Then he began to scream

Forrester risked another glance at Putridrine and Morris. He was staring at Lester, his lips tight below his mustache. Putridrine had remembered to close her mouth, but she, too, stared.

“I wish to give you an offer of aid,” Lester continued. “Each of you . . . one and all . . . needs me so very much. I would like to help you.”

Again, no one had the slightest idea what to say. But, finally, Professor Putridrine managed to speak. “What could you possibly . . . offer us?”

He favored them with another musical laugh. “Much, so very much. All of you have needs and desires, appetites unsatisfied...” He turned to face Morris. “Monographs unwritten.” Then to Putridrine. “Enemies to be confronted.” Then to her, “Fidelities to be maintained.” Then, seemingly, to everyone in the room. “So many things.”

He smiled again. “Well, I’ll be off. If you need me, just ask, and I’ll do whatever I can. Happy Halloween, everyone.”

And then, he was out the door, and gone.

For a long, strained moment, no one said a word. Then, everyone spoke at once, and wondered what the hell . . . what the bleeding, sulfuric hell . . . had happened.

*

It was a question that would occur, as well, to a young car thief a short time later.

Actually, he was a would-be thief. He’d never stolen a car before. In fact, he was only sixteen. He was one of the numberless young men and women who were, in theory, attending high schools in the grim little post-industrial city where the University remained as a relic from another, richer age when the mills still churned out shoes and optical instruments, rather than rotting empty on backstreets.

The boy saw the old car, beat up and ill maintained, on the road leading up to the University. It says much about him, and how green he was, that he paid any attention at all to it. A more experienced thief would have eyed the Morris’ little BMW, or Putridrine’s Audi, where they sat unattended in the lot known informally as Pedantic Place.

He crept up beside the driver’s side door. He tried the handle. It was unlocked! He looked through the window. The key was in the ignition! This was too good to be true. This was like someone was forcing the car on him.

He glanced up and down the street. No cops in sight. Now, he thought, for a little quick action. The guys would never believe it.

He opened the door and slid behind the wheel. Fantastic.

He realized the seat was wet. He put his hand on it. It came up red and dripping. What? He looked at the floor, in the passenger’s seat, in the back.

Then he began to scream.

Someone heard him and called the police. They arrived a little later. They saw the hysterical boy weeping in the street next to a parked car. Indifferently, they assumed he was on drugs. Indifferently, too, they shot him with a stun-gun and took him away in cuffs.

Only then did one of them look in the back of the car.

The Best of Friends

You could hear the gasps around the table. Someone whispered, “whoa.”

Morris sputtered for a moment, then spoke, “Mr. Graham, that is hardly the language appropriate for this situation.”

“Really? Oh. Sorry. It’s bloody dripping excrement, then. Doesn’t that sound better? I think so. But, whatever you call it, it’s still shit. Probably the worst that’s ever crossed your desks.”

The shocked silence deepened. Finally, Forrester found herself saying something, if only because no one else would. “I wouldn’t say … that.”

“No”—he laughed again, a warm, hearty sound—“but only because you’re much too nice. You would prefer the term . . . what was it? . . . Oh. Yes . . . Not Up To The Standards We Hold Dear.”

She felt as if some one had slapped her in the face. How had he known what she… ?

But by then he was speaking to the table. “Yes, shit. Of course, it didn’t have to be that. I mean, I’ve read his… my original. Naturally. And, frankly it wasn’t that bad, when it started out. What was it? Two years ago now? Or about that.”

He scanned the table with those fake red and yellow eyes. “It wasn’t a bad proposal, as proposals go. Not great.” The eyes focused on Putridrine, then moved on to Morris, rested at some spot between them. “But, then, you played games with it. Rewrite and revise. Obstruct and condescend. Patronize and pulverize. For no reason whatsoever, other than that you could get away with it.”

Aghast, Forrester glanced at her colleagues. Oh, shit. This would ruin her in the department! Morris was white with fury. Putridrine’s mouth had dropped open with disbelief. Oh, shit, shit, shit!

