"You claim, although apparently either living or wishing to live in the world of rock 'n' roll music, you've never heard of the Rolling Stones?"
Gibson nodded. He felt weighed down by the seeming contradictions that were built into his story. Only a certain dogged stubbornness kept him from curling up on the couch and refusing to answer. "Where I came from, there was no band called the Rolling Stones."
"Doesn't that tell you something."
Only the drugs stopped Gibson snarling. "It tells me that I have come back to a world that's been radically altered, altered to the extent that I no longer exist."
Kooning regarded him gravely. "That's a very interesting statement."
"Isn't it just? "
"Could it be that because of some crisis in your life, perhaps what you perceived as a failure to win the level of success and recognition that you thought you deserved in music, you fixed on one very successful group and decided that they had usurped what was rightfully yours?"
They must have been round this point a dozen times in previous sessions, and Gibson could see what was coming a mile off.
"You're telling me that the only way I could get what was rightfully mine was by blanking out this band, creating the illusion that they didn't exist."
Kooning smiled and nodded. "It does make a lot of sense, doesn't it?"
"It would, except that it isn't the case here."
"So how do you feel when I make such a suggestion?"
Gibson didn't bother to pretend. "I get scared. If I give up what you call my fantasy, what do I have left? There doesn't seem to be anything else. Without it, I'm quite literally nothing."
"Don't you think this is something we are going to have to work on?"
Chapter Ten
GIBSON WOKE FROM a hideous dream into an almost as hideous reality. In the dream, the well that contained Balg had given up its dead. One by one, and then in increasing numbers, an army of slow-moving, crawling luminous corpses had scrambled painfully over the rim of the shaft, dragged themselves across the flagstones, and started clawing their way up the stairs on their hands and knees while Gibson watched in horror. He had spotted Lancer, the president, in among the crowd, along with a host of friends and faces from his past: Gideon Windemere and Christobelle; Rob Tyler, the bass player from the Holy Ghosts who'd been the most bitter about the breakup of the band; even Desiree and the woman who'd been at his apartment the day that Casillas had come calling were part of this legion of the living dead.
He only recognized the woman that he'd seen seen sacrificed by the torn black lingerie still clinging to her green, decaying flesh. Instead of crawling to the stairs like all the others, she made straight for Gibson, giggling as she dragged herself toward him, the same mindless, stoned-out, space-case giggle that he'd heard the previous night, as she had swayed on the edge of the pit, staring uncomprehendingly at her death. Her black fingernails scraped on the granite flags, and her eyes had the vacancy of madness. He wanted desperately to get away from her but he found that he couldn't move. He was flat on his back, naked, exposed, and helpless, chained by the wrists and ankles to the iron rings set in the flagstones. He twisted and struggled until his wrists were raw and bleeding, but he couldn't free himself. He also didn't seem able to close his eyes, and he was compelled to watch as she agonizingly inched nearer, leaving a slime trail like a slug or snail.
The giggle and the scrape of the nails was close to deafening, and her hands were reaching out for him. "I'm going to hurt you, Joe Gibson… and you're going to love me for it."
His screams were still ringing around the circular chamber when his mind lurched back into the real world, but he experienced none of the grateful sense of relief that usually comes after waking from a nightmare and realizing that it was all just a bad dream. To his horror, he found that he was still in the underground chamber, Balg was still in his pit, and very little was right with the world. No corpses were crawling from the well shaft and he wasn't chained to the flagstones, but he was naked, frozen and stiff and hung over. There were scars across his chest as though he'd been raked by talons, and Nephredana had vanished. He couldn't believe that he had fallen asleep in this hellish place. How the fuck had he managed that? He hadn't even been particularly drunk. The only mercy was that he was alone in the awful place, unless he counted Balg.
His clothes were scattered all around, and Gibson started hastily gathering them up, at the same time praying that Nephredana hadn't locked the door at the top of the stairs, if indeed she had left by the door at all. He didn't want to spend another moment in the green glow of Balg and was already frightened about what ugly long-term effects he might have racked up in his mind or body by sleeping in such close proximity to the monstrous entity. He saw it as the psychic equivalent to bedding down in a nuclear reactor. As he wriggled into his pants, he held off from wondering about what might have possibly happened to cause Nephredana to disappear, leaving him alone in a place like this.
Without bothering to slip into his tux jacket or tuck in the tails to his dress shirt, he started up the steps that led out of the chamber, taking them two at a time and not looking back. To his infinite relief the door opened when he tugged at it. Up to that point, his only motivation had been to get away from Balg. As soon as he was through the door, however, a whole new set of problems dropped on him with lead boots. He was not only in Raus's mansion with no readily available means to get away, but he was also deep beneath the mansion in an area that had to be fatally off limits to strangers like himself. He took the next flight of stairs slower and with a great deal more caution. The very last thing he wanted was to run into a couple of Raus's minions bringing Balg his breakfast. Gibson had no doubt that such an encounter would almost certainly result in his being included on the menu.
Fortunately, he seemed to be blessed with the kind of after-the-fact luck that allows one to crawl away intact following a disaster. The mansion was very quiet. The only noises were what he might expect from an early-morning cleanup crew, plus somewhere in the main hall someone was playing a slow walking-bass figure that was almost rock 'n' roll.
Gibson started down the main corridor in the direction of the grand hall, doing his best to look like a drunk who had woken up in a dark corner somewhere and was now trying to retrieve his bearings and get home. It hardly required any award-winning feat of acting to create the illusion.
The grand hall smelled of smoke and stale booze, and the floor was a sea of debris that was being slowly swept into more manageable piles by four men in gray overalls pushing wide industrial brooms. One of them glanced up as Gibson came across the empty dance floor.
"Where did you come from?"
Gibson rubbed his eyes and looked bleary. "That's a good question."
"You just wake up?"
Gibson nodded. "Sure did."
The man pushed the garbage in front of his broom for a few more feet. "Some party, huh?"
"What I remember of it."
"They're serving coffee in one of the marquees by the lake for stragglers like you."
Gibson slipped on his jacket. "I could use some coffee."
He glanced up at the stage, where a figure in a tuxedo was standing by himself on the empty bandstand with his back to the room, plucking thoughtfully at the strings of a standup bass. Gibson watched him for a tew moments and then shrugged. Some people never stopped. He started toward the coffee and whatever his next move might be. He had just realized that he had no money. His wallet was still in the borrowed suit in Slide's Hudson. This upset him more than anything since Balg. He seemed to be moving toward a dependency on the kindness of strangers, and this wasn't a pleasing prospect in a place where albinos appeared to be high on the list of targets for prejudice.