by Scott Smith
He kissed her again in the cab uptown, his mouth tasting of sushi and sake, and then he cupped her breasts in his hands, first the right, then the left, giving each a gentle squeeze: Rose had a brief memory of her mother, in the produce section at Safeway, testing oranges for ripeness. She was half-splayed across Patrick’s lap, and she could feel his erection through his pants—the bulk and heat of it. When she pressed down with her leg, Patrick groaned, then bit her ear.
His apartment was on the Upper West Side, somewhere beyond Lincoln Center, but before the Apple Store, a prewar building, with no doorman. The elevator was tiny, almost phone-booth size—they rode it to the seventh floor—and then there was a long, dimly lit hallway, a door with three separate locks. The door was dark gray, and had two black numbers painted at eye level: 78. Patrick looked nervous suddenly. He undid the first lock, dropped his keys, undid the second lock, dropped the keys again. Rose was accustomed to this by now, the terror some men appeared to feel when there was no longer any question of what was about to happen. It always seemed odd to her, since this was precisely the moment when she began to feel most calm: no one needed to think anymore, they were in the chute, all of the necessary decisions had already been made, and now gravity could take command. Other people’s anxiety had a way of unsettling Rose—as if it were contagious—and she felt an urge to soothe Patrick. She lifted her hand to caress the nape of his neck; she was close enough to feel that buzzy sensation another person’s skin can radiate an instant before you touch it, when the barking began. Rose jumped at the sound, then laughed, and the final lock was undone, and the door was swinging open, and there they were: three dogs, one big and black and shaggy, one small and white and fluffy, and the last of them lean and brown with a white patch over its eye, like the hero in a children’s picture book.
Rose managed only a brief impression of the apartment. It had a dorm room feel: linoleum on the floor, a glimpse of what appeared to be a plastic lawn chair through the archway to the darkened living room. There was a flurry of panting and licking from the dogs, along with much wagging of tails, and some leaping and yapping by the fluffy white one, and then Patrick was leading Rose across the little entranceway, kicking off his shoes, dragging his shirt over his head, pulling her down the hall to the bedroom. He pushed her onto the bed, and started to undo his belt, while all three dogs watched from the doorway. The dogs stayed there while she and Patrick fucked; every time Rose glanced in their direction, she saw them staring. Rose was too drunk to enjoy the sex—it felt hazy and faraway, and the bed kept threatening to start spinning—but none of this was Patrick’s fault. He was surprisingly gentlemanly in his efforts; he seemed to want her pleasure almost as much as he desired his own, and Rose was grateful for this—grateful, too, for the glass of water he fetched afterward, grateful for what felt to her like clean sheets, and grateful most of all that Patrick showed no appetite for post-coital conversation. Sometimes guys wanted to talk. In Rose’s experience, it was never a good idea.
The last thing Patrick said to her was the dogs’ names.
Jack was the taut, brown, intelligent-looking fellow with the patch over his eye—a mix of whippet and Lab.
Zeus was the big, black, shaggy one … a Bernese mountain dog.
Millie was the tiny, fluffy, white one: a Bichon Frise, which Patrick assured Rose meant French bitch.
“For real?” Rose asked.
Patrick laughed, and something about the sound jarred loose the word she’d been searching for earlier. It just popped into her mind—sometimes that could happen, too.
Cherub.
A moment later, with the lights still on, they were both asleep.
* * *
“The most difficult part is right here: believing this is happening. If you can manage that, you can manage everything.”
Rose was still half-asleep when she heard the voice—a male voice, calmer than Patrick’s, deep and slow. There was an air of authority to the words, of command; Rose sensed it was the slowness that accounted for this quality (one further tap of the brakes, and the voice would’ve slipped into a drawl). She opened her eyes. Patrick wasn’t in the room—she could hear the shower running. Jack, the tan dog with the eye patch, was sitting beside the bed, staring at her, and she knew without a moment’s doubt that it was his voice she was hearing.
“He’ll come back from the shower in another minute, and he’ll suggest you have sex again. He’ll pressure you to try on a pair of handcuffs. Then he’s going to kill you.”
