That’s when he heard the whimper. A murmur, a small whine fighting to distinguish itself from the swash of nightsounds. Better check it out, he thought, and he started to climb. It didn’t take long, maybe three or four upward strides until the spire came into view. By then, though, the whine had turned to a wail, a million blaring sirens. Those supplicants! Howling in the night!
The monster withered ’neath the din. At the outset of the 90 Series, he’d tried to convince himself that it was all a hoax, that the supplicants never really existed, even that they were being generated by Shig himself, product of some offshore ventriloquism. Now this notion seemed impossible; these screams could not be counterfeit. Building, ever building, they became a mother’s cry to a lost child down an empty stairwell, an urgent shout that gains in wretched authority with every unreturned echo until it becomes the terror of every mother searching for every child everywhere, the shriek of the wildebeest staring into the hyena’s bloody jaws on the Serengeti, the moan of monkeys seeing their offspring fitted for an organ grinder’s costume and cup. It was insane, standing there, feeling those pulsations swirl about that spire as if it were a maypole of despair. Gojiro stepped back, aghast. Could all that have once been inside his head, all that
need
, all those unanswered prayers?
Gojiro fell to his knees and began to weep. “I’m sorry!” he screamed into the agitated air. “But it ain’t me! I ain’t the one you want! You got to believe that.” His voice rose, became just another supplication in the seething darkness.
Then he heard that tick. It wasn’t loud, but just as a gouge in vinyl cuts across two hundred years of time to truncate Beethoven’s fury, it soon became all Gojiro could hear. He went forward ’til he found the sound. It was coming from a large plastic box attached by a heavy cable to the bottom of the spire. Inside were numerous tape decks, all turning, hundreds of cassettes. They’d run to the end, then—tick—turn around, go the other way. Each tape bore some sort of recorded message, Gojiro could tell, but it was hard to make out any single one amid the bawl. Right then, however, enough of the tapes tracked simultaneously for the reptile to hear “Yo, this is Gojiro! I am sorry, I cannot come to the Crystal Contact Receptor right now. I am still in the terrible grip of that Narcolepto Opposer. But have no fear, I will return your supplication. I will return all supplications! I will fulfill the 90 Series! Have
faith
in that, loyal zardpards!” It was the same pathetic imitation Shig had used on that movie trailer.
“Bastard!” Full of frustration and wrath, the monster cogwheeled his every appendage through the pandemonic atmosphere. In his rage, he never noticed how close he was to the spire until his great tail clashed against its base and held there.
Gojiro jerked at his posterior peninsula, but it seemed welded in place. “Shit!” Years ago, he assumed, he possessed tail-detachment capability. But now, likely still another product of his unfortunate encounter with Joseph Prometheus Brooks’s nucleus-smashing brainchild, the lizard’s backdragger was fixed solid. It stayed glued to the spire. A dull vibration was creeping up his dorsal ridges, vertebra by vertebra, nerve ending by nerve ending. Soon it was in his neck, an inch from his head. Physical contact with the spire load allowed those 90 Series supplications to surge back into him.
Just stay perfectly still, he told himself. Don’t say a word. Stonewall. That was the key. Komodo said as much during that conversation they’d had about where the weight of the 90 Series fell. “Perhaps,” Komodo said, “it is like a glance across a crowded room that is never seen and therefore cannot be returned. No love can grow from that.” When the impulse came, though, it wasn’t like before. There weren’t thousands of supplications, no graspy horde, no inconsolable throng. There was only one, a single supplicant: Billy Snickman.
How, out of all the teratogenic syndromics, the run-of-the-mill victims of divorce, and the sad ones who keep their sadness hid, how in the world did Gojiro choose Billy Snickman? Or was it how did Billy Snickman choose him?
