Husk

by Dave Zeltserman

  I was careful as I emerged from the alley, making sure there were no cars driving by or people walking on the sidewalk. I moved as swiftly as I could in the shadows and crossed a number of streets, looking for the darkest ones to travel down. It wasn’t until I had gone six blocks that I spotted anyone outside, and it seemed likely no one even noticed me. I waited until I had put several miles between myself and the restaurant before hiding the bag of bloody clothes in a dumpster behind another restaurant, making sure the bag was buried in food scraps.

  Using the pale light of a street lamp, I consulted my map to find a subway station connecting Brooklyn with Queens, as I didn’t want to use one anywhere near the restaurant where my savagery’d occurred. As I walked, I pieced together what I could about what had happened and realized why the cravings had gripped me so thoroughly after only one week, while my clan had gone three weeks before being driven to the same blind madness. It was because I’d been living among them, and that had proved too much of a temptation for the cravings. In my mind I could picture those worms being worked up to a wild frenzy, with the scent of so many of them close by and at the same time being starved. As disgusted as I was over the savagery I’d resorted to, I kept thinking about how much easier it would be to live among them knowing that their blood satisfied the cravings. I knew that if I needed to abduct some of them and perform the slaughtering ritual, more likely than not I’d be discovered by the police, even if I was able to find a private place in their city for the slaughtering ritual and meat preparation. The savagery I committed earlier was something very different. That could be done quickly and in countless number of places. And I might not have to kill them. I might not even have to break any of their laws.

  The book I read after Frankenstein was Dracula. When I saw that book buried among the others on Jill’s shelves, I felt my heart race and quickly grabbed it. During my first year of picking them up for the clan, I found a paperback copy of that book among the possessions of those I had collected. When one of the elders learned that I had added Dracula to the clan’s library, he was furious with me and had the book burned. He also warned me that if I ever brought a copy of Dracula back to the clan again, all the books in our library would be burned and reading made taboo. This surprised me, as I didn’t think the elders or anyone else in the clan had any interest in or knowledge of the books in our library, since I was the only one reading them. But he knew enough about Dracula to make it a forbidden book, which was why I had to read it once I spotted it. And this was why I knew about vampires.

  Of course, I knew they were make-believe, but I had made it a habit when riding the subway between Queens and Brooklyn to read the free newspaper distributed at Chris’s restaurant, and in the back pages I’d recently seen an advertisement announcing that a woman was looking for someone to be her vampire and drink her blood. At the time I considered it an absurd joke, like many of the advertisements in those back pages, but perhaps it wasn’t. Maybe she really was looking for someone to pretend to be a vampire and drink some of her blood. And maybe there were others like her in New York. As repellent as I found such an act of savagery, if I could make a deal with those people so I could keep the cravings satisfied and be able to live safely with Jill, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was after four in the morning when I got back to Jill’s apartment. Her bedroom door was closed, and I listened with my ear pressed against it for the sound of her breathing but couldn’t hear anything other than the hum of something electric. Even though her pleasant scent permeated her apartment, I reckoned it would’ve been stronger if she was home. I didn’t open her door so I could be sure, but I was fairly certain she hadn’t returned yet.

  I changed out of Sergei’s clothing and into my own, then slipped back outside so that I could dispose of his clothing someplace miles away. It was an hour later before I came back to Jill’s apartment. Once again I sensed that it was empty.

  Maybe it was because of how quiet and content the cravings had become, but I fell into a deep sleep seconds after lying down on the couch even though early morning light was brightening the room, and I stayed in that same deep sleep until the sound of her apartment door opening woke me.

  I lifted my head, blinking groggily, and watched as Jill and her friend Brittany stepped out of the hallway and into the living room. My blood chilled when I saw that Jill’s shoulder and arm were bandaged.

  I was quickly off the couch, and my voice was barely a croak as I asked, ‘Are you hurt?’

  Jill showed me a tired smile. ‘I have a shoulder strain, that’s all.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ said Brittany. ‘You’ve got torn ligaments!’

  ‘I have one slight tear. And that’s basically what a strained muscle is.’

  Brittany looked like she wanted to argue the matter, but before she could do so I asked what’d happened.

  ‘Once again Ethan is what happened,’ Brittany said, her mouth twisting into a spiteful, angry smirk.

  I must’ve looked as perplexed as I felt. Jill explained that Ethan was at the after-hours club they went to last night, and when Jill tried to walk past him he grabbed her by the arm and yanked her to him.

  Brittany interrupted, saying, ‘I’ve been trying to talk sense into her about filing charges against that asshole!’

  ‘I’m not going to do that.’

  ‘What he did was assault and battery!’

  Jill was shaking her head. ‘I refuse to believe he meant to hurt me,’ she said. ‘He was drunk, and he overreacted badly when I ignored him.’

  ‘He didn’t mean to hurt you?’ Brittany stated incredulously. She fixed bloodshot eyes on me and said, ‘You should see how badly bruised Jill’s arm is under those bandages. Quite an ugly shade of black and purple, believe me. You don’t grab someone that violently unless you’re trying to hurt them. Charlie, can you talk sense into your girlfriend and tell her she needs to go to the police?’

