Penny Dreadful

  There was a clock beside Moon’s bed, a pale red digital. Two minutes past five. I hoped the sun would come up quickly. I hoped something interesting would happen on the weather channel. Moon flopped over onto his left side, grunting. I moved closer and stared at his face, at the infinite twitching of his eyelids. His breath was terrible, oozing from his wide nostrils and thick, parted lips. Moon was two or three days past his last shave and I could see the beginnings of gray in his beard. It becomes him, I thought. There was a sudden change in temperature and I jerked back, afraid that Moon might wake to find me leaning over him like a killer. But one window was cracked, and a breath of cold air had merely entered the room. Shame stretched, then leapt from the bed. He glowered at me briefly, his eyes green and yellow. Then stalked out of the room with a lazy flip of the tail.

  I wandered after him, stupidly eager for company.

  Eve:

  A shaft of yellow light in an otherwise dark apartment. Eve crouched in her closet, sifting through papers and discarded shoes. She wore thin black sweatpants and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. If she were normal, if she were someone with houseplants and a cat and a nice boyfriend, then she might have just come home from the gym. Her heart still thumping from aerobics. She would be drinking a vitamin-enriched smoothie and her rib cage would not be laced with cuts, she would not be stiff with bandages. Eve wore no underwear and no shoes and she didn’t feel at all sexy. Eve was tired, worried. She was annoyed, as well. She was worried about Phineas and she didn’t want to be.

  As a small child, she had spent hours upon hours in her mother’s closet. Trapped, she had imagined herself a spider. She had loved the four walls, the dangling clothes that hung like cheap, shrunken tapestries. Her mother’s clothes had always seemed to be moving, touched by an impossible breeze. She would look behind them for a window, a portal. But there was only another wall.

  When she was nine, she began to have dizzying nightmares about open space, fields of wheat surrounded by wide gray concrete. Nothing ever pursued her. But the emptiness had been unbearable and she always woke choking, as if she had swallowed half the sky. She would then crawl not to her mother’s bed for comfort, but to her mother’s cramped closet. Then had slept like a kitten on a heap of dirty laundry that smelled of smoke and fried food.

  Now she found what she was looking for. A flat wooden box, taped shut like a cozy little coffin. Eve slit the tape with her thumbnail and removed the bald, naked Barbie doll from her childhood. She had an idea that she might use it for her piece. That Goo might use it. Eve glanced at her watch. She frowned and lifted it to her ear. It had stopped again. A dead piece of metal on her wrist. She tossed it aside and wondered if Phineas was okay, if he was coming back. She noticed there was a strange feeling in her stomach, a peculiar flutter, when she thought of him.

  Shame swirled around the kitchen, murmuring. He twisted himself seductively around my leg. He was clearly hungry and there was no cat food to be found. I dug for a while through Moon’s barren cupboards and eventually offered the cat some corn flakes. Shame stared up at me, disgusted.

  I shrugged. Aren’t you used to this, I said.

  There was a crusty jar of peanut butter in the fridge. I scooped out a spoonful and wedged it into a coffee cup, which seemed to satisfy Shame. I knelt, then stretched out on my belly alongside the creature, who made a fairly nasty sucking sound as he worked on the peanut butter. His eyes flickered, warning me not to touch him.

  The floor was yellow linoleum, torn and ravaged by Moon’s feet, but it felt cool against my skin.

  Moon had been drunk last night, raving. But he had offered me a job, sort of. The whole business was borderline craziness. It was nonsense and it wasn’t. Moon wanted me to go undercover and look for a few lost cops. As if they were merely trapped on the wrong side of the wardrobe, with the lion and the witch. They could be anywhere and the disappearances could be unrelated. These were cops, though. And cops weren’t known to disappear. They went mad, some of them. They got stabbed by their wives. They ruined their livers. But they generally showed up for work.

  I watched the cat eat. I thought about it and I tended to think that thirteen missing cops was a case for somebody else, somebody who still had a badge, for instance. If there was any truth to Moon’s story, then it was something heavy. It was FBI territory. The kind of case that I was more likely to make worse than better. The kind of case I would be sorry to fuck up. But if Moon really wanted to set me up in a motel room with a pocketful of walking money, then I might as well look into it. I could sniff around.

