by Andrew Pyper
You’ve lost touch with your body, her inner voice clarifies. As in, nobody’s been touching it. Not even you.
Yet here she is, trying on clothes that reveal her curves instead of the tidy lines she’d grown used to. Clothes she could never wear to the Kirby. Sexy. This is the word she uses after skipping off work for the first time since getting the job, taking a cab to Midtown, and strolling down Fifth Avenue.
“I’m looking for something sexy,” she tells the first salesperson in every door she enters.
It isn’t easy.
Lily is striking—big almond eyes, delicate mouth, a dancer’s body—but she’s always chosen good taste over boldness. It’s an approach that extends to more than just her clothes. “A tamer and shamer,” as her professor-lover had called her. He’d meant it approvingly, as he was the kind of man who liked to imagine he deserved discipline, and needed someone to remind him how bad he was. But the remark had wounded Lily. Not as an indicator of how she treated her boyfriends, but how she treated herself. Taming and shaming. Enough truth in it to hurt.
Was there an option? She was a doctor, a professional. A woman. Petite. For someone in her position, it’s what you had to do. Stay controlled, let your balance earn you the authority that comes automatically to others, to men. Lily’s inner voice liked to remind her of what she would be capable if she let all of it go. There was power in the opposite of balance. Her clients showed her every day. The things that impulse could achieve, the liberty of recklessness. Madness. For as long as she could remember she’d never allowed even a taste of it to enter her bloodstream.
Today she would make an exception.
As she tries on a cocktail dress the saleswoman describes as “deadly,” her phone vibrates in her purse. Another e-mail from Dr. Edmundston, asking if she’s okay. Please remember, Lily. You can talk to me. And it’s true. He’s as close to a mentor, to a father, as she’s ever had.
She can’t outright lie to the man. But the truth won’t do either. So she goes with something between the two.
Lionel—
I’m fine. Just a queasy stomach (beware the cafeteria salad bar!). Apologies for missing the meeting. Will call in the morning.
Thanks for your concern,
L
In the mirror, as she turns to see how the dress sculpts her body, she pretends the man from the interview room is watching her. She wonders if he’d like what he saw. What part of her his eyes would settle on. Where he’d reach out to touch first.
“I’ll take this one,” she says.
* * *
HER DATE DOESN’T LOOK QUITE as good as he did in his photos. Lily guesses this is standard. And he’s not as interesting as she’d expected him to be from the profile—mountain climber, working “private equity plays” on solar energy farms—but he’s good-looking enough, interesting enough. Lily can’t help but compare him to the man from the interview room this morning and find him something less.
What the hell is wrong with you? That was a client. A psycho. This is a date.
It’s an ongoing struggle to remember the name of the man sipping the wine and forking the halibut across the table from her. To remind herself, she slips it into the conversation as often as she can.
“But Tim, aren’t you ever afraid when you look down from the summit?”
“Can I ask you something personal, Tim?”
“I’d like to go now, Tim.”
This last one before their desserts arrive.
“Are you feeling all right?” he asks, pushing his seat back as if in readiness to perform the Heimlich on her.
“I’d really like to go to your apartment,” she says. It’s a surprise, even to herself.
He’s surprised too. But not so surprised that he doesn’t stand and make a signature-signing gesture for the waiter to bring the check.
* * *
EVEN DURING SEX SHE MAKES sure to call him Tim.
It’s to try to stop imagining that it’s not her online date who’s in bed with her but today’s client. Because she can’t keep thinking of him as this—her client—and 46874-A doesn’t work either, she gives him a name. Thinks of him as Ivan.
Don’t let him into your thoughts, Lily. Especially now. Stay with this man. With Tim.
What would he be like? Not the solar energy guy, but Ivan. Here, in bed?
She’s sure he wouldn’t be like this.
Though this is really good—Tim is nothing if not attentive, eager to show her his trademark tricks, his smooth shifts of position—in Lily’s mind it’s all lovemaking. Ivan would be less aware of their presumed roles, less self-congratulatory in his generosity.
It’s that I feel no hesitation in any action I take.
Ivan would fuck her.
* * *
TIM IS STILL ASLEEP WHEN Lily awakens to the sound of crickets.
The clock radio on the bedside table reads 2:42 A.M. The crickets are her phone’s signal of an incoming call. Aside from Denise using it to pull her out of interviews that have gone overtime, or her yoga instructor notifying her of a canceled class, nobody calls her.
She slips out of bed and carries her purse into the bathroom down the hall. Closes the door.
“Hello?”
“Lily? It’s Dr. Edmundston.”
“Lionel. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to be worried—”
“This isn’t about you missing yesterday’s meeting. It’s rather more urgent than that.”
Edmundston’s voice is calm, even though he’s calling her at a quarter to three. But Lily’s heard that version of calmness before. She uses it herself with some of her less predictable clients.
“What is it?” Lily asks. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t talk about it over the phone. Could you come to my apartment?”
