I wheeled around.
Buddy stood blocking the door.
In his hand was a .38 snub, the barrel pointed at my chest.
I showed him my palms. “Whoa! Easy now, Buddy.”
“I didn’t mean for you to see this, Joe. I was gonna fix this one myself.”
I nodded my head towards the body in the tub.
“It wasn’t blackmail, was it?” Which meant—shit—there was no fifty gees.
Buddy didn’t answer.
“And Ramona?” I said.
This explained her—his—mysterious disappearance.
“Jesus, Buddy … How many have there been? How many others?”
His lips teased into a smirk. Something terrible glinted in his eyes. I may have removed the gerbil from his ass, but there was another animal inside Buddy Mortimer, a wild beast with sharp fangs and insatiable appetites.
“You gotta understand, Joe. I need these things. All the happiness and joy I’ve brought to people through the years, it’s not too much to ask. Hell, I deserve them! Is the world really gonna miss trash like this?”
He wrinkled his nose, shook his head prissily.
“Now,” he said, “are you gonna help me fix this?”
I glanced at the gun in his hand.
“Whatever you say, Buddy.”
“Go fetch a hatchet, a saw and some garbage bags from the garage.”
He considered the body in the tub. “Four oughta do it.”
But it turned out three were all we needed.
By the time I was finished, no one would’ve guessed the bathroom was a murder scene. The place was spotless, every tile gleaming white. The tools I’d used to hack and saw the masseuse into pieces had been scrubbed clean and set to dry. The three bulging garbage bags were placed neatly next to the door.
I laid Gerry to rest inside a Ritz cracker box casket. Vacuumed the bedroom carpet, made the bed with fresh sheets. Buddy cleaned the booze and blow from the nightstand, and packed his sex toys back into his suitcase, including that damn squeaky cock, and the cat whip he’d strangled the kid with. Throughout it all, Scamp McRascal smiled from his perch in the corner, a silent accomplice.
We drove my hire car to a spot in the woods Buddy knew. Dumped the kid’s remains in the river. As we watched the garbage bags sink, I wondered how many other times Buddy had been to this spot; maybe every time he visited his family?
“Now …” Buddy said, “There’s just one last thing to fix.”
He turned towards me with the gun in his hand.
I’d already resigned myself to how this was going to end.
But instead of plugging me, he said, “Gerry.”
I frowned. “But—Gerry’s dead.”
Buddy grinned. “My granddaughter’s only six-years old. You really think she’ll know the difference between one fucking gerbil and another?”
* * *
Buddy waited in the car while I went inside the pet store alone. He didn’t want to run the risk of being star-spotted buying a gerbil. People might leap to the correct conclusion. He took my cellphone before letting me out of his sight. “Wouldn’t want you calling the cops.” Or the men in white coats with the butterfly nets, I thought. But he needn’t have worried. After hoovering Gerry from Buddy’s ass, I was hardly thinking straight to begin with; dismembering the masseuse had pushed me right over the edge, driven me blood simple.
I returned from the store carrying a small box with a perforated lid. I climbed back in the car and gave Buddy the box. He prized up the lid, peered inside and grinned. “Any problems?”
I lied and told him, no.
We drove in silence back to Golden Elm Lane. I pulled up outside #141. “You done good today, Joe.” He made it sound like I’d passed an audition. And maybe I had. “About that fifty grand we talked about—”
I dredged up my voice, “Forget about the money.”
He frowned at me.
“All I want is out,” I told him.
“Out?” He looked at me in stark surprise. “You mean, leave showbiz?”
I nodded.
He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the lid of the gerbil box.
“You wouldn’t ratfuck me now, would you, Joe?”
I glanced at the box in his lap and shook my head.
“Because I go down, I’m taking you with me. You think people will believe you only ever helped me dump one body?”
“I understand.”
“Fine. You want out, you’ve earned it, I guess.” He studied my glazed expression with something like grandfatherly concern. “Give it a few days, Joe. All this’ll seem like nothing but a bad dream.” He winked at me. “You’ll see.”
