Wolf Flow Read online

  K. W. Jeter

  Wolf Flow

  ***

  YOUR HEALTH IS YOUR ONLY TREASURE …

  These words buoy Mike as he recuperates in Thermalene, the shell of an abandoned turn-of-the-century spa. Pitched from a speeding Cadillac when the deal went bad, he has come to this haven at the edge of his life.

  The waters here are said to heal. But in this Oregon desert all is dry and dead-and Mike will be too, unless the waters' powers are for real.

  The desert souls and parched dreams within this book are real and frightful, and demonstrate the exceptional literary prowess that has made K. W. Jeter one of today's most important young writers.

  1993 Locus Poll Award (Best Horror/Dark Fantasy Novel, place: 10).

  ***

  From Kirkus Reviews

  Gritty, spare but rather empty horror yarn from the author of Dr. Adder, Farewell, Horizontal, Infernal Devices, etc. Vicious drug-dealer Aitch and his reluctant sidekick Charlie beat their erstwhile partner Mike, a doctor and drug addict, to a pulp, then throw him from a car in the high desert of eastern Oregon following an attempted double-cross. Brought, barely alive, to an abandoned spa resort by a concerned trucker, Mike suffers wild dreams of bodies splitting asunder, and of an ancient doctor waving a scalpel-who subsequently appears alive, bathing in a pool of the spa's sulfurous water. Mike too bathes and drinks, and is healed in body, indeed possessed of extraordinary strength. The old doctor, Nelder, tells him that the water is an ancient evil, somehow alive-and it likes Mike. Enthralled by the horrid dreams conferred by the water, Mike now attacks his girlfriend, Lindy, whom he phones for help before drinking the water, and the trucker's son, Doot, who has also helped him. He mutilates the hapless Lindy, breaks Nelder, revenges himself bloodily on Aitch and Mike, then threatens Doot-who, somehow, acquires the water's powers and rips Mike apart while himself remaining uncontaminated by the evil. Jeter can write, and his tightly controlled individual scenes succeed, often handsomely. But the overall picture-the slender plot, the repulsive yet uninteresting atrocities, uncertain character motivations, and the improbable desires of the sentient spa-doesn't add up. Gripping in patches, then, but the patches conceal a number of leaks.

  ***

  "Wolf Mow by K. W. Jeter is characterized by a somber elegance that is Jeter's own trademark. The pace never lets up. This book grabs you and pulls you irresistibly into a disturbing and splendidly delineated world. Jeter details his story with hallucinogenic clarity. Don't miss this one!"

  -Robert Sheckley

  "Jeter's is one of the most impressive bodies of work in my field today. Sometimes reminiscent of noir fiction but far darker, oppressively intense and hallucinatorily vivid, deeply felt and unflinchingly honest, these books are what I believe contemporary horror fiction should be."

  -Ramsey Campbell

  "K. W. Jeter sees through the human to the grotesque underneath, a singular kind of vision that grabs you on the first page, fascinates and terrifies you all the way through, and haunts you long after the last page is over."

  -Pat Cadigan

  "Jeter is a writer who resists categorization in genres obsessed with categorization, and there is a steely consistency in the worldview through which his fiction is filtered. It produces novels which are densely textured, bleak but with a saving note of grace, and edged with razor-sharp sarcasms generated by a refusal to accept genre tropes, to take shared assumptions at face value."

  -Paul J. McAuley

  "The best of the 'new' horror writers today."

  -Joe R. Lansdale

  ***

  DEDICATION

  To the Chocholaks-Michael and Misha, and Aaron, Adrienne, Justin and Thane.

  EPIGRAPH

  When I first heard Howlin' Wolf, I said, "This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies."

  -Sam Phillips of Sun Records

  ONE

  The car must have been doing fifty when they threw him out. One of the ropes snapped, the one binding his wrists, and his arms flew out in a pinwheeled crucifix as he hit the ground.

