by Mick Farren
"What was that? Windemere's familiar?"
"That's Errol. He shares his home with us and we feed him. He's a bit neurotic and doesn't altogether trust strangers."
Christobelle closed the door behind the animal. "You think you'll be okay here?"
Gibson was a little surprised when she closed the door; he couldn't really believe that she intended to remain through the night with him on so brief an acquaintance. He picked up the book and leafed through it, doing his best to look casual. "I'm sure I will. I could sleep on a cement floor if I had to."
Christobelle dimmed the bedside light and turned back the covers; then she started unbuttoning her shirt. Gibson glanced up and raised a questioning eyebrow. "You look as though you're planning to stay?"
She grinned at him, "Unless you have an objection."
Gibson sat down on the bed."No objection at all. I just didn't expect it."
Christobelle wasn't wearing a bra.
"Didn't you think that well-brought-up English girls did this sort of thing? "
Gibson chuckled.
"Hell, no, I've met a few well-brought-up English women in my time. They didn't act any different to anyone else."
"So why the look of amazement? You must have had girls throwing themselves at you all the time."
"Windemere isn't going to be put out by us being here like this?"
"Why should he?"
"I was wondering how he might feel about a total stranger debauching with his secretary."
"Listen, Gibson, Gideon Windemere's secretary debauches with whom the hell she wants. Don't you forget that."
She was sliding the leather miniskirt over her hips. Her panties were plain black cotton. She sat down beside him and put her lips close to his ear. "If you want to, you can look at it as just a little more dreamstate reinforcement. Or put it down to the tact that, when I was little, I always wanted to be a groupie."
Gibson could reel the warmth of her breath, and he needed no further urging.
After all that he'd been through, making love to Christobelle Lacey was close to a hallucinatory experience. He was beyond exhaustion and far from certain that he'd be able to respond at all. Fortunately, Christobelle seemed to have no reservations about taking control, and Gibson was more than happy to relax and leave himself in her capable hands, lips, arms, mouth, and all the other parts of her body that continuously drifted in and out of his soft-focus opium half-dream. She moved against him sinuously. She stretched and writhed. There was muscular, feline joy in each slow variation of her movement. She was a jaguar crouching over him, purring and sighing, hot breath on his face. Momentarily, her teeth clamped into the flesh of his shoulder, and he later tasted blood on her lips. As if from a great distance, he could hear his own gasps of pleasure, and despite all that he'd been through, he found himself rising with her, coming up for annihilation, drawing a strange new strength from somewhere in the depths of complete unreality. The only disturbing part was that each time he opened his eyes he found that he was looking at the Warhol Electric Chair on the wall that faced the end of the bed. Who was it who said that there was only a fine line between orgasm and death? You said a mouthful there, Jack.
When they were both finished, Gibson lay on his back, panting, watching red explosions beneath his eyelids. Christobelle rested her arms on his chest and looked down at him in the gloom with a wicked but contented grin on her race,
"Did you like that, Joe Gibson?" He noticed that she had very sharp little incisors. He opened his eyes and smiled.
"That would be an understatement. I feel like a violin that's been played by a master."
"Or maybe a mistress?"
Gibson laughed. "Top-of-the-line, five-thousand-dollar hooker couldn't have done better."
Her teeth were very white in the darkness.
"You really know how to sweet-talk a girl."
"Were you ever a top-of-the-line, five-thousand-dollar hooker? Maybe in another life?"
Although Gibson knew that it was probably the gentlemanly thing to stay awake and talk, he couldn't fight his sinking mind and wilting intelligence. Within minutes, he was fast asleep. His dreams were a procession of ragged fragmented images, weird but not terrifying and certainly not imposed from outside. At one point, he floated on his back in a warm, buoyant sea while an entire armada of stately UFOs, rainbow-colored and in an infinity of configurations, slowly crossed the jet-black sky in multiple formations. Christobelle or someone very like her swam beside him, occasionally reaching out a soft hand to touch his body. There was nothing in this part of his dreamstate to warrant any complaint.
