Company Town

by Paul Neuhaus

  “I think so,” Annabelle said.

  “I’m sorry. You must think I’m out of my mind, but that’s what it was like. I didn’t ask any of the other men there—and I wouldn’t because all of them were my betters—but I knew they were all feeling it too. Mr. Laemmle in particular. I’d been with him a year by then and I could read his face.”

  “Okay. So, Verbic was intimidating. What was he being intimidating about? He called the meeting, and the men all came. All those powerful men. What did Verbic want?”

  Another bit of marginalia. ‘Inhales, finding words’. “He told the men right out that he hadn’t gotten where he was because he was smart. He told us he had the police department, the D.A., the mayor’s office all lined up and ready to jump when he said jump. But it wasn’t regular old Machiavellian tricks that put him where he was. ‘You wanna know how I did it?’ he said. I got the feeling that none of the bosses really wanted to know. Like they wouldn’t like knowing it when they heard it. That’s what it was like in that little room that night. And Verbic was loving it. You could tell he was feeding on their anxiety. He sat back in his chair and he said one word: ‘Power’.”

  “Power?”

  “That’s right. The way it came out of him, you could tell he meant the word differently than, say, a president or a king. To those kind of people, power’s a blunt object. To Verbic, it was more elegant. Like a scalpel, I suppose.”

  “What do you think he meant?”

  “I don’t have to guess,” Horace said. “He showed us what he meant. After he said that one word—‘power’—Mr. Sato got up and left the room. We all waited in silence until he came back. Longest few minutes of my young life. Finally, Sato comes back and with him he’s got a girl. Pretty thing. Younger than I was at the time. She looked… blank. No expression at all. Anyway, what I saw happen next was… Well, let’s just say I didn’t talk about it for more than fifty years. Long after all the other men in that room were in the ground.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Verbic, acting like a gentleman, steered that young girl around him so that she stood at the head of the table. She was wearing a long fur coat which he reached up and slipped off her shoulders. The coat—it was heavy—fell to the floor and the girl was naked underneath. I’ll tell you without shame that was the first woman I ever saw without clothes on—and it was the last I’d see until my wedding night. I was stunned. Mortified. Aroused. All of those things at once. I could tell the other men were, at the very least, shocked. I mean, I’m sure they’d all seen more naked ladies than I had, but they weren’t expecting to see one then and there. I must say, the girl herself was calm and collected. Being as naive as I was, it didn’t occur to me ’til after she might be drugged. She was unfazed. She didn’t make eye contact with any of us, but she didn’t turn away either.”

  “And what was Verbic doing?”

  “He was measuring us. This grin on this face. Like a wolf.”

  “What about Sato?”

  “I never seen anybody so removed in my life. Apart from going out and getting the girl, he always sat stock-still. It was like he was an extension of Verbic. Like a limb Verbic had but rarely used.”

  “I see,” Grindle said. “What happened with the young lady?”

  Per Annabelle’s annotations, Kronenbusch hesitated for a long time, shutting his eyes and conjuring up a seventy year old memory. “Verbic stuck his arms around the girl—not embracing her, but putting his hands in front of her so that we could see them. For the first time, I realized Verbic had long, pointed nails, lacquered like a woman’s. It was the oddest thing, but on him it seemed natural. His gestures were—God, what’s the word I want?—sublime. In anyone else, such fluid, sweeping motions would seem affected. With Verbic, they seemed a natural part of who he was. He turned his fingers inward and mimed cutting into the girl’s torso and belly with those nails. He never touched her, but blood appeared along the invisible line his fingers traced. It was, for want of a better word, magic. All the men around that table—with except for Verbic and Sato—gasped out loud. Then, as the blood trickled around her sex, we settled in, thinking this was a parlor trick, easily done. We only had a moment to think that because then Verbic spread his fingers—like the wings of a bird when it takes off. When he did that, the seam he’d cut into the girl opened up too. Suddenly, we could see the inner workings of this beautiful, hollow-eyed creature. She didn’t react, but there were all her organs and bones, continuing their processes as if a grievous harm had not been done. It was— Give me a moment.”

