I stared at the dregs in my cup as though trying to read my fortune there. In the periphery of my vision, Janis sat in a yoga lotus. Her left great toe, the nail painted blood red, was a plum within easy reach. I don’t know what came over me—something like easy affection mixed with sympathy—but I reached and gave it a playful squeeze. She unfolded her legs, reclined backward slightly, and pointed her left foot—extending the toe within an inch of my mouth like a lady offering her hand to a gentleman to be kissed. I shot a wary glance toward the door. Diane was nowhere in sight and safely out of earshot.
I took Janis’s toe in my mouth and sucked it, cradling her instep in my hand. It seemed a natural gesture of obeisance, like washing the feet of a guest, yet more intimate. Her taste was sweet as rainwater.
A breathy moan escaped her lips. “You’ve rediscovered my Achilles’ heel. Let me find yours.” Her right foot found my root. With her delightfully prehensile toes, she massaged me, her face an expression of lupine glee. Nearby thunder rattled the windows of the house and the lights flickered. Diane was still nowhere in sight. Moments later, another blackout cast us into total darkness. Even the streetlights were out. All I could hear over the drumming and driving rain was the rhythm of my own heavy breathing.
“Janis?” I called out.
Her voice was startlingly close and tantalizing. “Why so tense, Ricky? Scared of the dark?”
“Maybe a little.”
“What you’re really afraid of is what you want in the dark when nobody’s looking. What we both want.” I heard the rustle of her clothing. “You always get what you want, don’t you, Ricky? You got it from Sandra Kokker the other night.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, trying for a nonchalant whisper.
“Why else would she have given you the dagger? I know Hairless Krishna didn’t hand it over.”
“Is that what this is all about? That damn knife? I committed I don’t know how may felonies for you already when I wiped it clean of fingerprints. Why do you still want it? ”
“To wash the blood off it, that’s why. Then it can never be identified as the murder weapon. Give it back to me, Ricky, and I’ll give you everything you want. Sensual practices you never knew existed. Fleshly wisdom lost to mankind—forgotten since those torrid ancient nights when the courtesans of Egypt plied their wily arts.” She sighed. “Too bad that library of theirs burned down.”
“What library?”
“Alexandria. Who knows what love scrolls went up in smoke? The human body should come with an instruction manual. Instead, you have to fumble around—find out what gives you pleasure by accident. What if they sent out computers that way? No manual. No instructions. People would be using them for a night light.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I don’t have it.”
She exhaled with impatience. “Of course you do, Ricky. You must have taken it before you made it out my door that night.”
“Janis, I swear I didn’t take the dagger. Madeleine must have.”
“Madeleine was upstairs the whole time. Madeleine knows nothing about it. No, Ricky. You took it. You were angry, trying to get back at me.”
“Janis—”
“Anyway, I forgive you for acting like a child. Now give me the dagger.” She pushed her hand inside my sweat pants. Diane must have heard me cry aloud.
“Ricky? Honey, are you all right?” Candlelight flickered through the hall of icons like an approaching religious procession. At the last moment Janis drew away.
“Fine, hon. Janis just reminded me I have a brief to get off by Monday.”
“You and your briefs,” Diane said. “Can’t you delegate it to somebody else just this once? Why should you do everything at that office?” She set the candle on an end table. Then, turning to Janis, she added, “No offense, Janis. I know you do more than your share there, too.”
“I’m always available to help Ricky get his briefs off,” Janis said, “but now I really must go. I’m sure you two must have other things to do besides entertain me. Diane, Ricky, it’s been real.”
The rain had ended, swept away by a cold howling wind that dried up the streets like a sponge. I was lustful as a stallion before I even turned away from the door to face Diane. I seized her in my arms and drew her to me, clutching her to my chest with a force that knocked the breath out of her. “Kids at the grandparents’ house” is one of nature’s most underrated aphrodisiacs. My legs felt weak with desire, but we both sprang up the stairs to resume our interrupted tango in the bedroom.
After a ridiculous attempt to block the lockless guestroom door by propping the Bentwood rocker against it, I abandoned the effort and sought refuge in my sweet Diane. This time there were no interruptions. I don’t know whether I would have noticed any. The wind moaned with a lover’s passion. Timed perfectly to our mutual climax, the lights came on in the hallway. For a moment, I thought Sandra had returned, but it was only the power restored. We lay spent in each other’s arms, listening to the sounds of the empty house.
“Janis is pretty,” Diane said, breaking our silence.
“Did I tell you she’s dating John Diaz?” I asked her after a moment’s hesitation.
“No,” she replied. “You didn’t.”
“He’s working on Madeleine’s disappearance.”
“I don’t like him,” Diane grimaced, shaking her head.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Something about him just turns me off, ever since he came looking for you today. He’s a bad influence. I think that must be it.”
“I’m not the one dating him.”
