by Harvey Click
“Maybe you’re just gonna let me freeze to death?” she said.
Before Dexter could untie his shoes, she pulled him down on top of her and tugged his trousers to his knees. She wrestled with him on the pine needles, clutching him hard and digging her fingernails into his skin. He knew the taste of her sweat and the sounds she made in her sleep and the distant look in her eyes when she awoke, but he didn’t know who she was or why he wanted her so badly. He pinned her hips against the needles and ground his tongue into the warm musk of her groin until she shuddered to a climax. She let out a faint cry as he entered her, and even that sounded mysterious, like the yelp of some strange animal.
“Fill me up,” she said. “Make time stop.”
She wrapped her legs around him and locked her ankles together to force him closer. A gust of wind made the whispering pines lean down to watch.
After they were done, they lay quietly for a while beneath the stone face, peacefully Dexter thought, but when Mary stood up he saw that her face was streaked with tears. He’d never seen her cry before and wasn’t sure what to do. He got up and fastened his trousers and went to her, but she turned away.
“I hope my aunt didn’t upset you,” he said.
“No. I like her. She reminds me of you—tough and gruff.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No.” She brushed pine needles from her panties and slipped them on. “Don’t pay any attention to me.” She wiped her face and put on her skirt and sweater. “Everything’s all fucked up,” she said. “Nothing’s what it seems.”
“Come on, Mary, it can’t be that bad. We’ll be out of here tomorrow. It’ll be nice.”
“My father useta say only a damn fool knows what tomorrow will bring,” she said.
“Well, this damn fool says it’ll bring blue Canadian skies and a nice vacation. Here.” He gave her a handkerchief.
She tried to clean her face, but it kept getting wetter. Dexter could see she wasn’t very good at crying. Most of the women he’d known were able to turn tears on and off with greater skill. Mary seemed to be trying to turn them off but was just making them worse, and the effort looked painful.
“What’s this about?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Some things get started before you’re born, that’s all.”
“What things? What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You said your first memory is this place, but my first memory is a burning house. It left a bitter taste, that’s all.”
“What house? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just try not to hate me.”
“Jesus, Mary, you know I don’t hate you.” He wanted to tell her that he loved her, but love was a difficult word. How could he love someone he couldn’t understand?
“That’s about all I’m sure of right now,” he said, “so why don’t you fill in some missing pieces?”
“I can’t. Maybe someday.”
“When?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “We better get back, we’ll be late for dinner.”
“Wait.” He grasped her wrist. “Maybe you’re getting tired of seeing me, is that what this is about?”
“No. Just the opposite.”
She kissed him. Usually her kisses were rough and sensual, but this one was slow and sweet.
“Let’s not talk anymore,” she said. “I’m sorry I upset you.”
They started down the overgrown path to the house. It was getting chillier, summer sinking into autumn as the sun sank behind the trees, and they walked quickly to keep warm. Dexter wished she were beside him so he could put his arm around her, but the path was narrow and she kept her distance behind. The wind picked up, and he plunged his hands into his pockets and shivered.
Chapter Three
The apartment was too quiet. Linda Hall listened to the hush, wanting to hear Mark’s footsteps in the hall and his key in the lock, but the building might have been uninhabited. The thick traffic outside sounded far away, in a different world.
She poured a glass of rosé and sat on the sofa to nurse her headache. It felt like a hangover, but this was her first drink all week. When her husband died four years ago, she had suffered an emotional breakdown that began with a headache ushered in by an anxious stillness like this. But at least then she hadn’t been insane enough to imagine a voice emerging from a locket.
Buying second-hand jewelry had become a compulsion, trying to fill her own emptiness with someone else’s useless baubles, and it was probably no wonder the baubles were beginning to talk. She felt around in her purse for the locket, and it seemed to flutter against her hand like a cold egg ready to hatch. She threw it onto the coffee table with disgust.
