by Alex Moss
THREE
A film of smog glistens on Anna Fayne’s cheeks and forehead. It’s already a hot day and the sun has skimmed off the remaining ocean mist, the little there was of it. She’s in a more upscale part of town that shimmers with old Hollywood glory: Hancock Park. The mansions vary in taste. Some are classic, others are ruined by new money. She’s on South Muirfield Drive just north of Wilshire and she’s casing these mansions like a hawk with a grudge. A Latino pool cleaner unpacking his truck pauses to consider her with suspicion, yet masks a perverted excursion of the mind.
“Uh huh, like you get paid to stop and stare,” Anna says.
The pool cleaner snorts and jettisons a dirty green nose lob and plants it near her feet and recoils back to his truck. Anna keeps walking, head down, nullifying the confrontation.
She stops outside a 1920’s classic mansion, set back and raised, with a row of cloned palms bordering each side of a stone staircase and pathway leading to a double doorway made of a dark reddish hardwood. She takes the paved car drive leading off to the right side of the house and toward a double garage. Before the garage she throws herself into a well-manicured shrubbery and pushes her way through to an ivy-covered hidden gate in the high wall that borders the rear garden. She knows this house, its foreboding aspect, and she has no hesitation in penetrating its facade. She’s inside, and the garden is close to Eden.
The surroundings seem to merchandise her presence, her graceful figure padding over the lush grass and toward a glassy blue square of swimming pool. Anna licks her lips as though she could drink it all up. She gets close to the edge. There is a cabana style pool house on the opposite end with loungers and a day bed. The pool bottom is tiled in over-sized mosaic pieces and at one end of the pool it says: The Shallows, and at the other: The Deep.
She now looks more serious and purposeful. She has to be here. Doing this.
Anna removes the red shoulder bag, drops it by her feet, unzips her silky hooded top, and pulls it off, revealing a sports bra and a flat, sweat-moistened stomach. Beneath her loose black sweat pants are matching black knickers. She corrects their contours against the flesh of her ass so that they’re comfortable and tidy.
Left foot pushing off the side, she dives, breaking the calm of the shallows and skims the mosaic bottom and glides toward The Deep, tracking the incline. She glides into a seated position, Zen-like, closing her eyes and ritualistically controlling neutral buoyancy. She holds this for at least ten seconds before a long shadow casts itself over The Deep.
Anna keeps her eyes shut tight, not wanting to open them, her chest heaving a little as it reaches for pockets of unused air trapped in her lungs.
Her eyes flick wide open, pupils dilated with shock as she looks toward the surface, the figure of a small boy standing nearby that moves closer to the edge of the pool and peers down at Anna, the face–the most striking feature–clown-like but distorted. The distortion accentuated by the ripples on the surface. The make-up and the facial features seem crooked and grisly–a misplaced member of a freak show entourage.
Anna maintains her neutral buoyancy but she’s been under for what seems like minutes now and her face is starting to puff out, the blood vessels around her eyes all wiry and purple.
The clown-faced boy kneels and plunges his face under the water and smiles, displaying blackened teeth. The water starts to smudge the make-up, polluting the pool water with a brownish effluent. The end of his nose is scarred and stripped of flesh and the cheeks emaciated and grey. His eyes are pale green, molten, and trance-like–Stelson’s eyes–but then the demonic boy blinks and the color has changed to blue as though there is some uncertainty about exactly what this boy looks like. His lips are scabby and thin with red painted blotches hiding further decay. He opens his mouth wide to take a big gulp of water but instead screams his lungs out until the whites of his eyes go crimson and a chilling cacophony reverberates off the pool bottom and penetrates Anna’s skin, tissue, organs, and finally her soul.
Anna’s chest heaves in spasm. She’s having some kind of attack or fit that makes her dance momentarily and then flag from exhaustion. She’s now still, her arms and legs outstretched, gracious, swan-like, flowing, and she’s drifting to the bottom of the pool.
