Wetbones

10

Near Malibu

Lonny wasn't sure how long he'd been crouching in the old cactus garden between the main house and the smaller one out back. He'd crawled in on his hands and knees and nestled among the yucca spears and he had only been jabbed once or twice. He held the gun lovingly as a kitten in his hand as he peered through the bushes, wishing he'd never come, feeling sure that Mitch was dead. Not wanting to find what they'd done to Orphy.

How could people like this hang out in the world at all? Why was it allowed?

There was a light in the window of the guest house, downstairs. Once, he thought he heard Orphy's voice from over there. Some of the others came and went – just shapes in the darkness, some of them nude, some of them in sloppy clothes – and now here came four more, so he scrunched, down lower, biting off a shout when he accidently drove a cactus needle into his right arm near the elbow. Grimacing, he felt for the broken-off needle and plucked it out. He was going to lose an eye in here next. Had to get out.

But he was safe in the cacti. Maybe he should stay till daylight. These sick fuckers probably slept during the day. Or maybe they never slept. That wouldn't surprise him, either.

Two more of them went by, carrying something long and sodden that dripped onto bricks. What they were carrying didn't have to be a man's severed arm. Not necessarily.

They paused a moment, next to the pool. One of them bent and seemed to tease the surface of the water with the drippy end of the thing he carried in his hand. Lonny thought he saw something sparkle, faintly, in the pool, then, but he wasn't sure. The two laughed. Were they men? Yes, now, seeing them pass across the open area of the terrace where more starlight reached them, he could see they were white men, both clothed but one of them with his dick hanging out his fly – from here it looked like a little white worm.

They paused at the door to the back house – and both glanced over their shoulders at the cactus garden. A flash of teeth as they grinned. Then they went into the house.

Holy shit, Lonny thought. The fuckers knew he was there. They'd known it all along.

They wouldn't leave things like this.

Lonny crouched lower, got down under the curve of the yucca spears, and squirmed like a soldier moving under barbed wire, pulling himself with his elbows, till he got free of the cactus garden. Then he got to his feet and ran in a crouch across the big terrace.

He still had the gun, anyway.

And he had to know. He scurried up to the lower window of the guest house. The windows were curtained. He heard voices. One of them was Orphy. Sounding delirious. He had a drunk, disbelieving quality about his voice and Lonny couldn't work out exactly what Orphy was saying.

He made up his mind. He went toward the door, circling the treetrunk-thick stem of the huge rose bush growing up the side of the place – looking quickly away from the yellow bony thing wired into the roses. (Bones with only the grease of a human body left on them.) Gun at the ready, Lonny walked through the front door of the guest house. There was a hallway, strewn with trash and rose petals. Beyond it, a sickly gray light from the hall corner.

The trash moved. Lonny stared. There was a man among the bottles and cans and old rags. He looked like a rag himself. He was crawling through the trash toward Lonny. He wore only bloodstained diapers. Baby's disposable diapers. Scabby rips all over his gray skin. He was… Lonny shook his head with amazement. He'd never seen anyone that skinny except on TV commercials about those starving kids overseas. A skeleton with skin shrunk-wrapped on it.

"Don't…" the guy rasped. No hair on his head. His eyes looking two different directions. "Don't…" The voice like a rustle of paper, barely audible. His body made a dry scraping on the floor when he moved a few inches closer. Saying, " Don't let them do this to you."

Lonny's mouth went dry. Instantly. He turned to run – then he heard Orphy yell his name. " Lonny ya fucking… Feez motherfucker… Don't… Lonny…! " Something skewed wrong in his voice – the words were pleadings, protests – but the tone was childishly happy.

"I've got the gun," Lonny murmured. And maybe they had Mitch with Orphy.

He forced himself to go around the corner and look through the door into the room.

There was one dirty white bulb directly in the middle of the ceiling. Under it was a kind of platform, about bed-height from the floor. It took him several seconds of staring to be sure that the platform and the chairs around it were made of human arms and legs. The bone-ends, the bits of meat at the join, showed it was real. They'd preserved it and crudely stitched it together and tied it up with strips of skin; clunky and haphazard looking, but it held together as Orphy thrashed on it.

