Penny Dreadful (30 page)

Okay. His feet were muddy and he was pretty well sick of walking around this house so he ambled up the back steps and used his formidable girth to huff and puff and kick down the door. It wasn’t so easy. It took three tries and on the second he found himself flat on his ass.

But the door was only wood, and wood splinters in the end. It gives.

Jimmy Sky crashed through and found himself in a kitchen. Flicked on a light and commenced to explore. A lot of knives in here. He opened the fridge and found a leftover carton of moo goo gai pan, barely touched. Excellent. He grabbed a fork and walked into the living room, shoveling the stuff into his wide gob.

Nice fucking place.

The Breather who was said to live here was obviously thick with silver.

Jimmy stomped upstairs and took a cursory look in each of the bedrooms, his eyes peeled for human shadows. Everything was fine and white and fairy-tale clean and he was sorely tempted to take a long yellow piss on one of the sheepskin rugs but then couldn’t be bothered. He couldn’t be fucked.

However. He did need to pee and of course whenever he found himself alone in a stranger’s house, one of Jimmy’s favorite tasks was to find the nearest bathroom and root through the medicine cabinet for prescription drugs. But then he supposed everyone was this way. He shrugged and soon located the bathroom. Thankfully emptied his bladder and polished off the moo goo gai pan as he did so. Jimmy sighed to see it go and tossed the empty carton into a wastebasket, then hurriedly washed his hands. He opened the medicine cabinet and whistled at its contents. He had found the mother lode, hadn’t he? And the little Breather who lived here was mad as could be.

Decisions.

Well, now. There were plenty of vitamins and expensive herbal smart-pills and a wild rainbow of antidepressants that didn’t much interest him. But there were also quite a few muscle relaxers and painkillers and amphetamines that were exactly to his taste, and he thought a couple of Demerol tabs would go down nicely with a diet pill or two. He rolled four or five pills around in his mouth as he walked back down the hall because he always preferred to taste whatever he was consuming and so he favored the dry swallow. But now his mouth seemed to be full of chalk and his tongue was a bitter ashen lump so he rapidly steered himself back to the kitchen and took a pitcher of what he incorrectly assumed to be lemonade from the fridge and had a big unfortunate gulp of the stuff.

Grapefruit juice.

Which might as well be poison, in his book. And not only did it burn his sore gums and torture his glottis, but the juice did not integrate well with the moo goo gai pan and before he could say howdy doody Jimmy Sky was vomiting all over his shirt. And what a fucking mess. His shirt was foul beyond belief and he was standing in partially chewed noodles and bits of gray matter that upon closer inspection were not necessarily meat nor vegetable and to top it off, the pills he had just taken were gleaming like tiny extra buttons down his chest.

Now then.

He could have gone back to the bathroom and gotten a few more tabs of the Demerol but these little guys on his shirtfront were hardly dissolved and what was the difference anyway. Waste not, yeah. Jimmy Sky plucked the little buttons between thumb and ring finger and swallowed rather more carefully this time, washing his mouth out with water from the kitchen sink.

And he paused, thoughtful.

Jimmy Sky was a practical man. But this sort of behavior, the consumption of partially digested pills, that was pure Moon. Ah, well.

Bang.

Metal against metal.

Bang, bang and his ears perked up like an old dog’s. That sounded a lot like the front gate.

The back room of the Witch’s Teat.

The whorehouse décor and somber lighting. The whistling kettle. The peculiar smells. I found it familiar and terribly sad at once. Crumb peddled inexpensive sex toys, used records and relatively legitimate drug paraphernalia out the front door, and in the back room wielded his untrained medical skills on the mad souls who wanted or needed to avoid regular hospitals. Crumb was no butcher, and he would rarely reach for a scalpel when drunk. But his education was spotty. His run at college had been disastrous, from what I could gather, and irrelevant besides. Crumb had been a theology major. He had picked up a little medicine while working in a tattoo parlor, and later was apprenticed to a back-alley abortionist for a year or two. And beyond that, Crumb was self-taught. He subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine and he kept an expensive video library of the medical dramas on TV. He swore by St. Elsewhere and complained that Quincy, while entertaining, was medically unsound. Quincy was a menace, he said. Crumb read every textbook he could get hold of and had faithfully practiced his surgical skills on rubber dummies, dead dogs and a few comatose friends. His specialty was extractions: bullets and other foreign objects, bad teeth, unwanted fetuses. Crumb could remove things from the body. And he was pretty good with a needle and thread. I had come to him quite a few times over the years, with minor lacerations and other flesh wounds that I might not have wanted to report to the department.

Crumb had acquired a dentist’s chair in the year or so since I last needed his services. It faced the television and gleamed darkly in a corner by the sink. There was a Batman cartoon on the box, the sound muted. I stared at the screen for a moment, my brain clicking. It was so obvious, and kind of sad. But all superheroes had pretty much the same problem. Batman was flash and sexy compared to Bruce Wayne and even Robin the Boy Wonder was a lot cooler than Dick Grayson. As for Superman, well. It was a fucking miracle that Clark Kent had never committed suicide. I glanced at Eve, who was pacing around the little room as if she couldn’t stay and she couldn’t go. Obsessively twirling one finger in her hair, around and around.

Crumb steered me toward the dentist’s chair and tottered off to scrub his hands.

No thanks, I said.

What’s the matter? said Crumb.

Nothing. I’ve got torture on my mind, though.

So?

A dentist’s chair?

It’s perfect. I can clean your teeth while I’m at it.

Fuck that. My teeth are fine.

