Wetbones

4

The Outskirts of Bakersfield, California

The guy was kind of cute, Constance thought. He had a nice smile.

He's got a nice dick too, Ephram told her. Yes, she thought dutifully, he's got a nice dick.

When Ephram told her things, it didn't come like words in her head. Just little pushes of idea, maybe a picture or two. But Ephram was in there with her, all right.

She knew his name was Ephram, by now. She knew some other stuff about him, too. She knew that Ephram was a murderer. She had glimpsed it through the kaleidoscope strobing of mental ideation. He was a murderer, but he didn't let her care about that.

They were admiring the young man in a Sizzler steakhouse. The man was sitting across the aisle from them, a few booths up. He had long, wavy brown hair past his shoulders and a new-looking Levi jacket and a gold watch. There were some keys on the table with a little plastic BMW tab on them. He had a nice face that looked slightly Latin. And probably a nice dick. A nice dick, A nice dick. A nice cock. A big fucking cock.

Constance had eaten most of her steak, though she didn't feel like eating. But she was afraid of what Ephram would do if she didn't. This was the second night they'd stopped at a Sizzler. The time before they'd had the All You Can Eat Shrimp Dinner and Constance hadn't wanted much so Ephram had jolted her in the Rewards, gave her a flush of pleasure if she so much as looked at the Shrimp, and even more if she ate it, so she did, she ate it, and ate more of it and more of it, and he sat there silently laughing, his jowls shaking, watching her, jolting her with pain if she complained that her stomach was too full, jolting her with pleasure when she ate more, so that even the big guys in the restaurant who could polish off five platesful, even they stared at her when she went back for number seven, and she wanted to cry but Ephram wouldn't let her, he kept making her eat, Constance wolfing the stuff down noisily and rapidly, till she threw up, she projectile-vomited half-chewed shrimp across the table and then he made her eat some of that and enjoy it and everyone was afraid to come over and tell her to stop and then they left, Ephram pasting a hundred dollar bill to the cash register with some of her vomit, "just to pay for her disgusting mess", and she'd tried to run away again and he'd punished her terribly as they drove away…

So tonight she ate her steak.

She looked out the window. Headlights like stars going two by two fell horizontally along the horizon (what was up and what was down? Constance didn't know, she didn't think anyone knew) under a sky heavy with slate and indigo… Nearer were the motel signs, the gas stations and fast food places, this place so like the last town it was as if the day of slow driving hadn't happened, as if they hadn't travelled hundreds of miles.

"Come on, Constance," Ephram said aloud, as the young man Ephram had picked got up lithely and went to the door.

They followed him. Constance wanted to warn him but she didn't try, she knew Ephram wouldn't let her.

And why should she? (Was that her own thought or Ephram's? She wasn't sure). Why should she warn him? She had seen the world as she had never seen it before. Just watching TV with Ephram, she had seen it anew.

"Look there," Ephram had said. "Ethiopia, the government murdering thousands of its own people. Look there, our own government playing footsy with the Khmer Rouge after they murdered millions of innocent people. Look there, the industrialists are poisoning us – everyone knows they poison our air and water and people die as a result, but they feel no remorse, these men, and we are all too greedy for our economic comforts to truly punish them. Look there, how many thousands of rapes every week? How many murders? How many children are locked in closets or used for sex? How many infants used for sex? How many men have made how much money making nerve gas? Look there! The man who invented the Neutron bomb is on CNN, sweating with desire, urging that we use his toy on the enemy! How much murder are we considering, at his behest? Constance, did you hear that? Fifty thousand children die, every day, around the world, from famine! Think of the vast scale of the suffering! In Burma, in Ceylon, in Guatemala, people are murdered at the convenience of the government – but we are safe here, aren't we? Those of us free of persecution – what do we have? If we're not beaten to death by men with baseball bats at our ATMs; if we are not dying of cancer on the fringe of some nuclear power plant, why… what do we have? What is our reward? Television and beer! Then: death! Or worse: abandonment to psychopathic strangers in nursing homes. Slow suffering! The horror of Death! Annihilation!

"Let us at least be ourselves, Constance! Let us at least prey before we are preyed on! Let us reward ourselves and take part in the slaughter instead of being the slaughtered! Let us not mouth the lie that the world was not made for murder!"

He'd said all that. She wasn't quite sure if he'd ever said it aloud.

"Hi," she said to the handsome young man in the Levi jacket. Walking up to him in the parking lot of his motel. "What's your name?"

