Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (3 page)

Still, they could get lucky, and the longer I operated in this area the better their odds got.

Victor would be a problem. He probably could move, but it'd be tough. We'd need a refrigerated truck, probably, and have to have something set up on the other end. It was too complex for me. I could tell him that I was planning on moving and then let him make his own arrangements, but what if he didn't want to go?

What if he didn't want me to go? Could he stop me? Could he stop Catskinner?

I really had no clear idea of Victor's capabilities. If I was going to leave him it would best to just go, disappear into the night. I was good at that.

But, dammit, I liked this town. I liked my little house.

How about it, I asked, should we move on?

all places are the same place.

Yeah. No help there. I finished my breakfast and decided not to make a choice. Instead I washed dishes.

I opened the shop at ten. As soon as I was in, Victor called me on the intercom.

“How did it go?”

“Great,” I told him. “Just peachy. A bunch of dead guys face down in their fettuccine alfredo.”

A pause. Then, “Are you feeling okay?”

I sighed. “Yeah. Just tired. You know he gets me wound up—it was hard to get to sleep.”

“Well, if you want to close up. . . .”

And do what, I wondered? Get drunk and maudlin and think about being a monster? At least in the shop I could pretend that I was doing something useful. “Naw, I'm fine.”

“Well, if you want to talk, you know I'm here.”

“Thanks,” I said. Talk about what? I was suddenly quite sure that if I did move on, I wouldn't tell Victor.

I got on my computer, loaded the music program with a bunch of Tom Waits and Nick Cave. It was that kind of day, Friday or not.

I played some games of solitaire, moved some of the stock around so I could dust the shelves, wrote a couple of checks to pay for the stock I bought last month, and played solitaire some more. I kept losing the card games, which should have told me something, but I've never been good at auguring omens.

The skinny woman came back at noon. This time she had friends with her.

Of course, at first I didn't know that. At first she had nothing but an index card with her. She came through the door and I smiled because I always smile when I see customers, and then I recognized her and my smile kind of faltered and by then—since she's such a long-legged bitch—she was right up to the counter and she whipped out this index card and said, “Would you look at this please?”

and

everything

stopped.

It was a simple 3x5 index card, the kind you use for jotting down addresses or recipes if you're the kind of person who jots down things, one side with lines on it and the other side blank. She held the side that had been blank towards me, but it wasn't blank, it had four characters on it arranged in a diamond, not English. Maybe Hebrew?

I had plenty of time to study them because my body froze. I stood and looked at the card. She nodded a kind of I-thought-so nod, said, “Please keep looking at this,” and walked—my head and then my body and then my legs followed her—over to the wall. She put the card against the wall and stuck a push pin through the card into the drywall.

I looked at the card. Four Hebrew letters in a diamond.

She walked to the door and opened it. More people came into the shop but I couldn't look at them. I was looking at the card and the letters. Things were happening behind me. I couldn't turn around. I couldn't move at all.

Doors opened and then footsteps moved down the hallway. There was a bang bang bang, metal on metal, and I heard Victor on the intercom, small and far away, asking questions.

I looked at the card.

In the distance the pounding continued, and then there were crashes and a puff of cold air and a long burbling scream ending in a liquid thud like someone dropping a watermelon on asphalt and a collection of clattering, rifling, and smashes and grabs, all in a doubled echo through the hallway walls and over the intercom, and

I looked at the card.

There was the high-pitched whine of a drill that went on for a long time. I guessed they were opening Victor's safe.

Footsteps coming down the hallway passing behind me and out the door, the little bell ringing impotently at each exit and they were gone.

I smelled old sweat and sandalwood. She was close enough that I could hear her breathing. I waited for her to kill me like she'd no doubt killed Victor, but she didn't. She stood there behind me and then just turned and left.

I was alone.

Looking at a cheap 3x5 card pinned to the wall with a red headed push pin. The air grew cold around me, the door to Victor's office open, probably broken down. It wasn't as cold as it should have been, though. Victor's air conditioner—refrigerator, really—must not be working.

