Wednesday Story: Lizard Man

Despite the heat he always wore the same clothes, day in, day out: A long raincoat, a homburg hat, and a pair of dusty torn trousers with ragged turn-ups - which seemed to emphasise those feet of his. The long, arching claws emerging out of his scaly skin like scimitars.

In the heat of mid-day he would clamber up the rickety drainpipe that ran up the side of the Town Hall entrance and climb to the place where the arch of the entranceway almost met the overhang of the roof. He would lie, or sit - I was never entirely sure how to tell which was which with him - up there in the shade as the sun burnt the dust on the ground, that was too hot for anyone to walk on, a hundred feet or so below him.

I lived across the street from the Town Hall at the time, in the ruined cinema. I could look out of the window and see his cold-blooded reptilian eyes, almost on a level with mine, staring down at the street below. Powerful sunlight and deep shadows can cause all sorts of tricks, especially when we look too hard. But I am sure I once saw blood on those huge white teeth of his. It was around the time we found the first bodies. Although, it could have been a trick of the light, or even a trick of the mind, though.

It could have been just wishful thinking, of course. He was the only lizardman in our town. He was one of those who’d had the money - and, yes, the courage - to get the operation done when we all discovered what was going to happen, and that it was far too late for anything to be done to save us.

I suppose we all need something to fear, to hate, especially now. The lizardmen make easy, and obvious, targets for that helpless rage we all feel.

About a month or so after the lizardman arrived in our town, Suze offered to let me watch the next time he came around to her place. She said he was no better, and certainly no worse, than most of her customers. She said he had never, even once, scratched her with his claws, no matter how ungain and dangerous they seem. With the shape of his face, she said, he did not attempt to kiss her. He has no lips, anyway. And, she said, his breath smelt no worse that the water-miners’ breath when they come back to town after months out in the Barrens.

I was tempted, very tempted, to take Suze up on her offer at the time. I wanted to see if he could show emotion, passion. I expected that he would need to show some degree of passion to kill, especially in the way those travellers were killed, with their hearts ripped out. I suppose I wanted to see him in... what...? I don't really know… a more animal state than the urbane way he strolled down the street in his dusty clothes, almost like some American private-eye in those black and white films from early last century. Not long after he, the lizardman, turned up in our town I found some catalogues and magazines down in the basement of the cinema from that time when the whole cinema nostalgia kick was in full swing, showing stills from some of those films. If he was not a lizardman, he could have been the star in any of them.

I found it difficult to reconcile visions of his reptilian skin lying next to Suze's familiar nakedness. I wondered if she ever joked and chatted with him as she did with me? A couple of times I even wondered if she offered to let him watch me with her? Or if he thought perhaps I was the killer and he climbed up to the Town Hall roof to watch me, to get some clues from my haunting of the empty cinema.

*

It doesn't matter how much time we have left. There is not much that to be said about that. It seems we just carry on living out of… out of habit – I suppose – rather for any purpose, or any reason. The buildings were ruined, and mostly deserted, when I first arrived in this town. The desert had already claimed them, blowing sand into the rooms, taking over all the buildings as it took over everything else that stood in its way. I was just a drifter at the time myself too, blown about the desert by the never-ending winds. I had lost all sense of the concept called home until the moment I saw the abandoned cinema. I came out of the desert and there it was, appearing out of the heat haze like some mirage. A relic of the past, like the bones of the unfortunate people and animals spread all over the Barrens, picked clean, then bleached by the relentless winds, scouring sands and the unforgiving sun.

The buildings in this town looked as though they were reverting to, or already on the way to being claimed back by, the desert - sinking slowly into the sand. One day the Barrens will cover them, either burying them or scouring them down to sand, indistinguishable from everything else. Then the whole town will be gone too, becoming just another range of dunes. Everything will be dust.

Already, by the time I arrived in this nameless town, the scraggly desert plants were laying claim to any crack or niche they could find that gave them some relief from the heavy heat. The rest of the town was slowly being buried under the shifting sands, becoming just a few more featureless dunes where once there had been shops, houses, factories, warehouses and all the other monuments to that fading, lost civilisation. It seemed as though the desert was mocking us, mocking mankind, by showing how effortlessly it could destroy all his works.

There were skeletons in the buildings at first, of course, wearing the tattered rags that once were clothes. Many posed in the positions where they had fallen and died when they gave up their own personal battle against the encroaching desert. Others had crumbled to a pile of bones and rags in corners and other shadowed places.

*

A few days after I arrived, Geep turned up at the door of the cinema. He stood there, in the doorway, smoking one of his foul home-grown cigars.

“You moving in, here?” he said, wandering into the foyer.

“For a while, maybe. If no-one minds,” I replied. “I don’t want to cause any trouble.” I looked around the abandoned cinema as we strolled together into the cooler darkness of the auditorium. “If anyone has a prior claim, I mean. Or, anything like that?” I shrugged.

