Turns out, in real life, there’s not a whole hell of a lot you can do. Kitten Face was clear across the room. I couldn’t reach him. And even if I could, I doubt I would have had the courage. That black bore staring at me—and me one finger twitch from kingdom come. My brain went on the fritz as it searched itself for options and came up with nothing. So I just stood there, like the heroes in the movies. I even put my hands up instinctively, or maybe because it was what heroes in the movies did. Plus, I was afraid. Not to state the obvious, but I was afraid of getting shot, afraid of dying. I tried not to think about how afraid I was, but I didn’t have to think about it. I just was.
Now there were footsteps outside. Heavy, thumping footsteps. To the left of the gunman, through the window, out there in the night, I saw Billiard Ball moving over the path by the house, from the patio, approaching the front door.
Kitten Face glanced his way, then sashayed a step or two into the foyer to make room for him. He swung his hips elaborately as he moved and eyed me as if he thought I might be watching his hips and how they swung. He made a big show of it. I felt he was mocking me. It pissed me off. That and the gun. He kept the gun trained on me the whole time.
Billiard Ball walked in. He was dragging Sean Gunther by the ankle, dragging him behind him as if he were nothing, no weight at all, the way a little kid tows a security blanket. Gunther was drenched from his sopping silver hair to the darkened knees of his white slacks. Billiard Ball must have held him by the ankles and dunked him head first into the pool.
The author lay on his back, dazed, with his hands lifted and his eyes open and his mouth open as he was dragged helplessly over the floor. His nose was smashed and there was fresh blood on his upper lip.
Billiard Ball slung the writer’s body into the living room like you might sling a stick for a dog to fetch. Gunther cried out as he flew down the two stairs from the foyer. His cry was cut short as he landed hard on the tiled floor, sending scattered papers flying. He groaned then. He rolled over onto his front, propping himself up, dripping water and blood onto the pages still underneath him.
He started to rise. Kitten Face watched him. There was something really awful about the expression on the androgynous gunman’s face. He was smiling, like it was cute, you know, cute to watch the broken Gunther try to stand. As if Gunther were a toddler just learning to stand and he, Kitten Face, was the toddler’s admiring mother. Billiard Ball meanwhile stood with his massive arms crossed on his massive chest. He sneered cold death at me, just as he had from the window of the black Mustang.
Gunther pushed up onto his knees. Every move he made brought another grunt of effort out of him. He wiped the blood off his mouth with his hand, grimacing at the pain in his nose. Then, grunting some more, he rose to his feet. I could tell he was still drunk from the way he staggered a step, his body swaying like a reed in the wind.
“Who the fuck are you people?” he said, gingerly touching his nose again. He was talking to Kitten Face even though it was Billiard Ball who’d given him the beating. “Huh? What the hell did he rough me up for? I told him I didn’t know anything.”
Kitten Face pouted and smirked and glanced over at Billiard Ball.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Billiard Ball said. He had a surprisingly high voice, almost mousey. Strange to hear it come out of a guy that size.
“See?” said Gunther. “What did I tell you? It’s nothing to me if—”
Kitten Face shot him dead.
THE MURDER OF Sean Gunther was so nonchalant I couldn’t take it in at first. Still pouting and posing and sticking his hip out provocatively, Kitten Face simply flicked his wrist to move the gun from me to Gunther then pulled the trigger and flicked his wrist to point the gun at me again. The shot was loud and flat, like a ruler whapping a desktop. I hardly would’ve known what it was if I hadn’t seen the burst of smoke and flame from the barrel. Even so, I couldn’t believe it. I stared at Gunther as if I expected him to finish his sentence.
He didn’t finish his sentence. He staggered again. He turned—turned toward me with his head down, looking in stunned surprise at the ragged black hole that was now in the middle of his white shirt just beneath his sternum. Then he lifted his eyes to me. The expression on his face was terrible. He was just beginning to realize that the story of his life was over. Any plans he had—for change or renewed success or personal redemption—they were all off. Time was up.
