mean a thing.”
—Raymond Chandler
The High Window
They quickly checked the dealer’s room, thinking it was possible Clay had seen something there he’d decided he couldn’t live without. (Hell, Nika wanted to buy a Sybian.) They went down the main hall, each taking one side to save time, checking rooms they’d already visited.
No Clay.
They went to the second floor. They never got around to asking themselves how he’d have managed to maneuver the wheelchair up the long, winding staircase. Had he found a service elevator?
Perhaps he’d been kidnapped.
They opened the door on the first room. An enthusiastic entrepreneur offered, “Feel what it’s like to skin something alive!”
“Fuck,” Peter cussed. “I really am this year’s theme.”
He flinched as he tried not to look. The way well-dressed rubes lined up, you’d have thought this was the parachute jump at Six Flags Over Chaos.
Peter had to look.
Was this how Dunkel had done him? The cops never elaborated, never mentioned if he’d been hung by his heels. Yet he must’ve been hung somehow, otherwise Dunk would’ve needed to flip him over to do the other side. No way to get the skin off in a single neat piece.
Pete doubted he’d been upside down. He’d been cored at the base of the neck and flayed from there, the skin possibly rolling down like a sweaty gym sock.
Could it have been that easy?
Dunk had to hang him by the head or neck. But wouldn’t that have killed him?
So, how? A secret from The Family Business?
Peter’s father had taken them hunting a few times when he was a kid in Texas. Before Curtis died.
It was a good Republican activity, slaughtering for sport. He’d seen a few field dressings.
To skin a squirrel, his dad made an incission in the back, loosened the skin with the blade’s point, then crooked one finger from each hand into each side of the hole. Then he pulled in opposite directions. He’d pull it down to the head and front paws at one end, then to the back paws and tail at the other.
To skin a deer, his father cut at the neck using a skinning knife with one hand as he pulled the hide down with the other. If it came freely enough, he set the blade aside and rolled the hide down to the tail.
And then there was the time the two went rattlesnake hunting. Dad nailed the dead snake’s head to a tree, made an incission near the head, grabbed the skin with pliers and pulled.
Pete had never seen a rabbit done before. Seemed it should’ve been a common enough game. Just never ran across them when Dad took him out or it wasn’t something his father had a taste for. And he’d never seen anything skinned alive. Clean, quick kills only. No cruelty, even if no mercy either.
They handed aprons to those interested in the rabbits. Hey, leather aprons like Leatherface wore in CHAINSAW.
The noises the rabbits made as they struggled caused Pete’s tongue to hurt. It fizzed as it used to when he’d eat Pop Rocks as a kid. And his skin tingled, electric storm magnetism, Ben-Gay burn-freeze.
No Clay.
The next room had a placard announcing:
FILM FEST
It was the kiddie snuff the detective had told them about. All Nika and Peter saw were dark rooms with children’s eyes glowing like deer caught in the headlights on moonless nights.
The only sounds were of glass breaking too softly, muted thuds, tiny shrieks.
Out of there so fast they left tred marks from their shoes. Both shaking, eyes squeezed shut tight until in the hallway again. Blind leading the blind.
“Didn’t see him,” Nika finally said.
“Nope,” Pete agreed, looking at his watch to have something to put in the visual part of his brain to replace what it had just suffered through.
Third room, a row of beds covered in old-fashioned patchwork quilts, feather pillows with their telltale dander suspended in streaks of light like motes of memory dust. Around the room were set vases of cut lavender, bowls of decayed rose petals, and pots of extremely rare Rafflesia arnoldi—also known as stinking corpse lilies.
Very old women with advanced cases of osteoporosis, their bones crumbling under grinding weight.
Pete’s chest hurt, he couldn’t breathe or swallow. His ears roared as if he were trapped underwater. Nika stifled a moan, blinking rapidly to banish tears. They clung to one another as they fled back into the corridor.
“No…” they both whispered in sync and then each took a breath, “…Clay.”
Fourth room. Decked out as a mini-casino. Roulette wheels clattered like guns on empty chambers. Blackjack. Poker. Craps.
