Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (34 page)

“Get over here.” Andre flicked his fingers at me.

My legs wouldn’t bend at the knees. So stiff. I forced my legs to walk, and I did as Andre told me.

When I was behind the bar with him, he studied my face again. A finger touched my cheek. “So waxy,” he said. The finger shifted to my hair. “So thin and dull,” he said. He surveyed my body. “So scrawny.”

“Give me wine,” I rasped. “Please. Before you decide my fate, let me drink.”

He raised a glass to my lips.

I couldn’t part them.

Andre had to pry my lips apart to get the wine into my mouth.

I knew that I would never be able to sing again.

Andre knew it, too.

“But you can stay as long as you’re able to move even a tiny bit,” he said. “You can be like the others. The girls of Gloria.” He smiled as if giving me a gift.

“What is…” I couldn’t form the other words.

He nodded as if guessing my question. “Yes. What is it? What does this to you girls? Well, I don’t know, Clarisse. A combination of the drugs you take and the special mushrooms we have down here? The atmosphere?”

Tears welled, and I couldn’t blink them back. I was having trouble controlling my eyelids.

“You see, we men don’t take your drugs and don’t venture into those caves. We stay here, don’t we? There’s something in those tunnels that’s just not right.”

Daddy. What about you, Daddy? Nobody knows you’re in the special cave. Nobody knows, and I can’t move my lips to tell them.

My unblinking eyes saw the needle right before it plunged into my throat. Giant waves of euphoria crashed down my body. I seemed to melt across the wooden bar. I was golden. I was red. I was lilac, and tobacco. My heart pounded in rhythm to the filaments in Daddy’s cave. My lungs breathed to the rhythm. My head filled with kaleidoscope whorls of black and gray, and with lunatic tunes.

I’ll be your rainbow.

I’ll never let you go.

I was one with Daddy, and I dreamed that he loved me.

She will never be the same. She knows that, accepts it. Life once made sense, but not now. Why did she listen to them? But it was
her
actions, right from the start,
her
making wrong decisions… It was as if she had intentionally entered a rank, twisting tunnel that drew vermin, narrowing, becoming ever more grave-like the further in she went, burying her alive with the awareness of… of this… this… abomination…

§

At the beginning, it hadn't been the intervention that bothered Liz; it was the fervor, the wild, ecstatic gleam in the eyes of her sister, her cousin, her best friend. She'd wondered why they were so avid about changing her but let it pass as caring.

"It's not life or death, you know!" she reminded them several times, progressively hearing her voice weaken as they brought up counter arguments.

Her best friend Marti was the voice of reason that rang in her ears afterward: "Liz, it
is
life or death! Do you want to die single? Childless?"

"I'm thirty-eight. Not exactly over the hill."

"Your best days are right this minute," her cousin Phyllis said. "It doesn't get any better from here. I should know."

Liz wanted to say,
Phyllis, you're only forty-eight, just ten years older than me. You're not exactly ready for an old-age home!
But whatever protests she had mounted over the last two hours had been countered with the same basic argument—if she didn't get married soon and start having kids, “which,” they all were only too happy to reminder her, “you say you want”, it will be “over.” And they had a point. She did want those things. Badly. And time
was
slipping by.

She'd brought up, "Well, Mom had me when she was forty-three, and I'm okay." The silence had been deafening. That they all thought she wasn't “okay” unnerved her.

"This is silly," Liz said, reaching for a breadstick on the coffee table laden with healthy food. She dipped one end into the sour cream and onion sauce. Instantly, Phyllis grabbed the breadstick from her hand and hissed at her.

Liz sighed. "Okay, okay, I give up! I'll go for a stupid facial."

"You'll go for dermabrasion!" Marti said.

"And Botox!" Phyllis ordered."

"You want me to have botulism injected into my—"

"And fills. Don't forget the collagen fills," Marti added. "That will get those wrinkles and sags out of your pouchy cheeks and give you the plumpness of youth."

"I thought you said I'm too fat," Liz snapped.

"Not fat, sweetie, just, well, you could stand to lose ten pounds and be better off for it."

Liz looked longingly at the breadsticks and heard her stomach rumble in sympathy. She hadn't eaten since lunch and now it was after 8 pm. Maybe if she just agreed to everything they'd let her have a grape!

"Look, Lizzie, hon, we're all on your side, you know." This from her perfect twin sister Tiffany. Slim, well-coiffed, stylishly dressed, glamorous or sophisticated—depending on the day—birthing a son named Jim, Jr. at thirty-one and more recently the mother of triplet girls. "Men have gotten
very
picky over the last couple of decades. Every male and female on the planet knows exactly what they want."

Liz wondered what deep knowledge Tiffany could possess with the same not-yet-four-decades under her belt, one of them childhood. She hadn't even dated until college! They might be twins, but they were so different, the two of them, so how could she take advice from her “kid” sister by three minutes who seemed to have everything and—

"Look what I had to do to get my Jim! What I do to keep him."

"True," Phyllis said. "You're not a slippers and robe kinda girl."

Tiffany shrugged. "I like to look good. So sue me. But it gets me what I want."

Liz wondered what was so wondrous about Jim, a tall,
GQ
-handsome guy with a fake smile full of thirty-two perfect teeth and a seven-figure income that kept him out of the house 15/7, presumably at his office at the brokerage firm, but who could be sure. And apparently Tiffany didn't care.

