Still

by Charlee Jacob

  Their three skulls touched above Peter, forming a strange triad, as of triplets born conjoined.

  Names of others he recalled. Barbara Snow, Hulet Waris, Tomoko Negishi and Hidetaka Ueda, Beatrice/Timmy/Bruce/Dory Oswald, Elizabeth Short.

  Whole and severed heads/arms/legs/genitalia reaching.

  He tensed in that dream state. Waiting for the rip, the rend, the torture as they remade him in their images.

  Now.

  Now.

  Brush of their rotten flesh to his none.

  They caressed him, softly, head to toe. Lifting him up to touch each part front to back. He heard them moan and weep, sigh and gurgle blood bubbles. Those with shotgun blasts to faces or windpipes severed foamed like fountains full of strawberry seltzer. The strangled castrati emitted tormented pig squeals. Other voices were raw and strident with disaster until they sounded like chainsaws. He felt tears of sanguine rain and a snowfall of long-expired maggots.

  The victims touched him and, therefore, all through one another. A sizzle of red lightning. A mortal continuity.

  And a beat.

  They didn’t hurt him at all. If anything, they appeared to be grieving for him.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 24

  “The scene was over like a dream, but the dream

  had left proof and traces of its passage.”

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Body Snatchers

  “Am I going away for a long time?” Samson Barnette asked his psychiatrist as they spoke privately at the police station.

  Nika wouldn’t lie to him. “Yes. That would be my guess, given your previous convictions. But I think it won’t be difficult to make the sentence refer you to a hospital, considering the nature of the charges.”

  Samson smiled, smug as usual. “No jury in the world would believe I’m sane if I prefer dead muff, right? How would they know if they’ve never tried it? It’s definitely more passive—to my aggressive, if you get my drift and I know you do. No nagging, bitching. No I like it this way, Samson! Soft as butter, as chocolate melted in a double boiler except cool as a custard. Some of them actually possess a little custard…”

  Nika remained unruffled. “Tell them that on the stand and I’ll bet they’ll hand you a ‘nuts’ verdict on a silver platter.”

  “Speaking of nuts…dead men’s are like eclairs. And their assholes are the perfect combination of compatibly compliant and tight, since their rectums have a tendency—at a certain stage—to collapse. If I pull out for a looksee, it seems my condom’s wearing a condom. And if I cum at the right moment and a blast of body gas whooshes out the blow hole, it’s like riding a giant Orca whale at the top of a tsunami.”

  He watched for her reaction. As usual, Dr. Noll was perfectly serene. He tried to push her buttons and she knew it.

  Well, he’d been trying for years.

  Noll didn’t consider him insane. He knew what he did was wrong. He’d been trying to escape when he was caught. Had, in fact, gone to all the trouble of stalking the graveyard shift attendent to know exactly when he took his dinner break and for how long.

  The man had good looks and money, ran a thriving real estate business—one of the biggest in the whole country. (Although how he’d kept his predeliction and its past legal consequences out of the public eye must be a supreme feat of bribes and threats.)

  Samson thoughtfully bit his bottom lip and rubbed his hands together as if trying to start a slow fire. “Not likely I’ll get bail. My lawyer’ll be here any minute. She’ll tell me the same. They just don’t release necros on their own recognizance. But, hell, it isn’t as if we’re going to kill anybody. Right? So much rot, so little time! And it’s Saturnalia. Do you know what that is, Doctor?”

  “Some old Roman celebration?”

  “Yeah, it started a few days ago on the 17th. In Cicero’s time—about the second century B.C.—it was extended to seven days. Seven Deadly Sins. Seven thunders and plagues of Egypt. Seven Days of Saturnalia. Only some people extend it so it culminates at midnight beginning Christmas Day. Sabbats and schisms, Dr. Noll, sabbats and schisms. What a shame…”

  He suddenly looked right and left, making sure no one else was within earshot. This wasn’t like on some of the cop shows, with them being watched through a two-way mirror. This was a private conference room. Confidentiality between patient and shrink.

