Wetbones

11

The Hills near Malibu

The first thing Lonny noticed when he woke was the smell. He thought: They caught me and they threw me in some stinking pit of rotting dead people under the ranch. Maybe he should just lie here and let himself die.

He decided he had to face it anyway. He sat up – the movement made his head swim with pain – and opened his eyes a crack.

"Oh fuck," he said. Now he knew what the smell was from. He had been captured by a hippie.

He was in a shack, unevenly lit with greasy yellow light from three kerosene lamps hanging from three different walls. The reek of unwashed man and dog overcame even the oily stink of kerosene. Sitting in an old rocking chair at the foot of the bed, watching him fixedly, smoking a briar pipe that reeked of pot, was an old hippie. At least, that's how he looked to Lonny. He wore kerchief-patched, age-shiny jeans and, yes: they were bell-bottoms. His horny, dirt crusted feet in homemade leather sandals. He wore an ancient Grateful Dead t-shirt, the one with the skull crowned in roses…

Roses…

The girl in the rose vines.

"Look like ya seen a ghost, brother," the old hippie rasped. Sniggering to himself. "You come off the Cocksucker Ranch?"

"I… " He couldn't seem to pull up any words.

"Devil's Cocksuckers is what them fuckers are. The Devil's Cocksuckers." He sniggered again, this time showing his few rotting, mossy teeth. His gaunt face was leathery and sun-reddened. His eyelids budded with benign growths; his eyes were the faded blue of his jeans. His receding, waist-length black hair and beard were streaked with gray and clumped with dust. His mustache had grown over his mouth and was stained with food and pot-smoke. His fingernails were two inches long and crusty with dirt. He reached over to a worktable next to the squawky rocking chair and found a box of wooden matches. Meditatively, with one hand, he relit his pipe, never taking his eyes off Lonny. Leaning against the wall next to the worktable – within reach of the rocking chair – was a twelve gauge shotgun. Lonny never forgot it was there and neither did the old hippie.

In a corner, behind the rickety, multi-padlocked door, a mongrel dog got to its feet in a nest of foul rags, stretching, shaking itself, its long brown fur matted, the inevitable grimy kerchief around its neck. It came trotting over, claws clicking on the flattened tin-cans nailed down over most of the floor, and laid its muzzle on the old hippie's lap, casting sideways glances at Lonny. The hippie put his hand absently on the dog's head; somehow, its blind trust in the guy put Lonny more at ease.

He looked around; there were shelves of rusted tools; from nails on the shelves and ceiling dangled little dolls made of coloured wires and bits of junk. Between the rickety, unmatched shelves, the walls were covered with odds and ends: a cobwebbed poster of a babyfaced Mick Jagger and a startlingly human Keith Richards posing in costumes of Asian potentates against a psychedelic backdrop; randomly nailed up road signs pocked with bullet holes; and lots and lots of glued-on newspaper clippings, gone the colour of aged ivory, scribbled with notations and multiple exclamation points.

Sure. The dude was a paranoid old hippie. "You… find me?" Lonny managed.

"About a mile west. Me'n'Jerry here watched you for a while, crawling and talkin' to yourself." He exhaled an aromatic plume of marijuana smoke. "You crawled right through one of my fields and never looked twice at the buds. You either don't like pot or don't know it – well I expect you was spaced pretty bad. I knowed you was one that got away. First one I know about except for the movie star. And I helped him too. Lots of graves out in them hills, around the Ranch… You want some of this?"

He offered Lonny the pipe. Lonny shook his head. It was the last thing he wanted. "You…" He struggled with his mouth. "Hard to talk…"

"You're dehydrated is one reason. And maybe you're trying not to think about some things, and that keeps your brain busy. You got to deal with it sometime, brother, but maybe now ain't a good time. You did, though, dincha, see some pretty bad stuff in there, dincha. Devil's cocksuckers. Suckin' them worms. Dincha?"

Lonny didn't want to even acknowledge the memories with a yes. But he nodded, once. Forced out: "You got any coffee?"

The hippie stopped rocking and leaned forwards so suddenly toward him Lonny thought he was going to bite him in rage. But the old dude grinned and cackled, "Hell fucking yes! It's the only thing I go into town for, that an' aspirin. I go in twice a year, regular as the bad wind! Sure, Hell yeah, I got some coffee that'll make your hair stand up on your head and go, Holy shit!

"

Turned out his name was Drax. Mike Drax. The coffee was everything he'd said it would be and, though Lonny'd knocked back two cups only after drinking three pints of water and eating beans and tortillas, he was buzzing so intensely he was barely able to hold himself quiet on the edge of the foul-smelling bunk. He tried to relax and asked, "How'd you come to be out here?"

Drax looked at him with a bald suspicion. "I like it out here, is all."

"Look – I told you what happened to me. Come on. Straight up. You know all about the Ranch. Why didn't you tell the cops?"

