Skin and Bone

The ballroom looks like it was custom-made for magazines to call "sumptuous". A single room, two stories high, at the top of a tall building, two opposite walls entirely of glass looking disdainfully out across the night-lit city below. The design theme is black marble and gold Deco flourishes, glass-paned railings lining the raised areas flanking the main floor, lighting indirect of course: wall sconces, underlit counters and stairs, pure white shining squares atop marble plinths supporting elegant ice sculptures. Piled upward on the distant ceiling is a raft of helium balloons in gold and silver, black and white; they hide some device that drops a continuous but light snow of confetti.
The people in the room are there to be seen: women silently competing for the most outrageous yet subdued yet revealing yet demure, developing over the course of the evening a spiteful consensus on the winners and losers by means of telephone-game passive-aggressive whispers; men assessing the prices of each others' identical black evening wear.
On the raised stage, behind which rises a behemoth golden Deco mushroom cloud, the contempo-swing band plays one of those numbers that sounds sort of forties, maybe thirties, some kind of old-fashioned; sedate background music with a name nobody knows and a tune nobody will remember. There's no dancing yet; it's too early to be drunk enough to couple up and slow dance to that sort of soft casual sweet nothing of a tune, although the trays of champagne circulating the room (in proper flutes, to preserve the sparkle and capture the nose, not in broad shallow margarita glasses practically designed to ruin the experience) are helping to work on that.
This is the time before the affair really starts, the time to roam the room alone or in small flocks, finding out who is or isn't there, enthusiastically greeting friends and even more effusively greeting enemies, cruising the buffet but not taking anything yet (though it doesn't count if something small is popped into your mouth; you haven't started eating until something is on a plate), making sure that everyone who matters has seen how finely you're dressed.
Rick hates everything about it. With no sense of irony, he considers the entire crowd phonies, glad-handing loci of wealth accumulation whose every interaction is a strategic maneuver. At least tonight he doesn't have to herd a camera crew around the crowds, trying to get five seconds of facetime from celebs who treat him like Kryptonite. He's officially unofficial tonight, not a member of the press, just a very minor media face with enough connections to score a ticket to the city's swankiest New Year's party.
But he's got his eyes and ears open anyway, and his phone at the ready. Aside from the gossamer-brained heiresses, aging leading men, and musicians du jour, this annual shindig draws in some of the real players -- string-pullers, serious money, elected servants of the public. Elite of the city, as far above consequence as the penthouse party was above the streets, getting drunk and festive. No telling what might happen. Could be quite photogenic.
And if nothing of real interest happens, at least the food ought to be good. Possibly the best spread in the entire city tonight.
Now here she comes, as though summoned by the thought of a well-arrayed buffet, sleeking through the crowd straight toward him with the broad, welcoming smile of a hungry predator: Pamela Norman, the city's beloved Princess of Hospitality, second only to Queen Stewart herself.
"Richard, darling! Such a delight to see you here!" she gushes, voice warm and sincere as a woodgrain veneer, closing in on him for an embrace crinkling with stiff lace trim. She draws back, sliding her silk gloves down the sleeves of his formal jacket to take his hands. "I hope you're not here on duty, ace reporter?"
She laughs brightly, as though the very idea is just too absurd, but her hands tighten their grip enough for him to feel the points of her nails against his palm.
"Just a private citizen tonight, Pam." He extracts his hands, carefully, and holds them up in a surrender position.
Her eyes, blue as sapphire and sharp as diamond, pierce through his innocent expression with preternatural ease. "Sure you're not chasing scandals?" she asks in a still playful, but darkening tone. "Or… oh, hahaha, Richard, are you following the rumors about this party?"
He hesitates, for the narrowest hair of an instant, but she catches it. "Oh good heavens dearie, are you really expecting… what, Danny De Carlo passing a big sack of money over to the Commissioner? Mayor Dyson in a hot tub with the Eastside High cheer team?
"Or, better yet! Maybe at midnight we'll roll out a special table and sacrifice an unbaptized baby to Satan! Or welcome our alien overlords with a round of ceremonial Kool-Aid? Oh, Richard, you really have to get yourself out of the podcast slums and back to real journalism."
