Chaingang

Huge. Beyond anything you can imagine. Arms and legs like steel tree trunks. Butt, belly, and upper torso heavy and ugly with great rubbery tires of hard fat over the body muscle. Scarred, dimpled face partially covered with a mouth restraint, a “biter,” the head appears to sit directly on the torso. The gigantic boulder of a neck is not visible. That part of the face that shows is not unlike a mound of wrinkled dough, but for the eyes—which are tiny, hard, black, and unblinking. There is no life in the eyes of the beast. They are unmistakably a killer's eyes. But these eyes see nothing.

He is far away, inside the nightmare of his strange and amazing mind. Deep within his head he is lost, as free and unbound as a wild dog running through the hills. Several levels of the beast-man's complex brain are at work.

His first books were encountered while he was in a foster home. He learned something that gave him an edge, and the book, which happened to be an adult instruction manual and not meant for the eyes of children, discussed in clinical detail certain vulnerabilities of the human body. He seized on this scrap of information as if it were the Rosetta Stone, using it to decode one of the mysteries about death. He saw that books and other printed matter, when applied to actual experimentation, could further enhance one's ability to destroy an enemy. He began reading for self-defense.

Where are books kept? In public libraries. Logically then, that was the next step: to penetrate the libraries and obtain all the relevant information he could lay hands on. Already adept at swiping toys, comics, candy bars—kid stuff—he graduated to library books. He preferred stealing them to checking them out, on principle, and so Daniel began his lifelong affair with the library system.

Reform schools and adult jails did not offer the wealth of literature one could find in Kansas City's public libraries, but there one could attend impromptu classes taught by street professors of B & E, armed robbery, escape and evasion, identity change, disguise, unarmed combat (from street-fighting to sophisticated martial skills), demolition, and a thousand other nasty subjects from con stings to murder modes.

He would use this information to get better data, since he was aware that these were failed exponents of their respective spheres of expertise, but in many cases their experiences could point the way for him. He soaked up information like an immense sponge, always seeking more.

By the time he'd done his second bit in prison, he had probably ingested (sometimes literally!) twenty-five thousand stolen library books. He once computed his total of overdue fines, and it was in seven figures. He'd swiped everything—from elegant, rare, quarto-size volumes of arcane subject matter to massive coffee-table books which he smuggled out under voluminous shirts and overcoats. He left many a little old lady gasping at the sudden downdraft of noxious sewer stench as he clomped loudly through dusty reference rooms in his gigantic 15EEEEE combat boots.

What did he do with the books? Think of a huge, wrinkled desert that stretches across the mindscape of the imagination. This is the monster's brain. For thirty years or so he's used this desert as his private dumping ground for information.

Every wrinkle is deep, like a chasm; a dangerous, deadly repository filed with stolen library books. He reads the books, sometimes eats pages that he particularly likes—one of his weird and inexplicable habits—chewing the corners, sucking the foulness out of them, devouring special passages that somehow imprint themselves on his remarkable memory.

His memory banks are not the same as yours and mine. At the heart of his brain there is something akin to a mental computer, and it is this oddly efficacious organ that retains data for him.

His is no “photographic memory,” which he knows to be a misnomer, but is a freak of nature known as eidetic recall. Perhaps a part of the gift of physical precognition is the essence of this ability: to retrieve those shreds of seemingly forgotten knowledge that become input relevant to specific situational confluences.

At the moment he is reading from the pages of a scientific quarterly he once scanned for pleasure: “Massim Matrilineal Reincorporation and Kula Ring Rituals.” He is reading, mentally, about his favorite subject. Rereading and savoring the bizarre anthropological studies of Massim mortuary practices. Considering, with the greatest pleasure and fascination, the cultural implications of eating the dead.