And then there was the time he opened the door and threw a bottle of his urine in her face. Worse than the tangy warmth of her husband’s warm piss going up her nose and running down her cheeks was the wild and almost menacing look in his eyes. That hadn’t been her husband, she was certain. Her Hank never would have done something so . . . vile. But what could he be doing behind that door right now? She didn’t want him to be angry with her for knocking again, but his silence was beginning to worry her.
A sharp cramp drew her belly taut and she braced herself against the door to keep from doubling over. No. Not now. Please not right now. “Hush, little baby,” she murmured and rubbed her hardening belly. The pain wrapped around her like a hot cummerbund and she fell against the door. She started pounding with both fists. “Hank! Please open the door! The baby . . . I think he’s coming.”
A distinct shuffling came from inside the study and her mind brightened. Oh thank God! I couldn’t coax him out with stew or just plain begging, but at least he’ll react for the birth of his son. The lock disengaged from the inside and the heavy maple door opened a crack to reveal candlelight and a distinct but familiar odor of sweat and bodily waste. But she couldn’t see Hank in there. A trickle of fear dripped down from her heart and burned in her gut. Another contraction followed, but she felt it only distantly compared to her mounting worry.
“Hank? What are you doing in there?”
A shaky whisper issued through the crack. “Come in, darling. Come see what I’ve done. It’s glorious.”
But she didn’t want to go in there. Hank had never invited her into his study like this, and she couldn’t blame him. It would be like inviting someone into the darkest corner of your mind, where every passing thought of murder and revenge and madness gathered like dust bunnies with teeth. “Sweetie, not now. I need you to come out. The baby—”
“Fuck the baby! Come in here now!” His voice cracked under the strain. Then, softly, almost a whimper: “Please, Lady. I need you.”
Lady’s world broke into prisms as the tears spilled over. He’s lost it, she thought. Gone mad. It had only been a matter of time. The doctors all warned them it might come to this one day if he didn’t get the lobotomy or stay on the medication, but neither of them wanted to listen or believe. They thought they could manage it, and they’d done quite well at it for a while. She had to call the doctors, though. Hank’s first, then hers. Oh, this was not how she wanted things. Not at all.
She backed away from the door and hit something that grunted. Lady shouted and turned around to see Kali standing there in a sari the color of blood. Another contraction rushed forward, and this one obliterated all shock at seeing the nanny she’d hired, unexpected. Uninvited. She felt a pop and warm fluid gushed down her legs, pattering on the expensive rug.
“Kali, help me!” she cried, no longer questioning why the woman was there, only needing the help of someone who hadn’t gone crazy.
“Do not worry, Mrs. Ballas. Your husband called me here. I will care for your son.”
“What? Called you? I don’t understand. He—”
Another contraction doubled her over. The pain was constant now and excruciating. World-eating. She had no idea it would hurt this badly, or that it would make her unable to truly grasp the horrible implications in Kali’s words. I will care for your son. What did that mean? Had the whole world gone mad or was it just her?
“Take me to the hospital, Kali. He’s coming. I can feel it.”
Kali’s eyes, which had been so warm at their meeting, were now like unyielding black stone. “There is no time. We must do it here.” She took Lady by the wrists and started guiding her toward Hank’s office, pushing the door open to reveal the menagerie of lit candles on nearly every horizontal surface. Terror was an icicle through her belly. “What are you doing? Kali, no!”
Another contraction. This one buckled her knees, making her certain her stomach was going to split down the middle like a rotten melon. She hit the rug, immediately smelling piss. A lot of it. The sensation of dampness on her hands soon followed and she realized this was Hank’s toilet. He’d been peeing on the carpet like an untrained animal for days. This was not like him. Not at all. Hank had never been so . . . unsanitary. What she saw next, however, obliterated all other thoughts, even the pain, at least briefly. Illuminated by candlelight were the ropes, presumably from the pulleys Hank had installed to help her lift and move him when he was too weak to help himself. He’d strung them up near the ceiling, from wall to wall like a web. He hung from the middle of the network by his ankles, swinging back and forth. Naked, emaciated, and pale like an albino spider.
