She'll get over it, he thought spitefully to himself. Normally, he would have talked to Diane and found out what was bothering her, but with the possibility of losing his job hanging over his head not to mention the possibility of losing his mind due to the strange young woman and her phantom lips-he felt he was justified in not bending over backwards to make her feel better. As far as he could see, he was the one who needed a little TLC.
Frustrated beyond words, Steve exhaled loudly and rolled over onto his stomach, trapping his throbbing erection be neath him. While trying to seduce Diane, he had been able to avoid thinking of the young woman in the hearse. Now, her inviting, seductive image came back to him, again refusing to let his hard-on soften.
Next to Steve, Diane wept silently, her face turned well away so that her husband couldn't see. She was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions: lust, jealousy, fear, paranoia. She didn't know what to think or believe. She only knew that if she didn't obey her father's voice, the pain would return, and something bad would happen to her unborn child. That sense of doom was devastating and kept her thoughts jumbled. Whenever she tried to concentrate and straighten out the jigsaw puzzle of her thoughts and emotions, her father's face loomed; she felt his ice-cold touch on her belly again, and heard his voice echoing through her brain, leaving her feeling as though she might lose her mind. To escape, she slipped into a deep sleep, floating down until she reached the REM stage and her eyes flitted back and forth rapidly behind her closed lids.
Cloudy scenes and images arose in her mind's eye and solidified. She dreamt she was in Haymarket Square, the outdoor produce market in Boston where her father had had his fruit stand for twenty years. She was walking the narrow blacktopped alley that ran between the stands, which sold everything from fruits and vegetables to mussels and stuffed pot roasts. The chatter of the merchants bickering with fat Italian women wafted to her as if over a great distance, even though she saw them within arm's reach as she walked by.
Her father's stand was at the end of the row, just past the Camella Brothers' seafood stand. She could smell the pungent odor of shellfish and garbage as she approached the end of the row. The odor had always reminded her of the smell of the nursing home where her grandmother had been sent when she lost her mind to senility. It was a smell like weekold tuna fish, stale urine, ammonia, and death.
She could see her father's fruit stand, a large wooden cart with a big, bright red Prince Spaghetti Sauce beach umbrella over it to protect the produce from the sun. The cart was loaded with wood-slatted baskets that were filled with apples, pears, strawberries, peaches, tomatoes, green beans, heads of lettuce, and loads of zucchini.
All the produce her father sold was grown on her Uncle Sal's farm, northwest of Boston, in the tiny farming community of Bolton. They were trucked fresh daily every summer morning into Boston and her father's stand at Haymarket Square. A few hours later, after breakfast, Diane would walk down Hanover Street, under the overpass of 1-95, and visit her father who had already been there since 4 A.M. unloading the day's fruit and washing it before arranging it on his stand for sale.
As she came around the seafood stand, breathing through her nose so as not to smell the stench from it, she started to shout, "Papa, I'm here," but stopped. He wasn't standing there by his cart, haggling with some old padrone over the price and freshness of his zucchinis, as she had expected to see him.
"Papa? Where are you?" she called to him.
"Right here" His voice came from behind her. She whirled around and there he was a few feet away, dancing with an old, white-haired woman dressed in black. At first glance, Diane thought it was her grandmother let out from the nursing home for a visit, but as her father twirled the old woman around, Diane saw that it wasn't.
Diane blinked and rubbed her eyes. Everything had suddenly changed. Haymarket Square had dissolved and was replaced by a thick green forest, the kind one might read about in a fairy tale. Deep within the forest she caught a glimpse of a small, shining white cottage with a thatched roof. She turned around. Papa's fruit stand was still there, but the forest had sprung up around it and ferns now framed it making the fruit look deliciously tempting. All the other stands were gone, as were the nearby expressway, Faneuil Hall, and the buildings of Government Center that usually dominated the skyline.
"Papa, what's happening?" Diane asked, as she turned back to her father and his dancing partner.
