by Michael Shea
He saw Scat and Dee and seemed struck by a notion. He smiled. “Excuse me, ladies. Can I get a word witchoo?”
“A quick one, Tye. We’re outta here.”
He came easing over. His tone was sympathetic. “It’s just I heard about Nolo, you know. An awful, awful thing! An’ I wonder if you talked to Serena.”
“Why? Because she found him? Because she…has the details?”
“Naw. Thass not why. But does she have the details?” He asked this with an odd, mild humor, as if he regarded Scat with tenderness and found something delightful in her. Or maybe it was just the bud-buzz he had on.
“Well,” said Scat, eyes snapping, “the details might be scary for a brother pimp, Tye.”
He laughed. “What’s more scary than bein’ murdered?”
“He was partly eaten. A big part.”
“As I live and breathe. You not shittin’ me?” And yet Tye seemed more amused than amazed. It made Scat falter. Both women had the dazed feeling that he saw something in all this they had missed. And he spoke to their thought. “Ladies, it’s a big strange world we livin’ in, didn’t you know that yet?”
“Well,” said Dee, “why did you want to know if she talked to Serena?”
“To see if she still be moving Nolo’s bud. Because if not, well, I know you a friend of Susy’s, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Because if Susy won’t be coppin’ from her, I want her to know I can give her the same good deal Nolo did.”
Again, with his easy smile, he surprised them. “You know,” Dee said, groping for some chink in the man’s surreal indifference, “from what we’ve heard from Serena, it might have been getting stoned that got Nolo eaten.”
“You mean, because he started hearing things when he was buzzed?” He smiled, just letting that hang in their silence. “Man,” he said, rolling his eyes as if searching for words to tell wonders, “I wish I could describe to you the things I been hearing. At night, every night, I can hear things like…pouring into the streets, like leaking in from under the streets, coming in from the ocean, you dig? They sound like…cold smoke when they move, an’ they be like moaning an’ jabbering. You know I never knew what it meant before: The Universe. The spaces in it, an’ the voices, the millions of voices…”
“But don’t you…?” said Scat. “Aren’t you…?”
“Hey, this is huge, ladies! This is the Universe, showing itself. If it’s there, I wanna be aware. Aren’t you tired of this little ol’ dirt-box world anyway? Aren’t you jazzed to meet a miracle?” His shirt-pocket chirred, and he plucked out his cellphone. “’Scuse me, got some biz. You tell Susy, hear?” He went back to his room.
The women packed Scat’s duffel bag, carried it down to the Bug, and drove to the Hyperion—all without trading a word. They were listening. Tye heard it in the streets…and exulted. Could they hear it? And if they could, would there be something more than mere terror in it for them as well?
Elmer, at the desk, told them Susy was gone. Had come in, but gone back out just half an hour ago to make the tail-end of Serena’s visiting hours at the hospital.
∴
Susy drives a ten-year-old Mustang, much scuffed by her headlong verve behind the wheel. She has paused at the Skyscraper Bar for a beer and a bump. She’ll still have maybe half an hour with poor Serena. She doesn’t want to be with poor Serena, not really. The terror of what Serena saw seems to surround the poor woman like a mist, and when Susy goes to her bedside she’ll have to step into that clammy fog with her.
On her rounds of biz today, Susy stopped by Mission Rock for some fries and beer out on the deck by the Bay. Had a discreet doob for a chaser, felt good and lingered over another beer…and as she sat there, looking at the mighty cargo cranes emptying a ship a few docks down the shoreline, she heard again what she’d heard with Serena in the jacuzzi.
Where does that little bitch of Dee’s get off telling Susy she should be afraid? Who says there’s a connection, even if Nolo heard the same thing? Because that sound, that whispering multitude, there’s woe and rage in it, yes, but also…majesty. Also, exaltation. Because she can hear it now, and since this afternoon has found she can hear it whenever she really listens for it. And right now the roar of her engine, the occasional blare of horns (for Susy’s a very brisk, decisive driver)—these don’t obscure it at all, if she listens.
