Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Art pulled back a little to smile at her again. “Your kinky dead uncle?”

  “Yes.”

  “This seems a little artsy a movie for his tastes.”

  “He wasn’t stupid. Just sick.”

  “Aw, Ruby. A guy who has sex with cadavers is sick. A guy who experiments a little is just...liberal.”

  “He’s sick if it gets him killed,” Rubina said. She wasn’t smiling.

  Art changed the direction of the subject somewhat. “So where’d you find the tape?”

  “With some other stuff of his, in the cellar.”

  “Any other movies?” Art asked with a hopeful and exaggerated leer.

  “No.”

  Rubina’s tone was a little terse, and so he dropped his inquiry. Rubina had not been close with her uncle, but everyone knew how much she’d loved her aunt...and missed her.

  Still, as he drew closer to his climax, and the waves pounded the shore more rapidly with the onset of a storm, Art whispered, “I can understand fetishes, sweety. I have a fetish for your hair.” Though Rubina’s mother was of Irish descent, her father was from Pakistan. Her hair was so black as to be nearly midnight blue, and she wore it long and parted in the middle. Toward its ends, it coiled itself into serpentine black ringlets. He scooped a slithery handful of it and draped it across one breast, pushing aside strands so that her nipple poked out through the dark web. He kissed it in its nest.

  Art drew back so that Rubina wouldn’t bump heads with him as she propped herself up on one elbow. “Did you hear something on the porch?” she hissed.

  “Yeah. The wind blows your mom’s cheap plastic chairs over all the time.” Art pried two slats of their new Venetian blinds apart to look out at the porch. “It really blows down this street, I notice,” he continued. “It’s like a wind tunnel.” They had only moved into this ground floor apartment two months ago. Rubina’s parents lived on the second floor. For seventeen years – up until two months ago – Rubina’s mother had rented this apartment to her sister Helen.

  “See anything?”

  It was dark outside. They had begun watching the movie in the early evening; the sun had fully set since then but they had forgotten to turn on the outside light. Art couldn’t reach the switch from here, and was obviously not inclined to remove himself from where he was. He sank back atop her, resumed his movements but at his earlier subdued rate.

  “Nothing there,” he said, playing with her hair again. He pulled a thick black rope of hair across her throat, looped it tightly under her chin. “Haven’t you ever wanted to try a little autoerotic asphyxiation, sweety?”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “Come on. Let me strangle you with your hair. That would be so hot.”

  Rubina pushed his hand away. “Stop it, Art. It isn’t funny.”

  “I wasn’t entirely joking.”

  “Well get it entirely out of your head. The last thing I need is for my boyfriend to act like my uncle.”

  “That’s different. He was alone. He used a...”

  “Arty. I mean it.”

  “Sorry. Come on...take it easy.” He leaned in to kiss her under the jaw again.

  She put her hand on the back of his neck forgivingly. “It isn’t just my uncle,” she told him. “It’s my aunt.”

  “Your aunt...of course...I hadn’t thought of that. I’m sorry, sweety.”

  Rubina hadn’t forgotten. It had only been two months since her Aunt Helen hadn’t returned from an early Christmas shopping excursion in downtown Worcester. Two months since she had been raped and manually strangled in the stairwell of the mall’s parking garage.

  “I don’t want to see the rest of the movie,” she said close to Art’s ear.

  “Okay, sweety.”

  But a few minutes later, when they had finished and he lay atop her, using a strand of her hair now to give her a thick mustache, Rubina asked him, “How does the movie end?”

  “Maybe we should drop it.”

  “Tell me, Art.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Here comes the spoiler. The guy and his mistress get more and more obsessed until they just can’t get enough of each other. So he tells her to strangle him all the way. Until he dies. So she does it. And then – and it’s really gross – she slices off his dick.”

  “Now that’s love,” Rubina said dryly.

  * * *

  Rubina thought that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all, carrying down to the basement her boxes of Christmas decorations, packed away again until next year. She was a bit light-headed, a touch feverish, her throat a bit sore. She was feeling just badly enough that she had called in sick today at work. Still, it was February third and Art had been teasing her about not yet having taken down the tree. Not that he’d offered to help her.

