Mr. Creator by Joe McKinney

Originally published in The Sound of Horror (Magus Press, 2007)

“Well,” said Miles Fesler, my new landlord, “this is it. Fifty dollars a month. Just like we discussed.”

He was an obscenely fat, grizzled man in his late fifties with a horse-like face and eyes that reminded me of jaundice, a sickly yellow. We’d walked up three flights of stairs to get to the apartment and it’d left him winded. He wheezed wetly while he talked.

I glanced around at my new accommodations and sighed. The room was a depressingly small box with two yellowed windows on the north wall. I went over to them and looked out at Cattleman’s Square, a rectangular field of poorly manicured grass in the midst of moldering urban decay and poverty that gave the area its name. Tenement buildings shouldered up against the Square on three sides, and I could hear the delighted screams of children, squawking mothers, and the not so distant traffic noises of the city at twilight.

The San Antonio skyline loomed beyond the tenements, and the sky was a charcoal smear of black, foul smog against a rust-colored sunset. It was strangely beautiful, not without a certain romantic charm, but as I turned back to the apartment I had to admit that there was little romance to poverty when seen from close up. The wood floor was badly scuffed, the plaster on the walls was flaking off in great leprous chunks, and there were several suspicious stains. A fine patina of dust covered everything and a large brown cockroach stared up at me brazenly from a corner near the back wall. The only light came from a naked bulb hanging by a string in the center of the room.

“There’s no bathroom,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the lingering odor of mold that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

Fesler wiped the sweat from the back of his hairy neck with a gray snot rag. “Yeah,” he said, still wheezing. “The best thing for that is a bucket.”

I gawked at him. “A bucket?”

He nodded without a trace of apology. “That’s what the other tenants do. I own the hardware store down on the first floor. If you want I can sell you one.”

I studied the man, trying to find some indication that he was joking, but apparently he wasn’t.

“You are getting the place cheap,” he said.

Yeah, cheap, I thought. I had exactly $371.14 in my pocket, which in my estimation made the word cheap dangerously suggestive.

But I didn’t have any other choice. I’d thoroughly wrecked a marriage, lost a job, and alienated my two teenage sons. This was rock bottom, and it was either build myself back up from here or die in the dust with the roaches.

And I still had a little will to live.

I put my painting supplies down in the middle of the room, and with the air of a man accepting a lengthy prison sentence, said, “Fine. I’ll take it.”

Fesler nodded. I don’t think he doubted I’d say anything else.

“Are my neighbors quiet?” I said. “I like quiet.”

“You’ve only got the one on this floor,” he said. “His name’s Wesley Suffles. Good man. Folks around the Square think the world of him.”

Fesler suddenly smiled brightly, an unsettling, black-toothed gesture that made my stomach turn. “Say, I bet the two of you’ll get on like a house on fire. He’s a writer. Same as you.”

“I’m a painter,” I said patiently. “I do portraits mostly.”

“Even better,” he said. He clapped his hands together and waddled toward the door. “Rent’s due first of the month. Come see me about the bucket if that’s what you decide to do.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

Two hours later, after the sun went down and the sounds of playing children were gone from the Square, I went down to Fesler’s hardware store and did just that. I also bought an ice chest–another of his recommendations. With two dollars worth of ice I could keep my food in it for four or five days without rotting.

On the way back from the convenience store on the corner, as I was climbing the stairs up to the third landing, I met my neighbor, Wesley Suffles.

I recalled Fesler’s words, that everybody in the Square thought the world of Suffles, though as I stared up at him, I strained at the hyperbole. He was at the top of the stairs, completely naked save for his gym socks, waving a bottle of tequila around with one hand and a ball point pen with the other, like some parody of a concert conductor.

He was so fat his gut, which was covered by coarse gray hair, hung over his genitalia, and for a moment I wondered if they even existed. His skin, where it wasn’t hairy, was a pale road map of blue veins, and his doughy face was lit red with intoxication.

“Hello,” I said, because nothing else seemed to answer to the situation.

Suffles blinked at me.

“I’m your new neighbor across the hall,” I said.

“I know who you are,” he said. His words were wet and slurred, like his tongue was too big for his mouth. “You’re William Barton.”

“That’s right. I guess Mr. Fesler told you–”

“What are you doing here?”

I tried to smile. “Excuse me?”

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. He looked confused, angry. “What are you doing here? Here? You’re supposed to be in St. Louis murdering your wife.”

