Hollow Dolls, The (15 page)

Mel and Melanie would sit and eye someone like Vic. They didn’t
need to come right out and say it. They could see he was a bad wolf. And that they
were fucking—the bad wolf and Tifa. Mel sipped her drink and watched without
looking away. As Tifa left the stage, a kid barely drinking age began
collecting and folding the bills from the stage floor.

Mel looked back and caught Vic’s gaze as she and Claire headed for
the door. It was all slo-mo; and that feeling came inside her when the stars
and fishe swam in blood.

Claire hung out on Main Street while Mel went for cigarettes.

When she returned, Claire began filling Mel in on touristy
highlights of the region. “There’s dozens of street workers being murdered, the
killers never caught,” said Claire. “Standing around like this, we might get
tagged by some sicko.”

They smoked and walked.

“Stay away from him,” said Claire.

“Who?”

“Vic Denton.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s been in the papers—a suspect for murder. Twice in fact, and
never been charged.”

That made Mel want to know him even more.

“Hey Claire de Lune—paranoid much?”

Claire just shook her head. They were on their way over to
Commercial Drive, Claire’s stomping ground.

Claire had lots of military paraphernalia around her apartment.

“Got a practice tonight?”

“We count the gigs as practice. Stories to tell the grandkids.”

“Do you think you’ll have any?”

“Kids? No, I could never take care of one—you?”

“Not likely.”

 “Check out these guys,” said Claire.

Mel didn’t say anything. She was gone away, staring out the window—destination
unknown.

Claire dropped the needle. And the guitar crush filled the room—it
was a Garage-Rock two-piece girl band, ‘Pack A.D.’

Are you with me? I can't see you. Turn the lights on I can feel
you...

Mel examined the ‘iron Christmas Tree’ and Claire cooked some
heroin. A three-foot nest that was a growing sculpture of iron crosses, WWII artefacts,
most probably knockoffs, generally weapon-ish sharp objects, anyone of which could
easily maim or kill a person.

Mel sat sat with her at the kitchen table. Claire bit down on a
needle plunger with her teeth pulling it back, sucking the hit through some
cotton.

 ‘Gimme an arm,” said Claire.

Mel didn’t hesitate. It was a moment. A random access digital
click in the matrix. Yes-No-Yes. She felt like crap anyway and she didn’t care
either, needles or not. As Claire found a vein, Mel watched the blood flag into
the syringe.

“This is the Li stuff. Best around,” said Claire. “This is just a
kitten dose.” She sunk the plunger back down and started on herself. Within ten
seconds Mel put her head down on the table feeling the effects.

“It’s all so beautiful,” said Claire circling a strand of Mel’s
hair with her finger. Then Claire found her own vein.

Mel rushed to the kitchen sink and gagged. Breakfast leftovers. Claire
rinsed it down the drain and got Mel back to the couch. The album played on and
they drank a little.

“I killed her—slit her throat,” said Mel out of nowhere.

Mel’s voice was a breathy confession that scattered into the loud
music. In her mind it was a confession none the less. She had done it, hadn’t
she? Reality was hardly relevant at the time. She stared out Claire’s window
like she’d just mumbled something about the weather. It was obvious Claire
hadn’t heard what Mel said. And no wonder—Claire couldn’t contain herself any
longer. She took Mel’s cheeks in her hands she kissed her full on the lips.

Claire’s lips pressed against Mel’s and she felt like she was
watching from another room. She resisted for a brief moment then gave in.

“Go ahead. Just try to make me cum.”

Mel said it aloud—it was Nigreda goading her. They were a tag team
inside her now. Whenever sex arose, they’d be together with Melanie on the
sidelines learning the ropes. They were a nameless raven-brained trio of chicks
high on straight up heroin for the first time.

Claire played with Mel’s body, caressing and kissing her all over.
She was gentle and kissy. It surprised Mel deep inside where little thoughts
were occurring. Claire as a person was even vague. Then Claire donned a Black
Beauty strap-on. Uh huh her.

Mel’s arms were back over her head, holding on to the arm of the
couch, her legs over Claire’s shoulders. The gratings. It was Georgy fucking
her. Then it was Jack. She knew he’d fucked her lot. Somewhere besides the
island. Where? Claire slid her temporary black cock in and out, filling Mel,
stroking her breasts, slapping her ass. She said c’mon a few times trying to
get Mel going like a horsey ride. Then Mel was gone closer to Nigreda, thinking
of sharp things and blood.  

Claire’s buzz cut temples grazed her thighs. Mel winced. Peter
flapped his wings clumsy and weak between Mel’s legs like a mammoth bat. She
squeezed her thighs hard on Claire’s head. Claire pulled away.

“Did that hurt?”

Barely were the words out and Mel pulled Claire’s head back down
between her legs for more. Chalk Farm Road flat, the day Peter had walked in on
her. The flow of blood from his neck. So much blood. Mel remembered it all as
she pushed herself against Claire’s mouth. She cupped Claire’s head, pulled
hard, rocking her pelvis.

