It's Always Time

by Oblimo

She taps a fingertip against her lip. "You're dreaming, Master."

  She spreads her wings and pirouettes on the toe of her candy-apple red Mary Jane clog. "Finally!" Her wings ignore the dimensions of the crowded bathroom, as things often do in dreams, and fly wide. "I thought your green whore would never let you sleep." The buffeting air is redolent with sex, and the unmistakable scent of baking cookies. "I thought she knew better." She winks, shrugs, "Her loss," and wing claws longer than daggers and sharper than any swords slice through the air.

  Dee feels no pain, only a gentle chill, as the claws pierce his skull and meet with a click somewhere behind his eyes. Black Cherry frowns in a moue. "Well, that didn't work." She pivots her chin, inspecting with her light-swallowing eyes. "Something's keeping me out. Is it you?" She smiles, a proud pet-owner. "Are you really that strong, to keep me out, even now, when I'm so close?" She holds up a length of black braided rope, tied up in white ribbon. "Even when I have this?"

  The knowledge comes to Dee now fully-formed, as if he always knew, a part of the dream's back-drop slotted into place. The rope is Ursula's hair. Over ten years worth of growth. Ten years worth of work: an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening with…

  [gates]

  …combs of horn and ivory, every day, sitting at her…

  [altar]

  …vanity, gazing into her own eyes reflected back out at her from a century-old…

  [scrying]

  …looking glass. She performed this…

  [ritual]

  …compulsive routine, twice a day, every day, for ten years. The subtlest knife could not cut the bond tying Ursula to her…

  [talismanic]

  …trademark braids, any more than losing a limb makes someone less of a person. Black Cherry holds Ursula's life and power in her hand.

  "Caught up?" Black Cherry asks. "Good. Whatever the reason, I can't get into your inner mind. I'm stuck here, in your imagination." She takes in her surroundings with a knowing smirk, and, as the bathroom vanishes around Dee, she muses, "What an odd place."

  Linoleum bathroom tiles and specks of caulking and tumble upward in zero g. Fixtures and walls melt into wisps of menthol. Black Cherry brushes the drifting detritus away with a flick of a wing. "There are two gates of Sleep," she recites, skimming a finger across the page of a fusty tome that plops out of thin air and into her hands, "one said to be of horn, through which true shades given gentle passage."

  She licks the pad of her thumb and flips the page. Dee knows she reads from the Aeneid, although he cannot fathom how he knows. Black Cherry grins at his confusion and holds the book out to him. Pages have been cut away to make room for a faded, four color comic book. "Classics Illustrated," she winks. "Is this how you BS'd your way through college?"

  She returns to reading, "The other gleams with the whiteness of polished ivory." She pauses, raises a brow and harrumphs. "But through it the gods of the dead send false dreams to the world above." The book snaps shut. "Bingo."

  Dee and the scarlet girl stand on a rain-slick city street before a door cornered off by red velvet rope. A sign above the door proclaims Lux in pale neon. Black Cherry flits over the rope and cracks open the door. Piano music spills out into the night. She whirls about and sings, her face a mask of sly delight, her soprano sparking and pitch-perfect:

  I've just read of Cleopatra

  The glamorous empire shatt'rer,

  Who to Caesar lost her heart as well as her head,

  But that stingy old Rotarian

  Gave her nothing but one Caesarian,

  So she fell in love with Marc Antony instead.

  To worship two men in turn may be sublime,

  But, oh, it's Hell when you care for both at the same time.

  She twitters and dips her head through the door, one leg raised behind her butt. "Not the sort of ivory I was expecting. Where do you get this stuff?" She peeks back at Dee.

  Dee's speech slurs, his mouth feeling full of peanut butter. "Comic booksh. Innernet."

  "Never heard of it," Black Cherry mutters, then sighs. "Can't get through your Gate of Horn. Tried that already." One wing claw dimples the side of her skull before leaning through the piano bar's front door again. "Ivory will have to do." She squares her shoulders, unruffles her wings, and scampers inside.

  "Welcome to your nightmare, Master."

  The wake of her wings drags Dee across the velvet-rope boundary and into the piano club. Upon stumbling through the front door, Dee finds himself in a tiny kitchen, a cluttered twin of the kitchenette of Dee's own apartment. A tall steel mixing bowl keeps the refrigerator's door wedged open and its compressor running nonstop. A few dozen empty boxes of cherry Jell-O are piled atop the kitchen table.