"We're dancing, little one," he remarked. "Come dance with us " He laughed boisterously.
"But the woods ..." Diane began and stopped, suddenly unable to remember what it was she wanted to say.
The old woman dancing with her father turned a familiar face toward Diane as she waltzed. Where have I seen her before? she wondered. As she stared at the old woman, she suddenly realized who she looked like: the wicked queen disguised as the old woman who offers Snow White the apple in the Disney classic. It was crazy that a person could look like a cartoon character, but the woman not only looked like her; Diane suddenly knew, as one can truly know something only in the mystery of a dream, that the woman actually was the wicked sorcerer queen of the movie.
The old woman smiled at her, showing brownish gray, bad teeth. She winked and stepped away from Diane's father. For a moment, the two of them appeared soldered together. Diane could almost hear a tearing sound as the old woman pulled herself free from Papa.
The old woman approached Diane, reaching out a gnarled, claw-fingered hand. Diane backed away, but the old woman reached past her and picked an apple off Papa's cart. "Protect the baby," the old hag whispered, offering the apple.
Diane took it and the old woman placed her ancient hand on Diane's stomach. Her touch felt strange and uncomfortable, like ice, yet warm, almost melting. Diane wanted to pull away immediately but could not. The apple the old woman offered mesmerized her. It began to pulsate and glow as if it were alive. She stared at it and the apple's skin became transparent.
As if looking at the fruit through an X-ray machine, Diane looked inside and gasped at what she saw. Instead of a core and seeds, there was a tiny fetus inside the apple. She knew immediately that the fetus was her unborn child.
She brought the apple closer and felt a shriek build in her throat. Besides the fetus, the apple was filled with maggots and they were squirming all over the helpless baby. A shriek erupted from Diane's throat and she tried to throw the apple away. It felt glued to her hand.
Diane looked pleadingly at the old woman but she was laughing and pressing her wrinkled hand against Diane's belly. Diane tried to call to her father for help, but he was disappearing into the forest, being swallowed up by the trees and bushes that grew rapidly around him.
"Protect the baby," he managed to say before ferns grew into his mouth and vines wrapped around his head, pulling him into the forest until he was gone.
Diane felt a sharp pain in her stomach and a searing, burning sensation. She looked down and tried to scream at what she saw, but couldn't. It was as if a hand were clamped tightly over her mouth. The old woman's fingers were piercing Diane's abdomen, sinking into her pregnant flesh. The hag pushed, and her whole hand slipped inside Diane's stomach with a gurgling, sucking sound. The woman's hand delved deeper until it had searched out her womb and clutched at the baby.
"This is me," the old woman said, and burst into the most horrid, cackling laughter that Diane had ever heard. She struggled to escape the dream and wake up.
Steve was dozing on his back, his erection pushing against the sheet he had pulled over himself. When Diane began whimpering in her sleep, he knew she was having a nightmare. She'd had them before and always whimpered like that when she got so scared that she would try to scream in an attempt to wake herself up. The cruel irony of this reaction was that she was never able to really cry out, only whimper deep in her throat as if her screams were being muffled by invisible hands. Usually when she did this, Steve would gently shake her awake and hold her until the dream was forgotten and she could sleep again. Now, tho
ugh, he listened to her whimpers and made no move to rescue her from her nightmare. On the edge of sleep himself (due to the several beers he'd downed at lunch) and still angry at Diane, he exacted a small measure of revenge on her by letting her sleep on, tortured by her nightmares.
It wasn't long before Steve himself was dreaming. He saw himself in a field, lying naked in tall grass. Bending over him was the seductive young woman who'd nearly given him a psychic orgasm outside the cafe. She was fondling his penis and blowing on it gently before sliding her lips over its head and swallowing the shaft in one slow, sucking motion.
In the ecstasy of this dream, Steve heard Diane's tiny cries as little moans of passion in the young woman's throat. Her head bobbed up and down, faster and faster, giving him the best head of his life. He began to build to what he felt was going to be the ultimate climax. Eyes closed, he arched his back, reached out with both arms and dug his fingers into the ground around him as he rose higher and higher toward the pinnacle of ecstasy.
