“Nyoman!” I shout.
Kala lunges at her with a heavy arm, but Nyoman skips out of the way, slashing the hand. Dark blood spurts forth from the wound and Kala screams in agony and rage. He stamps with his horny heel, trying to squash this little warrior, only to receive yet another deep wound in the tender bridge of his foot.
Kala clutches at a branch on the Tree of Life as he staggers back, his foot gushing blood. The branch is unable to support his great weight and snaps away. He falls, crashing to the dust, and the world shakes as in an earthquake. Nyoman leaps onto his chest and begins stabbing this way and that, at the throat, in the shoulder joints, at the eyes. Kala is blinded. In his terrible sightless fury he grips the small figure on his breast, but his fingers slide from the oiled leather armour. She is a slippery lizard, unable to be grasped, dancing the dance of death on Kala’s form.
“Quickly,” she calls to me, “it must be you who delivers the mortal stroke.”
Nearby is the branch which was torn from the Tree of Life. Where it has broken away the torn end is sharp, like the jagged point of a stake. I snatch this weapon, jump onto Kala’s chest, and plunge the stake into his heart. There is a flood, a fountain of blood shoots forth, high as a cedar. Kala lets out a loud, hollow moan, which fills every crevice in the land of shadows, and echoes back and forth through the distant mountains and valleys on the edge of the world.
Kala quivers and shimmers like a black poplar in the wind, his protruding eyes full of the terror of DEATH, the GREED in them shrinking rapidly as the light fades, and his armour rattles, shaking me from his breast. His pupils dwindle to the size of black gnats and his limbs wither. His teeth rot and crumble in his mouth. Down between the massive thighs, his once huge phallus shrivels until it resembles a tiny root. His scrotum bag deflates like a dead puffball and splits open: a dusty powder spills out and blows away on the warm night breezes, seeding the grasses with impotent evil.
Kala is dead.
“Thank you, Nyoman,” I say, “I owe you my whole existence.”
“I am yours and you are mine,” she says, then she walks away, over the lonely and level plains.
I stare at the giant Kala and shudder. Even in death he is a terrible sight. Then the wonderful Kresna comes out of the east, his blue-black form shining with holy beauty. His tall, handsome figure comes to stand beside me and I feel the glow of his Goodness, and Righteous Wickedness, filling my heart. His hand is on my shoulder, as he tells me, “Someone has done my work for me . . .”
* * *
I awoke from my dream in the safety of the darkness and found myself on the bed. I remembered someone shared the other half.
“Nyoman?” I whispered. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” she replied in her quiet voice. “Don’t worry, my darling.”
She folded her wraith-like form around me, holding me in the nothingness of her touch.
“A terrible thing has happened,” I cried, my voice seeming to fade a little. “A frightening thing.”
I clung to her in my distress, needing comfort, needing her sympathy and companionship.
“I know,” she said, running her light fingers through my hair, “Now we’re the same and we can be happy together. You do feel happy, don’t you, darling? You do want to be with me?”
I knew I was safe now, even in the moonglow, safe from Kala, as she opened the shutters and we saw the tattered remains of my shadow next to the ragged shade she herself cast. I had not noticed until now, that her dark twin was such a shabby creature: a stray mongrel amongst shadows, thin and wasted: a shadow that had been ravaged, yet one that had, eventually, emerged victorious from the struggle of life over death.
It was true that though I myself had a certain substance, my form was a nebulous thing, undefined and indefinite. I was now that forgotten person in the crowd, unnoticed, to be disregarded by my fellow creatures. I was myself as evanescent as a shade, as elusive as Nyoman, and my reply choked in my throat as I tried to express my utter and eternal love for her.
ROBERT BLOCH
The Scent of Vinegar
ROBERT BLOCH was born in Chicago but lived in Los Angeles for many years. His interest in horror first blossomed when he originally saw Lon Chaney, Sr’s performance in the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera. After discovering the pulp magazine Weird Tales, he began corresponding with author H.P. Lovecraft, who advised him to try his own hand at writing fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.
