by Michael Shea
So she thumped the air for emphasis as she walked and, alone on a path through the park, said softly, “Just open your eyes, girl! Read the papers! Brutally murdered. A man you know! A pimp. You know a fucking pimp!”
Time was Susy’s trap too. She’d just rounded fifty and was deeply freaked, meaning more sociable and hilarious and party-down than ever. She lived by selling eighths of Humboldt skunk-weed, meaning carrying them in her pockets and selling them wherever. Susy was the kind of woman, if she knew you, you were a friend. So she sold as she went, wherever she ran into a “friend”—to friends in the restrooms of bars, to friends met on the BART or in a restaurant, to all her friends in the shabby old Hyperion Hotel. She was so afraid of herself, so afraid of being old and alone, that she was throwing herself away with both hands.
Dee came down Divisadero into the Castro. The sun was just setting. She had half an hour to relax with a beer, get calm, so she could make her case in a way Susy would have to hear. She stopped into the Gin and Beer It.
And noticed, once she’d sat at the bar, that her young friend Scat was back there at a corner table, hunkered down like a cute little raccoon in her bandit mask of mascara and shadow, her black hair short and sleek as fur. Dee waved to her and was bringing her ale over to the table before she realized that the girl’s stare was without recognition. Scat looked completely elsewhere. She looked scared.
Scared was just not Scat. She was a nervy little minx, bright as a button. She’d walked into Dee’s and Babs’ bookstore, Treefrog, several months ago—black microskirt, black sequined vest. “You got any Clark Ashton Smith?” she asked them. “Or any Mythos?”
“Mythos like Lovecraft?” asked Babs.
“Yeah, Lovecraft.” Then a glint of raccoon humor. “I’m a hooker who reads.”
Babs smiled. “If you’re a hooker, I think you are a sweet lovely young woman who’s making a terrible mistake.”
The girl laughed—a good laugh, quick and rich. “Well…thanks, I guess. So…?”
Dee said, “No Smith, dear, I’m afraid, but there’s a few Lovecrafts down there at the bottom.”
After that, the girl stopped in every week or so to feed her fantastic-fiction jones, and had gone out for a beer with them a couple times when they closed up shop. A bright kid, merry and invulnerable…
“Are you all right?” Then the explanation dawned on her before the girl answered. “Did you know that pimp that was killed? Is that it?”
“It was Nolo. He was hooked up with my best friend Serena.”
“God damn,” Dee said softly. Sat down across from her. Here was another one, living even more dangerously than Susy. Scat’s youth and her boldness made you forget it, but she too was throwing herself away, and with far more left to lose. “Listen. I’m going to visit a friend at the Hyperion Hotel. She knew him too. Why don’t you come?”
Out of a long silence, the girl asked, “Does she know why it happened?”
“I don’t know. She might not even know it did happen.” And was going to add, She’s suicidally careless like you, but bit it back. The girl seemed too stunned for nagging.
And said nothing for blocks as they walked down toward the Mission. The sky was indigo, the poisoned-candy-colored neons burning. People were quick-stepping, dinner in mind. Dee felt hungry herself, and the cars seemed to growl with appetite, beasts thinking of meat. The girl, though born to walk boldly, had a kind of cringe in her gait tonight, and Dee had the odd notion that Scat heard something abroad in the restless evening and shrank from what she heard.
“Scat. Do you know something? About that killing?”
The girl gave a twitch of head and shoulders, not so much a negative as a shaking off of the question itself.
They were buzzed in the big battered old steel door and climbed the crackly rubber carpet-runner up the stairs to the Hyperion’s first floor.
“Is Susy in her room, Elmer?” Dee asked the bony-chested old rooster behind the bars.
“Wull, she come up a little while ago.”
Meaning sociable Susy was at least in someone’s room.
But they found her in the doorway of her own, giving a friendly thwack to the tattooed arm of a youngish man with a waxed baldy, who said “Thanks, Sue!” over his shoulder as he passed Dee and Scat.
“Hey Dee!” Big hug from lean, lively Susy. “I’ve seen you around,” she said to Scat while still hugging Dee.
