House of Skin, page 2
A man he needed to become if he ever hoped to find him.
Eddy stood and leaned against the wall. It was here, he knew that much, that special psychic odor he needed. His father’s trail began here. But where? Where was the clue he needed to begin the hunt?
Think, he told himself, think.
Just let it come to you.
And what happened then, he wasn’t sure. Thoughts cavorted through his mind, meaningless little ditties that were flat and lifeless. His respiration increased, his heart hammered in his chest, his blood flowed with a rushing din that was like thunder.
My God, what is this?
But questions weren’t to be answered. He’d come seeking truths and now, in ways known only to the house itself, those truths were coming. It was like the delicate fabric of reality itself was beginning to open up, slit by razored fingers, insane, whispered secrets pouring forth. Everything he needed to know, or at least a good deal of it, was filling the air around him. His head was raging with a high, discordant buzzing. It was only a matter of deciphering it. The answers were here, all around him. The answers to what his father was and where he’d gone.
The ceiling seemed to be coming down on him … something dark as oil was seeping from it in a swirling, fighting cloud of blackness. And it was alive with squirming, worming, wanting life and it had secrets to tell.
And Eddy was listening.
He saw his father as a boy plucking the wings from insects. There were well over a dozen in a cardboard box on his knees. He was attempting to reattach them as if his fingers were blessed with impossible surgical gifts. But no, they wouldn’t go back on. He was angry. He dumped the box out and squashed the pitiful things under his shoe. He was angry that he couldn’t take them apart and then put them back together.
Eddy was grinning.
And here was another scene planted in his head. His father as a young man stooped over a corpse in an anatomy lab, picking and prodding at it with a knife, willing it to do something. Trying to breathe life into it, to make it overcome its cold simplicity.
Now here were answers, indications of the man and how he’d finally chosen his life’s calling. But it was all so purposely vague, so terribly ambiguous. Eddy needed more to go on.
The shadows were gathering around him now, whispering in his ears, taunting him, teasing him, telling him things he couldn’t understand, didn’t want to know, but had to. He could feel pressure against him, an avalanche of being, of need, of want, of love, of hate. Oh yes, he was the catalyst here. They’d been waiting for him, waiting for this moment of moments and now it had come. They danced and played and clutched and clawed at him, these shadows that were not shadows at all. They had him now and if he was sorry he’d come, it was far too late. The darkness became a black, greased womb, a palpitating orifice that opened wide and spilled a flood of crawling, creeping things that swarmed over him: lice and maggots, rats and pale crabs, undulant leeches and blind squirming roaches. They covered him, buried him, encased him, physical representations of the shifting shadows themselves. He felt them feed in through his ears, his mouth, his nose, his ass, crowding in him, showing him the sights and sounds of broken lives and pain without end. He tried to speak, but they were in his throat, black and mulling, suffocating him with their ideas, their dreams. He tried to think, but they flooded his brain, pushing his thoughts aside, forcing their needs and wants and desires on him.
He was helpless.
They pulled him from the room, dragging him over the cold and dusty floor, peeling his clothing free, screaming in his ears, kissing his will away. They made him creep about, a naked and deranged thing. They led him to the attic door and pushed him through, up the dirty stairs and into the vaultlike space above where … where—
Where he could finally see what they were so desperate to show him.
Skins.
Yes, the multitude patchwork of skins tacked to the sloping walls like grim tapestries—the graying pelts of men and women, of dogs and cats and rats and even apes. All of them peeled free in a single sheet from their respective anatomies with the utmost surgical precision by a man who was a highly skilled dissector, a skinner of no little talent, who fitted them all into a great puzzlework of hides upon the walls. A gruesome work of art. Eddy stared around him at skins with faces and scalps, even fingers and toes completely intact.
It was his father’s work. Here were the membranes of all his victims and the animals he had experimented upon before them. Each had been meticulously divorced of their skin, what lay beneath dissected and reduced to basal anatomy—skeletal systems, nervous systems, vascular systems. It was the work of a diabolical genius, some had said after the house was entered by the police, a demented medico, an insane surgeon … but they hadn’t understood the purpose, the technique, the ritual.
Eddy blinked his eyes and it was all gone.
His father’s workshop was just a series of dusty attic rooms and alcoves now. There was nothing left but a single antique mirror whose surface was thick with grime. The shadows had shown him what he wanted to see, hinted at the dark path he must soon follow.
