Wetbones: The Authorized Edition

by John Shirley

  "Time to par-tayyyy . . ." the More Man said softly, mockingly.

  The Handy Man said something in German. The woman with the big sea snail thing on her head answered in German, something muted and bubbly under the stuff, and sobbed, and lifted up her dress and . . .

  Constance looked away. He slim black girl on the bed of body parts was crying softly, rasping. "Mitch . . ." He boy was dead. The black girl was trying to heave his body off her and couldn't. She was crying with crusted, dried out eyes and cracked lips, trying to roll the boy off her. Constance looked away from her too. She didn't want to feel bad for anyone. If she let herself feel anything, it'd open a can of . . .

  The yellow-silvery tendril reached out to her.

  A rattling in the lock Then the door opened behind her.

  She turned and saw Ephram there.

  But Ephram looked defeated. "That's enough . . ." He tossed the key onto the floor. "I . . . will cooperate, Samuel."

  "You have become peculiar lately," Sam Denver chuckled. "Very well, Constance." The tendril slunk

  back to him like the gelatinous antenna of a snail pulling into itself.

  Denver drew the Handy Man aside, away from his wife. "What can you do for her, then, Ephram?"

  Seeing they'd lost interest in her, Constance edged toward the bed. She wasn't sure why - but she had to do this. Maybe some door in her had been left open a slit. She pulled the white boy off the black girl, rolled him toward Denver's side of the murdered bed. The girl turned on her side to try to crawl off the bed - and found herself staring, three inches away, into the mummified face of the boy they'd made into a mattress cover. She screamed in recognition: and Constance saw the family resemblance between the two faces. The girl's brother.

  The girl covered her face with her hands, screaming uncontrollably into her bloody palms. Constance helped her to stand, and drew her aside. The girl fell silent, shaking. Constance wondered if Denver would let the two of them get out the door.

  Ephram was staring at the woman. That'd be Mrs. Denver, Judy, from what he'd told her. Once Mrs. Stutgart. Ephram was doing something to her with his mind. Ephram grimaced and shook his head. "I haven't got the strength. They're too firmly a part of her."

  Denver nodded grimly. "Then get the hell out of here. And leave the girl."

  Ephram hesitated. Then he started mumbling. He was chanting, Constance knew, calling up the . . .

  "No," Denver said. "If you can't do it alone, don't do it."

  "It's the only way," Ephram said, pausing in a distracted kind of way. "The Spirit can draw them off from her. I don't have enough strength."

  "The Spirit!" Denver laughed bitterly. "What the

  Bloody Hell do you think the Spirit is, Pixie? Don't you know what it'd do to her? Or is that what you want?"

  Ephram stopped his murmuring. He blinked at Denver. "What do you mean - what it is?"

  Denver shook his head. "Do you really have that much of a blind spot? But of course, it's kept you that way . . . Ephram, your spirit is just another Akishra. A Magnus. The most powerful Akishra - but it is still just an Akishra."

  "No!"

  Constance had never heard Ephram sound so off balance. And so afraid. She looked at the door. The girl beside her - God, she smelled bad, of rotting blood and shit and worse stuff - was sinking to her knees, unable to walk by herself. Constance couldn't carry her and couldn't bring herself to leave the girl here. What am I doing? she wondered. Maybe she'd been too long without Reward, and this was withdrawal. This feeling . . .

  "You don't think I'd perceive such a thing?" Ephram said, with a trumped-up sneer. "I'd know."

  "You really can't see them?" Denver said. "The control lines? I suppose it doesn't want you to. See for yourself. Here, with our influence, you should be able to see them . . ."

  Ephram looked up, and shocked Constance by whimpering. Constance followed his gaze. Shimmying into view like puppet strings over Ephram's head were dozens of fine, translucent tendrils. Now, as they began to move around, billowing and gleaming, they didn't look like puppet strings so much as the little trailing stingers that dangle from big jelly fish . . .

  They were sunken into his head. Grown right into it. They stretched from Ephram up into, and through, the ceiling. And through this world into another. They were

  not quite physical things - you could see that, looking at them. But they were there.

