Wetbones: The Authorized Edition

by John Shirley

  Lonny said, "Uh uh. We thought it was you . . ."

  There was a noise from under the truck. A very soft noise. Prentice thought maybe it was just Drax's foot scraping something.

  Drax took the end of the cable on the truck's spool, and attached it to the cable coming through the fence, screwing an insulated clamp down onto it. "I hope to Mescalito that holds," Drax said. Shadows in the fog moved over his pale face as he dropped the cable -

  Something jerked him off his feet. Prentice jumped back and looked at the ground. Lissa!

  Oh God it was Lissa, just enough of her face left to recognize, and a deep tyre tread printed into her back, one arm tangled up with the axle like a piece of bloody rope. Her free hand clutching the fallen Drax's ankles as he scrabbled back from her his face twitchy with horror.

  For a long moment Prentice felt a profound pity go through him - and then a veil of fog drifted away and he saw the worms fluttering around her head . . .

  Lonny's gun banged and echoed and most of Lissa's head exploded. Drax was up, running back from the cab of the truck with a shotgun. "Get back! Ricochets!" He yelled. They scurried back as he fired, the shotgun smashing her tangled arm off at the shoulder, freeing the truck of her. Lissa's body tried to climb from under the truck but seemed to have difficulty organizing its few working parts . . .

  Prentice looked away. As Drax ran to the cab of the truck and climbed in, threw it in gear, Prentice tried to tell Lonny he'd had enough, he was leaving. But he

  couldn't quite say it. His tongue seemed numb in his mouth. He felt as if he was going altogether numb inside. He wanted to go back but he was not at all sure he had the strength to climb over the fence. And then Lonny swung his gun around to kill Jeff, as Jeff loomed up in the fog, a bearded stranger at his heels.

  Constance lay passively under Arthwright as he rammed into her, each thrust of his hips driving her a few inches farther along the terrace, to the edge of the pool. Now the top of her head thrust out over the vitreous, secretive surface. She heard things moving down there. She could sense them, all of them, and she sensed more: all the worms moving excitedly in the soil, under the surface of the earth. Nothing like the Akishra, but somehow communing with them; she sensed things hovering in the air around her, unseen; she sensed the huge psychic gravitation of the Magnus lowering itself over the pool. It hadn't gone far; it had only withdrawn to wait.

  She saw shapes unfold and fold and reshape again in the fog overhead; intricate geometrical designs, like Mayan carvings; ugly variations of mandalas; constellations forming and reforming: one shaped like a scorpion, another like a spider, a third like a hangman.

  She watched all this only distantly - her hair dangling in the wet surface now, sucked slowly through the waxy ooze over the pool as Arthwright fucked her along the slippery ground. Now her shoulders were over the stuff and soon her torso would dip into it, her head upside down in the water, her eyes greeted by the swarm that waited down there . . .

  They were neatly detached, these perceptions,

  capering beyond a druggy haze. She barely felt Arthwright's penis in her; she felt mostly the swelling boil, the pustulent buboe, of her own pleasure: the Reward they were jolting into her, using up the last of her ability to feel as they shot it into her in time with his triphammer thrusts.

  If she just concentrated on the glow of Reward . . .

  And didn't pay attention to the hallucinations, the signs. The tarantula with a body shining like a hairy lightbulb; the corkscrews of blue fire pursuing one another endlessly through the fog; the imploring faces of Ephram and Elma Stutgart Denver and the boy who'd died on the bed: these she could see scribbled in the air to one side, sketched in shadowy fog. In the background: the far away screaming of Eurydice where someone was raping her by the old fireplace, pushing her head into the fire as they raped her. The Madonna record they were playing at a speed freaked Minnie Mouse 78 RPM. The vagina lined with seeking worms that opened in the sky: inside it, a window into Hell that opened with the squeal of tortured glass . . .

  Arthwright's detonating head.

  It blew up, his head, she saw through slitted eyes. It shattered upward and outward, close in front of her, taking most of his face with it. Then she heard a familiar voice cursing and ending with a sob: "Oh shit I shouldn't have done it that way -" the voice said. The voice was very familiar but she couldn't quite make out who it was.