He looked at her, and at Ephram, then back at her. He swallowed. "Darryl. And uh what's – "

"Eloise. And this is Benny. We're kind of bored – my friend just likes to watch…"

Darryl's eyes widened. Then he hemmed and hawed and flustered for a minute or two. Finally he said, "Wow. That'd be kind of weird…"

"Actually he doesn't have to watch. He could just listen, in the bathroom. People hear you anyway. In the next room."

"That's true. What the heck."

She could tell he was thinking that he'd have a good story to tell his friends, about the kinky old dude and his weird little mistress.

Darryl glanced at Ephram, who was standing a few paces away. Not looking at them, but staring up at a clutch of stars glimmering in a cloudbreak. Ephram stared at stars a lot and seemed to see things in them. Sometimes he talked to them.

"Uh…" Darryl said. "Your place, or…?"

"Yours," Ephram said, not taking his eyes from the shining stars.

Darryl led the way. Opened the door for both of them. Hemmed and hawed a bit more. Constance scarcely noticed, as Ephram was lacing up her brain with soft snakes of pleasure, making the feelings slither down her spine and through her groin and up again to nest thickly over the empty place that she used to call her Heart… so she couldn't feel the emptiness… and she simply took off her clothes and drank some of Darryl's Blue Nun and then let him play with her body for awhile and then she rolled over on top of him…

"Oh yeah," he said, "I like it when a girl's on top."

Constance not thinking, just doing, with Ephram's star-glimmery fingers inside her brain like a hand fitting perfectly into a glove; Constance slipping Darryl's penis inside her (rewarded with a blaze of pleasure that made her arch her back, which Darryl mistakenly took for something she got from him) and reached behind her to Ephram as he stepped from the bathroom to give her the knife…

The room was dark except for the pushy crowding motion of the TV light and a deader shine that came in through the white-curtained window. Not far away, outside, the freeway made noises. Different cars and trucks had their different pitches. Sometimes a big semi sent a faint shake through the building. The light from a Pizza Hut sign – one of the really amazingly high signs towering to be seen from the freeway – shone through the curtains in one corner of the window, and you could see wavery red outlines of some of the letters on the motel room wall. She could make out a P and a Z and an H and a T. Darryl had the wall-mounted colour TV on near the foot of the bed, MTV with the sound turned off, one of those fast-edited designer jeans commercials came on, and then Downtown Julie Brown with her hand on her hip, mincing and prancing, wubba-wubba, and then a Sting video (she wished she could watch it, she always thought Sting was cute… a flash of punishment for that… then a rewarding flush of pleasure as she thought: No, I'd rather fuck this guy and use the knife). And the noise of a crying baby and angry voices and slamming car doors from the parking lot and a thin honking from the freeway; a splinter of light from a truck flashing its highbeams, caught and spun through the Blue Nun bottle…

She cut off his nipples first. The knife was so sharp, they came off easily. The Niagara of pleasure that Ephram sent through him meshed with horror right in the middle of his face and the confusion was kind of funny (wasn't it?), a logjam of expressions and the blood welling prettily in the bluish TV light. Darryl, of course, briefly tried to escape but that was cut short by Ephram's ghost-hands working in the boy's brain, paralyzing him, then giving him a jolt of pleasure, making him giggle and making his face like The Joker, a horrible smile up to his ears almost, pasted there even when she starts to saw up the middle of his stomach with the knife, opening it up like with a can-opener (Next time, Ephram said, we will use a can-opener. and all the time her hips pumping on his cock which stayed hard because Ephram had control of that too, her vagina sucking, milking the semen out of him as the knife pulled the other lifebloods out of the belly and isn't it pretty inside, really, when you look at it just right and feel the molten wax of pleasure up your spine smothering your heart, and Just get into it, Constance told herself, it was the only way to get away from what you were doing, just nestle deep inside the pleasure that Ephram gave you…

Perhaps, Ephram thought, I'm going too far with her too soon… This is the third stupid young man in as many nights and Constance will be losing her brain's capacity for pleasure soon (remarkable how the brain never really lost the capacity for suffering: your delicious irony, my Lord) if he didn't ease up and give her time to restore herself… perhaps put her on some sort of tranquilizer for a few days… Ephram himself feeling the strain of controlling her and the men. Perhaps that strain making him careless, that and his greed for sensation. Three murders in three days along the same route. He really should get rid of the Porsche; he'd found himself putting it off, one gets attached to a fine car. Soon… With luck, the other two bodies hadn't been found yet. Yes, that's it girl, now put the knife in his hands and I'll make him suck on its wet blade so that the blade makes ribbons of his tongue…

Ephram, meanwhile, slipping up behind the girl and sliding his mercifully small member up into her anus.

Ha ha, if her father could see her now!