  "You pretentious old bastard," Denver said. "You thought you were better than the rest of us - because of your overblown talent? That you were in touch with some glorious God of the dark dimensions? You perfect ass! It was just the biggest Akishra; the Magnus itself. The greatest of them, playing games with you, letting you play on the line, reeling you out then, reeling you in now. It brought you here, for this. Manipulated you into coming to L.A. Oh, yeah. The thing you called down for Wetbones. And - you want to bring that here? Now? You're out of your pompous little skull."

  "Yes," Ephram croaked. His face gone white. "Yes. Having come this far: yes. To cure us all." And he spoke three more words.

  The ceiling seemed to vanish. It turned transparent and then faded completely. Smoke replaced it, a living smoke made up of ten thousand restless, microscopic eyes. Constance thought she glimpsed people there, too, whirling, caught like the birds in a tornado. The rectangle that had been the ceiling was now an infinite reach of crowded and living sky. And then the iridescent bulk of the creature who'd masqueraded as the "Great Spirit", the Akishra Magnus, descended slowly toward them. What Constance could see of it made her think of a house-sized plasticine squid; its upper parts tapering into the boiling smokes of staring, black-light space; reeling in on some tendrils, seeking with others, its vast sticky, glimmer-edged, polyp-bearded mouth opening . . .

  A great wind raged through the room, roaring, smelling like an overheated electric train; and static electricity invested the air, making Constance's hair crackle out, as the "Spirit", the etheric animal that had kept Ephram for

  its toy, lowered itself over Mrs. Stutgart, taking her into its translucent, feeler-furred envelope. They could see her inside it, through the foggy membrane. And for an instant, within it, she was freed - the husk of Akishra was drawn off her head, and the old woman beneath wept with gratitude. Then the woman's own face was peeled off her skull, sucked cleanly off her, upward, and her eyes remained in her skull for a moment staring in naked realization. Until the skull exploded, and Elma Stutgart disintegrated into a pulp of flesh and bone . . .

  Denver was all this time moving away from her, pushing the Handy Man ahead of him . . .

  The bed, the cobbled body parts of the furniture, were leaping in the electric galvanization pervading the air, tearing free of one another, twitching with the damaged reflexes of some half-rotted nervous system. A spasmodic tarantel of dis-juncted body parts.

  Constance stood near the door, unable to move, paralyzed with the immense psychological gravitation of what she was seeing.

  She saw Ephram rigid, shaking, his eyes rolling back in his head. The Magnus reeled him toward it. He staggered its way. Shouting over the roaring wind something Constance recognized from one of the evenings he'd made her read to him from Nietzsche: "The beauty of the superman . . . "He paused to gasp for air, then went on, ". . . came to me as a shadow . . ." He paused to clutch at the twitching, preserved leg that had been part of the disassembling bedframe. Then seemed to make a decision and deliberately let go, shouting, finishing the quote: ". . . what are the gods to me now!"

  Ephram was sucked slowly toward the Magnus, as blood ran down from new wounds opening on his skull and neck, a hundred little rifts giving up brain and blood

  to accompany soul through the feeding tendrils of the Akishra Magnus . . .

  As the great one tilted toward him, its mouth opening.

  Constance thought she caught a glimpse of a single opalescent eye in the writhing tendrils of its lower parts; maybe even a fragment of a desperate face; a visage that might once have been
human, millennia ago, the remains of something that now suffered enormously in the aching, interstellar void of hugely imbecilic hungers.

  Ephram glimpsed this face too, and seemed to sense its implications. Now he tried to hold back, shrieking. She could see his face contorting as he attempted to use his talent to disentangle himself from it. But it drew him nearer, with little effort. Constance almost felt pity for Ephram . . .

  And she felt herself drawn after him. She felt a jolt of Reward as she staggered toward the Magnus, transmitted through Ephram but originating in this Lord of Akishra itself. She was connected to Ephram - she had to go with him. It was that simple. It was not to be questioned . . .

  No. Go your way, my dear. More than me, it wants you. Go. Ephram's voice, from nowhere. Let us take some comfort in frustrating it, a little.

  And then she felt Ephram withdraw from her. His psychic fingers slipping out of their sockets in her brain. She felt cold and strange and sick and relieved.

