Smoke and Mirrors (23 page)

And the figure in the silks . . .

I had smelled her perfume when I wore man-shape. Now I could smell something else, less heady, beneath it. A smell of decay, of putrefying meat and rotten flesh.

The silks fluttered. She was moving toward me. She held the knife.

“Madame Ezekiel?” My voice was roughening and coarsening. Soon I would lose it all. I didn’t understand what was happening, but the moon was rising higher and higher, losing its amber color and filling my mind with its pale light.

“Madame Ezekiel?”

“You deserve to die,” she said, her voice cold and low. “If only for what you did to my cards. They were old.”

“I don’t die,” I told her. “ ‘Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night.’ Remember?”

“It’s bullshit,” she said. “You know what the oldest way to end the curse of the werewolf is?”

“No.”

The bonfire burned brighter now; burned with the green of the world beneath the sea, the green of algae and of slowly drifting weed; burned with the color of emeralds.

“You simply wait till they’re in human shape, a whole month away from another change; then you take the sacrificial knife and you kill them. That’s all.”

I turned to run, but the barman was behind me, pulling my arms, twisting my wrists up into the small of my back. The knife glinted pale silver in the moonlight. Madame Ezekiel smiled.

She sliced across my throat.

Blood began to gush and then to flow. And then it slowed and stopped . . .

—
The pounding in the front of my head, the pressure in the back. All a roiling change a how-wow-row-now change a red wall coming toward me from the night

—
I tasted stars dissolved in brine, fizzy and distant and salt

—
my fingers prickled with pins and my skin was lashed with tongues of flame my eyes were topaz I could taste the night

My breath steamed and billowed in the icy air.

I growled involuntarily, low in my throat. My forepaws were touching the snow.

I pulled back, tensed, and sprang at her.

There was a sense of corruption that hung in the air, like a mist, surrounding me. High in my leap, I seemed to pause, and something burst like a soap bubble . . .

I was deep, deep in the darkness under the sea, standing on all fours on a slimy rock floor at the entrance of some kind of citadel built of enormous rough-hewn stones. The stones gave off a pale glow-in-the-dark light; a ghostly luminescence, like the hands of a watch.

A cloud of black blood trickled from my neck.

She was standing in the doorway in front of me. She was now six, maybe seven feet high. There was flesh on her skeletal bones, pitted and gnawed, but the silks were weeds, drifting in the cold water, down there in the dreamless deeps. They hid her face like a slow green veil.

There were limpets growing on the upper surfaces of her arms and on the flesh that hung from her ribcage.

I felt like I was being crushed. I couldn’t think anymore.

She moved toward me. The weed that surrounded her head shifted. She had a face like the stuff you don’t want to eat in a sushi counter, all suckers and spines and drifting anemone fronds; and somewhere in all that I knew she was smiling.

I pushed with my hind legs. We met there, in the deep, and we struggled. It was so cold, so dark. I closed my jaws on her face and felt something rend and tear.

It was almost a kiss, down there in the abysmal deep . . .

* * *

I landed softly on the snow, a silk scarf locked between my jaws. The other scarves were fluttering to the ground. Madame Ezekiel was nowhere to be seen.

The silver knife lay on the ground in the snow. I waited on all fours in the moonlight, soaking wet. I shook myself, spraying the brine about. I heard it hiss and spit when it hit the fire.

I was dizzy and weak. I pulled the air deep into my lungs.

Down, far below, in the bay, I could see the frog people hanging on the surface of the sea like dead things; for a handful of seconds, they drifted back and forth on the tide, then they twisted and leapt, and each by each they
plop-plopped
down into the bay and vanished beneath the sea.

There was a scream. It was the fox-haired bartender, the pop-eyed aluminum siding salesman, and he was staring at the night sky, at the clouds that were drifting in, covering the stars, and he was screaming. There was rage and there was frustration in that cry, and it scared me.

He picked up the knife from the ground, wiped the snow from the handle with his fingers, wiped the blood from the blade with his coat. Then he looked across at me. He was crying. “You bastard,” he said. “What did you do to her?”

I would have told him I didn’t do anything to her, that she was still on guard far beneath the ocean, but I couldn’t talk any more, only growl and whine and howl.

