“I think they liked you.”
Delilah swung her Vector microphone toward the sound and clocked a depressed-looking girl in the face. She screamed, dropped her beer, and covered her mouth with a little pale hand that instantly slimed the color of blood mixed with dark lipstick. No one made any sudden movements because most kids knew about Delilah’s temper, and the fact that Delilah just stood there vexed rather than apologizing surprised nobody. Damn voice, Delilah thought. It pissed her off that he could follow her wherever she went. Weren’t most ghosts supposed to be bound to the place where they died? Many laws of the underworld were certainly broken.
Stubborn in her own way, Delilah would finish her drink, play her show and then leave like nothing was between them. But before that she would indulge in some good old-fashioned sweet leaf. Beneath the guise of gaudy hookah one could order a fat stash of sour diesel and smoke it scot-free in here for a night of relaxing and talking smack. It was a smart way to bring some of the culture of Amsterdam to a small dive in Manhattan. Delilah’s hookah was gold plated and ornate as an Arabian king’s throne; she took three huge pulls before she felt the flowers bloom in her skull, before she felt as if she was living in a new skin to become so chatty.
“Aren’t you supposed to be stuck in the last place that saw you alive?” she asked.
“Not when such gifted beings as you can talk to us.”
Delilah chugged her beer.
“You’re killing yourself to live, Delilah. What a waste.”
“I see Clive … in my dreams, okay? I can’t get him out of my goddamn head! I wish I knew how, but I don’t.” Delilah pulled on her hair and her eyes widened. A few kids embraced one another as if she was going to explode.
“I can get him out. I’m a jealous—”
“You’re a fucking haunt, not God—”
“Let me inside you.”
Inside you.
“No!”
“Then do as you always do: drink yourself into a stupor and dream like there’s no end to regret.”
“Stay out of my damn head. Rez warned me.”
“Your brother’s sensitive. But he has it all wrong, love.”
Hair whipping out of control, small scarred hand rubbing her temple. “Liar.”
“Seeing Clive in your dreams makes him your incubus. Not me.”
The door slammed and Delilah’s band came straggling through in a cloud of cigarette ash—three bony blots of darkness—with instruments on their backs, bringing with them the stench of Jägermeister and warm summer nights. Billy, Jimmy, and Sheigh barely exchanged a glance with Delilah before they set up in the equipment in back of the dive.
“You’d think she would’ve helped us bring the shit in from the trunk,” Delilah heard Jimmy say as he unloaded the custom Warlock strapped to his back.
“She’s in one of her quiet moods again … nothing personal,” Sheigh said.
“Or maybe she’s become a real diva now that we’ve had some minor success.”
Blah. Blah. Blah. All talk. Delilah just wanted to play, wanted to tear into the world so deep with her music that she’d be able to smell the dark force that keeps the universe in balance. And then finally she saw Alex stroll in, beautiful as always in his genderless fashion, multicolored hair tied into a pony tail and that same huge trench coat hanging heavy on his fragile bones. Rez was not far behind him, chatting with a couple of friends about the advance reading copy of some beat poet’s novel he was obsessed with.
“Alex,” Delilah screamed.
“Hey, D. You ready?”
“I don’t know if I can do this tonight.”
“Still having those dreams?” Alex wrapped his skinny arm around her shoulders.
Delilah’s head craned to lean on Alex’s collarbone. “Clive’s usual begging.”
“He’s still looking to get laid? He hasn’t changed, even in death.”
“You’re the only one who knows that he’s haunting me.”
“Remember what I told you: as long as you ignore him, he can’t get to you. He can always look, but can never touch,” Alex said.
“What if I made that mistake already … what if I made a certain contact?”
“Then we’re taking too many steps back into the past. I thought those days were dead.” Alex kissed Delilah’s flushed cheek. “Oh, gods, you’re wearing way too much powder.”
