Fantasmagoria

by Rick Wayne

  That was the last time anyone came over from the other side. After that, everyone knew. You either worked for Erasmus Pimpernel, or he’d fucking kill you.

  Erasmus couldn’t wait for the film to be developed. It was all he talked about for days. Jack never asked which was faster, shutter or samurai. Jack may have been the most prolific of Erasmus’s Murderlings, but Zen-ji was the most efficient. Three moves. Seven kills.

  Jack stood in front of the giant with his hands in his coat pockets. It was impossible to tell if Zen-ji’s eyes were open under the large, curved helm. It shrouded all his features. Not that it mattered. A trained Japanaman could spear your heart just by fixing on the sound of it beating. Jack had seen it.

  Not that Jack had a heart to spear, but there was plenty clicking in his chest.

  The guys at The Dive said the same as LaMana—Jack was still alive because Pimpernel couldn’t convince anyone to take the hit. But Jack knew better. He was looking right at him. Erasmus was patient when he wanted to be. He had his own reasons for leaving Jack alive.

  “Jack!”

  The gunslinger turned and walked toward Zeek, who stood outside the doors to Erasmus’s chambers. Zeek had switched sides. She’d been born a man, but she now enjoyed life the other way. Her make-up clung like a mask to her face, plastered thick to hide the five-o-clock shadow. Her dress was dark and matronly and covered everything up to her neck. She kept everything running. She held a leather-bound book in one hand and thrust the other out.

  Jack clenched it in greeting.

  “Good to see ya, Jack. Been a while.” Her words were thick with meaning.

  Zen-ji, on his dais, didn’t move.

  “Jack!”

  Jack turned to see Ruud sitting on a couch inside the plush waiting room, wood-paneled and window-less. Art hung from gold frames. An inverted glass dome bulged overhead, revealing the large aquarium above. Jack knew it was rigged to explode and flood the place if the building were ever raided. Somewhere up there was a sixty-five-foot squid, the main attraction of the carnival that fronted most of Pimpernel’s illegal activities and under which he had built his subterranean headquarters.

  Jack shook Ruud’s hand. He was an effete man with slick hair and a pencil-thin mustache, good with a stiletto, and Erasmus’s go-to society assassin. Jack could never blend with socialites. The boss always sent him to the gutter.

  Ruud didn’t get up. “Long time, no see.” He nodded to the next set of double doors. “He’s with the girls, but we’re supposed to send you right in.”

  “You sure?” Jack looked at Zeek. He knew what happened to guys who interrupted Erasmus’s private time.

  Zeek shrugged. “That’s what the man said.” After Jack started walking Zeek added, “But I wouldn’t go in there.”

  Ruud chuckled.

  Jack nodded and opened the double doors.

  Erasmus Pimpernel was out of his mechanical spider. The glass capsule that held most of him rested in a solid gold dish designed to dangle his spinal cord over the gilded tub. A young girl, wet and naked, sat in the tub sucking on the stubby end of his cord, which hung like a limp dick out of the last of his broken vertebra.

  “Oh fuck . . .” Erasmus moaned. “Oh, Jack. Oh Jack, just a minute. Oh . . .”

  Most men would have been dead if they’d walked in on this. But then Jack wasn’t a threat. He stood motionless. There were two more girls in the tub, also naked, and they smiled at him. Jack figured they couldn’t be older than nineteen or twenty, and all flesh and blood. The boss left the mechanoids for the club.

  The working girl held Erasmus’s rubbery cord with one hand and diddled the frayed ends of his spinal nerves with the other, running it up and down the vertebra like she was petting a cat. The glass helmet that held the brain clinked rhythmically against the gold dish as she sucked, and the motion caused the two eyeballs in the tank to sway back and forth. Both were lidless and round and attached to spinal nerves that disappeared into the brain. The left eye was frosted and gray.

  “Damn Jack, you see this?”

  Jack just nodded. Girls number four and five were clothed and sitting at the bar on the left. They must have the night off, he thought.

  “Stop. Stop.” Erasmus called. “That’s enough. Fuck. Put me back.”

