Dead Mans Hand

11:00 P.M.

The sound of singing floated through the night, a ragged drunken harmony in a couple different keys. The lyrics were something about hanging Leo Barnett from a sour-apple tree.

The path curved off to the left, but Jay cut across the grass and through a stand of trees. Blaise followed desultorily, kicking at the occasional rock.

The fire was out; the only light came from a few embers glowing feebly amidst the ashes. It wasn't until they were quite close that Jay realized the group of jokers squatting by the tent wasn't a group at all. Or maybe it was, if you count Siamese quints as a group.

By then the singing had stopped.

All the eyes were looking at him. The five bodies were twisted and malformed, flesh flowing into flesh in places and ways that made Jay want to turn his head. He wasn't even sure you could really call them quints; there seemed to be five bodies, but they shared four heads and maybe seven legs between them. On the other hand, they'd come out way ahead on the arm-and-tentacle count.

"Oh, gross," Blaise said with astonishing tact.

Jay ignored him, and hoped the jokers would, too. "Maybe you could help me," he said. "I'm looking for a friend of mine, name of Sascha. Skinny, slicked-down hair, kind of a fussy dresser. Has one of those little pencil mustaches like you see on desk clerks in old movies." No response. "No eyes. Did I mention that? Just skin."

Four mismatched faces regarded him dully. Jay couldn't decide if they were stupid or hostile or what. He waited a long awkward moment and tried again. "Maybe you don't know him. He used to work at the Crystal Palace. You guys from New York?"

"I can make it answer," Blaise said eagerly. "Just watch. I'll make it get up and do a little dance."

"They don't talk," a woman's voice said from behind them.

Jay turned around. He could barely make her out, just a shadowy form sitting under a tree. "I heard them singing," he said.

"They sing," the calm voice replied. It was a young woman. Through the branches, he could see the moonlight reflected on pale white skin. Her dress was unbuttoned down the front, and she was cradling something in her arms. "They sing, but they don't talk."

"Oh," Jay said. He stopped a few feet away from her. He could see one breast, pale and cone-shaped. A baby was nursing at the other. She stroked it gently as it sucked. She looked very young, no more than eighteen, sad and pretty. Her baby in her arms was a round red thing, like a bowling ball made of flesh. "I'm sorry," Jay said. "I didn't mean to intrude…"

"I know where Sascha is," the woman said.

In the darkness behind her, someone moved. Jay looked up, saw eyes peering out of the bushes. They were pale green, and burned with a dim feral glow. He was staring at them when he heard a soft footstep behind him. The hairs on the back of his neck stirred. There was a sudden overwhelming sense of being watched, and all at once Jay was terrified.

He backed away from the woman and the sad twisted creature in her arms, trying not to show any of the fear that was tearing at his guts inside. "Blaise, we're getting the fuck out of here;" he said. He turned.

Sascha stood behind the boy, his eyeless stare fixed on Jay. Ezili was there, too. He could see her body, full and lush. She was naked, and in the darkness, her eyes glowed red, brighter than the embers in the fire. She smiled at him and said nothing.

Jay must have made some kind of noise, because Blaise turned around. He saw Sascha, but then his eyes went to Ezili and got big. He grinned, then gave a low hoot of approval that Jay knew he hadn't learned from Tachyon. The boy had no idea of the shit they were in. "Sascha…" Jay began.

"No," Sascha replied. "Now it's too late for talking."

A man with a club came sliding out of the darkness, his feet bare, silent as a shadow. He swung, missed, Jay danced aside, and made his gun with his fingers and popped him away. Someone leaped onto his back. He went down hard and rolled. Long fingernails raked across his face, clawing for his eyes. Jay caught the hands, pried them loose, tried to untangle himself. He got his right hand free just in time to pop off a small girl who was coming at him from the right, but by then the woman had sunk her teeth in the fleshy part of his left hand just beneath the thumb.

He cried out. Blaise finally took his eyes off Ezili's tits long enough to see what was going on. "Hey!" the boy called out.

The woman worried at his thumb with her teeth and tried to kick him in the balls at the same time. Jay slapped her hard alongside the head, got his hand loose, and popped her right out from under him. Sascha shouted out, "Stop itl Leave them alone!"

It was enough to freeze everyone for a second. Blaise was staring at Sascha with fierce concentration, holding him in the palm of his mind. Behind him, Jay saw the vast shadow of the Siamese quint lurch unsteadily to its feet and stumble forward. Oh Jesus, he thought. "Run!" he screamed at Blaise. He saw motion out of the corner of his eye, and whirled. The thing with the pale green eyes had emerged from the bushes and was gliding silently across the grass, five feet off the ground, like some obscene manta ray with a semihuman face. It was naked, its skin pale and pimpled. Male genitalia drooped from the center of its face beneath those hideous eyes. Jay fought to keep down his lunch as he sent it away, but behind it came others. The looming joker with flesh soft and dark as blood pudding, the boy with the ice pick, the human centipede skittering forward with knives in half his hands. They were all around him.

He got rid of the ice pick when he saw the sad-voiced young woman coming at him, her baby lifted over her head like a weapon. It made him hesitate, only for a second, but it was enough.

A dozen strong hands seized him from behind, the ground dropped away under his feet, and pain erupted everywhere.

Sunday July 24, 1988