Noir

“Understand what, honey?”

“What I’ve become. What I was always trying to become.” McNihil picked up his own glass and used it to point toward the mirror. “An extra. Like in the old movies. That real world I was always trying to crawl into. Because it was real.” He glanced over at the woman beside him. “You see them and you don’t see them-the extras, I mean. They exist in that world, they’re even necessary-but you don’t remember them. Just like prowlers that way; there’s nothing in their faces to snag onto normal people’s memories.”

“Our faces,” said the woman. “And yours.”

“Exactly. And that’s just what I always wanted.” The words were fervent in McNihil’s mouth. “To be there-to be here-and to exist and watch and maybe even have a few lines to speak. You know; to tell a real person which way to Fourth and Main, to maybe even light a cigarette for a real woman, the one the movie’s about…” He closed his eyes, imagining all he’d spoken of. “That’d be all right.”

“I don’t smoke,” the barfly said drily. “Otherwise I’d let you light my cigarette. If that’s what you’d get off on.”

McNihil stayed silent, knowing he shouldn’t have said anything at all. Not about this, at least-it was too close to some other dark place, a little unentered room inside himself. He folded both hands around the almost-empty glass, and thought about his dead wife. Thinking without words; just the image of her face. Which was not just snagged, but stitched with iron threads, to his own memory.

“Like I said before…” The barfly stroked the back of McNihil’s neck with her cold fingertips. “It’s nothing you have to worry about. Everything’s going to happen just the way it was meant to.” She used one nail to draw a knifelike incision, just short of opening the skin at the top of his spine. “And that’ll be fun. Loads of it. I promise you.”

He lifted his head, raising the glass at the same time and using the watered dregs in it to sluice away the vision of his dead wife’s face. The lock on the door of the little room inside him remained keyless. “Great,” said McNihil. The single drink, combined with some percolating residue of the Adder clome’s injections and his own self- generated toxins, turned a different key in a different lock. A doorway through which he knew he was going to step, though he already knew what was on the other side. The glass splintered into shards in his fist as he slammed it back onto the bar. “Let’s get going.”

“Oh,” said the barfly in a voice only half-tinged with sarcasm. “I love a man who knows what he wants.” Her hand seized his once again. Tight around his wrist; tight enough to force apart his fingers. The bits of glass dropped like dice, altered to transparency and razor edges, around his elbow. The barfly leaned forward, blond hair trailing through the pool of melting liquid; a red drop fell from McNihil’s wounded palm, diffusing into blurred pink. She caught the next one on the tip of her scarred tongue; the blood glistened her lipstick as she kissed the center of his hand.

“I know, all right…”

“Like I said-you came to the right place.” In a predator crouch, the ultimate barfly looked up at him through her lashes. The red looked like black, smeared on her chin. “I can do a lot for you, baby.”

McNihil nodded, letting the key turn another click farther in his heart. “I bet you can.”

The mirror of her eyes held him. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting for you… for a long time.” She used the back of his hand to wipe away the blood below her lip. “It’ll be worth it.”

Something between fear and disgust pushed McNihil’s gaze away from hers; something in which those terms no longer had a negative connotation. He just didn’t want to see that appetite in her eyes, in case it was a reflection from his own. McNihil looked across the bar, across the perceived but still-hidden figures in the shadows. He could discern them well enough that he could see both male and female prowlers returning his own scrutiny. That’s what they’re made to do, he reminded himself. Just like me. What he’d been before, and what he’d become once again-there really wasn’t that much difference between a prowler and an asp-head. They went out looking for something, the sensory treasure they’d been programmed to sniff out, and they brought it back to their masters. Just like me, he thought once more. Answers rather than thrills, Harrisch’s lost property rather than a collection of scars and tattoos that crawled over one’s skin like the black-clawed shadows of sea creatures-no difference at all, it now seemed to him.

He squeezed his fist tighter, the blood oozing wetly between his fingers. He gazed at the trickle running down his wrist like spilled ink, wondering if he’d achieved some evolutionary apotheosis by combining asp-head with prowler. Either the zenith, thought McNihil, or the nadir-it was something else that didn’t matter. Further proof that everything evolved, or at least changed, one way or another. He wondered if Harrisch, if anybody over at DynaZauber, knew about this. The world of the prowlers, the subterritory of the Wedge, might be getting out of their control faster than they knew. Maybe Travelt hadn’t been the first to have undergone that transference effect, the shifting of his human nature into the mask-faced, artificial receptacles. It didn’t appear that the late junior exec had been the last.

“I’m glad,” said McNihil, looking over again at the woman next to him. “That you’ve been waiting for me.” All irony had been drained from his words. “It’s nice to be wanted.”

“We’re not the only ones.” The other’s presence was so close and unfolding that a perfume of body- temperature latex and soft industrial resins had drifted in the air between them. “There’s somebody else waiting.” The barfly both kissed and whispered into his ear. “She’s waiting, too.”

McNihil didn’t need to ask her. There was only one possibility. “I’m ready,” he said. The glass had been drained and then shattered; what more was left? “Let’s go.”

“You first.” The woman looked straight into his eyes, the way someone about to plunge into a dark, still lake would. “You know how…”

He hesitated only a second. Then brought his hand along the side of her head, the blood from his palm seeping lines through her blond hair. He pulled her even closer and kissed her.

The woman drew back suddenly, her gaze turned to both wonder and almost frightened concern. “Your heart’s stopped.” She had placed her own hand against his chest, as though helping him to keep his balance in the gap between her barstool and his. “I can’t feel it beating…”

“Don’t worry about it.” He couldn’t keep himself away from her. “Not important,” said McNihil, pulling the woman harder toward himself and his mouth.

It took a moment for the inside contact to be completed. McNihil could hear behind himself the silence of the bar’s shadows and the prowlers’ mingled, expectant breathing. Just what they want-there was time only for that thought fragment, before the spark hit.

He’d felt the woman’s tiny scars with the tip of his own tongue, like deciphering a wet braille that chaptered down her throat. If he’d known how to read it, a biography in stitched flesh or a warning:

Abandon all hope

Blue lightning sizzled the insides of his eyelids, like the frayed curtains of his apartment bursting into flame.

Ye who enter here

Image rather than words filled his head, a newspaper photo of an electric-chair execution a long time ago, where flames had burst from underneath the cloth mask as soon as the switch had been thrown. In a sliced-apart microsecond, he wondered if he looked as well as felt like that, his skull wrapped in the incendiary halo of a martyred saint, fire-laced smoke rising to the bar’s low ceiling.

“You gave me… too much…” Talking like one of the spidered-together junkies in the lobby of the End Zone Hotel; he’d felt, been dimly aware through the rush of sensation and memory data, the woman grabbing the front of his shirt to keep him from toppling off the barstool. McNihil’s tongue felt burnt and swollen, as though he’d licked it across the terminals of a live battery. “That was… too big a hit…”

Other hands grasped him under the shoulders, lowering him to the bar’s floor. Far away, in the anteroom of the world he’d just left, he’d heard chairs toppling over as the seizure had snapped his muscles tight, and more than one of the watching prowlers running forward to catch him.

They laid him out corpselike, the back of his hand flopped against the stool’s chrome leg. He gazed up, still able to discern a fragment of real time through all the hurtling images that had risen into his eyes from the woman’s kiss.

“I should’ve known…” McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d managed to mumble the words aloud. “I should’ve known it