All of a sudden quiet, doomsday lingering, and the shadows in the bar began to ravage Alex’s face. On the way to the stage Delilah watched the bobbling drunken heads of the crowd lose themselves in talk, cheap beer, and a universal love for music. They smelled of dirty clothes, stale cigarettes, and teenage dreams. Delilah felt those same butterflies like when she’d first played in New York, that night still so fresh in her mind: downtown club full of wasted youth, wasted talent, and wasted needs. Would she still wow them? Would she still be the reigning queen of the underground music scene as all of those downtown and Brooklyn publications labeled her?
Only one way to find out.
Time to fly.
Smoke machine out of control and the lights a stroboscopic rage. Sheigh’s distorted bass shook the stage madly; Billy’s drumstick kissed a cymbal three times before Alex’s synthesizer rang out like something derived from Black Sabbath’s Sabotage album. Delilah closed her eyes and allowed music to be in control; her lips brushed the edge of the Vector microphone and her fingers spread across it in a powerful grip. Jimmy charged steadfast, his feet slamming at his damaged guitar pedals for crazy effects, and unleashed a beastly parade of chords and pinch harmonics like screaming birds. And so Delilah opened her mouth, let her voice flood the room like a silver river.
Green slate sky dark as pain
Manifest the decadence
I call the goddess to reign
It was risky to open their set with a new song, and it had taken hours of Delilah’s begging to convince the band to do such. The fans like our shows to be a certain way. Delilah understood their concerns: you have to start a set with a hit in order to reel the crowd in, to make them feel like they want to stay. But Delilah liked to take chances. The song was entitled “Ambigrams & Palindromes,” inspired straight from the pages of Rez’s speculative short fiction. Jimmy had written the key-note change, chorus, and bridge within an hour after he’d read Delilah’s lyrics, the bottle of Jäger only half empty and already blazing in their stomachs: a writing milestone. Sheigh threw her bass line over it fluid as mercury, as did Alex and Billy with their respective instruments. But it was Delilah’s melodies which remained the most controversial.
The night is in control
Under the guise of demons
Her mind will open into a black hole
Voice of purgatory, of the stairway to hell, and soon the crowd dispersed. Did they not like the new music? Did they not understand that an artist must evolve, must keep moving forward in order to not make a joke of herself? Delilah closed her eyes and continued her rough vocal line, but when she opened them again she saw dozens of tall, lanky kids with disheveled hair and ghost hunting cameras swaying in their hands. Had she fallen asleep?
Only one way to find out.
Delilah began her molt, ripping free from the skin of reality, and stepped off the stage. Behind her, the other Delilah was still singing as her dream body sailed through the sea of faceless bodies and entered the astral plane. Honeycombed descent, labyrinthine, and the sky was the color of pumpkin teeth; the moon rolled cold and snapped fierce as lightning. This place might as well have been the underworld of Kur, the loathsome lair of Lilitu and Alû. Maybe the goddesses of redemption and plague would finally come, her muses, her salvation.
Slate-colored road pale against her black boots, and Delilah knew that no direction was safe; in this world, every road is the one of needles. Delilah lifted her arms to show her insidious tattoos, the razor scars a beacon to all the lingering suicide ghosts. She kept singing because her music attracted the dead, because in this world each word was a w
eapon, each sound another building block to answers most sought after. There was no way around it: if she was going to stop the dreams, if she was going to become whole again, she’d have to make contact. Fuck what Alex said. Enough was enough.
“You still sing beautifully, love.”
Clive had startled Delilah; she actually flinched, and hated the fact that she did. He stood tall as she remembered him, a long time since she’d seen his face, a long time since she’d fucked everything up. The grimy ghost-hunting device was held by hands covered in thief’s gloves; the Misfits t-shirt hung loose on his torso and the usual beanie covered his ratty English hair.
“What the hell do you want?” she asked.
“You have to ask after all these weeks? To finish what we started, love. You know you feel guilty about what you did to us.”
Weeks? Delilah saw the shape-shifting presence behind Clive, his own wasted shadow. It was thin, wretched.
“All that pathetic poetry. Just like when you were alive,” she said.
