She actually laughed. I exhaled.
“Is that really how you see the world?”
“That’s the way it is, hon . . . V.”
“What about the cinema, Mr. Burns? What does that give people?”
“Arty, please. I don’t know. Couple of hours in the dark to escape their lives. Maybe a moist squeeze and a quick ball at the end of the night if they’re lucky. Jujubes.”
“And that’s all you think of the movies?”
I let out a sigh that accidentally turned into a Bronx cheer.
“I don’t know, lady. I’ve met a lot of people in this burg who buy into that ‘Dream Factory’ hokum. I mean, I like a good picture as much as the next guy. Give me a nice Western or a pirate pic—Errol Flynn pig-sticking Basil Rathbone—and I’m a happy little hog in shit. But you know, they’re just stories, right, and they don’t usually make any sense if you think about them for five minutes after. And in the end you still got to go home and walk the dog.”
“Do you own a dog?”
“I’m talking—what do you call it?—metaphorically.”
“Ah, but it is precisely in their metaphors that the movies are so rich.”
“What? Like that overblown cashew nuts thing? Monster movies?”
“Cthulhu. But you know that, don’t you? I don’t think you’re half as dumb as you play.”
“Yeah, yeah, Cthulhu. What’s your metaphor there? Monster chases screaming babe. Monster gets killed. Hero gets babe. You gotta love that three-act structure.”
She slowed down slightly—thankfully—thinking. She actually pulled over before she spoke.
“You underestimate the monsters.”
“Howzat?”
“Don’t you understand the appeal of such movies? The deep truths they reveal?”
“Go on, then.”
“The stories are a veneer, a scrim behind which shines a meaning that would be too blinding to look upon uncloaked. We laugh and shriek at the monsters on the screen in order not to think upon the monsters we most deeply fear in our lives. There is no place so deep to hide as out in plain sight. Mr. Poe taught us that long ago.”
“Poe. Producer at Metro, right?” I said.
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Nevermore,” I said.
She smiled. “I think maybe I’m starting to like you, Arty.”
“Welcome to my dark den,” she said.
The KTTV studios were up on Sunset, on the site of the old Nassour complex. I did a brief hitch as security for Ed Nassour on an Abbott & Costello pic. Christ, you’ve got to go back to Cain and Abel to find two guys who hated each other more than that pair. I spent most of the job chasing hobos back onto Van Ness and hitting on Hillary Brooke, though I never got so much as a handful of thigh off her.
The confined set was totally wild. Barely even room for cameras. And it had an actual ceiling—what the hell?—mosaiced with a complicated pattern of stars. They were kind of weird, too: not constellations, exactly— no crabs or archers—but after I looked away from them, I thought I could see pictures lingering in my head. Shapes that didn’t quite make sense and made my stomach roll. I tried not to look at them, but I could feel them hanging over me, threatening me or something.
The floor was covered with grass—fake, I thought, until I saw a couple of caterpillars doing the dirty bop in a weedy patch and reached down to touch it. Creeping vines, thick and gnarled as an old sailor’s arm, snaked up the walls, reaching for those nasty stars. A huge black divan sat in the middle of it, with a glass coffee table in front and a big, illuminated crystal ball resting on the top. Smoke swirled around the crystal, and I had to admire the skills of the effects team on a super-low budget, late night TV show. Skulls—I don’t know from what kinds of critters—had been propped up in a circle around the globe. Fish-heads? Frogs?
“It is good of you to see us, Enchantra,” V said. I’d not heard her sound so solicitous to anyone.
“Always for you,” the woman sang.
“Enchantra?” I asked.
“My colleague, Mr. Burns,” V said.
“Call me Arty,” I said automatically and put out my hand.
She didn’t so much reach out as float her arm in the air until it bobbed my way. Her hand felt cool and soft and kind of melted at the touch. Her skin was as white as Grace Kelly’s teeth.
