“Stay right where you are,” he said, the authority of winter chill in his voice. “Keep changing the baby.” He brought the window down all the way, latched it.
“Crazy fucker,” she muttered. “Where’s Laura?”
“Don’t talk,” he said, surprised at his boldness. He freed his hands, flopped his gloves like dead trout to the floor, undid his coat and stepped out of it. Coming right up to her, he set his left hand high on her hip and found, under her skirt with his right, the hot inside of her left leg just above the knee. No stockings. Firm warm flesh.
“You’re insane.” It was a whisper. There was a hint of admiration there, a turn-on.
“Shhh.” Hand upward, soft muscled widening grippable inner thigh, Marcie not moving to stop him. Expecting the breechable barrier of panty elastic, he found sheer smooth undelineated flesh and then the moist archaic vulval pouch in lip-receptive mode. He thought of a one-handed unbelt, unclasp, unzip, a comical jog-dance behind her getting his pants and jockeys down past his dick. Uncool. Just a zip then, deft twist of the white cotton slit, up and over head and shaft, so he sprang out, zipper-teeth down by the balls like dead shark mouth. Up under her skirt like a silent-movie photographer, baby Jenny nonjudgmental over Marcie’s shoulder, Marcie bending and widening to receive him, her ready vagina fisting him amazingly in, her bent-neck gasp as her hands knuckled protectively about his daughter.
Behind them, suddenly, the window exploded inward.
Baby’s room smelled sweet if too close and warm. She felt along moonlight to the bassinet. Poor darling’s lips weakly probed thumbward, her brow a wrinkle, then relax.
Marcie slowly zipped down the sleepsuit far enough to sneak fingers inside. Smooth plastic; beneath, still dry.
Wonder baby, hundred-percent absorbent bladder and bowels.
She hushed the zipper back upward, led the long red thumb back into the mouth where it stayed in renewed suck.
Too damned hot in here. She set the space heater two notches lower and the thing shut off. Then, yes, Laura be damned, she unlatched the window and tugged it open not so wide as a pencil. One more glance around the room and she headed for the door. The moment it closed behind her, the baby’s forehead wrinkled sharply up. But her poop blurted out in great profusion and the tinkle flooded from her and her face eased into relieved sleep.
Travis was walking along cleared mounded sidewalks of snow one moment. The next, Laura was nudging him and the hall came back up around him. He was grateful, realizing he’d been simultaneously drawn into the dead guru’s stare and impelled by revulsion into a desperate psychic escape, something involving Marcie and baby Jenny and a zip-gutted woman dragging her nude booted body over shards of jagged window glass to reach them.
“In life, there were many desires: Attentiveness and constant observation, appreciating them in their totality, in every articulated detail, led to their dying away. But in death, this death you see in me, there is but one clear and burning desire: to chew the red root of life in hopes that it will wake the palate, slide down the dead throat, revitalize the cold silent organs, and trick the walking shell of life into thickening inwardly even unto the cold core. As my words come forth, my witness is ever on that desire. There is no ‘I’ to control it, but only the fact of witnessing, the lifetime of making that my craft, which keeps me detached from that desire.” Apadravya’s teaching was, to Travis’s astonishment, a strange mingle of comfort and terror. His thoughts went again to their child and to their upstairs neighbor.
But then, the auditorium doors let out a high squeal. Down the right aisle, people craning in their seats to see her, strode a woman, calling, “Rajib, save our son!” From under a knit cap, her short blond hair arched over a face of anguish. At her right shoulder, she held a slumbering child, blanket swaying as she came.
Huguette shivered fiercely under her dead boyfriend, a cold hoarseness in the throat she’d screamed silent. Warm numb tingling in her fingers and ears frightened her most, a first sign of frostbite setting in. She’d die here, the dark hump of the Black Angel’s wingtops filling her vision and the incessant whine of sirens scouring her ears.
Then a miracle: Louis-Phillipe stirred.