The smile drained from my face and a tight-lipped scowl took its place. I was from St. Louis. I’d hated my wife so much I’d had to get away from her. And, yes, I’d even had fantasies about killing her. But of course I’d told no one about that. No one knew me in San Antonio. I was just a name on a lease in a rattrap apartment.

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“That’s true,” Suffles said, swaying dangerously on the top stair. “But you haven’t told me what you’re doing here. How can you be here?”

“We’ll talk another time,” I said stiffly. “When you’re more…put together.”

I walked up the stairs, past Suffles, who stared after me, seemingly unaware of his own nakedness.

I glanced back at him as I fumbled the key into the lock and then hurriedly went inside. With my back to the door, I listened for movement out on the landing, praying for the man to go away.

When at last he wandered off, I went to my painting supplies and set up a canvas. I had brought a mirror with me, but it had cracked on the bus ride down from St. Louis, so that now it looked like a car’s windshield that’s been hit with a brick.

Still, I thought, as I looked into my shattered reflection, it suits me.

And I began my first painting, a self-portrait.

—

I spent the next two weeks working on my sketchbook. Facial studies, mostly. I couldn’t afford a live model, so I had to settle for taking mental snapshots of the people I met in the Square. Whenever I found an interesting subject, I’d quickly transfer his or her likeness to the sketchbook and then over the next few days I’d rework the original likeness into a portrait worth putting onto a canvas. It was a slow process, but I had plenty of time on my hands.

I enjoyed my work. For the first time in years, I was actually enjoying myself, and I can’t tell you how liberating that felt. I was…well, I was free. I can’t think of another way to describe it. It was glorious.

My only complaint was the shoddy quality of my surroundings. Oh, I don’t mean the dirtiness of it. No, that I expected, especially considering what I was paying for it. What got to me was the constant noise I heard from Wesley Suffles’ apartment. It was a scratching noise, a steady, unnaturally loud, pen on paper scratching. You wouldn’t think I’d be able to hear something like that through the wall — from a completely different apartment at that — but there it was just the same.

Constant.

Steady.

Scratch scratch scratch.

In the beginning, I dismissed it as an echo of my frayed nerves. So many people had picked and pulled on me for so many years, everybody wanting something, some quick piece of my time, that I almost felt I had ceased to exist. Me time had disappeared from my life.

Then I thought, Brain tumor. People with brain tumors hallucinate, don’t they? See birds at the foot of their bed. Think the carpet they’re walking on is beach sand.

And then I thought, Well, if it is a brain tumor, I guess I’m screwed. I don’t have the money to do anything about it anyway, so just go on with life such as it is.

Ignore the scratching if you can.

And so I threw myself into my painting, and to my surprise, I enjoyed myself.

One day, as I was wandering the Square, I happened to see a young mother and her two sons. The older boy looked about five, the younger maybe three. The mother was busily shepherding the boys down the front stairs of one of the tenements, telling them over and over again that they’d miss it if they didn’t hurry.

Though I was intrigued by what it was, I was more interested in their faces. The young woman had a black eye, the left one. Her shiny black hair was thick, but crudely styled, and fell about her face in clumps. She wasn’t especially slender, but she was attractive, despite the black eye and the beleaguered look of worry that haunted her features.

It didn’t seem to me that she was running from someone, as the black eye might have otherwise suggested, but rather that she was worried about some other, less tangible, problem. Perhaps it was a lack of money, I thought. Maybe there was another child on the way. Either one, or neither one, was a possibility. She was just one of those people who beg to be explored, layer by layer.

But the thing that thrilled me most, as an artist, was the contrast between her perpetual worry and world-weariness on the one hand and the look of wide-eyed naive wonder on her children’s faces. The contrast was striking, even profound.

I wanted very much to paint them, and so I followed them.

I soon found out what it was. A parade was marching down Commerce Street, one of the major downtown thoroughfares just a few blocks from the Square.

The boys chattered happily. Their mother fretted over them, trying her best to keep her brood clutched around the hem of her skirt. They took up a spot on a street corner and the boys climbed up on a green metal lamp post so they could have a better look.

From where I sat on a bus stop bench across the street I had a perfect view of them, and I began to draw.

