by Michael Shea
The document’s cumulative effect on Patti was more of melancholy than fear. The john who wrote it was a hurt-freak, sure, but the letter-writing types blew it off that way and never came to dealing harm. The girls had done some blow from Sheri’s vial to clear their heads from the beers, and Patti’s body was liking it; she was feeling stronger than she had for days. This letter writer’s words were strange, yes, this incredible gloominess hung over them—but then, bottom line, this was a very easy fifty bucks.
Sheri, on the other hand, got a little freaked about it. She’d started drinking much earlier in the day, she’d had a lot more blow than Patti, and her nerves now were wearing down. She was still laughing at things, but the humor was very thin. “I’ll tell you what, girl, these are weird vibes I’m getting today. You know what? I did kinda hear like, music. Behind the door…? Now we get this shit!” and she swept her hands at the pages but not touching them, as a woman might try to shoo off a spider. “You know what let’s do? Let’s have a sleep-over at your place, I’ll come sleep over, just like slumber parties.”
“That’d be fun! But you sleep in my bed, no kicking, OK?”
Sheri cawed with relieved laughter—her sleep-kicking a joke with them. Sensing Sheri’s fear—her desperation not to be alone tonight—scared Patti in turn.
They walked the sidewalks through the almost-night, headlights blazing everywhere, both of them so glad of each other’s company it almost embarrassed them.
At the all-night Safeway they got provisions: sloe gin, vodka, bags of ice, 7UP, bags of chips and puffs and cookies and candy bars. They repaired with their purchases to Patti’s place.
She had a small cottage in a four-cottage court, with very old people living in the other three units. The girls shoved the bed into the corner so they could drop pillows against all the walls to lean back on. They turned on the radio and the TV, then got out the phone book and started making joke calls to people with funny names while eating, drinking, smoking, watching, listening, and bantering with each other.
Their consciousness outlasted their provisions, but not by long. Soon, back to back, they slept; bathed and laved by the gently burbling soundwash and the ash-grey light of pulsing images.
They woke to a day that was sunny, windy, and smogless. They rose at high, glorious noon and walked to a coffee shop for breakfast. The breeze was combing buttery light into the waxen fronds of the palms, while the Hollywood Hills seemed most opulently brocaded—under the sky’s flawless blue—with the silver-green of sagebrush and sumac.
As they ravened breakfast, they plotted borrowing a car and taking a drive. Then Sheri’s pimp walked in. She waved him over brightly, but Patti was sure she was as disappointed as herself. Rudy took a chair long enough to inform Sheri how lucky she was he’d run into her, since he had something important for her that afternoon. Contemptuously he snatched up the bill and paid for both girls. Sheri left in tow, and gave Patti a rueful wave from the door.
Patti’s appetite left her. She dawdled over coffee and stepped at last, unwillingly, out into the day’s polychrome splendor. Its very clarity took on a sinister quality of remorselessness. Behold, the whole world and all its children moved under the glaring sun’s brutal, endless revelation. Nothing could hide. Not in this world…though of course there were other worlds, where beings lie hidden immemorially…
She shivered as if something had crawled across her. The thoughts had passed through Patti, but were not hers. She sat on a bus-stop bench and tightly crossed her arms as if to get a literal hold on herself. The strange thoughts, by their feeling, she knew instinctively to be echoes raised somehow by what they had read last night. Away with them, then! The creep had had more than his money’s worth of reading from her already, and now she would forget those unclean pages. As for her depression, it was a freakish sadness caused by the spoiling of her holiday with Sheri, and it was silly to give in to it.
Thus she rallied herself and got to her feet. She walked a few blocks without aim, somewhat stiff and resolute. At length the sunlight and her natural health of body had healed her mood, and she fell into a pleasant, veering ramble down miles of Hollywood residential streets, relishing the cheap cuteness of the houses and the lushness of their long-planted trees and gardens.
