Jim and the Flims (11 page)

“A tiny world,” said Weena. “Clever indeed.”

“I'm their god,” said Ginnie. She picked up a carton of Friskees cat-food and scattered kibble into the tub. “Feast, my pretties!”

Abruptly the surface teemed with hungry translucent tubes sporting dark eyes and bursts of tentacles.

“Squid?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Ginnie. “Plain old calamari. Easy to raise. Supposedly they talk by changing the colors of their skin. Sometimes I can almost understand them.”

“And now we'll hear their voices,” said Ira, hunched over the tub. “
Eeek!
” He'd gotten hold of Ginnie's contact microphones, and he was busily affixing them to the slanting inner walls of the tub—all the while pretending that the squid were biting him.

He ran wires from the mikes to a sound-card jacked into a grungy old laptop sitting on a table by the tub. Tinkling runs of squid squeaks chimed from the room's large speakers, offset by oozing anemone burbles and the percussive clicks of the crabs. Ira swept his fingers across a digital drawing pad, creating guitar ostinatos that looped into aural eddies.

“Louder!” yelled Ginnie working the laptop's mouse and keys.

“Thicker!” And now she found the sweet spot, a resonant mode that made the room reverberate like the bones of a psycho punker frying in an electric chair.

“We gotta take this public,” said Ira. “Our sound is so deeply sick.”

“Maybe bring the generator to your concerts,” I remarked. “That heavy roar.”

“And we could get our bass line by sampling the wind,” said Ginnie. “We'd be playing beach parties, I think.”

Ira plucked a pair of live squid from Ginnie's tide-pool and popped them into his mouth, thrashing his head back and forth with the tentacles showing. The frightened squid voided their ink sacks, turning Ira's mouth and lips a goth black, a perfect accent to his grunge-fop look.

“I used to play the flute in band,” I said. “When I was in junior high. I never got very good at it—but maybe I could play with you guys too.”

“Screechy squeaks,” said Ginnie. “Why not? The uglier the better.”

Footsteps sounded on the porch. The guests were arriving, one freaky weirdo after the next, materializing from the warped space-maze that surrounded the lot. The guests were pale, awkward, shadowy, with a very few normal humans in the bunch. I knew a couple of them besides Chang. I talked to a very pretty little woman for a few minutes at the pizza table—I was greedily trying to sample a slice from each of the ten boxes. But soon Header swept the woman into his orbit.

The next couple of hours went by at an accelerating rate. Feeling somewhat shy and out of place, I drank rather more than usual. Not all of the guests were drinking beer—some of them had brought along a punchbowl filled with a fuming spicy fluid that seemed like a dense gas. Echoing a word that Weena had used, Ira said the stuff was called kessence. The wispier and less talkative guests clustered around the kessence punch bowl, dipping their hands and even their faces into it. I tried a little, but it didn't do much for me.

By now Chang had gone. Weena was out of sight, and Header was busy with some friends at the other end of the big the room snorting powder off the back of his hand. Ginnie and Ira were into their noise-music thing, off in the other room, and lot of the others were in with them.

A creepy guy came down the stairs, heading for the pizza. He was tall and lanky, with his head constantly in motion. His tufty hair looked like he'd trimmed it with nail scissors.

“Skeeves!” I exclaimed. “I saw your gold coffin in basement.” I'd thought the other guests might be surprised to see Skeeves as well, but I guess everyone but me had already known he was living here.

The gnarled old surfer cocked his head, studying me. “Jim Oster. The man who made the hole.”

“Tell me the whole story,” I said.

“You scratched a leak into an electron with the tip that Ira gave you. The other world is inside the electron, you dig.”

“An electron's a cloud,” I objected. “A probability wave. Not a hollow ball. I already heard this line of bullshit from Weena.”

Skeeves cracked a faint smile. “Ah yes, Weena. She's up in my room right now. She's hot, huh? Even though she's old.”

“I've been living with her all week.” I said shortly. It was disgusting to think I was sharing a woman with Skeeves.

