Smoke and Mirrors

He was crying. He stank of insanity and of disappointment. He raised the knife and ran at me, and I moved to one side.

Some people just can’t adjust even to tiny changes. The barman stumbled past me, off the cliff, into nothing.

In the moonlight blood is black, not red, and the marks he left on the cliff side as he fell and bounced and fell were smudges of black and dark gray. Then, finally, he lay still on the icy rocks at the base of the cliff until an arm reached out from the sea and dragged him, with a slowness that was almost painful to watch, under the dark water.

A hand scratched the back of my head. It felt good.

“What was she? Just an avatar of the Deep Ones, sir. An eidolon, a manifestation, if you will, sent up to us from the uttermost deeps to bring about the end of the world.” I bristled.

“No, it’s over—for now. You disrupted her, sir. And the ritual is most specific. Three of us must stand together and call the sacred names while innocent blood pools and pulses at our feet.”

I looked up at the fat man and whined a query. He patted me on the back of the neck sleepily.

“Of course she doesn’t love you, boy. She hardly even exists on this plane in any material sense.”

The snow began to fall once more. The bonfire was going out.

“Your change tonight, incidentally, I would opine, is a direct result of the self-same celestial configurations and lunar forces that made tonight such a perfect night to bring back my old friends from Underneath . . . ”

He continued talking in his deep voice, and perhaps he was telling me important things. I’ll never know, for the appetite was growing inside me, and his words had lost all but the shadow of any meaning; I had no further interest in the sea or the cliff-top or the fat man.

There were deer running in the woods beyond the meadow: I could smell them on the winter’s night’s air.

And I was, above all things, hungry.

I was na**d when I came to myself again, early the next morning, a half-eaten deer next to me in the snow. A fly crawled across its eye, and its tongue lolled out of its dead mouth, making it look comical and pathetic, like an animal in a newspaper cartoon.

The snow was stained a fluorescent crimson where the deer’s belly had been torn out.

My face and chest were sticky and red with the stuff. My throat was scabbed and scarred, and it stung; by the next full moon, it would be whole once more.

The sun was a long way away, small and yellow, but the sky was blue and cloudless, and there was no breeze. I could hear the roar of the sea some distance away.

I was cold and na**d and bloody and alone. Ah well, I thought, it happens to all of us in the beginning. I just get it once a month.

I was painfully exhausted, but I would hold out until I found a deserted barn or a cave; and then I was going to sleep for a couple of weeks.

A hawk flew low over the snow toward me with something dangling from its talons. It hovered above me for a heartbeat, then dropped a small gray squid in the snow at my feet and flew upward. The flaccid thing lay there, still and silent and tentacled in the bloody snow.

I took it as an omen, but whether good or bad I couldn’t say and I didn’t really care any more; I turned my back to the sea, and on the shadowy town of Innsmouth, and began to make my way toward the city.

BAY WOLF

Listen, Talbot. Somebody’s killing my people,

said Roth, growling down the phone like the sea in a shell.

Find out who and why and stop them.

Stop them how? I asked.

Whatever it takes, he said. But I don’t want them walking away

after you stopped them, if you get me.

And I got him. And I was hired.

Now you listen: this was back in the twenty-twenties

in L.A., down on Venice Beach.

Gar Roth owned the business in that part of world,

dealt in stims and pumps and steroids,

recreationals, built up quite a following.

All the buff kids, boys in thongs popping pumpers,

girls popping curves and fearmoans and whoremoans,

all of them loved Roth. He had the shit.

The force took his payoffs to look the other way;

he owned the beach world, from Laguna Beach north to Malibu,

built a beach hall where the buff and the curvy

hung and sucked and flaunted.

Oh, but that city worshipped the flesh; and theirs was the flesh.

They were partying. Everyone was partying,

dusted, shot up, cranked out,

the music was so loud you could hear it with your bones,

and that was when something took them, quietly,

whatever it was. It cracked their heads. It tore them into offal.

No one heard the screams over the boom of the oldies and the surf.

That was the year of the death metal revival.

It took maybe a dozen of them away, dragged them into the sea,

death in the early morning.

Roth said he thought it was a rival drug cartel,

posted more guards, had choppers circling, floaters watching

for when it came back. As it did, again, again.

But the cameras and the vids showed nothing at all.

They had no idea what it was, but still,

it ripped them limb from limb and head from neck,

tore saline bags out from ballooning br**sts,

left steroid-shrunken testes on the beach

like tiny world-shaped creatures in the sand.

Roth had been hurt: The beach was not the same,

and that was when he called me on the phone.

I stepped over several sleeping cuties of all sexes,

tapped Roth on the shoulder. Before

I could blink, a dozen big guns

were pointing at my chest and head,

so I said, Hey, I’m not a monster. Well, I’m not your monster, anyway.

Not yet.

I gave him my card. Talbot, he said.

You’re the adjuster I spoke to?

That’s right, I told him, tough-talking in the afternoon,

and you got stuff that needs adjusting.

This is the deal, I said.

I take your problem out. You pay and pay and pay.

Roth said, Sure, like we said. Whatever. Deal.

Me? I’m thinking it’s the Eurisraeli Mafia

or the Chinks. You scared of them?

No, I told him. Not scared.

I kind of wished I’d been there in the glory days:

Now Roth’s pretty people were getting kind of thin on the ground,

none of them, close up,

as plump and curvy as they’d seemed from farther away.

At dusk the party starts.

I tell Roth that I hated death metal the first time around.

He says I must be older than I look.

They play real loud. The speakers make the seashore pump and thump.

I strip down then for action and I wait

on four legs in the hollow of a dune.