Almost she left the entire city. A happy, rushing sense of her freedom grew upon her, and she suddenly pointed out to herself that she had nearly four hundred dollars in her purse. She came within an ace of swaggering into a Greyhound station with two quickly packed suitcases and buying a ticket to either San Diego or Santa Barbara, whichever had the earlier departure time. With brave suddenness to simplify her life and remove it, at a stroke, from the evil that had seemed to haunt it recently…
In the end, it was Patti’s laziness that made her veer from this decision. The packing, the bus ride, the looking for a new apartment, the searching for a job…so many details and hours of tedium! And as she meditated on the toilsomeness of it all, she found that these familiar old Hollywood residential streets were taking on a new allure.
And really, how could she leave? After what had it been? Four? Five years? After so long, Hollywood was basically her hometown. These shady little streets with their root-buckled sidewalks—they were so well known to her, yet so full of interest.
She had turned onto a still, green block, gorgeously scented and overhung by huge old peppertrees. She was some few dozen yards into the block before she realized that the freeway had cut it off at the far end. But at that end a black-on-yellow arrow indicated a narrow egress, so she kept walking. Then, several houses ahead, a very large man in overalls appeared, dragging a huge German shepherd across the lawn.
Patti saw a new brown van parked by the curb, and recognized it and the man at once. The vehicle was one of two belonging to Fat Face’s stray refuge, and the man was one of his two full-time collectors.
He had the struggling brute by the neck with a noosed stick. He stopped and looked at Patti with some intensity as she approached. The vine-drowned cottage whose lawn he stood on was dark, tight shut, and seemed deserted—as did the entire block—and it struck Patti that the man could have spotted the dog by chance and might now be thinking it hers. She smiled and shook her head as she came up.
“He’s not mine! I don’t even live around here!”
Something in the way her words echoed down the stillness of the street gave Patti a pang. She was sure they had made the collector’s eyes narrow. He was tall, round, and smooth, with a face of his employer’s type, though not as jovial. He was severely clubfooted and bloat-legged on the left, as well as being inordinately bellied, all things to which the coveralls lent a merciful vagueness. The green baseball cap he wore somehow completed the look of ill-balance and slow wit that the man wore.
But as she got nearer, already wanting to turn and run the other way, she received a shocking impression of strength in the uncouth figure. The man had paused in a half turn and was partly crouched—not a position of firm leverage. The dog, whose paws and muzzle showed some Bernard, surely weighed well over a hundred and fifty pounds, and it fought with all its might, but its struggles sent not even a tremor through its captor’s massive arm; the animal was as immovably moored as to a tree. Patti edged to one side of the walk, pretending a wariness of the dog, which its helplessness made droll, and moved to pass. The collector’s hand, as if absently, pressed down on the noose. The beast’s head seemed to swell, its struggles grew more galvanic and constricted by extreme distress. And while thus smoothly he began throttling the beast, the collector cast a glance up and down the block and stepped into Patti’s path, effortlessly dragging the animal with him.
They stood face to face, very near. The ugly mathematics of peril swiftly clicked in her brain; the mass, the force, the time—all were sufficient. The next couple of moments could finish her. With a jerk he could kill the dog, drop it, seize her, and thrust her into the van. Indeed, the dog was at the very point of death. The collector began to smile nas
tily, and his breath came—foul and oddly cold—gusting against her face. Then something began to happen to his eyes. They were rolling up, like a man’s when he’s coming, but they didn’t roll white; they were rolling up a jet-black—two glossy obsidian globes eclipsing from below the watery blue ones. Her lungs began to gather air to scream. A taxicab swung onto the street.
The collector’s grip eased on the half-unconscious dog. He stood blinking furiously, and it seemed he could not unwind his bulky body from the menacing tension it had taken on. He stood, still frozen on the very threshold of assault, and the cold foulness still gusted from him with the labor of his breathing. In another instant Patti’s reflexes fired and she was released with a leap from the curb out into the street, but there was time enough for her to have the thought she knew that stench the blinking gargoyle breathed.
And then she was in the cab. The driver sullenly informed her then of her luck in catching him on his special shortcut to a freeway on-ramp. She looked at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign tongue. More gently he asked her destination, and without thought she answered, “The Greyhound station.”
Flight. With sweet, simple motion to cancel Hollywood, and its walking ghosts of murder, and its lurking plunderers of the body, and its nasty, nameless scribblers of letters whose pleasure it was to defile the mind with nightmares. But of course, she must pack. She rerouted the driver to her apartment.
This involved a doubling back that took them across the street of her encounter. The van was still parked by the curb, but neither collector nor dog was in sight. Oddly, the van seemed to be moving slightly, rocking as if with interior movement of fitful vigor. Her look was brief, from a half-block distance, but in the shady stillness the subtle tremoring made a vivid impression.
Then she remembered Fat Face. Of course! She could report the driver to him. His majestic face, his bland avuncular smile—the comforting aura of him flooded soothingly over her fear. What, after all, had happened? A creepy disabled guy with an eye infection had been dangerously tempted to rape her. Fat Face would talk to him. Fat Face would vigorously protect her from any further danger. And meanwhile, in the telling of the story…Patti smiled, planning her pretty embarrassment at the intimate topic; she would express her girlish gratitude so warmly. It would lead smoothly to the tender seduction of her fantasy.
She rerouted the taxi yet again, not without first giving the driver a ten-dollar tip in advance. She had him drop her on the Boulevard. She would cop a little blow and get some donuts before going back to the Parnassus, and across the street to Fat Face.
But instead she spent the rest of the afternoon on the Boulevard. Having kindly Fat Face close on hand to fix things neutralized the terror of the near-rape. Patti believed in finding effective antidotes to her problems. Fat Face, the remedy, was on hand, so there was no rush about it. She did a couple healthy knuckles full of flake in the ladies’ room of Dunkin’ Donuts, and then went out and enjoyed two chocolate frosted Old-Fashioneds with thickly creamed coffee. She mused that while there was relief in Fat Face’s presence, there was a creepiness about his entire enterprise that was a real obstacle to visiting him, and that she might as well put it off till tomorrow morning and just relax today. It was cruel, of course, to see deformity as creepy—that had to be what was freaking her in Fat Face’s building yesterday, and it was unfair, even that huge creep—strangling the dog one-handed, his eyes fixed on her, rolling black—even he deserved sympathy for his deformity. That was what was so great about Fat Face, he was so humanitarian, but the flip side was that his humanitarianism associated him with all these creeps.
She went to a double bill, and then went to another one a block away. She nursed a flat of Peppermint Schnapps and honked discrete knuckles of flake, all snug up in her corner balcony seat, mind-surfing through the bright, delirious tumult of car chases and exploding spacecraft and skull-spraying gunfights and screaming falls from the peaks of skyscrapers. This was relaxation! Her favorite way to spend an afternoon.
But her mood began to falter as the movies ground on. She kept thinking of her almost-attacker. It was not his grotesque image that nagged her so much as it was a fugitively familiar aura he had about him. The more she worked to shake this thought, the more its persistence frightened her and the more vivid grew the haunting sensations. A cold malignance gusted off the man like a breath of some alien world’s atmosphere, yet it was an air somehow obscurely known to her. What dream of her own, now lost to her, had shown her that world of dread and wonder and colossal age that now she caught—and knew—the scent of, in this man? The thought was easy to shake off as a freak of mood, but it was insistent in its return, like a fly that kept landing on her. After the movies, when she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the noise and the blaze of neon and headlights in the dusk made her edgy. She felt cold. It may have been the flake still revving in her system, but her legs seemed to feel a hollow thrumming, a big uneasy emptiness somewhere beneath her foot soles. She walked for a while, picking up a new flat of Schnapps. Finally she stepped into a booth and called Sheri.
Her friend had just got home, exhausted from a multiple trick, and wearing a few bruises from a talk afterward with Rudy.
“Why don’t I come over, Sheri? Hey?”
“No, Patti. I’m wrung out, girl. You feel OK?”
“Sure. So get to sleep, then.”
“Naw, hey now—you come over if you want to, Patti, I’m just gonna be dead to the world, is all.”
“Whaddya mean? If you’re tired, you’re tired, and I’ll catch you later. So long.” She could hear, but not change, the anger and disappointment in her own voice. It told her, when she’d hung up but remained staring at the phone, how close to the territory of Fear she stood. Full night had surrounded her glass booth. Against the fresh purple dark, all the street’s scribbly neon squirmed and swam, like sea-things of blue and rose and gold, bannering and twisting cryptically over the drowned pavements.
And, almost as though she expected a watery death, Patti could not, for a moment, step from the booth out onto those pavements. Their lethal cold strangeness lay, if not undersea, then surely in an alien poisonous atmosphere that would scorch her lungs. For a ridiculous instant, her body defied her will.
Then she set her sights on a bar half a block distant. She plunged from the booth and grimly made for that haven.
Some three hours later, no longer cold, Patti was walking to Sheri’s. It was a weeknight, and the stillness of the residential streets was not unpleasant. The tree-crowded streetlamps shed a light that was lovely with its whiskey gloss. The street names on their little banners of blue metal had a comic flavor to her tongue, and she called out each as it came into view.
Sheri, after all, had said to come over. The petty cruelty of waking her seemed, to Patti, under the genial excuse of the alcohol, merely prankish. So she sauntered through sleeping Hollywood, knowing the nightwalker’s exhilaration of being awake in a dormant world.
Sheri lived in a stucco cottage that was a bit tackier than Patti’s, though larger, each cottage possessing a little driveway and a garage in back. And though there was a light on in the living room, it was up the driveway that Patti went, deciding, with sudden impishness, to spook her friend. She crept around the rear corner and stole up to the screened window of Sheri’s bedroom, meaning to make noises through a crack if one had been left open.
The window was in fact fully raised, though a blind was drawn within. Even as Patti leaned close, she heard movement inside the darkened room. In the next instant a gust of breeze came up and pushed back the blind within.
Sheri was on her back in the bed and somebody was on top of her, so that all Patti could see of her was her arms and her face, which stared round-eyed at the ceiling as she was rocked again and again on the bed. Patti viewed that surging, grappling labor for two instants, no more, and retreated, almost staggering, in a primitive reflex of shame more deep-lying in her than any of the sophistications of her adult professional li
fe.
Shame and a weird childish glee. She hurried out to the sidewalk. Her head rang, and she felt giggly and frightened to a degree that managed to astonish her even through her liquor. What was with her? She’d been paid to watch far grosser things than a simple coupling. On the other hand, there had been a foul smell in the bedroom and a nagging hint of music too, she thought, a faint, unpleasant, twisty tune coming from somewhere indefinite…
Those vague feelings quickly yielded to the humorous side of the accident. She walked to the nearest main street and found a bar. In it, she killed half an hour with two further doubles and then, reckoning enough time had passed, walked back to Sheri’s.
The living-room light was still on. Patti rang the bell and heard it inside, a rattly probe of noise that raised no stir of response. All at once she felt a light rush of suspicion, like some long-legged insect scuttling daintily up her spine. She felt that, as once before in the last few days, the silence she was hearing concealed a presence, not an absence. But why should this make her begin, ever so slightly, to sweat? It could be Sheri playing possum. Trying by abruptness to throw off her fear, Patti seized the knob. The door opened and she rushed in, calling:
“Ready or not, one, two, three.”
Before she was fully in the room, her knees buckled under her, for a fiendish stench filled it. It was a carrion smell, a fierce, damp rankness that bit and pierced her nose. It was so palpable an assault it seemed to crawl all over her—to wriggle through her scalp and stain her flesh as if with brimstone and graveslime.
Clinging still to the doorknob she looked woozily about the room, whose sloppy normality, coming to her as it did through that surreal fetor, struck her almost eerily. Here was the litter of wrappers, magazines, and dishes—thickest around the couch—so familiar to her. The TV, on low, was crowned with ashtrays and beer cans, while on the couch that it faced lay a freshly opened bag of Fritos.
But it was from the bedroom door, partly ajar, that the nearly visible miasma welled most thickly, as from its source. And it would be in the bedroom that Sheri would lie. She would be lying dead in its darkness. For, past experience and description though it was, the stench proclaimed that meaning grim and clear: death. Patti turned behind her to take a last clean breath, and stumbled toward the bedroom.