“Now?”
“If you’re feeling well enough. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“I don’t understand. Why can’t—”
“This all sounds strange, I know. But you’re the only one I can speak to about this. Please. Would you come?”
“Of course. Just give me time to—”
But Dr. Edmundston had already hung up.
6
* * *
She’d been to Dr. Edmundston’s apartment several times before, for dinners and departmental gatherings, but never on her own. The possibility that this is some kind of romantic invitation occurs to her, though she immediately dismisses it. Lionel Edmundston is divorced, midfifties, his two kids away at college. Lily gets the impression that his new freedom has given him the chance to pursue a different life. He will sometimes mention going to the opera or movies at the Angelika with “my companion,” and she understands this to mean another man.
Lily asks the cab driver to drop her off at the corner of Madison and Ninety-Sixth Street, and she walks the rest of the way to Edmundston’s building. It’s the hour when even in New York you can find yourself the only one on the block, just as Lily finds herself now. She’s unpracticed at the high heels thing so that her new shoes scratch the sidewalk every third step. Clop-clop-scrawwp. It strikes her that if she needed to run she could go no faster than she’s going now.
She hits the call button for Edmundston’s unit and within seconds his voice crackles out of the speaker.
“Lily?”
“It’s me.”
The door buzzes.
Instead of opening it, she feels the overwhelming urge to turn and clop-clop-scrawwp her way back down the street. She doesn’t have to do this. If Lionel Edmundston is worried about an interdepartmental civil war, if he’s asking her to help him cover up some embarrassing negligence, if he’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown—it doesn’t have to be her to go up the stairs and knock on his door in the middle of the night.
It’s not that, you bullshit artist, her inner voice says. It’s because you’re scared.
The exterior door buzzes and buzzes.
She shoulders it open.
Up th
e stairs to the second floor. The street outside pulling at her through the walls like a magnet but she fights it off by going as fast as she’s able. When she comes to Edmunston’s unit she finds the door is ajar. He’s saved her from the new round of hesitation that knocking would have brought on. All she has to do is push the door wider and walk in.
She pushes it wider. Walks in.
Lily loves this place. The high ceilings, arched windows, the exposed brick wall. And on the Upper East Side too. She has no idea how Lionel affords it. Family money, probably. The New Yorker’s go-to answer to the puzzling calculations of apartment envy.
It’s this distraction that prevents her from immediately noticing the place is mostly dark. The only illumination comes from a single standing lamp at the corner of the sofa. That, and a dim yellow spilling out from behind the kitchen wall, as if he’d left the fridge door open.
“Lionel?”
“Come in,” he answers from the kitchen. “Would you like a drink?”
“No, thank you.”
Two ice cubes drop into a rock glass and she waits for the gurgle and splash of something poured over them, but if there is, it’s too faint to hear.
“Please, close the door and come in, Lily,” he says.
Close the door.
Does he sound normal? Is this a normal place to be, a normal thing to be doing?
No, no, and no.
The strangeness of the situation hits her in a way that pulling down the jeans of her date didn’t, that collecting her clothes from the floor of his room and leaving without leaving a note behind didn’t. It’s because she’d chosen those things, and this had chosen her. There had been too many oddities in the last twenty-four hours already. Now, standing in Lionel Edmundston’s underlit apartment, she sees that abandoning control eventually leads you to this. You bluff and go all in enough times and your luck is guaranteed to run out.
She’s moving backward to the door when Edmundston appears from the kitchen. It’s too dark to make out the details of his face. He’s holding the glass with the ice cubes.
“Thank you for coming,” he says.
He sounds normal, even if the situation isn’t.
“I knew if you were calling me at this hour it was important,” she says as she steps closer. “But I’ve got to tell you, this is all a bit—”
His face.
Now that she’s only a few feet away from him, the light from the lamp shows what she couldn’t see earlier. It’s Dr. Edmundston, but he’s been crying. A string of spit hanging from his lower lip. His whole body shaking.
Go.
His mouth shapes around this word, but no sound comes out.
Lily tries to move but the weight of her legs has doubled. She could no more run from the room than make herself disappear by snapping her fingers.
A shadow moves across the floor.
Lily watches as a figure emerges from the kitchen to stand behind Edmundston. It places a hand on his shoulder. A hand that’s not a hand. The fingers too long, the tips curled and pointed, metallic.
A claw.
The figure leans its head forward as if to whisper something in Edmundston’s ear. Far enough to bring half its face into the light.
It’s him. The man from the pea-green interview room. The one Lily had started to think of as Ivan. Though she will never think of him as that ever again.
“Don’t make a sound,” the man says.
It’s not clear whether he’s addressing Edmundston or her, but both of them remain quiet.
The man’s free hand lifts something the size of an apple to his mouth. Is it food he’d pulled from the fridge and has decided he would now finally eat? She waits for the crunching sound of his bite. Instead, he opens his mouth almost impossibly wide and pushes the thing inside. Clicks it into place.
