Beyond the Pale Motel (20 page)

“She used to make me take her picture.” Cyan sounded like a schoolteacher giving a lesson. “She said I'd be a great artist someday.”

I knew who she was, although I had never seen her photograph; Dash didn't want to think about his mother anymore.
I survived one fucked-up woman …

“She left him alone,” Cyan went on, as if he knew what I was thinking. “I made sure of that. But kids know what's happening. Look at her.” He shook his head. I couldn't read his expression in the dark. “She taught me how to do these,” he said.

And then he showed me a series of black-and-white photographs of women.

Strangely—or maybe not—they all looked as if they had already left their bodies. At least the souls had escaped, knowing there was no hope for the bodies. The bodies that were naked, except for their shoes, and bound. Their disembodied beauty was a blank and terrible thing.

I recognized Mandy Merrill and Adrienne Banks from their smiling pictures in the paper and on TV. Except, in the images I'd seen, they looked fresh and alive. In these made-up, dead-eyed photographs Mandy wore black stiletto boots and a silver choker necklace; she had her hair dyed black and cropped close to her head so her eyes looked even larger in their blankness. Adrienne wore satin pumps and pearls and had her hair in curls. The third woman, with a gardenia behind her ear and high-wedge, ankle-strap sandals, was Michelle Babcock. The fourth young woman was Leila.

Leila's picture made her look like a tan, 1970s pinup with feathered hair. She was wearing one other item besides her metallic platforms. It was the necklace that said
California
. Just like the one I'd found. For a moment I thought,
Did I kill her? Did I kill Leila?
And I wanted to weep but I could not.

All these young women had felt, or would have felt, like threats to me; I would not have invited them over for dinner if, like Michelle Babcock, they were my neighbors, running by in neon shorts. I might not even have learned their names. I would have avoided them, afraid Dash, or, later, if I'm honest, maybe even Cyan, might have chosen them over me.

Cyan had chosen them over me.

The last thing Cyan showed me was the industrial-size refrigerator in the motel basement. By then the drugs he had injected into my leg had fully kicked in and I couldn't scream anymore in spite of what I saw. No one was there to hear me anyway. But what I saw should, by all rights, have dragged screams from the realm of the dead.

The refrigerator hummed like Cyan's pulse and the terrible light in his eyes. In the cold, cold box were what appeared to be a pair of arms wrapped in plastic, a pair of legs similarly wrapped, a pair of hips severed cleanly below the waist and at the upper thigh, and a torso with a pair of once-perfect breasts. I remembered seeing, as a teenager, a picture of a human head stored like meat.

By the refrigerator's greenish-white fluorescence, I saw Mandy reach out to me, though she had no arms. I saw Adrienne balanced on the stumps of her legs, holding Michelle like a baby. What was left of Leila tried to smile at me. I remembered the first time I had seen her smile, the guilelessness, the freckles. She had been a little girl not that long ago. They all had.

My frozen heart cracked into shards. I turned and vomited on the floor, but I did not try to escape. It was the drugs and the knife and the fact that I was tied. But there was something else: maybe somehow I believed that if I gave myself to Cyan, my body and my soul, he would let Bree go.

“I just want her to be safe,” I whispered. It took every effort to speak. My face was wet. I was crying but I hadn't noticed it happening. “She has a son.”

“She was going to be the face,” Cyan said. His voice was a sheet of clear plastic, wrapping my body, suffocating me. He didn't seem to notice that I had thrown up. “She was beautiful. But you have a beautiful heart, Catt. I need your heart more than I need your friend's pretty head.”

“Please don't hurt Bree, Cyan,” I managed.

“This proves it.”

Proves? What did he mean?

“You have a perfect heart.”

No, I didn't. Not at all.

“You are what I needed to make her,” said Cyan.

I knew what he meant before he said it.

“Her,” Cyan said.

Perfection.

Cyan told me many things that night. And I listened because I wanted to know, I wanted to try to understand what had happened. He told me how his alcoholic, heroin-addict mother had made him photograph her naked and how he did it in order to get her to leave Dash alone. Although Cyan didn't say what he meant by this, I could guess. He said he began to enjoy taking pictures because it was the only time he felt in control around his mother. He told me how, when his beloved dog died, he began killing strays and collecting and photographing their body parts. How he became a successful photographer and grew to despise the “narcissists” he worked with. He took home runaways and prostitutes, promising them modeling careers. No one ever found out what he did; he became more bold. On a trip to LA (he hadn't contacted Dash that time; we didn't know Cyan was there) he had met an aspiring model named Mandy Merrill, suggested she cut off her hair, which she did, and photographed her at the abandoned motel he had purchased for shoots. And killed her. Then he met Adrienne Banks and killed her, too. And my neighbor, the one I hadn't let myself get to know—Michelle Babcock. He'd seen her jogging in my neighborhood; she'd smiled and said hello. The night I'd heard the sound outside, he'd watched her from her bedroom window and then slipped back in before I came downstairs and found him. Later he had followed her, given her his business card, photographed her. Killed her.

But Cyan wasn't done.

He'd photographed Leila the day before he stayed overnight at my place. She'd left her necklace behind and he'd put it in his pocket. It had fallen out. Later, he'd bought another one and asked her to meet him again to retrieve it and take a few more shots.

