T H E G L I M P S I N G
BY J A M E S L. B L A C K
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE – JUST EIGHTEEN 6
CHAPTER 1 – THE CALL 10
CHAPTER 2 – JACK PARKE 13
CHAPTER 3 – THE GIFT 18
CHAPTER 4 – THE RED 24
CHAPTER 5 – SWEET DREAMS 29
CHAPTER 6 – GLIMPSING 39
CHAPTER 7 – DREAD 52
CHAPTER 8 – AN OMEN OF FLOWERS 58
CHAPTER 9 – THE DARKNESS 68
CHAPTER 10 – DECONSTRUCTION 79
CHAPTER 11 – THE DARK ROOM 83
CHAPTER 12 – LET ME SHOW YOU 86
CHAPTER 13 – THE STAIN 93
CHAPTER 14 – THE MAN ON THE HILL 97
CHAPTER 15 – THE GODSEND 105
CHAPTER 16 – SHE NEEDS TO KNOW 115
CHAPTER 17 – SKEWER 124
CHAPTER 18 – STRANGE THINGS 133
CHAPTER 19 – BURN 138
CHAPTER 20 – A NEW MAN 143
CHAPTER 21 – CONSUMMATION 149
CHAPTER 22 – RIGOR MORTIS 157
CHAPTER 23 – PREMONITION 162
CHAPTER 24 – PERFECT 166
CHAPTER 25 – GLIMPSING PORTIA 174
CHAPTER 26 – THE THIRD MAN 178
CHAPTER 27 – LOST 181
CHAPTER 28 – CONFESSIONS 183
CHAPTER 29 – NO MORE SECRETS 191
CHAPTER 30 – THE CLOSET 200
CHAPTER 31 – BLOOD BEDROOM 203
CHAPTER 32 – FAULT 214
CHAPTER 33 – PANDORA’S BOX 217
CHAPTER 34 – SALTAIR’S CORPSE 230
CHAPTER 35 – WAKING 235
CHAPTER 36 – LIBERATION 239
EPILOGUE – SMILE 241
The Glimpsing
Copyright © James L. Black, 2011
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, or locales in entirely coincidental.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy or copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my family—my wife Kelli and daughters Amber, Taylor, and Hailey—for being so patient and understanding with me as I poured myself into this work. I would also like to thank Richard Might, Joshua Haist, and David Hope, who were there with me from the beginning and whose encouragement, criticism, and friendship helped me in more ways than I can possibly recount. I’d like to especially thank Professor Mary Byrnes, who was instrumental in the editing of this work, and whose initial excitement over it gave me the confidence to believe it was worthy of publication. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Stephen King, whom I do not personally know, but who, through his writings, taught me more about storytelling than any conference or how-to book ever could.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
William Congreve, The Mourning Bride
1
PROLOGUE – JUST EIGHTEEN
She was eighteen when the darkness took her. Just eighteen.
When I peered through the peephole that night, I didn’t even know who she was. I was so drunk I could barely recite my own name. I happily swung the door open, watching as this unrecognizable girl flashed what was a rather extraordinary smile. Almost immediately, however, her eyes blinked away to the woman behind me, who was perched on a high bar stool, holding a glass of white wine and wearing little more than a pair of black panties. The woman’s name was Susanna Amoretti, an accountant I’d been seeing for the last two weeks.
The pretty face of the girl standing at my door disintegrated, becoming the most pained expression I had ever seen. Still too drunk to realize what was happening, I kept looking back and forth between the two women, who were staring at one another, each seemingly transfixed by the other’s presence. I still had no idea who was standing before me. In my stupor, she looked so much like Susanna, with her dark hair, milky skin, red lips, and provocative dress, that for a moment I wondered if she might be her sister. Then, almost magically, my alcoholic haze seized just long enough for me to realize who the girl was. It was Portia.
I immediately burst into laughter. I touched her hair with my fingers, and asked what the hell she had done to her herself. But Portia just kept gazing awestruck at Susanna, who was now returning a sardonic grin.
“Time to go home, little girl,” I heard Susanna say.
Portia suddenly cut her eyes back to me. She looked physically ill, as if the pain of my betrayal was simply too much for her to fathom. Her hands came up and covered her face. She then turned and hurried down the hall.
I recall feeling particularly grieved at that moment. I had an impulse to chase Portia down, to do my best to diffuse the situation, but Susanna had come up behind me and was sliding her arms over my chest. She pushed the door closed, and mere moments later, Portia was the last thing on my mind.
I only know what happened to Portia after this because for the last twelve years, she has dragged me out of the closet, propped my listless body up in a chair, and recounted it to me step by appalling step. She intends to hurt me by doing this, knowing that I now understand that it was that day that changed her, that day that led to my own demise, and prompted all the ugly horrors that were to follow. And even to this day, every time she chooses to do so, it does. It hurts like you can’t possibly imagine.
Portia drove home that night utterly devastated, barely even able to breathe. She cried for several days. Within a week she was deep within the throes of a severe depression, one from which she’d never fully recover.