  Then Arthwright's corpse was flipped summarily away from her and she was dragged back from the edge of the pool and a man was pulling her to her feet and she sagged down on knees weak from disorientation and the sudden, vicious cessation of Reward . . .

  "No, no, no, don't," she told the man. A bearded

  man, who looked a little familiar. Who was he? It didn't matter who he was. 'No don't, you stopped it, you stopped the Reward I have to find it again . . ." She turned and ran to the edge of the pool.

  He caught her by the wrist and dragged her back, just as a big ugly red machine roared around the corner of the main house, smashing through a corner of the cactus garden as it came toward the terrace, its one eye shining . . .

  Something vast screamed with frustration.

  A drain opened up inside Constance and she want down it.

  Garner caught Constance as she fell. He tossed the gun onto the terrace next to the shaking body of the man who'd been raping her. Then he picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the way of the crazy old man with the truck. He had a three second sweeping vision of the scene on the terrace before the truck hit its objective.

  He saw Jeff Teitelbaum shooting a gun at someone who was holding a girl's head over a fire at a stone barbecue, as the one they called the More Man glided around the corner of the house, moving in that oozy walk that meant the worms were guiding what was left of him; something flopped out the door of the back house and it was too late to warn Jeff as the thing moved onto his back - a shapeless wreckage of probably-human flesh that was furred with worm-heads, tendrils that flittered around its broken bone-ends and torn tissue, muscle and flesh mixed - Wetbones, Garner knew. Reanimated, guided by the tendrils . . . tendrils that reached up from it to the thing that manifested in the churning fog over the pool:

  A vast thing, up there, at first looking like a partly-filled hot air balloon, then a tapering head, its nearer end bifurcated into a worm-edged mouth opening to show a terrified remnant of face - its tendrils reaching out to puppet the starfish of smashed human flesh that closed around Jeff Teitelbaum and broke his neck -

  Reaching out with other tendrils to embrace the six men and two women who stood naked and blood-spattered around the body of a woman near the back of the main house -

  Reaching out to Prentice - it must be Prentice - who was running open mouthed and glaze-eyed to pull the girl from the fire; stretching out to the boy Lonny who'd nearly shot Teitelbaum and Garner two minutes earlier. Lonny now reflexively shooting at the More Man who had one hand in his own guts and another on his purplish, exposed dick, as a worm grew arm-thick from his mouth, the worm reaching for Lonny . . .

  As the thing over the pool reached for them all. Reached for Garner.

  Three seconds were up. The cable on the spool unfeeling behind it, the truck roared up to the pool. The crazy old hippie in the driver's seat, screaming triumphantly at the top of his lungs, drove the truck deliberately head-on into the water. The exposed strip of wire on the spool-attached end of the cable struck the water with all the voltage that could be stolen from a high power line as the truck broke through the waxy protective skin over the pool and nosed down, crackling with sparks. It sank into the surging, boiling, green-black waters. Watching, Garner understood. He could see the colony of tens of thousands of tiny astral worms outlined in violet fire, deep-frying in the pool, as electricity arced and crackled in small lightning bolts across its tortured surface. Like

  randomly aimed particle accelerators, the seething electrons shattered the plasmic; Astral skeins of the Akishra - and travelle
d along the circuits of etheric relationship, conducting up through the tendrils of the Lord of Akishra hovering over the pool, passing into the Magnus and through it into the others on the terrace and in the house.

  Violent streams of electricity roared down from the Akishra Magnus and into the More Man; into the wreckage of Jeff and his murderer by the doorway to the back house; into the weave of rose bushes up the outer walls of the guest house. The rose bushes writhed like a nest of neon snakes, wailing in despair. The vast currents of electricity crackled into the eight Followers and Feasters standing back of the fireplace, and into two worm-driven corpses - the ragged remains of Lissa and Arthwright - crawling along the stone flags. Fingers of electricity dabbed like the fingers of a blind man at Garner, and seemed to find him not to their taste; they moved on to Constance, pausing over her so that she went momentarily rigid, and glowed faintly in his arms as a starburst of worms fled from her, disintegrating in the air. The charge left her, and passed over Lonny and Prentice and the black girl; and went on.

