Wetbones

by John Shirley

  Garner swallowed. His mouth was very dry. He took a long drink of the Sprite. His tissues seemed to soak it up like desert sand sucking a raindrop. "Seems to me it could still be… a hoax. Stolen bones from some medical school or… Were there organs?"

  "Yeah. Some. What wasn't mushed into… gunk."

  "And skin?"

  "I didn't see it. But there was a lot of stuff I couldn't quite make out what it was and I didn't wanna look that close."

  It's a big city. it wouldn't be her.

  "But – why do you bring this up…?"

  'They were all young girls, I heard, these bonepiles…" He shrugged. "I don't wanna be insensitive or nothin' but…"

  "Any identification of the…?" He waited, heart thudding so hard in his chest he thought that Blume must be able to hear it.

  "Nope. That's part of why this thing hasn't really broken into the papers much because they're not connected to specific missing girls and the cops are taking the same tack that you did – that they're stolen bones… I.D. ing them's hard. There are so many missing kids in the L.A. area it's unbelievable."

  "Yeah. I know." Garner fingered his soda glass. Stared at the slowly, slowly melting ice. "But you drive around in this town for a day or two – especially when you're from out of town – and you find the statistics about missing kids very believable indeed, Blume…"

  "You got any kind of fingerprints on your little girl?"

  "Yes. I left them at your office with your boss when I first came in. And I've given the police a stat of them. They should be in the police computer."

  "As far as I know they haven't got any fingerprint I.D. on these Wetbones things yet. Hey, don't give me that look, it's a long shot – but we should push the cops into crosschecking it just to eliminate that longshot, when they've got some fingerprints on those bodies… If you can call 'em bodies…"

  "You already said that," Garner pointed out, through grating teeth.

  Suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. The smell of the men's room, the stale beer, the reek of booze off Blume himself. He wanted to shout at Blume that he was killing himself with alcohol, an addictive drug that's sold on television to children, sold in advance through hundreds of thousands of beer and wine commercials, but then his automatic guard against self righteousness came into play, and he said nothing, except, "I need some air. Just keep looking for her, all right? I'll call you."

  Garner lurched out of the booth, staggered outside, as so many drunks did, coming out of Blume's favourite low-cost boozery.

  For a few moments Garner was staggering like a drunk but – he was horribly, terribly sober.

  Santa Monica

  She was beginning to see pictures in her head that seemed to come from nowhere at all. She knew where they were from, though – not from Ephram, not from God or the Devil. They were from her, the part of her that she couldn't stop from feeling.

  Constance was sitting under a lemon tree in the backyard of the little condo that Ephram had rented, sitting in a lawn chair, wearing a white bikini that Ephram had picked for her, and sunglasses she wore as often as he'd let her. Ephram had pushed some buttons in her head and she felt no pain.

  Ephram was in the house scribbling in that little book of his. It was the only time he left her alone and she was trying to enjoy it – though she knew he was still watching her in some way, and she mustn't even think fleetingly of climbing over that white wooden fence and running. So instead she was sitting there quietly, seeing herself transfixed by steel poles.

  It was sharp, mental image, like a slide projection: Constance with three shiny steel rods, each an inch thick, thrust laterally through her breasts; another transfixing her neck; another through her temples, passing, presumably, through her brain. Constance smiling happily through it all, talking, chattering, saying nothing.

  And then it would vanish, this picture, only to be replaced by another: Constance walking through a party, talking to people like she was the hostess, only she had a noose around her neck, already tightened, her face swollen and black, as if she'd already been choked to death, or – no, she wasn't quite dead, she was perpetually on the verge of choking to death, but never did, not quite, she just walked around chatting, shaking hands, hugging people, smiling as she said, "Excuse the rope," in a strangled voice. No one seemed to mind.

  And then she saw herself in a steel globe that was just a little bit too small for her body but big enough so that she could wriggle around looking for the escape hole that she knew must be there but she couldn't find She kept trying but still couldn't find it, and the globe was tightening, was getting smaller…

  "Constance?"

