by Edward Lee
And with the realization she felt something she hadn’t genuinely felt in years.
She felt happy.
An absurd thought struck her then. The kitchen sink, she thought. Earlier she’d discovered a small leak, and had left a message on the plumber’s answering machine, all the while knowing that she was going to kill herself. God, it was almost funny.
And it was very surprising, too—the moon in her eyes, the gentle night sounds in her ears, the beautiful waterscape before her and the final peace in her heart—how painless it all turned out to be, when the brand-new edge-point of the blade sliced into her flesh and she dragged the razor across her wrist—
—and plummeted.
— | — | —
11
—plummeted—
—plummeted…
Not a sensation of physically falling, but something else. Her spirit, perhaps.
Expectations rose, tabloid tips. But there was no light at the end of this tunnel, no queues of dead relatives in wait, no dramatic instance of leaving her own body and looking down at herself. And there was no refulgent figure in white.
Just the opposite.
Just…black.
I’m dying, it occurred to her. I’m…dead.
The sense of peace she felt was extraordinary. But as her spirit continued to sail, she eventually noticed something else, a sensation that she was walking.
Walking? I just committed suicide. How can I be walking?
She didn’t deliberate; she didn’t have time. Darkness pooled like dusk settling over a hollow; she found that she was indeed walking, her physical body intact, in the flesh, her senses very much alive.
Was it a dream?
It must be, Alice concluded. I’m dying, and this is my last dream.
The place in which she walked now was like nowhere else she’d ever seen in her life.
A warm warren of stone—stone, yes, the color of grave markers. A warm stone floor. The air hung stagnant with humid heat…
(Alice? Alice?)
The voice again. The voice she’d heard before while standing on the veranda, just moments before she’d cut her wrists.
Who was it? And—
Where am I?
The slate stone walls of the warren darkened as she drifted onward. Her limp unchecked, she walked ahead in this unknown place, yet somehow she seemed to know her direction. With each step the bottom of her prosthetic foot scuffed unfeeling against the rough stone floor.
Yes, of course it was a dream. She felt sleepy; she felt adrift. She remained dressed in the long blue satin nightgown she’d put on before she’d extricated the razor blade from its dispenser. As the heat of this dream warren steepened, the gown began to adhere to her skin from her perspiration.
Tiny lamps pitoned into the stone flickered as the warren’s only light. Oil lamps. And, yes, the rough-hewn walls did, indeed, seem to darken as she limped on, their pocked slate gray going over to a hue that was greenly black. She reached out as she walked to touch the blackened surface, and her hand found it…soft.
Moss, or lichens, had grown into the surface, damp with hot condensation. Moisture glittered amid the black spongy patches like diminutive teardrop jewels.
Where am I? she thought again, and once more she was answered:
(Alice? Alice?)
The voice came as a whisper—an etching, really, like a nail scratched against the rock. One thing she knew, though, and beyond all certainty:
It was a woman’s voice.
What would a woman be doing down in this dark place? What would anyone? But—I’m here, she reminded herself.
The voice lured her, enticed her on.
(Alice—)
Louder this time. More precise.
The warren opened to a malformed room of sorts. In flickering lamplight she could see that, here, the lichen growth was so abundant that the walls were a total, porous black, so that she couldn’t really even discern the chamber’s dimensions.
Her eyes held wide, waiting to adjust. Then shapes, however indeterminate, began to surface from the shifting ebon around her. Shapes that seemed to be stretched across other shapes. Alice stepped forward; then something solid brushed her leg.
More shapes.
Boxes? she wondered. Long black boxes? No, they seemed to be solid as rock, and to extend from the center of the chamber. Two rows of them, with an aisle down the middle.
She leaned over, reached down to touch one. Rock, she thought. Her fingers came away wet. A squared, stone slab, lichen-covered and black as everything else here. Though not perfectly symmetrical, each slab appeared to be of similar dimensions, about two feet high, six feet long, two feet deep.
