But, you say to me, you say you love the sea. How can you love such a terrible thing?
Have you not been reading the story I am telling you? Have I not always loved terrible things? My love has been nothing if not misguided and unwise. And how could I not love the sea, when my children are a part of it? No matter where I go in the world, I can touch the sea and touch some part of them, the atoms of their being.
On that day, twenty years after I walked into the sea in my attempt to die there, I ran screaming into the sea demanding that it bring back my babies. Ancient and implacable, it did not reply. And it was so calm. You’d have never guessed that such an act of inexplicable violence had just occurred.
Everything came out after that, of course: my flight with the children, and accusations from Bernard that I was unhinged and had killed them. Because of him, they investigated, but they said they found no reason to think that what had happened was anything but a tragic accident. Bernard said he would never believe that. I think it is because he had a guilty conscience. I would never have hurt them. What kind of a mother, what kind of a person would that make me? I am not that kind of person.
All of the publicity was strangely advantageous for me. A local innkeeper took pity on me and did give me a job cleaning rooms. From there, I worked my way up to supervising the maids, and then over to the front desk, and at the end of it all, I was running the inn myself. Somehow, from all that horror and despair, I made a good life for myself. I could never have imagined such a life.
And I travelled the world, and I visited the sea everywhere I went, and every year, on the night of my children’s death, I walk down to the shore where it happened and I talk to them. I tell them what the last year of my life has been like and I tell them stories about how their lives would be now. The first few years it was easy, but the older they get the harder it is; I cannot imagine my babies, even little Joann, in their forties and fifties now! They would have families of their own, of course. Their lives would be blessed. I would have seen to it. I would have given them good lives. I would have.
This is the first year I am not able to go down to the beach and talk to them. The weather is too bad, and I have done something to my right foot that makes it difficult for me to walk. I am hesitant to see a doctor about it. I have remained what people call “surprisingly spry” throughout my older years, and I know how they are, these medical people, how they take one look at you and diagnose you with “old”, and everything that comes after that is secondary to the disease of “old”, and the next thing you know they are poking you and prodding you and trying to put you away, and you with nothing to say about any of it.
But I have a little house that is right on the coast, on the edge of a cliff with a path leading down to the shore, and I can hobble out onto my front porch and see the sea smashing against the rocks below. I don’t dare go any further than that. This storm is very violent; it feels as though the wind itself could pick me up and toss me into the ocean. They would collude in that way, the elements, to get me back to the sea, to do away with me like that.
I have not gone out just yet, though. For some time now the wind has been howling in a way that sounds like the children crying. They are calling for me over and over: “Mother! Mother! Mother!“ Children get so angry, and they must be disciplined. They must not be allowed to run wild and do whatever they like, don’t you think? It spoils them, and above all, children must not be spoiled.
It was better for them this way. We saved them from love, saved them from passion, the sea and I. My only lover, my one true love, vast and unfathomable and savage, subject to the whims of the moon and the vagaries of the wind, oh my darling brutal sea.
Something thumps on the front porch. A single thin line of seawater has trickled from under the front door and across my floor to stop now at my foot. Their voices on the wind are so loud now, shrieking for me, and their little fists are beating at my door. My children have come home. Suddenly, for the first time, I feel afraid. I never meant any harm to come to them.
Can you believe that?
Will they believe that?
JOHN LANGAN
THE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY
JOHN LANGAN lives in the New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and younger son. He is the author of two novels, House of Windows (Night Shade, 2009) and The Fisherman (Word Horde, 2016), and two collections of short stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime, 2008) and The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus, 2013). With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime, 2011).
Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine, and forthcoming is a new collection, Sefira and Other Betrayals (Hippocampus, 2017), and a reissue of House of Windows (Diversion).
“One of the strategies Robert Aickman employed in his fiction was to begin with something that’s already an obvious metaphor, and then to push past that layer of meaning to another level altogether,” Langan observes. “The result is fiction that is unlike almost anything else I’ve read.
