Vurt 2 - Pollen (26 page)

Let them buzz and fly, away into the map of flowers.

Having supped at the root, eaten of the berries, sucked at the stalk… she was ready. Having felt the sap leaking from her lips, and the dew on her petals… she was ready. Having spread herself like a flower, secreting nectar from her womb, and having bees with it; having coated her tongue in pollen, made in the garden of her body… the young girl was ready. Her mother and her husband had deemed it so.

And now the lover calling himself Kracker is staring down at her wetness. Persephone waves her petals ever so temptingly, and like a bee that man comes buzzing. The cop is sweating and sneezing. Drops of moisture are landing on Persephone’s exposed face. She receives them gratefully, letting her petals taste the perspiring rain. She is feeding off him, making a meal of the man. He has a look of concern on his wet and sadly human face, but she can feel his excitement growing; Persephone is revelling in his discomfort. She forms her petals into words his small brain can understand.

“What’s worrying you, my darling?” Persephone asks. The cop’s thin, dry face is creased with doubt, but all he can do is shake his head, back and forth, back and forth, as though denying his own worth. How pathetic these creatures of flesh are, Persephone thinks. What a pity she has to keep this one happy. She has some need of his skills. “You can tell me. I’m your prize.” Persephone lets her petals fall into these shapes. “You know you can’t resist me. Tell your sweetheart everything. Maybe I’ll be nice to you then.”

She hates to speak like this. How it reduces her.

“They’re on to us, my precious,” Kracker replies.

“I know this already. Tell me something new.”

“Her name is Belinda,” Kracker continues. “She was asking about Coyote, the black-cab driver. Columbus told her that you killed him.”

“Can’t you handle it?”

“I’m trying to, Persephone.” The cop sneezes. “You promised me I would never sneeze.”

“You must not be weak. You’re not going to deny me, are you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Remember the pact you made with Columbus. You wouldn’t want to make him angry?” It is a simple question, and she lets her petals ask it firmly. She has to stop them from shaking. She doesn’t want the cop to know her fears. Because for the first time during her visit to this world, Persephone is worried. She has sensed the girl called Belinda in the map. She has tried to push her green fuse into the girl, searching for identity. Finding only a barrier to her growth. Persephone could not grow in that visitor. The girl was a dark nodule on the map of flowers, a tightly clenched bud that would not open. The girl was immune.

“I’m not making him angry,” Kracker is saying. “I’m just telling you my fears. Somebody has found us out. Persephone, I’m so scared. I fear that Belinda knows about us… about our…”

“I want you to take care of her, my darling.”

“Me? Take care of her? I… What do you mean?”

“Uproot her.”

“No more of that, please. I tried it once already. Failed. Then I employed a good officer to do it. Even that loyal dog made a mess.”

“Come to me, my darling. Let me comfort you. Soon I will show this sad town my power.”

“What do you mean?”

“Keep watching, my gardener. I will make the people explode with pleasure. Tomorrow I will bring my new home into existence. The people of this city will feel the shock of their little lives. The dream will take them over. This Belinda girl will soon be no more, believe me. I will find her with my flowers. And then you will do what you must, for she is beyond my touch. And also her mother, Sibyl Jones. You must kill them both. I will not allow another mistake, do you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Tell me what you hear, my sweet?”

“You will not allow another mistake.”

“What must you do?”

“I must kill Sibyl and Belinda.”

“You must finish their story.”

“I must finish their story.”

“And then we will be safe once more… to enjoy each other. Come closer now, taste my need for you.”

Petals opening and closing…

Kracker is clambering into the cabinet. He can’t stop himself. His fragrant lover is opening up to him. Her midriff pushes up through the soil. A flower is growing from her vagina. Its petals are pink and moist, opening and closing. Her stigma is splitting apart for him. Kracker lowers his thin body onto hers, letting his penis enter the tight orifice. Persephone’s petals are clutching at his cock, opening and closing, opening and closing… an earthy, natural rhythm that teases out the sap from the stem. Kracker is in heaven.

Heaven is sweaty, and blossoming.

