But it was.
Aluke watched as the scuba diver drifted up, arms floating to the sides. The air tanks bumped hollowly against the cavern ceiling. Before swimming away he glanced up at his tormentor one last time.
The scuba mask fitted over the face of a frog.
Chapter 28
Safety was rare.
Maribel had forgotten how it felt. She’d made it out of the Puppet Inferno, which was like a haunted hell-house for older kids. Demons lived there now. She’d seen them doing things to each other…didn’t want to think about it again. She was just glad not to have attracted their attention. Then there was Puppet Deep where scuba-diving puppets and fake sharks swam—thankfully, it wasn’t as populated as she remembered from her outings with the kids. She found an alley between Puppet Deep and the food court, where a black curtain spilled from the sky. She’d made her way to it when growling glass monsters came rushing out of gift-shop windows. Their footsteps sounded like mirrors shattering, again and again. After running nearly to exhaustion, she’d lost them and ended up in the same alley where she started.
She was about to move when lips pressed into her neck.
Maribel turned and drew her hand back.
Allie stood there, rosy-cheeked, video camera still in hand. “I have so much good footage of you. I’m learning so much. I want to show you.”
“How did you get in here?”
“I will follow you,” Allie sang the oldie song, swaying her hips disturbingly.
“Keep your voice down. Jesus! What is your problem, anyway?”
With a petulant sniff, Allie thoughtfully clicked the video camera on. “My problem? I tell you what my problem is…. My husband wants you, Maribel. He’s going to leave me. I’m not a liberal woman like yourself, see.”
“Are you kidding?”
“He doesn’t think I can fuck a woman.” Allie took a deep breath and unbuttoned the top button of her green blouse. “I can fuck a woman.”
“You’re…confused.”
“No I’m ready. Let’s add this to the rest of the tape. It’s great stuff. I’m learning to be worldly like the Rhodeses.”
A deep snarl came from the alleyway. Allie’s head jerked and her eyes widened. “You sent it here to kill me?”
“Get in here, before it sees you.” Maribel sank into the darkness in front of the men’s bathroom.
Allie screamed and charged down the alley. She shrieked as a jumble of glass flesh lunged at her. Maribel winced, imagining the woman being torn apart, but Allie staggered sideways, just as a potted tree toppled in the beast’s swiping paw.
Allie sprinted through the black curtain, camera in hand like a runner’s baton. The curtain swished to the side as she broke through it.
Another growl, but it was from afar. The beast had gone elsewhere and could be heard gutting Frogmen on the other side of Puppet Deep.
Maribel emerged from her hiding spot and ran for the curtain. It would be nice to leave this crazy place. She certainly wasn’t bringing the children back here. This place had become really dangerous, what with demons and frog people and beasts. It just wouldn’t do, her mind told her.
Someone walked through the curtain from the other side. At first Maribel thought it was Allie again, but it clearly wasn’t. This man was a Bone Man, his brown skin darkened to a perverted tone, beyond deepest night. Bones protruded everywhere.
Maribel slid against a wall, hoping he’d go past her.
The Bone Man peered up at the black curtain as though it was something he’d never dreamed of seeing before. He took the fabric in his hands, feeling it between his fingers and then, unexpectedly, wrenched it. The curtain tore away in shreds, falling around his feet
and disappearing in puffs of black smoke as it struck the ground. With one last mighty tug, he pulled down the rest of it, and the tattered curtain fell from the sky and, as it connected with the earth, a great column of gray-black smoke lifted.
Dozens more Bone Men emerged from the shadows. Maribel stepped back. She wondered where to go, now that the curtain was gone. A tall Bone Man approached the other, nodding.
“It is good to be back in my own place. Out there, my heartbeat made strange music,” the Bone Man told the tall man. “But I feel real again, and now we can all last forever.”
“How did you take down the curtain, brother?”
