The Narrative of Allen Ginsberg PI, Part ONE

Those big Nazi bastards blew my brains out at dawn last Christmas. They burst into the room while I was trimming the mayor and cut loose with their Uzis. Sometimes you imagine your own death. You think of falling out of a tree house in soiled underwear. Or drowning in sludge with an anvil on your chest. Or getting crushed in a hog stampede at the county fair. But you never think you’ll get strafed out to tarnation while circumcising the mayor of a small Southern town. Shit happens, especially when the flush isn’t working and you’ve run out of asswipes.

I saw it coming. I mean I saw the bullet coming. It was just a black dot at first. Then it was a purple lozenge in phallic extension. Then it was a bronze shark-head looming gape-mouthed. I felt it tear through, felt it explode in cranial orgasm. When you get shot that way you stay shot. When your brains get blown out to palookaville they stay blown. And yet here I am a year later, live and intact, my brains back where they’re meant to be. How’d that happen? Don’t ask me. Ask Gyani if you ever find him, which you won’t.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead, right to the end. I ought to introduce myself first. My name’s Allen Ginsberg and I’m a thirty-three year old private investigator here in Snowdrop. There’s not much call for PI’s in this town but I became one anyway. On my thirtieth birthday I nailed a signboard to a picket and stuck it out by the porch steps of my new office. Back then the sign read: ALLEN GINSBERG, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Now it reads: ANUS GIN, PIT GATOR, some letters erased, a couple added.

I didn’t damage my own sign, natch. It was vandalized a while back, I really ought to get it fixed right off, soon, sometime, never. There’s no shortage of vandals in Snowdrop, ragass hillbillies looking to mangle or destroy. I pretty much know who messed up my sign but it doesn't matter. I can understand why they did what they did. In a town this small, this deep in the boonies, you have to get creative to stay amused. You have to push the envelope, go off the beaten track. That’s what I did. I pushed my beaten envelope and became a PI three years back. On my thirtieth birthday.

Three years isn’t very long career-wise but maybe it’s long enough for me. I’m not sure I want to be a PI anymore. I’m not sure of anything, if truth be told. Not after what I went through last December. That four-day ordeal before Christmas. Dying in hail of bullets Chirstmas day. I’ve been trying to forget it all, I really have. I’ve been working to push it to the back of my mind, make it hazy and distant. But I can’t. It’s still clear, every last bit of it. Vivid as a child’s nightmare. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. Maybe it was a prolonged acid flash, I tell myself. A four day mescaline dream.

But that’s just wishful thinking. It was real alright. It’s never a mind trip when you want it to be. It happened sure as shit on diapers and I’m still trying to live it down, a year later. I think maybe I’m going to spend the rest of my life living it down. The Bale County Almanac listed me for the first time last month, under ‘P’ for Private Eye. I guess that makes it official, pretty cool in a way, but you won’t catch me celebrating. That mangled signboard out there says it all. It pretty much looks like I feel.

***

When I say I became a PI I mean I just decided I was one and stuck a signboard where people could see it. I’m not a true blue card-carrying gumshoe, a dick trained in the usual methods of detection. I’d be at a real disadvantage if I were. The usual methods wouldn’t work in this town. Down here, your rational approach would put you on a fast track to the nearest nuthouse. Suddenly you’re in a padded cell gnawing on a droolcup, insisting you’re Cleopatra.

That’s no excuse for operating without a license but around here no one gives a damn, least of all Billy Rain. Billy Rain’s the sheriff of Bale County, whatever the hell that means. No one knows how he became sheriff, or even what his job entails. He wears a wide brim khaki hat, drives around in a battered cruiser and chews Red Man baccy. That’s good enough for most.

I guess I’m the closest thing to a sheriff’s deputy. Or was. Billy Rain used to call on me about once every month, till last December. Gon need your swingin dick oane this one, he’d say, through a mouthful of baccy. Be right over, I’d say, after I’m through with my nap. For me, every call from Billy Rain counted as a PI gig. Most of those gigs were trivial but we worked some good ones.

One time we busted a clique of hillbillies who liked messing with farm hogs in tubs of soggy bonemeal. They’d gotten someone to film their rollicks, a movie called Hog Hump Happy Hour. Billy and I trashed their game, nabbed them on two counts: illicit sexual congress and misuse of farm equipment. Billy still calls me once a month but I don’t respond. Can’t. I’m too busy recovering from last Christmas.

I didn’t always partner up with Billy. Sometimes he handed me gigs he was too busy to work himself. The Driessen case for instance. Norm Driessen’s a farmer who grows genetically modified corn on a plot of land outside Snowdrop. He visited his folks in Philadelphia one summer, married a distant cousin and returned home with his bride. Trouble was, the bride refused to sleep with him or even touch him anywhere except this one spot under his left armpit.

At first he figured maybe she was shy and religious the way Amish chicks tend to be before they wig out and go porno. But before long he got desperate and called on Billy who called on me. I’ll need to skulk around the farmhouse and take pictures, I said, pictures of Norm’s wife. Do what you have to, Billy said. We need to know what’s goin on.

I took some pretty useful ones as it turned out. Useful pictures. They showed a neanderthal with a buzz cut, missing eye-teeth and a nonexistent brow. The clincher was a close-up of outsize male genitalia and absent mammaries. Norm’s wife was titless and hung like a bear. Which is to say, Norm’s wife was a husband. He was disappointed with the findings, Norm, but not disappointed enough. He’s still married to the hump.

I also worked some Missing Persons cases for Billy. There was this preacher who went missing a couple years back. He checked into a local motel, left all his personal effects under the bed and vanished. So Billy Rain rounded up a search party and asked me to assist. You know these hills better’n the back o’ your ass, he said. If you cain’t find the sumbitch no one can. I did find him as it turned out. I found the preacher dead on the hillside two days later. He’d been savaged almost beyond recognition, his entrails draped over a dwarf pine. We all knew who’d done it: Elmer the East Yazoo Wolfman.

Elmer’s our local werewolf, a harmless schmuck though scary-looking in his polka-dot cassock, bubble-plastic brogans and cedar-bark busby. All Elmer ever does is bark at the moon, feed on cicadas and hump possum. He’s shy for a country werewolf, won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with him. But the preacher HAD messed with him as it turned out. He’d tried to spook the wolf out him with a hide-bound bible, an emerald crucifix, a black scorpion and a fresh lemon peel. Elmer had retaliated the only way he knew how: display mutilation. Cain’t arrest a wolfman for defendin himself, said Billy Rain, so we buried the preacher where we found him and left it at that.

It was fun while it lasted. Working with Billy Rain, doing the small-town PI thing. I should’ve remained content with that, but I didn’t. I started to lose my bearings, suffer delusions of grandeur. I started comparing myself to other PI’s in Bale County, guys like Big Ed Klytemnestra and Johnny ‘Jizzboy’ Johanssen and Perdido Centavos. I’m not as good as they are, I thought, but I could be. A major gig is what I need, a humdinger that’ll grow hair on my chest, that’ll make me feel like my life means something. I got what I wanted, sure enough. A big, nasty Christmas gift, a yuletide kick in the nuts. My old man used to say: be careful what you wish for, it might give you the drizzling shits. I should’ve listened.

Weirdo TWO: Allen Ginsberg, PI

Not all weirdos are foam-lipped, nystagmic nutcases. Some of them are charming, gregarious types with haloes around their heads. Ginsberg was definitely the latter kind, despite everything he'd been through. I didn't go looking for Al G. He came looking for me. Or rather, he contacted me through Chip Dooley, founder and editor of Alien Wreckage, a monthly print magazine dedicated to serious explorations of the paranormal.

