Wetbones

6

East L.A.

Bugging out on the school bus wasn't hard. That was the easy part, Lonny thought. The bus that carried the work crew from Juvenile Hall to Griffith Park, where they were supposed to spend the day painting park benches, was a standard school bus with the emergency exit back-door. The emergency door wasn't locked and when the armed driver, halfway to the park, got in a shouting match with a UPS truck driver who was blocking two lanes with a sloppy double park, Lonny saw his chance and kicked open the back door and jumped down and dodged through traffic and climbed over a fence and skidded down the concrete embankment into the big culvert containing the skimpy stream that was called The Los Angeles River. He ran down the culvert a ways, then climbed up a drain pipe, went over another fence: crossing into East L.A., into a pretty fucked up barrio where he was going to find Eurydice and bring her out…

He found, instead, Orpheus. And all the time he was thinking of a third person. Mitch. Goddamn that little fucker. Mitch, his baby.

Sometimes you walk along without thinking where you're going; your body knows the way, your mind is someplace else. Lonny had glimpses of the neighbourhood drifting by after he climbed up out of the ''river" and over the fence. Lots of little houses, some of them fanatically neat, with gardens and little fences; others strewn with hulks of cars and trash; clusters of small but noisy brown children who seemed to have been strewn themselves. The barrio cholos low-riding by, checking him out, seeing it was okay, that he had the right shoelaces and scarf for this neighbourhood, making with the power salute or just a nod. All the houses – neat or trashy – were small and cheap, hot little boxes cooking in the yellow brew of the Los Angeles air; most of them marked with graffiti.

He saw all this like a scattering of polaroids. In his mind he was seeing Mitch; was hunching with Mitch under the bedcovers with a flashlight, the two of them seven years old, giggling and talking about where babies come from and then Lonny touching Mitch's hairless groin, showing him things… No. That wasn't Mitch; he was misremembering. It was Gavin, the little boy under the covers, years ago; Gavin, who was a hustler now on Santa Monica Boulevard, the shit-whore giving his ass away for dope to motherfuckers with big cars and small dicks. But Lonny remembered the two of them coupled on the top of Gavin's bunkbed, Lonny thirteen and Gavin only just eleven, never thinking of it as fucking then. Instead it was "just trying some stuff out"; hard to think of it as fucking even later because, if he did, then Lonny would be a fag.

Mitch. More than once Mitch had let Lonny hold him, when he'd been hurting and needed comforting, or when he talked about his tucked-up parents, but

Mitch had never let him do anything else, had never let Lonny try stuff out with him, and Lonny hadn't forced him, had just that once put his hand…

Eurydice's place. He was here. Seeing the crackerbox plaster house with all the busted toys in the front yard where Eurydice and Orpheus and Aphrodite lived with their Holy-Roller aunt. She was an alcoholic, plus addicted to some kind of prescription cough syrup she got for "chronic bronchitis". Still, the woozy old aunt was better for Eurydice and Orpheus than their mom. They'd been moved in here by Children's Services because their mom had tried to sell their asses to get herself some hubba. Fucking crackpoofing cunt.

Their dad was doing twelve in the San Q.

Lonny walked up the concrete flagstones, paused at the bottom of the bowed wooden stairs to look at the yard. The toys in the dead grass and packed clay of the front yard were all grimy and busted, probably had been since the day after they came home from Toys-R-Us. Trucks with the wheels off; Hot Wheels cars embedded into the clay like fossils; splintered day-glo green and orange plastic squirtguns, and dried-up dogshit. And lying with a piece of yellow dried out dogshit nosing up to her head like some kind of giant killer worm, was a Barbie doll, with all its clothes gone and most of its hair ripped out and one arm missing. They were just dolls, but when he saw them like that they always made Lonny feel a little sick and sad.

One of the kids came out onto the slanty wooden porch, Aphrodite, an eight year old black girl in dusty shorts and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt stained with barbecue sauce; she was holding a black baby's hand, the baby just old enough to toddle around. A cousin. Baby with shit-filled cloth diapers pinned onto her, nothing else. Lonny could smell the diapers from here, twenty or so feet away.

"Orphy!" Aphrodite called, into the house. "That boy's here that Eury used to mess wid."

Lonny winced in irritation. He'd never "messed wid" Eurydice. That was Mitch. It was Mitch in love with her, or told himself he was.