But Lester didn’t even pause to take a breath. “And, now,” he laughed again, “we have the fruits of your efforts. Trash. A piece of trash that shall be swept away with the other rubbish of the department. Marvelous.”

Morris rumbled into action. “How…how dare you.”

Another of the bright smiles went his way. “Yes, it is always difficult to dare speak the truth. But, it doesn’t matter. I’m leaving the program today.”

“You most certainly will,” Morris said, his voice thick with fury. His fists were clinched on the table before him.

“However,” Lester continued. “Let me make it certain that I hold you in the . . . deepest . . . affection. And respect. Yes, I respect you. Even admire you. In fact,” again the eyes swept over the committee, “I want to part friends. The best of friends.”

A Dapper Demon

A total, fucking, bloody, dripping, waste

“Anyway,” he continued, “the long and short of it is that I’ll be invited to rewrite one more time. Or, to put it another way, you’ll hint yet again that it’s time for me to consider a nice job in … oh…shoe repair or something. Only, this time, I’ve finally gotten the message.”

His red and yellow eyes shifted to some point behind her. “Ah,” he said, “here comes the rest of the party. Let’s join them, shall we?”

Lester took her arm and she was too startled to resist. He turned her easily and she found that coming up the stairs behind her were, indeed, the rest of the dissertation committee…Morris in all his obesity, Putridrine with her disconcertingly elfin features, following them six or seven graduate students.

They reached the landing and, at the sight of him, the professors stopped in shock. The graduate students, their way blocked, bunched up in a confused little knot. One girl, who’d been looking over shoulder while she spoke to her friend behind her, bounced off Morris’ copious posterior and nearly fell. With a squeak, she teetered backwards, but then one of the other young women steadied her.

Lester seemed wholly unaware of, or unconcerned with, his effect. Instead, he greeted them jovially. “Hello, hello! Everyone’s here. Superb!” He gestured at the door of the conference room. “Let’s begin, shall we? I’m eager to chat with you all.”

He held the door open and the small group filed in past him, each nervously glancing at his bizarre features and dress. Or else, they stared stiffly ahead, pretending nothing was different.

Forrester was the last to go in. She passed him with something a little like a shudder, then found a seat for herself around the table.

Dear Lord! He was mad. That had to be it. Or on drugs. Or something. There was no other explanation.

She knew she had to take charge somehow. “Well, uh,” she said, “I guess we should get started.”

“Absolutely,” Lester chirped from where he sat on the other side of the table. “Let’s do begin. Who wants to be first?”

She glanced at the other members of the committee. They were still staring at him, blankly.

“Come, come,” he urged them. “Speak up. I know you’re out there. I hear you breathing.” He laughed at his own joke.

Morris cleared his throat. Someone’s chair squeaked.

“Please,” he said, smiling. “One of you must have some nasty thing to share. Maybe you, Professor Putridrine?”

She looked at him. “I, that is, ah . . .”

“Let me see if I can help.” He gave them all another of his newly dazzling smiles, all pearly teeth. “I’m sure that you’ve read the manuscript and concluded that it is based on a severely out of date interpretative apparatus in that it fails to employ the criteria of Race, Class, and Gender within a postmodern context.”

Her eyes bulged. She glanced down at her notes, then at him again. “How did you know what I…”

“Just a guess. Anyway, my response to your critique is that, by Golly, you’re absolutely right.”

“I…I am?

“Yep. No use of Race, Class, Gender, or Postmodernism. In fact, that’s just the tip of ye ole iceberg. The whole dissertation is a total waste. A total, fucking, bloody, dripping, waste.”

Like an S&M wet dream?” he said, again cheerfully.

It was he. He turned and greeted her with a dazzling smile. “Hello, Professor, lovely day for a lynch mob, don’t you think?”

She was stunned. What on earth had happened to him? Where before he’d seemed gray and shallow, and a little hunched in on himself, now he radiated confidence. He was rosy, in fact. A bit reddish, even. As though new blood coursed in his veins.

