by Unknown
Harold didn’t answer him, though he did throw an apparently casual glance at his muscle’s love-muscle that was enough to tell me more about Harold than I really needed to know.
Matthew grinned down at me. “Middle of the Mojave,” he said. “Miles from anywhere. Go ahead and scream.” He reached down and pulled the duct tape off my mouth. I neither screamed nor said a word, just kept my eyes fixed coldly on his.
“Think you’re tough, don’t you?” he said. “How about I shove this in your mouth?” He gave a demonstrative tug on his dick. I opened my mouth, wide, and then slammed my teeth together hard and fast in a little preview of what he could expect if he tried it. He flinched instinctively and raised his fist, ready to smash it into my face.
“No,” said Harold. “We don’t mark the meat.” He turned and headed away from the car, speaking to Matthew over his shoulder. “Zip it up. Behave yourself. And bring her.”
4
The only structure anywhere in sight was a shack, which I guess is where Harold had changed into his black robe, but the event was scheduled to take place behind it, out in the open, in a small and shallow basin-like depression in the sandy soil. That’s where Matthew had brought me and where, after first pressing the Taser hard against my throat to discourage any funny business, he’d surprisingly slashed the duct tape off my wrists and ankles with a serious-looking knife and then, keeping the Taser in plain sight, backed off to the perimeter of the basin, leaving me standing in the center.
Harold was on the perimeter, too, but he and Matthew were a good twenty feet apart, triangulating me.
“As you can see,” Harold said, already sweating like the fat pig he was in his heavy black robe under the low desert sun, “the ground has been prepared.”
Yeah, well that was one way of describing the various bloody pieces of Jimmy Fitz that decorated the four corners of the area as if marking the bases on a ballpark diamond in hell. Poor Jimmy’s idiot head stared at me from home plate, dead eyes still holding an echo of astonishment, jaw held open by a swizzle stick and the cave of its open mouth filled with small rose petals of a delicate and almost translucent yellow. The petals would have struck me as, you know, an unusual grace note, but forgive me if I was a little low on appreciation of aesthetic fucking incongruity right at that moment.
“Where’s Stacy?” I asked.
Harold glanced at his watch. “Oh, I’m sure she’s back with Paulie by now,” he said, and smiled.
I didn’t say anything, and I hope to Christ I didn’t let him see anything, but he knew I was feeling it all right, and he took a moment or two to let it take a good firm hold.
“If it’s any consolation,” he said eventually, “you don’t have long to worry about being played for such a fool. The sun is soon to dip below the earth and the betrayal of friends will be far from your mind.”
I might have laughed at the strange formality that had crept into Harold’s speech if I wasn’t busy realizing that I might be quite seriously fucked here. I still didn’t know exactly what Harold had in mind, but I was pretty fucking sure I wasn’t going to enjoy it. Still, Stacy and Paulie were on my list now. They’d served me to this insane bastard like a party favor, and I found a little comfort, or at least distraction, in thinking about how slowly I was going to kill them if I managed to get out of here alive.
The back door of the shack opened, and an old woman came out.
At first glance, she could have been some ancient relative of mine from the old country. Big Black Irish bitch turning brick-house solid in her final years. She walked, poorly, with the aid of a stick, the ornamental handle of which was the dry skull of a dead hawk. One of her eyes was sea-green. The other was dead. And the skin of her face was white. I don’t mean pale. I mean white. White as the paper you’re reading this on. White as the roof of the world.
She reached the perimeter and stopped, keeping the same kind of semiformal distance from Harold and Matthew as they did from each other. Her head swiveled on her neck to face Harold with a leathery creaking so brittle-sounding that you’d swear there was nothing liquid inside her.
“I have come as contracted,” she cawed at Harold, “to bear witness to the keeping of your covenant.”
Harold inclined his elephantine head as elegantly as he could. “The offering has been brought,” he said, “unmarked and unbound, and bearing the sigil.”
Christ on crack, what was this? A fucking Masonic lodge? The desiccated old crone turned to look at me.
“Welcome, child,” she said. “I am The Planet Trilethium.”
