ANIMALS.

By John Skipp & Craig Spector.

For Buddy...

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

To Wayne Alexander and Lance Bogart, hard working and longtime attorney and accountant, with thanks for the years of effort, skill, and friendship; to Lexia Marie, for the fantastic cover art; and to David Niall Wilson and Crossroad Press,for bringing this into the 21st Century. Thank you all.

And to Marcello "Buddy" Martinez, wheresoever your spirit now roams. Miss you, love you, wish you were still here. This one's for you, bro...

--Craig Spector.

Thanks and apologies to all my friends and lovers from the old dark days. Also big thanks to booze, the blues, and bad choices based on just doin' what comes natural, without which this story would not have been necessary.

--John Skipp.

PART ONE.

November.

1.

There was something large and wet and dead in the middle of the road. "d.a.m.n," Syd muttered, easing up on the gas, slowing to a 35 mph crawl. He just thanked G.o.d he had the road to himself, no h.e.l.lbent crystal meth-crazed eighteen-wheelers on his tail. There wasn't much reaction time, coming around the bend at highway speed. Most animals learned the hard way, and this one had been no exception.

From seven yards away and closing, he tried to identify the remains. They glistened in the wash of his headlights, mashed and splayed across the center line of the curving mountain pa.s.s. A good-sized deer? A very large dog? It was impossible to say.

He'd gotten pretty good, over the years, at playing "Name That Roadkill"; you learned to check for size and coloration, the shape of the head and tail. But the head appeared to be gone entirely, and there was nothing in the mangled ma.s.s that vaguely resembled a tail. The big rigs that rumbled through these hills at night had really outdone themselves this time, he mused. By the first light of dawn, there was nothing left for him to go on. Just a big fur-covered speed b.u.mp, stuffed with mashed animal pate.

Syd grimaced, swerving mostly out of deference to the deceased. Driving over roadkill was a little too much like dancing on a grave. Not for the first time, he wondered just what in the h.e.l.l that thing could have been thinking: what force or impulse drove it from the sanctuary of the woods, to such a stupid and ignominious end?

His tires bit on the gravel on the narrow shoulder, and then it was behind him, leaving Syd once again alone with his thoughts and the slow unwind of the Mt. Haversford Road. Soft and lonely blues on the '67 Mustang's. .h.i.tachi stereo. Pale blue-white Camel smoke, unfiltered, curling around the dust motes in the air. It was just another blue-gray five forty-five in the ayem, cruising the two-lane blacktop ribbon that gift-wrapped this stiff-backed Pennsylvania ridge, the faint thrum of a hangover dulling his customary appreciation of the valley below.

Heat blasted out from the defroster vents; it wasn't quite enough. These days, Syd wore a battered flight jacket and long johns to help ward off the creeping autumn chill. His thick dark hair was tousled, his strong, ruddy face unshaven. He had a sleep potato nestled in the corner of one eye, and a coffee mug wedged between his bluejeaned thighs. The cup said s.h.i.t HAPPENS. He suspected poor Bambi-or Fido, or whatever-would concur.

He had no problem with the drive itself, forty-five minutes of clear sailing through familiar countryside. He loved these woods, these lonely roads, this panoramic overview. It was dragging his a.s.s out of bed every morning that was starting to pose some difficulties for him.

Ah, life, as his pal Jules liked to say. How it do go on.

Syd felt his emotional index take a dip toward depression. "Nuh-uh," he mumbled. "Not today." He leaned forward to crank up the tunes. Queen Bee's cover of "Every Night, About This Time" filled the car: a deep, rich, dark chocolate voice from heaven. Her band would be playing at Chameleon's tonight. It gave him the strength to go on.

Syd Jarrett was thirty-four years old-would be thirty-five, in less than a week-but the discontent was nothing new. He'd been born with an itch at the back of his brain that he'd never quite figured out just how to scratch. Not that he hadn't experimented around some. In fact, it was kind of a lifelong pursuit.

He remembered first cruising these same back roads as a sixteen-year-old, downing quarts of National Bohemian in the back of Jim Ilgenfritz's Pinto wagon with about eight other guys. You could barely get the bottle up to your lips in the sea of other people's lit cigarettes, bottles, faces, elbows, sweaty armpits, and backs. It was like some bizarre frat house shenanigan-one of those old-fashioned collegiate phone booths, stuffed with old-fashioned drunken collegiate a.s.sholes-only underage, undereducated, and set on burnin' wheels. A movable feast of fragrant, jostling, bellowing buffoons.

