Get up get up. “No.”
He took four long sharp needles out of the drawer, and began talking in a low monotone, mostly Arabic but some nonsense English. The woman’s eyes drooped half-shut and she slumped in the chair.
“Now,” he said in a normal voice, “I can do anything to this woman, and she won’t feel it. You will.” He pulled up her left sleeve and pinched her arm. “Do you feel like writing your name?”
Lindsay tried to ignore the feeling. You can’t hypnotize an unwilling subject. Get up get up get up.
The man ran a needle into the woman’s left triceps. Lindsay flinched and cried out. Deny him, get up.
He murmured something and the woman lifted her veil and stuck out her tongue, which was long and stained blue. He drove a needle through it and Lindsay’s chin jerked back onto his chest, tongue on fire, bile foaming up in his throat. His right hand scrabbled for the pen and the man withdrew the needles.
He scrawled his name on the fifties and hundreds. The merchant took them wordlessly and went to the door. He came back with Abdul, armed again.
“I am going to the bank. When I return, you will be free to go.” He lifted the piece of string out of the mud. “In the meantime, you may do as you wish with this woman; she is being paid well. I advise you not to hurt her, of course.”
Lindsay pushed her into the back room. It wasn’t proper rape, since she didn’t resist, but whatever it was he did it twice, and was sore for a week. He left her there and sat at the merchant’s table, glaring at Abdul. When he came back, the merchant told Lindsay to gather up the mud and hold it in his hand for at least a half hour. And get out of Marrakesh.
Out in the bright sun he felt silly with the handful of crud, and ineffably angry with himself, and he flung it away and rubbed the offended hand in the dirt. He got a couple of hundred dollars on his credit cards, at an outrageous rate of exchange, and got the first train back to Casablanca and the first plane back to the United States.
Where he found himself to be infected with gonorrhea.
And over the next few months paid a psychotherapist and a hypnotist over two thousand dollars, and nevertheless felt rotten for no organic reason.
And nine months later lay on an examining table in the emergency room of Suburban Hospital, with terrible abdominal pains of apparently psychogenic origin, not responding to muscle relaxants or tranquilizers, while a doctor and two aides watched in helpless horror as his own muscles cracked his pelvic girdle into sharp knives of bone, and his child was born without pain four thousand miles away.
A Garden of
Blackred Roses
Charles L. Grant
1.
Bouquet
A comfortable February warmth expanded throughout the house as the furnace droned on, and the cold outside was reduced to a lurking wind skittering through leafless brown trees, the ragged tail of a stray dog tucked between scrawny haunches, and glimpses of bright white snow through lightly fogged windows. Steven paused at the front door, his left hand on the knob, his gloves stuffed into his overcoat pockets. The girls were in their rooms, either napping fitfully or lying on the floor staring at the carpet, hoping for something to do. Rachel was in the kitchen, arranging in a Wedgwood vase the flowers he had slipped out of old man Dimmesdale’s garden. He glanced into the living room, at the fireplace and the logs stacked neatly to be charred into ash; up the stairs at ancient Tambor’s tail poking around the corner while the rest of his dark brown-and-tan bulk slept in front of the furnace’s baseboard outlet; then down to his hand on the knob. Barely trembling, as he waited.
“Steven, have you gone yet?”
The voice was muffled but the apology was evident. In the beauty of the roses, she had forgiven him the act of stealing. He grinned, rubbed once at a freshly shaven jaw, and slipped on his gloves. There would be no need now for penance.
“No, not yet,” he called. “Just going.”
“Well, look, on your way back would you stop in Eben’s for some milk? I want to make some pudding.”
“Chocolate?”
“Butterscotch.”
His grin broadened; the peace was complete. “Shouldn’t be more than an hour,” he said.
“Love you.”
“Me, too.”