“Hank? My God, what is this? What happened?”
“I found the source of all the filth, darling. The floor! I no longer have to touch it! Isn’t that wonderful? I’ve never felt more free!” He spread his arms open, letting out a harsh cacophony of laughter that echoed off the wooden walls and belied the presence of any sanity.
The next contraction was like an ax to the gut and she fell forward as if praying to Allah, pressing her forehead into the urine-soaked rug. She had never before experienced labor, but instinctively knew there was something more to this pain. Something dangerous. More warm fluid ran down her legs and she felt something stick into her neck, like a bee sting. She looked up to see Kali holding a syringe.
“What is that?” Already she felt her body going limp and numb. The pain of her labor was still there, but growing further away as whatever drug Kali had injected her with went quickly to her brain.
“Something to dull your pain, dear,” she said.
Kali gently rolled her over onto her back and she was greeted by the sight of her husband’s face hanging several feet above hers. His eyes were glassy and insane and hungry. The drugs did nothing to alleviate the stench of his waste or her fear of that leering grin gleaming in the candlelight. Lady’s mind began to detach like a blimp from its mooring.
“You are bleeding very heavily, Lady. We must move fast.”
This couldn’t be happening. Her baby coming too soon, maybe even dying, her husband no longer her husband, barely even human by the look of him. “No, get my doctor! Call an ambulance. I need a hospital.” Her tongue felt thick and stupid in her mouth. The words fell off it like logs.
“There is too much blood. Neither you nor the baby would make it,” Kali said. The crimson sari hooded the woman’s face, but Lady could see the whites of her eyes with their coal irises, and they were not the warm, maternal ones from the nanny interview. They were cold and driven, like those of a woman whose long laid plans were on the verge of fruition. “We must take him out right away.”
“Yes, cut it out! Release the filth! Release it!” Hank cried. Or at least the ghoul that used to be Hank.
Lady heard a metallic scrape and a shiny blade gleamed in the dimness, but Kali’s movement was too swift and Lady’s medicated brain was too slow to make a connection between the blade and the woman’s intentions until the eight-inches of curved steel came back up again lacquered with blood. And then, finally, the pain flooded in, overriding the drugs and bringing the certainty that her belly had been ripped apart and set ablaze. The agony made the contractions seem almost quaint. Every system in her body began misfiring. Her vision doubled and then trebled, her ears began to ring, and her skin flushed with the jabs of a million searing needle points as Kali dug around inside her for what felt like hours but must have only been minutes. The pain was so enormous, even with the drugs, it seemed almost separate from her, like a vivid nightmare she was watching happen to someone else. Perhaps all the stress was bringing on a hallucination. And the laughing, pendulous ghoul overhead . . . it couldn’t be Hank. He must have left his study earlier, perhaps to get some fresh air, and this loon slipped in through the window.
But even then she didn’t realize the truth of the agony, the horrible and oh-so-personal robbery taking place, until the room filled with the high-pitched squeals of what could only be her baby.
>
“It is a boy, Lady. Congratulations,” said Kali, her voice shaking.
He was tiny and so very thin and pale in the woman’s hands. A gooey mixture of blood and amniotic fluid dripped from his gangly white limbs. Something was wrong with him. Lady could sense it not only in the way the child’s skin seemed gelatinous and translucent, or how his tiny ears came to points, or the way his skull looked lumpy and badly formed. It was in Kali’s face, dawning with horror as she glanced down at the newborn.
“What is it?” Lady heard herself ask, though from a distance as the world began to gray around the edges. She was no longer cognizant of her own body being butchered open. Her mind was on her child. “What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with my baby?”
Slow regret and terror filled Kali’s eyes. “I . . . I’m so sorry, Mrs. Ballas.” She turned the child around so Lady could look upon his face. Terror sucked the air from her lungs and reality shrank to the size of a pinpoint as she screamed at the thing—no, the monster—that had been living in her womb all these months.
