Winter 2007 (10 page)

He bolts the inner door,
too. Resisting Marley’s attempts to get amorous, he opens out the couch bed,
makes her lie down and take a couple of aspirin with a glass of water. He sits
in a chair by the couch as she falls asleep, his anxiety subsiding. She looks
like a kid in her T-shirt and diaphanous green panties, drowsing on her belly,
face half-concealed by strings of hair, and he thinks what a fuck-up he is. The
thought is bred by no particular chain of logic. It may have something to do
with Marley, with his deepened sense of the relationship’s inappropriateness, a
woman more than twenty years his junior (though, God knows, he’s championed the
other side of that argument), and she’s younger than that in her head, a girl,
really…It may bear upon that, but the thought has been on heavy rotation in his
brain for years and seems to have relevance to every situation. He’s pissed
away countless chances for marriage, for success, and he can’t remember what he
was thinking, why he treated these opportunities with such casual disregard. He
recalls getting a third callback to test for the Bruce Willis role in
Diehard.
Word was that the studio was leaning toward him, because Willis had pissed off
one of the execs, so one the night before the callback he did acid at some
Topanga cliff dwelling and came in looking bleary and dissolute.

Looking at Marley’s ass, he
has a flicker of arousal, and that worries him, that it’s only a flicker, that
perhaps his new sense of morality is merely a byproduct of growing older, of a
reduced sex drive. He has the sudden urge to prove himself wrong, to wake her
up and fuck her until dawn, but he sits there, depressed, letting his emotions
bleed out into the sound of windowpanes shuddering from constant slaps of wind.
Eventually he goes to the door and switches off the lights. Seconds later, he
switches them back on, hoping that he won’t discover some mutant shape sneaking
toward the porch, yet feeling stupid and a little disappointed when nothing of
the sort manifests.

Chapter Four

He’s waked by something
banging. He tries to sleep through it, but each time he thinks it’s quit and
relaxes, it starts up again, so he flings off the covers and shuffles into the
living room, pauses on finding the couch unoccupied, scratches his head, trying
to digest Marley’s absence, then shuffles onto the porch and discovers it’s the
screen door that’s banging. Thickheaded, he shuts it, registering that it’s
still dark outside. He walks through the house, calling out to Marley; he
checks the bathroom. Alarm sets in. She would have left a note, she would have
shut the front door. He dresses, shaking out the cobwebs, and goes out onto the
porch steps, switching on the exterior lights. Beyond the half-circle of
illumination, the shore is a winded confusion, black sky merging with black
earth and sea, the surf still heavy. The wind comes in a steady pour off the
water, plastering his shorts and shirt against his body.

“Marley!”

No response.

With this much wind, he
thinks, his voice won’t carry fifty feet.

He grabs the flashlight
from inside the door, deciding that he’ll walk down to the Surfside and make
sure her car’s gone from the lot. She probably went home, he tells himself.
Woke up and was sober enough to drive. But leaving the door open…that’s just
not Marley.

He strikes out along A1A,
keeping to the shoulder, made a bit anxious by the music he heard earlier that
evening, by the boomerang sound, though he’s attributed that to the booze, and
by the time he reaches the turn-off into the lot, his thoughts have brightened,
he’s planning the day ahead; but on seeing Marley’s shitbox parked all by its
lonesome, a dented brown Hyundai nosed up to the door of the Surfside, his
worries are rekindled. He shines the flashlight through the windows of the Hyundai.
Fast-food litter, a Big Gulp cup, a crumpled Kleenex box. He bangs on the door
of the bar, thinking that Marley might have changed her mind, realized she was
too drunk to drive and bedded down in the Surfside. He shouts, bangs some more.
Maybe she called a cab from his house. She must have felt guilty about coming
on to him. If that’s the case, he’ll have to have a talk with her, assure her
that it’s not that she isn’t desirable, it’s got nothing to do with her, it’s
him, it’s all about how he’s begun to feel in intimate situations with her, and
then she’ll say he’s being stupid, she doesn’t think of him as a dirty old man,
not at all. It’s like the kids say, they’re friends with benefits. No big deal.
And Cliff, being a guy, will go along with that—sooner or later they’ll
wind up sleeping together and there they’ll be, stuck once again amid the
confusions of a May-September relationship.

