* * *
While he was shifting his position over her, Art accidentally pinned some of Rubina’s hair under his elbow, yanking at her scalp. “Ow!” she snapped. “Watch it!”
“Sorry, sorry. Jeesh. I’m starting to think you should get a crewcut, sweety.”
“You’d like that, huh?”
“Just kidding.” She lay on her belly on their bed, and he lay atop her back. He kissed the back of her head. “It was your eyes that really hooked me, but the first thing that struck me was your hair. When I think of you, I think ‘hair.’ But enough about your underarms...”
“I hate you,” Rubina said against her pillow.
He had bunched up her pajama top, and now he ran his hand under it, across the smooth plane of her back. “Your skin is so hot. I like it better when it’s cool and clammy.”
“You’re so romantic, Art.”
He had slid out of her, and now moved slowly down her spine, as if to kiss each vertebrae in its chain, as if to soothe her fevered skin. He rolled her pajama bottoms further down her legs, then lay across them, encircling her bottom and laying his cheek against it. “Mm...nice funky bum.”
“Shut up!” Rubina squirmed until he removed his face. “Why are guys so perverse?”
“Hey, perverse means unnatural. It’s normal for guys to be pigs.” He pinched one buttock in an effort to lighten her spirit, and resumed his kisses in the scooped out hollow of her lower back. “You have got the prettiest shade of skin, my dear.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
More exaggerated smooches. “Mm.” He seemed to have hit one particularly tasty spot, which he kissed again and again. “Did you know you have a mole right here?”
Rubina rolled over and sat up so violently that her hip clipped Art painfully on the jaw. “Oh my God!” she said.
“Jesus, easy! What did I do now?”
Rubina sprang up from their bed, and tore at the slats of the Venetian blind covering the window nearest the bed. Art watched her peering out into the frigid darkness.
“What is it? Did you hear something again?”
Slowly she let the slats fall back together, withdrew from the window. “No...”
“What, then?”
“Art...I was reading a kind of journal or something my uncle wrote. I found it in the cellar, when I found that movie.”
“And?”
She faced him. “He said he was peeping at a man while he was kissing a woman’s mole. On her back. A mole she didn’t know she had.”
“Really? Huh. That’s a funny coincidence.” Art sat up, his expression growing more perplexed. “So why did you look out the window? Who’d you expect to see out there? Uncle Perv?”
“Art...you’re alienating me, you know.”
He threw up his hands. “Well, what, then? You read some voyeuristic stuff he wrote. Don’t read any more if it freaks you out.”
Rubina was rearranging her clothes, covering her skin while a shiver of gooseflesh spread across it. More to herself than to her boyfriend, she murmured, “I thought he was spying on my aunt and her boyfriend. But it sounds like he was spying on us...”
“Ruby...”
“My God.” She flashed her huge dark eyes at him. “And the other night...on the couch while we were watching the movie. He wrote something about watching a man and a woman making love on a sofa...”
“Look, Ruby. Two things. First, your uncle is dead. Second, if he was dead and spying on us and writing this stuff down, which would be impressive in itself,” Art paused to snort, “how could he have written about me kissing your mole before I actually did it?”
Rubina ran both her hands back through her hair, pacing in bare feet alongside their bed. “He wrote all those things down while he was suffocating himself, I know he did. When he was oxygen deprived. In another state of mind – close to death. What if he saw us that way, Art? Saw something that hadn’t happened yet?”
“A voyeur with psychic powers. That’s better than being Spider-Man,” Art remarked.
Rubina stopped her pacing to glare at him. “I’m sleeping on the couch tonight.”
“Yeah? Okay. Maybe Uncle Fester will be out on the porch looking in at you, Ruby. Or maybe he’ll wrap your hair around your neck while you sleep.”
“Yeah, speaking of which – maybe that was you who wrapped my hair around my neck today, Art. And maybe you’ve already read that notebook in the cellar. I’ll bet I don’t even have a mole on my back...and you’re just playing some sick mind game with me.” Rubina’s pitch was notching up toward hysteria.
