Inside, darkness glittered, parting for her now dark-sensitive eyes. She saw a short man dressed in rags wandering the cell aimlessly, bumping into walls. At first she wasn’t alarmed, only curious. Then she saw that he wasn’t very short, not really. It was only an illusion. He was not short, but headless.
She had never seen a headless body before, certainly not one that walked—maybe in a special effect movie somewhere. It did not seem real. It moved mechanically, lurching from one wall to the next like a robot. Stop. About face. Repeat. It grew maddening after only a few seconds and she found herself turning away.
He misinterpreted. “You are disturbed?”
“He’s horrible,” she said flatly, as if she was speaking of some pesky little brother that was bothering her.
“You don’t sound convinced, Poppet.”
“How?” she asked. “How have you done this?”
“How else, Poppet? The Elixir.”
She found the glint of his eyes. She held them, a changeless shine. He did not blink. Then again, neither did she, unless she wanted to. Perhaps they no longer needed to blink, or eat, or sleep, or breathe, and did so only from reflexive force of habit. If he was not going to thrust her in there with that thing, if he was not going to imprison her, she would need to explore these concepts further.
“Was he…is he…?”
“That is the body of Captain Pymm,” said the Doctor.
The shock was bleak, sudden, a dull knife thrust. Yet it didn’t really surprise her.
He reached out, past her, and pulled the door closed. The locked engaged. But if she listened carefully, she could still hear those slow, dragging footsteps sounding endlessly through the old stone walls.
“Let me show you the rest.”
There were other cells like the one that housed Captain Pymm’s restless body. Some were people—or might have been, once. Most were pieces, farms of eyes, hands, hearts, other organs, quivering chunks of jelly flesh that skittered along deep watery tanks like strange deep-sea creatures. They were not aware, she thought, or hoped. They just were. Curiously, there was no frightening equipment, no horror movie set pieces. There was just the Elixir, in tubes, tanks and syringes, preserving all.
She touched each door, peered into each cell, explored every tank. She studied every creature or half-creature, the shocking hopelessness of every small horror spiking through her body in echoes. Yet it awakened a strange, listless curiosity within her as well, and she wondered if she might one day assist the Doctor in his experiments. It would be interesting.
She was not afraid. Parts of her had come from these body farms, he said. Without them she would not be whole.
They reached the last cell.
“My brave Poppet,” he said. He reached out and touched her hair. She put out her hand, to touch him touching her, but he suddenly took it and drew it down until her fingers rested on the latch of the door.
With a swallow she bravely opened that last door.
Immediately some great creature lunged at her.
The Doctor slipped between her and the beast, soundlessly, with that great catlike agility if his, and the beast stumbled back in fear. As with the first creature, at first she found she was mistaken in her observations of it. She thought it was a wild dog of some kind, vast as a lion, its dark fur savage, and the muscular, wolflike body certainly suggested that. But nestled in the mane of the neck was a human head with one egg-white eye peering out at her, a human head that writhed, full of human hate.
She felt sick.
“Pymm,” she said immediately. She put both hands to her lips. It was him. The Doctor had said he was a dog. The irony fit. It was correct.
Turning, she fled.
4
Somehow, the Doctor was past her, blocking her escape from the library. He was quick, like all the things were who lived by night. She pulled away and came around, but the Doctor had her, as if all this had been choreographed in the past.
He cupped the back of her head. He wanted to kiss her, but the bandages were between them. He turned his head instead and buried the coarseness of the fabric against the pulse in her neck. She felt like she was falling within. She gave up. Gave into it. She thrust herself against him, her flesh instinctively seeking its maker. She did not care. Yet she was screaming. Screaming and crying hysterically, like some god-awful heroine in one of his books.
He clutched her and she hung limply in his embrace, the doll that she was. He drew both hands down her body, touching her intimately through Lizabeth’s golden-white dress. Then he drew back, to gauge her reaction. To study her, she his science.
She felt angry, sick with loss.
He looked on her cruelly, flawless in his monstrosity.
“Let me die,” she said.
“No,” he answered. “Never.”
She struck him across the face, rending the bandages along his cheek on one side with her hooked nails. Scarlet glinted out, the surreal landscape of his ruin. He grunted but did not cry out. He only raised his long surgeon’s fingers to the patch of wetness there, then brought those fingers around to his mouth, to lick, as he watched her through the little slits in the bandages.
“Fuck you,” she said, stumbling back away from him. Her voice was scorched from her screaming, barely more than a breath. There was no strength left in it. Then she corrected herself, she articulated. “Fuck you to hell. I hate you,” she screamed. “I hate what you’ve done to me!”
“What a nasty, cruel little bitch you are,” he said. He did not sound altogether displeased. He reached for her. He took her by the arm and threw her back against the bookshelves so forcefully that a line of books winged to the floor like dead angels. She didn’t feel a thing. He came unto her again, but it was all he could do to hold her still, such was her strength.