As he walks home, swinging
the flashlight side-to-side, he wonders if the reason he put some distance
between him and Marley had less to do with her age than with the fact that he
was getting too attached to her. The way he felt when she popped up at the
Surfside last night—energized, happy, really happy to see her—is
markedly different from the way he felt when Stacy Gerone came over the other
morning. He’s been in love a couple of times, and he seems to recall that
falling in love was preceded on each occasion by a similar reaction on his
part, a pushing away of the woman concerned for one reason or another. That, he
concludes, would be disastrous. If now he perceives himself to be an aging
roué, just imagine how contemptible he’d feel filling out Medicare forms while
Marley is still a relatively young woman—like a decrepit vampire draining
her youth.

His cottage in view, he
picks up the pace, striding along briskly. He’ll go back to bed for an hour or
two, call Marley when he wakes. And if she wants to start things up again…It’s
occurred to him that he’s being an idiot, practicing a form of denial that
serves no purpose. In Asia, in Europe, relationships between older men and
young women—between older women and young men, for that
matter—aren’t perceived as unusual. All he may be doing by his denial is
obeying a bourgeoisie convention. He gnaws at the problem, kicking at tufts of high
grass, thinking that his notion of morality must be hardening along with his
arteries, and, as he approaches the cottage, verging on the arc of radiance
spilling from the porch, he notices a smear of red to the left of the door.
It’s an extensive mark, a wide, wavy streak a couple of feet long that looks
very much like blood.

Coming up to the porch, he
touches a forefinger to the redness. It’s tacky, definitely blood. He’s
bewildered, dully regarding the dab of color on his fingertip, his mind muddled
with questions, and then the wrongness of it, the idea that someone has marked
his house with blood, and it’s for sure an intentional mark, because no one
would inadvertently leave a two-foot-long smear…the wrongness of it hits home
and he’s afraid. He whirls about. Beyond the range of the porch lights, the
darkness bristles, vegetation seething in the wind, palmetto tops tossing,
making it appear that the world is solidifying into a big, angry animal with
briny breath, and it’s shaking itself, preparing to charge.

He edges toward the steps,
alert to every movement, and starts to hear music again, not the whiny racket
he heard earlier, but strings and trumpets, a prolonged fanfare like the
signature of a cheesy film score, growing louder, and he sees something taking
shape from the darkness, something a shade blacker than the sky, rising to
tower above the dunes. The coalsack figure of a horned giant, a sword held over
its head. He gapes at the thing, the apparition—he assumes it’s an
apparition. What else could it be? He hasn’t been prone to hallucinations for
twenty years, and the figure, taller now than the tallest of the condominiums
that line the beach along South Atlantic Avenue, is a known quantity, the
spitting image of the Black Demon from his movie. Somebody is gaslighting him.
They’re out in the dunes with some kind of projector, casting a movie image
against the clouds. Having established a rational explanation, albeit a flimsy
one, Cliff tries to react rationally. He considers searching the dunes, finding
the culprit, but when the giant cocks the sword, drawing it back behind its
head, preparing to swing a blade that, by Cliff’s estimate, is easily long
enough to reach him, his dedication to reason breaks and he bolts for the
steps, slams and locks the inner door, and stands in the center of his darkened
living room, breathing hard, on the brink of full-blown panic.

The music has reverted to
rackety percussion and skirling reeds, and it’s grown louder, so loud that
Cliff can’t think, can’t get a handle on the situation.

