Thomas Disch - The Genocides

They were afraid of him. They could hear his hard breathing and Blossom’s theatrical whimpering (which she maintained, like a foghorn, just so that they might hear it and gauge their distance), and they hung back. They had too much contempt for Neil to be ready to risk their lives desperately against his. Surely there was some way to trick him—to make him take the gamble.

Perhaps, Buddy reasoned, if he became angry enough, he would do something foolish—squander his single bullet on a noise in the dark or at least loose his grip on Blossom, which must by now be wearying. “Neil,” he whispered, “everybody knows about you. Alice told everyone what you did.”

“Alice is dead,” Neil scoffed.

“ Her ghost ,” Buddy hissed. “Her ghost is down here looking for you. On account of what you did to her.”

“Ah, that’s a lot of hooey. I don’t believe in no ghosts.”

“And on account of what you did to Father. That was a terrible thing to do, Neil. He must be awful angry with you. He must be looking for you, too. And he won’t need a lamp to find you with.”

“I didn’t do nothing! ”

“Father knows better than that. Alice knows better, doesn’t she? We all do. That’s how you got the pistol, Neil. You killed him to get it. Killed your own father. How does it feel to do something like that? Tell us. What did he say at the very last moment?”

“Shut up! shut up! shut up!” When he heard Buddy begin to talk again, he set up the same shrill chant, backing away meanwhile from the voice that seemed to be drawing nearer to him.

Then it was quiet again, and that was worse. Neil began to fill the quiet with his own words: “I didn’t kill him. Why would I want to do that? He loved me more than he loved anybody else, cause I was the one that always stuck by him. I never ran away, no matter how much I wanted to. We were pals, Dad and me. When he died—”

“When you murdered him—”

“That’s right—when I murdered him, he said, ‘Now you’re the leader, Neil.’ And he gave me his gun. ‘That bullet’s for Orville,’ he says. ‘Yes, Dad,’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything you say.’ We were always pals, Dad and me. I had to kill him, you can see that, can’t you? Why, he would have married off Blossom to Orville. He said so. ‘ Dad ,’ says I, ‘you gotta understand—Orville ain’t one of us!’ Oh, I explained it very careful, but he just lay there and wouldn’t say a thing. He was dead. But nobody else cared. Everybody hated him except me. We were pals, Dad and me. Pals.”

It was evident, to Orville, that Buddy’s strategem was failing of its desired effect. Neil was past the point where he could be shaken. He was over the edge.

While Neil spoke, Orville moved forward, crouched, his right hand exploring the air before him, tentative as a mouse’s whisker. If Neil had not been holding Blossom, or if he had not had a gun, it would have been a simple matter of running in low and tackling. Now it was necessary, for his own sake but more especially for Blossom’s, either to disarm him or to make sure that his shot went wild.

To judge by his voice, Neil could not be far off. He swung his hand around in a slow arc, and it encountered not the gun, not Neil, but Blossom’s thigh. She did not betray her surprise by the slightest flinch. Now it would be easy to wrench the gun from Neil’s hand. Orville’s hand stretched up and to the left: it should be right about here .

The metal of the gun barrel touched Orville’s forehead. The weapon made such perfect contact that Orville could feel the hollow bore, concave within a distinct circlet of cool metal.

Neil pulled the trigger. There was a clicking sound. He pulled the trigger again. Nothing.

Days of immersion in the sap had effectually dampened the gunpowder.

Neil did not understand, then or ever, why the gun had failed him, but after another hollow click , he was aware that it had. Orville’s fist came up for his solar plexus and glanced off his rib cage. As Neil toppled backward, the hand holding the pistol struck down with full force where he supposed Orville’s head must be. The gunbutt struck against something hard. Orville made a noise.

Lucky—Neil was lucky. He struck down again and hit something soft. No noise. Orville’s body was limp at his feet. Blossom had gotten away, but he didn’t mind so much about that now.

He pulled out the axe from his gun belt, where it had been hanging, the head flat against his stomach, the handle crossing his left thigh.

“You stay away, Buddy, you hear? I still got me an axe.”

Then he jumped on Orville’s belly and his chest, but it was no good without shoes on, so he sat down on his belly and began hitting him in the face with his fists. Neil was beside himself. He laughed—oh, how he laughed!

But even so he stopped at intervals to take a few swipes at the darkness with the axe. “Whoop-pee!” he yelled. “Whooppeel”

Someone was screaming. Blossom.

The hard part was to keep Blossom from rushing right back into the thick of it. She just wouldn’t listen.

“No!” Buddy said. “You’d get yourself killed. You don’t know what to do. Listen—stop screaming and listen!” He shook her. She quieted. “I can get Orville away from him, so let me do it. Meanwhile, you go up the shaft the way we went before. Along the detour. Do you remember the way?”

“Yes.” Dully.

“You’ll do that?”

“Yes. But you’ve got to get Jeremiah away from him.”

“Then I’ll expect to see you up there. Go on now.”

Buddy picked up Alice’s rigid and festering corpse, which had been already in his hands when Orville had rushed in like a fool and spoiled everything. He lugged it a few feet in the direction of Neil’s voice, stopped, grappled the old woman’s body to his chest like a suit of armor. “Oooow,” he moaned.

“Buddy,” Neil shouted, standing, hoisting the axe, “you go away.”

But Buddy only went on making the same silly moans and groans that children make playing ghost on a summer night or in a dark attic.

“You can’t scare me,” Neil said. “I ain’t scared of the dark.”

“It isn’t me, I swear,” Buddy said calmly. “It’s Alice’s ghost. She’s coming to get you. Can’t you tell by the smell it isn’t me?”

“Ah, that’s a lot of hooey,” Neil retorted. The moaning started up again. He was uncertain whether to return to Orville or go after Buddy. “Stop it,” he yelled, “I don’t like that noise.”

He could smell it! It was the way his father had smelled when he was dying!

Buddy’s aim was good. The corpse struck Neil full-force across his body. A stiff hand grabbed at his eyes and wiped across his mouth, tearing his lip. He toppled, waving the axe wildly. The corpse made an awful screaming sound. Neil screamed too. Maybe it was just all one scream, Neil’s and the corpse’s together. Someone was trying to pull the axe away! Neil pulled back. He rolled over and over again and got to his feet. He still had the axe. He swung it.

Instead of Orville, there was someone else underneath his feet. He felt the rigid face, the long hair, the puffy arms. It was Alice. She wasn’t tied, and the gag was out of her mouth.

Someone was screaming. Neil.

He screamed all the while he hacked apart the dead woman’s body. The head came off with one stroke of the axe. He split the skull with another. Again and again he buried the axehead into her torso, but that wouldn’t seem to come apart. Once the axe slipped and struck his ankle a glancing blow. He fell over, and the dismembered body squished under him like rotten fruit. He began to tear it to pieces with his hands. When there was no more possibility that it would haunt him again, he stood up, breathing heavily, and called out, not without a certain reverence: “Blossom?”