Deadly Nightlusts

by John Everson

  Jan pulled her gaze away from the carpet that she was no longer seeing and leaned against the back of the couch, stifling a sob. The bleeding had always come. And Jeremy had always shaken his head, as if disgusted with her...

  Time for bed. When her thoughts turned to this, Jan turned out the light, but didn't rise from the couch. She stared at the wall she couldn't see in the darkness, and cried.

  * * *

  For a week, Jan came home and spent her evenings staring at the rug, memorizing its twists and paths and delicate twines in her head. While sometimes those intricate threaded trails led her mind to wander down unpleasant paths of its own, mostly she was happy, lost in the blur of the day's events, and the swimming color of dyes. Jan enjoyed the depth the rug brought to her apartment, though she couldn't say it had completely filled that empty feeling when she came through the door at the end of the day.

  The next Thursday, on a whim, she pulled off Glenn Ellyn Road into the parking lot of the carpet shop after work. She felt lazy, idle, and maybe she'd browse the counter statuary, or just admire one of the other carpets.

  There still was no sign on the door, only the glow of neon tubes to announce that it was a store at all. Jan pulled the door open and stepped inside, and the door slapped shut behind her like a trap.

  The store was empty.

  White walls and beige carpet, bulb on the ceiling without a fixture. Empty.

  They failed fast! she thought, and then considered... hard to draw a crowd when you never post a sign.

  "What's on your mind?" a familiar voice said, and the white-haired man seemed to materialize like a light flicked on from the darkness of the hallway.

  "Oh," she said. Jan felt embarrassed for some reason, as if she'd stepped into the man's bedroom and caught him in his stained, torn boxers.

  "The store," she said, pausing awkwardly. "Didn't it do well?"

  "Oh, we're doing just fine, ma'am," he answered, and smiled, eyes glinting brightly in the glare of the bulb.

  "You just come back when you need something - when you really want something - and we'll have it. I guarantee."

  With that, he turned and vanished into the back hallway of the shop.

  Jan stood there a moment, almost as lost and disoriented as the last time she'd stepped inside and been overwhelmed by the rugs. She felt betrayed as she stared at the empty white walls and the boring beige floor.

  What kind of game was this guy up to?

  She drove home in a kind of shock.

  "You just come back when you need something - when you really want something..." she kept hearing in her mind.

  When she reached her apartment, she kicked her shoes off with force, bouncing one off the wall to land on top of the coffee table. She dropped her briefcase on the foyer and knelt at the edge of the Oriental rug.

  "I know what I want," she whispered, tears already starting to run down her face. "I know what I want."

  * * *

  Later, after the microwave, after the TV news, after the vodka, Jan got back in her car.

  "I know what I want," she mumbled, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  The shop door slammed shut behind her, and this time she wasn't shocked to see a bare bulb and an empty room.

  Well, it wasn't completely empty.

  Against the back wall leaned a pickax and shovel, obviously freshly used. There were mudprints on the banal carpet, dark, dirty footprints that congregated in a jumble at the side of the dirt-smeared silver casket that served as the only furnishing of the otherwise white room.

  "You've made up your mind then," the proprietor said, his voice a cool dagger parting the silence with bloody sound.

  Jan was too drunk to cry, too tired to crumble.

  "I want Jeremy," she whispered then, thinking of the cruel way he'd treated her, blamed her and left her. She corrected herself. "No... I want Jeremy's child."

  The nod of his silver hair was almost imperceptible, but his eyes were irrefutable.

  "So I surmised."

  "Is that... him?" she asked, staring at the casket.

  The man nodded. "Is that what you really want?"

  "More than anything else."

  "Then I will leave you in privacy. You have until midnight." He checked his watch. "Roughly an hour."

  "And the cost?" she whispered, already moving forward.

  "That you never return," he said and vanished once more to the dark hallway.

  * * *

  Jan moved to the edge of the casket. Her eyes wouldn't stop leaking; the room didn't stop shivering beyond the veil of her tears. What if it wasn't him? What if it was him, six months gone?

