The Place of Dead Roads
Page 25
The Shmunn is a predator with the powerful hindquarters of a hyena and the hyena's bonebreaking jaws. There the resemblance ends and indeed this foul beast beggers description. Blind, entirely silent and devoid of vocal cords, they are guided by scent perceptors that cover the entire body, which is pale pink, pitted and porous like pumice stone. It's a terrible sight to see a Shmunn smelling its way in, its whole body writhing in peristalsis, steaming caustic saliva dripping from its fangs. The Shmunn is devoid of an anus, voiding waste products through the skin, which gives off such a foul odor as to repel the hardiest predator. And the body temperature of the Shmunn is 212°, the boiling point of water. The creature has such a rapid metabolism that it literally burns for food. At the smell of food it quivers with excitement as the boiling frenzied digestive juices flare through its flesh like a furnace. It has to eat every twenty-four hours to stay alive. It will eat anything alive or dead. A pack of these creatures, owing to their high body temperature, steam off such a pestilent cloud of noxious vapors that in many cases the prey is already incapacitated before the serrated shark teeth and the tongue sharp and hard as a rasp go to work.
The Shmunn is also armed with an interlocking network of razor-sharp incurving claws on its four feet. It can throw itself on one side and kick upward with its hind claws to disembowel an opponent. And any wound inflicted by a Shmunn will cause death by infection within twenty-four hours. The virulence of such infections in this steaming inferno of explosive growth must be seen to be believed. A man who cut himself while shaving died of tetanus before lunch.
As for the miniature vultures, I have so far seen none of them but today I heard a strange rumor in the marketplace. [Kim was learning Venusian and he frequently circulated in public gathering places disguising himself as a beggar or an itinerant entertainer. Kim could do magic tricks and juggling.]
So I start to tell Tom about this rumor I picked up today, disguised as a diseased beggar in the marketplace, about "Soul Suckers" and without even waiting for me to go on Tom says he doesn't believe in souls anyhoo, he knows I hate to hear anyone say anyhoo so I shoot back,
"You should keep an open mind and stuff."
And he grins at me...He can be so irritating at times, like the putdown nagging wife they dragged out of the archetype closet and one time I did a little skit:
Hubby comes in all full of enthusiasm and mixes a drink. Wifey watches his hand and catches him trying to add another dollop...
"I've just been looking over the new place, darling, and it looks great..."
"That sounds tacky."
Hubby finishes his drink.
"Oh, you'll like it when you see it, darling."
"I've had a terrible headache all day..."
"Oh uh I'm sorry to hear that, can I get you an aspirin.
"Certainly not." She glares at him indignantly.
Hubby sidles unobtrusively into the kitchen...thinking someone should invent a silent drink mixer.
"Are you mixing another drink?"
I showed this to Tom and told him he acted that way sometimes and he didn't think it was funny at all.
So I took a big dose of majoun, which is why the whole possum scene took place and stuff. And I keep getting off the subject of the rumor I picked up today from a traveling merchant into smuggling mostly... Red Devil and Dream Dust...force knives...the usual line...Well he told me over a glass of khat that in the areas south of here occupied by a number of ancient decaying city states well there are these creatures with human heads about the size of a fist...and shimmering insect wings and they stick out from their mouths this long proboscis...which penetrates right to these special places in the nervous system and sucks all the soul and spirit right out of the target while he squirms and shrieks in the deadly pleasures of the proboscis. These creatures are transparent like a heat wave, just the outline and the colors that flush through them and you can hear the whir of wings hovering over you. Once that proboscis gets into you it's curtains. A young soldier who was rescued in time said it was like all the best comes he ever had all rolled into sweet liquid gold in his nuts. "She was killing me and I knew it and I loved it..."
The Colonel shuddered and put the area off limits to all personnel. We call the critter Andy since it can assume the form of either sex. The chemistry dept is trying to come up with a viable repellent. Since the proboscis is composed of some substance much more rarefied than ordinary organic or inorganic substance, no suit or space suit could provide protection against penetration on a molecular level...
