She saw that, like the young man, she could be amused by this place. In fact, her jokes were probably better than his. The corridor twisted again, confronting her, for some reason, with William Tell. He hadn’t yet fired the arrow, and he seemed to be aiming at the white sky, as though the boy with the apple on his head was just incidental.
Strangely soothed, she followed her guide, whose faintly luminous shirt led her on, shorn of head, hands and legs.
They passed a semi-circle of old movie stars, grey and white. Suzie’s glance was drawn to a movement among them.
One of the dummies was stretching out an arm.
It was Charlie Chaplin but her first thought was that this was her father, in disguise, that he was going to wink and step forward before collapsing, along with the student, into conspiratorial giggles at her fright. All a trick, a schoolboy jape: she wouldn’t put it past him. However, the dummy’s pale features remained immobile and its actions confined themselves to the repeated movement of that arm, backwards and forwards. The movement had no connection with Chaplin’s neighbours (Al Jolson, Jean Harlow); it didn’t seem to be greeting, or dancing, or even pushing away. Faintly, Suzie could hear the buzz of a motor.
“He used to have a stick,” said the young man, who had stopped and now stood framed in an entrance full of reddish light. “But it went, I couldn’t say where.” Did that explain anything? Certainly the dummy’s fingers were clenched, as though closed around something. There was an awkward silence in which they both stared at these fingers, as if in sad consideration of the loss. Suzie’s eyes swivelled, following the hand’s movement, and she thought, I’m being hypnotised! It was an absurd thought, a joke, except that now it seemed to her that the fingers were growing thicker, that there was hair on the back of the hand.
On its next journey forward the hand would spring open, a claw. She looked away to the young man’s shadowy head, more embarrassed than scared.
“We’ve come to the end,” he said in a hollow voice. “So soon? Yes. So soon. And of your father no sign.”
He’s trying to frighten me, she thought and was instantly afraid that she might shriek or giggle. “One possibility,” the young man intoned, “remains.”
“What’s that?” The question emerged as tremulous, scared of what it might find. It wasn’t what she’d intended.
The young man leaned closer to her. “My dear,” he said in a doom laden, affrighted voice, “It’s the Chamber of Horrors.”
She couldn’t help but smile: fear was laughable, in a place like this. The young man contorted his silhouette into a twristed, hunched shape and shuffled into the entrance, leading the way. She laughed. He was putting on a show for her, that was all, trying to please her in his own strange way. She had nothing to fear from this pathetic sideshow, except that he might want her to pay at the end.
She followed him into the Chamber of Horrors. ABANDON ALL HOPE, said a sign hanging on chains from the ceiling.
There were no customers, as she had expected, although in the thick, reddish dusk it was hard to be absolutely sure. Her father was outside, waiting. It was almost depressingly obvious, now that she came to think of it. The adventure was over.
A mummy, dressed in clean bandages, stared at her in stupid surprise, its eyes stuck to the surface of the bandage, not peering from within. To her right, Frankenstein’s monster was frozen in the act of reaching up towards the spotlight above him with a conventional human hand which contrasted oddly with the boxy, greenish, bolted head. White-faced, red-lipped, Dracula resembled some weary old tart, long past it and trying to cover the fact with thick makeup. Over in the far corner, a dummy was caught helplessly in a ticking, creaking torture device.
Each exhibit stood in its own island of bloody light. Elsewhere was darkness.
In between Dracula and a ghoul there was a particularly murky area, as noticeable as a gap in a mouthful of white teeth. “Can’t you put some proper light on?” Suzie asked, not believing that her father was lying in some dusty corner, simply feeling that the student still deserved having some trouble made for him: a balance needed to be redressed, she somehow felt.
“Proper light?” The student imitated her deliberately irritating whine. Features tinged with red, he turned to her. “Proper light? I’m afraid we don’t run to that. However . . . I’ll see what I can do.”
Sniggering, he disappeared into the void between the two figures.
Not to be outdone, she sniggered too, although she no longer felt any amusement. What was he up to? She was uneasy again. Inside her there was only a nervous buzz of activity which wouldn’t settle, and wouldn’t clarify itself.
Should she move? Or speak? Images flickered and muttered in her head as around her the exhibits waited. The darkness yielded neither sound nor substance.
Then there was a rumble of thunder. She turned to the sound and saw Frankenstein again, as lifeless as any of the other dummies except, she now saw, for the reaching human hand, which really did look like it was stretching towards something. The taut fingers, the bulging veins, conveyed genuine tension. She could easily imagine that, if she concentrated for long enough, she would become aware of painfully gradual movement there . . .
And then she noticed that this hand certainly was backed with hair, and she thought she saw it tremble, as though on the verge of grasping what it was after.
She turned away. Of course it was her own trembling which had made the hand appear to shake.
The student was taking his time. Where was he? Vague shapes, black and red, swirled in front of her eyes as she tried to make out movement in the space he’d vanished into. Were she trying to escape, this would, she reflected, be the ideal opportunity. The exit sign glowed over by the torture victim, whose blood-spattered, serene face failed to register any reaction to his plight. Come on, she thought. Get on with it.