What the hell are they?
The slabs confused her as much as everything else in this barely lit place, and the heat was wringing her out, exhausting her. The heartfelt peace she’d experienced as she’d worked the razor over her wrist had vanished, replaced by a curious if not frustrating mystification—
Surely this was not what she’d expected upon her own suicide. She’d expected solitude. She’d expected nothingness. She’d expected heaven or even hell. But…this? Wandering around, sweating in her nightgown, in some bizarre room of moss-ridden stone?
No, this was not what she’d expected at all.
She sat down on the first slab, sighing and wiping sweat off her brow. This place was so hot, much more so than the stone warren, and maddeningly humid. She could hear the condensation trickling profusely all around her, running in rivulets down the mossy black walls, dripping steadily off the ceiling. The hot droplets plopped on her bare shoulders and into her lap. The wet, black cavern moss she sat upon soaked through her nightgown. Then her gaze fixed ahead of her.
At the other shapes.
Another stone slab, larger, and laid across two stone plinths of some kind, all just as lichen-infested. At either side of the slab stood candles set in stands that seemed crudely fashioned from bronze. The bronze had long gone green with tarnish.
And the more intently Alice stared, the less she seemed to see of this place and the more of herself. Blobs of memory, as blackened as the walls, began to throb around her.
A hapless moan escaped her throat.
Her own anguish betrayed her. Holly had always emphasized the need for her to put the past behind her, to move on. But it only took a moment, sitting here in this grotesque dream chamber of glittering gloom, for her to be cloaked in despair. It seemed to hug her now. Yes, despair, despondency. She breathed it into her lungs with the humid air.
Memories. Catching Steve with that other woman on that snowy night last winter. The sudden, shuddering headlights sliding like twin comets. Awakening in the hospital to find that her left leg was gone…
But it wasn’t just the accident, was it?
She felt ruined, unwanted—she always had—despite everything Holly had tried to reinforce in her. Shrink-babble, she dismissed. Just talk, just words.
Words wouldn’t help her. Positive thinking wouldn’t change her life. The incident with Bob was proof, wasn’t it? How could Holly tell her otherwise? The man Alice had taken to her bed had fled in disgust the instant he’d seen her stump…
But at once she felt cheated. Here she was, not minutes after a suicide attempt, dreaming as she no doubt lay dying back on her veranda. And what was she thinking about? The same thoughts she’d cut herself to be free of.
Not fair, she thought in the weird, glitter-pocked darkness. So maybe that’s what this was, maybe—
Maybe this is hell, she thought.
Maybe this was payment for the sin of suicide, to sit here forever contemplating the same despair that had driven her to the act in the first place.
More of the chamber’s warm drool dripped onto her shoulders, onto her face. The tiny droplets hid her tears well, like the snowflakes melting on her face the night of the accident.
(Alice?)
The voice again.
Alice looked up from where she
sat.
Her breath spurred in her chest.
A figure stood behind the forward slab, barely lit by the candles at either end.
Like a priest at a church. Standing behind the altar…
But this was no church, and the parallel stone slab certainly no altar.
The figure appeared more as an apophysis than a figure, obvolutions in the darkness that were somehow made flesh. It wore black raiments, a mantle and drooping hood of flyblown sackcloth. The figure faced her, perfectly still. Alice could make out nothing of a face beyond the yawning hood. All she could do instead was sit there and blink at the immobile presence.
Then the figure raised its hands, again as a priest might, perhaps at the finish of a eulogy.
And then its eyes turned into the tiniest specks of green light, like diminutive chippings of an emerald.
Alice dissolved, then, into the effusive darkness—
««—»»
—and next found herself in a different darkness. The darkness of her own bedroom, it seemed, though still damp with sweat, her lungs still full of the black church’s humid air, its strange taste lingering on her tongue.
