John Shirley - Wetbones

by Unknown

  He took her hand and smiled, to show he held no rancor for her, and led her into the living room. They sat down on the leased couch. ''I had to come back," she said mechanically. "Did you do something to . . . ?"

  "Did I make you come back with my mind? Not at all. You were well out of my reach. No, my dear. You came back on your own, wagging your tail behind you, ha ha." He smiled at her, trying to make it a sad smile, hoping she'd feel sorry she'd hurt him. Not wanting to force it on her psychically, if he didn't have to. "You see, your brain has been somewhat re-ordered. You are an addict now. What you felt was withdrawal. It would have gotten worse. It would have killed you." This last was a lie, of course, but a necessary one.

  "I'm an addict? Addicted to the Reward?"

  "Yes. I know you don't love me - but I hold no grudges, my dear. After all - only a short time ago, you were forced to submit while I cut off one of your fingers. No doubt a bit traumatic, but a necessary sacrifice, for our protection. No, I will not punish you this time. In fact -" He put his arm around her, and with it gave her a burst of Reward. She slumped against him with relief. "Did you call anyone?" he asked.

  "No," she said absently, humming to herself. "No. Well - I tried to call my dad once but he wasn't home and I didn't try again . . . I didn't call the cops or anyone either . . ."

  "Good. Lovely." He wondered in passing why he hadn't been more worried about that possibility. In the interim between her rebellion and her withdrawal, she might well have turned him in. It occurred to him, not

  for the first time, that he had been behaving with a sort of recklessness lately.

  He shrugged and went on, "Well now - I have some news for you. I have made a decision. I have, you see, been chewing your fate over in my mind, this last couple of weeks. Wondering if I should send you into Wetbones and have done with you, or go on as we have been - or, the third possibility. I have decided on the third recourse. That other step. I seem to have . . . to have become very attached to you.

  "And I would like to see you feel the same about me. I know you don't, despite your pretenses. I'd rather not simply program you to be attached to me. I want something deeper. So . . . I thought perhaps - and this may be foolish - if I taught you what I know, up to a point, you might see me as I really am, underneath, recognize the Nameless Spirit that guides me. Understand me better. And learn some of these disciplines yourself." He hesitated, licking his lips. His mouth had suddenly become dry; the palms of his hands damp. He felt strangely off-balance - he was used to simply commanding her. He sighed, and went on, "You could become an initiate. I've never shown you my diary but . . . well, ah, all in good time. Understand, anyway, that this is an honour I have shared with no one else. The others are all dead. Only you have been chosen for this Knowledge . . ."

  "I know it's an honour Ephram. I do," she mumbled into his breastbone.

  "But you must promise me to be very close-mouthed about whatever you learn. Look at this . . ." He took a newspaper clipping from his shirt pocket and unfolded it for her; it showed a photo of three cops standing around awkwardly in the trapezoid of a yellow-tape police barricade, as a plainclothes morgue technician squatted with

  a bodybag. There was a row of onlookers behind the tape. Ephram tapped the image of a faintly-smiling man in sunglasses. "This is a certain Samuel Denver, my dear. Some of his followers call him The More Man." Ephram paused to read a paragraph under the photo: The remains left by a fourth "Wetbones" killing prompted Angela Herman, Assistant District Attorney to issue this statement, "We are bearing down on Wetbones' with all we have, and so far getting nowhere. But we won't ease up - this killer has taken the final step that only the Nazis equalled. He's taken women victims beyond even reducing them to murdered sex objects, or hunted animals - he's turned them into unrecognizable mounds of wrecked flesh and bone. It's the ultimate dehumanization and I'm sorry to say it doesn't surprise me - that's the logical next step in our deterioration as a society . . ." Ephram chuckled, and went on, "Denver's been talking to people around the investigation. He has to be - because they're calling it 'Wetbones'. That's my term and he is one of the few who knows it. I don't think he's giving them a line on me - that'd be dangerous for him. He's playing games, is what he's doing, the rogue. He got into this photo on purpose, expecting I'd see it . . . He paused to give her another jolt of Reward, so as to seal her attentiveness. ''And you see, Constance, I do not wish to be located either by the police or by dear old Samuel . . ." Odd, he thought, how he'd come to think of her so much more personally than the other girls. She was not a number in his journal the way they were, not any more. She was Constance. Very reckless indeed. "We must be careful, Constance, even of a small slip. Well, ha ha, a small slip can lead to a big slap, my dear. Oh yes."

