The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities Read online

  “The Meat Manager,” LaFogg said. “I haven’t seen anything in the paper about it.”

  “Check this out,” said Rekka, and he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded flyer.

  At the top of the white sheet was a photocopied image of a Polaroid of Foxcroft, massive, muscled arms folded over his chest, staring into the camera with a malevolent intensity. The copy was dark, so most of his features were obscured in black ink, but the flyaway brows and the mustache were evident, as was the gleam of his bald pate. Below the picture was the following:

  ***FOXCROFT***

  I was born with a great gift, and have honed it with intensive study in the OCCULT SCIENCES of CARNOMANCY and BIBLIOMANCY

  Love, Work, Luck, Family, Business

  Legal Matters

  I will read and interpret your OMENS!

  The most effective JADOO!

  AVENGE a loved one! AVENGE yourself!

  I am your PORTAL! SEE THE RED WORLD BEHIND OURS!

  LaFogg looked at the shadowy figure on the flyer. “Can I have this?” he said.

  “There’s one on your car,” Rekka said. “There’s one on every car in the lot.”

  That night after his shift LaFogg drove to Foxcroft’s shop. He had no idea what he might do when he got there. Maybe just take a look inside. Maybe get a cheap reading done, to satisfy his curiosity. The building was one that he recognized as having recently housed a Verizon Wireless outlet. It was a wide set A-frame house with an open porch fronted by four steel columns. The word PSYCHIC in massive red spot-lit letters spanned the second floor facade, the first C nearly enclosing a porthole emanating ivory light. The two ground floor windows bore neon representations of yellow eyes on a purple crescent moon, of a green head split in two with an orange cow skull visible in the fissure, of a red hand with the middle and forefinger raised. Behind the windows, the spotless louvered blinds lay slightly open, angled upward.

  He opened the outside door and entered a small anteroom. To his left sat a white wicker couch with flowered cushions, a glass-topped coffee table, also of white wicker, with a vase of flowers. Ahead stood a solid white door with a peephole, adjacent to that, a doorbell, which LaFogg rang. Somewhere within, chimes sounded.

  The door opened a crack, a female eye appeared, the lid red-lashed and freckled. As she pulled open the door, LaFogg recognized her as the redheaded cashier. The room behind her was larger than it had seemed possible from the outside. There were racks of candles, many melted down, only a few lit. The shop reeked of dueling incense aromas with an undercurrent of smoked meat. On another set of shelves sat a variety of disparaged stone Buddhas in aspects of derangement and disfigurement and horror. Some were small as mice; the largest was the size of a fat housecat. To a piece the carving was precisely and exquisitely detailed. Some of the figures had torn earlobes eroding at the edges. The robes of a few were littered with scattered teeth under an anguished gummy grimace. In one or two, that grimace bore a violently truncated tongue. Some had split skulls from whose ragged gashes sprung bubbles and some unknown manner of sprouts. One large red figure’s chubby cheeks were torn like paper, revealing striated muscle beneath. Stuck in its forehead was a cluster of porcupine quills; its eyes, somewhat crossed, looked upward in abjection.

  To the right of the display from a thick rope depended clusters of sausages, like the many-fingered fists of some unknown species of giant. Settled into their gray skins like a profusion of warts were a variety of stones and crystals: chalcopyrite, speckled with the colors of autumn; ocean-hued lapis; purple ametrine; rutilated quartz that looked like fine hairs caught in a congealed bubble. A standing fan, its blades grey with dust, pointed at them, causing them to undulate slightly, the stones clicking together in tinny percussion.

  Mounted on the wall in the far corner was a grotesque cow’s head, untouched by even the rudest taxidermy. Its eyes, red and rheumy, bulged from their sockets, its mouth hung open, crowded with a swelled and split tongue that pushed up against its teeth, and LaFogg could see the bullet hole that had ended its life, ringed with singed fur. Maggots squirmed in its flared nostrils while flies buzzed about it. He felt something plummet in his stomach.

