Private Midnight

by Kris Saknussemm

  “Are you all right, Sunny? You look a little pale.”

  The cookie made me thirsty so I took a sip of the milk. I couldn’t remember when I’d last drunk milk. My mind flashed to Pico and the earlier scene in that room with the rats and the clock. When I glanced back at her I saw that her outfit and appearance had changed dramatically again. Marilyn had been replaced by a dominatrix in a black leather corset with thigh-high boots of black and red, a plumed magenta wig and vampire red lipstick. In one black-finger-nailed hand was a shot-weighted riding crop.

  “So, tell me. What did you expect to find inside my house?” she asked.

  I blinked, trying to find my voice. “I—th-thought you’d already know that,” I stammered, realizing that I had to be drugged. How was she doing this???

  “Oh, but I’d like to hear you say the words. Before you arrived today, try to describe exactly what you’ve been imagining.”

  I had to get a hold of myself. To remember this was all some kind of illusion. Theater. Hallucination. CIA-style hypnosis. I took a deep breath.

  “I expected you … to have an exotic animal pet,” I managed at last. “Maybe a monkey or an ocelot. There’d be a bunch of kooky paraphernalia. And Fantasy Rooms. You know, like big baby cribs—a jail cell.”

  “Or a tree fort. So, you think I provide dark adult entertainment. Tell me more,” she directed, and ran the crop up the inside of my thigh very slowly. “I love to know what you have in your mind.”

  I didn’t care for her mention of a tree fort one bit—but I gulped down my rush of fear and jabbered on. This broad left El Miedo for dead.

  “There’d be people in costume. A dungeon—a man being stretched on a rack.”

  “Fascinating,” she murmured, pausing the crop in my lap and tracing down the zipper line. “What’s the strangest thing you thought you’d find?”

  “Other than you?”

  She let out a laugh. After her experiment with me the other day—and all that was happening then …

  “I can’t say,” I said, afraid to say anything. “Maybe a naked girl in a cage … on a giant hamster wheel. I don’t know. I …”

  “Oh, Sunny,” she beamed. “Isn’t this fun? I knew you would repay my interest. Now, what would you be most afraid to find?”

  That stopped me again. El Miedo … or …

  “I wouldn’t be too keen on finding a dead body—being a homicide detective and all. But honestly …?” I mused, shutting my eyes. Why was I being honest with her? “I’m afraid right now. I’m afraid I’m going to find a room filled with pictures of me. Pictures taken of me over the years when I didn’t know I was being watched.”

  “That’s extremely interesting,” she replied—and when I opened my eyes she had sandy brown hair cut short and a cement gray pant suit with a brooch on her right breast that looked like a piece of circuit board. How? I wanted to pass my hand through her to see if she was really there—wherever it was we really were. Whatever she was.

  “I’ll reward your honesty, Sunny. I’m going to take you on a tour, and you shall see for yourself if the reality of my residence lives up to the expectations of your fantasy. This, after all, has just been mine!”

  If I’d been drugged it was too late to bail out … and I was way too damn curious and just straight up snuzzled. I couldn’t for my soul understand the outfit changes … the room, the props. But she didn’t give me time to mull it over.

  We began upstairs on the top, third floor, taking the Sweetheart stair machine mounted in its frame of iron figures. There was a guy with winged sandals, a woman with snakes for hair, and a man playing a lute for a gathering of animals. As we hit the second floor landing and made the turn to ascend further, I could see the doors to all the rooms were closed, which added to the occultish atmosphere of the house. The layout contributed, with alcoves and skylights arranged in unexpected places, then a sudden narrowing of a hall to what looked like another staircase system—perhaps a servant’s quarters in the old days, or maybe still. There was a discontinuous, dreamlike air about the house, as if it existed in different parts of history—as if we could step through one door and be in the conservatory of an English country estate. Choose another hallway and we’d end up on the balcony of a Storyville bordello.