Truth was, at the outset, Gojiro figured being transported into Billy Snickman’s skin wasn’t all
that
bad. Not that the kid’s life had been free of violin music. As Gojiro whizzed through the pathetic pages of the thirteen-year-old’s luckless dossier, the usual hurt and heartache ruled. His father was a black-lunger, sixth generation in a Kentucky mine. The bosses made everyone sign a release the day before the full extent of the epidemic became known, then moved the company to Atlanta, diversified to textiles and poultry. A month later Billy’s dad got shot in a bumper-pool dispute. His mom took him out west, but the car broke down in Arkansas, where they hitched along the road until the wrong pickup stopped. They found her body in a drainage gully, and Billy began his career in foster care. Sixteen families in three years. He was withdrawn, they said, a retard. Billy didn’t mind the labels. He made up little poems about those sixteen families and sang them to himself. The one he liked the best was called “Forget That House.” It went “Forget that house, forget that door, tomorrow it’ll be another color, not there no more.”
When he was twelve, Billy ran away again, but is it really running away when they don’t chase you? His big break came while hiding inside the trunk of a Buick about to cross the California line. He coughed at the fruit-inspection stop and was found out. The driver smacked Billy around, accused him of trying to steal spare tires, but his clubfoot won him sympathy. The local paper ran a story; the driver, a feed and pesticide dealer looking to make a name in local politics, made a show of adopting Billy. After that he lived in a raised ranch house, eating wordless dinners under a cut-glass chandelier with his new parents, who, until him, were childless. He got his own room. It wasn’t until the feed dealer, in the midst of his campaign for county clerk, broke Billy’s withered arm with a hard hit in a father-son touch football game and screamed at him, “Get up and walk it off, you pansy,” that Billy ran away again, this time to craggy mountains in back of Barstow where he lived like a wild wolf child, sleeping in interstate rest stops, stealing food from motel dumpsters, singing his poem-songs in the sunbaked arroyos.
It was a typical enough catalog of woe: a drag, but no Ethiopia. And after living Billy Snickman’s life along with him, Gojiro readied himself for what he knew would come next. What would this Billy Snickman want? An organ transplant for the wheezing dog he found that night in Needles? What would this bottomfeeder of the genophenic pool request—a request that would never be answered, or fulfilled.
“Come in, Gojiro. Please heed this humble servant’s plea,” Billy Snickman rasped. “I only got one question.”
Gojiro swallowed hard. This wasn’t going to be so easy, after all. To deny a million supplicants, that was a breeze. You could look into a million needy pairs of eyes and they’d never lay a glove on you. Numbers like that added up to an administrative problem, nothing more. Maybe that’s how those men in that B-29 approached their mission, thousands of feet of air between them and eternal pain. Gojiro wondered: Suppose the only way to detonate an A-bomb was to strap it to a soldier’s body on a time release, send him to the center of the town, make him walk around, eat in the greasy spoon, take a book out of the library. Then would there have ever been a Bomb?
“I need to know this one thing,” Billy Snickman said. Gojiro girded himself. It was strange; usually the supplication was blurted out, a slurred invocation followed rapidly by a behest for the monster to come step on wildeyed drinking parents, or to blow dry rot from decaying bones, or to provide a life’s supply of Mars bars. But this Billy Snickman was deliberate, careful.
Finally, the boy said, “I need to know—
who are you?
”
After that, it was pretty much a blur, a smear of lurching emotions. First came the schizoshock of hearing his own voice say, “I am Gojiro, Bridger of Gaps, Linker of Lines, Nexus of Beam and Bunch, Defender of the Evolloo.” That was followed, almost immediately, by the panic of trying to deny that he had said it. Not that it mattered. Billy Snickman was gone. Gojiro could not raise him again.
Then came the worst of it, the way Gojiro went running to Komodo, screaming that the spire was defective and more drastic methods had to be taken to banish the 90 Series from his brain. “You got to cut it out,” the monster screamed, “whatever part of the Quadcameral that takes in the supplications! Cut it out or I’m gonna die!”
“But . . . what happened?” Komodo was stunned, horrified.
“Don’t matter, just do it. Please!”
Two hours later, Komodo was climbing up a ladder he’d leaned against the monster’s massive noggin. Toolbox in hand, white smock over his black pajamas, miner’s lantern strapped to his forehead, he began his forced entry of the parietal. It was a terrible thing, Gojiro knew, demanding his friend pierce the parietal loam and descend, bootfirst, into the fourth chamber of the Quadcameral. Insisting Komodo make that obscene incision, defile what he held Sacred, knowing his friend would never deny his request—it was the king of sins! But what else could the monster do? He couldn’t let Billy Snickman come back into his head, not with what that boy knew.
