“Sit me up?” Danny begged.
She started to obey but then realized she didn’t want to touch him. “No,” she said, “I can’t do that.” Frank came to her, held her.
Danny said he understood. Then he raised the sword up, cord-wrapped hilt toward the cabin’s crossbeams, and without hesitation sank it into his abdomen an inch from his belt. He grimaced and grunted as it cut across his belly, his strong hands never faltering. Blood welled behind the blade, drooling along the crusted runnels of Marcie’s blood. He let the sword clatter to the floor and called to Karin. “Kneel beside me.”
Frank tried to hold her, but she said, “He’s dying. It’s a last wish.” She went and knelt and saw the pain deep as starless night in his eyes. He raised his hands, imploring one last touch. She hesitated, then relented and rested her hands on his, felt them close around them and tighten and pull her hands downward, pull them toward his belly, toward the garish clown’s mouth, touching the wet lips, her fingers sinking into the steaming warmth of his wound. “It’s not working,” Danny said, his voice a razored whisper. “Kill me, kill me all the way.”
She stopped struggling and let him guide her hands inside him. His abdomen looked like a burst basketball. Her fingers felt serpents asleep in steaming mud, praying hands clenched around hot guts. She calmed herself, eased her eyes closed, slowed her breathing. She touched the wellspring of his life, the thing she’d sparked anew in him back in the graveyard. Like an abscess, she drained it, her weeping, her anguish, joining with his. But after a while, the sorrowful outgasp of Danny’s voice died away and only hers, higher pitched, remained, her arms buried deep inside a corpse whose fire had gone out.
***
Frank helped Karin up, her gloves of melted crimson cellophane spattering the dead man as she rose. As swift as a startled wildcat, and as fierce, she wheeled around, wrapped her arms about him, and hugged him. “It’s over,” he said, “and I love you. I haven’t told you that much, but that’s going to change.”
“You’re such a dear sweet man,” she said, not looking at him, her head nestled against his shoulder. She seemed about to say something more. But looking around the room, she thought better of it. She took his hand and led him past the table through the kitchen alcove to the bathroom. It felt exhilarating to leave behind the horrors of the front room, like stepping out of the sick, smoky smell of a cross-country bus into fresh Arizona air.
She stripped him, then herself, dropping the soiled clothing in a heap behind her. Frank felt his belly where the sword had gone in—smooth and unbroken, a crusted dash of dried blood the only remaining sign. She paused at the indoor shower, then shied away, again looking about as if the worst part of the house had followed her here. “Bring some towels,” she said, gathering soap and shampoo. The door let in the night air and then they passed through it and were outside, matted stairs rough against their feet. Frank set the towels on the steps as Karin turned on the solar-heated water and tested it with her fingers. She stepped under the shower, soaped her hands first, washed them off, then soaped them again.
A light breeze wafted across Frank’s belly, just two or three degrees away from cool. Karin looked strangely beautiful in all that blood, but more beautiful as little by little it spiraled down her thighs and was gone. She shampooed her hair, pink and white sudpuffs curling there, then held out the soap: “Help me, Frank. I don’t want to one spot left that hasn’t been soaped and rinsed clean.”
Frank joined her. The warm water steaming on the concrete beneath their feet sent up a swirl of cloud that both set them apart from and joined them to the panorama of thick dark forest fanning out from the logged back of the cabin. He lathered her up as the water battered his shoulders and raced down his back and buttocks. Then he led her under the water and watched the white suds melt along and define every contour of her flesh. She was a wood nymph freeing herself at last from the confines of bark and trunk, limb and leaf, and it was his privilege to witness her transformation.
Now she soaped him. He surrendered himself to those caring hands, recognizing gestures and sounds she had only used hitherto on plants, feeling how extraordinary Karin’s touch was, not simply in bestowing new life but primarily and more importantly in blessing and encouraging the life already in him. She soaped him everywhere, then washed him off, drew him under the downspray, and impaled herself on him, closing about him like a moist fist. “I love you, Frank,” she said, her voice at his left ear but also deep inside him, as rich and full as the smells and sounds of the forest. Her lovemaking was fierce but controlled, and yet the sounds of her mounting frenzy came free and loud, more uninhibited than she’d ever been. And that set him off too, gave him an openness of sound he’d never before given in to.
Above them, the stars, so bright on his approach to the cabin, dimmed and guttered for an instant. But then he was locked into Karin’s eyes, the ferocious love there driving him onward—scarcely believable the mutual upward spiral they had going, climbing, soaring, but not yet at its apex. He had no idea he had loved Karin this much. Nor she him. The continuing revelation in their locked eyes seemed both to create new love and to reveal the love that had previously been hidden.
He held back his orgasm, even as she coaxed it. She seemed to be doing the same, her shattering animal sounds building like wave on wave but never quite crashing on the shoreline of release.
Then bright light flared on and the first bark of a bullhorn and both of them went over the edge into ecstasy. Part of Frank’s mind registered what was happening, but most of him was deep into their shared coming. As their mingled breath began to calm, he heard more clearly the repeated message: “Put your hands up and step away from her. We have you surrounded.”
