St. Agnes' Eve

by Malachi Stone

  “No, I need it to look at something, that’s all.” I threw her a five-dollar bill. She came back a few moments later with a pocket mirror.

  “I need that back when you’re done with it, hon, okay?”

  I went for my billfold. She hovered expecting another tip but left when I pulled out Diane’s wallet-sized black-and-white bridal portrait.

  The camera had caught Diane in a full-faced, high fashion pose. The picture still enchanted me—Diane’s arresting eyes, her patrician cheekbones, the delicate lines of her classic beauty.

  I lined up the mirror’s edge along the vertical axis of Diane’s nose, bisecting her face from glabella to philtrum. No matter how many times I tried, from either side of the picture, the face remained exactly the same. No subtle change in physiognomy, no eyes too close together or too wide apart, no funhouse mirror distortion of her countenance when I reflected either half of her face on itself. A paper doll’s cutout face, unfolded, perfectly symmetrical—the left half the precise mirror image of the right. Why had I never noticed it before?

  Diane wore the paradise face. She was one of them—had always been one of them. My mind, running a three-legged race with the crystal and the Chivas, tried to wrap itself around that astonishing revelation.

  “Nice shot.” A derisive male voice over my shoulder. “Not something you see every day, though—a guy ogling his wife’s bridal picture at a strip club.” Diaz pulled up a chair uninvited. I slipped the picture into my jacket pocket along with the mirror.

  “Just trying to remind myself I got better at home,” I said.

  “You’re going to have to narrow it down, Counselor. When you say ‘better at home,’ you talking about wifey-poo or you mean her girlfriend?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Stark Staring Mad

  Diaz stayed another two hours and bought most of the rounds. His presence made me nervous—or maybe it was the crystal. Paranoid fantasies began to take over.

  Finally Diaz seemed to have had enough. He drained his glass, stood, and slapped me on the back in an unaccustomed fraternal gesture, then shambled up the theater aisle and out of the club.

  I sat alone and wept like a lost child—the clientele and staff must have thought I was nuts. Maybe I was nuts at that; my behavior the last few days was not that of a sane person. I decided that as soon as I got a grip on my runaway emotions, I’d go home and face whatever problems I’d created. I glanced at my watch. It had stopped at six sixteen. I tapped it. Nothing. Batteries must be dead.

  The announcer’s voice startled me, sitting so close to the speakers as I was. “And now gentlemen, a new departure for the Sphinx Lounge. An initiation into the bizarre world that lurks only in the darkest corners of your fantasies: The Blood Clubs!”

  I heard a savage rumble of male voices. The early Christian martyrs had heard it long before me in the arena, the obscene roar of the mob lusting for spilled blood. The announcer shouted over it. “Gentlemen, will you welcome please...the beautiful and talented young lady known only as… Gash!”

  Aggro-rock blasted from the speakers. A tall, lithe woman dressed like Vampira strode onstage. The footlights surrounded her like a witch-burning bonfire. Her eyes were blackened sockets shedding griefless mascara tears. She gave the raucous crowd the finger, then reached under her skirt and openly masturbated. She began to perspire as she worked away, causing the veil of hair she’d purposely thrown over her face to mat and stick to her melting stage makeup.

  There was something uncomfortably familiar about her. She flipped me the bird, painted now with menstrual gore.

  “Madeleine!” I gasped. At the sound of her name, Mad tore her black Goth garments, exposing her right breast, shoulder, and arm. The crowd exploded in a roar of lusty approval. The ruby red of her CS medallion glinted in the spotlight. From somewhere hidden in her clothing, she withdrew a familiar prop: the Lilith talisman. She grasped its golden handle in her left hand.

  Mad extended her right arm toward me in the attitude of a beckoning ghost, the crook of her elbow laid bare. Staring into my eyes, she pressed the curved, scythe-like tip to the pulse point of her elbow and bore down. She winced. Sitting close enough to see the tip go in, I recoiled in horror as the hemorrhage spurted forth. She drew the razor edge of the blade down the length of her forearm, splitting a bone-deep incision the whole way, inflicting impossible damage. I could hear yielding flesh as she went—the sound of a knife through taut fabric. Blood poured out of her and onto the stage. Then she drew back the dagger, slashed a match strike across her wrist perpendicular to the other gash, and let her right arm hang limp. The wounds formed a sanguine upside-down cross.

  Next she went to work hacking up her right breast. Soon it, too, was criss-crossed with bloody wounds. Her brand of Lucifer she kept untouched. She expressed fresh drops of blood from her lacerated breast. Then, holding her fingers above her mouth and extending a greedy length of tongue, she caught the sprinkles.

  A voice beside me confided, “I got the bitch rolling so hard on Ecstasy, man, she don’t know what the fuck she’s doin’ up there.” I turned to regard the source of that bit of insight and encountered a shaven-headed, emaciated specimen in a sleeveless black T-shirt. Every cord in his neck looked like a guitar string about to snap. He must have bought his shades from the same store as Ramses, but I still recognized the taut, twitching face of Artie Tremayne leering back at me.