He parts his lips wide.
Teeth.
Silver. Oversized and sharp. The incisors long and thin as needle points.
“Watch,” he says.
Edmundston’s fingers slip away from the glass he holds and it shatters on the floor, spinning ice cubes and a thousand diamond chips over the hardwood. The man waits for Lily’s eyes to return to his, then he sinks his silver teeth into the side of Edmundston’s throat.
Lily does as she’s told. She watches.
There’s very little blood. Where she would expect to see it spilling down the white of Edmundston’s neck and soaking through his shirt there’s only a moist ring around the man’s lips. It takes a moment to understand why.
It’s because he’s not only biting. He’s feeding.
Go!
Lionel had tried to warn her. So afraid that the utterance of this single word was all he was capable of. Now she whispers the same word to herself.
Look away . . . and go!
It makes no difference.
There’s nothing stopping Lily from backstepping out the door. Nothing but him. Held to the spot by the man’s command to witness this as surely as if her feet were screwed to the floor like the table in the Kirby’s pea-green room.
She tries to concentrate on Lionel, to communicate some reassurance, the comfort that there is a friend here with him. But his eyes only goggle at her, his skin growing paler, turning to paper. His mouth open, gasping. The Adam’s apple in his throat lurches up and down as he gulps at spit and air.
It’s easier to look at the man.
She hears the broken glass moving over the floor and sees it’s from Edmundston’s shoes, kicking and pedaling. Making only glancing contact with the floorboards because the man behind him has lifted him up as if he were the weight of a child.
It doesn’t take long but it feels like the whole of the night.
The man pulls his teeth out of Edmundston’s throat and drops him. Her colleague writhes on the floor, grinding shards of glass into his clothes. But this for only a moment. There’s a final spasm, along with a sound that may be an attempt at a word—beat or meat or eat—and then he’s still.
The man steps over the body and comes toward Lily.
He will do the same to her.
That’s what will happen next. He wanted her to watch so she could know what it was to die in the way he delivered it. Yet his face tells her otherwise. The crimson line around his mouth like misapplied lipstick. An expression of what may be sympathy. The look a father gives his child before taking the old family dog to the vet to be put down.
Before he touches her, he stops. A strange sensation of slowness overcomes her. Time stretched like chewed gum, thinning and thinning but never breaking. She doesn’t look away. She can’t.
“Sleep,” he says.
Then she steps off the cliff and she’s falling.
7
* * *
Dear Lily,
I know what you’re thinking, but don’t do it. Don’t call the police. Don’t tell anyone. I would say you would regret it but you wouldn’t live long enough for that.
This adventure—is that the right word? this revelation? this exchange of gifts?—is between you and me. There are so many things I wish you to discover, truly startling things, but I cannot be at your side the whole way. Aside from the police, there are other, far more dangerous elements who pursue me, and if they see you as my accomplice, they will destroy you as swiftly as they seek to destroy me.
Even now, you may feel compelled to involve the authorities. This urge must be resisted.
First, consider how fantastical the truth would sound: an escaped madman lured you to your superior’s apartment so that you could witness his—his what? His biting the man’s neck with silver teeth? His feeding? Take a moment. Think of uttering these statements to a homicide detective under fluorescent lights and only a styrofoam cup of bitter coffee to calm you.
If your conscience still has you reaching for the phone, let’s consider the other factors. The doctor’s blood, to begin. In your sleep, I applied some to your hands, your clothes. Touched your fingerprints to the floor, the table, the door h
andle. Not a concern for someone such as yourself whose DNA would not exist in the current library. But if you came forward the police would run every test they could. It would be a simple matter after that to pin the murder on you.
Have you been inside your kitchen yet? Note the absence of the blade from your block. Of course, you saw me snuff out Dr. Edmundston’s life before your eyes. But once I’d put you to sleep I used your knife—taken from your apartment while you were at dinner with your handsome stranger—to add new injuries to the doctor’s body. Coroners don’t look for custom-fashioned teeth, Lily, they look for the obvious. Those odd puncture marks will be a mystery, to be sure, if brought up at your trial. But your knife? More than sufficient to make you a murderer.
I have the knife. If you do not do as I say, I will mail it to the police.
What am I asking you to do? Only one thing.
Come to me.
I am the escapee, the ear ripper, the killer of a prison guard. A man with no name. They will search for me so long as they don’t have anyone else—as long as they don’t have you—on their list. They will track me like an animal.
As ever, if I am to be an animal, I will be the superior animal.
If I am to be hunted, it will be the hunters who suffer.
8
* * *
Lily awakens on the floor of Dr. Edmundston’s apartment and recognizes immediately where she is.
Her first thought is that she was at one of Lionel’s dinner parties and had fainted. Too much wine on an empty stomach. A food allergy discovered at an inopportune time. She looks around for the guests to express her embarrassment to, but the apartment is empty. No music. And dark for a party.