John Shirley - Wetbones (32 page)

"That's it," Jeff said, standing up suddenly. "That's all of this bullshit I can handle. I'm sorry, Mr. Kenson. You were great, by the way, in
The Bishop's Daughter
. Now I gotta hit the road." He turned to Prentice. "I'm gonna call Blume again. You won't believe this message he left on my machine. He's playing with my head, the fucking drunk."

"You like prostitutes, Mr. Teitelbaum?" Kenson

asked, pausing to cough afterwards. "It's hookers, right? Maybe two a day sometimes."

Jeff turned to gape at him. "What?"

"I can see the sex addict worms on you, man. And it's a kind people get from using women in a professional way. Sick sex. Impersonal and nasty in your car. They give you head, most of the time, probably, right there in the car. Lots of guys with dough are addicted to it. The women are so
accessible
and some of them are surprisingly good lookin'. Sometimes you like to go to those brothels where they line up for you and you pick 'em, I bet. That's the part you really like - you point and say
that one
and she gives it up. And it's an addictive charge you get outta that. Your worms are real thick around your -"

"Shut the fuck up, Kenson!" Jeff said dangerously. His face mottled red.

"It's true, isn't it? And how'd I know? You going to tell me I had you followed?"

Jeff looked at Prentice who was careful not to look back at him or smile. Prentice had been wondering how one guy could take so many "meetings".

Jeff was breathing hard. He spun on his heel and shoved past Prentice, storming out the door. Prentice went to the chair and sank into it with a thump. "Kenson - you too tired to answer a couple of questions?"

"You don't think I'm full of shit, too?"

"I - don't think you're full of shit. No. Is there some way that . . . well, suppose I was having sex with a girl and she had an arrangement with these Akishra prime, could she, uh, enhance the experience through them to kind of draw me in and uh . . . ?"

"Sure. That's Lissa's favourite thing. You know her?"

Prentice's limbs suddenly felt leaden on his bones, as

if truth had tripled gravity. In a small voice, he said. "Yeah. I do."

Kenson nodded. He reached up and took another long hit of oxygen. Then he held the mask on his lap and said, "If you can crank my bed down a little I could go on for a few minutes more maybe . . ."

Prentice was sitting within reach of the two control buttons, on a box just out of Kenson's reach. He pressed the lower button and the bed whined to itself as it lowered the top end of the mattress almost to horizontal. "That's good," Kenson said. "Right there. I need a little elevation . . . Well, now. What you want to know?"

"Besides the Akishra - are there other creatures on the Astral Plane, or whatever you call it? Maybe something more . . ."

"Benevolent? Sure." He scowled. "But they're haughty bastards. The higher spirits. The Akishra are just a kind of animal. Etheric animals. But the higher ones . . . some of them are things that only help you if they bother to take any notice of you, and some of them are nasty fucks that are always fighting. They're always playing a kind of game . . . well, Judy called it a 'dance' . . . the dance of the ones who construct, who grow things, with the ones who destroy things . . . I don't pretend to understand all that very much. All I know is, the so-called 'good' ones are there, but they never did shit for me. They're hard to get in touch with and what I heard it gets harder all the time.

"See, the Akishra, and the other predators, all your garden variety demons, they reproduce in cycles. And they got going with this really big reproduction cycle a couple of times in this century - most recently in the middle 1970s. Started to spread through the world, usually showing their works through your serial killers,

your child molesters, your Republican Secretaries of the Interior, vicious assholes of all kinds. Usually they aren't so - what's that word. Uh . . . symbiotic. They're usually not so symbiotic as they are with Denver and 'his toy-boys. Well anyway, the Akishra are gearin' up for another big repro cycle." He chuckled creakily. "You think there's a lot of murderous lunatics out there now? They cultivate those fuckers . . . Just wait a few days till the cycle's complete. Denver's got the incubator out there at . . . oh God." He lapsed into silence, his eyes closed, hands clenching.

"You want a doctor?" Prentice asked.

Kenson shook his head. His shoulders quivered. After a few moments his eyes fluttered open. He lay there looking into nowhere, murmuring, "One thing, Jeff . . ."

Prentice didn't correct his confusion about who he was talking to. He could see Kenson was drifting.

