It was the worst night of Boot's life.
And it was just beginning.
Strange About Mom
Andy didn't know what the noises were at first but they woke him from his dream.
He was at summer camp climbing a mountain. There were shade trees all around. The quiver of arrows was slung over his back — though for some reason the bow was missing — and the scout knife was in his hand. The knife was open to the big blade because there was something on the mountain he was supposed to be afraid of. He wasn't really afraid, though. He felt sure that whatever was up there wouldn't hurt him. The knife was just in case.
As he climbed, though, the nature of whatever was up there began to change. He didn't know how he knew that but he did. At first it was a cat like a mountain lion, then something insect-like whirring out of sight above his head as he crawled up the rock face. Then he was walking past a storefront, somehow not out of place there, and knew that whatever it was, it was inside the store now and had changed again.
He was opening the storefront door when something woke him. It sounded as though she was crying.
He pushed off the covers and got out of bed and peered into the hallway, listening.
She was crying all right. In her sleep?
For some reason he felt she was asleep.
Little liquid crying sounds. And the breathing wasn't right.
He wondered if he should go in there. If he was wrong and she was awake, she might feel bad about him seeing her like that. He didn't want to make her feel bad. He walked out into the hall.
She'd left the door open. There was light in the room from the streetlight. He could walk by, pretend he was going to the bathroom, take a peek and keep on going. That way if she was awake he wouldn't have to embarrass her. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, assumed what he thought was a normal, going-to-take-a-whiz-in-the-middle-of-the-night pace, and walked by. And stopped.
She was alone. His father wasn't there.
She was asleep.
And she was naked.
He was not supposed to see her that way.
She was lying atop the covers with her nightgown open, naked underneath. He had never in memory seen his mother naked before. He had never seen what she was doing either.
Not in real life. In some of the R-rated movies they rented sure and even then you didn't see much. But not a real woman.
Not his mom.
He felt dizzy. A wave of heat passed over him, then a wave of chilling cold.
There was something . . . not right about it.
It wasn't the masturbation. He knew about masturbation — at least he knew people did it, though he'd never heard of anybody doing it in their sleep before. And it wasn't just that it was his mother either. Though it was partly that.
It was the sounds.
Whimpering, crying.
Then growling. Low in her throat like an animal.
He didn't know how he dared but he moved closer, into the room, a few feet from the bed.
She was sweating. Her body was coated with sweat, plastering back her hair, pooling where her breasts pressed together trembling—trembling because both hands were down there now, her legs spread wide and the fine pale hair of her thighs dewy with sweat and one of her hands — God! her whole hand! — glistening with what was inside her. She was writhing like a snake. He saw four fingers disappear inside her to the knuckle and the other hand rubbing something wet outside and there was that noise, that hissing, crying, groaning sound like she was in pain, like she was dying!
Run! he thought.
No! Wake her!
But he was afraid to wake her and it was as though he were hypnotized, he couldn't run. He was afraid to wake her because he stared down at what her hands were doing and the teeth grinding and the lips quivering as though from some biting cold and the awful trembly smile and he didn't even hardly recognize her, he was scared of her, what had happened to his mother?
His stomach rolled and tumbled. He was going to be sick.
He watched the hand glide back and forth, the head toss and shudder.
He ran. He stumbled into his room. The dizziness was terrible. He fell into bed, trembling, sweating now almost as much as she had been. He pulled the covers up to his chin — the first time since the second grade. He really did have to go to the bathroom now but he was not going to pass that door again. No way.
He listened. The sounds had stopped.
Had she heard him? Was she awake, coming toward the bedroom? He heard nothing.
Maybe she's asleep now, he thought. Really asleep.
Outside his window he heard a siren, a police car rolling by. His hands on the bed sheet looked ghostly pale. The room seemed filled with shadows.
He lay there for a long time, listening and hearing nothing, remembering the look of her, the dark full nipples against the pale breasts, the glistening public hair, the streams of sweat. He remembered her face most of all, that rictus grin of pain and ecstasy. Remembered it with horror.
Horror, he thought. And I thought it was monsters and Freddy Kruger.
Slowly, a long time later, he was able to push the vision away from him. In the long silence his eyes began to close. The shadows folded back into the ordinary landscape of the room — dresser, closet, TV set, window.
Once he seemed to hear her sigh.
She sounded as she always sounded.
Night and the City
There might have been an inkling on the evening news. It might have saved lives if there had been. But as yet little anyone would consider particularly newsworthy had happened. What slept inside them slept like a malefic shadow in the corner of a huge bustling room, unnoticed.
By the time it erupted, for many residents of Manhattan the night had concluded normally. They had made love, gone to films and bars, watched television. And finally, slept.
If there appeared to be somewhat more police activity than usual on the lower West Side or Chelsea or Central Park South, it was just another busy night for the city's numerous thugs and crazies. If a disturbance erupted in a theatre it was hardly the first time.
