Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
Author: Cody Goodfellow
Date: 2009-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Politics; Science Fiction
Description: WINNER OF THE 2009 WONDERLAND AWARD! In the brutal zero-sum game of the new future, every meal is a murder, and every act of love is a declaration of genocidal war. To survive it, you will have to make alliances with the sleeping demons in your blood; learn to wear new names and faces, and shed your soul; feed your inner child to the machine, before it eats you alive; build and defend your own heaven; and become one of the sacred, secret tools with which nature reinvents itself. To win this game, you will have to change into everything that you are not. To play you need only open this book and

“Cody Goodfellow’s work is ’80s vintage horror with a contemporary edge. An exemplary wordsmith, his prose sticks a needle in your brain and gives it a twist. This stuff is Lovecraft on acid. Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars is anything but quiet: it announces Goodfellow’s continued presence among the leading cohort of modern horror with a thunderclap.” —Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories

“Cody Goodfellow is a force to be reckoned with. Grab this book, but keep your arms inside the vehicle while you’re turning the pages. There are things within these pages with teeth on ‘em. You’ve been warned.” —Norm Partridge, author of The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists and Dark Harvest

“The writing here is sharp, rife with a mixture of clever allusions and metaphors that glint with ingenuity. Goodfellow is one of those writers whose voice sweeps you away like the undertow of a tsunami, and once you’re in, he’s got you pinned.” —Mike Arnzen, author of Proverbs for Monsters and Play Dead

“[I]t is obvious that if Cody Goodfellow is a writer of ‘extreme’ stories, then it is as a writer of concomitantly ‘extreme’ ideas —the thinking person’s extreme writer.” —Bill Breedlove, editor of Mighty Unclean and Like a Chinese Tattoo

“A new and original author bursts onto the scene. [H]is descriptive passages leap off the page, his dialogue snaps and crackles with the authenticity of real life.” —Jack Olsen, Edgar Award Winning author of 31 books, including the best-selling Doc: The Rape Of The Town Of Lovell and Son: A Psychopath And His Victims.

Swallowdown Press

PO Box 2466

Portland, OR 92708-2466

WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM

ISBN: 1-933929-02-2

Hinterland originally appeared in Westwind Vol. 35, Spring, 1993. Baby Teeth originally appeared in Dark Discoveries 11, Spring 2008. El Santero originally appeared in Horror Carousel 5, Spring 2007. A Drop Of Ruby originally appeared in Third Alternative 41; Spring, 2005. Champagne Room originally appeared in Horror Quarterly, 2, Oct. 2005. Feast Of The Ixiptla originally appeared in Three-Lobed Burning Eye 15, Summer 2005. Magna Mater originally appeared in Dark Passions: Hot Blood Vol. 13, September, 2007. Burning Names originally appeared in Cemetery Dance 51, Spring, 2005. Atwater originally appeared in Black Static 4, Spring, 2008. In His Wake originally appeared in Dark Recesses 10, November, 2008.

Copyright ©2009 Swallowdown Press

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Copyright ©2009 by Cody Goodfellow

Cover art copyright ©2009 by Alan M. Clark

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for satirical purposes. This is a work of fiction.

Acknowledgments

For encouragement, education, inspiration and support, the author thanks Victoria Goodfellow, Carolyn Goodfellow-Carter, Matt Carter, Adam Barnes, John Skipp, Aaron Costello, Steve Cordova, Rob Winfield, Jeromy & Claudia Cox, Travis Hoecker, Chris Frandsen, Ron McPhee, Irwin’s Conspiracy, Nancy Curren, Doc Hansen, Art Schor, Nancy Holder, Richard Chizmar, Brian Freeman, Andy Cox, Jeff Gelb, James Beach, Ed Bove, Ryan C. Thomas, Darius Shahmir, David Agranoff, Paul Stuart, Mike Arnzen, Zak Jarvis, Clay Wittrock, Eunice Magill, Scott Bradley, Amy Wallace, Alan Clark and Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.

Introduction by John Skipp: Heavy Lifting, for the Lunatic Bastard in You!

Baby Teeth

El Santero

A Drop of Ruby

Champagne Room

Feast of the Ixiptla

Hinterland

The Good News About God

Magna Mater

His Station & 4 Aces

Burning Names

Atwater

Conscientious Objector

In His Wake

Losers, Weepers

Batteries

Afterword by Jeremy Robert Johnson: What You Need to Know

“For Hailey and Madeline... my secret weapons.”

A How-To Introduction by John Skipp

The brain is a muscle. Many people forget that. If you exercise it, it gets big and strong. If you strap it down, leave it laying around, it gets feeble as veal, but with none of the flavor.

But if you work it insanely, it bulges out of your braincase, rippling with a trillion mini-minds of its own, firing lightning bolts of pure mentation that blow holes through the shrieking skull-meat of the weak.

That’s what you get with Cody Goodfellow: a man who works his brain so hard it’s like a Mr. Universe Pageant every day of the week. Sweat pours from his quivering fissures. Literary tendons flex and howl. Bones groan, snap, mutate, and come back together in ungodly configurations.

And yet—from the crazy-ass grin on his face—you’d think it was a walk in the fucking park.

This is to say that Cody works harder at being more prodigiously ripped in the cranium than most of us will ever begin to achieve.

And he does it for fun.

The best reason there is.

He does it because he loves the weird shit that squeezes out of his head, every time he flexes his absurdly overdeveloped story gland. The globules that emerge contain fully-formed universes, simultaneously batshit crazy and painfully sane, each of them containing enough complexity to power a full-grown novel, usually in 7-10,000 words.

Within them, every genre he’s ever devoured is broken down like Brundlefly vomit, laced with bottomless bloodhound research data, stitched together with gonzo bravura and an anarchist’s total disregard for whose sacred cow just got dynamited up the ass.

This is high-end psychological surrealist horror meets bottom-feeding low-life crime in a techno-thrilling science fiction world full of Lovecraft and magic that probably isn’t magic at all, but merely an uglier science that less-flexed brain-muscles would probably worship as a series of unfortunate gods.

But even that oversimplifies the weirdness—the extremely high weirdness—of these fucked-up Cody tales.

I don’t want to daunt you, but here’s the truth from my experience: virtually every one of these stories gets better, every single time you read them. Because there’s so much going on. Between the virtuoso wordplay and the staggering “bet you never thought of THAT one before” ideas and Young Master Goodfellow’s tendency to bury the lead—which is to say, drag you out and keep you guessing—it’s almost impossible to get it all, the first time through.

But is it worth it?

Oh, my fucking god.

This isn’t a Greatest Hits collection—give it a couple of years, and that shit will begin to sift itself out—but there are some definite highlights for me.

If I’d had my druthers, I would have called this collection The Phantom Pornbooth, and Other Stories. Because “Magna Mater”—a story I’d fuck and fall in love with blindfolded if it was a woman, and I were doomed—was originally called “The Phantom Pornbooth.” And I liked that title. But not as much as I love the story, a thorned rose by any other name.

Same goes for the waaaay-beyond-hallucinatory “Atwater,” the hilarious gambling saga “His Station and Four Aces” (named after Cody’s favorite poker-playing dog painting), and “In His Wake,” which finally takes psychotic post-rockstar deathwish cult worship precisely as far as it has always needed to go.

The rest of the stories just expand the staggering range of what a crazed mind can conceive, when it pumps itself up beyond ordinary mortal comprehension.

Consider this a Bizarro workout regimen, designed to push your own deepest threshold of weirdness, pumping molten iron with one eye on Dali’s clock, the other watching unexpected muscles burst through your own exploding brainscape.

Getting smarter.

And laughing all the way.

As David Mueller crossed the dead lawn to his father’s house, he thought the white, withered face in the upstairs bedroom window—his window—was a leftover Halloween decoration, and it struck him as strange that his father would have put up such a thing in April, but then people do weird things right before they die, and Dad was weirder than most.

He looked under the big terracotta garden gnome on the porch, but found only a key-shaped patch of rust among the hills of insect husks. A car horn blared “La Cucaracha” somewhere nearby, and a salvo of pops that might have been the low-rider’s exhaust or the driver silencing a critic. God, the neighborhood had changed…

The door wasn’t even shut.

The family must have been here. Nobody had called him about Dad being sick. He’d found out from the lawyers, and he knew his cousins and aunts and uncles would not hesitate to loot the place. Anything of value would be long gone, and they were welcome to it, if it meant he didn’t have to see them. He hadn’t come to steal. He wanted only what was his, whatever relics of his childhood were still entombed in this house.

The stink of moldy bread and formaldehyde rolled out on the porch. He left the door open and went inside, skin knitting in goosebumps at the unseasonable chill, eyes aching to see in the dark.

From the atrium, forking fire-trails wended back into a shadowy hinterland of piled junk; household cast-offs and garbage rubbing against odd treasures of pure distilled memory, like the faces of celebrities peeking out of a concentration camp body-pit. A cocktail dress of Mother’s, still bagged from a long-extinct dry cleaner; a tattered periodic table from Dad’s high school, to which someone had added, then erased, over a dozen new elements; David’s old board games, Risk, Mouse Trap, Go To The Head Of The Class…

He thought coming back might rekindle something ugly inside him, and sighed with relief that he felt nothing he couldn’t handle. The rooms were too dark, too deep in the trash of a life he’d escaped, to haunt him.

So what about the mask?

The phantom he thought he’d seen in the window, as any therapist worth his billing would have told him, was to be expected. He must be feeling some anxiety, somewhere deep down, and if it wore his old mummy mask from Halloween, 1974, so be it.

Mom took him trick-or-treating, the new rubber mask flapping around on his face so he couldn’t see, and a hundred yards of coffee-stained Ace bandages tightly wound over his pajamas. When the sadist at the first house answered the door in a werewolf mask and howled in his face, David ran home screaming with only hot chocolate to show for his labors, and all of it in his shorts. Mom took his mask and the bag and went out to fill it, and in the morning it was discovered that someone had dealt the sadist’s house and car a stiff Grade AA egging.

That was Mom. The cancer that took her away erased her bit by bit, but the last thing it took was her smile. With her gone, the house was as good as empty. There was only Dad…

He threaded a path through the boxes and bags and ziggurats of newspapers, going to the stairs. Best get this over with before dark, before he choked up—

And there it was on the floor, at the foot of the stairs, flat and bereft of menace, like a spent condom. He picked it up. The brittle rubber cracked and coated his hands. Well, why not? Dad never threw anything away.

“Your mask sucks,” said a little voice. “Mine is better.”

David looked around as a kid-sized figure jumped down the stairs and alighted atop a pile of junk. The boy—it looked and sounded and dressed like a boy—had an oily brown paper bag on his head, with crude eyeholes and a jagged shark-mouth torn rather than cut out of the front.

Crap, he thought, when his pulse settled back down. His cousins were still here. But then he noticed something odd about the boy’s clothes. They were old—thrift store old, and not well cared-for. The red corduroy overalls were cut off and sloppily hemmed at the knees, and the ugly striped velour sweater he wore underneath bore the unmistakable color-blindness of the Seventies.

A Garanimals outfit; Mom bought it for David at Sears when he was eight, for school picture day. He almost laughed. Were his cousins so destitute that they dressed their kids in the trash from his attic?

“OK, you scared me. Now, who are you, and what are you doing here? Are you one of Aunt Mimi’s grandkids?”

The bag rustled on the boy’s head as he bobbed up and down in a pantomime laughing fit, then turned to face him. Through the crude eyehole in the mask, David saw a cornflower blue eye pinned by the light. “Those assholes left. They took the TV.”

“Yeah, they’re real assho—” David started to agree, but then who the hell was this, anyway? “Take the mask off,” he said, but the boy sprang off and scuttled behind a bureau and into the dining room.

David followed, feeling idiotic. He was not, had never been, able to talk to children. He froze in the doorway, unhinged by the sight of the dining room.

The dinner table was the site of a derelict city of glass, all manner of retorts, alembics, glass and rubber tubes, burners and ventilator hoods gerry-rigged to accordion tents over the window. He looked under the table, but a pile of books and magazines filled every inch of space. When Dad retired from teaching, he cleaned out his old lab with the school’s blessing. All of it had been junk, but Dad had been able to part with none of it. Things were what he’d lived for—

The buffet cupboards flew open and the boy uncoiled out of the impossibly small space, but David had him cornered. He ducked to field him like a line drive, but the boy squirmed through his hands, leaving the torn paper bag in his grip. David stumbled into the table, toppling a domino-array of glass beakers into each other, musical shards everywhere.

The boy glowered at him over the ruined experiment.

His hair was every color, a ragpile wig made of barbershop sweepings—brown and black and blonde, shot through with ball-lightning streaks of silver and white. The face underneath was soap carved with shadows, whiter and more artificial than the mummy mask he’d been wearing at the window. The sunken, dour slash of mouth puckered in a cruel, tight-lipped smile. “What do you think you’re doing here?”

“Me? Who the hell are you? What’s your name?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, David.”

The boy ducked through a beaded curtain into the living room, and David followed. The little asshole had to be some neighborhood crackpot who moved in after Dad died. Kids never did anything this bold alone, though. “Where do you live?”

“Here, stupid.”

“Who are your friends?”

“Don’t have any. Dad was my best friend.”

“Where’s your Dad?”

“He’s dead, dummy. He always said you would be too chicken to come back until he was gone.”

“Boy, you have until I count three to get out of my father’s house.” David felt as threatening to the boy as a squirt gun on a hot summer day.

“So, are you queer? Dad always said he thought you’d turn out queer.”

“Get out!”

The boy went over to the mantel, stretched and took the lid off the tarnished golden urn that held pride of place in the center. Mom’s ashes. “Get away from there…”

The boy reached up and his little white hand dipped into the urn. David charged him, stumbled over a mound of papers stuffed into old shopping bags. The boy jumped away just as David closed in. “Get away from my mother!” He grabbed the urn and looked inside. If one mote of ash was spilled—

But there were no ashes. The urn was brimming with Brach’s grape candies and peppermints, bloated and half-burst with rot. The boy noisily unwrapped one and popped it in his mouth, swirled his purple tongue at David and bounded up the stairs.

David went to the foot of the stairs, far enough. This wasn’t his problem. Dad had taken in a crazy runaway in his declining years. It was a job for the men with the butterfly nets, but he was so angry, he couldn’t just put it down. “Where are your real parents?

The boy whooped, hopped down to the first landing. “My Dad is Dr. Warren Mueller.”

“Wrong, kid. My Dad was Warren Mueller, and he wasn’t a doctor. He was a high school chemistry teacher.”

“You’re half-right, David,” the boy sneered, stinging him with the dismissive remark Dad always mumbled when David tried to impress him. “My Dad was a Sixth Degree Doctor of the Great Work. Jeez, you didn’t really know him at all.”

Oh, David thought acidly, I guess I didn’t, at that. He’d tried, of course, calls and cards at Christmas, even offering to fly out to visit, but Dad had sounded like he always did—indifferent, irritable to be taken away from his pet obsessions, so David had left him to it. “How long have you lived here?”

“All my life.”

David edged a step closer to the boy, hands fluttering behind his back. “How old are you?”

The boy leaned closer, almost within reach. “How old do you think?”

“About eleven.”

“Ha! Shows what you know! I’ve been eleven for six years!”

Enough of this. “Where’s the phone?”

“Aunt Mimi took it.”

“You can’t stay here. You have to leave.” Closer…

“Why don’t you make me?”

David fought the urge to jump at the boy. “My Dad is dead, and you’re going to have to go back to wherever you came from.”

The boy thought this terribly funny, even if no one had taught him to laugh properly. “I came from a Philosopher’s Egg. I can’t go back.”

“What kind of bullshit has he been feeding you?”

“I am a stone, but not a stone. Don’t you know anything?”

David tried to look slow, stupid. It came all too naturally. “About what?”

“About alchemy, stupid! Base metal into gold. Dad was right about you.”

Alchemy? Dad studied that old junk for a hobby, when other dads were studying parenting. “What did he say?”

“He said you were lead.”

David sprang. His legs betrayed him instantly; he knew it even as he sprawled out on the risers, his hands tangling with the boy’s bony ankles, as he leapt away like a kite.

“He said you were the necessary accident.” The boy kicked teasingly at David’s head, the toe of his moldy Keds sneaker parting his hair. “The raw ore that he had to refine for the Great Work.”

David wheezed, his chest a rat-infested accordion. “What’s the Great Work?”

The boy’s face smacked into his, cold, stale breath like a compost heap. “IT’S ME!”

He easily eluded David’s blind hands as he ran to the top of the stairs and, again, stopped.

This had gone too far. He had to get out and call the police from a neighbor’s; maybe the trigger-happy lowrider down the street would let him use his phone.

Why didn’t he have a cellular phone? Everyone else in the world did, but everyone else in the world wasn’t phobic about cancer like David. How many premalignant freckles have you had frozen off in the last year? He wasn’t phobic, just cautious. The studies waffled back and forth about the phones and brain cancer, and he had to be careful, cancer ran in his family—

“Did you ever see it?”

David blinked and crawled to his feet on the landing. The boy dangled off the railing, just in reach. “See what?”

“The cancer, dummy. The cancer that killed your mom. They cut it out of her, but it metastasized, and got her anyway. He used to show it to his class, so they wouldn’t smoke.”

David backed away, one step too many off the landing and he stumbled. He felt like throwing up. “My mom never smoked. She had ovarian cancer.”

“I know. He said you killed her. You know, when you grew up in there? He said that’s why you were spoiled. That’s why he made me.”

“Get out of my house!”

The boy chuckled and rubbed his hands together, skin sloughing off and floating on the dank, dead air. “You’re pretty old, too, huh? Dad said your mom’s family gets cancer a lot, so you probably have it by now, huh?”

David lost the power to speak. Finally, rage made him fast enough to catch the boy.

But not strong enough to hold him. The arm in his grasp seemed to deflate and slip free like a wet silk stocking. “Dad said you have too much of your mom in you.”

He squirted up the stairs and down the hall, but David was right behind him, and there was nowhere to lose him. This was his goddamned childhood home! The hall was narrower than he remembered, lined with bookshelves jammed and spilling out notebooks onto the floor. The boy danced through it, but David kicked up a storm of books and papers in his wake, still gaining on the little bastard, when his left foot snagged a tripwire and the shelves caved in on him.

He dove, hands over his head, through a downpour of books and junk. Something like a bowling ball smashed into his lower back, and it was raining jelly jars filled with pennies and marbles and jacks. He scrambled to his feet, gasping, and through tears of pain, he saw the boy just a few yards away, doubled over, laughing with his lips clamped shut.

David threw an encyclopedia, but the boy ducked it and shut a door to block David’s next shot with a shoeshine kit. David heard bolts slamming home on the other side.

David was locked out of his own room. He studied the door, trembling when he didn’t find the growth marks his mother had made with Magic Marker on the frame. The marks had been painted over. On the left side of the door, there were new growth marks in Dad’s writing. The last one, at age eleven, was smeared and faded. Above it, he wrote, MY BOY.

“You open this goddamned door!” David threw his shoulder into it.

Wood splintered and the boy gave a girlish shriek. “You break it, you buy it!”

David pounded the door like a speed-bag. “This is my room! You better let me in…”

“Or what? You left it, now it’s mine! Finders keepers, douchebag!” The boy’s whinnying laugh rose up and up into a squeal of ecstasy. He’d been waiting to do this, bred for it. Whatever he was, Dad had raised him to torment David, to hurt him, to—

What would he do next? David had him cornered. He could go and get someone, but the freak would leave, or burn the house down…

“Alright,” he shouted, stomping down the hall, “screw you, you little bastard. I’m gonna call the cops and the social workers, and you can go live in an orphanage, for all I care.”

Backtracking silently to the bedroom door, he practically hugged himself for his cleverness, but the boy was silent.

He heard a thump directly above his head, a scrape of something heavy being dragged, in the attic. So the little shit wanted to play hide and seek. David knew the house, too.

He went to the linen closet and got out the metal stepladder, quietly set it up beneath the trapdoor in the hall. He took a mop handle and, more or less balanced atop the ladder, jabbed it at the door. It flopped back and David cowered, but nothing dropped on him.

He planted his hands on the frame and jumped off the top rung just as the trapdoor slammed back down.

It cracked him squarely on the crown of his skull and he fell, hands still gripping the doorframe when the attic door smashed them.

For a moment, he hung there by his mangled fingers, his legs kicking the stepladder over, his screams ripping his larynx so blood sprayed from his lips.

Pure galvanic spasms launched David up and into the attic, where he flopped on the creaking floor. He sobbed and hugged his hands, frantic dying birds, against his chest. His vision was trashed. One eye saw only TV snow, lava flows and Jacuzzi bubbles. The boy—

“Gee, David, you look pretty bad.”

David looked up. The boy knelt on top of an antique mahogany wardrobe with a rusty red Craftsman toolbox held high over his head. David threw up his arms and rolled, but he was trapped between mildewed cardboard boxes of Dad’s junk. His hands rained blood in his eyes, so at least he didn’t see it coming.

Awake in a box, upright coffin, with no room to sit.

His hands throbbed like extra hearts. Most of his fingers were broken. His head felt like it had rocks and nails in it. His whole face was numb, and his tongue couldn’t find his teeth, but he could see again.

He knew the musty smell of Dad’s old Army locker. He used to hide in here and ogle the naked natives in National Geographic when Mom thought he was outside playing with friends, when he was the boy’s age.

Coldly, reasonably, he still very much wanted to kill the boy. His pains were nothing compared to the betrayal in flesh, the idea of this parasite slipping into the emptiness his father left in him, the place where most fathers, he imagined, build a man in their sons.

There was a slot cut out of the door, right at the height of his mouth. He slouched and peered out, winced away from bright white light.

“You hurt Dad a lot when you left, David. He blamed himself for the way you were. He doubted himself, David. That was his nigredo. Do you know what that means? It totally sucked, but he had to go through that crud to be reborn and commit to the Great Work.”

David tried to speak, but his head roared disapproval. He still couldn’t see the boy, but the flashlight beam bobbed just in front of the locker.

Rustling and scraping, the boy built a tower of junk at the foot of the locker, climbed it and peeked at David. “His soul was reborn, and he learned the Secrets, like the Philosopher’s Stone. But you’re so dumb…”

“I know what it is,” David mumbled. “Dad made gold, and got to live forever?” His own voice struck him funny, until he laughed. The words sounded mushy, and hot red spit dribbled down his chin.

“Not even half-right, David,” the boy sneered, and through all his pains, David got a chill. The gestures, the tone in which the boy lectured him, were vintage Warren Mueller. He looked closer, and his chill became frostbite. “Alchemists used code words—the Stone is power to change things. Dead matter into life. Base metal into gold.”

In the light, the boy looked like David when he was young, but sharper, traits exaggerated, as if in caricature. He thought of old family photos of his own father as a boy, and saw the resemblance, but it was still too skewed.

And now he saw injuries, scrapes, cuts, bruises and even bent limbs, crudely bandaged or ignored, for they healed badly, the flesh remolded over the injuries like clay. The features, up close, had a pathetic crudity to them, as if they were shaped by a loving, but unskilled, god.

“What do you want?”

“He could have made gold or lived forever if he wanted to, but instead, Dad made me. He wanted a real boy, to try again, but he had to use some of you to make me real.”

“What did he use? I haven’t been here! I never knew—”

“You never asked! You never cared! He loved you, but you wouldn’t listen, so he made me out of what you left behind.”

The boy opened his hand and showed him eleven tiny green-black stubs. “Your baby teeth,” the boy whispered.

Almost peevish, David moaned, “Those were mine. He had no right.”

“He made me with these, so I grew like a normal boy, but they’re no good, anymore, and without him, I can’t grow up. But then you came…”

“What?”

The boy smiled now, and David recoiled from the stench. In his gray gums, six big white permanent teeth, like a horse’s in that tiny, underslung jaw. David’s teeth.

David probed with his tongue, dumbly thrilling to the fire drill agony of holes where his front and canine teeth had been.

The boy held up pliers and an ether rag. “I need the rest of them. You had your chance, you had everything, and you blew it. I only want what’s fair…”

David screamed and threw himself backwards. The locker rocked a few inches and hit a ceiling beam. David stampeded back and forth until the locker tipped over on the tower of junk and pinned the boy to the floor.

Through the slot, they lay nose to nose. The boy squawked and coughed up gouts of something like petroleum jelly. The pliers wiggled against his shoulder. Ether fumes softened the rough edges, so David felt only what he wanted to as he bit into the boy’s face with his remaining teeth. “You want these teeth? Have ‘em, kid, fucking have ‘em!”

David wept and broke the rest of his fingers without denting the locker, thinking about the empty urn, and Mom’s cancerous private parts in a jar.

Dad never threw anything away.

David rolled with the locker as something flipped it over and unbolted it.

Screaming, “You’re not my mother! You’re not my mom!” he tried to jump out, but she caught him and showed him that, as usual, he was only half right.

The sun beat down just as hard on both sides of the San Ysidro crossing, but something in the dirty sky ate the warm yellow light before it fell on Tijuana. Arid, ionized Santa Ana winds held the coastal breezes at bay and basted the traffic in dust, smog and sweat. In the No. 9 Lane of the Primary Inspection Zone of the San Ysidro Port Of Entry, US Customs Inspector Burt Gillis snorted a line and offered a prayer, to God and science and any Orishas who might be listening, to bless and protect him from the Santero.

For those waiting to cross into the United States, it was going to be a very long Memorial Day. For Gillis, it felt as if it would last the rest of his life. He had not slept in nearly forty-eight hours, but did not want the day to end, because he knew what the darkness would bring. The Great Night was coming.

From the iron-fenced compound of the primary inspection pits, Gillis watched the tar-paper and plywood shanties of Colonia Libertad, the most godforsaken slum district in Tijuana, pressing on the border like an invading refugee army in the last days of a siege. Whenever his attention wasn’t demanded elsewhere, he stared at it until his eyes wanted to cry blood, combing the brown shadows for some sign of the one who would be crossing tonight, the one he had to stop.

Pico told him, last night.

They sent Gillis home to sleep for a few hours before the insane holiday shift, but he hung around the US short-term lots to meet Pico. At four AM, the lot was still saturated in rusty iodine light and packed with cars. Drunken high school kids fucked or slept in the back seats, squirming pink worms behind fogged-up glass. No one saw them together.

Pico was Javier’s man on the other side. He received the cars Gillis let through, and distributed to the retailers. Gillis had known him for two years, a lifetime in such work. He had never seen Pico so wired as he was now.

Gillis zipped up the Padres windbreaker covering his uniform and tugged down his hat. “What happened to Javier? If anything changes, I want to hear it from him.”

“It is all new, Señor Migra.” Pico chuckled and gagged as he dragged on his cigarette. Pico liked his smokes shermed—dipped in liquid cocaine when times were good, in dry cleaning chemicals when they weren’t. A disgusting habit, it was also a status symbol: he started out with los cementeros—a glue-sniffing gang— so to him, it was swanky.

It was all the worse to watch because Pico had no lower jaw. Someone smashed it with a brick when he was nine. The meatball doctors at the clinic in Libertad just picked the shards out and sewed him up, so the lower half of his face was a slack pouch of scars.

Gillis fanned away Pico’s smoke cloud and looked in vain for the pupils in his eyes and wondered how bad things had to get for him to smoke formaldehyde.

“Señor Javier is no seeing you anymore, but you can see him.” Pico flashed a Polaroid. A badly overexposed shot of plaster walls festooned with red party decorations. In the center stood a battered steel cauldron brimming with a flyblown stew, but Gillis knew what it was in the same instant he realized the red stuff was Javier.

“Fuck!” he barked, looking around with his hand on his sidearm. “Who did it?” he demanded, daring Pico to say the name aloud.

Pico hit his smoke so hard it squeaked and touched the medallions on his chest. “He rules now, and the ground is red.”

Gillis felt hammers passing through his heart valves, but more than half of it was relief. They would cut up their own and feed them to the nganga, but they’d never dare hit a white man on his own side. He could just walk away. “He’s shutting us down?”

Pico coughed so hard meat from his throat hit Gillis’ gold-tinted sunglasses. “Nothing change for you. He ees taking over.”

“What the fuck? He’s a vigilante! He’s massacring the cartels…” It was insane, but it was Mexico. “So he’s just another pusher, so what? He doesn’t cross la linea.”

“Oh no, my main man. He bring something very new, very big. He leading his people to freedom. The Great Night coming, and the sun that rise after, will be a New Sun.”

“What the fuck does he expect me to do?”

“What you always do, amigo. Take what we giving you.” Pico slipped a bulging bindle to Gillis, brushed the back of the border guard’s neck with his other hand.

Something like sand tickled the hairs of his back as it sprinkled down his spine. Gillis snapped the bindle out of the fixer’s hand and almost decked him. He scratched the tickling itch on his neck away and made damned sure Pico didn’t try to put a Flower Of Darkness on him.

Gillis looked around. The glass and steel corridor of the bridge that crossed over the inspection pit was empty of all but a few drunk white kids going to get cavity-searched. Girls smuggled stray puppies and cats, filthy piñatas stuffed with parasites and bacteria; boys tried to sneak ounces of grass or coke, most of which weren’t even real. When he caught them, he had a good eye for people. He could see who was a smuggler and who just made a mistake. He gave them a second chance. Most wept with gratitude when he lifted the contraband off them and waved them through.

Nobody on his side saw, but they saw. And that was the beginning of the deal.

That was what this was about—a new deal. But he didn’t want to live on the same planet as the Santero, let alone work for him, if half the stories were true. Not a year ago, stories like that used to make him laugh at the stupid shit Mexicans believed.

He fingered a dab of coke into each nostril as Pico laughed and coughed some more. Gillis flipped him off and started to walk away when his laughter turned to gargling screams.

Pico’s sock-puppet mouth vomited out an endless scarf of glossy black smoke like powdered obsidian that wafted around above him like a cloud of ebony moths, like a huge carrion bird.

A big pimply ass pressed against the rear window of the Ford Escort that Pico collapsed on, choking and retching out boiling blood. It reeked of the bacon-wrapped dog-sausages they sold on Avenida Revolución.

The smoke congealed into a wall between Gillis and the border, shining with an inner light that showed Gillis his reflection. The smoking mirror rippled and revealed another face he’d never seen before, and could never describe. Those eyes, staring out of a mask of blood, followed him as he backed up, they saw him… marked him—

Pico shriveled, wrung out like a rag, and Gillis turned and walked away. Nobody saw anything.

Faced with the prospect of going home to pack his things and run, Gillis just felt tired, and a craven repulsion at his own thought of deserting the border. If he turned and ran, the border would follow, and the moment he turned around, there, one step behind him would be Mexico, staring him down with those eyes—

Gillis’ father hated Mexico like cancer, a hate so pure it almost hid his fear. All Gillis ever learned about it was that his father went fishing down in at San Felipe once and ended up pulling a month in a Tijuana jail. He grew up cheek by jowl with Mexico, and had seen all the invisible shades of the border: the pollos, wetbacks, running like roaches to work and breed in los Yunaites Estaites; the coyotes and drug runners, predatory scumbags like Javier and Pico; macho monsters in uniform with licenses to steal, like the judiciales and the federales who fed the leviathan of ritualized graft below the border. La mordida—the bite—ruled all, and Gillis hated their cops most of all, when he first started. He’d really thought he was going to be better than that.

He did ten years in the Border Patrol, and never a spot on his record. But when he moved over to Customs, excitement was so hard to come by, and it was so easy to be a judge, separating the innocent from the unclean at the border, that he forgot he was doing anything wrong until they came to him. Javier bought him with drugs, and the money came so late in the game that he never made the connection between his corruption and theirs, except in his dreams.

Each year, he flagged two to five tons of cocaine into the Port of Entry for Javier. In small discrete shipments, the cars ran from Tijuana with twenty to one hundred pounds each. Packs of urchins and teenage mothers sold chiclé and souvenirs to the gridlocked motorists in the northbound lanes, and steered their couriers to Señor Burt. And they almost always had something extra for him.

In less than a year, the Santero changed all that.

The savior of Colonia Libertad simply appeared one day and began handing out pesos and tortillas in the slums and the squatter villages in the city dumps. When a mob formed around him, the people trampling each other, he disappeared in their midst. The legend grew. Soup kitchens opened in vacant storefronts, tortillas and beans and coffee and chickens handed out from the backs of trucks with a whispered name, El
Santero.

Then drug runners and border bandits began to be found dead in the streets. Then corrupt judiciales with bloodless slashed throats, parked in cars stripped of evidence and vandalized by righteous looters.

Everyone knew who was behind it, and when the Chief of Police and the Mayor of Tijuana swore to prosecute the vigilantes, they never even bothered with a press conference. El Santero was cleaning up the streets, said the peasants; the ones who believed in Santeria started calling him that. A sorcerer, a master of white magic, blessed by the Orishas. Javier’s contempt froze into fear and a facial tic as El Santero worked his way up the food chain, but Gillis never thought it would touch the business. In Mexico, the incorruptible were merely expensive.

Now he knew the Santero was just another don. He’d behaved like one, once you cut the magic and the charity out of it. Business was business. Except Gillis found he couldn’t. He hated beaners most because, somewhere, off dirty money or cut coke, he’d ingested the virus of their crazy bullshit. Lie down with dogs, as his Dad used to say—

He chopped out a line at his inspection station, busy hands, look what you’ve done? I can’t do it here, he thought, but the next car was haggling with the urchins over an Elvis piggy bank, and the other inspectors were all poking around in cars, grilling drivers, flashing lights in eyes to gauge drunkenness and lies.

Why not? He huddled over his desk, a sawed-off straw ready in his hand. The coke was filmy, fine gray powder with gritty, brittle yellowish specks in it that resisted chopping up into the fluffy Colombian powder Javier usually gave him. Sometimes, the mass shipments got nabbed to make a show of enforcement, but tons more came through pressed into pills and labeled as aspirin. Still, he’d never seen a worse batch.

As he ducked down to snort it, a wicked thought hit his brain just ahead of the white-out. What if this was the same shit as in Pico’s cigarette?

“Hey, Burt!” a shout from too close behind him, and he jumped, destroy the evidence, and it was going up his nose, even as his brain was screaming, Stop!

Gillis palmed the straw and turned to look at his watch commander, though all he could see was white ball lightning.

“Burt, the inbound line’s backed up three hours! You think you could pick up the tempo a bit?”

Gillis shivered as the first galvanic overture of the coke overwhelmed him. His muscles tingled and snapped like overcharged batteries; his brain seethed and percolated with the random energy of a lotto ball-cage, and the considerable weight of his gut simply vaporized as blood was routed elsewhere. He looked the watch commander in the eye and smiled, wiping away the fine particles from his nostrils. “I’ll wave them through a little faster, yes sir—”

Since 9/11, they were supposed to suspend their well-honed inspectors’ eyes and subject everyone to the same withering examination, whether or not they fit the profile of a smuggler or terrorist. Solid citizens got the same harsh scrutiny as hippie surfers and shifty, turbaned foreigners. On holidays, however, when the traffic backed up halfway to Ensenada, vigilance went out the window. But today, he had to watch like never before—

The traffic crawled and time stood still. Gillis robotically demanded, “Nationality?” and “Purpose of visit?” and heard only muted, flatulent blats in response. He interrogated shadows as to what they were bringing back, and rubbed his eyes to see past the masks they wore. He got wise-ass, mush-mouth answers from vacationing Missouri ministers and earnest Tijuana students commuting to UCSD to research doctoral theses. He banished them all to secondary: slash their seats, sift their urine, yes, sir or ma’am, this is how we do things in America.

He knew what the Mexicans believed. You couldn’t work so close to them without soaking it up. Their faith came in layers, some buried so deep they couldn’t know to whom they were really praying. Under every cathedral in Mexico, it was said, there was an Aztec altar, and under that—

The Yoruba people of Africa, whose sad lot it was to be the preferred stock for the American slave trade, brought their gods to the Caribbean, rechristened and reborn as Catholic saints. The Mexicans absorbed the potent syncretic faith of Santeria, which blended the upstanding piety of the Church with peasant sorcery that promised them deliverance in this world, as well. Every stripe of Mexican had a pet orisha, a pagan saint who heard their pleas. Even hoodlums like Pico and Javier—and himself, he supposed—had their patron saint, but Santissima Muerte had proven unable or unwilling to save her wayward supplicants today. The Santero was stronger. To the people, he was a white magician, a vigilante savior, but with his new eyes, Gillis could see how old he really was.

In Mexico, ancient, savage faces hid behind even the mask of Santeria, old gods who drank blood and prayers and received sacrifice in pious disguises. Gillis used to scoff at the stories he heard for so many years, but when you pass so many sleepless nights in the company of those haunted by hungry spirits, it begins to bury roots in your heart. The Santero was not just another drug lord, not just a faith healer. He was all that Mexico had pretended to shed in its haphazard crawl into modern civilization. He was all that fearful white men had built the border to keep out, and he was coming—

“Nationality?” he barked at a Trans Am filled with hung-over Marines. Normally, he waved them through with a salute, but you had to be careful, today. He wore so many masks—

The cherry-red PFC sounded off, “Aztlan.”

Secondary. He would have to find a better disguise.

He was losing it. He dabbed a finger of the coke into his nose as he bent to the next car. It scoured the uncertainty away like cobwebs, but kept on burning through his brain, twisting his nerves into braids of icy fire. The uncrushed yellow nuggets in the bindle were brittle and glossy, like fragments of bone and teeth. He snorted and wiped the doughnut off his lip. The powder smeared into his skin like ashes, creeping numbness spreading to make his face feel like a cheap Halloween mask. He stared into the inscrutable brown eyes of a carload of Mexican Carmelite nuns. The driver presented their visas. So many masks—

“What is the purpose of your visit to the United States?” he asked, boring into her skull with his coke-honed X-ray eyes and seeing only fog.