  “I… I should go,” he said. The girl smiled, shook her head, and reached for his hand to grasp it. He took her hand into his instead. He hadn't intended to do so. She frowned, but did not pull away. Her hand was small and cold, and he held it lightly, between his fingers and thumb, as one might hold a baby bird rescued from a snow drift. She led him to a corner of the room sectioned off by diaphanous white curtains. She pulled aside a section of fabric and hooked it to the wall, and he entered to see two folding chairs facing each other, between them a white cloth-covered table bearing a covered platter. On the back of the nearest chair was a scribble of marker indicating that it was from the nondenominational church a block south, the one KaraLee used to attend against LaFogg’s wishes. The cashier motioned her hand at the chair, and he sat.

  “He will be along in a matter of moments,” she said in a soft, shy voice, and LaFogg felt a jolt of fear touch his spine like the cold point of a knife.

  She was gone. He shivered in the frigid cold of the room. He put his hands on the edges of the chair to lift himself, to leave, when Foxcroft ducked in and swiftly sat. He was wearing all black, some kind of linen robe that looked almost like a Karate outfit. LaFogg wondered that the chair could hold him. “I know you,” said Foxcroft.

  Though it wasn’t a question, LaFogg felt pressed to answer. “I’m the front-end manager at Foster’s.”

  “Of course,” Foxcroft said, not sounding at all surprised. “Oh, Mister LaFogg. Such insights await you.” His voice was unaccented, thin, as though emitting from the cheap speaker of a transistor radio. “You’ve always been so close to the other side. Have you felt it?”

  LaFogg had not, but he thought it would be rude to say so. “I have,” he said.

  “No, no, you haven’t.” Foxcroft said, smiling. He was missing two teeth. “But that doesn't mean a thing. You have walked so close to the rift. If you couldn’t smell it, it could you. Something is missing for you, yes?”

  LaFogg thought of KaraLee. What had become of her? He had blocked out his memory of her for so long. Had she left him? Or was it he who had left? He pictured her face distorted by tears, her voice pleading for him to stop, just stop, please stop. He opened his mouth and what came out was, “The girl who opened the door for me, who brought me in…”

  Foxcroft pushed his lips back from his teeth. “Nobody brought you in,” he said. “You rang the bell, and I buzzed you in.”

  “Was it KaraLee?”

  “It was no one, Mister LaFogg. No one at all.”

  He reached out and lifted the cover from the platter, his eyes fixed on LaFogg’s eyes. Underneath sat an oblong chunk of meat. “Put your hands on this.”

  LaFogg put his hands on either side of the meat. Foxcroft rested his massive hands over his. They were cold as snow. What is it, whispered Foxcroft. What is hiding under the stairs inside your head? He began to chant, to sing, in some unknown language. LaFogg clutched the meat in his hands. Images fluttered around him like butterflies: holding KaraLee’s long red hair under his nose like a mustache…a snowdrift, pink with blood…winged cashiers, their heads bent in prayer under lit, numbered halos…severed hands on Styrofoam platters, trapped under taut blankets of cellophane, trying to dig their way out.

  Oh, we are in the thick of it now, in the marrow, in the throes, Foxcroft said. The red neon from outside shone on his head, giving it the appearance of a gaudy bulb. We are truly in the head of the long bone. He grabbed the chunk of meat from between LaFogg’s hands and hurled it at the wall, then grabbed LaFogg by the shoulders of his shirt, lifted him and spun him around.

  The wall was all meat, red, bifurcated vertically with a labial line of white deckle.

  GO, Foxcroft demanded, and LaFogg went to the wall and put his hands to it.

  It felt cool to
the touch, just slightly damp. He dug his fingernails into the deckle, pushing the meat to either side, tearing at the cartilage, forcing it open. It was cold under his nails. His muscles ached with the strain. He bowed his head and used it to push further through the meat, while his hands pushed to widen the gap and his right foot stomped downward. He pushed himself in all the way. The wall closed behind him and he was enwombed, the red and pink and white pushing in at him from all sides. The smell of raw meat, of blood, was bright and blue in his nostrils. He continued to push, tearing, the meat yielding, the spongy sinew splitting, he pushed and he pushed and tore with his hands and his head and his knees.

  And then he was out.

