by Paul Pipkin
The rain returned as I steered her inside, mulling her remarks in San Antonio about sugar imbalance. The lassitude and disorientation might well have a physiological basis. Rummaging through her flatly disgusting kitchen, I could come up with only a package of peanut-butter crackers. Justine lazily munched them while I sponged her off. I toweled her dry, salving the more acute abrasions, then crawled into bed beside her. Such a rainy Wednesday morning was good for sleeping in. I roused only a couple of times to the sound of the rain rattling on the tin roof.
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I LAY THERE IN A KIND OF TWILIGHT, reconstructing what I could of strange dreams and consolidating them into memory. Figures like skydivers, in a snowflake formation, reminded me of my ritual dancers, but I drew back from the association. Permitting such assignments may lead the conscious layers to reinterpret images as stitched-together composites—images that, while unfamiliar, may be quite discrete. I watched them turning and turning until they collapsed into one another like a string of paper dolls.
Another seemed even more the typical sort of mixed-image-fest. I was in the old shelter house at the lake. But rather than JJ, I was talking with Justine, wearing the old party dress from the chest upstairs. She had been offering me a gift, a tray on which, instead of hors d’oeuvres, there was an octagonal icon. As I watched, crystals grew out of it at strange angles, like sections of a hypercube unfolding.
I awoke in the afternoon when I’d thrown my arm about Justine’s shoulders and she’d whimpered. I started away, but she reached back for my hand. Turning over with a soft moan, she nuzzled my neck. “Can’t find a comfortable position,” she murmured.
“Sort of what we had in mind,” I ventured, “or didn’t you anticipate that going with the territory?” She giggled and hugged me, inquiring whether I wanted to make love. “Yes, it’s true that we old men are best right after waking, but you must know that’s going to hurt for sure.”
She bit my ear. “I’m a wreck, I truly am,” she teased sleepily. “Come on, lazybones. We’ll do slow-processing.” Loving her, I was again home and happy. You have to understand that happy was something I had never expected to know again. Her movements, that time, were slow and deliberate. She liked to talk after penetration, as do I. “Rewind what she said after they were finished with the blonde.”
“That the girl would be working the next night; that her fresh marks would make her the favorite. For at least a week, she would get the best tips.”
“How did Linda like that?” she sighed.
“She was squirming in her chair. While I’d been playing with the blonde, the old woman had sounded her out about finishing her contract at The Château, instead of the strip joint. The drift was that Linda’s work with the magician led her to believe we might find all this attractive, so she’d taken us to see the whole deal.
“She’d gone on about Linda’s regular acts fitting in but the punch line was that, she would have to be interviewed and initiated like any other slave-girl dancer.” I gasped, as Justine reached between my legs and grasped the back of my scrotum, “You are so not like your mother.”
“I should hope not,” she giggled. “Tell more!”
“She told her that, if she thought another girl’s punishment too severe, she would be allowed to take her place, that girls sometimes expressed affection for each other that way.”
Justine shuddered, gently kneading my balls. “Thinking about that, much, would get me done way too quick-like. How did Linda take to that idea on female bonding?”
Talking about my dead wife could have been just a bit distractive, had not Justine’s handling been keeping me aroused. “Linda looked like a deer caught in the headlights, and she asked an odd question. Would the old woman do that herself, do it for her?” Justine slowed our combined motion, looking up expectantly.
“She laughed about her skin being too old and thin; the members wouldn’t be particularly entertained by seeing her whipped. Claimed, though, that she’d done such things more recently than we might have believed.” I recalled a detail I’d not thought about in years. “She put her hand on Linda’s knee, saying that she reminded her of someone, that she might talk a girl into taking her place sometime.”
Justine resumed her undulations, closing her eyes. “The blonde?” she sighed.
“Might have been. When Linda was being initiated the next night, I saw the blonde pause while waiting a table and focus on her. Linda stared back at her, their eyes locked. They were thoroughly taken with each other and the reversal of their positions from the previous night.”