Many-colored lights flash
in the windows, pale rose and purple and green and white, reminding him of the
lights in a Manila disco created by cellophane panels on a wheel revolving past
a bright bulb. He has a glimpse of something or someone darting past outside. A
shadowy form, vaguely anthropomorphic, running back and forth, a few steps
forward, slipping out of sight, then racing in the opposite direction, as if
maddened by the music, and, his pulse accelerated by the dervish reeds and
clattering percussion, music that might accompany the flight of panicked moth,
Cliff begins to feel light-headed. unsteady on his feet. There’s too much
movement, too much noise. It seems that the sound-and-light show is having an
effect on his brain, like those video games that trigger epileptic seizures,
and he can’t get his bearings. The floor shifts beneath him, the window frame
appears to have made a quarter-turn sideways in the wall. The furniture is dancing,
the Mexican throw rug fronting the couch ripples like the surface of a
rectangular pond. And then it stops. Abruptly. The music is cut off, the lights
quit flashing…but there’s still too much light for a moonless, starless night,
and he has the impression that someone’s aiming a yellow-white spot at the
window beside the couch. Cliff waits for the next torment. His heart rate
slows, he catches his breath, but he remains still, braced against the shock he
knows is coming. Almost a full minute ticks by, and nothing’s happened. The
shadows in the room have deepened and solidified. He’s uncertain what to do.
Call the police and barricade himself in the house. Run like hell. Those seem
the best options. Maybe whoever was doing this has fled and left a single
spotlight behind. He sees his cell phone lying on an end table. “Okay,” he
says, the way you’d speak to a spooked horse. “Okay.” He eases over to the
table and picks up the phone. Activated, its cool blue glow soothes him. He
punches in Marley’s number and reaches her voicemail. “Marley,” he says. “Call
me when you get this.” Before calling the police, he thinks about what might be
in the house—he’s out of pot, but did he finish those mushrooms in the
freezer? Where did he put that bottle of oxycodone that Stacy gave him?

A tremendous bang shakes
the cottage. Cliff squawks and drops the phone. Something scrabbles on the
outside wall and then a woman’s face, bright blue, reminiscent of those Indian
posters of Kali you used to be able to buy in head shops, her white teeth
bared, her long black hair disheveled and hanging down, appears in the window,
coming into view from the side, as if she’s clinging to the wall like a lizard.
Her expression is so inhuman, so distorting of her features, that it yields no
clue as to her identity; but when she swings down to center the window,
gripping the molding, revealing her naked body, he recognizes her to be
what’s-her-name, the witch who gave him the STD. The mole on her left breast,
directly below the nipple gives it away. As does her pubic hair, shaved into a
unique pattern redolent of exotic vegetation. Even without those telltales,
he’d know that body. She loved to dance for him before they fucked, rippling
the muscles of her inner thighs, shaking her breasts. But she’s not dancing
now, and there’s nothing arousing about her presence. She just hangs outside
the window, glaring, a voluptuous blue bug. Her teeth and skin and red lips are
a disguise. Rip it away, and you would see a horrid face with a proboscis and
snapping jaws. Only the eyes would remain of her human semblance. Huge and
dark, empty except for a greedy, lustful quality that manifests as a gleam
embedded deep within them. It’s that quality that compels Cliff, that roots him
to the floorboards. He’s certain if he makes a move to run, she’ll come through
the window, employing some magic that leaves the glass intact, and what she’ll
do then…His imagination fails him, or perhaps it does not, for he feels her
stare on his skin, licking at him as might a cold flame, tasting him, coating
his flesh with a slimy residue that isn’t tangible, yet seems actual, a kind of
saliva that, he thinks, will allow her to digest him more readily. And then
it’s over. The witch’s body deflates, shrivels like a leathery balloon, losing
its shape, crumpling, folding in on itself, dwindling in a matter of four or
five seconds to a point of light that—he realizes the instant before it
winks out, before the spotlight, too, winks out—is the same exact shade
of blue as the Vacancy sign at the Celeste Motel.

It’s a trick, a false
ending, Cliff tells himself—she’s trying to get his hopes up, to let him
relax, and then she’ll materialize behind him, close enough to touch. But time
stretches out and she does not reappear. The sounds of wind and surf come to
him. Still afraid, but beginning to feel foolish, he picks up his cell phone,
half-expecting her to seize the opportunity and pounce. He goes cracks the
door, then opens it and steps out into the soft night air. Something has sliced
through the porch screen, halving it neatly. He imagines that the amount of
torque required to do such a clean job would be considerable—it would be
commensurate with, say, the arc of an enormous sword swung by a giant and
catching the screen with the tip of its blade. He retreats inside the house,
locks and bolts the door, realizing that it’s possible he’s being haunted by a
movie. Thoughts spring up to assail the idea, but none serve to dismiss it.
Understanding that he won’t be believed, yet having nowhere else to turn, he
dials 911.