Orpheus came onto the porch, a raspberry Bartles amp; Jaymes wine-cooler in his hand. He nudged Aphrodite and the baby back inside. He was a tall, skinny black teenager with a basketball player's muscles. Reeboks and jogging pants and a Lakers muscle shirt and a fake diamond earring in his left ear and a gold chain around his neck with the big gold-plated letters ORPHEUS in the middle.

"Hey man, what'up," Lonny said.

"Yo, Lonny, where's Eury?"

"The fuck you askin' me?" Lonny said. "She's your sister…" Lonny felt a sinking in his gut. Eurydice was missing.

"Mitch's you homie, that why. Lonny, you got you ass thrown in Juvie so you can chill with Mitch. You know where Mitch is, don't tell me no shit. Eury with Mitch."

Lonny spat angrily at a wheel-less Tonka tractor. You get you ass thrown in Juvie so you can chill with Mitch. What was Orphy saying about him? "I came here lookin' for Mitch," Lonny admitted. "I thought maybe he'd be with Eury."

"Was Mitch got Eury fucking with that old dude. Out the ranch. You know where that place is?"

"The ranch? No. I thought maybe he went out there but then I thought, How'd he get out there? There's no bus out there. So I thought maybe he'd come here…"

"You on probation?"

"Yeah," Lonny lied.

"Who you got for a P.O.? Bentley?"

"No." He didn't want to talk about his Parole Officer. Because he didn't have one. "You think she's at that guy's place?"

"Yeah. Denver. She be goin out there yesterday night. I don't know where the fuck it is… Mitch, he know."

"Maybe. But he was in the hospital. Only he ain't there now, I heard. He cruised on it."

The Ranch. Eurydice, now. And Mitch.

Where was it? Where was the fucking place?

West Hollywood

Ephram had to bribe some guy fifty bucks at the door to get Constance in because she was underage but once inside it didn't seem to matter how old she was. A lot of the girls here, and most of the young gay boys, seemed like teenagers.

She'd never been in a disco, if that's what it was. That's what Ephram called it. It was just a long white room with coloured track-lighting and four wall-video screens. Just now the screens showed Janet Jackson – no, Janet's video was just finished, now it was Taylor Dayne. There was a long, curvy, transparent-plastic bar – by some trick of the light it looked as if the people at the far end of the bar were leaning on nothing, on thin air – and there were a lot of tables crammed together, and a small dance floor at the far end. Mirrors on two sides of the dance floor made the room seem to extend onward like another car in a train. On the third side of the dance floor was one of the video screens so that a slightly larger-than-lifesize, two-dimensional Taylor Dayne was dancing with the half-dozen gay boys and hetero girls who rollicked on the dance floor.

Constance was occupying herself with all the details – even the splatter of colours mixed into the black floor tiles – in order to keep from feeling the panic, the fear that came like a swarm of mosquitos, the bad feelings that Ephram punished her for. In order to keep from thinking about Daddy. In order to keep from thinking about the men they'd murdered, her and Ephram.

Most of her mind, she knew, was locked away inside her, a mewling cat in a carrier-box. You had to ignore its muted yowling to get where you were going.

She wanted to go to the bathroom but she was afraid – no, not afraid don't think that… She wanted to go to the bathroom but Ephram would mentally follow her in, and it embarrassed her.

I have to follow you in. Otherwise you might wander off, out bathroom windows or back doors.

Escape? She laughed and sipped her Coca-Cola.

"We won't be taking any young men along with us, tonight, actually," Ephram remarked. "It happens that young ladies come here who work as rather expensive whores. They pick up the moneyed men at the bar here. We'll let one seem to pick us up. There are things I want to try… Best with a woman… A very young one preferably… Thank heaven for little girls, ha ha."

Constance nodded. (Don't think, don't think, don't think).

She sipped her Coca Cola. After a while, the video screen showed the band Poison, with their cockatoo hair and day-glo costumes and the cheap mystery of dry-ice clouds.

She had a thought and instantly hid it away.

From the Journal of Ephram Pixie "for July the 22 199":

It's not enough, anymore. My use of proxie neural pathways to experience pleasures is not entirely protecting me from being used up myself. I have a sense that there is some aspect of the negative astrology, some variant of the hidden constellations that is hidden to me as well as to ordinary men. Something veiled. Could someone be veiling it from me, setting me up for a fall? Who? Denver? The Akishra?

