by Laird Barron
"Love your hair," she said.
"Thanks," Royce said. They stood shoulder to shoulder; close enough he smelled her bath oils, the sweet exhaust of gin on her breath. "Cigarette?"
"No. They ruin your teeth."
He lighted one for himself, suppressed the urge to fidget with his lighter. After the silence between them dragged out, he said, "A mushroom walks into a bar—"
"Oh, shit."
"A mushroom walks into a bar. Sees this gorgeous woman sitting by herself. So he buys her a drink and asks if she'd like to dance. The woman looks him up and down and finally says no thanks. And this mushroom is pretty deflated, so he asks why not. The woman says it's nothing personal, 'I don't dance with mushrooms.' And he says, 'Oh, c'mon, I'm a real fungi!'"
She delicately wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her sweater. "Can you?"
"Dance? Sure. I learned to tango at charm school."
"I meant in your condition. You're pretty shit-faced. Besides, the band's calling it a night."
She was correct; the sextet began to break down their instruments and pack them toward the gatehouse. Royce sighed. "Maybe next time. The Rover has live music on weekends. If you like jazz hits rendered by girls whose English consists of "hello, mister" and most of the words to most of the songs—"
"Here's a better idea: Why don't we nip off to your place and have a nightcap."
"I'm out of stock" he said, trying for a light touch.
"Or better yet, let's skip all the bullshit. I'll get down on my knees and suck your cock. Does that work for you?" She tilted her head to meet his eyes. Her face was smooth and white and luminous.
Royce floundered for an appropriate response; between the horror show of a video, the half-magnum of pink champagne, and the surrealistic conversation, it took several seconds to deduce she'd been toying with him. Heat rushed through his skull and he overcame the nearly overwhelming urge to crack her across the face, to grab her shoulders and shake her until she rattled. His gorge rose; he forced his fingers to unclench. He said, "I suppose you're good with your mouth. James and Shea know talent when they see it, right?"
She chuckled and flipped the bottle underhand. It splashed in the pool. "Nighty-night, sweet prince. Go sleep it off, hey? You stink like a rat."
Rat? There was a provocative choice of words. Shelley Jackson and Agatha Ward must've compared notes. Maybe they knew something, maybe he'd slipped along the line; his work was art, not a perfect science, and he was far from flawless — especially of late. He was up to his neck in mistakes. For the first time in an age, he wanted to go home, whatever that meant. He could take a vacation, look up some of his college buddies, an old girlfriend or two with whom he hadn't managed to burn every bridge.
"Screw you, bitch. You look like a boy, anyway." Shelley Jackson was too far away to hear, but the morose waiter gave him a pitying look as he came to retrieve the empties. The man used one of the deck chairs to snag the bottle floating in the pool.
Agatha Ward stood near doors to the ballroom in a tight circle, which included the building superintendent, an elegant gentleman named Bertram Harris; Mrs. Tuttle; and several geezers Royce vaguely recognized from around the complex. Mrs. Ward waved to him as he listed for the elevator. Her body rippled and became transparent, revealing her skeleton suspended in its jelly. The bones were too long, too sinuous for a woman of such enormous girth; her spine recoiled like a chain of knives as her skull swiveled to track him. The mirage fanned outward and the crowd was abruptly transfigured into a mobile of skeletal X-rays. For an instant the flesh of his own hand gave way to showcase his finger bones, the metacarpal with its scar and the pins from a long-ago biking mishap in the Pyrenees, the slender tube of forearm—
Royce collapsed into the lift. When the doors parted, he'd gone completely rubbery and had to slide along the wall to his door. Too much champagne. Or something more sinister. He'd heard the cautionary tales about Mickeys in the wine, the date rape drugs kidnapers preferred. Worst case scenario, in a few hours Atlanta would receive a call from a disembodied voice demanding X amount for Royce's safe return. Maybe they'd send Atlanta a finger or an ear first, just to set the ground rules. If he worked for the Germans, or the French, or the Italians, there'd be no question about whether they'd cough up the ransom. American companies were more unpredictable. Next time, he'd definitely go with the Italians, just to be on the safe side.
Too much champagne, I'm fine, everything is fine. Full speed ahead, Royce, old bean. Kick the door shut. There's a boy.