"Now what the hell would the pigs do? Some of them over there at the Cocksucker Ranch is cops. They in it up to their old piggy snouts." He sniggered and muttered, "It's all there, I seen it all." He waved toward the newspaper clippings. "I got the proof right there. You can check 'er out. That Mideast oil thing, it's there too. They suck on that just the same. Yeah, brother. Dobbs knows and Jerry here knows and I know." He turned to the cluttered, paint-spattered work bench that served for all the table the shack had, and sorted through a mound of tarry, golden marijuana, began to crush pot-buds between his thumb and forefinger with practiced exactitude, winnowing out the seeds.

The old dude smokes too much fucking pot, Lonny thought. No wonder he's half cracked.

"Your friends might still be alive," Drax said. "Sometimes the Cocksuckers save 'em for a long time." Abruptly he shot a narrow eyed look at Lonny and said, conspiratorially, "I will tell ya." His lingers kept crushing and winnowing the pot as he looked at Lonny, and went on, "It was my dad. He was a singer. Well he started out a rancher – we had a real ranch I mean, down in New Mexico. Worked it ourselves too. My mama was long dead. My dad, he was a real singin' cowboy. Not much of a rancher. About the time I was ten somebody heard him in a honky-tonk, signed him to records, two years later he was singin in big concerts. That led to movies. He was in two westerns. Then he was in television. Well sure, he was a good looking fella.

"I was a boy, I thought he was a god. Goodest-hearted man you ever want to meet. Took me everywhere with him, right to the nightclub concerts, near everywhere he went. Never left me somewhere so he could play with those pretty-pussy girls. He loved me! And then, when I was fourteen, bang, he forgot I was alive! He left me to knock around by myself. He knew I was alone in that big old house and he…"

The anger shook its way out through Drax's voice; showed in his white knuckled grip on the armrest of his rocking chair. The dog whined and put a paw on his lap. Lonny sat very still. The old fuck was crazy and he might grab one of the oily tools on the desk and brain him on a whim, for all Lonny knew.

Drax's shoulders slumped. He went on, a little subdued. "… they did it to him. Sam Denver, he took my old man up to that place and they played with his head and made him one of them and started soaking up his money and his talent and everything he had. They wanted me, too. They came to get me one day and I went over to that ranch and I saw what they were doin' to them kids and I went over the fuckin wall, brother, you bet your fuckin' ass! Got myself up to San Francisco. Got myself a ticket to the other world, from Mr. Owsley himself, who I knew personally. Hell, I fucked his old lady and with his blessing, too. It wasn't no perverted thing, either. And then I drifted down to Santa Cruz. And I read about they found my old man dead in a car, all wasted up. I think he was trying to get away and they crashed his fuckin' car is what they did… Well, I knew a few things by then, I seen that other world and I knew some Peyote eaters, they showed me a few things…" He gestured toward the fetish dolls hanging from the shelves.

There was only one window, with a wooden, padlocked shutter over it. Drax got up, crossed to the window – only three paces, his every step seeming to bring out a creak in each board of the little one-room shack. He took a thickly clustered ring of keys from his pocket and opened the padlock on the shutter, tilted it back and propped it up with a stick. Lonny blessed the infusion of clean air coming through the broken-out window panes, as Drax pointed through the window at the ground in front of the shack It was all packed earth, enclosed in a circle of waist-high wooden posts. Hanging from each post was a trio of the fetish dolls – made from bright pieces of radio wire, bits of transistors, feathers and dried seeds and strips of cloth; they seemed to glow golden-red in the light of the setting sun. "You see that? They guard us! They guard us here. The More Man is scareda me, brother, you know he is. I know some things and I got some friends. He knows I'm going to get him sometime soon. The solstices swing around: with the stars you can see and the stars you can't, they tell the story. I'm going to get the son of a bitch, and I'm here practically on his front porch, waiting for the chance…"

Lonny was intrigued. But the coffee having worked its way through him, he had more urgent concerns. "You got a bathroom here?"

Tongue trapped mischievously between his snaggled teeth, Drax whirled on him, sniggering. "Well, I guess I sure as hell do! I got a bathroom maybe forty square miles wide! Just be careful there ain't no snakes laughin at the pimples on your butt."

East Los Angeles

Garner got off the bus a few blocks from Blume's apartment building. The city was supposedly trying to cut back on air pollution but the buses gouted black smoke and this one blew a toxic cloud directly onto Garner as he looked around the street corner. Choking, stomach bucking with nausea, he hurried across the street. On the other side was a liquor store and a row of tenements, most of them draped in the evening shadow; the streetlights had been shot out at both ends of the block. In front of the tenements the Set roiled with men and women, blacks and cholos mostly, and a few skinny white girls. Most of the steady customers for crack were white, middle-class men, Garner knew, and he watched them drive up in their Camrys and Ford Tauruses and buy crack through the car windows.

Garner had been to the Western Union; he had some money on him now, himself…

And he realized he had crossed to this corner only because he'd glimpsed the drug-dealing Set happening down here. This wasn't the way to Blume's place. He should've turned down the Boulevard.

Goddamn, he thought, it's got me already. Two lousy runs and it's got me.

