The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 10

  She resumed then, and told the silent spot where she figured Maria to be how handsome William had been when she had first met him at a church dance. How sweet he had been, or seemed to be. But after their marriage the drinking had escalated, in response to the pain in his jaws that he could at least put a name to, and the pain in his mind or soul he could never articulate to her, and perhaps not even to himself. “He hit me time to time,” Rose related. “Afterwards, when he was sober, he’d say, ‘I’m sorry, Rose.’ Course, he’d just do it again. And then it was, ‘I’m sorry, Rose’ again. Well, I took it. But I had some pets. I had me a cat named Tom and a dog named Rascal, and a horse. I always loved animals, ever since I was a child. I brought home birds with broken wings, pollywogs in a bowl of water. One time our family cat even knocked a snake cold, batting it with her paws, so I took that snake and put it in a bureau drawer until it came to and could move around again, and then I took it outside and let it go, and my Momma was never the wiser. I felt closer to animals than I did to people. I felt connected to them. See, animals ain’t evil like people are. The harm they do each other...well, it ain’t like the sins we do. They only kill to feed themselves. Or to protect themselves.”

  Only the echo answered. Only the banshee song. But still she went on.

  “Sometimes William would give Rascal a kick. Most times I bit my tongue about it, and other times I spoke up, but of course then he’d turn that anger on me. Which was probably what he wanted to happen, anyway. But one day he saw Tom sitting on the kitchen table and he picked him up and threw him right against the wall. Then he stomped on over to Tom and gave him a kick. Such a kick.” Rose paused for a moment to contain the emotion that threatened to seep out and stain her words. “Well, he killed him with that kick. And so I went at him. I pushed him away and slapped him in the face. Slapped him good and hard right across his jaw full of pain down deep in the bone, and I didn’t care.

  “But then he went in the other room and got his Spencer twelve gauge.”

  A slight jingle of metal chains. Rose paused in her story, waiting tensely, but the sound was not repeated. Still wary, at last she continued.

  “Rascal was outside, so William stomped out into the yard and called him, and when the dog came around the corner of the house William shot him. Then he walked right on past what was left of my Rascal, walked straight to the barn, with me chasing after and crying and screaming. And before I could get my hands on him to try to pull him away, he shot my horse.

  “When I tried to hit him again, he turned around and struck me right in the chest with the butt of his gun. Knocked me onto the ground. And he stood over me and pointed that precious pump-action of his right down at my face...”

  A new sound caused Rose to pause again. It was not the shifting of chains, but another sound, at first barely heard until a momentary ebb in the roaring dust storm exposed it for what it was.

  Tiny, whispery giggling...coming from some uncertain point in the utter blackness.

  The surprised anger that welled up in Rose left her speechless. Fury had knotted in her throat, even as it sent electric currents crackling through every nerve in her body.

  She did not finish her story.

  In the dream, Rose had taken shelter in a cave in a mountain side to escape the pummeling of a monsoon rain. For several moments she stood at the edge of the cavern’s opening, watching the torrents punish the jungle canopy below her, before turning away and following a passageway eroded by time through the mountain’s flank.

  When she came to a hollow chamber in the rock, she crouched down with the granite wall pressed against her back for a sense of security, wet and shivering and hugging her knees for warmth. She would wait out the storm. Wait for many long years if she had to, before she could emerge free into sunlight again.

  But slowly she became aware that she was not alone in the Stygian darkness. She did not hear the beast that sheltered in this cave, did not even smell it, but simply sensed its presence as if the savage blood in its veins radiated heat through its hide. Sensed its feral eyes – which she knew could see her clearly, even though she couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face – summing her up cunningly, as the beast waited for just the right moment to spring.

  “Don’t do this,” she said to the black beast camouflaged in the darkness, her own voice echoing back to her. “Go back to sleep...please...”

  She thought the beast replied with a low growl, rumbling deep in its throat, but it was difficult to tell as the sound of the rainstorm drumming against the mountain side swelled in intensity...became deafening...

