Blind Shrike

by Richard Kadrey

  “When was this? I remember you getting better in rehab,” said Spyder.

  “Jesus, Spyder. I didn’t last a week there,” Lulu said. “I wouldn’t let you visit, remember? I always called you? I checked out and was on the street scoring until I met these people.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Real monsters. Born monsters,” she said. “But I didn’t know that back then. They offered me the deal of a lifetime. I’d get clean, get healthy and get my talent back. They promised they could make me better than ever. Can you imagine what that meant to me back then?”

  “How’d you end up like this?”

  “You know how dealers are. The first one’s always free. Then the price just keeps going up. You got a cigarette?”

  Spyder pulled a pack of American Spirits from his jacket pocket, took one, gave one to Lulu and lit them both. They smoked in silence for a few moments.

  Lulu blew a series of small smoke rings through the center of bigger rings, something Spyder had been watching her do since junior high. “The price for giving me back my life was my eyes,” she said, “They said that sight’s mostly in the brain and that in this Sphere of existence, they could make it so I’d see better without them.” Lulu took a long drag off the American Spirit. Spyder wanted her to stop talking. “They were right, only they didn’t tell me it wouldn’t last. Every year or so, my sight would start to go and they’d show up, ready to deal. They’d already taken my eyes, so they took something else each time. Stomach. Liver. Skin. I don’t know what all anymore. But not my heart. You’d be surprised what you can live without, but not your heart.” Another long drag. A cloud of blue smoke. “Each time, they’d do their little voodoo so my body’d keep going, till the next visit. No one ever noticed the difference. When they took my eyes I saw a whole new world. The world, I guess, you’re seeing now. Shit, Spyder, no one knows anything. All the teachers and cops and priests and shrinks they sent us to, they don’t know what’s really going on. When I saw the real world, knowing how long I’d been blind scared me a lot more than the monsters.”

  “You think this is some kind of goddam gift?” asked Spyder.

  “For you it is. You got it for free. It cost me a little more.”

  “Fuck this world and fuck this gift.”

  “I’d rather fuck your sister.”

  “I’ll trade you for your mom.”

  “Deal,” said Lulu. She stuck out her hand, the traditional end to a stupid joke that they’d done since they were kids. Eventually, Spyder shook Lulu’s hand.

  “Goddam,” said Spyder. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Spyder slid his arm around Lulu’s shoulders and pulled her to him. She hugged him and laid her head on his chest. They sat on the floor until the sun went down and the studio was dark. People knocked on the door, but they ignored them.

  SEVEN

  Shadows

  Many years ago, Ishtama was the mother of birds, Setuum was the mother of fishes, and in a golden city in the south Coatlique, the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes—her body decorated with human skulls, serpents and lacerated hands—gave birth to the first man, Mixcoatl.

  Mixcoatl’s sisters were the stars in the sky and he brought one to Earth to be his wife. Their children were the human race.

  As much as Mixcoatl’s wife loved him, she missed her sisters and longed to visit them in the sky. Mixcoatl went to Apsu, the lord of the birds, to ask him to fly his wife back to heaven. When Mixcoatl arrived, however, Apsu wasn’t there. His wife, Tiamut, told Mixcoatl that Apsu had been murdered by his Shadow Brother, Marduk. Apsu was a friend and Mixcoatl grew very angry at this news. He climbed to the top of the tallest mountain in the world and cut out Marduk’s heart with an obsidian knife, throwing the Shadow Brother’s body into a deep gorge that led to the center of the world.

  When Mixcoatl went home, he told his wife what he had done. She was afraid. “Our mother, Coatlique, the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes, is dead. Your Shadow Brother, Huitzilopochtli, burst from her breast in battle armor and a bone sword.”

  Mixcoatl told his wife, “I have no brother, shadow or otherwise.”

  His wife said, “Before she died, our mother warned that at some moment in our life, all men and women create their shadow form, born from their desire and rage. These shadow forms do not manifest themselves in flesh unless called into being by an act of violence or madness, a blow at creation itself. When you rashly killed Marduk, you bought forth your Shadow Brother and released pure chaos into the world. Huitzilopochtli is you reborn as a soulless void. If you do not destroy him, he will kill you and take your place.”

