Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 Read online

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  You Were Neither Hot Nor Cold, But Lukewarm, and So I Spit You Out

  Cara Spindler & David Erik Nelson

  with love to MoJo

  Once upon a time there was a Famous and Talented Horror Author with a problem: His wife was a monster in bed. The Famous and Talented Horror Author would scream himself awake in the morning with his wife, who slept soundly asleep next to him, soft and naked and warm and human and oblivious.

  In the dream her face would turn fiery red and melt like wax, like Santeria candles whose smell of rotting roses might fill a tiny mercado and murkily remind shoppers of a great-aunt's house on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. Her eyes would turn charred and black, velvety and endless pools in which he'd scream and thrash and drown. Her touch was a thousand knives, abrading his thighs with a deep, epidermal ache, a burn that crawled across his whole body in a sudden phalanx of pain.

  In the dream his wife sucked great chunks of his soul as he clawed and cried in his sleep. His soul was pink and viscous, like hot, unstretched taffy, and having it sucked felt like she was digging into him with a tiny, serrated scoop. In the dreams she was a terrible and boneless tentacular thing, a clinging inescapable ache. A squeeze. If a heart-attack were to be incarnated, it would be as this thing he dreamed his wife became.

  At first this notion evaporated in the day's clarifying light, and by the time he stepped into the bathroom to take that first morning piss, it was utterly dissolved. But, after a few weeks of reduced sleep, the nightmare began creeping in around the edges of his day.

  Did I really dream that she was a tentacle thing digging out my flesh with razored suckers, with fangs and venom slavering maw? he would wonder, sitting before his idle computer, Did I dream that? In the evening, after dinner, he would clear the table and surreptitiously watch his wife, her delicate hand tucking a stray hair behind her ear as she labored over her laptop, and dismiss the dream as ridiculous. Then he'd fix himself another Jack on the rocks to ward off dreams.

  And then things went deeper. There was strange grit in among the sheets. Windows he was sure were latched when he went to bed, he found unlatched in the morning. Dots of blood on the bedclothes, not toward the middle of the bed like a period uncalculated, but up near the pillows and down at the foot, and not menstrual-dark, but a light cordovan, sometimes still sticky fresh when he went to make the bed in the morning. The carpet seemed cooler under the window, just a little damp to his feet, but when he drew his hand over the carpet, it was dry. Sometimes he found wet leaves in the bedcovers or on the window sill. Once one was plastered to his cheek.

  By some mechanism unknown to him—but presumed to be a by-product of matrimony—the Author found that he knew the terrible things she did out in the world after sucking him soulless. Like frescoes on the vault of his skull, he saw them painted in among the candle-lit shadows in his head, visions unbidden and awful: crushed cats, toes raggedly torn from clean sea-shell pink feet, blood in the jaws and teeth smashed against brick schoolyard walls. The high jabber of fear, the begging: first for salvation and mercy, and then just for death. The violations of the night.

  Sitting on the toilet, or leaning over the kitchen sink rinsing out the coffee pot, the Author would suddenly find himself gripped in one of these visions, these impossible memories of his wife's monstrous hungers, and he would freeze with the fear of it, of her. Often he wept, helpless, until it passed.

  His wife might come into the kitchen, cheery for the morning, smart in her grey business suit, leather attaché case swinging in her arm.

  "Just coffee and an egg,” she might call to him, “Gotta get to the office double-quick."

  And then glance up to see her husband and the sink, ghost-white and red-eyed.

  "Hon,” she'd say, “Oh, hon. What's wrong? What's wrong?” and she'd go to him, to stroke his hand, to comfort him, and he'd jerk away, as though she was hot or sharp.

  "Nothing!” too loud, too quick. “Nothing,” calmer, “I..."

  She drew her hand back, “Were you crying?"

  "I was ... just. I just thought of something sad, from when I was a boy. It's nothing."

  Nothing.

  * * * *

  As he wasn't really sleeping anymore, the dream took to creeping up on him suddenly, when he shut his eyes over the computer at work in the drowsy hours after lunch, or when he took a late night walk and the streetlight happened to go out.