Soon the parade arrived; pretty girls in prom dresses waving to the crowd from the rumbleseats of old-timey cars; marching bands; Shriners in go-carts; black men on horseback dressed up as Buffalo Soldiers. The boys were delighted, and I drew at a frantic pace, trying to put it all down on paper.

The crowd pressed closer to the street, their mouths open and a gasp on their lips as a man on a ten foot high unicycle rode by, juggling flaming torches.

Somebody pressed up against me, and his thigh bumped my elbow, sending my pencil scratching across the page where I’d nearly finished drawing the mother’s face.

“Hey,” I said. “Watch it, buddy.”

But when the man looked down at me, my mouth went dry and I couldn’t breath.

He had no face, no features whatsoever.

I gasped for air and stumbled to my feet. The man seemed unaffected by my fear, oblivious to it, and as my mouth worked desperately to say something he turned away and melted back into the crowd.

Only then did I notice the other people in the crowd, for all of them were strangely out of focus. The people nearest me had dark pits for eyes and an unformed hump for a nose and a red slash for a mouth, but beyond them, in the ranks of spectators in the background, the faces became less and less distinct, the features
disappearing entirely. It was like looking at a photograph of a large crowd, a seething mass of humanity that became blurrier as the perspective lengthened. To my horror, I realized I was surrounded by the indistinguishable props that made up that photograph.

Panic overwhelmed me.

I think I screamed.

I dropped my sketchbook on the sidewalk and stumbled out into the street and right into the middle of the trumpet section of a marching band.

Their music became a jumble of ruined notes, and cries of protest mixed with jeers of laughter rose up from the crowd. I couldn’t process any of that, though. I was too frightened, too rattled, to register the confusion I was creating.

Suddenly a pair of hands grasped me roughly by my collar and spun me around. I found myself facing a barrel-chested policeman, whose great bulk was easy enough to see, but whose face was a blurred shifting of half-discernable features.

“What the hell’s your problem?” he demanded. His voice sounded like a tape cassette being eaten by a tape player.

I fumbled for words, but couldn’t say them.

“Are you drunk?” he croaked.

“No,” I managed. I couldn’t meet his melting eyes. His mouth drifted from one side of his chin to the other.

He picked me up and dragged me through the crowd, which spread open for us like a zipper.

The next thing I knew, I was being thrown into a garbage heap.

“Get lost,” the garble-voiced policeman said. “I see you again, I’ll take your ass to jail.”

I dragged my aching body into an alley and climbed to my feet. Blinded by confusion and half mad with fear, I ran back to the Square and headed up the stairs for the safety of my apartment.

And I heard the scratching again. It grew louder the closer I got to third floor landing. It seemed to come from Suffles’ apartment and from inside my head at the same time. I don’t really know how to describe it, except to say that it was weird, and wrong, and so persistent and emotionally painful that it almost made me cry.

Wesley Suffles came out of his apartment as I was climbing the last few stairs to
the third floor landing.

“Hello,” he said happily. He was fully clothed, and he appeared to be sober.

“Hello,” I answered, trying to sound cool, but still with desperation in my voice, and probably in my eyes. Standing there, I was aware of the garbage smell that still lingered on my clothes.

Perhaps he thought I was afraid of him, because his voice was oddly gentle, almost parental.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about the other night. I realize now that I must have seemed out of my head.”

“Perfectly all right,” I said, fumbling through my pockets for my keys.

All I wanted to do was get inside and forget about the weirdness I’d seen at the parade, but he wouldn’t let me go that easily.

He followed me to my door and said, “It’s just that it caught me by surprise, you know? Seeing you here?”

Something about the way he said it unsettled me. Was I supposed to know him or something?

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Well, surely you can imagine my surprise. It’s not the kind of thing that happens every day, you know. I mean, wouldn’t it rattle you if the subject of one of your paintings suddenly stepped off the canvas and struck up a conversation with you?”

The man must sniff glue, I thought.

“Mr. Suffles,” I said, “what in the world are you talking about?”

“You really don’t know?” he said, his expression incredulous. He tried to smile.

“Know what?”

“Who you are, man! Who I am!”

“I think,” I said, “that we ought to say good day.”

I threw the bolt with my key.

“Please don’t go,” he said. “This must scare you horribly. I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to scare you.”

“What is it you think scares me, Mr. Suffles?”

“Why, meeting me, of course. The man who created you. The man who wrote you into being.”

I blinked. In my mind, I saw Suffles’ status drop from alarmingly insane to pitiable and foolish.

