The Revenant Road (17 page)

24

Juno

I hate candles. Dim lighting makes me nauseous.

I write in the harshest electric lighting possible: One hundred and fifty-watt ‘Brite-white’ bulbs. They spotlight the corners of my office like a prison yard after a food riot. Anything less feels
unclear
to me, overly forgiving in the presence of encroaching darkness.

Juno Kementari’s house offered entire dissertations on the tepid forgiveness of candlelight. There were candles everywhere: on shelves, on tables. The lukewarm illumination they provided reminded me of an Indian leprosy ward I’d read about where the residents lived in the dark, stumbling over themselves rather than seeing the ravages of their illness in the faces of their neighbors.

Despite my best efforts earlier that afternoon, I’d been unable to attain the depth of drunken stupor to which I’d aspired. As I stood in Juno’s entry hall, I was disgustingly sober.

While I waited for my host to descend the winding stairway that led down to the entry hall, Trocious, her manservant, towered over my left shoulder, his massive frame half-visible in the medieval illumination.

“Dark,” I observed.

“Ms. Kementari is a staunch conservationist,” Trocious rumbled. “What light there is she finds sufficient.”

“Wonderful,” I grumbled.

“We see the truth in darkness, Mr. Grudge.”

There’s something surreal about the voices of the ultra famous. When you hear them standing in the same room, or ahead of you in the express line at Food World, there’s always a moment when real life blends with fantasy; when borders blur and boundaries realign. 

Juno Kementari had never been a great beauty.

Her diet dramas were the stuff of legend. Her complex history of binge eating and purging had provided material enough for entire mini-series. One particularly vicious tabloid had published nude photos of Juno sunbathing at her vacation home in
Tuscany
, inciting litanies of walrus jokes on the late-night talk-show circuit.

But the woman gliding down that winding staircase looked fit, even svelte in a black pinstriped suit and white silk shirt, which she wore open at the throat. Black high heels accentuated her height. On a tall day, Juno might have stood five-feet-seven-inches, maybe five-eight at the most. In the shadows of her domain, however, Juno seemed taller, more imposing than I remembered.

“Trocious, please take Mr. Grudge’s coat.”

I was grabbed a little too enthusiastically a second later. Trocious was as big as Shaquille O’Neal and twice as wide. His hands closed around my upper biceps and yanked my jacket off like a gorilla peeling a wily banana. Then he patted me down.

“Is this really necessary?” I snapped.

“When you’ve encountered as many stalkers as I have,” Juno said, smiling. “You can never be too careful.”

“He’s clean,” Trocious rumbled.

“He is?” Juno said.

The surprise in her voice was as confusing as it was offensive.

“Hey,” I shrugged. “I’m not in the habit of assassinating my hosts.”

The smile on Juno’s face seemed to brighten the air around her. At the same time, I thought I saw the flicker of something predatory ignite in her eyes. She looked me up and down with a hunger that appeared vaguely cannibalistic.

I wondered if I was about to get lucky. If so, I welcomed the challenge. An energetic bout of star-fucking seemed like just the thing to take my mind off my problems.

“Please join me in the dining room,” she purred.  

My entire upper body felt bruised from Trocious’ manual dry-hump. As Juno moved away down a long candle-darkened hallway, I limped after her into a sitting room. It was small only in relation to the dining room I could see through the double doors on the other side, a room the size of a small ballroom. 

“Trocious can be a little overzealous,” Juno said. “But I like that in men who safeguard my well-being.”

“I find that rather unsettling,” I said.

I shivered as a cold draft from the open windows in the dining room raised gooseflesh along my forearms. I jerked my head sharply to the right, trying to break up the knot of tension that had been growing between my shoulder blades since I’d first laid eyes on Juno’s valet.

Darkness. Stink. Sleeping in filth...

“Wine?” Juno said as she waved me toward a sofa. “I’ve worked up a dynamic little Merlot at my vineyards upstate.”

“Yes, please,” I said.

It was growing increasingly cold. As Juno disappeared behind the bar I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. At the same time, beads of sweat popped up across my forehead and my nose began to run.

“Do you have a cat?” I said.

“Can’t stand the things,” Juno said. “Why?”

“I’m allergic.”

Juno stepped out from behind the bar and handed me a crystal wine glass. The merlot swirled, thick and brackish in the candlelight. Tiny ripples of flame danced in liquid so red it looked black, flecks of moonlight trapped in a swirling cauldron of blood.

“Don’t worry,” she purred. “There’s only room for one pussy in this house.” 

Juno eased herself down next to me on the sofa.

Somewhere, far away, a bell began to toll in my head.

A drop of sweat rolled into my right eye and Juno’s image blurred. My throat tightened and my tongue seemed fiercely intent on slipping down the back of my throat.