Well, it asked him, so what? I mean, what's the use? Constance probably isn't really alive. The guy probably had some other girl call and say she was okay so we'd stop looking for him. But that didn't make sense – they'd expect someone on the other line to know her voice. Okay – so she was alive that day. His birthday… He's probably killed her by now…

But it didn't seem as if he planned to. Not right away.

Suppose she is alive? What of it? You'll never find her. He can torture her to his sick heart's content – might be cutting off more of her fingers right now – and you could be within a block of her and never know and probably never see her.

So you might as well give up. You give that money to Blume to continue the investigation, it'll be thrown away. He's a waste of time. He's hopeless. It's all hopeless. Might as well use the money to get loaded…

Thinking all this, he'd drifted into the Set.

No one crowded around him, as they would a white guy who looked like he had money, because, instead, he was bandaged and dirty and dishevelled. And he thought for a moment he might get through without buying. He was walking a razor edge; horror on one side and drug lust on the other. He wanted to buy; his bowels felt like they'd let go with the excitement of it. And he very much didn't want to but his hands were clammy, his heart thumped with fear.

Are you crazy, man? What happened last time? Beat to shit in a basement!

But the addict in him superimposed images of the pipe over that, and soothed him: Don't worry. Not this time. This time you'll do it differently. You won't get hurt. You won't get ripped off. This time…

"You lookin' for something, man?" A hispanic guy with wrap-around sunglasses and a red kerchief head-band. It was so dark out here, how did the guy see with sunglasses on?

"What you got?" Garner heard himself say.

"Doves. Choo want it or not, this ain't cool we stan' around an' chit."

Constance…

But Garner nodded and fished four twenties out of his pocket. The guy swept them from his hand and with the other dropped four irregular white pellets in his palm. Drifted quickly into the Set.

Garner turned around, walked back toward the liquor store, frowning. Something about that exchange…

In the light of a neon beer sign in the store window, he examined his purchase. It looked a little too white and crumbly. He tasted it. Aspirin and baking soda.

He stared into his palm. He'd been gaffel'd. Ripped off.

He tossed the white pellets into the gutter. A weight slipped from his heart.

"You look pretty happy about it," said a deep voice, just in front of him. He looked up and saw a tall black man in a turtleneck sweater. Gold watch on his wrist. He was somewhere between forty and sixty. Hard to say in this light…

But somehow Garner knew the guy was a minister.

"They gaffel you?" the man asked. When Garner nodded the man said, "You were smiling. How much money you lose?"

"Eighty bucks." He noticed two women standing a little behind the man. They had stacks of leaflets in their hands. Smiling black ladies. They seemed amused. The man they worked with just stood there, rocking slightly on his loafers, hands in his pockets, looking at Garner casually but with an irritating knowingness.

''You a minister?" Garner asked.

"Pastor Ray Brick, First Congregational." They shook hands.

I was a Methodist pastor, if you can believe that. Still am officially, I guess."

"I can believe it. Man, we lose 'em all the time. You used to be a drug counsellor – in recovery yourself?"

"You guessed it."

"Uh huh. That's a pattern. One in four long term addicts-in-recovery relapse years later. Most of 'em don't make it back. What was your excuse?"

"My daughter was kidnapped. Probably murdered."

He looked impressed. "That's a pretty good one. You had enough, out here?"

Garner stared. His guts knotted.

Don't waste your time, the addict said. You can be more careful next time you buy.

"Let me ask you something," Brick said, seeing his hesitation. "You think it was a coincidence, you getting ripped off and me coming along like that? Well, it was. But ydu should know – God's the only one can arrange coincidences. You were happy you hadn't got real crack. You don't really want it."

Garner nodded, slowly. "I – was on my way to meet a man… might help me find my daughter."

"That's pretty important. How about we walk you a ways in that direction – till you get out of this neighbourhood. Can we do that?"

Garner nodded, enormously relieved. "I'd appreciate it." He felt tears welling. "I really would."

Blume's door was open about two inches. Typical of a drunk to space out something basic like closing your door behind you. The guy was probably useless as a detective, this far into alcoholism. But then, Garner thought, I've been pretty useless as a pastor lately.

He knocked and waited. No reply. No sound of movement from inside. A little lamplight spilled through the door and the angry mutter of a TV set.

The agency had said Blume hadn't been in for three days; hadn't been answering his phone. "He goes on these drunks from time to time," his supervisor said. "I don't know why we never get around to firing him"

Garner pushed the door open and went in. It was a cluttered studio apartment, smelling powerfully of a catbox and some hidden rot. The cabinets and drawers had been opened, their junky contents dumped on the floor. A half empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor beside him, Blume sat facing Garner in a green cloth easy chair in the very centre of the room. He was in his underwear, sitting in front of an old black and white TV set currently showing a wonky double image of Barbara Walters interviewing another "reclusive" movie star. Blume was staring at it, motionlessly, unblinking. Garner could see the gray and white TV screen reflected in both Blume's eyes in nearly perfect miniature. Beyond him, above the crap-lumpy cat box, was a half open window onto a fire escape. No sign of the cat. The cat had abandoned ship.

