A Small Killing - chapter 3

Welcome back! We're on to chapter 3 of A Small Killing. You can find my write-up of chapter 1 here and of chapter 2 here.  If you want to follow along (warning, there's going to be a lot of spoilers) you can easily find a used copy online, or if you're less morally inclined, you can read it online here.

To start off, the chapter page tells us we’re in Sheffield and the years Timothy is dealing with in his past were 1964-1979. Roughly, those were the years he was 10 to 25. A teenager to a young man. The chapter page is in stark contrast black and white of a taxicab in the rain outside the Sheffield railroad station. Why Zarate chose to make it stark black and white… no idea.

Sheffield is a small city up near Leeds in the north of England and we’ve heard mention in the past that Sheffield is where Timothy is from.

The chapter starts with Timothy deep in thought in the back of the cab thinking, “I daredn’t think anything.” Good luck with that.

He’s so busy not thinking about a kid trying to kill him that he doesn’t realize he gave the cab driver the wrong address and ended up outside the old flat he and his wife Maggie used to live at.

And then he flashes back to think about Maggie. He thinks of their marriage, “It was just something left over from when we were kids. It wasn’t real.” As he thinks that, we’re seeing a dollhouse, thinking it’s real before a giant eye peeks into the window. Notice that the eye doesn’t look like it’s wearing glasses.

In a way, Maggie and Timothy were playing house. Playing grown up. But maybe they weren’t really grown up? Maybe you don’t really become grown up until you have kids of your own? But claiming that it wasn't real is a way that he attempts to absolve himself of the crime of single-handedly destroying that marriage.

Of course, for the rest of the flashback, he refuses to look at Maggie or us as he lies about Barry’s party, which we saw one of last chapter. He admits that Barry has “done no end for me,” which is not something he would admit now. And is he talking about career wise or sex wise?

He tells Maggie that she wouldn’t like the people at Barry’s party: “not your type. Well, not my type either…” except he’s thinking of Sylvia, who we've talked about how she really wasn't his type.

Maggie tries to console him for having to work for Barry in advertising, “I know you feel compromised, working with advertising people… you’re not doing anything wrong, love.” Of course he is on so many levels. But notice that this isn’t what gets him upset. We go to another whole panel where she starts to slip off his glasses… starts to take down the lies so he or she can see things as they really are, and that’s what gets him to jerk away from her.

He gives her the butterfly necklace that Sylvia made. And now we realize that the Barry party he was at wasn’t the one where he met Sylvia, it was after he’s been to her shop, after he’s told her that he’s married to Maggie and after Sylvia has given him a look that says she knows and is willing to have a sexual relationship anyway.

Maggie loves the necklace and says whoever made it must be Maggie and Timothy’s type of person. Because, of course, Maggie and Timothy are the same type of person, right? Or is one of them living a lie?

Then he thinks about his nickname for her: Magoo. It’s from Mr. Magoo, a weird cartoon about an old man who can’t really see and all the oddball adventures he gets into because he thinks he’s somewhere else and refuses to admit he has a vision problem. Hmm... sound familiar?

I think this is another way of showing them still as kids: nicknames are what we give to each other as kids. “Because of her eyesight,” he thinks. But that’s weird, since he’s the one who wears glasses and has problems seeing reality and her only problem is seeing Timothy for who he really is.

He heads to the pub and thinks of the old flat, “Had a children’s room, so Maggie said it would be handy for when we had…” But they didn’t have children, because again, everything that he creates is already dead.

He goes into a pub and hears lots of working class voices as he orders a beer. And a voice from the side orders a Vimto. He looks over and it’s the kid.

It turns out that Vimto is a real soda from nearby Manchester which I’ve seen here in the United States. I always thought Moore made it up, like Flite.

Timothy actually orders the Vimto and goes and sits with the kid, who asks, “Do you really like beer?” I’m not a beer drinker, so I’m kind of biased, but beer does taste horrible and I can see a kid, asking in a direct way, whether someone really enjoys the taste of beer.

