by Jack Ketchum
Yesterday he'd lifted his hospital gown to check his groin. No penis remained visible. Just a sharp red nest of glistening fungal ridges. In other words, he finished for the doctor, I'm going to die. "We'll do everything we can to keep you comfortable," he said. Howard nodded.
"Here's a letter for you, by the way. If you like, I'll open it and read it to you. If that's easier."
A letter!
"No!" He reached out a fungus-chipped hand. "Please. Leave."
The lovely florid script was Clara's. His pulse rose. Suddenly, in spite of the terminal prognosis, he felt blazing with light.
The light of love, he realized.
And Clara had at last written back to him, to verify her own love.
I can die now, he thought, even before opening the pink perfumed envelope. He did not fear death now. He wouldn't die alone and forgotten.
She's written. She still loves me.
His scaled fingers fumbled. His ridged face drew up in the brightest smile.
Out dropped a stack of Polaroids.
He looked at the letter. It contained one line.
Here's how much I love you.
His eyes felt held open by fish hooks. His heart slugged in his chest as his blood reverted to sludge.
His scale-encrusted fingers flipped through the deck of photos one by one. Each picture, once its image registered, felt like a shovel of grave dirt dropped into his face.
~ * ~
It was a bright, wickedly hot Saturday afternoon when Clara learned of Howard's death. She'd been walking back to her dorm from the quadrangle where she sunned herself every day in a white Bill Blass string bikini. A good tan was top priority. She was surprised how few women strove to be appreciated; Clara's most personal goal was to turn every male head she passed, and it was a goal she'd long since achieved. It particularly tickled her to know that the two campus day-shift cops went out of their way to scope her on the quad with binoculars every day. She'd always give them a show, to tease them up. Yeah, it's nice to be appreciated. Her body, and the extent she went to keep it looking good, she regarded as an aspect of her womanhood which deserved to be celebrated. And, well... It's also a great way to reel in cock, she thought, and a woman like Clara—she needed to reel in a lot of that.
But—
She'd stopped at the Student Union for a campus paper. And there it was in boldface.
ASSISTANT BOTANY PROFESSOR DIES IN RAIN FOREST
Poor Howard. The genus of shelf-fungus that was going to make him famous had also killed him. A "blood-born spore infection," the article reported. "Antibiotic resistant."
A heavy grief settled over Clara like a weighted net.
It lasted for all of two minutes.
Because suddenly there were Barney and David, coming through the lobby, smiling. David in his tight jeans, Barney in his more fashionable khaki baggies. Muscles straining their tank tops, and something else straining at their groins.
"Sandwich anyone?" asked Barney.
And Clara was hungry.
It was weeks later that she received his final letter, delayed by overseas mail.
She read it over, thankful that he'd obviously died before getting those awful Polaroids she'd sent. They'd been weighing on her conscience lately.
Dearest Clara, the letter said. I still love you.
Howard
It was shorter than usual, thank god.
"Rest in peace," she muttered, and tossed the letter into the garbage.
~ * ~
I'm a monster, he'd thought, giggling as he plodded toward the nurses' station. Walking didn't come easy. Not when your body sprouted hundreds of fungal shelf bodies. But he plodded on, inspired to the very end by love.
At 4 a.m. the floor was vacant, the skeleton crew of nurses all busy with their bed checks.
Howard crunched across the floor.
Writing had been harder even than walking, yet his scarlet, scaleencrusted hand had eventually penned his final love letter to Clara Holmes. Before he'd sealed the envelope he'd coughed up several million white spores onto the letter, invisible against the paper. By now the tendrillike mycelium of Vermilius Moleyus had wormed into his brain. He could think only in snatches. Air...dispersible...
...blood-born...
...via inhalation...
He shuffled down the hall to the desk, then shuffled back to his bed, where he died moments later, his ridge-studded face set in the faintest of smiles. Love had prevailed. No one had seen him place his letter in the OUT box on the counter of the nurses' station.