Could it be they've lured me to L. A…?

No. I am Ephram Pixie, master of my destiny as no man else is.

Still, I am feeling enervated. Or at least rather ragged in my enjoyments, sagging in my appetites. Perhaps it is at last time to attempt Wetbones again. If I do, it will attract the Akishra. And that could be fatal.

Or will it – in particular? This is Los Angeles. They feed so widely and so well here. It could well be that the Spirit brought me here so to give me a smokescreen, a place of concealment, where the Akishra will not notice me in the general background of suffering and decadence. So very many emissions here.

It could be that I have lost faith, that I should be trusting the guidance of the Spirit more. It could be that the Spirit plans to exalt me, at last, in this place and that is why I have been guided here. He does seem to be guiding me back to the Engorgement Ritual. But oh! That Ritual is so very taxing. But oh again! How very rewarding it is, once the labour is done, ha ha.

There could be another reason the Spirit is prompting me to Wetbones. It might well be the ideal way to stop any search for Constance in its tracks. When she was twelve her father had her fingerprints registered; there was a police drive on for it, a way to help locate children if they turn up missing, and to identify their bodies if they turn up dead… I saw it in her mind as a hope, back when I allowed her hope. She doesn't need all her fingers to be of use to me. Not really.

I have made my decision.

Wetbones.

Downtoum Los Angeles

Garner had known what the police would say. The verbal shrug he would get. There were literally tens of thousands of missing teenagers in Los Angeles. Most of them were homeless addicts and prostitutes, living in cars and under freeways. Giving his report was just a way to get Constance's name on the LAPD computer.

Now he drove the van West, onto the freeway, glad he wasn't going East; traffic Southeast-bound, on the other side of the freeway divide, was thick as coagulated blood.

He'd spent five hundred bucks on a deposit for a detective agency, a cheap gumshoe who was just another warm body to go about asking have you seen this girl have you seen this girl have you seen this girl, anyplace she'd be likely to turn up.

Of course, he could be wrong about where Constance would likely turn up. And he could be wrong about it even being in this city. And even if it was in this city, the town was so fucking big.

But he'd learned to trust his intuition; he thought that maybe – along with the patterns of incidents and coincidences that made up the flow of life – pulses of intuition were God's Morse Code.

Or maybe he was kidding himself.

He had to stay busy. Had to. So he started on Hollywood Boulevard, showing a display cardboard taped with several pictures of Constance to anyone who'd talk to him. He wandered tirelessly but fruitlessly through Hollywood and the Fairfax and downtown L.A.. He talked especially to prostitutes, trying to get a handle on the local trade in chickens. Who was dealing in young flesh? Where were they?

It could be that the son of a bitch who had her would market her in those shadowy and seamy venues.

He walked the streets for two days, sleeping at night in his van to save money for bribes, before he began to hear the recurrent note. The rumours kept cropping up: The More Man. A rich movie industry sleaze who sometimes scattered largesse on compliant teenagers.

And then he began hearing about the murders. The kids on the street would try to sound knowledgeable about the murders. But all they really knew, apart from the condition of the corpses, was what to call them: Wetbones.

Culver City Los Angels

Prentice was trying not to think A universal skill, a widely applied survival technique: Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and just do what you have to do.

"Jeff – you know where Mitch probably is?" Careful,

Prentice told himself, leaning back in the desk chair of Jeff's office. You don't want to come off sounding like that cop that came over here. That'll turn Jeff against you in a hot second.

Jeff was sitting pensively on the edge of the desk. Afternoon sunlight came in dusty stacks through the cantilevered blinds. "Do I know where Mitch probably is? If I knew where the fuck Mitch was we wouldn't be having this fucking discussion," Jeff said.

Prentice thought: I'm helping him, I really am. This whole paranoid thing is just making a wreck of our lives. Both of us feeding on it emotionally – me because of Amy, Jeff because he feels bad about not taking care of Mitch.

The dreams Prentice had been having about Amy were enough to convince him he had some kind of morbid entanglement with her memory. Best all that were jettisoned..

