Something opened in his shuttered face. “Damn straight she is.” His stony eyes actually widened. “Nobody ever . . . How’d you know?”
“Just . . .” I forced myself to smile a rather loony tunes smirk at that awful knife. “Just because of the way you love her.”
“Oh, yeah. Pandora is a goddess.” Something came alive, almost animated, in his face. “Pandora rules the world, you know? Whatever Pandora says, that’s what you got to do. You never met such a sweet bitch. Cold like an Italian ice. Call her Mommy, she doesn’t even hear. You got to call her Penny or Pandora.”
Oh, my God.
Blake’s voice sank so low I could barely hear him. “A few times I had sex with her.”
Oh, my God.
But I didn’t even blink, just said, “That’s wild.”
He grinned. “I like it wild.”
Sick, sick, even sicker than my queasy, dizzy body. But my weakness helped to make it all seem like a fever dream, and anyway, there was no time to think, just blurt out another crazy hunch. “Is that when she cut your arms?”
“Cut me and laughed. It made her happy. Pretty red blood coming out of me. Beautiful bright blood.”
Blood equaled sex equaled knife/mother equaled happy sweet candy equaled cherry red blood, round and round like the vertigo threatening my head. I wondered whether it had to be wrist blood.
“And your wrists?”
“That . . . um, no. That was later.” He glanced downward and to the left, away from me.
I saw guilt in that glance.
Guilt? In Blake Roman? Lying didn’t make him look guilty. Seduction, abduction, and rape didn’t make him look guilty. Murder didn’t make him look guilty. What in the name of—
Pandora.
Mother.
I knew where all my irrational guilt came from.
“Blake,” I accused gently, almost teasing, “you haven’t been doing it the way Mommy wants, have you?”
Instantly his face hardened. “You shut your fat mouth about her!” Flip went the mood switch, and he was all rage. “You don’t know a freaking thing about her, you dumb fuck. And you lie. You’re not—you’re not—I don’t know you. Fat bitch, you lie like a rug, all you tell me is lies, lies, lies—” Projecting his own guilt onto me, working himself up to a fury, he lifted the knife to lunge at me again.
And I was not afraid.
Because I had flipped a switch in my own exhausted mind, and now I could watch myself do whatever I had to.
I could watch myself be as ruthless as Blake. I could stand aside and watch myself be the Candy he deserved to meet. I had rejoined Blake in his bizarre world where blood was sex was love. I did not know what was going to happen next or whether I would live through this or whether I would ever be the same, but the only thing that frightened me was that I didn’t care.
“My name is Candor,” I told Blake. “Candor Birch White.” Whether it was the force of my tone or the power of my name, he froze, then lowered his knife and stood like a stone man. “I am not a bitch,” I scolded on, “and I am proud to be fat in normal places, not my head. And I do not lie.”
Or not anymore.
Especially not to Sam. If, please dear God, I ever got to see him again.
I loved Sam. I had grown to love him with a deep, daily love with which no teenage infatuation could compare. I knew that now.
The romantic yearnings I used to have for Blake, my virginal willingness to be swept away by his perverse passions—the best thing I could do now was to recapture that lust unto death and use it.
“My name is Candor,” I repeated more softly. “You used to call me Candy. This affliction is my punishment.” With my hands I indicated the red and white crust of rash on my face, the hamster cheeks, the pinto spots of lost pigment on my bruised arms, the hippo hips. “My punishment for not doing it right, Blake.” My parents had told me this so many times that I almost believed it, although the meaning Blake would take from my words was entirely different from the one my parents had intended. “I have been punished. And you will be punished too, Blake, because you haven’t been doing it right either. Have you?”
I could actually see the blood ebb out of his face, leaving it chalky. He stood like white stone, his eyes staring into mine as if I had somehow hypnotized a blind man.
“Have you been doing what Pandora said, Blake?”
Like a wooden puppet’s, his mouth cracked open. “I tried.” His voice came out a hoarse whisper.
