“Hey, Cliffie,” says a woman’s voice, and Marley, a diminutive package of frizzy, dirty blond hair and blue eyes, a cute sun-browned face and jeans tight as a sausage skin, lands in the chair beside his and gives him a quick hug. She’s young enough to be his daughter, old enough to be his lover. He’s played both roles, but prefers that of father. She’s feisty, good-hearted, and too valuable as a friend to risk losing over rumpled bed sheets.
“Hey, you,” he says. “I thought this was your night off.”
“All my nights are off.” She grins. “My new goal—becoming a barfly like you.
“What about…you know. Tyler, Taylor…”
She pretends to rap her knuckles on his forehead. “Tucker. He gone.”
“I thought that was working out.”
“Me, too,” she says. “And then, oops, an impediment. He was wanted for fraud in South Carolina.”
“Fraud? My God!”
“That’s what I said…except I cussed more.” She neatly tears off a strip of cocktail napkin. “Cops came by the place three weeks ago. Guns drawn. Spotlights. The whole schmear. He waived extradition.’”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
She shrugs. “You know how I hate people crying in their beer.”
“God. Let me buy you a drink.”
“You bet.” She pounds the counter. “Tequila!”
They drink, talk about Tucker, about what a lousy spring it’s been. Two tequilas along, she asks if he’s all right, he seems a little off. He wants to tell her, but it’s too complicated, too demented, and she doesn’t need to hear his problems, so he tells her about the movies he did in the Philippines, making her laugh with anecdotes about and impersonations of the director. Five tequilas down and she’s hanging on him, giggly, teasing, laughing at everything he says, whether it’s funny or not. It’s obvious she won’t be able to drive. He invites her to use his couch—he’d give her the bed, but the couch is murder on his back—and she says, suddenly tearful, “You’re so sweet to me.”
After one for the road, they start out along the dunes toward home, going with their heads down—a wind has kicked up and blows grit in their faces. The surf munches the shore, sounding like a giant chewing his food with relish; a rotting scent intermittently overrides the smell of brine. No moon, no stars, but porch lights from the scattered houses show the way. Marley keeps slipping in the soft sand and Cliff has to put an arm around her to prevent her from falling. The tall grasses tickle his calves. They’re twenty yards from his front step, when he hears the sound of boomerang in flight—he identifies it instantly, it’s that distinct. A helicopter-ish sound, but higher-pitched, almost a whistling, passing overhead. He stops walking, listening for it, and Marley seizes the opportunity to rub her breasts against him, her head tipped back, waiting to be kissed.
“Is this going to be one of those nights?” she asks teasingly.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A boomerang, I think. Somebody threw a boomerang.”
Bewildered, she says, “A boomerang?”
“Shh! Listen!”
Confused, she shelters beneath his arm as he reacts to variations in the wind’s pitch, to a passing car whose high beams sweep over the dune grass, lighting the cottage, growing a shadow from its side that lengthens and then appears to reach with a skinny black arm across the rumpled ground the instant before it vanishes. He hears no repetition of the sound, and its absence unsettles him. He’s positive that he heard it, that somewhere out in the night, a snaky-jointed figure is poised to throw. He hustles Marley toward the cottage and hears, as they ascend the porch steps, a skirling music, whiny reed instruments and a clattery percussion, like kids beating with sticks on a picket fence, just a snatch of it borne on the wind. He shoves Marley inside, bolts the door and switches on the porch lights, thinking that little brown men with neat mustaches will bloom from the dark, because that’s what sort of music it is, Manila taxicab music, the music played by the older drivers who kept their radios tuned to an ethnic station—but he sees nothing except rippling dune grass, pale sand, and the black gulf beyond, a landscape menacing for its lack of human form.
