by Edward Lee
“Oh, sure, everything’s up to code if that’s what you mean.” He seemed to turn toward the bar, then thought better of it, which pleased Cristina. She wouldn’t exactly say that he drank too much, but she felt much better when he refrained. “Third and fourth floors aren’t even Sheetrocked yet, but the second floor is, and it’s all wired. Go ahead and check it out if you want. You might get some ideas about how we should refurbish the rest.”
“Okay,” she said and skipped up the dark-scarlet carpet. From the landing she could see unfinished doors standing open, filling the hall with fading daylight. She browsed around each empty room amid the scent of newly cut Sheetrock, but instead of thinking about redecorating she found her mind locked on her new line. Evil Church Creepies, she mused. The Noxious Nun …
Would she have the same dream to night?
It didn’t matter how bizarre the dream might be, nor how disturbed she was by it. I used it to my creative advantage, she knew. Now I just need it to sell—BETTER than Cadaverettes. Bruno von Blanc, the owner of the development company, assured her that Evil Church Creepies would outsell everything else on the market. “Your creative visions are right on the pulse of the marketplace, Cristina,” he’d insisted. “You thought we were taking a chance on Cadaverettes, remember? You thought they’d been branded as derivative. But I knew before we even signed you up that they were exactly what the market had been waiting for. Everything else is derivative, Cristina. Cadaverettes are the only original figurines coming out now, because they mix the old with the new. And Evil Church Creepies isn’t just an extension of that; it’s a new avenue. The preorders alone will be through the roof.”
Cristina hoped so, and it had nothing to do with the money. If anything, she still couldn’t relate to that part of it. She’d made a phenomenal amount off the last line, yet most of it was stuck in the bank, somehow defying her awareness of it. She merely needed her creations to perpetuate, to be enjoyed by others—preferably lots of others.
Semi-immortality, she thought, and wandered into more rooms.
The front room. What looked immediately back at her from the great bow window was another window: a great wheel-window of stained glass, accented by intricate traceries. The church across the street, she recalled. So far she’d scarcely noticed it but now, from this higher vantage point, it appeared quite grandiose, almost a mini Notre Dame, with buttresses, pointed iron crockets, even a belfry. It looked drab, though, unused. Cristina understood that the house in which she and Paul now lived was originally some sort of an annex building for the same church.
Staring at it now reminded her that she hadn’t been to church in over ten years.
She left the room in a rush, electing not to confront the subtle guilt.
Oh, wow. Now this is something …She’d drifted into the rearmost room, as wall-patched and unfinished as the others, but found herself spellbound. High lancet windows made the room appear galleryish, and let in radiant blocks of late-afternoon light. This room is it, she knew at once, and in her mind she already envisioned how it would be painted, carpeted, and arranged. I doubt that Paul will be hurt that I like this room better than the studio. It was the feel of the room, even in its denuded state, that instantly appealed to her artist’s perceptions. The view looking down wasn’t much—just the boring alley—but it was the way the windows let in all that light that made her fall in love with the room.
My new studio, she thought.
It was exciting just to think about, but after some undefinable moments, her thoughts had drifted elsewhere and she wasn’t sure why. Suddenly she felt flushed again, prickly with desire. God …A warm, delicious flash broke her out in gooseflesh as she imagined Paul’s hands on her skin, sculpting the contours of her body. Her eyes closed by themselves as further images poured into her head. She stood boldly naked before him, in this same room, before this same window, her nudity displayed to the sun as he knelt at her feet and—
It’s been so long since he’s done THAT, her thoughts slurred. But even longer since she’d done much of anything for him. That all changes tonight, she felt certain.
