The Best New Horror 7

by Stephen Jones

  Now you are ready. You take a last look into the mirror, squaring the knot of your tie and drawing in a stomach-tightening breath. The man who looks back at you seems tired but knowing, in control of his own destiny and that of his clients.

  You wonder why it is that mirrors always lie.

  The clock is running, and Delacorte, if anything, is punctual. He has thirty minutes for his errand and enough paper waiting on his desk to keep him busy half the night. He drags a comb through his hair, carefully buttons his doublebreasted jacket. He decides to wash his hands again, and tosses the wad of paper towel the length of the washroom, a swish, before he exits. The receptionist waves a farewell to his call of “Back in twenty,” and then he is riding the elevator to the pavement.

  The streets of the capital have no names. In this quadrant, letters run in alphabetical order, absent the J, from south to north, while numbers count ever higher east to west. Some mad Frenchman is responsible.

  Delacorte needs no grid systems, no tourist maps, no directions. He has made this pilgrimage nearly every week for the past year, and his eyes may as well blink closed. It is no longer a walk but a migration. He prefers the east side of 13th Street, crossing at I Street to enter Franklin Park, where he endures the usual gauntlet of broken men: gristled faces, shriveled bodies, brownbagged bottles. An elderly black woman wearing a mottled DuRag maneuvers her shopping cart in an endless circle, stopping on occasion to rearrange the newspapers inside. At a bench near the fountain sits the man Delacorte knows only as Ernie, for this is the name sewn above the pocket of the grey-purple Texaco jumpsuit that is apparently his only clothing. Ernie smiles at the sight of him and asks for bus fare; the same question, the same words, he offers each time Delacorte has passed. Delacorte slips a dollar from his wallet and presses it into Ernie’s trembling hand: “Go home,” he tells Ernie, the same advice he has always offered. Ernie nods and sits back down on his bench.

  On the far side of the park is 14th Street, across which waits a brownstone enigma, the liquor store and its angled alley, the last remnants of the invasion of mirrored glass and marble façade known as urban renewal. To the south was once a block of bars and burlesque clubs, bookstores and model studios, a shadowland tended mostly by women, frequented mostly by men. Now it is a furrow of bright concrete dwarfed by multistory monoliths. Inside these buildings are law firms and lobbyists, bankers and businessmen, the endlessly expanding hive of frantic worker bees. Delacorte looks both ways before crossing.

  The windows of the liquor store offer the wet dreams of beer and bikini teams, but Delacorte isn’t buying. There is time for three dollars, no more, no less. He thinks himself invisible and veers into the alleyway, takes the ten or so footsteps that lead to the decrepit portico lurking at its north side. Into the doorway, into the dark.

  The smell, as always, astounds him, a stew of stale breath and sweaty armpits, Lysol cleanser and spent semen. He calms his surging stomach and looks down the waiting avenue of booths; one day, he is certain, he will meet someone here who he knows. Though he does know the bullnecked Jamaican who minds the cash register; he knows him rather well, in the same way that he knows the man whose jumpsuit nametag reads Ernie. Most every weekday he hands each of them dollars.

  Today Delacorte deals three portraits of George Washington onto the countertop and takes three stacks of quarters in return. He drops eleven of the quarters into his jacket pocket; the twelfth he holds between thumb and forefinger as he nods a wordless thank you to the man at the cash register. A woman known as Taylor Wayne hovers at the man’s shoulder, twisted in some impossibly alluring contortion across a glossy poster, nearly life-size, fully nude. Last week it was the woman known as P.J. Sparxx, and the week before that, the woman known as Aja: the ever-blonde, ever-naked, ever-willing. They mean nothing to him.

  His favorite booth is 7: truly a lucky number, for it was there that he met her. It happened years ago, before the video monitors were installed, when the backs of the doors of each booth were laminated with tiny white-speckled screens onto which robot projectors tickered their five- and ten-minute film loops. There was no sound; not yet. It must have been 1978, 1979; that long ago. He had come to this place only once or twice before, for reasons that he could not even begin to explain: an impulse, a vague need, idle curiosity. He thought of the visits as a kind of vulgar release, the kind of sex, like that with the occasional secretary, that could be appreciated and despised – quick and easy and forgettable.

