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  “They pass it around and let the spirit of the owner communicate to them through it…send them prophecies,” Joey explained.

  “You?”

  “Not fully initiated yet. I’m still being prepared.”

  Jimmy drew close to the container. “Well, if Ricky wants to puree this thing and make it into a chocolate and formaldehyde milkshake, that’s his problem, right, Joe? But what say we take their god and go get us a real drink somewhere, huh?”

  Joey nodded vigorously, glad his mission was over.

  “What is going on out here, Joe—hey!”

  Joey whipped around with a gasp. In the doorway leading into the house stood Warren, the leader of the People, wearing rumpled pajamas and a rumpled expression of confusion.

  “Oh, ah, Warren, this is my friend…”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, lifting the silenced Beretta from under his coat and pointing it. Poof…poof!

  “Christ, man!” Joey hissed. “Christ!”

  Warren grunted at the impacts and slumped in the threshold. Jimmy went to him, took him by the arm and helped him half up, dragged him into the temple and closed the door into the house. Then he let go of Warren’s arm and shot him once more in the back of the skull.

  Jimmy turned to Joey. “Can’t let little Ricky down, Joe. C’mon, we’re outta here.”

  * * *

  “You did well, boys…I’m so proud of you.” Ricky hugged Jimmy, then Joey, who was swaying. Ricky smelled Joey’s breath and held him away by the arms. Joey didn’t look well.

  “It was a tough mission for Joe.” Jimmy spoke up quickly in his defense.

  “Of course it was.” Ricky patted Joey’s arms. “Go get some sleep in the green guest room, Joe.”

  “Thanks, Ricky…thanks.” Joey staggered off.

  “Well…here’s someone else who’s imbibed a bit too heavily tonight, though I told him not to.” Ricky moved further down the conference table to where Kolosimo was slumped, more disheveled than ever. Abruptly, Ricky snatched hold of Kolosimo’s hair and yanked him half out of his seat. Through gritted teeth, the satin-robed diminutive star hissed, “Look, you sorry son of a bitch, I want you to make this shake tonight and I want you to do it right! You understand me, you puke?” With his high-pitched voice, Ricky sounded like an infuriated Mickey Mouse.

  “Yes…yes,” the old man groaned. Ricky let him go, dragged the heavy jar across the table toward him, unscrewed the lid. Jimmy smelled the released stink. Rolling back his sleeve, Ricky glanced up into Jimmy’s eyes, then plunged his own delicate hand into the fluid.

  The gnarled black hand dripped. Ricky pushed it into the fleshy hands of Kolosimo. “What do you feel, Kol?” he demanded.

  The psychometrist held the dripping hand against his forehead. The other two stood over him staring.

  “Oh…uhhh,” mumbled Kolosimo. Then: “Uhhhh…” He let the hand drop to the table and his heavy paws trembled as they smoothed back his hair, smearing it with formaldehyde.

  This seemed to please Ricky, however. He nodded for Strappado and Bastinado to emerge from the shadows. They lifted Kolosimo under the arms, took him and the hand away.

  Ricky invited Jimmy to join him for a midnight snack while they waited. They had hamburgers and fries brought to them right there at the gothic conference table. Jimmy didn’t like being alone with Ricky, but they mostly ate in silence. Just as they were finishing, the handsome and mime-silent teen age boy who had served them their meal reentered with two metal tumblers on a tray. They were frappes, and one was set down in front of Jimmy. His stomach churned.

  Ricky saw Jimmy’s barely checked revulsion and giggled. “Don’t worry, Jimbo, yours is vanilla. I get the chocolate.” And with that, Ricky Concertina lifted the tumbler to his lips and began swallowing the thick chocolate-flavored concoction. Jimmy couldn’t help but openly stare.

  “Ahh,” breathed Ricky, setting the cup down and smiling at Jimmy. He popped a few fries in his mouth before he polished off the rest of his drink.

  Vanilla or not, Jimmy barely tasted his shake.

  * * *

  The next several months abounded with activity as a heavily inspired Ricky Concertina not only finished up his album, but rushed it into its advertisement, promotion and sales strategies, consulted with his makeup and wardrobe people to establish an updated look, shot videos, and even mapped out his initial tour agenda. Those unable to keep up with the hectic pace were unceremoniously axed.