"Mitch is probably deliberately letting you stew, man," Prentice said. Everything he said was an attempt to convince himself as much as Jeff – an escape from culpability. From the sense of something precious inside him rotting away because he was trying to play along with Arthwright. "I mean, think about it – Mitch is into rock'n'roll. Wants to be a head-bangin' rockstar. Chances are he's hanging out with that crowd on Sunset Boulevard, down by the Whisky, the other clubs down there. I mean – he probably was at Denver's, and then that didn't come to anything, and he split for town."

But what about Amy? Prentice asked himself. Her connection to Denver. Her death.

He squashed the thought. Sometimes you have to just close your eyes and…

"Maybe you're right," Jeff said grudgingly. "But that headbangin' crowd is big, man. How am I supposed to find him in it – if that's where he is.

"A private eye. Go on foot and ask people in the lines outside the clubs. Maybe even see Mitch there. I mean, if you…" He broke off. He was about to say, If you tangle with the Denvers in court you could lose a lot of money – and and make an enemy of Arthwright. But if he said that, Mitch might realize that Arthwright had put him up to this.

Prentice writhed inside. Wrongwrongwrongwrong. The word like a bell pealing in his mind. Wrong.

Jeff hugged himself wearily. "I'm fucking tired of thinking about this. I'll decide what to do tomorrow."

The desk phone rang. Jeff answered it in a monotone. "Yeah. Hello… Yeah, he's right here."

He passed the phone over to Prentice and left the room.

Prentice put the phone to his ear. "Tom Prentice here."

"Hi, 'Tom Prentice here.' It's Lissa."

Prentice's gut did another flip-flop. There was anticipation in it, and fear. "Hi. I'm glad you called."

"Listen – Zack wanted me to invite you to a party he's giving for some of his friends. He's giving it at their place, but he's setting it all up, I guess. Oh and I'm supposed to ask you – it was all very cryptic – how it's going 'with Jeff'? Whatever that's about."

"Uh. Fine." Could Jeff be listening on the extension? No, why would he? "It's taken care of."

"Good – I guess. I'm not in on that loop. Anyway – taking me to a party's a nice cheap date, don't you think?"

"I'd love to take you on the expensive kind." But he was glad he didn't have to, yet. He was veering dangerously close to flat broke. God, he might have to write that video. ''For that matter, I'd take a trip to Baghdad with you in an F-16."

"Good. I like an explosive date. But, in the meantime, Arthwright's party at the Denvers' is on Saturday -"

"It's where? " Unable to hide his startlement.

"At the Denvers'. You're supposed to not bring you know-who. Can you pick me up?" She gave him the time and her address and they exchanged a few more vague innuendoes and he hung up.

Telling himself, This way I can clear up the question of Mitch being out there…

Then asking himself, What are you so scared of?

West Hollywood

"First time I saw a Wetbones body, I didn't want to believe it used to be people. If I believed that, shit, I'd have to puke," Blume said. "Eventually, I did have to puke." He was six inches taller than Garner, but slumped in his chair almost to the same height; he had bushy hair receding with clown-like frontal baldness. A tired, cynical face built around a long, thin nose; the nondescript clothes that private detectives wear. He took another long pull on his beer. "You sure you don't want a beer or something?" he asked Garner. "I don't like to drink alone."

Garner was tempted. He ached for a drink, sometimes, to put out the smoldering anguish of fear for Constance. But he wasn't going to throw away all those years of sobriety for anything so sickly as a mere temptation.

Garner shook his head. "Naw. I'll have a Seven-Up though, if that helps." They sat in a corner booth under a buzzing Felix The Cat clock. Garner wished they'd sat nearer the door. The tavern stank of old beer and a piss-choked bathroom.

"How many of these bodies have you seen?" Garner asked.

"If you can even call 'em bodies… Two."

Blume heaved himself abruptly out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back moments later with a double tequila in one hand and a fizzing glass of soda in the other. He sat down, passing Garner the glass. "They didn't have Seven-Up. Sprite."

"Great. Fine. You were saying…"

Blume knocked back the double tequila in one swallow. Blew out his cheeks. Then shook his head sadly. "If there hadn't been a skull, you wouldn'ta been able to tell it was human. Too much of a mess. Just a lot of… wet bones. Broken up wet bones. Wet with blood and… gunk. Piss and phlegm I guess. Even shit from the busted intestines. Busted bones and guts in the middle of a puddle of blood. No clothes around. It didn't look like it was dug up, neither. Too fresh. Not like somebody'd messed with a grave. You could just see these bones were new. And in one there was this busted skull, and the eye – well, one of the eyes was intact. But no lids…"

Garner swallowed. His mouth was very dry. He took a long drink of the Sprite. His tissues seemed to soak it up like desert sand sucking a raindrop. "Seems to me it could still be… a hoax. Stolen bones from some medical school or… Were there organs?"