There was a book held in Blume's hands. A bio graphy. There was something about the way it was set up in his hands that made Garner feel sure it had been put there by someone else, set up like a prop. The title of the book was Remembering Trotsky

Garner didn't bother saying anything. He took a moment to decide if he wanted to walk around behind Blume. He hated to give them the satisfaction. But in the end, he did it. He stepped behind Blume and saw the ice pick stuck to the handle in the back of Blume's skull. Just one small trickle of blood dried on the bald scalp beneath the handle.

Garner turned away, grimacing, thinking it would have been a better effect if they'd turned off the TV. He caught a tiny blinking red light in a far corner, next to a huge heap of old Los Angeles Times. It was a call-recorded light on a Sears answering machine, the phone on top of it.

He circled Blume widely and went to the phone, hit the answering machine's play button. There was a message from the agency, telling Blume if he didn't at least call in before midnight he was fired. And then there was a message from another of Blume's clients.

A petulant, phone-fuzzed voice said, "Blume? You there? No? Okay. This is Jeff Teitelbaum. I get this cryptic phone message from you saying that Sam Denver was seen at the sites of three Wetbones murders – if I'm hearing this slurred-up mumbling of yours right it says 'not long after killings'… What the fuck? You trying to give me a heart attack with this cryptic shit? If you think my brother is one of those Wetbones victims just fucking come out and say so and get your ass over here. You can't leave me messages like this and just… Shit! I'm at the Culver City hospital right now but I'll be home in a half hour or so… I want you over here personally.

My address in case you're too blitzed to find your fucking rolodex is…"

Garner dug through Blume's things for a pen, finally located a stub of a pencil and scribbled the address down on the back of a tract for Brick's drug recovery program. He folded it up and carefully put it in his pocket, then looked around for notes or tape recordings or photos – anything pertaining to Blume's investigation.

He found nothing relevant. They'd have taken anything like that, of course.

He made a quick, anonymous call to the LAPD to report the body, then hurried out, keeping his mind focused on his errand so as not to think about crack. Hurrying to find a bus that would take him to Jeff Teitelbaum's part of town.

Los Angeles

"You're really not going to that party?" Jeff asked again, as they walked into the overlit, almost empty lobby of the hospital. The one Mitch had run away from. "I mean, Christ, you got a deal trembling on the verge with Arthwright. Not a good time to snub his party."

"Arthwright." Prentice grimaced. "I don't think I want to know Arthwright all that well."

"It's your career."

Prentice shrugged. What was he supposed to tell Jeff? That he kept hearing Amy in his head warning him away from Arthwright and Lissa? That he was afraid of Lisa – for no clear reason at all? That he didn't quite believe there was a party to go to – and he wasn't sure why? And he hadn't yet told Jeff where the party was. The Doublekey Ranch. After what the old lady with the parrot had told him about her niece's death, he didn't much want to go out to the ranch…

Jeff went on, "So, did the doctor tell you what he wanted?"

"You can ask him yourself," Prentice said, nodding toward the small white-coated brown-skinned man coming through the double doors into the lobby. Doctor Drandhu.

Drandhu advanced, one hand extended for shaking, smiling nervously. "Mr. Prentice! Mr. Teitelbaum! Correct?" His accent was native Indian, but his English was otherwise controlled with a brittle formality as he shook both their hands with fingers that felt like they were made of bird-bones, and said, "I am thankful you were able to come. Oh you have hurt yourself, Mr. Prentice?" He was looking at the bandage on Prentice's left hand. The cut still smarted dully.

"Yeah. On a busted bottle in the tub." He still felt strange after the dream in the tub. He wanted to run out and get a drink

"Not a very professional bandage, Mr. Prentice, would you like me to…?"

"No, no thanks. What's up? You said it was something about Mitch?"

"It is related, yes, yes. Please. There is someone I must show to you." He led the way through the double doors, down the antiseptic-reeking halls. "I asked you to come because your brother, Mr. Teitelbaum, was one of my first ES patients…"

"ES?" Jeff asked. "You've got a name for it?"

Drandhu smiled shyly. "Emaciation Syndrome. This is my term. When I find out more about it I will write a paper. But there is so little I understand now, I am sad to say. So very little. I am a little frightened, to be frank, and feeling very much alone. When I try to interest my colleagues they say I am mistaking AIDS or drug-induced for something distinct. But I don't think so, no. The patients are negative for AIDS and… no, there are no drug indications. But the wasting and the self mutilation…"

"My ex-wife had the same thing. If it is a disease," Prentice said.

Drandhu looked at him with interest. "Oh yes really? That is very interesting. They knew each other, the boy and your wife?"

"A little. But…" He shrugged. He didn't want to get into it that far, yet. "Anyway, yeah: it occurred to me and Jeff that it's just too big a coincidence, Mitch and Amy having the same kind of sickness. Mitch had just started to lose weight but the rest of it was there."