“Promise me one thing, Ricky.” She lifted her head from my chest to face me. I felt the bikini-line bristles and the damp stickiness of her against my thigh. “Promise me you won’t go drinking with him again. Not ever. I’m afraid of something awful happening. Will you promise?”
And so I promised my lady there in the dark, staring into her perfect face, stroking her hair until she fell asleep—her eyes two catlike dream slits I knew so well.
I lay awake, too unnaturally excited to sleep. Finally, careful not to wake Diane, I tiptoed downstairs, feeling my way through the darkened salon and into the workroom. Booting up Diane’s computer, all the while imagining Janis’s fingers dancing the flamenco over the keyboard, I read the chat logs Janis had failed to erase from Mad’s documents file. Under the screen name st_agnes, she had chatted with Artie about something called “blood clubs.” I Googled the expression and found three within driving distance. The closest, near Belleville, called itself The Wet Spot. The Wet Spot’s web address linked in turn to a porn site called “Mardi Gore.” Members had posted before and after thumbnails. One series featured a dark-haired beauty who couldn’t have been more than nineteen using a scalpel to fashion a necklace of tiny cuts, festooning herself with a May Day garland of bleeding wounds. The expression on her face was that of a little girl showing her boo-boo. Another gallery displayed a well-endowed woman sporting clusters of blood-filled hypodermics hanging from both breasts like Cupid’s arrows.
It was like a bad car accident; I couldn’t look away. The sensual, come-join-me expressions of the women, gashed and seeping from every erogenous zone, told me the blood was real, all real. In a streaming video display, wannabe vampires got into the act, slavering over their willing victims—lapping up the blood, then proudly displaying their red milk mustaches and goatees—giving the phrase “exchange of bodily fluids” a whole new meaning. Was this what Artie was into? And now Madeleine?
Repulsed, I returned to the chat logs. It was like eavesdropping on an obscene phone call, only with caller and victim both into the same weird scenes. Madeleine—st_agnes—claimed to have cut herself regularly, once to the point of needing a tourniquet. She’d acquired a thirst for her own blood, she bragged, and knew how to lie to the emergency room.
The barely audible sound of a weeping woman broke my concentration. At first I thought it was the wind. I’d seen too many ghosts latel
y—Sandra had shown me two who wouldn’t stay buried. And Belleville boasted more than one old haunted house. But this was no ghost. The deep, shuddering sobs emanated from somewhere close by. The entire room seemed cold, as if the macabre images had drained all the blood warmth out of me. I turned.
Sandra, tiny rivulets of mascara streaming down her cheeks, stood mesmerized behind me, staring at the screen.
“How long have you been standing there, Sandra?”
She pulled the robe she wore tighter around her neck. “Let’s go in the kitchen. It’s too cold in here for polite conversation. Or impolite conversation, either. Come on. I’ll make us some herbal tea.”
“How about coffee instead?”
“I need to avoid caffeine for a while. And you look too tweaked out for coffee. You oughta go easy on that stuff, man.”
“What? Coffee?”
“You know the stuff I mean.”
Sandra heated two mugs of water to a near-boil in the microwave. “Kirk doesn’t know I can cook. Let’s make it our little secret, okay?”
“What other little secrets are we keeping from him?”
“As in?”
“Sandra, what’s the real reason you gave me the dagger that night?”
She gazed into the dim light of the microwave as though debating whether to tell me. Finally she said, “Because I love my husband, Ricky. Warts and all. Diane and that old priest, Father Seraphim, are helping me realize that I still love him.”
“When did you see Father Seraphim?”
“You know Di. When she and I were supposed to go shopping the other day? She dragged me kicking and screaming to her church instead. I guess she could sense the pain in me and thought it might do me some good. Well, it did. Father talked with me for hours while poor Di sat alone in the sanctuary. Father made me see how it was my anger at Kirk that made me steal the dagger and the videotapes from Kirk in the first place. Father Seraphim says my anger at Kirk can mean only one thing: I’m still in love with the bald-headed little prick.”
“Sandra, if I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times in my practice. Abused woman forgives wife-beating husband, goes back to him, gets another, worse beating next time around. It’s the original vicious cycle. Cops know it, prosecutors know it—”
“Hear me out, Ricky. The other thing I came to realize is that, because I gave the tapes and dagger to you, it means I’m in love with you. I love you even more than I love Kirk. My love for Kirk is dying, while my love for you is still in the womb.”
“Diane doesn’t know about us, does she?” I waited for her to answer, but she didn’t. “What does all this have to do with the dagger?”
“I guess part of me thought if I could only get that damned knife away from Kirk, he’d come to his senses and everything would go back to the way it used to be in the beginning—before all the hoodoo.” Sandra brought the two mugs with steeping teabags to the table. “It’s not just a funky antique, see? He really believes the knife has a special power that makes him rich.
“I know.”
“You know? Who told you?”
“The dagger does have occult power, Sandra. We both know we’re talking about the Lilith talisman here, so let’s quit playing games.”
