At 5:40 one Monday morning, Friendly stopped in at Farrell’s Donuts on his way to the dayroom briefing. Aside from two post-rave punks at the Samurai Showdown machine, the dreary dining room was empty. He ordered two assortment dozens and a cranberry smoothie and sat to wash down some vitamins while the donuts were boxed up.
A bum slipped in the door and into a booth, picking stray sprinkles and flakes of glaze off the table. A vital foundation of Santa Cruz’s ecology, bums were the town’s sacred cows. It didn’t pay to roust them, because as often as not they turned out to be lawyers or sociology professors. The bum cleaned off the booth and slid into the next one, leaned across it into Friendly’s face.
He smelled like a rendering plant. His sickdog eyes glinted through a mastodon pelt of filthy dreadlocks. The advanced decay of his person seemed to have been cultivated to Dickensian proportions. Perhaps he belonged to one of the fringe communes in the mountains between here and San Jose, come into the valley to “tox out” and cadge a free love ride miracle ticket thirty years out of date.
“Do you know why Herbert Mullin did those murders?”
Friendly shook his head once, a first and final warning.
“Believed only the shedding of blood could stop the Big One. Little bloodshed’s a small price to pay to live in paradise, isn’t it? ‘Materialism must die or mankind must stop.’ No, that was Linley Frazier.”
“Are you high on something, or just stupid?”
“Shit, fuzz, I feel at home with you because you been laying with the Lamia.” The bum drew closer and sniffed greedily, like a cat trying to steal his breath.
Friendly scrambled out of the booth, drew his baton. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“Hey, man, it’s cool, I don’t want to fight, I want to fuck. Where can a guy like me get a ride on that Night-Hag, I wanna know? Guy’s gotta have cash or a badge, for some of that gash.”
The Korean cashier ordered the bum out, waving a broomstick over his head. Friendly followed him to the parking lot and kicked him as hard as he could just above the tailbone.
The bum launched into a parked car without raising defensive arms or even shouting. His soft-boiled head dented the door with a leaden crump, and Friendly had his baton under his jaw before he could lie down.
“So you think you know where I spend my nights, asshole?”
“Shit, man, I’m not trying to harsh your mellow, man. We’re both like, men of the world, right? Didn’t mean nothin’ by it…”
“You keep your filthy mouth shut about it, and show some respect. She’s a goddess.” Friendly went in and got his donuts.
Friendly went eight rounds with the Venus that night and staggered into the kitchen for a pineapple-kelp shake with spirulena and henbane, when he realized he could see with the lights off. Red flame shadows danced and devoured each other on the bare walls, silhouetting a nude woman standing before the stove. Friendly smelled burning hair. The flames haloed her head and obscured her face, but he saw the glint of tooled steel manacles on her wrists and knew who she was.
“Hello, Brad. I wish I could say I was glad you’ve finally found somebody.”
Friendly’s spine rebelled, dumped him on the sticky linoleum at the apparition’s feet. “Francine,” he managed to gasp, “I never thought I’d see you again—”
Though two years had passed, the unique circumstances of their parting had left Friendly without a sense of closure. The night after he’d marched in the Academy commencement ceremonies, he’d finally convinced Francine it was time to go all the way. She was saving herself for marriage; he’d made it clear that his becoming a cop was the next best thing, and a sure guarantee of the other. The sex was good; he lit candles and gave her a backrub first. She had to remind him to be gentle only six or seven times.
Somewhere in the middle of it, however, Friendly lost touch with the program and got kinked on her. He pinned her arms behind her back with his brand new handcuffs and tried to force himself in her mouth. She kicked away from him and knocked over the candles, igniting her hair. His last glimpse of Francine was in her role as impromptu Passion Play martyr, pinioned arms akimbo, hair blazing, shrieking to beat the smoke alarm. She’d bolted from the bachelor apartment before he could muster his wits to put her out. That was the last time he ever saw or heard from her until now, when she’d returned, naked and blazing, to his kitchen.
“Are you a ghost? Are you… dead?”
“I’m not here about what you did to me. You have to come to grips with what you’re doing here, now.”