“Uh…” she collected herself. “Yes, Lester, ah, pleasant day.”

Then she realized what he was wearing. It was time for another shock. What she’d taken to be a black sports coat was, in fact, a hard black leather jacket. He wore as well shiny black leather chaps and what seemed to be shirt of black cotton. She realized what it was.

“A Halloween costume?” she asked, aghast.

“Well, it is the right date,” he said cheerfully. “Do you like it?” He displayed the backs of his hands to her. Running from the wrists to the top of the index finger knuckle were rows of heavy brown stitches, as though they’d been cut open and then roughly sutured shut again.

“You look like . . .” she sputtered.

“Like an S&M wet dream?” he said, again cheerfully. “Yes, I think so.”

Then she saw his eyes. Where before he had dim little eyes of dishwater blue, now they were yellow and red, with cat’s eyes slits rather than human pupils.

“Your eyes!”

“Contact lenses,” he explained. “Novelty ones.” He put a hand up to his right eye, covered it for a moment, and then there was a faint but strangely sickening sucking sound. He dropped his hand and then his right eye was its familiar dim blue. “You used to be able to get them at just about any toy store, but then they realized they were a health hazard. Now you have to order them special.”

She looked way from him, compulsively. Somehow the red eye on the left and blue on the right was more distressing then when both the contacts were in place. “Take it out, take it out…” She directed him, meaning for him to remove the other lens.

“As you wish,” The hand went back to his face. But, it went to the right eye. Again there was the horrible little sound of something wet. Then, both his eyes were red again.

She glared at him. “You come . . . like this . . . to your proposal defense?”

“Well, yes. I’m going to a Halloween party just after I leave here, so I thought I would just save some time—”

She interrupted him. “But…but…this is your defense!”

“Yes.” He gave her another dazzling smile. “And we already know what will happen, don’t we?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ...”

He continued cheerfully. “What will happen is that dear Professor Morris . . . Uncle Morrie, I call him . . . will harrumph once or twice, quiver his mustache, and conclude that I haven’t gotten nearly enough evidence. And then Professor Putridrine . . . bless her heart . . . will announce that I’m under-theorized.” He winked at her. “Lovely word, that. ‘Under-theorized.’ I’m not sure what it means, but it sounds grand. Almost like you’re really saying something. I must remember to use it in a sentence someday.”

She gaped. What had happened to him?

Something had died in the walls, and it was rotting

Lester Graham was possibly the third worst graduate student she’d ever had, Susan Forrester, Ph.D., thought gloomily as she walked to Dunpher Hall.

The second worst was Phoebe McGrieve, a middle-aged housewife who’d come into the program under the auspices of that great fat idiot, Morris. McGrieve had some faint idea about wanting to get a Ph.D. Only she’d been, basically, dead from the neck up. She couldn’t decide on a dissertation topic, and finally Morris had given her one. He’d discovered some obscure local politician who’d gone to jail for some half-witted bit of underdone graft in the nineteenth century and he’d told her to go research the man. That was three years ago. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, she was still researching.

The very first worst had been Martin Jackson Taylor, who’d been a complete pain to everyone. Oh, he was bright enough, but he’d been older—he’d been fifty. He’d been a journalist or something, and had written a book or two, and so he thought he knew everything all ready. Or, worse, that he knew enough to be treated with something like respect. Which, naturally, isn’t how the game is played at all. Not with graduate students. So, he had to be slapped around a little, in a supportive and mentoring sort of way, of course. Alas, the treatment had been ineffective, and the man had left the program with a curse.

But Lester . . .

Lester was simply dim. There was no way around it. He just wasn’t mentally up to the challenge of graduate studies. “He cannot uphold the standards which we hold dear,” was the way that Linda had put it. She liked that phrase. The Standards We Hold Dear. She rolled it silently off her tongue. How profound it sounded.