“I’ve seen you,” returned Scat more dully. Susy scooped up flung clothes to make them seats on her bed.
“So you guys wanna brew? A toke? Not you, of course, Dee. Hey, I made you some cookies!” Susy had just perched on the room’s one chair and was ready to launch again, playing hostess.
“Susy. Just sit. I’ve got an agenda. What about Nolo? You knew him, right?”
“Knew him? He’s a friend of mine! I buy bud from him sometimes!”
“Jesus, Susy! You didn’t know he was murdered? Brutally murdered, unquote. It’s in the Chron!”
“You are shitting me.” Susy was awed. The years were drawing her face ever more sharply, but she still had a haggard beauty when she was laughing, or amazed. So much sweetness in her, really, her delight to make others delighted. And so afraid beneath it, afraid to let the party buzz die down, to hear time marching her life along. “Gods that’s so…so unreal. I was just up at his house a couple days ago. Up in Bernal Heights. Serena and I got high in their jacuzzi on the back deck!”
“Right there!” erupted Dee. “Right there is what I came to talk to you about, to talk to both of you! Just please look at how you live, Susy! You smoke dope in a pimp’s jacuzzi! And you!”—wheeling on Scat—“You hook, you brainless little bitch! How can you?”
Startled out of her fearful brooding, the girl bleated a defense. “Hey! I only do hand-jobs, OK? And not that often!”
“Oh great. You only do hand-jobs. Would you both just open your eyes? The so-called Underworld can kill you. There’s nothing romantic about it.”
“Romantic? Hey. I’m a realist! Love and romance, that’s your illusion, Dee!”
“Right, right—you’re hard as nails, etcetera. You’re a pup! You don’t know shit!”
“Oh really?” Scat swiveled her little bandit gaze to Susy. “You know, Serena told me about you two getting high in the jacuzzi. She said you guys both…heard something.”
“Whoa! That’s right! I’d almost forgotten. It was a radical kind of hallucination, like an auditory hallucination, and we both had it!” Mercurial Susy was now all gee-wow stoner amazement, brutal murder forgotten. “We were toking in the tub, and we started to hear this sound coming from the sea. I mean we were like two miles from the water, but we knew it was from the sea. It was like whispering, thousands of people whispering, but whispering from, like, under the sea. I swear to God it was so strange-sounding. And it was strange because that almost never happens, two people having the same hallucination like that…Oh my God, it’s so awful! Just a couple days ago, all three of us were laughing on their deck.”
“Well,” said Scat, “Serena told me the same thing. And she told me something else. She said that she told Nolo about your whispering, and he told her he’d heard the same thing a couple days before.”
A silence. Dee found she had to clear her throat. “Was he smoking?”
“When isn’t he smoking? Wasn’t he smoking? I mean, Serena’s on tranks up in County General right now. She’s torn up about Nolo, sure, he was a pretty good guy. But mainly, she is scared shitless. Because she’s the one that found his body out on their deck when she got home last night. And she told me that he’d been…half eaten.”
“Eaten?” croaked Susy.
“Half eaten.”
“Christ, that’s…even worse somehow. And are you telling me…that I should be scared too?”
“Aren’t you?!” asked Dee.
“Why are you asking? I’m scared shitless!” But when they left soon after, Dee had to wonder. Susy was going to spend the nigh
t in a friend’s room, and she was already treating it as some kind of slumber party. “I’ll bring her some of my good cookies.” A wink here at Scat. “Here, Dee, don’t forget your clean and sober chocolate chips. I promise I’ll call you in the morning.”
On their way down to the street, Dee asked Scat, “What about you? You want to stay over with me or Babs?”
“Dee, I’m OK.” Like a ticked teen to a hovering mom. “I mean, it’s pretty clear that you’re OK if you don’t get stoned, right? And I don’t smoke.”
As they walked down Valencia Street, Dee struggled to digest this. “You think you have to have this hallucination to be in danger.”
“Well? That’s what it looks like.”
“But I mean, how does that work? How does the killer know you’ve had the hallucination?”
“The hallucination calls the killer.”
