Control

by Ed Kurtz

  “Fucker!” he cried. “Now you’ve gotten into me…!”

  “What’s your fucking problem?” Lisa spat.

  A high-pitched titter escaped from his mouth, which surprised Leon enough to clasp his hand over it. He lowered himself onto the sofa and continued to tremble with quiet laughter.

  And when the doorbell chimed only a few minutes later, Leon neither flinched nor recoiled, nor did he feel the least bit anxious or afraid. Rather, he smiled a broad, beaming smile and asked Lisa to answer the door.

  She ignored him, crossing her arms over her breasts.

  Good, he thought. Good, good.

  Silently, he lurched to the door and, covering his bad eye with his hand, opened it to reveal a strange, mismatched pair, both of whom regarded him with evident surprise. One was a grossly obese man with a ponytail and black-rimmed glasses. The other was a petite woman, a third the size of her companion, though busty and full-figured in spite of her tininess.

  “Hello,” the woman said, her face brightening. “You must be Frank? Angelica’s told me a lot about you.”

  The man looked distant and severe.

  “We’re the Zimmermans,” he stated in a way that sounded like he regretted to relay the news.

  Leon knitted his brow and gazed dumbly at them. The woman asked, “Are you okay?”

  Leon shook with laughter.

  “Can we come in?” the fat man wanted to know. He arched an eyebrow and pursed his lips effeminately.

  Leon turned into the foyer, stumbling a little along the way, and then paused to get another look at the fabled couple, who had supposedly traveled out of town in lieu of attending the Shelton soiree. He chuckled at the sight of them, at this immensely overweight giant and his thin, wee wife.

  Upon seeing Lisa appear in the foyer, the fat man lurched forward.

  “I’m Kirk,” he began, stopping short with a gasp.

  Leon dropped the hand from his face and nudged Lisa out of the way, studying the couple closely with his one seeing eye. The nub in the other one convulsed and leaked down his face.

  “I used to be Leon,” he told them. “I don’t know what I am now. But I know what I have to do.”

  “Oh—oh, crap,” Kirk stammered, staring with revulsion at Leon’s dreadful disfigurement. “Your eye…”

  “Oh, you like it?” Leon asked, smiling coquettishly and poking the protuberance with his finger. “I got it from a dear old ant.”

  “I don’t…is this….,” Kirk blabbered. He pressed his thick, rubbery lips together, frustrated with his own inability to form a coherent sentence, and finally sputtered, “Where’s Frank?”

  “Frank’s stuck to the wall with a steel arrow in his face right now,” Leon said like it was the most natural thing in the world. He shook his head and said, “This party’s over, man.”

  The woman tugged at her enormous husband’s sleeve, looking more like a daughter than a wife, and asked, “Should we call the police or an ambulance or something?”

  “Morgan, I got this,” Kirk snapped.

  “Actually, Kirk,” Leon said, “I got this.”

  He gazed deeply into the portly man’s watery eyes and said, “You’re driving.”

  24

  Pixie Stix and Atomic Fireballs. Sunday morning matinees—Benji and Herbie and Black Beauty. Summer excursions to Anderson Mill Pond; the younger girl terrified of the prospect of leeches, the elder one pushes her in. Chutes and Ladders. The older sister’s first date, upon which she was so dismissive of her baby sister’s excitement and anxiety for her—then, the break-up, and up all night in front of the television set, getting sick on popcorn and root beer and giggling at the Monster Movie Mayhem Marathon on channel 20 until four in the morning. Naila liked Varan the Unbelievable best. Ami was partial to Reptilicus. Randall Holibaugh and his indecorous dismissal of Naila was forgotten, if only for one night.

  Tears flowed from Ami’s eyes while her brain involuntarily ripped through fragments of memories, hazy and half-formed and out of sequence. There were better times—much better ones—before Tony Alexander and Naila’s Great Awakening thrust a seemingly permanent wedge between them. Bad marriage, worse divorce, then faux solace in a deep pit of severe fundamentalism…it was more than enough to hide Ami’s own sweet memories from her. Though now, as they broke free from the muddy hollows of her subconscious, Ami wept more furiously and freely than she had in years, and she wondered how it was even remotely possible to have let go of someone with such ease, such abandon. Someone she’d loved so completely as she once loved her only sister.