The dream had transported Alice out and away. Am I dead yet? she wondered. No, she was no longer in the black church, nor in its oil-lit stone warrens. She lay instead—
I’m—I’m in my own bed, she thought.
And she was, indeed, lying as still as a body in repose. Now the darkness felt cool. The bed sheets under her felt cool. Cool twilight blinked in her eyes from the clean glass panes in the French doors.
Yes, she reasserted. I’m in my bedroom, in my house. I’m in the watch room.
But so was someone else…
Alice noticed the figure the instant she turned her head, which took all the energy she could muster. She’d smelled something like faint perfume, hadn’t she? Yes, and then she’d willed herself to turn her head at the pleasing scent.
The figure stood at the bedside. But—
What? Alice thought.
She expected the same figure, the cloaked figure from the black church. After all, this was a death dream. But it was no sack-clothed shadow that stood before her now.
It was a beautiful nude woman.
(Alice?)
“Who are you?” Alice managed, an awful dryness and acridity shriveling her throat. It made speaking feel like spitting up bits of gravel.
Then the woman replied, in a fine, gentle voice that was nearly a whisper:
(My name is Dessamona.)
Alice had never heard the name, and she was certain she’d never met this woman before. Nevertheless, she felt compelled to ask, “Do I know you?”
(No, not really. But in another way, you know me well. We know each other very well.)
This made no sense to Alice, but then— It’s not supposed to make sense. I’m dying, and this is my last dream.
“Am I dying?” she asked.
The woman seemed forlorn in the impasse. (Yes), she said.
Dessamona, Alice thought then. She didn’t know why she summoned up the strange name— Perhaps just to feel the sound of it, or to touch it in her mind. Dessamona, she thought. I’m dying, yes, I know I am.
But she already knew that, didn’t she? She wanted to die; otherwise why would she have slid a razor across her wrist?
Somehow, death felt welcome; perhaps it had for a long time now, and she’d just failed to realize it. She turned her head again, with a nearly excruciating effort.
And she looked then, looked hard at the nude woman standing beside her bed…
Yes, she was beautiful; she was stunning. Her nudity offered an attestation to the rest of her being. Firm, robust breasts, long legs, flawless skin, fine and white as rice paper. The moonlight from the glass reduced the sleek body to perfect, curvaceous etchings in the tinged darkness. The abundant triangle of pubic hair was a glistening shadow, and the hair upon the woman’s head flowed like a gentle gush of black ink to a level well past her shoulders. The tiniest tufts of fine black down strayed from her underarms.
(I know what you’re feeling…)
Did she? Did she really? This woman, who was everything Alice was not—beautiful, vibrant, empowered. How could she know? How could anyone really know how she felt?
“Take me away,” Alice asked, still looking up limply. And that’s what Dessamona was here for, wasn’t it? An acolyte of her death dream. Here to take her away, to guide her to whatever awaited in the realm that followed living.
Now the woman was holding something. Her strong yet elegant hand gently gripped some dark, tapered object that was roughly a foot and a half long.
(Do you see this?) Dessamona asked.
Alice squinted tranquilly.
(Do you know what this is?)
“I can’t see,” Alice murmured. “It’s dark.”
Dessamona stepped forward in the dead silence, leaning over, holding the object out into the moonlight.
And Alice could see it now. It looked pallid, cold, paraffin-like but gritty with details.
Alice let out a parched scream.
What the woman held out for her to see was Alice’s lower left leg…
A cusp of white bone could be seen at the severed edge. Cleanly cut. The leg was so white. The toenails had grown on the stiff foot.
(I can give this back to you) the beautiful nude woman said.
Then she vanished.
— | — | —
12
“Goddamn you, Alice. I could wring your goddamn neck.”
Alice gulped, her eyes squeezed shut. There was an awful taste in her mouth that reminded her of the few hangovers in her life. But she was mortified at what she’d just heard.