Art nearly vaulted from the bed, and took her by the shoulder, spinning her so that her back faced toward the mirror of her vanity. “Stay here a second.” He stomped out of the room, into the bathroom, came back with a hand mirror. He lifted the back of her pajama top with one hand, positioned the hand mirror carefully with the other.
Straining her head over one shoulder, Rubina could see the dark mole on her lower back, reflected in the silvered glass.
* * *
Rubina called into work for a third day. She promised she’d get a doctor’s note, but through the morning kept putting off a call to make an appointment...instead, pacing her kitchen, drinking tea, her eyes continuously returning to the shut and bolted cellar door.
Several times, she even put her hand out to the knob, but then withdrew it again as if she felt a burning heat radiating from its metal.
She found herself eyeing every window in every room she entered; even the skylight in the bathroom when she was seated on the toilet. She hadn’t showered in two days, but was nervous about closing herself in with the curtain, water in her eyes, and instead took a long bath with the curtain open and another cup of tea perched on the edge.
At one point, she caught herself dozing off in the water, her hair floating about her shoulders like spreading squid’s ink, and sat up in the suds with a start. She looked up to the skylight, to see if a face was framed there, leering down at her. She realized that snow had begun to fall yet again, and had painted over the skylight. It made her imagine that the house was trapped under an avalanche of snow, made her feel buried alive.
The bathroom had been enlarged by her uncle in some earlier time, extended out beyond the floor above. As Rubina dried herself, she looked around her at the walls that her uncle had erected with his own hands. He had lived in this very apartment for five years, until the divorce, until his wife made him leave.
What energies had his dead skin cells, the oil in his fingertips, the blood of a nicked thumb, the sweat of his palms conveyed to these white walls? He had gazed into this same mirror Rubina’s face was framed in. His whiskers down that drain, his wastes down that toilet. His sperm, perhaps, down the drain of the shower? Did this sludge of him linger still, recirculating itself through the plumbing, more than enough material to clone a person from -- almost enough to clog together and form some clotted fetus, blocking one of the pipes, waiting to be flushed up to the surface and walk these rooms again, reborn?
Though she had none of his blood in her veins, what energies might the sweat of his hands have conveyed to the flesh of her younger self’s legs, the flesh of her back? Had her mole existed before he had caressed her there, or was it a cancer he had impregnated her with? Rubina almost felt the urge to return to the bathtub...to scrub at her lower back vigorously...
Almost physically reeling back from these thoughts and images, Rubina reached up to feel the heat of her own forehead. She felt its radiance on her palm even before it touched her skin.
Despite her fever, she swaddled herself in blankets on the sofa and flipped through cable in long, idle loops. Somewhere in her wanderings through the cathode labyrinth, she dozed off.
She dreamed it was snowing. Snowing through a skylight that was open in her small living room above the couch, instead of in the bathroom. As she lay there, layer upon layer of snow collected on her...at first melting against her hot face, but eventually dusting it. Coating it. Cover
ing it entirely...
Rubina awoke with a gasp, or with the intention to gasp, but she could not draw breath. The pillow over her face pressed down against her too tightly, mashing her nose and lips. Mashing even her eyelids shut. She pushed at it, grinding her heels against the sofa cushions in a writhing panic. Not being able to press the pillow away, as if it were a crushing stone too heavy to lift, she thrashed around for wrists to claw, hands to grasp, fingers to pry loose.
The pressure on the pillow eased. Just before she could fling it away herself, it was lifted, and hovering close was Art, smiling down at her.
“You bastard!” she sobbed hoarsely, devouring oxygen with raw wheezes. She batted the pillow in its red pillowcase out of his hands, sat up as if to launch herself at him, and Art backed off holding out his palms to ward her off, chuckling nervously.
“Whoa, hang on, hang on! You were dreaming, Ruby! You had that pillow over your face when I came in. You were holding it there yourself. I’m the one who took it off...”