  But he could not forget her. One look, and he belonged to her, just as she, in time, would belong to him. There was no title on the tattered remnant of a film box that had been taped to the door of booth 7. She was nowhere to be seen in the lurid photographs on its splayed front and back. She was not even a featured player; those roles were reserved for the long-forgotten and now, perhaps, long-dead. The centerpiece of this loop was a threesome, a man and two women so blonde and tanned and athletic as to be almost indistinguishable as they coiled in urgent pantomime on a spotlit, silkskinned dais. Around them in huddled humping shadows lurked the minor players in this filmic orgy, quaffing imaginary wine from empty bottles and biting at plastic grapes. She was but one of them, a shadow within shadows; set-dressing, nothing more than fleshy backdrop, until the closing seconds of that short reel, when the featured trio, momentarily spent, untangled their knot, the women kissing each other gently as the Adonis stood, reaching up into the darkness for a bottle. A portly, greyhaired celebrant rises from his decorous deed, flaccid pencil of a penis flapping beneath a furred belly, and through a trick of the light she is exposed, alone, no longer something but someone: a person. She is young, no doubt underage – fifteen, sixteen years old, corn-bred in some midwest nowhere, Nebraska or Iowa, run away from the usual things: alcoholic mother, abusive stepfather, boring high school. She is too thin, her hips sharp and pointed, her breasts flat and tiny. Her hair is blue-black and Dachau short. But her pose, the vague and vulnerable gesture; the pose has its own purity, its own perfection. She reclines into the shadows, helpless, waiting, wanting, wishing . . . for you. You must stand in the tiny booth, the sudden erection cramped and painful.

  The film spools from end back to beginning, and you push more quarters into the mouth of the meter and wait patiently through the minutes, the images blurring into a kind of meaningless newsreel until she appears again, and again, and again, and here, in this dark confessional, you visit her each day, feed quarter after quarter into the coinbox bolted to the plywood wall, the clank of the metal a kind of overture, an expectant signal that brings your mind and body awake with total intensity, watching but not watching this ten-minute loop of grainy film until you know its every nuance, and hers: those timeless twenty seconds from shadow to light to shadow again. The sagging carcass of her partner, tilting forward, bottle in hand, and in his grey wake the sliver of alabaster skin that widens into the pair of adolescent breasts and then into the upper torso of a woman, head turned aside, looking not at the camera but to some vision that just escapes your sight off-frame, and then the first breath, almost a sigh, that raises her nipples and her shoulders, her left arm moving back, her hand, invisible, seeking some purchase on the pillows beneath her, lips parting, a look both pliant and puzzled and then, with a second breath, her leg angling up and then the pose, the sublime pose, and darkness.

  You watch her and you watch her and you watch her and then, one day, she is gone. Taped to the door of booth 7 is a shiny new cardboard box, and inside, when you sit, disbelieving, hoping, praying, and offer a shiny quarter to the coinbox, the projector whirs out a new film, a different film, something called Hardcore Hookers. You watch with dutiful resignation, but of course she is not there. You ask the man at the cash register – at the time, a scowling Filipino troll whose throaty laugh collapsed into a cough. “Gone,” he said. You even offered him money; but he knew nothing about the film, nothing but “Gone, gone”. His hand waved to the door, as if the reel itself had arisen from the wet darkness of the
booth and slouched out into the alley.

  Years later, scrounging the racks of dusty boxes in a place called Top-Flite Video, just off Times Square in the ragtag reach of the Port Authority Terminal, you found and bought that first Super 8 film, even though you owned no projector. Just touching the plastic reel was enough to bring back the vision, and with it, that feeling, the one like no other, the one that took you out of this world and into hers. The loop, you learned, was called Roman Hands, and though the foxed yellow carton listed the names of its stars, none of them was hers. But by then, you didn’t need to know her name. She was famous.