There was no sound from the darkness. There was only the slow, creaky rhythm of the torture device as it feigned the crushing or cutting or stretching of its contents.
She walked forward quickly, to mask her own indecision, and opened her mouth to speak. Then stopped. Someone stood just in front of her, making no movement or noise, unseen eyes looking into hers.
Shit, she thought. He wasn’t harmless after all. A light clicked on and a black-clad figure seemed to leap up in front of her, knife raised.
It was Jack the Ripper.
His thin white face smiled, a warm and friendly grin from which the front teeth protruded slightly; as though, knife poised to stab you, he was about to do you a favour. The lips looked moist and flexible, not something that could be said of the rest of the face. Stubble had been applied to the chin, unless the wiry black hairs were growing there, pushing through the hard, chalk-white flesh like weeds through the pavement. She became aware of a strong, unpleasant smell, like disinfectant mingled with vinegar.
“Satisfied?”
The young man’s head appeared over the Ripper’s right shoulder.
“Nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Yet he has his fascination. Clearly.”
Suzie pulled her gaze away from the Ripper’s face and its familiar smile. A dismal yellowish light now filled the room, revealing the dusty objects which lay behind the figures – stacked chairs, faceless heads, broken limbs, a ladder. A door had also appeared, just beside the exit. PRIVATE, said the letters on it, white on green.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” the young man told her, noting her interest in the door. “Not if I were you.” His voice was calm, seeming to offer a neutral statement rather than a warning. He stepped out from behind the dummy. “Your father clearly isn’t here. You may leave via the exit.”
Suzie looked from the green door to the curtained exit.
She turned back to the Ripper’s smiling mouth but, although it seemed suspended, frozen on the point of saying something, it told her nothing. She looked away, to the body parts scattered on the floor. All were smooth and bland, decidedly artificial. She made for the door marked P
RIVATE.
“I wouldn’t advise it. It’s not for the young or the easily disturbed.”
He might have been reading out an official health warning: his voice was toneless. Why wasn’t he moving to stop her? Was he bluffing, pretending not to be concerned? Kicking an eyeless false head out of her way, she approached the door.
Her hand closed on the metal handle. She turned, briefly, back to the room. The student stood watching her, no longer animated, his mouth an expressionless line. “You won’t like it,” he said. The mouth seemed hardly to move as he said it. No emotion coloured the words, as if this was purely a statement of fact.
She opened the door.
Pushing the thin curtain aside, smelling that disinfectant smell again, she stepped into the lobby. The dull metal of the turnstile glimmered. The glass of the abandoned booth was clouded with vague, bright reflection.
Her father was resting his backside against the Open/Closed sign. He looked up at her and grinned.
“There you are!” he said.
She looked back, but saw only the purple folds of the curtain. This couldn’t be right. She needed to think about this. (She remembered the winding corridor, pulling her round and dizzyingly round.)
“Come on Suzie. We’re late!” That would be true, she realised: they were meant to be meeting Mum in town.
“What are you waiting for?”
The turnstile yielded to her hesitant push. Outside, the sun had finally emerged, bringing the front to life. Garish colours drew strength from the light. Cars, slipping past, threw it off in glinting shards. An old man, looking up at her as she stepped onto the pavement, seemed alarmed, as if one of the exhibits had tottered out into the sunlight right in front of his eyes. Did she look pale, sick?
Her father took her right hand in his left. He began to walk faster, pulling her along, laughing at his own exuberance. Taken by surprise, she was laughing too, but she wanted him to stop or slow down – this was too sudden, he was almost running now. She tried to free her hand but his grip was firm; tried to speak, to tell him to hold on a moment, but laughter and breathlessness got in the way. Obviously a part of her was having fun but she still wished that the flow of faces on either side of them, made liquid by their motion, would cease. She had the idea that, even when stilled, they would remain a blur, like things not properly finished.
KATHE KOJA
Leavings
KATHE KOJA lives in Berkley with her husband, artist Rick Lieder, and her son. She made her book debut in 1991 with The Cipher, which was the winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Since then she has published Bad Brains, Skin, Strange Angels and Famished.
Her short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Pulphouse, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Best New Horror 3, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror, Universe 2, The Best of Pulphouse, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, A Whisper of Blood and Little Deaths. She has also recently published a number of collaborative stories with Barry N. Malzberg, one of which appears elsewhere in this volume.
ANOTHER HAIR.
Stuck this time half-down his gagging throat; spit-clumsy fingers and Gordon reeled it out: long and dark and slick as surgical silk; unmistakably Sophy’s.
And beside him Andra, roused by his movement, puffy blue eyes and last night’s elaborate coif now gone to the dogs and beyond, “What’s the matter?” and he reached beneath the pilling blanket to give her breast, big breast, a reassuring squeeze, tried to talk and coughed, gagged again, louder and wetter. On another hair. Wrapped around his tongue.
“What’s the matter?” the balance between annoyance and concern, he shook his head, false cheer, tugged at the hair. It slipped through his fingers, savage tickle at the back of his throat, was he going to puke or what. Feel its curl, floss-like, between his front teeth.