He was crying. He stank of insanity and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.

Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.

In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliff side as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark gray. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.

A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.

“What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.” I bristled.

“No, it’s over—for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”

I looked up at the fat man and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck sleepily.

“Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane in any material sense.”

The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.

“Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the self-same celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath . . . ”

He continued talking in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning; I had no further interest in the sea or the cliff-top or the fat man.

There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter’s night’s air.

And I was, above all things, hungry.

I was naked when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.

The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer’s belly had been torn out.

My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was scabbed and scarred, and it stung; by the next full moon, it would be whole once more.

The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea some distance away.

I was cold and naked and bloody and alone.
Ah well,
I thought,
it happens to all of us in the beginning. I just get it once a month.

I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted barn or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.

A hawk flew low over the snow toward me with something dangling from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small gray squid in the snow at my feet and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.

I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn’t say and I didn’t really care any more; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.

B AY W OLF

Listen, Talbot. Somebody’s killing my people,

said Roth, growling down the phone like the sea in a shell.

Find out who and why and stop them.

Stop them how?
I asked.

Whatever it takes,
he said.
But I don’t want them walking away

after you stopped them, if you get me.

And I got him. And I was hired.

Now you listen: this was back in the twenty-twenties

in L.A., down on Venice Beach.

Gar Roth owned the business in that part of world,

dealt in stims and pumps and steroids,

recreationals, built up quite a following.

All the buff kids, boys in thongs popping pumpers,

girls popping curves and fearmoans and whoremoans,

all of them loved Roth. He had the shit.

The force took his payoffs to look the other way;

he owned the beach world, from Laguna Beach north to Malibu,

built a beach hall where the buff and the curvy

hung and sucked and flaunted.

Oh, but that city worshipped the flesh; and theirs was the flesh.

They were partying. Everyone was partying,

dusted, shot up, cranked out,

the music was so loud you could hear it with your bones,

and that was when something took them, quietly,

whatever it was. It cracked their heads. It tore them into offal.

No one heard the screams over the boom of the oldies and the surf.

That was the year of the death metal revival.

It took maybe a dozen of them away, dragged them into the sea,

death in the early morning.

Roth said he thought it was a rival drug cartel,

posted more guards, had choppers circling, floaters watching

for when it came back. As it did, again, again.

But the cameras and the vids showed nothing at all.

They had no idea what it was, but still,

it ripped them limb from limb and head from neck,

tore saline bags out from ballooning breasts,

left steroid-shrunken testes on the beach

like tiny world-shaped creatures in the sand.

Roth had been hurt: The beach was not the same,

and that was when he called me on the phone.

I stepped over several sleeping cuties of all sexes,

tapped Roth on the shoulder. Before

I could blink, a dozen big guns

were pointing at my chest and head,

Well, I’m not your monster, anyway.

Not yet.

I gave him my card.
Talbot,
he said.

You’re the adjuster I spoke to?

That’s right,
I told him, tough-talking in the afternoon,

and you got stuff that needs adjusting.

This is the deal,
I said.

I take your problem out. You pay and pay and pay.

Roth said,
Sure, like we said. Whatever. Deal.

Me? I’m thinking it’s the Eurisraeli Mafia

or the Chinks. You scared of them?

No,
I told him.
Not scared.

I kind of wished I’d been there in the glory days:

Now Roth’s pretty people were getting kind of thin on the ground,

none of them, close up,

as plump and curvy as they’d seemed from farther away.

At dusk the party starts.

I tell Roth that I hated death metal the first time around.

He says I must be older than I look.

They play real loud. The speakers make the seashore pump and thump.

I strip down then for action and I wait

on four legs in the hollow of a dune.

And days and nights I wait. And wait. And wait.

Where the fuck are you and your people?

asked Roth on the third day.
What the fuck am I paying you for?

Nothing on the beach last night but some big dog.

But I just smiled.
No sign of the problem so far, whatever it is,

I said.

And I’ve been here all the time.

I tell you it’s the Israeli Mafia,
he said.

I never trusted those Europeans.

Third night comes.

The moon is huge and a chemical red.