“Whatever happens,” Komodo said before he began the surgery, “might not be reversible.” One false move, he pointed out, one mistaken slice with his garden shears, and they might be saying goodbye to each other for all times.
“Chance we got to take,” the lizard shot back. “Cut it out!”
Then Komodo was inside Gojiro’s brain, and there was the sound of something popping, a wire being cut. This was followed by a soft sob, and the track of a single tear from Komodo’s eye, falling through that Quadcameral, from the tortured realm where the 90 Series had been to the highlands of the Neo-Cort, down through the muddy flats of his limbics, tumbling like a solitary silver pearl of dew from leaf to leaf until it was lost among the dense mists of so long ago.
* * *
These were the recollections Gojiro carried with him as he and Komodo reached the edge of the Cloudcover and looked for the exit that would take them through to another world. Komodo never asked why Gojiro changed his mind concerning Sheila Brooks’s letter, nor did he inquire further about the strange supplication scrawled at the bottom of it. For that the monster felt relief. How could he explain? Was there any explanation? Why did he answer Billy Snickman’s question as he did? How had that reply wound up in Sheila Brooks’s maniacal invitation for them to make
Gojiro vs. Joseph Prometheus Brooks in the Valley of Decision
? The monster didn’t know, didn’t want to know, but there was no denying it. This was one supplication that had to be answered.
“Steady as we go, keep starboard-bound,” Komodo, the able mariner, said, gentle in the monster’s ear.
It would be no easy trick, escaping the Cloudcover, that grayish Astrodome that encased their world like a tarnished platter surrounds a cooked goose. It was nothing solid, no jut of geology with weight and properties. Instead, it was an angry wall of heat, a sheer blare, a space-age Styx. So much had come through that fevered curtain, but nothing had ever gotten out.
The warp. Komodo kept talking about the warp. It was there, he said without apparent sentiment, he’d seen it all those years ago, the only other time they’d been out this far, the only other time they’d sought to escape their land. Gojiro closed his eyes. He had no desire to see that scene of still another of his crimes, where those waters once raged, the spot where the swirling death-pool dragged Komodo’s beloved down.
“There!” Komodo screamed, gesturing left toward that growling tunnel. “Go there!”
The monster clenched his jaw, sprang ahead. “Hang on! We’re going through!”
Then there was no horizontal, no vertical; all plain geometry was out the window. The churn shook them like fries in overheated oil. Then the sea went flat, an eerie calm, only to shatter out again, a spew of watery shards.
“It’s like trying to crawl out of a drain!”
“I’m slipping,” Komodo cried, the tiller rope bucking madly in his bleeding hands. He tried to dig his heels into Gojiro’s drenched leathers, but they were too slick.
“Hold on,” Gojiro called, craning his neck to snatch his friend up safely in his mouth.
Again the ocean exploded. “We’re going over!”
Over and over they tumbled, a great log cascading down the most slicked of shoots. And when they stopped, they were right-side up on the most tranquil of seas.
·
Part Two
·
The Hermit Pandora
K
OMODO TRAVELED AS PROFESSOR TAKAMOTO,
a visiting lecturer from the Herpetoholographic Institute of New Chiba-chrome City. Gojiro, shot up with a special shrinkage potion that contracted him to a mere nine inches, stayed inside Komodo’s carry-on bag, posing as a specimen. In this fashion, they made their way across the Pacific, hopscotching from a Caroline to a Gilbert to a Hebride. Before long they were circling the smogsky over LAX.
“Who can tell,” Komodo sighed as he peered through the plasticine window down to the El Segundo tract houses below, “what this world will hold for us, my own true friend?” Gojiro didn’t know, couldn’t say. He couldn’t say anything. Over Hawaii, he’d devoured Komodo’s in-flight chicken cordon bleu, gotten sick, and been swimming in his own juices ever since.