Chip admires my sedulous pursuit of weirdos and their narratives. Surrealist subversion, he calls it. An incipient weirdo insurgency aimed at the squares, at all the assholes in suits fucking up the planet. He also digs the fact that I'm a former serial flogger who slaughtered over two hundred child abusers in less than six years. I find his admiration just a tad disturbing but he doesn't so it's fine.

He also finds charming my addiction to cherry-flavored edible panties. He feeds my addiction by having a package delivered to my door every month. Once every week he shows up at my cabin in duck-hunting gear and we share a panty over breakfast. Chip is a proud Irishman who never fails to quicken my pulse with stories of the potato famine and the Irish freedom struggle. He also has the largest skull I've ever seen on a human.

Macrocephalic Reticulans were legion on the Mother Ship. I saw some monster skulls up there but none as large as the one Chip owns. Sometimes I wonder if he's an alien-human hybrid. Hyrbidity would explain the size of his skull. It would also explain his possum-skin testicle truss and his absurdly noisy blinking. Chip is one of the noisiest blinkers around, a sure indication of alien strains in his DNA.

A letter arrived at my cabin one day, a white envelope delivered by a midget in a gray confederate uniform. The midget cantered up on a piebald shetland pony and cantered off after tossing the letter on my doorstep. I recognized Chip's idiot scrawl on the envelope. Chip is one of the smartest, most literate dudes around but he handwrites like a genetically enhanced hamster with a taste for dimestore rotgut.

You've got to go meet Al Ginsberg, the letter read. The man is an amateur private dick in a town named Snowdrop and he has a story to tell, a real humdinger. Best of all, he's named after my favorite poet Allen Ginsberg. Did I ever mention I memorized Howl back when I was at Harvard? I still remember most of it, pretty hard to forget. Who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war. Great lines, boy.

I didn't think about it for too long. I hit the road a day later in my beatup station wagon. Chip's letter had included directions but I didn't need them. I'd been to Snowdrop before and I found it without difficulty on a fine winter morning in the year 2004. It was a pretty little town, very lush despite the season, with hills ranged around. It looked different from other small towns I'd seen in the South. It also felt different. I figured maybe it was my imagination but it wasn't.

I asked around and got directions to Ginsberg's house. It was a nice place up on the hillside, a wood and glass structure his old man built. I found Ginsberg lounging in his unfenced front yard. He looked like he'd been waiting for me. He greeted me warmly and I liked him right off. He was a big guy with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes that smiled even when his lips didn't. He wore white baggy pants, a white sports coat, a powder blue shirt and a black bowtie. The threads looked shabby but they suited him somehow.

After the usual pleasantries he fixed me a mug of hot chocolate and we repaired to a second floor loft with a large patio. The patio commanded a fine prospect with Snowdrop showing quaint and evergreen in the valley below. But Ginsberg didn't give me time to admire the view. He was eager to talk and he started in on his story almost without preamble. I had my tape machine out and running and that bothered him at first but he adjusted soon enough.

A blue-eyed feline appeared minutes into Ginsberg's monologue, a well-fed chocolate-point Siamese. I learned later that it was Ginsberg's beloved cat Little Boy. I also learned that Little Boy had played a significant role in Ginsberg's demented four-day saga. Chip Dooley had promised a real humdinger and that's what I got. Allen G really did have a story to tell, a damn good one. He insisted his story was true but he wasn't sure of its implications.

Weirdos tend to be painfully earnest but Ginsberg was skeptical, even ironic. I believed him nonetheless and he seemed relieved by that. I think you did save the world from a bunch of mutant Texans from Uranus, I said. And I think you really are who they say you are. He thought about that for a minute and said: I don't WANT to be who they say I am. I liked things just the way they were. Still, damned if this ain't a weight off my shoulders. I can't thank you enough.

I hung with him for the better part of the afternoon running over his story and exploring the woods around his house. He didn't want to see me go but I did nearabout sundown. Come visit me sometime, I said. You're a man I can talk to and I think we have plenty to talk about. Glad to hear it, he said with a grin. Chip told me where you live. I'll find you. He hasn't found me yet, but I have a feeling he will. Even world-saving avatars need someone to talk to. Things can get pretty lonely when you're battling hideously malformed dream assassins from a hostile planet.

The Narrative of Wilhelm Wanderlust: Part ONE

I raise the knife slow and solemn, place the point over my left tit. It's a Southern Baptist sacrificial knife with a curved blade and a whalebone handle, sharp and cold as a snake-fang on ice. Last week Benny Santeria used it to slit open his stomach in a neo-Fauvist death orgy on a floodlit helipad atop one of the Sacher-Masoch Towers a half mile south of Churchtown, a million miles south of sanity.

His acolytes garotted him with his own guts, tenderized him with a bout of rawhide stroppado, set him ablaze with a blue sapphire torch and slung him out into the night with a customized trebuchet. It’s how he wanted to go, his final tribute to the Meister, got to come up with something better when it’s my turn. Benny’s last words were: now and forever praise be, my life with Thrill Kill Cult.

Trotjohn laughed so hard he pissed himself, which made me laugh so he pissed on me, his boot-heel digging into my ribs, and I figured he’d drop a turd on my cheek like he sometimes does and say: here’s some soap to go with that golden shower, or maybe jizz in my hair and say: that’s all the shampoo you need, lather up, bitch, but all he did was whizz in my ear, he was in high spirits that night watching Benny Santeria do his thing.

That Sacher-Masoch blowout was a tribute to the Meister like I said and Benny, his guts smoking between his knees, bloody mess, looked at me and bawled: Willy gets my knife! Willy gets my fucking knife!

I’m Willy, Wilhelm to you, and this is Benny’s knife, but I don't plan to eviscerate myself tonight, not a chance. I have people to do, things to kill. I mean me and Trotjohn and the Wald and Monk, we few, we happy few in obeisance to our Meister Buford Aloysius Howell, Lord Baron of Pain.

So here, now, it's the knife-point over my left tit, the flat of the blade mirroring my left nostril, dark lumen leading up to my forebrain, a spot of light showing at the far end. Light in a pulsing orb, my Third Eye coming awake, bright with murder. The knife point flickers in a short arc, blood wells in a red smile and I smile back, good to see you too, strange weather we’ve been having, nice night for us hellions.

I have five other cuts arranged symmetric, bleeding gashes poulticed with rose petals and ginger mulch. This one here makes six, the Meister’s number, his sacred Numeron oozing ichor as I scoop up ginger paste with the crook of my finger, smear it on a rose petal and press the petal to my wound. Six cuts symmetric and I set down the knife, reach with my right hand and brush the pink, clitoral knob of the Voltburn Unit.

There's a mute crackle, a blue flash and the juice rips through me whitehot as clenched and shuddering I adjust my headset and press PLAY. Brrroooom: grindcore slashervox, Lem from Angstfuhrer screaming in on a distortion tidal wave going: snake-eyes, death-dream second sight; blood rain, storm fire, dark arctic light...

And something blazes up from the root of my brainstem, fanged mouth in a soundless howl and I’m laughing.

***

I inhale deep, raise my lids. Quiet now, just the sound of my breath and I’m still on the couch crosslegged, my boner in steady throb, my pores wisping fulgent smoke. Above, a pair of bioplast buttocks fixed to the ceiling beam down a spotlight through a rectal orb and I’m in that spotlight gashed naked, my hair matted sweatcold, my pecker straining up from the rictus of my lap.