She wanted to call Mark at work, but she shouldn’t depend on him every time her nerves acted up. Sooner or later he’d get sick of her moods. If she were Mark, she would have given herself the boot long ago. It was a mystery why he stayed with her and kept asking her to marry him.
The glass of wine didn’t ease her headache. She went to the refrigerator and poured another, even though drinking before dinner always proved a mistake. Her kitchen looked cramped and ugly. Mark’s place was much nicer, but they’d fallen into the habit of spending half their nights here. Linda resisted moving into his condominium because it would be another step toward marriage. He should be grateful that she was protecting him from her neuroses. Why did he want her weirdness?
She felt dizzy as she returned to the living room. She set her wineglass on the coffee table and lay down on the sofa. Her ears began to ring with a soft shrill tone. She shut her eyes and tried to make the ringing go away, but it didn’t.
The voice she had imagined at the second-hand store was probably a warning from her subconscious mind, but she wasn’t sure what it meant. She considered calling her friend Toya Jones. Toya was a spiritualist medium, and Linda trusted her more than any psychiatrist.
The ringing in her ears reminded her of the sound made by a wet finger skating around the rim of a glass. She opened her eyes and saw a narrow purple shadow stretching from the locket to the wineglass beside it. Not really a shadow, more like liquid darkness oozing through the air and seeping up the stem of the glass like blood in a catheter. The rosé was darker than Burgundy. She touched the glass and the ringing stopped.
Too much, too bizarre. She grabbed the phone and called Mark’s work number.
“Mark Burton, Actuarial Department.”
“Why are you still there?” she asked.
“Leaving in a minute,” he said. “Guess I better stop at the grocery store, or did you?”
“Just come here and hurry up.”
“Something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I bought a locket and there’s something funny about it.”
“So take it back. Did you keep the receipt?”
“I mean there’s something inside it,” she said. “This weird kind of creepy purple darkness comes out. I don’t like it.”
There was a long pause. “Why’d you buy it if you don’t like it?” he asked.
“When I saw it in the shop it . . .”
It did what? she wondered. Did it really say, “I am God”?
“Just listen and tell me if you hear anything,” she said. She held the phone next to the ringing wineglass for a few seconds. “Did you hear that?”
“I don’t know, the phone sounds fucked up,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Just hurry up,” she said.
“All right. On my way.”
Linda hung up and stared at the locket. Maybe some joker had hidden a tiny radio inside it, she thought. That shop owner looked like the kind of sorry-ass wanker who’d get his jollies that way. So the radio voice had spooked her and brought on the headache and the migraine-hush. Probably the purple ray was caused by electronic circuitry.
There must be some way to open the damn thing. She picked it up to
examine the seam, and a blinding darkness sucked the light out of her eyes. All the sounds in the room drained into a deep hush except a tingling voice vibrating in the nerves of her hand.
“Blessed are you, my child, for today you will be with me in Paradise,” it said.
“I know who you are,” she said, and her voice sounded small and hollow in the hushed room. “Briggs. That’s your name, isn’t it, Stephen Briggs. I’m calling the police, you little jerkoff junk store pervert.”
The locket trembled in her hand. She tried to fling it away, but her fingers were stuck to the metal like icicles.
“I am that I am,” it said. “I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
But she did believe, and the migraine silence mocked her. All things rush to God, she thought, and she saw the room’s reality rushing away into a purple vortex, leaving nothing behind but a flat silent photograph of walls and chairs.
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?” the voice asked. “Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?”
Finally she heard a real sound in the soundless room. It was Mark’s key in the door.
“Mark! Hurry!” she called, and as soon as she said it she thought: What’ll I tell him, that I’m talking to God?
“I tell you a mystery,” the voice said. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”
The door swung open. A tall thin man dressed in black stepped quickly toward her and grasped her throat with a black-gloved hand.
“Don’t try to scream or I’ll break your neck,” he said.
