Wetbones

by John Shirley

  "The director James Whale, the auteur behind the films Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, was a cocaine addict and, in the '30s, one of Mrs. Stutgart's most frequent guests. Sometimes Whale was her lover, but so was nearly everyone else, after her film-star sweetheart refused to have anything to do with her. Apparently she'd gone mad with jealousy at a party, on seeing her pet flirt openly with Rudolph Valentino, and tried to kill him with an ice pick. She continued the parties spitefully without him, throwing herself ever more into perversity. There were, for example, the young boys, not yet teenagers, whom she hired from the local fagens; a baker's dozen of dough-soft young things who were forced to act out an obscene play Mrs. Stutgart had written, buggering one another while declaiming bad verse. Must have been quite amusing.

  "Are you paying attention, Constance?"

  "Oh yes, I am, Ephram, really, I'm listening!"

  "There were more exotic visitors to Mrs. Stutgart's late-night circle," Ephram continued. "There was Madame Blavatsky, the Spiritualist and architect of Theosophy, and Aleister Crowley, a drug addict himself. He was largely a fraud as a sorceror, was Crowley; but a fraud of great power, strangely enough. Mrs. Stutgart learned some interesting things from Crowley and Blavatsky. Certain things that neither of them spoke about in public or in print, except to hint at it. Mrs. Stutgart experimented with some of these things, and Crowley and Blavatsky, alarmed at her successes, soon departed for the continent. But Mrs. Stutgart was undaunted. She went on and down, ha ha…

  "She was a driven woman, our Mrs. Stutgart. Cocaine users, and users of methedrine – whether they inject it, smoke it or snort it – inevitably discover, my pet, that after the first few strong doses of cocaine or amphetamine, there's very little pleasure left in the drug. There's only the compulsion to get high. The pleasure centre of the brain – and this you and I know only too well, Constance – has only so many cells and can only bear a certain amount of unnatural stimulation before it's necrotic. Burnt out, you would call it. So what is left? What next?

  "The drug-maddened Mrs. Stutgart and a few of her grasping, leechlike friends found a way to bridge the gap, to pass beyond the barrier. They found that, having learned certain psychic disciplines, and having contacted certain… well, certain creatures of the Ether World, and having made arrangements with those creatures, whom we call the Akishra, they could use other people's brains for pleasure. They could pirate that pleasure. First, one takes control of those people with the proper manipulation of the reward and punishment centres of the brain – then one stimulates them, whether through pleasure or pain, rerouting all sensations through the pleasure centre. Once the pleasure stimulus is used up, the pain sensors can be used and the impulses altered. And one can experience a portion of what goes on in that other brain by proxy. If one has control of five such people, one can feed off five brains- without damaging one's own brain. It is the soul, ultimately, my dear Constance, that experiences pleasure or pain – the brain is only the fragile circuit that translates the sensations.

  "Now, Mrs. Stutgart became more and more reclusive. Many of her circle were murdered, or very sensibly committed suicide. She became more psychically powerful still – and her 'arrangements' with the Akishra, the creatures who make this parasitism possible, became more involved. They maintained her in a degree of good health, while others aged around her. They fed, through her, on the shattered souls of those who were her prey. She took the senses, the minds of her victims; the

  Akishra sucked instead at their spirits. She had become symbiotic with them.

  "Eventually…" Here Ephram paused to sigh, and chew a nail in sudden anxiety, wondering: What was he risking, with these revelations?

  But he found he could not prevent himself from continuing…

  "Eventually, little Constance, Mrs. Stutgart developed a new circle of friends around her. A whole new generation. This was in the 1940s, and on into the early '60s. There was, for example, a young producer named Sam Denver. Whom she eventually married. She changed both her first and last names – she goes, now, by Judy Denver. Also in this circle were other luminaries of film and the arts. There was the actor Lou Kenson; there was the painter Gebhardt who claimed to do portraits of one's aura as well as one's physical person. And there were -"

  I remember Lou Kenson!" Constance exclaimed. "He was a big star when I was little. He was in that TV show Honolulu Hello."