“But you didn’t do it. All those Candies, and each time you didn’t do it. You killed the Candies, but you didn’t kill yourself.”
“I . . . tried. . . .”
Nothing about his white stone face moved, but water ran down his cheeks. Like condensation dripping. I had gone harder than he was, so I did not perceive that moisture as tears.
“And now you’ve really messed up,” I went on, relentless. “You’ve chosen a Candy who is your own daughter. You cannot join with her in blood or you will go to a worse hell than the one you’re already living in. You cannot join with her in flesh or you will go to the ultimate hell designed especially for incestuous perverts. You cannot kill her because she is your daughter, and you cannot let her go because you will go to jail. What are you going to do, Blake?”
His wet stone face turned to sodden clay. He sobbed aloud. “Mommy,” he wept, his voice cracking.
“What do you mean, ‘Mommy’? You don’t have a mommy. You never had a mommy.”
“Pandora, please . . .”
I pushed myself away from the wall and stood as tall as I could, hardly even swaying, my stare locked onto his wet pebble eyes. I demanded of him, “What is my name?”
He whispered, “Candor.”
I placed the palms of my hands flat on my cheeks, hiding rash and chipmunk cheeks, pushing them up and back. All eyes and lips, I demanded, “What else?”
He choked it out. “Candy . . .”
And as his raining eyes gazed into mine, that scarlet lightning electric connection flew between us again, stronger than ever. I know he saw me as if seventeen years had never happened, because that’s the way I saw him, my demented weeping sweetheart, and right on cue I started weeping too.
“Blake,” I cried, all the time watching myself from some disassociated place as if I were an actor on a stage, all the while silently coaching myself, Good, Dorrie, good. Do whatever it takes.
“Candy, it really is you, my love. I can only just barely believe it. . . .” Shakily he reached toward me. “You were supposed to stay, stay young forever with me in a red embrace, and you didn’t obey, you were punished, we were both punished, but we’re still . . .” He put his arms around me, embraced me, making the knife wound hurt like fire. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, although I think he was not referring to my blood on his arm. “I’m so sorry. You’re still my Candy, my first true Candy.”
As he hugged me, I could feel the knife blade pressed to my back.
* * *
I am a skinny, trembling, shy teenager sitting on the sofa in the librarians’ lounge, my naked thighs clamped together. In my shaking hand I clench the razor-sharp hunting knife. Blake kneels before me, his pale underarm presented to me. That creamy skin looks as soft as his penis does. I have never touched his penis with my hands, but I can feel it right now fingering my knees. Presumably it’s his penis that I feel. I don’t look. I don’t want to look at his arm either. I keep my gaze fixed on his face.
“Cut me, Candy,” he whispers.
His voice is pleading and hypnotically powerful at the same time. And his eyes—the passion and importunity in them—his gaze is so naked that now I can hardly bear to look at his face either.
“Cut me. Do it, Candy! If you love me, do this to me.”
I whimper, “I can’t.”
>
“Once you do it, you’ll love it, Candy. Do it!”
When his voice takes on that vehemence of command, I cannot resist him, even though I must use both quaking hands to lift the knife. Barely able to control the wavering blade, I place its grinning edge against the petal-soft skin with its blue shadow of a vein on the inner side of Blake’s elbow. Wincing, I slide the blade about an inch. Bright, bright cherry red drizzle wells up from Blake’s vanilla skin to spiral in candy cane stripes down the side of his arm, then drip to the dull linoleum floor. And the low sound that trickles from Blake’s wet mouth—I have never heard anything that stirs me so deeply, not even the way he moans when he comes in me.
He is right. I love cutting him. I want to cut him again. I want to hear that cry of utterly passionate, injured ecstasy again.
And the fierce feral grinning knife, I want it for my own. I want to take it home and make my parents cry out in a red ecstasy that will have nothing to do with love or nakedness. I want to open them up and see whether they have blood inside them. I want to make them scream and be real.
I want to kill them.
I am terrified.
Not of Blake.
Terrified of someone savage and fearsome whom I have never met before.
