By the time he finished with her, Lou had been violated many times and in many different ways with the bottle, first whole, then broken and full of teethy shards.
6
The girl on the swing was waiting downstairs by the curb when Tim stepped out of Lazlo’s club.
Earlier it had started raining in miserable grey sheets, a typical New York industrial rain. She stood as close to the eaves of the club as she dared, but in a way that allowed her to spot the late bus on the street. She gripped a newspaper over her head. She had an amazing figure in her wet, tight-belted raincoat. And streaming all over her was a thick, wet spillage of black hair that seemed too delicate to belong to a human being. It looked more like fairy hair. Doll’s hair. Her face was white, her eyes black with makeup, and her lips as pink as seashells. She was simply gorgeous.
Tim scuffled across the puddles on the sidewalk until he reached her. “Liz, right?” he shyly asked.
“Yes,” she answered. But she did not look at him. She was glancing into the street.
“What bus are you waiting for?”
“The 41. To the Bronx.”
“You missed it. Sorry.”
“Oh.” It was a soft, lost sound. Obviously she was new to the city. She didn’t know the beat the way he did.
“I can give you a lift. My car’s around back. I mean,” he said, pouting in a way that brought out his bedroom eyes, “if you’re okay with that.”
She continued to stare into the street, as if willing the bus to arrive. She seemed very childish. Almost virgin. Maybe she was the One? Could Mother be right after all?
She turned to him. “All right.”
7
He led her into his darkened apartment. It was very neat and orderly from the Big Cleaning, and all the stains had been scrubbed out. The sofa with the scrunchy plastic had done its job. Not so the bed; that had been replaced.
He closed the door, and, reaching past Liz, touched the light switch.
There was a harsh click, but nothing happened.
Outside there came a belly growl of thunder. The power was out.
Liz turned to face him. She looked at him strangely with bright, fever dark eyes. She blinked only once, slowly. She had really amazing eyes, even though they weren’t the same color.
Tim felt a dizzying wave of desire. In the dark he kneaded his crotch with one hand. With the other he started to reach for her in the dark. But Liz’s slow gaze moved obliquely to the left.
Tim looked.
A strange man stood in the shadows of his apartment. He was tall, spare, unmoving, but darker than the darkness all around them. Even though this was New York, Tim did not at first think of burglars. He thought of Louise. Had a friend, a relative, perhaps a hired investigator, found him out? And what would Mother do if he went away to prison? Who would take care of her?
“Who are you?” Tim asked in a choked whisper.
Lightning snapped at the room like a rabid dog. For one second Tim saw the man clearly. Tim had never seen silver eyes before, nor such a carnivorous hatred.
“The Doctor,” answered the man.
Tim immediately voided himself into his clean, pressed trousers. He opened his mouth to scream, but Liz seized him, covering Tim’s mouth with one delicate hand. This is silly, he thought. Her strength was debilitating.
“You cunt,” said the Doctor behind the shroud of bandages masking his face. His voice came from deep within his body, like the best British actors, but the voice wasn’t human. It was too elemental. It was like the thunder outside. It was like a wild animal that had learned to speak. His metallic eyes inched downward, considering Tim’s soiled crotch. “Look at the mess you’ve made.”
Louise, he thought. Louise had come back. And she had brought a doctor…
As a child, doctors had always frightened Tim, gowned in bleak white, armed with prickling instruments. His mother used to bark at him furiously to sit still.
Tim’s body surged with fear. He bit down hard on Liz/Louise’s hand, but she did not remove it, nor did she cry out in pain. It was like biting soft plastic.
The Doctor grabbed Tim by the hair, jerking his head to one side, pushing his body effortlessly up the wall. Tim’s scalp screamed in agony. Jesus Christ, he whimpered, then chastised himself. His mother did not like him taking the Lord’s name in vain.
The Doctor pressed close. Tim squirmed. To his upmost horror, the Doctor was hard and aroused against him. Tim heard the appalling sound of the Doctor’s tongue slowly churning in his mouth.
“Doctor…” Liz/Louise warned, standing close beside them.
“Yes, Poppet.”
“He’s mine. You promised.”
Another epileptic shock of lightning lit the room. Tim saw that the Doctor was grinning behind the bandages. It was a sight more demonic and unnatural than he could endure.
“As you wish, Poppet.”
They were the last words Tim heard before he passed out.
THEN
1
Beneath the sound of a Mozart sonata she heard him enter the library.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Louise looked up from her book about a Russian princess fleeing from revolutionaries, then over at the record player in the corner. It wasn’t quite a phonograph, but it was still very old, a tarnished antique like everything else. She willed it to stop, because everything in the world was required to stop when he entered a room. But the tinkling, surreal music went on and on.
