Prelude to a Scream (29 page)

He took these steps two at a time, crossed the loading dock, and tried the door.

It opened.

There was no light behind it. He went in anyway.

Closing the door behind him he pulled the pencil flashlight from his hip pocket.

The place looked very much like what Stanley would expect to find beyond any loading dock, like the warehouses of any number of places at which he daily picked up produce.

It didn't smell like produce, though.

This loading dock had another exceptional detail.

There was a carpet on the floor.

It was a nice carpet, too. Oriental job. Fringe.

Against the far wall stood a gurney, much like those Stanley had seen during his recent stay in the hospital. This one had a couple of seat belts dangling from it. Beyond the gurney was a glass wall that looked on to a sort of control room. It would be from in there that the flame and the conveyor and other aspects of cremation would be controlled.

Stanley clicked off the flash and stood in the dark. As he grew accustomed to the darkness he could hear the distant hum of machinery. A compressor perhaps. Refrigeration.

Then he discerned a line of light. He watched it for a long time, but it didn't move. It didn't get bigger, and it didn't get smaller. It was just a horizontal line of light, floating in the darkness in front of him.

Not in front of him, exactly. More like below him.

He clicked the penlight on again. To his right the beam found a concrete ramp behind a pipe railing, leading down. At the bottom of the ramp was a wide double door.

He clicked the penlight off. The sliver of light reappeared, right where the threshold of the double doors would be.

He watched the line of light as his dilating eyes allowed it to reappear, and listened. Other than the distant hum of machinery, the place was as quiet as a globe full of falling snow.

He thumbed on the penlight and followed its thin beam down the ramp. When he reached the doors he doused the penlight and listened. Nothing.

He pocketed the light and clicked off the safety on the pistol.

With his other hand he pushed gently at the door.

It moved. A vertical slit of light appeared before him, and the sounds of compressor motors became louder. There was a smell, too. A smell he recognized but couldn't place. He applied his eye and the gun barrel to the slit. Nothing stirred beyond the door. It looked like a corridor, pale green and brightly lit. The door swung easily, about fourteen inches away from him. He was about to step through it when the door crashed violently backwards, throwing him down on the concrete ramp.

He lost the gun as he fell, and for some reason it didn't go off in his face. He expected to be attacked, but nothing touched him. Something kicked the doors from the other side. The doors shivered but didn't open.

“Oh! That was a nasty trick to pull on me. But I've got you now!”

Still, nothing touched Stanley. No light came on over the ramp. The doors did not open.

There were sounds of a struggle, followed by the deep laughter of a woman, and assorted kicks and thumps against the door.

The woman screamed, and fabric was torn.

“Hah!” said a man, and something was torn further. “Jezebel!”

“Monster!” she screamed. “Beast!”

As Stanley rolled away from the door he also rolled over the automatic.

“Oh, God!” shouted the woman, amid the rending of cloth.

“Mine!” screamed the man. “All mine!”

Stanley retrieved the pistol, sat up, and pointed it at the closed doors. Loud thumps and grunts sounded beyond it.

“Jesus!” the woman shouted.

“Christ!” The man responded.

The man puffed and rhythmically grunted, as if he were driving a stake with a twelve-pound mallet.

“Mother of God!” the woman screamed.

“Hippocrates!” he screamed.

As Stanley crouched toward the doors, he could smell natural gas and some kind of solvent, maybe formaldehyde or ether — strange industrial odors.

Preceded by eight inches of pistol he pushed open the door.

Sweeping the gun to his right he saw an empty corridor, with closed double doors at the far end, perhaps thirty feet away.

To his left a pair of slim rails, let into the concrete floor like railroad or trolley tracks of a narrow gauge, paralleled beneath and past him and disappeared under steel double doors at the other end of the hall a mere ten feet away. These were secured by an iron bar.

Dead center between the two rails, pinned against the bar, Green Eyes struggled. She wore a nurse's uniform, or what was left of one. Her dark hair was in disarray, spilling over one shoulder, with a little white nurse's cap clinging to it by dint of a single bobby pin.