“Behold, I come, and you will sweep the road clear,” said the nun.

His fist drummed the roof of the rusted-out Chevy Vega. “What the fuck did you just say?”

The nun blinked, biting her hairy lip and shifting in her tent of a habit. “I am so sorry, señor… I only said that Our Lord, the Flayed One, comes to don his golden cape, and want will go from me.”

He slapped an inspection sticker on her windshield. “Secondary. And tell your master I’m not for sale.”

The phone rang in his station. Gillis picked it up, expecting the watch commander.

“My god, give me in part plenteous tender maize,” chanted a rumbling, subterranean voice, in English, in Spanish, and in the guttural, reptilian tongue he somehow knew as Nahuatl, the speech of the ancient Aztecs. “Thy worshippers looketh toward thy mountain.”

“You’re not scaring me, fucker! Come on! Come on and face me, I fucking dare you!”

“Gillis, what’s going on down there?”

“Oh, shit, sorry, sir, I’m…” losing my mind. “I’m just tired,” he mumbled in a mushy rush, “but I can tough it out, and I shall be content if first I ripen.”

“Burt, you’re burned out,” said the watch commander. “I’ll see if I can’t call somebody else in to close out your shift. You need rest.”

“I don’t need rest, sir. I need to stay here, he’s coming and I’m the only one who can see him…” Dig yourself in deeper, that’s it.

“Burt, you’ve got me scared. Come back up to my office. The warrior chief is born.”

Gillis fumed, dropped the barricade across his station. Horns honked in skull-splitting chorus at the outrage, but Gillis could only stare dumbly at the endless ranks of cars snaking back into the chaotic netherworld of Tijuana, their headlights like a river of votive candles. The faceless, dirty urchins and souvenir sellers—eyes and ears of the Santero— swaying, dancing among the cars like a net drawing tighter around him, and somewhere among them—

When had it gotten so dark? Gillis dumped the bindle in the gutter and crossed the secondary inspection yard. The service lane was open, and a massive Itasca motor home idled in the gateway. Gillis recognized it immediately.

The Chief of San Diego Police went down to Baja to fish every Memorial and Labor Day weekend with his wife. Nobody searched the Chief’s RV— he’d been the Chief for twenty-two years— but one or two ice chests of tuna or shark were always “confiscated,” and ended up at some inspector’s backyard barbecue that night.

Gillis wandered over to the driver’s side. Bob Echols and Lee Ortiz chatted up the Chief, who, by the way his arms measured out an impossible length, was describing a fish he’d almost caught. The Chief and his wife usually got out and stretched their legs, but he hadn’t shut off the engine. Echols and Ortiz were candy-asses, with no eye for telltale signs, no brains to speak of.

“Hey, Chief,” Gillis called out, “you leave any fish for the natives?” He climbed up the step-ladder and hung on by the side view mirror, and took a good look.

Gillis had pulled a turn or two on service gate duty when the Chief came through, had hosted more than one barbecue at his house on the Chief’s catches. He knew the Chief. He recognized the Chief’s clothes and salt-and-pepper hair, his sallow, acne-scarred skin, but with a weird corkscrewing twist, his vision shifted and showed him that the man inside the skin was not the Chief at all.

He sat in the driver’s seat with the Chief’s T-shirt from the SDPD Academy softball team on over skin laced with long, artfully contoured surgical slits, bound together with fishing line. Beside the imposter sat another suit of skin, the Chief’s wife, out of whose gaping face-mask leered a pair of hungry brown eyes and a lascivious, flicking tongue and long, curling canine teeth.

The Chief’s face drew close. Out of the expertly peeled skin of that stolen face, out of black pits such as moray eels might nest in to ambush unwary prey, out of a dark that knew no sunlight, came those eyes.

“Do you like my costume? This faded skin is become holy god-flesh, the golden cape of Xipe Totec Iouallauan, the lord of sowing. I will bring a new spring, and make the fire serpent a quetzal.”

Breathless, speechless, Gillis could only look.

“I will bring rain and plenty to the people, but I must have the nagual of a gringo. This one is all that we would have, all that you have kept from us. In his heart, I found the power to bring a new sun for my people. You have tasted the seed I will sow.”

The Chief touched Gillis’ inflamed nose with his bloody glove, and chuckled. “Can you imagine the harvest we shall reap?”

“That shit you gave me,” Gillis growled. “It’s not coke. Nobody will buy that shit.” He leaned into the cab of the RV, into the abattoir stench of blood, cyclones of flies buzzing around the Santero and his bride. The others could not see what was smeared in the Chief’s blood, could not see the shrink-wrapped blocks of yellow-gray powder filling the RV like blocks of concrete.

“Did you like the medicine? Very powerful… so potent, you are blessed to receive it, a sacrament, for you shall be my cloak. Only the priests could use it, in times gone by and yet to come, to give flesh to the invisible world, and let the ancestors speak. It is not coca at all.

“I promised to lead my people into a new world, new lives in new bodies, and the wealth of the white man. They offer their bones, burned and crushed…” The Santero touched his stolen nose and sniffed.

Gillis gagged, but nothing would come up. The scummy film of cremated Mexicans coated his sinuses. Gritty fragments of bone and tooth stuck in his arid throat. Panicked voices unleashed a tumbling Babel tower in his brain, but he couldn’t understand a word of it.

“The spirits are dead to you no longer. When my medicine comes to your streets, there will be no more border between us. We will live in your empty bodies. We will share one world, with the same gods. We shall feed them together…”

The Chief started up the RV. Gillis jumped down and pocketed the bindle the Chief slipped into his hand. The buzz ran amok in his skull, making him hate himself, making him crave more. He looked around. Nobody else could see it. The world of the spirit was dead to them, the truth—

He could see it. Even now, as the Santero wrestled with the gearshift in the Chief’s clumsy skin-mittens, Gillis alone could see the truth, and the awful promise of the future.

When my medicine comes to your streets—

Gillis drew and fired into the open window of the RV. His first shot smashed the sideview mirror, but the next two slapped the Santero out of his seat, one in the neck, one just above his ear.

The other inspectors shouted and swarmed over Gillis, but all the fire he had left exploded in his muscles. He tore free, leapt onto the running board as the RV rolled out of the inspection pit, and emptied his gun into the driver and his passenger. As they pulled him down, Gillis screamed, “It’s not the Chief, it’s an imposter, can’t you see?”

Suddenly, the crowd ripped apart. Sirens and police from both sides of the border converged on the inspection station. Ragged brown shapes swept through the unguarded inspection pits, an invisible army timing its invasion perfectly with the bloody moment.

Gillis ripped his arms free and dropped his empty pistol. He stopped it. He killed the Santero. When would the magic wear off? When would they see what he saw?

But the illusion was stronger than ever. Even to him, the bodies slumped over in their seats looked like the Chief and his wife. The only blood in the RV was leaking out of them, and the blocks of crematorium powder were coolers sealed with duct-tape marked, BLUEGILL, TUNA and SCALLOPS, with dates and locations. The Chief was a methodical fisherman.

A siren whooped and a van swerved into the midst of the crowd of inspectors. Gillis stood alone before it, dazzled by the flashing red and blue lights, Catherine wheels of sparks overlapping the phosphene fireworks of the gunshots lingering in his eyes. An American Hartson’s ambulance, though it came over from the south, didn’t it? Gillis was all turned around, he needed to know which way to go—

A paramedic snatched Gillis’ sleeve and tugged him in the open doors. All the inspectors around him seemed frozen, the SDPD approaching with guns drawn, murder in their eyes, he’d killed their king. Anywhere was better than this, so he let himself be pulled into the ambulance, and fell onto the gurney as they squealed out of the inspection pits, heading north.

He needed to straighten out, he needed to get a handle on things, he needed something to straighten him out, he needed something—

The walls of the ambulance were lined with shrink-wrapped bricks of powder that he knew were not cocaine.

“O Xipe Totec Iouallauan,” said the paramedic, “why dost thou mask thyself?” He pushed Gillis down and showed him the knife: chipped obsidian, yet sharper than any scalpel. His eyes swam up out of bottomless pits in his unspeakably naked face, wide enough to reflect the first hot rush of blood.

“Put on thy disguise,” he said, “for you shall be my cloak.”

The days flow by as blurs of feverish color: rising in tarnished gold, crashing and bleeding out in scarlet haze, clotted with violet shadows. My pharmacology isn’t what it used to be, and I keep it too dark to consult my manuals, so I’ve dispensed with the niceties. Do I have a drug problem? Hell no. I’m a doctor, so I can get all I want. I pop Halcyon from the trash bag of samples drug companies mailed to my house last fall, so I could pass them out to trick-or-treaters. I’ve long since bypassed the ethical dilemma of prescribing my own therapy. My situation is such that understanding would be hard to come by.

I suspect I may have built up a tolerance to the sedatives, and I wish I could afford a sensory deprivation tank, so I could go deeper. These fleeting moments of lucidity are more than enough to convince me that there is no alternative, nowhere to go but inward.

In the few minutes between waking to change my IV and catheter, washing down another handful of pills and actually returning to blackout is when the ache of loneliness becomes true physical pain, when the pressure in my head drowns out all other sensations, all other thoughts but her, and the echoes of her blood in my veins.

They called her Jane Doe Seven: the seventh unidentified female of the year when they found her at 1:30 AM on April 13 of last year, but she was the first and only one to be discovered alive. The media, with its unfailing gift for degrading tragedy, christened her the Mole Girl and the El Segundo Cellar Dweller, and so gave her the names by which many of you included her in your prayers. She became one with Baby Jessica, the girl with the baboon heart; David, the legendary Boy in the Plastic Bubble; and the legions of crack-addicted and AIDS-afflicted babies, the famine-struck stick-people of the Third World.

It was hardly the top story of the morning, but it stuck in the throat long after anxieties over air pollution and the war had been smoothed over. She was receiving treatment at the University Medical Center, pending examination by a team of specialists. I had only to consider the challenge and opportunity this girl’s condition offered, the groundbreaking research sure to yield mountains of publishable data, and I instantly became quite passionate about Jane Doe Seven’s plight. I was prepared to fight for her, never suspecting that she was already mine.

Traffic inched through the trough of its own petrochemical shit infinitely in both directions, each driver blankly despising the others as dumb, dead obstacles. Each of them heard the news and their faces froze in mid-curse. They were a bit less begrudging in allowing others into their lanes that morning, and congratulated themselves that at least the world wasn’t a mess because of them. It got me to the hospital that much faster, so I couldn’t condemn it. I was parking when my phone chirped and they offered me her case.

Jane Doe Seven was under heavy sedation in one of the soundproofed basement cells for quarantining infectious patients. Every light on the ward was switched off to simulate the darkness of her natural habitat.

She’d been curled up in a basement when firefighters found her, where she’d lain, by all accounts, since before she could walk or talk. She was skin and bones held together by a lifelong accretion of dirt, dust and spider webs. Once the nurses had cleaned her, she looked so raw and frail that you’d catch your breath for fear her onion-thin, moonstone-pale skin might break open with the slightest stirring of the air. Her limbs might come off with one wanton twist of the hand, like the legs of an insect. Nurses kept a vigil around her oxygen tent, intently playing miniature flashlights over her muted vital signs.

I was told to expect a social worker, Carmen Fuchs. A red-eyed woman with too much turquoise jewelry camped outside the girl’s door, studying a case file and nursing a coffee. She didn’t notice me when I leaned over her, so I tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped from her chair, but her mind lingered someplace else.

“Ms. Fuchs?”

She set down the file and offered her hand, clammy and shaky from caffeine and sleep deprivation. “I hope you’re Dr. Shields?”

I nodded. “How long have you been here?”

“Since they found her, at about two. I don’t know how much Dr. Randels told you over the phone, but you can look over the file I started. Early blood tests confirm he was hers. Nobody guessed he’d had a daughter until she was found in that basement. If not for the fire, she’d still be down there. She’d almost have been better off if he had beaten her… buried underground her entire life, in the dark, his own flesh and blood…” She choked back more tears, leaving me thinking she meant for me to comfort her, but she recoiled, eyes grazing the floor. “Maybe you should just go talk to the police, or Dr. Randels. I’m a little high strung right now.”

“I’d rather hear it from you, if you don’t mind. Maybe we could go to the cafeteria.”

“Sure,” she said, distracted. “Do you smoke?” I shook my head, and she moaned. She tried to uncoil her knotted neck muscles as I led her to the elevators.

“I never thought I’d run out of stomach for this job. Do you know why the lights are off in there? She was blinded by the first light the firemen shined on her, and went into deep shock. I don’t think she’s ever even seen light before. She’s below feral; she’s not even an animal, and the doctors say she’s twelve. I just wish he wasn’t killed in the fire, so he could answer for this.” She was looking beyond me, thinking out loud as fatigue and, perhaps, misplaced maternal instinct got the best of her.

“Maybe he couldn’t live with his sexual impulses towards the girl and locked her away,” I offered, “to protect her. Starting the fire would, then, be a predictable outcome to such a repressive syndrome.” I was trying to infuse some logic into the conversation. I should have known she’d have none of it.

“You’d say as much in court, wouldn’t you? Some things, even a sick mind is no excuse for. When I think of the loneliness he condemned her to, the chance for humanity he took away from her, I only hope they make Hell even hotter for him.”

She was obviously too overwrought to see reason on that subject. “What about the mother? Was Cykes ever married?”

“Yes, to a ‘Roja Zachardo.’ She was an illegal alien, from Guatemala. None of his neighbors reported having seen her for the last several years, and nobody’s been able to find her. His was the only body they found, so we’re assuming she left him, maybe went back over the border. I don’t know how anyone could throw away her daughter like that, but I hope she’s somewhere safe.”

What she told me made me want to see the house.

Even with the fire engines and the curiosity seekers gone, I had no trouble finding it. The house was deep in the heart of the Hispanic ghetto east of Watts, on a dead-end street that had somehow managed never to get paved. Chickens and kids selling bushel bags of oranges and hot dogs wrapped in bacon dodged my car and cursed my dust.

Clouds of ash and the overpowering reek of burning still marked the area. The Cykes house had been razed to its brick foundation, leaving only a gaping black cavity in a row of other likely firetraps. A pair of investigators in windbreakers and plastic hardhats knelt and sifted the ashes.

Norman Cykes was an orphan, raised in foster homes throughout the Eastern United States. He distinguished himself in school and received a grant from a research firm to study hematology at Stanford. Unlike many such hardship cases, whose scarred self-esteem prevents them from applying themselves, he buried himself in a cocoon of work. I wish I could have been half as dedicated as the young Dr. Cykes.

He derailed his illustrious career almost before it began, however, when he quit his residency at a San Diego hospital and disappeared. He met Roja Zachardo there while treating her for an injury she sustained while crossing the border. They were married shortly thereafter and moved to Los Angeles. Cykes stole a lab’s worth of equipment from the hospital, and bought the house with the last of his meager savings. They had groceries delivered and performed their own repairs.

According to neighbors, Roja Cykes was a bruja, a Santeria witch, who healed ailments with rituals, prayer and transfusions of her own blood, probably their sole income. He’d only been sighted outside once, when he shot a dog caught rooting through his trash. A classic misanthrope, paranoid but hardly pathological. Mrs. Cykes stopped seeing patients seven years ago, and was believed to have run away. No one ever knew there was a daughter.

“Can I help you?” The investigator offered me a blackened glove and too-firm grip. He looked as if he’d lost a coin toss to talk to me. His eyes homed in on the clip-on badge I wore, and his face became static. I’ve grown accustomed to the guardedness many laymen adopt around shrinks. I once derived a banal thrill from tweaking their discomfort, but it’d long since become a bore.

“I’m Jane Doe Cykes’ psychiatrist,” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to see the basement.”

His broad, sunburned face soured. “Let me get some extra gear.” He walked back to his truck, where the other investigator was now reclining in the cab. They exchanged words about me while he rummaged in a tool locker. He returned with two flashlights and another hardhat. We crossed the sidewalk onto the Cykes property; as he held up the yellow CAUTION ribbon for me to cross, he introduced himself as Bart Shanley and remarked, “You figure out why he did it yet?”

“Unless the girl can speak, which is highly doubtful, we may never be able to do more than guess about his motives. Isolation can compound our anxieties over time, as our inner world, our imagination, takes the place of the outside world.”

He snorted. “I heard of a deputy sheriff, lived in a trailer park in Mono County, Krazy Glue’d his mother’s ass to a toilet seat to keep her from going off to a rest home. She sat there for six years before a Jehovah’s Witness heard her hollering that her TV was busted. Said he loved her too much to let her go.”

I shrugged. “Anything’s possible. Is the cause of the fire known yet?”

“No mystery, there. Splashed a can of kerosene all through the place, blew out his pilot lights and opened a couple oxygen tanks upstairs. Place was full of old books and papers. Went up like a fucking bomb. You could see it for miles.” Shanley gazed out over the wreckage, inhaled the ashes lustily. Discussing fire plainly both relaxed and exhilarated him, even before a complete stranger. He was in his element in this sort of carnage and, very likely, was sexually aroused. “The cellar door’s around back.”

We skirted the ruin and passed through a warped wrought-iron gate into the backyard, a waist-high field of what looked like long black hair. It ran unbroken for fifty feet to a ramshackle scrap lumber fence. The investigator’s mind was lost among the hillocks of charred house bones until I asked him if anything had been salvaged.

“I doubt it. Something this old burns this hot, even the fixtures get melted down. The flashpoint—” the ruin’s heart, marked by a twisted tree that might have been the steel pipes of a bathtub, “—had a lot of heavy lab equipment, and it brought the whole second story down, when it went. Witness said the guy was watching from a window the whole time, like it was someone else’s house burning down. Totally batshit. That girl, she couldn’t have found a better place to hide. She was damned lucky being where she was. Here…”

We stood at the edge of the foundation, looking down into a hole in the weeds with a jagged border of splintered wood all around it. I could see no stairs. Our reflections glared up at us from a scummy pool on the basement floor, monochrome doppelgangers guarding a surrogate womb. The luxuriant stench of countless varieties of fungus ran riot here, even over the stink of burning.

“You still want to go in? That smell’s just a preview, I can tell you, and it’s only a crawlspace, about waist high, inside. The fireman that fell through the kitchen floor compounded his ankle trying to get out. He must’ve kicked her or something, and she started screaming her head off. They had to use axes on the storm door, over here.”

I stepped back where I couldn’t see my reflection. “I don’t think there’s any reason to go inside.”

“There sure isn’t.” It was obvious something more than just the basement disturbed him.

We circled back to the sidewalk, where I returned the hardhat. I thanked him and started for my car, when he said, “That storm-door had been nailed and caulked shut for years when they broke it down.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Her daddy locked her in there at least ten years ago and never went down there again.” He took a deep breath to anchor himself. “You saw the only way in, and the nails in that door were rusted over. So was the padlock, and the key was broken off in it. All the vents around the foundation were plugged up. Neighbors could see into the backyard, and they never saw him, or anybody else, out here. It’s like you said—anything’s possible, right?” He smiled as DT cases often do when trying to convince others to see their pink elephants.

“Are you the only one who’s noticed this… evidence?”

“Firemen told me about it, but they couldn’t put two and two together.”

“Then I don’t think telling me is the best course, unless you need someone to recommend you for a leave of absence.”

“I’m fucking serious! I’m not putting any of this in my report, because I know how it sounds. But either that little girl’s the New and Improved Jesus, or she’s been living off toadstools and her own shit her whole life. We didn’t find any of that laying around, by the by. The whole goddamned thing—” He settled back against my car door, his gaze still locked on the ruin.

“Did you consider that what the fireman fell through was probably a trapdoor? Listen, I’ve really got to go—”

“Have they done anything about her, um… bleeding?” he asked.

“She sustained no injuries that I was aware of. Why do you ask?”

“No, nothing like that. Her, you know... her period. I was on-site when they brought her to the ambulance. I saw blood running down her thighs. Unless she was hemorrhaging, it had to be her period. Do starving cave-kids get their periods regular, doc?”

“Her development has been stunted to such a degree that menstruation would be highly unlikely. I suppose you were the only one who saw this, as well.” I sidestepped Shanley and slipped into my car. His eyes on the ground, he returned to the gutted house as I drove away.

I’d decided not to report Shanley’s hysteria by the time I arrived at the hospital. Everyone was upset by the case, particularly those who were parents. I suppose this was why I’d been chosen to treat her. I never had any family myself, so I could remain detached.

The drive back was all gridlocked freeway again, and Jane Doe Cykes’ magic had long since worn off. I spent every minute of the ninety it took to return considering the girl. In the scant few similar cases on record, years of intensive treatment had left the patients with little better than a four-year-old mentality. When the doctors exhausted their pet treatment theories, the patient cycled through abusive foster homes and ended up in a state institution, the forgotten flotsam of another failed experiment.

I sincerely thought I would succeed where they all failed. Jane Doe Cykes would be moved out of the quarantine cell as soon as she regained consciousness, and her humanization would commence.

Shanley’s delusions and Fuchs’ unreasoning rage kept intruding on my thoughts. If I had children of my own, would such melodramatic notions affect me as well?

I found Ms. Fuchs asleep in a chair outside my door, her files spilled out around her. I snuck past her and sat at my desk, then checked my messages.

The forensics team had uncovered a steel case in the ashes. It contained several journals filled with markings in an erratic code, probably devised by Cykes. Very likely it would never be deciphered, as it had meaning only to his disturbed mind.

The case had also contained six one-liter mason jars full of dark crimson fluid. They were marked “ROJA.” They were full of human blood.

I had a nurse bring coffee and woke Fuchs. She already knew.

“I’m sorry I nodded off, there. I can’t believe—”

“I know. What’s been done with the remains?”

“You mean the jars?” she asked, and I nodded. “They were brought here by ambulance. The lab tested them. San Diego has no patient records for Roja Zachardo, because Cykes stole them, but the blood tests out almost identical to our girl, so it must be hers. This is all so sick…” Her chest quavered, and a sob escaped. I drew the curtains.

I elected not to repeat what Shanley had told me about the cellar. She’d take it too seriously, I thought, wondering if she had children of her own, or wished she had. I excused myself and went to see the patient.

Dr. Randels was checking Jane Doe Cykes’ pulse, his eyes on his watch. I’d seen Randels professionally on a few occasions, so I expected him to behave somewhat distantly. He was the kind that tries to get laid at funerals, but a decent pediatrician.

“Dr. Shields, I know you were briefed by Ms. Fuchs,” he whispered. “All in all, she’s doing amazingly well.”

I looked past him at the delicate figure in the bed. The oxygen tent had been taken down, but she still seemed scarcely human, an elfin changeling. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I studied her frail musculature and birdlike bones. She’d come out of total solitude, her whole world shaped by the darkness, the mysteries of her own body and the formless phantoms of her own mind. Perhaps years had passed between the thunder of each heartbeat. Had they frightened her? Or did they sound like God, speaking only to her?

“Yes, it is quite incredible,” I returned.

“Her growth was a touch stunted, and her muscles are atrophied, but her blood sugar’s not much below normal. Whatever else he did, he didn’t starve her.”

“How much longer do you plan to keep her under? I’d like to get some EEGs and an MRI before she wakes up.”

“I don’t see why we can’t let you have at her as soon as she regains consciousness, but we want to leave her alone until then. Waking up to a brain-mapping would freak out a normal person. We’ll move her into pediatrics as soon as she learns to adjust to the light. Right now, that’s our biggest obstacle. The outside world’s going to be one hell of a shock, I don’t have to tell you.”

Randels scooped his clipboard up off the EKG monitor and walked to the door. He furtively picked his nose. “I’ve got to see another patient upstairs. You coming?” Afraid to let me alone with his star patient, I knew.

I leaned over the girl. Randels opened the door so that only my shadow sheltered her from the beam of an orderly’s flashlight. Her lustrous black hair drank in the glow from the light off her translucent skin. The dark canals of her veins stood out, the only part of her that seemed alive.

“Is there any possibility she may have entered her menarche?”

I felt, rather than saw, Randel’s bemusement, as he sprayed it in my ear. “Impossible. She’s of the right age, but her bodily functions have been heavily traumatized, as you know. Why do you ask?”

“Just something somebody thought he saw.” I followed him out and gently pulled the door shut.

“It’s funny you should mention blood, though,” Randels said. “You heard about the jars?”

“Yes, I was told. Symptomatic of an obsession with his studies. Perhaps a memento.”

Ms. Fuchs was nowhere to be found. I was bone-tired and looking forward to a nap in my office. I folded out the cot I keep in my closet. I’d never been able to sleep comfortably on my couch. No doubt I associated it with the sacrifice of power it would’ve symbolized, although at the time I only thought it was too soft for my back. I sat at my desk to sort through the file the social worker had left for me, wanting to get some work done even as my eyelids began to droop. Before I realized this, I was asleep.

And when I awoke, I was wet.

Warmth and moisture covered me, my clothes clinging all over. Absurdly, I believed I’d spilled something on myself, or wet the cot.

I’d left my desk lamp on, but the room was now pitch black. I reached for the switch. Streams of liquid force coursed up my torso and enveloped my face. Involuntarily, my mouth opened and I gagged on hot, salty foam. The intruding fluid gushed at once up my sinuses, forced itself over my palate and down both my esophagus and trachea, bored into my ears.

I could hear only the pulse of the incoming tide, feel only a simultaneous probing at every orifice, taste only a briny tang like seawater. The pressure in my head was terrific, and mounting as the volume of fluid rose. I was unable to expel it by coughing or choking, and my hands passed through it without effect.

I found the switch. The blackness became uniform red. It felt as if the fluid had managed to penetrate as well as cover my eyes. Dimly, I felt alien warmth coursing up my rectum and the channel of my urethra. My bowels swelled to the limits of their flexibility, but the fluid continued to seek entry. My equilibrium failed as blood poured into my inner ears, and, flailing in my chair, I collapsed on the floor. Straggling droplets filtered through my pores and merged with the ocean within.

I was a red world. I was the mouth of the river of Life, and she flowed into me.

Plasma chimes sounded in my arterial heavens, resounding down through capillary alleys and cardiac abysses. Torrents of divine incarnadine mingled with my own insensate blood, singing a hormonal lullaby that stilled all circulation. My lungs subsided, turgid, dormant; red tides effortlessly conducted oxygen directly to my cells, braced their membranes against the hydrostatic surge of redoubled pressure. My brain lolled in a languid current that whispered and murmured in time to the alien tocsin that stirred my heart. Cell by cell, it engendered understanding.

It wanted its daughter back.

The blood had existed symbiotically with Roja Zachardo all her life without her knowledge. Norman Cykes discovered its secret and impregnated the host, forcing it to split itself into a daughter, then locked it away. He drained the blood from Roja’s body and for years experimented with it, sometimes injecting himself, though the transfusions all failed. The blood would only bond of its own free will. Bereft of its host, the mother craved reunion with its daughter body.

I located Jane Doe Cykes for her; rapture bereft me of any secrets. I could hold nothing back. In return, she shared herself with me.

I/We could feel nothing outside my/our own body, could see no sense in ever wanting to, ever again. Outside the sub-molecular intimacy of our embrace was only infinite, empty space, the lonely pain of which I could not imagine enduring again. We were closer than the most passionate sexual act could bring two separate beings. I/We encompassed each other totally, sharing body and thought.

I awoke in the dark, dry everywhere but between my legs. This time, I had indeed voided my bladder.

There were no stains on cot or carpet, no marks on my clothing. My watch had gone dead, but the wall clock read 7 PM. I’d been incapacitated for roughly an hour and fifteen minutes. My muscles were slow in responding, and my knees buckled the first few times when I tried standing. I crawled to the door, and hauled myself upright by the knob.

I knew I had to locate the blood before it could infiltrate the quarantine room or commune with anyone else. I assumed it was traveling through the ventilation shafts. I examined myself in the mirror; when the spasms in my hands and knees had subsided, I cleaned up and changed.

I made myself walk down to the nurse’s station. A candy striper sat at the desk, engrossed in a personal phone conversation. I signaled to her to hang up. “I need you to page Dr. Randels. Tell him to meet me at my office immediately.”

She nodded, her bright burgundy nails clicking on the numbers, though her eyes never left my face. After a moment, her voice rang out through the hospital. She hung up. “Is there anything—” I stepped into the elevator and pressed the basement button.

I leaned against the mirrored steel wall of the elevator car as it descended, my eyes turned inward. I felt hollow inside, and knew I’d always felt that way and never faced it. I considered the possibility that the blood might have found Randels before it got to me, and might use him to aid its escape. I could only hope I was the only one with whom it had shared itself.

As the doors opened, I began to run, which made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. I slid past Jane Doe Cykes’ cell and fell sprawling. My arms flailing, I hit the floor face first. My left eyebrow burst open upon impact; the blood that flowed over my eye was drab brown, tasted thin and cold, inanimate.

I struggled to get up as the phone rang by her door. It trilled unanswered, jarringly out of sync with my pulse. I grasped the knob and found it locked. I would have to call maintenance and order them to shut off all airflow to the basement. I answered the phone.

“Shields, is that you? What’s going on? I’m up here at your office, and the receptionist told me—”

“The girl has an inherited condition that makes her a potential carrier of viral infection. We’ve got to isolate her completely.” I jerked at the doorknob again without success. Blood was trickling down my face faster than I could blink it away. “Do you have the key to her cell?”

“I’ll be right back down, Shields. Don’t go anywhere this time.”

I hung up. My vertigo subsided. The hallway was empty of personnel and equipment, but I recalled seeing a fire axe in its case in the stairwell. Pressing my face against the glass, I tried to make out any movement in the dark cell. A sickly green line arced and dove in the blackness to display the girl’s pulse rate. All else was still.

I jogged down the length of the hall, hands out before me in the dark. As long as I kept up forward momentum, I could stay upright. I wrapped my coat around my fist and punched the glass. It shattered on the third or fourth try, and I cut myself on the loose shards as I pried them out, then took the axe.

The elevator opened as I was lurching back to her cell with the axe cocked over my head. Randels popped out, a nurse beside him. He cringed behind her as I came at them.

I barely kept my footing as I pivoted and hacked at the window. The second swing went wild and I slipped again. The axe launched from my hand and crashed through the safety-glass.

Randels came shouting out of the elevator with the nurse close behind. I got to my feet and threw one leg over the windowsill. The axe was lodged in the wall above Jane Doe Cykes’ head.

Randels punched me in the throat. I gasped and slipped from my straddling position into the cell, at the foot of her bed. Glass grated under my weight, biting into my skin, drawing more blood. Randels dug for his keys.

The air recirculator gurgled.

Randels opened the door and came in holding a flashlight out in front of him as if to ward wild animals away, the nurse creeping dutifully behind him. His brow knitted as he squinted around, then his features were eclipsed by a splatter of darkness and his arms flew to his face.

I know what the videotapes showed. The hospital claimed they never existed, but I saw them before they were destroyed. I could not be made, then, to explain what they showed. For a long time, they formed my only memory of what went on once I entered the girl’s cell.

On the tape, I stood beside Jane Doe Cykes’ bed and leaned over her, hands outstretched as if to drink in the moonstone glow of her skin. My mouth opened and closed spasmodically, my eyes rolled back in my head, and I vomited blood all over her. From out of the gash in my brow and the lacerations in my palms came fans of crimson spray like the fountains of severed arteries.

Blood cascaded out of me in a serpentine arc, and into the girl in the bed. I swiped at it, but my hand passed through the stream and emerged as dry as desert sand.

Jane Doe Cykes opened her eyes. The blood pummeled her and formed lakes in her lap, between her arms and torso, in the ravine where her rib cage gave way to her concave abdomen. Her mouth gaped and crimson jewels came pouring into her, gathering like to like with the eerie prescience of living mercury. A fountain of blood swirled and drained into her lips, and I threw myself upon her, taking her in a deep kiss.

I choked and lost control of my body, but somehow managed to hold on to her. Some of the blood flowed into my lungs, but came right back up, gushing out my nostrils. It was like trying to stifle a hearty New Year’s Eve puke. I bit through my lips, trying to hold her back, licked and frantically bit her cold, waxen lips to steal her back. I might have eaten her, if Randels hadn’t clawed at my shoulders and dragged me back.

I was losing her. Blood spat from my mouth, bubbled out of my sinuses, wept from my pores and flew across the room to the bed. She had only used me as a vessel to reach her daughter. With all we shared, she could still hide inside me, use me, and slip away—

I was too weak to resist as Randels grappled me into the corner of the cell. His teeth chattered in my ears, but he could not even speak.

Jane Doe Cykes seemed to grow, to swell, to ripen, as she absorbed the red reservoir in the bed. The girl disappeared beneath its surface. A voluptuous black-red woman lay upon the spotless sheets now, the secret form of the goddess who had slept in the veins of the bruja, visited upon the daughter from my unwitting lips.

Randels relaxed his grip and I elbowed him in the face.

I knelt before her, my arms out in surrender. “Take me! What are you waiting for? I can help you escape, I’ll be your host, just don’t leave me! You need me!”

Jane Doe Cykes stretched to bursting with an ocean of singing blood. She was breathtaking as she drew herself up and flowed to the door, her face stolen from Jane Doe Cykes’ body and reproduced as a negative framed in locks of fluid hair undulating to the beat of her heart.

After all the inquests, the civil trial and the APA review, the incident was explained away as inexplicable. The lab technician found unconscious in my closet, the vessel by which she came to my office, could shed no light on the events. The security tapes were, of course, not entered into evidence. Jane Doe Cykes was never seen again.

Dr. Randels and I both took medical leaves after the last review, he to resume drinking, I to decode the Cykes journals. Others, FBI cryptographers and a retired Army Signal Corps officer among them, tried to break them, but their skill had no personal impetus behind it. I have succeeded, at least partially, where others failed because I desperately needed to. Where I have achieved little else, I have solved at least a fragment of the mystery.

“Host A is unaware of the symbiote in her bloodstream. Interactions between the two organisms seldom take place above a cellular level, and conventional tests cannot discern any abnormal presence, though Host A attests to feeling a ‘holy spirit’ inside her when she performs her ritual cures. I believe Host A’s perception of stimuli from the outside world acts as a buffer between the host and the symbiote, suppressing any macromolecular contact. It sustained her, worked miracles through her, loved her, though she never knew it.

“If this buffer could be removed by the screening out of all stimuli from birth, the host’s perceptive sphere would be turned entirely inward, a world unto itself. In perfect darkness, they might find each other, and develop mutual comprehension, symbiotic consciousness, even a means of life support that would render nutritive intake obsolete. Host B, my darling Ruby, nears the end of her gestation period, which should make such an experiment feasible at last. Such a life will truly be a gift, when one considers the alternative to which we are all condemned.”

So I’m waiting in the dark. I’ve made encouraging progress since I weaned myself off solid food and punctured my eardrums. I must lie still, so that my pulse becomes regular enough to hypnotize me. Soon, I will lose the use of my eyes, weakening them with mild acidic irritants until I see only black, then red. I must dive into myself and slow the dismal thunder of my heartbeat until I can hear her voice again in the place where she hid inside me before, until some remnant mote of her teaches my blood to sing. I must lie still and whisper into myself until I hear a response. Soon, I know, there will be two less lonely souls in the world.

I am an ugly man. Women seldom look at me, and never in the eyes, unless I’m giving them money. So I go to strip clubs.

Let me tell you about my favorite.

The Black Box used to be called Strip Search, and before that, Freaky Kiki’s Cockpit, but nothing else about it has changed, except the cover charge. It’s a topless dive next to the airport runways. The overpriced, watery drinks keep the sailors and bikers away, and the hardcore perverts go to the all-nude shows at Les Girls and Pacer’s. Only hardcore losers and conventioneers go there, before hitting their flight home; people who can’t or won’t tell what happened to them there. Most of the locals know about the Black Box. I heard the warnings; that’s why I went.

You think you know me. I’m the sad, sick, deluded loser in the darkest corner of the club, who believes if he just keeps tipping, one day, maybe he’ll pay enough to do more than look. I am all that, and less. I keep coming, I keep paying, and they can barely bring themselves to touch my hand long enough to take money from it.

They know my name. They all shout it out when I come in, pretending to fight over me, but I always get Brandi. We have something special, she and I. She understands what I want.

She is not the prettiest, or the nicest. Drugs have made her scrawny and mean, but they have opened her to me.

She doesn’t fuck around. “Let’s get you started,” she says, grazing my crotch with a champagne bottle. It’s always open when I get there, and I’ve never asked to open it, like the other customers often do. I don’t want to know what’s really in it.

The first time, I was scared, like anyone would be. Sydni was my dancer. She had a weave and atrocious fake tits and a dangling tampon string. I dropped fifty on her for a private show, and another fifty for champagne. The only thing I remember after that is that she didn’t drink any.

I came to on a bus bench across the street from the club a few hours before dawn. A plane roared overhead, touched down and sucked newspapers off my body. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes, beer-soaked rags from the lost and found box at the club. My gold chain was missing. My wallet was cleaned out, and four hundred dollars was gone from my account, the limit I could pull out of an ATM.

There was only a hole from the first drink to when I woke up, a total void. Anything could have happened, before they robbed and stripped me. With such a vacuum, anything was possible.

But Nature hates a vacuum.

