Wetbones

by John Shirley

  He wasn't feeling great, now, but still, he was stoned. Stoned and numb, which was right where he wanted to be. Constance seemed like a strange dream. An aberration in his life. Constance and the years of ministry. He had taken up the past seamlessly; he was back where he belonged, on the streets, burning himself up like a smoldering cigarette butt.

  He waited impatiently for the next hit. It finally came but it wasn't much and he said so.

  "What it is, we don't have the good shit," Hardwick said. "I can git it though. You front me two hunnerd, I bring you somethin' like a quarter ozzie."

  Gretchen was shaking her head at Garner, but he fingered two hundred dollars out of a shirt pocket – he had the rest of his money tucked into his shoe – and passed it tremblingly to Hardwick. "Just do it fast."

  "Need to borrow your van, bro," Hardwick said, shooting Gretchen a warning look.

  Garner stared at Hardwick. The room swam around him. "My van? I don't know, man…"

  "Hey – I leave you my I. D., and you in my place here, this is where I live, man, so you know for sure I'm comin' back."

  "Oh yeah." That seemed to make sense. Sure. Yeah. He passed over his car keys and Hardwick was up and out the door.

  "Motherfucker," Gretchen said. "I hope that wasn't all your money."

  Santa Monica

  It came to Constance suddenly, on a balmy early evening, with the sunlight turning the smog into a sluggish light-show at the horizon.

  She could run away from Ephram. All she had to do was suffer enough. And what would that mean? Misery. He'd shoot her full of hurt.

  So what? She looked at her maimed hand; the bandages over the stump of her missing finger. He'd cut off her finger and she hardly felt it. She was disfigured, and she didn't care. She could take it. Anyway, what could be worse than this seesawing between ecstasy and the steel rods?

  She was sitting on the back stoop of the place he'd rented, looking at the wasps making dabbing motions with their bodies at the rotting lemons in the corner of the backyard. They didn't seem to want the lemons but couldn't quite leave them alone.

  Maybe they get sweeter when they're rotten. She looked at the fence. The gate in it.

  Ephram was in the shower. He'd be distracted, though she knew he was monitoring her somehow. But he couldn't be following her too closely. He hadn't punished her for these thoughts…

  "Go on," she said. "Let him."

  She stood up and started toward the gate. It was just across the yard but it seemed to take a long time to get there. Then she'd reached it, fumbled at the latch, pulled it open, stepped into the alley -

  It came like black lightning. Negative lightning from the negative constellations, from the hidden cracks in the sky, searing through a thousand light years to seek out the mote that was Constance, smashing into her head, scorching down her spine, exploding in her gut. She felt as if her intestines had exploded and blasted shit throughout her.

  She screamed and staggered but kept going.

  Constance!

  She was in a gravel alley. The mouth of the alley and the street were about forty yards to the left. She staggered that way – and then her legs stopped working. She fell, paralyzed.

  He'd reached into the motor-controls of her brain. He'd stopped her cold. She was lying on her face, with the lower half of her body turned into a granite statue, shivering with sickness and pain.

  Then it lifted. It was as if the wing of an angel had come between her and the pain. It was gone. The feeling in her legs returned. She felt no hurt but for the sting of a scrape where the gravel had dug her knee.

  All right, Constance. You dirty little whore. Go. You don't love me anyway. You never loved me. Go. Run away. Enjoy…

  The words echoed in her head – and then faded. She got to her feet. Was he really going to let her go? She jogged off down the alley. She got to the corner. She had no money – wait, she had a dollar in change, in her jeans.

  A dollar was enough for the city bus that came trundling along the boulevard toward her, as if eager for a long-anticipated rendezvous.

  Hollywood

  She knew this was the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood, and that the crowd standing in line outside the rock club was there to hear some headbangers. She could hear some band inside thundering away. It was about eleven p.m. and getting dark, and she was hungry and tired. That's about all she knew. She'd called her dad's house, using his credit card number, and some boy answered, "Garner residence." And she'd asked, "Who're you?" He said his name was James and he was house-sitting for Mr. Garner and she told him, "This is Constance. I just wanted to tell dad I'm okay and uh, I'm… Uh…"

  Then she'd hung up. She wasn't sure why. Why didn't she tell him where to find her? Why didn't she want her dad to find her?

