In This Skin

  Benjamin Lockram appeared calm onscreen, although now Benedict might substitute the description with ”resigned”or even ”fatalistic” Whether this presentation of Lockram's ”confession”using video footage revealed the old man's love of the theatrical or whether he genuinely believed it the most effective way of telling his story, Benedict didn't know.

  Whatever the man's intention, it was disturbing. It had the power to frighten.

  On the sofa Benedict held his breath as chills needled their way to his fingertips. The gray-haired man was about to speak. His voice came whispering from the TV. Somehow there was a sense it came in ghostly waves across a vast, dark gulf.

  "I am dead. Or should I say, by the time you-whoever you are-see this, I will be dead? And I will have followed my wife to whatever… or wherever…” Lockram cleared his throat. Benedict West's attention was drawn to the mans eyes-those eyes that were full of quiet wisdom but sadness, too. The eyes of a saint. After looking directly into the camera lens, Benedict felt as if he locked gazes with Lockram himself.

  The man resumed speaking in his slow, rhythmic way as he sat there in that beam of white light that formed a shining aura around his head. ”My life began leading up to this moment the second I walked through those dance floor doors when I was fifteen years old. I am now eighty-four. From that instant the Luxor had its grip on me. I knew then that this place was special. And it was more than knowing-it was feeling, too. The Luxor cast its spell. Soon I was working here. Within ten years I managed the Luxor. Ten years after that I'd bought the place. It became mine. I possessed it. Hmm… I possessed it? At least at the time, that's what I thought. As you saw on the earlier tape, I'd moved into the apartment upstairs and lived there with my wife for fifty years. And that's where Nathaniel was born. This is the fifth film I have made using video equipment I acquired recently. I'm no moviemaker; however, the camera and editing machinery are simple enough to operate. Oh? But why have I chosen to go to the trouble of producing this document as a TV program when I could have more easily kept a diary? Well… I believe the reasons will become transparent when you see the program I made. And, yes, there are rough edges. There will be shots that are blurred, sound that is muffled. I haven't mastered the camera operator's art of the dissolve or the tracking shot. My hands are rather shaky these days. But I have made this program to the best of my ability so you-whoever you are-will understand what has happened here in the Luxor. What you will witness are equal measures of the miraculous and the monstrous…”

  ***

  Floating free in the back of Benedict's mind were still recollections of the crook he'd watched die on the steps of the Luxor just days ago. And seeing that thing with the gross red mouth bending over the girl he now knew as Robyn Vincent, who lived with her boyfriend in the Luxor's apartment, the same one inhabited by Lockram years ago. Those recollections were there because with an uncanny symmetry the video he now watched matched some solutions to earlier puzzles.

  In that slow, rhythmic way, Benjamin Lockram's words came ghosting down the years through the mediumistic power of the TV.

  ”Many happy decades I enjoyed at the Luxor. I shook Buddy Holly by the hand at the bar over there in the corner. He was a tall man, softly spoken, and he had a smile that lit up a room. And Mr. Buddy Holly wanted to know why so many crows had settled on the roof. At the time I didn't know the significance of this, that it was an evil omen. He'd even picked up one of the long crow feathers and tucked it into the tuning peg of his guitar. A little while later I heard about his fateful flight into a snowstorm. The same night as the Holly concert there was a guy here celebrating that his girl had agreed to marry him. I remember that, too. He bought the champagne we used to stock then. Champagne. A sticky sweet liquor brewed from cherries, of all things. But sometimes it's as if there's a great spirit in the sky that weighs up how much happiness you have. And if you have too much it takes some back. The same happened with this kid. It seems the girl's sister was jealous for some reason and told the happy guy that the only reason his girl had agreed to marry him was because she was pregnant by someone else. The guy went out into the lot where he'd parked his truck and blew off his head with a hunting rifle, right there and then, at the same time that Buddy Holly was blasting out 'Peggy Sue' onstage. While I was out there with the police and the ambulance guys I watched how the crows all took off in one great big black cloud that swirled around and around the top of the Luxor. And the noise they made, calling out? Inside my head I can hear it now. An awful, awful sound.