The door opened and he was on the stoop, his face tightening against the cold, his breath taken in small, metal-cold stabs. Using his boots to clear the way, he kicked a narrow path down the concrete walk and past the barberry hedge. There were no cars yet on Hawthorne Street, it was too soon for the returning commuters, but the snow at the gutters was already turning a desecrating brown, though the fall had stopped only an hour before. He wondered what it was about the physics of weather that caused flakes to drift here an unbearable white, and there become slush that could only be described, and charitably so, as unspeakably evil. It seemed to be automatic, needing neither cars nor trucks nor plows to make the transformation. It was, he decided finally, not physics but magic, the word he used when nothing else made sense.
Several women and not a few young children were already out, shovels scraping against stone as they pushed aside the several inches of accumulation amid temptations of snowballs and snowmen, and the lingering grey threat of another fall. He waved to several, stopped and spoke with two or three, laughed when a missile struck his back and he was delayed for a block fighting a roaring action against an army of seven. But finally he broke and ran, waving, and warning that he would be back. The children, pompously waddling in overstuffed coats, shrieked and scattered, and the street was suddenly quiet.
No place like it, Steven thought with a smile that would not vanish. Then he looked to his left across the street, and the smile became a remembering grin. Where else, he wondered, except on our Hawthorne Street would there also be a house that belonged to a man named Dimmesdale, the damned and adulterous minister who rightfully belonged in The Scarlet Letter? He paused, then, a momentary guilt darkening his mood as he stared covetously at the garden the old man had planted at the side of the blue Cape Cod. While the rest of the street’s gardens were brittle and waiting for spring, Dimmesdale had discovered a way to bring color to snow.
Magic, Steven thought: no two ways about it.
The flowers were mostly roses, and at the back of the house-long garden was a thicket of rosebushes with blossoms so deeply red they seemed at a glance to be midnight black.
The night before, as he and Rachel were returning from bridge at Barney and Edna Hawkins’ apartment over the luncheonette, Steven had bet his wife he could steal a few of the flowers without being caught. She had grown angry at his sudden childish turn, but he had sent her on in stubborn defiance and had crept, nearly giggling, along the side of the house until he had reached the rear of the garden’s bed. There, with a prickling at the back of his neck (though he refused to turn around), he had risked the stab of thorns to break off and race away with a double handful.
Rachel had not spoken to him when he finally returned, out of breath and grinning stupidly, and he had placed the roses in the refrigerator. And the next morning he found her standing over them, each lying neatly and apart from the others on the kitchen table. Her brushed black hair was pulled over one shoulder and she tugged at it, and worried. When he had brought out the vase, she’d glared at him but did not throw the flowers away.
“Amazing,” he whispered to the silent house; and when he returned from the office with the papers he’d wanted and had run the gauntlet of children again, Rachel was waiting for him in the living room, smiling proudly at the roses displayed in the bay window.
“You’re incorrigible,” she said, dark lips brushing his cheek.
“You love it,” he answered, shrugging out of his coat and tossing it onto a nearby chair. “Where are the kids?”
“Out. I chased them and the cat into the yard when Sue decided to fingerpaint her room.”
“Ah… damn,” Steven muttered.
Rachel laughed and sat on the broad window
ledge, her blue tartan skirt riding to her thighs, her black sweater pulled snug. “Watercolors, dope. It came right off.”
“You know,” he said, sitting by her feet and lighting a cigarette, “I don’t know where they get it. Honestly, I don’t. Certainly not from their father.”
“Oh, certainly not,” she said. “And I’m too demure and staid. It must be in the genes.”
“Gene who?”
“The milkman, fool.”
“As I thought,” he said, holding his cigarette up as though it were a glass of wine, turning it slowly, swinging it gently back and forth. “It’s always the husband who’s the—”
The scream was faint, but enough to scramble Steven to his feet and race out onto the back porch. His daughters were running toward him, arms waving, hair streaming; four girls, and all of them crying. Rachel came up behind him as he jumped the steps to the ground and knelt, sweeping his girls into his arms, listening through their babbled hysteria until, finally, he understood. And rose.