The fantasy doubled then. She closed her eyes harder to see it more clearly, and to feel it. Paul was on his knees, his mouth tending to her sex. The sensations rushed. Soon she’d actually opened her blouse for real, to let the sun pour on her breasts as her own hands caressed them…Yes, if she only had the vibrator; that would really send her off. One hand eventually opened her jeans and slipped down. The hand was now Paul’s mouth, working the delicate flesh to a hot, pulsing craze. Did she moan out loud? Her belly sucked in and her thighs quivered as her first climax in over a month broke and nearly brought her to the floor. Her fingers teased out the last sensations as her upper teeth crimped her lip…
I can’t believe I just did that …She let her breath come back, let the tensions lift off from her muscles; then she opened her eyes.
Oh my—
She brought her hand to her mouth to keep from shrieking in embarrassment. Her heart seemed to swell twice its size—
Because when she’d opened her eyes, her head had been bowed down toward the window, and a woman was standing there on the alley street looking right back up at her.
Grinning.
Cristina stepped back in the corner, shivering. She re-buttoned her blouse so fast she’d lined it up wrong. This is so embarrassing! What if I see that woman again?
But—
Something occurred to her. Cristina was fairly certain she’d seen the woman before, on the street. One of the homeless waifs that loitered around 67th Street and vicinity, panhandling.
But she had to be sure.
She inched forward along the wall. As the edge slowly crossed her line of sight, she inched even more slowly, peeping down. Eventually the entire alley street came into view and there, for just a second, she thought she could make out the woman’s features: holey jeans, barefoot, a baggy, stained T-shirt full of holes and hair hanging down like an oily mop. The woman—or girl—was walking away and a second later was out of the window frame completely.
Yeah, one of those homeless girls. Thank God. Who could she tell? And had she even been able to seen Cristina’s face clearly enough to recognize her later?
I doubt it …
She sighed out the rest of the shock and buttoned her blouse up right this time. But something compelled her to take one last look at the girl as she was walking away.
Ever so careful, Cristina took off a window latch and angled the window open enough for her to stick her head out.
The girl wasn’t to be seen.
Must’ve been walking really fast to be on the street by now …But before Cristina pulled her head back in, she stopped to squint.
Wait …
A figure stood at the end of the alley but it certainly wasn’t the same girl. In fact, the figure looked almost like a nun.
(II)
They were whittling.
scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch …
The sound filled the dirty, brick-walled room like rats skittering—a sound they were well accustomed to. Empty cans had been heaped to the farthest corner—the garbage corner, where they sometimes went to the bathroom, too, and old empty boxes for makeshift walls. A dead Sylvania television sat askew in another corner; they watched it a lot, and sometimes even saw things. There were four of them tonight; others came and went but it was mostly just these four: Francy, Sandrine, Scab, and Stutty. Shoplifted candles burned to give them light. It was Stutty who’d just crawled in through the hole that was almost too small for them to squeeze into.
“I just saw the lady in the house,” she said, “and she was playin’ with herself.”
“She was not,” Francy scowled.
“She was too! In a window upstairs, and she saw me-saw me-saw me-saw—”
“Be quiet!” Francy yelled. Most of Francy’s teeth were missing, and her pink glasses always slid down her nose. Her breasts sagged in an orange halter she stole from
a store, and she wore baggy men’s jeans and flip-flops. “We’re working, we’re whittling. You could be helping, Stutty, but we can’t find the fourth knife we stole last night.”
Stutty’s obsessive-compulsive mind stalled. Knife? She sat down in a corner on a plastic storage bin that read BANANA REPUBLIC. She put her feet up on the old kerosene heater they found in the garbage last year that still worked, and watched the other three continue whittling. Stutty wished she could whittle too because it looked like fun. Stutty’s breasts itched beneath the stained white T-shirt that said THE DAMNED on it, and it had a blue picture of a woman with a crown of thorns; she’d taken it off of a dead crackhead in the Meatpacking District. The color of her hair was indeterminate due to dirt and head oil, but it didn’t really matter what color it was. She rarely wore shoes, often leaving black footprints.
The knife? she thought again, then said, “Oh, I know where it is!” and she pulled it out of her back pocket. It was a simple whittling knife.