  ”Of course, I couldn't blame myself for the guy's death. It was suicide. Life went on. The fifties exploded into the sixties… and if you were there, you know what I mean… suddenly clothes were every color of the rainbow; the music got more colorful too. Only they called it psychedelic. By then I was into my sixtieth year and my wife was fifty. That's when life changed. And strange things began to happen in the Luxor. On recollection, maybe they'd always been happening. But the first thing that made me sit up and take notice…”

  On screen the twitchy image of Lockram sat up straight. The power of the memory had brought a shiver to those old bones.

  ”The first thing that made me take notice was men and women began to be drawn to the Luxor. They'd come at odd times of the day and night and want to take a look inside. They were scared and excited all at the same time. The strangest thing is they all had some excuse why they wanted to see the dance floor… maybe to relive a little of their youth… or out of architectural interest… some claimed they were Buddy Holly fans and wanted to see where the guy had played. But the Luxor was one of the smaller venues… we weren't The Winter Gardens or the Hollywood Bowl. We were a little dance hall in an old industrial zone. We had plaster moldings of Egyptian pharaohs, fake gods and phony tomb paintings. Why the Luxor? And the audience changed. For example, we'd have a pop band with nothing but teen appeal, yet we'd find a middle-aged woman or two in the audience, or an elderly man. Were they eccentrics? I don't know… or at least didn't know. All I knew then was that they joined the audience but sat there not paying any attention to the band, looking around as if they expected to find someone or something there that… that… I don't know… would transform their lives.

  ”About this time my wife fell pregnant. Is there anything so strange in that, you might ask? Not strange. No. A miracle for us. We'd tried for children, but we weren't blessed. Only one day my wife says to me, 'Ben, I've been to the doctor and I'm pregnant! Remember, I was sixty and Mary was fifty. Pregnancy at that age isn't impossible but it is rare. I wasn't the world's most demanding husband back then. Even so, Mary moved into the spare room. She didn't say as much but I knew she couldn't bear for me to touch her in a way that would… you know, lead to something sexual. It was as if she became so nervous of the idea of making love that she wanted to keep me at arm's length. I understood-or thought I did-she didn't want to put the unborn baby at risk at her age. This was the one last chance in her life to have a child. Even though it seemed to me she rejected me, that she couldn't bear to share a bed with me, I figure I did the right thing by being supportive and aiming to be as understanding as possible.

  ”Anyway, at that time we had a break-in. An intruder got into the Luxor in the early hours. I was alone in the place with Mary. When I looked down from the apartment window and saw the broken glass by the door, I figured that some punk had grabbed liquor from the bar and taken off. So rather than call out the police I took a flashlight and my old twelve gauge to check out the damage myself. I planned to nail a board to the broken glazing, then report the crime in the morning. You see, Mary was in a jumpy state about her pregnancy. I didn't want to alarm her.

  ”The moment I stepped out onto the dance floor I saw the intruder. It wasn't some scuzzy bum looking for whisky. It was a woman of around thirty-five. She wore a flared skirt and schoolmarmish blouse. She had respectability stamped right through the center of her. You couldn't have found someone who looked less like a thief if you'd tried. I
could see there was no point in waving the gun and yelling the cops were on their way. Instead I switched on the house lights. My appearing like that in my robe and slippers with a shotgun under my arm didn't even surprise her. Instead she looked at me with this expression of wonder on her face. She filled the room with her happiness, her eyes shone, she kind of puffed herself up with excitement, holding her hands up like this…”

  Benedict saw the man onscreen raise his hands at either side of him until they were as high as his shoulders. 7 figured she'd seen the gun and was surrendering, hands held high. I told her, 'Don't worry, ma'am. I'm not going to shoot.' But she never even noticed the gun, I'd swear to that, because she was so thrilled at being in the Luxor- my Luxor, my little old dance hall in the middle of nowhere. Then I asked her 'Ma'am, why are you here? You know it's late and this is private property?

