by Michael Shea
There was something Ricky had to do. Because in spite of his body, his nerves being his, he didn't know who he was now, had just had a big chunk torn out of him. And there was something terrible he had to do, to locate, by desperate means, the man he had lost, to find at least a piece of him he was sure of.
His hands and arms knew the way, it seemed. Diving down into the thicker fog, he smoothly threw the turns required . . . and slid up to the curb before the liquor store they'd parked near. . . when? A universe ago. Parked and jumped out.
Ricky was terrified of what he was going to do, and so he moved swiftly to have it done with, just nodding to his recent companions as he hastened into the store—nodding to the Maoris in shades, to the guys with the switchblade cap-bills, to the guys with the crimson hoods and the golden pockets. But rushed though he was, it struck him that they were all looking at him with a kind of fascination . . . .
At the counter he said, "Fifth of Jack." He didn't even look to see what he peeled off his wad to pay for it, but there were a lot of twenties in his change. The Arab bagged him his bottle, his eyes fixed almost raptly on Ricky's, so Ricky was moved to ask in simple curiosity, "Do I look strange?"
"No," the man said, and then said something else, but Ricky had already turned, in haste to get outside where he could take a hit. Had the man said no, not yet?
Ricky got outside, cracked the cap, and hammered back a stiff, two-gurgle jolt.
He scarcely could wait to let it roll down and impact him. He felt the hot collision in his body's center, the roil of potential energy glowing there, then poked down a long, three-gurgle chaser. Stood reeling inwardly, and outwardly showing some impact as well . . . .
And there it was: a heat, a turmoil, a slight numbing. No more. No magic. No rising trumpets. No wheels of light . . . . The halfpint of Jack he'd just downed had no marvel to show like the one he'd just seen.
And so Ricky knew that he was someone else now, someone he had not yet fully met.
"'Sup?" It was the immense guy in the lavender sweats. He had a solemn Toltec-statue face, but an incongruously merry little smile.
"'S happnin," said Ricky. "Hey. You want this?"
"That Jack?"
"Take the rest. Keep it. Here's the cap."
"No thanks." This to the cap. The man drank. As he chugged, he slanted Ricky an eye with something knowing, something I thought so in it. Ricky just stood watching him. He had no idea at all of what would come next in his life, and for the moment, this bibulous giant was as interesting a thing as any to stand watching . . . .
The man smacked his lips. "It ain't the same, is it?" he grinned at Ricky, gesturing the bottle. "It just don't matter any more. I mean, so I understand. I like the glow jus fine myself. But you . . . see, you widdat Andre. You've been a witness."
"Yeah. I have. So . . . tell me what that means."
"You the one could tell me. Alls I know is I'd never do it, and a whole lotta folks around here they'd never do it—but you didn't know that, did you?"
"So tell me what it means."
"It means what you make of it! And speakin of which, man, of what you might make of it, I wanna show you something right now. May I?"
"Sure. Show me."
"Let's step round here to the side of the building . . . just round here . . . " Now they stood in the shadowy weed-tufted parking lot, where others lounged, but moved away when they appeared.
"I'm gonna show you somethin," said the man, drawing out his wallet and opening it.
But opening it for himself at first, for he brought it close to his face as he looked in, and a pleased, proprietary glow seemed to beam from his Olmec features. For a moment, he gloated over the contents of his billfold.
Then he extended and spread the wallet open before Ricky. There was a fat sheaf of bills in it, hand-worn bills with a skinlike crinkle. It seemed the money, here and there, was stained.
Reverently, Olmec said, "I bought this from the guy that capped the guy it came from. This is as pure as it gets. Blood money with the blood right on it! An you can have a bill of it for five hundred dollars! I know that Andre put way more than that in your hand. I know you know what a great deal this is!"
Ricky. . . had to smile. He saw an opportunity at least to gauge how dangerously he'd erred. "Look here," he told Olmec. "Suppose I did buy blood money. I'd still need a witness. So what about that, man? Will you be my witness for . . . almost five grand?"