  The girls in the tub stood up. Jack saw the water run in rivulets down their bare skin. Each girl was a different complexion. The boss liked variety.

  “Hurry up,” he chided.

  The girls lifted the little glass-helmed brain out of the dish and fed the loose spinal cord into the middle socket of the spidery contraption. The metal collar around the base of the brain, which held the voice box, clicked into place and the mechanical spider’s legs wiggled to life. With the capsule attached, it looked like a virus.

  “Jack!” Erasmus exclaimed. “Goyen in heaven, Jack. It’s been forever. How you been? You want a girl?” Erasmus laughed. It was a rhetorical question. “You and me, Jack, you know, we have a lot in common. Always did.”

  “Oh?”

  “Two things, Jack.” The mechanical walker moved across the room, past the chairs, toward the desk on the far side. “There are two things that will ruin a man. Know what they are?”

  “Nope.”

  “A dick and a heart. Ain’t that right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You and me, we got neither.” Erasmus moved behind the desk and settled into place. “Nothing’ll get your ass into trouble faster than a fat prick hanging between your legs. Guys with small dicks, they don’t like whipping it out. Don’t want people to see, ya know? They’re ashamed. So they’re always real careful because they’re always worried.”

  “Right.”

  “But a fat prick? That’s a beauty. You got something like that, you wanna show it off. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really.” Jack stood in front of the guest chairs. They were new, or at least Jack hadn’t seen them before. He wondered who had died in the old ones and how many sets Erasmus had gone through in his absence.

  “I used to have a big dick, Jack. A fuckin’ monster. You know that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Took three or four women to tame that dragon. Shit, these days I can’t handle more than a few minutes with Cyndi before I turn to jelly. Ain’t that right, baby?” Erasmus called.

  She smiled from the bar. The girls were drying themselves and whispering, probably about Jack. The Jackrabbit. The traitor.

  “But look at me now,” Erasmus went on. “What’s a guy gonna do?”

  Jack looked around. Other than the two up front, the entire compound was empty. It was surreal. Erasmus’s offices were usually bustling. “Where is everyone?”

  “Shoveling LaMana’s shit.”

  “What happened?”

  “You didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Have a seat, Jack. We need to talk.”

  Jack stepped backwards to a chair.

  “LaMana’s dead.”

  Jack paused for a moment before lowering himself into the finely upholstered seat. It creaked under his weight.

  “Shit, don’t sit there, you asshole. That chair’s an antique. You weigh like eight hundred pounds. You’ll break it.”

  Jack decided to stand.

  Erasmus watched him. Every one of Jack’s movements was slow. “How you movin’ these days?”

  Jack couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the floor-to-ceiling painting of Riming Temple hanging to his right opposite the bar. Erasmus’s vault was behind it. Jack glanced and looked back in an instant. “Oh, you know . . . winding down.”

  “I bet.”

  There were a few moments of silence. Erasmus was making it clear he wasn’t going to get the key.

  “Damn, it’s good to see you, Jack.”

  “Was it a hit?”

  “What?”

  “LaMana. Was it a hit?”

  “It was a fuckin’ Fury.”

  Jack scowled. It didn’
t make any sense.

  “Zeek will tell you all about it. I need you to take her to see Pugs.”

  “You collecting the books?”

  “You’re damned right I’m collecting the books. That little two-faced aminal works for me now, whether he likes it or not.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “Does he know that?”

  “You’re gonna tell him.”

  Jack raised both eyebrows. “He might take exception.”

  “Who the fuck cares?” Erasmus screamed from his voice box. “That little rat-dog is a venereal stain, a shit streak on the underpants of the world! You hear me? You get Zeek, you go to that herpes pit Pugs calls a club, and you tell him. You don’t ask. You tell him. Erasmus Pimpernel owns him. I own him and his goddamned books. You get those books, do you hear? You don’t walk out of there without them.”

  Jack nodded.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? You don’t come back without them.”

  “It ain’t my first rodeo, boss.”

  “Yeah, well I know what happened on your last rodeo, don’t I?”

