Iceman

Vega, 1955

The boy-child was slipping off the mountain. Even though he was still a child in years, with a child's absence of morality, he was already possessed of a burning intelligence that told him how different he was.

And inside his mind he could see himself going off the deep end, over the high side, down the cliff. See himself caught in the throes of something dark and tenacious and deliciously forbidden and all-consuming. But the human mind is such that it will attempt to block out the imputations of anything remotely resembling encroaching insanity.

So he went with it. Gave himself over to its pull. And in that mind he created fantasy hideouts and magical escape routes. Great, safe havens in which he could hide from the laughter and cruelty downstairs. Safe hideouts from the overpowering urges that came and held lit matches to his groin and then made him do the bad things to his sister, to the child down the block, to himself.

And the boy-man constructed wonderful secret rooms inside his strange and frightening mind where he could go, always late at night, tuning in the faint signals of security as you tune in the sound of a distant station over late-evening radio. And in fact he would huddle into a fetal ball with total concentration, straining to hear the voices of escapism from the old Fada's tinny speaker.

Late in the night, when the last mysteries and horror tales were over, he'd switch from the network stations to the local stations in nearby Amarillo. And he'd lie there for hours with the midnight dance bands soothing him, playing lullabies in the darkness, as his imagination would concoct complex fantasies of revenge, release, and escape. And they nurtured and comforted him, these evil and dark thoughts, rendering him invisible and all-powerful, a man-child going all the way over the edge into a kind of controlled madness.