No one played for money. The Videre usually had money enough.
There were lots of prizes heaped on tables. Butt plugs, ball gags, blindfolds, manacles, jewelry fashioned from laminated feces, jars of sugared eyes like sourballs. Some antique wipe sticks from ancient Roman public toilets. Sets of drinking goblets made from cat, monkey or human skulls. Fossilized stakes reputed to have been used on victims of Vlad The Impaler and Ivan The Terrible. Ice chests contained packs of human sushi and pickled nipples. Teratophallic strap-on dildoes decorated with razors, shards of glass, penny nails. Joke douches filled with acid. Exotic poisons and aphrodisiacs in exquisite little bottles. Silver dipped mice and baby birds, gold or platinum dipped clitorises from girl children who’d undergone forced female circumcision or testicles from juvenile castrati singers. There were straight-jackets, thumbscrews, thumb cuffs. Tongue-, nail-, and nose-rippers. A scavenger’s daughter and several perfectly-knotted hangmen’s nooses. 50,000 volt tasers, pepper gas, special firecrackers designed as secure fits both anally and vaginally…their fuses extra long. Cattle prods and shock batons, brands, stunguns and stun grenades, immobilization guns and projectiles. Smoke grenades and incendiary grenades. Munitions and submunitions M429, M450, M451. A bundle of dynamite bound with a pink ribbon. Numerous automatic weapons and ample ammunition for them.
Could you say private army? (Knew you could.)
They backed into the hall again, noticing the sign on the door.
NO SMOKING
“From either end,” Pete added with a nervous chuckle.
Nika laughed gratefully.
Inside the fifth room Nika saw the messenger who’d given her Samson Barnette’s Saturnalia invitations. He was naked, both his legs now quite obviously the same width. The penis between them hung to the floor, quite flaccid.
She realized, her mouth hanging open, that he must have had it strapped to the right leg that morning at Samson’s office. She finally understood why his voice was a damaged crackle as he lifted the cock and put it in his mouth. It was from blowing himself. He sucked until the tip emerged from his asshole like a viper. He’d had the penis tip surgically bisected and tattooed to resemble a fanged head. Two studs gave it glowing red eyes.
Continuing to suck as he danced and swirled like an Indian fakir, he gesticulated to others there who also had unusual physical characteristics. There were prodigies everywhere. Pretty miniature ladies, some as short as two and a half feet tall, too small to protect themselves, dressed only in tinsel, their tears as bright. Conjoined boys with rose attar greasing their shuddering plump asses. Sad-eyed, three-legged clowns and unhappy songbirds who had nothing below their breasts but the evening star. Shy, brainless pinheads without specific gender. Another set of twins, connected at the head, askew on a single shoulder, always seemed to be looking back across it. Their features melted from one expression to the other until they appeared to be disappearing in fog. There were shivering, wolf-faced triplets with licorice lips and nipples, whimpering. Hydrocephalic children were propped on cushions, their heads like sad moons rising over splindly desert trees.
The messenger played at being Saturnalia’s Master of Revels. He flicked his wrist to signal a partnering. One of the songbirds screamed as she was thrown across a Videre’s shoulder and carried off.
It proved too m
uch for Peter. He started to rush in, cursing a violet streak. Nika slapped a palm across his mouth as she grabbed his arm. “You’ll get us killed.”
He pulled her hand away, yet kept his voice down as he insisted, “I’m calling the police. We should’ve a long time ago.”
“Not until we find Clay. Besides, no matter what the cop told us in the hospital, some of these guys are the police.”
“These people can’t wait until we find Clay.”
Looking behind them, they saw a couple staring, apparently suspicious.
“Looks like we’re being watched,” Nika whispered. “You’d never get to a phone. We might not get out of here ourselves.”
Peter’s eyes were wild, unable to accept that he must do nothing. How he wished right now that he was one of those in the black/white dream. For they were long dead. These poor people suffered hell tonight. Many would die. He couldn’t help them and he couldn’t bear that.
Nika opened her purse. “I had a feeling you’d have a crisis.”
