Wetbones

by John Shirley

"Maybe we'd better pull over," Prentice said vaguely, as the chilly rain off the sea began to patter down over them. He tried to help her with the top.

  But she snapped, "Don't touch it! It's cranky, it has to be done just right… goddamn it… And we don't have time to pull over…"

  What was the hurry, he wondered. It was as if she were trying to get him there before…

  Before what? And what had put that thought into his head?

  The rain splashed down his face now, and he felt odd, as if he were just waking up out here in her car. He remembered getting in with her and driving out here but till now it hadn't seemed quite real.

  What was real? Suddenly he found himself thinking that maybe some of what Kenson had told them was real. And just as suddenly the story Lissa had told him about "Xedrine" seemed improbable. Contrived.

  It was as if the dash of cold rain water and Lissa's distraction had slipped him from a noose he hadn't been aware of till he was free of it.

  How did I get here? he wondered. He'd been determined to avoid Lissa and Arthwright. How could he have believed that bogus story about the drug treatment centre? How could he have got in her car after all that Kenson had said about her?

  And why, he wondered, was Lissa the one who was to bring him – and not Arthwright?

  Lissa had been assigned to him, he thought. (Did he think it? Or was it Amy's thought?) He was a natural for Lissa. He was the type that went for her specialized bait.

  He was the type. That seemed a key, somehow. A type is compulsive about something.

  It had started long before Lissa's effortless seduction of him. He seemed to see an unbroken linkage of cause and effect stretching back to his days living with Amy, in New York.

  It began with his need to blindly chase girls. Why had he started cheating on Amy? Was it just her sickness? Or had that been a handy rationale? Some of the time he'd been happy with her – and he'd been frightened by his happiness with Amy.

  The car swerved on the newly slick road, threatening to spin, but Lissa kept it on track, and now they'd come to a straight stretch. She used the opportunity to close the convertible roof the rest of the way. Absently, Prentice helped her lock it in place.

  There'd been something missing in his life with Amy – something more than the stability sacrificed to her erratic behavior. He'd missed the sense of validation that came from new seductions, new relationships. He remembered something a male character in one of his scripts had said: JACK

  Women to me are doorways. They're a way into another would – an alien country where the landscape is made up of each woman's distinctive personality, her tastes, her desires, the way she feels under my hands and the way she feels about my hands… And me, I'm an explorer, is all. I can't be satisfied with exploring only one frontier…

  He remembered, too, what Amy's reaction had been, reading that. "An explorer? That's a comfortable euphemism for it."

  Euphemism for philanderer. For a guy who needed to have affairs. Who needed that periodic input of reassurance that he got from making a new girl. But there was something else, underlying the urge. A concealed anger against all women.

  Riding passively along in the BMW, distantly aware that Lissa was saying something to him, trying to snag his attention once more, he was nearly overwhelmed with a sudden and infinitely tragic yearning for Amy.

  And that seemed to pierce a membrane of some kind…

  When he turned to see Lissa, all filters were – for one moment – quite gone. He saw Lissa as she really was. Seeing her spiritually and, in some etheric sense, physically.

  The sickly, silvery-grey protoplasm of wormstuff had grown out of her mouth and eyes and out from psychic pressure points in the throat and temple – the worm had taken her over and grown to surround her, its great lamprey mouth, ringed and razoreid, turning toward him when she looked his way… its body, thick as a primed firehose, sliding through her body like a maggot through rot. Sliding through her. Squirming. A part of her and independent from her, as she calmly drove the car…

  The worm had clusters of polyps for eyes. They could convey no human expression, but he saw clearly its longing and hunger as it looked at him.

  Prentice shrieked like an infant stepping on a scorpion.

  He flailed, and his hand closed over the steering wheel. He wrenched it toward the brush to one side of the road. Anything to get out of the car.