Juno slid closer to me on the sofa, her eyes shining, her face shimmering like an image seen through clear ice. An itch tickled the roof of my mouth. Dimly, I recalled my reaction to the bite of the red worms the day before.

“I’ve followed your career with great interest, Obadiah,” Juno said. “I’ve read each of your books from cover to cover.”

I couldn’t breathe. My throat felt as if someone had shoved a ball of burning hemp halfway down my esophagus. My vision wavered and Juno’s face, the ubiquitous flames from a million candles, shimmered behind a curtain of tears.

“I’m... sorry,” I said. “I think I need...”     

“Your stories have attracted a great deal of attention, Obadiah,” Juno said. “People want to know more about you. We can’t have that.”

“I need...need a
doctor,
” I gasped.

“You’re sick?” Juno said. She shook her head and offered me a pained smile of sympathy. “That’s a pity. Still, maybe you can share some part of my wonderful darkness before the Feasting Time comes.”

I staggered to my feet and immediately fell to my knees. Even that meager increase in distance from Juno seemed to clear my head. The pressure in my throat eased somewhat and my vision cleared.

I began to crawl.

“Oh you can’t get away,” Juno said. “It’s much too late for that.”

I was five feet from the door of the sitting room. It hovered before me like an entrance to Nirvana encircled by golden flames. Every inch that separated me from Juno Kemantari seemed to return some measure of my faculties. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I had to get out.

I dragged myself toward the hall, reached out for the doorjamb to pull myself out of the room and my hands fell on a pair of immense black Cowboy boots. I looked up.

Several stories above my head, Trocious leered down at me, his eyes burning in the candle-gloom like dying twin suns.

“Please,” I gasped. “Help...me.”

Trocious grinned. His teeth were longer than I remembered, sharper. His incandescent eyes seemed to flash with an inner fire. That flame pierced the clouds that obscured my senses like the light from a gangrenous moon.  

Then he slammed the doors in my face.

“The Greeks always did have a flair for the drama,” Juno said. “Only appropriate, I suppose, since they invented it.”

I turned.

Juno stood in the center of the room, her head thrown back, hands on her hips. She was naked.

“It’s not too late, Obadiah,” she said. “I sensed it as I read
Death and the Sorcerer.
We’re kindred spirits, you and I. We could make this world our plaything.”

I lay there, unable to move, as Juno began to tremble, her flesh quivering until it rolled across her body in brown waves.

“I have something wonderful to show you,” she moaned. “Something I picked up during my travels abroad.”

She reached up behind her head, thrust her hands beneath her mop of black hair and tugged. I heard a sound like thick paper ripping and Juno’s eyes rolled back in her head. With a grunt, she pulled her scalp down over her forehead.

A flash of bone peeked between her fingers as she rolled her hair and scalp down over her face like a snake shedding its skin, pushed the skin down around her shoulders, her hips, her thighs... then past her knees and calves.

The glistening network of muscles and veins that stood before me in the Elizabethan illumination gloom stepped out of Juno’s empty skin, and moved toward me with its arms outstretched.

“Can you see me?” it said. “I’ve been… practicing.”

I couldn’t respond. I was only able to shake my head back and forth, dimly aware of the gobbling sounds that were drizzling from my mouth but unable to stop myself.

The thing with Juno Kementari’s voice took another step toward me. “It hurts to hold the fires inside,” she said. “No one tells you...how badly... the power... huuuurtsss.”

The fleshless thing limped forward, dragging a glistening red stain across the light oak hardwood floor. She opened her mouth. In the candlelight a double row of needle-sharp teeth glinted wetly.

“I dreamed about you,” she said. “Dreamed you were inside me.”

I flipped over and reached up for the doorknob. My hand met only cool wood where the doorknob should have been.

“No way out,” the Juno thing said.

The thing grabbed me by the legs and pain exploded in my calves and ankles. It felt as if I’d stuck them into a roaring furnace.

It flipped me over as if I were a child. I punched it in the head, grabbed at it, my hands slipping across wet muscles and exposed tendons.

Pain seared the palms of my hands and I jerked them away as my flesh blistered. Then the Juno thing gripped me with its terrible, burning strength, pulled my head back until the tendons in my neck creaked, and sank its fangs into my throat.

I screamed. I could taste my own blood on the back of my tongue as a stream of lava poured out of me, faster, faster. The Juno thing sucked harder; drew more of me into its mouth.

Like God injecting fire into your veins. The fire leaves a little of itself inside you, changes you.

You were right, Lenore,
I thought
. Right about everything.

From a million miles away, I heard shouting. It was coming from the hallway.

The Juno thing withdrew its fangs from my throat, lifted its head, and whirled toward the sound as the shouting grew louder. Its skin grew unbearably hot. A second later she began to smolder. Smoke rose up from her head and shoulders, and filled my nostrils with the smell of burning pork.