Nightmare Magazine Issue 7 Read online

  Gordon laughed at these tales at first. Until now. He pulled a feather from the bed-ticking and stroked his chin thoughtfully before tossing it away. It floated down, a breath of tawny mist. Gordon determinedly pulled the covers over his head and went back to sleep.

  He was reading the paper in the kitchen next morning, a detailed account of Ms. DeLucia’s trial and a new atrocity. Three women returning late from a nightclub had been harassed by a group of teenage boys, some of them very young. It was one of the young ones the women had killed, turning on the boys with a ferocity the newspaper described as “demonic.” Gordon turned to the section that promised full photographic coverage and shuddered. Hastily he put aside the paper and crossed the room to get a second cup of coffee. How could a woman, even three women, be strong enough to do that? He recalled his neighbor down the hall. Christ. He’d take the fire stairs from now on, rather than risk seeing her again. He let his breath out in a low whistle and stirred another spoonful of white powder into his cup.

  As he turned to go back to the table he noticed the MESSAGE light blinking on his answering machine. Odd. He hadn’t heard the phone ring during the night. He sipped his coffee and played back the tape.

  At first he thought there was nothing there. Dead silence, a wrong number. Then he heard faint sounds, a shrill creaking that he recognized as crickets, a katydid’s resolute twang, and then the piercing, distant wail of a whippoorwill. It went on for several minutes, all the way to the end of the message tape. Nothing but night sounds, insects and a whippoorwill, once a sharp yapping that, faint as it was, Gordon knew was not a dog but a fox. Then abrupt silence as the tape ended. Gordon started, spilling coffee on his cuff and swearing, rewound the tape while he went to change shirts.

  Afterward he played it back. He could hear wind in the trees, leaves pattering as though struck by a soft rain. Had Olivia spent the night in the country? No: they had plans for tonight, and there was no country within a day’s drive in any direction from here. She wouldn’t have left town on a major shoot without letting him know. He puzzled over it for a long while, playing back the gentle pavane of wind and tiny chiming voices, trying to discern something else there, breathing or muted laughter or a screen door banging shut, anything that might hint at a caller. But there was nothing, nothing but crickets and whippoorwills and a solitary vixen barking at the moon. Finally he left for work.

  It was the sort of radiant autumn day when even financial analysts wax rapturous over the color of the sky—in this case a startling electric blue, so deep and glowing Gordon fancied it might leave his fingers damp if he reached to touch it, like wet canvas. He skipped his lunchtime heave at the gym. Instead he walked down to Lafayette Park, filling his pockets with the polished fruit of horse-chestnuts and wondering why it was the leaves no longer turned colors in the fall, only darkened to sear crisps and then clogged the sewers when they fell, a dirty brown porridge.

  In the park he sat on a bench. There he ate a stale ersatz croissant and shied chestnuts at the fearless squirrels. A young woman with two small children stood in the middle of a circle of dun-colored grass, sowing crusts of bread among a throng of bobbing pigeons. One of the children pensively chewed a white crescent.

  She squealed when a dappled white bird flew up at her face, dropped the bread as her mother laughed and took the children’s hands, leading them back to the bench across from Gordon’s. He smiled, conspiratorially tossed the remains of his lunch onto the grass, and watched it disappear beneath a mass of iridescent feathers.

  A shadow sped across the ground. For an instant it blotted out the sun and Gordon looked up, startled. He had an impression of something immense, immense and dark and moving very quickly through the bright clear air. He recalled his night-time thoughts, had a delirious flash of insight: it was one of the shields torn loose, a ragged gonfalon of Science’s floundering army. The little girl shrieked, not in fear but pure excitement. Gordon stood, ready to run for help; saw the woman, the children’s mother, standing opposite him pointing at the grass and shouting something. Beside her the two children watched motionless, the little girl clutching a heel of bread.

  In the midst of the feeding pigeons a great bird had landed, mahogany wings beating the air as its brazen feathers flashed and it stabbed, snakelike, at the smaller fowl. Its head was perfectly white, the beak curved and as long as Gordon’s hand. Again and again that beak gleamed as it struck ferociously, sending up a cloud of feathers gray and pink and brown as the other birds scattered, wings beating feebly as they tried to escape. As Gordon watched, blood pied the snowy feathers of the eagle’s neck and breast until it was dappled white and red, then a deeper russet. Finally, it glowed deep crimson. Still it would not stop its killing. And it seemed the pigeons could not flee, only fill the air with more urgent twittering and, gradually, silence. No matter how their wings flailed it was as though they were stuck in bird-lime, or one of those fine nets used to protect winter shrubs.

