Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (22 page)

Or she would josh the various pimply employees at the Dunk-O-Rama in a similar spirit, saying things like, “They sure got you working, don’t they?” or, of the tax, “The old Governor’s got to have his bite, don’t he?” When asked how she wanted her coffee, she always answered with neighborly amplitude: “Well, let’s see—I guess I’m in the mood for cream today.” These things, coming from a vamp-eyed brunette in her twenties, wearing a halter top, short-shorts, and Grecian sandals, disposed the adolescent counter-hops more to sullen leers than to answering warmth. Yet she persisted in her fantasies. She even greeted Arnold, the smudged, moronic vendor at the corner newsstand, by name—this in spite of an all-too-lively and gurgling responsiveness on his part.

Now, in her recuperation, Patti took an added comfort from this vein of sentiment. This gave her sisterhood much to rally her about in their generally affectionate recognition that she was much shaken and needed some feedback and some steadying.

A particular source of hilarity for them was Patti’s revival of interest in Fat Face, whom she always insisted was their friendliest “neighbor” in their “local community.”

An old ten-story office building stood on the corner across the street from the Parnassus. As is not uncommon in L.A., the simple box-shaped structure bore ornate cement frieze work on its façade, and all along the pseudo-architraves capping the pseudo-pillars of the building’s sides. Such friezes always have exotic clichés as their theme—they are an echo of DeMille’s Hollywood. The one across from the Parnassus had a Mesopotamian theme—ziggurat-shaped finials crowning the pseudo-pillars, and murals of wrenched profiles, curly-bearded figures with bulging calves.

A different observer from Patti would have judged the budding schlock, but effective for all that, striking the viewer with a subtle sense of alien portent. Patti seldom looked higher than its fourth floor, where the usually open window of Fat Face’s office was.

Fat Face’s businesses—he ran two—appeared to be the only active concerns in the whole capacious structure. The gaudy unlikelihood of both of these “businesses” was the cause of endless hilarity among the Parnassus girls. The two enterprises lettered on the building’s dusty directory were:
hydrotherapy clinic
and
pet refuge
.

What made the comedy irresistible was that sometimes the clients of the two services arrived together. The hydrotherapy patients were a waddling pachydermous lot, gimping on bulky orthopedic boots, their wobbly bulks rippling in roomy jumpsuits or bib overalls. And, as if these hulks required an added touch, they sometimes came with cats and dogs in tow. These beasts’ wails and struggles against their leashes or carrying cages made it plain that they were strays, not pets. The misshapen captors’ fleshy, stolid faces, as if oblivious to the thrashings of the beasts, added that last note of slapstick to the spectacle.

Fat Face himself—they had no other name for him—was often at his high window, a dear, ruddy bald countenance beaming avuncularly down on the hookers in the lobby across the street. His bubble baldness was the object of much lewd humor among the girls and the pimps. Fat Face was much waved-at in sarcasm, whereat he always smiled a crinkly smile that seemed to understand and not to mind. Patti, when she sometimes waved, did so with pretty sincerity.

Because though you had to laugh at Fat Face, the man had some substance to him. He had several collection vans with the Pet Refuge logo—apparently his hydrotherapy patients also volunteered as drivers for these vans. The leaflet they passed out was really touching:

Help us Help!

Let our aid reach these

unfortunate creatures.

Nourished, spayed, medicated,

They may have a better chance

for health and life!

This generosity of feeling in Fat Face did not prevent his being talked about in the lobby of the Parnassus, where great goiter-rubbing, water-splashing orgies were raucously hypothesized, with Fat Face flourishing whips and baby oil, while cries of “rub my blubber!” filled the air. At such times Patti was impelled to leave the lobby, because it felt like betrayal to be laughing so hard at the goodly man.

Indeed, in her convalescent mellowness, much augmented by Valium, she had started to fantasize going up to his office, pulling the blinds, and ravishing him at his desk. She imagined him lonely and horny. Perhaps he had nursed his wife through a long illness and she at last expired gently…He would be so grateful!

But forward though Patti could be, she found in herself an odd shyness about this. It would be easy enough to cross the street, go up to his clinic, knock on his door…But she didn’t. A week, seven nice long convalescent days, rolled by, and she did nothing about this sentimental little urge of hers.

