The stranger’s touch on her shoulder is cool, but insistent. “Do you have a place where we might get more comfortable or not?”
Elise breathes in, deep. The time for decisions is now. She takes the man’s hand, meets his gaze, and smiles, the curtain rising on her show. “This way. It isn’t far.” She leads him east, toward Greenview and the place she calls home. She pulls him along, hurrying him, the click of her heels insistent on the hot pavement. She wants to get him home, get him done, and get it over with.
“My name’s Terence.” His grip on her hand is firm and cool. He has no trouble keeping up.
She hopes she will have no trouble keeping up with him.
“Mine’s Midnight,” Elise murmurs, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. Wondering, will this be the time she regrets breaking her own rule and letting a john into her own home? Will this be her Mr. Goodbar, with strangling hands or a switchblade in his pocket? In spite of her earlier cavalier attitude toward her own murder, there is still a compulsion to live, a will to survive. Feeling threatened makes her realize that, no matter how desperate an existence she has, she still wants to keep it. It is her own.
She squeezes his hand and slows a little. “So, we haven’t really talked about it.”
“Yes?”
“What are you into?”
“I just like plain old sucking and fucking. I trust that doesn’t disappoint you.”
“Not at all.”
And Elise picks up the pace once more. His response is small comfort.
Once back in her studio, she doesn’t want to turn on any lights. Spare as it is, it’s still her home. It holds memories (once upon a time, things were different: it was brighter, crowded, not exactly happy, but still there were happy times…early on). It holds her art, and grim as that has become, it’s still a piece of herself, a substantial piece that she doesn’t want to share with a trick. She doesn’t want to share this world with anyone, not yet, not in any personal capacity anyway. Perhaps one day things will change and she will spend her evenings at gallery shows of her art, appropriately modest and dressed in black, but those dreams of glory hardly seem within her reach. Not now, with a horny trick at her back.
The moonlight streams in, making the short passage across the room easier. The moon gives everything a grayish cast, making of the easels, drawing board, and few pieces of furniture nothing more than dark shapes. As they move across the room, she is stepping out of her dress, kicking off her heels. She sits on the bed and pulls off her stockings in one fluid motion; she’s had practice. Naked, she leans back on the bed, draws in air, and lets out a slow, quivering breath. Never let them see you’re afraid; never let them feel your anxiety. If you do, they sometimes pounce, smelling your weakness. Recklessly, she tosses her hair back and puts on her most alluring smile, hoping its bravado isn’t lost in the shadows. She parts her legs and touches herself. The move is calculated to look like she can’t help herself; in reality, she hopes the digital stimulation will get the juices flowing.
She touches, flicks a tongue out of the corner of her mouth, stares. Provocatively, she hopes; she’s learned that the whore’s first rule is to get ’em excited, get ’em overly excited. That way, you get rid of them sooner. You learn to welcome the “afterglow”: his remorse and desire to get away. She pats the bed beside her.
“What about light? Surely, you have some candles around.” Terence stands above her, and suddenly fear grips Elise. The dark shape of him, the smell of the leather, the chain around his neck, the thicker one around his waist. She has put herself in this submissive position carelessly, and now she wonders how vulnerable she is and what will happen to her. It would be so easy—he is, after all, a big man—for him to just reach down and hit her, pummel her face, strangle her. She shivers. Such scenes happen all over the place—every night. She should never have brought him here. She will become—she just knows it—another grim statistic.
Her lackadaisical attitude about life crumbles as her heartbeat picks up, thudding. A line of sweat forms at her hairline and her muscles flex, taut.
“We don’t need any light.” Her voice comes out, hoarse from fear, a croak. She thinks for a moment and then mumbles, unconvincingly, “The electricity’s out.”
“I think we do. And I’m paying. I call the shots.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I think you’re lying about the electricity being out.”
Elise tenses. “This is my place. I…” Before she has a chance to say anything further, he is moving toward the door, where the switch for the overhead light is.
“No!” Elise shrieks and runs toward him. “No.” She takes his arm and pulls it back. “I’ve got to have the darkness. Please.”
He reaches out, and Elise tries not to flinch at the coldness when he caresses her face, long fingernails sliding across her cheek like the tender touch of a switchblade applied lovingly. She continues to meet his gaze, supplicant and pleading. She doesn’t want him to see her art. It would be more of a violation than if he fucked her up the ass.
“All right. If it’s so important to you.”
When Terence reaches into his pocket, Elise expects a gun or knife, but all he has withdrawn is a small wooden pipe. It’s burled walnut and black, a skull carved into the bowl. It’s kind of beautiful, really, and, for just a moment, Elise forgets her trepidation, forgets what’s taking place here. The craftsmanship and the old wood, burnished to a dull glow, fascinate her artist’s eye. She then notices there’s a bud in its bowl. She breathes in, taking in the aroma of the resin.
It’s been years since she’s gotten high, partying days left behind long ago. College, art school, memories of another life. But the idea doesn’t seem so bad…perhaps the smoke will obscure the experience, cloud and befuddle her brain, allow her to get through this, anesthetized.
