Aaaiiieee (17 page)

He wondered if he should apologize for rejecting Idelia Hamlin’s advances yesterday evening. He could tell she’d been hurt, dejected. She had said something like it being for the best, anyway. Something about going away. Going back home, wherever that was? Would she have already left?

More than this, however, he wondered if he should have rejected Idelia Hamlin’s advances at all.

In the light of a new day it was difficult for him to imagine how he could have been so uncomfortable with her little…show of affection…that he would have broken off from it. It was he who was mad, not her. Here was this gorgeous fragile flower of a young woman, certainly no older than twenty, who had thrown herself at him, an undistinguished-looking man in his early thirties who had had fewer lovers in his life than his sixteen-year-old nephew had, he reckoned. Well, that must have been it right there, then. He was too inexperienced to respond to spontaneous desire. Too timid. Had he not been so bloody meek all his life, he might have been more experienced by now. Have a lover right now rather than be living alone. Own a book store rather than work in one. He stood mired in his self disgust—but his fingers had been curling around the railing of the staircase.

As if pulling a boot from sucking mud, he placed his right foot on the first step.

In the murk of the upper hall the door was an obscure portal almost indistinguishable from the shadowy wall. He rapped upon it. A timid knock, despite his new determination. Watch it be Guy who opens the door, he thought. Guy’s great bulk, and Idelia having fled away like some nervous fawn, back into the deep woods…

The door opened, and it was Idelia who stood in the threshold.

She wore the same heavy, dark brown sweater and black tights as yesterday, her feet again bare but she had wiped away her dramatic red lipstick and the dark mascara. It left her looking even more pale, if this were possible, white almost to bloodlessness, and made her eyes look more vulnerable, her too-full lips tender and more child-like. She appeared more sad than surly, as when she’d answered his knock last evening.

“Hello,” she murmured.

“Hi. Um, I’m glad to see you’re still here. I just, ah, just wanted to…I hope yesterday I didn’t hurt your feelings…you know…” He chuckled quite uneasily, threw up one hand. “I didn’t mean to run away like that and…embarrass you or any-        thing…”

The young woman looked away and smiled slightly—half bashfully and half bitterly, he felt—and then looked back at him, her smile fading again, that brooding drowsiness returning. “Why don’t you come in?”

“Yeah, sure,” Griffin said, trying to sound casual while an almost nauseous passion loomed up through his guts like a solid invading object. It was as though he were penetrating himself. “Okay…”

As soon as Idelia had closed the door behind them and turned to face him, she reached beneath the hem of her sweater and slipped her thumbs under the rim of her tights, began skinning them down her legs like a snake shedding its skin. The contrast of the slender snowy limbs that were revealed from behind the eclipsing black material was shocking and mesmerizing. She balled the garment and tossed it onto a chair and then stood staring at him expressionlessly. She didn’t remove her over-sized sweater, so that it reached to the tops of her thighs and hid her private area in delicious secrecy.

She extended her hand to him. He took it, and it was small and cool, and she led him to the bedroom. Like a sleep-walker he followed, no longer questioning or protesting.

“I thought I’d starve myself,” she told him as she crawled onto the large bed that Griffin felt must be Guy’s. “I thought that was for the best. To just let myself fade away.” She stretched onto her back, still in her sweater, but pulled it up just enough for him to catch a shadowed glimpse of soft hair. “But now here you are,” she went on. “Here you are. I leave it all up to you. My own will…it isn’t like yours…”

Her words trailed away, but Griffin wasn’t listening, at any rate. He began to pull off his jacket, fumbled with his buttons. He watched her white, slim legs part like a flower opening its petals.

As soon as he was above her he was inside her, and she hooked her heels over the backs of his legs. He clamped a ravenous mouth over those tender lips as if to willingly bruise them, held her skull between his trembling hands. But she pushed at his shoulders gently, broke their kiss and gazed up at his face. Now she held his head between her palms.