  To achieve greater inspiration, Ricky kept handing lists over to Jimmy—shopping lists from hell. Ricky wanted something from Elvis. Not too surprising—Jimmy had been expecting that one. But requesting items from Jim Jones, Charles Manson and Grigori Rasputin? “For their mesmeric powers,” Ricky had explained. And what of the objects belonging to Al Capone, Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler? Jimmy had a lot of trouble with these last two, but thank God he acquired a signature of Hitler’s. Ricky was satisfied enough to drop Stalin. Ricky explained, “They’ll give me unflinching power to forge ahead with my vision unhampered by any.” Four people were axed the day after the Hitler shake.

  Kolosimo had vanished shortly after the night Jimmy delivered the mummified hand. He never asked Ricky about it, but he did notice that Ricky now made his own milk shakes. And whenever Jimmy brought him a new acquisition, Ricky would hold it to his own forehead to test its powers first, as if he had stolen this ability from his former mentor.

  * * *

  The opening night of the concert tour was a zoo. Utter, unheard of madness. A phenomenon. The press was so abundant that a lesser artist would have exalted at their number of bodies alone. For all his efforts, Jimmy was invited to be amongst those backstage, though his talents were not required tonight.

  Ricky’s eyes were so bright and yet so glazed, Jimmy might have thought he was on drugs if he didn’t know how much Ricky abhorred drugs. They didn’t talk; Ricky kept himself sequestered for the most part. Jimmy wasn’t sure what form the mummified hand’s inspiration had taken exactly, but Ricky had been keeping to himself like never before. Jimmy no longer dared to mock or doubt Ricky behind his back for fear of it reaching his pierced ears. Only the money kept Jimmy on this ship.

  Rick-ee…Rick-ee…the crowd was out there chanting. Stomping. As chilling a sight as a storm-churned ocean. Jimmy felt that if Ricky were to announce that he wasn’t performing tonight, they would surge forward in a tidal wave and tear the whole town down around them. Was it true after all? Kolosimo’s talk of the power in objects…his ability to harness the energy of others? How else could one frail scarecrow of a man hold so many people so utterly in his thrall?

  Nah, Jimmy thought, peeking out at them. Just sheep. A shepherd doesn’t have to be muscular. And I’m one of his sheep dogs.

  The roars…the screams…the cheers as Ricky Concertina appeared amidst clouds of dry ice and lightning-flash strobes…like some newborn god. Why shouldn’t they be mesmerized? wondered Jimmy as he watched. He was mesmerized himself.

  The music pounded into life—crashing, thumping synthesized drum beats—like a great factory firing up its machines. And almost instantly, as if he’d timed it perfectly—and perhaps he had—Ricky Concertina transformed before his audience…

  It was horrible, and it was the hideousness of it that mesmerized Jimmy now. Ricky went into spasms that at first he thought were a frenzied dance. But then the frail little man pitched forward onto hands and knees. Jimmy almost started out onto the stage to help him, but froze as black suds spewed from Ricky’s mouth, bubbling up from his back through his splitting glittery jacket. Soon Ricky was a mass of iridescent black foam.

  The audience was shrieking, crying out to the star.

  A tormented shape forced itself up to its feet, the suds clinging thickly to it. It was a bent, twisted figure, gnarled and misshapen, the head an immense loaf, globs of cauliflower-like flesh protruding from the naked body. The creature wailed as it was sucked back down into the foam.

  “We have to help
him!” Strappado the inscrutable cried.

  Rick-ee…Rick-ee…

  “Good God,” breathed Jimmy as the suds melted away abruptly. Left in their place was a black, glistening heap of ooze…smooth and amorphous. Little forks of greenish electricity branched out of it like serpent tongues. Center stage, musicians bolted. A female dancer ran too close…

  “No!” cried Jimmy as the blob lashed out, caught her ankle, drew her toward it.

  A maw opened, lined with dozens of flicking green electric tongues. The woman was swallowed; her shape bucked and thrashed inside the ooze as if under a blanket.

  Jimmy reached inside his coat for his Beretta, but Strappado shoved him aside, charged out onto the stage.

  “Ricky! Ricky!” he yelled.