  The years had passed with increasing intensity. These were the 1980s – your thirties – and you measured them with money. You lived the law, slept the law, worked the partnership track until there was no doubt that you would be among the tenured few. The visits to Peepland slowed, and as the weeks multiplied into months, and the months into years, you finally brought an end to what you saw as a boyish fling, the last gasp of adolescence. It was like visiting your mother’s grave, a desire that in time became an obligation and at last lost all vestiges of sentiment. Once you dated a woman who reminded you vaguely of her; but in bed, her body folded beneath you, she did not transform. Her kisses were dry, her breath stale. As you slid into her, there were gasps, not silence. Sooner or later you had to call her by name: Jane it was, or Jean. Janine. In the morning, when you woke up next to her, you wanted to cry. You bought her breakfast instead, and never called her again.

  In a few months you met Melinda, our lady of investment banking; Melinda of the business suits and wire-rimmed glasses, forever clinking glasses of Chardonnay and daring you to unfurl that braid of ash blonde at the nape of her neck. Her voice filled your silence and, for a time, even touched that silence inside, the place in your mind and heart and gut where only the picture people walked and talked and made love in silent shadows.

  Melinda, who stole into your life on a rainy afternoon, late in April or early in May; and who left, not at all quietly, almost four years later. Melinda of the Georgetown condominium; Melinda of the Nordic Trac; Melinda of the unwanted pregnancy; Melinda of the career that mattered most.

  Melinda, whose photograph you need to bring back memories of her face.

  Your first wife, Melinda.

  Nothing has changed inside booth 7: Four walls and a roof of painted plywood, the plastic bench bolted to the wall opposite the coinbox, a closet of monastic simplicity bathed in the cool blue light of the television monitor. The television and her first video, Fourplay, were waiting there, waiting for Delacorte’s return. It was the summer of 1983, and after a three-martini lunch that sealed the settlement of another lawsuit, Delacorte found himself wandering north along 14th Street, watching the next of its ancient buildings fall prey to the swinging metal ram of the demolition crane. Three stories of red brick and dirty windows, haven of stripshows and massage parlors, were broken in half, blasted into dust. An adult bookstore would follow, the final domino, and the block would be cleansed, made ready for secretarial pools and stock options.

  Whether his footsteps were impulsive or merely inevitable, he found the alleyway and escaped the August sun in the dank solace of Peepland. The old ways came back to him too easily. The crumpled dollars from his pants pocket were transmuted into quarters, and he made his way to booth 7 with nervous certainty: that she would be waiting, that she would be gone, and disappointment settled into his gut as the video played out its plotless episodes, the random collision of anonymous bodies in anonymous rooms. The male star, a mustachioed Ron Jeremy, plied his smirking sexplay on a series of listless bodies until one dollar, two dollar, three dollar, four brought on the final scene, the gigolo and his latest conquest, a slutty Amber Lynn, tangling the sheets of a soundstage bed. Through an angle of light, a French maid enters, black fishnets and white ruffles, and feigns surprise with a silent surge of her lips. A latticed door is the shield through which she peers at the writhing couple, whose contortions urge her own fingers to touch at her breasts, her stomach and at last between her legs. There is no doubt that it is her. The hair is brunette, a shag cut, like Fonda in Klute, and she is no longer thin but lean, her stance effortless and athletic and all so knowing as she works open the buttons of the insipid uniform, unveils a budding body, still so young, so pale, so fragile and yet so willing: her mouth and at last her taut darkness taking in her fingers with such singleminded joy.

  This time she did not escape him. Delacorte insisted on buying the video, haggling with the clerk until, after a phone call, the man accepted a hundred dollars, cash. As Delacorte returned to the sunbaked street, tape tucked beneath his arm, he blinked at the relentless light and knew with a sudden certainty where the visions would go, coiled in black cases, unleashed from the rundown storefronts, the back-alley theatres, the bygone houses of the holy and sent into the living rooms, the bedrooms, the dens of suburbia, where videodecks in the thousands, the millions, would loop out her secret life and, in time, make it public.

  Her name is Charli Prince. It is a new name, taken for her headline role in the Vivid Video production known as Air Force Brat. Or perhaps the name was always hers, but only now, in her newfound fame, is it worthy of revelation. For her very first film credit, a seven-minute Swedish Erotica loop in which she gave a dreamy blowjob to a dusky construction worker, she was known simply as Cherie. The loop ran in booth 12 of Peepland for five weeks in the winter of 1980: Hostages held in Iran; Reagan’s election; the space shuttle taking flight. Then came a series of loops for Pleasure Principle Productions in which she took third or fourth billing as Cheri Redd. Her hair was long and wicked, thickets of crimson fire that she flung furiously from side to side as men in ones and twos were taken into her mouth and then her vagina before spilling necklaces of pearly white across her throat and chest.