He crumpled to the floor and let out a throaty breath. Finally, he lay utterly still, staring sightless at the ceiling. That terrible expression was now frozen on his face forever.
“Aw,” said Kitten Face. “Poor thing.”
I think if I could have, I would have killed him then, killed him with my bare hands. I was that angry. It was such a dismal thing to do, just shoot the man like that for no reason. And the girly gay humor made it worse somehow. Like it was nothing. Like Gunther’s life was nothing. Like it was all about Kitten Face. His cute little joke. His cute little show.
But it wasn’t nothing to me. The reality of the author’s death was beginning to register in my brain now, as final and inarguable as a brick wall. I had never experienced death before, never seen a man die, never even known anyone who died, not anyone I cared about. There was the jailer in the dungeon when the ogre bit his head off, I guess. But that wasn’t like this, not real like this. Cowled jailers with torches, ogres, dungeons. All that was just too insane to be real. Not like this.
Kitten Face was coming toward me now. Swinging his hips elaborately. Daintily stepping over Gunther’s corpse as if it were a puddle.
“What’s the matter, peaches?” he said to me as he came. “You look pale. Something troubling you?”
My eyes flashed to the body on the floor. Kitten Face glanced back at it. “Oh. Yes. Poor darling. But then, he didn’t know anything.” He came up close, then closer, keeping the gun on me. “What about you, sweet cheeks?” he said. He reached out with his free hand and squeezed my cheeks between his thumb and fingers as if I were a child. Holding his gun on me so I couldn’t push him off—or anyway didn’t dare. “What do you know? Hm? Do you know anything? Hm?”
I didn’t. I didn’t know anything, and I figured when I said so, he’d kill me too. And I was even more scared than I was before, and I had been plenty scared before. But I was also furious—helplessly furious—at being mocked and manhandled like this.
“Tell Mama,” Kitten Face said. And he let go of me and slapped me, not hard but hard enough to hurt.
I wanted to jump at him. I wanted to kill him. He was muscular but small, smaller than me, and I might’ve been able to do it, angry as I was. But the gun held me in place. I didn’t have the courage to try.
“Tell Mama what you know,” he said.
“I don’t even know what you want,” I said. My voice came out thin and tight. I was strangling on my helplessness and rage.
“Ooh, baby’s angry, isn’t he?” Kitten Face said. He patted my cheek, more softly this time. “Don’t be an angry baby, peaches. You know what I want. I want what you want. The book. The woman. Ellen. What do you know about those?”
What could I say? What could I tell him that would keep me alive? I just stood there, staring at the gun barrel, staring past the gun barrel at his pouting, preening feline face. Waiting for him to pull the trigger. Wishing I had the guts to attack him—and why not, since I was going to die here anyway? But I didn’t attack him. I just stood there.
“You’re being very naughty,” he said, waggling the gun back and forth, the way he had when he’d turned it on Gunther and fired. “Don’t make Mama punish you.”
An idea came to me. Something to say, anyway. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t get the words out at first. I had to lick my lips and swallow hard before I tried. I tilted my head toward the cabinet.
“It’s in there. The book. If that’s the book you mean.”
Kitten Face followed my gesture. He touched his lips with a finger and made a theatrical moue of su
rprise when he saw the big volume with the red binding: Another Kingdom. He kept the gun trained on me as he slinked over to the cabinet. He kept the gun trained on me as he lowered himself gracefully and plucked the volume from the shelf. Then he wagged the book in my face.
It wasn’t a book. It was a fake. Just a binding. The pages had been torn out, leaving nothing but a few ragged shreds.
Kitten Face tossed it at me. I knocked it out of the air. It flapped to the floor.
“So that’s no help, is it?” he said. “Is that the only copy?”
“It’s the only one I know of,” I said. I felt like I was signing my own death warrant.