“No! No, Art! You were playing your games again. First with my hair, and now with my pillow. I’m not falling for it again! Did it turn you on? Or are you just a cruel sick bastard?”
“Ruby, I’m telling you. I came in and you were having this fit, holding the pillow over your own face! I swear it!” As Art’s voice became more agitated, it was apparent that it had a wheezy quality to it, too.
“What are you doing home now?” she demanded.
“I’m starting to get sick myself.” He gestured at his throat. “Losing my voice. Sweety, come on, listen.” Gingerly he sat down beside her, their thighs touching, and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “It was a dream. I wouldn’t hurt you. Ever.” He leaned in to kiss her temple, and whispered huskily, “Unless you wanted me to, of course.”
Looking straight ahead, she nudged him away with her elbow but said no more about it.
* * *
That night, as they sat watching TV together in silence – one of a seemingly endless number of forensic programs to be found on cable – Art snuggled closer to Rubina and tried to nibble at her smooth neck, parting the heavy curtain of her hair to expose it. Just under her jaw, he kissed a dark dot of a mole he had never really noticed there before. She squirmed away from him, scowling at the TV, where a specialist was explaining that the brain of a dead person begins to liquify immediately, and that the discoloration of lividity commences within three to five hours. Art withdrew from Rubina, and minutes later rose, mumbling in his increasingly raspy voice, “I’m going to bed.”
Brain death. Lividity. Rubina woke to see the same program playing, though the VCR’s clock told her hours had elapsed. She had dozed so long that the program was being played again. Hazily she sat up straight and winced at the pain in her back. Too much sleeping on the couch of late. Carefully she stood, massaging her own muscles under the back of her pajama top. After watching a few more minutes of the program, dully entranced, she willed herself to shut off the set. Barefoot, she shuffled toward the dim glow of the kitchen’s nightlight. Across the kitchen, the black oblong of her open bedroom door.
Inexplicably, she felt vaguely aroused. It made her wonder what she had been dreaming this time. It made her feel awkward to be aroused when she was still distrustful of Art. She hoped he would not gloat, would not say something sarcastic or smug, when she crawled naked into bed to awaken him.
Rubina stepped through the black rectangle, and edged carefully to the bed, pulling her top up over her head as she did so. After stepping out of her bottoms, she began to crawl onto the side of the bed she always slept on, but found that it was already occupied. Her knee as it depressed the mattress caused a hand to slump against her bare skin – and startled, she reached out with her left hand.
It came into contact with something slippery. Something with pliable folds, like a loose skin over hard bone.
Rubina jerked her hand away as if electrically shocked, and the same hand darted sideways to the bedside lamp, half toppling it before she got it to snick on.
Then she was screaming, jolted back from the bed, backing straight into the wall.
Because her uncle lay on her side of the bed, one fist clenching the sheet beneath him. Wearing nothing but a plastic bag cinched tightly around his neck. His expression was peaceful, with even a touch of a slight contented smile on his lips. He was not discolored (no lividity yet), but streams of stark red from asphyxial bleeding ran down from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, pooling in a pocket of the bag around his chin.
She thought his eyes would flick open, piercing blue. Art’s eyes. Not uncle’s eyes, after all. She was groggy, she was still dreaming, it was Art and she expected his eyes to snap open because Art liked to play games, to tease, to be morbid and...
His eyes didn’t open. And when Rubina slapped at Art’s foot it rocked limply. When she slapped at his arm it flopped off the edge of the bed and his head rolled to one side on the pillow.
And Rubina screamed until she thought she tasted the sting of blood in her throat from the strain. She screamed until she nearly strangled on her scream. Until she lost her voice altogether.
* * *
Rubina was questioned at her apartment. Through her pain, she felt fear. They thought she had done this, didn’t they? And even more frightening than that thought was the thought that perhaps she had. While she had been dreaming; somnambulantly seeking out Art in their bed an hour or so before she sought him out again, naked, later...