The Voltburn Unit sits on a low tripod just ahead. It’s a recent model: a pink, glandular flatworm with a blue dendritic spine encased in a clear hyperconductive gel. I’m wired to the Unit via nipple clamps and a metal sheath capping my peckerhead.

Once every few minutes I touch the Unit’s clitoral knob and the glandworm crackles blue-white, juice ripping through me like lucent shrapnel, smell my toasted areolae, a charred ring around my glancap.

I’m priming myself for another hit, reaching for the Voltburn knob when the dildo lights up with a high-pitched buzz. It’s the phone I’ve had since last year, a mammoth bioplast dildo set in a scrotal base, buzzing now with its head glowing red, veins on the shaft squirming purple. I lean over, grab the dildo and press ON.

Yeah?

He doesn’t talk at first. He hums instead, a toneless croon that raises my hackles. He hits a low note, soars in glissando, pauses abrupt.

Bitch, he goes, you there, bitch-dawg? His voice. Trotjohn.

Been here forever, I go, slut.

He chuckles soft, breathy. You ready asshole?

Ready as a boner, baby. Blue steel. Throb throb.

He snorts. You gon' have to hold on to that hard-on awhile, sweetheart. We start at seven.

I frown. Seven?

Damn right. Seven on the clit. Seven on the napalm nipple.

I feel my teeth grit. That's a whole fucking HOUR from now.

He whistles. Dang. Bitch can count.

The Meister didn't say WHEN, I snarl, He NEVER does.

No. I'M sayin. We ride at seven. Seven dark. You know us and the Dark, we've had it goin so long, hot and heavy...

I cut him off, drop the dildo. There’s a vein throbbing on my brow, an image forming. A lizard in slow bleed, dragging mangled guts over shattered glass under a neon sun.

HATE! I yell, HHHAAATE!!!

The room in echo, my vision quaking.

I wait motionless, seconds passing in slow drip. Then I bend, grab the REM Corticon with both hands and hoist it off the floor.

The REM Corticon is a bioferric casque studded with green synth crystals. It resembles an old-time war helmet and induces visions via synaptic fibrillation, high risk of permanent psychosis en route to brain death, all part of the thrill.

I raise the Corticon with both hands, push it down over my head. The synth crystals light up, I can see them in the mirror across, green pupils in a panoptic orb.

The Corticon tightens, bolts pressing in hard around the rim, and my eyes water some, tears of pain, but I won’t need eyes for what I’m about to see and the pain’s just extra flavor, an old friend.

A moment passes grimacing, teeth clenched. Then the Corticon comes on with a shudder, humming toneless, and some larval plasm in my hindbrain twitches awake, my vision fragmenting in brilliant mosaic.

There’s a rush of black wind, a sound of hollow laughter and I’m swept out over an abyss, out and down and down...

Walking barefoot on white tiles slippery with blood, through a forest of chains hung from a halogen sky, torn flesh impaled on rusted meathooks. Someone’s moving ahead slow and unsteady, a girl. A kid girl in a blue dress, a stained ribbon at the small of her back.

I call out in wordless echo but she doesn’t pause, doesn’t look back. I break into a run, a slow dream lope, and the chains swirl clinking, part sudden.

I’m on a tiled expanse shading off into darkness. The girl stands ahead in partial profile holding a headless doll. Her bare feet have left red streaks on the tiled whiteness of the floor and a black trickle runs down the inside of her leg, her straw hair parted around a tumor.

The tumor pulses and squirms but I’m not looking. My gaze cuts past the girl, following her line of sight. A giant cylindrical vat looms ahead, a glass silo full of phosphorescent gel.

The gel holds a pair of spermatozoids in suspension. Outsize spermatozoids joined coital, albino tadpoles with human heads, coiled tails writhing.

The zoids have pegs driven through their skulls, a fibrous cord rising from each peg. The cords ascend in double helix to an enormous eyeball floating high above, its blue iris staring up into a nighted void.

I want to follow the eyeball, see what it’s seeing but I don’t get the chance. The girl is turning, her lidless eyes white, her smile sewn shut with catgut. Nailheads wink on her brow, her leper’s hand rising in accusation.

I drop to my knees with a mute cry, pleading in a language I don’t understand. But it’s too late. Bloody wasps erupt from a hole in her head, a dark swarm winking red as her smile curves in towards me, bright pincers aimed at my throat and I’m screaming...

Weirdo ONE: Wilhelm Wanderlust

For me, a weirdo isn't just an odd person. A weirdo is someone with a radically different, impressively detailed worldview. Someone with an immense, fantastically strange narrative. I've heard a number of outlandish stories over the years, but the one Wilhelm told me stands out in my mind. It's easily one of the most bizarre and disturbing tales I ever heard, though 'tale' isn't the word. Wilhelm's narrative was reportage of a kind, a recounting of events in another world, another time.

I found Wilhelm in the South, no surprise. The American South produces an inordinate number of weirdos, a fact Southerners ought to be proud of. Weirdos are genuises by definition. That means the South produces more geniuses than any other part of the country. Wilhelm didn't contact me directly. His doctor did. An East Indian doctor from Snowdrop, a small town in North Alabama.

I found the Dixie Way motel off the interstate a few miles from Dothan. It was an overcast day in the fall of two thousand and four, gray and cold and a bit wet, nature coming through with a bit of pathetic fallacy for the tale I was about to hear. I drove into the motel lot and saw a pink stucco facade, hacienda style arches. The motel rented rooms by the hour, a hump haven if I ever saw one.

The man at the desk seemed a weirdo in his own right: a fat, red-faced guy with a yellow beard and small, moist blue eyes. He wore a white bunny suit with big floppy ears and held a large mason jar of pickled carrots. He set down the jar when he saw me and reached for a twelve gauge shotgun. You Jackanape? he asked, aiming the gun at my chest. No, I said, I'm Zorn Altheus. I'm here to meet Doctor Trivedi.

He seemed to relax a little. You here to meet Doc Amrish? That's right, I said, he called me here. The man nodded, lowered his gun. Doc's here, he said, he's been waitin on you. A side door opened just then and a small, dapper-looking man walked out. He wore a dark blue suit and brown patent leather shoes and he carried a burled walking stick with a polished brass knob. His beard was trimmed, his graying hair combed back.

The man walked in and paused, scowling at the fat guy in the bunny suit. Dex, he said, have you been threatening this gentleman with your gun? The fat guy's face changed. He looked like a kid caught with his pants down, pecker in hand. It's alright, I said, not a problem. I've had worse. A lot worse. The little man scowled some more. Then he turned, hand proffered. You must be Mister Altheus. I am Doctor Amrish Trivedi. My apologies for meeting you at this disreputable establishment. My patient has chosen to reside here against my wishes.

No apologies needed, I said, it's all the same to me. The doctor nodded. Very well then. Let us proceed without further ado. I followed the doctor into the front lot and around the side of the motel to the back. The back of the motel recalled a pair of unwashed buttocks but I was too keyed up to notice. I tend to get keyed up before meeting weirdos but this was more intense than usual. There was a different vibe here, intimations of something abyssal and alien.

The doctor paused at Door 6 and threw me a look. It was an odd look, something like dread showing there. The door was painted blood red with runes etched on its surface with a blade. The window beside it was blacked over with duct tape. There is a young man in this room, said the doctor low-voiced, a very peculiar young man. He calls himself Wilhelm Wanderlust but I suspect that is a pseudonym.