It wasn’t long before the darkness came. And, as if to welcome it, Portia began to do something she hadn’t done since she was very young. She began to paint.
She’d always enjoyed painting and was so naturally skilled at it that had I not introduced her to modeling, she could easily have made a living from it. As a child, she had few friends—most considered her a “weirdo”—so painting became a pleasant way for her to occupy her time. She hadn’t given up the craft until she’d befriended a thirteen-year-old girl, who visited every summer from Brazil (I believe the girl’s name was Gabrielle), who convinced her try out for the school play.
On this occasion, however, Portia’s painting was not merely to pass the time or soothe the effects of her depression. She was doing it as a way of saying goodbye, as a final memento to this cruel and twisted world.
She had closed the sheers on that fateful day. Their cranberry color had left the room glazed in a reddish hue. The room was almost completely empty, save for the easel, which she had dragged out of the closet, and the stool upon which she sat.
In the beginning, she wasn’t sure what to paint. But soon enough, an idea flowed forth. She began with the tapered shape of a head, followed by the hollowed circle of two eyes and a loosely defined nose. It was a face. Her own. At least that was the way it began. As the image continued to take shape, it began to reflect different features: a slightly less narrow chin; lips that were a tad less plump; eyes deeply black instead of blue. It wasn’t until after the face was completed that Portia realized what she had done: created a visage that perfectly harmonized her own face with those of Susanna’s, the woman I’d been having an affair with.
In
spired, Portia continued the painting, adding a shoulder-length mane of black hair, styled the way Susanna’s had been on that dreadful night. She added the outline of a body, this one her own, postured on her stomach with her arms crisscrossed in front and her feet raised playfully in the air behind her. She painted a bed for the woman, and then, for the background, added a bedroom, my bedroom, the place she had intended to lose her virginity that night.
Portia then calmly lifted away from her stool, went to the bathroom, and pulled open a cabinet. She removed a razor and, with the tranquil ease of a skilled surgeon, carved two neat slits into each of her wrists. The blood flowed forth, not in a great gush, but slowly, steadily. Perfectly.
She returned to the room, took hold of the paintbrush and easel, and sat on the stool, preparing to add the painting’s final element: a brilliant red dress, the same red dress she had worn to my apartment that night.
But as she resumed work on the painting, blood continuously dripped from her wrist to the easel. Noticing this, Portia first considered rinsing the easel clean, but she quickly realized that would be of no use. Her wrists would only continue to bleed, and the easel would have to be cleaned once again. Instead, she decided to put the blood to good use. She twirled the paintbrush in, and then brushed a few strokes to the canvas. She then went back to work, seeking to complete the dress using the precious liquid draining from her wrists.
Finishing the dress was more difficult than she had presumed. The action of painting had caused the blood to flow faster. It was staining her arms, smearing her clothing, creating a small puddle beneath the stool. She became so sullied that at one point she decided to stop and strip down to nothing but her underwear. In doing so, she almost passed out. Time, she knew, was growing short.
In a matter of minutes, her skin had grown chalk white and her breathing labored and shallow. Focusing was becoming difficult, and she had to fight to keep from fainting. But she pressed on, determined to complete the dress.
And then, finally, she did.
She leaned back, beholding her work. A wearied smile formed on her lips. The woman she’d made, the woman formed by her hands, was nothing short of perfect. She loved the woman. She loved the woman because she knew that I would love the woman. And she knew that I would love the woman because she was a faultless blend of both Susanna and herself, a woman who possessed the body of a virgin, and all the blatant sensuality of a whore. Portia believed she would have been the woman of my wildest dreams.
Still gazing at her creation, Portia finally succumbed to her wounds. Both easel and paintbrush went clacking to the floor. Her eyes rolled away to the whites. She teetered a moment, and then drifted, falling from the stool, her body was as limp and listless as a rag doll.
She landed on her side, hitting the floor with a loud thud. The puddle of blood immediately soaked her hair, wet one side of her face, and crept warmly into the corner of her mouth. Moving was all but impossible. One of her arms—she could not comprehend which—was elbowed out in front of her. She watched as the blood continued to trickle from her wrist, forming another pool beneath her hand. A thin tentacle of the liquid soon broke away and began to run toward the bedroom’s rear window.
Pain, sharp and sudden, ravaged her chest. Her ears were ringing loudly. She could feel her heart, its hard but increasingly slower pounding. It was coming, she had thought. Soon the darkness, and blessed peace.
She didn’t know what happened after that, a strange pause of some sort. Perhaps she had blacked out. But she could see that the blood tentacle had now reached all the way to the window and was beginning to pool beneath it. Her heartbeat now seemed absent, a perfect stillness in her chest. Was she dead? But then it sprang to life, just one shockingly hard throb that made her entire body convulse.
Then a cold blackness covered her eyes.
Somewhere within it, as the seconds or minutes, or perhaps even hours passed, she heard something: a decidedly loud thud, the same sound her body had made as it hit the floor.
As if jolted by this, her vision momentarily returned. Her eyes were cutting upward, trained on her creation, the painting. And that was when she saw something that upset her to the point of tears. The woman she had painted was no longer there. No face. No red dress. Nothing.
