The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (27 page)

Everyone was waiting inside at a collection of candlelit tables near the recessed end of the great varnished bar. People, already flushed with their martinis and bourbons and cocktails, rose to shake his hand and clap his back or hug him outright and they reeked of booze and perfume and hairspray and cigarettes and talked too loudly as they jostled for position around him. The Johnsons and Steiners attended as a unit, which made sense since so many of their kids were intermarried, it was exceedingly difficult to determine where the branches and the roots of the respective family trees ended or began; Barb and Michael Cotter; Mel Redfield, the former California poet laureate; old man Bloom, the former city councilman, and his nephew Regis, a tobacco lobbyist who kept rubbing his eyes and professing irritation at all the secondhand smoke; Skip Arden, doing his best John Huston as The Man from the South, in a vanilla suit hand-sewn by a Hong Kong tailor of legendary distinction; Jacob Wilson, recent heir to the Wilson fortune, who matched Skip in girth and verbosity, if not in taste or wit, and Jacob's bodyguard, Frank, a swarthy man in a bomber jacket who sat at the bar with Delaney and pretended inattentiveness to anything but the lone Rolling Rock beer he would order for the duration of the evening; Randy Freeman, wild-eyed behind rimless glasses and dressed way down in a wrinkled polo shirt, khaki pants and sandals and his lovely, staid wife, Janice; the Jenson twins down from Bellevue, Ted and Russell who worked for Microsoft's public relations department—they were smooth as honey and slippery as eels; Jerry Premus, Wallace's hired gun in matters legal, who was twice as smooth and twice as slippery as the Jenson brothers combined; a couple of youngish unidentified women with big hair, skimpy gowns and glittering with the kind of semi-valuable jewelry Malloy's on State Avenue might rent by the evening; Wallace forgot their names on contact and figured they must be with a couple of the unattached men; and dear old Dad himself lurched from the confusion to kiss his cheek and mutter a gruff, how do ye do? Wallace looked over Dalton Smith's shoulder, counting faces and there were another half-dozen that he did not recognize and who knew if they were hangers-on or if his faculties were still utterly short-circuited. He decided to play it safe and put on his biggest movie-star grin for all concerned and bluff his way to the finish line.

Skip took charge of the event, dinging his glass of champagne to summon collective attention. He proposed a toast to Wallace's regenerative capabilities, his abundance of stalwart comrades and his continued speedy recovery, upon which all assembled cried, "Hear, hear!" and drank. No one mentioned Helen. She sat amongst them, nonetheless. Wallace, ensconced at the head of the main table like a king, with his most loyal advisers, Skip and Randy at either hand, saw her shadow in the faces that smiled too merrily and then concentrated with abject diligence on their salmon and baked potatoes in sour cream, or in the pitying expressions blocked by swiftly raised glasses of wine or the backs of hands as heads swiveled to engage neighbors in hushed conversation. Not that such clandestine tactics were necessary: Wallace's exhaustion, his entrenched apathy, precluded any intemperate outburst and Skip's thunderous elocution mercifully drowned out the details anyway.

Wallace was fairly saturated and so nursed his drink and picked at his birthday prime rib and tried to appear at least a ghost of his former gregarious self. Matters were proceeding apace until the fifth or six round of drinks arrived and Manny Steiner started in on Viet Nam and the encroachment of French and American factories upon traditional indigenous agrarian cultures. Wallace suddenly feared he might do something rash. He set aside his glimmering knife, grinned and told Manny to hold that thought. He lurched to his feet, miraculously without upsetting a flotilla of tableware and half-full glasses, and made for the restrooms farther back where it was sure to be dim and quiet. Delaney, alert as any guard dog, cocked his head and then rose to follow, and subsided at a look from Wallace.

Wallace hesitated at the men's room, limped past it and pushed through the big metal door that let into the alley. The exit landing faced a narrow, dirty street and the sooty, featureless rear wall of Gossen's Fine Furniture. A sodium lamp illuminated a dumpster and a mound of black garbage bags piled at the bottom of the metal stairs. He sagged against the railing, fumbled out his cigarettes, got one going and smoked it almost convulsively. Restaurant noises pulsed dimly through the wall. Water dripped from the gutters and occasionally car horns echoed from blocks farther off, tires screeched and a woman laughed, high and maniacal—the mating cry of the hopelessly sloshed female.

