In any case, even if the company he worked for had ended up with some of her tissues, it would have been in vain. Something had gone terribly wrong at ManuCel this week. The company supervisors were scrambling to discover the source of the problem. It had to be a breach in aseptic protocols, a compromise of sterile conditions. They would run viable particulate tests on soybean-based media set out in Petri dishes to see if they could isolate the cause or causes of the trouble before the FDA became concerned.
One thing was for certain – nearly all of ManuCel’s current, in-house product had been discovered to be contaminated. Infected. The cells decaying, blackening, and dying.
His eyes drifted independent of his brain, back to the window. One tree growing close to the converted brick factory which housed ManuCel had leaves of a scarlet intensity. They shifted in the breeze like a shoal of fish. The sunlight glowed through them so that a subtle red haze of color was projected. This swarming red color made Lee narrow his eyes, as if vaguely reminded of something important someone had once told him but which he’d forgotten until just now. Something about red. Cells. Corpuscles of blood...dropping/dripping from a living body, falling dead to the earth...
He saw a body pass quickly along the sidewalk below, obscured by the cloud of red leaves. The glimpsed figure looked like he or she was wearing a ragged dark trash bag over their head, the loose tatters streaming in the breeze. No doubt someone on their way to one of Salem’s numerous Haunted Happenings attractions; probably one of the many teenagers who found autumn employment masquerading as ghouls in haunted houses such as Terror on the Wharf or Boris Karloff’s Witch Mansion, both down on Pickering Wharf where he knew Dot’s daughter worked in The Pier restaurant. He had been asking Mai to dine there with him so that he could meet her, but she seemed to be stalling. Embarrassed, no doubt. He’d try not to pressure her. Behind muffling glass, he listened to the receding step of the mummer as it scuffed away through the leaves...
Dot stared down at her heavy boots as they plowed up little drifts of leaves. She wore black hose and a tight black skirt, and under a leather jacket she sported one of the T-shirts she had had made for her by a friend in a shop here in town, incorporating slogans of Dot’s own creation. One of them said, “Wow, can I be different just like you?” Another read, “You think I’m paranoid, don’t you? DON’T YOU?” This T-shirt, white letters on black, said, “No one in the world is more humble than me.” Her mother never understood any of them, clicked her tongue and asked Dot why she didn’t shop at Filene’s like she did.
She was on her way to meet three old friends for lunch. One of them, Jason, she had dated as a senior in high school, back when he was the drummer in a band called The Bourgeois Pimps. She’d heard he was dating another old classmate of hers, though that girl wouldn’t be there today, which had Dot wondering if that meant Jason wasn’t seeing her anymore. Maybe he had agreed to come along today in order to rekindle things with Dot. She didn’t know if that concept interested her, or not. She supposed she wouldn’t know until she looked into his face again.
They were going to meet for lunch in an Irish pub which Dot resented, actually, because it had formerly been her favorite Salem restaurant, The Crypt Café, with its horror theme and tacky/fun haunted house decor. It would have been the perfect destination today; with Halloween growing ever closer, the magic was thick in Salem’s air.
Halloween was on a Friday night this year, and Dot was resentful that she had to work at The Pier, but she had decided to make the most of the evening by dressing up as the character O-Ren Ishi from the movie Kill Bill. She hoped the patrons wouldn’t get too disgusted by the fake severed head she had bought to carry around by the hair. She had also bought a geisha costume, so all she needed now was a samurai sword. She hated to have to use a cheap plastic toy, but the only other thing that came to mind to use wouldn’t be appropriate; that was the machete her father had threatened her with years ago, and which she had hidden from him in the basement, on the floor under an old bureau...
It was a surprisingly warm day, and though it had rained overnight the sky was perfection now. However, this tree-shaded stretch of sidewalk was still soaked dark with absorbed damp. And as she walked along, she noticed there were worms strewn all around her; had she been stepping on them under the leaves and not realized it? No doubt summoned forth by the combination of warmth and moisture, they littered the sidewalk in an imitation of the leaves’ profusion. Though they varied in size, they all looked like bits of putty torn from the same large mass, rolled into tubes in the hands of a god and cast like seeds before her...their soft taffy bodies stretched to their full lengths like disembodied phalluses.
