John Shirley - Wetbones

They were sunken into his head. Grown right into it. They stretched from Ephram up into, and through, the ceiling. And through this world into another. They were not quite physical things – you could see that, looking at them. But they were there.

"You pretentious old bastard," Denver said. "You thought you were better than the rest of us – because of your overblown talent? That you were in touch with some glorious God of the dark dimensions? You perfect ass! It was just the biggest Akishra; the Magnus itself. The greatest of them, playing games with you, letting you play on the line, reeling you out then, reeling you in now. It brought you here, for this. Manipulated you into coming to L.A. Oh, yeah. The thing you called down for Wetbones. And – you want to bring that here? Now? You're out of your pompous little skull."

"Yes," Ephram croaked. His face gone white. "Yes. Having come this far: yes. To cure us all." And he spoke three more words.

The ceiling seemed to vanish. It turned transparent and then faded completely. Smoke replaced it, a living smoke made up of ten thousand restless, microscopic eyes. Constance thought she glimpsed people there, too, whirling, caught like the birds in a tornado. The rectangle that had been the ceiling was now an infinite reach of crowded and living sky. And then the iridescent bulk of the creature who'd masqueraded as the "Great Spirit", the Akishra Magnus, descended slowly toward them. What Constance could see of it made her think of a house-sized plasticine squid; its upper parts tapering into the boiling smokes of staring, black-light space; reeling in on some tendrils, seeking with others, its vast sticky, glimmer-edged, polyp-bearded mouth opening…

A great wind raged through the room, roaring, smelling like an overheated electric train; and static electricity invested the air, making Constance's hair crackle out, as the "Spirit", the etheric animal that had kept Ephram for its toy, lowered itself over Mrs. Stutgart, taking her into its translucent, feeler-furred envelope. They could see her inside it, through the foggy membrane. And for an instant, within it, she was freed – the husk of Akishra was drawn off her head, and the old woman beneath wept with gratitude. Then the woman's own face was peeled off her skull, sucked cleanly off her, upward, and her eyes remained in her skull for a moment staring in naked realization. Until the skull exploded, and Elma Stutgart disintegrated into a pulp of flesh and bone…

Denver was all this time moving away from her, pushing the Handy Man ahead of him…

The bed, the cobbled body parts of the furniture, were leaping in the electric galvanization pervading the air, tearing free of one another, twitching with the damaged reflexes of some half-rotted nervous system. A spasmodic tarantel of dis-juncted body parts.

Constance stood near the door, unable to move, paralyzed with the immense psychological gravitation of what she was seeing.

She saw Ephram rigid, shaking, his eyes rolling back in his head. The Magnus reeled him toward it. He staggered its way. Shouting over the roaring wind something Constance recognized from one of the evenings he'd made her read to him from Nietzsche: " The beauty of the superman… "He paused to gasp for air, then went on, "… came to me as a shadow…" He paused to clutch at the twitching, preserved leg that had been part of the disassembling bedframe. Then seemed to make a decision and deliberately let go, shouting, finishing the quote: "… what are the gods to me now!"

Ephram was sucked slowly toward the Magnus, as blood ran down from new wounds opening on his skull and neck, a hundred little rifts giving up brain and blood to accompany soul through the feeding tendrils of the Akishra Magnus…

As the great one tilted toward him, its mouth opening.

Constance thought she caught a glimpse of a single opalescent eye in the writhing tendrils of its lower parts; maybe even a fragment of a desperate face; a visage that might once have been human, millennia ago, the remains of something that now suffered enormously in the aching, interstellar void of hugely imbecilic hungers.

Ephram glimpsed this face too, and seemed to sense its implications. Now he tried to hold back, shrieking. She could see his face contorting as he attempted to use his talent to disentangle himself from it. But it drew him nearer, with little effort. Constance almost felt pity for Ephram…

And she felt herself drawn after him. She felt a jolt of Reward as she staggered toward the Magnus, transmitted through Ephram but originating in this Lord of Akishra itself. She was connected to Ephram – she had to go with him. It was that simple. It was not to be questioned…

No. Go your way, my dear. More than me, it wants you. Go. Ephram's voice, from nowhere. Let us take some comfort in frustrating it, a little.

And then she felt Ephram withdraw from her. His psychic fingers slipping out of their sockets in her brain. She felt cold and strange and sick and relieved.

Ephram tried once more to hold himself back. Shouting: "Ich bin der Ubermensch!" (Hearing that, the Handy Man laughed).

Then Ephram was drawn up inside the Spirit -

Constance found her will to move again; she turned and jerked the black girl to her feet. Denver and the Handy Man had gone ahead of her, fled from the room.

Constance pulled the sagging girl along with her, out into the hall.

The wind roared through the door, behind them, banging it open and closed, open and closed, and open again. Denver and his wife's servant were waiting for her, the Handy Man weeping now, calling softly, "Elma… Elma…"

Constance felt it when Ephram exploded. She felt it as a release of hatred: her own. And suffering: his. Her own buried hatred; his buried suffering. She screamed like a vivisected cat. She bared her teeth at Denver – preparing to lunge at him. Sink her teeth into him.

Then a mountainous pressure vanished completely. It was just gone.

There were two sickening squelching sounds. Out of sight, in the room behind them: Two bodies pulverized to lumps of mush, dropping from midair to splash over the remains of the bed and the dead boy. Constance looked through the open door. The room was empty, except for the absurd tumble of body parts and the fresher, steaming, unrecognizably pulped heaps of what had been two human bodies. The ceiling was in place again, with the same cobwebs.

I ought to be happy Ephram's dead, Constance thought. She smiled wearily. And I sure as Hell am.

The Spirit – he Magnus, the Akishra, the godsized predator of Astral places – was gone, for now. It had withdrawn.

Constance's rage floundered and lay sodden in her. She swayed, feeling as if the floor were rocking under her, though in fact the house had settled to a new quietude.

Slowly, she turned toward the front door. It was very easy to figure out, she told herself. You just go away. Just walk away…

"No," the More Man told her. He took a gun from his coat pocket. The tendrils, the thing on his head, were no longer visible. But she knew it was there, too, cocked as much as the gun.

"No," the More Man said. "You will stay with us. And play."

The Hills near Malibu

"He's out there, talkin' to nothin' again," Lonny said.

"He do that a lot? Prentice asked, wearily. He was pressing an old towel soaked in cold water against his battered head. "I did some of that myself, lately."

He and Lonny were sitting in the best-lit corner of the old shack. Prentice propped up on the bed, Lonny sitting on the rocking chair next to it. The dog paced restively near the closed wooden door, growling softly to itself.

"It's almost dawn, too," Lonny went on. "Fuckin Drax's been out there since midnight. Smokin' weed and chewing those cactus buttons and talking to those dolls on their posts out there. It's trippin' me out. Like he might geek out and come in here and smoke us with that shotgun. You sure you can't sleep? You oughta."