by Trisha Telep
Never noticed before how easy on the eyes Miss Dale was. Yeah, I’m an unobservant bum.
“Go home, Sophie.” It was getting hard to talk again, the teeth were coming out. Sophie, I mangled her name the first time I ever said it. “You’re a doll. A real doll.”
“What are you going to do?” She had never asked me that before. Plenty of questions, such as ‘Where did you put that file?’ and ‘Do you want coffee?’ and ‘What should I tell Boyleston when He calls about the rent?’ But that particular one she’d never asked.
“I’m going to finish the Kendall job.”
I slid out of the car and closed the door softly, headed down the street. She waited, just like I’d told her, for me to reach the corner. Then the Ford’s engine woke and she pulled away. I could hear the car, but the biggest relief came when I couldn’t hear her pulse any more.
Instead, I heard someone else’s. The drumbeats were a jungle, and here I was, the thirst burning a hole in me and the rain smacking at the top of my unprotected head. I flipped up the collar of my coat, wished like hell a bottle of scotch could take the edge off the burning, and headed for Chinatown.
You can find anything in Chinatown. They eat anything down there, and, I have a few friends. Still, it’s amazing how a man who won’t balk when you ask him to hide a dead body or a stack of bloodstained clothes might get funny ideas when you ask him to help you find . . . blood.
That’s what butchers are for. And after a while I found what I was looking for. I had my nineteen dollars and the twenty in pin money from Miss Dale’s – Sophie’s – kitchen jar. She said I was good for it, and she would take it on her next pay cheque.
I would worry about getting her another pay cheque as soon as I finished this. It might take a little doing.
After two hours of heaving as my body rebelled, the thirst took over and I drank nearly a bucket of steaming copper, and then I fell down and moaned like a doper on the floor of a filthy Chinatown slaughterhouse. It felt good, slamming into the thirst in my gut and spreading in waves of warmth until I almost cried.
I paid for another bucket. Then I got the hell out of there, because even bums will stop looking the other way for some things.
It’s amazing what you can do once a dame in a green dress kills you and pins you for murder.
The next thing I needed was a car. On the edge of Chinatown sits Benny’s Garage, and I rousted Benny by the simple expedient of jimmying his lock and dragging him out of bed. He didn’t know why I wanted the busted-down pickup and twelve jerry-cans of kerosene. “I don’t want to know,” he whined at me. “Why’d’ja have to bust the door down? Jeez, Becker, you –”
“Shut up.” I peeled a ten-spot off my diminishing bankroll and held it in front of him, made it disappear when he snatched at it. “You never saw me Benny.”
He grabbed the ten once I made it reappear. “I never goddamn see you, Jack. I never wanta see you again, neither.” He rubbed at his stubble, the rasp of every hair audible to me, and the sound of his pulse was a whack-whack instead of the sweet music of Sophie’s. How long would his heart work through all that blubber he had piled on?
I didn’t care. I drove away and hoped like hell Benny wouldn’t call the cops. With a yard full of stolen cars and up to his ass in hock to Papa Ginette, it would be a bad move for him.
But still, I worried. I worried all the way up into Garden Heights and the quiet manicured mansions of the rich, where I found the house I wanted and had to figure out how to get twelve jerry-cans over a nine-foot stone wall.
The house was beautiful. I almost felt bad, splishing and splashing over parquet floors, priceless antiques, and a bed that smelled faintly of copper and talcum powder. There was a whole closet full of green dresses. I soaked every goddamn one of them. Rain pounded the roof, gurgling through the gutters, hissed against the walls.
I carried two jerry-cans downstairs to the foyer – a massive expanse of checkered black and white soon swimming in the nose-cleaning sting of kerosene – and settled myself to wait by the door to a study that probably had been Arthur Kendall’s favourite place. I could smell him in there, cigars and the fat-headed, expensive cologne. I ran my hands down the shaft of the shovel while I waited, swung it a few experimental times, and tapped it on the floor. It was a flathead shovel, handily available in any garden shed – and every immaculate lawn needs a garden shed, even if you get people out to clean it up for you.
