The Nobody

  The Nobody

  Tom Piccirilli

  Smashwords Edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2010 by Tom Piccirilli & Macabre Ink Digital Publications

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  MORE FROM TOM PICCIRILLI & CROSSROAD PRESS

  SHORT RIDE TO NOWHERE

  Jenks and Hale aren't friends, partners, or even next door neighbors anymore. Not since they each lost their jobs and had their homes foreclosed. Not since they lost their wives and kids and whatever stability they'd fought for in the world. Adrift on the streets of New York, Jenks' dark path seems to parallel Hale's step by step.

  After Hale is found nearly dead beside the corpse of a nine-year-old girl, and soon after commits suicide in a mental hospital, Jenks decides to find out just what the hell happened. What happened to Hale and the girl, what happened to the wayward American Dream, and what happened to his youth and forfeited hopes.

  Because whatever happens to Hale happens to Jenks just a few months later.

  THE FEVER KILL

  Crease is going back to his quaint, quiet hometown of Hangtree.

  It's where his father the sheriff met ruin in the face of a scandal involving the death of a kidnapped little girl and her missing ransom. It's where crease was beaten, jailed, and kicked clear of the town line ten years earlier.

  Now Crease is back. He's been undercover for so long that most days he feels more like a mobster than a cop. He doesn't mind much: the corrupt life is easier to stomach than a wife who can't understand him, a son who hates him, and a half-dozen adopted kids he can't even name anymore. He's also just gotten his drug-dealing, knife-wielding psycho boss Tucco's mistress pregnant.

  A fine time to decide to settle old scores and resolve a decade-old mystery.

  With Tucco hot on his tail, Crease has to find his answers fast. Who kidnapped little Mary? Who really killed her? Was his own father guilty? And what happened to the paltry fifteen grand ransom that seems to spell salvation to half the population of Hangtree? The town still has a taste for his blood and secrets it wants to keep. Crease has a single hope; a raw and raging fever driving him toward the truth that might just burn him up along the way.

  NIGHTJACK

  On the day of his release from a mental institution Pace is taken "hostage" by Faust, Pia, and Hayden, three escapees from the hospital who disappeared after the presumed rape and beating of Cassandra Kaltzas, daughter of the Greek munitions tycoon Alexandra Kaltzas. Each suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder, experiencing complex delusions and sometimes fantastical identities. Pace tries to piece together what happened when apparently one of their alternate personalities tried to kill Cassandra.

  Pace himself is an alternate of William Pacella, a man whose wife died in a restaurant fire set by a local mobster for insurance money. William Pacella "dies" so that Nightjack can be born–a new personality who may or may not be Jack the Ripper.

  For unknown reasons, Pace is able to see others’ delusions–when alternates take over members of the group, Pace alone is able to interact with each persona. Included among them is Princess Eirrin, a ten thousand year old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne; Smoker, a half-breed gunman from 1880s Arizona; Thaddeus, friend and companion to St. Paul; and the ancient Greek architect Daedalus, who soared among the clouds with his home-made wax wings and watched his son perish in the sea.

  Now the four find themselves under attack from assassins sent by Kaltzas to punish the person who attacked his daughter. Conflicting stories abound about Cassandra–whether she was raped, if she was perhaps murdered, or if she and Pace somehow crossed paths even before the hospital. In fact, she may not even exist.

  As the attacks persist, the group is forced to face their own personal traumas and terrors, and go in search of Kaltzas in Greece. There, on an island where fantasy, myth, and truth are all entangled, Pace and his many alternates must sift through madness and deceit to unlock the mystery. And everyone may wind up dead unless Pace willingly unleashes the most brutal killer of all: Nightjack.

  1

  As he searched backwards down the avenues of his black pain, he understood his name hadn’t always been Cryer.

  Perhaps then it had been Chuck Smith, or Joe Evans, or maybe Abe Fishbaum, you just couldn’t tell. Turn it over for a while and you started to wonder how much you were the name and how much the name was you.

  If he’d been Johnny Guitar, would he have ended up in the same place, with the same damage? Nick Steel might’ve been able to protect his family. Freddy "the Switchblade" Davis wouldn’t have stopped off for a couple of double cheeseburgers and three extra-large fries, sitting in the empty parking lot scarfing down the food while Bach’s "Air on a G String" thrummed on the CD player. Besides the classical music, the incessant satisfied slurps and greasy grunts were the only sounds in the night.

  Then sneaking in two slow cigarettes, despite having nearly quit. Cheating on his diet, breaking his promise to his wife to take better care of himself as he slid across forty and entered, far too comfortably, into middle age. At least he wasn’t drinking again. He was content that his vices were minor ones when all things were considered.

  Cryer was a madhouse name.

  ~ * ~

  When Cryer got home that evening he found his twelve-year-old daughter gutted and whimpering, crawling around the living room in agonized circles. The carpet was thick with her blood and viscera. Cryer ran to her and let out a noise that sounded like a baby seal being pummeled.