  And now, though Naila was merely asleep (thanks largely to the heavy dose of cough syrup Ami administered to her by force an hour or so earlier), Ami felt absolutely certain that her beloved sister was gone to her forever.

  Her knees and ankles were badly swollen and dark with clotted bruises, her skin shiny with sweat. Ami could not know how long Naila had danced like that, but she sensed it could have been hours upon hours, and possibly days. And all because a strange, erstwhile unassuming little man with white-blonde hair and sad, downcast eyes told her to.

  “Fucking Leon,” she hissed to herself as she daubed Naila’s skin with a warm, damp washcloth.

  Naila snored—a short, loud snort—and jerked her legs, one after the other, like pistons. A translucent bubble poked out from beneath one of her eyelids, then ran down the side of her head, disappearing into her hair. She was dancing again, even in her medication-induced sleep.

  “I’ll kill him,” Ami groaned through her own coming onslaught of tears. “For taking you away, I’ll kill him.”

  Ami spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping fitfully beside Naila, waking regularly to check on her, always finding her still asleep and sometimes jerking in rhythmic spasms, a Saint Vitus’ Dance Ami knew would never cease. By nightfall, she awoke for the last time, triggered by a worrisome clicking sound that turned out to be Naila’s knees. They were worn down from the incessant, wrenching movement. Ami figured the pain must have been incredible, and yet there was nothing she could do to put an end to it. However unbearable it had to have been, Naila bore it. Her face was slack with sleep, her eyes were gummed up with crust, but her continual stream of tears seeped out from the cracks in the crust like a broken levee. Ami’s heart was breaking seeing her like that. She rubbed the crust away with her thumbs, and the tears flowed more freely.

  Still, Naila slept. Still she danced.

  Ami sat up, stifled a sob in her throat, and left the room for the kitchen. She put the teakettle on the stove and switched on the burner, and as the water heated to a boil, Ami sat at the kitchen table and cried. When the kettle whistled, she took it off the flame and poured a cup, into which she dropped a tea bag from the cupboard. And while it steeped, Ami’s sorrow turned to grim determination.

  There were no two ways about it: she had bleak tasks ahead of her, duties that make her heart sink and stomach flip, but which she knew she had to do.

  Less than a week earlier, her life had been uneventful and mundane. Then she made a friend, a friend who ruined everything. Now Naila was lost; possibly Lisa, too. She had no idea about poor Bess, but she worried. And from there it could only get worse—there was no telling what Leon might do, to what extreme heights his terrible power might take him. How many people he would destroy, or even kill.

  If that awful demonstration at the city center was only the beginning…

  Ami sipped her tea and glared out the kitchen window at the darkening horizon and the slow moving clouds that were orange on the bottom and purple on top. From across the house she heard the bedsprings creaking. It sounded to Ami like lovers who were so familiar with one another that their lovemaking fell instantly into a balanced rhythm. Instead, she knew it was only Naila in the throes of her unremitting paroxysm, contracting and jerking and kicking her legs against her will, for her will was stolen from her. Laden with this knowledge, the sound became agonizing and horrific to Ami, a ghastly portent of the actions she
was preparing to take.

  The tea was still too hot to enjoy, and even if it wasn’t Ami did not believe she could enjoy anything in light of everything that had happened. So she left the steaming cup on the table and returned to Naila’s bedroom.

  Naila continued to thrash about, and now her eyes were open, staring mournfully at her little sister in the doorway.

  “You’re awake…,” Ami whispered.

  “Huh…,” Naila gasped, breathless from the exertion. “Huh—help me.”

  “I’m going to, babe,” Ami said, trying her best not to choke up, not yet.

  “Help.”

  “I will, sweetie. I will.”

  Ami sat down on the edge of the mattress, which groaned under her weight. Naila violently flipped onto her side, thrusting her arm out and smacking Ami on the shoulder with her flailing hand. Ami gently took Naila’s arm and held it still, though the older woman’s legs still twisted and kicked. Naila let out a keening wail.

  “Okay, Naila. Okay.”