~ * ~
"Just our luck, huh," Straker was still complaining. "I look forward to a gander at that dish every day. I mean, she might as well be wearing dental floss."
Bilks frowned. No gander today. Where the hell is she?
Just as the car backed out of the undergrad library lot, their radio started squawking. "Campus Unit 208, 82 with guard at Morril Hall, Room 304. Investigate possible Signal 22."
Bilks frowned. He frowned a lot. "10-4," he answered.
"What the fuck's a Signal 22?"
"Unknown trouble," Bilks recited off the code sheet.
"Some call. Shit." Straker pulled onto Campus Drive. "What was that loke again?"
"Morril Hall, 304." He checked the student directory. And stared. "Anybody we know?"
"Morril Hall, room 304. Clara M. Holmes."
"What's this 22 shit?" Bilks asked.
The security guard, a criminal justice major part-timing, seemed fidgety. "Complaints about a smell."
"You don't say. Stinks worse than a Georgia hoghouse."
"No answer when I knocked. And her car's in the lot."
Bilks nodded. A moment later the floor RA appeared, a chubby blonde in flip flops and an avocado sundress. "What is that?" she asked, her nose crinkling.
"We won't know what till you open up," said Bilks.
The girl unlocked the door with her master. Took one glance into the room and fainted.
The stench hit them like a runaway truck. The security guard turned away and threw up in the hallway. Bilks and Straker gagged as they entered the cramped room.
Time to go back to the city, thought Bilks.
At first he wasn't even sure the thing on the bed was human. But it had to be. Despite the mass of queer, flat, glistening red ridges, like slimy chips of stone, that covered the body so completely you couldn't see an inch of flesh between them. It had to be because the thing had a head—topped by short butter-blonde hair, neatly coiffed.
That, and a white string bikini.
Masks
"The bedroom's down this hall," he said. "You'll find a box at the foot of the bed. I'd like you to wear what's inside. Only what's inside." He smiled and poured them each a second glass of cognac, handed one to her. The crystal sang against her fingernail. She drank and touched the delicate silver chain around his neck, felt its warmth between her thumb and forefinger—his warmth—and let it fall.
She turned to do as he said. On the wall in front of her was a mounted stone image of the triadic Shiva Maheshvara. The face on the left was female, on the right, male. In the center, the mask of Eternity. An ancient masterpiece. Where in God's name had he plundered this? she thought.
Below, on a pedestal, stood a terracotta figurine from Tlatilco over seven hundred years old—the dual-faced "pretty lady" that the Toltecs buried with their dead. And on the opposite wall, a relief carving in black granite. Kali. His apartment was filled with treasures. Scythian goldwork. Bassari and pre-Christian Polynesian sculpture. The restored fragments of twelfth-century Norman mosaics—two of them—occupying an entire wall in the living room. A "Harrowing of Hell" from a fifteenth-century psalter. The dealer/collector in her was reeling.
So was the woman.
It wasn't the cognac. It was the man. This man.
She'd waited a lifetime for one who just might be her equal. "Christine," he said.
She turned and saw him backlit by the glow of the fireplace. He ra
ised his glass to his lips. "When you get in there, be sure to light the candles."
His bedroom was modest and spare, though every piece spoke quietly of his taste. A simple walnut mirror hung over a Hepplewhite chest of drawers. An old, primitive oak wardrobe that had probably once belonged to the servant class. A Saladino bookcase, a Louis XVI writing table and a Louis XV bergère. A William and Mary four-poster bed.
Two candles stood on the Louis XVI, two more on an inlaid cherry nightstand by the bed. Wooden matches lay in a Georg Jensen silver pit plate. She lit the candles and turned off an oil lamp.
From the wall beside the bed sprang a wooden Magalenian atlatl carved in the shape of a horse. Yet another masterpiece.
Christ...
A plain white hatbox sat on the bed. She opened it, parted the taupe tissue within.
And stared into the face of an African lioness.
Magnificent.