  "Yes, yes, quite. Ah, also in this new circle were many who didn't seem to belong – such as myself. I had written an essay on Nietzsche that 'Judy Denver' enthused over, so she contacted me, and wired me a ticket to visit her at the Doublekey Ranch. Some intuition prompted me to accept. There, at the Ranch, I was initiated. I had a rather spectacular talent, you see – a talent the others did not have – which set me apart, and made me a valuable resource to the Denvers.

  "The blossoming of this Divine Vision, as I think of it, this special talent, made me realize I was above the repugnant miscegenation that the Denvers and their set indulged in…

  "What's miscegenation?" Constance asked.

  "Interbreeding between races, my dear. In this case it went farther, really – it was interbreeding between species. Well, perhaps what they were doing was not exactly breeding, not sex – but it was a hideous congress of animal and man. The Akishra are thinking creatures, in a sense, but they are not highly evolved beings – they are really a kind of animal. An etheric animal. They are not in the same class as the Nameless Spirit…

  "I did not wish to belong to the Akishra. So, I broke away. I found the Nameless Spirit, and with it, my own direction…

  "Pleasure is important, but – despite what I may have told you for my earlier convenience – it is not enough alone. There must also be exaltation. True dominance and transcendence! Otherwise I would be only what the Denvers are: pleasure vampires. Vampires of the pleasure-centre of the brain, something they are absorbed in so fully they are no longer able to think beyond it. It is their raison d'etre . Pleasure – and pain in others that becomes pleasure in the Akishra.

  "Pleasure can be taken to levels the Akishra cannot comprehend, when one becomes the superman, the man who is more than man. And we simply cannot achieve real dominance with the damn worms haunting us day and night…"

  "Ephram?" she asked. "Could you give me a little more Reward now?"

  "Oh yes, my dear. Here's a little. That's all for now.

  "We'll talk more of this later. We'll talk of the Nameless Spirit. First, let me play some Mozart for you, and let us have a bite to eat. I know how you like pizza, and I ordered one for you in anticipation of your return. I'll just put some in the microwave. Then we'll drink in more Reward, and contemplate, together, a fine and elegant murder…"

  Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles

  It was a relief when Lissa opened the door. Though the sunny afternoon seemed to make a joke of his fears, Prentice had been irrationally certain that Arthwright would be waiting at Lissa's place, smirkingly poised behind the door. "I should have been cool and waited to see you at the party," Prentice said. "But -" He shrugged ruefully and hoped he was coming off charmingly smitten. "I just had to see you."

  She smiled. "I can live with that." She was wearing a sky-blue Japanese robe, embroidered with red dragons, open in the front to show only a white string bikini. "You wanted to see me – and you can see me pretty well, in this thing. I was out back getting a tan. Come on in."

  He'd been hoping that coming here would drive the burden of Amy's imagined presence from him. He'd felt dogged by memories of her, almost by a sense of her nearness, for days. It was wearing on him. Sometimes it very nearly terrified him.

  But the nagging intrusiveness, the taint of Amy's point of view, stuck with him as he followed Lissa into the house. Tacky robe she's wearing, he imagined Amy saying. And these paintings. What is she, a Hare Krishna?

  The wall was adorned with framed prints of Hindu deities, scenes from the Uppanishads; brilliant-hued panoplies of spirits from the tormented ferti
lity of India.

  They stepped into a modern living room with a flagstone floor scattered with sheepskin rugs, and a tinted glass back wall; out back, a cinderblock fence enclosed a kidney-shaped pool, a redwood hot tub, and immaculately gardened strips of Bird of Paradise, gardenia bushes and yucca. The back door was open and the heavy odor of gardenias hung almost cloyingly in the air. "You live rather well," Prentice began, pausing to look around. He had almost finished by saying, For a secretary. But that would have been rude. Still, it was odd. This place was large and expensive.

