Tex shrugged. Charlie needed him, so he had a certain license.
Within limits.
Charlie looked back, away from the house. The film company was turning over again. Riff was pretending to chain-whip Junior.
“Something’s got to change,” said Charlie.
“Helter skelter,” said Leech.
Charlie’s eyes shone.
“Yeah,” he said, “you dig.”
* * *
Inside the house, sections were roped off with crudely lettered PELIGROSO signs. Daylight seeped through ill-fitting boards over glassless windows. Everything was slightly damp and salty, as if there’d been rain days ago. The adobe seemed sodden, pulpy. Green moss grew on the floor. A plastic garden hose snaked through the house, pulsing, leading up the main staircase.
“The Old Lady likes to keep the waters flowing.”
Charlie led Leech upstairs.
On the landing, a squat idol sat on an occasional table—a buddha with cephalopod mouth-parts.
“Know that fellow, Mr. Fish?”
“Dagon, God of the Philistines.”
“Score one for the Kwiz Kid. Dagon. That’s one of the names. Old Lady Marsh had this church, way back in the ’40s. Esoteric Order of Dagon. Ever hear of it?”
Leech had.
“She wants me to take it up again, open store-front chapels on all the piers. Not my scene, man. No churches, not this time. I’ve got my own priorities. She thinks infiltration, but I know these are the times for catastrophe. But she’s still a fighter. Janice Marsh. Remember her in Nefertiti?’
They came to a door, kept ajar by the hose.
Away from his Family, Charlie was different. The man never relaxed, but he dropped the Rasputin act, stuttered out thoughts as soon as they sprung to him, kept up a running commentary. He was less a Warrior of the Apocalypse than a Holocaust Hustler, working all the angles, sucking up to whoever might help him. Charlie needed followers, but was desperate also for sponsorship, a break.
Charlie opened the door.
“Miss Marsh,” he said, deferential.
Large, round eyes gleamed inside the dark room.
Janice Marsh sat in a tin bathtub, tarpaulin tied around her wattled throat like a bib, a bulbous turban around her skull. From under the tarp came quiet splashing and slopping. The hose fed into the bath and an overspill pipe, patched together with hammered-out tin-cans, led away to a hole in the wall, dribbling outside.
Only her flattish nose and lipless mouth showed, overshadowed by the fine-lashed eyes. In old age, she had smoothed rather than wrinkled. Her skin was a mottled, greenish colour.
“This cat’s from England,” said Charlie.
Leech noticed Charlie hung back in the doorway, not entering the room. This woman made him nervous.
“We’ve been in the desert, Miss Marsh,” said Charlie. “Sweeping Quadrant Twelve. Scoped out a promising cave, but it led nowhere. Sadie got her ass stuck in a hole, but we hauled her out. That chick’s our mineshaft canary.”
Janice Marsh nodded, chin-pouch inflating like a frog’s.
“There’s more desert,” said Charlie. “We’ll read the signs soon. It will be found. We can’t be kept from it.”
Leech walked into the dark and sat, unbidden, on a stool by the bathtub.
Janice Marsh looked at him. Sounds frothed through her mouth, rattling in slits that might have been gills.
Leech returned her greeting.
“You speak that jazz?” exclaimed Charlie. “Far out.”
Leech and Janice Marsh talked. She was interesting, if given to rambles as her mind drifted out to sea. It was all about water. Here in the desert, close to the thirstiest city in America, the value of water was known. She told him what the Family were looking for, directed him to unroll some scrolls that were kept on a low-table under a fizzing desk-lamp. The charts were the original mappings of California, made by Fray Junipero Serra before there were enough human landmarks to get a European bearing.
Charlie shouldered close to Leech, and pulled a magic marker out of his top-pocket.
The vellum was divided into numbered squares, thick modern lines blacked over the faded, precious sketch-marks. Several squares were shaded with diagonal lines. Charlie added diagonals to the square marked ‘12’.
Leech winced.
“What’s up, man?”
“Nothing,” he told Charlie.
