That moment of touch with Edgar brought more than the memory of my basement wall, however—it gave me a vibe for him. As I said before, Edgar was the predator of the two, but there was also something like a force about him, like whatever was in this tower and on the Black Tongue Tape, Edgar was the opposite.

  I stood on shaky legs as Edgar finished digging me out, shivering with the cold of air touching wet clothes. I popped open the morphine bottle and gave him one. He studied it for a moment between thumb and finger, then plopped it in his mouth. One long ear twitched.

  “Now let’s get the fuck away from el-creepos,” Tracy said, rubbing her arms.

  The buzzing filled my awareness again, not of the fluorescents, but that original buzz that I'd heard upon entering the tower of the bat.

  I stepped over the pink shell Edgar dug me out of and stood next to Tracy. Doc and Edgar stood against the far wall. Mango and toothpick, I thought as I looked at them. Doc had a gold chain hanging from one pocket to the other.

  “Who's Brenda?” I said.

  “Why we still here?” Tracy said. “You know what happens every time you find other people right? They fuckin like kill you, rape you, rob you and shit. Every fuckin movie, they fuck and rob your ass soon as they can.”

  Doc removed his glasses and wiped them. He dabbed his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. “Brenda was a friend,” Doc said.

  Edgar did not answer, boring into me with eyes terrifying and aware.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Doc dug her out,” Edgar said. “On Floor Z of this tower.”

  “And she died?” I said.

  Edgar nodded. “She did. That was two months ago.”

  “Bullshit,” Tracy said, “we've been here like three fuckin days.”

  “The lights go out,” Edgar said, then pointed to the ceiling with a very long finger. “Every day. And they rotate. First the Mothers bring the Pink, with the mamilla in the dark, and then the … Angels.”

  “The Angels and the Mothers, if you like,” Doc offered.

  “Fuck is a mamilla?” Tracy said.

  I shook my head, shrugging.

  “What a mother feeds her young with,” Doc said. “Hence Mothers. But nipple does just fine. You’ll have to excuse Edgar—what else would he do with his variegation of obtuse words if he couldn’t batter us over the head with them?”

  “Doc dug Brenda out of the Pink three times,” Edgar said. “And the Mothers ignored her when they passed over us from then on. Even when she begged in the darkness, running from one mamilla to the next, they refused her like a baby bird with the stink of 'other'.”

  “Stop it, Edgar,” Doc said, shift his bulk to face the corner of the room.

  “No, Doc, I will not stop, because they must know. We have helped you once,” Edgar said, holding that long finger up again, then shaking his head as he folded it back into a fist, “but no more. The Mothers will starve you. And then the Angels will pick off your mind when the Mothers leave, and you are alone, with no Pink to protect you from their probe. Only the screens for light, you will cling to them, watching the film that guided us here in the first place. And so we found Brenda when we broke from our Pink and the lights came back on. She held to the screen like it was her mamilla, claiming to have taken a mouthful of our Pink exterior, but it turned to ash in her mouth. And when Doc gave her some of his interior, it similarly crumbled and only absorbed more of what spit was left to her.”

  Doc’s shoulders trembled, one arm hooking around his middle to reach his face, a low husk of hip hip’s and woo woo’s bouncing out of him.

  “The thirst brought on by the buzzing is enough to inspire madness, but then to have the Angels lingering just outside the light of the screen, her only solace in a film just as damnable as those that would rummage through her skull—Brenda was close to dying of thirst, but she died by her own hand, bashing her head against the screen until the glass broke, then slamming her neck into what sharp edges were left. It was clear this took time, considering the blood on all sides.”

  “Alright you can stop now,” I said, eyeing the shaking form of Doc. “I get it.”

  “Do you?” Edgar said. “I hope you do, because she was our only test subject. We dug her out of the Pink three times, then they refused her. But how should we know when your scent will taint? Perhaps it already has.”

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  “You agreed to dig us out,” I said, “for the morphine.”

  “Yes.” Edgar nodded. “And I'd expect this one to do the exact same, judging by her dependency.” He pointed at Tracy who moved to stand behind me.

  “You mentioned a film that got us here,” I said.

  “We have half a day in which to move,” Edgar said. “It took us one month to get off the first floor.”

  “The movie,” Tracy said.

  She'd seen it too, I knew it. The fucking Black Tongue.

  “That's it,” I said. “We all watched it. El creepo said it already.”

  Tracy laughed. The morphine was coloring her face a bit. I found that sad. “That's a good one, huh. El creepo.”

  “It's called the Black Tongue Tape,” I said.

  Tracy's expression soured as I turned away to study Edgar once more.

  “Yes,” Edgar said. “It plays on the screens outside this room.”

  I nudged a pile of Polaroids with my foot, shifting the images over each other to see if any would give me a clue as to what the fuck was going on. Nothing. Random images, nothing to do with me, the film, or the others.

