“Mmm,” she moaned, reaching in to stroke his face, “don’t talk about that. Makes me want to do that with you.” She straightened away from the window. “I have to go.”
“Okay, honey. Say hi to her for me, at least.”
“I will. I love you.”
He smiled, a little sad to be leaving her, but quite tired himself all of a sudden. “I love you, too,” he told her...and in his rearview mirror he watched her wave to him from the sidewalk, looking as small and weary as a child returning home with a plastic pumpkin full of candy offerings to the wandering mock dead – on this, the festival of Samhain, “summer’s end.”
“Mom,” Dot said, when her mother let herself in with her own key, floating to her and wrapping her in a too-tight embrace.
Mai held her away by the arms to take in her costume. “Look at you – Japanese girl.”
“Tell me what happened, Mom.”
“Let me take a shower first, honey. You let me borrow some pajamas?”
“Sure...I’ll get some.”
Mai smiled tiredly. “And make some popcorn, huh?”
When Lee arrived at his own house, dark and empty as if Margaret had already divorced him years ago, he found himself even more wiped out, too exhausted even to pull his cheap black robe up over his head. He uncapped a Samuel Adams beer, plopped heavily onto his own sofa, and thumbed the remote until he came to AMC’s horror movie marathon. After only a quarter of an hour, he pushed off his shoes and leaned back more heavily against a small mound of throw pillows. His eyelids grew weighted to a lullaby of growls and shrieks.
Dot and her mother had only been sitting on her sofa for fifteen minutes, both under the same quilt as when they had used to watch Disney movies like Mulan together years before, when there came a thunderous pounding on the door to the apartment.
In his dream, Lee found himself standing on the dais in the center of the circular building of pillars. The mists made the columns into smudged suggestions and suffocated all sound. The sound of the living sea he knew lay somewhere beyond, the sea from whence all life began and perhaps to which all life returned. As always, he was waiting. Though he had been nude in the earliest dreams, in more recent dreams he had worn this flowing black robe. Everything was in place for another performance of the same play. But he felt a weight at his hip and looked down to see a scabbard thrust through the sash of his cloak. This was the first time he had worn a sword in the realm of dream.
“Go away!” Mai screeched from the sofa, but the pounding went on and on and Dot launched herself from the cushions, throwing the quilt off her. The other tenants of the house would complain, maybe even call the police. Good, she thought. She might just call the police herself.
“I’ve had enough of him, Mom,” she raged, her bare feet slapping as she stormed into her kitchen toward the bolted door. Her shame for having cringed meekly in his presence earlier today had festered into righteous anger. She heard her mother get up to dash after her.
“Don’t open it, honey!” Mai hissed. “Let him go away...”
They could hear Trang’s shouting voice behind the door now. The swears in both English (“bitch!”) and Vietnamese (“whore!”)...
“Go away!” Dot yelled close to the door. “I’ll call the cops down here!”
“Open the door, bitch! Bitch!” Trang barked. Dot didn’t know if that command, those swears, were directed at her or her mother.
“She’s had enough of you! We both have! She’s going to leave you!” Dot shouted.
“Honey, no, let me do it,” Mai moaned, trying to take hold of her daughter’s arm, but Dot pulled herself free.
“We’ve both had it with you...with your abuse...understand?” Dot yelled. She had one hand braced to the side of the door, her head inclined close to the wood.
If anything, the pounding only deepened. Despite her father’s slight frame, the wood now creaked under the blows. He was obviously kicking the door as well as slamming the heel of his fist upon it.
“Asshole!” Dot ranted. “Asshole!” Her free hand lifted to the slotted bolt.
“No, honey, honey,” Mai said, attempting to catch hold of Dot again.
Over her shoulder, eyes fierce and shining, Dot snarled, “I’m not afraid of him, Mom. He thrives on that. You have to stop being afraid of him.” She jerked the bolt back. “I’m not afraid of him anymore...”
Then the door was slammed open, smashing Dot in the shoulder, causing her to stumble back several steps. Trang burst through the opening sideways, his face flushed red with blood, the whites of his eyes threatening to drown his twitching pupils. His momentum took him past his daughter, hurtled him at his wife.
Dot saw her father throw a wide punch at her mother’s head. Mai flinched back and the blow only ticked her lightly against the jaw. But he kept coming, hurling profanities and swinging a flurry of unfocused blows. Dot saw Mai scrunch her head into her shoulders. She heard the thumping of the blurred strikes more than saw them land. This was the first time she had ever seen her father actually strike her mother. The image made her stomach heave. And it was her fault...her fault for stupidly letting him in...thinking she could confront him, shout him down...
For several seconds, it was as if her nauseating terror immobilized her. Regressed her to a quivering, frightened child. But only for several seconds – and then Dot launched herself at her father just as he had launched himself at Mai. She, too, flung curses and punches. She had inherited her father’s temper without ever really knowing it until now.