Then late one afternoon, Sheri, her best friend among the girls, took her to a bar a few blocks down the street. Patti drank, got happy and goofy. The two girls sat trading yo-mammas and boasts and dares, and then it just popped naturally out of Patti’s mouth: “So why don’t you go up and give old Fat Face a lube?”

“Jesus, girl, if all of him’s fat as his face is, it’d be like lube-ing a hill!”

But there was the exploit on the table between them, and they both felt too jolly and rowdy to back down. “So whatta you saying, you trick only superstars? So what if he’s fat? Think how nice it’d be for him!”

“I bet he’d blush till his whole head looked like an eggplant. Then, if there was just a slit in the top, like Melanie was saying—” Sheri had to break off and hold herself as she laughed. She had already done some drinking earlier in the afternoon. Patti called for another double and exerted herself to catch up, and meanwhile she harped on her theme to Sheri and tried to get her serious attention:

“I mean I’ve been working out of the Parnassus—what? Maybe three years now? No, four! Four years. I’m part of these people’s community—the druggist, Arnold, Fat Face—and yet we never do anything to show it. There’s no getting together. We’re just faces. I mean like Fat Face—I couldn’t even call him that!”

“So let’s
both
go up—there’s enough there for two!”

Patti was about to answer when, behind the bar, she saw a big roach scamper across a rubber mat and disappear under the baseboard. She remembered the plump body in the towel, and remembered—as a thing actually seen—the slug-fragmented skull.

Sheri sensed a chill. She ordered two more doubles and began making bawdy suppositions about the outcome of their visit. The pair of them marched out laughing a quarter hour later, out into the late afternoon streets. The gold-drenched sidewalks swarmed, the pavements were jammed with rumbling motors. Jaunty and loud, the girls sauntered back to their intersection and crossed over to the old building. Its heavy oak-and-glass doors were pneumatically stiff and cost them a stagger to force open. But when they swung shut, it was swiftly, with a deep click, and they sealed out the street sound with amazing, abrupt completeness. The glass was dirty and put a sulphurous glaze on the already surreal copper of the declining sun’s light outside. Suddenly it might be Mars or Jupiter beyond those doors, and the girls themselves stood within a great dim stillness that might have matched the feeling of a real Mesopotamian ruin, out on some starlit desert. The images were alien to Patti’s thought—startling intrusions in a mental voice not precisely her own. Sheri gave a comic shiver but otherwise made no acknowledgment of similar feelings.

They found the elevator had an out-of-order sign fixed to the switch plate by yellowed Scotch tape. The stairway’s ancient carpet was blackish-green, with a venerable rubber corridor mat up its center. Out on the street the booze in Patti’s system had felt just right; in this silent, dusty stairwell it made her slightly woozy. The corridor mat, so cracked with age, put her in mind of supple reptilian skin. Sheri climbed ahead of her, still joking, cackling, but her voice seemed small, seemed to struggle like a drowner in the heavy silence. It amazed Patti, how utterly her sense of gaiety had fled her. It had been clicked off, abrupt as a light switch, when those heavy street doors had closed behind them.

At the first two landings they peeked down the halls at similar vistas: green-carpeted corridors of frosted-glass doors with rich brass knobs. Bulbs burned miserly few, and in those corridors Patti sensed, with piercing vividness, the feeling of
kept
silence. It was not a void silence, but a full one, made by presences not stirring.

And as they climbed her sense of strangeness condensed in her, became something that gripped her by the spine. She was afraid! My God, what
of?
It was ridiculous, but when Sheri led them into the fourth-floor corridor, performing a comic bow, Patti’s legs felt cold and leaden, and carried her unwillingly.

“Come
on!”
Sheri mocked. There was something too much, something feverish about the hilarity in her eyes.

Patti balked. “It’s a bad idea. You win, I’m chicken—let’s get outta here.”

“Ha! And you call yourself a working girl! Well, just a minute here.” She took out the little pad she carried for phone numbers and addresses, and hurried down the hall with a parody butt-swinging hooker’s prowl. The doors nearest Patti said
hydrotherapy clinic
with an arrow—she watched Sheri pass other doors, sashaying all the way to the corridor’s far end. Patti stood waiting. Did she hear, ever so faintly, a kind of echo from behind these closed doors? Sooo faint, but the echoes of something resonating in a vast cavernous space? And there…ever so soft…it was almost like the piping of a flute…

Sheri stood by the last door, scribbling on the pad. She ripped off the sheet and slipped it under the door. Then she came running back like a kid who’s played a prank. Patti willingly caught her mood—they rushed giggling back down the stairs like larking twelve-year-olds. Patti wondered if Sheri too was giggling from sheer relief to be out of this building.