“Whoa. Whoa. How in––”
“Scat!” The call came from across the street. An angular young man stood there, hand half-lifted toward her. He seemed to hesitate, and then began to dodge his way across the street, but Scat kept walking.
“Aren’t you going to––”
“That’s Mishou. He’s one of my clients.”
“Great. One of your clients.”
“Stop saying that!”
“OK. I’m sorry.”
Here he was, an olive boy with a scimitar nose and hesitant black eyes. Dee sensed about him the inwardness of a computer geek or writer. He addressed Scat urgently, as if Dee wasn’t there.
“Listen. Listen. I don’t wanna talk about this, OK? I just wanna say it, I just wanna warn you, because, I mean, well, we’re friends, really—” Scat half turned away in vexation, and he hurried on: “Dagon. I have to warn you. Dagon. First, you have to hear him. If you hear him, then you can see him. And if you can see him, then he can take you. But I can’t talk about it. I don’t dare! Be careful.” And he turned and strode off.
Dee gaped at the girl. “How does he…? What did he…?”
“We talk Mythos,” the girl snapped. “Look. I have to go home. I want to do some reading. Maybe I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Why do you have to do some reading? What was he talking about?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have to do some reading.”
“Look, Scat. I was scared for Susy because she was close to this guy, to Nolo. And here it turns out you’re closer! Serena’s your best friend! You need some input about this. You need to change your life!”
“I will call you. At the store tomorrow.” And the girl spun and marched away, back in the direction Mishou had gone.
∴
During a lull the next morning Dee, behind the counter, told Babs the whole story. Babs reordered shelves as she listened. The two women had never been lovers. From the first, they had been too close as friends. But much though Dee loved her, Babs had an irksome way of always being the Older, of being calm and judicious whenever Dee was urgent about something. Now Dee was secretly glad to see amazement in her old friend’s eyes.
“Eaten,” she said, after a long silence.
“Half eaten. And even if he was only, like, mutilated, that’s bad enough. Maybe an animal attack. A feral dog? But how did it get in the yard? And then, there’s this kid Mishou with his weird warning.”
“That sequence. Hearing, then seeing, then being taken…”
“As if it’s some…entity, and not just a psycho or an animal.”
Babs resumed her shelving. Her thoughtful eyes scanned and alphabetized.
“She promised she’d call me,” Dee said after a moment.
“What are you going to tell her?”
“To get the fuck out of the Mission, for starters. To stop hooking.”
“Sound advice.”
“Babs. What do you think it was?”
“What were the alternatives again?”
The girl called the store three hours later. Babs said, “Take off. Go meet her at your house.” Scat surprised Dee by agreeing to this idea.
She must have been en route already, because when Dee reached her tall, narrow little house in the hills above the Haight, here came Scat, not a block away.
“You making something to eat? I’m hungry.” The girl was clearly determined to deflect serious talk for the moment.
Both in her eating and her shopping, Dee was somewhat haphazard, veering between feast and famine. She bustled after what could be found, telling Scat, “Sit out on the balcony. It’s the best thing about this house.” And shortly brought out to the table on that narrow little promontory a block of cheddar, a quart of lemonade, Susy’s cookies from last night, half a baguette, and some butter.
The girl was hungry—and so was Dee, it seemed. As they set to, Dee identified landmarks in the rumpled, house-crusted hills subsiding to the north, and around the blue Bay beyond, narrowing on the left toward the Golden Gate. At length they relaxed in the afterglow of eating and gazed at the view. It grew more beautiful by the minute, the westering sun bathing it all in amber light, the City’s great growl dwindling to a rumor as it rose into this golden sky.
Dee said, “Dagon.”
Scat gave her a level look. “He’s like a sea-monster god. He’s one of the Great Old Ones. But his sea, his ocean, fills not only this space, but other spaces, and not only our time, but other times. And he hungers for all living things, to add them to his…dominion.”
“That’s what Mishou was talking about?”
“Yes.”
“And you think…what?”
“Well, Dee…” Again she fixed her little raccoon gaze on Dee’s. “I’m not ruling it out.”