She touched it. The fur was real, smooth and soft in the direction of its growth and courser as she moved her fingers against the grain. A soft linen lining had been sewn in. Rich creamy leather fashioned the wide nose and think dark lips and carbon-black lashes seemed to flutter above each eye slit—she could not imagine what time and care it had taken to do this. Perfect, genuine whiskers lanced from the snout.
She picked it up. Her fingers teased around the edges. Some sort of plate obviously had been slipped inside to give the mask some rigidity, plastic or thin wood. The mask felt surprisingly light, delicate as Tibetan silk. Beautiful, she mused.
The ears lay back flat against the head. They and the open mouth gave the lioness an appearance of waiting. She could almost see her in the tall, waving grass of some veldt. Crouched, scenting the wind.
She stepped out of her kidskin heels, unzipped the back of her dress and allowed it to flow down her shoulders, heard its silky hiss to the floor. She draped it carefully over the back of the bergère. Then the stockings and the black slip and finally the sheer lace bodysuit. She stood naked before the mirror, aware that already she was participating in some sort of arcane ceremony with him. That this was not just sex but ritual. The thought excited her in the way that sex itself hadn't for a very long time.
Her body was the object of that ceremony.
Her body...and the mask.
She'd never had a child. She had never allowed the tight smooth flesh to disappear. At forty her body still deserved to wear the mask. She took it to the mirror.
There was no strap. It was designed to extend across the back of the skull almost to the neck. Her own coiffed hair was nearly the same color of the lioness' fur. She could simply tuck it in.
She slipped it on.
The fit was perfect.
She leaned in close to the mirror and turned her head from right profile to left. Then stepped back and gazed at herself.
The mask hugged her like a second skin.
She was aware that she was trembling. It was warm in the room but her nipples had gone rigid, dark.
A cat, she thought.
A predator.
You've never been so beautiful...
Trace sweat gathered between her breasts. In the mirror she saw the door open slowly behind her.
He stepped silently into the room. He'd changed into a sheer, plum-colored kimono. She saw him smile at her image. She turned.
"You like it?"
"Stephen, it's... spellbinding."
"I'm glad," he said.
He moved across the room to the bed, reached beneath it and withdrew a second box. He smiled again.
"It's Tutsi, isn't it?"
His smile widened as though impressed. Or...
"You knew this was coming, didn't you?"
She nodded, smiling too beneath the mask.
He opened the box, extricating its contents from the tissue. He looked up at her and opened the kimono and let it fall off his shoulders. He was naked. She saw that, like her, the years had barely breathed upon his body.
In his hand he raised the massive head, its mane trailing eighteen inches at least. Its dark wide mouth hung open in a howl.
He drew it on over his head.
She sensed the sudden pull of him as he held his arms out to her and she saw the shadow of his erection, saw the muscles of his arms twitch and the muscles of his shoulders. She crossed the distance between them and the supple grace of her walk seemed like something unknown and new to her.
She knew what sex with him would be like. Something crimson. A crimson gash in time.
She wanted his hands on her, the long polished nails tearing.
She gazed into the eyes behind the mask, saw them flick across her body like the tongue of a whip. Were his eyes different somehow? No, she thought—just hungry. His hands were electric as he reached for her—power flowing from fingertips, bared ends of wires. Power that had nothing to do with wealth or position or even intellect, but something deeper and much older.
She could feel it clawing out of her too. A power of her own which very nearly matched him.
Already she could taste his blood.
The sheets were streaked with blood.
It was morning.
The masks lay beside them on the bed.
She watched him sleep.
He was Stephen and she was Christine and they lay in bed in a Manhattan loft in Soho. Outside, below the windows, were shops and galleries. One of them was her own—she, Christine, with a masters in history and an doctorate in art—who had never wanted for anything nor ever failed at anything, born of New York privilege, who had been engaged not once, but twice, only to find each man bereft and even empty in both the moral courage to stand up to her and the wisdom not to try. Who had neither regretted these men nor missed them. Who had been quite content alone to this very moment.