  Ephram tried once more to hold himself back. Shouting: "Ich bin der Ubermensch!" (Hearing that, the Handy Man laughed).

  Then Ephram was drawn up inside the Spirit -

  Constance found her will to move again; she turned and jerked the black girl to her feet. Denver and the Handy Man had gone ahead of her, fled from the room.

  Constance pulled the sagging girl along with her, out into the hall.

  The wind roared through the door, behind them, banging it open and closed, open and closed, and open again. Denver and his wife's servant were waiting for her, the Handy Man weeping now, calling softly, "Elma . . . Elma . . ."

  Constance felt it when Ephram exploded. She felt it as a release of hatred: her own. And suffering: his. Her own buried hatred; his buried suffering. She screamed like a vivisected cat. She bared her teeth at Denver - preparing to lunge at him. Sink her teeth into him.

  Then a mountainous pressure vanished completely. It was just gone.

  There were two sickening squelching sounds. Out of sight, in the room behind them: Two bodies pulverized to lumps of mush, dropping from midair to splash over the remains of the bed and the dead boy. Constance looked through the open door. The room was empty, except for the absurd tumble of body parts and the fresher, steaming, unrecognizably pulped heaps of what had been two human bodies. The ceiling was in place again, with the same cobwebs.

  I ought to be happy Ephram's dead, Constance thought. She smiled wearily. And I sure as Hell am.

  The Spirit - he Magnus, the Akishra, the godsized predator of Astral places - was gone, for now. It had withdrawn.

  Constance's rage floundered and lay sodden in her. She swayed, feeling as if the floor were rocking under her, though in fact the house had settled to a new quietude.

  Slowly, she turned toward the front door. It was very easy to figure out, she told herself. You just go away. Just walk away . . .

  "No," the More Man told her. He took a gun from his coat pocket. The tendrils, the thing on his head, were no longer visible. But she knew it was there, too, cocked as much as the gun.

  "No," the More Man said. "You will stay with us. And play."

  13

  The Hills near Malibu

  "He's out there, talkin' to nothin' again," Lonny said.

  "He do that a lot? Prentice asked, wearily. He was pressing an old towel soaked in cold water against his battered head. "I did some of that myself, lately."

  He and Lonny were sitting in the best-lit corner of the old shack. Prentice propped up on the bed, Lonny sitting on the rocking chair next to it. The dog paced restively near the closed wooden door, growling softly to itself.

  "It's almost dawn, too," Lonny went on. "Fuckin Drax's been out there since midnight. Smokin' weed and chewing those cactus buttons and talking to those dolls on their posts out there. It's trippin' me out. Like he might geek out and come in here and smoke us with that shotgun. You sure you can't sleep? You oughta."

  "Sure, like I can sleep when you talk about how this fuckin' crazy old hippy is going to come in and waste me while I'm sawing logs. Shit! Anyway, I think I remember something about how you're not supposed to sleep for a while if you get a concussion. If that's what this is."

  "So let's get you to a doctor, dude."

  ''No. Drax says he's got a way to beat them. Let's check him out."

  "If he's not just, like, hallucinatin' it."

  Wincing, Prentice got up and walked to the window, and peered out at Drax. He was squatting between two of his kerosene lamps. Small white insects flung themselves at the lamp, drew back, and flung themselves again. The dawn was just adding aluminium filings to the blue steel of the sky. Drax said something inaudible, then cocked his head to listen. He rocked back on his heels, laughing, reacting to something that was said. By no one visible. Then he stood up, and stretched. Looked at the horizon. He stared into the white crescent of sun that showed over the hills. Then he turned, picked up a kerosene lamp in one hand and the shotgun in the other, and strode back to the shack.

  Drax shouldered through the door, hands laden with gun and lamp - and paused to glare at Prentice as if he'd never seen him before. Then he seemed to remember, and grinned. "Yore wife got a great sense of humour. Says some damn funny things." He stalked past Prentice to the woodstove in the corner, hung the lamp on a nail, and dumped water from a bucket into a coffee pot sitting on the stove's white upper shelf. Some of the water spilled onto the stove griddle, and it sizzled into steam.

  Prentice stared at him. After a moment, not caring much about the shotgun that Drax had leaned against the wall near the stove, said, "You're full of shit."

