by John Everson
Ligeia ran a hand through his hair before walking to the edge of the ship. Donato watched the flesh of her ass shift as she walked, and even without the drug of her song, he was entranced.
As she lifted one leg over the side of the ship, Donato heard someone yell from below.
“Antonio?” the voice called. “What’s happened? Oh God, Antonio no. Oh no!!”
Ligeia caught Donato’s eye in the murky light of the moon. The black vengeance of her soul sparkled in her eyes for that moment, and she grinned, showing a mouth full of sharp, dangerous teeth.
She sang one low, sonorous note that filled Donato’s heart with sadness.
And then with a faint splash, she was gone.
Green Apples, Red Nails
I knew she was a witch the moment she offered me the apple. How else could she have known what the perfect lure would be for a man like me? She must have cast a spell and looked inside my head at all of those moments I’ve kept hidden in the darkness of shame and pain.
And then she’d shown up at my porch to gloat.
I had no idea who she was, or why she had chosen me, but I opened the door to let her inside, anyway. She shook her head. “You need to clean house first, before you are ready for me,” she said. Her voice was cool, but smoky with promise. Red lacquer gleamed in the fading afternoon light as her long fingernails dug faint trails across the skin of the apple. It slipped in slow motion anticipation from her grasp to fall into my waiting hand.
“Look inside. The answers are there,” she said with an ever-so-slight raise of her brow, and then she turned and walked away, down the uneven sidewalk path and up the hill that led from our slum of a subdivision and into the bramble woods that bordered the entry to town. I watched the pendulous sway of her rear as she slowly stepped from concrete square to square, never looking back. I wondered again, why she’d chosen me. And wondered if she came from that house that nobody in town would ever visit without the aid of a big money bet and a bottle of liquor for courage. The house in the woods. The House of the Lost, they called it during late-night whispering conversation.
I closed the heavy door to my rundown ranch and tossed the apple a foot in the air, catching it easily before throwing it higher. And then higher again. When it nearly touched the ceiling, I almost fumbled it on the way down, so I stopped and set it down on the kitchen counter next to a handful of other green apples that I’d just bought from the store that afternoon. Then I looked around my little hovel and wondered what was so desperately in need of cleaning before she would deign to step into my home. The stained brown couch was empty but for an afghan on its back cushions that my late grandma had knitted me. The old thrift shop coffee table in front of it had a stack of magazines and an empty Coke can on it, and the TV remote. The carpet was worn but uncluttered, and the kitchen counters were empty but for a stack of junk mail, my coffeemaker and the coffee and sugar canisters. I didn’t keep much of a house, but I did keep it neat.
I stared at the green apple there in the middle of the counter. How had she known? What did she want? A tear wriggled loose from the corner of my eye, and slid down my face as I remembered so many things best left forgotten. “The answer is inside,” she’d said. I thought about that for a moment, and shivered at the thought of biting into the apple. I thought of the fairy tales and a poison apple. Instead of eating it, I took a heavy cleaver from the utensil drawer, and held it for a moment above the stem of the unripe fruit. Then I brought the knife down cleanly, easily dividing the apple in half. It fell in two pieces and I stared at the center, where the seeds should have been.
The apple was hollow at its core. A small worm lifted its head from the rotten brown pit in one half of the apple, and then put its head back down, content to continue eating the apple’s heart out.
The unripened fruit was already rotten.
What was she trying to say?
The hurting began early. It wasn’t dramatic or extreme. You hear stories about these schizophrenics and street bums and mass murderers and how their childhoods were so cliché over-the-top bad. You know what I mean—“Oh, well, his mama slept with every man in town while her son played Tonka trucks next to the couch as she gave head to the guy who would later sodomize the poor kid repeatedly once his mom had passed out from a steady daylong series of complex cocktails of sperm chased with vodka. Yeah, it’s no wonder he turned to collecting severed heads when he grew up.”