I heard a vehicle start up in the street. A big one. I thought of a blond model in a green string bikini. The Land Of Tan.

Time passed.

 My eyes were locked in place, my muscles as cold and unresponsive as carved wood. I knew the feeling well, it was the way I felt when Catskinner took over my body. I reached back into my head and tried to talk to him, Hey, what's going on, What are you doing, Hello, are you there?

Nothing. Dead silence.

Four Hebrew letters in a diamond. They meant nothing to me. I watched the sunlight fade. I wondered if they had locked the front door when they left. I wondered if they had flipped the sign over. Not that it made any difference. Most days went by without a customer. If customers had come in, though, I wonder what they would have done when they saw me standing and silently staring at a card pinned to the wall. Called 911? Cleaned out the till and walked out? Maybe if someone had waved a hand in front of my face it would have broken whatever hold those characters had on Catskinner. But nobody came in. From time to time I heard cars passing on the street outside.

It grew dark, darker than it should have. The overheads in the shop must be out, I thought, probably they tripped the breakers when they trashed Victor's office.

Victor.

Victor was the only one who had ever really understood what had been done to me. He was the only one who really understood Catskinner. Other people tried to convince me that he was a part of my mind that was split off, that he was a protection mechanism or a coping strategy or something. I got good at agreeing with people who held the keys to the boxes I slept in, but I never believed it.

Catskinner can do things that I can't do. He knows things I have no way of knowing. He doesn't feel pain or fear or compassion or guilt or any human emotion. He sees the world differently than I do. He looks through my eyes but he sees alien relationships, lines of force and consequence that I can't see or understand. He's not alive, not organic. Catskinner can take over my body and use it as a weapon, but he has no more in common with human beings than a stone.

Victor understood that. He knew what Catskinner is in a philosophical sense. He never forgot that, and he never confused the two of us.

He taught me how to give Catskinner the two things he needs—freedom and the opportunity to kill—and how to live free myself. Victor had been the closest thing to a friend I had ever had.

I was working the door at a strip club in East St. Louis when Victor found me. I had come to an uneasy truce with Catskinner that began when I stood on the edge of a railroad bridge. I'd had enough of running, of hiding, of living like an animal. I couldn't take living with him inside me anymore, never knowing when it would strike out at someone. I was ready to die—death was all I had ever known. It was easy.

Of course he took over my body and stopped me from stepping off the edge, but he must have realized then that he could keep me from killing myself, but he couldn't make me stay alive. He can't control my body all the time—his metabolism is too extreme, and there is too much that he can't do. He moves my body, he can speak with my voice, but he doesn't understand how to live with human beings. He needs me, my cooperation, if he wants to stay out of some maximum security institution.

And he wants very much to be free.

It was easier after that. He began to listen to me, let me tell him when it was safe to hunt and when he needed to stay quiet. Victor taught me how to negotiate better, how to get more of the life I wanted and to be more than just Catskinner's puppet. He recognized what I am the first time he saw me, and we talked that night, very late. Victor's condition wasn't so extreme back then—he could still mingle with ordinary people and pass as one of them. Better than I could, in fact.

I started working for him that week, and he began to find jobs for Catskinner to do. Names and places, people to kill. He gave me some money, but I'm sure he made much more.

Sure, Victor used me, he used both of us, but it was a mutual relationship. Given the choice, I'll take being used over being hunted.

Now Victor was dead. There hadn't been a sound from the back of the store since the tall woman and her companions had left. Hours, certainly. The only measure of time I had was the shadows on the wall. I was frozen, numb, while the room grew darker. It was surely past the time I would have closed up the shop. On another night I would be upstairs by now, reading or watching television or playing games.

All that was gone now. Whatever happened next, my scale model life died with Victor.  I would have to leave, live on the move again, and I'd have to leave my things behind. You have to travel light when you don't know where you're going.

