David was perched on the edge of the bed, grinning at her, rocking slowly back and forth.
“Stop it, David … please.” She cried softly, her voice broken by sobs.
He moved to the floor, pulling himself toward her with handfuls of thick carpet, moving on his stomach like an animal with a shattered spine. In the moonlight, his eyes were a darker, colder blue, etched with red Mean, sore-looking eyes where she imagined she saw a flicker of something dark, throbbing, the charred and blackened remains of his sanity. She saw that one of his fingers was badly cut above the knuckle and bleeding heavily, but he didn’t seem to notice. She moaned softly. He moved closer, still grinning. A tic fluttered in her eyelid as his face loomed close, blurred by the tears, and she saw a thin glistening thread trickle over his lips, felt it run smooth and warm across the back of her hand. She bolted and turned to the wall, sobbing. One hand felt the windowsill and the other scrambled across the floor until it touched the nightstand. She pulled herself up. Her fingers touched the clock, the telephone and finally, the lamp. The room swirled with sounds as she fumbled with the switch; a voice calling her; her own ragged breathing.
“Lisa, Lisa?” The voice sounded worried. David’s back down there, she thought. She screamed when the light finally went on.
The shaking had passed, but her throat felt dry and her eyes were puffy from crying. He spoke to her in soft whispers as his hands moved over her, comforting, soothing. Sometimes, the hands would leave her when he reached for a cigarette or an ash tray, and when they touched her again she would begin to shiver once more. Then he would press her close to him until the trembling had stopped.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked.
She shrugged.
“I’d like to talk about it, Lisa. I mean, I don’t think I’ll get to sleep if we don’t talk this out.”
For an instant she wanted to hurt him. “Well, that would make two of us up all night.” She was sorry she’d said it.
“Lisa …” he pleaded, gently shaking her shoulder.
“All right, David, let’s talk about it” Her voice sounded tired and shrill and it cracked as she spoke. “Why do you do this? Do you know? I don’t think you do. Do you hate me so much—?”
“No,” he whispered, “no.”
She touched his shoulder. “David, David,” she said, soothing. “You need help, and I don’t think I’m the one who can give it to you. You know I love you, but—” But what, she thought. Leave him? If she hadn’t by now, she wondered if she ever could. “Don’t you see—”
He wasn’t listening. He was staring beyond the edge of the bed, at something near the door on the far wall. She turned and followed his stare, straining her eyes until they ached from the darkness. Then she saw what it was. Beneath the closed door a pale puddle of light seeped into the room. The living room light was still on. Oh God, she thought, don’t say it.
“David.” She shook him. “David!” Harder, but he just stared, his eyes that cold silent blue. “No,” she whispered.
“Lisa …” he started.
Then she was crying again. She heard him rush from the room, heard him cursing as he twisted and clawed at the hot bulbs, heard their muffled pop as their glass shattered in the sink, heard the clatter of the old plumbing as he ran cold water over his poor, burned hands. It was over an hour before he came back to bed and another hour until he slept.
In the small room, the sound of his breathing hung closer than the darkness. She heard his words echo, like bits of conversation heard in another room—”… if you sleep … that could be bad …” She promised herself that she would not fall asleep. The air in the room was hot and thick and she moved to open the window. A cool breeze moved into the room, making her feel less uncomfortable. She listened to the sound of his breathing until she fell asleep.
There was a sloping meadow, and below her, a small pond that sparkled like a field of crystal. At the far edge, a sandy shore disappeared into a forest of slender, dark trees, smooth and tall, that clattered in the wind, a strange, discordant marimba. The air was hot, but fresh with the smell of the pond and long grass and moist soil. Above a distant red plain, the sun rode the horizon like a fiery warrior, half-buried in the dark land.
She lay back on her quilt and listened to the sound of the wind as it moved the strange trees. The dress she wore was of white lace, the color of smoke in winter and her hands fluttered over it, touching here and there as she pressed her fingertips against the delicate patterns.