Well, my mother wasn’t a junkie whore and I didn’t live in a rat-infested tenement. I have no horrible story to tell about why I ended up living a lonely life in a forgotten town. I can’t even talk about a Bonnie & Clyde robbery spree or a bat-shit-crazy murder trail. I was nobody, am nobody. But I still felt the hurting, regardless. Maybe it wasn’t dramatic enough to make me famous, but it hurt still. And most people would probably hear the story and laugh and say, “Well, get over it.” If it were only that easy! You just never know what thing is going to stay with you for life.
My parents and I lived in a typical suburban house with a mutt of a dog and a chain-link fence and meatloaf on Wednesday nights. Memorably unmemorable. But I can remember the first time I really hurt inside. The kind of hurting that stays with you for life and creeps out in the night during those moments when you’re truly alone. The hurting didn’t come from a beating from Dad or a lecture from Mom. My parents never hurt me. Hell, sometimes I wonder if they even noticed I was there. And maybe that was hurt enough, I don’t know. They had their own lives to sort through, and I probably didn’t ever even tell them about the girl with the green apples.
I was twelve or thirteen and really getting interested in girls when Allysa Romano, an 8th grader who looked more like a high school senior to me, promised me a peek beneath her blouse. She told me to meet her in the picnic clearing at Busse Woods, which I did. Busse Woods was one of those dark quiet places…where furtive people met in shadows to do shadowy things before parting, without a word. So I was excited and scared to go there. But how could I resist Allysa, with those long wavy locks and eyes that always seemed to be laughing at secret jokes? When I arrived, she was holding two green apples. She grinned when she saw me, and slipped them inside the bra beneath her yellow T-shirt. “Wanna bite?” she asked, and when I nodded, albeit hesitantly, she smiled. “I need to see what I’m getting into,” she said. “Take off your shirt first.”
I argued a bit, but finally peeled it off and asked her to do the same. She shrugged, and dropped the yellow tee to the ground. I could see the green of the apples pushing out of her white bra, the soft flesh of her smooshed breast trying to escape from the opposite edge.
“Now your pants,” she said. I hadn’t expected things to go this far, but now I was excited, and horny and it didn’t take much before I was standing naked in front of her.
“Hmmm,” she said, sizing me up and down with an eye that had more of woman than girl in it. She walked around behind me as she talked. “You might be a little green yet, I think.”
“Your pants?” I asked, a little breathless and cold but still warm with the queasiness of excitement in my groin.
“You still want a bite?” she asked, leaning against my naked back from behind. I nodded, and I felt her hands brush against my skin. “Hold out your hands,” she said, and when I did, they were suddenly filled with something cool and hard and round. The apples.
“Eat up!” she laughed, and grabbed her shirt from the ground. At that moment, the woods suddenly released a mob of taunting, hooting, laughing girls from my school. As Alyssa put distance between us, a hail of apples suddenly rained down on me from the hands of almost a dozen creatures whose wickedness was masked in braids and barrettes. One of them rushed up close enough to slap me in the ass as I wheeled about, scrambling to find my clothes and still, unconsciously, clenching the hard bitter skins of the green apples that Alyssa had left me. When I got home later that afternoon, eyes still red with the residue o
f tears, I found that I still clenched one green apple. When I bit into its skin, the tart juice only served to make my eyes tear up again, and I threw it on the ground of my backyard. It was much like me—unripe and unready. And bitter.
Shaking away the memory thirty-five years gone, I threw the rotten apple in the garbage and put on my shoes to take a walk. Not too surprisingly, my feet led me down the same path I’d watched the woman leave my house. When I came to the path leading into the woods, I hesitated, but not for long. I wanted to know. Did someone live still in The House of the Lost?
When I was a kid, we used to dare each other to run into the woods on Halloween and egg the old gray frame shack that hid in the middle of the trees like a canker on otherwise healthy flesh. Only the bravest of the brave trick-or-treated here, and there was a time in grade school when I had been dared to visit the House of the Lost on Halloween.