The Bone Man shrugged and raised his arms. “I am from both places now. This was the only way. We have our own land now.”
Just then a craggy hand fell on Maribel’s shoulder. A Bone Man hauled her forward, bringing her through the hooting mass of warriors.
“And do you see? At long last, we have a Queen to abuse us,” said the newcomer with a laugh, zeal sparkling in his savage eyes.
Everybody dropped to their knees and put their spears at their sides. They bowed their heads in supplication to Maribel. Even the man who had brought her over to the crowd fell back, chin pressed to his chest, spear pointed down.
“We will serve you,” they cried in unison.
Maribel couldn’t think what to say. Her eyes continued to search for a way out of Puppet Town, but there was nothing.
The newcomer lifted his head and gazed at her with his knowing eyes. “I will help you rule this place. Enslave the frog people to bring us fresh fish from the lowest points of the coldest seas. Ensnare the demons to use for sport in the arena, use their hides for clothing and roofs for our homes. That is only the beginning to this place. There is so much here to rule!”
“I don’t want to rule anything. Let me out of here!” Maribel shouted. “I want outside. There are people who will come looking for me soon.”
“Nobody will find us here my Queen,” said the newcomer with a grin. “Nobody.”
The tribe hurrahed.
“Not even The Mare.”
Chorus:
Has this Godhead song always been audible? Nobody knows. It’s bloody, whatever it is, it’s bloody. But, then it’s a way to have fun, whatever anybody else may say, it’s a way to have fun. You see, he’s doing this to get better, whatever made him ill before, he’s doing this to get better. Therefore you must ride it to dirty glory, whatever lathers you and makes you holey, ride it to dirty glory. Too many questions while I’m playing and laying in the hungry sand, whatever tastes better flesh or marrow, playing and laying in the hungry sand. People do not create people. Bodies do. Flesh does. Bones, yes, the bones are used for building new people, whatever otherwise God might tell you, the bones are used for building new people.
He implores the very heart of the clown tunnel, “Stop singing.”
Verse 8: All for One
Chapter 29
It was a bizarre view of Hell.
Aluke Rhoduz examined the offices of GeoGreen Motorcycles Inc, still half-submerged in the cold water of the passage that split the ground in the lobby. Aluke climbed onto the marble floor. His teeth chattered. He tried to rub his arms to warm up. Behind a bronze statue of a motorcycle popping a wheel over surging flames, a crisp, clean waterfall dribbled down a sheet of diamond plate on the wall. The water ran down the plate, across the floor, and into the passage to the tunnel.
Aluke had worked for this clean-technology motorcycle-engine company his entire adult life. He’d gotten the job just after marrying Dara Mackenzie, who left him for another man a few years later. His second wife, Maribel Wilson, had passed away from complications with diabetes not long ago. Their son, William, had gone to live with Maribel’s grandmother.
If Luke Rhodes and Alberto “Johnny” Cruz had separate thoughts on these new details, none of them surfaced. They knew that they were in a nightmare and needed to escape, but as far as being Aluke—that was who they were.
He walked, shoes soggy with water, to the waterfall. His rippled reflection in the diamond plate stared back, tired eyes and perfect movie-star hair belonging to Luke Rhodes and pudgy bronze face and bandito mustache belonging to Johnny Cruz. Aluke was not quite as large as Johnny, but
probably flirted with morbid obesity.
None of this felt right, and Aluke hurried to the exit to search the horizon for a curtain.
“What?” he breathed.
Across the freeway stretched the black curtain, a broad stroke of nothing in space. Two others rippled, but these were a disconcerting blood red.
“We are inside out, outside in,” said a voice on the staircase.
A man who might have been Luke’s friend Blake Jackson, and who also might have also been Johnny’s co-worker Grover Franklin, staggered down the stairs, bracing himself while he devoured a long strip of bloody meat from his forearm. His darker skin had paled to Irish white, yet his short cropped African hair remained; his close set eyes looked to belong to Grover and his other strong, handsome facial features were most definitely Blake’s. The abomination’s licked blood from his lips and hissed like a snake having an orgasm. His eyes fixed on Aluke as it reached the final stair.
