Cities of the Red Night

knee, raking the slope with his spark gun. the Spermers scream, rolling down the slope, clothes burning, setting the grass on fire. The truck is burning. Audrey and Cupid sprint on as the gas tank explodes behind them.

The unconscious imitated

by a cheesecake

The Double Gallows is the late place in Tamaghis. At 11:30 it is still nearly empty. The bartended is checking bottles and polishing glasses. SOme character is freaking out at the bar.

'We're all a bunch of dirty rotten vampires!' he screams. The bouncer throws him out.

'We don't like that in here. I mean it.'

A Siren undulates in and trills for service.

'You see that sign, lady?' The bartender points to a picture of a Siren with a noose: '... will not be served here.' The bouncer hustles her out.

It's an exclusive-type place where everybody goes. What do people do in Tamaghis? They see the Show. They all come here and see the big Show. There's a hanging show every night. The bar is filling up now, because this is Flasher Night. The chic clients make their entrances through trapdoors in the floor and ceiling, or through disused side entrances, and even now they are popping up through the floor in green drag screaming like mandrakes, dropping down through the ceiling in gauzy parachutes or with ropes around their necks, slithering in through mirrors and screens. Some are completely naked but most wear at least cowboy chaps, or scarves, or capes, or masks, or body paint, or sarongs, or snakeskin jockstraps, or Mercury sandals, or Scythian boots, or Etruscan helmets, or space suits with transparent ass and crotch.

Noose peddlers circulate among the clients, stopping here and there as a table of young aristocrats feel the nooses, which are of various grades and materials—silk in all colors, hemp cured and softened in rare unguents, tingle nooses burning with a soft blue flame, leather nooses made from sniffhound hide.

Audrey drops a noose languidly and waves to Jim across the room. Jim comes over and sits at his table. Audrey introduces him to Rubble Blood Pu, a slim elegant youth dressed in expensive nineteenth-century clothes with a red rope mark around his neck, and to Captain Strobe, the Gentleman Spermer, in eighteenth-century clothes, his yellow hair in a pigtail. Strobe too has the hemp marks around his neck. Cupid Mount Etna with a cupid-bow mouth, yellow goat eyes, and curly hair, is naked except for goat-hood sandals. Blindish Wasp, black sideburns, eyebrows that completely cover the eye sockets, thin purple lips, is shaped like a wasp—thin rounded chest, a waist so narrow Jim could have put his hands around it, long thin legs. His skin is dead white and shiny, his cock pointed. He is naked except for a black skullcap and black pointed shoes of soft leather. He gives of a sharp aromatic odor.

The guests are becoming impatient. 'Pop Pop Pop,' they scream.

Lights go on in a little alcove and there is the double gallows. It's a hologram and it makes you queasy to look at it floating there in stagnant rotten air like a solid mirage you can almost drink out of and almost smell. The star is a dummy called Whitey because he cost as much as the white shark in Jaws. A door opens on the gallows and Whitey is led in by a red demon as the clients caper around the gallows, standing on tiptoe and twisting their heads to one side and making clicking sounds with their tongues.

Now Whitey stands with the noose around his neck, pelvis tilted forward, cock almost hard, pupils pinpointed. The platform falls and he hangs there ejaculating and a blaze of light flashes out his eyes.

'A Flasher! A Flasher!' The clients throw up their arms and wriggle their hips forward ecstatically, bathing in the flash, pushing each other aside, wallowing about in heaps.

The gallows disappears. In an old silent film 1920s guests are jumping into a swimming pool.

'Come along to our digs, old sport,' says Rubble Blood Pu. 'This place is getting vulgar.'

Pu leads the way through an area of vacant lots, rubble, and half-demolished buildings overgrown with weeds, scrub, and vines.