"I'm only here to enjoy the party," he says stiffly.
"Please. When have you ever 'just enjoyed' a party?"
"I liked that dip you took in the pool at the Brooker wedding."
Her smile vanishes. Her eyes freeze. "Well. You've proved me wrong. Tabloid asswipes and internet mudholes are where you belong. You broke a couple of real stories once, twenty years ago, but all you've been good for since then is celebrity crotch shots and coasting around the daytime talk shows on what little value your name still has."
She rotates on her heel and moves away, snapping back over her shoulder. "Enjoy the party, Mr. Camden."
Rick stands there a moment, holding his half-empty champagne glass, rifling his mind for a comeback, but clearly the victory is hers.
The party is all right, at least. There are people Rick knows here, some he doesn't know personally but is happy to meet, even some who are star-struck to meet a low-level celebrity like himself. And as expected, the food is fantastic.
The buffet is of a scale, variety, and quality sufficient to incite a revolution: an entire table of nothing but different pastas and sauces, a line of roasts and poultry each with an attendant ready to carve off portions, veritable lagoons of seafood; all overseen by gleaming guardians of chiseled ice. Decoratively carved pineapples, artfully arranged fishing nets, six-foot palm trees spaced evenly along each row of tables, and miniature volcanoes holding sauces or acting as chocolate fountains create a tropical theme, for some reason.
Cruising along to survey the bounty before deciding what to pile his plate with first, Rick's eye is caught by the caviar spread -- a little private beach of its own, with the caviar bowls and surrounding dishes of blinis, lemon segments, crème fraîche, and other accouterments nestled into a bank of sand. Enticed, he spoons a small amount onto a toast point to sample it.
Miraculous. His eyes close as the flavor, nutty and rich with just the slightest hint of sea in the salt, bursts across his tongue. He considers himself fairly skilled at assessing caviar, which is distinct from many things he considers himself skilled at, being something he's actually skilled at. And this is caviar of the highest quality he's encountered in his life. This stuff must cost a good apartment's rent per ounce. There's no doubt what he's going to start with on this buffet, and he sets to dishing a good-sized glob of the luscious glossy black spheres onto his plate along with smaller dabs of all the trimmings.
He brings the plate over to a thick black marble planter of convenient height for sitting, grabbing along the way a second glass of champagne. He has no intention of getting plastered tonight, but two or three flutes of bubbly are certainly well within his limit, and only such a top-notch beverage can do justice to the lofty quality of the caviar.
He goes through two plates before electing to start sampling the rest of the buffet, vaguely embarrassed by how much of the expensive treat he's eaten; but after all, there are two enormous bowls on the buffet, so it's not like he's hogging it all. Even so, it would be silly to fill up on just one thing, however tasty, when so much else is on offer.
He's in the midst of spooning some small meatballs in an unknown but tangy golden-brown sauce onto his plate when he finds himself swaying a little, suddenly light-headed. Moving his head creates a vertiginous tilting sensation, as though his cranium were on a rocking boat while his feet remained on solid ground. He makes a hasty retreat to the planter bench, where he plops heavily down, a sudden sheen of sweat gleaming on his forehead.
Sitting still is a little better, but not by much. It feels as though the entire building is slowly rotating along all axes, so much so that he has a strange, vivid image of the entire ballroom separating from the building and drifting free into strange dimensions of space. Gazing blankly around the room with eyes gone watery, he seems to see everything distorting along with the twisting of the room, squashing and stretching as they spin. Faces in the crowd melt between strange forms, masks blossoming out from their eyes before transforming to unnatural animal visages then back, and are they staring at him? Can they see something's wrong with him? Is he making noise?
He must be. A wave of strange crawling feelings sweep up his body, flows up to his head and snaps off, leaving him a moment of clearer vision. The murmur of concerned voices breaks through the chittery rattle in his ears and he can see that a small ring of party-goers are looking at him in fact. He tries to say something to them but realizes that he's already making a weird, choking warbling noise, and he can't seem to stop.
Something -- not something, a person -- it looks like something else for a moment but as the carrot-orange and seafoam-green colors loom closer it comes into focus. Pam, it's Pam Norman, she's coming close and taking his hand, waving the gathered rubberneckers away.
