George Martin - Jokertown Shuffle

He found out later, sometime the next morning, when the street artist woke up and elbowed him awake. She pushed him over on his back and started rubbing her crotch against his dick. He was hard almost instantly, and she reached down to insert him as casually as if she were handling a bar of soap. Her intent cat's eyes were fixed intently on his. His vision was better than hers, reached into more spectra.

She leaned over him when she came, hips pumping blindly over his groin. Her claws gripped his mattress, punctured his sheets. Her mouth was open, and strange croaking sounds came out. He could look past her teeth and see, glowing with IR heat, the stub of a tongue that ended in a mass of scar tissue.

Someone had cut her tongue out.

She fell asleep instantly, her head on his chest. Shad wanted to cry.

Take care of her? What a joke.

Hours later, he awoke to the scratching of chalk. He opened gummed eyes and saw the street artist back in her clothes, drawing something on the particleboard floor. A plastic plate near her hand held a half-eaten sandwich made from some Polish sausage he had in his icebox.

He looked at the clock and saw it was late afternoon. He dressed, had a sandwich, and watched her work.

She was drawing a cavern-irregular walls, stalactites, strange subterranean gleams. The sketch occupied the whole floor, and large parts weren't finished yet.

"The Rox," Shad said. He pointed at his clipping again. "Ellis Island. You understand?"

She looked up at him and wrinkled up her face, then went back to her sketch.

Shad gazed bleakly into a future in which he was dragged from one world to another by this child, used for sex in one venue after another. Love-slave of the multiverse. Wonderful.

It was night before Chalktalk was finished. Shad put on his darkest clothes, black Kenyan cords, navy shirt, the boots he'd come in, his quilted Manchukuoian jacket. If they were going spelunking, it was likely to get cold. He made two packages of food, wrapped them in tinfoil, stuffed one in his pocket and gave the other to Chalktalk. He thought about getting flashlights and decided it would be a worthwhile investment. He went to the store and bought two big electric lanterns.

He stepped up behind her, looked at the growing picture, put his hand on her shoulder. She gave him an irritated look and shrugged the hand off.

Looked like the romance had gone out of their relationship. The picture deepened, the third dimension dropping away, receding to a glittering cavern.

The girl took his hand, and reality fell away.

Darkness, darkness entire. Shad felt right at home.

He flicked on the lantern, and Robert Fallon Penn lunged out of the night, garrote in hand, smiling his twisted blood-flecked smile.

Neil was ten years old when he'd last seen Penn. Penn's partner, Stan Barker, was sodomizing Neil from behind while Penn played with his garrote, putting on the pressure till he started to black out, then sportively easing up, prolonging the agony 'a little longer.

He, his father, his mother, and his little sister had spent the weekend under torture, and Neil was the last one left alive. Stan Barker had just cut his father's throat, and Shad remembered how slippery the floor had been, how his hands and knees slid in the darkening wetness while Penn jerked on his throat with his wire and Barker clutched at his hips…

And now Bob Penn was back, leering at him, blood flaking off his lips because he'd bitten off Mrs. Carter's nipples. Lightning burned through Shad's nerves. He gave a scream and swung the lantern. Somehow Penn avoided injury. Chalktalk looked at him impatiently. She grabbed his sleeve and tried to pull him toward Penn.

"No!" Shad yelled. He pulled Chalktalk out of danger, flinging her to the ground, and launched himself at Penn. His fists and feet went clear through the man. Shad could hear Stan Barker's giggle and knew that Penn's partner was somewhere out there in the dark. Shad screamed in anger and terror, and tried to drain the heat from Penn's body. There was scarcely any there, no more than if Penn had been a ghost.

Chalktalk picked herself up and walked impatiently through Penn's body, then turned back to Shad and shrugged. Sanity wedged its way into Shad's panicked mind. He reached out, passed a sword hand through Penn's body. Chalktalk turned away and padded on, her bright lantern held high.

Shad passed his hand through Penn again. His heart drummed against his ribs. There was a deep ache in his throat where the police had given him the tracheotomy that saved his life.

Penn wasn't there. He was an illusion.

Shad watched closely, and he saw that the Penn illusion didn't seem very lifelike-it was huge and distorted, a sixteenyear-old maniac seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old victim.

Chalktalk's lantern was fading into the distance. Shad took a deep breath and followed, his spine tingling as he turned his back on the killer of his family.

Penn didn't follow.

Shad caught up to Chalktalk. His hands were trembling, and his voice shook. "Where the hell are we?" he asked. Chalktalk said nothing, natch. Shad looked around.

He was in Carlsbad Caverns, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Tall formations, lightless passages, the constant drip of water. Formations where illusions of mass murderers lurked. Shad wondered if they were under the high New Mexico desert, until he saw the graffiti, spray-painted on a bright vein of quartz: JUMP THE RICH.

Somehow, Shad knew, he was right where he wanted to be.

Then there was the sound of clattering footsteps, the clank of weaponry. The squawk of a walkie-talkie. It didn't sound much like an illusion.

The locals knew he was here. Shad turned to Chalktalk. "Go back a ways, okay? These are some bad people coming. Maybe you better make a sketch and get yourself out of here."

He looked up at him with shadowed dark eyes, then shrugged, squatted, reached for her chalk.

She walked up the wall, covered himself with darkness, and moved forward along the ceiling. Putting himself between Chalktalk and pursuit.

Shad turned off his lantern and navigated on IR. He entered a chamber twenty feet high, moved forward between limestone columns, and saw jokers, half a dozen, all wearing some kind of informal war-surplus battledress, most carrying M-16 assault rifles. Kafka led them, unmistakable in his brown chitin, holding a walkie-talkie and a four-battery flashlight. He wasn't carrying a weapon. Even in his haste he was careful not to touch any of the other jokers.

Shad remembered he had some kind of contamination phobia.

High-powered flashlights swept the confined area of the stair. Shad deepened the black cloak around him and waited. "No sight of him yet," Kafka reported.

"He's right there." A high-pitched, almost comical voice came out of the hissing walkie-talkie. "He's watching you. And he recognized you from somewhere."

Watching you. The thought rolled through Shad's mind. Someone knew he was here, someone who couldn't see him… Maybe the person who had called Penn into being.

Shad tried to make his mind blank.

"He's onto me," the high-pitched voice warned. "And he can hear you."

Kafka jumped wildly, his flashlight beam dancing. Then he scuttled under the staircase, put his back to the wall. "You and you! Over there!"

Two jokers charged with weapons ready, the sound of their boots echoing.

"He's right there," the high-pitched voice said. "He's right near you."

"That's right," said Shad. He kicked loose from his perch, dropped to Kafka's side, snatched the flashlight. He shone the flash upward into his own face and let the darkness fall away from the part of his body facing Kafka, so that Kafka could see his face and upper body. He let Kafka see his pose, standing upright with his right arm horizontal and bent, hand under his chin, the edge of his hand pressing against his throat.