“Be on a paddle wheel?”
“Fighting monsters?”
“Not anymore. It’s like the mafia, once you’re in, you’re in. I mean, I’m glad I’ve done it, but it pissed on the rest of my life. Couldn’t stay married, and can’t keep focused on anything outside of this. The world thinks I’m always doing Vegas, and the rest of the time lying around at Graceland listening to my old records with a blonde’s face in my lap. Not so.”
“This what happened to your career? This job. It the reason you fell off making hit records? Why you made all those bad movies?”
“Why thank you for noticing what a shithole my career has become, right after telling me how great I was doing. Hell, honey, on my worst day, and just living on royalties, I’m doing better than most at the height of their career.”
“I wasn’t talking about money. Sorry. I’m too blunt sometimes.”
“Think so, huh? Look. You’re right. When you’re right you’re right. My career is in the shitter for just that reason. Well, in the shitter for someone of my status. This work eats everything else up. Also, I got another reason. That bastard Colonel has my mama’s soul in a gris-gris bag. Hangs onto it, won’t let it go until he’s through with me. Which may only be when I get killed, if then. I got a fear I’ll be serving dinner on this damn boat sometime in the future, like Elvira. You know, I think about chunking it all. If I could get Mama’s soul loose, I think I’d get an impersonator to take over the music business. There are people out there making a living pretending to be me. Some really look like me. Some of them sound more like me than me. I’d stick one of them in Graceland and go back to hitting the road, singing tunes. There’s one guy, Sebastian Haff. He’s even had surgery to look like me. He could do it, if he’s not too stupid to play the part. I think, hell, I’d make a great Elvis impersonator. Hit the road and do what he’s been doing, and he can be me and I’ll be him being me.”
“Be funny if the Colonel were to ask this imposter to fight monsters after you’re gone. He wouldn’t know what in hell that was about, would he? Be kind of funny.”
“Wouldn’t it?” Elvis said. “Well, maybe not for the impersonator.”
“You know what? I don’t think the Colonel has your mother’s soul in a gris-gris bag. I don’t. I admit I can’t say for sure, but I think that’s a scam. Colonel’s tricky. I’ve caught him in some lies, even though for the most part he’s been good to me.”
“I can’t take that chance.”
“I think you might want to believe what he’s telling you, to justify yourself.”
“That so?”
“What I think is you want to be a hero. Know what Freud says about the hero?”
“I have the distinct impression you’re going to tell me.”
“That the idea and desire of heroism is based on an attempted self-cure for our flagrant vulnerability.”
“He said that, did he?”
“You and I have charisma. A certain kind of charisma. The others here do, too. Not the same as us. Ours goes with our looks and our entertainment factor. But that’s another reason you’re good for this job. Charisma comes from a kind of internal energy, confidence.”
“Sometimes I’m not that confident.”
“No one is. But charisma is a weapon we can use. It’s also what attracts us to this job. Our charisma is what attracts THEM to us.”
“Them?”
“The supernatural baddies. Colonel says charisma is our main source of power. People like you and me, more than the others, have a power source even we haven’t fully tapped into. He says he has tapped into his.”
“Colonel has tapped into a charisma force?” Elvis said. “Well, that kills the idea for me. He’s not that charismatic.”
“He has a different kind of charisma. You can’t do all he’s done, made the deals he’s made for you, without some kind of juice that goes beyond just being a wily business man. He has something going for him.”
Elvis nodded. “On that note, think I’ll go to bed. I’ve had enough revelations for tonight. We elderly need our rest.”
Elvis started toward his cabin, paused when Jenny said, “Hey, just to let you know. You look pretty good for an old guy.”
“I’m not that old.”
“But I’m that young. No gravy boat for you, big guy. Good night.”
“Good night,” Elvis said, and went to his cabin and to bed. Unhappily. He got the teddy bear out of the secret compartment in his luggage and put it in the bed with him and snuggled with it.