  A long straight road, with nothing at either end. A hawk drifted lower in the sky, then caught the cross-beam of a telephone pole. The road's asphalt wavered in the shadowless heat. The hawk furled its wings and watched for small things to eat in the dry scrub underneath the wire.

  For a few seconds the hawk's gaze checked out the thing that had rolled and flopped into stillness among the loose rocks and gravel. Whatever it was, it was still alive; the hawk's eyes scanned blood trickling through the dust on the thing's face, and the lift and fall of the breath moving inside. But it was too big. Maybe later, when it would be fresh dead, the blood still warm inside, then the hawk could tear at it with the sharp machine of its appetite.

  Charlie looked in the rearview mirror and saw the hawk sitting up there on the pole, watching. The world was yellow out here, and grey and brown-dry colors-the hawk the only scrap of life visible, and it just sat there, watching and waiting. Shit like that had a lot of patience, he figured. It'd have to.

  "Slow it down a bit." Beside him, Aitch twisted around in the passenger seat and looked back behind the car. There wasn't much to see of what they had dumped out, except a cloud of dust rolling up from the ground… Charlie could see in the mirror just the top curve tumbling about like a slow explosion. "Come on"-Aitch sounded impatient, like a child-"slow down, will ya?"

  He let off the gas and eased on the brake, allowing the car's own dust to catch up with it. They came to a stop. In the silence filling the car, broken only by the engine's idling murmur, he heard the voice coming off the tape deck.

  It sounded terrible, more of the old junk that Aitch was so nuts about. Some old black guy shouting and moaning, the music sounding as though it'd been recorded with tin cans and string. That was all they'd listened to, all the way out from the city. With Mike sitting between them, his battered head lolling back and forth, and Aitch's arm around his shoulders to keep him upright. "This is good stuff," Aitch would say, reaching out to turn up the volume. "You should like this stuff, man." Grinning into Mike's face, with the eyes rolled up to show just whites and the blood smeared and drying into a black crust all over his nose and mouth and throat. Aitch'd been having so much fun, he hadn't even cared that the blood seeping through Mike's torn clothes, and the dirt and grease, had got on his pricey Italian jacket. He'd just kept on grinning, eyes sparking, and saying funny shit.

  The dust settled behind the car. And farther back, it drifted down on something at the side of the road that looked like a bundle of rags.

  "Go back," said Aitch. He had turned all the way around in the passenger seat, rising up and leaning over the top to look through the car's rear window.

  "What?"

  Aitch gave him one of those looks. "Just go back-all right? Just put it in reverse and go back there."

  Charlie said, "Shit," under his breath. Wondering what weird crap Aitch was up to now, as he put the car in gear. He laid one arm along the top of the seat and steered one-handed, the wheels kicking up gravel where he let the car swerve off the road.

  He didn't know why he put up with some of this shit. He had fifty pounds of muscle on Aitch and was a good head taller, with a reach to match. But he also knew full well why he put up with Aitch's shit. The money that rolled off of Aitch was good, that was why. It was good as long as you didn't get stupid and greedy about it.

  Mike had forgotten about that last part. Charlie stopped the car, letting it rock and nod on its suspension. Mike was over there on the ground now, with the flies already promenading on his face.

  There was too much action around this spot, too much coming and going, for the hawk's taste. It flapped off, the tips of its wings fingering the still air. Charlie turned his head and watched the
hawk's shadow slide across the stubby weeds and bare, dry dirt.

  Aitch rummaged around in the glove compartment. These big honking American cars that Aitch preferred had miles of space tucked away inside them. Charlie didn't care for them-like driving a boat or something. You just wallowed all over the road. He'd rather squeeze his bulk behind the wheel of some little Porsche or the like. He still had a wistful remembrance of a red Alfa Romeo that Aitch had made him take back to where he'd found it, The air-conditioning in these American jobbies was nice, though. He had to admit it. They'd have been roasting, coming out here without it.

  A handful of Aitch's cassette tapes clattered onto the floorboard's carpet. Aitch was practically elbow deep into the glove compartment before he came up with what he wanted.

