This time, the thing with the sword did not stop. It still kept coming. With an even more deafening cry, it swung its sword in a whoosh that slashed through and parted the mists...
To save her from the strike, the black-garbed man pulled Dot forward with a violent jerk that almost popped her shoulder from its socket. And in doing so, he had to step off the circular platform. In doing so, he pulled her off the platform as well.
The man did not disappear. She was not transported back to her apartment, her bed. She was still here. Her pursuer, her tormenter, was leaping up onto the dais, unafraid of touching its surface...
Still holding Dot’s hand, the man in black clothing began to run, forcing her to run along with him. They charged for the opposite side of the temple from that which Dot had initially entered.
Their legs pumping madly (though the man, with his long legs, must have been controlling his pace so as to keep Dot beside him), they made it to the opposite side before the flesh specter could catch them (Dot heard its blade cleave the air a few times, however, in near misses). Without looking back or breaking their stride, together they plunged through a gap between two of the structure’s supporting columns.
They had become immersed in thicker clouds of fog, and were able to slow their pace to a jog when they heard their enemy wailing raspily at an increasing distance. Was it lost in the fog, or had it been too afraid to even leave the circle of the theater? When they could no longer hear its shrieks behind them, they slowed themselves further, now merely walking through the living haze. They still held hands, however, so as not to lose each other. Self-conscious about her nudity now, Dot looked up at the man’s profile, and he seemed to sense her eyes because he glanced down at her and tightened his grip on her hand and smiled, but none of this in a lascivious manner.
The haze thinned, though it never entirely dissipated. Silhouettes loomed up like buildings that had formed themselves out of the fog’s very substance. The ground under her soles felt lumpy. Cobblestones, Dot realized...round like the tops of children’s skulls mortared into the earth. They had entered a city...
From what she could make out through the mist, the buildings were not soaring skyscrapers, and many were simply houses clustered close together. Dim lights glowed in windows here and there, barely cutting through the shrouded air. There were trees planted along the sidewalk in places; she ran her hand over the bark of one. Its hide was unpleasantly damp and she brushed her fingertips off against her leg. The branches of these trees might have held foliage but she couldn’t tell as they snaked away into the fog like exposed veins or nerves.
They heard a sound that made them stop in their tracks. It was distant, mournful as a fog horn, sad as a train passing through the night, melancholy as a whale song. It sounded like an elephant’s trumpet but slowed down, deeper like the low of a bull. Dot squeezed her companion’s hand more tightly. “What is that?” she said aloud, her own voice sounding wrong to her in this realm, the breaking of a nun’s vow of silence.
“I think it’s the dragon,” the man said simply. And when the distant sound wasn’t repeated, they journeyed onward again.
They followed a new sound. Maybe this was the direction that deep call had originated from. As they advanced, Dot recognized that slow rhythmic noise like the breathing of a god in his sleep. It was the sound of the sea of blood. They had circled around through these shadow streets, close to the shore again. Ahead of them, between the angled roofs of several structures, Dot made out a skeletal framework of some kind, which darkened and grew somewhat sharper the further they went. At last, she stopped in her tracks again, forcing the man to do the same. He looked at her quizzically.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in his gentle sleepwalker’s voice.
“That’s the Friendship,” Dot whispered. She recognized the skeletal structure for what it was. The masts and rigging of an antique ship, its sails all rolled up and tucked away, like bones with their skin removed. She knew this ship well, saw it every day from the windows of the restaurant where she worked. The Friendship was docked between Derby and Central Wharves...
“We’re in Salem,” Dot told the man.
He looked around him slowly, dreamily. “Yes,” he said, “we are.”
And then they turned slightly, away from the waterfront, and continued along without a clear sense of destination. It was okay. They could move by instinct now. With familiarity...