  Black Cherry perches on the kitchen counter, feasting on the last scraps of Bernie's—Bee's—flesh she is willing to eat. Pheromones of fear befoul the meat. Cannibalizing Bee for his collagen was no picnic. "But I did it, Master," she says, slurping down wobbly bits of gristle.

  Dee's revulsion overcomes the sleep paralysis swaddling him like wet cotton. "Why, Cherry? Damn it, why?"

  "To be strong for you. Strong enough to fuck you. To beat you." She sucks the dregs of marrow from a cracked femur. "To please my Master whether he likes it or not."

  After a few final, lingering licks, she bites the thigh bone in two, chokes down one half, and drops the other into the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. She flips a wall switch and the disposal coughs to life. The femur dances and descends into the disposal as hidden, dull blades whack it into splinters. "I ate all that I could use," she shouts over the racket. She glances aside. "Well, almost all."

  She holds up a mason jar with the remains of Bee's manhood. Dee struggles to reach out and throttle Black Cherry's throat, but his arms plough through air thicker than treacle, and the scarlet girl rebuffs them with an impatient wing. He can still speak, and opts to scream for a long while before words come out. "Why show me this?"

  "No choice." Black Cherry shuts off the disposal. "Through the Gate of Ivory, I can't make any true visions or new memories. I have to work within what's inside you already—my memories from before you consumed my novilunium. Plus, it's fun!" She gazes up at him through her eyelashes. "You should see how adorably angry you look."

  She hops off the counter, mason jar in hand. "Now then, where is…Ah." She plucks up the tin of nanomek in the other hand. "Hm." She contemplates the two containers. "I wonder if the old trick still works."

  She plunks the mason jar back onto the counter. The two gobbets of raveled flesh inside the jar roll and rebound off the sides of the glass. "I just need a little bit of offal." She fishes inside the mouth of the garbage disposal and comes away with a finger-scoopful of muck. She flicks a dollop of the stuff into the mason jar.

  She pops the top off the tin and dread blankets Dee. "My God, Cherry. Don't…"

  She shushes him and gives the tin a short shake. "No talking during my flashbacks." A slight shower of soft powder wafts down into the jar.

  "You didn't really do that," Dee says, aghast. "This is a nightmare, a false dream. You're…you're making this up."

  "Could be," she twitters, locking the top of the mason jar in place. "I think I'll leave this little guy for you, a guardian at the threshold of the underworld. I bet you'll completely forget about it until it's too late, just like in all the stories."

  Dee presses his fists against his forehead. "Remember, remember. This is important. Forget everything else about this fucking nightmare but remember this."

  Black Cherry laughs like she will fall apart. "I love loose ends, don't you?"

  Dee lunges for her but he still moves in slow motion. Black Cherry laughs again and skips from the kitchenette into the living room. She skids to a halt. "That smell. I didn't notice it in the kitchen—Bee's fear was too thick—but now…" She turns back to Dee, eyes wide. "I know that smell, Master." She giggles. "It's another me, isn't it?" A frown clouds her face. She swallows her laughter. "No, wait." S
he tips her head toward the ceiling. "It's her."

  Dee staggers after her. Black Cherry groans. Wing claws scourge her back, her chest, raising crisscrossed, weeping welts. "There are gaps in my mind, Master." Beads of brandy bleed down her legs. "Glittering caverns filled with only the shadow of memory. I am newborn but there are echoes of something older, far older." She hangs her head. Her bangs fall over her eyes and she sobs, "I'm so confused. I'm so alone."

  Dee reaches for her shoulder. "Cherry."

  Black Cherry glares up at the lime-stained ceiling, defiance shining through sanguine tears. "I should be alone." A wing claw stabs upward. "She should not be here. It's all wrong." She sniffles, hiccupping giggles. "You made a mess of things this time, Master. But I will fix them for us."

  She strides to the living room window, wrenches it open, and scuttles out. Wing claws punch through aluminum siding for purchase. "Come along, Master. I mean for you to see this through."

  The dream-world shifts around Dee. He drifts three stories up in the middle of the night air. Black Cherry suspends herself upside-down above an apartment window. She peeps through, her face illuminated by a jittering electric glow.

  Dee's heart is in his throat. "Galatea?"