Finally, he made it to the bed and sprawled on his back. He pawed at the phone in his pants pocket, unaware of who he might call at this late hour, who might gallop to his rescue, if not the police, and he knew from a thousand dirty deals the police were never to be trusted, but all feeling leaked from his fingers and a few moments later he fell unconscious.
Somewhere in the void of night Shelley Jackson crept into his bed. He jerked awake and shoved her to the floor in a moment of stark terror, his brain confused as to whether this was another nightmare, a hallucination fueled by his earlier kamikaze excesses. Shelley Jackson laughed crazily. A tendril of blood leaked from her nostril. The blue and red running lights of a low-flying helicopter traveled across the room, briefly illuminating the wildness of her expression, her feral, inhuman beauty.
Royce froze in a half-crouch upon the edge of the bed, now very much convinced this was the real deal for once, not a fever dream. A hundred thoughts crashed into each other, among them, How the hell did she get in here? He didn't have much of a chance to analyze the situation. As the light from the chopper dwindled, Shelley Jackson was blurred in the shadows and she sprang upon him, knocked him supine, twisting in his arms, wiry and ferocious. She ravished him with sloppy kisses and nipped his lips, his tongue. She tasted of liquor and blood and darkness. Her skin was damp and hot against his. Her hair was matted and tangled and smelled of animal sweat. She tore his clothes away and licked his chest and belly. As her frantic mouth sealed his cock and her tongue began to circle in tight, efficient strokes, he wondered whose bed she'd recently crawled from before tumbling into his. He came then and the thought was obliterated as he turned inside out.
Later, she straddled him, her sleek, powerful thighs locked against his hips, and rocked slowly, muscles shuddering, her teeth gleaming in the dark as she panted. Royce lay flattened and nearly lifeless from absolute exhaustion, yet his cock profoundly engorged as she took him in until his balls were tight against her ass. She groaned in Cantonese. Her palms ground into his chest and he winced, thinking dimly of the bruises sure to come. His gasp was cut short as she leaned down and clamped her hand over his mouth and nose and shut off his air. He bucked in pseudo orgasms, his hands prying at her wrist and forearm. No way could she maintain her grip; he thought this as fire turned his lungs to ash and black tracers shot through his brain.
Above the thunder in his ears a raucous, eager croaking resounded from the darkness and grew close. Half-formed shapes gathered around the bed, witness to his pathetic struggles. He glimpsed lank hair fanned across elongated breasts, and round paunches rugose as elephant hides. Withered lips fastened to his nipples, the span of his inner thigh. Mouths, toothless as hagfish, slobbered on him. He was dimly mortified and repulsed as his erection intensified and he came again so powerfully he thought his back might break.
He went deaf and blind and spun in clockwise revolutions, faster and faster until he was plunged down the drain into insoluble night.
"Black Weasel."
"Huh?" Royce's eyes were glued shut. Dull, cold light pressed against his lids. His mouth was dry and chapped. He'd curled into the fetal position; his entire body felt like it had been beaten with a club.
Shelley Jackson said, "I don't think it's black sloth. I think it's black weasel hell. A Buddhist punishment."
He covered his face with his arm. "Oh, boy. What?"
"You were raving."
"Oh," he said, and stuck his aching head under a
pillow.
Shelley Jackson wouldn't let up. She said, "What's the worst predicament you've ever been in? Me, I got lost in Bangkok; drunk, drunk, drunk, don't you know; separated from my friends who actually knew their way around the goddamned rat warren. Some guys started following me, chased me into a really slummy part of town. The whole city is slummy, but this took the cake. Very spooky."
"But you made it." He licked his blistered lips, tried to clear the rust from his throat. The previous evening was becoming as distant and mysterious as the depths of the oubliette he'd once seen at a tourist castle in the Loire Valley. He had to piss in the worst way, yet his cock was so sore he dreaded the slightest movement. "You escaped their clutches."
"Did I?" Shelley Jackson's voice was scratchy. She snuggled her warm, solid weight against him, one leg flopped across his own. "All's well that ends well. I could be living in a bamboo box giving head to faceless sonsofbitches who pay for that sort of thing. I'm a lucky girl, then."