That ole paddle wheel beat on, and down below in his bed in black pajamas with red horse heads stitched on them, his brown house shoes on the floor beside his bed, his cane within easy reach, the Colonel tried to remember how it was when he was young, before he made the grave mistake that caused him to become what he was now, a liaison for the light on the edge of darkness.
He had a few more years as the Colonel yet, but then he would morph again, inhabit another body, another someone whose past was murky or who had no real past, perhaps no living relatives, perhaps some character on the edge of it all. He might have to pick someone living on the street. He could do that, and within a week or two he’d have a job, and then he’d have a career. He had been a soldier, a baker, and actually had been a candlestick maker. He had been a circus barker, and in a considerably more attractive body, he had been a male prostitute, then gigolo, and then a captain of industry, and now he was Elvis’s manager. It was a bad career move. Oh, he made money alright. Shit, he was sticking it to the kid, getting fifty percent of what he made, and skimming here and there, but hey, he had to stash some so that when the change came, when he grew too old or sick to stay in his present corpse house, he had to move on. Get inside someone else and become them. Elvis was his original thought. He even considered suicide to make the jump. Elvis got more pussy than male rabbits, and things were handed to him on a platter, but there was something about the guy, something that made him think he didn’t want to take that body over. Frankly, he wasn’t sure he could. Elvis could have tremendous willpower when he wanted, though there might be a way to defeat him via a peanut and banana sandwich.
Whoever he ended up being, there would be the inevitable arrival of the Men in Black, the ones who worked for the President of the United States, who in turn worked for HIM. The thought of HIM made the Colonel feel ill.
Jesus, HIM, the Shadow Keeper, the world wide creeper, the man that made Nixon tremble. And yet, HIM, and all at his command, including the President of the United States, held back things so much worse than themselves, and frequently, that was saying something.
Hell, not everyone could have a great boss. Course, the insurance plan was good, had dental, and for someone who could not actually die of natural causes, that really mattered, from host to host. Course, there was a good chance that he would bite it by means of very unnatural causes, a strong possibility considering the job, and if the source was unnatural enough, there would be no jumping of his soul to a fresh host. It would be all over for him.
The Colonel sighed.
Because I signed in blood, the Colonel thought, I am HIM’s representative on Earth. At least for now. There had to be a way out of it, a way to disappear. He had thought on it for some four hundred years, from one flesh-house to the next, but a perfect exit plan had eluded him year after year.
The Colonel reached and turned on the lamp by the bed, rang a little bell he lifted from the nightstand. The door opened and the zombie Elvira lumbered in, waiting for his command.
The Colonel studied her for a moment. He motioned her to a chair beside the bed. “Just sit with me awhile. Keep me company. Oh, and wear my house shoes.”
7
THE JUNKYARD
The padlock on the junkyard gate popped open and swung wide without the use of key or bolt cutters. A mass of shadows swirled inside the fencing like black confetti blown by the wind. However, there was no wind.
The shadows broke apart into dark swirls that became more fully for
med. Night was sucked out of them. They looked human, four men and two women. They wore black clothing, simple shirts and pants and shoes. For a moment, when they moved, they lurched forward in electric-jump motion, then smoothed out, strolled six abreast, the girl with the pony tail carrying the black bag with their catch in it. The bag quivered and cried. As they walked, the six were twelve, and then the twelve were eighteen. Duplications of themselves. And then, in the blink of an eye, they were six again and human in appearance except when a cloud rolled over the moon, and then they were something dark and hard to identify, something even less identifiable than shadow.
They came to the rows of rusted cars and glided down one of those rows as if on skateboards, past moaning sounds from the rusted machines. White round faces pressed against car windows here and there. The shadow people came to a stop in a large clearing in the junkyard before an old, aluminum building, and next to it, a rickety shed.