  She thought about the cops, again. But she was a murderer. Even though Ephram had forced her, she had murdered people, she had cut them up and tortured them to death, and if she turned Ephram in the cops would get her too. They'd never believe she had been forced to do all those things. They'd never believe her about how Ephram had done it. And how could she prove it? She couldn't.

  Of course, she should at least turn Ephram in anonymously. Stop the killing. They'd be looking for any lead at all on the Wetbones killings. They'd check out the call.

  Why couldn't she do that? She could make the report for free, by calling 911. What was stopping her?

  She churned inside. Her emotions in such turmoil she couldn't move, couldn't turn this way or that. But one feeling came up, more stridently than any other. It took her a while to recognize it.

  "No," she said aloud. "No, forget it, no."

  She shook herself out of the stuck feeling, and walked up the line of headbangers. Not sure what she was looking for.

  She found it, though: she picked them out easily. Three boys, who'd clearly come here without girlfriends.

  Boys with fantastic, feathery, multicoloured haircuts and leather jackets; badges pinned between the spikes on the black lapels, military insignia, anything official-looking enough to be both glittery and out of place. "Hi you guys," she said, stopping near them as if she'd been about to walk by but had only just noticed them. "Didn't I meet you, like, somewhere in the Valley at that girl's party? What was her name?" She kept her maimed hand in her jacket pocket.

  "Oh – Olivia?" one of the boys said. He wore dark glasses and fingerless black leather gauntlets. Spiked belt, like the others, and spiked straps slung around his snakeskin cowboy boots.

  "Yeah," Constance said. "I think her name was something like that. Olivia. I was kind of drunk."

  "Oh wow," the taller, blond one with the big adam's apple said. Buying the lie completely. "I think I remember you. Are you, like, the chick that fell into the pool?"

  "Yeah. That was me."

  "Oh dudette," said the smallest and, judging from his slack mouth and dull eyes, the stupidest one of the three. He had black hair and zits and eyebrows that grew together. "You don't rully get stoned unless you like fall over, you know?" He said stoned so it sounded like stooned and know so it came out knoo. "An' why fuckin bother to get stooned if you don't rully get stooned you know?"

  "I know," she said, making herself smile. The line shuffled toward the door; she went with the three boys, peering anxiously at the burly doorman. "I'm not 21 – do you think I could get in this place?"

  "Oh yeah dudette," the small, stupid one said. "They got it fixed so if you don't order no drinks at the bar, you can be under 21 and still get in the club, you know? You just chill in the main room. Hey, you wanna smoke a number?"

  The small, stupid one paid her way in and snuck drinks to her, hovered close, touching her arm from time to time, checking out her tits, thinking he was getting over and he was finally going to get laid. The other two tried to bird-dog her too, when they could, but she stuck close to the stupidest one. She could handle him.

  The place was dark but fragmented with coloured light, pierced by the small spotlights striking at
the stage in perfectly straight-edged shafts of whirling cigarette smoke; the walls reverberated with the roar of the Marshall stacks behind four air-humping rockers on a beer-sticky stage. Once she saw a handful of sweat from the capering lead singer fall onto the footlight next to the monitor speakers and sizzle back up in oily steam. The bass player was kind of cute.

  Huge waves of metallic sound rolled out of the Marshalls and over the crowd, so that most of the time Constance didn't have to make conversation, since it couldn't be heard anyway. The club was only a four-hundred-seater and the noise of the band would have filled an auditorium.

  She felt strange. Confused, hungry but not hungry, tired but wired, teetering on the crumbling edge of a cliff unseen in the darkness of her inner world. She had been stuffing her feelings into the cat-carrier for so long, guarding her thoughts so endlessly, she couldn't quite make sense of freedom from Ephram's super-vision. Every so often, she asked herself, again: Why don't I call the cops? Why don't I try harder to find dad? Why don't I try to get home to Alameda?