  Mixcoatl put on his armor, called his sons to his side and took them to war. For years they roamed the earth looking for Huitzilopochtli, but they didn’t find him. At night Mixcoatl had terrible dreams and awoke in the morning pale and weak. Finally, Mixcoatl grew sick and his army rested by the banks of the frozen sea at the bottom of the world.

  One night, Mixcoatl awoke from fevered dreams to find Huitzilopochtli sitting on his chest. Mixcoatl was too weak to resist and Huitzilopochtli cut out his heart saying, “I’ve eaten you piece by piece in your dreams, brother, but don’t hate me. I’m not your enemy. I have no choice in killing you and if I smile as I do it, remember it’s only the joy a humble servant feels when he restores order to a disordered house, because, of course, there can’t be two of us walking the Earth.”

  Huitzilopochtli took his brother’s place on the throne of the world. His flightiness and endless cruelties inspired many beings to unwittingly turn their shadows into flesh through acts of treachery or revenge. The different Shadow Brothers—kings and farmers, birds, fish and horses—ruled the Earth. This was the era of blood and massacres that caused the world to be divided into Spheres, because no matter how the Shadow Brothers tried to reason together, they couldn’t. They were soulless voids, and even the most cordial exchanges usually ended in murder.

  Thousands of years passed before the living things of the Earth rose up and killed all the Shadow Brothers in power. To make sure that shadow forms never ruled again, each realm of life appointed auditors to keep the world in balance. These celestial officers had the power of life and death and could roam all the Spheres at will. They had different names among the different animal tribes—such as Soul Weavers, Holy Clerks, Black Scribes, and others. These beings didn’t destroy the Shadow Brothers, but they kept their influence in check, even when they sometimes had to collaborate with individual Shadow Brothers to set the world right. The loyalties of these auditors weren’t to animal, plant or man, but to the universe. And like the gods themselves, their plans were their own, subtle and unknowable.

  They were thought to be beyond the influence of any god or beast in the universe, and this was true. What no one considered were things outside the universe.

  EIGHT

  Slow Children

  “Did you ever feel like you were a million miles from where you’d thought you’d be when you grew up? Like you thought you were heading for a weekend in Vegas, but ended up in Mongolia instead?”

  Lulu was lying across the three wooden garage sale chairs they kept up front for customers. Her arm hung down and a lit American Spirit between her fingers pointed at the floor illuminating the scars on her arm with a faint red light.

  “Sometimes,” said Spyder. “But then I remember the scariest truth about being a grown up: that no one really knows anything. Maybe where most people want to be is as wrong as where they end up.”

  “We’ve been taking our happy pills, I see,” said Lulu. “Know what we never, ever talked about: What did you really want to be when we was kids?”

  Spyder stood up and stretched, saying, “That’s easy. A private detective. You know, a Sam Spade thing. The whole world’d be in black and white and the streets would be slick with rain and lit like a film noir set.”

  “Sam Spade was always lonely and miserable, least in the movies.”

 
; “But at least he knew something. That makes him the exception.”

  “When I was a girl, I wanted to be Mary Magdalene,” said Lulu. “The most hated woman in the world, but Jesus saw her true heart and loved her for it. I wanted that so much. To be hated by the riff-raff, but loved by that one perfect, bright-eyed soul who knew me from the inside out. I used to jerk off to the picture of Jesus over my bed. He looked just like Jim Morrison before the alcohol bloat.” Lulu took a drag off her cigarette. Spyder still wasn’t sure how she was able to smoke with no lips. “When I realized I liked girls more, I jerked off imagining Jesus fucking Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus, of course. I wonder, does that make me narcissistic?”

  “No, you’re more like Mother Teresa.”

  “I’d have fucked Mother Teresa.”

  “You’d have fucked Nancy Reagan if she’d of held still.”