  Suddenly the eagle halted, raised its wings protectively over the limp and thrashing forms about its feet. Gordon felt his throat constrict. He had jammed his hands in his pockets and now closed them about the chestnuts there, as though to use them as weapons. Across the grass the woman stood very still. The wind lifted her hair across her face like a banner. She did not brush it away, only stared through it to where the eagle waited, not eating, not moving, its baleful golden eye gazing down at the fluttering ruin of feather and bone.

  As her mother stared the little girl broke away, ran to the edge of the ruddy circle where the eagle stood. It had lifted one clawed foot, thick with feathers, and shook it. The girl stopped and gazed at the sanguine bird. Carelessly she tossed away her heel of bread, wiped her hand and bent to pluck a bloodied feather from the ground. She stared at it, marveling, then pensively touched it to her face and hand. It left a rosy smear across one cheek and wrist and she laughed in delight. She glanced around, first at her mother and brother, then at Gordon.

  The eyes she turned to him were ice-blue, wondering but fearless; and absolutely, ruthlessly indifferent.

  He told Olivia about it that evening.

  “I don’t see what’s so weird,” she said, annoyed. It was intermission of the play they had come to see: Euripides’ The Bacchae in a new translation. Gordon was unpleasantly conscious of how few men there were at the performance, the audience mostly composed of women in couples or small groups, even a few mothers with children, boys and girls who surely were much too young for this sort of thing. He and Olivia stood outside on the theater balcony overlooking the river. “Eagles kill things, that’s what they’re made for.”

  “But here? In the middle of the city? I mean, where did it come from? I thought they were extinct.”

  All about them people strolled beneath the sulfurous crime-lights, smoking cigarettes, pulling coats tight against the wind, exclaiming at the full moon. Olivia leaned against the railing and stared up at the sky smiling slightly. She wore ostrich cowboy boots with steel toes and tapped them rhythmically against the cement balcony. “I think you just don’t like it when things don’t go as you expect them to. Even if it’s the way things really are supposed to be. Like an eagle killing pigeons.”

  He snorted but said nothing. Beside him Olivia tossed her hair back. Thick and lustrous darkbrown hair, like a caracal’s pelt, hair that for years had been unfashionably long. Though lately it seemed that more women wore it the way she did, loose and long and artlessly tangled. As she pulled a lock away from her throat he saw something there, a mark upon her shoulder like a bruise or scrape.

  “What’s that?” he wondered, moving the collar of her jacket so he could see better.

  She smiled, arching her neck. “Do you like it?”

  He touched her shoulder, wincing. “Jesus, what the hell did you do? Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “A little.” She shrugged, turned so that the jaundiced spotlight struck her shoulder and he could see better. A pattern of small incisions had been sliced int
o her skin, forming the shape of a crescent, or perhaps a grin. Blood still oozed from a few of the cuts. In the others ink or colored powder had been rubbed so that the little moon, if that’s what it was, took on the livid shading of a bruise or orchid: violet, verdigris, citron yellow. From each crescent tip hung a gold ring smaller than a teardrop.

  “But why?” He suddenly wanted to tear off her jacket and blouse, search the rest of her to see what other scarifications might be hiding here. “Why?”

  Olivia smiled, stared out at the river moving in slow streaks of black and orange beneath the sullen moon. “A melted tiger,” she said softly.

  “What?” The electronic ping of bells signaled the end of intermission. Gordon grasped her elbow, overwhelmed by an abrupt and unfathomable fear. He recalled the moon last night, not crescent but swollen and blood-tinged as the scar on her shoulder. “What did you say?”

  A woman passing them turned to stare in disapproval at his shrill voice. Olivia slipped from him as though he were a stranger crowding a subway door. “Come on,” she said gently, brushing her hair from her face. She flashed him a smile as she adjusted her blouse to hide the scar. “We’ll miss the second act.” He followed her without another word.