"Yeah. Some. What wasn't mushed into… gunk."

"And skin?"

"I didn't see it. But there was a lot of stuff I couldn't quite make out what it was and I didn't wanna look that close."

It's a big city. it wouldn't be her.

"But – why do you bring this up…?"

'They were all young girls, I heard, these bonepiles…" He shrugged. "I don't wanna be insensitive or nothin' but…"

"Any identification of the…?" He waited, heart thudding so hard in his chest he thought that Blume must be able to hear it.

"Nope. That's part of why this thing hasn't really broken into the papers much because they're not connected to specific missing girls and the cops are taking the same tack that you did – that they're stolen bones… I.D. ing them's hard. There are so many missing kids in the L.A. area it's unbelievable."

"Yeah. I know." Garner fingered his soda glass. Stared at the slowly, slowly melting ice. "But you drive around in this town for a day or two – especially when you're from out of town – and you find the statistics about missing kids very believable indeed, Blume…"

"You got any kind of fingerprints on your little girl?"

"Yes. I left them at your office with your boss when I first came in. And I've given the police a stat of them. They should be in the police computer."

"As far as I know they haven't got any fingerprint I.D. on these Wetbones things yet. Hey, don't give me that look, it's a long shot – but we should push the cops into crosschecking it just to eliminate that longshot, when they've got some fingerprints on those bodies… If you can call 'em bodies…"

"You already said that," Garner pointed out, through grating teeth.

Suddenly he felt like he was going to vomit. The smell of the men's room, the stale beer, the reek of booze off Blume himself. He wanted to shout at Blume that he was killing himself with alcohol, an addictive drug that's sold on television to children, sold in advance through hundreds of thousands of beer and wine commercials, but then his automatic guard against self righteousness came into play, and he said nothing, except, "I need some air. Just keep looking for her, all right? I'll call you."

Garner lurched out of the booth, staggered outside, as so many drunks did, coming out of Blume's favourite low-cost boozery.

For a few moments Garner was staggering like a drunk but – he was horribly, terribly sober.

Santa Monica

She was beginning to see pictures in her head that seemed to come from nowhere at all. She knew where they were from, though – not from Ephram, not from God or the Devil. They were from her, the part of her that she couldn't stop from feeling.

Constance was sitting under a lemon tree in the backyard of the little condo that Ephram had rented, sitting in a lawn chair, wearing a white bikini that Ephram had picked for her, and sunglasses she wore as often as he'd let her. Ephram had pushed some buttons in her head and she felt no pain.

Ephram was in the house scribbling in that little book of his. It was the only time he left her alone and she was trying to enjoy it – though she knew he was still watching her in some way, and she mustn't even think fleetingly of climbing over that white wooden fence and running. So instead she was sitting there quietly, seeing herself transfixed by steel poles.

It was sharp, mental image, like a slide projection: Constance with three shiny steel rods, each an inch thick, thrust laterally through her breasts; another transfixing her neck; another through her temples, passing, presumably, through her brain. Constance smiling happily through it all, talking, chattering, saying nothing.

And then it would vanish, this picture, only to be replaced by another: Constance walking through a party, talking to people like she was the hostess, only she had a noose around her neck, already tightened, her face swollen and black, as if she'd already been choked to death, or – no, she wasn't quite dead, she was perpetually on the verge of choking to death, but never did, not quite, she just walked around chatting, shaking hands, hugging people, smiling as she said, "Excuse the rope," in a strangled voice. No one seemed to mind.

And then she saw herself in a steel globe that was just a little bit too small for her body but big enough so that she could wriggle around looking for the escape hole that she knew must be there but she couldn't find She kept trying but still couldn't find it, and the globe was tightening, was getting smaller…

"Constance?"

She'd felt him coming before he'd spoken. "Yes?"