Only on the West Side could you tell immediately — something so askew now that stepping out of the subway at 72nd Street your impulse might be to turn and run. Elsewhere it was simple city madness, more virulent than usual. But here, in the very feel of the place, you sensed something.
~ * ~
On Amsterdam and 66th Street a woman walked into a fire station wearing nothing but a black half-slip and, laughing, accosted the nearest fireman, smearing his face with cruelty-free Flame-Glo Honey Raisin Lip Gloss, which she had applied on her own face from nose to chin.
Across the park on 5th and 81st Street, an old man recuperating from his second coronary in as many years leaned out his fifth-floor window and heard someone crying for help just out of sight around the corner. The voice was male and terrified. Heart pounding, he closed the window.
On the northernmost border of Greenwich Village, a normally quiet lesbian bar called Belle Starr's erupted into an orgy the likes of which its proprietor, an ex-stripper named Lorna Dune, hadn't seen since Albert Anastasia was alive and she was still more or less straight.
In Soho, an aging ingénue hung her two-month-old infant son from the bathroom shower curtain rod using the white cloth belt she had worn as the Girl in The Fantastiks and watched it strangle.
At 42nd and Broadway, three dancers in a peep show hurled themselves through the nearest fifty-cent window and dragged its occupant screaming through the broken glass.
~ * ~
The drunk at Broadway and 69th woke on his bench to stare at the world through sore, soupy eyes. Someone had kicked his bottle.
He was keyed to that sound. It was probably the only sound that would have woke him. He reached for the bottle instinctively beneath the flaking weather-beaten green park bench but the effort was far too much for him. He wheezed a sigh and leaned back against the bench.
"Let me help you."
The voice was young and female. He looked up. The woman stooped beside him fishing for the bottle. Her hair was short, cropped close to her head. He didn't much care for that. He liked a woman to be feminine.
"When ya gonna wake up and smell the coffee?" he rasped.
The woman raised her head and stared at him. Not bad looking despite the hair. She picked up the half-empty fifth.
"Hey, ya found it. Good girl!"
She smiled. "It's broken, though," she said.
"Izzit?"
He tried to focus.
The girl was nuts. The bottle wasn't broken.
"Is not," he said.
"Sure it is," she said, and swung it in a short arc, smashing it against his mouth and chin. His last two brittle teeth shattered into his chalky gums. He tasted blood and shards of glass redolent of sweet wine. He tried to spit them out but his lips were in tatters.
Nothing hurt, though. Nothing ever hurt till morning. If he had another fifth maybe not even then. So fuck her.
He'd survive.
He made a face, the kind of face he used on the little girls to scare them of the drunk, to scare them home to their fucking mommies. The girl was looking at him like he was some sort of bug.
She was the bug.
"Why doncha wake up . . ." he tried to say but the words only gurgled in his mouth and pushed a long shard of glass he wasn't even aware of out over his chin. He coughed, and that was bloody too.
And the girl wasn't scaring.
He didn't like her eyes.
He thought, this is gonna be bad — and then it was bad, because the hand with the pretty gold ring drew back the bottle and then pushed it forward into his face and twisted it so that it tore a jagged trench of flesh from the bridge of his nose across both cheeks and down as far as his lower lip.
She released it and the bottle stayed there, like a false face made of glass.
He felt a quick, burning flash of unexpected agony and then passed out in broken shock, vomiting into the still-capped neck of the bottle. He gasped and began to choke. His face went livid blue.
~ * ~
At the newspaper stand on 72nd Mary Silver walked quietly away from the stack of papers and magazines which had surrounded her and, knife in hand, proceeded down Broadway.
The knife got a lot of use.
The first was a Greek who had just come out of the subway station after a strange little ride on the #2 line. A woman on his car, a black woman, had begun laughing at 14th Street and hadn't stopped until they reached Penn Station. Whereupon she leapt suddenly from her seat and began to kick the subway doors with her imitation patent leather shoes. The other riders on the train had witnessed her fury with varying degrees of amusement. All except the Greek. The idiot sister he'd left on Corfu made any such amusement impossible. He left the subway blindly, lost in remembrance.
When Mary came up behind him he was still brooding on his sister and because the knife was sharp and the blade thin he felt no pain at first. His only thought was that the woman had punched him hard between the shoulder blades. Why she should do that he didn't know any more than he knew what had happened to the woman on the subway.
He felt the wetness seeping through his shirt and a sudden faintness overcame him and he fell to his knees. He died in that position, watching the woman continue past him down the street.
The second man was a young yuppie broker in suspenders and a baggy white Ralph Lauren shirt which set his Hamptons tan off nicely. As she passed him she stabbed him in the kidneys. The man watched the red stain spread over his shirt like burning celluloid on a movie screen. The shirt had been brand new. It cost him two hundred dollars.
At 70th Street she passed a fat old man and smiling, stabbed him in the ass. A playful gesture. The knife sunk only to the depth of an inch or so but the old man howled and tripped and fell to the pavement and lay sprawled there waving his hands and screaming.
She proceeded down Broadway, steel blade dripping.
