The Children of Hamelin (40 page)

“Well now, cunt, I don’t see what you’re getting so excited about,” Ali said.

“Hey, now I remember,” crooned Marvin. “Month ago, when I was in the Haight, there was a story going round about some Federal narc was going around making big scores off all the dealers in sight and then busting them quietly, one by one. Was getting kind of ominous. Then, the story goes, some cat put the narc in a position where he had to taste some of the merchandise and it turned out to be cyanide...”

Groove came back from giggle-land just long enough to say: “If this is the same cat, then we’re talking to a hero!”

“Hero!” screamed Tanya. “Some fucking hero! For openers, he didn’t know the narc was a narc, he just slipped him the Depthcharge on general principals. It’s his thing, he grooves behind it. He’s left a string of bodies everywhere he’s gone—cops, dealers, connections, customers, Feds, carhops, mafia hoods—you name it, he’s killed it.”

“Well now,” said Ali sitting on one side of Tex and suddenly making it seem very significant that Marvin was on the other. “This changes things, doesn’t it? This creature has the Feds, the Mafia, and for all we know the CIA and the NKVD after him—sounds like he’s set the all-time record for Heat. I figure we just take his acid and pay him nothing. If he bitches, I figure we might just as well make a lot of people happy and kill—”

Suddenly, Tex California exploded off the couch, whirling around like a typhoon, gun coming up out of his pocket—

A muffled Cooosh! sound like someone jabbing a chisel through cheap sheet-metal and the firecracker smell of gun powder—

Tex California’s face was suddenly ten years younger, a Malibu beach bum looking at death from the wrong side folding and falling like a punctured balloon clutched feebly at his chest where the blood made a weirdly-lovely rising-sun pattern on the shiny white leather of his coat; he pitched over on his face and I knew he had died could feel the cosmic stench of his death in the room
he was really dead
I was looking at a
dead body
would never get up and walk again he was dead dead really
dead...

And Groove was giggling and stroking the silencer on some kind of automatic.

“You stupid cunt!” Ali snarled at Robin. “Bringing that thing here! We oughta waste you too...”

“Yeah,” Marvin said, far more reflectively, “it’d be safer to kill these two creeps too...”

Robin’s nails dug into my thighs in a spasm of total panic. All of them were staring at us from a million eyes with pistols for pupils all staring at us they were gonna kill us oh Sweet Jesus they’re gonna kill us I don’t wanna die don’t wanna die die die...

“Yeah, and this other creep is probably Allen’s partner,” Tanya said. “Let’s shoot the motherfucker.”

“Yeah man,” said Ali, “just who the fuck are you coming here and making like the great gray ghost?”

Die die die die don’t wanna die please don’t kill me don’t don’t kill me kill me please please PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE—

I was off somewhere—the dark side of gibbering hysteria—then realized I was hysterical and my life was on the line and something cold and swamplike cold stone hard cold took control of my vocal cords and The Man in Black ate my mind and filled me with himself.

“I’m afraid that’s something it wouldn’t be healthy for you to know,” said The Man in Black. “Let’s just say I represent a certain organization for whom you have just done a small service. The girl... knows no more than you do... a kind of Judas-goat, if you see what I mean.”

“You’re gonna have to come up with a better story than that,” Groove said, still holding his gun.

The Man in Black ignored him and his gun and continued as if he hadn’t heard the interruption. “Luckily for you,” he said, “you’ve managed to convince me in the only possible manner that you weren’t involved with the late lamented. The contract I accepted was for Allen and anyone I considered his partners, which of course is why I took my time fulfilling it—it called for a payment of $15,000 for Allen and $2,000 apiece for any... extra work. You’re very lucky I’m not the greedy type, or rather that I hate cleaning up after myself. But I’ve decided that since you’ve fulfilled my contract for me, everything concerned becomes your property: the red Cadillac convertible outside, the acid, any money on the deceased’s person—and of course, the body.”

“The body?”
Ali screamed shrilly.

“Of course, the body,” said the Man in Black. “You want the car and the money and the acid, you get rid of the body. If I have to get involved with the details, I keep the acid. Don’t be stupid enough to think that my employers give anyone something for nothing. That was one of Mr. Larry Allen’s more costly mistakes.”

