Worship the Night

by Jeffrey Thomas

  This time, tonight, October 28th, when they made love things progressed even further. Maybe because they were more acclimated to each other? Maybe because he had more hope that they could, in fact, one day be together properly...maybe even as man and wife? And several days ago he had stopped taking his medication, as well, one of the possible side effects of which was sexual dysfunction. Mai was pleased that he had.

  This time when they made love he was able to ejaculate inside her. He held her tightly as shudders wracked him, and he told her huskily that he loved her. She didn’t seem concerned about becoming pregnant, regardless of the fact that she used no birth control, so he didn’t let it concern him, either.

  When they made love again in the morning they were less successful, despite their ardor, her legs wrapped around him, their secret language of pants – but Lee was still glowing from the night before and wasn’t terribly disappointed. He considered masturbating while she was in the shower, but they ended up showering together again anyway. This time they were more playful. He swatted her bottom with his hard cock, and she compared their wet pubic hair – his curly and tight, hers long and straight when she pulled at it. Lee offered to trim it with his teeth.

  They went out for coffee at Lee’s favorite café on Front Street, and talked about his mother for a time. Mai held his hand atop the table and told him she wished she had had a chance to meet his mother while her mind had still been sound. Mai wanted to bring flowers to her grave. “There isn’t a stone yet,” Lee muttered, and he changed the subject. He asked her if she had seen much death in the years of the war, during which she’d been a child. She hadn’t really, though she’d heard bombs going off, and one of her classmates had been killed by a mine in the forest. One time, a group of Communists were captured, executed, and hung up for people to see...but Mai hadn’t wanted to go gawk at them. The worst thing she had seen, actually, had been accidental in nature. When she was eight years old, a friend of Mai’s had begged her mother to let her go buy some banh mi sandwiches, and finally her mother had told her to go ahead. Excited, the child had raced into the street – and been hit by an army truck. It had rolled over her head, and though Mai hadn’t seen the accident when it occurred, she saw the aftermath. She watched as her friend’s uncle scooped up the child’s brains and blood in his bare hands.

  “Oh my God,” Lee said. “What did it look like?”

  “Yucky,” was all Mai could say to describe such a horror, something Lee could barely conceive of witnessing, despite the fact that every day he dealt with the living tissues of dead people. Though, lately, few of these tissues were actually alive, as ManuCel still struggled to isolate the cause of their catastrophic troubles.

  “Really,” Lee brought up the matter again over coffee, “I want to meet your daughter, Mai. Take me to The Pier restaurant next time. I’d like to be her stepfather someday, you know.”

  “That would be nice, huh? If we were a family?” She smiled.

  “Would be. Could be. It can happen, Mai, if you leave your husband. You know he doesn’t love you. You’re just a slave to him. I guess Dot isn’t even that much to him. You two deserve so much better than that.”

  “I like to.” She stirred her coffee excessively, her large eyes lowered. He stared at them. They had an odd kind of subtle sheen across their black irises – as if she wore silvery contact lenses – that Caucasian eyes didn’t possess. In the past, he had never looked into an Asian’s eyes closely enough or long enough to notice such a thing, and photographs apparently didn’t capture the effect. “I will,” she went on. “Soon. I will do it. But I have to take my time, honey...”

  “I’ll be here,” he told her.

  “Anyway, you still have to divorce Margaret, right? Does she still love that guy?”

  “Dennis. Yes. They’re very serious about each other. The other night I came home and they were sitting on my couch, all snuggled up, watching TV in the dark. Very cute.”

  Mai looked up in astonishment, grinning. It seemed to both amuse and delight her. “Really? You saw that? Right in front of you?”

  “Yup.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went and sat on the toilet for a long time and read a book. When I came out, he was gone.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “We waved to each other and grunted, I think, when I first came in.”

  “So how did you feel? Did it make you mad?”

  “No,” he lied. If he told her he’d been hurt and jealous at so open a display, she would take it the wrong way. He couldn’t tell her that since he and Margaret had agreed to stop sleeping with each other, in order not to cheat on their respective lovers, he had repeatedly dreamed of asking Margaret to go to bed with him. He had dreamed that in going through a trash bag of old clothes, he had discovered a denim jacket that he remembered Margaret wearing a lot back in the 80's, and in the dream he had felt great pain to see her disposing of it; he had wanted to hide it away and keep it. (The jacket must have represented me, he mused now.) He hadn’t told Mai that when he’d recently chanced upon some cute, affectionate notes which Margaret had slipped into his lunch years ago, and which he’d kept to this day, it had made his throat choke up. He couldn’t tell Mai everything. It might make her doubt him, it might hurt her. He hadn’t told Mai that Margaret had once referred to her with barely masked mockery as “Miss Saigon.”

  “It was just rude,” he told Mai, about having seen Margaret and Dennis cuddling on his sofa. “It made me lonely for you.”

  “Poor baby,” she said, pouting, holding his hand again.

  “Yeah. Poor me.”

  They sat in the café from breakfast time until it was lunch time, and at last they departed, strolled out through the old city hand-in-hand. Even with her thick platforms Mai came up only to his shoulder, so that Lee joked to himself it was like trick-or-treating with the child he had never had.