“So you took it,” Sandrine said, smirking in her stained, pink sweatpants, and white T-shirt. Her black-spaghetti hair hung over most of her face. “Is that…blood on it?”
All the girls looked. Stutty turned the knife and touched the smudged blade. “Oh, yeah! I got money—I got five dollars-five dollars-five—”
“Be quiet!” Francy yelled.
“Stutty got a trick,” Scab said, as if jealous. She was the most quiet of the bunch, and probably the least mentally defected. Her large, dirty breasts swayed in the kind of sleeveless T-shirt that people called a wifebeater, and she wore cutoff army pants. Very short black hair covered her head, but she had lots of bald spots and scabs from some disease or hair blight. She wanted to grow her hair out long like the other girls but it just never grew. “But that was a shitty trick if all you got was five dollars.”
“Why ya think the knife’s got blood on it?” Stutty retorted with a wisp of pride in her voice. “Some fat guy in a little car, said he’d pay twenty but only gave five.”
“Did ya kill him?” Sandrine asked, looking up from her whittling.
“No, but I stuck him right in the bag. Twice.” Stutty laughed. “He had a wedding ring on!”
“Good,” Francy approved. “Let the fucker go home to his wife and explain why he’s got two knife holes in his nut-sack.”
The four girls burst into a round of giggling.
“Oh, and I got some sardines, too,” Stutty added.
The other three looked up with expectation in their eyes as Stutty took the narrow cans out of her pocket and gave them one each.
“King Oscar, I hope,” Scab said, but then she frowned at the can.
“These are anchovies, not sardines!” Francy complained.
Sandrine cranked open her can and first drank the oil out of it. “But anchovies are better, they’re easier to steal, and they’re salty, and I don’t even like sardines ’cos they remind me of my fucked-up childhood.”
“Sardines?” Scab questioned, picking a narrow fillet from the can.
“Because my name’s Sandrine so when I was a kid the other kids called me Sardine.”
“Oh,” someone said.
Stutty’s eyes popped open. “And look at this real expensive eye shadow I stole!” She reached down the front of her pants and withdrew a small jar with a gold lid. “It cost five hundred dollars, the sign said.”
“Huh?” Francy, Sandrine, and Scab said in unison.
“Yeah. It’s the best. I reached around and stole it when the guy wasn’t looking. They had red ones and white ones, too, but I think the black looks better.”
“Gimme that!” Francy said and snatched the little jar. She opened it and smeared some over her eyelids, but then winced. “This stuff stinks! You sure this is eye shadow?”
“Well, yeah, I think-I think-I think-I—”
“Be quiet!”
Scab took the bottle; she could read better than the others.
“Only thing was weird is they had it in a refrigerator,” Stutty remembered.
“Eye shadow?” Sandrine said.
Scab read the tiny words on the lid, chuckling, “Product of the Ukraine. Beluga caviar—”
“You didn’t steal eye shadow, you dick! You stole fish eggs!” Francy grimaced, wiping her eyes. Scab shook her head and threw the $500-per-half-ounce jar against the wall.
Stutty liked to talk, so she kept talking, “Oh-oh-ohoh—”
“Be quiet!” Francy yelled.
“I saw the hooker from last night—in a car,” Stutty finally said.
“Who?”
“You know, that ho who saw us run out of the hardware store last night-last night-last—” But then she pinched her lips shut.
“So what?” Sandrine huffed. “We got away with it, and the New Mother’ll be happy with us.”
But Francy seemed concerned. She picked at a scab on her foot. “You saw her…in a car? Was it…a police car?”
“I think it was. It was unmarked but the two guys in it looked like plainclothes cops, and they were all looking around, like the ho was telling them to.”
Francy smelled like fish eggs now. Her eyes locked on Stutty. “Did they see you?”
“Nope-nope-nope-nope—–”
“Be quiet!”
“They didn’t see me ’cos I hid behind the newsstand.”
“Good.”
