Shifters
Authors: Edward Lee
SHIFTERS
Edward Lee & John Pelan
Necro Publications
— 2010 —
First Digital Edition
Shifters © 1998 by Edward Lee & John Pelan
Cover art © 2005 Erik Wilson
This edition March 2010 © Necro Publications
Kindle Formatting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
ww.fatcatgraphicdesign.com
Cover Design:
David G. Barnett
Copy Editors:
Amanda Baird
John Everson
Jeff Funk
C. Dennis Moore
Printing history:
Obsidian Press hardcover edition: March, 1998
Also available in a
Trade Paperback Edition
ISBN: 1-889186-55-4
Necro Publications
5139 Maxon Ter.
Sanford, FL 32771
www.necropublications.com
Though the authors are in debt to many, they would like to particularly thank the following:
The bald guy who drinks behind the 7-Eleven on 40th and Stone, The Brotherhood (they know who they are), Dave Barnett, Bob Brown, Doug, Wayne, P.G., Ryan, Brian and Dolly, Craig Jenkins (wherever the hell you are), Matt Johnson, Alex Johnston, R.K., Paul Legerski, Dallas, C.M., Tim McGinnis, Wilfred Owens (rest in peace), Mike Paduana, Michael Pearce, Kathy, Mary Pelan, Larry Roberts, Sergeant E-5 Sanders, Sarah and Dawn at Verotik (don’t know your last names), Eunice Seymour, Scott Siebert, Brian and Jan, Russ Snyder (for the cool nautical passages), Susan, Lucy, Terry Tidwell, Steven Wardlaw, t. Winter-Damon (for initial interest), Mark and Cindy, and lastly a heartfelt thanks to the respective staffs of Murphy’s Pub, The Ram’s Head Tavern, and the Mecca Café where much of this book was conceived and the staff of the Knarr Tavern, where all the signature pages were done.
When, by a decree of a greater power,
The poet makes his appearance in a bored world…
Who calls on a pitying God at whom these curses
Are hurled.
—BAUDELAIRE
PROLOGUE
Evil is relative. But so is blood.
Have you ever tasted blood—I mean really tasted it? No, not like when you bite your lip, or suck at a thistle scratch. I mean, have you ever cupped it in your hands and let it pour into your mouth? Have you ever gulped it down your throat like wine from a goblet? Have you?
Have you ever killed anyone?
Questions—yes! I can’t help it, I’m curious. Curiosity is a challenge, and challenges excite me. Have you ever slit open someone’s throat and watched the blood squirt out? Have you ever eaten human brains from a freshly cracked skull, or sucked out an eyeball? Hmm? Have you?
Have you ever bitten into a man’s heart while it’s still beating?
I have.
I’ve done lots of things.
Yes.
Blood. Flesh.
It’s all relative, like good, like evil, love and hate, and like anything born of humanity.
So where does that leave me?
««—»»
I can see the moon from here. It’s huge and bright. It’s beautiful. It seems to be following my eye along the water like a luminous spirit, a companion.
Or like a lover.
Love is all I’ve ever wanted. It’s also the only thing I’ve never really had. Love. Real love.
Is that so much to ask?
I’ve been on the water for days now, or perhaps weeks. Time, too, is relative. It scarcely matters. I feel like I’ve been standing on a ledge for a thousand years. I feel like I’m falling off a mountain. I don’t even know where I’m going.
Love sings to me; it beckons me like a siren, like something only half-real melting in my fingers. Love is all that leads me on, that fuels my pursuit. It’s all that gives me life. One day I will find it, but until then…
My days are dreams. My nights are black/red scraps of memory. The memories are hot, erotic. They taste like salt, like spicy metal on my lips. They’re as beautiful and as relative as the moon.
Their blood bursts hot from my mouth, runs quickly down my breasts and my belly. In the moonlight it looks gorgeous black on my white skin. Sometimes I stand naked beneath the moon, and I rub their evil blood like hot oil all over my body. Sometimes…
…it makes me come.
Right now I’m lying between wooden crates marked
GLASS, USE NO HOOKS, ONITA BREWERIES, MUTO, HENNIG, & ANDERSON IMPORTERS, INC., SAN FRANCISCO, CA.
I’m in the cargo hold of some ship. When I get bored, I touch myself. I just think back, and I go to sleep in the memories. I’m the beautiful tousled stowaway hiding in darkness from the rugged men above. If they only knew they were shipping more than beer! Some cargo.
GLASS, USE NO HOOKS, ONITA BREWERIES, MUTO, HENNIG, & ANDERSON IMPORTERS, INC., SAN FRANCISCO, CA.
I’m in the cargo hold of some ship. When I get bored, I touch myself. I just think back, and I go to sleep in the memories. I’m the beautiful tousled stowaway hiding in darkness from the rugged men above. If they only knew they were shipping more than beer! Some cargo.
The ship rocks back and forth, on and on and forever, like the time I first died.
