Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue

by Nightmare Magazine

  His short speech finished, Westmisley laced bent fingers into a fleshy shield before his lower chest and stared at me until I could almost make out his eyes behind the infernally reflecting lenses . . . slow-blinking, turtle-wattled eyes, small shiny balls set in a webbing of crinkled, oddly shiny skin. Those eyes were so unnaturally bland, so removed from pain or any sort of inner suffering, I wondered if they were cosmetic contact lenses, perhaps to cover sun-induced discoloration or disease; no one who had gone through such indisputably painful treatments for cancer should’ve possessed such calm, untroubled eyes.

  Oh, I’d heard of people with no threshold of pain, who never felt so much as a headache, but that was a rare condition; what could the odds have been of such a rich, worldly man also being blessed with freedom from external or internal agony? Yet, for him to intentionally inflict pain on another—

  “But it was an accident . . . I didn’t mean to hurt him,” I countered, as I shifted around in the chair, trying to assume a more upright position, but the chair (a modernistic, nubby-surfaced marshmallow perched on a stem-like base) seemed to have no internal framework . . . just layer upon layer of spongy softness, with no hard core to pull myself up on. So there I sat, legs slightly splayed, arms loosely akimbo, head just barely supported by the high back of the stupid seat, yet still trying to hang on to whatever dignity I possessed.

  “All the better for the desired effect . . . why do you think I told Kenny to hire a woman to devour Cody’s tattoo? All the members of the group were similarly embellished, some with more pleasing designs . . . but only he sported pierced nipples. And the nipple is such a sensitive area of the anatomy . . . much more so than the earlobe, don’t yew think?” He stared at my ears, with their trio of studs per lobe, and I reflexively pawed my hair over my ears before replying, “Yeah . . . I don’t know how anyone could have that done—”

  “Getting your ears pierced didn’t hurt?” Behind those shining lenses, something flickered for a second in his pale eyes, something eager, hungry—

  “No—wait, I mean, yeah, it hurt, y’know, but it wasn’t a major thing . . . not enough to stop me from having more holes put in, but an earlobe isn’t a nipple—”

  “No, no, it isn’t,” he agreed, in a surprisingly regretful-sounding tone. Then shifting his voice from wistfulness to its former briskness, he went on, “You probably realize I didn’t ask you here to discuss body piercing and tattoo-removal . . . listen carefully to this, would you?” Nearly smiling for real, he unlaced his fingers and reached over to his left, where he pressed a slightly-recessed portion of the desk-top. A few seconds of hissing static followed, the sound coming out of every wall as well as the ceiling; white noise amplified and captured on ferrous oxide, then came this almost-familiar looped sample, its tune nearly buried in industrial drum-beats and fuzzed-out electric techno synths, with additional layers of reverb and redubs—

  “Is that the intro to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’?” I ventured timidly, having decided that Westmisley got off on whatever information he could glom on to from people; in reply, he said softly, “Lukewarm . . . it’s the drum-line from ‘Goody-Two Shoes,’ Adam Ant’s solo effort—but wait—” With his right, whole index finger, he motioned for me to lean forward. Despite the squishiness of the chair, I leaned—

  —and a fraction of a second later, this . . . voice cut through the beat, redubs, and reverb; just a single sustained note that somehow grew stronger, louder and needier by the minute. When it seemed that no set of lungs could power a note for that long, that energetic a period of time, the voice swooped down to a shivery whisper, droning on and on in a rhythmic, chant-keen-prowl melody without actual words . . . definitely not house, not quite speed metal caterwauling, nor thrash, and certainly not a grunge growl, but whatever this . . . sound was, it was definitely hard-core. And miles beyond any alternative music I’d heard before . . .

  More like . . . elemental. Pre-primitive, but with a hybrid industrial/thrash/techno back-beat swooping in and around every flutter and trill of that incredible, inexhaustible set of pipes.