The green eyes were open and looking right at Stanley. But her mouth was open, too, and she was rhythmically moaning. The sound upset Stanley deeply. Blocking most of his view of her was the bulk of a large man, draped in a white coat not unlike the uniform of a lab technician. But this man's tweed pants were pooled around his ankles, which were encased in a pair of argyle socks. From the paired V's of their garters the stems of two hirsute, pale legs disappeared up into the drape of the white coat. With all of his weight, with all of his energy, this monstrosity was slamming his body into that of Green Eyes. She was pinned between him and the double doors of the crematorium, the iron bar across the small of her back. Yet, far from resisting or even letting him do it, she was helping. She was reciprocating.

When Green Eyes saw the gun her eyes widened, and she faintly smiled. Then she raised her right leg, the one toward Stanley, who stood not ten feet away, and lodged her foot firmly in the small of Lab coat's back. The coat caught on her heel so that, had he had any doubts before, Stanley could plainly see that everybody was mostly naked beneath.

Naked except, on Green Eyes' part, a white garter belt and two torn white nylon stockings.

Torrid, thought some part of Stanley's mind. They are filming pornography in here. But the sexual aspect of this scene commanded only part of his attention.

Equally riveting was the syringe taped to the inside of Lab Coat's naked forearm.

“Ach!” screamed Lab Coat, raising his face toward the ceiling. “It is close!”

“Is it close?” coaxed Green Eyes, lapsing into apparent passivity despite the fervent jactitations of the man who had her pinioned against the door, while her eyes, though glazed, never left Stanley's.

“Jah!” screamed the other. “Jah jah! It is close! Ever so close! Minutely, incrementally, Angstrom close!”

“Say when, darling,” said Green Eyes, and she moved one hand to the syringe.

So fascinated had he been by the two circles of white adhesive tape, holding the stem and the barrel of the syringe firmly to the inside of the doctor's forearm, for the first time Stanley noticed a length of coffee-colored rubber tubing knotted around the arm, just below the biceps, and just above where the point of the needle had entered the man's skin.

“When! When!” screamed the man, lunging against the woman with such force that the firebricked doors behind them boomed with the impact. “Now is when!”

Despite the ride she was getting Green Eyes managed, with considerable adroitness, and not taking her eyes off Stanley for so much as a second, to loose the knot in the surgical tubing, and, even from ten feet away, Stanley saw a bright trace of scarlet jet into the glass of the syringe with the abrupt suddenness of a moray eel starting after its prey.

“When,” she gasped, and “When,” the man whimpered, and Stanley could see that if, a moment ago, he had blown the spine out of this man theoretically assaulting Green Eyes, as he'd originally considered, she might have torn him, Stanley, limb from limb. For this was a consensual act he was witnessing. It would have been like a cop interrupting a fist fight between man and wife, only to have them both turn on him.

The man was grunting, huffing, laboring toward some invisible peak of ecstasy, one arm hooked under his partner's shoulder, the other with its syringe suspended mid air, as if from an invisible subway strap, the fist opening and closing. He could barely master his voice sufficient to croak, “Now! Now my bitch, my angel, my nurse, my whore! Now Now Now…!”

And Green Eyes, clutching the forearm with both hands now, sent the plunger home, not with an abrupt stab but with a deliberate, even pressure of her thumb, a disconcerting vector, harrowing to witness, for all its thoughtfulness.

“My God!” the man screamed. “My God!” And his head rolled back between his shoulders, and his eyeballs into his head.

Green Eyes released the syringe and clasped the man's hips to hers, taking her eyes off Stanley for the first time, closing them in fact, and closing with her shuddering partner, convulsing with him, whispering nonsense to him, stroking, encouraging, joining him in the anguish of these frantic devotionals, to which they, she and he, had obviously gone to such great lengths to achieve.

Stanley let the door swing to behind him. His gun hung unaimed at his side.