And sure enough, Kitten Face stepped toward me and pressed the barrel of his gun hard into my forehead. My brain told me I had nothing to lose. I could make my move. Grab the gun. Turn it on him. Kill him like he deserved. Maybe even shoot down Billiard Ball too. Be a man, I thought.
But I couldn’t do it.
“So you’re not much use to me either, are you?” he said. I didn’t answer. He pressed the gun against me harder, making me hurt. “Are you, you naughty baby?”
I still didn’t answer. Because screw him. I was a dead man anyway, so screw him. I waited for him to pull the trigger, afraid of death and furious at my killer and sad that I was going to die. But I didn’t have the courage to go for the gun.
Then, from across the room, Billiard Ball made a noise. A little cough. Barely audible.
Kitten Face drew the gun away.
“All right,” he drawled. “Let’s go.”
HE MARCHED ME at gunpoint out of the house. Along the path. Through the driveway door. Down the drive. Back to my car where it was parked across the street in the shadows. Billiard Ball walked just behind us. I caught a glimpse of him in the car window, hands in his pants pockets as he strolled along barely paying attention, eyeing the night as if this were just a stroll in the garden.
Now that it seemed Kitten Face wasn’t going to kill me right then and there, my frozen mind started to work again. And I realized: this—this, now—what was happening to me right here and now—made no more sense than my insane, supernatural trips to Galiana. Who were these people? What did they want from me? Why me? I thought of Gunther lying back there in the house, all his plans over, all his hopes gone. For what? What was it about? What could it be about? Had Gunther known the answer? Had he understood why his future was erased like that, his life, such as it was, erased just like that?
We reached my Nissan. Kitten Face spoke to Billiard Ball. “You take the ’Stang. Peaches and I will drive back in his car.” He added to me: “Won’t that be cozy, peaches?”
Billiard Ball didn’t answer, just obeyed. He strolled off to the black Mustang, which was now parked at the curb just a few yards up the road.
Kitten Face prodded me in the back with his gun.
“Get behind the wheel, darling,” he told me. “And don’t try anything, or I’ll blow your balls off. You won’t like it. No one ever does.”
I unlocked the door and pulled it open. I took a quick glance back at Kitten Face. I don’t think he was expecting me to do that because I caught him with an expression on his mug that wasn’t part of the whole showy camp repertoire. It was a hollow expression, slack and dead-eyed: the expression of a man sitting alone in his room as the sun went down, contemplating a life of emptiness and despair.
I lowered myself into the car—and like the snap of a finger, I was blind. I couldn’t see anything. Had he shot me? Was I dead? Everything was blackness.
Then the next moment I felt my body sliding downward, bumping downward over a rough surface, then flying off the surface and into the empty air.
I heard a shout from above and behind me: “Go after him!”
I heard another voice, urgent in the pitch blackness: “This way!”
There was a moment of stunned confusion before I recognized the nasal, squeaking female voice of the mutant rodent Maud from Galiana. Christ, I was back in the dungeon again! I was running for my life again with the executioner and the guard right behind me. I remembered: I had pulled the grate out of the wall and scrambled headfirst through the opening. I must have slid through some sort of chute into this blackness.
I smelled shit. All around me. As if I were in a sewer.
I saw a light up ahead of me—a flash of sparkling colored lights. Maud.
I started running toward her.
I GUESS IN SOME BIZARRE WAY, I WAS GETTING USED TO this: stepping through doorways from one world into another. Whether it was a brain tumor or the onset of psychosis or actual magical teleportation from reality into fantasy land, I was starting to get a handle on it. It only took me a second this time to realize I was no longer facing death at the hands of a gun-wielding androgyne madman but was, in the blink of an eye, facing death instead from a medieval sword-wielding dungeon guard while I escaped in the wake of a mutant rodent.
As a side note, psychosis seemed the most reasonable explanation.
Anyway, I ran after Maud’s sparkling lights, but I didn’t get far. The lights went out. The dark was absolute. The ground underneath my feet was uneven. I took a couple of steps and tripped on some sort of rise and went sprawling to the ground. I skinned the side of my knee and lost my bearings utterly.
