There was another steer skull in the box. What else? I thought. But it had only the base stumps of its horns and looked unpainted, in the murk of the room, except for a dark design on the forehead, so I lifted the skull out for examination.
There was nothing painted on the forehead, but rather something glued to it. Interesting. A kind of mixed-media sculpture? I carried the thing to the lamp and hunched down close to its intimate ruddy glow.
It wasn’t glued to the forehead, either, but embedded in it. Almost in the center, like a black glassy third eye. Spherical, with subtle grooves, curves and figures inscribed in it, apparently as designs. Lightly I brushed my fingers over the surface. I turned the skull over in my hands and peered inside it through the sharp-edged holes underneath. With the eye holes, nasal channel, and huge molars on the underside it looked like another face in itself, hidden inside a cow’s outer face. Through one eye socket I could see splintered breakage where the sphere had been driven straight through. Had Mother hammered the object into this skull?
I’d have to ask David about it; right now I needed that coffee. Much too early to retire just yet. I set the skull with the third eye down on the work bench, shut off the lamp, and closed the studio door behind me.
* * *
What was that commercial for, skin cream? Moisturizing lotion? And how often was it that the commercial said we shed half a million dead skin cells…every thirty seconds? Every second? A lot, fast, in any case. Good thing they regenerate or we’d just crumble away to dust, I thought. I remembered hearing, also, that much of the dust in homes—most of it?—consisted of these shed scales. And we inhaled this scurf, it settled in our food.
The dust was thick in my mother’s bedroom. She was no great housekeeper…but then, to be fair, she’d been very sick toward the end. Here she had lain wasting away, crumbling. She was, in effect, all around me as if her cremated ashes had been scattered like powder across the bureau, the book shelves, the mirror and window sills. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Back to senseless matter. I ran my finger through the dust on the bureau top, rubbed it between my fingers. A shudder went through me, and I wiped my hand on my jeans.
There was a nice smell in the bedroom, despite the dust. A light perfume, not cloying. Delicate, feminine, appealing. But the dust. It was almost as if I were afraid that by ingesting it I would be infecting myself with my mother’s cancer, latent in those flakes of cell matter. Or that, by inhaling the dust, I would be cannibalizing her.
I would have to dust in here, vacuum, but not tonight. And I would not sleep in here tonight, either. I went to the smaller guest room instead.
* * *
I was awakened by the smell of cigarette smoke.
For a moment I lay totally disoriented in the alien bed; it was almost a kind of startled, momentary panic. I had not yet moved in, really, had brought virtually none of my things from my apartment, and I figured I had freaked myself out by jumping into this.
The house’s burnt-in layer of cigarette stink was so much stronger this morning, sharp and immediate. I almost expected to find David in the house, but then I realized I had never seen him smoke. Leaving the guest room, I followed the smell to where it was strongest: my mother’s bedroom. Very concentrated there, much more so than I remembered it from the previous night, but I assumed that I must have become used to the smell after being in the house for so many hours, and waking up fresh to the odor had made it seem distinct again.
I stretched; my neck hurt from sleeping tense in that strange bed. Idly, I slid open the top drawer of my mother’s bureau. Underwear, in soft colors, both cotton and silky. The silky surprised me a little and I shut the drawer, embarrassed, opened another more toward the bottom.
I found several photo albums, and sat on the edge of the bed to open one of them in my lap.
Cracked photos of my mother as a little girl; those unsettling cat-direct eyes were unmistakable, and even more weird in a child. There were pictures of Mother with her parents. Her mother looked nothing like her but my grandfather was, as Dad had told me, tall and slender. In fact, I could see myself in him. I am tall and slim like he was…like my mother was.
Grandfather had been an alcoholic…and Dad had told me, a nasty one. He had beat his daughter, my small empty-faced grandmother obviously not stepping in for fear of similar treatment. I resented the woman for it, looking at her, but I thought I could actually see the fear in Grandmother’s eyes, in her shy smiles, and then I felt sorry for her.