  Salem’s Halloween fever was at full blaze now. Only several days yet to go. Every tourist shop seemed draped in cotton cobwebs, or festooned with orange and black bunting, or had its windows outlined in orange fairy lights. There was an annual horror-themed art gallery which Lee always liked to visit, and when he brought it up to Mai she seemed uninterested herself but mentioned that Dot liked it as well. The patchouli and sandalwood scents from the candles and incense in Pyramid Books seemed to spill out and permeate all the streets. As he often did, he chuckled at the sign for the Bunghole liquor store, but had to explain the humor to Mai. Along the outdoors Essex Street Mall, carts sold Salem T-shirts and hot sausages and hot cider. Leaves scraped across the cobblestones or bricks that paved this street or that sidewalk like large dying insects. Men appeared to be scaling the side of one building but were only paintings of pirates on the walls of the Pirate Museum. Mai informed Lee that Thai pirates had posed a danger to the crafts of the Vietnamese boat people, and said that she had been one of 188 people crammed into the one she had escaped in.

  “I wish we’d seen the Grande Opening Parade together,” he said. It had been back on the 11th, and always made him think of Mardi Gras. “That’s a lot of fun.”

  “Too scary,” she joked. “Too many ghosts and devils. Maybe some of them are real, huh? Hiding with the peoples?”

  “Maybe I’m a ghost, hiding with the living people.”

  Red lines were painted along some of the sidewalks, like the unseen “ley lines” of Britain or the “dragon paths” of the Chinese – purported streams of powerful earth force. At night, “ghost tours” would be led along these marked paths, everyone holding a burning candle. “We should do that one time, too,” Lee told Mai.

  Right now, he wanted to take her inside the Peabody Essex Museum to see what it looked like after its recent renovations but she wasn’t interested today, and scoffed at the oriental-style addition with its blue pagoda-like roof. “Should be red, not blue,” she told him.

  As they wandered, more than once he noticed men steal glances at Mai, and w
as proud – though he felt a bit self-conscious, strangely wondered if people seeing them together ever took him to be one of those pathetic types who ensnared a desperate mail-order bride.

  They walked down to the Old Burying Point cemetery, with its monument to the Witch Trials – stone benches, each with the name of one of the innocent victims etched into it. As if it were his own mother’s grave, Lee laid his palm tenderly on the bench for Elizabeth Howe and told Mai that his family tree had been traced back to her. Mai said, “You related to one of the witches?”

  “They weren’t witches, Mai!” he said, trying not to get exasperated. “That’s why they made this memorial!”

  “So why they call this Witch City?”

  “Good for business. The only magic those poor people ever did was conjure up a lot of money for this town.”

  Later they stopped outside the purple-painted, gambrel-roofed house containing Crow Haven Corner, owned by Salem’s “official witch,” Laurie Cabot. Mai squeezed Lee’s hand. “You want to go in and see what the witches say about us?”

  “I don’t believe in that stuff,” he told her. “I don’t want any self-appointed psychic trying to influence you or me about each other and our future.”

  “Maybe it’s real – you don’t know.”

  “Well, even if it is real – especially if it’s real – I don’t want to know about the future until I get there.”

  “You scared?” she teased him.

  “I guess so,” he admitted.

  Could the psychics explain to him the meaning of his recurring dreams? Not that he subscribed to the notion that the occurrences and imagery of dreams could be broken down neatly into universal symbols. He hadn’t told Mai about these disturbing dreams, about the slow but increasingly unsettling changes in their familiar loop. Superstitious as she was, as quick as she was to see negative portents all around them that might cast further doubts on their ending up together, he didn’t want to alarm her.

  There were two dream symbols he could be sure of, without the aid of Jungian analysis or tarot cards and palmistry. One: the creature menacing the girl in his dreams was the Crooked Man that his mother had hallucinated. He had allowed her delirium to infect his own mind. And two: however younger she was, the Asian girl must be a representation of Mai. Regardless of how closely that young goth he had seen in the street had matched up with his dream girl, how could the dream girl be anything other than a prop meant to portray his love, like a marionette in that red abattoir of a theater?

  As they continued on their aimless way, Mai turned her palm up and pointed at its central crease. “See this? Very short. I die early.”

  “Stop it. Don’t say that. I’ll slice you a new one,” he joked. “Nice and long.”

  They returned to their cars, at last, parked along the street not far from the restaurant where they’d had dinner last night. Here, they hugged, kissed, her tongue darting only briefly and discreetly into his mouth; as chaste a French kiss as he could imagine. She blew a kiss to him through the window of her car as she drove away.

  Lee walked toward his own car, and was hauling open the door when a peripheral, almost subliminal presence attracted his eye across the street, which was faced with a string of small gift shops, another restaurant, and a tattoo and piercing parlor. A man seemed to have been watching him from an alley that was barely more than a crevice between two of the old, converted houses. The man turned about (or maybe he didn’t...maybe he walked backwards) and receded down the alleyway. In the gloom at its end, he vanished – though the shadows there hardly seemed dark enough to have swallowed him so utterly.

