CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT – “IT HURTS ME”

Eric frowns, lifts a heavy Trouble Factory shoe. It's one of those little model cars, still moving… circling, as if resentful that he'd kicked it away a while back. Some strong, kebbin' battery, to be able to move like that after so many years, Ice thinks… tossing the book aside… it's quick, and it's sharp. Quick as a rat, but... as it lunges towards the policeman's foot, again... Eric is quicker, and he stomps it flat. More old-fashioned, genuine plastic than metal, it gives off an unholy, animate deathsqueal…

And Eric sees more of the little fexxers, circling the attic. Closing in!

It's kebbin' hot up here…

It stinks…

Negative thinking! Eric focuses on the mudline two thirds up the sloping walls of the attic and composes himself, thinking positive thoughts. Fresh, mountain air… kung-fu fighting. Banging a waitress caught slipping caffeine pills into the zooks' herbal teas for tips -turning a fifteen proof Dick Clark, bought at three-thirty, for five-twenty to those kebbin' Chinese…

Why is his hand so kebbin' gray?

Some of the grimy religious magazines piled up under Graceland's eaves seem to breathe in unison with the policeman, too… swelling and sighing, shaking specks of crusted mud from their covers with low, rasping, death-rattle gasps…

Eric backs away, feeling the lascivious prickle of thingbites across his neck. The warm. gold disk throbs against his genitalia, throbbing back. Maybe the attic wasn't such a good idea.

There's a busted-up guitar leaning against more soggy, crusty boxes - strings in disarray, but it's playing somehow, of its own accord. Nothing recognizable, not music, even, just soft, dissonant chords, noise… but Eric backs off, anyway, then fairly leaps when there's a furnace-blast behind him, and the reposing tiki torches burst into flames. There must be a hundred of the kebbin' things, and… slumped against the wall as they are… the policeman thinks: Fire!

"Hey!" Eric calls out. "Hey, you! I know you're up here - what th'keb you think you're doin', man? Place ain't so wet that it couldn't go up in smoke. Hey!…"

Nobody answers.

"This ain't funny," Eric Ice warns his unseen adversaries. "You don't want to mess with me, hey… I can keb you up. I'm a killer… really… an' I ain't talking Jerry Lee kebbin' Lewis, no Jerry Lewis, neither. You hear?"

There's a last, strangled chord and, then, only a silence - in which the attic itself seems to breathe along with the policeman. And then, strings of blue and white Christmas lights in an open box sputter on and off and , finally, explode in blue and white flashes. Now, there's a cordite reek in the attic air to season the heavy, dark smoke from the smoldering timbers that the tiki torches touch…

"Keb!" the policeman swears, just before the rustling begins…

Eric turns, watching the King's capes and jumpsuits slither off the clothing racks and slouch across the floor, joined by Gladys Presley's musty old dresses, then the clomp! clomp! of blue suede loafers and Beatle boots tumbling out of boxes on the attic's north side… all of them seemingly desperate to escape the flames…

Eric hears a soft plop! behind him - turns, skimmer raised. One of the King's raggedy, putrescent teddy bears has fallen out of a box, struggling erect… black, beady eyes radiating with what seems like congealed hate. Another falls out, then another… they are not falling, Eric realizes, taking a step backwards, they're leaping!

The busted guitar resumes its random, jagged solo… louder, now… and, somewhere behind a bank of rapidly emptying clothesracks, a stringless bass and a dented saxophone swell the cacophony. The shot-out televisions, piled in awkward pyramids, ignite into sighs and screams, classic punchlines from classic comedies and detective serials; jagged, diagonal lightflashes…

Another tiny Corvette bumps Eric's ankle, painfully, and the policeman kicks it away.

The black and white noise and signals of the televisions seem to be trying to coalesce into something… a face, perhaps, or an image of Elvis with Ed Sullivan, or in Vegas. A box of pink and purple scarves tumbles over, and the scarves begin to snake across the attic floor, beneath a cloud of increasingly acrid, brown smoke…

Teddy bears, by the dozens, are hopping out of boxes, waddling towards the encircled policeman. Eric trains his skimmer on the foremost and plugs it in a vaporizing puff of reeking soot, but there are forty more behind it… four hundred more behind them!… some even with red hearts sewn into their fake fur.

It's a teddy bears' picnic, the policeman realizes, and I'm the entrée…

Blue and white blazes from more boxes of Christmas lights intensify and Ice sidesteps the approach of a crawling, gray and yellow polka-dotted frock, off the rack…

There is more chaotic noise from the rooms below, and the walls are shuddering, as if under siege. Graceland 's rooftimbers are, by now, engulfed in billowing orange and lavender pyrotechnics - the conflagration elongated by the swampwater trapped in this ancient wood for more than twenty years....

And the stairwell is filling with flapping, sighing religious magazines.

When the first teddy bear mounts his leg, Eric almost laughs… this is no tiger, come to rip him up, tear him up, no wolf… just an eager, slobbery hound dog of a toy. When the second starts crawling up the other leg, the policeman snatches it, almost bemused, even staring into the blank, black beads for a moment, trying to read the inanimate motivation in the trifle's eyes…

"Teach you to keb with the Trouble Factory," he admonishes the toy, flexing his fingers (and favoring the needle-pricked thumb) before ripping into the soft, plush belly to rip the guts out of the damn thing, teach it who's the bossman up here. A searing fire - not pain, not quite pleasure - consumes his fist up to the elbow, and Eric begins to shake, frenetically, to dislodge the devouring green horde from his arm. Hell-flies creep up his shoulder while, beneath, the first of the teddy bears sinks its fangs into his knee… others are climbing, climbing towards his groin.

The policeman screams…

Beneath the floor, Chester Aspid hollers back!

The green flies and wormthings swarming out of the King's old clothes, hone in on teddy bear wounds, burrow beneath the collector's skin - sopping up flesh, muscle and gristle, eating Eric Ice alive and excreting him whole, like worm-casings over still-twitching bones. They devour and defecate the gold record, too, and a gold, liquid sheaf flows across the collector's root - making a perfect genital deathmask; there is hardly any pain, now, only liquefaction. The policeman is becoming fex, himself, under a comforter of blank-eyed teddy bears… a diseased, runny fex, to be sure, until...

His white, polished skeleton still erect (no doubt thinking positive thoughts in its skeletal, Jatesian way), the dross that had been Eric Ice seeps through the floorboards and drips through the cracks in the ceiling below, soiling, spattering the howling policemen retreating down Graceland’s stairs…

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT – “IT HURTS ME”

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