“And then I saw the New Mother—”
“You did not!” Sandrine insisted.
“The New Mother only comes out at night,” Scab corrected in a singsong voice.
“I only saw her for a second, in a shadow!” Stutty challenged this affront to her credulity. “She can do that, she told us she could!”
“Sub…cuh-poor,” Francy began, her lips struggling. “Subcor—Shit! I can never pronounce the word!”
“Subcorporeal,” Scab said. “So Stutty really did see her.”
Stutty fumed, “Then don’t call me a liar-a liar-a—”
Francy pointed a finger at her.
Stutty calmed down again, but kept talking. “I saw her right after I saw the hooker with those cops, and right after that, that’s when I saw the woman in the house friggin’ herself in the window.”
“She gave me hot dog money today,” Sandrine said. “She seemed nice.”
“Then where’s the hot dogs?” Francy complained.
“I…ate ’em…”
“Shit-wad!”
Scuffing could be heard. The four girls’ eyes widened in the candlelight as they all turned their heads toward the hole.
“It’s the New Mother,” someone whispered.
“Aw, no it ain’t!” Francy griped. “It’s just Virginia…”
“Hi,” the dirty-elbowed girl peeped when she crawled in and sat up. She had one ear cut off from a crack dealer who didn’t like her, and wore cutoff sweatpants and a Yankees shirt. She switched from crack to smack, depending on availability but more often than not—and like a lot of them—the one component in her existence that was even less available than drugs was money. Her looks were far too gone now to get many tricks. “Ya got any food?”
“Sardines,” Stutty said.
“Anchovies!” Francy yelled. “You think anchovies are sardines and fish eggs are fuckin’ eye shadow!”
Scab and Sandrine laughed.
“I do not-do not-do-do—”
“Be quiet!” Francy yelled so loud her glasses flew off.
“You’re not one of us, Virginia,” Scab said, “so we can’t give you our food—”
—but then they all froze as a shadow like smoke seemed to sift around them. Soon they could see something standing near the candles.
And the voice flowed, Virginia is welcome in our convent, girls. All are welcome, and just as our generous lord shared with honest peasants, we too follow his example. We share with our sisters, don’t we?
Stutty gave Virginia a can of anchovies.
Let my love be upon you, the sweet voice fluttered, hovering. The gir
ls all looked up in awe…
Such a righteous flock …
Then the voice, and the shadow, was gone.
“Give Virginia your knife,” Francy ordered Stutty. “She’s one of us now.”
The girls all looked at each other and smiled, and then—
scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch—
—continued to whittle.
CHAPTER FOUR
(I)
John Rollin absently turned the ring round and round his finger—a fat silver ring with the strangest crest: a dragon strangled by its own tail. He was still doing this when he got out of the cab and looked up. Unbelievable, he thought. The cab drove away.
Just about the worst thing that could possibly…
Inside, the familiar walls of his home seemed alien now. He’d only been gone for six months, his first hiatus in a decade. It had been the best of his life—
—and I come back to this…this calamity.
He didn’t even take his bags to his room; instead, he was upstairs in the front reading room, reaching for the binoculars. It was almost funny. Over forty years of training have led me to this: peeping in windows …
How could they have sold the annex house without consulting Rollin first?
He let his eyes acclimate, made sure the hall light was off so not to be detectable from outside. He carefully swung open the window, and in leaked the distant sounds of the city at night. Car horns, a siren, a late bus roaring by on 67th. One of the street lamps on Dessorio flickered on and off. It seemed to tranquilize his quiet rage.
And his fear.
A scuffing noise came from the street. Footsteps? Rollin raised the binoculars and looked.
Yes. Two girls. They wore ratty clothes and flip-flops. Addicts, he presumed. Or homeless. Often the two were synonymous. The optics of the binoculars seemed to magnify the meager available light to something surreal. He watched the two women shamble away, carrying their shrill chatter with them.
Now the street stood dead.
Rollin lifted the binoculars to the annex house…
