Exquisite Corpse (2 page)

I was never one to moralize, and how could I argue ethics now? There is no excuse for wanton, random murder. But I came to understand that I didn't need an excuse. I needed only a reason, and the terrible joy of the act was reason enough. I wanted to return to my art, to fulfill my obvious destiny. I wanted the rest of my life to do as I pleased, and I had no doubt what that would be. My hands itched for the blade, for the warmth of fresh blood, for the marble smoothness of flesh three days dead.

I decided to exercise my freedom of choice.

Before I began killing boys, and afterward when I couldn't find one or hadn't the energy to go looking, there was another
thing I would sometimes do. It began as a crude masturbation technique and ended very near mysticism. At the trial they called me
necrophiliac
without considering the ancient roots of the word, or its profound resonance. I was friend of the dead, lover of the dead. And I was my own first friend and lover.

It first happened when I was thirteen. I would lie on my back and relax my muscles slowly, limb by limb, fibre by fibre. I would imagine my organs turning to a bitter soup, my brain beginning to liquefy inside my skull. Sometimes I drew a razor across my chest and let the blood run down the sides of my ribcage and pool in the hollow of my belly. Sometimes I enhanced my natural pallor with blue-white makeup, and later a trace of purple here and there, my own artistic interpretation of lividity and gaseous stain. I tried to escape what seemed a hateful prison of flesh; to imagine myself outside my body was the only way I could love it.

After doing this for a time, I began to feel certain changes in my body. I never managed to make my spirit separate completely from my flesh. If I had, I probably wouldn't have come back. But I achieved a hovering state between consciousness and void, a state where my lungs seemed to stop pulling in air and my heart to cease beating. I could still sense a subliminal murmur of bodily function, but no pulse, no breath. I thought I could feel my skin loosening from the connective tissues, my eyes drying out behind blue-tinged lids, my molten core beginning to cool.

I did this in prison from time to time, without the makeup or razors of course, remembering some boy or other, imagining my rancid living body to be his dear dead flesh. It took me five years to realize that my talent might be put to another use, one that would allow me to someday hold a real corpse again.

I spent most of my time lying on my bunk. I breathed the heady, meaty smell of hundreds of men eating and sweating and pissing and shitting and fucking and living together in
cramped, dirty quarters, often with only one chance to shower each week. I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythms of my own body, the myriad paths of my blood, the sweat beading on my skin, the steady pull and release of my lungs, the soft electric hum of my brain and all its tributaries.

I wondered just how much I could slow it all down, how much of it I could stop entirely. And I wondered, if I was successful, whether I would be able to start it all up again. What I had in mind was much more advanced than my old game of playing dead. I would have to be dead enough to fool the guards, the nursing officer, and almost certainly a doctor. But I had read about Hindu fakirs who stopped their own hearts, who allowed themselves to be buried for weeks without oxygen. I knew it could be done. And I thought I could do it.

I halved the amount I ate, which had never been much in prison. On the outside I had been something of a gourmand. I often treated my boys to a restaurant meal before the evening's festivities, though the fare I chose was usually too exotic for them: lamb vindaloo with flaky nan bread, Chinese pork buns, jellied eels, stuffed grape leaves, Vietnamese emerald curry, Ethiopian steak tartare, and the like. Prison food was either gristly, starchy, or cabbagey. I had no trouble leaving half of it on the plate. I knew brains would serve me better than brawn anyway; they always had. And I felt an emaciated look would aid my task somehow.

(“Off your feed then, Compton?” was the only comment I ever received on this matter from the guard who delivered and removed my trays. I managed a listless nod, aware that he was trying to be friendly in his fashion. Some of the guards would try to talk to me now and then, presumably so they could go home and tell the wife and kiddies the Eternal Host had spoken to them today. But I didn't want him to remember this particular exchange.)

One day I deliberately gashed my forehead open on the bars. Telling the guard I'd tripped and banged my skull earned
me a trip to the infirmary. I was in handcuffs and leg irons the entire time, but I managed to have a look round as a garrulous nursing officer swabbed out my wound and stitched it up.