  “It’s me all right,” he sneered. “In the flesh. Hiding in plain sight.” He offered me some kind of tweak brother’s handshake.

  “Artie, we’ve got to get a tourniquet on that arm of hers and rush her to a hospital. Then maybe a good plastic surgeon—”

  “Sorry, Counselor, but like so many other less fortunate Americans nowadays, Mad and I find ourselves momentarily embarrassed by a lack of major medical insurance coverage, and besides, I’m—strictly speaking—a wanted man.”

  “She’s liable to die, Artie, you crazy fuck!”

  Artie gestured toward the stage. “You think?”

  The place erupted in roars and cheering. I looked up at Madeleine, who now stood completely nude onstage, her rags of black clothing wadded in one hand, bloody talisman gripped in the other. She bowed extravagantly, still covered in her own blood but no longer bleeding. The coagulating blood appeared dull red. Her fair skin had closed over every wound without a trace.

  The crowd thought it was stage magic, but I knew different. She flounced down from the stage and plopped herself in a chair across from Artie and me, oblivious to her own nudity. She crossed her legs, interlaced her fingers over one knee, and grinned at us with a performer’s bravura. Her breasts, tiny for a girl of her size, turned inward toward each other, her blood pooling like sweat between them.

  “I feel like a great big steak.” She was wild with the drugs. “Rare. How ‘bout you, Mr. Galeer? You like ‘em pink on the inside? Oozing a little blood, maybe?” The waitress brought her a wet towel. Madeleine, bloody as Lizzie Borden, looked at her and asked, “You guys serve steaks here?”

  “Kitchen’s closed,” the waitress replied in the parental tone one reserves for precocious children.

  “Ok, then. I’ll have a sloe comfortable screw.”

  The waitress regarded her suspiciously. “How old’re you, sweetie?”

  Mad brandished the knife. A feral gleam flashed from her wide eyes. “Old enough to cut you, bitch cow.”

  Artie made a noise I once heard emanate from the gibbon exhibit at the zoo in Forest Park. The waitress stood frozen with fear. On impulse, I grabbed the wet bar towel from her, lunged behind Madeleine, and looped it around her knife-wielding wrist like a tourniquet. I wound it tight until water wrung out and the talisman dropped to the floor. Mad was so messed up she thought the whole thing was funny—laughing like I was tickling her until I half expected her to fall out of her chair. I kneeled on the floor, crawled under the table, and wiped the blood off the talisman with the bar towel.

  I remembered Janis’s
offer. And Kokker’s. While I was down there, I ripped a foot-wide swath from around the hem of Mad’s dress and rolled the talisman in it, making a bundle about the size and shape of a billy club. I stuffed it into my pants thinking I could feel the talisman’s power between my legs—a magnetic tingling in my loins.

  To make peace with the waitress, I ordered a round—a Virgin Mary for Mad, Chivas doubles for Artie and me. She told me the hundred was already all used up “what with the tip.” I was in no position to argue with her. Artie did the honors. He showed her a fifty, then thrust it so deeply into her pants that I thought he was going to make change. She walked off as though nothing had happened. If General Grant’s beard was chafing against hers, she sure didn’t show it.

  When the drinks came, Mad pulled out the celery stalk from hers and tossed it on the floor, shrilling, “Who the fuck ordered vegetables?” She took one sip, then play-complained, “Aw, I thought it was real blood.”

  “They don’t serve that to minors here, either,” Artie told her. “You and I both know a place they do, though. What say we go there now?”

  She nodded, eager as the child she was. She stood, then slipped her dress back on and wore it open like a robe, not even noticing the shortened hemline. The nearby audience of men stared in rude appreciation. One tablefull caught her eye; she flashed them before leaving.

  “C’mon along for the ride, Counselor,” Artie offered. “Live a little. You’re too shitfaced to drive anyway. Take you to a little out-of-the-way place you never been before.” I drained my drink in one gulp, got to my feet, pushed in Mad’s gory chair, and followed them up the main theater aisle. All eyes were on Mad as she led the way.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Wet Spot

  Artie’s hearse lurked behind a semi parked in back. “The Angel a’ Death,” he remarked with pride, “cloaked with invisibility. A thousand cop cars all around, and here she sits unmolested, waiting for us.”

  “Open the car door, I’m freezing my ass off out here,” Mad shuddered.

  “Keep your pants on. Woops, too late.”

  “Goddamn you, Artie, open the car door. I mean it.”

  “Ooh, she means it.” Artie lounged against the fender of the gleaming hearse in the manufactured moonlight of the parking lot and dangled the keys at scrotum level, taunting her.

  Madeleine doubled over, shivering. Artie said, “Okay, get in. But plug that leak. Counselor here’s got a sensitive side. Bleeding bitch like you riding shotgun, liable to spoil a few illusions for him. Right, Counselor?”

  Artie opened the front passenger door and beckoned me in, formal as an undertaker. Mad slid in after me. From somewhere under the seat she produced an open box of tampons. She inserted one, as oblivious to the two of us as a Buddhist nun contemplating her navel. I could smell the butcher shop on her, the dried blood from her act. She reached in back, grabbed some jeans off one plush bench, and slipped them on.

