He put his trembling hand on the door and it opened, letting him in.
At the end of a short hallway, through an entranceway, was a small lobby. It looked as though it might once have been a taproom. The ceiling was oppressively low. The front desk might once have served as the bar. Above it, butting the ceiling, was a thick square beam which ran the length of the desk. On it were intricate carvings of animal grotesques. Jan shivered. There were bloated pigs with the faces of wild men, mouths grinning, sitting on their haunches, bellies sliced open to reveal hanging strings of sausages and bacon slabs immersed in twisting clouds of smoke. There were pigs with the heads of women, sprouting great tufts of hair, open mouths full of sharp teeth. Some were biting themselves; one had its head thrust into the gaping stomach of an adjacent sow. Above these fantastic animals, at the line of the ceiling, had been carved scenes of violent weather: fat thunderclouds with thick jets of rain pelting down, hailstones square as bales of hay, blizzards of snow tacked up in leaning drifts against the unheedful animals below. Jan studied the bizarre scenes, moving along the desk slowly from depiction to depiction. The thick black beam drew him, mesmerized. Again, he knew this place.
“What do you want?”
The rough sound of a human voice startled him. A short man was now facing him from behind the front desk. A door behind him, which had been closed, was now open wide. The man had a shock of white hair like those of the fantastic swine-women above him. But there was no hog body below his neck, only a hard torso sporting a green felt vest. In one sharp-fingered hand he held a piece of bread which had been torn from a loaf and a slice of sausage, which he now pressed together before bringing them to his lips. Half of this meal disappeared into his mouth and he chewed, waiting for Jan to speak, regarding him with his unfriendly eyes.
“Are you Edward?”
The other continued to chew, his hand holding the remaining sausage and bread pressing them together. He started to bring his hand up to his mouth but stopped and said, “You have a reservation?”
“No. Your hotel was recommended to me by a friend.”
“Recommended, eh?” For a moment the man's stare softened, but then he put the rest of his meal into his mouth and wiped his hands across the front of his vest. “It will cost you extra if you don't have a reservation.”
“How much?”
“Twenty for the room. And ten more for not phoning ahead.”
“That's too much,” Jan bluffed, remember the old blind woman's warning about the proprietor being a skinflint. “When my friend stayed he said it was ten for the room.”
“Twenty.” Edward shook his head. “Costs go up.”
“I could stay at the other hotel.”
“Go on, then,” Edward said, but he added, “All right. Ten it is for the room. In advance. And ten more for not reserving.”
Remembering the blind woman's other words, Jan said, “I want a room in the rear of the hotel.”
“Fine,” Edward said, impatiently. “Just pay in advance.”
Jan paid him, and was taken to a small room in one of the back corners of the third floor. It was hot. It looked out onto an oppressively close stand of oak trees: What little light reached the room filtered through the sway of branches. Looking out through the small window, he saw that the entire back of the hotel was suffocated by encroaching trees. Damn old woman. So much for her advice about morning sun.
When Edward had left him Jan lay on the bed. He found it lumpy and tilted annoyingly to one side. It smelled of old feathers and mildew. He laced his hands behind his head, finding with his fingers a rip in the pillow. He stared at the ceiling, trying to think of nothing, to make this day, what had happened to his life, vanish. But it would not. He saw it all again, as if played on a television screen: the haunted look on Jozef's face as he approached them on the bridge with his news; the smug visage of the man in the trench coat, sure of his job and his prey; and his mother's face, looming over him, telling him to get up for work, then weeping alone in her room after the police had gone, her rosary clutched in her praying hands, kneeling over the quilt, crying and praying to God crucified over her bed on his crucifix.
He pushed himself up on his elbows at a sound of movement, and there at the end of his bed was a girl he had never seen before, holding her hand out to him. She was short, her pale face suffused with freckles, her hair straight and red. She did not look Polish. But when she spoke she spoke Polish to him.