  As his girl reached for him, her lips parting and brow furrowed as she fought to speak, Cryer wailed and drowned out whatever she might’ve said. A moment later, she blinked twice at him and gave a deep, quivering sigh. She was dead and Cryer pounded his fists on the stained carpet once, twice, three times, nearly giving in to a convulsive tantrum. He vomited the fast food he’d choked down fifteen minutes ago. Then he was moving through the house, screaming for his wife.

  He heard a thump on the second floor and rushed upstairs. All the rooms were dark. He flipped switches, shouting–sometimes calling her name, sometimes just letting go with little shrieks–and found her in the bathtub, fully clothed with her throat cut.

  Her wrists were bound by duct tape. Another square had been placed over her mouth. She was still alive and turned her head to Cryer. Arterial spray arced through the air and struck him across the face. Blood sailed against the walls and pulsed over her lips and chin. She tried to speak but it looked like she’d bitten through her tongue trying to work the tape loose.

  The killer was going out the window.

  Cryer slid in his wife’s blood, and awful as it was it actually helped him cover the distance quicker. He was ninety pounds overweight with a huge spare tire but he made an awkward leap, feeling his gut wobble as he did so. He managed to catch the intruder by the belt before the guy cleared the sill. Cryer thought he recognized the face but couldn’t tell from where.

  He tried to speak, wanted to say, Why? Why did you do this? Who are you? What? What is this? What? Heya–

  A flash of light off metal crossed Cryer’s eyes. A knife high and twisting. A gloved hand. The guy spun and stabbed Cryer in the forehead.

  The blade went in about three inches, almost directly between Cryer’s eyes. There was no pain. Cryer watched the killer slip out the
window with a great agility, unafraid and in complete control, jumping two floors down to the back yard without a worry.

  Cryer tumbled backward over the edge of the tub, but managed to stay on his feet.

  Weirdest thing ever, he had a hardon.

  His wife made a supreme effort of will and attempted to climb from the tub. Wrists still bound, watching her own life streaming out against the peach wallpaper in weakening, shorter and shorter spurts, her face hardened into of iron. Her eyes showed a great but controlled fear as well as a beautiful and haunting concern for him.

  As she staggered forward she tried to raise her foot over the edge of the tub but couldn’t quite seem to take the step.

  She tried again but a cold and awful realization flooded her expression–she wasn’t going to make it to him. She reached for him with bound hands, coughing out thick ribbons of blood through the gash in her throat, the endless rain thrumming against the porcelain like a brief summer shower. She fell back in a seated position, her hands still out to him, and Cryer tried to say something but again nothing would come out.

  He dropped backward, his knees bending but his legs not giving way. He didn’t collapse, just lowered inch by inch until he was lying on the tiles wet with his wife’s blood, staring up at the ceiling. He tried to blink and couldn’t do it, but after a while his eyes closed on their own and he waited behind them in the darkness, lost and yet awake.

  2

  He opened his eyes again to see a lady cop bending over him. Nice black suit on, her feet covered in little plastic booties, the badge on a chain around her neck. Startled, she jumped back against the sink and broke the mirror of the medicine cabinet with her elbow. "Jesus fucking Christ, he’s still alive–"

  Someone out of Cryer’s eyeshot said, "That’s not possible. There’s three inches of steel in his head."

  Like you needed to hear that kind of shit considering the situation you were in. Cryer’s throat was dry. He swallowed twice and said, "Fuck off."

  "His lips are moving." The lady cop leaned over, afraid to get too close and get blood on her suit. "What did you say?"

  "Fuck off!"

  They still didn’t get it. Thought he was trying to give them a clue or something. Someone kneeled and bent an ear to his mouth. Thick as hell with wax, what the hell kinds of cops were these anyway? He could tell already, they weren’t going to be able to solve a damn thing. It was up to him, except he couldn’t remember who he was.

  3

  He woke up once on the operating table, the tape holding his right eyelid down having loosened enough for him to open his eye. He glanced around the room at six or seven doctors and nurses all impossibly similar looking in baby blue scrubs and masks. He wanted to speak but there was a tube down his throat, another up his nose, all this machinery hooked up to him.

  He still had a hardon.

  There were bright lights and lots of metal reflective surfaces. On a small metal table beside him was a device with a circular saw covered with blood. They’d cut through his skull with it. His forehead had been peeled wide to expose his brain, and number of retractors held back his flesh and muscle.

  Someone noticed him blinking and said, "Jesus Christ."

  It caused a mini-riot. They started yelling at each other, shifting blame. One nurse took the brunt of it. He felt sorry for her, wanted to say, 'It’s not your fault,' but the words refused to come.

  Someone else played around with some needles and tubes and he eventually fell asleep again.