  His disturbed and disturbing thoughts—his million dollar thoughts, thoughts which petrified and drained his heart when in his head, but made him the Famous and Talented Horror Author when on paper—had always had a habit of creeping up on him throughout his days. These flashes of terror—gut-wrenching, adrenaline-pumping—had always been fun thrill-panic, like when he was a little kid and had watched a scary movie and knew, just knew that two nights from now after playing Capture the Flag or videogames at a friend's house he would get that horribly-pleasantly sick feeling walking home alone, and he would swear to himself to never, ever again watch a horror movie.

  But these strange brood of his dream about his wife were something different, and getting worse. They had even started to creep up while his eyes were open, as he waited in grocery store lines, or when he answered the phone and the caller took just a second longer than normal to reply to his Hello? Sometimes, when his wife wasn't yet home from work, he would let the phone ring and ring, because he dreaded what grave-moss voice might speak to him through the miles of roadside copper. Sometimes, when she was home, he let it ring and ring because he dreaded being distracted by the caller, dreaded the tentacles catching him unaware. It had happened in one of the dreams, he was sure. She looked normal, like her heavy-eyed two a.m. self, hair askew. And then she opened her mouth, and out came a voice deeper than the holes under waterfalls, rougher than a lion's tongue or shark's blood-hungry hide. It had scraped him down to the bone. And so he let the phone ring.

  The dream had crept from the back of his mind and now it perched on his shoulder, sometimes gently playing its taloned, toothed suckers across the back of his ears. The dream was so real and horrible that he started to consider the possibility that his whole life was actually a pleasant dream and the true reality was the monstrous, sucking wife-thing that tortured him at night. Memories? All the hours in his sunny home office with its dark varnished bookshelves, garnished with sunny pictures from his honeymoon to Aruba with his brown, young wife? All those other memories that made up a successful, contented childhood of family camping trips and a brother who had marshmallow toasting contests with him? Those were all memories that had been pinned into him, and were not really a part of him at all, not nearly as real and solid as the tentacles and doll's eyes, as the thing his wife became at night.

  In his dazed, sleep-starved stupor, the Famous and Talented Horror Author's mind gently bifurcated. Half perseverated over those classics he'd read in college—Beowulf and Gilgamesh and the Odyssey—and what had to happen to Grendel and Marduck and Cyclops. The other half of his mind thought of guns. He'd never owned a gun—never touched a gun—but all day he thought of guns, of holding one in his hand, of slipping one under his pillow and gripping its reassuring weight as he slept, of slipping the barrel into his mouth.

  * * * *

  Now, this man had a brother, the Club-Footed Janitor. Since Cain and Abel, all brothers have been the same: in every pair, each is equal, but one succeeds and one fails. Sometimes this affects their love and affection, as it did with Cain rising up left-handed, and sometimes it doesn't. It was fortunately the latter case with the Famous and Talented Horror Author and his brother, the Club-Footed Janitor: They had loved each other dearly as boys, and loved each other dearly as men, despite the divergence in the paths of their lives.

  Also, ever since Cain and Abel, brothers have always had secrets from each other.

  The Club-Footed Janitor was not really a janitor, although he worked every day mopping floors, cleaning toilets, vacuuming thin in
dustrial carpet. Innocuous. A relief because he was not the classic mentally retarded janitor who just can't seem to understand the importance of using the right size can liner, who speaks to us with his moist, garbled, mentally-deficient voice, cheery and vacuous, an idiot man-child unable to take the world's manifold sufferings and ecstasies in his stunted grasp. Not that kind. Hardly worthy of note at all.

  But, unbeknownst to the Famous and Talented Horror Author, and largely unbeknownst to himself, the Club-Footed Janitor worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. He killed people for the Central Intelligence Agency. It didn't make sense, really, that this brother ended up in law enforcement, because when the man and his brother were younger, the Author had always been the athletic one, not due to any sort of natural talent on his part but because his brother had been born with that horrible clubfoot, so reminiscent of the turned-ankle the Irish wish on their enemies so that they might know them when they see them coming down the street.