“I love you so much,” he said into her mouth.
“I love you more,” she said, her lips on his, a wet giggle forming there. “You going to step away from me?”
“Never. They’ll have to shoot me first.”
“Me too. Better put your hands up, though.”
“I will if you will.”
And, hands clasped like twin prayers, Frank and Karin brought them up, his arms running the length of hers like a hopeful tree reaching upward toward the sun.
EPILOGUE
SUNDAY, JULY 4, 1993
Frank backed out the door, letting it close and latch behind him. On a silver tray sat two champagne glasses of sparkling cider and a thin cut-glass vase which sprouted a carefully dethorned Pink Rose, as per Karin’s request. He set the tray on the ledge of the spa and removed the towel wrapped about his waist. The water bubbled about his wife like freshly opened ginger ale.
“Fireworks started yet?” he asked.
“Nope.” She gestured with her head. “Are you sure the park is off in that direction?”
“That’s what the natives tell me. Meg Kornfeld from the office, she and her husband live a few blocks over but their house is oriented same as this one, and according to Meg we should have the perfect view.” He slipped into the spa, put his hand on the almost imperceptible convexity of Karin’s belly, and kissed her gently on the lips.
“Beautiful lady,” he said, “you make me so happy.”
Smiling, she touched his face. “Is Mom in bed?”
“Yes.” He reached for the champagne glasses and gave one to Karin. Good old Martinelli. The first fruity sip was perfect, cool in his mouth, a dream going down. “She likes it out here. It’s amazing the change in her since I met her at the airport last month.”
Karin, her jaw tight for a moment, looked toward the darkening slope that rose abruptly out of their backyard, smooth stained steps set into it and rising to a trellised gazebo at the top. As beautiful as the rest of the house was, that one feature—more than the less hurried pace of life in general, more than the prospect of real seasons up here in the foothills—had sold them on the move to Grass Valley. “All it took was a transplant,” she said. “Gave her roots a chance to breathe. Poor woman, the separation was long over
due. She still has plenty to work through.” She turned again to Frank, kissed him, caressed his neck. “I have a feeling we won’t recognize her in another year.”
“I think you’re right. And I’ll bet the advent of little what’s-his-name here will help.”
Karin agreed, then sipped her cider. Frank couldn’t believe how lovely she looked. Her mother’s hadn’t been the only transformation he’d been witness to. As soon as the procedural hullabaloo had died down—in fact the day after the coroner took a professional gamble and issued a report stating that the corpse in the cabin was both long dead (in parts) and recently dead (in others) and that all signs corroborated the Tanners’ outrageous claim that this was Danny Daniels returned from the grave—Karin persuaded Frank to put their house and the Chiquita Lake property on the market and bought two round-trip tickets to the east coast. In a private meeting with her father, she’d shamed him to tears, convincing him—so Karin reported, though he apparently hadn’t yet implemented her suggestion—to see a therapist. And she had talked her mother out from under her father’s thumb, persuading her to “visit” them for an unspecified time, no hurry to return east, and they fully expected, indeed hoped, that she would spend her remaining years with them. Now that they had settled in Grass Valley, now that Frank’s Sacramento responsibilities had concluded and he’d linked up with Meg Kornfeld and Tommy Natale in a more relaxed, almost countrified law firm, Karin had begun to circulate, to find friends, to cultivate them almost as assiduously as she had her plants.
As for Frank himself, something—maybe helping Karin triumph over Danny, maybe his brush with death, maybe just vacating the Rocklin house—had healed the split he’d felt between his professional and personal lives. Where it was called for, there was still plenty of room for legitimate uncertainty in his life, but in matters crucial to his and his family’s well-being, he found himself iron-willed and decisive.
“Cider okay?” he asked her.
“Couldn’t be better.” She set it down on the ledge, her breasts wet and lovely as she twisted about. Her hand dipped below water, found his hardness.
There was a distant whistle in the sky, then a burst of gold stars, blue stars, red stars, followed by a white puff of smoke and a sonic boom that reached in and fisted his viscera tight and good.
“The fireworks are starting,” said Karin.
He laughed. “It sure feels that way.”
***
Karin took her husband’s glass and set it down next to the rose, then found and fondled him again beneath the incessant suds of the spa, nibbling on his ear. His warm wet hand found her left breast, thumb circling lovingly at her nipple. “I love you, Frank,” she said.
“I love you too, Karin,” he soothed, and it thrilled her ears like thick rich golden sunlight. To think she’d been on the verge of losing him, of never having lived the continual unfolding of new love, each glimpse of him, each shared experience adding new natural dimension to what had already grown precious between them.
Up in the sky, a corkscrew of orange sparks wowed and wippled, hotly pursued by a faster red upstart running the same evanescent track. They met high up, spraying diamond streamers in all directions, a pretense of breeze rippling their fanciful folds.
“That feels so incredibly good,” Frank said.
