Damned Don't Die

Jim Nisbet

Description

This is his first novel and it is a gruesome and dark novel set in suburbia.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468302967
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY J IM N ISBET
-N OVELS -
Windward Passage
Ulysses Dog
Lethal Injection
Death Puppet
The Price of the Ticket
Prelude to a Scream
The Syracuse Codex
Dark Companion
The Octopus On My Head
-P OETRY -
Poems for a Lady
Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley
Morpho
( WITH A LASTAIR J OHNSTON )
Small Apt
( WITH PHOTOS BY S HELLY V OGEL )
Across the Tasman Sea
-N ONFICTION -
Laminating the Conic Frustum
-R ECORDINGS -
The Visitor
For more information, as well as MP3s of
The Visitor and The Golden Gate Bridge, visit
NoirConeVille.com
Copyright
This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2010 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail]
Copyright 1981 by Jim Nisbet
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-296-7
Contents
Also by JIM NISBET
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter One
T HE ECSTATIC MOANS FROM THE APARTMENT NEXT TO HIS kept Herbert Trimble awake, but they gave him, as he lay in bed listening, an idea for a story. It would be the best trash story he d ever written. All he had to do was get up out of bed, walk to his desk, sit down to his typewriter, and begin. There was even a sheet of paper already in the machine; it was blank, and it was rolled down under the platen and back up about 3 inches, just the proper distance from the top of the page at which to begin an opening paragraph.
I ve always wanted to skin a woman .
He d seen Ms. Sarapath many times and wasn t surprised at the noise from next door, though she d never, to his knowledge, expressed her orgasms like this before. At least, not since she d moved into the apartment adjacent to Herbert s. It was true that Herbert thought Ms. Sarapath to be possessed of an unusual beauty, a very dark, smoldering, full-lipped Levantine beauty of the sort that undoubtedly caused Ms. Sarapath a great deal of trouble on the streets of San Francisco, even on the nicer streets, and that it was to this beauty s great attractions Herbert laid responsibility for this long night of aural lubricities. She just can t help herself, he thought, over and over again. Some stud has her pinioned against the wall in there, between the refrigerator and the water heater, a man whose single purpose in life at this moment- he checked his watch: 2:35 A.M.-this hour and fifty minutes worth of moments, has been to bring to this beautiful, lonely, single, working woman pleasure beyond the imagination of the wildest gossip she has ever heard.
Oh, well, Herbert thought to himself as he rolled over again, maybe they ll get married.
That ll cool things off.
The voice coming through the partition ebbed to the soft, modulating hum that had underscored all the other sounds of the evening, sounds that ranged from throaty inhalations of delight to piercing shrieks and groans of the most absolute joy and, possibly, pain. Herbert Trimble s imagination had run amuck in the first hour of this woman s night of nights. He had envisaged all manner of sexual acts, sacred and profane, as it were, pleasures he himself had never experienced, had only heard about or dimly conceived. But as the hours wore on, as the tempo or volume of Ms. Sarapath s vocalizations suddenly peaked in wailing or shrieks, Herbert s mind had taken a different tack. These pleasures were not, after all, his own, they flocked to the experience of a stranger he d never met. He was sharing Ms. Sarapath s ecstasy with another man; she had given herself to someone else. As he realized this unsettling fact, Herbert Trimble also realized that he d become accustomed, in the few months he d not quite known her, to thinking of Ms. Sarapath as his own woman. And now, tonight, here she was, apparently in another man s arms, completely out of control.
He tried to imagine her, this woman who wore very fashionable, revealing clothes, and something on her lips that made them look always wet, and not so much facial makeup that it overwhelmed her features. He envisaged the dark, curly hair that fell to her shoulders; he saw her walking in stockings and high heels. And yet she d always seemed to him a reserved and quiet woman, who seldom, if ever, spoke to him. He tried to imagine this exquisite, possibly brittle creature writhing , in sexual abandon. He tried to picture Ms. Sarapath completely naked-except possibly for her stockings and her little open-toed shoes, a thin, gold ankle chain-arched backward over the forearm of an unidentified man, the two of them standing in the middle of the kitchen or the living room, one of her long legs crooked over the buttocks of this deliberate, expert stranger.