"Kkkkkayyy, goooooo ahhhhhn, Aiiiiiiiii goooott dthissss…" she moans, but then another shuddering snap hits Rick and it all becomes clear again. Pam is sitting beside him on the planter, gently patting his cheeks. "Rick. Rick, look at me. Look at me. Are you here? Come on, dear."
As if rising from deep water Rick finds his mind clearing, somewhat, at least enough to see Pam and comprehend what she's saying, though things behind her still seem warped and somehow threatening. "Jesus, Pam, I don't, I can't… I don't feel good… the fuck is in that champagne? Someone dosed me?"
"Shh-shh-shh-shh, calm down, it's okay." She puts one hand behind his head and holds it up straight. "Just relax, it will pass."
"Pass? What's passing? What's going on?"
Pam shakes her head with a rueful but affectionate smile. "Oh, Rick… always diving in before scouting the landscape. So eager to get into the Skyline Gala looking for dirt. Well, now you're in."
Rick stares at her, wide-eyed and angry, as his vision begins to slip again. In his view Pam wobbles and ripples, as though her skin is a pond with strange fishes swimming beneath it. "What? What the fuck, Pam, can't you just give me a straight answer? Is thish -- diss -- idss dthiss -- "
His tongue is clumsy, as though it had broken into pieces all trying to work together to speak but not doing very well. It feels too big for his mouth, and sort of hairy. He coughs, feeling a wad of phlegm fly out but too scrambled to care, and tries again. "Is. This the whole. Deal then? Some kind of drug party? Or do -- do -- just -- they -- what, do they just drug some people an, and, and then point n laugh? The hell!"
Pam shakes her head, or maybe it's just his warped vision, and gives him what might be a sympathetic smile, chuckling softly. "Don't try to play detective now, Rick."
She turns away and says something to one of the waitstaff. In Rick's eyes it seems as though she rotates much too far, with a fluid pivot as though her top half wasn't really connected to her hips, and that strange fishpond ripple flows in a twirl beneath her dress. She flows back toward him.
"We're going to get you some water, just stay here and drink it. You'll feel better before long." Her head flexes upward on a neck that seems too loose and checks the clock on the wall. "It'll be midnight soon. Everything will be clear after the countdown. Trust me, it's easier just to show you than to try to explain."
She stands and gives his hand a reassuring pat. "Just sit tight. You'll feel better soon."
All he can do is shake his head in disbelief as she steps backward, as though worried he might be about to fall over, then moves away. Someone carefully hands him a glass of water and helps him bring it to his mouth, and although he feels like he'll surely just throw it right back up, instead the first swallow bursts on him like a miracle and he quickly chugs most of the glass. It really does feel better. The coldness seems to wash down not just his throat and stomach but to flow all through his body, down to his feet.
A second glass and he feels nearly human again, senses cleared, aware of his surroundings. He feels weird still, but it's more as though he'd had too much to drink and maybe a bit too much weed as well, which is worrisome since he hasn't done either, but at the same time the feeling is tranquilizing. The relief of coming down from whatever the hell kind of bad trip that was also helps mellow his mood, and soon he's able to act normal enough that all the helpful people hovering around him feel safe leaving him and the gawkers drift away with nothing much left to gawk at.
Since Pam had told him just to sit tight, naturally the first thing he does is to stand and wander away. He takes his glass of ice and tells himself that all he's doing is looking for more water, but really he's searching the crowd with the vague, cloudy idea of looking for some kind of clue -- someone who looks suspicious, some kind of goddamn answer.
He can feel the unsteadiness of his steps, but by this point he's hardly the only visibly off-balance guest; the party has begun to heat up with liquor and who knows what else, and the band has kicked up to higher-energy numbers, attracting a central nexus of vigorous dancers to the floor.
Everything, including himself, still seems a little off-kilter. The only frame of reference he can think of regarding the way things seem as he walks is that movie trick of attaching a camera to an actor focused on his face, so the world behind him appears to tilt and jerk around as he moves. His senses seem clear, not warped and foggy like they had been, but that only makes the sense of wrongness sharper. 
It was one thing for shapes and colors to shift around strangely when the whole of his sensorium was unmistakably fucked up, but quite another to be seeing weird shit in high-definition crystal-clear vison.
