“Aha—go bomb the phone company. Bomb the phone company of your choice, that is.” Burt laughed. “But who’s to judge? Who decides?”
“You do, when you know it in your heart. Can you buy something as nebulous as that?”
“Depends. Maybe Rambo knew in his heart that he was right. If so, we’re all in deep shit. You’re a romantic, Lucas. That’s not a slur; Jefferson, Franklin, Adams —those guys were all romantics. Idealists. So what the hell are you, a romantic, doing in the publicity business?”
They paused, then recited the joke’s answer in chorus: “Making a living, boy!” Commercial irony at its finest.
“Those masonite doors on my office closet?” said Burt. “I always get masonite, so I can continue punching in the doors without breaking my hand when I get angry. I get angry a lot these days. I rarely try to check it anymore. It’s a steam valve.”
“It’s therapeutic,” said Lucas.
“Fucking-A. Vent thy anger, 0 mad one.”
“The shrinks have reversed themselves on that one, too. Now they say venting your anger does no good. That while you do express it by, say, punching your door, you never actually rid yourself of it. Which was what punching the door was supposed to have achieved in the first place. The anger stays with you, always. Kind of like herpes. Once you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”
“Are you telling me that you aren’t cured?” Were they not friends, Burt would not have pushed it this far. “Do you hold that kind of anger inside? About Kristen, I mean.”
“Sure, I’m still angry. Useless death should anger any sane man. Cory took a ride on a big red roller coaster and fell off. She knew what she was doing, and did it to ‘get’ me. And it worked. Case closed. Kristen’s death was…insane. Five hundred police there and they were totally impotent. In an evening’s entertainment, thirteen people get trampled to death. Thousands are bruised, lacerated, bloodied, their bones broken. The band is called Whip Hand. Yet nobody anticipates the break point between stage violence—which is sanitized, like TV fight scenes—and the real thing. What’s the difference between a disaster like that and the riot mentality you predict, Burt? No, I haven’t lost that anger. You never lose it. You deaden it, anesthetize it. We have to take refuge in knowing we’re right. In your heart, like I said.”
“The ancient Christians felt the same way,” said Burt. “A lot of folks with fish on their chests got eaten by lions. But even they got pissed off enough to lash out, the way Billy Budd did. Pow. The end.”
Pow.
Lucas reached into the cooler on the Bronco’s suicide seat and cracked open a can of cold Pepsi. He nestled the can in his crotch as he drove. He was thinking of Buddy Holly.
Holly had gotten chastised by the descendants of those Christians Burt had cited, for playing the devil’s music, inciting young people to lewdness. Then came Elvis the Pelvis. God, how Presley had hated that epithet! They framed him from the waist down on The Ed Sullivan Show, so that the children of America would not be possessed by sexual demons. Black performers were a hideous racial threat to the same minds. Janis Joplin unveiled a lesbian bent…bye-bye, Janis. The music of the Doors had been on Lucas’s stereo throughout Kristen’s infancy. Then Jim Morrison shouted “Ain’t anybody out there gonna love my ass” in Miami one preternaturally black night, and they busted him for dropping trou. Then Alice Cooper (AKA Vincent Somebody-or-other in real life) cavorted with his snakes, hissed his lyrics about fucking the dead, was hung and decapitated onstage. This was after Black Sabbath had every pulpit pounder in the country up in arms. Ten years after Alice, good old Ozzy Osbourne took the rap for chomping the head off a dove. Gene Simmons of Kiss spit forth blood and fire. The sonic assault of punk juggernauted in and offended everyone. Explosions, raw butcher-shop entrails, skanking and slam dancing, and anything that could get a rise out of an increasingly jaded audience were dutifully noted by the watchers with unblinking lizard eyes. The kids didn’t see the threat. All they saw were new invocations, new congregations, good clean fun, the music, with trappings that were an E-ticket attraction, a slide ride fraught with lots of disposable badness and terror. But Holly and Presley, Joplin and Morrison, and Keith Moon and John Bonham and Bon Scott and Sid Vicious were dead, dead for real. The audiences did not seem to understand that part. Kristen was dead. For real. To them it had all been part of the stage show. Another cheap thrill, another special effect. To read the hideously bland articles in the newspapers was to go oh, wow…and feel nothing.