She hits the bottom like a wounded shark pup and lays motionless for a moment.
Her eyes flicker open, full of life, and the vision is over as she breathes heavy, gripping the side of the pool, her head above the surface in the sun, her long dark hair swept back but tangled and messy. The clown-faced boy is no longer there and the sun still heats the grounds of this majestic house in Hancock Park. The air is hot but Anna shivers, chilled to the core.
She heaves herself out of the pool, her knees and toes blue with cold, and she dresses herself after mopping the water from her skin with the black hooded top. The manner of these actions might resemble those adopted by a Field Doctor stemming the blood flow from shrapnel wounds and cleaning the cavities. She is overly deliberate and careful–the pool water is poison, the residual water droplets like pure untreated sewage to her skin.
The Fayne Mansion, built on a strict specification of lines, edges, and pillars, stands firm and proud in the background, forever the silent observer.
The rebooted memory of The Deep has taken hold of Anna’s consciousness, and it continues.
A dark cloud moves over the house and garden. Anna shivers from the loss of ambient heat and wet clothing she’s now wearing. But there’s something else–she senses a presence behind her and she turns back to face the pool and resting on the bottom is the body of a middle-aged woman. Fully clothed, face down, and motionless. Anna looks at the body, vacantly, retrospective, and mutters the words, “Mother, are you okay?”
Wearing a new pair of cheap, knock-off Wayfarer sunglasses, Stelson plays with a plastic Casio watch while watching a three-a-side soccer game from the sidelines on a small makeshift pitch on Silver Lake meadow. It’s the watch Anna was wearing and then discarded. He followed her to find it.
The digital display is faded but readable–12:12 p.m. He depresses the buttons and toys with it as though it had some secret code to crack. The alarm bleeps from an earlier setting.
Fifteen seconds later, a cloud of black smoke begins to rise up from a neighborhood on the other side of the lake. Stelson ponders the bleeping alarm and its timing with the distant fire in Los Feliz or thereabouts–he’s not sure–but it sets him off. Being open to signs or random events that guide him, he leaps off the sideline, and aggressively tackles the soccer ball away from the controlling player–a sweaty overweight, rehabilitated teenage gang-banger in street threads.
“I need my ball back. I gotta go. Sorry, fools.”
The young players tut, spit, and shrug their shoulders while kicking the dirt.
Stelson leaves them in his wake and exits the meadow and runs onto Silver Lake Boulevard while glancing at the black smoke in the distance. It curls and snakes its way into the sky until it merges with the layer of smog above.
Anna runs, the red shoulder bag strapped to her back and she is fast approaching the source of the rising back smoke. As she gets nearer she knows in her gut it’s her home, but for now she runs calmly with controlled emotion and with clear expectation of what she’s about to confront.
She turns a corner onto Lexington Avenue. A humble single story house pumping flames with smoldering edges of blackened timber. There is a fire truck on the scene and a small crowd gathering. She stops in her tracks a few hundred yards down the street and holds her hands to her face and covers her eyes. She composes herself and walks steadily toward the burning house. She’s checking the surroundings, scoping for others who might be observing the scene–smart enough to make the link between her failure to execute the drop and this quickly executed act of revenge.
Victor nowhere to be seen, probably long gone, leaving her hanging–these thoughts cross her mind
and the frustration and anger that’s overwhelming her pretty face are plain to see. But she’s conscious that the house is being scoped out. There is a blacked out SUV parked up Lyman Place and she studies it surreptitiously. Its edges glint in the sun, a strong reflection off the windshield and then something crosses her line of sight and she’s distracted and follows the awestruck path of the young man holding the soccer ball who turns to her and stares with those pale green animalistic eyes. He drops the ball and it rolls away.
Stelson approaches Anna.
“Are you following me?” Anna says.
“I saw the fire. I had to come.”
“You had to?”
“I got your watch.”
“You followed me?” She’s not sure whether to show how creeped out she is or how flattered.