Hearing this made Dee realize she’d been forgetting just how young Scat really was. Such a kid, really! Hand-jobs to boys her own age. She was a “hooker” because she just didn’t know how to be friends. She was, or wanted to be, a loner. But they, her “clients,” called themselves friends and, in this, seemed to understand her better than she did. Poor brash lonely Scat! A little gotta-be loner, and both desperate and romantic enough to be willing to believe that the Mythos actually lived…
Such a radiant afternoon! The City’s hubub had grown even more remote. All the City’s business seemed like a big Important Party, such a world-shaking event to the revelers, of whom none suspected what small potatoes it was, what a tiny little shindig, really, under the bigness of this sky, islanded by the waters of this sea…
Dee’s heart had already been open to Scat, but she felt it open wider, now that Scat had called back to her what it was like to be young and intense. What it was to look at that blue reach of Bay out there, opening onto the earth’s greatest sea, to look at that, and see time-spanning titans stirring within its depths.
And was this really so wild a thought after all? Was it not pure miracle, this world, this universe? The deeper you looked, the more colossal its entities. The harder you listened, the vaster and more multitudinous its voices. Listen now. Wasn’t that a strange new stirring she heard?
She was hearing it. Was suddenly aware she had been hearing it. A soft sizzling––vast!––as if a whole stratum of atmosphere had been set to simmering. It was the whisper of a million million tongues, but an oddly silken susurration, a whisper lubricated by some medium. By water. That simmering stratum was not the sky, but the sea that girdled them upon their hillside perch. It was a tide of sinuous sound, of urgent utterance…of woe! Of woe and lamentation eternal, that seethed in the boundless deeps and hissed in a sprawling corona around some one thing, some huge and central thing that was its core. Some titanic thing charged with a dark intent. The whispering wailing host environed this lone hugeness, their Master.
“Oh shit!” Dee moaned. She looked in Scat’s eyes and saw there the image of her own dawning terror. “I heard it!”
“I heard it too! I’m stoned to the gills. It has to be these fucking cookies!”
“Jesus Christ, I think you’re right. I haven’t been high like this in thirty years! Susy mi
xed them up! She makes straight ones for me and doped ones for other friends. The silly bitch gave me the wrong box!”
“We heard it!” groaned Scat.
∴
Dee sat listening to Babs’s long silence on the other end of the line. She watched the last sunlight draining from the sky, her sane life drawing away with it, a new life of madness and danger sliding over her like a dark blanket.
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this on the telephone,” Babs said at last. “If you two are in danger you should be over here at my house where the danger’s less likely to find you.”
“We are the danger, if there’s anything to any of this. If we’ve heard, then we’re found.”
“I can’t believe any of this.”
“Neither can I! I don’t think even Scat can, really.” The girl gave her a broody look and returned her gaze to the darkening Bay. “But we’ve just had…an auditory experience exactly described by a guy who was…torn to pieces. It’s as crazy not to believe it as it is to believe it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We go by Scat’s, grab her duffel, go by the Hyperion and grab Susy, and the three of us take a motel room far outside of the City for a while.”
“I want to hear from you the minute you’re settled.”
When she’d hung up, Dee stood looking out past Scat at the darkening city. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to take my car.”
“You have a car?”
Dee backed her rarely used old VW bug coughing and rattling out of her garage. “I took you for one of those earth-first no petroleum types,” said the girl.
“I am, mostly. But tonight I want wheels under us.”
“Good idea. And we should ride it straight outta here.”
Scat lived down in the Mission a few blocks from the Hyperion at the Apollo, a smaller, louder, and even shabbier hotel. They trudged up three flights to a hallway where five out of the ten doors stood open, with five different musics and raucous conversations spilling out. And out of one came a gaudy, full-bodied girl with major makeup who tipped Scat a wave and called back over her shoulder to the room she’d just left, “Two sixers is all I’m getting, Tye, unless you shake loose some more money,” and marched on to the stairs and down them before a slender black man, dark as tar, stepped tardily out after her and called with lazy humor, “I given you all this bud, aren’t I? Dollar for dollar you should bring me a case!”