“His story ‘The Swords’ is a fine example of this technique. In it, a group of men take turns thrusting swords into a beautiful naked woman who is somehow unharmed by their violence. It’s as over-the-top, blatantly Freudian a trope for male heterosexuality as you’re likely to encounter. But that’s only part of the story, as the narrator subsequently goes on a date with the woman that veers into surreal nightmare.
“When Simon Strantzas offered me the chance to contribute to his Aickman tribute anthology, Aickman’s Heirs, I thought of ‘The Swords’, and had the idea of approaching its material from a different point of view. The resulting story swerved into unexpected territory, which seems entirely appropriate.”
THAT’S NOT WHAT I want to talk about. If you’re interested in hearing about the day to day of a stripper, there are plenty of books you can read. Some of them are pretty good. Or you could watch Showgirls. Not, it’s not accurate, but it’s the kind of movie most of the girls I danced with would have made about themselves. So there’s that.
It’s a person—Nicole AuCoeur, the girl who told me I should try out at The Cusp, they were hiring and I could make some serious cash. I want to talk about her, about this thing that happened to her.
We weren’t friends. We’d been in a couple of classes together at SUNY Huguenot. Both of us wanted to be writers. Nikki said she was going to be a travel writer. I was planning on writing screenplays. We took the same fiction-writing workshops, and were in the same peer-critique group. I read two or three of her stories. They were pretty good. The teacher was into fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, so Nikki turned in that kind of story. She was that type of student. Figure out what the professor likes and play to it.
I didn’t know she was working at The Cusp. She was always late for class, and she always showed up stoned. She drenched herself in some kind of ginger-citrus perfume, to hide the smell, but it clung to her hair. She had long, brown hair that she wore in long bangs, like drapes. If anything, I thought she was some kind of dealer. I remember this one time, in the middle of class, she opened her purse and started to root through it—I mean, frantically, taking stuff out of it and piling it on her desk. The professor asked her if everything was okay. She said, “No, I can’t find my stash.” The guy didn’t know how to respond to that. The rest of us tittered.
Anyway. I ran into her the summer after that class. I was sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts, making lunch out of a small coffee and a Boston cream donut. Nikki sat down across from me. I hadn’t realised she was still in town. I assumed she’d gone home for the summer. She said she’d stayed in Huguenot to work. I asked her what she was doing. She said dancing at The Cusp.
I blushed. Everyone knew about the club. It was on 299, on the way into town, a flat-roofed cinderblock building. We used to call it The Cusp juice bar, because they couldn’t serve alcohol there, on account of the girls dancing fully nude. I hadn’t known anyone who wo
rked there—well, not that I was aware of—but I knew people who’d known people. Although what I’d heard from them had concerned the professors who were regulars at the place. There was a story about this one old guy who’d paid for a girl to come to his place and pee on him, so I guess I had an idea of the place as one step up from a brothel.
Nikki ignored my blush. She said the money was fantastic, and the club was hiring. If I was interested, there were auditions the following Wednesday. We made conversation for a couple of minutes, then she left.
To make a short story shorter, I tried out, was offered the job, and took it. Money—yeah, the money was better than I could make anyplace else in town without a college degree, and in a lot of cases with one. I had been working part-time as a cashier at Shop Rite, but I couldn’t get enough hours to cover the rent, my car—which was a piece of shit that spent as much time at the mechanic’s as it did on the road—and groceries. Not to mention utilities. And going out. My Dad had wanted me to come home for the summer, and when I didn’t, he got pissed and said if I wanted to stay in Huguenot so bad, I could find a way to pay for it.
So I did. I had to shave my crotch, which was no fun, and kept it shaved, to give the customers a clear view of what I was waving in their faces. The dancing wasn’t, not really. It was wriggling around on stage, teasing I was going to undo my top, wriggling some more, removing my top with one hand but keeping my boobs covered with the other, wriggling some more, etc., until I was down to my shoes. Oh, and the garter the guys stuffed their dollar bills into. The air stunk of cigarette smoke, mostly from the dancers. All the same, I smiled at everyone. Not because I was enjoying myself, but because it made me more money if the customers thought I was enjoying myself. It intimidated some of them, too, which did please me.
