77 Shadow Street

below, he would have been seen.

Mickey returned to dead Jerry. A blanket didn’t sufficiently disguise a corpse. When you started hauling it around, anyone who saw it would know it was a dead guy in there.

Sensation was the only reason for living. Sensation stimulated thought and action. In this case, aromatherapy wasn’t potent enough to rev up his mind.

Mickey went to the walk-in closet in his bedroom. From a high shelf, he took down a black carryall. The smell and feel of the leather pleased him.

In the bedroom, he put the carryall on the bed. He pinched the pull tab between thumb and forefinger. He relished the erotic sound of the slider separating the teeth of the zipper.

From the bag he removed panties and lingerie that had belonged to his mother. Silk, satin, lace.

Tactile sensation can be a powerful stimulant.

After a while, he knew how he must dispose of the body. The only problematic part of the plan would be killing the guard currently on duty in the security room.

Murdering the guy would be easy. But that would be two jobs for which nobody was paying Mickey. Not good. The various people who contracted his services must never discover that he was murdering for free. They might decide he was no longer professional enough to be trusted. Then they would put out a contract on him.

In order to enjoy the most intense sensations that this world offered, you had to earn entrance into the right circles, to be one of those with a license to do anything you wanted and the wealth to ensure you could fulfill your most exotic desires. His mother had taught him that to be certain of achieving such a rarefied position, far beyond the reach of ordinary law, you had to make yourself useful to the Anointed, which was the class to which she belonged.

Like his mother, he exterminated people to make himself useful. She hadn’t used guns or garrotes, but words—theories and analyses and well-crafted lies. His mom killed reputations. She destroyed people intellectually, emotionally. She was always happy to see them dead if later they committed suicide or if eventually disease got them, but she never actually pulled a trigger, slid in a shiv, or set the timer on a bomb.

Mickey would dispose of the guard in the same place he dropped Jerry. By the time they were found, if they ever were, too little of them would remain to be identified, and no one would know how they had died.

With that decision made, to his surprise a vivid series of erotic images teased his mind’s eye. There was another resident of the Pendleton whom he found incredibly hot. But he couldn’t buy sex with Sparkle Sykes, because she didn’t need the money. He liked her daughter, too. They reminded him of Mallory, the cocktail waitress, and her younger sister, two of his first three murders. A nostalgic yearning overcame him. He would never again have sex with someone before killing her. Too risky. But if disposing of dead Jerry and the guard proved as simple as he expected, there was no harm in a little fantasizing about someday doing the Sykes girls and disposing of them in the same manner. Everybody liked to daydream.

Inspired, he put away the panties and lingerie. He returned the carryall to the closet.

He pulled on a pair of socks. They were a cashmere blend. His newly manicured toes were snug and warm in them.

One

In your wisdom, you once observed: “What need have we of gods if we become gods ourselves?”

I am sure, however, that you will come to understand that a world populated by gods would be as disordered as a world crowded with ordinary human beings in all their mad variety. The Greeks imagined a panoply of gods and demigods; consider the jealousies and rivalries that ensued among those residents of Mount Olympus. Men as gods would make of the world one vast Olympus, in a constant turmoil of supernatural events.

I am the One. I have no need for either humankind or godkind. In destroying the former, I destroy the latter.

Consider the one who kills for a living and who murdered his brother, as Cain murdered Abel. He allows for no god who will condemn him. He says that sensation is everything, that it is the only thing, and he is correct. He understands the truth of life better than do any of the other residents of the Pendleton. If there were a human being to whom I might grant a measure of mercy, it would be he. But mercy is a concept embraced by the weak, and I am not weak.

Tremors rumble under the building, then and now.

The current crop of Pendleton residents will soon stand before me like stalks of wheat waiting for the scythe. If blood ran in my veins, I might thrill to the prospect of this impending harvest, but I am bloodless and not subject to blood passions.

I will inflict pain upon them, I will lead them into despair, I will administer death unto them without the ecstasy that the hit man might experience when he murders, but with an efficiency and a prudent self- interest that ensures I will become and will remain the One until the sun dies and the world goes dark.

21

Here and There

Witness

Cold rain streamed down the tall chimney stacks, which were whetstones against which the wind whistled thinly as it sharpened itself, and even here, where few would ever see them, the grand architectural details did not relent. Every chimney was capped by a fascia of carved acanthus leaves, and each of its four tall walls was decorated with an oval medallion of limestone in which were engraved the letters BV, for Belle Vista.