Orfeo

by M. J. Lawless

  As they came to the first corner, however, he grabbed hold of Orfeo’s sleeve. “If we meet anyone, let me do the talking, alright?” Orfeo did not reply but, shrugging his arm free, moved on, cautiously turning around the edge of the wall.

  Both of them were relieved that no one lay around the corner. The pulse of Hades was more audible here and, a few yards ahead of them, lay another staircase while to their left was a doorway onto a room that did not concern them now. Visualising the plans they had been shown, Orfeo realized that at the top of this lay a door leading onto another corridor. They would have to follow it halfway around the building until they came to the final staircase that led to Earl’s lair.

  They carefully climbed the stairs, Orfeo ahead and Baptiste close behind. They were almost at the top when, suddenly, the door flung open and a light shone into Orfeo’s face blinding them.

  “That’s them!” they heard someone shout. For a second Orfeo was paralyzed with indecision. His body sought to flee, to escape any danger, but his will overruled it. Footsteps were moving toward him and he could just make out the black shapes of two figures silhouetted in the doorway.

  Baptiste, meanwhile, had immediately given vent to his first instinct and, turning tail, began to run at full speed down the stairway. He did not see the door at the bottom opening until it was too late.

  Unaware of anything behind him, with a furious cry Orfeo flung himself forward and managed to land one punch on the nearest of the figures, making him cry out in pain and drop the torch that he was holding. As he struggled to climb to the last step and lose his disadvantage, however, the other shape moved forward and, with a grunt, hit him across the back of the head with a nightstick. Bright lights flickered in his eyes and he just managed to make out the grim face of a bald-headed man, thickly set, before a pair of arms grappled him.

  He struggled and fought, but a few well-aimed blows to his chest brought him to his senses, pain flaring from his ribs. He was gasping for breath, unable to fight and barely able to stand. For a while adrenaline and determination had been enough to keep him going, but tonight his ability to make a stand soon drained away.

  When they turned him around he let out a shout of surprise.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Baptiste was held in a tight grip, forced to look up the stairs as Orfeo was made to face him. He looked old and frail and was trembling. In the dull, sickly glow of the purple lights, the tattoos on his captor’s face seemed to shift and move as she held him with one hand around his throat, the knife in her other pressed into the side of his neck.

  “You stupid fuckers,” Snake hissed with a malevolent glee. “You don’t think we got CCTV in this place? We saw you as soon as you came into the warehouse. The boss wanted me to organize a little welcome party for you.”

  “Let him go!” Orfeo shouted out. “I’m the one you want—he’s nothing to do with this.”

  “You’re the one we want?” Snake did not shout, but her voice was loud enough to carry up the stairs toward him. “What makes you think that, you stupid bastard? We don’t want any of you. Boss has got what he needs, and you’re getting in the way. Unfortunately, for some stupid fucking reason he insists on keeping you alive, just for the time being.” She turned her gaze away from Orfeo and gazed with pure lust at Baptiste, sweating and terrified in her grip.

  Still speaking loudly enough for Orfeo to hear she continued: “I ain’t got no specific instructions about you, though, you fucking queer, which kinda makes me think I can do as I please. Didn’t I tell you I was gonna stick you like a pig next time I saw you? Wasn’t that the truth?”

  Barely able to stand up in his terror, Baptiste gave a miserable nod. “Please,” he whispered. “Please, let me go.”

  “Don’t think I can do that, old man,” was her response. In the next instance she had thrust her knife deeply into the side of Baptiste’s neck and, when she pulled it out, dark blood began to spurt from his jugular. Baptiste let out a scream which quickly became an obscene, gurgling noise.

  “No!” Orfeo roared out and pulled against the two men with all his strength. The other held onto him while his partner drew out the nightstick once more, smashing it into the back of Orfeo’s head and making the singer slump forward.