He started climbing from the car. “Buddy?” I said.
He glanced back at me.
“Break a leg on Wake Up, America.”
He grinned. “You know I will, kid. Don’t forget to tune in.”
Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world …
* * *
The next morning, slumped at the bar in the airport lounge, waiting for my flight home, I necked my beer, ordered another, and thought about the run of bad luck and worse life choices that’d led me to work for a monster like ‘Uncle’ Buddy Mortimer. I wondered about my other celebrity clients; what skeletons were they hiding in their closets, what dirty secrets were they keeping from their own fixer? I glanced at my haunted reflection in the back-bar mirror. Was I doing the right thing not calling the cops? Then I remembered my visit to the pet store …
It clearly wasn’t the first time the storekeeper had been complicit in the cover-up of a deceased pet. Like me, she was a fixer. She’d peered inside Gerry’s Ritz cracker box casket, recoiled slightly at the stench, but to her credit, let it slide without comment. “One brown female gerbil.” She went to find a ringer.
Before I could tell her I believed Gerry had originally been white—
I suddenly registered what she’d said. “Female?”
“And by the looks of her,” the woman said, “very recently pregnant.”
Nursing the dregs of my beer, I stared intently at the airport lounge’s TV screen.
Wendy Wang was welcoming Buddy and Scamp to the Wake Up, America couch. Buddy took a seat, perching Scamp on his lap. Buddy’s autobiography was displayed prominently on the coffee table. The old man’s voice cracked with emotion as he described to Wendy Wang the living hell of his secret life as a keisterer. As Buddy recalled his time in rehab, and his painful journey towards self-enlightenment, Scamp reached up a spindly arm and a brushed a tear from his master’s cheek. Even Wendy Wang choked down the lump in her throat.
“Do you have anything to say to the children of America?” she coaxed him.
Buddy took a deep breath. “Yes, Wendy, yes, I do.”
The old man cleared his throat, staring soulfully into camera, steeling himself to deliver the heartfelt apology that would win him America’s forgiveness—
Then he suddenly sat bolt upright, the color bleeding from his face. Scamp’s jaw dropped open, his glass eyes rolling spastically back in his head. Buddy shuddered on the couch, wild-eyed, breaking into a sweat that soaked through his snazzy suit. His lips trembled as he cut a long foghorn of gas.
Wendy frowned in concern. “Uncle Buddy? Is everything—?”
Buddy clutched his gut and bellowed in pain. Then he sprang to his feet and flung Scamp from his wrist, the puppet flopping lifelessly across the coffee table. Screaming, Buddy started yanking at his clothes, tearing his pants down, ripping off his underwear. Wendy Wang cried out in horror as Buddy nakedly squatted and shat a shower of hairless pink baby gerbils into every home in America—
The live TV transmission cut to static. Then a PLEASE STAND BY card appeared. Muzak played. A crowd of people thronged the airport lounge bar around me, staring at the TV in shocked silence.
I raised my glass to Gerry aka Geraldine, and said:
“Come back from that, Buddy, you sonofabitch.”
<
<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
Writers are often encouraged to “write what you know,” something which may alarm readers of Foreign Bodies, my story about a Z-list Hollywood fixer, a sleazy children’s TV entertainer with a dark secret, and a gerbil named Gerry. The basic idea came to me while watching Ray Donovan. I remembered the urban legend about Richard Gere and the gerbil and I wondered how Ray would handle the situation if the gerbil became … stuck. Regular readers of my work will know that I do not shirk when it comes to research. They have come to expect a certain gritty realism from titles such as Jesus in a Dog’s Ass, Damn Dirty Apes, and Tijuana Donkey Showdown. So how far did I take my research this time? Sadly, not as far as I would have liked; as a consequence of researching those stories, I have found myself banned from my local pet store, blacklisted by my veterinarian, and forbidden from keeping small animals. But I’m a stubborn SOB, not easily discouraged. I considered improvising with one of my baby daughter’s plush toys. She has a miniature chimpanzee that I estimated to be approximately the size of Gerry the Gerbil. Then I remembered the advice Sir Laurence Olivier gave to method-actor Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man: “Why don’t you try acting, dear boy?” The plush toy was spared. I used my imagination … or did I? Because that’s something else about writers—you can’t believe a damn word we say.
