Penny Dreadful (21 page)

But she didn’t sound so sure at all. Eve wanted to go back to the birthday party. It was nice in there. Ice cream and cake and funny hats. They had helium balloons and she wanted nothing more than to shrink her voice down to munchkin level.

Do you have a telephone? she said with some effort.

Dizzy blinked. What an odd question. I think so. I have no idea if it works.

The telephone rang and my mouth dropped open. The phone. What fucking phone. There was no phone, I was sure of that.

The phone rang insistently and I followed the noise to the couch. Beneath one cushion was a little portable. I shook my head in disgust and pulled it out.

Hello.

You are there. It’s me, she said. Eve.

Hey, I said. Where are you?

She hesitated. I’m at a friend’s house.

I nodded, realized she couldn’t see me nodding.

Everything okay? I said.

Yes, she said. And no. The apartment isn’t…safe.

I glanced around. How’s that?

Oh, well. This may sound strange.

This is me, I said. This is Phineas you’re talking to.

She laughed. Okay. The apartment isn’t stable.

What do you mean, Eve?

Don’t ask me how, but it’s sort of disintegrating.

I glanced down at my feet and the wood floor appeared normal enough.

Are you okay? I said.

It’s hard to explain, she said. But look at the wall behind the couch. It’s like…fading. The molecules are breaking down.

Uh-huh.

And there’s a hole in the floor, near the bathroom.

Eve, I said. Are you high, or something?

Listen, she said. This is not a joke. Look at the wall.

I lowered the phone and stared at it. Fucking crazy. I felt crazy, like I was really holding an apple in my hand and Eve’s voice wasn’t real at all and she only existed in my head.

Nevertheless.

I walked back to the couch and hesitated, then reached out to touch the wall. It was pretty ordinary textured Sheetrock, and it felt very solid. It was real. I knocked on it with my fist.

Eve, I said. There’s nothing wrong with the wall. Where are you?

I can’t tell you, okay. I’m sorry. Please get out of there.

Where are you? I said.

Something else, she said. You met my friend Chrome, yes?

Yeah, I said. He seemed like a really nice guy.

He’s dangerous, she said. If you see him, walk away.

Dial tone.

Eve, wait a minute.

Dial tone and I wondered, not for the first time, exactly what sort of research had gone into the selection of that particular sound. The military had been involved, no doubt. The psychological discomfort that the dial tone caused was no accident. The phone company did not want the sound of a dead connection to be pleasing and Eve had hung up on me. I chewed at my lip and nearly tossed the phone at the disintegrating wall, then smiled and star sixty-nined her. I felt very clever for about two seconds, but an automated voice soon told me it was sorry and my call could not be connected as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

Then I got a fresh dial tone.

I threw the phone against the wall and it shattered pretty convincingly but I didn’t feel any better. Eve was in some kind of trouble. Everyone was.

I touched the wall again, almost hoping I would fall through it. But the wall was solid. Then I noticed the damp, brown lump on the floor beside the couch. It looked like a hat, a crumpled sock. I bent to examine it, to touch it. The lump was a dead bird, its neck broken.

Jimmy Sky:

Christ on fire but he was fat. He was large. He caught a glimpse of his tubby profile just now and about lost his lunch. His belly boiled over the edge of his waistband and his thighs rubbed together as if they were in fact connected. It was no wonder he was soaking wet all day. He had no neck at all, really. There was a confounding clump of flesh there between his collar and chin that couldn’t be called a neck, not by anybody’s standards. And he had tits, okay. That was the big kick in the ass. That was the final straw.

Here was the thing about Jimmy. He only had access to this body on a very limited basis. Detective Moon was tooling around in it most of the time, and abusing it with pure suicidal flair. He was killing himself. Jimmy, though. He tried to eat right and lay off the booze. Jimmy sighed. All of this was going to change, and fucking soon. If he could only shake Moon out of this psychofunk he was wallowing in. Here was the thing. Moon wanted to kill Jimmy. He had asked his sketchy pal Phineas to find him, to find Jimmy. Hilarious, wasn’t it. Except for the fact that Moon’s intentions were unfriendly. He wanted to wipe him out. He wanted to strip Jimmy of his status as a character. It was annoying, to say the least. Jimmy had been Moon’s very reliable undercover identity for two or three years now, an alias is what he had been. Nothing more. Moon had trotted him out now and again for a little police business and Jimmy would make the buy or solicit the blow job or kick the shit out of somebody while Moon took a breather. He had always known that Moon got a laugh out of Jimmy, for Jimmy was a lot cooler and sexier and had no worries about electric bills and taxes. Jimmy was a vacation from himself.

Then Moon got sucked into this game, this game of tongues. Which was interesting for a while. A nice, harmless fantasy ripe with vampires and magic spells, with medieval weirdness and good drugs and a fair amount of nudity. The drugs were a concern, though. Moon had got himself hooked on this sweet narcotic potion called the Pale. Or Jimmy did, as Jimmy Sky was his name within the game. Jimmy was a rare self-aware Fred who was angling to hook himself up as a Redeemer. But Jimmy had a problem, a nasty and fairly frightening problem. Moon and Jimmy were estranged. They barely knew each other anymore. His state of awareness was tenuous at best and he seemed to have no control over how and when he slipped in and out of the game. He would drift into Moon’s world without warning and completely forget he had ever been Jimmy. Then he was helpless, he was trapped in daylight with no memory of the game and a powerful ache for the Pale that he didn’t understand. And meanwhile, Jimmy was fucking tired of the game and he was mighty tired of being toyed with by Theseus the Glove.