  Jack didn’t flinch.

  “Don’t I?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Goyen-damned fucking right, I do. But that isn’t going to happen again, is it?”

  Jack turned to leave.

  “And then we use the key, Jack. After.”

  Jack stopped. He nodded.

  “And I want Rosa.”

  “Don’t have her.” Jack shrugged.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit.”

  Jack stood straight and silent. He looked right at Pimpernel.

  “Well, where the fuck is she?”

  Jack shrugged. “Gone.”

  “Whaddya mean gone?

  “Just gone. Been gone, ever since that night.”

  Erasmus thought for a moment. “That’s a damn shame. A real damn shame. You were a wizard with her. Unstoppable. A regular one-man army.”

  Jack didn’t say anything.

  “I mean it.” Erasmus’s voice was softer now. “You were something else, Jack. A fucking god.”

  “Don’t believe in gods.”

  “Who? You or me?”

  Jack scowled and started to walk out.

  “Jack?”

  He stopped.

  “We missed you, Jack. I missed you.” The little voice box let out a mechanical sigh. “I miss the old days, Jack. I miss whiskey and fucking and the feel of a man’s throat in my hands.”

  Jack gave a nod. “Good to be back.” He walked out of Erasmus’s office and back into the gilded hall without saying a word. He nodded at Zeek and the pair walked down the grand staircase. Jack didn’t speak and he didn’t look back, but he felt the samurai’s eyes follow him out the door.

  (EIGHT) The Well of the Night Runs Dry

  Vernal stood in his old apartment inhaling burnt flesh. It hung on everything, wet and sticky. The plaster reeked of it, like a pungent dumpster, and it coated his tongue in smoke and bitters. It used to make him sick, but just as pig farmers get used to the methane, even miss it when it’s gone, burnt flesh only reminded Vernal of family.

  He had entered through the kitchen window via the fire escape and set three bags of groceries on the table as quietly as he could. He had planned on leaving the same way, but the smell drew him. As he stood in the archway to the living room surveying the dead orgy, he wondered why he had bothered.

  Vernal adjusted himself. The bugbear he’d eaten was giving him a constant, painful erection. He cursed the old man and stepped over a pair of legs.

  Two plump, ruddy-faced men in nothing but white underwear were passed out on the floor against the wall, spooning. One had his hand in the other’s shorts. A skinny woman, bony and gaunt, was slumped naked against the sofa, snoring, her legs spread wide. Down the hall, a pair of hairy legs jutted from the bathroom. Everyone was high.

  On the table next to the couch was a soldering iron. Small wisps of smoke drifted up from the charred, gum-like bits clinging to the tip, which was leaning against the couch fabric. It was still plugged in.

  Vernal nudged the naked woman with his foot. She didn’t budge. Vernal kicked her. Still nothing. He sighed, grabbed the woman’s limp hand, and dragged her across the torn vinyl tiles in shuffling steps. He unplugged the soldering iron and set it on the floor. It left a black stain on the arm of the sofa. Fucking fire hazard.

  Vernal thought he’d better check under the sink.

  He walked back into his old kitchen and found the small fire red extinguisher resting behind the pipes. He checked the expiration date. Still good.

  Vernal paused, then carried the extinguisher out of the apartment and up three flights. It was Velma’s day off, and if she wasn’t home, there was only one other place she would be. Vernal popped the cap from the nozzle and got a good grip. Then he pounded on a door with the butt of the metal canister. It was loud and echoed through the stairwell.

  Vernal heard the shuffling of metal locks. The door opened.

  “Fuck.” A stick-legged man with facial piercings and a teardrop tattoo swung the door shut as soon as he saw Vernal.

  The short scoundrel jammed the extinguisher into the gap of the closing door at the last moment, tilted it up and sprayed the doorman in the face with high pressure foam. The man stumbled back coughing and swatting at his face and mouth. He cursed and ran to the kitchen.

  Vernal walked in, careful to leave the door unlocked. The layout was identical to his own apartment. There was the same stench of burnt flesh with the nauseating addition of incense. Velma was passed out on the couch clutching a small plastic bag. It was empty.