Waking was a whole different matter. Christobelle was gone, replaced by O'Neal and a headache of Godzilla proportions. O'Neal was standing at the end of the bed. He was wearing a zipped-up nylon windbreaker that made him look like a narc.
"You'd best be getting up."
His voice had the harsh rasp of Catholic Belfast. Gibson sat up. For a few moments, he had no idea where he was. Then it all came back to him. It was hardly a pleasant sensation. Even less pleasant was the taste in his mouth. He reached for one of the Cokes on the bedside table. The ice had melted, but it was still cold.
"What's going on?"
"Windemere will fill you in. You'd best get some clothes on. Everyone else is waiting for you in the drawing room."
The White Room
IT WAS THE shrink hour at the small but very exclusive clinic. That is to say, it was shrink hour for Joe Gibson. It was plainly a very self-centered attitude to think that the clinic revolved around him, but there was nothing to give him any greater perspective. They had him completely isolated, and he had absolutely no idea what went on in the rest of the place. Monday through Friday, he spent one hour a day with Dr. Kooning. Indeed, the only way that he could recognize a weekend was by the lack of Dr. Kooning's hour and the change in the TV schedules. Monday through Friday, they came for him in his white cubicle with the ceaseless TV set, put him in a wheelchair, and wheeled him through the bright, sterile corridors of the clinic to the equally white interview room with the garish, orange-and-yellow floral curtains. Gibson couldn't figure the logic of transporting physically healthy mental patients from one part of the clinic to another by wheelchair. Why in hell couldn't he be allowed to walk and maintain some shreds of his dignity? Did the patients being in wheelchairs make them easier to subdue? Gibson had learned more than he really cared to know about subduing procedures at the clinic when he'd made that first futile attempt at a breakout.
Dr. Kooning was a small woman with scraped-back, graying hair, rather prominent teeth, and very thick, circular glasses that she wore balanced on the bridge of her nose. Her face was locked into a permanent expression of distaste. Gibson wasn't sure exactly what she found so distasteful: humanity at large, the nature of her job, or maybe just him. He didn't believe that it was him alone. She'd appeared to have been wearing the expression so long that almost all the lines of her face conformed to it. Dr. Kooning had been viewing the world with distaste long before he'd shown up. That was, however, no reason for her not to make him the focus of it during their sessions. They had clashed immediately. One of Gibson's first ploys was to refuse to lie down on the couch. Another token maintenance of dignity. He would sit on the couch, he'd lean on the couch, he'd sit on the couch hunched in a corner with his legs curled up under him, or in a full lotus position. The one thing that he wouldn't do was lie flat on his back on the couch.
"What frightens you about the couch, Joe?"
"I'd get too anxious and I wouldn't be able to concentrate. I'd be too worried that someone would suddenly jump on my stomach with both feet."
The thing that annoyed him the most about Dr. Kooning was that she always tried to insinuate herself into the picture.
"Do you fear that I'd jump on you?"
"No, but one can't be too careful."
After about a week of sparring, Dr. Kooning had accepted Gibson's attitude regarding the couch. She still brought the ma
tter up at roughly weekly intervals, but the initial fight seemed to have gone out of her. Instead, she had recently taken to challenging his fundamental belief in himself.
"So it was only when you returned to this particular dimension that you began to believe that you didn't exist?"
"I didn't say that I didn't exist. I said that all evidence of my existence had been erased."
"Isn't that the same thing?"
"Only if you take a very Orwellian view of the world."
"Are you angry that you've been erased?"
"I'm not very pleased."
"Do you feel that you're being punished?"
"No, I think something tipped over on its side."
"Or maybe that the world isn't grateful. It took away your fantasy of being a once successful entertainer."
"It wasn't a fantasy."