I am terrified of my primal self.
* * *
This was what I had not wanted to remember.
Standing at the dead end of the dark passageway in Blake’s embrace, with my lifeblood trickling from my arm while Pandora’s blade pressed to my spine, I flashed back to that last day with Blake before my parents took me away, and I shuddered. That scene of the story, that brief red interlude, was the part I had blocked out with a white light in my mind. It was the reason I had wrapped myself in shining dreams of a true love all my life. It was the reason I had fantasized Blake as my prince, my darling, my angel, for all these years.
Because, if he was my prince, then I remained a princess, no matter what my parents called me.
And if he was my rebel angel, then, bearing his child, I was a rebel angel too.
But if he was—what he really was . . .
If I had done what I had done, and felt that sick thrill, and that even more fearsome urge to kill—then what was I?
Even now, I could barely face it.
Yet now I needed it as never before. As Blake held me close. As Blake eased his hands to my shoulders, his knife blade caressing the side of my neck, while he gazed into my face.
God only knows what he saw in my eyes. The red memory, intimation of the unthinkable, knifed through me for only one slashing flashback moment, then left me dazed and stupefied, like an accident victim attempting with difficulty to remember who I was and where I was and how I had gotten there.
* * *
Sam’s first impulse was to obey Walker’s summons, to go tell the Appletree police and the FBI guys about finding Dorrie’s flashlight.
But then a leaden, stubborn feeling stopped him. Had they come running when he called? No. So why should he come running when they called?
Keeping his distance, Sam crab-walked his way back toward the building, casting about like a beagle hunting for rabbit spoor. He saw a clear plastic candy wrapper on the gravel, then another. They meant nothing to him, but in the ironically golden sunshine they sparkled, caught his attention, and led him on a kind of trail toward the back of the old library, where the antiquated concrete cellar entrance jutted out from the foundation. Near it, something else glinted in the sun. Sam headed over there to see what it was.
Standing beside the old-fashioned cellar entrance, a stairway into the ground covered by a metal door, Sam bent to see what the sparkly thing in the gravel was.
Some sort of kid’s toy or bauble. Little, about the size of a triple-A battery, with some kind of blue cut glass—heck, probably molded plastic—some kind of lens or ornament on the end. It meant nothing to Sam. He didn’t even bother to pick it up. With a grunt he began to straighten—
And found himself looking directly at the edge of a rusty old cellar door hinge. That is, the sloped concrete cellar entryway at this point rose to the level of his eyes, and the hinge lay on top. Mostly horizontal, because the heavy door—two doors overlapping, really—lay on top to keep snow and such out of the stairwell. They didn’t make cellar doors like that anymore.
The remarkable thing about this hinge was that it had big round screwheads on top, but Sam didn’t see any screws going through the metal into the concrete.
No screw shafts.
Just shadow.
The hinge was kind of hovering about an eighth of an inch above the concrete.
Sam blinked, peered, then looked at the other hinge on this side. But even before he moved his eyes, he knew.
The door looked like it was doing what a door was supposed to do, but actually it was just lying there on top of its concrete base.
Firmly padlocked, of course.
A wordless roar erupted from Sam’s chest. He lunged, gripped, and flung the entire double door, padlock and all, off the cellarway in one heave, like a grizzly bear attacking a deadfall.
FOURTEEN
Bert saw Sam White begin to straighten, then freeze into a rigid fishhook, peering at the side of the cellarway.
Then he saw Sam White surge up like a tsunami, seize the door that lay on top of the cellarway, and hurl the whole damn thing to the side. He threw it on the gravel of the parking lot with a crash worthy of a demolition derby. Heads turned. Men shouted. Paula, the constable, screeched, “Oh, my God!”—her soprano voice the only one Bert could understand. Not that he understood much at the time. He just reacted, running forward.
He got there before anyone else, in time to see Sam White plunge down a steep flight of concrete block steps and slam into a closed door.