The ground around him felt strange; slippery yet sticky once it got on his hands. He opened his eyes and turned his head, groaning as his balls felt as if they were going to explode with built-up sperm. His fingers were wet with dark, purple blood. He looked at his other hand and realized at the same moment that he was no longer in the field, he was back in his bedroom. There was something swinging overhead but he ignored it because the young woman's head was pistoning on his cock now at an unbelievable rate and he was at the point of no return. Any second now his orgasm would explode with so much jism that he thought he could fill the room with it and drown.
Suddenly she pulled her face from his crotch and looked up at him, smiling. Her teeth were disgustingly bad and caked with decaying meat. He winced at the thought of those diseasedlooking teeth touching his cock. She looked above him and he followed her eyes. Swinging from the light fixture was a man in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, a rope around his neck, his face purple and bloated, the eyes bloodshot and bulging, the tongue swelling from the mouth like a partially inflated balloon.
It was his father, just as Steve had found him on the day the old man had decided to take his wife's advice and die. There was one important difference, though, between this scene and the way Steve remembered it: There was a large blood stain on the front of his father's boxer shorts and blood ran down his legs to his feet, dripping off his bare ankles and toes.
Steve looked back at the young woman bending over him. The breath went out of him when he saw what she was holding in her cupped, bloody palms. A severed penis and testicles sat in a pool of blood in her hands. He looked down at himself and realized they were his.
"That's what women and the responsibility of a family will do to you, son," his father said, his words thick and wet around the obstruction of his swollen, dead tongue. "They emasculate you; whittle away at your balls until you're nothing but a sniveling bleeding cunt! "
Steve jumped into wakefulness, sitting straight up in bed. His hands were protectively clasped over his nuts. It was just a dream, he thought thankfully to himself. The burning, gnawing desire in his cock made him realize just how close he had come to having a wet dream. He felt foolish and flushed hotly like a kid going through puberty and embarrassed by what his body was doing to him.
Next to him, Diane was sleeping fitfully, apparently still bothered by bad dreams. He looked past her at the clock radio on the night table. It read 2:15 P.M. Steve reached over and shook Diane's shoulder. "Di, wake up. You've got to get the kids at 2:30 when they get out of school."
Diane jumped and moaned softly and rolled over onto her back. "What?" she mumbled through a bad case of cotton mouth.
"Get up. You've got to pick the kids up at school in fifteen minutes. I'm going to take a shower and do some work" Steve got up from the bed and left the room.
Diane struggled to open her eyes but felt as though the lashes were tied together, top to bottom. "Can you go pick them up?" she asked the empty room, not realizing that Steve had gone. "Steve?" she struggled up on an elbow and managed to force one eye open. Someone was sitting on the bed. "Steve, why didn't you answer me? Will you go get the kids for me?"
No answer.
Diane squinted at the figure. Her eyes crossed with the effort and the figure doubled then shrank back into focus. Her father was sitting on the bed. He tossed a round, red object into the air and caught it.
"Go back to sleep, Filia Mia," he said softly. "Everything is fine."
His voice was like a lullaby, closing Diane's heavy eyelids and singing her into a bottomless sleep before her head even hit the pillow.
CHAPTER 11
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick ...
Jennifer and Jackie stood at the playground gate watching the late bus leave the yard and head down Finch Street to Route 47. Their bus had been one of the first to leave, but they had remained behind waiting for their mother to pick them up like Steve had told them to. The last bus pulled away at 2:40 P.M. Twenty minutes later, Jackie and Jennifer were still waiting.
"I'll bet she's too busy with Ste-e-ve," Jackie said with emphasis on his stepfather's name. He was still helping Jennifer carry a grudge over the fact that she couldn't have her own room.
"I don't know," Jen said and added, "I hope there's nothing wrong, like she's having the baby early or something."