Justine, building toward climax, yelped as I grasped her tender buttocks. “How, did that make you feel?” she stammered.
“Babe, I’m not still able to call up all this detail because I was so turned off! One night when Linda had been auctioned, I asked the old woman to put the blonde up as well. She accommodated me. I think she even rigged it—there wasn’t much bidding against me. The girl was still worked up by what I’d done on her initiation night, and she was just delicious. She knew I was thinking about Linda. She kept me turned on by talking about what was probably happening to her right then.”
We had both been withholding climax for indeterminate minutes. As she began rhythmically squeezing me, her juices soaking the sheets, I came almost involuntarily to ejaculation. My extended climax triggered her own shuddering spasms. It was as if the long-ago erotic excitement had melded with our present passion, and through it, lived again. In the afterglow, I wrapped up the story.
“Your great-grandmother blew our young minds. As it happened, Linda was whipped only on the night of the initiation but, during the two weeks, was auctioned several times. I wonder now if that wasn’t contrived so Madeleine could spend more time with me? She knew all the buyers and assured me there was nothing to worry about, which turned out to be the case.”
Justine sighed once more. “I can see you holding out your hand for the blonde when you bought her, like when you met me,” she murmured before dozing off again. “Dead cool.”
After we finally got out of bed, Justine expressed an urgent postcoital necessity to go prowl a mall. I first made a run into Buford to get us some burgers and use a phone. The house had only a dedicated line for her computer. Justine explained, “I didn’t need Mother spitting in my ear.”
I called Cris to see about Kong and Joe to tell him I’d see him when I saw him. Beyond fully understanding the obvious, he was ecstatic to learn that the mural was indeed there, and that this thing was some kind of real. Then I talked unpaid leave shit to my boss, feeling guilty for not just telling her that I wasn’t coming back. I would need the unemployment when they deleted the position.
I took longer than intended, but it gave me time to think. I concluded that I was way sure it was the time to confront the previous night’s ghosts. However, in the full light of day, yet another apparition was awaiting me. Climbing the creaking steps I could hear, as during the last night’s drive home, another ghostly lyric.
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“AROUND THE CORNER, AND UNDER THE BRIDGE, a handsome sailor, made love to me. He kissed me once, he kissed me twice, and-ever-since-I’ve-wanted-to-go…” Déjà vu bites! Whereas the ghostly lyrics of the night before had been in my head, these were composed of definitely audible material vibrations. Tr oubling with the sense of familiarity, I identified the tune as a round I could just recall my mother singing when I was a child. It had been a song from her girlhood. My mother had been born in 1904.
“Around the corner, and under the bridge, a handsome soldier made love to me. He kissed me once…” Justine was bobbing her shoulders with the old round in her characteristic fashion. In front of the long Adam mirror, she was wearing the party dress from upstairs. She’d also found a long strand of beads and a Grecian-goddess forehead band that looked art nou-veau. It lay beside her on a small teakwood table, along with containers of the mascara, rouge, and lipstick that she’d applied in a perfect period likeness.
“I can’t get that tune outta my head.”
Riveting me with incredulity was what she had done with her hair. Its decidedly nonperiod crimson length was piled, in an elaborate French wave, on the back of her head. A tube of styling gel, apparently attempted and abandoned, lay on the table. She was using a curling iron and a card of bobby pins to frame her face with little spit-curls, in a mode that I could hardly conceive a modern girl even knew.
“I wonder if they still make Dippety-Doo?” she mused, finishing her curls and placing the classical band on her forehead. “Would you photograph me, tied to one of the columns and looking distressed? Wouldn’t I look scrumptious?” She peered at me mischievously in the mirror.
I recalled Willie’s fantasies of the chained ladies, which he’d been convinced Grandmother Piny’s telepathy had helped generate. “Seabrook would be gaga,” I answered, “though I’d as rather see both my goddesses and distressed damsels naked.”