It starts with quick flashes of oddness at the edges of his sight, vanishing as he turns to look directly like one of those little eye-floaters, but as the alarms grow louder in the back of his mind he becomes alert to more and more. A rat's head poking out from the pocket of a man's jacket and sniffing around. A woman with a snake sliding slowly around her neck. There seems to be an increasing number of insects flitting around the room.
All that is bizarre but within the terrain of the natural, but then he's stopped dead by the sight of a young lady in a scarlet evening gown. He stares until she turns and notices. With a little nod and smile, trying his best to make it look like he'd just been looking her way in passing, he quickly shuffles on, mind reeling.
Something is seriously wrong. Either he's hard-core hallucinating or there were multiple small shapes undulating beneath that girl's skin, long squiggly thing crawling up and down her arms. After that he starts seeing similar things everywhere. He soon realizes that most of the attendees have similar grotesqueries going on beneath the cover of their skin, dozens of faces writhing with the unmistakable outlines of squirming vermin, a party of people seemingly full of snakes and roaches and mice.
Looking at the buffet table is a hideous mistake. The banquet is alive and crawling. Rats and mice scrabble among the cheese boards. Worms and centipedes squiggle around in bowls of pasta. Serpents slither through sideboards of sausage. Unable to look away, enthralled with horror, he finds himself drawn inevitably, inescapably, toward what he least wants to see.
The caviar. Oh God, the caviar. The gleaming dark spheres, they --
He can't see it. He can't think it. He runs, or tries to, stumbling and pushing through the partygoers, deaf to their angry noises, he slams into the wall beside the bathroom door, jerks it open, runs inside. There's no time to get into a stall. The sink is closer. He braces his hands on the counter and heaves.
What emerges from his throat is a flow of bile, the remains of some pizza he'd had earlier, and a couple hundred shiny black spherical spiders.
A hoarse scream rips from his throat, but the sound is strange and staticky. As though it were being made by hundreds of spiders scraping their legs together to emulate a human voice. He slams the faucet handle and frantically sloshes the squirming black widows down the drain.
Unwillingly he raises his eyes to the mirror. Countless small spheres writhe beneath his skin. A fringe of black wiry legs are tickling between his lips, and when he tries to push the horrible things out, he realizes that his tongue has been replaced with a mass of spiders clinging tightly together in unholy cooperation, simulating the shape of his tongue n bumpy approximation with the curved shells of their abdomens.
Even as he watches, more legs emerge from the outer corner of his left eye and twitch for purchase, trying to pull a bulbous body out into the open.
Another howl of horror echoes off the porcelain as he lunges away from the mirror and crashes back out the door. The ballroom floor has become a landscape from the sweating night terrors of Bosch, people dancing and drinking and laughing with a carefree lack of concern for the creatures crawling all over their bodies. The band leader is singing in a raw bluesy voice, wasps flowing from his lips with every tone and swarming in preternaturally disciplined skirls around his body, as he brings the raucous barrelhouse-jazz number to a close with a savagely joyful crow.
When you're on that crowded dance floor
With those red hot saxophones
It ain't no SIN to take off your SKIN
And DANCE AROUND IN YOUR BOOOOOONES!
No sooner does the band behind him finish the last flourish and he bows with thanks to the audience, the chant begins to rise from those who've been minding the TV monitors spaced around the walls:
TEN!
NINE!
EIGHT!
Now most of the voices in the room have caught on and joined in. The chorus still has sounds of human voices but layered over them is an array of croaks and shrieks and grating buzzes and even of blatting toad calls.
SEVEN!
SIX!
Something touches Rick's shoulder and he damn near leaps twenty feet in startled terror, his shriek lost amid the raucous crowd. It's Pam, or most of her.
Rats skitter up and down her body, in and out of her dress, chasing each other through the wreck of her formerly elaborate hairdo. She laughs merrily and a pair of shiny bulbous eyes is peeking between her teeth.
"Oh, Ricky, what's eating you?" she says in a voice of choral squeaks.
FIVE!
FOUR!
THREE!