His other hand gestured in front of her face, gloved fingers speaking a slow strange sign language that she somehow understood. Silent words fell like soft snow covering her with forgotten childhood dreams. She and her favorite doll were drinking tea with a family of talking squirrels in a treehouse decorated with pink puffs of cotton candy. When he let go of her throat, her arms and tongue felt too massive to move.
One sand-gray eye stared at her beneath the brim of a black Stetson while the other gazed at a far corner of the room as if peering into another world. A scar ran from his dead eye to his chin like a dry river in the tawny desert of his face. He took the locket from her hand and slipped it into the pocket of his long leather coat.
“Come on,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “It’s getting late.”
He grasped her wrist, and she felt herself standing up and following him through the doorway into the hall like a sleepwalker. She tried to fall down, but her legs kept marching to the slow cadence of his boot heels. She watched her feet descend the stairs and step out the back door into the long, cool shadows of the parking lot.
He led her to a pickup truck with a camper shell. As he was opening the passenger door, Linda heard a familiar sound and saw Mark’s Miata pulling into the lot. He parked and hurried toward the apartment building without looking her way.
She tried to yell, but all she could squeeze out of her throat was a faint moan. The tall man eased her into the passenger seat of the truck and was reaching to shut her door when an ugly strangled noise erupted from her throat and swelled louder while the door swung shut.
Mark turned and squinted against the setting sun, trying to make out her face behind the windshield. As he approached the truck, the tall man pulled something like a long black soda straw from inside his coat and blew into it like a pea shooter. Mark swatted his chest, and for a moment Linda stupidly thought he’d been stung by a wasp. She forced out another ugly noise when he collapsed onto the asphalt.
The man got into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. “See what ya made me do?” he said. “Try keeping your mouth shut now so I don’t have to kill any others.”
The truck pulled onto the street, but Linda kept staring back at Mark and praying that he would move. He didn’t.
The driver took a highway to the southern outskirts of town and exited west into what was left of the sun. He drove past junkyards and trailer parks and ramshackle houses and turned onto the cracked blacktop of an old service station. The windows were covered with graffiti-sprayed plywood, and two outdated gas pumps stood in front like gravestones marking a dead era.
The tall man got out to raise one of the garage doors, and Linda tried to scoot her sleeping body over to the steering wheel. She was still trying when he climbed back in, but she hadn’t budged. He parked in the dark service stall and got out to shut the overhead door. She heard it slam down like the lid of her coffin.
Her muscles remembered how to move when he grasped her wrist and helped her out of the truck into the smell of old motor grease. He switched on an electric lantern and aimed it around the adjacent stall. A radiator rusted in the darkness of a corner, a cash register lay open on its side, and a rat scurried behind a hubcap on a grease-black shelf. A grimy calendar advertised auto parts with a picture of a grinning blonde holding spark plugs in front of her bare breasts like long hard nipples.
The man opened the back of the camper shell and got out something that looked like a brazier or a large incense burner. It stood knee-high and had three legs supporting an ornate canister made of iron or maybe the same gray metal as the locket. It looked like something Linda would want to buy if she found it in an antique store, but she didn’t want to buy anything right now. He brought out two more just like it.
“Take off your clothes,” he said.
Linda felt her fingers undoing the buttons of her blouse. The tall man bit off a piece of plug tobacco and watched her unhook her brassiere. The scar running down his face was worm-white against his tanned-leather skin, and the worm seemed to wriggle as he chewed. He stared at her breasts while she unzipped her skirt and let it fall to the greasy floor. She told her hands to stop as her thumbs hooked the sides of her panties, but they had forgotten everything she’d taught them. They teased down the scrap of pink silk like naughty children playing dirty games.
“You don’t eat good, not much meat on the bone,” he said. “I’d just as soon you kept your clothes on, but they can get complicated. One time a man ended up with his britches stuck in his gut and his belt hanging out his asshole. Lay down on the floor.”
She did. He kneeled and started wrapping rope around her ankles. A charley-horse seized her left thigh, and she watched her foot rise slowly and powerfully against the rope and suddenly slam down hard on his hand. He yelled and sucked his index finger.