He bolts the inner door, too. Resisting Marley’s attempts to get amorous, he opens out the couch bed, makes her lie down and take a couple of aspirin with a glass of water. He sits in a chair by the couch as she falls asleep, his anxiety subsiding. She looks like a kid in her T-shirt and diaphanous green panties, drowsing on her belly, face half-concealed by strings of hair, and he thinks what a fuck-up he is. The thought is bred by no particular chain of logic. It may have something to do with Marley, with his deepened sense of the relationship’s inappropriateness, a woman more than twenty years his junior (though, God knows, he’s championed the other side of that argument), and she’s younger than that in her head, a girl, really…It may bear upon that, but the thought has been on heavy rotation in his brain for years and seems to have relevance to every situation. He’s pissed away countless chances for marriage, for success, and he can’t remember what he was thinking, why he treated these opportunities with such casual disregard. He recalls getting a third callback to test for the Bruce Willis role in Diehard. Word was that the studio was leaning toward him, because Willis had pissed off one of the execs, so one the night before the callback he did acid at some Topanga cliff dwelling and came in looking bleary and dissolute.
Looking at Marley’s ass, he has a flicker of arousal, and that worries him, that it’s only a flicker, that perhaps his new sense of morality is merely a byproduct of growing older, of a reduced sex drive. He has the sudden urge to prove himself wrong, to wake her up and fuck her until dawn, but he sits there, depressed, letting his emotions bleed out into the sound of windowpanes shuddering from constant slaps of wind. Eventually he goes to the door and switches off the lights. Seconds later, he switches them back on, hoping that he won’t discover some mutant shape sneaking toward the porch, yet feeling stupid and a little disappointed when nothing of the sort manifests.
Chapter Four
He’s waked by something banging. He tries to sleep through it, but each time he thinks it’s quit and relaxes, it starts up again, so he flings off the covers and shuffles into the living room, pauses on finding the couch unoccupied, scratches his head, trying to digest Marley’s absence, then shuffles onto the porch and discovers it’s the screen door that’s banging. Thickheaded, he shuts it, registering that it’s still dark outside. He walks through the house, calling out to Marley; he checks the bathroom. Alarm sets in. She would have left a note, she would have shut the front door. He dresses, shaking out the cobwebs, and goes out onto the porch steps, switching on the exterior lights. Beyond the half-circle of illumination, the shore is a winded confusion, black sky merging with black earth and sea, the surf still heavy. The wind comes in a steady pour off the water, plastering his shorts and shirt against his body.
“Marley!”
No response.
With this much wind, he thinks, his voice won’t carry fifty feet.
He grabs the flashlight from inside the door, deciding that he’ll walk down to the Surfside and make sure her car’s gone from the lot. She probably went home, he tells himself. Woke up and was sober enough to drive. But leaving the door open…that’s just not Marley.
He strikes out along A1A, keeping to the shoulder, made a bit anxious by the music he heard earlier that evening, by the boomerang sound, though he’s attributed that to the booze, and by the time he reaches the turn-off into the lot, his thoughts have brightened, he’s planning the day ahead; but on seeing Marley’s shitbox parked all by its lonesome, a dented brown Hyundai nosed up to the door of the Surfside, his worries are rekindled. He shines the flashlight through the windows of the Hyundai. Fast-food litter, a Big Gulp cup, a crumpled Kleenex box. He bangs on the door of the bar, thinking that Marley might have changed her mind, realized she was too drunk to drive and bedded down in the Surfside. He shouts, bang
s some more. Maybe she called a cab from his house. She must have felt guilty about coming on to him. If that’s the case, he’ll have to have a talk with her, assure her that it’s not that she isn’t desirable, it’s got nothing to do with her, it’s him, it’s all about how he’s begun to feel in intimate situations with her, and then she’ll say he’s being stupid, she doesn’t think of him as a dirty old man, not at all. It’s like the kids say, they’re friends with benefits. No big deal. And Cliff, being a guy, will go along with that—sooner or later they’ll wind up sleeping together and there they’ll be, stuck once again amid the confusions of a May-September relationship.
As he walks home, swinging the flashlight side-to-side, he wonders if the reason he put some distance between him and Marley had less to do with her age than with the fact that he was getting too attached to her. The way he felt when she popped up at the Surfside last night—energized, happy, really happy to see her—is markedly different from the way he felt when Stacy Gerone came over the other morning. He’s been in love a couple of times, and he seems to recall that falling in love was preceded on each occasion by a similar reaction on his part, a pushing away of the woman concerned for one reason or another. That, he concludes, would be disastrous. If now he perceives himself to be an aging roué, just imagine how contemptible he’d feel filling out Medicare forms while Marley is still a relatively young woman—like a decrepit vampire draining her youth.