No one seems to know who he is. He was found by our sheriff two weeks ago. The boy was standing stark naked in the middle of Route 9 at midnight. Completely disoriented of course. It seems to be an extreme and extraordinary case of psychosis but I hesitate to pass judgement. Something very strange is at work here. I will be very frank with you Mr. Altheus. I am afraid for the boy and I am afraid of him. That is why I have allowed him to remain here, away from the care of specialists.

I understand, I said, you called on me because you felt you had nowhere else to turn. The doctor nodded. Precisely. I heard that you have some experience in such matters. That is why I called on you. I am relieved that you are here. It has been difficult for me to handle the boy alone. Not that he is unruly, no, not at all. Quite the opposite. During his stay here he has, on more than one occasion, entered a trancelike state of suspended animation. When it first occurred I thought he had died. But then I detected a pulse, very slow and faint.

In my home country, advanced practitioners of yoga enter a state known as samadhi. During samadhi the beating of the heart slows down or stops altogether. But the boy is not experiencing samadhi as far as I can tell. He insists that his trance states occur when he travels to another world or another time in the future. He claims to inhabit a city called Churchtown. There is a Churchtown not far from here but it bears no resemblance to the city described by him. The boy seems to suffer psychotic episodes that are prolonged and remarkably vivid. But again, one hesitates to pass judgement...

The doctor turned, rapped the door with his knuckles. There was no response. The doctor knocked once more, then turned the knob and entered. I stepped in after him. At first I thought the room was on fire but it wasn't. It was full of incense smoke. The smell of jasmine was strong but not strong enough to kill the stench of stale food and vomit. There were two single beds with cans and cartons littered around. A pale, emaciated figure lay on one of the beds, apparently naked under a sheet. The TV was on, the screen snowed over with static, the sound cut down to a soft hiss.

He looked like a heroin addict in his late teens, a kid with smooth dark hair, a gaunt, parchment-pale face and eyes with dilated pupils, though 'dilated' doesn't quite cut it. Those pupils seemed to fill his eye-sockets, saucer shapes sheened iridescent. I figured the kid had to be in one of his trances but he wasn't. He spoke without turning, his voice surprisingly strong and even. Sit down, he said, sit down and listen. You can record me if you want but don't talk.

I stared down at him, my flesh in slow crawl. You know who I am, I said, don't you. The kid blinked, but didn't turn. I know things you wouldn't believe. Things you can't begin to imagine. Now sit down, pull out your little tape machine and hit the record button. I'm going to tell you what happened last Friday in Churchtown. I'm going to tell you what my fellow disciples and I did for the Meister. All you need to do is listen. If you talk, it's over. I'll leave and I'll never come back.

The doctor was already seated on the other bed. I sat beside him, pulled out the tape machine from my knapsack, hit the record button and waited. The kid was silent for a minute, motionless on his bed. It was like looking at wax dummy, a consumptive corpse in replica. He didn't blink and I couldn't tell if he was breathing. My name is Wilhelm Wanderlust, he began all of a sudden, and I'm not from around here. There's no point asking me who I am or where I come from. My answers won't make any sense to you.

All I can tell you is what we did last weekend for the Meister. What I and Trotjohn and Monk and Wald did for our Meister, Buford Aloysius Howell, Lord Baron of Pain. We wandered in sacrifice and that's what I'm going to tell you about. It was that time of year and we wandered in sacrifice extracting and storing the elixir, and when we had enough we approached the Meister on bended knee and he accepted our sacrificial offering and that's what I aim to speak of. Know that this is precious testimony, words birthed in the torment of sacrifice. Know and listen and understand. So let it begin.

It took him three hours to get done. Or maybe it took a lot longer, there was no way to tell. I sat mesmerized, lost in a poisonous swirl of sound and image. The kid's words flowed clear and without pause, his voice unflagging. No one stirred as I recall, not the doctor, not Wilhelm, not myself. I had the distinct impression the words were echoing in my head via direct transmission, the kid's lips not seeming to move. And I was with him while it lasted. In his world, living his nightmare. He talked like it was happening now, in the present. He'd said it was from the weekend but he spoke like he was there once more, living it in eternal recurrence.

That's what it was in truth. An endlessly recurring nightmare. The kid was living through nightmare events occurring in ceaseless iteration, or so it seemed to me. His narrative was, nevertheless, coherent for the most part, with very little of the fracture and derangement that characterizes your average REM trip or psychotic episode. And I understood, as I listened, why the doctor had expressed doubt and fear. Something strange at work, he had said. But it was more than just strange. It was profoundly disconcerting. Or better yet, terrifying.

The kid finished at last and fell silent, staring at the dead TV screen. No one moved or spoke. I noticed my tape machine wasn't running anymore, no surprise. It'd stopped hours before and I'd been in no position to flip the tape over or replace it. We remained seated for what seemed like a long time, no sound but the hiss of TV static. It was the doctor who broke the spell. We must leave now Mr. Altheus, he said rising. Wilhelm must rest. He is suffering from exhaustion. I noticed then that the kid had his eyes closed, his breath gone slow and ragged.

I got out of there as fast as I could. I had the overwhelming urge to run and keep running but there was Doc Amrish to think of. The man seemed more in need of help than his patient. I agreed to meet the doctor at his clinic over the weekend but we never did meet. He called a day later with news. Wilhelm has disappeared without a trace, he said. The sheriff is conducting a search with help from local residents. Don't bother, I said, you won't find him. You seem rather sure of yourself Mr. Altheus, the doctor said. I AM sure, I said. The kid is back where he belongs. Roaming the hell-scape of Churchtown.

I, Zorn: Part Three (Why a 400 Pound Elvis Kicked the Crap out of a Bionic Mother Teresa)

Think of all the dead celebrities you know. Think of them as you crouch naked in a filthy trailer, giggling in idiot monotone as a noose tightens around your neck, as images of desert war-porn flash on a giant TV screen installed by your hypertrophic dyke dominatrix. Count the number of dead celebrities you know as you gout tainted jizz and shudder in the throes of auto erotic asphyxiation.

Let's say you count twenty dead celebrities aloud, in a barely audible croak as your nipple clamps tighten and electrodes spark and crackle on the charred mound of your peckerhead. You figure those twenty dead celebrities really ARE dead but they're not. Only about half of them are wormfood, their catafalqued corpses moldering in adipocere. The rest are stuck in nine giant motherships orbiting our planet in quantum-dimensional spaces that render them invisible.

About half the dead celebrities you ever heard of are alive, if not well, in alien spaceships hovering above in hostile scrutiny. How do I know? I know because I saw them there. I saw purportedly dead movie icons like John Wayne and James Dean and Bruce Lee and Marilyn Monroe. I saw putatively dead singers like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, dancers like Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis and Ginger Rogers, painters like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro and Francis Bacon, cannibal serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa. They're all up there in those spaceships singing and dancing and acting and kicking the living shit out of each other in vats of hot lava as their Reticulan overlords look on in paroxysms of noiseless mirth.

You ever watch that TV show X-Files? Sure you have. You watched it yesterday as you hung hog-tied from a metal spar in the sewage-clogged trailer of your acromegalic dyke dominatrix Helga. The X Files mythos has hostile aliens colluding with Uncle Sam in a vast conspiracy of domination, conquest and Nazi eugenics. I'm here to tell you the conspiracy is real. It exists and is fully active now as we speak across this fiberglass partition with our nuts nestled warm in a red ribbon giftsock and our outsize nipples pressed to the pane.

