Borderlands 4 Read online

  But now was time for Mistress Eve to scoop him out of the darkness and return him to the waking world on a magic carpet of sex.

  He kicked the coffin lid with his knees. He mumbled through the gag. He rolled back and forth, knocking into the walls, bumping his butt against the floor. Twice he drove his head into the lid. She had to hear him beg with whatever means he had to catch her attention. She had to hear the signal they had agreed upon.

  After a few intense moments of effort he collapsed, exhausted, desperately sucking air through his nose. His skin burned from the stifling heat of his own body. His stomach turned and he considered the possibility of choking on his own vomit.

  Still, she did not come. For a dizzying moment, Gene thought he was going to cross the border. He was going to die. The golden memories would be gone, but the nightmares would also end.

  (Women and girls, their torsos ripped, their faces veiled by swirling painted designs, dance around little boy Gene after Dad’s tucked him in. They come closer, touch him, caress him, beg for him to be the man his father is. He looks at the door to his room. The girls are in bed with him. Footsteps boom in the hallway. The women stroke his privates with sticky hands. Lights come on. He starts to wake, he wants to wake, before his father comes. A big shadow stands in the lighted doorway. The girls shriek, the women fall over him. He screams.)

  Gene screamed again. He started reaching into the golden flow of memory for a fragment of the distant past.

  Then a breeze blew across his face. Strands of hair tickled his nose. Something pressed against his cheek, his forehead. He felt wet lips kiss the tip of his nose.

  He groaned with relief, and with disappointment.

  The plastic wrap came apart around his legs. The cold metal of a knife slid over his arms, freeing them. Fresh moisture beaded on his skin where the knife had passed.

  A casual brush knocked the blinders askew. A distant voice giggled.

  The sound of running steps faded away.

  Slowly, Gene freed himself and sat up in the open coffin. In the darkness, he rubbed life back into his sweat-slick, trembling limbs and breathed in the basement’s cool air. The entrance to the dimly lit stairwell at the other end of the room was empty. He called for Mistress

  Eve, but she did not answer.

  He shivered. He listened for her in the room but heard only his breathing. The ritual had broken down.

  With elaborate care, Gene crawled out of the coffin, wincing at the flashes of pain calling attention to his body’s fresh bruises. He put his foot down on the floor, discovered a slick spot and slid before he could pull back his weight.

  He fell and cried out as much from fear as pain. The dampness from the floor, warm, thick, sticky, covered his hands. The taste was coppery, the smell sickening.

  Gene loped towards the stairwell, shoulders hunched against an unexpected blow. His head bumped against the hanging cage. A knee brushed against the gear wheel at the end of the rack. Gene reached the bottom of the stairs and looked back. The basement’s darkness rushed towards him, propelled by the blackness at the furthest corner where the coffin lay.

  Gene backed up the stairs towards the closed door at the top.

  Daylight streamed in from the living room and kitchen windows when he opened the door. The hinge squeaked. A clock ticked steadily in another room. Otherwise, the house was quiet. Gene tip-toed to the entrance where he found his clothes. He reached for his underwear, then hesitated. His hands were covered with blood, and drops of blood crept down his forearms and thighs.

  Animal blood, he thought quickly. But Evelyn never involved animals in her fantasy enactments. Human blood. An even more ridiculous possibility.

  Stage blood. She was luring him on, digging deeply into his mind to find the triggers to his secret pleasures.

  His penis jumped, stiffened into an erection.

  He called for her again, held his hands against his chest so the blood would not drip over the carpet and tiles as he searched for her on the first floor, then went upstairs. A thick trail of blood on the carpet led to the bedroom.

  He found Evelyn naked, tied spread-eagled to her brass bed, gutted.

  A pink, flowery design lanced with jagged lines in yellows and black covered her face. Her mouth was open, as were her eyes. She stared at the doorway, at Gene, with a frozen expression of terror.