"We're going to go out tonight, we're meeting someone at a motel…"

She nodded. She tried to feel nothing. She was getting pretty good at it…

Lately, Ephram had got into this prostitute thing. First that girl they picked up at the disco, then call-girls chosen from classified ads in the Los Angeles Swingles Guide. Constance could see the logic, that the girls he picked weren't with pimps or madams, they were working alone, and they usually didn't tell anyone where they were going. Or so he assumed. But maybe he was wrong about that. Constance had pointed out that they'd know it was risky going out with all these strange men, maybe some would tell their boyfriends or whomever, have them waiting outside…

But no, Ephram said, they were complacent and too-confident, these girls, and besides he mentally frisked them for traces of accomplices. "These are girls," he said, "one can snip off at the stem – and no one will notice them missing in a tree already heavy with rotten fruit, ha ha."

None of the girls were surprised to see Constance with Ephram; with the trick. They were used to threesomes and foursomes.

Sitting with Ephram in a thickly padded blue vinyl booth in a dark corner of the Howard Johnson's cocktail bar, Constance felt a squeezing pleasure of anticipation and excitement. For a moment she thought that Ephram was prompting the sensations, but then she realized that, instead, those feelings were her own, were coming up out of her unbidden. And that meant, she thought with a surge of joy and relief, she was becoming what Ephram wanted her to be. There would be less punishment now – and she could be another person, a new person, so that the Constance she had been need no longer be responsible for the things she'd done; need not exist at all. The old Constance could die… on the vine. Like rotten fruit.

The latest girl was a little overweight, and Constance could see some anxiety in her eyes as she approached the booth, wobbling a little on her high pumps, carrying an overnight bag that would have her working lingerie in it. The girl was nervous the old man would reject her because she was overweight, and she'd lose the great wad of money he'd promised her. She had lots and lots of fake blond curls tumbling over her bulgingly exposed cleavage; she had a deep-dark tan and capped teeth and a tighter than-skintight short black dress. And a big butt.

Ephram beamed at her. "My dear! You must be Naomi! Sit down and I'll get you a drink…"

There were drinks and there was small talk and an envelope passed between Ephram and the hefty prostitute. Constance felt her pussy getting wet looking at the girl, imagining what Wetbones would do with all that flesh.

This was just getting better and better, Constance thought: now I'm responding. Getting excited thinking about it. That ought to please Ephram.

She could feel Ephram's glow of approval like a space heater in a cold room.

The girl made a few dumb, sexy remarks about Constance, stuff she probably just felt obligated to say. But Constance liked hearing it. She was beginning to enjoy female attention. It was something she'd never have thought herself capable of six months ago the very notion would have made her burst out, "Gross!", but compared to most of the recent innovations in her appetites, it was minor.

After a couple of Margaritas, Naomi was animatedly talking about herself, on and on. Constance wondered if Ephram was already priming the girl's pleasure centres. "Oh anyway," Naomi was saying, "I met this guy you know? Who's, like, a movie producer? And he's, like, really into me? And he wants me to, um, audition for his next movie and I'm all, Oh listen I wasn't born yesterday but he's all, No really, I'll get you an appointment right now let's call up my secretary right? And, like, I knew it would happen eventually because I've always had this higher destiny. That's what the girl who does my charts says, You have a higher destiny."

Ephram smiled at that. "I'm quite sure you do, indeed, Naomi. Ha ha."

Naomi chattered on, "And, like, I always knew I'd be something special anyway, even without seeing it proved on my charts? You know? Because, um, like, I've always had this talent for acting stuff out – I always do it with my clients, they love it, I get in all these kind off like, characters the clients want and certain outfits – I have all these costumes – and I can just be like, these people, like I'll be Elvira – you know, Elvira from, like, on TV? And I'll pretend to be Elvira with a blackwig and a black dress and they ask me, Come on, you really are Elvira and you do this on the side right? And I say no, but I've always had this talent…"

Finally Ephram got a glazed look in his eyes that meant the girl was going to die soon. He paid the bill and took Naomi by her plump, silver-ringed hand and, still chattering, she followed Constance and Ephram out and across the parking lot and up to the second tier of the motel and into number 77 and Ephram put on the Adult channel. The girl didn't mind that at all, it just started her talking about how she'd acted in an adult video and knew some of those girls and how the director always said she was the one with real talent… she'd always had this talent, this knowledge of her special destiny…

