© 2011 asotir.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
7
AMBER stared up at the club, baffled but determined. She turned and walked around the side.
The side of the club was on the alley. The song of the little girl was louder here.
Frère Jacques, frère Jacques,
Dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?
Amber walked slowly into the alley.
There were crates and bags of garbage. Down the way was a rusty yellow lamp over a doorway. The sign over the door was in thick black letters:
ELYSIUM – DELIVERIES ONLY
Amber approached it. She tried the knob. It was locked.
She turned and walked away. And stopped. She looked back at the door.
She went back to it. She pulled a cord off her neck over her head. At the end of the cord was a key. She held the key in her hand and guided it to the lock. The key slid into the lock and she turned it and it turned and the lock went click.
Amber opened the door and stepped inside. The door closed behind her.
§
THE STRIPS of theater lighting glowed a bit brighter in the Chamber of Mirrors. The gentlemen and ladies began to file out. The buyer remained seated at his table. He was now the only one left in the room. He dabbed at his neck and brow with a linen handkerchief and waited.
After some time, the hostess returned to the buyer’s table.
‘Did you not enjoy the performance, sir?’ she asked, but the leer on her lips said she was certain that he had.
‘She was – she was—’
‘Yes, sir.’
The buyer said, ‘I want her. I want to see her. Alone.’
‘She’s quite … busy, sir.’
‘How much?’
The hostess smiled.
‘The usual gratuity, sir, is $3,000. For the half hour.’
The buyer pulled out his billfold. He removed the bills and spread them on the table. He pulled out another bundle of money from his jacket pocket and dropped it on the table. He dropped another bundle alongside it. And a fourth. He pushed all of it toward the hostess.
The buyer said, ‘There’s $50,000. It’s all I could wring out of the shop for now. It’s for the night. All night. All mine, alone – you understand?’
The hostess’ hands stacked and counted the money.
‘Yes, sir. It’s very handsome. I’m just not sure – there are all the other gentlemen and ladies—’
The buyer said, ‘Do I take it back?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
She placed a card on the table beside the money. There was a number on the card: 13.
‘Someone will come for you, sir. The lady will accept your offer … personally.’
The hostess left. The buyer neatened the piles of money and dabbed the handkerchief over his upper lip. A voice spoke up behind him.
‘Keep it.’
The buyer turned. At the table behind him a man sat in the darkness. He must have just entered, but the buyer hadn’t heard it. The light from the floor strips only touched his trousers from the knees down to his shoes. The trousers were coarse cloth, worn and stained. The shoes were heavy, brutal work-shoes, scuffed and muddied.
The buyer said, ‘Are you addressing me, sir?’ The way he said sir expressed his contempt.
‘Keep your money for yourself.’
‘What for? If I might inquire?’
‘You’re going to need a casket, aren’t you?’
The man’s hand appeared beside his leg and something glinted in it.
It was an awl, heavy and crude and deadly.
The buyer paled. He scooped up his money and left.
The man got up and stood over the buyer’s table. His hand picked up the card. Number 13. Someone entered from behind and stepped up to the table.
It was the morgue attendant. The man showed him the card. The morgue attendant nodded.
‘This way, sir.’ He gestured toward the outer door.
The man held the card up beside his face and scratched his cheek with the edge of it.
Garrety said, ‘No, not that way. We’ll go the way the suckers don’t. Shall we?’
The morgue attendant nodded, unsure. Garrety led the way onto the stage. He paused a moment and looked back at the Chamber of Mirrors from the stagefront. He looked down on the small tables and the starry glow from the theater strips on the floor and reflected oddly off the mirrors on the walls and ceiling.
The morgue attendant coughed. Garrety nodded and passed through the curtains.
§
AMBER closed the back door behind her. The latch clicked in the wall.
She started down the hall.
The hall was narrow. There were lights in the ceiling at intervals. The walls were bare and broken only by small closed doorways.
She looked straight ahead and she held the key in her fingers. It was as though she knew where to go.
The hall ended at a door. She stepped up to the door. It was locked, but the key at her throat unlocked it. She entered.
The room was small. There was a desk, a cabinet, a closet. The desk was bare except for three objects: two books and a gift box for a bottle of brandy.
She opened one of the books.
It was heavy and old. Its pages held two columns. In one column were rows of Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the other column were dense paragraphs in German.
The second book was heavy and black and its pages were dyed scarlet around the edges. It looked like a bible. It too was in German.