"I will talk to you about that just a little later if you do not mind. I would like to take some notes. But now there is a man here with ES – he asked to speak to you. He said he knew what was causing his problem but didn't want to tell me. I think he is afraid… Oh, yes, here he is, here is – Mr. Kenson?"

They'd stepped into a private room; a generic hospital room. Kenson was lying on a white hospital bed. He was strapped onto the bed, under the sheet, its mattress cranked up so he was near sitting position. The straps weren't psycho-restraints, Prentice judged – they were to keep him from falling off the bed. And Kenson looked as if he could fall off, quite easily: he was a shrunken caricature of the man Prentice had watched on TV years before. His eyes were sunken and unaligned, looking at separate parts of the room. His lips were flattened onto his few remaining teeth. His arms were bandaged wrist to shoulders. A bottle of glucose water hung from a portable stand, feeding into a tube that bit with a steel needle into a vein on the back of Kenson's bony hands. "It must have hurt like a bitch when they put that IV needle in," Jeff said softly, as they came to stand beside the bed.

Kenson nodded. "Did."

Drandhu seemed flustered by the lack of introductions. "I should perhaps say, this is Mr. Louis Kenson, and this is Mr. Teitelbaum and Mr. Prentice his friend. Mr. Teitelbaum's brother was the one I told you about, Mr. Kenson -" Drandhu turned hastily to Jeff. "I do not mean to lapse confidentiality, no, but it seemed so important to find the connections -"

"Don't worry about it," Jeff said. He drew a chair from the opposite wall and sat down by the bed. "You wanted to talk to us, Kenson, I think?"

"Yeah." His voice a croak. "I thought maybe you'd seen some things. I mean… You know what your brother was into? See, if I tell the doctor here, he's going to think…" He paused to wet the scraps that were his lips. "He's going to call in the psychiatrists… I figure if I have somebody else here who knows… I was hoping you might have found the kid. Brought him here too. I guess not huh?''

Jeff shook his head. Prentice looked around for a chair. There wasn't another one. He was suddenly very tired. He hadn't been sleeping much. And looking at Kenson made him feel drained himself

"Well – maybe we shouldn't talk about this," Kenson went on hoarsely. His voice drifting to join his gaze which was lost somewhere in the middle distance. "Maybe not. No I don't think so. If you haven't talked to the kid."

Goddamn it, Prentice thought, I want to know. "We haven't talked to Mitch lately. But I know what really happened to a little girl named Wendy and her mother, for example." That was mostly a bluff.

Jeff looked over with puzzled surprise. One of Kenson's eyes stopped its roving on Prentice. "Do you? Well then. Okay. Let's talk."

"Drandhu to Pediatrics…" A nurse's voice from some distant intercom speaker.

"Oh my gosh," Dr. Drandhu muttered. "They are calling me." He took a tape recorder from his pocket, no bigger than the kind of transistor-radio that mental patients carry about with them, and hung it on its little leather strap from the IV stand, just under the bottle of glucose water. "Please – I have to go upstairs and check in. But it is I think all right if I record this?''

Kenson gave a leathery sigh. "Fuck I don't know. I guess so. I don't 'know why I'm bein' so careful. I guess it's habit. Thirty years of hiding things…"

Drandhu switched on the tape recorder, then fluttered around Kenson for a few moments, writing down his pulse and temperature.

After the doctor had gone, Kenson told them about Mrs. Stutgart, and the Akishra. Jeff listened with polite amusement. Obviously not believing a word of it. But Prentice felt the rightness of the story. And he could almost hear Amy, somewhere, saying, I suppose you know your girlfriend is one of them. A pleasure vampire, in more ways than one.

"I was one of them for a long time," Kenson was saying. "But after a while, see, it's not enough for the Akishra just to be there to take their share of stuff psychically. They move in on your body. They get to be part of you. Physically. And I couldn't hang with that. So I started backing off – and then Denver started holding me prisoner. Using me for their games. Which sure, I deserved, I can see that. It's karma energy, you know? But I waited for a chance, and I stole a car. Denver's toy-boys came chasing after me and I took off into the desert and the car died under me and then this crazy old desert rat came along. He says he was watching us the whole time, following along. He puts me in his pick up and takes me to his place and the toy-boys leave off the chase. They're kind of scared of this old guy for some reason. Denver says the old guy's an unknown quantity and he's protected so they stay away from him. His name's Drax. So anyway, Drax brings me to town and leaves me at a doctor and they send me here."

"The Akishra…" Prentice said. He could almost visualize them. Why? Why did it seem familiar?

"You have to understand about the Akishra, man, or you don't understand anything. I mean, the real nitty gritty about these fuckers. Hand me that water glass, will you, I need to wet my… thanks." He paused to sip the water. Took a deep, weary breath and went on, "The name Akishra, see, is from Hindu mythology," Kenson was saying. "People in the Orient, they know all about 'em. They're astral parasites. They're… they look like worms, big transparent worms. Sorta silvery. Bunches of them. Never only one, except the Slabfathers. The Akishra Prime. You can't see Akishra with the naked eye. Your hand goes right through 'em without feeling a thing. But they're there. They seem immaterial, like less than fog, but they're material in a way. Some kind of subatomic particle stuff they're made out of, Judy says. And yeah, they're here. They're all around people. Especially addicted people. Mythical! Shit. I wish to fuck they were, fellas."