  Gene felt only numbness as he stared at the scene. Horror came when he realized he had not lost his erection.

  He stares at the pieces of the airplane model spread out before him and wonders with a growing sense of helplessness how he will ever put it together. He glances at the picture on the box cover. The old World

  War II bomber flies effortlessly through Nazi flak, turret guns blazing and distant Luftwaffe fighters falling away in trails of fire and smoke.

  On the table, the pale plastic pieces mock him from their grids. The instructions on the sheet read like the Egyptian hieroglyphics from the

  Mummy’s tomb. He feels like throwing up from the smell of the open tube of rubber cement. Then his father’s hand settles on his shoulder.

  The solid weight anchors him. His father’s towering presence at his back fills him with confidence. Together they sit at the little desk in his room and begin to build the airplane. The picture on the box cover starts to look like something he can make.

  He backed out of the room, but her stare still burned in his thoughts as he leaned against the hallway wall. He looked at his bloody hands and suddenly saw his name in headlines. He remembered a newspaper his mother had snatched out of his hands long ago. (“He’s gone. Your father’s gone,” she cries. “Stop looking for him.”) Then he remembered the kiss on his nose, the brush of hair across his skin, the faint giggling. Gene lost his erection. The killer had set him free. The killer might still be in the house.

  Breathing deeply, he went to the bathroom. Listening for the faint whisper of footsteps on carpeting, he washed the blood from his hands.

  After he put his clothes on, he looked at the front door while listening to the silence. The murderer could be watching him now from a closet, from behind a sofa, he thought. But when the police arrived they would find the wrappings downstairs with his hair. They would find his fingerprints, the book he knew Evelyn kept with information about her johns. There might be videotapes, tape recordings, photographs.

  He decided he’d rather die than live with Kim, Art and Diane believing the news reports and fearing him.

  It took three hours to search the ground and upstairs floors. He tapped for false bottoms, hollow walls; he searched through every box, every bag and pocket. He found her phone book, the notes she had taken when discussing the fantasy he had wanted to enact, a book of secretly-taken photographs featuring all her johns in various restraints and humiliating postures. The tape he removed from her answering machine had captured his last call. He stowed the mall in a knapsack.

  The anticipation of hearing the police sirens or the doorbell ringing, of being attacked by a knife-wielding madman never left him.

  He left by a side door, sneaked through a neighbor’s lawn and walked briskly to his car parked several blocks away. He drove slowly to a Burger King where he tried to settle his stomach with a soda. When the cup was empty he slipped dropped the unwound tape cassette into it, then stuffed the cup into a paper bag and the bag into the trash bin.

  The phone book, notes and pictures of himself in bondage he tore methodically into small pieces which he mixed together and then dumped in various trash bins at two different nearby malls. He tossed the bag with the photo album into a dumpster at a road extension construction site.

  Kim’s car was in the driveway by the time Gene came home. He put his car in the garage while rehearsing the litany of excuses he had decided to use to explain his absence and the lack of dinner: restlessness, an attack of claustrophobia, traffic, shopping. Kim would be irritated and might even ignore him. He’d retreat to his study, help the kids with their homework, stay home tomo
rrow again and try to figure out what had happened.

  And what, with a killer imitating his nightmare father stalking him, might yet happen.

  “Kim?” Gene called out as he walked in through the front door. “Kids?

  Sorry I’m late.” He went through the living room into the empty kitchen.

  There was nothing on the stove, in the microwave, or in the sink. The morning dishes remained where he had left them in the plastic drip stand.

  The silence in the house collapsed over him like a suffocating blanket.

  “Kim?”

  Somebody from the family came by and took them all out to dinner, Gene thought as he left the kitchen and headed upstairs. Kim should have left a note, but she must have been mad at him.

  Half-way up the stairs, his fingertips brushed against something cold and sticky on the banister. He jerked his hand back and hastily wiped it against his shirt. When he looked down at himself, a reddish brown stain streak marked his chest.