I’m good at waiting, and I waited a long time. The fumes got into my nose and made me light-headed, but when the Packard came purring up the drive I was pouring the last half of a jerry-can. I then lit a match and a thin trail of flame raced away up the stairs like it was trying to outrun time. Even if her nose was as acute as mine she might not smell the smoke through the rain, and I bolted through the study, which had a floor-length window I’d been thoughtful enough to unlock. Around the corner, I moved so fast it was like being back in the war again, hardly noticing where either foot landed as long as I kept moving. The shovel whistled as I crunched across the gravel drive and then smacked Shifty Malloy right in the face with it, a good hit with all my muscle behind it. He had gotten out of the car, the stupid bum, and he went down like a ton of bricks while Letitia Kendall fumbled at the door handle inside, scratching like a mad hen.
The house began to whoosh and crackle. Twelve jerries is a lot of fuel, and there was a lot to burn there. Even if it was raining like God had opened every damn tap in the sky.
She fell out of the Packard, the black dress immediately soaked and flashes of fish-belly flesh showing as she scrambled on gravel. Her crimson mouth worked like a landed fish’s, and if I was a nice guy I suppose I might have given her a chance to explain. Maybe I might have even let her get away by being a stupid dick like you see in the movies, who lets the bad guy make his speech.
But I’m not a good guy. The shovel sang again, and the sound she made when the flat blade chopped three-quarters of the way through her neck was between a gurgle and a scream. The rain masked it, and she was off the gravel and on the lawn now, on mud as I followed, jabbing with the shovel while her head flopped like a defective Kewpie doll’s. I chopped the way we used to chop rattlers back on the farm and, when her body stopped flopping and the gouts and gouts of steaming blood had soaked a wide swatch of rain-flattened grass, I dropped the shovel and dragged her strangely heavy carcass back towards the house. I tossed it in the foyer, where the flames were rising merrily in defiance of the downpour, and I tossed the shovel in too. Then I had to stumble back, eyes burning and skin peeling, and I figured out right then and there that fire was a bad thing for me, whatever I was now.
She was wet and white where the black dress was torn, and the flames wanted to cringe away. I didn’t stick around to see if she went up, because the house began to burn in earnest, the heat scratching at my skin with thousands of scraping gold pins, and there was a rosy glow in the east that had nothing to do with kerosene.
It was dawn, and I didn’t know exactly what had happened to me, but I knew I didn’t want to be outside much longer.
Of course she hadn’t gone to sleep. As soon as I got near her door, trying to tread softly on the worn carpet and smelling the burned food and dust smell of working folks in her apartment building, it opened a crack and Sophie peered through. She was chalk white, trembling, and she retreated down the hall as I shambled in. It was still raining and I was tired. The thirst was back, burrowing in my veins, and my entire body was shot through with lead. The pinpricks on my throat throbbed like they were infected, my skin cracked and crackled with the burning, still, but the divot above my right eye wasn’t inflamed any more.
I shut her door and locked it. I stood dripping on her Welcome mat and looked at her.
She hadn’t changed out of the blue dress. She had nice legs, by God, and those cat-tilted eyes weren’t really dark. They were hazel. Her wrist was still bruised where I’d grabbed her; she had peeled the Ace off and it was a nice dark purple. I
t probably hurt like hell.
Her hands hung limp at her sides.
I searched for something to say. The rain hissed and gurgled. Puddles in the street outside were reflecting old neon and newer light edging through the grey mist. “It’s dawn.”
She just stood there.
“You’re a real doll Sophie. If I didn’t have –”
“How did it happen?” She swallowed, the muscles in her throat working. Under the high collar her pulse was still like music. “Your . . . you . . .” She fluttered one hand helplessly. For the first time since she walked into my office three years ago and announced the place was a dump, my Miss Dale seemed nonplussed.
“I got bit sugar.” I peeled my sodden shirt collar away. “I don’t want to make any trouble for you. I’ll figure something out tomorrow night.”
Thirty of the longest seconds of my life passed in her front hallway. I dripped, and I felt the sun coming the way I used to feel storms moving in on the farm, back when I was a jug-eared kid and the big bad city was a place I only heard about in church.
“Jack, you ass,” Sophie said. “So it’s a bite?”
