Honey is Sweeter than Blood (7 page)

“It was old, Di…”

“It was
alive!
 It was still alive! Oh god …my tree…”

“Diane, you’ve got to stop this…come on.”

Diane drew away, smiling sharply.  “I do have to stop it now, don’t I? They haven’t left me any choice.  All I had and they took it away.  But we can’t have a nasty little menage-a-trois in our pious little cemetery, can we ?”

“Diane…”

“Yeah, look at me like that.  You have a boyfriend.  A lover…”

“Don’t be jealous of me…”

“I saw them! I could actually see them the last few times, Jen…not just
picture
them; I
saw
 them! And they saw me too, I’m sure.  We could have truly joined together, all three of us, I know it, but now they’ve killed them and they’ve killed me too!”

“Diane, let me help you…”

“Go away! You don’t understand!”

“Yes I do…”

“Go away, go away, go away, go away!” Diane tore up the mound and flung herself like a sacrifice across the circular altar table atop it, arms and legs spread.  

Good God, thought Jen, almost terrified of her friend, even as she went up the small hill after her.  It was late afternoon and the air was dark with the threat of rain and no one knew she was alone here with Diane.  

Diane’s head lifted, her round face glistening with tears but she was grinning and an ant crawled across her forehead.  “Shhh,” she grinned, “can you hear it ? Can you feel it? The throb?”

“Diane…”

“They’re
alive
.  It isn’t dead.  It was just an outgrowth of them but they’re still there.  Can you hear them? They never stop…it’s just that the storms bring it closer to our senses.  The storm locked them here.  I’ve tapped into it.  I want more.”

Rain started falling, big hard pellets of it.  As Diane stood the sky rumbled and Jen withdrew a step.  Eyes locked on Jen’s, Diane pulled away the elastic band that restrained her once short hair, now falling darkly to her shoulders, and then undid the buttons of her blouse.  

“Want to watch?”

“I’m going for help, Diane…you need help.” Jen was so afraid of her friend now she almost hated her.  

“Go away.  Leave me alone.  You don’t feel them…”

“I’ll be back, Diane.  Don’t make me bring people here and embarrass you.  I mean it…”

Thunder boomed far away, rolled heavily toward them like a surf.  Diane shrugged off her blouse; it slithered down her body to pool at her ankles.  Rain splashed her bare shoulders as she reached around behind to unhook her bra.  “You’re the one embarrassed, Jen, not me.”

Jen whirled to run, slipped, slid down the mound on her rear, smudging blackened mushrooms on the way.  She was crying now.  She hit the paved path and ran…

Once she stopped to glance back.  Just once, before she raced to her parked car and downtown to the police station.  The mound was distant, but there were no trees close by it and it loomed distinct.  And there on the pedestal tree trunk stood Diane—fully, whitely naked, almost phosphorescent in the wet dark, her pubic hair like a blotch of deep shade…a living monument, legs together and arms upraised to the heavy lowering sky…

The bolt that killed Diane had rattled the police station’s windows with its force, Jen would realize later.  

*     *     *

Even years later Jen would stop at the base of the mound with her daughter in a stroller, and on occasion go so far as to climb the hill to stand and close her eyes, and gingerly feel for what Diane had said to have felt of the power rooted there, the passion impressed on the spot.  And she did come to feel something etched there, she believed in time.  

Loneliness, she felt.  And sadness.

Scorpion Face

If John could see his own alternate self, on that other plane of existence in which it resides, he might name that being Scorpion Face.

This creature, smaller than John by a foot and greatly bent in addition to that, has a pale bald head twice the size of John’s and a face that shades into obsidian black.  These chitinous features look mechanical but are organic; two matching rows of articulated arms with a tail-like limb at the bottom which uncoils seemingly upon its own will to flick at the air.  Sloughing gauzy membranes like cobwebs cover its long bony hands and the back of its head in place of hair.  It wears shabby black clothes—much too small even for its tiny frame—like a tuxedo with a long forked tail.  Whenever it ventures out it wears an immense top hat.  It never goes outdoors when it goes out, however, as there is no outdoors in its dimension…only endless labyrinths, tunnels, dust-choked attics upon attics, web-cloaked basements and sub-basements.