Clive’s lips pursed but his eyes remained tired. Was he still hunting ghosts in death? Could a ghost hunt another?
“You’ve given me a new life in dream. I’m so alone. All I want is you, mon fleur vénéneux.”
“I’m not your fucking concubine.”
Clive laughed. “In this place the rules are not your own. My dreams are yours, and yours are mine. I can feel your anger in here, your guilt. You liked what we had. But as with everything else … you ruined it.”
“I just don’t want it.”
Clive shook his head. “An empty, indecisive answer as always.”
“You’re no Freddy Krueger; you’re not a living nightmare. You’re just my fading memory.”
“Don’t you miss me, Delilah? I miss you, your music, and the sound of your voice; I miss its power, how it brought us to here. Don’t you remember bringing us here?”
She didn’t answer Clive right away, couldn’t answer him. The memory of their night in the alleyway by the Cabal art gallery came streaming before her eyes like a skipping record. Oh, the way Clive manipulated her mind and her flesh, the way his strong hands stroked her hair, her breasts, and oh, how his words coerced her legs to open and her panties to slip off! It was so easy to give in, to let hormones pave over critical thinking: she wanted him so bad. She wanted to feel loved, protected, desired.
“I remember how you looked at me,” Clive said with a shallow smile. “I remember how you let me touch you.”
The Jäger was still fresh on their tongues and the cloves had been smoked past the filter; all of a sudden they were kissing, long and deep, tongues and teeth, mouth-flesh and the walls of her vagina began to throb in time with her confused heart. Animalistic, and the rain warm as the sweat between them but tasteless as the hollow fuck session in a sleazy city alleyway filled with rats the size of cats. Her body burned with desire, and she was about to explode before she realized that what they were doing was wrong. The light that night just wasn’t right; the way Clive grew obsessive was too much to handle. He was going to love her forever, be by her side forever—until she put a stop to it.
The cornfed complacency of man and woman ruling the world will not infect me.
She wouldn’t fall for Clive, and the only way she knew to escape was through song. So she began a vociferous melody, let the very cells of her stop dividing so her soul could slide free from her body like umbilical residue. She grabbed hold of Clive tight as they entered the dream world she had been visiting since she was a little girl.
“If you would’ve let us be together … ” His English accent began to unravel to a drawl. Unveiled, he said, “I’d not have to sneak into your life, into your dreams under the guise of a mythological imbecile.”
“We don’t belong together. You were bad for me then and you’re bad for me now.”
Hangover pain like someone had dropped a brick on her head, and Delilah was brought back into the night Clive almost raped her. They were trapped in a burning building in Long Island City cleaving to life by the magic of aerosol art and the control of old ghosts. Clive had already beaten Rez to a bloody pulp for disagreeing with Clive’s love for Delilah; he’d manhandled Delilah to the point of nearly passing out. The anger over Delilah’s refusal to love him helped Clive call upon an anger that convinced him that if he could not have Delilah in life, then he’d have her in death.
The knife gouge in her side was pulsing darkly and the blood was molten over her stomach and chest. Her legs were open and her skirt was ripped; her body was so weak she could barely fight him off. It wasn’t until his hands had slid up her thigh, teasing the warm heat of her, that Delilah knew she was so vulnerable that Clive could do whatever he wanted, that no one would care, no one would help. He would pluck his sweet flower and then crush her in the end.
“I thought an incubus was a rather good disguise. Creature of seduction and insatiability. Now that would work for me. Not you,” Delilah said with her hands molding into fists. “After all you did? After the scars you left me, after the dignity you nearly stole?”
“Fuck you. Just fuck you. It was your teasing—”
“It’s over! You can’t hurt me; you’re a powerless, bitter ghost unable to move away from the life you cursed yourself into.”
Clive stepped closer, his limbs elongating, his hair lengthening and his shadow shrinking. His face was mangled by rage and jealousy, and it was the last thing Delilah saw before their bodies clashed, skin to ectoplasm, bones snapping and blood spilling thickly as the ghost of her past invaded without permission. Her head throbbed and one of her legs fell limp in pain, but she was on the offensive fast, and Delilah’s nails ripped furrows into Clive’s face. Their mingled blood had the consistency of jelly and smelled of a sewer.
