by Lee Thomas
“I will soon,” Becky said. “I’m going to miss this place. I don’t want to go, but the movie is almost finished now, and I’d just be in the way.”
“They’re not going to let you leave,” Kathy said. How stupid could the girl be?
“I keep forgetting you’re new. People leave all the time. Let’s go,” Becky said. The disco music that Kathy associated with her dream pulsed in an adjoining room. She gazed at the door as they passed.
“That’s Dallas’ room. He loves to dance.”
One floor below, Kathy recognized the studio. “Shhhh,” the pretty girl hissed, holding a finger to her lips. “They’re filming.”
The two snuck down the hall and into the studio. The set up was similar to Kathy’s first visit—the mattress, the lights, the camera—except a tall white cross occupied the center of the room. A young man, maybe twenty years old, hung from the cross. His arms were bound by thick lengths of hemp. William, with his curly feminine hair, stood at the base of the cross, a cigarette glowing from between his lips. He inhaled deeply, stoking a glowing red ember. Then he applied the searing end to the captive’s thigh. The crucified man screamed and rolled his head. Pleading and begging filled the chamber. Another application of the searing cherry. This time the ember disappeared into the soft white flesh of the young man’s belly. Then William crushed the cigarette under his heel and walked to the back of the cross. When he returned, he held a fireman’s ax.
“Oh God,” Kathy moaned. She had to help the man. But no, she had to help herself. She stepped back, into Becky’s waiting arms. They snaked around her, crossing at her chest. William lifted the ax and drew the blade slowly across the man’s porcelain stomach. The blade did not pierce the skin, but rather caressed it. Still the prisoner screamed, shouted for help and dropped his head to the side. Desperate, pleading eyes caught Kathy’s. Then William pulled the weapon back and swung. The blade dug deeply into the crucified body. Blood erupted in splashes and ropes from the wound, quickly pouring down the ivory abdomen to paint the man’s pubic hair and genitals. The handle jutted away from the torso like a perverse appendage.
Kathy screamed. Becky shook her and tried to get a hand around her mouth. But it was too late. Desmond and William stared at the girls in the doorway. Whispers of discontent from the audience in the shadows filled the chamber. Kathy fought against Becky’s grip, but she was too strong. Then something incomprehensible happened.
“Great,” a high voice cried. The man on the cross looked at Kathy, his expression was dark and angry. She stared incredulously. Her stomach knotted and her mind raced. The young man with the ax in his belly gazed down on her. “The shot’s ruined. I don’t believe this shit,” he huffed. “You try and do your best work and some amateur walks in and ruins the whole thing. Desmond,” the boy said, “I cannot work under these conditions.” He undid himself from the binds and hopped off the cross. The ax remained firmly planted in his gut.
“I know, I know,” Desmond said, rushing forward. “I’m sorry. You were perfection, as usual.” Silver regarded Becky for a moment. “You should have known better than to bring her here,” he said before returning his attention to the disgruntled performer. “Sweetie,” he cooed. “The lighting wasn’t very good anyway. We’ll re-shoot next week as soon as you’re up to it.”
“Next week? This is going to take at least two to heal,” the boy said, pulling the heavy weapon from his belly. He dropped it to the floor, where it hit with a clatter. Blood oozed from the wound, and a purple rope of intestine surfaced in the gash. “We finally had it. What if I can’t get the inspiration back? What if the part is cold next time?” The young man looked distraught.
“It finally felt right.”
“It’ll be okay,” Silver said. “You are never less than perfect.” He made to put his arm around the man, and then jerked his hand away. Silver whispered accolades in his ear as the two walked out of the studio.
“That was Bobby,” Becky said, leading Kathy back to her room. “He’s a little temperamental but his style is impeccable. He’s been here for about two years now. This is his second film for Desmond. Desmond is a little worried that his clients will feel cheated if they realize he’s been used before, but Bobby used to be blonde, and he really does look different now.”
Kathy couldn’t speak. The horrible images of that bright room still played in her head.