Orpheus was strapped spread eagled, naked on the bed with the Feasters – so Lonny thought of them – crouched around him, or sitting in bodypart chairs. They were connected to him. Something like stretched-out bits of glue ran from their mouths and exposed genitals, into Orpheus. The stretched-out bits quivered and flowed, and Lonny could see that they were alive, that they were something…

Something like worms. And they were part of the people around the bed, half a dozen people including the guy who called himself the More Man and the little guy, the Handy Man, and a woman whose eyes seemed to shine… you couldn't see her face at all, there was a kind of gas mask effect because the transparent slick white stuff had erupted from her mouth to cover most of her face. The other worm things squirmed into the wounds on Orpheus's throat… Another woman crouched over his genitals, chewing them up, as a worm thrashed whitely next to her pink tongue… A fat man crouched next to Orpheus's foot; the ankle had been broken, a bone end sheering out through the breached skin and the guy was licking marrow from it. Orpheus looked down at the guy and made a sound of pleasure.

Orpheus made that sound?

They'd done something to him. He was writhing,

Lonny saw now, not in pain but in ecstasy… as the More Man used the severed arm of the security guard to fuck a wound in Orphy's side, the arm a dildo. Orphy writing in repugnant happiness. Feeling no pain while they snapped his bones. He looked invitingly at Lonny. Mucous bubbling from his mouth as he urged: "Git on, Lon!" he said wetly. "Take a hit!"

The worms thrashing and squirming over this feast. Not eating flesh but taking something – taking what? The woman looking up at Lonny with eyes that were glossy with sensation but something imploring in them too.

Use the gun on me, boy. Use it on me

Was that her voice?

Use it on me, Mein Schones jung. The head. Shoot me in the head

Orpheus's belly was humping up with the movement of the things probing in him and he was way beyond yelling now, he was just staring deep into the lightbulb and going "Ack… ack… kuh… ack

…" as they probed into him, his eyes bulging, the joy in his face worse than anything else. All of them smiling through the wormstuff at Lonny. Reaching out…

Lonny felt a buzz in his head. A flush of pleasure.

"NO FUCKING WAY!" Shouted so hard he could feel something rip in his throat. And the gun came up -

Me, herrliches boy…

– but he wrenched the. 45 away from the target it wanted, and pointed it at Orpheus. Fired. Felt it jump in his hand, glimpsed Orphy's brains splash. He fired it wildly at the others till it expended its magazine – with the last round, the light bulb exploded and the room went dark.

He threw the gun into the darkness and spun, careened into the hall. Sprinted for the front door.

He stumbled through the trash. Bottles and cans rebounded from his feet; he felt his heels crunch something that was probably a spine. A fading murmur of gratitude came from underfoot. Then he was outdoors and racing across the terrace. Someone lunged from the shadows under an oak tree and he felt a hand close around his wrist and he shrieked his best approximation of a karate yell and slammed a fist into a soft part of whoever it was. They went flailing down and he kept going, tearing through brush and feeling it tear through his skin, until he got to the black metal fence. He was over it in seconds, wailing one long note like a siren the whole way over. Dropped to the other side, ignored the pain in his ankles and ran on. Another fence. It was nothing. He went up it like a cat up a treetrunk. Dropped into the sand on the other side. Thought he heard a really pissed-off yell behind him. They hadn't expected him to get away.

He just kept going, shouting hoarsely, "Not me you fuckers!" He kept going, running at random into the brittle, aromatic brush of the countryside, until his legs stopped working. He fell into sand and rocks.

After a spinning while, the sobbing started. With that, came strength to crawl.

It didn't matter how he went. He just had to keep going.

Culver City, Los Angeles

Prentice had been sitting with a stack of books at the table in the Los Angeles main library since eleven a.m. It was almost two. His butt hurt from the chair and his stomach growled, but something kept him there. He imagined Amy saying, You always did give up too easily, Tom. Like with me…

He shook himself, and focused on the book. It wouldn't do to let the Amy obsession haunt him again. He turned the page, and then he saw them. Sam and Judy Denver.

