by David Nickle
And there was the shame—the idea that the newspapers in Miami were making sniggering insinuations about Mr. and Mrs. Voors, fucking in a restroom while Flight 1205 nearly crashed—she must’ve been a little slut; he must have been insatiable; they both must have been on something.
And then there was this:
He’s raping me.
“That’s good, Mrs. Voors,” said Hirsch. He produced a tissue from the box. “Let it all out.”
You don’t want that, she thought, and before she could stop herself, she said aloud, “You don’t want it all out, Mr. Hirsch. Neither does Mr. Rickhardt.”
More of the fast blinking. Hirsch got up, and went to the door, cracked it open. He peered down the hallway, and shut the door, firmly. It seemed that in doing so the temperature in the room dropped noticeably. Ann felt the hairs on her arms rise, and her tears freeze. A terrible thought occurred to her.
She didn’t know this man. He had a business card that had his name on it, and he’d identified himself as a lawyer and he’d dropped Ian Rickhardt’s name. But that in itself was no assurance. And she was alone with him in a room where he had shut the door.
He smiled, as though he’d divined her anxiety, and put both hands up in an “I surrender” gesture to reassure her.
“Mrs. Voors,” he said, “I’m on your side.”
Are you? she wondered. But this time, she said nothing.
He sat back down in the chair beside the bed, rocked back and forth in the seat.
“There are a range of things that can happen. This can be very serious—you could, if you play this foolishly, implicate yourself in your husband’s death. I suspect that my counterparts with the airline would be very pleased, faced with evidence that you and he behaved recklessly and their crew were perfect professionals. Now look—I know that you didn’t. Like I said—on your side.”
“But you’re working for Ian Rickhardt.”
“He’s paying the bill,” said Hirsch. “But Mrs. Voors—may I call you Ann?—rest assured. My only interest is seeing you out of this unscathed. At least, as unscathed as possible. Because there is another thing that might emerge. And I think we both know what that is.”
“Mr. Hirsch, please sit back. Just a bit.”
“Of course.” He had been leaning forward in his chair. He rocked back now, and regarded her.
“Now,” said Ann, “what do we both know?”
Hirsch didn’t answer immediately.
“What do we both know?” she said again.
Hirsch’s eyes darted away from her, to a corner of the room. He rubbed his arm and looked back at her. His face was flushed, and his eyes widened, almost hopefully.
“It’s here, isn’t it?” he said.
Ann sat up and pushed herself against the headboard. Somewhere at her shoulder was a button to summon a nurse—although she hadn’t used it since her arrival, not being that kind of patient.
“Yes,” Hirsch said, “you can do that. Call in a nurse. But you remember what happened on the plane, don’t you? When it came out. Do you really want to expose a nurse to that? Do you want it to get out?”
Ann found the button. It dangled from a wire that was velcroed to the headboard. Her finger brushed it.
“What do you call it now?” he said. “The Spider?”
“That’s an arachnid.”
“Ah hah. Right. The Insect.”
“The Insect.”
“And it’s here.”
“It is.”
Ann dropped the help button. The exchange had happened fast and cold, and it had hauled her down, as down a staircase, as into a cellar. How had he drawn it out of her? Was this a trick he used on the stand?
Those were questions that circled for just a moment. Because the ugly answer they circled was obvious, and terrible in its implications.
He knew about the Insect. She hadn’t told him anything. John Hirsch had come to her room, on retainer from Ian Rickhardt, after the Insect had very nearly crashed a plane and killed her husband, and he’d brought that knowledge here with him.
And now, Ann found herself agreeing with him. Whether the Insect was emerging or not right now, calling the nurse wasn’t the best use of her time.
“What is Ian’s, um, friend really paying you to do?” she asked.
“Oh, just what I’ve represented. Ian wants to make sure you get out of this and back to Canada safe and sound. He wants to minimize any fuss with the FAA, and would like the news stories to stay away from him. But fundamentally, he wants to make certain that you’re looked after.”