  And as I listened, I felt myself wanting, needing to move, to just free whatever it was that made me alive in my body, to shake flesh and bones and pulsing blood to that impossibly fast over 140 beats per minute melody . . . I can’t remember getting up, but a couple of minutes into the song, I was up and dancing around the cluttered, musty-aired room, my limbs jerking from places deep within me, my head rolling sinuously on my neck, my eyes almost but not quite closed, as if I’d just dropped a cocktail of smart drugs, or E—

  —but when I found myself face-to-face with one of them, it was like a switch had been shut off in my brain, leaving me frozen in unblinking place before the wall opposite Westmisley’s ebony desk.

  I was virtually eye-to-eye with a trio of the most gawd-awful ugly . . . constructions I’d ever seen anywhere, be I sober or stoned, and as I gazed at their oddly slick and slightly moist-looking surfaces, I wondered how their owner could bear to look at them while sitting serenely behind his desk, especially since their lidless eyes were all but locked on his shielded ones.

  They were about twenty-some inches tall, like baby dolls, only no kid would’ve taken one of those things to bed with her. Big bald heads, the skulls ivory-pale with nary a hint of hair stubble, just filmy-thin shiny flesh, with gelid glassy eyes set into the sockets and open jaws filled with glistening over-sized ivory teeth. No hint of flesh on the exposed arms, just finely-carved bones attached to each other with some sinewy-looking waxy amber threads. The rest of the bodies were wrapped in quasi-mummy-style linen bandages, culminating in a blunted point where the feet should’ve been. Repulsive as they were, I couldn’t stop staring at them; whoever fashioned these images did an ingenious job of waxing or varnishing or . . . wetting the surfaces to make everything glisten in a not-sunny-but-it-should-be manner, so that the skulls and their pencil-thin arm bones shone like they were resting under clear, clean water instead of being exposed to the drying, polluted L.A. air.

  Just then, the song died away, culminating in a fevered, intense whisper before the final triumphant whoop, and I was able to speak once more, now that the song had released my body and mouth.

  “Wha . . . what are those things?”

  “What do you think they might be?” That same cold toying voice I’d heard upon entering the building. Not wishing to be suckered in again by the sheer power of his ability to possess things, to manipulate that which was just beyond his reach, I concentrated on the middle figure, taking in the gelid yet hazy tan-irised eyes, and began, “Uhm . . . representations of dead people—”

  “Warm,” he conceded.

  “Or . . . life after death, like spirits?” After the intense work-out I’d just experienced, I still had trouble organizing my thoughts.

  “Waaarmer . . . “

  “Really old spirits,” I ventured, to which he replied in a terse whisper, “Hot . . . they’re Kakodiamones. Ancient Greek for evil spirits. Very rare representations . . . I acquired them three years ago or so—”

  Without needing for him to explain further, I realized he was talking about his final yacht voyage; within months of returning home he’d haunted every cancer clinic in the world, trying to halt the fast-spreading, disfigurinig melanomas which threatened to all but rot the flesh off his carcass—the indy ‘zines and even Loder on MTV attributed it to too much time spent lounging in equatorial and Mediterranean sunlight and not enough time spent smearing on sunblock. As my gaze cautiously roamed his corrugated flesh, while I tried to appear as if I were maintaining polite eye contact, I was struck by the irony of such a powerful, old-money dude not bothering to shell out a few bucks for a case of SPF thirty-two sunscreen, but then again, if what I’d read in those same indy rags was true, parts of his body which didn’t show in polite company were still . . . viable, according to those ex-mistresses who were willing or able to say anything at all about him.

  After taking in every ridge, wattle, and u
nexpected contour of his face, I realized that the subject of his repulsive, spit-shined figurines might hit too close to home, make him uncomfortable (or possibly invoke his legendary, quirky temper), so I took a conversational side-step and asked, “Isn’t that inscription over your outer door Greek too?” in an over-confident voice which made me cringe in retrospect, for Westmisley’s puce-mottled shining lips jerked into a chilly smile. “Just warmish, if that. Actually, it’s from the Latin . . . Virgil was a Roman, after all. It means, “I fear the Greeks even when they offer gifts.”