  Baptiste was thrashing about, ineffectually trying to staunch his wound with his hands. Snake, however, refused to release her grip, laughing as she held him close to her and watched him die. At last the life poured out of him so that he was barely conscious, his body sinking against hers, and, with a feral grin, she let him fall to the floor. Blood continued to seep out of his wounds, spreading in a thick, black pool across the carpet.

  Lifting her hand which was spattered with gore, Snake pushed it to her mouth and licked her fingers, sucking the blood between her lips. Then she spat it out onto Baptiste’s body. “Fucking queer blood,” she hissed. When she looked up at Orfeo, unconscious between the two men, her eyes were blazing with a strange fire. There was nothing she would have liked more than to take her knife to him, to try the taste of him, perhaps take him to a private room and pursue her own games with him before he died. With a grimace she remembered her orders.

  “Take him back the way he came in,” she barked.

  “Shouldn’t we get rid of him?” one of the men asked.

  She shrugged. “If it was my decision, sure. But it’s not. Earl wants him alive. Make sure he remembers not to come back again—but don’t kill him.” She raised her finger as she spoke. “You fuck up and you can be the ones to explain why things went wrong. Make sure he can’t get back in, then come back and clean up this fucking mess.”

  As the two thugs dragged Orfeo past her toward the door by which he had entered, Snake stood silently for a few minutes, prodding Baptiste’s corpse with the toe of her boot. Waste of fucking time, she thought to herself. Now the other one—he was someone worth the effort. She could only guess what damage Horse had done to him, but for him to come back and try again... She shook her head. He might be a cocksucker, but he was sure a brave cocksucker. That or just plain stupid.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Earl lifted himself from the bed, as dissatisfied as ever. How many times had he dreamed of moments such as this? How many times had he lain in the darkness, his mind full of visions and fantasies of Ardyce here with him, her body next to his? Why, then, whenever he lay with her did he return to life so dispirited, so ill at ease?

  As he pulled away from her form, as still as the dead, she didn’t try to cover herself. At first he had thought that this was a good sign, an indication that she could be comfortable with him and that she belonged to him. But increasingly he saw that it was nothing more than a token of her lack of interest. She did not struggle, she did not resist or complain, but then she gave no sign of pleasure either, no hint of ecstasy aside from the moment when she placed out her arm, waiting for him to inject her.

  That at least he could give her. He knew what she wanted—for that, if nothing more. Try as she might, he had understood just how much she couldn’t give that up, no matter how hard she tried. You could always remove the drug from the addict, but you could never remove the addiction.

  Then why did it make him feel so uneasy? He knew the answer without the necessity of thought—and precisely because of that a great, leaden weight fell across his mind, sealing his response to the answer before it could form itself into words. That didn’t make it any less true, however. For all that he refused to think of it, he wanted her love: ever since he had met her that was all that he had wanted.

  She was so beautiful, even now, like this. She gazed up at the mirrored ceiling, her half-glazed eyes regarding herself in a beatific contemplation, her body pale and naked. Her skin was so soft and white—not white like his, which was almost corpse-bleached in its complexion, deathly for all that he worked out and pumped iron to build up his muscle. No. Through her paleness ran the tenderest colors, the faintest hues and flushes of living blood beneath the skin. Her cheeks, her breasts, her
thighs, all of them glowed with the sweetest tinge of pink and red, and when he nuzzled her breasts, sank his fingers into her buttocks as he pulled her legs around him, he could feel the warmth of her body.

  Her hair and her eyes also had been such a source of radiance. The subtle hues of her green eyes, even as they glittered with contempt for him, held such a fascination that Earl could look at her for hours. And her hair! He had simply never seen such a color—sometimes copper, sometimes a deeper, fiery auburn.

  And yet something was changing about her. Her skin was becoming whiter, the soft tinges fading from it, just as her hair had begun to look duller in the last few days and her eyes held that dead expression so often. Just like now, for example: as she stared up at herself in the mirror, her body almost transparent against the red satin sheets he had had placed upon the bed, was the cloudiness in her eyes because she had cum or was it something else? It made him angry that he didn’t know, and sometimes he wanted to shake her, hit her even so that she would tell him some kind of truth. He didn’t, of course. He was always as tender as he possibly could be, and there wasn’t a blemish on her body except for the needle marks in her arm.