  Grindle, a thorough recorder of circumstance, noted Kronenbusch’s breathing became rapid and Annabelle herself was forced to both fetch water and calm the old man down. Quinn thought for a moment that Grindle had been a terrific interviewer.

  When Horace was ready to speak again, he finished his tale. “Well. As I said, Verbic laid this girl open and held his hands in their creepy, bat-like pose. Looking at each of us in turn, smiling, he spread his hands wide. The girl rose up off the floor. She… Her toes were six inches off the ground. She spasmed uncontrollably. I’ve seen epileptics in my time. The worst kind. The most egregiously afflicted. I have never seen a body shake that badly. Finally, the girl screamed. So loud in fact I couldn’t believe the restaurant staff didn’t come running. Her back arched past the point where a healthy back can arch. She bent double with her abdomen pointed at us. Her organs started to burn, and still she screamed. A raging flame consumed her, burning her skin and her hair, her… essence. As her body flaked away to ash a… sphere of light emerged from her vagina. It was as though she was birthing the light. By the time the light was out, the girl was nothing but dust. She disintegrated. Apart from the coat on the floor and the ball of light floating above the table, there was no trace of her at all. Then Verbic brought his arms back in and leaned forward. I hate to use this term but—his expression, the light in his eyes—he was… sexy. He pursed his lips, inhaled and the light—the girl’s essence—went into his mouth and was gone. Then he said one word: ‘Power’. After that, Mr. Laemmle turned to me and said, ‘Why don’t you wait outside, kid?’ I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise, but I fell over myself getting out of there.”

  The transcript went on for several more pages as Grindle was interested in Kronenbusch’s tenure at Universal. Quinn had what she needed, though. The story was outlandish, but, based on her recent experiences, Henaghan believed every word of it. It marked the beginning of the Guild.

  As she turned back to the first page, the bedroom door opened and Molly came out, rubbing her eyes.

  “You’re naked,” Quinn said.

  “That’s my t-shirt,” Blank said, pointing.

  Molly left in the early afternoon. She had to tend to her sick father. That left Quinn alone in her apartment. Though, with Blank there with her, Henaghan had slept well the night before, she was still exhausted. Emotionally stretched and physically drawn. She sat for a long time at her computer desk, looking out at the gray, rainless day. She thought about writing and researching something for Company Town, but her creative reservoirs were depleted. In light of recent events, the website felt like the fancy of a much younger woman. Rather than write, rather than read, she watched the tree where the little blue birds had been a couple of nights prior.

  Eventually, unable to engage with the world in a meaningful way, she returned to bed. She was still wearing Molly Blank’s big t-shirt (Molly had, rather charitably, left wearing only her bra and her jacket). Quinn realized, before she drifted off, there were never any repercussions from whatever town she’d been in when Darren Taft and Chuck Sato died. Somehow, they’d never traced the events of that wild night back to her.

  One less thing to worry about.

  Despite the fact the phantasms had left Quinn’s body, she had two visitations. No longer side effects from the tincture, these came from somewhere else

  Slam forward. Snap back.

  The late 1940s. Quinn wasn’t looking through B
ettie Lyman’s eyes, she was looking through her own. She was in a cocktail bar, surrounded by women in clothing of the period and servicemen. A piano player tickled the keys, sleepy and noncommittal.

  On the table in front of Henaghan was a drink with pieces of fruit and a yellow umbrella. A girl drink, she thought, picking up the glass and taking a sip. Not bad. Just the right amount of pineapple juice. To her right was her date. Dr. Jeremiah Daggett. He was following his standard M.O. Show the lady a good time, get her drunk, and then beat her to death. “I assume Reggie sends his regards,” she said

  “He doesn’t like being called that,” the doctor said, leaning forward and whispering it into her ear. As though this was a seduction.

  “What’s the plan here, doc? You beat me and strangle me in Vision-land and that’ll do me in the real world?”

  “Something like that,” he said, taking a fleck of tobacco off his lips. “No reason we can’t have a little fun while we’re at it.”

