John Dies at the End (23 page)

Oh, shit! Badger! Baaaadgeeeerrr!

Camel Holocaust! Camel Holocaust!”

We hit the first solo, John ripped into it. Several of the wig monsters were now chewing on John’s guitar wire.

The sound died into faint, pathetic guitar pluckings.

The monsters lurched toward us en masse. John, thinking quickly, ran over and snatched the microphone from my hands. He began making guitar sounds with his mouth.

“WAAAAHHHH wah-wah-wah-wah-wah, weet woo weet weet woo—”

I didn’t think that would work. I spun on Dr. Marconi, saw him stepping up over the human-parts wall toward the fountain itself. I followed him, climbed up, stepped on a face, a bundle of six hands, an ass.

The pool was black now. Not black like oil, but black like a cave, so that you couldn’t see any reflection or ripples in the surface, not even when Dr. Marconi waded out into it. A black rain fell off the angel’s wings above us.

John mounted the pile behind us, screamed,
“WAH, DO-DO-DO-DOOOO-DO, DEE DOO DOO—”

Marconi, knee-deep in black oil, reached out and touched the icy surface of the statue. He said, “We ask you, Father, with your Son . . .”

John had reached the end of his solo, was now making up a third verse to the song.

“My hat smells like

lubricant, I don’t wanna touch it

Wait, this isn’t mine! And it’s not a hat!

Camel Holo—”

John’s mic cable was cut. The sound died.

“—on the waters of this font. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Marconi stepped back.

Nothing.

John turned to the waves of approaching monsters and said, “NOW LICK THE STATUE!”

The blackness in the pool suddenly rose, covering the feet of the statue, spilling over the edges of the fountain. I leaned over and pulled at Marconi’s jacket, pulling him back, not sure what was happening but certain we didn’t want to be standing in the middle of it when it did. He waded over to the edge of the pool. He raised one leg out of the blackness and we saw, with horror, that he had no leg. Everything that had been submerged was gone, his pants ending in a neat line with only empty space beneath—

—and then it was back, whole again. Like a trick of the light. The doctor suddenly sprang out of the pool with renewed motivation. I glanced nervously at my white patent leather shoes disappearing under the rising black tide.

John and Jennifer helped us clamber up the wall of human limbs, then we ran our asses off across the ballroom floor. There was a whistling sound, like wind howling through tree branches. I saw a couple of chairs scooting along the floor toward the fountain, suddenly felt a pull like I was running from an electromagnet with a gut full of iron pellets.

One of the wig monsters skittered toward us, but was suddenly lifted out of the air and sucked back to what I was fairly certain was a portal to Hell. The howling sound was loud now, deafening, the sound of a jetliner. Folding chairs were flying through the air as if propelled by dozens of invisible Bobby Knights. The five of us pushed our way forward, somebody screaming around me but the sound lost in the rushing noise. John grabbed my shirt and pointed me toward the small space behind the stage, room to crouch back there. Jennifer screamed something I couldn’t hear, something that sounded like “Todd!”

Sparks blew out from the ceiling lights, and we were cast into darkness.

A few small banks of emergency lights clicked on, faintly glinting off the wings of the ice angel in the center of the room. We stumbled back behind the stage, huddled down like tornado victims. We waited.

Silence. I risked a peek back at the dark well. From the blackness, there was movement. Dark shapes rose up out of the portal. They were like freestanding shadows, vaguely human, long and lean figures, eight or ten feet tall each. Their only features were a pair of tiny, glowing eyes like two lit cigarettes.

One by one they slipped out and into the dark room, a crowd of them, shoulder to shoulder, flowing out of the portal. They shambled out like a spreading pool of spilt oil, perfectly silent, filling the room, a constellation of little red flickering eyes.

They were around us now, closing in just feet away, making their advance in perfect stillness.

And then, the silence was broken. There was a low, screeching sound, like steam escaping. Plumes of smoke or steam rose from the base of the ice angel, a bright, white light down there like it was a rocket about to take off.

The sound grew and grew and grew, became animal, a scream of pain.

In the dim light of the emergency lamps, the holy water angel sank, descending into the black hole.

There was a thunderclap, so loud I thought it would split me in half. I clenched my eyes shut, covered my head with my hands, begged God to forgive me for accidentally bringing an end to all of creation.

There was a jolt, then a bodiless, weightless feeling like drifting out of a dream.

A hand touched my shoulder. I flinched as if gouged with a branding iron. Things were quiet again. How much time had passed? I felt like a man waking after a nap to complete darkness, confused about the time of day.

I opened my eyes and it was Jennifer, with John and Marconi standing behind her. Lights were on. She helped me up and I turned to the center of the floor.

Nothing there but empty, red carpet. No fountain, no bodies, no black hole. The room was completely vacant except for us and a few random toppled chairs still scattered about. I sat down on the floor, suddenly exhausted. John and I looked hard at the spot where the fountain had been. We each extended a hand toward it, and gave it the finger.

The doors burst open. Suits and cop uniforms poured in.

Molly the dog came bounding in with them, a bundle of chewed-up papers in her mouth. She dropped the stuff in front of me, barking her head off. I looked down at two tickets to the Marconi show, which she had presumably gotten out of the young couple’s luggage. I nudged the tickets aside, saw a CD labeled:
Amazing Grace: The Brooklyn Choir Sings the Gospel
.

A bearded man wandered over, looking dazed, and I recognized him as the husband of the woman we tried to save before she dismembered herself and everything went to Hell.

I said, “I’m sorry. About your wife. What was her name? Becky.”

