He had to be careful now or he might never find her.
The police hunted him and his counterparts as serial killers who set their victims on fire, and official warnings urged the city toward panic.
Fools, Malcolm thought.
To think they could hide from something commenced aeons ago and happening all around them. Still, it meant fewer women walking the shadow-canopied streets of downtown or out dancing at the clubs where they mortified themselves on the nail bed of their secret lusts.
Some nights Malcolm took women two or three in a row, bedding each one quickly before venturing out again to stalk a new mate. He had mastered his power. He could attract women by the heat of his breath. Holding hands could trigger an explosion of desire. A lingering gaze and they became his. None of his chosen had ever before known a lover like him, one who channeled raw delight into their soft bodies, elevated them to the purest incarnations of pleasure, and then stranded them there for all eternity.
* * * * *
The blonde woman fascinated him.
Her diaphanous hair floated like a veil when she moved, and she wore the lightest of clothing: form-hugging blue jeans and a filmy, white blouse that hopped and twitched with every move of her body. She was as close to perfect as Malcolm had ever seen, and when he looked at her inner being he saw a true free spirit, liberated in mind and body, brimming with self-confidence to rival his own, and overflowing with a deep well of desires and needs.
She sat at the corner of the bar in the crowded pub Malcolm liked to visit before hitting the nightclubs. A cold pint of beer stood in front of him, untouched while he observed the woman’s reflection in the bar mirror. She rebuffed any man who approached her, turned them away like children, and sipped her drink.
The bartender stood her a round, and when she leaned forward to leave a tip, she pressed her arms against her sides and forced the buttons of her shirt to bow outward and expose the upper reaches of her elegantly perfect torso. She had noticed Malcolm watching and done it on purpose. Malcolm gripped his drink, waded through the mob, and made his way to her.
They stood side-by-side, speaking to each other’s reflection in the mirror.
“Tell me your name,” he said.
A hint of disdain passed through her eyes, but he saw that she preferred his bluntness to the clumsy humor the others had attempted. Lights sparked in her mind; Malcolm admired their intricate pattern.
“Dianne.”
“Hi, Dianne,” he said. “I’m Malcolm. You caught me staring at you.”
“That I did, Malcolm.”
“Well, I’d say I’m sorry, but I’d be lying.”
“See anything you like?”
“Enough to know that you should be stared at. You should be worshipped, in fact.”
A flickering rain of thought fell in Dianne’s mind, bronze and gold flashes of jubilation, red and blue flecks of excitement, all tinged with a darker strain of indigo wariness. She turned and confronted Malcolm with the crystalline allure of her eyes. Something about this woman made all the others Malcolm had known seem like ghosts and illusions. Dianne’s body flowed with power. He needed to feel it. He placed his fingertips on the back of her hand. The reaction was instantaneous. A shock of palpable force traveled between them, a dizzying ripple of anticipation that jump started their senses.
Malcolm sensed the boisterous crowd fade, the pub dissolve, and the burning eyes of the invisible legions surrounding them peer in. The world became a place of shadow pierced by the glare of a thousand, a million, a billion inhuman sensory organs, all of which focused for the briefest of moments on one man and one woman, perceived them, passed judgment, and then turned back to the toils of their existence. For that single, immeasurable moment in time, the universe ceased to exist except within Malcolm and Dianne. Then it was over.
The rest happened quickly after that.
They stumbled arm-in-arm out of the pub, weaving like drunks, rounded the corner, and stumbled against the brick wall beside a pay phone. They locked together and kissed. Dianne forced her thigh between Malcolm’s and locked her legs around his. Her breasts prodded him through her thin shirt. She slipped her tongue along the corner of his mouth and then broke away. The two raced along the sidewalk, laughing, flush with the intensity that ruled them.
It had never felt like this before.
Not for either of them.
Malcolm wondered if this was how he had made his other lovers feel: glorious and important.