It wasn’t hard to understand my mother after all, was it? Seeing her father’s dry, hard face brought it home to me. He had made his daughter like him. An alcoholic, filled with destructive anger. But where he had turned it outward, she had turned it inward. Maybe that was why she had let me go, and the thought felt so true to me: a realization. She had wanted me to leave so she would never be tempted to harm me.
Insanity is inherited in families like houses are. Not in the same way tallness is, but passed on nonetheless. She had wanted to remove me from that chain. And seeing how much I looked like her father, I was glad she had. It made me oddly afraid of myself for several moments, and I turned far ahead in the book.
Mother was in her late teens now, and her beauty dazzled me. I was really rooted there gaping. She sat in a low-cut black dress with some horny-looking side of beef in a soldier’s uniform at a club somewhere. Those eyes stared right into me, even at that moment, through decades. They saw me, they were so piercing and alive. And here was Mother standing on a beach, her eyes hidden behind big dark glasses but her smile carnal as she posed. She knew the power she was transferring onto that negative. She wore a black two-piece bathing suit, sexy for the 50s. Her breasts weren’t large and she wasn’t as curvy as they liked them then, but she was long and sleek.
The erection pressing against the spine of the album seemed to prod me out of a dream and I snapped the book shut, stood up from the bed abruptly. As I reached to place the book atop the bureau, I noticed an odd thing.
The bureau top was glossy and clean in the pale morning light. Last night the dust had been thick upon it; I had run my finger through it. I traced my finger along the bureau top now. Nothing. I turned to the mirror, previously filmed, then to a lamp shade that had looked cloaked in dust. Everything appeared clean. Had David or someone been in here after all, tidying up for my benefit? Maybe I had done it in my sleep. Right; and I had smoked while I did it, too. But I didn’t smoke, just like I didn’t drink. Bad habits of times past, that I had made it a point never to indulge in.
Maybe I had been mistaken about the dust last night. The light was different in quality now; the room had a different character. A bit, anyway. Maybe a breeze had flowed in from somewhere and blown the dust away.
Or maybe I was going insane.
* * *
When I left work that evening, I stopped at my apartment first to pick up a few things before proceeding on to Eastborough. At my mother’s house I made myself an early supper, afterwards deciding to go back to sorting through the art studio.
As soon as I had reached in and hit the light switch I saw the skull, and saw that it had changed.
It was the steer skull with the spherical object jammed into its forehead, and it was still on the work bench where I had left it…but it was not as I had left it. I had handled the thing closely, and I knew that last night it had only had stumps for horns. I knew this without question. But even if I had never seen the skull before, I would have known that no cow on earth ever had horns like those…
I came into the room to look at it. I didn’t, however, touch it.
The horns had grown, there was no doubt. There had been nothing glued on, or slipped over the stumps. The stumps wed smoothly into these new projections. They were much like a stag’s antlers, branching out into sharp curved fingers of bone. Also, I noticed in my dazed bewilderment, two projections had grown out from under the eye sockets, like a misplaced lesser set of antlers just coming in.
What in
the name of God had Mother found out there in the desert? And what had I done to activate it? Left it on the table where a little sunlight had got onto it? I had touched the sphere last night. Had that done it?
I looked about me. David had taken his row of skulls but I moved to those others on the walls. Yes…they had been affected also. Not so profoundly, but a skull coated in glossy black with a purple vaginal flower painted on its forehead had begun to sprout thick ridges around the eye sockets—this growth cracking the paint. The white bone beneath showed through the gaps. And the skull tiled in turquoise: thick bony swelling in several areas had pushed the pebbles away from each other so that spaces showed between, and a number of stones had dropped to the floor.
I smelled cigarette smoke a half-second before I heard the voice behind me.
“My art seems to have a mind of its own.”
I wheeled around. I think I gasped comically.