No shuddered intake of breath, no pained groan at his mutilations. His intact cheek moved on her breast, stuck frozen in bloodpool, and she felt a surge of power stream through his body. “Louis-Phillipe?” she said, every sound but empty gasp gone. And then instead of lifting his eyes to her, his mouth found her nipple. Through the torn gape in his cheek, she saw him shred it, suffering the ravaging outrage of pain even as she denied it. Rousing blood, his teeth mauled her. She tried to shove him away, but he was as unmoving as the statue—and yet, under her boyfriend’s exertions, the Black Angel now bobbled. Zagging greedily down her body, he took huge bites as he went, and the top of the Angel’s head gouged a raw furrow up his back. When he began scavenging the soft pit of her belly, the scandal of it put her into a merciful faint and then to death.
Louis-Phillipe’s teeth furrowed lower.
“No, do not stop her.”
The yoga instructor had risen to intercept her, had followed her onto the stage, but he backed away to sit in uncertainty, cross-legged on the stage edge, watching from a distance.
Stepping onto the oriental rug, she unwrapped the blanket from about her son, letting him fall-flop into her arms. Only then, Travis saw, did the woman register what Apadravya had become. She flinched back, but almost immediately resumed her mission, the boy clearly not sleeping at all.
“Is he—?” Laura whispered.
Travis cut her off with a nod.
“This is my dear Aysha,” said the guru. “And this is our son.”“He died this afternoon, Rajib.” The woman’s voice, unamplified and thrown upstage, only carried a few rows, but Travis and Laura were close enough to hear. “You can bring him back. You’ve been there. You have the power, I know you do.”“Oh my Aysha,” said the holy man, and the way he said it touched Travis to the heart, “I have no such powers nor would I want them. He is well quit of the world. It were best he did not come back.”
Travis saw a shaving of slush fall from her boot-heel onto the carpet. She swayed forward and laid the dead boy in the guru’s lap. Then she knelt wordlessly, raising her hands in prayer.
Apadravya watched her. A sleeved left arm prevented the boy from twirling senselessly off his lap. He raised his right hand, training his attention on the child as his dead fingers rested on dead eyelids, thumb and pinkie upon the hinges of the boy’s jawbone.
The eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. Then the swami’s hand cupped to one side of the neck, and at once the small body convulsed violently, the nostrils flared and subsided, the limbs flexed.
He came to as one sick and enfeebled, fixed on the dead eyes of his savior, whined for his mother, who crushed him in an embrace that seemed never ending. Sweep of murmur ran through the crowd.
And that’s when the guru lost it entirely and leaped upon mother and child in a feeding frenzy so swift and so voracious it froze Travis and Laura in their seats even as it parabola’d them in hot freshets of blood.
Apadravya’s dead fingers rested on the boy’s face for what seemed an eternity. Then they came away, relaxed to a curve, as the holy man shook his head.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Laura warmed into her husband’s ear. Not really, he thought. Just weirded out was all she was.
“Me too, hon,” he said, but his eyes were riveted on the woman as she came forward and wept over the boy, still on the guru’s lap. Compassion but not commiseration stood in the holy man’s eyes, a light hand falling on his wife’s shoulder.
Then it happened. At first, Travis thought it might be simple gravity, the turn of the boy’s hand—or a brush past it by Apadravya’s hand. But then it rose and gripped the woman’s arm, and the boy’s face was up and kissing his mother, her shuddering in amazement. And then they turned as, stumbling,
she rose out of obscurity: There was blood between them, slick and new, her beige sweater red-icicled about the neck and her neck now below the ruin of her face a clutch-mouthed feast for her son.
The yoga teacher had risen and come forward, thinking clearly to separate them. But as soon as he laid his hand on the boy, it turned from its fallen mother and clung, an activated magnet, to him. Tar baby. He backpedaled. Too late. The bloodmasked dead boy was working its bloody way up the off-white cotton of his thigh.
Famished. An aching gape of hunger. Then, eyes in a scudded night opening. Dark lean-to. She peeled off from it, turning to rise, coat shrugged away and one thick numb gash bandoleered across her bloody front. Woozy thrumble, a catch on tombstone, neither cold nor hot at issue, but a hole into infinitude where her belly used to be. Mounded plots, spear-crunched under boot, slope gradual into black wink-gleam below. She led; she followed. A thing caromed against her, tumbled her groundward, scented her, stumbled on. She rose, followed sirens, lights, and a sear of cars scouring along Côte des Neiges. Down the mountain, down, down. Hunger flared.
