by Bruce Jones
Her mouth was warm. He felt her tongue immediately.
He closed his eyes and saw two children standing behind the school under long evening shadows, young faces pressed together, hearts racing, knees quaking.
The woman dug nails into his arm, pulling him down onto the picnic blanket, the perfume of the dandelions.
You promised, the little girl said. You promised you’d show me if I let you kiss me. The boy, back pressed uncomfortably to the rough brick wall of the school, craned anxiously in both directions for trespassers.
The woman bit his cheek, breathed heavily in his ear, ran a shaking hand up his leg, searching, touching…
I’m scared somebody will see, the boy said. The little girl giggled. I’ll do it. She tugged at the zipper of his jeans. The sound of it opening was so raggedly loud it made him jump. He caught her hand. Somebody will see us! he protested. She frowned. You better let me do it if you ever want to kiss me again!
The woman found his belt, fumbled at it, pulled at his trousers, slid them down.
The girl stood wide-eyed behind the school. Gazing hypnotized down at the boy. Oh…she said.
The woman caressed him eagerly. “John…John, please…” “Your daughter,” he began. “It’s all right,” she said. “She won’t come back till I call her. John, please!”
Please, the boy said, back rigid against the wall. Please. Wanting her to stop, wanting her to never stop. The girl’s eyes sparkled in the setting sun, watching fascinated at the change coming over him. John, she whispered, clutching him in her warm little hand, John kiss me again…now!
* * *
He lay on the blanket beside her, staring up at the volley of slowly rolling clouds. She was straightening her skirt with sharp, deliberate pats, her breath still labored. “Well!” she confessed.
He hardly heard her. I’ve come full circle, he thought. I’ve stumbled and groped through twenty years of misery and failure to find my way back here, to this meadow, this girl.
It all seemed so simple now. He’s divorce Jean, of course, move back here to Louisiana and live with Mary Ellen and the child. And he could change jobs! Teach! Teach elementary school, maybe right here, right inside the old red brick building! He’d always secretly wanted that—Jean, of course, reminding him he was better than that, the pay better in higher corporate employment.
He smiled, closing his eyes to the warm sun. The nightmare was over. He’d awakened for the last time.
He turned to her, watched her lovely profile, the spill of still golden hair. “I love you, Mary Ellen,” he said.
She smiled. Kissed the air at him. “You’re sweet. Sweet little John.”
“Let’s get married! This week! I mean it!”
She laughed her wonderful laugh. “Sure!”
“I’ll contact my lawyer and have him start work on the divorce. He’s a smart guy! We’ll never even have to see her again!”
She turned to him, bent, gave his forehead a loving peck.
“Is this week too soon? Am I rushing you, sweetheart?”
She sat back, grinning, blue eyes sparkling. Then the grin faded slowly. “You’re serious.”
“Of course!” He grabbed her hand, started to pull her up. “C’mon!”
“John…”
“We’ll drive into town, get a blood test--”
“John, I am married.”
“You…”
He stared at her at moment, waiting for the joke. Waiting for his mind to catch up. “But, you said—“
“I remarried two years ago. I’m Mrs. Kenneth Watkins now.”
He became aware his mouth was hanging open, closed it. “Watkins?”
“Yes. John, I’m sorry, I thought you understood.” She brightened. “Say! You remember Kenny, don’t you? From school?”
“Kenny Watkins.”
“I don’t know what Mary Ellen and I would have done without Ken. She needed a father, and I…well…”
“NO!” He sat up quickly, spilling coffee, a man stricken. “NO!”
She gaped up at him. “John…” reached out for him...
“Don’t touch me!” He sprang to his feet, skittered away from her as if dancing.
“John! Your face…”
“Faithless!” he screamed at her. “Faithless!”
The woman drew back in horror.
He stood there before her, shaking violently now, face twisted in agony. Then he spun and ran. He ran across the hills of gold away from the woman on the picnic blanket, tears filling his eyes until the world became a yellow blur and he hardly saw where he was running. He ran until his legs ached and his breath came in sobs and still he ran…he would never stop, didn’t need to, he was the best runner in school, even without his sneakers on.
At first he didn’t know where he was going, what he was going to do; all he could think of was getting away, getting away--running until his soles wore thin and he reached the end of the world. Then it came to him. There was only one place left to go. Only one place in the whole world he could still run to.
He stopped, panting, and regarded the hollow, gazed expectantly into its warm, black depths. The hollow. His old friend. His only friend.
He plunged fearlessly in.
Into another world.
He ran among the brambles and creepers under the canopy of shadowing trees and felt a stirring deep within him, a long dormant awareness rising darkly from the moss tangled loam into his flying feet, his legs, his body. And with it, growing more and more acute, the feeling that at last he really belonged, that here in the friendly darkness, he’d found home.
Home.