The book was called Those Fabulous Hollywood Parties. The Denvers had been known for their parties. Prentice was looking for anything he could find about them – he wanted to get some kind of impression of them, and judge how likely it was that Mitch was actually being held out there…

He'd just about given up on finding them in this book – it seemed to focus on the old Hollywod Babylon sort of parties from the days of silent movies. Too early for the Denvers.

But here they were – there names caught his eye, first, in boldface under the photo. Not the names "Sam and Judy Denver." It said " Mrs. Stutgart and Future Husband, Mr. Samuel Denver." The date was 1929. Here was a middle aged woman and an older man in Roaring Twenties fashions, Denver holding eight champagne glasses clutched together at the stems like a bouquet in his hands, Mrs. Stutgart slopping champagne over them as if to fill all eight at once. Both of them laughing. Oliver Hardy looking on, making a comical face of mock astonishment; Faye Wray drunkenly leaning on Hardy with one of her dainty feet cocked up behind her. Another man stood rather stiffly in the background in an immaculate black tux. Denver's bowtie was undone and his salt and pepper hair rumpled.

Prentice stared. Maybe it was a misprint. This man was far too old, here, to be the man who later made his mark in Hollywood as a television producer. That would be thirty years later. This man was at least sixty. The producer of Honolulu Hello must have been this man's son.

But to the right – under the caption The Merry Widow, and after a rather sensationalistic description of the widowed Mrs. Stutgart's ribald, cocaine-dusted parties – the text related, "… born Elma Hoch, she married the industrialist Albert Stutgart; their relationship was said to be stormy and it was, in fact, during a storm that poor Albert was mysteriously lost overboard during a transatlantic crossing to New York. It was some years later before she married Sam Denver and became Mrs. 'Judy' Denver. Sam was later to become a successful television producer.

"In the late '30s and early '40s the parties at the Doublekey Ranch faded noticeably after nasty remarks by L.A. columnists regarding certain of Elma's visitors who were alleged to be high functionaries in Germany's Nazi party. The man shown in the background behind Faye Wray and Oliver Hardy has been identified only as a 'Mr. Heingeman, a follower of the German firebrand Mr. Adolf Hitler'.

"Sam and 'Judy' were childless but for a time ran a charitable' summer camp for disadvantaged youth at their Malibu ranch. Accusations of child molestation, which were never prosecuted, caused the closing of the 'charitable summer camp' in 1976…"

So it was the same guy. But how old had he been, as a TV producer? Ninety? A hundred?

Prentice got up, stretched, and went to the microfiche stacks. His body begged him for food and his brain implored him for coffee. But he had to know immediately…

In minutes he was at another chair, reading the old newspaper accounts from a fiche projector screen, shadowed over, in spots, with magnified dust particles and what appeared to be the leg of a fly. Variety, early

'70s. A photo of Sam Denver giving an award for documentary film production at a dinner for the Producer's Guild. Maybe the guy's last public appearance, from what Prentice had been able to find out. The picture showed a man in a leisure suit, his hair dark blond. He looked about 40. He looked younger than the picture in the Those Fabuhna Hollywood Parties book. But it was unquestionably the same guy.

Unless – it was a son by another wife. That must be it.

It took Prentice another ten minutes to locate an encyclopedia of Television History in the nostalgia section. Denver had one brief paragraph. It didn't give a birth date for him. It was the only entry he could find with that omission. It simply said " Born -? " The last remark about him was, "Denver married the widow of industrialist Albert Stutgart in 1946. He has no children as of this writing."

It was him.

So what? The guy was probably into health foods and plastic surgery. Maybe he looked older in that photo from the 20s than he really was. But looking at the picture, he had a nasty feeling of recognition. An ugly certainty.

Prentice decided to check the microfiche files one more time. There might be an article about the child molestation incident…

The house was only a mile from the library. It was a small, stucco house with Spanish tile roof and a row of sickly geraniums in a red wooden box on the porch railing. Prentice pressed the buzzer for the third time.