I waited a week before I went back. I wore shabby clothes and carried only a two hundred dollar roll. I cancelled all my credit cards and moved all but one hundred dollars out of my checking account.

They gave me to Brandi. She took all my money.

I woke up walking in a glade in Balboa park as the sun bled over the horizon. They gave me another glorious hole, but this time, dreams came bubbling out. Visions. Memories.

Slivers of what they said, when they thought I couldn’t hear, and what they did to me. What they did to each other. Her bony ass crushing my tiny cock, her long yellow teeth and dry gray tongue, the mouth of the bottle; her zombie eyes, sucking mine into a perfect void that ate me up and spit me out into the empty morning.

I go back about once a week. The drugs they use on me each time have the permanent effect of a heavyweight prizefight. Whole parts of my brain are going to sleep and waking less each time I recover. They get more brazen, milking me, steering me to the ATM until the bouncers cut me off and dump me on the street. I really believe they’re selling my blood.

The visions get richer, which is how I know my mind is not dying. They go on longer each time, you see, blending into waking life, so when I close my eyes, I can relive every moment in the hole, and more.

Because I could see things that I shouldn’t have seen, I started to wonder. I saw Brandi after they rushed me out, saw her shower and snort coke or go down on another stripper in the dressing rooms, and it made sense. I was seeing all of it through her eyes.

Her real name is Rhonda Elaine Scroggins. I see her go home to a trashed apartment and a boyfriend turning fat and bald, ripening into the spirit and image of the stepfather who taught her to do things to men for money. I see him hit her, make her suck off his friends at poker parties, see him feed her coke until her head is a buzzing hole of infinite possibility, and she will do anything. That’s when she is closest to me, closer than when I feed her bills at the club. I am the only thing she truly owns, the only one who’d miss her if she disappeared.

Like a moth with its antennae singed off, I blunder through the cavernous, lightless hole where the rest of my life used to be. I start to forget things—stupid shit, like my PIN number, my mother’s name, how I make a living. But for every light that goes out in my head, for every dollar I pay, a little gray light goes on inside Brandi’s, and we are closer together. I am closer than her hogbitch boyfriend, closer than any man who’s ever had her. I look out of her eyes for hours at a time, now. When she’s sky-high, I can make her hands do things, and my control is growing.

I am building up a tolerance. It takes more every time to black me out, more to get me inside her. I can control her body better than my own, but I worry that they will cut me off for good, or that my money will run out. But I keep going. What we have is something special. She is almost paid for.

On the highest, holiest night in Tenochtitlan, it was unseemly for the people to be out in the streets celebrating, and the jaguar-priests feared that so much joy could only arouse the wrath of the god they honored.

At the head of the procession, flanked by his eight companions and four warriors, his four concubines and a horde of cheering spectators, the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca capered and piped skirling plumes of languidly ecstatic song down the avenues and alleys of the imperial capital. Despite his obvious exhaustion, his suit of feathers and bells jingled a merry rhythm for the crowd to clap in time, and Ahuac, the high priest of the Smoking Mirror, noted with bored horror how they dared to look directly upon him, and hid their faces only when Ahuac marched past on the bed of crushed flower petals in the ixiptla’s wake.

Chosen from the prisoners taken in flowery combat with one of the neighboring cities, the ixiptla became the living vessel of Tezcatlipoca for a year. Showered with comforts such as the lords themselves could only covet, and bearing at the end of his reign the quetzal-plumed crown of the king himself, he paraded through the streets each night to remind the Mexica by whose grace they lived and prospered.

The ixiptla was a figure of dreadful authority, the god incarnate, and never so much as when he raged at his captors, cursed the Mexica, pleaded for his life or tried to escape. Tezcatlipoca was the arch-sorcerer, the Great Night who wrought the doom of Tula when the Toltecs denied him human flesh. In his palm danced the warrior god Huitzilopochtli, who drove the Mexica from nomadic poverty to lordship over an empire uniting the shattered Seven Tribes of Aztlan. But he was also the Smoking Mirror, god of deceit and contradiction, and lived to sow disaster among the gifts he brought, to remind the people that the world was unjust.

For his part, Ahuac was most displeased with this year’s ixiptla, and began to doubt the value of the entire ritual. This avatar of the god, a lewdly handsome captain from Tlacopan, confounded them. In battle, he had split thirty skulls before he was captured, yet under the raiment of Tezcatlipoca, he had become meek and mad as a village shaman. He was never seen to eat, yet he gave gifts of food from his robes, stolen from the lords’ banquets, for the poor. He blessed beggars and children, and gave them tiny toy jaguars carved from the walls of his luxuriant cell.

The people flocked to him tonight, and sang blasphemous songs begging for him to be spared, or at least shared out amongst the mob, and Ahuac waved the soldiers closer for fear they might lose their minds and take him.

He still harbored the hope that this year’s incarnation might grant him that moment of essential communion with the Smoking Mirror, and a momentary glimpse of the future, which the king so desperately craved and feared. But after months of fasting and bleeding and mutilating himself, of maguey thorns in his tongue and penis until he could taste or feel nothing, Ahuac simply lusted to cut out his heart, visions or no, and nearly drooled at the prospect of dividing his flesh among the lords of the city.

The ixiptla waved to the crowd, and a shower of corn and chocolate fell from his sleeve, inciting a stampede. His concubines clucked at his trickery, and wondered too loud how he had kept his flesh so robust, if he took no food for himself. His prowess with the women had shamed the legends of the god, himself, they crowed. His ritual companions hissed at the waste of such fine fare on the peasantry.

“Ah, my servants,” asked the ixiptla, “will my flesh be devoured only by the lords of the city, and by the king and all the priests?”

His companions laughed and sang in slurred monkey-chatters. “Only the finest will eat you, O lord.”

The black and gold-painted face of the ixiptla split in an unseemly white grin. “Then what will the poor have to eat? On what holy day will they have the honor of eating you, and so sharing in the gift of my flesh?”

When the last of the city lay behind them, they made their way through the crush of peasants to the waters of Tezcoco, where a canopied canoe awaited the ixiptla’s party. Behind the phallic water-dog mask of Xolotl, executioner of the gods to feed the sun, Ahuac gulped blood from his mangled tongue and forced himself through the prescribed sermon: on the midnight glory of Tezcatlipoca, on the vital symbolism of his final journey to the shrine of Tlapitzahuayan, where he shed his godhood and offered himself up for the holiday feast. He had to shout to be heard over the sounds of the people weeping.

The party made haste to the canoe, and Ahuac ordered the soldiers to harrow the crowds after someone shied a stone at him. The ixiptla climbed into the boat and took his place on the jaguar mat as if he had done this every year. As they pushed off, the rotted golden light of the moon dazzled the priest so he stumbled at the gunwale, and the ixiptla steadied him. Ahuac shrank away, sneering, “Glut yourself on their fickle worship, O Great Night, for you’ll find no such fare on your journey beneath the earth.”

The grin of the ixiptla was the moon multiplied. “But will I not rise to hear them again, as I do every year, for am I not your god?”

At the far shore, Ahuac saw that the crowds had already encircled the ancient shrine. The peasants swarmed the ixiptla as he set foot on the mud, and the priest’s heart faltered as he lost sight of him for a moment. But the living god gently pulled himself free and urged them back, taking his place in the ritual with a feverish glee. Ahuac thought he saw something pass from the crowd into his hands, and had him searched, but found nothing. No unclean blood must soil this holy ground, so Ahuac merely ordered the crowd beaten back, and cleared the path to the pyramid.

The ixiptla performed his part of the ritual well enough, breaking a reed flute on each step as he climbed towards Ahuac, who awaited him at the sanctuary atop the shrine. The priest was glad for the mask of Xolotl, for he feared what others might make of the look on his face as he beckoned the ixiptla up to the sacrificial stone.

There were no litanies to sing here, no sermons to waste on the shameless mob of children besieging the shrine. No mere words could brand them with the truth of what it meant to reach out to the gods; to them, a god was a clown bearing gifts. If the annual cycle of the ixiptla dragged on agonizingly, at least its culmination would be swift, the moment of ascension so eagerly anticipated would wash away all uncertainty.

As the ixiptla climbed the last step, legs trembling with fatigue, he murmured, “You must envy me, priest, for I shall go to the warrior’s paradise denied your kind.”

“I doubt it,” Ahuac answered, giving vent to all the gall of a lifetime. “I have communed with the heart’s blood of more men than you have in your city, and have tasted only fear of the black cloud that hides their faces. I think we have fallen from favor with our gods, and I cannot say whither your nagual will fly when I let it loose. Most likely, it will merely rot in the bellies of the lords.”

“Then whence came the order of the god to raid Tlacopan, O my priest?”

“I gave it myself,” Ahuac made the mask grin, thinking this last would melt the ixiptla’s bravado, but he only nodded and smiled back.

The ixiptla meekly lay down on the altar, baring his chest to Ahuac’s obsidian blade. The priest noticed that the ixiptla’s flesh was indeed not so withered as he had expected, given that he took no food for a year. His lips and tongue were stained black, as if he’d eaten his face-paint.

The ixiptla laughed, sly eyes ensnaring Ahuac’s as he gagged on black foam. “I have not starved, all these months, my priest. I feasted on snakes and scorpions and poisonous frogs, which the poor gave to me in return for your fine food, and tonight, I have eaten enough to kill even your god. You Mexica are so chained to your rituals; you are more a slave than I. If you do not eat this flesh, your terrible lord will hurl earthquakes and plagues on the city… but this meat is death.”

The ixiptla shuddered, and bile leaked from his slack mouth, his muscles going to water beneath his painted skin. “Will you taste my name, priest? Will you savor my courage? My heart is a codex of venom. It holds all the future you need to see.”

“At last,” Ahuac hissed, “you reveal yourself.” The priest removed his mask and showed his face to the sacrifice. He raised the obsidian knife over the ixiptla and cracked his chest wide, as he had done it hundreds of times here and thousands in his dreams, ripped out his heart and held it up for the ixiptla to see.

Close before his clouding eyes, Ahuac bit into the beating heart and gorged himself on the envenomed blood. Choking now as it mingled with his own, Ahuac said, “Your name is Tezcatlipoca.”

Even as his own strength began to fail, Ahuac ordered the body of the ixiptla to be prepared for the feast.

He pulled up to the crosswalk at Hinterland and Blossom, in a big goddamned rush, but not too much rush to stop for a pedestrian. When citizens shirk their duties to their fellow man, he reminded himself to soothe the nervous twitch in his leg muscles as he braked, then everything goes to hell.

But the human toadstool just stayed planted on the curb, digging at a ragweed sprouting from a crack with one shiftless toe. Maybe lost, maybe just visiting this planet, but he was wasting the driver’s time. The selfishness of the patient black smear made him see red. “Enough’s enough, ped; move ‘em or lose ‘em.”

He kneaded the wheel, gunned his engine to urge him along, but no dice. Hours passed behind the driver’s sweat-streaked brow, an unforgivable sentence, until finally, the slacker feebly waved him on, evidently satisfied he’d stolen a sufficient chunk of the driver’s life. Standing still as a portrait on the corner, hooded from the rapacious blade of his stare. He peeled out to regain the lost time, but mostly to blow off steam, shouting out his window, “What makes you think you’re worth running over?”

The next day, in an unusually big goddamned rush, due to the sheets of black sleet holding traffic down to a blind baby’s crawl, he burned down Hinterland through the red light at Blossom with his gas foot crushed to the floor.

Shimmying across smoky black glass like a needle on a grooveless record, bathed in the dim red stoplight bloodglow, as the walker on the curb went all eyes to take him in. Sucker’s eyes. Twice shy and no time to spare playing the clown for another stinking ped. Off the curb at the light’s indifferent command to WALK, spasming like an epileptic bullfighter in an involuntary veronica, his foot snatched back from the scissorblade tire and scarred gunmetal tarmac, suddenly as precious as found money.

In any orderly society, thinks the driver, easing down on the accelerator to turn onto Victory Circle, in any one that really works, there’s got to be give and take, or everything just goes to hell.

“God-dog-damned if I’m gonna let some hot-rodder holier-than-y’all motherfucker run me down,” swore the pedestrian, breathless, at the tiny, faraway car. Shook his red windbreaker over his head. He wandered away from Hinterland, down Warren, where the dark burns brighter than any light. Kicking a trail through scattered trash, fists balled in pockets. Into a hole in the wall to recover, regroup, and strategize.

He felt his reflexive anger taking root in reason and unfurling to entangle his mind in red shoots of hate. He was alive, wasn’t he? A faceless stranger had tried to take that life, for no other reason than that he could, because he had a car. Sick mothers, every one of them foaming at the mouth, looking to get put down. He watched Hinterland out his barred window.

He felt it swell into a tower inside him that night on Hinterland and Luddite, only to fall when he threw a brick at the next speeder was too important to let him stop at the crosswalk. He went home to get a beer, at peace with the world.

His fiberglass bodywork was smashed to hell, remolded and repainted at stellar cost—the computerized custom paint-matching alone ate up a paycheck—that his insurance company deftly squirmed out of paying. The assaulted driver now saw the street’s camouflaged threats with new eyes. The meaningless blurs resolved when he slowed to pace them into sinister shapes brandishing weapons under coats and behind packages, pretending to buy drugs or forage for change in payphones, huddling, plotting to take their frustrations out on their betters. He cruised late into the nights down alleys and avenues in questionable areas to show he was not afraid.

His new vision bore fruit during a night patrol on Hinterland and Conquistador, when the ped sent by his nemesis charged out in front of his car from behind a burning pay latrine, one arm cocked to seal his fate. His independent suspension bore out the impact without spilling his coffee. When they stopped him at Hinterland and Cassandra, it was all he could do not to bust out laughing.

The injury to his grillwork and rightside turn signal would cost much less than the damage caused by the brick. He realized how much smoother it would go to play dumb and keep his motive to himself. They knew the score, and would only have to look him in the eye to know the truth, but no one did. An accomplice had removed the pedestrian attacker’s weapon from the scene before anyone had seen it, complicating any self-defense case he might try to make. He would ride out his probation and suspended license with a clean conscience and, most importantly, no fear.

The slain pedestrian’s widower found himself aimlessly wandering the streets in the freezing rain coming back from the hospital. He studied the slick gray asphalt scrolling beneath him alongside the black tarmac, separate and supremely unequal, looking for chalk outlines. Upon reaching the northbound Conquistador crosswalk, he stopped cold and began to cry.

This was where it happened. This was the scene. His grief eroded into panic as the gauntlet of idling automobiles, held back only by the blind blinking lights, honked their horns, daring him to step into the no man’s land of the intersection.

“Got stage fright, asshole?” someone behind the headlights shouted and gunned his engine. After what seemed like days of chewing his lip the pedestrian waved them sheepishly on from the curb…

Saturday mornings, rain or shine, Jubal Gibbons and his son, Caleb, walked neighborhood rounds, spreading the Word.

By age seven, Caleb had already deduced that very few of their neighbors had any real interest in God’s message, and nobody seemed to want to hear it from Father. At thirteen, he sleepwalked through the agonizing ordeal with the weary aplomb of late middle age. He knew which houses had kids from school, and hid until the door slammed in Father’s face. He knew which houses had lonely weirdoes who would suffer an afternoon of Father’s sermons just for the company, but never convert. He knew when he could catch a decent nap just out of earshot, until the loud call to prayer jolted him out of dreams of watching TV and talking to girls.

Father did this not because the church expected it of him, but as penance. He knew his naked faith scared or offended most decent suburban folk, and banged his head against their repulsion as a way of demonstrating his total commitment to his God. Sometimes he volunteered to help with yardwork or chores in return for a shared prayer vigil. They drank beer and laughed at him as he raked their lawns, and never warmed to his faith. Jubal didn’t seem to care, or else he buried it so deep that it only came out as a more intense, angry silence.

Why he brought Caleb, when it was clear his son had other things on his mind, had taken longer to unravel, but with nothing but church pamphlets and his pocket Bible to read, he’d had a lifetime of Saturdays to mull it over. God did not speak to Caleb as He had to Jubal, who heard the Lord with such stunning intensity that he’d been committed twice. Surely Caleb, with his mumbled, cracking prayers and sweaty, fidgeting hands, could only spook the heathens and queer the pitch.

Father had no hope of kindling a torch of faith in his son, who’d been ruined by public school, but dragged him through the godforsaken backwaters of their neighborhood to peek into the homes of strangers and show him how they lived without God in their lives—the hangovers, the neglected children, the smut coming out of the TV. Never did the endless, episodic lecture turn to why the godless houses were larger and nicer than theirs, or why the sinners who lived in them had better jobs and were still married, and home on Saturday with squeaky-clean consciences.

On rainy days, they rode in the old Pacer with the leaky moon roof, but on sunny summer days like this, Father brought an extra sheaf of pamphlets. They started in their own neighborhood, and walked until every pamphlet had been delivered.

As he limped the last mile of their route on this blistering late August day, with his feet swollen halfway out of his cheap brown shoes and the grubby canvas pamphlet bag chafing the calluses around his wrist, Caleb daydreamed about the Pacer with its AC that blew only smoky engine heat, windows that only rolled halfway down, broken bumper festooned with embarrassing bumper stickers—MY GOD IS AN AWESOME GOD; FOLLOW ME TO SALVATION; HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD MADE FLESH?

He dreamed of Father actually making just one sincere convert, and ascending bodily up to Heaven like the Prophets of old, or maybe just chucking the pamphlets in the gutter and leaving Caleb in front of a bar. Either would be fine.

Caleb despised the Mormons who breezed past them on their ten-speeds, wind ballooning their short-sleeve white shirts out behind them.

Father came to the door of a house they had visited every month for the last eight years, though the man who lived there never answered. The door opened as Father raised his fist to knock. A magazine girl staggered out, her laminated conversation card in hand and her shirt half-unbuttoned. Her face was flushed, and the man inside the door wore a bathrobe and a bestial grin.

Jubal railed at the house until the sinner threatened to call the police. Caleb had to drag his father away. He was disgusted with his own excitement over the episode, but couldn’t condemn her. At least she got inside. At least she was selling something somebody wanted.

If Caleb hoped Father would be moved to give up for the day, he should have known better. As they split their dry tuna sandwich and a mushy Bartlett pear on the concrete bench in a neighborhood park, Jubal studied the street map on his clipboard and slashed at it with a felt tip marker. “We’ve tried and tried with this area, and none will hear us. They are dead to the word.”

Caleb nodded mutely at the solemn verdict. More of the world was dead to them every year, with this simple marking out. Television, Catholics, Jews, Islamists, evolutionists, fornicators, his teachers, his fellow students, Caleb’s mother—all dead.

“We’ll go spread the word down here, today,” he announced, tracing an arrow across the map, like the scythe of a conquering army, into the Hollows.

A maze of steep hills, canyons and cul-de-sacs that seemed to twist on forever, the Hollows was mercifully out of their territory. Caleb truly pitied whoever had to walk it every Saturday. “Isn’t that someone else’s route, Father?”

“No, son,” Jubal answered, “not for a long time. The church gave up on it years ago. I’ve heard…” he clammed up, then leaked a little smile, as he knowingly sinned. He wanted so badly to excite his son that he gossiped. “I heard once that a couple of missionaries even quit the church after walking the Hollows. Nobody ever knew why—”

“What happened to them, Father?”

“They left the church, Caleb. Their faith was broken. We never saw them again—”

They set out from the park and plunged into the eucalyptus-shadows of the Hollows. Though the shade was a blessing, the heat was, if anything, even thicker, a syrupy membrane pregnant with thirsty mosquitoes. Caleb marched on behind his father, who consulted his pocket Bible in preparation for the first house.

No one answered the first door, or the second, or the third. Oh, they were home, and made no secret of it. TV’s blared cartoon and baseball noises, but no suspicious phantoms darkened the fisheye lens set into each door, no children peeked at them out the mail slots.

Father knocked louder at the fourth house, and made Caleb ring the doorbell. At the fifth house, he knocked and read from his Bible in a braying shout, like a battlefield chaplain saying mass over artillery strikes. Inside, someone laughed, and a lawnmower started up in the backyard. Caleb backed off the porch and called, “Come on, Father,” wanting to add, We’re dead to them.

Caleb’s father was apoplectic, face mottled with red rage, jaw muscles working like fists in his mouth. Caleb began to worry that if anyone ever did answer their door, he was going to pummel them with his tiny Bible. It went on like this until the bottom of the next cul-de-sac.

Jubal Gibbons stood in the middle of the dead end street, ringed by haphazardly parked cars and overflowing recycling bins, looking up at the brutally blue sky like he was daring lightning to strike him down. The look on his face made Caleb shy away to the curb. “Father, come out of the street. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea—”

“A few more, then we’ll turn back,” Jubal finally said, as if he were relaying a message from on high that he didn’t particularly care for. He crossed to the sidewalk and went up the crushed gravel path of the house at the end.

It was a swaybacked two-story villa with Spanish colonial trappings, cracked pink adobe walls and red tile peeking out through lush tufts of glossy green-black ivy. Eucalyptus and willow trees vied with rampant stands of bamboo and pampas grass for dominance over the front yard, flanked the sprawling house to climb the hills and join an unruly backyard wilderness. Caleb heard birds—not the croaking crows that had driven every other flying creature from the suburbs, but a lively symphony of mating calls and twittering sirens that drowned out the other muted sounds of the neighborhood.

Caleb approached the house with a new spring in his stride, but he stopped dead when he came up to Father at the porch, his Bible and pamphlets held out in a rare and terrifying gesture. “You do this one, son.”

Fresh waves of sweat oozed out of Caleb’s armpits and stung his eyes and acne. He hadn’t been entrusted with the duty in weeks, and hadn’t missed it. The prospect of leading the charge into a stranger’s home, a gangly thirteen year old swimming in the kind of cheap suit poor kids got buried in, and trying to seize their souls and turn them to Glory, made him hate himself for being too weak to tell Father what he really believed. “Yes, sir. Um, and if there’s nobody home?”

“Keep going ‘til you get one, son.” Father rapped on the front door and stepped behind Caleb.

The door opened just a crack and a single eye regarded him. “Good morning,” he stumbled. “Um… isn’t it a lovely day?”

“You look hot,” said a woman’s voice, low and knowing.

The door swung wider, and Caleb stepped back into Father’s shoving hand.

“Do you… Ha-have you… ever heard of the glory of the Word Made Flesh?”

“Why don’t you come in and tell me about it? You and your chaperone…”

Father’s grip on the back of his blazer tightened. “Is the man of the house present, ma’am?”

“No men at all to speak to, in here,” she replied. “Come in, please. I’m very interested in what you have to say about the Bible.”

Slowly, Caleb’s sun-dazzled eyes picked her out of the gloom. She wore a black kimono, and rich, wild whorls of burnished auburn hair tumbled down to her shoulders. She was younger than Father, but would never look older. His eyes roamed crazily over her body, voluptuous curves straining at loosely tied silk, the fluid poise of her stance in the doorway, the delicious, mischievous grin when he finally met her stare and retreated to study her doormat.

He knew of girls like this from school, but women like this had been dead to him all his life. He’d always been told that sin killed them before they could become mothers and spread their taint.

Caleb wondered what Father was doing behind him. A rough, rigid hand still held him leashed, but he neither pulled nor pushed. “Maybe we could come back at a more appropriate time, ma’am.”

She reached out and took Caleb’s hand. Her skin was pale cream, so soft and smooth you could swim in it. When her hand touched his, he had to restrain his other hand from going for her. Boiling blood flushed his sin-hungry body, draining out of his head.

He didn’t notice the furniture or the décor as it slipped past. Blotchy planes of black and green were all he could register. His eyes never adjusted to the dark, as if the sight of her leeched away the background. His head swiveled idiotically to keep her in sight as Father steered him into a living room and onto a couch soft as quicksand. The woman followed them in, offering coffee, tea, soda pop…

“Just a glass of water, ma’am, if you please,” Father said.

“And for you, young man?”

Father replied for him, “We’ll share, thank you.”

“Fine, I’ll be right back.” She vanished through the kitchen door.

Father whispered out the side of his mouth, “What was that, son?”

Caleb couldn’t turn to look at his father. “What, Father?”

“You raped that woman with your eyes. There you’ll be before God at your judgment, facing up to what you just did. Just you tell her about the Word, and we’ll get on to the next house.”

Caleb swallowed a knot of fear that his father would demand that he show her. He was not ready for that, did not ever want to be. “Why did we come in, then, Father? Why don’t we just leave? Is she worth saving, if it damns us?”

“Mind your mouth, boy. Your faith is hanging by a thread, don’t think I can’t see that. You’d better step up, before even I can’t save you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This whore has something south of the soul on her mind at the moment, but we’re going to show her the true face of God in the Word. Are we going to save her, son?”

Show her. Oh, God. The social worker hardly ever checked him for marks, anymore… “Yes, sir.”

She came back in and offered the glass to Caleb, smiling at his father. “If he’s going to be doing all the talking,” she said.

Caleb tried to force a smile, took the water to drown it. Thunderclouds gathered over Father’s head.

She sat on the couch beside Caleb, taking care to loosen the belt of her kimono. “So tell me about your religion, hon.”

“Well, the Bible you may have read tells us how God created the earth and man, and how man sinned against God and fell from grace, but up until now, you haven’t heard the whole story. You haven’t heard the Good News.”

“Oh, I haven’t?”

“No, ma’am, there’s more to it, but for a long time, the book of the Bible that told it has been left out by unscrupulous worldly powers concerned for their own gain.”

“You mean the Gnostic Gospels, or the Apocrypha?”

He was stunned. Looking to Father, who also studied the woman with new eyes, he managed, “Yes, that’s right, but the book I speak of is still buried in secrecy.”

“And what does this book say, that’s so controversial?”

“I’m glad you asked,” he said, though he wasn’t. “In brief, what it teaches is the nature of man’s relationship with God. In the age of miracles, God was without, and visited those whom He would command to serve Him, or to bear witness to His divine works. Yet the age of miracles is long gone with the New Testament and the rebirth of Jesus. Where has God gone?

“In the lost Gospel, God speaks to the last prophet and declares his woe at the perpetual fall of mankind. He decries His attempts to purge and purify, to teach His chosen people, and sees no joy left in the world. Unable to die, He enters humankind, into all of us, and loses Himself in His Creation.”

She smiled. “So your book denies the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, and affirms an individual relationship with God, which would make all churches obsolete and false.”

Caleb stuttered and kicked his father’s knee. After a choking moment, Jubal said, “It affirms the divinity of all humankind, because God lives in us, ma’am.”

She purred, deep down in her throat. “Tell me more.”

Eyes on his father again, but he saw no help there. Jubal just stared at the woman. Caleb looked around, disturbed that he still only saw the green-black smear around her. Was there a room here, a space with all the things a living person needed and loved and wanted to show off? Father seemed to be trapped in the same fugue—sunstroke, that’s what it was. He bolted down the last of the water, rebuking himself, but Father didn’t notice. Caleb looked at her.

Her skin shone brighter, beaded with jewels of sweat. When he held the Bible up before his eyes, he saw where she’d touched his hand. It glowed too, but red and ripe, like a hothouse tomato or a blood blister.

“Sit down, Caleb,” Father said. “Tell the woman.”

“Well, what—what,” Caleb stuttered, “what would you like to know?”

“About your God. You say he’s real, and he’s watching.”

“He’s your God, too, ma’am,” Caleb shot back, “He’s the God of the Bible…”

“And stage and screen, I know. But if God resides in us all, why doesn’t he ever speak to us? Why is the world getting worse all the time, if he’s in us? Why would he need a church, or sweet young men like you to spread his word?” “Because He sleeps in us, ma’am, and stirs only in the pure hearts of the faithful. And we have been charged with spreading His word, in preparation for the day when He will awaken in all of us, because we have seen His true face.”

“Can you show me His true face right now? Is there a picture of it in your Bible?”

Caleb almost laughed, until he saw how her eyes baited him. This was not a nice lady, he saw suddenly, but to his shame, not all of his body got the message. He wrapped himself around the Bible to hide his distress, which his cheap polyester slacks were not designed to accommodate. “If I may read from our Gospel,” he mumbled, clawing through the tiny book so that the onionskin pages came apart in his clammy hands.

“You do that, son,” Father muttered dreamily. “Show her.”

As soon as he started to read, Caleb knew something was going wrong. The woman returned Father’s vacant stare with a wide smile, and shifted her body towards him. Caleb dared, on the familiar verses, to flick his eyes up over the book.

Father stared at her, but his hands battled in his lap and his head traced a sleepy, bobbing circle. His lips moved, mouthing something in the spaces between the words of the Lost Gospel. The woman nodded and moved her body some more, caressing her silken thighs.

Caleb read louder and faster, reaching out to take Father’s hand, but it slapped him away, and was too greased with sweat to hold on to. He read faster. He read louder. He made it worse.

“I can show you the face of God,” she hissed. She spread her legs wider, and Father leapt to his feet.

Finally, thank the Lord! Caleb started to climb up from the couch, when he felt dizzy. He barely saw Father fall to his knees before the woman’s yawning legs and cry out in gobbling, glossolalian imprecations to whatever he saw in there, between them.

Caleb, who had grown up too close to his father and the bosom of the church, had no idea what a normal woman’s private parts looked like—he was barely familiar with his own. But he knew that whatever lurked there normally did not exert such monstrous control over a man.

He did not awaken, so much as he was born again.

Into Hell.

Dark, itchy heat, smoke and nausea, like he was shrouded in burning jute. His first thought was, God, we failed you and we died, and we deserve this...

Hands pawed at him, lifted him up and touched his face. Something wrapped around his head was slowly unwound. The blackness took on layers of red. “Oh, God, look to your servant,” he cried out.

“He can’t hear you,” a voice croaked, spit and rot-breath in his face. “He isn’t here.” And Caleb knew he really must be in Hell, for the voice was his father’s.

Father hovered over him, head cocked pitifully to listen to his son’s breathing. Broken, bloody hands fumbled up and down Caleb’s body. He was blindfolded like Caleb, but two bloody asterisks stained the burlap where his eyes should have been. So none of it was a dream.

It was Hell, only smaller.

He lay on a hot earthen floor, against a mold-encrusted cinderblock wall. In the center of the room, a pit had been dug and filled with glowing coals, and it was by this murky red light that he saw. The opposite wall stood only fifty feet or so away. To his left, fifteen feet above the floor, a door was set into the wall, and brackets from a staircase that had been destroyed to make this ordinary suburban basement into a dungeon.

Caleb looked at the other wall.

A gang of men worked there. Draped in rags and coated with soot, they groaned like the damned. He heard grinding and chipping, and low, rhythmic grunts of torturous toil and sighs of unrequited lust. The men swarmed over the wall like ants dismantling a corpse, and at first Caleb thought they were digging a tunnel. They had no proper tools, only jagged bits of rock and their own fingers.

It was an image of her. From floor to ceiling, they had carved a lovingly detailed idol out of the gray-green stone beneath the house. She stared down on them with the same knowing half-smile with which she had first bewitched Caleb and his father. They had painted her hair red with their own blood, and her eyes gleamed with inlaid quartz crystals and shards of green glass.

The work was very close to completion, and doubly impressive when Caleb observed that the artisans had not an eye between them. She was the last thing they saw before they blinded themselves, and her image lingered in their hearts and spilled out into the walls of their prison, now a temple.

But of course, like the blind men describing the elephant, they had gotten it all wrong. Her nose was a pair of jutting breasts, their succulent tenderness painfully apparent even in the brittle stone. Worse still was the mouth, the smile rendered vertically and smeared liberally with layers of dried blood and hair. Though it bore only incidental resemblance to a mouth, yet it had teeth—row upon row of polished bones jammed between the rosette layers of obscenely exaggerated lips.

“How long have we been here, Father?”

“I don’t know, son. Maybe a few hours, maybe a day… but eternity awaits.”

“But we’re going to get out, right? She’s just a whore—and we can pray for a miracle.”

“We don’t deserve one, son.”

The quavering in his father’s voice provoked him to shout. “Why? We have the Word. We have only to call on Him, and awaken Him from His slumber in our unworthy flesh, and He will lighten our burdens.”

Father swatted the verses out of the air like a noisome odor. “We have failed the Word.”

“But you believed, Father, and I believe. What about us?”

“I believed with all my heart, son, but… I was powerless…”

“But God spoke to you, Dad! He chose you! This is—it has to be a test.”

“We failed, son. This is punishment. I’ll hear no more—”

“What about the Church, Father? They’ll come looking for us, won’t they?” But Caleb knew the answer, and regretted rubbing sand in the old wound. “I mean, even though we’re not really members, anymore—”

“We weren’t cast out, son. The church dissolved. There were never more than twelve of us, anyway, and most of them up and left before you were born. Those stupid damned teenage boys I told you about, they were the last.”

Two slaves turned their eyeless heads toward Father and limped closer. One of them whispered, “Hey, Brother Gibbons, is that you?”

“Who wants to know?” Father demanded.

“Josh Heslop, sir, I was a member of your church, with my mom and stepfather? I used to go around door to door, preaching all that shit you told us? I wanted to thank you, sir, for showing me the way—to Her, I mean. I never would have found my true calling if not for you, and it’s so cool that you’re here, too…”

The young man stood a head taller than Father, and had a beard like a hermit, wraparound shades and matted dreadlocks down to his ass. Beneath years of soot and filth, Caleb made out the rags of black polyester slacks and white Perma-Prest shirt.

Father squirmed and squeezed his temples, scratching under his blood-rusted blindfold. “Joshua Heslop… you and that other boy…”

“Danny Collier. He’s here, too, but he made Her mad, and he’s ashamed of himself, right now.” Josh shook his head in pity. “Hey, do you have anything to eat?”

Father shook his head, “Sorry, son, no.”

“Brother Gibbons, how are my folks? I haven’t seen them since I… came here, about, what, a couple years ago…?”

“They left the church after you disappeared. Everyone agreed you ran away, and it was nobody’s fault, but it broke their faith. They left the church and moved out of state, I’ve no idea where.”

Caleb reached out to Brother Joshua, asked, “Would you like to pray together, Brother?”

Joshua snorted, spat on the ground, something like a laugh escaping his cracked lips. “Shit, dude, get over it, already. She told us the truth about your church.”

Caleb jumped. “But the Lost Gospel—”

“The scrolls were written in Milwaukee in 1973 by a defrocked minister named Jubal Gibbons. He told my folks he translated them from scrolls he smuggled out of the Holy Land, but he made it all up while he was in a loony bin. My mom answered his ad in the back of a magazine. She was batshit crazy, too.”

Caleb wanted to slap the man, but he looked to Father. “He’s lying, isn’t he, Father? Tell him the truth!”

Father shook his head fiercely. “God spoke to me, in my flesh… but I’ve failed Him…”

“But the church is real,” Caleb snapped.

“Jesus, kid. There is no goddamned church. Your Dad started the church, but he blew it. He never even got a building, and my folks were just about the last suckers left in his flock.”

Caleb remembered a few holiday gatherings with strangers Father called Brother and Sister, but nothing after he was of school age, after Mom went away and became dead to them. Church was every day, every hour, at home with Father. “No, but… I thought, after Mom left, we got exiled…”

“It’s all a big scam, kid. Your Father was just too dumb to get rich off it. But now it’s cool, because you’re here.”

“God is going to save us, isn’t he, Father?”

Father just kept shaking his head.

“We’ve been sowing the Word our whole lives, Father! What has He ever done for us?”

The door opened and white light stabbed down into the scarlet dark. Caleb recoiled from the painful brightness, but the eyeless slaves dropped their tools and came away from the great work. They stampeded past, changing course only to avoid the fire. Caleb clung to the wall to escape being trampled. There were at least two dozen of them.

“Who are they, Father?” he asked, but he knew the answer. Magazine hustlers, candy peddlers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, handymen, gardeners, door-to-door salesmen in the blackened rags of their varied trades. Men who made such pests of themselves, that their vanishing only inspired relief.

They pressed against the wall beneath the elevated door, and Caleb could make out a silhouette at the heart of the light. She stood there and basked in their worship as they gloried in the feel of the fresh air that spilled into their dank domain, rife with her ambrosial perfume.

Caleb pinched his nose shut. She secreted some kind of poison that bewitched their minds. It was what had burned his hand. Perhaps he was allergic to it. It didn’t seem to affect him like it did the others.

She waved an arm, and rain fell in the basement. Caleb heard sprinklers gurgle and hiss in the ceiling, felt water drizzle on his face and gratefully washed himself, taking great gulps until his belly ached.

The water shut off too soon, and the crowd pressed closer still beneath the doorway. They raised their hands up, and she stepped down on them. They knelt and bore her tread on their backs until she reached the ground. Now Caleb saw her, and had to look away, because he still could not believe his eyes.

He looked back as they set her down and crowded against her on all sides. They pressed close with faces and hands outstretched as if she radiated life-giving sunlight.

Whatever he’d seen upstairs, now she looked much older. She was a hag, fat and stooped over a medicine ball gut, draped in a frayed black bathrobe and rubber rain boots. Old and wrinkled she was, but not frail, even Caleb could tell that. Thick flab drooped off heavy bones and gnarly muscle as she lewdly gyrated and set the blind crowd to baying and barking as if they could, somehow, see her.

She carried a covered tin pail and a long, serrated steak knife. The knife shook in her hand, but not from palsy. In her bright, tiny eyes, Caleb saw hideous eagerness, as she looked through the mob right at him.

“Why didn’t she cut out my eyes, Father?”

