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Change. The majority of them had slowly melted and dissolved into something stickier and nastier. All the better to fit into Greasetown. What was Greasetown’s pre-Change name? It didn’t matter. All cities had become Greasetowns if what the news said was true. My stomach grumbled and burned hungrily, but the way this case was shaping up, supper could wait. I knew that the more time I let pass the better my chances of turning around and finding myself dead.

We drove along Comte Avenue until we found 1675. Comte Avenue was in one of the besieged and embittered neighborhoods huddled just outside the border of New Garden District. Nice little place, but decay was setting in, and the residents didn’t have the money for denial. Forrester’s was a large, red brick house with warm orange windows. I told Elmo to park the car under the long, low boughs of a maple tree whose roots had slowly lifted the sidewalk at its base into a mound. I got out, smiled at Elmo, told him to wait, and then walked up to the front door. A record was playing. I heard that plain enough. The song was sad. Whoever sang it was wondering what she would do when someone, I supposed her lover, was far away. I disregarded the sympathetic wave it generated in me. Overhead, a porch light designed to resemble a coach and four was hung from a heavy brass chain near the door. I pulled my collar up, and my hat down, then knocked once, twice, three times, and waited. I heard the distant creaks and groans of movement come from inside. I waited. The door slowly opened on a chain. A thin slice of a person appeared at the crack. A cutting of eyebrow leapt up and away from a piece of eye. A sliver of mouth opened.

“What the
” The voice was thin enough to slip through. “Who?”

I held my license up. “Wildclown, I’m a private investigator. I called earlier. Dr. Avery Forrester?”

The fragment of eyebrow lowered over the eye then leapt up again. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Well, it’s a, a
” I started to reply, but it suddenly seemed as though my tongue was screw-nailed to my jaw. “I’m, uh
” I stopped talking and worked my mouth. My hands suddenly achieved independent life, the right one whipped out and pushed at the door. “A, a!” The chain banged tight. Someone had cut the power off to my mouth, like it hadn’t been paying its bill. Tommy had staged a mutiny. My vision doubled, I groaned in a very unprofessional manner. My left hand whipped down below my gun and grabbed the swollen bulge that was growing there. I seemed to retain some control of my right because with it I grappled my left away from my groin.

“N-n-not, n-o! T-T-T
” I twisted inside; my thoughts took on eight dimensions. I saw the face at the door, then, it disappeared. I reeled back and slid into a garden rake and broom, we fell in a clattering pile. “I-I-I!” was all I could manage, like a wiener dog half-crushed by a car. The left hand now made a grab for the gun; I tackled it with the right. The left whipped the gun out and turned it to my face. I pushed with all my strength against it. I felt veins popping out of my neck. My breath went out of me. I choked, and gagged, fighting for control. The gun wrenched around, the barrel gaped at me, I pushed, but it seemed the right lost impetus. The hand dropped suddenly. I squirreled my head away from the barrel of the gun. I heard three things: an enormous boom, a terrified voice screaming “No!” and a deafening roar of silence as a black vacuum engulfed me.

Chapter 52

A Maruichi band was playing a frenetic song in my head. Funny, instead of guitars and maraca’s everybody played drums. Oh there was some joker playing the xylophone but he was using the bones that covered my temples to strike the notes. I realized the band grew louder, the closer I came to consciousness, so for a moment, I stopped resisting the warm darkness that tried to cover me.

Transition.

Walls of jade-colored ceramic tile bulged in at me. The grout was very dark, rust-colored and from all corners came the reek of mildew.

“Please relax now, Jimmy.” A voice to my left. I was strapped into a dentist chair of some kind. A hunk of rubber was fixed between my teeth with a belt that circled my skull. I turned my head as far as I could. I looked up and into the blue, unshaven jowl of a man holding a pair of metal paddles with wooden grips. His nose was long and pointed, and his armadillo eyes peered out of thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He smelled of sweat and aftershave. “If I am to put these demons to rest, you must, relax. You shake the paddles each time I have applied them. Cooperate. You’ll never forget him if you don’t cooperate.” His breath stank of sugar and vomit. His teeth had rotted down to black nubs. I felt the paddles at my temples. They were cold round circles. I tried to growl or speak, but nothing came. Then, my back was arching uncontrollably as the electric current was applied.

Transition.

A brief moment of blackness, and the Maruichi band started up again. I opened my eyes, and listened to the pounding staccato music. A hazy brilliance was all I could make out, strange blurred shapes moved through it. Dancers! Morris Ackerby and Shelley Donaldson turn and turn on the dance floor out on a cruise away from their spouses. They fall in love in the sunny south when they see the Prince and Princess Charming in one another—until it all ends with Morris ejaculating prematurely, as they rut like pigs on some trash strewn beach. Eight brown-skinned street urchins watch from inside a cardboard box. “They’re all the same,” whined the dissatisfied housewife, her hands a blur on her damp pelvis. “Where am I?”

