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Heat That Doesn't Warm

Tex Kerschen

They call me Wooden. At school. Almost wouldn't. The results of the class poll mention me near the bottom of the page: Least Likely to have a soul.

I've taken the trouble to categorize most of what I noticed when I was hiding out in the underworld. Here it is: Decapitated skulls in flight on bat wings. Dogs with tense skin, reptilian tongues, and red glowing eyes. Giants in medieval chain mail swinging hand axes with one arm and electric guitars with the other. Troops of armed ex-human skeletons riding skeletal ex-horses. Dragons. Things that looked like rats except they moved on two feet. People with the heads of snakes, and the Devil too, himself growing larger heads over feet as the whole pack blotted out the horizon. Mostly red. All red. The color of sunset.

My parents have both been possessed for about five and a half years. I'm not sure who caught it first. Or what caused it to happen at all. I have my suspicions.

My father was getting into cybernetic implants, a variety of home-made devices he had welded together out of egg whiskers and extension cords. These he inserted into cuts made in the muscle of his thigh.

The counselors say what I have is a problem of context. Like I was a dodo egg hatched by lizards. Otherwise, they are convinced, I would be doing much better for myself than skulking around the high school.

When I get home I ask my mother if anyone has called. She turns her head two hundred degrees and shrieks in a pre-human language. My father, meanwhile, is busy with the gear teeth of his prosthetic stomach, ripping out the heart of an American Way representative. A stack of notices and bills waits for me on the kitchen counter, and I sift through these before I head to my room with the cordless phone.

For a senior class assembly they shipped in an inspirational speaker named Ulysses. He, who elected to speak in crisp businesslike tones, and who had probably never ripped a phone book in half in the name of Jesus, and who, knowing nothing of what we had here, fulminated that he had run and off-the-cuff inspection of the campus before first period. He found, here he paused, headless human remains in the first floor men's bathroom. It is a disgrace, he announced, To deserve an education and rather get decapitation.

No one said anything, for fear of coming across rude, but everyone knows that if the heads themselves are needed for any reason, they can be found on spikes surrounding the baseball field.

I don't drive a fancy car (like many I know). I don't wear designer labels (like many I know). I don't sleep in the lap of luxury (like many) and I haven't got connections or pull. All the same, I don't enjoy being marginalized. There are older students and there are worse students. There are worse people and those that aren't one way or another.

My father no longer has a job. In the first years of his demonism he used to say let work come to him. And they did. And he de-limbed them all with his garden shear elbows.

Earlier students at our high school had constructed a maze out of gym lockers in an abandoned wing of the building. A crabman prowls this maze. It has the shape of a crab and the size, the color, and the eyes of a man. Its skin abounds with denticles like a shark's. The crabman has twice as many pincers as the ocean variety crab and these are unusually small, but each sharp as a pair of wire cutters and place at the terminus of a long double-jointed leg.

The curse is what's laid at your feet. I keep my ambitions in the cooler like everyone else. The cat drags in dead birds. That's what arrives on the doorstep in the morning.

The crabman is no platypus, no postmodernist. Its taste is distinctly its own, as was made clear by recon posts from the robots that were sent to replace our missing freshman class.

My mother fell in with the speaking of tongues. The way of the Zero pilot only appears to start slowly. Words like headstrong and singular lose all bearing, but still they are put to work.

One day my mother was speaking her mind to the PTA about ethical matters. The next day she made a declaration. She would not stop at what she called unnecessary stop signs. To hell with the police. To hell with the neighbors. Ab Infernam. Abe Infernam. There are children being ruined by leisure and commerce. She whirled joyfully one last time, in the living room of our home, as Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson joined in voice.

My own studies in demonology have been informal. Also, for the most part environmental. I watched the course they run with my parents. I kept an eye on what was going around.

The counselors suggest that I am not being straight up, as they say, about the nearly simultaneous demonic possession of my parents. They wonder if maybe a brief stint in the crabman's maze will iron me out. The counselors keep a lot of blinking lights in their office. This, they tell me, Is to encourage seizures in our more epilepsy prone subjects.

A word to the wise, garlic has next to no repulsory effect on the minions of the damned. Ketchup none likewise. Mustard, maybe. Barbecue sauce seems to attract them like flies.

I don't put stock in the pre-millennial scare, but I've got a number of things to do before I even consider getting out of high school. There have been a number of girls involved, each one sexier than the last. Each more distracting, more apologetic, less committed. Even Edison would agree that eleven years is a long time to devote to such a cause with such little result.

It's not as though I am homely. I don't think so. Not so bad as my father these days. He has conductors sticking out of his temples, spiracles have replace his ears, and his back looks to be growing one large vestigial wing. But, I think that as far as girls go I may have picked up a stigma over the past twelve years.

A factor to account for when discussing my high school is the Hell Mouth. It is also in the maze where they keep the crabman. Consider a giant medieval cart -- painted up, Devil's gapes, smoking proscenium -- that has stopped touring the village circuit with its morality play and its coronet players and set up permanent shop in the middle of a locker room in a suburban high school. I think it is the reason they bred the crabman in the first place, as a deterrent, but I don't follow the school paper as closely as I should. Every time we get a subterranean tremor, it's worth noting, the Hell Mouth burps up a new plague. We've already had: Gorgons. Devils. Ifriti. Hydra. Vampires. Trolls. Harpies. Poltergeists. Brownies. Basilisks. Cyclops. Wolfmen. Succubi. Incubi. Wild Dogs. Thes were being bused into the inner-city schools for a number of years before the whistle got blown. Now they do seasonal work around the neighborhood in addition to being subject to execution and mass graves.

