“And the mome raths outgrabe…”
AVERY HANESwas anticipating a swim platform running athwart the boat on the stern, with a narrow vertical ladder going up to the lower deck. Instead—and he considered this a stroke of absolute good fortune—a loading platform was in place on the boat’s port side, and a proper ladder with side rails and steps, instead of rungs, was pointed up at a forty-five-degree angle toward the boat’s second level where, he knew, cocktails had been served earlier tonight. The action now was on the lower deck, the ballroom level, the main deck salon where dinner and dessert had been served to a hundred and twelve guests who now sat watching Tamar Valparaiso performing on the parquet dance floor, all unaware. It would have been riskier to board the yacht on that main deck, bursting into the midst of the party, so to speak, although surely this was what they intended to do, anyway. But it would be far better to board on the second level, so handily made accessible by whichever Gods were in charge tonight, and work their way down by stealth to where they eventually wanted to be.
“The masks,” Avery told Kellie, and she went below to fetch them as he eased the Rinker in alongside the loading platform and cut the engines to idle speed.
BETWEEN STANZASone and two, there was a four-measure interlude in the unrelated key of G, punctuated by drum beats and slashing, off-beat, E-minor power-chords on electric guitars. The drum beats grew louder and more insistent as the synth picked up the B-flat note again, more ominous-sounding now, and Tamar’s almost- blues melody reached out with the words of the second stanza, her voice tremulous, her brown eyes wide and darting uneasily, the lights behind her becoming dark and swirling as if in anticipation of a sudden storm.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
“The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
“Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
“The frumious Bandersnatch!”
BISON RECORDShad used twelve different rubber masks during the shooting of the video, changing colors, shapes, and sizes to achieve the morphing effect they were looking for, the transmogrification of an insistent date-rape hazard into a crazed and violent beast intent on rape and possibly murder.
There were only three masks aboard the Rinker tonight, and they would not be used for effect, merely for disguise.
Avery handed one of them to Kellie.
He himself pulled another one over his head and face.
Cal Wilkins put on the last one.
Kellie took the wheel of the boat.
Both men lifted AK-47s from the deck, came through the gate on the transom entry, and stepped onto the loading platform.
In the ballroom, Tamar Valparaiso was about to soar into the third stanza of “Bandersnatch.”
IT WAS STRANGEhow all tension left her the moment she began performing. She knew she had them, each and every one of them, could tell by the pin-dropping silence out there that they were hanging on every word she sang. She was hanging on to each word herself, for that matter, caught in the suspense of the moment she alone had created, waiting for whatever was going to happen next, just like when she was a kid listening to stories her mother told her, and then what, Mama, and then what?
There was the insistent B-flat note again, pulsing from the speakers left and right. She imagined that sound magnified a thousandfold, visualized herself singing on the stage of a vast arena, hundreds of thousands of fans cheering and whistling as she stamped around the stage in her flirty little tunic, wanting more of her, ever more of her, screaming for more of her.
Behind the screen on her left, she could see Jonah looking all muscular and masculine and macho in the clay-colored mask he wore for his entrance, waiting to come on, just waiting to burst onto that dance floor and tear off all her clothes.
“He took his vorpal sword in hand:
“Long time the manxome foe he sought—
“So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
“And stood awhile in thought…”
AS THEY CLIMBEDthe ladder to the second deck, Avery glanced upward to the sun deck and the pilot house above, where he could see two uniformed figures busily performing nautical tasks, half-turned away from where he and Cal tried to flatten themselves against the side of the yacht so that no one listening to the big performance in the ballroom would catch sight of them in their rubber masks. They reached the second deck of the launch undetected, paused for an instant, but only an instant, to listen to the music coming from the main deck…
“So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
“And stood awhile in thought…”…and then, AK-47s in hand, moved into the lounge.
The space was empty now, bottles gleaming behind the bar, bar stools bolted to the carpeted deck. Abruptly, the singing from the deck below ended. Now there was only a steady beat that sounded to Avery’s garage-band ears like a quarter note, a quarter-note rest, then two more quarter notes as they started for the wide mahogany staircase that led down to where Jonah, in a mask quite unlike the ones they were wearing, burst onto the dance floor.
THIS PART OF“Bandersnatch” was straight hip-hop, harsh and relentless, the repeated quarter notes in the background serving as a sort of submerged pulse that seemed slower than the Lewis Carroll lines, making the talk seem crammed over it, word after word crowding into the stanza, but always covertly in time.
“And, as in uffish thought he stood,
“The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
“Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
“And burbled as it came!”
And here indeed did Jonah come whiffling from behind that tulgey screen erected at one side of the dance floor, wearing the grotesque clay-colored mask, red pin-spots knifing the air to catch the eye sockets as if they were belching flame or spouting blood, burbling as he came.
And now they danced.
Oh, how they danced!
On the video, Tamar and the beast danced for three solid minutes while he tried but failed to defile her. Here on this small parquet floor, they danced an abbreviated version, to be sure, but none the less violent for its brevity. Silently they struggled, the insistent beat in four behind them, Jonah at first insinuating himself upon her in oily intimidation, muscles gleaming, confident of his advances and his allure, Tamar surprised and timorous, but suddenly intuiting intent and beginning to back away from him, which signaled the first blinding light change and —
The audience gasped.
Where an instant earlier there had been a neutral gray mask covering Jonah’s face, almost benign in appearance, a slight smile on the mouth…well, perhaps he
But now, in the blinding flash of an instant, that nice little fraternity brother who just a heartbeat ago had been beseeching a kiss or negotiating a copped feel was suddenly wearing a tarnished copper mask, and his genial smile had been replaced by something more closely resembling a smirk or a snarl, as if the little girl singing her heart out here had somehow offended him by spurning his advances.
And to show how annoyed he was, to demonstrate clearly and without ambiguity exactly how much he’d been insulted by her having denied his heartfelt compliments and sincere gropings, to indicate without a modicum of doubt precisely how mightily pissed off he was, with one vicious swipe of his right hand—which all at once
