Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) Read online

  My body hopped up on the table. I could feel what my body was doing, the muscles pulling in my legs and the smack of my feet on the tabletop, but Catskinner was in total control and I didn't have to do anything except stay out of his way. The men at the table were all busy, ducking, reaching for things, shouting, and Catskinner kicked out, left and right, knocking plates of food and glasses in their faces.

  Then he kicked the bald man in the head. His head spun the side and I felt something crack in his neck. Catskinner kicked him again and now his head was pointed up and to the side. One more kick and his head was turned around almost all the way backwards. His body jerked and salad went all over his lap.

  The other men were getting up, shaking off the food and plates. Catskinner gave a jump and the table toppled across two of the men's laps. He rolled off the table as it fell and had a knife in my hand, a wooden handled steak knife he'd gotten off the table somehow. My arm snapped out and then the steak knife was sticking out of the face of the man who wasn't under the table. He slid off the booth onto the ground.

  One of the other men had a gun out then, still pushing the table off him. Catskinner reached out and grabbed the gun. He twisted and I could hear the man's fingers breaking. He took the gun and threw it at the other man who was still tangled in the tablecloth.

  Catskinner dropped to the floor and bounced back up, and there was a bottle of wine in my hand. He slammed it against the table edge so it broke, wine and glass spraying all around, and pushed the half he was holding into the neck of one of the men and there was a lot of blood.

  The last man, the one with the broken hand, was just sitting there, holding his hand, his mouth and eyes wide open. Catskinner scooped up a fork and stuck it in the man's mouth, then pushed until something inside the man snapped and the fork went up into his brain.

  People in the rest of the restaurant were starting to get up or get under the tables or just standing and getting ready to scream. Catskinner moves a lot faster than people do, so no one really knew what was going on yet.

  Let's go, I suggested. The four men were dead, and Victor said don't do anything with the other customers unless we had to. If we left now we wouldn't have to.

  but i like this place, he whispered back, laughing. love the atmosphere.

  Victor said clean, I reminded him. I could feel the fever in him, the hunger to destroy. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't feel it, too. It felt good, the power, the rush of knowing that the most dangerous thing in the room was under my skin. Catskinner could kill everyone in this building before anyone could stop him, except for me.

  Please, I said in my head. Enough. Let's go.

  Catskinner turned, slow enough that the other people could see him move. “goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight” he said out loud with my voice, and then we were out the front door, the glass cracking as he slammed it behind me.

  Catskinner ran then. Across the street, down an alley, over a fence, down another alley, so fast that I wasn't sure where we were until he slowed down and stepped out onto a street I knew, a couple of miles from the Italian restaurant. And then—just like that—he let go of me and I was walking on my own again. I wasn't tired or sweaty or even breathing hard. I was hungry, though. Ravenous.

  Catskinner gets the energy to move my body the same place I do, from the chemical energy stored in my body fat, and this little job had probably burned a thousand calories. Hence the candy bars.

  There was a bus stop on the corner, I walked down there and waited for the bus.

  Yeah, I know. A contract killer taking the city bus as a getaway vehicle from the scene of a multiple homicide sounds pretty crazy, right?

  In the first place, though, no one was going to expect me to flee on foot, and in the even firster place if they did they'd concentrate their search much too close to the scene—Catskinner can cover ground in a way that no police department in the world is prepared to believe. Cabs keep records, and stolen cars can be traced. The bus is a very anonymous way to leave a murder scene—not that I'm advocating murder, mind you. It's not a business that suits everybody.

  Besides, there are any number of well-paid expert witnesses willing to testify that I am crazy. Some of whom still have the scars to prove it.

  So I sat on a bench with an ad for a pawn shop and ate chocolate for a while. It was a nice evening for sitting on a bench and watching the traffic go by. I did a little discrete checking for blood on my hands and clothes. Didn't see any. Catskinner is a very neat monster. I didn't see a single emergency vehicle go by. Some sirens, but they were far away. The bus rumbled up and I took it close enough to home to walk the rest of the way.

  I could have stopped by Victor's office and reported the success of the job—I don't believe he has actually slept for several years—but I didn't feel like it. He'd assume everything went well unless he read otherwise in the on-line papers in the morning.

  I went straight upstairs. I wanted to watch TV, maybe find some cartoons where the violence didn't leave scars and everything turned out okay in the end.

  The last kill was staying with me, little details coming up every time I tried to close my eyes. That man looked at me, clutching his ruined hand and knowing that he was facing something he could not understand, knowing that he was going to die. He looked at me, and I wasn't there. There was nothing human in my eyes, only Catskinner's hungry alien intelligence. I saw what he saw, mirrored in his dying eyes, a man-shaped hole in the world.

  Maybe he was a mafia enforcer, maybe he was a really bad man. But he had been a man, a human being, and he was dead because something dark and cold and unnatural had used my body as a conduit to reach down onto this Earth and snuff out his life.

  Guilt makes me angry. I never asked to be born, never asked to be made into what I am. I'd suggest you take it up with my parents, but they're dead and I devoutly pray that they are suffering more in hell than anything I could ever do to them.

  Redemption is costly. Whiskey, on the other hand, is cheap. I took a couple of shots and thought about something else. Bunny rabbits. Puppy dogs. Pretty girls.

  Anther couple of shots and I was able to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  “nature abhors a vacuum. the feeling is mutual.”

  The next morning—Friday, actually—I woke up hungry. I usually do on days after Catskinner's been active. I took a shower and checked myself over for injuries. Sometimes they don't show up right away, but there was nothing. None of the men last night had so much as touched me.

  When I got out of the shower, my coffeepot had finished gurgling, so I poured a cup and made breakfast. Eggs and cheese and toast. I took it out on the back fire escape and ate it while watching the world wake up, well, actually there wasn't a lot of waking up going on in the alley behind the shop. Every once in a while I heard a bus go by.

  Four more dead by Catskinner's hand. I wondered if maybe it was time to move on. There was nothing to tie me directly to this killing, and the eyewitness accounts would be useless. The witnesses would be confused and unsure themselves what they saw, and the police would keep working over the stories until they had something that made sense. Looking for something that made sense meant they weren't looking for me.

  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 pl
aces 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.