When Fritz brought the Pinto to Dead Man's Curve at a rattling, shimmying ninety per, what with everybody screaming, that would almost scratch the itch.

But all those great teenage excuses dried up with the end of his j.d. status, and 1975 marked his personal watershed point. That was the year Marc Pankowski sent poor sweet Kimberly Myers face-first through his windshield, just three days before their graduation. From that point on, teenage drinking and driving became something of a local community crusade . . . years before the advent of organizations like M.A.D.D. turned it into a national craze.

That summer was Syd's first experience with random checkpoints, spot searches, and mandatory curfews. He discovered very quickly that it was hard to scratch the itch when you were handcuffed in the backseat of a police cruiser.

(He remembered, also, the first time his old man had to come to pick him up at the township station. Chief Hoser had been frying Syd's a.s.s for the last two hours over half an ounce of Mexican and a bottle of Bali Hai: without a doubt the worst wine in human history, the Hawaiian Punch of intoxicants. The cold blue-gray of his father's eyes had notched him like steel in that moment.

Marked him for life. "Get ready for a world of s.h.i.t," his old man had said. And then taken him home . . . ) Syd sighed. That was almost half his life ago. Which, when he stopped to think about it, really kinda sucked. He didn't think he looked that old-he sure as h.e.l.l didn't feel that old-and hoped to G.o.d he never would.

But, d.a.m.n, did he ever feel tired sometimes.

As in, maybe, tired of being alone . . .

And that, of course, made him think about Karen, which was no way at all to start your day. Just the thought of her now had the magic power to vacuum-pack every last speck of his joy. Like striking a match in deepest s.p.a.ce, or picking a freshly crusted scab. Her effect on him was instantaneous. All he had to do was imagine her face.

Not that he felt the need to flagellate himself, whip up a little pity party of one. He'd had a year, since the breakup, to acquire some perspective. In his more depressive moments-which he'd learned to cope with pretty well, though they still came around with oppressive frequency-well, sure: it seemed like everything Syd had ever wanted out of life, or ever tried to hang on to, was either mortally wounded or already dead; and, yeah, now that you mentioned it, everything he'd hoped to maybe change in this life was hanging on emphatically, determined to outlast him. No matter how badly he wanted it.

No matter how hard he tried.

He had failed to hold his marriage together. He had failed to stave off financial disaster. Despite his deep and abiding love of music, he would never have a singing voice to rival Jim Nabors, much less Cab Calloway, or even Root Boy Slim. And he couldn't get out of-nor do anything to save-this nearly dead and clearly decomposing one-horse town.

Not to mention the fact that he wasn't getting any younger.

And that he was so awfully G.o.dd.a.m.ned tired of being alone. . . .

"Whoa!" He caught himself, psychically teetering at the brink. "No no no no!" If he let himself go, it was a long way down; that much, he knew from painful experience. The steep cliff to his right, overlooking the valley, wasn't any more precarious for all its physicality. At least it came with its own guardrail.

Depression didn't have one; and what was even scarier, depression came on like your best drinkin' buddy and oldest, dearest friend-the only one who really knew you, would tell you the honest truth about yourself. Indeed, whenever Syd got the urge to anthropomorphize, for clarity's sake, he always pictured the character of Depression as his ol' pal: the legendary Marc Pankowski.

In high school, Marc had been Mr. Popularity: handsome, glib, and well-to-do. His folks, in fact, were incredibly well-heeled: their fortunes built well before their time, in the steel industry's historical heyday. If Marc had any real disadvantages, they would have been his height (five-one), his laziness (in the upper percentiles), and his underlying conviction that other people were just plain inferior (which rated somewhere completely off the scale).

But n.o.body seemed to sweat much over those little details. Somehow, he always managed to swing pa.s.sing grades. And making friends had never been a real problem. He had, after all, so much to offer.

So by his junior year, Marc had pretty much decided that he didn't actually need a personality anymore. He had a real DeLorean-fresh off the a.s.sembly line, before the cocaine scandal-to go with his brand new driver's license. He also, ironically, had cultivated a real taste for c.o.ke and other extravagant drugs, so he always kept plenty on hand. All of which virtually guaranteed him not only a date on Sat.u.r.day night, but a pa.s.sel of big guys to back him up when his mouth got him in trouble.

Which began to happen with increasing frequency, yielding increasingly unpleasant results. Because the fact was that Marc's personality hadn't so much vanished as atrophied. It hadn't gone away. It had just gone bad.