After his first story was published in 1934, Bloch quickly established himself as a popular and prolific short story writer, and by the 1940s he had begun to develop his own unique style of twisted psychological horror and grim graveyard humour. Although he wrote more than two dozen novels, hundreds of short stories, and numerous scripts for TV and movies, he will always be identified with his 1959 novel Psycho and Alfred Hitchcock’s subsequent film version. His wonderfully entertaining autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, was published in 1993.
“Writing my autobiography was fun,” he wrote in the October 1994 Omni. “Living it was not always that entertaining. Actually, I was writing in self-defence. As a longtime fantasy writer I was aware of my eminent colleagues in the field, and while I couldn’t compare my work to that of an Edgar Allan Poe or an H.P. Lovecraft, I did share one thing with them in common – a vulnerability to the biographers who could come up with their own version of a life-story after its subject was no longer around to dispute what was said. I preferred to tell the truth as I saw it.”
Robert Bloch died on 23 September 1994. He had confided to friends that the doctors had told him a few months earlier, “I could play with fireworks, but I shouldn’t plan on trick or treating.” As the following Bram Stoker Award-winning story proves, in a career that spanned an amazing seven decades, he was still a master of his craft up until the end . . .
EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT Tim and Bernie went bowling at the whorehouse.
“It didn’t look like a whorehouse,” Bernie said. “At least not any more than the places most of us lived in back then. And the damn thing was perched so high above Beverly Hills you’d have to look down to see King Vidor’s spread.” The old man glanced at Greg, the cigar in his hand semaphoring apology. “Sorry, I keep forgetting we’re talking 1949. You’ve probably never even heard of the man.”
“King Vidor.” Greg paused. “He directed The Big Parade. And Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest, the picture where she says ‘What a dump!’ Right?”
Bernie aimed the cigar at Greg. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“I’m seventy-six.” Bernie’s eyes narrowed behind his hornrims. “Where’d you hear about Vidor?”
“Same place I heard about you,” Greg said. “I’m a student of Hollywood history.”
“And whorehouses.” Bernie’s dry chuckle rose, then ceased as pursed lips puffed on the cigar.
Greg Kolmer grinned. “They’re part of Hollywood history too. The part I couldn’t find in books.”
Bernie was nodding. “In those days everything was hush-hush, and if you didn’t keep your mouth shut, Howard Strickling shut it for you.”
“Wasn’t he publicity director at MGM?”
“Right again.” Bernie’s cigar gestured benediction. “He’s the guy who said the first duty of a publicity man is to keep the news out of the paper.” Another chuckle. “He knew everything. Including where Tim and I did our bowling.”
“Was it really that big of a deal? I mean, all those stories about living it up out here – ”
“– are true,” Bernie said. “You think sex was invented by Madonna or some hot-dog computer hacks over at Cal Tech? Let me tell you, in the old days we had it all. Straights, gays, bi-, tri-: anything you wanted, you could get. You bring the ladder, we furnish the giraffe.”
“Then why were you covering up?”
“Censorship. Simple as that. Everybody knew the rules and cooperated, or else. Tim and I were in management at the same studio; not
top-level, but our names were on parking slots. So we weren’t going to risk the ‘or else’ part, if you follow me.”
Greg nodded, concealing his impatience. Because that was the only way to get Bernie to tell him what he really wanted to hear. And Bernie would tell him, sooner or later, because he had nothing else to do, sitting in this rundown old house on the wrong side of Wilshire with no friends to talk to, because you can’t talk to the dead. Which is probably why he’d agreed to talk to Greg, was talking to him now.
“You take the stars,” Bernie was saying. “The smart ones never fooled around with anybody under contract on their own lot. Getting involved with somebody you were liable to see every day was too risky; too much pressure, and you couldn’t just walk away. So they patronized the hook-shops.” Bernie’s face crumpled in an old man’s grin. “What do you suppose the folks in Peoria would say if they knew their favorite loverboy had to pay to play, just like the guy next door?”