Stelson pulls out the Casio watch from his pocket and presents it to her.
“You keep it.”
Stelson shrugs and puts it back in his pocket.
Anna’s house burns unrelentlessly behind them, the firefighters seemingly losing the battle, but Anna doesn’t take her eyes off Stelson. She’s studying him with a certain air of incomprehension, combined with disdain and curiosity.
“Are you waiting for something?” Anna says.
Stelson scratches the nape of his neck. He’s unsure what to say, stunned by his own sudden wave of shyness.
Anna probes with the sole intention of triggering some assumed old memories that she seems convinced about. “I know it’s you hiding behind those sunglasses–those freaky eyes. Don’t you remember me?” Her manner is borderline flirtatious.
“I don’t think so. I’m kinda sure I’d remember a girl like you.” Stelson admires her, looking her over, but he ruins the moment by changing tact. “What’s in the red bag?”
Anna immediately switches her gaze to the blacked out SUV down the street. A long-haired man in sandals, possibly a local neighbor, is talking to the driver of the SUV through his window. Anna looks freaked. Then the man points down the street directly at Anna like lightning bolts were firing from the tips of his fingers. She pulls her hood up and turns her head away. She considers running and moves away from Stelson, a look in her eyes that says goodbye forever, but it doesn’t last. An idea hits her. She turns back to Stelson with hope as the SUV pulls slowly away from the curbside toward the confusion.
“What would you do for me?”
Stelson seems confused.
“What would you do? How much do you want me?”
“Anything or nothing. I don’t want or do things by halves.”
“Slick.” Anna grabs his hand and leads him up the street toward the SUV that’s rolling toward them in super slow-mo.
“These moments. We make them happen and we don’t expect them, ever,” Anna says.
She likes the feel of his strong hands as he grips onto her. The SUV stops. Anna and Stelson keep moving toward it with a newfound confidence.
“He won’t expect this,” she says.
“What?”
“He burned my house down. Make sure he pays for it.”
Anna lets go of Stelson’s hand so that he can run around to the passenger window to get a glimpse of the Asian gentleman driving the SUV who is just looking in his direction, a mild look of surprise on his face.
Stelson glances at the burning wreck and then at Anna whose face is turned away, and then at the driver who pulls a semi-automatic while trying to get a glimpse of Anna’s face, and Stelson moves so fast his clenched facial muscles create a distortion of his profile that seems more ferocious–a hunter locked on its prey–and he knocks the gun from the man’s hand, twists it with his other hand to inflict a broken wrist and then pulls the man from the vehicle through the open window and onto the road. It’s over in seconds. The gentleman is stunned by Stelson’s power and speed, at least for now.
“Now what?” Stelson asks, seeking some guidance and possible explanation from Anna.
Stelson is holding him down, the Asian man now starting to struggle, rage quivering facial muscles. A couple of onlookers have picked up on the scene. One notices the gun on the ground and moves away, not wanting to intervene or be part of it.
“Get me the gun,” demands Stelson.
Anna picks up the semi-automatic and hands it to Stelson at close quarters. She seems to linger, looking him in the eyes while their hands brush against each other with the exchange. She retreats and Stelson jumps up quickly, releasing the man while pointing the gun at his head.
“Crawl under the truck,” Stelson shouts.
The Asian man lies on his back. “We will find you.” He has a pseudo-American accent.
“You don’t know who we are? We could be just a couple of Bonnie and Clyde’s stealing your ride,” says Stelson. “Crawl under the truck. Do it.”
This time, the Asian gentleman moves and turns over and crawls slowly under the SUV.
Stelson signals to Anna to get into the vehicle. She does. Stelson looks about. He’s now got unwanted attention. He pulls his hood over his face as much as he can to hide his facial features.
Anna slings open the driver’s door for him and he jumps in, slams it, tosses the gun onto the street, and accelerates, leaving the gentleman with his hands over his head, eating gravel, looking shameful.
