Complete Stories (33 page)

Pally and Meg and been doing the ritual a few times a week now for several months. The giant grex held some sixty mues. Blessedly, it seemed satisfied with its life, though there was no telling what it thought about while resting in its locker room. One thing for sure, no one was going to investigate. Just throw a bunch of food in there once a day, and keep the door shut.

Now the huge group-mutant was slithering across the gymnasium floor, sliding closer and closer to the dais holding Pally and the three mues. There were eyes scattered all over the grex’s surface, and there were bunches of hands here and there. Towards the front was a moist slit, the thing’s tooth-filled mouth.

“The body of
Christ
,” bellowed Pally. “The mystical body of Christ!” Not wanting to take the chance of being eaten or absorbed, he shouted a last blessing and hurried over to Meg’s side.

“
Kwa
,” cried the porcupine-flesh-fingers mutant on the dais, “
Bah Kwa!
” The one with no real head made a sort of high whistling sound and now the grex was at the edge of the dais.

Each time they did the giant leech ritual, the leech looked more developed, more integrated. At first it had been easy to pick out the individual members of the grex: they’d been like the constituent parts in one of those old paintings where an allegorical face, say “Harvest” or “Spring”, is made up of the fruits and flowers of the season. The giant leech had started as “Radiation”, made up of dozens of skungy freaks. But now the grex was fully integrated, all smoothed out.

A web of veins lay under the pink, wet skin. There were eyes all over…like raisins in a pie. The bottom of the thing was covered with hair. Everyone’s scalp had migrated there to give the grex something to “walk” on. The hairs all pointed backwards for traction, like mohair on the bottom of a cross-country ski. There was a row of ears along the grex’s median line, and bunches of hands both fore and aft.

Meg’s stomach was hardened from two years’ work with Pally and the mues, but the sight of the giant leech always made her retch. Its muscular symmetry was somehow worse than the ragged deformities of the mues. Meg leaned forward, gagging, hoping she wouldn’t actually vomit.

“Stop it,” muttered Pally, right at her side. “Control yourself, Meg.”

The grex was on the dais now. It arched itself up over the three waiting mues like a croquet wicket. The long slit-mouth was only for feeding…the thing had another method for absorbing new members, a disgusting, vaguely sexual procedure. As the grex arched over the three naked mues, the one with no head began whistling louder, whistling like a tea-kettle. Perhaps it was in pain.

The hair on the grex’s bottom was suddenly wet, wet and dripping. Some of the constituent mues’ stomach tissues were down there to produce hydrochloric acid. The acid drizzled on the three naked forms, eating at their skins. Just as his face began to burn off, the kid with no legs shot Meg a hard glance, a look that said, “I know why you’re sorry for me, but you’ll never know why I’m sorry for you.”

Once again, Meg wondered who was really using who. In a sense, she and Pally were the mues’ servants…even though Pally thought it was the other way around. More than anything, Pally needed power and adulation. The normals, the people in the clans, thought Pally was a fool, a liar and a bully. Pally needed to have the mues worship him. The clanspeople didn’t think about Pally very much. If they spoke of him at all, it was only with weary contempt. The clans didn’t hate Pally, but Pally hated the clans. Oh, did he hate the clans! The less they cared about him, the more he hated them. Sometimes he would preach to the mues about leading a crusade, a holy war against the unbelievers. Until now it had all been just so much talk. But with the giant leech…or with
ten
leeches …

The skin was pretty well gone from the three mues now, and the grex began slowly to lower itself down on them. Its wet bottom-hair parted to expose a long red welt, a strip of naked tissue that the new mues could merge into. One of them cried out something like, “It is finished,” and then it was. The great leech lay flat on the dais, calmly pulsing.

They all sang a hymn then, and the leech swayed to the beat. Standing well over to one side of the gym, Pally gave a closing harangue and sent the congregation on its way. Meg handed him the cattle prod and went to stand by the exit door, trying to get a few more donations from the mues as they left.

“Okay, Meg,” called Pally as soon as the hall emptied. “Help me herd it back.” Pally didn’t like getting close to the big leech. He held the cattle prod out like someone holding a crucifix up to a vampire.