A raucous voice inside said, "Awright, keep your pants on!" It was followed by mimicry in a weird little cartoon voice, '' Awright, keepapantin! " The door opened and a woman with a parrot on her shoulder scowled at him from the other side of the screen. She was somewhere in her sixties, probably, her hair puffed out with the odd shade of blue-silver that some old ladies affect, her face jowly, her hooded eyes as green as the parrot. She wore a mu-mu with scarlet and blue flowers; the bright green parrot crapped on the print of a nasturtium on the old woman's right shoulder, and shifted its footing, torquing its head to peer at Prentice with one hostile eye. "All I can say is, you better not be selling anything," the woman snapped. "I needed that nap, boy."

"Actually – " Well what was he going to tell her? How was he going to get her to open up about it? With an inward sigh, he chose the one route that would probably work. Lies mixed with the truth. "I'm a writer. A screenwriter. My name's Tom Prentice. I have been, uh, researching a story about Wendy Forrester -"

"She's dead. Did your research tell you that?"

"Well – no. Uh – when did she die?"

"A year after her lovely little summer vacation. That much you can find out yourself. I'm not stupid enough to tell you anything more without a contract."

"What? A…?"

"You heard me. You want the story, you people have to buy it. I owe it to that poor child to get a little something for her story."

Prentice almost laughed aloud at this pretzeled logic. But managed instead to say, "I see. Story rights for the film. Well, it's not that far along. We don't know if there's enough of interest…"

"A twelve-year-old child driven to suicide by the filthy molesting of a TV producer? If you want to believe the suicide part of it."

Prentice held in his surprise. He hadn't seen anything in the article about the suicide. But then, it had happened much later. "What do you mean, if you want to believe that part of it?"

"I think those bastards killed them both."

"Both…?"

"My sister and my daughter, obviously."

" Obviously Obviously! " the parrot squawked.

Prentice could smell vodka on the woman now. She leaned against the doorframe, cocked her head the way her parrot did, and sharpened her glare. "Wendy was my niece. And I don't believe this business about Susan killing herself after she found Wendy dead. I can't imagine Wendy loading and shooting her father's shotgun at herself. A little girl like that! She didn't know how to load a shotgun. Killed herself with a shotgun! The police will believe anything if they're paid enough," she added, sniffing loudly.

"You think she was murdered."

"Surely! She was in therapy and she was beginning to talk about those Denver people!"

"Do you know what exactly they did to her? I mean – nothing was proved. Did a doctor -"

She aimed a mottled finger at him. "I am not telling you another goddamned thing without a contract. You think I don't know your business? Of course I do. Why, I've written a screenplay! Part of one anyway. I have it in a notebook. I can get an agent and a lawyer – " She snapped her fingers. "Just like that, my fine boy!"

Prentice nodded. Everyone in L.A. who spoke English, and some who didn't, had a screenplay somewhere. He deserved this harangue, he supposed. He'd lied to her about his interest.

"If you want to come in and have a drink we can talk over a deal -"

"No, uh, no thanks. I'll – I'll send a representative around." Maybe he'd send Blume over to talk to her. "Your name is…?"

"Griswald, Lottie Griswald. I don't mean to be rude, now, but a story like this – "

"I understand. You're, uh, perfectly within your rights." He decided he'd learned enough. What sounded superficially like a morose and isolated old woman's paranoia might well be true. Maybe it hadn't been a double suicide. "I'll be in touch…"

"You sure you wouldn't like a drink?"

"No, no really, thanks." He backed away, smiling, almost stumbled off the porch but caught a railing and steadied himself, turned and hurried down. He heard the old lady mutter something, but he couldn't make it out, till the bird echoed it for her:

" Asshole! "

Downtown Los Angeles

The codeine was making Garner woozy, but he was grateful for it. It was the only thing that had got him through the morning at the General Assistance office. The hours at the combined food stamp and welfare office were humiliating; the stories were true: they treated you like a dog. No wonder there were so many welfare cheats – it was the only revenge. And the place was foulsmelling enough to make William F. Buckley sneer knowingly. But Garner had gotten emergency foodstamps; he'd eaten and kept most of it down.

