Terror Incognita (16 page)

“Maybe, ah, you should think about it a while longer,” Roy told her. “The fads change so quickly, too...I think the more involved procedures will die back down to minor touches soon. If you can’t afford to have your look adjusted or returned to normal I’d advise you to think twice about undergoing a major make-over which may become obsolete and which you’ll be stuck with until you have the money to change it.”

That appealing lopsided smile. “I’ve never met a doctor before who tried to get me to spend less money...I know doctors who’d prescribe me a brain transplant for a headache.”

“I’m not a doctor—I’m an artist. I’m an artist for the artistic gratification first...the money second. I have a compulsion to be an artist. I’m not a doctor, or a mechanic, May.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked embarrassed.

“Don’t apologize—please. I’m not offended, I’m just making a distinction. Really. So...I’m really not sure what to suggest, either, May...if you’re sure you want to do this.”

“Oh yeah, I want something.”

“What have you seen that you like?”

“Well, like I said, I want you to decide, but my friend Stacee had her head shaved bald with a ring of like glassy balls implanted around it that change color with her moods. A friend of mine, Jhonn, had one arm removed and a tentacle put in its place with a mouth at the end and a tongue.” May smiled bashfully at the implications. “Zelda had her ears pointed and face made a lot like a cat, even with whiskers. I like them all but they’re all different.” She threw up her hands.” I like old art. I was thinking maybe something Picassoy. You must know Picasso?”

He did. “Picasso. That sounds extreme, May.”

“Well, I don’t know...”

“I suggest something subtle. The fad will change soon, as I see it.”

“Well I can always get the money to change it in the future.”

Roy sighed. He stared at the monitor on his desk, wondering if he should have her take a look at his photo file of previous customers. Her photo on the monitor gazed back at him. Striking. Lovely. He didn’t suggest the file.

“I’ll think of something,” he said. “In the price range you’ve listed your work will be done within two to three hours. Are you ready?”

“Yes. Are
you
 ready?”

She sensed his reluctance. “Yes...of course.” He rose.

“What about the man in the waiting room, if he has to wait three hours? Do you have an associate?”

“No. Rhik just likes to come early, read, hang around. He likes it here.” Roy could almost keep the bitter edge out of his words. “This way, please.”

Picasso. He hated Picasso.

*     *     *

Roy made a big mistake in having had May Azul undressed and laid starkly, whitely naked like a corpse on his slab. A corpse without bullet-hole, wound, mark of violence. It only heightened his confusion. But still, her face remained his focus. He was a portraitist, primarily. A face man.

For a full half hour he paced around the table, coffee in hand, studying her. She was a tree. He was a chainsaw. And she wanted to become a chainsaw sculpture from the tree.

It wasn’t easier to do a Mrs. Kingston or Mrs. Violet simply because they were less beautiful than this young woman. Of course that reaction was natural. But his reluctance had grown beyond his dismay at the application photograph—grown upon talking with her. She was shy...cute...sweet, he thought. It was easy to despise the college types—they sought the most outlandish expression of his aristic contempt. But she was naive, he told himself, simply giving in to peer pressure. She couldn’t
really
 want to look like one of Picasso’s excuses for beauty...

Slowly, uncertainly, he set about preparing his pallet, eyes never straying long from that bare canvas.

*     *     *

Still in his lab smock, taking a break from his work on Rhik, Roy went into the recovery room to see how May Azul was doing. Roy had sent Iris in a few minutes ago to revive her, and when he entered May had already swung her bare legs off the side of the bed. She wore a plastic smock. She was already viewing herself in a display of wall screens. Iris stepped aside. Roy’s stomach was clenched in a fist of dread.

“Hello, May.” Professional smile. “So what do you think?” Light tone.

“Well.” She fingered it timidly. His sculpture. Her face. “It’s a little subtle. I thought we’d agreed to do a little more.” She had checked the time...it hadn’t been any three hours. He’d better not charge her for the three-hour range.

“I thought you trusted my artistic instincts.”

“I do. But...well.” A small red jewel, glowing with a light inside it, was implanted in her forehead. From the corners of her eyes, two implanted, thin, rounded black plastic strips extended to her temples, then curved down under the line of her jaw to connect under her chin. That was all. “I still look kind of boring.”

