Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

The Man Who Murders Happiness

He drives a car just like yours, the one you polish and shine on Saturdays. Nondescript. You’d never notice him parked across the street.

His eyes are hidden behind a pair of square-rimmed glasses with mirror-bright panes. His hair is black and slick, heavy with Vitalis and cigarette smoke.

You’ll never hear him coming. You might see him step from the shadows. Or watch the butt-end of his cigarette hover like a firefly in the night fog. He could be anybody, but you know who he is the moment he sets his eyes on you.

In the alley outside Big Pete’s, two vagrants were torched to death last night. Six blocks away a police cordon surrounds the body of a girl who leaped from the roof of her apartment building. Somewhere in the big maze of post-war housing, someone is dying from a stab wound. Someone else waits patiently, watching the blood seep out.

The man shows up when you least expect him. You never realize it when you’re having a good time. That’s the danger. Suddenly your senses are more alive, your skin abuzz with electricity, your heart beating faster. Suddenly there’s hope in the world and a reason to keep on going. At this point most people ask themselves: “Is this happiness?”

Then they look up and the quiet man is standing there. The man and his gun, a black metal extension of his gloved fist. He’s the man who murders happiness, and he’s caught you red-handed. Blam. Your time is up. On to the next fool.

They say his job pays immensely well.

On Tuesdays the factory boys come pouring out of the industrial park, checks in hand. The dive bars and strip joints fill up for the weekend. Drink will flow and blood will spill, all the usual shit. Behind the truckstop an aging prostitute buys smack to feed her habit for another day. Her hungry baby wails as she slides the needle into her arm. A drunkard with a bloody face sleeps in the gutter outside the liquor store. There’s an amputated leg sticking out of the dumpster. It wears a thousand-dollar shoe.

The man drives by in his nondescript automobile, unmarked and unnoticed, just another motorist. Directions come through on the radio. He hates the way it interrupts the music, but it’s part of the job. Mostly he listens to rockabilly, sometimes jazz. But the music dies every time the hollow voice of authority blares from the speakers. Direct communication with the boys upstairs, the secret infrastructure behind the official infrastructure. The one that knows where all the happiness is, and the one tasked with eliminating it.

He usually gets a name, and the name of a town. That’s it. He drives, sometimes for days at a time. It’s all flat farm-country now, and not much else. He drinks hot black coffee at nameless diners and bottles of cold soda sprung from gas station automats.

They say he can actually feel it as he gets closer to his mark. He feels the happiness like a bloodhound scents his prey. Drives into town like a shadow, finds the right neighborhood, parks his car somewhere nobody will ever notice it. Nobody ever does.

He walks along a sidewalk littered with dead leaves. Autumn wind moves cool and damp through the lanes. Each little house is exactly like the one next to it, and so on, all the way to the end of the street. And all the other streets here are just like it. Tiny green lawns, covered porches, a single old oak or elm rising in the front yard. Old folks sat on porches nursing shotguns. Lazy dogs lay a their feet. Children dig worms from the ripe grass, collecting them in old jelly jars. The sounds of television cop show themes blare from open windows.

He feels the happiness like warmth now, the heat from a blazing conflagration. As if the fifth house on the right was an inferno. On fire with joy. Sheer, raging happiness that will ignite the houses on either side unless it’s stopped. The doors are locked, and heavy curtains block the windows. He slips in through the back door. He carries tools for the opening of locks, and he’s very good with them. His primary tool is the gun now back in his hand. The soft moans of a woman drift from a back room with roaring fireplace. He moves closer on noiseless feet.

At first they’re only shadows. Locked in a tight embrace on a shaggy rug by the fire. He watches them for a moment, removes his square glasses. His eyes are blank and colorless, like dead fish scales. But he sees the happiness. He watches it spill from their sweating bodies, rippling waves of color, invisible to the human eye but glaring to his own. Their naked joy mesmerizes him, and he cannot look away from the sheer beauty of it. The awesome beauty of the awful thing he was made to root out and destroy.

Happiness. The man and woman have found it together somehow. The quiet man’s fascination turns to outrage. He’s never seen such an intense bliss. Suddenly he’s ashamed of himself for watching. He pulls the trigger.

It’s fear that makes him do it. Time and time again, he pulls the trigger out of sheer fear. He accepted that long ago. He imagines what it would be like to be happy, to lose himself in those blazing energies he’s witnessed so many times. To spark like comet and burn yourself to nothingness, existing as pure ecstasy.

To be happy.

It is a horror he could never endure.

That’s why the government has agents like him. To keep its people from the threat of bliss. To keep the entire population from being devoured by voracious joy. Happiness leads to oblivion. To keep mankind alive, he must keep it suffering. The next stop he makes is at the lakeside, where a man with long hair mediates by the water, coming perilously close to bliss. The quiet man approaches, making no sound in the wet grass, and shoots him in the back of the head. Nobody notices. They never do.

In a rust-eaten trailer park three children play with a stray dog. Their faces are dirty, their clothing little more than rags. He shoots the dog and walks away while the children weep, poking at their dead friend with a stick. On the other side of the trailer park a man hangs up the phone. He’s going to meet someone later that night — someone he can’t wait to see. His happiness is like a flare in the dark. It draws the quiet man toward him, and the gunshot echoes above the squalor.

On his way out of the park, he shoots down an old lady feeding pigeons. The birds scatter as her blood stains the yellow grass to red. If her deep joy had spread any further than the pigeons, it might have infected the entire town. He considers shooting the birds, but they’ve already lost themselves in the gray sky. Not his problem anymore.

That night the radio calls him back into the city, where a young father celebrates the birth of his first child. Far too happy, especially for the urban district. Even with a permit for a birth celebration, the new father’s happiness had been blazing in his heart for a week, exceeding his allotment. Too much happiness. Expired permit.

The quiet man intercepts the new father in a parking lot, and shoots him in the leg. He doesn’t always have to kill. Sometimes a maiming shot is enough to restore the balance, squelch the gout of happiness. Close the psychic wound. The father howls in pain, bleeding on the concrete, until his co-workers drag him away. He doesn’t thank the quiet man for sparing his life. He’s no longer happy, but he’ll be fine walking with a cane from now on.

After midnight the quiet man sits at an all-night diner, drinking black coffee. Long day. He tries not to think about the couple on the rug, the vortex of ecstasy that almost smothered him. It had been close, but he’d pulled the trigger. Restored the balance. He would never understand how they could be so terribly happy, so insanely elated. Some cases weigh on his mind, and he realizes this will be one of them.

He doesn’t see the girl come in and walk toward his booth. He’s looking at the plastic menu, lost in thought. She slides into his booth with a rustle of her silk blouse, and before he knows it she’s looking right into his eyes. Her face is exquisite.

It’s a face he’s seen in his most secret dreams, the ones he can’t even admit to himself. Her eyes are dark with secrets, brighter than stars. Staring at her, he cannot reduce the magnificence of the moment to the stumbling weakness of words.

His heart beats madly and he smiles at her. It’s all he can do.

She raises the gun.

“Is this happiness?” he asks.

She pulls the trigger.