Smoke and Mirrors (41 page)

INT. WEBSTER’S OFFICE. DAY

As WEBSTER sits

reading the LA Times, MCBRIDE walks in

and tells in

FLASHBACK

how his SISTER came

to Hollywood eleven months ago

to make her fortune, and to meet the stars.

Of how he’d heard from friends that she’d “gone strange”.

Imagining the needle, or far worse,

he travels out to Hollywood himself

and finds her standing underneath a bridge.

Her skin is pale. She screams at him “Get lost!”

and sobs and runs. A TALL MAN DRESSED IN BLACK

grabs hold his sleeve, tells him to let it drop

“Forget your sister,” but of course he can’t…

(IN SEPIA

we see the two as teens,

a YOUNG MCBRIDE and SISTER way back when,

giggles beneath the porch, “I’ll show you mine,”

closer perhaps than siblings ought to be…

PAN UP

to watch a passing butterfly.

We hear them breathe and fumble in the dark:

IN CLOSE-UP now he spurts into her hand,

she licks her palm: first makes a face, then smiles…

HOLD on her lips and teeth and on her tongue).

  END FLASHBACK

Webster says he’ll take the case,

says something flip and hard about LA,

like how it eats young girls and spits them out,

and takes a hundred dollars on account.

CUT TO

THE PURPLE PUSSY. INT. A DIVE,

THREE NAKED WOMEN dance for dollar bills

Webster comes in, and talks to one of them,

slips her a twenty, shows a photograph,

the stripper — standing close enough that he

could touch her (but they’ve bouncers on patrol

weird steroid cases who will break your wrists) —

admits she thinks she knows the girl he means.

Then Webster leaves.

INT. WEBSTER’S CONDO. NIGHT.

A video awaits him at his home.

It shows A WOMAN lovelier than life

Shot from the ribcage up (her breasts exposed)

Advising him to “let this whole thing drop,

forget it,” promising she’ll see him soon . . .

DISSOLVE TO

INT. MCBRIDE’S HOTEL ROOM. NIGHT.

McBride’s alone and lying on the bed,

He’s watching soft-core porn on pay-per-view

Naked. He rubs his cock with vaseline,

lazy and slow, he doesn’t want to come.

A BANG upon the window. He sits up,

flaccid and scared (he’s on the second floor)

and opens up the window of his room.

His sister enters, looking almost dead,

implores him to forget her. He says no.

The sister shambles over to the door.

A WOMAN DRESSED IN BLACK waits in the hall.

Brunette in leather, kinky as all hell,

who steps over the threshhold with a smile.

And they have sex.

The sister stands alone,

She watches as the brunette takes McBride

(her skin’s necrotic blue. She’s fully dressed).

The brunette gestures curtly with her hand,

off come the sister’s clothes. She looks a mess:

her skin’s all scarred and scored; one nipple’s gone.

She takes her gloves off and we see her hands:

her fingers look like ribs, or chicken wings,

well-chewed, and rescued from a garbage can —

dry bones with scraps of flesh and cartilage.

She puts her fingers in the brunette’s mouth...

AND FADE TO BLACK.

INT. WEBSTER’S OFFICE. DAY.

THE PHONE RINGS. It’s McBride. “Just drop the case.

I’ve found my sister, and I’m going home.

You’ve got five hundred dollars, and my thanks.”

PULL BACK on Webster, puzzled and confused.

MONTAGE of Webster here. A week goes by,

we see him eating, pissing, drinking, drunk.

We watch him throw HIS GIRLFRIEND out of bed.

We see him play the video again...

The VIDEO GIRL stares at him and says

she’ll see him soon. “I promise, Webster, Soon.”

CUT TO

THE PLACE OF EATERS, UNDERGROUND.

Pale people stand like cattle in a pen.

We see McBride. The flesh is off his chest.

White meat is good. We’re looking through his ribs:

his heart is still. His lungs, however, breathe,

inflate, deflate. And tears of pus run down

his sunken cheeks. He pisses in the muck.

It doesn’t steam. He wishes he were dead.

A DREAM:

As Webster tosses in his bed

He sees McBride, a corpse beneath a bridge,

all INTERCUT with lots of shots of food,

to make our theme explicit: this is art.

EXT. LA. DAY.

Webster’s become obsessed.

He has to find the woman from the screen.

He beats somebody up, fucks someone else,

fixated on “I’ll see you, Webster, soon”.

He’s thrown in prison. And they come for him

The man in black attending the brunette,

Open his cell with keys, escort him out,

and leave the prison building. Through a door.

They walk him to the car park. They go down,

below the car park, deep beneath the town,

past shadowed writhing things that suck and hiss

and glossy things that laugh, and things that scream.

Now other feeder-folk are walking past...

They handcuff Webster to A TINY MAN

who’s covered with vaginas and with teeth,

and escorts Webster to

THE QUEEN’S SALON.

(An interjection here: my wife awoke,

scared by an evil dream. “You hated me.

You brought these women home I didn’t know,

but they knew me, and then we had a fight,

and after we had shouted you stormed out.