  She felt no guilt, not really, but a dull ache of disgust at having participated in the killings. It was like stepping in dogshit. She really hadn't had any choice. She'd tried refusing, three times, letting Ephram punish her – he could leave her lying on the floor paralyzed for hours, or move her limbs around like a puppet. Could make her part of it whether it was voluntary or not. And when he pushed her pleasure buttons, she responded automatically to do whatever was necessary to keep it going. There was no choice about that, not at those levels of pleasure. It was… programmed. Something she knew about from her dad.

  Oh God. Now there was some guilt: Thinking about her dad. How could she go on like this without getting in touch with him? He must think she was dead or something…

  Dead. What difference did it make who was dead, and who was briefly alive? Everyone, Ephram had pointed out, was dying: they were in a waiting room called life. When they were done waiting, their number was called and they were hustled through the door into death. Into nothingness. She'd seen so much death. It seemed so near and so easy. What did it matter if her father thought she was dead? She was near enough to it.

  She hugged herself, wincing as the guitar player went into another sonic tirade. She could make out the music in the wall of sound, but it was some kind of speed-metal thing, and she didn't relate. She liked Bon Jovi and Whitesnake because those guys had something sweet about them, even if they did act like hard-rock types sometimes.

  No matter what she thought about, that one feeling wouldn't go away. It was this painful pulling sensation in her gut. Like there was a crab in there, pulling on her innards with its serrated pincers, trying to get her to go somewhere. The discomfort was getting worse and worse.

  She felt something else, now, and sharply. A hollow aching. A big black hole of depression. The drinks and the pot hardly helped at all. It ached deeply in her, from her stomach down into her uterus. She thought she might collapse inward on herself…

  She imagined Ephram, smiling at her in an avuncular kind of way. His semi-erect little pee-pee radiating solace and waves of Reward…

  Now the stupid one with the single long eyebrow was yelling something in her ear. Something about did she want to go get loaded, somewhere. He was making his move.

  She had to get away from him, hanging around him just made her want to give in to that aching hunger…

  Made her want to kill him. It would feel good. It would be such a relief to kill him.

  She shouted in his ear: "Do you have any condoms?"

  His eyes lit up, hearing that. He shook his head. "No! But -"

  "They have some in the girl's bathroom here, I think. There's a condom machine. They cost a couple of dollars. Could you give me the money?"

  He nodded, trying not to grin, and gave her a small wad of cash. She squeezed his arm, smiled at him, and headed for the girl's bathroom. Once camouflaged by the crowd, she broke for the exit door.

  Ephram wasn't surprised to see her come back. He had known, and that was the only reason he had let her go. The inevitability of her return was almost tiresome.

  He took her hand and smiled, to show he held no rancor for her, and led her into the living room. They sat down on the leased couch. ''I had to come back," she said mechanically. "Did you do something to…?"

  "Did I make you come back with my mind? Not at all. You were well out of my reach. No, my dear. You came back on your own, wagging your tail behind you, ha ha." He smiled at her, trying to make it a sad smile, hoping she'd feel sorry she'd hurt him. Not wanting to force it on her psychically, if he didn't have to. "You see, your brain has been somewhat re-ordered. You are an addict now. What you felt was withdrawal. It would have gotten worse. It would have killed you." This last was a lie, of course, but a necessary one.

  "I'm an addict? Addicted to the Reward?"

  "Yes. I know you don't love me – but I hold no grudges, my dear. After all – only a short time ago, you were forced to submit while I cut off one of your fingers. No doubt a bit traumatic, but a necessary sacrifice, for our protection. No, I will not punish you this time. In fact -" He put his arm around her, and with it gave her a burst of Reward. She slumped against him with relief. "Did you call anyone?" he asked.

  "No," she said absently, humming to herself. "No. Well – I tried to call my dad once but he wasn't home and I didn't try again… I didn't call the cops or anyone either…"

  "Good. Lovely." He wondered in passing why he hadn't been more worried about that possibility. In the interim between her rebellion and her withdrawal, she might well have turned him in. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that he had been behaving with a sort of recklessness lately.

  He shrugged and went on, "Well now – I have some news for you. I have made a decision. I have, you see, been chewing your fate over in my mind, this last couple of weeks. Wondering if I should send you into Wetbones and have done with you, or go on as we have been – or, the third possibility. I have decided on the third recourse. That other step. I seem to have… to have become very attached to you.