Below too and uptown were Stephen Gannet's offices—Gannett Financial Services, snapping at the heels of giants like Paine Webber, Salomon Smith Barney, Dreyfus, and outperforming all of them. He said he'd been in the military once but he didn't seem the type. Before and after, he said, he'd prowled the world while his curious fortunes amassed. He'd been on digs but spoke of them as though bored. She only knew a little about him. Fortune suggested a net personal wealth exceeding ten billion dollars. She'd looked him up. In the financial world the fact that he chose to live in SoHo was considered eccentric if not downright crazy. He supported the arts and was notorious for ignoring all other forms of charity.
They'd met at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, at a benefit for the Lincoln Center Library of the Peforming Arts. They'd talked about sculpture, architecture, Expressionism and Post-Impressionism, and Post Neo-Expressionism. She found him more than knowledgeable. And amazingly attractive.
They went to bed. And now...
Her body ached, stung.
Claw marks etched her breasts and thighs. She could feel their sting glowing across her back.
Yet she'd given as good as she'd received. You only had to look at his shoulders.
Cats, she thought. A mating of lions.
God knows what we did.
She could remember only in knifelike flashes of flesh on flesh, torso to torso, torso to back. She remembered him pulling so astonishingly hard at her nipples that she came merely from that. At some point they'd discarded the masks to use their mouths, their tongues, their teeth, but that seemed to change none of the scarlet animal fury of their lovemaking. Something had worked its way inside them. Some primal kiss of fantasy, some gossamer thing that lit her nerves and dropped her into fiery bliss.
She'd come, it seemed, for hours on end.
"Morning," he said.
"Good morning."
"Any regrets?"
"Not a one."
"Good. That's good."
Her eyes took him in. Her thoughts could not. The words just seemed to slip out of her.
"Who are you?" she said.
He smiled. "A collector, nothing more. Rich by accident and then design. Much like you." She watched him idly t
race a scratch on his neck with his index finger. A scratch she'd made the night before.
"I collect little pieces of cultures, anything that's left. So damn much has been plundered. There's truth in those pieces, you know—and power in truth. You could say I try to collect some of that power. All too often those little pieces scattered all the hell over the world provide the only remnants of entire civilizations."
Little pieces? Her eyes accessed the room. His nonchalance astonished her. So much of what he referred to as "little pieces" were actually priceless relics. Each room in his apartment could be a mini-museum worth millions.
"You must've been everywhere," she said.
"Nearly, I suppose. From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah. From Hastings to Golgotha to the Seven Hills of Rome. Yes." His voice darkened. "From cenotes to ziggurats."
Fascinating. But his previous words resurfaced, like shadows standing just behind her. Little pieces. Power. Truth.
The wounds of his passion radiated on her skin.
She shook her head. "I wish I could remember..."
"What happened? Last night?"
"Yes. Not that it really matters. It was... wonderful."
His face grew stolid. Like a mask.
"Of course it matters. Do you want to know what happened? I mean what really happened?"
She nodded.
"It was the masks. The masks happened."
"The masks...yes, but..."
He leaned up on one elbow. "We're living in an age that's been so thoroughly demythologized, there's nothing left. You know that Christine—you know that as well as anybody in our field because you see it every day in your gallery. Art today has no mythology. Which is why so much of it is empty, drained of its real vitality, exsanguinated. And why we prefer the works of former eras, other cultures, things...so...old."
He was right of course. They'd known instantly they had that in common.
"People think that masks are about nothing more than children at Halloween. But take a good look at Mardi Gras and you see what masks can do. Even today. People get monumentally, fabulously drunk. They trash the streets. They do drugs they wouldn't ordinarily touch. And they fornicate with anything that moves—regardless of gender. The masks release them, Christine. The masks separate the chaff from the real seeds of the soul. But what they forget, and what we know, is that all they're doing is tapping into a kind of vestigial power based on a much, much earlier magic. When the powers that the masks invoke weren't just psychological. They were far-reaching. Cosmic, limitless, without parameter."