Boring. With those bee-stung lips. “Did you see this?” He picked up a small device. Touched a key. The forehead jewel turned sapphire. Another key. The black plastic half-frame around her face became white. Pink. Metallic gold. The gem became an emerald.

“Yes,” May murmured, only half looking into the screens. “I just...I like it, but I could probably buy jewelry like this and glue it on. I thought from the friends I described, and from the price range we agreed on, you’d do something more distinctive. I  trust your artistic instincts, but this is
me
 ...I’m the one who has to be artistically gratified. Right?”

Maybe she could be bashful and sweet, but she could be cold and bitter also, he observed. “This is what I saw for you,” he said emotionlessly. Iris looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry you don’t like it.”

“I’d like a little more, if I have the money left over.”

“You do. But I really don’t know what else I might do for you.”

“I’ve seen your photographs on the walls, Mr. Roy! I saw that guy Rhik in the waiting room! What do you mean you don’t know what else you can do?”

“Iris, will you tend the front?” She nodded, split-faced, left. Roy moved to a coffee maker and got himself a cup. May declined. His back to May, the artist said, “Why does such a lovely woman want to look like an axe murderer attacked her and a drunken doctor patched her back together?”

“Why are you saying this?
Lovely?
 Nobody looks at me! I don’t stand out! I want to make a statement!”

“Those aren’t their statements. They’re mine. They aren’t individuals. They’re all the same. Can’t you see how beautiful you are? You want me to ruin that? I don’t like Picasso, May...I like Renoir.” He faced her.

“You’re a hypocrite, Mr. Roy. You do things like I saw in your photographs and you act like you disapprove.”

“I do.” He sipped his coffee grimly.

“Why?”
 She gaped at him in disbelief.

Roy’s eyes were hot in a face that was clean-shaven, somewhat plump and boyish, and devoid of any artistic embellishment. Only now did May notice that. He said, “John Merrick the Elephant Man ached to look like regular men. He
dreamed
of it...in vain. Never had a wife. Died young, after years of pain. And I have a...ludicrous
fool
on a table in this other room who wants to look like him exactly! If I could only trade his body with Merrick, but I can’t. Can you see the horror in this?”

“What horror? He looked happy to me. He
chooses
 to look like that. Merrick didn’t. In our time nobody will make fun of that man or pity him—they’ll admire him and envy him! So what’s so horrible?”

Now it was Roy’s turn to gape in disbelief, coffee hovering in his hand. “Don’t you see it isn’t
natural?”

“Natural? I don’t believe you, not at
all!
Look at
you.
 Is it natural for humans to wear clothes, jewelry? Is it natural for you to wear deodorant, cut and comb your hair and shave? What’s natural? You’re  the artist—why do you do it? Just for the money after all, after your big speech about ‘artistic gratification’?” She mocked the words.

Roy set down his coffee. “I didn’t lie to you, Miss Azul. I do achieve a great deal of artistic gratification. More so than when I used to repair people who had been burnt or disfigured, making them beautiful again. I
love
 deforming these fools and blathering, mindless sheep who follow the drunken herdsmen of fashion!”

“So you’re a poet too, eh?” May hugged her arms, sneering her pouty bee-stung lips at him to hide her nervousness.

“An unhappy poet, Miss Azul. With a talent for working from the black ink well. The dark end of the pallet. I am only too happy to hack the arm off a buffoon like your friend and give him a tentacle instead and take his money. He’s a horror to me, a monster. I laugh at him.”

“You’re sick! You know that? You’re sick.”

“Oh? But he’s happy with his tentacle, isn’t he? You don’t see me with a tentacle. We’re
all
 sick, May.”

“I didn’t come for a philosophy lecture, Mr. Roy. What do I owe you? I’ll go elsewhere for what I want.”

“No.” Roy dropped his coffee cup three-quarters full into the trash zapper. “I’ll finish with Rhik and be right with you—it will just be an hour.”

“I’m not sure I want you now.”

“You may have to wait elsewhere for weeks for a session. Go read a magazine. One hour.”

“All right,” May muttered, slipping off the table, gathering up her belongings. “I just want what I want,” she said in a softer tone.