There were no moving vehicles on the roads, just more room in which the red-glowing mists could chase their own ectoplasmic tails. The two tourists worked their way deeper into the heart of the city, along what Dot judged to be the Essex Street Mall or its equivalent. Up until now – since their nemesis had been left in their wake at the arena – they had encountered no other residents of this alternate world. But now, that changed.
Sounds approached. Footsteps, but more: funny little grunts and croaks, barks and chittering noises like birds or monkeys. Similar to the sounds of the creature with the sword, but different. More benign. Still, unnerved, Dot and the tall man stepped out of the street, up onto the sidewalk, and practically flattened themselves to the wall of a brick building as the sounds grew louder and closer...wanting to stay out of their way.
Movement in the fog. It looked like a long dark animal approaching on countless millipede feet. This winding form sparkled with points of light, as if it were an unfurling banner of outer space itself, full of stars. And then, out of the haze, came the head of a dragon.
The face was both indistinct yet fearsome, decomposing. Were those empty eye holes? Nostril holes below that? The gaping mouth was unmistakable, at least, but it was toothless. The red, sparkling dragon continued crawling up Essex Street on its many legs, but now Dot could see that the legs belonged to people, not to the animal itself. It wasn’t just the haze or the dragon’s shadow that made these beings so difficult for the eye to properly define. They looked half made or half undone. They might have lacked clothing or epidermis or both. Some appeared to have blowing rags of hair, though that might have been the membranes of their heads floating on the increasingly chill breeze. Some of them were as small as children. Several of the entities which she had at first taken to be awkward giants were actually walking along on stilts. Some possessed heads far too large for their bodies, and these heads were not necessarily red like the rest of their bodies. Dot understood, at last, that many if not all of the beings wore masks that were every bit as vague as their natural bodies.
She understood, now, as well, that the dragon was only the hide of a dragon, like the skin shed from an enormous snake. This serpentine skin was supported by sticks that some of the congregation held aloft in their fists, as if carrying along flags. Though they did not dance as they walked, imitating a dragon’s movements, those who bore along the shed dragon skin reminded Dot of the dragon dancers at the Vietnamese New Year festival of Tet, carrying a colorful dragon along through the street in a place like Boston’s Chinatown.
And the sparkling they had seen from a distance; these lights were in fact candles. Every one of the people carried one, except those whose job it was to support the dragon skin. These guttering flames showed through the red, translucent hide.
Still pressed against the wall, Dot and the man watched the parade approach, then pass by them. She was more in awe, now, than afraid. The people in the procession ignored her, meant her no harm, despite the unnerving appearance of their bodies and their masks. And she had a sense, now, an intuition, that the recent change of this dream realm to a violent and dissected red was not a sign of corruption. It was something akin to the ebb and flow of tides, the changing of the seasons or the phases of the moon. And the glossy, wrinkled hide of the dragon did not mean the beast was dead. It had shed its skin to grow larger, stronger...
At last, the parade receded again into the fog. Its sounds grew eerily distant, disappeared along with the migrating constellation of candle flame. Dot looked up at the man, as if to ask his opinion of what they
had witnessed – assuming they could even form an opinion of a realm so unfathomable.
He smiled down at her as he had before, but said nothing. A strange kind of fondness for the man spread through Dot warmly. She smiled up at him in return, and said, “Ba.”
She didn’t know why she had said it. It was a Vietnamese word used for “dad” or “daddy.”
Dot opened her eyes. She saw Jason sitting naked at her desk, going through her CDs; he had replaced the one by Joakim Back with Akira Yamaoka’s soundtrack for the video game Silent Hill 3. She imagined she could still feel Jason’s living sperm insinuating themselves throughout her system, stealthy as guerillas, and being picked off and killed by her body’s defenders – soldiers loyal to the cause of birth control. His invading cells died, blackened, rotted inside her.
“Jason,” she mumbled, startling him. He swiveled toward her. “Could you go home, do you think? Sorry, but I really need to sleep.”
She felt guilty, but his job was done. She slept, but this time she didn’t dream. It was just as well; she was all dreamed out for the time being.