They hurried to Dianne’s building, rode the elevator locked in an embrace, tugged at each other’s clothing as they traversed the hallway, and then vanished into Dianne’s apartment. Their clothes came away in shreds and they fell together across a futon. Perspiration erupted from their skin. Their hearts pounded. Bursts of adrenaline kicked their senses into a primal mode governed by instinct and desire. Malcolm savored Dianne’s scent and taste, the feel of her body against his. He traced her curves with his fingertips, lingered at the creases of her skin, glided across its open plains.
He thought, with this woman, he might learn to love.
He hoped the ecstasy would not claim her as it had all the others, but if it did, he was eager to see what would rise from her ashes.
Dianne shifted her body, pulled Malcolm close, and drew him into her.
Malcolm focused on the physicality of what they were doing, on bringing Dianne to the place where she would join with the dark, immanent gods that watched them. She met him with enthusiasm. Her lust frightened him. The way she gazed into his eyes reminded him of how he had felt staring into the eyes of the other women had had taken, as if she could see into his being, see everything he wished he was and everything he desired her to be.
He wanted to stop, but they had gone too far.
Dianne churned, clutched his waist, and rolled over so that Malcolm lay on his back, staring up at her, enraptured by the soaring arcs of her tan breasts, her proud, jutting nipples. He was lost in the feel of her pristine back and tight buttocks sliding beneath the palms of his hands. An alien feeling twitched inside him. Dianne bent and kissed him.
“It’s all right,” she whispered.
The fire washed through Malcolm’s body, attacked every cell of his being, and purged them as he succumbed to the unstoppable pulse of energy swelling out of him. Dianne jiggled and shimmied in the light, a divine smile on her face as she delivered the most startling rapture Malcolm had ever experienced. The walls of reality fell away; Malcolm peered further into the void than ever before to where the hordes of grubbing young dangled from endless rows of pendulous udders on the underbelly of floating behemoths. The mocking jeers of their inhuman faces filled the spaces left by the vanished world. Bursts of dazzling, infantile entities darted from the earth like backward hail, striving for nourishment, filling the sky, crowding it to the breaking point, and Malcolm knew they would change, grow, come into their own, until one day the weight of their existence would prove more than the universe could sustain. They would become an unbridled heat, a cosmic eruption of new life.
Horror blasted him with striking clarity.
Flames leapt, spurted, devoured all that Malcolm sensed. This must have been how he had made them feel when he ended their lives—torn between perfect ecstasy and monstrous reality. His atrophied conscience whispered of guilt, of betrayal, of crimes against those he had corrupted and killed. Then terror crept in.
He didn’t know what would become of him.
He thought Dianne might be his true mate. He feared the Dark Woman had not granted him a gift but had only used him as he had used so many women.
Dianne ground herself against him. Her eyes shone with joy. He could tell she saw the same things he did and thought maybe the Dark Woman had given her the gift, too. Together they gazed toward infinity as the sweaty fault lines of their loins slid together and apart. The last things Malcolm felt were absolute physical pleasure and perfect spiritual despair.
He screamed.
Fi
re consumed the world and cast him into nothingness.
* * * * *
Malcolm roused to scorched ruin.
The burning had sterilized Dianne’s apartment.
He touched his chest, his scalp, and found all the hair singed from his body. Something cool and smooth stroked the lowest reaches of his belly.
Dianne’s fingertips. Dry. Steady.
She lay curled against him, her skin raw and glowing.
“There will be legions,” she said.
Rising on her elbows, she pushed her lips against Malcolm’s, slid her tongue between them then took his hand and guided it to the gentle swelling of her belly. Something kindled inside; Malcolm felt its heat. A thing of flesh and muscle and bone curled within, an organism pressing Dianne’s unblemished flesh outward. A thing that would be something greater than all the other progeny Malcolm had sired, and far, far greater than he could ever hope to be.
Malcolm looked into Dianne’s eyes. “And there will be those who must command them.”
