Company Town (Quinn Henaghan Chronicles Book 1)

by Paul Neuhaus

  That was exactly the response Quinn had hoped for. “Thanks,” she said. “You look like a million bucks.” Molly did look like a million bucks. Her dress was pink and she wore flats that exposed her perfectly feminine feet.

  Blank stepped back and took an orbit around Henaghan. “See? See what a fabulous ensemble can do for a gal? This is perfect. It’s simple. Right on the money.”

  Quinn covered her mouth, blocking her smile. “Thanks,” she said from behind her hand.

  Molly took the hand away and held onto it. “There’s a neat Vietnamese place around the corner from here. Do you maybe wanna not go there?”

  “I’ll drive since you’re the girlie-girl.” Then she stopped, processing what the brunette had said. “Not go there?”

  Blank grinned. She nodded.

  “I—”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” Molly said, pulling Quinn through the house. As she did, she blurted a tour. “That’s the living room. There’s the kitchen. That’s my empty antique birdcage. Over there is the bathroom. Let’s check out the bedroom.”

  Quinn was vibrating with excitement. So much so she thought the blood rushing to her head might make her dizzy. “I’ve never done this before,” she said.

  “Okay by me,” Molly replied, pulling Quinn into the bedroom and locking with her in a full French kiss. The taller woman, ran her hands up and down Quinn’s body and Quinn kicked off her high heels. “Wait,” Molly said, laughing. “Now you’re tiny.”

  “You’re making me self-conscious,” Henaghan said around Blank’s hungry mouth.

  “Sorry. Let’s go with ‘I’m gigantic.’”

  “You are,” Quinn said, letting her own hand rest on one of Molly’s ample breasts. Molly reached around and began undoing the buttons on the back of Quinn’s dress. When she’d gotten them all, she slid the garment down around Henaghan’s shoulders. Remembering the marks on her torso, Quinn panicked, taking a step back. “Wait,” she said. “I— I have scars.”

  Blank shook her head, wide-eyed, pupils dilated. “I do not give a fuck,” she said and Quinn allowed her to remove the little black dress.

  When the sun came up, both Molly and Quinn stirred. Molly was tucked under Quinn’s arm with her head on Quinn’s chest. “Weren’t you supposed to make me breakfast in bed?” she said.

  “We hadn’t discussed it,” Quinn replied.

  Blank adopted a tone of mock high-maintenance. “I shouldn’t have to tell you these things, Quinn. You should just know.”

  “Mmm. That’s a little too girlie-girl.”

  Molly laughed without raising her head. “I know. I’m just fucking around.” She ran her fingers significantly over Henaghan’s lips. “I should make you breakfast in bed.” Then her hand went down to Quinn’s bare belly. After a few moments sitting in the near dark, the older woman said, “Can I ask you—” she said.

  “About the scars?”

  Molly said, “Mm-hmm.” As Quinn spoke, Blank traced her fingers over several of the little circlets near Henaghan’s belly button.

  “I—” The younger woman began then stopped. “When I was—”

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t mind. I don’t mind telling you. I— She wanted me to be something I wasn’t.”

  “Who did?”

  “My mother. She stabbed me. With a pen knife. Because she wanted me to be something else.”

  Molly sat up on one elbow and looked Quinn in the eye. “Your mother did this to you? Where was your father? Was he not around?”

  “He was around. He wanted the same thing she wanted, but I could tell he didn’t want her hurting me. He never stopped her, though. And they never did it to my sister. They never stabbed her. God, how I hated her for that.”

  Blank’s brow furrowed. “Why would your mother do that? Why would she cut you? What did she want you to be?”

  Quinn could see tears leaking out of Molly’s eyes and she realized she might be falling for the older woman. “She never said. All she said was it was in me and needed to come out. I was a little girl, and I would cry, and I would beg her to tell me so I could give it to her—whatever it was she. I didn’t know what it was that was supposed to come out of me.” Now Henaghan knew exactly what her mother wanted, but she didn’t say anything about that to Molly. She was crying, too.

  Molly Blank said nothing. She pulled Quinn in and held her.