  Aitch held up a Polaroid camera, an SX-70 that looked like a square clam. He popped it open, and the round lens in front stared at Charlie. "Come on." Aitch pushed open the door on his side. "Let's go take a look."

  Aww, man… Charlie shook his head, his hands resting on the top of the steering wheel. "No thanks. You go ahead." Have yourself a ball. He didn't need to see what a body dumped out of a moving car looked like. They might not have been going quite fifty-he'd eased off the accelerator instinctively, out of some leftover sympathy for the poor bastard, when Aitch had wrestled the limp form up against the door, then reached past Mike for the handle, with his other hand right in the small of Mike's back. But they'd still been going a good clip when Aitch had done it.

  The worst of it was that they didn't even necessarily die when they hit the ground. Probably because they were already unconscious, or close to. If they knew what was happening, they'd naturally tense up, and the impact would probably bust them all to pieces. This way, they could just roll with it. But they were still pretty messed up by it. Like that Tony guy that they'd dropped off somewhere around here, just a couple of months ago. He'd gotten out of the car with Aitch that time to go take a look, and he still wished he hadn't.

  The camera thing was something new, though. From the car's cooled sanctuary, he watched as Aitch walked over to the bundle of rags. The dust had all settled by now, except for what was being kicked up by Aitch's shiny black shoes. A gritty brown layer had draped over Mike, pulling him down into the landscape, making him part of it, like the outcropping of rocks a few yards distant.

  Aitch put his foot on one of Mike's shoulders, pushing it back so that Mike's face rolled into view. Aitch bent down with the camera, to get a good shot. When he took his foot away, the body flopped back the way it had been.

  Finally heading back to the city-they had a long way to go. It gave him a little bit of the creeps, just a cold finger tracing up his spine, to see Aitch sitting over there, looking at the Polaroid snap in his hand, watching the image in it swim up into view. He could already see the outlines of Mike's fucked-up face, and the green blotch of the hospital-type shirt he'd been wearing, with his last name stenciled on the breast pocket.

  Aitch glanced over at him. "I decided to start keeping a scrap book-okay?" He smiled to show that he was just joking around about being on the defensive. "That all right by you?"

  Charlie shrugged, his hands loose on the wheel He didn't give a fuck what Aitch got up to. He sighed-quietly-as Aitch slid another one of his cassettes into the dash, and more rotten old music filled the car.

  ***

  The hawk wheeled back to the telephone pole and took up its station again. The big, noisy things had gone; the quiet of the high desert country had returned. That was the way the hawk preferred it.

  There was still a big thing on the ground, though. It wasn't moving. It hadn't moved for a long time. The hawk dropped down to the ground in front of it.

  It smelled like meat and blood. The noon sun hammering down had crusted the face's broken skin with black. The dark hair around one ear and across the top of the skull was stiffened into pointed fingers. One cheek was pressed against the gravel and dust, and the mouth was open, as though trying to suckle from the dry earth. A spot of red-tinged spittle had formed there; in its center was a fragment of smooth bone, sharp and red at the end where it had been broken from the jaw, then coughed out here like a flawed pearl.

  The hawk tilted its own head, looking into the big thing's eye. The lid had twitched and pulled open a fraction of an inch, showing a dull, unfocused stare. The hawk stared back into it, the same as he would to the bright bead eye of a field mouse he had trapped on the ground. A moan shuddered the big thing's ribs, and the dull eye closed. The sound hadn't been enough to alarm the hawk; after a few moments more, it flew back up to the pole.

  The thing on the ground beneath it had looked promising. Maybe a coyote would come down out of the hills and rip it into smaller pieces. The hawk had no taste for scavenging, but the blood-soaked ground would attract others, the smaller things that the hawk could swoop down upon.

  It was worth waiting around to see.