“Hey... hey wait a minute!” Tanya said, suddenly starting to shake. “Allen was supposed to have slipped one of his depthcharges to the son of a capa mafiosa... You’re not...? Look, none of us ever had anything to do with the creep! You’re not...?”

“Would I tell you if I was?” said The Man in Black. “Let’s just say that Allen had very poor taste in enemies and leave it at that. Naturally, you people aren’t stupid enough to make the same mistake. None of this ever happened, did it? My employers dislike... publicity. They tend to over-react to minor annoyances. Need I be cruder?”

“Well now, take it easy man,” said Ali. “We’ll get rid of the body. After all, an ounce of acid’s worth a little effort, isn’t it?”

There seemed to be a general agreement. Groove put away his gun.

The Man in Black got up, had to pull his Lady with him—she was totally out of it. “And of course you people have never in your lives seen me?” he said.

“Never in our lives,” said Marvin.

“And you don’t know this girl either.”

“What girl, man?”

The Man in Black smiled a basilisk smile and said: “You will do well to remember that,” And let a thoroughly uptight Ali rush him and his Lady outside the door.

Outside on the empty street, the universe flew out of me in a rush of psychic vomit and I was a kid screaming in terror dragging a sleepwalking Robin by the hand and running dead-out to Seventh Avenue and the next thing I remember we’re in a cab back to my apartment and the cab driver is shaking and sweating and Robin is smiling and smiling and crooning to me and stroking my hair...

“Oh, wow... oh wow... baby you were beautiful you’re the heaviest cat there is I love you I love you...” The sea whispering in my ear. I started to come out of it—we were
alive,
out of there, in a cab home, they didn’t know who I was I had scared them off looking and left them a big deathday present... they had no reason to come looking...

“Oh baby, and have I got a tasty surprise for you,” Robin said, seeing my mind back in my eyes. “Just rest easy baby, everything’s gonna be groovy... groovy... groovy... groovy...”

I bolted the police lock behind us and only now, in my own dark apartment, did I start to feel safe, really safe from rising sun blood on white leather eyes of a million pistols—

In the pitch blackness of the kitchen, I felt Robin’s arms around me, tasted her long lingering kiss from three cold universes away.

“Oh man,” she sighed, “you were
beautiful.
I still don’t believe it, the way you rapped down those cats, heaviest dealers I ever saw... And the best is yet to come, baby. Go on into the living room, and turn on the light and I’ll have a big beautiful surprise for you.”

I went into the living room, turned on the orange ceiling light, and grew on the couch like a vegetable. How groovy it was to be a vegetable growing in the hidden dark earth with not a care in the world... timeless mindless dark and drifting...

Into my orange root-cellar stumbled a smiling girl with huge dark eyes and long black hair. The creature stood over me with her hands behind her back.

“Man,” she said, “you are too much! Those freaks were the biggest dealers in town and they had just killed a man and you got away with pulling rank on them and you were stoned on acid! Too much! Man, we’re gonna make millions!”

“What are you gibbering about, girl?” Why didn’t she leave me alone with my dark roots and soft silence?

“You got the head to be the number one dealer in New York, maybe the country, and I got the connections to get us started. All we need is a big enough stake, and baby, thanks to that creep from California, we got it! Dig: while you were getting your coat, he stashed it under the sink.”

And grinning like a lemur, she held up the second bottle of acid.

“ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID—”
I screamed. “After... after... after
all that
... another bottle of acid!” A monstrous insane joke—I was speaking its idiot punchline. But there
was
another bottle of acid! No joke—another bottle of deadmen mafia hoods narcs electric chair pistols Ali Blah-Blah and his Forty Fiends condition terminal
ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID...

“Hey man, what’s—?”

I leaped to my feet screaming: “Down the toilet bowl! Hush that fucking stuff down the toilet bowl!”

Robin backed away from me, clutching the bottle to her chest. “Are you crazy? Thousands of dollars worth of acid!”

“Get that stuff the fuck out of here or get yourself the fuck out of here! Down the toilet—now!”

“Come on, man, take it easy, you’re stoned...”

“Me or the acid! You can’t have both! Hush it down the toilet or flush yourself down the toilet! Now! Now! NOW!”