  She pushed at the lid and her hands slipped on the damp earth still clinging to and smeared on the edge. She pushed again and this time it opened, slowly, with a creak like that of a door in a haunted house.

  It was Jeremy.

  His hair, so blond and perfectly coifed in life, was dulled, dirty, unkempt. His lips, once so full of sarcasm, were pale, lacking in spite. His eyes, once electric and sparkling grey, were flat, listless. But his lips opened when she gasped, and his eyes blinked as she laid her head on his pinstripe-suited chest.

  "I love you," she cried, almost incoherent, tears muddying the dust on his deep blue tie.

  "And I loved you," he croaked, barely audible in the silence of the empty room.

  He raised his arm slowly, hesitantly, like a crane that spent the winter months rusting tight in the yard.

  "I wanted to have your child," she cried. "I'm so sorry."

  "It was never you," he hissed, and pulled her down into the velvet clutch of the casket with him. "But I could never admit it."

  * * *

  Jan never went back to the store with the neon lights. She passed it every day on her way home from work, sometimes noting a new car parked there. She wondered what the store held for those patrons, but never dared to stop to find out.

  She thought of it nearly every evening as she sipped warm tea and watched the nightly news and traced the ever-twisting patterns of the deep, dark Oriental carpet with the fingers of her mind.

  She smiled a little when she thought of Jeremy. And she cried. But mostly, she just closed her eyes in contentment, and felt the warmth of her belly, and of the child growing so quickly there.

  She had what she wanted. And would ask for nothing more.

  Green Apples, Red Nails

  I knew she was a witch the moment she offered me the apple. How else could she have known what the perfect lure would be for a man like me? She must have cast a spell and looked inside my head at all of those moments I've kept hidden in the darkness of shame and pain.

  And then she'd shown up at my porch to gloat.

  I had no idea who she was, or why she had chosen me, but I opened the door to let her inside, anyway. She shook her head. "You need to clean house first, before you are ready for me." Her voice was cool, but smoky with promise. Red lacquer gleamed in the fading afternoon light as her long fingernails dug faint trails across the skin of the apple. It slipped in slow motion anticipation from her grasp to fall into my waiting hand.

  "Look inside. The answers are there," she said with an ever-so-slight raise of her brow, and then she turned and walked away, down the uneven sidewalk path and up the hill that led from our slum of a subdivision and into the bramble woods that bordered the entry to town. I watched the pendulous sway of her rear as she slowly stepped from concrete square to square, never looking back. I wondered again why she'd chosen me. And wondered if she came from the house that nobody in town would ever visit without the aid of a big money bet and a bottle of liquor for courage. The house in the woods. The House of the Lost, they called it, during late night whispering conversation.

  I closed the heavy door to my rundown ranch and tossed the apple a foot in the air, catching it easily before throwing it higher. And then higher again. When it nearly touched the ceiling, I almost fumbled it on the way down, so I stopped and set it down on the kit
chen counter next to a handful of other green apples I'd just bought from the store that afternoon. I looked around my little hovel and wondered what was so desperately in need of cleaning before she would deign to step into my home. The stained brown couch was empty but for an afghan on its back cushions that my late grandma had knitted me. The old thrift shop coffee table in front of it had a stack of magazines on it, an empty Coke can, and the TV remote. The carpet was worn but uncluttered, and the kitchen counters were empty but for a stack of junk mail, my coffee maker and the coffee and sugar canisters. I didn't keep much of a house, but I did keep it neat.

  I stared at the green apple there in the middle of the counter. How had she known? What did she want? A tear wriggled loose from the corner of my eye and slid down my face as I remembered so many things best left forgotten. "The answer is inside," she'd said. I thought about that for a moment, and shivered at the thought of biting into the apple. I thought of the fairy tales and a poison apple. Instead of eating it, I took a heavy cleaver from the utensil drawer, and held it for a moment above the stem of the unripe fruit. Then I brought the knife down cleanly, easily dividing the apple in half. It fell in two pieces, and I stared at the center, where the seeds should have been.

