The More Man laughed. 'A good semblance of winning ingenuousness.'
Something glimmered around the More Man's head. She could see that he had the thing that looked like an undersea-crawler on his head, too, like his wife – only his was less substantial looking. It reached out, though, to Constance, stretching like phlegm, reaching for her. She backed away. The door was locked behind her.
'Time to par- tayyyy…' the More Man said softly, mockingly.
The Handy Man said something in German. The woman with the big sea snail thing on her head answered in German, something muted and bubbly under the stuff, and sobbed, and lifted up her dress and…
Constance looked away. He slim black girl on the bed of body parts was crying softly, rasping. 'Mitch…' He boy was dead. The black girl was trying to heave his body off her and couldn't. She was crying with crusted, dried out eyes and cracked lips, trying to roll the boy off her. Constance looked away from her too. She didn't want to feel bad for anyone. If she let herself feel anything, it'd open a can of…
The yellow-silvery tendril reached out to her.
A rattling in the lock Then the door opened behind her.
She turned and saw Ephram there.
But Ephram looked defeated. 'That's enough…' He tossed the key onto the floor. 'I… will cooperate, Samuel.'
'You have become peculiar lately,' Sam Denver chuckled. 'Very well, Constance.' The tendril slunk back to him like the gelatinous antenna of a snail pulling into itself.
Denver drew the Handy Man aside, away from his wife. 'What can you do for her, then, Ephram?'
Seeing they'd lost interest in her, Constance edged toward the bed. She wasn't sure why – but she had to do this. Maybe some door in her had been left open a slit. She pulled the white boy off the black girl, rolled him toward Denver's side of the murdered bed. The girl turned on her side to try to crawl off the bed – and found herself staring, three inches away, into the mummified face of the boy they'd made into a mattress cover. She screamed in recognition: and Constance saw the family resemblance between the two faces. The girl's brother.
The girl covered her face with her hands, screaming uncontrollably into her bloody palms. Constance helped her to stand, and drew her aside. The girl fell silent, shaking. Constance wondered if Denver would let the two of them get out the door.
Ephram was staring at the woman. That'd be Mrs. Denver, Judy, from what he'd told her. Once Mrs. Stutgart. Ephram was doing something to her with his mind. Ephram grimaced and shook his head. 'I haven't got the strength. They're too firmly a part of her.'
Denver nodded grimly. 'Then get the hell out of here. And leave the girl.'
Ephram hesitated. Then he started mumbling. He was chanting, Constance knew, calling up the…
'No,' Denver said. 'If you can't do it alone, don't do it.'
'It's the only way,' Ephram said, pausing in a distracted kind of way. 'The Spirit can draw them off from her. I don't have enough strength.'
'The Spirit!' Denver laughed bitterly. 'What the
Bloody Hell do you think the Spirit is, Pixie? Don't you know what it'd do to her? Or is that what you want?'
Ephram stopped his murmuring. He blinked at Denver. 'What do you mean – what it is?'
Denver shook his head. 'Do you really have that much of a blind spot? But of course, it's kept you that way… Ephram, your spirit is just another Akishra. A Magnus. The most powerful Akishra – but it is still just an Akishra.'
'No!'
Constance had never heard Ephram sound so off balance. And so afraid. She looked at the door. The girl beside her – God, she smelled bad, of rotting blood and shit and worse stuff – was sinking to her knees, unable to walk by herself. Constance couldn't carry her and couldn't bring herself to leave the girl here. What am I doing? she wondered. Maybe she'd been too long without Reward, and this was withdrawal. This feeling…
'You don't think I'd perceive such a thing?' Ephram said, with a trumped-up sneer. 'I'd know.'