Rose lifted her head from the pillow. She could still feel the alcohol from last night, a sloshing sensation inside her brain, as if she might spill out of herself were she to move too quickly. Zeus, the big black dog, was lying on the floor by the closet. Millie, the little white one, was on the armchair by the window. They were both watching her.
Jack’s voice continued: “Other girls have decided this was a dream. I hope you won’t make the same mistake.”
Over on the chair, Millie began to wag her tail. Rose’s clothes were scattered across the floor. She was thinking about how much effort it would take to pick them up and pull them on, and how unpleasant it would be to rush out of the apartment without washing her face or emptying her bladder or rinsing her mouth, when she heard the shower shut off.
Jack walked toward the armchair, his nails making a clicking sound on the linoleum. There was a square of sunlight beneath the window, and he lay down in its center. He didn’t move his mouth when he spoke—it wasn’t like that. Rose just heard the words inside her head, and she knew they were his. “The knife is in the night table drawer,” he said. “All you need to do is get there first.”
Then he shut his eyes. So did Zeus and Millie. From one second to the next, the three dogs went from staring at her to what looked like the deepest sort of sleep. Then Patrick was in the doorway, smiling down at her, naked, rubbing his hair with a towel. His penis was edging its way toward an erection, both stiff and floppy all at once. “Wanna try something fun?” he asked. He moved toward the closet, without waiting for a reply.
Rose was about to tell him that she’d just had the weirdest dream, that his dog was speaking to her in it, telling her that—
But then Patrick turned from the closet, his penis all the way erect now, a deep purple. He was moving toward her, holding a pair of handcuffs, bending to reach for her wrist.
She lunged for the night table, and all three dogs began to bark.
* * *
Afterward—maybe an hour, maybe two, Rose wouldn’t have been able to say for certain—she was sitting on a bench, five or six blocks away, on the edge of Riverside Park. The panic was starting to ease now, but this didn’t mean she was feeling calm, not remotely. Numb would be the better description, though even this adjective would imply a degree of equanimity that was completely lacking. It was more like the absence of sensation that comes with extreme cold, as frostbite starts to set in: Rose knew there was a lot going on inside her head, but it had reached a point of extremity beyond which she could no longer feel anything specific, just a generalized, deeply subterranean hum of distress.
It was early April, and the wind off the river retained a wintry bite, but the trees didn’t seem to mind: they were beginning to bud. Nannies pushed strollers; squirrels made darting forays across the still-not-quite-green grass. Rose’s nose was running. She didn’t know if it was the wind or an early bout of allergies or maybe just some physiological response to what had happened—to what she’d done. Could terror cause your nose to run? She kept wiping the snot on her sleeve, her leg jiggling with leftover adrenaline, while she tried to decide what she ought to do.
She’d gotten the drawer open, and there was indeed a knife inside, a large knife, the kind a soldier might carry in a sheath on his ankle, though there wasn’t any sheath for this one, just the knife, its blade forged from some sort of black metal, its grip feeling slightly sticky in Rose’s hand. The next few moments might not have unfolded so easily for her had
it not been for the dogs. All three were leaping and barking, and in the midst of this tumult, Zeus made contact with enough force to knock Patrick off balance. Rose wasn’t trying to stab him in any particular place; she was just swinging the blade, and the dogs were leaping, and Patrick was rushing toward her—stumbling, really, and then falling—and that was how the blade ended up piercing his throat, sinking deep, all the way to the hilt. Patrick dropped to the bed, and the knife came out of his body with a sucking sound, like a stick yanked from a muddy yard, and there was blood everywhere, an immense amount of it, fountaining upward, hitting the wall beside the bed and splattering to the floor with a lawn-sprinkler sound, and Patrick was gurgling and frothing and trying impotently to rise, and Rose dropped the knife, gathered up her clothes, and ran from the room. Her arms and face and chest were covered with blood. At first, she’d feared it might be hers, but when she washed it off in the kitchen sink, she couldn’t find any wounds, and finally she decided it all had to be Patrick’s. Standing at the sink, still naked, searching for a towel to dry her body, there was a moment when she thought she was going to call 911. It seemed like the obvious path, and if there’d been a landline in the apartment, she might’ve gone ahead and dialed the number—it would’ve been so easy, just three quick taps of her finger, and then other people would be making the decisions for her. But there wasn’t a landline, and Rose’s phone was still in her purse, and her purse was still in the bedroom, which was where Patrick was, along with the three dogs, so Rose found a tablecloth to dry herself, and she crouched to pee into a drinking glass, and emptied the glass into the sink, and then she was shivering, so she pulled on her clothes, and suddenly it seemed like maybe the easiest thing to do was leave, just leave, walk across the little entranceway to the front door, undo its three locks, and flee.
