John Shirley - Wetbones

by Unknown

  How could people like this hang out in the world at all? Why was it allowed?

  There was a light in the window of the guest house, downstairs. Once, he thought he heard Orphy's voice from over there. Some of the others came and went - just shapes in the darkness, some of them nude, some of them in sloppy clothes - and now here came four more, so he scrunched, down lower, biting off a shout when he accidently drove a cactus needle into his right arm near the elbow. Grimacing, he felt for the broken-off needle and plucked it out. He was going to lose an eye in here next. Had to get out.

  But he was safe in the cacti. Maybe he should stay till daylight. These sick fuckers probably slept during the day. Or maybe they never slept. That wouldn't surprise him, either.

  Two more of them went by, carrying something long and sodden that dripped onto bricks. What they were carrying didn't have to be a man's severed arm. Not necessarily.

  They paused a moment, next to the pool. One of them bent and seemed to tease the surface of the water with the drippy end of the thing he carried in his hand. Lonny thought he saw something sparkle, faintly, in the pool, then, but he wasn't sure. The two laughed. Were they men? Yes, now, seeing them pass across the open area of the terrace where more starlight reached them, he could see they were white men, both clothed but one of them with his dick hanging out his fly - from here it looked like a little white worm.

  They paused at the door to the back house - and both glanced over their shoulders at the cactus garden. A flash of teeth as they grinned. Then they went into the house.

  Holy shit, Lonny thought. The fuckers knew he was there. They'd known it all along.

  They wouldn't leave things like this.

  Lonny crouched lower, got down under the curve of the yucca spears, and squirmed like a soldier moving under barbed wire, pulling himself with his elbows, till he got free of the cactus garden. Then he got to his feet and ran in a crouch across the big terrace.

  He still had the gun, anyway.

  And he had to know. He scurried up to the lower window of the guest house. The windows were curtained. He heard voices. One of them was Orphy. Sounding delirious. He had a drunk, disbelieving quality about his

  voice and Lonny couldn't work out exactly what Orphy was saying.

  He made up his mind. He went toward the door, circling the treetrunk-thick stem of the huge rose bush growing up the side of the place - looking quickly away from the yellow bony thing wired into the roses. (Bones with only the grease of a human body left on them.) Gun at the ready, Lonny walked through the front door of the guest house. There was a hallway, strewn with trash and rose petals. Beyond it, a sickly gray light from the hall corner.

  The trash moved. Lonny stared. There was a man among the bottles and cans and old rags. He looked like a rag himself. He was crawling through the trash toward Lonny. He wore only bloodstained diapers. Baby's disposable diapers. Scabby rips all over his gray skin. He was . . . Lonny shook his head with amazement. He'd never seen anyone that skinny except on TV commercials about those starving kids overseas. A skeleton with skin shrunk-wrapped on it.

  "Don't . . ." the guy rasped. No hair on his head. His eyes looking two different directions. "Don't . . ." The voice like a rustle of paper, barely audible. His body made a dry scraping on the floor when he moved a few inches closer. Saying, "Don't let them do this to you."

  Lonny's mouth went dry. Instantly. He turned to run - then he heard Orphy yell his name. "Lonny ya fucking . . . Feez motherfucker . . . Don't . . . Lonny . . . !" Something skewed wrong in his voice - the words were pleadings, protests - but the tone was childishly happy.

  "I've got the gun," Lonny murmured. And maybe they had Mitch with Orphy.

  He forced himself to go around the corner and look through the door into the room.

  There was one dirty white bulb directly in the middle of the ceiling. Under it was a kind of platform, about bed-height from the floor. It took him several seconds of staring to be sure that the platform and the chairs around it were made of human arms and legs. The bone-ends, the bits of meat at the join, showed it was real. They'd preserved it and crudely stitched it together and tied it up with strips of skin; clunky and haphazard looking, but it held together as Orphy thrashed on it.

  Orpheus was strapped spread eagled, naked on the bed with the Feasters - so Lonny thought of them - crouched around him, or sitting in bodypart chairs. They were connected to him. Something like stretched-out bits of glue ran from their mouths and exposed genitals, into Orpheus. The stretched-out bits quivered and flowed, and Lonny could see that they were alive, that they were something . . .

