Authors: Steve Rasnic Tem
Mannequins littered the hallway. Pieces of clothing hung from
scattered plastic arms and heads. A battered hat. A leather glove. A red rain
coat. A stocking mask.
She ran through an open door, into a bedroom.
Several lamps affixed with colored bulbs
burned before a mirror on the large dressing table. A cat moved listlessly
across piles of broken plaster toward her. It seemed to have unusually short
hair; then she realized it had been shaved down to tissue-thin skin. Under the
colored lights, the shaved cat’s skin looked blood-red. She leaned over and
stroked it—it was too drugged to purr. She could see veins laboring just
under the surface of the skin. A diagram had been drawn in black permanent
marker under its torso, like a butcher’s chart.
Four naked cats lay near the dusty red bed (a bed for lovers, she
thought), their tiny throats cut.
And then she heard him out in the hallway, whispering his love for
her.
She crashed through the next door into an old kitchen with its
piles of rusted silverware and broken plates and cups—smeared with dark,
blood-like stains—littering the gray linoleum floor. Her feet, now bare,
scraped across the shattered edges. The walls echoed complexly. She imagined
them riddled with secret doors and passages, but more likely it was the effects
of generations of rot.
She passed through another door into a hall a bit more barren than
the first. Most of the ceiling bulbs in the hall were broken, their curved
jigsaw pieces breaking under her bare feet like deadly eggshells, barbed edges
gleaming under the remaining yellow light.
A loud noise behind her and she fell into agony. She scrambled up
and stared at her left arm: a sharp shaft of bone jutted from her broken skin.
She leapt back across the hall and slammed the door into the
kitchen, painfully turning the old-fashioned latch. A knife blade suddenly
appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb, working its way down
toward the latch. The man laughed softly, whispering love songs as he worked.
She jerked her head around, searching for the next escape. A
staircase led downward. She hobbled over and stumbled down the steps.
Animal teeth scattered on the floor, rats in the corners, nesting.
A Polaroid of a sliced eyeball had been nailed to the wall beneath a precisely
mounted spotlight. Below this was the body it had been taken from: she thought
she recognized him as the man who had sold her a comb earlier that day.
Another body lay at the end of the short, subterranean hallway:
maggots had blunted the sharp planes of the face and made a curlicue border
along the dark hair line, but it still bore a startling resemblance to a woman
who used to sell tickets at the movie theatre.
In a small, clean room she found another woman’s body, razor
blades embedded in cheeks and neck tendons. A scratching at the small window
near the ceiling made her turn her head. The glass broke, as if in slow motion,
across her face. It showered down before her like frozen, glittering, magical
tears.
First arms, then a head, burst through the rainbow-sheened glass.
The man from the restaurant grinned at her through the blood washing over his
face. He looked down at the cement floor, where he had dropped his knife.
She stooped and picked up the knife off the floor. She stroked its
smooth handle. She imagined using it, slipping it through clothing into flesh
and beyond. She imagined making love to the man’s body with it, kissing him all
over with it, until he cried. It made her feel strange, imagining a man’s
tears, imagining a man’s submission.
Maxwell stared at his lover through a dull red filter. Her
constant screams of passion had receded as they blended with the loud music in
his head, until eventually he could not distinguish the two melodies. He
desperately wanted her to join him with the knife, to make of them one
creature, to blend their blood streams until they were, finally, one single,
gaping wound.
But then he found himself falling the rest of the way through the
basement window, glass and blood descending with him as he flew away to regions
of dream.
Only when her voice finally gave out into a raw, bleeding whisper
did she realize she had been screaming constantly since her discovery of the
first body. The scream joined the frantic music which still filled her head.
She struck out against him even as he crashed into her, but in the
course of their struggles dropped the knife. She was surprised to find him
naked but for his bright red uniform of blood—at some point he had
stripped away all pretension. His toenails felt like metal against her body,
but his fingernails were so sharp she did not feel them at all when they slid
beneath the surface of her skin.
He brought the edge of his hand down on her cheekbone, filling her
vision with bright, blinding flashes of light. He grinned at her, and dipped
his finger into the blood covering his face, and drew a bright red line across
her neck.
She rose onto her knees and rolled, and he rolled with her, his
teeth biting her ear as he whispered her name. They crashed into the door,
closing it firmly on the hall and the little light it had provided.
A glint in the dark, a flat surface catching any available light.
His hand was on it, and raising it high above her head.
The knife passed through her hand, nailing it to the door. She
spat into his face and he pulled the knife out and thrust it at her again. The
point passed through the surface of her right cheek. She stretched out her arms
to ward off the blows: the blade bit at the fleshy areas of her palms, her
fingers, releasing exclamations of blood. She jerked forward, catching him
off-guard, jamming the webbing of her damaged hand into his throat. He fell
back and she was on her feet again, slamming open the door and running back
into the hall. She turned and scrambled up a pile of crates to a screened
window, her hands leaving red prints on everything she touched.
Then he was behind her, pushing her face roughly into the large
squares of wire mesh. She could feel the checkerboard pattern etching into her
soft skin. Getting her feet beneath her, she pushed back against a crate
launching them both backward through the air. She could feel something breaking
beneath her, something in the man’s body, as they slammed into the floor. But
he simply groaned and said, “Darling.”
Across the hall there was the open door to a dingy bathroom. She
crawled up off the man and scrambled through the door on her hands and knees,
locking it behind her. She stood up. The bathroom was brightly lit by six huge
incandescent bulbs mounted in the ceiling. Judging from the heat they gave off,
she imagined they had been burning for some time. Blood like red greasepaint
smeared the fixtures. On the other side of the door a high-pitched man’s
voice—imitating a woman—began chanting her name.
