Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction

by Richard Bowes

  Once the nurse left, Olive wept until she lost desire to weep. She felt sleepy and contented. She was pinned again to the bed, but by her own arms and legs, and it did not alarm her. At some point, she thought she smelled Caleb, but when she opened her eyes, the rough-skinned nurse was forcing sips of milky sugared tea down her throat.

  She woke up in the darkness. Another weight dropped onto her bed, but this time beside her. She squinted at it. It was blacker than the darkness, and she could only make out the silhouette. Was it man shaped? She reached out to it, and something warm—a hand?—clasped hers. The perfume was familiar. The attendant. He’d returned as he promised. She reached out again, but felt nothing. He was gone.

  “Please don’t leave me,” she said. “Please stay.”

  So he did.

  The nearest surgeon was a week’s journey away. Doctor Cole continued the laudanum regimen—though it confounded the nursing staff that in the mornings, when Olive should be low and begging for her next dose, she hardly seemed to need it at all.

  She was serene and calm, and nearly even friendly. However, her fair skin was turning pallid and moist, and she grew thinner at an alarming rate. Her spine stood in relief through her stomach, as if she was lying on a snake.

  Doctor Cole took her measurements, and even his constant insincere smile wavered.

  She wasted away, in both senses, during the day. Her husband came to weep at her bedside a few times and she held his head, supporting his neck, without pleasure or annoyance, though the smell of milk and sugar would then hang in the air like a ghost long after he left, and would only dissipate after she voided the contents of her belly.

  Hours passed and she examined the embroidery of the coverlet, or watched the sunbeam move across her room and disappear.

  When the sunbeam disappeared, that meant it was night.

  And at night, the attendant came to her. He sat beside her, and ran his hands through her hair. Then he lay beside her, and ran his hands down her body.

  Then he climbed on top of her. The first time, though he was tender, moderate in movement, and as still as he could, Olive understood that he had been the weight dropped upon her, choking her from dreams. He was a beast who had well studied the habits and peculiarities of the living, but innocent to their practice. And he hadn’t meant to hurt or frighten her but rather he sat upon her that night because he had chosen her for the most intimate of examinations. Not a hunter with prey though, if that is how he thought of their encounters, she was willing quarry.

  Once, when she was in finishing school, she’d distracted herself riding a nubbed tree branch. She’d thought she’d damaged herself once the paroxysm subsided, and thenceforth she avoided that tree from fear and embarrassment.

  But these nights, under the sure hand of her lover, Olive felt that damage again and again. It took her less and less time between to catch her breaths, though he couldn’t control how quickly he drained her essence.

  He, though a devil, worried over her. He would find another from which to feed, he whispered to her. Much more time with him would kill her. Then he would kiss her forehead before he left in a gesture of farewell.

  But Olive begged him to return to her, and he was compelled by her asking.

  On the seventh day, Olive’s body was down to its bones and organs. The nurses ascribed her bright eyes to a fever, though Olive knew it was that she was finally clear sighted.

  At her bedside, Doctor Cole debated the procedure with the surgeon. She is too weak, said one. But this may save her life, said the other. The sobs, she smelled the ones that came from her husband in sour caramel. The nurses, in and out of focus, smiled down at her with the smile one gives the dying.

  Olive closed her eyes for the last time. He’d set her free. She was already cured.

  Doctor Oliver Reed’s title was largely ceremonial, but his patients did not mind. It was no lie that he had trained under the right hand of a master.

  Any suspicions prompted by his recent appearance in the field, his lack of an office or the late hour of his house calls, were superseded by his startling results.

  By the height of Doctor Reed’s career, nerve-vibration and excitation through medical massage as treatment for functional hysteria were already lauded as the only reliable and proper course—taken from, as Doctor Reed explained to his patients—the original writings of the great physician Galen.

  Numerous were its symptoms, but the cure was simple.

  “Call me Oliver,” the doctor told his new patient. She was a hale woman of thirty-two, and he figured she could handle three visits with him before he drained more vitality than could be countered by treatment.

