“Benny is a homosexual, and I’m not. Not anymore.”
“You’re not…” She hesitated. “A homosexual?”
He held up a hand, as if taking an oath. “I am no longer. My great mentor, Alberic Crabtree here, has shown me the way out of that trap.” He gestured at the skeleton in the chair next to his. “And with the assistance of a few young women we engaged for the purpose. Professionals, of course. Never settle for an amateur when you can get a professional. Correct, Alberic?”
“You gave your skeleton a name?”
“Good heavens, no. He was named by his parents, over a century ago. I bought him online, believing him to be only an anonymous skeleton, and only gradually came to know his true identity as I learned to communicate with him. It was all intended to be. It’s what’s in those coolers that made it possible. Alberic’s invention, you know. It opens the doors of perceptions as nothing else in this world can.”
“The pink water is fucking LSD?”
“LSD! Did you hear that, Alberic? First alcohol, now LSD!” He reached over to the skeleton, put his arm around its bony shoulders and leaned his head against the rib cage, laughing heartily, as though the two of them were going into delighted hysterics together.
He stopped laughing abruptly, became very serious. “Forgive us, Veronica, we don’t mean to laugh at you. It’s just that misunderstandings about Verum Deus are insidious and multifold. I myself, along with many others, had the mistaken notion that a substance derived from Alberic’s great creation was an improved version, cooked into an edible form often called worm. Indeed, there’s currently a fashion for this concoction, which amounts to no more than yet another recreational drug, that is, a cheap high. Alberic has enlightened me on this score, that ‘worm’ is simply a distraction and, in effect, a deception. Verum Deus itself is the aged fermentation of Louisiana Bald Cat sarsaparilla, which Alberic predicted plainly back seventy some years ago, but flaws in the texts of his key works obscured this fact. I myself engaged Todd Dewolf to make some of this degraded version, and Benny tells me your silly husband, so very unworthy of you, is peddling it locally to the misinformed masses. In reality, aged Bald Cat itself is Verum Deus, and all you need do is drink it!”
As Roni stepped backwards away from him, Hobie rose from his chair, grasped each of her hands and gazed into her eyes. She glanced down at the front of his pants, poking out at her. She pulled her hands away, turning for the door. “I really have to go now. Sorry.”
She was out in the hallway and headed down the stairs in moments.
CHAPTER 25
TODD WAKES
Todd dragged himself out of a dismal bog of sleep that had rendered him too stupefied to dream. The bedsheets were damp and faintly foul, twisted over him like an ill-fitted strait-jacket. Beneath them, he was naked and alone. He rolled to one side, and his eyes went wide at the sight of several white maggots crawling over the edge of his pillow. He jounced up and fell out of bed.
After a moment, there were sounds coming from down the hall; someone was in the kitchen. Then steps, and Sky was in the doorway, looking fresh and clean with her hair wrapped up in a towel, in his big bathrobe, and carrying a mug. He smelled coffee. “Hey, you up? What are you doing on the floor?”
“I, uh, fell. When’d you get up?”
“Not long ago,” she said, setting down the coffee mug. She sat on the bed, nuzzled her face against his face and tousled his hair. “Hey, you were incredible last night.”
“I was—what happened?” He noticed a dark bluish mark under her left eye.
“You really don’t remember? We were fucking like beasts. It was great.”
“No, I mean, what happened to your eye?” He now vaguely remembered having sex with her, wasn’t even sure it hadn’t been a dream. But the sight of the bruise near her eye filled him with dread.
“It was an accident, my eye got in the way of your elbow at some point in the frenzy. Oh, my goodness.” She got on her knees, put her arms around him and squeezed hard. She seemed awfully strong. He glanced at the pillow again, the maggots were gone.
“See how well those oysters work? Want some more for breakfast?”
PART
V
CHAPTER 26
JAIME AND CLARE, STILL ON THE ROAD
“So have you seen Todd’s mural?”
“You mean the picture on the wall?”
“Yes, Todd’s mural.”
“Yeah. It looks like a man holding his hands up. People say it’s Jesus, but, I dunno if it’s him.”
“But the spaceship that Todd painted is still there?”
“Yeah. Over him.”
“And so this Qwiff just happens to show up when the image of Christ manifests on the wall that Todd had meant to use for his mural.”
“Well, I don’t know that she’s a Qwiff or anything.” He assumed this word meant slut.
“Oh, you don’t think so? So you know who the Qwiff are?”
“No.”
“That’s right, you don’t. You know what they really are? Not who, but what?”
“What?”
“Corpses. Corpses of beautiful women, reanimated to seduce men into having wild, depraved sex.”
Jaime blanched, kept his eyes on the road.
“And this one has red hair, of course. Like his tattoo,” she said.
“Whose?”
“Todd’s tattoo.”
“I never seen it.”
“It’s of a girl with red hair. The girl who’s with him now. Obviously.”
“Do they all have red hair?”
She laughed bitterly. “Why would that be?”
“Well, ’cause there was that other girl. She had red hair. Like the other one. Real red. Like… like blood.”
Maybe he shouldn’t have brought this up.
“What other girl?”
“I told you, the one that died. With red hair.”
“Girl that died.”
“In the woods, with Todd and Shannon. And Dewey.”
“How do you know about such a thing?”
“I seen ’em. I happened to be running around there when they had her out in the woods.”
“Had her… when was this?”
“Year ago.”
“After I left?”
“Before.”
“Out in the woods. And she died there?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t want to tell her more, not about what he did, and not about her being a victim of the Slasher, according to TV.
“I think you’d better tell me the whole story.”
Jaime became flustered. “It was just, I was runnin’ around and saw them. First Shannon was with her, then he got mad and was chasin’ me, then Dewey was chasin’ after Shannon, and that left Todd.”
“You’re saying they were fucking her.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a low voice, remembering his brothers smacking him around for snitchin’.
“And Todd was with her when she died. Fucking her.”
“I guess.”
“How do you know she died?”
“I don’t. I just seen her. Todd got up and ran away, and I seen her there.”
“You saw her lying on the ground?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think she was dead?”
“She was real dead. She rotted away.” Uh-oh, he shouldn’t have said that. Now she might figure out the rest.
“Awright, I understand now. So she’s back.”
“I don’t… it can’t be. I buried her.” It occurred to him he hadn’t been watching where he was driving and now didn’t know where he was.
Clare clamped a hand onto his shoulder. “There’s much more to this story, isn’t there? And you’re going to tell me the rest of it.”