“But that’s not your whole game,” she said.
“Quite so, Mrs. Voors,” he said. “I’m working for Ian; I’m paid for by his friends. And I . . . well, I sometimes take my own counsel. And Mrs. Voors—there is another option. We might be able to avoid the FAA altogether. At least for a short time. My firm has a relationship with a private clinic outside St. Augustine. It is used by several plastic surgeons in the Greater Miami area as a recovery facility sometimes. Right now, it’s empty. I can, I believe, have you moved there—and arrange a later date for your interview.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Recovering from the grief at the loss of your husband?”
Did Hirsch smirk for an instant? Prick, Ann thought, he did.
“That’s one reason. The other reason, the real reason, of course, is only obvious to you and me.”
“The Insect. Which you apparently know all about.”
Hirsch nodded. “It’s freezing in here,” he said. “Colder than south Florida air-conditioning. Didn’t you notice?”
“As you mention it.”
“Yeah, you girls never notice that on your own. You’re too used to it. All those spooky drafts . . .” Hirsch got up and stretched, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops. He walked around to the foot of her bed, and picked up a green plastic bedpan. “What’s this doing in the middle of the floor? I bet this wasn’t here when your Air Canada rep was here talking to you. And—” he craned his neck, to look at the small washroom off the hospital room “—I swear, the light wasn’t on in there when I came in.”
“Stop it.”
Hirsch looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Mrs. Voors, I tell you honestly—right here, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Any more than you can. Isn’t that right?”
Ann felt tears welling up, her throat constricting. “Fuck off.”
Hirsch shook his head. “Don’t think so. I think, though, that we can calm this thing down a notch, if we keep from the potty mouth. Isn’t that right?” The last sentence he spoke at the ceiling, as though something hovered there. Possibly something did.
Without looking down from the ceiling, Hirsch continued.
“I gather that Ian Rickhardt visited you on your honeymoon. There are stories going around, about that visit. The terrible fire. Might I say—” he looked at her now “—Mr. Rickhardt reported enjoying himself terribly at the fire. He should have; he went down specifically for that purpose.”
Ann thought again about what she’d seen: Ian Rickhardt, turning slowly in the air as the Insect rampaged through the guest house. The expression he wore on his face . . . rapturous. Orgasmic.
And the words that the Insect conveyed to her, on the plane . . .
He’s raping me.
Ann felt the tightness in her throat well up, and this time, Hirsch didn’t bother with the tissue. He set the bedpan in her lap.
It caught nearly all the vomit.
They called a nurse in for that. Ann smiled, and thanked her, and when she asked what had brought it on, Ann said she didn’t know.
“Well you’ve been through a lot,” said the nurse. “I’ll tell the doctor.”
She pulled away the sheet that had caught a few flecks of the vomit, and pulled a new sheet from a cart.
“You figure you two are about don
e here?” she said.
Ann had looked at Hirsch, then back at her and said, “No. We still have some more things to discuss.”
The nurse closed the door. Ann thought she heard something click in its latch, roughly, as though the lock were being asked to do something it had never done before.
Hirsch reached into his jacket pocket, and removed a small stainless steel hip flask. “Scotch,” he said. “I don’t know if your stomach is up for it—”
Ann took the flask before he’d even properly offered it, and drew a long swallow. It burned down her throat but her belly welcomed it like an old friend.
They sat quietly for a moment. A breeze crossed the room, slow and cool, as though it were coming from a distant place to the north. The fluorescent bar over the bed flickered, ever so slightly. Hirsch started, and looked sharply at his shoulder, as though he had been touched there. Ann offered him the flask back, and he took it, drew a mouthful.
“What’s it doing?” he finally asked.
“It might not be doing anything,” said Ann. “It might not even be here. After a while, your imagination can do almost everything the Insect can. It might be getting ready for something big. It never does the same thing twice. But . . . I don’t think it’s going to be bad.”