“I’m glad it does,” she said. The Fresh Pink sat on the silver tray next to her husband’s half-full champagne glass. It had been difficult to bring roses into her new backyard garden, but she’d been determined to knock down that barrier too. The Rocklin house had gone to another green thumb, though she’d warned Pat Sandoval that some of the more outrageously off-season or out-of-locale flowers were unlikely to survive. Here she had, by design, about half the garden and many fewer houseplants, but what she had she loved no less than before. The roses had been a welcome addition, a missing puzzle piece found and fitted into its proper place. They had even joined the rotation of blooms that perfumed their master bedroom.
After the media flurry had passed—all offers to spin off a book or to talk to Larry, Oprah, or Phil having been politely but persistently rejected—together she and Frank had decided she needed to cultivate her talent. They had suppressed, in relating the events of that week, all that they knew, or could piece together, about Karin’s role in Danny’s revival, feigning bewilderment as to how such an out-and-out impossibility could have come about. So when Karin had called the hospital, there had been no churning in the media waters, no laying-on-of-hands exposes in the offing to give the hospital administrators pause. They’d accepted her as a volunteer, with understandable caution, but as patients brightened, and minor—and not so minor—miracles occurred on her watch, Karin bloomed and grew in their esteem, came out of herself, felt as if she’d lived most of her life in a vacuum-packed jar but that now the lid had flown off and the glass had shattered outward and been swept away.
“You’re making me see stars,” Frank joked, one hand at her back, the other leaving her breast to move lower.
“Wait.” She glanced at the rose, then at him.
“I wondered why you wanted the thorns removed. You don’t, by any chance, have some kinky sex act in mind?”
“As if you’d object!” She was suddenly nervous. “I think you’re going to like this. And I really need it to happen, Frank. Call it unfinished business.”
“No problem,” he said, “if it feels good—if it makes you feel good—I’ll do it.”
He made her laugh, relieved the tension. The sky lit up like a flashbulb. Blinding white light sizzled outward in all directions like painted clown tears, then vanished. Letting Frank go with a gentle squeeze, Karin moved around to face him, then let her arms curve around the rim of the spa and lifted her dripping legs out of the water so that they rested on his shoulders. She floated there, feeling the bubbles moving like benign fairies along her back and buttocks. When Frank made as if to lower his lips to her, she said, “Use the rose. Stroke me with it.”
It came out low, maybe even sexy in Frank’s ears, but she was full of anxiety. It reminded her too much of that night long ago, the horror she’d remembered and lived over and over for more than twenty years. Surprising how easy it had been to confront her father, to make him confess to abusing her, and to coax a tentative and finally a tearful apology from him. But this last demon had his claws sunk deep inside her and only Frank’s love could help her send him packing.
“With pleasure,” he said, lifting the miniature rose from its vase. She saw it come near, its furls illumined by the light show in the sky. It reminded her absurdly of the heated coils of a car’s cigarette lighter. It was her father’s branding iron, closing in to sear her most secret part, the male hand, all male hands bringing it nearer, to steal pleasure from her, to give her only pain—but this hand was different, no threat, no sacrilege. Soft petals touched her and she gave a small cry. The childhood room vanished, the blood, her mother’s cowardice, her father at the bedroom door—and there was just her and Frank in the partially screened spa, just the two of them and the fire in the sky and the stroke of the rose, the tender rose, a Granny Eva rose in the hand of the man who loved her and was now, as always, intent on showing it.
An upspray of sapphire stars was overlapped by one of rubies and it in turn by one of emeralds. Then more and more overlaps, coming faster and faster, raising audible applause from the distant crowd and seeming to draw Karin closer and closer to climax. Then the upsprays stopped, the sky hung fire for an instant, and suddenly a flower etched itself on the blackness, stitched in brilliant red that expanded and grew a collar of green, becoming more clearly defined with each passing moment—a rose, no time to decide which one, it was the best rose that ever was, and Karin screamed out her bliss and ascended into it and then claimed the night that, having given it to her, now superseded it.
“Oh, Frank.” She gasped and then laughed. “I love you so much.” And then she lowered herself back into the water, splashing into his arms and kneeling herself o
pen down around him, feeling his goodness ease inside of her, intent on making him see what she had just seen, wanting to show him, to show him all there was to see.
ROBERT DEVEREAUX made his professional debut in Pulphouse Magazine in the late 1980’s, attended the 1990 Clarion West Writers Workshop, and soon placed stories in such major venues as Crank!, Weird Tales, and Dennis Etchison’s anthology MetaHorror. Two of his stories made the final ballot for the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards.
His novels include Slaughterhouse High, A Flight of Storks and Angels, Deadweight, Walking Wounded, Caliban, Santa Steps Out, and Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes. Also not to be missed is his new short story collection with Deadite Press, Baby’s First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit.
Robert has a well-deserved reputation as an author who pushes every envelope, though he would claim, with a stage actor’s assurance, that as long as one’s writing illuminates characters in all their kinks, quirks, kindnesses, and extremes, the imagination must be free to explore nasty places as well as nice, or what’s the point?
Robert lives in sunny northern Colorado with the delightful Victoria, making up stuff that tickles his fancy and, he hopes, that of his readers.
You can find him online at Facebook or at www.robertdevereaux.com.
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