But Liz realized that she was jealous of her sister. Besides having the life she wanted, Tiffany had only worked for five years—as a fast-living flight attendant, which is where she had met Jim. Liz, on the other hand, had been relegated to curatorial assistant in the entomology department of the natural history museum's basement for the last fifteen years. But she was honest enough to know she was justifying. She
did
want to marry and have kids. That had been her dream all of her life. A dream that had eluded her so far, and time
was
running out. She'd always thought she would do anything to make that dream come true, so why was she resisting their suggestions? They were only trying to help her get what she wanted.

"The media is full of airbrushed women. Today's men are as demanding as women. They want perfection!" Tiffany went on knowingly.

"Why would I want a guy who demands a perfect woman?"

"Because that's the only kind there are?" Marti laughed, and everyone but Liz joined in.

That led to another serious silence, everyone but Liz shaking their head in agreement, followed by a chorus of pitying looks in Liz' direction.

Phyllis, the long-suffering one in this group, took Liz's hands in hers and said as if she were talking to one of the kids in the daycare she ran, or to a mental defective, "You have to play it the way they want to play it, Liz. It's pay for play. Once you've got the guy, the kids, the house, car, boat, fabulous clothes and vacations and more, if you get bored, you can let your hair down. By then you'll be tired of him and the divorce won't matter because you'll get half of what he earns anyway and really, that's the whole point in playing the game, get the guy with the most dough."

"That sounds incredibly cynical," Liz weakly told her twice-divorced cousin.

"That sounds realistic," Tiffany said. "There are a million women out there. Three for every guy. It's a box of chocolates and you want them to pick you so you have to be the fanciest, most intriguing truffle in the box."

 "Are you
Forest Gump
ing me?"

 "Whatever it takes!"

 They all nodded, even Marti—her close girlfriend since high school—and Liz felt herself cave.

§

Marti accompanied her to the dermatologist's office. The wizened man with huge dark eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses was not at all like the
Nip/Tuck
actors. Sharp-featured with mud-colored corkscrew hair, olive-complexioned, zero lips to speak of and tiny ears, a face a lower-life-form might admire. He moved furtively, as if he had ADD. She wondered why, if he was such a renowned dermatologist, he didn't take advantage of his own skills.

"No good, no good," Doctor Tod mumbled, examining her skin under a ten-times magnifying glass surrounded by bright LED light that was attached to the reclining clinic chair positioned to nearly prone.

Besides those few words, he only made sounds, like soft moans followed by clicks at the end, as if he was in pain. His breath wasn't the greatest, and Liz held hers.

He poked and prodded and stretched the skin on her face with his fingers and instruments, moaning and clicking softly all the while.

Marti, who had insisted on coming into the exam room to hold Liz's hands, said, "She's not too far gone, is she?"

To which
Doctor Doom
, as Liz was now thinking of the man, moaned and clicked.

Marti patted her hand but Liz couldn't even feel it, she was so stressed with worry.

Finally, Dr. Tod diagnosed, "Damaged!" in a tone that conveyed blame. His accent was vaguely New England with a Germanic twist, and she began to wonder about his history. He was such an odd duck, like something out of a Grimm's fairytale. "Exposed!" he suddenly snapped, gesturing wildly at her face.

Liz assumed he meant to sunshine. "I, well, a bit, but I wore sunscreen as a child. Mom always made us wear it."

When he said nothing, she added, "The high SPF type."

He scowled, thin lips turning down, and mumbled disdainfully a word that sounded like 'sun' or 'shun' or something she couldn't make out.

"What can you do for her?" Marti asked nervously, as if Liz had gotten a diagnosis of 'terminal'.

"Surgery!" he said unequivocally. "New face." The last tinged with repugnance.

"No!" Liz shook her head. "Not happening!"

A deeper scowl from Dr. Doom, who looked as if he were about to throw up his hands and order her to “Get out!”

"She's afraid of the knife," Marti supplied.

That wasn't strictly true. Liz had undergone dental surgery once to remove two impacted wisdom teeth. She'd recovered quickly and painlessly. And while she had no desire to repeat the experience, she didn't feel fear so much as the logical reaction: why do something so extreme? What's the point? But she did appreciate her friend going to bat for her.

"You mentioned Botox," she said to Marti, who looked hopefully to Dr. Tod.

He gave a quick nod, turning his back on them in dismissal.

"Fills?" Marti asked the back.

He emitted one of those moaning/clicking sounds.

"You need the works," Marti whispered to Liz on their way out of the examination room. "You should have plastic surgery."

"Don't even go there, Marti. I'll do the rest, but not that."

An appointment was arranged for the first of what would turn out to be many regular visits over many months for a variety of treatments, all administered by the strange Dr. Tod who, with the passing of time, in Liz's eyes, had grown a tad less grotesque, not that he was friendlier than the day she'd met him.

She often wondered if it was the intimacy of the procedures he did on her face that changed her perception of him. He had two assistants who performed facials and other minor treatments on patients, but he always worked on Liz himself. She found that oddly comforting. Or maybe he just felt she needed so much help he couldn't trust anyone else to get it right.

Marti had come with her to the first two appointments, after which Liz was on her own. The peculiar man usually eyed her as if she was a bug pinned to a board. Being in his presence made her shudder at times, especially at the beginning, but the procedures were somewhat invasive and she felt that was likely the underpinnings of her fear.

But oddly, after one year of twice a month visits, she realized she did look better and her skin appeared almost new; the sun damage, the acne scars, the rosacea, the premature wrinkles that had become permanent, all of it had vanished. She also felt more comfortable in his presence. He never said hello, just nodded, waved at the gown to cover her clothes and at the chair. He still said little more than "head," with a gesture to turn one way or the other, but somehow he didn't seem as frightening as before.

She told Marti this over coffee at their favorite cafe.