  Fuck! he thought to himself. That bitch could soak it up. She was like some kind of sponge, waiting for him to inject her. Soon he’d have to move to the other arm, and then perhaps her thighs, hunting out veins to give her the fucking heroin. Nor could he leave her with the paraphernalia for her to shoot herself up. Partly it was a matter of control, but more than that he genuinely feared any flames near her.

  That thought made his left hand itch beneath its glove. His right hand was bare, as naked as she was, the knuckles large and bony, the fingers thick and rough. It was a hand that could cause a lot of pain when it wanted to, but all he wanted with her was to feel the texture of her skin. The rest of him was covered beneath the shirt and trousers that he wore. To be as naked as her would mean she would see his arm, his other hand.

  He snarled uncontrollably at this, turning his head away from her for a moment so that she wouldn’t see his expression—not that she was watching him. With other women, he didn’t care. He was proud of his body, and if their faces ever betrayed any sign of disgust at his disfigurement, then his pleasure was so much greater when he showed them who really was in charge. But if Ardyce’s eyes were even to flicker with distaste that would be his ruin.

  Fuck the bitch! She unmanned him. Yes, that was it. She made him less of a man, reminded him that he was less than he had been that night so long ago, before the fire. His eyes screwed up in pain and for a second a gasp escaped his lips. Why couldn’t it just be like before? Then she had been filled with passion for him, with a desire like no other that he had encountered before or since.

  “Does it hurt?” Her voice startled him and, turning, he saw her looking at him with her dull, green eyes. He stood transfixed to the spot, as dumb as Horse.

  “Your hand, does it hurt?”

  “No,” he replied, his anger and grief subsiding.

  “Let me see,” she said quietly, not moving, her head still turned slightly sideways toward him.

  “There’s no need,” he began to explain, but words failed him as they always did in her presence.

  “Yes there is. I want to see it.”

  For a few seconds, both of them were fixed looking at each other. Then, unwillingly but unable to refuse for some reason, Earl began to peel back the glove. The skin of his wrists, exposed between the edge of the glove and cuff of his shirt, formed whorls, blue-white veins standing out against rust-hued patches, the only color on his body. As he pulled the leather down, that gnarled and matted pattern continued across the back of his hands and his fingers, two of which appeared half-fused and could no longer bend.

  As he removed the covering so for the first time in days Ardyce appeared to become animated, sitting up on the bed, the rough amulet she wore dangling between her full breasts. He hated that necklace, wanted to tear it from her throat, but whenever he touched it she would become wild and vicious, attacking him with no care for her own safety.

  “Show it to me,” she said, a strange look on her face.

  He held out his hand and, to his surprise, she lifted her own fingers and touched it gently. For a long time she seemed to regard it as an object of wonder, ignoring the rest of him and gazing on the ugly skin, knotted and badly healed.

  “Why didn’t you ever get a skin graft?” she asked.

  Why? It was a question he had asked himself many times. To do that, however, would be to forget her, to lay the past to rest—and he wasn’t ready to do that, not yet. Not ever, perhaps. He couldn’t reply to her question.

  Holding him tenderly in both hands, she surprised him by bringing her mouth to his fingers. Gently, very gently, she pressed her lips to him and kissed the tips of his hands. He could feel her warm breath of him moving over her, and she placed her mouth on his skin—the dead, unfeeling skin of his left hand—again and again. Turning it over, she stared at the palm for a while, seeing the same decay there.

  Then, finally, she let his hand drop and lay back down on the bed, turning away from him. Her back, smooth and pearly white, was all she showed him now, her spine curving in a sensuous flow down to the cleft of her buttocks, her thighs pulled up beneath her in a foetal position as she hugged herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He made to move closer to her, to touch her shoulders, but as his dead hand came closer her felt her freeze. Her body was ice to him now—no longer warm. Whatever tenderness there was had passed.