He wore a leather jacket. It was thick, dark, glossy like the hide of some creature far larger and more powerful than her father. Her blows thudded against this intimidating surface, and at first it seemed that the thick hide was protecting him from the impacts. But then he whipped himself around. Those drowning eyes streaked in her direction. Teeth bared in a clenched grimace, lips curled back from them. At any moment it appeared that the blood flushing his face would begin to leak right out of his pores, beading and streaming...
Lee put his hand on the hilt of the sword. It was familiar to his touch. It was a long, two-handed hilt, wrapped in black braid. The tsuba, or hand guard, of the sword was broad and black and square-shaped. He closed one hand around the hilt and squeezed until he heard the soft, appealing creak of the braided handle in his fist.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” Trang roared, and one wild swing caught Dot high across the cheekbone. She stumbled backwards toward the edge of the kitchen table...
Then Mai was flashing forward, grabbing by its hair the fake rubber head that rested on the table. She swung it in an arc and hurled it directly into the center of her husband’s chest. The head bounced to the floor, and for several beats Trang was stunned, knocked rigid. Then, only steps away, Dot saw her father reach out to another of the items she had deposited on the table herself not so long ago tonight. She saw her father’s hand snatch up the rusting machete.
Lee’s head came up, his neck going stiff, his fist creaking even tighter on the hilt of his sword. There had come a sound at last. A distant, horrible bark or croak from somewhere out in the weaving, knotting fog.
The machete rose up. Up above Trang’s head. Up above Mai’s head.
A smudged figure was racing toward Lee through the mist, which curled and parted before it like plowed up snow. The terrible, half-strangled barking noises grew louder, closer. Lee drew perhaps an inch of the ninja sword’s straight, bright blade.
“Mom!” Dot cried, plunging forward, her arms stretched out to push her mother away, looking in her kimono like an actor in some tragic Japanese Noh play.
Lee was prepared to draw his sword and swing it at the figure plummeting toward him. Ah, but of course he should have known better. The presence of the ninja-to had disoriented him, caused him to momentarily forget the pattern of the dream. For now, a second figure came racing on the heels of the foremost figure. And as they neared him, he could see that the pursuing figure – a thing of dark rags and broken ang
les – had a short sword with a single-edged blade held high over its crescent-like head.
The machete whooshed down. There was a disturbingly innocuous thud as the blade hacked across the side of Dot’s neck.
The naked girl was slight of build, small, child-like. She was Asian, but with short bristling hair instead of the long black curtain one would stereotypically envision. And no matter how quickly she ran, the thing loping after her with movements impossible to accurately liken to those of any person or animal was closing the distance between them. Coming up on her so fast that Lee opened his mouth to call out a warning to her, a warning to break off in another direction or throw herself down, but it was too late. He saw the short sword’s whooshing descent. He heard the thud of impact across the back of the fleeing girl’s neck.
Dot stood staring at her father. He stood staring at her. The machete hovered in the air, poised between its last blow and an undecided second. Then she lowered her head slightly to see the blood that was spreading in a tide down the front of her imitation kimono, like the life fluid of a samurai who had just slit his own belly, pooling in his lap. Dot lifted both her hands but they fluttered in the air like moths drawn to the bright color. “Mom,” she said.
Then a shriek like a swooping gull, and Dot looked back up to see her mother behind Trang with a long kitchen knife in her upraised fist. Her mother – who had one just like it – had bought Dot the chopping knife as a gift, when she’d first moved into this apartment. She saw Mai bring the knife down. There was no dramatic thunk of blade into bone. There was no dramatic wail of agony from Trang. He merely shuffled around numbly so as to face his wife, reaching one hand behind him to gingerly touch the handle of the knife. The blade was half-buried within him.
Despite the blow, the girl kept coming...but she had faltered, and lost ground, and the creature raised its weapon for another strike. This time, Lee had no doubt that the blade would sever her head from its lovely slender neck.
As if some chain tethering him to the circular platform had been released, Lee jumped down from the dais, charged forward in a black blur.
Dot pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and slumped down into it heavily, watching her father as he dazedly stumbled out of the room toward the bathroom, maybe to use the mirror in an attempt to pull the knife out, maybe to lock himself in against another attack. She saw the blood that marked his departure, fat drops like strewn rose petals. Also in his wake there was a terrible, half-strangled barking cough as her father began to choke to death on his own life fluid. As her mother came to her side too late to catch her, and Dot fell sideways to the floor, Dot heard the slam of the bathroom door as it closed.
The girl dropped to her knees, then fell forward onto all fours, as if surrendering herself to the Crooked Man’s killing stroke. But this move was to the creature’s disadvantage. It lifted its gaze from the fallen girl to the man racing toward it. And now, closer than he had ever been to the entity, Lee could see its face, or what approximated a face. Lee imagined a person (why did he imagine that person to be his deceased father, Bill?) dead and rotting in a bed, its face pressed into a pillow, and the decomposing juices of that face transferring an image onto the pillowcase, like the stained features on the Shroud of Turin. Then, those stained features coming alive, the mouth opening wide, wide to bark at him...
The thing’s short sword, with its blade red with rust or blood, now seemed ready to swing at him instead of down at the girl’s slashed neck. But this change in direction slowed its progress. Lee’s blade was already in motion, flowing out of its black scabbard and cleaving the mist in one roaring white crescent.
