She had made that sort of sound with him in bed. That was what kept him from bursting through the door in the role of white knight. Now a new image played across the screen of his mind, one that could not be shoved down. By the time his hand touched the bedroom door it was almost as if he had willed that dreadful picture into reality by the sheer force of his concentration.
Again, as on the night of the thousand candles, Peter saw his own empty bed. The room was lit in faint gold tones by the track lighting on the ceiling; the rheostat was turned up about halfway. The sheets, blankets and pillows were strewn across the floor like the trail of clothing he had left on a night not so long ago. His view tracked along from the bed until he saw them on the floor.
They were enthusiastically missionary.
Peter watched a round, almost girlish ass thwack up-out, down-in, with the frenzy of a machine. Alea was beneath, feet in the air, legs bent at the knees, hands hooked so she could rock backward with each thrust. The man on top was sunk into her like a baby into a cradle. Broad shoulders, muscle-knotted back, short, badly styled dark hair. He pushed off into a quicker, rabbity pace as she enwrapped him, legs and groin rocking faster. Her feet, angled down in a dancer's point, flattened back as orgasm rollicked through her. Peter had never noticed that before. She clutched at him, pulled him down to meld with her, gasps tearing out of her throat. With a suicidal detachment, Peter marked the ascension and declination of each cry - up, up, peak, plateau, down, down, down, down.
Then laughter. It rose, as familiar to Peter as pain.
A steel web, strands thread-thin and ice cold, constricted around his heart.
Her partner uttered not a sound.
Instead, he pushed up from her just enough to turn his head and glare directly at Peter through the two-inch crack in the door. His pupils were solid disks of bronze; they caught the overhead light and glinted as though chatoyant. Peter knew he was not visible, yet the eyes transfixed him, shimmering copper from lid to lid, no irises. They locked with his own eyes and held. Slowly, the man, the thing atop Alea, smiled at him. It was vampiric, hideous; the face seemed to rupture and shift thickly like molten wax.
Peter reeled from that malignant gaze, sucking in a startled breath and groping blindly for support. His knee bumped the door and it swung freely open. Alea's incubus was still staring at him with its death's-head grin.
The plans of attack that had capered through Peter's brain - of kicking in the door, of doing violence, of using stealth and surprise-freaking them, of doing the manly thing, the macho thing, the mad reactionary thing - all shrivelled to nothingness under the targeted power behind those inhuman eyes. Peter froze.
Alea's voice unfroze him.
"Peter. Get out of here."
Her tone suggested that his intrusion had been expected. The resonant and calm modulation of her speech was even more frightening than the soulless gaze of her demon lover.
Peter began to tremble. No stopping it.
The lover with the sculpted torso devoid of moles or blemishes resumed fucking her, penetrating to the hilt, his buttocks clenching with each push. Alea's hands scampered over his body, grabbing the protruding shoulder blades, touching the smooth small of his back, cupping his ass, her fingernails leaving white and bloodless indentations in the perfect skin.
Amputated from those eyes, that smile, Peter swallowed hard and stumbled back. His body forced him to flee on a purely autonomic level; his mind was stunned and shut down. Numbly, stupidly, he slammed his own apartment door behind him as he fled into the corridor.
In five minutes he came back.
He had run like a gazelle down the stairs. He took the elevator back up. It had not taken him long to wrest control, to come back into himself. In the grip of his right hand the claw hammer swung pendulously. He had gotten it from the Mazda's trunk; a carpenter's hammer, a foot-long haft of wood terminating in several pounds of drop-forged steel. Two metal wedges cinched the head solid.
Peter smiled pleasantly at the elderly woman in the car with him as the numerals blinked upward. The two poodles at her feet yapped and danced. Peter smiled. The woman watched the numbers and pretended not to notice the crazy roadmaps of dry tears that formed a shiny latticework on his face. He was disgorged on the seventh floor. His smile remained cemented in place.
He was thinking of what he could do to his visitor's face with the hammer, what the claw-end would do to his unearthly eyes, how the vee of the claw would become clotted with hair and blood and skull and brains, oh yeah.