Now he stood in the smoggy late afternoon on a barren streetcorner under a freeway overpass. The street echoed with the shriek of the big trucks shaking dust down from the monolithic slabs of concrete above him. He was standing at a payphone next to a hotdog stand, waiting for James to call him back. He thought about the freeway that had collapsed in Oakland, during the October 17th earthquake; he thought about how, at first, the media had rosily reported that people were "heroically pitching in to help" until it was learned that more of them were looting the bodies; he thought about a woman he'd counselled who'd been pinned, by the collapse, in an overturned car. Two men had come from the Oakland slums, clambered over her to rob the bodies of her friends, then jerked her purse from her hands and crawled away – one of them stepping on her broken leg as he went. He thought about all this with Olympian disdain, through the fuzzy filter of the codeine they'd given him at the hospital.

The payphone rang. It was James. "Mr. Garner? Hi! Um – I couldn't get the guy Sykes on the line. But I left a message that you need him to wire you some money at Western Union and all that."

"Try him again. And I want him to see about selling my things. Tell him he can take forty per cent." Garner was pretty sure Sykes would come through. Sykes owed him favours. He mentally went down the list of the other people he could siphon money from. His brother, though he hardly ever saw him, ought to be good for a hundred or two. His friend Larry – but he'd have to be careful about that, Larry was a reformed addict too, he might suss out that Garner was going to use the money for drugs.

No. Probably not. Garner had been clean a long time, so far as Larry knew. But it was best he didn't talk to Larry himself, he'd hear the slur in his voice from the codeine.

"You gonna be okay, Mr. Garner?" James asked.

"Sure." Okay? What a fucking joke. "Sure, I'm just… mild concussion, some fractured ribs, busted nose, a few bandages. What happens if you're lucky when you get rolled down here. I was looking for Constance in a rough neighbourhood -"

"Oh shit!"

"Hm?'

"I forgot to tell you she called! Constance called. How could I forget that? Jesus!"

Garner snorted. "She called." Just like the postcard. The scumbag had her call, sometime before he killed her, to try and keep them from looking for her. "And she said she was okay and all that and not to look for her?"

"Um – not exactly. She said she was alive. That's about it. Then she just sort of hung up. Oh and your brother called the same day to say happy birthday."

"Yeah. Great." The depression rolled over him like a tidal wave of sludge. "Listen – I really need that money." He had it all figured out. He'd just avoid the toss-ups, the strawberries, the coke whores, the other users. He'd buy himself a case of whisky and a double handful of crack cocaine and lock himself in his room and burn himself out that way.

"Sure thing, Mr. Garner. You got it."

"Okay. I'll check Western Union in the morning." He could get through the night without crack. He had the codeine. He could trade some foodstamps for liquor. Of course, he could also trade foodstamps for crack. It was done all the time. Crack or heroin. He could get fifty dollars worth of rock for a hundred dollars worth of food stamps. It was something to think about. "Thanks James. See you…"

He reached out to hang up the phone. His hand stopped over the hook. What was wrong? Why couldn't he hang it up?

The codeine mists were parting…

Your brother called to tell you, happy birthday.

His hand started to shake. He put the receiver to his ear. "James!"

The infinite buzz of a dial tone, like his own neurological drone behind codeine. Fingers shaking, he stabbed the buttons again, calling Alameda collect. Waited impatiently as the operator languidly asked James if he'd take a collect call…

"Mr. Garner? You forget something?"

"James – when did you say my brother called?"

"On your birthday. He said it was your birthday."

"James – no think, get this right – was it the same day Constance called?"

"Yeah. It's right here on the note pad. And I remember because her call interrupted your brother's call. She came in on call waiting. And when I came back he'd hung up -"

"Two days ago? She called two days ago?"

"Yeah."

His birthday. A day after he'd I.D.'d her body. He remembered the cop, on the way out, saying something about how her body was the only one with a finger intact. Lucky they could get an I. D. this time…

The son of a bitch. The motherfucker. The bastard had cut off his daughter's finger and dropped it in with somebody else's body but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST SHE WAS ALIVE!