Lucas enjoyed the music. He preferred it loud. But the boom-box audio network wired throughout the cabin shell of the Bronco was silent as the vehicle gorged itself on the highway. It was not the music that fueled the anger inside him.
Whip Hand’s stylishly dangerous reputation was as pointed as a live grenade. It had preceded the band to the Civic Auditorium by months. Any moron could have seen disaster coming, if a mote of attention had been paid. And that was the problem: the shakers putting on this concert were not morons. They were consummate businessmen who knew that the profit margin for a party band like Whip Hand was in direct ratio to the number of warm bodies that could be packed into the arena. A standing-room-only floor would prove lucrative. Reserved seating alone would not have netted the promoters a sell-out show. Too boring; not enough window for action. Festival seating offered a fatter turnover. Just open the main floor to whoever can get there first and they’ll line up a hundred deep for the chance to rush the stage. Until the accident with Whip Hand, festival seating had been economical. Two dozen similar accidents spanned the country, but it took an even bigger name band—the Who—to nearly shut down the phenomenon entirely. When eleven concertgoers were crushed to death in Cincinnati, festival seating became a pariah gambit. The promoters could comprehend bad publicity, even as Lucas was sensitized to it by his occupation. To cover asses and provide the illusion of social responsibility, festival seating was banned. For a while, until the furor dissipated. But money talked; you could never shut it up for very long, and already selected events were backsliding. Now they called it “dance concert” seating.
Lucas raced the sun along the coastline, into twilight. There had been no victory. More people would get killed. The anger never really left you.
Then came the toe-parade of Whip Hand’s attorneys and the inevitable settlement offer. And the schmuck, Woodberry-or-Washburn, whatever his name had been.
“I’m sure, Mr. Ellington, that you can appreciate the fact that the individual members of Whip Hand cannot in any way be considered culpable for this horrible tragedy.” He was ten years Lucas’s junior. His suit was dark blue, in accordance with Dress for Success. There was bogus sympathy in his dead eyes. “Off the record, I hate this…this sterile write-off whenever someone…uh, loses their life.”
“You talk like this happens all the time,” Lucas said. He was not looking at Woodberry-or-Washburn and had said it through clenched teeth.
“I have a daughter.” He said it as though leaking a state secret.
“How old?”
“Sixteen months. Nevertheless, I hate to think—”
“Think what you like, Mr…whatever.” Lucas’s convictions were as unstoppable as the tides of the ocean. “The real reason you are cluttering up my office today is not because you feel simpatico in the matter of my dead daughter. You are here in a misguided attempt to prevent me from appealing my case, because it would inconvenience you. You have come to offer me a financial incentive pursuant to my withdrawal.” He warred with something inside himself, almost won, and continued. “I am quite close, as we speak, to shoving those stupid designer wire rims up your ass, folded double.”
Lucas had already unnerved Woodberry-or Washburn with his icy manner, and now that things were thawing the younger man got flustered and scrambled to save face. “Really, Mr. Ellington, I don’t see how threats…”
He detested dealing with such emotional nincompoops. He resented the amount he had been authorized to offer Lucas. It was obscenely h
igh. “In the matter of compensation, my clients—”
Lucas stood bolt upright behind his desk. His chair was propelled violently backward and crashed into the wall. All commotion in the outer office ceased. His hands gripped the lip of the desk whitely.
The lawyer jumped up involuntarily, fumbling his briefcase and nearly falling over the divan behind him. Papers scattered like huge snowflakes across the floor. His face was red. There was raw sweat on his upper lip.
“My buddy Ace, the Legal Chickenhawk, was kicking the shit out of recalcitrant insurance companies when you were still pissing your didies. Rolif got meaner with age. You just got stupider. Rolif has advised me not to appeal for reasons that seem sane to me. I have no use for your filthy fucking money. It has my daughter’s blood on it. But Rolif is going to cost you guys more than you can comprehend. Much more than your prepared ceiling. And that’s fine with me, too. Now get your ass out of my office before I spoil your promising young career.”