Olmec did let the sum hang in the air for a moment or two, but then said, quite decisively, "Not for twice that."
"So Andre got me cheap?"
"Just by my book. You could buy witnesses round here for half that!"
"I guess I need to think it over."
"You know where I hang. Thanks for the drink."
And Ricky stood there for the longest time, thinking it over. . . .
• NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT •
“The Montressors,” I replied, “were a great and numerous family.”
“I forget your arms.”
“A huge human foot d’or, in a field azure: the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are embedded in the heel.”
“And the motto?”
“Nemo me impune lacessit.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
What were my feelings to see their rental car swing, shadow-dappled, up the curving drive, that windy afternoon? To see them climb out and squint up at the uncouth façade of my beloved Sternbrucke, and to know that they—and especially those two of them—were delivered at last into my hands? Ah, sweet tumult of my heart! On the sward the great horse chestnuts roared like bonfires in the bright blue gale, each one of them a cheering multitude, and still the soul within me out-roared and out-rejoiced them all! What ecstasy of the flesh comes near that first savor of revenge arrived-at, assured?
As they stretched their legs and scanned the house and grounds, their posturings displayed bored ease, or droll disbelief, and yet there was an edge of nervous excess in their pantomimes. How could they not feel out of place? How could they help but half-perceive their own vapid gaudiness on the threshold of that centuried grandeur?
Of course she queened it with panache enough—my wife-that-was, my Valerie—or was there a head-toss too many to accord with genuine blitheness? Her stallion, her paramour the Porno Prince yawned frequently to advertise that Sternbrucke fit him ill, but that it was no greater matter than a sports-jacket that pinched under the arms. His was the dimmest if plainest unease. Natalie, my ex-sister-in-law, viewed the house truculently. She resented any thing or person that failed to propitiate energetically her aggrieved sense of personal worth, and no doubt Sternbrucke, in being strange to her, committed the error of making her feel her ignorance. Perhaps Bo Beck, the fat and bearded fourth, was least perturbed, making his survey and wincing wryly, as at a cliché. He was the sound-and-camera man, and I was glad of his ease, for he was the first of my day’s projects.
“Even thus,” I murmured, watching them, “with arrogant preenings, do the bright-plumed, small-brained birds flutter condescending to the limed branch.” I left the window and went down to them, down to the indignity of their mocking underestimation of me. To them I was an oddball, bookish cuckold; a gaunt, Old-Worldly man of late middle age who was still so infatuated with the remorseless young beauty who had misused him, that he now permitted new and grotesque indignities to be visited upon himself, just to bring her near again.
A bitter role, yet I went down almost merrily to play it. I, who have wrested man’s deepest lore from its thousand crypts, and tirelessly sifted through decades and decades of labor, the deep debris of human history and more-than-human history—I whose age alone they were not near suspecting, leaving aside all else. I cheerfully put on the cap-and-bells. Let the king, the sacker-of-cities, play out his last cringing scene as the fool of his wife’s suitors—though of course, Valerie was no Penelope!
They in their uneasy arrogance, I in my harsh, antic mood
, we made quite a little ceremony of their welcoming-in. They entered singly, meeting Sternbrucke’s grim challenge with unconscious pomp, and I gave each a bow and hostly rictus of greeting and self-deprecation. Now, in the golden aftermath of my fulfillment, I remember their first entries as I would: a scene from a beloved play:
VALERIE [she has a long-limbed flamingo strut, her russet hair cascading like her laughter]: Jesus, Monty! How come you never told me about this place, sweetheart? I mean hey—talk about family secrets. I mean, just that staircase by itself––you see it, Kamin?
MR. QUARTZ [he gives her a weary nod, and me another]: How’s it going? [He has a drifting walk, a cool bodily denial of effort, and he keeps his lothario face at rest, holding his handsomeness still and unwrinkled, as one might do with water cupped in his hands.]