  “You call this fun? That piano player is positively somnambulant.”

  Daggett’s eyes lit up. “‘Somnambulant’. I like that. You’re smarter than any of my other girls.”

  “You mean the girls you beat, strangled and carved up?”

  “Yes, those girls. You know my work.”

  “Of course I know it. You made such a fuss about it afterwards. All those notes to the papers and the police. That’s a big part of it for you, isn’t it?”

  The doctor leaned forward again. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean you can’t just do a thing for the sake of it. Acknowledgement is more important to you than craft.”

  Daggett threw his head back and laughed. “I like you. You’re a thinker. You think so much you could almost be a man.”

  “But if I was a man you wouldn’t be able to do what you do. You wouldn’t be able to exert your will over me. You need that power imbalance. Otherwise, you can’t cum.”

  The doctor scowled. “That’s a bit crude, isn’t it?”

  Henaghan smiled. “You have funny ideas about what’s crude and what isn’t.”

  Daggett snubbed out his cigarette. He was still scowling. “Why don’t we go somewhere more… intimate? You can tell me all about your theories.” He stood and slid his hand underneath her armpit and tried to lift her. She didn’t budge.

  “This place is growing on me,” Henaghan said.

  The doctor’s eyes burned. His smile turned wolfish. “Get up. Now.”

  Quinn took another sip of her drink and then, looking up, she entered him.

  She caught him completely unawares, and he flailed against her, desperate to fend off her invasion.

  She envisioned a star going supernova and the glowing ball that was her essence turned orange and grew hot. Hotter. Hotter. Hotter. Then came the explosion. Tendrils and floods of fire burning through Daggett, destroying his neural paths, cauterizing and closing the byways of his Self. She could feel his scream, echoing through every inch of his body. Every part of him realized he was soon to die, and every part of him cried out. Gathering in upon herself, she exploded again. Gather, explode. Gather, explode. Daggett was little more than a weeping fragment of consciousness, broken and infantilized. With her last, bitter outburst, she flung herself from him and back into her own head. After the shock of reconnection, she looked at her handiwork. The doctor had fallen back into his chair. His hand still held his cigarette. Above the neck, there was nothing. A blackened crater, wafts of smoke and sparks snaking upward.

  In the club, hysteria.

  The people—the women in their finery and the servicemen—all fled, screaming and falling over one another in their rush to exit. Smiling, Quinn stood. For the first time, she looked down at herself. She was clad in a beautiful period dress and high heels. An outfit so fine, it could have come from the desk of Edith Head. She wanted to stay and admire herself, but there was nothing more to do here. As she walked toward the bandstand, the world around her dimmed until she was walking through a black void.

  Snap Forward. Snap back.

  The change in environment was drastic. She was floating in mystical ether, her bare toes pointed down. The Astral Plane. She was in a denim skirt and Ramones t-shirt, surrounded by stars and distant whirls of multicolored gases.

  In front of her, a slit of light opened—an arcane vagina—and a figure emerged, obscured at first by the glare. For a moment, she thought it might be Darren Taft, whole again. Once the slit reclosed and the blinding light was gone, Quinn shut her eyes tight to banish the spots clouding her sight. When she opened them again, she saw David Bowie drifting in the quiet void.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you here,” Quinn said.

  “I wasn’t expecting to be here,” Bowie replied, his accent much posher than his shock of hair and outlandish makeup suggested.

  “What were you told?”

  “I was…” Confusion was evident on his face. He struggled to make sense of who he was and what his mission might be. Verbic had taken him, a man without clear definition, and filled him with dreams. Dreams of power, dreams of wholeness. “I was told there was a… parasite here. I was told to destroy it so the energies could flow.”

  “Do I look like a parasite to you?”

  Bowie looked away then back at her. He was struggling. “No,” he said. “You have beautiful eyes.”

  Henaghan fought back a momentary excitement. David Bowie just told her she had beautiful eyes. “Verbic told you he could make you complete. He said he could give you purpose.”