  A pseudopod formed instantly, back-handed the big man, the blow casting him out several rows into the audience. They roared.

  “Help me, damn it!” Jimmy yelled across the stage to Bastinado. “Help me!” And with that, Jimmy stepped out into the multi-colored lights and fluttering strobes.

  A moment later, Bastinado followed suit, drawing his own automatic. Jimmy fired into the semi-fluid mass first, then they were both firing continuously as they approached the horror from either side. The bullets lodged in the thing, not passing through or ricocheting off the floor. They seemed to be hurting the creature. The maw opened wide in an ungodly, otherworldly high-pitched wail. The tongues of lightning sought to reach out at first one man, then the other. Jimmy and Bastinado wisely stayed clear and kept firing from a safe distance. The music still boomed mindlessly from computerized equipment, and the vast hall thundered with the rhythm of the audience stamping their feet in unison.

  Jimmy had emptied his Beretta but Bastinado kept blasting. The ooze reared up suddenly to a height of a dozen feet. At the top of this pillar of slime was the wailing mouth. Jimmy wanted to flee, but gaped at the towering nightmare, transfixed.

  It fell. It fell toward him. A falling tree. A tidal wave. Space itself hurtling down at him. He screamed. The creature turned to foam, and the foam turned to mist, just as it was upon him. The fine wet mist breezed gently across his face, and yet Jimmy still crumpled to his knees and dropped his forehead to the stage. He hadn’t fainted entirely, however. He could still feel the vibration of the auditorium through his forehead as the thousands stomped their feet, though his hearing had abruptly shut off.

  The doctors would tell him the damage had come from the high-pitched cries of the monster, but Jimmy would always wonder if it hadn’t been the rapturous chanting of the audience as well.

  Rick-ee…Rick-ee…they screamed.

  It was the best concert they had ever seen.

  Black Walls

  1: RED GLASS

  Johnny Belfast’s gun jammed, as if it too were obeying the red light. It gave Heron time enough to pull his own piece, a Glock that had been napping like a guard dog under a jacket on the passenger’s seat. Belfast hadn’t thought Heron would be packing, hadn’t realized Heron was fully aware of the danger he was in, and made the mistake of trying to work the slide of his weapon to clear the round. The Glock started barking, the guard dog roughly awakened. But while Heron was busy shooting wildly out one window, Drake had run up to the passenger side of the car and fired in through another. Belfast and Heron both took one in the head at the same time, but Drake had a sawed-off pump loaded with double odd buckshot, each shell’s nine pellets thick as a rifle slug, so Heron definitely got the worst of it as a firing squad of nine men turned his skull to skeet dust.

  Belfast lay on his back in the middle of the street, a light spring rain sprinkling his face. It wasn’t rain water he felt running across his forehead, though, winding into his shirt collar; a creepy sensation almost more troublesome than the pain that spiked his head to the pavement. He saw the stoplight swing like a pendulum in the strong breeze, like a red lantern being waved over him. It reminded him of those red glass lanterns with candles in them in the Catholic cemetery where he had gotten high as a teen. The light had changed that color several lifetimes ago, when Heron pulled his car to a stop at the silent midnight intersection. Drake had pulled up right behind him, and Belfast had been out the door in a blur of black coat, black gun. Now, at last, the light changed green, spring green, but the two cars still sat there and the blood kept flowing down his head, annoyingly into his ear now, too, and he knew that color hadn’t changed.

  Then, hands on him. He swung his pistol, still gripped, and almost clipped Drake across the temple. Drake pinned his arm and swore at him. “Hey, it’s me! Damn, man…damn! Look at you!” Dogs had begun barking, dark faces must be pressed to dark windows. Drake seized Belfast by the coat front and hoisted him to his feet.

  “Get in the car, man, before somebody comes. What the hell, Johnny? You said you didn’t need my help!”

  “Jammed,” Belfast mumbled, shuffling along, his arm around Drake’s shoulders.

  “You should have used mine. God damn, look at you! Look at you!” And he shoved the bleeding man into the passenger’s seat.

  Their car backed up a bit, then surged forward, swerving around Heron’s. Leaning against his door, head tipped against the glass so that blood began running into the corner of his mouth, Belfast saw that Heron’s wipers were still sweeping in a futile attempt to wipe away all the red liquid sprayed on the inside, but only smeared the red-lit water on the outside as the stoplight changed colors again.

