Etched Deep & Other Dark Impressions Page 9

  It will not tell you why the killer's world required that these people be abducted and killed. It will not tell you how the police intersected their own reality with that of the criminal and brought him to justice, not really. It will tell you what fits into the pseudo-world of society, and you will believe it, probably. It is the path of least resistance.

  John's world is about to come to an end, as he knows it. The others, those who have studied, hated, died, and reviled it–they will never know it at all. You can't enter another man's world. Therein lies the rub, so to speak. Even now, as I pontificate from my own world, I know that every reaction to these words will be different, and that no two people will read them the same way, or with the same outcome. The difference is that I accept this–to a point.

  It hit me when I was still a child. Nobody really understood me. I was riding in the car with my mother, watching the houses go by, and it smacked me like a sledge-hammer to the center of the forehead. There were people in each and every one of those houses. Each of them lived a separate life–most of which would never, in any way, interact with my own. Each of them loved, hated, lived and lied–alone. That was fine, as far as they were concerned, but that wasn't the end of it. It meant that I was alone as well.

  Even in that car, with my mother–the closest human being to my universe to ever exist–I was absolutely alone. I accept this now, as I've said, or at least I've come to somewhat of an understanding with it, but to a six year old boy it was a staggering revelation.

  I tried to talk to my mother then, tried to explain the fear this concept had caused me–tried to get her to explain it away and make things better. Wasn't happening. First she smiled at me, told me I was being silly. Then, when I continued to pester her with it, when I couldn't let it go–she got angry. One car, two worlds. It felt as if the carpet had been yanked out from beneath my universe.

  I was scared witless, frightened as I'd never been before. In the face of this, after hearing what had frightened me in my own words --or my explanation of those words as interpreted through the lens of my mother's world–she felt amusement, then anger, but no fear . . . no understanding.

  A friend of mine once recounted a similar experience. He was an artist, or could have been, if he'd stuck with it. He could draw like you wouldn't believe, and he could make the things he drew seem real. He was also obsessed, had been since he was a child.

  He'd been drawing along, pretty as you please, forming vases and walls and doorways, learning the magic of perspective, when it hit him. There were no lines in or around the things he was drawing. On the paper, everything was separated from everything else by the dark borders of his pencil outlines. There were borders. There were limits. On the real wall, or around the real vase of flowers he'd been drawing, there were none.

  "How can I draw," he wondered, "if there are no lines? If there are no lines, what keeps me from being part of that vase? What makes me different from the floor or the pencil in my hand?"

  Of course, his mother laughed. Of course, she next got angry–very similar world to my own mother, I'd say, though I'd of course be wrong. None of them are the same.

  So there he was–by the time I met him, 21 years old–still trying to figure out how to draw without using any lines. He also still had the anxiety attacks that came with the knowledge that if there were no lines, there was nothing keeping things out of one another. I tried to explain to him that all of those things he wasn't separate from were in his own world anyway, and that as long as they were part of his world and not someone else's, it was nothing to worry about. Of course, he didn't understand. He never will, not the same way that I do.

  There are certain moments that I remember more clearly than others. I read a lot–mostly about people who seem the most cut off. Serial killers are all like that. Sociopaths, they call them. I call them realists. They understand that nothing beyond their own world matters. They understand that no matter how safe a society might seem, it only takes a small slip from the "norm" before they begin to hound and persecute you out of their own insecurity. A part of them knows the society is bullshit, but they mostly have that part locked away pretty deep inside. To look at them, you'd think they really did see the same things.

  I read a book recently by a man named Straub, writing as a man named Underhill, writing about characters that may or may not have existed in the lives of one or the other of them. Worlds within worlds. In it, he mentions a photograph, front page of the New York Times the day after Ted Bundy was fried. I was obsessed, so I went and looked it up, and there it was. Louise Bundy, communicating for the last time with her son before his execution, their last connection immortalized.

  That photograph is a perfect illustration of my concept. She was calling him from her own little world, of course, and in that world she believed that none of the places where her son's world and that of society had meshed were real. She believed that she could turn back the hands of the clock to the time when he was her "good boy."

  He was never that person. That person was a figment of her own imagination, a construct that took the place in her own world inhabited by the world that was her true son. I wondered if he'd seen the houses along the road, as I had, or if he'd tried to draw the vases without lines. Maybe he just saw doorways into other people's worlds, and he went through them at will. He certainly seemed to be able to gain their trust. I think that Ted found a way out, if only for a little while, a way into other worlds. I think John Wayne Gacy found one too.

  My own world becomes stagnant, at times. It would be refreshing to enter another, to understand how someone else understands, if you get my meaning.

  Even if Louise Bundy could have maintained complete contact with her son throughout the execution, she would never have seen his world. No telling what might have happened in hers, though. Maybe old Teddy would've come waltzing in for the first time, face to face with his creator–maybe he'd even have said "Heeere's Johnny!" I'd kind of like to know for sure, but then, my impressions would never be quite the same as his, or hers, would they?

