Dark Terrors 3 (24 page)

She looked into the window of a hardware store: an axe, shovel, shears. Then several clothing boutiques: black gloves, black lace. Sexless beings dressed completely in black: hats, gloves, black leather coats.

She imagined she could hear the sounds of zippers snagging flesh from deep inside these shops, the customers weeping softly.

She was vaguely aware of someone taking photos of her, but when she turned around no one was there.

She had to step over an old man in dark glasses, lying with his German shepherd, both of them sprawled across the middle of the sidewalk. The old man’s cane came up, pointing at her like an arrow. The dog turned and bared its teeth, then lunged for the pasty flesh of the man’s wrinkled hand. The man yelled. Blood sprayed in a mist across the sidewalk.

She looked past the wounded man at another man standing in a doorway. His damp lips. His glistening eyes watching her. His hands clutching, as if they held the stolen tableknife. But she knew this wasn’t the same man.

Thunder crashed behind her. For a second the city skyline appeared to be on fire, a giant camera scorching it as picture after picture was taken. Rain began, then suddenly became a downpour.

Even through the heavy rain she could see them all staring at her. Jane found sanctuary beneath a large store awning. On the other side of the glass an elderly woman was cutting shapes out of black paper, demonstrating silhouette portraiture. Jane thought she recognized the profile the old woman was working on as her own.

The woman looked up, gasping as she peered into Jane’s face. The scissors slipped and cut through the face of the silhouette.

Jane ran back out into the rain. Music crashed inside her head. The storm sounded like the same music. She gazed past the grey buildings, searching, intent on returning to her apartment. The rain slackened some. She entered the
park. Blades of leaves, blades of grass. Children had gathered by the north gate and were playing with a lizard. There was no sign of the man selling combs. Another bright, soft explosion, but Jane didn’t bother to look up this time. She gazed more closely at the children. Their lizard wriggled madly, nailed through its neck to a board. She suddenly burned hot with shame.

The centrepiece of the park was an arrangement of giant metal sculptures with razor-thin planes, broad fields of metal. At first glance the sculptures appeared curvilinear, but closer examination revealed hidden points, sharp edges residing within the folds of illusory soft steel and brass.

She ran past the sculptures as another bright flash almost blinded her, and suddenly a pigeon was flapping at her side, caught on the huge button of her coat sleeve. Its claws came out and dug a ridge into the flesh covering the back of her
hand.

She finally shook the bird loose, crying loudly as it pecked her. No one came to her aid. The world was full of too many sharp edges. It was pointless to get too deeply involved. You risked your own death. She ran the few remaining blocks, the rain beating the blood away as it struggled to escape her cuts.

She slammed the apartment door behind her. Someone had dropped a shiny, brightly-coloured magazine through her mail slot. She picked it up. Inside, nude photos of women had been scored horizontally repeatedly with a razorblade, turning their flesh into Venetian blinds.

* * * *

Maxwell used up all his film, and he would have loved to have had several more packs. The passion in her face as she ran away from the man with the cane, the trapped bird - he would have given anything to have had such passion directed at him. He loved her more with each stolen glimpse of intense emotion. He hoped the magazine he had left for her demonstrated just how much she made him feel, how badly he wanted to reach her, make contact, and banish his loneliness for ever.

* * * *

When Jane threw the magazine to the floor a note fell from its pages. She ripped the envelope open frantically, jerking the folded letter out with shaking fingers. His handwriting consisted of thin, jagged uprights, virtually unreadable.
Love . . . sharp . . . you . . . reach:
these were the only words she could make out.

A crashing in the alley. Garbage can lids banged out a crazed musical. She crept to the back door that led to the fire escape and pulled it open. The alley was silent, empty.

She closed the door and turned back into the hallway which ran the length of her apartment. She stepped on something soft and pliant. She reached down and picked up the worn leather glove. A man’s glove: who was responsible for it? It was stained here and there a dark colour, a shade of red like ancient rust.

Bright neon from the hotel sign outside the window at the end of the hall washed the walls a more brilliant red. At the end of the hall the tall curtains on either side of the window swept the floor, gliding in and out as if the window were a mouth, breathing. She knew there were sharp blades behind the billowing curtains, an erect penis behind the soft gabardine swaddling the crotch of the man who might be hiding-there.

She could not stay here any longer. In her make-up mirror she paid particular attention to the jagged patterns in her eyes, but no cosmetic could smooth these. It was all a part of being in the world, she supposed, but now she did not know if she wanted to be a part of the world or not. She glanced at her clock: impossibly, it said she had been back in her apartment for hours.

She finally gave up on returning a semblance of normalcy to her face, put on her coat again, and left her apartment to go see a movie. At least she could be assured that in the movie theatre,
nothing
is real.

* * * *

Maxwell wondered if Jane had read his note yet, if she had glanced through his magazine, if she had discovered his
intentionally dropped glove. Simple things, but they had the power to agitate the imagination of those vulnerable enough to suggestion. The innocent knew that the world was a dangerous place, but they were incapable of fully appreciating the implications.

In the two hours since he had left Jane’s apartment he had been quite busy. The close proximity of her things had aroused him so he immediately went out looking for a substitute for her.