NATALIE: You’ve got to be kidding, Monty! No hints now, there’s a hunchback butler, right? Or else he’s a cycle-ops, one eye, right? [She’s a leggy stork after her sister's flamingo, but she is proud of this because she takes it as a proof of Intellect. Soon she will be dragging out the little French she knows to murder it publicly for my edification.]
BO BECK: Hello, Professor. It all just knocks my hat flat off! I mean I am sincerely blown away. You never had a film crew here before? A terrible, terrible waste! [He’s the teasing, malevolent type of pachyderm, glossy-bearded like a Neronian senator. He brings up the rear of the gaggle which I lead with bows, and strained little chortles, and cringes of anxiety to please, into the western drawing room.]
Yes, my own performance was the canniest of that whole scenario, for all that they thought themselves to be the Show People, and took me for a dazzled spectator. I gave Valerie furtive, doleful glances, and received witticisms about the room’s “gothic” quality (all its appointments are Baroque) with nervous, pained smiles. I played—and to a turn!—the agonized Man of Culture enthralled by unaccustomed Passion and struggling to ingratiate himself with people who violate his every canon of taste. A droll and forlorn figure.
I summoned Koboldus to take up their luggage and bring us cocktails. His form is that of an elderly, thick-set little man, nothing more bizarre, to Natalie’s disappointment. However, as that which he is in truth possesses a Voice that may not be disguised, he is, to outsiders, mute, and when Natalie learned this, she squawked with self-confirmation. Bo Beck bet me rallyingly that I had a basement—no! Not just a basement, catacombs, right?
“They’re not catacombs, Mr. Beck,” I answered. “Few bones, I’m afraid. Heh heh. They’re just cellars, but they are quite extensive and complex, and full of…atmosphere, if that’s what you mean.”
Something, perhaps nothing more than Beck’s having scored a point, touched off Natalie. She planted herself in front of me.
“You know, Monty,” she said, “whether they’re cellars or catacombs or subway tunnels, I’ve just got to be up front with you. I think the whole premise of this movie is a loser! How could you let Roger talk you into such a thing? Sex and horror—they don’t make it! When Roger phoned us about this, I told him: ‘Roger, you might just as well do a porno at Marineland or a porno musical, or any other damn dumb thing, because these two concepts just don’t go together! They don’t do anything for each other, and you’re going to have the audience—’”
She would have gone on, for she loved to quote herself, but plump Beck squelched her with aplomb:
“You’re beating a dead horse, Nattie, give it a rest. Here we are, right? What I don’t see the point of is the set. It’s like an upstairs chapel, with a stained glass window, right?”
I nodded.
“So why did we come so far for horror just to shoot all our heavy inserts in a bleeping church? You get my meaning. A church we could’ve found up the street from the studio, and no plane tickets necessary. It seems to me the heavy stuff should be set in the cellars or someplace like that.”
Unctuous as a mortician, I soothed him: “I think, Mr. Beck, that you should see the ‘chapel’ before deciding to abandon Roger’s plans. I’d be glad to show it to you now, in fact.”
There was a freshening of drinks, and then they all trooped after me up the stairs. It is a considerable walk to the north wing. The somber hangings, the onyx statues darker than the darkness of the alcoves that shelter them, the carven wainscoting where satyrs and grimmer things dance through alien foliage—all these seemed to oppress my friends, or perhaps Sternbrucke wafted them some faint premonition, and each of them caught the far-off scent of his fate in those corridors. For my guests grew plaintive and snappish as we walked, like ill-tempered children who don’t quite know what vexes them. My Valerie complained about the lines that she and Kamin had been assigned by Roger. Kamin added a grunt which, for him, spoke volumes, and Natalie was quick to take up the cudgels for her sister.
“My God, Monty, what does it matter what they say? This stuff is not even pronounceable! It’s gibberish! So they’re supposed to be saying some witchcraft gobbledy-gook? Any gobbledy-gook will do! Who cares? Why on earth that sonofabitch Roger had to drag us all out here, and has the nerve to not even be here to explain what he wanted…” Her voice petered out along with her syntax. I had thrown open the door to the ‘chapel.’