He unlocked his door normally, shifting the hammer to his left hand. Everything was unchanged inside. He shifted the tool back because the biceps were better in his right arm - more swinging momentum, more impact. He moved back down the hail, strolling now, skin tingling, ears pricking for sounds, but otherwise totally composed.
The smile hung improbably on his face, like a mortician's final joke on a corpse.
He used the head of the hammer to push the re-closed bedroom door open again. The hammer thunked heavily against the hollow-core door, which rasped back along the carpeting. The knob bumped against the back wall.
The trailers were over and it was time for the main feature.
The bed was still empty. But this time, so was the room. Five minutes, and they had cleared out.
He glanced around, double checking, the metabolic backwash requesting permission to throw up now, please. He fancied he felt his soul emit a soft hiss of relief. In a second, he knew his fall had been aborted. What might have happened was not going to happen. The thought of what he had intended did not sicken him; it became a dull ache that settled in alongside the others already imprisoned inside him. He could deal with it. The apartment was empty. Alea was gone.
Again.
His big mirror, five feet on a side, was canted against the bedroom's west wall. He caught sight of himself. He looked haggard and old. He thought of the body bills he had run up on his compulsive all-night shoots, using caffeine as collateral for one more hour, dexedrine caps for one more night. He thought of where his life had been invested, of karmic loans, and considered the hammer in his hand, his gaze moving from it back to his own face, as if requesting not absolution, but just a simple explanation.
This was the crash point. Crash, as in bankruptcy, as in the Great Depression, as in what happens when you slit a computer's throat, as in that's all there is and there ain't no more.
He planted the hammer into the center of the mirror, into his own burned-out image. Crash.
Crouching behind the seventh-floor door, Maurice monitored the corridor through the rectangle of wire-gridded window until Peter Deutsch emerged from his apartment. The man was disheveled, off-kilter; there were slivers of glass in his hair. His eyes hung in purplish sockets. They saw little, recorded nothing. Maurice thought of feeble bulbs flaring their last, then smiled.
They almost always looked this way when the fun began.
The elevator doors met, terminating his view of the lost man with the hammer still depending from one fist. Maurice eased the fire door open. He had blocked the latch with a slip of cardboard. Since there was never much traffic within these high-rent filing cabinets, he quickly padded down the corridor, his nudity of no concern. His comically exaggerated phallus bobbed from thigh to thigh like a bell clapper.
From behind his ear he plucked the key, fabricated several days back from a wax impression, and unlocked Peter's door. He vanished inside, water slipping past oil.
The smashed mirror was strewn about the bedroom floor in ten thousand pieces. Maurice did not even slow his pace, and wicked silver barbs punched deeply into the soft soles of his feet. A jagged, five-inch wedge caught and pierced, erupting through the top of his right foot just behind the big toe. The point jutting from the split flesh was dulled with gobs of red clay.
In Peter's bathroom Maurice gave the counter mirror a jolly salute, then gouged out his eyes with the white points of his tapered, perfect fingernails. Two clay-smeared Linco
ln pennies rang merrily as they spun in the bowl of the sink. He pushed the stopper down to keep from losing them. Then he unfolded the ivory-handled Gay Nineties straight razor that had been presented to Peter as a birthday gift, used once, then left on display ... where it could do no further damage.
Maurice jabbed the point of the stropped blade into his throat below the Adam's apple. A drop of oil oozed forth. He held firm and sliced shallowly floorward, stopping at the root of the penis.
The monster, gutted, eyeless, was still standing before the mirror. Still smiling.
Maurice's stubby hands eased out of the monster's chest and grasped the lips of the slit. He shucked the entire carcass like a scuba suit, and once he was out it piled up bonelessly on the floor. He herded the rubbery mass together, scooped it into the bathtub, and cranked the shower tap to full hot. While steam clouded out from behind the pebbled glass door, the dwarf grabbed one of Peter's bath towels and mopped sweat.
In moments the shell of Alea's non-human fuckmate had dissolved and escaped into the pipework. Now it was just several gallons of liquid clay headed for the city sewer network.