  The BMW squealed and Lissa shouted in furious surprise. A flash of a concrete post pebbled with tiny round stones and then the car shuddered into a stand of Manzanita, the trees' load of rainwater shell-bursting over the windshield. A sickening thump as Lissa struck the windshield at the same moment; some of her blood splashing across its inside. The car jerked back with finality, the engine dying. Prentice was distantly aware that he'd thumped his own forehead on something; that Lissa had been badly hurt. He clawed at the door, scarcely able to see for the blinding pain. Lissa clutched at his elbow, hissing. He didn't want to look at her. He wrenched free of her weak grip and jerked the door open, flung himself from the car. Head pain grinding with every step, he ran into the brush and up into the hills. She was yelling something after him, but it didn't sound as if she was following.

  After perhaps a quarter mile, his breath coming in panting stabs, he stopped and looked around. He had to clear his eyes of the lashing rain, before he could quite focus – it was dark out here, though a little light came from up the hill. A house up there. The Ranch? It was too dark and rainy to tell. He was standing on the edge of a gravel road. It forked, a little ways to his left. He stepped onto the road, and walked unsteadily up to the fork. He could taste blood mixed with rainwater, running down from his forehead.

  He stood there, blinking stupidly at the fork in the road. Should he go up one of these forks, or go back down the road the other way?

  Go up the hill, and then to the right, Amy told him. Quite clearly. Look for a red pick up truck…

  Prentice staggered up the right-hand fork, feeling gingerly at the ragged lump on his forehead. He kept on, more or less blindly, thinking about Lissa. Wondering if the thing could pull free of her and come slithering up the road behind him.

  The rain slackened to a mist, but he was already soaked to the skin, his clothes rasping and heavy. Up ahead, off the road to the right, was a soft, yellow light. In the oily shine from a small square of window, he could just make out the outline of a one-room shack, and to one side of it, a pickup truck.

  Culver City

  Garner found the apartment easily enough. But it was locked and dark and no one answered the door. He stood on the dark landing, trying to decide what course to take now. Get something to eat and come back, maybe. He still had a little money. He was getting hungry, and his fractured ribs were aching; his nose and head, too. He needed more codeine, and some food. The codeine would upset his stomach, though. And he probably didn't deserve to eat. For all he knew the bastard motherfucker who had Constance was starving her in some basement.

  Once more the sludge-wave of post-cocaine depression rose up around him…

  He forgot about it, for a moment, when someone pushed the muzzle of a gun against the back of his head. All he could think of to say was probably the wrong thing, but he said it anyway. "You sure move quietly, man. I didn't hear you comin'."

  "I saw you up here trying my door knob, went to my car and got my gun and came back real quiet. It worked out."

  Garner could see the guy out of the corner of his eye. Gangly, narrow face, big nose. A glitter of honed intelligence. An expression of triumph. He was the kind of guy who liked guns and had been just waiting for the opportunity to use his… "How many other places here you break into?" the guy asked.

  Garner said. "I don't know why I tried the knob. Not even thinking. I'm on codeine, it makes me fuzzy. You're Jeff Teitelbaum?"

  He looked startled for a second, then smiled. "So you can read names off mailboxes."

  "I guess I look pretty bad, huh? Haven't shaved. Hair all f
ucked up with bandages. Like a street person. Probably smell like one too. Shit, I feel like one -"

  "Bandages…" Something seemed to occur to

  Teitelbaum. "Jesus Christ. You're with those lunatics who murdered Kenson!"

  "I don't know any Kenson. But I came here partly because of a murder. Detective named Blume. I found Blume's body over in his place… and uh…"

  Teitelbaum's jaw had dropped. He took a step back and slowly lowered the gun. Garner turned and looked at it more closely. Holy shit. It was a. 357.

  "You really need that thing?" Garner asked. "A gun like that the bullet would probably keep going through my head and right through somebody's window. Must be frustrating to be a gun freak and not get a chance to use it much."

  Teitelbaum scowled. "What the fuck you know about Blume?"

  "I hired him to find my kid. You lost a child? A boy – Mitch, isn't it? I heard your answering machine message to him…"

  "So that's it…"

  Garner tried to ignore the gun and spoke fast. "Whoever's been doing the Wetbones killings took my daughter and left her finger with somebody else's bloody bones. Blume thought there was a connection between them and somebody named Denver?"