“Don’t worry,” the girl said. “It doesn’t hurt or anything. That’s why we have to act. After awhile it’s like brushing your hair. It might pull if you catch a tangle, but it doesn’t really hurt. You might even get into it.” Becky turned to her new friend. The glittering expression that told the world how happy she was to be a part of it had faded. “I do hope you stay. I’d really like somebody to talk to, you know? Somebody to go to the movies with.”
The girl smiled at Kathy; the heaviness in her eyes reflected an emotion that Kathy had never been able to define in herself. When Becky left, Kathy felt empty.
Desmond Silver came to her soon after Becky retreated down the hall to study lines for her shoot the following week. His face hung with concern. But it was his eyes, eyes that projected such intense sadness that captured Kathy. He’d changed clothes, opting for a pair of khaki shorts and a black dress shirt.
Kathy felt exhausted. She hadn’t even thought of escape. Girls always tried to run in the movies and something horrible always happened. It was better to just rest until her mind cleared. Then she might think of a plan. Right now, she just wanted to sleep.
“Tough day?” Silver asked, sitting on the edge of Kathy’s bed. “The first shoot can be rough.”
Tears rose in Kathy’s eyes. How could he seem so nice? After what she’d seen? After what he’d done to her? How could he seem so kind? Did all monsters have such warm smiles and such fatherly eyes?
“Before,” Silver said, “before all of this, I was a doctor, but I had to give it up. I…” He smiled wanly. The corners of his mouth pushed at the tired flesh of his face. “There’s a certain attraction for me in the opening of skin. The way it releases under a blade and opens like a waiting kiss, and then the blood comes, constant and warm like affection just waiting to pour over me, and of course in that line of work the beautiful wounds proved distracting. But I saw girls like you every night, trundled through the emergency room because their boyfriends or tricks had gotten tired of them, discarded them after making sure their pretty faces would never land them another man.” He shook his head. “They always went back to these men. I used to stay up nights wondering what had become of them. Eventually I had to give up medicine, because of my distraction. Financially comfortable I went into filmmaking. I tried to justify my early films by telling myself that I was saving girls like you from a lifetime of pain. It wasn’t very effective. When I found my glue, I found a way of balancing my art with my ideals.”
All of Silver’s talk about medicine and wounds and glue confused her. He murdered people for movies. He was crazy, and she could care less about hearing the details of his insanity. “I don’t care,” Kathy said. “I just want to go home.”
“Which home is that? The home with the abusive parents or the home with the boyfriend who sold you for a hundred dollars and a bottle of Jack Daniels?”
“Keith loves me,” Kathy said. Her voice cracked as tears filled her eyes.
“He doesn’t,” Silver said. “Kathy, I’m not a good man, but I am an honest one. If you go back to him he will sell you to someone else, and the next man isn’t going to have my glue. Any damage done to you will be permanent. Yes, this place is odd, maybe even a little scary, and you will have to endure some terrifying moments, but you will have the support and protection of everyone here—like a family—and when you leave, you will leave whole and ready to make a new life for yourself.”
“Can’t I just go?” Kathy pleaded.
“If that’s what you want,” Silver said. “But you need to stay until your neck heels. The glue’s efficacy is limited. I’
ll send William down to give you another shot. We don’t want that wound to open.”
Silver stood, casting one last smile at Kathy. “I do hope you’ll reconsider. I think our film would be stunning.” Then he left the room.
The loneliness entered her like frigid air, filling her body and freezing her lungs. She stood hesitantly and walked to the hall. Stepping forward she gripped the door and rubbed the wood with a palm. All that Silver had told her bustled and wrestled in her mind. Her decision should have been easy. Escape. Get as far away from Silver and his freaks as she could go. Run back to Keith. He’d tell her that he loved her, and he’d apologize and kiss her and make love to her and promise he’d never let anyone hurt her again.
Except he wouldn’t. She wanted to believe this fantasy, but fantasy was just another word for fiction.
Kathy pressed her cheek against the door, hugged it.