His cottage in view, he picks up the pace, striding along briskly. He’ll go back to bed for an hour or two, call Marley when he wakes. And if she wants to start things up again…It’s occurred to him that he’s being an idiot, practicing a form of denial that serves no purpose. In Asia, in Europe, relationships between older men and young women—between older women and young men, for that matter—aren’t perceived as unusual. All he may be doing by his denial is obeying a bourgeoisie convention. He gnaws at the problem, kicking at tufts of high grass, thinking that his notion of morality must be hardening along with his arteries, and, as he approaches the cottage, verging on the arc of radiance spilling from the porch, he notices a smear of red to the left of the door. It’s an extensive mark, a wide, wavy streak a couple of feet long that looks very much like blood.
Coming up to the porch, he touches a forefinger to the redness. It’s tacky, definitely blood. He’s bewildered, dully regarding the dab of color on his fingertip, his mind muddled with questions, and then the wrongness of it, the idea that someone has marked his house with blood, and it’s for sure an intentional mark, because no one would inadvertently leave a two-foot-long smear…the wrongness of it hits home and he’s afraid. He whirls about. Beyond the range of the porch lights, the darkness bristles, vegetation seething in the wind, palmetto tops tossing, making it appear that the world is solidifying into a big, angry animal with briny breath, and it’s shaking itself, preparing to charge.
He edges toward the steps, alert to every movement, and starts to hear music again, not the whiny racket he heard earlier, but strings and trumpets, a prolonged fanfare like the signature of a cheesy film score, growing louder, and he sees something taking shape from the darkness, something a shade blacker than the sky, rising to tower above the dunes. The coalsack figure of a horned giant, a sword held over its head. He gapes at the thing, the apparition—he assumes it’s an apparition. What else could it be? He hasn’t been prone to hallucinations for twenty years, and the figure, taller now than the tallest of the condominiums that line the beach along South Atlantic Avenue, is a known quantity, the spitting image of the Black Demon from his movie. Somebody is gaslighting him. They’re out in the dunes with some kind of projector, casting a movie image against the clouds. Having established a rational explanation, albeit a flimsy one, Cliff tries to react rationally. He considers searching the dunes, finding the culprit, but when the giant cocks the sword, drawing it back behind its head, preparing to swing a blade that, by Cliff’s estimate, is easily long enough to reach him, his dedication to reason breaks and he bolts for the steps, slams and locks the inner door, and stands in the center of his darkened living room, breathing hard, on the brink of full-blown panic.
The music has reverted to rackety percussion and skirling reeds, and it’s grown louder, so loud that Cliff can’t think, can’t get a handle on the situation.
Many-colored lights flash in the windows, pale rose and purple and green and white, reminding him of the lights in a Manila disco created by cellophane panels on a wheel revolving past a bright bulb. He has a glimpse of something or someone darting past outside. A shadowy form, vaguely anthropomorphic, running back and forth, a few steps forward, slipping out of sight, then racing in the opposite direction, as if maddened by the music, and, his pulse accelerated by the dervish reeds and clattering percussion, music that might accompany the flight of panicked moth, Cliff begins to feel light-headed. unsteady on his feet. There’s too much movement, too much noise. It seems that the sound-and-light show is having an effect on his brain, like those video games that trigger epileptic seizures, and he can’t get his bearings. The floor shifts beneath him, the window frame appears to have made a quarter-turn sideways in the wall. The furniture is dancing, the Mexican throw rug fronting the couch ripples like the surface of a rectangular pond. And then it stops. Abruptly. The music is cut off, the lights quit flashing…but there’s still too much light for a moonless, starless night, and he has the impression that someone’s aiming a yellow-white spot at the window beside the couch. Cliff waits for the next torment. His heart rate slows, he catches his breath, but he remains still, braced against the shock he knows is coming. Almost a full minute ticks by, and nothing’s happened. The shadows in the room have deepened and solidified. He’s uncertain what to do. Call the police and barricade himself in the house. Run like hell. Those seem the best options. Maybe whoever was doing this has fled and left a single spotlight behind. He sees his cell phone lying on an end table. “Okay,” he says, the way you’d speak to a spooked horse. “Okay.” He eases over to the table and picks up the phone. Activated, its cool blue glow soothes him. He punches in Marley’s number and reaches her voicemail. “Marley,” he says. “Call me when you get this.” Before calling the police, he thinks about what might be in the house—he’s out of pot, but did he finish those mushrooms in the freezer? Where did he put that bottle of oxycodone that Stacy gave him?