13: Two Swords
It was Halloween.
It was a Friday, the best night for this holiday. And it would be a warm night, without rain. The gods were sometimes kind to trick-or-treaters.
Despite the nice weather, the magic collected in the air like an electric storm. As afternoon deepened, Lee Todd admired the silver-blue sky from his office window. Big purple clouds drifted, like whales that were not so much slaughtered and flayed as they were macerated and dissolving in the air. He drove home that afternoon a little extra fast, as if afraid that the holiday would begin without him, that the mummers would start trickling out onto the leaf-carpeted streets before he could close himself up in his house against an invasion of nocturnal living dead. It was an exciting anticipation, even at his age.
He had procrastinated about decorating the outside of the house he had shared all these years with Margaret – who would be attending a party with Dennis tonight (she’d be dressing up as a ghostly bride, her face painted white with black eye sockets, Dennis as her similarly cadaverous groom). Usually Lee liked to carve a pumpkin and put a candle in it for his front step, but there wasn’t time. At least, he knew he still had an electric jack-o’-lantern in the basement somewhere. What kind of self-respecting citizen of Salem would he be if he couldn’t conjure up that much?
Thinking of his home of Salem made a memory flicker briefly like a firefly in the dark grass of his subconscious; something about exploring the city in a dense fog, but he decided he must have been recalling his recent tour of the city with Mai.
In the cellar he rummaged for the plastic pumpkin. He found it readily enough, and a few other props he might make use of if he could do so before the sun set (which would occur faster, now, since daylight savings time had been adjusted again). But as he went through his belongings down there, he chanced upon another article which he hadn’t touched in several years. It rested in a long cardboard box in a sooty, brick-walled corner. From this box, Lee slid out a samurai sword in a hard black scabbard.
The sword was an inexpensive model of the ninja-style katana, called a ninja-to or shinobigatana, its blade only two feet long and straight instead of curved. Its tsuba, or hand guard, instead of being richly embellished as many were, was instead plain and black, square-shaped and broad. A ninja might prop his sword against a wall, stand on this broad hand guard, and use it to boost himself up over the wall (then drawing the sword up after him by use of the cord, or sageo, attached to it). The scabbard, likewise, had further practical functions: the hole at its end made it possible to use the scabbard as a snorkel underwater, or a blowgun.
Lee had acquired this sword while in his twenties, when still absorbed in the martial arts. His interest in martial arts had begun in his teens, when his first mail-order weapon had been a pair of heavy black nunchakus. One night, when his father Bill was especially drunk and bad-tempered and had shoved his mother roughly across the kitchen, the teenaged Lee had fetched his chained sticks and smashed them down on the kitchen table only inches from his father’s hand, leaving a deep dent in the wood. His father had not even looked up and around at him. Lee had been pleased with himself for so surprising, for so frightening him. Though it had not prevented his father from drinking, from swearing at his mother and himself, for many a night beyond that one.
Lee drew the sword from its scabbard, held it in two fists in front of him, the heavy blade seeming to float on its own like a dowsing rod, a pattern of waves running along its sharp edge. Like a pistol fitting too comfortably into a man’s palm, like the perfectly balanced weight of a rifle or shotgun, like the simple weight of a club, this weapon possessed the intoxicating heft of an instrument of death. It was this seductive, comfortable weight, this extension of the body’s natural strength, that had left so many dead men and women and children in time’s wake.
Once, Lee would have posed in front of his mirror with this razored phallic symbol, shirtless. His new dragon chain would have added pleasantly to the image. Back then, Lee had begun two oil paintings but had never finished them, though both had held real promise. One showed a geisha’s face, her eyes and glistening lips life-like. To more realistically suggest flesh covered up with white makeup, he had first painted her in natural skin tones before adding the white oil paint on top of that. Still, her lacquered black hair and the collar of her kimono looked unfinished. The other painting he had never even begun, except to have sketched it out with pencil on its canvas. This was based on a photograph of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, posing shirtless – his oiled muscles bunched and gleaming – brandishing the seventeenth century samurai sword which Mishima’s homosexual lover would later use to behead him after Mishima had first disemboweled himself in the ritual of seppuku.