". . . one thing to . . . get clear . . . the human hosts of Akishra . . . they always . . . always offer themselves up
willingly
. Whether or not they know it . . . know it consciously . . . they always . . ." He shook his head and made a shooing gesture-with his hand.

Feeling unreal, Prentice got up to look for Jeff.

He saw Jeff on the phone in the lobby, trying to reach Blume. Prentice called to him, "Hey Jeff - I'm gonna wait for you in the parking lot."

Jeff nodded and said, into the phone, "He's what? When? So who am I talking to? Sergeant what?"

Prentice thought,
Now what?
He didn't want to know, quite yet. The story Kenson had told him was too much to deal with already. If it were true. Now, stepping

out into a chilly evening the blotted sky promising rain - Kenson's tale once more seemed like raving. He probably had some disease and some kind of occult hobbyhorse and he'd slung all this together in a paranoid fantasy to explain his illness.

But he knew Lissa. And he'd said -

"Hello, Tom."

She was there. Lissa, just getting out of a convertible BMW. Prentice felt his legs weaken, looking at her. He thought he felt Amy somewhere in the background, trying to tell him something. But he ignored the fantasy and walked over to Lissa. She wore black jeans, a red halter-top, red spike heels. The heels looked particularly sexy with the jeans, somehow. He stopped just out of her reach. "Hi! How'd you track me down!"

She glanced past him at the hospital. He started to turn, to see what she was looking at, or who but she came closer and touched his arm as if to hold his gaze. "Hey - are you standing me up? Weren't you supposed to pick me up about an hour ago? For the party?"

"
Is
there a party?"

She looked at him in a fair reading of hurt surprise. "Why would I say there was if there wasn't?"

"I don't know." He exhaled windily, suddenly feeling stupid. Why would she lie??

He took a step back, looking at her in the indirect light of the parking lot's streetlamp. Was it there? A kind of tell-tale sheen in the air around her, that seemed to squirm a little?

He shook himself and looked away. She stepped in and threw her arms around him, drew him close. And instantly he felt the warm, drunken sweetness pass from her to him. He found himself putting his arms around her, returning the embrace, as she said, "Listen -

something's bothering you. Aren't we close enough we can talk about it?"

"I don't know - for some stupid reason I feel responsible for Amy. What happened to her. And now I just talked to this guy who was sick with the same thing as Amy . . . If that's what it was . . ."

It all seemed murky and distant, now that he held her again. This was real; this feeling.
This
was important.

"Look - I want you to come to this party," Lissa was murmuring. "Because I want you to meet the people who saved my life."

"How'd they do that?"

"They got me off drugs. They've been sort of weaning me off them. I shouldn't have taken that X, the other day. I wasn't supposed to. See - there's a new drug going around town." She drew back and looked at him earnestly. "You heard of Xedrine?"

"No . . ." He felt pleasantly sleepy but somehow glowing, his loins, his sexuality shining with a soft light.

"Well - Xedrine is this new designer drug. I was hung up on it and - I thought I could get off it by taking Ecstasy as a substitute. But no go. A lot of people are hung up on this stuff, and other drugs, and the Denvers help them get clean. They have a drug detox clinic out there."

"Yeah . . . that might explain all the secrecy . . ."

"Sure. The celebrities. And listen - I just realized today I knew your ex-wife! Amy! Only a little - she was out at the clinic. She was a Xedrine addict. She and Lou Kenson got into it."

Kenson? His attention came back from the plane of pleasure for a moment. "Lou Kenson . . ."

"Yeah, Lou was really gone on the stuff. And Amy. It can leave you wasted, make you prone to self mutilation.

And it'll give you paranoid fantasies . . . hallucinations of monsters crawling on you, that kind of thing. Like the way cocaine overdose makes you see bugs on your skin. Kenson and Amy back-slid into the drugs but I stayed off Xedrine and the Denvers are the ones who helped me. They and Zack Arthwright . . .''

He felt grounded, then, and enormously relieved. It all came together. It made sense. He smiled. "God - I needed to hear that. Wait'll I tell you what . . . Well - later. Let's head out there. I came in Jeff's car -"

"Not a problem. Let's go in mine."

"Okay - let me just go in and talk to Jeff."

She made a something-smells-bad face. "I'd rather you didn't. That guy's kind of crazy. I don't want him to know I'm here. Couldn't we just go?"