She flipped the pages. She picked up and opened the cylinder gift box. She slid up its sleeve.
Inside the box was a jar. The jar was clear glass. Inside the jar was a black liquid. It wasn’t brandy. It was thick and shiny and something stirred within it.
She held the jar up to the light before her face and stared into it. There was a tapping sound. Amber put down the jar and looked back.
The door was closed. The tapping was repeated. The doorknob started to turn.
She slunk back inside the closet.
§
GARRETY and the morgue attendant went through the curtains into the stage area.
The tank stood to one side, bristling with the video cameras, empty. Behind it a switchboard lined the wall. The floor was littered with rags and discarded props. The backdrop was only a brick wall painted black.
Garrety considered. Then he went to the side away from the tank where a narrow door stood like the entrance to a maintenance closet. Garrety opened it and went through. The morgue attendant followed.
They went down a narrow back hall. Behind them a door stood under a red EXIT sign, which was the only source of light. The right hand wall was of old bricks with crumbling mortar. The left hand wall was new wallboard. They came on a long narrow window set in the wallboard.
Through the window Garrety could see into a small room lined with chairs. The room was lighted by a green desk lamp on a small table at the far end, next to a red painted door. The chairs were occupied by club members, men and women. Some sat like they were alone, others in couples or groups of three, usually two women and a man. They all held small cards in their hands or laps with numbers on them, like the card in Garrety’s hand.
The back hall came to a blank brick wall a little past the window. Right at the end an opening had been cut in the wallboard and filled in with hangings of heavy black-purple velvet, tied off with a thick gold rope.
Garrety stopped. He looked back at the morgue attendant with a quizzical look in his eyes. The morgue attendant waited. In the red gloom of the hall his face was too dark to read.
‘That’s all,’ Garrety said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be needing you anymore.’
The morgue attendant didn’t seem to understand. Garrety took hold of the morgue attendant’s shoulder and turned him around and gave him a shove. The morgue attendant walked back up the hall, turned at the small door and went back to the backstage area.
Garrety took hold of the awl in his right fist. With his left hand he pulled on the gold rope and drew the velvet hangings a little to one side. He leaned forward and peered through the gap.
The room beyond was about the same size as the waiting room, to which it connected by the red door. Recessed lights in the ceiling cast a greenish pall over the gilt walls. In the center of the room stood a large bed with posts at the corners like an old fashioned bed. The posts were made of steel and connected to a grid of beams over the bed; the effect was of a cage, though the sides were open between the four steel posts.
On the bed was a mattress. The mattress was purplish and had a shallow trough or depression running down the middle. Clear plastic sheeting covered the mattress.
Along the sides of the bed were two antique sofas from the Gilded Age of the Old West, like something you might find in old San Francisco. A couple sat on each of the sofas in elegant evening dress. They leaned forward with outstretched arms hovering over the thing on the bed.
On the bed, lying in the trough in the plastic sheeting, was the Lady of 1,001 Marks.
She lay passively, accepting the caresses of the patrons on the sofas. Her nude body gleamed with the greenish oily liquid that filled the trough in which she lay. Her eyes looked blankly up at the hands that ran over her form. All up and down the length of her body, the bright tattoos crawled and writhed and quivered beneath the caresses of the wandering hands. The tattoos crawled up onto the fingers of the patrons, at which the gentleman or lady would utter a slight moan of horror or pleasure or pain, maybe; the tattoos crept under the gentlemen’s cuffs or up the long bare arms of the ladies, then turned and scuttled back down onto their home over the naked body of the dead woman.
One of the gentlemen stooped forward and kissed the dead woman’s breast. He let his lips linger and immediately a dozen or so marks congregated around his mouth and swarmed across his cheeks and back down.
The gentleman sat back with an odd expression in his face.
‘What was it like,’ murmured his lady partner.
‘Vile,’ he said with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Wonderfully vicious and vile…’
‘Oh I simply must try it,’ she said but then Garrety pushed through the velvet hangings and struck the awl against one of the steel posts.
It rang out like a church bell.
‘Sorry folks,’ he said, ‘show’s over.’
They looked at him with outraged fury. But again he struck the post with the awl and they got the message and rose. They strode to the red door. ‘The management shall hear of this intrusion,’ one of the men said.
Garrety said, ‘Fine, now get out.’ They left him alone with the bed and the dead woman and her obscene marks.
The smell in the room was oppressive. It stank of disinfectants, formaldehyde, ammonia and embalming chemicals.