  Still he leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “Listen, this is important. Go to my office. Be there at six A.M., sharp. Don’t be late, Doctor. A messenger is bringing an envelope. Something I can’t use now. But I know you won’t waste it. I’ve always sensed the kinker inside you. It’s the only reason I showed up for every session the court demanded.”

  ««—»»

  Nika appeared in Peter’s hospital room doorway, breathless. The envelope intended for Samson Barnette had been delivered by a pale messenger with an odd limp. His right leg was twice as thick as his left.

  “Sssssspeak the name,” he’d hissed, voice damaged.

  She’d thought, What name? Samson didn’t tell me this part.

  Suddenly she was very afraid of what would happen to her if she couldn’t give it to him. His eyes were concealed behind dark glasses. And it wasn’t even sunrise yet. She imagined slits or reticulation, or a tapetum lucidum—the area behind the eye which reflected light at night back upon the retina, creating that jack-o-lantern glow. A cat’s eyes, a viper’s eyes.

  What name could he want to hear? Samson’s own? Or Saturnalia?

  She’d hesitated, wracking her brain for the answer.

  He’d reached into his coat pocket in a manner so sly, fingers abuzz about some lethal mechanism, that she shuddered involuntarily.

  Necros. Messengers with twitching mamba right legs and a scent of milk and creosote. Secrets.

  “Videre,” Nika said quickly, as sure of this as she was that if she’d failed in that instant to invoke it, she’d have been murdered on the spot.

  Nor would it have been a clean, quick kill. She’d put the envelope he handed her into her purse and hurried to see Peter.

  Only to find him in the darkened room, completely covered by a sheet.

  Oh, no.

  Bhombal had confided to her the night before—since she was also Peter’s doctor, working on treating the psychological trauma of this case—that Mr. Beta’s condition had deteriorated, serious infection setting in. She’d badly wanted to be present when Bhombal informed Peter. She knew he’d need her.

  Then Samsom had paged her from the police station.

  Had he already died? It wasn’t fair.

  “Damn it,” she cursed almost silently. “This envelope might’ve helped. Why couldn’t you wait for me?”

  She crept forward, crossing the room as if trying to accomplish this while suffering a heart attack. (Wasn’t that what this breaking inside her chest was?)

  Nika would fold down the sheet and kiss him. Sit by his side and mourn until they arrived to move his body out, stripping off the bedding, taking away the morphine drip. Would he be buried in his bandages like a pharaoh?

  She knew he would not. He’d be autopsied, every vestige used for study.

  She turned on the light by the bed.

  The sheet hung over his chest as usual. But it didn’t cover his face. Then what did?

  Nika reached out.

  His eyes opened through whatever it was. He gasped, sucking for breath, the substance partially inhaled into his mouth. He choked.

  “Fuck me,” she muttered, startled, jumping back. “Wait. Let me…”

  She stepped foward again and grasped at a damp edge across his jawline, plucking tendrils up, a membrane that left his entire head as one big snail trail.

  Destiny’s snot ball.

  A caul.

  “Nika,” he rasped. “Jesus, it’s hot in here!”

  She yanked down the sheet. And found his body covered in a dense, black chitin. Where had the bandages gone that held him hostage
for so long? Dissolved like white mulberry leaves into silk-worms.

  “What the Sam Hain is that?” he tried to shout, looking down at himself. “Help me get it off! It’s hot and it itches.”

  She turned toward the call button. “I’ll get the nurse.”

  “No,” he commanded sharply, voice losing its crackle. “You help me. I don’t want anyone else to see this. Start at the chest and pull.”

  She knelt upon the bed’s edge and dug in. How easily it came off. Like a latex mask, like the peel of a tangerine.

  Like…

  …the old style Instamatic photographs. Two sides: one a negative, the other a positive image. Only there were no images. Not in bright doppelganger or in dark reverse.

  She threw strips onto the floor. With one arm freed, Peter began helping.