  ”Then she turns to me and says, 'Do you know what happened to me last week?”

  ” 'Wo, ma'am, I don't-'

  ”I went to see a specialist at the hospital and he told me I have cancer of the liver. I won't be alive six months from now. 'I'm sorry to hear that.' I told her, and offered to drive her home.

  ”She didn't seem sorry. She looked happy as a sand boy. Straight out, she told me, 'Last night I was doing the dishes and crying so hard I had to wipe my eyes with a towel but then all of a sudden I said to myself, 'Grace, the time's come to go home.' But I am home, I thought. 'No,' said this voice in my head. 'Return to your real home.' I didn't even have to ask myself where that was. I knew I had to drive to the Luxor, where I used to come dancing when I was seventeen. This is home. 'Your home is here in the Luxor? I'm sorry, but this is just a dance hall-'

  ”She looked at me, her eyes all bright and shining; she had this huge smile on her face, then she says, 'Please don't ask me how I know this is home. All I know is I'll find it here.'

  ”By now, I'm thinking she must be on some pretty powerful medication. In any event, the poor lady's mind must be every which way due to the shock of learning she was dying. That'd do strange things to a person. I'm also thinking how can I persuade her to give me the telephone number of a family member who can collect her. And all the time she's talking about how happy she is to find her way home… to her real home, that is.”

  That was the moment that Benedict West brought to mind the crook who the off-duty cop had shot in the convenience store. For some reason, the dying man had taken off on his motorcycle, driven across town to the Luxor, then tried to claw his way into the building. All the time he'd been claiming he was going home. And he was dying, just like the woman Lockram had found on the dance floor. Both had said that their home lay somewhere in the Luxor. Benedict's mind leapfrogged forward to finding Robyn carried by the creature with the blossoming mass of lips, and the arms that looked not like regular arms but… he strived to pull a description… stems? Did the arms resemble stems? Robyn had stated without a glimmer of doubt in her eyes that she'd somehow found herself in a forest inside the Luxor.

  Benedict had seen for himself the leaf fragments clinging to her hair.

  Was that the key to all this? If so, could all this somehow relate to Mariah Lee's disappearance?

  Benjamin's Lockram's slow voice drew his attention back to the TV where the thirty-year-old videotape ghosted images of the now-dead man across the screen.

  ”This woman, Grace, was so full of the joys of spring, as the old saying goes, that I didn't know how to begin calming her. I started to tell her to take it easy, that I'd get her a drink of water… a drink of brandy, come to that… then arrange a ride home. Only she'd have none of that. She just told me how excited she was at this miraculous vision of where her real home was. That she'd seen it before in dreams when she'd been ill with rheumatic fever as a child. That home lay beyond a gray forest on a mountainside. And there were towers and domed buildings-and that you could hear the sound of hundreds of bells pealing away; that it wasn't discordant but beautifully harmonious. 'A symphony for the soul'was how the woman described it. And that she'd been able to smell a wonderful perfume floating through the streets of this magical city. By this time, I didn't know what I could do with the woman; she was so happy she was close to mania. I was afraid she'd start dancing about the place. Just as I decided I'd have to get mean with her to calm her down (after all, I didn't want Mary to hear the commotion and come downstairs in her state. She was close to six months pregnant by then)… just as I decided I had to grab the woman by the wrists, she stopped and turned to look at the stage like she'd heard something. Only she couldn't have. Because apart from Mary asleep in the apartment, the only people in the Luxor were the happy bouncing lady with shiny eyes and myself, one Benjamin Lockram. Grace stared toward the stage. I found I stared, too, half expecting a second intruder. Only I saw nothing. But I felt something. I felt a cool breeze blow into my face. A cool wet breeze like you get in the fall. I could smell fallen leaves, moss, wet wood, dew, toadstool, mushroom. Those forest smells that fill your nostrils after it rains in the great outdoors.