His father shook and dripped rain on him. “You have to see it, son. You’ve never had—never sinned with a woman, so it won’t work on you. Somebody has to see Her, I think. Oh God, help me, I can’t…”

Father tore away from Caleb and joined the throng kneeling before the crone. She looked around like she was deciding which chicken to kill for dinner. “The Goddess is pleased with what you have wrought. The image is almost completed, but the age of desire cannot be won without sacrifice. One of you must open the door with your blood.”

The mob murmured to itself, but Caleb backed away, calling to his father.

“Who among you is false in his love for the Goddess?”

“No! No!” they shouted, but she lashed out, slashing one across his scalp and braining another with the bucket.

“Don’t hide him! I let him come among you as a test, to see who loves me most. You must find him and bring him, you who truly love the Goddess.”

Hands closed on Caleb, hauled him up over their heads. Somewhere, Father fought, but his words were garbled. He seemed to be shouting, “Show them, Lord! Show the boy!”

Caleb was dropped, kicking and screaming, into the open space before the Goddess. They forced him to kneel, slammed his forehead into the mud, which was fine, he didn’t want to look, but then he did.

She was almost bald, with a nylon stocking stretched over her liver-spotted cranium to hold the few remaining tufts of rusty white hair in place. She smiled at him. She hadn’t even put her teeth in, before coming down to accept their worship.

“Yes, your love for the Goddess is false,” she lisped. “Your defiance is offensive to Her sight.”

“Let us kill him!” they cried, “we’re so hungry…”

The Goddess laughed. “Oh, the goddess loves you, but She loves to be loved, most of all. Her love is impossible to resist. I would not spill the blood of a heathen in this sacred place, so he must be made to love me. Pray for him, pray for him to love me, and save you all for the age of desire to come!”

They prayed for Caleb to love her, so she would kill him. They prayed for her to let them have his flesh. They prayed until he screamed to drown them out, a wordless howl that made the hag gnash her gums at him as she saw through him.

Light poured out of her skin, so much light he had to turn away, but some irresistible magnet pulled him back to her; that scent, that light, filling him with golden power, and he would do anything to put it into Her divine body, to give it back a thousandfold, to give everything, even his life.

He saw her again as she wanted to be seen, young and ripe and lovely, and rejoiced in his rebirth. “I love you,” he crowed, and fell back to abasing himself in the mud. “I love you.”

“No, not yet, sweetheart, but you will,” she said, and handed him the knife.

“Now go and find me the one who loves me least, and offer him up to me. I read your silly fake Bible, too, so I know you know how to do it.”

Caleb rose and took the knife from her hand, twitching at a feathery touch at his wrist. He turned on the crowd, and almost instantly saw himself about to do it. He reached out with the knife to stab at the nearest worshipper, but stayed his hand. It was Father.

The mob drew back around them and began, slowly, but with great force, to pound the muddy ground.

“Go on, son,” he said. “Do it. I want you to.”

Caleb hugged the knife. “No, Father, I can’t…”

“You have to, son. It’s the only way.”

“The only way to what, Father? You want me to…”

The knife cut Father’s thumb to the bone, but he tugged it, jabbed his chest with it. “Do you remember the face of God, son?”

“Father, I won’t hurt you…” he said, but he remembered.

It was his earliest memory. The night his father saw it in a dream after fasting for a week. The drawings, the paintings, the carvings, the cutting, the commitment. Three months in a foster home until his father got out, totally cured, coming into his bedroom and hacking the face into the lampshade so it projected on the ceiling and far wall, and the beating when he said it looked like a monster, Father roaring, “He is your God! He is the Word Made Flesh, the Lord of Hosts, and He sleeps in you!”

Father, eyeless, stared up at him. The shiny scars of the image on his chest glinted in the firelight like the unconnected dots of a surgeon’s coloring book. “Take the knife and call Him, Caleb. Like I showed you. Do it.”

Someone shoved Caleb and he fell down on one knee. Father lunged onto the knife, then arced back as reflex kicked in. He thrashed in the mud with the knife up to its hilt in his belly. The mob closed in behind Caleb, drumming on his back.

Father clasped the knife and wrenched it out of Caleb’s hands. Caleb fought to get it back, but only cut himself on it. The crowd pressed him down, their screams crushing his father’s prayer.

“Lord, look to your servant, and awaken in this, thy unworthiest vessel! Lord, make me Your own!” Father coughed a gout of blood in Caleb’s face.

The crowd sprang back as if from an electric shock, then began to pound the ground again. Caleb climbed off his father and wiped the gore from his eyes.

Father lay on his back, crushed into the mud, his hands working the knife deep into his abdomen. Caleb was revolted, shocked beyond breath, but he bore witness.

Jubal Gibbons was nearly finished completing the image of his God, worked in the transient medium of his own flesh. The knife had cored out grievous circular holes in his pectoral muscles, and the spirals of radiant fury spilling out of them, converging upon the third eye over the sternum and the heart. His hands shook and nearly failed as they completed the seppuku slash of the wide, downturned mouth in the floor of his modest potbelly. Until the last foamy freshet of lung-blood splashed out of his mouth and jetted from the eyes cored out of his chest, Father prayed, “Awaken in me, Lord, make a miracle, Lord… teach my son to love you…”

The Goddess was displeased. She laid into the prone worshippers with the pail, spilling stew onto some so that others attacked them to lick it off. “Come here, boy,” she growled, but Caleb didn’t look at her. She had no power over him so long as he didn’t look, didn’t breathe…

“Come here, Caleb,” she said. “You’re a man, now. The Goddess has something to show you—”

Caleb turned to look at Father, who was quite dead. His arms lay out to the sides. The knife stood upright out of the corner of his drooling abdominal grin.

Caleb wanted to tear out his own eyes, but for what his father had said, just before he died. Knowing the Lost Gospel was an insane lie, he’d given his life for his faith, not to escape this hell, but to save his son’s soul, to awaken God—

The hag raised the hem of her bathrobe up over her hips. A stench like mothballs and old flypaper soured the air. Caleb looked at his father and prayed.

Deep in the heart-blood mandala bored into Father’s chest, a red eye opened.

The Goddess came closer. Caleb gagged on her rancid perfume, but he was so choked up with love and rage, that he was quite beyond her power.

“Here is your offering, children! The Goddess is well-pleased. Now, feast!”

They closed in on Father and began to tear at him. Caleb tried to break in, but he was clubbed and thrown away.

The mob exploded and broke apart, bodies flung and broken against the walls. Father stood as if he’d been yanked upright by a noose.

One worshipper tried to strike him with his fist, but Father’s yawned abdominal cavity gnashed jagged ribcage teeth and bit off his arm at the elbow.

Father moved through the crowd on puppeteer’s strings, arms pistoning to hammer down anyone who got in his way, or to feed them to the mouth. As he waded through the slaughter, Father soaked up horrendous blows, shrugged off men who tackled and stabbed him, and advanced, step by step, on the Goddess.

In his mutilated chest, the lower pair of eyes rolled and flashed in their settings of dead flesh, while the third bored straight ahead into the infinite, beholding all futures, all secrets. White light blazed out of the eyeholes like a radioactive jack-o-lantern. Scalding blood bubbled out of its nose slits as it snorted in scornful, Mosaic rage. The gaping, saturnine mouth quivered and sprayed sizzling gore and offal in a frustrated attempt to speak. Caleb sank to his knees and prayed silently as it lumbered past him.

The Goddess backed up to cling to the bas-relief idol carved into the wall. A weeping throng of worshippers struggled to lift her up, but her illusion faltered, and their strength was sapped. She tumbled on them and lay prone at Father’s feet.

She screamed curses at him, but the lips of God spoke in the First Tongue, and though none understood it, all fell still. The mouth dropped open wide, and blobs of inflammable bile roared out and smashed her flat. The blind mob backed away as the hag writhed in a cocoon of napalm, leaving a snail-trail of ash and burning fat, mewling like a litter of kittens.

Father lurched away across the basement to the door, which still stood open, spilling heavenly sunlight into the dark. Tripping on his own intestines, he collapsed against the cinderblock wall, beckoning to Caleb, and pointed up.

The divine light of the eyes in his chest had gone dim, and the mouth was only a fatal wound like what samurais gave themselves when they royally goofed up. No strings held him up, anymore.

Caleb pushed through the motionless crowd and stepped into the cradle his father made with his hands. Shaking, Father hoisted Caleb up over his head and within reach of the threshold. Caleb caught it and wedged his elbow against the door, was almost vaulted head over feet into the kitchen as his father threw him.

He turned and reached down for Father’s hand, but Jubal Gibbons backed away into the pool of sunlight. As his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, his bowels spilled out and coiled around his hands, which steepled at his belly. “Thank you, Lord…”

One by one, the heathens fell down before his corpse and bowed in worship.

Caleb went to find a phone, numbly wandering among mountains of old tabloids. He felt itchy all over, as if something crawled under his skin.

Looking around, he noticed another rash on his arm where Father had touched him. Angry red sores swelled and spread down the length of his forearm, bursting open to bear witness and speak in tongues. He tore off his shirt and scratched. The Word was alive in him, and needed no knife to let it out.

Stumbling out the front door into pounding sunlight, and birds exploded from the trees and swirled over his head like leaves in a hurricane, their flitting bodies defining a shifting but unmistakable face. The shoals of clouds masking the sun knitted into a beetling tri-ocular brow that bore down on him and pinned him to the earth until the Word lifted him up and sent him flying into the street.

He could not find the breath to scream or to pray, but the eyes and mouth of the Word opened all over him, and sounded a call to worship that shattered every window, knocked down every door.

Gone and forgotten was the time of humble begging, when he would plead with them to accept the god that slept in his flesh as their savior. Now, it was their turn to beg…

It wasn’t in the nature of the place for anyone who worked at The Tender Trap Adult Books & Video to notice what went on in the #9 coin-op video booth. Real human contact was not what anyone came there for, and those who lurked and groped themselves in the booths were the most painfully shy customers, like ghosts sure to vanish under a good strong stare.

Violet was a quick study, having learned early in life the connection between constant vigilance and not getting hit, but she had her own problems. It was only when those problems began to fade into the background that she noticed that many patrons who used the #9 booth simply never came out.

The Tender Trap was the last growth industry on J Street, the embattled border where urban renewal had surrendered to sleaze, and the stately Gaslamp District degenerated into seedy downtown.

Violet came in on the bus from Riverside. Wade would be gone a week, maybe a month, and when he returned, tearful and pleading if he remembered what he’d done at all, she had planned to be set up in a new town with her own home, job and life. She had run away before and always came back to the trailer park within a day or two, so this start had gone better than most.

She found no room at the Salvation Army Women’s Shelter, which was packed with wives worse off than her and crawling with children. Wandering the streets, weighing the relative merits of going back to wait for Wade or sleep on the street, she found the Tender Trap.

When Violet walked in a month ago, drawn by the Help Wanted sign, one of her eyes was still too swollen to see out of. She looked like what she was, but while waiting to speak to the manager, she caught a shoplifter stuffing EZ-Whip cartridges in his pants, and was hired on the spot. The rest had come with it—a room above the store to sleep in and a few people to talk to, and money to save for something better—and she began to feel safe.

Then she began to notice #9.

The booths were a relic from the pre-home video era, when porno theaters and hookers thrived on the local sailor traffic. While all kinds of perverts came into the store, only a few virtually invisible types still used the booths. The homeless who begged on the Boulevard all day and night came in to jack off as a kind of conjugal coffee break. Illegal aliens, filthy and shaking from exhaustion, often had to be chased out because they tried to catch a nap in them. Then there were the businessmen, the upright solid citizen types whose wives would never tolerate such filth in their homes.

They were as broad a cross-section of masculine humanity as could be found in the city, but once they came in the door, they adopted uniform customs, darting past her roost at the elevated cash register to duck into the back of the store, stopping only to get quarters from the change machine. They stayed inside for a few minutes or an hour, then darted out just as quickly, while Lupe, a hunchbacked Latina crone who sat on a stool at the end of the row of booths, cleaned up the dregs of their ardor with paper towels and 409.

Violet had zero interest in the private lives of the customers, but just keeping her eyes open, she soon noticed how, every so often, one would fly into the booth alley, and never come out. The Tender Trap had no back door, but Violet didn’t ask questions. She watched a little closer when she saw a customer go in. She came out onto the floor to straighten the bargain VHS carousel closest to the batwing saloon doors that blocked her view, glancing over them at the retreating masturbator. It took several of these spying expeditions to discover that only #9 held onto its suitors.

After an hour or so of whatever went on inside, Lupe went to the booth and opened it with a skeleton key, sprayed down the interior, and shuffled back out, always carrying a bundle wrapped in towels in the crook of her arm, which she brought back to the closet that was her workspace and where, for all Violet knew, she slept. Lupe, the manager told her, was a Mayan Indian and didn’t speak a word of English or Spanish. Whatever language she did speak, Violet never once heard her use it, no matter how many times she tried to draw the cleaning woman out.

She asked the other clerks about it, but got nowhere. Merle, the defrocked carnival-ride operator who ran the counter through the dinner hours, eyed her warily and snapped, “What’re you, a cop?” Crayonne, the ugliest, gayest, blackest man Violet had ever seen, told her there were peepholes, if she wanted to watch them jerk off, then laughed at her the rest of the night. Judith, the early morning cashier, sighed in obvious relief. “Do you see them right now, too?” she asked, sweeping her shaking bird-claw hands and jangling silver jewelry around to accuse the whole empty store. “I do, too…”

Violet did not ask the manager, Zoe, about #9. Zoe hired her and set her up with the studio apartment upstairs, asked no questions but seemed to understand everything. When she thought of bringing it up, Violet began to doubt that there was anything amiss but her own fucked-up nerves misfiring. Besides, every time she got deeper than surface chatter with Zoe, she was pressed against the ceiling of her own ignorance. After a few days of the job, Zoe had asked her how she was doing.

Violet stuttered, “Doesn’t any of this stuff, you know, ever make you feel, you know, weird?”

“How do you mean, honey?”

“You know, being a woman,” she said, feeling a flush of shame fill her face. She wasn’t offended by the wares, but she failed to see what the pixilated video couplings and sterile rubber hardware they sold had to do with sex. Not that what passed for sex in her house would come any closer to a romantic ideal. “Doesn’t it, you know, objectify women?”

“Oh Gods, Vi, where’d you ever get such a big, dumb word?” Squat, doughy Zoe was about as sensuous as a garden gnome, and acted like they were selling plumbing fixtures. “Men objectify women, Vi. They look at us and see machines to make them come, to fill their bellies, and we see them as machines to make us feel special and safe. This stuff—well, we should all breathe a sigh of relief that some men whack off to it and leave real women alone.”

“I don’t mean, well… You know, Wade, he used to—” and she shut up when she found she could not articulate her feelings or thoughts without Wade stories.

“Men come in here for all kinds of reasons, Vi. We don’t judge. Nobody is beyond forgiveness.”

So she let it lie. But night after night, she caught glimpses out of the corner of her eye: when she rang up a gross of nitrous chargers for a gay biker couple, or rousted drunken frat boys who tried to climb into the Swedish Swing, or when Cowboy Chuck Berry or any of the regular street people came in to beg bus change or read her a poem. She would see a man dart in the front and vanish through the saloon doors, or she would only see them swinging.

And then one day, she caught one.

Above the sounds of sweat-slick hands pawing rubber and neoprene and leather, the whisper of licked lips and spastically blinking eyes, the idiot-music of the door sensor jerked her out of her trance. He was already halfway across the floor to the booths, and Violet slid off her stool and banged her knees on the counter. She followed the phantom into the dank corridor and peered around the corner and yes, the hunched figure stood before the door of #9 with a roll of quarters in one shaking fist.

The full weight of the stupidity of her obsession sat upon her chest and struck her dumb. The plans she’d hatched as she lay in bed in the morning, wishing she’d had the brains to bring the TV from the trailer, scorched and fell away like film stuck in the gate of a jammed projector.

She reached out and touched his grubby flannel shirt, but the man jerked away as if her aura burned him. Only when he turned and faced her did she realize that she’d feared, hoped, he was someone else. “Excuse me, mister, you can’t use that one—”

He was Hispanic, with an old drunk’s face like piss-cured leather, eyes melting, bloodshot marbles. He blinked at her as if she’d awakened a sleepwalker. His fist balled, his arm cocked and stopped inches short of smashing her face in. She looked long and hard at the frozen fist, seeing just who she’d thought he was. Big as a billboard, the wall of knuckles before her eyes was scarred and swollen, bruise-blue and black, and red, red red with blood and lipstick.

If she was startled by the man’s reaction, he was thunderstruck. He looked at his poised fist as if it was only the last and least of his countless betrayers, then let it sag against his drooping gut. She thought he was hyperventilating, but as he grasped himself, she heard the razored breaths as prayers, though in what language, or to whom, she couldn’t tell.

“I know what I want, puta,” he mumbled, and ducked through the door into #9. The door-music sounded again, and she retreated to her post.

He never came out.

Crayonne sat at the counter, shaking his head at her. Zoe called her into the office. “You’d think you would know to steer clear of that type.”

“What type?”

“You know.”

“How do you think you know—”

Zoe pointed to the signs on the mirrored ceiling, where only a shifty customer would look, that said SMILE! YOU ARE ON CAMERA!

“I—I—” she stuttered, making the truth feel like a lie, “I thought he was someone else.”

“And if it was him, what would you have done?” Zoe’s round face was all laugh lines. She had rhino hide skin, trouble never penetrated. But she must know what happens back there, in that booth…

“You don’t even know me! You think you do…”

“So tell me what makes you different. Why did you run away, Vi?”

She defended herself and attacked Zoe until her manager lit a joint, grumbled, “Fuck it,” and dismissed her.

Maybe Violet had to be yelled at or blown off to open up, but she sat down and started talking about Wade, and kept talking until Zoe told her again to get out.

Shaky, Violet rose and went to the door, stopped. “What happens in there?”

“You’re not ready to ask that, yet. Ask yourself this, first. If he came back tonight, could you forgive him? And when he hit you again, could you forgive yourself?”

Violet bought a little TV, some groceries and a discreet, minimalist vibrator with her first paycheck. But when she tried to fall asleep watching her shows in the morning, Zoe’s words banged against each other in her head.

She kept watching. In the week since their talk, four men had gone into #9. Neither of them brought it up. Once, thinking she’d caught Lupe in the act of cleaning up #9, she snuck back. She was not at her perch at the center of the labyrinth, and none of the booths were occupied.

The other booths bore bland, stenciled placards on their doors, announcing the nastiness within—BLACK GLADIATOR STUDS IV, DIAPER PAIL HIJINX, SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMA, and so on.

There was no placard on #9, but someone had tagged the door with a black permanent marker. The ritualized graffiti flare was so dense the words were an abstract picture, but as near as she could tell, they said MAGNA MATER.

She thought she heard someone stir inside, a whisper and a hiss of wet flesh against sticky plastic. She drew in a deep breath and grabbed the edge of the door, threw it wide open and prepared to get hit. But the booth was empty.

It looked just like an Andy Gump porta-shitter, with a molded plastic seat bulging out of one wall and a twenty-inch screen with a coin slot at lap level on the other. The blank screen was indifferently smeared with a streaky antiseptic that made raw chlorine smell like sugar cookies.

The booth was dimly lit by a stuttering fluorescent bulb. The interior crawled with spiders of black ink, every battered inch of the green plastic walls, floor and ceiling swarming with insect initials inscribed in Magic Marker, pocket knife and blood: tags, symbols and names, most rendered with no flamboyant gangster style whatsoever, but in the unaffected, palsied script of the drunk, the drugged, the lonely, the beaten down and the beaters.

So many names.

The booth reeked with the rancid musk of ancient jism, but aside from the names, there was no sign that the booth had ever been used. None of the sticky, omnipresent ooze, here, that coated even the outer floor, despite Lupe’s relentless chemical warfare. No trapdoors, no secret entrance to an underground railroad for damned masturbators, no scent of brimstone, no scorch marks or fresh blood. Nothing but whatever Lupe took out wrapped in towels, and she had foiled Violet again.

Shivering, holding the door open with one foot, Violet put a quarter into the slot. If this was some sort of trap, then surely this was how to spring it, and the thing had chewed up Violet’s brain too much for her to care whether she sprang it on herself. When nothing happened, her sigh of relief was sour with disappointment.

Lupe was back at her perch in the cleaning closet when Violet came out. She must’ve been there all along, but the door had been closed while she disposed of whatever she took out of #9. Her sad chocolate eyes bore right through Violet as she asked once again about the man who went in, about all the men, and where they went.

She learned nothing more, and tried to forget what she already knew, until the night she’d feared and hoped for finally came.

She held down the counter at half past two, head propped up on her sweaty hands, glassy eyes turned inward as she sat watch on the empty store, when he came in.

She told herself at first it was just her eyes playing tricks, like before, because none of the men she’d thought were him bore any real resemblance to him, except in the way they walked like a losing boxer leaving the ring. When she saw him come in the door, she believed it was only a fantasy, a waking night terror.

But it was Wade.

He looked to be at the ragged end of the bender that had driven her away, six weeks ago. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin oily and oozing alcohol dregs and less healthy stuff. His fists flexed at his sides as he stood there in the doorway. Violet opened her mouth to call for Zoe or Crayonne, but her teeth clamped on and bit through the tip of her tongue.

She leaped off her stool. One leg pulled her towards the back office, while the other simply buckled. She caught herself against the frame, rattling the beaded curtain screening the office.

Wade just stood there, looking. She knew what he would be expecting. She’d been collected before, and though her terror was never greater, neither had she ever missed him so much. She hated herself for it, but what else, who else, did she have?

“Wade,” she managed, “how did you find me?” She made herself look up and meet his gaze, recoiled as if slapped when his eyes roved over her. He didn’t recognize her at all. Or if he did, the rage he burned her with where other men felt love had guttered and gone out. The walls he’d built to keep her out were smashed and smoking ruins, and deep down inside where he’d let her in, there was no hurt little boy, no cursed, bestial prince, only a howling vacuum.

Looking into him was like putting her ear to a big conch shell, the rumbling silence of a ghost-ocean where his shouts of love and hate came from echoes without a source. He knew her, but he was past hitting, past begging, far past any words or feelings. He looked like a man bound and determined to drown.

He fed the change machine, then turned and went through the saloon doors into the maze of booths.

“Wade,” she cried out, “don’t.”

A hand reached through the beaded curtains and clutched her shoulder. Surprisingly strong, it tugged her off balance as she tried to rip free and go after him. “Let him go, honey. He’s not here for you.”

She got away and ran for the booths. She hit the saloon doors so hard one of them broke off its hinges and flapped in her wake. She hit the locked door of #9 even harder, screaming, “Wade, come out, baby, I’m sorry, it’s my fault, come out of there, they’re gonna kill you—”

From inside, she heard a choked sob.

She turned to Lupe, inscrutable on her stool in the closet. “Open it,” Violet shouted in her face, taking hold of the cleaning woman’s smock and shaking her like a doll. “Open it, or so help me, if he’s not okay, I’ll fucking—”

“So you forgive him, then?” Zoe’s reasonable voice pricked her panic and instantly flattened it. The manager stood behind her, massaging Violet’s white-knuckled claws off Lupe and pulling her back down the corridor. “His life is not in your hands, honey.”

Violet trembled so hard her words wouldn’t come out in a string. Even now, she couldn’t be of one mind about it. She knew nothing about what went on in #9, but she knew what it meant.

All the men who came in here were of a type, Wade’s type, the kind who hit women, and none of them came out.

How many times had she wished him dead? How many times had she seen his type defiantly roaring at a talk show audience mob, and wished for all of them to burn and hang and be blown straight to a special Hell run by battered women? This, too, Zoe must have known, when she hired Violet. She knew everything. She must have known that, sick as it was, her love for Wade was still strong. “You set him up, you bitch!”

“I told him nothing, honey. He came here, but not for you. Sooner or later, when there’s nowhere else to go, that type of man always finds his way here. It’s just a sort of coincidence, or maybe the Goddess brought you here, to see.”

“You kill them! What gives you the right? You’re not the one to judge him—”

“No, none of us can judge, any more than we can change them. You still think you can change him, don’t you, honey? Well, come into my office, and I’ll show you.”

Numb, she let herself be led. Crayonne had locked the front door and stood outside, pointedly watching the street. They went through the curtains and into Zoe’s cluttered office. Zoe crossed the room and took down a row of binders on a shelf above her desk.

There, on the stained formica-paneled wall, was a single fisheye peephole. Zoe beckoned her closer, bade her put her eye to the hole. “There’s security cameras in every booth, but they don’t capture what really goes on, inside. You have to see it with your own eyes. Go ahead and look, honey…”

Violet pushed back, but again Zoe’s soothing hands squeezed the resistance right out of her limbs. “You want me to watch him get… ki—ki—killed…”

“It’s what he wants, Vi. It’s all he wants, now, and it’s all he ever wanted, and couldn’t have, so he hit you and every other woman who tried to give it to him, and couldn’t. Watch…”

She put her eye to the hole. She saw only blackness, but she heard rustling and the familiar cadence of Wade’s half-snoring, drunken breathing. Clicking, and the booth filled with grainy silver-blue light as he fed the slot. A fine blur of wire mesh before her eyes told her she was looking through the ventilation gills behind and above Wade’s head.

She cursed that she couldn’t see his face or the screen, but the set of his shoulders, the galvanic twitches that wracked his neck, told her all she needed to know. He had gone past the point where he broke and begged forgiveness, and she had not been there. What was going on inside him now, she couldn’t begin to guess.

She wanted more than ever to go to him and pull him out, but the screen blinked and syrupy electronic music snapped on, and she was pinned to the spot.

“Go back to your bitch, then, asshole! Go beat her up, and eat her fucking food!” The voice on the soundtrack was her own. She was so angry and hurt and wired that night, she knew there probably never was another woman. He barely had the strength to beat her up—

She listened to the sounds and remembered how Wade cornered her against the sink and yanked her baggy sweatpants down around her knees, bent her over the dirty dishes. His cock, knobby and brittle like driftwood, knifed into her to the root, though she was dry as Egypt, down there. She screamed into the porkchop-greasy water, and flies swarmed up out of the swampy scum. She screamed and whooped with no pleasure, but something deeper, the painful thrill of being needed, made it all right.

When he came, he shivered and let out a strangled growl and zipped up, disgusted with her again. He went all cold and sneered, shifting gears, changing games so fast she was speechless, frozen pulling up her soiled pants.

“Yeah, I got another bitch.” She mouthed his words as they came out of the tinny speaker. “She’s hotter than you, she’s cleaner, and her insides aren’t all fucked up, either. She can have babies, Vi, and she’s gonna have mine.”

If she could find a knife in the mess, she’d stab him. Her arms whipped out at him, and nobody was more surprised than she was, when they slapped and scratched his face. “You want to make babies, Wade? You want to make a baby with her? You can’t be a fucking father, you’re not even a fucking man, you—”

And Wade said, “That’ll be enough of that,” and threw her right out the door like garbage. Into the garbage, in fact, which had piled up outside their door for two weeks, his seed leaking out down her leg, dying inside her, circling her scarred, scraped womb like kamikaze pilots with shitty directions until the acidity of her inner tubes burned them all up.

Violet blinked away tears, watching Wade’s silhouette pumping at his cock. God help him, he was hard and whacking off at the impossible replay of his cruelty, but he was sobbing, too.

“Oh, Vi, baby,” he choked, “I’m so sorry—”

His hand froze on his dick and dropped it like it shocked him. “What the fuck…” he grumbled as he stared at a new scene.

The soundtrack regressed, sax flatulence, junkie-funk guitar and canned moans seeping through the wall.

“What did you see?” a woman rasped, lighting a cigarette.

“Nothing, mama,” a boy mumbled, and Wade’s broken whisper echoed him. Popcorn popped on a stove.

“He wants to watch TV, so you make yourself scarce.”

“But mama, it’s Monday Night Football night—”

She cuffed him across the right ear with her silver Cricket lighter clenched in her fist. He yelped and ducked away. The Jiffy Pop’s pregnancy came to term, swelling foil belly splitting open to ooze steamy popcorn kernels into the hungry stove flames. He rolled away from her kicking legs and ducked for the door.

“What the fuck, Ruth?” a bleary man’s voice came from the bedroom.

“You want to be his Daddy? You want the duty? No? Then shut the fuck up!”

The ghostly cathode light went murky as the screen before Wade became a mirror. The music changed, too, subsiding into a deep bed of whispers and moans, soft, edgeless cries as of a dozen girl-girl scenes playing at once.

Wade leaned forward to feed the slot more quarters, cursing his reflection in subsonic hisses, when Violet spooked and jumped back from the peephole.

On the screen, she thought she’d seen herself peeping through the wall, as if the camera in the booth had x-ray vision. But when she went back to the hole, her heart pounded as she saw that Wade wasn’t alone in the booth, and what was in there with him looked nothing like her at all.

Zoe grasped her shoulders, held her up to the hole. “This has to happen, sweetie,” she murmured in Violet’s ear. “He wants it, he needs it… and so do you.”

She looked again, daring it to be real, but it was still there, more there than ever. On the screen, someone rose up behind Wade, but she knew this was a trick, because nothing blocked her view. Wade stared into the screen, transfixed.

All she could tell was that it was a woman. She stood taller than Wade so that the screen cut off her head, but her alabaster body was so enormous as to defy the physics of the booth. Absurdly voluptuous breasts dwarfed Wade’s head, while her elephantine belly smashed and overflowed around his skinny, shuddering form. Her gyrating hips rutted against the walls and blocked the door. Her arms floated up and stretched out to the screen, shockingly dainty little hands reaching up to the thin film of glass that separated her from the flesh-and-blood Wade, all but claiming his stupefied TV ghost.

“Please, mama,” he wheezed, “please take me—”

On the screen, Wade closed his eyes and went limp as the arms closed over him.

In the booth, something rose up between Wade and the screen. It bloomed and swelled and enveloped him, the glow of the screen shimmering through its molten form as it filled out and became a liquid replica of the headless woman.

As it grew, Violet saw rancid white slime oozing out of every seam in the booth, all the spilt seed of a million meat-beatings conjuring itself out of the walls like ectoplasm at a séance, and congealing in #9 to form the Magna Mater.

Violet bit back a scream.

The liquid mother-thing took Wade in its arms and cradled his head. His sobs broke into seizures that she smothered in her mammoth breasts. She guided a dripping nipple to his mouth and he locked onto it for all he was worth, sucking convulsively like a newborn.

The milk soothed him, and he subsided in her arms, anguished cries subsiding, deflated into a fetal ball. His limbs sagged bonelessly as his belly filled.

Violet groaned and tried not to vomit. The thing grew still larger and rolled over Wade, oblivious, delirious, at the teat. His clothes peeled back, shredded, melted away. The thing rolled up onto the bench and settled down around him, his rigid cock swallowed by slithering mouths of fluid flesh.

He moaned loudly around the monster teat, but the thing flowed through his fingers and rearranged itself so breasts and belly lolled backwards, and he sat facing the oleaginous grotto of a sopping, cavernous vagina.

Wade uttered a piercing infant’s whine and leaned back from the maw. Her cyclopean thighs clenched him and drew him in deeper, like food going down an esophagus into a bottomless stomach. Finally, Wade gave in and put his face into the gaping, flowery mouth of her sex.

Violet’s revulsion spilled out over her lips, and she threw up on the box of domination supplies between her feet. Through her tears, through hot flashes of an oncoming faint, she could not stop looking.

As the thing lowered itself onto him, Wade leaned face-first into her, and she parted, unhinged, like the mouth of a python to kiss, then devour him. The puffy, prehensile labia closed over his whole head, then flexed and strained to gobble up his shoulders, chest and abdomen.

Violet shoved Zoe back, ran to the booths. Lupe stood before #9, but stepped back when she saw Violet coming fists-first to save her husband. Violet grabbed the skeleton key from around Lupe’s neck and jammed it into the door. The Occupied light still glowed above, but she could hear nothing inside—no music, no moaning, no Wade. She threw open the door and lunged inside with her fists cocked, but the booth was empty.

“No! No, goddamit, Wade! Where are you, baby?” She whirled on Lupe and the approaching Zoe. “Bring him back, you bitch! How dare you judge him—”

“We don’t judge, here, sweetie,” Zoe said. “We just help them get where they need to go. Take another look.”

Violet looked inside the booth again, eyes straining in the dim half-light. All she saw was a pile of rags on the bench—Wade’s clothes. They were no dirtier than when he came staggering in, but they were all torn and wet and wound up into a tight, owl-turd bundle that stirred as she came closer. Stirred and gave a tiny cry.

“Her people come for the ones nobody claims,” Zoe whispered in her ear. “Why don’t you go home early, sweetie? He’s beautiful, now, and he needs you.”

Violet stumbled and bumped into the remaining saloon door on her way out. She didn’t even notice Crayonne holding the front door open for her as she wandered out into the night cradling her newborn baby.

When the time came for a serious inventory of the soul, some people prefer a secluded beach, the woods, or the relative isolation of a city rooftop; but for Leo Knobloch, there was no place more conducive to deep rumination than the trunk of a strange car.

When Leo “Lo-Ball” Knobloch woke up in the trunk of a car, most who knew him would say it was the start of a good day, because at least he’d slept indoors. Then they would wonder aloud where said car might be found, and ask you how much money Lo-Ball owes you.

But they—and you—would be shit out of luck, because said car was moving fast with no witnesses, and Lo-Ball had, as usual, not a cent on his person.

He also had no idea how he came to be in the car. He felt like he’d slept with his head in a paint shaker, but he didn’t remember drinking. Knobloch only drank when he was winning, and since Lady Fortuna was perpetually on the rag for him lately, it was a safe bet he wasn’t hung over.

A tender joy buzzer on his mostly hairless dome told him someone had sapped him. Probing it with the plaster cast on his right hand did neither his head nor his broken fingers any good. Whoever hit him must now be escorting him somewhere, most likely for an audience with one of his legion of debtors.

Or maybe he’d just pissed someone off. Always a dark horse on the outside rail, pure cussed bad luck had stalked Leo Knobloch since the day of his birth, when he caught herpes from his mother coming out of her chute (and passed it onto the nurse who weighed him), and his father botched cutting the umbilical and severed his own thumb. Born under every known astrological system’s baddest of bad signs, Leo was a veteran professional gambler, though the only real money he’d ever won had come from trading on the fear he inspired as a legendary loser.

Leo felt around the hot, sparsely carpeted floor of the trunk for his lucky hat, which had fallen onto his head out of the gray, rainy sky at Disneyland (having blown off the head of a forty-two year old man, also named Leo, who suffered a fatal heart attack while riding the Matterhorn), but it was nowhere to be found.

Surely, if they left it behind, these bastards could not be professionals. Even if you had no regard for the cherished personal possessions of others, you had to at least try not to leave evidence around. His name was already embroidered on the brim, but he suspected the fickle camp hat with Grumpy, the sourpuss dwarf from Snow White on the front, was already luck-wrangling for another bum, somewhere.

Likewise, his lucky toupee, which was also missing. He won it off the head of a Vietnamese grocer in a low-ball poker game at a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in Reno, and though his own native hair was curlier and several shades lighter than the original owner’s, he wore it everywhere, especially at the pai gow parlors where he ran his bread-winning grift. Asians took luck seriously, and the sight of a shabby quiloc waggling his sandy brown eyebrows at you with the trophy-scalp of a fellow celestial draped on his skull was enough to make any pragmatic gambler toss him a few chips to go away, even if they didn’t know his reputation.

But everyone in this town who turned cards, threw dice, played ponies or made books for a living knew Leo Knobloch, and they hated him like cancer. Locked out of every legitimate gambling venue—and welcomed with knives and baseball bats at all the rest—Leo had to hunt for action.

He slowly reclaimed bits of the morning as he tried to calm down. He got up and looked at the calendar. It was a fancy one, from the current year, and everything. Eliza was selling them for her school to raise money for a bake sale or something. Every month was a different scene of dogs playing poker by some nut named Cassius Coolidge. This month’s picture was his favorite.

A gentlemanly poker game on a train, and a tubby, little Boston terrier—a runt who rolls on his back before other dogs even notice him—yelps with astonishment as he flops down the quartet of aces in his paw. The dogs in the aisles have their hats and umbrellas, but everyone turns to stare at the runt as he breaks a lifetime losing streak just as his train pulls into the station.

Next, he took Eliza to school. They had to go out the back window of the motel and beat it to his car around the block, because the place was condemned, and the doors were all boarded up. They stopped at McDonald’s for hotcakes and juice, and he dropped her off in record time—only fifteen minutes late. And no hassles with traffic, since all the buses and the other parents’ cars had already beat it.

Eliza was in a mood because of the tardiness, and because Mom had taken off with no forwarding address, again. Not that either of them had clapped eyes on her in almost five years, but the occasional cash-stuffed cards helped soften the blow.

He kissed her and told her not to worry, rubbed her red hair for luck—diplomatically avoiding the clump of fossilized gum wadded into her auburn curls because it fell off the bedpost in the night and onto her pillow—and nudged her out the door. Then he went to the nearest 7-11 and bought a lottery ticket. He scratched it and stuck it in his lucky hat, then went hunting.

In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to challenge the Afghani cab drivers outside the zoo to a backgammon tournament, but hindsight was 20-20, and nobody else would let him in the door. He knew it was stupid to go out and gamble at all, since he could no longer play the bad luck troll for chips, and he had only a hundred to last the month.

