by Edward Lee
He followed them down a relatively clear alley. Were they whispering? Glasses must be talkin’ the other one into it. She knows the score. Once a crackhead, always a crackhead, even when you ain’t got shit left. Their dirty flip-flops slapped ahead of him.
When they stopped, Glasses pushed a garbage can away from the brick wall of one of those fancy white clothes stores that had gone out of business. A long time ago it was a department store Doke thought his mother worked at, but he didn’t really remember her much. He knew his daddy turned into a hype and always thought that maybe he killed her. Doke didn’t care.
Behind the garbage can was a hole in the wall. “In here,” Glasses said, and then got on her hands and knees. The stutterer had already shimmied in before her, fast as a skink.
“You fuckin’ crazy? I ain’t goin’ in there,” Doke said.
She glared back. “Fine. Then don’t, then we’ll have to cop from the Z-Men. Only way you’re getting any money from us is by coming in here.”
“Bullshit—”
“I ain’t smokin’ crack on the street when it’s light outside!” And then before Doke could raise further shit, she shimmied into the hole.
Doke looked down. He didn’t like that remark about the Z-Men. And I’ll bet they been buyin’ from those motherfuckers all along …And what would he have to fear by going in? It was fucked-up, sure, but there was no way they had a guy or a pimp in there. Maybe I’ll just jack both the bitches out, take their green, and kill ’em, he considered. Doke had killed a few bums in his time. A man needed something to do when he got bored.
Fuck it. He got down on hands and knees.
He could barely get his shoulders in but after some fidgeting, he succeeded. His face seemed to constrict when he squeezed through the narrow passage. Bum piss, he knew. He’d smelled plenty of it in his time. As he inched through, each inhalation felt thick. But then what could he expect following two homeless crackheads into their crib? He squeezed through a larger hole, and when his hips passed the makeshift threshold, he knew he could see light.
Yeah, my time’s worth a lot more than havin’ to crawl into a shit hole for fifty bucks. I’m killin’ these hoes …
He had an ice pick strapped to his ankle for such occasions.
Once inside, Doke smirked and stood up. Several candles provided the weak, urine-yellow light that flickered on the bare-block walls. This was probably a boiler room or something a long time ago, but now only rubble, stacks of boxes and crates, and garbage characterized its stark features. A kerosene heater sat off to the side, next to boxes of candles and some packs of magic markers. Several ratty sleeping bags lay on the floor.
“Over here.” Glasses’s voice.
But Doke remained stalled in place. In one corner a mountain of trash sat piled, and several rats skittered like they owned the place. “Smells like piss in here,” he complained. “Shit’s stingin’ my eyes.”
“Oh, you get used to it,” came a squeaky voice he didn’t recognize but then he looked aside and saw a third girl sitting on a box. She appeared to be watching a television on the floor but the television was off.
“You bitches told me no one else was here.”
“That’s Sandrine,” Glasses excused. “She likes to watch TV.”
“The fuckin’ TV’s busted!”
Glasses giggled. “Yeah. But sometimes you can still see stuff.”
In fetid dark, the bum-chick called Sandrine enthused, “It’s true. Right now I’m watching the man on the stone slab. It’s like a show you see over and over again.”
Watching the man? Doke, frowning, walked over, unconsciously ducking his head beneath low pipes. Something crunched under his foot; then he frowned harder when he saw what it was: an anchovy can.
“Anchovies are easier to shoplift ’cos they’re smaller,” Glasses informed.
“Now the dog’s barking, too!” exclaimed Sandrine like a little kid even though she was probably thirty.
Glasses went behind her, to smile at the television screen.
Doke looked at the screen, too. It was dead, blank. Their brains are garbage. “I ain’t got time to fuck around in this piss-hole. Let’s see that money or else I’ll have to go ghetto on your asses.”
Glasses handed him fifty very dirty dollars.
Awright. Now what? Am I really gonna kill these kooks? Right now all Doke wanted to do was get out of this freaky place. The smart businessman pursues all profit, large and small, Archie’s voice etched at the back of his head. Just give ’em the crack, Doke figured. They’ll want more tomorrow.