  That same book I read, by Straub/Underhill/whoever, held another insight for me. All of the introspective writers have that quality. They make you think. Maybe things could be different. In Vietnam, says Underhill, he met a man named Dengler. The world they walked through over there, endless jungles, short little men who looked different and didn't operate in the "American" mode of "society," ate away at them. The "world," their term for reality back here at home, faded slowly into the background. The Earth itself made noises. Dengler said, "I think that's what happens when you're out here long enough. The edges melt." Maybe he should have met my friend–he could have found out that it's okay if they melt, there are no edges–no lines, either.

  The lines melt too. When you separate yourself long enough, concentrating on the only world that matters, your own, the lines on the vases disappear, the relationship of time to reality becomes less important, and the barriers melt away. Your world, in my world, is different. Your world in my world is mine. This is the fundamental truth that I have discovered in over thirty years of research, the fundamental truth that I can't even explain to you, but that is no less true. In my world, I am God. In my version of your world, I am God, still. John knew.

  In John Wayne Gacy's world, the tiny universe of a man named after a big, slow-talking actor who drank too much and didn't like black people, John Wayne Gacy, was God. He even constructed his own hell, beneath the floor of his home. That is one of the things that make me believe that he knew. I wonder if he stole the clown thing from Stephen King?

  I read a lot, sorry to digress. I just wonder–when the bodies were pulled from beneath his house, bloated and rotting–did they hear a sinister, Tim Curryesque voice floating up through the drain?

  "Down here, we bloat . . . we all bloat."

  Writers fascinate me. Within their own worlds, they create others, worlds within worlds, and they share them. We can't do that with our true worlds. When someone kills th
irty-three people and gets caught, they fry him and celebrate. When someone creates a serial killer in his mind, imagines that killer's life and thoughts as his own, if only for a short time, and puts it on paper, he is paid the big bucks and labeled as a genius. A creative talent.

  Maybe it's just a payoff. Maybe they read about killers that can't hurt them, and they thank the writer for capturing the "evil" on the paper and not releasing it into "society." Maybe they just envy the writer his release. Or maybe they have just a hint of the desire that I have; the desire to find a way into other worlds.

  One question about these writers remains, for me: do the edges melt when they write? Are they fully in their own world at the moment of creation? Maybe they create a new world that they can slip into at will, enjoying freedoms there that they are denied by the concept of society? Do the characters have lines, or do they blend one to another? Is each character in his or her own little world? Gods in a pantheon? Good questions.

  I tried writing myself. Thought I'd push the boundaries a little, see what came of a little creative hack and slash on the old keyboard. Nothing came of it. Either there is no magic there of the type I sought, or I just don't have the talent to bring it forth. Not that my plots were lacking. It was just that, whenever some creation of mine began to put his fingers around a young woman's throat, or to bash a particularly innocent young man's face against a wall, I didn't want my fingers on the keys. I wanted my fingers wrapped in soft skin, or banded like steel across a pliant throat.

  Description falls short of reality every time, and the visions in my head only screamed the louder for release as my fingers and mind failed to bind them to paper. The lines did not melt, they solidified. My characters were trapped within them, and even I could not set them free. I couldn't reach them at all. I was still stuck in my own little world, no help for it there.

  For every question, I am told, there is an answer. I would modify that to say that for every question there are as many answers as there are people, or worlds, but it is sufficient to know that there is an answer for me. The question? How can I get into another man's world–how can I become his God? It is possible that this is only happens at the moment of death, but somehow I believe there is another way. I am going to find out today–tonight.

  I've been working off that death angle for several years, and while it is satisfying in its own way, it is incomplete. I can become another man's God by destroying his world forever. This I know. I have seen it in their eyes, felt it seeping from wounds and rattling through throats on the heels of proverbial last breaths. In that moment, that final moment where they look into my eyes and truly see me, our worlds collide. That is also the shortcoming of death–it is only a final moment. I want more than that.

  That is why I stood there, watching and waiting, moving with the crowd as it lived and breathed a separate life of its own, a temporary bonding of all those souls who just couldn't keep away. It is a life-form more closely aligned with Gacy's own world than they might believe. They have all come here expecting–praying, even–for one thing. They want a man to die. They want to be the pantheon that rules his world. They want it as a memory to put on the self in their own worlds.

  Granted, he was a dangerous man by any standards, particularly those of "society," but a man nonetheless. A man with vision beyond their own. Watching the hungry looks on their faces as they waited, I was reminded of the gladiators in Rome.

  There's a visual for you. Gacy and Dahmer at forty paces, silverware to the death–battle until the second course is served. It might help pay for all those people languishing in the prison system, their own worlds shrinking in around them until they take up no more air or energy than a parking space. It might also prove another interesting study into the way those who gather to watch executions react to violent entertainment.

  In two hours, give or take a minute or two, John Wayne Gacy will cease to exist. I will not. His world will be vacant, or what his world represents in my own, and I will step in. I have essentially already done so. That simple. Gacy is out, I am in. The sequel.