Transition.

“Christ, stop it! Stop it!” I growled between teeth clenched tight enough to shatter. The hallucinations fell like broken glass. Then I heard a voice.

“Take it easy, Mr. Wildclown. You have had a seizure of some kind. Try to relax.” Then through closed eyes I heard the voice speak to someone else. “That is his name, Wildclown? Has he ever had a seizure like this before?”

“No sir, not really like, with the gun and all.” It was Elmo. “He has moments when he feels kind of poorly, I think—sleeps standing up type of thing. But he never tried that before.”

“It’s difficult in a seizure, to draw a relationship between intent and action. Dangerous, in fact. The body does strange things when it loses control. I had a patient once who suffered temporal lobe seizures and when in the midst of one, he might do anything. On one occasion he found himself hopping up and down in the middle of the street. The honking horns brought him out of it.”

“Well,” I grumbled as I raised myself with Herculean effort. I levered into a sitting position on a couch that was covered in rough tartan fabric. “I don’t think you’ll get any action like that out of me. But we’ll see how I’m feeling later.” I opened my eyes. Elmo knelt close by, beside a coffee table stained with pale cup rings. A thin weedy individual crouched on the other side of it. He wore a stethoscope around his willow neck. From the slow cautious way he climbed to his feet, I could tell he was dead.

“Dr. Forrester, I presume.” I rubbed my temples. The Maruichi band seemed to have taken a break. “You’ll have to forgive that one. I’ve been waiting a long time to use it.”

“Yes, Avery Forrester. You had quite a moment there, Mr. Wildclown. You’re very lucky to be alive.” He smiled. The doctor was one of those lengthy, angular people. He was all bone and skin. His legs and arms grew on and on, as though he had some procrastination gene for growth that could never get around to finishing off the project. The skin on his face was sagging somewhat in a dead man’s jowl, but aside from that he appeared quite youthful. He had thick black hair, and long rubbery ears to match his nose, which continued to point accusingly at me. Dr. Forrester’s mouth was wide, and eyes deep and dark. He wore denims, a plaid shirt and a comfy wool cardigan.

“I haven’t been eating well.” I shook my head. “Do you have a drink doctor?”

“Certainly,” he said, turning to Elmo. “Friend?”

“Yes sir,” Elmo said in his Sunday school voice.

Dr. Forrester disappeared through a door he had to duck to get through. I looked around. Elmo still stared at me worriedly. I smiled at him then scanned the room. It was a cozy little place. Two walls were completely covered in books, and the far end was a fireplace. I looked at some of the titles. Great Expectations, and Last of the Mohicans sat uncomfortably cheek and jowl with medical texts: Treating Fatalities, Advanced Rigor-Treatments to Prolong Flexibility in Dead Connective Tissue, Psychology of the Deceased and Health for the Exhumed.

The doctor reappeared with a crystal decanter and three glasses on a tray. “It’s brandy.” He sat down across from me and poured us a drink. “Take it easy.” He handed me a half-full glass of the ruby liquid. “You don’t want to go too fast.”

“I just need a little anesthetic, Doc,” I mumbled, then threw the tumbler’s contents into my guts. They jumped, but steadied themselves around the burning liquor. I held my glass out. The doctor started to shake his head but poured me another anyway. I socked that one away, then felt around for a cigarette, pulled one out and lit it. Human again. I felt Elmo’s worried presence pressing the seat springs to my left.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about the daughter of Wilson and Helen Hawksbridge. Their son, Robert, is still looking for her.” I pulled the smoke into my lungs and slowly let it out. My vision was clearing. I really didn’t want to talk about the episode on the porch. I still had to sort that out. “Julie’s disappearance is linked to a case I’m working on.”

Dr. Forrester’s look of confusion was replaced by amusement as he read from my tone that I had just become a closed book. “Certainly. You understand I no longer work for them. They died so suddenly—and finally. Their son, it seems he was unnerved by my condition.” He pointed at his chest with both open hands then made one beating wing motion down toward his knees as if to say ‘look at me I’m dead.’

“I understand he was unnerved, but I don’t understand why,” I said in way of consolation. “Tell me, Doctor. Julie had become pregnant a number of times after the Change. You’re supposed to tell me how that is impossible.”

“Again?” The doctor leaned back and studied me for a moment. “Am I to go through this again?”

“I see.” I leaned forward, felt my bowels turn to water, leaned back again. “Authority was here. They questioned you.”

“Yes, numerous times, in fact. The day after the Hawksbridge’s met their end. You see, I remember it all so well, because it was the day I died.”

“How did that happen, if you don’t mind my asking?” I was eyeing the brandy.

“Oh, it was stupid. I was painting my main hallway there—you can just see the ceiling, up those stairs. It’s still unfinished. The last or what I hoped would be the last of the Inspectors left

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