He reached into his pocket…
“Oh,” Glasses said. “We don’t want any crack. We don’t smoke that shit anymore. We don’t do any drugs anymore.”
Doke stared.
Sandrine looked up from the dead TV. “We’ve been purged. The New Mother has sanka-fried us.”
“Sanctified,” Glasses corrected.
“We only-we only told you we’d cop some crack to lure you in-you in-you in-you—”
“Be quiet!”
It was the other one, the one that talked fucked-up. Doke wasn’t really nervous yet, but there was something a bit uneasy behind his rage. The stutterer had resurfaced from a back corner. She had something in her hand. Doke squinted.
A brick.
Doke blurred for a split second, and in the split second after that he had his ice pick in hand. “I’m fillin’ all you crazy bums fulla holes—”
“Salut,” another voice said.
Doke froze.
The voice sounded accented and…weird. Like someone talking through the wind.
“She’s here…”
Black knuckles turned white as Doke’s hand tightened around the pick’s handle. That voice he’d heard seemed to come from every direction of the squalid room, yet something he couldn’t begin to define commanded his gaze. He looked to the corner, behind the pile of garbage.
Is that …
A woman stood there. He could see candlelight flickering up and down her nude body, and he could also see that she wasn’t any bum. She was all curves and enticing female lines. But…
Nude, yes, but there was something like a weird hood around her face…
Then the accented voice repeated what the bum-girl had said:
“Look.”
As Doke’s eyes widened, his vision dimmed to black, and it was in the all-pervading absence of light that he began to see things…
He saw his mother being pummeled by the fists of the man he presumed was his father. “Where’s my skag! Where’s my skag!” the man raged, arms full of needle marks, a candle burning on a table next to a spoon. The fists flew into a frenzy as his mother’s face was pounded open. “Ain’t worth SHIT!” Then the man collapsed her head with a rolling pin…
Doke hitched in a breath. “No…”
“Look.”
Another vision: soldiers from long ago slowly proceeding into a forest, the looks on the faces in the oval chain-mail hoods that of horror and revulsion. The forest seemed to extend without limit, yet between every tree stood a twenty-foot wooden pike on which a Turkish soldier with the invasion force of Mehmed II had been impaled. Some through their mouths, some through their rectums, some through their chests—there were thousands of them—and as Doke was forced to stare harder at the impossible image, he noticed that there were hundreds of women and old men impaled as well…
The blackness snapped away. Then—
Doke was back in the shitty room, staring at the nude woman in the corner. Her eyes seemed alight. She was grinning.
Two very thin, inch-long teeth could be seen in the grin.
“Now, my blessed sister.”
SMACK!
The stutterer brought the brick so hard against the side of Doke’s head that the retinal lining of one eye detached. Half his sight winked out as he collapsed to the dirt-lined floor. The throb of pain at his head had Doke convulsing.
Shadows hovered. Doke couldn’t move.
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Hands pulled off his blinking shoes while greasy fingers first extracted the fifty dollars from his front pocket, then the five-hundred-dollar roll. His baggie full of crack was extracted as well, then tossed to the garbage pile. Doke could feel more than see his pants being pulled off.
He continued to mildly convulse from the preliminary effects of hematoma, yet those sociopathized brain cells continued to fire, continued to feel the pain thud like crashing waves. He thought he also felt a hand fiddle with his genitals.
The other bum-girl laughed. “It’s so little…”
Doke was too far gone to feel emasculated, and too far gone to do essentially anything except lie there and shudder as blood and spinal fluid gently leaked from his fractured skull.
“Enough merriment, sisters.” The accented voice. Did Doke sense the nude woman closer now, leaning over him? Her voice seemed to ooze along with his blood.
“Let us pay homage now, to our great and generous defender.”
The girls rose and stepped away. But two of them moved up, each grabbing an ankle. They stepped apart, to spread Doke’s legs.
The oozing voice smeared across Doke’s mind…
“Singele lui traieste.”