  Why not? I said to Shame.

  The cat had finished his breakfast and was now hurriedly cleaning himself. He looked pretty pissed off at me and I decided that the peanut butter was maybe a bad choice. Like glue in those old whiskers. I tried not to laugh, as I was pretty sure that animals didn’t much like to be laughed at by ignorant humans. Shame gave his genitals a cursory lick, then glided from the room without a backward glance.

  I could not live here, clearly. The cat didn’t like me.

  Mingus:

  Pinched his nostrils between thumb and finger. Breathed through his mouth and stared bleakly at a patch of grass. He had alien memories, images that couldn’t possibly be his. A tiny house in the suburbs, painted a dull peach color that had faded to an unpleasant flesh tone. The same color as every home around it. Each house had one sad midget tree in the front yard, a skeletal sapling that would never grow taller than five feet. Trees that provided no shade.

  Mingus shuddered as a thin man entered his mind, whistling.

  The man wore bright blue suspenders and a torn white shirt. The shirt was tucked carefully into khaki shorts. The man had long, strangely hairless legs. He wore destroyed black penny loafers with no socks. He pushed a lawn mower and sang softly to himself. There was a child in the background, a boy with hair so blond it looked white. The man was familiar, yes. The man was his father. His father. Mingus clutched at his face, his mouth and nose. He’d never had a father.

  But he resembled the thin man.

  I never had a father, he said.

  Chrome punched him in the belly and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Chrome, whose hands were still wet. How does that feel, he said.

  Mingus sputtered, unable to speak.

  Image of the thin man faded. Boy with white hair was gone. He glanced fearfully at the patch of grass before him and nothing happened. His head was empty, thank god. The bliss of forgetting, of never knowing. He wondered if he would ever control his sense of smell and the terrible rush of images that he could not be sure were his own. The brutal memories that devoured him. He was aware that Chrome was sitting very close to him. He didn’t want to look at Chrome for fear of seeing blood. He was reluctant to breathe and he wanted to be careful when he spoke, very careful.

  I’m better now, said Mingus finally. Thank you.

  My pleasure, said Chrome.

  Friday

  I managed to brew a pot of coffee in Moon’s wrecked kitchen. There was no milk to be found and the sugar had a few bloated ants crawling drunkenly through it, and more than a few of their cousins that looked to be dead, overdosed on sugar. But what can you do. In some countries, sugared ants are not cheap. The coffee was too thick and black, it was like oil. It tasted of ancient, frozen rubber. I added a fistful of sugar and dead ants and sucked it down.

  I attempted to clean up the living room for a while, pushing garbage and dishes and clothes and general debris into various piles but soon lost interest in the project. I ended up just kicking the broken table into a corner. Then I started looking for something to read. The phone book, a dictionary. Even a little junk mail. Bored, restless. But I didn’t much feel like venturing into the city. Not sure what I was afraid of. I was feeling shy or something. I didn’t want to face the hum and buzz of technology. The drone and clatter of machinery. I was forever hearing false gunshots in the distance.

  It crossed my mind that Eve might be worried about me, or
rather I hoped she was. I would have called her, but she didn’t have a phone. She didn’t even have a toaster.

  The sun was coming up in a hurry and I contemplated the social order of ghosts. If any of them were still out and about they had better take cover. Because it seemed to me that a stray phantom caught drifting the streets past daybreak looking washed out and pale with less than frightful hair would be tortured by his peers.

  I sat with my feet up on a windowsill, my eyes peeled for any interesting neighbors to spy on. I am not a pervert, exactly. If I spotted another human in a compromised position with the shades up I would surely turn away. I was only bored out of my mind and lonely. But there was nothing much to see. An old woman came out with a small bag of garbage and walked to the curb in a painfully slow shuffle, so slow in fact that I was tempted to run downstairs and give her a hand but this would probably just frighten her and I had alternate visions of the poor woman either suffering a heart attack and collapsing at my feet, or beating me senseless with the black leather pocketbook she had curiously chosen to bring with her to the curb.