  ‘No.’

  She reacted as if I had slapped her. ‘What do you mean by “no”?’

  I smiled at Jill with as much gentleness as I could muster, even though my blood was boiling over because of how her ex-boyfriend had hurt her.

  ‘I’m never going to tell you what to do,’ I promised her. ‘If there is anything I can ever do to help or comfort you, I will do so gladly. But it’s not my place to tell you what you should be doing.’

  Brittany let out a snort of derision, but Jill’s reaction was very different. Her eyes moistened with tears, and when one of them ran down her cheek I stepped toward her so I could wipe it away with my thumb. She took hold of my hand with her unbandaged one and pressed it against her lips. When Brittany tried to enlist my help in involving the police, the reason I gave for declining to help was not the one that first occurred to me. But, although I had a very different reason for not wanting her ex-boyfriend to be locked away in jail, I had still ended up speaking truthfully.

  ‘This is just great!’ said Brittany, her eyes angry dots as they fixed on Jill. ‘You’re just going to let that asshole Ethan get away with this. Incredible! You don’t think you’re empowering him so next time he’s in the mood he’ll hurt you even worse?’

  ‘There’s not going to be a next time,’ Jill said quietly and confidently. ‘I understand all too well how his mind works. He’s a classic narcissistic personality. Everything is somebody else’s fault. If I have him arrested, he’ll blame me for losing his job – and then he’ll spend months planning some sort of bizarre revenge against me. But I won’t just ignore this. I’ll file for a restraining order against him. Deep down inside he’s also a coward, and once I file for a restraining order he’ll keep his distance.’

  Brittany was shaking her head, her lips once again pressed into a tight, angry smirk. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘I’m too tired to argue about this anymore. Five hours in an emergency room is far more exhausting than spending the same number of hours jumping around in an after-hours club. Toodles, darling
. I still love you, but I need to get home and collapse.’

  She gave Jill a careful embrace, making sure not to touch her injured shoulder. Before leaving, she pointed an index finger at me and warned me to take good care of her girl. ‘And if you get a chance to knock that asshole Ethan’s teeth out, I’ll owe you one.’

  According to the clock embedded in the electric stove it was now ten minutes after eleven, so I asked Jill if I should make her brunch (I’d learned that that was the name of a meal that combined breakfast and lunch).

  ‘Charlie, I’d be eternally grateful if you could make a pot of coffee and pour it into me.’

  Jill made her way over to the couch and gingerly lowered herself on to it. A familiar lump formed in my throat as I saw how worn out and frail she looked, in no small part because of her damaged shoulder. I told her that of course I would do that for her. A few minutes later as I waited for the water in the coffeemaker to percolate, I heard a light snoring coming from the couch and, sure enough, Jill had fallen asleep.

  I picked her up, being careful not to wake her or touch her injured shoulder, and carried her to her room. She didn’t wake as I lowered her on to her bed, nor when I removed her shoes or fitted a blanket over her so that it rested just under her chin.

  I hadn’t been in Jill’s room before, nor had I seen it. Most of the time Jill kept her bedroom door closed, but those times her door was left open I avoided looking inside so I wouldn’t encroach upon her privacy. Now that I was in her bedroom, I allowed myself several moments to soak in how pleasing it all was. Of course it was filled with Jill’s wonderful scent, but everything else in it seemed to fit Jill so well. The way the walls were painted the same bright gold as her hair. The bed that was so soft and frilly, covered with inviting pastel-colored blankets and pillows. The delicate but finely crafted desk and other furniture. The small paintings of nature that decorated the walls. The stuffed bear (perhaps meant to resemble a cub without claws or teeth, as the adult ones I’d encountered in the wilderness didn’t look so gentle) that sat on a corner of her desk, and the colorful glass figurines and other knick-knacks that lay scattered about the room. I’d read about such rooms, but my imagination must be lacking because I’d never imagined a room being such an oasis. As I gave the room one last look before leaving Jill to sleep, I realized that not only had that lump in my throat returned, but that my chest was aching with both longing and happiness. The reason for the pain of longing was obvious, but I also knew why I felt such intense happiness. Because I understood that having found a way (as distasteful as it might be) to keep the cravings from forcing me to leave Jill, there was now a real chance that I might court her and someday be invited into this wonderful room.

  I quietly closed the door behind me so as not to disturb her sleep, and let the coffee finish brewing. I was going to need it myself, as I had some thinking to do.