A tremendous bang shakes the cottage. Cliff squawks and drops the phone. Something scrabbles on the outside wall and then a woman’s face, bright blue, reminiscent of those Indian posters of Kali you used to be able to buy in head shops, her white teeth bared, her long black hair disheveled and hanging down, appears in the window, coming into view from the side, as if she’s clinging to the wall like a lizard. Her expression is so inhuman, so distorting of her features, that it yields no clue as to her identity; but when she swings down to center the window, gripping the molding, revealing her naked body, he recognizes her to be what’s-her-name, the witch who gave him the STD. The mole on her left breast, directly below the nipple gives it away. As does her pubic hair, shaved into a unique pattern redolent of exotic vegetation. Even without those telltales, he’d know that body. She loved to dance for him before they fucked, rippling the muscles of her inner thighs, shaking her breasts. But she’s not dancing now, and there’s nothing arousing about her presence. She just hangs outside the window, glaring, a voluptuous blue bug. Her teeth and skin and red lips are a disguise. Rip it away, and you would see a horrid face with a proboscis and snapping jaws. Only the eyes would remain of her human semblance. Huge and dark, empty except for a greedy, lustful quality that manifests as a gleam embedded deep within them. It’s that quality that compels Cliff, that roots him to the floorboards. He’s certain if he makes a move to run, she’ll come through the window, employing some magic that leaves the glass intact, and what she’ll do then…His imagination fails him, or perhaps it does not, for he feels her stare on his skin, licking at him as might a cold flame, tasting him, coating his
flesh with a slimy residue that isn’t tangible, yet seems actual, a kind of saliva that, he thinks, will allow her to digest him more readily. And then it’s over. The witch’s body deflates, shrivels like a leathery balloon, losing its shape, crumpling, folding in on itself, dwindling in a matter of four or five seconds to a point of light that—he realizes the instant before it winks out, before the spotlight, too, winks out—is the same exact shade of blue as the Vacancy sign at the Celeste Motel.
It’s a trick, a false ending, Cliff tells himself—she’s trying to get his hopes up, to let him relax, and then she’ll materialize behind him, close enough to touch. But time stretches out and she does not reappear. The sounds of wind and surf come to him. Still afraid, but beginning to feel foolish, he picks up his cell phone, half-expecting her to seize the opportunity and pounce. He goes cracks the door, then opens it and steps out into the soft night air. Something has sliced through the porch screen, halving it neatly. He imagines that the amount of torque required to do such a clean job would be considerable—it would be commensurate with, say, the arc of an enormous sword swung by a giant and catching the screen with the tip of its blade. He retreats inside the house, locks and bolts the door, realizing that it’s possible he’s being haunted by a movie. Thoughts spring up to assail the idea, but none serve to dismiss it. Understanding that he won’t be believed, yet having nowhere else to turn, he dials 911.
Chapter Five
Detective Sergeant Todd Ashford of the Port Orange Police Department and Cliff have a history, though it qualifies as ancient history. They were in the same class at Seabreeze High and both raised a lot of hell, some of it together, but they were never friends, a circumstance validated several years after graduation when Ashford, then a patrolman with the Daytona Beach PD, displayed unseemly delight in busting Cliff on a charge of Drunk and Disorderly outside Cactus Jack’s, a biker bar on Main Street. Cliff was home for a couple of weeks from Hollywood, flushed with the promise of imminent stardom, and Ashford did not attempt to hide the fact that he deeply resented his success. Nor does he attempt to hide his resentment now. Watching him pace about the interrogation room, a brightly lit space with black compound walls, a metal table and four chairs, Cliff recognizes that although Ashford may no longer resent his success, he has new reason for bitterness. He’s a far cry from the buzz-cut young cop who hauled Cliff off to the drunk tank, presenting the image of a bulbous old man with receding gray hair, dark, squinty eyes, a soupstrainer mustache, and jowls, wearing an off-the-rack sport coat and jeans, his gun and badge half-hidden by the overhang of his belly. Cliff looks almost young enough to be his son.
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