mottled blood-pudding face. And what we'd heard about the dead — that they were sometimes far more powerful than they'd been in life — was true. Effortlessly these two palsied-ruined creatures opened John's gut and pulled things out of him and then for a while there were nothing but munching noises until she broke the silence.
'Mom likes it hard and fast,' she said. 'But not too hard. You know, pieces could fall off. You've got to be careful.'
The faceless thing looked up at me through black clotted eyes and did something with its mouth that might have been a smile. I could see the crisped breasts, the scorched sex between its stick legs.
'And Billy's gay. Try to get him off with your mouth, otherwise he's gonna put the whole thing up your ass. Ouch!'
Already its cock was getting hard. The glans looked like a spoiled green tomato.
They both began to crawl in my direction.
'You're the one who wanted to have sex with the dead,' she said. The gun was cocked and pointed at me. 'So get to it.'
She kept her promise — she obviously didn't kill me. So I guess I got it right. They keep me in the back room now with Mom and Billy, shackled.
I hear her bring in other guys all the time. None of them last long. I hear a pop and that's the end of them. So far I'm their favorite. I figure she must have singled me out after all that evening at the bar. And the sex? It's horrible, sure, it's hideous. But it's better than being their next meal. You'd be surprised what you can do if it means staying alive just one more day.
But their appetites are…awful, tremendous.
My only hope is that Neal's out there somewhere looking for me. Looking for his buddies, John and me. That he's got the cops onto it, maybe. That somehow, against all odds he'll find me. That maybe one of these days she'll slip up, make a mistake — she'll go by the World Cafe again and Neal will be On Point that day at the big plate glass window watching the ladies go by in their short summer skirts and tees and tank tops and see one who looks just like Daryl Hannah.
Eyes left.
Meantime it's winter now. The City's cold in winter. And it's very cold in here.
Sleep Disorder
Bill Dumont never dreamed.
Hadn't for as long as he could remember. The popular wisdom was that you simply had to dream or you'd go crazy — you'd maybe already be crazy — so he assumed he did, really. He just couldn't recall a thing. Not a single image. Practically speaking that was as good as not dreaming at all. Which was fine with him because he doubted that his dreams were going to enlighten him much.
Bill Dumont was a Grade-A, All-American bastard and he damn well knew it. His father had been before him and probably his father before that. He got to live the life every day. He didn't need to dream about it too.
But there had to be dreams. Or elsewhere would all this talking come from?
He talked in his sleep.
Pretty much every night if you were to believe Annie, his current live-in girlfriend. Or Laura, his soon-to-be-ex wife. Or any of the squeeze he got on the side. And he guessed it had started way back in college because he remembered he'd sure scared the hell out of Harry, his last roommate, the second night in their apartment together by sitting bolt upright in bed and saying, 'I have come to you through space and time — but not through New Jersey.' And then going back to sleep again.
Harry was kind of leery of him for the next week or so. Couldn't blame him.
New Jersey for god's sake.
'What you dream,' he'd said, 'is how you see others, seeing you.'
Well, Harry was a psych major so what could you expect? He could talk some mean Freudian, Jungian or Reichian dynamics but Bill was less interested in Harry's analysis than in his wallet back in those penny-pinching college days. Harry was a rich kid. Harry also had a crush on the proverbial tall, dark and handsome Bill Dumont — and Bill didn't want to fork out all that tuition money if he didn't have to. And as the saying went, it was all pink on the inside.
Bill feigned a fervent affection for the entire senior year, secretly boffing cheerleaders and business majors on the side, taking them to nice expensive restaurants on Harry's cash. Between the tuition and party money, Bill took the poor chump for a small fortune. When Harry got the gist, he blew his head off — day after graduation. Too bad. But hey, Harry's mental problems weren't Bill's problem.
This dreaming business, though. From age thirty on, everybody complained about Bill's talking in his sleep. Laura had even bought earplugs. Which he thought was pretty damn rude. But at least the bitch never really complained much after that, except occasionally about the earplugs bothering her. 'Go sleep on the couch if you don't like the damn things,' he'd suggested once but she never did. Laura was insecure and Bill was — well, proverbially tall, dark, and handsome. He loved to think about other women when he was putting the blocks to her, pretty fair lay though she had been.
But as for the talking, Bill supposedly spoke in a clear, conversational voice and everything he said evidently made perfect sense — or would have, if you could find a context for it.
But you couldn't. At least he couldn't. Because the context was the dreams.
And he never remembered his dreams.
The talking was a minor annoyance as far as he was concerned. It didn't disturb his sleep. Annie even seemed to find it funny at first.
'Who's Millie?' he remembered her asking one morning. There was a scratch on one of his knuckles, a little dried blood there, and he was looking at that trying to figure out how it had gotten there while he slept.
'What?'
'Who's Millie? You talked in your sleep last night.' She laughed. “'Millie, Millie, Millie,' you said. Your lover on the side, huh?' Then she laughed again. She trusted him.
He didn't know why she should.
He laughed too, almost too quickly. 'Millie, that's what we call Reginald Milton, one of my best clients. He hands me half a million a year to let him in on all the hot IPO's. Thank god for guys like Millie.'
Decades of practiced lying had given Bill a knack for credible comebacks in a pinch. There was no Reginald Milton, no 'Millie.' Millie was a cute but abundantly flawed fifty-dollar trick he picked up once in a while when Annie was away on business.
And it occurred to him then that this talking shit could possibly get him into trouble. There was a whole lot of stuff Bill didn't want to be yammering about in his sleep. Or anywhere for that matter.
He'd put together a little over two million in untraceable cash from various grossly illegal tactics and it was all carefully secreted in the living room wall behind the couch. He'd jigged one section of the panel with a magnet, so it was removable. You just had to know exactly where the section was.
Also stashed behind the wall was the highly valuable coin collection Annie had inherited from an uncle. Back before she'd moved in with him the collection had been stolen from her apartment in a regrettable burglary while she was out of town. And what a coincidence! Laura had a couple hundred grand in bearer bonds which had also been stolen from her apartment in a regrettable burglary back before they'd married. The bonds were there, behind the wall.
Bill didn't need to be talking about such things, ever — much less in his sleep with Annie lying right beside him.
It pissed him off. He wasn't supposed to be talking in his goddamn sleep.
It was a little worrisome.
Some nights it was funny what he'd say and some nights — when Annie needed her sleep and he'd wake her shouting 'Mail it!' — it could get annoying. But nothing more than that.
What was really annoying was the snoring.
The first time she elbowed him in bed he was mortified.
