up a pithy bon mot to scribble in the guest book. Instead I just wrote this:

  MERVYN: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU DRINK,

  LOVE, ANGELA

  He’d blogged that the doctors had recently told him his cirrhosis was advancing. He had maybe two or three years if he laid off the whiskey.

  Mervyn wasn’t about to lay off the whiskey. He was drinking himself to death, more or less intentionally. The funeral festivities hadn’t even begun, and he already looked shit-faced.

  He looked down at what I’d written and winked. “Darlin’,” he said in his Dixie drawl, “I’m always careful what I drink. Nothin’ but Woodford Reserve for this reprobate!” He smiled, baring lustrous yellow teeth (almost the same shade as his jaundiced skin). Sweat beaded over his bald head and dripped into his dyed-red ZZ Top beard. The smell of stale liquor oozed out of every pore, mixing with a stench of body odor that only Guestwhaite himself seemed not to notice (or care about).

  “You know it doesn’t have to be like this. You could—” Right in the midst of my attempt to tell Mervyn about how good sober life had been to me, one of his fans elbowed me out of the way. He screamed something about Mervyn being “The Man.” Mervyn hollered back, insisting that, to the contrary, the fan was “The Man.” In any case, I was (without a doubt) not “The Man,” I found myself nudged out of the way, shoved to the side of the line, my one-to-one time with my old friend diminished to a swap of one-liners.

  A tall, Scandinavian-looking dancer with a pixie hairdo seemed to notice my distress. “Do you have a service leaflet, ma’am?” the stripper said. She sounded as if she came from up North, but the jerk of her chin and the darting of her eyes suggested that I was supposed to glance South. I looked down and found a dozen funeral programs stuck in the girl’s milky white cleavage. I went ahead and took one. She made a cooing sound, as if I’d just felt her up.

  I’d never blushed at a funeral before. I did that night.

  “Don’t forget your wristband,” a Katy Perry lookalike said. She put a fluorescent orange paper band on me.

  I moved over to the side of the line to get my bearings and found that Mervyn’s fans had flooded in to the place I’d just vacated. It looked as though it would be standing room only. I pulled out the perfumed service leaflet and looked at the liturgy for this evening. It set a new standard for poor taste. It read something like this:

  8:00 p.m. Benediction—Mervyn Guestwhaite Drinks Whiskey & Prays

  8:01 p.m.—Mervyn Drinks Whiskey & Watches Strippers

  8:30 p.m.—Mervyn Drinks Whiskey & Gets A Lap Dance

  9:00 p.m.—Mervyn Drinks Whiskey & Reads From His Legendary Zombie Novel, Renegades Against Necrotic Killers (R.A.N.K.)

  9:30 p.m.—Mervyn Drinks Whiskey & Answers Your Questions On How To Break Into Publishing

  10:00 p.m.—Mervyn Drinks Whiskey & Signs Copies of His Last Zombie Novel Ever, Renegades Escape the Corpse Horde (R.E.T.C.H.)

  10:30 p.m.—Presentation, Mr. Benedict Brown from Brown’s Funeral Parlor, “You, Too, Can Have A Pre-Planned Funeral Just Like Mervyn’s”

  11:00 p.m.—Mervyn Drinks Red Bull So He Doesn’t Pass Out, Then Drinks More Whiskey

  11:30 p.m.—Mervyn Writes His Will

  12:00 a.m. (?)—Mervyn Drinks Himself To Death

  12:00 a.m (?)–4:00 a.m.—Mervyn’s Body Is Taken To A Private Room For Embalming

  Deluxe Membership Guests Only

  2:00 a.m.—Panel Discussion: Mervyn’s Death & Its Impact On The Collectible Market

  4:00 a.m.—Panel Discussion: Who Will Be The Next Mervyn Guestwhaite?

  6:00 a.m.—Eulogy (To Be Given By Whoever’s Still Sober)

  7:30 a.m.—Sunrise Burial At Pleasant Meadow Memorial Garden

  At first, I didn’t believe all this could be happening. Was Mervyn really that eager to throw in the towel? Could the local authorities be that laissez-faire about what amounted to exhibitionist suicide? But here I was, holding a funeral leaflet in my shaking hand—having just seen how ill Mervyn looked, knowing that Mervyn was, well, Mervyn.

  It sounded like exactly the sort of thing he’d do. It was, after all, the same sort of high-gamble publicity stunt that he’d built his career on.

  I’d always envied Mervyn’s career, but had grown to pity his life. It didn�
�t seem so much that he had success as that success had him. The industry trampled him underfoot. He himself was just a grape. All that his publishers were interested in was the wine of his words.

  How, you might ask, do I dare say these things? How can I tell you things that imply a knowledge of Mervyn’s personal life?

  Years ago, before he made it big (when we were both just unknown writers), I knew him pretty well. Back then, I drank just as much, if not more, than he did. I threw up in hotel hospitality suite sinks. I passed out at book release parties.

  But I ended up crashing, burning, and not writing for several years—not until I finally got clean and sober. It had only been recently that I had returned to the game. The clear mind yielded rewards, and I found myself writing better stuff—and finding more success—sober than I ever had drunk.

  But anything more than a superficial connection with Mervyn was gone. While I went away and got sober, he ascended the ranks and got famous. And so whenever I ran into him at conventions, I felt a chilly distance that hadn’t been there before. After some soul-searching, I didn’t hold it against him. He’d always had a lot of people in his life. In the years I left to get sober, though, his following increased exponentially. Almost everyone wanted to be close to Mervyn Guestwhaite; if only so they could leverage their closeness for career advancement. He had to draw the velvet rope someplace.

  I came to regret staying away from writing for so long, but I found that the mind cannot create when it’s closed down for repairs.

  Yet if I had myself been cursed with the disease of alcoholism, Mervyn had been doubly cursed. He suffered the worst variety of that disease: the functional kind. The kind of alcoholism in which the alcoholic is still able not only to stay employed and put food on the table, but also to produce some of his best work; win awards, contracts, and fans. Tens of thousands of fans. The type of alcoholism that preserves the brain while destroying the body. The type that doesn’t give you any reason to stop drinking, until the body ups and quits.