Prentice shrugged. Jeff was a big boy. He could call him later and explain. "Sure. Let's head for Malibu."

Jeff was just coming back in from the parking lot when Drandhu bustled up, stethoscope in hand. "Ah, Mr. Teitelbaum, there you are! Do you mind if we go and talk to Mr. Kenson a little more?"

"Sure, whatever. I got some questions for him. If he can be reasonably civil for about five minutes."

"He said something . . . disturbing?"

"He pissed me off is what he did. But come on. Probably Tom went back to Kenson's room."

Just outside Kenson's room Jeff noticed a short, stocky guy with a kind of Howdy Doody look about him, and big earlobes, walking along toward them carrying a canvas bag. He smiled sunnily at them and continued on past.

There were shouts and curses from Kenson's room. Inside, they found a fat, mustached male nurse trying to hold Kenson down. "Doctors orders, you're supposed to take it easy, pal -"

But Kenson was going into convulsions, moving with an energy that Jeff would have thought impossible, given Kenson's condition. Coming closer, Jeff was sickened, seeing Kenson was foaming at the mouth, jaws snapping open and shut clack-clack-clack, arms flailing, legs randomly kicking. His bowels letting go, judging from the stink and the stain spreading down the sheet. And the tape recorder was gone from the IV stand.

"Who put that bandage on his head?" Drandhu snapped. "No one was to have put any bandages there - had no need at all . . . !"

Kenson gave a final shudder and lay back, gasping, eyes rolling wildly, rigid now. The nurse stepped back, protesting, "Look I didn't touch his head, I just heard him flapping around in' here and -"

"Yes, yes, just get out of the way -" Drandhu snapped, moving around behind Kenson. He unwound the bandage.

Not knowing why, Jeff was drawn to stand behind Drandhu when he removed the bandage entirely . . .

The top of, Kenson's skull had been freshly sawed away. And his brain exposed. And his brain was squirming.

Someone had taken the top of his head off and introduced vermin into his brain. Real maggots - not the ethereal variety. Spiders. Centipedes. Large black and. red ants. Dozens of them, thrashing and chewing their way through his brain.

Kenson gave a final spasm and died, as Jeff turned away and threw up on the male nurse.

12
Near Malibu

Mitch tried to remember coming here, and couldn't.

As far as he knew, he'd always been in the fog room. There was just a bed, and there was Eurydice, and that was all. There were no walls. Just the fog around the bed. If he looked up from Eury's heaving, sweat and blood-sticky breasts, and if he stared at the fog for a moment, it resolved into shadows that fanned out like shapes in a kaleidoscope; they were man-shaped shadows, and they were caressing themselves and dancing in a stupid sort of way. And then they were fog again as a jolt of punishment pushed his attention back to Eury and he pumped into her and the Reward came and he knew the things on the other side of the fog were feeding but it felt good, it felt very good so it was not to be argued with, you were not to notice the suffering on Eury's face, the look of a terrified lost child, you just got into the pain and then you didn't have to notice the other hurt, the one that couldn't be expressed, the final pain, the pain at the root of whatever it was that made Mitch himself . . .

Just keep at it and after a while maybe it would end.

But he was pretty sure it wasn't going to end till they were both dead . . .

A Highway near Malibu

The BMW took the curves at fifty, but Lissa was a better driver than Jeff. Nothing much was bothering Prentice, anyway. He felt dreamy. Even the pain in his hand from the gash was gone, completely faded. He was strapped into a bucket seat, letting the damp wind lick his ears and stream his hair, looking up at the few stars visible through knot-holes in the ceiling of clouds.

Lissa was amazing. She had only to touch him and he was transported. Maybe it was being in love. Hadn't Kenson said something about her? He couldn't remember what it was, now.

"Oh Hell," Lissa said.

He looked at the road ahead. A wispy gray broom of rain swept down the highway toward them. And they still had the top down on the car.

In seconds the rain was on them, even as Lissa reached back to unsnap the accordion top, and hit the switch to close it over them. It came up a little too high and caught the wind, didn't clasp properly. Lissa cursed, trying to close the convertible top with one hand as she drove with the other.

"Maybe we'd better pull over," Prentice said vaguely, as the chilly rain off the sea began to patter down over them. He tried to help her with the top.