“Don't worry, Jan.”
He reached his hand out to her, and she took it in her own. Her touch was gentle but in the fingers he felt a fierce hardness. He sensed that, if she wanted, she could grip him so tight it would feel as though his hand was in a vise. And yet she held his hand now as gently as a lover.
“Come with me,” she said, in her beautiful, soft, enigmatic voice, letting his hand go.
He rose from the bed. She walked into the far comer of the room. He thought she had disappeared. But then he saw that the shadows in the comer lengthened, and that the walls did not meet. There was a hallway there.
Jan entered the shadows, leaving all but faint tendrils of light behind. He felt the walls with his hands. Abruptly the hall ended, and there were stairs. He climbed. Above him the stairway ended, and he faintly saw the girl turn away from him. There was only a wall ahead. When he reached it he found himself in another hallway which turned to the left. The girl was ahead of him, opening a door.
“Come on, Jan,” she called tenderly to him.
He reached the doorway. Inside was a huge attic. At first he did not see the girl, but then he located her at the far end of the room. She was bending over something in the midst of a forest of stacked boxes.
He hurried to catch up to her. There was dust on the floor, as deep as fallen snow. He had to kick it aside to walk. He covered his mouth to prevent his lungs from being filled with it. He began to cough. He had kicked up so much dust that he could not see.
“Where are you!” he shouted to the girl, but there was no answer.
Suddenly the room was very dark. There was a noise off to his right. He turned toward it but found only darkness and settling dust.
Something ran by him, brushing his leg and kicking up more dust. “Help me!” he yelled in fright. He could not see through the dust and darkness. There was a cold grip on his ankle, and he cried out. The grip released and the thing was gone in a cloud of soot.
“Where are you?” he called to the red-haired girl. “Help me!”
The dust settled to the floor like a cloak. She was very close to him. “Don't worry” she said, soothingly. “Follow me, Jan.”
He looked, and saw that there was a stairway at her feet. He followed.
They went down a steep flight of steps. It was like the one in his grandfather's house that led to the cellar. Another memory washed through him. He had gone down there to see something. He remembered squeals, the sweet red smell of blood, his grandfather's face turning up under the bright overhead bulb to look at him, his spectacles red-spattered, the drawn dripping blade held at the sweeping height of its arc, the limp pink thing held in his other hand making a weakening whooshing sound like air escaping from a gasbag, Jan's own cry mingling with the wheeze of the dying pig, rising past it to reprise its lost squeal, his feet slipping, falling.
Jan felt a movement of cold above him. A sudden, unshakable fear took hold of him. He stopped, head level with the floor of the attic. He saw the girl proceed ahead of him; a moment later she was gone. It became very dark again. He reached down, gingerly, and touched the step he was on; it felt exactly like the steps in his grandfather's cellar, dry wood cracked to splinters.
The air was cold all around the upper part of his body. He became filled with terror. When Jozef told them that the police wanted him he had felt fear, but it had not been like this. This was a formless thing; this was concentrated to a sharp, needlelike point that seared his middle, making him want to scream. He felt on the verge of becoming a mindless thing; he wan
ted to push the fright from his lungs with his shrieks and thrust it away from him.
In the darkness above him, there was the slightest of movements. He heard a tiny scratching sound, like a fingernail across slate. He thought he heard even breathing, above the sound of his own ragged breaths.
Something touched his head. It was a tap, as of a hard fingertip tapping a blackboard. The carvings in the beam over the bar in the lobby rose into his imagination. A shiver swept over him. He remembered the pigs with the faces of wild men, stomachs happily revealing processed innards. One of those creatures, he was sure, was crouched above him, leaning over the stairwell, a mere inches from his head.
The step he was on sagged. Something moved past him, down the stairway. There was a passing hot breath on his face. A grunt of laughter.
It ran back up the steps; something hard and bristly (a leg?) brushed his face.