Pony Tail dropped the black bag on the gravel. The bag came apart and lay as a pool of shadow, the Chaser, balled up and throbbing, lay in the center of it. His clothes were rags, having been ripped to rags by sharp flying tongues, needle-like bug legs, and greasy-wet tentacles. Bones poked through the tears in his clothes, his face was puckered and raw. With his legs bent over his back, the tops of his feet pressed down tight against his shoulders, the sides of his ankles firm against his head, his head flattened somewhat on top, he didn’t look like anything that could, or should, be alive. He certainly wanted to die. He was starting to feel pain again.
Where before the air had been as still as an oil painting, there was now a cold, sour wind that lifted dust from the ground and caused the old cars to creak. Behind him the shapes wobbled, moaned, broke apart and flowed into the ground like spilled ink.
The Chaser’s eyes rested on the shed. Something was moving under the door, flowing from beneath it where the crack at the bottom was wide. It seeped out like lumpy, dark sewage, spread out over the ground, then swelled into a great, heaving shadow that fanned wide and rolled like a slow-motion, black ocean wave toward him.
The wind began to blow harder and cars in the yard rattled like a rusty, old carnival ride. The dark wave froze, but he could see a split in the darkness. A kind of panting sound came from it. In front of the frozen wave dust devils swirled off the ground, twisted about, tossing dust into his eyes. The wave came unstuck and flowed over him and touched him and made him sick with its slaughter-house stench.
Its strange mouth slurped over him and a tongue came out of it and wagged over his head as if licking chocolate drizzle off the top of an ice cream cone. Something small and nasty seemed to be sticking into every one of his pores, and the touch was an old man’s hand on a young child’s crotch, a fist clutching an old woman’s heart, squeezing the last of life out of her, wild animals ripping a baby apart, a mother cutting up and frying her children, a man with a shotgun waiting for his wife to come home, cats in gunny sacks with bricks for ballast, tossed into the river. He could sense all that and so much more in the thing’s touch.
The great black wave and all its probing accessories pulled back from him, lost its darkness, became a shape like a massive white potato with rows of porcine tits. Sprigs of dark, greasy hair sprouted from its porcelainwhite bald head. Its eyes were like bullet holes. Its nose like a squash. Its belly rolled like Jell-O. Its legs were squatty trunks of coiled lard with wide, flat feet and toe-like thumbs. Its pubic area was like a pelt of squirming black worms, its sexual opening winking through the worms was like a red, raw wound made by the slashing of a sword.
The great thing leaned over him, lifted him with stubby arms that grew longer, clutched him with fat hands and multi-jointed fingers. It raised him above its head as if readying itself for a free throw. A slobbery tongue rolled out of the monster’s mouth and lapped about in the air, and then slapped down on his forehead. The tongue was rough and cold, different this time from before. It was poking a hole in his skull with its sharp, cold tip. He felt like a jar of syrup slowly being emptied by the snout of an ant-eater.
With one cold wipe of that tongue he was nine years old, on the hill near his house, perched on his big blue bicycle. A moment later he was riding down that hill, pedaling insanely, the wind blowing his hair, cool on his face. He was laughing, going fast as the wind. And then his pants leg got caught in the chain as he pedaled, and he was thrown from the big blue bike as if from a bucking horse, thrown high. He came down on the cement, hard, breaking his leg in four places.
The wet tongue stirred his memories. After coming home from the hospital he lay on the couch in a cast for four months to heal. It was four months of nothing but listening to his father beat his mother in the bedroom next door, passing by him on his way to the bar, pausing long enough to bend his ass down on the Chaser so he could fart in his face.
“Enjoy that with a Coca-Cola,” his father would say.
The probing tongue moved on, taking the memory with it. Then another memory was probed, brought up for investigation, then that memory was sucked on and removed from his memory.
Enjoy that with a Coca-Cola.
The fat, female-thing yanked her tongue out of his brain, dropped him with a sound like a bag of china dishes being tossed off a cliff, and he rolled under a rusting Dodge truck.