Sawa Monka

Ephram was in the lawn chair, in the back yard, in that same smoggy late afternoon, a Panama hat and yellow tinted sunglasses shading his eyes from the westerly tilt of the sun as he scrivened busily in his notebook Constance was in the chair beside him, dozing.

Ephram wrote,

I can't get over the feeling that I am playing some odd sort of game with myself, a game which as yet has no name. Could it be that I came here out of a sense of destiny? A realization that here – or more precisely in that snakepit out by Malibu – waits those who should be, and will be, my followers? Is it not possible that the stars have turned to facilitate my domination over them? The Dark Constellations are beginning to yield up their secrets; the Negative Signs are beginning to speak. Once more I turn to Nietzsche at his most inspired, and this I write purely from memory, demonstrating how well I know his gorgeous Ecce Homo: "… I know my fate. One day there will associated with my name the recollection… of a crisis like no other before on earth… of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite… For when truth steps into battle with the lie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of…"

There was a noise at the back gate, making Ephram glance up from his notebook. His blood seemed to arrest in his veins.

Sam Denver pushed the gate open and, smiling, stepped into the back yard.

"Hello, Ephram."

Ephram took a deep breath and put on his courtliest persona. "Why Sam. This is an unexpected pleasure."

Constance was just sitting up, blinking sleepily at Denver. Shading her eyes against the glare of the sagging sun. Ephram could feel the fear rise in her, as she looked at Denver.

"Constance dear, why don't you go into the house and get a chair for Mr. Denver."

"All right." She got up and hurried into the house.

He hoped she wouldn't take this opportunity to run anywhere. It would be most embarrassing to have to drag her back here by the brains in front of Denver.

"You seem to have her well trained," the More Man said. "It's kind of sweet, really."

"How did you… find your way here?" Ephram asked, glancing at the back fence. There were several large men back there; difficult to see them clearly in the glare of the westering sun. There would be one or two others around the front. He wondered if they were Denver's followers from the Ranch, or if they were hired muscle. He could paralyze one or two, of course, but the Akishra protected Denver from him, at least up to a point, and Denver would surely be armed…

"How did we find you?" Denver raised his eyebrows in mock astonishment. "You advertised for us, of course! The Wetbones killings. That could only have been you. You left your calling card all over town, Ephram. It made things a bit hot for us. But I assume you wanted us to find you. The Akishra led us straight here, of course."

Ephram felt dizzy. "The Akishra?"

"Yes. You really thought you wouldn't attract them? After all those engorgements? Or perhaps you thought you had eluded them each time? They are here. But your… 'friend' has kept them somewhat at bay. The one you call the 'Spirit'…"

Ephram crossed his arms over his chest to cover the trembling in his hands. They are here.

Denver sighed and went on, "Judy's out in the limo – she's become rather… well, your prediction has come true, I'm afraid. They've overwhelmed her. They've externalized. It's rather a disgusting sight. Oh, thanks – Constance, was it?"

Denver sat in the kitchen chair Constance had brought out for him. She resumed her seat in the lawn chair next to Ephram. He was gratified to feel her clutch his arm – she clearly preferred him to Denver, it seemed, despite all.

Denver was staring at her. She lowered her eyes. He nodded to himself. "Yes. I believe so. I saw this girl in the paper. Her picture. They found her body, or so they thought…" He looked at the bandage, where her finger had been removed. She covered it with the intact hand. He grunted. "Oh, I see. Very clever." He looked back at Ephram. "Are you ready?"

Ephram knew precisely what Denver meant. But he said, "Ready for what, dear fellow?"

"Why, to come out to the Ranch, of course. We can't let you roar about town like a loose cannon anymore. And you've got to help Judy."

"I hardly think I can do anything for her."

"You can get Reward without the Akishra. Or at least – you used to. You can repel them, you can muddle them

– you've demonstrated very handily that you can do that, or you wouldn't have gotten this far without an Attachment. You can, ah, delouse her for us. You can save her."

