black. Only the floor and ceiling had she spared, though had it not been for the landlord she would have coated them as well.
But now, for Belfast, it was like the room had no walls at all. He was reminded of staring into the great central tank, several stories tall, in the city’s aquarium. Watching sharks and rays glide past like deformed angels. But again it was as though there were no walls, not even the foot thick glass of that tank. It was as though he faced the void of deep space itself…and saw the creatures that lived between stars.
The apparitions swarmed, full size, in great numbers. For the first time, he could clearly take in their entire forms. They fluttered like jellyfish, lazily flapped their limbs like stingrays as they drifted, would suddenly change direction and dart away like startled fish. And they were all looking back at him. They pressed their sketchy faces and the smoky, long-fingered suggestions of hands to the walls, as if to push through to reach him.
Somehow, he knew he was not hallucinating. Somehow, the bullet in his head had made him a new eye. An eye that could see into the world where he had sent the men he killed. The world he had cheated tonight. And that was it, wasn’t it? These specters, jealous, demanded that he join them…
Belfast backed out of the room. “I won’t,” he whispered, shaking, but strong. “I’m not going with you.” Now so many of them pressed unmoving to the walls that it was like looking out on a rapt audience. “Leave me alone!” he hissed, and slammed the door shut.
He turned, and there was Sheila, and she screamed, and in his terror he tore his gun out of his coat and pointed it at her face.
5: DOUBLE ODD
“No, please!” Sheila blubbered, raising her arms to cover her face. “Don’t!”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Belfast groaned, lowering his still inoperative weapon. He took a step toward her.
“No!” she cried again, backing against the wall of the hallway, trapped there, still cringing. “Don’t hurt me!”
“Sheila.” He reached out to gently touch her hair. He loved her hair. Honey blond, it fell to the small of her back.
“Who are you?” she sobbed hopelessly. “What are you doing here?”
His hand halted, doubted itself, lowered. Was his face so stained in blood that she didn’t recognize him? “Baby, it’s me—Ron.”
“Ron!” she shrieked, at last looking straight at him, meeting his eyes. Hers were red and raw as if she had been weeping for hours, before he had even startled her with the pistol. “You aren’t Ron! Who are you? You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one who killed him!”
“Killed him?” Belfast chuckled nervously. “Honey, wh…what are you talking about? Are you all right? Look, it’s me…”
“I don’t know you!”
“You’re talking crazy, okay?”
“You’re the crazy one! You are! You killed my husband, didn’t you? And then you come here and tell me you’re
Oh…of course…he understood. Someone must have called, told her he’d been shot in the head. Of course she would think he was dead. And now, his face brown and flaking with dried blood (face like a burned doll) and hair caked with it, she didn’t know it was him. “Baby,” he went on soothingly, “it’s Ron. I didn’t die. I…”
“Ron did die!” she blurted at him, her eyes going crazed, tendons standing out in her long neck. A vein showed in her forehead. In her fear of him, she was still strong enough to show him rage. “I just came from seeing him! All that you left of him! He doesn’t have a head! My husband doesn’t have a head! I had to identify him by his clothes, his wedding ring, the tattoo on his chest! But he has no face! No head! And you killed him! I know it was you!”
Belfast studied this woman. She was acting like someone else, someone he didn’t even know. But…but he did know her. He remembered their wedding. She had been transcendently beautiful in her gown, tall as she was, a commanding work of art in her own right. He remembered their honeymoon in Florida; it had emptied their pockets. (Someday, he had promised her, they would see the world, not fabricated fragments of it at the Epcot Center.) He remembered when they had met at college. He was immediately taken with her. She was taller than he, slender, long-legged, long-haired. She had a prominent nose that would not be flattering were it not for her pretty eyes and mouth; instead, it gave her a distinct, unusual look that made her all the lovelier. He first realized she liked him when they were chatting outside between classes, one afternoon, and she stretched her arms above and behind her head while they conversed. He had had women do this with him before. An unconscious, instinctual action, like a dog walking in circles to clear imaginary grass before it lies down. She was arching her back, thrusting out her chest in a peacock’s posing, but more importantly, he felt, shooting little pheromone darts like Cupid arrows from her underarms. Animal signals, big smiles, talk of art. They had connected on every level all at once, in a delirious moment that he still thought of as one of the greatest of his life.
Now, looking into each other’s eyes, they seemed not to know each other…
“It was Drake,” he muttered, unsure of his words, of everything now. Drake had no head. It had to have been Drake she saw. But she wouldn’t know that name…
The hall was lined with more of her photographs. One of these was indeed a burned doll. It had one good eye, and the black empty skull socket showed white larval forms wriggling inside. Another photo, less grim, colored, showed the two of them in Florida. An old woman had snapped the photo for them. Hair blowing, eyes squinted in the sun, arms around each other…
But, reflected in the glass of a photo closer to him, Belfast saw another face. It wasn’t the face in the photograph, the face of Ron Heron. It was the face from the mirror when he had arrived home. It was…another man’s face…
He was thus distracted, thus confused, when Sheila took another photo down from the wall and swung its side against his skull like an ax. Glass broke. Belfast dropped to his knees. Sheila whirled to bolt, shrieking for help. Belfast’s vision began to go black…and he fell forward.
But as he did so, he reached out and caught Sheila’s ankle; held on tight. She fell with him, still screaming, and Belfast felt as though they tumbled together down a deep, black well.
6: A SIEGE OF HERONS
“Stop,” Johnny Belfast murmured, pointing his gun at her with his right hand, still grasping her slim ankle with his left. She was kicking out at his face, as if she hadn’t caused enough damage with the metal picture frame; blood was oozing around the band-aid on his forehead.
She didn’t know the gun was inactive, and obeyed him, her hoarse screams dwindling to ragged gasps and whimpers. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet over her. She remained lying there, drawing her long body into as small a ball as she could, hugging her knees to her chest.
“Sheila,” he began, but he stopped. Yes, he knew her name now because he had heard himself say it, but he didn’t know what she looked like naked. He did not know what she had looked like in her wedding gown. He did know, now, that he was not her husband, any more than this was his home. Any more than Ronald Heron had been a hired killer. Heron had gotten himself into deep, dark waters. He had made a man want to kill him. But it was he, Johnny Belfast, who was the murderer. Somehow, his memories of himself had become tangled with those of the man he had been sent to kill. Their bloods mixed in his mouth, their brain cells blended in his skull by the shot ball which had merged them in some perverse intercourse.
“Sheila,” he started anew, “I…I did kill your husband. Well…I didn’t. My friend did. But I…meant to kill him. But your husband…he got inside me. He’s still inside me…”
“Go away,” the tall woman moaned in a very small voice, a traumatized child. “Please…just go away…”
“Listen. I’m…I’m sorry, what I did. I understand why you hate me. I feel his pain…your husband’s pain. I’m sorry, Sheila.” A stream of blood trickled into his eyebrow. A tear dropped onto his cheek. “I love you,” he husked. “I’m sorry. I love you…”
From behind the door of the darkroom, he heard the cries of the dead. Growing louder, piercing his skull. But no; sirens. The night was alive with them, like harpies.
He knelt by her, timidly touched her leg. She flinched slightly, that was all.
“Sheila…remember in Florida?” he croaked. “In Disney World…in the Haunted Mansion? While we were on the ride, it broke down or something? We were stuck in one place for about fifteen minutes, and the mechanical ghosts kept popping up over and over? Do you remember that?”