“I’m turning in for a nap,” I said.

“I know you,” Suffles said urgently, desperate that I believe him. “I know you better than any one. Better even than you know yourself.”

It sounded like a challenge.

“You do, eh? What do you think you know, Mr. Suffles?”

“Okay,” he said, smiling, eyes darting back and forth, like he was trying to find his place in a script only he could read. “Okay. Remember that skinny little Hispanic girl in your office back in St. Louis?” He winked at me obscenely. “The one with the killer ass? You remember her, don’t you? She wore that tight little yellow skirt her first day. Her little black thong was showing over the top of her skirt every time she sat down. After you saw that you went back to your office and spent the rest of the day with your hand in your pocket, rubbing your cock. Remember that?

“And remember that day you came home and your wife told you she was pregnant with your oldest boy? How about that one, eh? You ran out of the house and went to that little bar with the palm trees out front. The front looked like a wrecked boat. Remember that? You got drunk and tried to think of a way to tell her to get an abortion because you didn’t think you could handle it and you hated yourself because of how weak you thought you were. Remember staying out all night? Remember waking up in your car the next morning? The jerk in the car behind you blowin’ his horn ‘cause the light had changed and you didn’t know it? And remember how–”

“Stop it!” I yelled. The horror I had felt at the parade was flooding back into me, harder than ever. “Stop it. You don’t know me.”

“William, think about it,” he said. “Don’t I know you? Aren’t you asking yourself how I know what I know right now?”

“You’re insane,” I said, though at that moment I felt much less sure of my own grip on reality than of his. What he was saying…it was impossible. But it was all true. Every word of it. All those things had really happened.

“You are the finest character I’ve ever written,” he said. “I’ve written thousands of them, William. I filled Cattleman’s Square with their stories, their lives. But of all the characters, you William, you are my favorite.”

“You mean…all of this?” I said, and waved my hand vaguely in the air. “All of this is in your head?”

I felt seasick.

“That’s right,” he said, nodding gravely. “You understand.”

“No,” I said.

He was completely unperturbed by my denial.

“I did something for you I’ve never done before or since, William. I gave you free will. I gave you the greatest gift I had to give.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“Don’t you see, William?” he said. He took a few steps towards me, his hand stretched out before him lovingly, like a father to a son. “That’s why I was surprised to see you here. I wrote a story for you, what I thought would be your last. But you were more than that. You demanded to be more. You jumped right off the page.”

I shook my head desperately, denial pulsing in me like a wild heartbeat.

“You’re more than I gave you credit for,” Suffles said. “It restored me, waking up to that realization. And I’m writing more stories for you now too.” He was breathless, excited. “I’ve heard you’ve taken up painting. That makes me happy. I’ve written success into your story now. Just you wait. Good things are gonna start happening for you.”

I was shaking with rage, with denial, with fear. I tried to speak but couldn’t. My mouth was working like I was chewing gum, and I still couldn’t answer.

Suffles put out his hand again, inviting me to take it.

God help me, I actually came close to doing it.

But I didn’t. Instead, I stared at his offered hand, then closed my eyes. Without saying another word I turned the doorknob to my apartment and went inside.

—

Late the next evening, I was sitting on the floor in the corner of my apartment, my hands over my ears, trying to shut out the noise of that pen scratching.

There was a knock at my door. It was a spindly, skinny, white-haired little old woman in her early seventies. She was dressed all in purple–purple slacks, purple short-waisted sport coat, a light purple silk blouse with frills down the front. Her low-heeled shoes were purple. She even had webs of purple veins showing through the skin on the backs of her hands.

She held my sketchbook under her arm.

“William Barton?” she asked uncertainly.

“Yes?”

She held the sketchbook out to me with both hands. “I believe this is yours,” she said.

I looked at it, then took it from her. “Thanks.”

She smiled, but didn’t leave. We stared at each other.

“Um,” she said.

“Yes?”

“This is rather awkward. I found that in the street. After the parade?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I hope you don’t take offense, Mr. Barton, but I looked through your work.”

“Oh?”

“They’re very good,” she added abruptly.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“I don’t suppose,” she said, wringing her hands with obvious unease, “that you’re a painter?”

I told her that I was.

“My name is Gloria Hearns,” she said. “By any chance, have you ever heard of me?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Hearns,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Gloria, please,” she said. She handed me her card.

