At the guard house he hesitated, then turned toward them, raising the shotgun so its barrel rested casually against his right shoulder. Not so casually, really.
Jeff hissed, 'Shit, shit, shit, ' under his breath as he turned and got into the car. He started the car, backed it up, went slowly back down the road. Making a statement with his slowness: You didn't run us off, I'm leaving because I want to.
'Look, let's go to the cops,' Prentice said, when they got to the edge of the highway. 'Mitch was out of his gourd on something. Maybe these assholes are giving it to him. He could end up dead, like Amy.'
Jeff stopped the car on the verge of the old concrete road. Sat there, staring at it. 'Fuck the cops!'
'I know how you feel about them – '
'Especially LAPD. They're total fuckers. And I swore I wouldn't go to them. I swore to Lonny.'
'That's just stupid, man. What is this, Tom Sawyer and Huck swearing on the bones of a pirate? For Mitch's sake, let's go to the cops.'
Jeff made a long sigh. He coughed, spat dust over the side of the car. Finally, he changed gears so violently Prentice feared for the transmission, and the car bounced up onto the highway. 'Okay. Okay, fuck it. Let's try the cops.'
Near Malibu. The Doublekey Ranch.
Late afternoon. But it was shadowy in Mitch's room; no light on, and the rosebushes around the window took all the sun for themselves. It was quiet, except for the sounds of ripping wallpaper and, briefly, in the distance, the sound of a car – a sports car, by the sound of it changing gears and gunning away.
Mitch was peeling wallpaper. Starting it with a thumbnail, then peeling it away like the strips of skin he'd pulled from his own ribs, a few days before.
Fucking roses on the wallpaper. Drooping rosebuds between that spiky shape from European shields. Let's see what's under it…
He wasn't really seeing the wallpaper. His head was churning with pictures. Images of hurting himself, cutting himself, the nosing knife in his forearm. He tried to remember how it had started, how he'd got into something that sick. But it was like trying to see through a fogged window. It wouldn't come clear. Not quite.
Just bits and pieces. The More Man telling him, Basically, it's a mystical discipline. It had sounded heavy, then. Now the phrase sounded totally bogus to him. Mystical discipline, bullshit. That kind of talk was supposed to fake him into seeing himself as some messiah type guy. Christ's scourging and crucifixion immediately preceded his exaltation, The More Man had said. And he'd talked about fakirs who laid on beds of nails and saints who whipped themselves all day. But the secret is, if you do it right, it's not painful! Mostly not. When it does hurt, it only hurts you for a while. Once you're in touch with that higher place, you can feel anything. Heal anything. The Spirit will heal you…
They'd been on some terrace at a beachside condo. The More Man in shades, holding Mitch enthralled. I want to make you a star, Mitch – but that takes a godlike transformatian. To be a real superstar takes total discipline. Discipline need not be painful. It need not hurt – it needs only the courage to explore… This body is not your true body, so what you do to it doesn't matter. Your true body is ectoplasmic, Mitch. It's ethereal, a higher thing that cannot be hurt
…
And then he'd given Mitch the Probe, just a big silvery knife. And when Mitch hesitated, this girl just sort of drifted out onto the terrace and, holy shit, it was Jeff's buddy Tom Prentice's wife, Amy, wearing a bikini, tanned but her body with all these mooncoloured marks on her, and she'd taken the knife ( Mitch peeled another long spiral of wallpaper away) and knelt beside him and put her hand on Mitch's thigh – instant hard-on – and, with the other hand started carving her breasts with the knife.
Mitch wanted to vault over the terrace railing and run, when the blood started guttering along the edge of her bikini top, curling down the round sides of her breasts. He saw the look on her face, the most totally awesome ecstasy and he thought, The bitch is sick…
Until Sam Denver said, 'Feel what she is feeling. Touch her arm, and it'll come through to you.'
'She – no. I can't. She'll stab me.'
'No. No she won't, Mitch. I promise you.'
So Mitch reached out and touched her arm – and the feeling went into him like a hot wet tongue running over his nervous system. The feeling expanded from there; it encompassed him with a monstrous pleasure.
He was feeling what she was feeling, yes, he could even feel the hot, intense places where the knife dug in – where the pleasure was as intense as the flame of a welding torch, you couldn't look at it directly. He could feel her breasts (peeling another strip of wallpaper away) as if they were his own; could feel the blade slicing them an inch deep here and there…
Could feel his pussy getting wet between his legs.
He wrenched away from her, sick with gender disorientation. But wanting more of the pleasure. Immediately.
'Give me the knife,' he said.
The next morning, he'd felt wrung out, used up, depressed. The pleasures took their toll. The wounds? He couldn't feel them – not back then. He felt fear simmering slowly in a steel pot of emptiness.
But by the next night he was ready for more…
'Got some other little things I want you to do for me, first,' Denver said. 'Just to show us your devotion. Your dedication. There's a certain street…'
Now, Mitch wrenched another strip of paper from the wall and ground his teeth, shook himself, though the movement sent shards of pain spinning through him, to drive out the memory of what the More Man had made him do on that street.
But once you've felt the Head Syrup, The Spirit's Reward, the More Man called it, you'll do anything to get it back.
You want more, the More Man had said, And it's all right to want more. They try to teach us that we should only want a little as it's doled out to us – but it's a lie, a conspiracy to make us slaves to Society, Mitch. The Spirit wants us to have more… and more and more…
The slowed-down sound of electricity crackling. That's what tearing paper sounded like to Mitch, as he tore away another uneven strip of wallpaper. You could smell electricity, a kind of electrical burning smell, when the Reward was coming…
He'd cleared an area of the wall about a yard square, next to the head of his bed. Under it, was just more wallpaper. Another kind of rose pattern. Shit.
He wondered vaguely if they'd punish him for it. Probably not. They probably didn't expect him to be sane.
He had no idea why he wanted to strip away the wallpaper.
On the left side of the flame-shaped patch where he'd stripped the outer layer of wallpaper away, the under-paper showed a long, drip-shaped brown stain.
His hands started to shake, as he tore away more paper on that side, revealing the old wallpaper beneath. More brown stain. Drippy brown stain. Where rainwater had seeped?
No… But he kept clearing it away till he was sure that it was a splash that had come from the bed. You could tell by the way it was splattered outward from the top right of the bed. He pinched a piece of the discoloured underpaper with his finger tips, and brought it to his nose. A smell of rot and iron. It was blood.
He thought, What'd you expect, dumbshit?
But he kept stripping away wallpaper, revealing more and more of the splash – and then a place where the underpaper had been breached. Clawmarks, four of them, ran down the wall here, to the plaster beneath. In one spot exposing a crack in the wall. As soon as he'd exposed it, he felt a little puff of cool air from the crack. And a moment later heard the voices.
And the edge of the crack was outlined in light.
He bent, and pressed his right eye to the crack (an icepick, there'll be an icepick spike coming through the crack into his eye – no, shake that bullshit off…) and squeezed his other eye shut. He could just make out pink shapes moving, in the next room… fleshy pink…
It took a moment for his eye to adjust. Then a piece of the neighbouring room came into focus. A man and a woman fucking on a bed. Fucking without rhythm on the bare mattress. He couldn't make out what they were