Truth to be told, she was both a little intimidated and a little in awe of Linda Putridrine, even though Putridrine was technically her subordinate, as well as nearly thirty years younger than herself. The fact of the matter, though, was that the younger woman had graduated from an extraordinarily influential program in New York, where-as she had only graduated from a state school. It had been a good state school, but it was . . . well, second tier. Not to be compared with Putridrine’s Manhattan credentials.

So it was that she had let Linda more and more set the tone for the department. When, as second reader on Lester’s proposal, she had announced that it wasn’t even mediocre, Forrester quickly agreed. Yes, she had passed his work before, but if Linda Putridrine said it was bad, well, clearly, there was something wrong.

Besides, to be honest, there was another issue.

Forrester had recently remarried. After many long, uncomfortable years alone as a single mother with two children, and an ex-husband who combined total irresponsibility with a certain touch of mental illness, she had found herself unexpectedly in love with a lawyer from out of state. They’d married over the summer, and, frankly, he was a lot more interesting than the University.

She was on track for retirement, and easing out of the situation before hand seemed a perfectly good plan. If Linda wanted to run things, well, great. Let her.

She came to the doors of the Hall and trotted up the main stairs. This wasn’t going to be fun, she knew. But, best to get it out of the way.

She waved at the department secretary through the glass door on Floor Two and continued up the stairs to the conference room on Floor Three. Odd. There was some sort of smell in the place. It was like . . . like . . . well, like something rotting. Or, like fetid water.

Where is it coming from? She glanced around. The walls? Yes, that was it. Probably something in the walls. A rat or something had died in there and it was rotting.

Right. She turned her thoughts back to Lester. What would he do when they made him rewrite the proposal again? Get violent? Kill himself? It had happened before . . . though, he didn’t seem to be the type for the former, and she doubted he had the courage for the latter.

She came to the landing of Floor Three and glanced around. No sign of Lester. There was only a tallish, thin, rather handsome young man leaning against the far wall. She hadn’t seen him before. She wondered who it was.

Then she looked again.

Lester?

The blade touched his beating heart

That was it! It was from the Marlowe play, Doctor Faustus.

He hurried to his bookshelf and threw books aside. He found his copy of the collected plays of Marlowe and went thumbing through it desperately. There! Act Five. Right at the end. As Faustus is about to go to hell. It came when the Bad Angel is tormenting him.

Wow. Decuir … or at least Decuir’s Id . . . had read Faustus.

He carefully put his notes in a folder. This, he knew, might well be the answer to all his prayers. He could go to Morris and say, here, look, I’ve found something important. For that, they might even let him stay in the program.

Delighted, he poured himself a half-inch of wine in a juice glass and toasted the long dead Decuir. Murderer and a bastard you may have been, but you may have saved my bacon.

He went to bed and, for the first time in months, went to sleep easily.

Until…

Three a.m. He woke with a start. He’d had some kind of horrible dream. He couldn’t remember the details. It was something about being torn to pieces. And his whole committee had been there—Forrester, Morris, Putridrine, all transformed and somehow horrible.

He switched on the light beside his bed. He knew what the dream meant. It didn’t matter what he gave them. They wouldn’t let him stay in the program no matter what he did. He was doomed.

Well…

He got up, put on his robe, and went into the front room. Maybe he’d make warm milk. It might help him sleep. He put some in a cup, heated it in the microwave, then sipped it meditatively.

Well, best face facts. They were going to kick him out of the program…or at least make him rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite until he left in frustration. Okay. Fine. He’d get a job somewhere. Maybe he’d teach at a private school. He’d save money and then, in a couple of years, he’d try again at another university. This time, he’d be careful about who he’d have on his committee.

The milk was good, but didn’t seem to make him any sleepier. He put the empty mug in the sink. It was good, he decided, to have a plan. At last he was facing reality and ready to move forward. And further …

…what was in the pocket of his robe? He put his hand in and…ouch! … something bit him. What the fuck? It was the paring knife! How on earth had that gotten in there?