Southern Cemetery. Saturday. Midnight. Coyote’s grave. Darkness breathing through the trees. The dog driver’s stone memorial completely covered with flowers. They are taking over the image, these flowers, moulding it with petals. The dirt is rich in nutrients from a decomposing body.

Belinda’s gift of an orchid placed there.

A new stalk breaks through the grave’s soil. It blooms in an instant into a brilliant flower. Petals of creamy white with the darkest brown spots.

Call it Dalmatian Flower.

May the road rise with you.

Sunday

Shivers of dark light floating over water, shining from a cellar’s pavement-level window, and then reflected from pillars of marble that are rooted in the pale water. Shadows shimmer around the floating shapes of a young woman whose naked, street-lined body takes on the glimmers of light and turns them into a movement of glittering feathers. As though from underground wings.

The underground swimming pool at Slavery House, the Gumbo’s Palace, cleaned up and renovated by the illegal residents. Early, early morning, Sunday, all the house still sleeping except for one lonely drifter.

Shadows shimmer, and Belinda floating there.

The birthday girl.

3.50 a.m. Sunday morning. I’m woken up from fitful slumber by the telephone. Dove’s voice on the other end…

“Come to the cop station, Sibyl.”

“You know I’m not allowed there. What’s happening?”

“Kracker’s vanished. Just get over here.”

I see to Jewel’s needs and then head on down to the Comet.

Kracker is parked outside Sibyl Jones’ house, drinking down some small measures of Boomer just to get his edge running. He needs all that he can get, having failed in his previous attempts to please Persephone.

How far have I got to go? he asks himself. All the way, Biscuit Boy, is the answer. He pulls his gun loose from the cop-holster.

The pollen drifting through the darkness, golden and global.

A light comes on in Sibyl’s house.

“Uh huh.”

The front door opens, and Sibyl Jones walks down the drive towards her car. Kracker watches all of this from the other side of the street. “Shit. Where’s she going now?” he murmurs. “This time of the morning?” He raises his gun and listens to the gentle whirr it makes as the auto-aim focuses on the woman, the good cop. Kracker’s finger starts to squeeze at the trigger, and then relaxes.

“Shit!”

He can’t do it. Not yet anyway. He can’t stop seeing her as a cop, and a woman he’s known for years.

It’s easier to kill strangers.

Kracker decides to take the other route first, the one that leads towards Belinda.

Tom Dove led me down into the cop morgue, where robo-Skinner was piled like a heap of dead trash.

“What happened to him?”

“Somebody took a blade to his circuits,” Dove told me.

“Kracker?”

“That’s a good guess.”

“Why?”

“Maybe something that he saw. You following me?”

“I’m trying to.”

“Skinner kept his head going way past bedtime. That was one good robocop.”

“It’s still in there?”

“Let’s take a look.”

So we opened up Skinner’s head and found the film and the recording there. The video image came up negative but the soundtrack produced the goods. The quality was bad and only muffled fragments could be heard amidst the static of Skinner’s dying head. Kracker’s voice was in there but it was like he was talking to himself. Kracker called the other person Persephone at one point.

“He met the flower girl in here?”

“Maybe she came visiting,” replied Dove. “Keep listening.”

It was obvious now that Skinner was reaching the end of his tape loops. Kracker’s voice was growing misty and distant as the robo-circuits spluttered into final sparks. The last thing we heard him say was this: “I must kill Sibyl and Belinda.” Kracker said it like an automaton following orders.

I didn’t know what to say.

“I think the girl has told him where Gumbo lives.”

“How can she know that?”

“I believe she’s moving through the flowers of Manchester.”

Skinner’s final information died to a crackling of wires.

“What can I do, Tom?”

“Find Belinda before Kracker does.”