  She'd felt him coming before he'd spoken. "Yes?"

  "We're going to go out tonight, we're meeting someone at a motel…"

  She nodded. She tried to feel nothing. She was getting pretty good at it…

  Lately, Ephram had got into this prostitute thing. First that girl they picked up at the disco, then call-girls chosen from classified ads in the Los Angeles Swingles Guide. Constance could see the logic, that the girls he picked weren't with pimps or madams, they were working alone, and they usually didn't tell anyone where they were going. Or so he assumed. But maybe he was wrong about that. Constance had pointed out that they'd know it was risky going out with all these strange men, maybe some would tell their boyfriends or whomever, have them waiting outside…

  But no, Ephram said, they were complacent and too-confident, these girls, and besides he mentally frisked them for traces of accomplices. "These are girls," he said, "one can snip off at the stem – and no one will notice them missing in a tree already heavy with rotten fruit, ha ha."

  None of the girls were surprised to see Constance with Ephram; with the trick. They were used to threesomes and foursomes.

  Sitting with Ephram in a thickly padded blue vinyl booth in a dark corner of the Howard Johnson's cocktail bar, Constance felt a squeezing pleasure of anticipation and excitement. For a moment she thought that Ephram was prompting the sensations, but then she realized that, instead, those feelings were her own, were coming up out of her unbidden. And that meant, she thought with a surge of joy and relief, she was becoming what Ephram wanted her to be. There would be less punishment now – and she could be another person, a new person, so that the Constance she had been need no longer be responsible for the things she'd done; need not exist at all. The old Constance could die… on the vine. Like rotten fruit.

  The latest girl was a little overweight, and Constance could see some anxiety in her eyes as she approached the booth, wobbling a little on her high pumps, carrying an overnight bag that would have her working lingerie in it. The girl was nervous the old man would reject her because she was overweight, and she'd lose the great wad of money he'd promised her. She had lots and lots of fake blond curls tumbling over her bulgingly exposed cleavage; she had a deep-dark tan and capped teeth and a tighter than-skintight short black dress. And a big butt.

  Ephram beamed at her. "My dear! You must be Naomi! Sit down and I'll get you a drink…"

  There were drinks and there was small talk and an envelope passed between Ephram and the hefty prostitute. Constance felt her pussy getting wet looking at the girl, imagining what Wetbones would do with all that flesh.

  This was just getting better and better, Constance thought: now I'm responding. Getting excited thinking about it. That ought to please Ephram.

  She could feel Ephram's glow of approval like a space heater in a cold room.

  The girl made a few dumb, sexy remarks about Constance, stuff she probably just felt obligated to say. But Constance liked hearing it. She was beginning to enjoy female attention. It was something she'd never have thought herself capable of six months ago the very notion would have made her burst out, "Gross!", but compared to most of the recent innovations in her appetites, it was minor.

  After a couple of Margaritas, Naomi was animatedly talking about herself, on and on. Constance wondered if Ephram was already pr
iming the girl's pleasure centres. "Oh anyway," Naomi was saying, "I met this guy you know? Who's, like, a movie producer? And he's, like, really into me? And he wants me to, um, audition for his next movie and I'm all, Oh listen I wasn't born yesterday but he's all, No really, I'll get you an appointment right now let's call up my secretary right? And, like, I knew it would happen eventually because I've always had this higher destiny. That's what the girl who does my charts says, You have a higher destiny."

  Ephram smiled at that. "I'm quite sure you do, indeed, Naomi. Ha ha."