  Catching her breath, a fizz of almost visible static filling her brain, Rubina poked around the cellar with its dusty cement floor, webs filling the gaps between the rafters and insulated pipes of the low ceiling. Her mother and father had stored boxes of old books down here, and she flipped through some of them. One of these she uncovered was a dog-eared copy of Alex Comfort’s THE JOY OF SEX, heavily illustrated. Horrified at the thought of her parents referring to this manual, she abandoned her book-grazing, afraid of what embarrassments she might disinter next.

  She glanced up at one of the small windows near the ceiling, this one looking out into the driveway. Over the weekend the last of the snow had finally melted...and now, here it was snowing again. She rose on her toes to gaze out. Often a smell, a taste, a quality of light would fill Rubina with an acute if brief nostalgia (in the realm of the senses, she thought) – and the brittle bluish glow against the cellar’s brick wall made her feel like a kid home sick from school.

  Her Aunt Helen had used to make homemade chicken and rice soup. Had used to bring it upstairs to her.

  She returned to her idle browsing. At last, holding an old LIFE magazine that had belonged to her aunt in her hands, Rubina found her eyes inevitably drawn to the half-moldered cardboard box that, a week ago now, she had spotted in the web-festooned cavity under the stairs, and dragged out from that cave with the end of a broom. She hadn’t carried it up to her apartment, had left it on the floor by the stairs...but she had not poked it back into hiding, either.

  After a few pulses of hesitation, Rubina walked to it, and after a few more pulses, crouched beside it, unfolding its warped flaps like the petals of a huge and rotting tropical flower.

  It was in this box that she had discovered the video. And the other things that she hadn’t told her boyfriend about.

  There was the handful of Polaroids. Shuffling through them again, she decided she should hide them more securely or even destroy them before Art or especially her parents found them. Rubina liked to believe – from her aunt’s grim expression, from what she hoped was a weary resignation -- that Aunt Helen had not submitted to these poses, to these bindings, enthusiastically. She hoped that her uncle had imposed these humiliations on her.

  Her aunt and uncle had divorced twelve years ago. Rubina’s mother had confided in her that toward the end Helen had taken a coworker as a lover, and ultimately she left her husband for him. Rubina’s mother seemed to have approved of this decision for reasons she wouldn’t elaborate on. So Rubina’s uncle had moved out, and the lover had moved in...had lived with Helen in this house until he died of throat cancer three years ago.

  A year before that, Rubina’s uncle had died, alone in his own apartment. For some reason, Aunt Helen had taken this box from among his possessions. Had stored it away down here instead of destroying it. Had she harbored some feelings for him, still, after all? The thought of her beloved aunt even somewhat enjoying the activities captured in those photographs repulsed Rubina more than the image of her own parents coupling.

  The last photo in the batch was the most disturbing. Rubina was reluctant to even look at it again, though – as if following the imp of the perverse – she did.

  He must h
ave taken the blurred, crooked photo of himself, holding the camera up in front of his face at arm’s length. The camera’s flash had reflected in streaks and glints on the plastic bag that covered her uncle’s head, his blue eyes gazing intensely out from behind that caul-like membrane.

  Rubina had heard about autoerotic asphyxiation. She had even looked it up online one time, and had been darkly amused to read that a recent ruling (Padfield versus AIG Life Insurance Company) had declared that fatal mishap through autoerotic asphyxiation was not excluded under ERISA-governed accidental death policy. There was even an online support group for victims of accident death by autoerotic asphyxiation.

  She had understood, from her brief reading, that most practitioners chose to hang themselves, the oxygen deprivation enhancing their self-simulation. Often, unsolicited death was the result – often interpreted at first as suicide. There were rumors that the lead singer of INXS, whom Rubina still thought of as incredibly sexy, had died in this manner. Another sort of celebrity, 55 year old “vampire rapist” John Crutchley, had suffocated while arousing himself in custody at Hardee Correctional Institute. He had been given a mere 25 year sentence though suspected of killing 20 women (a little over a year per murder), and after only 10 years of that appalling sentence had even been moved to a halfway house. Good riddance, Rubina thought. Reading that story had only made Rubina despise her own dead uncle more, by tenuous association.