Two of them are playing in the surf.

boy and girl play,

the hormones still a little ahead of the drugs. She’s giggling,

and the surf crashes slowly.

It would be suicide if the enemy came every night.

But the enemy does not come every night,

so they run through the surf,

splashing, screaming with pleasure. I got sharp ears

(all the better to hear them with)
and good eyes

(all the better to see them with)

and they’re so fucking young and happy fucking I could spit.

The hardest thing, for such a one as me:

the gift of death should go to such as those.

She screamed first. The red moon was high

and just a day past full.

I watched her tumble into the surf, as if

the water were twenty feet deep, not two,

as if she were being sucked under. The boy just ran,

a stream of clear piss splashing from the jut in his speedos,

stumbling and wailing and away.

It came out of the water slowly, like a man in bad monster movie makeup.

It carried the bronzed girl in its arms. I yawned,

like big dogs yawn, and licked my flanks.

The creature bit the girl’s face off, dropped what was left on the sand,

and I thought:
meat and chemicals, how quickly they

become meat and chemicals, just one bite and they’re

meat and chemicals . . .

Roth’s men came down then with fear in their eyes,

automatic weapons in their hands. It picked them up

and ripped them open, dropped them on the moonlit sand.

The thing walked stiffly up the beach, white sand adhering

to its green-gray feet, webbed and clawed.

Top of the world, Ma,
it howled.

What kind of mother,
I thought,
gives birth to something like that?

And from high on the beach I could hear Roth screaming,
Talbot
,

Talbot you asshole. Where are you?

I got up and stretched and loped naked down the beach.

Well, hi,
I said.

Hey, pooch,
he said.

I’m gonna rip your hairy leg off and push it down your throat.

That’s no way to say hi,
I told him.

I’m Grand Al,
he said.

And who are you? Jojo the yapping dog-faced boy?

I’m going to whip and rip and tear you into shit.

Avaunt, foul beast,
I said.

He stared at me with eyes that glittered like two crack pipes.

Avaunt? Shit, boy. Who’s going to make me?

Me,
I quipped.
I am.

I’m one of the avaunt guard.

He just looked blank, and hurt, a bit confused, and

for a moment I almost felt sorry for him.

And then the moon came out from behind a cloud,

and I began to howl.

His skin was fishskin pale,

his teeth were sharp as sharks’,

his fingers were webbed and clawed,

and, growling, he lunged for my throat.

And he said,
What are you?

He said,
Ow, no, ow.

He said,
Hey, shit, this isn’t fair.

Then he said nothing at all, not words now,

no more words,

because I had ripped off his arm

and left it,

fingers spastically clutching nothing,

on the beach.

Grand Al ran for the waves, and I loped after him.

The waves were salt: his blood stank.

I could taste it, black in my mouth.

He swam, and I followed, down and down,

and when I felt my lungs bursting,

the world crushing my throat and head and mind and chest,

monsters turning to suffocate me,

we came into the tumbled wreckage of an offshore oil rig,

and that was where Grand Al had gone to die.

This must have been the place that he was spawned,

this rusting rig abandoned in the sea.

He was three-quarters dead when I arrived.

I left him to die: weird fishy food he would have been,

a dish of stray prions. Dangerous meat. But still,

I kicked him in the jaw, stole one sharklike tooth

that I’d knocked loose, to bring me luck.

She came upon me then, all fang and claw.

Why should it be so strange that the beast had a mother?

So many of us have mothers.

Go back fifty years and everyone had a mother.

She wailed for her son, she wailed and keened.

She asked me how I could be so unkind.

She squatted, stroked his face, and then she groaned.

After, we spoke, hunting for common ground.

What we did is no business of yours.

It was no more than you or I have done before,

And whether I loved her or I killed her, her son was dead as

the gulf.

Rolling, pelt to scales,

her neck between my teeth,

my claws raking her back . . .

Lalalalalala.
This is the oldest song.

Later I walked out of the surf.

Roth was waiting in the dawn.

I dropped Grand Al’s head down upon the beach,

fine white sand clung in clumps to the wet eyes.

This was your problem,
I told him.

Yeah, he’s dead,
I said.

And now?
he asked.

Danegeld,
I told him.

You think he was working for the Chinks?
he asked.