  Naomi chattered on, "And, like, I always knew I'd be something special anyway, even without seeing it proved on my charts? You know? Because, um, like, I've always had this talent for acting stuff out – I always do it with my clients, they love it, I get in all these kind off like, characters the clients want and certain outfits – I have all these costumes – and I can just be like, these people, like I'll be Elvira – you know, Elvira from, like, on TV? And I'll pretend to be Elvira with a blackwig and a black dress and they ask me, Come on, you really are Elvira and you do this on the side right? And I say no, but I've always had this talent…"

  Finally Ephram got a glazed look in his eyes that meant the girl was going to die soon. He paid the bill and took Naomi by her plump, silver-ringed hand and, still chattering, she followed Constance and Ephram out and across the parking lot and up to the second tier of the motel and into number 77 and Ephram put on the Adult channel. The girl didn't mind that at all, it just started her talking about how she'd acted in an adult video and knew some of those girls and how the director always said she was the one with real talent… she'd always had this talent, this knowledge of her special destiny…

  Ephram toyed with her in the room for awhile, jolting the girl with pleasure, little jolts, which she attributed to Constance's touch. After a while Naomi stopped chattering, and they slipped into an unreal subworld, smoky with a pink fog that seemed to thicken out of nowhere, clouding the room with a fragrance that was both floral and epidermal; an insulated retreat where Naomi's black lace crotchless lingerie was the requisite uniform of simply existing here, and where the only window was the TV screen with its writhing pixel-patterned flesh and sodden connections and false sighs and cheap hip-hop soundtrack; and where the only constant beyond the probing of slick membranes and swollen clitoral nodes and Naomi's great bouncing and swirling breasts, was the dumpy little man masturbating in the corner; the little man was simply there, ever there in the background, as the two girls played on the bed – the prostitute, normally exactingly conscious of the ticking away of her mental taxicab meter – coasted with only a murmur of wonder down into a nautilus-shell retreat from the currents of time.

  And the little man in the background was the source of nourishment and renewal, a ridiculous and divine fixture of this self-contained universe…

  So it went until Ephram himself broke the spell by declaring that he wanted to do something special outside.

  "Outside?" The girl seemed puzzled. She'd forgotten that Outside existed. Now the recollection of the outside world came back, because Ephram permitted it to. She nodded – and then frowned. She had mixed feelings about the proposition. She was intrigued, for financial reasons, because here was an excuse to ask a lot more money, but also dismayed because of the risk. "We could get busted for that. Now if it was off in the country somewhere… I did this video once, I was so good in it too, we were like naked cowgirls you know? And uh -"

  As Naomi chattered, Constance, knowing Ephram's mind, was dressing the girl, smiling and nodding and tugging her dress onto her – grunting with the labour of it. At the same time Constance focused on the waves of pleasure Ephram sent through her, taking refuge in them. She needed refuge because at the mention of outside, the place for the Engorgement Ritual, her earlier mellowness began to slip away and she felt herself drying up inside, the familiar hollowness growing in her, the feeling that came when she was being used a little too much… being used up in the effort to insulate her from the monstrousness of her complicity…

  Soon they were all dressed and it was the world that was naked around them, the exposed flank of the night making Naomi blink with confusion as they strolled up the alley. Naomi only vaguely articulating her misgivings, talking about "the shoot in the country" and how they did it and the "professional way to do outdoor stuff" but never really carping because Ephram wouldn't allow it, Ephram had his fingers on her control centre, giving only little punishments and big rewards.

  The spot Ephram had picked out earlier in the day was in the parking lot of a healthfood bakery in a residential block of Venice just ten minutes stroll from the Howard Johnson's motel/bar/restaurant.

  To either side, as they walked up the gravel alley, were houses with wooden backyard fences over which peered small palms and citrus trees and sunflowers. There was a faint scent of the sea from just three blocks to the West, and there was a rather cloying odour from some summery blossom calling out hopelessly in the darkness for fertilization. They heard a whisper of passing cars out on the street and, from the houses, the occasional murmur of voices as people on terraces drank beer over the remains of their charbroiled chicken. They heard them, but saw no one; and no one seemed to see them.

  The bakery's parking lot was asphalt with a sprinkle of gravel and it was secluded by cinderblock walls on three sides. There was one yellow utility light burning over the empty lot, and no sound at all from the bakery. An odour of yeasty dough and molasses lingered. Constance found the smell sickening.

