They Had Goat Heads Read Online Free PDF

holding their mouths. The man stood, smoked a cigarette, gibbered at the camera. Then it happened all over again.
   The clerk turned the TV off after the sixth attack. “Mind you, he is an amateur dentist. But one can’t deny the virtue of his product.”
   I listened . . .
   “Violence happens every day,” she croaked in a forcibly possessed tone. “Nobody knows why. People live and die and are forgotten. Nobody cares. And yet people want answers. Hence the drama of human existence.”
   Ignoring her, I said, “Do you have this shirt in a larger size. The shoulders are constricting. The larges in this brand are like mediums, I think. Can you check on that for me?”
   “Let me check on that for you,” she said. Her tone was normal now. She took the shirt and draped it over the TV and wheeled it into the changing room.
   I spent twenty minutes looking at shoes. I needed a new pair of sandals. They had been arranged on a narrow set of shelves that rose to the ceiling of the store. I had to use a ladder to look at them all. Several pairs caught my attention, but whenever I reached for them, someone shook the ladder from below. It was a different person every time. Nobody looked familiar. I climbed down the ladder again and again to confront them, but I was far too slow, and by the time I reached the bottom, they were gone.
   I wandered up and down the aisles searching for the clerk. I couldn’t find her. I asked another clerk where she was. He asked me to describe her. I said she was a woman and that’s all I remembered. The clerk nodded and excused himself.
   Tentatively, I crept into the changing room.
   It was bright. I had to shield my eyes.
   I moved forward, hunched over, squinting, struggling to bring things into focus. I acclimatized slowly. I heard voices. Panicked voices. Breathing. A few cheers.
   The lights went out. The changing room fell silent.
   I listened . . .
   I moved forward . . . down a dark hallway, feeling the walls. They were cold, like ice, but not quite like ice . . .
   I passed through a door into a vast amphitheater.
   I could see well enough. There were at least 100 people sitting in the audience, including the glitterati in the balconies.
   A circle of light fell onto the empty stage.
   Nothing happened for awhile. Then an SUV rumbled onto the stage, spun out of control, and crashed into a support column. A man exploded through the windshield and tumbled, with a certain lumbering grace, onto one knee, arms outstretched, blood coursing from his gored forehead. He wore a disheveled brown suit and struck an eerie polyphonous high note. He paused, and struck another note. And another one, and another one. No microphone—his voice was powerful and carried across the amphitheater like rolling thunder. At first I thought the notes were letters, and I thought the letters might be spelling out my surname, but like so many things, I couldn’t be sure . . . I concluded that the notes didn’t mean or say anything; they merely went up and down and up and down with no apparent purpose or direction or dénouement  . . . In time the man passed out. He fell forward and his chest and face hit the floor of the stage with a crack of bones and wood. Nobody clapped. The circle of light expanded until the entire stage was in view and a movie screen descended from the ceiling, slowly and mechanically.
   An old 35 mm projector sputtered to life.
   There was an advertisement for coffee.
   There was an advertisement for lard.
   Then the main attraction: a pornographic film called Makeshift .
   The clerk stood awkwardly in an empty park, naked except for glossy black boots and gloves. Blonde wig. Her breasts heaved above a stomach of stretch marks. Birds chirped in the treetops. She looked into the camera with glazed eyes and her mouth half open. A man with an erection entered the scene. It was the amateur