“Keep them here,” he said quietly.
Rachel, who had heard, was fighting not to cry.
He walked across the yard, his legs leaden, his head suddenly too heavy to keep upright. Oblivious to the cold wind blowing down from the grey, heedless of the snow tipping into his shoes.
Tambor. A Siamese that had been with him since before he had met and married Rachel. Seventeen years, fat, content, extraordinarily patient with the babies who yanked at his crooked tail, pounded his back, poked at his slightly crossed eyes and pulled his whiskers.
Tambor. Who loved laps and the bay window and the hearth and thick quilts. Who dug into paper bags and under rugs and as far as he could get into anyone’s shoes.
He was lying beneath the crab apple tree at the back of the yard. The children had cleared the snow away from the knees of protruding roots, and the grass was still green, and the earth was still warm. Steven knelt, and was not ashamed when the tears came in mourning for nearly two decades of his life. He buried Tambor where he lay and, as an afterthought, took one of the roses and placed it on the freshly turned, clayed dirt.
“He was old,” he said late that night as Rachel hugged him tightly in their bed, her head on his chest. “He was… tired.”
“I expect him to be there in the morning, big as life, with the rose in his mouth.”
Steven smiled. Tambor ate flowers as much as his own food.
“I don’t want him to die,” she whimpered, much like his daughters. “He introduced us.”
“I’ll get Dimmesdale to bring him back. He’s sure spooky enough.”
“Not funny, Steve,” she said; and, after a minute: “What are we going to do? I want him back.”
“So do I, love.”
“Steve, what are we going to do?”
There was nothing he could say. Rachel had hated cats when they’d met, but Tambor had sat in front of her in the apartment, his crossed blue eyes regarding her steadily. Then, as she’d reached out politely to stroke his cocked head, Tambor had gently taken her finger into his mouth, released it and licked it, and Rachel had been besieged and captured in less than a minute.
To replace him was unthinkable.
Yet, the following morning as he trudged glumly down the street to fetch the morning papers, Steven could not get the idea out of his head.
The children were inconsolable. They’d moped over breakfast and refused to listen to his multivoiced rendering of the Sunday comics. When he suggested they go outside and play, they pointedly used the front door and lined up on the sidewalk, watching the rest of the neighborhood, but not joining in.
Lunch was bad, supper was worse, and his temper grew shorter when Rachel took the remaining roses and threw them into the backyard.
“They’re too dark,” she said to his puzzled glare. “We have enough dark things around here, don’t you think?”
And as he lay still in bed again, Rachel sighing in her sleep, he listened to the wind scrape at the house with claws of frozen snow. Listened to the shudder of the eaves, the groan of the doors, and tried to remember how it had been when he had brought Tambor home for the first time. How small, how helpless, stumbling across the bare apartment floor with Steven trailing anxiously behind him, waiting for the opportunity to teach him of litter boxes and sanitation.
The cry made him blink.
Sue, Bess, Annie, Holly. Damn, he thought, someone was having a nightmare again.
Sighing, he waited for Rachel to hear and to move, and when she didn’t, he threw back the quilt and stuffed his feet into his slippers. A robe on the bureau found its woolen way around his shoulders and he slipped into the corridor without a light.
A baby crying, wailing plaintively.
He looked into Bess’s room, into Holly’s, but each was silent.
A baby. Begging.
The other two rooms were equally still.
He pulled the robe tightly across his throat and, after a check to see if Rachel had awakened, he moved downstairs, head cocked, listening, drawn finally into the kitchen. He stood at the back door after flicking on the porch light and peered through the small panes into the yard beyond.
The crying was there.
We were partners, Tambor and I, he thought; friends, buddies, my… my conscience.
Remembering, then, the look on the cat’s face when he’d crept into the house with the roses in his hands.
Tambor?
You’re dreaming, son, he told himself, but could not stop his legs from taking him to the hall closet, his hands grabbing boots and coat and fur-lined gloves. Then he rushed back into the kitchen and yanked open the door.