Doke’s good eye blinked. He could see a fourth girl now, one with short black hair covered with bald patches, walking around.
In one hand she held a hammer, in the other a long, sharpened pole.
CHAPTER EIGHT
(I)
This is crazy, Father Rollin thought as he stood at the corner of 67th and Columbus, counting the number of hotel rooms facing the street. He counted with his finger, very intently. Several strollers stopped to peer at him. I don’t care if they think I’m out of my mind, he asserted to himself but still felt embarrassed. He looked over his shoulder, to approximate the alignment; then he thought, Hmm. Fourth one from the right side of the building. That looks like it …
He picked up his small suitcase and entered the old brown brick Ketchum Hotel, well known for its Federal-period architecture. A quick trip up to the second floor, trying to maintain his bearing, and then he found the fire-exit map near the elevator. The fourth room from the right appeared as Room 207. Got it. Now let’s just hope I’m not wasting an awful lot of money.
Back downstairs, he approached the check-in counter. The lobby seemed very busy, which wasn’t good. Somebody’s probably already booked the room, his cynicism told him, or perhaps it was a secret hope so that he wouldn’t have to go through with this at all. He actually winced at several women in shining dresses, carrying physiques that he could only describe as…comely.
A lanky, narrow-faced clerk addressed him with a French accent. Rollin had always carried a trifling grudge against the French, for forcing Pope Clement V to move the papacy from Rome to Avignon in 1309. It was all political! he’d raged with some other priests once, after too much wine. GOD is not political! How can the masses believe that the Church is infallible when everyone from kings to presidents can manipulate the Holy Office? It was a silly argument, but Rollin still didn’t much care for the French.
“It’s a plea sure to receive you at the Ketchum, Father,” said the clerk, whose brow seemed to twitch at Rollin’s presence. “How may I be of assistance?”
“This is probably a fool’s errand,” Rollin began his lie. “I don’t have a reservation, but I was wondering if Room 207 is available. Of course, seeing how busy you are today, I’m sure it isn’t…”
The clerk’s narrow face seemed to tweak at the odd request. A few taps on the keyboard, and, “You’re in luck, Father. We’ve only three rooms unreserved today, and 207 is one of them.”
“I’ll take it for, say, three nights, if possible.”
“Of course, Father.” But then the clerk stiffened with some French-accented chuckling. “The standard rate is $279 per night—”
Rollin wilted, extracting his credit card. God’s work always costs money…damn it, and what is this dupe laughing about?
“It’s regrettable that I won’t be able to give you the convention rate since, I feel certain, you’re not attending the convention.”
Only now did Rollin notice the looks he was getting from the flashy lobby crowd. “Convention? No, no. And the reason I’ve asked for Room 207 is only because I’ve stayed here before and love the room’s view.” Priests shouldn’t be able to lie so easily, he considered. But the man had said something about a convention. “So what’s the big event? Consumer trade show or something?”
Now the clerk was beside himself to stifle his amusement. His smile nearly went up to his eyes. “No, Father, I’m afraid not. It’s the Adult Video Awards Convention.”
Oh my God! Rollin thought. “I’ll just…take the room, please.” He collected his key-card and skirted back to the elevators. Absolutely humiliating …
More cosmetically perfected women smiled at him when he got off the elevator. “Oh, Father, I love your ring,” said a platinum blonde in a body stocking. Rollin trembled when she grabbed his hand to look at it, forcing his eyes away from croquet-ball-sized breasts. “Uh, thank you. Go with God.” He rushed to Room 207 and slipped in as quickly as he could. If somebody I know sees me here… what on earth can I say? But he shoved the trepidation away when he approached the wide windows and parted the drapes. The moment of truth was at hand. He took out his binoculars, stepped six feet back from the gap in the drapes, and zoomed down the alley, which cut up to Dessorio Avenue.
Well at least SOMETHING went right today, he thought when the view showed him that he’d calculated the angle with accuracy. If he stood right against the wall and hunched down, he got an almost dead-on view of the rear windows of the annex house. Rollin fixed himself some coffee, then pulled a chair to the wall to sit. Peeping Tom time again, he thought, amazed at his low-brow tactics. What else can I do? Break into the place? The diocese couldn’t bail me out because they don’t even know!