'You really can't see them?' Denver said. 'The control lines? I suppose it doesn't want you to. See for yourself. Here, with our influence, you should be able to see them…'
Ephram looked up, and shocked Constance by whimpering. Constance followed his gaze. Shimmying into view like puppet strings over Ephram's head were dozens of fine, translucent tendrils. Now, as they began to move around, billowing and gleaming, they didn't look like puppet strings so much as the little trailing stingers that dangle from big jelly fish…
They were sunken into his head. Grown right into it. They stretched from Ephram up into, and through, the ceiling. And through this world into another. They were not quite physical things – you could see that, looking at them. But they were there.
'You pretentious old bastard,' Denver said. 'You thought you were better than the rest of us – because of your overblown talent? That you were in touch with some glorious God of the dark dimensions? You perfect ass! It was just the biggest Akishra; the Magnus itself. The greatest of them, playing games with you, letting you play on the line, reeling you out then, reeling you in now. It brought you here, for this. Manipulated you into coming to L.A. Oh, yeah. The thing you called down for Wetbones. And – you want to bring that here? Now? You're out of your pompous little skull.'
'Yes,' Ephram croaked. His face gone white. 'Yes. Having come this far: yes. To cure us all.' And he spoke three more words.
The ceiling seemed to vanish. It turned transparent and then faded completely. Smoke replaced it, a living smoke made up of ten thousand restless, microscopic eyes. Constance thought she glimpsed people there, too, whirling, caught like the birds in a tornado. The rectangle that had been the ceiling was now an infinite reach of crowded and living sky. And then the iridescent bulk of the creature who'd masqueraded as the 'Great Spirit', the Akishra Magnus, descended slowly toward them. What Constance could see of it made her think of a house-sized plasticine squid; its upper parts tapering into the boiling smokes of staring, black-light space; reeling in on some tendrils, seeking with others, its vast sticky, glimmer-edged, polyp-bearded mouth opening…
A great wind raged through the room, roaring, smelling like an overheated electric train; and static electricity invested the air, making Constance's hair crackle out, as the 'Spirit', the etheric animal that had kept Ephram for its toy, lowered itself over Mrs. Stutgart, taking her into its translucent, feeler-furred envelope. They could see her inside it, through the foggy membrane. And for an instant, within it, she was freed – the husk of Akishra was drawn off her head, and the old woman beneath wept with gratitude. Then the woman's own face was peeled off her skull, sucked cleanly off her, upward, and her eyes remained in her skull for a moment staring in naked realization. Until the skull exploded, and Elma Stutgart disintegrated into a pulp of flesh and bone…
Denver was all this time moving away from her, pushing the Handy Man ahead of him…
The bed, the cobbled body parts of the furniture, were leaping in the electric galvanization pervading the air, tearing free of one another, twitching with the damaged reflexes of some half-rotted nervous system. A spasmodic tarantel of dis-juncted body parts.
Constance stood near the door, unable to move, paralyzed with the immense psychological gravitation of what she was seeing.
She saw Ephram rigid, shaking, his eyes rolling back in his head. The Magnus reeled him toward it. He staggered its way. Shouting over the roaring wind something Constance recognized from one of the evenings he'd made her read to him from Nietzsche: ' The beauty of the superman… 'He paused to gasp for air, then went on, '… came to me as a shadow…' He paused to clutch at the twitching, preserved leg that had been part of the disassembling bedframe. Then seemed to make a decision and deliberately let go, shouting, finishing the quote: '… what are the gods to me now!'
Ephram was sucked slowly toward the Magnus, as blood ran down from new wounds opening on his skull and neck, a hundred little rifts giving up brain and blood to accompany soul through the feeding tendrils of the Akishra Magnus…
As the great one tilted toward him, its mouth opening.
Constance thought she caught a glimpse of a single opalescent eye in the writhing tendrils of its lower parts; maybe even a fragment of a desperate face; a visage that might once have been human, millennia ago, the remains of something that now suffered enormously in the aching, interstellar void of hugely imbecilic hungers.
Ephram glimpsed this face too, and seemed to sense its implications. Now he tried to hold back, shrieking.