  The room was a mirror image of the one he'd left, but the floor and all of the walls were red, marbled with bright white sinew. The curtains were silverskin, the bone dome on the skeletal table resting on a platter of paillard. Behind the bone chair stood Foxcroft—or, rather, Foxcroft's skeleton. Swirling in complex orbits around it were intestines like a writhing nest of snakes, a pulsating liver, clouds of fat, his brain circuiting his bare skull on a stiff lasso of spinal column. LaFogg lifted the dome off of the platter to find Foxcroft’s face, folded like a washcloth, an eyeless lid gaping at the top. Next to it was a length of tongue, tied in a knot at its root.

  Go home, said Foxcroft.

  Home, thought LaFogg. What was home on this side of the wall? Would KaraLee be there? Or the angel from the television, wings unfolding wetly, tearing away from the body like fat pulled from flesh, fanning out behind her in preparation for flight?

  LaFogg opened the door, walked through the red anteroom, and stepped out into the world. Above was a ceiling of strips of white fat split by yellow ribbons of backstrap, beyond which lay degraded sky bloomed cherry, interrupted by distorted half-moons of connective tissue. Ahead, cars like butterflied cutlets rumbled on purple tournedos, navigating the red roads, bouncing through tissue-ringed abscesses. Above swooped squalls of ganglia, lighting here and there, browning the surface of whatever they touched. LaFogg walked past buildings that were sawed and squared roasts, under bridges of bone from which depended rags of torn muscle. To his left seethed the river, all roiling pink exudate. Numerous times he slid as though on ice. Before long he attained Haines Street, its houses stacked like brochettes with windows of glistening marrow. His own building, fronted by a doubled-over cluster of intestines, was tinged here and there with blue-green iridescence where in the other world there had been a tangle of vines.

  He squirmed up the slippery stairs, pulling himself forward by his nails. His apartment was brightly lit, crowded with skeletons pouring cocktails into their jaws and down their ribs like grim fountains, ice cubes tumbling like boulders down the staircases of ivory bone. The cadavers cackled and gibbered as they navigated the floor of piled wings, feathers withered and black with blood. The woman from the sex line commercial lay face-down on the futon, the feathers gone from her wings, all that remained of them jointed black tines like the skeleton of an umbrella. He turned, and there was KaraLee, shredded and shorn and dead, one of her gnarled hands resting maternally on the rotting shoulder of the ginger-haired cashier, the other on the rotting shoulder of Rekka. The three grinned at him brainlessly. Their skin was sloughing off of their bodies, puddling damply around them like discarded grey skirts. A terrible sound filled the room, a cacophony of buzzing insects, whirring blades, white nose. Foxcroft emerged from the crowd, his jaw hanging to his collarbone, his organs constellating about him, the electric knife vibrating in his huge hands. He ran it down LaFogg’s body, and again, and again. He decorated the room.

  Outside, in the street, under the night sky, the bearded man danced and danced.

  Monica, the ginger-haired cashier, sat in the break room playing Words With Friends on her phone. Stan, the deli guy, pushed the door open and slouched into the room.

  “Did you hear about the front-end manager? LaFogg?”

  Monica did not look up from her phone. “Crazy,” she said. “To do that to someone.”

  “I know,” said Stan. “And she was…”

  “Yeah. With twins, too.”

  “And then to turn himself in, after five years. I mean, like, he’d gotten away with it. Guilt, maybe? They said he was ‘insensible.’”

  Monica put down her phone. “He always looked at me funny, you know,” she said. “Gave me the creeps.”

  .

  spettrini

  Ketter Greyson was an illusionist by trade, schooled and experienced in all of the attendant disciplines and varieties of performance, but if there was a trick to aging elegantly, or at least gracefully, it was one he was unable to master. While the Great Spettrini, his mentor, before disappearing amidst rumors of deviltry and dark doings, had affected a patriarchal, authoritative manner and a pointed Van Dyke beard of solid white, Greyson had grown paunchy and raspy, tentative and hesitant. His hair, which at one time he could sweep up into an imposing pompadour, had grown thin and wispy. His eyebrows, once tools of suggestion and dark insinuation, had become as overgrown and unruly as black thatch on a blighted landscape.