Some hairiness ensued at the airport. Waiting in the customs line, forcing near face-breaking smiles to each passerby, Komodo noticed a sign referring to animal quarantine.
“What’s that mean?” Gojiro asked with alarm as he peeked from the bag. “They gonna stick me in a pound?”
Unsure of the answer to his friend’s question, Komodo moved quickly. He broke off a section of an emergency shrink pill and crammed it into Gojiro’s mouth. Then, with the monster further diminished to less than an inch, Komodo stuck him on the front of his shirt. The customs inspector, clearly no expert when it came to reptilia, knew nothing of the morphologic dissimilarities between the alligator and monitor types and waved Komodo through as if he were just another Izod wearer.
A moment later, approaching the rent-a-car desks, there was more trouble. Due to complications Komodo attributed to rapid altitude shifts, the shrink drug became unstable. Without warning, Gojiro began to blurt in every direction. His head ballooned, his back leg grew seven feet. That linoleum floor was cold; he felt the blood of his ancestors down there. His tail surged outward, wrapping around Komodo’s neck. Before the necessary corrections could be made, three Hare Krishnas and a bag hustler fled the main concourse in terror.
Shaken, Komodo ran out the door and hailed a taxi. It was just as well. Renting a car would have probably been a bad idea. Sure, Komodo had practiced saying, “Oh, are you not the trying-harder company who only carries the fine family of Ford cars?” But really, aside from an occasional spin in one of the three-wheeled plasti jobs that served as all-terrain vehicles on Radioactive Island, Komodo had never driven a car. He had no clue as to California geography either.
Taking a taxi avoided those potential problems. But when the driver, a young woman, turned and asked, “Where to?” in a deep, noir-affected voice, Komodo froze. It was the woman’s appearance that did it, the way her long, knotty white hair seemed to lunge from beneath her cap, the ghostly pallor on her face, and the tilt of the black sunglasses she wore shoved tight against her eyes.
“Ms. Brooks?” Komodo gasped. Could it be that Sheila Brooks had anticipated their arrival and, for reasons known only to herself, affected this cabdriving persona? “It is so thoughtful of you to greet us at the airport. We never expected it.”
The cabdriver giggled. “Pretty good, huh?” she said.
“Pardon?”
“My facsimilation.” As it turned out, the woman was only dressed up like Sheila Brooks. She was “a Brooksian” she explained as she edged the yellow cab onto the teeming freeway. “You know, like, we’re into Sheila. We try to vision with her Vision, dream the Sad Tomorrow, see the End. It’s very constructive. Sheila Brooks has changed my life. I never miss an Eschat-out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Eschatological Outlet Session. Jim—Jim Dust-to-Dust—he’s my Annihilation Terminal, you know, sort of our group leader, a really together guy. He says it’s really important to unburden your Apock Vision. You know, we midwife each other’s End Day intimations, enfold them to our own. It’s nothing heavy. We just get into our Sheilaness, know what I mean?”
Komodo nodded. Words were impossible for him right then.
“Good. I didn’t want you to think I was a Satanist or something, like my parents do. They threw me out of the house when I got into Sheila. They don’t know anything. Sheila’s not about Evil, she’s about getting rid of your Evil.” The woman, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, turned to look at Komodo. “You into Sheila?”
“Into her?” Komodo pulled at his suddenly sweaty collar. “I don’t know. I hope to see her, my friend and I. We hoped she might be able to help us.”
“Wow! You really sound into her. Maybe you could come to one of our meetings. We eschat at the Dull Medulla—you know, that club downtown. You’d dig it, I’m sure.”
Gojiro couldn’t believe it. So this was what “fans” were like! No wonder any number of zardpards and ’tile-o-files were more than happy to embrace whatever chicanery Shig spewed out. Apocalypse Anonymous, Armageddon on the pyramid scheme. Sapiens would believe anything!