  At the first door we came to, which like all the others was painted an enameled white, she gave an exaggerated knock. After a moment of silence, she opened it with a large skeleton key. All of the doors we visited on that floor she opened with this same key and the contents were exactly the same. They were all empty. Except for a light fixture embedded in the ceiling rose, which was repeated in every room and resembled a woman encircled by a dragon, the chambers were bare of any furnishings, the walls painted a flat white, the floorboards polished hardwood.

  “Disappointed?” she asked with a barracuda smile.

  “Confused,” I answered. Meaning stone blown spun out.

  “There’s more to a seemingly empty room than there appears,” she replied. “An empty room can be filled by the mind of someone who enters. But this is only the top floor. Now it’s time to descend. Into another world.”

  That got my heart beating.

  We rounded yet another corner—the house was certainly much larger inside than it looked from the street—and came to either an oversized dumb waiter or a dwarf elevator. On the steel door she rapped again—and this time a metallic echo came in reply—which made me jump. The sliding surfaces clanged open on a pulley weight and there appeared a very small and very old man. He wasn’t a midget—just unusually short and wrinkled with age. Each of his ears sported the largest hearing aids I’d ever seen—so large that it was fortunate that he was afflicted in both ears because his head would’ve been off-balance otherwise. He was dressed in a flamingo pink bellhop uniform and looked like he’d just woken from a nap on his feet.

  “This is Mr. Dover,” Genevieve announced and the little uniformed ancient snapped to attention when we stooped inside the steel enclosure.

  “Down, Mr. Dover.”

  “We can’t go up,” I remarked.

  “Mr. Dover likes to take instructions. Don’t you, Mr. Dover?”

  “Ye … ssss … ma’am.”

  With jerkingly anxious progress the wizened bellhop lowered us down through the house. We could’ve been in a diving bell.

  “Isn’t there a quicker way?” I inquired, feeling the walls narrow.

  “Would you like to fall faster?” Genevieve queried, brushing my hand. “Indeed there are more efficient means. But I like seeing Mr. Dover at his post. He’s had an association with this house going back nearly 70 years. Haven’t you, Mr. Dover?”

  “Ye … ssss … ma’am.”

  Mr. Dover looked like he’d been in the elevator for at least that long.

  “This house has an interesting history—as you correctly imagined. It was once a very exclusive brothel. That’s why I keep all the rooms on the top floor empty. In honor of the ghosts. Some very tempting, beautiful ghosts. And very tragic ones too.”

  “Like Mr. Dover,” I suggested, regaining a bit of composure.

  “Sunny’s being naughty, Mr. Dover. You know what we do to the naughty ones.”

  “Ye … ssss … ma’am.”

  “What?” I asked. “Keep them locked up in a little elevator without a stool to sit on?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Mr. Dover’s not a ghost. Next you’ll be saying that I’m one too!”

  The elevator at last thumped to a stop, and Genevieve ceremoniously allowed Mr. Dover to hoist open the sandwich doors for us—a feat that made the old codger’s back crack audibly. We stepped out into what seemed like almost total blackness as the doors scrunched shut again. Genevieve took my hand and it was like the touch of a taser. Mr. Dover fled utterly out of mind.

  “This space was built out of a cave network that runs deep into the bluff,” she said—with girlish excitement. “During Prohibition there was a speakeasy down here … and … a casino!�
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  With that, she hit a switch and a remarkable sight flooded into my eyes as a bank of spotlights on the floor burst on. Two sights actually. The first was that she’d changed again. She stood before me now decked out in the guise of an old-time nightclub singer. Platinum blonde hair, her bosom accentuated in a velvet mulberry colored gown. Like the other changes, there was no accounting for it. Either I was having a breakdown or …

  The second thing to throw me was the space the lights revealed. Imagine an underground gambling club from Tommy gun times. A large yet low ceiling room … green felt and tall stools for blackjack, a roulette wheel—a cashier’s cage, mirrored bar, several round cocktail tables, a baccarat lounge and a private room for high rollers—the sort of off-limits place that everyone’s wise to and all those who are in the know frequent regularly. Mobsters, showgirls, politicians. The joint’s always jumping into the wee hours. The cops don’t raid it because they’re on the take or at the bar. Liquor flows. Deals go down.