“I want to see your eyes,” she breathed huskily, shakily. “Look at me. Don’t close your eyes. Look at me…”

He did as she asked. In his fevered state, it was the best he could do for her in the way of foreplay. But he awkwardly kneaded her small left breast through the heavy material of her sweater…and then lowered his hand to its hem so as to slip beneath it and touch the bare flesh of her belly, her nipples that must be as pale a pink as her lips…

She suddenly reached to stay his hand from sliding under her sweater. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please…”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m—too thin. I’m embarrassed.”

“You’re lovely. You’re so lovely. You don’t have to worry. I want to see you…please…I want to touch you, Idelia.” He braced himself higher above her, still deep within her, and took hold of the sweater’s edge. Her hand still closed on his wrist, but her grip was either weak or fatalistic, and he peeled back the sweater to bare her upper body. He wanted to taste it. He wanted to lose himself in its pale glow…

But it was not pale beneath her sweater. There was a shadow there, glaringly black against the contrasting whiteness.

A patch of liquid darkness like an inky stain covered much of the woman’s belly, starting just above the squint of her navel and encompassing the lower half of her right breast, nicking the bottom of her aureole. It was not a hole, in that its edges blended into the flesh, and yet it was of a more profound depth than any hole. It was as though the void of space itself had burned through her thin tissues. And in this oblivion, a mist or fog rose and fell in billowing, blowing and soundless waves.

“You want to see me? You want to touch me?” A membrane of tears began to jiggle across her wide eyes. “Touch me.” She still held his wrist, and drew his hand toward that dark window.

Griffin yanked his hand free, slipped out of her (what darkness had he been penetrating within her?) and backed naked across the room. He didn’t want to know what that blackness felt like. Whether he would meet with solid flesh, or whether his hand would slip through her into that cold, churning mist.

She slung her legs over the edge of the bed, pulled the sweater down again to hide her wound, if such it was. “It’s spreading,” she informed him. “Every day…”

“What are you?” Griffin managed, in something like a whispered sob. “A ghost?”

Rising, Idelia smiled. “Not even that. A ghost at least was once alive.”

She was too near the door, but there was another by his left. She took a step toward him, still smiling, still weeping, and he darted to his left without waiting to gather his clothing. He plunged into another room, slammed the door, but could find no lock. He turned his back against it to see where he was. It was another bedroom, with no lamp on, just dim sunlight that struggled through the drawn shades and closed drapes. But against this wan light, a figure shuffled into silhouette. Then another. Shadows rustled now to both sides of him. Griffin whirled around and flung open the door he had just come through…but of course, Idelia was there, and he backed helplessly into the center of the room.

She flicked on a wall switch, and an overhead light came on. Griffin found himself ringed by a half dozen people. At least, they were people to varying extents.

They were all women, and all naked, but tainted as Idelia was with that plague of darkness. More afflicted than she, in fact. They were more skeletal, as well—cadaverous. One woman had no breasts left whatsoever, and one of her arms had vanished at the shoulder, where the black void gaped. Another woman had an abyss where her face should have been, this mask of nothingness framed in long straight hair like Idelia’s. One woman had no head remaining at all, but her body still stood at attention. Well, she was  a kind of machine, wasn’t she? A machine Guy had made from the ether. That was it, wasn’t it?

“These are my sisters,” Idelia said. “They came before me. They were sketches, mostly, though Guy still used a few of them.”

One of them—the very first?—was not even fully in focus. She looked like a badly blurred moving figure in a photograph, though she stood quite still before him.

And what of Guy? Griffin had no doubts about a great hulking form on top of the bed. It was wrapped in a blue plastic tarp, this package wound with silver duct tape. There was a faint smell of rot which he had first, erroneously thought was coming from the decaying women. How long Guy had been dead and how he had died were the only particulars that needed answering. Idelia noticed his frantic glance at the bundle.

“We didn’t kill him, if that’s what you think. We aren’t vampires. He had a heart attack, I think. Three of us were with him.” She tittered, her lower lip quivering. “It funny, isn’t it? We with too little flesh, and he with too much? He couldn’t survive the pleasures he wanted. He was too hungry. And here we are, with no life, and we outlive him.”

Griffin looked back at Idelia. “Don’t hurt me,” he whimpered.

“You aren’t listening,” she laughed, then she sobbed, and gestured at the bulk on the bed. “I loved him, you know. We all did. He made us to love him.”