There was just a touch of theatrical delivery left in Kenson. The actor in him seemed to enjoy telling the story, despite his wretchedness. "You have to get this clear: the Akishra are everywhere and always have been. Everybody – and I mean everybody – who is addicted to anything, well, the Akishra's involved. Cigarettes? Right. The ones we call the Alpha Flutters are there. The smaller Astral worms. If you could see a cigarette smoker the way a trained eye can see him -" He laughed bitterly. "- cigarette addict has this… it looks sort of like an Indian chiefs head-dress made out of these floating astral worms. They're stickin' out of the smoker's head, see. Attached to him at one end – their bodies floating up there like seaweed.

"Your moderate drinker, he's generally free from astral parasites. But real alcoholics, they got a bigger kind of worm looks sort of like a tapeworm. A line of 'em running up their spine to their heads, streamin' back there. Cocaine addicts got another variety, looks like a big corkscrew. Mean, manipulative little fuckers. Heroin addicts get another kind look like leeches. You can have two or three different kinds at once of course. A whole fur of 'em. Barely see some people for the worms on 'em. Walk through a crowd downtown, it's enough to make you puke, once you learn to see 'em.

"The addict see, is losing life-force. He's basically using up his life energy on his addiction – little bit by little bit. The Akishra suck that run-off. They get developed enough, they can encourage the addict to go farther and farther. Mostly, though, the Lower Akishra just ride along and stay quiet, take what they can get. Now, the Akishra come in lots of varieties, and there's the Prime Akishra – got one of those hatin' me and suckin' at me right now. They're coiled around you, those Primes. Any of the worms get big enough, they do that: twist around you like pythons. Now the Primes, they're the ones that we know how to communicate with, we can make deals with them, and they can have a lotta psychic influence on people. Those you got to sort of invite in – they're special. They got to be brought in on you with ritual, see.

"And – we make these deals with 'em. What we do is, we bring in fresh people and put the plaything, as we used to call the people, through all kinds of sick fun and hell that releases the life-energy run-off. The Akishra suck that up and then re-route some of the pleasure-impulses back to us. And they addict us, and pick one of us out to follow around, start drainin' off of us too. You followin' me? And if we let them actually move into our bodies, well, they regenerate the cells. On the outside, anyway. They keep an old body running. But the price for that's nasty to see, when it goes too far. Judy…"

He shook his head and paused to rest, panting slightly. He reached up to a rack behind the bed and drew down an oxygen mask, making a "wait a minute" gesture with his free hand. He inhaled oxygen for a full minute, while Jeff fidgeted on his chair, embarrassed by Kenson's ravings, and Prentice shifted from foot to foot, wanting a drink. And feeling strange about wanting a drink, in light of what Kenson had been saying…

Kenson put the oxygen mask aside and said. "I'm sorry. I'm so tired."

"Maybe we should split," Jeff said. "Let you rest."

"No! No, let me get this out. It's been years I've been wanting to… part of me wanting to tell someone…" He swallowed a little water and went on, "Now, some of the Akishra will let the victims wander out into the city in search of, well, sensation I guess you'd say. Just… sensation. Stimulation. They get to be sucked dry – like me."

Like Amy, Prentice thought.

Jeff heaved a sigh of aggravation. Kenson didn't seem to notice. He continued, "The Akishra withdraw after the victims are used up and too far gone to be helped. And not coherent enough to be listened to. They become withered up street people, if they live that long, you see'em dying in vacant lots, babblin'… It's kind of funny, though. I mean, it's not as if every kind of pleasure attracts the Akishra. Only the kind that's… like a sickness in you. That's the kind that uses up bits of your soul, y'know. Sometimes if you change direction you can break away from them. the addict voice they plant in you gets fainter and fainter, like, and they give up and leave. But if you were one of us, with the real psychic communication – well, eventually you come back to 'em. And that's because you're addicted to the Akishra connection itself. Addicted to the ecstasy. The Reward. It's… more than you can imagine, when you play along with the Primes. That's all I can say in my defense – some of the things I took part in, man, with no hesitation and no thinking, it's sickening to remember and it's easy to judge me but once your pleasure buttons are pushed like that, you're fucked. You get programmed. You get addicted. And the fuckin' Akishra take advantage of that. So it's like it's this addict part of your brain conspirin' with the fuckin' worms…"

"That's it," Jeff said, standing up suddenly. "That's all of this bullshit I can handle. I'm sorry, Mr. Kenson. You were great, by the way, in The Bishop's Daughter. Now I gotta hit the road." He turned to Prentice. "I'm gonna call Blume again. You won't believe this message he left on my machine. He's playing with my head, the fucking drunk."

"You like prostitutes, Mr. Teitelbaum?" Kenson asked, pausing to cough afterwards. "It's hookers, right? Maybe two a day sometimes."