"White slavery isn't the trend. They probably wanted your kidneys."
"Not these sorry bastards, they don't. You weren't kidding when you said you were dry. I looked everywhere and nada. I need a drink."
Metal snicked and cigarette smoke coiled into Royce's nose. He moaned and held out his hand until she stuck the cigarette into his mouth for a long drag. He coughed hard enough his guts churned, but the nicotine rush began to do its magic straight away. Eventually he said, "I thought you didn't smoke." When no answer was forthcoming, he continued, "I'll tell you what I need. Coffee."
"Me too. Get up and make some."
They had coffee on the terrace; she in a set of his boxers and a white dress shirt; he wrapped in a towel. It was raining again. Gray clouds erased the city beyond the walls of the compound.
"How come you trashed your TV?"
Royce had to think on that. His TV? It came back to him then, how he'd been trying to find the news, but every channel was filled with either black static, or the repeating image of a chamber filled with dozens of screaming people. The latter was filmed at some distance so the actors were indistinct miniatures. The people screamed because they were strapped to tables, or slung from poles, or trapped inside small baskets. Torturers were quartering them with winches and chains, stabbing them with barbed prongs, or slowly sawing them to pieces. And childlike figures cowered beneath the killing tables in the lakes of gore, bloated bellies like famine victims, and unnaturally slender necks—cranes' necks—and alabaster faces that shone with pure, ravenous horror. Channel after channel of this, and somewhere in the confusion the remote died and the images ran together, faster and faster, and the sounds—! He'd flown into a vicious rage and speared the monitor with one of the fancy plastic kitchen chairs. When was this? A week ago? Two? The little details kept slipping his mind.
Royce said, "Something on the news pissed me off."
"You crazy, Hawthorne? That's it, I bet." She eyed him over her cigarette. "And what the fuck is up with the wig? Ashamed of the ol' bald spot? Overkill."
"Guess I'm a diva at heart."
"Yeah, okay. So. What's yours?"
"My what?"
"Predicament. The worst fix you've ever been in."
"Most people would ask what's the worst thing you've ever done, or what's the worst thing that's ever happened to you . . ."
"Yeah, but I didn't. Pay attention, fool."
"I got locked in a trunk. Russian mobsters. A bunch of amateur slobs. They were just trying to scare me off a job at a munitions factory, but damn." Royce enjoyed the lie because it came so naturally and was so close to the ugly truth of his profession. He had worked at a Russian factory, and if they'd ever caught him spying he imagined they'd have done something drastic, probably far worse than scare him. Yet, even as the lie rolled from his tongue, the brutal peasant faces of his imaginary captors, the suffocating darkness of the trunk, his terror and panic and despair were solid as memories ever got. A black gulf opened in his mind's eye and he shivered and looked away.
"Holy crap. Did it work? They scare you off the job?"
"Hell yes." Royce dragged on the cigarette and blew a rolling cloud of smoke. "Hell, yes."
"That's good stuff, Hawthorne. I ain't ever met anybody who'd been kidnapped by Russkies. You spies live on the edge, doncha?"
There it was, game over. He wondered how it'd happened and discarded the thought. It didn't matter, did it? He turned his face to stone, ticking off the possibilities, the likely outcomes, the avenues of escape. "Excuse me?"
"Lighten up, boy. You've got telescopes and cameras up the wazoo . . .Either you're a perv, which I bet is incidental, or you're keeping tabs on somebody here at the LRA. Besides, I've done a little checking on you; you got a lot of free time for a QA."
"I'm a hobbyist," he said, his heart beating double time. "Majored in film back in the day. Been thinking of shooting a documentary about voyeurism."
"Bullshit. But it's okay if you've got secrets. It's sexy in a creepy way."
"Wow, thanks."
"No problem, eagle eyes. So, since you mentioned it, what's the worst thing you've ever done. And I don't mean spying on broads in their undies. I mean the worst."
"Be prepared for disappointment. I've lived a blameless, pedestrian life. Besides getting stuffed in the trunk, of course."
"Now you're boring me," she said. She stubbed her cigarette and hugged her knees as the wind came up and rattled the loose bars in the rail. "Wanna know why I decided to come over here? Wanna know what changed my mind?"
