The Graveyard Shift (16 page)

“Hello, Rosa,” George said, eyes lowering to the scuffed tips of his tennis shoes. “I’m so very sorry we didn’t say goodbye. I’m also sorry about all of this. But, you
see, now you will live forever. With me. And with the others.”

George surveyed the scene, knew it was going to take him most of the night to clean up this mess. On top of that, he needed to drag her to her awaiting hole in the back yard. It was a nearly depressing thought that he should have so much work to do tonight when all he really wanted to do was sit and marvel at the newest addition to his collection.

He sat on his haunches, frowning at the smell, but admiring Rosa’s thick black pool of hair. He took it in his fingers, sighed, and flicked the knife open.

*

When George left the room he was disgusted with himself. But at the same time his heart hummed with excitement. Because in his hand he held the final remaining piece of the mannequin’s necessary anatomy: her hair. With it, he knew, she would be the most beautiful thing that anyone had ever dared to behold with their eyes.

As he walked through the secondary room, he cast a sidelong glance to the row of lovelies watching him cross. He could not bring himself to look directly at their faces, not yet anyhow, with evidence of the deed he’d just done dangling from his bloodstained fingertips. He could almost hear them whispering, wondering what was to become of the poor girl in the next room. Or how he had managed to let her die there alone, trapped in a pool of her own refuse. George tried to swallow the notion down but found his throat uncomfortably dry.

“It had to be done,” he said hoarsely as he looked away and reached for the doorknob. “You wait and see. It had to be done.”

Once he was out of the mannequin room, George breathed a little easier. The sea of accusatory eyes was safely shut behind the door at h
is back. He rested his head against it and took a few deep breaths. His shirt was uncomfortably damp with sweat so he unbuttoned the top two buttons. Both his fingertip and his forearm ached.

When
George opened his eyes, he furrowed his brow. Something about the scene was amiss. Rosa—his Rosa—was no longer standing next to the bed. Instead, she stood facing the opposite wall, beside the stairs. Her hands still rested on her hips, and her frame was still and lifeless, but she was in an entirely different spot than the one in which George had left her. Wasn’t she? George squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and opened them afresh. Had he moved her before going into the back room to deal with her human doppelganger? Yes, that must have been the case. The stress of ridding himself of the living Rosa had made him forget what he was doing. He looked down to the bloody wad in his hand, felt his stomach churn, and knew it to be true.

Rationality served to calm his nerves and for that George was thankful. The first order of business, he knew, was to wash the hair (and the scalp), so that Rosa could be united with her rightful locks.
And it must be done tonight. Too many wrenches had been thrown at Rosa’s construction along the way for him to delay satisfaction any longer.

The mannequin remained motionless, just as it should have, as George walked across the length of the room and approached the stairs. George kept his eyes trained on it the whole way, feeling incredibly foolish for doing so. But he could not help himself. Because once an unsettling thought took hold of the imagination—no matter how unlikel
y—it was often hard to shake.

The bald, shining Rosa stared at the wall.

When George was within five feet of her, an inexplicable chill ran through him, starting at his chest and burrowing down into his stomach and fingertips. As illogical as it may have been, he thought he could feel her presence in the air, just as one could sense the physical being of another person in the room. And, moreover, even though Rosa’s silky, pale back was pointed toward him, George felt that he was being watched.

The sculptor
snorted, tried to laugh at himself, but it came out lamely forced.

He lifted the wet scalp to his chest and gripped it tighter. It left bright crimson tattoos on the front of his s
hirt.

George blinked a few times, took a slow breath through his nose, and began to climb the stairs. He spent the next ten minutes scrubbing, shampooing, and carefully combing the disembodied pelt of hair. He treated it with gentle care, there in the dismal bathroom attached to the kitchen. The room contained only a toilet, lidless and coated with decades worth of shit and urine, and a chipped porcelain sink ringed by expensive salon hair care products.