  Rather than hang himself while masturbating, her uncle had chosen to cinch a plastic bag around his neck. And this was how he had been found, sitting on the sofa in his apartment’s small living room, after having been dead for several days. In his VCR, police had found a home movie of him and his wife Helen on vacation in Bermuda, some years back...though there was nothing pornographic on the tape. Rubina had seen it years ago, in fact, vaguely recalled her aunt’s youthful beauty as she splashed in the bright surf in her bikini, smiling at the camera without the weary resignation of the secret Polaroids. There was the day and the night in every relationship.

  From the cardboard box, Rubina next withdrew the spiral notebook she had scanned through once before.

  While sitting on his couch, bag around his head, it appeared that her uncle had not only watched tapes and taken photos of himself, weirdly smiling at the camera, but he had sketched vulgar drawings on the notepad in his lap. Had scribbled vulgar phrases, as if to either further excite himself, or – as Rubina had the impression – to record his sensations while in this precarious altered state, wavering on the threshold of life and death. Rubina could not prove he had written in this notebook while deprived of oxygen, but the unsteady lines, deeply indented in the paper, strongly suggested that possibility.

  She was as hesitant to view those pages again as she had been that photo of his face, the eyes riveted on her own. But again, she found herself rereading those words as if against her will...

  On one page was scrawled : “I see my mother. I see her like a dog, Dad taking her from behind.” Rubina sneered. While she turned away from such imaginings, her uncle had obviously fantasized about them.

  Another page had a sentiment so roughly carved into it that the paper was torn through in places. “I saw the little bitch and her man doing it on the sofa. They didn’t see me watching.”

  That one unsettled Rubina greatly. Could it have been true? Could her uncle have spied on his wife while she and her lover made love on the couch? If so, had they already been divorced at the time? None of these weird journal-like entries were dated.

  Rubina flipped back through more pages. She stopped at one she hadn’t seen before, though she had thought she’d seen them all previously. On this page was scrawled: “I took her throat in my hands. I put my thumbs on the center and pressed. Her eyes and mine were locked as I pushed her down on the stairs. It must have hurt her back. They were her stairs to heaven.”

  A shudder went through Rubina, causing her to look up anxiously at the gloom of the furnace room, gaping ahead of her unlit. For a delirious, ghastly moment, she thought she was reading a confession. A confession of her aunt’s murder two months ago.

  But it could only be a coincidence. A horrible coincidence. Because her uncle had accidentally suffocated himself four years ago, now.

  Rubina flipped pages back and forth more intensely, searching for more she might have missed. And she found one. The last one. On it were the words: “I saw the little bitch and her man in their bed. He was kissing her back, above her round beautiful ass. He told her she had a mole there and she didn’t know it. He was kissing it. They didn’t see me watching them.”

  “I don’t care what Art says,” Rubina whispered aloud, shutting the notebook. “You were sick.”

  She remembered sitting on her uncle’s knee when she was little. His palm running up and down her legs as he told her how pretty was the dark skin she had inherited from her father. She remembered him hugging her at her fifteenth birthday party, and slipping one hand under the back of her t-shirt across her bare skin.

  “I’m glad you’re dead, you freak,” Rubina muttered, refolding the flaps of the box. With her foot, she shoved the box with all her force, and saw it slide under the staircase and vanish in darkness and the winding sheets of cobweb.

  A subtle shadow flicked across her peripheral sight. A brief eclipse of the cold blue light coming in through the small cellar window which looked out upon the driveway. She had had the impression of legs scissoring past.

  Art. He must be home for lunch, to see how she was feeling. Rubina thumped up the wooden steps, shut off the basement light, and went into her bathroom to look out at the driveway.

  There was no car in it...just an ethereal haze of falling snow.