~ * ~
He was staring at a copy of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, wondering if he should steal it. Lydia was still in the storage room and his jacket had big pockets. The cover of the book was badly ripped but his copy at home was falling apart completely. It would be like taking day-old bread from a bakery. Why not?
Because you're honest, that’s why not, he thought. And because you like her.
Face it, you more than like her.
"Shel, come here a minute," she said.
He sighed and climbed off the ladder. He could guess what was coming. Lydia was going to ball him out again for something he'd done or failed to do — which would make it about the fifth time that night. She was in a pissy mood. Couldn't she see he was exhausted? Up the ladder, down the ladder.
Couldn't she see he was crazy about her?
Sure, she had ten years on him. She had a boyfriend and a business too but none of that mattered. He knew she loved books. They had that very much in common. They could talk books the next thirty years of their lives together given the opportunity. He knew it. He'd like to do just that.
That and . . . the other thing.
His shirt was plastered to his back. The air conditioner wasn't working again. It was miserably close in here, so that his thick heavy glasses kept slipping down his nose. He pushed them back and walked to the storage room.
It was pretty dark. There was just the single 30-watt bulb she refused to change for a bigger one — Lydia was actually a little cheap, always saving on the electricity — and they could have used a new air conditioner too. The light didn't do much more than push back the murk into the corners.
"Where are you?" he said.
"Back here."
He was relieved. She didn't sound mad at all.
He walked inside. The back room was wall-to-wall boxes set on rows of metal shelving, filled with books. They were the first things they'd inventoried.
So what was she doing back here?
The dust got into his nose and made him want to sneeze. He held his breath so he wouldn't have to. Even if he did love books he didn't much care for the old musty smell of them, like the smell of mold in a cellar. He thought he was probably a little allergic.
He heard shuffling to his right. Over there.
He stepped in front of the next row of shelves and saw her way down the end of the row, facing the grey cinderblock walls, her back to him, half in shadow, her head tilted down like she was reading.
In the dark?
"What's up, Lyd?"
She turned.
It wasn't reading.
What she'd been doing was she'd been working at the buttons of her shirt.
She was almost finished.
He couldn't believe it. All he could do was stand there gawking like a dope while she slipped the shirt off her shoulders and he saw that she had no bra on, that her breasts were naked — and god she was pretty there!
He braced himself against the metal shelving.
"Well? What do you think?" she said.
"Huh?"
She flipped open the top button of her jeans and zipped the zipper and pulled them down over her thighs, the thighs a little too big but that was okay because her stomach was nice and flat and she had lovely breasts and it was all so good he could barely look at her. But he did look. She smiled.
"What do you think?"
This wasn't like Lydia at all.
Lydia was his boss.
Lydia was . . . modest.
He couldn't believe his luck.
But he couldn't answer her, either. Not while he was looking at her body anyway. So he wrenched his eyes up to her face and held them there, determined, her face in shadow, looking at it anyway because it was the right thing to do even as she bent slightly to pull down the pale-colored panties and then stood a moment and then took one step toward him.
Out of the shadows.
And Sheldon wanted to scream.
Because the lips that were smiling at him were s
plit in a dozen places and gleaming with blood, her blood where she had bitten them, bitten almost through them in some places and he started to say, Lydia, Jesus ! what've you done? but he didn't really think there was a Lydia there anymore to talk to.
Her teeth were grinding so hard he could actually hear them. Her pale blue eyes looked contaminated with red, twitching in their sockets like caged birds. And he did not even consider seizure, epilepsy or something, because the look on her face was evil, terrible, the fear of her went right to his bones and he screamed, long and loud and yet without the strength to pull away as her cold arms wrapped around his neck and she opened her ruined mouth and bit him, deep into his neck and pushed him to the floor.
His glasses cracked beneath him. He heard his own blood pulse and splash the dirty concrete floor.
As consciousness raced away from him and she clung and bit deeper and he felt her tongue move inside the open wound he gazed up at the boxes above him and saw the one marked with red grease-pencil near his head and even upside down he could read it.
FILE UNDER HORROR it said.
~ * ~
On 73rd and Broadway in front of the Beacon Theatre a stewardess who had worked the first-class compartment on the very same flight that had brought Elizabeth in from LAX to Kennedy was walking her dog, a miniature poodle named Marvin, her pooper-scooper, toweling, and plastic baggie in hand, when a pair of teenage girls with leopard jackets and red and green hair jumped out of a '74 Chevrolet and approached the dog murmuring nice doggie, nice doggie, bent down and with one girl holding and the other pulling tore its head from its body.
~ * ~
Jim "Jumma" Jackson moved slowly off the yellow plastic seat and tossed his food wrappers and the cup from his shake into the trash bin.
It was about fuckin' time.
Over an hour, watching and waiting for the booster who was the only potential trouble in the place to get the hell out of there like he was doing now, ambling out the door.
He pretended to study the overhead menu, like here was a dude with one real big appetite back for seconds and then moved up to the counter. It was only then he realized that there was nobody there.