Aaaiiieee Read online

  “What are you, if not a fallen angel? Why are you walking the earth?”

  “Why are you walking the earth, Father?”

  “I have a mission. To do good. To right wrongs.”

  “As do I. Father Venn…though tonight I wear this lovely dress, and mingle with this lovely group of people, in my mortal life I was not so fortunate. My husband and I both lie in that potter’s field. Pinned to that unconsecrated ground as though we were both staked through the heart. All because we didn’t have a few words said over us by some man in black. And there are babies there, Father. All cursed to a limbo of endless waiting, all for want of a few drops on their brows. It’s cruel, Father Venn. The rules aren’t fair. Men make the rules. God is more compassionate than that, I think. But men’s rules are men’s rules and that’s how the game is played.”

  “So what you want is to be released…”

  “To be exorcized, Father. To have the demons of our unworthiness cast out. To be allowed the peace we have so long been denied. I’m not a fallen angel, Father. I was never permitted to rise.”

  Laughter came distantly from the house, like the chatter of night insects, tiny and ephemeral. Though the woman’s anger was strong, Venn no longer feared her.

  “Why did it take you so many years to arrange this blessing?”

  “I was just released from my grave this year. I don’t understand the lapse. Perhaps God was busy and I had to wait my turn on His list. Perhaps He’d forgotten us, in our unhallowed corner. Perhaps it was a penance I had to pay for the sins of my life.”

  Venn shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But let me help you. I’ll be here with Clare on that day. I’ll set you free. You and your husband, and all the others.” He gazed off into the murk of the garden. “Perhaps it was this I was meant to do all along, and not hunt for the demon that burned my cathedral, as I believed.”

  “Maybe it was God Who burned your cathedral,” said Emma Garland. “You don’t seem to know Him any better than I.”

  “I suppose not,” he murmured. After a moment he began to move away from the woman. “I’ll go now, Mrs. Garland. But I will be back—I promise you.”

  “Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “When you put me to rest, will you then be able to rest, yourself?”

  He smiled. “I do hope so.”

  “I can see your eyes, Father. You know you died in that fire, also, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “I just wanted to be sure you understood. So many ghosts don’t realize it.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Garland. It was a pleasure meeting you.”

  “Thank you, Father Venn.”

  “Forgive me for…not understanding you,” he said.

  “Forgive me for my bitterness.”

  “You are forgiven.”

  The priest reached up to his face and removed his spectacles at last, folding them away. For the first time, he saw the lovely woman without her tapered black wings. He had wanted to see her this way. As if they both might pretend they were mortal again.

  “Good night, Mrs. Garland,” he told her.

  “Good night, Father,” she replied.

  Gun Metal Blue

  Every gun has a demon.

  They might be thought of in that sense, or they might be considered elemental spirits, bred from the mating of ore harvested from the earth and the fire of forging. And some essence of their being might even come from the manufacturers of these machines; an errant shred of human mind or soul, entering into the alloy.

  They are as diverse in form as are the guns themselves. The demons that are linked to single-barrel, break-open shotguns, for instance, are Cyclops-eyed and slack-mouthed. When they kill a human, these beings barely notice the difference from their usual diet of fowl and squirrel.

  But there are demons with sharp minds and a ravenous hunger for the rending of human flesh. They are the demons of the genus Glock or Beretta. They are often far more intelligent than their owners, who feel that winning a rock of crack or settling a driving dispute is a worthy enough wish for the summoning of the genies from these polished lamps. Those humans who feel that an absence or an abundance of melanin in the skin cells is reason enough to kill the other. The demons know no such racism, though they often kill each other’s owners, orphan each other until the next masters comes along to adopt them. The demons know no competition with one another, although the makers of their earthly metal vehicles compete to out-do each other’s product. The demons welcome the competition. The better the gun, the sharper their minds.

  It does seem that the complexity or sophistication of the gun dictates the intelligence of the resident spirit, as if the minds of the human designers and engineers have imparted their force to the demon’s mind. And it seems that the intended use of each gun dictates the disposition of the attending demon, in regard to its thirst for human blood.