Ephram wondered briefly if the postcard he'd made her write had convinced the police she was just another runaway. It should have. He shouldn't have sent that one, though he'd made her cross out the signal she'd tried to send – and of course he'd punished her severely for that – but he'd been tired, feeling lazy, and they had no more stamps in the shop and he wanted to get it done so he'd sent it off instead of making another card. She'd scribbled over it well, so it shouldn't be a problem. So, he asked himself, why are you letting it nag at you? Concentrate on the pleasures at hand.

But there was another distraction: Ephram saw something from the corner of his eye, that made him freeze. Was it some errant shadow from the TV set?

He turned and looked, and saw it clearly. His cock shrank inside the girl. No, no shadow, or not a shadow merely: it was the Akishra.

He saw them swarming in through the window, wriggling with hideous purpose, ectoplasmic and urgent with hunger, sending out squirming feelers, scouts trying to locate him. The Astral Protection he'd put on himself was fading or… perhaps the girl had attracted them… perhaps she had some latent Power…

The Protection is not enough, at this close proximity, Ephram thought. They'll sense me. They'll know me.

I won't be enslaved again!

He drew back from the bed, doing up his pants, dragging the girl physically away from the dying man on the bed – and then jolting the man hard with a pleasure impulse, releasing the energy in him that would draw them over…

There. The cloud of wrigglers had drifted through the air, were hovering over the bed, descending to feed. They were a young, blind Mass of Akishra and they hadn't sensed Ephram or the girl yet – or anyway hadn't identified them. They were interested in the transmitter and the boy was transmitting beautifully now, his suffering and pleasure all murkily intermixed. The cloud of Akishra clothing him with their etheric maggotry. Oh Lord, the repulsiveness of their motion, how it ever sickened Ephram.

Now the boy's mind opened. He saw what had happened to him and he perceived the Akishra and his scream made the windows vibrate.

Ephram had got the girl roughly dressed and dragged her out the door. They fled across the parking lot. Behind them someone was shouting. The manager of the motel.

The police would find this particular stupid young man's body. Ephram had to get back to his motel and away before they came out to see who had left this horror… Too bad they couldn't see the Akishra, that'd cloud Ephram's trail, ha ha…

Well, it was not so grave, Ephram decided, when they'd got the car loaded and were away. No one had noticed them running away, evidently, for they were allowed to depart unmolested.

He put the girl to sleep, so that she slumped, snoring, in her seat, and he drove to the next cluster of generic motels and restaurants, for a rest before beginning again…

Alameda

Typical Bay Area weather, Garner thought irritably, as he locked up the house about ten-thirty in the morning, hunching his old brown leather jacket against the moist wind. He went hurriedly to the Econoline van – he'd traded in the Toyota for it, thinking he might need a free place to sleep when his money ran out. He sat behind the wheel, asking himself if there was anything else he should have packed. He kept himself busy that way, with details, so that he didn't think about Constance too much, because if he went crazy he could never hope to find her.

And it was all on him, finding her. It was obvious the police weren't going to be much help. Which was partly his fault: he hadn't written down the license number of that Porsche, when he had the chance. He thought he'd be able to confront the guy and take Constance back. It never occurred to him he'd be struck unconscious before he could utter a word; that Constance would be taken beyond his reach…

Stupid. He should have realized it might be abduction. He should have written the number down. You stupid son of a bitch, he told himself.

He leaned against the van, and took the post card out of his pocket. It was postmarked Fresno, the day before. A picture of the Sunken Gardens. Constance's handwriting on the other side. Dad I'm okay, don't worry and don't look for me. Am with friends. There was one line more that had been scribbled over. Then her signature. He had used a pen-eraser on the scribbled-over line. The result was hard to read, but after looking at it for a long time, he was pretty sure the line under the scribble had said, Please take care of my doggie. That was a code they'd set up when she'd been twelve and he'd got her fingerprints done and they'd talked about avoiding child-snatchers. She didn't have a dog. She didn't even like dogs. Whoever had her, had become suspicious, made her scribble out the signal line.

Of course, Garner had showed the cops the card, pointed out the message she'd tried to plant in it. The Oakland detective had squinted at it and made a wavering motion with his hand in the air. ''Maybe, maybe not. Hard to say what it says. Can't really make it out. You think it was the signal line but to me it looks just as much like Please take care of yourself."

"Why would she cross that out?"

"Who knows? Maybe she thought it would make you mad, like it was patronizing or something. This card seems to indicate to me that she left voluntarily…"

"Then why did they hit me on the head? My kid would never voluntarily leave me lying there on the ground…"

"Maybe she wasn't there, at that point. Maybe – and this is just as likely – you had the wrong room. And whoever it was, was getting loaded – that happens a lot in those motels – and they were tweaking out with crack paranoia and put out your lights because they thought you were busting in to rob them… We just don't have enough to assume she was kidnapped…"

He'd gone to the Alameda police, the Oakland police, and the FBI, and none of them seemed convinced it was definitely a case of abduction and not runaway. But they were "looking into it." Fuck.

