Todd was willing to try and did want to play a part in the whole endeavor with the theater, though Hobie was doing all the real work. But all he’d managed to finish at the Mirror itself was the white varnished surface to paint on, and that little flying saucer. At home, he’d done a number of preliminary sketches and acrylic tryouts, but was never satisfied with any of it. Hobie had gotten a sizable money settlement some years after his parents were killed in an accident on a cruise ship vacation. His aunt, an attorney, had kept most of the money, but Hobie did okay. He’d been pretty spendthrift about it, first opening a video store along with Todd, then closing that and renting a large abandoned theater in town. He’d advanced Todd a large amount of money for the mural, an insane twenty grand, though it remained unfinished. Todd didn’t know when he’d get back to it, maybe never, but had been living off that money for some months. Hobie never called him anymore, so maybe he’d actually forgotten about it. Todd himself had let the whole thing be put off indefinitely and perhaps forever.
Well, maybe he could make money off this worm thing. Though, at some point, he’d have to consult with Hobie about getting some more of that Bald Cat soda pop or whatever it was, the main ingredient. He still had several bottles of it in the basement, but he thought Hobie either had some more or could get some.
Glancing at Sky on the sofa, he noticed she now had her eyes open and was looking at him. Occupied with his thoughts, he hadn’t noticed when she’d woken up. She stretched nicely, shook her hair like a mop, and gave a wide yawn ending in a bright smile. How did she keep her teeth so white like that?
“Have you been awake all night?” she asked.
“All night? Why? Is it…” The curtains in his place were dark but, looking at the corners of the windows, he saw the first light of dawn had come.
She sat up. “Is it okay if I take a shower?”
“Umm, sure. Just let me, uh, go and do one thing.” Those pants on the floor. “Umm, make sure there’s some soap and all. Just take a minute.”
She nodded, and he hurried off to hide the evidence of his bad habits, though it had already been on display. If only he’d known she was coming. But if he had, he probably would have tried to prevent it.
It was still quite a mess, but he didn’t have time to clean up. He did put out a fresh bar of soap. Thankfully, there was an unopened one in the cabinet.
He stepped into the next room. “Okay, it’s all ready,” he said.
“Great,” she smiled and jounced off the sofa, unbuttoning her shirt and pulling it off as she went. Her back was bare, no bra. She turned her head and smiled mischievously. “Do you want to take one too? We could shower together.”
He paused, surprised. “Uh, how about I take one later. I’m kind of, not ready to take one right now.”
She cocked her head, gave him a direct look with those green eyes. “Okay. See you in a bit.” Her walk was somewhat slinky, provocative. He probably did need a shower, but, no.
He sat on the sofa in the spot she’d occupied, still very warm from her body, and listened to the shower coming on full. Naked and getting all squeaky clean in there. Yikes. What was he going to do? He hadn’t been laid since Lenore, didn’t even jerk off, even when he watched porn. Did anybody besides him watch porn and never jerk off?
Listening to Sky in the shower, Todd began thinking again of Clare. It was weird how she’d developed these crazy theories so much like the religious stuff she’d been so against when they first met. Clare had been into some hippie and New Age shit before, but she didn’t start to get wacky until after the miscarriage, after saying she didn’t want to fuck anymore, and then after Lenore.
He picked up the Plan 666 book, tried to find the part he’d been reading earlier, couldn’t. He found this:
…Crabtree claimed the concoction allowed for communication with deep psychic forces in the center of the Earth, imprisoned there by a higher civilization from outer space, which he named the Niff, while the prisoners were Gnoomes, and the female humanoid creatures the Gnoomes employed to expand the human race through lust were called the Qwiff. There is some evidence Crabtree had worked as a pimp in his early days in the New Orleans area. His eventual incarceration in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee was the result of a conviction under the Mann Act, for transporting underage women across state lines. It was in Brushy Mountain that Crabtree died in 1943, in a supposed suicide by hanging that many observers deem highly suspicious.
In Crabtree’s elaborated interpretation, the Qwiff were the original female humans, invented by the Niff to spread their influence across the Earth by causing the human race, originally a primitive but pure genderless species that lived in perfect accord with nature, to at once evolve and decline. Crabtree apparently did not explain in any of his writings how the genderless proto-humans reproduced; one interpretation is that they were initially immortal and only declined into mortality as a consequence of physical lust.
There’s some evidence that Wingdale, who’d been diagnosed in his late teens as paranoid schizophrenic and at various times in his earlier life was confined in mental hospitals, had become still more demented in the late period of his leadership of the Kindred, just prior to his forced departure. Developing Crabtree’s Qwiff conception further along deeply misogynistic lines, Wingdale alleged that Qwiff kill the men they’ve seduced by beheading them, and thus somehow steal their mind-essence, to then carry for some ambiguous purpose down into the underworld. These killings, he claimed, were fairly frequent but widespread and thus little noted, but the time would come, shortly before the return of the Alien Christ, when the numbers of Qwiff dispatched would greatly increase. An inspiration for this dark concept was likely the natural practice of the female praying mantis, which bites off the head of her male mate during intercourse and devours his corpse.
In later interpretations, the Qwiff were either sacred prostitutes or sinister seductresses, recruited from the fallen among womankind and rendered as soulless or even literally heartless creatures. A much later interpretation had it that the Qwiff were “retired” by agents of the Gnoomes known as Jaks, who would reclaim their hearts to install them in other, more reliable Qwiffs.
Delbert Wingdale claimed to have been captured by Gnoomes when he pursued a Qwiff named Lily into the underworld, whom he’d engaged as a prostitute after she’d stolen his pants and run away from a hotel room they’d shared in a small town in Louisiana. He emerged eight years later and founded the Kindred organization, claiming to have been liberated from his imprisonment by Christian evangelist Niffs who taught that Christ was himself a revolutionary latter-day Niff who’d come to Earth to redeem the human race who’d suffered so long under the wicked dominance of the Gnoomes, but had been defeated by the Gnoomian forces. The evangelical Niffs, known as Shrooms, had journeyed to Earth themselves as an advanced force of an army the Savior had been assembling for nearly two Earth millennia to do battle with the Gnoomes in a final apocalyptic war for the liberation of humanity…
Yep, this was some of that same crazy shit both Hobie and Clare used to talk about. Maybe the book was actually Hobie’s and not Clare’s.
Clare had always said he was waiting for a girl to come to him and she’d be an angel or an alien, or something—it was some theory of hers. Maybe it was this Qwiff thing. She probably would have said that was what Lenore had been.