The third floor.
Hallways are many, but you follow the most likely one, that will lead you to her. Your footsteps are small clicks in a greater hush made not of silence absolute, but small echoing murmurs heard through the walls. Someone is crying somewhere, and someone else laughing. Elsewhere, children are singing, but it’s no song you’ve ever heard, and not a song for children’s throats.
The door you decide upon is stout, peeling, as scabrous as your face. Unlocked, naturally, but you knew it would be. Another hand might not find it so, but for yours the knob twists easily.
It stinks in here, of mildew and unwashed bodies, but nothing you couldn’t get used to. Sometimes you crave a friendly touch so much that you think you’d welcome it from a leper.
And you thought this place would be emptier than you’re finding it. At least two dozen people are here, along the walls, but there’s no furniture to speak of, and no one sits together, no one talks. Mostly they stare at the baseboards and the floor, some the ceiling, like gray strangers in a doctor’s office. Waiting for their name, their turn, the expected surrender of their bodies.
In another room you find no one alive, just a jumble of blue limbs, bodies with hands bound behind them, thumbs tied together with wire. You can’t see their faces clearly because all the heads have been covered by plastic bags, then cinched around the necks with rubber bands. Most of them died with their mouths open wide, straining against the plastic, sealed forever.
One of them looks like Stavros, but you can’t be sure.
You find her in a room glaringly lit by a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. A moist, yeasty smell surrounds her, but maybe that’s just imagination, because her skin reminds you so much of dough. A roll of fat bunching about her thick waist, she kneels on the floor before a middle-aged man who lies naked and trembling on a tabletop. Her arm, her right arm … you can’t find it, and for a moment think she must only have one. Then you realize:
She’s working it up inside the man. He shudders, groaning, as one bony foot pedals ceaselessly in the air, like a tickled dog.
You watch, a voyeur, until at last she grins at you. Red, so red. A tangle of greasy hair obscures her eyes, and she licks her lips as if she’d like to kiss you.
Not yet. Not yet. You’re not that desperate yet.
“Get started anywhere,” she tells you. Her voice is low and, for a woman, almost gravelly; not unerotic. “That’s the one thing about this place, the work’s never done.”
“I … I don’t understand.” At least you’re being honest. You think.
And she laughs, fisting her arm another inch into the man. “I remember when I was like you.”
“How? Like how?”
She grins again. “Asleep.” Then she tilts her head back, and you know her eyes must be closed in something like ecstasy. Her mouth curls into a sneer, lips skinning back, and she’s gritting her teeth, little gray pegs that rim her jaws.
“So few innocents,” she says, “and so much time.”
The man cries out, suddenly and sharply, and with the thick sound of membranes giving way she yanks her arm out. It glistens, and in her hand is clutched what may be his heart. It’s so hard to tell, though — you think it should be red, but mostly it’s clotted black, as if riddled with disease.
“Thank you,” he breathes, head lolling back, and at last his leg drops prone, exhausted, spent. “No more, please, no more…”
She rests the organ on the sparse gray mat of hair sprouting across his sunken chest. “You know better than that. With men like you, there’s always more.”
She has her arm back in up to the elbow before you can turn to run, run from the building into the welcoming night, where you have no name, no longer even a face.
*
In the months since
Red-eyed, red-faced, you burn gas this night as if there’s no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t. The world has surprised you, has shown you things that a year ago might not have even been allowed through the filters that all brains keep in place to strain out whatever can’t be tolerated. Now, though, you’ve been prepared, and it will take so much more to surprise you.
Traffic has been thinned by the lateness of the hour, but here you are in white line fever. When you see something hurtling at you from above you don’t even swerve. The windshield implodes, a brief storm of pebbles of safety glass showering your bed, your home, the final sanctuary left to you. The brick ricochets off the passenger seat, slamming into the ceiling, then the dashboard. Surprisingly, you feel little fear, knowing that you can’t be killed. Not here, not like this. You’ve come too far. Something has invested much cruel effort on your behalf.
You’re standing on the brakes. The car spins out across two lanes of screaming traffic, and then you’ve broadsided a chainlink fence that shears apart to let you through. You’ve barely come to rest on the other side before your equilibrium is restored and you scramble from the car. Others have slowed to look, to marvel, as you emerge as unscathed as anyone can expect. Dusting yourself clean of glass, seizing the brick that was meant for your head…
And you run.
Backtracking, running parallel to the expressway, you pound toward the ramp that lets drivers on from the overpass. The city, the night itself, has turned red in your eyes, and you wonder what they’re saying about you in those cars that swerve to miss you on the ramp. They notice you now, don’t they, these people who once were you.
You crest the rise, stand for a moment beneath a sky full of gathering clouds. Down below you can see the fresh loops of rubber left by your tires, and on the other side of the overpass you see them, two figures running from the scene of the crime, and now you obey the purest and most instinctive impulse you’ve ever felt.
Whatever has filled you, they’re no match for it. Run as they might from the expressway, deeper into mazes of