He licked his lips, tried to swallow. “I don’t understand,” he managed. “What does it mean … what …”
They all seemed to rage in his head at once, screaming and shrieking. Not only the voices of men and women, but the whimpering of dogs and the pained mewling of cats, the squeal of rats and the shrilling of vivisected apes. It filled his head in a cacophony of noise.
Yet, through it all, he heard the voice coming up the stairs.
“Eddy?”
He couldn’t hope to answer.
“Eddy? What are you doing up there?”
Cassandra. Jesus, he shouldn’t have brought her! This place was too dangerous, too alive, too undead for her. She could never understand this. The touch of the shadows would drive her insane.
There was a jolt of electricity in them, a raw and pungent stink of ozone and he knew they wanted her just as his father had wanted them. He knew that he was the vessel with which they would get her.
His brain rioting with their lust and rage and insanity, he crawled down the steps until he lay gasping in the dust of the second floor, trying to breathe, trying to reason, trying to do anything but what he was doing: curled-up mindlessly in a fetal position, his thighs wet with his own piss and his mouth tasting of his own vomit.
Cassandra, Cassandra …
This was all his doing. Maybe he brought her here on purpose and not by accident, knowing, somehow, that an innocent would be needed. Her blood and life would be needed. Maybe this vague psychic trail he’d been following had demanded it. And now the trail ended here and in ending would only begin anew.
But what were these shadows that knew so much of his father as if they’d been witness to his every action, his every misdeed? They were more than shadows, more than bits of enfolding ghosting darkness, they were his victims. The parts of them that could never leave this plane. The anger, the shock, the need, the wanting of life, of living, the shattered minds and residual hate of the human condition. Yes, they were all around him and they wanted much more. If he wanted to know what path his father had taken, then they were the only ones who could show him, because they knew, they had to know. And the price of their services wouldn’t be cheap, for only the negativity of what they’d once been was left behind in these cloying shadows. They were killers now, deranged and hateful bloodsuckers and soul-eaters. Sadists and perverts and abusers. A roll call of the damned.
“Eddy?”
They rushed towards her voice with him in tow.
“Please …” he whispered.
(you want answers we need something in return …)
A knife was pressed into his hand.
* * *
Cassandra was coming up the steps now.
She’d heard something from above—voices, whispers—she wasn’t sure. It could’ve just been Eddy talking to himself again. Yet, she didn’t think so. And in this awful place, she would take no chances. Her head was bright, her nerves at peace. Heroin could do such things for you. She felt she could take on the world and best it without so much as panting.
“Eddy? What are you doing up there?”
No answer. Did he need help?
“You all right?” She was standing at the top of the steps now.
Eddy was coming at her, rushing at her like the wind, enveloped in a mist of starving blackness. And he was coming for her … with a knife.
She tried to cry out, but the blade had already opened her throat and she went down, tumbling down the steps and landing in a bleeding heap. She stared up at the monster coming for her with eyes mirroring confusion and no little amusement.
I’m cut, she found herself thinking. I’m fucking cut.
Her head was so fogged with narcotic delights, she couldn’t be sure of anything. Maybe it was a game. If it hadn’t been for the spreading wetness at her throat, she might have believed it.
“I’m sorry,” Eddy said. “I’m so sorry.”
Cassandra’s lips opened and closed, but no words came forth, only blood.
Eddy took the knife up again and let it dance over her flesh, watching her secrets, red and ripe, spill out over the floor in a wash of death until he was drenched in her wine. He grew hard at the feel and the smell of the blood. His heart was hammering, his breath gasping from his lungs.
He let out a scream.
“They made me do it,” he explained to her staring face as the shadows soared and screamed about him. “They wouldn’t tell me anymore without sacrifice. You understand that, don’t you, my love? They’re so hungry, my God, they’re ravenous. But with blood … oh, then they’ll talk, then they’ll tell me …”
Cassandra didn’t seem to mind.
Her lips were silent, her thoughts quiet, her pain and addiction finally at an end. She lay there, wrapped in a cloak of red dreams, cooling slowly to nothingness.
Eddy kissed her wet lips and ran his fingers over her like he used to as the red milk of death pooled around them. He eased her into stillness and soothed her life away as she’d done so many times with his worries and frustrations. Even in death, he supposed, she understood, she knew and still loved him the way only real lovers can. Never really dying, never really fading away.