  The electricity crackled more powerfully yet into the More Man, into the worm-haunted hamburger that had taken Jeff Teitelbaum, into the More Man's followers - and they shook and screamed, electrocuting physically and spiritually, each surrounded by a spark-spitting corona of brilliant blue-white discharge, human fireworks displays; they ran spasmodically to one another and, as if galvanized to act out the archetypes of their compulsions, they lunged at whoever was nearest. The Handy Man tearing into the body of the More Man with

  his bare hand - the rest crowding together, doing the same to each other, a crowd of about ten of them closely clumped, tearing one another to pieces with teeth and bare hands, so that rags and gobbets of flesh flew through the halos of sparks, each flying handful of bloody flesh itself flaring with electrical discharge and exploding in sparks; the More Man and companions bodily burrowing into one another, a woman thrusting her head into her partner's guts and emerging beside the shattered spine as someone else, electrified into superhuman strength, ripped her leg out of its socket and then thrust his hand into the wound to yank out her intestines, and someone else sank teeth into the side of the face of the one who'd torn the leg away and someone else popped out the eyes and then the brains of the one who bit the woman who . . .

  It took five seconds, as the old red truck boiled like a lobster in the pool. The human hosts of the Akishra tore one another to pieces, faster and faster till it was too fast for the eye to follow and then they - and the worms that motivated them - were lost in a seething cloud of exploding flesh -

  Garner turned away to see a raging ball of electricity double back from this hand-made Wetbones and up the connective tendrils into the Akishra Magnus, which detonated like a sobbing and suffering roman candle, expelling a hundred thousand trapped spirits that spiral-led away into void and . . .

  The Akishra burned in the air, ten thousand thousand worms fluttered up and burned out. Or burned out of this world, Garner supposed. There was no exterminating them, not completely.

  And then the fog dispersed. Sunlight expanded around the pool. The apparitions vanished from the sky. The Magnus was no more. The More Man and compan-

  ions were steaming heaps of burnt flesh, without the Akishra to animate them. Lonny was helping Prentice carry the poor, charred, black girl away.

  Garner was abruptly aware that he was dizzy, in danger of falling over with Constance in his arms. His heart was playing a drum roll, his mouth as dry and foul as a road kill. But he had to see one more thing. He turned to glance into the pool . . .

  In the pool, Drax was, of course, quite dead. The pool had lost its colour, was now crystal clear, illuminated with an inner glow. The truck was glowing with violet fire; and inside it, like a filament in a bulb, Drax glowed with a psychedelic coruscation all his own, his shining corpse grinning in triumph.

  14

  Berkeley, California . . . One Year Later

  Garner was glad he'd thought to bring flowers. There were none in Constance's room. She was wearing shorts and a rather old The Simpsons t-shirt and no shoes. She'd put on weight, a little too much. Earlier in the year, in the months after the Ranch, she'd barely eaten at all. Now she was eating too much. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad.

  She sat by the window, at her desk, with a copy of Cosmopolitan open in front of her. She was looking at the pictures. Next to her was a broad window looking out on the hospital's Activities Lawn, a sort of commons where sports were played and picnics held and catatonics wheeled about. The sky was overcast; the light that came in through the window was muted. The trees sheltering the sanitarium from the world were beginning to streak with russet and yellow.

  He stood looking at her a moment, readying himself. She was better, he told himself. She'd really gotten

  better. The months of withdrawal symptoms were over. She had stopped trying to slash her arms up; she'd long since stopped attacking people.

  "Hey dudette," he said, putting the flowers on the table across from her bed. He put the sack of cookies down next to them. "Smell anything good? Not me and not the food around here. Not even the cookies. I mean the flowers. You like carnations?"

  "Sure." She looked out the window. "You gonna watch TV with us again tonight?"