She giggled and, turning about, curtsied with a slight lift to the tiers of her scalloped satin skirt. She had substituted white panty hose for silk stockings, but the satin slippers were clearly originals matching her dress. She looked a vision out of another age as she donned the flapper beads and beamed. “My heart, you have a most improper imagination. I’ve been feeling quite all-overish since I woke up, I mean to say!”
She displayed the fact that she’d removed the backing, which would have preserved modesty behind the Georgette inlay over her chest. What the hell had come over her while I’d been away? I wondered at “my heart,” which had been delivered like an address rather than an exclamation. The old Bronx accent had become pronounced.
I put our food on the table, moving aside the memorabilia. The African masks grinned at me. Before we sat down, I took a folder from my leather case. “Justine, I have here a copy of Seabrook’s Witchcraft. I photocopied the reference book in full.” As she sat down, looking at the pages with curiosity, I saw her hands sweep up the skirts—with upturned palms!
What the gesture made me remember filled me with awe and consternation. That was becoming a familiar state of mind, ever since a young Goth had seated herself, in identical fashion, beside me at the WorldCon. It was as if a ghost, wrapped in a reality of sweet, young flesh, belittled my wildest conjectures.
Would it have been more easily handled had I believed her demented, victim to multiple personalities, instead of struggling to accept what I suspected might have been happening there? Oh God, this was indeed some kind of real!
For once, her typically piggish table habits consoled me, as she savaged the burger and fries with sickening amounts of ketchup. I started reading to her, from the “Justine” chapters, the description of her predecessor passing into a trance during a bondage session and having an elaborate precognitive vision.
I’d reached the point where Willie, upon discovery that she’d long been hanging free of any foot support, had rescued her. She’d been ticked off, because she’d been enjoying her vision of the street circus, the one they were destined to witness the following year in the city of Petrarch’s muse Laure, an alleged ancestress of Sade…
“In Avignon,” Justine breathed the name with a melancholy lilt, her perfection of pronunciation discernible to my ear. I just stopped and looked at her. “You’re thinking about me complaining last night, which wasn’t fair.” Her throat trembled, “I’m gonna get to go? Really and truly?”
“Justine, I’ve procrastinated about telling you this story for three days. Avignon was mentioned in the Testament, also the fact of the circus, right? Are you pulling my leg? Have you read this story before? It’s not in my notes, I know that, but some of the reviewers did, I believe, synopsize it…”
Shaking her head with a very slight smile, she seemed to be looking afar off. “Dearest, don’t be contrary. Someway or other, it gets read, but not yet.” Something in her responses was askew from any sense of immediate reality. She then brought up the red-leather discipline mask; the mask on the little figure in the mural, which the old woman had alleged to be herself. She described it, much as in the pages that I’d been only about to read to her, but made mention of a pair of blue, tightly laced gloves. That rang a disparate bell.
In the mid-sixties, a young writer of Anton LaVey’s acquaintance had published a satire on pornography. The Nightclerk, like Candy, had become an underground classic. A special favorite of my wife’s had been a scene in which the female lead, named “Katy,” was being hand-fed in a public restaurant. Her arms were immobilized in a pair of blue-leather discipline gloves.68
The workmanship of the gloves, among other haunting similarities, had put me in mind of Willie and Justine’s restaurant adventure described in Witchcraft. That had opened a new portal of conjecture during my research. What else might that author have known? I had wondered whether Katie, Willie’s first wife, might have been a component of a composite Justine? Katie had certainly not been a shrinking violet, to be sure, but it was a long reach.
“Someway, this all involves a place called Evenos,” Justine was saying, absently running her tongue around the spout of the ketchup bottle before replacing the cap. “Do you know that name? It sounds Greek.”
“The Château d’Evenos, near Toulon. Seabrook took a long lease, but failed to restore it. The place and its neighborhood are described in detail in Marjorie’s book.”
“It was certainly all empty and fallen down when we were there last night. The time before, it was full of life. Like you were describing the roadhouse, muchly.”