Ephram toyed with her in the room for awhile, jolting the girl with pleasure, little jolts, which she attributed to Constance's touch. After a while Naomi stopped chattering, and they slipped into an unreal subworld, smoky with a pink fog that seemed to thicken out of nowhere, clouding the room with a fragrance that was both floral and epidermal; an insulated retreat where Naomi's black lace crotchless lingerie was the requisite uniform of simply existing here, and where the only window was the TV screen with its writhing pixel-patterned flesh and sodden connections and false sighs and cheap hip-hop soundtrack; and where the only constant beyond the probing of slick membranes and swollen clitoral nodes and Naomi's great bouncing and swirling breasts, was the dumpy little man masturbating in the corner; the little man was simply there, ever there in the background, as the two girls played on the bed – the prostitute, normally exactingly conscious of the ticking away of her mental taxicab meter – coasted with only a murmur of wonder down into a nautilus-shell retreat from the currents of time.

And the little man in the background was the source of nourishment and renewal, a ridiculous and divine fixture of this self-contained universe…

So it went until Ephram himself broke the spell by declaring that he wanted to do something special outside.

"Outside?" The girl seemed puzzled. She'd forgotten that Outside existed. Now the recollection of the outside world came back, because Ephram permitted it to. She nodded – and then frowned. She had mixed feelings about the proposition. She was intrigued, for financial reasons, because here was an excuse to ask a lot more money, but also dismayed because of the risk. "We could get busted for that. Now if it was off in the country somewhere… I did this video once, I was so good in it too, we were like naked cowgirls you know? And uh -"

As Naomi chattered, Constance, knowing Ephram's mind, was dressing the girl, smiling and nodding and tugging her dress onto her – grunting with the labour of it. At the same time Constance focused on the waves of pleasure Ephram sent through her, taking refuge in them. She needed refuge because at the mention of outside, the place for the Engorgement Ritual, her earlier mellowness began to slip away and she felt herself drying up inside, the familiar hollowness growing in her, the feeling that came when she was being used a little too much… being used up in the effort to insulate her from the monstrousness of her complicity…

Soon they were all dressed and it was the world that was naked around them, the exposed flank of the night making Naomi blink with confusion as they strolled up the alley. Naomi only vaguely articulating her misgivings, talking about "the shoot in the country" and how they did it and the "professional way to do outdoor stuff" but never really carping because Ephram wouldn't allow it, Ephram had his fingers on her control centre, giving only little punishments and big rewards.

The spot Ephram had picked out earlier in the day was in the parking lot of a healthfood bakery in a residential block of Venice just ten minutes stroll from the Howard Johnson's motel/bar/restaurant.

To either side, as they walked up the gravel alley, were houses with wooden backyard fences over which peered small palms and citrus trees and sunflowers. There was a faint scent of the sea from just three blocks to the West, and there was a rather cloying odour from some summery blossom calling out hopelessly in the darkness for fertilization. They heard a whisper of passing cars out on the street and, from the houses, the occasional murmur of voices as people on terraces drank beer over the remains of their charbroiled chicken. They heard them, but saw no one; and no one seemed to see them.

The bakery's parking lot was asphalt with a sprinkle of gravel and it was secluded by cinderblock walls on three sides. There was one yellow utility light burning over the empty lot, and no sound at all from the bakery. An odour of yeasty dough and molasses lingered. Constance found the smell sickening.

Ephram had brought along a buck-knife, this time. Constance wondered why; he'd never bothered with a knife on one of these expeditions. He was just unfolding it as they stepped into the lot. The girl hadn't noticed. Naomi was looking around, giggling nervously. ''Oh wow. I guess this'll be okay. Yeah, you know some people just kind of get off on doing it in weird places and I can, you know, get off on anything, I guess that's my ability as an actress -"

Constance nodded and smiled and undressed her, right here under the yellow, moth-haunted light, and under the few stars that could be seen through the smog. Ephram was speaking, now, droning to stars behind the stars, and to the Spirit, speaking in a language that sounded like something from India but wasn't quite. The girl looked at him in sheeplike puzzlement until her eyes lit on the knife in his hand. She opened her mouth. Then shut it and looked around for her clothes and bag. Constance could see she was planning to scoop up her clothes and run. The hollowness in Constance ached at this and she almost found herself warning the girl but then a stroke of deep pain and brutal nullity swept through her, Ephram punishing her, telling her, Say nothing. It could be you and not her.