  For the Club-Footed Janitor, the younger brother, it wasn't his body the CIA needed, but his mind. Much as the Famous and Talented Horror Author had just the exact right type of mind to be what he was—over imaginative, fearful without being timid, arrogant and yet terribly insecure, paranoid—his brother had just the right mind to kill for the CIA: his brain was a set of rooms whose doors he could open and close at will, and in which he could hide from others and from himself; a warren, like the tunnels of the Vietcong or Al-Qaida or rabbits. No one could force from him the details of his orders, because he kept them locked away from even himself, and only let them come out of the room at their appointed time. When the office rats with their Franklin planners confused him with his co-worker, the aforementioned idiot man-child, and spoke to him in an exaggeratedly slow and loud voice, using sign language of their own devising, never did it cross the brother's mind to slide under their SUVs, clutch the chassis to his chest, and ride it out to the suburbs, past the gates and guard dogs and fences, and wait until the opportune moment to sneak upstairs, unbidden, unseen, and open a vial of ground glass onto their shower floor—not just one shower, but all the showers: the white marble of the wife, the pink tile of the daughters. Never, because a door is either open or closed, and when the brother was in his janitor room, he could not be in his killer room.

  The Author could not know his brother for what he was, because the Janitor himself didn't know who he was. Just a crippled janitor, just a bright and quiet boy who had amounted to nothing. But a boy who became a man who dwelt in rooms and knew the truth only to be that which he saw directly in front of him, in the room with him. A man who had smothered the infant sons of drug lords, stomped and electrocuted the wives and daughters of terrorists, slowly poisoned the aged, bed-ridden and enfeebled patriarchs of white-supremacist klans. A man who slept easily in a comfortable room with no windows and all the doors firmly shut. Some doors lead to weenie roasts with his parents still alive, others to procedures performed in soundproofed, windowless rooms, but all doors are either open or closed.

  * * * *

  So the Famous and Talented Horror Author went to the anonymous, dark-eyed office building where his brother worked. He ducked in through the loading dock, walked through the cool halls, heard the water fountain humming metallically. The shadows were dusty and still; it was a place where it seemed completely preposterous that a face-sucking demon could hide. He took the freight elevator to the caged basement maintenance office where his brother sat in a wobbly-wheeled office-chair, his twisted foot propped on the scarred top of his cast-off desk, listening to quiet tango music waft from a plaster-caked portable radio.

  The man was broken-hearted about his monster wife: a face-sucking demon in his semi-sleep; a perpetual draining worry on his sleep-fuddled brain and heart; a beast that hung in the back of all of the family photographs and sunny afternoons, of his gross sense of reality. His whole nuclear family—Author, wife, 2.5 as-of-yet unconceived children—was crumbling before it had even started, somehow broken down on a school yard where one brother played soccer and the other hung out on the swings with the girls. He had nowhere else to go.

  He'd almost left his wedding ring in the glove-box of his car, he explained. Almost pulled it off as he boosted himself through the loading dock, almost handed it to a moon-faced janitor laboriously changing the bag on a vacuum cleaner, telling him, Keep it for me, wouldya? because it felt like her, warm and smooth, and maybe it, too, could connect to the netherworld and the horrible monster would find out about his plans, another function of that strange machine of matrimony.

  Because even if the author's brother was a failure, even if his family hadn't been very close, he could still believe in things that we all need to believe in: our family will always love us, and help us, and offer support, be it financial, mental, emotional, or answer big questions, like Should I kill my wife? Should I kill myself?

  * * * *

  The Club-Footed Janitor, the assassin, leaned back in his creaking, paint-splattered chair, deep in some office building, in the bowels of some city, some late afternoon, somewhere in America. The Author poured out his story, his months of quasi-not-sleep, the gathering intensity of the dreams, the way shadows ran alongside his car, like the monster pacing him leisurely.

  The Famous and Talented Horror Author realized he was babbling (a frequent complaint of his critics, he quipped nervously) and so he asked his brother, who stared at him for an endless moment afterwards, if he should kill his wife or kill himself, since he believed that she was now—or perhaps always had been—a hideous, primal monster.

  The Club-Footed Janitor laughed. “You've been reading too many of your own books, bro."

  The Famous and Talented Horror Author said nothing.