  "Tell me," she said, snuggling against him. "Tell me about the Spirit . . ."

  "The Nameless Spirit? In time, my little one" Ephram said. "Not yet. First you must know the behind of it all . . .

  "In 1923, a group of people came together in Hollywood at the house of a woman named Elma Juda Stutgart. She was a wealthy German immigrant - though perhaps immigrant is not the word. Citizen of the nation called Wealth, is closer. She maintained houses in several countries, and often returned to her lovely home in Berlin. Mrs. Stutgart was recently widowed; her husband had been rather mysteriously lost overboard in the course of a transAtlantic voyage. She had a servant who was a rather sturdy Bavarian peasant from the Black Forest and she called him Thandy, although I think this was some sort of corruption of his real name.

  "Mrs. Stutgart was fascinated with the relatively new art of the motion picture - to generously grace that business by calling it an art.

  "Actually, Mrs. Stutgart's true fascination was with a certain silent film star. She gave a number of extravagant parties for her pet star. The parties began as glamorous, and soon became sordid. Valentino and William S. Hart and Fatty Arbuckle were regulars at her bacchanals. Mrs. Stutgart was a morphine addict and once in America, increasingly infatuated with cocaine. Cocaine was quite a popular drug, in certain circles, even back then. Its addictive qualities were not understood in those days, and it was not illegal. Bowls of it were set out at parties and the revellers indulged with wild abandon. This, along with drink and his native stupidity, is what got Fatty Arbuckle in trouble.

  "The director James Whale, the auteur behind the films Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, was a cocaine addict and, in the '30s, one of Mrs. Stutgart's most

  frequent guests. Sometimes Whale was her lover, but so was nearly everyone else, after her film-star sweetheart refused to have anything to do with her. Apparently she'd gone mad with jealousy at a party, on seeing her pet flirt openly with Rudolph Valentino, and tried to kill him with an ice pick. She continued the parties spitefully without him, throwing herself ever more into perversity. There were, for example, the young boys, not yet teenagers, whom she hired from the local fagens; a baker's dozen of dough-soft young things who were forced to act out an obscene play Mrs. Stutgart had written, buggering one another while declaiming bad verse. Must have been quite amusing.

  "Are you paying attention, Constance?"

  "Oh yes, I am, Ephram, really, I'm listening!"

  "There were more exotic visitors to Mrs. Stutgart's late-night circle," Ephram continued. "There was Madame Blavatsky, the Spiritualist and architect of Theosophy, and Aleister Crowley, a drug addict himself. He was largely a fraud as a sorceror, was Crowley; but a fraud of great power, strangely enough. Mrs. Stutgart learned some interesting things from Crowley and Blavatsky. Certain things that neither of them spoke about in public or in print, except to hint at it. Mrs. Stutgart experimented with some of these things, and Crowley and Blavatsky, alarmed at her successes, soon departed for the continent. But Mrs. Stutgart was undaunted. She went on and down, ha ha . . .

  "She was a driven woman, our Mrs. Stutgart. Cocaine users, and users of methedrine - whether they inject it, smoke it or snort it - inevitably discover, my pet, that
after the first few strong doses of cocaine or amphetamine, there's very little pleasure left in the drug. There's only the compulsion to get high. The pleasure

  centre of the brain - and this you and I know only too well, Constance - has only so many cells and can only bear a certain amount of unnatural stimulation before it's necrotic. Burnt out, you would call it. So what is left? What next?

