CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE – “DON’T BE CRUEL”

Swamp-rosebushes protrude from the water to Norlin's left, also, snaking up Graceland's smut-speckled columns, but these are sparser than the thicket guarding the easternmost windows - leaving a portion of the nearest frame exposed... its grille-facade rusted, only broken shards of knifelike glass thrusting outwards. Norlin pushes off from the submerged chandelier over the King's drowned threshold, kicking towards that nearest, left column… squeezing around it and flailing towards the outermost gray pillar, fingernails scrabbling across thorny vines and ancient alabaster debris for purchase. Here and there, the head of a phibe breaks the surface of the water, less often something else that prompts the Corporal to look back to Graceland's deep cracks and shiny, poisonous vines, hesitating...

Something in that window glides past and the Corporal blinks - a momentsflash of black hair and sequins, a glance... impossibly old.

Suddenly the waters heave and part... Norlin's fingers slipping from the white column. He swallows another mouthful of rancid Mississippi broth - spinning away from the column, he kicks and gasps and clings to that vegetative veil for dear life with only a knocking against his hip to remind him that he hasn't... yet!... lost the Veronica.

Backing the patrol cruisers away from the gate, Kruppe had reached into the brown box, grasping a grenade in either hand...

"Lieutenant, no..." Chester Aspid warned, "you'll set the river on fire! You'll burn Norlin to a crisp - and the King's fex with him!"

"Keb it!" Kruppe had howled, raising one of the grenades to pull the pin with his teeth as he had, no doubt, seen in some movie... now prohibited, of course, as violent and un-Jatesian. "Think you can live forever?"

"It's for the better," agreed Germany Smith. "Look... nothing lives forever. Not even the King. His reputation stands between Jatesland and its new dawn. The time is at hand for beauty's closure, though the limitations must be imposed gradually. Erase Elvis and you erase a pernicious reservoir of the baroque, untenable past… it's a simple matter of intelligence, Chet... and I am Intelligence..."

"That keb on C-Squad's refrigerator out there," Aspid had glowered, "he was right."

"Of course he was," Germany Smith assured the Sergeant. "Becoming will smooth over the acute angles and treacherous, jagged edges of vissure - the eclipse of agitative music only hastening encirclement of the Hu-man and its subrogation by the Tu-man. Look at that kebbin' monstrosity!" the chief of Intelligence had, then, pointed out towards Graceland, "...nothing but angles! Obscene, poisonous..." he'd sputtered.

And, then, Kruppe hurled the first grenade at the gates, pulled the pin on another and tossed it against the stone wall on the other side - the explosions, almost in tandem, hurling great chunks of stone and mortar and lethal shards of iron backwards in every direction...

"Sergeant?"

The patrolman named Redding, the one who couldn't stop talking about his wife and the baby on the long trip upriver, was grasping the jagged end of a fragment of iron bar protruding from his left eye. "I... I..." he began, but then had nothing else to say because he was dead, standing-up dead in the Clarksdale boat as a particularly vehement veil of fog and smoke settled over the speedboats. Then, he fell forward through the soot and drifting debris into the water, and, if phibes grabbed him and carried him down into their watery caves with their endless, watery kitchens, nobody saw and nobody heard.

"Jesk'ball!" Eric Ice cried out, hands to his ears.

"Now that," swaggered Kruppe, "is what the Trouble Factory does to a wall. Captain... take us in - no, not straight in, take us around back." The great, ruined ghost of Graceland loomed up before them, mold-spattered and seemingly breathing with the anticipation of something great, and yet horrible, staggering towards its long-overdue consummation.

The walls still bulge and ripple with grenade-vibrations... Norlin kicks off from the column and flails to the open window with its jagged glass teeth, resting both hands on the sill. All strength has leached out of his left arm along with more blood, smeared against the sill and the gray bricks... his head spinning, he feels himself beginning to sink back down. Another pair of phibes grasp him, one from either side, hoisting him upwards with such urgency that a jagged triangle of glass rips through the another long gash across his stomach.

And… then… he's rolling on the floor of a room in Graceland, floundering in sixteen inches of mud and water, spitting and cursing and hearing the puttering patrolcruisers crisscross the river just outside the window.

"Do we go in - there?" points one of the more aggressive of the remaining policemen in Kruppe's boat...

"We... uh, no, take us around the back, Cap'n." The Lieutenant makes a cone of his right hand and raises it to his ear, theatrically (although the concussion has damaged his hearing rather more than he'd admit). "I hear that keb, mucking 'round in there... we'll go round back, take him by surprise. There is a place we can tie up, right?"

He turns to Captain Sykes, who nods.

"There's a deck round back. Used to be... might be..." he shrugs...

"Then take it back. You!" he calls out to the men in the second boat... "back... back!"

"What?" frowns the deputy, throwing the throttle forward at full strength. The cruiser lunges forward, pouncing at its partner like a panther… swerving to avoid crashing into Kruppe and Aspid, then tipping up on an end before flopping over entirely. Dr. Skark, his Blue and Gray men, Eric Ice and four patrolmen besides, of course, the EastAmi deputy, cartwheel up and out, sailing into Graceland's sullen waters with the plop, plop, plop of bait, fallen off a hook.

The turgid river erupts in a boiling, seething horizontal showercurtainslash of fang and claw and gore while, on the floor of the dark room of Graceland, Norlin lifts his ears to the screams of men being devoured alive - cries of pain and wonder, fear and revelation and, at last, silence... silence, but for the retreating rustle of the surviving patrolboat as its occupants seek a better haven from which to launch their ambush.