  Something about the question hinted a gray continuum of hopelessness. It dug a hole through him. But he said, "That's the plan. I brought cookies for the whole floor."

  "Next time bring candy for Marcia. She doesn't like cookies. She's weird about cookies. Somebody choked her by forcing 'em down her once. Her mom said she was over-eating so she tried to teach her a lesson and she almost died. From cookies."

  Her voice was a monotone.

  He wanted to hug her. He knew better.

  She turned a page of the magazine. He carefully didn't stare at the stump where she'd lost a finger. After a moment, she asked, "You been going to meetings?"

  "Sure. I got a year clean and sober next week. I didn't tell you, I was elected secretary of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting over in the city."

  "That's good." Her voice was as flat as the line on Aleutia's EKG.

  "So -" He was afraid to ask it. It might push her into one of her screaming fits, and he found those hard to bear up under. But it was September and her therapist said he was supposed to ask her around the beginning of every month. He took a deep breath and plunged in. "How

  about it? You want to come home for a weekend? Get you back here bright and early on Monday. I was thinking this Friday -''

  "No."

  "We could talk about it."

  "No."

  Floundering, he blurted, "Constance - why not?"

  "I lived in that house." She was still looking out the window. Her voice was still a monotone but now it seemed an octave lower.

  He waited. She didn't say anything else. He prompted, "Go on - please."

  She shook her head. He wanted to go to her, to put his arms around her, at least touch her on the shoulder. But he knew she didn't like that.

  Still - he had told him something. I lived in that house.

  She'd lived in that house, their house when she'd met Ephram Pixie.

  "Why didn't you tell me before, it was the house? The reason you didn't want to do home visits . . . I thought it was me . . ."

  She shrugged.

  He said, "Want to come and stay with me someplace else? Um . . . How about we visit your aunt in Portland?"

  He waited on tenterhooks for twenty seconds. Then she nodded. Relief flooded through him. He remembered a Barbie doll. He wondered how her therapy was going, but didn't want to ask her. "Sooner or later," he said, "you have to look at what you went through. I know it's hard here, because they don't believe a lot of it. But I know what happened. And I'm willing to listen as much as you need."

  She covered up her maimed hand with the intact one. He knew that as a warning.

  He thought about confronting her. Talking her through it. He made you murder people. Only you and I know it wa
sn't you who did it - that he had the power to make you do that. Only I believe you. But God knows and you know and I know and the police don't know and it's okay now to feel the pain and sadness that you couldn't feel then. You have to just feel it and let it go, just feel it and tell yourself yes my body was a murderer, my hands helped torture people to death, but it wasn't really me, that wasn't me, it was him. You know it rationally and you know it emotionally and now you've got to say it, you've got to -

  But he was afraid of it, himself. It might shatter her completely . . .

  "I liked it," she said. "He made me like it."

  Something took off and soared inside him. She was taking about it!

  "It wasn't you, Constance! He pushed a button that made you feel pleasure. He punished you when you didn't play along. He paralyzed you when you tried to run. Sometimes he manipulated your limbs. He raped you a dozen ways." He was trying not to cry. It was hard; it was really hard not to cry. "Anyone would have done what you did because -"

  "But I did. It wasn't 'anyone'. It was me."

  "No! It wasn't really you. You were trapped in the body he was using. You were trapped inside. He was moving you around like a puppet."

  She shook her head. She opened her mouth and shut it again. Her shoulders shook and for a long moment he prayed she would cry.

  She didn't. She pushed it back down, again.

  But Garner wanted to dance around the room. She had talked about it! For the first time in a year. She'd talked - just a little bit. It wasn't even the light at the end

  of the tunnel. But it was a little gray patch hinting that the far-away light was closer.

  "I got three kinds of cookies," he said. "Better tell me what kind you want before we go down and put on the Disney channel. I'll put some aside for you. You know how Alice is. She'll eat a whole box by herself."

  "Then she goes in the bathroom and throws it up," Constance said matter of factly. But she got up and went to look in the cookie bag . . .

  The Hills near Malibu