Exit the schmuck.
Woodberry-or-Washburn never heard Lucas repeat the single word to himself “Compensation.”
Now Lucas was rolling up fast on a laggard Datsun long-bed pickup with a racy camper shell. He let it grow in his windshield. Montana plates, a CB whip antenna dawdling in the slipstream of air. It was laden with camping gear, straining along. The tailgate was brown with road dirt. Lucas blinked his headlights once, then blew past at a hundred per. They ate his dust, not blinking back. He thought he saw the driver give him the finger in the purple dusk.
He had purchased the Bronco outright, for cash on the tabletop. Fully equipped, winch and all. There was cash to burn. So much for the rioting minorities Burt had droned on about. Locally, it was fat time. Nothing else mattered. He could loan money to friends in need. Wasn’t that one of the purposes of life, to keep one’s friends from harm?
Yeah, and wasn’t another purpose of life to destroy one’s enemies? After staying fed and paying the rent? And seeking out beauty in the world? Even if one was called a romantic by a Visigoth like Burt Kroeger?
The Datsun dwindled in the semidarkness, shrinking to twin dots of light in the rearview.
Highway 101 would have cut two hours off the northward haul, but Lucas had chosen the Pacific Coast road out of Los Angeles. He had never before taken the scenic route. Now the sun was fizzling out into the sea, and the ocean’s uninterrupted surface began to resemble a trackless black desert. A wasteland. Out there, beyond a certain point, one would drop right off the curvature of the Earth. Lucas was pleased he had driven this way, pleased he had done something for the sheer pleasure of it.
It was compensation.
Miles to the north, the crate waited, like buried treasure.
He was doing the right thing. If not, he had Burt, his ally, to worry about him and steer him right if he needed steering. Past him was Sara. Problem dealt with and filed.
Lucas tooled into the night, toward home base.
4
The bald black man stood an enormous six five, and his shoulders seemed a yard from end to end.
He strode down the long, carpeted hallway on broad bare feet thick with calluses. His toes gathered against the shag as he walked with feline grace, barely disturbing the still air as he cut through it. He was wearing a fighting costume tunic and trousers of black silk. It was not a karate ghi, nor did it feature a belt. The business of colored belts was for faggots. You could be strangled with your own belt in a close fight.
Workout sweat glistened on the man’s shaved pate. On the right ear, gold studs traversed the fossa of the helix; the lobe was pierced by matching golden rings. A perfect two-carat blood ruby decorated his left ear. His lower jaw was massive, almost prognathous. His teeth were huge and perfectly aligned, except for a pair of large canines that looked like fangs and had displaced the bicuspids behind them. His eyelids seemed thick, and he did not blink often. His eyes were the color of strong, steaming coffee, liquid and unrippled. They drew in everything.
From the open door at the far end of the hail, a television set burbled. He recognized Eva Gabor’s mangling of the English language and guessed that a Green Acres rerun was on.
The man also heard the creak of a bowstring being drawn back, the pung of release, the hiss of the triple-edged deer arrow, the thunk of the strike. Like Heimdall, the Norse god who stood sentry over the Bifrost and whose senses were so acute that he could hear grass growing and see the wool as it emerged from the flesh of sheep, the black man clad in black silk was especially receptive on all sensory levels. He heard the archer release his breath. From the sound of the exhalation, he knew the arrow had found the intended target. It was not a sound of disappointment. He stepped forward.
“Horus.” Gabriel Stannard knew who had entered the room behind him. “How goes the sparring?”
“I am pleased,” said the huge black man. His voice was gorgeously deep and mellifluous. “In another twenty years, perhaps fifteen, I may achieve a glimpse of the total balance I seek.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “As is, I can tear ass outta any ten white guys. Especially the mindless ones, the iron pumpers, the artificial body inflators. They know not what they do.”