Outside a child picked through a dumpster, hoping that his breakfast wouldn’t make him sick before it relieved the foggy exhaustion in his head and the ache in his belly. In the adjacent building, a mother gave birth to a child and sawed through the umbilical cord with a broken bottle before abandoning the screaming bundle in a cardboard box and creeping back into the dawn. A good husband and concerned father opened the door to his silver Honda and let a fourteen-year-old boy back onto the corner he’d taken him from. Cars raced by and the city awoke. It was the day after Christmas and the season for giving had come to an end.
Inside
Where It’s Warm
Clouds the colors of rotted meat and tumor spit ashen rain and sleet, and through the pelting downpour, colliding with concrete like the stomping boots of a clumsy army, a scream rises and quickly fades, and I turn to the sound from reflex. Peering between white houses that stare at me like the faces of forlorn ghosts, I see nothing in the gloom and continue my trek down the middle of the road. I am chilled but this is a reaction to the weather, not the fleeting protest of a stranger who is soon enough beyond the fingertips of hope.
My jaw clenches against the cold, knuckles ache from clutching the iron bar, my leg throbs as it has for days, and I think it would have been better to wait until morning to manage my errand, because the early evening is as dimly lit as a waning dusk, except the rain provides cover, masking the sounds of me and the heat of me in icy torrent, and I speculate they do not hunt by sight, or else they would always be at one another. Too little was said about the threat before the newscasts died because too little was known. So I can only guess. I walk down the center of the road, trusting my eyes perhaps more than is wise, and counting on my legs, even the damaged one, to get me far beyond danger should it arise.
I left the city to avoid the problems of a great population, and this decision proved sufficiently warranted, but my preparation was not sufficient—all too shortsighted. I accounted for food and drink and warmth, but failed in one important regard, and it is because of this that I expose myself to the wandering threats as I move toward the center of a town no longer thriving—hardly living at all.
She walks across a distant yard, a spirit in a flowing nightdress, and she turns to me and one of her arms raises in a half wave and I think to wave back, but her gait is familiar and in no way inviting, her steps leaden, her knees locked as if bound in braces. She lifts her other arm and moves across the lawn, untended grass a tide of filaments brushing her ankles, and she approaches me like a crippled mother desperately trying to reach a beloved child. I continue along the white line in the street, and she changes course, and soon her bare feet shuffle onto the sidewalk and seem to disappear as if her skin wears an identical shade to the damp concrete. Her hope is to greet me in the middle of the road. I survey the landscape, the lonely, unlit houses, the overgrown lawns, the track of street at my back covered in a screen of sleet, and I see we are alone this woman and I.
Led by chipped and torn nails, guiding her to me, she appears serene. Once, not long ago, she was beautiful, with delicate features, lips plumped by nature or needle, and silky skin, but her eyes, which had certainly been lovely, were now bleached of color, many shades paler than the emerald they’d once been, and a thin cowl of sopping hair frames her too gaunt face in an unflattering way. Amid the weather she seems a black and white image, projected on a screen agitated with static.
The iron bar bites into her scalp and follows her down. I step back and observe her fingers, once crowned with impeccably painted nails, which are now serrated and stripped of polish in unflattering tracks. She lies motionless, and I check over my shoulder to be sure none of her breed has found opportunity in my distraction, and we are still alone this woman and I, only she is beyond concern.
Then I continue on my way.
At the edge of town I see five more like the woman, but they are enrapt with a banquet, crouching over the body of an obese man wearing red canvas sneakers and blue sweat pants, the latter being devoured in great swatches along with the meat and fat beneath. I have come to understand they are never quite so vulnerable as when they eat. The ritual of feeding mesmerizes them, and if it weren’t for fear of summoning more, I could draw my pistol and execute each of them without disturbing the others until the bullets ended their trances, but the food distracts and incapacitates them and this is an opportunity, so I cross to the far sidewalk and make my way onto Main Street.