  "And I would like to see you feel the same about me. I know you don't, despite your pretenses. I'd rather not simply program you to be attached to me. I want something deeper. So… I thought perhaps – and this may be foolish – if I taught you what I know, up to a point, you might see me as I really am, underneath, recognize the Nameless Spirit that guides me. Understand me better. And learn some of these disciplines yourself." He hesitated, licking his lips. His mouth had suddenly become dry; the palms of his hands damp. He felt strangely off-balance – he was used to simply commanding her. He sighed, and went on, "You could become an initiate. I've never shown you my diary but… well, ah, all in good time. Understand, anyway, that this is an honour I have shared with no one else. The others are all dead. Only you have been chosen for this Knowledge…"

  "I know it's an honour Ephram. I do," she mumbled into his breastbone.

  "But you must promise me to be very close-mouthed about whatever you learn. Look at this…" He took a newspaper clipping from his shirt pocket and unfolded it for her; it showed a photo of three cops standing around awkwardly in the trapezoid of a yellow-tape police barricade, as a plainclothes morgue technician squatted with a bodybag. There was a row of onlookers behind the tape. Ephram tapped the image of a faintly-smiling man in sunglasses. "This is a certain Samuel Denver, my dear. Some of his followers call him The More Man." Ephram paused to read a paragraph under the photo: The remains left by a fourth "Wetbones" killing prompted Angela Herman, Assistant District Attorney to issue this statement, "We are bearing down on Wetbones' with all we have, and so far getting nowhere. But we won't ease up – this killer has taken the final step that only the Nazis equalled. He's taken women victims beyond even reducing them to murdered sex objects, or hunted animals – he's turned them into unrecognizable mounds of wrecked flesh and bone. It's the ultimate dehumanization and I'm sorry to say it doesn't surprise me – that's the
logical next step in our deterioration as a society…" Ephram chuckled, and went on, "Denver's been talking to people around the investigation. He has to be – because they're calling it 'Wetbones'. That's my term and he is one of the few who knows it. I don't think he's giving them a line on me – that'd be dangerous for him. He's playing games, is what he's doing, the rogue. He got into this photo on purpose, expecting I'd see it… He paused to give her another jolt of Reward, so as to seal her attentiveness. ''And you see, Constance, I do not wish to be located either by the police or by dear old Samuel…" Odd, he thought, how he'd come to think of her so much more personally than the other girls. She was not a number in his journal the way they were, not any more. She was Constance. Very reckless indeed. "We must be careful, Constance, even of a small slip. Well, ha ha, a small slip can lead to a big slap, my dear. Oh yes."

  "Tell me," she said, snuggling against him. "Tell me about the Spirit…"

  "The Nameless Spirit? In time, my little one" Ephram said. "Not yet. First you must know the behind of it all…

  "In 1923, a group of people came together in Hollywood at the house of a woman named Elma Juda Stutgart. She was a wealthy German immigrant – though perhaps immigrant is not the word. Citizen of the nation called Wealth, is closer. She maintained houses in several countries, and often returned to her lovely home in Berlin. Mrs. Stutgart was recently widowed; her husband had been rather mysteriously lost overboard in the course of a transAtlantic voyage. She had a servant who was a rather sturdy Bavarian peasant from the Black Forest and she called him Thandy, although I think this was some sort of corruption of his real name.

  "Mrs. Stutgart was fascinated with the relatively new art of the motion picture – to generously grace that business by calling it an art.

  "Actually, Mrs. Stutgart's true fascination was with a certain silent film star. She gave a number of extravagant parties for her pet star. The parties began as glamorous, and soon became sordid. Valentino and William S. Hart and Fatty Arbuckle were regulars at her bacchanals. Mrs. Stutgart was a morphine addict and once in America, increasingly infatuated with cocaine. Cocaine was quite a popular drug, in certain circles, even back then. Its addictive qualities were not understood in those days, and it was not illegal. Bowls of it were set out at parties and the revellers indulged with wild abandon. This, along with drink and his native stupidity, is what got Fatty Arbuckle in trouble.