Timothy starts yelling at the kid until the bartender comes over and tells him to be quiet. He asks the kid if he’s trying to kill him, to which the boy answers yes and walks away. As Timothy chases after him we see the empty beer glass and the full Vimto. Of course we’re supposed to wonder at this point whether the boy is real, since no one else talks to him or notices him and he only seems to affect the world through the adult Timothy.

Thinking about that, isn’t that absolutely the power of ideas in Moore’s view of Idea Space and magic? That they exist and have power because of how we respond to them? By what they make us do?

Back out in the rain, he can’t find the boy so he heads to his parents’ house and tries to come up with a rational explanation for this. He thinks maybe Flite’s competitors hired a midget to kill him or drive him mad, knowing no one would believe him. He thinks about the crazy midget woman in the movie Don’t Look Now.

Okay, if you don’t know the movie Don’t Look Now, it’s also very much a part of the themes Moore’s playing with. In the movie by Nicolas Roeg, adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier, a married couple are in Italy trying to recover from the shock of their young daughter’s accidental death. A clairvoyant tells them that their daughter is trying to contact them and that they’re in great danger. They have premonitions that appear as flashbacks and flashforwards. The father keeps seeing a figure in a red raincoat, similar to the one his daughter died in. When he confronts the child-like figure, it’s a female dwarf who pulls out a meat cleaver and cuts his throat, which is the image he saw in his visions. It was a famous movie for focusing on the psychology of grief and the effect the death of a child can have on a relationship.

Um, yeah, I don’t think Moore slipped that reference in accidentally any more than he did Mr. Magoo.

He thinks of the Talking Heads song, Burning Down the House, with the phrase, “Psycho killer. Qu’est ce que c’est?” The French phrase is used to ask, “What’s going on?” but it’s literally translated as “What is it that it is?” As he thinks this he looks at us. Almost as if he’s asking us, What is this man that it is? What is the truth to him? What is he really?

Behind him there’s a strange grinning face in the window. But that’s just his dad and mum, who welcome him in. He dries off as they talk to him in the warmth of home and he thinks about a time he had taken LSD when he was 17 and tried to act normal with them.

Two things to consider with the revelation of the LSD. One is that people experience flashbacks years later. Maybe we’re supposed to suspect that he’s haunted by something he experienced as a kid? Two is that LSD messes up your sense of time. You might see the world around you in flashforwards and flashbacks. Moore, who famously got kicked out of school for dealing LSD, has said that his use of LSD prompted him to see time differently, which allowed him to write Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen.

Okay, so I’m trying to figure out what is going on in this panel where he talks about the LSD. His dad is talking to him and holding up four fingers. Are they making a shadow puppet on the TV or is the TV just playing a wolf movie? It really doesn’t matter, but I can’t figure it out.

He goes to bed and thinks about how they live in such a dull, real world far removed from one where little boys try to commit murder. And as he thinks that, his glasses are off.

He wakes up and he explains how he can’t see without his glasses and it comes back to him that yes, the boy is trying to kill him. He asks his dad where he can hire a car, but his dad tells him to take the old beater a younger Timothy sold him when he was broke. He goes to inspect it and thinks it’s “been waiting here these years.” It’s been waiting, like his parents have. “I s’pose I’d always thought that they’d be dead by now.”

But things live on forever at home because they aren’t always real things. It’s like when you go home and your parents make you feel like a child. That truth only exists in how we think or feel about home. But that truth never goes away no matter how old we get.

He goes to pull a “Rock against racism” sticker off that he had put on when he was younger and more idealistic. But try as he might, it doesn’t completely come off. You can’t get rid of your old ideals and old truths that easily, Timothy.

He thinks about going to the police, but they’d never believe him. And then he thinks back to how much simpler life used to be in this car. And his old, distrustful eyes become young, idealistic eyes in a flashback. He picks up Maggie at high school (maybe) and they talk about their art projects before he asks if she wants a bite to eat or something. She looks directly at him and says she wants something and then we see a beautiful scene of them making love on her jacket on a hill side.