“I don’t need any shit from somebody who ran out on me. Besides, I’m not doing anything… wrong…”
“Has she met your parents yet, Brad?” Francine laughed, spitting tongues of fire at Friendly’s eyes. “On some level, you’ve got to recognize how deeply fucking wrong this is. You tried to rape me, and look where it’s got you. You confused love with dominance before and now you fuck a monster, and you’re falling in love with it.”
“You’re not Francine. Francine never cursed. Fuck off!”
“You believe this is how it was meant to be, and who can blame you? You’ve clubbed one and dragged it back to the cave, and it can’t crawl out again. The perfect wife for the perfect cop. You’re so sure of the dominator you have to be that you can’t see what’s dominating you. She’s using you, Brad. Think about that, for me.”
The flames died away.
Friendly lay on the floor for a while before he got up. Where he wasn’t numb with cold, he itched, and everything was frozen but his crotch. He hobbled into the bathroom and turned on the light, then turned it off again. Then off, on, off. Trying to see what he was supposed to see, and not what glared back at him.
His swollen penis and testicles were studded with succulent purple buds, like malignant kernels on an ear of corn from Love Canal.
He ripped the medicine chest off the wall in his haste to get the tweezers. When he pinched one, there was no sensation, but the rubbery skin refused to tear. When he tried to pull one out by the root, it popped and squirted acrid, unripe pheromones in his eyes. He reeled, clawing at his eyes as if he’d been Maced.
He saw the black room in murky shades of red, a dying solar system, and a collapsing sun in the shrine. He shielded his eyes and rushed at it, brought his fists down between its pendulous breasts and felt something give way beneath. At first, his blows rebounded like a child’s fist against a punch balloon, but he made headway with one of the dumbbells under the bench. It was like a pumpkin; beneath the pliant womanflesh rind, the Venus was a sac of membranes, bloated, fibrous organs and reservoirs of fluid, some his, some Hers. He smashed and smashed until his arm became tired and he noticed the stacatto pounding from the ground floor tenant.
“Call a cop!” Friendly screamed, and smashed on.
The next morning, Friendly called in sick and prowled the strip joint advertised on the rubber boner on the driver’s keychain. Knowing his name and rap sheet shed no light on the trail of the Venus, so he forgot it. He broke out the footlocker and unwrapped a Colt Desert Eagle and a .22
short-barrel automatic. He loaded each and shrugged into a shoulder holster for the Colt, an ankle holster for the .22.
Casing the parking lot from across the highway, Friendly recognized no one. He massaged rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide into his crotch until he was sitting in a quagmire of eye-watering antiseptic. He got on the highway and turned around, scoping for cops as he pulled into the lot.
Dancers wobbling around the foyer on cocaine fumes, tiredly offering private shows. Feminazi students blandly took notes. A naked woman sat on a director’s chair at the end of the runway, reading something with Oprah on the cover. Sad, sagging silicon ballast reminded him of the perfect curves he’d crushed, and he choked back a raw sob of longing.
Friendly paced the room, hoping to scare someone into flight. No one budged. He tossed the men’s room. Three sailors sharing a tiny bindle of crank dropped their works in the toilet and b
ailed.
He smelled the Venus. He touched his bobbing dowsing rod, still icy from its antiseptic bath. While the chemicals did nothing to stop the buds, they stifled the smell, so he practically saw the cloying contrail wafting out of the fourth bathroom stall.
He kicked the door in. It rebounded off the occupant’s kneecaps, and Friendly kicked it again. The screaming from within had barely gone into its overture when Friendly’s eager hands flipped the new cripple over and dunked his head into the toilet.
“I’m going to ask questions, and then you can breathe. Cool?”
Glubs of desperate willingness to please filled the bowl, or maybe he was just trying to blow the turds away from his mouth.
“I’m going to trust you not to scream.” He lifted the man’s head out of the bowl, cradling him in the prelude to a sleeper hold. His intake of breath was almost enough of a scream to merit another dunk, but it trailed off in whimpers.
