Arcane II (35 page)

“Where are we headed, driver?”

“My place. I set up the spare room.”

“But I need to get some work done.”

“It’ll wait.”

“Justin, I want to go
home
.”

Justin pursed his lips and floored the accelerator, looking unaccountably grim.

“Come on, Justin, I want to see my
cat
, for Chrissakes!”

“Millicent’s at my house.”

“You can’t mother me, I’m too big a boy. You’ll have to sleep sometime. Come on, daddio, give me the car keys!”

Justin whizzed down the maze of streets until every apartment and thrift shop looked the same. Leroy felt dizzy, but never let up the barrage of banter. The skin about Justin’s eyes grew tight; slamming breaks, whizzing around corners... they screeched to a halt in Leroy’s yard.

“Gee, thanks, chum.”

“You won’t be thanking me once you get inside.”

Leroy hurried up the creaking floors of the old house. Second story, third, the keys fumbling, almost dropping. When Leroy pushed the door open, the motes of dust momentarily blinded him.

Nothing.

That was what she’d left him: and after that first stunned moment, he hurled whatever was left at the walls—an empty cat food can, a blender he’d always meant to fix. He was trying to rip out the microwave when Justin pulled him away. He couldn’t batter the barren walls with the shit she’d left, so he set up a barrage of sound. Justin dragged him to the bedroom.

“She didn’t know when I’d be coming back,” Leroy said dully. “Sunny doesn’t deal well with being alone.”

“I told her you’d be back in about a week.”

“Thought you hadn’t seen her.”

“She was here the day I came to get Millicent. With a friend. She didn’t want to talk.”

“A friend.” He lingered over the words.

“She’s seen the photographs, Lee.”

In the silence, those last words hung in the air. Leroy felt every inch of the apartment, every mote, every bar of sun and smudge of shadow. With the camera in his lap, his consciousness expanded, filling the room, spreading like ether into the street. Lazily as a coal-stained cloud, he drifted in pursuit of that lone sunbeam in the gray city—

—Sunny, riding pillion behind an unknown biker—

—Justin shaking him, calling his name—

—Martin Leroy Gregory, 36, photographer, listing like a ship going down, shaking as foam touched the corners of his mouth.

Justin was yelling, “Lie
still
, you idiot!” The room narrowed to a tunnel, bordered by black, the camera an unrelenting pinpoint of the end. “I’ll find her for you, for God’s sake, but you know what’s going to happen!”

Yes, he knew. Darkness, calling him through a lens he thought he’d mastered.

He dove into the dark place in his mind. Quiet. Cool, slick as mud, dark and rank and calming, smooth squelching between the toes. When he surfaced, it was with a dark filter before his eyes. Justin appeared in negative, black eyeballs and teeth and dark, gray-shaded skin, a patch of white for hair.

“I’m all right now,” Leroy said, smiling. “Find Sunny for me, that’s all I need.”

How much easier, to read Justin’s new black eyes. “I wouldn’t take her back.”

“She’s been with me six years. I want to know why.”

“I think you might be better off not knowing.”

Leroy only smiled as lifted the camera, watched Justin’s negative-face darken with pallor. “Run along now, Justin. I’m counting on you.”

***

That night, Leroy sprawled on the bed while he waited for the camera to speak. It was his only tether. He drifted toward sleep, and the camera waited patiently, a black box with a penetrating eye that would open precisely as he dozed, smooth as a cat purring.

Somewhere at the base of his skull, he felt the tiny click of the shutter. The box probed, recorded what it found. He was drifting in a sky beyond the richest blue he had imagined. Stars, milky-bright as day. He read signs, followed streets, tracking Sunny to her new house, following her about town, watching as she cavorted through carnivals with various boyfriends, giving each of them that radiant smile. Sometimes, her smile darkened, and one of the boyfriends would frown and look behind him, as though they could feel his presence. Days and nights, he took pictures of her in the most intimate and embarrassing moments, against the focus-screen at the back of his eyes.

One night he was jerked back from his perusal of Sunny with her latest beau to find his mouth filled with the taste of burnt copper. Hammering in his chest, hammering on the door that echoed in the empty stairwell, hollow as a coffin. He lay still, hardly daring to breathe. Had they found him out, at last? The infernal pounding went on and on till he felt he must move or shatter. He thought he heard the click of rifles in the hall.

