5

THE ED GEIN THING

Les is going to meet with Mary at the school. He wants to talk about the Ed Gein thing. As he drives he pictures his own revulsion at the children’s proposal. Mary’s considered it, accepted it. Les pictures higher and higher moments of fine discomfort. His Orpheus. Les looks out the window at the snow fields passing in long checkers of white and black. Out there. Out there is a killer for God’s sake. For a moment he includes his afternoon encounter with bloody death as just the very reason why Ed Gein is an inappropriate subject.

He looks forward to the centre line shooting its bars at the grill. Slow? Fast? What kind of a phrase is it?

Les adds up his argument for Ovid and against Ed Gein. Shape Shifter versus Killer. The former can also be the latter, but the latter can only destroy the former. Open. Closed. Dead. Alive. Good. Very bad. Except, he can’t quite hear the speech, something is holding it in front of the truck, not letting it in where it could be audible. Les looks out and watches a barn, black as the moon, and he knows why he has no speech. Because there really is a killer out there. I crossed paths with a predator today. Someone bloody. Out of control. In control? He’s out there. Now. He feels the tickle of fear grow. He pictures the rough hands of Ed Gein pounding the side of a horse.

“Hi Les.”

Mary is the principal of the school. Her background is military, and when the province attempted to redistribute talent outside the cities it met with a firmer resolve than its own in Mary. She is well liked, far friendlier, with more imagination and sanity than the young, unstable reformers so popularized by the government. At least that’s the local perception. She is a veteran of the tough decision, respectful of things beyond her control, with an angry, emotional bottom line. She detests the current government’s flippant emergencies. She is alarmed at the appearance of Les.

“Les, are you OK?”

She lowers Les into a chair in her office and he tells her his story. His back aches and his eyes water as he recounts the horror of what he’s seen. The scene has grown slightly bloodier now that it has taken possession of him, and he feels the bowling ball holes of the hunter’s eyes slipping behind his own sockets as he speaks. Looking down at his hands retracting between his knees, Les knows that he has changed. He feels that this person he’s becoming is not reliable, and of course he’s right. He’s attempting to absorb a great deal of unrelated material into a fairly primitive emotional machine. As the spinning blades descend into the febrile jar, what is going to be made of it all? An enlarged estranged lover, a son so new he’s still in orbit, a dead man’s cuttlefish face — and the cuttlefish himself, out there, scrubbing blood from his hands in the snow. He can’t help but make mistakes. I am at the centre of this. I am somehow made of this now. Ashamed, he confuses Mary’s hand on his shoulder with Helen’s.

Something she never did. She never let me soften. Not like Mary does.

He gives Mary a look so sodden with feeling that she turns away.

This man is in shock, Mary thinks, and she asks him to wait while she goes to get the nurse.

Shock has made Les dull. He looks automatically to his wristwatch, but is unable to distinguish the time as being any different from when he had sat waiting for the detective. He rocks the face between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the tightness of the band around his wrist. A swirl of fake snow, distributed up from the base of the watch, covers the front of a dark church, and falls again quickly, frosting the little plastic cemetery on its grounds. Les shakes his hand, stirring up the scene as he winds his watch. He peers at its face and this time he can see a tiny robot, clad in a torn hunting vest, mechanically dipping and lifting a shovel in the cemetery. Les scours the icy black forest behind the church, looking for the killer. It is no surprise, then, that he does not understand that there is more than one killer on the loose.

The first killer, whose work Les has already seen, is now burrowing his upper body in the snow, thrashing his open mouth against the frozen ground. He is soon going to die a death like no other. Another killer is brandishing the same open mouth at a nurse, not thirty metres from where Les now sits. This killer has the nurse’s lips in his mouth and, with enough power to break both their necks, he shakes her face until its muscles pop from their moorings. The nurse falls against the cabinet, just out of reach of Les’s wild sight, and slides onto the floor. The killer’s neck is broken and he stands over the nurse with his head dropping to his chest. His mouth is open, a bright red gasket through which the bleating of animals can be heard. The sound he makes isn’t human; the message, however, is unmistakable. He’s saying: This doesn’t work, I’m failing.

The killer flees up the hallway, led by his own open mouth. Distended by its searching, it now flails forward. When Mary arrives in the nurse’s room she stops at the door, going no further than the single bloody hand wrapped around the door frame. Murder scene, she thinks. Get Les, get out of the building.

She runs down the hall, back to her office. Les looks up, calm and blind. He makes a child’s resistant face when Mary drags him up by the arm. She doesn’t explain, leading him through the gymnasium toward a side door that exits onto the parking lot.

Mary pulls Les back, swinging his slightly stupid body behind her.

There he is.

The killer is sitting against the wall beside the door. He is rocking his upper body, his arms bowing at his sides. At their ends are upturned hands. Dead hands. Dead legs. His extremities, face, fingers and feet, are creased with jellied blood. Mary takes a step back, knocking into Les. He trips in a fall that brings Mary down with him. The killer is stirred and he sways his torso backward, turning his head to see them. Mary takes a four-legged step away. The killer tilts his body in her direction, as if he is part of her movement. Mary freezes, knowing that this man isn’t thinking, that he’s responding to his environment automatically. She sees his eyes. His eyes. Like split thumbs they rise in his sockets and turn in their glue of prehensile clots. Towards her. Looking. The thing coils slightly, and Mary knows exactly what it will do.

It jumps across the floor.