  The crackling sound that had awakened Rose was so loud that for a moment or two it made her think a fire raged all around her, cooking her alive. She was wildly disoriented by both the strange sound and the impenetrable darkness, not aware of when she might have fallen asleep or for how long. She was sure she had let out a gasp or unintelligible exclamation upon coming awake. As far as the darkness was concerned, she might have believed she was a spirit without a body drifting through oblivion were it not for the pain in her bottom and back from the pressure of the metal bands, like a giant waffle iron, against her.

  The tangible contact of the cage at least helped ground her thoughts, gave her mind a handhold, and she remembered where she was – but what was that ungodly sound? Now it put her in mind of a vast audience clapping their hands, as if the Dark Cell might be filled impossibly with countless people, all applauding her punishment...but that wasn’t the cause of the great clamor, either.

  Then something like a pebble thrown in the darkness ticked her thumb, stinging her skin, and she drew her hand back as if bitten by a scorpion. While she had heard scorpions did indeed venture into the Dark Cell, and occasionally snakes too, she realized that what had struck her hand was a piece of ice. Hail stones the size of bird shot were finding their way in through the little vent in the ceiling, but the clicking sound of their impact was drowned out by the thunderous onslaught of frozen pellets against the roof of rock above. The dry hot dust storm, whipped up by the rain storm behind it, had moved on and been replaced incongruously by this.

  Had night fallen while she dozed? Again, there was no way to gauge the passage of time. Rose once more recalled that one prisoner had spent over a hundred days in this cell. She wondered who he was, and if the experience had driven him to madness.

  But more important right now was a different prisoner: the one who was chained across from her in this cramped box. Did Maria realize that Rose had fallen asleep...been vulnerable? Perhaps she herself had drifted off. Well, the girl certainly couldn’t be sleeping now, not with this cacophony raging above their heads.

  Rose arched her back, stretching her aching muscles, and repositioned her legs to one side so that she sat on the outside of her left buttock. This series of movements caused her chains, unavoidably, to clatter across the grated floor.

  Immediately, she heard a sound that seemed to be a reaction to her movements. It was hard to distinguish over the skeleton dance of the hail – and might she even have imagined it? – but she thought she’d heard a deep throaty rumble.

  Rose froze like a startled deer, breath clenched in her lungs’ tight fists. The sound, real or imagined, had been less than human...bestial...and it made her recall Maria touching the engraving in the natural history book and evoking the name of Tepeyollotl, the jaguar god of a magical people.

  It was easy to believe in magic in the absolute absence of light. Easy to believe in magic when it sounded like the sky outside had split asunder, the fabric of reality ripped wide open and all the tumult of the universe pouring in through the rift. The four elements all cascading through the fissure in a chaotic state, raw material to remake this sad little world...to transform it...

  Again, a deep bass growl, maybe not so much heard as transmitted through the metal bands of the cage, like a vibration through a tuning fork. The warning growl of an animal that feels threatened...or hungry.

  “I know you,
” Rose whispered so softly that she couldn’t even hear the words herself. “I know who you are.”

  Somewhere in the darkness, the rattle of chain links as they dragged across the floor grate, like a delayed echo of her own movements.

  “You’ve killed before,” Rose said, louder this time, maybe loud enough to be heard above the hail storm. “But you don’t have to do this again. Please don’t do this again.”

  A different kind of sound then, veiled by the hail, veiled by the dark, but it still cut straight to the heart of Rose. It was that giggling laughter again, though closer this time. And on the tail of it, a voice croaked, “Poor Rosa.” Once more, mockingly: “Poor Rosa.”

  Then, she flinched when an unseen hand touched her cheek, as if in a tender caress. “I’m sorry, Rosa,” that voice said, near and intimate. But it was a lie...his love was a lie...and the beast roared.

  John and another guard, named Bob, arrived at the entrance to the Dark Cell at a run. Bob had drawn his Remington revolver when he came within sight of its gated door – which unsettlingly stood open and unattended – but John stopped his companion from plunging into the passageway until he could light the kerosene lantern he’d brought with him.