  Drax nodded, his beard wagging. "Her name's Amy, am I right?"

  Prentice shivered. "You found that out from someone else."

  Lonny snorted. "You never told me her name. He be

  talking to Orphy, too, and he came back with some shit only Orphy know about."

  It wasn't that Prentice disbelieved in the supernatural. Not after what he'd seen in the car. But he didn't want to believe Amy was . . . so close.

  Drax took a brown sack of coffee from one of six stacked crates, all of them containing coffee, and dumped an unconscionable amount in the coffee pot. "Fuck you if you don't believe it, pal," he said cheerfully. "But how you think you found your way here? Luck? No more'n this boy did. I've been working on these here friendships for a while . . ."

  They drank coffee and Prentice ate a plate of stale Oreo cookies, which Drax also bought by the crate. He declined marijuana. After drinking a cup of acrid coffee with a thoughtful look on his face, Drax hurried to the door, ran outside, and vomited explosively. Then he came back in, wiping his beard with the back of his hand, muttering, "Damn peyote do it to me most every time, when I drink coffee." And to Prentice's amazement poured himself another cup of coffee.

  After they'd eaten, they went outside to pee. Prentice was feeling better. He pissed toward Denver's house, though it was hidden by the swell of a hill and trees and distance, and pissed toward Lissa's wrecked car, and spat once in that direction too. It did him good.

  Then Drax said, "I want to show you what I got to kill them things with. If we got time to do it."

  "What's this about 'time to do it'?" Prentice asked, walking with Drax and Lonny through the blue light of early morning, around the side of the shack.

  "They going to reproduce like a motherfucker, so to speak," Drax said, "and if they get too far along we're dead meat. Awright. Here we go. What do you think?"

  He flapped a hand in the general direction of the battered red '59 Ford pick-up. It was scored with rusty dents. Its front window had been knocked out. Its crooked hood was wired down. It had oversized tyres with big, stand-out tread. Some sort of old tractor tyres, never meant for a pick-up.

  "What do I think of what?" Prentice asked, his headache beginning to pound again.

  "The truck!" Drax said, impatiently, eyes wild. "That's how I'm gonna git 'em! What do you think?"

  A Highway near Malibu


  Garner was tired. He thought he could feel his bones bending with each wrenching turn the Cabriolet made as it shot along the freeway. Now and then the rising sun strobed in the hollows between hills and caught him a blinding flash in the eyes. He turned toward the west. His eyes were tired. His ribs ached. He was a mess.

  But he was psyched, too. He might be close to Constance. Jeff Teitelbaum, at the wheel, was fresher than Garner. But Garner was less afraid. Garner was afraid of nothing but his addict.

  "You know, Jeff," Garner said, "they might not be there. Your Mitch. My Constance. You could be wrong. Blume could be wrong. We could get trigger happy and kill some people who have nothing to do with this."

  "Who killed Kenson?" Jeff demanded. "He mentioned the More Man. Denver is the More Man. Blume connected the More Man to Wetbones. It's that simple."

  "I hope it is simple," Garner said. "But I doubt it will be. I really do doubt it."

  If they were wrong, Garner thought, someone innocent could get killed. But he had a feeling - and it

  was something he hadn't felt so assuredly in years. A sense of guidance. Even the return to using cocaine had been guided, he suspected. He had to hit bottom again and see the true horror of it again. He had to come face to face with his own shrivelled faith, side by side with his bloating addict. He had been guided through that particular circle of Hades, through the Projects, through its punishment, and brought out again, and when he'd nearly stumbled back into the pit, he'd been saved first by a rip-off artist, who'd done him the favour of selling him bunk crack, and then the presence of another pastor out doing street work. And hearing the phone message at Blume's.

  You should know, Brick had said, God's the only one who can arrange coincidences . . .

  He was being guided here. He was sure of it. But he knew that being guided here was no guarantee of success, or safety.

  The sad truth was, God was not all powerful. Not in Garner's estimation. God just did the best He could. And lots of the time it wasn't enough.

  The Doublekey Ranch, near Malibu

  It was neither day nor night, here. It was dark, but not dark as true night. It was dark as the dirty fog . . .