In that moment he understood the gift the Dark Woman had really given him and how foolish he’d been to think that he was anything more than a child handed a spear and pointed toward a target. Even as Dianne, bristling with desire, gripped him and began to stroke, he felt everything he’d held inside him disgorge itself, leaving him scoured clean, as empty and barren as he’d been the night he met the Dark Woman. Futile tears crept from his eyes as his body’s natural reactions to Dianne’s touch took over.
Outside, beyond the city and the gathering winds, constellations of eyes paused in their glutting, stared downward upon what they perceived as a tiny speck of fire, like a misplaced drop of stellar plasma, and a ruckus of unearthly voices rose up from them to fill the uncharted heavens, sending forth the word, waiting, listening for an answer from the inner depths of a woman’s body.
When it came, a terrible fervor washed through the feeding things and awoke within them new, untested, and ravenous appetites. They would be sated soon.
The Last Stand of Black Danny O’Barry
How Black Danny O’Barry came to be called by that name depends on whom you ask. Some say people called him black after his personality, and there’s no doubt that Dan was one of the deadliest, nastiest, and most ill-tempered prospectors ever to make it out of the Sierra Nevadas with his hide intact and his fortune in hand. Others say Dan earned the name by virtue of his appearance and habits: a wild bramble of coal-black hair, a tangled weave of beard flowing around his chalk white face, an unvarying wardrobe of black clothing, and his almost religious avoidance of daylight. A few malcontents put it down to Dan’s cynical philosophy and lurid sense of gallows humor, but that theory never held much truck with most folks. I knew Black Danny personally. We struck up a rough friendship based on his steady patronage of a Kearney Street dive called Chesmire’s where I tended bar, and it is my intention to preserve here a record of that unique rogue named O'Barry.
That Dan hailed from Ireland was obvious by his name and the deceptively charming lilt that was the vestige of the thick brogue he’d left behind on his trail across the continent. His doings before he came to America remain shrouded in mystery, though there was talk in the past that he was a political man and a most wanted fugitive from the Crown, having refused to give up his home on the orders of an English landlord. Word had it that single-handed he stood off the Redcoats who came to persuade him toward compliance for better than a week, with more than a few of them finding that duty to be their last. Reportedly Dan spent three days in the Atlantic clinging to the underside of an American steamer, bound by a single rope and breathing through a reed in order to make good his escape. In the days when a fair number of folks still held first-hand memories of the most recent war with the British, that was a crime people could understand. In some circles it was an accomplishment much to be admired, and true or not, one can be sure Dan played the hand for all he could.
But once word of James Marshall’s discovery of California gold leaked out to the world, there was no stopping Dan from heading west with the rest of the human throng to sample the wild climate of that far coast and seek his fortune.
One thing everyone knew for certain about Black Danny O’Barry was where to find him after the sun went down, for on any given night he was sure to be haunting Pacific Street, tasting whiskey at his favorite saloons, pinching the bottoms of dance hall girls, and patronizing the local brothels. On a rare happy night Dan could be heard barking out a song the melody of which only he himself might rightly call musical. He became such a force for ruckus and debauchery that a night without him on the waterfront felt like a ceasefire. It was commonly agreed that, should a stranger encounter Dan’s pale visage while walking San Francisco’s hard-packed streets, the wisest course of action was to step up one’s pace, avoid his eyes and beat a hasty path to another part of town.
This especially when Dan was in his cups, which, frankly, was more often than not.
When drunk he was at his most unpredictable and dangerous, and there’s many an imprudent beggar who put the touch on old Dan and still bears the scar he earned for his trouble. There are more than a few shopkeepers, too, who earned a tidy limp as reward for nodding politely in the wrong direction on their way home in the evening.