I had reluctantly agreed, and dressed as a hobo, had walked into the forest after dark with a flashlight, to ascend the creaking steps of the old house’s porch. I had knocked on the door and a woman had answered the door. She wore a black pointed hat and for a second I almost ran when I saw the yellowed fangs and the horrible warted nose of a witch beneath the hat.
And then she had lifted the mask to reveal a softer chin and warmer lips. And green eyes. With a long-fingered hand, she answered my “trick or treat” by offering me a taffy apple. “Made it myself,” she said, before letting the mask slip back over her face and giving out a hideous cackle. Not knowing what to say, I backed off the porch and then ran back to the sidewalk.
“She gave me this,” I said to my cronies who’d dared me to brave the dark. I raised the caramel apple in the air with a flourish and then put it to my mouth for a bite.
“No, don’t!” Tom had yelled as I bit into the fruit and the sour juice of a green apple coated my tongue. “It might have razor blades in it! Or pins!”
I spit the piece on the ground and threw the rest of the apple into the forest. “You’re right,” I said, hoping that there hadn’t been poison in the sour juice. I spit and we’d left the witch behind.
It had looked like a death house three decades ago. And as I approached it now, at dusk, I saw that it hadn’t gotten any better with age. The green of moss obscured the black of its peeling shingles, and paint hung in strips from the eaves beneath. In the side yard to the left of the porch, a broad but short tree hung heavy with green apples. So. Now I knew where the “witch” got her stock. I wondered where Allysa had gotten hers. And all these years later, I still wondered why.
Some hurts never heal.
The two windows on either side of the front doorway were dark, betraying nothing of what was inside, and I smiled at myself. Fool, I thought. Why would a beautiful woman live here? Whoever she was, her “magic” was a knowledge that she shouldn’t have of me. Not true magic at all. What her purpose was, I didn’t know, but as I stood there in front of the old house as shadows fell deeper by the second, I was suddenly certain that there was no witch, and the rotten green apple had no more meaning than the green apple I had carried home from my public shame in the forest clearing so many years before. There was no magic here, only the sadness of decay.
I was turning away from the porch when a light flickered on inside.
“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” a voice said from the doorway.
I turned back and faced my witch. She had the green eyes just like the witch I’d seen on my Halloween trip here in high school, and from just an hour or so earlier, on my porch. She couldn’t have been the same woman, and yet…
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“What do you want from me?” she said, countering my question as she used one hand to pull aside her long emerald robe. It shimmered faintly in the moonlight as it moved, and revealed the naked shadow of her breast and belly behind it. I could see the wide cone of her nipple still soft and unaroused. But the promise of her body stirred an instant reaction in me. And that reaction made me angry. I could imagine the feel of her velvet skin slipping against mine, her lips brushing my ear and promising so much. And I hated her for teasing me that way.
“Just leave me alone,” I said, and suddenly ran from the forest. Behind me, I heard the gentle titter of a woman’s scornful laughter following me.
That night, I dreamed of Alyssa. She led me into the forest again, and this time she didn’t offer me apples at all, but instead unbuttoned her white blouse and dropped her private school plaid skirt, before kicking aside her panties and bra to stand nude and white before me. Her breasts looked smaller untethered than they seemed in her sweaters, but my eyes were drawn to that soft black down at the crux of her thighs. She slid a hand behind my belt and made a fist around what she found there.
“Use it or lose it, my friend,” she said. And the next thing I knew the dark locks of her hair were tickling my naked legs and Alyssa was using it and abusing it with wanton heedless abandon.
