She had blond hair falling to the base of her neck and shoulders, styled in a fashion that reminded me a bit of Farrah Fawcett from the zenith of the seventies. Her eyes were large and brown and gave her the semblance of wide-eyed innocence. If you looked closer, weren’t distracted by her youthful body, by those legs, you’d catch the haunted, frightened look that surfaced, fighting against practiced, drugged apathy, and you’d see the real her.
She was dressed in a costume, a caricature of a Dallas cheerleader with white mini-shorts, white cowboy boots, and a blue shirt, open to reveal her cleavage and tied and knotted up to expose her midriff. She held a white cowboy hat in her hands, clutching it tightly. Looking at me, she smiled; it was sweet and very sad, like she was glad to see me, but she bore awful news. Her true name had never been known, but the name she took during her brief time in the porn industry, when she had been alive and mortal, was Bambi Woods.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was childlike, lilting, almost musical with a raised, halting inflection, like she was reading every word she said off a cue card she had never seen before, like maybe she was a little high. There was a very faint northern New York accent in her voice.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry to trouble you. Thanks for responding.”
“Sure,” she said. “Wow, I’m surprised anyone still knows how to get in touch with me like this. People, y’know, forget.”
Bambi had disappeared after becoming an overnight porn superstar. There were more rumors, urban myths, and speculation about her fate than actual porn films she had starred in. Legend had it that “Bambi” had been ritually murdered in a drug-and-sex-fueled ritual in L.A., back in the early eighties. Another myth was that she was now a plump and happy housewife and grandma in the heartland of America and just wanted to forget her porn star years. Even I didn’t know the full story behind what had actually happened to the real, flesh-and-blood woman behind the sex symbol. I knew a few of the touchstones to the myth, however. She had been drug-addicted, sad, and frightened. She got caught up in the belly of the beast to pay off a drug debt. Was any of it true, was all of it? In this town, what was real and what was fake shifted like sand in the wind. I had learned that the image, the idea of Bambi Woods, had become a separate entity, the Madonna, the holy mother, of the skin trade, an archetype that had little basis in fact, fed and fueled by lust, greed, and fantasy. Bambi had become the Marilyn Monroe of the sex industry, of this dark corner of Hollywood. Bambi died for their sins and for ours.
Ideas fed power often take off on their own, become boilerplate in this shared hallucination we call reality. Bambi was hardwired into the universe of porn now, into the growling, humming nexus of the meat-grinder that took in people and spit out husks. She was the Pornoracle, and she saw it all, all the time.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said. She nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “You’ve been looking for her for a really long time.”
“Actually, not that long. Her working name is Crystal Myth. What can you tell me about her, where she is, if she’s alive?”
“Yeah,” Bambi said, taking a step closer to me. “She’s alive, but she won’t be for much longer. That’s sad. And Crystal Myth, that’s only one of her names. You’ve been looking for her for a real long time, Laytham, as far back as when you used to jerk off to those videos and think of Rosaleen just before you came.”
“Wait, what are you saying? Rosaleen … how?”
“I could see you on my side of the screen,” she said and giggled a little. It was practiced and fake. “I’m on the other side of all the screens, watching.
“Y’know Rosaleen, that necromancer you were so hot for? You’ve been looking for Crystal, for all of them, since back when you still used to cry. She’s got lots of names, lots of faces, always a pretty face, never torn up. You’ve searched for every one of them.”
“What are you trying to say?” I asked. “Are you telling me the asshole who’s been killing women since the eighties, been destroying their souls, is hunting Crystal now?”
“Yeah,” Bambi said, nodding, a shadow of a smile at the edges of her face, her eyes full of wisdom, fraught with pain. “They are, but they didn’t start in the eighties. They’ve been at it for a real long time, honey.”
“They?” I said. “Who, please, Bambi, tell me who’s been doing this to these girls? Why are they after Crystal now?”
“A lot of it’s outside, y’know, my field of vision,” she said. “They have lots of names. They’re real old. ‘Dog’-something? They wear like … hats? I don’t know, sorry. But they’ve been here, in the city, for as long as the movies have been made, and they’ve been killing, destroying, all that time … ten to the hundred and nineteenth power … plucking petals off a flower … so many petals you can never see an end … but each one diminishes the flower. They do all this…’cause they like, y’know, get off on it, the annihilation.” Bambi cocked her head and looked directly at me, into me. “They’re … kinda … like you.”
“No,” I said. “They’re not.”
“You guys have a bunch of stuff in common, y’know? That’s sad too. I thought you were a nice guy.”
“I am