She'd stay with the same question like a dog worrying at a bone. "Maybe the world isn't grateful enough?"
"Why should the world be grateful to me?"
"For saving the universe,"
"I didn't save the universe. My world has gone."
"Perhaps that's why you're being punished."
When this kind of concentric looping of the subject didn't get anywhere, she had him go over his story in the minutest of details.
"Now, Joe, if I remember correctly, when we finished yesterday, you were about to tell me how you woke up in that house in London."
"The house that doesn't exist anymore."
"Forget about that for the moment and just tell me how you felt when you woke up that first time. You'd briefly felt safe and you'd made love with a woman who'd given you more satisfaction than you'd experienced in a while. Very quickly, though, you began to feel as though it was all slipping away…"
Chapter Five
"GO TO THE window and look out."
Gideon Windemere's drawing room was on the first floor of the house. The big bay windows with their small wrought-iron balcony commanded a perfect view of the street out front. Gibson walked over to the window, pulled aside the heavy blue velvet drapes, and looked out. Windemere was standing behind him.
"Tell me what you see."
A light drizzle was falling on the town. The road surface was slick, and cars hissed by with windshield wipers flicking. Water dripped from the plane trees that lined both sides of Ladbroke Grove. Even in the house, there was a smell of dampness.
Gibson considered the scene in the street below him.
"There's a large black car across the street. An old Hudson, '51 or '52, the one with the small narrow windows that looks like a big turtle."
"Anything else?"
"There's a man leaning against the car. I'd say at a guess that he's watching the house. The funny thing is that he doesn't appear to be getting wet."
"Describe him."
"He's wearing a long raincoat of some kind of dirty off-white material-it's a bit like a duster-and a black cowboy hat with studs around the band."
"Can you see his face?"
Gibson shook his head. "No, it's hidden by the brim of his hat. Who is this guy? Is the Jesse James look big in London this year?"
"When he's in this dimension he calls himself Yancey Slide, and he's nothing to do with London."
Gibson turned and looked at Windemere. "What is he?"
"He's an extremely dangerous entity."
Gibson looked out of the window again.
"This cat in the cowboy hat is a superbeing?"
"No, but he's hardly human."
As O'Neal had told Gibson, everyone had been waiting for him in the drawing room. Christobelle was sitting in a deep leather armchair. She was comfortable in torn and faded Levis and a bulky fisherman's sweater. As Gibson walked into the room, she gave no indication that the previous night had ever happened. There was no quick smile or fast intimate eye contact. Cadiz and O'Neal flanked the door. Smith, Klein, and French sat side by side on the leather couch that was part of the same set as Christobelle's armchair. Windemere presided over the room, leaning on the mantel of the marble fireplace, in which a small log fire was burning.
"Yancey Slide is what was known in Sumerian as idimmu, a minor demon."
Gibson was still staring out of the window with his back to the others. "You're telling me that a minor demon is standing in the rain on a street in London in broad daylight, leaning on a 1951 Hudson? I don't see no horns or tail and certainly don't see no smoke rising or smell any brimstone."
Christobelle rearranged herself in the armchair. "He isn't getting wet, is he?"
"That is a little weird," Gibson conceded. He slowly turned. "At risk of sounding overparanoid and being accused of believing that I'm the center of the universe, does the fact that this guy is lounging around across the street not getting wet have anything to do with the fact that I'm here?"
Windemere half smiled. "It would be pushing coincidence not to recognize that there could well be a relationship between you turning up and then Yancey Slide arriving just twenty-four hours later."
"So what about this character? What do you know about him?"
Windemere scratched his ear and looked a little unhappy. He glanced at Smith.
"You want to field this one?"
Smith shook her head with a quick but very smug smile.
"It's all yours, Gideon. I don't do demons. They're not my field."
Gibson looked slowly from Windemere to Smith and back again. She was calling him Gideon? Had there been something going on between these two last night? What went on between an otherzone cop and a weird-ass, postmodern philosopher?