But there was no more time for talk or sweet nothings or tender postmortem embraces. The shadows were starving. They demanded to be fed.
In a frenzy, Eddy gave them what they desired, hacking at Cassandra and bathing in her blood, swimming in it like a hungry fluke, orchestrating her mutilation like a conductor with a red dripping baton until the cold meat concerto was complete, until he was collapsed on top of her, welded to her with drying blood and entrails.
The shadows wove around him, heavy, drunken, and sated. There were no more screams or laughter or demands. They were bloated now, their death-bellies full of the seed of life.
Eddy lay over the violated corpse of Cassandra, muttering prayers and remembering something that he was certain was not his own memory: a clown. A clown? I never knew any clowns. But the memory persisted. A clown that came into his room at night, an obscene thing in yellow silk pantaloons and an orange ruffled shirt with pom-poms down the front. The clown’s face was painted white, the eyes black holes, the mouth thick-lipped and smeared with red lipstick. It danced around the room before it covered him with its weight as he was doing to Cassandra now. The clown’s breath stank of whiskey. Its fingers were cold. It smelled of sweat and filth and pig semen.
No, no, no, no, not that—
He shook it from his head. It seemed real, yet it was not his memory. And if it wasn’t his that meant it belonged to—
Don’t think it. Don’t ever think it.
He sighed. The memory was gone.
The shadows. They would help him find his father, they would lead him there, they would take him home like a lost child by the hand. Together they would travel those same dark and enlightening roads as his father had and ultimately, they would be with him, in soul, spirit, and flesh.
“So tell me,” he urged them later when Cassandra’s corpse was cool, drying, and sticky. “Tell me what I need to know.”
The shadows encircled him sluggishly, ready to tell tales and point the way. They began to speak and Eddy Zero, the boy who’d sprang from the loins of a deranged and delusive man, listened and learned. They told stories in voices like the wind, the stars.
When they were finished, the stink of old blood permeating the air, they fell back and began to dream.
And out on the street before that desolate and disturbed house, a wicked and depraved laughter fell like rain on the walks.
“AHA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA—”
And whether it came from Eddy or the crumbling pipes of that sullen house, it was anyone’s guess.
* * *
It had to start somewhere, so it started here. Like winter starts with a few flakes of snow or spring with a few drops of rain, it began. Eddy knew the way, he knew the dark byways he would travel, through what gutters and boneyards and theaters of suffering his search would take him.
And he went willingly.
MEMOIRS OF THE TEMPLAR SOCIETY (1)
* * *
In the days of his youth, James Stadtler sought out the underbelly of society. He kept the company of criminals, perverts, fetishists, and prostitutes. All those who had sampled life’s darker pleasures and lived to tell the tale. It was in this way he met Zero and Grimes. They were both older than he—professional men, it turned out—and equally as jaded by the experiences life and ready cash had brought them. There had to be a better way.
And together, they would find it.
* * *
He met them quite by accident in a Chinatown brothel. They had just finished with their evening’s amusement and were hanging about the bar, drinking and talking in low tones. Stadtler paid them little mind. He was waiting for his oriental flower and wouldn’t leave until he sampled her wares.
They sidled up next to him and sat quietly for a time.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” one said. “Name’s Grimes. This is my associate Dr. Zero.”
“What of it?” Stadtler said.
“And you’re …”
“Stadtler. Jim Stadtler. Again, what of it?”
The two men looked to each other and laughed. Grimes was short and stout, balding with twinkling blue eyes. Zero was tall and thin, dark-eyed, with an immaculately trimmed beard. They both wore business suits and overcoats.
“Is there something funny about that?” Stadtler asked.
“We find your manner … refreshing,” Zero told him.
“Do you?”
“Oh yes.”
Grimes ordered more drinks for them all. Stadtler didn’t mind; he barely had enough money to cover his whore, let alone all the booze he was sucking down. If these two queers wanted to pay, so be it. He’d gladly talk with them if they covered expenses.
“Do you have any favorites here?” Grimes asked.
“The Asian women,” he told them. “Particularly Lee Chang. I’ve been through the rest. Whites, blacks, Indians. I’m tired of them all. Even Lee is getting boring. But what else is there?”
“Yes, what else?” Grimes said.
He and Zero exchanged another of their secretive looks.