  And his brother asked, “What do you want to do?"

  "I don't know,” the Author said. “That's why I asked you."

  "Either you do or you don't,” said the brother, “and you're in my office, now, telling me that you think that your wife is a monster. So you have to decide what to do. What you want me to tell you is what you think is true."

  The man didn't know what to say, or what it meant, and so he waited.

  "What is true,” said the Club-Footed Brother slowly, cracking his knuckles, “is what you see, and hear, and touch. You know what you have to do. Don't ask me to make that decision for you.” The Club-Footed Janitor pushed back from his desk, easing his deformed foot down, and limped to a filing cabinet atop which sat a steaming tea-kettle on a hot plate.

  "It's always struck me as funny that it's a man's world,” he said idly, glancing into a mug and blowing out some dust. “All through nature, it's the females calling the shots, in bee hives and baboon troops, with lions. Species to species, males are lazy: drones built only for fighting and mating.” He opened the top drawer of the cabinet, dug out a box of Lipton's tea bags.

  Doors were opening in the Club-Footed Janitor's head.

  "Different in humans, somehow,” he remarked, selecting a bag. “Don't know why. Maybe that explains misogyny, spousal abuse, all these ‘God the Father’ religions. We're the only species that's inverted that ‘Ladies On Top’ order, and it takes a lot of crazy hoopla to keep the drones on top of a social order and the queens down.” He deposited the tea bag into the empty mug, set it atop the cabinet, and gingerly poured in the boiling water. “But one thing is for sure: you hit your mid-twenties,” he looked significantly at his brother, who was twenty-nine years old, and then rolled his eyes, as he himself was twenty-six, “without killing or making a baby, then you've certainly become an evolutionary aberration."

  The Famous and Talented Horror Author, who had a keen ear for dialogue—the fans love prosaic dialogue in horror stories: it builds tension—felt his brother's speech building to an overwhelming question. He waited. He watched.

  The Club-Footed Janitor stood at his filing cabinet, staring into the middle distance. He sipped his tea reflectively.

  "You know those descriptions of the old monsters?
Dragons and vampires, Bigfoot and the like? You ever notice what they have in common? The size and the fangs, the strength. Lotsa times they have scales, have wings. Just the sort of things little tiny mammals are afraid of, aren't they? Imagine what a hawk looks like if you're a deer mouse. Imagine what a four inch rodent thinks of a four-and-a-half foot boa constrictor, and all of a sudden dragons make a lot more sense, don't they? You know the way people react to snakes. It's silly, for a 190-pound man to scream and dance around like a little girl when he catches sight of a six-ounce snake, but they do. You ever seen how chimps react to snakes?"

  The Famous and Talented Horror Author shook his head, but his brother didn't see: The Janitor's eyes were turned inward, to memory, and he remembered standing on the dirt floor of a tin-pot African general's compound, a cool Atlantic breeze blowing back the curtains and making the mosquito net sway around him, standing over the general, a hypodermic needle of warfarin buried in the general's neck, the Janitor's finger on the plunger. An autopsy was unlikely, but one clan assassinating another's warlord with rat poison was hardly unheard of in Sierra Leone. No questions.

  What was this man, this lone man with his drug-addled army of children? Why was he important? Why did he need to be liquidated? The Janitor didn't even open the door to the room where those questions paced off their shuffling, senile lives.

  No questions.

  The general, eyes huge and shining in the night dark, talked, talked, talked, on and on in Krio, about snakes and bees, about drones and dragons, about women and men. Trying to buy his life with words, but only buying time. The Club-Footed Janitor, curiosity piqued, listened, and then pushed the plunger, watched the general buck and vomit and weep blood from eyes and anus. And then he left.

  The next day he'd left his hotel—with a middle-of-the-road digital camera and lots of sunscreen—and gone sightseeing to a local preserve, had seen what chimps do to snakes.

  "They go nuts, whirling and screaming and smashing the thing with rocks and logs, even if it's harmless, even if it's dead. Hell, they'll go nuts and slaughter a garden hose. They hate snakes. They hate monsters. It's a deep memory, an old memory. Genetic. And good. There's more than just dragons and Bigfoots out there.