Reg sipped his fair-trade coffee quietly, thinking his bloodshot eyes
and stiff muscles to be a comfort compared to the guilt gnawing at his
soul. He wanted to have a good opinion of himself, but the only
self-image he could entertain was dark, corpse-black and blue. Something
had rotted inside, either weakness of personality or weakness of the
flesh. He wasn't sure what it was, but he knew that the vision of what
he'd become was a sluggish nightmare, and he would carry on with it.
Beyond the burger joint's steamy window, a field of weeds shook with
wind and rain. It was rain that never ended, and it had dampened his
action this summer … like everywhere he went, he got mud in his eye as
an increasingly smaller pool of potential victims disappeared like
fluttering raincoats into the gloom. Most of this stretch of Scarborough
was suburban in appearance, but this was a dead end where high-rises and
some weeds trespassed over the borderline to grow tall and unwanted.
Scarborough was a faceless place of mixed races; people seemed to blend
into a uniform blandness. Reg liked to blend into the scenery in
faceless places, like part of their null history. He'd drift on the
streets until he did what he had to do, then he’d disappear into
bone-white oblivion, waiting for inner darkness to wake him again.
His favorite oldie floated moodily from the radio, but it wasn't really
a good day to think about Scarborough Fair. He got up, dumped his tray,
and left, banging the door. The wind and slashing rain tore at his
hunting outfit. Waves of rain whipped across his dented Ford. His mind
was becoming a dismal blank; it always did after a killing. An image of
the little boy's battered body in his trunk flashed in his thoughts,
then things went blank again.
A bleached white sky illuminated the lake as black clouds drifted on the
horizon. The narrow gravel road he turned down rested in misty gloom.
The road ran along a lonely, mostly hidden stretch of the bluffs, and
the heavy rains had made the area a sudden swamp. He looked for familiar
landmarks in the fields of bland mud, but could find none. The feeling
was that this place existed in the bowels of Scarborough and every other
windy lakeside city in the world.
With disappointment curling his lips, he stopped by a row of dead oak
trees near the edge of the bluffs. Exposed roots gripped the mud like
the talons of a griffin. Behind the trees, a pond lay like melted
chocolate. The pond's bottom would digest a body well; he decided to
dispose of it there and got out.
A warm, moist wind blew off the water, but it was an ill wind, like the
breath of a zombie. Since the mud was soft, dragging the body would be
the easy way. As he worked, he noticed that Lake Ontario was stained and
rolling with muck for quite a distance out.
His spade cut into the mud, knifing too deeply. He halted for a moment;
the body's gory face was causing his breakfast to leap, so he took a
moment and turned it. The mud was heavy, and the hole immediately
refilled when he lifted the shovel, so he decided it would be better to
get some rocks and sink the body out under a few inches of water.
“Damn!” he said as he noticed his rubbers had sunk a couple of inches
into the mud. Reaching down, he held his right rubber as he lifted his
foot. The ooze's suction made a loud pop as his foot came out.
Thrown off balance, he nearly fell, unable to regain his footing.
Suddenly and silently, his whole world began to shake. Looking up, he
saw the oak tree in front of him tilt and pull a section of earth with
it as it slid down the bluff. It was a mudslide, and a shift of the mud
knocked his feet free. He fell on his butt.
Jabbing his hands into the mud, he used them as an anchor and rode the
slide like it was a giant toboggan. As he screamed vile names at the
gods, he saw the slide heading for a flat span atop a second steep wall
of the bluffs. The frothy lake and certain death were beyond the wall.
With a jolt and an incredible blubbering of ooze, the slide halted on
the second wall of the bluffs. The oak tree tilted out over the water,
swinging roots and branches like dripping tentacles. Reg turned over to
his knees and looked up the slide. A big swell of softer ooze was
flowing over the top edge. To save himself, he turned to face the lake
and dug in up to his knees. He stood up, and the ooze flowed around him,
slowly rising up his ribs, touching him like a filthy molester. Then
water came pouring down, and he held his breath as the contents of the
shallow pond raced over him.
