There it was again; he hadn’t imagined it after all.
Someone was at the door.
He walked across the room with alarming effort. He felt sluggish, dragged, as if all his pockets had been filled with lead shot. Then he realized he was dressed in his police uniform, and about the same time he
But the strangest part was that he felt extremely averse to answering the door. He couldn’t explain it. He just didn’t want to do it.
He stuck his head into the foyer, refusing to even look at the front door. What did he sense waiting for him behind it? “Melissa, be a sport and get the door for me, will you? I’m…busy.”
He waited, but she made no reply.
And again—
It was much louder this time, driven by insistence; Kurt actually felt the frame of the house vibrate. He pictured Conan pounding on the door with a giant wooden mallet.
“Melissa!” He paused, waited. “Melissa! Get the door!”
“Get it yourself!” her small, pointed voice shot back. Hostility gave a crack to the words.
“Come on, Melissa,” he pleaded. “Someone’s at the door, and I don’t feel like getting it.”
From deep in the house, Melissa’s voice unwound as an enraged squeal: “Go fuck yourself! Lazy do-nothing son of a
Kurt’s face darkened. Melissa had been brought up liberally, he knew and understood, but now her precocity had slipped too far. It was fine for him to swear, he was an adult. He would not, however, tolerate language like that from a twelve-year-old.
“No one’s home!” he spat at the door. To hell with whoever was knocking. Kurt crossed the foyer, the TV room, then marched purposefully into the long hall. It was hot, a dense wet ensliming sensation; the darkness seemed to bleed out of the walls and drip. He breathed the dark, he could feel it fill his chest. But he paid no attention to the incompatibilities he’d observed since finding himself in the den.
He pushed open Melissa’s bedroom door.
Moonlight flooded the room; it was dark, yet he could see everything in the cool, phosphoric glow. The room had been emptied out, save for a bed which he noticed only through the corner of his eye. The floor and walls were stripped. Dust lay stoutly, in clumps, along the baseboards. Opposite him, a single bare window framed the moon.
Kurt’s eyelids felt sewn open.
Melissa sat cross-legged on the floor, in a limp, white nightdress. An ashtray clogged with butts rested beside her knee. She seemed very thin. A cigarette tilted out of her mouth, its tip glowing orange like a fox’s eye. She hadn’t even noticed that he’d entered, but instead seemed fixed on something across the room.
Kurt reeled in his own furor, blood thumping at his temples. “How’d you like to chow down on a box of Tide? Sounds to me like your mouth needs a good cleaning.”
She laughed, cackled at him. “Put your cock in a rat trap, faggot. And trip it with your balls, if you got any.”
“That’s telling him, baby,” a third voice oozed. “Ask him to take it out. Let’s see how big it is.”
Kurt’s senses sank—he recognized the third voice at once. Of its own volition, his head turned slowly toward the other side of the room.
“Not you,” he heard his own voice rattle. “Anyone but you.”
Joanne Sulley was sitting on the edge of a coverless bed. All she wore was a moth-eaten black satin blouse open down the front. It revealed nearly all of her. Like Melissa, she seemed much thinner than usual, as though she’d not eaten in weeks. Her hipbones jutted, and he could see the slats of her ribs. Shadows pooled in her body’s hollows. She looked like a whore from the death camp joy divisions.
He tried to sound infuriated, but the sight of her like this made his voice quaver. “What the goddamned hell are you doing? What are you doing in my house?”
Joanne leaned her upper body back on her arms. “Melissa invited me,” she said, and parted her legs obscenely wide. “She’s my friend. We both like each other a lot. Isn’t that right, baby?”
“Uh huh,” Melissa said.
Kurt squeezed his eyes closed till his entire head throbbed.
“Well, what did you think?” Joanne said. She flexed her cadaverous calves, black-nailed toes pointing to the wall. She spread her legs wide. “This is all a dream.”
He blinked. His mouth went dry from being open so long.
Joanne smiled like a waxen mask, her face little more than a skull thinly covered by sheet-white flesh. “Watch, Kurt,” she said. “Watch this,” and from nowhere she produced a foot-long vibrator. It hummed softly and glimmered in the moonlight; it looked like a bullet. She inserted it into herself, let her head loll and her jaw sag. Kurt stared as the humming object disappeared further. Her hips shifted, her legs tensed to cords. She pushed it in some more and moaned.
“Stop!” he yelled.
“Doesn’t turn you on?” the stripper said. “Maybe this will then.” She took the vibrator out, and jammed it into her mouth. Her lips stretched blue and thin against the girth of the shining, white cylinder. Soon its pressure at the back of her throat caused her eyes to swell forward in their sockets, as if they might eject altogether.
“Stop it!” he shouted. “Please, stop it! You’re crazy to do this in front of a little girl! You’re crazy!”
Suddenly the vibrator was gone. He supposed she had swallowed it.
“How can I be crazy, Kurt?” Joanne said. “It’s
“Yeah,” he agreed, “and since it’s my dream, I guess that means I can do anything I want. It wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t be real. Why, I could even—”
“Kill me?” Joanne finished. “You don’t want to kill me, Kurt. You want to fuck me.”
A heavy tingling, like a rash, crawled over his face. He seethed. He hated this girl—not that he could kill her, even in a dream. But, still, the thoughts which filled his mind turned utterly black.
Joanne was drooling now, profusely. Saliva glazed her chin like glycerin. “Come on, admit it. You want to fuck me, don’t you?”
“No.”
“No!”
She bent forward, her ribs moving beneath her skin. She breathed expansively as she fondled her own tiny, emaciated breasts. He noticed a fierce glimmer between her legs. It revolted him. Then, with both hands, she cupped the lean, grooved pubis and rubbed it desperately.
Dream or not, this would have to cease. It was time for a little wagon fixing—he hoped she wouldn’t mind being thrown out the window.
But when he lurched forward, nothing happened. He felt instantly encased in cement, with only a hole left for his face to peer through. He couldn’t move. He could only look as the nausea pulsed up his throat.
He heard lewd, slick sounds, like clicking.
“Come on, Kurt,” Joanne whined, and her tongue traced her upper lip. The tongue was black. “Let’s give our little friend here a lesson in biology.”