"Maybe you should call and make sure," Jackie said uneasily. It hadn't crossed his mind that anything might be wrong, but now that he thought of it, whenever his mother stressed something as much as she had about the importance of her picking them up that first day-when they would rather have ridden the bus then he knew that she would do it unless something really serious came up.
Jennifer looked back at the school. Going in and asking a teacher if she could use a phone to call for a ride home would make her look like a stupid little kid. But there was another reason Jennifer didn't want to go in and call: She was afraid that if she did, she would find out that, like Jackie said, their mother was too occupied with helping Steve in his study (or that they were fooling around like she'd heard them doing a few times) and had completely forgotten about them. That would be worse than her having the baby early or anything else; it would confirm what Jen and Jackie had begun to fear lately, that their mother cared more about Steve and his baby than she did about them.
Jennifer turned away from the school and surveyed the short length of Finch Street that ran by the school and out to Route 47. She knew they were only a few miles down the highway from home and that they could walk it easily. "I think we should start walking," she said to her brother.
"But Steve told us to wait for Mummy no matter what"
"I know, but if we start walking she'll see us and stop. Anyway, the car might have broken down again and she might need help," Jen replied.
"I don't know," Jackie hesitated. "What if the guy who's stealing kids tries to get us?"
"We'll just tell him to get lost. He can't do anything to us if we won't go with him."
Jackie looked down the street, then back at the school. "Why can't you just call her?" he asked his sister.
"Because they don't let kids use the phones," Jen lied. She turned and walked out of the schoolyard and down the street. Reluctantly, Jackie followed.
Finch Street was nice and shady. A wide, bumpy concrete sidewalk ran past hedges and stone walls with tall white Colonial houses behind them. Overhead, the leaves of the maple trees, which lined both sides of the street, rustled softly in the warm afternoon breeze. The bustle of traffic from the nearby highway was just loud enough to be reassuring.
This was a new experience for the two city-born and bred Nailer children. Even Jackie, who remained distrustful of their new home, especially the woods, had to admit that he liked this tree-lined street. Everything was so much quieter here than in the city, but not too quiet like it was around the new house. He liked that. Here was a neighborhood where he didn't have to worry about the woods and what was in them, or of getting run over if he stepped
off the curb like in the city. Jackie found himself wishing they had moved to Finch Street with its many houses, a real neighborhood, rather than to where they had. Their house on Dorsey Lane was too isolated and alone. It felt like one of those houses in the middle of the woods in a fairy tale where bad things always happen to the children.
Things were different on Route 47. When riding in the car, Route 47 was a nice, rural highway, part of which was populated with Colonial houses like those found on Finch Street, the other part with tobacco fields, and barns that had every other board in their walls pulled out at an angle so as to dry and ventilate the curing tobacco. But walking on Route 47 was another story; it was a fearsome experience.
They walked on the left shoulder, heading east. To their right, cars roared by, buffeting them with turbulence. With a deep drainage ditch running just off the side, Jackie and Jennifer had only five feet or so of shoulder upon which to walk. Jennifer walked, protectively of her younger brother, on the traffic side with Jackie holding her hand and walking a little behind her, wincing at every speeding car and truck that flew by.
For Jackie, the trucks were the worst. They came charging down the road like raging dinosaurs, their engines roaring, their grills gleaming like teeth. When one approached, the sound of its engine got louder and louder until the metal monster was right on top of them, bellowing in their ears and shaking them with wind like invisible hands. Sometimes the driver would blow his horn in greeting, or warning, which only served to scare Jackie even more, making him jump each time and break out in a cold sweat.
They walked a mile, looking hopefully and fearfully at every oncoming car-hoping it would be their mother, fearing it would be the monster in human form their mother had warned them of. At a mile and a half they came to a narrow dirt road that crossed from the highway over the drainage ditch and went into the woods. A bent, iron pole carried a faded green street sign that read: DORSEY LANE EXT.
Grimm Memorials Page 9