“And a little more.”
Miss Dale lifted her chin and eyed me. “I don’t have any more steak.” Her pulse was back. It was thundering. It was hot and heavy in my ears and I already knew I wasn’t a nice guy. Wasn’t that why I’d come here?
“I’ll go.” I reached behind me and fumbled for the knob.
“Oh, no you will not.” It was Miss Dale again, with all her crisp efficiency. She reached up with trembling fingers, and unbuttoned the very top button of her collar.
“Sophie –”
“How long have I been working for you, Jack?” She undid another button, slender fingers working, and I took a single step forwards. Burned skin crackled, and my clothes were so heavy they could have stood up by themselves. “Three years. And it wasn’t for the pay, and certainly not because you’ve a personality that recommends itself.”
Coming from her, that was a compliment. “You’ve got a real sweet mouth there, Miss Dale.”
She undid her third button and that pulse of hers was a beacon. Now I knew what the thirst wanted, now I knew what it felt like, now I knew what it could do . . .
“Mr Becker, shut up. If you don’t, I’ll lose my nerve.”
Sophie is on her pink frilly bed. The shades are drawn, and the apartment’s quiet. It’s so quiet. Time to think about everything.
When a man wakes up in his own grave, he can reconsider his choice of jobs. He can do a whole lot of things.
It’s so goddamn quiet. I’m here with my back to the bedroom door and my knees drawn up. Sophie is so still, so pale. I’ve had time to look over every inch of her face and I wonder how a stupid bum like me could have overlooked such a doll right under his nose.
It took three days for me. Two days ago the dame in the black dress choked her last and her lovely mansion burned. It was in all the papers as a tragedy, and Shifty Malloy choked on his own blood out in the rain too. I think it’s time to find another city to gumshoe in. There’s Los Angeles, after all, and that place does three-quarters of its business after dark.
Soon the sun’s going down. Sophie’s got her hands crossed on her chest and she’s all tucked in nice and warm, the coverlet up to her chin and the lamp on so she won’t wake up like I did, in the dark and the mud.
The rain has stopped beating the roof. I can hear heartbeats moving around in the building.
Jesus, I hope she wakes up.
Untitled 12
Caitlin R. Kiernan
As it turns out, finding her was the easy part, as easy as falling off a log, as easy as pie, as easy as you fucking please. I spent so many years preparing myself to begin looking – years and years and finally a whole decade seeking out those frightened old men hoarding secrets, the mad women guarding forbidden and forgotten books, years committing all the usual indiscretions and blasphemies that might finally make me suitable in her eyes, if I could ever find her. But I doubted I ever would. I would search, I thought. I would search as diligently as anyone had ever searched for anything, holy or unholy. I would likely search my entire life away and, as with all the others before me, I would only find hints and rumours; there would be times when I’d come so, co close and that would seem some capricious agent was leading me, surely, coaxing me, feeding me the right leads only to steer me astray at the very last moment. That’s what I’d been told to expect, and that’s what I’d read in the books – Unaussprechlichen Kulten, De Vermis Mysterüs, Livre d’Eibon and so on and so forth – pages too brittle and stained to read, riddles too oblique to fathom, all of it spiralling deeper into the certain despair that I was only an idiot chasing a myth that had never possessed more substance than the ramblings of schizophrenics and liars. And then, one night, she found me. Weeks after that I don’t recall, darkness until I woke somewhere unfamiliar, sick and sweating in half-light and shadows, sick as a junky going cold turkey; the high walls, bare masonry, bricks and mortar, fire doors scabbed with rust, the constant sound of water dripping somewhere. I lay naked on a bare mattress soaked through with blood and piss and mildew, realizing, slowly, that I’d been beaten almost to death, maybe more than once, that there were broken bones and missing teeth. The pain made me want to climb back down into the numb, insensible darkness. But she crouched nearby, watching me with her ebony eyes. Those secret, ravenous eyes to match the black holes waiting at the centre of galaxies, eyes to devour stars and planets and even time, eyes to devour souls, and when she smiled blood spilled from her mouth and pooled on the concrete floor.
“It’s not a game,” she said and licked at her lips.
“I never thought it was,” I replied, dizzy and slurring the words.