She screamed back at him, “What did I do? I’m a nice person!” Then
she laughed huskily, the laughter bringing bile up her raw throat.
A knife blade slipped through a crack in the door panel, moving
back and forth first in a sawing motion, then a chiseling one. She grabbed a
piece of broken pipe off the floor and started swinging at the blade, finally snapping
it off. She released a strained whoop of victory. “What kind of lover would you
be?” she screamed through the door.
“I loved you!” the man shouted on the other side.
Jane collapsed into bleating laughter. The loud music faded from
her head, exhausting her. “No one can make love to me,” she said, finally,
quietly. “I am too afraid of all these sharp edges.”
A thundering on the other side of the door, and then the door
disintegrated in rage around her. Clouds of dust floated in brilliant crimson
light.
Maxwell saw himself in the bathroom’s mirrored, blood-stained
wall. Jane’s face floated at his knees, gazing up at his reflection in a way
which resembled longing, but which he knew might be any emotion at all. He
realized, now, that he could never know what Jane really felt about anything.
With a scream he plunged the blade into his own belly. He looked down at what
he had done to himself, examining the knife handle curiously, as if it were his
umbilical cord suddenly reappeared after all these years.
He sank to his knees behind her, touching her torn shoulder with
one hand.
“I am too afraid,” she said.
“We’re all afraid,” he said.
“Am I going to die now?” she asked.
“No,” he replied, gazing down at the blood seeping from his belly.
She did not move away. He would always be thankful for that, as he closed his
eyes, and in his long dream carried her back upstairs and into his bed.
I let myself in with the key she had given me and tried the light
switch by the door. Nothing. I stepped into the living room, outlined in the
yellow neon that seeped through the windows from the fast food place across the
street. Paper crinkled under my shoes and there was a sharp crunch now and then
like she’d left cracker crumbs or bits of pretzel all over the floor. And sharp
smells like cheese and liquor and bad perfume, but then Liz had always been a
lousy housekeeper. I could never have lived with her, myself.
I tried the light switch by the dining room. Still nothing. Now I
figured it was a fuse problem. The whole circuit was out.
The rhythmic shush of the cars out on the wet pavement was so loud
they sounded like they were in the next room. The fractured reflections of
their headlights washed the dining room walls in waves. Dark patches spotted the
walls. Even with that stingy bit of light, I could see that bowls of food had
been turned upside down on the table.
Somewhere in the apartment there was a snuffling sound, then a wet
whimper. “Liz?” I moved toward the bedroom.
She was sitting on the floor, down in the shadows by the bed.
“You’re a little late…” she said softly, with the hint of a slur. I figured
she’d started drinking when I didn’t show up on time. I really couldn’t
complain, however; I’d had five or six gin and tonics and a couple of beers
myself before coming over. They’d filled up the spaces, and these days I felt
like I had a lot of spaces.
“Honey, I’m sorry. It was hard to get away.”
“It’s always hard to get away. So what? You still
gotta
do it.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
She laughed. “I’ve never been more sober. Come sit beside me,
lover.”
So I went over and I sat down. The carpet there was damp. In the
dim light I couldn’t see her expression, just a white sliver of teeth, the blue
cast in one of her eyes. “So why the dark? You didn’t pay your bill?”
She laughed again. “That’s just like you, lover. Everybody knows
it’s more romantic in the dark.”
“I don’t know from romance, but I like to see what it is I’m
getting into.”
She laughed again, leaned over, and gave me a big, sloppy kiss. Her
lips were wet and salty, like those pretzels maybe, and smeared with something
sweet and heavy. A sauce or a chili, I couldn’t tell; the liquor had killed my
taste buds. Then I thought about the spilled food in the dining room. “What’s
all the mess out there? I take it Walter didn’t like dinner again? That why you
invited me over?”
She chuckled wetly. “Walter never liked my cooking. We had a
fight, that’s all. Now come here and taste some more of me. That’s what you
came for, isn’t it? Not to criticize my housekeeping.”
She had a point. I edged closer, then stopped. Something about the
way she smelled. “How long you been sitting here? You hurt or something?”
Liz laughed so hard she started coughing, coughing so hard I
thought she was going to choke on it. “No, lover. Way past hurt.”
I felt awkward sitting there beside her, especially with the funny
way she smelled, so I got up and sat on the edge of her bed. Their bed.
Walter’s and hers. “So is he coming back anytime soon? You guys have a big
fight?”
She snorted. “And you’re horny, right? You want to get something
going before he gets back? Well, get back down here on the floor. I don’t want
to mess up the bed.”
I was mad, and I was getting disgusted. I didn’t like being around
Liz when she was drunk. And the way she smelled—I was beginning to think
that
maybe’d
she’d wet herself. “I was just showing
my concern, Liz. If you weren’t such a mess you’d see that. Christ… at least
you could straighten things up around here. What’d you two do, have a food
fight or something?”
“Is that what you tell your wife? You tell her she should be
cleaning the house better? Is that your excuse for going out and finding
something on the side? Something like me?”
I held my breath, thinking fast, but having no real place to go, the
thinking just running around in circles. So I stopped thinking. “How’d you find
out?”
“Walter told me all about it. He explained things real good.”
“So Walter found out about us? Or did you just go and tell him?
Dammit, Liz.”
“Walter wasn’t stupid. Not like me. I guess he knew for a long
time. He said you were just playing with me. He laughed a lot when he told me
that. I always used to hate it when Walter laughed at me like that. Like I was
the dumbest person he’d ever heard of. And maybe I was.”