Sitting on the park bench, Rose tried to imagine what she must look like to the people passing by. It was a shock to realize she probably seemed perfectly fine; it made the whole situation feel that much stranger. A horrifying, desperate thing had happened to her, and none of these strangers who saw Rose here, sitting in the sun, wiping her nose on her sleeve, jiggling her leg, none of them would ever be able to guess.
Not one. Not ever.
She’d made mistakes. Jesus fucking Christ: it appalled her to think how many.
If she were still planning to call 911 (and she was, wasn’t she?), she should never have left the apartment—she shouldn’t even have left the room, shouldn’t have washed herself at the kitchen sink, shouldn’t have pulled on her clothes. She should’ve scrambled for her cell phone, should’ve called for an ambulance right there, standing beside the bed, bent over Patrick, balling up the sheet and pressing it against the jagged wound in his throat.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. She’d fucked this up.
Now, when she dialed 911, the police would want to know why she’d left, why she’d waited so long to call. And what was she supposed to tell them, anyway? That she’d stabbed a near stranger in the throat because his dog had warned her the guy was planning to kill her? How well was this story going to play for her? Rose didn’t have any wounds, not even a bruise—Patrick hadn’t managed to touch her.
And the dog … well, she had to think through that part of the morning’s events, didn’t she? It had seemed so obvious when she was there in the room, half-awake, hearing his voice.
But now?
Oh, for fuck’s sake. She’d had one of those weird early morning dreams, hadn’t she? She’d mistaken it for real, and she’d killed a guy.
But what about the handcuffs? And how had she known there was a knife in that drawer? And why was there a knife in that drawer?
Rose thought of Doctor Dolittle. She thought of Son of Sam. Neither model seemed especially helpful.
She’d left her purse in the apartment. Her phone. Her wallet. And that was just the easy stuff. There would be fingerprints. Hair. Saliva. Vaginal fluid. Tiny flakes of dead skin. There would be other stuff, too—there had to be—stuff she’d probably never be able to think of.
Rose had no idea what she was going to do, but one thing seemed unavoidable: she needed to go back.
* * *
The street door was locked.
Rose hadn’t thought of this, and it made her angry with herself—there was so much she wasn’t thinking of, so much she was getting wrong. She tried the knob; she pushed at the door with her shoulder. There was a buzzer system, with buttons for the different apartments. In movies, people were always using this sort of thing to gain illicit access to buildings. They’d push a button, claim to be a UPS deliveryman, and some too-trusting tenant would buzz them in. Rose didn’t think this strategy would work for her, but she also didn’t think she had much to lose in trying: she started with the top floor, pressed the button, waited long enough to realize there wasn’t going to be a response, then tried the next apartment down the line. She was on her fifth button before she got an answer. What sounded like a very old man’s voice said: “Hello …?”
Rose put her mouth up against the speaker: “UPS.”
There was a long pause—too long, it seemed to Rose—maybe there was a camera? Or maybe the old man was coming downstairs to sign for the supposed package? Or maybe he’d seen all of those movies Rose had seen, and he was calling the police right now, so she’d have one more inexplicable thing to explain to them when they finally showed up? Or maybe—
The door buzzed, and she jumped forward, pushing it open.