“I know.” Roy didn’t look at her, and left her to dress although she had lain naked for him to manipulate before...a field of snow inviting the trampling of a herd of mindless sheep.

While Roy finished up with Rhik’s session he flipped through books from his extensive collection in his mind. Horror movies. Texts on medical anomalies. A half dozen on circus sideshows of old. Bosch. Maybe a little bit of each?

Mr. Roy was inspired, now.

He sweated eight hours over May Azul.

CRIMSON BLUES

He smelled the top of her head, as he had sniffed her head when she was a wispy-haired newborn. But she was a woman now, and in bending his nose against her scalp he inhaled shampoo and mousse. Shutting his eyes, James tugged the spiked blade of the awl out of the base of his daughter’s neck.

He was crouched on the floor, Cheri sprawled half in his lap. Her open mouth was still moist against his left palm as if suction-cupped to it. He let her down onto her back, the plastic drop cloth under them rustling. The chair that he had told her he meant to paint, here in the middle of the kitchen, had been knocked on its side in her brief struggle—a few convulsive kicks.

James stood over her now, looking down, as he had looked down at her in her crib so many times. After his wife had left him, he had sometimes thought to suffocate that sleeping infant as he watched her blissfully dreaming. She would have been better off if he had done it then, he knew now. And so would he. He fought down the rising sob in his throat. It was a sob of self-pity more than of guilt.

After all, she had meant to leave him. Just as her worthless mother had abandoned him. And hadn’t she become every bit the whore her mother had been? He had seen his daughter chatting so cozily with the mailman on the front step. That was only an example, that was only what he
saw.
 She even flirted with his sister’s husband, his smarmy brother-in-law, Curtis. And when she kissed him goodnight, him, her own father, didn’t she linger just a moment too long? Her lips pressed to his cheek? Wasn’t she trying to seduce even him? Yes, she was better off now, delivered from further temptations of evil. And now James was delivered from his own.

No one would suspect that he had murdered his own daughter. No one did that. Their wives, girlfriends, certainly, that was practically a fad. But in this, he felt safe. And he had had it all planned. The drop cloth under her, which he had lured her onto like those nets in the movies that gathered people up into the trees. And the awl, its spike so slim, to minimize the splashing of blood.

Yes, it was pooling now into folds of the drop cloth, but James lifted Cheri’s head to stuff a kitchen towel under her neck, as if tenderly slipping a pillow beneath her, to absorb it. And there had been a little spattering of blood across his sleeve, across the drop cloth. He had, after all, had to stab her several times. But he would burn his clothing in the fireplace, and sweep out the ashes after that. And her body would be wrapped up in blankets, driven out into the woods and set aflame also, then the remains buried. He would tell those who asked that his daughter had run off with some ominous-looking young man whose name he didn’t know. Hell, he’d even call the police and report her missing. Maybe gone to search for her missing mother, he’d speculate.

James stooped, began to fold the edge of the drop cloth over Cheri like a blanket. Like a shroud. As he did this, a small black shape caught his eye. Something by Cheri’s head.

It was a large black beetle. No, a cricket. Good-sized, almost an inch. Weren’t crickets an omen of good luck? Cheri must have let it in with her.

James shooed it. Waved at it to swat it off the drop cloth rather than crush it, feeling in a merciful mood. It jumped. A good jump, too—so good that it jumped right out of his vision. But in that split second before it leaped, before it vanished, James had seen the single spot of red that glistened wetly on the cricket’s back.

“Damn,” he hissed to himself, and got down on hands and knees to peer under the table.

Well, he had to find it, didn’t he? Cheri’s disappearance would be noticed sooner or later even if he didn’t call the police himself. A boyfriend, a class mate, his sister Ann and that smug bastard Curtis might come looking for her. Ann and Curtis had acted like Cheri was their daughter rather than his, over these past seventeen years.  Always fretting, always meddling.  They would come, yes, and he would tell them no, no, he had no idea where Cheri had gone. And then a black shape would leap incriminatingly out into the center of the floor between their feet, or onto the table between their coffees, and then there it would be, the cricket, a spot of red on its back like the hourglass of a black widow. A moving, living piece of evidence. Like a charred black skeleton’s finger, pointing accusingly to him.