He decided it must have somehow fallen in when he had put away his cup. He put the knife back on the counter and held paper towel to his finger until the bleeding stopped.

He still wasn’t sleepy. A shower, he decided, might help. He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower in the tub. He let the water run while it heated up. He loved the peaceful sound it made.

Yes, it was good to have a plan. He didn’t feel great, but at least he knew what he had to do. He had to take charge. He needed to move forward.

He took off his robe and hung it on the hook on the inside of the door. Something went “clunk.” What? More cautious than he had been before, he checked the pocket. Damn! It was the knife again.

He must—he thought—have caught it with the sleeve of his robe when he put the mug away. It must have fallen back into the pocket. Weird. Oh, well, he decided, he’d just put it back when he came out of the shower. He left it on the back of the toilet tank so he wouldn’t forget it.

Nude, he stepped into the water. Yesss. That was the ticket. The hot water caressed his neck and his back.

Everything would be all right, he decided. It wouldn’t be great. It wouldn’t be easy. But, he would get things done. In the end, it would all work out. Just a matter of time.

And thinking thus, he reached out from behind the shower curtain, took the knife from where it rested on the back of the toilet, stabbed himself in the stomach just above the groin, and then in a single ruthless motion, slit himself open from gut to lung. The blade touched his beating heart.

Yes, he thought, as he collapsed into the tub, everything will be just fine.

Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be

An accident, surely. Surely, they had just picked the first available Friday for his proposal defense. It just happened to be Halloween.

Still…

He went down the walk to his apartment. So they were going to let him defend at last.

He unlocked the door and let himself in. It was dark inside. He switched on the overhead but it was hardly brighter. For some reason, the owners had painted the place a deep hunter green, so the walls seemed to suck light right out the place. You could probably, he thought, launch flares in here and it would be dark as a graveyard at midnight.

He put the bills in one place and his books in another. What was he going to do about dinner? Well, he’d left a little steak to thaw out on the counter of his tiny kitchen. But, somehow, he didn’t feel like eating beef right now. Eggs? A salad? He remembered then there was left-over pizza from the other night. He ate that standing over the sink. Then, he thought about having some vegetables. He had a couple of carrots in the ‘fridge. He got out a paring knife and thought about peeling them, but then he changed his mind. Not worth the effort. Instead, he held the knife in his hand for a moment, considered it, and finally touched the blade with the index finger of his right hand. He was startled with a drop of blood appeared.

Damn. It was sharper than he thought. He washed his hands and then rinsed the knife. He left it in the drainer to dry.

Now what? He realized he was bone tired. He fell into the chair in front of the TV and switched it on. Maybe there was something on about the shooting in the building. But, there wasn’t. Just the usual collection of sitcoms, soap operas, and reality TV shows. One was a game show where contestants confronted their fears. He watched uneasily as a woman with a phobia about worms was slowly submerged in a vat of them. Only her eyes, wide with terror, projected above their slimy mass.

Shit!

He switched it off. What now? Read? Go out? He had few friends (none, really) so going out with “the guys” wasn’t an option. Maybe then take a walk? No, that wasn’t an option either. The neighborhood was safe enough in the day, but, well, at night . . . no. There’d been muggings lately. The whole area was going downhill.

He found himself thinking of the automatic writing.

Maybe . . . he stood and got his book back. The copies of the Decuir’s pages were there in a folder. He sat back down and regarded them. They were weird and flowing, somehow graceful. Yet, it was chilling to think he was looking at communications from the mind of a killer and madman. From, in fact, his subconscious! His . . . what was the term? His Id.

He tried to read them. Could that be a letter? Was that a word? He stared at them, daring them to make some kind of sense. But nothing came. They lines squirmed in front of him.

Hell.

And then . . . there! That was an “S” . . . and that was a “…an.” The lines seemed to unlock before his eyes. That was a “t.” And a whole word! That was “bodies.”

Fantastic! He wondered why he hadn’t been able to see it before. It was so clear now. “…bodies boil in lead.” “…ne’re can die” “more horrid be...”