All those souls rioting on the silty plains of the seafloor…And in their midst…a gigantic presence. The drowned host swirls around it like a conflagration of aqueous flames feeding off it. And through their mad chorus, there weaves a note of triumph, a hint of hallelujah––as if those voices are marveling together at their own eternity, their fierce undying energy, their endless change of state…
She parks on an empty side street near the hospital, on an illogical impulse to keep her distance from her distasteful errand. The City seems suddenly quiet. It’s as if the hour, all at once, is midnight, and she can hear empty asphalt echoing from the most distant streets, and the echoes she hears are of the strangest kind. As if something is creeping, like the tide, into the city itself. Somewhere, a manhole cover blows out…and out it pours. A hydrant opens…and out it pours. A drain-grate in a curbside goes clanging and dancing across the asphalt, and out it pours: that sinuous sound that mutters and whispers in outwelling waves.
She pushes through the glass doors and into light and order. Here she can stop listening and slough off the imaginings that cling to her. A little Filipino nurse behind the main counter directs her and severely reminds her that visiting hours end in twenty minutes.
The elevator seems to take forever to rise four floors! Does Susy really want to do this? Serena’s no doubt got good meds, and probably just needs to rest…But besides sympathy, Susy has another reason for coming. Serena knows where Nolo kept his stash, and if he left any amount of it behind she might be glad of some income if Susy can turn it for her, for a moderate commission.
She steps out onto four. The long corridor is empty in both directions. There’s 4099, 4100…
It’s so quiet. Is there no one in all these rooms? And don’t they need any tending if there are? There’s not a nurse or a doctor or an orderly in sight. It’s disturbing how, in this quiet, her clogs make so much noise…
But there’s an open door ahead, and that’s it––4117. Is that a murmuring coming from inside it? Is Scat or someone else already visiting?
As she reaches the doorway, she is surprised. The room is dark, except for faint streetlight from a curtained window in the far wall. And a smell comes out of the room, a low-tide dankness.
“Serena?”
There is an answering murmur, and Susy steps inside. There’s Serena in the bed, the fan of her dark hair spread on a pale blur of pillow. But who is this tall figure standing by Serena’s bed?
∴
Dee and Scat walked into an empty lobby.
“Where is everybody?”
“It’s good they’re gone, let’s get up to four,” said Scat.
The elevator’s rise seemed laggard, leaden, as if it climbed against undersea pressures. They stepped out on four. No one at the nurse’s station. Long halls empty in all directions.
“Down here.” The girl’s voice had the faintest tremor in it, and the clocking of her heels was hesitant.
“Is her door that open one?”
“Yes…”
Something made Dee step into the lead––a quality in the silence that they were being…awaited. That was why this great emptiness and silence. Only they were the awaited ones.
And so Dee was first to see the darkness inside the room, and a dark complex something on the bed, and first to breathe in the cold scent of dankness and salt and iron.
“Go!” She whirled and shoved Scat back. “Go get someone! Find someone! Hurry!”
Staggering backwards, the girl seemed to draw from Dee’s face the horror she’d only half seen. Death dawned on Scat’s face, and she t
urned and ran shouting, “Help! Someone help us here!”
Dee turned toward the room again. I have to look. But I won’t look long. Just long enough to know. No light, though. No light. Do it!
She stepped inside.
The misty pallor of streetlight bled through a curtain beyond the bed and laid a silver sheen upon a tangled shape. No. Two entangled shapes. Legs, arms, torsos, heads––two heads. One a black, sticky skull with empty sockets and a piano-key grin of teeth, and the other head Susy’s, her face unscarred except for the rictus of agony. Half eaten indeed! Trenched to the bone in a spiral pattern. Poor Serena was a stripped skull on a bony stick, her full bosom unscathed, but her midriff gone, just a bloody banjo of pelvis-bone there, while her thigh-bones were still half-trousered in flesh. Of Susy, the unimaginable carnivore had denuded legs and lower back, her trellised ribs, her cervical spine…
And when at last she tore her eyes away and ran, her mind adhered to the horror that she fled…a horror she was fleeing to?
