SACRED MONSTER
DONALD E. WESTLAKE
THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS
New York • London • Tokyo
Copyright © 1989 Donald E. Westlake All rights reserved.
The Mysterious Press, 129 West 56th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: May 1989 10 987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Westlake, Donald E.
Sacred monster.
I. Title.
PS3573.E9S23 1989 ISBN 0-89296-177-5
With sympathy and respect, this novel is dedicated to the memory of (in alphabetical order):
Esther Blodgett
Daisy Clover
Norma Desmond
Emily Ann Faulkner and
Georgia Lorrison
Contents
1
2
FLASHBACK 1
3
FLASHBACK 2
4
FLASHBACK 3
5
FLASHBACK 4
6
FLASHBACK 5
7
FLASHBACK 6
8
FLASHBACK 7
9
FLASHBACK 8
10
FLASHBACK 9
11
FLASHBACK 9A
12
FLASHBACK 10
LUDE
13
FLASHBACK 11
14
FLASHBACK 12
FLASHBACK 13
15
FLASHBACK 14
16
FLASHBACK 15
17
FLASHBACK 15A
18
FLASHBACK 15B
19
FLASHBACK 15C
20
FLASHBACK 16
21
FLASHBACK 16A
LUDE
22
FLASHBACK 15D
23
FLASHBACK 15E
24
FLASHBACK 17
25
FLASHBACK 17A
26
FLASHBACK 17B
27
FLASHBACK 18
28
FLASHBACK 18A
29
FLASHBACK 17C
30
FLASHBACK 19
31
FLASHBACK 20
32
FLASHBACK 21
33
FLASHBACK 22
34
LUDE
DREAM SEQUENCE
LUDE CONTINUED
FLASHBACK 23
35
FLASHBACK 24
36
FLASHBACK 1A
37
FLASHBACK IB
38
FLASHBACK 25
39
FLASHBACK 26
40
FLASHBACK 27
41
1
"This won't take long, sir."
Oooooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooohoo ooooooocooooooooooooooohooooooooooooooooooooooooh ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, wow.
I hurt all over. My bones ache. God's giant fists are squeezing my internal organs, twisting and grinding. Why do I do it, if it makes me sick?
"Ready for a few questions, sir?"
I open my eyes; slowly, very slowly. It is daytime, but thank God a high, thin cloud cover shields me from the sun. I am home; where else would I be? Here is my broad slate patio, grayer than the thin cloud way up above, spread like a monochrome quilt between my house and my pool. Big house; white; Tara, you know what I mean? I can't look at the pool; dancing waters.
And ahead of me is the interviewer. A neat, drab man, a plain man in plain gray slacks, plain tan sports jacket, button-down blue shirt, maroon bow tie. Brown loafers, black socks. Steno pad at the ready, ball-point pen at the ready, eyes at the ready.
I open my mouth, which alters the balance of my body, which makes me dizzy, which makes me want to return to sweet oblivion. But duty calls. “Sure, pal," my voice says, with some assistance from me. “Anything for the press."
“Thank you," the interviewer says, neat and polite. He has a round, neat head without flab or jowls or character at all. No lumpy nose, thick lips, shaggy eyebrows, big ears. Nothing. Not a character you can catch hold of. He has a head like a shaved coconut with a seedy, flat wig pasted on.
Which is why he's a reporter and I'm a star. / am interesting. Even when I'm—oh, God! in pain).— I'm interesting. I mean, here he is, you see what I mean, pen and pad in hand, interested in me, while I don’t give a fat rat's ass about him. You see how it works?
Well, no, let's be fair. It isn't just the face, this interestingly mottled and cunningly cragged visage the world has grown over the years to know and to love and to pay money for the sight of. Behind the face there's—there was—there is, dammit!—well, there was, anyway—a talent that would knock your socks off and tan your toes. This face, this voice . . . the slope of this shoulder, the movement of these hands . . .
I could still do it, if I had to. You don't think so? I could. I don't have to, of course, haven't had to for a long time, but I still could, if push came to goddamn shove. Still could.
Not today, however. Today I'm doing well enough just to sketch in the vaguest outline of a human being here. I risk disembowelment, self-destruction, by making a smile in my interviewer's direction, using all those muscles in the face. I say, “Where would I be without the press, huh?”
“I guess that's right," he says. He's so toneless I may die; I'm suffering life deprivation.
In fact, I'm suffering. “Listen, pal," I say, my voice waving and shaking all on its own, “I'm sorry, but I got really wasted last night. I took chemicals science hasn't discovered yet. I mean I just got back to this solar system, you follow me? I'm sorry, pal, but I just got to sit down."
He looks at me with faint concern. “Sir,” he says, “you are sitting down.”
I gaze about me in mild amaze. Son of a bitch, the man speaks true! Blue canvas cups my penitent rump. A pale blue terry-cloth robe is closed over legs stretching away from me over the slates, ankles crossed, feet bare but wonderfully clean. I am a clean person.
But sick. “In that case,” I say, leaning forward, stretching out these arms, these arms, “in that case,” tipping over my own knees, palms brushing slate, canvas chair groaning as I depart, “in that case, I got to lie down.”