"So which of you is going to tell me about Yancey Slide? This waltzing around is making me nervous."
Smith looked to Windemere for a response. Windemere stared long and hard at the rattlesnake skeleton that was coiled in a glass dome on the mantelpiece. Finally he straightened up and went and stood beside Gideon. The gray afternoon light in the London drawing room was suddenly detached and alien, and there was a chill in the air despite the fire.
"It's funny that you should mention Jesse James. In many respects, Yancey Slide is the very same kind of morbid, psychotic, ethnopath white trash. Except, of course, that he may be as much as twenty thousand years old. He seems one and the same as Yanex, the servant of Maskim Xul during the first occupation, although it's very hard to know with idimmu. There's one theory that they're immortal, much in the manner of the vampire, while another suggests that they might be a series of entities that consecutively take up residence in the same personality."
"Kind of like renting an apartment?"
Windemere seemed pleased that Gibson was taking it so well.
"Exactly. There's definite evidence that Slide has always had an affinity with the southern part of the United States. He appears to have started a vampire plague in New Orleans around the beginning of the nineteenth century and later roamed the settlements along the Mississippi as a professional witch-finder. He's recorded as hanging seventy-three women and sixteen men in one summer of operations. It's also likely that he may have been present at the burning of Lawrence, Kansas, so the Jesse James connection is more than just sartorial."
"You're going to tell me next that he rode with Attila the Hun."
"Attila the Hun didn't keep records."
Gibson peered at the man in the street, but this time he did it from half behind the curtain. Slide hadn't moved.
"Can he be stopped?"
Windemere spread his hands.
"Stopped? I doubt it. Deflected might be possible."
Gibson turned to Smith, Klein, and French. "Can't you zap him with one of your weapons and send him back to where he came from?"
Smith shook her head, "It's not possible. Slide's much too complicated for that."
"Silver bullets? Stake through the heart? Holy water? Exorcism?"
Windemere was shaking his head. "None of the above."
"So?"
"So I suggest we go and see what he wants."
Smith loo
ked up in amazement. "Have you taken leave of your senses?"
Windemere shrugged. "You have a better idea? We can't zap him, and I certainly don't intend to cower in the house until he gets bored and goes away. If we talk to him, at least we know what he wants and if there's any chance of negotiating."
Gibson didn't like the sound of the word "negotiating." He could all too easily see himself as the subject of the negotiations.
"Hold up there a minute."
Windemere quickly turned. "Don't worry. We won't be giving you away to him unless we absolutely have to."
Smith still looked less than overjoyed by the idea. "Are you sure you can handle this?"
Windemere nodded. "I think so. It's my turf, after all."
Gibson stood up very straight. "I'm going with you."
Windemere and Smith responded in unison. "Don't be ridiculous. "
"I'm going."
Windemere was busily shaking his head. "Your being there is just the kind of distraction that Slide could use to pull something."
"I don't want to argue about it."
Smith fixed him with a look that should have left freezer burn. "We're not arguing. You're not going out there."
It may have been the look that snapped it or it may have been the tone of her voice. Gibson wasn't sure which. All he knew was that he was suddenly as mad as hell. He jabbed a ringer at Smith.
"Listen, lady, we had the start of this discussion last night. I'm getting mighty tired of being told what to do and being expected to obey without question. I don't do that sort of thing. I spent a lifetime not doing that sort of thing and I'm not about to start now. I'm extremely grateful for you pulling me out of the shit in Jersey, but nobody appointed you either my babysitter or the custodian of my life. If they did, they were acting well outside their authority. I'm a grown man and I make my own decisions, and here's the one for today. I intend to have myself a very large Scotch-" He glanced at Windemere and made a slight bow. "-if I may-" He returned his attention to Smith, "-and then I'm going to walk out of the front door and find out what this Yancey Slide wants with me."