  The men found their fellow guard Martin standing at the end of the passageway staring into the cell, just short of its threshold, as if he had never quite entered the room – or as if he had retreated from it.

  “What did you do, Martin?” John asked, smelling the gunpowder that still hung in the confined air. “What in God’s name did you do?”

  The fusillade of hail had ceased, leaving an unearthly stillness in its wake. Though the storm had passed on, evening had descended and no light shone through the vent in the Dark Cell’s ceiling. Martin had brought his own kerosene lantern, however, and it rested on the floor in front of his feet. Between its wavering light and the illumination cast from John’s lamp, the three men could see enough of the two prisoners chained inside the cage at the center of the room to know that they were both dead.

  “I thought it was something else,” Martin said in a weak, stunned voice. “What I saw...I didn’t know how it got in there, but it had a hold of the girl’s neck...”

  John squeezed past Martin into the chamber, pushing down the barrel of his Winchester rifle as he did so, to get a better look at the bodies. He held his lantern up higher, and hissed, “Dear God.”

  “It looked like something else,” Martin repeated, as if he stood before a doubtful jury. “I swear it did. It wasn’t a person, John. It was some kind of...animal. But after I shot it...after the smoke cleared...”

  The sixteen-year-old named Maria lay on her back, eyes gazing emptily at the vent in the ceiling as if her spirit might have ascended through it. Her tightly striped blouse was saturated with blood from the ragged wound where her throat had been torn out, the larynx exposed and carotid artery chewed through.

  Chewed was the word John thought, when he saw how blood was smeared thickly across Rose’s nose and lower face. But it was Rose lying there across Maria’s body, Rose with three bullets fired into her back, not some animal as Martin claimed to have witnessed.

  “Look what she done to that girl,” Bob said, wagging his head. “Just like I heard she done to her husband.”

  “It wasn’t Rose,” Martin insisted, and he was beginning to quake with sobs now. “I swear it wasn’t, boys!”

  Gently, Bob took the rifle from the other man’s hands. “She was killing that Mexican girl, Marty. You did what you had to do.”

  “But what I saw, Bob!” Marty cried.

  “It was dark, Marty,” Bob reassured him. “It was dark.”

  John couldn’t take his eyes from Rose. Couldn’t stop thinking about their conversation when he had been escorting her to the Dark Cell.

  “She was afraid to be put in there with Maria,” he said. “I thought it was Maria she was scared of. But now I think maybe she was scared of herself.”

  He thought of Rose asking him if he loved his wife, and there was a deep contraction in his chest. He reminded himself that her punishment hadn’t been up to him...and there was nothing he could have done to change it...and that there was no denying the woman had been both dangerous and mad...

  And yet he couldn’t help but murmur, “I’m sorry, Rose.”

  SNAKE WINE

  Gorch wasn’t sure which source of pain had awakened him: the headache that felt like his skull was ready to give birth to a full term baby, or the throbbing of his left hand, which was black in a glove of caked blood and missing its index finger.

  He blurted muddled curses, sat up too quickly on the edge of his bed and nearly blacked out for his trouble. He shut his eyes to will the elevator of his stomach not to rise up and disgorge its contents. With his eyes clamped shut, sizzling phosphorescent blobs swam on the insides of his lids like amoebas on a microscope slide.

  When he cracked his eyes again, his innards under a semblance of control, he raised his hand in front of his face. He hadn’t imagined it, dreamed it, misinterpreted what he’d glimpsed upon awakening. His left hand’s index finger had been removed at the base. A glance at his bed showed no severed finger lying there, but the sheet was soaked thoroughly with drying blood. How long had he been passed out? How long would it take for blood to dry to that extent?

  Gorch’s apartment was on the third floor above his bar. The second floor was where his bargirls, called bia om in Vietnam, took amorous customers for more than the hugs that om alluded to. A sliding glass door gave access to a balcony. Through the door’s sheer curtain he could see that the sun had risen, an orange ball buoyed on the sea.