Like Mishima, a weak and sickly child turned weight-lifter and martial artist in his later years, Lee had once fancied himself a modern day warrior, carrying on a majestic tradition. Today, however, he was out of shape, his belly soft and round, as blanched and unhealthy as the plant he kept in his cubicle at work. The years hadn’t been merciful. In fact, Lee’s martial arts instructor and good friend Tom had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when in his late twenties. During one of his many hospitalizations (during which he was usually treated with steroids), Tom had been told that he would never walk out of the hospital on his own two legs...would have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Tom had proved his doctors wrong; his powers of mind over matter, his sheer rock-headed stubbornness, had enabled him to stay tough where others might have surrendered. Tom now felt that MS was the true reason he had become a martial artist in the first place, though he hadn’t known it for all the years preceding his diagnosis. He had been destined to study these arts in order to be ready for his true battle – not against muggers, gang members, an enemy army, but against his very own body.
Lee wondered what form his own personal battle would take, if any. Or was he too old for even such a glorious struggle as Tom’s? He felt foolish, ashamed, even to be handling this ominous-looking weapon right now. Childish. Was he going to trick-or-treat as a ninja, then? One of the Ninja Turtles, perhaps?
Lee slid the shinobigatana back into its scabbard. The scabbard back into its cardboard box. He took his Halloween props and climbed the creaking wooden steps out of his basement, returning old dreams of warrior sweat and blood to the dark and cobwebs from which he’d briefly exhumed them.
The steps Dot descended into the basement of her parents’ house were of newer, sturdier wood; this small vinyl-sided house had lived through only a fragment of Salem’s long history. In contrast to her contemporary surroundings, however, she wore a cheap kimono Halloween costume, her short hair hidden under a geisha-style wig. The decapitated head she meant to carry around with her, in imitation of the actress Lucy Liu in the film Kill Bill, was still in her car, parked behind her father’s car in her parents’ driveway. She hadn’t see
n him when she’d let herself into the house, though the moment her feet – in white socks and sandals – touched the neat cement floor she heard a toilet flush above her head, pipes gurgling.
She had descended these steps to descend into her past. Her childhood. That was why she walked with trepidation. That was why she wished her mother was in the house with her, too. Dot had come down here to look for her father’s machete, which she had slid into the narrow space beneath an old bureau in a corner many years ago. She had stolen the machete from him when he was out of the house. She had stolen the machete, which he had used to chop at weeds or brush in their backyard, following the incident when she had been five and angered her father in some small way and he had fetched the machete – swearing furiously – then raised it over his head, over her head, as if to behead her with it (she thought of the grimacing rubber head waiting in her car trunk) until her mother intervened, pleading a mile a minute in hysterical Vietnamese. With a last disgusted explosion of profanity, Trang had left his daughter cowering there, tossing his weapon across the kitchen table and stalking out of the house like a mighty warrior, barely five feet tall, loathing his enemy too much to kill him. He had gone off to a local coffee shop to sit for hours with one of his male Vietnamese friends. He had never had a female friend. Dot couldn’t imagine her father laughing at a woman’s joke, greeting her with a smile that wasn’t simply a kind of Halloween mask itself.
It was not so that she could use the machete as part of her samurai movie regalia that she had come down here in search of it. She had given in and reluctantly bought a cheap plastic samurai sword from a cart selling toys and trinkets down on the cobblestoned Essex Street Mall. No; Dot had come here to see the machete again because of the most recent dream she had experienced. The most vivid dream of all. The one in which she had outrun the sword-wielding phantom, and walked the streets of a spectral Salem with her spirit guide/guardian angel at her side like Virgil accompanying Dante.
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