Jingling his pennies, Maurice fetched his carpetbag from the bedroom closet. He pulled out wads of his own clothing and replaced them with the jeans and tee shirt worn earlier by the monster (to get him into the building). Maurice had known Peter Deutsch would be too preoccupied to ever notice the extra, alien bag amid his own closet clutter.
When he raided Peter's bar for a congratulatory nip, he discovered some excellent vsoi and decided to liberate the bottle. It had gone very well tonight. Now it was time for M. Rogoff to work the magic, as only he could. Time now to fire the clay lovingly initiated by his master's hands. The next item on Peter Deutsch's agenda was the blissful hell of M. Rogoff's kiln.
One more thing, I love you, too.
Peter paid pathological attention to packing. This, too, was an autonomic thing, this ability to pack for a trip in a great rush and not forget a toothbrush or a checkbook or a needed file folder. A skill his shell retained when the rest of the relevancies of his life had dropped away. Stuffing balled socks into a sling bag, he let this skill run frill auto, trusting that nothing critical was overlooked. He sensed, if only subdermally, that once he closed the door of this place and boarded the jet for Canada that he would never return to his home.
"Home" had lost all meaning for Peter in the past few hours he had slept preparing to abandon it. Until Alea, home was never what he'd called these rooms where he bathed and slept and never quite found the time to put in the oak shelves, or order the deskwork, or hang pictures, or invite peers for diversion. It was an enclosure that kept at bay certain inconvenient elements - heat, smog, rain - and imposed a sameness that was simplicity to ignore. It was a numbered door in a corridor of like doors, mazed into a floorplan that mirrored itself above and below and beyond. The building was a vast filing cabinet for people, an upscale address stocked with all the amenities. It was a mail slot individuated by initials and a phone number with a taped message.
Never a home, not truly.
It was the place where he had made love to Alea. That made it a home. They had never had sex anyplace else but on his carpeting, his mattresses, his iron-gray pillowback sofa group. Few areas in the apartment had not had their virginity violated, but it struck him that they'd never gotten naked at Alea's place, or a hotel, or anywhere but here. Home was the place where he and Alea had made love.
But this was also the place where Alea had fucked and been fucked where she had enjoyed spreading her legs for something that did not look totally human. Where she'd told Peter to get out.
Betrayal seemed to seep from the waliwork. This was no longer Peter's place.
Slow rage steamed in his gut, subsided, marshaled again, until his mouth tasted foul. The wraparound picture windows showed him the Hollywood lightscape. Damon Fletcher had told Peter about Hollywood in all its bilious glory; here was a place where nothing was guaranteed to be lasting or sincere or real. No causes, no motives, no blame to be placed - this was Hollywood. It was where they worked because they could hack it and millions could not. Schwab's was boarded up and the Brown Derby shut down. Grauman's Chinese had been Mann's for more than a decade and the famous Tiny Naylor's drive-in coffee shop was history.
Hollywood.
Peter was supposed to be progressive, tolerant. Simple sexual infidelity had nothing to do with his anger. And the Pacific Ocean was not really wet.
Jealousy was a dragon with emerald eyes, one he had to engage in battle to deny what he felt. All the tender and private moments, and telling interludes between two human beings in sync, had been cleared away by a fierce possessiveness as frank as a jamming signal. The soft confidences he had shared with her were now drowned beneath thick, oily waves of selfishness and anxiety with a suddenness that sent the bowels plummeting and struck the brain comatose. He had heard her make those sweet sounds he thought reserved only for him, heard her laugh in a crushingly familiar way.
Sir, you got took, sir, and fell hard, sir, and offered the knife your shieldless back, stupid, and…
Truth buffeted through the windows of his mind and knocked asunder the card house he had been tilting together. Alea's feelings had been not only reciprocal, but had radiated from her and come home to him two hundred percent. She had never been seduced. Despite the fact that Peter was wounded and hurt, he could not honestly round-file the one truth that defied the prime rule of Tinseltown: She had not used him for anything.