The monster felt terrible for Komodo; this conversation wasn’t doing him any good. The reptile had never seen his friend so nervous. It had been building throughout the journey. Just the day before, waiting to change planes in who-knew-where, the two friends found themselves staring at a young well-groomed couple. With them was a young girl wearing a blue frilly dress. The parents were holding hands, beaming at their daughter. It wasn’t anything you’d really notice, just natural, in the way of things. The woman and the man kissed lightly, but within that slightest touch was a passion that spoke of much more. The man got up, lifted the daughter in his arms, hugged her. Then he took his briefcase and went off. “Tomorrow night!” he shouted over his shoulder, waving.
Something that happens a million times a day in a million airports, right? But immediately Gojiro felt Komodo’s gyros scramble. Uneasy on his feet, he had to lean against a vending machine, his breath coming hard, in spurts. It killed Gojiro to see his friend suffer like that. So many times before, not completely kidding, he’d downrated the extent to which the Heater worked its surreal elasticity upon Komodo’s person. “Compared to me, what’s your beef?” the monster mocked. “You ain’t a hundred times your supposed size, you ain’t got feet for days. Ain’t like anyone can tell what you are by
just looking
. You open a sushi bar in Shreveport and what’s the worst—they make fun of how you say your
r
’s?”
Now Gojiro regretted those not-so-gentle jokes. This was Komodo’s first time amongst his erstwhile Bunch since those dim-perceived days on Okinawa. And it was obvious, regardless of his outward appearance, that he wasn’t one of them and never would be again. It was one thing to be Bunchless on Radioactive Island; that was a world of freaks. But here—everywhere Komodo turned was a reminder of all he’d lost, what he’d never regain. It wasn’t fair! Why shouldn’t Komodo have been that man with the wife and the daughter, that man who was about to board an airplane, be hurled into the void of space, yet was so assured of his place he could turn and shout, “Tomorrow night!”
“This is it—235047 Neptune View Lane,” the cabdriver said, apparently ignorant of the fact that she was stopping in front of her idol’s home.
Komodo gave her a twenty-dollar bill and, remembering his lines, said, “Keep the change.”
“Thanks!” she said, handing Komodo the address of the Dull Medulla, telling him to come by. “You look like you have some great nightmares.” Then, somewhat quizzically, she asked, “You don’t wear pajamas all the time, do you?”
* * *
“You sure this is the right place?” Gojiro said, poking his head from Komodo’s satchel. “You’d figure big Tinseltown types would have a doorman with a bearskin hat. This joint looks abandoned.”
It was true. Set alone atop a hill overlooking the ocean, the house that corresponded to the address Sheila Brooks gave in her letter appeared to be ripe for the gentry’s rape. All along the barely visible sidewalk were crumpled cigarette packs and pieces of shattered glass. The tall cement wall was cracked in spots by creepers, overgrown with palm fronds. The iron gate hadn’t been painted in years and was nearly rusted away in some places. The only things that looked new were the half-dozen or so shiny locks drilled into the gate.
Locating a small squawk box, Komodo pushed a cracked plastic button. An ear-splitting gnash emitted. “Naaaaaaa.”
“What’s this thing’s problem?” Gojiro sneered. He could feel himself getting into a pretty bad mood.
Komodo rang again, and this time a shriekish message came out. “Voice-activated! Intone now.”
“Excuse me,” Komodo said into the box. “I am Yukio Komodo. I wish to please speak with Ms. Sheila Brooks.”
There was no answer.
Louder this time: “Please, I am Yukio Komodo of Radioactive Island, to see Ms. Brooks.” With that the locks turned in their tumblers and the gate slid open with an Inner Sanctum creak.
“Geez,” Gojiro said as they stepped into the courtyard. For sure, no Beverly Hills landscaper was getting any richer off this spread. It looked like someone had thrown a wild party there in 1962 and forgotten to clean up. Off to one side of the two-acre enclosure was what looked to be a half-finished swimming pool. Now, though, it was no more than a mosquito breeding ditch with a caterpillar tractor stuck in the bottom. A weatherbeaten, blindfolded clothes-store mannequin slouched behind the tractor’s controls. In the center of the yard was a cracked and mottled statue of Saint Sebastian, but instead of arrows, rusted golf clubs were stuck into it. The lawn was solid kudzu.