  I smoked the last of Moon’s cigarettes and finally gave up on any action from the windows. I made another search of the living room for something to read and came upon a drawer that contained a relative mother lode of unpaid bills and one grimy, water-stained and thoroughly abused leather address book. There were a hundred names and addresses in there, including one heartbreaking entry for Phineas and Lucy Poe that was crossed out with a slash of blue ink. And while almost every other name in Moon’s book was that of a cop, not one of them was Jimmy or James Sky.

  Chrome:

  They sat on a damp beach, waiting for a bus that would never come. Mingus was beside him, hunched over like he had a belly full of angry butterflies. Chrome smiled, or gnashed his teeth. He wanted to tell Mingus to slow down, to taste life and now he whispered it, softly. Taste it, he said. Taste life. But Mingus wouldn’t look up. Chrome shrugged and licked his lips. There was a touch of dried blood just beneath his nose, caught in his whiskers like chocolate milk. Everyone loves chocolate milk, he thought. Oh my. How restless he was, how like a child. His arms and legs were bouncing, quivering. As if his molecules were coming loose. He was trembling like a wee little girl. It’s just juice, he told himself. It’s juice from the kill, from the real. The real.

  Oh, yes. He was happy. He wanted to go back to the alley and look at the dead Fred again, to look into his flattened eyes and say thank you. And he realized that true killers always love their victims. They love them. They love them for sharing that last breath. Evolution would never dispense with murder, not if love was involved. Chrome was on fire. He wanted to walk for miles. He wanted to kiss the ground. But he had to think of Mingus. The poor little troll was trembling beside him. He must be exhausted, thought Chrome. And he was visibly upset. He was probably wrestling with his conscience or something. Chrome would have to come down to earth, for his sake. The Breather needed sleep, he needed to feel safe. But what did he need, what did Chrome need? Maybe a little sex would calm him down, a little love. He poked Mingus with a bony finger.

  I have blood on my upper lip, he said. It smells like sea salt. It smells like the tiny golden hairs on the back of a woman’s neck. It smells like a kid with a sunburn.

  You bastard, said Mingus.

  I’m sorry. The mind wanders, doesn’t it.

  Please. I’m a wreck. I need to get inside, to sleep perhaps. To dream.

  Are you sure you want to dream? said Chrome.

  In my dreams, I have no sense of smell.

  Interesting. I am color-blind in mine.

  Mingus grabbed at his leg with the small, powerful fingers of a monkey and Chrome jumped.

  Let go of my leg, said Chrome. Damn you.

  I want to go home.

  We don’t have a home.

  A motel, then. A flop in the subterrain.

  Chrome softened. He pried Mingus’s fingers loose from his pants with a sigh and now he thought of Goo. She had strong fingers, too. Chrome did need a touch of love. And his friend badly needed sleep. Chrome sighed as it began to rain. He patted Mingus on the head and told him not to fret.

  Then he smiled, feeling wicked. Look at the sky, he said. It’s purple. Almost the color of a plum. A ripe, sweet-smelling plum. A bruise on the ass of a little child.

  Mingus groaned.

  Then again, said Chrome. If I were dreaming, I suppose the sky would look sad and gray.

  Please, said Mingus.

  Chrome still held the little man’s hand. Thick callused fingers, with fairly chewed nails. He gave the hand a squeeze and said, come on. Let’s get inside.

  Not quite seven and Moon was miraculously awake. If not, there was an angry and very clumsy burglar crashing around in the bathroom and blowing his nose for about five minutes with what seemed to me truly morbid gusto. The toilet was flushed several times. Then more crashing. Moon came into the living room finally, panting. I looked up from the newspaper I had stolen from his neighbor.

  The Nuggets won, I said.

  Uh. What happened last night?

  You killed some furniture.

  Moon gazed without recognition at the shattered coffee table. He nodded and stared and I was struck with the uneasy sensation that Moon had no idea who I was. In a minute, the wheels would grind in his head and he would know me for an interloper. Moon would find his strength and leap upon me, beating me about the head and face with extreme prejudice and evicting me from his cage.

  You, said Moon. You disarmed me last night.

  I nodded. You were something of a menace.

  Where is my weapon, please?

  The freezer.

  Yeah, said Moon. Is there more coffee?

  If you want to call it that.