  4

  He came to with bandages around his head, one of his eyes wrapped, no pain at all, but with the weird and distinct impression that a very small man was in the process of climbing out of his skull. Cryer reached up to grab the little guy, in order to either help pull him out or to try to shove him back inside, but the tiny fucker struggled to stay exactly where he was, laid out across the ridge of his brow, stuck halfway. Cryer wanted to ask a lot of questions, find out what was going on, how long he’d been here, what his name was, and the little guy seemed to want to answer, looking back at Cryer and staring into his one good eye, but neither of them could say a word.

  5

  As he recuperated in the hospital he was given intense physical therapy, mental faculty and motor skills testing. All the shit you’d expect. The Rorschach cards, word association–failed that one, he couldn’t talk, although they said he should be able to–even baby tests like putting square blocks in holes.

  There was a great weight in his head. Maybe the little man living in there or maybe the metal plate that they’d stuck inside. They talked to him in goo-goo voices, like he was an infant or a dog. The docs put their index fingers in his hands and told him to squeeze as hard as he could. He had no strength. So they had him bounce hard rubber balls and catch them. Sometimes he played and sometimes he just looked at all these doctors and thought, You crazy sons of bitches.

  They put him in a child’s pool and pretty young girls in bikinis tried to help him to walk and swim. His hardon was finally gone, fucking shame that.

  Sometimes the little guy was there and sometimes he wasn’t. On occasion he was a touch further outside and at other times he was almost all the way back in. Cryer awoke from intense and vivid dreams, often crying, often finding that days had passed.

  They said he had walking catatonia. They said his rational facility was so damaged by either the knife or the traumatic events themselves that he might never recover. They said he had the cognitive capacity of a five-year-old.

  They stopped talking directly to him and instead spoke to one another across his bed. The nurses stopped the goo-goo talk and started complaining about their husbands, their ungrateful children. They couldn’t stop disgorging their daily frustrations, using him as a sounding board, knowing he couldn’t pass on their secrets but could still listen.

  They got rougher when they changed his bedding around him. They bounced the balls like they wanted him to fetch.

  The cops said he was faking.

  They said he’d snuffed his own family. They said the bloody hand prints he’d left on the carpet next to his daughter proved he’d murdered her. They said the pile of vomit he’d left on the floor was evidence. They said he’d been covered with his wife’s blood from where he’d cut her throat, further proof he’d done it all himself. They wanted a confession. They said that his wife had gotten a lucky defense strike even as she was dying.

  At first they questioned him good cop-bad cop style. Later on, they both went bad cop and even worked him over a little when nobody was looking. He felt a strange and distant pain that had nothing to do with their fists. It was beyond him, an anguish that hovered behind his body and a little to the left, even when they slugged him in the guts.

  They broke his pinkies and he made no sound.

  6

  One middle-aged nurse had a seriously fucked up fetish and could only get turned on by comatose and insensate patients. It was thoroughly screwy, even the little guy in Cryer’s skull said so.

  She called Cryer her daddy. She pulled his pants down, yanked her panties aside, got on top, and tried to ride him. Saying the whole time, Daddy oh Daddy.

  You had to wonder about the depth of some folks' poor parental guidance.

  She kept bucking along. His hard-on was gone, and that was that. She still managed to get herself off.

  The bandages got thinner. So did he. The spare tire had dwindled to half of what it had once been, and then it was gone.

  They transferred him to a different wing of the hospital, and then soon sent him off to a private facility, and then to a state run clinic.

  Many other doctors talked to him once or twice. They wrote on their charts and left him alone.

  Cryer squeezed the hard rubber balls. With the single-minded fixation that only a real maniac could have, he squeezed the hard rubber balls. Hour after hour, day in and out, for months. He didn’t even know he was doing it most of the time, his mind adrift in a void of color and subtle fluctuatio
n, and terrible transition.

  The muscles of his arms grew thick and huge. Eventually his fists were strong enough that he managed to finally grab hold of the little bastard stuck inside his head, tear him free, and throw him on the floor.

  The little bastard looked up at Cryer and, somehow, perhaps because he was free at last, had achieved the power to speak.

  Torn apart and dying on the floor, the little guy said, "Dis moot."

  7

  Cryer was given his name by the suicidal cop who’d mistakenly shot a pregnant woman while responding to a 211, and who’d then botched his own hanging.

  After the internal department investigation, the cop, who called himself Officer Bliss, was exonerated despite having had a few beers at lunch that day.

  His partner and commanding officer covered up the fact. Bliss, never known for his emotional depth before, couldn’t forgive himself.

  After taking anti-depressants for five months after the incident and deciding he should just eat the barrel of his gun the way a lot of the old-timers went out of the game, Bliss discovered that couldn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t even hold onto his service weapon with any strength of conviction anymore. He couldn’t make his hand close around it, which made him worthless as a cop, and so, he thought, as a man too.

  On little more than a whim he decided to hang himself in the bedroom closet next to his wife’s nightie that had the nipples cut out. She hadn’t worn it since they were newlyweds but she kept it anyway, dangling there in the closet, a constant reminder of what they no longer shared.