But he had her. And he, too, had strength.
He held her placidly against the books with one hand, and with the other reached through her writhing skirts and lace and found her core. She grunted at his ungentle touch. “My beautiful, my lovely one,” he told her. “Fight me if you can.”
His words only made the desire worse. Inside this cage of nightmare, caught up in his web, she wanted this fabulous monster. She wanted the Doctor.
He knew. He always knew. He pushed himself, the source of his power, deep inside her body. She screamed even though there was no pain at all; she was too ready for him.
She grappled with him until the fabric of his clothing rent under her nails and she felt his unnatural cold seeping forth. She thought of that perfect, horrible, impervious body, the face of the monster, and inside it all the hard, pure tyranny of princely desire.
“You’re hurting me,” she said, moving with him.
“Yes.”
“Hurt me. I want you to. I want…”
“What do you want, Poppet? Articulate...”
They came together, suddenly. In that last moment she saw Pymm, felt the sweet, saturating vengeance of the Doctor’s handiwork. She hated him, his perfect circle, his completed story.
“Revenge,” she screamed.
5
And two days later, after all her plans had been set, all her designs perfected, Louise dressed for the academy where Jerry Pacino worked as a janitor.
And so it all began.
NOW
1
Tim came to in the dark. He at first thought he was at home, in bed, and everything else was a dream, but the hardness of the bed beneath him made him think of morgue slabs in movies where private detectives investigated strange crimes. He sat up slowly, and found he was, in fact, lying on a gurney of some ancient, rusted design. Had the police found him passed out in his apartment and rushed him to the hospital, the victim of a mysterious assault? And if so, where was Mother?
The gurney creaked ominously as he moved. The walls dripped. He did not think he was in a hospital.
The room he found himself in looked like someone’s forlorn basement. He got to his feet, nearly slidin
g on the wet cement. His mind swirled, making him grip the sides of the gurney for support. Maybe they had found Mother and had sent him away to some grim asylum like when he was a kid. They didn’t understand how Mother lived beyond death.
When he was ready, when he could walk without pitching forward, he tried the only door to be found in the room. It was unlocked, which he thought was odd. They did not often leave doors unlocked in asylums. He knew that.
He pushed against it.
A chill breathed over him and through his clothes. The room let out into a crumbling flagstone hallway of some medieval design. Perhaps, he thought, he really was dreaming. His last coherent thought was of a man all in nightmare black touching him…he shuddered.
A part of him urged him to run, but he sensed things in the dark, squirming.
He found the lighter in his pocket. He did not smoke—it was an unacceptable habit to Mother—but many of the girls at the club did. He thumbed the butane wheel until he caught a flame.
The hallway, he discovered, was a writhing carpet of rats. He gaped involuntarily, wondering where in hell he was, what he could do. But the rats quickly scrabbled away from the light, leaving the floor as bare as if no rats had been there at all. He knew he had to get out of here, whatever this place was.
Cupping the flame to protect it, he started mincing down the hallway, his direction random. Sounds pressed in, driving him on ever faster and more desperately—strange, muffled whimpers, sounds neither human nor animal.
He hit a door unexpectedly with his shoulder, and he cried out. Somewhere in the darkness behind him something growled as if in response, a sound so human—and yet inhuman—he felt his bowels clench and nearly give out. Reaching, his hand fell on a rusted metal latch. The muffled noises persisted, strange high murmurings that sounded like human speech. Something was in here with him, something larger than a rat, larger than he, something trying to speak to him. He scrabbled crazily with the unfamiliar mechanics of the latch until it, like the first door, swung open.
Tim lurched forward, into blinding light. He landed hard on the floor, his teeth clacking against the rough stone tiles. He grunted in escalating horror. Something was crashing down the hallway behind him, banging bones and muscles against the narrow walls, its cries razoring over his skin. He flipped himself over and saw a great black beast with chips of glinting eyes in a human face charging toward him.
He would not have believed it could exist were he not seeing it now, with his own eyes. He rolled himself over so he was on his back and out of the way of the door and instinctively kicked out, slamming the door closed on the nightmare barreling down on him like a runaway locomotive. A latch snapped home and a moment later the door took an enormous hit, as if with a sledgehammer. But it seemed to hold against the assault. Tim paddled against the floor like some overturned turtle until he found his feet, then slowly rose in a half-crouch.
That’s when he saw he wasn’t alone.
They were here, waiting for him.
He saw the girl first, Liz—who was also, somehow, Louise. She wore a long, funny-looking dress of shiny brocade and ugly, old fashioned shoes. He was not used to seeing so much clothing on Louise’s lank body. With her was the man from the apartment, the one who had held him effortlessly against a wall, and he was even more fantastic and horrifying. In this vast room full of old books and flickering gaslight, he looked like a warlock secreted away in a tower somewhere, weaving mischief and spells.