And so I do, stretching out on my back, the coolness of the slate filtering through the terry cloth to soothe my fevered ass, my sacrificial shoulder blades. My right hand comes up, knowing the appropriate gesture all by itself, the back of the hand resting on my forehead, fingers slightly curled. I gaze up past this monument at the herringbone sky. I speak:
“It is true that I am rich and famous. The movies I star in have never grossed less than eighty million. I make so much money I'm an industry. I support entire villages of lawyers and agents and managers and secretaries and accountants and hookers and dope dealers and plastic surgeons and ex-wives and relatives and friends and gardeners and poolmen and gym instructors. I've got people to stand me up when it is absolutely necessary that I stand up, to dry me out and clean me off when I must go once again in front of that old debbil camera, people to keep me out of trouble with the law, to buy me the very best dope money can buy. These people don’t just love me, man, they need me.”
I smile, thinking of my citizens. Delicately, carefully, I turn my head just enough to include the interviewer in my smile. “Jack Pine's army,” I say.
“Yes, sir.”
“But probabl
y you want to know how it all began, am I right?”
“Yes, sir, I would,” he says.
"How a God-given talent became such a far-flung enterprise."
I gaze again heavenward, thinking back . . .
screams, screaming, engine roars, flashing lights in red and white reflecting from the bumper chrome, slicking on the heaving trunk of the car, madness, danger, movement, peril, speed . . .
No! I blink, I make some sort of noise out of my throat, I press the back of my head against the hard slate, my fingers clench at air. I will not let that in!
It's all right. It's all right. "Yes," I say, nodding, catching hold of the reins once more. I smile. The practiced sentences roll forth: "It all began, it all began, the night I lost my virginity."
2
She was my first. Wendy. Of course, I wasn't her first. Not even that night. But she was really nice. Really nice.
We went to the same school, she was a year behind me. I was sixteen, Wendy was fifteen, she went sometimes with three, four guys in a car. Her father's car. I heard about it, but I never thought she'd do it with me.
Buddy fixed it up, Buddy Pal, he set the whole thing up, just the two of us and Wendy. And naturally, because he set it up with Wendy, he went first.
FLASHBACK 1
I rank William Pal, Jr., known as Buddy, smiled at Wendy and backed out of the car. With the door open, the interior light had come on, and Wendy shielded her eyes with a pudgy-fingered hand. Supine on the backseat, blue jeans and panties in a snarl around her right ankle on the floor, sweater and bra bunched up to her armpits, she was less pretty but more provocative than when seen in the corridors at school, prancing along, eyes wise with knowing sidelong glances, lips full and mouth pink when she laughed. Now she breathed in little gasps, her pale belly contracting, and her voice was hoarse as she said, “Ow. Shut the door, willya?”
'Til send Jack over," Buddy told her, and shut the door, killing the light. It was a soft and humid spring night, and the car windows were all steamed on the inside, making them opaque in the darkness. Buddy, a skinny six-footer of sixteen with nondescript brown hair, took the roll of paper towels he'd left on the car roof, ripped off a few, and put the roll back on the roof. After using the towels, he pulled his pants up, secured them, stepped into his loafers, and walked away from the dark and silent Buick, down the dirt road among the pine trees in the dark.
Jack Pine stood nervously walking-and skipping and kicking at stones about a hundred feet down the road. He too was skinny at sixteen, his brown hair less controlled than Buddy's. They were similar in looks and build, enough so that people sometimes thought they might be cousins, but they were merely best friends. Their differences were not in their features, but what they did with them: Buddy's expressions were confident, amused, aware, while Jack's face mostly mirrored doubt and insecurity. Between the two, Buddy seemed the older, the more mature. He came strolling down the dirt road, smiling, hands in trouser pockets, and softly called, "Dad? You there?"
"Buddy? Here I am!" Jack's voice, anxious, was too loud, the words too jumbled together.
Buddy found him in the dark, and squeezed his arm. "Take it easy, Dad."
"I'm fine!" Jack told him, smiling maniacally though they could barely see each other. "Is Wendy—?"
"All softened up for you, Dad."
Jack swallowed. "I just—I just go over there?"
"She's waiting, Dad. You know what I mean? Waiting”
"But—I don't know how to . . ." Jack's hands fluttered in the night like moths. "How to act. I don't know how to act.”
"Act like me, Dad," Buddy told him, grinning as he presented the gift. "Just go over there and be me."
Jack's eyes widened. He looked at his friend as though for the first time. "I could," he whispered, awed by it.
"Sure, you could, Dad. Go on, get over there before she cools off."
Buddy gave him a little push, and Jack stepped toward the unseen Buick, tripping but recovering, moving on. In the dark, his movements were like Buddy's, gliding, insinuating, certain. Then he stopped and looked back. Above, clouds shifted, and the sheen of perspiration on Jack's face suddenly gleamed pale in moonlight. His smile was one he'd never owned before. “Buddy?" he called, transfixed, spotlit by the moon. “Thanks!" And he turned away, sliding Buddy-like through the dark.