ADRAMELECH
SEAN PATRICK HAZLETT
From L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future
Editor: David Farland
Galaxy Press
I dreamt of a peacock. Not the majestic fowl in all its pomp and beauty, but a twisted and perverted chimera. Blackened, burnt, and torn plumage radiated from its serpentine form. Jaundiced eyes, both human and animal, infested its spotted feathers. Each eye shone with what struck me as a keen and malevolent intelligence.
I woke to find myself scribbling arcane symbols in my daily ledger—strange, indecipherable glyphs. Though executed by my own hand, the writing was more precise and beautiful than mine. It was so small, I considered using a magnifying glass to make out the wedge-shaped marks. My phantom hand had filled all two hundred pages with this inscrutable script in the course of one night.
As I turned the pages to marvel at this prodigious effort, I stumbled upon several revolting illustrations. Children boiling in kettle pots, inverted crucifixions, and the dismemberment of babes—these were but a few of the horrors I witnessed on the ledger’s sacrilegious sheets.
As I leafed through the tome, a crushing sense of melancholy suffocated me. It was as if a sickly film of somber gray had occluded my vision. After turning the book’s profane pages, it took all the energy I had to rise from my bed.
I should’ve burnt the accursed book on the spot, but its artisanal quality was unrivaled. Despite its corruption, it had a dark beauty that made it impossible for me to feed it to the flame.
The urge to destroy the blasphemous text waned, while my curiosity about its contents waxed. So I wrapped the book in burlap and brought it to my dear friend, Alastair Moorcock, Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at the University of Glasgow.
A Christ-fearing man, I had never resorted to outright deception before, but I feared Moorcock would name me a madman if I’d told him the truth. So instead, I concocted a story about how I’d uncovered the ledger in some flea-bitten apothecary shop in West London.
Surrounded by dusty books lining his walls or arranged on the floor in haphazard piles, Moorcock cultivated an aura of aristocratic intellectualism. With a keen eye and a strong sentimentality for the past, he refused modern conveniences, preferring the illumination of candlelight to one of Edison’s incandescent light bulbs.
“Where did you really find this?” he demanded, his waxed whiskers vibrating as he stared intensely at me from his cramped study.
“What do you mean?” I said, playing coy.
“This text is written in Sumerian cuneiform, in ink, and on a modern ledger, not chiseled on a stone tablet.”
“That is rather unnerving,” I admitted.
“If I may ask,” Moorcock continued, “which apothecary shop sold you this forgery? I should very much like to meet the shopkeeper. He seems to be an exceptionally well-educated man. Only a handful of academics possess the scholarship to identify these glyphs; even fewer know enough to translate, let alone write them.”
I lowered my head, embarrassed. If I continued this charade, Moorcock would summarily expose my lie. Then I’d get no help from him at all. So I confessed. “My deepest apologies, Professor Moorcock. I didn’t find this at an apothecary shop. I composed it last night. The truth is so preposterous I reasoned you’d more likely accept the lie. Regardless of the text’s origin, I very much require your expertise.”
His eyebrow arched. His jaw tightened. “Mr. Brooks, how is it you’re incapable of reading something you wrote?”
He had a point. So I tried a different approach. “It matters not how this ledger came to be in my possession. What’s important is that we decipher its contents. You’re the first and only person I’ve sought for guidance, because I’m convinced that your curiosity will outweigh your concerns about how I acquired this book.”
Moorcock cupped his chin in his hand in what appeared to be a moment of consideration. “You didn’t steal it, did you?” he asked in a manner suggesting that’s exactly how he thought I’d come by it.
I smiled and shook my head. “Of course not.”