I know it's real because I was part of the conspiracy. Or rather, I was forced to become part of the conspiracy after my abduction that night in New Mexico. My memories of the event are clear as a kick in the nads on dry ice but everything afterwards is garbled, fragmented, hazy. I remember that brilliant circle of light in the desert, that white beam blazing down on those five Reticulans and on Elvis, James Dean and Bruce Lee. It's what I saw when I rose from a dead faint that night in the badlands.

No one spoke at first and no one moved. The silence was absolute, not even a keen of wind across the scape. Just for a second I thought I was hallucinating but I knew I wasn't. I don't feel my calves and buttocks when I hallucinate. There's no sensation in my calves and buttocks and my pecker feels gaseous or even vaguely astral, like it's made of refried ectoplasm. But there was none of that here. I had gooseflesh on my rump and I'd grown a REM sleep boner for some reason, pretty embarrassing, you don't want a blue buddha messing up your first alien abduction.

I spoke up first as usual. If I hadn't, we might've stood there forever in frozen tableau. I come in pieces, I said, if not in peace. I'd like to break bread with you guys or failing that, break wind over a narcotic peace pipe with windchimes and mantras sounding in ambient trance as turbaned capuchin monkeys serve iridescent absinthe in flutes of dark crystal. No one answered. My overture hadn't gone over too well.

I thought you guys were dead, I said, addressing the humans, but I'm glad you're not. I always dug you, Bruce Lee, and you, Jimmy Dean, and you, Elvis Presley, even though I knew you were a lousy bigot who stole his music from black people and became a fucking zillionaire while they toiled on unrecompensed and unrecognized.

They didn't answer but they did move. Elvis struck one of his dramatic stage poses, Bruce assumed his Jeet Kune Do fighter's stance and Jimmy grabbed his crotch, ran a hand through his hair and swaggered like he used to before supposedly dying in a storm of crushed metal that tore his head off and sent it sailing through the kitchen window of a nearby farmhouse straight into the cauldron of possum stew that Aunt Mae had set out for Sunday lunch. Jeet Kune Do is the martial art Bruce Lee invented after years of studying Wing Chun with Yip Man out in the urban thickets of Hong Kong.

What gives fellas, I asked, you guys planning to beam my ass up to heaven? They chuckled then, speaking in unison. You're going to wish you were in Hell when they get done with you. Hell can't be worse than what they have up there. I didn't like the sound of that but it didn't matter. I was rising butt first, floating up into that column of light. The Reticulans were ascending too, Elvis, Bruce and Jimmy in tow.

And that's where my sequential memory ends. Everything afterwards plays like an ill-recalled, gladly-relinquished dream. Not a dream. A nightmare. I learned, up in the bowels of the mother ship, that they'd been watching me a long while, tracking me from the time I left the rez on my peripatetic flogger's quest. They'd studied me, understood my shamanic power and innate genius. That's why they wanted me up there, for their program.

Over the next ten years I WAS part of their program. They systematically drained me during that time, sapped my powers with fibrous umbilical cords fastened to my chakra centers via fleshy disc mouths lined with teeth. What they sought was Agenbite, a luminous sap found in the pituitary glands of powerful medicine men. Apparently I had Agenbite stored up to my gills with more being produced every minute.

About once every week (by my calculation) I was taken off the cords and sexually revitalized by three foot female Reticulans with translucent nipples on their chins (one on each) and green lacquered lashes on their lower lids. Reticulans blink very rarely but when they do it's bottom up, not top down as with humans, and it makes a sound like a wet baseball hitting a bare gut. They're noisy blinkers, those Reticulans.

It wasn't much fun getting ravaged by three foot alien chicks but at least I wasn't forced to participate in the 'entertainments' imposed on the celebrities imprisoned in the mother ship. The celebrities had to sing and dance and even do some theater, but mainly the Reticulans amused themselves by pitting genetically altered icons against one another in vicious and bloody gladiatorial contests. I once saw Marilyn Monroe feeding on John Wayne's skull as she cornholed him in mutant replication of a female mantis.

I also saw a massively corpulent Elvis face off against a heavily muscled, anabolically enhanced Mother Teresa who put me in mind of a prune-faced power lifter in a blue and white sari. They'd fought before, those two, and Teresa had won each time but Elvis emerged victorious on this occasion. He distracted her with peeled bananas and gobs of peanut butter, then proceeded to kick the living crap out of her bionic Albanian butt with rubberized Dutch clogs as she sang Old Man River in a deep-baritone, testosterone-fuelled descant.

I never could figure out how Teresa'd ended up here in this Reticulan mother ship. I asked Jimmy Dean about it once. Isn't she, like, supposed to be in heaven tap-dancing for Pater Seraphicus and his posse of divinely jock-strapped popes? Sure, said Jimmy Dean, but there was some sort of nasty clerical error and she ended up in Hell by mistake. She was being repeatedly shredded by demon dogs in a cistern of boiling brimstone when the Reticulans rescued her, if you can call it a rescue. Jehovah should've replevied her steroid pumped ass by now but apparently he's having too much fun watching her get pounded by that tub of hog-lard Elvis.

Jimmy Dean's explanation saddened me and I wanted to weep as Teresa bawled out Old Man River in a weird melange of Bengali, Vulgate Latin and demotic Albanian but I ended up laughing myself comatose as a tittering sextet of female Reticulans ravished me in a cocoon of rotating blades that recalled a giant eggbeater. It was a nightmare like I said, a bright kaleidoscoped horrorfest that lasted a decade.

I didn't think I'd ever get out of there alive but I did. I'm not sure why they let me go. Maybe they thought I didn't have enough celebrity points to warrant a permanent berth on the mother ship. They left me where they'd found me. Or rather, where they'd abducted me. I came awake to a chill desert dawn, with the sun spreading a fine layer of gold on the mesas ranged around. I felt like a revenant, like I'd returned from the dead after eons of maggot-ridden entombment. And yet, little had changed that I could tell. I was wearing the same clothes, the same shoes, the same everything.

I didn't stop to think about it. I rose to my feet and started walking, back towards the highway and the nearest town. I knew, even as I walked, that the old life was dead and gone, that a new one would have to be birthed ex nihilo, out of nothing. I figured I was going to have to quit flogging ogres in extremis but I wasn't quite sure.

I was thinking about it in an Arizona flophouse when there was a knock on my door and three suited Feds walked in. I knew they were Feds by the way they were dressed and by their aura of subtle arrogance, the kind you acquire when Uncle Sam grants you a monopoly on violence. We know all about you Zorn, they said. We know about the people you've killed and we know where you've been for the last ten years. You killed nearabout two hundred men before the Visitors took you. You should be getting juiced in an electric chair this very minute but we've decided to leave you be.

There IS a condition though, they said. We need an assurance you're going to hang up your little flogging whip. No more killing. You start that shit again we'll come after you so fast you won't know what hit you. I smiled at that one. I can live with that fellas. No cause for worry. You hear that rustling sound? That's me turning over a new leaf. They stared down at me a minute, three pairs of freezing blue eyes fixed in scrutiny. Then they turned and walked out single file.

I never saw them again, mainly because I didn't give them cause to reappear. I returned to Pine Ridge soon afterwards and burned my flogger's knout on a patch of sacred ground. I stuck around on the rez for a while, waiting for the Call. The Call of a new path, a new life. It came six months later and I left the rez once more, wandering the country in search of weirdos. I found them of course. Found them and recorded their stories. Some of those stories were sent to Alien Wreckage but the rest are with me in this Dixie log cabin where I live now. They've remained in storage long enough. Time to dust them off and set them free here, in this space, where they belong.