Friendly said, “Tell me why you smell like you’ve been fucking my girl.”
“I didn’t know she was yours, man. Blow job for blow, bitch tried to cut me—”
“You know what I mean. I’m talking about Her,” driving the capital home with a quick dunk in the bowl. “Where did you meet her? Where did you fuck Her?”
“Bullshit! I don’t know who the fuck you think I am—”
“Don’t shit me! I can smell her on you!” Friendly shoved his head in the bowl and flushed. A cyclone of sewage engulfed the toilet dweller’s impassioned cries for salvation or death. Friendly brought him up, a fist still knotted in his thin hair. “The House of the Venus,” he gurgled, punctuating his capitals by vomiting in the bowl. “Everybody knows where it is. Off the 17, ten miles out from Front Street.”
“Address.”
“No numbers out there. Just trees, and trees and trees and the House of the Venus. Three stories, no paint, bunch of fucked-up old cars and trucks and shit all around it. What, you want a map?”
Friendly rapped the man’s head on the rim and seated him on the bowl. As he turned to leave, he caught a glance, out of the corner of his eye, purely by accident, at the man’s dick. It was a priapic purple nightstick to shame his own, twenty inches and ribbed for Her pleasure with purple buds the size of macadamia nuts. Friendly saw himself dousing the diseased member with lighter fluid, but how could he do to another what he wasn’t man enough to do to himself?
Friendly never had cause to wander the indifferently maintained roads that wound through the Santa Cruz backwaters; sheriff’s deputies had that detail, and he didn’t envy them one bit.
If the northbound PCH out of Santa Cruz was a tunnel by night, Highway 17 was a leap over a Berlin Wall of wilderness, a ribbon clinging to a mad jumble of rampaging ridges and valleys that time tried to forget. Forty miles of alpine hairpin tarmac christened “Blood Alley” by those damned to commute on it, the 17 claimed almost daily accidents, over half of which were fatal. Exits lurked behind glowering stands of pines, leading to hermitages for freaks who made the weirdest citizens of Santa Cruz look like Mormon missionaries.
He watched his trip odometer climb to ten, killed his headlights and slammed on his brakes to veer down an unpaved tunnel through the trees, a glory hole into the black guts of the forest. His truck shimmied and bucked on the loamy soil of the road, Friendly bolt upright and peering through the windshield, navigating by stray streams of teasing moonlight. Too narrow to be an exit, this was probably a private driveway, though there was no sign of the obligatory wrought-iron gates and TRESPASSERS EATEN HERE signs. He fought the road to a level stretch that broke out of the trees into a meadow strewn with a menagerie of rusted-out car-carrion. Across the vast expanse of junkyard and hip-high weeds, Friendly made out the derelict hulk of a school bus up on a scaffold like a Sioux warrior decked out for burial, its Day-Glo war paint proclaiming “House Of The Venus—All Suitors Welcome.”
Friendly drove up to the porch, climbed out. The windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti depictions of coitus in all its forms, animal, vegetable and spiritual. The door was reinforced with steel bands and had no doorknob. A view slit rattled open and bubbled over with suspicious eyes. Friendly smiled engagingly and sidled close enough to draw his revolver.
“What do you know?”
“I’ve got purple shit growing out of my dick.”
The door opened a crack and Friendly shouldered in and rapped the doorkeeper across the bridge of his nose with the massive muzzle of the Colt, scanned the room for potential threats.
The atrium opened directly on a great hall, the walls a shadowy smear of tapestries and incense clouds. Pallets and beanbags scattered over a crazy quilt of Indian rugs, bums and thugs spilled all over them, heads numbly turning like buds to the bright sobbing of the doorman holding his nose together.
A circle of huddled heads in the center of the room, each clutching a tube to the colossal hookah before them, inhaling and puffing out in unison like monks sucking the poison out of the world’s wounds. One of them stood and came around to the door. Dressed head-to-toe in clashing tie-dye patterns, His Santa Marx beard twinkling with tiny bells like twittering thornbirds. One of his eyes twinkled merrily as Friendly’s game face melted, staring fixedly at the hippie’s other eye, which was gone. Out of the socket sprouted a toadstool with iridescent orange gills, like a semi-tumescent penis.