Anyone else would say it was stupid, but nobody who ever lived had been run over by the wheel of fortune like Leo had. Life had only ever given him just enough to stagger on, but he never gave up hope. He had always played not just for the rush, but to break the bad streak like the spine of a snake. When he got shut out of the pai gow parlors, the rationale took on the colors of salvation. He would not float along on the riptide of bad hands the bitch goddess saw fit to deal him; he would throw his last chips into her crooked teeth and force a sea change, or die trying.

And he would pick himself up and try again, as soon as these dice-loading Pashtun bastards let him out of this trunk.

He’d seen a show once, where a kidnapping victim in a trunk pulled the wires out of the taillights and used them to send an SOS, which got a cop to pull the car over. Knobloch didn’t know Morse code, but he figured any kind of frenetic pattern would alert someone that something was amiss. Lord knew, he couldn’t drive a mile without a cop pulling him over for a busted taillight.

Once he pulled the wires out, he couldn’t get them back into the socket to make the light flicker. He curled up to turn around and try the other one, when the taxi hit something.

Then something hit the taxi. And then something else.

Knobloch flew up against the roof of the trunk hard enough to pop it open. He hovered above the scene just long enough to get a memorable snapshot of the action, as the terribly unlikely response to his cry for help unfolded to punish all in the area.

The cab had been rear-ended by a huge old Cadillac, a gigantic battleship that drove them hard into a pickup truck belonging to a wildcatter exterminator, and knock loose a salvo of big green tanks of chemicals, which tumbled like torpedoes through the windshield of the cab and disgorged their pressurized contents into the bearded faces of his captors.

The billowing silver insecticide clouds gushed out the open windows and smashed windshield, shrouding the cabbies’ death-twitches in a languorous mystique, like a Vegas magic show.

The exterminator stumbled out of his truck with his hand a brimming cup of blood clamped to his mouth. He never saw the car coming the other way through the intersection until it scooped him up on its hood and carried him away on a wave of screams and screeching tires.

Behind the wheel of the Cadillac, Knobloch could see only the blue beehive of a wig and two knots of knuckles throttling the steering wheel behind the airbag.

And then, his moment of grace expired, he tumbled onto the hood of the Cadillac, banging his knee painfully and tearing his slacks, but otherwise none the worse for wear. He wrapped his shirt over his mouth and plugged his nose to reach in and grab his lucky hat off the dashboard of the cab. Hotcha, his toupee was still inside it.

He heard sirens.

His leg tingled when he walked away. When he rubbed his thigh, an unfamiliar bulge in his pocket gave him pause. He limped down the street to a drive-up coffee kiosk and redeemed an expired coupon for a free espresso while cars piled up and honked behind him, but nowhere near as bad as the traffic jam forming around the taxi. It took him a few more minutes and most of the tepid coffee before he realized the bulge in his pants was a cell phone, and it was ringing.

He dug the unfamiliar phone out and unfolded it awkwardly with his splinted hand.

“Daddy, I love you…”

“I love you too, honey…”

“But you’re so effing stupid, sometimes…”

He didn’t correct her language. He was too preoccupied by the brittle edge of an echo chasing her brave, shaken voice. She was on a speaker-phone.

“Honey, what happened? I know it’s not a holiday again. Was it a field trip?”

“No, Daddy… it’s a staff development day. There’s no school…”

“Oh damn it, how many of those do they have this year? What kind of holiday is that, anyway? Jesus, sweetie, I’m sorry. I don’t have my car right now, but… um…” Looking around, he tipped his lucky hat to the cabbies. “Daddy will come get you. I don’t think I can call a cab, right now. Where are you, baby?”

“Daddy, you better come quick…”

Eliza was snatched away. A passing motorist tossed out cold coffee that splashed his crotch; a second screamed obscenities, and a third driver took careful note of Leo’s outlandish appearance, which memory he would recount in detail to police after murdering his wife and blaming an intruder.

“This can still have a happy ending, Leo.” The deeply accented voice twisted his name into liao, the Malaysian word for loser. “Do you have my money?”

Suddenly, everything made sense. “I have everything you’ll ever get out of me, right here, Tony.” He tried to make his voice into a weapon, but it cracked like a Saltine.

“I hope you were not stupid enough to give the cabdrivers my money.”

“They got paid, alright.” Up the street, the strobes and flashing red lights had swallowed the accident. Scrubbing bubbles. “Put Eliza back on.”

“She is safe with me and Dr. Kwak. You can have her, when I have what you owe the house, and you out of town.”

“Put her on. I need to calm down.”

Musical laughter tinkled in his ear, like splashes of piss. “You do not dictate terms to the house, Mr. Knob—”

The red paramedic lights pinwheeled and warped until Leo saw the world through a flashing red filter. He walked in tight circles, arm pumping out so spastically, it was all he could do, not to swing at passersby. What would he do? What could he do? They had Eliza. He, as always, had nothing.

“Where are you?”

“The cab would have brought you here.”

“You’re at your place, right?”

“Come and pay me, or you will have your bush most grievously whacked.” A moment of muffled mumbling, and then Tony Sherpa added, “And I trust you have your lucky hat.”

If you were a recreational gambler who paid his debts and stayed out of the cutthroat card rooms on the east side of town, chances are you would never breathe the same air as Dr. Kwak. Nobody who formally met Dr. Kwak wanted to talk about it.

But it was not always thus. He was once a respectable man. A real doctor, before he came to the States. Imagine emigrating from Korea to practice medicine in America, only to find out your name phonetically told people you were a fraud and a cheat. Pride would not let him change his name, and he soon found another use for his talents. He certainly knew his way around the human body, anyway. The first time he shook hands with Leo, he deftly broke two of his fingers right out on the casino floor. He leaned into his ear and whispered, “Our money. One week. And you never play here, anymore.”

That was three weeks ago.

What kind of crazy bullshit was this? Who took hostages to settle a gambling debt?

Leo got off the bus on the frontage road for Interstate 5. The Industry Casino was open 24 hours a day, but the parking lot was almost empty. Tony had repainted and put in new carpet, so the lifers were spooked.

Leo knew it was risky, but he needed all the luck he could get, so he snuck into the bushes beside the overpass and took off his pants, then his boxer shorts, turned them inside out, and put them back on backwards. If he was right about who and what waited inside, then nothing he could do would matter. To put to rights the imbalance they represented would cost more than everybody involved was worth.

Funny thing was, Tony Sherpa used to be the most generous loan shark in town. Even after he took over the Industry, he would still carry a guy way longer and higher than any mob-bonded bank would. He respected the tidal flow of luck, and all the rich diversity of life that thrived on its fickle bounty. Somebody put a bug up his ass. He might have known, even before he picked up the phone, who it was. He could hear her breathing, sucking the luck out of him through the connection.

The Three Lees worked the front door, but Leo would never go near it, anyway. A Buddhist monk blessed the entrance when it reopened. Good luck and prosperity—for the house.

The back entrance was usually watched by a uniformed rent-a-cop, but Dr. Kwak himself waited for Leo as he came ambling up, shuffling to nurse a sole which had come unglued.

“Dr. Kwak. I’m no Freudian, but a cigar never looked quite so much like a huge black man’s penis, as it does in your mouth.”

Kwak pursed his lips and waved Leo into the casino, but he crushed out the fat Macanudo in the nearest ashtray. As he did so, he chanced to brush the front of Leo’s trousers with the back of one nimble hand. Leo felt nothing at first, but halfway across the floor, his balls convulsed like they’d been smashed by a hockey puck. The pain overflowed his groin and poured like a string of bloodclot pearls down his leg. He staggered and nearly fell in the koi pond next to the buffet. Vicious Lee and Silent Lee took him by the arms and dragged him the rest of the way.

Only a few tables were lit and dealing as they crossed the casino floor to the entrance to the high rollers’ room. The two guards flanking the gold-plated doors tossed candy at Leo’s feet as he passed, to ward off any evil spirits that might be thinking of abandoning him for better prospects.

The lights were turned way down, except for the pinpoint spots on the dealer’s pit behind the pai gow table at the head of the room. Tony Sherpa sat there, nervously shuffling a pack of cards. Standing next to him, a head taller even if he stood on a stack of phone books, was Wanda, Leo’s spiritual nemesis.

A lifelong pro gambler like himself, and not much better than he in the end, but she was charged with good luck—the same way a rabbit’s foot is, after you cut the rest of the rabbit off it. She was born on a Leap Year Day in the Year of the Rabbit. She had deep red hair in ringlets, and unfreckled, milky white skin. She was also, according to local legend, a virgin. Asian men liked big redheads, and they paid broker’s fees to keep a beautiful virgin around. Be a shame, if somebody told them the truth.

“Aw honey, relax,” Leo said as he came in and slouched into a seat opposite Tony Sherpa. “This must be very exhausting for you.”

Her mouth opened to let killer bees and Ginsu knives fly out of it, but Tony cut her off. “You have both put me in an extremely awkward situation, which I do not wish to enjoy any longer than necessary. Your parasitism is at an end. You owe me three thousand dollars.”

“The hell I do! It’s eighteen hundred, and I was getting it for you, when you cut off my livelihood and kidnapped my daughter.”

She snarled, but let a lot of her venom boil off before she finally opened her mouth. “If you want to see your daughter again, you will settle your account with us, and the both of you will leave Los Angeles on the next train.”

“I don’t have that kind of money. Ask her.”

A little of Wanda’s hair color drained into her face. “Just give him the hat, Leo.”

Leo took his lucky hat off and spun it on his splinted fingers. “Well, I don’t have much, but there’s only two things in the world with my name on them. You already took one, and you can have the other, if your name’s also Leo. The wig, I’ll play you a hand of Low-Ball for. If I win, I get my daughter back, and I can come back and play the tables… and free buffet for a year.”

It was a joke, but only Dr. Kwak laughed. Nobody got lucky at the Industry Casino Buffet.

Wanda said, “We just want the tickets, Leo.”

“Aw, shit. Is that what this is about? You sure know how to spoil a birthday, Wanda.”

“Don’t twist my tits here, Leo. You don’t even redeem the goddamned things.”

“You know why.” She looked away. He almost asked her if she was familiar with the art of Cassius Coolidge. “Fine, you can have them. But I want to see Eliza, right now.”

Dr. Kwak left the room through an unseen door. Tony reached for the hat, but Leo offered it to Wanda. “Close your eyes,” he told her.

Smirking at him, she indulged him and dipped her hand into his lucky hat.

Tony looked like he expected a mousetrap to go off. He sighed when she produced his Quik Pix card from today.

Tony snatched the hat and turned it over. Stuck to the hat’s liner by years of flop sweat and glacial accretions of dandruff, the layers of past lottery tickets gradually made a pretty pot in the table’s center.

A little guy who looked twelve-going-on-fifty checked them against the US Lottery Almanac. Of the twelve tickets on the table, seven were instant winners, while three were matching numbers in the Pick 6 in the California, New Jersey and Nevada lotteries, and the oldest one sent the winner to appear on the Big Spin, a lottery game show cancelled a decade ago.

The old unredeemed tickets were trash, but today’s ticket alone was worth $200,000.

“Where is my daughter?”

Wanda got in front of Leo. “Tony, can we have a minute?”

Tony glowered at her, but took the ticket from Wanda and left the room.

“A message would’ve been nice,” Leo said. “For old times’ sake. I would’ve played ball.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wear that bad luck bullshit like a hair shirt. You’re a coward, and everyone knows it. They don’t pay out of respect, they pay to keep the stink of you away.”

He bit his tongue on a kneejerk thought. You used to like my stink, well enough. “I could change my luck, like you. Really nice setup, here. You and Tony. He’s a lucky guy.”

“It’s real work. I finally got a place. He’s not a cheapskate. The buffet hardly makes anybody sick, now.”

“That’s great. And all Eliza and I gotta do is drop dead, to make all your dreams come true.”

“That’s not fair. I tried to talk some sense into you ages ago.”

“You told me that since your lucky charm act involved playing a virgin, that it would cramp your style for anyone to know you had a daughter.”

“You sure know how to twist a story, Leo.”

“Sure, babe. Hey, waiter!” Leo shouted at Silent Lee. “CR&RC for the lady, and a tall glass of warm coconut milk for myself.”

Silent Lee tried to ignore him, but Leo dipped his fingers in Tony’s drink and tossed ice cubes at him. “Crown Royal and Royal Crown Cola, separately, with crushed ice. Try to slip Pepsi by her, and I wouldn’t want to be you. And the milk. Pretty please.”

Lee looked at Dr. Kwak, then slouched off to get the drinks.

“Liza can stay with me. I can keep a secret.”

“Tony’s not an idiot, Leo. He’s willing to stick his neck out for me, but he’s not Blue Cross.”

“Time was, Tony Sherpa would carry a guy right up until he stopped breathing. Somebody’s been riding him about making his own luck, I guess. I’ve never talked dirt to her about you.”

“I know that, Leo. She hates me all on her own.”

He wasn’t taking that bait.

Silent Lee came back. He slipped on Leo’s ice cubes and broke his nose on the edge of the craps table, flipped the tray onto the green, warm coconut milk and flammable liquid sloshing all over hand-painted baize and the ashtray where Tony’s last two cigarettes still smoldered.

“Oh shit, that’s gonna stain. Here,” Leo got up to blot up the mess and put out the fire that leapt out of the tray and hungrily bit into the gaming table’s unbelievably expensive surface. Dr. Kwak gently kicked the back of Leo’s leg and reduced him to spaghetti.

Wanda caught him before he fell over. “He doesn’t want to hurt you. He just wants you out of his casino, out of his town. It’s his now. It was never yours. A barnacle doesn’t own a boat, Leo.”

“I can’t fucking believe this. You’re really kicking us out of LA. Banishing us. How far do we have to go? How am I supposed to make a living?”

“Get out of the life, Leo. Take care of Eliza. She loves you, and she’s smart enough to turn out better than you.”

Leo just stared at the wisps of smoke rolling up out of the hole in the table. Nobody moved to get him another glass of milk.

“You won’t have to work, if you don’t want to. You’ll get a cut of the ticket, and I’ll send—”

“You pretending you don’t understand? Maybe you don’t really believe in the system, but you know what I believe. I can’t touch that money.”

“No, I don’t understand. It’s the screwiest bunch of bullshit I ever heard.”

He didn’t want to waste his breath telling her again. He could just blow her off and see Eliza again, and she would have to leave, and then whatever happened next would happen. But it would happen fast and they would take no chances, because he was toxic. To touch the same cards and chips, to breath the same air, could rub off his luck on them. To lose to such a cursed man could permanently swap their fates. Tony would never face him over cards or dice, but Dr. Kwak was not a superstitious man.

He tried, anyway. “You remember the first time I bought a ticket.”

She started to get up. “Don’t.”

“I bought it for you, on our first date. You were lucky, even then.” It was a hundred dollar ticket. His car got towed. The yard fee was ninety-six. He used the change to buy a pack of cheap rubbers for their second date.

“I bought another one when you said you were pregnant. It paid ten thousand dollars, remember? You left with my car, so I thought that balanced it out… but funny thing, I had this pain in my arm, like a hot copper wire inside my bones, and I wondered how much a heart attack and a triple bypass cost.

“That’s nobody’s money, Wanda. It’s not just a sacrifice to keep my bad luck at bay. It’s a trap someone set up. If I tried to claim that $200,000… I don’t have anything in my life worth that, except Eliza.

“It’s my job to pick that ticket every year on my birthday, so nobody else will win it, because it’s nobody’s lucky day. If Tony can claim it, more power to him, but—”

Tony blew into the room, holding a napkin over one eye. Red-faced and hoarse from screaming at phones, he barked something in slurred Korean to Dr. Kwak, who gave him a lot of static.

“Oh God, Leo, what did you do, now?”

“I’m ready to leave. Where’s my daughter? And I distinctly recall coming in here with a hat…”

Dr. Kwak shuffled out the door Tony just came in.

Leo tried to be helpful. “Whatever just happened to you, Tony, I bet it was really expensive. You want me to go call you an ambulance?”

Tony pointed a gun at Leo and screamed, “In the back, now!” He grabbed another lottery ticket out of the hat and flicked it at Vicious Lee. “Run this one!”

The winning Pick 6 ticket was only a year old, but stiffened by sweat and oil, it sailed like a ninja’s shuriken, and steered by Tony’s anger and pure, cussed bad luck, it nicked Vicious Lee in the throat.

Lee fell back against the wall and said something in Cantonese, but no one understood the words, since they came out of the gushing hole in his neck.

Tony bit back a high, throat-shredding scream and tried to throw his own hand away. His men backed away from him and the fountain of blood from Vicious Lee’s cut throat.

“So Wanda,” Leo said, “don’t suppose you’ve talked to your daughter since you kidnapped her?”

“Just go, Leo.” She pushed him towards the door. No chance Tony was going to let him ruin any more of his high-toned casino with his unlucky blood. Oh, yeah—

He stopped and leaned in close. “They tested each other’s blood in school, you know, for biology class? And it got me to thinking, so I got a blood test, too. That’s how I found out Eliza’s not my biological daughter.”

He amiably waddled out the back door and down a hall to a counting room, where the floor was lined with dropcloths and all the cash machines were covered in plastic shrouds. One of them called him Daddy.

Leo ripped off the shroud. Eliza sat in a padded leather pit boss’s chair, wearing the same mismatched shirt and skirt combo he’d picked out for her this morning, and a white blindfold. White is the color of death in Asia. Were they afraid of her, too?

Dr. Kwak stood behind the chair with his gun pressed against her red curly hair. Tony Sherpa came in behind him and shoved him towards his daughter.

“Hi honey,” Leo said. “You about ready to go?”

“Daddy, please just do what they say. They said if you don’t, they’re going to kill Mom.”

Staring mind bullets at Kwak, Leo kissed his daughter on the forehead and stroked her hair. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Mom, sweetheart.”

“It doesn’t matter where you go,” Tony growled, dropping the napkin. His eye was drooping and filled with blood. The whole right side of his face sagged oddly, muffling his words. “A curse can’t be banished… only broken, burned and cut away.”

Leo knew Tony would never do it, himself. “Deal her out. I’ll do anything. What’re the new rules?”

“You end yourself now, or you watch the girl die, before we end you.”

“Wow, Tony, you are way out of your league, here. You know, this is probably just the blood hemorrhaging into your frontal lobe talking, right now.”

Tony looked down at his patent leather wingtips, which had tracked Vicious Lee’s blood all the way in here from the high roller’s room. “This is survival, now.” Dr. Kwak stroked Eliza’s hair with his gun.

“How am I supposed to do it, swallow my tongue? C’mon, Kwak, give me a gun. We can settle this with a few rounds of Russian roulette.”

Kwak sneered, “I do not gamble, liao.”

“Oh, you’re gambling right now. Go ahead.”

Kwak laughed and pointed the gun at Leo.

He knew Dr. Kwak wouldn’t shoot Eliza. The man was a stone douchebag, but whatever he was a doctor of in Korea, it probably wasn’t executing little girls.

Leo took a quick inventory and found he didn’t regret much about dying, aside from doing it with his daughter in the room.

In the moment before Dr. Kwak pulled the trigger, Leo closed his eyes and instead of his life, he saw that little runt-dog from the calendar.

How his eyes screwed up in his little head with a seizure of emotion the uninitiated could easily mistake for surprise and joy. Only Leo could know the terror that little dog must have felt, the sick sense of falling out of his own body as he tried to calculate the price of those aces. Whether or not he collected the pot and made it off the train, he was never going home. Such was the fallout of the lousy hand he’d been dealt before his birth. Ages before any of this shit existed, the game was rigged.

“I love you, Eliza.”

“I love you too, Daddy—”

“Cover your ears, baby.”

He heard a click. A curse.

He opened his eyes and saw with preternatural clarity the cylinders in the drum rotating as Kwak pulled the trigger past the empty chamber under the hammer. Nothing but bullets, now, his smile said. Leo forced himself to smile back and blow Kwak a kiss, trying to put all his bad luck into it.

Then he looked down the barrel, and started laughing so hard he didn’t even duck when Dr. Kwak pulled the trigger.

So that’s how you get chewing gum out of hair!

The gun went off. Leo fell back across the pai gow table untouched.

The revolver exploded in Kwak’s hand. The plug of brittle pink chewing gum from Eliza’s hair fouled the barrel, and the gun backfired in his face.

Eliza cried. Wanda barged into the room and took her in her arms, cooing, but Eliza didn’t seem to recognize her. In shock, she screamed, “Daddy!”

“We’ll go,” Leo said. “You take the tickets.”

Tony Sherpa dabbed at his eye. “If you ever come back—”

“We won’t.” Leo went to Eliza and pried Wanda’s hands away. Without removing the girl’s blindfold, he led her out of the room.

When they were back in the VIP room, he peeled off the white scarf and tossed it. Eliza blinked and hugged her father. She looked around, but her eyes passed over Wanda without recognition. She hadn’t seen her mother in almost five years, and Wanda had changed.

“Where will you—”

“I don’t know. Don’t look.”

“I just want you to—” Wanda handed Leo his hat, with the toupee in it.

“No way. He took it for debts, and we’re settled.”

“Tony is my partner.”

“You bought into this dump? I thought you were—”

“I saved it. He’s not anything to me. But I’m the house. If you want to play for it—”

“I could never beat you,” Leo said, starting to turn away. And you know what could happen if I beat you, he didn’t add.

Wanda sat down at the dealer’s chair on a blackjack table. “Lo-Ball,” she said.

“Honey,” Leo said, “Why don’t you get something to eat at the buffet? Daddy’s going to play a couple hands with the nice lady.”

When they needed to score and all their old marks were played out, Roshawn and Aida went shoulder-fishing at the County Clerk’s. Aida was too tweaked to keep the numbers straight and stop picking at her face, today, so Roshawn fished alone. Aida was better with people, better at stealing, better at all of it, until she got like this.

An old man caught Roshawn looking on with her lips still moving as she read his social off his form request. She ducked out before he could alert the security guard, streaked across the lot and into the dent-resistant side of a brand-new Volvo wagon with kids and groceries in the back and a mom in a soccer coach outfit, and a fancy white leather purse, more expensive than all the things anyone had ever bought for her in her life, put together.

It was the purse that Roshawn studied as she jumped back from the coasting Swedish shuttle, not the screaming kids or the oblivious mom. It was the purse, which was sitting on the roof. She jogged after the car as it sped up and, to her delight, turned down the side street where she’d left Aida in her shitbox Fiero. She saw the driver’s head turn and notice Roshawn in her mirror, dropped back so she wouldn’t stop. Go on, bitch, don’t worry about me, go back to La Mesa.

She broke into a run, rounded the corner and skidded to a stop as twenties blew by her on the dank afternoon breeze.

Aida danced down the middle of the street, snatching bills out of the air and laughing. “D’you believe this? You say praying don’t work, then what’s this shit?” Swinging from one skinny claw, the purse.

Aida smoked cigarettes like she was sucking venom out of a snakebite as she counted bills, “Three C’s and change,” but she counted again. “Let’s go see Hector.”

Roshawn’s nerves danced, sparks of autonomic joy sending the Fiero bouncing across the lanes on the eastbound 8. “The cards be trash by the time we get Hector out of bed,” Roshawn said. “Use your head, that shit makes you so stupid. We max ‘em out with a quickness and blow town. That was the plan if we got a fat one…”

“This bitch on the vapors. She lose her head, if it ain’t tied on. We fry her now, she lock up the castle and call out the feds. She too hot now, but she on the vapors, like I said. She cancel these, get new ones in the mail. We don’t need her cards. We’ve got her. We ghost her, and ride her to the next level.”

Roshawn and Aida had burned more people than they could hope to count, but in short, sharp shocks. Card dips, picked pockets, mail shakedowns, small schemes Roshawn learned from Aida. They sold numbers and papers to the Trashman, who prowled the rich condo dumpsters. But Aida wanted to slow-burn this bitch herself, something they’d talked about, but never got the nerve to do.

“We could bleed her so long, we be livin’ her life before she saw we took it.”

Roshawn came from poor Tennessee Navy trash, stranded in San Diego by a dishonorable discharge, and grew up in the ghetto. She had to learn to pass for black, though she was abysmally white, with the close hazel eyes, ash-blond hair and awful dentition of the Scotch-Irish mountainfolk who paid for passage to America as indentured servants before slaves were imported from Africa. Mimicry was survival for as long as she could remember, but Aida showed her how to make a living at it.

As to where Aida came from, Roshawn had learned little that stayed the same from one telling to the next, and she was smart enough to see how Aida’s lessons gave the lie to it all. Know what your mark knows, let them see you’re part of their world, and nothing more.

When they first met, Aida’s own stories of hardship as a military brat, of abuse at the hands of men, rang true, and bonded Roshawn to her. Overjoyed to find she didn’t have to choose the lesser of masculine evils, thrilled to find someone who understood her, she didn’t notice for a long time how much Aida had changed her.

In her more lucid moments, Roshawn guessed that the essential Aida must be whatever she was slowly changing Roshawn into, but she remained passive, fascinated. Becoming anything was better than what she’d been. She learned how to play men and women, straight, solid types who could draw cash on a credit card without getting the stink-eye from the manager. In between, she learned how to be hard and blank, to partake of the empty rituals of addiction without hope of pleasure, to endure the ugliest underside of life without pain or fear. It was a better life than she could have made, on her own.

They picked up three eight-balls of crank from Hector, but Aida swept into the bedroom, stripping off her clothes, and crashed on the waterbed. Roshawn sank in beside her, as close as she dared, wary of Aida’s feverish glow. The arid heat redoubled and cooked the sweat out of her naked body. Roshawn longed to touch her, but feared waking her up. This wasn’t normal, this kind of sleep, and she feared breaking it.

She lowered her head to the hollow between Aida’s tiny breasts and lapped at the rivulets of sweat, tasting the smoke and ammonia and ether of crystal meth, and something else she had always figured was the true essence of Aida, because she could not guess what else it might be. For a minute, she thought she knew the real Aida, and was happy.

Roshawn didn’t know how long Aida had been sleeping with the driver’s license under her pillow. She changed the sheets whenever they stole new ones, because neither of them liked to do laundry.

It was no kind of betrayal that Roshawn could explain, but it derailed her cleaning binge and got her taking things apart, and that was how she found the books.

“What’s all this shit?” she barked, when Aida breezed in from shopping.

Aida, confused, got defensive about the flock of gossamer shopping bags that seemed to float around her like balloons. Before Aida could stroke her, Roshawn charged her with the fattest of the books, something called the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. “What’re you reading for? Why are you keeping shit from me?”

Aida took the book and pocketed the license. “Haven’t you ever thought about your soul?”

Roshawn went slack. She hadn’t even looked inside them. Books were for learning how to do things, and if the books were a secret, then what was she learning?

“These souls we got now, they pretty beat-up, Ro.”

Roshawn looked into Aida’s eyes, lost in the way the golden mandalas in her irises seemed to burn and turn when she operated. “We could stop…”

“We’d still be us, wouldn’t we? Still damned, just starving, too.”

Why did she feel like the one who was hiding something? “We could change…”

Aida smirked, mute shorthand for helpless recognition of how dumb Roshawn was. “Ain’t you heard of predestination? God knows everything, from the beginning to how it’s all gonna turn out. So no matter what you do, if your name’s not in the book, you never get saved. God made you, so He knows you can’t change.”

Roshawn tried the smirk, but only felt dumber. “Where’d you get all this shit?”

“Daddy was a righteous Calvinist. After a good Sunday-go-to-meetin’ beatin’, he used to tell me about the Elect—that’s the saved ones. Since God knew how Daddy’d turn out in the end, he could do what he did to me, and still go to judgment with a clean conscience. This is their world, Ro. We just live here.”

Roshawn snorted a line to keep from laughing. “So you’re one of the Elect?”

“Hell no. Nothing in the Lord’s big book about Daddy knocking up a whore in the Philippines who could track him down in the States. Daddy used to say I had no soul, anyhow. They do give you a lift, though, knowing you judged and damned, whatever you do. Everything’s free, you know?”

“No judgment you need to fear but mine, girl.” Roshawn tried to look as brave as the words sounded.

Aida’s long acrylic nails tickled the tender scalp of Roshawn’s cornrow braids. “So I belong to you, now?”

Later, when Aida showed her the new ID with her picture and the mark’s name, she was too stoned in love to care. Aida had only to look at her that way, that said she knew who and what Roshawn really was, and could bear to keep looking, though she would never, ever tell what she saw.

A week later, the cards came. A Titanium Visa, Platinum American Express and, just for laughs, a Discover. They moved into a decent one-bedroom condo and bought new furniture: solid modern black lacquered oak, not like the flimsy particle-board Ikea shit that fell apart every time they had a fight.

And fight they did, as soon as the furniture was delivered. Roshawn was edgy, tweaking for two days, and Aida, she suddenly realized, hadn’t touched any in a week, hadn’t even lit a cigarette. They had it out until Roshawn’s anger, under Aida’s careful husbandry, mutated into lust.

“Why’d you have to tear my clothes?” Aida asked, after.

“To get at you,” Roshawn answered, but the lie had no legs. These clothes made her mad—frothy pastel floral prints, soccer-mom country club togs. Aida dressed like the mark, shopped in the same stores, cutting the game too close. She didn’t care if Roshawn didn’t like it, wanted her not to. Roshawn could steal, she could lie, and on a good day she could pass for a Wal-Martian credit-slave, but Aida could put on quality with or without the clothes. If Roshawn could get her hands on the thing that could enable Aida to leave her behind, she would gleefully rip it to shreds and eat it.

“D’you want to go out?”

“No,” Roshawn moaned.

“Well, I do.” Aida squirmed out from under her, skinned into fresh clothes and was gone.

Roshawn made herself look at the books. It wasn’t even that they were hidden. Books, written words in any configuration, made her feel stupid and mean.

They were about souls, but not like Aida talked about. A couple of them were religious stuff, about good works and sin and prayer and salvation, but these were outnumbered and outweighed by the others—science books, the kind Roshawn hated most. A head-shrinker book said the soul was an illusion, but a very real one, while another book by a brain-mechanic said that the soul was an energy field made by the brain and DNA, and a third was full of poetry about the soul and its hiding places in the heart, the eyes and the brain.

She thought Aida was going to clubs, or maybe to Hector’s, because she hadn’t dented her share of the crank. Whatever she was doing—and in their time, she had caught Aida doing everything—Roshawn could forgive, but what she saw when she followed her one night, she couldn’t even comprehend.

Aida left her Fiero at the curb and walked down another block to a Volvo station wagon with Avis plate frames. Roshawn huddled behind a bush until the silver wagon’s frosty high-beams died away, then ran back to the apartment for the spare keys to the Fiero.

She wasn’t hard to catch. She drove so slow she might have been on the links, looking for a lost golf ball. Roshawn dropped back. The Volvo only went another few blocks to the outlet mall, where Aida parked in the front of the enormous, empty lot and just sat there. For an hour.

Roshawn shivered and scratched, sure Aida had spotted her, wondering why she didn’t just come over and call her on it. Because she can’t, came an unaccustomed rational judgment. Because she’s not Aida, right now—

When the Volvo finally pulled out, Roshawn had almost fallen asleep. Her feet prickled with oxygen-starvation, the crank stealing all the blood from her extremities, but she made the little shitbox car go into gear and slipped in behind the crawling wagon.

She followed it to the park next, where it stopped beside the soccer field for another hour. Roshawn resisted charging the car and finding out what the fuck was going on, but she felt the old numbness washing over it all, every bad or inexplicable thing in her life getting cemented over so it seemed normal.

She loved Aida. She’d never told her, and never would, but Aida knew it, used it, wrung it dry. She’d never been this close to anyone, though, and wasn’t about to fuck it up like everything else. When the Volvo started up again and pulled out into the street, Roshawn forced herself to turn around and go back to the apartment. Whenever she got home, they would figure out what was what.

Lying in wait in the dark, Roshawn snapped into action when the arc-sodium lamplight from outside spilled in the open door. She’d tossed the condo, found more books, more things she never knew Aida had bought. She took the book in her hand—on making mummies, of all fucking crazy things, not the heaviest, but slim and wide, lots of pictures—and pulled a muscle in her shoulder throwing it at the silhouette in the doorway.

The book met flesh with a pulpy crack and a scream that raised goosebumps of joy on Roshawn’s skin before she realized she didn’t recognize her victim’s voice.

“What the fuck?” Aida shouted and flicked on the lights. She stood behind the woman Roshawn had hit—the mark. She wore sea-foam green silk pajamas and a matching wrap that looked like very expensive smoke. Her hands were tied behind her back with nylon rope, and duct tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were red and streaming, and her nose was crushed to the right and just starting to bleed.

“What’s going on, Aida? What the fuck, girl—”

“Time to take it to the next level, Ro.” Aida led the crying woman to the dining room and sat her on one of the new chrome and black leather barstools. “She can’t help us any more, like she is.”

“What do you want with her?”

Aida flanked Roshawn into a corner of the room so she couldn’t see the woman, could see nothing but Aida’s hungry eyes. “It’s no good anymore, Ro. This life… it’s all make-believe, you know? We keep using her cards, in a couple months, they going to catch on, and we have to run, and start all over. And you and me both got bench warrants, fucking cops know us both from all fucking day, girl. I’m sick of this shitty deal, Ro. I want what she got.”

Aida backed up to the bound woman, beckoning Roshawn closer. She ran her fingers through mark’s sweat-plastered hair. Her tongue flicked out and lapped a bead of blood from the end of her broken nose, a tear from her rolling, popping eyes.

Roshawn wanted to vomit fire. “Too far, Aida, this is way fucking past too far…”

Aida jerked her back by her braids. Cranked as she was, Roshawn was fast, but Aida paralyzed her with a gaze, stopping Roshawn just short of crushing her windpipe. In the air before her eyes hung that promise, that knowledge, that Roshawn hungered for. That look told her she might just be more than a throwaway drug casualty, more than a shitty little thief, and Roshawn knew, by now, that the look was its own reward, a tool and no more, but still she couldn’t look away.

“We can use her body,” Aida whispered. “We burn this place up with her in it, and get gone, and they think she’s me. We go on, like born again, and all that shit you been trying to forget, you just shed it like old skin. Just roll it off you and start over, and we can be together, baby…”

Roshawn gave this a moment. “Bitch, you so stupid. You watch them detective shows, same as me. They always get dumbfucks who try to play that. They got DNA, no matter how burned up she is, they still won’t take her for me, and you? You a mutt, Aida. She a purebred.”

“I can fix it,” Aida said, beaming, so proud. “Been fixing it. DNA is just records. Just shit on computers. It’s fixed.”

“And don’t we need two bodies?”

“Yeah, we do.” Aida went behind the bar and chopped out some rocks on the beveled, mirrored top. “We’ll go back out and get yours, right after, I got it lined up…” Aida bent and snorted manfully of the fat rails at the bar. Roshawn came up behind her, and the rich bitch was watching, so she ran her hands over Aida, feeling electricity rushing through her, and she wanted to taste it, to go down on Aida right now and show the bitch who she belonged to. But Aida twisted away and slipped her the straw.

Roshawn knew this was not a time to ponder the situation. It was time to be a bullet from a gun, a kamikaze pilot, until it was all done. She sucked up a line and switched nostrils for the next, slaloming through the remaining six before sitting back to savor the burn.

Aida was tying the woman to the barstool with more rope, and getting books out and setting them on the bar, and opening a brand new toolbox full of shiny things. Aida moved so fast she blurred into a green shimmering comet, and Roshawn realized she must be wearing the same green pajamas as their hostage, the Volvo lady who’d forget her head if it wasn’t tied on—

She dreamed that she saw part of what happened next.

Aida sat down before the woman, but really, she just appeared, because she’d been a blur, and all the books before her, and so many tools for ingesting drugs she’d never imagined existed, for doing things to people that even she had never been subjected to.

Aida shouted in the woman’s face, but Roshawn couldn’t hear it. The woman screamed and sobbed back until Aida shrugged and rocked back on the barstool.

When Aida did the drugs and picked up the other tools, the woman in the chair suddenly came to life, her arms scissoring the rope, the tape slipping away, but she did not try to escape, nor did Aida restrain her. What she saw was not their physical bodies, which hung motionless behind them like shadows of candlelight.

Aida stormed the mark with her tools. She scooped out both eyes with a peculiar notched spoon, and swallowed them like oysters. She seemed to meditate on their digestion for a moment, then, finding something wanting, dug deeper.

The fluttering shadows of the rich bitch mirrored Aida’s movements so that they seemed to eat each other in a dead heat, the clatter and scrape of their feasting competing with the slurp and pop of stolen morsels fitting into place in their new bodies, only to be torn away and eaten again.

Roshawn tried to say or do something to stop it, but it just went on and on until they were identical, and then Aida ordered her to be a dog, and the woman echoed her command, and Roshawn was a dog, and rolled over and thanked Aida for letting her go to sleep.

She woke up in the middle of the hands-down best visual trip she’d ever had in her whole life, because the whole room was wreathed in dancing flames.

She realized with a start that she was on the waterbed, and she called for Aida to see if she could see it too, but her voice was so small before the roar of the vision. Roshawn reached out and tried to grab one of the blue-gold snakes slithering across the headboard of their week-old bed. Her hand went right through it, but her hand jerked back and slapped her face and the pain had so much to tell her about how hot, how very real, the fire was, that she could only scream as it got closer.

The flames raced up the frilly canopy like spiders. Burning shreds of lace fell on her and sent her into fresh spasms of screaming, but now she leapt off the bed and bolted from the room, clawing the cobwebs off her face and trying to remember where the front door was.