You said you’d find a girl to fuck and eat.”

This scares me just a little. As we write

we summon little demons. So I shrug.)

The handcuffs are removed. He’s left alone.

The hangings are red velvet, then they lift,

reveal the Queen. We recognise her face,

the woman we saw on the VCR.

“The world divides so sweetly, neatly up

into the feeder-folk, into their prey.”

That’s what she says. Her voice is soft and sweet.

Imagine honey-ants: the tiny head,

the chest, the tiny arms, the tiny hands,

and after that the bloat of honey-swell,

the abdomen enormous as it hangs

translucent, made of honey, sweet as lust.

The Queen has quite a perfect little face,

her breasts are pale, blue-veined; her nipples pink;

her hands are white. But then, below her breasts

the whole swells like a whale or like a shrine,

a human honey-ant, she’s huge as rooms,

as elephants, as dinosaurs, as love.

Her flesh is opalescent, and she calls

poor Webster to her. And he nods and comes.

(She must be over twenty-five feet long.)

She orders him to take off all his clothes.

His cock is hard. He shivers. He looks lost.

He moans “I’m harder than I’ve ever been”.

Then, with her mouth, she licks and tongues his cock...

We linger here. The language of the eye

becomes a bland, unflinching, blowjob porn,

(her lips are glossy, and her tongue is red)

HOLD on her face. We hear him gasping “Oh.

Oh baby. Yes. Oh. Take it in your mouth.”

And then she opens up her mouth, and grins,

and bites his cock off.

Spurting blood pumps out

into her mouth. She hardly spills a drop.

We never do pan up to see his face,

just her. It’s what they call the money shot.

we see his face. He looks all dazed and healed.

Some feeders come and take him out of there.

Down in the pens he’s chained beside McBride.

Deep in the mud lie carcasses picked clean

who grin at them and dream of being soup.

Poor things.

We’re almost done.

We’ll leave them there.

CUT to some lonely doorway, where A TRAMP

has three cold fingers up ANOTHER TRAMP,

they’re starving but they fingerfuck like hell,

and underneath the layers of old clothes

beneath the cardboard, newspaper and cloth,

their genders are impossible to tell.

PAN UP:

to watch a butterfly go past.

In the end, the Lord gave Mankind the world. All the world was Man’s, save for one garden.
This is my garden
, saith the Lord,
and here you shall not enter
.

There was a man and a woman, who came to the garden, and their names were Earth and Breath.

They had with them a small fruit which the Man carried, and when they arrived at the gate to the garden, the Man gave the fruit to the Woman, and the Woman gave the fruit to the Serpent with the flaming sword who guarded the Eastern Gate.

And the Serpent took the fruit and placed it on a tree, in the centre of the garden.

Then Earth and Breath knew their clothedness, and removed their garments, one by one, until they were naked; and when the Lord walked through the garden he saw the man and the woman, who no longer knew good from evil, but were satisfied.

Then the Lord opened the gates and gave Mankind the garden, and the Serpent he raised up, and it walked away proudly on four legs; and where it went then no man can say.

And after that there was nothing but silence in the Garden, save for the occasional sound of the man taking away a name from another animal.

Neil Gaiman is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of the novels
Neverwhere
,
Stardust
, the Sandman series of graphic novels, and
Smoke and Mirrors
, a collection of short fiction. He is coauthor of the novel
Good Omens
with Terry Pratchett. Among his many awards are the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.

Visit his website at www.neilgaiman.com.

Jacket design by Amy Halperin

Cover photograph by J.K. Potter

Interior design by Kellan Peck

“Reading the Entrails: A Rondel” © 1997 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
The Fortune Teller.

“An Introduction” © 1998 by Neil Giaman.

“Chivalry” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“Nicholas Was . . .” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Vistations.

“The Price” © 1997 by Neil Gaiman. First published as a chapbook by DreamHaven Press.

“Troll Bridge” ©1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“Don’t Ask Jack” ©1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Overstreet’s
FAN
magazine.

“The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories” © 1996 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
David Copperfield’s Beyond Imagination.

“The White Road”© 1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Ruby Slippers,
Golden Tears.

“Queen of Knives” © 1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Tombs.

“Changes” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Crossing the Border.

“The Daughter of Owls” © 1996 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Overstreet’s
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“Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
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“Virus” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
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“Looking for the Girl” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
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“Only the End of the World Again” © 1994 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Shadows Over Innsmouth.

“Bay Wolf” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
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“We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” © 1994 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
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“Cold Colors” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“The Sweeper of Dreams” © 1996 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Overstreet’s
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magazine.

“Foreign Parts” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“Vampire Sestina” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“Mouse” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“The Sea Change” © 1995 by Neil Gaiman. First published in Overstreet’s
FAN
magazine.

“When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11 1/2” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman.

“Desert Wind” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman.

“Tastings” © 1998 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Sirens.

“Babycakes” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“Murder Mysteries” © 1993 by Neil Gaiman. First published in
Angels & Visitations.

“Snow, Glass, Apples” © 1994 by Neil Gaiman. First published as a chapbook by DreamHaven Press.

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