  "There's a kind of cult…" Jeff broke off, shaking his head in exasperation. "I can't believe I'm discussing this stuff with a…"

  "A street bum? I got rolled, is all. I screwed up, and then I got rolled. I haven't had a chance to clean up. They've got my daughter, man. And I want to know what you know."

  Near Malibu

  She was skilled at hiding it. But Constance hated Ephram deeply and profoundly.

  Even so, she wished she could be with him now. And not just for the Reward. He was safer than these people. This place. This dimly-lit room with its infrastructure of purest grotesquerie. Besides, Ephram wouldn't make her watch a thing like this, not for so long. He'd have stopped it by now, for all the wrong reasons. He'd have regarded it as ''esthetically gauche" or something.

  The bed. It was made of people. Pieces of people. Pieces of legs for posts, bones for frames, most of it looking brown and old. But the skin over the mattress (what was the mattress stuffed with?) looked new. It was made from a black man; maybe not much more than a boy. She could see his face upside down on the side of the mattress. The eyes were sewn crudely shut.

  The room stank.

  The teenagers, a white boy and a black girl, were humping listlessly in the middle of the bed, and clawing at one another. It was making Constance sick, because she wasn't getting any Reward, and some of her natural feelings of repugnance were coming back. But the More Man and Thandy, the Handy Man, and the woman with the white thing growing from her face – they wanted her here, they wanted her to watch. They were standing on the other side of the bed. Playing. She supposed they were preparing her for something. She didn't care. She just wanted to get back to Ephram and hide behind him.

  On the bed, abruptly as the fall of a house of cards, the boy collapsed. "Lost too much blood," the Handy Man said, examining him. "He's dead."

  "Now," the More Man said, "is the time, Constance.

  Go to them. Mitch's dead and Prime will pass to you – you will become one of us."

  "No, thanks," Constance said.

  The More Man laughed. "A good semblance of winning ingenuousness."

  Something glimmered around the More Man's head. She could see that he had the thing that looked like an undersea-crawler on his head, too, like his wife – only his was less substantial looking. It reached out, though, to Constance, stretching like phlegm, reaching for her. She backed away. The door was locked behind her.

  "Time to par- tayyyy…" the More Man said softly, mockingly.

  The Handy Man said something in German. The woman with the big sea snail thing on her head answered in German, something muted and bubbly under the stuff, and sobbed, and lifted up her dress and…

  Constance looked away. He slim black girl on the bed of body parts was crying softly, rasping. "Mitch…" He boy was dead. The black girl was trying to heave his body off her and couldn't. She was crying with crusted, dried out eyes and cracked lips, trying to roll the boy off her. Constance looked away from her too. She didn't want to feel bad for anyone. If she let herself feel anything, it'd open a can of…

  The yellow-silvery tendril reached out to her.

  A rattling in the lock Then the door opened behind her.

  She turned and saw Ephram there.

  But Ephram looked defeated. "That's enough…" He tossed the key onto the floor. "I… will cooperate, Samuel."

  "You have become peculiar lately," Sam Denver chuckled. "Very well, Constance." The tendril slunk back to him like the gelatinous antenna of a snail pulling into itself.

  Denver drew the Handy Man aside, away from his wife. "What can you do for her, then, Ephram?"

  Seeing they'd lost interest in her, Constance edged toward the bed. She wasn't sure why – but she had to do this. Maybe some door in her had been left open a slit. She pulled the white boy off the black girl, rolled him toward Denver's side of the murdered bed. The girl turned on her side to try to crawl off the bed – and found herself staring, three inches away, into the mummified face of the boy they'd made into a mattress cover. She screamed in recognition: and Constance saw the family resemblance between the two faces. The girl's brother.

  The girl covered her face with her hands, screaming uncontrollably into her bloody palms. Constance helped her to stand, and drew her aside. The girl fell silent, shaking. Constance wondered if Denver would let the two of them get out the door.

  Ephram was staring at the woman. That'd be Mrs. Denver, Judy, from what he'd told her. Once Mrs. Stutgart. Ephram was doing something to her with his mind. Ephram grimaced and shook his head. "I haven't got the strength. They're too firmly a part of her."