  I didn’t want to leave Jill alone in case she needed me, so I ignored the temptation to turn on her television set (I didn’t want the noise to wake her) in order to learn whether anyone had spotted me leaving Sergei’s restaurant. Instead I finished the book I’d been reading, which was titled The New York Trilogy, written by an author named Paul Auster. I chose the book because Jill had talked about it as being one of her favorites, and also because I thought I could learn more about New York from it. At first I thought it would consist of mysteries like the Sherlock Holmes stories I’d read many years ago, but it turned out to be very different. Although it was puzzling to me, it seemed to be more about the nature of mysteries and of people losing their identities. After drinking more coffee and mulling over what I’d read, I returned the book to its shelf and picked out a new book to read – this time choosing one by the author whom I’d picked up on the Boston streets, the one who had written a fable about a man who believed he was saving the world each day by weeding a field. This book was very different from that other one. It turned out to be about a disgraced police officer who is let out of jail, and all the damage he causes through denying his true nature. After finishing it, I found myself for the first time regretting taking the life of one of them that I’d picked up for the slaughtering ritual. I found myself wishing I’d left him on that Boston sidewalk so he could now be writing more books. That thought stunned me. It wasn’t just Jill I was seeing differently, not merely as one of them, but that writer too. And if I was being honest about it, Eduardo as well. I hadn’t allowed myself to realize this (or accept it) until now, but I had to admit that I’d appreciated the jokes and kind words he greeted me with each morning when I arrived at work.

  It wasn’t until after five o’clock that Jill emerged from her bedroom. Her color was better than it had been earlier, but it was obvious that the pain from her injured shoulder was weighing on her more heavily. When I asked her about this, she explained that she had been medicated earlier, but she was trying to limit the amount of painkillers she took.

  I had a pot of coffee and a meal of pancakes waiting for her, and she was grateful for both. I didn’t have any blueberries left and resisted the urge to go to the market to buy more in case she woke up and needed me, but Jill told me the pancakes were perfect and exactly what she wanted after last night.

  After we ate, Jill needed to do more reading for college, so we read together on her couch while more Mozart music played. I picked Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor from her bookshelves, another novel that Jill had spoken highly of. As the night wore on, I grew more anxious to learn what the police knew about my killings, both recent and otherwise, but I kept myself from asking Jill whether we could watch the news. Shortly before eleven o’clock, she bid me goodnight, telling me she needed to start grading some papers before going to bed. The kiss she gave me was more tender than passionate, but from the look in her eyes I knew nothing had changed between us, and that she was simply tired and in some pain from her shoulder.

  After Jill disappeared into her bedroom, I turned on the television set and kept the sound low. The very first story on the news was about my killings. An ashen-faced police spokesman talked about how they were the most brutal and gruesome murders he’d ever encountered, but other than saying that the bodies had been mutilated he didn’t reveal much else. Certainly nothing about whether anyone had seen me leaving that alley or fleeing the area. I did learn that Sergei and the others I’d killed were criminals who were involved in sex trafficking, bank robberies and extortion, and that the police believed the murders were committed by rival criminals. One thing that stunned me was that the police didn’t believe robbery was a motive – both because of the extreme brutality of the murders and because a very large sum of money was found in one of the offices. When I searched the restaurant, I was looking only for more of them who might’ve been hiding, and wasn’t opening desk drawers to look for money. I speculated about what a very large sum of money might be, but decided it didn’t matter. My wallet was thick enough with the $6,000 I’d gotten from Sergei.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  This time when the work slowed I was the one to ask the cook to join me in the back alley behind the restaurant. He looked surprised by my invitation.

  ‘You got the money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK then. After I get these on a plate.’

  He nodded to a couple of pieces of cow meat that he was grilling. I left him to wait out in the alley so I could get away from the grease and the smell of burnt animal flesh. After several minutes he joined me. He was too excited to bother shaking a cigarette loose and lighting it. Instead, he stood in front of me grinning widely.

  ‘I told you, if you tried hard enough you’d find the money,’ he said. ‘You got the money with you?’

  ‘I’ll get a birth certificate and a social security number?’

  ‘Yes, brother, you get both.’

  ‘You don’t even know my name or where I was born.’

  He made a face as if he was disappointed in me. ‘I was going to ask you to write both those down. You gotta have trus
t, brother. I’m not trying to cheat you. I’m trying to help you out.’ He winked at me. ‘I’ll be making a small piece of cash for myself out of this, but that’s only fair, right?’

  ‘How is your friend going to get me those papers?’

  He made another face, this time as if he was losing patience with me. ‘He knows people who work in those government offices. The birth certificate will be fake, but the social security card will be real. When you get that, you’ll be able to tell Chris to go fuck himself, and get yourself a real job. Maybe you even kick Chris’s fat ass on your way out.’

  I’d already taken $2,000 out of my wallet. I knew if he watched me taking the money out of my wallet and saw how fat it was, he’d be scheming to get the rest from me. I handed him the money, which quickly disappeared into one of his pockets.

  ‘You don’t want to count it?’ I asked.

  ‘Trust, brother,’ he said. ‘I trust you, and you need to trust me. World don’t work without trust.’

  I nodded as if he had said something profound and that I actually trusted him, which I didn’t.

  ‘When will I get my papers?’

  He looked past me, as if he was anxious to be done with me. ‘I’ll see my guy tonight, and tell you tomorrow,’ he said, his words more thick and mumbled than earlier. ‘I gotta get back inside before that fucker Chris is on my ass. Tomorrow, brother.’

  We both went back to work. I didn’t feel him staring at me, not even once, during the rest of the day. Instead, it was as if he was intentionally trying not to look in my direction. I wasn’t as stupid as the cook believed I was. I knew Eduardo had told me the truth earlier, that the cook would cheat me if given the chance, and I knew he’d been planning to do so from the moment he offered to help me.