  She smiled at him finally. “May I get you some tea first?”

  “Yes, please,” Doctor Reed told her. “No milk.”

  “No,” she agreed. “I prefer it straight.” She leaned over to whisper. “My husband insists I take it with milk and sugar. As he does.”

  She was ready. “Perhaps we can take tea afterward,” the doctor said.

  Her hair was auburn in the candlelight, with a soft sheen he knew came from painstaking care and disciplined brushing. It was loosely bound with a ribbon, which he gently untied and laid at the bedside. “This won’t hurt a bit,” he said as he combed the bit of silk free with his fingers. He took his time.

  Unveiled

  J. Daniel Stone

  A painfully skinny androgyne at the drab third-floor window of her drab third-floor apartment, tobacco-stained tongue running across lips striped black. The record she plays is on repeat, the couch that is taking over her body is scrungy and the Manic Panic hair dye reeks like poison. Dreaming … thinking … demon … monster. I’m a monster. But then the curtain (Salvation Army special) flapped, unveiling the cryptic lyrics she’d scrawled in scarlet across the pane: Believability—Menocide—Unveiled.

  She would evoke none of the goddesses of ash and salvation. What came had no marks of cultural inferiority, no decay to speak of. Rather, it had many names and many faces juxtaposed and disengaged; a supranatural force that lived within maddening melodies of her music.

  “You grieve long and hard,” the incubus, the goblin, the fiend said.

  She brought a bottle of wine to her lips, leaving a black smear across the tip.

  “I know when one hides their feelings. You hide yours quite overtly.”

  “No kidding,” sharp little face hidden beneath still-wet dreads smearing black.

  This girl was a master of the rictus grin, the kind a corpse makes. Like a corpse there was no possible way that he could read her thoughts for she’d already blocked him out of her head: the little wisp was a gifted child. She seemed pleasantly surprised when he said her name, even though it was already stapled to the walls on cheap neon poster prints and inscribed in gold like spilled beer across all of the records that she’d recorded with her band. Delilah Dellinger, such a devilish name to compliment a silhouette clad in black on black on black.

  “Are you in mourning?”

  “Nope.”

  “I think you are. You’ve lost your one true love. I can feel it.”

  “Ghost drawl.”

  Her tattoos bulged furiously through the tight lace that covered her arms—bats, a squiggling road map, musical scales. Her demeanor did not match her mystical outer grace. She almost had a Stevie Nicks flair about her, that is until one realizes that Delilah is generally cold and oppressive, the natural characteristics that hide vulnerability. Too smart for her own good and far too mentally bruised for her twenty-three years, Delilah often spoke about her frustration with the dead, death itself and her pure rejection of it. She flat out refused to die, refused to stand fucking still. Her lyrics were flawed by words like “ghost hunting” and “Shadow Man” and “astral projection”: the haunted part of her life she wanted to erase. Hunting ghosts had been Clive’s thing, and Delilah flat-out ruined that relationship. But what she never said out loud was how bad she felt about it. Delilah did not know how to
grieve privately; public grief was a performance.

  “Would you ever consider loving a man? A demon? A monster?”

  “Clive’s dead and talking to the worms. I don’t think much about love.”

  “Independent movement?”

  “Rational thinking.”

  There is a Bible of rules that states a proper incubus must covet his charge while possessed by the swirling paralysis of REM sleep, or drunk on a week’s worth of rotgut whiskey. But Delilah hardly slept. Bruise-dark bags suffused beneath eyes the color of blue fire; a constant bitterness flowered within her like it would any insomniac. But as complex as the human body has evolved to survive, it also needs to repair the damage brought on by stress, rage, depression, and intoxicating substances. Sleep is the only cure for all that is deemed terrible while awake. Without rest, one can die.

  He loomed above her. “When you sleep it’s like your body is suspended between pain and regret before you wake up screaming, only shutting up as the bottle hits your lips.”

  “Congratulations. Want a lollipop?”

  “You’re running from your dreams.”

