| In the Clay |  |
| by David Dunwoody |
The man in the light-blue windbreaker is circling the block for the eleventh time. When he reaches the property line between my house and the vacant lot, he will have completed one-half of the next circle. Eleven and one-half times two is twenty-three; the significance of this does not escape me and I watch his slow approach.
He's in his fifties, salt and pepper hair, prominent jowls, big hands deep in pockets. I read the creases in his face. Faces are shaped and etched by psychology, so much so that a trained eye can follow a laugh line and tell whether the flesh prefers naughty limericks or philosophical ironies. Windbreaker's face is almost absent of laugh lines, those remaining faded and swallowed by the puffy red cheeks of an alcoholic. His jowls are heavy with shadows of grimaces and frowns and the echoes of screaming arguments. The eyes, they're small and dark beneath a jutting brow. He only sees what he wants to see and what he sees feeds his anger and anxiety. We all kill ourselves like this.
I'm no saint. My face, as it were, is all lines, but indiscriminate scribbles meant to conceal my true self from the world. How would someone like Windbreaker describe my face? “As if—“ No, “Like someone jammed a pike right in the middle of it and gave it a sharp quarter-turn.” It's a snarl of pink tissue, obscuring my lips and eyes, my nose a scabbed-over ruin. Brightly-colored ribbons of infected skin rope around my hairless head, but I'm not worried about that. The infection has to eat through all the scar tissue that, like clay, surrounds my true face.
Windbreaker stops on the property line, his gaze shifting from the empty lot to my squat. I cower beneath the broken window. I'm not sure yet whether or not he's an avatar sent here for me. He looks like a tired old man, but they can look like anything: children, mothers, painted clowns. I peer over the edge of the sill and see him stepping onto the lot. He stands on the ground, studying it, then crouches and pushes one stubby finger into the damp earth. It doesn't yield easily; he twists his wrist and screws his finger down. Paying no mind to the old house, his fascination lies solely with that barren lot.
There's a little hole nearby, and he moves to study that. One hand plucks thin white gloves from the pocket of the windbreaker. He shoves his hands into them, splaying anxious fingers.
Pulling my hood over my head, I shuffle across the floor. Insects scatter and reform their milling ranks at my back. I find the rust-eaten knob I the dark, turn it with a squeal.
I pull the door open and he looks up. His narrow gaze sharpens further. I back away into the house, inviting him in.
Boldness enters his step as he crosses the porch and, as I expect, flashes a police badge. Just a tired old cop after all. “What's your name?” His voice is sandpaper on gravel. He drinks a lot and has a cold. “I honestly don't remember.” I tell him. I bring my face into the light.
Windbreaker doesn't flinch. He takes it all in with a pitiless stare. He's seen worse, he'll tell me, in graver circumstances. “I'm Detective Kaufman.” Another flourish with the badge, and he puts it away, filling the doorframe with his girth. “You own this place?”
“I stay here. Is that a crime?”
“As a matter of face, it is.” But he's preoccupied; stealing another glance at the adjacent lot he asks, “Who else hangs around here?”
“No one. I don't make trouble.” Besides the hooded shirt, I'm wearing baggy sweats, and I cross my legs on the floor. “Sometimes I go to the shelter on Luther. That's all.”
“You're well-spoken.” Kaufman studies my twisted visage as if it might help him guess my lineage. My voice still has a bit of an Eastern European cadence to it. “How'd you end up here?”
“When one falls from a mountain, they don't stop until they hit bottom.”
“Did you know this house is condemned?”
“Asbestos. It falls from the ceiling. Bugs.”
“What happened to your face?”
The hundred-thousand-dollar question. I fold my callused hands and look up to give him the full view. “I rearranged.”
“You sculpt.”
An unexpected choice of words – surprisingly intimate. Was I wrong? Is he an avatar? I clench my toes and wait.
“You make pottery,“ He continues, “I saw it at the ceramics shop down the block. I assume you dig your clay from this lot over here.” So it comes together – his fascination with the lot, with the holes pockmarking its surface – and with me.
“So, then, I'm under investigation for stealing soil?” My wretched spiral of a face tightens in a semblance of a smile. Kaufman smiles back.
“Doug, the guy at the shop, says he lets you use his kiln.” He steps into the room, comfortable now as he works the suspect. “He sells your pots on a shelf right by the door, that's nice of him. Does he take a cut of the money?”
“We're both happy with our arrangement.” I reply.
“Let me get right to the point. He towers over me. “One of your little masterpieces broke open. There was a lady's pinky finger inside.”
He's no avatar.
He isn't what chills me to the bone in this moment. No, he's delightfully ignorant of the revelation that pours from his chapped lips. “Neatly severed – surgically, maybe. Or maybe some sort of terrible accident. We'll know soon – the finger was well preserved, you know.”
The smile hasn't yet left his face. He awaits my response.
“They're coming.” I breathe, spittle running over the shelf of my chin. “It never even occurred to me…they're building…coming…”
He kneels. “All right pal, just calm yourself down. Who's ‘they'? Tell me.” Now I'm in his snare, he's thinking, time to cut through my derelict's ramblings to the prize, to my crime, my shame. “Talk to me,” he says.