But no, not her, not her! Art had that kinky side, waiting to evolve further, to rise more fully to the surface, the side that had drawn him to her uncle’s movie from the basement. Frustrated by her coldness, her rejection, he had instead sought self-stimulation. It had to be that! Her uncle’s methods and that film had been on his mind. It was an accident, not a suicide. Not a murder by his lover...
Rubina was not arrested, not charged, though she was questioned again. And on the second time she was questioned, she reluctantly mentioned the items of her uncle’s she had found hidden away under the staircase in the basement, how one or more of these items (the photos of Aunt Helen, bound and gagged?) might have inspired Art to some extent, and the police had then asked to take these articles for examination.
The third time the police came to talk to her, they returned the moldy carton, though they had found it useful.
“Do you remember previously seeing the plastic bag your boyfriend used – inside that box of your uncle’s belongings?” asked a gravelly-voiced detective in street clothes as he unwrapped a menthol lozenge and popped it into the side of his mouth.
“I don’t recall seeing that bag in my uncle’s box. Why?” Rubina asked in a lobotomized tone. As if her brain had partially liquified.
“Well,” said the detective, “we found some fingerprints on the plastic bag that didn’t belong to your boyfriend. Actually, we didn’t find any of your boyfriend’s prints on it. On a hunch that he was aware of your uncle’s belongings before you discovered them, we dusted some of those items and found prints on them that match several prints on the plastic bag...”
Rubina was sitting on her couch, and realized her hand rested on her pillow in its red case. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep again in her bed. She withdrew her hand from the pillow as if it might incriminate her, and mumbled, “Those prints...you mean they were mine?”
“No...no, not yours. We think they’re your uncle’s prints, is what I’m saying. We think that plastic bag was in the box with his other possessions.”
But Rubina did not remember seeing any such bag in the cardboard box previously. Everything she saw inside that carton – when she carried it out to her backyard later that same afternoon, when she laid the box down in the snow, when she squirted it with lighter fluid that soaked into the mildewed cardboard – was just as she remembered it from before. She had returned the video to it, as when she had first discovered the box. The Polaroids were there. And as before, resting atop the other articles in
the box was the spiral notebook. The one containing her uncle’s cryptic notes. His journal of fantasies...or observations.
Just one last time she had picked it up. Opened it directly to a page she had apparently overlooked before. On it were scrawled the words: “The man looked into my eyes. I thought it was a mirror at first. I thought I was looking out of the plastic at him. Then I realized he was looking out of the plastic at me.”
Rubina’s face burned with the rising heat of the flames, as if she were again in the grip of some terrible, disorienting fever.
But the crackling fire seemed to burn away invisible bindings from her. And despite the smoke, the cold outside air seemed to clear her congested lungs.
The End
The Call of the Worms
The steep path up the slope was lined on either side with the fossilized shells of an extinct mollusk, set into the ground so that their long spiral shells pointed upwards like stalagmites.
Actual stalactites dripped from a calcite ceiling lost in gloom. At one point the party of King G. stopped to rest, and G.’s Second – the King-in-Waiting – turned his face up to catch a steady stream of cold, pattering water across his forehead. It soothed his agonies somewhat. All of the members of the King’s party felt the agony of the worms, but that pain had been steadily increasing in the Second’s skull. As his worm grew, so did his skull expand to contain it. But the pain was a blessing, the presence of the great worm Yahhew within him. And he was particularly blessed, being the King-in-Waiting.
The winding path through the ranked spikes of spiral fossils ended in a level cliff top. Its ragged edge overlooked the Gulf, a plummet of deep gloom like the vaulted ceiling of the cavern above them. The Second had never seen into the Gulf’s depths himself, but he had heard stories related by those who had been lowered by rope. In a pool of black water or some other fluid, countless fossilized ammonites – these shells coiled in spirals rather than tusk-like – churned against each other constantly. Not buoyed up by the water, but filling the pool to its bottom, however far that might extend. Though constantly gnashing against each other in the turbulent pool, the coiled fossils never eroded, never wore down smooth.
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