  Something like worms. And they were part of the people around the bed, half a dozen people including the guy who called himself the More Man and the little guy, the Handy Man, and a woman whose eyes seemed to shine . . . you couldn't see her face at all, there was a kind of gas mask effect because the transparent slick white stuff had erupted from her mouth to cover most of her face. The other worm things squirmed into the wounds on Orpheus's throat . . . Another woman crouched over his genitals, chewing them up, as a worm thrashed whitely next to her pink tongue . . . A fat man crouched next to Orpheus's foot; the ankle had been broken, a bone end sheering out through the breached skin and the guy was licking marrow from it. Orpheus looked down at the guy and made a sound of pleasure.

  Orpheus made that sound?

  They'd done something to him. He was writhing,

  Lonny saw now, not in pain but in ecstasy . . . as the More Man used the severed arm of the security guard to fuck a wound in Orphy's side, the arm a dildo. Orphy writing in repugnant happiness. Feeling no pain while they snapped his bones. He looked invitingly at Lonny. Mucous bubbling from his mouth as he urged: "Git on, Lon!" he said wetly. "Take a hit!"

  The worms thrashing and squirming over this feast. Not eating flesh but taking something - taking what? The woman looking up at Lonny with eyes that were glossy with sensation but something imploring in them too.

  Use the gun on me, boy. Use it on me

  Was that her voice?

  Use it on me, Mein Schönes jung. The head. Shoot me in the head

  Orpheus's belly was humping up with the movement of the things probing in him and he was way beyond yelling now, he was just staring deep into the lightbulb and going"Ack . . . ack . . . kuh . . . ack . . ." as they probed into him, his eyes bulging, the joy in his face worse than anything else. All of them smiling through the wormstuff at Lonny. Reaching out . . .

  Lonny felt a buzz in his head. A flush of pleasure.

  "NO FUCKING WAY!" Shouted so hard he could feel something rip in his throat. And the gun came up -

  Me, herrliches boy . . .

  - but he wrenched the .45 away from the target it wanted, and pointed it at Orpheus. Fired. Felt it jump in his hand, glimpsed Orphy's brains splash. He fired it wildly at the others till it expended its magazine - with the last round, the light bulb exploded and the room went dark.

  He threw the gun into the darkness and spun, careened into the hall. Sprinted for the front door.

  He stumbled through the trash. Bottles and cans rebounded from his feet; he felt his heels crunch something that was probably a spine. A fading murmur of gratitude came from underfoot. Then he was outdoors and racing across the terrace. Someone lunged from the shadows under an oak tree and he felt a hand close around his wrist and he shrieked his best approximation of a karate yell and slammed a fist into a soft part of whoever it was. They went flailing down and he kept going, tearing through brush and feeling it tear through his skin, until he got to the black metal fence. He was over it in seconds, wailing one long note like a siren the whole way over. Dropped to the other side, ignored the pain in his ankles and ran on. Another fence. It was nothing. He went up it like a cat up a treetrunk. Dropped into the sand on the other side. Thought he heard a really pissed-off yell behind him. They hadn't expected him to get away.

  He just kept going, shouting hoarsely, "Not me you fuckers!" He kept goi
ng, running at random into the brittle, aromatic brush of the countryside, until his legs stopped working. He fell into sand and rocks.

  After a spinning while, the sobbing started. With that, came strength to crawl.

  It didn't matter how he went. He just had to keep going.

  Culver City, Los Angeles

  Prentice had been sitting with a stack of books at the table in the Los Angeles main library since eleven a.m. It was almost two. His butt hurt from the chair and his stomach growled, but something kept him there. He imagined Amy saying, You always did give up too easily, Tom. Like with me . . .

  He shook himself, and focused on the book. It wouldn't do to let the Amy obsession haunt him again. He turned the page, and then he saw them. Sam and Judy Denver.

  The book was called Those Fabulous Hollywood Parties. The Denvers had been known for their parties. Prentice was looking for anything he could find about them - he wanted to get some kind of impression of them, and judge how likely it was that Mitch was actually being held out there . . .

