I looked toward the entrance to see the old man staring at me.
'Your time's up,' he said.
I walked toward him, reaching for my wallet.
'I don't want your money,' he said. 'I want you out of here.'
I looked at him. 'What?'
'Out.' He stood next to the door, and I hurried past him, walking around the counter into the gift shop.
'I don't — ' I began.
He pointed to a sign above the cash register:
My face was flushed. He must have seen me, I thought. He must know. I looked away, started toward the door.
'And don't come back!'
'Fuck you!' I yelled over my shoulder.
I walked across the dirt to the Dart, my heart pounding in my chest. Ordinarily I was not the type of person to engage in any sort of altercation, verbal or otherwise. I always tried my best to avoid confrontation. But I felt a strange sort of defensiveness at the thought that the old man might have seen me looking at the panties, and I was angry enough that if he had responded to my epithet in any way, if he had come out of the building and come after me, I would have punched him.
I got into the Dart, drove out of the parking lot, pulled onto the highway. I drove five miles east until I saw the back of the billboard that I was looking for on the opposite side of the divided highway. I slowed, looked in my rearview mirror to make sure it was the right sign, then drove over the dirt of the center divider and parked underneath the words 'See Marilyn Monroe's Panties!'
I waited there until dark.
I had not checked to see what time The Place closed, so I drove closer, until I could see the building. The lights were still on in the gift shop, so I pulled off the side of the road and waited.
The lights went off at seven. I waited another hour, but the pickup in the parking lot did not move, and I assumed that the old man lived somewhere on the property and did not have to drive anywhere to go home. I gave it until nine, just to be on the safe side, then pulled forward to the arrow billboard, turned off my lights, and coasted to a stop in the parking lot. I waited a few moments to see if I'd been spotted, if the old man was going to come out, then took the flashlight from the glove compartment, got out of the car, and quietly hurried around to the side of the building where the door was. As I'd feared, the door was locked, but I knew there were no dead bolts or anything, just the knob lock, and I took out my Texaco card, pushed it in the doorframe, slid it down, and was gratified to hear a click and see the door move outward. I pulled open the door and stepped inside. My heart was pounding, my hands shaking with the rush of adrenaline. Turning on the flashlight, I walked quickly across the room to the case housing Marilyn's panties. I stood there and shone the light through the glass. The beam of illumination highlighted the dark fuzziness that coated the material. And the panties moved.
I stopped, the flashlight shaking in my hand. I held my breath, forced myself to exhale. This was stupid. The light had jiggled in my shaking hand. Or my perception had been off. The panties themselves had not moved. They moved again.
I stepped forward, peering through the glass, terrified and at the same time fascinated. The panties were definitely moving now, inching across the bottom of the display case in a wormlike crawl that was sickening and unnatural and. and somehow arousing.
I was already hard, and I unbuckled my pants with my left hand while my right trained the flashlight on the crawling panties. I yanked open my button fly, pushed down my jeans and underwear. My penis was firm and rigid, harder than it had ever been before, and I reached out and opened the back of the case.
I smelled mildew and dirt, rot and decay, and I wanted to touch myself, to stroke myself, but I was already coming, and my hips thrust convulsively in the air as my semen shot into the case, the thick white liquid spurting onto the panties, the panties moving back and forth across the floor of the case to catch every last drop of my randomly pumping sperm.
It went on for what seemed like minutes, until my penis was hurt and sore, still throbbing in time to spurts that were no longer coming. I was out of breath and shaking, and I stared into the case, holding weakly on to its frame, watching as the whiteness grew dark, hardening, solidifying, developing what appeared to be an outer covering of mold and mildew. The individual pools and puddles and drops and droplets slid over the irregular surface of the panties, meeting in the middle, becoming one unified mass that pulsed and undulated in a rhythm so alien that even in the aftermath of my ecstasy, I was frightened by its strangeness.
The wadded panties jerked once, throwing off the hardened lump of darkening sperm, which landed on the floor of the case next to it, still pulsating. The mound of sperm stretched, twisted, grew, and underneath the moldy surface, I thought I could detect a vaguely humanoid form.
The lights in the museum switched on.
I jumped, looking immediately toward the door to the gift shop. The old man was standing there, staring at me, his hand on the light switch. I'd half expected him to be holding a shotgun, but he was unarmed. I quickly reached down, pulled up my pants.
'I figured you might be back,' he said. 'I was hoping you wouldn't be, but I figured you might.'
I licked my lips, not knowing what to say.
He walked into the museum. 'I know how it is, boy. I know how it gets.'
He looked into the case, and I did too. My moldy sperm was now the size of a hardback book, and pale protuberances that definitely looked like arms stretch ed out from the fuzzy darkness. I swallowed. 'What is it?' I asked. My voice was quiet, barely above a whisper.
'It's yours. Yours and Marilyn's.'
'This. this has happened before?'
The old man nodded. 'You could say that.'
I looked at him. 'Are you… are you going to have me arrested?'
He shook his head. 'Wouldn't make much sense. You didn't have no more control over it than I did. It's not you. It's her.' He motioned toward the panties, now hunched in the corner opposite the open door of the case.
The pulsating mass was now obviously humanoid in shape, pieces of hardened mold and gelatinous blackness cracking and sliding off from the small figure as it struggled to right itself. I saw a head, eyes, mouth.
The old man cleared his throat. 'I can help you dispose of that,' he said.
I looked at him, not certain what to say, not certain of what I was feeling.
'Come here,' he said. 'Follow me.'
I hazarded one last look at the twisting creature, at the panties in the corner, then followed him to the rear of the museum. We walked through the back door and out behind The Place. There was a full moon, and though no lights were on in the back of the building, I could see clearly and did not need my flashlight. I followed the old man down a barely extant dirt path, behind a stand of ocotillo and over a small rise.
And looked into the pit.
It was easily as big as a football field, sunk some twenty or thirty feet down in the desert. He obviously used this as his landfill. There were sacks of groceries, pieces of broken bric-a-brac, a couch, a car door, lying in the dirt.
But there were other things as well.
I felt sick to my stomach as I looked at the dried vaguely humanoid forms piled on the sloping sides of the pit, as I saw the small bones protruding from the dirt.
'Ten bucks,' he said. 'No one'll ever know.'
I don't know what shocked me more, the fact that he had a killing field in his backyard and was willing to kill my. creature for me, or the fact that he wanted to charge me for it.
He must have guessed by my silence what I was thinking, because his voice, when he spoke, was softer. 'It's not human,' he said.
I nodded.
'Do you want me to dispose of it for you?'
I shook my head, staring at the overlapping forms in the pit.
'Well, then, we'd better get it into your car.'
