Eddie wondered if the almost constant swearing-from both the Talking Head and Masterton himself-when in conversation with him was just an exaggeration for the sake of imitation, or a true representation of how he, Eddie, really spoke. Pain in the ass if the latter were so, but then again you could never tell with something like that.
“… trapeze artists, ” the Head was saying, “ Stilton cheese, grommet-hearings, tapas, gingham, loudhailers, Billie Holliday platters, loam… ”
Eddie glanced to one of the technicians who ran the Command Module. “Is there a reset button on this? I think it’s gone into a loop or something.”
“ Hands off, fucko, ” said the Talking Head. “ I haven’t crashed or anything. I can just do that shit for longer than is humanly possible. ”
“So you’re, uh, aware of the basic nature of your existence, then?” said Eddie.
“ Course I am, ” said the Head. “ I’m not a complete fucking moron, and it’s more than I can say about you. ”
“What,” said Eddie, “that I don’t know the basic nature of my existence, or I’m a complete moron?”
“ Look into the dead flat marbles that are my eyes, ” said the Head. “ What are the fucking odds. What do you know about Butts? ”
“Do you know,” Eddie snapped. “These last few months, seems as like every sucker and his pooch has some snide little thing to say about me and sex. I’ve got a Testostorossa who thinks I should be mincing around in a pink tutu, Trix Desoto just assumes I like boys as a matter of course and now some glob of solidified goo in the shape of a disembodied head is coming it with the goddamn butts!
“Well, I’m getting sick of it-so let me lay it out once and for all, and you can tell any asshole who asks. I’ve done it maybe four times in my life, with backroom girls, when I’ve managed to scrape together the coin. I’ve got nothing so against the backroom boys that I’d run a mile, but then again I don’t feel any real need to go across the street. I’ve no idea what I want out of the rest of my life, you know, if I happen to meet someone, and maybe that’s because of this Alienation Syndrome Trix was talking about-but maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’m only fucking seventeen years old! So get off my fucking back, okay?”
There was a pause.
“ That must have been building up for quite a while there, ” said the Talking Head.
“I suppose,” said Eddie.
“ Feel better for getting it off your chest? ” said the Talking Head.
“I suppose,” said Eddie.
“ Well, cathartic as all that might be, in a Reichian sort of way, ” said the Talking Head. “ I was actually talking about the author, Oscar Butts. ”
“Oh,” said Eddie.
“ Two-bit crime writer who had a lot of stuff published in rags like Spicy Detective either side of the Second World War. I’m surprised you didn’t get a complete bio and bibliography along with the Loup, since the knowledge might have been of actual use. ”
“Yeah, well I got stuff about the Romantic Movement that would blow your socks off,” said Eddie. “As they all did to each other on a regular basis, by all accounts.”
“ In any event, ” said the Talking Head, “ Butts’s stock in trade was definite C-grade detective fiction. The kind of story where roscoes belched and people flung woo. The guy was going nowhere fast, so his getting drafted and sent to fight in Europe in ’42 was no great loss to literature. But something happened to him in Europe, something that would change the direction of his future writings.
“ Nobody’s quite sure what that something was. Some people say it was because he was in the same unit as Henry Kuttner and the horror writer did a complete number on Butts. He introduced him to the Cthulhu Mythos-you know, the stuff that Lovecraft, Derleth, Ashton-Smith and guys like that used to write-and it coloured his fiction for the rest of his life.
“ Other people say that his unit were ordered to guard an artefact that the Nazis were caught trying to smuggle from North Africa through Italy and the experience drove him mad. Depending on who you listened to, this artefact was anything from the Spear of Destiny to a fully operational inter-planetary craft complete with alien corpses. Sound familiar?
“ Either way, as soon as he got back stateside he began writing again. Not the sub-Dashiell Hammett crap he churned out before the war, but genre-splicing innovative fiction where private dicks were just as likely to go insane staring at the visage of Tsathoggua as they were to solve the case and get the girl. Magazines and publishers started to take note of Butts and his work and it wasn’t long before his novels started to be published. The first was The Lady From Beyond the Stars and that was swiftly followed by The Killer had a Million Faces, Murderphillia, The Star Goat-
“Hang on,” said Eddie. “You mean like ‘Attack of the Mutant Star Goat’-no tin can is safe? Did it have a big straw hat on?”
“ At the time, ” said the Head, “ people found his tales quite terrifying. The stories haunted them. The most horrific things they’d ever read. ”
“Doesn’t sound all that terrifying to me,” said Eddie.
“ Well, other times and other sensibilities, ” said the Head. “ Of course, the main reason was that, as a writer, Butts was frankly just a little bit rotten. He tended to cop out of actually describing his entities, ending the story with the narrator delirious, or writing that they’re coming for me with their aarg aarg aargh. That left a hole for people to fill with their own worst nightmares. Like looking at a dark reflector. Stick one finger in the pool, there’s three fingers pointing back at you, you know?
“ Of course, you can’t get away with ambiguity much these days, ” the Head continued. “ Suckers who can even read, after a fashion, can only follow something simple and point-to-point. Nobody has the nuts for inference in fiction, these days. There’s quite enough of that in real life. They need things all spelled out when they read books. ”
“And that’s why Butts is important?” said Eddie. He wondered if he was still, somehow, totally failing to grasp the point.
“ It’s important as a model for humans dealing with the Other, ” said the Head. “ I mean, ninety per cent of our universe is made up of Dark Matter, which is basically stuff just hanging around-but the name itself makes it sound a bit dangerous and mysterious. Dark Matter, you know?
“ However discontinuous, however dislocated the Other might be from human experience and terms, those terms are still the only things that count. We eat what we bring to the table, no more, no less. ”
“So what you’re telling me, basically,” said Eddie, “is that it doesn’t matter a damn what’s really going on because humans are screwing around with it, and it’s only the human screwing around that counts.”
“ If I could nod all sagely and smugly I would, ” said the Head. “ As it is I’ll just settle for a somewhat smug precisely’. Listen up, sport, and I’ll clue you in on all the human-level poop. ”
“And it’ll finally be the complete and actual truth?” Eddie asked.
“ True as anything else, ” said the Head. “ Sure, why not. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin… ”
19.
In the bottom drawer of the desk was a barely half-finished quart of Wild Turkey, and Colonel Roland Grist could hear it calling to him. It was the proper twenty-five year-old article as well, turn of the century, no dicking around.
He wasn’t going to reach for it, though, not with this… well, let’s be honest, here, this jumped-up whore watching him with her mocking eyes.
Grist found himself longing for the days when life had been simple, the days when he’d seen the world and killed people as an airborne ranger. Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Even twenty years after a bunch of fundamentalist ragheads had flown a few planes into innocent buildings it could still be used as justification for invading hostile nations. God bless America. And if you happen to blind or cripple a few stone-throwing children or make some Congolese girl do something she doesn’t want to do on one of these extended vacations then whose to argue? Say what you like, an officer in the US Army still got you some goddamn respect.