BISON RECORDShad used twelve different rubber masks during the shooting of the video, changing colors, shapes, and sizes to achieve the morphing effect they were looking for, the transmogrification of an insistent date-rape hazard into a crazed and violent beast intent on rape and possibly murder.
There were only three masks aboard the Rinker tonight, and they would not be used for effect, merely for disguise.
Avery handed one of them to Kellie.
He himself pulled another one over his head and face.
Cal Wilkins put on the last one.
Kellie took the wheel of the boat.
Both men lifted AK-47s from the deck, came through the gate on the transom entry, and stepped onto the loading platform.
In the ballroom, Tamar Valparaiso was about to soar into the third stanza of “Bandersnatch.”
IT WAS STRANGEhow all tension left her the moment she began performing. She knew she had them, each and every one of them, could tell by the pin-dropping silence out there that they were hanging on every word she sang. She was hanging on to each word herself, for that matter, caught in the suspense of the moment she alone had created, waiting for whatever was going to happen next, just like when she was a kid listening to stories her mother told her, and then what, Mama, and then what?
There was the insistent B-flat note again, pulsing from the speakers left and right. She imagined that sound magnified a thousandfold, visualized herself singing on the stage of a vast arena, hundreds of thousands of fans cheering and whistling as she stamped around the stage in her flirty little tunic, wanting more of her, ever more of her, screaming for more of her.
Behind the screen on her left, she could see Jonah looking all muscular and masculine and macho in the clay-colored mask he wore for his entrance, waiting to come on, just waiting to burst onto that dance floor and tear off all her clothes.
“He took his vorpal sword in hand:
“Long time the manxome foe he sought—
“So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
“And stood awhile in thought…”
AS THEY CLIMBEDthe ladder to the second deck, Avery glanced upward to the sun deck and the pilot house above, where he could see two uniformed figures busily performing nautical tasks, half-turned away from where he and Cal tried to flatten themselves against the side of the yacht so that no one listening to the big performance in the ballroom would catch sight of them in their rubber masks. They reached the second deck of the launch undetected, paused for an instant, but only an instant, to listen to the music coming from the main deck…
“So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
“And stood awhile in thought…”…and then, AK-47s in hand, moved into the lounge.
The space was empty now, bottles gleaming behind the bar, bar stools bolted to the carpeted deck. Abruptly, the singing from the deck below ended. Now there was only a steady beat that sounded to Avery’s garage-band ears like a quarter note, a quarter-note rest, then two more quarter notes as they started for the wide mahogany staircase that led down to where Jonah, in a mask quite unlike the ones they were wearing, burst onto the dance floor.
THIS PART OF“Bandersnatch” was straight hip-hop, harsh and relentless, the repeated quarter notes in the background serving as a sort of submerged pulse that seemed slower than the Lewis Carroll lines, making the talk seem crammed over it, word after word crowding into the stanza, but always covertly in time.
“And, as in uffish thought he stood,
“The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
“Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
“And burbled as it came!”
And here indeed did Jonah come whiffling from behind that tulgey screen erected at one side of the dance floor, wearing the grotesque clay-colored mask, red pin-spots knifing the air to catch the eye sockets as if they were belching flame or spouting blood, burbling as he came.
And now they danced.
Oh, how they danced!
On the video, Tamar and the beast danced for three solid minutes while he tried but failed to defile her. Here on this small parquet floor, they danced an abbreviated version, to be sure, but none the less violent for its brevity. Silently they struggled, the insistent beat in four behind them, Jonah at first insinuating himself upon her in oily intimidation, muscles gleaming, confident of his advances and his allure, Tamar surprised and timorous, but suddenly intuiting intent and beginning to back away from him, which signaled the first blinding light change and—
The audience gasped.
Where an instant earlier there had been a neutral gray mask covering Jonah’s face, almost benign in appearance, a slight smile on the mouth…well, perhaps hewas behaving like an overly ardent suitor, perhaps hehad drunk a wee bit too much, but this playful creature certainly wasn’t anyone a girl in a creamy-white tunic need worry about, was he? Not on a lovely day like today, when the borogoves were all mimsy and the mome raths were out-grabing all over the place.
But now, in the blinding flash of an instant, that nice little fraternity brother who just a heartbeat ago had been beseeching a kiss or negotiating a copped feel was suddenly wearing a tarnished copper mask, and his genial smile had been replaced by something more closely resembling a smirk or a snarl, as if the little girl singing her heart out here had somehow offended him by spurning his advances.
And to show how annoyed he was, to demonstrate clearly and without ambiguity exactly how much he’d been insulted by her having denied his heartfelt compliments and sincere gropings, to indicate without a modicum of doubt precisely how mightily pissed off he was, with one vicious swipe of his right hand—which all at once looked rather like a claw—he slashed out at the skirt of her tunic, opening a slit from her waist to her thigh, down the lefthand side of the garment.
Tamar backed away.
He came at her again, this time clawing at the garment’s bodice, leaving in tatters a goodly portion of the fabric over her right breast. The pulsing beat behind them, insistent, a rap riff without words, a rap stroll without talk, he began stalking her now, closing and retreating, swiping and withdrawing, each new slash of either claw ripping more and more of her tunic away. Viciously, he slashed at her again—and missed! Seizing her advantage, Tamar shoved out at him, knocking him more completely off balance. He fell to the floor, and lay there as if dead, his hands and arms covering his head and his face. Tamar circled him cautiously…the quarter note, the quarter-note rest…and drew a sharp breath, breasts heaving on the quarter note again, again.
Silence.
She moved closer to him.
Bent over him.
A sudden blinding flash of light transformed the copper mask to one of sheer crimson and the creature on the floor became a fully realized raging beast that sprang to its feet and attacked again without warning.
There was no question in this last minute or so of the dance that Tamar was struggling for her life. With each slash of the beast’s claws, as more and more of her garment was torn away to reveal the flesh beneath, she appeared to grow weaker and weaker until at last the beast seemed to become a dozen or more beasts, and the assault became not some college-boy adventure in the back seat of Daddy’s Ford but a realized gang-rape in the middle of a dark municipal park.
Tamar reached out and up for something.
Both hands closed around something.
She struggled from her knees to her feet.
The beast circled warily, ready to charge her again.
Her eyes turned fully upon him, a laser beam caught in a hot follow spot.
And she rapped out the words in exultant victory.
“One, two! One, two! And through and through