“But see, the talisman is like any other religious dealie: it works on faith. Once Kirk finds out he’ll still be rich even without the talisman as a crutch, maybe he’ll be able to let go of the other stuff.”
“The other stuff?” I casually dipped my teabag and prodded it with some kind of plastic swizzle stick Sandra had placed in the mug. “You mean the Sisterhood? The brand of Lucifer?”
Her eyes widened. The trails of smeared mascara gave her the surreal visage of a lost soul. “What do you know about the brand of Lucifer?” she hissed.
“Everything,” I lied. “I know about the amulet, about the mole. Everything.”
“They’d kill me if they knew I’d even talked to you about it,” she whispered, so softly I barely knew she had spoken.
“You might as well tell me,” I said. “I already know everything, anyway. Plus, as your attorney I have to keep it just between us. It falls under secrets, confidences, and privilege.”
She raised her mug to her lips and held it there like a veil. “If I tell you,” she began, “it’s only because I’ve fallen in love with you, Ricky, and want to be with you—both you and Di. Here in this house. Lovers with no secrets among us. Agreed?”
I swallowed. “Agreed.”
“So what do you want to know?”
“How do you become one of them?”
“Free choice. They let you try on one of their amulets. Wear it around for a while to get the feel of it. Feels great, at first. Then comes the initiation.”
“Initiation?”
“A little nighttime ceremony with a corpse as guest of honor. Man, I was so wasted that night. I remember them dripping hot candle wax all over my boobs. Hurt like hell. And having to drink some nasty shit from one of those big silver cups—you know the ones I mean?”
“You mean like a chalice?”
“That’s what it was, a chalice. Only this one had a gleaming skull on it for decoration. They held me down and forced me to drink from it. Believe me, Ricky, I’ve sucked enough cock to recognize the flavoring in the drink they were pouring down me. Then, for the big finale, the Demon Mother herself appeared, wet her fingertip—where, I won’t tell you—and touched it to my breast.”
Sandra shuddered.
“You know, I’ve decided to do something.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re gonna think I’m crazy.”
“Try me.”
“I told you I’ve fallen in love with you, Ricky—it’s not just the sex anymore. Don’t get me wrong; the sex is still great, and it’s bound to get even greater once Di joins in. But if I’m gonna be lovers with you two, I wanna be like you in every way.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’ve had it with this eternal youth thing. That’s part of being a member in this little Lucifer club. But what good is eternal youth without love, you know? I want to be human, like you and Di. I guess you know all about the daughters of Lilith. As powerful and scary as they are, I’m tired of being one of them. This Lilith thing cannot go on another generation. That’s why I was crying just now. That’s why I’m ready to tell them all to get fucked.”
“Sandra, I don’t know what to say.” I took Sandra’s hand in mine across the table.
After a long interval, she said, “It’s not too late for me, Ricky. It’s not too late for either one of us.”
“You’re getting religious on me?”
“Fuck, no,” she said. She stood, grasped the gold chain holding her medallion, gave a yank, and threw it aside. With a clatter, the whole works ricocheted against a lower cabinet before plopping into Vlad’s water dish.
Sandra instantly looked tired. Her body sagged. Within moments, she grew puffy around the eyes and drawn in the mouth. The change was barely perceptible, akin to the redefining play of light and shadow across the face when one tilts a lampshade. She looked as haggard as I probably did. In the last few days I had barely slept, a legacy of the Crankenstein. Although I was beginning to mistrust my senses, Sandra looked every one of her thirty-eight years tonight.
“I feel like I’ve aged ten years in one night,” she sighed. “In a way I suppose I have. It was ten years ago this coming Samhain I took the plunge. Oh, well. The things we do for love, right, Ricky? Mind if I smoke?”
She produced a pack and lit up a cigarette, carelessly leaving the match burning in her fingers.
“Those things will kill you,” I warned her.
Behind us, I heard an angry hissing sound. I spun around in time to see the last of Vlad’s water erupt into an angry boil, then vanish in a cloud of vapor—as though a tiny white-hot meteorite had found its target there.
Sandra screamed. I turned back just as her robe caught fire. A ruby coal, the size a
nd shape of a cigarette burn, smoldered over her right breast, then burst into azure flame. I bolted to the kitchen sink, splashed water into a tumbler, whirled and emptied it on her, but not before she had thrown open the robe to the waist. Below her right nipple, at about eight o’clock, a point of light sputtered and sparked like the fuse of a bottle rocket. Choking sulfurous fumes filled the room, setting off the earsplitting squeal of the kitchen smoke detector. Or was it all in my imagination? I had read in college psychology texts how someone sleep-deprived for extended periods could hallucinate, look in a mirror and think his hair was on fire. My own hair had been burning out of control for days. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the tiny spitting flame shooting from Sandra’s breast self-extinguished with a noise no louder than a popcorn fart, leaving a round black wound like a cigarette burn. I moved away to stupidly wave a towel at the smoke detector until it shut off.
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