He knew what things were worth; that, if anything, was his special talent. But he knew such values were out of step with the times. He did not want to be thought a breadhead. Not until the 1980s, when he had an itchy feeling that it’d be mandatory. If there was to be a 1980s.
“This is the surface chart, you dig,” said Charlie, rapping knuckles on the map. “We’re about here, where I’ve marked the Ranch. There are other maps, showing what’s underneath.”
Charlie rolled the map, to disclose another. The top map had holes cut out, marking points of convergence. The lower chart was marked with inter-linked balloon-shapes, some filled in with blue pigment that had become pale with age.
“Dig the holes, man. This shows the ways down below.”
A third layer of map was almost all blue. Drawn in were fishy, squiddy shapes. And symbols Leech understood.
“And here’s the prize. The Sea of California. Freshwater, deep under the desert. Primordial.”
Janice Marsh burbled excitement.
“Home,” she said, a recognisable English word.
“It’s under us,” said Charlie. “That’s why we’re out here. Looking. Before Chocko rises, the Family will have found the way down, got the old pumps working. Turn on the quake. With the flood, we’ll win. It’s the key to ending all this. It has properties. Some places—the cities, maybe, Chicago, Watts—it’ll be fire that comes down. Here, it’s the old, old way. It’ll be water that comes up.”
“You’re building an Ark?”
“Uh uh, Arks are movie stuff. We’re learning to swim. Going to be a part of the flood. You too, I think. We’re going to drown Chocko. We’re going to drown Hollywood. Call down the rains. Break the rock. When it’s all over, there’ll only be us. And maybe the Beach Boys. I’m tight with Dennis Wilson, man. He wants to produce my album. That’s going to happen in the last days. My album will be a monster, like the Double White. Music will open everything up, knock everything down. Like at Jericho.”
Leech saw that Charlie couldn’t keep his thinking straight. He wanted an end to civilisation and a never-ending battle of Armageddon, but still thought he could fit in a career as a pop star.
Maybe.
This was Janice’s game. She was the mother of this family.
“He came out of the desert,” Charlie told the old woman. “You can see the signs on him. He’s a dowser.”
The big eyes turned to Leech.
“I’ve found things before,” he admitted.
“Water?” she asked, splashing.
He shrugged. “On occasion.”
Her slit mouth opened in a smile, showing rows of needle-sharp teeth.
“You’re a hit, man,” said Charlie. “You’re in the Family.”
Leech raised his hand. “That’s an honour, Charles,” he said, “but I can’t accept. I provide services, for a fee to be negotiated, but I don’t take permanent positions.”
Charlie was puzzled for a moment, brows narrowed. Then he smiled. “If that’s your scene, it’s cool. But are you The One Who Will Open the Earth? Can you help us find the Subterranean Sea?”
Leech considered, and shook his head, “No. That’s too deep for me.”
Charlie made fists, bared teeth, instantly angry.
“But I know who can,” soothed Leech.
* * *
The movie people were losing the light. As the sun sank, long shadows stretched on reddish scrub, rock-shapes twisted into ogres. The cinematographer shot furiously, gabbling in semi-Hungarian about “magic hour”, while Sam and Al worried vocally that nothing would come
out on the film.
Leech sat in a canvas folding-chair and watched.
Three young actresses, dressed like Red Indians, were pushing Junior around, tormenting him by withholding a bottle of firewater. Meanwhile, the movie moon—a shining fabric disc—was rising full, just like the real moon up above the frame-line.
The actresses weren’t very good. Beside Sadie and Squeaky and Ouisch and the others, the Acid Squaws of the Family, they lacked authentic drop-out savagery. They were Vegas refugees, tottering on high heels, checking their make-up in every reflective surface.
Junior wasn’t acting any more.
“Go for the bottle,” urged Al.
Junior made a bear-lunge, missed a girl who pulled a face as his sweat-smell cloud enveloped her, and fell to his knees. He looked up like a puppy with progeria, eager to be patted for his trick.
There was water in Junior’s eyes. Full moons shone in them.
Leech looked up. Even he felt the tidal tug.
