A rush of noise. A hand reached down and parted the curtain. Other hands grabbed me and pulled me up and out, into the dark. Kevin shouted as another figure dragged him to his feet
I was on my tiptoes, being held by my shirtfront. The man holding me seemed eight feet tall in the blackness, his fist the size of my head. I could smell garlic on his breath and assumed it was Denofrio.
“Let us go!” shouted Kevin. There was the sound of a slap, flat and clear as a rifle shot, and Kevin was silent.
I was shoved into a barber chair. I heard Kevin being pushed into the other one. My eyes were so well adjusted to the darkness that now I could make out the features of the two men. Innis and Denofrio. Dark suits blended into black, but I could see the pale, angular faces that I’d been sure had made Kevin think they were vampires. Eyes too deep and dark, cheekbones too sharp, mouths too cruel, and something about them that said old despite their middle-aged looks.
“What are you doing here?” Innis asked Kevin. The man spoke softly, without evident emotion, but his voice made me shiver in the dark.
“Scavenger hunt!” cried Kevin. “We have to steal a barber’s clippers to get in the big kids’ club. We’re sorry. Honest!”
There came the rifle shot of a slap again. “You’re lying,” said Innis. “You followed me on Monday. Your friend here followed Mr. Denofrio in the evening. Both of you have been watching the shop. Tell me the truth. Now!”
“We think you’re vampires,” said Kevin. “Tommy and I came to find out.”
My mouth dropped open in shock at what Kevin had said. The two men took a half-step back and looked at each other. I couldn’t tell if they were smiling in the dark.
“Mr. Denofrio?” said Innis.
“Mr. Innis,” said Denofrio.
“Can we go now?” said Kevin.
Innis stepped forward and did something to the barber chair Kevin was in. The leather armrests flipped up and out, making sort of white gutters. The leather strops on either side went up and over, attaching to something out of sight to make restraining straps around Kevin’s arms. The headrest split apart, came down and around, and encircled Kevin’s neck. It looked like one of those trays the dentists puts near you to spit into.
Kevin made no noise. I expected Denofrio to do the same thing to my chair, but he only laid a large hand on my shoulder.
“We’re not vampires, boy,” said Mr. Innis. He went to the counter, opened a drawer, and returned with the straight razor Kevin had been fooling with earlier. He opened it carefully. “Mr. Denofrio?”
The shadow by my chair grabbed me, lifted me out of the chair, and dragged me to the basement door. He held me easily with one hand while he unlocked it. As he pulled me into the darkness, I looked back and caught a glimpse of my friend staring in silent horror as Innis drew the edge of the straight razor slowly across Kevin’s inner arm. Blood welled, flowed, and gurgled into the white enamel gutter of the armrest.
Denofrio dragged me downstairs.
The barber finishes the shave, trims my sideburns, and turns the chair so that I can look into the closer mirror.
I run my hand across my cheeks and chin. The shave was perfect, very close but with not a single nick. Because of the sharpness of the blade and the skill of the barber, my skin tingles but feels no irritation whatsoever.
I nod. The barber smiles ever so slightly and removes the striped protective apron.
I stand and remove my suitcoat. The barber hangs it on a hook while I take my seat again and roll up my left sleeve. While he is near the rear of the shop, the barber turns on a small radio. The music of Mozart fills the room.
The basement was lighted with candles set in small jars. The dancing red light reminded me of the time Kevin took me to his church. He said the small red flames were votive candles. You paid money, lit one, and said a prayer. He wasn’t sure if the money was necessary for the prayer to be heard.
The basement was narrow and unfinished and almost filled by the twelve-foot slab of stone in its center. The thing on the stone was almost as long as the slab. The thing must have weighed a thousand pounds, easy. I could see folds of slick, gray flesh rising and falling as it breathed.
If there were arms, I couldn’t see them. The legs were suggested by folds in slick fat. The tubes and pipes and rusting funnel led my gaze to the head.
Imagine a thousand-pound leech, nine or ten feet long and five or six feet thick through the middle as it lies on its back, no surface really, just layers of gray-green slime and wattles of what might be skin. Things, organs maybe, could be seen moving and sloshing through flesh as transparent as dirty plastic. The room was filled with the sound of its breathing and the stench of its breath. Imagine a huge sea creature, a small whale, maybe, dead and rotting on the beach for a week, and you’ve got an idea of what the thing itself smelled like.
The mass of flesh made a noise and the small eyes turned in my direction. Its eyes were covered with layers of yellow film or mucus and I was sure it was blind. The thing’s head was no more defined than the end of a leech, but in the folds of slick fat were lines which showed a face that might have once been human. Its mouth was very large. Imagine a lamprey smiling.
“No, it was never human,” said Mr. Denofrio. His hand was still firm on my shoulder. “By the time they came to our guild, they had already passed beyond hope of hiding amongst us. But they brought an offer which we could not refuse. Nor can our customers. Have you ever heard of symbiosis, boy? Hush!”
Upstairs, Kevin screamed. There was a gurgle, as of old pipes being tried.
The creature on the slab turned its blind gaze back to the ceiling. Its mouth pulsed hungrily. Pipes rattled and the funnel overflowed.
Blood spiraled down.
The barber returns and taps at my arm as I make a fist. There is a broad welt across the inner crook of my arm, as of an old scar poorly healed. It is an old scar.
The barber unlocks the lowest drawer and withdraws a razor. The handle is made of gold and is set about with small gems. He raises the object in both hands, holds it above his head, and the blade catches the dim light.