Garrety sighed and sank down on one of the sofas.
The Woman lay passively in the oily trough in the plastic sheeting on the mattress in the steel cage of a bed.
Garrety stared at her.
She looked back at him. Her sea-green eyes displayed nothing. No fear. No desire. No recognition. Only the blankness of beauty that is dead, but desirable beyond all price.
‘Isn’t she lovely?’
Garrety looked up. At the red door the hostess stood beside the bald man. Both still wore the hospital latex gloves. The hostess smiled and entered. She said, ‘We strongly urge our patrons to use protection.’ She indicated a box of the latex gloves on a small table at the foot of the bed.
Garrety said, ‘They didn’t.’
‘Not all our patrons are cautious enough to obey instructions. And it does lessen some of the … sensations involved. And, after all, they pay so much for the privilege, so strict compliance is not enforced.’
She walked to the bed and turned up the Woman’s chin with her fingers.
‘I wish I could be like her. She has over one thousand marks. One for every man, every woman, who has touched her. The darlings find in her skin a fertile breeding ground. That’s why we call her Our Lady of 1,001 Marks. And how many of them she has shared!’
Garrety said, ‘It’s monstrous.’
‘Oh, and I thought you would approve! After all, you played a large part in creating her. Herr Doktor called her our finest work. The prototype of the future. I like to call her Herr Doktor’s Daughter.’
Garrety started forward but the arm of the bald man twisted round his neck and pinioned him. The awl fell from his nerveless grip.
The tattooed arm squeezed Garrety’s throat. Something moved across it – the scarab mark. It slipped off the bald man’s arm onto Garrety’s cheek. It showed a red dot.
The hostess gestured.
The morgue attendant entered and softly closed the red door behind him. He put his hand on Garrety’s temple. A beetle slid down from under his sleeve and crawled on Garrety’s forehead. It also had the red dot.
The hostess set her foot on one of the sofas. She pulled her skirt up.
The bald man forced Garrety to his knees. He pressed Garrety’s face between the hostess’ legs. The red and black spider crawled from under her skirt. It crawled onto Garrety’s lips.
The hostess signaled and the bald man let Garrety loose. Garrety staggered back against the bed’s steel post.
The Woman looked on blankly.
Garrety closed his eyes. The sweat burned on his forehead. The marks crawled over his eyes, his mouth… they scuttled down his chin. They disappeared underneath his collar.
He opened his eyes.
Garrety said, ‘That was a mistake.’
The hostess said, ‘You are a strong man, Brother Garrety. Very strong and very stubborn. All right. Resist if you must. You’ll only die more slowly.’
She gestured. The morgue attendant and the bald man moved away to the red door. The hostess joined them there.
‘She ought to appreciate watching it happen. Very well. Enjoy yourselves, my darlings.’
They left.
The hostess closed the door in the waiting room. She made a slight gesture of apology to the patrons. ‘The private sessions have been unfortunately suspended for the time being. We apologize for the delay. All your cards will be honored in the proper order.’
One gentleman, white haired with a precisely-clipped white mustache, said, ‘It’s rather late. Will there be time again another evening?’
‘Whatever you wish, sir. The management will make all arrangements at the door on your way out. I will personally attend to it.’
The hostess ushered the patrons out. When they were alone again, he turned to the bald man.
‘Go to the office. Make sure it’s safe.’
The bald man nodded. He passed out into another hall. He went to the door at the end. He tapped on the door. There was no answer. He tapped again. Then he opened and went in.
§
ACROSS THE ROOM the outer door opened and Amber sank deeper into the closet and closed the door to a crack. Through the crack she could see the bald man come in.
The bald man crossed to the desk. He closed the two books. He picked up the sleeve to the brandy gift box. The jar of ink was gone.
He said, ‘Who’s here? What have you done with it? Where are you hiding?’
Inside the closet, Amber pulled down a wire hanger. She bent it and looped one end over the door knob and the other on a hook on the wall.
The bald man approached the closet. He placed his hand on the knob.
Inside the closet, Amber pressed her back to the wall.
The bald man pulled on the door. It opened a little farther. Then it stopped.
Inside the closet the coat hanger strained and kept the door from opening farther.
The bald man pulled harder. The door wouldn’t give.
Inside the closet, Amber stared down.
A pale hand entered through the crack in the door. It was followed by an arm. The arm looked like a snake. The hand groped deeper into the closet.
Amber’s hands opened Aunt Amber’s purse.
She pulled out the razor and opened it. The new blade gleamed. She brought it down.
