Bentley Little - The Ignored

The man wiped the blade off on Ray’s hair before taking his hand from the planning inspector’s mouth. The noise that issued from Ray’s bloody throat was more a gurgle than a scream, but by now he was flailing around wildly enough that he had gotten the attention of everyone in the office.

The clown grinned at me, did a little jig. I looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was insane. Even beneath the clown makeup, I could see the craziness. This was not the temporary insanity of Philipe. This was the real thing. And it scared the shit out of me.

“There he is!” I cried, pointing, finally able to move, to act, to speak. People were running over to where Ray was slipping bloodily out of his chair, but no one heard me, no one paid any attention to me.

And no one saw the murderer.

“You’re almost there,” the man said, and his voice was a crazed raspy whisper. He laughed, a sound like fingernails grating on a chalkboard. “Oh, the things you’ll see….”

And then he was gone. Vanished. Where he had been there was nothing, only clear space.

The air felt heavy, filled with the burnt-rubber smell of drilled teeth.

I looked around wildly, ran to the elevator, waited for it to open, all the while scanning the room. But there was nothing. And when the elevator door did not open, when it was obvious that the murderer had not simply turned invisible and made for the exit but had actually disappeared, I hurried back behind the counter to where Ray lay dying.

Paramedics arrived, performed emergency lifesaving procedures, rushed Ray to the hospital, but he was dead even before he left the floor, and they were unable to revive him.

After Ray’s departure, I became the center of attention. The police were there, photographing the chair, taking down statements, and a crowd gathered as I gave my story. The same people who had been ignoring me as I screamed and pointed at the murderer were now all ears as I related what I’d seen, what had happened. I recalled what the clown had said to me: “You’re almost there.”

What did that mean?

But I knew what that meant.

I was becoming Ignored here in Thompson.

Like he was.

The Ignored of the Ignored.

I remembered as a child going on a ride at Disneyland called Adventures Through Inner Space. On the ride, you were supposed to feel as though you had been shrunk by the Mighty Microscope and were entering the invisible world of the atom. I wondered now if I was in just such an invisible world, a world that most people couldn’t see, that existed concurrently with the visible universe.

Maybe the murderer was a ghost.

I wondered about that, too. People throughout the years, throughout the centuries, who claimed to have seen ghosts? Maybe they’d just seen an Ignored Ignored. A man like that would be two steps removed from normal human life. Perhaps there were no ghosts. Perhaps there was no afterlife. Maybe we just ceased to exist when we died. Maybe the whole concept of life after death had originated with a misinterpretation of Ignored sightings.

I wished there was a history of our people, a history of the Ignored.

Ralph got off the elevator and hurried immediately over to where I was talking to the police. “I was at the bank when I heard. What happened?” he demanded.

The cop questioning me gave him a brief overview of what had occurred.

Ralph looked at me. “You’re the only one who saw anything?”

“I guess so.”

“We need you,” the mayor said. “For whatever reason, you can see this guy. You can help us track him.”

For whatever reason.

I knew the reason, and I was frightened. It was getting worse. Like some progressive disease. At one time, I had had normal friends, participated in normal society. But I had faded into the ranks of the Ignored. Now I seemed to be fading even more. At the moment, I appeared able to bridge the gap between the regular Ignored and this guy — whoever, whatever he was. But would I eventually become like him, invisible to everybody? Would James and Jane and everyone else I knew stop thinking about me, stop noticing me, and one day look around and find that I was not there, that they could no longer see me?

No, I told myself. It didn’t work that way. I wouldn’t become invisible. I wouldn’t let myself become invisible.

“He’s crazy,” I said. “He’s insane.”

“Don’t worry. You won’t be in any danger. Someone will always be with you. You don’t have to hunt him down, just track him. Like a bloodhound.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“We’ll take him out,” the cop said. “He won’t kill again.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” I said.

“Then what are you worried about?”

I looked away from them, unable or unwilling to share with them my true fears. “I don’t know,” I lied.

He struck again, an hour later, killing Teddy Howard in the church and leaving the reverend’s slit-open body to flop around on the altar like a gutted fish until unmerciful death arrived.

The mood of the city changed overnight. Instantly, everyone became tense, nervous, on edge. It was like the Night Stalker days back in Southern California. Thompson had never had serial killings before. There was a crime rate, of course — with rape and domestic violence statistically on a par with the national average. But there had never been anything like this, and when the police composite based on my description was printed in the paper and shown on the Thompson channel, the fear factor jumped up considerably. The clown costume struck a chord in everyone, and the fact that there was an Ignored out there who was ignored even by us, who was trapped in that boss-killing initiation mode, scared everyone. Gun sales shot through the roof. Even Jane started sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed.

And yet…

And yet I could not get as worked up about the killer as everyone else. I had seen him, I knew how dangerously deranged he was, but it was not the fact that he was a murderer that disturbed me.

It was the fact that no one but me had seen him.

You’re almost there.

I had been Ignored at Automated Interface, at UC Brea, perhaps for my entire life. I could deal with that. I had accepted the fact that I was different from normal people. But I could not accept the idea that I was different from the other Ignored.

That I was getting worse.

I went to work the next day, and I noticed for the first time that the nods and smiles I had once gotten from my coworkers at city hall were no longer forthcoming. How long had this been going on? Had I been fading away for a while now and just not noticed it?

I tried to think about what I discussed with my coworkers and friends. Was it any more boring than the conversational topics of others? Was I that forgettable even here? Again, my thoughts on being Ignored were swinging back again. Maybe I wasn’t average because I was Ignored. Maybe I was Ignored because I was average. Maybe I had brought this on myself. Maybe there was something I could do, some way I could change my behavior or personality, that would reverse the process.

I was temporarily transferred from the planning department to the police department. Here I was not ignored. I was an important detecting device in the eyes of the mayor and the chief, and I was treated as though I were Hercule Poirot.

The only problem was that there was really nothing to go on, nothing that could be done to facilitate the capture of this lunatic. I could only walk around town, followed by two detectives, and see if I could spot him anywhere. For an entire week, I spent my days walking through offices and stores and shopping centers, my eyes peeled for the clown or for someone who looked like he could be the clown. I rode with patrolmen up and down neighborhoods. I looked through books of mug shots.