Believe me, I’d love to have laughed. But her voice had no humor in it, nor any trace of self-consciousness. She was speaking her true name, and, as she did, it seemed that her dead eye glistened for a second as if there were a light far behind its surface, as if it was watching from a very long way away.
And I swear to God the sand beneath my feet shifted in response.
And sighed.
I felt it all almost drain out of me then, felt the way you have to figure the prey feels when the predator’s jaw closes on it. You’ve seen it, right? In those nature films? They just go limp at the last, accepting it, letting it happen. There’s probably a comfort there.
But, as my sainted mother used to say, Fuck That Shit.
Considering Matthew was the only one with actual weapons in his hand—the Taser and the knife—I must have looked like a moron running at him instead of one of the others. But I figured him as the nearest to an amateur and, besides, what the fuck did I have to lose? I belted toward him, fast, straight, and furious. And sure enough, the dickwad instinctively fired the Taser immediately instead of waiting for me to get close enough. I hardly even had to sidestep. The look on his face when the stinger went wide was so fucking sweet that I almost paused to savor it. But I didn’t. Because that would have meant less momentum when I drove my boot into the kneecap of the leg he was putting his weight on. He screamed like a girl and, starting to go down, swung wildly with his knife, which was just what I wanted. I got a clean grip, snapped his wrist in two, grabbed the knife from his useless fingers and took a whole luxurious second to let him have a good look at it and see what was coming.
I didn’t get a clean swipe at the fucker’s eyes, because Harold’s three hundred pounds suddenly slammed into me from behind, but even so the blade ended up hilt-deep through Matthew’s upper cheek and it must have been angled upward enough to sever something important in what passed for his brain because he suddenly stopped moving altogether.
Harold grabbed at me before I could either steady myself or get the knife back, and I only managed a half turn before he had me in a bear hug. We did some halfhearted wrestling, my forearms flapping around pretty uselessly, grabbing at his robe and his jacket beneath, and I tried to get my knee up to find wherever his balls hid beneath his mountainous gut, but it was no use. After a few seconds of letting me struggle, he slammed the flat of his arm against the side of my head, and I went limp long enough to let him carry me back to the center of the basin and drop me there, still semi-dazed.
Harold was back at the perimeter before I could get to my feet. I saw him give an apologetic look to The Planet Trilethium, but she seemed, if anything, mildly amused.
Despite my ringing head, my blood was up now, and I’d have been perfectly happy to take another run at the fat sack of shit, maybe try and sink my teeth into the meat of his throat and rip his fucking windpipe out, but the desert had other ideas.
The sand was rippling.
Slowly. Not like an earthquake. Like an ocean. Like an ocean with its depths disturbed, as if something far below was waking and moving and would soon break the surface.
The Planet Trilethium sighed in anticipation, the breath rattling in her ancient open mouth like a reptile hiss.
Behind me, the sun was flattening as it reached the horizon.
“You have come to the appointed place,” Harold called out. “You have come to the appointed hour.”
&nb
sp; It was actually hard to keep my footing now, the desert beneath me bucking and dipping, and the speed of its impossible movements increasing. Harold had one last thing to say.
“And you bear the sign of the appointed one.”
I planted my feet far enough apart to let me keep my balance and stay upright as I found his eyes in the vanishing light and locked on them.
“Check your pocket, bitch,” I said.
What, you think I wrestled the fat fuck to cop a feel?
Harold’s hand flew beneath his robe to ferret in the pocket of his jacket, and I could tell the precise moment that his hand closed around the baggie with the severed finger by the way his face crumpled past anger and disbelief into something much more satisfying.
I began running out of the center of the basin, hurdling the raging earth, and Harold—screaming like a baby, I’m delighted to say—ran to intercept me, holding the baggie out like he was going to force the ring on me again. But the Sun was gone. And rules is rules, right? Appointed hour, and all that shit.
The Planet Trilethium opened her mouth. Real wide. And a tongue the color of bruises and the length of a garden hose flew at Harold, wrapped around his throat, lifted his massive bulk effortlessly, and slammed him, back first, onto the bucking desert floor in the center of the basin.
