by Brian Hodge
Hours passed him by, and he was startled, at last, by the lack of light as the sun’s ray’s faded and he was forced to blink, squint, and then turn on the light above his desk.
Throughout this, the moth sat quietly, as if posing. At some point he’d opened the case again, and he’d never closed it. There wasn’t much danger while he was present. If it were to rise into flight, he could merely follow, wait until it lit, and carry it gently back. He told himself all of this, and yet he sensed it was pointless. There was no agitation in the gentle motion of its wings, no desire to flee, or to be free.
As he had the previous evening, Jeffrey worked until his head slid down to rest on his arms. His hand moved the pen one last time, a sliding, jagged line across the page as he passed into darkness. In its case, the moth sat still, wings flapping slowly.
She woke him with a kiss. He was groggy, uncertain, but she pulled him from his chair, drew him against her and held him tightly, insinuating her desire into his thoughts before he could clear them. He fought the sensations that were claiming him weakly. He wanted to talk to her, to ask who she was, where she had gone. He wanted to know her name.
He made love to her instead, and she shuddered in his arms, wrapping him in long, slender legs and sliding herself softly over him, her tongue long and fluttering, teasing his flesh, bringing him again and again to the edge and toppling him over. He was weakened from lack of food, from too-long hours in front of the spiral notebooks, from too many thoughts of her and too many questions.
She drew every ounce of what he had to offer from his weary frame, drew more, and then left him to darkness again. When he woke in the late hours of the morning, too late, even, to call his excuses in to work, he was alone. The case was open on his desk, the golden wings flapping slowly — hypnotically — over the small branch. It seemed, almost, as if he were being mocked. The task was laid out before him — his future. His mind was a fog of images and memories, desires and questions. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, and he’d had nothing but coffee since the previous morning. He made his way to the kitchen, set the pot to brew, and returned to his desk.
When the coffee was ready, he poured his first cup, and he stared at it. On a whim, he grabbed the sugar and poured a generous helping into the cup. He normally drank his coffee black, but the memory of her kiss reminded him of sugar and it made her seem closer. Whoever she was. He took the coffee to his desk and settled in for another day. There were a few angles he’d meant to check, cross-referencing mixed strains, searching for discrepancies in patterns of yellows, browns and gold that might explain, might deny his theory of new-species. It took longer than usual, but the magic of the hunt drew him in slowly, and he lost himself in his work once more. Lunch was never a consideration.
The phone rang about 4:30 in the afternoon. It had been ringing for a while, six, seven rings? More? He fumbled the receiver from its cradle and mumbled an answer.
“Jeffrey?”
The voice at the other end of the line — Matt? Concerned, urgent.
“Yes?” he managed, knowing it was inadequate but hardly able to make himself care.
“My God, man, where are you?” Matt erupted. “I’ve been trying to call you for nearly three hours. I must’ve let it ring two dozen times before you picked up. You never called in. Your classes were in an uproar, not to mention Dean Rosenman...”
With a great effort, Jeffrey sorted his thoughts and answered. “Give my apologies to the Dean,” he said slowly. “I’m onto something big, Matt, something important. I’m afraid I’m a bit distracted.”
“Distracted? You miss school, don’t call in, don’t answer your phone, and you tell me you’re distracted?
“Yes. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ll explain when I’m finished, Matt, but tell them I won’t be in tomorrow morning, and maybe not this week. I’m not certain how long this will take me.”
There was a momentary silence, and then Matt replied. “I don’t know what’s up with you, Jeffy-boy, but I’ll tell you this. You don’t come in until next week, you’d better bring Rosenman a golden egg, the formula to transmute lead to gold, or your resignation.”
“Fine,” Jeffrey answered, dropping the receiver back onto its cradle and rubbing his eyes. He thought briefly about the conversation. What had Matt said about the phone, two dozen rings? No way. The question slipped from his thoughts and he drifted back toward the desk. Time had been lost. He turned to the kitchen doorway again, hurried in and started another pot of coffee.
His stomach ached, but he ignored it. He didn’t have much food in the house, anyway, and no way was he going out now; not so close to the time she’d been arriving. Not so close to proving his theories, though he suddenly wondered why it seemed so important that he do so. If she came to him, nothing else mattered. He filled his cup and returned to his desk.
There was so much to do, so many details to be catalogued. He sat, sipped the hot coffee and admired the play of her wings against the backdrop of leaves and twigs that lined the case. He absently drew out another spiral notebook, this one blank, and began to write.
He did not inscribe color patterns, or measure the wingspan, nor did he examine the thorax for markings, or the antennae for function or form. He wrote to her. She might come, she might not. Jeffrey sat and wrote. Years sloughed away. Deborah returned to haunt him, and yet the memory was bittersweet, faded and weak. Deborah had taught him the dark side of love; he was just beginning to suspect the light. If only he were granted the time. If only he were able to let her know how he felt.
If his suspicions proved true, then it would make no difference to her what he wrote. It would make no difference to anyone in a sane world, but it helped him to put things in perspective, warped as it might be, and it helped to calm his nerves. Nerves that coffee, lack of food, and her image were beginning to fray and tweak in a manner that was more disturbing than the possibility that she might read what he wrote.