  For there are many breeds of these demons which crave human blood; not content with rabbits and deer, demons that are vampires waiting in the metal coffin of an ammunition clip, that fly free—embodied in part in each bullet—to taste that blood. The demon of a gun is both a god demanding sacrifice, and the sacrificial knife itself.

  * * *

  His name, for all intents, was J611821. This was the serial number stamped in the butt of the Smith and Wesson .38 Chief’s Special Revolver, Model No. 36. It was a snub-nose with a five shot cylinder and checked walnut grips. His first owner had ordered pearl grips and left a deposit for them but had never picked them up. The metal of J611821’s earthly form had a chrome-bright nickel finish, though his demon’s flesh, could it be seen by the limited vision of humans, would have appeared as dark as the metal beneath that mirrored nickel epidermis. All humans were red on the inside, J611821 liked to joke to himself, and all demons were a deep gun metal blue.

  J611821 joked only with himself because there was no interaction between demons, not even on a telepathic level. The most they had was an awareness of their brothers, a sort of collective unconscious, a vague feeling of their connectedness and shadowy memories of their origins in wombs of fire.

  But J611821 was not alone in his world. Sometimes he’d had guests, over the years…

  He had first been owned by a man who only dreamed of violence, of brutal revenge for wrongs imagined or real, but who had never actually set J611821 free against anything more living than a tree. J611821 had been born in the late 70’s following a pure lineage of revolvers before him; he was young and old at the same time. But times had changed. After decades of sameness, a race of radical new guns had been born; semi-automatics were revered in the arts and favored in the streets by cop and criminal alike. He accepted the change; he felt no competition, envy or resentment. What he lacked in modern looks and ammo capacity he made up for in the sheer dependability of his durable, simple design. And he welcomed the passing of time, because it finally brought him his first taste of blood.

  His first owner’s home was broken into and J611821 was stolen. He missed being carried from room to room by his first master, because the man’s adrenalin had tasted good to him in place of blood. He missed his master pointing him into the mirror and silently snarling hatred. But his second master ended his virginity in a sense, when this man killed another behind the counter of a convenience store. The store proprietor fired some shots of his own before he was killed, and J611821 remembered nearly brushing a bullet from that man’s gun as they crossed in flight, but even then the two demons had not been able to communicate with each other.

  Since that glorious first night’s feeding there had been only two others over the last decade. But J611821 was not impatient. He knew his sturdy design would endure, perhaps for centuries…and he would feed again.

  But it was not blood that he fed on in the literal sense. He thirsted for blood more for the sheer symbolism of it, for the sight of it, than for any real sustenance it might provide. It was what the blood represented that he truly fed on.
The blood was simply the bright red lingerie that clothed the object of true desire. And that desire was for ghosts.

  Each soul that was freed from its earthly cells by a bullet became the property of the demon who had liberated it. J611821 had known three such visitors. He had captured three such slaves. And it was on these souls that he actually feasted.

  * * *

  Kirk Whitehead had been dissed. That is, he had been made to countenance a grave act of disrespect. Tonight at Tommy’s party, Ricardo Ortiz had made a pass at Kirk’s girlfriend,

  Shelly. And Shelly had even flirted back with Ortiz. When Kirk had got in Ortiz’s face about it, Ortiz and his friend Manny had pushed Kirk around, knocked off his baseball cap and half torn his jacket off him in the scuffle. Kirk had stormed out of the party without so much as a glance back at that traitorous, smirking girlfriend of his.

  Kirk couldn’t understand why Tommy had invited the Puerto Ricans in the first place. He couldn’t understand Shelly flirting with Ortiz, as if she might find the creature attractive. Kirk’s fury was volcanic, too awesome a force to be contained, like some ancient, wrathful god let loose in the body of a seventeen year old. The pimples on his neck seemed to glow more red, like pin holes in his flesh, showing the fire inside.