I’m a girl who watches her manners, so I’d like to have stopped to thank her but, you know. Busy running. And I really don’t think she did it for me anyway. I was utterly irrelevant now, thank fuck, both to her and to whatever was rising from beneath the desert floor. They didn’t need me. They had Harold.
I didn’t stop running till I reached the Olds on the far side of the shack. I didn’t look back even then. You couldn’t have paid me to look back. Because, God knows, the sounds were bad enough.
I was ready to hotwire the car if I needed to—because, you know, I’ve got mad skills—but the key was right there in the ignition. I had no idea which way the freeway was but as long as The Planet Trilethium was behind me, then I was going in the right direction.
I drove for a long time. Let midnight come and go. It was after I’d stopped for a burger somewhere off the 1-10 that I discovered there was a cell phone in the glove compartment.
I seriously thought about giving Paulie a call.
But, you know, why spoil the surprise?
AMUSEMENT
TANANARIVE DUE
“I WONDER HOW eunuchs go to the toilet,” Nicola said as though it naturally followed their conversation on the genocide in Darfur.
At first, Paul couldn’t help being pleasantly surprised that Nicola knew what a eunuch was and, further, that she could use the word in a sentence. That aside, his ears glowed hot. They were eating curry with Charles and Anne, who had enjoyed more than one occasion to question his judgment. Nicola’s comment had come like raw chicken dropped unwanted on their plates. Perspiration dampened the backs of Paul’s thighs as Charles ventured a cutting glance that said, Well, I can see your tastes haven’t changed.
“With difficulty, I would imagine,” Paul answered. Nicola must always be addressed as if they were alone, no matter what the level of discomfort. She pouted when she was ignored. “Depending on what’s left down there, of course.”
In Nicola’s unbecoming shrug, Paul could read her displeasure at eating with Charles and Anne, whom she always derided as pseudo-intellectuals who made her feel like a case study, and in her apparent boredom lay the ever-present threat that she would not ask Paul to stay with her tonight. Even after six months, he could never rely upon an invitation, which she doled out like a treat. Paul’s discomfort turned to annoyance.
He raised his glass to drink and watched Nicola’s smooth, long face flatten and deform through the cloudy glass. A shout rose from the back of the curry house as water and lager flew in an argument between drunken students.
“That’s our next cue to leave, don’t you think?” Anne asked Charles, with special emphasis on the word next. She kept her eyes only on Charles, waiting for an answer before reaching for her purse or even unfolding her hands. Watching them, Paul thought of a finely tuned mechanism; each maintained and deferred to control, and Paul suffocated in envy of them. The fact that they were both novelists—and that Paul had been a Booker finalist—only heightened his thinly buried resentment.
“Yes, I think this conversation is finished,” Charles said. “You, Paul?”
“Quite,” Paul said, rising. “Let’s go.”
All of them stood and gathered their coats. Except Nicola.
“I’m not finished with my pint,” Nicola said. A half-inch of lager and lime lay diluted at the bottom of her glass.
“Of course, darling. Take your time.” Paul sat, bumping against the table in his haste. His curry-stained plate fell before he could catch it, shattering on the floor.
“What was that bit about eunuchs?” Paul asked Nicola when they were alone in his car, but she seemed captivated by her rain-dotted window. Her hair hung in loose, dark strands past her shoulders, the soft tips tickling the soft mounds of cleavage she always exposed, no matter what the temperature. She did not answer right away. Sometimes she gave no answer at all, forcing him to repeat his questions. This time, he wasn’t sure he dared.
“Oh, I dunno,” she said at last. “You remember palace eunuchs, like in Shakespeare. I’ve always wondered how they can piss. Do they have a hole and squat like girls?”
At last, he understood: As much as he condescended to her and enslaved himself to her second-rate beauty, she was resorting to insults. He wanted to remind her that she would be damn lucky to find a lover half as good, that what he lacked in her childish concept of masculinity he made up for in stamina and stability. Paul locked his teeth, remembering that she had only allowed him to sit beside her at the Three Horseshoes, the pub where they met, because he mentioned that he was a movie screenwriter. This alone had sustained him for two months, until Nicola began to realize that the movies he wrote had nothing to do with his life.