  The stench of this carapace was caustic, a stinging stink which made both wrinkle their noses and breathe through their mouths. As the strips came away, they left a slick stickiness, shining in the light. Gruel-thin, a silver vomit, the kind children who have been starved in basements bring up before they die. Only Peter wasn’t dying. They smacked as they were unbound, each side from the other. They clicked, as of cameras and cicadas.

  Beneath, no hair. Only a moon patina of cocoon still.

  Beta butterfly, damp and new.

  Metamorphosis.

  Skin.

  “They healed me,” he confided to her in an awed whisper.

  He was perfect, totally unblemished. His balls were as smoothly polished pink quartz. His penis was opaque glass. He had baby flesh aglow of petri dish miracles and theoretical mangers. He held up his hands, looking back and front. The nails were gray satellites for some distant, icy planet at the far edge of the solar system. The palms were blank, no heart- or life- lines. No past.

  No future?

  “I don’t know why they did it,” he admitted as Nika helped him get out of the bed. He’d been lying there for months, his leg muscles rubbery. Yet he didn’t fall. “I’ve been afraid of them for no reason.”

  She held him close, snuggling carefully into an embrace, nervous she’d find him sore. Happy even if disbelieving ghosts could do this. There must be a logical explanation.

  It doesn’t matter. Here he is. A moment ago I thought he was dead.

  “Nika, I’ve got to get that skin back,” Pete insisted. “They deserve a decent burial. Where is it this week? We could fly out there…if you’ll go with me.”

  She shook her head. “We don’t have to travel, honey. It’s on its way to us.”

  She took the envelope from her purse. “The Videre hold a Christmas Eve event every five years, based on the old Roman holiday of Saturnalia. The most unusual is put up for sale. Last time—in 2000—they had it in Buenos Aires. In 1995, it was held in Bangkok. Cairo in 1990. Tomorrow, it’ll be here in L.A. The most outrageous perversions are available. A kind of trade show from Hell. They have something they call The Great Auction at midnight. And the big hype, sweetheart, is that your skin and Zane’s book will be the highlight of the evening. Dunkel Friedhof probably thinks he’ll be able to buy a small island somewhere and retire to torture natives till the end of his misbegotten days.”

  Peter trembled. He scratched his belly with chiaroscuro nails, north and south, then east and west, leaving a crosshatch of rip and ripple.

  Nika stared as these marks vanished.

  ««—»»

  Dr. Bhombal wanted to run tests but Peter refused.

  “No offense but I’m out of here. You may keep those black strips I shed. Write a paper. Win a Nobel Prize. Whatever. I’ll even come back in a week or so and let you examine me. No more now. I’ve spent enough time as the steak tartare project.”

  The couple went to Nika’s place and fucked for the next twelve hours, in her heated waterbed, in the Kama Sutra hot tub, then trying out some of the most accessible K.S. positions before a thinly curtained picture window after the sun set. Frankincense- and myrrh-scented candles flickered inside to backlight them so The Neighborhood Association would have no doubts.

  “Let them get their tongues wagging,” Nika said.

  “Give that wagging tongue of yours here,” he told her.

  His dick and balls tasted of spring cherries, newly uncorked Shiraz, and ripe habaneros. Red things.

  Kinky.

  Pete didn’t go back to his house. Didn’t want to see where it had happened to him. (Any of it.)

  Diane had trashed his office and cleaned the place up for sale. He’d get half. Community property state.

  At first it pissed him off that he’d lost the whole collection. But he realized he didn’t need it anymore. Sometimes you simply reached a place in your head where outer stimuli was unnecessary. You understood good and evil, the machinations of light and dark and every gray area in-between. To your benefit or detriment, horror became a state of mind.

  — | — | —

  CHAPTER 25

  “What kind of book is that, you depraved child,

  and where did you find it?”

  —Edith Cadivec

  Eros, The Meaning of My Life

  Videre.

  The perv convention, somewhere near Hollywood. Not open to the public—duh. Not covered by conventional media. In some old movie star’s mansion, a silent period action hero who’d been murdered in the early ’60s by gay-bashing bullies who’d broken his brains with his own Oscar. The house was on a hill, in a canyon filled during a certain time of year with the swirling roar of Santa Ana winds.