He dashed for paper and pen and then began to work feverishly at his kitchen table. Yes! He could translate it!

…into that vast perpetual torture-house.
There are furies, tossing damned souls
On burning forks. Their bodies boil in lead.
There are live quarters broiling on the coals,
That ne’er can die; this ever-burning chair
Is for o’er-tortured souls to rest them in.
These that are fed with sops and flaming fire
Were gluttons and loved only delicates
And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates,
But yet all these are nothing. Thou shalt see
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be.

Dear heaven! What on earth was it?

He stared at his translation. Horrible, yet . . . yet . . . it was familiar. He had seen it before. Where . . .

Doctor Faustus!

Halloween?

He parked on the street and walked the distance to his building. The gray-faced landlady of uncertain age was standing out front smoking a cigarette and periodically hacking her lungs out.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Shooting.” She said it as though it were the most common thing in the world.

“Who got shot?”

“B4.” Meaning the tenant in that apartment. And she started hacking again.

He watched while an ambulance arrived. EMTs appeared and wheeled a man’s body on a stretcher out of the building. The man’s face was veiled with an oxygen mask, but the men moved with the indolence of those who know their job has ended before it had a chance to begin. The man was surely dead or nearly so.

They loaded the body in the ambulance and took off. The fire engine and the police cars went their way. The landlady went back into her apartment. He heard her television switch on. A televangelist exhorted his flock to send money.

Lester remained where he was.

Who was B4? He tried to remember but nothing much came. A dark haired man, taller than he, and very slim. He always seemed a little . . . well, out of it. He suspected B4 of doing drugs, and very likely dealing them as well. That was probably how he got shot.

So …

Creepy, though. His own apartment was A4, just below the murdered man’s. Oh! That was a scary thought.

He went to the bank of mailboxes at the end of the wall and opened his own. A number of envelops fell out. He glanced at them hurriedly. Bills. An advertisement or two. And…his heart stopped...a note from the University.

He opened it trembling. It was brief and unsigned. It said simply that he was to defend his proposal (again) two weeks from “the above date.” He calculated. That would be . . .October 31.

Halloween?

They'd have his head on a platter.

One of the archivists interrupted his thoughts. “It’s four forty-five, everyone,” the man announced to the room. “Everyone wrap up, please. We’ll be closing at five.”

Around him the other researchers put away their notes and books. Lester returned his box to the desk and then prepared to leave.

He was proud of his little discovery of the automatic writing. He wondered if Morris would pleased.

Probably not.

The mild sense of satisfaction he’d gotten from his work evaporated. No, Morris wouldn’t care in the least. Worse, Morris and the rest of his dissertation committee … Linda Putridrine, Susan Forrester…would soon have his head on a platter. They’d cut it off and leave it bleeding.

His hopes for a degree were as dead as, well, as any of Decuir’s unfortunate friends and family. It was only a matter of time.

He made his way to the parking lot and his car. The engine turned over with the choking death rattle of an ill-maintained and elderly vehicle. Yes, they’d have his head. Sliced off and spilling gray matter on the street.

He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened. For the first two years of his time at the University, he had been quite happy. The professors had seemed to like him. His grades had been fine. Oh, there had been problems now and then. There was the time he’d lost his temper during a visit by a semi-important scholar. But, he apologized to her and everyone else a dozen times. There were papers that hadn’t been particularly well liked, but that’s the norm. So, on average, everything had been more or less fine.

Then, a year and a half ago, he had written a proposal for his dissertation. Everyone seemed pleased with it. He had shown it to the members of his committee—his major professor, Forester, plus Linda Putridrine and Morris. No one had objected. Everyone had an opportunity to criticize the piece if they’d wanted. But, he’d heard nothing.