The blade slashed the arm and cut the flesh and there was a shout and the arm slipped out.
Outside the closet, the bald man lifted his arm. There was a long, ugly gash dripping blood.
Rage filled his face. He stabbed the arm in as far as he could reach.
Inside the closet, the arm groped. It grabbed hold of Amber’s thigh.
She swung the razor, slashing at the arm. It let go. It struck against the wire of the hanger and it followed the wire to the hook and fumbled there and tried to slip the wire off the hook.
Amber’s eyes filled with desperation.
The razor flashed against the arm. Blood spurted from the many deep cuts. The blood stained her legs, her dress, her arms and face, as well as the floor and walls of the small closet. From outside the bald man’s groans rose to a growl, then a scream.
He snatched back his arm.
The bald man said, ‘All right then—’
He hurled his body against the door and it slammed shut and he twisted the knob and jammed the desk chair under it.
He stepped back to the outer door. He was holding up his arm and laughing, bleeding all over the floor.
‘We’ll be back. We’ll all be back!’
He left. He left the door open behind him.
Inside the closet, Amber tried the door. She pushed.
The door pushed against the chair but the chair wouldn’t give.
She gave up and sank to the floor.
§
GARRETY sat on one of the sofas. The Woman watched impassively. Garrety’s face showed something of his struggle and his pain. He leaned on the steel post.
‘Hello, Miss Wertham,’ he said in a choked whisper.
Something flickered in the sea-green eyes.
Garrety said, ‘You do remember me, I see.’
He removed his seaman’s coat. He stripped his shirt and his undershirt.
Across his chest the beetle marks with the red dots, and the red and black spider, grappled with the large beetle mark that had no dot.
He sat beside her on the bed. His hands caressed her body. She lay naked under him, but with the marks, the things, crawling and swarming over her, she hardly seemed nude. She flinched a little but he bent down all the way and took her in his arms and held her tight.
Garrety said, ‘How much do you remember?’
He kissed her.
Her arms rose up from the trough of oil and curled around his back.
He held the kiss.
The marks on her arms crawled onto his back.
He held on, kissing her, and leaned her back into the trough in the plastic sheeting. The small room was quiet. The plastic sheeting squeaked a little under them. He held her and her tattoos moved and swarmed all over his naked back.
Her sea-green eyes flickered and her brow arched and something glimmered in her eyes. His shoulder was covered with tattoos but her arms were pale and bare and her nails dug into his back and spasmed and he broke the kiss and drew away.
He stood away from the bed.
She looked down. She lay in the trough quite naked. Her body no longer had any tattoos. She seemed to realize that she was naked and covered herself with her arms.
Garrety said, ‘Wait.’
He went through the velvet hangings. He went back up the narrow back hallway, across the stage, through the Chamber of Mirrors. He took the nightdress from the mannequin and brought it back. He staggered when he reached the velvet hangings and almost fell but somehow he managed to lurch into the room and hang onto the steel post of the bed.
The tattoos, hundreds of them, were swarming across his face. They ran up and down his arms. They swarmed over his chest. His arms were rigid. He raised his face and it was a mask of agony and the thought crossed his mind, maybe, the minor question, were there really a thousand of the marks that had crawled off her body onto him?
Stretched out on the bed below him was Aunt Amber’s corpse.
The eyes flickered with yet a little life. They looked up at Garrety. The eyes told of rest, of peace, of serenity, of gratitude. Then they closed and she was gone, finally and forever.
Garrety said, ‘Rest in peace, Miss Wertham. Here. I’ll dress you.’
He managed to stand. He stooped down over the bed and put the nightdress on the body. He gathered her up in the nightdress in his arms and he carried her back through the velvet hangings, up the back hallway and through the maintenance door. The greenish oily liquid dripped off the corpse and left a trail that shone like the trail of a slug.
Garrety brushed through the curtains into the Chamber of Mirrors and the corpse of Aunt Amber was in his arms in the nightdress. He staggered off the stage and moved through the tables and passed the naked mannequin and went out of the room.
§
ELYSIUM. The Last Gasp. The sign outside the club went dark. Below, the last customers straggled down the steps.
The hostess locked the main door. She came back into the barroom. It was dark and still and empty.
The bald man appeared at one door. He leaned against it oddly. His face was pale. One arm hung down; the other groped.
‘I didn’t – I couldn’t – help me—’
The arm hanging down was streaming with blood. The bald man slid to the floor in a pool of blood.