The Doctor was carrying an ornate brass candelabrum with him. She thought they only existed in movies about haunted castles and opera houses. He set it down on the mantel beside the record player, then reached for the needle, stopping the music abruptly.
“Am I disturbing you, Poppet?” he asked.
She let the book slide out of her lap. She could not read or listen to music when he occupied a room. She could do nothing but wait patiently for him to speak again.
“Mary is preparing a special tea,” he said. “And I have something to show you.”
Louise stood up, smoothly, and without effort. Tonight she wore a long bustled dress of deep emerald velvet that looked plush in the dark, like soft cat’s fur. There were a hundred buttons up the back. At first, when she woke that morning, she had felt intimidated by the sight of the dress lying across the foot of her bed.
Ever since that first night with the Doctor, she had found a new dress waiting for her in the morning, Doctor-chosen. She didn’t mind. She had called for Mary, and the old crooked witch came impassively into the chamber, her face as blanked of emotion as a medieval portrait, and buttoned the dress up for her without even the slightest nuance of interest. Tonight, before bed, the Doctor would unbutton it, his lips and fingers brushing each newly exposed inch of her skin.
She followed him into the bedroom where he had, inexplicitly, laid out a new dress for the evening. This one was made of creamy white beaded satin that shimmered like water. Unlike the others he had chose for her, all masterful haute couture reproductions manufactured in France and Japan, this one was truly an antique. She knew. She felt a wave of fantastic nostalgia.
“It once belonged to Lizabeth,” the Doctor explained. “It is the only thing of her I have left.”
Louise waited patiently beside him.
“Will you wear it tonight, Poppet?”
He had never asked before, only commanded.
“I couldn’t,” she stated simply. “I might tear it.”
“Do you mean to tear it?”
“No,” she said, appalled by the very idea. “Of course not.”
“Then wear it.”
He came to her, undoing the buttons on the back of the green velvet dress, efficiently. The touch of his fingers sent pulses sounding deep within her body. But he did not help her don the white dress; he only watched.
It fit well, though somewhat snugly in the bust, and the hem fell at least three inches too short. In his time, she would have been showing her ankles, which was unaccept
able. The Doctor had said Lizabeth was small and delicate. Louise was neither.
He stood over her, admiring the dress, running the smooth of his fingernails along her cheek, an absent touch she instinctively turned into.
“Mary will see to that. The dress can be let out, the hem taken down. Then the dress will be yours.”
She hesitated. “Was it Mary’s, the dress?”
“I told you. It was Lizabeth’s dress.”
“But did Mary wear it?” she asked. “When she was younger, I mean?”
His fingers grew still against her cheek, coldly burning. There was a malicious glee in his eyes. “Are you always so jealous, Poppet? Do you dream of all the hundreds of little girls I have surely plucked from the river, only to seduce and then throw away when I tire of them?”
He was mocking her. “How many?” she mocked him back. She loved him, but she would not be cowed, like Mary, like the rest of the subjects in his underground kingdom.
“I,” he answered, “have lived over a hundred and fifty years. Do you think I am so virginal? A priestly vampire trapped in amber?”
“Stop it,” she said through ground teeth. “Stop hurting me!”
He continued to touch her softly, yet his voice was as cutting as his blades. “I can do whatever I wish with you. You are so easy, Poppet. Wind you up, set you loose. As easy and malicious as a hungry Whitechapel whore…”
Her hand lashed out, clasping the Doctor’s throat like a necklace of primitive bone. She pushed forward, through the seething cloud of her rage. Then she was against him, and he against her. She did not stop. She kept surging forward. Her strength was enormous. But there was little room to move.
Together they hit the wall of the library. The wall shuddered. He did not.
He only stared down into her upturned, sweating, bestial face as if she were doing absolutely nothing to him. His complacency, as much as his invulnerability, enraged her.
She screamed. She screamed until her throat tore and blood coughed over her lips. She screamed for herself and she screamed for every woman who had ever been butchered to unlovely shards in a dark corner of this city. It wasn’t a human sound; it was akin to an animal baying. Her elbow jerked upward, thrusting the Doctor up the stony wall. He felt light as air to her; she used almost no effort at all. She held him, her arm vibrating with power. She could have held him a million years and never tired.
Then she saw what she had done, the horror of it, and she let him go.
He felt lightly to his feet, unperturbed, the cat that he was.
Not so she. She crumpled to her knees. She was no cat. Just a girl of heavy bones, blood and bruises. She covered her face with both hands and began to rock back and forth, there on the carpet with its swirling arabesque patterns, keening through her fingers, the sound coming nonstop like vomit.
It all went on for some time.