Mel went visceral, in her mind to the depths where the foreign
oval opening in Peter’s neck resided. The place where her wrists were cut. The
lines on the inner skin, that looked like layers of different colored
Plasticine sliced open with a plastic knife by little innocent Melanie at
school.

Slut.

Tramp
.

The unnatural beauty of opened flesh.

Dermis, epidermis, hypodermis.

Flesh being cut open. The feel of it. Doing it to yourself, to any
skin, anywhere.

She stared into the gash with Nigreda. Back at the apartment that
day, watching the gush of red death come out of him. Mel felt Claire licking
the opening on Peter’s neck over and over as the life drained from his face.

Mel and Nigreda came and came. Together they squeezing Claire’s
head harder, convulsion after convulsion.  Claire continued, hoping to feel
another pulse from Mel’s body. When she realized it was going nowhere, she got
off, unstrapped her harness and let it drop to the floor. She walked with a
modest triumphant swagger to the fridge for a beer.

“Want one?” asked Claire, holding up two bottles.

“Sure,” said Mel, sitting up.

 “I like your rings.” She set one on the table for Mel. The perfect
gentleman.

Mel went off to the bathroom and back, got dressed all in about
two minutes. She had a ritalin in her mouth when she came back.

For Mel it was just like after a show—getting dressed. “Did you
like that?”

“I haven’t had much sex with girls really.” Lie.

She swallowed the ritalin with a sip of beer.

It was time to go. That was just how she always felt right after,
with someone new.

“Well, I liked it enough for both of us,” said Claire who didn’t
care. She knew Mel came lots and rubbed Mel’s bum as she zipped up her jeans. Mel
searched for something to say. She was no good at being nice.

The record ended and Claire took the remote and surfed satellite
channels. The sound was loud as she flicked channels all over like a spaz;
dialogue, music, news announcer parodies. The images reflected in Claire’s
glossed-over post-sex eyeballs.

Along with her shards of black hair, Mel was envisioning Claire as
a psycho killer. Mel knew it was Nigreda inside her, looking for blood
accomplices. Claire finally settled on a Whitecaps soccer game live from BC
Place Stadium. Her eyes focused on the play-by-play. That made Mel feel more
relaxed, like she didn’t need to rush off.

“Can I borrow your laptop?”

“Help yourself. You hungry?  I’ll order in.”

“Maybe.”

Claire was absorbed into her game which Mel liked. She pulled a
water from her bag, smoked, and checked out Vic Denton on the web. Vancouver
Star online had the murder cases Denton had been a suspect in.

...Vancouver Police Detectives Martin Reuben and Frank Barnes
working the Lydia Westerley case: a street worker murdered in her
room May 12, 2012. The detectives said this was their third open case.

She found a link to an article about Vic’s mother in West Van.
She’d been an actress. He was a trust fund baby playing Survivor; a double life—in
style. Slumming downtown, keeping a finger in the pie of his inheritance.
Lena Denton, Vic’s mother had become governess of the Dentowne fortune after
the death of her husband; a fortune which had, according to the articles on
her, dwindled considerably in Lena’s hands. Years before, when Vic was still a
young child, after being widowed, Lena had shortened their family name to
Denton to escape the Dentowne dynasty’s dark history.

Hiding out in style, high in the British Properties of West
Vancouver, Mrs. Denton even reminds one of Gloria Swanson. She lives out her
days in a reclusive Norma Desmond syndrome plying shades of Mommy Dearest eye
shadow,  and spiting every glance at the wrinkles and sags in the mirror.

Mel read how the Dentowne family went way back to the slave trade.
Vic had a triple great-grandfather who came across on a two hundred ton ship,
‘The Confidence’. It left Southampton, England on April 11, 1638, under the
guiding hand of Master John Gibson carrying eighty-four passengers and bound
for Boston, Massachusetts. Aboard were the Dentownes: George and Martha, and
their three children, Suffrance and Mary who were five year old twins, and
their only son and heir, George II.

There was a quote by George:  “Actually, we weren't on the
Mayflower. We sent the servants over first to get the cottage ready.”

After George II passed away, the considerable family wealth was
handed down to Robert who took it upon himself to establish a banana plantation
near Holguin, Cuba in 1740.

The article went on to explain a little about plantations of the
day.

It was ‘the golden age’ for Cuban plantation owners, who often
ruled as totalitarians basking in the lap of luxury, and ruling with an iron
fist. In those days slaves were subjected to harsh discipline routinely, and
were seen as animals on par with a horse.

She found an account which depicted Robert Dentowne as a notorious
sadistic psychopath and one of the most abusive toward slaves, of all the Cuban
Plantation owners. On an old family tree site  was  a note made by of one of
the workers at the mansion on the Dentowne plantation at Holguin, Cuba. The
worker’s name was Broderick Gibson.

His account was in plain handwriting and it seemed someone had
photographed this document way back when, and it had been handed down some way
or another. Now it was scanned and  posted on this site. It was his account of
a slave who was murdered on the Dentowne plantation. Her name was Cloe
Montgomery. There was even a small photo of her tacked onto the handwritten
account of her murder. Mel tried piecing it together. This was what she could
make out from the scrap of paper with fountain pen ink scrawl:

Cloe’s days were numbered as an indoor slave. Soon, she’d be put
to work in the fields. Or worse. The reason: Robert Dentowne liked his sex
slaves to be quite young and Cloe had reached seventeen on her last birthday.
The Massa Dentowne was sending her out to pasture.