“What is it? Oh my dear God what is it?” The abomination began to scream too as Hank screeched more laughter overhead. The eye is so huge, she thought, and it was the last clear thought Lady had as she grabbed onto the encroaching darkness like a life raft and let it carry her away to oblivion.
Chapter 1
Nina’s Last Trick
She sat before the Madam’s desk, legs crossed, hands clasped in her lap, chin pointed toward her chest. The position was more demure than her job usually demanded, but the Madam of the Weeping Willow frightened her. Maybe it was the woman’s hair, a flame-red nest of curls threaded with silver, or the hard red slash of her mouth set in flesh that resembled carved ivory. Mostly, Nina thought, it was those chipped diamond eyes. They reminded her of the frost that formed around the inside edges of her room’s window during the winter months. The Madam kept her own office nice and toasty, but she was a miser with the heat in the rest of the house; you just had to fuck harder if you wanted to stay warm.
It was her second time in this room. The first was four years ago, with her face puffy and well on its way to purple in the places Victor Cassini’s thugs used their fists. She’d sat in this very same chair, soaked through with the late autumn rain and shivering, partly from being cold and wet but mostly from her mad craving for a fix. From that night on, she hadn’t taken anything stronger than the generic aspirin the Madam sparingly doled out to the girls if they were sore from a particularly rough client. Nina’s junkie days were now little more than a nebulous collection of memories replaced by events far more demeaning and sinister. Sweaty ball sacks, calloused hands, ugly and desperate men. But the Madam offered Nina a second chance at life, and anything less than effusive gratitude for that was punishable by the Madam’s own particular brand of torment. Nina had a few scars to prove it.
She hadn’t been alert enough on that long ago night to examine the Madam’s inner sanctum in much detail, but she got a good look now, and what she saw soured her stomach. Oil paintings of nude men and women in erotic poses dominated the space. The one hanging directly behind the Madam’s desk depicted a man’s naked back and buttocks in stark relief as he plowed into the wide-eyed redheaded mistress below him, his hands gripping her wrists like fleshy handcuffs. The artist might have intended for her to look lost in ecstasy, but the girl’s mood came off more as frightened, non-consenting. Nina shuddered with a chill, despite the fire roaring in the room’s enormous fireplace.
She could barely detect the house’s perpetual salty reek of sex and sweat in here; the Madam attempted to cover it up with some sort of woodsy incense or potpourri. The deep red paint on the walls reminded Nina of the times clients would pay extra to get rough with her. But none were as rough as the Madam, who was now sitting on the opposite side of a mile-wide mahogany desk, looking at her like a farmer sizing up a hog before the slaughter.
“How are things, Nina darling? You look healthy.” Her voice was a seductive purr that snaked around Nina’s head like wisps of cigarette smoke. It was easy to be seduced by that voice, lulled into complacency, but Nina knew all the rules of the Madam’s predatory game, so she stayed on her guard.
How were things, anyway? Well, she was about as happy and healthy as an indentured sex servant could be, but she would never say such a thing aloud. She had nearly been another dead junkie at the bottom of the harbor four years ago, and she was one or two wisecracks away from becoming one now. The only reason she was even at the Willow was because a made guy in the Cassini crime family liked the way her tits looked when she was tied to a chair. And she’d been tied to said chair because that same made guy caught her and her boyfriend robbing one of the family’s smuggling warehouses in Queens.
It was all Joey’s plan. He was a runner for some low-level crooks in Jersey who knew about a cash drop coming in that night, and he was sure they could pull it off, pay off their dealer, and earn a little more favor with the local capo. Stealing from the mob had never been part of Nina’s Great Life Plan when she stepped off the bus with the dust of Des Moines still in her hair and the lights of Broadway in her eyes. Becoming a drug addict and the girlfriend of a Sopranos wannabe had also not been part of the plan, but she managed both of those within the first six months. It was a real achievement, even with her family’s lowlife pedigree. The best her mother, the unflappable Janie Quick, could manage was working for under the table wages at a local greasy spoon while collecting disability checks.