“Did you have Hummer in here?” I asked, referring to an A-wing prisoner who had died of heart failure the month before.

“Old Artie? No, we didn't know the cause of death, so they took him out in an ambulance. Autopsied him in Lower Slaughter and sent him home to his family, what was left of 'em. Artie was in for shooting his wife and son, you know, but there was a daughter away at school. I expect she was none too pleased to get Daddy back, eh?”

“What do they do with the organs after an autopsy?” I asked, partly so he wouldn't remember my asking only one question, partly out of honest curiosity.

“Toss 'em back in every which way and sew up the trench. Oh, and they save the brains for study. Murderers' brains in particular. I'll wager someone gets yours in a jar of spirits one day, Mr. Compton.”

“Perhaps,” I said. And perhaps someone would. But not a grinning sawbones in Lower Slaughter, not if I could help it.

The nursing officer took a vial of blood from my arm that day, though I didn't; know why. A week later I was hauled off to the infirmary again, where I learned something that would help me more than I could fathom.

“HIV-positive?” I asked the pale, sweaty nursing officer. “What does that mean?”

“Well, Mr. Compton, maybe nothing.” He pinched a slender pamphlet between the tips of his thumb and forefinger and gingerly passed it to me. I noticed that he was wearing rubber gloves. “But it means you could develop AIDS.”

I studied the pamphlet with interest, then looked back at the officer's chagrined face. The whites of his eyes were webbed with red, and he looked as if he'd forgotten to shave for a few days. “It says here the virus can be transmitted by
sexual contact or through the blood,” I noted. “You sewed up my cut last week. Wasn't that dangerous for you?”

“We … I don't …” He stared at his gloved fingers and shook his head, almost sobbing. “No one knows.”

I brought my shackled wrists up and coughed into my hand to hide a tiny wicked grin.

Back in my cell, I read the pamphlet twice and tried to remember what I had heard about this malady borne on the fluids of love. The odd news article had caught my interest back before I was arrested, but I'd never been a great follower of current events, and I hadn't seen a paper since my trial. There were some in the prison library, but I spent my precious hours there reading books. I didn't see how news of the world could help me any longer.

Even so, I remembered a mind-boggling assortment of reports: headlines shrilling
HOMO PLAGUE
, calm assertions that it was all a Labour Party conspiracy, hysterical speculations that anyone could catch it by almost any means. I'd managed to ascertain that gay men and intravenous drug users were at special risk. Though I wondered whether any of my boys might have been exposed, I never dreamed I could catch it myself. Most of my contact with them had occurred after their deaths, and I assumed any virus would have died with them. But now it looked as though viruses were hardier than boys.

Well, Andrew,
I told myself,
anyone who violates the sweet sanctity of a dead boy's ass cannot expect to get away cot-free. Now forget that you may become ill, for you are not ill now, and remember only that this virus in your blood makes people afraid of you. Any time someone is afraid of you, you can use it to your own advantage.

My supper tray arrived. I ate a sliver of boiled beef, a soggy leaf of cabbage, and a few crumbs of dry bread. Then I lay on my bunk, stared at the pale blue network of veins under the skin of my arm, and plotted my leave of Painswick.

·  ·  ·

Compton
…

I squeezed my eyes shut and turned my face toward the sound of the sea. The sunlight felt like liquid gold spilling over my cheeks, my chest, my skinny legs. My bare toes dug into the cool, rich soil of the bluff. I was ten years old, on holiday with my family in the Isle of Man.

Andrew Compton
…

The bright yellow gorse and dusky purple heather made a shifting wall, tall enough to hide a small boy lying on his back, refusing to move, refusing to answer. No one in the world knew where I was, or even who I was. I began to feel as if I might fall off the earth and into the boundless blue sky. I would drown in it like a sea, flailing my arms and legs, straining to breathe, sucking in crystalline lungfuls of cloud. Cloud would taste of mint drops, I imagined, and would instantly turn my insides to ice.

I decided I wouldn't mind falling into the sky. I tried to let go, to stop believing in gravity. But the earth held me fast, as if it wanted to pull me in.