After his own round of sexual torture, Dentowne stood by and
supervised the others to have their turn with Cloe’s young body. The men who
refused to take part in ‘disciplines’, were beaten themselves, and blacklisted
by all plantation owners in the area at the request of Dentowne himself. Often
the slaves were innocent of any real wrong doing, the circumstances having been
fabricated for Dentowne’s own insidious need to absolve himself, ad dementia.

The few good men who stayed outside watching through the door
prayed for the poor girl. After being whipped themselves, they were banished
from the island.

Mel was spun. She leaned back and closed her eyes, drifting away.
Deep inside she learned other things about what was heard that night.

The screams of the young slave Cloe were heard for a long period
of time. In the still of the night the sound carried across the open spaces to ears
other than those in the barn. To the ears the men outside the barn who refused
to take part, including Broderick, the author of the little slip of paper Mel
had been reading. To the ears of other slaves in their ‘Negro Huts’—wood-shingled
log cabins not far from the barn. Even to those of the Dentowne family members
themselves inside the main house. And out in the cosmos longer ears listened. Those
of the Man-Rabbit scribe who sat next to the Moon Goddess Ixchel.

Mel’s eyes opened wide. She’d gone away. Far away.

She saved all the links and emailed them to herself. Then went on
to some other linked articles and found one on the history of the  old Dentowne
mansion in the Shaughnessy neighborhood of Vancouver. That place had a mixed
bag of history and was a notorious local legend. The house was originally built
in 1895 by Frances Dentowne, grandson of the same Cuban plantation owner Robert
Dentowne.

So that meant Francis Dentowne was Vic’s great grandfather. Mel
wondered about the ones in between, Vic’s father and grandfather. She could
take the whole lot, stuff them in  potato sacks and drown them like kittens.
That’s the kind of shit they would do.

“Hey. You okay,” said Claire, nudging Mel.

She looked up forgetting where she was.

“Fine, I’m just reading.”

In 1930, Frances along with his wife and three young children were
murdered at the Dentowne mansion in Shaughnessy during a home invasion. The
official police report stated that the deaths were the result of a robbery gone
wrong, although the incident was underscored with deception and the killers
were never caught.

One newspaper made a reference to the fact that the Dentowne’s
bodies were found in many pieces, evaluating it as more gruesome than the famed
Black Dahlia murder. Eventually the Dentowne murders became known as ‘The
Jigsaw Murders’ due to the difficulty of piecing together whose parts belonged
to whom.

Due to the monstrous nature of the crime, the mansion gathered
dust for years; potential buyers were dissuaded by rumours that it had become
haunted by the children’s ghosts. Then in 1933 the old Dentowne mansion was
rented for a mere $125 a month and used as a headquarters for the Canadian
Chapter of The Ku Klux Klan. Before long, the management company to the
Dentowne’s had a local bylaw passed prohibiting mask wearing and the KKK were
ousted.

Back in the day, the mansion with its two voluptuous domed towers
was dubbed the ‘Mae West’. By the time the depression had taken its toll on
land values, the old girl was only worth ten percent of her value, ringing in
at seventy-five hundred dollars.

The mansion’s history of misfortunes seemed to have been quelled
when it was acquired by a large conglomerate, Li International in 1996.
According to neighbors, in its newest incarnation, the mansion was renamed ‘Glen
Brae’ and was being used as an anonymous safe home for young homeless girls who
had been removed from dangerous situations by child welfare.

Mel closed the computer and stretched out on the couch. Claire had
gone for take out. She called Winnie. No answer. She drifted off to the drone of
voices on the TV.

~*~

Waves rolled into shore along with pulsing heat across her face.
Hot little white girl, Melanie headed for shade this time in search of any bit
of coolness she could find. Off the beach she went into the tropical broadleaf
forest. She felt excited, like it was an adventure.

In search of any bit of coolness, she stepped around five hundred
year old giants; nested lattice works of Strangler Figs that had taken over 
this patch of the forest. Past the figs were some fronds of broadleaf on the
forest floor; she yanked a leaf from its stem and crunched it up in her hands. Melanie
smelled the goo from the leafy innards. That was real goo, sticky and it clung
to her skin like cum when she drew the leaf away. That’s probably what it was
to the leaf, a death orgasm. She looked hard at the goo. Nigreda and her
together.

Making her way through the ground fronds and trees she came to a
clearing. Immediately on exiting, she came upon a hut where a  man with very
black skin stood with dark green banana bunches hanging from wooden rafters. He
looked at Melanie through his one eye. He was suspicious of her. His other eye had
been injured and was closed up long ago. The man hardly moved—and neither did
any of the others. Beyond the first man and the first hut was a second and
third and fourth…creating a green and black pattern, banana bunch, man, banana
bunch, man... that went on as far as she could see, the men and the huts and
the banana bunches growing smaller and smaller along the edge of the plantation.