It seemed banal to think that the steel doors behind the couple led into the furnace. So the rails must lead from the furnace to the chamber wherein the bodies were prepared for cremation. In a chamber where bodies could be prepared for cremation, they could be prepared for other things.…

“Oh,” said the man, sobbing now in the woman's arms, she stroking his hair, their clothing as if the wreckage of the cocoon from which they'd just emerged. “Jesus, Joseph and Mary…”

Before Stanley could consciously detect the absence of the door's mass and the draft that had replaced it, tiny cool pricks arrived, nearly simultaneously, at the hollows beneath each of his earlobes.

A voice behind him, as falsetto as a child's, said, “If you move, you'll die.”

Chapter Twenty Two

T
HOSE GREEN EYES HAD FOOLED HIM AGAIN
.

Even as the spent customer in the white coat sagged in her arms, Green Eyes watched Stanley. Like a cat in a window watching a bird's nest, she studied him. She'd used her eyes to hold Stanley while some guy with a voice like broken train wheel slipped up behind him.

She'd fooled Stanley again.

Green Eyes let her ankle fall away from the small of her partner's back. As her dress fell with it, Stanley caught a glimpse of pale thigh and despite the circumstances felt himself momentarily blanked by loathing and desire.

He moved his head.

“Tsk,” clucked the man behind him. “There's a hollow stainless steel no. 14 point aimed at each of your eardrums. A penetration will destroy your hearing. But you'll never hear the sound of silence.
Hello darkness hello pain
… Eh? Eh?”

Oh, perfect, thought Stanley. I'm going to be Simon and Garfunkeled to death.

“But,” the helium voice continued, “there's enough sufenta in these two syringes to enable you to walk through the fires of Hell without feeling a thing, if you get my meaning.”

Green Eyes smoothed the front of her skirt.

“I've never done it before,” the high voice assured him. “But if you're up for fuel-injected audio, I'm willing to watch — get it? Get it?”

The guy was hysterical. “Take it easy,” said Stanley. “I get it.”

“So. Let's dosey doe, down to the floor, and let that heater go.”

Stanley bent his knees slowly.

The needles followed him down.

“This is like dowsing,” said the helium voice. “Dowsing for disarmament.”

Stanley laid the pistol on the floor in front of him.
The safety is still off
, a little voice said inside him.

Oh
, Stanley responded.
All I have to do is kick backwards, catching this helium freak in the nuts and rendering his voice a full octave higher, pitch myself forward as he convulsively stabs himself in each of his wrists with the two needles intended for my eardrums, taking up the pistol as I roll, and come up one gun blazing.

He opened his hand over the pistol, as if releasing a set trap.

Still and all, he thought, with a longing look, the safety is off.

“Good boy. Now, up. Up.”

Stanley, the needles, Helium Voice—they all stood up.

The man in Green Eyes' arms had begun to collect himself.

Savagely, he tore away the circles of tape holding the syringe. Two pale bracelets of depilation encircled the forearm, indicating repeated applications of adhesive tape.

Green Eyes was working on her appearance. She raised the dress in order to straighten the garter of first one stocking, then the other. Then she dropped the hem of the skirt and demurely smoothed it over her lap. She glanced over one shoulder, then the other, inspecting the white line of the seam of each stocking, tracing the apogee of each calf before it tapered into the upper of a well-tailored nurse's shoe.

The guy in the white coat, his pants around his ankles, penis dripping, blinked as he plucked the needle from the vein inside his elbow. There was dried blood on the front of the smock.

“What was in that?” Stanley asked suddenly.

Helium Voice chuckled. “Doctor's little cocktail…”

The man in the white coat looked up, as if noticing Stanley for the first time. His upper lip twitched. The eyes were bright as marbles.

When the guy suddenly smiled, Stanley clearly saw that he was absolutely, disconcertingly, hopelessly sane. As sane as a television newscaster, as sane as a vacuum cleaner salesman, as sane as any politician. As sane as the man with the sledgehammer, who, all day long, every day, coldcocks horses for dog food.