“I was only a king of men,” I stammer,” How many kings have there been, who bought and sold their kingdoms – yet they still pursue me! Ravenous devils! Don't you see why I've disfigured myself? To hide from them ? And you want me to speak their names? I'm no madman!” The cold fear pitted in my gullet makes my teeth chatter, and I see daylight fading over Kaufman's shoulder. It's all coming down, isn't it? And here I have only the skeptic of skeptics to mock me! “I gave my soul for a thousand years' reign, before Christ, before science made fools of us all. At the very last second of my last day I watched the city walls crumble to dust – and I fled. They sang my name and called for my debt to be paid, but I ran. I've never stopped running. I'm so tired, and stupid, I never saw them coming—“
“The finger!” Kaufman shouts. He shoves a plastic bag into my face. The finger tapers to an accusing point.
I knock it from his hands and pull the hood over my eyes. “No!” I scream, again and again, and steel bonds close over my wrists.
*
They've erected floodlights around the perimeter of the lot. Men with instruments crawl along the earth, nattering insects. I'm cuffed in the back of a police cruiser.
Kaufman strolls across the scene and opens the door opposite mine, sliding in. What little I had is now all is, and that, for the moment, includes me. “They're mapping out what it looks like under that field,” he says. “We'll have a complete picture soon, then we dig. Until then, I'm giving you one last chance. Just tell me what you know, what you've seen. C'mon, no one thinks you buried all those people yourself. But you do know something – I can see it in your face, no matter what you've done to it.
“Now, who are ‘they'?”
“You mean the bodies, or my pursuers?”
“Start with either. The bodies.”
“I'm quite sure that you'll find no means of identification for any of those so-called corpses. Oh, I know all about fingerprinting, and DNA, but there are none of either to be found.”
He frowns. He knows that the flesh on the pinky finger had no ridges, no creases; it was just translucent putty. He can dig and dig and collect with gruesome treasures, but will find no purchase.
“I'm done for.” I laugh. He sighs. “You know, I was actually off duty when I first came out here. My daughter bought that pot, painted it and gave it to me. I must've dropped it when I got home, or set it on the edge of the table. I can't remember.”
“What was the occasion?”
“Anniversary. My wife – her passing. Maggie and I get together and exchange gifts every year. It helps, a bit.”
He nudges me. “Your turn. ‘They'.”
An officer trudging past steals a glimpse at me. They're bringing in a backhoe now. Kaufman drums his fingers on his knee.
“I sold my soul.” I tell him again. “I reneged on my half of the bargain. Hell comes.”
“The devil made you a king. In ancient times.”
“Devils. Yes.”
“Tell me about no fingerprints and no DNA.”
Before I can answer, a gloved hand raps on the glass by Kaufman's head. He slips out with a quiet scowl.
Despite the long, gnawing knowledge of what was coming to me, despite the cold inevitability of it all – and maybe now I'm even a little relieved – despite that, there's no stopping the pressing dread that seeps from the earth and permeates the garishly-lit excavation. They feel it too; I see the investigators glancing over their shoulders at a prickling on their necks. The vacant lot suddenly seems miles from any city center. Beyond the reach of the floodlights is only blackness without depth or detail. Like we've entered the slavering maw of the beast and only I, shackled in this flimsy metal shell, realize it. Like we're already dead.
The backhoe drives its greedy hand into the clay.
The car door opens, and terror spikes in my throbbing veins; but it's only Kaufman. He seems lost. His hands grasp at unformed questions in the air. “Bodies…” He says to himself. “The bodies…dozens…so far down, they may have been there for decades—“
“They weren't buried there,” I whisper, “they grow.”
“Our instruments found them stacked atop one another, crisscrossing, latticework.” He turns toward me, eyes boring through my skull. “What did you just say?”
“They grow.”
The dark is closing in. The lights outside are beginning, ever so subtly, to die. “Detective, I'm putting you on. You should go. Go now.”
“You're telling the truth,” he insists, “somewhere in what you're saying is the truth. Tell me!”
“I can't. I won't! Don't you feel it?”
“I feel…yes. I feel it. What is it?” He grabs my arm. Kaufman has a daughter and the memory of a wife. Even that would be too much to bear losing just to know the truth. Tendrils of darkness slide over the glass. Outside, the backhoe raises a clump of earth, with one pale leg dangling out the bottom—
“Get out. Go. Come back tomorrow. You'll have a tomorrow if you go!”
“You were a king.”
“I'm nothing !” The word scrabbles about in the back of my throat like a panicked spider. “I'm already damned! Leave me!”
The men have stopped their digging.
Kaufman won't let me go. He's right on the precipice of understanding and he can't stop, so much like the relentless idiot-things that…”Hell comes. Please just go and leave me to this. It's over for me. Kaufman!”
“They grow?” He muses. “In the earth? No prints, no blood, no—“
“No navels, no pricks, no life. God made men from clay and breathed souls into them. Hell, it can forge flesh and bone but it can't endow them with a spirit – no, instead Hell uses these vessels to move between worlds. Conduits, Kaufman, a goddamned ladder – not latticework, you fool, rungs on a ladder and now you've helped them the rest of the way!”
Pinpricks of light denote the lot, vague patch somewhere outside the glass. Then it all goes black.
Kaufman paws at the window. White hands push through the night-shroud to fill his vision. He's gibbering here in the backseat and their pale moon-faces are smeared across every inch of glass and, I don't know, I just can't help laughing and screaming out their wretched names.
___________________________________________________________________