Rick screams again and again, feeling the flow of spider bodies dripping from his lips with each cry, as Pam approaches and slips one hand behind his back, the other onto his shoulder, swaying as though inviting him to dance.
TWO!
ONE!
The room explodes in jubilance, noisemakers and confetti poppers and air horns filling the air, and around the rim of the city below fireworks are let loose. All across the ballroom floor, couples and people who happen to be standing next to each other exchange kisses, letting their vermin crawl over each other's bodies.
"Happy New Year, Rick," Pam squeal-says, tenderly. "Let's let bygones be bygones."
She turns her head up, clearly expecting a kiss, and though Rick tries to draw back in revulsion, her hand goes from his shoulder to the back of his head and he gives in. Her tongue's wiggly nose and tickly whiskers tease across the slick carapaces of his; his spiders flow across her cheeks as her rats scurry through his hair.
Some of the strange voices of the room have been singing, or approximating, "Auld Lang Syne", but another chant has begun to overwhelm and replace the song, starting low and growing as more of the guests join: "Un-Mask! Un-Mask! Un-Mask!"
The chant rises and rises, and Rick breaks the kiss to look aside to the loudest nexus of it, where it seems the crowd are mostly chanting to encourage the girl in the scarlet dress, who is vamping and making coy I-can't-hear-you gestures and dripping worms all over the stage.
"Unmask?" he asks softly, realizing that he's gained control of his strange spider-voice. "But this isn't a masquerade?"
Pam laughs again, the eyes of the rats in her eyesockets twinkling with amusement. "Oh, Rick, you're still so new to this. It's not some silly piece of cloth or paper they're talking about."
On the stage the girl, squealing with naughty laughter, has drawn her dress up to her waist. As she pulls it up further and her breasts pop out beneath it the crowd goes wild, fresh flights of flies and bats skirling up like graduation hats.
Others throughout the crowd are similarly disrobing, or pulling the clothes off each other, the humanity draining from the collective chanting and celebratory voices in favor of pulsing, rhythmic animal sounds.
The girl onstage is completely nude, but her gathered admirers continue to chant "Un-Mask! Un-Mask! Un-Mask!"
Suddenly Rick gets it, just moments before the girl raises her hands to her scalp and pulls the skin apart neatly down the middle. Worms flow from the bloodless wound and she continues peeling it down, making a strip-tease of it, sensuously drawing the skin of her arms off and shimmying her hide down past her hip-bones. There's nothing between skin and bone but worms, bunched in coordination like muscles, animating her skeleton. They've eaten her flesh, eaten her hollow.
Rick understands. His skin is just a wrapper now, a mask, for hiding among the humans. What used to be inside him has been a buffet for the spiders.
He sees the police commissioner shucking out of his gray-haired old costume, revealing a fake beergut made of clustered eels. Mayor Dyson is a pack of lizards, which gets a sharp laugh from Rick.
As the skins come off, the puppet skeletons are groping and embracing, melding their flocks in the motions of passion, sinking down to the floor, divested of masks and shame.
The kitchen doors open and the chefs, along with the waitstaff, come out with their bones nice and tidy, their vermin carefully marshaled into close human semblance, wearing their smart uniforms and toques over their skin-free forms. Surrounding the buffet tables, they take up the platters, bowls and trays, and begin flinging the contents over the crowd, which grunts and squeals in appreciation, consuming the splattering feast even as they thrust and thrash in lusty undulations.
But Pam forcibly turns Rick's head away from the carnal spectacle, back to her, eye-rats looking directly into whatever arrangement might currently serve him as eyes, and sliding off his jacket.
He's got no resistance left in him. The spiders know what they want and he sees no reason to rebel. Hastily he gets his arms out of the jacket and together they get his shirt unbuttoned and he shucks out of that too, then with his arms freed he pulls on the straps of her dress and tugs them down, and her skin splits conveniently at the shoulders, and the long sleeves of her arms peel off the writhing and coupling rats below, and together they too slide down to the floor, and the snakes and roaches and millions of ants of their neighbors meet and mingle and explore, but each skeleton-centered swarm remains distinct and aware and it's Pam and her rats and Rick and his spiders who join together and exchange their selves amid the crawling living carpet of the ballroom floor.
Category:Food
Category:RTWC23
Category:Animals