My thoughts wander and I recall a party I attended. Like Poe’s Masque, the privileged gathered in a penthouse apartment to toast their good fortunes while small fires dotted the city below. The crowd, drunk and jovial, made me uneasy, as crowds often do, so I spent much of the evening at the window, gazing down at the panic and the pockets of flame licking the distant streets. A man approached me, a handsome mannequin draped in Italian wool and arrogance. He suggested we spend the evening in a spare room, naked and together while the city collapsed, because it was his intent to overdose on pain pills and found the idea of being fucked as he drifted into death appealing. I turned away from this offer and again peered through the glass, downward. Men and women ran and cars collided, but the celebratory gathering heard none of the commotion. Screams couldn’t travel so high. The next morning, I left the party and convinced that the outbreak was not an incident so much as a movement, I packed a bag and loaded the car and drove to the North while the police and army kept brittle control of the situation.
I found this town and settled in. The supply of medication I brought from the city lasted until this morning.
The glass door of the drug store is smashed. I look into the gloom and take the flashlight from my pocket and shine it over the wreckage within. Shelves are toppled and the floor is littered with boxes and packets and pools of shampoo. That this place has been looted is of no surprise. It offered food for the scavenger, supplies for the wounded and sick, and free dreams for the addict. I step inside and pain flares at my shin. I wince and continue into the shop, stepping over a cardboard display that had once held cheap dog toys. The lantern beam reveals one derelict aisle after another, but nothing moves here save me, and I make my way to the back of the store, picking through the wreckage, cautious so that I don’t wound my legs a second time. The Plexiglas shield that once guarded the pharmacist from his patrons wears an enormous black-rimmed hole. A creative junkie burned his way through a barrier he could not smash. On the floor at the foot of the counter, I see the discarded tank of acetylene and note the tremendous streak of blood it lies in. The smear runs like a poorly painted trail along the back aisle and veers right. I pause and listen, though feel no genuine concern.
The afflicted are quiet in their state, but they are clumsy. It would be impossible for one of them to move through the store’s debris with any degree of stealth.
I climb onto the counter and work my way through the hole and drop onto the pharmacy’s linoleum floor. Then I begin to search. As I expect, the shelves have been picked through, but I’m grateful to see they are not barren. My light falls over each shelf and I examine the labels on the remaining bot
tles and on a bottom shelf I am grateful to find one labeled: Truvada. The weight of the bottle is a relief. It goes into the backpack brought for this chore and I return to my search, finding labels that read Viramune, Viread, Zerit and Epivir—all names from the dosage chart I keep in my pocket. They too go in the backpack, rattling like muffled maracas as they drop into place.
Though I consider seeking out a pain medication for the ache in my leg, it strikes me as a waste of time. The addicts—those not dragged away by the wandering threat—would have made a priority of the numbing prescriptions, and the safety and the warmth of the house call me. Back through the charred hole. I hit the floor, and like an echo of my soles’ impact, I hear the hiss of a box whooshing across the floor at the front of the shop. I secure the backpack over my shoulders and put the flashlight in my left hand, retrieving the iron from my belt loop with the right. I stand perfectly still, listening for more noise, but hear only the rapping downpour on the street outside.
Satisfied that whatever shares this chamber with me is not moving in my direction, I follow the smear of blood across the back of the store and turn right, and then I pause again because the weather’s chill is intensified by uncertainty as I peer down the aisle. The murky air, visible through the shattered front door, shifts strangely; indistinct shapes drift and sway as if caught in an ocean tide, and a new sound, this one clearly caused by a bit of metal clacking on the linoleum in a nearby aisle, sends tremors through my chest.
I move toward it, iron bar raised, flashlight beam illuminating the side of an end cap where condoms are displayed. This seems the only product untouched by foragers.
He steps into the back aisle. Not long ago he was someone’s young son, with chestnut hair grown long over his ears and brow. A pea coat too large for his youthful frame drapes from his shoulders. His cheeks are full and his eyes shine like bits of brown glass in the disk of light bathing his face. The bar arcs high over my head, and I begin the downward swing, when I’m struck by the color in his eyes—still vibrant—and the boy cringes, throwing an arm above his head to ward off the blow, and the bar stops just short of crushing his elbow.