  5

  The World is Wide

  That night, Henaghan was conflicted. She was deeply attracted to Molly Blank but the oddness of a same-sex coupling snuck up on her and shook her. Was Quinn a lesbian? Was she a bisexual? Did either of those labels matter? Did she, as she always had, still want a husband and a child? It was an argument she’d never had with herself and she wanted to take it out and let it breathe. She didn’t want to go home. Not tonight.

  As she drove through first Westwood and then Santa Monica, Quinn also mulled over the nature of her visions. Darren said they were a side effect of the tincture on Olkin’s knife. Fine, but side effects were most often temporary. How much longer should she expect her nocturnal visitations? She was filled with a sudden desire to work them out of her system like a fever.

  As the two thoughts, on parallel tracks, ran through her head, she realized she was at the Santa Monica pier. The place she and Molly cemented their relationship. She parked on the well-lit street and got out for a while, wary of unwanted followers. But the streets and sidewalks were empty—thanks to a thick fog rolling in off the Pacific. Rather, they were almost empty. A tall woman with flowing blond hair, a white dress, white high heels and a gorgeous face passed Henaghan on the sidewalk. As the two women made eye contact an electric charge passed between them and Quinn felt the sudden shock of sexual arousal. The blond flashed a smile and went on her way. Quinn turned her head to watch the woman go. Who was this White Lady? Why was Quinn suddenly attracted to women when she’d spent over a quarter of a century not being attracted to women? For several minutes, she let the feelings wash over her before she getting back into the Prius and pointing it inland.

  She was on her way back up Santa Monica Boulevard toward Hollywood. She took a hard left when she realized she was about to pass the Holiday Inn near the NuArt theater. It was a sudden impulse, tied to her need for new surroundings. Her apartment wouldn’t do. After she parked the car and secured a room, she showered and lay down in the bed. She liked hotels. The drapes were almost always completely opaque (the way David Bowie liked them), and she could run the air conditioner as cold as she liked. When she stayed in hotels, she made them like an icebox and “enwombed” herself in the comforter and blankets. Following that strategy, she was asleep quickly.

  Then she was in a basement. Harsh illumination from two work lights mounted on stands. She blinked hard, trying to get her eyes to adjust. She was strapped to a cold metal table, hard against her back. She didn’t know if it was day or night. She didn’t know if it was past or present. The basement had no windows. All over, she hurt—not from soreness but from cuts and bruises. He’d sliced at her, he’d hit her with powerful fists. He stood over her now. Jeremiah Daggett, his jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled up. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like it when you run around and play.” He looked down at her pussy. “This disease you have on you. Lesions on your lips. Do you know what that comes from? Running and playing.” For the first time, she saw the scalpel in his hand. He raised it, allowing it catch the light just so. A flair for the dramatic. “Let me help you.”

  Then Quinn felt a pain like no other. Two pains. Two vertical slashes down the sides of her vagina. Bettie Lyman’s vagina. He’d sliced away sections of her labia on both sides. Bettie Lyman screamed, and mixed with that scream in perfect harmony, was Quinn’s.

  Daggett threw something behind himself with a look of profound distaste. “There. Is that better?”

  Henaghan knew the Doll’s thoughts. They were so raw and
near the surface. The memories were woven together with imagery—imagery and recorded bits of old internal monologue. Quinn could also read the subtext, roiling beneath the surface. Lyman hadn’t entered into her relationship with the Dr. Daggett for sex, though she used sex as a lure and as a bond with men. She’d come to him for treatment. At his V.D. clinic. But he’d pulled her in—at first with kindness, then with threats. Lyman’s whole being was laid bare for Quinn. She was so lonely, and she didn’t enjoy lovemaking. Her condition made sex painful and staved off intimacy. On a deep level, Henaghan understood. A sardonic notion welled up out of Lyman—the girl, younger than Quinn, was smart. Maybe now that I’ve had the surgery, she thought, I’ll like having sex again. Even in the grips of so much pain and fear, Lyman hadn’t abandoned irony.