The smile was a death's head. Nourishment had clearly become a problem. The teeth were dark, their gums receding. The skin was sallow, like old paraffin. The man was gaunt, and he looked older than his years, perhaps sixty-five. The hair was thinning on top, receding in front, spotty in back. Reddish blotches had appeared on the forehead and about the throat. A modest pimple directly over the carotid artery had become infected. There was an abscess over the inside of his right elbow, too.

This climax-injection thing has been going on a lot, lately, thought Stanley.

The man held his arm aloft, massaged the inside of the elbow, and grinned a rictus, if comradely, salute. “Speedball,” he said proudly, through clenched teeth. “Finest veterinary quality.”

And then the man laughed.

His laughter was a hideous combustion, mechanical and vapid, as of a John Deere tractor chained to an unyielding stump, or the
wap wap wap
of a biplane climbing into a stall.

It was the laughter of a man who'd always known that everything in the world had been put there either for his annoyance or for his amusement, and for no other reason. Nothing was funny, and everything was funny, it was all up to him. It was the laughter of a man whose entire being had been subsumed by turpitude, who could not distinguish between pain or joy in others, who lived only for the depravity that he might deploy upon them. His philosophy would preach a freedom of indulgence as the true test of liberty, but he would believe in it only insofar as it enabled him to debase. Rare, indeed, would be the partner who might share his perverse delights, compete for them while maintaining the delusion that their shared equity would always rejuvenate amusement.

Green Eyes seemed to have taken on the job with all four paws.

Indubitably damaged, his super-ego—if the term even applies—keelhauled after walking the plank, the doctor's intelligence would not be in question; it would be as inspired as it was debauched.

All this Stanley grasped in a moment, even as the doctor held the syringe aloft for him to admire.

“Injected just milliseconds before orgasm,” said the physician dryly, “It is, as they say, way, way cool.” He made a broad sweeping gesture with the side of his hand. “It is like passing the medical boards all over again.” The hand came back to lay its fingers at his temple. “And now, of course,” he bulged his eyes, “I am
wide awake!
”

That laughter again. Automatic, impersonal, deadly laughter.

The safety is off, thought Stanley, on this guy, too.

He allowed his eyes to fall, rather fondly, onto his gun, on the floor perhaps two yards away.

The doctor's eyes followed his. “U.S. Army,” the doctor said. “Caliber .45. Big slug with a lot of momentum, designed to stop armed Filipinos on betelnut.”

“Well,” said Stanley, “I only wanted to blast doped-up avarice on the hoof.”

The man with the needles tittered behind him. It sounded like air escaping from a pinched balloon neck.

“All I can hear right now,” said the doctor mildly, touching two fingers to each temple and narrowing his eyes, “is little tiny yuppies kayaking my white corpuscles.”

Oh, man, thought Stanley. And I thought I could speak English.

The doctor suddenly stooped and stood up again, dragging his trousers up to his waist and cinching them.

Stanley heard a door open behind him, and the sounds of rubber wheels on linoleum.

“Comin' through,” said a familiar voice from the far end of the corridor. “Outta the way.”

“Turn around,” said Helium Voice. “And don't make no funny locomotions.”

Stanley turned. Vince and the white guy whose name he'd never learned advanced down the hall, rolling a gurney between them.

On the gurney was a purple sleeping bag.

“Step aside,” said the black man, passing Stanley.

On the sleeping bag lay one of those plastic signs most often seen hanging from motel doorknobs.

OCCUPADO

N
O
L
O
P
ERTURBARA

“Hello, Vince,” Stanley said.

The black man stopped so abruptly that the white man drove the gurney straight into his thigh.

“Hold it!” said Vince. “I said hold it!” he repeated, and gave the gurney a kick.

The sleeping bag groaned.

“Hey,” said Helium Voice. “That guy's in Recovery.”