Stadtler was waiting for the inevitable proposition he was certain was coming. Hopefully, they’d buy him more drinks before he had to turn them down. He figured Grimes was at least fifty; Zero somewhere in his forties. It was a novel approach they’d developed, he thought, hanging around whorehouses and trying to pick up men. It all seemed rather absurd when there were dozens of places males of all ages could be had for a price or for free.
“We know of your plight,” Zero assured him. “There isn’t a house of pleasure in this damn town we haven’t milked dry for entertainment.”
Grimes nodded. “A man reaches a point where he needs something new.”
Here it comes, Stadtler thought.
“Before you bother going any farther,” he said, “I should tell you I’m not interested.”
“In what?” Grimes asked. He looked slyly amused.
“This isn’t a proposition,” Zero said.
“Isn’t it?”
“If it was a young man we wanted, sir, the city’s full of better pickings than you, I dare say.”
Stadtler felt terribly foolish. He’d as much as insulted them and all on the part of an over-inflated ego. “My apologies,” he said. “I thought—”
“Think nothing of it.”
“What do you do for a living?” Grimes inquired, ordering more drinks.
“Private security,” Stadtler said. “You’re a doctor, I take it?”
Zero smiled. “I hold that degree, but I’m not in practice. I sometimes lecture in anatomy at UCSF.”
“If it pleases him,” Grimes said.
Stadtler studied Zero. His clothes were tailored, his nails manicured. Everything about him spoke of money. A man, apparently, who only worked when it pleased him. A dream life.
“And you?” he said to Grimes.
“I teach mathematical theory at the university.”
“And you get together from time to time to enjoy certain pleasures?”
“Weekly.”
Zero added, “But it seems there’s less and less to be had. Our little circle of two is growing tiresome. We need fresh blood.”
“New thoughts on the nature of experience.”
“And you want me to join?”
“Maybe.”
“And what do we call our little group?” Stadtler asked.
Grimes and Zero locked eyes again.
“The Templar Society,” Zero said.
“As in the knights of history?”
“As in the way they were reputedto be,” he explained, “not as they truly were.”
“Interesting.”
A silence passed between the three as each debated this possible partnership.
“I’m game, if you still want me,” Stadtler said.
“What do you think?” Grimes asked.
“He’ll do nicely.”
Eddy stood and leaned against the wall. It was here, he knew that much, that special psychic odor he needed. His father’s trail began here. But where? Where was the clue he needed to begin the hunt?
Think, he told himself, think.
Just let it come to you.
And what happened then, he wasn’t sure. Thoughts cavorted through his mind, meaningless little ditties that were flat and lifeless. His respiration increased, his heart hammered in his chest, his blood flowed with a rushing din that was like thunder.
My God, what is this?
But questions weren’t to be answered. He’d come seeking truths and now, in ways known only to the house itself, those truths were coming. It was like the delicate fabric of reality itself was beginning to open up, slit by razored fingers, insane, whispered secrets pouring forth. Everything he needed to know, or at least a good deal of it, was filling the air around him. His head was raging with a high, discordant buzzing. It was only a matter of deciphering it. The answers were here, all around him. The answers to what his father was and where he’d gone.
The ceiling seemed to be coming down on him … something dark as oil was seeping from it in a swirling, fighting cloud of blackness. And it was alive with squirming, worming, wanting life and it had secrets to tell.
And Eddy was listening.
He saw his father as a boy plucking the wings from insects. There were well over a dozen in a cardboard box on his knees. He was attempting to reattach them as if his fingers were blessed with impossible surgical gifts. But no, they wouldn’t go back on. He was angry. He dumped the box out and squashed the pitiful things under his shoe. He was angry that he couldn’t take them apart and then put them back together.
Eddy was grinning.
And here was another scene planted in his head. His father as a young man stooped over a corpse in an anatomy lab, picking and prodding at it with a knife, willing it to do something. Trying to breathe life into it, to make it overcome its cold simplicity.
Now here were answers, indications of the man and how he’d finally chosen his life’s calling. But it was all so purposely vague, so terribly ambiguous. Eddy needed more to go on.