  When the hurt had ebbed, the Silver Lake Doll opened her eyes. Quinn could feel the burning, the hate. She bored her look into Daggett, determined to take away his little victory. If she didn’t give in to panic, if she remained defiant, she could rob the doctor of his triumph. It was working. “Don’t look at me like that,” Daggett said. Lyman didn’t stop. “Don’t look at me like that,” Daggett said again, only barely in possession of his refined demeanor. Lyman didn’t stop. Daggett tried to wait it out. Lyman still didn’t stop. Daggett cracked open and Quinn saw the monster living inside him. “Don’t fucking look at me like that!” he screamed.

  Predator and prey locked eyes—Bettie was determined to hollow-out Daggett’s victory, and Daggett was just as resolved to return her to a state of debasement and fear.

  In that moment, Henaghan had a thought, a suspicion.

  She leapt from Bettie Lyman into Jeremiah Daggett. The transition was, despite its quickness, marked by nausea and vertigo. Quinn righted herself in the doctor’s forebrain, locking his sight with hers. She was looking down at Lyman and what she saw both sickened and aroused her. She knew the arousal came from Daggett, so she did what she could to fence it off from her own consciousness. That was difficult since she and the doctor now shared a mind. Collecting herself, she took a look around. She wanted a sense of what the doctor was from the inside. He was a writer, a poet, a musician, a surgeon, a genius. Higher I.Q. than Einstein they said. But his parts didn’t connect. Any one of those pieces could have led him to greatness, but they were separated, uncomfortable with one another. What Quinn sensed was a pervading sense of unease. Daggett was deeply, profoundly, at war with himself—and the only glue he’d found for his warring parts was anger.

  But Daggett wasn’t alone.

  He’d found a mentor. To guide and shape him.

  With him in his head was a dark shadow. A voyeur. An instigator.

  Henaghan saw the leering face of Chuck Sato, lurking in the shadows.

  The Holiday Inn was not where she landed.

  A bustling backstage area. People walking on either side, nodding and smiling when they saw with whom they shared a hallway. A hand-written sign on the cinderblock wall to the left, “The Universal Amphitheater is not responsible for any lost or stolen property”. Underneath that, handwritten, were the words, “Watch your shit”.

  In front of her, leaning against the wall and talking to pretty young girl, was a teenaged boy. He wore a suede jacket and had a messenger bag hanging from his hip. Quinn felt Bowie’s recognition before he spoke. “Cameron,” he said (Cameron Crowe?) “You were a naughty boy.”

  Cameron turned, his face flushing red. “Word travels fast.” He couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

  “That it does. That it does.” Bowie made eye contact with the girl and she saluted him with a smile. There had been some agreement between the two.

  “Don’t tease me, Mr. Bowie,” Cameron said.

  “’Don’t tease me, David.’ I’ve told you.”

  The boy grinned. “Thanks, David.”

  By then they had passed the boy and girl and come to Bowie’s dressing room. Two men stood guard at the door, one on either side. Two very, very big men. Bowie went inside and Quinn felt an immediate drop in temperature. The dressing room was at least ten degrees cooler than the hallway—and not because Bowie kept it that way. Bowie took off his long trench coat, threw it over the chair in front of the make-up table and said, “Hello, James.” He looked to his left and, for the first time, Quinn saw the translucent spiral floating at man-height above the floor. The source of the chill.

  “What’re you doing in, L.A.?” the spiral—who’s name was apparently James—said.

  Bowie sighed, sitting down in the spinning chair and turning himself toward the spiral. “Making a living,” he said.

  “Getting busy dying, more like. You know we can’t go to Southern California. Not for a while. It’s back. It’s back and it’s hungry.”

  Quinn immersed herself more deeply into the waters of Bowie’s consciousness. Who is this James? The response didn’t come as a statement, it came as Bowie’s unspoken familiarity with his guest. Memory, not words. The two men weren’t friends, but they shared certain interests. James Patrick Page. Jimmy. Guitarist for Led Zeppelin. Quinn knew Page to be into the occult (as many ‘60s and ‘70s rock stars were). Jimmy went them all one better, though, by buying a home on Loch Ness formerly owned by Aleister Crowley, the infamous British wizard. His collection of Crowley’s writings was said to be the largest in the world. When it came to Magik, Page was the go-to guy. “If I stayed out of every place on your… wizard’s watch list, I’d go broke,” Bowie said, weary.