So, came the day when he was supposed to present and defend it. To his horror, and in front of all the other graduate students, they’d ripped him to shreds. Forester had sat, expressionless, silent, watching him perish. Avuncular Morris had announced behind his blubber and his mustache that, alas, there was no dissertation here. Putridrine was worse of all. She was all but frothing at the mouth. How dare he assume that … didn’t he know that . . . how could he begin to believe that . . . was he really so fantastically stupid?

He left the room in shock. Behind him he’d heard the twitters of one or two of the other graduate students—the young, pretty women that Morris seemed to always have around him, in spite or because of his girth. On the days that followed, he asked around . . . discretely . . . and, yes, it soon became apparently that those other students had known what was coming already. They’d been told what to expect.

He, alone, was to be surprised that day. He had been set up to take a fall. For a time, he’d considered leaving the program. But, no. He was strong (he said). That was the kind of thing you had to expect in the academy. From women, particularly. They were busy showing that they were every bit as tough as men. Tougher!

But, then . . .

There had followed a year of rewrites, and more rewrites—not of the dissertation, just of the proposal. Each time he’d turn in one version, they’d demand yet another. He had done it now, he thought, just about eight times.

Slowly, even he was beginning to get the message.

He turned a corner and came to his apartment building. It was a little sixteen-plex in the student ghetto. He was startled to realize that there was a fire engine and police cars out in front, their red, flashing lights illuminating the late afternoon twilight.

What in the world?

there are furies

sketches of dead bodies, clinical and precise, organs exposed to the air.

Shit! He thought. The sketch was horrific. He glanced through the book. There were others, equally graphic, scattered all through it. Around them were line after line of some, strange looping script.

He looked at the writing. What? There were no words that he could recognize. It didn’t seem to be English.

He glanced at the cover in hopes of finding some note or identifying label, but, no, there was nothing but more of the strange tangled script. After a moment, he carried the notebook up to the desk where one of the archivists regarded him suspiciously.

“Any idea what this is?” he asked her. She looked at it. Then she put on a pair of reading glasses and looked at it again.

“No…” she said, hesitantly. “You’re working with the Decuir material, aren’t you?”

He admitted that he was.

“Does it say anything in the finding aid?”

He checked. All it said was “personal notebook.”

“Hmm.” She nodded. “Do you suppose there’s anything in the next box?”

“That would be 176. Can I see it?”

“Are you finished with 175?”

“Just let me copy these pages and you can have it back.”

“Fine,” she agreed. “By the time you’re done, I’ll be back with your box.”

He took the notebook to the copy machine and scanned a few pages. Then, the archivist returned. He put the notebook back and took the new box back to his desk.

He could find no other notes like those he’d found, but he did find a folder full of letters. One of these to Decuir from something called, “The Psychic Research Fellowship of New York.” It was unsigned and simply said that Dr. Decuir was now a full member in good standing.

Below that was a second letter, this one a carbon copy of an original, and dated 1934, which Decuir had apparently sent to the Fellowship early that year. It read in part, “…obviously, I must insist on the greatest discretion. If it ‘came out’ that I was conducting these researches, it would have a most distressing effect on my relationship with my patients.”

Attached to the letter with a rusting staple was a receipt, $1.50 for one copy of the “Psychic Research Pamphlet, Automatic Writing: Your Gateway To The Other World.”

Whoa!

He looked at his copies of papers from the notebook. Automatic writing, that’s what it was.

It just so happened that he knew something about it. He’d even tried it a couple of times. The idea was that you got in contact with your unconscious mind by simply putting a pen in your hand and holding it over paper. You’d try to relax and, if you were lucky, your hand would start writing all by itself. It was sort of like doing a Ouija board, except you didn’t have two other people helping you. Supposedly, your Id or subconscious or whatever could send you messages that way.

He’d even tried it a couple of times, back in the days when he’d been in middle school and he’d been looking for something, anything, to give him some sort of control over his situation. He had also given self-hypnosis a try, and karate, and meditation. None of it had worked, of course. No matter how hypnotized he was, his parents were still a pair of acerbic and cruelly witty alcoholics, mutually abusive, and hating him with a deep sense of personal martyrdom. “We stay together,” they told their therapists, “for the sake of the kid.”