  He'd just about given up on finding them in this book - it seemed to focus on the old Hollywod Babylon sort of parties from the days of silent movies. Too early for the Denvers.

  But here they were - there names caught his eye, first, in boldface under the photo. Not the names "Sam and Judy Denver." It said "Mrs. Stutgart and Future Husband, Mr. Samuel Denver." The date was 1929. Here was a middle aged woman and an older man in Roaring Twenties fashions, Denver holding eight champagne glasses clutched together at the stems like a bouquet in his hands, Mrs. Stutgart slopping champagne over them as if to fill all eight at once. Both of them laughing. Oliver Hardy looking on, making a comical face of mock astonishment; Faye Wray drunkenly leaning on Hardy with one of her dainty feet cocked up behind her. Another man stood rather stiffly in the background in an immaculate black tux. Denver's bowtie was undone and his salt and pepper hair rumpled.

  Prentice stared. Maybe it was a misprint. This man was far too old, here, to be the man who later made his mark in Hollywood as a television producer. That would be thirty years later. This man was at least sixty. The producer of Honolulu Hello must have been this man's son.

  But to the right - under the caption The Merry Widow, and after a rather sensationalistic description of the widowed Mrs. Stutgart's ribald, cocaine-dusted parties - the text related, ". . . born Elma Hoch, she married the industrialist Albert Stutgart; their relationship was said to be stormy and it was, in fact, during a storm that poor Albert was mysteriously lost overboard during a transatlantic crossing to New York. It was some years later before she married Sam Denver and became Mrs. 'Judy' Denver. Sam was later to become a successful television producer.

  "In the late '30s and early '40s the parties at the Doublekey Ranch faded noticeably after nasty remarks by L.A. columnists regarding certain of Elma's visitors who were alleged to be high functionaries in Germany's Nazi party. The man shown in the background behind Faye Wray and Oliver Hardy has been identified only as a 'Mr. Heingeman, a follower of the German firebrand Mr. Adolf Hitler'.

  "Sam and 'Judy' were childless but for a time ran a charitable' summer camp for disadvantaged youth at their Malibu ranch. Accusations of child molestation, which were never prosecuted, caused the closing of the 'charitable summer camp' in 1976 . . ."

  So it was the same guy. But how old had he been, as a TV producer? Ninety? A hundred?

  Prentice got up, stretched, and went to the microfiche stacks. His body begged him for food and his brain implored him for coffee. But he had to know immediately . . .

  In minutes he was at another chair, reading the old newspaper accounts from a fiche projector screen, shadowed over, in spots, with magnified dust particles and what appeared to be the leg of a fly. Variety, early

  '70s. A photo of Sam Denver giving an award for documentary film production at a dinner for the Producer's Guild. Maybe the guy's last public appearance, from what Prentice had been able to find out. The picture showed a man in a leisure suit, his hair dark blond. He looked about 40. He looked younger than the picture in the Those Fabuhna Hollywood Parties book. But it was unquestionably the same guy.

  Unless - it was a son by another wife. That must be it.

  It took Prentice another ten minutes to locate an encyclopedia of Television History in the nostalgia section. Denver had one brief paragraph. It didn't give a birth date for him. It was the only entry he could find with that omission. It simply said "Born -?" The last remark about him was, "Denver married the widow of industrialist Albert Stutgart in 1946. He has no children as of this writing."

  It was him.

  So what? The guy was probably into health foods and plastic surgery. Maybe he looked older in that photo from the 20s than he really was. But looking at the picture, he had a nasty feeling of recognition. An ugly certainty.

  Prentice decided to check the microfiche files one more time. There might be an article about the child molestation incident . . .

  The house was only a mile from the library. It was a small, stucco house with Spanish tile roof and a row of sickly geraniums in a red wooden box on the porch railing. Prentice pressed the buzzer for the third time.