The shadows were gathering around him now, whispering in his ears, taunting him, teasing him, telling him things he couldn’t understand, didn’t want to know, but had to. He could feel pressure against him, an avalanche of being, of need, of want, of love, of hate. Oh yes, he was the catalyst here. They’d been waiting for him, waiting for this moment of moments and now it had come. They danced and played and clutched and clawed at him, these shadows that were not shadows at all. They had him now and if he was sorry he’d come, it was far too late. The darkness became a black, greased womb, a palpitating orifice that opened wide and spilled a flood of crawling, creeping things that swarmed over him: lice and maggots, rats and pale crabs, undulant leeches and blind squirming roaches. They covered him, buried him, encased him, physical representations of the shifting shadows themselves. He felt them feed in through his ears, his mouth, his nose, his ass, crowding in him, showing him the sights and sounds of broken lives and pain without end. He tried to speak, but they were in his throat, black and mulling, suffocating him with their ideas, their dreams. He tried to think, but they flooded his brain, pushing his thoughts aside, forcing their needs and wants and desires on him.
He was helpless.
They pulled him from the room, dragging him over the cold and dusty floor, peeling his clothing free, screaming in his ears, kissing his will away. They made him creep about, a naked and deranged thing. They led him to the attic door and pushed him through, up the dirty stairs and into the vaultlike space above where … where—
Where he could finally see what they were so desperate to show him.
Skins.
Yes, the multitude patchwork of skins tacked to the sloping walls like grim tapestries—the graying pelts of men and women, of dogs and cats and rats and even apes. All of them peeled free in a single sheet from their respective anatomies with the utmost surgical precision by a man who was a highly skilled dissector, a skinner of no little talent, who fitted them all into a great puzzlework of hides upon the walls. A gruesome work of art. Eddy stared around him at skins with faces and scalps, even fingers and toes completely intact.
It was his father’s work. Here were the membranes of all his victims and the animals he had experimented upon before them. Each had been meticulously divorced of their skin, what lay beneath dissected and reduced to basal anatomy—skeletal systems, nervous systems, vascular systems. It was the work of a diabolical genius, some had said after the house was entered by the police, a demented medico, an insane surgeon … but they hadn’t understood the purpose, the technique, the ritual.
Eddy blinked his eyes and it was all gone.
His father’s workshop was just a series of dusty attic rooms and alcoves now. There was nothing left but a single antique mirror whose surface was thick with grime. The shadows had shown him what he wanted to see, hinted at the dark path he must soon follow.
He licked his lips, tried to swallow. “I don’t understand,” he managed. “What does it mean … what …”
They all seemed to rage in his head at once, screaming and shrieking. Not only the voices of men and women, but the whimpering of dogs and the pained mewling of cats, the squeal of rats and the shrilling of vivisected apes. It filled his head in a cacophony of noise.
Yet, through it all, he heard the voice coming up the stairs.
“Eddy?”
He couldn’t hope to answer.
“Eddy? What are you doing up there?”
Cassandra. Jesus, he shouldn’t have brought her! This place was too dangerous, too alive, too undead for her. She could never understand this. The touch of the shadows would drive her insane.
There was a jolt of electricity in them, a raw and pungent stink of ozone and he knew they wanted her just as his father had wanted them. He knew that he was the vessel with which they would get her.
His brain rioting with their lust and rage and insanity, he crawled down the steps until he lay gasping in the dust of the second floor, trying to breathe, trying to reason, trying to do anything but what he was doing: curled-up mindlessly in a fetal position, his thighs wet with his own piss and his mouth tasting of his own vomit.
Cassandra, Cassandra …
This was all his doing. Maybe he brought her here on purpose and not by accident, knowing, somehow, that an innocent would be needed. Her blood and life would be needed. Maybe this vague psychic trail he’d been following had demanded it. And now the trail ended here and in ending would only begin anew.
But what were these shadows that knew so much of his father as if they’d been witness to his every action, his every misdeed? They were more than shadows, more than bits of enfolding ghosting darkness, they were his victims. The parts of them that could never leave this plane. The anger, the shock, the need, the wanting of life, of living, the shattered minds and residual hate of the human condition. Yes, they were all around him and they wanted much more. If he wanted to know what path his father had taken, then they were the only ones who could show him, because they knew, they had to know. And the price of their services wouldn’t be cheap, for only the negativity of what they’d once been was left behind in these cloying shadows. They were killers now, deranged and hateful bloodsuckers and soul-eaters. Sadists and perverts and abusers. A roll call of the damned.
“Eddy?”
They rushed towards her voice with him in tow.
“Please …” he whispered.
(you want answers we need something in return …)
A knife was pressed into his hand.