Yes, it was all so clear now. He would never fear or want for anything again, as long as he stayed here. Here he was welcome. Here he would live, safe, secure, independent of anyone or anything. Protected. He laughed out loud and the sound of it rang through the endless caverns of twisted trees, echoing back to him until the entire hollow laughed with him, until he was the hollow. It was so good to be home.
In time, of course, he would have needs, grow hungry. But that was no problem. He need only wait patiently in the thicket at the edge of the meadow near the schoolhouse.
Wait quietly in the brush until the bell rang and the laughing children came out to play…
“Here sighs, plaints, and deep wailings resounded through the starless air: it made me weep at first. Strange tongues, horrible outcries, words of pain, tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse, and sounds of hands amongst them, made a tumult, which turns itself unceasingly in that air for ever dyed, as sand when it eddies in a whirlwind.”
That was Dante. Specifically, The Inferno (Canto III, 22-31)
Here is Roger Zelazny in his foreward to Harlan Ellison’s From the Land of Fear, Belmont Books, 1967:
“What does it take to be a writer and why? The quotation from Dante…contains the answer. There are these sounds, this tumult, turning in that air for ever dyed, eddying in a neat simile and beginning with that all important word “Here.” Everybody hears the sounds, some people listen, and a writer, for some damfool reason, wants to put them down on paper and talk about them—here, right now. So that’s the answer to the question: “Some damfool reason.” It’s why Dante wrote too. My damfool thing, the thing inside me that makes me say what I have to say, is a thing that I don’t understand at all, and sometimes I curse because it keeps me awake at night…”
Now here is Bruce Jones, writing a foreward to his own short story and proving what it really takes to be a writer: the ability to steal from two other far better ones and create, essentially, three different introductions. More for your money! I was a naïve kid when first reading Harlan’s book of short stories. Him making a ton of dough out in La-La land writing for TV, me sitting on my Fort Leonard Wood barracks bunk with his paperback making 75 cents a day-- wondering if my platoon was next in line to be shipped to Viet Nam. Not having yet sold my first short story. Not having yet even braved the wailings and tumult of New York publishing. Not h
aving yet met Harlan, let alone called him friend. And certainly, in my wildest dreams, not having the least inkling of something to be dubbed The Internet, an invention as wondrous strange as Dante’s Pit, which would soon threaten the printed page as avidly as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451’s book police-- allowing me to reformat, somewhat rewrite and pass along to thee the kind of personal bit of morbid mayhem like:
Trisha was killing her mother again—this time in the farmhouse kitchen with the old broken-handled steak knife—and in a little while killing her sister Dolce, who grunted like a pig when stabbed and bled liberally and long.
Then, free of them, free of the knife, free as the wind lashing her tawny locks, Trisha came running…came galloping fierce and proud, heedless and grinning over the rolling meadow, Shep nipping and barking delight at her bare heels—the fair-skinned girl and with the banner of summer hair and the bounding, yelping German shepherd, alive and free and safe at last among fields and more endless fields, undulant and sweetly perfumed with earth and grass.
Until the warm breeze shifted sour, grinning Mojo abruptly materialized, gold tooth contrasting midnight skin glistening now with the sweat of hate, rough, callused hand shocking sharp across her tender face, starting blood at her lip…and Shep—brave Shep, try as he might—could not sink eager teeth into skinny black legs which kept disappearing, winking in and out, which meant they weren’t real at all and neither was Shep, long dead now like this half-forgotten meadow…and this was now not then, and Mojo was her pimp and she, Trisha, was a hooker and these peeling walls could never be the lovely golden meadows… as she came up and up and finally out of the dream…to the dreary little room and the man asleep beside her.
Amazing, she thought, yawning.
--not that she had dreamed of killing--that was old hat--but amazing she had fallen asleep here on the job next to her john. They did that sometimes—the johns—passed out and snored blissfully if she gave them an extra good ride, especially the fat ones, the smelly ones, though this one had been neither. This one had been quiet and gentle and strangely tender. Even nice-looking in his dark way.
Which is why Trisha was so startled there on the tired hotel sheets, turning in brassy afternoon sun to find what her john had become…to find the far darker, more terrifying form that had replaced him while she slept.
Not a man at all, this misshapen shadow that shared her bed, but a thing of black hair, cruel pointed muzzle, pink lolling tongue guarding bone-white incisors as deadly sharp and long—longer really—than Shep’s. So that for a moment Trisha actually thought the dream was real and it was her long dead pet there beside her on the pillow, Shep come to comfort and sleep with her while Momma was busy with the men.
But no. This creature was far bigger, far more terrifying than anything canine, or strictly human either—a savagely insane juncture of the two, a great, dark sleeping beast from childhood nightmare, midnight matinees, but all too real, all too here and close, its hot breath against her bare arm, its great shaggy head so near she could see the corona of coarse hairs along the sleek, swept-back ears.
The eyes, mercifully, were closed; had they been open, red (she was sure they must be red) and full of blood lust, Trisha Kincaid would doubtless be a dead whore, not a recently dreaming one.