As the sincerity vanished from his remaining social graces-and as the stories of his behavior began to spread-the nature of his popularity changed as well. People getting date-raped or beaten up at parties didn't sit real well with a lot of his peer group. And the fact that he never got nailed for any of it only heaped injustice on the growing pile of resentment that many were feeling toward him.

When Marc totaled his DeLorean late one night, he had three of his buddies along for the ride. All three ended up in the emergency room at Montgomery Hospital, although only one, Baxter Calley, actually made it onto the critical list. Baxter had been a pretty okay fellow, when he wasn't so c.o.ked he could barely speak; but the f.u.c.ked-up, goggle-eyed brain damage case that crutched home to the Calley clan five months later had more st.i.tches in him than a major league baseball. And the headaches that came with that plate in his head made his new personality somewhat less than okay.

Marc, of course, emerged from the wreckage utterly unscathed. A couple of scratches. That was it. And with his family keeping any whiff of scandal out of the papers, it was almost as if the whole thing had never happened.

Except for the fact that everyone knew: at least everyone in school, and that was more than enough. The worm had turned, as did most of his friends, including the tough guys who had paid out his slack in the past. Suddenly, Marc was one majorly ostracized, roundly vilified, extremely unpopular little high school student.

Enter poor sweet Kimberly Myers.

n.o.body knew exactly what he'd said to her, or what secret resources of guile and persuasion he'd employed on his own behalf. But within the month, Marc Pankowski had scored perhaps the most impressive young slice of womanhood in the entire senior cla.s.s. Kimberly wasn't the cla.s.s valedictorian, or the head of the cheerleading squad; but she was both athletic and cerebral-was, in fact, both a cheerleader and an honor student-in addition to being friendly, cheerful, thrifty, brave, and genuinely drop-dead gorgeous. Syd himself had almost gone out with her once-which was to say, he'd almost mustered up the nerve to even ask her-and he didn't know a single guy who didn't have at least a king-sized crush on that girl.

Now, seemingly overnight, Kim Myers had become the official spokesperson for Marc Pankowski. He was totally, tragically misunderstood, she told everyone who would listen. Since the accident, he had really changed. He was so sorry about what had happened. And all he wanted was a chance to prove that he was really a decent person underneath.

That he was-ultimately-a victim, too.

In lesser hands, the story would have sunk like a stone. But Kimberly had the courage of her convictions. She'd fallen in love with him, after all; and she certainly was no fool. So public opinion was begrudgingly swayed; and Marc, for his part, played the role of the sad-eyed penitent for all it was worth.

That lasted for about a month. By that time, the public relations battle had been won; and with Kim still vouching for him, his old slack was back as well. It didn't take long to restore the same uneasy balance he'd held before: buying allegiance with good drugs and money, fooling most of the people at least part of the time.

Right up until that fateful night-three days before graduation-when Marc missed a critical curve on Route 79 and spun his brand new Trans Am into a violent three-sixty, which terminated abruptly upon slamming into a utility pole at almost seventy miles per hour.

Once again, there'd been three other pa.s.sengers.

Once again, Marc got away clean: a couple of bruises, a broken rib.

But this time, poor sweet Kimberly Myers had been keeping the death seat nice and warm. And when her face had exploded through the Trans Am's windshield-

launching a hailstorm of glistening, red-tinged safety gla.s.s cubes and white, jagged bone-there were not enough sutures and skull plates in the world to put it all back together.

This time, his parents couldn't keep it out of the papers. And this time, there was no one left to argue his case. In the resulting typhoon of negative publicity, Marc Pankowski learned what it was like for a man to be despised in his own lifetime. On top of that, he was essentially disowned: cut off with nothing but a pittance, and no real hope of coming back.

But that was not the worst of it.

The worst of it was this: Marc Pankowski was still around. Not dead. Not missing. Not halfway around the world, bravely trying to start his life over again. Sure, he'd tried to leave once, heading out for Colorado with some vague idea of "getting into ma.s.sage"; but the sheer gravitational pull of his crime had him back in town in less than a fortnight.

He hung out at Chameleon's now, at least three nights a week, nodding his head in time to the music and scrounging up drinks as best he could. His once-handsome features were the worse for the wear, done in by hair loss, drug use, and soul-rot. His face had grown longer, his dark eyes more beady. All those little yellow teeth had just completed the effect.

Syd had seen it a million times. To paraphrase ol' Honest Abe, the Great Emanc.i.p.ator: once a man reaches thirty-five, he's responsible for all of the lines on his face. As the layers of youthful resiliency and innocence got worn away by time, the outer face was slowly carved into an image that mirrored the inner life.