With a funny little shiver, Dot decided to cross to the other side of the street. As she lifted her eyes to gauge the traffic, she saw a figure walking along the sidewalk in her direction. Though the shadows of buildings and trees obscured it, she took the figure to be wearing a sort of crude, makeshift Halloween costume. Still, this ill-defined costume was effective in that it disquieted Dot, and she was all the more anxious to cross the street. She did so at a little jog...and when she had reached the other side, she glanced back almost involuntarily.
Several cars passed in the street and a large truck for an office supply chain rumbled by. When the truck no longer blocked her view, she saw that the person in the costume had already reached the end of the street and was turning the corner. She was surprised that they had gotten so far along so quickly; perhaps he or she had burst into a run for several seconds.
As the figure turned the corner, it seemed to glance back at her as well, and it was now that Dot finally made out the shape of its head. A crooked point, like a wizard’s tall conical hat bent in the middle. It was like a crude crescent moon.
Dot stood riveted now, unconcerned about the possibility that she stood upon the boneless bodies of crushed worms, unmindful of the red leaves that swirled around her boots like scales shed from an immense dragon.
For a moment she thought to turn back, to pursue the figure, shorten the distance between them to have a better look. But she forced a mocking tone into the voice of her thoughts. She had misinterpreted the individual’s costume. She must have been recalling, without forcing it, the half-dissolved fragments of last night’s dream as she walked along. She had obviously superimposed those dream images onto some hapless teenager in a hooded grim reaper outfit, perhaps...
But regardless of what she had seen, or because of it, those dream fragments rapidly coalesced, like a rotting thing suddenly reversing its decay and becoming whole once more. The memory loomed up in this intact state so suddenly and powerfully that it was as though she had been teleported into a movie theater, and stood directly before the screen.
No. It was not a movie screen she stood before. Dot stood small and naked on the shore of a sea that was both familiar from other dreams and yet shockingly transfigured. Above her, a high ceiling of clouds which normally should be a mostly deep brown color had become dyed a lurid red by some masked and dying sun.
The ocean, too, appeared to have become dyed. Where once its waters had looked silvery in color, thick like waves of molten metal, now it had a vivid crimson hue like the fog that crawled above her, and which veiled the sea’s horizon, its limits (if that sea had limits). The waves were as heavy, as languid, as ever, but they broke upon the shore in foamy pink spray. These opaque red waves seemed to buoy up pieces of flotsam and jetsam, but it was not trash or driftwood. At first, Dot took this water-borne refuse to be the tops of people’s heads, black and slimy, mostly submerged in the waves. At the same time that these apparent submerged heads brought fear to her, Dot was also oddly reminded of the water puppets her mother had described to her and which were a traditional part of the recent moon festival of Tet Trung Thu. If one of these slippery lumps should rise up from the scarlet waters, would she see a colorful water puppet, manipulated by unseen hands, or the head of a bloated corpse with its hair plastered to its purple face?
Across the street from where the mummer in the ragged costume had passed, a woman had stopped on the sidewalk and stood perfectly still, as if watching the outside of Lee’s building, though she didn’t appear to see him up here in his office looking down at her. She was covering her lower face with one hand. Was she ill? Or perhaps just lost, a tourist trying to reorient herself?
At first, for only a second really, Lee had thought that she was Mai come to visit him. He felt embarrassed about that. Did he, like so many Americans, think that all Asians looked alike? Clearly she was not Mai. As young as Mai looked for her age, this woman was younger, dressed like a goth, and whereas Mai’s hair fell long and silken down her back, this woman’s hair was short and gelled into irregular spikes.
And then he was reminded of another woman. But one he had only seen, and whose arm he had seized hold of, in an on-going series of dreams. She so resembled that unnamed woman – even seen at this distance, out a third story window and through a red cloud of leaves – that he shivered, centipedes in his veins.