“Go ahead.” Terence hands her the pipe and silver lighter.
Elise fires up the bowl. In the flame, the hunger in Terence’s eyes is startling: more than lust, it encompasses and embodies him. Elise draws the smoke into her lungs quickly, holding it as she returns the pipe.
What has it been? Minutes? Hours? Elise has no idea. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. She is supposed to save all of her feelings for her art. These men are just a means to an end. She shouldn’t be feeling any kind of pleasure—or any emotion, really—with her tricks, they who are nothing more than commerce.
Yet her legs feel weighted, glued to the floor as the chill of his lips and tongue move up and down her thighs, exposing and caressing. Somehow, she has let go and buried her hands in his thick blond hair as he kneels before her, supplicant and instrument of a pleasure so intense Elise cannot consciously describe it. Her head lolls back and, for the first time, she hears herself sighing and whimpering. It’s almost as if she has stepped outside herself and these cries of pleasure—so intense—are coming from someone else.
His tongue moves up and inside her and for now, nothing else exists. Elise closes her eyes, panting as shudders and waves of pleasure claim intellect and body. She yearns for more, yearns for him to be inside her. She would pay him. Please, she thinks, please, now…
Suddenly, he withdraws, and she cries out, synapses tingling, craving, yearning. Mute, she watches as he undresses, the leather and chains falling to her filthy floor in a heap, clinking and thudding, becoming a burrowing animal in the shadows. His naked body reminds her of Michelangelo’s David, and it reinforces her knowledge of what the sculptor was expressing, something about the perfection of the human form, about rising above the physical and approaching the ethereal. Elise reaches out, fingertips tingling, wanting to cry out, “Come to me,” but unable to form words with her thick tongue.
And then he is moving across the room.
And then the room is flooded with yellow light.
Elise closes her eyes, something from underneath a rock exposed suddenly, cruelly. All her work. “No,” she whimpers. She is unable to move, unable to do anything
more than just lie there, a vessel waiting to be filled. She hates herself. But her brain is clouded, the drug and desire twisting inside her, creatures that have taken on lives of their own, overpowering her.
Jealous. His lover’s gaze is no longer on her, but on her creations, boring into them, penetrating them instead of her.
She watches, mute and paralyzed, as he takes in her drawings and paintings, one by one, opening them with his eyes, seeing everything Elise has said in the last few years with her dark vision. She tries to get up, but slumps back down, wishing for once she could gather up all of her art and destroy it. She would trade it all for just a few moments in his arms, their bodies joined like one organism.
His cock is stiff, jerking as he absorbs the art. Elise crumples to the floor. What he has paid her is not enough. In the midst of her lust-filled delirium are the stirrings of rage and betrayal. No matter if she didn’t feel ready to share her art with the world, it was still her, her essence, maybe even her soul. How dare he?
“You’re a genius.” The words filter down as if played at slow speed, heard through a tunnel. What need has she for praise? Angrily, she watches him devour her art, stealing it. He touches the paper upon which she has drawn with reverence, touching himself with the other hand.
“You see. You really see,” he whispers, and turns to gaze down at her.
And then he is gone. Wind rushes in through the open door, lifting her drawings, the paper rattling in the breeze. And Elise lies alone, naked and betrayed on the floor, where a cockroach, sensing her heat, skitters across her thigh.
*
Terence blazes through the night, Harley roaring between his legs, wind whipping his hair behind him. His teeth are clenched as he tries to sort out the emotions caroming through him, crashing like cymbals. Is it rage he feels? He grips the throttle so tightly it’s as if his knuckles will burst through the skin. The world whizzing by is a blur, incomprehensible.
All he can see is Midnight’s art. He remembers leaning against her peeling, colorless walls, finishing the pipe, letting the THC do its work: sharpening his focus, bringing her art to life. What horrifying vision. Terence swears the art has let him see the woman’s soul, dark, her own, no way to possess it. The bleak drawings, black and gray, layers of shadows, speak of the void in which she lives: the animal lusts, the chains confining her, earthbound…her need for survival. The woman speaks with a knowledge he had thought no human possessed.
And the woman herself: reddish-brown hair, fright in her eyes as he stood above her, blood heat pulsing through her veins. He remembers it all, even in the lightless void of her apartment. The temptation to devour it then was nearly unbearable, filling every fiber of his being with need so intense it virtually erased his reality. By devouring it—literally—teeth gnashing, saliva making of the paper upon which she has drawn her visions nothing more than graying pulp, he might perhaps begin to touch what she can do in her humanity, with feelings that have long since become alien to him, to all three of them, to the entire race of beings he calls brothers and sisters. By ingesting her art, perhaps he could begin to feel what makes her human, in a way similar to the manner in which he feels things as blood from his victims pumps down his throat and fills his veins and brain with their memories and experiences, with core images of what makes them alive. The temptation was a fierce, burning desire.
But he stopped.
He could not destroy her, not the vision she had splattered or drawn with precise detail on paper, on canvas.