  In the waning years of his life, Greyson carried on his person at all times a 19th century Sheffield dagger eight and one half inches long encased in a scabbard of red leather. The handle was said to have been made of bone, specifically from the femur of a 119-year old magician still performing nightly in Prague. On the not infrequent occasions that Greyson performed in an unfamiliar venue or a private home, before entering, it was his custom to leap to the doorjamb, thrust the dagger’s blade into it, and lurch back, his hands raised in an aspect of defense and defiance. He would deduct from his fee the cost of the repair. One may find among his papers, housed in the archives of the Leeds Public Library, a weathered but still legible carbon copy of a contract with the Leeds Academy of Music which says as much. The practice was thought by many to have been an affectation, a peccadillo, or simply a mark of the man’s eccentricity. In point of fact, the custom was more significant than that.

  Greyson the Great sprawled in the hotel bed face down as if hurled there, and he dreamed. A grey fog hung in the air just above a filthy river lined with sagging trees, as though it were the river’s spirit looking down upon its dying body. Old ladies in nightgowns were being swept helplessly along by the flood-swollen waters, and their rescuers, gruff old men in sheriff’s uniforms and hats, were pulling them onto the shore by their sagging, veined arms, calling them “goddamned fools.” Greyson himself stood on the shoreline in his underwear, crying, not for the women, but from embarrassment at his exposed paleness and flab. The mud covered his feet. He freed the big toe of his right foot, then his left. They popped from the mud. Plorp. Plorp. He stirred, awakened, flipped himself onto his back with considerable and vocal effort. The hotel room was unbearably hot. He would have written it off as haunted if not for having been taught that ghosts bring cold, not heat, to their haunts. He exited the bed, feet finding his slippers, and stepped into the hall, with its faded carpet and cracked wallpaper, to catch a cross-breeze, and indeed found one, though it was anemic and smelled vaguely of mold.

  Greyson had traveled a long distance to this unfamiliar village after having been hired by telephone to perform at a child’s birthday party. The voice on the other end of the line had been brisk and businesslike. The caller had inquired as to Greyson’s fee and promptly offered double. In his younger days, the offer might have set bells of alarm chiming, but gigs had of late been sparse, and he was in arrears on his rent, his housing depending largely on the nearly exhausted generosity of his landlord, who was, thankfully, very much enamored of “artistic types.” The party was not scheduled until midnight—late, especially for a child’s party, but Greyson was no parent, so what did he know? His children were cooing doves, sniffing rabbits, and young female assistants in leotards, none of whom knew from bedtime.

  Driving at dusk on a long rural road that paralleled the interstate, he had first seen the town, through a break
in the thick forest, as a garland of twinkling yellow lights. The tree-lined road on which he was driving was devoid of streetlights until it emerged from the woods; after that point the occasional low cottage or trailer hunkered in the vapor glow, and then, after a hairpin turn, he found himself on a silent yellow-lit main strip cramped with businesses and unfamiliar restaurants, all caged and shackled despite the early hour. If not for the occasional hooded figure sitting in a doorway or meandering along a sidewalk, he might have thought he’d wandered into a still picture. There was no recognizable chain store or familiar corporate logo, save the yellow and red Shell sign impaled on a long pole many yards above a shack of a gas station, glowing like a blood-smeared moon.

  The hotel was one street over from where the man on the phone had said it would be. The three-story clapboard building leaned like a drunk against a large, gnarled oak; in fact, the ancient tree had pushed itself up through a portion of the third floor balcony and had consumed a length of the railing. The institution was presided over by a skeletal baroness behind bulletproof glass. She was festooned with dusty scarves and a haphazard constellation of costume jewelry. She looked like a diseased Christmas tree. He afforded her neither courtesy nor conversation as he perfunctorily filled in and signed with his curving, ornate G the various forms required of him. She pulled from a hook a diamond shaped bit of plastic with the number 184 scrawled on it in marker; from it depended a small copper-colored key. She pushed it over to him, and only then did she tear away her gaze from the adding machine that squatted in front of her like a flattened frog.