Dot lay on the linoleum with her head cradled in her mother’s lap. Now it was her mother’s lap that seemed filled with a samurai’s pouring blood. She heard her mother screaming into her cell phone. As if in slow motion, Dot reached one of her arms back so she could stroke her mother’s arm. She felt one of her mother’s hands at her throat, pressing a towel there, but the towel was soaked and heavy. She recalled her mother soaking a face cloth in ice cold water and pressing it against her forehead when she’d been a child, with a fever. Her mother sitting on the edge of the bed, cooing to her...and soothing her to sleep.
When the shinobigatana’s blade had completed its crescent, the Crooked Man stood before Lee without its head. It had dropped somewhere into the mist lapping at their ankles. The headless figure lingered there unmoving for a little while. When it fell at last, it was like old, torn clothing that had been unpinned from a laundry line. As if it contained a body without bones, or no body at all, it crumpled and also vanished into the floor of mist.
Standing over the girl, Lee could see the blood pumping thickly out of her neck, pulsing with the rhythm of her heart, and flowing down over her shoulders, spiraling around her arms. But she lifted her head and her eyes still shone up at him.
With his sword gripped in his right hand, Lee held out his left hand to the girl. She took it, and he lifted her to her feet.
16: The Dragon
They walked hand-in-hand into the fog blindly, but eventually there were shapes around them, close together, which suggested structures, houses, buildings. Yellow squares of windows hovered in the mists here and there. Lee looked down at his feet at one point and saw that the uneven sidewalk they were moving along was paved in cobblestones. They felt strangely, subtly wrong to him – soft. He paused, and the girl with him, so that he could reach out a hand (he had sheathed the sword a little while ago) and actually touch the surface of one of the obscured buildings. It was composed of bricks, but the bricks were like bone encased in a rubbery skin. The subtly resilient paving stones beneath his feet were presumably covered in this thick membrane as well.
As they wandered, Lee became aware of a fact that hadn’t consciously registered before, back in the arena or on these narrow streets. When he and the girl had been to this city before, the haze engulfing them had been tinted red like blood misting out of titanic severed arteries. But the fog was now merely a smoky brownish color, dark but not inky. There was a distant light source low in the sky – apparently a sun, either rising or setting – that imparted gold and red light to the fog, but only in that direction.
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. The bleeding girl squeezed Lee’s hand more tightly. “What is that?” she said aloud, her voice sounding wrong in this realm, the breaking of a nun’s vow of silence.
“I think it’s the dragon,” Lee 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, Lee recognized that slow rhythmic noise like the breathing of a god in his sleep. It was the sound of the sea. They had circled around through these shadow streets, close to the shore again. Ahead of them, between the angled roofs of several structures, Lee made out a skeletal framework of some kind, which darkened and grew somewhat sharper the further they went. At last, the young woman stopped in her tracks again, forcing Lee to do the same. He looked at her quizzically.
“What’s wrong?” he asked in his gentle sleepwalker’s voice.
“That’s the Friendship,” she whispered.
Lee looked again and finally 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.
“We’re in Salem,” his companion told him.
He looked around him slowly, dreamily. “Yes,” he said, “we are.”
Without discussion, they steered their steps into the sound of the sea, letting its increasingly pervasive hisses and rumbles draw them closer even as it reached out its long, attenuating waves toward them, as if the humans and the ocean both strained and stretched to
meet each other at some mid-point.
The masts of the ship reared larger, higher, piercing the belly of the low-slung, tumbling clouds. The congestion of houses opened up, fell back, parted like theater curtains. The dream ship was docked between what Lee knew were equivalents of Central Wharf, from which the craft could be boarded for tours, and the much longer Derby Wharf, which thrust far out into the water. It was toward Derby Wharf that their feet were guided by instinct. Or perhaps it was the light beaming through the fog that swallowed the wharf’s tip. It was the beacon of a small lighthouse, glowing golden like a sun.
As they stepped onto the wharf and the ocean lay to either side of them, Lee could at last make out the surface of the water itself. If water it was.
Though there was barely a detectable breeze stirring the air, the ocean was active...waves rolling far into Salem Harbor. They threatened to lap over the edges of the wharf, humping up full and ominous, but subsided before they ever broke. The water, Lee saw, was a gray color that was almost a metallic silver. A sea of melted lead, of liquid mercury. Minerals, elements, the most primitive foundation of all earthly matter, churned and stirred in a world-sized kettle.
They had only ventured to the wharf’s halfway point when they became aware of the sounds emerging from the fog-heavy stillness in their wake.
The sounds were footsteps, but more: funny little grunts and croaks, barks and chittering noises like birds or monkeys. Unnerved, Lee pulled the girl to one side, out of the direct path of the sounds as they grew louder and closer...but the ocean trapped them to either side out here on this narrow structure that projected out into the sea like a bridge across the fog. Lee knew they could not return the way they’d come – because he could begin to see figures stepping onto the wharf.
Within the mists, 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.
Worship the Night Page 23