* * *
Cassandra was coming up the steps now.
She’d heard something from above—voices, whispers—she wasn’t sure. It could’ve just been Eddy talking to himself again. Yet, she didn’t think so. And in this awful place, she would take no chances. Her head was bright, her nerves at peace. Heroin could do such things for you. She felt she could take on the world and best it without so much as panting.
“Eddy? What are you doing up there?”
No answer. Did he need help?
“You all right?” She was standing at the top of the steps now.
Eddy was coming at her, rushing at her like the wind, enveloped in a mist of starving blackness. And he was coming for her … with a knife.
She tried to cry out, but the blade had already opened her throat and she went down, tumbling down the steps and landing in a bleeding heap. She stared up at the monster coming for her with eyes mirroring confusion and no little amusement.
I’m cut, she found herself thinking. I’m fucking cut.
Her head was so fogged with narcotic delights, she couldn’t be sure of anything. Maybe it was a game. If it hadn’t been for the spreading wetness at her throat, she might have believed it.
“I’m sorry,” Eddy said. “I’m so sorry.”
Cassandra’s lips opened and closed, but no words came forth, only blood.
Eddy took the knife up again and let it dance over her flesh, watching her secrets, red and ripe, spill out over the floor in a wash of death until he was drenched in her wine. He grew hard at the feel and the smell of the blood. His heart was hammering, his breath gasping from his lungs.
He let out a scream.
“They made me do it,” he explained to her staring face as the shadows soared and screamed about him. “They wouldn’t tell me anymore without sacrifice. You understand that, don’t you, my love? They’re so hungry, my God, they’re ravenous. But with blood … oh, then they’ll talk, then they’ll tell me …”
Cassandra didn’t seem to mind.
Her lips were silent, her thoughts quiet, her pain and addiction finally at an end. She lay there, wrapped in a cloak of red dreams, cooling slowly to nothingness.
Eddy kissed her wet lips and ran his fingers over her like he used to as the red milk of death pooled around them. He eased her into stillness and soothed her life away as she’d done so many times with his worries and frustrations. Even in death, he supposed, she understood, she knew and still loved him the way only real lovers can. Never really dying, never really fading away.
But there was no more time for talk or sweet nothings or tender postmortem embraces. The shadows were starving. They demanded to be fed.
In a frenzy, Eddy gave them what they desired, hacking at Cassandra and bathing in her blood, swimming in it like a hungry fluke, orchestrating her mutilation like a conductor with a red dripping baton until the cold meat concerto was complete, until he was collapsed on top of her, welded to her with drying blood and entrails.
The shadows wove around him, heavy, drunken, and sated. There were no more screams or laughter or demands. They were bloated now, their death-bellies full of the seed of life.
Eddy lay over the violated corpse of Cassandra, muttering prayers and remembering something that he was certain was not his own memory: a clown. A clown? I never knew any clowns. But the memory persisted. A clown that came into his room at night, an obscene thing in yellow silk pantaloons and an orange ruffled shirt with pom-poms down the front. The clown’s face was painted white, the eyes black holes, the mouth thick-lipped and smeared with red lipstick. It danced around the room before it covered him with its weight as he was doing to Cassandra now. The clown’s breath stank of whiskey. Its fingers were cold. It smelled of sweat and filth and pig semen.
No, no, no, no, not that—
He shook it from his head. It seemed real, yet it was not his memory. And if it wasn’t his that meant it belonged to—
Don’t think it. Don’t ever think it.
He sighed. The memory was gone.
The shadows. They would help him find his father, they would lead him there, they would take him home like a lost child by the hand. Together they would travel those same dark and enlightening roads as his father had and ultimately, they would be with him, in soul, spirit, and flesh.
“So tell me,” he urged them later when Cassandra’s corpse was cool, drying, and sticky. “Tell me what I need to know.”
The shadows encircled him sluggishly, ready to tell tales and point the way. They began to speak and Eddy Zero, the boy who’d sprang from the loins of a deranged and delusive man, listened and learned. They told stories in voices like the wind, the stars.
When they were finished, the stink of old blood permeating the air, they fell back and began to dream.
And out on the street before that desolate and disturbed house, a wicked and depraved laughter fell like rain on the walks.
“AHA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA—”
And whether it came from Eddy or the crumbling pipes of that sullen house, it was anyone’s guess.