  2: MAGIC BULLET

  Again, they waited at a stoplight. Distantly, the keening banshees of sirens like a growing chorus of the damned. Drake looked over at his partner. “You still alive?” he asked shakily.

  From the murk, a soft wet whisper. “Think so.”

  “We’ll get you to the apartment. I’ll have Doc Cool come over. Too risky to take you to a hospital. It can’t be in your brain, man, or you’d be toast! I’ll have Doc Cool come over. It musta just like deflected off your skull, man.”

  Johnny Belfast did not protest this plan of action, or inaction. He was occupied wondering if the blood he tasted was partially that of their victim, sprayed in his face to mix with his own. There was an alien taste to the blood, as if what little of his blood he had sucked from a sliced finger or busted lip over the years had imprinted its own unique character on his palate.

  Yes, he decided, he could taste Heron’s life stuff blended with his own. He became aware that he was rubbing at the wound just at his hairline. At that moment, realizing that he was fingering the bullet hole, realizing he was tasting Heron’s blood, another realization came to him, not as a possibility but as stark naked fact.

  Heron’s shots had been close, but none had fully struck him. Belfast dropped his hands to his coat, rummaging through its folds until he poked a finger through a hole that wasn’t made for a button. Lifting his T-shirt, he saw blood oozing from a raw furrow across the outside of his chest, on the left, where a slug had skated along a rib. Heron was no trigger; he had never shot a man before. But Drake had. Drake had stooped down to expertly aim in at their victim’s head. And it was a ball of OO buckshot that had caromed from Heron’s exploded skull, up and out the driver’s window to bury itself in Belfast’s skull. He knew this. It was as though his fingers could feel the shape of that deeply buried ball of lead, like a dark pearl folded in the tender oyster of his brain. It was as if those tissues could taste the projectile, and tell its origin. It had been a miracle that Heron’s several panicked shots had all but missed him at that range. It had been another miracle that a magic bullet had passed through Heron’s brain and into that of the man hired to kill him.

  The light changed, the car jumped into movement, Belfast’s head was slung back against the seat by the lurch. He turned arctic eyes on his friend’s tense profile. Drake had been trying to save his ass, but the idiot had fired with him just behind their victim. Belfast was too dazed, too numbed to be enraged. Staring at his friend, his eyes bright in a dark mask of blood, he felt…irritated? Bitter? He felt, most of
all, disoriented…

  Staring made his head hurt. He closed his eyes. Maybe he should sleep. Maybe he should die.

  3: TERROR INCOGNITA

  When again he opened his eyes, their lashes heavy with gummed blood, Belfast saw it was snowing. The sky just above the city glowed with its pink night haze like radioactivity, but beyond that where the heavens turned black they were swarming with glowing flakes. Yet the more Belfast gazed on this churning blizzard, the more he doubted his interpretation. It wasn’t only that it was April, but, in looking down at the street, he saw no snow on the ground. It wasn’t even raining any longer.

  He decided it was his head wound, making faint lights swim behind his eyes, showing up better against the dark. Against black, specifically; he saw nothing, really, in the shadows of the car, but against his coat, dyed the actual color black, he observed the phenomenon with increasing clarity. Only, against the sky the lights were tiny, distant. Against his coat, the lights were large and close, if no brighter.

  First, they mesmerized him. Then, as he watched them, he began to feel fear. He had been too stunned by the wound to feel concern before. The reality of his wounding had become unreal. But this phenomenon, which had to be unreality, had engaged his emotion.

  Against his black sleeves, he saw rags of membrane sailing past, tumbling, tatters of ectoplasmic tissue floating in a black sea. One of these vague phantasms swam nearer to him, seemed to gaze at him from his sleeve as if it were pressing its face to a narrow window. For it was a face, he realized, this close up. Indistinct, a rough sketch; blurred smudges of dark eye sockets, a mouth gaping and yawning and working soundlessly like that of a fish sucking air from water. Then the face ducked down out of sight. On his other sleeve, another face had been peering at him, but darted away when discovered, trailing its ragged, ethereal vestments.