  ***

  In the cab of the diesel rig were three copies of Hustler magazine, one as old as 1979. They were part of the general mulch that had collected around and under the seats, along with flattened Dunkin' Donuts cartons and cracked styrofoam coffee containers, the big economy size, with brown sludge coagulated at the bottom; orange hamburger wrappings, shiny and translucent where the grease had soaked through; a Harold Robbins novel with the front cover torn off; a couple other strips that had cost a nickel apiece at a flea market in La Grande; and other shit. In the sleeper behind the seats was more of the same, including a black brassiere with a safety pin holding together one strap, that was a souvenir of either an ex-wife or a thirty-five-year-old road bunny working the parking lots at the Burns Brothers truckstop near Reno.

  Everything smelled like sweat and Prince Albert hand-rolleds. The driver smelled that way, too, as though he'd been steeping inside the Peterbilt's hermetically sealed box so long that the diesel stink had started to come out of the pores of his skin. The trucker had had his name painted once on the door of the cab, by a famous and expensive pinstriper named Von Dutch, but the sun had chewed away the swirling letters. Nowadays, he mainly seemed to live in the truck. There was a house somewhere, too-the remnant, along with his son, of his busted marriage. The house was good mainly for catching a shower and a three-day stretch of sleep between long-distance loads, checking out his mail, and fudging the interstate cheat sheets.

  Right now, he had to take a piss. The pneumatics on the driver's seat were about shot, and his kidneys were overstimulated from the vibration traveling up from the asphalt and concrete. The roads out here were all shit, anyway; he'd have been just as well off, he figured, barreling straight across the sand and rocks.

  The air brakes sighed as the Peterbilt came to a stop. He left the engine ticking over, its murmur and clatter the only sound in the still desert air, as he climbed down from the cab. The heels on his Dan Posts were worn round in back from working out on the accelerator and clutch pedals; it took him a moment to catch his balance when he stopped from the last chrome rung to the ground. From the open cab door above, the yellowed Robbins paperback and miscellaneous trash spilled and fluttered down.

  The trucker walked stiffly toward the rocks a few yards from the edge of the road. His spine felt as though it had been welded together into one straight rod. He was getting too old for this shit. Maybe-he'd been thinking about it a lot lately-maybe he could line up a dispatcher's job with some outfit. Sit in some air-conditioned office somewhere, letting his ass grow wide and horsing around with whatever divorcee did the bookkeeping… That'd be nice. A lizard peeped at him over the top of a rock, then scurried away, leaving an S-shaped trail in the dust.

  Over by the big rocks, he unbuttoned his fly. A little river formed at their base, flowing past the toe of his right boot. The piss rounded like a thin black snake, crawling a couple of feet before sinking into the dust. His bladder eased, signaling its gratitude. He looked around, scratching the side of his face with his free hand. He had time; this was a long o
ne.

  He drew his squint down tighter when he spotted something lying by the side of the road, some twenty, thirty yards up from where he'd pulled the truck over. He couldn't make out what it was-just a shape sprawled out in the dirt-but he had a good idea. He'd come across shit like this before, out here. He finished his business, then did up his fly. He ambled toward the thing, whatever it was, in no hurry. It wasn't going anywhere.

  As he figured-some poor sucker had been laid out here. Or thrown out: there were skid marks in the gravel, leading up to the body. The guy's arms were spread out, his face cocked into the dirt, ankles bound together with rough jute rope, a loop of the same stuff dangling from one wrist. A fly lifted from one of the red and black patches on the face and buzzed angrily away as the trucker squatted down and rolled the body over on its back.

  The guy didn't look too good, but he was still alive. Barely. The trucker could see the shallow rise of the chest, and a bubble of red at the corner of the mouth. A young guy, though you could barely tell, he'd been worked over so good. He had on jeans-the bottom few inches of one leg seam ripped open, the denim fabric darkened where the blood had soaked through-and some kind of greenish shirt without a collar. The shirt's thinner fabric had torn, showing the bruises and abraded skin across the guy's ribs. It wasn't all from getting thrown out of a car. The guy had been in bad shape before he got here.

  The trucker stood back up. His shadow fell across the guy's face. The eyes in the battered face fluttered open. They looked up and pulled into focus for a moment, then drifted back into unconsciousness.