The bump came again.
He stood up and walked out to the counter. The front door, he saw immediately, was still closed and locked, the window shade pulled down.
Could someone have been shopping in one of the rear aisles and not heard or noticed that the shop had closed?
He heard footsteps from behind a row of armoires to the left.
'Hey!' he called. 'Who's there?'
There was no answer, but the footsteps retreated down the aisle away from the counter. The thought occurred to him that someone had been deliberately hiding in one of the trunks or armoires while he closed up, waiting until he left in order to rob the place. Common sense told him to call the police, but instead he walked around the front of the counter.
'Who's there?' he called again.
From the other end of the store, the dark furniture aisle farthest away from the windows, came the sound of a woman singing. Vie stopped. The sound sent a chill through him. There was nothing threatening in either the voice or the song, a folkish tune sung in another language, but the incongruity of the circumstances lent the situation a decidedly surrealistic tinge.
'We're closed,' he said, instantly aware of how ineffectual his announcement sounded.
The woman continued to sing.
Heart pounding, he proceeded slowly down the aisle toward the source of the sound. I should be carrying a baseball bat, he thought, some type of weapon.
Then he was around the corner and it was too late.
The woman was of approximately his own age and was dressed in a long, sheer gown which recalled the earth dresses of the past. She was obviously drunk or stoned and was humming to herself as she swayed back and forth in the center of the aisle, eyes closed. Next to her on the floor was a stick about half the size of a broom handle, tipped with what looked like a small pine cone.
Vie stood silently for a moment, watching the woman instead of announcing his presence. She was beautiful. Her hair was long and black and hung in naturally uncombed splendor over her shoulders and down her back. Even in the dim light he could see the smoothness of her perfect complexion, the classic line of her well-formed nose, the sensuous fullness of her lips. Through the transjuscent gown he could see a dark thatch between her shifting legs, the outline of nipples where the light material caught at her breasts.
What was she doing here? he wondered. How had she gotten in?
He was about to clear his throat, let the woman know that he was here, when her eyes suddenly snapped open. The effect was so startling and unexpected that he nearly jumped. Her eyes fastened on his. There was hunger in her expression, and a wildness which seemed totally at odds with the makeup of her face. Although she had seemed spaced out a moment before, there was in her features none of the vagueness associated with being high. Her gaze was sharp and focused, crystal clear.
'I don't know what you're doing here,' Vie said. 'But you'll have to leave.' His voice sounded more authoritarian than he'd intended, than he'd wanted.
The woman closed her eyes again, began humming, began singing.
'You have to leave,' Vie repeated.
Smiling, swaying, almost dancing, the woman moved forward until she was directly before him. One arm snaked around his waist, the other lightly cupping his crotch, as she tilted her face upward to kiss him. He did not draw her to him, but he did not push her away. Unsure of how to react, he allowed her to control the moment, silently acquiescing as she kissed him, her soft tongue sliding gently between his lips. He felt himself growing. It had been a while since he'd been to bed with anyone, and to his body even this casual contact felt good. She gave his crotch a small squeeze.
Pulling away, still humming, she dropped to her knees and began unbuckling his belt.
This isn't happening, he thought.
She's crazy, he thought.
AIDS, he thought.
But he remained in place. He wanted to back away, to put a stop to this--it was too strange, it was happening too fast--but he stayed rooted, his body refusing to listen to the arguments of his mind.
She pulled down his pants, pulled down his underwear. He was hard and quivering, and slowly, expertly, she began massaging him, stroking him.
He found himself putting his hands on the top of her head. Her hair felt smooth, soft, wonderful. He closed his eyes.
The rhythm changed. What had been gentle became aggressive, then just plain rough. He opened his eyes, looked down. The woman was smiling up at him, and there was something in the expression on her face that chilled him.
She grabbed his-balls tightly and with one quick pull yanked them out by the roots.
Vie screamed, a primal, instinctive expression of agony, as his erection disintegrated in a wash of warm blood. The woman, still on her knees before him, lifted her hands to catch the spurting blood, smearing it on her face and in her hair, laughing with drunken, ecstatic glee. He staggered backward and would have fallen had it not been for the armoire behind him. And then she was wielding her pine-cone stick, shoving it deep into his stomach, thrusting upward. New agonies flared within him as the serrated, irregular end of the spear pushed in farther, piercing skin, rending muscle, ripping veins. She pulled the stick out and dropped it, trying to shove a hand into the hole she'd made. Her gown was covered with a Pollock canvas of red, and still she was tearing at him, her mouth open to catch the spray, greedy fingers bathing in the hot liquid.
He kicked out at her with what strength and coordination was left to him, all the time screaming, but she absorbed the blows happily, laughing, her head whipping back and forth in a frenzied motion as she clawed into his abdomen, grabbing viscera, squeezing. He slumped to the floor, his vision clouding, coherence slipping fast.
The last thing he noticed was that she had ripped off her gown and was naked.
After Mythology, Dion followed Kevin out of the building to the cafeteria. He felt pretty good. He had been here less than a week, but already he had settled in to the familiar rhythm of school, making the adjustment with unusual ease. The teachers, the classes, seemed not much different than those in Mesa, certainly no harder, and most of the students he met seemed all right, although he hadn't really spoken in depth to any of them except Kevin.
He was still not sure of Kevin's status in the school social structure.
His friend clearly did not belong to any of the identifiable cliques, but neither was he a true loner or outcast. He seemed to fall through the categorical cracks. Kevin knew almost everyone, was on good terms with most of the people he knew, yet he chose to spend his lunches with Dion. The two of them were still not completely at ease with each other, were still in fact defining their roles within the friendship, but a friendship it was, and for that Dion was grateful. Kevin talked tough, but between the frequent obscenities there lurked evidence of a mind, a sharp one, and Dion suspected that Kevin had latched onto him because he sensed a soul with similar interests. Indeed, their taste in everything from music to movies to schoolteachers seemed remarkably in sync, and Dion thought that perhaps that was one reason why he and Kevin seemed to get on so well.
He was surprised to find that his interest in Penelope Daneam had not abated. He had half thought that his first day attraction to her was the result of her resemblance to the girl in his dream, but as he heard her talk in class, as he eavesdropped on her conversations with the friend seated next to her, as she grew into a person of her own, distinct from his mental image, he found that his interest had increased. She too seemed intelligent, far more aware of events and ideas than the girls he'd known in Arizona, and that impressed him. What's more, she appeared to be approachable. She was gorgeous, of course, no doubt about that, but she did not seem as far out of his league as he had initially thought. She was not in the least standoffish or stuck up. There was an easiness to her manner, an unaffectedness obvious even within the confinements of the classroom. She seemed like a real person, not a phony.
She also did not seem like a lesbian.
The problem was that he didn't know how to go about meeting her. In class, he imagined what he would do if she accidentally dropped her books and he picked them up, their eyes meeting, but he knew that sort of thing happened only in film or fiction and wasn't a feasible possibility. He could, and did, however, move his seat closer to