She opened a metal box of Altoids and handed him a pill.
“What’s this? My breath bad?”
“The Altoids are gone. I just used the container to bring something to calm you down with. Don’t worry. It won’t put you to sleep. Just relaxes you. We give it to people with social anxiety disorder.”
She swallowed one, too, surprised at herself.
This wasn’t simple S & M. No controls.
No Safe Words.
Not only a matter of breaking a few taboos, but of seeing who was the most adept at creating new ones. She was disgusted with herself for giving into a whim she’d thought so harmless, for riding that Sybian. It was like partying with the folks who ran Auschwitz and thinking none of it could rub off on you. No, you’d never harmed anybody. Your karma was clean, kid.
No guilt by association.
You didn’t gut helpless animals or crush a terrified granny. You just had a harmless orgasm with people who did those other things.
Peter sniffed the pill, then put it in his mouth. Started singing a variation on ‘I Feel Pretty’ from WEST SIDE STORY, “I feel minty, oh so minty. I feel minty and flinty and flayed…and I just don’t know if my skin is going to make the grade.”
“For that new lamp shade,” Nika added, a bit more in key than he’d been.
They burst out laughing.
“We’re horrible,” he commented.
They both hung their heads, solemn for a moment. Then burst out laughing again. But the laughter didn’t feel good.
The sixth room opened on a pit filled with corpses in varying stages of decay. The stench was un-fuckin’-believable. How did they keep that from seeping into the hall?
Peter gagged, coming up just short of a man going down on a maggoty muff. Peter threw up on him and the guy didn’t even notice. He figured the woman he’d spied in the downstairs closet must’ve moved her ripe-ish ladyfriend from here, probably without permission. Rotten fruit organs, flesh soft as organza or tough as leather, faces like icing left under a hot sun.
There’d been something like this on the first floor, except it had all been animal parts. From what he could tell, none of this was animal.
“Here,” Nika said as she handed him another trank. “You puked out the last one.”
He almost couldn’t choke it down.
“Did you see him?” he asked.
She shook her head. No Clay.
There was the last, the seventh room. But there was also a long window at the hallway’s end, providing a view of a garden below. It was the bonfire out there that got their attention, sparks and smoke curling up in eerie tendrils. There was a high chainlink fence beyond the garden which itself was mostly roses and hedges. It was ringed by sharpened vertical spikes set close together about a foot long apiece and at about five feet high. Unless you were very athletic, you probably couldn’t jump them to climb the rest of the fence.
Someone ran around a hedge. By the firelight they could see it was a woman. She saw them at the window and cried, “Help! Please help me!” Then slapped her hands over her mouth as if aware this would give her position away. Another figure, a man, rounded another hedge in front of her and she practically somersaulted backward into a thicket of rose bushes, apparently so frightened as to be heedless of thorns.
Peter and Nika saw three more, naked, leaping from shadows to fall upon the man. They bore him to the ground in tandem. They were all muscular to the point of redundancy. Steroids, more than likely.
There were screams and gurgles. The man was torn to pieces, blood spattering in all directions, in the night black as ink as from a mortally wounded octopus. How did they do that? There were no weapons in their hands.
They threw their heads back in ecstasy. Now Peter and Nika could see their faces, the fangs too long in lips stretched too rictal-wide. These teeth tilted out from the mouths in something of a forty-five degree angle.
“What the hell are they?” Nika asked, clutching her throat.
“Special effects. Movie make-up,” Peter told her. “Dental appliances held in place by the teeth and in the corners of the mouth—even as they stretch that mouth.”
The attackers were two women and another man. They slobbered over the strewn parts, gobbling flesh down without swallowing—probably because they couldn’t chew with those things they were wearing. With their bare hands they ripped into the slashed torso for organs. The skull was broken on a paved pathway between American Beauties and bits of brains plucked out by fingerfuls like wrinkled strawberries.
What were they supposed to be? Werewolves? Vampires? Zombies? All three or none?