Jeff turned to gape at him. "What?"

"I can see the sex addict worms on you, man. And it's a kind people get from using women in a professional way. Sick sex. Impersonal and nasty in your car. They give you head, most of the time, probably, right there in the car. Lots of guys with dough are addicted to it. The women are so accessible and some of them are surprisingly good lookin'. Sometimes you like to go to those brothels where they line up for you and you pick 'em, I bet. That's the part you really like – you point and say that one and she gives it up. And it's an addictive charge you get outta that. Your worms are real thick around your -"

"Shut the fuck up, Kenson!" Jeff said dangerously. His face mottled red.

"It's true, isn't it? And how'd I know? You going to tell me I had you followed?"

Jeff looked at Prentice who was careful not to look back at him or smile. Prentice had been wondering how one guy could take so many "meetings".

Jeff was breathing hard. He spun on his heel and shoved past Prentice, storming out the door. Prentice went to the chair and sank into it with a thump. "Kenson – you too tired to answer a couple of questions?"

"You don't think I'm full of shit, too?"

"I – don't think you're full of shit. No. Is there some way that… well, suppose I was having sex with a girl and she had an arrangement with these Akishra prime, could she, uh, enhance the experience through them to kind of draw me in and uh…?"

"Sure. That's Lissa's favourite thing. You know her?"

Prentice's limbs suddenly felt leaden on his bones, as if truth had tripled gravity. In a small voice, he said. "Yeah. I do."

Kenson nodded. He reached up and took another long hit of oxygen. Then he held the mask on his lap and said, "If you can crank my bed down a little I could go on for a few minutes more maybe…"

Prentice was sitting within reach of the two control buttons, on a box just out of Kenson's reach. He pressed the lower button and the bed whined to itself as it lowered the top end of the mattress almost to horizontal. "That's good," Kenson said. "Right there. I need a little elevation… Well, now. What you want to know?"

"Besides the Akishra – are there other creatures on the Astral Plane, or whatever you call it? Maybe something more…"

"Benevolent? Sure." He scowled. "But they're haughty bastards. The higher spirits. The Akishra are just a kind of animal. Etheric animals. But the higher ones… some of them are things that only help you if they bother to take any notice of you, and some of them are nasty fucks that are always fighting. They're always playing a kind of game… well, Judy called it a 'dance'… the dance of the ones who construct, who grow things, with the ones who destroy things… I don't pretend to understand all that very much. All I know is, the so-called 'good' ones are there, but they never did shit for me. They're hard to get in touch with and what I heard it gets harder all the time.

"See, the Akishra, and the other predators, all your garden variety demons, they reproduce in cycles. And they got going with this really big reproduction cycle a couple of times in this century – most recently in the middle 1970s. Started to spread through the world, usually showing their works through your serial killers, your child molesters, your Republican Secretaries of the Interior, vicious assholes of all kinds. Usually they aren't so – what's that word. Uh… symbiotic. They're usually not so symbiotic as they are with Denver and 'his toy-boys. Well anyway, the Akishra are gearin' up for another big repro cycle." He chuckled creakily. "You think there's a lot of murderous lunatics out there now? They cultivate those fuckers… Just wait a few days till the cycle's complete. Denver's got the incubator out there at… oh God." He lapsed into silence, his eyes closed, hands clenching.

"You want a doctor?" Prentice asked.

Kenson shook his head. His shoulders quivered. After a few moments his eyes fluttered open. He lay there looking into nowhere, murmuring, "One thing, Jeff…"

Prentice didn't correct his confusion about who he was talking to. He could see Kenson was drifting.

"… one thing to… get clear… the human hosts of Akishra… they always… always offer themselves up willingly. Whether or not they know it… know it consciously… they always…" He shook his head and made a shooing gesture-with his hand.

Feeling unreal, Prentice got up to look for Jeff.

He saw Jeff on the phone in the lobby, trying to reach Blume. Prentice called to him, "Hey Jeff – I'm gonna wait for you in the parking lot."

Jeff nodded and said, into the phone, "He's what? When? So who am I talking to? Sergeant what?"

Prentice thought, Now what? He didn't want to know, quite yet. The story Kenson had told him was too much to deal with already. If it were true. Now, stepping out into a chilly evening the blotted sky promising rain – Kenson's tale once more seemed like raving. He probably had some disease and some kind of occult hobbyhorse and he'd slung all this together in a paranoid fantasy to explain his illness.

But he knew Lissa. And he'd said -

"Hello, Tom."

She was there. Lissa, just getting out of a convertible BMW. Prentice felt his legs weaken, looking at her. He thought he felt Amy somewhere in the background, trying to tell him something. But he ignored the fantasy and walked over to Lissa. She wore black jeans, a red halter-top, red spike heels. The heels looked particularly sexy with the jeans, somehow. He stopped just out of her reach. "Hi! How'd you track me down!"