He screamed.
The hardness of a nailed foot tapped his head.
Suddenly the coldness left the upper part of his body. The thing crouching above him scuttled into the darkness of the attic. Below him, the stairway became visible again.
She was waiting for him.
“Don't worry.” She smiled.
He descended after her. He found himself back in his small room. The girl stood by the bed, silently smiling at him. Wordlessly, not taking her eyes from him, she removed the shoulder straps of her gown. The gown fell to her feet, revealing her naked to him. She was a mixture of girl and woman. Her face, the perfect white lines of her body, were childlike, yet the rise of her breasts, the V of deep red hair below her belly, the loving smile and the magnetic sexuality of her look and stance aroused him deeply. She lay her hand out. He went to her, and as he took her hand she lay back on the bed, pulling him down above her. She lay very still, looking into his eyes. Her hair was almost the color of cherries. She let his hand go so that he could touch her. He wanted to kiss her. She looked into his eyes. “Someday,” she whispered, a moan. And then her eyes became huge and blank, her skin bristled as she vanished beneath him.
Someone struck Jan roughly, on the back. He was pulled away from the bed and turned around, then pushed back, feeling the lumps of the old mattress under him.
The man who had pushed him now held him with his hand on Jan's chest and sat down next to him on the bed. It was the man in the trench coat. Behind him, to either side of the window, stood the two uniformed policemen. They looked tired; one of them yawned into his hand.
The man in the trench coat took his hand off Jan's chest and flipped open a small notebook.
“You are Jan Pasek?” he asked, matter-of-factly.
Jan said nothing.
The man in the trench coat looked down at him; when he spoke he sounded almost bored. “I can make a phone call from downstairs,” he said quietly, “and it would be very hard for your mother indeed.”
He looked at Jan dispassionately.
“I am Jan Pasek,” Jan said.
The man in the trench coat wrote something in his notebook and then closed it, putting it into his pocket. He studied Jan's face for a moment. He, too, looked as though he wanted to yawn.
“You have caused me great inconvenience,” he said, and then he swung his fist in a high arc over the bed and hit Jan squarely on the nose.
Jan felt an explosion of pain followed by numbness. Another blow struck his face. Dully, he looked up to see that the two uniformed cops had moved to the bed. The man in the trench coat stepped back. The uniformed men began to beat him methodically, raining blows on his ribs and stomach. He tried to roll into a fetal position. They struck his head and legs. One of them pulled him to the floor between them, and they began to kick him.
Through a curtain of torment that was lowering him to unconsciousness, Jan heard the man in the trench coat tell them to stop. He heard the word “dinner.” Turning his head, he saw through one nearly closed eye the man in the trench coat leave with one of the uniformed men. The other sat on the bed, trying to light a cigarette with an uncooperative lighter.
Jan attempted to sit up. The uniformed cop put his lighter aside on the bed. “Feel like fighting?” he laughed, dipping his boot toe into a sore spot in Jan's side, rolling him over onto his back.
Jan felt another deep push of pain in his side and then blacked out.
When he awoke they were carrying him through the lobby of the hotel. Edward, the proprietor, had another sandwich of sausage and bread in his hand. He turned his face away from Jan as he was dragged through the front doorway, his shoes scraping over the flagstones outside. Jan caught a glimpse of the roses through nearly closed lids. He could smell the flowers; their sweetness was mingled with the odor of his own blood.
He was carried a long way. They dumped him once on the way to rest. Jan heard one of the cops grunting, the other making fun of him for being out of shape.
“You would be too if you relied on using your head instead of your fists,” his partner replied. The other mocked him in return until the man in the trench coat told them to stop bickering.
They dragged him to the town square, near the statue, where a dark sedan was parked at an angle. The blind woman was still in her accustomed spot. She cocked her head up and smiled at Jan as he was taken past her.
“You found your way to the hotel?” she said, giggling throatily, but Jan didn't know whether she spoke to him or the policemen.