My informant also told me that the "honey" so collected was stored in the body of Andy and was used to feed scorpion larvae of a particular breed of scorpion incomparably venomous, one hundredth of a drop causes death by internal combustion. These scorpions are prized by the nobles as bodyguards, a certain whistle conveying the attack order.
The Colonel shuddered some more...he gestured to the south. "All those stinking little kingdoms down there, God knows what goes on...I say we should knock them off one after the other before they find some devilish way to get rid of us..."
I want to visit this southern area. It sounds like my sort of thing.
Kim is in a station wagon driving east. Guy Graywood is at the wheel. No words are spoken. To the south a low dark sky...Much lower than earth. Wind behind us, clouds scudding east...a long skinny shape races across the sky faintly illuminated from behind by a green purple light all rather like the high-school play...music from The Isle of the Dead. They pass a house of red brick smooth as if the bricks have fused together under great pressure. The house has a passageway through the middle and you can see it is only six feet from front to back. No sign of anyone in or around the house, which sits there in a block of palpable darkness, a dark black red like rotten blood. On the right side of the road are some buildings. We stop and get out. We have business here. A call to make. A door opens on a narrow corridor with another door at the end. Kim observes that the doors and walls are compacted layers like plywood and that they have a malevolent life of their own, snapping open and shut, you can get lost in a maze of doors and corridors, steps going up to nowhere, steps going down to a dead end as a heavy door slams shut behind you. Have to stick to your objectives. A door at the end of the corridor opens.
Kim is standing in the doorway of a room about eighteen feet long by twelve feet wide. There are sand troughs in the floor and paths around the troughs at the sides and one path down the middle. At the end of the room is another door. The room is full of light from windows in the far wall. In the sand troughs are naked men with bald heads, dead gray skin, a soft boneless look. They are all small, dwarfs actually. Their gray, faceted eyes keep darting about in agitation. They wallow in the sand with galvanic sloughing movements, their bulbous gray foreheads like egg sacs, from time to time a black claw moves inside. Other gray dwarfs wearing tunics, who seem to be the overseers, move about on the walkways, pass in and out of the door at the back...
Kim remembers a reek of evil. In the middle of a red-carpeted room a plot of ground about six feet square where hideous bulbous plants are growing. Centipedes are crawling about and from beneath a rock protrudes the head of a huge centipede. Kim arms himself with a cutlass. Graywood stands by with a crowbar. Kim kicks the rocks over and the centipede digs deeper, he can see that it is at least three feet long and that the plant roots stir like centipede legs, part plant and part insect...He wakes up shivering with horror because he knows these hideous insect plants and giant centipedes were once (an evil old-woman voice tinkles in his brain)
"silly little boys like you."
He walks back along the corridor through several doors and up some narrow stairs and comes out onto an open hillside. Two hundred yards away across a limestone court he can see a waterfront promenade. Someone from inside the building says,
"He won't leave without his friend." And Guy comes out in green slacks and a gray shirt. I point to the promenade, the trees and the sea beyond.
"Run!"
He flashes back to the trough building. He goes down to the trough room. One of the overseers comes at him, hands and fingers outstretched. Kim puts up his hands palm out and arrests the dwarf. Leaves him frozen there, hands stretched out. He walks back to the door that leads to the exit where he encounters a giant twelve feet tall, rather thin with a triangular face and peaked cap. The giant is wearing a brocade coat and pants of black satin with white and yellow brocade. He seems friendly. Another dwarf pops out through a door. Kim engages. The dwarf snaps back through the door, leaving a stink of insect evil...
They are back on the hillside and Kim says to Guy..."Just to be anywhere out of there...no matter how ordinary...just out of that horrible place.
Kim realizes that the dwarfs in the troughs are being processed into centipedes. The centipede eyes are already in place. Eventually the centipede will emerge from the forehead, leaving the dead gray hulk behind.