John wakes to a clock radio that blares annoying snatches of music between lengthy discourses by smarmy D.J.s.  He opens his eyes to a gray and wordless despair, as he does every day, his only comfort being that he can hit the snooze alarm and sleep another half hour before waking again to a gray and wordless despair.

In its world, John’s doppleganger sits in a corner with its great head resting on its knees, its spindly arms wrapped around its shins.  Pain awakens it, and it scrambles out of the corner on hands and knees, glancing back over its shoulder at the long black nails which continue to extend from the walls where they meet.  The being trails the shroud of cobwebs which has formed like a cocoon around its body while it slept, the stuff of its own dreaming exhalations.  Standing, it brushes more of the webs off its arms and sides.  With jerky darting motions like those of a bird, its facial appendages clicking, the creature moves to a cracked and slanted mirror.  When it sees its reflection, it wails in a high shrieking voice, just as it does every day.

John drinks an instant coffee, showers, drives thirty minutes to work.  As he steps out of his car and looks across the lot at the squat, sprawling building bleak against the blue winter sky, he has the irrational impulse to duck back inside his car and drive away, drive anywhere, without direction, without money, to just escape in a blind and numbing panic.  Instead, he starts across the parking lot to the building’s metal side door.

Top hat on, Scorpion Face emerges from its series of small dusty rooms into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor formed from rotting planks of wood, stretching off in either direction into seemingly limitless gloom.  As it makes its way, a walk of several hours by John’s reckoning of time, it passes off-branching hallways, and metal hatches in the ceiling and floor with ladders to other levels.  The walls change from wood into riveted plates of black metal scabbed with rust, covered in cables and hoses, turning gears and churning pistons, grease and dripping slime, and Scorpion Face has to tear its way through veils of web at times.  Finally, for the last stretch of its walk, the corridor becomes chiseled from rock, slick with mold and trickling with water, lit with far-spaced bare bulbs.  It stops at last at a door labeled with fifteen black nails driven into the wood in a circle, with a huge white moth pinned in the middle of the circle by those spikes.  The moth twitches, still alive.  The being turns the knob and lets itself into its work place.  At no time since leaving its apartment has it seen another of its kind.

John sits in a cubicle with padded partitions upon which are pinned a few snapshots of his two daughters, whom his wife has custody of.  He speaks on the phone for much of the day, but seldom to the people in the other cubicles.  Just these disembodied voices, usually angry at him because to them he is the company personified, he is that bleak sprawling building, and he tries to soothe them.  He will run a UPS trace to find out why they haven’t received their package.  He will have them credited.  He will do his best.  He logs each call he makes onto a sheet.  Usually a hundred unhappy voices a day.  He feels like a medium who can only channel the voices of furious ghosts.

Scorpion Face stands in a tiny chamber that shakes like a rickety elevator, great unseen machinery clanking and thrumming behind the metal walls.  Glass tubes criss-cross before its gaze, and it watches hordes of tiny insects crawl through these, each insect carrying a glowing orange nugget of matter like a hot glob of metal.  The little entity throws switches that close off one tube, open another, direct the insect stream here instead of there.  Occasionally steam bursts from a vent in the wall.  Once in a while a sound of rushing liquid passes beneath its feet.  Its top hat hangs from a nail in the wall, the only other decoration being four huge black snail shells stuck to the walls here and here.  Tomorrow they will have slowly repositioned themselves, but they will not have escaped this room.

At lunch, John buys a tuna sandwich from a machine and sits alone at a table to eat it and drink oily black coffee.  The lettuce in his sandwich is slippery and limp.  He finds it hard to imagine that this tuna and that coffee found their origins in living things.  From the corner of his eye he watches young office girls clustered at one table, pretty and giggling and as removed from him as the women on television.  He focuses on the Marketing supervisor, who is young and very pretty and crouches in front of the refrigerator to get something from the bottom shelf, her shirt riding up to show the taut skin of her lower back.  He pictures himself holding her waist and entering her from behind.  It’s the position he fantasizes about most, because he is made uncomfortable by the idea of a woman actually looking into his eyes during intimacy.