  "The place is left over from a former marriage; he got the cash and I got the house," Lissa said; she said it rather glibly, Prentice thought. She looked at him thoughtfully a moment, then went on, "I was just going to have a light beer. You want one?"

  "Sure. Thanks."

  Beers in hand, they settled on the white couch. "You look kind of tense," she said.

  "Do I? I guess I am. It's a couple of things. Not knowing how to act today with you – how much of what happened at the party was a fluke of your mood or… or what. And I've been bothered by… Well. Maybe I should tell you about Amy."

  She raised a casual hand. "Hey. You're under no obligation to apologize for having girlfriends and wives or whatever."

  Prentice imagined Amy remarking, You might know the slut would take that attitude.

  He took a long pull at the beer, and then said, "You misunderstand, Lissa. Amy's dead. She was my ex-wife. I identified her body not that long ago… I'm still a little freaked out by it."

  He expected the ritual noises of sympathy from her. But she only nodded slowly, and squeezed his arm. And said, "Look – the only thing you can do is let go. Just let go of her. And feeling responsible – I see that in you, that you feel responsible. But we're not responsible for how other people end their lives. You know? You get out of yourself you'll feel better. I've got an idea…"

  She disappeared into a side hall, past the kitchen area, and he wondered if he were supposed to follow her back to the bedroom. He imagined Amy saying, God what a bitch. 'Just let go of her' she says. That's easy for this slut to say…

  "Stop it," he muttered to himself

  Lissa came back with something cupped in one hand. She sat down and opened her hand; in it were two large gel capsules of white powder. Prentice stared at it, then shook his head hastily. "No. No thanks. I don't indulge. Too many of my friends have taken the big plunge behind drugs…"

  "This isn't anything addictive. It's MDMA. You know – Ecstasy."

  He knew. He remembered Amy had taken it…

  She went on, "With a little demerol mixed in, just a little, to take the edge off because these are pretty big hits."

  "Uhhh…"

  "It's a great aphrodisiac."

  She knows your weakness, all right.

  "Sold," he said defiantly, taking a capsule. He downed it with beer, and she took hers as she walked to the CD player. She put on some George Benson. Then crooked a finger at him, opened her arms. He stood and walked to her, and he thought he could hear Amy saying, You've done it now, dumbshit. She's completely -

  But then Lissa slipped into his arms. And with that contact, the imaginary voice cut off. The stifling memory of Amy, the presence that had dogged him – simply vanished. Instantly.

  Prentice and Lissa danced. By the end of the third tune, there was an electricity flickering between his teeth and along his spine, his nerve ends sang along with the music, his dick was hard, and he was convinced Lissa was the finest girl in the world.

  9

  Watts, Los Angeles

  "Yeah right," Garner said irritably. "I'm supposed to give you my – " He broke off not wanting to let her know he was down to his last fifty dollars. It was amazing his money had stretched this far, considering the night of smearing his lungs with crack residue.

  "Your cousin steals my van and a big roll of my money and you want me to give you more money?"

  "That was Hardwick, shit, I'm not Hardwick. Anyway what I trust you for either? You ran out on me."

  "I went to look for that asshole. Shit, why should I stay? You weren't living up to your side of the bargain."

  Meaning, she hadn't put out. The crack had affected him with an outrageous sexual desire, and it was a tacit part of the deal that she come across for her share of the stuff. She'd kept inching away from him, saying, "Just hold on now, it's worth waiting for, we going get real here in a minute, lemme see that motherfuckin' pipe first." Slipping into something closer to ghetto English now that she was fucked up and tired.

  Tired. Both of them, now, on the street corner, staggering through the conversational wrangling like zombies, sagging from their bones. That's how Garner felt, anyway. Gretchen looked tired but a little fresher than him. She's used to this shit, he thought. Probably got herself tuned to sleep for two days once a week.

