my prayers, back when I thought my prayers would be answered. But it turned out to not be so, and I don’t ever talk about what happened in Maine.
Anyway, back in ‘75, I was up in Saratoga Springs for a while. It had been raining all day, so it was hard for me to tell when true night was coming. I was drinking whiskey in the park they have up there, with all those nasty, sulfurous springs all over the place, when all of a sudden, the pain hit my guts. I heaved the half of the bottle I had inside me back into the bushes and ran. I had to get away from the sky.
I broke into a two-story home a few blocks away. I figured I could hide in the darkness for a while, but before long the family came home, and I ducked out the back way. It was better to find another cover than to be around children.
I soon found myself back on Broadway, and at this point, I could barely walk straight. My depth perception was starting to get funny, and I knew I really had to get inside somewhere. I figured I ought as well try to get myself arrested. They could lock me in a cell, then I’d have no choice but to deal with the pain, and in the morning, if I made it, there would be one less dead body on my hands. I went into a clothing store and started knocking racks over and cursing at the women.
This kid that worked there came up to me and said, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store.”
I feel bad for that poor kid nowadays. He had terrible acne, and probably weighed a buck fifty soaking wet. I hit him with such a mean shot, his tooth was stuck in between my knuckles.
The cops came, and there I was in aisle five, surrounded by all the black, liquid crap that had slithered from my bowels. Instead of taking me to the jail, they put me in an ambulance. It took eight men to tie me down, and then they loaded me into the ambulance.
On the ride to wherever they were taking me to—either the hospital or the madhouse—I caught the light of the full moon through the window.
I changed.
The last thing I remember was the men screaming and the ambulance flipping onto its side and bursting into flames.
The next day, I woke up naked in a ditch far away.
I had to go back to Saratoga to gather up my stuff. Everything I had was in a shitty little motel room, but all my clothes and my keys were gone. I broke into a house and stole a pair of pants and a shirt.
Up in the motel room, I collected my few possessions into a bag and dressed myself in my only other set of clothes—blue jeans, a Beatles shirt, cowboy boots, and my leather jacket.
Downstairs in the lot was my motorcycle, the one I’d had for years, but it was worthless now without the keys. I did not yet know how to hotwire a vehicle. I walked it out of town, and when I came to a little pond hidden behind some trees on the side of the road, I rolled it in. The air was cold and sweet. The sky was gray. I felt like I’d lost the only friend I’d had anymore, the only thing that kept me free and human.
When I got back on the road, I stuck out a thumb. After a few minutes, a red truck stopped.
The driver asked, “Where are you going?”
I said, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Canada,” he said.
“Sounds good to me.”
Since the beast and I joined forces back in the early eighties, the pain that blossomed throughout the evening didn’t hurt so much anymore. I’ve often wondered how much of it was psychosomatic, and how much was supernatural. It became a kind of buzzing feeling, like having to go to the bathroom, and as the years went on, I got to savor the feeling for the buildup that it was—the foreplay to a night of brutality and mayhem. And I always waited long enough to change for there to be a minimal amount of people out on the streets. The pain of changing has remained just as horrible over the years, but it can hardly be argued that I don’t deserve it, and maybe a little bit more.
I sat in my recliner. An old lamp rested on a desk against the far wall of the living room, illuminating just a quarter of the space. There were electric lights that ran across the ceiling, but they hadn’t worked for months, and I was always too distracted to get around to fixing them.
On the trunk in front of the recliner was my naked-lady ashtray, and the remote control for a television that picked up three or four stations, depending on the weather and the time of day.
The beating of my blood was like getting punched from somewhere deep inside. The heart pounded so furiously, so continuously, I almost felt like I was vibrating. I smoked my cigarette, and the carbon monoxide that those fuckers pack in there only made the pounding in my ears that much stronger. Someone could’ve gone at my door with a battering ram, but I wouldn’t have heard it over my own frantic heart. It was time.
I put the cigarette out in the naked-lady ashtray and went over to my front door. I unlocked the four locks. After that, I checked all the windows. Then I went to the bedroom.
I rolled up the old piss-colored rug that covered the floor and dragged it into the corner. From one of the dresser drawers, I took out a plastic tarp and laid it out on the floor. I pushed my bed into the corner, and had forgotten that I had put the gun under the bed when Pearce came over. I slid the gun back under the bed with my foot. I was, after all, Mr. Safety.
I took off my nasty white T-shirt and threw it onto the stack of dirty clothes I had in the corner. I unfastened my brown leather belt with the silver skull-and-crossbones buckle and rested it on a chair. I took off my jeans and put those on the bed. They weren’t dirty enough to warrant getting put in the wash. My socks and undies, however, had earned their place in the laundry bin.
There was a night-light with a clown’s face plugged into the outlet in the corner. I flipped the small switch on it, and the night-light came to life. It glowed just above the floorboards. The clown had a white face, which was made a sickly yellow with age. It had black makeup around the eyes which made it look like it was sad, even though the mouth was frozen in a maniacal grin. The hair was orange, the nose was red, and the lips were red. It had on a green hat with a black band. There was a little yellow flower sticking out of the band.
That night-light meant more to me than anything else I had. It once belonged to Doris. She’d had it since she was a little girl, because no matter how old she got, there was something about the dark that scared her. I used to tease her that it was a wonder she was never afraid of clowns, but she loved clowns. For some reason,
The night-light had the job of guarding the house while no one was home.
I took the rubber band from my hair, and ran my fingers through my mane. I looked at myself in the mirror. Every once in a while, it was hard for me to believe I was forty fucking years old.
Up on the wall, the numerous articles I had put back glowed in the faint yellow light the clown gave off. Each was a cry from the public, a plea from the world at large for restitution; only the law wasn’t going to be the one dishing out the justice. Not that night.
Standing at the bedroom window, the moon yearning on the other side of the curtains, I felt that buried pain roll up my nerves, felt it lick my ribs. I breathed in deeply through my nose with my eyes closed, and then I opened the curtain.
Hard white light hit the glass and came through silver, bathing me. A spasm flared through my body from my ankles, up my spine, to the back of my neck. My head shot back, and the veins in my throat became engorged, thick blue, with burning blood. I hit the floor hard just as the milky, white froth began to bubble up from my insides. I forced myself to crawl over to the tarp.
Tears leaked from my eyes from the pain, and snot ran down my face in a rivulet. In a moment’s time, my body would no longer belong to me at all. It would be the vessel of a ghastlier, more terrible entity.
Lying on my side on the plastic sheet, I saw the nails fall off my fingertips, replaced by thick, cedar-colored talons. Black hair oozed out from every pore. New muscles bulged and flexed under tearing skin, and where I ripped, smoke billowed and blood spurted out like children spitting up food.
I thought of the Rose Killer. Through the pain, I smiled.
It was the last act of the evening I would be able to will my body to make, because from that point on, my mind was on the back burner. Marlowe Higgins was going someplace farther than sleep, a place that was too deep for even the sandman to tread lightly. As I fell away, I heard my scream turn into a howl, and then I was gone.