The wind changed and, from far off, she heard the sound of blowing leaves and singing voices. She strained for snatches of the song and she heard: (sssss) a sibilant hiss; (aaahh) a long hollow sigh; (leeeee) a high keening wail. Her name. Changed, made foreign shaped by strange tongues, but her name. Leeeaaahhleeesssaahh, they chanted and hearing it, she wept. It was a song of prayer or of mourning, surging, sad. Far off, the singers walked from behind the forest across the face of the sun. There were six: tall, the color of charcoal, they marched in a slow deliberate cadence, their heads lowered. On their shoulders they carried one of the dark trees and lashed to it, a small still form. She could not see what it was. Small dogs followed, dancing between the long, dark legs of the men, their yelps rising in wild counterpoint to the sound of the song. The singing stopped. The men lowered their burden to the ground and one of the small dogs, braver than its companions, rushed toward it. A long knife flashed red in the sun and there was a startled yelp, then silence. There was a smell of blood in the air. The wind rose, sailing her bonnet across the meadow to the edge of the pond. But the pond had changed. The sparkling water had become a stagnant pool, only an occasional bubble of gas breaking the still surface. The air smelled of sulphur and salt. At the pond’s far edge something moved and she saw a large dog drinking from the still water, his dark fur patched with sores and jagged pink scars. As she watched, he raised his head from the pond and regarded her with the dead white of blind eyes. The air around her grew cold. Sensing her, it almost seemed that he grinned as he started toward her in a loping run around the edge of the pond. The sky had grown dark and the wind had died, but there was a sound like the wind, a sound of breathing. She tried to rise, to call to the dark men, but her legs would not hold her. She saw that they were gone, the wide plain broken only by their long knives stuck deep in the sand, glinting coldly in the remaining sun.
The dog was running, breathing in hard, short gasps, muzzle flecked with foam. His eyes had changed, grown brighter, as if a curtain had been drawn back from a window to reveal an icy-blue waste. They were eyes she knew and she smiled. As he drew close, she reached to touch him, but he crouched before her, just out of reach. He licked her ankle. It was like ice and sand on her skin. She felt the tongue, cold and rough, move along her thigh and broken nails rake across her breasts. And she felt his eyes. The sound of the breathing roared in her ears. A dream, she thought. It’s a dream, and she knew, then she laughed, reaching into the darkness. The light, she thought as her fingers touched, pulled, twisted, unable to turn the switch. She drew back her hand, clutching a matted clump of dark fur. “David,” she screamed, “this is a dream!” She felt the cold tongue drag once across her throat, then the press of frayed lips and broken teeth. The sound of breathing stopped.
In the morning he awoke before the alarm sounded, feeling fresh and well rested. Odd, he thought, considering the miserable night before and the way he had frightened Lisa. He smiled and looked at where she lay huddled under the covers. He set the alarm so as not to disturb her, then rose quietly, carrying the phone with him into the living room as far as the cord would reach.
It took him ten minutes of explaining, gentle cajoling and the promise of a ride downtown before Doctor Berman consented to see David before the first appointment. He was smiling as he hung up the phone. That morning, for the first time in months, he sang in the shower and whistled happily as he shaved. He felt a twinge of disappointment that Lisa was not yet awake when he stepped into the bedroom, and
there was a gnawing urge to wake her with gentle lovemaking as he’d done other mornings, long ago. Better to let her sleep, he thought. Tonight he would tell her of his talk with the doctor and he imagined how relieved and happy she would be. He pulled his yellow sport jacket from the closet, the one that she liked but that he seldom wore, feeling it too loud and conspicuous. Today, he thought, the way he felt, it was just right. Before leaving, he stepped softly to the quiet form on the bed and kissed her ear, hoping for a split-second that she would wake up long enough to say good-bye. Her skin was cool against his lips. Tucking the covers tight around her, he closed and latched the window, then patted her gently on the shoulder. He was whistling as he walked from the house.
Beneath the covers pressed tight against her face, Lisa’s eyes were open, the delicate flecks of gold that had once made their greenness sparkle, now dull and tarnished under a haze of white, like frozen tears.
David had trouble parking and finally had to settle for a space nearly a block away from doc Berman’s apartment. The walk would be a good opportunity to get back in touch with the old neighborhood, he decided. He noticed the change as he stepped from the car.
