James Ellroy - Silent Terror

Twenty-five minutes later I was on New Hampshire Avenue, approaching Los Feliz. I hit a stretch of dark one-story houses and started walking across the front lawns, perusing mailboxes for the names of single women. The first four designated the inhabitants as “Mr. & Mrs.”; but the fifth house was meat — Miss Francis Gillis. I walked up to the door and rang the bell before fear could take hold.

Silence.

One ring; two rings; three. The darkness behind the front window seemed to deepen with the echo of each ringing, and I slipped on my gloves, got out my instrument and stuck it into the narrow space where the door met the doorjamb. My hands were shaking, and I was prepared to push, gouge and whittle. But then my tremors accelerated, and the flat edge of the pick nipped the lock slide just right. The door clicked open on a perfect fluke.

I stepped inside and eased the door shut, then stood perfectly still in the interior darkness, waiting for the shape of the front room to make itself known. My body from knees to pelvis tingled, and as I stood there thinking of Shroud Shifter, the feeling localized itself in my groin.

Then there was a scrabbling sound, and a powerful blunt force knocked me onto my back. Teeth snapped at my face, and I could feel a section of my cheek being ripped loose. Two yellowish eyes glowed immediately in front of me, huge and weirdly translucent. When I saw cataracts near the black pinpoints in the middle, I knew it was a dog and that Shroud Shifter wanted me to kill it.

The teeth snapped again; this time they grazed my left ear. I felt legs digging into my stomach, and I swung the gouging edge of my tool in and up, just where I thought the animal’s lower tract would be. It was a perfect imitation of S.S.’s gutting motion; and when the blade pierced skin, and entrails slid out warm and wet, I felt myself approaching orgasm. I rolled out from under the dog just as he began a series of reflex death snaps, pressing myself into the floor as I came. My eyes were now accustomed to the darkness, and I could see a pillow-strewn couch a few feet away. I dragged myself to it, grabbed a large tufted cushion and flung myself on the dog and smothered him.

My head was reeling as I got to my feet, found a floor lamp and turned it on, casting light on a Danish Modem living room with a Plunkett Modem still life square in the middle of it — bloodsoaked carpet, dead German shepherd with a crocheted pillow for a head. My hands were shaking, but a blank-framed brain-movie kept me calm inside. I set out to perform my first burglary.

In the bathroom I cleansed my cheek wound with witch hazel, then pressed a styptic pencil deep into the cut. Soon a crust formed, and I crisscrossed the area with tiny adhesive bandages and walked into the bedroom.

Slowly, methodically, I went to work. First I stripped off my bloodstained shirt, rolled it into a ball and rummaged in the closet until I found a blue button-down shirt that would not arouse suspicion on a man. I put it on and checked out the result in a wall mirror. Tight, but I did not look incongruous in it. My pants were soaked with blood and entrail residue, but they were dark, and the stains were not that noticeable. I could safely wear them home.

Thinking loot, I dug through drawers, cupboards and cabinets, coming away with a small cedar box full of twenty-dollar bills and a velvet box of sparkling stones and pearl strands that looked genuine. I thought about making a search for credit cards, but decided it was inadvisable. The dead dog might mean that this burglary would receive more police attention than usual, and I did not want to risk fencing cards that would be the object of special cop scrutiny. For a first-time “caper,” I had stolen enough.

With the gouger, cash and jewelry stuck in my pants pockets, I took a last walk through the house, turning off lights. When I picked up my bloodied shirt, Shroud Shifter sent me a little commemorative embellishment, and on my way to the door I dumped a box of dog biscuits by the Shepherd’s pillowed head.

The night on New Hampshire Avenue was the beginning of my criminal apprenticeship and the start of a terrible series of conflicts — internal battles waged by the jigsaw pieces of my emerging drives. Over the next eleven months, I wondered if the different parts of me would ever reconcile themselves to the point where all the pieces would dovetail perfectly, allowing me to become the man of mean business I aspired to be.

I continued my burglary career two nights later, hitting three dark apartments on the same East Hollywood block, using only my pick-gouger to break and enter. I stole $400 in cash, a box of costume jewelry, sterling silverware and a half-dozen credit cards; and it wasn’t until I was home safely that I realized I was disappointed — my triple success felt like an anticlimax. A window punch job the following night forced the reason consciously into my brain: my first B & E had been blood and grit and viscera and courage, my subsequent ones a refining of skills, and not nearly so exciting. The realization sank in as the need for circumspection and super-caution; I must never, ever, get caught. Intellectually, that realization held me — for a while.

But other truths came hard on its heels.

For one, I could not bring myself to sell or fence the jewelry and credit cards I stole. I was afraid of establishing criminal connections that might make me vulnerable to blackmail, and I needed to touch the concrete rewards of my deeds. The hard plastic embossed with anonymous women’s names made their lives feed into my brain-movies, so that each card was good for hours and hours of escape from boredom. The jewelry gave added tactile weight to my screenings, and I never even bothered to learn whether it was real or fake.

So, as my burglary forays progressed, my only practical “take” was money, usually accrued in tiny amounts. I retained my library job, and kept my stolen cash in a savings account. Walt Borchard taught me how to drive, and early in ’68, six months into my apprenticeship, I got a driver’s license and bought a car, an innocuous ’60 Valiant. It was while charting wider territory in it that my most dangerous conflict came into focus.

A dreary Valley neighborhood of tract houses was unfolding in my windshield, and from the number of children playing in cement front yards I could tell that single women were at a minimum. I decided to head west toward Encino, but something kept me pressed to the edge of the right lane, with my eyes pressed to the identically laid-out driveways I was passing. Then a stray dog ambled down the sidewalk, and the picture within the picture hit me.

I had been staring at circular pet doors inset in the regular side doors that were stationed in the same place on every house I had passed for a half-dozen blocks. Suddenly I could smell the house on New Hampshire Avenue ten months before — a metallic scent that filled my nostrils and made my hands quiver on the steering wheel. I pulled to the curb, and the memory came back full. Along with it there was a bombardment of flashbacks from my other senses — the taste of my mother’s blood mixed with water; Beware of the Dog signs I had seen while choosing previous burglary sites; how it felt to climax. The dog on the sidewalk started to look like Shroud Shifter’s hated foe, Cougarman. Then the acquired sense of reason took hold, and I got out of that dreary and dangerous neighborhood before it could hurt me.

At home that night, I fondled my pick-gouger and shut down the movie theatre that was there to entertain me twenty-four hours a day. When a blank screen was in front of my eyes, I filled it up with what I knew and what I should do about it, in plain typeface that left me no room for embellishment.