Hirsch screwed the cap back onto the flask and slipped it back into his pocket. Ann rubbed her temple; the whiskey was good, but she felt the beginning of a headache, and that was probably partly to blame. Still, she wouldn’t say no to another slug. Or three.
“Ian Rickhardt raped it, I think,” she said. “I think my husband—Michael did too.”
“I think you’re right,” he said softly. “That’s what it’s for, as far as they’re concerned. That’s why they trained it, all those years: to be unable to resist them. I hope it understands that’s not what I’m going to do.”
Ann shivered as the sheets of her bed billowed up her thighs, an icy wind manifesting underneath them.
“I hope so too,” she said, and looked at him. “What are you going to do, Mr. Hirsch?”
“Nothing it doesn’t want me to.”
“You’ll understand if I’m skeptical about that.” Ann looked around. The chill seemed to be leaving the room. Nothing that she could see was in motion. “You’ll understand if the Insect might be.”
“Is that meant as a threat?”
Ann shrugged. Inwardly, she tallied it up. They’d never met, she and this lawyer, who said he worked for Ian Rickhardt—who hadn’t so much as telephoned. He knew about the Insect. He wanted to take her somewhere safe.
Where no one else could see her, or find her.
And he knew about the Insect. And the only living people who knew about the Insect besides herself were her brother, who hadn’t spoken in a decade, and Eva, who was down with a stroke.
Even Michael . . .
Well, if he knew anything, he wouldn’t be saying. Not where he was.
“What are you smiling at?”
She hadn’t realized she had been. She blinked.
“Look,” said Hirsch, “I think I’ve got a bit of an idea of what you’re going through. You’re not the first woman that’s been caught in Rickhardt’s mill. It’s like you’re cut off from a piece of yourself. Things don’t connect like they should, isn’t that right? You’re out of joint.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll lay it on the line,” said Hirsch. “You probably have no idea—but you’re well-known in certain circles. The . . . thing that you’ve got following you around, maybe inside of you. It’s a commodity to men like Rickhardt, in those circles. Do you understand?”
Ann thought she did. “That’s how you know about the Insect, isn’t it? Because you’re a part of those circles too.”
Hirsch puffed out his cheeks and exhaled in a silent whistle.
“Lay it all on the line, I guess?” He grimaced. “Yes. I have been.”
“And you’re not now.”
“Something like that.”
“And you want to protect me from your old friends. No. Not me. You want to protect the Insect. Keep it for yourself.”
“That—”
“—is exactly what you want to do.”
Hirsch looked away, and his shoulders hunched a bit—like a preteen boy caught with porno. It was as good as an admission.
Ann went on. “You were never nervous about the prospect of the Insect coming out, were you? You were . . . you were excited. I’ve seen that before. You can’t wait to see how it goes; you can barely hold yourself back—”
“Mrs. Voors,” he said, “you’ve got—”
“Well Mr. Hirsch, let me clue you in. If you were to meet my Insect in the washroom back there, it wouldn’t go well. It would smash your head into the toilet. It would bend your spine to the breaking point. It would bend it past that point. It would kill you. If you were lucky.” Ann slid away from Hirsch as she spoke, until finally she was standing, on the opposite side of the bed. “But you might like that. You might just like that,” she said.
“Mrs. Voors,” he began, and she cut in:
“Stop calling me Mrs. Voors.”
Hirsch opened his mouth to say something else, but the breath caught in his throat. He half-stood—or at least that was how it seemed at first. As Ann watched, the lapels of his suit-jacket rose higher, as though they were tugging him. His arms spread, like wings starting to unfurl—and as the front of the jacket spread, Ann could see the fabric of his shirt creep up his chest, as though pulled by invisible fingers.
Ann stepped away so her back was against the drapes. The room was freezing now; she could see her breath in front of her face. She reached behind the drape—the sunlight through the window was warm on her hand, nourishingly so. She wanted to pull herself behind the curtains, bask in the Florida sunlight. But she couldn’t look away.