A vertical door this time, made of metal painted a dirty dark green, army green. Otherwise, featureless. Standing at the top of the cellarway, Bert scanned that door as Sam clawed at the damn thing. The poor guy literally couldn’t get a handle on it. There was none.
Bert felt people, cops mostly, pressing all around him to gawk like a troop of monkeys, and he heard their voices unprofessionally babbling: Holy shit, would you look at that, damn thing was just lying there all the time, wait till DC hears about this, neighbor lady said she thought somebody’s been going in and out, who the hell is that civilian in there, where’s the judge when we need a warrant. Static. Static of radios and static of bureaucracy.
“Bert!” bellowed Walker’s voice in his ear. “Get Mr. White out of there!”
Staring at the gloomy green door, Bert did not immediately respond. Not that conflicting orders bothered him—come here, go there—but the door at the bottom of the cellar stairs was not the entry he remembered from when he was a kid and worked at the cigar factory. And he couldn’t imagine why the library would have put in a massive metal door like that, worthy of a fortress, just to keep people out of the basement—
“Bert!”
Asshole, Bert thought as he started to move, walking forward to wince his way down the concrete block steps, which were too steep for his aching old bones. Walker should do some of his own shithead work sometimes. At the dank, dim bottom of the stairs with Sam White, Bert laid a hand on the younger man’s upper arm. “Come on, Mr. White. Out of the way, now.”
Sam barely seemed to notice. Didn’t even look at him. Just shook off the hand like a horse shaking off a fly, stood back, launched himself from the bottom step, and rammed the door as hard as he could with his shoulder.
He might as well have been ramming Hoover Dam. The metal door took no notice of him whatsoever.
Sam White looked a bit shook-up, though, and Bert took the opportunity to grasp him by the arm again. “Come on, Sam. Let the professionals—”
From some small distance above a
nd behind him he heard Paula’s voice yell, “The light just came on!”
Bert heard the hubbub up there increase. Heard Walker yell, presumably at Paula, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“In that room with the broken window!” Paula screeched in reply. “I’m telling you, an electric light just came on in there!”
* * *
“We do it to each other,” Blake was telling me huskily, a drizzle of tears on his combat-scarred face. Inches apart, we gazed into each other’s humid eyes, and any sense of the real world receded into haze and shadows.
“Yes,” I breathed. “Yes, darling. You and I.”
“And Pandora.”
“Yes. Yes, with Pandora. We do it together.”
He nodded, blinking; tears trembled like dew on his eyelashes. “We take turns. I open your wrist. The left one, because that’s where the blood runs straight from the heart. Then I give Pandora to you, and you open my left wrist. Then we press them together so the blood mingles.”
“Oh, how beautiful,” I whispered, gazing into his eyes, so close to him that I should have been able to see his soul if he’d had one.
“Yes.” He swallowed hard. “It’s my own dream of the . . . the ultimate way for two to become one, better than lovemaking, better than intimacy. Since I was a kid, I dreamed wet dreams at night and I dreamed this dream all the time. We press our slit wrists together and we press our bodies together. We join in blood and we join in flesh.”
“It’s poetry,” I murmured.
“Yes. Yes, it’s poetry. And to make it complete we slash the right ones as well, and join them in blood, and we embrace. . . .”
I heard a clashing, metallic noise from outside somewhere. At the far end of the building.
Blake heard it too. His gaze grew vague, worried, shifting away from mine. He said, “No. No, it’s not right. We should be naked and we should be lying down.”
“There’s no time. They’re coming.” My God, were they coming? Not daring to believe that help could really be on the way, I stayed in role as the mother of all Candies, lifting my hand to Blake’s face. I touched. Harsh wet skin, scars, hard flesh, hard bone. I pressed my palm to his chin, urging his gaze back to mine. As long as he looked into my eyes, deep into my eyes, gazing only at my eyes, bypassing my lupus-ravaged body and face, he seemed to know who I was. And he was mine again. Or I was his. And everything depended on my keeping it that way until Juliet was safe.
Dark Lie (9781101607084) Page 20