The living room proved more than she could handle. The woman still sat on the barstool, still hog-tied, but she must have been splashed with gasoline, for all the fire pouring out of her. She sat upright like a martyr, with no face and the light pouring out from her hollowed skull and cracked ribcage. Roshawn could only conclude that Aida had been unable, as always, to decide what she wanted or needed, and so took it all.

Now, the novelty value of the fire had completely worn off, and Roshawn dove out the window and into the tasteful decorative landscaping.

The sad honk of the fire alarm brought sleepwalking adults and excited children out into the common area, but Roshawn was already gone, palming Aida’s spare key to the Fiero under the bumper and peeling out for the suburbs.

She got three blocks away before the shock of it hit her, before what happened and what it meant blinded her with tears. She pulled over and gathered herself, slotting the new developments into her life. Then she started the car.

She almost didn’t find it. The cul-de-sacs and twisting, junior-high poetry street names lulled her into a blind, slow-motion panic. The identical buff-stucco ranch tract houses rolled by on both sides like teeth in a jaw, only the colors and makes of the SUV’s and European sedans in the driveways to tell them apart. Roshawn was sure she was going in circles, mistrusting the hazy memory of the address, and then she saw it. The silver Volvo out front, but it might have been any Volvo, but for the fancy white leather purse on the roof.

Roshawn sat and looked at the purse, and suddenly had no idea what to do. Maybe if she had a line, if someone smarter was there to tell her what to do. If Aida was there—

The front door opened and they came out in their Sunday best. Twin towheaded boys chased each other around the Volvo until their older sister collared them, and Dad, sandy-haired and tanned like a movie star, with an expensive sweater on even though it was summer, told them to quit it or no brunch after church. Roshawn started to get out. Maybe she should tell them what happened, and go, before the cops came. Maybe she should just go—

And then she came out. She wore a smart, fashionably pious blue dress that Roshawn had seen her buy at Nordstrom’s. The children fell silent and got in the car as their mother smiled at the beauty of the morning, took her purse off the roof, and then fixed her gaze on Roshawn.

Roshawn’s hand went numb on the latch, slipped away. The woman’s eyes skewered her, though she couldn’t meet them for more than an instant. When only the two of them could see each other, the woman’s face went away, and she could see the real Aida. The mark had given Aida as good as she’d gotten, and what was growing back in its place was anything but flesh. It only took that long for those eyes to tell her exactly what she was, and send her on her way.

Roshawn followed the smoke back. The alley behind the condo was choked with fire trucks and ambulances, but they were already packing up. Nobody noticed her as she stumbled over the hoses and cables and the odd knot of die-hard fire-watchers to stand in the carport across from her condo unit.

The fire gutted their place, and ate most of the upstairs neighbor’s before they put it out. The firemen tramped around the upper floor, chopping down smoldering furniture, but there was nothing left to save. Not that any of it had belonged to her, anyway.

Something rustled in the shadowy carport behind her. The plastic tarp over a car crumpled and something breathed charcoal and cremated bacon on her neck.

“All she had to do, was ask,” said the woman.

Roshawn jumped and bit her lip. Policemen across the alley stood with the manager, who pointed at the burned-out ruin and mouthed, junkies.

“Your stupid friend hurt me so, and still almost fucked it up… All she had to do was ask.”

The police said there were no bodies, or maybe they said nobodies.

“What are you…?” Roshawn whispered. She turned and looked, and the more she looked, the more she saw Aida, and not an eyeless apparition of glowing bone embers and melted spandex dripping on the concrete. She looked no worse, now, than plastic surgery disasters Roshawn had seen in tabloids, and she kept changing. She didn’t have to work at it like Aida had, because her kind just got whatever they wanted. The Elect—

“I’m myself, ain’t I?” said the mark. “And I guess you belong to me, now.”

Roshawn bit back a scream that would have brought all the police for miles. Empty sockets worked and blew bubbles that clouded and became gold-flecked, turning, burning eyes. “Come on, Ro,” she said. “Let’s go shopping.”

Life was not so unkind to Howell as it seemed to the world at large—it offered few surprises, and predictable rewards. Where there were explicit directions, Howell found he could go anywhere, do anything, but whenever and wherever he got lost, he found Atwater.

The first time it happened, he believed, at first, that it was as real as everything else in his life up to that point had been. On his way to a business appointment in Burbank: he’d given himself plenty of time to get there, leaving the office in Mid-Wilshire an hour ahead of the departure time on the Triple A itinerary he’d printed out the night before. After living in LA for over a year, he still did this for any place he had never driven, and kept a binder and three map books.

Traffic shut him down within sight of his office. Parked on the 101, swimming in sweat, and he suddenly, absolutely, needed to pee. He couldn’t just give up and get off; it had to get better soon, but it got worse, so clusterfucked by Hollywood Boulevard that he couldn’t even get through the glacial drift of traffic to the exit. Watching as the time of his appointment came and went, and he wasn’t even in the Valley, yet he was committed. The southbound traffic was almost as bad. Howell left a message to reschedule with the client in Burbank. The secretary treated him like some idiot who’d tried to ride a horse into town.

Wondering which of the empty coffee cups at his feet he’d like to try going in, wondering why the sensible Volvo people had never tackled this crying need of the long-haul motorist, Howell crawled through the pass and into the Valley.

With a dramatic flare that must be truly impressive from a swiftly moving car, the 101 burst out into Griffith Park, and a blazing Catherine Wheel avalanche of sulfurous afternoon sunlight speared his brain. Cascades of shaggy green hills and shadowed black canyons of wilderness under glass lurched up to the shoulder and Howell was looking somewhere else when horns sounded behind him, and the road ahead was a vacant plain.

Howell whooped with joy and stomped on the gas. The Triple A directions had wilted into pasty slime from the heat and smog and sweat from his hands, pages stuck together. The damned thing was supposed to be foolproof, distances totaled out to the hundredth of a mile, but 42.62 crept by on his trip odometer, and no Burbank Avenue. No offramp at all, and then he saw from the baffling menu of interstate and city highway junctions in the southbound lanes, that he was on the wrong freeway, and headed east to Pasadena.

No one let him out of the left lane until he’d passed under the Golden State Freeway. With a defiant berserker roar, he kamikazed the next off-ramp and slammed on the brakes, power-sliding up a hairpin chute between blank brick walls. He skidded to a stop just short of the sign.

ATWATER, it said. No population or elevation, no explanation, no Kiwanis or Lion’s Club chapters. Just ATWATER.

He idled at the intersection for a good long time. No other cars came. There were no other cars. Anywhere.

In the middle of LA. No cars. No pedestrians, either. Howell waited for something, for a director to scream, “Cut!” and a crew to spill out from behind these painted murals of a ghost town to resurrect the scene he’d ruined.

On the three corners opposite the off-ramp, a 7-11, an AM/PM, and another 7-11, all abandoned, windows shattered, roofs askew and foundations cracked. All angles subtly off, and apartment buildings down the street had collapsed, crushing their ground floors or spilling their contents out into the street. All the entrances were swathed in CAUTION tape, and Condemned notices were pasted on all remaining doors. “By order of FEMA—”

The last real earthquake in Los Angeles was in 1993. Howell looked into this before taking the job and moving here. A decade later, and they never tried to rebuild? Unless it was a movie set… or something else happened here—

Imagination did nothing good for Howell. He let it go and set the Volvo rolling down the main drag.

Atwater wasn’t large; he could see the same brick wall cutting across the street only a few blocks from the offramp. The whole area was walled off from the rest of the city, a pitcher plant with only one mouth, into which he’d stumbled. The sounds of the city outside were almost completely muzzled. He heard only the hushed hum of distant traffic and something like electronic wind chimes, or a Don’t Walk alarm for blind pedestrians, but here, nothing moved. Fine then, he’d turn around.

A man threw himself across the hood of his car. Threw himself, those were the right words, because Howell certainly didn’t hit him—

“Please,” the man bleated, beating on the windshield, “please help—”

The man came around to the passenger side, and Howell hadn’t locked it. He wore a navy blue suit and tie, shabby and shiny, the kind of thing an exceptionally cheap prison might parole its least promising inmates in, but he didn’t look like a bum, and Howell supposed he wanted to help, so he let the man fumble it open and fall into the passenger seat. “You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting,” the man said, “for someone to come…”

“Where the hell are we? Where’s everybody?”

“No onramp,” the man wheezed, hauling the door shut and turning to look at Howell. “We have to go back up the off-ramp, but nobody comes in here, ever… For God’s sake, let’s go!”

Something buzzed past Howell’s ear. He whipped his head around so fast something tore in the back of his neck, but he let out a sharp yelp and shouted, “Did you see it? You let a—let it in—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

Howell looked at the man’s face, at gaping pores all over his face and neck, tessellated hexagons like tiny, waxy mouths. Black, buzzing bullets oozed out of them. His head was a honeycomb.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” the man offered, his humming hand shooting out to bar Howell in his seat. “Please just drive.”

Howell shrieked. He was allergic to beestings. He was allergic to the word Bees. He yanked open the door and threw himself out, but the fucking seatbelt trapped him, hanging upside down in the street. His hand slapped at the button, or was it a latch…

Bees swarmed and formed a beard on the man’s face. “You’re making them mad,” the man said, his eyes wet, nose streaming snot and furious bees drowning in it. Tiny feather-touches of agitated air played over Howell’s face, the microscopic violence of thousands of wings. A homicidal halo roared around his head.

The seatbelt snapped free and Howell rolled out of the Volvo, hit the street running on all fours, out of the intersection and into the nearest shelter, the underground garage of a three story townhouse.

He slid on his belly down the steep driveway and crawled under the gate, jammed open on a toppled Vespa scooter. The dark was his only cover, here. He had no real hope of finding help, only of hiding until the lunatic either stole his car or abandoned it, but he was not getting back in there. He’d walk out onto the freeway and hail a Highway Patrolman, he’d get out, he’d go home and never come back…

Almost nauseous now with relief, Howell unzipped and pissed in the dark.

A sound, and then another, behind him. His bladder slammed shut; his balls crawled up and wrapped around his femoral artery, legs tingled and fell into a coma. Small sounds, but distinctive, and if not threatening, then in this alien place they portended a myriad of things, all awful.

It was the sound of a metal tool striking a metal tray, and the sound of a miniature saw biting into something hard, and the cloying reek of burning bone. Howell turned and sought something to hide behind as he saw how far from alone he was.

A moth-battered ceiling fixture lit up a shining steel table in the center of the empty garage. Two gaunt figures in black smocks and leather aprons hovered over it. They wore cages over their heads like old-time insane asylum alienists, or else their heads were cages, for they seemed to imprison nothing but shadows.

Between them on the table lay a nude female body, painfully white, viciously thin, a naked sprawl of cruel angles and lunar planes, decoratively inked with dotted lines that encompassed her whole form. Freshly sutured cuts ran down the arms and legs, and perhaps the worst of it was that Howell saw nowhere a drop of blood.

Deftly, one of the alienists sawed down the bridge of the dead woman’s nose, while the other peeled the parted skin away from the skull. Howell didn’t know how long he watched; their procedures were so methodical, he got sucked into infinite minutiae, only to take a sudden, stabbing breath when suddenly, with a magician’s flare, the peeler laid bare the skull and held it up.

The skull was black glass, toxic onyx ice, squealing and smoking as it met the hot, stale air. The alienist dropped it into an oil drum, changed into a fresh pair of heavy rubber gloves and opened the gilded doors of a medieval reliquary on a sideboard.

The cutting alienist continued his master ventral incision at the jaw, laying bare the fuligin struts of the rib cage, which spewed ribbons of oily black vapor across the table.

Its colleague selected an ancient yellow skull from the reliquary and deftly slipped it into the hollow pouch of the face, arranging the features just so, then stitching the lips of the incision together with colorless spiderweb thread as fast as a sweatshop matron.

Cowering behind a Camaro half-propped up on cinder-blocks in the far corner of the garage, Howell started to creep backwards to the gate. He’d face down the honeycombed man, or just run out onto the freeway, and get out of here…

When the woman on the table spoke.

“I felt that,” she whimpered, and Howell was gored by the wonder in her voice, as much as by the fact that the speaker was a filleted cadaver, with two headless surgeons elbow-deep inside her. He trembled, but it was thousands of misfired reflexes warring with each other as he tried to frame a reaction.

An alienist set a crumbling, fossilized rib cage into the empty thorax and sewed it up as the other prepared to join his incision with the cleft of her groin.

Howell rushed at the cutter, screaming, “Get off her!” with his fists pounding its broad back and he almost fell into it when the towering form collapsed on itself with no more resistance than an airborne shopping bag.

He blundered into the edge of the table and knocked the wind out of his lungs as the alienist with the needle calmly reached for something on the tray that looked like a nail gun.

On the table, the woman looked at him. Her eyes, impossibly vast black pupils, ringed by violet irises like bone-deep bruises, drank him in and stole something he needed to breathe. “Take me,” she said, “take me away—”

Howell’s hand found the knife and lashed out across the table at the other alienist. The blade slashed through unresisting fabric, the black form deflated and melted into the oil-stained shadows.

Howell dropped the knife and looked for something to cover her with, trying to say, “I’ll get you—get you out—”

“What’s your name, here?” she asked.

He took off his jacket and draped it over her, arms out, awkwardly trying to size her up to lift. “Um, Howell, Roger, um, Howell. Listen, are you okay to move? I saw them…”

She sat up on the table and leaned into him. The exquisitely fine stitching down the center of her face creaked when she smiled and put the knife to his throat. Her other hand hustled his crotch. “I’m cured.”

He looked away, but she forced him to look with her knife. “Get hard,” she commanded, and tore herself open.

Her breasts, almost imperceptible swells but for her angry, erect nipples, like bites from some enormous spider that lived in her bed, like accusing snail-eyes.

His stomach rolled and everything was hot, rushing water, drowning him. He wished he could melt and flow away through her fingers, but where he wanted it least, he swiftly became solid under the harsh ministrations of her bony hand.

Using the knife and his cock as levers, she got him up onto the table, peeled away his slacks and boxers. “Let me see you,” she husked in his ear, “show me what you really are.”

He couldn’t melt or run away, so he just took it. Froze solid as she lowered herself onto him, cold, tight and dry, spat on the head of it and impaled herself.

Inside, she felt like anything but flesh, ground-glass needles and gnashing teeth and mortuary marble, doors within doors opening in a cold black cathedral. He thought of the operation he’d interrupted, the looted fossils of a saint swapped out for her toxic necrotic skeleton, and in the open reliquary he saw a pale yellow pelvis, untransplanted—

Spastic reflex wrapped his arms around her, protruding ribs like notches for his fingers. Her concave torso shook as if she was full of panicked birds, and she hissed, to him or to herself, “Take your medicine.”

Shuddering, she rose up and dropped herself hard against him, and spider webs of black ice shot through his hips and into his guts. In his head, he reviewed sums, columns of expenditure figures for the projected relocation scheme his company had sent him up here to investigate. Culling them fiercely in the quiet corners of his mind, he noted two adding errors and committed them to memory, as soon as he got back to his laptop, he’d correct them—

The knife never left his throat. It sawed back and forth as she smashed herself against him, eyes rolled back, breath choppy gusts of frigid mist that grew colder with every stroke, despite the unbearable friction.

“Take it, take it,” she growled in his ear, and in rushing waves of cold and heat, he knew he’d lost what he’d put into her, it was hers now, and she was fucking him to death with it. He could only hold on.

Her rhythm sped, stiffened, such a ferocious blur of motion that he could not open his eyes, and she screamed, “He’s coming, faster, he’s coming—”

The sensation spreading through him now pulled him further away from the world, fired his gut-sense that the agony of pleasure he felt was really her coming inside him, taking him over. He hid from it, crying inside, please God, just let it be over—

She clung to him and froze, screaming like a rabbit in a trap. His skin was slathered in cold motor oil, and then she was gone.

He did not look around or try to cover himself, huddled on the icy steel table in a puddle of oil and urine, shocked mute by the sudden, sepulchral stillness.

The ground shook.

Dust and grit sprinkled his cold, raw skin. He rolled off the table and hitched his piss-soaked pants up over his bloodied hips.

He was alone in the dark. It was so quiet, he could hear the Volvo, still idling out on the street, and those faint, phantom chimes. But something else was coming, an itch in the soles of his feet, a tremor that shivered through his bowels, and he remembered what she’d said, just before she vanished.

He’s coming—

A steady, subsonic rumble spread up through the floor, a silent sound of pure terrestrial protest. A whole patch of ceiling gave way, dumping plaster and shattered concrete and spark-spitting washing machines into the garage.

Howell crawled under the gate and scrambled up the driveway on all fours, uttering a weird, panicked hooting sound with each hard-fought breath. He could still hear his car, so close, he could hear the seat belt alert beeping endlessly, and the dull burble of a public radio talk show on the stereo, but he could also hear voices on the street, and those chimes, growing louder, reverberating off the encircling walls of Atwater. And buzzing—

Howell hit the sidewalk and had to remind himself to keep moving to the Volvo. He saw no one inside it, but the honeycomb man stood in the middle of the street, and he wasn’t alone.

Another man, short, with a head like a claw-hammer, and snarls of piano wire running from his arms and legs and torso to a jumbled mound of marionettes in the street behind him, like the sole survivor of some sort of street-mime’s massacre. A little girl stood beside them, sucking her thumb and holding a length of an impossibly long albino python, which wrapped around her so many times, showing neither head nor tail, that she might have been made of snakes.

She pointed at Howell as he ran for his car. The honeycomb man shouted, “Wait! Take us with you!”

He said something else, but though Howell saw his mouth working, he could hear nothing but the sound of jets, a squadron of them, flying up out of the secret, hollow heart of the earth.

Behind Howell, the townhouse lurched forward with an orchestral moan and settled down into the underground garage. The apartment block behind it bulged and broke open, rooms bursting like bubbles full of abandoned human lives and flaming, flying debris, a wall of dust and smoke and something coming through it, something that made the freaks on the street race for his car.

Howell got in and slammed the door, locked it and threw the Volvo in gear. He threw the wheel to the right, jumping the curb and flattening a street sign. The honeycomb man spilled across the hood in a roiling cloud of bees. Howell screamed and stomped on the gas, batting the air vents shut.

The puppeteer waved at him, hurling screaming marionettes into the grill of the car. Their wooden claws gouged out his headlights and chrome and ripped off his antenna as he passed, looking for the narrow niche in the wall that he’d come in through, but it was gone, the intersection with the three convenience stores was now a T-junction facing a blank brick wall.

The insanity, the injustice of it all, finally broke him. He kept going forward, but he saw nothing.

And then the ground shifted, and the car was going uphill, but he only went faster up the tilting fragment of the street. The wall fell away as the ground rose, as something unspeakably heavy gained on him, making a sinkhole of Atwater from which he could not hope to escape.

Howell saw the freeway. The cars were hurtling by and he was headed into their midst in the wrong direction, but he did not care. He saw only fire and black smoke in his rearview mirror. He wrenched the wheel around as the Volvo sailed off the ragged edge of the broken road and over the wall, and he saw a flash of white in the mirror.

He looked back and saw her face, a snowflake in the collapsing furnace, and then he was over the wall, and the car’s axle nearly snapped as the car hit the onramp with the wheels at a right angle, sailed down the dry ice-plant embankment and swerved, amid a chorus of horns, into the flow of traffic.

It was some weeks before Howell could admit to himself that he wasn’t going to report the incident. To tell it would make it real, declare that he believed in it, but no one would believe him. How much easier to just go on, to leave it behind, when it fit nothing else in his life but his dreams, which he never remembered, anyway. For over a year, a bad dream was all it was, and all it would ever be.

Until he got lost again.

Driving up to Sacramento, an interview for a senior accounting position with the state comptroller’s office, and he would have flown, if not for the terror of handing over his life to some unseen mumbler with a bar tab in eight states. If he had been meticulous in his planning before, he was now obsessive. He bought maps and plotted his route and itinerary, and he researched Atwater, and made damned sure that nothing brought him any closer to it as he passed the junction he’d stumbled into last time.

He’d been stunned to discover it was a real place, an odd, isolated knothole in the haphazard sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, encircled by freeways and largely undeveloped since the early Seventies, but an unremarkable, ordinary place that had suffered only a few broken windows in the last earthquake. What might have driven a more curious man mad only salved the fear he hadn’t dared confront since it happened, because it confirmed that it was all a bad dream. He drove through the Valley, and passed Atwater unmolested.

He had the itinerary folded in his lap and the GPS unit in his new Volvo told him he was in the San Joaquin Valley on the northbound 5, entering Chowchilla, but the GPS unit had no way of knowing about the truck wreck, bodies strewn across both lanes and up the scrub-brush shoulders, naked children everywhere, and all he could do was clutch the map to his breast and tell himself, you’re not lost, not lost, don’t look—

But they were only pigs, scattered by the impact with a truck loaded with tanks of flammable gas that came off the Chowchilla onramp too fast. A pair of highway patrol cars was parked sideways on the highway, the troopers hanging their heads at the waste of good bacon.

Detour signs and sawhorses with rusty orange blinking lights diverted the traffic up through Chowchilla onto the two-lane eastbound 140. Howell followed the signs through the tiny town and turned north on the 99 at the promise of eventually reaching Sacramento thereby. Remarkably, almost no other cars joined him on the detour, preferring to sit in gridlock while the dead pigs were mopped up, and he should have sneered at their stupidity, but instead, he couldn’t stop wondering what they knew.

He was on the 99, he was sure of it, when it started to rain. Suddenly, he was driving through a car wash, and the GPS unit in the dash, in fact everything in the dash, blinked and went black.

He hit the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work. He braked soberly to a stop, angling to the right shoulder and hitting his hazard lights, though no sign that they worked, either. He was about to call Onstar and have them send a tow truck, and he had his map out on his lap, when he saw two men in workman’s coveralls step into the tiny arena of his headlights, arm in arm and grappling, legs crazily digging for traction in the slick mud.

Howell had his phone in his hand when the two men smashed their heads together and staggered back into the dark. He was pushing the number he had programmed to speed-dial the friendly Onstar operator somewhere in Bombay or New Delhi, who would use satellite imagery and impeccable, pleasingly accented English to guide him back to the highway, even though he was definitely not lost—

His eyes roved over the map, up the aortic 5 to the blue branching 140 to the 99, and up the 99 past Merced, and a tiny town just off the highway, though no roads to or from it showed on the map. The town was called ATWATER.

He looked out the window at the two men, but despaired of asking them for directions.

Each fighter had his hands around the other’s throat, and throttled his foe for all he was worth. Faces purple and streaming in the rain, they had wrung each other half to death when one suddenly kicked the other in the gut. The injured man folded, and his attacker pressed the advantage with ruthless abandon, smashing his head again and again into the pavement.

Howell sat there watching, even after the dashboard lights came back on, and the windshield wipers gave him a clearer view.

The victor lifted the vanquished up by his head, looking deeply, longingly, into the eyes of the man he’d beaten. Then his arms tensed and he squeezed the skull, crushing it as his mouth opened wider, jaw unhinged, skin stretching, to engulf the top of the broken head between his lips.

Howell’s hands fumbled for the gearshift, switched on the hi-beams. Oblivious to the light, the victor opened his mouth still wider, hoisting his twitching enemy off his feet and forcing the body, inch by inch, into his own.

Howell reversed and floored it, headed back the way he’d come. But the road was different. Corn crowded in on both sides. He saw peaked Victorian rooftops behind the waving stalks, but knew he’d find no help there. His brain crawled out of his skull and flew above the racing Volvo. If he hadn’t been so meticulous in his bathroom stops this trip, he would have voided his bladder as he screamed through the town of Atwater.

Not a single board of a building looked familiar, but he knew that somehow, it was the same town.

He passed an intersection that wasn’t there before, a big black sign swinging above an old wire-hung traffic light said, PENTACOST ROAD.

He passed a man dressed in his mother’s skin, that still screamed and nagged in his ear; a naked old woman who sweated fabulous tumors of molten gold, and goggled at him through crystalline growths like malignant diamonds, shining out of her eyeholes; an armless, legless nude woman in an eyeless rubber mask and a ball-gag stuffed in her mouth, racing alongside the car, borne aloft by black segmented tentacles growing from her gaping, snapping vagina.

The crumbling Victorian mansions crept closer to the road until they strangled it. In its death-throes, the road thrashed from left to right until a sprawling, misplaced mansion blocked it entirely. Howell aimed for the narrow alley between the colossal house and its neighbor, but the car wedged itself into the space and refused to budge in either direction. Howell climbed over the seats and out the back.

The storm battered the land with an ever-growing ferocity, but still he heard the somnolent music of those molten chimes, coming from everywhere and nowhere—and growing steadily louder. He looked frantically all around, waving a flashlight in the rain-slashed dark, but he still ran full into the honeycombed man before he saw him.

Howell fell on the pavement, but rolled and aimed the flashlight at the man. His problem with the bees had gotten worse. They were bigger, the size of hummingbirds circling his head, dancing secrets to each other on his shoulders, the hexagonal combs like shotgun holes in his face and neck and down beneath his shirt.

“Hurry,” the honeycombed man said, and the bees echoed, “she’s waiting for you.”

Howell backed away from the man, from his car, from his own body. There had to be a way out of this, a way to escape, to wake up—

He turned and took a long stride to run away, but there was the man who’d beaten—and eaten—his doppelganger. “Get me out of here,” the man said, and fingers squirmed out of his wide, froglike mouth, clawed at his lips. The fighter bent over, wracked by spasms and surges of movement under his muddy coveralls. He screamed, and Howell saw something thrashing in the seat of his pants, tearing away the fabric, a tail—no, a leg…

Howell backed away again, but he heard angry bees circling behind him. The fighter threw himself at Howell’s feet, screaming so loud, so wide, Howell could see the man inside him screaming, too.

“Come on,” the honeycombed man took his arm and dragged him to the porch of the mansion in the road. Cobalt blue lanterns saturated the darkness in the parlor, vertebral shadows of legions of ferns, and among them, a bed, and on it, a woman’s body.

But no, it wasn’t her, and had he hoped it would be? This one was enormous, a monstrous puffball belly with drained, flaccid limbs trailing away from it like the knotted fingers of empty surgical gloves. Sizzling wings at his back drove him closer.

“Mr. Howell,” she said, and he started, because underneath all that, it was her. “I know all about you, Howell. I even know your real name. What do you know?”

“I—” he looked around, at anything but her, and he heard creaking, crackling sounds, the ferns growing up through the floor so fast they glowed, feeding on the fever-heat, the light, pouring out of her. “I don’t know anything.”

“You got away, but you only think you keep getting lost… you keep coming back.”

“I got away because I don’t belong here. This is all some kind of—”

“A mistake?” Her breath hitched hurtfully inside her, like laughter, or something inside trying to escape. “You escaped because you have no imagination. You don’t dream.”

“I had a dream… about you, before. You—This… this is a dream…”

“This is a dream,” she agreed. The ground rumbled. Pictures and knickknacks shook off the walls. A window looking out on the street shattered, the wind and rain pried away the storm shutters. Her massive belly shivered and stirred. “But it’s more real than where you think you came from.”

Her hand shot out and caught his. He pulled away so hard he staggered into the wall. His shoulder went right through the moldy plaster. “You… did something to me. Why did you do… that?”

Her face brightened. “You remember! I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea, but there was no time. There’s no time, now, either.” Her hand caressed the turgid globe of her abdomen.

“I don’t understand what’s going on, here, but what are you?” He swallowed and choked as he realized he was most afraid that she was not real. “All of you? What happened to you?”

“You did.” She convulsed, pain drawing her into a ball around her pulsating womb.

He pointed and stammered, “No, that’s not mine.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before.” She shrieked and made ribbons of the sheets. Her heels dug into the mattress, kicking divots of flea-infested stuffing across the rumbling room.

Howell knew he should take her hand, but was terrified of coming any closer. Her belly contorted as if it caged a wild animal, then two animals battling, as each of them began to transform to catch the other at a disadvantage. Her skin stretched out into wild formations, stalks like roots and the eyes of overripe potatoes looking for anchorage or food to fuel its runaway metamorphosis—looking for him.

Howell backed into and right through the wall. He tripped over crumbling plaster and spilled into the atrium, narrowly dodging the heavy front door swinging in the whipping wind. The rain was no longer rain. Hot ash and bits of still-flaming trash swept by his face.

The hordes of Atwater, a hundred or more of them, crowded into the cul-de-sac before the mansion. On the horizon, a blood-red sun rose and swiftly grew, for it was not rising into the sky, but rolling up the road. The horde met this sight with bestial screams and wails of despair, but they remained rooted, distracting themselves with desperate last-minute orgies, battles and suicide attempts. Though they seemed incapable of coming, killing or dying, still they chased these forbidden states in the burning rain even as the red sun drew closer.

The chimes grew louder, a steamroller trampling a forest of tubular bells. Inside, the pregnant woman called out to him, but he was fixed to the spot.

As the sun swelled, it came clear to Howell. A towering, brazen idol, taller than the highest weathervane on any of the mansions it shouldered aside as it rolled down the street on gigantic iron-shod wheels.

A huge, saturnine head and torso, with great hands outstretched to lift its worshippers to its grinding mechanical jaws. The whole idol glowed dull red with the heat of the furnace raging inside it. All that it touched crumpled in white flames, but the hordes of freaks crowded closer, herded by cage-headed alienists armed with baling hooks and pikes.

The horde tortured itself, each tearing at the deformities of his or her neighbor as the heat between them came alive with white light and fire. Packed closer and closer together as the advancing idol trapped them in the cul-de-sac, they approached an ecstasy of panic, yet they meekly stepped or knelt, singly and in knots of writhing bodies, onto the spreading bronze palms of the glowing idol.

Howell knew this was the thing from which he had averted his eyes, the last time he got lost in Atwater. When she said, “He’s coming,” she meant this. Now, it was too late to escape. The horde danced on his trapped car. He could go through the mansion, dive out a window on the other side and run all the way home, if he had to, but he got no further than the parlor, where the woman’s ordeal was, for better or worse, nearly over.

The woman who raped him told him the thing inside her was his. He could come no closer than the hole he’d made in the wall, but he could not run away from it. Her legs jerked and wrenched impossibly akimbo, laying bare her outraged genitalia, and a glimpse of something fighting its way out of her.

No one had ever asked for what she took from him. No one had ever wanted anything from him but his facility as a calculator, and so the violence with which she had taken his seed had left him curiously stronger than he’d been, before. He’d never realized how much he feared human contact, and he saw in her slitted eyes, now, how much like him she was, how loathsome the act had been for her, but how desperately necessary.

That the act had produced some offspring, here in this place that was insanity itself, was the only sane thing Howell could find to cling to.

He went to her and took her hand. He tried to soothe her with words and touch, but she seemed beyond noticing. “If you’re going to be the mother of my child,” he said, “I think you could at least tell me your name.”

Her eyes rolled but focused on him, and in the midst of her panting seizure, she found breath to laugh at him. “Your child? Oh, Howell, you idiot—”

A wash of scalding heat raised blisters on his face, and the mansion’s outer wall melted away like a tortilla under a blowtorch. Outside, all he could see was a single red eye, glowering cruel and absolute with the fires of a collapsing sun behind it, a brain that blasted all it touched to atoms. It looked full on them now, as, all at once, the woman gave birth.

Her hand clasped his and the mountain of her belly tore open like a water-balloon smashing into a wall.

Ferns curled and turned to silver tornadoes of ash. Swamps of sweat vaporized out of the sheets. The woman’s hand went slack and deflated in his grip, crumbled like a sheaf of autumn leaves. Howell’s own clothes smoldered and gave off puffs of steam and smoke, but he noticed none of it.

The thing that squatted in the ruined chrysalis of the woman at first looked like nothing more than her insides come to life: bones, muscles, guts and all, stirred and resculpted into a crude effigy of a newborn child, but it redefined itself as he watched. Swaddled in blood and shreds of uterine lining, the thing uncoiled and opened its eyes. Swollen sacs of tissue burst and unfurled into membranous wings, and Howell understood.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice piping and unsteady in its new vessel, “for helping me escape. I’m sorry you won’t.”

The iridescent wings snapped and beat the stagnant air, shaking off slime and lifting the newborn body out of its cocoon in one swift motion. Howell ducked, then made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but she eluded him and dove out the window, into the eye of the idol.

And then the whole house was flying sideways, and Howell had no choice but to go with it. The chiming, roaring explosion went on forever, the room rolling end over end and dancing wheels of fire all around him. And when it all stopped, he was too broken to move, but somehow, he was outside.

The brazen idol clawed at the sky, at a fleeting dart of light that was well away from its glowing grip, and the idol seemed to rust and come unhinged inside, all its parts simply disconnected from the others and the furnace, unleashed, spilled out waves of fire upon the hordes.

Howell ran and ran and still the sound of the fire rolling, gaining, eating up the land, grew in his ears, but he kept running, in his mind calculating his speed and caloric consumption and estimated time of arrival if he just ran and ran home, if he ran to Mexico, if he just ran around the world and came back to this exact point—

Somewhere, long before he got home, he dropped in his tracks and fainted, mind and body completely spent.

And he woke up in a ditch beside the 99 just outside the town of Chowchilla, a sheriff’s deputy in an orange poncho poking him in the ribs with a flashlight.

He held his life together pretty well, after that, all told, and most of the time, he didn’t remember his dreams.

He worked from home, toting up accounts for several small, borderline illegal companies. He did not, could not, go outside. The fear that he would get lost again, that he might lose track of the route down the street to the corner store, kept him inside. In every corner of every place he did not know as intimately as his own body, a doorway to Atwater waited.

And yet he kept working, eating and sleeping, because, though he did not admit it even to himself while he was awake, he hoped for something.

He lurched on through life like this for months before the dreams started to push through into work, into the blank spaces on the screen and the black pauses between commercials on TV. Her face, her luminous blue wings lifting her out of the fire and into the sky. He still lived, he began to see, only because he hoped she would come back.

He began to seek out some sign, some message to affirm that she was not just a dream, but nothing came forth to save him. He looked for other Atwaters and found one, in Minnesota—”a small, friendly community which welcomes people with open arm,” said the website of the town “named for Dr. E. D. Atwater, of the land department of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad”—but nothing to distinguish it or marry it to the others, except its name. He did searches, found hundreds of people, streets and companies named Atwater, but nothing that resonated… until he found a listing in a San Diego phone book, and did a search on the computer.

Atwater Transpersonal Institute. The website gave a breezy outline of treatments, but Howell didn’t read them. He looked only at the picture on the home page, of a row of couches with people lying on them, sleeping peacefully with spider webs of electrodes pasted to their skulls. He studied the woman on the nearest couch, the planed bones of her face, the black wings of hair flared out on the pastel pillow, and he got his car keys.

At the end of a quiet residential street, on the peak of a hill overlooking Presidio Park with its Spanish colonial fortress, the Atwater Institute looked like the first outpost of yet another colonization. A low, faux-adobe building honeycombed with courtyards huddled around a conical tower of tile and glass. It hid itself from the street behind white brick walls and eucalyptus trees, but the gates readily swung open when Howell pressed the button at the unmanned security checkpoint. He drove up the cobblestone path to the front doors, where a nurse waited. He wanted to turn around and go back home, but he forced himself to get out and walk up to her. “I think I know a woman who is being treated here. I’d like to see her, please.”

The nurse only stared, backed away and went inside, leaving the door hanging open. He followed, pausing helplessly as a valet slipped into his car and whisked it off to an underground garage.

Inside, the atrium was dimly lit by a soothing cobalt light. Banks of ferns in hanging pots softened the outlines of the room, and a soft, almost inaudible music played somewhere, an atonal carillon stirred by alien wind.

Howell wanted out, needed in. She’s here, somewhere, it’s all here, it wasn’t in your mind, oh God, it was all real—

“I’ll just get Dr. Atwater,” the nurse said, and fled the room. Howell looked at abstract pictures on the walls, at a watercolor of a man with a beehive for a head, at another of a puppeteer being strangled by marionettes with their own wires, which sprouted out of his flesh.

“Art therapy,” said a voice over his shoulder. “It’s not pleasant to look at, but it makes them healthier.”

“What else do they do?” Howell turned and looked at the Doctor’s feet. He could not look at his face, but he heard the man’s reaction.

“I—my God, what’re you doing out here?” asked Dr. Atwater.

“You treat people with sleep therapy here, right?”

“That’s correct. Maybe you—”

“I have been having bad dreams for a long time, Doctor. About this place.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe if I could show you…” Dr. Atwater beckoned him through a door into an even darker corridor. Howell followed, looking around him. The music was louder back here, liquid chimes that made him feel sleepy.

“Binaural tones guide the treatment,” Atwater said. “Shamanic cultures use them in rituals, in drumming and trance-inducing states to guide the shaman into the realm of the spirit. It’s subtler than medication, and it doesn’t blunt the subconscious input from the limbic system. It lets lucid dreams become the patient’s reality.”

“For how long?”

“In my papers, I recommended regimens of three-day sessions over several months, but the modalities promised so much more for extreme cases, if we could only push deeper, longer. But you know all this.”

Howell stopped avoiding the doctor’s eyes. Against the tanning bed bronze skin, they were cold, faded gray. “Where is the woman? The one in the picture?”

Atwater opened a door, waved Howell closer. A body lay on the couch that filled the tiny cell. Howell leapt at it, but froze. It wasn’t her.

The honeycombed man twitched and shivered on the couch. He wore mittens and restraints, but still his face was red and chafed, all facial hair plucked out from compulsive grooming.