  His car was a Frankenstein’s monster of bondo, rust, and parts that looked wrongly matched. By contrast, the pistol that he took from under the seat was pristine-looking, as clean as a carving from ice. Holding it in his fist, he felt stronger already. And so did J611821.

  * * *

  As if he gazed right out of the gun’s muzzle, J611821 relished staring into the faces of the children at the party. Their terror intoxicated him. He inhaled, in his way, their adrenalin. He smelled the platelets of their blood as, agitated, they rushed more quickly through veins like hordes of panicked sheep. The sweat of Kirk’s fist excited him further. He loved the foolish, weak, moronic boy at that instant. They had never been more bonded. The boy had purchased J611821 illegally six months ago and hadn’t yet used him. Now J611821 would relive the loss of his own virginity as the boy lost his. How could the sex humans experienced be more intense than this coupling of lust? How could the deluded artifice of love compare to the clean, honest purity of hate?

  Kirk pulled the trigger. J611821 roared loudly in the ecstasy of release. He flew like an angel. He pierced the fragile dome of Ricardo Ortiz’s skull. Ah, the blood! All around him, tissues and membranes steeped in blood. And here, in the brain, the soul of Ricardo Ortiz made its office. Sometimes a demon had to pursue a soul through the body a little, but J611821 caught Ortiz instantly before the human’s essence even knew what was transpiring.

  Kirk swivelled and thrust his arm at Ortiz’s friend. Three joyous blasts, and the boy went down with a slug flattened against his shoulder blade and two zigzagging through his meaty buttocks. The boy did not die, however, and J611821’s instincts told him that he would not perish from these wounds. A pity. Ah, but the blood. And before he withdrew his essence from the buried lead slugs, abandoning them, J611821 at least got to taste the fluttery horror in the boy’s soul.

  A black boy tried to seize hold of Kirk’s arm, to twist the gun up so that Kirk would shoot himself under the jaw. Ah, that would be nice! Despite his rapture for their bonding, J611821 would have loved nothing more than to feast on the soul of one of his masters. Imagine that bonding! But it was not to be. Another boy grabbed onto Kirk, and another, and they wrestled him to the ground. They pulled the handgun from him, and then proceeded to kick Kirk in the face and ribs until his blood flowed. J611821 could only look at the blood without tasting it, but that was all right, because he had a visitor now, and he turned to meet it and introduce himself.

  * * *

  Ricardo Ortiz did not have a body in any real sense. Even to J611821, the human merely resembled a barely corporeal ragged membrane swimming in the air, like the ghost of a jellyfish. But J611821 was able to reveal the beauty of this, his other form. Not as shiny as his earthly self, to be sure, but just as impressive. To Ortiz, the demon’s head might have appeared like the skull of an antelope charred to a beetle’s blue/black color, the horns majestic and the eye sockets empty. But the demon’s terribly long fingers were tipped in claws like an eagle’s. And to welcome his guest, J611821 reached out with these hands and drew Ortiz to him. In doing so, he tore a shred from the ragged jellyfish, and stuffed it between his rows of midnight blue molars.

  He had been greedy that first time, with the store owner. Had eaten his soul in a few great, gluttonous bites. Since it was a long time between visitors, J611821 would make Ortiz last. He would ration him, a shred at a time.

  He might make Ortiz last for months. Years, if he could restrain himself. But the screeching wails of Ortiz’s soul were so intoxicating that he feared he might lose all control.

  * * *

  The mangled soul had lapsed into a sort of coma. They did that sometimes, but they became revitalized and reawakened eventually. For now, J611821 turned his attention outward again to see what had become of Kirk. More specifically, to see who his new master might be. The black boy who had seized Kirk’s arm?

  There were no humans in the new place he had been brought to. Only other demons, their thoughts hidden from him inside the metal skulls of their own guns. J611821 was reminded of the plant where he and his kindred demons had been mass produced. He was reminded of the store where his first master had bought him. Not since those places had he been in the company of so many of his brethren.