When I get sex-crazed I run to the hills. This is my second instinct.

The cops don't target me because of my bad reputation. Not anymore than anyone else. Not anymore than the bureaucrats do. They take potshots at my car, but that's just because they can. I can tell when they've been using the armor-piercing hollowpoints by tracing the in and out paths of their bullets in my car. These paths look like the work of lampreys. The bureaucrats, I guess, hold some sway with the school board. They have had a referendum to lock me up with the crabman.

The witch doctors say we're not as materialistic as we think we are. But we think we are. That's how it goes for them. Witch doctors, a living is a living. I buy the charms with aniseed in them. They're said to ward off evil and bad luck with numbers.

It's not as though I never go on dates with girls. I do. I ply them with drinks. The problem is when I take them home. My mother, usually serene and occupied with her otherworldly concerns, always makes a point of devouring my dates. And it is malicious. No matter what the counselors say.

The thing is, when I tell it like it is, nobody seems impressed. Jadedness goes down to the root at my school. Tell us about the crabman, they call out. I'm not really impressed in talking about the crabman anymore. It's half crab and half man and it has obviously taken german design to heart. What more can be said about the crabman?

Wooden, the Devil said to me when I finally stopped running, I'm going to show you what most people have to die to see.

The witch doctors have turned on me. Now they sell me bunkum. Every night I hear my parents get louder in the hall, as they trespass line after line of my defenses. And in their frustration they fight with each other. With the door shut I can hear my father's robotic add-ons whirring and cracking. I can hear my mother punching and scraping. And I no longer know I am safe.

Spanish fly. Freckle Juice. Bloody Mary three times in the bathroom. The alternator. Fuel pump. The thermostat to the air conditioner. Lysergic acid. Mimosas. Tennis elbow.

What would save many in my shoes is peer support. But look at mine: Mongoloids. Oafs. Rubes. Thyroid cases, and meat. No wonder I keep to myself.

The first thing I noticed inside the crabman's maze was how clean it was. Free from the usual decor of nostalgic infant prints and novelty posters that adorn the counselors' offices. Nothing here to distract me. The other thing is that the Hell Mouth, from which hellish things originate and into which I decided to walk rather than let the crabman find me and tear me apart like a chicken stringed up as bait in the saltwater, is not really a mouth at all when you get right to it but more of an open set of french doors through which I could make out a very clear picture of Hell.

A man for all seasons, my father in the summer picking fruit in northern California fields, the migrants yelling, Mister George, Mister George, Mira, Mira! as red ants the size of shetland collies with their bitch avids as big as dobermans burrowed up from under the ground with the erection of twenty foot watch towers in the middle of the strawberry patch, the raspberry line.

The females I observed in Hell were of two varieties. The first kind were very sexy, with long black hair teased up in all directions. They were voluptuous and almost naked, but you could tell where they were coming from because their eyes lacked pupils lacked irises and their hands were clawed. The second kind at first appeared more or less librarianish, but quickly transformed ala the manner of the first kind. The whole effect -- you could see it coming by a twitch in the ground and a flash of lighted smoke -- was disheartening.

Hell is, like you would imagine, primarily very red. And hot. There was purple in the color of it and orange too. I hit the ground running. There were old-time castles in there and a number of muscle cars.

I'd like to be able to say that I went looking for my mother -- her immortal soul and all that is gone now -- but I can't really. I was trying to keep my skin together, looking out for all the funny business, minding the way.

Can I say my mother was vain and use the past tense when that particular vice has stuck with her long after her irises had grown red from the burn and the bleach of evil thoughts? She was a tall woman. With the devil raging on and puffing out she can get to around nine feet tall sometimes. Unfortunately, her body mass stays the same. And she drapes herself in expensive dresses and pantsuits stained and sometimes caked brown with the oxidized blood of her victims.

I've realized some things. I don't miss clean clothes and I don't miss sandwiches cut into two triangular parts. But I could do without the fear. Not as much is liable to go off in the morning, but there have been instances. Chickens get ripped up. Fires crackle into life in the bathroom filling the house with smoke so waxy that it stains the wallpaper and curtains for good. Things take a turn and never turn back.

The men of all nations were at the door last night. Looking for my father. They wore Benetton, Dockers, Banana Republic. Open fires, they said, have been reported. Do you know anything about the cars on blocks? The green in your pool. Have you any idea, they asked me, of the deed restrictions around here? My father, right in front of them, is out of sight. Undergoing tertiary chrysalis within a cocoon he sewed up out of leather belts, newspaper inserts, ripped dress shirts, deflated basketballs, auto parts, overexposed film, linoleum, wire coat hangers, cudded up money. You can make out his countenance beneath it all. It is many faces, all of them wearing the same pained expression. You cannot say, for all the suffering in the world, that there are any of us the less in love with life.

The Devil goes to no little trouble for his audiences. He is the patron saint of rock stars. Let me see the nine circles, I said, and he told me, not short in speech or proud of himself at all, but like any good teacher simply and directly that the whole idea had run out of steam. I asked the Devil about a few of the signs sticking up out of the blocked-off area: The Poor. The Unlucky. The Meek. Immigrants. His response? They get it pretty much the same around here.

There was drama involved in the demonic possession of my mother. She was a beautiful woman before a third-order devil took up residence in her temporal lobe. Here I tried to intervene. The problem I found was that most of the reliable methods in exorcism require the availability of a suitable host, like a zombie or a herd of pigs. All I had on hand, by the time I realized this, was a can of tuna fish, which I promptly opened. To no avail.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

Authors of individual works retain copyright, with the restriction that subsequent publication of any text be accompanied by notice of prior publication in Fiction International.