He was seated in a straight-backed chair, with Louise sitting across his lap.
Tim burned. The familiar way the man touched Lou, running his heavy, beringed hand up her leg and then up the bodice of the gown, made it clear to Tim that they were lovers, that she was his. The touch said mine. The touch said suffer without. The man in black, the one Lou called the Doctor, looked directly at Tim as he touched Louise, savoring Tim’s agony. His face was terrible—not the bandages, but the dreadful, shining glee in his eyes.
“So you,” said the Doctor, his voice hypnotically deep and scorched, the sound of a piece of machinery cranking over, “are the one who violated my wife.”
Tim took a step back as if physically pushed by the force of the voice alone. His back hit the horrible door with the horrible thing lurking behind it. Yet he was immovable, as if the voice alone held him there.
He looked at the Doctor. He looked at Lou. He didn’t recognize her at all. Yet, somehow, he did.
Louise stood up, her gestures fluid, unreal, and moved to the center of the vast chamber of books. Her face was different, but he would have recognized her moves anywhere. She stood like a ballerina in the first position. Meanwhile, the Doctor, who seemed to think himself her husband, moved to a table where an old record player was waiting.
He dropped the needle onto a vinyl record. After a moment, music pounded out.
Tim expected something old, surreal, something his mother would have approved of, but the music was surprisingly modern, a rattling dance beat similar to what he heard played at the club every single night.
As he watched, dumbstruck by the strangeness of it all, Louise started to dance. She slithered slowly out of the long gown and began to prance around the wing chair in the center of the chamber, dancing the way she always had at the Gate, with all the life and energy she had—even though, by all rights, she ought to be dead and at the bottom of the East River. How had she survived? Tim himself had taped the bloody remnants of her seemingly lifeless body into a large disposal bag before dumping it into the frothing black water.
Yet there she was, Louise—and yet, not-Louise—thrusting her gyrating ass into his face, then whipping around in a pirouette and stalking toward him in her funny, old-fashioned shoes as if they were big, clunky stripper platforms, drawing so close to him that he could see her unblinking, mismatched eyes. Smiling sweetly, Louise snapped her teeth at him. Tim jerked back, banging the back of his head against the door behind him.
The record played on. Louise slunk down to her hands and knees and crept forward like a prowling lioness, then flipped onto her back and rolled her spine across the floor, undulating her ass and thrusting her legs out into a deep V. She brought her heels down on the floor resoundingly, arched her back and flipped over onto her feet in a limber little move that very few girls could pull off, even after a lifetime of dancing.
Tim opened his mouth to say something, to ask how it was even possible that she was alive and walking, but Louise spun around him, surrounded him, then suddenly thrust him backward into the wing chair. Her strength was irresistible. Then she was right there, right in his lap, facing him and writhing to the music, her powerful dancer’s legs clenched up tight around his waist.
Tim realized he was about to get the first lap-dance of his life—and all by a living-dead girl. He wasn’t sure if he ought to be thrilled or appalled by the idea.
Louise’s hands, her lips and tongue, were all over him, leaving ghostly snail-trails of cold wherever they touched. One of her hands cupped the back of his skull. The other slid snakelike past the belt of his trousers. Tim lunged within. He had never come before—at least, not with another person. It was almost a relief.
Louise smiled. Her teeth looked as hard and gleaming as chips of bone.
Then Tim felt a deep, unfelt pain rip across his groin and stomach. He looked down at his crotch and saw that Lou held something in her hand that resembled a piece of mangled, bloody hamburger. There was a gaping black hole that began somewhere just south of his belt buckle, a hole bubbling forth a bloody froth. In her other hand, he saw, she held a glinting surgical scalpel. This she deftly inserted into his new, homemade cunt. There was a soft sound as she slowly unzipped the musculature of his waxy white abdomen in a long wet line. The tubes of his intestines slithered forth through the slit in his belly like frightened snakes escaping a cavern.
He felt too stunned to react. And, anyway, there was no pain.
Louise seized him at the throat. Her face was stone, even her smile. She st
ood up, pulling him up her long, tall body as the music played on carelessly. Tim’s body pulsed with the beats and with blood loss. Louise was taller than he, taller than most men, though not taller than the Doctor; his head rested on her chest. She put the scalpel, cold and hard and bloodstained, against his throat.
Tim held very still. He was already dead. He could not survive such horrible wounds, he knew—and, anyway, he really didn’t want to. Louise had made him come, made him a man. She was the One. It was done. He did not struggle.
The record began to skip. Louise let him go.
Tim fell straight to the floor, watching the blood pour from the great mouthlike cavity of his body. He was concerned, but not for himself.
The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler Page 8