The crying was there.
And the snow.
Silently now, sifting through the black curtain beyond the reach of the light.
“Tambor!” he whispered harshly.
A shadow moved just to one side of him. He whirled, and it was gone. A faint flicker of red.
He stumbled across the yard to the crab apple tree, pulling from his pocket the flashlight grabbed from the kitchen and aiming it at the grave. It was, in spite of the snow, still cleared; and the rose still lay there, its petals toward the bole.
“Tam, where are you?”
The crying.
He spun around, flashlight following, and in the sweep the darts of red… eyes reflecting. He slowed, and there was only the falling, sifting, gently blowing white.
Something else… something crouched beyond the cleared space of the grave. He knelt, poked at it with a stiffly trembling finger and saw another rose, one of those Rachel had thrown away. And, still kneeling, he suddenly looked back over his shoulder and saw the shadow, and the steadily gleaming twin points of red.
Big as life, Rachel had said.
One rose… big as life.
Two…
Suddenly, choking, he threw the flashlight at the now glaring red, at the eyes that told him they did not like being alone. Then he fell to his hands and knees, digging at the snow, thrashing, casting it aside in waves, in splashes. Another rose, and another, as he made his cold and slow way back toward the light, the porch, the safety of the house.
The crying was louder, no longer begging.
The snow was heavier, no longer drifting.
And just before the porch light winked out and the shadow grew, he wondered just how many roses he had stolen from the garden.
2.
Corsage
A sea of clouds in shades of grey. Breakers of wind that scattered spray. And Barney Hawkins—short, large, nearly sixty—stood by the fence and chewed on his lip. As he had been for an hour, and as he would be doing for an hour more, for the rest of the day, if he didn’t make up his mind one way or the other.
He was the owner of the only luncheonette on Hawthorne Street, and he was proud of it, and of the fact that what he called the “nice kids” had chosen his corner establishment for their base, their rendezvous, their home away from school. With long hair and short, short skirts and j
eans, they had somehow decided that the red false-leather booths and the green stools lining the white counter were peaceable places undisturbed by disdaining adults and scornful police. He never bothered them, never tried to be more than a friendly ear, except when he tried to show them by his example that romance both capitalized and small was something that did not belong in the modern world. They might argue, then, through a barrier of what he called reality; but as he tolerated their flowers and their causes, so they tolerated his cynicism and his acid.
And he wished that tolerance extended to his wife.
Just that morning a quartet of boys had been huddled over a small tape recorder in the back booth, poking at it apprehensively, looking at one another and at Barney, but not touching it.
Brian was a junior, and the bravest of the lot, and as Barney stared over their heads through the plate-glass window into the drizzle beyond, he listened with half an ear while the boy made his case.
“Look, I was there! And there ain’t nothing there at all. You guys don’t understand these things, do you? I mean, if there’s nothing there, then there’s nothing there. That’s all there is to it.”
“Brian, you’re a…” The speaker looked toward Barney and grinned. “You’re a jerk.” It was Syd, bespectacled and tall, somewhat respected and definitely feared for the brains he had, and used, but seldom flaunted. He pushed back his wire-rim glasses and poked at Brian’s arm, then at the recorder. “I was there, understand? And I got it all down on tape. Tapes don’t lie. I wouldn’t fool you.”
The other two only nodded; for whom, Barney could not tell.
“All right,” Syd said finally. “You want to hear it or not? I haven’t got all day. My dad’s coming home this afternoon and I got to be there.”
Barney pushed reluctantly away from the counter when Edna called him from the back. Shaking his head, he took a swipe at the grill with a damp cloth and pushed aside the bright-blue curtains that kept the wrong eyes from peering into the sanctuary he used when things out front got a little too sticky, lovey, and loud. Edna, her dimming red hair bunned tightly at her nape, was seated at a battered Formica table, a cup of cold tea cradled in her wash-red hands.
Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition Page 41
