Aaaiiieee

looking at her, but I thought I could actually see the fear in Grandmother’s eyes, in her shy smiles, and then I felt sorry for her.

It wasn’t hard to understand my mother after all, was it? Seeing her father’s dry, hard face brought it home to me. He had made his daughter like him. An alcoholic, filled with destructive anger. But where he had turned it outward, she had turned it inward. Maybe that was why she had let me go, and the thought felt so true to me: a realization. She had wanted me to leave so she would never be tempted to harm me.

Insanity is inherited in families like houses are. Not in the same way tallness is, but passed on nonetheless. She had wanted to remove me from that chain. And seeing how much I looked like her father, I was glad she had. It made me oddly afraid of myself for several moments, and I turned far ahead in the book.

Mother was in her late teens now, and her beauty dazzled me. I was really rooted there gaping. She sat in a low-cut black dress with some horny-looking side of beef in a soldier’s uniform at a club somewhere. Those eyes stared right into me, even at that moment, through decades. They saw me, they were so piercing and alive. And here was Mother standing on a beach, her eyes hidden behind big dark glasses but her smile carnal as she posed. She knew the power she was transferring onto that negative. She wore a black two-piece bathing suit, sexy for the 50s. Her breasts weren’t large and she wasn’t as curvy as they liked them then, but she was long and sleek.

The erection pressing against the spine of the album seemed to prod me out of a dream and I snapped the book shut, stood up from the bed abruptly. As I reached to place the book atop the bureau, I noticed an odd thing.

The bureau top was glossy and clean in the pale morning light. Last night the dust had been thick upon it; I had run my finger through it. I traced my finger along the bureau top now. Nothing. I turned to the mirror, previously filmed, then to a lamp shade that had looked cloaked in dust. Everything appeared clean. Had David or someone been in here after all, tidying up for my benefit? Maybe I had done it in my sleep. Right; and I had smoked while I did it, too. But I didn’t smoke, just like I didn’t drink. Bad habits of times past, that I had made it a point never to indulge in.

Maybe I had been mistaken about the dust last night. The light was different in quality now; the room had a different character. A bit, anyway. Maybe a breeze had flowed in from somewhere and blown the dust away.

Or maybe I was going insane.

*     *     *

When I left work that evening, I stopped at my apartment first to pick up a few things before proceeding on to Eastborough. At my mother’s house I made myself an early supper, afterwards deciding to go back to sorting through the art studio.

As soon as I had reached in and hit the light switch I saw the skull, and saw that it had changed.

It was the steer skull with the spherical object jammed into its forehead, and it was still on the work bench where I had left it…but it was not as I had left it. I had handled the thing closely, and I knew that last night it had only had stumps for horns. I knew this without question. But even if I had never seen the skull before, I would have known that no cow on earth ever had horns like those…

I came into the room to look at it. I didn’t, however, touch it.

The horns had grown, there was no doubt. There had been nothing glued on, or slipped over the stumps. The stumps wed smoothly into these new projections. They were much like a stag’s antlers, branching out into sharp curved fingers of bone. Also, I noticed in my dazed bewilderment, two projections had grown out from under the eye sockets, like a misplaced lesser set of antlers just coming in.

What in the name of God had Mother found out there in the desert? And what had I done to activate it? Left it on the table where a little sunlight had got onto it? I had touched the sphere last night. Had that done it?

I looked about me. David had taken his row of skulls but I moved to those others on the walls. Yes…they had been affected also. Not so profoundly, but a skull coated in glossy black with a purple vaginal flower painted on its forehead had begun to sprout thick ridges around the eye sockets—this growth cracking the paint. The white bone beneath showed through the gaps. And the skull tiled in turquoise: thick bony swelling in several areas had pushed the pebbles away from each other so that spaces showed between, and a number of stones had dropped to the floor.

I smelled cigarette smoke a half-second before I heard the voice behind me.

“My art seems to have a mind of its own.”

I wheeled around. I think I gasped comically.

A woman in a bathrobe leaned languidly in the threshold to the studio, her face in shadow. A cigarette head glowed orange as she inhaled with a crackle. When she drew the cigarette from her lips, she flopped her wrist back like one who pretends to smoke.

“Jesus Christ!” I bellowed. “Jesus Christ!” And I backed into the room until I nearly fell atop the work bench.

The woman stepped casually into the room. Into the lamp glow. I had expected gray hair, sagging flesh. But this woman was beautiful, maybe a few to five years older than my thirty. A sly cat smile, then smoke blowing out of gently puckered lips. And through the smoke, those eyes…

“Jesus Christ,” my mother repeated amusedly. “Hm. Well…Lazarus, maybe.”

I had never fainted in my life. I had never come close to fainting. I have never known a man who has fainted. But I fainted.

*     *     *

Perhaps it was she who willed me to faint. Hypnotized me with those eyes. And, now, had awakened me with them; for they hovered just above me when I opened my own.

She sat back a bit, smiling down at me. Mother’s hair was shortish and nearly black, just barely starting to thread with white, brushed back from her forehead. Her eyebrows were tweezed somewhat thin, but not overly so. She was just beginning to get bags under her eyes, and light crow’s feet, but these and the white threads gave her a handsome character. Her nose was long but in proportion to her longish face, her chin tapering to a point. Her lips were full and a dark pink against her white flesh.

They say you can’t tell that a person is disturbed, insane, dangerous simply by looking at them, but I think you can. When you see photos of serial killers, for instance, there is always something off in their faces—even in a good-looking man like Ted Bundy. There was something off in my mother’s light green eyes. Something mad. And mixed with that, there was pain. It was so obvious, so strong, it made me marvel to think Mother had survived another twenty years beyond this age. If I had blocked her smile with my hand the pain in her eyes would have been much more evident, but it was evident enough.

But I couldn’t block her smile with my hand, because I couldn’t move either hand. My wrists were bound to the posts framing the headboard of Mother’s bed.

I couldn’t see behind her just yet, but my ankles were obviously bound also. Together. Later I would see that a nylon cord around them extended across the room to the door knob. But I couldn’t see past Mother just yet, and I couldn’t move my lower body either, because she was sitting on top of me, astride my body, and Mother was completely naked.

Now that I was awake she began to rock back and forth on me, gently, as if in a rocking chair.

“Hi, Jacky,” she breathed both tenderly and seductively.

“Are you a ghost?” I managed. I was on the verge of tears from terror and from a boiling cloud of emotions too confused and immense for me to articulate today, let alone grasp at that moment.

“I suppose so. I think there are different kinds of ghosts, and some kinds might come into being this way. I know of at least one other.”

“Come into…being what way?”

Only a smile. Rocking. I was getting hard between her buttocks.

“Please…get off me,” I said in a watery voice.

“I don’t want to. And you don’t want me to, either.” She lifted a bit to slide her hand under her, and took hold of my erection. “Do you, Jacky?” It jerked in her fist as it flooded fully erect. She pointed it upwards and pushed its tip inside her. I cried out, raised my head to look. There was some resistance but when she withdrew and then pushed down on it again her lubrication guided me wholly inside in one smooth gulp; as if I had skewered her straight into the guts, it felt so deep. Her black wiry hair ground down against mine, and she let out a long moan like the warning growl of an animal.