A woman’s voice, but not Dessamona’s. Was this the first thing she would hear in the afterlife? Some coarse angel telling her she could wring her goddamn neck?
White light vibrated and smirched her vision when she opened her eyes. Heaven? she wondered. Or hell? Heaven was supposed to be full of white light, wasn’t it?
But then, maybe hell was, too. Who could know for sure?
“Goddamn you, Alice. I am so pissed off at you, I could slap you right in the face.”
Holly. That’s who the voice belonged to; Alice recognized it now, and upon this realization—that she was alive—she felt no real relief. At first, instead, she felt…disappointment.
Then anger.
Eventually Holly Ryan’s stern face, framed by her sable hair and bangs, materialized before Alice’s vision.
“Holly,” Alice groaned.
“You asshole,” her psychiatrist remarked kindly. “Why didn’t you call me? You promised to call me if you ever felt this way.”
Alice didn’t answer. She felt foolish and cranky. She wished someone would turn off the bright overhead lights so she could go to sleep.
“You’re in South County General,” Holly informed her. “The psychiatric wing.”
“Great,” Alice groaned back. Then she groaned again, lifting her arm to see the tight white bandage around her wrist. “Who found me?”
“I did. I was driving through your neighborhood so I stopped by. Your door was wide open. Only ninnies leave their doors open. Have you ever heard of burglars? Are you aware that there have been a rash of burglary-related rapes in town recently? Are you the least bit aware that there is a thing called crime in most cities?”
“Well, I’m sorry, Holly. I was trying to kill myself. I wasn’t really worried about burglars at the time.”
Then Holly grabbed Alice’s taped wrist. “And look at what you’ve done to yourself. God, you’re such an asshole. Now you’re going to have a stupid-looking scar on your wrist for the rest of your life. People will see it, Alice, everywhere you go. They’ll think you’re a headcase.”
“Well, I am, aren’t I?”
“You’re a dickbrain, is what you are.”
Alice’s lips pursed into a seamed frown. She hated profanity, even when she was cussing herself.
> “You didn’t even do it right,” Holly said next, almost as if she was being critical. “You slashed your wrist laterally, Alice. Any airhead knows that if you slash your wrist laterally, the blood will clot long before expiration.”
Expiration, Alice thought. What a term. “You have a lot of gall, you know that? You’re criticizing me because I didn’t kill myself properly.”
“I have a mind to kill you myself,” Holly said. “I could strangle you. Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is for me?”
Alice sat up in bed and gaped. “What?”
Holly pointed absently behind her. “These people here? These doctors and nurses? They know me, Alice. And since I’m the one who had to register you, they know that you’re my patient. It makes me look like the worst psychiatrist in the world, bringing in a patient with a slashed wrist.”
Alice was outraged. “Well, pardon me! I do hope I haven’t ruined your reputation!”
“Shut up,” Holly said. “You’re mad because I’m not pitying you. I’m not patting you on the head and saying ‘Poor little Alice felt bad today and tried to kill herself. Boo-hoo, poor little Alice.’”
“Why don’t you just get out of here?”
“I ought to,” Holly replied, “you lame-brained little asshole.”
“And stop cussing! God, I hate that!”
Holly spared her a slight chuckle. “You know what you are now, Alice? You’re what we call a transitive suicidal. And do you want to know what that means? That means that you are in the legal custody of the state for a period of observation of at least seventy-two hours.”
“You’re…kidding!”
“No, I’m not. That means they take you out of here and drive your dumb ass straight to the state hospital in Crownsville. State doctors will evaluate you while you sit in a precaution ward.”
“No!” Alice exclaimed. “They can’t take me to a mental hospital!”
Now Holly chuckled outright. “Oh, yes, they can, and they will…unless—”
“Unless what, Holly?”
“Unless a licensed psychiatrist with whom you’ve undergone therapy for a period of no less than thirty days sees fit to have you released under his or her own professional recognizance.”