“I doubt if many people in Peoria went to brothels in those days,” Greg said.
“Maybe not.” Bernie flicked cigar ash as he spoke. “But we did. Tim and I hung out at Kitty Earnshaw’s. Great old broad, a million laughs.”
Greg leaned forward. At last. Now it’s coming. “The one who had this house up in the hills you were talking about?”
“Right. Kitty was the best. And her girls were user-friendly.”
“Where was this place?”
Bernie spiraled his cigar in a northerly direction and more ash fell carpetward. “Way off Benedict Canyon somewhere, past Angelo. Been more than forty years since I’ve been up there, I don’t remember – ”
“Why’d you stop going?”
“Kitty Earnshaw retired, got married or religion or something. The new management was different, everyone Oriental. Not just Japs or Chinese, but girls from places like Burma, Singapore, Java, all over. Woman in charge never showed her face when I was there, but I heard stories. Marquess de Sade, that’s what they called her.”
“Marquis de Sade?”
“Marquess. A gag, I guess. But the place was getting a little too kinky for me. Like the night I met some drunk down at the bar and he says, ‘You pick a girl yet? Take the one with the glass eye – she gives good socket.’”
Bernie shrugged. “Maybe that was a gag too, but I saw enough to make me start wondering. The chains and bondage scene – you know, with the little whips and the handcuffs on the bedposts, all four of them, and the Swiss Army knives. Anyhow, I stopped going there.”
“And your friend Tim?”
“I don’t know. Studio dropped him when television took over out here. What happened to him after that I can’t say.”
“Did you ever try to find out?”
The old man stubbed his cigar in the ashtray. “Look, Mr Kolmer, I’m getting a little tired, so if you don’t mind – ”
“I understand, sir.” Greg smiled. “And I want to thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” He rose. “Just one other thing. The location of this place we’ve been talking about. If you could be more specific – ”
Bernie frowned. “All I remember, it was east of Benedict. Dirt road, probably been washed out for years now.” He hesitated. “Come to think, the place must have been burned out in that big fire back in the Sixties.”
“I could look it up,” Greg said. “Fire Department records.”
“Don’t waste your time. The place wasn’t even in Beverly Hills city limits, or L.A. either. Area up there is no-man’s-land, which is why the house could operate. Nobody was sure who had jurisdiction.”
“I see.” Greg turned. “Thanks again.”
The old man walked him to the door. “Don’t do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Don’t try going up there. Look, it’s none of my affair. But for your own good I’m telling you – ”
“Telling me or warning me?”
“Call it advice. From somebody who knows.”
“Knows what?”
The old man smiled, but his voice was somber. “That house up there is no place to take a bowling ball.”
Greg didn’t go up there with a bowling ball.
He didn’t even take a Thomas map, because the place Bernie Tanner had told him about wasn’t on the map. The area was blank, which meant there was no access unless Greg could locate that dirt road, which might or might not still exist.
It took Greg almost two hours of cursing up and down Benedict before he found the path. And it was scarcely more than that, at best a winding trail. The entrance was so overgrown with scrub that it couldn’t be seen from the lane leading to it, and the stretch spiraling around the hillside was invisible from below, choked with weed and sage.
At first Greg wasn’t sure it was wide enough even for his small car, but he had to chance it; chance the ruts and ridges and clumps of vegetation that punished tires and driver alike as the little hatchback went into a slow low. Without air-conditioning it was like trying to breathe with a plastic bag over your head, and by the time he was halfway up the hillside he wished he hadn’t started.
Or almost wished. Only the thought of what might be on the summit kept him going, through the stifle of heat and the buzz of insect swarm.
The car stalled abruptly, and Greg broke into panic-ooze. Then the transmission kicked in again, and he sweated some more as a bump in the road sent the hatchback veering left, pitching Greg against the door. Beneath underbrush bordering a curve he caught a sudden sickening glimpse of the emptiness just beyond the edge, an emptiness ending in a tangle of treetops a thousand feet below.
