Clive Barker - The Great and Secret Show

"Nothing to be done," she said. "You should go wash." He nodded grimly, and left her side. The Lix were running down, their motions becoming sluggish. Presumably Kis-soon had better things to do with his energies than waste them pressing his agents to further mischief. She closed the door on the sight, sickened to her stomach, and went back through to check under the furniture that there were no others lurking around. The creature she'd nailed to the floor was now completely dead; or at least inert. She stepped past it and went to find another weapon before checking the rest of the apartment.

In the bathroom Raul let the bloodied water run from the sink, and peered at the hurt the Lix had done him. It was superficial. But some of its poison had got into his system, as Tesla had warned. His whole body seemed to be shaking from the inside out, and the arm that had been touched by the Nuncio was throbbing as though he'd just plunged it into boiling water. He looked down. The arm was insubstantial in front of him, the sink behind it showing through more solid flesh and bone. Panicking, he looked back up at his reflection. That too was growing hazy, the bathroom wall blurring, and some other image—harsh and bright—demanding to be seen behind it.

He opened his mouth to cry for Tesla's help but before he could do so his image disappeared from the mirror entirely; and so—a moment of utter dislocation later—did the mirror itself. The glare grew blinding around him, and something took hold of his Nunciate arm. He remembered Tesla describing Kissoon's grip on her gut. Now that same mind took his hand, and pulled.

As the last trace of Tesla's apartment gave way to an endless, burning horizon, he threw his untainted arm out to where the sink had been. He seemed to connect with something in the world he'd left, but he couldn't be sure.

Then all hope was gone, and he was in Kissoon's Loop.

Tesla heard something drop in the bathroom.

"Raul?" she said.

There was no answer.

"Raul? Are you all right?"

Fearing the worst she went quickly, knife in hand. The door was closed but not locked.

"Are you there?" she said. When she received no reply a third time she opened the door. A bloody towel had been dropped on the floor, or fallen, carrying a number of toiletry items with it: the noise she'd heard. But Raul was not there.

"Shit!"

She turned off the faucet, which was still gushing, and about-faced, calling his name again, then going through the apartment, dreading with every turn she was going to find him prey to the same horror that had claimed Mary. But there was no sign of him; nor of any further Lix. Finally, steeling herself for the sight on the sheets, she opened her bedroom door. He was not there either.

Standing at the door brought back to Tesla the look of horror on his face when he'd seen Mary's corpse. Had that simply been too much for him? She shut off the sight of the body on the bed and went to the front door. It was ajar, the way she'd left it when they'd first come in. Leaving it that way she started down the stairs and along the side of the building, calling after him as she went, the certainty growing in her that he'd simply decided he could stand no more of this madness and had taken to the streets of West Hollywood. If he had he was exchanging one madness for another, but that was his choice and she couldn't be responsible for the consequences.

He wasn't in the street when she reached it. In the porch of the house opposite two young men were sitting enjoying the last light of the afternoon. She knew the names of neither, but she crossed to them and said:

"Have you seen a man?" which raised eyebrows and smiles from both.

"Recently?" one of them said.

"Just now. Ran out of the building opposite?"

"We just came out here," said the other. "Sorry."

"What'd he do?" the first said, looking at the knife in Tesla's hand. "Too much or not enough?"

"Not enough," Tesla said.

"Fuck him," came the reply. "There's plenty more."

"Not like him," she replied. "Trust me. Not like him. Thanks anyhow."

"What did he look like?" came the question as she re-crossed the street.

A little vengeful part of Tesla, one she wasn't much proud of but which always came to the fore when someone did the dirty on her like this, replied: "Like a fucking monkey," in a voice that must have been heard halfway down Santa Monica and Melrose. "He looked like a fucking monkey."

So, Tesla babe, what now?

She poured herself a Tequila, sat herself down, and reviewed the overall picture. Raul gone; Kissoon in league with the Iad; Mary Muralles dead in the bedroom. Not a lot to take comfort from. She poured herself a second Tequila, not unaware that drunkenness, like sleep, might put her closer to Kissoon than she'd strictly like to be, but needing the burn of it in her throat and belly.

There was no purpose in staying in the apartment. The real action was back in Palomo Grove.

She put a call through to Grillo. He was not at the hotel. She asked the hotel operator to put her through to the front desk and enquired there if anyone knew where he was. Nobody did. He'd gone out in the middle of the afternoon she was told. It was now four-twenty-five. They estimated he'd been gone an hour at least. To the party on the Hill she guessed.

With nothing to detain her at North Huntley Drive but mourning her sudden loss of allies, her best move now, she decided, was to go find Grillo, before circumstance took him from her too.

Grillo hadn't come to the Grove with garb appropriate for the gathering up at Coney Eye, but this being California, where sneakers and jeans were formal dress, he thought he wouldn't be conspicuous in his casual gear. That was the first of the afternoon's many errors. Even the guards at the front gate were wearing tuxedos and black ties. But he had the invitation, on which he'd inscribed a false name (Jon Swift), and it was not questioned.

This was not the first time he'd slipped into a gathering under an assumed identity. Back in his days as an investigative reporter (as opposed to his present role as muckraker) he'd attended a neo-Nazis' revival meeting in Detroit as a distant relation of Goebbels, several faith-healing sessions by a defrocked priest whose scam he'd later uncovered in a series of pieces that had earned him a Pulitzer nomination, and, most memorably, a gathering of sado-masochists, his account of which had been smothered by the senator he'd seen chained up eating dog food. In those various companies he'd felt like a just man in dangerous company, going in search of truth: Philip Marlowe with a pen. Here he simply felt nauseous. A beggar sickened at the feast. From Ellen's account of the party he'd expected to see famous faces; what he hadn't anticipated was the strange authority they'd had over him, quite out of proportion to their skills. Gathered under Buddy Vance's roof were dozens of the most well-known faces in the world; legends, idols, style-makers. Around them, faces he couldn't have put names to but he recognized from copies of Variety and Hollywood Reporter. The potentates of the industry—agents, lawyers and studio executives. Tesla, in her frequent railings against the New Hollywood, saved the sourest venom for these, the business-school types who'd superseded the old-style studio bosses, Warner, Selznick, Goldwyn and their clan, to rule the dream factories with their demographics and their calculators. These were the men and women who chose next year's deities, and put their names on audiences' lips around the world. It didn't always work of course. The public was fickle, sometimes positively perverse, deciding to deify an unknown against all expectation. But the system was prepared for such anomalies. The rank outsider would be drawn into the pantheon-at startling speed, and everyone would claim how they'd known all along the man was a star.