“Not as far as I know, son. As far as I’m concerned, it’s yours.” He too looked around as we stopped in front of the low stage that once held the screen. “Hardly the Ritz, is it?”

“The… what?”

He stepped right up to me, narrowing his eyes as he stared into my face in the gloom. The wrinkles and folds in his face were deep, much deeper than any I’d ever seen before. We all had wrinkles and furrows burnt deep into our skin by the sun and wind-blown sand, but these days most people die before they get old.

“Sometimes,” Geep said, after a long pause while he studied my face carefully. “Sometimes, I forget just how old I really am. Sometimes… it feels like I can’t die.” He looked around the cinema. “The Ritz was a hotel. Last century, or even the one before… I forget. Big, posh, swanky.”

I nodded. “Yes. I know about hotels.”

He nodded too. “Good.” He turned to go. “Oh, by the way,” he turned back to look at me. “If you need food: meat, vegetables and so on… then I’m your man. Just ask for my place and someone will point you in the right direction.”

“Right. Thanks. I will,” I said.

He turned to walk off.

“Oh, hang on,” I called after him.

He turned back, head cocked to one side.

“What’s your name?”

“Name?” he said as though unfamiliar with the concept. “I… I don’t remem…. Anyway, everyone here just calls me Geep.”

“Oh, right.” I nodded. “Thanks… Geep. I’ll see you around.”

He nodded, turned and waved without looking back.

*

I can’t remember exactly when the lizardman first turned up here, emerging out of the desert sand storms like a creature emerging from out of some half-forgotten nightmare. It must have been several weeks after I first arrived, because I remember Jan asking me what I knew about him, and she never talks to strangers.

The lizardman seemed to emerge out of the heat, out of the desert, like another mirage. At first, none of us was entirely sure that he was here, that he did exist. It is easy to have dreams, visions, nightmares and – of course – mirages in a climate like this, and he is - after all – a creature more suited to the realm of the mind than reality. But since our reality has now become this nightmare landscape, perhaps it is we that should haunt his nightmares rather than us having him haunt ours.

At first, he was just a darker part of the shadows deep inside the Town Hall, a soft sibilance on the wind, a stirring of dust. It was almost as if he had grown out of the heaped sand and dust. After all, the lizard is a creature of the desert and now that the desert has taken over this world; I suppose that we should not be surprised that its creatures are taking over what was once ours; our bodies as well as our buildings.

*

The first time I saw Geep’s garden I just stood and stared. I stood there for what seemed like a life-time. Eventually, I managed to close my open mouth and turn to look at Geep.

“Wha…? How?”

He grinned at me. “Just time, patience and care,” he said.

It had been so long ago, hardly more than a childhood memory. So long ago, that I thought that kind of green, that living green could only exist in fairy tales. That smell too: the smell of moist soil, of growing things. The smell of life.

That afternoon Geep told me how he had spent years of his life travelling, collecting seeds, and – later – animals. How he had found this place, one of the few old towns that had some water, but was still quiet enough for him.

“I had a dream, you see....” He smiled at his own foolishness as he sat there, stroking one of his rabbits and staring off, deep into the past.

“Nothing wrong with dreams,” I said. Although, it had been so long since I’d had anything to dream about I could hardly speak with confidence.

“Maybe….” Geep was silent for a long, long time. I felt he was on the verge of saying something, something beyond what is usually said. But he just sighed. “Maybe not.” He seemed to surface slowly out of his communion with the past. “Anyway….” He dropped the rabbit back in the cage with the others and slowly got to his feet. “Things to do… chores,” he said. He looked around at his few acres of green and the handful of small farmyard animals. I could see the pride in his face. “This all depends on me, y’know?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

He stepped closer to me, still stiff from sitting so long. “That is important, y’know. Something we’ve lost… matters far more than just… just fucking up the climate, killing the planet. A reason to care.” He turned away again. “Maybe it is too late, though.”

“Too late for what?”

He didn’t answer, just waved his hand dismissively as he headed towards a tumbledown old shed, right on the edge of his fields. I saw him fumble in his trouser pocket and pull out the key for the heavy padlock. Before he opened it, he turned and stared at me. He waved, and then watched me closely until I turned to leave.

*

The next time I saw Geep I was sitting in the shade around the side of Suze’s place, trying to get some sort of life out of one of her solar panels so she could run a fridge and a fan. I’d found the fridge down in the cellar of the cinema and got it to – sort of – chug along without breaking down too often. The solar panel was cracked, but I was able to get it to work eventually.

Geep stared down at me twisting wires together. “What’s the point?” he said.