“Christsake, it’s been a long day,” he said. “Now my nail’s gonna turn black.”
After he tied her ankles together, he got the locket from his coat pocket and somehow opened the lid. A purple gem burned inside, clutched by metal prongs. He lifted it out and stuck it in her mouth.
“Wouldn’t swallow it if I was you,” he said. “He’d have to cut it outta your gullet, and that gets real messy.”
The chill made Linda’s teeth hurt. She spat out the stone, and it rolled on the floor.
“Figured you’d do that,” he said. “They all do.”
He got a staple gun from the truck. He shoved the gem back into her mouth and stapled her lips shut. Pain shot all the way down to her feet.
He lowered the hook of an engine hoist and attached it to the rope binding her ankles. He pulled on a loop of chain, and the hook lifted her feet above her head until she was barely touching the oily floor with her fingertips, and then touching nothing but oily air. Blood rushed to her head and oozed out the holes where staple prongs pierced her gums. It trickled from the torn tip of her tongue and filled her mouth. The bastard kept pulling the chain until her face was up to his shoulders.
He arranged the three brazier-like tripods beneath her in a triangle three or four feet to a side. He twisted the top of one of the canisters, and inky light wafted out like smoke. When he opened the second one, the light snapped into a sharp purple beam drawing a las
er-thin line in the air between the two tripods. Electricity crackled and raised the hairs on Linda’s arms. He opened the third canister, and a solid triangle of purple darkness sizzled beneath her head. The greasy air spun sluggishly around her like water going down a drain.
The tall man went to his truck and got a machete. He sent a stream of tobacco juice into the triangle, and it hissed like a hot skillet. He licked his long brown teeth and grinned.
“Meet God,” he said.
He cut the rope that tied her ankles, and Linda plunged headfirst into the dark triangle.
***
Mark Burton thought he should be frightened when he realized he was floating, but in fact he felt perfectly relaxed as he let go of his body like dropping a bag of heavy ballast from a balloon so he could drift up into the air above the parking lot and hang there weightless looking down at himself, or rather at his body, not himself at all, just the flesh-vehicle that had served him well for thirty years, a vehicle blessed with good health and good looks and good ears and good eyes, though without eyes or ears he could see and hear even more clearly, see each miniscule detail of his own lifeless face, see the ambulance arrive with its flashing lights and see the paramedics gather around him, hear the deep rumbling voice of the one giving him CPR calling for the defibrillator, and everything that Mark saw and heard told him that he ought to be frightened, but instead he felt the delicious painless peaceful freedom of having every worry and ache and fear unshackled from him at last.
He turned weightlessly and saw a hole in the sky deepening into a tunnel, and though it looked long and dark he wasn’t afraid of it because he could see a warm shimmer in the distance like the glow of a hearth, so he allowed himself to tumble up into the tunnel and be swept along faster and faster toward the faraway light, exhilarated by the speed as he’d been all those many happy hours that he’d spent on his big Harley sailing up and down the curvy hills of country roads, but this was a wilder and faster and better ride, plunging like an astronaut toward a distant planet at the speed of light moving fast as time itself, so far from earth now that all earthy sounds had ceased though there was a lovely music like the song of whales or the murmur of Mommy’s womb, and as he hastened toward the singing light he saw his life replaying like a movie told from beginning to end in its own good time, not running slow or fast for time meant nothing but running in its own good time from the moment Mommy’s womb spit him out to the first time she gave him her breast warm and sweet and her face so young, movie running to the pain of his first tooth breaking through his gum to the misery of measles and pimples and the fumbling ecstasy of his first fuck, and he watched the earthly dramas of hate and lust and hope and pain melt like gold in the light that grew brighter as he sped toward it, a light so bright it should have hurt his eyes but didn’t, a perfect white gold so intense it should have scorched his skin but didn’t, and he realized that the light was called Love and Love was a vast sparkling city and he would soon be a citizen of the city called Love.