Fuck the game, he said.

He wanted to end it, he wanted to blow it out of the water with a big, big splash and the first order of business had been to put a hit out on old Moon. That’s right. He offed the fat bastard himself. He cut his throat and bled him dry. Okay, so he faked it. It looked good, though. It looked real. Beyond that, he had no idea what he was doing. He just wanted to stir things up and see what happened.

Dear Jude.

This shit is well out of hand and there’s no reason to think it will change gears and become painless or dull anytime soon. I have to meet Griffin in less than an hour. Oh fucking joy.

Truly, I barely feel like myself. And it’s not that I’m afraid of becoming Ray Fine, exactly. There is an ugly new sensation that I can only describe as degeneration. My physical presence is failing.

I am not real, okay.

The reflection that I seek in mirrors and blackened store windows, this is real enough. My reflected image is cruising up the street without a care in the world but I am nowhere to be found and how fucked up is that.

And I thought Eve was crazy. Her apartment was unstable, so what.

Come on you neurotic piece of shit. Take out your knife and poke yourself in the thigh. Your shadowself will hardly bleed, will it. But the mirror version of Phineas will certainly lose its status in the ghostworld if it shows itself to have ordinary bodily fluids so go ahead boy, open up a fat vein.

This was no good, no fucking good.

I was talking to myself and of all my nervous habits, that was one I had never cared for. And I seemed pretty bent on cutting a big hole in my own leg. What a shivering mess I was. I turned around and around, looking for a safe place to roost. A place with normal, friendly humans. There was an open café across the street, yeah. I could have a five-dollar cappuccino and a piece of pie and read a few pages of Ulysses and with any luck there would be no mirrors in the place and just maybe that would do the trick.

Nervous bowels or bad coffee or too much sugar. Whatever the cause I was soon camped out in the public toilet with a horrible case of liquid shit. Which always makes me feel like I am probably dying. It just seems inherently bad to spray fluids from that particular hole. The bathroom was not filthy, at least. It was equipped with toilet paper. But the stall had been recently painted and the absence of graffiti was unnerving.

I pulled out Ulysses and flipped the pages around. For some reason, I couldn’t read it in its proper order and I thought Joyce would forgive this. Why else would he write in such maddening circles.

Metempsychosis. The transmigration of souls.

I was with Molly on that one. Tell us in plain words, as she said. But I got the general idea and maybe this was my own problem. I was transmigrating.

Dear Jude.

I’m sure it’s just residual sadness or some kind of projection but I can’t read a word about Leopold Bloom without seeing Detective Moon. His round unhappy face. And I hope that doesn’t cast me as Dedalus because he was one fucked-up person. He was tormented by memory, by false guilt. He was terrified of water and pregnancy and dogs. He was obsessed with the past, with the death of his mother. He had trouble with women. He had trouble with sex, like the rest of us. Stephen Dedalus was nearsighted and he was forever hallucinating.

He didn’t much believe in reality.

Of course. It does sound very familiar.

But I think Dedalus was essentially good. He was frail and tortured and he had his doubts about the origin of sin but he was at least searching for the high ground. He wanted to be pure. He was a tragic hero, whatever that means. I would personally claw the eyes out of anyone who said that shit about me.

Chrome:

Love. He was in love with this one. He had spotted him at one of those automated cash machines where the humans line up like rabbits for a food pellet. Pushing buttons, their faces bright and fearful. They were always so relieved when the cash appeared. They smiled, as if they were chosen.

His target was of medium height, white or Hispanic. Dark eyes and very nice skin. Clean skin was a plus in all new relationships. He appeared to be healthy but not dangerous. And definitely a Fred. It was in the eyes, the emptiness of the Pale. Chrome had watched the man at the money machine, laboring to enter his code correctly. His card kept getting rejected. The Fred’s little world was slipping and the machine hatefully spat out his card like a bad seed and he kept pushing it in until the machine finally ate it. The Fred remained placid all the while. He didn’t wail at the sky or pull out his hair, he didn’t strike the machine. He never blinked. Again, this was the Pale. And when the Fred had first flipped his wallet open to fetch out his card, Chrome saw the flash of a silver badge and felt his pulse jump. Another policeman.

Now. The hunt.

The Fred moved along at a turtle’s pace, stopping every so often to obsessively examine his damned shoelaces. As far as Chrome could tell, the man’s laces had not come undone yet. It was the very idea that seemed to plague the Fred. And each time the Fred stopped, Chrome was forced to stop as well.

His heart drumming crazily in the shadows. He was sure the Fred would hear it, if he only bothered to listen. But the Fred was busy untying his left shoe now, then tying it again. For the love of Mary. Did every serial killer have to put up with this sort of thing? He doubted that Hannibal Lecter would tolerate such foolishness. It was downright unseemly, is what it was. And he resolved to punish the Fred a little bit extra for the shoelaces.

They were moving east now. Away from downtown. Chrome nibbled at his own tongue and tried to think of ways to make this interesting. Eyes closed, perhaps. Hopping on one foot. Anything to give the Fred a fighting chance. And now the Fred did something that made Chrome smile, that brought the blood to his mouth. The Fred decided to take a shortcut through a graveyard. The ambiance would be divine.

Elvis was waiting.

Major Tom:

Black flies buzzing round and round behind his very eyes and something caught between his teeth, shred of apple skin or a piece of thread. A fingernail, maybe.