  He remembered the woman then.

  She had come into the bar with another man, a British tourist in his sixties, his formidable belly like a cask and his sweating and wheezing head like a fat clenched fist. He boasted of having been a professional wrestler in younger days, but Gorch didn’t volunteer his own past as a fighter. He hadn’t fled to this country – as a result of some paid fist work outside of the ring – only to draw attention to his bloody past now.

  The big man was already drunk as he raucously ordered a round of Saigon beer for himself, his lady friend, and a number of other white tourists and ex-pats seated at the bar or clustered around the billiard table.

  Himself an ex-pat from Melbourne, now four years in Vietnam, Gorch had opened a bar catering primarily to the many Australians who visited the seaside city of Vung Tau. The bar looked across the coastal road toward the South China Sea, where the surf was iridescent from the Russian oil ships punctuating the horizon. Despite this pollution, along the coast where there were strips of beach swimmers could wade far out into the water, or lounge on the sand eating crabs while clouds of dragonflies hovered above them.

  The Australian tourists found the Down Under Pub a welcome oasis when they tired of the indigenous fare. As if the bar’s name left any doubt, live rugby played on the TV and boomerangs hung on the walls along with photos of boxing kangaroos (Gorch’s private joke) and a large painting of Ned Kelly in his bizarre armor and helmet, firing his revolver rifle from the hip.

  The British tourist became enamored of one of Gorch’s girls, No, and the drunker he got the more he seemed to forget the one he had come in with. Rather than act jealous or insulted, however, his companion appeared to take it in stride and cheerfully switched her own attention to Gorch as he tended the bar. Her English proved more than adequate. She told him her name was Hong.

  Gorch thought the old man was a fool for neglecting her. Hong was more beautiful than No and probably a few years younger, he guessed between nineteen and twenty-one, but he supposed it had to do with the old man being jaded and gluttonous. Dolled up for their date, Hong wore a clingy red silk dress with a high Chinese-style collar, cut to the tops of her thighs, her hair falling to the small round posterior her dress so artfully encased.

  No took the ex-wrestler upstairs to “nap” for a bit and recover from imbibing too much. Gorch hoped No di
dn’t try to support him if he lost his balance on the stairs, lest she be crushed in the avalanche. Hong didn’t bat an eye. Instead she asked Gorch where he was from. He swept his arm around the bar. “Uh, Australia,” he said. She asked him what it was like there and he spoke in generalities, told her about Sydney – where he had also lived for a time – instead of Melbourne.

  Atop the bar, she took his left hand and held it in both her much smaller hands, turning it over and examining it as if to read his future. “You have strong hands,” she observed. “You have worked hard with them.”

  “At times,” he admitted, uncomfortable. Then he asked himself why he was always so wary. Did he think she was a spy hired by vengeful enemies back in the city he had exiled himself from?

  She didn’t let go of his hand, and that was when he was certain they were going to fuck. Which was fine by him; he had already slept with every one of his bia om, repeatedly. Gluttony and all that.

  He invited her upstairs to see his apartment. “Do you have photos of your country?” she asked him with shiny-eyed interest, though he suspected what really interested her was the money he’d doubtless have to pay her.

  “No,” he answered. “But I have a camera. Maybe I could take some photos of you.”

  “Ahh,” she said, smiling. “But I don’t like people taking pictures of me...I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, so we’ll skip that part.”

  Gorch got one of his girls to take over behind the bar, but before he could show Hong to the stairs she said, “My motorbike is outside. In the seat I have a gift I bought today for my father, but I think I’d like to give it to you.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t want to deny your father his gift.”

  “Oh, I can get him another. Please wait a moment, will you? I will go get it.”

  In his flat on the third floor of the narrow building he had bought with all his savings, ill-gotten and otherwise, Hong pulled a bottle out of the plastic shopping bag she had fetched from her Honda’s seat compartment. “My father likes to drink this sometimes,” she told Gorch. Smiling with charming if unconvincing coyness, she further explained, “It’s good for a man’s baby.”