  * * *

  The next morning Rubina felt more feverish, and called in to work sick again. She hoped the rest would allow her to avoid a third absence, or she’d require a doctor’s note. She knew that companies resorted to this measure not out of mistrust, but simply to make extended absences a pain in the ass.

  She visited her mother in the second floor apartment, sat over tea with her at the small kitchen table, both looking out at the snow that was still falling, still accumulating. Art had been out shoveling last night for over an hour. He had shooed back inside Rubina’s father, who had had a heart attack last year.

  “Mom,” she asked in a distracted tone, “did you like Aunt Helen’s husband at all?” She found even the taste of his name on her tongue repugnant, since finding that box. The box she hadn’t told her mother about, for fear of what it might suggest about Aunt Helen’s complex feelings.

  “He could be funny, and charming, when he wanted to be. Why?”

  “I was just thinking of Aunt Helen last night. So I thought of him.” After sipping her tea, Rubina asked, “Do you know if he ever hurt her?”

  Her mother looked surprisingly wary. “What do you mean, hurt her?” She knew about the bondage, Rubina realized then. Maybe she had even seen those Polaroids, at one time or another.

  “I meant, did he ever abuse her?”

  Rubina’s mother dropped her eyes to the spoon she stirred slowly in her tea, as if trying to view the past – or peek at the future – there. “I don’t know. They had their secrets. It was a love/hate thing. But I thought it was...more healthy for Helen to leave him.”

  Would he ever have hurt her badly? Rubina wanted to ask. Would he ever be so jealous – or even so much in love with her – that he might actually take her life?

  But she didn’t give voice to these thoughts. Her unease was illogical, absurd, even to her.

  Later, Rubina dozed off on the sofa while watching TV with the sound turned low. The empty box for IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES still rested on top of the VCR. The tape still waited inside the machine, not fully uncoiled, coitus interruptus. She was tempted to watch the climax. She was tempted to bring the movie downstairs and return it to the mildewed box she’d taken it from.

  She rose up from the pool of sleep from deep below its surfac
e. Hands were pulling her up, as if rescuing her from drowning. The hands had hold of her dark hair, which billowed around her like squid’s ink, obscuring her view of the murky silvery depths. But the higher she rose, holding her breath so she wouldn’t drown – holding her breath until her lungs seemed like spent condoms and her face bloated with blood like a man’s engorged glans – the tighter and more painful seemed the grip on her hair. And now, cords of her hair had gotten snagged around her neck. As the hands dragged her to the surface, the noose of hair tightened around her throat. Rubina wanted to gasp in air, but she knew there was only water that would fill her. She clawed above her, trying to rake the hands with her nails, praying that she might cause them to withdraw before she was choked...

  Then, before her, hovering in the water, youthful and beautiful in a bikini, was her Aunt Helen. Not smiling, though, as in those videos of Bermuda. Her face was weary, and sad, as her hands reached out to Rubina...took hold of the cords of hair and tried to pry them free...

  Rubina awoke with a sharp inhalation. Her hands plucked at her throat – where her hair had become wound tightly around her neck.

  She sat up, gagging, clawing so desperately now that her nails etched vivid welts on her flesh. She loosened the hair, sucked in gulps of air while sobbing out at the same time. And when the front door opened beside her, she bolted to her feet with a rasp meant as a scream.

  Art stood there, a smile fading from his face as he saw the tears in the oversized chestnut-brown eyes that had first attracted him to her, now bulged and frenzied.

  “Were you just in here?” she hissed at him.

  “What?”

  “Did you do this to me? Wrap my hair around my neck? Is this your idea of a joke?”

  “Ruby...I just got home!” He saw the disheveled blanket on the sofa, her crumpled pillow in her favorite red pillowcase, and Rubina still in her pajamas. “You had a bad dream, sweety. Maybe you tangled your hair yourself, rolling over...”

  He reached out to feel her forehead for fever but she flinched back from him, still struggling to recapture her breath, her lower back slick with sweat where Aunt Helen’s husband had once caressed her.