And he'd gone to a couple of memorial societies for kidnapped youngsters. Her picture would appear on milk cartons. He'd stay in touch with them.

Now he was going to look for her himself and it was, maybe, as stupid as not writing down the Porsche's license number. It seemed likely they'd continue going south. The guy seemed less likely a drug-dealer, now. Drug dealers just don't up and leave their territory.

Garner looked up at the house. He had a kid from his therapy group house-sitting for him, an act of faith if ever there was one, and he had paid the rent for three months in advance out of the savings he had, and the rest he had with him in traveller's cheques…

Maybe she'd come back when he was gone. She'd need help and he wouldn't be here, he'd be out on some freeway with his face in a wild goose's ass.

James was going to be here. Give the kid some responsibility, taking care of the place, and he'd be here watching the house if she came back. Garner would call the house every day.

James. Garner hoped the little son of a bitch didn't try to fuck Constance if she came back.

He slammed the side door of the '77 van. The door didn't latch, slid open again. He got more of a running start on its rollers this time and slammed it so hard the whole van shook and it stayed shut. He walked around to the driver's side and got in. The van started on the first try and he put himself in the stream of traffic for the freeway. Got onto the 880 headed South to San Jose. First step on the trip to Los Angeles. The sky was clumped with low grey clouds. A faint drizzle slipped across the road from time to time; filmy membranes of dirty water. Precipitation would slow traffic, but he almost wished it would really pour down rain.

He tried listening to the radio but every damn song seemed to have some sinister meaning for him, seemed to mock him about Constance. He remembered having read about the two human monsters who'd kidnapped a number of twelve and thirteen year old girls, tortured them to death, raping them in the intervals, and videotaped the whole thing… One of them had gleefully told the cops in his confession about having put an electric drill into the girl's ear and how she flopped about like a fish on a hook as he pushed it in and…

The tears came painfully out of Garner, coming out so hard and thick they hurt.

The motherfucker could be doing anything to her!

Pray, Garner counselled the drug addicts and the alcoholics. Even if you don't believe, pray. Its called Fake It Till You Make It, Garner'd tell them. Just pray whether or not you believe in God. You'll reach Something. It'll help.

But those little girls in the hands of those total assholes, those human monsters… You knew they'd prayed for help. But had God helped them? Hell, no.

The tears, achingly, ran dry. His face was sticky and hot. He kept driving. Just to make him feel as if he was doing something for Constance…

He thought about Aleutia and the baby, dead on that table. Just two more casualties to tick off on the endless list, two more taps of the calculator button.

The traffic was heavy. Crenellated rows of condos and ranch homes crowded the hills around the freeway, some of the projects with only a thin fence and thirty feet of dirt separating them from the roar of the freeway; many of them only half constructed. He was stuck for a while behind a double trailer semitruck emblazoned Miracle Merchandizing. He knew what that was, he'd seen something about it on the Good Morning show. A business that specialized in lighting manufacture and overnight delivery of hot, media-merchandizing, goods. Big money in Bart Simpson dolls, Bart Simpson keychains. Before that, Garfield – some of the cars around him still had the stuffed cartoon cat stuck to their windows trying to claw its way out, very funny. And lately it was Chomper, the Simpsons' clone show which had the cartoon toddler, Chomper, who ate and drank everything in sight and once, isn't it funny, smoked a whole carton of his alcoholic Mom's cigarettes… Cut to a beer commercial.

And that semitruck trailer blocking his way was in all probability filled to the gills with Chomper dolls, Chomper keychains, Chomper posters, Chomper chewing gum.

Garner had to search for his little girl in this endless sea of irrelevancy and indifference and preoccupied people and deteriorating places. This is crazy, this is hopeless…

Not necessarily, Garner told himself He'd been on the streets himself for twelve years. A crank addict, then a downer addict and alcoholic. And there were ways to find people, down near the street level. If the guy was keeping Constance some kind of prisoner it might be that he'd have to hide himself and her in parts of town where he could get away with it easily. And if Garner was right, the son of a bitch would go to L. A…

Line up the ifs like toy soldiers, move them around the way you want, try to make yourself feel better. It's still just playing with ifs.

It's better than doing nothing.

He wanted a drink. If ever he had a reason to drink, he had one now. How long had it been? How many years?

He was owed a drink.

He laughed at himself, bitterly, and shook his head. Mentally changed the subject.