“I dunno,” I said without looking up at him. “I never really found a point to anything, even in the days before all this.” I stared around at the wind-shifted sands. I looked up at him “Why do you bother… the animals… the vegetables…. You must think there’s a point?”

Geep was silent for a moment, kicking sand into a heap with the toe of his shoe and then obliterating it, flattening it and sweeping it away with the sole. “There’s a point, I think, to the rest of nature, to the rest of life… but not to us, not to humanity, not any more.” He looked up towards the horizon. “We fucked it up… and we deserve to pay, to suffer for it.”

He glanced down at the bag in his hand. I could see the dark shadow of blood pooling at the bottom of the bag. Geep saw me looking.

“It's for Suze... y'know?”

I nodded. My repairing the devices was for Suze too. A form of barter. “She's upstairs” I said quietly without looking up at Geep. “Alone....”

“Right. I...”

Still without looking up I saw him gesture vaguely with the bag and nodded, busying myself with some of the intricacies of wiring on the back of the solar panel. Then he was gone.

I wondered about Geep, everyone else – except the lizardman, of course - talked about the killings, but Geep seemed very reluctant to take any interest in the killings, he blamed the lizardman for them, like everyone else. We had no proof though, and - to be honest - not enough courage to attempt to tackle the lizardman about them. So we just kept on watching him and whispering to each other.

The bodies we'd found had all be young – men and women in their twenties, or so. “They're all about my age,” Suze had said shivering and hugging herself when a water miner came into town carrying the latest body in the back of his solar-powered truck. It was like all the other bodies, mutilated with its heart ripped out, it had been ravaged by predators too - wild dogs probably. There was evidence of injuries which Geep said could have been caused by the lizardman's claws.

I watched Geep examine the body with a sort of resigned professional detachment which made me wonder if the name Geep was some sort of distortion of GP – General Practitioner... a doctor. I was about to ask him when I caught the look in his eye, something odd, strange, as though he was trying to build some sort of barrier between his old professional knowledge and who he was now.

*

Later that night, I was lying awake in bed thinking about the mutilated bodies and trying to find enough courage to will myself to confront the lizardman when suddenly through the open window the lizardman came into my room.

Naked, weapon-less and vulnerable I crawled back across my bed away from him.

He held out a clawed hand towards me, shaking his head.

“No... no... come with me!” he said in his hissing sibilant voice. “Quickly... It's Suze. He's trying to kill her too. Get dressed.... Hurry!”

As I reached for my clothes, not taking my eyes from the lizardman as he strode impatiently to the window and back, I wondered if it was some sort of ruse, some sort of trap. Perhaps he knew we were on to him and now he was going to start picking us off, one by one.

“Here!” he said suddenly reaching into the deep pocket of his long coat as I finished dressing. He held out his hand... his claw to me. There was a gun, a revolver. “I can't use it.” he said. “My hands....” He shrugged.

I took the gun from him as he assured me that it was loaded and that it worked. I could smell the oil from it and it felt as though it was still a working piece of machinery to me.

“Come on... quickly,” the lizardman said, climbing through the window, not waiting to see if I was following.

In the darkness of the night, it took me a while to realise that we were heading for Geep's garden... his farm.

Then there, in the middle of Geep's fruit orchard stood Geep with some sort of machete in his hand. Suze was on the ground at his feet, naked with her hands and feet tied, tears and pleading in her eyes.

The lizardman growled and Geep turned to face us.

"I spent my whole working life keeping people alive," Geep said. "And for what? Look how we have killed this planet. All I am doing now is getting rid of a few useless drifters, people this planet can no longer afford to keep, to keep our town alive, at least until I die. If it wasn't for what I did, then this town, and probably all of us, would be dead. What's wrong with it anyway? There are no laws left, human society, civilisation is over."

He raised the machete above his head, looking down at Suze. He was about to kill her, but before I could even raise the gun, the lizardman leapt forwards at Geep, snarling and growling, his teeth and claws flashing white in the moonlight.

Geep moved fast for such a seemingly old man, sidestepping the leaping lizardman as the machete arced around in a blur. The lizardman's body fell to the ground, spurting blood as his severed head sprayed more blood over Suze, who screamed and tried to roll away, finding that all she had done was roll closer to Geep. He raised the machete again, the lizardman's blood on the blade dripping blackly in the moonlight.

The shot was loud in the dead of the night, surprising me, even though it was my hand taking careful aim and my finger pulling the trigger. Geep's eyed widened in shock as the bullet hole seemed to suddenly grow out of his forehead between them.

He said something to me before the life went from those eyes. It sounded like “ Thank you.” But that didn't really seem likely to me.

I raced over and untied Suze, checking to make sure Geep was dead. I held Suze in my arms as she cried, feeling the lizardman's blood that still covered her, soaking through my clothes. We sat there together in the dark, holding each other tight and close, waiting for the dawn to come.