Sleepside: The Collected Fantasies (11 page)

“Why him and not one of us?” Reggie asked.

Momma gently pushed the babies aside, swung open the gate, and marched down the hall, dressed in her best wool skirt and print blouse, wrapped in her overcoat against the gathering dark and cold outside. “Where you going?” Yolanda asked her as she brushed past.

“Time to talk to the police,” she said, glowering at Reggie. Denver backed into the bedroom he shared with his brother, out of her way. He shook his head condescendingly, grinning: Momma at it again.

“Them dogheads?” Reggie said. “They got no say in Sunside.”

Momma turned at the front door and glared at them. “How are you going to help your brother? He's the best of you all, you know, and you just stand here, flatfooted and jawboning yourselves.”

“Momma's upset,” Denver informed his brother solemnly.

“She should be,” Reggie said sympathetically. “She was held prisoner by that witch bitch whore. We should go get Oliver and bring him home. We could pretend we was customers.”

“She don't have customers anymore,” Denver said. “She's too old. She's worn out.” He glanced at his crotch and leaned his head to one side, glaring for emphasis. His glare faded into an amiable grin.

“How do you know?” Reggie asked.

“That's what I hear.”

Momma snorted and pulled back the bars and bolts on the front door. Reggie calmly walked up behind her and stopped her. “Police don't do anybody any good, Momma,” he said. “We'll go. We'll bring Oliver back.”

Denver's face slowly fell at the thought. “We got to plan it out,” he said. “We got to be careful.”

“We'll be careful,” Reggie said. “For Momma's sake.”

With his hand blocking her exit, Momma snorted again, then let her shoulders droop and her face sag. She looked more and more like an old woman now, though she was only in her late thirties.

Yolanda stood aside to let her pass into the living room. “Poor Momma,” she said, eyes welling up.

“What you going to do for your brother?” Reggie asked his sister pointedly as he in turn walked by her. She craned her neck and stuck out her chin resentfully. “Go trade places with him, work in
her
house?” he taunted.

“She's rich,” Denver said to himself, cupping his chin in his hand. “We could make a whole lot of money, saving our brother.”

“We start thinking about it now,” Reggie mandated, falling into the chair that used to be their father's, leaning his head back against the lace covers Momma had made.

Momma, face ashen, stood by the couch staring at a family portrait hung on the wall in a cheap wooden frame. “He did it for me. I was so stupid, getting off there, letting her help me. Should of known,” she murmured, clutching her wrist. Her face ashen, her ankle wobbled under her and she pirouetted, hands spread out like a dancer, and collapsed face down on the couch.

The gift, the thing that Oliver needed to inherit Miss Parkhurst's mansion, was a small gold box with three buttons, like a garage door opener. She finally presented it to him in the dining room as they finished dinner.

Miss Parkhurst was nice to talk to, something Oliver had not expected, but which he should have. Whores did more than lie with a man to keep him coming back and spending his money; that should have been obvious. The day had not been the agony he expected. He had even stopped asking her to let him go. Oliver thought it would be best to bide his time, and when something distracted her, make his escape. Until then, she was not treating him badly or expecting anything he could not freely give.

“It'll be dark soon,” she said as the plates cleared themselves away. He was even getting used to the ghostly service. “I have to go soon, and you got to be in your room. Take this with you, and keep it there.” She lifted a tray cover to reveal a white silk bag. Unstringing the bag, she removed the golden opener and shyly presented it to him. “This was given to me a long time ago. I don't need it now. But if you want to run this place, you got to have it. You can't lose it, or let anyone take it from you.”

Oliver's hands went to the opener involuntarily. It seemed very desirable, as if there were something of Miss Parkhurst in it: warm, powerful, a little frightening. It fit his hand perfectly, familiar to his skin; he might have owned it forever.

He tightened his lips and returned it to her. “I'm sorry,” he said. “It's not for me.”

“You remember what I told you,” she said. “If you don't take it, somebody else will, and it won't do anybody any good then. I want it to do some good now, when I'm done with it.”

“Who gave it to you?” Oliver asked.

“A pimp, a long time ago. When I was a girl.”