I wasn’t especially nervous working at The Cusp. Probably, I should have been. But I was sure I could handle any creeps who tried anything with me. My Dad had been a Marine, and a martial arts nut, and I had grown up knowing how to punch an attacker in the throat, tear off his ears, and gouge out his eyes. Plus, there were always at least two bouncers in close proximity, in case things in the private rooms got seriously out of hand.
That was where the real money was. Private dances. Lap dances, mostly, which were forty dollars for five minutes plus whatever you could convince the guy to tip you. Some girls could keep a customer in there for two or three dances in a row. I didn’t, not usually. There was also a room at the back of the club, the Champagne Parlour. Two-fifty for half an hour with the girl of your choice. And a complimentary bottle of non-alcoholic champagne. That was mainly for the guys whose buddies had brought them to The Cusp for their bachelor parties.
Nikki was the queen of the private dances. She had this routine. The DJ would announce her as, “Isis”, which was the stage name she used. (Mine was “Eve”. I know: subtle, right?) She would walk out onto the stage in a long, transparent gown that trailed along the floor behind her. She danced to Led Zeppelin, ‘The Battle of Evermore’. I think she’d studied ballet at some point. There were a lot of ballet moves in her routine. She stood on one leg and held the other leg out in front of her, or behind her, or to the side. She skipped across the stage on the tips of her toes. She half-crouched, leapt, and came down in another half-crouch. She twirled, sometimes on her toes, her arms stretched above, sometimes with one leg bent behind, her head thrown back, her arms curved in front.
The gown floated after, whipped around her. She let it drift away. Underneath, she was wrapped in scarves, each of which she undid and sent fluttering to the floor. Throughout, she went from customer to customer, bending towards them, giving them a closer look at what lay beneath the remaining scarves.
By the end of the song, all she had left on was a pair of fairy wings. I guess that’s what you’d call them. They were like something from a Halloween costume, one for adults. Sexy Tinkerbell or whatever. A pair of clear straps looped them around her shoulders. They weren’t that big, and they were made of thick plastic. When the lights played over them, they filled with a rainbow of colours that slid about inside them like oil. Something to do with the plastic. They weren’t butterfly wings, which is what most fairy costumes come with. They were long, narrow, shaped like blades. Hornet wings, or an insect from that branch of the family. If I thought about them that way, they almost freaked me out.
Nikki danced stoned—she did everything stoned, from what I could tell—and the glaze the pot gave her eyes made them resemble the hard eyes of an insect. Together with the wings, they lent her the appearance of an extra from a grade-Z sci-fi flick, Attack of the Wasp Women or something.
None of the customers noticed this. Or, if any of them did, he had a kink I don’t want to think about. Nikki never danced more than one song. As Zeppelin faded away, she was off the dance floor, followed by one and sometimes two guys. Most of them went for lap dances, which took place in one of a row of booths set up opposite the club’s bar. Yeah, the juice bar. The booths were basically large closets with small couches in them. The customer reclined on the couch, and the dancer did her thing. Each booth had a camera mounted high in one of its corners. For the safety of the dancers, supposedly, and to ensure no one went from lap dance to out-and-out hooking. Part of the bouncers’ jobs was to keep an eye on the video feed; although I never saw any of them cast more than a glance in the monitors’ direction. I don’t think Nikki ever unzipped anyone’s jeans, but there’s a lot you can do before you reach that point. To be sure, as far as tips went, none of the rest of us could keep up with her.
Not that she was stingy with her money. If it was a night the club closed early, a bunch of us would head into one of the bars in town, and Nikki would cover our drinks. If we were working a late night, once the last customer was out and the front door locked, she’d produce a bottle of Stoli for us to mix with the juice bar’s juices. Those times—sitting around the club, shooting the shit—were better than being at an actual bar, more relaxed.