  Samson Barnette had told Dr. Noll, “There are three tickets. Clearly I won’t be able to use mine. The other two were for associates. One I’m no longer speaking to. Let him get there under his own steam. The second died three days ago when a corpse crumbled under him and a splintered rib stabbed him through the heart. Just like I’d like to go! Well, we won’t go into karma.”

  Nika and Peter invited Clay. Owning an honest interest in reclaiming his father’s book, he jumped at the chance. McFadden clearly wanted to ask how it was that Peter walked around. Had the last graft taken? He remained polite and didn’t inquire.

  Armed security guarded the entrance as people were let in one at a time. Most wore regular clothes, even if expensive. Just the cute serial-killers next door…in Beverly Hills. They’d have been right at home at a top flight movie premiere, with some opinionated biddy-diva commenting snidely on their taste in rags.

  Some folks, though, wore outlandish costumes. It reminded Pete of a Star Trek convention he attended once, only here he saw spiked dildos, stifling rubber, bone chip-mail.

  He’d disguised himself. Snap-brim hat, dark glasses, beatnik beard, short-sleeved sport shirt from the 1950s. Sinatra meets Allen Ginsberg. He still expected security to stop him and was prepared to run to keep from being skinned again.

  (The short sleeves ought to keep anyone from suspecting. They could see skin. Peter Beta wasn’t supposed to have skin.)

  Nika had dressed up in a long green gown, tight to every curve, low cut at the full bosom, split up front between her legs to reveal a red fox thong. These folks wouldn’t be anti-fur animal activists.

  It made Peter blush—twice—thinking of the little red pigtail barely concealed inside.

  “I would’ve thought you’d wear black or red,” he said.

  “Had to be green,” she told him.

  This perplexed him until Clay added, “Why sure. It’s the color of jade.”

  As for McFadden, he’d dolled himself up in a dandy Victorian suit, complete with a silk cloak and top hat. He’d been mindful of the danger of the hem tangling in the wheels. He’d wrapped it about his legs, tucking it in.

  “These contacts are gritty. I hope I can stand to keep them in for the effect,” he’d explained when they first picked him up early that afternoon. His eyes were blood red. “But I suppose it’s like seeing the world through gross-colored glasses.

  “Nice Dracula bit,” Nika had complimented him.

  “Wel
l,” he’d said, “I’m really trying to be Jack the Ripper. I even have a surgeon’s bag. See?”

  Then they parked and walked uphill. They approached the entrance, two security hulks stopping them.

  “May I see your invitation, please?” the first one asked Peter.

  Pete produced it and the second hulk said, “I need to pat you down, sir.”

  It was a quick frisk.

  Satisfied, the guard added, “I see you have The Great Auction ticket. The auction begins precisely at midnight. Be there to get seated at least ten minutes before, because they close the doors on The Grand Ballroom right at twelve.”

  Nika and Clay had already presented the first with their invitations.

  “Open your purse, please,” the second told Dr. Noll.

  He glanced at the contents. Found nothing listed as forbidden on the tickets. No digital photo or video cameras or tape recorders. No hand grenades.

  He granted her a perfunctory wink. Where would she have concealed much in that dress? And anything in her body cavities was probably there for the games.

  “May I see your bag, sir?” he requested from Clay.

  “Sure.”

  Inside were four pints of Ozarka water and six plastic bottles of various medications, all without child-proof caps.

  “I’ll need to pat you down.”

  “Okay, but be gentle, Golem,” Clay cautioned good-naturedly.

  The man started at the suit jacket and vest, working lower. He touched an object too large and unsolid to be Clay’s wallet.

  “What’s this?” the guard wanted to know, narrowing his eyes.

  “Careful!” Clay squeeked in exclamation as if goosed. Then he added more confidentially, “That, Sonny, is my colostomy bag. Please don’t cause a spill.”

  The guard snatched his hand back. Evidentally not a copraphile.