  Cursing silently, Earl turned and found the glove where he had dropped it beside the bed. Pulling it back over his damaged fingers, he buttoned up his shirt and strode to the door.

  What was fucking wrong with the bitch? What was happening to her? For a guilty moment he pondered whether it was the drugs, but he knew how she reacted to those. That wasn’t it. Searching his memory for a while, he thought that the change in her seemed to come from the night when that asshole singer had tried to sneak back in, the night when Snake had killed the old queer nearly two weeks before. Was that it? Had she found out somehow that her friend had died? Earl found it hard to believe that she cared that much about some sick old pervert, but he had no other explanation for her condition.

  When he entered the main space of his apartment, the window looking out over Hades, Papa was already waiting for him. He always seemed to be waiting for Earl recently. Did he suspect something? Did he have some understanding of what was happening not just to Ardyce but to Earl himself? The thought made a flame of anger flare up inside him: he’d never trusted Papa, not completely, not like the others. But for the moment he was too useful and, though Earl never dared to admit it to himself completely, too dangerous.

  “How’s little moth?” Papa asked. As always he was dressed in a sharp, cream-colored suit that oddly made his dark skin look almost gray-brown, a fedora on his head.

  “Don’t call her that,” Earl snapped. “You know I don’t like it.”

  “As you insist,” Papa replied laconically. “How is she?”

  “What the fuck do you care?” Despite his best intentions, however, Earl could not maintain his anger toward Papa. As the older black man stared at him calmly, his frustrations melted into a desire to share something—anything—with someone.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed at last. “She just... she just fucking lies there. I don’t know what I have to do to get a reaction out of her. The only time she shows any life is when I fucking shoot her up. I mean, I bring in the best French chef—and that bastard charges top dollar for that fancy slurry he’s cooking up for her—and she barely touches her food...” His voice trailed away as he realized that he no longer desired to reveal any further intimacy with Papa. Lamely he concluded: “In the past couple of weeks she just seems to be getting worse.”

  Papa seemed to consider this for a few moments then said in a neutral tone: “Perhaps she feels that the singer has given up on her
.”

  Earl snorted at this, but deep inside he knew instantly that Papa had hit upon a truth. “She doesn’t care about that piece of shit. I know Ardyce. I’ve known her for, what, ten years now. What should she care about some fucking beggar who wanders into her life for a month and then fucks off out of town at the first sign of trouble.”

  Papa shrugged. “You know,” he said at last, his voice still level and measured, “I remember an old story, about how people weren’t individuals, you know—with two arms and two legs and all that shit. We were all bound up together with a special person, kind of like a spider, I guess, eight-limbed an’ all. We were pretty powerful too, so the story went, so much so that the gods got jealous and split us up so that we became much like we are today. The problem is, deep down inside we’re still looking for that other person, the one we were bound to before we got split up, and we’d move heaven and earth to find them.”

  Earl stared in astonishment at Papa as he spoke, wondering what had entered the loa’s head. As he slowly comprehended the story’s meaning that astonishment turned into anger.

  “Are you fucking trying to tell me that Ardyce was bound up with some nigger? That she’s got fucking nigger blood in her?” Earl’s face was twisted in a mask of rage, spittle flying from his lips as he started to shout, coming forward to Papa and shaking his gloved fist in the other man’s face. “Don’t you ever tell me that kind of shit again or I’ll...”

  Papa stared back at him with lifeless dark eyes, his intentions hooded. “Or you’ll what?” he asked very quietly. Then he gave one of his unnerving smiles, his mouth broad and full of sharp, white teeth, but his eyes as unmoving as ever. “It was just a story, boss.” The smile dropped as suddenly as it had appeared. “But that ain’t why I’m here.”

  Disturbed, Earl took a few steps away from his henchman. As he turned and walked toward the bar to fetch himself a whiskey he growled: “Then why the fuck are you here?”