Her face had an odd shape: oblong with a thin, witchy nose. Pretty, though, in an Yvonne De Carlo kind of way. Her neck was too long and her head a half-size too small. Her hair had been razored into a widow’s peak in front, but flowed long at the back, nearly to her (very pert) ass. Her midnight-black dress was cut as low as you can go without begging a visit from the Vice Squad, and Mr. Hughes himself would surely have admired the . . . sophistication of her chest. The dress streamed all the way to the grass, hugging her lower half, and her legs seemed as long as the Nile.
Little Arty sent me a telegram about launching an expedition to discover their source.
“Enchanted, darling,” she said.
Enchantra enchanted. Ha-cha-cha!
She had an accent, an intonation—something European, I don’t know, from overseas—but it sounded so B-movie Lugosi that it could have been a put-on. On the other hand, there was something generally . . . other-ish about her.
“Quite the digs you have here . . . Enchantra.”
“I do try.”
“Not bad for TV,” I said.
Her eyes and cleavage narrowed.
“You don’t like the television?”
You think my baby’s ugly? she might as well have hissed. I hate to be rude—well, circumstances permitting—so I tried to make nice.
“I like it fine. Hell, I’ve got two TVs,” I said.
“Television. Is. The future.”
“Yeah, sure,” I offered. “Great for sports, huh?”
Enchantra looked over at V. “What is this you have brought to me here?”
“Hey!” I said.
“I believe there’s more to him than meets the eye,” V said.
“There would have to be.”
That was enough.
“Listen, lady,” I said. “I dig your groovy ghoulie get-up, and those love puppies of yours could make a dead man jump up and jive, but I think you’re on the wrong side of who’s leading the band here. I . . .”
She spat a word.
I don’t know how to describe its sound: mice with hangnails sliding down a mile-high blackboard; a freeway pile-up played back at 78 r.p.m.; the stumps of broken teeth chewing the glass from a bottle of battery acid.
Not nice. Uh-uh.
I felt something wet on my lip, touched the back of my hand to my mouth and saw the blood that dripped down from my nose. I wobbled slightly, had to lock my knees to keep from tumbling over. Reaching out to steady myself, I grabbed onto one of those weird vines: it was prickly and slick and pulsed like a heart. I quickly let go.
I looked over at the crystal ball on the table, which now blazed with light. Where the hell was it coming from? The light flared through the fish/frog skulls, lending them an even more alien quality. For a second I thought I could see the flesh that once encased them.
“What . . . is going on here?” I said.
“There is a war coming,” V said. “In fact, it has already begun.”
“The Reds, I know. I already told you . . .”
“No,” Enchantra said. “That is a mere proxy. A feint. A . . .” She looked at V.
“It is a deception,” V said. “A disguise for the true battle that is at hand.”
I shook my head.
“Great forces gather. Ancient enemies. Powers beyond your perception,” V said. “And sides must be chosen.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Like Warners versus Fox?”
“You are not believing, Mr. Burns?” Enchantra asked.
“You’re not the most credible source I’ve ever met,” I said, gesturing at the surroundings.
“She’s ful
l of shit,” a voice called from behind.
I spun around and saw two big guys standing in the doorway. They both had guns in their hands.
Or . . . something.
As they walked into the room, lit by the glowing crystal ball, I saw that what I took to be guns were actually—I don’t know—animal horns? Curved, ivory things anyway, wrapped around their fists. They pointed them at us as if they were gats. The pair wore identical gray suits with black ties and gray Homburgs.
Feds? Feds with . . . bones?
No.
I started to reach for the spring-loaded sap in my jacket pocket.
“Ah, ah,” one of them warned, raising a femur.
“What are you going to do? Scrimshaw me?”
“Careful, Mr. Burns,” Enchantra warned.
“Careful of what? Who are these guys? What the hell is going on here?” I turned to V, who stood still as a cigar store Cheyenne, watching. “I’ve played tag along long enough. I’m . . .”
“Dick-deep in shit, so shut your yap,” a nasally voice informed me.