  Ephram had brought along a buck-knife, this time. Constance wondered why; he'd never bothered with a knife on one of these expeditions. He was just unfolding it as they stepped into the lot. The girl hadn't noticed. Naomi was looking around, giggling nervously. ''Oh wow. I guess this'll be okay. Yeah, you know some people just kind of get off on doing it in weird places and I can, you know, get off on anything, I guess that's my ability as an actress -"

  Constance nodded and smiled and undressed her, right here under the yellow, moth-haunted light, and under the few stars that could be seen through the smog. Ephram was speaking, now, droning to stars behind the stars, and to the Spirit, speaking in a language that sounded like something from India but wasn't quite. The girl looked at him in sheeplike puzzlement until her eyes lit on the knife in his hand. She opened her mouth. Then shut it and looked around for her clothes and bag. Constance could see she was planning to scoop up her clothes and run. The hollowness in Constance ached at this and she almost found herself warning the girl but then a stroke of deep pain and brutal nullity swept through her, Ephram punishing her, telling her, Say nothing. It could be you and not her.

  Naomi went for it, grabbed at her clothes, started to run. Ephram tripped her, though he stood seven feet away. She stumbled and fell, making a cry like a little girl hurting a knee roller skating. Ephram let her get to her feet, then he called down the Spirit thing, whatever it was. You could almost see it, though it was invisible, it displaced the air and you could just make out a flailing tracery in the murk swarming over the girl, something almost like a translucent tube but, really, more like a great mouth and throat; a mouth with feelers furring its lips and no face or head to set the mouth in, just the cupping, the wet enclosure and the quavery lines…

  Closing around the girl. Her heavy breasts and belly instantly compressing. The Spirit directed by Ephram to close invisibly around her. Encompassing Naomi head to foot. Flattening her breasts, her buttocks, her shoulders and thighs. Squeezing and twisting, like wringing a wet cloth. Squeezing the girl's insides out -

  Out through her own mouth. Squeezing her insides out through her mouth.

  Now it looked as if she was caught in some small tornado, and there was a paroxysm of movement in the air as Naomi turned inside out, bones and cartilage, soft tissues and hard, breaking and pulping and jetting out through her mouth, like some kind of perverse birthing labour, her mouth the vagina that squeezed out the fetus of her insides as if her gut
s had grown in the womb of her skin all these years -

  Naomi imploding and then exploding, some of her squeezed out through the ends of her fingers, niftily destroying the fingertips and their prints, each splayed finger shooting out its blood and bone like some fireworks effect before flying into red-rag flinders; some of her bursting out through the nipples, her breasts exploding from the sudden deepsea pressures Ephram had created in her body, the ripples flying off like champagne corks, the breasts emptying themselves into the air like foaming cherry-champagne bottles. Her womb expelling out through her vagina; other entrails blasting into confetti from her rectum. Most of the rest of her – including skull, brains and torso – shattered and forced out through her suddenly-flexible mouth. A hundred and sixty pounds of pulverized woman erupting, then funnelled downward by the Spirit membrane to the growing puddle on the tarmac…

  And in the process pulverizing every nerve in Naomi's body, the implosion sending signals that were both monstrous and exquisite out to Ephram, sensations routed through Naomi's nervous system before it shattered, an explosion of feeling transmitted to Ephram, who absorbed most of it with a gasp of reeling ecstasy, before passing on a measured portion to Constance.

  Constance felt it hit her in waves of liquid scintillations, sensations beyond pain and redefining pleasure, and she was, for a moment, satiated, her hollowness filled, the thundering and all encompassing pleasure beyond pleasure of drinking the crushed winelike essence of one complete entire human being, drinking psychically, so briefly and tantalizingly making herself whole by induction of someone else's wholeness… Naomi's whole body a swollen sexual organ crushed in the etheric vagina of Ephram's telekinetic bond with the Spirit… Crushed like a grape and like a grape squeezed from its skin, turned inside out and left in an oozing wreckage to make the asphalt wet and sticky…