Joey had been the catalyst for all of it, though. They met while she was dancing at a shitty club in Red Hook. After that, she stopped working altogether and fell into his crowd. Nights filled with sex and rails of coke in a tiny room—which was actually a walk-in closet in a rundown Brooklyn loft where six other guys lived—where a lamp and a deflated air mattress were his only worldly possessions. He was so very “New York,” with his scruffy hair, his east-coast accent and swagger, and she was so hooked, both on the drugs and on him, he could have convinced her to fly to Rome and rob the Vatican. But now he was dead and she was stuck here in some limbo between prison and death. She would have preferred either.
“Nina, dear?” The Madam snapped her fingers. “Are you still with me? I hope I’m not boring you.”
Nina gave her head a little shake. Bad time to fall into a daydream. “Sorry. I was just thinking about the last few years, I guess. I’m doing all right, though.”
The Madam smiled, and Nina’s stomach curdled a little. Some faces just weren’t meant for smiles, and when the Madam did it, she looked like an alligator in a human suit.
“I’m happy to hear it. And the clients have been quite generous in their opinions of you. Money talks, and your receipts have told me all I’ve needed to know. You’re a real asset here at the Weeping Willow, which makes me almost regret to say that you’ve nearly reached the end of your tenure here.”
Feeling like someone loosened an overly tight corset around her midsection, Nina let out an audible sigh. “That’s great, Madam. Really, thank you.” She’d known this time was coming, had been paying very close attention to the math ever since she started opening her legs here, but she was afraid to hope. In the movies, you never got away from the mob. The game was rigged every single time. But these people operated a little more legitimately, she supposed. Business was business, and far less interesting than the movies. She’d more than earned back what she’d taken, and now it was almost time to go home. If someone told her five years ago that she would yearn for the sight of Des Moines and the inside of her mother’s old trailer, she would have laughed and then snorted another line or two.
“I’ve put in a word with Victor about your status here,” the Madam said. “You’ve nearly paid your debt to him, and you’ll be free to go your own way soon, your name wiped clean from his ledger. But allow me to be frank, Nina dear. I’d rather you didn’t go. We’ve all come to appreciate your talents here. I would make it worth your while with the compensation, of
course. You would make twice your current income, and I would give you a larger room. But most importantly, you would stay out of the trouble that brought you here.”
Stay here? The idea sounded so absurd she nearly snickered, but that would have been suicidal in her current company. Nina knew she wasn’t the first to receive such an offer. Most of the girls who lived and worked at the Willow continued doing so long after they were solvent. They were institutionalized hookers with nowhere else to go. But Nina wasn’t like that. Compared to the abuse, homelessness, and drug problems a lot of the Willow girls came from, her home life had been like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It maybe lacked a little in warmth—Janie Quick was never the doting type, and the lupus only made her worse over the years. There had never been enough money, but none of that mattered now.
She’d once felt a little like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who wanted more than anything to leave her boring Kansas farm, but who only ended up making a few weird friends before being chased through a strange country by a wicked witch. Except Nina’s Oz had been a labyrinth of New York’s finest bottom-feeders, and her wicked witch was a white powder she snorted up her nose. Now she was just tired, wrung-out after years of “service,” and the only thing she craved now was the mundane. It was time to click her heels and get the hell out of here.
Once she got home, she would go to work at the same diner where her mother worked. Apparently, Janie Quick arranged it ahead of time and everything. That the bitter old woman was even willing to have her daughter back was something of a miracle. All Nina had to do now was get on a bus and go back the way she came. But she didn’t want to spoil the good will of the notoriously brutal Madam, who had once ripped off a nineteen-year-old Latina girl’s fingernails for stashing away an extra twenty dollars in tips under her mattress.
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