Suppose Constance had gone voluntarily. Who knew for sure what went on in her head? There was a lot more to her than the California airhead in the pump hairdo and the ankle bracelets and a greater interest in watching Dynasty re-runs than in reading. There had to be so much more under the surface. And in trying to give Constance "her space" all the time, he had maybe lost touch with her completely. They'd talked, they spent time together, but lately it had been superficial. The apparent shallowness of the girl was probably just a result of her being a teenager, with all the stresses of wanting to be liked.

Garner, himself, in high school, had been the school nonconformist, had worked strenuously on not being liked. Had been borderline pathological in his insistence on autonomy. Constance wanted to belong and his stupid prejudice had made him perceive that as shallow, kneejerk conformity. When in fact it was just healthy, human nature. Something the misfit in Garner was never comfortable with.

He ached, thinking about it. He'd lost her. It was easy to hate the bastard who'd taken her. It felt better to lay it all on the prick in the Porsche.

She hadn't run away. He just couldn't believe it. He knew – he knew – that she had been taken.

For no particular reason, he remembered when she was a toddler, the first time he'd taken her into a wading pool, a little plastic pool with the Flintstones in their caveman swimming togs printed all over it, the blue water a foot deep, and she'd been scared of the little pool at first. And why shouldn't she be? A toddler could drown in a foot of water, if she fell face down and panicked. If her Dad didn't watch over her all the time…

The guy might have his hands on her, right now.

To keep from screaming, Garner began a marathon of talking earnestly to God, praying for everything, everyone, as well as for Constance; for himself, he begged for strength and guidance and patience.

It took him another twenty minutes to get around that fucking truck.

Culver City, Los Angeles

"Where the hell did you get that?" Jeff asked, sitting at his breakfast bar next to Prentice. "Isn't it illegal for you to have that shit?"

"Maybe," Prentice said, distractedly, running his finger down the scribbled doctors' evaluations on the photocopies he'd fanned out on the table, "but I was married to her, right?"

"You bribe somebody?"

"Desk nurse. Gave him a hundred bucks which probably went to crack cocaine, from the look of him. It's pretty scary, what I hear about people in hospitals, nurses and doctors and orderlies, using hard drugs. They're gonna be pulling out your organs and selling them on the blackmarket to get drug money or something… Anyway, yeah, the guy photocopied Amy's files…" He tapped his finger on one copy-faded line. "Check it out."

Instead, Jeff got up to make capuccino. He had an espresso machine and a milk-steamer. He was going to be buying a house soon. Prentice felt resentment and jealousy chasing tails through him, and he stuffed it away, concentrated on the admissions form, reading aloud to Jeff. "Patient repeats certain phrases at intervals, eg: The Morman won't let me come home… patient is frequently labile…" Blah blah blah, the usual psychoguff… But check that out: 'The Morman'."

"The Morman?" Jeff said, over the hissing of the steamer. "Like… The More Man, you mean?"

"It says 'the Morman'. But yeah. She probably was saying, The More Man. Like Lonny said." Prentice waited for Jeff to react.

Bingo. Jeff turned, stared at him. "Come on. Mitch and Amy hooked up with the same guy? Bullshit."

"Hey – they both mutilated themselves, right? More or less the same way." Prentice smiled in quiet triumph. "I went to the Pinkertons, I was thinking of hiring them to investigate the whole shebang, but they're too fucking expensive. But – they do traces on credit cards and stuff for a pretty reasonable fee. So I had 'em trace the account she had that Gold Card on – it came from Sam Denver."

"You're shitting me!"

"You know, that's a revolting expression. No, I'm not 'shitting you'."

"Who are you, Miss Manners? Listen, bro – let's go out to the Ranch. No more talking about it, let's do it. Denver's ranch. See if we can find Mitch. I mean, right fucking now. Just look into it. If it doesn't pan out, we go to the cops."

"Just go out there? Just us?"

"Hey – chances are the Denvers are like my old man used to say about spiders: 'They're more scared of you than you are of them.' They won't want any trouble." He sipped his capuccino. Sprinkled more chocolate on the foam. "And I got a gun, bro. I got a bunch a guns. I got a fuckin. 357, they want to play games – "

'You been playing paintball too often, man. Spend too much time writing action pictures. Dirty Harry 's a fantasy, Jeff. But yeah. Let's go check it out. Only I want my capuccino first, with extra chocolate."

Near Malibu

Jeff was driving like a fucking lunatic, Prentice thought. There was a slate of thin cloud over the sky, but it was hot, the light suffused with an eerie sameness over the dry hills, the manzanita and stunted pine and purplish underbrush, the punky stands of yucca spears – all of it sometimes broken up by improbable squares of lushly green, manicured lawn where an irrigated estate or gated cluster of luxury condos wedged in between hills.