  At the top of the stairs, partially covering a fresh stain on the carpet,

  Gene found several sheets of yellowed, crinkled paper on the floor.

  Across the top of one sheet capital letters had been clipped from magazines and newspapers to form a title:

  THE BLANK GENERATION

  Below the title, in the uneven and faded lettering of an old manual typewriter, Gene read phrases he had not seen since his childhood:

  America, its genius, assimilation of everything that is capable of being assimilated, sucking everything in, but nothing underneath, just hunger, hunger, deep and ugly, the blank generation with their painted faces, watching TV, listening to music, slaves to fashion, to whatever the glowing screen tells them they should do, what is normal, going to the colleges like breeding coops, breeding the next generation of dead thinkers and consumers, full of hunger and devoid of wisdom, tell them what is and they laugh, speak to them in the night language and they don’t know, they’ve never heard, ignorant, don’t see the corners with history, accumulated blood, frustrations, hate all around them, festering disease, pain, too busy with careers and paychecks and all masks of normality, it’s the women, don’t they see, mothers to us all, they bring it all upon us, breeding the blank generation, raising the blank generation, have to teach them what is underneath it all, what is real, what is the nature of their hunger and the craving of their children, show them all what they have assimilated, what it means, how they can use

  He remembered reading the same kind of chaotic rambling in a newspaper as a child. The story had been about his father, accompanied by a picture of him in front of the house. After what happened to Shamus. His mother had torn the paper from his hands. (“He’s gone. Daddy’s gone.”)

  His father was gone. His mother was gone, withered away, haunted and eventually consumed by the fear of what she had lived with for all those years. All those bodies, gone. Gene shut his eyes.

  A voice whispered in his head, like it sometimes did late at night when he was tired and angry at all the advertising and vacuous programs clogging the television, and restless because things weren’t going well at the office, and afraid to fall asleep because the whispering voice would only get louder, and angrier, as the hands came down on him and painted his face; and the whispering voice rambled and talked nonsense, like in the newspaper article, and after awhile the voice became his own and he was speaking and he was painting his father’s face and he was carrying the heavy bag home and he was going after

  Shamus as the cars pulled up—

  He opened his eyes and steadied himself with a hand on the banister.

  His hoarse, rapid breathing filled the air. He looked up, away from the pile of papers on the floor.

  He thought of Art and Diane, and Kim. He became cold, bloodless.

  He checked his son’s bedroom. The smell assaulted him first: rancid, like meat left in the sun to rot for days, and pungent like the stench of Evelyn’s insides spilled across the bed. His hand instinctively found the light switch, and he was startled when the overhead lamp came on.

  What lay on the bed was unrecognizable.

  On the headboard, a painted face design leered at him.

  He found another rendered carcass and painted face in Diane’s room. He lingered for a moment, staring at the scattered dolls and stuffed animals all stained with blood. He tried to vomit, but only a searing, bitter stream of bile spilled from his mouth.

  He was ready for his wife’s corpse in their bedroom. When he opened the door and found the remains, he went to the bed and sat on the edge. He studied their wedding pictures on the dresser, the family portrait on the wall, the painted face—in blue and violet, with glitter highlighting the eyes—on the headboard. Then he slipped to the floor and put his hands to his face to try and shut out the world. Cool, thick blood soaked the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants.

  His fingers began to tingle, then his hands, arms and legs. Numbness crawled in from his extremities, along his spine, towards his heart.

  He sat for a while hoping for a heart attack or a stroke. Then something brushed against his hair. Gene looked up, startled, blood suddenly rushing to his head. His eyes refused to focus for a moment. Then he fixed his gaze on a figure in front of him.

  “Hi, Daddy” Diane said as she backed away. Her hair was tucked back into a pony tail, and her round face was flushed as if she had been outside running and playing.

  “You okay, Dad?” asked Arthur. His son wore old jeans and sneakers, and his Guns ’N Roses T-shirt was spotted with brown stains.