  “Yes.”

  “He can’t do that, you know? He doesn’t want to do that. Have you communed with him? Closely?”

  “Yes. He held me within himself. Deep inside.”

  “And what did you see there?”

  “Nurturing. Warmth. Reassurance.” Bowie’s voice quavered. He knew already that all was not as it seemed.

  “Is that all? What about underneath?”

  “No, I mustn’t…”

  “Why? Because the illusion will shatter and you’ll realize you’ve been handed shit?”

  “I-I don’t want that.”

  “No. Of course you don’t. But being tricked is no shame.”

  His eyes had been down. He looked up at her. “Inside. Behind. I saw a rapacious, greedy thing. Spiteful and bitter. Like an old spider skulking in its web. Right away, I thought to myself, If I submit to this creature, I will become this creature.”

  “And is that what you want?”

  “No,” he said, his resolve growing. “I-I have a son.”

  “Yes, I know,” Quinn said, smiling. “A beautiful son.”

  The singer returned her smile. “He’s two.”

  “Yes, I know.” After a moment, she said. “David, may I leave here?”

  Bowie seemed flummoxed. Like she’d asked him something so outlandish he couldn’t process it. Simple politeness (in which he believed) dictated his answer. “Yes, of course you can.”

  Henaghan turned and drifted away from the Brit. Before she went through the portal she’d summoned, she looked over her shoulder. “Your son is in England, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to him, David.”

  Bowie nodded. Before the girl was completely gone, he said, “What’s your name?”

  “Quinn,” she replied.

  8

  Stock-in-trade

  Molly opened her door and let Quinn in. She spun on one foot and took several steps into the living room with her back turned. Quinn, wanting to confirm she’d seen what she thought she’d seen, grabbed Molly’s wrist and turned her back around. Molly had two black eyes. “What’s this?” Quinn said.

  “Nothing,” Blank replied. “I guess he hadda tell me twice.” The joke just there as Molly sat down on her couch. She hadn’t washed her hair and she was wearing sweats.

  Henaghan sat down in the chair opposite Molly. “Who did that to you?”

  The older woman sighed. “Barry,” she said

  Quinn’
s eyes narrowed. “Barry? As in your agent Barry?”

  Blank nodded.

  “I’m pretty sure your representation isn’t supposed to hit you. Why would he do that?”

  “As in ‘what did I do to make him angry?’”

  “No, as in ‘I have no idea what circumstances could lead to Barry Faber boxing your ears.’”

  Molly smiled. “I know. I’m trying to keep things light.” When Quinn continued to stare at the actress, Blank sighed and went on. “He asked me to introduce you to him. I don’t know why. He wouldn’t say. I had no idea he even knew who you were.”

  “He saw us at the pier together. Although, before that, I don’t think he coulda picked me out of a line-up.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not how he came off. He seemed totally hip. He knew what you did, who you worked for, where you lived. If he hadn’t hit me, I’d’ve been jealous.”

  Quinn shook her head. This had to be some kind of Guild bullshit. Olkin and Faber working together. Olkin and Faber working at cross purposes. She couldn’t know. “What’d he…?”

  “He said he wanted me to bring you to his house so he could talk to you. I told him no. That I never mixed business with pleasure. Then this… thing came out of him. All rage and force. Two straight shots. One for each eye.”

  Quinn thought for a long moment. “I assume you have his contact info.”

  Molly nodded.

  “Call him. Tell him we’d be happy to accept his invitation.”

  Blank’s jaw went slack. “Are you fucking nuts?”

  Quinn sighed, still bone-tired. “How else am I gonna find out what he wants?”

  Barry Faber’s home was in the Hollywood Hills, past the Griffith Observatory. Molly Blank sat in the Prius’ passenger seat, saying nothing. She hadn’t spoken during the whole drive up. Both she and Quinn dressed casually. Even though Faber had invited them for dinner, neither considered it as an exciting social opportunity. When they pulled into the driveway of the gorgeous home, Molly broke her silence. “I told you this was a very bad idea. Don’t forget that.”