Twice as he worked in the dim light George paused to cock an ear at what his imagination told him were whispers, but were really just soft soughs of wind against the eaves of the house. Still he cast a glance over his shoulder into the darkened kitchen behind him, finding nothing. He shook his head, picked up the electric hair dryer with the diffuser attachment, and began blowing water from the sopping mane. When finished, not only was Rosa’s hair lush and lovely, but it looked alive. It looked just as appealing as the day he’d finally met her in the parking lot of her gym.

With a satisfied smile upon his lips, George laid a kiss upon the hairpiece. It tickled his nostrils and he gave a quiet giggle. He returned to the basement with that same reassurance in his head. He had no hesitation when he descended the stairs this time, because he knew what the end result would be: his hard-earned happiness.

Rosa stood precisely where George had left her, with her naked tits pointed at the wall. He picked her up by the waist and carried her into the mannequin room. Once she stood in her rightful place at the very front of the line, George dusted off the freshly acquired scalp and placed it over her bare skull. Its fit was exquisite. And when George stepped back he felt his heart warm at the sight of her. And he likely would have stood there staring for ten whole minutes except something caught his eye. There was blood smudged on her face, right at the corner of her lip.

George
tsk
-ed and peeled off his shirt. He took the cleanest sleeve and tried to daub at the bloody streak. Much to his dismay he found that the stain had dried. No getting that out; it was going to need paint. It wouldn’t take a lot of work, but considering all that remained on his chore list for the rest of the night, he didn’t have time to fix it right now. George growled, bit his lip. He was very disappointed in himself, so disappointed in fact, that the moment was completely spoiled. He couldn’t even look at her without his eye being drawn to the single marred flaw in her once perfect beauty. His reverie was broken and the only thing to do now was clean up the mess that awaited him in the third room.

But before dealing with that, George made one final futile attempt at daubing the blood from Rosa’s lip, this
time licking the powdery corner of his shirt to wet it first. He swabbed her face, managing only to smear the spot.

And that was the moment it happened. George saw movement in her face, from muscles that did not exist, as Rosa shifted her fiberglass eyes. At least George imagined that they shifted, and he paused with his hand still rubbing at her protruding lip. And then, as he stared into those ivory peepers that he sw
ore stared back, an incredible jolt of pain fired through his fingertip and up his forearm.

George rocked back, howling,
and dropped his shirt to the floor. It flopped in a heap, creating a mini mushroom cloud of dust. Atop it, drops of his blood bubbled down like the contents of a leaky gutter in a rain shower. George gaped at the wound that had become of his middle finger, cupped in a warm red pool in his other hand. He squeezed his damaged left hand, the one that had been injured at work. The fingertip, which had finally stopped bleeding from earlier, was now sending blood out in steady, rhythmic spurts, where the tip of it had been completely cut off. It was gone. A raggedy strip of skin had been left dangling at the end of the knuckle, and from it hung the fingernail, sagging like a fleshy fishing line with a full load.

3

The wounded digit spilled drops of blood freely, which were swallowed in the fine dirt of the floor, becoming tiny dark craters in the surface. It was not until George’s back hit the wall, knocking a wheeze from him, that he realized he was screaming. The pain did not register at first; shock and horror had delayed that. The natural opiates of George’s body helped too, for those first few moments. George wailed until he was out of breath, clasping his tattered finger with his good fist. His breaths came in haggard, irregular gulps once he finally stopped screaming. The air was cool but stale and he couldn’t seem to get enough of it into his lungs. His head swam while he watched his arms tremble uncontrollably.

And then, in a brief resurgence of mental clarity, George leaned forward and grabbed his shirt. Doing so threw him off balance and brought him to his knees, but he did manage to get hold of the shirt and wrap a fold around the severed finger. The moment heavy fabric grated at exposed nerve endings George screamed again. Fire radiated up his forearm. He clenched his jaw, biting his lip open in the process, and continued wrapping until his whole hand had been balled up like a stick of cotton candy.