Scorpion Face takes one break in what by John’s perception would be sixteen hours.  It opens a cabinet, and inside finds four glass jars filled with a glowing green fluid.  It unbuttons its vest and its shirt beneath, and then slides open a tiny drawer from inside its abdomen.  Into this metal drawer it pours the contents of each jar, slowly, until the drawer is full.  It carefully slides this drawer back into its flesh, rearranges its clothing, and then replaces the small jars inside the cabinet.  It never sees who fills the jars in its absence.  It never sees any other of its kind.  They work different shifts, travel by different corridors, live and work in different rooms.  It has never seen another of its kind, and never will.

At home, John logs onto the internet.  He enters—stealthily and guiltily as if peering into a bedroom window—a sex-oriented chat room.  He finds a woman willing to talk dirty with him.  He suspects she is lying about her blond hair and breast size and maybe even her gender but it doesn’t really matter.  He masturbates right there at his desk, one hand on the mouse as if that is his penis.  Afterwards he feels empty, as if he is squeezing out a dollop of his soul each time, and never getting it back.  He shuts off that box and turns on the box of his TV instead, watches one obnoxious sitcom after another, cute friends and cute lovers feuding and making up.  He finds it hard to believe those actors are living beings like himself.  He likes to read in magazines about actors who are addicted to drugs, or commit suicide.

In its own series of rooms again, Scorpion Face stands before a control panel of wheels and levers, and manipulates a metal puppet inside a booth recessed in the wall.  Some of the marionette’s complex joints and multiple limbs are articulated by wires from above, and others by rods from below.  A second silhouetted spider-thing emerges from a hole in the opposite wall, commanded by whatever unseen being lives in the next apartment.  The two puppets begin to interact erotically with grinding and scraping sounds, their many limbs inter-weaving.  Particles of rust or blistered paint sift from between their frenziedly abrading forms.  They pump and thrash, scuttle entwined, and Scorpion Face watches dully enraptured, projecting its imagination inside them.  At last the puppets lie quiet, limbs and wires still tangled, and the being slumps exhausted at the controls, hands clammy as they clutch onto the wheels for support.  The other’s spider disengages itself and withdraws through a black curtain over that hole in the wall.  The lights in the puppet theater go dim.  It’s time to retire for the night…although there is no day or night here.

John sits on the edge of the bed, still in his office clothes except for his tie.  He wants to put a pistol’s barrel in his mouth and burst the top of his balding head open, a shattered chrysalis, so that his brain might fly free from its imprisoning skull, if only in brief mayfly life.  But he is too cowardly to even buy a pistol, let alone put one inside his mouth.  He rises to undress for bed.

Scorpion Face has killed itself again, as it often does.  It lies crumpled on the floor with a large black nail driven into its skull.  But it will awaken soon, curled in the corner inside a cocoon of web.  And it will shriek when it sees itself in the mirror, and realizes it is still—unendingly—alive.

Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?

Kaylee, Taffeta, Shenandoah and Latrina felt like movie stars themselves when they were interviewed by a TV correspondent outside the theater where they had just seen the movie
Sssssss
, which in its re-release was currently number one at the box office.

“Shhh!” Latrina hissed at Kaylee, who was still frantically trying to load a videotape into her VCR so as to record their ephemeral celebrity.

“Hurry!” Shenandoah shrieked, hands flapping with fingers tensed into claws.

“Got it!” Kaylee cried, upping the volume with her remote and dropping to the carpet on her knees to watch.

Taffeta squealed in delight as she saw her own face on the television screen, heard herself say, “I almost cried at the end…Strother—I mean Dr.  Stoner—was only trying to bring peace to the world, by turning people into animals…just like Marlon Brando in
The Island of Dr.  Moreau
…”

“Marlon Brando in
The Island of Dr.  Moreau
,” Shenandoah was heard repeating wistfully, in a whisper of reverence.