“She's even better when she's not in a coma,” said Skeeves. He showed his teeth in an crooked grin and recited a limerick. “
Skeeves was a surf-monster man / With a comatose chick in his van. / They said shrink his head, she's practically dead! / He said ‘I just wish she was tan.'
That last line needs work, doesn't it? Maybe you can help me with it, Jim. You're supposed to be so smart and everything.”

“How did Weena get back into her body?”

“She was manipulating me from the other side. I heard her like a voice in my head. She set up Ira's tip for you, and she sent me to your house to take the charred sample with the special electron that you'd poked. By then the electron had healed over a little bit, but it still had a weak spot. I put your sample right next to Weena's sarcophagus in my van, and her soul found this giant snail to push out through the electron that you'd nicked.”

“It's not one
particular
electron?” I asked. “But Weena said—

“The other world is inside
every
electron, yes,” said Skeeves. “You go inside any electron, you're in the same place. Heaven is everywhere. It's a hall of mirrors.” But over on this side, only the one electron has a nick. Thanks to you, fuckhead.” He laid his bony finger along the side of his nose and winked. “I'm a sage.”

“And what about the thing that came through to kill Val, asshole?”

“Go to hell,” said Skeeves, pushing me aside. “I want pizza. And some of Header's vitamin dust. And I want to hang with my boy Ira.” He grabbed a slice and went off to the other end the room.

Wondering about Weena, I went upstairs to poke around. In the first room, I found the messy mattress where Header and Ginnie slept—I could see Ginnie's underwear and an overblown poster for a Metallica videogame that had to belong to Header.

Next door was a smaller room that was Ira's, with some library physics books scattered around. He'd drawn a bunch of occult patterns on the wall with magic marker, poor guy. I glanced out the window overlooking the back yard. Droog was sleeping down there, staying out of trouble. Fine.

The weird thing about Ira's room was that it had a miniature staircase in the corner that only went about half a floor down. That is, instead of going down to the kitchen, these little stairs went to an in-between room with a ceiling about three feet high. And I could glimpse a door to still smaller room beyond that. Just like—the chambers of a snail shell.

“Hello?” I called, crouching by the little staircase. No answer.

I took one of the work lights on orange cords and wormed headfirst down the little stairs, trying to see down the sequence of rooms. Skeeves's hide-out would be in there. But I couldn't squeeze in far enough to see Weena. Maybe the border snail had a way of shrinking Skeeves and his companions when they wanted to work their way in. Why not? Snaily was able to surround herself with a maze of space warps. She could do all kinds of things.

My hand was shaking, and the lights and shadows swayed back and forth. I could see a third room down around the doll-house corridors, and maybe a fourth. Something tiny was moving down there, like an ant on two legs. A little woman. The figure lurched this way and that, hiding herself in bits of shadow. She grew recognizable as she approached. It was Weena.

“Spying on me?” she said, her voice small and cracked. “Make way.”

I scooted back out of the little staircase leading down from Ira's room. Sighing and muttering with the effort, Weena hauled herself up the stairs.

“I can't believe you'd let Skeeves—” I began.

“He's useful,” said Weena. She regarded me with something of the old sparkle in her bleary eyes. “You're jealous, aren't you? How sweet. Help me back down to the party, and I'll see that Skeeves gets thrown out for the night.”

I should mention that the surfers' marijuana was really strong, and they'd been passing around hard drugs pretty freely as well. On our way downstairs, I began getting an unpleasant effect akin to what audio buffs call “clipping.” That is my sensations and thoughts were so radically spiked away from the norm that my cautious reptilian brain stem was cutting off the tops of the peaks to leave featureless mesas.

Ira's and Ginnie's mix of aquatic sounds, music samples and synth raged on. Tottery though Weena was, she prevailed on me to dance with her for awhile. But by now I didn't really like touching her.

Soon Weena twisted away and got into sharing her wriggly colored sprinkles with Header and Skeeves. They went after the stuff as if it were premium coke. After Header had his second round, Weena abruptly cut Skeeves off.

“No more for you,” she told Skeeves, choosing her words for maximum impact. “You're a demented pervert. I don't want you here. A live woman has no use for you. I'll spend the night with Jim. Or perhaps with Header.”