The Cabriolet made a razzing sound as it attacked the curves, fishtailing from time to time. Maybe Jeff's way of working up his nerve for the confrontation…

They had directions from Jeff's agent, who used to come out here, years earlier. But Jeff almost missed the dirt road. They were supposed to look for a redwood mailbox on a big, four sided post made of smooth quartz river stones. They saw the post at the last moment – Prentice spotted it and stamped an imaginary brake, yelling, "Shit – there it is!"

Jeff hit the brake and the tyres made crooked marks on the cracked white highway, Prentice grabbing the dashboard to keep from slamming his head into the windshield. "Coulda told me sooner," Jeff muttered.

"Not at those speeds, A.J. Foyt."

They backed up, turned onto the dirt road. There was a little gravel left in its deeper ruts. Jeff paused to look at the stone post. It was almost hidden in high fiddlehead ferns and sage. The wooden mailbox was gone. On the concrete post, the rounded quartz stones glowed faintly in the sunlight.

"Gotta be it," Jeff said. "They really let it go to seed." The car made a noise like a trumpeting baby elephant as he changed gears. They gunned up the road, pluming dust, tailbones banging on the seat springs as the car jounced in the ruts. The trees got higher nearer the top of the hill; there were hoary palm trees, here, transplanted long ago, looking over the shoulders of mistletoe-darkened oaks. Another curve and they came to a high, dust-coated hurricane fence, with a heavily padlocked gate made of the same stuff. Ten yards beyond it was a stone fence and a black, wrought iron gate figured with rusting cherubims holding a bullet-pocked sign that had once said, Welcome. Over the cherubims was a wrought-iron figure of two crossed skeleton keys. The Doublekey Ranch.

Jeff pulled up in the shade of an overhanging bower of roses. Big roses, so red they were almost black. Looking closer, as the dust cloud parted around them, Prentice saw that the roses were overgrown up a dead oak tree; its trunk and lower branches a black, warped skeleton for the fleshy roses.

From the midst of the rose bush came a wet, throaty snarling. No. It wasn't from the bush – why had he thought it was? It was coming from beyond the hurricane fence. Two Dobermans with spiked collars were running alongside the fence, snarling, teeth bared. They jumped at the fence, making it ring like chain mail, throwing their full bodies against it; shaking dust loose with each clank and making both Prentice and Jeff twitch back in their seats.

Rose petals filtered down from above, pattering softly into the car.

The dogs threw themselves at the fence again. Rose petals rained once more. Prentice looked up and saw that vines of another rosebush clung to the top of the fence.

A black man, well over six feet and three hundred pounds, wearing a generic security guard's uniform, stepped from a small guardhouse at the iron gates and shouted at the dogs. They cringed back, wincing as if afraid of being whipped. The guard came striding up toward the fence, a shotgun aslant across his tubby middle, his eggplant pate shiny with sweat, dark glasses strobing. "Ya'll got an appointment?" he bellowed.

Jeff looked at the glove compartment, where his gun was hidden.

Prentice said softly, "Way too soon to even think about it, Jeff."

Jeff nodded. Prentice could see him gather his courage. He took a deep breath and got out of the Cabriolet, ''Hi, how ya doin'!" he called, as the two men approached each other from opposite sides of the metal fence.

'Ya'll got an appointment?" the black man repeated.

Jeff shook his head. "I… I'm Jeff Teiltelbaum. I had word that my brother is here and I need to see him. I'm his legal guardian. His name's Mitch Teitelbaum."

'Mitch Tuttle…?"

"Teitelbaum."

'Lemme call up. I'm sorry about these damn dogs." He turned on his heel, slapping his thigh. "Come on, hounds, up wid me. Lesgo." The dogs trotted after him. Prentice could see a metal rod strapped into the man's belt that might be a cattle prod. He walked laboriously over to the guardhouse and reached in to a wallphone.

Prentice said, "This place is a paranoid's delight." Jeff nodded.

The guard came back three minutes later shaking his head. "Got no Mitch Teitelbaum here – hasn't been here neither. You maybe on the wrong road."

Prentice called, "This is the Denver place, right?"

The guard turned his mirror-glassed eyes toward him. "Surely. But your boy, he ain't here." He turned and walked away with an air of dismissal.

"Could we talk to someone from the house, the Denvers," Jeff began, "or – "

The guard turned back to them but kept walking, backwards. "No sir, not today. Mrs. Denver not feeling good. Can't have visitors. She's just not up to it. I already asked." He turned his back on them again.