  At the company barbecue, while his father is talking to the boss, little Gene spills mustard on his shirt. He takes a napkin and tries to wipe himself, but as he rubs he knocks over the boss’ beer on the picnic table. Someone cries out. Mother’s face turns red and her lips disappear. The boss looks down with his mouth open and turns his big eyes on Gene. People stop talking. Father chuckles and scoops Gene up. “Now, now, son, there’s plenty of time yet before you start drinking.” The boss laughs. His face bounces up and down. His mother’s smile is thin, and her eyes give a spanking warning to Gene. But the people around them start laughing too and little baby Gene buries his hot face in his father’s neck and lets his father’s big hand pat him on the back.

  (He opens his mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. The big figure in the doorway moves into the room. The girls covering Gene stop shrieking. He doesn’t feel their weight on him anymore. He pulls the sheet over him and peeks out. The big figure stands in the middle of a circle of women. He reaches out and rips the face from a woman. He puts the painted face on his chest. He rips another face off, and puts it on his shoulder. The figure goes around the circle. Then he turns to face Gene’s bed.)

  Kim slid quietly past the door frame, her gaze flitting between the kids and Gene. She gave him a smile, came up behind her children and drew them behind her. Then she went down on one knee half way between the door and the bed.

  “Gene?” she said huskily. “Baby? Can you talk?”

  Her beat-up sneakers were muddy, and there were holes in her jeans and sweat shirt. She passed a hand over the kerchief covering her head.

  “I have to ask you, were you careful at Evelyn’s house? Like your father would’ve been?”

  The urgency in Kim’s voice forced him to consider what he had done that afternoon. “Yes,” he answered at last.

  Kim’s tense expression relaxed and she sat down on the carpet, hugging her knees against her chest. Diane lay down on her side while

  Art put his hands on his hips and began to shift from one foot to the other.

  “Be still,” Kim said without turning around. “Your father has a lot to think about.”

  “Hope he straightens out soon,” Art mumbled as he sat down on the floor and began to study a blood stain on the carpet.

  “We’re covered,” Kim said, tapping a finger rapidly against her knee cap. “I left work and took the kids out of school at eleven. I told people we were supposed to
meet you at the doctor’s because you weren’t feeling well and I was afraid the kids might have caught something.

  If anybody asks, we can always say you felt better by the time we got there and instead we went together to the malls.” She paused, studying Gene’s face. “Don’t worry, me and the kids came at Evelyn’s house from different directions, and not all at the same time. Diane went in through a ground floor window and opened the door for us.

  Your father would’ve been proud of the plan.”

  Gene pictured Evelyn spread-eagled on the bed. He blinked away the image and stared at his family. “Wha—what?” he stuttered, struggling to find a question to ask.

  “We killed her, Daddy,” Diane said as she played with a lock of her hair. “Just like Mommy showed us. Like Grandpa used to do.”

  A family picnic day, bright sun shining in a pristine blue sky, light bathing over a green meadow bordered by trees. His father and mother on the grass, in each other’s arms, wine on their breath. Gene tries to look away, tries to disappear into the earth. But his father invites him into the circle of his parents’ embrace. Gene feels as if he’s melting into the press of the bodies.

  (The figure is standing next to Gene’s bed. The painted faces on his body stick their tongues out, roll their eyes, bare pointed teeth. The figure reaches down. A big, dark hand closes over his face. Gene has a hard time breathing for a moment. Then he sees the hand lift something up. The figure slaps the limp thing in its hand against its head.

  Gene looks down at himself and starts to paint a face on the little boy on the bed.)

  “We had to kill Shamus, too” said Diane. She looked down at the rug and her pink face paled slightly.

  Art laughed. “Yeah, and every other mutt in the neighborhood. For the practice, and the guts.” An expression of comic disgust passed over his face as he thrust his chin at the bed, then wriggled his fingers over his stomach.