∴
The rest of that night, and all the next morning––except for a few bathroom breaks and a half-hour breakfast of stale crullers and coffee––Dee and Scat spent in the company of two SFPD detectives. They were middle-aged, very sympathetic guys who only by the sheer endlessness of their sympathetic questions revealed their longing to discover that, after all, Dee and Scat had themselves “mutilated” Serena and Susy.
Periodically in the endless recycling of their routine, Dee found herself alone in her heart with Susy and grieved her death. Sweet, hectic Susy whose only harm was what she did to herself.
Through mid-afternoon traffic, one of the detectives drove them back to their car in the hospital parking lot. They got in and just sat there a while, looking at each other, haggard in the full light of day. Fourteen long hours in the useless company of the civil authorities, and they were alone on the streets again, still facing whatever it was that walked those streets with them.
“I say we get the fuck out of here.” Scat said it so dully, it sounded as if she didn’t really think they could do it.
Dee said, “Nolo heard it and stayed put. Serena and Susy heard it and stayed put. We have to leave.” And why did her own voice sound just as dull as the girl’s?
Because something immense sat with them in their little car. Something more urgent, somehow, than saving their own lives. “What I saw in that room…” Dee began. Then blurted, “There are monsters. There are monster gods.”
“The Great Old Ones.”
And there it was. Do you just run away from a miracle, however dark, however dire––just duck out on a Revelation and hide? Aren’t you dead already, if you do?
“Look,” Dee said. “Before we run, we’ve got to…find out more about what’s happening here. What exactly did Mishou tell you?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. I couldn’t catch him, he ducked out of sight. I went to his place this morning, and he was gone. I ransacked Lovecraft, and all I found was what I told you.”
“Then we’ve got to go back to Tye. Find out what he knows. He knew more than he said––wasn’t that how he acted?”
“OK, let’s try it. But before it gets dark, let’s get the fuck out of the City––drive somewhere inland at least, away from the sea.”
Tye wasn’t in, and no one else was hanging in his room either––a rarity. They went into Scat’s room to wait a bit. They lay on her narrow bed just to rest their eyes, and passed out.
And woke up just as the sun was declining. They went to the street window. The sky was strange, an opaque varnish of high thin cloud, like pre-storm weather on the Plains. It made the City feel submerged, this brassy ceiling underlit with pale amber.
“Man!” muttered Scat. “It’s quiet.”
“Yeah…the whole hotel is quiet.”
Scat opened her door and looked out. “”Tye’s door is open,” she murmured over her shoulder. They stepped out into the empty corridor.
“Tye? Hey, Tye.”
Scat pushed his door farther open. The hall light showed a tight-made bed and a clean, worn carpet. A surprisingly spare and ascetic room for a convivial pimp like Tye. On a small table, under a low dim lamp, a tablet of writing paper lay. The top page was densely written.
Loopily legible this handwriting was, and intense––the writer’s pressure dented the paper with each cursive stroke.