“I feel your touch,” he inscribed, “though you are not here, not in any physical manner. I can sense your presence, your emotion.”
It was true. There was a heaviness hovering near him, and warmth. Though the windows were closed, he thought perhaps he felt a breeze, and that he had caught the scent of some wonderful flower, though his jumbled senses couldn’t put a name to the fragrance.
“You fill my thoughts. I want to know you, your name, your past and future. I want to know your name.”
It tugged at him, this intimacy that was denied. His phone rang again, but he just stared at it. After a few moments, he reached out purposefully and disconnected the line coming from the wall. The phone sat, silent and dead, and he returned to his journal. It drew him in and held him. It held him until darkness claimed him, and his last thought, his last scrawl before his weakened fingers lost control of the pen, was, “She hasn’t come.”
And yet when next he thought clearly it was to put a name to the scent that had pervaded his apartment, to the touch of that warmth that had hovered so near, to her breath on his neck. Sighing, he lifted his head from the desk and leaned back against her. She pillowed his head against the silky softness of her breasts and held him closely.
He tried to speak, but his throat was dry and scratchy, and he couldn’t quite get the words to come. It didn’t matter. She brought him a glass of water and he turned slightly to watch her move, to watch the sinuous grace of her long legs, the swing of slender, shapely hips. Her hair slid over her shoulders and down across her breasts like a cascade of spun gold.
She held the glass gently to his lips, and he sipped, and then gulped, draining the glass greedily. The water seethed like acid in the emptiness of his stomach. Hunger ate at his insides, but he had no time or concentration to spare it. She set the glass aside and poured herself into his lap, pressing against him, sliding her tongue between his now damp lips.
This time she nearly carried him to the bed. Her eyes drank in the sight of him, as though she could never get enough, or she was et
ching every detail of him into her memory. This last frightened him. What if she was going to leave? What if she was taking a last, fond look, and would disappear, just as she had appeared, leaving him with nothing but the mystery of her existence, and his question.
“What is your name?”
He managed the words, pushing them feebly past the desire that was flooding him, prodding them between the pulsing beats of his heart as the blood rushed through his veins, slave to his passion as he was to hers.
She only shook her head.
“No, I must know … who — who are you?”
She slid over him like a wave of honey and his mind blanked. He couldn’t focus on the question, couldn’t be certain if she’d answered or not. Couldn’t remember, even, if it mattered. It was an obsession. Naming, categorizing, all of his life he’d been doing it. Collecting. His world was a museum of collected beauty and until she’d come, it had been as dry and frail as the wings of one of his mounted specimens, ready to crumble and fall to dust at the slightest provocation.
She took what he could offer, never protesting his weakened efforts, not complaining, but molding herself to his need, arranging their more subdued motions to the best advantage, urging him to completion and then beginning again with infinite patience. His mind disintegrated into darkness.
When he woke, of course, he was alone. He thought of coffee. He wondered what her name was. He couldn’t rise. He could almost smell the coffee, could definitely smell her, but he had no strength left at all, and what little he possessed, he would save for her. If she came again. Maybe she would tell him her name.
He dozed fitfully. About noon, as close as he could estimate it, there was an insistent knocking at his door. He didn’t answer. The pounding continued for quite some time, but then it ceased, and he was returned to his solitude, her scent, and his questions. They lured him once more into darkness, and he dreamed.
In his dreams, she came to him as he stood in a flowering field. Her hair danced around her in the breeze, and she wore a gown of gossamer that floated up like wings. She danced nearer, and he saw that her feet did not touch the ground, and the gown fluttered slowly, transformed until it was not a gown at all, and she hovered just out of reach, wings beating gently and wafting her scent to him.
When he woke, she was there, but he couldn’t even raise his head. Somewhere buried within the bliss that was the moment, a voice screamed at him. He ignored it. What was his was hers. He gave it freely. He felt her sliding down his torso, felt his body’s impossible response, shuddered, and nearly passed out from the effort. Only the urgency of her touch held him. Devoured him.
When the shadows claimed him at last, he felt light, like a third sheet on the bed, a feather tossed in a gentle breeze. He drifted off. Letters mixed themselves in patches before his dreaming eyes, forming for short moments into words, into her name, and then jumbling before he could grasp their pattern. They turned into a swarm of insects, drifting away, and he slipped free, let loose of himself, and followed. All he wanted was her name.
They battered down the door two days later. Matt dashed through, despite the warning of the Police Officer who’d come with him to wait. He took in the room, the soiled coffee cups on the desk, the open case, the journals askew on the writing surface, the pen still lying across the paper where Jeffrey’s dazed fingers had left it. But where was Jeffrey?
Matt stormed through the doorway to the bedroom and stopped. He didn’t speak, but the Officer heard the strangled gasp of his indrawn breath and pushed past him. Then he, too stopped.
The thin, wasted thing on the bed resembled a skeleton more than a man. Skin lay in dry folds, like paper, across his bones. His arms lay at his side, what had been arms, and his mouth seemed, even in hideous transformation, to be twisted into the memory of a smile. Both men backed from the room, gagging. No words were spoken. The officer went straight to the phone. He saw the cord lying impotently on the floor and re-connected it.