“I don’t freakin’ believe this,” stage-whispered Charlie, in Leech’s ear. “That cat’s gone.”
Leech pointed again at Junior.
“You’ve tried human methods, Charles. Logic and maps. You need to try other means. Animals always find water. The moon pulls at the sea. That man has surrendered to his animal. He knows the call of the moon. Even a man who is pure in heart...”
“That was just in the movies.”
“Nothing was ever just in the movies. Understand this. Celluloid writes itself into the unconscious, of its makers as much as its consumers. Your revelations may come in music. His came in the cheap seats.”
The Wolf Man howled happily, bottle in his hug. He took a swig and shook his greasy hair like a pelt.
The actresses edged away from him.
“Far out, man,” said Charlie, doubtfully.
“Far out and deep down, Charles.”
* * *
“That’s a wrap for today,” called Al.
“I could shoot twenty more minutes with this light,” said the cameraman.
“You’re nuts. This ain’t art school in Budapest. Here in America, we shoot with light, not dark.”
“I make it fantastic.”
“We don’t want fantastic. We want it on film so you can see it.”
“Make a change from your last picture, then,” sneered the cinematographer. He flung up his hands and walked away.
Al looked about as if he’d missed something.
“Who are you, mister?” he asked Leech. “Who are you really?”
“A student of human nature.”
“Another weirdo, then.”
He had a flash of the director’s body, much older and shaggier, bent in half and shoved into a whirlpool bath, wet concrete sloshing over his face.
“Might I give you some free advice?” Leech asked. “Long-term advice. Be very careful when you’re hiring odd-job men.”
“Yup, a weird weirdo. The worst kind.”
The director stalked off. Leech still felt eyes on him.
Sam, the producer, had stuck around the set. He did the negotiating. He also had a demented enthusiasm for the kind of pictures they made. Al would rather have been shooting on the studio lot with Barbra Streisand or William Holden. Sam liked anything that gave him a chance to hire forgotten names from the matinees he had loved as a kid.
“You’re not with them? Charlie’s Family?”
Leech said nothing.
“They’re fruit-loops. Harmless, but a pain in the keister. The hours we’ve lost putting up with these kids. You’re not like that. Why are you here?”
“As they say in the Westerns, ‘just passing through’.”
“You like Westerns? Nobody does much any more, unless they’re made in Spain by Italians. What’s wrong with this picture? We’d love to be able to shoot only Westerns. Cowboys are a hell of a lot easier to deal with than Hells’ Angels. Horses don’t break down like bikes.”
“Would you be interested in coming to an arrangement? The problems you’ve been having with the Family could be ended.”
“What are you, their agent?”
“This isn’t Danegeld, or a protection racket. This is a fair exchange of services.”
“I pay you and your hippies don’t fudge up any more scenes? I could just get a sheriff out here and run the whole crowd off, then we’d be back on schedule. I’ve come close to it more’n once.”
“I’m not interested in money, for the moment. I would like to take an option on a day and a night of time from one of your contractees.”
“Those girls are actresses, buddy, not whatever you might think they are. Each and every one of em is SAG.”
“Not one of the actresses.”
“Sheesh, I know you longhairs are into everything, but...”
“It’s your werewolf I wish to sub-contract.”
“My what? Oh, Junior. He’s finished on this picture.”
“But he owes you two days.”
“How the hell did you know that? He does. I was going to have Al shoot stuff with him we could use in something else. There’s this Blood picture we need to finish. Blood of Whatever. It’s had so many titles, I can’t keep them in my head. Ghastly Horror... Dracula Meets Frankenstein... Fiend with the Psychotropic Brain... Blood a-Go-Go... At the moment, it’s mostly home movies shot at a dolphinarium. It could use monster scenes.”
“I would like to pick up the time. As I said, a day and a night.”
“Have you ever done any acting? I ask because our vampire is gone. He’s an accountant and it’s tax season. In long shot, you could pass for him. We could give you a horror star name, get you on the cover of Famous Monsters. How about ‘Zoltan Lukoff’? ‘Mongo Carnadyne’? ‘Dexter DuCaine’?”