Dented garbage cans lined the curb and yellowed newspapers and foul odors leaked from under their ill-fitting lids. Shutters, door frames, and porch rails, once freshly painted each summer, were blistered and peeling, their true color masked by a dingy film of soot and years of fingerprints. One apartment window yawned dark and vacant while in others, old sun-rotted curtains hung limp and unmoving like battle-weary flags. And everything was so … small, he thought, diminished. I’m making a diminishing return, he joked lamely, but it didn’t help. He wondered why doc Berman had stayed and decided that it must have been because of the memories. Certainly there were enough here for himself, and he’d moved away just after high school; years before doc’s patients began to refuse to come into this part of town, forcing him to get an office in the business district He hoped that doc hadn’t changed as much as the neighborhood. Must have been a surprise for the old guy, he thought, hearing from him after all these years. But doc had been the first … no, the only one he’d thought of when he decided to get some help. He would listen, really listen, before sending him off to some shrink. It wasn’t the sort of thing you took to a stranger, he reasoned, at least not without some advice. Yes, this was the right thing, the right place to be. Why else would doc have come so automatically to mind after all this time? He thought of Lisa and how she would agree, and he began to feel better.
As he turned down the alley toward the apartment, he noticed a large dog standing amid a group of toppled trash cans, lapping water from a dirty puddle. It was an old dog, thin but muscular, with heavy shoulders and a thick corded neck. On one shoulder a fresh wound glistened raw and wet against a dark coat that looked tough and hard, more scar than fur. He moved closer, trying to see how badly the animal was hurt Stretching a tentative hand from behind the safety of a trash can he called softly, “Hey fella … here—” The dog looked up.
“Jesus Christ,” he gasped, staggering back. A knot of fear and revulsion twisted in his stomach. The dog stared, cocking its head from side to side, confused by the reaction it had caused.
“Ugly son-of-a-bitch,” David muttered, feeling embarrassed for the shock he’d felt when he had looked into that battered face, the diseased white eyes. Slowly, he backed away, then turned and hurried down the alley, breathing hard and trying to warm the chill that had crept into his flesh.
The smell of the man faded with his echoing footsteps. Shadows retreated, vanishing into light as the morning sun Hooded into the alley. And with the shadows, the blindness melted away until the sun sparked against gold in the green, almost human eyes. Far down the alley, the man in the bright sport coat moved quickly away. She moved after him.
Introduction
This is Ray Russell’s first short story in several years, coming hard on the heels of his new and very well received novel, PRINCESS PAMELA, published just this September.
The problem in dealing with people who carry with them monumental egos is that it is so maddeningly difficult to extract, when necessary, anything but the most blatant retribution. It isn’t always the case that the sublime works, and works well. But when it does—especially when the sublime is such that it doesn’t appear to be so—then the title of this story is much more apt than first meets the eye.
AVENGING ANGEL
by Ray Russell
When I turned the page of my desk calendar this morning, I saw a cryptic reminder scribbled in my own hand: OS, I yr. A chill rippled through me, and I was buffeted by two opposite, simultaneous reactions: Has it really been a whole year since I last saw him? Has it really been only a year?
Time is a carnival mirror, stretching a single moment to tenuous lengths, like taffy; squeezing a lifetime into the flicker of an eye. When Pythagoras was asked to define time, he said it was the soul of this world. I’ve never understood what he meant by that, but I’ve always liked the sound of it.
I walked slowly, reluctantly, from my desk to the closet on the other side of my study. I opened the door and peered into I lie darkness. It was musty from being closed so long, and mingled with the mustiness was the incongruous and almost Indiscernible aroma of oregano. With hesitant hand, I reached for the wall switch and—after a few seconds of indecision-snapped on the light.
There it was: still propped against the closet wall—that object, that enigma, that unspeakable monstrosity, that thing.
“And why shouldn’t it be?” I asked myself. “I hid it here a year ago, didn’t I? After all, it couldn’t walk away. It couldn’t transform itself into a mist and seep out under the door. I don’t believe in that occult rubbish … do I?”
I couldn’t look at it any longer. It was too repulsive. Too disquieting. Too … alive. I turned off the light, shut the closet door, and returned to my desk, but I couldn’t work. I pulled open the bottom drawer and lifted out a drinking glass and an almost empty bottle of Chivas Regal. There was just about one good stiff shot left, which I carefully poured. I dropped the dead soldier into the wastebasket.