When Cyan saw Leila's necklace on my blog,
Love Monster,
which, he said, he'd followed obsessively since I'd first told him about it, he realized that he'd left the jewelry at my house and worried that I might know something, that it might incriminate him. So he'd come back on the night of my birthday to see if he could get the necklace back. Which he did. He'd brought the cookies in case he needed them, in case he needed to get me high. He'd taken the rest of the cookies with him when he left so no one would find any evidence of what he had done.

The last victim Cyan had chosen was Bree. The woman he was making was almost complete. She would be his revenge upon his mother and the women who reminded him of her. The creature Cyan was making would be his masterpiece, his work of perfect art. She would be his ultimate possession.

“Why Bree?” I asked. My voice felt too thick to fit through my mouth. Why any of them, but especially why Bree?

“She's just as vain, but smarter than the others. Older. Somewhat of an artist. And you love her. But she mistreated you.”

I asked with my eyes,
How did you know?

“She contacted me on my Web site and said she wanted to do a photo session. But really I think it was also her way to get back at you somehow. To come here and see me after she abandoned you like that. She told me what happened after the party.”

My mind was trying to put the pieces together but they kept shattering into smaller fragments.

“I never wanted to hurt you, Catt,” he went on. His voice had been calm, almost meditative, the whole time he spoke; now it vibrated in his throat. “You are different from them.”

I found myself, sickly, wondering if he meant that I wasn't as desirable. Still, even in these last hours when nothing but the sacredness of life, in any kind of body at all, should have mattered, I thought of this. If Cyan had known, he might have killed me long ago. I was just as shallow and vain as any of them, maybe much worse. I told him this. He shook his head. No.

“What about Bree?” I said. “You won't hurt her. She's a mother. She needs to be with Skylar.”

I could see him in my mind. As a newborn lying on Bree's white sheepskin coat under the trees, gazing up with eyes like leaves. As a crawling baby with rings of fat around his legs, his chubby-cheeked, gummy grin revealing the delight of motion. Later, missing two front teeth, my charming rogue. At ten, asking me why I couldn't stop smiling at him; it was because his ears, which he hadn't quite grown into, were being folded forward by his baseball cap.

Catt?

Yes, Sky?

The next person you go out with?

Yes?

Has to treat you really, really well.

He had meant Scott, of course.

“Please, Cyan.”

“I'll have to go out there and get her soon.” He sighed, squinting out through the broken glass door into the vast black. “She'll have fallen.”

“She didn't see anything. She doesn't know you did all this.”

“She was never really your friend.”

I tried to shake my head no, but it felt too heavy.
She was scared, that's all. You're wrong.

Later, there would be sirens, but I could not yet hear them. If I had, would I have fought harder against Cyan, spurred on by hope? Or would I have given in anyway, sacrificed myself? A part of me believed that if I gave of myself, gave all I had, Bree and Skylar would be safe.

Cyan took a few steps away from me and smoothed his hands over his scalp, examined his tapering fingers. “I need you,” he said.

Then, before the sirens came and the police officers arrived, Cyan took my heart. From my body. A body that had always been perfect because it had been alive.

*   *   *

I think of my nine deaths, my nine lives. There had been my life up until Dash left me and Darcy London had his baby. There had been Jarell and Dean and even Carlton, whom I might have loved in spite of his harmless fetishes and his potentially harmful wife. There had been the loss of Cyan before I realized who he really was. Scott's death had been the most brutal loss of them all. I had died at my thirty-seventh birthday party, severed, ultimately, from Bree and, worse, from Skylar.

Now there are no more lives left. All that I have is this—my love for the living, and for the dead.

Love is not the monster, not at all. True love is the thing that makes life bearable. That reveals life's beauty. Love is the monster's opposite.

I will watch over the ones I love,
I tell myself—in this undefined vortex of time, in this place between life and death, while I still have a will, while I can still think thoughts and create this final inventory of sorts—as I cross over and turn into particles of light above the Pale Motel. As I spin in the vastness of the universe where bodies matter not at all. I turn and turn and turn and fall, into union with the ones now gone, with the love I never recognized before.…

 

Acknowledgments

 

I would like to thank the following people for their help: Karen Clark, Laurie Liss, Brandie Coonis, Denise Hamilton, Jessa Marie Mendez, Christopher Bird, Jeni McKenna, Michael Homler, Lauren Jablonski, Jessica Preeg, Jessica Hatch, Joan Higgins, Charlie Blakemore, and Jeffrey Hirsch.

 

Also by Francesca Lia Block

Lay Me Out Softly: Stories

The Elementals

The Island of Excess Love

Love in the Time of Global Warming

Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

Love Magick Anthology
(editor)

Pink Smog

Roses and Bones

The Frenzy

Pretty Dead

Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide

Quakeland

Ruby
(with Carmen Staton)

Necklace of Kisses

Guarding the Moon

Nymph

The Waters & the Wild

Blood Roses

Psyche in a Dress

Wasteland

Echo

The Hanged Man

Violet and Claire

The Rose and the Beast

Girl Goddess #9

House of Dolls

Open Letter to Quiet Light
(poetry)

How to (Un)cage a Girl
(poetry)

Fairy Tales in Electri-City
(poetry)

 

About the Author

FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK is the acclaimed author of many books, including the popular Weezie Bat series and
The Elementals.
She is the recipient of the ALA Lifetime Achievement Award, among other honors, and is published all over the world.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.