Once he could no longer see the mangled thing, the pain oddly subsided some. It stopped hurting enough so that George could begin to process the situation. He lifted his eyes to Rosa, who loomed over him like a scolding parent, hands still firmly buried against her sultry hips. But her eyes were blank, devoid of life. There was not a trace of menace in her seductive form, the eternal form that George himself had sculpted for her. And of course there would not have been. There
should
not have been, George knew. Yet when he saw the rivulets of his own blood now dribbling down her pale chin in two parallel streams, he only halfway believed it. For that very brief second, he believed in his heart that the mannequin had taken his fingertip on purpose, with scornful hatred.

George rocked back onto his heels, lost his balance again. He caught himself on his hands, with excruciating results, and scuttled on his ass toward the door. His eyes n
ever left Rosa as he fumbled his way out of the room. Finally, he made it through the door. George slammed it shut. He closed his eyes, leaned his forehead against its cool pine surface, and felt himself shudder as he breathed. Perhaps a minute passed as he sat there, just swallowing air. Perhaps it was ten. His only thought was of the magnificent beauty on the other side of the door, his greatest achievement, and the terrifying thought that he might very well be losing his mind. He knew precisely what it was that his brain
wanted
him to think, but he could not bring himself to believe such absurdity. He knew that it was impossible. Rosa had not intentionally hurt him. She was utterly incapable of it, logically and physically. She wasn’t like the
other
Rosa, who screamed and kicked and clawed at his bare arms when he tried to feed her. No,
his
Rosa could never do any of that. Nor would she ever want to. After all, he had created her and given her life.

The mannequin’s thin, smooth face was the only thing he could see when he shut his eyes. He saw her impassive look, despite the fact that her suggestive lips ha
d been sullied with his blood. He pulled his head away from the door and clasped his oversized bandage. George stroked the makeshift mitten, swallowing hard. When he opened his eyes he saw just how ridiculous it looked at the end of his arm. It was obscenely overdressed. In fact, it looked as if his entire hand had been amputated, not just the square inch of flesh of his fingertip. From here, there was so much wrapping he couldn’t even see any blood, except for what had wet his chest and right hand. His tan stomach was splashed with a thin layer of it, a macabre work of contemporary impressionism on sweaty human canvas.

George cleared his throat. It was hoarse from all the yelling.

“Rosa,” George said, feeling an unnatural chill in the pit of his stomach as he did. “How did this happen, my lovely? How did this happen?”

And then the answer was right there, staring him in the face. It had been all along. Its obviousness had just gotten lost in the confusion of his paranoia. At that very moment he recalled the injury he’d sustained only two hours prior in the factory. It was the exact same finger that he’d hurt while handling Rosa’s still
unsanded skull.

A snort escaped George’s lips, followed by an excited sigh of relief. How could he have been such an idiot? Somewhere on that beautiful face of hers was a very sharp edge in need of smoothing. It must have been small, but George knew that even the smallest edges of fiberglass could be dangerous. Were they dangerous enough to remove the tip of a human finger? Well, that was a thought he quickly kicked to the back of his mind. After all, maybe his finger wasn’t in that bad of shape. He
had
been fairly worked up at the sight of so much blood, and he’d gotten it bandaged quickly. Yes, the more he thought about that, the more sure he became that the injury could not be that terrible. Messy, sure, but not that terrible. In fact, the pain had abated almost totally. It could only be felt when he flexed his hand deep within the beehive-shaped bandage. It was warm, tingly even, as if that part of him had been sitting in the sun too long and gotten burned.

“Rosa,” George said again, thinking of her quiet, abandoned form waiting for him on the other side of the door. He knew what he must do. And of all the chores yet awaiting him for the evening, this one he would actually enjoy. He would remedy the problem of the sharp edge at that very moment. It would only take a minute—the lighting in the mannequin room was decent enough—and George already had a sanding block there on his bed.