“Very well then. Let’s have a look,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. He opened the tome and squinted at the first page.
“Here,” I said, handing him my magnifying glass.
He took it without saying a word and began his examination. He traced his index finger across the page in a steady hand. As he read, his eyes widened.
Then they rolled back into his head until I saw nothing but their whites. He raised his head, turning away from the ledger. He smiled in a most unsettling manner.
“And so it begins,” he cackled. “For your assistance in this life and for your eternal servitude once you pass beyond death’s veil, I will grant you the power to inhabit the bodies of others. What say you to my offer?”
Moorcock’s transformation was so strange and so abrupt that I hesitated, unable to formulate anything resembling a coherent response to this rather unnerving query.
“I’m sorry, Professor Moorcock, I don’t understand.”
“Not Moorcock,” it said, “Something else. Something far older. What say you to my offer?”
“No,” I said without wavering.
When I tried to elaborate, I found my ability to draw breath thwarted. I struggled for air, desperately opening and closing my mouth like a herring flailing on the slick deck of a trawler.
“What about now?” it said, grinning.
I fought and I prayed and I panicked and I tried to weep. But nothing would bring me air. As patches of hazy blackness obscured my vision, I nodded in submission.
With that, Moorcock collapsed. Shaking his head like a befuddled drunkard, he slowly rose back to his feet. “My God,” he said, “you must burn that tome, immediately.”
I shuddered at his suggestion. Once more, I couldn’t bear to contemplate the ledger’s destruction. The book was a foul thing, but one of exquisite splendor, and it hinted of shuttered secrets I despaired to learn. There were still too many unanswered questions. What had possessed Moorcock? With whom or what had I made a bargain? Could it be undone?
“No, I can’t. We can’t. There’s still much to learn from this text,” I pleaded.
Moorcock scowled. He lifted the foul ledger from his desk and held it over a candle’s open flame.
“No!” I yelled. Then, from Moorcock’s own eyes I watched my body collapse. I yanked the book away from the flame and placed it on the floor next to my still-breathing human husk. I sat in Moorcock’s chair. Then I returned to my own body and snatched the ledger before standing.
Moorcock regarded me with an expression that st
raddled the thin line between awe and horror. “What have you done, sir?”
“You have no right to destroy my property,” I replied.
Pointing at the tome, Moorcock said, “That thing is an abomination. You saw what it did to me.”
I tried to ignore his outrage. “Please, tell me what you learned. I must understand what just happened,” I begged.
He brooded behind his desk. “Get that thing out of my sight and never come here again.”
“Done,” I said. “But please, for the love of God, help me understand what knowledge you gleaned from your brief reading.”
Moorcock paused, then said, “Return to London and call on Sir Willard Hilton. Show him your ledger and inquire about the Dictionnaire Infernal. Good day, Mr. Brooks.”
With that, I grabbed the ledger, left his study, and returned to London by rail.
___
I was to meet Sir Willard Hilton in a modest pub about half a block away from the electric adverts illuminating Piccadilly Circus’s thoroughfare. I entered the establishment, happy to find shelter from the cold and rainy night.
It was always night for me. Since I’d birthed the ledger, I’d become a nocturnal thing, preferring the solace of shadow to the loud and arrogant face of the sun. Even the moon, whose source of light was the sun’s reflection, was something I shunned.
I collapsed my umbrella and removed my bowler hat, taking in the tiny pub’s ambience. The establishment was little more than an alcove, carved into the bone and sinew of London’s West End. The tables were roughhewn and discolored, pitted oak slabs from years of use and neglect.
“What’ll it be, sir?” the portly barkeep said.
“I’m just here to see someone,” I replied.
“Best you be seeing them elsewhere,” the man said, leering at me. “Only have space for paying customers.”
I balled my fists. Fantasies of ripping out the man’s throat filled my mind’s eye. I had to blink twice before I was able to regain my composure. “Fine,” I said. “A glass of whiskey will do.”
“What kind?” the man said.
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