  Glancing back at the stiff trio, I remarked, “Considering what they look like, no wonder Virgil said—”

  The puckered skin of his lips twisted into a full moue as he answered in a slightly peevish tone, “I’m certain that Virgil wasn’t referring to Katharine, Kerenze, and Kristine here—” Noting my puzzled expression, he elaborated with a crépe-lidded wink. “I’ve found the best way of dealing with the unknown and the frightening is trivialization, condescending pet names, inappropriately silly—”

  “‘Silly,’” I found myself echoing with a dumb nod of my head, until Westmisley’s expression shifted from indulgent to irritated, then, with a flick of his clawed hand, he indicated the concealed tape deck in his desk-top and asked, “Well, what do you think of this?”

  Giving Westmisley my most sincere would-be model smile, I began slowly, while making my way back to that impossibly pneumatic chair, “The singer . . . god, she’s fabulous. Just incredible . . .” Then, remembering that Westmisley had actually composed music, back in his Fluxus art-fart days, I backtracked, “. . . I mean the music itself was fantastic, but that voice . . . to sing like that, she must’ve been opera-trained, like Pat Benatar, or Linda—”

  At that, Westmisley again pursed his lips into a crooked moue, as if I’d insulted his newest musical acquisition in an unknown way, so I quickly added, while trying to lean forward, “But she blows them away, no contest. I’d love to see the reaction of the first rave crowd who hears her—”

  It was then, for just a fraction of a second, that he let down his guard—or at least allowed whatever it was that he was thinking or feeling to change his expression; no sooner had I uttered those last words than his features softened, as his eyes (through the tinted lenses) grew wistful, their surfaces sheened with unmistakable moisture, and, for a moment, he once again resembled the fairly-good-looking-in-a-snooty-British-fop-way producer he’d been before the low-hanging Mediterranean sun made his skin go supernova. It was like this song, this singer, meant so incredibly much to him; the pride he felt at that moment was all but palpable—

  —and, watching his ruined features melt with inner warmth, something went slightly soft and vulnerable in me; looking back on it, I can only describe what happened to me as being like that . . . momentum thing which occurs when you lift up one of those hanging steel balls and let it strike the rest of the balls suspended from that rack of five or six balls, when the moment of impact causes the last ball in line to fly free of its fellow balls. You’d think the last ball in line moved in sympathy with the first ball, rather than it being a controlled, impersonal reaction. His changed expression was that first ball. And my feelings were free-flying far from reality when my eyes registered those shifting features . . .

  There was a beat of silence as I let my voice trail off, then, while I still flew high and loose, words tumbled out of my mouth.

  “I’ve been to a few raves, but nothing they played matched this . . . it’s . . . it’s like you tapped into her, and put all of her there is on to a master tape . . . it’s life, in a song. Something that sweeps you into it and doesn’t let go until it’s done with you—”

  Cutting off my stream of babble with one slicing motion of his curved right hand, Westmisley leaned forward ever so slightly, and asked softly, his voice teasing in its insouciance, “What do you suppose she looks like, while singing?” Then, as if sensing that I’d need prompting in order to answer him, he thumbed on the tape player, albeit at a lower volume. I concentrated as I listened, letting my mind paint an image to match the voice before I spoke again.

  “Wild . . . jerking like Janis Joplin, not holding back at all . . . sweating, she’s dripping . . . hair’s all spiked where she’s run her hands through it as she sings . . . I see her dripping with chains, little rings digging into her skin between them . . . if she’s wearing anything, it’s mostly ripped off from all her flailing around . . . ribcage is heaving, the hollow of her throat is fluttering . . . she’s just sweating and gleaming there—”

  The silence which followed that wordless melody was painfully loud and echoing in my ears. I slumped back against the billowing padding of my chair, eyes half closed, and finished, more to myself than to him, “—then she just collapses in a shiny heap, panting softly. That’s . . . that’s what I see when I hear her . . .”

