Strychnine and Ceremony

Moments from the scenes:

Spring had come a little quiet this year, and the strychnine had furnished the citizens with their prime entertainment into early summer. The local joke was that nine would be struck before the fellow was stopped.

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Now the monster had given up cohabitation with the slime and sharks and come back to Dallas with his horn of strychnine replenished in his claws. Six more maidens waited for the gift.

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The ugly thing about strychnine was that it used up the muscles' supply of ATP, so that the rigor of their morte was almost immediate. The final agonies of the victims were frozen on their faces and in the photographs. Hasting was known, in his worst moments, to take out the folder and study it. He saw something similar, similar and strange, in the last gaze of the wild and staring eyes. He memorized them as a lover studies the face of his beloved, trying to enter the secrets in the eyes. Or was it only the Strychnos face, as Dr. Greuz had called it?

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Her beauty frightened him. He didn't understand her nonchalance. He had known two other girls, not counting the prostitute, and none of them had been so matter-of-fact. 'I should use something,' he said. He fumbled for the pocket of his shirt on a tomato bush where the condoms were.

'No,' she said. 'I want the real thing.'

'A coca-cola?,' he managed to say. Then they were laughing and in the subsidence of their laughter they must have come together.

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'The Afram guys {next-century slang for African American}want to set up possees all over town to catch that monster. The women are skittish everywhere. He's costing the guys a thousand pieces of ass a night.'

'Probably the whites are getting it,' said Hasting. 'So it's not a complete loss.'

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It was los habaneros, in a touch-me-and-die salsa with a sniff of okra and a tomato taint, that only Raffety could survive. Ruben kept in the fridge a pitcher of nitro habanero.

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Jack had satisfied himself in early December with a woman who was a nun. She hadn't shown for matins at the breaking of the day. Sister Dorotea, sent to the studio, saw the last convulsive moments of the saintly woman. She heard choked cries like a fragment of a prayer and then, sinking to her knees and beginning the sign of the cross, saw a puckering of the sweet face into a rocklike and final set. The Strychnos face.

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'Jack gives the poison to her shortly before the rape,' Raffety said. 'He enjoys the convulsions. They're terribly strong, as you saw. He watches them develop. He probably knows a lot about medicine and the human body. He guards the victim. He spends the time stripping her, more or less. He folds her clothes and puts them in a neat little stack. He waits until every muscle in her body is spasmodic and violent. Then he takes her down. Excuse me for saying all this. That's how he gets it off, don't you know.'

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Office money pools on the date of a Jack attack were satirized in the media, whetting the public need to get on with it.

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'He did what?,' said the doctor.

Chester Marton at fifteen was chubby but solid and almost as big as a grown man. He shrugged. 'What I said. He pissed on a snake and it bit him.'

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The desert yielded up its quiet to the chill shamal. Grab five bullets from the rock. Load them as you run. Run low, circle back. Of course, that's what the colonel would expect. You didn't wear the wings of an eagle for being stupid with a rifle. The fierce bird would swoop down where you didn't expect, blowing its hollow whistle and its talons in your face.

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She felt the old rush of blood and the tightening in her neck. 'He'd have to get rid of his whores first.'

'The disease of our times,' Ralph said. 'Real lovemaking is in bad shape nowadays, Missy. Nowanights. It's not sacred anymore. It's commonplace and terrible. Well, of course, it's always sacred, even when it's deformed.'

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She and Ferny had made vows of chastity--something Herold Hasting would find difficult to believe--and when they got in trouble, they pulled each other out with chains of rosaries.

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She sat in marble stillness for a time. If she wasn't Mary, she was Medusa waiting for the moon to draw its sails, thinking how the adventures of her imagination end in stone.

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He should have known it would be Catherine. Jack had come in the early dawn while she was getting ready for school and carried her spirit away with the rising sun.

The thing would have had to jump ten feet to avoid the clay.

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Jack had gone without a known relief four months since Josefina. He had passed up the holydays of many a lovely lady whose martyrdom, according to salutations on the internet and the gripes of comedians, deserved more than an obit in a news report two thousand years delayed. 'There are virgins afoot,' said Abnash Gill. 'Jack is the priest of the twentyfirst century. If we can't depend on him for mass, what do we have left but football?'

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Pechal had come to him, Peaches with the neat little twists in her character, Peaches at a time in her life when she needed a man of honor, some warm assurance of virtue that didn't break. What had he done but use her body and explore her ways, and Raffety was dead.

Screwing around was the most common thing in the world. One's litany of excuses began in the garden of Eden and ended up in hell.

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Inside the chapel, Mary on her perch played wooden games with her new Son into the early morn. Across their arms a neat little stack of clothing--a robe, a sash, some underthings, a pair of high-heeled shoes--was scarcely touched by glimmers through the window of snowlight. What was lying before them, shadowed on the alcove floor, would have small use for garments of cotton and silk, and no use at all for shoes.

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Gill burned him with his eyes. 'We're all more or less guilty. Jack's out there, but Jack's our pet. He's our puny vices added up. A little theft, a word uncaring, a dirty picture on the telly, the million tiny vices of our time, not to mention the big ones. Murder in and out of the womb. Love become only a spasm of the muscles. Its beautiful ceremonies deformed by latex and chemical shit.'

Gill stopped to breathe or rest his hand or let his battery rebuild. 'We can't wait to dirty the finest things in life. If we find a remnant of the sacred, we run to stamp it out. We--'

'You're rehearsing your column?'

'The monster is out there, all right. He has a name and eats pizza and does ordinary work and goes to church.' Gill shook his head. 'My column is all I've got. I'll never quit.'

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