Gloria Hearns
Blue Star Art Gallery
414 Pioneer Way
San Antonio, Texas

“Blue Star?” I asked.

“That’s my gallery,” she said. “It’s the largest in South Texas.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled gracefully. “In a way, it’s lucky for both of us that I found your sketches.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Well,” she said, “I think we can help each other out.” She glanced around the landing with distaste. She was obviously not one who appreciated poverty. “May I come in?”

“Oh,” I said, remembering my manners. They’d sort of slipped out of daily usage with me. “Sure. Come in.”

I stepped aside and she came in, her face a mixture of horrified repugnance at the mess, which was considerable, and fascinated surprise at the few paintings she could see.

She went right for my self-portrait, the one of me in the shattered mirror.

“My God,” she said. “I knew it. I knew I was doing the right thing by coming here.”

She turned to me and said, “Mr. Barton, I just knew this was a good idea. How would you like to exhibit your paintings in my gallery? A small run at first, maybe ten paintings. But after that…” She spread her arms expressively.

I was speechless.

“I could even offer you an advance,” she said. “Would three thousand be okay? That would only be an advance, of course. Any of the paintings I see here could easily fetch three or four times that.”

I still had my hand on the door knob when she said that, and the door was still open. From across the landing I heard Suffles’ door open, and I happened to glance that way as I was closing the door.

Our eyes met, Suffles and mine.

He smiled, nodding enthusiastically. He even gave me a ridiculous thumbs up gesture. Right on! That a boy!

I had been on the verge of joy, but seeing Suffles, and seeing him give me that sign, brought back the weirdness of our last conversation, and my expression soured.

“Mr. Barton?” Gloria Hearns said. She looked concerned, like she was afraid she’d offended me or something.

“Three thousand is a very good rate for a new artist,” she said. “I assure you of that. With your talent, of course, and a show or two under your belt, you’ll soon be able to demand much more. And you keep the money you make from the sale of your exhibits. Minus twelve percent for the gallery, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, and closed the door.

Funny, how you can think volumes in only a moment. As I stood there, suddenly aware that I was holding my sketchbook, I thought back on everything Wesley Suffles had told me. I thought back on his ridiculous claim that he was my creator, my God, my Frankenstein, but rather than laugh, I had to fight an inward struggle to keep my knees from buckling.

Was it really possible? Surely not.

But yet, he’d never misspoken a single word. That time he told me that laundry list of things he knew about me, all of them were true, and there was absolutely no way that anyone outside my own head could have known them all.

And there was my own strange behavior, the day the Greyhound bus I’d taken from St. Louis had stopped in San Antonio for a two hour layover. My ticket had been for Mexico. My intention was to lose myself on some Iguana-crowded beach and slowly self-destruct like a character in a Tennessee Williams play. But when I saw San Antonio, when I smelled its air and heard its sounds, something about it pulled at my gut like I was circling a black hole. I stepped off the bus, and with my head a twisted wreck of conflicting fears, I walked until I landed in Cattlemen’s Square. It was like coming home, and the feeling was so powerful, so undeniable, that I just stayed.

I also thought of the parade, and the melting faces in the crowd. They were unfinished somehow, not completely realized, and that’s when it hit me. All of Cattlemen’s Square was a figment of Wesley Suffles’ imagination. When I looked out my window, what I saw was a picture of his mind. Everything there was his creation, and as such, had only the depth, the texture, the history, that he had written for it. Those faces in the crowd were incomplete, not because there was some defect on their part, but because they were what Suffles needed for his fiction, a crowd, and nothing more.

It all fit, and I couldn’t deny it.

And there was that sound, the constant scratching of his pen on paper. I thought of the refrain from Poe’s masterpiece, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It’s the beating of his hideous heart. That’s what it is, the beating of his hideous heart.

“Mr. Barton?” Gloria Hearns said, her voice betraying an edge of fear. Could she see the hatred in my eyes, I wondered.

“Ms. Hearns,” I said, and laughed out loud when she straightened herself up and tried to look like she hadn’t just seen the devil in my eyes. “Ms. Hearns, who sent you here?”

Her mouth, her old woman lips, trembled. “What do you mean?”

“You know you’re a pawn, don’t you?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said indignantly. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“How much background did he write for you, Ms. Hearns? I’ve always heard an author should know more about his characters than he puts on the page. How deep did he go with you?”

I started to advance on her, and she, in sudden terror, backed up against the wall.

