“Right,” said Cally, recognizing Gigi’s familiar cynicism, wondering briefly what would happen if she got a better job, could support herself and her horse; would she leave Mark? The thought left within a breath, because it was no use making plans. The cicada song told her that.
Only after she was out of the woods and off her horse and had returned to Hoadley, to her house that happened to be a funeral home, to what should have been the bosom of her family, did the love-hunger return to her and she remembered, aghast, some of the things Gigi had said. That callous old woman, hard and hollow as a rotten tree, as Devil’s black hooves—all her female organs were gone; had cancer taken her heart, too?
Cally found Mark in the apartment flipping through mortuary supply catalogues, contemplating the dry shampoos guaranteed to remove tobacco stains from moustaches, the New Improved Weldit Lip and Eye Sealer, the No-Mold crystals for use in humans, the Sur-Kill fungicide. Glowering, he did not look up when Cally came in. When, a moment later, someone rapped at the door, she answered it even though she had been on her way to change her clothes, rather than asking him to do so.
At the door stood Barry Beal. Darkly he stared at her from under heavy brows, and for a moment she expected him to ask her if she had seen Joanie. But he had not been asking about Joanie lately. He must have gotten over Joanie since he had been spending time with Ahira and her band of misfits. Maybe he had fastened his childlike devotions on Ahira instead. Had she put her mark on him? Who was to know one way or the other? thought Cally with skewed and sour humor. Ahira’s mark would not show on Barry “Jamhead” Beal’s pinto-patch face.
Barry’s somber stare deepened. “Mrs. Wilmore,” he said with the unprefaced directness of the mentally slow person, “somebody messed up my layout.” He peered at her as though he thought she might have done it somehow, though she had been miles away at the stable.
“Huh?” said Cally, even though the words had been perfectly clear. The girl who had been raped, he meant. There was no other layout in the Perfect Rest at the time.
“Somebody messed up the blanket, and her dress and everything.” Barry shifted his suspicious gaze past Cally to Mark. “Mr. Wilmore, you was around all afternoon. You know who done it?”
“I wasn’t watching, Barry.” Mark came to the door, and Cally moved away. “Probably some prankster,” she heard Mark tell Barry. As indeed it probably had been, especially since the deceased was the girl who had been raped. Certainly her funeral would bring out the worst in people—though after every funeral, even the least likely funerals, Mark had to make sure to search the guest book for sick-sense-of-humor entries before he presented it to the family. “Could have been anybody,” Mark was saying. “Some old gossip curious to see what she looked like under her things. Whoever. Just fix her up again before the viewing this evening, would you?”
Barry’s mind was still stubbornly fixed on the injustice that had been done, not to the girl, but to him. “You mean I got to do her blanket all over again and everything?”
“I’m paying you to do it, right? I’m paying you by the hour. So what’s the difference?” Mark’s voice did not rise. He was really very good with Barry, Cally knew from many past occasions. He was kind to children, gentle with people in general, patient with the rambling mental processes of the elderly, supportive of the bereaved; he was really a very good man. She was surprised to remember how she had married him partly because of that goodness.
“Just pretend it’s another blanket,” Mark was telling Barry. “A whole ’nother job. You don’t have to get it back the same way again.” Mark went out with Barry to look at the damaged layout.
A good man. She knew he had always been faithful to her; he would have been paralyzed with remorse if he had slipped. She remembered his wincing guilt whenever he became annoyed with the children to the point of shouting at them, making them cry. Yet he had showed no such guilt after hitting her that one recent time. And even a few months before, such a scene would have been unthinkable.
Outside the cicadas sang their dirge. The keening voices loudened to Cally’s ears when the door opened and Mark came in again.
“The beast is hungry,” Mark announced to the air of the apartment. “The beast wants his supper.”
Making a mirthless joke of their estrangement.… Cally felt so starved for the sound of his voice that she didn’t mind. “Would the beast perhaps care for some spaghetti?”