  “If she was in that pink Jackie O outfit she wore to Ronnie’s second inauguration, hell yes. I’d’ve bent her over the big desk in the Oval Office and slipped her the high hard one next to the Bible Ronnie had Oliver North give the Iranians. Hell, I’d have bent Ollie over, too. Gotta love a man in a uniform.”

  “You’re a damned pervert, Lulu.”

  “What’s Dennis Hopper say in Blue Velvet? ‘Don’t toast to my health, toast to my fuck.’”

  “I wouldn’t be Dennis Hopper,” said Spyder. “I’d be Orson Welles. He can act, write, direct, he married Rita Hayworth and you know, deep in his heart, he’s a stone killer.”

  “That arty fuck never has happy endings. He’s always dead or betrayed.”

  “Yeah, but we all end up there if we live long enough. I love the guy’s certainty. He was willing to ruin himself for whatever he was doing. That’s the definition of balls.” Spyder checked the door again to make sure it was locked, then turned on the light in the studio. Lulu shielded her paper eyes and softly said, “Shit.”

  “So, what happens now?” asked Spyder. “Do we open up tomorrow like nothing’s different?”

  “Things are only different if you act like they’re dif-ferent.”

  “Bullshit. Everything’s different.”

  “I’ve been exactly what I am for years and it didn’t affect things. Why should that change now?”

  “That was before,” Spyder said, groping for words. “I was going to say the world has changed, but it hasn’t. I’m changed. And I fucking hate it. I take back what I said about Sam Spade and knowing things. I enjoyed my ignorance. Give me three wishes and that’s what I’d ask for first.”

  “Reality sucks,” said Lulu sitting up on the chairs. “But, if you wait long enough, everything becomes normal. You’ll see.”

  Looking out the studio window onto Haight Street, Spyder watched the people outside going through their happy, blind lives. Couples were going to dinner, ducking into bars. On the corner, a girl with blue hair was kissing a boy in a cop shirt and vinyl shorts. Softly Spyder sang, “When I’m lyin’ in my bed at night, I don’t wanna grow up, Nothin’ ever seems to turn out right, I don’t wanna grow up.” He looked at Lulu. “Know that song?”

  “Tom Waits. Jenny gave me the CD for my birthday.”

  “When I see the price that you pay, I don’t wanna grown up, I don’t ever wanna be that way, I don’t wanna grow up…” For the first time, Spyder was glad that Jenny had left him. He couldn’t imagine trying to explain all this to her. Where was she right that second? Was she happy? He hoped so.

  NINE

  Hard Thanks

  Spyder straightened up when he realized that he and Lulu were no longer alone.

  Three smiling men, dressed like bankers in an old movie, were standing in the studio. One of the men carried a large snake-skin ledger. All three men were very pale and carried long, curved knives in their belts. The banker in the middle was wearing the face of the businessman Spyder had spoken to in the street that morning. The face was held in place on the banker’s head by shiny brass clasps that stretched the skin like taffy.

  “You are not alone?” said the banker in the middle, the one with the book.

  “Who the fuck are you?” asked Spyder.

  Lulu stood up and pushed him against the wall. “Shut up, Spyder.” She looked at the bankers. “I wasn’t expecting you. It’s not time yet. I can still see fine.”

  All three men were wearing skin masks. From under the stolen meat, their flesh seemed to give off a cold chemical glow, like fungus on the walls of a cavern. There was nothing at all human about the men’s presence, Spyder thought.

  “This visit is not for you,” said the banker in the middle.

  “It is for us,” said the one on the left.

  “For accounts balance?” said the one on the right.

  “I don’t owe you nothing. My account is balanced,” said Lulu.

  “For now,” said the banker in the middle, who appeared to be the leader. “Our concern lies with the future?”

  “I saw what you did to that guy. Get the fuck out of here!” said Spyder, grabbing one of the chairs and starting at the men.

  The banker with the ledger calmly pulled his knife and pointed the blade at Spyder. “This is not for you, young man. Please do not interfere.”

  “Look at her. She doesn’t have anything left to give you.”