When you made me. Then I loved you, now I just don’t know…
««—»»
You’ve brought me a long ways, do you ever wonder if there’s more? If there’s something more to feel, to touch, to maybe love? Do you?
When you close your eyes, do you see angels or devils? Do you see love or hate? That’s what it all burns down to in the end, if there really is an end. Blood and flesh. Time. Good and bad. It’s about what we really are in our hearts.
I’m a killer, a murderer. I’ve eaten men’s flesh and drunk their blood. I’ve rived them open with my pretty, bare hands and drawn their innards out of their bellies like strings of yarn. I’ve watched the life go out of their eyes as I’ve grinned down, drooling in their mouths, and I’ve felt them twitch between my legs as they’ve died.
Oh, yes—a murderer. Me.
But when I close my eyes, I still see love.
««—»»
It’s a curse sometimes. It’s like lust.
I can smell the men above me on deck. Some stand watch, others idly run engines and boilers, or study charts. Many lay asleep in the bowels of the old ship. I can smell their dreams. Oh, what I could do to them! I could take them apart like dolls of clay, twist off their arms, their legs, their heads. I could bite open their skulls and suck their brains. I could burst their bellies and dress myself in their warm, steaming guts. I could gulp down their blood and swallow their hearts. I could, but I won’t.
Not yet…
ONE
Dissolution
(i)
“I don’t love you anymore.”
The words,
her
words, suffused beyond the wall of his sleep. They seemed like ghosts. Richard Locke shuddered in the darkness of his closed eyes. The bedsheets had somehow become entwined about his body and legs—they weren’t sheets as much as pale serpents come to feed on his dreams.
Dreams,
he thought. What had happened to his? He opened his eyes and stared.
her
words, suffused beyond the wall of his sleep. They seemed like ghosts. Richard Locke shuddered in the darkness of his closed eyes. The bedsheets had somehow become entwined about his body and legs—they weren’t sheets as much as pale serpents come to feed on his dreams.
Dreams,
he thought. What had happened to his? He opened his eyes and stared.
“I don’t love you anymore,” she’d said on the last day of August. But that had been months ago. Months, yet he felt no closer to being over it today than he did then.
Locke moaned, staring at the ceiling. Somewhere, a clock was ticking.
Months…
The drear of autumn daylight which lay across his face seemed used, secondhand. He got out of bed as if rising from a coffin. Yes, he felt dead. Pale, gaunt, tacky. Sweat plastered his hair to his scalp. His joints ticked as he walked sullen across the room and looked blankly down at his desk. A piece of paper hung out of his typewriter platen.
CENOTAPH by Richard Locke
My love is now a cenotaph,
an extant, keening door
slammed shut on my heart
by her five little words:
I don’t love you anymore.
“What a bunch of shit,” he muttered. He ripped the sheet out of the machine and tore it up. Suddenly, he felt maniacal; he tremored in place, eyes frozen open. He must look ludicrous: a pallid, skinny 33-year-old man standing in the middle of a disheveled room in baggy underpants with his hair sticking up. He rushed to the window, heaved it open, and leaned out. Several pedestrians looked up and laughed. Locke didn’t care. He let the torn-up poem slip from his fingers. He watched the pieces separate, then float dreamlike from the second-story window to the street.
(ii)
Locke was a poet. He may even have been an acclaimed poet in some vast local sense. The interest from the money his parents had left him was slightly less than enough to get by. He worked one day a week at the bookstore on Greenwood Avenue, and occasionally he filled in as a substitute teacher at Lincoln High, but that was all. He knew there were far more functional ways to live; instead of writing poetry six to ten hours a day, he could’ve pursued a more conventional career. That, however, seemed false to him. He felt obsessed with being true, whatever that meant. He was put on earth to write, and write he would. Poets made little or nothing from their work—when an editor did offer money, Locke turned it down—but he didn’t care. He wasn’t a materialist, he didn’t even own a television. To be real, all he needed was a roof, a typewriter, and his muse.
He’d been writing for ten years. By now, he’d had hundreds of poems published—he’d lost count years ago. His work appeared regularly in any number of college literary journals, small press magazines, newspapers, and poetry anthologies. He’d also gotten some into national magazines:
The New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic
Monthly,
even
Cosmopolitan
, but he had yet to establish himself on a national level. He didn’t really care if that ever happened; he didn’t need recognition to feel real about what he did. Perpetuation was all that mattered to him creatively—it need not be widespread. Locke figured that if only one other person read any given poem, then that poem, and the corms of its creation, was given truth.
The New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic
Monthly,
even
Cosmopolitan
, but he had yet to establish himself on a national level. He didn’t really care if that ever happened; he didn’t need recognition to feel real about what he did. Perpetuation was all that mattered to him creatively—it need not be widespread. Locke figured that if only one other person read any given poem, then that poem, and the corms of its creation, was given truth.
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