I have had other outsiders there. The statuettes, the woven hangings, the tripodia and their smoldering censers of lurid wrought gold, the obsidian monstrances displaying their nameless hosts, the carpet seething with unearthly and immemorial designs—these have always cast their spell, but always it has been the window, my treasured Portal—polychromatic, vertiginously lustrous—which has rapt their gaze and sealed their lips in silences longer than they knew. My friends were silent now. The window faces east and the spring sun, just then attaining zenith, smote its colors into a frenzy which only the May Eve moon, rising full tonight, would surpass.
The impact was such, my friends’ silence so extraordinary, I felt a sudden danger of awakening their dread. Even the littlest minds, sunk in petty pride of self, are susceptible to chords struck on the cosmic scale. I dared not let their wonder crystallize, and so I stepped inside and made my manner brisker, gave it a smugly taunting note:
“Well! It seems horror is not so demodé after all, eh Natalie? Don’t feel alone in your uneasiness—I promise you it frightens all my guests. Actually, when one has done a bit of reading, and the various symbolisms of all my toys are understood . . .” I trailed off with a condescending chuckle that brought them into the room after me like pups for biscuits. Natalie began a roving inspection punctuated with squawks of laughter, and Kamin actually sauntered about quite energetically to demonstrate his comfort in the place. Bo Beck began handling things with snorts and exclamations (though he desisted willingly enough when I reverted to the fussy curator and pleaded that he touch nothing), while my Valerie, most extravagant of all, went and lay down on the velvet-draped dais that was to support their filmed carnalities that night at moonrise. She stretched out and struck languorous, sensual postures, alternately giggling and practicing orgasmic whines and groans.
She supposed she was torturing me, and I seized the opportunity, with enthralled glances, to give the impression she was. In fact I was experiencing my final liberation from enthrallment. As she writhed there, I saw plainly how little she was, and I marveled. Could this small, stupid mammal actually have chained and mesmerized a man who had seen two centuries of human life and spanned far vaster gulfs of ultra-human time and space? By the Old Ones and the Elder! What an ape is the wisest man! The greatest scholars, perennial monkeys! Had I not abandoned, for nearly three years, my vital priestly labors? Did I not become an utter stranger to Sternbrucke and dwell in more than one mindless maelstrom of modernity amid the tube-battening, freeway-creeping, gibberish-howling yahoos of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles? Did I not play the well-heeled bibliophile amidst a dozen hellish circles of purse-proud fools—and all to woo and win and sustain in bliss this fidgeting, self-adoring gypsy posing on blue velvet? How she had taunted me, had used our
bed for humiliations, for farcical mockeries, for occasional charities! I was patient, and struggled to educate her to fairness and respect. Oh, our many talks! But she, being born to money, and college “educated,” and loving only herself—she found that the greatest pleasure lay in defying all that reason and decency expected of her. To become the “Queen of X”—here was freedom and accomplishment! Here was the proof of her beauty’s transcendence of all the boring laws and codes of the less-than-beautiful!
As I say, I knew my freedom then, and discovered in my heart that time had at last delivered me from my infatuation. I was indeed purified for the performance of the sacraments I had planned. The offering would be yielded up with priestly fervor, as is fitting, and those from whose service I had been renegade would be appeased by that which had seduced me.
At length we returned to the west wing, where Koboldus served drinks and fed rock albums to the stereo. I had bought both machine and records expressly for the occasion. My guests mocked many of my selections, but delighted in the incongruity of such a mechanism and such a music here. Valerie danced, mainly with Bo Beck, as Kamin disliked such undignified agitation of his studly frame. The portly photographer had a real comic genius for lewd pantomimes woven into the free-form strut then popular. Koboldus kept the drinks unostentatiously plentiful, and soon a raucous conversation raged, composed almost entirely of defamation of absent persons. And the music hammered on, whittling down the day according to the ingenious shape of my designs.
