It was well past midnight when the cabbie picked up the last fare of his shift. He looked into the rear-view mirror at his passenger, asking for a destination. Helpless to do otherwise, I looked along with him. There, smiling in the back seat, sat myself with orange wolf-eyes. The Vingaal, using my hands, reached up and slit the cabbie’s throat with one of my grandmother’s kitchen knives. With my tongue he lapped up the spilling blood like a thirsty dog. Then I was free of the dead cabbie, hurling through the dark again.
I found myself looking through the eyes of a police officer, responding to a domestic abuse call in some less desirable neighborhood on the city’s south side. I watched his gloved hand knock on the door, hearing nothing. I knew who would answer it. As the door opened, the eyes looked back at me from my own face. I watched myself (the Vingaal) stab me (the cop) through the gut, wrenching the blade upward until it reached the heart. Behind me, the cop’s partner was going for his gun, but I knew the Vingaal’s knife would be faster. Then blackness.
Several more times I tried to find sanctuary behind the eyes of city dwellers. But every time the Vingaal came for me with his blood-smeared blade, his cruel smile that was a twisted perversion of my own, and his wicked eyes. Every time, someone new died. Then I realized what was really happening.
The Vingaal wanted me. Just as it had wanted my grandmother. She had cheated it by dying of natural causes. Wherever I went, it would follow me. By inhabiting anyone, I was condemning them to death at the hands of the immortal thing that wore my body.
So I stopped searching for eyes to look through. I couldn’t bear the thought of more deaths on my conscience. My intervention would only bring more slaughter. There was only one way to avoid the Vingaal now.
I floated in the empty space between souls, caught in that infinite darkness. I could neither see nor hear. Blackness cocooned my disembodied consciousness. It was either this, or dive behind someone else’s eyes, and so draw the Vingaal to take their life.
I know that I will be remembered as a murderer in the world of the living, and there is no way for me to tell anyone that it is not me killing all those people. That is not me walking in my body.
All I can do is float here in this ultimate dark, sinking ever deeper, drawing further and further away from the world of sunlight and living beings. I embrace the nothingness, wanting only to become a part of it. Let it dissolve the last bit of my guilt-wracked soul. Let there be an end.
I fall away from a string of violent deaths, into bottomless oblivion. The Vingaal will never follow me here…the lure of murder and pain is too powerful…it will not abandon its blood-play to descend into this nameless, formless void.
And yet, there is something here…a presence. More than one. They come to swim about me like shadows against darkness, invisible, but somehow I sense them.
They stare at me with burning, hungry eyes, like shapeless wolves.
There are millions of them. Millions of wicked things, one of whom is called Vingaal in another world so impossibly far away. They envy his freedom, they all want what he has.
I understand now that this non-place, this dark oblivion, is where they dwell. It is where they are born, dreaming of succulent living flesh.
They whisper to me. Telling me secrets.
Soon you will be one of us, they say.
I sink deeper, dissolving, the tattered threads of my mind spinning into the dark.
Now you are one of us.
Open your eyes…
The Man Who Murders Happiness
He drives a car just like yours, the one you polish and shine on Saturdays. Nondescript. You’d never notice him parked across the street.
His eyes are hidden behind a pair of square-rimmed glasses with mirror-bright panes. His hair is black and slick, heavy with Vitalis and cigarette smoke.
You’ll never hear him coming. You might see him step from the shadows. Or watch the butt-end of his cigarette hover like a firefly in the night fog. He could be anybody, but you know who he is the moment he sets his eyes on you.
In the alley outside Big Pete’s, two vagrants were torched to death last night. Six blocks away a police cordon surrounds the body of a girl who leaped from the roof of her apartment building. Somewhere in the big maze of post-war housing, someone is dying from a stab wound. Someone else waits patiently, watching the blood seep out.
The man shows up when you least expect him. You never realize it when you’re having a good time. That’s the danger. Suddenly your senses are more alive, your skin abuzz with electricity, your heart beating faster. Suddenly there’s hope in the world and a reason to keep on going. At this point most people ask themselves: “Is this happiness?”
Then they look up and the quiet man is standing there. The man and his gun, a black metal extension of his gloved fist. He’s the man who murders happiness, and he’s caught you red-handed. Blam. Your time is up. On to the next fool.
They say his job pays immensely well.
On Tuesdays the factory boys come pouring out of the industrial park, checks in hand. The dive bars and strip joints fill up for the weekend. Drink will flow and blood will spill, all the usual shit. Behind the truckstop an aging prostitute buys smack to feed her habit for another day. Her hungry baby wails as she slides the needle into her arm. A drunkard with a bloody face sleeps in the gutter outside the liquor store. There’s an amputated leg sticking out of the dumpster. It wears a thousand-dollar shoe.
The man drives by in his nondescript automobile, unmarked and unnoticed, just another motorist. Directions come through on the radio. He hates the way it interrupts the music, but it’s part of the job. Mostly he listens to rockabilly, sometimes jazz. But the music dies every time the hollow voice of authority blares from the speakers. Direct communication with the boys upstairs, the secret infrastructure behind the official infrastructure. The one that knows where all the happiness is, and the one tasked with eliminating it.
He usually gets a name, and the name of a town. That’s it. He drives, sometimes for days at a time. It’s all flat farm-country now, and not much else. He drinks hot black coffee at nameless diners and bottles of cold soda sprung from gas station automats.
They say he can actually feel it as he gets closer to his mark. He feels the happiness like a bloodhound scents his prey. Drives into town like a shadow, finds the right neighborhood, parks his car somewhere nobody will ever notice it. Nobody ever does.
He walks along a sidewalk littered with dead leaves. Autumn wind moves cool and damp through the lanes. Each little house is exactly like the one next to it, and so on, all the way to the end of the street. And all the other streets here are just like it. Tiny green lawns, covered porches, a single old oak or elm rising in the front yard. Old folks sat on porches nursing shotguns. Lazy dogs lay a their feet. Children dig worms from the ripe grass, collecting them in old jelly jars. The sounds of television cop show themes blare from open windows.