“Well,” Taffeta went on, “except that Marlon—I mean Dr.  Moreau—was trying to bring peace into the world by turning animals into people.”

“Is Marlon one of your favorites, like Strother Martin?” asked the correspondent.

“Oh no…he was awesome in that movie, but he isn’t the same, really…”

“Why’s that?”

“Well,” Latrina responded, pushing into the frame, “he made so many movies when he was young, it’s hard to get young Marlon out of your mind.  But I’ve never seen a young Strother.”

“I wouldn’t want to,” Shenandoah said.

“I don’t like to imagine he was ever young,” Kaylee said.

“So, is Strother Martin your favorite actor of all, then?”

“Well…it’s close,” Kaylee replied, “but if you held a gun to my head…”

“Or a microphone to your mouth?”

“Yeah,” she giggled.  “I’d have to say my all-time favorite grandbabe would be Buck Druthers.”

*     *     *

Later, after the four friends had played the recording of themselves back several times, they sat in a circle on the carpet of Kaylee’s parents’ livingroom and paged through the latest issues of
Teenscreen
and
Babe Parade
.  Though they all concurred that they hated singer Spunk’s new forward-facing ponytail and the bangs at the back of her head (the rest of her skull shaved bald below those bangs), they would all be wearing their hair like that within a month.  The four fifteen-year-olds were already wearing clothing just like eighteen-year-old Spunk wore in this photo: super-small, super-tight white tee shirts with two holes cut out in the front for their bra cups to poke through, and super-baggy combat pants with open crotches covered by black mesh through which one could glimpse the alternating white flecks of their panties.

“Ooh, look!” cried Taffeta, holding up one magazine opened to a glossy full-page photo of actor Strother Martin, his long white hair uncharacteristically kempt, as Dr.  Stoner in 1973’s
Sssssss
.  Facing the photo was an article entitled, “Can You Pass Strother’s Love Test?”

“Yeah, read that one, bitch!” Kaylee enthused.  “This is good.”

Only stumbling over a word or two per sentence, Taffeta read aloud to her rapt audience, beginning with a few brief bio facts that mentioned Strother’s birth in Indianapolis and his role in movies such as
Cool Hand Luke
, from which came his most famous cinema moment, with the line, “What we have here is failure to communicate.” It was the big catch phrase right now; even the president, trying to seem hip, had used that quote in a speech this week.  (And the president was looking sort of cute himself as he seasoned.) After the introduction, Taffeta got to the test itself.

“Dee…Da…Despite Strother’s demented and ornery characters, beneath his dangerous exterior lies the gentle heart of a true grandbabe.  Do you have what it takes to make T-Bone’s heart beat for
you
?” The girls all knew that Strother’s nickname in life had been T-Bone.  “Answer these five questions to see…”

The friends took turn responding to questions such as, “How do you think Strother would like to spend a date with you? Would you suggest:
A:
Dancing with Strother all night in the clubs.  
B:
Swimming and sunbathing with S.  M.  at the beach.  
C:
Hanging out with Mr.  Wild Bunch in a video arcade.  
D:
 Snuggling in T-Bone’s lap while he reads you a cute bedtime story.”

“Ooh!” said Latrina, at the last choice.  Like this was hard! They all selected D, and weren’t surprised to see that when the magazine was turned upside-down, they chose each answer correctly.

“Looks like he’d want all of us!” chirped Shenandoah.  “We’d have to fight over him!”

They returned to their perusal of the magazines.  Taffeta read out loud from an article on juicy Jack Elam, who was born on November 13th in 1916 in Miami, Arizona and went on to make films such as
Cat Ballou
and
High Noon
and guest on shows like
Gunsmoke
and
Big Valley
, which were in syndication again and quite popular with a new audience, as they always promised a wealth of grizzly-cheeked curmudgeons whose heady unwashed effluvium practically oozed out of the TV screen.