“Cut some slack, Horus. Hoisting is good for the bod. Makes the teenies cream.” Stannard drew another deer arrow from the leather quiver strapped to his naked back and slotted it into the custom bow. “Spare me the speech on how it’s all fruitless labor, lifting to no end, huh? Check out these triceps, man. Eat your heart out.”
Stannard pointed the bow and arrow toward the sky, pulled the string slowly parallel to his right cheek, and tilted down to sight. He bulged in all the right places. His golden, artificially curled hair bounced in sweaty loops. He was bare-chested, clad in skintight red leather pants, belted with silver conchos so large they resembled wrestling awards. His feet were installed in a worn pair of felony fliers—black Converse All-Stars. His sculpted physique glistened. Horns heard the languorous, nasal intake of air as Stannard aimed and froze.
He held the pose, muscles rigid in isometric competition, for several long moments. Then he released.
The shaft sliced the air at top speed and ate up sixty feet of distance in the blink of an eye. At the far end of the oblong chamber, it embedded itself square in the groin of a straw-backed, life-sized cardboard cutout of a policeman waving his hand. Officer Mort, the Friendly Cop, already had arrows sticking out of his face and chest. An arrow hole pierced the palm of his upraised hand.
“The dick shot. End of the line.” Stannard propped the bow against a leather director’s chair and drank from a quart tumbler of sun tea full of ice and sliced limes. “Go for it,” he said to Horus, who watched with folded arms and a Bhudda-like impenetrability of expression. “Plug one through the badge on his cap, I dare
Horus hefted the bow, notched an arrow, and did just that. Stannard applauded. Horus just shrugged.
“Joshua called,” Horus said. “Your friend with the plastic gun has been discharged from Olive Grove.”
Stannard’s glass hesitated halfway to his mouth. “Is that so?” He had to consciously avoid touching his right eyebrow. The fine hairs there were neatly bisected by a shining diagonal strip of scar tissue. Having photographers favor his left side had become second nature after all this time.
Horus’ gaze found the hairless scar.
“Do you have any special instructions for Joshua?”
Stannard took another slug of tea. “Let’s be magnanimous. Bygones are bygones, right? Tell Joshua to report any unusual movement. Beyond that, I ain’t interested in the fucker as long as he stays the hell away from me.”
The radio phone extension on the director’s chair twittered. Stannard looked at Horus. Horus made a face. “Pick it up yourself,” he said.
Stannard smeared perspiration away with the crook of his muscular arm and telescoped out the unit’s antenna. One Katrina Van Der Leewon, she of the perfume inheritance, long, long legs and energetic Swedish body, had debarked from her
limousine and awaited his pleasure in the swimming pool wing.
Horus noted the way Stannard’s ice-blue eyes smoldered with memory. It was his job to keep track of such things. “Are you positive you want nothing done?”
“Nothing yet,” muttered Stannard, almost subaurally.
“You will notify me immediately if you—”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t fret it, Horus old chum. I’m cool.”
Horus nodded solemnly, wheeled about, and was gone.
As he walked down the hail, reflecting on what a marvelous body Ms. Van Der Leewon possessed (Stannard had invited Horus to watch a videotape of them making love in the Playboy bed he’d had installed in 1982), he heard a crash, followed by a sizzling, popping noise, and knew that his employer had just put an arrow through the TV set.
The little hardware store bag was of very thick brown paper. Inside it was a brand-new heavy-duty padlock and a pre-stressed, case-hardened steel hasp. Lucas dropped it on top of the pile of supplies and groceries he’d hauled into the cabin from the Bronco.
He had sneezed almost instantly upon forcing the stuck door open. There was quite a lot of dust.
The cabin’s walls were of split logs. It had a brick fireplace. A large central room branched off into a tiny kitchen area with about two feet of counter space. In the opposite corner was a tiny five-by-five room with a wooden door. The cabin stood above the hillside on concrete pillars and had a good board floor and a hurricane-proof roof. The roof was currently supporting about two tons of leaves and pine needles.
Sometime, perhaps last summer, a tree branch had blown through the north window on the uphill side. It still hung above a scatter of dusty glass shards. Lucas was glad he’d brought a boxful of domestic cleanup gear.
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 91