A woman in a bathrobe leaned languidly in the threshold to the studio, her face in shadow. A cigarette head glowed orange as she inhaled with a crackle. When she drew the cigarette from her lips, she flopped her wrist back like one who pretends to smoke.
“Jesus Christ!” I bellowed. “Jesus Christ!” And I backed into the room until I nearly fell atop the work bench.
The woman stepped casually into the room. Into the lamp glow. I had expected gray hair, sagging flesh. But this woman was beautiful, maybe a few to five years older than my thirty. A sly cat smile, then smoke blowing out of gently puckered lips. And through the smoke, those eyes…
“Jesus Christ,” my mother repeated amusedly. “Hm. Well…Lazarus, maybe.”
I had never fainted in my life. I had never come close to fainting. I have never known a man who has fainted. But I fainted.
* * *
Perhaps it was she who willed me to faint. Hypnotized me with those eyes. And, now, had awakened me with them; for they hovered just above me when I opened my own.
She sat back a bit, smiling down at me. Mother’s hair was shortish and nearly black, just barely starting to thread with white, brushed back from her forehead. Her eyebrows were tweezed somewhat thin, but not overly so. She was just beginning to get bags under her eyes, and light crow’s feet, but these and the white threads gave her a handsome character. Her nose was long but in proportion to her longish face, her chin tapering to a point. Her lips were full and a dark pink against her white flesh.
They say you can’t tell that a person is disturbed, insane, dangerous simply by looking at them, but I think you can. When you see photos of serial killers, for instance, there is always something off in their faces—even in a good-looking man like Ted Bundy. There was something off in my mother’s light green eyes. Something mad. And mixed with that, there was pain. It was so obvious, so strong, it made me marvel to think Mother had survived another twenty years beyond this age. If I had blocked her smile with my hand the pain in her eyes would have been much more evident, but it was evident enough.
But I couldn’t block her smile with my hand, because I couldn’t move either hand. My wrists were bound to the posts framing the headboard of Mother’s bed.
I couldn’t see behind her just yet, but my ankles were obviously bound also. Together. Later I would see that a nylon cord around them extended across the room to the door knob. But I couldn’t see past Mother just yet, and I couldn’t move my lower body either, because she was sitting on top of me, astride my body, and Mother was completely naked.
Now that I was awake she began to rock back and forth on me, gently, as if in a rocking chair.
“Hi, Jacky,” she breathed both tenderly and seductively.
“Are you a ghost?” I managed. I was on the verge of tears from terror and from a boiling cloud of emotions too confused and immense for me to articulate today, let alone grasp at that moment.
“I suppose so. I think there are different kinds of ghosts, and some kinds might come into being this way. I know of at least one other.”
“Come into…being what way?”
Only a smile. Rocking. I was getting hard between her buttocks.
“Please…get off me,” I said in a watery voice.
“I don’t want to. And you don’t want me to, either.” She lifted a bit to slide her hand under her, and took hold of my erection. “Do you, Jacky?” It jerked in her fist as it flooded fully erect. She pointed it upwards and pushed its tip inside her. I cried out, raised my head to look. There was some resistance but when she withdrew and then pushed down on it again her lubrication guided me wholly inside in one smooth gulp; as if I had skewered her straight into the guts, it felt so deep. Her black wiry hair ground down against mine, and she let out a long moan like the warning growl of an animal.
I was in tears now, sobbing harshly, bucking. “Please! Please don’t…”
“Shh. Every boy wants this. No one is here to see. Every boy wants to go back to the womb.” Mother undulated her body on me, then bent forward low so that her small breasts hung down to point in my face, so white, the dark nipples just barely brushing my skin. One of them trailed through a tear. “Take it, Jack.” I blubbered and shook my head. “You want it. Taste it.”