Oh, hell.

But, anyway . . . so Decuir was into automatic writing? Wasn’t that interesting, he thought.. Wonder what part of his unconscious mind he’d discovered that way.

He looked again at the sketches of dead bodies, clinical and precise, organs exposed to the air.

Ugh.

Best not to know what Dr. Decuir had discovered . . . when his hand began to move, all by itself.

the personal notes of a serial killer

And now he, Lester, was deep in Dr. Decuir’s papers—the personal notes of a serial killer. For the princely sum of three dollars an hour on top of his regular TAship, he was employed by Professor Q. Madison Morris, Ph.D. to go through them page by page, in search of anything interesting that might make it into the Professor’s upcoming book, Race, Class, Gender, and the Political Economy of Murder in a Nineteenth Century City.

Dear God, he thought . . . as he turned another page. Three dollars an hour wasn’t near enough. Not for this.

For a murderer, Decuir was a dreadfully boring man. His papers consisted mostly of notes, letters, business records, and a set of diaries, all of them uniquely tedious (“had toasted cheese for lunch. Tea was cold”).

He turned another page. Not that it mattered, he supposed. Morris would write whatever he damn well pleased. Whatever Decuir was or wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter to the good Professor. He’d find some way or another to wedge the throat-slicing doctor into the book. Assuming he ever got around to writing it, that is. Morris had received tenure after his second book—a magnificently researched monograph on a series of deaths in a small Colorado town shortly after World War I. It had been long believed that the many dead had been the result Spanish Influenza. Morris, however, argued a serial poisoner had been at work. Someone—and he suspected the local postmistress—had been spreading death, a little at a time, and for no other reason than it gave her pleasure.

Morris had finished that book 20 years before. He said he was now working on this new one, the one that Lester was supposed to be researching. But, so far, not a page of it had seen light. And, since he had tenure, what did Morris care?

Lester put aside the notebook he’d been reading (prescriptions written between April and June, 1920) and picked up another. It was a dusty, hardback thing, and when he opened it bits of browning paper fell to the table. There was a curious smell to it. Like earth. For some reason he found himself thinking of decay. He opened the book…

Oh!

There, on the crumbling paper, were sketches of a human body, sliced open from throat to groin.

The Archive

The Archive was scary.

It was like a bunker. They had it under the university library. It was where all the files and collectables were. People died and donated their papers here. Scholars . . . like him . . . then came down here to find out what dead people had said and written.

It was, he thought, sort of like robbing a grave. Except instead of dealing with rotting flesh, you dug through rotting ideas.

The graduate student—his name was Lester—shrugged. Well, maybe he was just being a little bitter. Not that he didn’t have a lot to be bitter about.

He sat at one of the tables with its little light. Around him, other researchers were working on their projects. All of them were under the inquiring eyes of the archivists who sat behind the desk at the front of the room. He glanced at the wall above their heads. A grim, yellowish painting of a scowling man glowered down at him. It was, he knew, one of the founders of the University. The man looked a little fish-like around the edges.

Well… he said again, best to get busy.

On the table in front of him was a document box, specifically Box Number 175 (*Section b) of the collected papers of Dr. Samuel Westticon Decuir (1879-1935), an obscure but apparently influential citizen of the little city of Crayhaven. He’d been, it seemed, a physician, a friend of the mayor, a supporter of the governor, a pillar of the Crayhaven Reformed Church, and, as a sort of hobby, a murderer. According to newspaper accounts at the time, he’d slaughtered his wife, a subsequent mistress, a neighbor, and an unknown number of vagrants whom he lured into his office with a promise of food.

He was never caught. Rather, he slit his own throat with a scalpel. A nurse found him, and a note confessing to his crimes, in the leather chair behind his (blood soaked) desk. There was also a will, leaving his money to the church, and his papers to the university.

The police found three more bodies, never identified but expertly dissected, decaying in the basement.