  “Fasten your seatbelt,” Artie ordered her. “I don’t want no tickets.” Mad drew the shoulder harness across herself. From where I sat, she looked like a topless crossing guard.

  Artie drove like a demon over two-lane blacktops toward Belleville, passing slower-moving vehicles on hills and curves at speeds close to a hundred, heedless of oncoming headlights. At four-way intersections he slowed to sixty-five or seventy, passing through slugs of cross traffic like a ghost carriage. I felt a song coming on. To take my mind off the danger, I sang aloud in a country-and-western twang to the tune of Wabash Cannonball:

  I cannot eat but little meat

  my stomach is not good;

  But still I think that I can drink

  with him that wears a hood;

  Back and side go bare, go bare

  both foot and hand go cold;

  Just let me keep my belly full

  with good old Cuervo Gold.

  “That’s pretty cool, Mr. Galeer,” Mad said. “Did you just write that, or what?”

  She reached for Big Rick, but what she grabbed instead was the talisman swathed in black linen. She dragged her fingernails up and down it, then squeezed. I feared more hemorrhaging if she gripped too tightly, but before that could happen, Artie warned, “Hands off the gearshift! I’m the one doing the driving.”

  I couldn’t tell you the route he took, only that the place he brought us to was a cinder block roadhouse—a Flying Dutchman kind of joint—out of town and down a hilly gravel lane so deeply rutted I thought Artie might lose an axle. We were miles from the nearest house and in no position to call a tow truck. I didn’t see all the cars clogging the parking lot until the hearse’s headlights shone on them when Artie swung in.

  “Private club?” I asked.

  “Boy howdy,” Artie replied.

  We negotiated the parking lot by available moon- and starlight. I’d never before seen a tavern open for business with no outside lights, but once Artie flung open the front door we were met by a flood of dim lights and strange sounds. Cones of luminescence almost off either end of the visual spectrum swept across a dance floor the dimensions of an Olympic pool; it took up most of the huge oblong room. The narrow frontage belied the sheer size of the place, which, as they say, was hell-full with women. Artie and I were the only men in the place. Madeleine walking in topless drew an unseemly stir of interest from the ladies.

  A curvilinear chrome bar ran the length of the building and along the back wall—a bar the shape of an immense scythe. The bartenders behind it were all women. A neon sign over the back bar spelled out The Wet Spot. I saddled up onto one of the few barstools still empty. The nearest bartender kept her back to me—slicing limes and giving me the cold shoulder.

  “Yo,” I called out. No visible response. I noticed there were no mirrors at all in the club. So I asked her about it.

  “What is this, Dracula’s place?”

  “More like his daughter’s,” came her familiar voice. “What brings you here, Ricky?” She turned to me, wearing clear plastic gloves and holding a serrated knife longer than the one in my pants.

  “Liz!”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “You’re full of surprises lately.”

  She put the knife down and swept the lime slices into a container. “I like getting up close to the girls who actually drink the stuff. You’d be amazed what some of them are down for after a few drinks to loosen up. So what can I offer you?”

  “How about a double Chivas?”

  “Sorry, Ricky, this joint has no liquor license. Management prefers to stay under the county’s radar. What would you say to a club soda? A Donald Duck, maybe?”

  “I feel more like a dead duck. Diane’s probably going to leave me.”

  She reached over and, with a sympathetic expression, patted my hand. “Club soda it is, then,” she said and iced up a tall tumbler. “On the house.”

  “Don’t suppose I could convince you to stick a scotch in there?”

  “No can do, Ricky.” She swabbed the bar with a rag. “So what brought this on? This thing with you and Diane, I mean?”

  “All right, so maybe I’m not the ideal husband. Up until a few days ago, I was doing okay. Kind of.” I sipped the club soda. It did clear my palate. “Everything was going along fine until Diane put on that amulet.”

  Liz stopped wiping the bar. “What amulet?”

  “You know: that man, woman, birth, death, infinity thing. After Sandra tore it off herself and threw it in the cat’s water dish, Diane must have found it and tried it on. Since then it’s been like PMS from hell, I can tell you.”

  “Remember I warned you to get rid of that thing?”

  “I remember. Guess it’s too late now, though.”

  “Not yet. But it soon will be—the Lilith Sabbat is the end of this month. You’d better find her and yank that thing off her, unless you want her becoming one of them.” “I had to get the hell out of the house tonight. She’s probably packed up and gone by now, judging by how mad she was when I got home.”r />
  “Where would she go?”

  I thought about it. “No doubt where she thought she could hurt me the most, give me the meanest payback. The most bang for the fuck.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “John Diaz’s house.” I hadn’t realized it until I’d said it out loud, but it was probably true. The moment I spoke his name I saw Liz’s glabella knit, that drawstring tension under the third eye that heralds every falsehood.

  “I don’t think she’d go there,” Liz said, nodding her head as though lost in thought. “I mean, why would she go there? He’s already dating that other one, Janis.”