She suddenly realized that she had never really painted the woman, that it had all been a delusion, a pernicious hallucination brought on by bleeding out too fast.
But then her eyes drifted away. They focused on something, something odd. And that was when she saw her, the woman she had painted, lying there in front of her. She was adorned in that blazing red dress, and gazing at her blankly, beautifully, with Susanna’s bold black eyes.
Portia felt a wave of overwhelming joy… and then her eyes went stiff.
She was eighteen when the darkness took her. Just eighteen.
CHAPTER 1 – THE CALL
The closet door stood open just a foot or so, allowing only a small glimpse of the luxurious bedroom outside. The half portion of an ebony bed jutted into view from the right, a small bookcase stood on the left. At the center was a large and very elegant vanity, topped with a massive oval mirror. Cosmetics and pricey perfume bottles bedecked the vanity’s surface. They gleamed brightly in the warm amber lamplight flooding the bedroom.
Portia slowly strolled into view, passing in front of the bed. She was wearing an elegant black dress with high heels that knocked pointedly against the hardwood floor. She was tall (5’ 10” according to most listings), but her delicate features seemed borrowed from someone far more petite. Her complexion was creamy, smooth, and she had wavy golden hair that spilled well beyond her shoulders. Although now thirty years of age, her youthful characteristics seemed to belie that fact. She might easily have passed for a woman a full decade younger.
Despite her accomplishments and fame, Portia was strangely superstitious, especially concerning her bedroom. Never did she allow anyone inside, whether that be acquaintances, relatives, or significant others. Not even Gabrielle, her best friend since the age of eight, had ever seen it. And Portia was even more guarded about the closet door. Never once did she permit it to close, because doing so signaled death, not her own of course, but someone else’s, and this peculiar superstition always proved true.
She moved off to the vanity and sat down on its plush stool. She reached for a small cloth, looked into the mirror, and began to dab away her lipstick. But soon the dabbing slowed, and a dawning blankness settled onto her face. She gazed at her own reflection, and then, in some strange way, far beyond it. Once more, she remembered. Once more, she thought of Jack Parke.
She had not laid eyes on him for almost two full months, since the day he had so coldly and cruelly ended their relationship. He’d said things to her she never thought him capable of, and although she tried to be strong, she broke right there in front of him. A single tear streamed from her eye. It simply hurt too much to see the man she was falling in love with, suddenly seem as foreign as a perfect stranger.
Of course, she understood full well why he was bringing things to an end; this was a well-worn path, tread by a number of other men. But what she could not understand was why he seemed to be enjoying it so much.
She had never taken breakups very well, but this one had managed to summon a level of pain not felt since she was eighteen, since the days of Collin Freely, the first and only man she ever loved. And just as in those days, the departure of Jack Parke had sent her into a soft spiral of depression. She had lost almost ten pounds. Eating had become a mere afterthought, an act engaged in only to keep Gabrielle from bringing up her increasingly gaunt appearance. Phone calls were rarely answered, and messages never returned. She spent most of her time locked in the bedroom, staring into the vanity’s mirror, sometimes for hours on end, as if into some black, bottomless tarn.
However, unlike those days with Collin, she had recently begun to feel better. In this case, time was enough to heal the wound. In fact, tonight she had just returned from
having dinner with friends, the first time she had ventured beyond her front door in weeks. She supposed that her ability to recover so quickly had to do with the fact that Jack was nothing like Collin. While true that Jack had ended their relationship for the very same reason Collin had, there was one important difference. Jack had been faithful to her, and that meant more to Portia than life itself.
A cell phone chimed, rousing Portia from her haze. She became aware of her reflection again. Another tear had streamed down her cheek.
The cell phone chimed again.
Portia stood and walked off, disappearing beyond view. It was approaching midnight, a very unusual time for a call.
She answered with a cautious “Hello”. She soon brightened, however, immediately recognizing the voice.
There was an exchange of pleasantries, a brief spat of small talk, and then a long stint of silence. That was finally broken by the slow, methodical knock of Portia’s heels against the floor. When she finally spoke again, her tone had become coarse. She questioned the caller repeatedly, doggedly. Sometimes she argued, almost desperately, but after another five minutes of conversation, she seemed to give in, and became contrite.
An apology followed. She promised to call the person back the next day, and then hung up.
From within the closet, the bedroom outside seemed to take on an unsettling stillness, perfect and unmoving, like a picture. Then a loud noise erupted. Something heavy had been tipped to the floor. A large dresser went sliding past the closet opening, coming to a stop only when it crashed into a wall beyond view. A lamp smashed against the wall above the vanity, its bulb popping loudly.
It became silent again… and then Portia reemerged into view. In her right hand, she held a long and silvery stiletto knife. She was clenching and unclenching it repeatedly.
She moved toward the vanity with deliberate slowness, and eased herself onto the stool. Once more she considered her own reflection. The tear had completely evaporated. The sanity as well. An inner rage had left her chest bruised and splotchy.
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