* * *
It had to start somewhere, so it started here. Like winter starts with a few flakes of snow or spring with a few drops of rain, it began. Eddy knew the way, he knew the dark byways he would travel, through what gutters and boneyards and theaters of suffering his search would take him.
And he went willingly.
MEMOIRS OF THE TEMPLAR SOCIETY (1)
* * *
In the days of his youth, James Stadtler sought out the underbelly of society. He kept the company of criminals, perverts, fetishists, and prostitutes. All those who had sampled life’s darker pleasures and lived to tell the tale. It was in this way he met Zero and Grimes. They were both older than he—professional men, it turned out—and equally as jaded by the experiences life and ready cash had brought them. There had to be a better way.
And together, they would find it.
* * *
He met them quite by accident in a Chinatown brothel. They had just finished with their evening’s amusement and were hanging about the bar, drinking and talking in low tones. Stadtler paid them little mind. He was waiting for his oriental flower and wouldn’t leave until he sampled her wares.
They sidled up next to him and sat quietly for a time.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” one said. “Name’s Grimes. This is my associate Dr. Zero.”
“What of it?” Stadtler said.
“And you’re …”
“Stadtler. Jim Stadtler. Again, what of it?”
The two men looked to each other and laughed. Grimes was short and stout, balding with twinkling blue eyes. Zero was tall and thin, dark-eyed, with an immaculately trimmed beard. They both wore business suits and overcoats.
“Is there something funny about that?” Stadtler asked.
“We find your manner … refreshing,” Zero told him.
“Do you?”
“Oh yes.”
Grimes ordered more drinks for them all. Stadtler didn’t mind; he barely had enough money to cover his whore, let alone all the booze he was sucking down. If these two queers wanted to pay, so be it. He’d gladly talk with them if they covered expenses.
“Do you have any favorites here?” Grimes asked.
“The Asian women,” he told them. “Particularly Lee Chang. I’ve been through the rest. Whites, blacks, Indians. I’m tired of them all. Even Lee is getting boring. But what else is there?”
“Yes, what else?” Grimes said.
He and Zero exchanged another of their secretive looks.
Stadtler was waiting for the inevitable proposition he was certain was coming. Hopefully, they’d buy him more drinks before he had to turn them down. He figured Grimes was at least fifty; Zero somewhere in his forties. It was a novel approach they’d developed, he thought, hanging around whorehouses and trying to pick up men. It all seemed rather absurd when there were dozens of places males of all ages could be had for a price or for free.
“We know of your plight,” Zero assured him. “There isn’t a house of pleasure in this damn town we haven’t milked dry for entertainment.”
Grimes nodded. “A man reaches a point where he needs something new.”
Here it comes, Stadtler thought.
“Before you bother going any farther,” he said, “I should tell you I’m not interested.”
“In what?” Grimes asked. He looked slyly amused.
“This isn’t a proposition,” Zero said.
“Isn’t it?”
“If it was a young man we wanted, sir, the city’s full of better pickings than you, I dare say.”
Stadtler felt terribly foolish. He’d as much as insulted them and all on the part of an over-inflated ego. “My apologies,” he said. “I thought—”
“Think nothing of it.”
“What do you do for a living?” Grimes inquired, ordering more drinks.
“Private security,” Stadtler said. “You’re a doctor, I take it?”
Zero smiled. “I hold that degree, but I’m not in practice. I sometimes lecture in anatomy at UCSF.”
“If it pleases him,” Grimes said.
Stadtler studied Zero. His clothes were tailored, his nails manicured. Everything about him spoke of money. A man, apparently, who only worked when it pleased him. A dream life.
“And you?” he said to Grimes.
“I teach mathematical theory at the university.”
“And you get together from time to time to enjoy certain pleasures?”
“Weekly.”
Zero added, “But it seems there’s less and less to be had. Our little circle of two is growing tiresome. We need fresh blood.”
“New thoughts on the nature of experience.”
“And you want me to join?”
“Maybe.”
“And what do we call our little group?” Stadtler asked.
Grimes and Zero locked eyes again.
“The Templar Society,” Zero said.
“As in the knights of history?”
“As in the way they were reputedto be,” he explained, “not as they truly were.”
“Interesting.”
A silence passed between the three as each debated this possible partnership.
“I’m game, if you still want me,” Stadtler said.
“What do you think?” Grimes asked.
“He’ll do nicely.”