“I’m confused. Which of the ‘châteaux’ are we talking about?” I tried to laugh, though hairs were rising on the back of my neck. “You’ve seen it some other way, perhaps? Babe, it’s been like that for decades.”
“Not the roadhouse, silly, the castle.” Putting down her burger, she studied intently, as though with difficulty pulling something up from long before.
“I dreamed of riding in a huge old open-topped car. Its wheels had wooden spokes, and everything was so bumpy and dusty! Above a dark gorge, there was an old castle with a spiral iron staircase that led nowhere. We laughed about it being the ‘stairway to heaven.’ It was like déjà vu, memories coexistent with their contents. I was dreaming the remembrance of the very dream I was having, but something was all wrong. The other time, the stairs did go someplace. I was so glad you were there to hold my hand. I felt like a ghost haunting the ruins.”
I remained very still for a while, hoping the fear in me would subside. Trying to follow her dreams resembled my vain quest to correlate the literary sources. They appeared contiguous with histories, even with fictional treatments, of which she possessed no knowledge. More, I felt a less-than-explicable reticence to grapple with an inference of relationship, in some eerie fashion, to our present-day experience.
“No bondage gloves are associated with the mask in any of Willie’s writings that I know of. Neither is this ‘stairway to heaven,’ at least in that form. Where is that coming from?”
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PLEASE GIRL, I PRAYED, TELL ME YOU READ IT! What I’d said was not totally true. Marjorie had recalled a story of “… that strange iron staircase—erected on top of the ruins by that last demented owner, the Count d’Evenos, who wanted to get a little closer to heaven when he prayed…”69
“Justine, did you see her vision of the street circus?” I burst out, now needing to know.
“The lion was in the vein of remembrance of memory. I was here now, long years after those happenings, but knowing I’d not even yet been to Europe. So it was like, remembering things that hadn’t yet happened. You’ll be taking me soon? Maybe next year?” Her eyes were all starlight and absinthe. Magic was in there, and I could not help but imagine that it formed the face of another Justine—the Justine of Witchcraft.
“Speaking of your own dreams,” she mused, “we talked all about brain waves, sans the spikes needful to earmark a time sequence, and such-like? You opened me up last night, so very wide…” My e
yes began to burn. “… and I feel like, susceptible, to dreams that had been waiting for me to have them… oh, dearest, not to worry…”
I’d drawn back, but I had no clue what she was seeing in my face. Dear God, no! Her perplexing condition was due, in part, to my stupid games. I spilled my guts. “I’ve suspected that there’s no escape from whatever destiny of yours I’m entangled with. I think I can accept that. But babe, you complete my life. I can’t live with having found you, just to lose you again—as I did with your mother. And not to a damned ghost!”
“Oh, pooh!” The green eyes flared. “JJ didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to take your hand or to take command of her own life.” She thrust her fists against her hips with exasperation. Had she not been seated, I believed she would have stamped her foot.
“So it’s like that, after last night? How very bore-some your life would of been if you’d married her. There is positively no comparison. If you still think that I could throw you, I’m tapped. I-am-not-JJ! Damn!”
Emergent, in her anger, was the persona I’d met on Sunday, and I tried to seize the moment. “That’s my point, babe, who are you?” I directed her attention to her elaborate coiffure and makeup, her varying accents and language. “This is something a little more extreme than accessing some scattered memories. Look, I don’t doubt the validity of Seabrook’s approach to psychic experimentation. I’m not some little narrow-minded shrink”—she raised a disapproving eyebrow, but I pushed ahead—”who would imagine that mere employment of the sexual motif invalidates results…”
I recounted Linda’s belief that the endorphins released by physical stress often allowed her to leave her body, enjoying watching her plight voyeuristically. Neither had her evidence, that something more was going on, been purely subjective. Once, believing that her back was being arched too far, she panicked. She had thrashed about and freed one ankle, but the cuff that had held her was still closed tight and double-locked. No examination of details could explain what had taken place.