Latrina read from an article about Walter Brennan, born July 25th, 1894, who fought as a doughboy in “Dubbya Dubbya One” and went on to play that sexy old coot Grandpa Amos on the TV series
The Real McCoys
.

“Check this out, bitches!” Shenandoah gasped, after paging a little further through one of the magazines.  She carefully freed and unfolded a mini-poster from the center of the publication, held it up for all to see.  On one side was a photo of Buddy Ebsen from
The Beverly Hillbillies
, but the side she showed her friends featured a photo from the premier of the latest film from Buck Druthers.

*     *     *

Justin Spring despised Buck Druthers.

Justin was Kaylee’s seventeen-year-old brother, and he had a major crush on Shenandoah, with her cute spiky hair dyed electric lime green like singer Spunk had worn hers while she was dating Buck Druthers last year.  (Now Spunk was dating the Stones’ Keith Richards.) Justin hated Strother Martin.  He loathed afrobabes Scatman Crothers and Red Foxx.  But Buck Druthers brought him close to fits.  Perhaps, he thought, because Druthers was still living, whereas most of the popular grandbabes had passed away years, even decades, ago.  But his sister and her friends didn’t want to hear that.  They literally covered their ears with their palms and screeched at him angrily as he raged, “Walter Brennan is dead, Kaylee…he died in 1974, when he was eighty! Okay? I saw it on the web!”

“Shut up, bitch, it doesn’t matter!” Kaylee screamed.

“Go away, little boy!” Latrina yelled.  “You’re just jealous because you’re a tadpole and they’re…um.” She rethought her analogy.  “Because you’re a little larva and they’re like butterflies.”

“Butterflies? They’re like pterodactyls! They’re extinct! You guys are in love with rotting skeletons! Strother Martin hasn’t made a movie since 1980 because he’s
dead
! He’s buried in the Court of Remembrance in Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills…number G 62420!”

They knew this already.  They had some friends who had made a pilgrimage to his grave site, burning candles and clutching 8x10 glossies, though like most girls these four chose not to address the issue of his death at all.  They were aware his resurrected films were quite old.  But weren’t movies and their stars about fantasy? Did Justin really think he’d be screwing millionaire Spunk one day in his little bedroom with its posters of painted and long-haired wrestlers who looked like rock stars and rock stars who looked like wrestlers? It was what Strother
represented
.  Though perhaps this was why Kaylee and her friends loved Buck best, they half recognized.  Because he was still alive, out there breathing in the world right now.

“Why does it bother you so much, Justin?” Taffeta asked him, screwing up her face.

“Why? I don’t have a girlfriend, that’s why.  And at this rate, I won’t have a girlfriend until I’m impotent! And watch…by the time I’m some stinky old hobo like Buck Druthers, the fads will all change and girls like you will want to date toddlers!”

“You’re sick, Justin,” Latrina said.  “That’s why nobody wants to date you.”

“I’m sick? I’ve seen how you look at my grandfather, Latrina…and I saw you wriggling around in his lap last Christmas eve, when he was dressed up as Santa Claus.  I think even Kaylee enjoyed sitting in his lap too much…”

“You bitch!” Kaylee shrieked at her brother like a descending hawk, springing to her feet.

“Grow up,” Shenandoah told him.  “But you’re right, Justin…you’ve got a long way to go before any girl would want to go out with you.”

This final insult, coming from Shenandoah of all people, made Justin’s face flood red with embarrassment and fury, but he choked it down as best he could, turned and walked briskly out of the livingroom.  Stomped upstairs to his own room.

“Don’t cry, little baby boy!” Kaylee shouted after him, triumphantly.

*     *     *

What Justin might not admit to his sister was that he actually liked Buck Druthers’ new movie,
Heart Attack
, which he’d seen in the theater last week only because his best friend Jason insisted.  Druthers had played a serial killer who ate the hearts of his victims (teenage girls), pursued by a cop played by Burt Reynolds, called out of retirement to hunt the madman down.  Justin had to admit that Druthers did a fair job in it, though the gory special effects impressed him more.  Also begrudgingly, he had to admit that the guest appearance of a computer-generated Jack Elam was well achieved.  This movie was a smash, closing in on the success of
Sssssss
, despite Druthers’ unsavory character.  But grandbabes were expected to play wild-eyed kooks …they were often more popular for their dangerous roles than their cuddly grandpa characters.