  "The drug-maddened Mrs. Stutgart and a few of her grasping, leechlike friends found a way to bridge the gap, to pass beyond the barrier. They found that, having learned certain psychic disciplines, and having contacted certain . . . well, certain creatures of the Ether World, and having made arrangements with those creatures, whom we call the Akishra, they could use other people's brains for pleasure. They could pirate that pleasure. First, one takes control of those people with the proper manipulation of the reward and punishment centres of the brain - then one stimulates them, whether through pleasure or pain, rerouting all sensations through the pleasure centre. Once the pleasure stimulus is used up, the pain sensors can be used and the impulses altered. And one can experience a portion of what goes on in that other brain by proxy. If one has control of five such people, one can feed off five brains- without damaging one's own brain. It is the soul, ultimately, my dear Constance, that experiences pleasure or pain - the brain is only the fragile circuit that translates the sensations.

  "Now, Mrs. Stutgart became more and more reclusive. Many of her circle were murdered, or very sensibly committed suicide. She became more psychically powerful still - and her 'arrangements' with the Akishra, the creatures who make this parasitism possible, became more involved. They maintained her in a degree of good health, while others aged around her. They fed, through her, on the shattered souls of those who were her prey. She took the senses, the minds of her victims; the

  Akishra sucked instead at their spirits. She had become symbiotic with them.

  "Eventually . . ." Here Ephram paused to sigh, and chew a nail in sudden anxiety, wondering: What was he risking, with these revelations?

  But he found he could not prevent himself from continuing . . .

  "Eventually, little Constance, Mrs. Stutgart developed a new circle of friends around her. A whole new generation. This was in the 1940s, and on into the early '60s. There was, for example, a young producer named Sam Denver. Whom she eventually married. She changed both her first and last names - she goes, now, by Judy Denver. Also in this circle were other luminaries of film and the arts. There was the actor Lou Kenson; there was the painter Gebhardt who claimed to do portraits of one's aura as well as one's physical person. And there were -"

  I remember Lou Kenson!" Constance exclaimed. "He was a big star when I was little. He was in that TV show Honolulu Hello."

  "Yes, yes, quite. Ah, also in this new circle were many who didn't seem to belong - such as myself. I had written an essay on Nietzsche that 'Judy Denver' enthused over, so she contacted me, and wired me a ticket to visit her at the Doublekey Ranch. Some intuition prompted me to accept. There, at the Ranch, I was initiated. I had a rather spectacular talent, you see - a talent the others did not have - which set me apart, and made me a valuable resource to the Denvers.

  "The blossoming of this Divine Vision, as I think of it, this special talent, made me realize I was above the repugnant miscegenation that the Denvers and their set indulged in . . .

  "What's miscegenation?" Constance asked.

  "Interbreeding between races, my dear. In this case it went farther, really - it was interbreeding between species. Well, perhaps what they were doing was not exactly breeding, not sex - but it was a hideous congress of animal and man. The Akishra are thinking creatures, in a sense, but they are not highly evolved beings - they are really a kind of animal. An etheric animal. They are not in the same class as the Nameless Spirit . . .

  "I did not wish to belong to the Akishra. So, I broke away. I found the Nameless Spirit, and with it, my own direction . . .

  "Pleasure is important, but - despite what I may have told you for my earlier convenience - it is not enough alone. There must also be exaltation. True dominance and transcendence! Otherwise I would be only what the Denvers are: pleasure vampires. Vampires of the pleasure-centre of the brain, something they are absorbed in so fully they are no longer able to think beyond it. It is their raison d'etre. Pleasure - and pain in others that becomes pleasure in the Akishra.

  "Pleasure can be taken to levels the Akishra cannot comprehend, when one becomes the superman, the man who is more than man. And we simply cannot achieve real dominance with the damn worms haunting us day and night . . ."

  "Ephram?" she asked. "Could you give me a little more Reward now?"

  "Oh yes, my dear. Here's a little. That's all for now.

  "We'll talk more of this later. We'll talk of the Nameless Spirit. First, let me play some Mozart for you, and let us have a bite to eat. I know how you like pizza, and I ordered one for you in anticipation of your return. I'll just put some in the microwave. Then we'll drink in

  more Reward, and contemplate, together, a fine and elegant murder . . ."

  Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles

  It was a relief when Lissa opened the door. Though the sunny afternoon seemed to make a joke of his fears, Prentice had been irrationally certain that Arthwright would be waiting at Lissa's place, smirkingly poised behind the door. "I should have been cool and waited to see you at the party," Prentice said. "But -" He shrugged ruefully and hoped he was coming off charmingly smitten. "I just had to see you."