Royce shook his head. "Don't jinx it."
"But c'mon—be honest. Isn't all this a bit much? Isn't it kind of unreal? That's what I said when I woke up and saw you half-dead next to me. I said, 'Shell, what kind of freaky shit were you drinking last night, girl?' Admit it. You thought the same thing, except yours was probably more like, 'Fuck yeah! I'm the stallion!' Right?"
His mind filled with pink and black clouds. He said, "I better get dressed. Big day at the factory."
After Royce didn't see Shelley Jackson for a couple days he checked with his sources and discovered she'd gone to Beijing with James for a multinational trade conference and tour of manufacturing provinces, which meant a week or so of morning confabs and afternoons and evenings of drunken debauchery; fully comped, naturally.
Royce broke into her apartment in the middle of the afternoon when activity in the compound was at its ebb. He told himself the trespass wasn't premeditated—he'd come home from work early and paced around the kitchen with caged nervousness, his head throbbing from squinting through the telescope at the same humdrum activity that was a mirror of the past several months. That didn't wash, though; he'd lifted her keys while she snoozed after their second evening of anguished screwing and made copies with a key-mold he stashed in a locked drawer. On the other hand, he'd barely made the conscious decision to do the deed when he found himself before the door as if in a dream or nightmare wherein the sequence of events conforms to the need of the story. The scenes just merged.
You've gone round the bend, pal o' mine. For Chrissake, just walk away. This isn't the silly shit you pulled in college when you were young and dumb and a little obsessive-compulsive behavior was a forgivable side effect of hormones and a lack of judgment. What the fuck do you think you're doing?
The proceedings continued to unravel with the dreamlike quality. He couldn't shake the stupor that descended upon him, that rendered him a helpless observer to his moving hands.
In this dream that was not a dream, Royce peeled yellow caution tape from the threshold; the tape had gone waxy and brittle with age. How could her unit be sealed when he saw her moving around in there so many nights over the recent months? He hesitated to turn the knob, nearly paralyzed by the utter certainty he'd be sorry in the end for this ill-conceived intrusion. Maybe Jenny was right—you're nothing more than a stalker, justify it anyway you want. His hands followed their own agenda and pushed open the door. You'll regret it. Wait and see! Your dick
gets you in trouble every time. But it was too late, he'd ignored the appeals of his better angels and set the machinery in motion. He'd succumbed to curiosity, jealousy and let the dream be his insulation from blame.
It was worse than he'd imagined. Shelley Jackson's unit reeked of carpet vinyl burned to slag, and a richer, headier undercurrent of cooked blood. The apartment was a series of connected boxes, each charred and ruined. A futile cascade of the sprinkler system had burst plumbing and devastated the enclosure beyond even the scope of the fire. Bits of plaster and melted wiring dangled from the ruptured ceilings; water dripped from exposed pipes. He gaped dumbfounded at a half-dozen sides of beef suspended by thick ropes. The slaughtered meat was wrapped in translucent plastic that mitigated the rank decay, muffled the buzz and whine of flies at work. Blood had dripped until it formed a small lake of black pudding. A partially skinned cow head remained attached to one carcass, a grotesquerie of flattened muzzle and bulging eye. Royce tapped the bovine eyeball through its plastic shroud, found it to be as unyielding as a knot of hard leather.
I was in a slaughterhouse once. When was that? Was I really? Oh, yes. You were thirteen, remember? Cousin Tobe's farm; he showed you the old barn where they killed the cows. Tobe's family hadn't used it, not in years. Didn't matter, you held the hammer, saw the chains and the hooks, you practically heard those cow ghosts bawling as they were strung up. What an imagination you've got there, son.
Royce fumbled for the tiny camera he'd dropped into his pocket and clicked an entire memory card of photographic evidence. He poked about the room, snapping his shots and wondering at the absurdity of it all. The dreamlike flow of continuity compelled him to open a cabinet wherein he found a metal box with the paint stripped from intense heat. Inside were a number of half-melted identification cards and blackened passports, each bearing Shelly Jackson's face, but with radically different names and hairstyles. The pictures and passports went into his jacket after a bit.