With his glasses off and looking at her, he asks what she would say if he asked her to marry him. (Even here, where we like him, he still can’t just come out and ask directly…it has to be someone else’s decision.) And maybe his eyes are closed this whole time. It’s hard to tell. But that might be the point.

She asks him what the worst thing he’s ever done is. He thinks and (while not looking at her) tells her he buried a can full of live bugs. But halfway home, his conscience got the better of him and he went and dug them up and got in trouble with his mum for being late. “But what else could I do?”

She says, okay, let’s get married. And a rabbit jumps through the panel.

It's such a beautiful little scene that we almost forget all the terrible things Timothy did to destroy his marriage and his life after this. It begs the question of what would have happened if he had been a better person from the start? But we'll get to that soon enough.

We cut, unsuccessfully continuing the rabbit jump, to a kid jumping in front of the car as he thinks about Maggie encouraging him to hang up his birds eggs. She accepted him even though his art was devoid of life.

His eyes in the mirror are full of fright. But he slams on the brakes, despite thinking, “I thought it was him, and I almost didn’t brake.” He thinks that everything is dangerous now… “I’m dangerous to me.”

The car stalled when he braked and now it won’t go again, so he has to push the car home. He hadn’t been paying attention where he was driving and now he’s by the old flats he lived in when he was a younger boy. “I don’t remember driving here.” Gosh… do you think his subconscious has been driving?

The old neighborhood hasn’t changed, despite everything else changing. You can’t change your past, but you can try not to look at it. “Eyes down,” he thinks as he pushes the car. He thinks about when he was a kid and tried to avoid some older kids. He had to stay ahead of the pack, referencing his later car ad. His moments of inspiration are influenced by his past, by who he used to be.

He makes it to his parents’ house and thinks about reading Lolita, but thinks about how Humbert’s obsession with Lolita drove her mother to her death under the wheels of a car. So he looks at an old photo album instead. His past is always there.

He works his way backwards: his marriage to Maggie. He can’t remember why they objected to getting married in a church. “Motives. They aren’t Kodachrome. They fade, they blur…” Of course he would put it in terms of an advertising pitch.

He sees a picture of him as a baby and then one of him as a teen, with his very symbolic artwork. The worker crucified on a dollar symbol. One of him at a christening party and one of him with his father on the beach for a holiday when he's twelve. He’s almost there... almost to his ten-year old self.

Notice that as a small child and baby he doesn't have his glasses and after about twelve, he does. And while that's true for a lot of people, that they develop bad eyesight about age 10 or 11, it also works for the metaphor of how his vision of the world changed. 

Then he sees a photo and in a fright, he has to get out of the house.

“I knew it. Get out. He’s here.” This is reminiscent of that old line from the horror movie about the killer who calls and the phone company said the call came from inside the house!

We see the picture of him as a ten-year old and it is the boy who is trying to kill him.

Escaping by his father’s bike, he thinks, “The murderer. He’s here.” Of course, the only one in this panel is Timothy.

What did you think?

Shameless plug

One more project I'm working on: A friend and I have created a comic book called Miskatonic High. Five teens take on H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters and their small-town high school … They’re just not sure which is worse.

We successfully launched our first issue on kickstarter, which you can buy (PDF or physical copy) from here. It has received plenty of rave reviews:

Jenn Marshall of Sirens of Sequentials said: “Miskatonic High is a fun story that balances everything you want in a good horror story. There is some gore, but not so much that you get overwhelmed. The jokes are funny, but they don’t make the story feel like a parody of something else. It was well thought out, and I cannot wait to see where it is going to go next.” Read the full review

The Pullbox called it “the bastard lovechild of John Hughes & H.P. Lovecraft.” (We’re pretty sure they meant that in a metaphorical way, because if that’s literal, well… ewww.) Read the full review

Our kickstarter for issue two ends in just a couple of days and you can find it here.

Goshdarn Geeky raved of issue 2: "Miskatonic High has proven it can hit us right in the heart with a character-centric story that goes past the cosmic horror, and I hope it can continue to deliver." Read the full review