(Fog like thick gray fungus … a furry moon seen dimly … the click of boot heels growing louder, nearer, in the dark, in the damp and chilly night … that would be the proper setting for what happened a year ago. Instead, it had taken place in blinding daylight, in the inferno of noon, in the shimmer and glitter of the sun, the Southern California sun that can char land, boil seas …)
I lifted the glass, murmuring, “Here’s looking at you, Orlando,” and added an old Irish toast: “May you dwell in Heaven for half an hour before the Devil discovers you’re dead.” I downed the scotch in one gulp.
“Potipharland,” a Biblical scholar of my acquaintance calls this stretch of geography, pedantically informing me that the name of the captain of Pharaoh’s guard (the one whose wife had a yen for Joseph) was Potiphar or Phutiphar, which means “belonging to the sun.” Podand might also be apt, I told him, considering the smoking preferences of many of the inhabitants.
Marty Meyerson and I pulled into the driveway of the little house in the Hollywood Hills punctually at nine A.M. Even that early, the day was beginning to warm up. There was an ivy-strangled trellis on the left of the house, leading to a patio (so called by realtors) about the size of a postcard. While I walked up to the front door and rang the bell, Marty began to set up his equipment on the patio: tripod, strobe, and that umbrella-shaped reflector photographers use.
The door was opened by a breathtakingly beautiful brunette with patrician features and a willowy body. She belonged on the cover of Vogue. She greeted me with a Gleem commercial smile and said, in a voice as bright and brittle as a light bulb, “Hi, I’m Nell. Mr. Silone’s secretary. He’ll be with you in just a minute.” She withdrew inside the house again, and closed the door.
The “minute” stretched to fifteen, but Marty and I passed the time constructively by planning the angles and poses of the pict
ures he would shoot for Today’s Artist, the small-circulation magazine that had commissioned me to do the Silone interview.
“That secretary of his,” muttered Marty, whose photog’s eye had spotted her from the patio, and who knew a good subject when he saw one.
“Lovely,” I said.
“Oh, a knockout,” he agreed, “but there’s something about her. Does she look familiar to you?” I shook my head. Marty said, “Well, I’ve seen her before, I’m sure of it, damned if I know where, though.”
A quarter of an hour after our arrival, Orlando Silone erupted out of the house, bellowing a rhyme: “No baloney! Here’s Silone!” He had several such rhymes, I’d been told, some on bumperstickers, others on T-shirts, business cards, letterheads—they served to make clear his preferred pronunciation of his name: not “Sil-loan,” to rhyme with “alone,” or “Silon-ay,” like his namesake, the late Ignazio Silone, famous author of Bread and Wine, but, rather: “Hail Silone—he’s no phony!” and “Big and bony—that’s Silone!” and “Matrimony? Not for Silone!” Some of his rhymes stated simple facts: he was, indeed, very tall, and thin to the point of emaciation. And he had successfully avoided marriage for four and a half decades. Whether or not he was a phony, on the other hand, was a matter of opinion. I, for one, did not hold his work in high esteem. He couldn’t draw very well, so he fell back on the cop-out of pseudo-Picasso abstractions and distortions (Picasso himself, of course, was a masterly draughtsman who learned the rules before he broke them). Silone stressed the ugly, specializing in vomit-encrusted winos sleeping it off in doorways, bloated prostitutes with grotesque leering masks for faces, and several gratuitously nauseating Crucifixion scenes, in each of which a naked Saviour is shown torn to gory shreds, disembowelled, and obscenely mutilated. Silone equated this ugliness with Truth, “telling it like it is.” To be blunt, he had ego but no talent; and this lack had barred him from recognition in the more important art circles and among major critics. But, somehow, he had managed to become a minor cult figure, and had slowly gathered about him a small following of very young and extremely unperceptive devotees whose noisy advocacy had attracted the notice of Today’s Artist. His fans formed a pathetic but not contemptible little coterie: they were mostly of high school and junior college age; yearning, eager, looking for something, someone, anything, anyone, to worship in an age of toppled idols and blighted faith. So they worshipped Orlando. They called him by his first name (“Like Leonardo, Rembrandt, Michelangelo!” he had said).
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