Made the day before, it could be warmed tomato sauce and all in the microwave without undue cooking odor to disturb the mourners who would soon be gathering down below. Anxious to please her husband, already moving toward the kitchen, Cally tried to speak lightly. But Mark did not answer.
She warmed the spaghetti and sat across the table from him, watching him eat. Even a few weeks before he would have offered her some, argued with her when she refused, coaxed or bullied her, trying to make her eat. But now he forked spaghetti impassively and did not speak.
Afterward he dressed for the evening viewing and went out into the cicada-chanting dusk. Hiding in the kitchen, Cally gobbled leftover spaghetti. She had meant to put it away in the refrigerator, but handling the food she found herself suddenly unable to keep control; hunger had gotten the better of her at last. She lifted gobs of cooling spaghetti to her mouth with her hands, licking the blood-red sauce off her fingers. It was not enough; would anything ever be enough for her hunger? There were iced sweet rolls in the cake saver. So much neglected food in the house since the kids were gone. She ate the rich pastries, all of them, then went on to assault the contents of the refrigerator. Cold gravy with the slab of congealed fat on top was as good as the cold chicken; cold soup and cold baked beans no more disgusting than the cold raw wieners. She bolted whatever food came to hand until she was gorged, until her stomach swelled as if she was pregnant with her own obsession, until she could not stand up straight. She sat on the kitchen floor amid droppings and splatters of sauce and juice and gravy, amid a devastation of greasy, empty Tupperware, with slimed face and filthy hands, and hated herself.
After a few moments she heaved herself up, walked bent over like an old, old woman to the bathroom, stood at the john and made herself vomit. She disgorged until nothing was left, until she felt light again, like a bird, as if even her bones were hollow. Then she rinsed her mouth, and washed, and went out to scrub the kitchen and all the evidence in it. She washed herself at the bathroom sink, then again in the kitchen while doing the dishes, then once more in the bathtub afterward, and still felt dirty.
When Mark came back from the viewing his wife was sitting on the bed, waiting for him.
“The beast is home,” he announced dourly to the apartment when he came in. Then, entering the bedroom with suit coat and tie in hand, he saw her.
The fragrance of her perfume covered the lingering odor of vomit. In an absurdly tiny black lace teddy, low below spaghetti straps to show off what Cally seemed to think were breasts, high-cut above her thighs—Mark saw picket-fence ribs, saw hip bones grotesquely jutting, angular as those of a concentration camp victim in some Life magazine photo. Her legs, coquettishly folded, reminded him of nothing so much as broomsticks. Yellow broomsticks; her skin had gone sallow as her hair. Muscles twitched transparently around her nervous mouth. Her nose had thinned to a beak, the juncture between bone and cartilage plainly visible. Wispy fuzz covered her broomstick legs, her dowel-rod arms, as her abused and frantic body tried to warm itself; and despite all that, the crazy woman was trying for a Playboy pose, thought she was attractive, when she was starving herself to death. The nut case. He was done shouting at her, worrying about her. His lip curled as he hung up his suitcoat.
“What wonderful timing,” he said.
She essayed a smile. Shy, it looked sweet and touching even on her hollow-cheeked, fleshless face. Despite the smile, or perhaps because of it, Mark saw that her bony shoulders and fiddlestick arms were shaken by a fine tremor, nearly invisible, her fragile body a violin under a rapid vibrato
. He knew that she was always cold those days, always shivering. He knew that her trembling at this time might not be due entirely to her airy outfit and to chill. Neither fact moved him. The sight of her in no way pleased him.
“I know what you want,” he said to her. Her presence on the bed was not an act of sensual desire; it was an act of fear and desperation and raw need. She did not want sex; she wanted him. She wanted to wind around him, a parasite, to entwine him, possess him, to draw her strength from him. She would be his succubus if he let her, like all the rest of them with their tentacles on him, their despairs leeching away at his life. She would suck him dry, she would take his essence, his soul.