Carefully then, not breathing, moving in a slow-motion haze of terror, she pushed herself up gently, hitching breath as the ancient bed sagged creaking resentment, lowered her legs over the edge of the mattress, found the cold floor, turned to see if the thing had awakened, was watching. It was not. Though now, at this angle, she could glimpse more of it in the dying ochre light—the broad matted chest, massive arms, muscular sweep of thigh, placid but fearsome phallus. This too was swathed in hair, as were the testes, fat and shiny as a seed bull’s. It was the power there, between the thing’s legs, that was perhaps the most fearfully awesome of all.
Heart and knees knocking, Trisha just made it to the formless lump of her skirt and blouse, just made it to the old cut glass doorknob, twisting it carefully, silently… the voice behind her spinning her about, gasping.
“You’re leaving?”
Her back against the door, throat constricted, heart slamming painful ripples, Trisha faced not the terrible dark beast, but the pale naked man of before. Only his eyes and the hair of his head were dark now, as a sad wistful smile tugged tender, remembered lips. He caught her look, returned a knowing one of his own, and nodded, sadder still. “You saw…”
Trisha, rigid against the weathered door, could only nod terror.
He came to her, tall and looming but reproachful only to himself. “I’m sorry. It happens sometimes, when I sleep.” An old accent, slightly English? Gentlemanly anyway. Which was shock enough for Trisha. “You’ve nothing to fear from me,” he told her gently. “I am sorry, truly.”
And twice amazed this day, Trisha found herself wholly unafraid…so much so she wondered absently if it was the creature itself she had truly feared, or something else. “You won’t…kill me?”
His smile was as disarming as his winsome, weary expression. “Never. Never in daylight.” Young eyes hollow, haunted by dark memories, perhaps decades of them.
Trisha, marveling, dropped her own eyes to find further changes. The naked man stepped back, his smile rueful now, regretful? “Yes…that goes back to normal too. All of me back to quite ordinary and normal.” He looked up again. “Will you keep my secret?”
Trisha, her mind on other things, slipped thoughtfully into her Wal-Mart blouse, all trembling gone now. “Have you ever…while you’re that way, I mean?”
This made him assess her with new eyes, searching eyes. “No. That would bring death. I change to feed, not for love.”
Then he turned, showing her his pale buttocks, and retreated to the bed, to his own clothes. Retrieving the little automatic she’d thought she’d hidden so well beneath her pillow, he placed it to his own chest, smiled into her eyes, and fired—the slug knocking him back violently but not penetrating, falling flattened as a dime to the threadbare rug. “I can’t be harmed in the normal way, you see.” He smiled that sad, nearly defenseless smile again, then asked reflectively: “Will you betray me, Trisha?”
A sudden pounding at the door—anxious, muffled cries.
The tall figure strode past her to the ancient knob, twisted it.
A beefy red face peered through the crack anxiously: Pudler, the bouncer. “Everything all right in there? Heard a shot!”
“Yes,” the tall man offered easily, “we were wondering about that too. Perhaps down the hall…”
The beefy face glanced once Trisha’s way, then retreated, mumbling.
The tall figure closed the door, turned back to Trisha, smiled again softly.
“How did you know my name?” she whispered, heart thumping again.
“Will you betray me?”
She turned from him, came back to the bed, ran a hand absently across the still warm sheets, head cocked in reflection. “Will I see you again?”
Which made his smile falter curiously. “Whatever for?”
* * *
At home—a refurbished Ninth Street penthouse—Mojo slapped her hard for falling asleep on the job—diamond ring cutting her cheek--slapped her again for forgetting his money. Took her silver automatic, Trisha on her knees, stuck it in her pretty mouth and made her suck, suck hard until she’d summoned the weapon’s load, the slug crashing through the back of her skull…except Mojo, laughing and gold-toothed, jerked free before this last, making her only imagine it, warning that the next whore in his stable who showed without money was a dead whore. He and Angela (Mojo’s current pump, a pretty Mex who had recently usurped Trisha in that dubious honor) both getting a good long laugh from this.
Trisha killed her mother again that morning, threw her off a cliff—forgot about killing sister Dolce and ran once more wild and free with Shep, yellow grass whipping her ankles.
That night, having made up her mind, she hit the streets searchin
g. It took her most of the evening but she finally found his big dark car, sauntered over and leaned down to the window. “Hello again. You forgot to pay me.”
“Yes, I’ve been looking for you. Here…” The tall man paid her double her usual, triple on account of her warm smile.
All of which Trisha returned to him, then stayed his hand before he could pull from the curb. “What’s your name?”
“Franklyn.”
“That’s a nice name. Old fashioned. I’m Trisha. Not old fashion at all.”
They shook hands.
“Franklyn, I have a…well, proposition. Will you be in town for a while?”
“I rather tend to keep moving, Trisha.”