I, Zorn: Part Two (The Flogger's Art)

I'm going to finish it quick now. Finish talking about myself in fast, disdainful strokes. Dismissive strokes. I'll dip my quill in a superheated stew of pitted prunes, sun-baked herring, coagulated hogblood and brain fluid drawn from the skull of a schizoid, octogenarian Southern Baptist . Then I'll blitz it out in a rush of hypnopompic automatism.

I don't want to dwell on myself like I said. This here is just a preamble, a way to frame the stories I'm about to present. I've chosen three weirdos to begin with. Three visionary revenants weaving bizarre, transmontaine narratives. The narratives will unfold in rotational collage, one following the other in uroboric succession, whatever the hell that means.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Best to get this over with first, sans ado. I ought to talk about my name here at the outset. People call me Zorn or Zorn Altheus but that's not all there is to it. It's never that simple, not at this end of the alimentary canal where the sun never shines, where crud dries in concentric rings and critters die soundless and asphyxiate.

My name, in its resplendent entirety, is Zorn Altheus Blue Vajra Cacodaemon Dancing Bear. My old lady used to be a sci fi enthusiast back on the rez, in happier times when she ran youthful and sunblessed under the Dakota sky. She read every bit of sci fi schlock she could get her hands on. One of her dog-eared, moth-eaten paperbacks featured an intergalactic superhero named Zorn Altheus.

Zorn saved the Proteron galaxy from utter destruction and killed Rruothkarr, scion of the insect people of Minraud and sith lord of the Ariguan Confederacy. Zorn died in the end, not from injuries sustained in battle but from chronic constipation caused by frequent trips across poorly maintained Einstein Rosen Bridges, also known as Wormholes. Zorn learned too late that a clogged wormhole will kill you faster than all the laser scimitars of an alien enemy.

My old lady adored Zorn Altheus, so she named me after him. Dancing Bear happens to be my Lakota family name, the one my old man gave me before crossing the mystic bourne in a flaming nimbus of blood and murder. The names Blue Vajra and Cacodaemon came to me during a sweat lodge vision quest supervised by Theodore Running Wolf.

I changed shape during that vision quest. I morphed into an eagle with golden wings and eyes of fire. I flew over the Black Hills in the shadow of Crazy Horse and rose in a tremendous soaring arc to the crest of the Himalayas where I communed with a troglodyte Yeti who I later learned was the immortal Hindu monkey god Hanuman.

It was Hanuman who blessed me with the name Blue Vajra. Later, as I coasted on chill wind-currents over an expanse of fulgent ice, a hooded manitou appeared on the horizon, pointed with a gnarled finger and said: Cacodaemon. Thus I emerged from the erotogoric abysm of my vision quest with a new name: Zorn Altheus Blue Vajra Cacodaemon Dancing Bear.

The new name came with a new purpose, the nomadic death-telos that Theodore Running Wolf had divined with his Orbis Tertius back at the rez. I wandered in deference to my new purpose, flogging and flaying the ogres who crossed my path. I covered much of the continental United States over a six year period with brief forays into Canada.

I lost track of the number of men I shredded and killed. Later, some of my abductors insisted I had murdered well over two hundred men between the ages of thirty and fifty. I take strong exception to the word 'murder'. I didn't murder those men. The Lord's Prayer says: deliver us from evil. That's what I did. I delivered those men and their victims from evil.

The men I flogged to extinction in sprays of consubstantiate gore were ogres, irredeemable tormentors of women and children. The men I shredded were nameless then and are nameless now. I didn't know who they were but I recognized them in a manner of speaking. I saw with perfect clarity that they were monsters who secretly yearned for the fate that awaited them.

I identified them via mantic apperception, the mindsight I had acquired under Running Wolf's guidance. I located them, isolated them and disintegrated them. Then I excised their scrota, stored them in mason jars of formaldehyde and moved on. Once every month I scooped those nuts out of their sacks, inserted colored light bulbs and created luminous scrotal pastiches on outhouse walls. I am an artist as I said.

I stuck to back roads and small towns, moving patient and unhurried. I never worked to stay alive. People helped me wherever I went, gladly vouchsafing to me that which I sought. They didn't help me because they chose to. They helped because I bent their will to my own with a glance or a word. It's easy to bend people to your purpose. You have to know how, is all. You have to stun their pineal glands with gestures and words directed with fierce intent, in a dense beam of pranic energy.

Your pineal gland is located between your eyebrows, in case you didn't know. I can stun your pineal gland with a gesture, a sound, a word or all three in conjunction. The specific combination changes with each person. One time I stunned a scrofulous prison warden by slapping my left tit, tweaking my right nipple and putting out a high-pitched squawk. Overkill, as it turned out. The man dropped like a sack of wet cement, his eyeballs capsizing white.

In my seventh year of wandering I joined a travelling carnival run by a goitred and flatulent Australian who once ran a brothel on the Thai Cambodian border. I figured the carnival would provide cover for my activities which indeed it did. Even serial-flogging paladins like myself need protection sometimes.

My knife-throwing skills were put to good use at the carnival, skills I'd picked up on the rez. I also learned to juggle a variety of disparate and dangerous objects: burning torches, active chainsaws, coils of livewire, bowling balls, milking stools and huge genetically modified rodents that bit my hands and delivered squeaking apostrophes of furious protest as I juggled their steroid pumped bodies.

I continued meanwhile to troll for ogres, locating them as before and shearing the flesh off their bones as they screamed soundless, their torment accruing about their bodies in phosphorescent aurora. While at the carnival I married a three hundred pound woman with a silver mohawk on her misshapen skull, a green patch on her missing eye and a flowing red beard on her absent chin.

Why I chose her in particular is not clear to me now, in retrospect. I could've had any man, woman or hermaphrodite I wanted, given my stellar good looks, my cyclopean nether appendage and my tangible aura of pathic self-assurance. It's possible that I married Bertha in a paroxysm of penitence for my crimes. In belated spasms of bogus guilt and Sartrean bad faith. Even natural born serial killers get the pangs on occasion.

The marriage did, nevertheless, offer certain deviant rewards. Our emperor waterbed quickly became the mise en scene for feral, bone-crushing, pudendal fusions that lit up the carnival in weird fulgor as squeals and grunts rent the night. Bertha wasn't so much a person as a plenum, a boiling adipose swamp of subterranean lusts, bestial ruts, cannibal debauches, howling saturnales and blood-drenched orgies of corybantic delirium beneath the glans of a purple moon.

Chances are, I'd still be a travelling carny Indian if Bertha had survived. But she didn't survive. She died of an aneurysm in front of a cheering crowd on a chill winter night in Arkansas. Her sudden and unceremonious passing affected me in ways I couldn't have imagined. The calescent intensity of my grief softened my heart, reshaped my spirit, turned the compass needle of my quiddity.

I left the carnival a week after her demise, intent on resuming my life of solitary wandering and serial assassination. The frequency of my crimes had waned during my marriage to Bertha. And for a while the killings had ceased altogether. The barbarous delights of the flogger's art had yielded to the incendiary catharses of copulation. Eros reigned in place of an extrovert Thanatos and Lordy's Love Whip lay unused at last, its rawhide strands curled limp and forlorn, its gleaming drail hooks piled mute.