  “Mmn…die,” she muttered.

  Ami’s face fell. “Wha—what did you say?”

  “M’wanna die,” her sister managed to say with difficulty, her eyelids fluttering manically.

  “No—Jesus, no, Naila…”

  “Won’t let me…the dance…I can’t…”

  “We’ll fix you, baby—I’ll fix you.”

  “Can’t die,” Naila continued, oblivious to Ami’s words. “Tried…won’t let me.”

  Naila spasmed; her back cracked audibly. Ami tried to stifle a sob, but failed.

  The pillow beside Naila, upon which Ami had so erratically slept before, was pink and lacy and packed densely with foam rubber. Ami reached over Naila to retrieve it, and she hugged it tightly against her breast for a while. Then she drew in a long, thin breath and steeled herself.

  Again, Naila’s back seized up and she bared her teeth in agony. Again, Ami squeezed her eyes shut and whimpered miserably.

  Naila bucked and twisted her head away from the pillow, startling Ami into withdrawing it quickly. But then the older sister shot a pleading, tearful glance up at Ami’s face.

  “Puh-please,” she said. “Please.”

  Ami clamped her teeth together, shuddered and jammed the pillow down on Naila’s face. As Naila’s legs thrashed and her arms flapped like wings, Ami could not help but wonder if it was only the dancing, or if Naila was fighting for her life.

  For a fraction of a second, Ami’s resolve broke. She wanted to hurl the pillow across the room, to embrace her sister and kiss her cheek and promise her that she’d find another way.

  Except there was no other way. And Ami knew it.

  She pressed down harder. The thrashing dance intensified for several long, agonizing seconds, then gradually began to slow to a languid squirming.

  And, eventually, Naila stopped moving altogether.

  The dance—her anguish—was over.

  Ami threw the pillow out into the hall with a savage growl and collapsed on top of her sister’s body.

  No more candy from the general store. No B movies or rotten boyfriends, summer swims or late nights, just the two of them.

  Ami threw her head back and screamed.

  25

  Leon cocked his head to one side and regarded his father. If he held his head at just the right angle, he was now able to see out of his right eye, though the vision was fuzzy at best. The nub had already developed into a sort of stalk, a cluster of fuzzy green florets growing at the base. Though the pain in the eye decreased substantially with the growth of the stalk, the deep throbbing in his forehead increased tenfold. Whereas his control of others successfully dulled the pain before, now it did nothing to assuage it. But Leon had a plan. Now, not even the hot, punching misery in his head could slow him down.

  Harold lay still in his chair, his head slumped on one shoulder, a little grayer than usual. He smelled awful, but he looked peaceful. Like he was sleeping.

  Leon patted the dead man on the top of his head.

  “Hey, pop,” he said. “I’m home. I brought some friends.”

  He craned his neck to see through the open front door, out onto the small patch of yellow grass and dead earth in front of the house. There stood six silhouettes—all of them perfectly still, like the shadows of tombstones in the pale moonlight. Leon jerked a thumb in their direction.

  “I’ve got loads of friends now, pop. It’s practically a whole new family for me. You’d be proud as hell if you weren’t dead. I bet you would.”

  He slapped Harold’s face with the flat of his hand. It was clammy and cool.

  “Proud, proud papa,” he said.

  From somewhere in the darkness of the back of the house, a soft, high-pitched whine sounded. Leon squinted at the hallway and said, “Bess?”

  As if to confirm his suspicion, the dog came limping in from the hallway, the bandages on her forepaw dangling loose and matted with dirt and a bit of blood. She kept her deeply scored snout pointed south, but her rheumy eyes stared up at Leon from their wet, red sockets.

  “Bessy,” Leon said, bending over to pet the dog.

  She snuffled and shifted back and forth, ecstatic to receive the attention.

  “That’s a good dog, that’s a good girl.”

  Bess reveled in the physical contact—her first in many days—and thumped her tail against the dead man’s chair. Then, as she hobbled a half-circle around Leon’s legs, Bess caught sight of the dark figures lingering in the front yard. She froze and bared her fangs, a trilling growl working up in her throat.

  “No, Bess. Friends. These are our friends.”