Her journey was long.
It happened so fast. He and Laura sat stunned, eyes on the besieged yoga instructor, who fell under the chomp of the dead boy onstage in a bloody heap. They didn’t see his corpse-mother in one motion rise and fall upon the man sitting alone in the front row. His seat wrenched. Laura leaped up and Travis followed her leftward, shoving at the backs of those blocking the way: there was rude and there was necessary. Behind, the gutted yoga instructor rose to follow the toddler to the edge of the stage and over. The swami—one panicked look toward him sitting there with his legs crossed—was undergoing a titanic struggle and it was clear to Travis that his gentler side was losing. A woman screamed in the far aisle, and a high-pitched man shouted, “Keep your hands off mmmmrrrrh—!”
They gained the aisle. Travis glanced behind. The front-row guy was pulling himself up, bloody half-hands on his seatback. Red wattles drooped from one cheek. Jesus, why had they sat so near? The aisle ahead was jammed with panic: people shoved, fallen. To the right, a steel door with a bright red Emergency Exit sign, clogged with clever folks possessed by the same brilliant idea.
“This way,” said Travis, gambling on the side stairs to the stage. He shotgunned up them, reaching back a hand to Laura, pulling her free of the missed grasp of a newly risen ghoul. Ahead, the holy man was uncrossing his legs, a look of terrible conviction flaring upon his face. They veered left, past black hanging curtains, counting on some stage exit. Ropes and pulleys. A sound board. There it was, the way out. They took it. Stumbled down icy stairs into a dim-lit alley, Rue Mackay ahead if he was clear on where they were. They raced past dumpsters, light-pooled doorways, rounding northward out of the alley onto Mackay and straight into a moving crowd of hungry corpses, hands on Laura, hands on him, and then the cold crunch of teeth inevitable, biting deep.
Out the stage door, instinct shot his hand out to his wife.
“What?” she said, frantic. “This way,” said Travis and veered her rightward, down the alley away from Mackay, toward Bishop. Felt safer. Halfway in, past snow-crusted dumpsters, he glimpsed backward a mass of shamblers moving past the far alley-end. “Don’t look back,” he said, panic tight there, and Laura hunched her shoulders and quickened her pace to match his. Broke free of the alley’s grasp, a clear breath on Bishop, then past the Musée des Beaux-Arts and scurrying along Sherbrooke, eyes sharp, past Montagne, one more block to Drummond—crazy as it was, if a taxi had come along, he’d have hailed it—turned north, home plate, their building in sight. A few blocks away, Travis heard a brake-squeal, impact of metal on metal, horns flaring up inside the confused weave of sirens that had followed them home.
A large man was heading south toward them, confusion in his walk. “He’s too close,” Laura said. “Run,” Travis urged, and they did. He was poised to cut them off, blood glistening on his bald head. “Wait!” he shouted, a living man; “back there!” pointing in horror. “Sorry, can’t help you. We’ll call the police,” Travis said, stunned that he and Laura kept walking, diagonaling across the dusted lawn to their apartment door.
They might be dooming the sorry son-of-a-bitch. No matter.
Couldn’t get involved, no need for the inconvenience. Jesus, couldn’t he tell they had their own problems? Anyway, Travis really would call the cops, not that he expected they needed calling.
Closed the sucker out. He turned away from the front door, dismayed. “We should have—” Laura said and he told her he knew. He fumbled his keys, tried the wrong one, it was strange Marcie didn’t come to the door, found it, gave it a turn, heard the click, and felt the knob wrenched out of his grasp from within.
His eyelids eased open. Travis saw that. Glisten of dark pupils, motionless and glazed. It amazed him, a dead toddler—for of that there could be no doubt—assuming the skin tone and motion and sleepy disorientation of a living breathing three-year-old.
Laura gasped beside him. “Let’s get out of here.”
“But why—?”
“I’ll explain outside.” She was already rising. The woman’s face was wet with joy, her arms flung madly around her son.
Apadravya sat quiet, corpse capable of miracles, danger hair-triggered beneath calm.
Travis followed Laura to the aisle, stupidly ducking as if to render his leaving invisible. When they had made their way to the vestibule, he asked her—buttoning up his coat as she hers—what the problem was.