  It was hollow at its core. A small worm lifted its head from the rotten brown pit in one half of the apple, and then put its head back down, content to continue eating the apple's heart out.

  The unripened fruit was already rotten.

  What was she trying to say?

  * * *

  The hurting began early. It wasn't dramatic or extreme. You hear stories about these schizophrenics and street bums and mass murderers, and how their childhoods were so cliche over-the-top bad. You know what I mean - "Oh, well, his mama slept with every man in town while her son played Tonka trucks next to the couch as she gave head to the guy who would later sodomize the poor kid repeatedly once his mom had passed out from a steady daylong series of complex cocktails of sperm chased with vodka. Yeah, it's no wonder he turned to collecting severed heads when he grew up."

  Well, my mother wasn't a junkie whore and I didn't live in a rat-infested tenement. I have no horrible story to tell about why I ended up living a lonely life in a forgotten town. I can't even talk about a Bonnie & Clyde robbery spree or a batshit crazy murder trail. I was nobody, am nobody. But I still felt the hurting, regardless. Maybe it wasn't dramatic enough to make me famous, but it hurt still. And most people would probably hear the story and laugh and say "Well, get over it." If it were only that easy! You just never know what thing is going to stay with you for life.

  My parents and I lived in a typical suburban house with a mutt of a dog and a chain link fence and meatloaf on Wednesday nights. Memorably unmemorable. But I can remember the first time I really hurt inside. The kind of hurting that creeps out in the night during those moments when you're truly alone. The hurting didn't come from a beating from Dad or a lecture from Mom. My parents never hurt me. Hell, sometimes I wonder if they even noticed I was there. And maybe that was hurt enough, I don't know. They had their own lives to sort through, and I probably didn't ever tell them about the girl with the green apples.

  I was twelve or thirteen and really getting interested in girls when Allysa Romano, an 8th grader who looked more like a high school senior to me, promised me a peek beneath her blouse. She told me to meet her in the picnic clearing at Busse Woods, which I did. Busse Woods was one of those dark quiet places... where furtive people met in shadows to do shadowy things before parting, without a word. So I was excited and scared to go there. But how could I resist Allysa, with those long wavy locks and eyes that always seemed to be laughing at secret jokes? When I arrived, she was holding two green apples. She grinned when she saw me, and slipped them inside the bra beneath her yellow T-shirt. "Wanna bite?" she asked, and when I nodded, albeit hesitantly, she smiled. "I need to see what I'm getting into," she said. "Take off your shirt first."

  I argued a bit, but finally peeled it off and asked her to do the same. She shrugged, and dropped the yellow tee to the ground. I could see the green of the apples pushing out of her white bra, the soft flesh of her smooshed breast trying to escape from the opposite edge.

  "Now your pants," she said. I hadn't expected things to go this far, but now I was excited and horny, and it didn't take much before I was standing naked in front of her.

  "Hmmm," she said, sizing me up and down with an eye that had more woman than girl in it. She walked around behind me as she talked. "You might be a little green yet, I think."

  "Your pants?" I asked, a little breathless and cold but still warm with the queasiness of excitement in my groin.

  "You still want a bite?" She leaned against my naked back from behind. I nodded, and I felt her hands brush against my skin. "Hold out your hands," she said, and when I did, they were suddenly filled with something cool and hard and round. The apples.

  "Eat up!" she laughed, and grabbed her shirt from the ground. At that moment, the woods suddenly released a mob of taunting, hooting, laughing girls from my school. As Alyssa put distance between us, a hail of apples suddenly rained down on me from the hands of almost a dozen creatures whose wickedness was masked in braids and barrettes. One of them rushed up close enough to slap me in the ass as I wheeled about, scrambling to find my clothes and still, unconsciously, clenching the hard bitter skins of the green apples that Alyssa had left me. When I got home later that afternoon, eyes still red with the residue of tears, I found that I still clenched one green apple. When I bit into its skin, the tart juice only served to make my eyes tear up again, and I threw it on the ground of my backyard. It was much like me - unripe and unready. And bitter.