  When he first heard her voice – that throttled cry of “Yeah, yeah . . . yes” cut short by gasps so pained that she may as well have been knifed – she was known as Lotte Love. He was huddled in what he hoped was a clean seat at the Olympic Theatre at 15th Street, just below H Street; a bank building now towers over its grave. He was watching her first feature film, directed by Radley Metzger and called Carnal Souls. Though Metzger’s films have found a skewed legitimacy, this one seems to have disappeared, with rare and usually oblique references in the filmographies. For years, Delacorte had to settle for two weatherbeaten publicity stills, found in a pricey collector’s catalog; in 1989, after his biotech clients consumed their leading competitor, he bought a 16 mm print. His memories of the movie, except for those of her scene, were muddled by the years; but the story was one he could not forget. A church organist, played with coy perfection by Kelly Nichols, fellates the hunky parish priest and then leaves a small midwestern farm town in shame, reckless with remorse, only to die when her car plunges from a bridge. Awakening in purgatory, she expiates her sins through a series of triple-X encounters with other lost souls. One of the dear departed – none other than Lotte Love – laments having never made love to a woman, and Kelly has no choice but to comply.

  It is one of his favorite scenes. She takes Kelly to the floor like a famished lion, not so much kissing as tasting her, from mouth to breasts to cunt and then back again. Her lips are fuller now, pouty and stung by bees. Her complexion is clear, burnished carefully by sun or sunlamp, and those blue eyes shine with a singleminded desire. The red of her hair is brighter, slashed with black. She owns the scene; she controls each gesture, each movement, even when she lies supine, Kelly’s fingers inside her.

  He remembered one other thing about Carnal Souls. It was that night, early in the eighties, that he entered the bookstore next to the Olympic and began to buy the magazines. Not many of them, not at first, just one or two each month: Adam Film Quarterly, Triple X World and the rest, devoted to the burgeoning adult movie trade. Searching, ever searching, for photos of her, and rewarded again and again as she flashed and fondled and fucked her way out of obscurity and i
nto his eager heart. In Gent she straddled a jockstrapped football player, teasing his erection with her cheerleader’s pompons; in Knave she sucked the spike heel of a Nazi-uniformed prison matron. Her wrists were circled with rope in Bondage Life; she knelt, her buttocks striped with welts, in Submission: she glistened, in red and in black, in Latex Lovers’ Guide.

  In the January 1986 issue of Gallery, she shed the skin of Lotte Love to pose as the “Girl Next Door” from Missouri, Sherry Ellen Locke: birthdate 6/11/64, passions for cowboy films, white chocolate, the Indy 500. He might not have noticed but for the pose on page 103: the tilt of her shoulders as she leaned over the hood of a vintage Ford Mustang, the careless but knowing thrust of her chin and breasts and hips. It took only a second look, and by then it was obviously her.

  Her hair was straight and silky, insufferably blonde, the kind of blonde that mingles silver and white; her breasts had inflated to ripe and impossibly firm grapefruits. A deep tan, cooked under California sun, was slit with the blue stripe of a T-back bikini bottom. On the following pages she is beyond glorious, bending and twisting in white garter belt and stockings, draping a poolside loungechair in nothing but high heels and suntan oil, spreading her legs wide for all to see.

  With each new magazine, each new video, each new vista, she opens herself to you, shows you some wisdom in a world of skin and muscle, nylon and silk, latex and rubber, leather and chain, where the unknowable is expressed by the down of blonde peach fuzz, a taut stomach, tensed thigh. She is immaculate and she is invincible, a wingless angel, unreachable perfection; and she is insatiable. She is now called Sherilyn, as you learn when paging through an issue of Video Xcitement, your fingertips bruised with cheap newsprint. You order her solo video from Southern Shore and watch her undress and dance to the distant sound of rock-and-roll while the picture fades into sunsets and at last a silver dildo.