3
I smile at the sky, remembering that incredible moment, that instant when I opened the Buick's door and the light went on—like a movie starting, like a curtain going up on a play—and there she was, like nothing I'd ever seen before. And she held her arms out to me. . . .
I held my arms out, up, to the sky, the way I did when I played the Aztec prince. Red. There's blood on my hand, my right hand. Dried, dark, dull. I put my hand to my mouth, I lick the blood away. All gone. No evidence left. No matter. I forget all about it. "That was something," I say, living nothing but that first moment so long ago. "It was so exciting. My very first time. I just lost ... I just lost all control. It was like an explosion. That's when I really and truly came to life."
From the corner of my eye, I see the interviewer make a note. A sexual suggestion, but just a hint, will get into his copy, past his editor. It's all good for my image. Then he looks at me and says, "Buddy Pal was there even back then, was he?"
"Oh, yeah," I say. "Buddy Pal's not only my best friend in all the world, he's my oldest friend in all the world. We met in nursery school, man. We ate sand together. And on to college."
FLASHBACK 2
In the college auditorium, in the evening, a production of Hamlet was being rehearsed. The director was a member of the school faculty, but all the actors were students. Act V, scene i, was being run through, in costume, but without scenery or sets.
The two gravediggers shuffled onto the bare stage, dressed in rags, shovels over their shoulders. The first gravedigger was a large and bulky boy of nineteen, moving like a football player at the end of a hard game, his manner awkward but willing. The second gravedigger, stepping slyly, hunch-shouldered, bowlegged, completely comfortable, was Jack.
The football player spoke first, in a flat monotone, like the telephone company announcing the time: "'Is she to be buried in Christian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation?'" He gazed out over the dark auditorium as he declaimed, over the heads of the other actors and their friends and the jaundiced-looking director. He seemed unaware of the other person on stage, to whom he was allegedly speaking.
Jack shuffled around him, quick but obscurely infirm. His voice was a triumphant cackle as he said, "‘1 tell thee she is; and therefore make her grave straight.'" He winked and leered at his partner, sharing the joke with him, though the partner gave him nothing back. With mock solemnity, Jack crossed himself and sardonically intoned, "'The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial."' An echo of brogue lilted his speech.
"'How can that be,'" the football player said, one word thudding after another, " 'unless she drown'd herself in her own defence?'"
Jack capered slightly, an arthritic imitation of a jester. ‘"Why, 'tis found so,'" he said, and winked.
The football player massively shook his head; acting. "'It must be say of ten-dough,”’ he announced. "'It cannot be else. For here—'"
"Wait a minute!" called the director, rising from his front-row seat, hurrying up onto the stage. A balding, potbellied man of fifty, he was famous in the school for long brooding silences followed by excessive explosions followed by tortured apologies. While everyone else in the seats watched with half smiles of anticipation, this man crossed the stage to Jack and the football player, crying out, "What is this ’often-dough’?”
"I dunno," the football player said, blinking and looking defensive. "That's what it says in the book."
"It is not,” the director assured him, and waved a paperback copy under the football player's nose. "The phrase is 'se offendendo.’ Do you suppose you can say that?"
While the football player made a stum
bling attempt to repeat the phrase, Jack looked toward the wings and saw Buddy there, just out of sight behind the side curtain, gesturing to Jack to come over. As the director attempted to teach se offendendo to the football player, with increasingly caustic asides, Jack crossed to the wings, walking with his usual quick buoyance, the shovel now jauntily borne on his shoulder. "Hi, Buddy," he said when he had cleared the stage.
Buddy spoke quietly, conspiratorially. "Listen, Dad," he said, "you stuck here?"
Jack smiled, like sunlight breaking through clouds. The hand not holding the shovel moved in an expansive delighted gesture. "I love it, Buddy! I'm alive here!"
Buddy nodded, without interest. "Oh, yeah?"
"Acting!" Jack beamed at the stage, where director and football player moved even further from understanding. "This is it for me," he said.
"Yeah, well, I got a date with that Linda from seventeenth-century lit."
Happy for his friend, Jack said, "Yeah? Great. She's okay!"
"Only I need a couple bucks, Dad," Buddy said. "Five?"
"Oh, sure, Buddy!"
Putting down the shovel, Jack searched his rags for his wallet, found it, and handed Buddy a bill. Buddy took it without comment, stowed it away in a pocket, and said, "Maybe she's got a pal for you, if you ever get outa here." Grinning, teasing with a little conspiratorial wink, he added, "And if you behave yourself."
Suddenly sheepish, Jack fiddled with the shovel, moving it from hand to hand."/ know how to handle girls," he said.
With an ironic laugh, Buddy said, “Yes, you do."
From the stage, the director, with a thin, high-nettled whine in his voice, called, "Mister Pine, could you manage to rejoin us, do you suppose?"
"Oh, sure!" Shouldering his shovel, Jack grinned at Buddy, said, "Luck with Linda," and hurried back to the middle of the stage, facing the exasperated director with his sunniest and most amiable smile. "Sorry," he said. "Here I am."
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 Page 1