Still gazing upon the glistening, congealing beached mass (“globster,” she thought), a sort of realization came to Dot. And in her dream, this vision, she spoke out loud, her voice bizarrely incongruous in so alien a place. What she said aloud was: “It’s a blood clot.”
Then, a movement drew her gaze up and out to sea, to where its reaches began to fade into the ghostly red haze. She had peripherally seen a dark shape roll in the waves like a whale surfacing and then slipping away again. She caught only a glimpse of a perhaps-tail as the blackish form submerged. A violent shudder shook her. She backed away from the shore several steps, then spun on her heel in the red sand and began racing inland in a near panic.
The indistinct shape and the possible tail had been like sighting the Loch Ness monster, or Ogopogo, or some other cryptozoological monstrosity. She was sure she hadn’t merely seen an especially large swell in the ocean of gore. Whatever she had witnessed, it had been huge.
Dot ran blindly through the ruddy fog until it enveloped her and she saw nothing behind her, nothing before her. But her bare soles knew the way. A vague but hulking silhouette began to take form as if absorbing its substance from the mists themselves. Moments later, she could more clearly make out the circular temple or arena with its many columns supporting its open roof. But the closer she got to it, the more she realized it had become changed, as well, and at last she had to stop and gape at it, terrified of the transformation.
The silvery-gray, rubbery skin which had once coated the pillars, the steps, the entire surface of the enigmatic theater had begun to decay like the sea. Or, perhaps it was better to say that this skin had been flayed away, leaving only muscle exposed. Every surface was a red so bright, so glistening and raw, that Dot worried she’d see live veins pulsing in it if she drew any nearer. The flesh had been pared so close to the stone – bone? – at the core of the building that she could even see its whiteness peeking out of especially deep wounds.
At last, summoning up her courage, she resumed her approach, but at a slow and wary pace this time.
So where was the skin that had been removed? Where had all the meat been dumped? Was that what she had seen in the ocean, then, and taken to be clots of the ocean’s blood? Or had it been carted away, further inland? Dot imagined a race, hitherto unseen, who erected buildings like this one not to worship in, or stage battles in, or enact plays in, but simply to grow their sustenance upon as grape vines grow on a trellis.
Dot stood at the foot of the staircase at the front of the theater, reluctant to put her foot upon its dissected surface. She couldn’t imagine herself entering into the theater, touching it with her bare skin. But then, in the deep fog behind her, she heard a muffled dog-like bark. She whipped her head to face in that direction. Though she saw nothing through the mists, lit a glowing crimson by a sun or planet she still couldn’t make out through the clouds, she heard another half-strangled, hoarse cry – closer this time – and perhaps the sound of running feet. All Dot’s hesitance fled her, and the next second she was plunging up the steps, ignoring how ghastly they felt against her unshod feet.
She didn’t dare look back again as she tore through the theater, heading for the raised platform she knew to be at the center. But the center was still lost in haze. What if, changed as the building was, the dais was no longer there to transport her back to her own world? Or what if the man upon the dais, who had taken her arm and hoisted her up to safety in the past, was decayed too? His flesh stripped down to muscle and yellow fat and juts of bone? Could she still let him touch her?
The alternative was worse. She heard her pursuer enter into the structure with her, another puppet added to the drama enacted in this theater. (Water puppets, her mind gasped mindlessly.) She couldn’t help but cast one look back over her shoulder. She saw the figure that tore after her. She saw its bent, tapered head, impossibly eaten away like a fruit with only a curved rind left. She saw its streaming rags. But something new. In one fist, the apparition carried a short sword of some kind. The chopping blade was coated in glittering blood, and blood seemed caked thick upon the thing’s fist and arm. She didn’t doubt that this creature, single-handedly in its fever, had been the one to flay the temple they raced through.
Where once this scarecrow had been a silvery membrane of flesh itself, now it too was a bloody hide of excised flesh – like a malignant tumor with a life independent of its original body.