The building had fifteen stories. Rose got into the elevator and pressed buttons for the ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and fourteenth floors. That way, if the old man had stepped out into the hallway and was watching the elevator, he wouldn’t know which floor Rose was going to. She rode to nine, then crept along the hall to the stairs, and tiptoed back down to the seventh floor.
Apartment 78. The gray door, with its three (not locked) locks.
Rose felt an impulse to ring the bell (which she resisted), and then—once she’d pushed open the door and stepped into the apartment—she had an even stronger urge to call out Patrick’s name (which she also resisted). From the entranceway, you could see into the kitchen. The tablecloth Rose had used as a towel lay in a damp mound on the linoleum in front of the refrigerator. To the right of the kitchen, a short hallway led to the bedroom. Beyond the bedroom, the hallway turned to the left—Rose assumed this must be where the bathroom was.
She made her way to the bedroom. Part of her was hoping that none of it had happened—that it had all been a dream, not just the talking dog: everything. Patrick would still be asleep in the bed, or else awake now, drinking coffee, wondering where Rose had run off to so abruptly, and why. The sight of the bloody sheets cured Rose of this fantasy: the blood on the wall above the bed, the blood pooling on the floor. There was no sign of Patrick, so Rose assumed he must’ve slipped off the mattress, that he must be sprawled on the floor now, hidden by the bed’s bulk. But when she edged her way into the room, angling toward the armchair by the window, where her purse awaited her, and inside her purse, her cell phone, and through the magic of the cell phone, the police … when she cleared the foot of bed and forced herself to look, there was more blood, there was the knife lying in the center of that blood, and there were paw prints—dozens of them—around the margins of the mess, but there was no Patrick.
He must’ve crawled under the bed as he bled himself out. It gave Rose a shivery feeling to imagine this.
She crouched, bent to peer into the darkness. Down low like that, just an inch or two above the puddle, the raw-steak smell of the blood hit Rose with extra vigor, and for an instant she thought she might vomit. The sensation passed as quickly as it came. She could see nothing under the bed but dust bunnies and clumps of shed dog hair.
Which meant … Patrick was alive?
Such an outcome seemed impossible to Rose, but even as she thought this, she was stepping into the pool of blood, and reaching for the knife. It was the purest sort of reflex,
fear-driven, from the base of her spine. Part of her was saying: Couldn’t this be a good thing? And another part—the stronger part, the part that had never intended to call 911, that had known all along the only way through this was to bury what needed to be buried, and run away from the rest—that part was shaking its head, and saying: No, no, no, no, no …
Rose didn’t see any blood on the linoleum in the hallway, and this puzzled her. She couldn’t imagine how Patrick had been able to escape the bedroom—crawling or staggering—without leaving some sort of trail behind. Then she reached the bathroom, and came upon Millie. The hallway was dim, and Rose’s first impression was of a soccer-ball sized clot of white fur, tensely vibrating. It took her a moment to realize that Millie was licking the floor, with a frenzied aura of purpose. The dog swung its tiny body toward Rose; she stared up at her for a half-second, her muzzle stained dark-red. Then she pivoted away, lowered her head to the floor again and resumed her licking, audibly panting with the effort. Beyond her, Rose could see that the linoleum was smeared with blood. The trail led to a shut door at the end of the hall, fifteen feet past the bathroom.
Rose could hear something making a shuffling sound on the other side of the door, and … was that a grunt? She took a step forward, and called out: “Patrick?”
The sound stopped.
“Patrick …?”
Jack seemed to materialize from the center of the door. Rose flinched, almost dropped the knife. Then she realized there was a swinging panel cut into the wood—a dog door. Jack had pushed his way through it, and he was standing there now, in the dim light, his front paws in the hall, his back paws still on the other side of the door. His muzzle, like Millie’s, was stained with blood. There was a strong odor coming from the room; Rose couldn’t identify it—all she knew was that it was unpleasant. Jack stared at her. She could feel him looking at her face, then at the knife in her hand, then back at her face. She heard his voice in her head again. “Why don’t you go wait in the kitchen? Get yourself something to drink. I’ll be out in a minute, and we can talk this through.”