“Where’s that dead concubine of yours?” He glanced down at the bloody mess of ripped fabric and exposed biology in his crotch. “I might have rammed her good and hard, had I not been so goddamned HUNGRY!”
The hybrid charged Aluke, who, too stunned to think, backed against the cold, glass double doors. He had crossed only half the distance when a figure hurled from the shadows and began feeding on the his neck, taking both to the ground. Between tremendous chunks of muscle tissue and gagging slurps, the attacker chanted, “get in me, marry, marry, marry, get in me, all in one, one in all, get in me. All for one. We’ll be MARRIED now! One. One. One. One.” It lifted its head a moment and Aluke recognized it as the merging of Maria, the secretary, and Lou, the copper thief.
Aluke couldn’t open the door. Needed to try the other pair of doors across the room.
Something struck him bodily—everywhere, every cell, every particle.
Not something.
Somebody.
And he was changed for it.
Suddenly.
Different.
One.
Of many parts.
Dara hard merged with him. She must have entered the nightmare and recalled the ballad also.
Now they were all together. Alberto Cruz, Luke and Dara Rhodes.
Alukara.
A man wearing Crusaders’ armor jogged noisily up and started hacking with a broadsword at the struggling pair of hybrid cannibals. The crusader chanted something in Latin, growing more impassioned with every gushing wound he created.
Alukara tried to leave—the broadsword touched her chest.
The warrior stood before her. As surreal as the nightmare was, its grip and hold on the sword were steady and too realistic. The point of the sword stung from its tip down to her heart.
“Do the interview,” said the crusader. Only his burning eyes, visible through his steel visor, indicated his humanity. Just the eyes. Calculating orbs of judgment. They belonged to both Stobecker and Dara’s father.
“I don’t want to do the interview.”
Blood welled through Alukara’s Killswitch Engage baby doll t-shirt. “Don’t… please.”
A metallic laugh from a metallic face.
“Dara wasn’t enough for Luke, was she?” the crusader asked.
“No,” said Alukara, lips trembling.
“Luke wasn’t enough for Dara, was he?”
Alukara swallowed. The word was less than a whisper. “No.”
“And Beltran wasn’t enough, either. That’s why you let him go. After you pushed your son to the ground and screamed at him to go to fucking bed already, that’s when you knew what a piece of sewage you really were? Isn’t that right?”
“Right.”
“You are blighted animals willing to spread your contagion over this good land. You have no place here.” The crusader lifted the sword, eyes burning with ecstasy. “Interview over!”
Alukara ducked, felt the sword swish through the air inches above her head. She staggered forward and ran.
The crusader’s loud plate armor clanked. “I condemn you for eternal sin! Unclean, intoxicated, bigamist, slug! For you, love is only a hole to crawl into. You have sullied your marriage and damned your souls to a dark, roasting pit! I shall cleave all your lusty parts from your filthy union and litter the ground with your bones!”
Alukara shifted, in a daze. The sword came at her, she bent out of its path. The momentum caused the crusader to lose ground and fall sideways to the floor.
She went on through the massive lobby and burst through the exit. She’d always wanted to work in that place. She had a mechanical engineering degree and had made something of a name for herself in local bike competitions, but she’d just been in a cocoon for the past ten years, while her partner Maribel supported her. Alukara didn’t know how long that would last, now that she was certain there was no job for her again; and with these nightmares, who knew if she’d live to make Maribel proud of her.
Maribel…where was she?
There was a single black curtain across a sea of whirling graph papers. A boat waited there. Alukara lumbered toward it. She was fat and disgusting. God she needed a drink, or a good run or swim, maybe just a few hours playing on the computer. They didn’t seem to go hand in hand, but she desired them all.