He looked at me, confused, said, “No, I’m not married. What happened in here?”

I couldn’t answer. I lay back on the floor, my body shutting down even with shoes shuffling all around me. I hadn’t slept in forty hours, every muscle screamed in pain. I had flown off the cliff of a gargantuan adrenaline rush and was crashing fast.

Somebody said my name, asked if I was okay. I didn’t answer, the sound of the commotion dying around me as the heavy monkey of sleep rested its warm, furry ass on my eyelids.

DARKNESS AND WARMTH
,
and then the nasal
EEEK EEEK EEEK
of an alarm clock. I had a taste in my mouth, smoky, like I had licked an ashtray. I felt something itchy and thick around my mouth. I shot my eyes open. Where the hell was I?

I sat up in bed. Not my bedroom. I looked over at a watch on a nightstand. Not my watch. A nicer one.

I looked around the room, the alarm still screeching its complaints from the nightstand. I found a mirror. There was something dark on my face, and I slapped my hand up to it. Hair. I climbed out of bed and walked toward the mirror. I had a thick, full goatee.

What the hell?

I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Whose room was this? A voice from behind me said, “Are you going to get that?”

I fumbled around and found a button on the alarm. Jennifer Lopez was in the bed. And I mean the actress.

Oh, wait. No, she rolled over and it was just the local Jennifer Lopez. She got out of bed, wearing a tank top and underwear, and she sleepily walked off to what I guess was a bathroom. She had a faint, white scar at the top of her thigh. She farted softly as she closed the door.

I stood, found a cell phone among the stuff on a nearby chest of drawers, dialed John’s number.

Operator recording. “This number has been disconnected . . .”

I was in a slow-burn panic now. I glanced out a window, saw a tree in the front yard with leaves turning fall colors. I went back to the phone, scrolled through the quick-dial numbers. I found an entry for John—a different number than I knew—and dialed it.

I heard water running in the bathroom. I held my breath as the phone rang four, five, six times. Seven.

“Hello?” John, sounding sleepy.

“John? It’s me.”

“Yeah. What’s goin’ on?”

“Oh. Nothin’.”

After a moment, he said, “You don’t remember the last six months, do you?”

“You, too?”

“No, I’m okay. This will be the fourth time it’s happened to you, though. You lose everything since that night. Is Vegas the last thing you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“I think it’s a side effect of the sauce. Come to my—well, you don’t know where my apartment is now, do you? Meet me at Dairy Queen.”

Jennifer came out and, much to my surprise, we kissed for several minutes.
Ashtray
.

I went out, took in the neat little white bungalow-style house and was a little relieved to find my familiar Hyundai in the drive.

I drove and found John sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, a brown DQ sack in his hand. I observed that he, too, had grown a thick goatee.

I said, “This sucks.”

“You say that every time.”

“Do I have to, like, work today? Where do I work?”

“Wally’s. You get Sundays off. This is Sunday, by the way. Come on.”

John walked me to a very nice motorcycle. He jumped on, slapped the seat behind him. I looked at it for a moment and then walked to my car, said, “I’ll follow you.”

As we walked down the hall to John’s new apartment he said, “It was a big deal, but not, you know, the real big deal. The story that came out was that five hundred people freaked out at a Marconi show, rushed the doors, one kid got killed in the stampede. That would be, you know, Jim.”

We stepped through the doors and I said, “One guy? What about the dozens of people who—”

I stopped, taken aback by John’s place. He had a brown leather couch, a matching armchair. He had a big-screen plasma TV sitting in the middle of the room; hooked to it were four video game systems, with game boxes littering the floor. A fairly nice DVD player, a one-hundred-disk CD changer in an entertainment center.

“John, are we crack dealers now?”

John opened a drawer on a writing desk and pulled out a big manila envelope. He extracted a bundle of papers, newspaper clippings, a couple of folded-up tabloids, a glossy magazine called
Strange Days
with a picture of a UFO on the front.

He said, “No. Nothing like that. Out in Vegas, we met a guy. He was a pimp. We made quite a bit of money as male whores. They used to call you Rocket Rimjob. You won the gold at the Greater Nevada Sodomy Olympics back in July, landed a bunch of endorsement deals. You own that house you and Jennifer live in. Paid cash, I think.”

He looked dead serious when he said this. I said, “Are you messing with me?”

“No. You really own that house. I made up the whoring thing, though. I like to add a little bit to it each time. Seriously, what happened is Molly won a bunch of money at the casinos.”

“John—”

He pulled out a newspaper, a color “Lifestyles” section from the
Las Vegas Sun
, headline blaring “Dog Wins Quarter Million Playing Slots!” There was a picture of John with Molly in his arms, struggling to get away from him. He had his right hand out, making the shape of a finger gun and pointing at Molly, his mouth wide open in a drunken “that’s my dog!” expression. Jen and I were visible in the deep background, trying to hide our faces.

“The thing with the Marconi show, the panic, there was a big investigation and everything,” he said. “Cops thought he had slipped acid to everybody, freaked ’em out with a light show or something. Everybody called him a fraud; it was kind of crappy the way they treated him. But he came out okay. The death hasn’t come out as anything but an accident and all of a sudden his book is a bestseller, people desperate to get to his shows. You’ve, uh, tried to contact him a couple of times, but he won’t take the calls.”

It was coming back to me as he told it. Everything was hazy, drunk memories. He handed me the UFO magazine, pointed to a little header in the bottom left:

Legend of Fred Chu:

Is this dead youth haunting his Midwestern hometown?