  A raucous voice inside said, "Awright, keep your pants on!" It was followed by mimicry in a weird little

  cartoon voice, ''Awright, keepapantin!" The door opened and a woman with a parrot on her shoulder scowled at him from the other side of the screen. She was somewhere in her sixties, probably, her hair puffed out with the odd shade of blue-silver that some old ladies affect, her face jowly, her hooded eyes as green as the parrot. She wore a mu-mu with scarlet and blue flowers; the bright green parrot crapped on the print of a nasturtium on the old woman's right shoulder, and shifted its footing, torquing its head to peer at Prentice with one hostile eye. "All I can say is, you better not be selling anything," the woman snapped. "I needed that nap, boy."

  "Actually - " Well what was he going to tell her? How was he going to get her to open up about it? With an inward sigh, he chose the one route that would probably work. Lies mixed with the truth. "I'm a writer. A screenwriter. My name's Tom Prentice. I have been, uh, researching a story about Wendy Forrester -"

  "She's dead. Did your research tell you that?"

  "Well - no. Uh - when did she die?"

  "A year after her lovely little summer vacation. That much you can find out yourself. I'm not stupid enough to tell you anything more without a contract."

  "What? A . . . ?"

  "You heard me. You want the story, you people have to buy it. I owe it to that poor child to get a little something for her story."

  Prentice almost laughed aloud at this pretzeled logic. But managed instead to say, "I see. Story rights for the film. Well, it's not that far along. We don't know if there's enough of interest . . ."

  "A twelve-year-old child driven to suicide by the filthy molesting of a TV producer? If you want to believe the suicide part of it."

  Prentice held in his surprise. He hadn't seen anything in the article about the suicide. But then, it had happened much later. "What do you mean, if you want to believe that part of it?"

  "I think those bastards killed them both."

  "Both . . . ?"

  "My sister and my daughter, obviously."

  "Obviously Obviously!" the parrot squawked.

  Prentice could smell vodka on the woman now. She leaned against the doorframe, cocked her head the way her parrot did, and sharpened her glare. "Wendy was my niece. And I don't believe this business about Susan killing herself after she found Wendy dead. I can't imagine Wendy loading and shooting her father's shotgun at herself. A little girl like that! She didn't know how to load a shotgun. Killed herself with a shotgun! The police will believe anything if they're paid enough," she added, sniffing loudly.

  "You think she was murdered."

  "Surely! She was in therapy and she was beginning to talk about those Denver people!"

  "Do you know what exactly they did to her? I mean - nothin
g was proved. Did a doctor -"

  She aimed a mottled finger at him. "I am not telling you another goddamned thing without a contract. You think I don't know your business? Of course I do. Why, I've written a screenplay! Part of one anyway. I have it in a notebook. I can get an agent and a lawyer - " She snapped her fingers. "Just like that, my fine boy!"

  Prentice nodded. Everyone in L.A. who spoke English, and some who didn't, had a screenplay somewhere. He deserved this harangue, he supposed. He'd lied to her about his interest.

  "If you want to come in and have a drink we can talk over a deal -"

  "No, uh, no thanks. I'll - I'll send a representative around." Maybe he'd send Blume over to talk to her. "Your name is . . . ?"

  "Griswald, Lottie Griswald. I don't mean to be rude, now, but a story like this - "

  "I understand. You're, uh, perfectly within your rights." He decided he'd learned enough. What sounded superficially like a morose and isolated old woman's paranoia might well be true. Maybe it hadn't been a double suicide. "I'll be in touch . . ."

  "You sure you wouldn't like a drink?"

  "No, no really, thanks." He backed away, smiling, almost stumbled off the porch but caught a railing and steadied himself, turned and hurried down. He heard the old lady mutter something, but he couldn't make it out, till the bird echoed it for her:

  "Asshole!"

  Downtown Los Angeles

  The codeine was making Garner woozy, but he was grateful for it. It was the only thing that had got him through the morning at the General Assistance office. The hours at the combined food stamp and welfare office were humiliating; the stories were true: they treated you like a dog. No wonder there were so many welfare cheats - it was the only revenge. And the place was foulsmelling enough to make William F. Buckley sneer knowingly. But Garner had gotten emergency foodstamps; he'd eaten and kept most of it down.

  Now he stood in the smoggy late afternoon on a barren streetcorner under a freeway overpass. The street