The male grabbed one of the females and she bent in front of him to be taken, even as she methodically moved a gobbetty forearm from the dead man in and out of the second female who spreadeagled herself.
The woman who’d hidden in the flowers couldn’t lie in the thorns anymore. She decided to take advantage of their involvement with one another and scrabbled out of the rose bushes. They stopped immediately, turning toward her with bloody grimaces in the firelight.
She took off, stumbling and badly scratched until her flesh looked harlequin. She’d seen what they’d done to the one they’d caught, all right. They let her have a few seconds head start, then pursued.
Neither Pete nor Nika could speak as she ran straight onto the spikes before the fence. She’d made no effort to jump, to climb. As she twitched, impaled, they bit into her legs and back.
“Damn!” the male yelled. Then he leaned forward and tugged at the appliance, pulling it out.
The females stopped. One laid a hand on his bulging shoulder.
“It slipped and I bit my lip,” he whimpered.
Peter and Nika swung away from the window. The seventh door had a sign informing all who wished to enter that this was:
THE FLASH CRACKLE CIRCUS
The room was large, fitted with a stage and seating capacity for about a hundred. On the stage was a mock dungeon where living victims hung on a conveyor line as, center-stage, a man gouged eyes, yanked tongues with red hot pincers, bolt-cut penises and breasts as a shocked yet meek woman looked on. He ripped open bellies and forced her to pull out the viscera one steaming pink-gray loop at a time. As they died or were close enough to it, the conveyor swung them stage left where another man lifted them down. He performed an autopsy on one, slinging pieces out into the audience from time to time. Music swelled, something combined of metal and classic oriental, guitars and zithers, electric violins and bamboo flutes and at least ten kinds of percussion.
The woman tried to escape but the first man dragged her back.
Peter saw at the front the homeless man who’d confronted him at the school, the elderly black lady in Victorian lace, and the Native American child with the Spanish helmet. Three spirits of death strutting and capering like shadows of camera obscura as the brute finally killed his compliant female partner in a ballet of bloodlust.
There were flickering torches.
An antique electric chair rose on a concealed platform stage right. The brute was lashed into it, screaming a litany of profanities that must encompass a hundred languages—both modern and ancient.
All this as an intense girl with black bee-stung lips stood at the edge of the stage and delivered a soliloquy with which to punctuate the violence. Her voice was rusted silk and eggshell chimes.
“Showboat assassin dies publicly for failing to kill secretly. Some art is boundless: trophies from the frontier, nails hammered into the head are just iron trinkets offered at temples. Flashbulbs. A boys’ club wink ludely following the stigmata shoeprints of his winnowing widow, anorexic for the limelight, photogenically gaunt, face pale and strained always staring off into the sunset. That clown at the NRA tee-shirt concession eats shit to manufacture the ground pounds of darkness which surround the prison at execution zero. A former victim—survivor to the knees—lumbers past on stilts. A hellium balloon holds his head-up. Death as an acrobat, springheeled switchbladed. Death the Cimmerian in a loincloth, happy to oblige, crayon gore/crayon smile. Media frenzy. Sharks and forgiveness, each imagine the electric lathe. Continuums of lost narrative clutched by ghosts as tickets for the ride to epiphany.
“They bring him out: quote/ the preconfigured primitive/ unquote. Grant him a final request…no mask. To show dying at the threshold, burns along the human borderline, warts and all, when the current aspirates. But he does ask for earplugs to better hear his own heart, the pounding contempt, the whisper of his lungs swelling against the uninvited sparkle. He senses the lever pulled down behind him against the slope at the labyrinth’s entrance. He shouts…”
(Here the brute in the electric chair does shout, “Bombs away!”)
“…and laughs, possessed by bone paradise. Sees through the window into the small audience, the last look ever—his wife’s wax eyes. Any blood he ever had faith in buried somewhere in rural Georgia. No names in the plague rat’s journal. No perfumes that resemble one’s violent terror or another’s meek submission. No recollection of specific faces consumed during splices of silence. He has no respect for regret and no use for self-forfeiture, wasting nothing he can’t carry into the fugitive fog.”
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