This sounded too fishy to resist; Phil finished his beer. “Come on, let’s go check it out.”
Eagle rolled his eyes. “I just got done telling you, man, regulars only.”
Phil leaned over. “Yeah, and you’re a regular. You could get us in.”
“Sure, I probably could, but I’m not going to.” Eagle seemed exasperated by the topic…and a little nervous. “Listen to me, Phil. You’ll blow chunks if you even take one look behind that door. They’ve got girls in there with three or four tits, triple belly buttons, triple nostrils. Hunchback girls, girls with no ears, girls with ten fingers per hand and two elbows per arm. The one time I went back there” —Eagle swallowed hard— “this one Creeker chick walks out on the stage, and she had a body on her that would make Vanna White look like Dr. Ruth—”
“Sounds great! Let’s go!”
“—but all she had for arms were these little twigs with fingers on them.” Eagle paused to gulp again. “And a head the size of a basketball. I’m tellin’ ya, man. It’s a fuckin’ freak show back there.”
These, of course, were not things that Phil wanted to see… But I have to get into that room, he determined to himself. See what else is cooking back there. He persisted, feigning more enthusiasm. “What’s the matter, Eagle? You scared of a few inbreds? Christ, this is Dullsville out here.” He shrugged at the stage, and at the next narcoleptic dancer. “These girls are tripping over themselves, for shit’s sake. They look like they’re ODing on ‘ludes. But I’ll bet there’s plenty of spark in that back room.”
“Spark, huh? That’s what you want?” Eagle shook his head. “All right, you pay the tab here, and I’ll try to get us in back.”
“Solid,” Phil said, and left a ten on the bar. “Let’s go.”
They got up and squeezed past the waitress station. Phil’s curiosity blended with abundant disgust; butterflies went mad in his belly. But he had to keep playing the part; he had to prove to Eagle that he’d changed, for the worst.
“Hey, Druck,” Eagle greeted the Creeker kid at the door. “This here’s my buddy, Phil.”
“Hey, Druck,” Phil said.
“We’d like to go in back,” Eagle added. “Phil’s a townie, he’s just been away a while. But he’s all right.”
The kid’s expression, if it could be called that, didn’t waver. His stout, muscled arms remained folded like a sentinel; the scarlet eyes never seemed to even blink. He looked Phil up and down, his enlarged jaw set, the swollen front of his head shining in mushy colors from the dance strobes.
Then he nodded.
“Thanks, Druck,” Eagle said.
“Yeah, man,” Phil added. “Have a good one.”
The music grated on. The strobe lights flashed behind them.
Then Eagle led Phil into the back room.
— | — | —
Sixteen
Kinks. Sickos. Kinks. Sickos…
The words siphoned round Phil’s head like a ring of scavenger birds. What he and Eagle walked into was not so much a different room but a different realm. A circumference of grainy darkness seemed draped around the single, elevated stage. Faces could not be discerned—just half-formed suggestions of faces signaled by the orange tips of lit cigarettes. Weird electronic music resounded in place of the typical fractious heavy metal, and there was none of the rowdy bar-talk, boisterous laughter, and perverted jokes.
Just human silence, and the steady electronic drone.
As a limping waitress took them around to a table, Phil nearly tripped. “Christ, this is like wearing a blindfold—I can’t see a thing!”
“Shhhh!” Eagle replied. “Quiet in here. Rules of the house. They don’t want no loud talk, clapping, shit like that.”
They were seated several rows back; the waitress or hostess or whatever she was seemed to evaporate. Eagle ordered two beers from another waitress who trolled through the unlit aisles; the darkness revealed only enough of her face to hint at deformities: overlarge eyes; flattened, uneven cheekbones; a bifurcated nose. She made a wan grunt in reply, and slid away. Then Eagle leaned over and whispered, “You’re the one who wanted in. Beers are ten bucks a pop back here.”
Ouch! Phil thought. Some scam. But was that really all that was going on here? The dusty darkness unnerved him; he wished he could see the faces of the other patrons, to compare them with the pictures he snapped while staking out the parking lot over the past few weeks. But what unnerved him more was the crowd’s utter silence. Anticipation thickened in the air; Phil could feel it, he could nearly breathe it…
The stage existed as a single colonnade of dark, roving light.
Then the light went out.
Jesus, Phil thought. They were now sitting in pitch dark; all that his eyes could make out were myriad cigarette ends rising and lowering. The music—or noise really—plunged into a barely audible suboctave note which Phil could feel rattling in his throat. Very slowly, it rose and grew louder.
And even more slowly, the stagelight—now a deep blood-red—revived itself, increasing in a lapse of time that seemed minutes long.
But now the lone stage had a host…
A woman, draped in diaphanous veils, stood immobile as a chess piece in the axis of scarlet light. The music began to throb in a diastole, like blood through a heart; the sound was somehow gelatinous.
And the woman on stage began to move.
It wasn’t dancing; it was more like some macabre kind of performance art. Dexterously, she drifted along in the midst of the arcane music and light, invisibly shedding the segments of her veil. In the meantime, and in imperceptible increments, the light adopted new colors—algae greens, yolk yellows, livid purples—so languorously the entire spectacle took on the texture of a dark dream.
Eventually, the girl was naked save for a pinkish, translucent g-string.
The sludge-like light played with Phil’s vision, while abyssal noise-works distracted him further. It was a trick. At first he could note nothing abnormal about the girl, but as he trained his gaze, details began to surface as uncannily as magic. Features seemed to appear rather than be noticed. The girl’s left eye was tiny as a marble, the right large as a scarlet billiard ball. Otherwise her face was flawless.
But the rest of her, Phil could soon tell, was not.
Aw, God…
Her bare splayed feet divided into but a pair of squab toes. Her hands were the same: two-fingered. As she swayed her head to the sonic dirge, shimmering black hair fell momentarily away to reveal that she had no ears at all, not even holes or indentations where the ears should be. Her navel, too, was fully missing—no suggestion of any such thing on her midriff. Pert breasts danced in the light, each topped by a perfect, dark nipple, yet more nipples —a half-dozen on each side—tracked down her sleek torso and abdomen like teats on the underbelly of a wolf.
Phil never tasted his ten-dollar beer. The grotesqueries onstage chained his gaze; repelled as he was, he couldn’t look away for the life of him. More dancers came and went, each harboring accelerated genetic deformities, which, if anything, exceeded even Eagle’s previous descriptions. One girl had three arms (two of them normal, but a third tiny arm sprouting from her armpit like a dead branch), another none, and a third possessed arms that appeared totally boneless—slack tubes of flesh swaying this way and that, with shriveled fingers at their ends. Another dancer displayed multiple breasts, four per side, stacked like pancakes, not to mention a head that seemed clovened.
Each girl finished her set with an obligatory—and masturbatory—floor show. The three-armed woman openly caressed her pubis with two hands, while the third hand—atrophied at the end of the shortened arm—plucked at her nipples.
Phil thought he might vomit any minute.
The evening’s progress seemed to drip. The dark grew more murky as cigarette smoke thickened, and eventually the room became sweltering. Phil felt narcotized, shocked to numbness, as though in the aftermath of being bludgeoned in the head. On a few occasions, his eyes had acclimated sufficiently to see that every seat in the