Griffin began to edge closer to her. She, at least, he knew somewhat. The others, however much they looked like her, were too silent, and too ghostly. But she was right; even phantoms were more substantial.

“Please, Idelia,” he said, “just let me go.”

She looked at him abruptly—then stepped back from the door. “I wouldn’t stop you, Griffin. I told you, this isn’t about my hunger—it’s about yours.”

He slipped through the door. She made no attempt to follow him, merely watched him from the adjoining room, along with those of her waning sisters who still possessed eyes. He dressed hurriedly, not taking his eyes off her…Guy’s daughter. Guy’s fantasy bride. And with untied laces and half-buttoned shirt he bolted out of the bedroom, out of the apartment…but Guy’s harem of apparitions made no attempt at pursuit.

*     *     *

The next morning, Griffin called in sick at work. He was over-tired from not having been able to sleep all night. He had sat up with a kitchen knife in his hand, watching the door and the walls as if some spectre or horde of spectres might step suddenly through them.

But when it came, the phantom knocked politely at his door. It was a faint, meek knock that he wasn’t sure he’d heard at first. Hesitantly but inevitably he went to the door. Cracked it, knife in hand. But then he opened it completely.

For a moment, with the door cracked, he had thought he saw Idelia standing outside, nearly lost in shadow. Her eyes wide and pleading, sad and afraid. A rush of concern or guilt made him open the door all the way. But when he did so, he found that she wasn’t there. There was only a swirling pale mist in the general outline of a body, he felt, but which dissipated in moments so that he was left to wonder if it had even been there at all.

Lost Alleys

There are places in cities only the drunk, drugged or insane can find. Even if you have been there before you will not find them again if sober—assuming you are one who occasionally regains sobriety. The angles and planes, the lay-out of buildings, conspire to direct you elsewhere, to more prosaic destinations. It may be this design is intentional. Streets point you past these alleys, and more conventional alleys bend eye and foot past the narrow sub-alleys. Magician’s misdirection and the psychology of art—but also our fear and inhibition of straying from the path—keep these places hidden.

I have found such secret or forgotten corners in several cities; I can usually remember what I saw at these places, but not always which city I found them in. I can’t always remember straight off in the morning which city I’m currently in. I suppose my proclivity for finding these shadowy caves in the mountain range of a city has to do with the fact that I am usually either drunk or drugged, and perhaps always insane.

Somehow tonight I had found my way back to a courtyard I had visited before in my somnambulistic wanderings. You never actually forget anything; your mind simply blots out what is unnecessary, or unwanted. But part of me must have wanted to return to see another of the battles in this tiny arena.

The walls were of brick, and stretched high, windowless. Perhaps it had been a great chimney; there was a black iron door, low to the ground. They kept some of the contestants in there. That other night, I had watched an oriental dwarf battle a thylacine, one of those supposedly extinct Tasmanian tiger-wolves. Crates and cinder-blocks piled shoulder-high enclosed the fighting ring. When I arrived this night, several dozen dark forms ringed the ring. Only two chickens wearing spurs presently went at it.

I can’t stand cruelty to animals; I had been glad when the thylacine won. I stood back smoking a cigarette until more willing opponents were brought out. These two had made a decision to enter the ring. Not necessarily a rational decision, but they weren’t innocent victims. Well, victims yes, of many unknown tortures from without and within, but too far gone to merit much concern from me. I didn’t ask for their concern, either.

They were two naked men. One was tall and skeletal, the other short and even thinner. The tall one wore brass knuckles with spikes on one hand, in the other gripped a baling hook. His opponent held a railroad spike and a broken bottle with a much-taped neck for a handle. The short one was black, and had blacker keloids of scar tissue, primarily on his face, but I didn’t know if they were decorative or the wounds of past exhibitions.

I insinuated myself close to the ring’s barrier. Someone squeezed my ass but when I didn’t look they stopped, and anyway the battle had begun.

The gladiators sprang away from each other, the tall one swinging his brass-knuckled fist up into his own face, the short warrior gouging his bottle into his own inner thigh while pounding the dull chisel-point of his spike into his sternum. I leaned onto the wall; I’d never seen this before.