The bedroom scene played countless encores in his head. He was well into triple-digit reruns - the flash of Alea's cinnamon skin, the flush of intraorgasm heat; shock-cuts of moisture and motion and love-grunts and the too-perfect monster filling her over and over. . . and two inhuman eyes full of molten copper. The memories stung and flew away and zipped home to sting again, like subliminals tucked away between frames of film. Unfair. Subliminals were supposed to be outlawed.
At first he'd been destructive, throwing things like a petulant child, punching the refrigerator so its contents rattled and broke. He hit hard and opened up his hand. The blood calmed him, cycled anger out and exhaustion in, let him trade seething rage for false despair. He cried. Time elapsed. He did not drink.
He stared toward, but paid no attention to, Nicholas Roeg's Bad Timing, unspooling in the predawn on cable. Art Garfunkel, who had sung of sounds of silence, was fucking a dead woman because he was obsessed with her. The TV became an insect tonal noise, snowing Peter's inputs and insulating him from the sounds of the city. He fell asleep in the wing chair, packed but not departed. Dreaming permitted him to hear Alea's voice almost at will.
Peter. Get out of here.
It was the same dark, soft voice that had once ordered him to leave his sperm nowhere but inside her. Doors opened by playful sensuality slammed with amplified violence because Alea's words held the unique venom of being unforgettable. They seemed designed to brand themselves into his memory. Peter had been neutered; his manhood wiped out by a single soft sentence in the dark. How could anyone fight artillery like that? How in hell to scour away the shame of turning and running? Nothing could win him back that lost dignity.
It hurt to think of Alea, but he was unwilling to forget any facet of her. He would not blank her out even if it meant his own survival. She had melted into the palpable Los Angeles darkness as easily as a wraith. Peter would not have thought it so simple to merely erase a person who had so much sheer presence that he thought of her anew every thirty seconds or so. Too many unfinished conversations hung between them, too many moments yet undecanted.
The bright chrome feelings he had embraced were oxidizing now. Alea had been a wish-fulfillment practically from the beginning. To get her back, what could he do, what might he give up? Damon's voice welled up inside him, laid behind a sardonic echo track: You actually sound happy.
"Happy," Peter mumbled, and woke up.
A key was ratcheting in the front door lock. All Peter's senso
ry knobs cranked to full tap. His vision targeted the door and his heartbeat hit runaway.
Light sheared in from the corridor and a small, hunched shape darted inside, hurriedly slamming the door. Peter heard furtive breathing in the renewed darkness, followed by a muffled slapping, as though the intruder was hastily brushing himself off. Then came the shuffle of short, waddling steps across the carpet, then a voice.
"Merde! Flaneur, indeed! Pah! Is not even a loafer entitled to a small, eh, restorative - urp! - nip now and again?" The voice was brackish, and seemed to emanate from somewhere near the floor, as though the speaker were muttering from the bottom of a well.
Peter bolted out of the chair, still woozy, trying for a good Clint Eastwood tone and missing: "Who the fuck are you!"
"Ma foi!" The dwarf's volume matched Peter's. He jumped, clutched at his chest, got tangled in his own feet and tumbled into the two-tiered section of sunken living room. Peter, unmoving and not quite buying all this, watched the dwarf scramble back toward the front door. It was like blundering into the third reel of a silent movie comedy; he had no idea of what was going on, but it sure looked funny.
"Hey." His voice came out conversational, comic. He sprang for the door and easily intercepted the tiny interloper, spinning him about and shoving him back. He blocked the door with what he hoped was an aggressive stance. "What do you think you're doing here?" It was hopeless and trite. He would have cut it from a script.
The dwarf smiled with forced ease. The dirt on his face cracked. "Heh, heh ... I clearly have stumbled, ah, literally, into the wrong apartment, Monsieur. I, em, I ... am down the hall... "His eyes were rheumy and flammulated, and the special aroma of bargain port wafted up from his soiled and threadbare coat. Disturbed fleas settled.
"You are not down the hall," Peter said. "You will be out the window very shortly if I don't get a straight answer from you, you sawed-off little pisswah." Yeah, that was manly, he thought. It was taking all he had left at full power to toss a scare into, a dwarf.
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