  For a long few moments, Lee stood staring across the street, his car door gaping open emptily.

  The man had apparently been wearing a cloak and a tottering conical hood. Maybe he was preparing to read Poe’s Masque of The Red Death at the In a Pig’s Eye restaurant tonight...because his costume had been entirely of a deep, dark scarlet.

  12: Which City

  The dream had stalled. During the past week, Dot had been to the bloody arena three times. Three times she had made it to the dais before the barking apparition could catch up to her, brandishing its streaming short sword like a gladiator pursuing a fleeing opponent. A fleeing sacrifice. Three times she had seen the fear and dismay in the eyes of the man who was always waiting there to save her just in time. But she couldn’t bear the stagnation any longer. Dot had to know what happened next.

  The visions of the living sea had come to her, in the past, not only at night but while she was awake, in orgasm, like the time she had had too much to drink and gone to bed with her gay coworker Josh. The other waking episodes brought on by orgasm had been while she was masturbating. But masturbating, now, didn’t spark the visions. Instead of asking Josh again, she had called up her old boyfriend Jason, whom she had met for lunch recently with several other friends. As it had turned out, he hadn’t broken up with his new girlfriend, after all, but he had flirted with Dot that day in the restaurant and he was only too eager to come over to her apartment this evening.

  Her mouth made barely audible slick noises as it slid up and down his dark, glistening cock. He wasn’t very large, which was good because her body wasn’t very accommodating, and she was able to slide her mouth all the way down to his musky pubic hair. She made occasional small moaning sounds, and his were louder as he held her head lightly, her jagged hair bristling from between his fingers.

  Apparently he couldn’t take much more of her ministrations, because he pushed her shoulders away, urged her onto her back, positioned himself between her legs with awkward urgency, and lay down fully upon her. She had to reach between them to help guide him into her small hole. When he was in, he let out an especially ardent moan, and she rested back her head, wrapped him tightly in her arms and legs, and closed her eyes. She gave rhythmic little jerks with her hips to further incite him but he asked her to stop because it was interrupting his own rhythms, so after that she just lay still and let him churn her insides...waiting for him to stir her dreams to life, mortar and pestle, the alchemy of sex, magic potion brewing...

  Incense wafted to her nose, and a vanilla candle burned in a hollowed-out pumpkin on her bedside table; she could see its guttering light glowing through her closed eyelids, the only illumination in the room. Her stereo played a CD she had burned of haunting, gothic instrumental music by digital artist/musician Joakim Back, downloaded from his website. This was as close to a religious ritual as Dot was ever likely to willingly partake in.

  Jason’s hip motions quickened and deepened. His panting grew more rapid, desperate. Dot could tell he was further arousing himself by bracing his body above her on stiff arms and watching himself slide in and out of her, his brown pubic hair intermingling with her own darker hair. She felt her climax mounting, approaching its apex, and her sheer anticipation made the mounting sensation that much stronger. She allowed no room for doubt about the outcome; that would only douse the green and purple magic flames in her mind. Moments before Jason came, with a not so terribly romantic cry of, “Oh shit, oh God, fuck,” Dot came. And so did the dream...

  In her earlier dreams, Dot had always found herself lying in a fetal position in the metallic sand, had always rolled onto her back and splayed her arms wide like wings. But as the dreams went on, they seemed to pick up at a later and later point in their familiar loop, as if she were fast-forwarding over their start; she would begin by finding herself already standing upright on the beach, behind her the sea of rippling flesh (now turned to an ocean of blood – the amount of which only a god could spill, and could even a god survive such a loss?). But this current vision was fast-forwarded even further; when it commenced, she was already standing on the steps of the circular theater of bone dressed in muscle so red in color that it was almost painful to look upon.

  The first thought Dot had, finding herself on these steps, was to run. Run now, immediately, before the horrible flesh apparition appeared. So she bolted forward, thinking
that she could get a head start on the thing, reach the podium at the center of the arena long before it could appear to pursue her. Her plan was futile, however. A moment after she launched herself forward, her bare feet hammering the floor of stripped meat, Dot heard that terrible barking/strangling/croaking cry behind her. If anything, the thing was closer on her heels than ever as she raced into the red haze filling the dream theater.

  She chanced only one look back at it, mostly involuntarily, afraid to slow herself up or veer away from the direction of the dais. She saw her pursuer, looking both broken-boned and boneless, its boomerang of a head and twisted form streaming flags of its own shredded membrane. Seeing her see it, the thing let out another cry, this one louder, more piercing, stabbing Dot’s eardrums. In one appendage that passed for an arm, the thing held a single-edged short sword, as if this were an instrument with which the thing had hacked and freed its own tissue away from some greater body.

  Through the slow-motion waves of mist, Dot could see the silhouette of a man – her savior – on the dais, his arm already held out to her. Then, she could see him more clearly. His concerned, attractive face. He was tall. In the earlier dreams she could have sworn he was as naked as she, but lately he wore black garments or a black robe, like some kind of priest or priest-warrior. He took her hand, said, “Step onto the dais,” and hoisted her up. And this was where the dream had been ending, recently. Had ended, until today...