“I don’t think I have screen presence.”
“But you can call off the bimbos in the buggies? Damp down all activities so we can finish our flick and head home?”
“That can be arranged.”
“And Junior isn’t going to get hurt? This isn’t some Satanic sacrifice deal? Say, that’s a great title. Satan’s Sacrifice. Must register it. Maybe Satan’s Bloody Sacrifice. Anything with blood in the title will gross an extra twenty per-cent. That’s free advice you can take to the bank and cash.”
“I simply want help in finding something. Your man can do that.”
“Pal, Junior can’t find his own pants in the morning even if he’s slept in them. He’s still got it on film, but half the time he doesn’t know what year it is. And, frankly, he’s better off that way. He still thinks he’s in Of Mice and Men.”
“If you remade that, would you call it Of Mice and Bloody Men?”
Sam laughed. “Of Naked Mice and Bloody Men.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“I’ll talk to Junior.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
After dark, the two camps were pitched. Charlie’s Family were around the ranch-house, clustering on the porch for a meal prepared and served by the girls, which was not received enthusiastically. Constant formulated elaborate sentences of polite and constructive culinary criticism which made head chef Lynette Alice, aka Squeaky, glare as if she wanted to drown him in soup.
Leech had another future moment, seeing between the seconds. Drowned bodies hung, arms out like B-movie monsters, faces pale and shrivelled. Underwater zombies dragged weighted boots across the ocean-floor, clothes flapping like torn flags. Finned priests called the faithful to prayer from the steps of sunken temples to Dagon and Chthulhu and the Fisherman Jesus.
Unnoticed, he spat out a stream of seawater which sank into the sand.
The Family scavenged their food, mostly by random shoplifting in markets, and were banned from all the places within an easy reach. Now they made do with whatever canned goods they had left over and, in some cases, food parcels picked up from the Chatsworth post office sent by suburban parents they despised but tapped all the time. Mom and Dad were a resource, Charlie
said, like a seam of mineral in a rock, to be mined until it played out.
The situation was exacerbated by cooking smells wafting up from the film camp, down by the bunkhouse. The movie folk had a catering budget. Junior presided over a cauldron full of chilli, his secret family recipe doled out to the cast and crew on all his movies. Leech gathered some of Charlie’s girls had exchanged blow-jobs for bowls of that chilli, which they then dutifully turned over to their lord and master in the hope that he’d let them lick out the crockery afterwards.
Everything was a matter of striking a deal. Service for payment.
Not hungry, he sat between the camps, considering the situation. He knew what Janice Marsh wanted, what Charlie wanted, what Al wanted and what Sam wanted. He saw arrangements that might satisfy them all.
But he had his own interests to consider.
The more concrete the coming flood was in his mind, the less congenial an apocalypse it seemed. It was unsubtle, an upheaval that epitomised the saw about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. He envisioned more intriguing pathways through the future. He had already made an investment in this world, in the ways that it worked and played, and he was reluctant to abandon his own long-range plans to hop aboard a Technicolor spectacular starring a cast of thousands, scripted by Lovecraft, directed by DeMille and produced by Mad Eyes Charlie and the Freakin’ Family Band.
His favoured apocalypse was a tide of McLitter, a thousand channels of television noise, a complete scrambling of politics and entertainment, PROUD-TO-BE-A-BREADHEAD buttons, bright packaging around tasteless and nutrition-free product, audio-visual media devoid of anything approaching meaning, bellies swelling and IQs atrophying. In his preferred world, as in the songs, people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made, worked for Matthew and Son, were dedicated followers of fashion and did what Simon said.
He was in a tricky position. It was a limitation on his business that he could rarely set his own goals. In one way, he was like Sam’s vampire: he couldn’t go anywhere without an invitation. Somehow, he must further his own cause, while living up to the letter of his agreements.
Fair enough.
On his porch, Charlie unslung a guitar and began to sing, pouring revelations over a twelve-bar blues. Adoring faces looked up at him, red-fringed by the firelight.
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 12
