Control, yes; but no more stand-ins, no more holding back, he told himself as his rage reasserted itself; his real targets awaited, and he should feel for them.
The great house was a titanic cake sparkling with stars. Luxury cars lined the long, snaking driveway out to the front gate. Several were parked on the grass in a hedged area near the house, looking like dark chocolates in a giant’s box, with one piece eaten. Bruno parked his Toyota in that space, with room to spare.
His rented tuxedo fit comfortably, he noted again as he got out of the car, and he now felt certain about why he was here. He stared at the illuminated house, watching the shadows in the great windows. The ants had gotten inside the cake. He wondered whether June was too far gone to appreciate anything he might exact from her; Henry wasn’t much of an enemy—just another parasite, but he would do because he wore Felix’s face. Some of the guests might be able to rise to the status of instant enemy, but he doubted that he would have time to pick up enough about any of them to be provoked. With any luck it would be as if he were going to a masked ball, perhaps never even to be noticed by most of the guests, much less unmasked.
A wondrous waltz from another age was playing as he walked up to the open door and stepped inside. He surrendered his coat to an aging, happy-faced butler, and was shown into the main ballroom, where slow-moving couples swirled around on the polished floor under the bright, glaring galaxies of chandeliers. The very air was whirling, space itself was spinning, distending and contracting to accommodate the turning human bodies.
Bruno stood dazzled and loose-limbed, suddenly enjoying a glow that had eluded him for many years. My great enemy is dead, he told himself once more. Maybe I can begin again, he mused forgivingly, and be ruled by what my kind call goodness. The beauty of the music soothed him, and he imagined that a true use of power would be to kill sparsely, control a lot; decide the fates, make the sisters weave for him. His spring of well-being was full, its energy waiting to be expended. He was inside the wedding cake with the ants, looking around for the plastic bride and groom.
“Bruno!” June cried out as she came up at his right. She wore a long, low cut black dress. “How wonderful of you to come!”
The waltz swayed with her words, and her bare arms and shoulders reached out to him. “June, June,” a regretful voice whispered to him. He leaned down and kissed his long lost wife on the cheek, and she was no longer a stranger as her eyes awakened to a new recognition of him. Henry gave him a wave from a nearby table, looking even more like Felix. Ages had passed and they were all here, breathing an idiotic, amnesiac happiness that flowed from the syrupy sweet waltz. He had stepped into the ancient sheepdom of the aristocracies, whose wealth commanded vast armies of empire, gathering ever more treasure, and whose flowers swayed in halls like this one to concentrate and ensure the genetics of future power. Why had they asked him here, he wondered. What did they expect him to contribute? They had no idea of him or of what he could do to them.
“Dance with me, Bruno!” June shouted in his ear, and he recalled a youthful Felix teaching them the steps.
Her eyes sparkled and flirted with him as Bruno took her arm and drew her onto the dance floor. She slipped into his embrace and swayed into the steps, and silk uncoiled from an infinite bolt of memory within him. He glimpsed Henry beaming at them from his table, nodding his head in approval. It was an enigma, this flow of energy in his muscles, as if it were streaming into him from the fire of the stellar chandeliers. The polished, black floor reflected the fierce lights, creating an upside-down universe of dancers who perfectly matched their steps to their doubles.
The survival of Felix’s face, in his cousin Henry, had little of Felix beyond the surface resemblance. Henry was a much lesser Felix, like Strauss’s third-best waltz; or maybe Henry was something like Johann the Younger to Felix’s Johann the Elder, if that wasn’t giving Henry too much credit.
Bruno had no idea of which Strauss waltz was playing, and didn’t much care as he spun June to the edge of the great floor. Suddenly, as they turned, Henry was there, grinning as he stepped forward to cut in.
Bruno slowed, suddenly drained of energy by Felix’s ghost, realizing that his mind insisted on upgrading Henry into Felix, filling in the face that had escaped him into death.
“May I?” Henry asked.
Bruno paused and nodded, and that old day’s pain crowded into him again, when Felix had taken June from him. “Oh, go away!” Felix had shouted at him in the park, where Bruno had followed them, desperate to make a fool of himself. “You see that she doesn’t want you!” Felix had shouted in triumph, with June admiring him as if he were Zeus hurling thunderbolts, without one grimace of pity for her discarded husband.
Bruno had made a fool of himself again at Felix’s door. And at her door. And repeatedly, until he had reached the abyss and stepped off into the choking darkness...
Now, as Henry whirled June away, Bruno noted with envy that this man was a superior dancer, almost as good as Felix had been. Henry and June were two bright planets, locked in each other’s embrace, free of any sun, dancing among the stars. And the gnawing was in him again, released from the prison of the past. Bruno felt it stretch within himself, admiring the brute. It was his beast, his strength, and nothing could wish it away.
The music stopped. The galaxy of couples froze in their whirl and let go of each other. June was out of breath as she smiled and made off toward the powder room. Conversation filled the ballroom, replacing the music with a poetic chaos of hissing whispers, laughter, and broken lines. The orchestra, Bruno saw, was taking a break, starving his beast’s vitality, and he would have to do something to keep it alive.