Fine, I thought. [ would sink into the earth, I would release my body's nourishing juices into the roots of the heather, I would let the worms and beetles flake away the tender meat packed between my bones. But the earth would not take me either. I was trapped inside this vault of sky and earth and sea, separate from all of them, at one with nothing but my own wretched flesh.

COMP … TONNN
…

The syllables were nonsense, as meaningless as the insistent clang that accompanied them. There was a box made of stone, and inside that box was a slab of metal covered with a thin cloth pad, and on top of the pad was an inert thing made of bone encased in meat. I was attached to that thing by an invisible tether, a fragile umbilical cord of ectoplasm and habit.
All times and all places seemed a constantly moving river, and while the inert thing lay on the shore of that river, I was immersed in its waters. Only the fragile umbilical cord kept me from being swept away on the current. I could sense the cord stretching, the ephemeral tissue beginning to disintegrate.

I heard the hollow rattle of metal against stone and recognized it as the door of my cell opening. A firearm cocked, and footsteps rang on cold stone. “Compton, you try anything funny and I'll put a bullet in your head. What the fuckin' 'ell are you playing at?”

Another voice. “Shoot 'im in the arse, Arnie, an' see if he moves.” Raucous laughter, unechoed by the first guard. My muscles did not tense, my eyelids did not flutter. If the guard did shoot me, I wondered if I would feel the bullet tunnelling into my flesh.

Steel bracelets snapped round my wrists, a familiar sensation; then callused fingers checked my pulse. Something cold and smooth brushed my lips. The guard called Arnie spoke again, his voice hushed, almost awed.

“I think he's dead.”

“Compton dead? Can't be; he's like a cat, only he's got twenty-three lives.”

“Shut up, Blackie. He ain't breathin' an' I don't feel a pulse. We'd better ring the infirmary.”

When one is an habitual murderer, one tends also to become a good actor. Now I had begun to pull off the greatest acting job of my life: my death. But it didn't feel like acting.

A blinding succession of cut-frame, stop-action memories: a gurney thundering down a long cinder-block hallway, my body strapped down tight, my wrists still cuffed, dangerous enough to merit bondage even in death. A smell of medicine and mildew that I recognized as the prison infirmary. A tiny needling pain in the crook of my arm, in the sole of my foot. A cold circle of metal on my chest, on my stomach. A tug on my right eyelid, and a ray of light as sharp and thin as a wire.

I remember hearing the voice of the prison governor, a man whose pale cold stare always drilled through me as if his firstborn son had died at my hands. “Aren't you going to examine the body? We need to know what killed him before we can let him out of here.”

“Sorry, sir.” That was the nursing officer who'd sewn up my cut forehead, sounding more frightened than ever. “Andrew Compton recently tested HIV-positive. He may have died of an AIDS-related complication. I'm not qualified to examine him.”

“Well, bloody hell, people don't just up and die of AIDS one fine morning, do they? They get lesions and things, don't they?”

“I don't know, sir. He'd be the first case who's died here. Most of the HIV-positive prisoners have been transferred to Wormwood Scrubs, Compton would have gone there eventually too.”

My tethered soul gave a little shudder of delight. If I'd ended up in Wormwood Scrubs, I would have had little chance of getting out alive or dead. The prison there was the largest in England, with its own hospital and morgue.

“Well, we can't be messing about with communicable diseases here. He'll have to be autopsied in Lower Slaughter. Ring Dr. Masters to come sign his death certificate; they won't take him without one.”

I had seen Dr. Masters exactly five times, once each year for the required physical exam. Now here he was again. His hands were as gentle and dry as ever; his breath still smelt of wintergreen and something rotten deep inside. “Poor old fellow,” I heard him murmur, too low for anyone else to hear, as he took the key from the guard and uncuffed my wrists. He searched in vain for my pulse, removed my prison uniform, prodded my belly, rolled me over and slid the fragile glass stem of his thermometer into my cooling rectum. I loosed my tenuous grip on the world and let my soul go drifting beneath the black waves of oblivion.

“What killed him then?” was the last thing I heard, and Dr. Masters' soft voice answering, “I've really no idea.”