  ”The lady's eyes were wide… wide! Like balls of glass in her head as if she's seen the Second Coming. 'It's here!' she shouts. 'It's here!' Then she dashed forward. I mean, she just catapulted herself, skirts flying, her arms stretched forward; she moved so fast her hair rippled straight out behind her. I ran after her. For some reason I thought she'd deliberately run into the stage to hurt herself. I remember telling myself it was those painkilling drugs scrambling her head. As I ran, my slipper flicked off my foot. The bare skin couldn't grip the floorboards properly and I went forward headfirst to land on my belly. It knocked the air right out of me. The gun and flashlight went skidding out in front of me. For a second I couldn't breathe. My ribs ached like hellfire from the belly flop. Even though it was only for a moment I screwed my eyes tight shut as I caught my breath. I put my hands out to push myself so I could sit upright. I recall the ground being soft and wet. One of the cleaners had left behind a wet cloth, I reasoned. Then I opened my eyes. The woman had gone, vanished as if she'd stepped through a hole in the atmosphere and into another world… The comparison was a truer one than I could have believed. The gun and the flashlight that went skittering away across the floor had vanished, too. And when I looked at my hands I saw I'd bunched them into fists because the pain in my ribs had been pretty bad. When I opened them I found I was clutching two handfuls of soft, wet leaves.”

  Benedict remembered the strange-looking leaf that he'd untangled from Robyn's hair and began to understand.

  ***

  In that slow voice that held a gentle resonance, Lockram finished his story. This was where Benedict leaned forward, hands gripping his knees, waiting expectantly for the final shot, daring it to be as he remembered it from when he'd first watched the tape an hour ago.

  Benjamin Lockram sat in that tight column of white light where silver flecks danced. He gave a little shrug. ”No, I never did find out what happened to the lady I knew only as Grace. She'd entered the Luxor. She never left. Not in a way I understood as leaving, that is. I'd have seen if she'd doubled back and exited through the broken glass. And when I checked, all the other doors to the rear were secure. My gun and flashlight had vanished, too. All I had in return were two fistfuls of wet leaves. One of the star-shaped leaves attracted my curiosity. I dried it, pressed it, then took it to the library to try to identify the species of tree. I never did find a match. But by then I doubted if I ever would. I knew people were coming to the Luxor 'to find their way home,' as they described it. Some left disappointed, but I could see all were obsessed with the notion… 'compulsion 'would be a better word. Later, I took to watching videotapes from security cameras. I'd watch some individuals walk in through the lobby back there. I learned to spot the ones. They didn't dress like the fans of The Ramones or Jethro Tull or whoever was playing. They stood out from the crowd. For some reason I could never see them step out onto the Luxor's dance floor and into that other place they called home. Only I saw, when I played
back tapes of the audience leaving at the end of the night, that they'd never left. Mariah Lee. Ice-water shivers flooded Benedict's bones. Mariah Lee had walked into the Luxor. Benedict had seen her with his own eyes. She'd never left. She'd never…

  ”The Luxor underwent a transformation in those final years before I finally closed its doors forever. It had always been an otherworldly place that was a step away from our mundane day-to-day world. For decades I ascribed that to it being a venue where generations of young people went to have fun; it was a little glittering splinter of show business in a land surrounded by grim factories. My Luxor was a place to escape your daily cares about holding down a job, keeping the house tidy, raising kids. But there was more to it than that. I researched its history and learned about the crows-those gangsters of the bird world, how they're omens of death-and that the creatures lay in wait to catch the soul the moment the person died and the body released its spirit. The name for these soul-catchers is a psychopomp-a funny name for a creature that struck terror into the hearts of our ancestors. All that and more. Much more. For some reason, certain individuals were drawn here. They believed-and still believe that their home lies through some invisible doorway on the dance floor. I don't know how they know. Come to that, I'm certain they don't know. They're driven by instinct just the way bears know when it's time to hibernate or geese know when it's time to migrate thousands of miles. Now it's time to draw this to an end…”