Just as Meg started towards Pally, the leech shuddered and slid off the dais, its long supple body flowing like water. Pally jerked convulsively, knocking loose the plug of the cord that led from cattle prod to his car outside. Moving faster than it ever had before, the leech flowed over the prod and put itself between Pally and the exit. Pally froze and shot Meg a desperate glance.

“Back to your room, guys,” shouted Meg, putting some iron in her voice. She strode angrily towards the leech. “Turn around and go back in. We’ll feed you double rations tomorrow.”

The leech raised its front end up in a questioning way. Its broad mouth was slightly parted, revealing two carpets of teeth. Its eyes shifted from Pally to Meg and back again.

Meg took another step forward, and stamped her foot commandingly. “BACK! Go back to your room, and I’ll get you a whole pig to eat tomorrow!”

Pally picked that moment to scream. His scream was lurid and juicy. The leech went for the sound. Moving so fast that it blurred, it darted over and clamped its mouth over Pally’s head and shoulders. His screaming stopped almost right away. The leech humped itself up and bolted the rest of Pally down into its gullet. It was like watching a snake swallow a rat.

Meg ran outside, locking the door behind her. As soon as the door closed, she heard the heavy thud of the leech throwing itself against it.
SPLANG
. The door shuddered.
SPLANG
.

Pally’s big car was out there running, still feeding juice into the cattle prod’s disconnected cord. Cooter, a black guy Meg’s age, was sitting behind the wheel.

“What happened?” he yelled.

“The leech got Pally,” answered Meg, getting in the car. “We better get out of here.”

The door gave then, and the leech came speeding out. Cooter peeled out, but not fast enough. The leech flowed up over the car and the engine stalled. With the mass of sixty mues, the leech had them pinned in place. For a moment nothing happened, and then the creature’s hairy underside began sucking at the windows, trying to pop one loose.

“Don’t open the door, Cooter, whatever you do.”

Cooter unholstered his .45 and fired a few shots up through the car roof. Acid began drizzling in. Now the leech was thumping on the windows instead of sucking at them. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the windshield. Cooter leaned on the horn.

Suddenly the leech slid off them. All the noise had drawn the rest of Pally’s private army out of their barracks. Five beefy guys that looked like good food. The leech wolfed down two of them, and the other three headed for the river. Cooter got the car restarted, and sped across the wood bridge that led from Pally’s island to the shore.

“Stop here,” said Meg. “Let’s burn the bridge.” Moving quickly, they got a drum of gasoline out of the car’s trunk and slopped it all over the bridge’s planks. They got back on shore and fired the bridge up. The sudden
WHUMP
of ignition singed Meg’s eyebrows and threw her onto her back. In the firelight, they could see the leech racing along the island’s shore, looking for the other men or looking for a way to shore. It tried several times to go into the water, but each time the current forced it back.

“It’s too heavy to swim,” said Cooter. “And the water’s too fast and deep for it to wade.”

The great leech reared itself up by the shore and began silently swaying back and forth, jerky in the fire’s light.

“It’s worried,” said Meg. “Good. It’ll starve to death out there. Thank God it’s not big enough to splash across.”

They got in the car to drive on up the hill into the city. But the road was full of dark figures. Mues. The grex was telepathically calling all mues, and they were flocking down to the river. Meg and Cooter stopped the car and stared back towards the island.

One by one the mues launched themselves into the current and floundered over to Pally’s island. One by one they went and joined the body of the great leech. In half and hour it would be two or three times as big—big enough to crawl across the river.

Cooter put the car into gear and began edging forward through the torrent of mues.

“Where to, Meg?”

“As far as the gas’ll take us.” She leaned across and checked the gauge. “Let’s shoot for Richmond.”

Cooter eased the car up the hill that led down to the river. The mues thinned out at the top, and he stepped on the accelerator.

Bye-bye, Killeville, goodbye.

============

Written in Spring, 1982.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, November, 1986.