I started to get up. I heard my pursuers shouting behind me. By luck, something had delayed them. There was some confusion about whether the guard should bring his torch into the chute with him.
“You know what’s down there?” shouted the guard—and I could hear raw fear in his echoing voice.
“Damn it!” answered the executioner. “He’s getting away! Let’s go!”
What’s down here? I wondered.
And then something sank its claws into me. I let out a high-pitched shriek.
“Oh for pity’s sake!” said Maud, disgusted—she was right beside me now. She pulled her claws out of my shoulder.
“Well, you startled me!” I muttered. I climbed to my feet.
“Just come on! Follow me.” “I can’t see anything.”
She sparkled, and I did see her then in the spray of light around her. She was clinging to the rough wall beside me like a squirrel. “This way,” she said. And she scrambled off along the stone, winking out into darkness as she went.
I stumbled to where I’d seen the wall and felt my way along it, moving more slowly, more carefully now.
Behind me, I heard a body hit the ground. A loud, gruff curse. The guard must’ve come through the chute. I glanced back, but the darkness was complete again. The guard had obviously decided to leave his torch behind him.
What’s down here? I thought again.
“God, the smell,” I heard him say.
It was bad, all right. Raw sewage. A lot of it. The stench burned in my nostrils. And it was getting worse with every step I took.
“Stop,” said Maude. Then more urgently: “I said stop!”
I stopped. There was a pause. Then she glittered—and by the vibrating confetti of colored lights, I saw that I was standing inches from the edge of a pit: a sharp drop into nothingness. The shit smell rose up out of the depths in a wet gust so strong it made me want to vomit.
The lights around the mutant rodent went out. I heard her voice. “Find the rungs. Go down.”
I lowered myself to my knees. It was so black, I could barely find the ground. I felt around for the rim of the pit. Felt past the rim until I touched a horizontal bar of rusted metal in the pit wall: the first rung.
Maud’s weirdly human, weirdly nasal, weirdly animal voice now came up from the depths below me. “Climb down.”
Nothing could have made me descend into the thick, nauseating stench of that pit—nothing except the sound of the executioner tumbling out of the chute behind me. His voice and the guard’s voice …
“Come on, move it!”
“I can’t bloody see!”
“To hell with that! Don’t let him get away!”
… closing in behind me.
I began the climb down the side of the pit, rung by rung, hand over hand. With every foot of the descent, the stench grew thicker, worse. It was like a living putrid shroud of wet excrement folding itself around me, covering my mouth, my nose, my eyes, tightening on my lungs, smothering me.
“God!” I choked out, strangling on the miasma.
But I could hear the guard and the executioner cursing and shouting at each other as they stumbled after me through the darkness. So I kept climbing, down and down, deeper and deeper into the thicker and thicker stench.
I touched bottom—not a solid bottom. No such luck. A wet, thick, moving, stinking bottom of God knows what loathsome stuff that rose around my ankles and squeezed up over my feet and soaked my leggings while the stink of it lived and breathed around me. I gagged. I shuddered.
“Make your mind go blank,” Maud said. She glittered—and there she was, clinging to the wall beside me. Her bizarre deformity of a woman’s face eyed me eagerly, like a Halloween mask hung on the head of a rat.
“What?” I said, barely able to speak, barely able to breathe.
“There is no magic here but Tauratanio’s,” she said. I still had no clue what this meant. But she went on, “You have to let it in. You have to open a path for it in your mind. Like I did when I broke your chains.”
“Well, why can’t you do it now?”
“This is bigger. It takes a human mind. Come on!”
Above me, there was a rough shout. Then a cry: “Watch it!”
“Bloody hell!”
The guard and the executioner had come to the edge of the pit. Another second and they’d be climbing down after me.
“What do I do?” I whispered, swallowing what felt like a solid chunk of stench.
Another Kingdom Page 10