Why? One of a number of expedients to destroy souls and so limit and monopolize immortality.
Where? Planet Venus, where else.
Who or what is behind the scenes here? Something dry, brittle, timorous. Kim senses that this is card magic associated with a special card deck. The cards are painted on a material like plastic that absorbs the colors to produce a three-dimensional impression. The cards move into combinations like animated cartoons...
When more flatly revolting things are done the Venusians will do them.
A narrow, almost two-dimensional space...Look at those houses...not more than four feet deep. They must slide around in there...nursery-rhyme magic, attacking clubs and coffee grinders, giants, dwarfs and palaces. The Lords in red robes, centipedes encrusted in their amber foreheads, old-woman magic with spinning wheels in tiny cottages of the plywood they use for building, compacted in layers like the cards animated by a malevolent sliding life", doors slide open, snap shut.
In his knee-length cape of centipede skins, Kim walks with the Noon Devil in hot still electric air. The cape makes a dry rustling sound. Kim stops and unfastens the pincer clasp at his throat and passes the cape to his faithful squire, Arn...under the cape Kim is wearing a magnificent coat of red satin with many pockets, a tricornered hat of blue satin, pants of yellow pongee silk, his boots, brownish pink and porous, are made from the skin of an electrical eel. At his side is the magic sword and the invisible swordsman, a creature of his will that moves with the speed of light. In his hand is a crystal tube. As he lifts the tube to eye level blue lightning crackles from his eyes out along the tube...
BLAT BLAT BLAT
The Palace goes up in chunks.
"You've seen the troughs..."
Kim nods, his face blazing with pure killing purpose as he remembers the dream.
"Well remember this. If they get their hands on you anyone can be broken down into the troughs...'peed,' they call it..."
He pauses, giving Kim time to know what it would mean to recognize a friend's face just as the pincers start cutting through the swollen egg-sac forehead.
The Supervisor is suddenly an old man who has carried heavy pain for a long time. Long long time, you can tell by the shoulders.
"They get you screaming curses like an old washerwoman...Make your hate solid in silence."
Ali trots down the street, his kris vibrating in front of him, pulling him forward, shop shutters bang down...this street...this shop...here she comes. The fat one with the dead cold shark eyes...we called her the Great White now isn't that cute her face shattering in recognition she dives for the pistol in her handbag late and she knows it he slices her open from her cunt to her gullet. The eyes roll back showing the white and she sinks in a reek of blood and guts...Her Consort is backing away, hands outstretched in supplication...
Ali smiles over his bloody kris. No mercy there. Consort turns to run, slips on dog shit, falls on his face. Ali glides forward, puts a foot in the small of his back, pulls his head back by the hair, and cuts his throat.
Making machine-gun noises...BBBBUUUUUUPP as he sprays the blood around...
Ali prances out with a T-shirt. Hand holding a bloody kris has written AMOK across his chest. He clasps his hands above his head and smiles...Plane crash? You carry Caesar and his fortunes unsteady, he slipped and bumped against me at the airport. It was his error. Pilot's error. And that's when I skipped in...I am leading him away from the controls...I can be soo seductive, look like anybody, he is already screwing the hostess, getting a hard-on...then the error...Shock on the co-pilot's face...
Realization
OH SHIT
The ripping splintering crash...Among the passengers killed in the crash of Flight 18...
Hurricanes...let it all sweep through faster faster ride the wind ride the glass shards stripping flesh from the screaming bones, the tidal waves churning houses, people, cows, and windmills...Anita advances on Texas...
Ali prances out in his ANITA shirt...A big fat whore with her mouth open is blowing a city away...
Tornado is quite a different operation. You pull all the curses and the hate in all the way in right to the epicenter...They are all pouring in everybody who ever hated you and cursed you...