He finished his cigarette and began another and was almost human again when someone called to him.

"Hey." The voice floated from the thicker shadows of the alley. It was a husky voice, its sex muted by the acoustics of the asphalt and concrete. "Hey, mister."

Wallace dragged on his cigarette and peered into the darkness. The muscles in his neck and shoulders bunched. His hand shook. He opened his mouth to answer that odd, muffled voice and could not speak. His throat was too tight. What did it remind him of? Something bad, something tickling the periphery of his consciousness, a warning. A certain quality of the voice, its inflection and cadence, harkened recollections of hunting for tigers in the high grass in India, of chopping like Pizarro through the Peruvian jungles on the trail of jaguars—of
being
hunted.

"Mister." The voice was close now. "I can see you. Please.
Prease
." The last word emerged in a patently affected accent, a mockery of the Asian dialect. A low, wheezy chuckle accompanied this. "
Prease, mistuh. You put a hotel in my rice paddy, mistuh
."

Wallace dropped his cigarette. He turned and groped for the door handle and it was slick with condensation. He pushed hard and the handle refused to budge. Locked. "Ah, sonofabitch!" He slumped against the door, face to the alley, and clutched his cane, wished like hell he had not been too lazy and vain to strap on one of his revolvers, which he never carried after the accident because the weight dragged on his shoulder. His heart lay thick and heavy. He gulped to catch his breath.

The sodium lamp dimmed. "
Mistuh Smith. Where you goin' Mistuh Smith?"
Someone stood across the way, partially hidden by the angle of the building.

Jesus Christ, what is he wearing?
Wallace could not quite resolve the details because everything was mired in varying shades of black, but the figure loomed very tall and very broad and was most definitely crowned with bizarre headgear reminiscent of a miter or a witch's hat. Wallace's drunkenness and terror peeled back in an instant of horrible clarity. Here was the figure which had appeared in his fever dreams—the ghastly, robed specter haunting the grounds of his estate. The lamp flickered and snuffed and Wallace was trapped in a cold black box. He reached back and began to slap the door feebly with his left hand.

"Wally. It is
soo
nice to meet you in the flesh." The voice emanated from a spot near Wallace's foot and it was easy to imagine the flabby, deranged face of a country bumpkin grinning up between the stairs. "Are you afraid? Are you afraid, sweetheart? Don't be afraid . . .
boss man
. They're about to cut the cake."

Wallace slapped the door, slapped the door. It was as futile as tapping the hull of a battleship. A rancid odor wafted to him—the stench of fleshy rot and blood blackening in the belly of a sluice. "W-what do you want?"

"I want to show you something beautiful."

"I'm—I'm not interested. No cash."

"Father saw you that day. What Father sees, He covets. He covets you, Wally-dear."

Wallace's stomach dropped into his shoes. "Who are you?"

The other laughed, a low, moist chuckle of unwholesome satisfaction. "Me? A sorcerer. The shade of Tommy Tune. The Devil's left hand. One of the inheritors of the Earth." Something rattled on the steps. Fingernails, perhaps. "I am a digger of holes, an opener of doors. I am here to usher in the dark." The odor grew more pungent. Glutted intestines left to swell in greenhouse heat; a city stockyard in July. Flies droned and complained. Flies were suddenly everywhere. "He lives in the cracks, Wally. The ones that run through everything. In the cracks between yesterday and tomorrow. Crawl into the dark, and there He is, waiting . . . ."

"Look, I—just leave me alone, okay. Okay?" Wallace brushed flies from his hair, his lips and nose. "Don't push me, fella."

"Wifey met Him and you shall too. Everyone shall meet Him in good, sweet time. You'll scream a hymn to the black joy He brings."

Wallace lunged and thrust at the voice with his cane and struck a yielding surface. The cane was wrenched from his fingers with such violence his hand tore and bled. He stumbled and his traitorous hip gave way. He went to his knees, bruised them on the grating. Pain telescoped from his hip and stabbed his eyes—not quite the sense of broken bone, but it hurt, Christ did it ever. Fingers clamped onto his wrist and yanked him flat. The hand was huge and impossibly powerful and Wallace was stuck fast, his arm stretched over the edge of the landing and to the limits of his shoulder socket, his cheek pressed against metal. The dying remnants of his cigarette smoldered several inches from his eye. Sloppy, avaricious lips opened against his palm. The tongue was clammy and large as a preposterously gravid slug and it lapped between Wallace's fingers and sucked them into a cavernous mouth.