∴
Tyrone I’m telling you, one last time I’m telling you this. And coming here to do it is the last thing on earth I want to do and I’m coming here anyway to tell you to get your black ass out of that city. This is not-shitting-you time. This isn’t as real as it gets, this is realler than it gets. This is bigger and deeper than the ocean by far. When you listen to those whispers that’s what it is, you drunk on Space. You hear eternity in there, eternal life. It sounds like they’re jubilating. But the sound is really more like the surf dragging heavy gravel down a beach, all those souls like a whirlpool of multitudes wheeling in darkness, in His darkness, in Dagon’s Great Drowning. You think you living in that whirlpool? You are being lived. I’m going to warn you this last time, I’m going to stand being in this city one more day, but only while the sun is high, to warn you. He increases his host, and they’re like cold blue flames that burn off him, burn off his ambition and his greed, and they rage forever with his rage, and they rage forever with grief for their captured lives. You know but you don’t understand how close he is. The rollers that bring in the surf, they his fingers twitching just offshore. He’s close! He right down there on the underside of that big blue sea, baby, and what are you doing? You sucking smoke! He needs you to do that, to touch you. Anybody toking, goofing, pushing their imaginations out, distorting their eyes and ears, making them too big, they reach out, and they realize he’s there. And then he can touch them and tear out their souls from their meat and take them. Because Dagon is ambitious, his power craves to swell. The greater his host of slaves, the mightier he stands among the Great Old Ones. Tyrone you as ignorant as I always said you were. You too toked to understand yourself. You think it’s real, but you don’t really believe it because if you did, you’d turn and run from those whispers like a bat out of hell. Your wings are smoking, baby brother, and it might already be too late for you to run. And god forgive me this is the last and all I can do for you, it’s in your hands now, I barely have the nerve to sit here and write this, and once I run from here, I never coming back.
Get your brain back, Fool! I love you but I’m gone now. Saint Louis is where I’ll be, in the middle of the continent. I hoped I’d find you in but this will have to do.
And don’t forget either, keep in mind, Tyrone, that the tearing out of your soul from your meat is a hard, long, screaming passage to eternity.
I Love you
Shaylene
∴
Dee traced her fingertips over the scored, scribbled sheets, feeling how the writing bit into the paper, as if she could read the writer’s terror directly in a kind of Braille. She asked Scat, “We’ve decided to find out more, right?”
“I think we just found out a shitload!”
“But nothing solid. Not precisely what. Not how.”
“We try to find out more until dark. Until before dark.”
“Until then, to find out what we can. Not to run blind.”
“OK.”
“Well, then we should try to find Tye.”
They asked Fat Albert, the gaunt black clerk, if he knew where Tye was.
“Yeah. In some bar or bed or trickspot somewhere in the Mission.”
“Thanks,” said Scat.
“Hey.” The snake-thin old coot seemed to show a paternal gleam for the girl. “You shouldn’t be smokin’ that shit of his, if that’s what you after.”
“It isn’t.”
“You tellin’ me it isn’t.”
“It isn’t.”
“Well, he said he was gonna catch some waves when he left. That’s been some time, though.”
/>
“He goes down near Mission Rock to smoke by the water,” she told Dee as they headed for the bug. “Bullshits with the old guys that fish those broken piers.”
“If he’s smoking there all day, he’s fishing, he’s pushing after it. Shaylene was wasting her time.”
Driving down Sixteenth, under the freeway and out to the bayshore, they found how the day had been spinning past. Up along the shore, in the City, the sun was just behind the skyscrapers, their windows blazing.
“Our time’s getting short,” said Scat, but Dee could feel her will wasn’t really into pulling back now––that the girl too had to know more.
They didn’t see him along the frontage road, or out on the decayed piers. They went into the Mission Rock Café, where the woman at the busy bar told them Tye had been in, left a little while ago, and said he’d be back.
They took beers out onto the deck. Drank those, and had two more. As the time drew out, their fear grew, but they bargained with it. Tye would know things they didn’t. The East Bay’s far rampart of windows went from blazing to gleaming, and the lights were coming on. The City’s skyline giants stood in the blue-gray sky. The sun was gone.
“Shit,” said Scat. “Maybe he’s parked farther down, still toking. We drive out and look, and then we gotta go.”
“OK. You’re right.”
As they got in the car, they heard what sounded like a shout, its distance indeterminate. They chugged along in second down the wide empty bayside drive, and perhaps a quarter mile along, near the last of the skeleton piers, Scat said, “That’s Tye’s. That black Impala.”