“What’d you write him, fool?!” Patti was elated to be back on the street, out in its noise and its colors; she felt like someone who has just escaped drowning. “You trying to steal my date?” Sheri had once tampered with a note that Patti had passed at a party, so that the trick would show up at Sheri’s house instead of Patti’s.

Sheri mimed outrage. “What you take me for? Come on for a beer, on me!”

As they walked, every outdoor breath reassured Patti. “Hey, Sher—did you hear any, like, music up there?” Even out here in the traffic noise she could call up clearly the weird piping tune, not so much a tune, really, as an eerie melodic ramble. What bothered her as much as the strange feeling of the music was the way in which she had received it. It seemed to her that she had not
heard
it, but rather remembered it—suddenly and vividly—though she hadn’t the trace of an idea now where she might have heard it before. Sheri’s answer confirmed her thought:

“Music? Baby, there wasn’t a sound up there! Wasn’t it kind of spooky?” Sheri’s mood stayed giddy and Patti gladly fell in with it. They went to another bar they liked and drank for an hour or so—slowly, keeping a gloss on things, feeling humorous and excited like schoolgirls on a trip together. At length they decided to go to the Parnassus, find somebody with a car, and scare up a cruising party.

As they crossed to the hotel, Sheri surprised Patti by throwing a look at the old office building and giving a shrug that may have been half shudder. “Jesus. It was like being under the ocean or something in there, wasn’t it, Patti?”

This echo of her own dread made Patti look again at her friend. Then Arnold, the vendor, stepped out from the newsstand and blocked their way.

The uncharacteristic aggressiveness gave Patti a nasty twinge. Arnold was unlovely. There was a babyish fatness and redness about every part of him. His scanty red hair alternately suggested infancy or feeble age, and his one eyeless socket, with its weepy red folds of baggy lid, made his whole face look as if screwed to cry. Over all his red, ambling softness there was a bright blackish glaze of inveterate filth. And moronic though his manner was most of the time, Patti felt a cunning about him, something sly and corrupt. The cretinous wet-mouthed face he now thrust close to the girls seemed, somehow, to be that of a grease-painted con man, not an imbecile. As if it were a sour fog that surrounded the newsman, fear entered Patti’s nostrils and dampened the skin of her arms. Arnold raised his hand. Pinched between his smudgy thumb and knuckle were an envelope and a fifty-dollar bill.

“A man said to read this, Patti!” Arnold’s childish intonation now struck Patti as an affectation, like his dirtiness, part of a chosen disguise.

“He said the money was to pay you to read it. It’s a trick! He gave me twenty dollars!” Arnold giggled. The sense of cold-blooded deception in the man made Patti’s voice shake when she questioned him about the man who’d given him the commission. He remembered nothing, an arm and a voice in a dark car that pulled up and sped off.

“Well, how is she supposed to read it?” Sheri prodded. “Should she be by a window? Should she wear anything special?”

But Arnold had no more to tell them, and Patti willingly gave up on him to escape the revulsion he so unexpectedly roused in her. They went into the lobby with the letter, but such was its strangeness—so engrossingly lurid were the fleeting images that came clear for them—that they ended taking it back to the bar, getting a booth, and working over it with the aid of beers and lively surroundings. The document was in the form of an unsigned letter that covered two pages in a lucid, cursive script of bizarre elegance, and that ran thus:

Dear Girls:

How does a Shoggoth Lord go wooing? You do not even guess enough to ask! Then let it be asked and answered for you. As it is written: “The Shoggoth Lord stumbleth unto his belusted, lo, he cometh heavily unto her, upon alien feet. From the sunless sea, from under the mountains of ice, cometh the mighty Shoggoth Lord unto her.” Dear, dear girls! Where is this place the Shoggothoi come from? In your tender, sensual ignorance you might well lack the power to be astonished by the prodigious gulfs of Space and Time this question probes. But let it once more be asked and answered for you. Thus has the answer been written: