Worship the Night

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I didn’t say no,” Mai whispered. “Call me tomorrow...we talk about it then.” She rose from her seat and said brusquely, “Excuse me now, I go to the bathroom.”

  It was while he waited for her that he started to sketch the Crooked Man.

  Lee had always been insecure with women. Whenever he was with Mai, he was both delirious with excitement and miserably depressed, as if at any moment she would deliver the news that she could no longer see him. This depression had not been helped by the fact that several times, over the past few months that they’d been seeing each other, she had nearly backed away, pronounced them as simply friends...only to be drawn toward him again. Now, he sat in his office filled with that same numbing combination of delight and dread...paralyzed before his computer and his work.

  Unwilling to nudge the mouse by his elbow, he retrieved yesterday’s newspaper from a shelf over his monitor. Paging through it, he came upon a local story about an unidentified, formless animal carcass that had washed into and later out of Salem Harbor. He snorted and thought to himself with amusement: “I hope they don’t think ManuCel’s dumping waste products.” After a quarter of an hour, he dropped the paper into the wastebasket.

  At last he forced himself into a semblance of productiveness. And two hours into his work day, the phone rang, and Mai was on the other end saying with business-like gravity, “I meet you tonight at your job parking lot...not my job. I don’t want anyone to see me; I’m not on schedule. Okay?”

  6: Living Ocean

  Dot lay curled in a fetal position. This was the position she had fallen asleep in, under her blanket in her little apartment in Salem, Massachusetts. But when she had drifted into slumber, she had been wearing loose satin pajama pants her mother had given her, and a T-shirt advertising the website My Pet Skeleton. But now, even though her eyes were still closed, she knew she was no longer wearing any clothing at all...and that she no longer lay beneath a blanket in a little apartment in a town called Salem.

  Without opening her eyes, she rolled onto her back. Pushed her legs out straight, and spread her arms wide as if crucified, as if ready to make snow angels in the sand she knew she was lying on.

  Slowly, she turned her face to the sky and opened her eyes.

  She could not see the sky, in fact, through the clouds boiling and churning above her. Layer upon layer of cloud, much of it a deep brown – almost black – as if a forest were burning and this was its spreading smoke, but some of the clouds highlighted or glowing within as some light source – perhaps a sun but perhaps not – burned behind the clouds. Clouds as solid as living stone, others as translucent as ghostly clipper ships scudding along, their sails full of a spectral wind, these ships attacked by the slow motion unfurling arms of vast ectoplasmic krakens. The staggered, billowing and blending cloud layers filled the air above her, mounting to the uppermost limits of the sky like snow-covered mountain ranges at dusk, mounting to the very edge of space itself...but also descending in floating curls and twists of fog, reaching down almost to caress her vulnerable, youthful skin.

  Dot drew in her arms and sat up in the sand. She felt its grit sticking to the curve of her bare back. She could see, now, that the sand around her was of an almost metallic quality, like gold dust. But more of a bronze color, over there. And directly beneath her bottom and the soles of her feet, more of a dark sterling silver appearance. Perhaps it depended on how the light touched the heaped granules, or maybe these pulverized minerals had all been brought together to form this beach...the gold dust swept in from the ocean, all that remained of some crumbled golden city at the bottom of the sea? The silver sand dropped here as ash from another city that had burned, or been blown to dust by a volcanic eruption? A bronze city that had once stood on this very shore, a port city, left to be eroded by the very ocean that had once sustained it?

  Dot gathered herself to her feet, now, and turned toward the unsettling sounds that could only be the ocean behind her. The lapping rhythm of the surf was oddly subdued, muted, however...slowed down to a drawn-out, sibilant hiss and then muffled thump as each languid wave collided with the shore – like the dragging and plodding steps of some impossible giant.

  She had seen this living ocean before, though never so vividly as she saw it now. It was as though the ever present veils of mist had pulled back from it, had parted like the velvet curtains of a stage, to reveal it to her in its full, terrifying splendor at last.

  The sea still extended into a horizon, or oblivion, of fog – looking like huge heaps of snow ploughed up at the edge of a parking lot, dark yet tinged with the color of dusk – but what she could see of it was still enormous, gave her a vertiginous sense of her own smallness, her own ephemeral existence. Even the fog seemed to be of more permanence than herself in the face of the sea’s expanse. It was silvery, and this silver again of a truly metallic quality, like an ocean of liquid mercury. Thick, its waves slow and heavy and languorous. But instead of being of a fluid metal, the ocean actually possessed a more organic quality. Its surface was like a vast skin, the movement of the waves like muscles flexing and shifting beneath that skin. The waves rolled to shore, but did not shatter into spray or surge into foam; instead, they spread themselves across the metallic sand in thin membranes, until they could spread no thinner and withdrew back into their source...like the searching pseudopods of an unbelievably immense organism, probing blindly, feeling the border of the earth before they were reabsorbed into the protoplasmic body.

  One of these rolling waves rose higher than the others, and when it struck the shore with its dull thud, it spread further inland than the others had. Dot shuffled backwards in a hurry, afraid that the attenuating membrane would reach her bare feet...perhaps seize her ankles and draw her out into the ocean to digest her, absorb her, so that she might become one with it. She saw the silvery, almost rubbery membrane extend within a yard of her toes before it slithered backwards again. A shiver skated across her naked flesh.

  Dot backed further away from the edge of the surf. Its awesome scope began to overwhelm her, despite its terrible beauty; she was approaching something like a panic. She had felt like this as a child lying on her back and staring up into the clear night sky. There would be a sudden sensation of falling, of plummeting, up into that sky. She would have to close her eyes, or roll onto her side until she regained her balance and could rise to her feet.

  What if she hadn’t awoken when she had? What if the tide had come in, and covered her in its fleshy film? Drowned her while she was still lost in her dreams?

  With another and more violent shudder, she turned quickly from the sea to face inland again, and just as she did so she saw that there had come a break in the writhing clouds. In this rift she caught a glimpse of some red star or planet that passed for this world’s sun, lowering toward the horizon. Or was it dawn, instead? Or did that star never rise, never set?

  Also, the break in the fog had revealed the silhouette of a building which had formerly been buried in its depths. The building seemed circular or semicircular, its front or maybe all of it composed of pillars. Between the looming pillars were windows without glass, tall and with arched tops, through which the reddish sunlight glowed.

  Dot started toward the mirage-like structure, before the fog could swallow up and conceal it from her again.

  She drew near enough to the curved, columned face of the structure that it did not recede into the mists...but when she looked back toward the ocean, she saw that it was hidden, the rift sealed up behind her. The thickness of the clouds seemed to mute the ocean’s slow motion movements even more, so that she almost couldn’t hear it at all.

  Now the building was less silhouetted, and she could make out a staircase in front that led up into its center. She might have thought interior, but it appeared that there was no roof on the structure, just a bordering ring supported by the columns, like that which the standing stones of Stonehenge had once supported, though this structure was of more refined architecture. Was it some
temple? Or an arena?

  Dot reached the bottom of the broad staircase and placed one foot on its first step. She withdrew her foot sharply. Instead of cold stone beneath her sole, the step had felt oddly rubbery. There had been a slight resilience to it, as she had begun to press her weight forward. Dot crouched down, and warily lay her palm against the step. She hadn’t imagined it. It felt as though a marble stair had been coated over, encased in a sheet of vinyl. The second step felt just the same. They were warm, as well; the same tepid warmth of the air and subtly moist fogs.

  Straightening, she steeled herself, and placed her foot back on the step. Began to ascend, toward the arched entryway to the pillared edifice.

  When she stood in its threshold, she put out her hand to feel the stone. It, too, was rubbery. The mist was so thin at the top of the steps that she could see the stone was silvery in color, like the ocean. Did the tide rise up this far, then? Far enough to cover this building? And had the ocean then grown a skin over the marble of this temple or arena, that lived on even when the tide ebbed?

  She stepped through the doorway, and though its far side was shadowy from the intervening mist, she saw that the building was indeed a complete circle, was indeed without a roof. But there were no seats from which an audience might watch man battle man or animal. There was, however, a low circular platform in the center, around which worshippers might gather to listen to a holy man who stood a little higher than they, if only in his own mind.

  Dot reached this platform, but hesitated short of stepping up onto it...as if afraid some angry deity’s face might come looming out of the clouds that roiled above her head. Some alien, angry god – though every god she had ever read about seemed just as angry, just as alien, as the others.

  The air was dead silent, the sea unheard from here. The deafness Dot experienced was claustrophobic. She might have thought that sound did not exist here anymore were it not for the vague reassurance of her own heavy breath. But then she did hear something more distinct, though what it was she couldn’t say. The choked bark of a dog? The throat-rasping dry heaves of a dying man?

  Dot whirled toward the sound, and saw an indistinct figure framed in the same threshold she had stepped through.

  The figure was mostly human in outline – she supposed. As she watched, it started forward, as if it had been waiting for her to look before it moved. If its vague shape had frightened her before, its movements frightened her more. There would have been no way for her to express its locomotion, except to say that the entity seemed to both float like a bundle of rags, and lope along like a person portraying a werewolf in a film, or on Halloween. Though its surface rippled like a flag, almost snapping in the wind, there was no wind...just the barely noticeable shifting of the warm air.

  Despite the fact that it seemed to be all but boneless, the figure still had a broken appearance, as if its spine were badly misshapen through scoliosis. Far worse, however, was that its head was horribly incomplete, an open half-circle. It was as though the head were a mere coat hanger, and from this coat hanger hung a flayed skin...eager to find itself a new body that could wear it. Give it legitimate life.

  As the figure moved in her direction, Dot found herself backing up until her heel struck against the base of the circular platform at the very center of the flesh-filmed structure. The floating/loping creature gave another croaking bark. It seemed to come for her more swiftly now, and she already began to get a sense of its rotting, fishy-musky smell...

  A hand seized her arm above the elbow, and before she could cry out, Dot heard a man’s voice say, “Step onto the dais.” Without waiting for her to comply, however, the owner of the voice lifted her roughly by the arm. She was forced to step up onto the platform...

  She saw the incomplete scarecrow of a figure come flying toward her at full speed now, a streaming banner of flesh, calling out like a strangled banshee. It was close enough that its stench was suffocating, and she could finally see that its flesh had a silvery aspect.

  But then the clouds fell upon her in an avalanche of snow, buried her, before she could even see the face of the person she would think of – when she awoke in her little apartment in a town called Salem – as her rescuer.

  7: Moon Cake

  When Lee and Mai entered the room on the motel’s second tier they kept their voices blatantly casual, conversational. He turned on the radio. She turned on the TV. He turned off the radio. She sat on the edge of the bed, watching a program about home decoration. He sat beside her. She told him to get dressed for bed. He changed first, into a brown T-shirt and gray sweat pants. She was lying on her belly, without shoes, watching the TV when he returned. He tried to massage her feet but she giggled, ticklish or shy, and got up to change, too. She came out of the bathroom in a leopard-spotted nightie. He would find there were silken, leopard-spotted shorts underneath its high hem, tight against her small hard buttocks. They got into bed together, and he kissed her shoulder, brown and as smooth as bare bone. Rubbed her arms, with their distinct muscles and their multiple, glaring vaccination scars like old bullet wounds. He ran his hand up under her nightie, across her back. Cupped her bottom, marveled at how small it was, like a child’s. He pulled down the front of her low-cut garment to caress, squeeze her breasts. Her nipples, which he had previously only touched in the dark of her parked car – whispery soft in texture, his hand dipped inside her bra – proved to be surprisingly puffy and full for her delicate little breasts. They were as dark in color as an African woman’s, almost black. She ran her hands across his back, under his T-shirt. Their caressing, embracing became more fevered. He kissed her thighs. He peeled away her leopard-patterned undershorts. He restrained his shock at seeing her cesarean scar. It ran from her marred navel to the undergrowth of her pubic hair, not a bikini cut because she was too small for that, her eight pound baby too large to deliver naturally (might she have died, instead, in an earlier time, another country?). It looked like a wound left over from a ritual disembowelment that had miraculously healed. As an extension of this wounding, the flesh over part of her abdomen was too soft, creased, like a deflated balloon. But this was the only area of imperfection. When he pulled her nightie up over her head (then shucking off his own garments, in awkward haste), he exposed her fully. Everywhere smooth like her now familiar and much-kissed shoulder balls. Brown, beside his bloodlessly white and much larger body. Only a rumor of hips – an alien terrain under his palms, which had formerly only known great swelling hills. A distinct, jutting ridge at the bottom of her rib cage, which fascinated his hands. A hard knob of bone, which was almost like the nub of an amputated tail and struck him as anomalous, at the beginning of the short, neat division of her tiny buttocks. (Or maybe it was just that these bones and muscles he felt now had always been buried from him before.) Though there were some spider veins on her lower legs, there was not a dimple of fat on her bottom or the backs of her thighs; the flesh flowed as pure as the plastic of a doll. Her pubic hair was a bold black shape, its strands straight and wildly long, coarse under his strokes. She helped him nudge the tip of his penis against it. His cousin had once had a petite girlfriend, who he had told Lee he’d had difficulty entering, so Lee was not surprised by their initial trouble fitting together. When he was inside her, it did not feel as deeply or securely as what he was familiar with, and her interior was not as slick. But he moved atop her, and she rested her head in profile, black strands across it in a tattered black veil, her full lips pressed together. When he tried to prop himself above her on extended arms, he slipped out, and after that he was too soft from nervousness and she too dry for him to find his way inside again. As a younger man, this failure would have been catastrophic to his ego, maddening to his lust, but they lay and embraced, ended up tickling each other and wrestling. Her ears were so ticklish that she had to cover them with her palms against his kisses and prodding nose, had done so at one point even while they were making love. He tickled her under the arms, and on her soles, and tickled her vagina whi
ch made her squeal and giggle and writhe. She tried to pinch and twist his nipples (teased him about the “fur” surrounding them), and pulled at the hairs in his underarms. He rolled her onto her belly, tried to enter her from behind, rooted futilely, asked her to help him find the correct opening but she only teased, “Mm?” And then she sighed, gently, “Tired.” The younger Lee would have persisted. He whispered for her to go to sleep. She slept, then, for close to five hours. At first, for maybe two hours, he couldn’t join her in slumber. His emotions had already been exploded into fragments, into mist, and then reconfigured before they had even agreed to come here, and so were not in themselves the reason for his sleeplessness; his emotional tumult was a given. It was as simple as being in an alien room, in an alien bed, with an alien body beside him, against him, twined tightly with his own. She was so distinctly of another race that he could have imagined her being from another world altogether. She would change her sleeping position with sharp, decisive movements such as those of her waking hours. She would suddenly wrap her legs around one of his, and drag his arm under her neck, or later her cheek, as a pillow. When he slipped it away, she dreamily awoke to ask him if his arm hurt, and somnambulantly began to rub at it, her eyes still closed. He lay against her back, making “spoons.” She lay against his side, with her head on his shoulder, pulling his arm across her chest and clutching it there snugly in both of her own. Always, her legs or his legs hooked over or around the other’s. He watched her face. In the gloom, so near, it was again so different, so alien, from any face that had been this close to his own. He felt little electric muscle tremors flicker through her from time to time. Once, he had a little spasm like this himself and her body immediately followed with one of its own, as if their bodies communicated at some primal level. He slipped out of bed and she rolled away; she had been complaining about the cold of the room (her feet had been icy when first they’d gone to bed) so he covered her with the quilted blanket and crept into the bathroom. He used the toilet, then showered. This brief time apart from her body was a period of beautiful longing. He returned to her, stole back in beside her, and again she gripped him tightly in her dreaming limbs. They both slept this time. The clock awoke them at 5, as he had programmed it to do. She groggily acknowledged the time. He ran his hand over her again, explored the hard-packed ground of her stark brown landscape. She with her little body like that of an adolescent. She rolled onto her front so that he could squeeze her bottom, rolled onto her back again, her eyes closed demurely. He lay atop her, struggled against her tiny opening to enter her once more. At last he was inside her a second time. He rocked and rotated his hips, and she brought her legs up around him. They were slender, but he had felt strong muscles in them before. They gripped him. Both of them panted out small, moan-like grunts or groans, subdued noises. But he grew too hot in his exertions under the heavy quilt, and he was afraid to ejaculate inside her (he had shyly hidden a condom in the top drawer of the bedside table, but had never put it on) for fear of impregnating her, and he was nervous again and her channel was so small and he withered, could not go inside again. He stimulated her clitoris with his fingers, and she moaned a little in response. He kissed her mutilated belly, traveled swiftly down to her legs, gently pried them apart and buried his face in her hair. With other lovers, he had occasionally thought that he couldn’t blame some men for disliking oral sex with a woman. The smell had been too unpleasant. Had it just been those particular women, or was it a trait of her alien body that there was no unpleasantness in the least? Later, she would tell him that her husband had once said her body smelled to him like something burnt; like funerary incense. But Lee found her cleanly fragrant. Anyway, he thought he would like funerary incense if he smelled it. But after a short while, she told him to “come up here” again...no doubt self-conscious. He thought it might have been her first time with it, and was rather surprised that she had let him try it at all. At last, she told him they had to shower. But they lingered a little while, tickled and wrestled some more to lighten some of the gravity pinning them to the mattress. Last night they had made love by the TV’s undersea illumination; he wanted to see her now in the bold light of the bedside lamp. She lay with her front fully exposed to him, but wouldn’t lie on her belly so he could look at her back and bottom (as if its neat little cleft could be more potentially off-putting than her shocking cesarean scar). Finally she had to spring off the bed and race to the bathroom to shower before he could get the lighted glimpse of her backside that he wanted. From across the room, her legs looked too short for an adult woman and her long, brown-tinted black hair made her head look too big for her body; again like a child or some slim-hipped faerie. He teased her by creeping over to catch her in the shower, but she hadn’t entered it yet and looked up at him in shock, and quickly shut the door. He laughed diabolically and returned to the bed. He gathered up their sleep wear, which lay on the floor to either side of the bed. He sniffed at the inside of the leopard-patterned, shed snake skin of her panties, but there was nothing...not even the hint of funerary incense. He lay in bed feeling both blissful and desolate. They had had pillow talk. Did her husband have pillow talk? Embarrassed, he had told her that if they should ever make love again, he’d use K-Y jelly to lubricate her, make his entry easier. “Yucky,” she told him, when he tried to explain it to her and reassure her about it. He had asked her if she’d enjoyed herself. She had sounded a little reluctant and had admitted to being afraid she might become impregnated. He had asked her if she had reached an orgasm. She had said, “Mm?” She was not familiar with the word. While he tried to explain it, he wondered if she’d ever experienced one in her life, because she said she didn’t know whether she had had one with him or not. She told him a woman could not have a baby if she didn’t achieve an orgasm. He told her this wasn’t true, that some cultures insisted that women have their clitorises cut off, but they still bore children. Now she was calling him to the bathroom; his turn to shower and dress. He found her, to his surprise, standing before the mirror blow-drying her hair wearing only a pair of black mesh panties. She let him touch her through them, cupping the distinct halves of her tight bottom again. She preferred white, especially under her work uniform, she told him, but all her underwear was lacy or frilly like this. He had never seen anything so exotic on a woman. This sort of thing, she wore at the nursing home every evening under her blank white garb? She put on her black bra. In bare feet, without her dizzying platform shoes, she was smaller to him than ever. They were like a husband and a wife standing at the mirror. He showered, dressed, sat beside her on a little sofa. She rested her head in his lap. They talked some more. Then, impulsively, she spun around in his lap and kissed him hard, thrust her hard tongue in his mouth. She bit his, to tease him. She ended up lying across his lap. When it came time to go, at her insistence (he would prefer to live with her in this tiny room for all of eternity), he stood up with her cradled in his arms like a bride. She laughed and he set her down on her feet. When they left (she nearly forgot her umbrella until he reminded her), he said good-bye to the room. After checking out, they drove to a fast food restaurant nearby and ordered bagel, egg and bacon sandwiches and coffee. Now he matched her order where in the beginning he had teased her about always copying his. Sitting right up against the window, gray highway and rain beyond, they talked about it being September and she told him that the Vietnamese/Chinese calendar ran differently. On September 11, by the American calendar, it would be something she described as a “Moon Festival,” when the moon became full, a holiday for children which she likened roughly to Halloween without the ghosts and demons. Children would parade carrying paper lanterns, either bought or made by the children themselves (she knew how to make one shaped like a star), inside of which glowed a candle (she used her little finger to indicate its size). These translucent lanterns might be shaped like birds or other objects. Younger people would give gifts to older people. And the traditional treat she called a “moon cake,” which was packaged in a pr
etty tin box in four individual squares, numbered according to the type of cake. In the center of each little cake was a dried egg yolk, which he correctly guessed represented the full moon. He asked her if the celebration had to do with harvest, fertility. She said she didn’t remember the origins of the day, but she told him she would bring moon cake to the nursing home tomorrow so that he could have some, and he told her he looked forward to that. Then they went to her car and sat in it together, and she rested her head against him and said she wished that he were her husband and that she could sit in this car with him in the rain and never leave it.