Instantly the tall, tormented Skeeves was in Weena's face, and it was only moments till the argument expanded to include Header, who stepped forward to give Skeeves a rough shove.

“You're a zombie, Header!” hollered Skeeves, windmilling his arms to keep his balance. “You've got an alien slug instead of a brain! I never should have kept you on.”

Header took a step forward and punched Skeeves in the stomach so hard that skinny freak collapsed.

“Give him his comeuppance, Header!” said Weena, like a rabid floozy at some old-style barroom fight. “Remove him from the premises!”

Ira was in the mix now too, shrilling insults at Header, trying to keep the beefy surfer away from Skeeves. Header brushed Ira aside and hoisted Skeeves onto his shoulders. He lumbered onto the porch, down the stairs, and out to the point where the street faded into a spatial maze. Humping his thick torso, Header tossed Skeeves into the invisible zone.

“Hurrah!” called spindly old Weena, watching from the porch.

“Good show.”

“I'm bringing him back in here later on, you bitches!” yelled Ira. “Skeeves lives here too!”

Back in the house, Weena gave Header more sprinkles. He got into an intense low-voiced conversation with her, all the while keeping one arm around the petite Marcy. Judging from Header's body language, he wanted something more than drugs or sex from Weena. For her part, Weena seemed to be temporizing, leading him on, all the while plying him with her pixie dust.

My sense of time broke into streaks and patches. At some point, I found myself on the back deck, leaning over the railing, wondering if I was going to puke—and then not wondering, just doing it, as naturally as a dog.

Weena appeared at my side, still looking well over a century old. With my consciousness slowly coming back, I observed that all the guests were gone—and that the fuzzed borders of the space-maze were starting to glow. Dawn. I'd missed out on the last couple of hours.

“I have grave news,” Weena told me.

“Careful where you step,” I said. “There's vomit on the deck.”

Weena waved off this information. “Now I must kill the Graf 's agent,” she whispered, leaning very close. “Header. This is a key aspect of my mission.”

Something suddenly came clear to me. “When the Graf was murdered in that car—you sent Skeeves to do it, didn't you, Weena?”

“I did what was necessary,” she said.

“But why mess with Header now?”

“There is a link,” said Weena stubbornly. “How else could Header have unleashed a yuel? Header knows who I am. He was pleading for a pardon tonight, and tendering offers. But I'm not to be swayed.”

Hearing a clunk on the deck floor beside me, I glanced down.

“You have an axe?” The appearance of this unlikely weapon set off a firestorm of images and emotions in my weary mind. The axe's handle was painted green.

“I found it in Header's closet,” said spindly Weena. “Do you know how to use an axe?”

“
You
use the axe,” I said. “This is your crazy idea. Not that killing Header is necessarily a bad thing to do.” Saying this, I giggled. I was still fairly high. Yes, Weena was holding the green-handled axe that Skeeves had threatened me with in high school. “Ask Skeeves to do it for you,” I said. “Your old boyfriend.”

“You know that Skeeves is gone,” was all that Weena said. “And you're barely in any shape to help me at all. A fine state for my cosmic mailman.”

“Is, uh, Header teeping this conversation?”

“No. Header is a weak fool. He reeled upstairs in a stupor. And now he slumbers.”

“Ginnie must be upset,” I said. Weird music was drifting from the house—Ira and Ginnie were still jamming.

“Oh, now you're after Ginnie instead of me?” said Weena with sudden spite. “And what about your wife? Never mind. The salient fact is that my deadly enemy's guard is down. I'll restore my strength, and I'll do what's necessary. And then, Jim, then you'll open that round cellar door so we can escape.”

“What about that, that—” I gestured at the shaggy eucalyptus trees that beetled over the yard. In my wasted state, I'd forgotten what Weena called the blue baboon thing. But sure enough, I could glimpse the faint glint of his yellow eyes.

“Yes, yes, the yuel,” said Weena. “We'll eliminate him first, and then Header. All the Graf 's Earthly influences must be annihilated. The Graf is the enemy of the jivas and of the Duke. He took advantage of the confidences I shared with him. He sought to thwart our plan.” She gave me a stern look. “I don't look kindly on faithless lovers.”