“How could you write this if you’d never been to Rwanda?” she asked of Battle Cry, his first and most well-received film.
“Research,” he answered, and saw something like disgust curl the sides of her lips. Then the disillusionment set in. Driving her home, he felt the familiar urgency to stem her boredom; as hopeless a battle as hoarding a ball of sand between his fingers by squeezing more tightly.
“It’s early,” was all he said.
“I know, but that place gave me a headache. Can you drop me off at home?”
“I’ll take you to meet a real one, if you’re so curious,” he said, one last squeeze.
“What’s that?”
“A eunuch.”
Malcolm was an American half-caste, “half Jamaican and half Californian,” as he described himself, a cinematographer’s assistant in his mid-twenties, UCLA film school grad, always cheerful. His hair was a crown of red-tinged spirals, and he was tall enough to be a basketball star. In the early days of the shoot, Paul avoided him because friendships and respect came with guileless ease to Malcolm, and he alone seemed immune to the rivalries plaguing them behind the set. Paul disliked almost everything about Malcolm, particularly his soft, high-pitched voice that made him sound like a Michael Jackson impersonator, and his lazy American mumble: “That’s some script you put together, dawg.” In Paul’s eyes, Malcolm’s flattery made him dangerous.
All of that changed when Paul found himself waiting beside Malcolm in a queue for the bar at a cast party. “We just can’t win in this world, Paul,” Malcolm said. “I told the girls I was gay so they’d lay off, and now word’s gotten to the guys.”
Paul was unsympathetic and told him so. The words sod off burned on his tongue.
Malcolm took Paul’s arm and Paul felt his warm, alcohol-laden breath tickling his earlobe. “Listen, I’m only telling you this so you won’t think I’m a conceited jerk: I can forget about a sex life,” Malcolm stage-whispered. “My balls got infected when I was ten,
and I didn’t know nothin’ about a doctor. Went on too long. So the next thing I know, my parents are sitting me down to tell me I have to have ‘an operation.’ In the process, the asshole with the scalpel cut the nerves… so let’s just say I lost my virginity at a very young age. Getting laid is not a huge priority in my life.”
Paul stared at him in wonderment and skepticism, but Malcolm’s whiskey-laden eyes were earnest. “You feel me?” Malcolm finished.
Paul nodded once he realized the phrase was another Americanism and not an invitation. He swallowed back a distinctive wave of nausea, excusing himself. The confession had been a blast of rank air, the chaotic ringing of someone else’s life. But Paul felt terrible about the way he fled. Later, he found Malcolm digging his hand into a bowl of crisps and murmured an apology.
“No worries,” Malcolm said, his eyes darting behind Paul as though the apology was akin to a broadcast. “I was out of line, anyway. I’ve always wanted to tell someone—for some reason, it was you.” He grinned boyishly.
Malcolm’s honesty struck Paul as noble, and nobility was compelled in return. “You confided in me,” Paul said in a sober voice, clasping Malcolm’s tawny hand, “and you won’t be betrayed.”
They began to take tea together during breaks in the shoot. “You know, I never drank this shit at home,” Malcolm said, “but now I feel like a freak if I don’t have two cups a day.” Of course you’re not a freak, Paul thought—and very nearly said—precisely, of course, because poor Malcolm was one. But pity turned to a friendship, of sorts. They compared the movie industries in the U.K. and the States, and even compared dreams. “You should come back to Holly-weird with me, Paul. You write, I’ll direct, and we’ll make films worth making.”
Paul came to relish these fanciful thoughts of Hollywood in the hours spent in pubs with Malcolm, until the curse of his unmolested loins drew him closer to Nicola and he discovered that it would take all of his free time to keep her.
Xavier woke Paul at exactly three A.M., and Paul was enraged. It had taken him a hot bath and a frustrated bout of masturbation to get to sleep, all destroyed when Xavier jumped on his chest and began bloodcurdling mews. His cat’s enlarged pupils glowed red, not unlike the eyes of a demon. A glimpse of the animal’s true face.