“Welcome to the House of the Venus.” His nose twitched and his smile went queer, bemused but ever playful. “You smell funny, friend. I smell cop, but I also smell our best kind of friend. What’s your pleasure?”
“I want some answers, shithead.”
“Hey, wow, you’re that cop who wasted Rafe Heenan.”
“That piss you off?”
“On the contrary, dude, if it wasn’t all in the line of duty, I’d owe you one.”
“He got the… Venus… from you?”
“He stole it out of my cellar. He was gonna die, one way or the other. Nobody steals one of my love goddesses.”
“There’s more than one?”
Bells tinkled in his beard. “Shit, dude, I grow ‘em.”
The dealer led Friendly down into the basement, a black abyss of hothouse damp, chittering animal panic and miasmal stench. The air was syrupy with Venus musk, and Friendly bit back thunderous nausea, which redoubled at the realization that he was sporting wood like never before.
Once a wine cellar, the cavernous basement opened on groined vaults that were in turn divided into stalls with curtains of black crushed velvet. From behind them Friendly heard men moaning, gasping, growling, begging. Voices called, “Bitch!” voices cried, “Mommy.”
“See, fuzz, my church welcomes all forms of worship. And when you think about it, everything we do is an act of worship or an act of rebellion against Her, isn’t it? Watch your step, fuzz. Big pits of batshit.”
The dealer stepped over a trench filled to the rim with tarry black bat guano. The trenches marched off into the inky darkness at the far end of the cellar. The festering excreta was pocked with clusters of flesh-colored bulbs, like a fat farm for headless Barbies. Real live Cabbage Patch Dolls, Friendly thought. Beneath the wrenching sounds of men and beasts, he could hear them growing.
A towering wrought-iron cage took up one end of the room. Bats squealed and hurled themselves at the bars. “Get it by the ton from a guy in Mexico, but it pays to have a source of fresh.”
“Tell me what they are.”
“It’s a fungus, but in function, it’s a lot like Sarracenia. You know, pitcher plants? No?
“Well, anyway, they secrete sweet juices to attract flies and bees, and they trap them in a sticky honey pot. Digest ‘em. The Venus is special, though. It attracts an animal host and feeds off it, while implanting its spores on the host’s dingus. Then he moves along, fucks another one, and the cycle begins anew.”
“Why do they look like chicks?”
The dealer’s bells jingled. “Natural selection, fuzz. Cavemen took a shine to the shapel
ier ones, started cultivating them to look the way they do. Or maybe they just knew what we liked. Kind of a chicken-or-egg question, really.
“This strain came from the Amazon. Psychopharmacologist friend of mine dug it up. But I think they were everywhere, a long time ago. You ever seen the Venus of Willendorf, or any Stone Age fertility fetishes? If you did, you’d recognize the Venus. To the ancients, I think it must have been the purest form of sexual congress—a holy communion with the Mother Goddess without the messy strings of human procreation. It probably survived as late as the cult of Astarte in Mesopotamia. Her priestesses were the first prostitutes, you know that? They had to take over after the matriarchy exterminated the Venus. They were jealous because men would rather fuck a fungus than them. These here are the fruits of original sin. Now let’s see what we can do about getting those spores off your dick.”
Friendly couldn’t let it go a moment longer. Pointing at the dealer’s infested eye socket, he said, “You know… you have something growing out of your eye.”
The dealer chuckled and touched the shaft of the toadstool gently, guarding it. “Shit, dude, if I can get viable spores from this puppy, I’ll buy a new eye.”
He led Friendly back to the furthest vault from the door, and raised his hand to part the mouth of a curtain. Friendly couldn’t see more than a few inches beyond it. He raised his gun to the dealer’s face. “Don’t fuck with me.”
“Nobody’s fucking with you, fuzz—not yet. The only way of getting the smut off, short of a blowtorch, is pollinating another plant.”
“No way. I’m never going near one of those things again.”
All-Monster Action! Page 5