He tried to get off the bed. Waves of dizziness washed over him, stinging with nausea, and he had to sit still, bare feet touching the cold wood floor.

Slowly, he rose, not fighting the darkness that flashed over his sight. He eased himself to the window, picked up the camera, held it solid and real as a cold-edged dream in both hands. He pressed it to his forehead.

Somewhere to the left, muffled by the wood, “Leroy? I know you’re in there. Leroy, answer me. Please, baby. Justin says—”

Sharp pain, tearing at his chest. Before his vision, the camera flashed a series of candid shots, telling the bitter truth: Justin, losing the museum job for defending him... finding Sunny, taking her to work with him at the old camera shop when Leroy didn’t come back. Sunny’s new-found artistry, her photographs surpassing his. Through it all, her love for his best friend.

Slowly, Leroy sank down on the army chest. He had been happy before all this started. If only he could have stayed clear of everything but his camera.

He set the timer. He posed wistfully on the chest.

The shutter clicked down to darkness, encapsulating the speck of light that was his life. He sat on the settle, naked, his hands and his shriveled penis dangling between starved knees: and he waited, and waited, and waited, but the blankness never ceased, and when Sunny finally opened the door, he didn’t feel her hands upon his shoulders, though to her kneading hands his dick rose wildly and unthinkingly, as it had always done.

The House That Wept Puddin’

Eric Dimbleby

When you cross into the cluttered breezeway of his house, you take off your shoes. Darby has asked you to do so. You’re often bothered by having your feet exposed, but you’ve got some thick wool socks on so it’s basically like you’re doubled up in the shoe department.

“We ain’t wore no shoes in the house, not since my kitty died,” Darby adds to his previous request. You nod, but you’re not really sure why. There’s something sort of transfixing when his drawling voice hits your ears. “Kitty never come back. So now we take the shoes off, got it?”

“Got it,” you reply. It doesn’t make any sense and you have a sneaking suspicion that it never will. Darby’s got a few loose wires inside of his skull, but luckily they’re insulated, just like those wool socks on your feet, which you’re entirely grateful for wearing now.

He invites you into his kitchen and the first thing you notice is smell. Not so much a smell, but a stench, really. Something along the lines of a hobo’s bloody, baked-bean-soaked feet after a long day on the rails, or a corpse’s asshole after it’s evacuated the Last Supper. Maybe a little bit of both, but tinted by a garlic clove. You don’t say anything about the odor because that wouldn’t be very gentlemanly.

You’re quite the gentleman, aren’t you?

The second thing you notice is that he doesn’t have any lights on. He mumbles something about how he prefers to work by candle light, just as he lights what may very well be the fiftieth actively flickering candle across his house. It puts off a surprising amount of light. You can’t quite help envying him a bit. He’s more environmentally conservative than most, and the man probably votes Republican. Good on him, you note. Good on him.

You met Darby on the internet, which seems to be the place that most strangers meet nowadays. You sort of miss the good old days, when strangers kept to themselves, never daring to interlope in the vexing lives of others, when people gave a hearty wave on the street, but never gave up any details beyond that. Now, folks won’t even make eye contact in public, but you immerse them into an internet chat room or message board, and suddenly they’re a Mister Fuckin’ Rogers avatar and a hometown listed as “The Moon.”

Darby has a doggie, and you are in the market for a doggie. Not just any doggie, but a Rottweiler. You know that they’ve got bad reputations, but you’ve been robbed three times in less than two years. Your wife keeps getting on you about buying a security system, but they’re just too expensive. If it was a one-time expense, okay. But a monthly bill for the service? Enough is enough, you say. The night before this one, you told your wife that you were going to pick out a guard dog. She disapproved of that notion, of course, but you went ahead anyway. Because you’re a man’s man, and a man has gotta do what a man has gotta do. And even though Darby’s house smells like Satan’s dickhole, he’s a man as well—a man who happens to own a dog that happens to be well known for biting the throats off of thieves.

“So where is the little bugger?” you ask. Bugger? You’re not sure why you called it a bugger. Part of you thinks that maybe you ought to have your guard up. That dog could come charging out of any cranny in the house.

Darby saunters over to the stove, which is covered in a thick black sludge. It looks as if Darby has been making fudge, but the smell says otherwise. “We look at that dog in a few. Cool your jets.”