“Where did you go to high school, Ms. Hearns?”

“What? Mr. Barton, what–”

“Who was the first boy you kissed? What was his name?”

“I–”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Mr. Barton, please.”

I had her there, I knew it. Had her figured out.

One of my paintbrushes was on the table next to the door, a heavy gauge #6 with a thick wooden handle, and I picked it up like a knife.

“You know what really pisses me off?” I asked her.

She shook her head. Her whole body shook.

“Not so much that my history has been rendered meaningless. That’s not what pisses me off. I mean, hell, I gave that up voluntarily. No, what really pisses me off is that my future has been taken from me too.”

I smiled at her, wickedly.

“I mean, look at it from my perspective. How can I be truly successful if I don’t earn it? You see what I mean?”

She shook her head again, violently now.

“No,” I said. “Of course you don’t. You don’t need that understanding to function in the role he made for you. The problem is though, I’ve got that understanding. I’ve got it up to my freakin’ ears. I know it’s not my talent that brought you here. It was him. He wrote you into my life.”

The poor thing looked like she was going to rattle herself to pieces.

“I don’t blame you, Ms. Hearns. Don’t think that. I know this isn’t your fault. You didn’t ask for this.”

I walked towards her and she put up her hands like she actually had a snowball’s chance of stopping me. It was sad in a way.

—

Several hours later, my apartment was dripping with her blood. The floor was covered, as were most of the walls. I even managed to get wet little chunky bits of her on the ceiling.

It was exhilarating, and when it was finally over, I fell back onto my butt and looked at my trembling hands.

Drunk with the joy that I was finally taking control of my circumstances, I threw open my door and walked out onto the landing like a man who has just been saved.

Wesley Suffles was coming up the stairs, a bag of groceries in his hands.

“William,” he said. He had that patronizing paternal smile on his face. But then he saw the blood on my hands. “William?”

He dropped his groceries and ran up the stairs. “William?” He grabbed my hands and turned them over in his while I laughed out loud.

Our eyes met.

He looked past me, through the open door to my apartment, and saw a glimpse of the scene inside.

He nearly puked.

“Oh my God,” he said, his hand cupped over his mouth. “William, what have you done?”

I laughed at him, and when he walked into my apartment, I laughed at his back.

He came back out to the landing and closed my door behind him. The effort he made to stay calm was impressive.

“William,” he said, pulling me away from the stairs. “My God, why did you do it? She was going to help you. She was going to make you a star.”

He took a moment to look over the railing, to make sure we weren’t overheard, and then said, “Okay, I can fix this. I can get you out of this. Let’s see, I’ll need a gangster. No, wait–Ah! I’ve got it. Come on.” He pulled me towards his apartment. “I’m going to write a story for you that’ll get you out of this.”

He opened his door and we went inside. The apartment was almost completely bare of furnishings. There was no dresser, no coffee table. His bed was an old, yellowed mattress in the corner with a moth-eaten blanket over it. The only other piece of furniture was a plain wooden desk and a plain wooden chair in the middle of the room.

Handwritten manuscripts were piled everywhere. In some places, you couldn’t even see the wall. There were mountains upon mountains of manila folders stuffed with loose leaf notebook paper, and every single page was crammed with a tight, surprisingly neat handwriting that contained all the lives of Cattleman’s Square.

I didn’t consciously look for my stories–at least not at first. Only after a few minutes of digging through the papers, listening to the steady scratching of Suffles’ black ballpoint pen on the pages at his desk, did I realize what I was looking for. Once I knew what I wanted though, my search became desperate.

Suffles’ apartment had two north-facing windows, just like mine, and they were open. A cool breeze drifted into the apartment, carrying with it the sound of a crowd gathering in the Square and the sound of workmen hastily hammering something together. But I ignored all that. I had a mission, a need to know the truth, and I dug for it until, at last, I found a pile of yellowed papers in a far corner, stacked waist-high from the floor.

My name was printed in bold letters on the top page, and it was with a hitch in my chest that I removed it.

My life was there, reduced to fiction. I read in horror as one by one the milestones of my life replayed on the page. Here was the time when I was eleven, when my older brother Russell drowned. Here was the first tit I ever cupped in my hand. It belonged to a fat, acne-scared girl who gave it to me during a game of spin the bottle. I found my first car; my first love; my first heartache; my sons; the death of my father; my mother’s stroke and subsequent senility; my wife; my divorce; my every glaring, ugly fault.