  “I suppose that’s one way of picturing her,” Westmisley reflected in a tone which somehow suggested that his mental image was far, far different from mine—but also one he was disinclined to share.

  Before I could ponder his words (as I’ve done so, so many times since), he smiled again, then added, “How would you like to . . . act out what you’ve just described to me?”

  That time, I needed no time to reflect on his words—or their implicit meaning. I’d been knocking around L.A. and the fringes of the music scene long enough to recognize his pitch for what it was, as my mind scolded me What else did you think he’d want from you? Did you think you had any talent he could exploit?

  He was talking C & C Music Factory, Black Box, even Milli Vanilli time. As if I was some hick bitch who’d just stepped off the Greyhound from Bible-Belt, USA in search of instant fame-’n’-fortune.

  “I won’t lip synch,” I said tersely, remembering all the negative press those video body-doubles had accumulated so quickly—and so permanently. I was about to get up and leave when Edan replied softly, his voice almost seductive in its faux warmth, “But I know what you do do . . . you wait in an overpriced, undersized apartment, waiting for your barely-in-the-loop agent to come through with yet another crotch shot or back-of-the-stage-only video shoot. Between each ever-more-infrequent gig, you wait. Growing a little older, a little less firm, a little less ‘in’ and a lot more desperate. I’ve checked your . . . résumé. You’ve tumbled from B-flick body-doubling to Euro-market crotch-grinds for U.S. made-for-TV films. And despite what our sweet friend Kenny assured you, that nipple-sore guitar god has spread the word about that wicked incisor of yours—”

  “But it was what you had in mind when—you used me—”

  “Shouldn’t one use what is bought? And if so, isn’t re-using it up to the owner, too?”

  I stood up, ready to head for that Open Sesame door . . . knowing that what waited for me beyond that endless, empty plush-floored hallway was just as barren—and without any potential surprises lurking behind those paper-cut-edged doors. I knew I was meat . . . which meant being devoured or left to rot. I sat down again, biting my lips to keep quiet, while Westmisley purred, “Thought you’d agree . . . now, how limber are you? I expect more than a mere mouthing . . . my divas dance,” he added with a spittle-flying burst of emphasis that made this slab of meat begin squirming on the plate, as if I’d been cut into steak but not yet placed on the sizzling grill—

  Trying to remember if Genius Productions Ltd.’s client roster boasted any other high-profile diva types, I decided to buy mental sorting-out time by asking, in an off-hand tone, “Poor thing . . . she must be terribly fat, or homely, for you to go through all this trouble . . . I’ve seen how the press eats performers alive when word gets out about them doubling for a singer . . . but with a voice like hers, could she really be that bad-looking?”

  Once the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them, for surely I didn’t have enough clout to get away with a taunt like that with someone as hideous-looking as Edan Westmisley . . . but his reaction proved to be far more frightening than an unleas
hed flood of curses or show of temper could’ve been—

  —he simply leaned back in his chair, laced his talon-like fingers behind the back of his had-to-be-wigged head . . . and began laughing, a deep, bubbling-from-his-toes chuckle that soon brought pearl-like tears to his shielded eyes and exposed both rows of teeth back to the first molars. He rode his swivel chair like a bronco, while the laughter erupted from his heaving chest, as if he were mentally replaying Monty Python’s “Killing Joke” skit, prior to him keeling over in a spent heap of ruined flesh—then he simultaneously stopped rocking back and forth and placed his tight-skinned curved hands on the desk before him, while regarding me with a sly, I-know-something-you-don’t smile.

  “How bad do you suppose she looks?”

  Like you, prick, my mind raged, while I forced my lips to smile prettily before replying tentatively, as if this were simply another mind-game, “Oh, overweight, no tan . . . couch-potato city—”

  “Brrr . . . cold, cold, cold,” he teased in a voice that carried no hint of humor, while his eyes danced and glittered behind the dark convex glass.

  Remembering some article in Spin mentioning that the only artists signed to his label were bands, all-male bands—(my divas dance)