  Now imagine everyone suddenly evaporates. One night they vanish in mid-dice roll, drink or poker hand—and the place is left exactly as it was that night—collecting dust, slowly disintegrating, so that it seems like only the fog of spider webs is holding it together. That’s what it was like. Even the old cigar smoke seemed to hang in the air, and the grime on the mirror behind the still-stocked bar was so cloudy, it was as if it contained all the reflections of those who’d ever been in the room.

  “I know,” Genevieve sighed, looking out at the compelling decay. “I should clean the place up—restore it to its former glory.”

  “No!” I said, being honest with her again. “You should leave it just as you’ve done. Anyone can have a few gaming tables and serve up some booze in their basement. Having a haunted casino is something else.”

  “I’m very glad you appreciate that Sunny,” she said.

  “I’ve heard rumors about places like this,” I muttered. “But I didn’t know any survived. Not the real ones from the old days. Imagine the things that happened here.”

  “Yes!” Genevieve enthused, and took my arm in hers—as if we’d just made the discovery together. As if we were a loving couple who had bought the house and were exploring its hidden wonders. I wanted us to play a round of blackjack—she could be the dealer. We could’ve ended up on the dust and moth wing baccarat table. But instead she led me to the roulette wheel, the only piece of equipment in the room that wasn’t coated in cobwebs. It was set into a corner that had an oil painting of old Funland on the wall behind. The proximity made your eye connect the Ferris wheel on the wall with the gambling wheel on the table.

  “Care to try your luck?” she asked with a fetching grin.

  “I already have,” I said, as the white ball plicked around—just as I felt I was doing in her presence, waiting to find a slot to settle in. Her eyes seemed to shine with a scandalous unbearable possibility. When the wheel at last ticked around to a total stop, there was another sound, like a latch popping and the harbor view painting of Funland eased away from the wall on two hinges to reveal a passageway.

  “Another surprise,” I coughed.

  “Now the real tour begins,” she replied.

  Into the unknown—and for me—the unthinkable.

  SUSPECTED THE PASSAGE HADN’T BEEN REWIRED SINCE the War, but the light from the ceiling’s bare bulbs was supplemented by a regiment of wall mounted candles. Some took the form of soldiers, others like temple priestesses, the soft suggestions of the faces congealing with the melting of the wax. She looked at me to gauge my reaction—and I saw that she’d changed again. Her head was completely bald now—with pendulous earrings that took the form of prismatic dragons. Her outfit was a pimento red Spandex bodysuit. I tried to ignore it. All my cop training had been about not ignoring anything—and it all went right out the window. Or through the mirror.

  A gallery stretched out before us lined with black-glazed ceramic statues of naked men and women about shoulder height. Some of the bodies had the heads of animals. Others were like huge insects or imaginary creatures. Feet turned into jagged talons, tails sprouted. An iridescent beetle-shell glitter reflected off the surfaces, and several of the figures had objects embedded in them—coins, clockfaces, dolls’ heads.

  Beyond these statues was a sort of museum full of apothecary jars and specimen vials swimming with the preserved remains of glass eels and tuberous things—various deformities and marvels … Siamese twins, a duck-billed platypus … placental sorts of creatures … something that looked like a rhinoceros fetus and polliwogs with enormous eyes. Then I had to look away. The other malformed, disfigured creatures were far too hideous to look at.

  She let me move forward into an area of tall windowed cases. One was crowded with historical weapons—from shining, sharpened throwing stars and ornamental daggers, to handheld crossbows and blowguns. Another displayed exquisite examples of lingerie. There were brassieres that looked like they’d been spun of black icing sugar—corsets and teddies embroidered with topaz and sapphires. Beside this was a case that housed sadistic masks and costumes that looked more like they belonged with the weapons—Dark Ages chastity belts and mesh helmets that seemed better suited to containing a rabid ferret than enclosing a human head. Another contained a collection of prosthetic devices and medical equipment—hands, arms, glass eyes, saws, trepanning dishes, hypodermics and vises. The largest case was devoted to a single object—a grisly abacus that appeared to have been assembled from pieces of human bone. The wires I guessed were dried sinews that had been coated with some glistening-thin layer of gold. The frame was substantial enough to be in proportion to the strung beads, which in this case were authentic looking human skulls, frosted with a shining porcelain finish.