Hirsch was bending backwards, his hips thrust outward. His belt snaked through the loops of his trousers, slipping finally to the floor.
“Oh,” he said, in a soft, little-boy voice. “Oh thank you.”
How like Michael he was, then. Not Michael in the aircraft, spinning in the small space . . . No. Ann was struck how similar he was to that first date—lunch, on top of Toronto. Watching the salt and pepper shakers dance across the table.
Michael Voors’ dream come true. How hadn’t she seen it?
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Hmm?” Hirsch spared her a glance through slit eyes. “You can’t imagine,” and he gasped as his trousers shifted a small rotation, making a frosted mist in the air in front of him.
“That’s why I’m asking you,” said Ann. She couldn’t imagine, obviously. Through the whole of her courtship—her marriage . . . she hadn’t imagined. She hadn’t even seen. “What do you get out of it?”
His eyes cracked open, just a little wider, and regarded her lecherously. “Do you . . . want to come see?”
The waist of Hirsch’s trousers was stretching out, the button undoing, the fabric sliding down his hips. They were muscular, tan, and glistened with sweat. And he was hard. She did look away, and although she fought it, crept a few inches farther behind the curtain. She looked outside sidelong, squinting in the afternoon sun as it bleached out the air-conditioning units on the rooftop below her window.
“Because you can,” he whispered. “Rickhardt . . . your poor late husband . . . never had any use for their wives. Their vessels. That’s what they call you, you know. A vessel. Because it’s all the ’geist for them. But . . .” he paused, and cried out softly, but Ann didn’t look to see what had caused him to do that “. . . we’re not all like that. Some of us love our women. Some of us . . . see the godly in you.”
Ann’s sun-warm hand clenched into a hard fist. “Thank you, Mr. Hirsch,” she said.
“You should come over here, Ann. You haven’t ever felt your own . . . the Insect’
s touch, have you?”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s . . . it’s like death.”
“How genuinely tempting.”
A chuckle. “Not death. But . . . you’re familiar with the term ‘petit mort’? Little death?”
“I know the phrase.” Ann’s fist pressed against the hot glass. “So it’s like an orgasm.”
“Like an orgasm. Yeah. But a genuine little death. When the ’geist touches flesh—in the way it’s been trained . . . it doesn’t just touch flesh. Goes straight . . . straight to the soul, straight to the Infinite. When you come . . . you come—into being.”
“Back up,” said Ann. “The way it’s been trained?”
“Well-trained. Yours . . . the Insect . . .” He grunted—low in his throat, almost lower than he should have been able to do. “The best we’ve done.”
Ann shut her eyes and swallowed hard. She thought again about Michael—sweet, unremarkable Michael Voors—and how she had met and married him without question, even as sex with him hardly brought her to orgasm, never mind into being; even as Ian Rickhardt came into their home and bullied and belittled her, and Michael did nothing; even through fire on the shores of Tobago and onto an airplane back to Toronto, one she had no business boarding, so her husband could find his being a mile in the air. . . .
The Insect wasn’t the only one who’d been well-trained.
“Come on out, Ann,” said Hirsch. “Taste the Infinite.”
Ann clutched the curtain . . . the sun was blessedly hot. She froze in its heat, immobile.
“Get out of here, Mr. Hirsch,” she said.
He didn’t answer this time. Outside, face pressed against the glass, Ann could hear the faint wailing of an ambulance siren. Something in the belly of the hospital’s HVAC shifted, and Ann felt a rumbling vibration through her forehead.
“Get out,” she said again, and when there was still nothing, she pulled herself away from the window, and looked to see what depravity the Insect had inflicted on her new lawyer.
“Oh.” She barely whispered the exclamation, and stumbled over to her bed.
John Hirsch was back in his chair. His trousers were buckled around his waist; his belt through every loop. His hands, strong and lean, were on the armrests. His eyelids were slack again; his mouth pulled down on the right-hand side. Saliva dribbled down his chin.