The tips of the Mother’s tits dripped black goo thick as heavyweight motor oil. The damp, shadowy collection of monsters flowed to her, grappled for position. Their mouths and tongues and tentacles and feelers licked and waved and touched and sucked, and like writhing, dark grubs, they dangled from the Great Mother’s tits and sighed as they sucked her foul honey.
8
SAFE HOUSE
“There it is,” the Colonel said.
He was referring to a long white wooden dock shining bright in the sun and to the long white gravel walk that went directly from it to a large two-story white house with a veranda on one side. Thick white wooden pillars designed to look like Greek-style marble supported the porch at intervals, and the porch helped support a top floor with an array of large windows shaded by great oaks that grew in intervals all the way around the house. There was a wind-spinning weather vane of rattling metal emblems mounted on the ridge of the roof, and the metal pieces caught the sunlight and whirled.
“This will be our headquarters,” the Colonel said.
The team stood at the railing at the front of the steamboat, watching the shore come into sight. Ducks swam near the dock. A fish jumped large and shiny in the sunlight as the Nocturne slowed and glided sideways and shoreward.
“This boat is some machine,” John Henry said.
“There’s nothing like it,” the Colonel said.
The Blind Man said, “I smell magnolias, and willows, and sweet gums,
a few pines, and oaks, something dead near the water.”
“Hell,” Jack said, “I could have told you that if I was blind. That’s what grows around here, and there’s always something dead.”
“Yeah,” said the Blind Man, “but I can smell them from here, all you can smell is your unwashed asshole.”
“Hey man, you think I won’t smack you because you’re blind?”
“I think you can’t smack me,” said the Blind Man. “I would smell you coming.”
“Boys, boys,” said Colonel. “Play pretty.”
The steamboat came to rest sideways next to the pier. The great ramp was lowered by the dead folk, and the Colonel, carrying his cane under his arm, strutting in a way that belied his age, walked the team to the house. The dead servants remained on board.
Glancing back at them, Colonel said, “They will be better here. If it starts, and it will start, they would just be in the way. Jenny, will you be our server?”
“No.”
“No?”
“What I said. I’m female, but pouring coffee doesn’t come with being female. I didn’t join this group to be a waitress. So, just in case you didn’t hear me, hell no.”
“Okay,” Colon
el said. “Jack?”
“Not likely.”
“Hell, I’ll do it,” said Johnny. “I like cooking. Someday I’m going to open my own restaurant.”
They went across the yard, past the veranda, walked around to the front door. As Colonel Parker rattled through a ring of keys, looking for the right one, the others noticed on the sill above the door a large wasp’s nest. Wasps flickered out from it, circled in the air, buzzed past the team, then flew away. The sound of their buzzing was akin to the sound of an electric razor.
“That is one big nest,” Elvis said.
Jenny said, “I hate wasps, bees, yellow jackets. I got stung bad once when I was nine.”
“Bees are good,” Jack said.
“I want them to be good somewhere away from me,” Jenny said. Colonel had the door open by then, and they all went inside.
The bottom section was nicely furnished and clean enough to eat off the floor. The rooms were painted in warm colors and the furniture was designed for comfort. The windows that went around the house had a series of small designs etched into the glass; protective spells. Similarly, on the central hall floor that led from the front door to the back, dividing the house with a dog run, there were numerous designs carved into the wall boards.
The steps of the stairs that led to the second floor had been decorated with protective designs. The railing was carved with shapes and symbols. At the top of the stairs, on the landing, and on the hallway floor that led left to right, the theme continued. There were ancient and heavy tapestries on the wall throughout with images of dragons and other exotic creatures woven into them.
The house had nine bedrooms, and two of them were enormous. Of the enormous rooms, one was for the Colonel, and the other was for Elvis, who was the designated team leader under Colonel Parker.
On the ceilings of all the bedrooms pentagrams were drawn, and curiously in the middle of each pentagram hung a ceiling fan. The king-sized beds were placed directly under the pentagrams.
Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers Page 6