lost child, their color drained from them, and her lipstick smeared across her cheek like blood.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s for the best anyway, if I go away. For the best…”
He faltered, and repeated, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. And then, he started downstairs. Above him, he heard the door quietly snick shut.
* * *
Fallen leaves scrabbled across the sidewalk like large insects that took flight, swirled briefly, settled to earth again. The leaves were dark red and soon to crumble, flakes of crusted blood drifting down from the dying sun. This sanguine orb made deep blue-purple silhouettes of the old houses along the street, narrow and huddled close together against the chill and seeming to lean over Griffin as if to box him in.
He gave a little shiver, wishing he’d brought his jacket with him, but as he’d related to Idelia the book store was just down the street and around the corner. During the week, he worked first shift hours, but on Saturdays—as now—he was scheduled from evening ‘til closing. He had no social life to sacrifice.
He could still feel Idelia in his mouth; she had seemed more solid there than in his arms, where despite her craving she had been so wispy and brittle. Thinking of her made Griffin dart a glance back over his shoulder at the house he shared with his landlord…a glance up at the second story.
Perhaps he had sensed a gaze upon his back, for someone was indeed staring down at him from an upper window. He stopped, and squinted, realizing that it was more than one person. Again, the buildings were murky with the sun dropping behind them, and there was no light on in that upper room, but he thought he could see three or four figures framed in the glass, crowded close together as if all of them were pressing in to get a look at him. His impression was that they were naked, all of them, but whether they were male or female it was difficult to distinguish. What he did seem to observe, however, was that every one of the pallid figures was wasted to cadaverous thinness, and splotched here and there with inky darkness as if someone had camouflaged them with black paint. These must only have been darker shadows than the rest of the gloom, but Griffin had no further opportunity to tell, for the figure closest to the front drew down the shade, and blocked them all from view.
Griffin remained staring at the window for several moments, as if the shade might be lifted again, but it wasn’t. Did the figures continue to peek at him, however, around its edges?
He decided he must have been mistaken. It must have been only one person, and that must have been Idelia. She had disrobed, and exposed herself, hoping to entice him back, but then had thought better of it. Yes, it could only be that.
Griffin turned back toward his destination and picked up his step, anxious to be out of this dark side street before it closed in on him altogether.
* * *
As he lay in bed that night, staring up at the black pool of his ceiling, he thought of the woman who was staying upstairs from him, even now perhaps in the room just above him.
Why was she visiting, if Guy were away elsewhere? To housesit in his absence?
Tonight, at work, Griffin had attempted—without success—to locate various books that Guy had lent to him and which he’d returned to Idelia. He thought he might like to purchase them so he could peruse them further, after all. He had been thinking about some of the pages Guy had turned down the corner of, or tagged with a scrap of paper as a bookmark, passages he had highlighted with a yellow marker.
One story which Guy had obviously been drawn to related how a group of Canadian researchers in the paranormal, headed by a Dr. George Owen, had in the 1970’s invented a ghost. They had concocted for him a spurious history, and the name of Philip, using the seance form as a way to focus him into being. Eventually, he apparently took on his own life, or after-life, and contacted the researchers as if he had been a real ghost. As if, Griffin thought, there were real ghosts.
Philip had communicated through rapping, and had even made a table physically “dance” about a room.
Another story that had particularly seemed to impress Guy was represented in several of the books; it discussed how the author Alexandra David-Nell, while studying in Tibet, learned how to create something called a tulpa, a thought form given its own sort of life through intense and lengthy concentration. Her tulpa was given the identity of a monk, who after a time was even physically seen by another person and mistaken for a man of flesh and blood. This monk was at first benign in aspect, but after a while grew strangely sinister even in his appearance, and took on his own life to the extent that David-Nell felt he was shrugging off the yoke of her power over him, like a child outgrowing its parents and rebelling for independence. David-Nell had then struggled for half a year to “unmake” him.
An almost subliminal sound broke into Griffin’s thoughts. It was the squeak of a loose floorboard in the room above him. He realized after several moments that he was holding his breath, as if even that sound might prevent him from hearing a repetition of the stealthy creak, but no more came.
His ceiling, lost in blackness, seemed suddenly not to be there at all. He imagined it was a gaping opening, and he imagined a figure was up there at the edge of the opening, gazing down at him, waiting for him to fall asleep. Watching, in the dark, with eyes of too light a blue.
Griffin reached for the lamp on the night stand, almost toppled it in turning it on. His ceiling returned, white and solid, if the plaster a bit cracked.
He fell asleep with the lamp still on…but dreamed of multiple sets of pale blue eyes peeking at him through those cracks in the plaster.
* * *
On Sunday, Griffin put on a jacket and set out to get a paper and a coffee-to-go at his place of employment (couldn’t even stay away on his day off, he chided himself), but found himself getting no further than the front hall, where he gazed up the stairs that ascended into the gloom of the second floor landing.
He wondered if he should apologize for rejecting Idelia Hamlin’s advances yesterday evening. He could tell she’d been hurt, dejected. She had said something like it being for the best, anyway. Something about going away. Going back home, wherever that was? Would she have already left?
More than this, however, he wondered if he should have rejected Idelia Hamlin’s advances at all.
In the light of a new day it was difficult for him to imagine how he could have been so uncomfortable with her little…show of affection…that he would have broken off from it. It was he who was mad, not her. Here was this gorgeous fragile flower of a young woman, certainly no older than twenty, who had thrown herself at him, an undistinguished-looking man in his early thirties who had had fewer lovers in his life than his sixteen-year-old nephew had, he reckoned. Well, that must have been it right there, then. He was too inexperienced to respond to spontaneous desire. Too timid. Had he not been so bloody meek all his life, he might have been more experienced by now. Have a lover right now rather than be living alone. Own a book store rather than work in one. He stood mired in his self disgust—but his fingers had been curling around the railing of the staircase.
As if pulling a boot from sucking mud, he placed his right foot on the first step.
In the murk of the upper hall the door was an obscure portal almost indistinguishable from the shadowy wall. He rapped upon it. A timid knock, despite his new determination. Watch it be Guy who opens the door, he thought. Guy’s great bulk, and Idelia having fled away like some nervous fawn, back into the deep woods…
The door opened, and it was Idelia who stood in the threshold.
She wore the same heavy, dark brown sweater and black tights as yesterday, her feet again bare but she had wiped away her dramatic red lipstick and the dark mascara. It left her looking even more pale, if this were possible, white almost to bloodlessness, and made her eyes look more vulnerable, her too-full lips tender and more child-like. She appeared more sad than surly, as when she’d answered his knock last evening.
“Hello,” she murmured.
“Hi. Um, I’m glad to see you’re still here. I just, ah, just wanted to…I hope yesterday I didn’t hurt your feelings…you know…” He chuckled quite uneasily, threw up one hand. “I didn’t mean to run away like that and… embarrass you or any- thing…”
The young woman looked away and smiled slightly—half bashfully and half bitterly, he felt—and then looked back at him, her smile fading again, that brooding drowsiness returning. “Why don’t you come in?”
“Yeah, sure,” Griffin said, trying to sound casual while an almost nauseous passion loomed up through his guts like a solid invading object. It was as though he were penetrating himself. “Okay…”
As soon as Idelia had closed the door behind them and turned to face him, she reached beneath the hem of her sweater and slipped her thumbs under the rim of her tights, began skinning them down her legs like a snake shedding its skin. The contrast of the slender snowy limbs that were revealed from behind the eclipsing black