  But this was not a store. Despite his location with many other pistols displayed on a wall, despite the rows and rows of handsome, gleaming rifles with their primitive bodies mostly of wood and with brains like those of the animals they killed.

  Chains. Trigger locks. This was a prison. Oh, no. It couldn’t be this bad…

  He was in the collection unit of a police department. Yes, there was a tag hanging from him like the plaque above the human Jesus.

  He might be here for years. No one to hold him. No rage to soak into his metal. No blood.

  He must shout to the humans who would eventually come in bringing new captive guns with them, or removing guns as exhibits in trials. He must shout to their minds as best he could. Take me! he would scream. Take me! Let me kill for you!

  But all the guns would be yelling the same thing, wouldn’t they? Canceling each other out? And in any case, the men who came in here would already have guns on their hips. For the first time in his life, J611821 felt envy and resentment for other guns, thinking of those smug police issues.

  He might never taste blood again. Or soul, most importantly. Despite the guns all around him, he felt alone. Like a dog that prefers humans to its own kind, he despaired at never again knowing the bond of blood lust. He glanced back behind him at the mutilated shroud that was Ortiz. He would make Ortiz last. Yes, if he only took tiny bites for decades, he could make him last.

  But what if the human jailors ultimately sent him to be destroyed?

  The thought terrified him. Panicked him.

  For the first time in his life, J611821 wished to break free of his beautiful earthly shell entirely. To escape it. But he was linked to it until it was someday broken to pieces, or melted down, or rusted to powder thousands of years from now. He and the revolver were one and the same.

  The humans had given him a new number on the tag he wore. The number of a prisoner. But it was a mere ink scrawl, not like the proud etching in his shining skin.

  Until he rejoined the hell-fires of his birth, he was forever J611821.

  The Sister

  From the mouth of a narrow alley, hidden on the other side of a wooden fence, Walt Corbin took a photograph of Richard Martin going down on Ed/Edna, the Half-Man/Half-Woman.

  Steam billowed from a grate within the tiny courtyard, and Walt had to wait for the chill winter wind to part it like a misty curtain in order to steal his shots. The walls of the courtyard were the stone flanks of great city buildings, so close t
hey were nearly touching. They were as gray as the sky and just as cold and hard.

  Through his lens, Walt didn’t think that the Half-Man/Half-Woman was anything more than a full man (Ed/Edna’s stiff, saliva-slick pole would be the envy of many a man) who had grown his hair long on the left side, applied makeup to the left side of his face, shaved his left leg, and built up the muscles in his right leg and arm. Walt caught a glimpse of a bare left breast as Martin reached into Ed/Edna’s half-feminine, half-masculine blouse to knead it. Ed/Edna had probably injected paraffin under his skin on one side to achieve the effect.

  Perhaps Martin’s wife, who had paid Walt to follow her husband and take these pictures, would have been somewhat more relieved if Ed/Edna had been an actual hermaphrodite, at least partially female, rather than a homosexual. But in the long run, Walt didn’t think Mrs. Martin was going to be much relieved by anything.

  The “half-and-half” put his/her hands on Martin’s head and moaned in a deep voice, the head rising and falling with increasing rapidity. Even though Walt’s picture-taking was finished, he stayed for the final outcome. He doubted that anything within the Five-In-One show was more interesting than this. It didn’t matter that Walt was not homosexual; he had entered the realm of theater and illusion here, and found himself growing hard as he spied on the furtive encounter. He wanted to reach into his own trousers, but resisted, unnerved by the windows that soared above the courtyard on all sides. But these seemed blind, like the eyes of dead things.

  When Martin was done administering, Ed/Edna went down on him in turn. Martin’s breath gouted from him in blasts of cloud in the freezing air. Walt stayed for this, too, but dared take no more photos for fear that the flash and pop of his bulb would finally be noticed.

  Walt’s erection ached in his trousers by the time it was all over, like another living entity affixed to his flesh, with a mind and hunger all its own, that wanted to be released and be sated. But the most Walt would do for the parasite was reach into his pants to point it straight up, so it was no longer slanting painfully along his thigh.