Naomi went for it, grabbed at her clothes, started to run. Ephram tripped her, though he stood seven feet away. She stumbled and fell, making a cry like a little girl hurting a knee roller skating. Ephram let her get to her feet, then he called down the Spirit thing, whatever it was. You could almost see it, though it was invisible, it displaced the air and you could just make out a flailing tracery in the murk swarming over the girl, something almost like a translucent tube but, really, more like a great mouth and throat; a mouth with feelers furring its lips and no face or head to set the mouth in, just the cupping, the wet enclosure and the quavery lines…

Closing around the girl. Her heavy breasts and belly instantly compressing. The Spirit directed by Ephram to close invisibly around her. Encompassing Naomi head to foot. Flattening her breasts, her buttocks, her shoulders and thighs. Squeezing and twisting, like wringing a wet cloth. Squeezing the girl's insides out -

Out through her own mouth. Squeezing her insides out through her mouth.

Now it looked as if she was caught in some small tornado, and there was a paroxysm of movement in the air as Naomi turned inside out, bones and cartilage, soft tissues and hard, breaking and pulping and jetting out through her mouth, like some kind of perverse birthing labour, her mouth the vagina that squeezed out the fetus of her insides as if her guts had grown in the womb of her skin all these years -

Naomi imploding and then exploding, some of her squeezed out through the ends of her fingers, niftily destroying the fingertips and their prints, each splayed finger shooting out its blood and bone like some fireworks effect before flying into red-rag flinders; some of her bursting out through the nipples, her breasts exploding from the sudden deepsea pressures Ephram had created in her body, the ripples flying off like champagne corks, the breasts emptying themselves into the air like foaming cherry-champagne bottles. Her womb expelling out through her vagina; other entrails blasting into confetti from her rectum. Most of the rest of her – including skull, brains and torso – shattered and forced out through her suddenly-flexible mouth. A hundred and sixty pounds of pulverized woman erupting, then funnelled downward by the Spirit membrane to the growing puddle on the tarmac…

And in the process pulverizing every nerve in Naomi's body, the implosion sending signals that were both monstrous and exquisite out to Ephram, sensations routed through Naomi's nervous system before it shattered, an explosion of feeling transmitted to Ephram, who absorbed most of it with a gasp of reeling ecstasy, before passing on a measured portion to Constance.

Constance felt it hit her in waves of liquid scintillations, sensations beyond pain and redefining pleasure, and she was, for a moment, satiated, her hollowness filled, the thundering and all encompassing pleasure beyond pleasure of drinking the crushed winelike essence of one complete entire human being, drinking psychically, so briefly and tantalizingly making herself whole by induction of someone else's wholeness… Naomi's whole body a swollen sexual organ crushed in the etheric vagina of Ephram's telekinetic bond with the Spirit… Crushed like a grape and like a grape squeezed from its skin, turned inside out and left in an oozing wreckage to make the asphalt wet and sticky…

A puddle of blood and broken bone and pulped flesh – and a garnish of blonde hair, like a pelt slashed from some fantastic fur bearing animal…

Constance had forgotten about the knife until Ephram made her kneel beside the wreckage of Naomi. Until Ephram took hold of Constance's left hand and flattened it out on the tarmac next to Naomi's steaming remains, so that Constance thought: At long last, he's going to kill me.

Constance was beyond struggling – especially now, in the aftermath of Wetbones, drunk on Naomi, stoned on the tsunami of sensation that had roared through her. She was pliant as a Gumby in Ephram's hands.

Let him kill her. It was a good time for it.

But instead he pressed the knife home on her ring finger, cutting it all the way through, below the second knuckle. Sawing away at the rubbery shred of skin remaining. Tossing the finger into the heap that had been Naomi – along with the gold CONSTANCE necklace he'd taken from her, weeks before.

Constance felt no pain through all this – he was pushing her cerebral buttons to prevent that, so she wouldn't thrash about – but the hideous crunch of the knife breaking through her finger bone reverberated through her, brought her horribly back to herself, and she seemed to see the wretched puddle of Naomi's pulverized flesh for the first time and thought she recognized the torn and flattened remains of a face in the midst of it, looking emptily back at her.