  Page’s tone was amused, sarcastic. “Los Angeles isn’t just a danger spot. It’s a get-yourself-killed spot. I’ve been there when Verbic’s there. The vertigo alone was almost enough to put me in the hospital. Has he tried to make contact with you?”

  Bowie hesitated. “Twice. Through his manservant.”

  “Are you… soliciting contact, David? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

  “‘Do what thou wilt’,” Bowie said, sarcasm creeping into his tone, too. “‘That be the whole of the Law’.” He was quoting Crowley. A tenet of Thelema, the guru’s own religion/philosophy.

  Page knew the axiom intimately and resented having it thrown back in his face. Of course he wasn’t able to refute Bowie’s right to be left alone. “‘Love is the law, love under will’,” he said, finishing the phrase. “I’m just trying to show you some love, kid. Don’t go tromping through the dark woods if you don’t know the way.”

  “Poetic. Why don’t you put that in one of your pretty little Tolkien songs?”

  “Cheers then,” Page said with mock pleasantness. His spiral fell in upon itself and was gone.

  Bowie started to turn back toward the mirror, someone stuck in their head and said, “Thirty minutes, Mr. B.”

  Bowie nodded. “Thank you, Dalton.” Then he turned the chair so it was facing the mirror. Quinn could see the body she was inhabiting and it didn’t look good. The eyes were sunken and the shoulders drooped with fatigue. Page was right. Bowie wasn’t just here to play a gig. He was here to make deliberate contact with Reginald Verbic. But why? Why would anyone seek out that kind of corrosive exchange? As the singer painted his face, Quinn dropped down into his psyche. The waters were not calm. Here was, Henaghan thought, a man at war with himself. His drives, his desires were in perpetual conflict. Drugs had not helped matters. They hadn’t cemented his disparate parts together. Like so many of the singer’s other pursuits from the era, they only served to cast him more adrift. Despite his international acclaim, David Bowie was lost. In that way (and in that way only) he was like Jeremiah Daggett. Quinn had seen documentaries about Bowie, and she was not surprised by what she felt radiating from him. After all, a person who is comfortable in their own skin doesn’t develop a chain of theatrical personas to hide behind. The man he became in the years before he died—a self-assured and happy man—was not yet in evidence. But Quinn did not want to spend too much time examining Bowie’s 1973 essence. To do so felt like a violation of the singer’s privacy. Henaghan had a more specific agenda
in mind, and she trusted she could direct herself through the almost random wash of the man’s Self to the places she needed to go. When she found the answer, she was not surprised. The Occult was a crutch for Bowie, a way to bolster his identity. He wanted to go further, he felt he needed a guide. The fact Verbic might be evil didn’t enter into the singer’s thinking. He was addled and afraid, desperate for something that would lend him substance. Though she thought Bowie was misguided, she was sympathetic to the scared little boy she saw cowering deep inside. She wondered, though… What had Sato meant when he said, “I already have him”? Had Bowie gone too deep into Page’s dark woods? As she pushed back toward the surface, she realized she was worried for the Brit.

  Then something odd happened.

  Bowie became aware of her presence. His response was frenzied, brimming with panic. All he knew was he had an interloper and his mind roiled and bubbled against her. Quinn didn’t want that. She didn’t want to create panic and fear.

  She pushed herself out and into the void between all things.

  This time she dropped like a stone into her own body. The Holiday Inn bed bounced with the impact and Quinn gulped air. It’s okay, she told herself. Everything’s fine. You’re in a dark, cold hotel room on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  But someone was there with her.

  At the foot of the bed.

  She knew it instinctively.

  Her senses were changing. She perceived things in a way she never had before. She felt Sato’s essence, but not fast enough. Before she had the power to move her own limbs, he was on top of her, pinning her arms and driving his groin into hers. More to weigh her down and protect his own genitals than to violate her (although Quinn sensed such a violation wasn’t impossible). In ten seconds time, she was back to herself, able to move. But it was ten seconds too much. Sato’s face was already above her own, his breath commingling with hers. Sato smelled of bird shit, a subtle grace note to his aftershave.