At the guard house he hesitated, then turned toward them, raising the shotgun so its barrel rested casually against his right shoulder. Not so casually, really.

Jeff hissed, "Shit, shit, shit, " under his breath as he turned and got into the car. He started the car, backed it up, went slowly back down the road. Making a statement with his slowness: You didn't run us off, I'm leaving because I want to.

"Look, let's go to the cops," Prentice said, when they got to the edge of the highway. "Mitch was out of his gourd on something. Maybe these assholes are giving it to him. He could end up dead, like Amy."

Jeff stopped the car on the verge of the old concrete road. Sat there, staring at it. "Fuck the cops!"

"I know how you feel about them – "

"Especially LAPD. They're total fuckers. And I swore I wouldn't go to them. I swore to Lonny."

"That's just stupid, man. What is this, Tom Sawyer and Huck swearing on the bones of a pirate? For Mitch's sake, let's go to the cops."

Jeff made a long sigh. He coughed, spat dust over the side of the car. Finally, he changed gears so violently Prentice feared for the transmission, and the car bounced up onto the highway. "Okay. Okay, fuck it. Let's try the cops."

Near Malibu. The Doublekey Ranch.

Late afternoon. But it was shadowy in Mitch's room; no light on, and the rosebushes around the window took all the sun for themselves. It was quiet, except for the sounds of ripping wallpaper and, briefly, in the distance, the sound of a car – a sports car, by the sound of it changing gears and gunning away.

Mitch was peeling wallpaper. Starting it with a thumbnail, then peeling it away like the strips of skin he'd pulled from his own ribs, a few days before.

Fucking roses on the wallpaper. Drooping rosebuds between that spiky shape from European shields. Let's see what's under it…

He wasn't really seeing the wallpaper. His head was churning with pictures. Images of hurting himself, cutting himself, the nosing knife in his forearm. He tried to remember how it had started, how he'd got into something that sick. But it was like trying to see through a fogged window. It wouldn't come clear. Not quite.

Just bits and pieces. The More Man telling him, Basically, it's a mystical discipline. It had sounded heavy, then. Now the phrase sounded totally bogus to him. Mystical discipline, bullshit. That kind of talk was supposed to fake him into seeing himself as some messiah type guy. Christ's scourging and crucifixion immediately preceded his exaltation, The More Man had said. And he'd talked about fakirs who laid on beds of nails and saints who whipped themselves all day. But the secret is, if you do it right, it's not painful! Mostly not. When it does hurt, it only hurts you for a while. Once you're in touch with that higher place, you can feel anything. Heal anything. The Spirit will heal you…

They'd been on some terrace at a beachside condo. The More Man in shades, holding Mitch enthralled. I want to make you a star, Mitch – but that takes a godlike transformatian. To be a real superstar takes total discipline. Discipline need not be painful. It need not hurt – it needs only the courage to explore… This body is not your true body, so what you do to it doesn't matter. Your true body is ectoplasmic, Mitch. It's ethereal, a higher thing that cannot be hurt

…

And then he'd given Mitch the Probe, just a big silvery knife. And when Mitch hesitated, this girl just sort of drifted out onto the terrace and, holy shit, it was Jeff's buddy Tom Prentice's wife, Amy, wearing a bikini, tanned but her body with all these mooncoloured marks on her, and she'd taken the knife ( Mitch peeled another long spiral of wallpaper away) and knelt beside him and put her hand on Mitch's thigh – instant hard-on – and, with the other hand started carving her breasts with the knife.

Mitch wanted to vault over the terrace railing and run, when the blood started guttering along the edge of her bikini top, curling down the round sides of her breasts. He saw the look on her face, the most totally awesome ecstasy and he thought, The bitch is sick…

Until Sam Denver said, "Feel what she is feeling. Touch her arm, and it'll come through to you."

"She – no. I can't. She'll stab me."

"No. No she won't, Mitch. I promise you."

So Mitch reached out and touched her arm – and the feeling went into him like a hot wet tongue running over his nervous system. The feeling expanded from there; it encompassed him with a monstrous pleasure.

He was feeling what she was feeling, yes, he could even feel the hot, intense places where the knife dug in – where the pleasure was as intense as the flame of a welding torch, you couldn't look at it directly. He could feel her breasts (peeling another strip of wallpaper away) as if they were his own; could feel the blade slicing them an inch deep here and there…

Could feel his pussy getting wet between his legs.

He wrenched away from her, sick with gender disorientation. But wanting more of the pleasure. Immediately.

"Give me the knife," he said.

The next morning, he'd felt wrung out, used up, depressed. The pleasures took their toll. The wounds? He couldn't feel them – not back then. He felt fear simmering slowly in a steel pot of emptiness.