He was thrown into the back seat of the car. One of the uniformed cops got in heavily beside him. The other drove, the man in the trench coat beside him in the front seat.
The car wouldn't start. The driver cursed, the other uniformed man, next to Jan, mocking his friend's ability as a chauffeur. Sharply, the man in the trench coat told them to shut up. The engine turned over, the driver shouting in triumph as they pulled away.
Jan lay on the back seat, watching the slate gray of the sky go past through the rear window, mingled with denuded trees. The face of the uniformed cop hovered over him. “Enjoy it now,” the cop smiled. He nodded at the sky with his head. “You won't be seeing that where you're going.”
They turned the car from the square onto the tree-lined road. It was then that Jan remembered. The cop's face rose over him again, the pink, stiff bristles on his face spreading into a grin. He put his hard-nailed foot on Jan's chest to keep him from rising. Through the window Jan saw the flower pot outside the inn as the car turned into the lane. He smelled the flowers. Again he smelled the blood in his grandfather's cellar. He saw the knife in his grandfather's hand, felt his own four feet slip on the cellar steps, heard his mother's barren cry at the top of the stairway, begging for a son her dead husband had never given her.
And, finally, as they led him from the car to the attic, he saw once more the look in his lover's blank huge eyes as he was lifted squealing away from her, the lover who now waited for him within, the look that promised, “Someday.”
RICHARD'S HEAD
Around five o'clock Richard began to moan, and Marjorie rolled her jacket up and put it beneath his head. They were two hours out of Boulder, off Route 70, doing eighty miles an hour. There had been a pile-up on the Interstate, and Carl had immediately gone to the meridian, keeping his foot to the pedal, until they got to the next exit.
“Fucking sun'll be down in an hour,” Carl said. It came out as a statement of fact, but Marjorie could read the fear in his voice. “Think he'll...?”
“I don't know,” Marjorie answered, immediately. Knowing that Carl would ask another question, she added, trying to add her own fear, “I don't know anything anymore.”
Carl drove, and for a while there was silence in the car. Marjorie pulled all the way over to her side of the back seat, snugging up against the window. She felt the cool flat of the window glass against her cheek, and concentrated on that. They were driving straight into the sun, and she watched it turn dark orange as it hit the mountain horizon and purpled the sky above it.
The purple made her eyes close, and she slept for
a little bit. At eight o'clock, Richard began to moan again.
Marjorie came up out of a dream, something about driving into the sun, angling straight up off the highway, heading straight to consumption....
The dream was gone and she blinked her eyes open. She saw Carl's frantic head in the front seat, swiveling around toward her and then back toward the road. “Marjorie—” he was saying, hissing it.
“Yes, I'm awake.”
“He's—”
“Okay,” she snapped, turning to adjust the jacket under Richard's head.
His head had elongated, changed shape. It lay at an odd angle, back over the rolled jacket and slightly to the side, resting over the back of the seat partly onto the rear window shelf. It was the color and shape of an eggplant now, had darkened and grown longer. The features had elongated with it, as if a normal face had turned to taffy, and been pulled lengthwise. The eyes, when they opened, were the same dark color as the skin, pupil, iris and lid.
“Jesus, he was......” Carl waved his hand at her helplessly.
“I—” she began.
A ripple of red sparking fire spread over Richard's head in the darkened car interior. The faint smell of ozone tickled Marjorie's nostrils.
“—That,” Carl finished.
Marjorie pulled her hand away, watched the network of tiny red lightning sparks cover Richard's head, dissipate with a faint snap. Richard began to moan again.
“Do something!” Carl said.
Again the red fire spread across Richard's features; a coat of yellow fire mixed in with the red and there was a slight burning smell. The fire went away.
Tentatively, Marjorie put her hand out to adjust the rolled jacket under his neck. Her fingers found his head cold, the skin taut and unyielding.
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