She interpreted his statement as playful, and he saw hope lift her bony head with its careful cap of permed hair the color and texture of dead grass. He had known plastic junk-store dolls with softer hair, and someday soon when she was fussing with it he would tell her so. But for now he would tell her what he thought of her idea for his evening. With his next words he swatted down her hope as surely as if he had swatted her flyweight body down to the floor.
“You stupid airhead,” he told her, quietly but with the joyous hardness that was new to him, that would protect him from whatever threatened to hurt him, that might yet deliver him from Hoadley’s incessant demands; where had he gotten this wonderful hardness? “You total idiot. Look at yourself! Who would ever want to make love with you? You’re like something out of a freak show! The walking skeleton; come see the walking skeleton girl! Who’d want to screw a skeleton? If I want to fuck a dead cunt, I know where I can find one.”
He saw her shrink, trying to cower into her useless scrap of nightgown—but then, as if knocking her down with one hand and picking her up with the other, he lifted her head again with a sudden smile. He knew how to do that, smile. He could show his teeth as well as anyone.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got an idea how we can do this. I finally found something that really turns me on.” His smile broadened, became a boyish grin, but his voice turned knife hard, honed to stab. “You go into the bathroom and run yourself a tub of cold water and soak in it for fifteen, twenty minutes. Then come back out here and just lie real still.”
He watched it hit her, watched it all become clear in her ever-so-intellectual mind. Watched the horror take her face, gape her mouth, she could not speak, she could not yet breathe—and he twisted the knife.
“You got any soft little baby blankets left around here? We’ll cover you with one. Lay it on you in pretty folds. I can’t do it as well as Barry Beal, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’ll just get messed up again when I lift it.”
She scrambled back from him, spiderlike on the bed, her adrenaline surge giving her back her breath, her voice. Though the voice spasmed in her throat. “Oh. Oh. You. You—you beast!”
“Right,” said Mark, and he started to take off his trousers.
Cally plunged off the bed, banging her emaciated knees on the floor, then found her feet and scuttled from closet to dresser, snatching clothing, clutching it against her half-naked, famished chest. Mark, hanging his trousers, stood in her way and laughed at her as she hesitated to come near him, to push past him.
“You were right, you know,” he told her. “This town is going down the tubes. Bears burning on the water tower, crazy bimbo preaching in the park, dead babies coming back as bugs, and now there’s a beast. It all goes to prove you were right. I admit you were right. We’ve got nothing to argue about any more.”
“Get out of my way,” Cally ordered in the same strangled tone, as if her own fury was a noose around her throat, turning her face red and threatening to kill her. Mark winced and pouted in mock pathos.
“You don’t approve of the beast?”
“Go to hell.” Goaded into courage, Cally reached past him to claw her jeans from their hanger. The movement pressed her against him, against the good smell of his tee-shirted neck and shoulders. If he tried to grab her … but his hands did not lift. He stood laughing deep in his chest as she turned and ran into the bathroom to dress where he could not see her. Even above the sound of his own stony mirth he heard the cold-metal sound of the bolt sliding shut.
He followed and stood outside the door, still laughing to make sure she heard him there. She was no longer entirely terrified of him, just wildly angry. He knew what would have thrilled and terrified her: if, after all, he had wanted her. But he preferred her anger. Standing there in his jockey briefs, he preferred to show her what she could plainly see: that even a corpse had roused him more than she.
Bolt slid again, door opened, she stood there clothed, the slim-cut jeans baggy on her, hanging in folds from her protuberant hipbones. Seemed like she was going to turn into an old bag, a craggy-hipped cow, no matter what she did. And too intent on herself to know it.
She said as if she expected him to care, “I’m getting out of here.”
“Where? Going home to Mummy?”
“None of your business.” She scurried circles around his large, half-naked presence in the bedroom, slamming things into a suitcase. A sizable suitcase, but not nearly large enough to hold all the baggage she was going to have to take with her. And she was in a wild hurry, and everything she laid hold of, panties, dreams, shirts and jeans and pain, makeup, break-up, purse and money and memories, they all went in jumbled, confused. Mark knew smugly that she was going to have a mess to sort out and clean up later. When the suitcase was only approximately full, Cally closed it.