  “Enough kooky paraphernalia?” she asked dryly. “Would you like to see my favorite?”

  “Yes … ma’am,” I gurgled.

  Goddamn it, when you lose all sense of humor, you really have lost your balls. I couldn’t let her impress me to death. Somehow there was an explanation to all this.

  She pointed to the last case, which before her gesture had been dark. It illuminated as she approached it. Inside was something like a glass sarcophagus, which housed a truncated human form. Male, with a serene death face and no limbs, just a body.

  “You may have heard of Prince Randian, the Human Caterpillar. Like the Half-Man Johnny Eck, he was a famous sideshow attraction—and played a crucial role in Todd Brown’s inimitable movie Freaks. This is Gilberto, the Silkworm. He was born with the same affliction, only smaller. I met him in Lima, Peru back in the 1940s.”

  “You weren’t even born then,” I pointed out blandly. Somehow I had to keep this madness on some coffee shop chit-chat level. I sensed it would peeve her. It was the way I’d always talked to heavies like Freddy Valdez. That tone of voice had saved my ass.

  “In addition to an absence of all but one of the vital appendages, he had an epidermal condition that meant only the purest silk could ever touch his skin,” she answered, taking no notice of my comment. “Despite these impediments, he was a wonderful and imaginative lover, a generous, provocative conversationalist—the most complete man I’ve ever met.”

  I let that one go by to the backstop.

  “When he died of the inevitable complications that had beset his short, noble life, I had him embalmed. It’s a rare privilege I am extending, to allow you, Sunny, to view him. These other trinkets are merely trinkets—but Gilberto I take with me when I travel … wherever I go.”

  He—or rather it—could’ve been fiberglass. And even if it was the mummy of some circus anomaly—I didn’t like it that he was her idea of manhood. I could tell my reaction miffed her. But she perked up quick, as if to keep the roulette ball rolling.

  “Now I’m going to show you something even more personal—things I have either made myself, or have had made to my exact specifications. I call it the Members’ Lounge. A unique collection of art that I have devoted hundreds of years to.”
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  She was trying to overload my mind. I tried to stay loose and cynical.

  But it wasn’t easy, because she led me into what I gathered had once been an old wine cellar. It was now lit like an art exhibit and pristinely clean, but it was still laid out like a wine cellar, with racks upon racks of objects. Only they weren’t bottles. No siree bob.

  “Each is derived from a mold taken from a man I have instructed or been intimate with,” she said, fondling a nickel plated one with a decided hook, which reminded me a little of a .45 I used to own. “Each has become a distinct piece of sculpture, a talisman. Some are cast in bronze. Some are wood carvings. Some are inlaid with jewels or engraved.

  “Just look at this example,” she said, handing me a bulb of ivory that made me think of an in-grown whale’s tooth. It had hundreds of tiny markings like on a cribbage board.

  “The technique of scrimshaw. This man was from Nova Scotia and had a seafaring family history.”

  “What about his medical history?”

  “He was the captain of an oil tanker,” she said, ignoring me. “Feel the detail!”

  I was flabbergasted I have to admit—not by the detail of that particular specimen but by the magnitude of the whole collection. Some were made of titanium—others jade, onyx or carbon fiber. A few were no bigger than a chess pawn. One she made me examine was the length and girth of a small torpedo made of finely dimpled zinc.

  “Soon yours will be on display here,” she said. “Sophia took a mold the other day while you were reading.”

  I was so flustered I dropped the pewter one I was holding. Her hand snaked out and snatched it before it hit the floor.

  “Don’t worry, Sunny!” she chortled. “It’s not time to pass the baton yet.”

  “I wish you’d stop calling me that name,” I said, getting honest again.

  “I know, Sunny. But you’ll identify with it soon. You’ll feel like a new man, believe me. Now, what do you think about puppet shows?”

  “Aren’t they for kids?” I snorted. If she wanted to play grown-up games, then maybe we needed to grow up.