Most of us changed into our regular clothes, jeans, T-shirts, wiped the make-up off our faces. Not Nikki. She stayed naked as long as she could. Except for her wings. She wandered around the club, a drink in her hand, the wings bouncing up and down with each step, clicking together. She would lean against the bar, where I was sitting with a cup of coffee because I had an 8:00 a.m. class I’d decided to stay awake for. We didn’t say a lot to one another. Mostly, we traded complaints about the amount of reading we had to do for school. But having her beside me gave me an opportunity to study the tattoo that decorated her back, so I did what I could to keep the conversation going, such as it was.
That tattoo. All of the girls had ink. In most cases, it was in a couple of places, the lower back and the shoulder, say. That’s where mine were. I had a pair of coiling snakes on my back, and the Chinese character for “air” on my right arm. There’s a story behind each of them, but they’re not part of this story. One girl, Sheri, had ink on most of her body, brightly-coloured figures that were enacting an enormous drama on her skin.
Nikki had a single tattoo, a square panel that covered most of her back. It was difficult to see clearly, warped by the plastic wings lying over it. The artist had executed the image in black and dark blue, with here and there highlights of pale yellow and orange. There was a car in the middle of it, an older model with a narrow grille like the cowcatcher on a train. The headlights perched high on either side of the grille. The car stretched along a foreshortened road, its rear wheels and end dropping behind the horizon. I wasn’t sure if the distortion was supposed to represent speed, or just an extra-long car. To the right of the car, a cluster of tall figures filled the scene.
There were five or six of them. They were dressed in black suits, and black fedoras. Their faces were the same pale oval, eyes and mouths empty circles. To the left of the car, a steep hill led to a slender house whose wall was set with a half-dozen mismatched windows. Within each frame, there seemed to be a tiny figure, but I couldn’t make out what any
of them were. A rim of orange moon hung over the scene in a sickly smile. The picture had been done in a style that reminded me of something from Mad magazine, exaggerated in a way that was more sinister than comic.
It fascinated me. I asked Nikki what it was supposed to be. She said, “Oh, you know, just a picture.” Which could have been true, for all I knew. At the same time, that was a lot of investment in a random image.
The customers didn’t mind it. Not that I heard, anyway. Most of them were too timid to say anything. They acted as if they were cool, confident, but it was obvious they weren’t. It was as if they were tuning forks, and our bare skin was what they’d struck themselves on. They vibrated, made the air surrounding them quiver. There were exceptions, sure. One guy who was a long-haul trucker. Not too big. Kept his hair short, his beard long. Had on a red flannel shirt every time he entered the club, which was about once a month. He was quiet, polite, said, “Yes ma’am”, “No ma’am”. But there was a stillness to him. It was what you’d expect from a wolf, or one of the big cats, a tiger. The utter focus of a predator.
That I know, he hadn’t tried anything with any of the girls before I started at The Cusp. He behaved himself while I was there, too. If I’d heard he owned a cabin in the woods, though, whose walls were papered in human skin, I would not have doubted it. I gave him a lap dance, once, and spent the five minutes planning the elbow I’d throw at his temple or throat when he grabbed me. He didn’t, and he tipped pretty well. That said, I wouldn’t have done it a second time.
The other exception was a group of guys who squeezed into the club one Thursday night. There were five of them, plus a man who said he was their driver. The bouncer who was working the front door said he saw them pull up in a white van. The five guys were huge, the biggest men I’d ever seen in person. I’m going to say seven feet tall, each, three feet and change wide. Three fifty, four hundred pounds. All dressed in the same khaki safari shirts, khaki shorts, and sandals. They had the same style, crew cuts that squared the tops of the heads. Their faces were blank, unresponsive. They stared straight ahead, and didn’t so much as glance at any of the girls. In the club’s mix of white and blue lighting, their skin looked dull, grey. They could have been in their early twenties. They could have been twice that. They stood beyond the front door in a group and did not move. They reminded me of the stone heads on Easter Island. They weren’t still—they were inert.
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