But now I took up the knout once more, eager to make up for lost time. I wished to embark on an unparalleled flogging spree, to flay my way across the country in deranged afflatus. But it was not to be. Somehow I couldn't summon the nerve. Something had changed. Prolonged communion with Big Bertha had leached and gutted me, blunted my resolve. My flogger's fortitude had ebbed to the point of extinction. I thought of killing myself but I didn't. I wandered adrift, going where my feet took me.

I started to feel it a month into my aimless walkabout. Feel like I was being watched. At first I figured maybe I had a stalker but no. The feeling persisted even when I was completely alone, miles from human habitation. I can't render with certainty what happened to me next. I remember most of it well but I can't vouch for its authenticity. It's possible that I lapsed into some form of delusional psychosis that lasted a long time. It's also possible that my abductors permanently distorted my recollection of capture and internment. I'll let my readers decide.

I entered the state of New Mexico sometime in the spring of nineteen hundred and seventy two. I'd left the carnival in Aintree, Georgia and hitchhiked west, along the southern route. I hit New Mexico on a Friday as I recall, an hour before nightfall. I followed the highway for a while looking to thumb a ride. But trucks and cars weren't stopping so I left the highway and headed north, into the badlands.

I'm not sure why I left the highway. It was an obscure impulse, a sudden yearning for solitude, for abnegation. It occurred to me much later that it wasn't so much an impulse as a command. I'd been led, driven by external volition. The landscape changed colors as I walked, distant mesas going from burnt sienna to tahitian bronze to blood red under a cyanic blue sky yielding to darkness.

Soon it was completely dark, the mesas bulked in silhouette under a bright smatter of stars. I remember stumbling at some point, stumbling and falling from fatigue and hunger. There was light when I came to. A circle of brilliant white light beaming down from above. I couldn't discern the light source but the creatures standing in the circle were clear enough. I say 'creatures' because some of them were human and some were not.

Five of the eight creatures were aliens of the kind you see in movies. They were short, pale and slender with large domed heads, black panoptic eyes, vestigial noses, slit mouths and absent ears. The remaining three were human. Not just human. They were famous and supposedly dead. The first was Elvis Presley in full stage regalia. The second was James Dean in black leather. The third was martial arts legend Bruce Lee in a blue kung fu suit. Just the people I wanted to see.

Concluded in Part Three.

I, Zorn: Part One (Lordy's Love Whip)

I guess I ought to say a little more about myself before I get to my fellow weirdos. I don't like talking about myself if truth be told. The last guy who made me do it got a foot jammed up his butt. I stuck my bare foot so far up his croup, we had to be driven to the hospital where they mistook us for conjoined twins. The dude was a cop who stopped me on the highway. He interrogated me, forced me to talk about myself, so I responded with my foot. I tickled his tonsils with my toes all the way to the hospital, my knee shaping a bump under his ribs.

There's a reason I don't like to talk about myself. The reason being: I get confused. I mean I start to get confused when I talk about myself. I start to think I'm someone else. I've been told I have multiple personality disorder or some version of it. Some days I'm convinced I'm a large, aggressive Haitian woman named Marie Therese Duvalier. This gal Marie is an accomplished Santeria priestess and lives in a log cabin up near Anchorage Alaska.

For those who don't know, Santeria is a bona fide American religion, a blend of African spirituality and Catholicism, too bad for African spirituality. Marie is a Santeria priestess who earns her keep by rolfing loggers and mountain men. Rolfing is a type of deep tissue massage invented by a bony, antisocial invert named Rolf. Rolfing has nothing to do with Santeria but Marie's good at it, can rolf your muscles to warm mush in minutes.

Sometimes I wake up naked on the floor at dawn convinced I'm Marie Therese Duvalier. Other times I wake up with a loud whinnying sound, convinced I'm a Mexican-Irish migrant laborer named Hernan Calderon O'Hanlon. This guy Hernan masturbates horses at a West Texas stud farm. I mean that's how he earns his living. Sometimes thoroughbreds don't mate like they should so the females have to be artificially inseminated with jizz jerked off the males. The job sucks like a bionic porn star but someone has to do it so that's what Hernan does.

I become Marie and Hernan when I'm confused and I get confused when I talk about myself so that's why I don't like to do it, but I guess I'm going to have to, here. A man's got to introduce himself before introducing his friends, you dig. And you folks out there ought to have a fair idea who you're dealing with. I don't want to be accused of misrepresenting myself to the great unwashed. I do aim to keep it brief though. I'm not here to put myself on display. I'm here to present a bunch of weird genuises and their whacked out stories.

I was born back in nineteen hundred and forty two and that's the tragedy entire, in a nutshell. If I hadn't been born I wouldn't be here wishing I'd never been born. My mother was Native American, a Lakota full-blood from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. My real father, also Lakota, died when I was two, murdered by agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Five years later a weird-looking preacher came to the rez, a white man named Gilson Reilly. He came to civilize us heathens with the support and approval of the Feds, same shit different century.

This guy Reilly was a hellfire and brimstone type, preached up a storm in the local church. He'd stagger around the pulpit foaming at the mouth and gibbering in tongues while we sat in the pews weeping with laughter. The sermons ended with him thrashing about on the floor, pissing and farting as his voice rose to a shriek. The man looked and sounded like an albino buzzard but my mother married him anyway. It's taken me fifty years to forgive her for that. It wasn't her fault if truth be told. She pretty much lost her mind after my old man died. His violent extinction caused a meltdown in her head and left a void that Gilson Reilly filled.

Next thing I knew, we were in this shitty little Texas town named Howaxahoochee, stuck in a shitty little house by the railway tracks. By 'we', I mean Reilly, my old lady and myself. I was eight when we moved there and sixteen when I finally left, eight years of pure hell, worse than the Hell Reilly talked up in his sermons. The abuse began soon after we moved there and didn't stop till I slaughtered his sorry ass eight years later. When I say 'abuse' I'm being euphemistic. Torture is what it was, the kind you work with whips, chains and branding irons.

It wasn't just me catching hell. My old lady caught her fair share. She even asked for more, hoping to spare me some. But Reilly was pretty democratic with his affections, an equal opportunity sadist. My old lady tried and failed to escape with me a few times, which only made things worse. A month after my sixteenth birthday I walked into the living room and found him muttering over his bible with one hand in his crotch. He used to let me walk around the house then, figuring I was too cowed to escape.

Your mother's gone, he said, she ain't comin' back. Gone, I said, gone where. He laughed high-pitched and catarrhal, his fangs showing yellow. Gone, he repeated, she ain't comin' back. I knew then that he'd killed her. I was sure of it. I didn't know where she was or how he'd done it but it didn't matter. What mattered was the weird light in my head, between my eyebrows. I went down to the basement and found the clown suit I'd seen there once. Then I went up to his room and found his shotgun. He never figured I'd be brazen enough to do that. I didn't either. I'd sneaked into his room once years back and he'd found me and damn near killed me.

But I wasn't afraid anymore. My head was like a butcher's freezer, my thoughts in arctic suspension. I walked into the living room in my new clown suit, shotgun in hand. Whut the HALE you think you doin' boy, he asked, his lipless mouth twisting in a snarl. I proceeded to show him. Show him what I was thinking. I took my time with it, really savored it. I used the gun to hold him in place while I trussed him up like a turkey. Then I dipped a sock in gasoline, jammed it in his mouth and went to work.