I sat on the floor and covered my face with my hands. “Why did I have to be like this?” I said.

The pen scratching stopped. “What did you say?”

“Why?” I asked him. “Why did I have to be this way?”

“William–”

“You gave me bad knees and bad eyesight and an ugly temper. You made me ugly and petty and worthless. You’re a mean, sadistic son of a bitch, you know that? You could have made me beautiful. You could have made me skinny. You could have made my sons respect me and my wife love me. But you didn’t do any of those things. You made me as mean and petty and weak as you are. Why? What possible reason could you have for being so cruel?”

“William,” he said, “stop it, please.”

But I didn’t want to stop it. I charged him, and when I put my hands on him, I began to flail with my fists until his nose was gushing blood and his lips were cracked open and pulpy, like smashed peaches.

He scrambled away from me in terror. His black ball point pen was on the desk and I took it up. I stabbed at him with it, and when he crossed his arms over his face in a futile attempt to block me, I nailed the pen through his hand.

He screamed, then moaned. It was a low, horrible sound so pregnant with pain it seemed to shake the walls. I stared at the wound, and at him, and when he turned and ran, I followed him.

I chased him down the stairs and into the hardware store on the ground floor. He turned then, his face that of a scared animal, and I beat him again. I punched and kicked him until I was too tired to swing my fists anymore, and then I sat down near the front counter and watched him as he crawled down the aisle with the hammers and nails.

Renewed anger washed over me, and I got up and followed him, picking up a hammer as I closed on him. “You can rewrite me, can’t you? You can start me over. Make me young?”

“No,” he said.

“No you can’t or no you won’t?”

“No,” he said. His hands were in the air, the pen still sticking through the right one.

I took a swing at him with the hammer and it sent him into a frenzied panic to get away. His arms spun like pinwheels, and he landed on spools of chain and barbed wire, fell to the ground, and got up again.

“Stop!” he screamed.

But I didn’t. I ran at him again, and he ran for the Square.

I stopped in the doorway.

There, in the middle of the Square, was a large crowd, and at the center of the crowd was a large wooden structure–a gallows.

Understanding hit me like a truck.

“Your story,” I said to him. “I thought you said you were going to write me out of trouble. Is this what you meant? You were going to have me hanged.”

“No,” he said. “This isn’t for you. It isn’t.”

You’re lying. I can see it in every crease in your face.

There was no point in prolonging what had to be done. With everyone watching in horrified silence, I stalked after Wesley Suffles, cornered him near the base of the gallows, and bludgeoned him to death with the hammer.

There were perhaps three hundred witnesses to my crime, and not a single one raised a hand to stop me. Not even when I dropped the hammer on the ground next to Suffles’ body. Not even when I pulled the ball point pen out of his hand. Not even when a black pall spread across the sky, blotting out the first delicate rays of the sunrise in the east and smothering the stars in the plum-colored sky.

Those idiots…they’ll never know why the sun won’t ever rise again, even though they were witnesses to the event. I pitied them for their ignorance, and I pitied myself because I knew the truth.

What a horrible, horrible thing it is to be free.

—

So here I sit, writing the final lines in this nasty little tale, making my own nasty little scratching noises.

After I went back inside and closed the metal accordion grill across the entrance to the building, I had to struggle with my mind for direction. Every decision was like pulling my feet out of mud. But at last I decided on this…this…what? A confession? A history? What can I call this?

I suppose, really, that it doesn’t matter. In a few moments I’ll be dead, and this thing, this whatever it is, will be all that’s left.

When I’m done with this, this thing that I’ve written with my creator’s ball point pen, I’ll stack the loose leaf pages that it’s written on and stash them under the loose floorboard in the corner of my apartment. But you know that, don’t you? If you’re reading this, you obviously found the loose board.

To you, whoever you are, please–

Ah! They’re through the accordion grill I pulled across the door to the hardware store. Only moments left now.

If you find this, please, know that I’m not insane. I’m not. I almost wrote You’ve got to believe me! but I figure, what’s the point? I’m past the point where that matters. At least from my perspective. Perhaps it will matter to others. It doesn’t to me.

Not anymore.

I merely wanted to silence the endless scratching of pen on paper, the beating of his hideous heart. But it seems that in the process of doing that, I’ve silenced my own hideous heart.