But by the next night he was ready for more…

"Got some other little things I want you to do for me, first," Denver said. "Just to show us your devotion. Your dedication. There's a certain street…"

Now, Mitch wrenched another strip of paper from the wall and ground his teeth, shook himself, though the movement sent shards of pain spinning through him, to drive out the memory of what the More Man had made him do on that street.

But once you've felt the Head Syrup, The Spirit's Reward, the More Man called it, you'll do anything to get it back.

You want more, the More Man had said, And it's all right to want more. They try to teach us that we should only want a little as it's doled out to us – but it's a lie, a conspiracy to make us slaves to Society, Mitch. The Spirit wants us to have more… and more and more…

The slowed-down sound of electricity crackling. That's what tearing paper sounded like to Mitch, as he tore away another uneven strip of wallpaper. You could smell electricity, a kind of electrical burning smell, when the Reward was coming…

He'd cleared an area of the wall about a yard square, next to the head of his bed. Under it, was just more wallpaper. Another kind of rose pattern. Shit.

He wondered vaguely if they'd punish him for it. Probably not. They probably didn't expect him to be sane.

He had no idea why he wanted to strip away the wallpaper.

On the left side of the flame-shaped patch where he'd stripped the outer layer of wallpaper away, the under-paper showed a long, drip-shaped brown stain.

His hands started to shake, as he tore away more paper on that side, revealing the old wallpaper beneath. More brown stain. Drippy brown stain. Where rainwater had seeped?

No… But he kept clearing it away till he was sure that it was a splash that had come from the bed. You could tell by the way it was splattered outward from the top right of the bed. He pinched a piece of the discoloured underpaper with his finger tips, and brought it to his nose. A smell of rot and iron. It was blood.

He thought, What'd you expect, dumbshit?

But he kept stripping away wallpaper, revealing more and more of the splash – and then a place where the underpaper had been breached. Clawmarks, four of them, ran down the wall here, to the plaster beneath. In one spot exposing a crack in the wall. As soon as he'd exposed it, he felt a little puff of cool air from the crack. And a moment later heard the voices.

And the edge of the crack was outlined in light.

He bent, and pressed his right eye to the crack (an icepick, there'll be an icepick spike coming through the crack into his eye – no, shake that bullshit off…) and squeezed his other eye shut. He could just make out pink shapes moving, in the next room… fleshy pink…

It took a moment for his eye to adjust. Then a piece of the neighbouring room came into focus. A man and a woman fucking on a bed. Fucking without rhythm on the bare mattress. He couldn't make out what they were saying. There was someone else, too, coming into Mitch's narrow field of vision for just a moment, moving to stand by the edge of the bed…

The More Man? He wasn't sure. He could only see an arm, a bit of his side. Then the guy moved back, into the shadows, and there were only the man and woman on the bed.

The couple on the bed were bleeding. They moved in sex like someone crawling across a desert. Like each movement was a fight with exhaustion. Each thrust a heave and a slump, a weak convulsion that was only technically sex. He could make out the knobs of the guy's vertebrae on his back. He looked so skinny, so used up. Blood runnelled down from a torn ear… the ear hanging by a flap…

They were crying, too. Weeping softly, the both of them. "Please," the man on the bed pleaded. "Let us stop. I can't… any more…"

"Yes please, please, please," the woman sobbed. "Just let us rest, we'll do a lot more later. A long, rasping, wracking sob. "Please."

"More," said the man watching from the shadows. "More. More. More. More."

Then the motion of the two on the bed changed. The whole quality of their movement changed. Mitch tasted burning electricity, shivered with lust for the Head Syrup, as the man and woman begin to giggle – hoarse, moronic giggles. Then they began to hump faster, writhing in puppeted semblance of sexual delight.

The woman's leg was twitching… spasming. Her arm flopping like a live fish dropped on hot coals. The man turned his face from her – Mitch couldn't quite see the guy's face but he could see and hear what was coming out of it: a thick vomit of blood.

Vomiting blood but still he humped into her.

Mitch felt the strength go out of his knees. He slid down the wallpaper to the floor.

Then he was up, lurching across the room, throwing himself at the window frame, smashing at it so that glass flew. But he couldn't get it open, it was completely blocked off…

He stared at the splintery geometries of broken glass on the floor by the wall. He could use a piece of glass to slash his jugular…

But then he felt the watcher. He turned, and no one was there, but he could feel the More Man watching him, and he could sense the hand of the Spirit poised over him. Waiting to punish.

They'd never let him kill himself. He'd never be able to get the glass to his throat. The More Man would never let him get away as easily as that…