In the summer of 1982 I started writing
Twinks
, the only science-fiction novel which I never finished. I often dream that there is yet another science-fiction novel which I wrote quickly and had published in a small, fugitive edition. The elusive extra dream book is something like
The Hobbit
, and my hurried editor is Craig Shaw Gardner, who was my editor at
Unearth
. Well, that’s not
Twinks
in any case,
Twinks
was a punk post-WWIII book with radiation mutants. “Bringing in the Sheaves” is the slightly altered third chapter of
Twinks
.

Pally Love is of course modeled on Lynchburg’s then-famous TV evangelist Jerry Falwell, and the giant leech is his so-called Moral Majority movement.

I got the tape in Heidelberg. A witch named Karla gave it to me.

I met Karla at Diaconescu’s apartment. Diaconescu, a Romanian, was interesting in his own right although, balding, he had a “rope-throw” hairdo. We played chess sometimes in his office, on a marble board with pre-Columbian pieces. I was supposed to be a mathematician and he was supposed to be a physicist. His fantasy was that I would help him develop a computer theory of perception. For my part, I was hoping he had dope. One Sunday I came for tea.

Lots of rolling papers around his place, and lots of what an American would take to be dope-art. But it was only cheap tobacco, only European avant-garde. Wine and tea, tea and Mozart. Oh man. Stuck inside of culture with the freak-out blues again.

Karla had a shiny face, like four foreheads clustered around her basic face-holes. All in all, it occurred to me, men have nine body-holes, women ten. I can’t remember if we spoke German or English—English most likely. She was writing a doctoral dissertation on Jack Kerouac.

Jack K. My main man. Those dreary high-school years I read
On the Road
, then
Desolation Angels
and
Big Sur
in college,
Mexico City Blues
in grad-school and, finally, on the actual airplane to actual Heidelberg, I’d read
Tristessa
: “All of us trembling in our mortality boots, born to die, BORN TO DIE I could write it on the wall and on Walls all over America.”

I asked Karla if she had weed. “Well, sure, I mean I will soon,” and she gave me her address. Some kind of sex-angle in there too. “We’ll talk about the beatniks.”

I phoned a few times, and she’d never scored yet. At some point I rode my bike over to her apartment anyway. Going to visit a strange witchy girl alone was something I’d never done since marriage. Ringing Karla’s bell felt like reaching in through a waterfall, like passing through an interface.

She had a scuzzy pad, two rooms on either side of a public hall. Coffee in her kitchen and cross the hall to look at books in her bedroom. Dope coming next week maybe.

Well, there we were, her on the bed with four foreheads and ten holes, me cross-legged on the floor looking at this and that. Heartbeat, a book by Carolyn Cassady, who married Neal and had Jack for a lover. Xeroxes of letters between Jack and Neal, traces of the long disintegration, both losing their raps, word by word, drink by pill, blank years winding down to boredom, blindness, O. D. death. A long sliding board I’m on too, oh man, oh man, sun in a meat-bag with nine holes.

Karla could see I was real depressed and in no way about to get on that bed with her, hole to hole, hole to hole. To cheer me up she brought out something else: a tape-cassette and a cassette-player. “This is Jack.”

“Him doing a reading?”

“No, no. It’s really him. This is a very special machine. You know how Neal was involved with the Edgar Cayce people?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t know.” The tape-player
did
look funny. Instead of the speaker there was a sort of cone-shaped hole. And there were no controls, no fast-forward or reverse, just an on-off switch. I leaned to look at the little tape-cassette. There was a tape in there, but a very fine and silvery sort of tape. For some reason the case was etched all over in patterns like circuit diagrams.

”…right after death,” Karla was saying in her low, hypnotic voice. “Jack’s complete software is in here as well as his genetic code. There’s only been a few of these made…it’s more than just science, it’s magic.” She clicked the tape into the player. “Go on, Alvin, turn Jack on. He’ll enjoy meeting you.”

I felt dizzy and confused. How long had I been sitting here? How long had she been talking? I reached for the switch, then hesitated. This scene had gotten so unreal so fast. Maybe she’d drugged the coffee?

“Don’t be afraid. Turn him on.” Karla’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. I clicked the switch.

The tape whined on its spools. I could smell something burning. A little puff of smoke floated up from the tape-player’s cone, and then there was more smoke, lots of it. The thick plume writhed and folded back on itself, forming layer after layer of intricate haze.