I used everything he'd used on us but I singled out the branding irons for special application. That and the flogging knout he liked to call Lordy's Love Whip. I see it now as I saw it then. Reilly screaming like the pope in that Franis Bacon painting, his eyes bugging blue-veined, gasoline spit dribbling from the sock in his mouth. His scalp seemed to whiten as I worked him over, fine lines of blood forming in dark filigree. I was the happiest I'd ever been and I wept in spasms of orgasmic release, hot salt tears running into my mouth gaped open in soundless laughter.

Reilly kept nodding out through the night but I roused him with the smelling salts he used before his sermons. Everything works in your favor when you have a purpose. It was near dawn when I finished with him. I'd started on him an hour past sundown and worked steady through the night. I should've been exhausted but I wasn't. I was shaking with nervous energy, my vengeance burning white in fulgent crucifixion. The wall behind him was bare when I began. It looked like a lurid expressionist mural when I got done, its surface streaked and blotched with bits of flesh, bone and blood.

I stared at that mural a while, entranced. Then I struck a match and set fire to the sock in Reilly's mouth. The house was a ball of flame when I left it an hour later. My old lady's corpse was in there somewhere but I didn't look back. I walked out of town with Reilly's money in my pocket and a bag over my shoulder. The bag held some of my essentials and sandwiches I'd packed for the road. It also held Lordy's Love Whip, the flogging knout I'd wielded all night in ecstatic catharsis.

I hitch-hiked to Dallas and took a bus north. Five days later I was in South Dakota, heading into the Pine Ridge reservation. I stayed on the rez for the next three years fully expecting to be apprehended by the state police. But the cops didn't come and I remained in hiding as I studied with a medicine man named Theodore Running Wolf. Under Running Wolf's guidance I discovered abilities I never dreamed I had. Psychic abilities and spirit powers that'd lain dormant, awaiting their summons.

I awoke one morning under a blue Dakota sky and found Running Wolf standing over me. You got to go, he said, it's time. The cops, I said, they're here. No cops, he said, you're done learning. Time for you to head out. Head out where, I asked. He gave me a strange look, his old man's eyes bright with sapience. You know where to go, he said, and you know what to do. I'd ask you not to do what you're gonna do if I thought it'd make a difference. But it ain't gonna make no difference. You gonna do it anyway. It's what you was born to do.

I left the rez that same day with a knapsack on my back. The sack held everything a drifter might need. It also held Reilly's flogging knout, the one I'd killed him with. I wandered the country over the next six years locating my victims and flogging them dead. I say 'victims' but they weren't victims. They were monsters of Reilly's ilk, wife-beaters and child-torturers every last one. I never had any trouble finding them. I could tell who they were just by looking. You'd be surprised how many of them there are in this country, new ones sprouting up every day.

I flogged them dead with Lordy's Love Whip and left no trace. If you check police records you'll see their faces under Missing. Serial killers tend to slip up at some point, but I never did. My crimes were bloody but always perfect. Perfection is hard to achieve when you're flaying grown men dead but I did achieve it. I said I was a genius and it's true. I'm a born genius with pronounced shamanic talents and I used those talents to deadly effect, just like I was supposed to. Old Running Wolf had been right as always. This shit was my personal telos, my raison d'etre. It's what I lived for, what I was born to do.

Introduction: Weirdos

People collect all kinds of crap. I knew a guy named Wedge who collected his toe nails and stuck them together with gunk from his ears. Now he’s got this giant sphere of toenails glued with earwax. I knew another guy named Gleet who collected used condoms from the local trash dump. He filled the condoms with crank case oil, mounted them on used chopsticks and stuck them out in his backyard. He was also a chopstick collecter, natch. Now he’s got a small forest of dirty pennants in his backyard, a demented memorial for America's war-dead.

There was this other guy, a roadhouse midget named Shortcake. Rednecks at the roadhouse liked to stick a harness on Shortcake and toss him down a greased ramp. That’s how good old boys entertain themselves out in the boonies. But Shortcake knew how to get back at his tossers. He’d ambush them in the parking lot after they were good and drunk. He’d knock them cold with a lead-filled baseball and slice off their earlobes with a rusted scalpel.

Shortcake was an earlobe collector and an artist. Back in his trailerpark atelier he’d dip those earlobes in colored glue and paste them to a large canvas. The result always put me in mind of Van Gogh. A trailer trash Van Gogh on speed and acid. Shortcake was a psychopath for sure though not a particularly dangerous one. I knew he was a psychopath because I was one too, still am. It takes one to know one as they say.

We got along like a house on fire with a cannibal fuckfest raging inside. I mean me and Shortcake did. I was a psychopath like he was and I was an artist like he was. I'm still an artist of sorts, though I don’t do the kind of art I used to back then. We had a third thing in common. I was a collector like he was except I didn’t collect earlobes. I collected the nutsacks of guys I killed and disintegrated. I collected the scrotums (scrota) of the child-torturers and wife-beaters I slaughtered and shredded for the sake of art and humanity. But I don’t collect scrotums anymore. I collect weirdos is what I do now.

I locate genuinely strange people and get them to tell me their stories. I record their stories and collect them. It’s my life’s work now, something I love to do. It’s spiritually rewarding and I make a decent living off it, can’t ask for much more. I do yearn for the old days sometimes when I was flaying the flesh of evil men and transfiguring their death-torment through art. But I can’t go back to that. I’m old now for one thing, sixty four years old, though I look about forty four. And I made a deal with Uncle Sam. No more killing now Zorn, they said, you start that shit again, we're gonna come after you hard and fast. Okay fellas, I said, no more of that, I promise to be a decent law-abiding citizen.

And that’s what I am. A decent, law-abiding citizen who lives alone in a Dixie log cabin and records weird stories for a living. Some of the stuff I record goes straight to Alien Wreckage, a popular print magazine that features UFO’s, werewolves, vampires, zombies and such. They pay me pretty well for the stuff I send them because it’s always compelling and because the founder/editor of Alien Wreckage knows I’m a former serial killer, the most noble and esthetically refined serial flogger of all time. The man digs and respects me, what can I say.

He also knows I keep the best material for myself. He says we’d make millions if we published that material in book form but I’m not interested. I respect my weirdos too much. They don’t deserve to be sold out for a bag of filthy lucre. The people whose stories I keep in storage aren’t just weirdos. They’re geniuses and prophets. They’re the most extraordinary people in North America and among the most extraordinary on planet earth. I paid them for the stories they told me, paid them well. But they didn’t give a fiddler's fuck about that. They would’ve told me their stories for free, only because they recognized I was one of them. They saw I was a fellow weirdo, a fellow prophet, a fellow genius. That’s the only reason they talked to me and I’m honored that they did.

I was going to have their stories published post mortem, after we were all dead and gone, every one of us. But I’ve changed my mind about that. I’m going to feature their stories here, in this space, for everyone to read. I decided to put them here because of the times we’re living in. We’ve got us a country run by fascist assholes bent on devouring the planet. We’ve got us a planet that’s near dead from being gang-raped by corporate pigs. We’ve got us a legion of media whores drooling lies as they fellate the Man.

The grand inquisitors of consensus reality have failed us. What we need now are voices from the margins. We need prophets speaking to us from beyond the pale. We need purveyors of Chaos Magick and Crazy Wisdom. The stories presented here are visions. Bizarre, phantasmagoric visions rendered in words. They’re testimonials of the sort rhymed by the Ancient Mariner. Readers will be tempted to dismiss them as mere lunatic ravings. That temptation should be resisted. Judgement should be reserved. Some of these stories may be literally true. Others may serve to enlighten, to point us out of the nightmare of the present age. If that's good enough for me it ought to be good enough for you.