We drove over to the Strangeways Feather Prison. There was a lone warden on the graveyard shift, a low-down-the-ladder robopensioner name of Bob Clutch. “What’s going on?” he asked with a mouth full of bacon and eggs. I told him the cop-code for the day and introduced Tom Dove as Tommy Veil, long-lost brother of one Benny Veil, currently serving the full pillow. The full pillow was the street name for a life sentence in the Vurt prison. “There ain’t no visiting hours.” Clutch spat this out around slivers of meat. I then explained about the request that had come from the Town Hall Authorities, regarding the urgent need to override the usual rights in the Veil case. Clutch stopped chewing the fat whilst his piggy eyes darted from me to Tom Dove. “I’ll have to check that,” he said, reaching for his cop-feather. I then did something I hadn’t done since childhood; I sent my Shadow out to the warden’s and made him believe me. I made him believe; I forced the overruling into his brain. This was totally against the Shadow Laws but even a good cop must sometimes step out of line. Clutch’s face took on a crumpled look for a second. “Yes, that’s fine,” he spluttered. “Let me show you the way.”

Down through banks of sealed cabinets we walked, Tom and Clutch and myself, moving through a cold air that raged against the outside heat, each cabinet containing a sleeping prisoner. The pillow cases were kept in the deepest part of the prison and Bob Clutch led us there along a wall of controls that the wardens used to regulate the prisoners’ life-support systems. These were the mechanisms that kept the inmates alive, even whilst they were feather-dreaming. Finally he found the cabinet marked Benjamin Veil, and pulled it open to reveal a sleeping near-corpse with a crease of pain etched across his features. A black feather protruded from his mouth. I pulled it loose from the prisoner’s lips and then turned on the warden. “What’s the game here?” Clutch’s face moved in waves of flesh before he managed to get control again.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“This is a black feather.”

“Never seen that feather before. Don’t know who put it there.”

It was a well-known fact that wardens sometimes changed the feathers in prisoners’ mouths, from the official blue and gentle flights into dark and deadly ones. They did this with child molesters, cop-murderers, anti-authoritarian figures and any other serious reprobates. They swapped the blue for a black, which meant that the inmates would be suffering eternal nightmares in their prison-sleep. Tom Dove put on a suitable look of familial concern, and I added to that my best show of senior cop-knowledge.

Clutch went scuttling off in search of a pleasant blue to replace the black, and whilst he was gone I asked Tom Dove if he was up to it, the feather-search. But he was already letting his eyes glaze, as though he was making that Vurt trip already. “Hang on, Tom,” I said to him. “Let’s make this as legal as possible.” So he came back down, and then waited until Clutch came running back with a sweet blue feather and many apologies for this mishap. Clutch handed the feather to “Tommy Veil” who sucked it into his mouth and then out again, so that the warden could lodge it in the prisoner’s mouth. Benny Veil’s face melted into a smile as the new feather took hold, and by then Tom Dove himself was already floating down and dreaming the same dream as the prisoner. I was by then a seasoned expert in sharing my Smoke with the dream, so we went down into that cell together, Tom and I, Vurt and Shadow, searching for clues…

… falling into bliss and numbers… numbers and bliss… the numbers overriding the bliss so that the whole world seemed like a mathematical formula… the bliss was the new feather recently lodged… full of a slow ecstasy it was, a long, drawn-out parade of tenderness… the num
bers were a mask over certain parts of the dream’s terrain… locks on feathery doors… Tom dragging me down into the numbers, trying for a breakthrough… the numbers ganging up on us like a street tribe, blocking our flight… a veil of numbers that we couldn’t travel through… Tom Dove was finding the going hard, but I shoved my Shadow into the formula, stroking smoke through the symbols… I used everything I had… all my resources… I felt weak and abused, until a small gap appeared between a number one and a number seven, and through that gap I darted my fingers of smoke… Benny Veil’s face came up lumbering and cursing… Who the fuck are you?…

It’s the cops…

Fuck, this is against the law…

So is murder, Benny
…

Get the fuck off my dream…

You enjoying this dream just now, Benny?

Sure is better than that last sentence. That was one black downer. Jesus! Felt like I was being prised apart and stitched back up again. That shit was gonna last until eternity. Sure is kind of you cops to sort that warden out for me. Hey, this blue feather is nice…

You can have the bad dream back, Benny… any time…

Lady cop, please…

Listen close, we’re here after the address of Gumbo YaYa…

He’d kill me if I gave that away…

What can he do to you now?…

It was at his word that I killed, you know, and then he put this condom rose of numbers all around me, so that I couldn’t name him…