"What utter nonsense. She's made her bed, now she must lie in it – with whatever's in it, ha ha. I can do nothing. If you want to help her, put a bullet through her brains."

Denver turned to look once more at Constance. It was a look of bloodless longing and desiccated lust. She turned to bury her face in Ephram's pudgy arm.

Denver laughed. "To make her prefer you – over anyone – oh yes, you must have her very much in hand. Well, we'll soon see if she has any juice left in her. She'll be coming along too, of course." He stood up. "And it's time to go. Now."

Perhaps, Ephram thought, if one of the men at the back fence were armed, he could take control, manipulate the man. Make him shoot Denver in the back of the head.

He reached out with his mind…

And drew back The men at the back fence were Denver's followers. They were clouded with the Akishra. Slimy to the mental touch.

Ephram composed himself for the inevitable. He stood up, and drew Constance to her feet beside him. He bowed, ever so slightly, to Denver. "We are, of course, gratified by your kind invitation."

Culver City

Prentice decided to take a long, hot bath, relax for half an hour before trying to finish writing the first scene of his screenplay. He was tense, lately; probably because he kept waking up at night. Every hour or two after he'd gone to bed he'd sit bolt upright, suddenly and completely awake, with Amy's voice fading in his ears. But no memory of what she'd said.

It took him a long time to get back to sleep and now the tension and fatigue was catching up with him. He got up from the desk, went down the hall to the bathroom. He ran the bath, undressed, sat on the toilet lid waiting for the tub to fill. There was a distant noise from people having an early evening swim in the complex's pool; otherwise the place was dead quiet. Jeff had gone for another one of his endless strings of meetings…

The tub overflowed on Prentice's foot. He jumped a little, then reached down and hastily let some water out. Have to sop up the floor later… He replugged the tub and dumped a little bubble bath in, ran the water just enough to make it foam up. He got in; the water slippery with liquid soap and hot enough to bring sweat to his forehead. He lay back, feet toward the faucet, and tried to relax. Don't go to sleep – just relax for a minute…

Something was bumping against his leg. He opened his eyes and looked at it. It was a woman's hand, severed redly at the wrist, floating between his knees. There was a ring on it, a gold band with an opal, which he recognized. It was Amy's. Blood swirled from the wrist stump, pink with the dilution of steaming water. Strangely enough, he felt no particular surprise or disgust.

Other parts of her began to bob up from under the soap-milky water. A middle section of leg, with one dimpled knee. A neatly snipped out segment of torso complete with breast. A healthy, unscarred breast, he noticed with casual objectivity. The body parts bled freely and the water went red and redder yet… and then Amy's head bobbed up, by his feet. Her neck had been sawed neatly through. Her hair was plastered to her head with water and blood. The lips on her decapitated head moved soundlessly. He could read the lips a little. Help me. They have me… they have a lot of us… help us… That girl…

''Oh shut up, Amy!" he interrupted.

Her lips drew back in a snarl. The head straightened, bobbed vertically in the water. It moved toward him, its lower half sunken in the water, only the eyes showing above the red, bubble-castled surface. Coming at him the way an alligator does, only its eyes and the top of its head showing. But you knew its mouth was opening under the water…

That's when the fear broke free in him and he kicked out, screaming, thrashing -

And woke in the tub. Woke to hear the echo of his own scream in the confined bathroom spaces.

The severed body parts were gone. But the tub was filled with blood. He scrambled to stand up, mewling with repugnance, thinking: Amy's blood Amy's blood…

But then he noticed the gash on his left hand. During the nightmare he'd flailed out and smashed a shampoo bottle against the wall and cut himself on the broken glass. Panting, standing in the tub, he kicked at the water and saw the scum of red part. He hadn't actually lost much blood…

He pressed his right hand against the gash in the other and with one toe pried up the drain plug. The blood in the tub began to move amoebically toward the drain as the pipes made an echoey sucking growl and the cleaner water welled up. Tenuous shapes formed there, around the little whirlpool where blood and water spiraled. For a moment, one of the shapes was Amy's face. The red lips mouthing Help me… Help us… And then it melted swiftly away in down-whirling water and was gone.