  She smiled. "I can live with that." She was wearing a sky-blue Japanese robe, embroidered with red dragons, open in the front to show only a white string bikini. "You wanted to see me - and you can see me pretty well, in this thing. I was out back getting a tan. Come on in."

  He'd been hoping that coming here would drive the burden of Amy's imagined presence from him. He'd felt dogged by memories of her, almost by a sense of her nearness, for days. It was wearing on him. Sometimes it very nearly terrified him.

  But the nagging intrusiveness, the taint of Amy's point of view, stuck with him as he followed Lissa into the house. Tacky robe she's wearing, he imagined Amy saying. And these paintings. What is she, a Hare Krishna?

  The wall was adorned with framed prints of Hindu deities, scenes from the Uppanishads; brilliant-hued panoplies of spirits from the tormented fertility of India.

  They stepped into a modern living room with a flagstone floor scattered with sheepskin rugs, and a tinted glass back wall; out back, a cinderblock fence enclosed a kidney-shaped pool, a redwood hot tub, and immaculately gardened strips of Bird of Paradise, gardenia bushes and yucca. The back door was open and the heavy

  odor of gardenias hung almost cloyingly in the air. "You live rather well," Prentice began, pausing to look around. He had almost finished by saying, For a secretary. But that would have been rude. Still, it was odd. This place was large and expensive.

  "The place is left over from a former marriage; he got the cash and I got the house," Lissa said; she said it rather glibly, Prentice thought. She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then went on, "I was just going to have a light beer. You want one?"

  "Sure. Thanks."

  Beers in hand, they settled on the white couch. "You look kind of tense," she said.

  "Do I? I guess I am. It's a couple of things. Not knowing how to act today with you - how much of what happened at the party was a fluke of your mood or . . . or what. And I've been bothered by . . . Well. Maybe I should tell you about Amy."

  She raised a casual hand. "Hey. You're under no obligation to apologize for having girlfriends and wives or whatever."

  Prentice imagined Amy remarking, You might know the slut would take that attitude.

  He took a long pull at the beer, and then said, "You misunderstand, Lissa. Amy's dead. She was my ex-wife. I identified her body not that long ago . . . I'm still a little freaked out by it."

  He expected the ritual noises of sympathy from her. But she only nodded sl
owly, and squeezed his arm. And said, "Look - the only thing you can do is let go. Just let go of her. And feeling responsible - I see that in you, that you feel responsible. But we're not responsible for how other people end their lives. You know? You get out of yourself you'll feel better. I've got an idea . . ."

  She disappeared into a side hall, past the kitchen area, and he wondered if he were supposed to follow her back to the bedroom. He imagined Amy saying, God what a bitch. 'Just let go of her' she says. That's easy for this slut to say . . .

  "Stop it," he muttered to himself

  Lissa came back with something cupped in one hand. She sat down and opened her hand; in it were two large gel capsules of white powder. Prentice stared at it, then shook his head hastily. "No. No thanks. I don't indulge. Too many of my friends have taken the big plunge behind drugs . . ."

  "This isn't anything addictive. It's MDMA. You know - Ecstasy."

  He knew. He remembered Amy had taken it . . .

  She went on, "With a little demerol mixed in, just a little, to take the edge off because these are pretty big hits."

  "Uhhh . . ."

  "It's a great aphrodisiac."

  She knows your weakness, all right.

  "Sold," he said defiantly, taking a capsule. He downed it with beer, and she took hers as she walked to the CD player. She put on some George Benson. Then crooked a finger at him, opened her arms. He stood and walked to her, and he thought he could hear Amy saying, You've done it now, dumbshit. She's completely -

  But then Lissa slipped into his arms. And with that contact, the imaginary voice cut off. The stifling memory of Amy, the presence that had dogged him - simply vanished. Instantly.

  Prentice and Lissa danced. By the end of the third tune, there was an electricity flickering between his teeth and along his spine, his nerve ends sang along with the music, his dick was hard, and he was convinced Lissa was the finest girl in the world.

  9

  Watts, Los Angeles