She glanced past him at the hospital. He started to turn, to see what she was looking at, or who but she came closer and touched his arm as if to hold his gaze. "Hey – are you standing me up? Weren't you supposed to pick me up about an hour ago? For the party?"

" Is there a party?"

She looked at him in a fair reading of hurt surprise. "Why would I say there was if there wasn't?"

"I don't know." He exhaled windily, suddenly feeling stupid. Why would she lie??

He took a step back, looking at her in the indirect light of the parking lot's streetlamp. Was it there? A kind of tell-tale sheen in the air around her, that seemed to squirm a little?

He shook himself and looked away. She stepped in and threw her arms around him, drew him close. And instantly he felt the warm, drunken sweetness pass from her to him. He found himself putting his arms around her, returning the embrace, as she said, "Listen – something's bothering you. Aren't we close enough we can talk about it?"

"I don't know – for some stupid reason I feel responsible for Amy. What happened to her. And now I just talked to this guy who was sick with the same thing as Amy… If that's what it was…"

It all seemed murky and distant, now that he held her again. This was real; this feeling. This was important.

"Look – I want you to come to this party," Lissa was murmuring. "Because I want you to meet the people who saved my life."

"How'd they do that?"

"They got me off drugs. They've been sort of weaning me off them. I shouldn't have taken that X, the other day. I wasn't supposed to. See – there's a new drug going around town." She drew back and looked at him earnestly. "You heard of Xedrine?"

"No…" He felt pleasantly sleepy but somehow glowing, his loins, his sexuality shining with a soft light.

"Well – Xedrine is this new designer drug. I was hung up on it and – I thought I could get off it by taking Ecstasy as a substitute. But no go. A lot of people are hung up on this stuff, and other drugs, and the Denvers help them get clean. They have a drug detox clinic out there."

"Yeah… that might explain all the secrecy…"

"Sure. The celebrities. And listen – I just realized today I knew your ex-wife! Amy! Only a little – she was out at the clinic. She was a Xedrine addict. She and Lou Kenson got into it."

Kenson? His attention came back from the plane of pleasure for a moment. "Lou Kenson…"

"Yeah, Lou was really gone on the stuff. And Amy. It can leave you wasted, make you prone to self mutilation.

And it'll give you paranoid fantasies… hallucinations of monsters crawling on you, that kind of thing. Like the way cocaine overdose makes you see bugs on your skin. Kenson and Amy back-slid into the drugs but I stayed off Xedrine and the Denvers are the ones who helped me. They and Zack Arthwright…''

He felt grounded, then, and enormously relieved. It all came together. It made sense. He smiled. "God – I needed to hear that. Wait'll I tell you what… Well – later. Let's head out there. I came in Jeff's car -"

"Not a problem. Let's go in mine."

"Okay – let me just go in and talk to Jeff."

She made a something-smells-bad face. "I'd rather you didn't. That guy's kind of crazy. I don't want him to know I'm here. Couldn't we just go?"

Prentice shrugged. Jeff was a big boy. He could call him later and explain. "Sure. Let's head for Malibu."

Jeff was just coming back in from the parking lot when Drandhu bustled up, stethoscope in hand. "Ah, Mr. Teitelbaum, there you are! Do you mind if we go and talk to Mr. Kenson a little more?"

"Sure, whatever. I got some questions for him. If he can be reasonably civil for about five minutes."

"He said something… disturbing?"

"He pissed me off is what he did. But come on. Probably Tom went back to Kenson's room."

Just outside Kenson's room Jeff noticed a short, stocky guy with a kind of Howdy Doody look about him, and big earlobes, walking along toward them carrying a canvas bag. He smiled sunnily at them and continued on past.

There were shouts and curses from Kenson's room. Inside, they found a fat, mustached male nurse trying to hold Kenson down. "Doctors orders, you're supposed to take it easy, pal -"

But Kenson was going into convulsions, moving with an energy that Jeff would have thought impossible, given Kenson's condition. Coming closer, Jeff was sickened, seeing Kenson was foaming at the mouth, jaws snapping open and shut clack-clack-clack, arms flailing, legs randomly kicking. His bowels letting go, judging from the stink and the stain spreading down the sheet. And the tape recorder was gone from the IV stand.

"Who put that bandage on his head?" Drandhu snapped. "No one was to have put any bandages there – had no need at all…!"

Kenson gave a final shudder and lay back, gasping, eyes rolling wildly, rigid now. The nurse stepped back, protesting, "Look I didn't touch his head, I just heard him flapping around in' here and -"

"Yes, yes, just get out of the way -" Drandhu snapped, moving around behind Kenson. He unwound the bandage.

Not knowing why, Jeff was drawn to stand behind Drandhu when he removed the bandage entirely…

The top of, Kenson's skull had been freshly sawed away. And his brain exposed. And his brain was squirming.

Someone had taken the top of his head off and introduced vermin into his brain. Real maggots – not the ethereal variety. Spiders. Centipedes. Large black and. red ants. Dozens of them, thrashing and chewing their way through his brain.

Kenson gave a final spasm and died, as Jeff turned away and threw up on the male nurse.