  Through self-medication and music therapy, Delilah was able to half function, at least enough to make band practice and write new songs. Though women are considered the weakest link in the game of gender equality, the incubus knew that they were twice as strong. They bear children, are the pillar of every family and their emotions can render them extremely feral beneath the veil of complete control.

  “You still dream of Clive.”

  Delilah slipped a crazy colored CD into the stereo. “That’s if he can catch me.”

  “He’s what I’d call your personal poltergeist. Dead … but not dead enough.”

  “I already told you to stay out of my fucking dreams!”

  “Your anger fascinates me. If I could only touch you … I imagine you’d incinerate me.”

  “Such a passive-aggressive poet you are. Why do you care?”

  “I admire you.”

  “I’m a fucking plague. The Rage Plague.” She bit at her dark lacquered fingernails.

  “Your Rez loves you. And Alex too.”

  This was Delilah’s second year in New York City and the memories of the Pennsylvania boondocks were about as fresh as the day-old fish sold in Chinatown. A once-smalltown girl succumbed to the city’s fervor and spent nights sulking in damnation and days with insouciant nightmares brought a bottle of cheap red wine. Music was her guide. She soon befriended the city’s local denizens, her apartment often sheltering drug deals and squatters, scrawny metal heads snorting whatever they could crush for a good time, and Brooklyn hipsters using their parents’ cash to score a taste of the real New York narcotic scene. Delilah never liked the hipsters; they claimed to know what hard work was, what living on the edge really felt like, so long as they had the cushion of their parents’ trust-fund account. But once Delilah’s fist met their teeth, they never spoke like that again.

  Two men lived in the apartment as well. Delilah called the frayed-looking one Rez and the girlish-looking one Alex. Rez was her twin brother and Alex was her best friend. All three of them were twined into the same disposition of angst, dread, and depression that tends to plague the few fringe scenes left in this city. Alex and Rez were partners, which often meant Delilah was left alone while they did what young boys do. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tag along; she just hated to be the wraith-like presence between a pair of boys who were so sickeningly in love. The gossip within the fringe scene claimed that she was asexual.

  “Shut the fuck up about them.” Her kohl-smeared eyes glossed with tears.

  “Don’t you know that I love you?” His voice a crescendo of need.

  She’d heard those words in a past life.

  “Sounds like something I heard before.”

  “Maybe it’s something I’ve already said to you.”

  “I don’t recall ever having a conversation with a ghost.”

  “Let me take away the pain,” he begged.

  “You’ll never get in my head, never know the truth. I refuse to wilt to your advances.”

  Delilah chugged from the wine bottle. On the ceiling dog-eared posters hung like butcher meat; the Heavy Metal superheroes she admired stared frozen with gawked mouths and fuck-me eyes, spreading comfort across Delilah’s sharp face. Admiration was the most lenient term for her love of music. She could find herself as any one of those oily forms in black leather, but for the ocean of indifference between them. Delilah was an amalgamation of passion, terror, and rage, finest ingredients that a self-proclaimed songwriter could never dream of.

  “Sometimes you just gotta smile, pretend and forget,” Delilah said, slipping a butterfly blade out of her pocket. It fluttered alive in her hand.

  “Doesn’t it hurt to cut that way?”

  “You mean you can’t feel pain?”

  “I don’t remember much about life.”

  So alive when I’m with you. She closed her eyes. “Physical pain belittles the emotional.”

  Delilah wore that infamous grin again as the knife created a tiny squiggling worm of blood across her wrist. It reminded her of how they first met: in the dark naturally, the moonlight soft as fur, the incense smoke trailing like a will-o’-the-wisp and the candlelight suffusing warmth in the hollows of her face. Delilah had just cut herself behind the knee, right through her black jeans as her body gyrated to a sinister song and her mind swayed between the temptations of passing out or insomnia. A warm autumn wind brought in the smell of piling garbage, spray paint, and spicy marijuana smoke. The tune playing in the background was “Flesh of Eve,” song two off the debut EP from her band Electric Orchid. Delilah’s voice had crawled out of the speakers like a séance, an original masterpiece poisoned with sorcery and malice. Her lyrics cut deep as her own knife, but it wasn’t until she scrawled a screaming line of poetry on the window pane that he came out of hiding.

