NECROM

Nephredana stopped the car. She leaned over and deftly tied his bow tie. "This is it, Joe. Take a deep breath and smile nicely; we're going to mix it up with the jet set."

The White Room

DR. KOONING TOOK off her glasses, and for her it was a gesture of triumph. "So basically you wanted to sleep with Elvis Presley?"

Gibson shook his head wearily. "I never even met Elvis."

"But in your dreams you wanted him."

"I wanted to be him, I wanted to be Elvis Presley. That's a very different thing. You shrinks have sex on the brain."

Her gaze was level. "If it seems that way, it's probably just a reflection of the patients we treat."

Gibson glared. "I've really had enough of this shit."

"You seem unusually hostile today."

"I do?"

"Yes, you do."

"Maybe that's because I don't think you understand the motivations of an artist."

"An artist?"

Gibson lost his temper. "Yes, a fucking artist."

He'd promised himself that he wouldn't do it, no matter how much Kooning tried to provoke him, but he could feel his control slipping away.

Kooning smiled her irritating smile."But you're not an artist, are you, Joe? You're only an artist in your fantasy. I think we've already established that."

Gibson silently cursed himself. He had run slap into the essential Catch-22 of his situation. He couldn't take the high ground on the strength of what he'd been because, as far as Kooning was concerned, he had never been anything.

She was leaning forward in her chair. "I think we should talk about this, don't you, Joe?"

Chapter Nine

YANCEY SLIDE WAS standing by himself at the bottom of the gentle grass slope that led down to the lake, smoking one of his thin black cheroots. But it was a somewhat different Yancey Slide from the individual that Gibson had seen in Ladbroke Grove. The gunslinger garb had been replaced by smooth, lounge-lizard evening dress, a white tuxedo jacket over black pants and a purple cummerbund, that made him look like a disreputable James Bond. Only the black sunglasses remained, concealing the frightening demon eyes. His hair was slicked back, and Gibson was amused to notice that his bow tie was undone, hanging loose. Maybe, even in eighteen thousand years, Slide hadn't learned to tie one, either. Slide also wasn't blue; like Nephredana, he had retained his white-boy demon pallor.

As Gibson and Nephredana approached, his back was toward them. He seemed to be staring thoughtfully out across the mirror-smooth water, but while they were still a few yards away, he appeared to sense them and turned. "So you brought him?"

Even though the demon eyes were hidden, Gibson still felt a definite chill when Slide looked at him. Nephredana made a sweeping gesture that seemed to present Gibson for Slide's approval. "He was already getting into trouble with the whores on the Strip."

It was happening again and Gibson wasn't having any. He wasn't prepared to be treated as a specimen any longer, and he quickly took a step forward. "Good evening, Mr. Slide."

Slide smiled and his dark glasses flashed with reflections of the party lights. He seemed to sense what Gibson was feeling. "Good evening, Mr. Gibson. It was nice of you to come at such short notice."

"It was nice of you to send the lady to fetch me."

Slide laughed. "Oh, the lady was very keen on the idea herself."

Gibson's eyebrows climbed. "She didn't mention that to me."

Nephredana shook her head. "Ignore him, Joe. He's just pushing your buttons."

Slide removed the cigar from his mouth. "I expect you could use a drink after your trip out here."

Gibson nodded cautiously. He trusted this affable new playboy version of Slide even less than the sinister longrider in Lad-broke Grove. "You're right, I could definitely use a drink."

Slide indicated a nearby floodlit marquee.

"Shall we walk?"

They started up the slope, away from the lakeside. Now it was Slide's turn to make a sweeping gesture. It took in all of the surrounding estate.

"So what do you think of Castle Raus, Joe?"

"I'm impressed, but I'm also wondering what I'm doing here."

Slide seemed to be working overtime at the demonic charm. "Doing here? You're my guest, Joe, I thought, after all that you'd been through, you deserved a little R and R."

"You won't take offense if, after all that I've been through, I don't absolutely buy that."

Slide shot him a sly look. "You don't believe that I could only want you to have a good time?"

"Why don't you just come right out and tell me what you really want with me."

"I hate to disappoint you, Gibson, but, right now, I don't want anything."

"You deny that there's something about me that interests you?"

"Well, sure you interest me. You got a whammy count on you higher than I ever seen on a human."

Gibson sighed. "An aura like a black cloud?"

Slide smiled and nodded. "Your mojo's rising so fast, boy, it should be making your head spin."

His whole accent had changed, switching from tuxedo velvet to the grate and rasp of all the way down and funky. Gibson was aware that he was being jived by a demon, but jive talk was better than no talk at all, and Gibson even had a strange feeling that Slide might be telling him the truth, albeit in a weirdly oblique ma

"It's certainly making my head spin." He had to agree with that. "Trouble is, it seemed to me that any mojo I had was on a strictly down grade."

Slide looked at him knowingly. "That's because you're back-pedaling with it as fast as you can, hoping it'll go away, but it ain't go

Gibson didn't like the sound of the word "fall." "You want to put any of that into plain English?"

Slide let out an impatient hiss. "That's as plain as it gets, boy. You want it any more plain, and I'll just have to assume you've been hanging with the streamheat for too long and you're beyond redemption. Why don't you just get drunk and enjoy the party? It'll all come to you in time."

They were almost at the entrance to the marquee and moving into the thick of Raus's guests. Despite the fact that everyone with the apparent exception of him, Nephredana, and Slide were rich shades of aqua and turquoise, and the styles of clothing, particularly among the women, were odd to the point of alien, the party was of a kind that Gibson instantly recognized. The guests had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to convince themselves that they were the cream of Luxor society. Back home, they'd confidently expect their pictures to appear in the next issues of Vanity Fair, Interview, or New York magazine. He found it strangely comforting to know that pretension hardly varied from dimension to dimension, and he discovered he didn't need a scorecard to help him spot the stereotypes. Society painters escorted politicians' wives; dress designers, hairdressers to the stars, TV actresses, and real-estate speculators ran in whooping packs; celebrity newscasters squired prominent lesbians; racecar drivers and teenage starlets carried out intimate investigations of each other in dark corners, as did fashion models and merchant bankers, while women who wrote sex novels avoided their lawyer husbands, and men and women with no claim to fame apart from an accident of birth making them heirs to legendary fortunes kept up a stream of inane chatter. Oh, yes, Gibson knew this bunch. The smart set had invaded too many of his dressing rooms and taken over too many parties thrown for him back in the old days. Even though he'd been a peripheral part of it for a while, Gibson had never understood and certainly never liked high society. He had never appreciated their absolute certainty that they had a right to be there, their condescension, their bland belief in themselves and their value systems. Above all, he loathed their arrogant stupidity. What was the old MC5 war cry from the sixties? "I see a lot of honkies sitting on a lot of money telling me they're the high society…" Among the lesser faux pas along the downward spiral of his career had been the times when, at the top of his not inconsiderable voice, he'd informed whole rooms full of the social crowd how he held them in total contempt and wished that they'd fuck off, stop drinking his booze, and leave him the fuck alone.