Henry wandered over to the big French doors, opened one, and stepped onto the terrace. Bruno slipped out after him, breathing deeply, as if his heart would burst, and the world fell away from the terrace into a glittering city of scattered gems that had spilled out from the jewel box of the house.
Bruno stopped.
The dark figure before him stood as if pasted against the view.
“Felix?” Bruno asked, thinking for a moment that he might unmask his old enemy, that against all reason Felix was wearing new flesh.
Henry smiled as he turned to face him. “I got that a lot even before his death. There is a resemblance, isn’t there?” His smile widened, open and trusting, as if Felix was mocking him through the shell of his younger cousin.
A cool breeze touched Bruno’s face as he opened the darkness at Henry’s back.
“Wonderful evening,” Henry said, taking a deep breath, and it was too much for Bruno to bear—the perfection of his own power and oblivious beauty of the setting.
Bruno stepped forward and shot his knee into Henry’s crotch, then grabbed him by the shoulders and held him, watching as pain distorted his darkened face and wishing that it might have been Felix; then he pushed him back onto the lip of the open pocket. Henry sat there for a moment, perhaps thinking that he had landed on a bench, then looked up with a horrified Why? on his face as Bruno shoved him over with both hands and closed the pocket.
A woman screamed behind him.
“You devil!” June shouted as he turned to face her. She rushed forward. “What have you done with him?” she shrieked, leaning down to search the terrace as if Henry had somehow become too small to see.
She straightened up and turned back to Bruno, looked around him frantically, then gazed up into his eyes as if she knew that he was responsible for whatever had happened.
“Where is he!” she shouted as he imagined her with Felix and with Henry, pliant and accepting as she opened her body in return for a toy house and a bank account.
“What... do you mean?” he answered, content that she was hurting.
June looked left and right, rooted by fright.
“I’m alone,” Bruno said, gazing at her with childlike innocence.
“What have you done to him?” she demanded in a hoarse voice.
“You’ll never see
him again,” Bruno said softly.
“What?” She clutched at her forehead and swayed, as if about to collapse.
“Didn’t he sign enough papers to take care of you?” Bruno asked coldly.
“Where is he?” she mumbled.
Bruno saw her confusion, and wanted to laugh, but it seemed unnecessary. “We’re alone,” he said. “It’s a beautiful evening.”
“What? You said I’d never see him again.”
“I said nothing of the kind.”
“What?” she asked, her voice breaking. “I heard you...” She was unsure now whether she had seen or heard anything.
“June, what is it?” Bruno asked sweetly.
“What have you done with him?” she demanded, perhaps trying to recover from the fear that she was hallucinating.
“He’s in my pocket,” he said.
“What!” she shouted, grimacing; but she looked at his tuxedo pockets, suffering, maybe wondering at her sanity. He stared down at her, smiling. Abruptly, she turned and went back into the ballroom. It would confuse the police, if she should call them.
After what seemed only a minute or two June came back out. She held a large automatic with both hands, pointing it at him as she came closer.
“What have you done!” she shrieked.
Bruno saw that there were several couples behind her now, hypnotized by the sight of their armed hostess. Others crowded the doorway, peering out.
Inside, the “Blue Danube” made a perfect entrance, and seemed to hang on its opening bars—then swelled and swayed relentlessly in all directions, an endless torrent of willful sound, unintelligible, asserting no content beyond the vitality passed on to human ingenuity by nature’s mad survivalist dance.
“Bring him back!” June cried. The big gun shook in her hands and seemed about to break her aging, porcelain fingers.
“Gentlemen, ladies!” Bruno called out to the growing crowd behind her. “Your hostess is having a nervous breakdown. Please call an ambulance right away!”
The gun flashed as it fired. The bullet grazed his temple, dizzying him. He staggered back. June stepped toward him, vital and determined to finish the job as she pointed the gun into his face.
“The next one will kill you,” she cried over the screams of retreating guests, “if you don’t bring... Henry... back—right now!”
Her eyes were wild, glaring. Had she almost called her lover Felix? Blood ran down Bruno’s left cheek. He touched the wound and looked at the dark blood on his fingertips, then noted that the guests had fled and he was alone with June again.
She tried to steady the gun. He raised his hand, feeling some rage but no fear as she fired again, missed, and dropped the gun in surprise. He opened a pocket behind her, then came forward before she could pick up the gun, grabbed her by the middle and held her close.
“Swine!” she cried as she looked into his eyes.
He looked back in wonder, seeking what had never been there for him.
She began to struggle with unusual strength, and he wondered if the pull of her muscles might break her bones. Her body was a living spring, wound up into a tight spiral that could not possibly hold its shape, and would uncoil with great force if he let her go. He manipulated her body and she pushed back, as if they were engaged in a mutual form of exercise. She was breathing hard, then stopped struggling and hid her face in his shoulder.
“Bruno,” she whispered, “if you ever truly loved me, stop, bring back Henry.” The plea seemed to come to him on a strange channel, inviting him to give up himself and do as she asked.