  He rose up to his full height and grinned.

  “Or disciples,” he muttered. “More like. They’re my disciples, and I’m the fucking bishop.”

  Leon’s cheeks bloomed red and he fell into a peal of shrill giggles.

  “Scratch that—I’m the pope.”

  His giggles exploded into wracking laughter, replete with tears and gasps for breath. Bess regarded him quizzically. The six dark figures on the lawn did nothing apart from stand still and wait.

  Leon said, “I—I have an idea.”

  * * *

  The disciples knelt on the grubby, trash-strewn floor of the living room, arranged neatly in an arch that began with Lisa near the front door and swooped around to Martina at the end, next to Harold’s gray corpse in the armchair. Both Martina and Jim remained buck naked, just as they were when Leon emerged from the fancy bathroom at Frank and Angelica’s mini mansion in Riverside Hills. Kirk, far and away the largest of the sextet, took up the middle of the arch, with his diminutive spouse Morgan right beside him. Between him and Lisa knelt Angelica, who by then was very likely the widow of Frank Shelton—for, by Leon’s decree, Frank was left as he was, stuck to the wall with the arrow going clear through his head and gradually bleeding out. There was no one left to object. They were all under Leon’s control now.

  He entered the room from the kitchen, a tattered shoebox held reverently in his hands. He kicked a Chinese food carton and an empty plastic two liter bottle out of his way as he sauntered toward the assemblage. None of them looked directly at him; rather, their eyes rolled helplessly around as though entirely blind, no two of them ever pointing their unseeing gaze at the same place at the same time.

  Leon inflated his chest and then exhaled slowly. He held the shoebox aloft and considered it deferentially.

  “This is my body, now,” he said. “This is my brain.”

  He brought the box down to chest level and approached Martina. Her arms hung dead at her sides, her head tilted at a slight angle. Leon glanced at her small breasts and her paunchy stomach, then brought his eyes back up to her face.

  “Open your mouth,” he commanded her.

  She obeyed.

  Leon dipped his hand into the box and withdrew a small yellow scorpion. The creature was quite dead, and a thin, long stalk protruded from the center of its head. Leon pinched the scorpion by its stiff tail b
etween index finger and thumb, and he gingerly laid it upon Martina’s tongue.

  “Eat this,” he said, “and remember me.”

  Martina closed her mouth around the dead scorpion and chewed. The arachnid’s shell crunched noisily between her teeth. When she swallowed, Leon moved on to Jim and repeated the liturgy, this time with a black and yellow centipede, wound tightly in its death coil. As Jim ground the fungus-infected centipede with his molars, Leon administered a large curly-hair tarantula to Morgan (who was forced to chew off the legs before tucking into the body), then a massive, black emperor scorpion to Kirk, and then Angelica received a hissing cockroach that would never hiss again. The final supplicant was Lisa, for whom Leon saved the finest of his Eucharistic arthropods—the rigid, curled remains of Pablo, the Brazilian wandering spider.

  “Eat this,” Leon instructed for the sixth time, “and remember me.”

  Lisa wrapped her lips around the poisonous spider and its insidious growth and she chewed it to a pulp.

  “My children,” Leon cooed, dropping the empty shoebox to the cluttered floor and spreading his arms out like eagle’s wings. “Soon we shall commence our pilgrimage to the cathedral…”

  Heads lolled and chins sagged. Bess tottered into the kitchen and collapsed in a heap on the linoleum. Leon touched his forehead, at the nucleus of the intense pain he felt there.

  He crooked his mouth to the side and said, “Would you like to see it? It’s ready now, I think. It’s ready to meet you all.”

  Reaching out with both hands, he cradled Lisa’s face and stared deeply into her cloudy eyes.

  “And you’re going to release it for me,” he said with a grin.

  * * *

  Per Leon’s injunction, Kirk and Jim tied his wrists to the posts at the head of Harold’s bed with linens, making sure the knots were good and tight, so that no matter how much he might thrash and flail the procedure would not be marred. His legs he left free, on the assumption that everything would go smoothly as long as his upper half was steady and restrained. Once this was done, Leon commanded Kirk and Jim to return to the living room to join the others—all but Lisa.