So this was the Turret House, so called because of the roundish protuberances at its two seaward corners. The domicile loomed large in the Brooks-Zeber legend. When Bobby Zeber first moved in, twenty years before, it was a boardinghouse. Just out of Brooklyn, a hardnosed city kid who wanted to be a movie director, Zeber paid seventy-five dollars a month for the room at the top of the left turret. It was in that room that Sheila Brooks was said to have had the first of the End of the World nightmares Zeber translated into films, creating the vast Brooks-Zeber empire. That’s where the couple stayed—along with the other tenants, two old cat-ladies and a country singer—long after
Tidal Wave
was breaking all box-office records. It was good, living with “real people,” Bobby Zeber was quoted as saying. But soon the old ladies were dead, and the country singer crossed over. Bobby Zeber bought the place and erected the giant fence, leading to much speculation as to the exact variety of beatnik Xanadu happening behind those walls. There were reports of hivelike installations of isolation tanks that doubled as bomb shelters, one unit for every fifty square feet. Looking at the joint now, though, none of that seemed feasible. It was just too beat.
The house’s heavy wooden door was ajar; after getting no response to his knocks, Komodo leaned in. The foyer was ripe with a thick scent of mildew and animal hair. “Ms. Brooks?” Komodo called out timidly, but there was only the sound of the ocean. A quick scan of the hallway, which opened into a large dark room that had most likely been the parlor of the boardinghouse, revealed no sign of life. Three large Spanish Inquisition-style banquet tables—seating for at least fifty—dominated the gloomy room, although it was difficult to imagine that anyone had ever eaten there. On the walls were stray op-art paintings and dozens of acid-rock posters stuck up with peeling Scotch tape. High stacks of yellowing newspapers and piles of greasy motorcycle parts were scattered everywhere.
“Ms. Brooks?” Komodo called out again, a little louder. The wood floor, which was partially covered with somber, thick-piled Oriental rugs, heaved with every step. A dim shaft of light coming from a small stained-glass window was the only illumination. “I thought this was California, not Transylvania,” Gojiro said, peeking from Komodo’s bag. Right then, two cats sprang from a breakfront and ran yowling in opposite directions.
“That tears it,” Gojiro shouted, lurching toward the door, nearly pulling the case from Komodo’s hand. “Let’s book!”
“Please! You know what we must do,” Komodo whispered, trying to be the brave one.
That was when they heard a groan from the next room. “I need an eight-letter word for ‘ersatz curd enzyme,’ ” came a pinched, wheezing voice.
Komodo went toward the voice. He turned a corner and was immediately blinded by a blast of light. When his irises adjusted he saw a tall, bony woman. She was standing in front of a large picture window, holding a folded newspaper. The glare streaming in the window blurred her outer edges.
“I’m close. It’ll fall into place—with just this one word.”
“Ms. Brooks?” Komodo said tentatively.
“Got it! Velveeta! They ask that one a lot,” the figure said. A moment passed. Then the woman slowly began to turn around to face Komodo and Gojiro. It seemed to take an eternity. Neither of the two friends knew what to expect. The few recent photos of Sheila Brooks they’d seen in magazines or on the Dish had been taken at extreme long range, between the pickets of fences or across crowded streets, and with that large floppy hat she always wore, not much could be made out. But it was her all right. The shock of recognition nearly blew Gojiro out the back side of Komodo’s bag. Sheila Brooks: that same face in the window of the seaplane in the Dream of the Black Spot, the little girl with the fear on her face.
Gojiro saw what twenty-five years of fear does to a face. It was all red, white, and black. The red was a haphazard streak of ruby lipstick applied, roughly, to the outline of her wide mouth. The white was her hair and skin—her cheeks seemingly colorless and the texture of hospital tile, a sheen of frostlike desolation down to the jutting point of her chin. And the black. The black was those glasses, wraparounds and more: the glacial slick of the lenses surrounded by suctioning rubber sidepanels extending from the upper reaches of her invisible eyebrows well down to the bridge of her prominent nose.
Sheila Brooks stood there without speaking. She wore a fuzzy pink bathrobe held closed by a patent-leather belt. With her eyes tucked up behind those gruesome glasses, it was impossible to tell what she was looking at.