2
She awoke on the floor of the library where she had fallen in a heap of aging brocade.
It was late; the tall, flesh-colored candles of the candelabra had burned down to amputated stumps. The shadows were deeper. There were no days or nights underground, of course, but there were shades of darkness. Shades of grey. She heard the bass growl of the grandfather clock standing lone sentinel beside the bookshelves.
So. It was midnight, the witching hour.
He was sitting in the wing chair where she often curled up to read his books during the day. He was watching her, waiting for something.
She touched the bodice of Lizabeth’s dress. Her hand found a frayed edge. “I tore it. I tore Lizabeth’s dress,” she said from the floor. She started to cry all over again.
He waited. And when he had observed her long enough, when she had cried enough, he said, “You’re awake. At last.”
She hiccupped. “I want to die.”
“You won’t,” he answered. For the first time, his voice sounded tired, even human.
“There must be ways. Methods. I can’t be this. I can’t be sixteen forever.”
He watched her with calm indifference. In the near-perfect dark his eyes shone like wet sea stones drawn up from a tremendous depth. “In one hundred and fifty years I have found no ways, Poppet. No methods.”
She could not move. She weighted a thousand pounds and she was a hundred thousand years old. She would never move again. “You should have let me die,” she said at last.
He thought about that, as if it made good sense.
“All your books,” she went on, “all those girls…Anna Karenina, Juliette…they found a way out. They weren’t this…thing.”
His eyes blinked, seemingly alive, or it was only a trick of the light. “There is no choice for you now but to continue as I have continued.”
“I can’t,” she said. Her voice was husky and cracked like old glass, like Mary’s voice. “I’m not strong like you.” She waited to sob, but nothing came. She was too empty.
He stood up smoothly. The shadows became a little brighter where he moved away from them. “Then I will make you strong, Poppet,” he said. “Come.”
His voice pulled her up like wires.
3
Within the grandfather clock there lurked a door. It would have been invisible to even the most trained human eye. The seams were invisible, and there was nothing to give it away except for an innocuous keyhole that resembled one of the numbers. The key the Doctor kept with him at all times, on a long gold chain around his neck.
He unlocked the door and, carrying the candelabra, pushed inward.
She hesitated. Beyond the secret door lurked an almost prehistoric darkness. The dank underground walls were cavernous, the shadows big and jagged. There was a smell of ancient grey tombs, an evil, almost reptilian smell. Instinct told her to flee.
Yet she remained fastened in place until her eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness and she picked out the rough, grave contours of a tunnel hewn right through the very bedrock of the city.
“I call it the Gallery,” said the Doctor. He stepped aside for her.
She took a hesitant step. Then another.
She stopped. She could go no farther.
The Doctor, sensing the hopelessness of luring her on, took her hand. He stepped boldly through the doorway. Within, immersed in her terror, she felt a curious excitement. Perhaps he had sickened of her. Perhaps she was to be incarcerated like some forlorn, troublesome princess in a story.
A kind of electricity came from the Doctor. She felt the tingling of it in his hand. Like her, it was a commingling of terror and excitement. She let him lead her on. It was probably not for the best, but she was part of his electricity, caught up in the web. There was no escape.
The walls were colorless and bleeding with water. Little musical notes chased them down the narrow corridor full of frightening, iron-banded doors. It was almost perfectly dark, even with the candelabra. Her foot came down on something squirming that quickly scampered away. She let out a hiss of surprise—she never had been much of a screamer—and stumbled.
The Doctor steadied her. “Take heed.”
“It’s dark,” she said stupidly. She was irritated. If he was finished with her, why didn’t he simply thrust her into a cell and be done with it?
The Doctor took her arm as if they were going to dance a minuet and walked her through a plush carpet of rats that skittered past the hem of her dress. They made almost no sound, only a dull hissing noise as their claws raked the floor in escape. She was not afraid of rats. The cats in the Doctor’s lair kept them in check. And anyway, a greater danger lurked at her side.
They stopped at a door. He took her hand and placed it upon a primitive latch. So here now, she thought, the journey ends. It was almost a relief.
“Open it,” said the Doctor. He was very close, his body flanking her on one side. She heard the soft roar of his voice in her ear and through her skull and all down her back.
Her fingers played over the latch. She might be faster than he; it was conceivable. She mig
ht be able to turn and outrun him, lock him within the tunnels, he and his little key.
“Poppet,” he said, “open the door.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to show you horror.”
His voice rushed through her to the floor this time. Had he reached inside of her, through the petticoats trimmed in clever lace, through knickers and flesh, he could not have drawn out her lust any better. She took the latch in hand and opened the door at his command.
The Dreadful Doctor Faust by K. H. Koehler Page 7