  Black Cherry grips the windowsill with her hands, and pries the window open with one long claw. Inside, the sliding lock rips free of the window frame and clatters to the floor. "If all your neighbors are this cute, Master," she remarks, "I won't have to eat many more of them." She swings to the side to let him see.

  The living room behind the glass is not his own, but he recognizes its occupant readily enough. Dee breathes, "Oh, no.

  "Viggo."

  Viggo Palm sits in a cushy lounge chair a few feet away from a wafer-thin television so high fidelity it needs to be calibrated against the magnetic disturbances in the Earth's crust. The only source of light in the room, the television's ambient glow casts Viggo's fine black hair in electric blue. His ears are swallowed up by boxy headphones. He is absorbed in his work, which, at the moment Black Cherry glides through the living room window, consists of killing zombies.

  Dee finds himself beside Black Cherry, standing amidst stacks of video game and DVD boxes in low-slung wire racks. Black Cherry nibbles her lip, eyes roving over Viggo's own low-slung, wiry frame. Viggo sits oblivious to everything but the virtual tide of the hungry dead rising in HDTV on the screen. His fingers blur over a wireless video game controller with so many knobs and buttons it looks like a gleaming scarab beetle. The room is silent save for the clacking controller and the muffled death-rattles of the living dead reverberating from his headphones.

  Black Cherry fixates on Viggo's nimble fingers. "He knows the Flying Octopus, Hooded Pearl Technique," she marvels.

  "Cherry," Dee says, "don't do this."

  "Don't do what?" she titters, trying to imitate the butterfly movement of Viggo's hands. "This has all happened already. Maybe you just don't want to see?" She perfects the finger motion, then lowers her arm and plays out the same pattern across her mons. She squeaks and jumps, the miniature wings above her ears frazzling. "Oh, my!" Her brows knit.

  "Cherry," Dee says, "wait." But she is already stomping across the room in her jelly clogs. Black Cherry opens her wings, curtaining the television set, and folds her arms below her bare breasts. The plasma screen's lumina ignite her curves with an eerie nimbus.

  "What's wrong with you?" she asks, head-wings fanned, mouth filled with crimson foxfire. "Spending the night alone when you have hands like that?"

  Viggo blinks up at her. The controller falls in his lap. He toggles the volume control on his headphones.

  Black Cherry tips her head and taps her foot. "Well?"

  The demoness and dweeb stare in silence. Then, in hushed tones, Viggo wonders: "Morrigan?"

  Black Cherry purses her lips. Her left wing fleets forward, claw hooked down. Dee shouts Viggo's name but the sleep paralysis returns, cramming Dee in invisible gauze. Dazed and unflinching, Viggo watches the wing sail toward him. He taps the PAUSE button on the game controller between his knees. The claw flies past his ear and flips the lounge chair backward. The chair's upturned footrest points Viggo's feet at the ceiling.

  The scarlet girl, more shadow than substance in the televised witch-light, sashays forward. She sighs, "Read a book sometime, alright?" and straddles Viggo's lap. The lounge chair creaks once, then wobbles as Viggo nods his fierce, wide-eyed agreement. Black Cherry tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, bends down, and enshrouds his mouth with hers.

  Viggo reaches down and tosses the game controller onto the carpet. Black Cherry molds her body over his, snickers, "Good boy," into his mouth, and guides his hands up from between his knees to her naked sex. "Find my pearl."

  Viggo moves beneath her and she trembles, still kissing, kissing. The miniature wings above her head furl into pointed cones, becoming perky cat ears. Dee knows he watches a cat at play with her prey and an enervating sense of dread and guilt—I mistrusted Galatea; I gave away the nanomek; I am the cause of all of this—roots him to the spot as an impotent spectator.

  Black Cherry breaks the kiss. Her throaty chuckle fills the silence, her wings outspread wall to wall. Her lips shine in the half-light, serous and wet. Viggo swallows, his mouth glossed with brandy. He worships the vision above him before whispering, "I'm Badjao."

  Black Cherry scrunches her hips around Viggo's hand. "Hm?"

  "My granddad: Badjao," Viggo says, his smile hazy, his voice slurry. "Pearl diving is in my blood."

  Dee manages to spit a few words. "You're. Mindfucking. Him."