Something in me snapped and I was no longer the frightened, humiliated boy that Alyssa taunted, but instead, I was filled with power and raw lust. I grabbed her by the hair and hauled her from my lap to push her back up against a tree. I bit her nipples like the skin of an apple and thrust myself inside her as the bark of the old tree scraped against her skin. She shifted and I twisted her around to make her hug the tree then as I used her from behind and laughed as she cried and slid down the tree trying to escape the force of my thrusts…But then she suddenly changed and stood up, taller than me, and older. Her hair was still dark but her eyes were the green of emerald and her breasts heavier and thick. With a hand she reached down and grabbed my penis and twisted until I screamed.
“Look inside,” she said. “The answers are there.”
And then I was standing naked in a forest, holding two green apples.
I woke up cold and shaking. What the hell was going on? The images of the dream just kept cycling through my mind, the tease of a past that never happened juxtaposed with the modern face of the witch. Why was this stranger in my dreams suddenly? Why was she at my door? My heart pounded as I thought about the red daggers of her fingernails releasing her robe to let me see her nakedness. I remembered a time that I had gone outside to the park nearby, wearing only a robe. Perhaps she was simply letting me know that she knew what I’d done… But I didn’t think anyone had seen…
It took me a long time to go back to sleep.
I had a girlfriend once who called testicles crotch apples. She didn’t last with me long; she was uncouth and wanted to do disgusting things. But that term stuck with me a long time. How could you sully the sweet purity of an apple by comparing it to sweaty hairy balls? I didn’t like the way she tried to put mine in her mouth…it felt strange and made me nervous every second that she was going to bite down.
I almost had a wife once. We got very close in college and I wanted her to move in with me. But in the night, when she stayed in my bed, she insisted on sleeping naked, rubbing herself on me and the sheets like some rutting feline. I had to wash my linens after she stayed over every time. She wanted me to put my tongue in places that were obscene. And I don’t mean in her mouth—though she eventually said some things that could only have come from the gutter. I realized too late that as sweet as she looked on the outside—the apple of my eye—she was rotten at the core. Just like the apple the witch brought me.
I’m rambling. I’m unnerved. My life was fine until she showed up yesterday. And now everything seems…unsettled. Old memories coming back. Old hurt. I need to get past this and just go to work. When I come home, I’m sure it will all be fine. No apples, no witches, no temptations for things of the flesh that are filled with well…foul mortality. Juices and stench and bitter and sweet and…
I’m rambling again. Just…never mind.
When I got home, she was waiting for me.
“Did you taste my apple?” she a
sked. It almost sounded like a double entendre.
I shook my head. “No, I chopped it up and found a worm inside. Was that supposed to be a message of some kind?”
“Only if you know how to read it,” she answered. She held out her hand and offered me another apple. This one was green on one side, and brown and soft on the other. There were holes in the skin, and I could feel liquid seeping out of the rotten side to trickle across my fingers. I threw the thing to the ground and wiped my fingers off on my pants.
She smiled. “Do you prefer your rot to be exposed on the outside?”
“Why are you here?”
“Because it’s nearly Halloween,” she said. “And this year, since you haven’t been able to do it yourself, I thought it was probably time to stop you.”
“Stop me from what?”
She pulled another green apple out of the pocket of her robe. She held it in front of her, staring at the green mirror of its smooth skin as if into a mirror. “There’s always one, isn’t there?”
I cocked my head, wondering what she was getting at.
“Always one perfect young apple, waiting to be plucked.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
“You’re not asking the right questions,” she said. Her lips split into a smirk, and the light flickered with humor in her eyes. She didn’t blink. “Why don’t you come back to my place, and I can explain?”
“I don’t even know your name,” I laughed. A little nervously, I might add.
“Beth,” she said. “It’s my middle name, but it’s what my mom and dad always called me. I don’t know why they didn’t use the name they gave me. In any case…does that help?”
“A little,” I said. “But I still don’t know you.”
“Ahhh…but you have known me,” she laughed, a quiet but tantalizing sound. “You have known me deeply.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Please leave.”
“Suit yourself,” Beth said. “But you are not going to give out a green apple this year. I’m going to make sure of that.”