“Gordon, are you all right?” Plop flop, somehow ludicrous in her concern, would she really give a shit if he choked to death? Of course. Grabbed for the hair again and missed, of course she would, he was projecting again, Sophy’s leftover spite like a malignant fog, a big black fart; a long black hair.
Finally. Wiggling his tongue and grateful for the freedom, regarded the hair with a careful face, a neutral corner. As carefully put it in the wastebasket beside the bed, beside the others.
“Okay now?” Andra said, and he smiled, touched again those big breasts, self-reassurance this time.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just absolutely fine.”
He drove her back to her car, brand-new Toyota, gutter’s reflection on the spill of its insect hood. Carapace. She kissed him twice before she drove away; he managed to conceal the hair in his mouth until she was gone, retching silent the minute it was safe.
“Damn it,” slimy in his touch, rubbing his fingers again and again down the seam of his jeans, new jeans. New jacket, too. New stereo, expensive prints, lots of nice new things. He owed it to himself. A bad time, a harrowing time, escalating carousels of pity and rage until the last one, oh yeah, some ride. And yes, Sophy had had a bad time too, Sophy’s time had been so bad she died of it. Was it his fault?
Stop it, walking faster, get in the car. Drive. Stop for coffee, stop thinking about it, broken windows, the smell and shiver of the room, how she looked when he found her. When she cut herself with scissors. When she cut off all her hair. Stop it, Gordon, his convulsive brushing, wiping at the blood, stop it, she said. You’re pulling my hair.
Finally, aloud, “Stop it!” to himself the only way to interrupt the cycle, yes Sophy, wherever you are, it hurts me too but life has to go on, that’s what the shrink said, life’s for the living and none of it was my fault. Turning into a coffeeshop, the first place he saw.
The thick black grind she taught him to favor, slow sip and remembrance, coiled and futile, inescapable. Jealous Sophy and her screech, how he had come to hate that special high-C rant, to circumscribe his activities – innocent; or almost so, he was in a relationship, not a grave – to go in fear, yes, in fear of that sound, building like some diamondpoint tornado, pterodactyl noise aimed straight at his head.
Such as: Near-morning, later than he planned but not as if he’d stayed out all night. Dry eyes wide-awake, long white legs bare, drawn up and oddly beautiful with tension, “Have a good time?” Already, the sizzle, fingers nervous with rage twisting her hair.
Patiently, he always tried for patience, it was never his fault that things always ended up so out of hand. “It was a meeting, Soph.” Or, “It kind of turned into a party, not really a party, but – ”
“Forget how to use a telephone? Or were your hands full?”
Always, couched in those mocking questions, she could make anything sound bad. He always came home to her, didn’t he? Even knowing she sat waiting, rehearsing herself flawless for the screaming to come, giving herself all the best lines. Who wanted to come home to that? He was pretty damned loyal, he thought. Considering.
“If you keep patting yourself on the back,” rising now, voice and body scaling, girding, “you might knock yourself over,” the whip of her hair as, impatient with battle, she shook the touch of it from her face, as she would shake away his touch, later, much later, lying cold in the conciliatory bed. And in the morning, always: the tears. Patting her back, now, petting her, bringing her long scrolls of toilet paper to blow her nose.
“Shhhh. Sophy.”
Not penitent, no; but entirely sorry. “I love you, Gordy.” Snuggling against him. Wet nose on his chest, for God’s sake Sophy, use the tissue. Red wet nose, red eyes, sore with a long night’s tantrum and still so hot, stroking the long scarf of hair, wrapping it around his fingers, his wrists, stray hairs gently scattering and her uncertain smile growing bolder as she slid lower, in the bed, all that hair drifting the tensing landscape of his thighs.
Smile, there in the coffeeshop, if
you have to remember at all, remember her that way. Drinking the last of the coffee, slight cough on bitter grounds. He left a big tip.
Turning his key into the loft’s artful disarray, smiling at the pleasing mess of the bed, last night’s nest: on impulse he lay, shoes still on, lifting the pillow to track the warm primal scent of Andra’s body, holding it against his face to catch instead the iron-dry smell of blood; the itch of hair.
“Shit,” press and jerk of fright and on his feet, cat’s cradle around his fingers just as it used to, she always did shed like a dog, petting her hair, tangles of hair like the grass underwater that reaches eyeless and warm, the grass you never see until it touches you.
The shrink kept saying he was projecting. The shrink knew Sophy only as montage, smiling snapshots, a morgue photograph.
Washing his hands, over and over, damp fingers on the phone book: Cleaning Services. How much to scour the place, just totally top-to-bottom; today? Fine. Leave the check on the counter. Gone for the day, and why hadn’t he thought of this before. Grisly little souvenirs. I bet you think it’s funny, Sophy, wherever the hell you are.
After the errands a movie, just to make sure, sitting through all the credits, deliberate amble to his car. Late, and even in the dark the loft was different, smelled disinfected. Cleansed.
Leisurely bedtime ritual, brush teeth, strip, set the clock. Clean sheets beneath him. He fell asleep right away.
all that blood
“Sophy?” his animal whimper
It’s all over, all over her hair, all over his hands and smearing it back from her face, those are scissors, oh Jesus God what she did to herself
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