  Moon shrugged and ambled away and soon he came back with a cup of the sludge in one hand and his big .45 in the other. The gun looked strange and ghostly, black steel gone smoky with frost.

  I blinked. How do your fingers feel?

  And after a moment of silence, Moon laughed. Pretty fucking cold.

  Don’t put it in your mouth, I said.

  Don’t worry.

  Moon settled onto the couch. He wore a fresh pair of white pants, a blue shirt. The familiar fish tie was crisply knotted. His socks appeared to match. His thin hair was slicked back and he looked much like an eccentric football coach. He looked like himself.

  Did I tell you a story last night, he said. By any chance?

  A wild story, I said.

  Moon sat there, nodding at me. I tasted the remains of my own bittersweet coffee. Room temperature. The same temperature as my own skin. Tingling. I felt a headache coming on and touched my fingers to my eyes. Maybe it was just loneliness.

  Moon is fucking crazy, I thought.

  Jimmy Sky is missing, said Moon. I know that much. He raised his frozen gun to his own ear, grinning as he made a hollow popping sound with his tongue. Or dead maybe. He’s gone to see Elvis. Poor fucking Jimmy. He was a friend of mine.

  What? I said. What did you say?

  The bastard, said Moon. I want you to help me find him.

  What’s this about Elvis?

  Moon’s eyes were flat and dark. I miss him, he said. I miss Jimmy.

  Okay, I said. Okay.

  Eve:

  Alone in bed, sleepless. The sky beyond her window was the thin, nameless color of thick glass and she felt temporarily trapped between night and morning. She lay on her back, tracing two fingers over the length of her body down from the sensitive throat and hollow place above her collarbone, tugging at her nipples until they were hard and then moving on to examine the bruises along her rib cage, the tender places where Adore had nicked her flesh and now she pressed one finger into these sores until the pain was fine and bright. She stroked her belly, her hip bones. She trailed the tips of her fingers lightly, lightly along the inner thigh before moving to touch herself through the thin cotton of her sweatpants and with the other hand move
d to stroke one breast in small circles close to but not quite touching the nipple and now she was wet and her hips were moving involuntarily and she slipped her hand under the edge of her pants and through the soft patch of pubic hair and the odd half-formed thought that she really needed to trim down there skated in and out of her head without quite being heard and now she had two fingers inside herself moving in slow collapsing circles but soon a shadowy person emerged in her mind, a ghoulish figure who somehow had Adore’s thin dark body and long fingers and Chrome’s sweet, wet mouth and the cloudy blue eyes of Phineas Poe and still the face belonged to none of them. Eve stopped and her breath came in blunt short gasps that pulled painfully at her bandages. She rolled over, frustrated and cold and her thoughts flying to what Adore had said last night. That it was time for Goo to do a piece of her own, to choose a victim. It wouldn’t be easy, for the choice was not about lust or hatred or domination, but a kind of awful tenderness. And the victim must somehow recognize the difference.

  I was glad when Moon finally said he might go to work. After a prolonged search that involved a lot of cursing and banging around, Moon produced a spare key and I told him I was going to need some money. Moon snapped his fingers and closed one eye. We were standing in the kitchen, a few feet apart. Hands empty, dangling. Shame brushed past mewling. His fur bright with static.

  Money, said Moon. Of course. He grinned too widely.

  He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and poked around. Roach killer and empty mason jars and Ivory liquid and one rotting blue sponge. Moon still hummed to himself and the tune was familiar. It was unlikely but I could have sworn this was from the soundtrack for 2001: Space Odyssey, the opening scene. Two monkeys were fighting over a piece of fruit, or possibly a female. They circle each other, shrieking and spitting. Then it occurs to one of them that he might use a chunk of wood to his advantage. To escalate things. One monkey crushes the skull of another and he is so pleased with himself, with his discovery. He dances around in his enemy’s blood and the camera pulls back for a wide view. Dark silhouettes that could be human. Kubrick. He wasn’t always subtle but he knew what he was talking about. And now Moon had found what he was looking for: a slightly mildewed cigar box. There was a shadowy, conspiratorial glow in his eyes that I didn’t care for. Moon removed a brown envelope from the box and handed it over.