I’m joking, of course. But I do have a tank of nitrous, if that helps.

I had to admit that nitrous would help.

And five minutes later I was strapped into the chair with a mask over my nose and I could feel the needle tugging at my skin as if it wasn’t skin at all, but a plastic sheath that I wore around my head. I could feel Crumb’s fingers resting heavily on my face and I could see Crumb’s eyes, round and never blinking bug’s eyes. Crumb had bumped up the volume on the TV before he started, saying it helped him to relax and that if I didn’t want my ear sewn onto my forehead not to complain and so now I listened as Batman exchanged dark nihilistic metaphors with the Joker and I smiled warmly with drool running down my chin.

Eve leaned over me, slow and sudden at once. It was stupid, she said. What you did was stupid.

I gurgled at her. Tried to smile but I felt vague about who she was. The dreambrain identified her as a conglomerate. My mother was in there, the sister I never had. My dead wife and a long line of forgotten lovers and characters from books and movies that I might have fantasized about.

I’m a creature of comfort, said the Joker.

I’m glad, though. I’m glad you were there, she said.

And I was pretty sure the needle would pull my face off. My poor skin could only stretch so far and no farther before it slipped from my knob like a wet bathing suit. It’s terrible, isn’t it. The way your skin clings to you.

Mingus:

He could hardly credit it but Mingus was losing his sense of smell. Overload or temporary freakout or some kind of total shutdown. Because he should have been able to taste Christian’s blood by now. The stuff was all over him.

He glanced over at Dizzy Bloom and was struck with worry and nausea, a queer star-shaped feeling blossoming in his throat for her. What visions must she be suffering, he wondered. Dizzy Bloom was strong, though. She had borne her half of Christian’s weight without a whimper. Maybe she was holding her breath. Dizzy Bloom was an alien, a beautiful creature, and he supposed the star-shaped sensation creeping up from his belly was love or something like it. This was unforeseen and perhaps a little frightening but he was too worried about his lost sense of smell to give it a lot of thought. He could see nothing behind his own eyes and he had no memories true or false. He had nothing.

Mingus took a deep breath as they lowered Christian onto Dizzy’s porch swing but there was still nothing. He watched as Dizzy dug through what seemed like a thousand pockets for her house key. He closed his eyes. He breathed.

Wait.

Rotten chocolate, thick and pungent and it wasn’t chocolate at all, it was the smell of fresh earth, of death. And as fast as it came it was gone and Christian was falling off the porch swing. Mingus crouched beside him, hugging his friend’s cool damp body and waiting for Dizzy to unlock the front door.

Isthmus cerebri, said Mingus. Vena ascendens.

The door swung open and Dizzy turned to help him with Christian.

Tunica elastica. Quadratus menti. Corpus callosum. Sympathetic plexus and vitreus humor.

What? said Dizzy.

Mingus blinked. He was only remotely aware that he had been muttering these phrases aloud.

Medical terminology, said Christian. His voice like the faraway croak of a frog. Our friend Mingus, he said. He often quotes from Gray’s Anatomy when nervous.

Mingus blushed, hoping that Dizzy would smile at him in the dark.

Christian, he said. Be quiet.

Why, said Christian. Why do you call me that?

Because you’re failing.

Dizzy sniffed the air and stopped short and the three of them nearly tumbled into her living room.

There’s someone here, she said.

Mingus felt the prickle of goose bumps along his arms. Fearful.

Theseus? he said.

No, she said. It’s the smell of sick.

The overhead light was flicked on and a stout, balding man in vomit-streaked clothes stood before them, a gun in his right hand. He touched his own forehead with the barrel as if scratching an itch.

Fuck me, he said. You call yourself a Breather. A little kid could walk in here and smell puke.

You, said Dizzy. I know you.

Christian was slumping to the floor and Mingus moaned, holding him close. And as he always had, he felt safer with Christian beside him. Even like this.

No, said the man. You don’t know me.

You’re a policeman, she said.

Not tonight, sister. The man waved his gun and nearly fell over. I’m no cop.

Who are you? said Mingus. He had found his voice, it seemed.

I’m Elvis, said the man. I’m king of the fucking Freds. I’m Jimmy Sky.

Dizzy’s face was white, her lips flatline. Our friend is hurt, she said. What do you want?

The man guffawed. I want him, of course.

What do you want with him? said Mingus.

That depends. His name is Chrome, yes? The Mariner.

Mingus hesitated. Yes, he said.

And the man who called himself king of the Freds stepped forward, he swaggered close with his gun held crooked. He swung his arm around, breathing crazily. He faltered, mumbled an obscenity or two and glanced upward as if looking for the sun. Then poked the end of the gunbarrel at Christian’s mouth.

Chrome, he said. You have made the game real.

Mingus watched the man’s chubby index finger tighten around the trigger, he watched the tiny creases in the skin of Jimmy Sky’s finger turn white and he could already feel the hot spray of Christian’s blood but there was a pause, a heaviness in the air. And Jimmy leaned close enough.

Don’t you find it curious? he said. That I don’t want your tongue.

Christian straightened, his cheeks deathly. Mingus knew that he wanted to be proud but he couldn’t stand alone. There was no strength left in him. Dizzy said softly, wait. And the man never heard her, he never did. But he was staring at Christian with the sudden horror of recognition in his eyes.

I know you, he said. You work at the Video Hound. I rented Star Trek from you, just a few weeks ago. The Undiscovered Country. Last month. Last fucking month. Jimmy lowered the gun. Oh, he said. This is…unexpected. This is fucking strange. And look at you, he said. Look at you. Someone has already killed you.