Oliver's eyes betrayed no judgment or disgust. She took a deep breath.

“He made you do it... ?” Oliver asked.

“No. I was young, but already a whore. I had an old, kind pimp, at least he seemed old to me, I wasn't much more than a baby. He died, he was killed, so this new pimp came, and he was powerful. He had the magic. But he couldn't tame me. So he says...”

Miss Parkhurst raised her hands to her face. “He cut me up. I was almost dead. He says, ‘You shame me, whore. You do this to me, make me lose control, you're the only one ever did this to me. So I curse you. You'll be the greatest whore ever was.' He gave me the opener then, and he put my face and body back together so I'd be pretty. Then he left town, and I was in charge. I've been here ever since, but all the girls have gone, it's been so long, died or left or I told them to go. I wanted this place closed, but I couldn't close it all at once.”

Oliver nodded slowly, eyes wide.

“He gave me most of his magic, too. I didn't have any choice. One thing he didn't give me was a way out. Except...” This time, she was the one with the pleading expression.

Oliver raised an eyebrow.

“What I need has to be freely given. Now take this.” She stood and thrust the opener into his hands. “Use it to find your way all around the house. But don't leave your room after dark.”

She swept out of the dining room, leaving a scent of musk and flowers and something bittersweet. Oliver put the opener in his pocket and walked back to his room, finding his way without hesitation, without thought. He shut the door and went to the bookcase, sad and troubled and exultant all at once.

She had told him her secret. He could leave now if he wanted. She had given him the power to leave.

Sipping from a glass of sherry on the nightstand beside the bed, reading from a book of composers' lives, he decided to wait until morning.

Yet after a few hours, nothing could keep his mind away from Miss Parkhurst's prohibition—not the piano, the books, or the snacks delivered almost before he thought about them, appearing on the tray when he wasn't watching. Oliver sat with hands folded in the plush chair, blinking at the room's dark corners. He thought he had Miss Parkhurst pegged. She was an old woman tired of her life, a beautifully preserved old woman to be sure, very strong ... But she was sweet on him, keeping him like some unused gigolo. Still, he couldn't help but admire her, and he couldn't help but want to be home, near Momma and Yolanda and the babies, keeping his brothers out of trouble—not that they appreciated his efforts.

The longer he sat, the angrier and more anxious he became. He felt sure something was wrong at home. Pacing around the room did nothing to calm him. He examined the opener time and again in the firelight, brow wrinkled, wondering what powers it gave him. She had said he could go anywhere in the house and know his way, just as he had found his room without her help.

He moaned, shaking his fists at the air. “She can't keep me here! She just
can't!”

At midnight, he couldn't control himself any longer. He stood before the door. “Let me out, dammit!” he cried, and the door opened with a sad whisper. He ran down the corridor, scattering moonlight on the floor like dust, tears shining on his cheeks.

Through the sitting rooms, the long halls of empty bedrooms—now with their doors closed, shades of sound sifting from behind—through the vast deserted kitchen, with its rows of polished copper kettles and huge black coal cookstoves, through a courtyard surrounded by five stories of the mansion on all sides and open to the golden-starred night sky, past a tiled fountain guarded by three huge white porcelain lions, ears and empty eyes following him as he ran by, Oliver searched for Miss Parkhurst, to tell her he must leave.

For a moment, he caught his breath in an upstairs gallery. He saw faint lights under doors, heard more suggestive sounds. No time to pause, even with his heart pounding and his lungs burning. If he waited in one place long enough, he thought the ghosts might become real and make him join their revelry. This was Miss Parkhurst's past, hoary and indecent, more than he could bear contemplating. How could anyone have lived this kind of life, even if they were cursed?

Yet the temptation to stop, to listen, to give in and join in was almost stronger than he could resist. He kept losing track of what he was doing, what his ultimate goal was.

“Where are you?” he shouted, throwing open double doors to a game room, empty but for more startled ghosts, more of Miss Parkhurst's eternity of bookkeeping. Pale forms rose from the billiard tables, translucent breasts shining with an inner light, their pale lovers rolling slowly to one side, fat bellies prominent, ghost eyes black and startled. “Miss Parkhurst!”