The woman hadn’t wanted to return home with him, but it never ceased to amaze him how easily obstacles could be got rid of by means of a simple act of murder.

He enjoyed dancing. It was the only time he could hold a live woman with safety. But death made this one an even better dancing partner than he was used to. He had to tie her body to his waist and legs, but once this had been accomplished she followed him perfectly, now and then rolling her head on to his shoulder in affection. A pity he was already taken.

He hadn’t caught her name before, but he preferred making up his own names anyway. ‘Janice,’ for this one, as she was to be Jane’s substitute for the moment. With the wound in her face Janice was completely possessable: a marred masterpiece, a ‘second’ available for a reduced price, reduced effort. But she remained a great work of art for all that.

As the music rose to a crescendo he recalled the moments of Janice’s creation: how he had heard her heart in his head, beating, struggling to escape the point of his knife (but not Jane’s knife - he would never betray Jane in that fashion), how again and again he had thrust the point into the centre of her beating, until the sound had faded from his head.

She had struggled, but all too briefly. She had kicked a bit; as if in a dream he had felt her high heels puncturing his flesh, marking him in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Now the dance was over. The music ran down. Maxwell grasped the knife handle still protruding from Janice’s chest. He pulled down on the knife. Her flesh split like rotted silk.
He gasped with pleasure as the blade sliced through blouse, slip, skin.

He gasped again and again, louder than the music screaming in his head.

* * * *

As she walked to the movie the passers-by whispered amongst themselves, too loudly for comfort, in fact far more loudly than was possible.

She might have gone to the police, but what could she tell them? She’d received a garbled note, a damaged magazine, and someone had lost a glove, someone had stolen a knife from a local restaurant. Her co-workers would be questioned, and they would talk about how nervous ‘Poor Jane’ had always been, how high-strung, how no one in the office really liked her. She would be embarrassed in front of the police; they would be disappointed in her.

She put on her glasses before entering the movie, intending to wear them for the rest of the night. She’d always felt protected behind the thick lenses. Even when she witnessed something terrible - a workman’s hand slashed open on a dagger of glass, a young boy stabbed just above the groin in a schoolyard fight - she felt shielded by that thickness from the full weight of these incidents. They could not touch her on the other side of the glass. The images would not adhere to the filmy surface of her eyes.

But there was also this accompanying sense of danger: glass that so shielded her might break if the images came too close.

The theatre darkened; the previews came up with amplified colour and volume. What little light remained reflected off all the sharp edges hidden in the theatre. A few minutes into the movie she realized she had seen it before, but she knew she wouldn’t be watching the screen anyway. Instead she gazed at the backs of people’s heads, the placement of their arms on companions’ shoulders, their small open displays of affection, and observed how they reacted to the murders taking place on the screen. Maxwell had always enjoyed the company of mannequins. So intent on looking a certain way for their male customers, they did not speak back. He envied their makers.

He bundled Janice, the mannequin he had created, into a bag and brought her back to Jane’s apartment during the movie - he had passed Jane on the way over, and followed her until he was sure of her destination. If he worked quickly, he knew he could be outside the movie theatre when the film ended.

The lock on the apartment door had jimmied easily. Poor, naive Jane. Her lack of informed caution filled him with a renewed tenderness towards her. On the bed, blood dripped down the mannequin’s arm, paused in the openness of the relaxed palm, then leapt from the forefinger to the carpet below.

He took the Polaroids he had made of Jane and spread them carefully across her dining-room table. He laid one against the other, matching patterns, shadows, stances, expressions. He permitted one image of her to kiss another image of her. His fingers lingered over her glossy surfaces. He meditated on the silkiness of her image. He took a pair of scissors from the drawer and laid one blade across a photograph, bisecting her face. He moved the blades together until her head disappeared. He raised one of the photographs, poised the twin points of the scissors over the image of her breasts, and pierced them simultaneously with one quick jab. He then began cutting through each of the photographs, disassembling each image of her until he had a large pile of shiny pieces. A bottle of bright red nail polish, retrieved from her dressing table, sat poised on the edge of her fragmented poses. He took this and began painting the pile of clippings with red swirls, arrows and bright red hearts.

He picked up a meat cleaver from her kitchen counter and used it to dismember the graceful lines of the bedstead, the side table, the dresser. He slashed through the bed clothes and started on the contents of her closet. He arranged the mannequin within the destroyed womb of her bed, then began hacking on it as well, imprinting it with all his secret signatures. Then seeing himself in the mirror of the dressing table, the glittering blade in his upraised hand, he started smashing his own image in the mirror.

* * * *

Jane felt a heightened self-consciousness leaving the movie theatre. She thought they must see her awkwardness, the wrongness in her. The crowd seemed subdued, as was often the case when people departed this sort of entertainment, as they attempted to extricate their thoughts and eyes from the webs and tendrils of fantasy. She felt as if she herself were too well-defined today, her terror too palpable against the crowd’s backdrop of oh-so-grey emotion. It made her too-involved, vulnerable, an easy target.

A dark murmuring in the crowd off to her left, but Jane was determined not to look. She and the others around her crunched through powdered glass on the sidewalk, no doubt the remains of some wino’s refreshment.