He tried to sever it all, along with the cosmic disappointment that a lifetime of service to God had led to this. Instead, he teased the focus ring on the glasses.
The top two floors stood drapeless and appeared empty, yet the long windows of the second level possessed raised blinds that revealed a room full of lit computers, book and media shelves, and a slant-angled table that he presumed was a drawing desk. Must be her studio. And below, on a balcony, one narrow window revealed a fairly wide wedge of a very ornate bathroom, complete with a hot tub. A floor lower, he could see the newly installed security bars of the basement windows.
Rollin sighed. Now what? I’m spending $279 per night of my own money—of which I have precious little—all to afford a view of the back of the annex house …
What do I expect to see?
He supposed if he saw nothing, then his prayers would be answered.
Movement flagged him from the studio window—There she is! Rollin could see Cristina Nichols sitting at the large computer screen dressed in a fine robe. At one point, she got up from her work and walked to the window. She seemed to be reveling in the sunlight, which was just beginning to pour in over the top of the higher-leveled condos behind the house.
When he coughed, the binocular’s surreal clarity vibrated like an earthquake; for a second he glimpsed the tops of two heads. Who could that be? He lowered his vantage point and saw a pair of homeless women shuffling down the alley toward Columbus. One with glasses, and one with scabs on her head. They jabbered silently as he watched. Though homeless persons regularly came to the West Side to panhandle, Rollin knew that few actually lived there. Most of the shelters were near the lower streets or up in the Harlem area, yet he’d seen these girls with some frequency.
And Rollin felt certain that it was these women specifically who’d broken into the annex house a number of times when he was its charge.
I’ll have to confront them, he knew, for all the good it’ll do. Or better yet, follow them some time.
Rollin squinted into the eyepieces when he looked back to the studio win
dow. He also gulped.
Cristina Nichols now stood behind the glass with her robe parted, her breasts bared. Rollin could hear his heart thumping. Don’t watch. This is NOT what you’re looking for, and you know it …
God knows it, too.
In that last fraction of a glimpse, Cristina Nichols’s face appeared blank, trancelike, and her hands were slowly caressing her breasts in the sun. The image seemed to pinpoint—on dark, swollen nipples. Then her hands slid downward…
What a place to do THAT—
But Rollin’s heart thumped louder when he brought the binoculars back down. The two homeless girls were approaching the end of the alley. Much closer now, he could discern their unkempt details.
The one with the scabs on her head seemed to be wiping her hands off with a rag.
A white rag that came away red.
(II)
A hot fugue state was the only way she could think of it. For the second time, Cristina caught herself standing before her studio window, touching herself. She nearly shrieked when she grew cognizant of what she was doing, the recognition arriving just short of climax. I’m turning into a nympho! she thought when her senses returned, and she jumped back and resashed the robe.
What brought THAT on?
Her hangover had gone, replaced by this. She didn’t like not knowing the cause of her actions, and after last night’s drunken blackout, an uneasiness began to unsettle her stomach.
The nightmare, magnified this time, the drenching eroticism, the blood.
She went to shower again, to cool herself off and clear her head. What had she been doing? She turned the water from cool to cold, drawing goose bumps. I was in the studio, working out a sketch of the next figure…The Vampirical Vicar …It struck her as odd how the “vampire” bent had seeped its way into the Evil Church line: first the nun, now the vicar. She knew it was all just more influence of the nightmare. And, yes, she remembered working at her drawing table when, without invitation, remnant images had crept into her head: last night’s lesbian-dream frolic, a half a dozen faceless women covering her with hands and tongues while the fanged nun looked on in proximity to the dead man on the stone slab and the queer vase sitting atop it. The unpleasant imagery should’ve left her desires mute yet Cristina found the opposite; she felt charged, misted with sweat, nipples tingling. It’s almost like I was in a trance, she mused. When the dream imagery had faded, it had been replaced by something even more objectionable…