“He’s good,” she said, hitting the doorbar and moving out onto Bishop, “he’s very good.”
“The swami?”
“He always was a mindfucker, but this is too much.”
“What? The boy wasn’t—?”
“It’s why I lasted such a short time at the ashram.” He did his best to keep up with her. Crossing Sherbrooke, he had to pull her back from stepping into the path of an advancing car.
“He always seems so deeply holy, and never more so than tonight, even beneath that ridiculous makeup. But there’s always trickery lurking. Aysha—or Sherri as she was known before he arrived—wasn’t the only one. So wise, so warm, the man’s a snake. Even now, he’s a lure. I can see why I was drawn back tonight.”
“Almost. He almost had me. Bra undone. Exposed to him.
But he let slip a look he thought I wouldn’t see, a hunger. It was enough. I gathered up my things and left. Packed without telling anybody and knocked on my sister’s door in the middle of the night.”
Sirens whipped through the winter chill, but the bare night-time streets were magical and calm. “But Laura, I’m sure that kid was dead. How could a three-year-old—?”
“I don’t know. Apadravya’s hypnotic sometimes.”
Travis recalled his mind wandering into fantasies of one sort or another as he listened. Maybe she was right.
“And dead is dead. It’s not simply breathing, skin tone, the outward signs. There’s brain damage involved. Organ damage.
That child stood up there normal as could be. No, we were set up and I’m upset enough about it to cal the cops. They could probably deport him on charges of drugging that lit le boy.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“He has that effect on people.” Drummond at last. “Ah, home,” she said. “Lovely Jenny. Lovely Marcie.”
Brief surge of Marcie’s face and form. “I love them too.
You don’t suppose that tonight we might… ?”
“Might what?”
“You know,” he said. “What we talked about.”
“Dirty old man. Now who’s the Svengali?”
“Just say maybe, that’s all, maybe.”
The look Laura gave him was the type he wanted to pry off, it promised such sweets beneath the lidded tin of her eyes.
“Maybe,” she said coyly, and they were on their way up the walkway to the front door.
Wet thing cooled as Marcie munched, what she craved from it escaping through her teeth. Lost in
terest. She let the bunched bone-loose residue floop floorward.
Hint of sound back where she’d come from re-roused a need, same urgency, her bewilderment at the moist thing’s inability to satisfy displaced by the monotonic pounding of I-want in her brain. She retraced her lurch out into brightness, hallway, food photos, crimson twin in mirror, key-jiggle at the door, turn, snick of deadbolt. Caught the slippery knob, crimped it, instinctual twist and tug, quick swing open: the meat, corpus animus, bi-fold. She hooked at heads, her hands thrilling to the warm vibrancy of neckmeat; but her grip held fast and the roaring faces came closer as her neck went sideways like a lover coming in for a kiss and she shoved them, despite a bonetooth of resistance, deep inside her mouth—two ripe breasts vying for the same insistent D-cup.
“Home early, I see.” That smile. It made Travis’s heart do backflips.
“You know how it goes,” he said, following Laura’s terse uh-huh inside. “A certain lovely lady got fed up with a certain guru’s sleight of hand and—”
“And here we are,” said Laura, paused with a hanger.
“How was the little one?”
“Fine, fine. Slept all this time, not a whimper. I checked on her maybe half an hour ago. Dry as a bone.”
Inside, he was feathers in wind. “How about a glass of wine and some conversation before you go?”
“Why not?”
“Let me get it,” Laura offered, giving him a look he wished he could read. “White okay?” she asked, moving to the kitchen door, passing through it at their yeses.
Now, he thought, now. He considered coming up behind her, surprising her with a waistwrap. But she turned from the kitchen and there were those warm inviting eyes again. He held their gaze, opening to her as he approached, needs there yes, but also his naked integrity and his generosity toward her, his longing to comfort and embrace and incite her, to foment riots in her, to bubble her over and watch her glow and explode under his touch.
“What are you doing?” asked Marcie, and then her lips were there full and warm under his, and her amazingly lush body welled up beneath the press of textile. Peeling back off the kiss, he drifted to her ear, whispering there.
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