Dot looked forward again, and began to see another figure posed on a circular platform. She didn’t wait for him to reach out to her this time. She ran with her arms extended to him...as if he were a father who could lift her out of a bad dream, into his comforting arms.
“Step onto the dais,” he said to her, leaning out of the mist, and his face was as it had been in her more recent dreams. It was not flayed, not frightening. She felt the man grasp her, and lift her...
Though the man’s face brought her relief, she saw terror in his own eyes as he looked past her shoulder. Then she heard the swoosh of the chopping blade.
“Lee?” he heard a voice say behind him, and a hand touched his shoulder; he was jolted and spun around in his chair so abruptly that his coworker Meg was startled as well. “Are you okay?” she asked him.
“What? Why?” he stammered.
“You were groaning, and holding your head. I thought you were sick or something...”
“Oh...I guess...I must have just fallen asleep...”
Lee swiveled in his chair to face out the window again. But now the Asian girl across the street was gone.
11: Crushed Girl
On his birthday, Mai took Lee out to dinner at the restaurant called In a Pig’s Eye, where at this time of the year there were often readings of classic horror literature, though not tonight. Here, she presented to him the gold chain with its small gold dragon, which she helped him put on. As always, she sat on his side of the table so they could view a single menu, their shoulders pressed tightly against each other.
She had two margaritas with their meal, told him she was drunk after only sips of the first one. As a consequence, when they saw the movie Kill Bill together (Lee thought it might interest her, with so many Asians in the cast) at the little theater inside the Museum Place Mall, Mai dozed on and off against his shoulder, awakening at times to become confused by the black-and-white and animated sequences and the nonlinear storytelling. Lee greatly enjoyed it, at least. Mai told hi
m her daughter had, as well.
As they drove to the hotel they had used on their last rendezvous, Lee thought about Dot liking the movie he had just seen, and he became a bit distant and distracted. Mai asked him if he had a headache. “No,” he told her. “Hey...I really want to meet your daughter sometime soon, you know. You could at least show me a picture of her.”
“Maybe I’m afraid you like her more than me. Beautiful young girl, not old like me...”
He looked at her sharply. “Don’t say that, Mai. That’s terrible. That isn’t funny.”
She squeezed his thigh. “I’m sorry, honey. Just joking.” After a few seconds, cowed, she said, “I love you.”
“I love you too, baby,” he told her. Her sweet tone soothed away his flash of anger. Where once she would have been too shy, or even too doubting of their relationship, to tell him that she loved him, he noticed she could now say the words easily. And each time was a blessing. He had not heard the words from his wife Margaret in several eternities. The words had become a rumored thing to him, like Bigfoot, like flying saucers and happy sitcom families.
This would only be their third time spending the night together. Mai had told her husband Trang that she was working the graveyard shift tonight. He didn’t know if she’d told her daughter Dorothy the truth about this final phase of his birthday present.
The last time, Lee had had difficulty climaxing again – shy, nervous, afraid to hurt her (she had gasped at one point that she couldn’t breathe, crushed beneath his chest), a few beers in him, and the antidepressant he took made sex more difficult for him as well. They had made love in the night, and again in the morning. He found it difficult not to slip out of her, between her being so small and his erection’s unsteadiness. At last, he had rolled her onto her belly and rubbed between her buttocks. “Why won’t it come out?” she had whispered. But at last it did, and it seemed like great gouts to him. His moans came just as profusely. A vast relief flooded forth as well, a profound sense of release. He had thought that she would be disgusted but she seemed relieved or satisfied with his release as well, lay contentedly with his juices pooled across her lower back. He apologized and started to wipe them away but she stopped him, told him she’d be showering soon anyway. And when he showered, he was surprised to find her slipping into the stall with him, apparently having lost a lot of her bashfulness. But it was all business on her part, not seduction, as she soaped up and scrubbed his back like a too-dutiful wife. It was a shower Lee would have been content never to have stepped out of.
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