Greg fought the wheel, and the car lurched back on an even course. The road must have been better in the old days; even so, it was one bitch of a trip to make just to go bowling. But that was Bernie Tanner’s business and Bernie Tanner’s road.
Greg’s own road stretched back a lot farther than the bottom of this hill, all the way back to Tex Taylor, a onetime cowboy star at the Motion Picture Country Home. He had all those stories about the old days in Hollywood, and that’s all Greg had wanted at first: just some kind of lead-in he could work up into a piece for one of those checkout-counter rags. He’d been selling that kind of stuff long enough to get used to the idea he’d never win a Pulitzer Prize.
But what the dying western wino told him gave sudden startling hope of another kind of prize – one that might have awaited presentation for nearly half a century up there at what Tex Taylor called the House of Pain. That’s what he said its name was, after the Asian woman took over and began to give quality time to S-and-M freaks. Maybe it was all a crock, but it sounded possible, certainly worth a trip up there to find out.
Trouble was that Tex Taylor was borderline senile and couldn’t remember exactly where this weirdo whorehouse was located. But he did, finally, come up with the name of somebody he’d seen there in the glory days. And that’s how Greg got hold of Bernie Tanner.
Greg wondered if Bernie had any money. Today anything with a Beverly Hills address could probably fetch a mil or so on the current market. Maybe Bernie would pay him a mil or so just for old time’s sake, just out of pride.
And there were others like Bernie still around, stars and directors and producers who were bankable way back when; some of them had saved their money or put it into real estate and led comfortable, quiet lives in Bel Air or Holmby Hills. If Bernie would pay a million, how much would all the others be willing to fork over, given the proper motivation?
Greg grinned at the thought. And then, as the car swung around the last curve, his grin widened.
He had reached the summit. And on the summit was the house.
Hey, it wasn’t the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or even the men’s washroom at the Universal Tour. But the bottom line was it hadn’t burned or gone down in an earthquake or been bulldozed by a developer. It was still here, standing in shadowy silhouette against the late afternoon sun.
Greg took a flashlight from the glove compartment and clipped it to his belt. T
hen he reached into the compartment again and found there was just enough left in the envelope for a little toot, enough to keep him bright-eyed and bushy-tailed while he did whatever he’d have to do up here. He waited for the rush, then got out and lifted the hood to let the steam escape. There’d be no water up here, and probably no gas or electricity; they must have had their own generator.
He stared up at the two-story structure. Frame, of course; nobody could have hauled machinery here for stone or concrete construction. The roof had lost its share of shingles, and paint peeled from boards that had once been white, but the building’s bulk was impressive. Half a dozen boarded-up windows were ranked on either side of the front door: tall windows for a tall house. Greg closed his eyes and for a moment day was night and the windows blazed with the light of a thousand candles, the front door opened wide in welcome, the classic cars rolled up the driveway, headlights aglitter, wheels gleaming with chrome. And off behind the distant hills the moon was rising, rising over the House of Pain.
It was the toot, of course, and now moonlight shimmered into sunlight and he was back in the teeth of searing heat, radiator-boil, insect-buzz.
Greg walked over to the double door. Its weathered, sun-blistered surface barred intrusion, and at waist level the divided doors were secured by lock and chain. Both were rusty; too much to expect that he could just walk up and yank his way in.
But it happened. The chain gave, then came free in his fist, covering his palm and fingers with powdery particles of rust from the parted links. He tugged and the door swung outward. Hinges screeched.
Greg was in the house and the house was in him.
Its shadows entered his eyes, its silence invaded his ears, its dust and decay filled his lungs. How long had it been since these windows were first boarded, this door locked? How many years had the house stood empty in the dark? Houses that once were thronged with people, throbbed to their pleasure and their pain – houses like this were hungry for life.
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