“One of our most challenging cases. He suffers from a massive OCD complex, but in his therapy, he externalizes his disorder, manifesting it in terms he can metaphorically abolish. He’s been dreaming for a month on, a week off for two years, and he’s getting better.”

Blinking, seeing the bees like ravens on the patient’s face, Howell muttered, “No, he’s not.” Then, rounding on the Doctor, he demanded, “Where is she?”

Atwater’s eyes flatly regarded him, but he saw the lambent red glow kindling in them. His mouth made a bold pretense of smiling openness, but his brow was forked with wrathful wrinkles, and his rusty red beard formed a mask of flames. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Who are you looking for?”

“You know, don’t you lie!” Howell flinched at his own voice, but he took hold of the Doctor’s arms and pushed him back against the wall. “You were there! You tried to eat her up like all the others, but she got away from you!”

Atwater’s eyes flashed, his jaw dropped. “So, you found a back door into the group… Well, that’s a mystery solved, at any rate.”

As if done with Howell, he made to turn away and go about his business, but Howell slammed him into the wall. “Where is she?”

Atwater sighed. “Gone. Transferred to a private institution. Her parents might not sue. They’re very wealthy, powerful people, and they were very upset when their neurotic, drug-addicted daughter came to us to be cured and emerged a full-blown autistic.”

“Your dream therapy wrecked her brain.”

“No, my friend, you did. She got it from you.” Atwater opened another door onto darkness. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Howell stepped inside. A body lay on the couch, but there were many machines, a congregation of automated mourners beeping and wailing their grief and providing the only light, trees with dripping IV solutions and the atonal music of binaural chimes.

Atwater spoke into his ear in a low whisper. “He was our first extreme case. Semi-vegetative autistic from birth, ward of the state. We secured power of attorney before the first bricks of the Institute were laid. He was going to be my greatest triumph.”

Howell approached the couch, feeling like he did in the mansion, as if he were about to ignite and combust from the heat pouring out of the body on the couch.

“At first, he responded swimmingly, but the deeper we tried to drive into his subconscious, the more he retreated… until one day, about three years ago, he just stopped waking up. I concluded that the psychic disintegration—for that’s what it looked like, to me—was a result of his distorted self-concept, his lack of imagination. But I underestimated just how powerful his imagination really was, didn’t I?”

Howell tried to remember where he went to school, who his parents were, anything more than three years old, and wondered why none of it had ever mattered before. Because he was a hermetically sealed, self-contained world unto himself, and nothing outside him had ever been anything but numbers, until she forced him to touch her, and escaped.

“At the time, we never reckoned on the possibility that our patients were manifesting in a shared environment, let alone that one could escape it. When Ms. Heaton began to exhibit your symptoms, we thought it was a ploy. Ms. Heaton was very cunning, manipulative, and had attempted suicide more times than her family bothered to keep track of. We never dreamed she could contact the other patients, let alone that she might find you. But you found her.”

Howell leaned closer to the sleeper, eyes roving over the only truly familiar face he’d ever known. The geography of it, seen from any angle for the first time, totally engrossed him, so that he didn’t notice when Atwater locked the door and took out a syringe.

“His name is Jeremy Ogilvie, but we use code names for our patients, to protect their privacy. The nurses coined his—he used to scream at the top of his lungs whenever he was touched, so they called him the Howler.”

Atwater’s shadow loomed across the white desert of sheet, but Howell only leaned closer to the sleeping face.

“For so long, I’ve thought of you, Mr. Howell, as my only failure. It would appear that you are the only one I ever really cured.”

Howell reached up and touched the mouth of the sleeping face, and smiled when its eyes opened.

Protestors lined the steps of the ivy-crusted Veteran’s Hospital. Police pushed them back, but they leaned over the barricades to scream and spit at us as we walked in a line.

On the left, draft resistors called us sheep, but their radical chic tasted like piss in their mouths.

The ones on the right called us cowards. The chickenhawks hated us because they wanted to see us die on TV, and the disabled vets hated us because they had high lottery numbers, and there were not enough of us to go around.

We took a final physical, and signed forms they didn’t let us read. I saw a box that I’d checked had been covered with layers of official stamps. I pointed this out to the corpsman, who got a PR officer. “The family doesn’t want him to meet you.”

Then we went into bright, tiled rooms where we were shaved, drugged and strapped down on gurneys.

I woke up during the surgery. I felt only second-hand pain and cottonmouth nausea. I remember smiling at the blood gushing out as they sawed off my left leg, but the magic trick went on too long. It didn’t feel like my leg was gone, but I didn’t want to look at it. I tried to move my head, but it was wired down tight.

I rolled my eyes around. It was weird how nobody seemed to notice I was watching them take me apart.

I couldn’t talk for the hoses going down my throat and up my nose, but I could look past the doctors and nurses and the armed MP at the door, up the walls of the surgical theater to the gallery. I could see the soldier sitting up there in his wheelchair, looking down at me and crying.

I couldn’t move my arms to give him the thumbs-up, because one was numb, and the other was gone. I think he would have saluted me if he could.

Later, I got to read his file, everything but his name. A private in the 29th Rangers, born and raised on an Iowa farm, nineteen and a proud father of twins. Lost his left leg, both arms and most of his face in a blue-on-blue napalm strike at Esfahan. A Purple Heart, but no valor medals, because America doesn’t drop napalm.

Crying, and he couldn’t wipe the tears from his intact eye. Someone came and wheeled him away, but he saw me looking at him for a second, and we connected together at the dotted lines of our symmetrical wounds, in the seconds before he was gone, and they came for my face.

Even if my country cannot forgive my refusal to fight, I saw understanding in the eye of the soldier who will walk out of this hospital on my leg, and hold his children, and maybe another rifle, in my arms. His war is over as mine begins, but I know that I have already won a battle, without getting out of bed.

Sloane rolls into the parking lot of the Hitchin’ Post Motel and scans the hearses and hatchbacks plastered with bumper stickers invoking the names of the undead. As she parks and climbs out, the music beats at the plaster walls like the last frantic defiance of a premature burial; syncopated bassbin thunder leaks out into the dry, cold night, loud enough to set off car alarms. Even louder: the screams, the manic laughter, the weeping.

“This isn’t the biggest one,” she tells her passenger, “but it’s the most volatile. You better wait in the car.”

Sloane pops open the trunk and goes around to fetch the bags of supplies. An old man lurks in the open door to the office, timid petulance carving his shapeless face. “Tell your friends to keep it down,” he calls out as Sloane makes for the loud room at the end of the row of tumbledown fuck-shacks.

“Have any of your other guests complained?” Sloane barks acid laughter into the auto-exhaust breeze. None of the drunks, junkies, jarheads and whores in the neighboring rooms is in any condition to file a grievance. The manager flips her the bird and retreats to his office.

A shirtless teenage Uncle Fester opens the door after she beats on it long and hard with her fist. So wasted he probably doesn’t know or care that someone scrawled BREEDER across his forehead in black permanent marker. His eyeliner runs in black streams down to his chins.

“Where’s Evelyn?” she shouts over the Godzilla-stomp of a redlined Skinny Puppy track. The breeder shrugs and dives into the crowd, leaving her marooned on the shore of a surly black sea.

She scans the ranks of black dusters and goth-frocks, zombie pancake makeup, silver studs and chains dangling from pierced noses and nipples, a murder of dysfunctional crows. Nearly all at least technically male, except for a few wolfish Vampira types and a brigade of plug-ugly rivethead dominatrixes with a skinhead escort.

Pot and clove smoke, Boones Farm bottles everywhere underfoot. Western-motif wallpaper, all wagon-wheels and cow skulls, spray-painted with His name and plastered with smeary Xerox copies of His face, the bed propped against one wall to make room for the slave-ship intimacy of the crowd.

Sloane notices that some idiot has already tried to set the mattress ablaze. Black serpentine singe-trails scar the flame-retardant nylon shell, so semen-encrusted it wouldn’t burn in a volcano. She wants to complain about the damage, not because she gives a shit about the deposit, but because it’s a symptom of lack of focus. They need even this childish, destructive energy, but it must be harnessed and channeled, if this party is to serve Him.

The music storms out of a sound system that looks like a SWAT crowd control robot, all trunk-sized amps and bassbins and a display with a gnashing sixteen-band equalizer grin. Skinny Puppy throws a rod and shudders to a stop, slam-cuts to Joy Division. Scanning the playlist on a jacked-in laptop, she approves. All artists dead, all bands split by overdoses, suicides, accidents and angst. All of it faithfully copied from the playlist on the website. Good mood music.

It is the purpose of all parties. All drunken dancefloor orgies, all wet T-shirt date rape keggers, are debased invocations of blessed nothingness, to the blind idiot god of the night itself, an exorcism of daylight, an unspoken prayer to hold Time hostage and make a fool of Death.

For His fans, life was an overlong rehearsal for the grave, a dreary dumb show that spawned a fetish for the trappings of death and the afterlife. His music awakened them to the beauty of their mortality, and the futility of their daily lives. It liberated them from faceless conformity, made them feel chosen for a higher purpose, to be true individuals—exactly like Him.

Her own purpose looms large before her, and she gets back to work. Surfing the churning crowd for five minutes before she reaches the bathroom where, true to form, Evelyn is holding court, chopping out rails of moist, chunky crank on a razored jewel case from His first CD for a rapt captive audience of juvenile tweakers.

“Truly visionary artists are never appreciated in their own lifetimes, and God help us if they were,” Evelyn says. “Celebrity destroys art, children. Great art is like poisoned Tylenol or letter bombs: only produced in obscurity, in anonymity. If M—”

“Nobody says His name, tonight,” Sloane snaps.

Eyes rolling out of her half-naked skull, Evelyn drags Sloane into the bathroom and offers up a fat caterpillar of a line. Sloane declines with a sneer, and one of the teenaged jackals snorts it up with a rolled-up playing card.

“Parasite.” Evelyn knees him in the crotch.

The tweaker drops, gagging, and one of his friends rolls up his sleeve. “But, yeah, but—no, that’s like, bullshit, right?” he jabbers. “Because He was a fucking god, right? Like, check this out.” He bares his scrawny, white bicep and the ineptly carved name in ugly pink nightcrawler scars on it. “My parents sent me to this reformatory in Coeur D’Alene two years ago, right? And like, I busted out and hitchhiked home, but like, I got so out of my fucking head when I was there that I, like, did this? Listening to His songs was the only thing that kept me from doing it to my throat, right?”

“He is God, dude,” the third magpie chimes in, a townie steakhead who dyes his hair with used motor oil. “Like Jesus, I mean. They fucking killed Him before He could get His message out to the people.”

“It’s like everything’s dark, now, dude,” the scarred one mutters.

“You know,” Evelyn starts in, “when a light like His goes out, it leaves a hole behind, a dark place that closes up quickly, but those with the right kind of inner light can follow…”

Sloane jabs her with car keys. Not yet. “School’s out, posers. Leave.” She flanks the door and kicks the still-prone teenager on the scummy tiled floor. Mumbling, “Bitch,” the other two pick up their friend and leave. Sloane slams the door and drops the bags.

Evelyn is one of the chief officers in the national fan club. For a tweaker, she’s fairly sharp, but not sharp enough by half, Sloane fears, for what she needs to do. “What the fuck, Sloane? Everything’s ready.”

Sloane pulls out a Ziploc bag stuffed with forest green capsules. “Babysit these until midnight. Keep these assholes in check so nothing, but nothing, happens until then. The manager’s ready to call the cops.”

Sloane distributes party favors, plants a backup web cam, changes the music. Growls and groans are squashed as His livid, vivid voice shakes the walls, a jilted Moses ranking out God and all his pagan poser predecessors to the empty heavens for their impotence. The room freezes, every mourner trembling as if in the throes of a nitrous trip. Then the epileptic 909 kicks in, and the bodies slam into each other like boiling molecules of nitroglycerin in a paint-shaker, like the Maenads ripping Orpheus to shreds.

She weeds out fakes, collaring a wayward frat boy, some high school kids, tourists in their mom’s mascara. “I’m trying to do you a favor, morons. Get the fuck out of here.” Checks tattoos—all of the real ones are permanently marked, somewhere, with His name. Her favorite, on a cadaverous scalpel of a girl in black mesh and plastic body armor: His eyes, billboard god-sized, gaze implacably out of her bony white back, framed in silver 8-gauge rings, by which the girl hangs from hooks, like any proper piece of art.

The eyes, one milky blue, one green, unmistakably His, gaze out of a smoking hole in her milky skin; a banished demiurge, burning to break out of this tiny vessel and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world. Sloane wants to show it to her companion, but he’s waiting at the door, tapping the face of his watch.

In the car, swooping down the onramp to the city’s aortic east-west freeway, they hear a news spot on the local alternative station. Squeezed in at the end, after two minutes of boilerplate about CD release dates and upcoming concerts, a few sentences sum up His career, noting His “small but intense cult following among the industrial Goth club scene,” and predicting that “his influence will continue to be felt for years to come in releases by far more successful mainstream artists.”

Only a few bone shards were found in the wake of the explosion that flattened the reclusive artist’s New Orleans studio, but they have been tentatively identified as His. A note recovered at the scene confirmed that the explosion was intentional. Rumors abound on the Internet about a final recording made hours before the explosion, and downloaded to His fan club’s servers as a farewell message. Authorities could neither confirm nor deny what many had already dismissed as a hoax, or, at best, a publicity stunt.

A house in the Hollywood hills, blotter acid and fine wine, dope-heads and wilting Goth-girls, hothouse flowers who would be ground to pulp by the rougher fans at the motel. He was so many things to so many wasted husks of people…

Languid layers of deep ambient music and opium smoke make a syrup of the air inside. Amorphous Androgynous and Autechre vie with Coil and layers of chanting monks and whale song, the DJ behind a bamboo bar across the Olympic-sized pool playing nasty games with the mix, a rogue air traffic controller orchestrating a slow-motion collision.

It takes a while to find Sylvie among the shrouded apparitions drifting like shopping bags in a breeze, lolling on beanbags and hassocks, floating in the pool. Sloane goes from room to room, lifting heads by their matted hair, peeling back sheets, disgusted to find three already growing cold.

Even among this crowd, Sylvie is a flake. When she ran the fan club, the site was never updated, chat rooms were rife with petty warring factions, and fans strove to outdo each other with extravagant suicides. It was merely a fan club. All that energy wasted… Under Sloane, it has become everything it’s going to be tonight. All she has to do is ride herd on these posers for a few more hours.

She finds Sylvie in an upstairs bathroom, half-heartedly trying to staunch the flow of blood oozing out of a snow-white girl in a tubful of red. “Stupid bitch,” Sylvie says over and over, and the girl smiles at her elegy.

“This is out of control,” Sloane grumbles, but sets to bandaging the twiggy white wrists with their mute, bubbling mouths. “Yours are checking out early. You can’t serve Him like this.”

Sylvie’s eyes are all fuligin pupil, but even the apocalyptic hallucinations she must be having can’t make her pretend to like Sloane. “They’re too sad, Sloane. Or they’re too happy…”

“I want to go with Him,” the girl in the tub moans.

“Not yet, idiot,” Sloane barks in her face. “He’s waiting for us, but we all have to go at once, to force the door open, or it’s just a waste.”

“I had this dream, He was a Pharoah, like in that video, and we built His pyramid, and when He died, they sealed us up inside, and it was dark, and we died, but when we were all dead, a door opened up and this beautiful black light poured in over us, and we carried Him into it—”

Sylvie’s eyes glisten, and if possible, get even bigger. Sloane sends her away. She kneels and whispers in the girl’s ear, “We’ve all had the dream, but it’s not time, yet.”

“And I wore a crown,” the girl says, “and He called me to His side to be His queen—”

“It’s alright,” Sloane looks around, gently pushes the girl’s head down under the red water, and goes looking for Sylvie.

Downstairs, the hostess has snapped out of her daze long enough to deliver an address. The crowd of heads and wasted waifs that gathers to hear it is still encouraging in its size and exotic range. Somewhere, He is watching, and she knows He must be pleased.

“He taught us not to be afraid of the dark,” Sylvie says. “He showed us in song that we are powerful, and the dark should fear us!

“He told us that there is no heaven but the one we create with our imaginations and our desire. He showed us a world of eternal, moon-silvered night that He built for us with His dreams. We have all given Him our love, and the strength to live and work in this world, for as long as He could stand it. Tonight, the power of our love will give us the strength to live forever in His world.”

Almost to the door, when Sylvie’s girlfriend draws Sloane aside and leers glassily at her passenger, slouched on her bumper, smoking a cigarette. “Who’s your friend?”

On the 101, going downtown, he says, “This is idiotic. It’s not going to work,” and she almost stops the car. This is all she needs, right now.

“Do you really believe that?” she shouts, rolling up the windows. “Because if you do, I’ll call it off. It’s going to happen, if you will it, but if you’re going to be a pussy, then all those people are just going to die.”

He lights a joint, inhales deeply. “I think I’m dead enough already.”

“You’re just a fucking coward, then.” She gets her cell phone out, hits Evelyn’s speed-dial.

When Sloane took over the fan club five years ago, he had already tried four times to kill himself. After the band broke up, he overdosed twice and blew off a major solo contract. She rose meteorically through the ranks, not because anyone liked her, but because she was a missile, seeking communion with him, and woe unto anyone who stood in her path. She reached out to him in carefully crafted e-mails that cut through all the noise, drawing him out as no one else could, because she, of all his legions of bungled and botched sociopathic fans, seemed to understand what he was trying to do.

He used the tropes of Goth and industrial music and the aesthetics of the French Decadents and slasher movies, but the ideas at the core of the whole—the artwork and the music and the image, the cryptic interviews, the drugs, the suicide attempts—were older and more powerful than even he knew.

When men did not pray to gods, but used magic and will to command them, there was an afterlife, but only those who could build a door could find their way in. The Egyptians and the Aztecs knew how to travel the Black Road, but only a few sorcerers and philosophers had discovered the way in modern times, men and groups whom history had branded as monsters: the Zodiac, Jim Jones, Aleister Crowley, Adolf Hitler, Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. And all the times it almost opened on its own, when men of vision were snuffed out, and broken little people leapt or stumbled after them into the dark: JFK, MLK, Elvis, Kurt Cobain…

But they were only half-formed fantasies, until Sloane came to him with the mandate of the newly reformed fan club. His followers already had one foot in the next world, and needed only His light to follow. If He was serious, and not just flirting with them, she could make it happen.

Last party: strictly for the hardcore, the worms in the industry corpse. An abandoned dance club, unsuccessfully torched by the owners, so half the ceiling is open to the night sky. Every smile a silicone-bloated cocaine rictus, all the machismo of a Pamplona bull run, a Viking funeral. Free-floating menace like a giant severed power line rampant among the crowd. Sloane’s lieutenants move through it like Furies, ready to tear apart anyone who brings them down from their ecstasy of grief.

These guests, of all the people in His life, should be celebrating. Many of them lost money, lost face, and some lost their minds, in return for backing His career, and Sloane has taken steps to keep the mood ugly. Execs and agents and producers who loathe each other line opposing poles of the club; former rivals, ex-bandmates come to gloat and trade told-you-so’s, get into glaring and shoving matches with the Furies, and photographers bother everyone. Nobody seems to have noticed the drinks are spiked.

She walks in with him: in drag, now, he’d be recognized here. He shouldn’t be here at all, but he needs to see this to believe in it, to make it real. The world, the fans, had to be lied to, so He would believe, and follow them.

Video walls shower the room with His cockeyed glare, a wretched dubstep remix of one of the old singles shaking asbestos dust into thousand dollar hairdos. She steers him through the crowd to the steps leading up to the DJ’s bunker. She’s shocked, looking around, to see so many faces in the flesh that she’s only known as photographs on her own site. His enemies list, and so many of them looking morose, broken… bereaved. She pushes him faster, his sequined shoulders shaking with laughter.

The DJ is a chubby kid in pajamas, bobbing his head to the screeching submix in his headphones. He takes Sloane’s disk without looking at it and slots it in, cues it. She checks her watch. Five to midnight. This is the one part she couldn’t time out, exactly. She hopes her Furies can make it happen.

She goes to the laptop set up in one corner, toggles to the video feeds from the motel and the house on the hill. They’re all waiting. Waiting for her to open the door and take them all to Him. Her heart skips a beat, then it races. She slips on a headset. The DJ fades down the music, patches Sloane’s headset into the PA.

“This is His final message to the world, children. Follow it through the dark until you get to the other side. Your dreams and blood and bones are the seeds of the new world.” She looks at her watch, cues the DJ. “Follow the music—”

The last song fades in, rumbling, molten womb-sounds, contorting basso shudders resolving at long last into a convulsive, peristaltic rhythm, expelling the unborn song out into an undeserving world of horror.

On the screens, the parties react to it according to their respective natures.

The motel explodes in violent Jonestown pathos, bodies beating each other to slush. Crunching down on pills, foaming rabid death-rattlers forcing fistfuls of poison into the mouths of backsliders. She sees those piebald eyes tattooed on that pale white skin, but someone’s ripped it off the girl’s back, and waves it like a battle flag.

The house party subsides into mellow, Heaven’s Gate surrender. Bodies sink to the floor in clouds of lace and silk, Sylvie and her girlfriend guiding the living and posing the dead into artful tableaux before disrobing, feeding each other pills and sagging into a cold embrace.

And here, the bloody lightning-strike catharsis of Hitler’s bunker.

She can feel it. Even as she sees all the little lights fading out across town, she can feel more going out across the nation. In her heart, like the pull of an unknown homeland, she really believes she can feel their energy building on the other side.

“It’s time, children.”

The DJ turns the music up in the booth, but she can still hear it. Shooting, screaming, crying, bullets caroming off the cinderblock walls.

And then it’s very quiet. The DJ and the Furies take their own pills, now. Only Sloane and her companion are left.

She sucks on doubt. She wants to go to him and change his mind, now there’s just the two of them, and both their old lives swept away, and all this unclaimed power in the air. They could make a heaven for themselves right here, or just run away, and live this life for each other, and maybe even try to be happy.

But she looks into his eyes, drunk on revenge, glutted with love, and says, “They’re waiting for you. Your estate is prepared.”

“Thank you, darling Sloane, for all of this.” He takes the pill between his teeth and bites down.

Sloane looks away from his sick grin, because in the end, she sees more than she should have. She sees the sick, empty little thing behind the mask of talent that beguiled them all. She sees only a worm who wanted to be loved, whose morbid genius called out to other sick, damaged souls; who collapsed under the weight of their desperate worship, but was too chicken-shit to go out alone.

He pulls her close and clamps his mouth over hers, his kiss sloppy and cold and not like how she always dreamed it would be, at all. His tongue shudders and dies in her mouth. She feels the edge of his dissolving gel capsule at the back of her throat.

His lips slide away from his bleached teeth, but his eyes remain fixed on her, as she lays him down. A little light seems to leak out of his eyes, a glimpse of silver, and it’s all she needs to see.

She tries to spit it out, tries to vomit, but her face goes numb and only a stream of drool oozes from her drooping lips. She goes to leave, skidding on blood, tripping on lead-shredded bodies. Bleary, she can’t see the door. She falls, but never hits the floor.

Awake in a forest. Quicksilver mist and electrified dew crackle on wrought-iron leaves and barbed-wire lawns. She picks her way through tar pits of liquid shadow and slithering, singing blades, amazed that in the afterlife, she can still feel pain, oh, like never before.

She staggers out of the razorblade trees to find His mansion sprawling out over both horizons, and the moon has His face, and all their prayers are answered at last, night without end, Amen.

And all of them are there, waiting for her.

Like any spoiled birthday boy, He awoke and unwrapped and broke all his presents, and is already bored. He stands on a balcony, all black curling horns and exquisite tentacles caressing the flayed remains of His slaves, sculpting and fusing the choice bits into a new and tantalizing toy, a voluptuous mountain of turgid, squirting teats and pouting, slobbering cunts. At its apex, the gargantuan torso ends in a stump, the protruding vertebrae carved into an empty throne of tattooed flesh.

In this private heaven created by their blind, suicidal worship, He has become what they always wanted Him to be, and now He is remaking them into what He always needed.

He shows her the crown she will wear forever, and the hammer and nails to put it on, and when He pulls its strings, His leviathan bride bows low to accept her as its head.

The sea of discarded human scraps parts for Sloane as she wades through it to kneel before Him, and she has to hide her smile, because He thinks this is His dream, and the game they are about to play will have to last forever.

“There’s one more thing you got to know about the dump,” said Igor Blasco, “if you want to be a real garbage man.”

Rope Lipton looked over the rusty iron drums in the bed of the pickup truck as he and Igor covered them with a tarp. Shit had already eaten its way out of two of them, and where it dripped off the tailgate, the oily gravel sizzled and danced. He had been here a year, and in the last month, when he’d got off some sort of secret probation, he’d started to learn how the dump really worked. He’d learned so much, already, that he never wanted to know.

“Like what?” he asked, backing away from the truck as soon as the tarp was lashed down. His mask sucked up against his mouth when he tried to breathe, and the air sweated toxins that he could feel dissolving into his blinking, dripping eyes.

“Where we take the bad shit, sport, the shit nobody ever wants found.” Igor always called him tiger and sport, and worse whenever Rope’s back was turned, but he couldn’t find a better job after he got out of jail.

Rope should have known better, but he was intrigued. He’d caught bits of rumor about some sort of secret place in the dump, something only Igor knew about, and this morning, perhaps in reward for lying to the OSHA inspector yesterday, Rope was about to be let in on it.

Most likely, it was merely something highly illegal, dangerous and stupid, but the tones of those hushed, black-lunged whispers in the break room—the way Chuy, the old Mexican bulldozer operator, crossed himself and kissed the weird amulet under his flannel shirt when someone brought it up—hinted at much more than just a hole in the ground.

They climbed into the truck. Igor fired up the enormous engine, threw it into gear and set out of the compound, into the sulfur-green glow of a junkyard sunrise.

They were at Collection Center 3, the furthest outpost of civilization in the dump. Furious seagulls circled over the shifting tides of trash, battling for the freshest jetsam from the armada of trucks disgorging their bagged and loose garbage in discrete pyramids. The pickers sorted recyclables out of the mounds, and the bulldozers rearranged the landscape into stratified terraces. Rope knew that if he dug in the same spot long enough, he’d find his own fossilized diapers and petrified newspapers from the day he was born.

The dump was the last and largest within the city limits, servicing the daily waste disposal needs of about two million consumers. Though they had filled in the last of the box canyons and graded off the last knobby coastal hills, you couldn’t see the surrounding city from anywhere inside—kind of like at Disneyland, and not just because of the sickly miasma of methane and nitrogen bleeding out of the overripe ocean of waste.

They reached the back gate, and Igor gave Rope the keys to unlock it. Rope took a while to find the right key to the big rusty padlock, and it got harder to concentrate when he looked through the fence. This part of the dump was different, and what he’d seen so far made him unwilling to go again.

He got the lock off and held the gate open for Igor to drive through. When he climbed up on the stepladder to the cab, Igor punched it. Rope’s boots, slick with slime, spun out from under him. He hung onto the mirror and slithered in the open window. He didn’t want to be outside.

The trash was older here, and piled higher, in precarious rolling hills and frozen tidal waves that shifted with the slightest stirring of the sickly wind. Hazardous shit—industrial and military junk, misplaced medical waste, stagnant ponds of scummy not-water, all but glowing in the shadows, clotted with pickled rat carcasses.

Rope looked to Igor for reassurance as the road sank into the walls of waste to become a narrow, twisting canyon. The senior sanitation engineer took a toot of crystal meth out of his plastic bullet and cracked open a Mickey’s Bigmouth like it was just another morning.

The walls of trash threatened to close over them, almost touching to form a tunnel, but the road serpentined around a dormant diaper volcano and emerged onto a festering field broken only by the gray concrete blocks of the old Navy housing project.

The Navy spared every expense on the drab rows of apartment blocks, and grudgingly abandoned them when the residents began to complain of birth defects. “Flipper babies,” Igor called them, “real Navy seals.”

Soil and water tests were taken and swiftly buried, and the Navy surrendered the property to the dump, which simply knocked down the fences and spread into the Navy project until the ground floor windows only peeked above the tide.

Rope looked in the broken windows of the second floor, saw hanging pictures and empty flowerpots and broken furniture left behind. He thought he saw silhouettes of children watching him, swimming through shadows on vestigial paddle limbs.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Igor demanded.

“I don’t feel nothing. Maybe a beer—”

“No beer, tiger. Gotta stay sharp. Ah shit, have one.” He collected his thoughts for a moment, something that left Rope amazed, because Igor never thought about anything, and he never, ever, shared his beers. “Nobody likes a dump, except people who have to be there, because all this shit got thrown away, know what I mean?”

Rope didn’t, but he nodded while he slurped his beer.

“You don’t know shit. When you throw something away, whatever it is, you kind of curse it a little. Nobody wants to touch trash, it’s like shit or piss, it’s taboo, see? And when you get all that shit in one place, pile it high and pack it tight… Look down there.”

The truck topped another rise and idled on the edge of a pit so wide and deep, Rope expected to see Chinks crawling up out of it.

He couldn’t see the fence or the city or the congested traffic on Highway 52 on the other side, just more trash-tundra, up to and over the mustard-gas horizon.

The pit was gouged out of the fossilized strata of compressed trash, and the road wound down to the bottom, where a cinderblock bunker sat all by itself. The truck slipped and squealed on the slimy spiral slope as it descended into the hole, and Rope started to see the things that moved in it and grew out of it.

Trees stood up out of the trash, but not like the spindly eucalyptus groves in healthier parts of town. The bulging trunks and succulent, swaying branches looked like boiled, spoiled meat, and the way they twisted and swatted in the still air at the frenzied clouds of seagulls proved they were not trees at all. Squawking gulls stuck to the lazy, predatory branches like flies, and were swiftly dissolved in bursts of acidic foam.

Naked, hairless rat-jackals prowled barrow-mounds of bloated Glad bags and loose, maggoty debris. They paced the truck knowingly, sat back on their leprous haunches and preened their delicate forepaws with long black razor tongues.

The truck stalled out in front of the bunker. Rope looked out at the rat-jackals and the meat-trees. “Did the—the stuff you dumped… do this?”

Igor polished off his beer and strapped on his gas mask, and Rope did the same. Through the chambered rubber filters, Igor sounded like Darth Vader. “Boy, when you get this much bad shit in one place, shit just happens, you know?”

He checked the action on his pistol, tossed the keys in Rope’s lap. “This is where we put the hazardous shit. We got a real deep hole, a special one.”

Only now did Rope look around at the trash at the bottom of the valley, and a low whistle escaped his lips. This was the strangest thing he’d seen yet, though there was nothing impossible or innately fucked up about it. The stuff on the ground all around the bunker was not trash.

Igor caught Rope’s jaw in his crusty glove, squeezed. “Don’t touch a fucking thing. You know those old shells?”

Rope tried to nod in the vise of Igor’s fist. The dump used to be part of an old Army proving ground before WW2, and the bulldozers sometimes unearthed live artillery shells. He thought they were just stories, until a bunch of them went off during a trash fire.

“This shit is a thousand times more dangerous.” Igor popped the door and slid his gigantic ass painfully off his inflatable hemorrhoid doughnut. “Get the shotgun and follow me. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Rope shrugged and unlocked the shotgun from the rack in the back window. “For what?”

The Loser rides the bus, in the sideways seat by the back door, under a big banner that says Winners Ride The Bus! Every other seat is crammed with morning express commuters, but even though he has his herd of bags close by his feet on the floor, no one sits next to him.

A golden ribbon of fluid trails out across the ripped seat cushion from under the fluttering wings of the Loser’s outermost raincoat. He notices it and feels bad. He dabs a finger in it and tastes it, remembers… something.

A faceless puppet in the next seat starts to scream, but its mother jerks its strings and hisses, “Don’t stare!” in a scalding whisper.

He hides his face behind his gloved hands, but this strikes him as silly and pathetic, because he has no idea what his face looks like. He checks the cracked plastic bottle of Golden Griddle maple syrup in his pocket. He picked it up on Adams in Kensington, where a woman with too many bags dropped it in a gutter coming out of a supermarket. But he doesn’t remember if it was today or yesterday, and the bottle has lost its glow.

Today, the Loser rides the 115 on a loop. He continuously rides and walks on his routes because he is the most functionally insane human being in the city, if not the world. If he ever had a past or a future, he lost and forgot them, but in return he gets to see what no one else can.

He cannot see any of the people on the bus as people, nor can he see the bus itself, or the drab procession of stores and apartment complexes outside. Not the way people do. He sees through them to the Platonic ideals of these things—what they mean, not what they appear to be—and all the webs, wires and nooses that bind them to each other, and to the world.

Some of the bus riders are expressed as complex mathematical formula, or floating words, or fuzzy, embryonic shapes, or bizarre jigsaws of animal and machine totems, or vague mists of noxious vapor. He can see right through most of them, and out through the ghostly outline of the bus, unfleshed but for a skeletal grid fused by the collective need and resentment of its patrons, and he looks deep and far and long in every direction, as the 115 grinds on down University Avenue, out of loud, lurid Hillcrest and into the muted neo-Victorian backwater of Banker’s Hill.

Through the drooping rows of palms and willows and between the dense picket lines of parked cars, he sees the beckoning glow only he has eyes for, and reaches up to pull the cord that rings the bell. His syrupy ass sticks to the seat when he lurches up to gather his bags.

A transparent rooster jumps up and kicks through the bags to get out the door before him, causing the Loser much distress. He gets the handles of the last bag over his wrist, and looks around, and sees something that was not there before.

A wallet under the glass rooster’s seat; cheap imitation eelskin, frayed at the single-stitched seams, stuffed with overextended credit and phone cards, three driver’s licenses, one hundred or so dollars in cash and a folded cocktail napkin with a phone number on it, outlined in stars. It is this napkin, oddly enough, that he sees most clearly, the number that makes this object glow so brightly.

Something very big might have happened to the owner, had he called. Something life-changing, forever lost. The Loser collects the wallet with a fluid dip that no one sees because he is as invisible to them as they are to him.

He drops the wallet in his bag and gets up. The bus driver floats up from his seat, a smoke-belching contraption accordioning out of the cockpit, grinding its gears up as frustration mangles its shoddy components. “You getting off today, sir?”

Words fail the Loser yet again, but he makes sorry noises and drops back into his syrup-puddled seat.

He has enough to go back to the dump, maybe enough that, at last, his offerings will be accepted. If he can get into the bunker, he can open the door and stand inside it and from there, he can see where the lost thing is, the one that he must find. He tries to think, for a moment, about what he is doing, and why, and who he is, and he thanks somebody that he cannot remember.

The rat-jackals slinked away when Igor shot the brains out of one, but Igor saw something else in the pea-green mist that made him rush unloading the truck. He threw down the lift-gate and shoved the dolly at Rope, who bobbled it and almost dropped the shotgun. He looked around, but he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, ha ha.

“Pay it no mind, tiger.”

“It ain’t real, right, boss?”

“Oh shit, boy, it’s all real.” Igor strolled over to the rusty meat locker door on the bunker and commenced keying the padlocks and deadbolts. Rope crouched and backed away from the door, skin prickling as if it knew something was going to spring out at him when it opened.

Finally, Igor threw it wide, looked back at Rope and cackled. A coughing fit doubled him over, but when he recovered, he said, “Come on.”

Rope followed him inside. The soupy sunlight stopped dead on the threshold. Inside, it was cold and dry as the Carlsbad Caverns, and nearly as dark. And filled with shit. But, like the stuff outside that covered the floor of the valley, it was not trash.

Toys, dolls and whole, wrapped gifts, accidentally thrown out with the Christmas wrap; boxes overflowing with fine and costume jewelry, glass eyes and prosthetic limbs; TV’s and lesser appliances, lost or dumped swag from botched robberies; crumbling ziggurats of books, pyramids of rolled rugs and tapestries, dismembered statuary, drained aquaria, Nazi and Commie flags and guns and swords and bongs and meth lab apparatus. And in the center, under a dome-shaped cage wrapped in layers of chicken wire, a big empty space that got no lighter when Igor hit a switch to ignite a row of yellow incandescent lamps.

It was to this caged empty space that Rope was drawn. It wasn’t darkness, but emptiness—so profoundly blank that it made the space around it seem like a picture, and the artist just hadn’t painted anything there. The longer he looked at it, the more it seemed to turn into a tunnel with pulsing lights streaming down into it, but he knew this was his mind playing tricks on him, because it had no clue what it was looking at.

“I started collecting lost-and-found shit almost from the first day,” Igor said. “Stop looking at me like that.”

Rope wasn’t looking at him at all, but staring into the empty space in the cage.

Igor crept up behind him and hung onto the cage with his fat fingers. He hawked a gob of snot into the hole, and a gust of chill wind stirred the lone lock of hair on his red, sweaty skull. The wind sucked into the hole, he noticed.

“When all you see is trash for a mile in every direction, you get an eye for stuff that don’t belong, when your bulldozer turns it up. I just wanted to fix up the shit and sell it at the swap meet, this was before all that Ebay bullshit, mind you… but I couldn’t part with it. I started to see something… a kind of light, like the rainbow shine on beef when it’s spoiled, but magical, you know? Like it was charged, because it was lost shit. Somebody missing it, gave it power…

“Anyway, I just collected the shit for eighteen years, and I couldn’t bring it home, so I put it all in here. But then he started coming around, and bringing his shit out here, and then it just opened up…”

“What is it?”

