"There's a kind of cult…" Jeff broke off, shaking his head in exasperation. "I can't believe I'm discussing this stuff with a…"
"A street bum? I got rolled, is all. I screwed up, and then I got rolled. I haven't had a chance to clean up. They've got my daughter, man. And I want to know what you know."
Near Malibu
She was skilled at hiding it. But Constance hated Ephram deeply and profoundly.
Even so, she wished she could be with him now. And not just for the Reward. He was safer than these people. This place. This dimly-lit room with its infrastructure of purest grotesquerie. Besides, Ephram wouldn't make her watch a thing like this, not for so long. He'd have stopped it by now, for all the wrong reasons. He'd have regarded it as ''esthetically gauche" or something.
The bed. It was made of people. Pieces of people. Pieces of legs for posts, bones for frames, most of it looking brown and old. But the skin over the mattress (what was the mattress stuffed with?) looked new. It was made from a black man; maybe not much more than a boy. She could see his face upside down on the side of the mattress. The eyes were sewn crudely shut.
The room stank.
The teenagers, a white boy and a black girl, were humping listlessly in the middle of the bed, and clawing at one another. It was making Constance sick, because she wasn't getting any Reward, and some of her natural feelings of repugnance were coming back. But the More Man and Thandy, the Handy Man, and the woman with the white thing growing from her face – they wanted her here, they wanted her to watch. They were standing on the other side of the bed. Playing. She supposed they were preparing her for something. She didn't care. She just wanted to get back to Ephram and hide behind him.
On the bed, abruptly as the fall of a house of cards, the boy collapsed. "Lost too much blood," the Handy Man said, examining him. "He's dead."
"Now," the More Man said, "is the time, Constance.
Go to them. Mitch's dead and Prime will pass to you – you will become one of us."
"No, thanks," Constance said.
The More Man laughed. "A good semblance of winning ingenuousness."
Something glimmered around the More Man's head. She could see that he had the thing that looked like an undersea-crawler on his head, too, like his wife – only his was less substantial looking. It reached out, though, to Constance, stretching like phlegm, reaching for her. She backed away. The door was locked behind her.
"Time to par- tayyyy…" the More Man said softly, mockingly.
The Handy Man said something in German. The woman with the big sea snail thing on her head answered in German, something muted and bubbly under the stuff, and sobbed, and lifted up her dress and…
Constance looked away. He slim black girl on the bed of body parts was crying softly, rasping. "Mitch…" He boy was dead. The black girl was trying to heave his body off her and couldn't. She was crying with crusted, dried out eyes and cracked lips, trying to roll the boy off her. Constance looked away from her too. She didn't want to feel bad for anyone. If she let herself feel anything, it'd open a can of…
The yellow-silvery tendril reached out to her.
A rattling in the lock Then the door opened behind her.
She turned and saw Ephram there.
But Ephram looked defeated. "That's enough…" He tossed the key onto the floor. "I… will cooperate, Samuel."
"You have become peculiar lately," Sam Denver chuckled. "Very well, Constance." The tendril slunk back to him like the gelatinous antenna of a snail pulling into itself.
Denver drew the Handy Man aside, away from his wife. "What can you do for her, then, Ephram?"
Seeing they'd lost interest in her, Constance edged toward the bed. She wasn't sure why – but she had to do this. Maybe some door in her had been left open a slit. She pulled the white boy off the black girl, rolled him toward Denver's side of the murdered bed. The girl turned on her side to try to crawl off the bed – and found herself staring, three inches away, into the mummified face of the boy they'd made into a mattress cover. She screamed in recognition: and Constance saw the family resemblance between the two faces. The girl's brother.
The girl covered her face with her hands, screaming uncontrollably into her bloody palms. Constance helped her to stand, and drew her aside. The girl fell silent, shaking. Constance wondered if Denver would let the two of them get out the door.
Ephram was staring at the woman. That'd be Mrs. Denver, Judy, from what he'd told her. Once Mrs. Stutgart. Ephram was doing something to her with his mind. Ephram grimaced and shook his head. "I haven't got the strength. They're too firmly a part of her."
Denver nodded grimly. "Then get the hell out of here. And leave the girl."
Ephram hesitated. Then he started mumbling. He was chanting, Constance knew, calling up the…
"No," Denver said. "If you can't do it alone, don't do it."
"It's the only way," Ephram said, pausing in a distracted kind of way. "The Spirit can draw them off from her. I don't have enough strength."
"The Spirit!" Denver laughed bitterly. "What the
Bloody Hell do you think the Spirit is, Pixie? Don't you know what it'd do to her? Or is that what you want?"
Ephram stopped his murmuring. He blinked at Denver. "What do you mean – what it is?"
Denver shook his head. "Do you really have that much of a blind spot? But of course, it's kept you that way… Ephram, your spirit is just another Akishra. A Magnus. The most powerful Akishra – but it is still just an Akishra."
"No!"
Constance had never heard Ephram sound so off balance. And so afraid. She looked at the door. The girl beside her – God, she smelled bad, of rotting blood and shit and worse stuff – was sinking to her knees, unable to walk by herself. Constance couldn't carry her and couldn't bring herself to leave the girl here. What am I doing? she wondered. Maybe she'd been too long without Reward, and this was withdrawal. This feeling…
"You don't think I'd perceive such a thing?" Ephram said, with a trumped-up sneer. "I'd know."
"You really can't see them?" Denver said. "The control lines? I suppose it doesn't want you to. See for yourself. Here, with our influence, you should be able to see them…"
Ephram looked up, and shocked Constance by whimpering. Constance followed his gaze. Shimmying into view like puppet strings over Ephram's head were dozens of fine, translucent tendrils. Now, as they began to move around, billowing and gleaming, they didn't look like puppet strings so much as the little trailing stingers that dangle from big jelly fish…
They were sunken into his head. Grown right into it. They stretched from Ephram up into, and through, the ceiling. And through this world into another. They were not quite physical things – you could see that, looking at them. But they were there.
"You pretentious old bastard," Denver said. "You thought you were better than the rest of us – because of your overblown talent? That you were in touch with some glorious God of the dark dimensions? You perfect ass! It was just the biggest Akishra; the Magnus itself. The greatest of them, playing games with you, letting you play on the line, reeling you out then, reeling you in now. It brought you here, for this. Manipulated you into coming to L.A. Oh, yeah. The thing you called down for Wetbones. And – you want to bring that here? Now? You're out of your pompous little skull."
"Yes," Ephram croaked. His face gone white. "Yes. Having come this far: yes. To cure us all." And he spoke three more words.
The ceiling seemed to vanish. It turned transparent and then faded completely. Smoke replaced it, a living smoke made up of ten thousand restless, microscopic eyes. Constance thought she glimpsed people there, too, whirling, caught like the birds in a tornado. The rectangle that had been the ceiling was now an infinite reach of crowded and living sky. And then the iridescent bulk of the creature who'd masqueraded as the "Great Spirit", the Akishra Magnus, descended slowly toward them. What Constance could see of it made her think of a house-sized plasticine squid; its upper parts tapering into the boiling smokes of staring, black-light space; reeling in on some tendrils, seeking with others, its vast sticky, glimmer-edged, polyp-bearded mouth opening…