Dark Terrors 3 (5 page)

The music at the Stag was mostly psycho-industrial, Skinny Puppy and Einstürzende Neubaten and Ministry, the Butthole Surfers and Nine Inch Nails and My Bloody Valentine. Justin liked the names of the bands better than he liked the music. The only time they played Sinatra here was at closing hour, when they wanted to drive people out.

But the Stag was where the truly beautiful boys came, the drop-dead boys who could get away with shaving half their hair and dyeing the other half dead black or lurid violet, or wearing it long and stringy and filthy, or piercing their faces twenty times. They swept through the door wrapped in their leather, their skimpy fishnet, their jangling rings and chains, as if they wore precious jewels and ermine. They allowed themselves one contemptuous glance around the bar, then looked at no one. If you wanted their attention, you had to make a bid for it: an overpriced drink, a compliment that was just ambiguous enough to be cool. Never, ever a smile.

Like as not, you would be rejected summarily and without delay. But if even a spark of interest flared in those coldly beautiful black-rimmed eyes, what sordid fantasy! What exotic passion! What delicious viscera!

He had taken four boys home from the Stag on separate nights. They were still in his apartment, their organs wrapped neatly in plastic film inside his freezer, their hands tucked within easy reach under his mattress, their skulls nestled in a box in the closet. Justin smiled at them all he wanted to now, and they grinned right back at him. They had to. He had boiled them down to the bone, and all skulls grinned because they were so happy to be free of imprisoning flesh.

But skulls and mummified hands and salty slices of meat weren’t enough any more. He wanted to keep the face, the thrilling pulse in the chest and guts, the sweet slick inside of the mouth and anus. He wanted to wrap his mouth around a cock that would grow hard without his having to shove a finger up inside it like some desiccated puppet. He wanted to keep a boy, not a motley collection of bits. And he wanted that boy to smile at him,
for
him, for
only
him.

Justin dragged his gaze away from the swirling depths of his martian and glanced at the door. The most beautiful boy he had ever seen was just coming in. And he was smiling: a big, sunny, unaffected and utterly guileless smile.

* * * *

Suko leaned his head against the tall blond man’s shoulder and stared out the window of the taxi. The candy panorama of West Hollywood spread out before them, neon smeared across hot asphalt, marabou cowboys and rhinestone drag queens posing in the headlights. The cab edged forward, parting the throng like a river, carrying Suko to whatever strange shores of pleasure still lay ahead of him this night.

‘Where did you say you were from?’ the man asked. As Suko answered, gentle fingers did something exciting to the inside of his thigh, through his ripped black jeans. The blond man’s voice was without accent, almost without inflection.

Of course, no one in LA had an accent. Everyone was from somewhere else, but they all strove to hide it, as if they’d slid from the womb craving flavoured mineral water and sushi on Melrose. But Suko had met no one else who spoke like this man. His voice was soft and low, nearly a monotone. To Suko it was soothing; any kind of quiet aimed at him was soothing after the circuses of Patpong and Sunset Boulevard, half a world apart but cut from the same bright cacophonous cloth. Cities of angels:
yeah, right.
Fallen angels.

They pulled up in front of a shabby apartment building that looked as if it had been modelled after a cardboard box some time in the 1950s. The man
- Justin,
Suko remembered, his name was
Justin -
paid the cab driver but didn’t tip. The cab gunned away from the curb, tires squealing rudely on the cracked asphalt. Justin stumbled backwards and bumped into Suko. ‘Sorry.’

‘Hey, no problem.’ That was still a mouthful - his tongue just naturally wanted to rattle off a
mai pen rai
- but Suko got all the syllables out. Justin smiled, the first time he’d done so since introducing himself. His long skinny fingers closed around Suko’s wrist.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s safer if we go in the back way.’

They walked around the corner of the building, under an iron stairwell and past some garbage cans that fairly shimmered with the odour of decay. Suko’s foot hit something soft. He looked down, stopped, and backed into Justin. A young black man lay among the stinking cans, his head propped at a painful angle against the wall, his legs sprawled wide.

‘Is he dead?’ Suko clutched for his Buddha amulet. The man’s ghost might still be trapped in this mean alley, looking for living humans to plague. If it wanted to, it could suck out their life essences through their spinal columns like a child sipping soda from a straw.

But Justin shook his head. ‘Just drunk. See, there’s an empty bottle by his leg.’

‘He looks dead.’

Justin prodded the black man’s thigh with the toe of his loafer. After a moment, the man stirred. His eyes never opened, but his hands twitched and his mouth gaped wide, chewing at the air.

‘See?’Justin tugged at Suko’s arm. ‘Come on.’

They climbed the metal stairs and entered the building through a fire door wedged open with a flattened Old Milwaukee can. Justin led the way down a hall coloured only by shadow and grime, stopped in front of a door identical to all the others but for the number 21 stamped on a metal plate small as an egg, and undid a complicated series of locks. He opened the door a crack and ushered Suko inside, then followed and turned to do up all the locks again.

At once Suko noticed the smell. First there was only the most delicate tendril, like a pale brown finger tickling the back of his throat; then a wave hit him, powerful and nauseating. It was the smell of the garbage cans downstairs, increased a hundredfold and overlaid with other smells: cooking oil, air freshener, some caustic chemical odour that stung his nostrils. It was the smell of rot. And it filled the apartment.

Justin saw Suko wrinkling his nose. ‘My refrigerator broke,’ he said. ‘Damn landlord says he can’t replace it till next week. I just bought a bunch of meat on sale and it all went bad. Don’t look in the fridge, whatever you do.’