  About seven a.m. Hardwick's room had become a shrinking box. Garner had gone out to see if he could catch sight of Hardwick, improbable as that was. Any loony move could seem like a good idea, loaded on this shit, he reflected. You got stoned and everyone could see it: could see your highbeams on, your eyes and mouth gaping, your exposed brain with a smoking hole in it. They could chuck anything they wanted into that hole in your skull. They saw you coming and they took you. It was a street skill they had: picking out the ones stoned enough to be stupidly tunnel-visioned but not yet stoned enough to be dangerously paranoid.

  Whatever indignity crack left him open for – every indignity, ultimately – it did one thing for him in exchange: Crack totally and entirely occupied his mind. It pushed out even visions of Constance shoved alive into a crushing machine…

  Take another hit

  He'd found a place down the street that'd rent him a room for a few hours, and he'd holed up there, knocking back a bottle of wine and six Ibuprofen, which combination, he'd heard, would shoehorn him into sleep. It worked for a while; something close enough to sleep descended on him in the roachy hotel, until a pain in his gut woke him; it was a pain that eventually resolved into a rusty-knife forged out of depression and sheer self-hated, gouging and torquing into him till he had thrashed himself off the bed and back down onto the street.

  Here on the street, in the pitiless sunlight, he immediately encountered Gretchen, dressed in the same clothes, eating one of those mushy popsicles pushed out of a plastic envelope. That would be breakfast for Gretchen.

  Ten paces away a white hooker stood on the sidewalk, next to a parking meter. She was the kind who did her best to compensate for being butt-ugly by wearing layers of make up and having her hair immaculately coifed. She was a big stocky, scowling girl. He thought for a moment she might be a transvestite but, looking closer, he could see she was simply an apeish looking woman. Even from here he could see the rash of track marks on the backs of her hands. She was pretty hard core, using her veins up to that point. She was jonesing bad, too; she couldn't get comfortable, where she stood. She'd shift from one foot to another; then walk a few feet, around the parking meter; then walk back; toy with the meter's lever idly. Then she'd look nervously up and down the street. Shift from foot to foot. Her hands twitchily clutching and unclutching. Straightening the hem of her dress. Three times.

  She was pretty sick from heroin withdrawal, poor thing. She wouldn't be out here this time of day, shifting twitchy like that, if she weren't.

  Garner once had a jones on heroin himself, in earlier years, and he remembered the insistent discomfort that just got worse and worse and worse till you were like a plucked but still-living turkey turning on a spit over a slow fire.

  Have to see if he could cop some of that, later.

  ''What you staring at that bitch for?" Gretchen asked.

  "Maybe I get my money's worth, I go to her," Garner said, though he had no such intention.

  "You think I should've put out for you last night? You think you'd've been able to get it up then? No way, that stoned. You think so, you don't know rock. But you had some sleep, you
could do it now – we could get a rock and, before you lose your hard-on, we could get down together…"

  Garner shrugged. He felt like shit. He felt like an old, old man; he felt wrung out and vastly depressed; his brain scorched and his self-disgust an inflamed, pustulant sore in his gut. And that was from smoking the stuff she was now proposing he buy for them once more. Already, the stuff was killing him.

  But he could almost taste it in his mouth. He could picture melting the crack, the smoke; he could picture inhaling it. He could imagine the rush – which his addict mind told him would be good again, though deep down he knew it wouldn't.

  There was really no choice about his decision at all; none that he could perceive.

  So this is what Aleutia went through, he thought, as he followed Gretchen down the street, and into the Projects, where only the stupidest white drug users venture without an armed guard. Here, there was no thinking about Constance. Not while he was being crushed alive himself.

  Near Malibu

  "This fence a motherfucker," Orphy grunted, pulling himself up onto the top.

  "Just keep going," Lonny whispered. He was already waiting on the other side of the fence. He'd scratched his right arm and one thigh rather badly, going over the top where the sharp wire-ends of the fence-weave stuck up; the wounds burned, and his heart thumped. They still had another fence to go over: the smaller, black iron fence.