  The three pale men nodded and laughed. “She lives and breathes? Yes. There is always something. Her heart?”

  Spyder looked at Lulu. “You said they didn’t take hearts.”

  “We take hearts, when life is not honored or appreciated. But the oblation can not live without one, so we take them last.”

  Spyder weighed the chair in his hands, knowing the moment to hit someone had passed. When he set the chair down, the middle banker put the knife back in his belt.

  “You can’t have her,” said Spyder. “But from what she told me, you don’t care about that. You just want a payment, right?”

  “Accounts must be balanced. This is our burden,” said the one on the right.

  “Any will do, if given freely?” said the one on the left.

  Spyder nodded, still trying to parse their odd, sing-song speech. “Then take something from me.”

  “Shut up, Spyder!” shouted Lulu.

  The middle banker said, “You owe us nothing. If we took from you, we would be in your debt?”

  “No. You’d leave Lulu alone, so we’d be even.”

  “This is possible.”

  “And you said this was for the future, so you wouldn’t need anything from me right now…?” Spyder asked.

  “Correct.”

  “Okay then. It’s a deal. I’ll see you down the fucking road. The door is that way. Use it.”

  “There is no deal yet,” said the middle banker. He stepped forward and grabbed Spyder’s arm with shocking speed and strength. With his knife the banker cut a symbol into the underside of Spyder’s left wrist. “Now we have a deal.” He smiled at Spyder. The flesh the banker wore didn’t quite synch with his muscles, so the smile came in stages. First the facial muscles worked, then the teeth appeared, then the outside flesh stretched into something a schizophrenic might call a smile. “So that you will not forget? And no one else can claim you.”

  Spyder had been tattooed, pierced and had a ritual scar on his chest, but nothing he’d ever done prepared him for the pain of the banker’s knife. It managed to be freezing and branding-iron hot at the same time. And it didn’t feel as if the blade was cutting, but raking away large sections of skin and muscle. However, when Spyder looked there was a small, neat incision that was already cauterized.

  “Pardon us?” said the banker, and all three men started toward the back of the shop.

  “Hey, Barry White, tell me something,” said Spyder. “You knew she wasn’t alone, didn’t you? This whole scene was just a vaudeville act. You weren’t here to collect from her, but to rope in someone new.”

  The middle banker nodded to his companions, then to Spyder. “You. The girl. This does not matter. The debt matters.
The restoration of balance? This is our burden.” One by one, the three men entered the little bathroom at the back of the studio. When Spyder opened the door a moment later, they were gone.

  “What was that word he called you just now?” Spyder asked Lulu.

  “Oblation,” she said. “It’s a kind of sacrifice. The kind you’re supposed to give with thanks.”

  “It’s not enough they zombifie you. You’re supposed to send them a thank you card, too?”

  “Pretty much. You wouldn’t think it to look at them, but the Black Clerks are all about having a good time.” Lulu put her hand lightly on Spyder’s shoulder. “You have no idea what you just got yourself into.”

  Spyder kissed the top of her head. “It’s all right. I think I know someone who can help.”

  TEN

  DOA

  After dropping Lulu at home, Spyder took at cab to the Bardo Lounge. He’d always preferred the night, but now he was falling in love with it.

  Spyder couldn’t really deny the angels in the sky or the anacondas with the faces of crying children hiding in the palm trees along Dolores Street, but in the dark smaller oddities were swallowed and invisible. Besides, night had always seemed a time of madness and possibility. The visions just felt more natural at night.

  The neighborhood around the Bardo Lounge had taken on a heavy, wet jungle feel, as if the cab had stumbled into the abandoned set of some expensive dinosaur movie. There were always a lot of film crews in town and for a moment, Spyder thought that they might have genuinely rolled onto a set. But sacrifice poles dotted the corners, animal heads and flowers dripping in the thick, humid air.

  The Bardo Lounge was packed. Rubi was serving drinks. She gave Spyder a kiss on the cheek and bought him a tequila. He was relieved to see that she was entirely normal, with none of Lulu’s mutilations.