Stelson just drives, and as they turn the corner onto Lexington, he sees his soccer ball resting in the gutter and a small boy approaching it. He looks straight ahead and considers how the day has turned out. Anna, now bonded to him through circumstance, an excitable reluctance about her body language and tone.
“Thank you,” she says.
FOUR
Heavy grey clouds roll in from the North and obscure the sun. It’s a rapid change in weather. Rain pours down immediately, creating a pane of water over the wind-shield that causes Stelson to swerve, panic, and fumble for the wiper controls on the Cadillac dash. A near miss with an oncoming car crossing a main boulevard, red lights only just visible, but too late to react to. Stelson finds the wipers and regains control. He slows to an awkward crawl with other cars backed up behind him.
“We need to dump this thing,” Stelson says.
“I don’t mind getting wet. Do you?” It’s the way she says it that makes Anna shudder. Her comment triggers something–perhaps an old memory. She shakes her head. “Take a right.”
“You have a plan?” Stelson asks.
“Yeah. Sorta.”
Stelson turns right on Second Street.
“Here?”
“Fine.”
“Are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about back there?”
“Not now. Just drive.”
The SUV continues weaving through residential areas, the houses getting progressively upscale with more breathing space between them.
“This is close enough. Dump it,” she says.
Stelson spots an empty drive in front of a double fronted faux-Spanish villa and turns into it, screeches to a halt, and applies the parking brake. They jump out and casually step away from the vehicle and move down the street, leaning into the driving rain.
“That your idea of dumping it?” Anna almost has to shout, the rain is plummeting down so hard.
“Looks the part.” Stelson removes his sunglasses and dries them off.
Anna marches ahead of him, leading them onwards.
Anna climbs a sturdy drain-pipe that branches out like a vine down the rear side of the Fayne mansion on South Muirfield Drive. Stelson waits in the garden below, the swimming pool set back behind him, its surface riddled and distorted by the shower. He looks up at Anna, but his vision is compromised and it’s hard to focus on her as she pulls herself up to the second floor ledge, shimmies along, and stops at a window.
The smothered sound of glass breaking. Some shards rain down to the right of Stelson, one large p
iece spiking a flowerbed like a bayonet through butter. It protrudes from the dirt like an arrow. Stelson squints up at her, shielding his brow, concerned, somewhat stunned by the closeness of the lethal shard. She’s looking right at him, vengeful, but it’s hard to tell for sure, so his imagination attempts to fill the gaps about whom she really is to him, preferring to wait until the answers come to him rather than scratch away for buried memories.
Anna looks back at the window frame without uttering a word. Her slender body seems to absorb itself into the masonry and she’s out of sight now, inside the house, Stelson left standing in the rain, mud caked on his black Reeboks. He turns around and squelches his way across the garden away from the house to get a better look at the window Anna managed to crack open and the house’s overall scale. He sees the broken pane of glass and then Anna’s dark outline standing back, veiled by the darkness of the room. Stelson squints.
“Hey, whatever-your-name-is.”
Anna doesn’t react or move, but as Stelson studies the dark outline of her figure he senses something that causes him to turn around and face the swimming pool. He looks back at her. Again, she remains motionless. He shivers, spooked by that and the rain beating down. He moves to the edge of the pool and watches the multitude of ripples merging into one another and somewhere amongst it all is his reflection near The Deep. He spends some time trying to piece it together in his head, his features all twisted and distorted. He seems disturbed by it and for good reason–the warped clown-like face is mixed in there somewhere, occasionally coming into focus to be captured in a subliminal way–urgent, disturbed, unforgettable. Stelson stumbles backwards.
Over his shoulder, Anna’s dark figure moves deeper into the shadows of the room and away.
Stelson wipes the excess rainwater and sweat from his brow. He’s sick of being soaked to the skin. Troubled, he turns back to house and notices some large French style doors, now wide open on the ground floor.