And yet the red aura surrounding her called to him with the voice of a siren. Calls still with a fire so intense it could destroy him. The flames are a peripheral orange blur, caught by dangling threads of consciousness. But if he took this woman’s lifeblood, he would take also her abilities to create things he could now only dream of fashioning himself. For once, Terence, purveyor of pleasure and pain, the greediest of his little three-pronged family, has shown some restraint, demonstrated respect for talent and sensitivity that would forever be beyond his reach.
But the hunger remains. And he is so lost in his thoughts that he almost misses its solution, almost loses out on a prime opportunity.
Terence stops the bike, looks back.
And there it is—the answer to his needs.
Smoke rises from a black metal trash can, its sides rusted. Back from it, in the entryway of a warehouse, silent this late at night, sleeps a man. Black. Nappy hair poking out of a coat wrapped around him like a cocoon. Terence feels the heat of his blood and the thudding of his heart. Music. He considers the coat wrapped around him so tightly for only a second: why so cold on this hot night?
Quietly, with stealth perfected through years of practice, Terence dismounts and moves the bike to a wall, hiding it in the shadows. He walks with purpose toward the sleeping man, a silent force, a whisper of black against black. Invisible.
He stands above the man, looking down. There’s no beauty here. No sexual rush. Yet, the throbbing of his life force is hypnotic and Terence wants to savor the moment, letting the desire and hunger build. It’s so much better that way: slow, steady, delayed gratification. Like the most perfect sex.
Terence knows he can bring a chill this slumbering man has never dreamed of. He descends, gliding, so quiet the man does not murmur or awaken. Gently, like a mother unwrapping her baby from its blankets, Terence opens the coat. The smell is putrid, body odor rising up, sweat and defecation. But underneath it, the sweet note of blood, warm, with a tang of copper, awaits. Terence squats down as the man’s eyelids flutter and for just a second, their gazes lock. He lifts the man like a lover, like the mother in a pieta, and lowers his head to his throat. The man cannot even struggle or scream as razor-sharp fangs pierce the dark flesh.
And then the blood is spurting in steady jets into Terence’s mouth. It is delirious. It is delicious.
And the man is emptied as quickly of his life force as he earlier had emptied a bottle of cheap fortified wine.
When he roars off on his Harley, there is nothing left of the homeless black man but a pile of ragged clothing, bones, hair, and pieces of flesh too tough for Terence to digest.
Chapter Four
1954
When Edward awakened, milky gray light streamed in through the open airshaft window. Borne on a cold breeze was the smell of the apartment below, something greasy and fried. Edward stirred and even the simple movement of turning away from the window set his head to pounding.
God, how much did I drink last night? Edward put a hand to his forehead, where pain bloomed behind his eyes, expanding and insinuating itself into his entire face, making it feel like a throbbing messenger of hurt. He fell back against his pillow and closed his eyes; nausea began to roil in his stomach.
This was no ordinary hangover. He would get no painting done today. This was why, in states of despair and after nights like the previous one (what had happened?), he often promised himself he would stay away from The Tiger’s Eye and drink no more, or no more than, say, a glass of wine with dinner, when he could afford it. The cost was just too high; not only did it empty what little cash he had in his pockets (dollars that could be invested more wisely in luxuries like food and rent), but also it exacted a larger—and more painful—toll in time. And time was a resource he could never renew, like money. Poor as he was, there was always the chance to make more money. Somehow. But time, once spent, was gone for good.
He would pay for whatever happened the night before with this entire day. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember anything from last night. How did I get home? What happened once I got here? Edward wondered and tried to retrieve the memories, but it was as if they were never there, as if most of last night, after leaving The Tiger’s Eye, was a void. Blacking out was a line he had yet to cross and the thought of it made him even queasier. He didn’t want to become one of those drunken has-been painters, regaling others in a bar about what could have been to cadge a free drink before he even had his first gallery show.
> Even though it felt like the almost palpable pain behind his eyes would push them out, Edward managed to get up on his hands and knees and crawl to the little sink in the corner of the room. He was glad, for once, that there wasn’t much in his stomach.
He turned the spigot on and lapped at the cold water like a dog, not bothering with glass or even cupped hands. The water helped calm the queasiness, and its chill was a balm to his aching head. Did he have what people in polite circles referred to as a “drinking problem”? Had he crossed a line from social drinker to alcoholic? Would he begin to lose weekends?
After drinking what seemed like gallons, Edward squatted and splashed water on his face, letting it dribble down his naked body. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, keeping his mind blank by concentrating on the cool water. He opened his eyes.
Looking down as the cold rivulets ran through matted chest hair, making their way south to a pitiful looking penis, shriveled and tiny, bereft of almost any blood (that was mostly in his brain, causing him the most delirious pain as a reminder to keep away from the booze), he noticed something wrong.
There were several small, vertical scabs on his inner thighs. Three or four on each. Precise lines, their slightly irregular appearance due only to the crustings of blood. They looked deliberate.
What had he done to himself?
Edward grabbed a bath towel from the floor and dried the cold water from his face and body. He didn’t need anything to make him feel more chilled than he already did. He trembled slightly.
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