Old death.
“You killed me.” His voice only a hectic whisper. “You broke my heart … ”
Delilah felt her insides wrench. As much as she’d have loved to take Clive on in a street brawl, Delilah knew that there was no point. That story had already been told. That story would involve keeping his memory alive when all she wanted was for him to be truly dead. And so she called upon the only thing that had ever saved her when she needed it the most: music. Her voice belted like an anti-melody to this dream world. Everything writhed uncomfortably as the image of Electric Orchid on stage came closer and closer as Delilah rode her musical ascension towards reality. She watched in pity as Clive was unable to follow; it seemed he was locked within his own shadow, never truly able to see past the dark times, much like a shadow is always dark.
And so he disappeared as if she’d never even known him.
Because her words were about rejection, of Delilah no longer needing old ghosts and never letting her feelings get the best of her, Electric Orchid played an extended set. There can be no explanation as to how music can cure a bad feeling, a virus of guilt, or a plaguing past. It just needs to be accepted. It was as enigmatic as magic itself. Delilah finished the last song with a throat-tearing scream and the sea of faces was left astonished, mind-fucked, their mouths hanging open like atrophy.
The Wedding Guest
Steve Chapman
He looked young, beach handsome with the blond hair and cheekbones. Not remotely her type. But each time Kristen stole a glance at him, he was staring back.
She sat alone at the table, her assigned seatmates off dancing and boozing, congratulating the happy couple. Robby was outside with a clutch of cronies, cigars, and shop talk. Dinner was done, the cake cut. Now there were only the endless hours between the end of the formal festivities and the forced evacuation of the ballroom, her least favorite part of any wedding.
The dire band played on, no end in sight.
Kristen had set a deadline of this evening—Mandy’s wedding, the family together, watching and judging—to decide. She could have a baby, counting on it to save her marriage. Or she could have an affair, certain its revelation would manage what she could not—the marriage’s e
nd.
She nursed the gin and tonic, her fourth, and decided she favored the baby. She imagined him raven-haired like his mother, the salve she and Robby needed to repair themselves, to fix whatever mysterious ailment had ruined them.
All she needed to do was get pregnant.
The blond young man stared, making no attempt to hide his interest. Kristen looked away—directly at her mother, glaring daggers back at her. She lowered her gaze to the table. Maybe he was about to come over, to take one of the empty seats beside her. That would give her mother and sisters something to talk about.
Kristen grabbed her drink and left the ballroom, wandering into the winding halls of the old hotel. Through oval windows she could see the dunes, strobes of lightning etching the dark ocean beyond.
When she had first felt the vertiginous despair in Robby’s presence, when she found herself more disappointed when he made it home than when he didn’t, she’d done what she always had—asked her mother. But where in the past Dorothy had offered rueful slices of hard-won wisdom in response to Kristen’s troubles, this time the intelligence drained from her eyes.
Kristen hadn’t asked again. She understood. There were some decisions that could not be second-guessed or taken back, at least not in her family’s world.
She had tried to fix her marriage, yet she was no closer to understanding what ailed it than she’d been a year ago. Twenty-nine years old, she felt middle-aged. Surrounded by her family, she could talk to no one.
She came to a long, dim room of scarlet and gold, gilded mirrors on the ceiling. The lamps were ensconced in glorious Beaux Arts shades of stained crystal, throwing rippling shadows from the blood-red carpet to the intricate detail of the tin ceiling.
“Another refugee from the ‘music’?” An older man sat alone at the elaborate bar. He might have been forty, fifty. Brown-haired and dark-eyed, he wore a light-colored suit and neatly trimmed beard. “Join me?”
The thought of speaking to someone outside her family, a complete stranger, was intoxicating. She felt a pleasing tingle at the base of her spine. “I’m Kristen.”
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 10