“Yeah,” you say, nodding as he runs a ladle through a pot, struggling with the thickness of the coagulated mess that has overtaken his kitchen. You say, “I hear you, but I’ve gotta be quick about this. Hundred bucks you said, right?” You pull out your checkbook and start to scribble. You better ask if he has his shots. If he doesn’t have his shots, then that runs your bill up unexpectedly high. You might as well have just gotten a security system if you end up dropping more than three bills.

“My old lady isn’t around anymore. Not since...” Darby starts to say, and you’re ready for him to end the statement with
since my kitty died.
“Not since she fell into the basement. Thing about the basement is: when you go into the basement, that’s all they wrote, ya know?” No, you don’t know. “Basement eats people up and shits ’em out the light sockets, best I can reckon.”

You form a sort of saggy grin, looking back and forth between your checkbook and Darby, wishing he would bring the damn dog out, finish off the transaction, and let you on your way to a life of safely protected electronics, wife, and jewelry.

“I’ll give you the nickel tour, then we get you moving. I can see you’re fidgety about getting done, but you’re gonna wanna see this—what’s your name again?”

You tell him your name and he chuckles, plopping the ladle back into the pot. You hear the squishy sound and it reminds you of having sex, which you haven’t done in months.

“Well fuck me sideways. That’s a funny name right there—sounds like a dinosaur screwed a wombat when you say it all fast like that.”

“My parents had a sense of humor,” you say, but it’s another in a series of lies.

Darby grazes past you, taking his sweet time. As he passes, you notice the smell of the kitchen waft away for a nanosecond, replaced by the smell of ginger and orange. It’s coming from Darby. The smell isn’t entirely revolting, and it’s far superior to the shit smell... which is back again.

You follow Darby into the den, where he snatches a candle from the mantel, then points at the electrical socket. “One of the reasons I don’t plug in no lamps is ’cause the sockets don’t work anymore.” He rubs his auburn-colored beard, sighing. “But it’s okay when you get down to it. The sockets feed me. They got puddin’, ya know?”

“Pudding? I don’t follow,” you state. You let the dead kitty and dead wife subjects go by without taking target, but with the pudding statement you’ve given up trying to follow through context.

“Puddin’. My house weeps puddin’ somethin’ fierce. You had your dinner yet?” Darby asks. You wait for the punch line but it never comes. You shake your head from side to side as Darby glances down at his watch, the flame of his candle flickering against what appears to be an Armitron with a calculator built into the face. “Best grab a cup if you’re hungry. It’s comin’ any minute now. When my house cries, it gets all over the place. Everywhere except your mouth.”

You stare at him, looking around the room for any sign of the Rottweiler. “Okay,” you say, but you’re just sputtering out words to fill dead space. This isn’t okay. You have a short amount of time on this earth, and this dummy is wasting that time.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven,” he says, counting down. He reaches behind the couch and returns with a mug. Holding the candle up to the mug for you, he grins as he displays the mug’s catch phrase: JUST ONE CUP OF COFFEE BEFORE YOU FUCK UP MY DAY. It’s witty, you think. Not that witty, but just witty enough if you’ve got the kind of significant other who regularly climbs into your sphincter about how she doesn’t want her grandmother’s wedding ring stolen by hoodlums. “Six, five, two, twelve, three, one!” shouts Darby, and then it begins.

The pudding dribbles from the electrical outlet at first, seeping down the wall (the color of which you cannot determine because it’s too damn dark, even with all the candles decked all over the place like that shitty video by The Police, the one where all their fans knew it was the end of the road because Sting was officially wearing feathered hair and exposing his bare chest).

Then, it kicks into high gear, just as Darby has the mug positioned beneath the early dribbling. “Might wanna back up!” he shouts over the sound of what he refers to as “puddin’” jettisoning out of the electrical socket. It stabs you in the chest and it sort of hurts, splattering into your eyes. As you hit the ground, blinded by pudding, you wipe it away from your eyes and soon realize that it stings like a son of a bitch. You can sort of see Darby through the sticky (and awful-smelling) muck, dancing a silly jig as he slurps from his mug. As you look around the room, wondering where Sting and The Police went off to, you realize that all of the sockets in the house are acting the same way. The idiot hadn’t been lying.