I barked a loud sob. Even as I lifted my head again to suck the nipple into my mouth. And then I was licking it, sucking as much of the breast into my mouth as I could, tears coursing down my face and neck, lightly chewing on the tough nipple, switching hungrily to the other one and wanting to draw the whole breast into my mouth I was so ravenous and wishing I had my hands free and unexpectedly I came, arching my back, grunting loudly. She was hot inside and my sperm was hotter. I felt it shoot deep, as if falling away into another, infinite dimension hidden inside her. Then I fell back and only cried some more, turning my face away with eyes tightly shut. She would be gone when I opened them. She was only a dream.
But her voice sounded above me, as if to soothe my nightmares. “Shh, it’s all right. We have all night. We have as much time as you want with me.”
She leaned off me enough for me to slip wetly out of her, and I looked. She had taken a knife from the bedside table. Alarm flushed through me; it was some kind of buck knife, cruel-looking. But she unstraddled me and sat on the side of the bed to saw at the cord binding my feet to the door knob. It didn’t take much; the blade was so sharp. I watched the muscles shift slightly in her back as she worked, a beautiful white expanse of skin. There was a small brown mole on her back. A ghost with shifting muscles, a mole on its back. A wet vagina, and breasts that tasted of musky flesh…
Turning her head to smile at me over her shoulder, her hair in sexy disarray around her face, Mother said, “I didn’t mean to scare you this way, darling, but if I didn’t tie you up you would have run away before I could convince you to stay.”
She ran the flat of the blade over my thighs. I was careful not to move. “Next time you can tie me up…”
And I did.
* * *
For three days I called in sick at work. I think I told them I had a sinus infection.
We dragged the mattress off her bed and into the studio. We kept the shades down in the day. On the bare mattress we tangled like wrestlers, grinding the bones of our thin bodies together. I buried my face in the shadow of hair between her legs, so fervently that one might think I did indeed intend to crawl back into that place of my origin. I held her head down against my crotch, white-threaded black hair through my clenched fingers. She rode atop me and cried out in orgasm fiercely, digging claws into my breasts while jolts went through her entire frame. For a ghost, she definitely sweated. If she were only ectoplasm, then the reality of the entire universe was in question.
On the evening of our first day we lay together exhausted, not touching, chilly as the air cooled the sweat on our bodies. “How did you get here?” I asked her at last. Since the previous night, I hadn’t allowed myself to think clearly enough to vocalize anything other than gasps and groans.
“You wished me here. You rubbed the magic lamp, honey.
”
“That ball. In the skull. I touched it…”
“It was your thoughts more than your touch.”
“So you’re an illusion the ball is making?”
“No. It remade me. It cloned me from what it could gather of me.”
God—I realized it. The dust. Skin cells…
“But what is it? Where’s it from?”
“I don’t know everything, but it’s a probe. It launched with a crew aboard it. They were just a few scraps of tissue that were to be automatically cloned when they reached their destination. Perhaps they were, and are out in the world somewhere. Perhaps they’re still trapped inside. But their computer resurrected me. It’s screwed up and thinks it’s doing its job. All this I know intuitively”
“And did you know this when you found it, or only since it remade you?”
“I’d seen it do this before, with someone else, seven years ago. Out West. Just from a hair between the pages of an old book. So I began to understand it then, and I know more now. But that’s all I know.”
“Why are you this age, though? Not fifty-five?”
My mother smiled, reached lazily to stroke my hair. “This is the age you best remember. You were ten. You thought I was beautiful. And you were looking at pictures of me the other day. You remembered me this way, very strongly. You brought me back. Your love. And your lust.”
“I never lusted for you.”
“Boys learn to love by lusting for their mothers; it’s the natural process.”
I sat up. “Bullshit. I missed you as my mother. I just wanted to have a mother…”
I gazed around the studio. Our loyal audience of death’s heads, those empty-eyed voyeurs. The transformation of the skulls was continuing. All had antlers like branches, gnarled and spreading, a bare birch forest ringing us. Four sets of antlers had grown from the skull with the sphere, these arms reaching the ceiling and spreading to either side impossibly. The cow’s own eye sockets had filled up with bone, leaving only that black cyclopean orb.
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