The two bone-men stepped aside to let a little guy into the studio. He hitched up his pinstriped trousers as he walked, then stuck a thumb in each pocket and spread his stubby fingers over his thighs. He smiled, kind of, but it didn’t hang right on him—like a bargain-store suit. I saw the yellow of his crooked, horsey teeth. And the dead blackness of his eyes.
“I know you,” I said, a memory from an old wrap party rising slowly out of its box. “Yeah, it was that Fritz Lang picture.”
A spread of the ill-fitting smile in reply.
“I had to toss you, I remember now. You got fresh with Miss Stanwyck.”
“Skank!” he spat.
“You’re a . . .” I remembered his name now: Berkeley. “A fucking writer! You’ve been singing to the committee about Reds in town.”
That took a bit of the glint out of his smile. “It’s Burns, isn’t it?” he said.
“Call me Arty.”
“You belong to Hughes. We’re on the same team, friend. So what are you doing with”—he nodded in Enchantra’s direction—“that?”
“Still haven’t learned how to talk to a lady, huh?”
“Lady!” He laughed a little man’s girly laugh. “Don’t you know what that is?”
The gunsels—bonesels?—had each taken a couple of steps back and to the side. The three of them formed the points of a triangle between us and the door. Remembering that crazy karate move she pulled on me, I shot a glance at V. Her eyes never left the little guy, Berkeley, and I sensed the tension in her body.
I could suddenly feel something else, too: a vibration. It rang in my fillings first, then penetrated right down to my ankles. Little Arty thought a party had started without him.
A light so bright it staggered me shot out of the crystal ball. Like someone had flicked on a thousand-watt Kleig under the table. All of us threw our hands over our eyes and I went down to my knees on the grass. I heard a little explosion and knew it had to be the crystal. The light dimmed and I could open my eyes.
Squinting, I saw one of the gunsels on the floor, blood pouring down his face. He was riddled with tiny shards of glass and moaning in pain. V was already on the move for the weird bone-gun he’d dropped. The other was still shaking off the blast.
In the middle of the set, Enchantra and Berkeley stood like a pair of gunfighters staring each other down in an Anthony Mann western. Their eyes were locked on one another and their lips moved. Berkeley had one hand up over his head, fingers curled, palms toward the sky. He chanted something in that high-pitched voice. It sounded like a rabbit in a lawnmower and it hurt my ears something fierce.
Enchantra stood with her hands in front of her, splayed fingertips pressed against each other. In the gap between them, an ultraviolet light hovered and glowed as if she had some purple sprite trapped in the cage of her hands. She chanted, too, but deeper and more resonant, like a hippo breathing through a snorkel.
Off to one side V and the remaining gunsel were engaged in some bizarre duel with their bones. Sparks flared every time the objects touched, the air around them sizzling.
I got to my feet when Enchantra’s eyes widened and she thrust her arms out, separating her hands to send the purple sprite spiraling toward the little writer. His high-pitched chant reached a peak and he started spinning madly. He spun so quickly that his weasley features became a blur. The space around him appeared to bend. I could swear that the very fabric of the air had been torn and a chilling nothingness—something far beyond the most starless night—began to emerge from the crack.
My very flesh objected to what transpired around me. It felt like fire and ice battling inside my skin to decide which would have the pleasure of consuming me first. My throat constricted, and wetness—tears or blood, I couldn’t tell—ran down my cheeks from the corners of my eyes.
Enchantra’s purple sprite exploded against the ebon rent emanating from Berkeley’s still-spinning form. The whole room shook, and the grass below burst into green and yellow flames. Those weird vines started exploding around me, releasing a warm sienna ichor that burned where it touched. The flames were consuming the vines as well, racing toward V and her attacker who rolled on the grass, bone-guns glowing. I fell back to my knees.
This was no good.
I don’t know what made me do it.
An impulse, a whim. Nothing better to do.
(I thought I heard a voice.)
Though the crystal ball had shattered, the fish-frog heads on the table still stood, glowing white from a source unseen. One of the heads had particularly sharp teeth—dozens of tiny, bone flechettes.