She nodded her head. “Just so we understand one another. Just so you understand me. Just so you know it ain’t–”
“– a game,” I interrupted, and for a moment I thought she might take my head off.
She crawled a few feet nearer the mattress, moving across the floor more like some reptilian thing than a woman, and the faintest, furious spark glinted in her dead eyes.
“Are you hungry?” she asked and more blood leaked from her mouth.
“Do you know what I’ve done to find you?” I said, instead of answering her question.
“Do you think that matters? Do you think that’s why you’re here? I asked you a question.”
“I’m sick,” I told her.
She nodded her head. “You’ll get a whole lot sicker,” she said. “Especially if you don’t eat.”
Then she vomited, a sudden gush of the darkest red across the concrete and the edge of the mattress. It spattered my bare skin, speckling me with half-digested blood. She wiped her mouth and sat down.
“That’s how you start,” she said.
I stared at the cooling puked-up blood for a moment or two and then lay back down on the mattress and stared, instead up at the ceiling of the place, which seemed far, far away. There was glass up there, a skylight, and I could see it was night. I shut my eyes and wondered what it would take to get her to kill me.
“You should hurry. It’s better warm,” she said.
“Can I still say no?” I asked. “Can I change my mind?”
There was a long moment of silence. Maybe she was surprised. Maybe she wasn’t. I doubt I’ll ever know.
“It’s not too late,” she said. “I’ll kill you, if that’s what you want. It seems a shame though.”
Her voice – I wish I could find the language to describe her voice. It has to be heard, I think. It made me want to scramble away on my shattered limbs and hide in some dark hole where she would never be able to follow. It made me want to die.
“It doesn’t really matter to me,” she said. “There will be others. There always are. They will never stop coming.”
“I didn’t come,” I said. “I don’t even know where I am. You . . . took me.”
“Is that how it was, l
ittle girl?” She laughed, licking some of the regurgitated blood from her fingertips. “Well that’s not how I remember it.”
And then she brushed the sweaty hair back from my eyes, her hand as cold as ice across my brow, arctic air against fevered skin, and I shivered so hard my teeth clacked together.
“Don’t look for monsters if you don’t want to find them,” she said.
What had I expected? Some glorious fallen angel, some beautiful Byronic being of light and shadow? Had I really thought she would be beautiful? I’d read enough to know better. But I’d been unprepared for this, this gargoyle squatting there before me, smeared with blood and gore, dirt and shit, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a matted crown, her lean boyish body a road map of scars and half healed injuries. At some point her left nipple had been torn entirely away.
“What? Am I not pretty enough for you?” she asked and bared her teeth like a spiteful child. Somewhere overhead, a bird fluttered about in the criss-cross of steel girders before the skylight. “I thought you were a learned woman,” she snarled. She stood up. And I saw the organ hanging down between her legs. It almost looked like a penis, almost, a stunted penis sheathed in bone or horn, barbed and ridged and misshapen.
“The books,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the thing between her legs, “the books were mostly a waste of time. The men who wrote them . . . they didn’t know . . .”
“They never do,” she said, stepping over the cooling pool of bloody vomit. Then she stood above me, glaring down with those hungry eyes, and she began to squeeze the sharp end of the penis thing between her fingertips. “They hide in their rituals and incantations, too afraid to confront what they truly desire. You’re not like that,” she told me
“I’m not? Are you certain about that?”
“No,” she replied. “I’m never certain. But we’ll see. Soon, we shall see, little girl.”
She knelt down, straddling me, and that hard prong, grown stiff now and slightly larger, pressed against my belly. She bent down and kissed me, her tongue darting quickly past my teeth, and I tasted the blood of whatever or whomever she’d killed that night. The taste of blood was nothing new to me. My earlier depredations had seen to that. But there was something more, something beyond the rich, faintly metallic flavour, something like biting down on aluminum foil, something that tasted of mould and molasses and dried thyme. She breathed into me then, a sudden etheric rape, storm wind blown off a tide-less pack-ice sea, her rancid, sweet breath pouring down my throat and filling my lungs. She withdrew immediately, and I gasped, coughed and gagged and almost threw up.