“Here’s for everything,” he said with a strange detachment as he gut-punched her, and watched her suck in air, then pushed her toward the darkness. She stumbled as she held on to him and he almost fell in after her.
“Holy shit!” a drunken man exclaimed from the doorway.
Bruno closed the pocket and lurched toward the man, opening a pocket next to him. He shoved him over the low lip head first and closed it up.
Bruno stood still, listening to the “Blue Danube” playing blithely on, sublime, tenderly edged, summoning an invulnerable order of grace. The music slipped through him, then faltered as he wandered back through the open doors into the bright ballroom.
The center of the floor was empty. Guests stood looking at him fearfully from the edges. The confused musicians played on as if accompanying a masque.
He drifted toward the center, raising his arms. “She shot me!” he cried. His words echoed. The chandeliers tinkled. A trembling silence of eyes stood around, and he felt weak. His vision flared, and what seemed to be black bolts of lightning stabbed across the red field.
Somewhere in the distance almost beyond his hearing, string instruments rumbled at their lowest register, as if the stumbling waltz was trying to regain its footing, but managed only to veer into a parody of itself. Whispers shot through him, as if he was being stalked by predators drawn to the blaring scraps of the insane waltz that now hated the world. He glimpsed dark objects in his side vision, but they slipped from his sight when he fixed on them. June’s guests stared at him, as if expecting him to perform an obscene miracle.
He was being circled by things dead and invisible. A tide pulled at his body.
“What’s wrong with him?” asked a distant voice.
He stood in the eye of a storm that threatened to veer off center and tear him apart. The smallest move by him would hurl him out into its ripping arms.
His vision blurred. He saw strange, irregular black shapes circling him, and realized after a moment that they were black pockets, still linked to him, orbiting his awareness.
His vision cleared, revealing more than a hundred circling him. The remaining guests screamed and fled from the ballroom. The pockets reshaped themselves, as if struggling to decide what to wear to the ball.
But there were too many!
They can’t all be mine, Bruno told himself. He sat down on the floor and covered his face, hoping to cut their ties to him.
They’re not mine, he said into himself, and strained to remember how many he had made.
Felix’s ex-wife and her two boys. No choice there; Felix had given him the skill, and their deaths had been part of the bargain. He could not have risked Felix somehow taking the skill away, or exacting some form of pre-arranged retribution for not carrying out his last wishes.
Larry Braddock had been a necessity.
Jean Scheler had been deserving.
Cecil Banes. Again, Felix’s wishes could not have been refused. Nothing personal there.
Winkes and Dillard? Two cops meddling in his affairs impersonally... but he had let them go!
Cecil Banes’s secretary. Who knew! Her misery was over. He didn’t remember her name.
The mugger. Risks of his trade.
The nameless cop. Again, danger went with his job. The mugger might have killed him. Same difference.
The mailman had been a luxury. But a new carrier might bring the mail on time, and that would benefit more people than one death might hurt, right?
The pizza boy? Had he pocketed him? Bruno couldn’t remember him or the pizza.
There was someone he had forgotten. Oh, yes, Al the busybody super, so easily replaced by the money that owned him. How could anyone blame him for Al, the thief and voyeur?
Henry and June? Long awaited justice. No choice. The right, unfeeling thing to do.
The drunk had simply been in the way, Bruno told himself. Great power must accept collateral damage.
Thirteen or fourteen...
He had imagined that there had been fewer.
But when he uncovered his face, the black swirl was still around him, drifting in closer.
Still too many!
They’re not mine! Somehow he had imagined that by counting up his own he might make the extras go away.
“Leave me alone!” he cried out.
The black shells were sinking to the shiny dance floor now, and still slowing, like a carousel breaking
up. One by one the great slugs slid onto the surface and squealed to a stop, some hitting one another with a sickening squish.
He sat there, staring at the collection of black, shiny bladders.
The ballroom was empty. Sirens wailed in the distance.
He stood up—
—and almost fell over from dizziness.
Above him were several more blisters, circling quickly, impatient to land.
And he knew why there were too many!
Felix had willed all his pockets to him.
A terrible sum added itself up around him, as his own lesser numbers joined the fleet on the floor.
This was Felix’s revenge.
Fatigue lifted from Bruno’s body, and he knew that these pockets had always been with him—Felix’s and his own. They had been his burden wherever he went, tiring him toward this moment, when he could no longer resist their arrival. He wondered if he could still send them away, but that, he knew, would only secrete them behind yet another debilitating veil.
It struck him suddenly that there was no afterlife, because if there was then Felix’s pockets would have followed him. Felix’s skill had enabled him to bequeath them when he died, and presumably the pockets would not follow the truly dead.
A popping noise burst in his ears.
Then another.
A smell clogged his nostrils.
He gagged and hurled as he got up and staggered between the bursting bladders. One set off the next in a seeming chain reaction. Oozing liquids flowed onto the smooth floor. He stopped to avoid slipping in the sticky liquid.
He saw a face in the slime, eyes bulging at infinities.
The figures were all dead, decomposing into a bony soup as they were whelped back into the world. Felix’s dead preserves—and Bruno’s own.
Black Pockets Page 30