I grabbed it. (It felt so cool.)
I raised it up and for a moment I saw not the skull, but the creature whose flesh it once bore.
It was hideous, sickening, indescribable.
Beautiful.
Utterly inhuman.
And it laughed.
I hurled the skull at the void that had started to envelop Enchantra’s purple spell. It screamed like a giddy fish-girl as it flew.
It met the black tear in space and everything stopped.
For an instant, I was someplace else, with no ups or downs, and where the very idea of life was a punch line.
Someplace . . . impossible.
There was black. Then there was purple. Then there was white.
Then all was well and truly dark.
I woke to the smell of Camels.
The cigarettes, I mean.
Without so much as the aid of a forklift, I raised my head. It was pretty dark. And it smelled.
Like camels.
Not the cigarettes.
“Bleughh,” I said. Or something very similar. It fully expressed my feelings.
“Do you smoke, Mr. Burns?”
“Call me . . .”
“Do you smoke, Arty?” V asked.
I started to shake my head, but that wasn’t fun. “Uh-uh,” I managed.
She sat on a three-legged stool. It looked like a milking stool. No cows, though. Or maybe that was the smell. V’s expensive skirt was soiled and torn, and her exposed skin dirty and covered in bruises. Other than one lonely strand, which strayed down over her right eye à la Veronica Lake, her hair was still perfect. Damn!
I had a look around, but there wasn’t much to see. A cabin, furnished in a very cabin-like manner. I lay on an old sofa, more springs than cushion. It creaked like a newlywed’s bed with every movement. So did I.
“Who looks worse?” I asked. “You or me?”
V took a long drag and breathed the smoke out through her nose as she sized me up.
“You,” she said, then nodded.
“That’s a shame,” I said.
“Meh,” she said.
I roused myself to a proper sitting position, shifted to get a spring out of my asshole, then settled down again. Unbidden, V scooped up a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and tossed it to me in a delivery worthy of Bob Feller. She moved like a
big cat, and even in my pained condition I couldn’t help but wonder how it would feel to have her moving beneath me.
She narrowed her eyes as if she could read minds. Hell, given all the weird shit of the past day, who’s to say she couldn’t.
I took a swig of hooch.
“Good stuff,” I said.
“Mr. Hughes pays the bills.”
“What happened to Berkeley?” I asked.
“He’s gone . . . for now.”
“You maybe want to tell me what’s going on?” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t get paid to think,” I said. “That’s why I work for Mr. Hughes.”
“Tell me about him.”
I sighed. Bourbon surely wasn’t the right medicine for my condition or this conversation. I took another swig. Then I tossed the bottle back to V with about a tenth the grace she had demonstrated.
“What’s to tell?” I said. “You obviously know him better than I do. He doesn’t let me sit on his office furniture.”
“All you need are D-cups.”
“Amen, sister, amen.”
That brought a slight upturn of her lip on one side.
“What if I told you,” she began, “that your Mr. Hughes is not at all the man you think him to be.”
“Let me guess: he’s secretly a monk sworn to celibacy. Chasing every juicy flap of cooze between Sunset and Pico is just a cover.”
“Maybe that’s not so far from the truth,” she said.
I sat up.
“Not the celibacy bit,” she added.
“Thank God. A man’s got to be able to believe in something in this world.”
“Yes. Belief.”
She picked up the bourbon and stared at the label so hard I thought maybe she was planning on slipping Old Grand-Dad the tongue. She delicately put the bottle down having arrived at some decision in her head.
“May I show you something, Arty?”
I was about to mouth smart about whether it involved taking off her panties, but I decided the moment wasn’t quite right.
I nodded instead.
“It will change your . . . beliefs.”
She stood up and walked toward me, undoing the buttons of her no-longer-white blouse. I realized that I had only ever seen her with her top buttoned to the neck. I swallowed hard, the panties quip still lingering at the back of my tongue. I don’t know what I expected. Nah, I do: flawless fun bags of creamy fleshiness. With cherries on top. I certainly didn’t expect what I saw.
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