Laughing Man

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NOVELS:

The Strange Seed Series

STRANGE SEED

NURSERY TALE

THE CHILDREN OF THE ISLAND

THE PEOPLE OF THE DARK

The Biergarten Series

THE CHANGING

THE DEVOURING

GOODLOW'S GHOSTS

THE ASCENDING

SLEEPEASY

The Manhattan Ghost Story Series

THE WAITING ROOM

A SPIDER ON MY TONGUE

Standalone Novels

BOUNDARIES

NON FICTION:

THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO FLYING SAUCERS

UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

THE CHANGING – NARRATED BY ANDREW RANDALL

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J
ack Erthmun remembered being left alone in a cave when he was a child. He maintained that he was less than a year old when this happened, although everyone else in his large family told him that it was pure fantasy. Some of them even laughed, which Erthmun thought bordered on cruelty, because childhood memories were sacred, after all. Childhood itself was sacred. Adulthood wasn't. Adulthood was profane, violent, and perverse. Erthmun sometimes wondered why nature allowed human beings to grow beyond the purity of childhood.

He remembered that, as a child, he had owned pets. This was fantasy, too, according to the other members of his family. They reminded him that Erthmun's father had harbored no particular fondness for animals, and was—according to family legend—not above shooting stray cats and dogs that happened onto the family property.

The cave that Erthmun remembered was small and dark, and it smelled of newly mown grass. This memory was particularly strong for him, as memories of smells are for everyone. It haunted his nights and clouded his days, though not all of his nights, nor all of his days.

"Do you remember if you were alone in the cave?" his sister Lila once asked.

"Alone in the cave," Erthmun said; it was not a question. He was repeating what she had said.

"Yes," Lila said, and grinned.

"Yes," Erthmun said.

"You were?" Lila said, still smiling. "Alone in the cave, I mean."

"I was alone," Erthmun said. "Yes."

"You know, of course," she told him, "that this memory is something you've concocted to take the place of another memory. One that's probably even worse."

Erthmun nodded. "Even worse," he said.

"Jack, it's a widely accepted concept," Lila told him. She smiled again, though Erthmun could not imagine why she was doing so much smiling. She finished, "Manufactured memories to take the place of other memories. It's a widely accepted concept."

"A widely accepted concept," Erthmun said, and when she smiled yet again, he wanted suddenly to bash her head against a wall. The impulse came and went as quickly as a twitch; he found it very confusing—though it was far from the first time that such an impulse had come to him, in many situations—and he was ashamed of himself for it.

E
rthmun did not often see the other members of his family, though two of his sisters lived within an easy commute of Manhattan, and his mother lived in a comfortable Cape Cod in White Plains, also an easy commute. He got along with his sisters, and his mother, when he saw them on Christmas and Thanksgiving because, according to social convention, holidays are times when people should get along.

The man that Erthmun had known as his father died when Erthmun was five years old. This had been the impetus for his mother to pack up their belongings and move him and sisters out of their house on Four Mile Creek, in the Adirondacks (the house near which Erthmun was born). It was a move she had been wanting desperately to make for a long time, but one which Erthmun's authoritarian father had denied her because the house on Four Mile Creek was, as he put it, "safely removed from the muck and mire and moral decay of the cities."

Erthmun did not remember much about his father. He remembered only that there were many times that he saw himself in his mind's eye stealing into his parents' bedroom late at night, or stealing up behind his father while the man sprayed weed killer on his small, mannered garden, and reaching into the man's back and tearing his spine out. Then Erthmun saw himself running through the fields with the spine held high over his head, as if it were a great and dangerous snake and he had defeated it in battle.

Erthmun did not feel connected to his surviving sisters, or to his mother. They clearly sensed this; his sister, Sylvia, once told him, "Molasses is thick, Jack, but blood is thicker, and if you ask me, families should be as thick as thieves."

"Thick as thieves," Erthmun said, though he had not understood it. The whole concept of families was odd to him. He could sense how his sister felt when she talked about families. He sensed much. But he did not feel the same warmth that she obviously felt when she talked about families, and he told her so.

"You're a strange duck," she said.

"I'm not a duck at all," he said, and though she cracked a smile, she knew that Erthmun was not trying to be funny.

Erthmun's impulses to violence were quick, and he rarely acted upon them. His own reflection—in a mirror, in a pond, in the polished metal surface of a car—often made his muscles tense, and made his hands ball up into fists. He had once hit a bathroom mirror with his fist, in response to his reflection. It made him feel foolish because, when he dwelt upon it, he could think of no good reason for having hit the mirror. His reflection had . . . excited him, or angered him, he guessed. It was as if it had been a stranger, and an enemy, not merely the reflection of his own square and essentially pleasant face, brown eyes, and thick, reddish hair.

People who smiled surreptitiously when he repeated their words also made him angry. He had been told by many that he had the annoying habit of repeating the words and sentences of those to whom he was speaking, but he could never remember doing it. Consequently, when people smiled at him because of it, he had no idea why they were smiling—he thought they were amused by him, or that they harbored a secret they weren't sharing with him. So he got angry, and saw himself doing some quick and bloody act of violence to them. But this was an impulse he had never acted upon because he was almost religiously concerned with being a civilized man, and with reacting in a civilized way to all that went on around him.

"It's called echolalia," Sylvia told him. "Jack, you have echolalia."

"Echolalia," he said.

She smiled. "See there, that's what I mean. You repeated what I said."

"No, I didn't."

"But you did, Jack."

"No, I didn't," he said, which was another facet of the problem; sometimes he repeated his
own
words.

Now, at the age of thirty-seven, his echolalia seemed to be fading, he thought. Or maybe people had gotten used to it, because there were fewer surreptitious smiles.

He also felt an impulse to violence when he ate. His sister Lila noticed one Thanksgiving—and not for the first time—that he seemed very tense as he ate his turkey, cranberries, and mashed potatoes, and she told him later that he looked like he was protecting his food.

"Protecting my food?" he said.

"Sure," she said. "So no one will steal it."

"Who's going to steal it?" he said.

She said, "How often do you eat out?"

"Eat out?"

"With friends."

He thought a moment. "What friends?"

"I know you have friends, Jack. Everyone has friends."

"They do?"

"Of course. What about the people you work with?"

He thought a moment, and said, "They're just people at work, Lila."

"But don't you . . . go out to lunch with your buddies? Don't all men do that? Don't you go to a bar and have lunch?"

"No."

"That's very sad," she said.

"Sad?" Erthmun said. "I don't know. Is it?"

She assured him that it was sad.

He said no, it wasn't.

E
rthmun lived alone in a three-room, fourth-floor apartment in Manhattan's West Village. His building was sturdy, old, and dreary, and the other people who shared the building with him were of various ages and occupations. One was an assistant editor at
Elle
Magazine
, another was a postal worker, another a retired professor of biochemistry. Several were self-proclaimed artists and writers looking for their big break in the city that had given more than a few big breaks to others like them. All of these people nodded at one another in the hallways and on the elevators, but none of them had developed friendships with anyone else in the building.

Erthmun had no pets. He had long ago found that he possessed a strange ambivalence toward animals, and that they apparently possessed the same sort of ambivalence toward him. He looked with awe at the stray cats that roamed his neighborhood, and he thought of them as survivors. He respected them for this, and felt an uneasy kinship with them, but they eyed him warily, as if unsure if he was friend or foe.

Erthmun had been named after a maternal uncle who was a favorite of his and of his siblings. Uncle Jack had been a bear of a man who did a lot of hearty laughing and had brought presents whenever he'd visited. He had been partial to Erthmun, but he'd hidden it well.