Backing towards the kitchen, Robin’s eyes got cold and hard like a million years of California Space Monster blood on shiny white formica table. “I don’t give up this acid for you or anyone else,” she said.

“Then get yourself the fuck out of here!”

Behind white leather eyeballs something warm and red and human seemed to pulse for a moment. “Come on Tom, you’re freaking, is all... I dig you... don’t do this to me... you’re stoned... you’re just stoned—”

Stoned!
I was
really
stoned, knew it because the universe had just hit me over the head with a gigantic club a huge voice screaming in my head:
“THERE’LL ALWAYS BE ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID!”

Robin was another bottle of acid! As long as there were Robins there’d be another bottle of acid! Acid boiled out of the blood of the blackest bowels of dead crawling things of night in the cesspool of the earth fermented bodies of Tex California in a million neon-blue pads “come on kid, the first one is free” Robin gobbled up by became the Vampire God of Acid!

ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID!

“Get out! Get out!” I screamed. “Don’t ever come back! Not another bottle of acid! Out! Out! Get the fuck out of here! You come here again and I’ll kill you!”

Robin slithered into the kitchen like the black snake that ate the world holding up the acid daring me to take it baby you can be the greatest dealer in the world... Her lips trembling, her eyes heavy with held-back tears—but it was all a fucking fraud! The Great Bitch-Goddess Acid had no tears for man not sucked up in a spike from
ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID!

“Look man... look man, you’re freaking out, but... but... I’m not taking this shit from anyone, you’re crazy—”

I opened the door. “Out! Out, cunt!”

“Eat shit, you gutless faggot!” she screamed like a harpy—and slammed the door in my face. Another bottle of acid! Another bottle of acid, oh Christ, another bottle of acid!

I bolted the door behind her, then the police lock.
Another bottle of acid!
I still wasn’t safe! I wedged a kitchen chair under the doorknob. Still not safe! It was colorless, odorless, tasteless, the Devil’s own nerve gas! Could creep in through the windows in the water supply nobody was safe from it I wasn’t safe from it
ANOTHER BOTTLE OF ACID—

—
Another bottle of acid another bottle of acid...
Oh Jesus, wouldn’t it ever stop? Why not just a harmless little blow your mind baby without Anne smack Robin acid dead bodies another bottle another bag another bag another fix one more time baby one for the road you could be number one dealer in a daisy-chain line from the tip of the needle to the navel of the universe down into blackness nothingness inside condition terminal... Why did they have to package crystal lovely nothingness in a spike in a cube in a joint in
another bottle of acid
and sell it through a long line of rotten-toothed vampires would suck you in suck you dry and fill you with the coal-black slime of final darkness in
another fucking bottle of acid!

I’m freaking out! a tiny lost part of me said—

Another bottle of acid
from cesspools of rotting teenyboppers with mottled teeth in the grave of the California Lizard—

Gotta do something, gotta come out of it—

Eat shit,
you fucking gutless faggot eat shit eat smack eat me eat acid eat Anne eat Ali eat Terry Blackstone’s speed-soaked brain eat death—

Gotta talk to somebody can talk me out of this I can’t maintain—

Eat death
eat garbage eat condition terminal gutless fucking motherfucker faggot eat
another bottle of acid
—

Harvey! Harvey the Man! Harvey the Shrink! Harvey the Bringdown... Total Consciousness of the Total Void I was staring down into on the brink of a cliff a million miles high I was a million miles high and maybe Harvey had the Antidote Stomach Pump Acid-Eater machine.

I slithered into the living room on a thousand ropy tentacles and chewed my way through piles of moldy paper until I came to the Foundation’s letterhead with Harvey’s emergency home phone number on it...

I became a dialing-machine dialing a string of numbers on the bedroom phone till the dial seemed to be dialing me dialing the combination of a safe inside my head inside of which was the gaping monster of
another bottle of
—

“Uh... huh...” said a voice on the other end of the vampire-thing sucking at my ear.

“Tom Hollander...” I screamed. “You gotta do something it’s coming in the doors in the windows—”

“What? What? Tom? What’s the matter? Take it easy. This is Harvey... Wha—?”

“Another bottle of acid!
They’re trying to get me to take
another bottle of acid!
She had it right here,
another bottle of acid!”