‘Why you don’t—’ Suko caught himself. ‘Why
don’t you
throw it out?’

‘Oh . . .’ Justin looked vaguely surprised for a moment. Then he shrugged. ‘I’ll get around to it, I guess. It doesn’t bother me much.’

He pulled a bottle of rum from somewhere, poured a few inches into a glass already sitting on the countertop and stirred in a spoonful of sugar. Justin had been impressed by Suko’s taste for straight sugared rum back at the Stag, and
said he had some expensive Bacardi he wanted Suko to try. Their fingertips kissed as the glass changed hands, and a tiny thrill ran down Suko’s spine. Justin was a little weird, but Suko could handle that, no problem. And there was a definite sexual charge between them. Suko felt sure the rest of the night would swarm with flavours and sensations, fireworks and roses.

Justin watched Suko sip the rum. His eyes were an odd, deep lilac-blue, a colour Suko had never seen before in the endless spectrum of American eyes. The liquor tasted faintly bitter beneath the sugar, as if the glass weren’t quite clean. Again, Suko could deal; a clean glass at the Hi-Way Bar on Patpong 3 was a rare find.

‘Do you want to smoke some weed?’ Justin asked when Suko had polished off an inch of the Bacardi.

‘Sure.’

‘It’s in the bedroom.’ Suko was ready to follow him there, but Justin said, ‘I’ll get it,’ and hurried out of the kitchen. Suko heard him banging about in the other room, opening and shutting a great many drawers.

Suko drank more rum. He glanced sideways at the refrigerator, a modern monolith of shining harvest gold, without the cosy clutter he had seen decorating the fridges of others: memo boards, shopping lists, food-shaped magnets trapping snapshots or newspaper cartoons. It gave off a nearly imperceptible hum, the sound of a motor running smoothly. And the smell of decay seemed to emanate from all around the apartment, not just the fridge. Could it really be broken?

He grabbed the door handle and tugged. The seal sucked softly back for a second; then the door swung wide and the refrigerator light clicked on.

A fresh wave of rot washed over him. Maybe Justin hadn’t been lying about meat gone bad. The contents of the fridge were meagre and depressing: a decimated twelve-pack of cheap beer, a crusted jar of Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard, several lumpy packages wrapped in foil. A residue of rusty red on the bottom shelf, like the juice that might leak out of a meat tray. And pushed far to the back, a large Tupperware cake server, incongruous among the slim bachelor pickings.

Suko touched one of the beer cans. It was icy cold.

Something inside the cake server was moving. He could just make out its faint shadowy convulsions through the opaque plastic.

Suko slammed the door and stumbled away. Justin was just coming back in. He gripped Suko’s arms, stared into his face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing -I—’

‘Did you open the fridge?’

‘No!’

Justin shook him. The strange lilac eyes had gone muddy, the handsome features twisted into a mean mask.
‘Did you open the fucking fridge}’
Suko felt droplets of spit land on his face, his lips. He wished miserably that they could have got there some other way, any way but this. He had wanted to make love with this man.

‘Did you
—’

‘No!!!’

Suko thought he might cry. At the same time he had begun to feel remote, far away from the ugly scene, as if he were floating in a corner watching it but not caring much what happened. It must be the rum. But it wasn’t like being drunk; that was a familiar feeling. This was more like the time Noy had convinced him to take two Valiums. An hour after swallowing the little yellow wafers, Suko had watched Noy suck him off from a million miles away, wondering why anyone ever got excited about this, why anyone ever got excited about anything.

He had hated the feeling then. He hated it more now, because it was pulling him down.

He was afraid it might be the last thing he ever felt.

He was afraid it might not be.

* * * *

Justin half-dragged, half-carried Suko into the bedroom and dumped him on the mattress. He felt the boy’s delicate ivory
bones shifting under his hands, the boy’s exquisite mass of organs pressing against his groin. He wanted to unzip that sweet sack of skin right now, sink his teeth into that beating, bleeding heart. . . but no. He had other plans for this one.

He’d closed the door to the adjacent bathroom in case he brought the boy in here still conscious. Most of a body was soaking in a tub full of icewater and Clorox. Suko wouldn’t have needed to see that. Justin almost opened the door for the extra light, but decided not to. He didn’t want to leave the bedside even for a second.

His supplies were ready on the nightstand. Justin plugged the drill’s power cord into the socket behind the bed, gently thumbed up one of Suko’s make-up-smudged eyelids and examined the silvery sclera. The sleeping pills had worked fine, as always. He ground them up and put them in a glass before he left. That way, when he brought home company, Justin could simply pour him a drink in the special glass.

He used the scissors to slice off Suko’s shirt, which was so artfully ripped up that Justin hardly had to damage it further to remove it. He cut away the beads and amulets, saving the tiny wooden penis, which had caught his eye back at the Stag. His own penis ached and burned. He pressed his ear against the narrow chest, heard the lungs pull in a deep slow breath, then release it just as easily. He heard blood moving unhurried through arteries and veins, heard a secret stomach sound from down below. Justin could listen to a boy’s chest and stomach all night, but reluctantly he took his ear away.

He crawled on to the bed, positioned Suko’s head in his lap, and hefted the drill, which was heavier than he remembered. He hoped he would be able to control how far the bit went in. A fraction of an inch too deep into the brain could ruin everything. It was only the frontal lobes he wanted to penetrate, the cradle of free will.