The bakery's parking lot was asphalt with a sprinkle of gravel and it was secluded by cinderblock walls on three sides. There was one yellow utility light burning over the empty lot, and no sound at all from the bakery. An odour of yeasty dough and molasses lingered. Constance found the smell sickening.
Ephram had brought along a buck-knife, this time. Constance wondered why; he'd never bothered with a knife on one of these expeditions. He was just unfolding it as they stepped into the lot. The girl hadn't noticed. Naomi was looking around, giggling nervously. ''Oh wow. I guess this'll be okay. Yeah, you know some people just kind of get off on doing it in weird places and I can, you know, get off on anything, I guess that's my ability as an actress -"
Constance nodded and smiled and undressed her, right here under the yellow, moth-haunted light, and under the few stars that could be seen through the smog. Ephram was speaking, now, droning to stars behind the stars, and to the Spirit, speaking in a language that sounded like something from India but wasn't quite. The girl looked at him in sheeplike puzzlement until her eyes lit on the knife in his hand. She opened her mouth. Then shut it and looked around for her clothes and bag. Constance could see she was planning to scoop up her clothes and run. The hollowness in Constance ached at this and she almost found herself warning the girl but then a stroke of deep pain and brutal nullity swept through her, Ephram punishing her, telling her, Say nothing. It could be you and not her.
Naomi went for it, grabbed at her clothes, started to run. Ephram tripped her, though he stood seven feet away. She stumbled and fell, making a cry like a little girl hurting a knee roller skating. Ephram let her get to her feet, then he called down the Spirit thing, whatever it was. You could almost see it, though it was invisible, it displaced the air and you could just make out a flailing tracery in the murk swarming over the girl, something almost like a translucent tube but, really, more like a great mouth and throat; a mouth with feelers furring its lips and no face or head to set the mouth in, just the cupping, the wet enclosure and the quavery lines…
Closing around the girl. Her heavy breasts and belly instantly compressing. The Spirit directed by Ephram to close invisibly around her. Encompassing Naomi head to foot. Flattening her breasts, her buttocks, her shoulders and thighs. Squeezing and twisting, like wringing a wet cloth. Squeezing the girl's insides out -
Out through her own mouth. Squeezing her insides out through her mouth.
Now it looked as if she was caught in some small tornado, and there was a paroxysm of movement in the air as Naomi turned inside out, bones and cartilage, soft tissues and hard, breaking and pulping and jetting out through her mouth, like some kind of perverse birthing labour, her mouth the vagina that squeezed out the fetus of her insides as if her guts had grown in the womb of her skin all these years -
Naomi imploding and then exploding, some of her squeezed out through the ends of her fingers, niftily destroying the fingertips and their prints, each splayed finger shooting out its blood and bone like some fireworks effect before flying into red-rag flinders; some of her bursting out through the nipples, her breasts exploding from the sudden deepsea pressures Ephram had created in her body, the ripples flying off like champagne corks, the breasts emptying themselves into the air like foaming cherry-champagne bottles. Her womb expelling out through her vagina; other entrails blasting into confetti from her rectum. Most of the rest of her – including skull, brains and torso – shattered and forced out through her suddenly-flexible mouth. A hundred and sixty pounds of pulverized woman erupting, then funnelled downward by the Spirit membrane to the growing puddle on the tarmac…
And in the process pulverizing every nerve in Naomi's body, the implosion sending signals that were both monstrous and exquisite out to Ephram, sensations routed through Naomi's nervous system before it shattered, an explosion of feeling transmitted to Ephram, who absorbed most of it with a gasp of reeling ecstasy, before passing on a measured portion to Constance.
Constance felt it hit her in waves of liquid scintillations, sensations beyond pain and redefining pleasure, and she was, for a moment, satiated, her hollowness filled, the thundering and all encompassing pleasure beyond pleasure of drinking the crushed winelike essence of one complete entire human being, drinking psychically, so briefly and tantalizingly making herself whole by induction of someone else's wholeness… Naomi's whole body a swollen sexual organ crushed in the etheric vagina of Ephram's telekinetic bond with the Spirit… Crushed like a grape and like a grape squeezed from its skin, turned inside out and left in an oozing wreckage to make the asphalt wet and sticky…
A puddle of blood and broken bone and pulped flesh – and a garnish of blonde hair, like a pelt slashed from some fantastic fur bearing animal…
Constance had forgotten about the knife until Ephram made her kneel beside the wreckage of Naomi. Until Ephram took hold of Constance's left hand and flattened it out on the tarmac next to Naomi's steaming remains, so that Constance thought: At long last, he's going to kill me.
Constance was beyond struggling – especially now, in the aftermath of Wetbones, drunk on Naomi, stoned on the tsunami of sensation that had roared through her. She was pliant as a Gumby in Ephram's hands.
Let him kill her. It was a good time for it.
But instead he pressed the knife home on her ring finger, cutting it all the way through, below the second knuckle. Sawing away at the rubbery shred of skin remaining. Tossing the finger into the heap that had been Naomi – along with the gold CONSTANCE necklace he'd taken from her, weeks before.
Constance felt no pain through all this – he was pushing her cerebral buttons to prevent that, so she wouldn't thrash about – but the hideous crunch of the knife breaking through her finger bone reverberated through her, brought her horribly back to herself, and she seemed to see the wretched puddle of Naomi's pulverized flesh for the first time and thought she recognized the torn and flattened remains of a face in the midst of it, looking emptily back at her.
7
Near Malibu
There wasn't much in the girl's room. Just a bed and a window and a bathroom with a pile of paper towels for toilet paper. It was dark out, and the only light was from a naked bulb in the overhead bracket. It was a weak bulb. She could see light coming from under the locked hall door and a little coming through a crack in the wall from the next room.
She turned to look at the bed. It was bare except for a single clean white sheet, like a bed in an emergency room.
She stood in the middle of the room, hugging herself. They'd stripped her down to her underwear. They hadn't even given her a blanket.
She was pretty sure, now, that they weren't going to get her into the modeling business or the music business, either one.
Mitch had moved the dresser away from the wall, when he heard them bringing someone into the next room.
He had a feeling it would be someone new. Something about the way the voices murmured – by turns cheerful and smugly secretive. And then there was the confused quality of the girl's unanswered questions.
He could see her, in there, standing in the middle of the room, shivering though it was quite a warm night, hugging herself. A tall, slim black girl. Shifting her weight from foot to bare foot. Her long legs and small waist and the swell of her hips glossy with the meagre light.
It took him fifteen minutes with one eye pressed to the crack, shifting his head to try to see better, before he finally got a glimpse of her face.