It was the musical movies that Buck had brought into vogue that really rubbed Justin the wrong way.  Since his unexpected arrival on the scene as Julia Roberts’ lovably loony grandfather in the immensely successful
Good Glory
, for which he’d won an Oscar, Druthers had become a sensation and almost single-handedly brought about the grandbabe phen-omenon (aptly seized upon and relentlessly pushed by canny marketeers).  The song Druthers sang for his grandchildren in
Good Glory
had led to a spate of movies with greater musical opportunities, culminating most recently in a $300,000,000 remake of
The Wizard of Oz
 in which Druthers played a scruffy and rusty Tin Woodsman alongside Jim Carrey as the Scarecrow and a computer-generated Cowardly Lion voiced by Robin Williams.  In this film, Druthers soft-shoed along the yellow brick road and sang in his characteristic, trademarked style:

“If I only had a skibeddy dibbedy dibeddy dibeddy doo! Picture me…skibeddy doo…a balcony…skabeddy skibbedy doo…”

These kinds of little interjections had been used in his
Good Glory
song, and his audience had not tired of them.  But songs like this in movies like that made Justin Spring want to hurl something heavy through the TV screen.  He imagined pushing the family TV over like Robert DeNiro did to his TV as the alienated and sexually frustrated cabbie in
Taxi Driver
, one of Justin’s favorite movies.  (Justin could quote from the movie at length, had each narrated diary entry memorized by heart.) Recently Kaylee had watched a video of DeNiro in
Rocky and Bullwinkle
and said the actor looked cute in it.  Justin had cringed.  DeNiro belonged to him.  The younger DeNiro of
Raging Bull
and
The Deer Hunter
.  Men of violent, decisive action.

*     *     *

Heart Attack
was now the number one movie in America, and there was talk of another Oscar for Buck Druthers plus a sequel with Buck returning as the cannibalistic psycho Gustav Nife.  Furthermore, Buck would be making a public appearance at the Boyd’s Megaplex Cinemas next weekend to promote a special screening of
Heart Attack
on every one of the Megaplex’s twenty-four screens.  The money raised from that night’s box office would be donated to the National Heart Association.

Justin learned of the news when he heard Kaylee screaming downstairs.  Consequently, she was on the phone for hours tracking down and informing her friends, so as to make arrangements for the four of them to be there.  Justin overheard snatches of her conversations.

“Can you imagine if we get close enough to get his autograph, and
touch
 him! Oh my God, bitch, I’ve got to wear my Buck tee shirt!”

“I’m going to wear my Buck Sucks tee shirt,” Justin said.

“Shut up, bitch,” Kaylee snarled.  “Yeah, Shen, it’s my sibling again.  Same old whining.” She moved the receiver from her ear.  “Justin, Shenandoah says you’re jealous because you’re just a seed and Buck is a flower.”

“Tell her I’m a…a tasty baked potato with sour cream and he’s this really old potato in a cupboard with all these ugly weird growths all over it.”

“She heard you.  She says to kiss her ass.”

“I wish,” he muttered to himself, stalking from the room.

*     *     *

Standing bedside the battered car his parents had bought him, parked at about the center of the Boyd’s Megaplex lot, Justin tried to imagine what the huge cinema complex would look like in several days, with limousines parked out front, perhaps huge spotlights sweeping columns of light across the bottoms of clouds.

He thought he might go in now and see a movie by himself, but he wasn’t sure if he were really in the mood.  While he leaned there he eyed two teenage girls as they walked past him on their way to the cinema.  One of them caught him staring and looked over at him.  Justin smiled at her shyly.  She just arched an eyebrow, sneered, and looked away.  Justin watched her blue-jean gripped bottom recede, dwindle, become swallowed inside the theater where she would dream that Buck Druthers would want to eat
her
 heart.