He takes three steps closer and draws the blade across my arm, opening the scar tissue like a puparium hatching. There is no pain. I watch as the barber rinses the blade and returns it to its special place. He goes down the basement stairs and I can hear the gurgling in the small drain tubes of the armrest as his footsteps recede. I close my eyes.
I remember Kevin’s screams from upstairs and the red flicker of candlelight on the stone walls. I remember the red flow through the funnel and the gurgle of the thing feeding, lamprey mouth extended wide and reaching high, trying to encompass the funnel the way an infant seeks its mother’s nipple.
I remember Mr. Denofrio taking a large hammer from its place at the base of the slab, then a thing part spike and part spigot. I remember standing alone and watching as he pounded it in, realizing even as I watched that the flesh beneath the gray-green slime was a mass of old scars.
I remember watching as the red liquid flowed from the spigot into the crystal glass, the chalice. There is no red in the universe as deeply red, as purely red as what I saw that night.
I remember drinking. I remember carrying the chalice—carefully, so carefully—upstairs to Kevin. I remember sitting in the chair myself.
The barber returns with the chalice. I check that the scar has closed, fold down my sleeve, and drink deeply.
By the time I have donned my own white smock and returned, the barber is sitting in the chair.
“A trim this morning, perhaps?” I ask.
“I think not,” he says. “Just a shave, please.”
I shave him carefully. When I am finished, he runs his hands across his cheeks and chins and nods his approval. I perform the ritual and go below.
In the candlelit hush of the Master’s vault, I wait for the Purification and think about immortality. Not about the true eon-spanning immortality of the Master . . . of all the Masters . . .
but of the portion He deigns to share with us. It is enough.
After my colleague drinks and I have returned the chalice to its place, I come up to find the blinds raised, the shop open for business.
Kevin has taken his place beside his chair. I take my place beside mine. The music has ended and silence fills the room.
Outside, the blood spirals down.
Amanda Russell
THE ORCHID NURSERY
Amanda Russell has had her prose appear in the Los Angeles Times and The Tibetan Review. This is her first professionally published poem.
The oft-witty, oft-charming Ray Russell book of poetry, The Night Sound (‘87), was dedicated to “my daughter, Amanda, the other poet in the family.” Editorially and personally, I feel that the world is ready, at last, for two Russclls.
THE ORCHID NURSERY
Amanda Russell
In this humid artificial tropic,
Images of lust are grown in pots.
For sixty-five dollars,
One can buy a leering maniac
With a greasy green face
Spotted in bloody purple.
“An excellent breeder,” says the tag.
He has the prognathous jaw
Of a later Hapsburg emperor,
But his line will grow stronger
With each succeeding generation.
On the next table
His courtesans await him,
Tiny and delicate beauties
Of pure white, yellow, and lavender.
Their waxen faces
Reveal only a hint of insane passion,
Like a women in a Goya tapestry.
Ray Bradbury
OF ABSENCE, DARKNESS,
DEATH: THINGS WHICH
ARE NOT
ELEVEN days after Halloween 1988, writers Jim Kisner, Dennis Hamilton, and I, along with our wives Carole, Jan, and Mary, saw the world premiere of a brilliant musical drama, Fahrenheit 451. We also welcomed its author, Ray Bradbury, to Indiana and listened to a different kind of music when—after the last curtain—Bradbury, flu and all, walked from the wings and took center stage.
It was a music of awe, of wonder—a word Ray sometimes seems to have invented—and it was full of other emotions such as joy, appreciation, and love. It was the first time I have heard the sound of memory being reawakened, restored, relived. We speak warmly of melodies we listened to when we gave our hearts first; we shriek within when we recall where we were when wars began, and when Presidents fell. We sing, our bodies electric, when we remember our own first readings of Bradbury stories, novels, poems—and it is a song from our skin and bones, of the inner mind and from the starved cells of our souls, when we see the man in our midst.
Here he is, again among us, to close this book.
OF ABSENCE, DARKNESS,
DEATH: THINGS ARE WHICH
ARE NOT
Ray Bradbury
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not
Each unshaped shape resembles
Some midnight soul
That “with Nothing trembles.”
Blind skies, cloudless dimensions;
Do smother souls
Whose nameless apprehensions
Go unborn; all’s diminution;
No spirit-fire flares, no apparition
Leans forth its faceless face from looking-glass
Or windowpane.
The rain wears only wind, while wind wears rain,
And when the wind with winter-white bestows
A-spectral ice, there no ghost goes.
All attics empty, all breezeways, bare,
No phantom, prideless, restless, drifts his dustprints there.
The autumn round all dreamless goes; no seamless shrouds,
No palaces of callous stars, no marble clouds,
The earthen basements drink no blood
All is a vacuumed neighborhood,
Not even dark keeps dark or death hides death,
And sightless pulse of panics keep their breath.
Nor does a ghostless curtain pale the air
All absence is, beyond the everywhere.
Then why this unplumbed drowning-pool of fear?
My soul dissembles
Like unit candles blown down-wind where nothing trembles
With bloodless, lifeless snowchild’s seed
Miscarried by nobody’s blood and need, No moans, no cries
No blizzard mourns of silent celebration
Whose tongueless population Stays unborn-dead.
But in my mindless marrow-bed: Fears unremembered
How then forgot? Yet: Absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
Darker Masques Page 30