  * * *

  Shaking away the memory 35-years gone, I threw the rotten apple in the garbage and put on my shoes to take a walk. Not too surprisingly, my feet led me down the same path I'd watched the woman leave my house. When I came to the path leading into the woods, I hesitated, but not for long. I wanted to know. Did someone live still in The House of the Lost?

  When I was a kid, we used to dare each other to run into the woods on Halloween and egg the old grey frame shack that hid in the middle of the trees like a canker on otherwise healthy flesh. Only the bravest of the brave trick-or-treated it, and there was a time in grade school when I had been dared to visit the House of the Lost on Halloween.

  I had reluctantly agreed and, dressed as a hobo, walked into the forest after dark with a flashlight and ascended the creaking steps of the old house's porch. I knocked on the door and a woman answered. She wore a black pointed hat, and for a second, I almost ran when I saw the yellowed fangs and the horrible warted nose of a witch beneath the hat.

  Then she lifted the mask to reveal a softer chin and warmer lips. And green eyes. With a long-fingered hand, she answered my "Trick or treat!" by offering me a taffy apple. "Made it myself," she said, before letting the mask slip back over her face and giving out a hideous cackle. Not knowing what to say, I backed off the porch and then ran back to the sidewalk.

  "She gave me this," I said to my cronies who'd dared me to brave the dark. I raised the caramel apple in the air with a flourish and then put it to my mouth for a bite.

  "No, don't!" Tom had yelled as I bit into the fruit and the sour juice of a green apple coated my tongue. "It might have razor blades in it! Or pins!"

  I spit the piece on the ground and threw the rest of the apple into the forest. "You're right," I said, hoping that there hadn't been poison in the sour juice. I spit and we'd left the witch behind.

  * * *

  It had looked like a death house three decades ago. And as I approached it now, at dusk, I saw that it hadn't gotten any better with age. The green of moss obscured the black of its peeling shingles, and paint hung in strips from the eaves beneath. In the side yard to the left of the porch, a broad but short tree hung heavy with green apples. So. Now I knew where the "witch" got her stock. I wondered where Allysa had gotten hers. And all these years later, I still w
ondered why. Some hurts never heal.

  The two windows on either side of the front doorway were dark, betraying nothing of what was inside, and I smiled at myself. Fool, I thought. Why would a beautiful woman live here? Whoever she was, her "magic" was a knowledge that she shouldn't have of me. Not true magic at all. What her purpose was, I didn't know, but as I stood there in front of the old house as shadows fell deeper by the second, I was suddenly certain that there was no witch, and the rotten green apple had no more meaning than the one I carried home from my public shame in the forest clearing so many years before. There was no magic here, only the sadness of decay.

  I was turning away from the porch when a light flickered on inside.

  "I've been waiting for you for a long time," a voice said from the doorway.

  I turned back and faced my witch. She had the green eyes just like the one I'd seen on my Halloween trip here in high school, and from just an hour or so earlier, on my porch. She couldn't have been the same woman, and yet...

  "What do you want from me?" I asked.

  "What do you want from me?" she said, countering my question as she used one hand to pull aside her long emerald robe. It shimmered faintly in the moonlight as it moved, and revealed the naked shadow of her breast and belly beneath it. I could see the wide cone of her nipple still soft and unaroused. But the promise of her body stirred an instant reaction in me. And that reaction made me angry. I could imagine the feel of her velvet skin slipping against mine, her lips brushing my ear and promising so much. And I hated her for teasing me that way.

  "Just leave me alone," I said, and suddenly ran from the forest. Behind me, I heard the gentle titter of a woman's scornful laughter following me.

  * * *

  That night, I dreamed of Alyssa. She led me into the forest again, and this time she didn't offer me apples at all, but instead unbuttoned her white blouse and dropped her private school plaid skirt before kicking aside her panties and bra to stand nude and white before me. Her breasts looked smaller untethered than they seemed in her sweaters, but my eyes were drawn to that soft black down at the crux of her thighs. She slid a hand behind my belt and made a fist around what she found there.