The hostess stooped over him. In the background the morgue attendant looked on stupidly.
The hostess said, ‘Go find out what happened to him.’
‘But, how?’
‘Idiot! Follow the trail!’
The morgue attendant tracked the trail of blood down the hall. The hostess regarded the bald man.
‘It couldn’t protect you anymore. Where is it? Where’s your mark? Where’s mine?’
The morgue attendant followed the bloodstains through a doorway and down another hall to the end.
The office was empty. But there was a desk and a chair jammed against the closet door and the closet door was splashed with blood.
The morgue attendant approached the closet door and pulled away the chair.
The door burst open and Amber appeared. She whipped the morgue attendant in the face with the strop, and he backed away and raised his arms and fell.
‘Lady – stop!’
She stood over him, strop ready.
The morgue attendant said, ‘I tried to help you, don’t you remember?’
She lowered the strop.
‘Don’t you? What happened to your tattoo?’
‘I don’t know. Where is this place?’
She held out her hand.
‘Come on.’
She helped him to his feet and they left the room.
Behind them in the closet the jar holding the ink sat on the floor.
§
THE BARROOM was empty. Garrety entered from the back. He held the beautiful corpse in his arms and as he moved through the tables the long hem of the nightdress trailed across the floor, leaving a greenish line.
Garrety reached the bar. He laid the body on top of the bar, curled on one side, the head facing away, the wheat-colored hair spilling down.
Garrety stooped and fetched up the bottle of brandy and set it on the bar. He fumbled with it.
Amber appeared in the doorway to the hall. The morgue attendant was behind her. She started into the room.
‘Is she – is she Aunt Amber?’
Garrety turned and looked at her. He shook his head.
‘You know what Dimes said. Your aunt died a long time ago. They cremated her by mistake and her ashes are at the County Office Building.’
Amber stared at the hundreds of marks writhing and crawling over his face and arms and torso. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Almost complete. Pretty, aren’t they?’
Amber said, ‘No. Horrible.’
She reached out to him.
Garrety said, ‘Stand off! You don’t want to get – too close.’
He sagged against the bar, but recovered.
‘You’re hurt.’
Garrety said, ‘Only one more.’
He held up one hand and the marks on it moved back up away from his wrist and he gripped the arm there and clamped it. He held the unmarked hand out to her.
Garrety said, ‘Take it. Don’t be afraid.’
She took his hand. She could feel something move down her arm. It was her mark. It felt like pins and needles, like an itch just about to turn painful. The mark crawled onto his hand and he let her go and she staggered back.
Garrety said, ‘That’s right. All done now.’
‘How touching.’
The hostess stood at the end of the bar. She lit a cigarette and sucked on it and approached. Amber gave way.
‘You’ve got something that belongs to me. My darling. My mark.’
‘So?’
‘So I want it back.’
Garrety took a cigarette from the pack she left on the bar. He could only use one hand because the other held onto the bar and kept him standing. He put the cigarette in his lips.
Garrety said, ‘Got a light?’
The hostess smiled her insolent smile. She flicked her lighter up to him. He swung the brandy bottle in the way and there was a bit of handkerchief stuck in its mouth and he lit it off her lighter and held the Molotov up for just a moment, to let her see it and to let her know.
Then he dropped it.
The flames leapt up the bar around them.
The hostess said, ‘Oh, you fool! You fool! You fool!’
Amber said, ‘Garrety!’
Garrety said, ‘No use, kid. These things… only one way to handle them … burning.’
Amber said, ‘But you’ll die!’
‘That’s all right… I did something once … now I paid for it… Besides, I never was much of a dancer. Can you get out?’
The hostess screamed, ‘Give me back my mark!’
Amber said, ‘The door’s locked!’
The hostess said, ‘You want the keys? Here!’
The hostess flung the keys behind the burning bar. More bottles blew and the flames spread fast.
The blank eyes of the dead bald man looked on.
Amber said, ‘Garrety! It’s all right – Aunt Amber left me the key.’
She unlocked the door and opened it.
The barroom behind the cloakroom hall was filling with flames.
Amber said, ‘Garrety?’
Through veils of flames, the figure of the man at the center of it all slouched against the bar. He laid his head on the side of the corpse and the tattoos swarmed feverishly, avidly, hungrily over him. And as the flames engulfed him, he smiled a little.
Garrety said, ‘So long, kid.’
Then there was only flame.
The flames reached the cloakroom hall and forced Amber out.