The older Marc got, the more he looked like a weasel.

Living proof, to Syd, that there was indeed a G.o.d.

And every so often, if you hung out in bars as much as Syd did, Marc would try to come up and talk to you. But only-and this was the key point-if he saw that you were down. Like a moth to the flame of sorrow, like a bat in a lightless cave, he could single you out from across the room. He was tuned to the frequency.

First, he'd happen to pa.s.s you, on his way to the bathroom, and he'd ask you how you were doing. If that went over-if you gave him anything more than an absent wave that distinctly said leave me alone-he would seize the opportunity to lever a way in. His favorite jimmy was the phrase "I know what you mean." It was a multipurpose tool.

If you said, for example, "fine"-nothing else; no "thanks" or "how 'bout yourself?"; simply "fine"-but there was the tiniest trace of sadness, or courage, or mock cheerfulness somewhere buried in your tone, Marc would stop for a second. c.o.c.k his head knowingly. Then look straight into your eyes and say, "I know what you mean."

On the way back from the bathroom, he would smile as he pa.s.sed your table. That would sort of guarantee that you'd continue to be aware of him. When he got to his seat, he would look at you, to make sure that you knew where he was sitting. If you were looking, he'd nod and smile. If you weren't, he'd bide his time.

About fifteen to twenty minutes later, Marc would swing by your table again. This time, he'd employ the ever-popular "Band Gambit": a time-tested conversational ploy. If it looked like you were into the music, he'd say, "Band's really smokin' tonight!" If it looked like you really weren't into the music, he'd say, "Band really sucks!" If you took the bait, he was in. All he needed was one little opening.

If that didn't work, on his way back from the bathroom, he would ask you if you needed something from the bar. He was on his way there anyway, it wasn't a problem. Again, he would nail you with that understanding look.

And suddenly you'd realize, once and for all, that this guy was attuned to your unhappiness. He knew what it was like. And he was only trying to help, to help you through it, whatever gets you thru the night.

And at that point, it would dawn on you that THIS MIGHT JUST BE THE GUY to commiserate with on the nature of your immediate personal pain.

This was Marc Pankowski's hope.

It was, in fact, his one last driving ambition.

Because Marc was a psychic scavenger, and he fed off your despair. He could only get close to you when you were weak; and so he would encourage that weakness, urging you to open yourself to him under the guise of warm supportiveness. In the process, he would naturally pick up the first round; and if you were buying, he'd be happy to drink with you all night. Urging you to get it all off your chest. Unload all your secret desires and shames. Unburden yourself of the pain of aloneness.

I know exactly what you mean.

And if you let him follow you home, either to crash on your couch or to sleep in your bed-a mistake more than one lonely woman had made-he would be there the next day. And the day after that. He would hang around as long as you let him, drop in when you least expected, call you at work, wake you up at night, sit behind you at the movies and corral you in the bar until you finally just told him to GET THE f.u.c.k OUT OF YOUR LIFE. . .

To Syd, depression was an awful lot like that.

There was a gust of frigid wind. It buffeted the car, bit through the cracked window vent, sliced through the heat blasting from his defrosters. Syd realized that he'd been driving on automatic pilot for G.o.d only knew how long, letting his mind wander while his body drove to work.

He checked his speed. It had dipped down to forty.

He looked at his watch. Five fifty-five.

s.h.i.t.

The road ahead curved down and to the right, as the steep ravines gave way to a thickly wooded descent. It was the homestretch: punch it a little, and he might still have a job when he got there. He downshifted and pressed on the gas, heading into the curve . . .

. . . and that was when the doe appeared, in a blur of frenzied motion: haunches dark and glistening, eyes wild as it closed on the side of the road. For one panicked, frozen moment, it balked at the sight of the Mustang. Syd's foot instinctively jumped from the gas to the brakes.

Then he thought he saw something else emerge from the woods, something huge, and the deer darted desperately into the road. Syd's heart ballooned. He tried to swerve clear. The doe went wump against the pa.s.senger side, then off. Syd ratcheted the wheel, staring into the rearview mirror, swinging wide as he rounded the curve.

And right into the path of an oncoming truck.

"s.h.i.t!" he barked, knuckles white against the wheel. The truck was an ancient flatbed, twenty feet away and closing on the steep upgrade. He slammed on the brakes and countersteered, seesawing the wheel to the right. Ten feet. The car started to fishtail. Five feet. His heart constricted like piano wire. And there was no time.

Four. As he veered toward the shoulder.

Three. And the guardrail loomed huge in his eyes.