Matt reeled about the room in search of his sanity. He found himself at the desk, staring down into the case that lay open there.
The moth was beautiful. It had long, graceful wings and intricate patterns in varied shades of gold played across the wings. He turned to the journals. The last few pages were an incoherent scrawl of love notes and scribbled questions. Written to a woman.
Deborah? Had Jeffrey finally gone over the edge in his loss? It didn’t seem like him, but nothing was out of the question in the face of what he’d just witnessed.
Matt moved backward through the notes, and he found the coding, the listing and research. A new species. That was it, then. Somehow his friend had been caught up in this research, and something had triggered, whatever that was in the other room. It made Matt’s stomach turn to believe that Deborah might have caused it, thin, bitchy, claw-up-the-ladder Deborah who had used Jeffrey and tossed him aside as Matt watched helplessly. She had to be the one, but it made no sense.
Matt gathered the notes together. When the police were done with them, he decided, he’d finish his friend’s work. It was the least he could do.
A question from the journal kept recurring in his mind, and he found himself staring more closely at the moth. The proboscis was jutting almost obscenely from the graceful curve of its body. Female, then, and about to lay eggs. An interesting turn.
“What is your name?”
He found himself asking the question out loud, though until that second he hadn’t been aware he’d been thinking it.
“Pretty,” the officer said, glancing over Matt’s shoulder and into the case.
Matt nodded. His mind whirled, too much input all at once, too many things to be sorted out.
“Officer,” he said at last, “this is a rare moth, very delicate, and the work my friend — colleague — was involved in is very important. I know there will be an investigation, but, do you suppose I could take it — and possibly the notes — back to the university? It would be a shame if it died and his last days were spent in vain.”
“Not up to me,” the officer replied, “but once the Detectives get here, I’ll put in a word for you. Sure is a pretty thing.”
The man was talking slowly, as though he were searching for something, anything, to focus his thoughts and bring him back to the world he’d walked out of and into the bedroom at their back. Though neither of them faced the doorway, they felt the presence of the thing on the bed, the thing that only days earlier had walked, written in the journals on the desk, and talked to Matt on the phone. It seemed like forever as they waited in silence, watching the moth’s wings flap slowly, each lost in their own world.
Matt put the case on the corner of his desk, much as Jeffrey had left it on his own, and sat back heavily. It had taken a lot of effort, a lot of bullshitting and pleading, and a call to Dean Rosenman, who had pulled a couple of bureaucratic strings, but he had her. He also had a week off, in the face of the job ahead of him, and the loss of his friend. He planned on doing something to clear his mind, and the only thing that had ever been successful at this was work.
The notebooks were in surprisingly coherent order, up until near the end. He put aside the last notebook altogether and took up where Jeffrey had left off in his study. One thing was certain, with the egg sack now hanging from the side of one of the large leaves he’d added to the cage, the gender of the specimen was no longer in question.
They’ll be like Jeffrey’s Children, he thought suddenly. He shook his head with a nervous laugh and returned to the pile of books he’d brought home from the library. No time for nonsense.
He poured over the journals and the cross-references that Jeffrey had plotted but not yet pursued for the entire morning, skipping lunch, and it was nearly seven PM when he finally set his pencil aside and snapped the book closed. He thought about eating, but he was suddenly so drowsy. What was that smell? Perfume? He let his face rest on his hands — ‘just for a moment’ — and it was hours later when he woke.
He noticed her
long, slender fingers first. They were on the desk before him, and he let his gaze swivel up quickly, taking her in slowly. He knew he must still be asleep, but at the same time the sensations of his creaking, stiffened limbs arranging themselves and the stiffness in his pants made two truths painfully obvious. He was not alone, and she was beautiful.
He moved slowly, aware that people didn’t break into your house to pass the time of day, but something kept him calm.
“Who are you?” he asked?
She arched one golden eyebrow, a motion that sent her hair cascading over her right shoulder and down over her breasts, naked breasts, he realized with shock.
“I …” she spoke very hesitantly, as if trying out her tongue for the first time, “I am Deborah.”
“What a lovely name,” he said stupidly, watching as she rose, advancing on him slowly with her arms open wide. As the musky scent of her enfolded him and the dust spread from her skin to his, he heard a long, slow scream inside. She teased him away from it, and he couldn’t catch the words, couldn’t remember why he’d want to. All he made out before she parted his lips with her tongue and she took his mind completely, was a single word, ‘Jeffrey,’ spiraling down and away, growing more silent with each spinning pass.
In the case on the desk, as if in answer, a small shiver raced across the surface of the egg-sack. Then all was still.
The Death-Sweet Scent of Lilies
The sound of dripping blood was hypnotic, drawing him away from the reality of the moment and into the recesses of his mind – of his memory. The stakes surrounded him like a small forest, their grisly cargos twisting and turning slowly downward as the sharpened tips worked their way through flesh and around bone with the help of gravity. The dying sun drew eerie shadows that trailed away from the corpses and drained into the growing night.