Igor grunted, but he didn’t answer for a while. “You know, when you lose your keys or your wallet, and you tear the house apart, but they’re nowhere? Not lost, not stolen, but just gone?”

Rope shook himself out of a trance and nodded.

“That’s where they go.”

Rope just nodded again. It made sense. “Who is the Loser, boss?”

Igor shoved him. “Go get the fucking barrels loaded, peckerwood.”

Rope gratefully turned away and went back outside. He stuck the shotgun outside first, then followed it out to the back of the truck. The barrels were on the lift gate, and he got one on the dolly and levered it back into the bunker without incident.

Igor held the cage door open, and pointed at the hole like a gracious host showing the way to the toilet. Rope edged the dolly up to the mouth of the cage, but balked. Igor tore the handles out of his weak grip and stood the dolly up with a jerk so the barrel tipped over and into the hole.

It never hit the floor, but beyond that, Rope could not say for certain where it went. It did not make a sound. It didn’t disintegrate or implode. It just dropped out of sight.

Rope leaned forward without meaning to, out over the edge of the hole before Igor hauled him back by the collar of his jumpsuit.

A sudden blast of wind hit his back, and despite Igor’s grip, he got dizzy and stumbled as the air sucked at him, whistling through the jumbled maze of Igor’s collection, like the mouth of a sleeping giant startled awake by the poison pill they’d fed it, and gasping all the air out of the room.

Rope threw himself back and turned to see Igor waddling the dolly outside, and ran after him. He leaned against piles of junk until he reached the door, when the wind abruptly died off and he jumped a step forward like he’d been on an express elevator that suddenly stopped.

Outside, the seagulls wheeled over the bunker in a halo of ominous intent. They were completely silent, not diving or fighting over scraps, but just tracing circles in the air above the tin-shingled roof. The drooling meat-trees stooped and snaked their groping, ropy tentacles among the scattered piles of lost stuff, slowly but unmistakably converging on the bunker.

Something hooted and howled in the yellow mist, sounding not very far away at all.

Rope rushed the next barrel onto the dolly, hardly noticing when his gloved fingers broke through the corroded lid.

A shadow swept over the truck and startled Rope into dropping the shotgun. A huge, shapeless blob of a body wobbled out of the mist on barbed black crab legs, two stories tall. Tumors like overripe cauliflower D-cup teats drooped from its blistered form, a blubbery cluster of buttocks that expelled spastic gouts of toxic diarrhea, though he could see no mouths for taking anything in.

He backed away from the truck as the hideous thing stilted by, spraying the truck with bright orange shit that ate the paint off the hood.

Fuck this. Looking back over his shoulder at the open door, Rope sidled away from the truck, keeping it between him and the open bunker door, so he could still hear Igor cursing and moving shit around without being seen.

He got closer, and his eyes popped out as they roved over the Loser’s collection.

Like Igor’s, it was clearly a museum of lost objects, but the Loser’s was, if less esoteric, far more portable. Rope noticed the prevalence of umbrellas, books, jackets, laptops, grocery bags, phones, hats, glasses and dentures, all deliberately arranged and stacked, as if to form some image when seen from the air.

Stranger items abounded, like suits of armor, knives and bullets and white powder in bags with EVIDENCE stickers, mason jars with blobs of jelly still wriggling inside. He wondered why Igor never plundered it, because there was a fortune here; and then he wondered how it all looked so clean, when it rained only last week. The Loser collected his loot from the streets of the city, and smuggled it into the dump, where it sat…

Rope noticed an ugly doll, pale and bony, shriveled until it could sit in his palm, shrouded in a bed of grimy kids’ jackets. It was breathing.

A crack baby or a boozehead’s kid, probably left behind on a bus bench by a raving addict chasing a fix. The baby looked as if it was only napping, though the coats it lay wrapped in were all years out of style.

A look over the shoulder, and he grabbed an iPod and dropped it in his pocket. He had no idea how the damned things worked, but he’d heard of kids getting killed for them back east.

He poked around the piles until a gnarly black cockroach the size of a cat scuttled out from a camera bag and nipped at his hand. Hissing, it tore his glove off and shredded it in rusty mandibles as he ran away.

Rope jogged the loaded dolly back inside and down the narrow avenue to the hole. As he worked, he found himself floored at how he’d just accepted all this shit. It naturally made sense to him, the lost stuff and the hole and the living trash, because he was trash, himself.

Abandoned at birth at a county hospital, raised in foster homes until age thirteen, and juvenile halls and labor camps since then, he knew how people shied away from him like he was made of shit. He knew how such rejection made him feel inside, so if that ugly feeling in extreme concentrate could make the dump come alive, then that, too, was nature. And if the lost stuff, collected here in sufficient mass, could open a door to the Bermuda Triangle or the Twilight Zone, then there were probably better uses for it than dumping toxic waste. Rope’s unscientific mind buzzed with theories and propositions.

Rope’s unsupervised body walked the dolly into a pile of junk. The barrel tipped and its contents sloshed out over the rotten lip. Rope reflexively grabbed for the lid, but it broke off in his hand. The barrel slid off the dolly’s skids. Rope could just watch it happen, see it reflected in Igor’s face as he, too, watched in helpless disbelief.

The barrel rocked on its rim, but came to rest standing upright. Only a gallon or so of the milky yellow contents slopped out on the nearest pile of junk.

Igor gingerly rolled the barrel onto the skids and shoved Rope out of the way. “Get the backup dolly by the door, and don’t be so fucking clumsy.”

As Igor rolled the barrel away, Rope went to obey, but froze and looked at the wall of junk that he’d smashed into. Crusty old ice chests, stacked chest-high and sealed with duct tape. The splatter from the barrel bubbled and ate its way into the bottom ice chest, a blue Igloo the size of an Army footlocker. He recoiled from curling fumes of burning plastic, but the smell from within was worse, far worse than anything he’d ever smelled in his life.

Igor dumped the leaky barrel into the hole, and the wind ripped the smell away. Rope leaned into the cage as the alien vacuum sucked at him like someone pushing from behind as a subway train approaches, a sudden jerk that caught him by surprise, though his hands were anchored in the chicken wire.

Up close, the void was full of things, if you looked long enough. His eyes got really tricky with the visuals, furry worms of fluorescent light mating to form more complex shapes, deeper meaning. Faces—a man and a woman stared out at him, tortured grief and confusion etched into their careworn faces. Though he’d never seen them, Rope knew who they were.

He wasn’t thrown away; he was lost.

Somehow, he’d gotten separated at birth from the people who loved him, and tumbled through a hole into this world of dumps within dumps and meat-trees and ass-crab monsters. The real world was on the other side; the one where he was mourned and missed, the one where he’d always belonged. All he had to do to get there, was let go…

The Loser rides the eastbound 27, heading for the Kearny Mesa business loop and the public dump entrance on Convoy, when something touches him, like ice chips sprinkling down his back.

A tiny thread of the web he builds is being pulled apart. The vibrations travel through the magnetic ley lines of the city’s highways and jolt him like a drowsy spider, at the trembling of ensnared prey.

He tries to still his inner noise and see deeper, but he knows all the other riders are staring at him, and the world goes dead black, all gone and good riddance.

He cannot even see the lost things in the bags at his feet or in his many pockets, but he sees a light, the light he has been searching for all his life, and he knows that this is what he is for. He stares into it, and it is like all the light of the sun poured down a thread into his eyes, but he stares into it, and he cannot believe he has been so blind.

The light shoots out from the terminus of all his many routes, from the one place his invisibility has not allowed him to enter.

He will go there now.

He was going there already, but now, he actually wants to go, and this alien volition presents a paradox his mind has not been able to grasp for some time, and with that unwelcome intrusion of the notion that he might also have a past, the Loser starts to try to remember it.

He tugs the cord as they straggle down the frontage road along the 52, a mile from the recycling center at Convoy Court, but now there is no time. He drags all his bags up to the front and sees that the mechanism driving this bus is filled with boiling water and shrieking seahorses.

He tries to plead with it in its native language to stop and let him off, but it won’t relent, and extrudes a white-hot electrode to herd him back to his seat.

They are passing so close to the light that even when he averts his eyes, he can barely see the driver through the glare as he lashes out with his armload of overloaded canvas shopping bags. The mechanism collapses on itself, and the Loser is left to his own devices to get the door open.

The other passengers are hysterical, trying to tackle him and hold him for the police, screaming into cell phones and taking pictures, but he sees none of it. Weightless, he floats out of their grip and out of the bus, bounding across the road and vaulting over the fence, buoyed up by the swinging bags loaded with all the lost things he has found. And these, too, glow ever brighter as their potential resonates with the offerings he has assembled to find what he lost and forgot, but now has found.

The rest of the barrels went pretty quickly after that, with a minimum of spillage. Each time, the wind ripped more fiercely at them, and sucked a few flimsy items up against the cage.

Igor was nervous, but unusually cheerful, even offering Rope a stingy bump of his white stuff. Rope snorted it and soaked up the electrical buzz, his spine coming alive and sinking envenomed fangs into his hindbrain. “So who’s the loser you said to kill?”

His boss’s good mood went all to shit in a breath. “He’s the fuckin’ Loser, that’s all.” He wheezed like someone was squeezing him, but the speed took hold and the words spat off his hyperactive tongue. “He’s nothing, but you gotta watch out for him. Gray… like shadows on a rainy day. He can hide so a fuckin’ Cu Chi tunnel rat couldn’t find him in his own fuckin’ pants.”

“But who is he?”

“The craziest fuckin’ bum there ever was. Been bringin’ shit here for almost eight years. He made that hole open up.”

“Why?”

“He’s fuckin’ crazy, how the hell should I know? Maybe he wants to jump in there, and suck the whole world in after him. Whatever, you just gotta know that you don’t never touch the Loser’s shit. And you fuckin’-A gotta keep him away from the cage.”

Rope swallowed hard before asking, “You ever try to sell any of that shit, out there?”

Igor looked him up and down and spat on the floor, like Rope had cursed him. “Fuck, let’s get the hell out of here, what’re you fuckin’ around for, think I’m gonna blow you?”

Rope looked back at the hole, hungry and restless in its cage. “He brought all that other shit out here, right?” It sucked the words out of his mouth, so his own ears never heard them. It vibrated with all kinds of new and insidious patterns, now his vision was tweaked. He wanted to get closer, but the light shut off, and he tripped over something in the dark.

“Get the fuck out here, now! No skin off my ass, you wanna die, but I ain’t waitin’!”

Using the dwindling ribbon of light seeping through the door as a compass, Rope tried to navigate the room without letting panic overtake him, but it was no use. He kneed something that sent him dancing into piles and stacks of sharp, filthy, fragile blackness. He screamed and put his bare hand in something that sizzled where his fingers touched it, and he smelled that dead smell again.

Rope practically flew to the door, but the boss blocked the way and elbowed him back inside and followed him, slammed the door and threw all the bolts. “Goddamit, he’s here.”

Rope fumbled at the walls for the light switch. “What does he want?”

Borne aloft by updrafts of decay, the Loser floats out over the hollow, draws himself into a ball and touches down on the naked dirt before the bunker.

The glow of it is so bright. How could he be so blind? The thing he has been searching for all these (years?) countless thousands of circuits through the city, honing his senses to see only lost things, to see through the world, to find—what? Who he was and what he lived for, when he lived. It is inside.

Maybe he has seen it a thousand times and forgotten, the Now rotting and falling away before he can nail it to his abandoned past and unbearable future. Or maybe he has seen and made himself forget, because he’s better off lost in the Now. Is he stronger now, than before he lost his mind? He knows that he is not quite a man, anymore. If he stops now, he won’t have to change.

Still, he finally decides, and flies like a lamp-dazzled moth towards the One Lost Thing.

Igor waddled out into the yard and faced the Loser with his hands on his hips. “I ain’t tellin’ you again. Get the fuck out of here.”

The Loser looked puzzled, though Rope couldn’t see an inch of him under all his coats and his broad-brimmed hat. He whirled around and only then did Rope see and hear the rat-jackals skulking out of the junk, tubercular, rasping snarls and sickly giggles as they drew together in a slipknot around the Loser.

A big one with clumps of oversized human ears growing out of its back leapt at the Loser, who just slumped there with his big old shopping bags weighing him down like balls and chains, and when he looked up, all Rope saw of his face was round, cracked spectacles and a gray scarf wound tight over his gray face.

With its curly talons extended, the rat-jackal pounced on his face, but the Loser ducked and it twirled stupidly in midair to see where its prey went, when a shopping bag full of junk completed the elaborate geometrical proof the Loser had just worked out, smashing into the airborne scavenger’s ribs.

The bag and the rat-jackal both exploded in a flameless conflagration of dust and ash and the tiny thunderclap of a vacuum violently closed. The blown-out carcass crashed and spewed syringes, spent condoms and Popsicle wrappers.

Igor trembled. The rat-jackals cowered and slunk away. He sidled over to the lost collection while the Loser shuffled towards the bunker.

Rope stood in the doorway, equally afraid, suddenly, of going in or out. “Mr. Blasco? Igor? What do I do?”

“Try to shoot him,” Igor shouted, and took cover behind a pyramid of wigs and college textbooks.

Rope had put down the shotgun when he moved the barrels. He had no idea where it was now, somewhere in the bunker, or in the truck, but it probably didn’t matter. Try to shoot him?

The Loser came within ten feet of Rope, and he breathed a little easier. The little freak came up to his shoulder, and wore half a dozen raincoats, but the bags worried him.

The Loser took another step. Igor held something up in the air and roared, “Stop, motherfucker!”

It was the crack-baby.

Igor cocked his arm like he fully intended to bowl a strike with the tiny, mewling body, but he froze in mid-stride and tensed every muscle, as if he had just shit his pants.

The baby cried out once, then it turned gray and flaked apart like a smoked cigarette and blew away. Wracked with spasms, Igor fought to hold the pose, as if he were trying to force a strike with the sheer power of his will.

The Loser paused in midstride, one mismatched oxblood wingtip out over the ground, when it split open beneath him.

A bloated gray tentacle slithered round his outstretched leg four times before he could move, hauled him into the air and brought him back to earth with bone-shattering gusto, then tried to drag him into its trench.

Rope tracked the acid-drooling limb to a meat-tree thirty yards away, bent and straining like an angler reeling in a prize catch. The Loser undid a belt buckle and shed his outermost pants, charcoal gray polyester slacks with a white macramé belt, and emerged intact, though one leg was banded with smoking wounds, and seven layers of severed trouser legs unraveled as he got up and walked towards the bunker.

Igor closed his fist on the smoking baby skull and cocked his arm back like a homicidal baseball pitcher. The air around his fist crackled. The gathering force threatened to split the sky, but it collapsed on itself when he tried to throw it.

Igor’s fist turned gray, instant frostbite creeping up his arm and he could only scream Portuguese curses at this ultimate outrage, as his fingers disintegrated and fluttered away like blasted moths. The harder he tried to force it out, the faster it ate him up.

The Loser came within arm’s reach of Rope, who still couldn’t decide which way to jump. Rope could hear the small man’s wheezing breath through the scarf, and smell his leg burning. “Mr. Blasco, what do I do now?”

Igor thrashed on the ground like he had a mongoose in his mouth and a cobra up his ass. The last thing he had was answers.

Rope backed up into the bunker. Maybe he could find the shotgun.

The Loser passed right by Rope, with his head swiveling back and forth to take in the mad jumble of junk. He went up the center aisle to where it jogged right, where Rope had crashed the dolly, and he knelt down before the melted, cracked stack of coolers.

The Loser didn’t seem to notice the hole. Slowly, painfully, he removed his hat and peeled off the scarf, mottled and blotted with sweat. Underneath, his round, bald head gleamed in the dim light, bulbous, convivial features cruelly hollowed out, like a defrocked cherub on a hunger strike.

He tugged the melted blue Igloo cooler out of the stack, peeled the brittle duct tape off the lid, and opened it.

A puff of necrotic dust wafted out. Rope, sneaking up behind the Loser, gagged and threw up into his hand. He got close enough to look over the Loser’s shoulder for just a second before he had to get away. Away from the smell and the sight of the putrid remains in the cooler, and the sound of the Loser’s weeping.

He loved her, before she was ever born.

He built a nest of his life, a secure and prosperous bower around a vacancy he dared not seek to fill, so idealized was his image of true love. But he had no such illusions about himself; his peers, blessed with more honesty than imagination, had left him no room for doubt, but that he was a loser. He was not handsome or strong, and painfully shy, so he sought to make beautiful things—gold jewelry and occasional poetry, to show the world the beauty inside him.

His poetry even bored him, so he became an English teacher, and found some pale consolation in passing his own unignited literary passions on to the few students who stayed awake in his classes.

But the jewelry line took off. His fingers succeeded where his words had failed, in venting the molten sensuality trapped in his unassuming, roly-poly body. His gold wedding bands came into local vogue for a while, their asymmetrical contours warped by a molten longing that made any half-appealing suitor irresistible. But he had never asked a woman for a date, let alone for her heart, her hand.

As he watched his waist spread, his hair fall out, his tragic resemblance to Elmer Fudd deepen, he tried to find words to tell himself in the mirror, some formal token of surrender of the last and greatest dream of his sad little life.

And then, long past the eleventh hour, it came.

True love, sealed in the first clash of eyes. Two hearts beating in tandem, two minds shedding cold cocoons of loneliness to join together in a Tiepolo sky of bold, infinite possibility, all before he even knew her name.

Francine Klowden sat in the front row of his third-period Junior English Composition & Literature class. She would be sixteen in October.

He was forty-eight.

It could have been a scandal, with a man more forceful, a student less modest, but he held himself back as much for fear of rejection as the impropriety of it, and told himself the signs she seemed to send him were wishful thinking.

Francine was plain and chubby, and favored unflattering sweaters and skirts, and was twice as shy as he. She loved Elizabethan and Romantic poetry, and wrote well. He let her compose sonnets for extra credit, and was shocked out of his paralysis by what he read. They were self-conscious and unsure of their imagery, and took frightful liberties with the rigid Petrarchan meter, but they burned with a submerged metaphysical lust that stoked the dead coals of his own love of language, and his love of love.

They were for him, she said. And she wrote more. He replied, taking up his old fountain pen and chewing up fine Venetian paper journals in search of the words he’d given up hope of ever getting out. John Donne he was not, but his fumblings somehow found their mark.

All the rest of that year and through the summer, they met and read and discussed poetry. He sent a few of her less ardent pieces to an amateur journal edited by an old schoolmate, who printed them. Her gratitude knew no bounds. She ran out of words, and a week before her seventeenth birthday, she offered herself to him.

The Loser weeps now, as the sweetness of those days and nights came back to him. The meetings in secret; trips taken under forged school field trip documents; the things they shared, the poetry that flowed from them as they helped each other to grow. Senior year was torture, until she arranged to take an independent creative writing period with him. They were almost caught so many times, a delicious game for her, but the terror of exposure nearly killing him every afternoon. When she was eighteen next fall, he would quit teaching, and they would marry.

They redecorated his bachelor pad, consecrating a well-lit storage room as an office for her to begin her brilliant career. Every moment of every day, he looked over his shoulder for the inevitable blow; discovery and scandal, blackmail, or, worst of all, a change of heart. For though he had never known a girl so strong of mind or anyone so passionate, he knew she was young.

Her poetry grew surer and broader in its themes, incandescent footprints in her path to womanhood. She still wrote him love poems, and they still nailed his heart, but they seemed paler, less mature, than the blossoming body of her serious work.

Just before graduation, she sold a poem to a prestigious small-press literary journal, about a caterpillar. He thought it a bit trite, but never told her so; what really gnawed at him was the pensive stillness of the piece, that suggested Francine had no idea what changes the transformation would bring. It had not yet come.

When she turned eighteen, they dropped the facade. Her mother threw a tantrum, but ultimately acceded, as he vowed to put her through college. There was a brief uproar at the high school, which he undercut by tendering his resignation. When she moved in, they made love all night, and at sunrise, he gave her the ring he’d made for her.

They honeymooned in Paris and Acapulco. He bought her a Mercedes, paid her tuition for USD, set her up with credit cards, sailing and riding lessons. Everything she could want, everything she asked for and more. With all the things he gave her, he never saw he was building a wall, until he saw all of them together in one place, when she disappeared.

He was at a gem show in Phoenix, when the police called him. Francine’s car was found parked at the mall, where it had sat overnight. Inside, they found her wallet, with all her credit cards, her ID, her cash, and all the pieces of jewelry he’d made for her, neatly wrapped in the Hermes Water Lilies scarf he bought her at Giverny.

Of Francine herself, no sign. No witnesses saw her at the mall, no activity on her cards, nothing missing from the house. By elimination, he deduced she was wearing an old sweater and some jeans from high school, not any of the fine clothing he’d bought for her.

The police were very conciliatory as they explained to him that there was no theft, no foul play, and no trail, so they had to conclude that Francine had voluntarily absconded. They would follow up on the missing persons report, but unless he wanted to hire a private detective, he was not liable to find her, because she clearly didn’t want to be found.

They looked at her poetry, their love letters, his alibi. They tracked his finances for big cash payments, probed his former colleagues, and decided he couldn’t kill a fly. They stopped looking.

He went home and sat in his empty nest for days, with no disturbance. He didn’t have to unplug the phone, because it never rang. Mail piled up at the front door, but none of it was addressed to him. He wandered from room to room, looking from one Francine-shaped void to another, and crying silently, touching things and trying to conjure her up.

Gone, and nobody was looking. Gone, because—well, just look at him! With her whole life ahead of her, with her talent just starting to take flight, she would have been a weakling or a fool to stay under his wing, this lecherous old goat who snatched her out of her teenaged insecurity and raped her with his authority and his smutty doggerel and his lavish bribes. Too shy, too sweet to make a scene, yet she had to escape him, or he would smother her to death, before she ever truly knew life.

Had he done that? Had he crushed her into a cage? Had he left her no choice but to abandon her whole life and flee? He knew her, as he knew no other human being. He trusted her with his life. She would never—would she?

Who wouldn’t?

It was obvious to the police and the rest of the world, but he could never accept it. He read the poems she wrote for him, the insatiable fire of their forbidden love turning yellow and mildewed in the dank corners of his empty house. He read them until they smoldered under his gaze, and he knew in his bones, that she would never leave him, not like this.

She was not on the run; she was lost. She was taken by someone who knew that the world would look at him and give up the search, who knew how to bury his trail so no one would ever see any crime but his, in trying to keep her.

He wandered from room to room amid the junk of his life, and looked for clues. He looked so hard, his beady eyes straining his bifocals until he saw through the walls, the furniture, the stacks of unread books, to the world outside. He looked for some sign of her, and where she went, where they took her, where she must be now, waiting, wishing for him to find her.

He looked and looked, and he has been looking so long that he can only see lost things, and dream only of the dark where all the lost things go when nobody is looking, all the things the world has forgotten but still pines for, and all he has dreamt of is building a bridge, a door, to that lost place, because, he believes, that is where she is, so that is where I will go.

The Loser reached into the cooler and brushed off the shaggy black carpet of mold that softened the angles of the contents. His hand dug down into ossified sludge and insect casings, pried loose something that gave way with a gasp of outraged delicacy, and lifted it out of the cooler. Green-black and caked with slime, yet unmistakable. A skull.

Rope had not been idle during the Loser’s tearful reverie, backing up to the cage door to recover the shotgun, but having it gave him no new answers. The shotgun only had one idea, and he wasn’t ready to try it, yet. He had never shot a man, but he always believed that he could, just not a small, strange helpless man who was crying over a box of bones.

Which left him standing there in the cage doorway again, unsure which way to turn, and the emptiness behind him beckoning him to look, look closer, he didn’t have to go through if he doubted, he had only to stick his head in, and he’d see—

The Loser shut the cooler and put his hat back on. His flushed face looked like wet hamburger, and his mouth worked silently, like he was reciting a rosary.

Rope’s brain tried to catalog his options, but he knew nothing about what anyone wanted, or what would happen when they got it.

There was no one between him and the hole. None of this was his problem. His problems could all be solved right here, right now—

The Loser got to his feet and bent over the cooler. Behind him, something blocked the watery green sunlight from the door, then stumbled into a case filled with an odd assortment of fine china.

Boom! A gunshot, and sparks and a howling ricochet off the chicken wire fence. “Goddamn you!” Igor screamed. “Is that what you came for?”

Rope dove into a branching aisle, away from the cage and the Loser and the shooting, of which there was much more.

“Fine then, fucker! Take it and go!”

Rope duck-walked back along the aisle, catching a glimpse of the Loser through cracks in the wall of junk.

The little man grunted and lifted the cooler, arms straining as if it was much heavier for him than it would be for anyone else. A bullet slapped his left shoulder blade and came out his chest, but seemed not to bother him at all.

“I found her!” Igor shouted as he reloaded. “I didn’t do anything to her, I just found her in the dump just like that, same as the others! Nobody claimed her, Loser! Finders, keepers—”

Rope ducked lower and nearly jumped out of his skin as someone stepped on his fingers.

He bit back a scream and looked at the gun in Igor’s remaining hand. Igor kicked aside towers of treasure for a clear shot at the Loser, who began to walk towards the cage. “Finders keepers,” Igor kept saying, as he stepped over Rope, “Losers, weepers.”

Rope crawled to the door, trying not to touch anything. The bunker and everything in it thrummed with the stored energy of a million ghosts of lost, beloved things. It was like a big can filled with nitroglycerin, clamped in a gigantic paint-shaker. And with every step the Loser took, with every curse Igor howled, the tension escalated.

“I made it!” Igor roared. “It’s mine! Don’t you go in there, or you’ll see what happens—” Igor emptied the gun into the Loser’s back, but didn’t knock him down.

The Loser paused at the door to the cage and turned to look over his shoulder. Rope couldn’t see his eyes behind his spectacles, but tears still streamed down his face, and his mouth still worked.

The walls of the aisle quivered as Igor lurched after the Loser. Igor threw the gun at him, but it sailed by his head and disappeared into the hole.

Rope shouted, “Boss!” too late to do any good. The whole roomful of junk seemed to lift up a little bit, tired old soldiers rising to attention, then slammed together, closing over Igor’s head. Like logs in a whirlpool, the junk floated and circled counter-clockwise round the cage.

“I found you,” the Loser said, and stepped into the hole.

Rope let the shotgun tumble out of his hands and clung to the doorframe. There was no one left to tell him what to do, except the hole.

He could go in after the Loser. He could reject everything the world had refused to give him, and go to the other side, where his lost family and a real life waited for him, where the Loser’s dead woman might rise up and make him human with a kiss, where Igor had been dumping barrels of toxic waste for years and years—

The hole became the eye of a cyclone that yawned and swallowed the cage as whirling junk smashed it in. The concussion sucked the air out of his lungs, the vacuum engulfed the contents of the bunker in one endless, howling gulp. The hole would not need to persuade him, now, to do what it wanted. It was coming for him.

He grabbed the doorknob and yanked against the mounting vacuum. His shoulders popped, almost ripping out of their sockets, but the hole seemed to lapse for just a moment to take another breath of everything, and he slammed the door shut.

Rope backed away from the door, afraid to take his eyes off it, though the noises from behind him clamored for his attention. Rat-jackals chased each other around the bunker, rending each other’s cancerous polyvinyl hides apart. The meat-trees gyrated and tried to tear their fleshy roots out to get to higher ground.

Rope ran for the truck, got in and reached for the ignition. No keys. He must have given them back to Igor, or they were lost.

The bunker screamed. The walls buckled and the corrugated tin roof went all concave, the mortar between the cinderblocks spiderwebbed with cracks.

He got out of the truck and ran.

The ground shook. The sky boiled, and rain that had nothing to do with water splattered the valley, burning his skin. A chill wind roared down into the hollow, scooping up debris and lofting it at the bunker, the walls of which were caving in brick by brick, so it seemed to whistle a dozen deafening tunes as it was devoured from within.

Rope clawed at the ground, but it crumbled in his hands or broke open and showered him with garbage. When he looked behind him, the bunker was gone, and the hole was eating up the hollow. The truck balked on its creaking parking brake, but the gravel beneath its tires subsided and the wind hurled it end over end into the hole.

Crawling, he reached the top and climbed over a hillock of black plastic bags, where the wind was only a noise and a tugging on his shirt. The roaring void abruptly cut out, like a vacuum cleaner sucking its own plug out of the outlet.

For a long while, as the blue shadows of the abandoned Navy housing projects shrank away and left him broiling in the sun, he lay on the bed of trash, just breathing.

Something dug into his hip. He took out the iPod. His fingers fumbled over it, unable to decipher the smooth surface or the inscrutable icons on the bumps that stood in for buttons. Igor told him never to touch the Loser’s stuff, and he winced at the memory of his boss’s arm rotting off when whatever he tried to do with the baby had backfired.

It bleeped, and the screen lit up, said, “HAILEY’S IPOD” and showed a list of songs he’d never heard before. Somebody’s favorite song started to leak out of the earphones.

He looks closer at it and sees the queasy sheen Igor talked about, the haunting rainbow glow of latent magic. He can see it now, and if he can see it, he can gather it, and wield it. He can build another bridge to where the lost things go, and cross it, and say goodbye to all this—

He cocked his arm to throw the iPod back into the hollow.

This was bad magic, chasing after lost things. He was not a lost thing, not trash. He was right here, and he was all that he had, all that he needed. There was nothing lost for him to find, and nowhere else for him to go, and that was all good news.

He slipped the iPod back in his coveralls and walked to the nearest fence, bus fare jingling in his pocket. He would find the owner, and return it; maybe face to face, maybe as a secret delivery. He had no idea what would happen then, but he knew that some new kind of magic would reveal itself in the deed.

Municipal Grid 17 wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where they went berserk and smashed windows when the lights went out, but Morton still bombarded Stu Fiedler with panicked phone calls while he was getting the batteries recharged. Fiedler told Morton that if he had a brainstorm for how to rush the job without going to the gas chamber, he was all ears.

The new cold fusion system used the first truly clean-burning, inexhaustible fuel, but there were still major supply issues.

The power station itself was lit by a cranky dinosaur of a backup generator that still burned biodiesel. It was the only light for two miles in any direction.

Morton waited at the door for Fiedler’s truck. Sweat plastered his sole surviving lock of hair into an inverted question mark on his ruddy forehead. “What kept you? Are they rioting?”

Fiedler pushed the loaded dolly into the control room and over to the primary generator. Even with all the insulation and tanks of liquid nitrogen, the new model took up less than half the space of the turbines from the old system. “Relax, Mort. There’s not even traffic. I got the runaround, though… I had to try five hospitals.”

“Ridiculous! They’ve got to clean up these snarls in the distribution, or they’re just setting us up to fail.” Morton pulled on gloves and donned a welder’s mask, then turned to the hatch in the belly of the generator. Black frost crumbled as he wrenched the hatch open with a pair of long tongs. The cold that wafted out was like Christmas on Pluto.

Fiedler averted his eyes and pushed the dolly up to the yawning mouth, then backed away to suck on a nicotine pop.

Morton slotted the batteries into the generator and slammed the hatch. “Where did you get these?”

The batteries had been warm, like loaves of aluminum bread, like newborn babies. Fiedler scrubbed frost from his eyebrows. “Does it matter?”

Morton flipped the mask up. Spiky puffs of crystallized breath floated out of his mouth. “Sure, it matters... not the way you’re thinking, but... well, if we have to listen to it all night...” His hands shook as he tugged off the gloves.

Fiedler tossed the spent pop stick in the trash and went over to the board. “It still bugs you?”

“I won’t pretend it doesn’t.”

Fiedler threw the big switch. “Nothing gets to you, unless you let it.”

The generator hummed and the batteries squealed as the circuit closed. Both men looked at each other, then at their feet as, like steam pouring off the big, frigid machine, the voices leaked out.

“Jack... it’s so cold... Did you let the pilot light go out?”

“Jesus, when my wife finds out, she’s gonna kill me—”

Fiedler reached for the radio, but Morton pinned his hand to the desk hard enough to leave a mark. “No, Stu. Listen...”

The voices were faint and brittle, but there was no shutting them out. They used the shell of the generator as their larynx, and the crackling of the cold fire that bathed them for their breath.

“Ynez... darling... there’s something you have to know...”

“...Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb—”

“Mommy, I’m scared—”

Fiedler bolted for the exit, double-hulled and soundproofed, but the voices spilled out and followed him into the night.

“Sure…” Morton peered nearsightedly into the dark, unscrewed the lid on a tarnished silver flask and took a long, searing belt from it.

“You know what I miss, Mort? I miss smog. I miss purple sunsets, and harvest moons, and oil slicks...”

Morton took the flask and scoured the chill out of his bones with three short, sharp shots. “Everything that turned to oil was alive once, too,” he said.

They toasted oil, dinosaurs and darkness. They killed the flask just as, two by two all down the avenue, the streetlights came to life.

An Afterword by Jeremy Robert Johnson

First, a heartfelt thanks goes to You for checking out this Swallowdown Press title and letting Cody Goodfellow’s magnificently weird shit into your cranium. Your continued support for the independent press ensures that oft-beleaguered authors with no desire to write tween vampire romance will still have access to essentials like beer and tacos (though we will go without tacos if we have to).

Second, welcome to Planet Cody. If you made it this far, and if this happens to be your first exposure to his work, then you are now aware of the truth: Cody Goodfellow is The Business. And these odd/astonishing tales keep rushing out of his fingers and on to the page without any sign of relenting, so watch for more from Cody and Swallowdown in the near future, including the wild, mind-bending novel Perfect Union.

As an author I have immense respect for Cody’s talent and eerily glowing imagination. As a reader I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. And as a publisher I am lucky enough to read his new stuff early, which means I can tell you he just keeps getting more berserk and spellbinding. Stay tuned (and be certain to check out his Perilous Press epic Radiant Dawn/Ravenous Dusk and manic duets with horror icon John Skipp in the meantime).

Third, it’s nice to see you again. Swallowdown Press entered a sort of existential coma for the last few years (as indie presses often do), but now we’re awake and we’ve grown a crazily long beard and we’ve acquired a two-to-three year roster of amazing books from diverse folks like Cody Goodfellow, Forrest Armstrong, Mitch Maraude, J. David Osborne, and more. The next few years should be fun for fans of strange/smart/surreal fiction.

And fourth, VIVA BIZARRO! The Weird Wave rolls ever onward!

Take care, friends,

JRJ

Portland, OR 2009

Cody Goodfellow was born in San Diego in 1970, and almost immediately adopted into the Free School, a nomadic hippie apocalypse cult whose existence has been repeatedly denied by the FBI. Roaming the back highways of the Southwest in ice cream trucks, subsisting only off trash from rest stop dumpsters and semi-annual ritual cannibalism on high hippie holidays, he enjoyed a blissful semi-feral childhood until 1981, when the Free School was savagely massacred and sacrificed by a rival drug-running Santeria cult in Baker, California. How Goodfellow alone walked away, and how he survived in the hostile Mojave Desert for the next thirteen years, remains a mystery. When discovered by authorities digging through the trash behind a Boll Weevil franchise in El Cajon, his vocabulary was still limited to words appearing on Jethro Tull eight-tracks.

The road to rehabilitation was long and arduous, but when Goodfellow finally began to speak out about his brutal ordeal, his harrowing autobiography was dismissed as a product of false trauma or Munchausen Syndrome. After alternate careers as a cult deprogrammer and psychic surgeon failed to take off, he turned to harvesting his apparently false memories for profit. Under the supervision of a professional hypnotist, he automatically writes accounts of experiences he does not remember, but subconsciously believes were real events in his life.

Cody Goodfellow has written three solo novels—Radiant Dawn, Ravenous Dusk, and Perfect Union—and Jake’s Wake, The Day Before and Fruiting Body with John Skipp. His short fiction has also appeared in the recent anthologies Mighty Unclean, Monstrous, The Bleeding Edge and Up Jumped The Devil.

He lives in Los Angeles.

Alan M. Clark hails from Nashville, Tennessee.  His illustration work has appeared in books of fiction, non-fiction, textbooks, young adult fiction and children’s books. His awards include the World Fantasy Award and four Chesley Awards. As a writer, he has sold short fiction, nonfiction and four novels.

alanmclark.com

“Cronenberg’s THE FLY on a grand scale: human/insect gene-spliced body horror, where the human hive politics are as shocking as the gore.” -John Skipp

Nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. A potent mix of bad drugs, bad dreams, brutal bad guys, and surreal/incredible art by Alan M. Clark.

An uncanny voyage across a newly nuclear America where one man must confront the problems associated with loneliness, insane dieties, radiation, love, and an ever-evolving cockroach suit with a mind of its own.

“A David Lynchian nightmare set in a Russian gulag... Osborne’s debut is paranoid, cold, brutal, haunting, mystifying (in a good way), and totally unforgettable.”- PAUL TREMBLAY

The hip hop lovechild of William Burroughs and Dali...

"WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific. Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. These stories have range and style and wit. This is entertainment... and literature."--JACK KETCHUM, author of “Off Season”, “The Girl Next Door”, and “The Woman” (w/Lucky McKee)

Table of Contents

Introduction by John Skipp: Heavy Lifting, for the Lunatic Bastard in You!

Baby Teeth

El Santero

A Drop of Ruby

Champagne Room

Feast of the Ixiptla

Hinterland

The Good News About God

Magna Mater

His Station & 4 Aces

Burning Names

Atwater

Conscientious Objector

In His Wake

Losers, Weepers

Batteries

Afterword by Jeremy Robert Johnson: What You Need to Know