Even sober Dan was reputed to be more than a match for any ten men, and this reputation he guarded jealously against all those who cared to give him trial. He was blessed with an unearthly luck, a skin thicker than saddle leather, and an ego that might just about have been contained by Mr. Jefferson’s purchase from the French. It was the kind of attitude all too common among the roughneck gold hunters who fought not only the mountain wilds but each other for even the tiniest glittering morsel, but the difference was that in Dan’s case it was a whole lot closer to the truth than usual, especially as supported by the story of how Dan came to be a rich man.
As it goes, riding down through the Sierra Nevada foothills with saddlebags full of gold, Dan led two men on his last prospecting jaunt when a band of rebel outlaw Joaquin Murietta’s vicious followers rode them to ground. Murietta’s men cornered them in a dead-end branch off a narrow box canyon and set to doing what outlaws and prospectors most often did to each other in those days. The battle began under the morning sun, and by the time it surrendered to the hot, afternoon quiet, only Black Danny was still standing on his two feet, having acquitted himself upon no less than twelve of the robbers. Of the other prospectors only one was still breathing when the dust settled, and so the story goes, Dan quickly put him out of his misery with the terminal cartridge in his Colt. Piling the sum of the previously divided gold onto two horses, Dan rode down alone and very free of financial worries.
Who knows what really happened? Mean and cold-hearted as he was, Dan might have simply murdered those men for their shares of the gold, and it would not have been the first time it happened and probably not even the first time a murderer got away with it. Dan did what he could to help the constable find that gully in the mountains, but somehow he never could manage his way back there, so that the bodies of Dan’s party and Murietta’s rebels, as well, were never recovered. This was in the days before the Mormon leader Samuel Brannan organized San Francisco’s first Vigilance Committee, which made criminal acts a fair amount riskier, and the matter was dropped in short order, leaving Dan alive, wealthy, and free to roam.
Now, the sensible person often wonders just why Dan, widely held to be as rich as a man can be, kept his digs just off Pacific Street in the heart of the most brutal district in town. That very thought once occurred to Dan himself, and around that time he set himself up in suites at the Hotel Le Marc (which had been built a mere six months earlier), began attending performances at Peterson’s Opera (which took place in a tent pending Peterson raising the funds to build a proper opera house) and dining out on fine foods and wines such as they were. It wasn’t but three months before Dan reached some pivotal conclusions: the bed in the hotel was too goddamn soft, the theater put him
to sleep, and caviar, without fail, gave him a touch of looseness. What really clinched it, though, was the realization that, while usually a good deal easier on the eyes and a fair bit sweeter smelling, the whores of rich men left Dan feeling just about the same as the chilenos he used to patronize at a third of the cost up on Telegraph Hill.
It was back to the Barbary Coast for Dan and post haste, at that.
Back in familiar surroundings, it was a rare occurrence when Dan knew a moment’s peace. Three things conspired against him: the need of drunken sailors to test his reputation as a scrapper, his own inflammatory disposition, and the talk that Dan’s entire haul of gold was cleverly hidden somewhere within his quarters, a location ingenious enough to keep it out of sight but not so secure that the right man might not relieve Dan of the burden of his great fortune. Soon it reached the point where Dan began to lay booby traps about his quarters and took to sleeping with a loaded pistol beneath his pillow and a ready blade beneath his nightshirt in order to fend off those who slipped by the pitfalls. In those days quite a few would-be burglars learned just how light a sleeper was Black Danny O’Barry. Those that managed to crawl away, at least.
But it was Dan’s own desires and ill-disciplined temper that led to the truly strange sequence of events that resulted in a night of otherworldly horror and the unforeseen inheritance of his gold by a handful of opportunistic neighbors. Like many of Dan’s misadventures, this particular episode began in a brothel. This brothel, however, was no common crib or whorehouse, but rather a fairly unique establishment that featured a single whore and operated under the innovative assumption that its customers would prefer quality to quantity. Unlikely as it may seem, the strategy worked thanks entirely to the rare beauty of the young Chinese woman whose presence and practices had become the constant subject of the whispers of lonely men.
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