  Vernal took his sister’s hand and pulled her arm straight as Derk, the apartment’s owner, gargled water in the kitchen. Vernal stared at the parade of cauterized circles that danced up and down Velma’s arm. Neverod was everywhere now, and Vernal knew enough about the drug to guess it would take months of abuse to get that many burns. They must have run out at the party downstairs and sent Velma for more. Derk had a thing for Vernal’s sister but had never dared try anything with Cecil around. At least she still had her clothes on.

  Velma cracked her bloodshot eyes. They fluttered. She was high. Very high.

  “Hi, sis.”

  Velma’s mouth tilted in a half-smile. It revealed a scab at the corner. Her eyelids scraped up and down. One was black and blue. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

  She had been pretty once, adored by every man Vernal knew. But she’d lived a hard life and it showed.

  “Good to see you too.” Vernal’s grated voice gargled each syllable.

  Velma pushed back her greasy blond hair and patted her swollen eye. She grimaced. “Why do you always have to be such a turd?” She sat up carefully.

  “Expensive habit.” Vernal lifted the empty plastic bag.

  “What do you want?”

  Derk stormed in on bare feet. His sweat pants hung loose around his thighs. He looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. “I’m gonna fucking kill you. No one does that to--”

  Vernal sprayed him a second time, right in his open mouth. Derk gagged and doubled over, spitting and coughing. It shook the piercings clustered around his left ear. He stumbled against the wall.

  Vernal scowled at his sister. “I thought you cleaned up.” She had promised him months ago and every week since. It was a condition for her to get the apartment, not that Vernal needed it now anyway, not when the world was about to end.

  “What, are you Dad now?” Velma coughed and reached for a cigarette.

  “It’s at least a few months I’m guessing, from the burns on your arms.”

  Cigarette and flame swayed back and forth in opposite directions as Velma tried to bring them together.

  Derk reappeared from the kitchen holding a knife. He held it up, wide-eyed. His shirt was soaking wet and his eyes were bloodshot and running tears. He held up a finger. “Don’t you fucking do that to me again, you little fucking choad.”

  “
That’s a butter knife, asshole.”

  “And I know how to use it.”

  Vernal ran a finger over the base of his palm. He liked having the stirge larva. He was a small man, and it gave him confidence. And no one would suspect. He sneered at Derk. “I’m tired of you selling drugs to my sister.”

  Derk snorted. “Me? You’re tired of me? I’m not the one getting her face beat in.” He pointed at Velma with the knife. “They were looking for you, asshole.”

  Vernal looked at Velma’s bruises and the cut in her lip.

  Derk kept his distance. “If not for me they would have done a lot worse, too. You should thank me for looking after her.” He shifted his weight back and forth. “You’re in so much shit. The only reason there’s not an army of Murderlings breaking down that door right now is because the Butcher’s dead and everybody’s out cleaning up.”

  Vernal had heard.

  “You’re so fucking dead, Vernal.” Velma chuckled and wagged the lit cigarette at him. Her eyelids opened and closed and opened. She slurred her words. “If you’re lucky, they’ll just lube up a saurus and let it rape you to death. If you’re lucky.” She took a drag.

  Vernal raised his eyebrows. “I was never all that lucky.”

  Velma sneered. “This isn’t like grifting the greasers out in the hills, or whatever the hell it is you do out there.”

  “Corpse disposal. Mostly.”

  Derk snorted. He kept the blunt knife raised. “Pimpernel’s people are gonna do vile shit to you. Vile.”

  “What did you do this time?” Velma asked.

  “It’s not important.”

  “You’re too much of a big shot to tell me?”

  “No. I want to protect you.”

  “Protect?” Velma stumbled to her feet. She lost her balance and gripped the couch for support. Her eyelids drooped. “Fat lot of good your protection is. Where was your protection when your nieces disappeared? Huh? You said you would help me.” She glowered at him.

  “Have the police found anything?”

  “Fuck . . . Why do you have to be so stoopid?” Velma fell back onto the cushions.