  “You watched it too,” I said, “didn't you, Tracy?”

  “I was fucked up when I saw it,” Tracy said.

  “As an alphate-dependent user, that is your resting state,” Edgar pointed out, raising that finger again. It was like eight inches long, that finger. “Either you are disoriented by your sickness, or by your—”

  “But I can’t forget that shit,” Tracy said.

  “You saw it too, Doc?” I said.

  He sniffed. “I do apologize.” Fiddling with his glasses. “Brenda, she … well, she insisted that we watch, that we come here.”

  “Brenda is also of the Aeld,” Edgar said.

  “The fuck is an eld?” Tracy said.

  “A-eld,” Edgar corrected. “Brenda and I are of them. Doc is not.”

  I briefly glanced at the fey ears of the two men. “Nothing to do with it,” Edgar said.

  “Fine. What is an eld?” I said.

  “The Aeld,” Edgar corrected again. “We seek this place. That is all.”

  “Well you found it, bitch,” Tracy said, “now what?”

  Edgar did not answer.

  “We should really be getting a move on,” Doc said, checking the watch on the end of his golden chain. “I am sorry it took so long, Edgar.” Doc smiled at me in a knowing way. “For now, Andy, let this be enough. You and Tracy here are man and woman, right?”

  Tracy and I shared a look.

  “Right,” Doc went on, “it's the same kind of subtle difference between me and the Aeld.”

  “He got like two dicks or something?” Tracy said.

  Me and Doc both doubled up with laughter. When we recovered, Tracy was smiling at Edgar who didn't seem to care at all. He just stood there, staring at Tracy with stone eyes.

  “I am the last,” Edgar said. “I would not have allowed Brenda to come had I known. I would have stayed behind had I known.”

  “Right,” Doc said, “I'm sure it would have ended there.”

  “Yes. And If I had been awake, I would not have let the second to last of my race become weakened by the helping, coddling, crippling hands of another digging her out.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. The moon opened in the corner of the room, pulsing and diffusing its pale light like an exhaled breath.

  Wub-Wub-Wub.

  Kevin Lipton, courtesy of Dan Lipton Entertainment, found directing Bee-Bee Evans to be impossible. For starts, she could not act, like, at all, and for two, she was always undermining his directorial authority.

  “Norris shouldn't be cast in that light,” she would say, or, “Kevin, Norris can’t say this line about, here, look here, second line: ‘I’ll fucking kill you, Jorge.” I mean, do we really need the profanity to convey the overarching theme of the picture? Norris, it’s your choice, but I really don’t think—” or, “Norris, if you say this line, you must consider what future casting may be. Think Calvin Cooper—you know how many death threats he gets. Death threats and villain roles, and that’s all for Calvin Cooper, poor sick thing.”

  Kevin was patient with it at first—he was paid to be patient in the presence of such under the table benefactors as Beatrice 'Bee-Bee' Evans, but a director can only take so much, especially one so avant-garde and integrity-of-the-film-absorbed as Kevin Lipton, who could not take much of this shit, at all.

  In the film, Norris seems in a constant state of uncertainty, paralyzed by choice as he traverses the moon world with his robot companion, Jorge, played by Petri Pouvé. In Joseph Rigby’s “The Grey Man” in Norton and Norton on Film, 1998, p. 36-38, Rigby makes the argument that these pressures added a meta element to Norris’s character, where the actor struggled with identity, while struggling to identify with the character, who himself is looking for meaning inside the hollow vessel he sees as his personality. Rigby goes on to claim, “It’s obvious he [Kevin Lipton] was aware of this, though it’s unclear when he started implementing it consciously; but it imposed upon Norris a method acting that Bee-Bee Evans would have blown one of her daddy’s oil wells over had she known the director was willing to damage the actors to the film’s thematic advantage. The role ended more than a career for poor, sick Norris Evans.”

  Here's an example from the film:

  “Senior! The demon planet! It glows, it glows!” says Jorge in his Hispanic accent, no mechanical, automated dialect with this robot, because he has found friendship in Norris's character, and so too has found cadence.

  “Uh-huh,” Norris says, whose name in the film, as well as in real life, is Norris, which was actually changed from Jax four days into shooting and makes me speculate that Rigby’s theory is at least halfway accurate. However, I find Lipton’s exploitation of the couple’s true moods as some kind of cathartic passive aggression just as plausible.

  “Sometimes it looks closer, Senior. You see? You see?” This being the only machine-like character trait that Jorge carries through the film, this occasional repetition at the end of sentences.

  Jorge shifts eyes from Norris, stage right where the tower looms in the middle of the city, then across the blackened rock landscape on the outskirts, like a dog trying to decide between the call of two owners.

  The sky is red. The hill is jagged and barren.

  Jorge says, “You see, you see?”

  “Yes,” Norris says like a man who sees nothing at all.