With hardly a glance at the needles gleaming under Stanley's ears, Vince demanded, “How'd you know my name?”

“Why, Vince,” chided Stanley. “I saw you on Upper Market just last night. Little cul-de-sac called Parajito Terrace? You were humping carpet with your partner, here.” He indicated the white man. “I didn't catch his name? But, say,” he swiveled his eyes back to Vince and smiled. “Didn't you do some time for rustling Jaguars a while back?”

Vince's mouth twisted. “Who the fuck is this guy?”

“His name is Stanley.”

Everybody but Vince turned to look at Green Eyes.

“Friend of yours?” said Vince, his hideous grimace now inches from Stanley's face.

“Vince,” said Green Eyes indulgently. “Try to think.”

“I'm thinkin'.”

“Cast your mind,” she suggested patiently, “back.”

“I'm casting.”

“A month ago. Maybe two.”

“That's asking a lot.”

“In your case,” quipped the doctor, “maybe you should cast your mind forward.”

“Very funny.”

“It was the night we used that place in the Excelsior. I've forgotten the address.”

Vince's expression didn't change. “Goettingen,” he said. “The house was on Goettingen, and the car was a Pontiac wagon.”

“Bingo,” said Green Eyes. “Vince, you're amazing.”

“Navy blue,” Vince concluded.

The white guy shook his head. “Can't add two and two, but he can remember the stupid stuff.”

“Hey,” said Stanley. “I got that kind of memory, too. The car you stole this week, for example, was a BMW.”

“Shut up,” said Vince.

“It was white.”

“Stanley,” said Green Eyes coolly, “was the one who gave us that bad kidney.”

Everybody looked at Stanley.

The doctor stopped twirling the spent syringe between two fingers. “The kidney that came up amyloidosic? This is the guy?”

“This is the guy.”

The doctor floated down the hall as if he were on wheels, stopped in front of Stanley, and contemplated him as if he were a smear on a slide. “Remove the needles.”

The icy epifoci of Stanley's being went away.

The doctor slapped Stanley's face with an open palm. Not a tap.

“Swine,” the man said, not raising his voice. “Do you know how much work you cost me?”

He backhanded Stanley this time, considerably harder.

“An entire night — wasted!” He was yelling, now. “Do you have any idea what that cost?”

Stanley lifted his knee into the man's spent testicles.

The doctor screamed and fell into a fetal position on the floor, both hands gripping his crotch. Vince watched him writhe there for a few seconds, not without pleasure, then planted a meaty fist directly in Stanley's right eye.

Vince didn't throw the fist far—a foot, maybe. But when it connected with Stanley's eye it made a sound like somebody trying to bat a fungo with a toad.

As he went down, Stanley lunged for the .45. But Vince planted a foot squarely between Stanley's shoulder blades and pinned him to the floor.

Helium Voice, laughing, his two syringes gathered into one hand, gingerly picked up the pistol by its barrel.

The doctor sat up, rather breathlessly, and held out his hand. “Give me that.”

The room went still. Helium Voice handed over the pistol, butt first. The doctor took it, inspected it, aimed it at Stanley's head. Then he turned and, despite a shriek from Helium Voice, discharged the weapon in the direction of Green Eyes, who was leaning, rather languidly, against the two steel doors at the end of the corridor.

The detonation filled the hallway with smoke and noise. The spent shell spun on the floor, right in front of Stanley's nose, like a game token.

“
Sheis
,” the doctor said, in the awed voice of a child, “this thing kicks.” He touched the inside elbow of his gun arm. “Damn near popped the scab off my abscess.”

Helium Voice squeaked like a stepped-on rubber toy. “Sibyl, are you… Are you…?”

Stanley rolled his good eye up from the floor. Sibyl, we are introduced at last.

Everybody was looking at her. Ten inches above her little nurse's cap, now neatly replaced onto her marvelously tousled hair, a puckered hole smoked in one of the metal doors. The green eyes stared them all back, insouciant.