“A genuine Boy Scout,” she said.
“I’ll get you some water.”
“I can get it myself.”
Harry helped her to her feet. Bits of glass fell from her hair and clothes.
When they stepped inside from the balcony, Connie paused to look at the painting on the bedroom wall. The headless human corpse. The hungry ghoul with mad, staring eyes.
“Ticktock had yellow eyes,” she said. “Not like before, outside the restaurant when he panhandled me. Yellow eyes, bright, with black slits for pupils.”
They headed for the kitchen to get water to chase the Anacin. Harry had the irrational feeling that the ghoul’s eyes in the Goya painting turned to watch as he and Connie passed by, and that the monster climbed out of the canvas and crept after them through the dead man’s house.
FOUR
1
Sometimes when he was weary from exercising his powers, Bryan Drackman grew sullen and petulant. He didn’t like anything. If the night was cool, he wanted it warm; if it was warm, he wanted it cool. Ice cream tasted too sweet, corn chips too salty, chocolate far too chocolaty. The feel of clothes against his skin, even a silk robe, was intolerably irritating, yet he felt vulnerable and strange when he was naked. He didn’t want to stay in the house, didn’t want to go out. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he didn’t like what he saw, and when he stood in front of the jars full of eyes, he had the feeling that they were mocking rather than adoring him. He knew he should sleep in order to restore his energy and improve his mood, but he loathed the world of dreams as much as he despised the waking world.
This crabbiness escalated until he became quarrelsome. Because he had no one with whom to quarrel in his seaside sanctum, his temper could not be vented. Irascibility intensified into anger. Anger became blind rage.
Too exhausted to work off his rage in physical activity, he sat naked in his black bed, propped against pillows covered in black silk, and allowed wrath to consume him. He closed his hands into fists on his thighs, squeezed tighter, tighter, until his fingernails dug painfully into his palms and until the muscles in his arms ached from the exertion. He pounded his thighs with his fists, knuckle-first to hurt the most, then his abdomen, then his chest. He twisted strands of hair around his fingers and pulled on it until tears blurred his vision.
His eyes. He hooked his fingers, pressed the nails against his eyelids, and tried to generate enough courage to gouge his eyes out, tear them loose and crush them in his fists.
He didn’t understand why he was overcome by the urge to blind himself, but the compulsion was powerful.
Irrationality seized him.
He wailed, tossed his head in anguish and thrashed upon the black sheets, kicked and flailed, screamed and spat, cursed with a fluidity and vehemence that made his tantrum appear to be the work of some spawn of Hell that had possessed him. He cursed the world and himself, but most of all he cursed the bitch, the breeding bitch, the stupid hateful breeding bitch. His mother.
His mother.
Rage abruptly turned to piteous distress, and his furious cries and hate-filled screams shivered into agonized sobs. He curled into the fetal position, hugging his pummeled and aching body, and he wept as intensely as he had shrieked and flailed, as passionate in his self-pity as he had been in his wrath.
It wasn’t fair, not fair at all, what was expected of him. He had to Become without the company of a brother, without the guiding hand of a carpenter father, without the tender mercy of his mother. Jesus, while Becoming, had enjoyed the perfect love of Mary, but there was no Holy Virgin this time, no radiant Madonna at his side. This time there was a hag, withered and debilitated by her greedy appetites and self-indulgence, who turned from him in loathing and fear, unable and unwilling to provide comfort. It was so unfair, so bitterly unjust, that he should be expected to Become and remake the world without the adoring disciples who had stood at the side of Jesus, and without a mother like Mary, Queen of Angels.
Gradually his wretched sobbing subsided.
The flow of tears slowed, dried up.
He lay in miserable solitude.
He needed to sleep.
Since his most recent nap, he had created a golem to kill Ricky Estefan, built another golem to tie the silver buckle to the rearview mirror of Lyon’s Honda, practiced godhood by bringing to life the flying reptile from the sand on the beach, and created yet another golem to terrorize the bigshot hero cop and his partner. He had also used his Greatest and Most Secret Power to put the spiders and snakes in Ricky Estefan’s kitchen cabinets, to place the broken head of the religious figurine in Connie Gulliver’s tightly clenched hand, and to drive Lyon half crazy by returning him three times to that kitchen chair in various suicidal postures.
Bryan giggled at the memory of Harry Lyon’s utter confusion and fear.
Stupid cop. Big hero. Almost peed his pants in terror.
Bryan giggled again. He rolled over and buried his face in a pillow as the giggling built.
Almost peed his pants. Some hero.
Pretty soon he had stopped feeling sorry for himself. He was in a much better mood.
He was still exhausted, needed to sleep, but he was also hungry. He had burned up a tremendous number of calories in the exercise of his power and had lost a couple of pounds. Until he quelled his hunger pangs, he would not be able to sleep.
Pulling on his red silk robe, he went downstairs to the kitchen. He took a package of Mallomars, a package of Oreos, and a large bag of onion-flavored potato chips from the pantry. From the refrigerator he got two bottles of Yoo-Hoo, one chocolate and one vanilla.
He carried the food through the living room and outside, to the Mexican-tile patio, part of which was overhung by the master-bedroom balcony on the second story. He sat on a lounge chair near the railing, so he could see the dark Pacific.
As Tuesday ticked past midnight and became Wednesday, the breeze off the ocean was cool, but Bryan didn’t mind. Grandma Drackman would have nagged him about catching pneumonia. But if it became too chilly, he was able with little effort to make some adjustments in his metabolism and raise his body temperature.
He washed down the whole bag of Mallomars with vanilla Yoo-Hoo.
He could eat what he wanted.
He could do what he wanted.
Although Becoming was a lonely process, and although it seemed unfair to be without his admiring disciples and his own Holy Mother, all was for the best in the end. While Jesus was a god of compassion and healing, Bryan was meant to be a god of wrath and cleansing; for this reason, it was desirable that he Become in solitude, without having been softened by a mother’s love, without being encumbered by teachings of solicitude and mercy.
2
So this stinky man, stinkier than rotten oranges dropped off a tree and full of squirming things, stinkier than a three-day-dead mouse, stinkier than anything, stinky enough to make you sneeze when you smell too much of him, goes from street to street and into an alley, trailing clouds of odors.
The dog follows a few steps back, curious, keeping his distance, sniffing out the trace of the thing-that-will-kill-you which is mixed in with all the other smells.
They stop at the back of a place where people make food.
Good smells, almost stronger than the stinky man, hungry-making smells, lots of them, lots. Meat, chicken, carrots, cheese. Cheese is good, sticks in the teeth but is real good, much better than old chewing gum from the street which sticks in the teeth but isn’t so good. Bread, peas, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and more to make your jaws ache and your mouth water.