Beyond the black curtain, three burgundy curtains swayed. She didn’t want to take a chance with those—she knew that the black curtain would get her out of this strange land. Stepping in the boat, she almost lost balance as it swept slowly through the papers. Beneath the freeway underpass, the papers flowed like a raging river toward the black curtain. A force from beyond was helping facilitate this.
The boat bumped against a curb near a Jamaican Jerk Chicken restaurant. The black curtain dropped in front of its door. Alukara lost no time and bolted through.
Then!
Like they’d all been struck with lightning, Johnny and Luke and Dara staggered three different ways and collapsed just over the threshold.
The room cloyed with the tangy aroma of chicken. A man with his dreadlocks tied up glanced uneasily over the front counter.
“What’re you doin’, you t’ree?”
Johnny shook his head and pushed up on a fist. Luke helped Dara from the floor.
“We’re drunk,” Johnny said absently.
“Go’on out din.” The man snorted and dropped a pan of fresh chicken in a steamer tray.
Luke shook out his bad hand, having fallen on it. Dara wrinkled her forehead and closed her eyes. “What was that?”
“Pretty fucked,” Johnny commented.
Luke held Dara for a moment. “Don’t want to do that again. At least the music seems a bit disconnected now. How about for you?”
Dara nodded and Johnny did as well.
“What were those red curtains?” Dara asked.
Johnny yanked open the door. “All I know is I don’t like it. This shit is just getting shittier. I’ve got confusion on top of my confusion.”
“Here, here,” Luke replied.
“That stuff…that the knight said.” Dara looked from Johnny to Luke. “It was just trying to get to us, right. That was part of the nightmare.”
“It wasn’t true,” Luke replied flatly.
“You never pushed Beltran down like it said. That never happened, right?” she asked Johnny.
Johnny took a deep breath and sniffed. “We need to get out of here before that guy loses it.”
“Go’on wich ya if ya aren’t eatin’,” the man behind counter said with a scowl.
They followed Johnny outside. The blare of distant sirens and the whipping wind greeted them. Burnt graph papers blew in small dust devils up and down the empty street.
“So you aren’t going to comment, I take it?” Luke prodded Johnny.
“Drop it, man—I probably killed an innocent man tonight, okay? He was just a drunk, and now he’s probably lying in cell right now, bleeding out from his head, and it’s because of me, all because I brought that nightmare with me to jail.”
“
He might be alive. Sometimes people live,” Dara said quietly. “I discovered some that did.”
“That makes me feel a whole fucking lot better, thank you. I’ll just hope from now on that all the shit does not slide downhill.”
“I’m just saying it’s possible.”
“I’m not going back to jail to look for him.”
“Then why are you bringing it up?”
“Lay the fuck off Dara!”
“Knock it off, both of you,” Luke snapped. “We’re alive. I was begging to die when you came looking for me. Now I’m alive. Standing here. Breathing. Let me just enjoy it for one goddamn minute.”
They turned away from each other. Luke rubbed his eyes for a moment, trying to think.
“You want to know if what the knight said was true? After being the same person for a bit, we all know each other a lot better now,” Johnny said. He glanced at Dara. “So no more obvious questions. You know the answer. You deal with your own shit how you want to, but for me, there’s enough going on right now not to add being delusional on top of it.”
Dara changed the subject. “None of us have ever eaten here then, I take it?”
Luke and Johnny exchanged glances and shook their heads.
“The curtain fell at the place where none of us have been.”
Johnny examined his Killswitch Engage t-shirt. “That makes sense, since we were…one person. But what about those red ones?”
Luke strained his eyes. “I don’t see any curtains now.”
“What happened to the fourth black curtain? You said it might have belonged to Maribel. Luke’s right. I don’t see it anywhere.”
Luke took Dara’s hand, and something dropped, heavy and sour in his gut.
Nightmare Ballad Page 24