  "Oh, yes," Black Cherry replies. She descends onto Viggo again. At first Dee thinks their kiss has become soulful and full of tongue. Then a trickle of cordial escapes Black Cherry's lips, drizzles down Viggo's cheekbone and over an ear. This is no French kiss, Dee realizes, watching Black Cherry gush and Viggo guzzle. This is a grotesque communion.

  "You won't…eat him?"

  Black Cherry rocks up. "Oh, no." She snaps the buttons off Viggo's shirt, one by one, and shrugs. "Well, yes. But not now. Why?" She turns to Dee. "Do you want me to eat him, Master?"

  Dee plods forward a single step. "Damn you." Words flow a little easier now. "Stop this. Leave him. Alone."

  "You and I should be alone, Master," Black Cherry insists. "But for that to happen…" She pauses and glares at the television—No, through the television, through the wall beyond, into my apartment, to Galatea—"There's someone I need to deal with first." She turns back to Viggo. "So, Badjao."

  "Viggo," says Viggo.

  "Whatever. Can you hear it now?" Black Cherry raps a knuckle on his forehead. "Blood music?"

  Viggo's face blossoms with silent revelation, a broad Oh, so that's what that is expression. "Blood music," Viggo echoes, glad to give the strange sensation a name.

  "For the next few hours, that's all I want you to hear. And this." She slips two fingers into her sex then smears them across his mouth and under his nose. "Is all I want you to think about."

  Viggo groans, "I already am." He reaches for her but she pushes his hands back. "Don't you want to fuck?"

  Black Cherry finishes undoing his shirt and plants her palm over his left breast. "Of course. But later. Master must be my first, and you're not him. You're for the Frenzy."

  Dee startles. It's like falling off a cliff. For an instant, he seizes upon the truth. He sees. He sees everything that's happened, everything that she's said.

  ["…It should be you…My master should be my first…It should have been you, but I have no time…"]

  The whole puzzle clicks together in his head, Black Cherry's whole, crazy, pointless, stupid game. The knowledge is ephemeral. Dee can already sense it slipping through his grasp, through the gate of ivory, the font of false dreams. "Dream logic," Yves called it. It rarely makes sense after you wake up. Yet the bitterness and bile welling up in his breast feel strong enough to last forever. He knows what he has to do. "Enough, Cherry."

  Blac
k Cherry ignores him. "Are there any guardsmen?" she asks Viggo. Viggo frowns. Droplets of Cherry's cordial spill down his chin. "I saw a guardhouse outside," Black Cherry continues, "but it was empty."

  Dee advances on the overturned lounge chair. "I mean it. It's over."

  "Central office," Viggo says. His fingers strive for Black Cherry's cleft but she pins him down and shies away. "Near the front gate."

  "I'm ending this." Dee stands before overturned chair. For the first time, Viggo registers Dee's presence.

  "Dee?"

  Dee looks down and speaks with his newfound voice: "Frog blast the vent core."

  Black Cherry's incredulous laughter dies in her throat as Viggo flays and swears beneath her. The scarlet girl stumbles off the chair. "What? What?"

  Viggo rolls onto the floor and springs up, wild eyed. Dee chases him out the front door of the apartment with two well-timed cries of "I'm out of ammo!" and "Shoot me!"

  "That." Black Cherry shakes her head. "That never happened. Whatever the Hell that was." She levels an accusing finger at Dee. "You cheated!"

  "No," Dee shuts the front door, bolts it shut. "I out-geeked you. V's a diehard gamer, and some instincts go deeper than sex. Besides, my head…" The apartment evaporates into diffuse light. "My rules. Get moving."

  Black Cherry twitters and casts about for a reference point in the white, sterile plane. She finds a worn, maroon leather recliner chair next to a counterfeit Tiffany floor lamp. "What is this?"

  "A Matrix reference." Dee smirks as he circles around to the front of the recliner. "You'll never understand me, or—" He freezes. "Tomoe."

  Tomoe goggles up at him from the recliner, a toddler caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Her hair is plastered with sweat against her cheeks. Her skirt is on the nominal white floor. Her fingers are jammed into her rose underwear.

  "Oh, hey, Dee."

  Dee spreads his hands, lost. "What the fuck, Tomoe?"

  "I," Tomoe starts. "I was…" She looks down at her crotch. The panty is soaked through. "I was just…" Her fingers withdraw with a lewd shlick noise, and she blushes strawberry red. "I was just leaving," she squeaks, hops out of the chair, wraps her skirt sideways around her waist, and crab-walks away.