Wallace thrashed and lowed like a cow that has been hamstrung. Teeth nicked him, might have snipped his fingers at the knuckle, he could tell from the size and sharpness of them. A great, Neolithic cannibal was making love to his hand. Then his hand slipped deeper, as the beast grunted and gulped and the mouth closed softly over his forearm, his elbow, and this couldn't be possible, no way the esophageal sheath of a monstrous throat constricted around his biceps with such force his bones creaked together, no way that he was being swallowed alive, that he was going to disappear into the belly of a giant—

The world skewed out of focus.

The door jarred open and light and music surged from the restaurant interior. "Boss, they want to cut the cake . . .Boss! What the hell?" Delaney knelt beside him and rolled him over.

Wallace clutched his slick fingers against the breast of his suit and laughed hysterically. "I dropped my cane," he said.

"What are you doing out here?" Delaney gripped Wallace's forearms and lifted him to his feet. "You okay? Oh, jeez—you're bleeding! You break anything?"

"Needed some air . . .I'm fine." Wallace smiled weakly and sneaked a glance at the alley as he hurriedly wiped his face with his left sleeve. The lamp was still dead and the wedge of light from the open door did not travel far. He considered spilling his guts. Delaney would call the cops and the cops would find what? Nothing and then they would ask to see his prescription and probably ask if he should be mixing Demerol with ten different kinds of booze. Oh, and by the way, what really happened in that barn. Go on: you can tell us. "I'm okay. Slipped is all."

Delaney leaned over the railing and peered down. "I'll go find your cane—"

"No! I, uh, busted it. Cheap wood."

"Cheap wood! Know what I shelled out for that?"

"No, really. I'm freezing. We'll get a new one tomorrow."

Delaney did not appear convinced. "It broke?"

"Yeah. C'mon, Dee. Let's go and get this party over with, huh?"

"That's the spirit, Mr. S," Delaney steadied him and said no more, but Wallace noticed he did not remove his hand from his pocket until they were safely inside and among friends.

6.

The remainder of the evening dragged to pieces like old fearful Hector come undone behind Achilles' cart and eventually Wallace was home and unpacked from the car. He collapsed into bed and was asleep before Delaney clicked off the lights.

Wallace dreamt of making love to Helen again.

They occupied a rocky shelf above Sun Devil Stadium, screwing like animals on a scratchy Navajo blanket. It was dusk, the stadium was deserted. Helen muttered into the blanket. Wallace pulled her ponytail to raise her head, because he thought he heard a familiar syllable or phrase. Something guttural, something darksome. His passion cooled to a ball of pig iron in his belly. The night air grew bitter, the stars sharp.

Helen said in a metallic voice,
There is a hole no man can fill
.

Wallace flew awake and sat pop-eyed and gasping. Clock said 3:39 a.m. He got out of bed, switched on the lamp and slumped in its bell of dull light, right hand tucked against his chest. His hand was thickly bandaged and it itched. The contours of the bedroom seemed slightly warped, window frames and doorways were too skinny and pointy. The floor was cold. The lamp bulb imploded, with a sizzle that nearly stopped his heart and darkness rushed in like black water filling a muddy boot print.

He did not feel welcome.

Delaney stood in the kitchen eating a sandwich over the sink. He was stripped to the waist. "You want me to fix you one?" He asked when Wallace padded in. He lived in the old gardener's cottage, used a second key to come and go as he pleased. Wallace had contemplated asking him to move into the downstairs guestroom and decided it was too much of an imposition. Delaney had women over from the clubs; he enjoyed loud music. Best to leave him at the end of a long leash.

Wallace waved him off, awkwardly poured a glass of milk with his left hand, sloshed in some rum from an emergency bottle in a counter drawer. He held his glass with trembling fingers, eyeballing the slimy bubbles before they slid into his mouth; poured another. He leaned against the stainless steel refrigerator. The kitchen was designed for professional use—Beth had retained a chef on the payroll for awhile. That was when the Smith House was the epicenter of cocktail socials and formal banquets. The mayor and his entourage had attended on several occasions. The middleweight champion of the world. A porn star and his best girl. With people like that dropping in, you had better have a chef. Anymore, Delaney did the cooking. Delaney, king of cold cuts.