Not just truss one up and rape her. I ve done that, bondage. Tied one up. Raped and sodomized her, too. And beaten them. But to skin one
A neat incision from the
Jesus, I m sick, Herbert thought to himself. He opened his eyes. The moaning continued through the wall. These thoughts They trickled, no, they flowed, they flowed into his mind, the seeds of narrative borne upon them. Of course, of course, she wasn t his woman, but the jealousy was there, or the beginnings of it, just as it must be in small amounts in any man. But he was a rational man. And if he wasn t?
I ve always wanted to skin a woman .
What a thought. Ugh. But yes, what a thought, hmm. Not rational, but psychotic. Not brilliant, either, but commercial. Point of view, a point of view worth money. An insight into a soul among the damned.
From the room next door the steady moaning rose almost to a scream, then subsided into a strange, continual sobbing sigh. Most disturbing, Herbert thought. I m sort of aroused and sort of scared. How am I supposed to discern the difference between pain and pleasure? He rolled over on the bed, turning his back toward the offending wall. They say the two blend and meet somewhere, Herbert thought. Somehow, somewhere the range of human emotion, of sensation, curves back on itself, and pain becomes pleasure, or vice versa.
The groaning assumed a tempo, little ohs came slowly, regularly through the wall. A thin layer of sheetrock thought Herbert, then air, interrupted by a stud here and there, another piece of sheet rock, perhaps 5/8-inch thick, a layer of paint And then a different kind of stud, harhar, Christ, I m sleepy Almost indiscernably, the tempo and volume of the moans slowed, reversed, and began to increase.
Herbert pulled his pillow over his head. He d been distracted by this apparent lovemaking next door enough to have long since abandoned the book he was reading ( Secrets of the Great Pyramid ) and he d gone to bed fully clothed. That had been hours ago. Now the moans came more and more frequently, as if they were being shaken from Ms. Sarapath s body. Herbert rolled over again. Christ, he thought, this guy must really be an expert.
- skin her-
By four o clock, Herbert Trimble was exhausted. He was half-asleep and irritable. He was put out with the girl next door for having so much fun and for keeping him awake while she was at it. And he almost hated the satyr with her. But somewhere in his brain, just lapping the surface of consciousness, Herbert s new idea coalesced and became the germ of a story. The tireless, nagging brain of the artist, Herbert thought to himself. Without it, where would I be? He picked himself up out of his bed and pulled a sweater over his head, answering his own question: I d be married, with two kids, a home, money in the bank, beer in the refrigerator. He ruffled his hair, leaned low over the typewriter, the keys bathed in a soft, yellowish light. I probably wouldn t be in divorce court, he thought, moving to the other side of the desk, or in this nerve-wracking, low-rent swingles triplex. He briskly massaged his hair and scalp with the fingertips of both hands. A nice, warped, psychotic tale, he thought, about 3,000 words. He seated himself before his typewriter and drew the chair up under the desk. Harry Feyn at Brandish magazine will use it, Herbert decided. And he ll pay me cash for it, that ll be good. So maybe the court won t notice, he laughed to himself, when they attach my income. Lousy fifty bucks.
He typed the first sentence.
Chapter Two
M ARTIN W INDROW LOOKED AT BUT DID NOT TOUCH THE sheet of paper in Herbert Trimble s typewriter. Upon the page, a single line was typed and, he had to admit, it didn t make things look too good for Herbert Trimble.
I ve always wanted to skin a woman .
As he read it, Martin Windrow experienced a second wave of nausea.
I ve always wanted to skin a woman .
And with it, Martin Windrow suppressed another familiar urge, the sensation of discovery that always rose in his sternum when he d found a lead, a vector, a clue. The police had found this clue, too. What would be their direction?
Though it was 11:00 A . M . and sunlight streamed in through the windows and across the desk, the desk lamp was lit. Beneath it, a haze of powder clung to the dark typewriter keys, like pollen on the stamens of a large, rectangular flower.
You must have gotten prints from both hands off this thing, Windrow said, peering at the distinctive lines and creases in the dust under the li