After a minute or so, it wasn’t bleeding too much. He poured some of the peroxide over the cut, which stung a little. Maybe he’d get some more Band-Aids at the supermarket when he went there to get more bottles of wine, after it got light out.
Well, he wouldn’t be able to do the dishes now, even if he’d wanted to.
Back in the living room again, he got down on the floor and looked under the sofa for the skidded-away tape. Damn, it was hard to get down on the floor, made his back really hurt. He didn’t move that way often. Reaching under, he was mildly surprised to find something else, a little paperback book, looked like science fiction at a glance. He used to have a ton of those, mostly SF, but had gotten rid of most of them after Clare left. He just didn’t want a whole lot of clutter around. He still had enough with all the VHS tapes. He told himself he’d lost interest in it all, turned off partly by Clare’s UFO craziness, not that that had a lot to do with real science fiction. He’d still find books around sometimes, in closets and so forth.
He put the book in his injured right hand and reached in farther with his left, finding something else: the cassette. He put that on top of the book and, with his other hand pressed onto his aching back, took both and sat down in his rocker with a weary huff.
The videotape was definitely fucked up, lengths of brownish-gray tape sticking out of the back of it, crumpled. No use even trying to put it back in the VCR. Oh yeah, now he needed to see how bad the VCR was. So stupid of him to bang it on the floor. It might be totally croaked.
Lifting it from the floor, he set the VCR on the TV stand again. He bent down, his back straining, and plugged the cords into the back of the TV set. Another tape sat on top of the TV, Latex Dreamdolls, a kind of arty porn movie in which inflatable sex dolls turned into real girls. He didn’t feel like watching it again but, since it was handy, put it in.
The screen brightened, and on it, a rubbery red mouth disgorged white slime. Hey, it still played. He was surprised, his luck being so bad all the time. Great, things are looking up, he thought sarcastically as the scene switched to a large black dildo jabbing in and out of a smooth and taut behind.
He looked at the book. The cover showed a sinister looking, bulb-headed alien with huge black eyes wielding a bloodied machete under the title: Plan 666: Sex, Satanism and Ritual Slayings in the UFO-Crazed Cults of Armageddon.
Well, what the fuck, it was one of Clare’s UFO books, though this one he didn’t remember. Great. Surprised she didn’t take it with her. She had a bunch of books on the subject and they were all gone on the day he’d come home and found she’d vamoosed. She must have misplaced this one. Clare hadn’t been much tidier than he was, especially after she went through her big sea-change.
He hadn’t read a book in a long time and, opening this one at a random page, found he had a little trouble focusing on the text. He’d wondered lately whether he was losing his sight. He’d been seeing a lot of floaters, and they could be really distracting. They ranged from swirling brownish blotches resembling coffee stains to odd, sketchy black figures that looked like some kind of evil bugs. He even wondered whether the trouble he had sometimes while watching movies, of colors getting more and more strange and figures distorted, came from a vision problem rather than the TV itself. Though it was an old TV, and it mostly only happened when he watched porn videos. But then, that was pretty much all he watched, anymore. Maybe you could literally go blind from drinking. If his eyes were too fucked up for him to read books anymore, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Oh well, maybe he’d try to read it, maybe not.
But he kept leafing through the book, barely noticing the frisky girls half-undressed in black rubber slutgear on his TV screen. He came across a passage about that Paradise Threshold group Clare used to talk endlessly about.
Well within the long tradition of American apocalypticism, and like the Kindred cult which had preceded it, Paradise Threshold originated with the testimony of Delbert Wingdale, who claimed to have been abducted and held captive for eleven years by the Niff, bodiless alien spirits stranded upon the Earth for millennia, whose habitat is a system of catacombs deep inside the Earth…
PART
II
CHAPTER 5
SHANNON AND DEWEY AT THE GRASSO
Shannon and Dewey pulled into the parking lot at the Grasso Villa. The lot was about half full, though it was near closing time. The damaged marquee over the entrance said, in letters of varying design:
Dewey was somewhat satisfied to see he’d been right about Bearflesh, but wasn’t going to point it out. The music coming from inside was muffled and distorted.
Hunching against the night air, they stepped fast through the front entrance. The fat, greasy kid with the razored mullet at the ticket window didn’t bother asking for their IDs, just took the cash they held out and banged the ink stamper over the backs of their hands while talking animatedly over his shoulder to a petite girl with a white-blonde perm and heavy make-up on her face that failed to cover up her acne. She looked about fifteen and was smoking a cigarette without inhaling. She nodded but kept looking away from the fat kid as he spoke, apparently not wishing to allow him to think she was much engaged. Good luck, chump, thought Dewey.
The music boosted hugely in volume as they pulled the heavy, green-lacquered interior door open and stepped inside to merge with the murmur of talk and the stench of beer and piss. The hall appeared vast because of the sparseness of the crowd, mostly the usual youngish-but-aging clientele with a few fresh-faced teenagers scattered among them, under lights that seemed bright above but provided little illumination below. Tables were bunched together in the middle of the place, leaving about thirty feet of space in front of them for dancing. Nobody was on stage, but a drum set was there, along with a couple worn-looking guitars on stands. The bass drum had a logo on it, BEARFLESH, along with a crude drawing of a growling grizzly’s head. A record was playing at high volume, ‘Practice What You Preach’ by Testament.
The crowd milled around or sat at tables drinking and talking, leaning their heads close to hear each other over the racket. Dewey sat at an empty table. Shannon leaned on a chair.
“Okay,” said Shannon, “so you were right about Beerflesh. Congratulations.”
“Told ya,” said Dewey. “Where are the kids?”
“Don’t worry, they’re around here somewhere. This is where they said, man, I’m sure.”
“Maybe they were kidding.”
“No, they said here. Maybe they’ve come to appreciate classic headbanger culture.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s the case.”
“They’re probably here for the pussy, really,” said Shannon. “I told them about the Mean Stevies phenomenon, and they were intrigued.” “The Mean Stevies” was Shannon’s term for some of the girls who hung out at the Grasso, or used to. It was an old quip of his, from ten or fifteen years ago. Back then, a lot of girls you’d see at the place seemingly tried to achieve a resemblance to Stevie Nicks, cultivating the singer’s spazzy ringlets, flouncy dresses and lipsticked pout. But instead of appearing soft and feminine, Grasso girls tended to still look harsh, as people on the grungy west side of Stankerton generally tended to be. Looking around, Dewey did see a few females of more or less the Stevie description, but those few were looking a bit haggard, maybe because it was late.