Stay all night and stay a little longer
Take off your coat and throw it in a corner
Don't see why you don't stay a little longer
Round and round faster and faster spinning in
a green black funnel...tornado sky...
tossing trucks and cars around like matchboxes
the funnel skips and hops
and it comes down here
And it comes down there
Take off your house and throw it in a corner...
The funnel whirls and tilts
And it comes down here
And it comes down there
And I said, "Pa, we best get in the house and there
wasn't any house..."
Don't see why you don't stay a little longer
And the music softly moans...tornado warning
sirens
'Tain't no sin to take off your skin
And dance around in your bones...
"The truck had crushed her completely, just her legs was sticking out."
Ali prances out in his T-shirt, KID TWIST in green-black letters across his chest. Ali smiles...Texas twister T-shirt... legs sticking out...
Get their hands on you it would mean operations...screaming face in the trough, you could just see her...
National Geographic voice: Guy, Marbles, and Kim are patrolling dead-end slums where addicts of the suicide drugs gravitate to hideous dooms. Some are dragged into the canals by the dreaded Lophy Women. Underwater, the abducted male depends on his mate for oxygen as he is slowly absorbed into her body until only his testicles remain. So she becomes a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite and fulfills her biologic destiny...Galvanized by hideous hunger, these half-formed creatures slither through the filthy alleys and warrens of slums adjoining a huge swampy lake. An underground river feeds in here, the water is clear and deep...Suddenly a Lophy Woman slithers out, huge mouth gaping to show the incurving teeth fine as hairs. They eat into the victim's face to block his breathing as they feed in oxygen through their gills. So the lethal mating is consummated. She absorbs first his head and brain, keeping his body alive with her bloodstream. Kim shoots her in the mouth with a shot load and blows the top of her head off...
Others wind up on the centipede troughs, or as sexual stumps for the Amazon tribes, cut off at the waist and the knee, kept alive by feeding tubes...
"It's not a question of shoot first and ask questions later. We never ask questions. We are here strictly in the capacity of Stoppers, our function to Stop. To arrest."
They turn into a square on the outskirts of a city. Here the poor are receiving their evening handout from a liveried servant. A carr
iage stands by. Each supplicant receives a slab of yellow metal paste. It is cut with a lead knife and the freshly cut paste gleams silver like sodium. Their faces are covered with metallic sores leaking pus like melted solder with a sickening sweetish metal reek.
The Stone Hots is a molecular alternation of the stone fish venom, a poison so agonizing that victims roll round screaming and must be restrained from suicide by any means at hand. Even large doses of morphine bring no relief...The Stone Hots affords the addict what he calls a "fire fit" as pleasurable as the unaltered venom is agonizing...
One of Kim's informants sidles up, an old man in a tattered black overcoat...
"There's a Stoner. You can tell by the burnt-out look. Those fire fits burn the brains out. Look in his eyes. Nobody there. Skin and bones at the end."
The Stoner sits on a shit-stained limestone curb, with his conch shell of Stone Hots...He dips in a little barbed sting and shoves it deep into his leg. His eyes light up and flash with insane delight. Like a galvanized skeleton, he jumps up and dances the Fire Fit Jig.
More and more unaltered venom accumulates in the body...The Stoner rolls screaming in the square. Urchins gather. One throws himself down and mimics the Stoner's screams while the others piss with laughter...Kim shoots the Stoner through the head...Nothing inside, as if you'd broken open a dry empty husk. The urchins hiss and slither away.
The Marbles is a heavy translucent white liquid that is carried in a golden bottle and injected in a gold syringe. The Marbles or the Rocks encases the addict in mineral calm. They live longer. Much longer. Up to six hundred years if they can keep the Rock on. Takes more and more as the body acids concentrate. Here is a gathering place for wealthy Marbles, gilt and gold and white satin. Tropical fish flash in floor-to-ceiling aquariums. They move very slow with the blank golden eyes of the axolotl salamander. They sit in chairs of smooth form-fitting marble.