I couldn't stay here without him. I didn't know his contacts. I didn't know how to do his deals. Some of those contacts might come looking for him. I didn't know what he owed to whom, and who might come to collect.

I didn't even know why he died or who killed him. The only one I even saw was the tall woman who nailed Catskinner to the wall with a push pin through a card.

The index card was just a blur, light gray on dark gray, with some squiggles on it, and suddenly I was free.

The pain was like nothing I had even known before. I hit the ground, every muscle in my body cramping and curling me into a ball. My eyes burned and in the darkness I saw clouds of blue roiling across my vision. I tried to close my eyes. I couldn't tell if they obeyed. I could hear myself whimpering. My bowels let go, I felt thick wet warm down my legs. I lay in it and fought to breathe.

the seal of solomon. i had not thought humans yet lived who could construct it.

My cheeks were wet. Tears. My eyes burned. I didn't try to open them, didn't try to move a muscle. I was trembling, all over, so hard it felt like the floor was moving.

Everything ends, in time. Even this.

I don't how long I lay there before it didn't hurt to breathe. I tried moving my hands and they obeyed, still feeling numb and strange. I got them to belt and my zipper, fighting the wet fabric, and crawled out of my jeans. I was sobbing and I still couldn't see—I didn't know if that was the dark or if my eyes were damaged. I got to my knees, reached up and felt up the wall until I felt that index card. I pulled it down. Even though I couldn't see a thing, I pressed my face against the wall and tore it in half, then again, and again, and again, until there was nothing left but pieces too small for my numb fingers to hold.

Enough? I asked Catskinner in my head.

quite sufficient.

I crawled to the counter and used it to pull myself up. I started to see dim shapes against the black. I managed to stagger into the bathroom and slapped the light switch from habit. It didn't come on. Of course. I tried to remember if I had a flashlight. I had a lighter in my jeans pocket, but I wasn't going to go back for it. I washed as best as I could, in the sink, in the dark, and then I drank deep from the tap. It felt good in my mouth, I could feel the dry tissues soaking up the moisture, but it triggered more cramps and I jackknifed forward and vomited it on the floor, water first and then everything else that had been in my stomach.

Strangely, I felt better when the cramps subsided. My limbs had stopped trembling, though I still felt too weak to tackle the stairs to my apartment. I would though. I was going to survive.

Survival was always what I did best.

The breaker box was in the storeroom. The whole place had been built around Victor's cooling equipment, there were shunts and interlocks to make sure that everything else would lose power before Victor's office did. I left the sixty-amp ones alone and slapped the others back on, and I had lights in the shop and hallway. I could finally get a good look at what had been done.

Victor  was a mess. He'd . . . liquefied while I had been frozen in the shop. His skin was mostly intact, like a deflated balloon of sickly pale yellow leather. Inside it I could see the lumpy shapes of clustered bones. The rest of what had been him soaked the carpet, thick black and oily, shot through with ropey strands of fiber.

His office was mostly intact though. His big floor safe was open, a neat hole drilled through the face, a lot farther from the lock than I would have expected. I pushed the door open. Inside it was all one big space, mostly empty. Scraps of wire and broken glass littered the bottom.

It had been in there, then, whatever had been worth breaking in here for.

What do I do with him? I wondered.

burn the building down
, Catskinner suggested.

It was a good suggestion, but I couldn't do it. Not with all my things upstairs. Not yet. I didn't know what to do. I sat in the hallway, my back against the wall to Victor's office so I didn't have to look at the stain on the floor that used to be the only person I trusted, and I thought about the Sundance Option.

Remember the last scene in
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
?  The Bolivian army has a couple of hundred soldiers set up all around this village square and when Redford and Newman come out shooting, all you can hear is gunfire as the closing credits roll. I've thought about doing that—not going to Bolivia—just walking up to a cop and punching him in the face. Someplace with a lot of other cops around, outside a courthouse, maybe. Catskinner could kill a lot of them, dozens, probably. But in the end they would call out snipers and bring him down.