  I’ll never speak of that moment so long as I live. She rocked back and forth, staring at the scramble of words on the window. There he caught his own reflection clouded by hers: faint ectoplasmic smear soft as spider web, much like Delilah’s soul. He’d already read her diaries, her forbidden book of lyrics. She’d written about Clive a thousand heartbreaking times, how she’d shown him her murky dream world, how she took it all away.

  Her famous angry scowl. “Shall I repeat myself again?”

  “As drunk as you are, you’re still the most eloquent girl I know.”

  All of a sudden Delilah was arguing with herself back and forth, an uncontrollable tide: the temptation of suicide but her pure fear of the act, the wounds from the butterfly blade on her wrists and calves forming a new set of scar tissue.

  Life does not have to be lived like some broken record.

  I can be my own person.

  “If you just let me unveil what’s inside you: your deepest desires, your true longings, we could—”

  “We?” She began to laugh. “There will never be a we.”

  “Cold as always, Delilah. Scared little girl refusing to explore her wants to save face.”

  Delilah bolted to her feet as if on the go and grabbed her pack of smokes. “I have a show tonight.”

  Too hot for October, humidity like August and the sudden smell of rain, the reality of it iridescent on the blacktop. Delilah bolted with the Vector microphone clutched to her chest, a snarling clump of girl-flesh as he tailed her through the streets of Alphabet City. Easy to track: just follow the trail of clove cigarettes and the forever turmoil of a pissed-off girl that lingers in the heavy air.

  Most of the blocks were alive with the usual bustle; the rest were dead as doornails. Not such a scary place anymore as it was scarily safe. The graffiti was sparse and the storefront windows were finally beginning to lose their runny coat of grease vapors. One did not catch the sore sight of a bum pissing in a random alleyway, or a strung-out junkie willing to rob you dry so long as he can get his fix. But the tenements that were
n’t filled with transplant posers paying holier-than-thou rents still spoke of bad times, of poor families three generations in, of the city’s bureaucratic capability of keeping certain people of certain color and status on this side of the jaded street and everyone else safe on the other side.

  The window to the bar was clouded with a massive number of grayscale posters that read Electric Orchid Tonight! Delilah noticed that someone had burned her band’s insignia into the wood door; that’s how serious her fans were. Past the entrance and she barely showed her I.D. to the doorman who was pleased to let her in without fault. Like many girls, Delilah denied her feral features; the grace of her high cheekbones, tiny chin, and straight teeth without the help of braces made her all the more beautiful. But all that beauty didn’t change the fact that she was the lead singer of tonight’s headlining band, and so everyone knew her by face if not by name, knew her age too.

  Inside was dark as some fucked-up X-ray; a world without color, the absence of light. Pipes lined the ceiling like varicose veins and the punky floorboards rattled beneath her Grinders. The deafening PA system vomited nu-metal and British punk, way too up-to-date a system given the ramshackle culture. Delilah eyed the poor excuse for a stage in the back and then took a panoramic view: random metalheads clad in dirty clothes called out to her and the usual grunge-punk-industrial posers sat in cliques sipping bright green cocktails that made their lips shimmer.

  Same fringe kids, but a good turnout.

  With twenty dollars in her pocket and happy hour slipping into its last moments of cheap drinks and half-smiling faces, she planned to order her cold black heart out. Drinking before a show soothed her because alcoholism did not exist in her vocabulary. The bartender would not take her money. For you everything is on the house! Bad juju to charge the headlining band’s lead singer even with the bar three people thick. Delilah accepted, and the Dog Fish Head 90 Minute IPA was like carbonated floral heaven as it invaded her tongue, double hopped and laid over the golden thickness of barley. She licked the wet remnants of the filmy head from the glass in such an erotic fashion that three hipsters turned their heads, interested, but soon had to look away when they caught a good glimpse of the snarling skinny girl with crazy hair.