Oliver brushed through hundreds of girls, no more substantial than curtains of raindrops. His new clothes became wet with their tears.
She
had presided over this eternity of sad lust.
She
had orchestrated the debaucheries, catered to what he felt inside him: the whims and deepest desires unspoken.

Thin antique laughter followed him.

He slid on a splash of sour-smelling champagne and came up abruptly against a heavy wooden door, a room he did not know. The golden opener told him nothing about what waited beyond.

“Open!” he shouted, but he was ignored. The door was not locked, but it resisted his entry as if it weighed tons. He pushed with both hands and then laid his shoulder on the paneling, bracing his sneakers against the thick wool pile of a champagne-soaked runner. The door swung inward with a deep iron and wood grumble, and Oliver stumbled past, saving himself at the last minute from falling on his face. Legs sprawled, down on both hands, he looked up from the wooden floor and saw where he was.

The room was narrow, but stretched on for what might have been miles, lined on one side with an endless row of plain double beds, and on the other with an endless row of freestanding cheval mirrors. An old man, the oldest he had ever seen, naked, white as talcum, rose stiffly from the bed, mumbling. Beneath him, red and warm as a pile of glowing coals, Miss Parkhurst lay with legs spread, incense of musk and sweat thick about her. She raised her head and shoulders, eyes fixed on Oliver's, and pulled a black peignoir over her nakedness. In the gloom of the room's extremities, other men, old and young, stood by their beds, smoking cigarettes or cigars or drinking champagne or whisky, all observing Oliver. Some grinned in speculation.

Miss Parkhurst's face wrinkled in agony like an old apple and she threw back her head to scream. The old man on the bed grabbed clumsily for a robe and his clothes.

Her shriek echoed from the ceiling and the walls, driving Oliver back through the door, down the halls and stairways. The wind of his flight chilled him to the bone in his tear-soaked clothing. Somehow he made his way through the sudden darkness and emptiness, and shut himself in his room, where the fire still burned warm and cheery yellow. Shivering uncontrollably, Oliver removed the wet new clothes and called for his own in a high-pitched, frantic voice. But the invisible servants did not deliver what he requested.

He fell into the bed and pulled the covers tight about him, eyes closed. He prayed that she would not come after him, not come into his room with her peignoir slipping aside, revealing her furnace body; he prayed her smell would not follow him the rest of his life.

The door to his room did not open. Outside, all was quiet. In time, as dawn fired the roofs and then the walls and finally the streets of Sunside, Oliver slept.

“You came out of your room last night,” Miss Parkhurst said over the late breakfast. Oliver stopped chewing for a moment, glanced at her through bloodshot eyes, then shrugged.

“Did you see what you expected?”

Oliver didn't answer. Miss Parkhurst sighed like a young girl.

“It's my life. This is the way I've lived for a long time.”

“None of my business,” Oliver said, breaking a roll in half and buttering it.

“Do I disgust you?”

Again no reply. Miss Parkhurst stood in the middle of his silence and walked to the dining-room door. She looked over her shoulder at him, eyes moist. “You're not afraid of me now,” she said. “You think you know what I am.”

Oliver saw that his silence and uncaring attitude hurt her, and relished for a moment this power. When she remained standing in the doorway, he looked up with a purposefully harsh expression—copied from Reggie, sarcastic and angry at once—and saw tears flowing steadily down her cheeks. She seemed younger than ever now, not dangerous, just very sad. His expression faded. She turned away and closed the door behind her.

Oliver slammed half the roll into his plate of eggs and pushed his chair back from the table. “I'm not even full-grown!” he shouted at the door. “I'm not even a man! What do you want from me?” He stood up and kicked the chair away with his heel, then stuffed his hands in his pockets and paced around the small room. He felt bottled up, and yet she had said he could go anytime he wished.

Go where?
Home?

He stared at the goldenware and the plates heaped with excellent food. Nothing like this at home. Home was a place he sometimes thought he'd have to fight to get away from; he couldn't protect Momma forever from the rest of the family, he couldn't be a breadwinner for five extra mouths for the rest of his life...