  It's taken a lot of planning, but, hey, what have I got but time? The house wasn't so tough. His plans were on file with the city, just like any others, and the diagrams in the magazine spreads and the paper made recreation of the "hell" beneath it all a snap. Maybe, since Hell is in place already, I'll put a little effort into heaven–for the truly good ones, of course. It's a thought.

  Stagnancy is not the goal. I believe he was on the right track, making progress, and I plan to pick up where he left off. It will be my interpretation of his world, of course, but I've been pretty thorough, and I believe it will be close enough. I think I can work myself in before everything snaps shut, before his world is banished to the ether. His world, my insight–the sky is the limit.

  I find that the folks in the Jaycees are a friendly bunch. They took me right in, especially when they saw how many hours of volunteer service they could wring out of me. Upstanding citizen. Fund raiser. Not a family man, yet, or a father, but I have all the time in the world–John's world. He won't be using it. I thought about sending him a thank you note, but why ruin his last few hours? Let him die the God he was in life–if I'm right, he'll know soon enough–he'll be with me, and he'll be out of life.

  The crowd is surging forward now, near the end, but I've hung back. Nothing to see from the outside, anyway, and I have other things to do, other worries. I've been careful with the paint, base-coat of white, big red balls for cheeks and three colors of blue lining the outside of my eyes in stars (always wanted them to say I had stars in my eyes). My face is even registered–painted on an egg-shell and registered as mine, and mine alone. They do that for you when you graduate clown school. Not an easy thing to do, in reality. There's more to the world of a clown than most people realize. Certainly more than I realized. Everyone might love a clown, but they don't necessarily love themselves. Not all the frowns on clowns are painted on, believe me. More of those masks are really hiding something than not. Another revelation.

  Another insight as well. A new face, a new world? Construction worker face–society world. Clown face, surreal world. John's real face? Only dead men can explain that one to you, dead men, and maybe John himself, and he's still claiming innocence.

  Some of the people brought their children to the execution. Pretty tacky, I say, but what the heck? What's the lesson here, it's bad to kill? It's fun to watch people die? Beware the Boogey Man? I don't really care what their motives were in making it a family affair; It gives me a chance to practice. Maybe you saw me on the news the day after. I was carrying a sign–there were other clowns there besides myself, we all had signs. Mine was painted bright orange and red. Clown colors. "Clowns Make People Laugh, John," mine says. Nobody is laughing at John. The children smile when they look my way, but nobody is really laughing at me today, either. That's fine.

  My little hell is waiting at home, and there is plenty of time. They will see me, and they will laugh. When I wear the clown face, live in the clown world, they will find me funny as hell. Others will come to me, and they will work with me at the little construction firm I've started–only a sub-contracting business, so far, but with plans for expansion. They will trust me, and they will drink with me in my construction worker world, and when I put on the paint and prance for their children, they will laugh at me too.

  In the end, I will steal their worlds. I will be their God. It will be simple–everybody loves a clown.

  The Fishmonger

  The fishmonger screeched

  From the corner of fourth and vine,

  Flinging his hands out

  Like a prophet, fish oil droplets

  Glistening– flung diamonds,

  Ripe with the stench of the depths,

  The scales, not to be forgotten,

  Clung to his yellowed nails…

  And no one came to buy

  As the rickety rust-caked Ferris wheel

  Creaked in circles, I-beam serpe
nts

  Eating their own tails,

  And a battered jukebox cranked

  The one tune it remembered,

  Spitting "Champagne Supernova to the sky"

  Redemption

  The Reverend Bookheim stood silently in the shadows beneath a large, neon sign that proclaimed "Live Sex Shows Nightly" in glowing pink letters. As the light strobed on and off, his shadow leaped to full length on the pavement, then receded to the blackness that had spawned it.

  She was beautiful. Her slender legs were bare beneath a short, skin-tight skirt. Her long hair was pulled up in a pony tail that hung loosely over one shoulder and dangled between budding breasts. Sixteen, seventeen tops. Her makeup was heavy, but on her it was exotic rather than gaudy. There was something in those features, something haunting that called out to him . . . something familiar.

  He stepped into the dim light of the street and started toward her, pulling the brim of his hat down to shield his eyes and adjusting his dark sunglasses nervously. No one would know him here, no one that mattered. There were women–several of them–women who knew him only too well, but would never admit it. This wasn't a place he could expect to run into members of his congregation.

  Back in Lavender, California, his face was well known. His church, "The Church of New Light," was the largest evangelical body in the area, and his radio show was broadcast up and down the length of the west coast. Here he was a shadow, a hungry shadow, aching for things that only the street, and the nameless faces he'd met there, could give him.

  She spotted him immediately, and he noted with a quick thrill of pleasure the subtle shift in her stance. She placed a hand on her hip and let it ride there for a second before sliding it down to smooth the skirt across her thigh in a slow, sensual motion. Her eyes locked onto his and never looked away, and her lips were parted slightly, inviting. She was perfect.