  Denver nodded grimly. "Then get the hell out of here. And leave the girl."

  Ephram hesitated. Then he started mumbling. He was chanting, Constance knew, calling up the…

  "No," Denver said. "If you can't do it alone, don't do it."

  "It's the only way," Ephram said, pausing in a distracted kind of way. "The Spirit can draw them off from her. I don't have enough strength."

  "The Spirit!" Denver laughed bitterly. "What the

  Bloody Hell do you think the Spirit is, Pixie? Don't you know what it'd do to her? Or is that what you want?"

  Ephram stopped his murmuring. He blinked at Denver. "What do you mean – what it is?"

  Denver shook his head. "Do you really have that much of a blind spot? But of course, it's kept you that way… Ephram, your spirit is just another Akishra. A Magnus. The most powerful Akishra – but it is still just an Akishra."

  "No!"

  Constance had never heard Ephram sound so off balance. And so afraid. She looked at the door. The girl beside her – God, she smelled bad, of rotting blood and shit and worse stuff – was sinking to her knees, unable to walk by herself. Constance couldn't carry her and couldn't bring herself to leave the girl here. What am I doing? she wondered. Maybe she'd been too long without Reward, and this was withdrawal. This feeling…

  "You don't think I'd perceive such a thing?" Ephram said, with a trumped-up sneer. "I'd know."

  "You really can't see them?" Denver said. "The control lines? I suppose it doesn't want you to. See for yourself. Here, with our influence, you should be able to see them…"

  Ephram looked up, and shocked Constance by whimpering. Constance followed his gaze. Shimmying into view like puppet strings over Ephram's head were dozens of fine, translucent tendrils. Now, as they began to move around, billowing and gleaming, they didn't look like puppet strings so much as the little trailing stingers that dangle from big jelly fish…

  They were sunken into his head. Grown right into it. They stretched from Ephram up into, and through, the ceiling. And through this world into another. They were not quite physical things – you could see that, looking at them. But they were there.

  "
You pretentious old bastard," Denver said. "You thought you were better than the rest of us – because of your overblown talent? That you were in touch with some glorious God of the dark dimensions? You perfect ass! It was just the biggest Akishra; the Magnus itself. The greatest of them, playing games with you, letting you play on the line, reeling you out then, reeling you in now. It brought you here, for this. Manipulated you into coming to L.A. Oh, yeah. The thing you called down for Wetbones. And – you want to bring that here? Now? You're out of your pompous little skull."

  "Yes," Ephram croaked. His face gone white. "Yes. Having come this far: yes. To cure us all." And he spoke three more words.

  The ceiling seemed to vanish. It turned transparent and then faded completely. Smoke replaced it, a living smoke made up of ten thousand restless, microscopic eyes. Constance thought she glimpsed people there, too, whirling, caught like the birds in a tornado. The rectangle that had been the ceiling was now an infinite reach of crowded and living sky. And then the iridescent bulk of the creature who'd masqueraded as the "Great Spirit", the Akishra Magnus, descended slowly toward them. What Constance could see of it made her think of a house-sized plasticine squid; its upper parts tapering into the boiling smokes of staring, black-light space; reeling in on some tendrils, seeking with others, its vast sticky, glimmer-edged, polyp-bearded mouth opening…

  A great wind raged through the room, roaring, smelling like an overheated electric train; and static electricity invested the air, making Constance's hair crackle out, as the "Spirit", the etheric animal that had kept Ephram for its toy, lowered itself over Mrs. Stutgart, taking her into its translucent, feeler-furred envelope. They could see her inside it, through the foggy membrane. And for an instant, within it, she was freed – the husk of Akishra was drawn off her head, and the old woman beneath wept with gratitude. Then the woman's own face was peeled off her skull, sucked cleanly off her, upward, and her eyes remained in her skull for a moment staring in naked realization. Until the skull exploded, and Elma Stutgart disintegrated into a pulp of flesh and bone…

  Denver was all this time moving away from her, pushing the Handy Man ahead of him…