“Here,” said Mark with exaggerated solicitude, “let me help you carry that. Wisp like you, arms like spaghetti noodles, you can’t possibly handle—”
She glared, silencing him—she almost frightened him. Her set teeth between thin, thin lips gave her the look of a death’s head, spectral. But she was too much in a rush and tumult to notice how Mark blinked; she snatched up the suitcase, heaved and blundered it out to the door and into the car, an ant carrying away what was left of the picnic. It was in fact very nearly too heavy for her.
“Toodle-loo!” Mark stood on the front lawn in his underwear and waved as she drove away.
“What I mean,” said Borough Council President Wozny, “we’ve got to do something.”
Since the animal-burning incident the night before he had called yet another emergency council meeting. Though nebulous council opinion had long since condensed into a consensus: no longer was it a question of whether there might possibly be a witch. Instead, it was a matter of eradicating the obviously extant witch.
Everyone sitting in the room knew, without Gerald Wozny’s needing to stick his neck out and say it, what he meant by “do something.” Ahira had been proselytizing and healing in the town park three or four times a week, and the council members had their informants; the number of her band of misfits had steadily grown, including even the “woodchucks,” the people who lived in holes and were scared of shadows, from the mountains surrounding the town. People like Bud Zankowski, the crazy coal mine hermit, and the otherwise-nameless Bicycle Man, who rode his eponymous vehicle from house to house sharpening knives and scissors, who slept no one knew where, somewhere so far back in the woods even the deer hunters hadn’t found it. And who was rumored to be a rapist, kidnapper and child molester. These were the sorts of people Ahira attracted. The Hoadley majority, who liked their religion served with coffee and doughnuts, looked on with a queasy, motion-sick sense of indecency at what Ahira was doing, rather as if they were seeing their town roll over like a shit-eating coon hound and show its verminous underbelly and spraddle its legs. Ahira’s band of followers had passed the five hundred mark and was creeping toward the ominous six-six-six. Ahira had to go.
And every day the cicadas wailed.
“Reverent Berkey and Father Leopold don’t want no more to do with it,” President Wozny admitted. “It” being the silencing of Ahira. He would have said more, something inspiring about the secular leaders of the community taking upon themselves the threats facing the community, but
he didn’t like the way the council secretary was looking at him through her aliform glasses. The woman lived to contradict him.
“Something you want to say, Zephyr?” he inquired with a show of resignation.
She laid down her notebook on the table in front of her and crossed her hands atop it; the nails were enameled into blood-red bone-hard spear points much the same shape as her glasses. “I been doing some checking,” she said. “And what I say, that Ahira ain’t your witch at all.” Zephyr paused, waiting for prompting from another council member. It would have been immodest for her to continue without urging. Reluctantly Wozny provided it.
“How come not?”
“She ain’t from around here. Ain’t none of us never seed her before. The ’cyclopedia says a witch is somebody from close at hand.” Zephyr produced a tiny fold of tablet paper from her purse, displaying it as proof of research done, though she did not open it. “It says this here kind of town is perfect for a witch. Any kind of backwater. Places where people just stay, got to put up with each other, one of them gets to be a witch. So what the ’cyclopedia says,”—Zephyr took care to cite opinion greater than her own, authority of Right Here In Black And White potency—“the witch is somebody we knowed from little on up, somebody we’d look right past. Somebody that’s got a secret, somebody—” Zephyr affected a delicate hesitation, but her eyes glinted salaciously behind her rhinestoned glasses. “Somebody different, been hiding it. Light in their loafers, what I mean.”
The other female council member pressed for a clarification of terms. “You mean somebody what’s a sissy, like?”
Tapping at her evidence, Zephyr came right out with it: “Says in here witchcraft’s got to do with all them wrong kinds of—sex.” On the significant word her voice dropped to a nasal leer. Measuring the reaction, she allowed herself satisfaction. Even Gerald Wozny was listening with greatest interest. A well-done presentation, she knew, really very well done.
Apocalypse Page 18