Holy shit, Lonny thought. The fuckers knew he was there. They'd known it all along.
They wouldn't leave things like this.
Lonny crouched lower, got down under the curve of the yucca spears, and squirmed like a soldier moving under barbed wire, pulling himself with his elbows, till he got free of the cactus garden. Then he got to his feet and ran in a crouch across the big terrace.
He still had the gun, anyway.
And he had to know. He scurried up to the lower window of the guest house. The windows were curtained. He heard voices. One of them was Orphy. Sounding delirious. He had a drunk, disbelieving quality about his voice and Lonny couldn't work out exactly what Orphy was saying.
He made up his mind. He went toward the door, circling the treetrunk-thick stem of the huge rose bush growing up the side of the place – looking quickly away from the yellow bony thing wired into the roses. (Bones with only the grease of a human body left on them.) Gun at the ready, Lonny walked through the front door of the guest house. There was a hallway, strewn with trash and rose petals. Beyond it, a sickly gray light from the hall corner.
The trash moved. Lonny stared. There was a man among the bottles and cans and old rags. He looked like a rag himself. He was crawling through the trash toward Lonny. He wore only bloodstained diapers. Baby's disposable diapers. Scabby rips all over his gray skin. He was… Lonny shook his head with amazement. He'd never seen anyone that skinny except on TV commercials about those starving kids overseas. A skeleton with skin shrunk-wrapped on it.
"Don't…" the guy rasped. No hair on his head. His eyes looking two different directions. "Don't…" The voice like a rustle of paper, barely audible. His body made a dry scraping on the floor when he moved a few inches closer. Saying, " Don't let them do this to you."
Lonny's mouth went dry. Instantly. He turned to run – then he heard Orphy yell his name. " Lonny ya fucking… Feez motherfucker… Don't… Lonny…! " Something skewed wrong in his voice – the words were pleadings, protests – but the tone was childishly happy.
"I've got the gun," Lonny murmured. And maybe they had Mitch with Orphy.
He forced himself to go around the corner and look through the door into the room.
There was one dirty white bulb directly in the middle of the ceiling. Under it was a kind of platform, about bed-height from the floor. It took him several seconds of staring to be sure that the platform and the chairs around it were made of human arms and legs. The bone-ends, the bits of meat at the join, showed it was real. They'd preserved it and crudely stitched it together and tied it up with strips of skin; clunky and haphazard looking, but it held together as Orphy thrashed on it.
Orpheus was strapped spread eagled, naked on the bed with the Feasters – so Lonny thought of them – crouched around him, or sitting in bodypart chairs. They were connected to him. Something like stretched-out bits of glue ran from their mouths and exposed genitals, into Orpheus. The stretched-out bits quivered and flowed, and Lonny could see that they were alive, that they were something…
Something like worms. And they were part of the people around the bed, half a dozen people including the guy who called himself the More Man and the little guy, the Handy Man, and a woman whose eyes seemed to shine… you couldn't see her face at all, there was a kind of gas mask effect because the transparent slick white stuff had erupted from her mouth to cover most of her face. The other worm things squirmed into the wounds on Orpheus's throat… Another woman crouched over his genitals, chewing them up, as a worm thrashed whitely next to her pink tongue… A fat man crouched next to Orpheus's foot; the ankle had been broken, a bone end sheering out through the breached skin and the guy was licking marrow from it. Orpheus looked down at the guy and made a sound of pleasure.
Orpheus made that sound?
They'd done something to him. He was writhing,
Lonny saw now, not in pain but in ecstasy… as the More Man used the severed arm of the security guard to fuck a wound in Orphy's side, the arm a dildo. Orphy writing in repugnant happiness. Feeling no pain while they snapped his bones. He looked invitingly at Lonny. Mucous bubbling from his mouth as he urged: "Git on, Lon!" he said wetly. "Take a hit!"
The worms thrashing and squirming over this feast. Not eating flesh but taking something – taking what? The woman looking up at Lonny with eyes that were glossy with sensation but something imploring in them too.
Use the gun on me, boy. Use it on me
Was that her voice?
Use it on me, Mein Schones jung. The head. Shoot me in the head
Orpheus's belly was humping up with the movement of the things probing in him and he was way beyond yelling now, he was just staring deep into the lightbulb and going "Ack… ack… kuh… ack
…" as they probed into him, his eyes bulging, the joy in his face worse than anything else. All of them smiling through the wormstuff at Lonny. Reaching out…
Lonny felt a buzz in his head. A flush of pleasure.
"NO FUCKING WAY!" Shouted so hard he could feel something rip in his throat. And the gun came up -
Me, herrliches boy…
– but he wrenched the. 45 away from the target it wanted, and pointed it at Orpheus. Fired. Felt it jump in his hand, glimpsed Orphy's brains splash. He fired it wildly at the others till it expended its magazine – with the last round, the light bulb exploded and the room went dark.
He threw the gun into the darkness and spun, careened into the hall. Sprinted for the front door.
He stumbled through the trash. Bottles and cans rebounded from his feet; he felt his heels crunch something that was probably a spine. A fading murmur of gratitude came from underfoot. Then he was outdoors and racing across the terrace. Someone lunged from the shadows under an oak tree and he felt a hand close around his wrist and he shrieked his best approximation of a karate yell and slammed a fist into a soft part of whoever it was. They went flailing down and he kept going, tearing through brush and feeling it tear through his skin, until he got to the black metal fence. He was over it in seconds, wailing one long note like a siren the whole way over. Dropped to the other side, ignored the pain in his ankles and ran on. Another fence. It was nothing. He went up it like a cat up a treetrunk. Dropped into the sand on the other side. Thought he heard a really pissed-off yell behind him. They hadn't expected him to get away.
He just kept going, shouting hoarsely, "Not me you fuckers!" He kept going, running at random into the brittle, aromatic brush of the countryside, until his legs stopped working. He fell into sand and rocks.
After a spinning while, the sobbing started. With that, came strength to crawl.
It didn't matter how he went. He just had to keep going.
Culver City, Los Angeles
Prentice had been sitting with a stack of books at the table in the Los Angeles main library since eleven a.m. It was almost two. His butt hurt from the chair and his stomach growled, but something kept him there. He imagined Amy saying, You always did give up too easily, Tom. Like with me…
He shook himself, and focused on the book. It wouldn't do to let the Amy obsession haunt him again. He turned the page, and then he saw them. Sam and Judy Denver.
The book was called Those Fabulous Hollywood Parties. The Denvers had been known for their parties. Prentice was looking for anything he could find about them – he wanted to get some kind of impression of them, and judge how likely it was that Mitch was actually being held out there…
He'd just about given up on finding them in this book – it seemed to focus on the old Hollywod Babylon sort of parties from the days of silent movies. Too early for the Denvers.
But here they were – there names caught his eye, first, in boldface under the photo. Not the names "Sam and Judy Denver." It said " Mrs. Stutgart and Future Husband, Mr. Samuel Denver." The date was 1929. Here was a middle aged woman and an older man in Roaring Twenties fashions, Denver holding eight champagne glasses clutched together at the stems like a bouquet in his hands, Mrs. Stutgart slopping champagne over them as if to fill all eight at once. Both of them laughing. Oliver Hardy looking on, making a comical face of mock astonishment; Faye Wray drunkenly leaning on Hardy with one of her dainty feet cocked up behind her. Another man stood rather stiffly in the background in an immaculate black tux. Denver's bowtie was undone and his salt and pepper hair rumpled.