Waves lifted, broke into silted foam, and seethed against the bluff
wall. Reg was up to his armpits in mud, and the stuff stank like an
outhouse. The pressure on his torso hurt like a gut punch. He tried to
squirm, but found that he couldn't lift himself out. Panic and slime
turned his dirty hair to hog bristles. He hollered for help and found
that hollering caused the mud to close in and cut off his air. It left
him choking, taking shallow breaths.
The slop began to percolate and splatter in his face; some sort of swamp
gas was bubbling up, sour and rancid. A blob shot in his right eye, and
his hands fought in vain to reach it. He was afraid the gross gas would
cause him to vomit and choke to death.
A torrent began; rain showered down, cleansing his eyes and face. When
the downpour eased, his eyes began to dart about, looking for hope like
a trapped animal might look for hope. A buzzing sound circled his head,
and he went cross-eyed. A fat mosquito had lit on his nose. He watched
full of misery as the bug grew even fatter, and he felt like one of the
kids he'd killed, twisted in the clutches of something as abominable as
it was unbelievable.
The mosquito flew off, and he found himself staring straight ahead at an
object rising out of the mud. Belching gas lifted it higher and higher.
Mud streamed from it, and Reg saw that it was a corpse. It had been in
the slop a while and was badly bloated, swelling with pus and rot, a
mass of raw maggoty flesh and exploded veins. And it stank so bad that
Reg choked and grimaced as he tried to hold his gorge down.
It rose to its hips and had a belly that had fattened to enormous size
and was splitting like a rotten vegetable. Violet intestines emerged
from the tear, hatching out on the mud like snakes. They were connected
to a football-sized spleen gone slimy green. Gobs of congealed gore, a
slab of brown liver, and a big red tongue of heart muscle followed; the
whole thing was a gross chimera of death and its ugliest decay.
Reg felt ill. All of his life, he'd been an admirer of human organs, but
this was incredibly different and disgusting. He'd always kept his body
parts in locked, sanitized containers, where he had power over them.
Organs on the loose was one of his worst fears.
Terror showed in his dilated eyes as the spleen and intestines slid
toward him, but the spleen never reached him; instead, it exploded,
throwing a wad of rotten tissue against his lips. Vomit rose, and he
choked horribly, certain that it was over, but after a few moments of
flaming lungs and long rasps, he was still alive.
A staring eyeball poked out of the mud in front of him, and a heavy
weight was pressing on his stomach. More swamp gas rose. As the eyeball
kept staring, the pressure rose to his chest, and he rose slowly,
propelled by the gas. He floated to his hips, his arms came free, and he
grinned hopefully.
Then another object rose in front of him, and he tried to hold it down
in case it was something foul. He failed, and it continued to rise until
ooze flowed off it, revealing it to be the dead little boy.
“Why can't you stay buried, you rotten kid!” he shouted, shaking the
corpse violently. Then he saw the tree moving and knew the slide was
loose again. The oak tree slipped over the wall, and the boy's corpse
pressed against him as the slide sloped forward. Reg had the corpse by
the shoulders, and it was jabbing at him with stiff limbs as he tried to
shove it away. He continued struggling with it as the slide took him
down the bluff wall and on down to the bottom of the lake.
Reg managed to hold his breath as he went under, and he saw air bubbles
and the boy's corpse floating in the cloudy water above. He pumped his
legs, trying to speed the melting of the mud at his feet, then waves of
blindness hit him, and he was rising. His lungs were a balloon about to
burst. He expected to see his life pass before him, but instead he saw
that old self-image again, himself as a corpse. This time he was swollen
and splitting to slime in the algae at the shore. And this time it was
the kids who were alive, dancing and skipping on the rocks as they poked
him with sticks of driftwood.
--the end--