  After the show they walked down by the river. Gordon couldn’t shake a burgeoning uneasiness, a feeling he might have called terror were it not that the word seemed one he couldn’t apply to his own life, this measured round of clocks and stocks and evenings on the town. But he didn’t want to say anything to Olivia, didn’t want to upset her; more than anything he didn’t want to upset her.

  She was flushed with excitement, smoking cigarette after cigarette and tossing each little brand into the moonlit water snaking sluggishly beside them.

  “Wonderful, just wonderful! The Post really did it justice, for a change.” She stooped to pluck something from the mucky shadows and grimaced in distaste. “Christ. Their fucking beer cans—”

  She glared at Gordon as though he had tossed it there. Smiling wanly he took it from her hand and carried it in apology. “I don’t know,” he began, and stopped. They had almost reached the Memorial Bridge. A path curved up through the tangled grasses toward the roadway, a path choked with dying goldenrod and stunted asters and Queen Anne’s Lace that he suspected should not be such a luminous white, almost greenish in the moonlight. Shreds of something silver clung to the stunted limbs of low-growing shrubs. The way they fluttered in the cold wind made him think again of the atmospheric shields giving way, leaving the embarrened earth beneath them vulnerable and soft as the inner skin of some smooth green fruit. He squinted, trying to see exactly what it was that trembled from the branches. His companion sighed loudly and pointedly where she waited on the path ahead of him. Gordon turned from the shrubs and walked more quickly to join her.

  “We should probably get up on the street,” he said a little defensively.

  Olivia made a small sound showing annoyance. “I’m tired of goddam streets. It’s so peaceful here . . .”

  He nodded and walked on beside her. A little ways ahead of them the bridge reared overhead, the ancient iron fretwork shedding green and russet flakes like old bark. Its crumbling concrete piers were lost in the blackness beneath the great struts and supports. The river disappeared and then materialized on the other side, black and gold and crimson, the moon’s reflection a shimmering arrow across its surface. Gordon shivered a little. It reminded him of the stage set they had just left, all stark blacks and browns and greens. Following a new fashion for realism in the theater there had been a great deal of stage blood that had fairly swallowed the monolithic pillars and bound the proscenium with bright ribbons.

  “I thought it was sort of gruesome,” he said at last. He walked slowly now, reluctant to reach the bridge. In his hand the beer can felt gritty and cold, and he thought of tossing it away. “I mean the way the king’s own mother killed him. Ugh.” The scene had been very explicit. Even though warned by the Post critic Gordon had been taken aback. He had to close his eyes once. And then he couldn’t block out their voices, the sound of knife ripping flesh (and how had they done that so convincingly?), the women chanting Evohe! evohe!, which afterwards Olivia explained as roughly meaning “O ecstasy” or words to that effect. When he asked her how she knew that she gave him a cross look and lit another cigarette.

  No wonder the play was so seldom revived. “Don’t you think we should go back? I mean, it’s not very safe here at night.”

  “Huh.” Olivia had stopped a few feet back. He turned and saw that she didn’t seem to have heard him. She squatted at the river’s edge, staring intently at something in the water.

  “What is it?” He stood behind her, trying to see. The water smelled rank, not the brackish reek of rotting weeds and rich mud, but a chemical smell that made his nostrils burn. The ruddy light glinted off Olivia’s hair, touched her steel boot-tips with bronze. In the water in front of her a fish swam lethargically on its side, sides striped with scales of brown and yellow. Its mouth gaped open and closed and its gills showed an alarming color, bright pink like the inside of a wound.

  “Ah,” Olivia was murmuring. She put her hand into the water and lifted the fish upon it. It curled delicately within her palm, its fins stretching open like a butterfly warming to the sun as the water dripped heavily from her fingers. It took him a moment to realize it had no eyes.

  “Poor thing,” he said; then added, “I don’t think you should touch it, Olivia. I mean, there’s something wrong with it—”

  “Of course there’s something wrong with it,” Olivia spat, so vehemently that he stepped backward. The mud smelled of ammonia where his heels slipped through it. “It’s dying, poisoned, everything’s been poisoned—”

  “Well, then for Christ’s sake drop it, Olivia, what’s the sense in playing with it—”

  Hissing angrily she slid her hand back through the water. The fish vanished beneath the surface and floated up again a foot away, fins fluttering pathetically. Olivia wiped her hand on her trousers, heedless of the dark stain left upon the silk.

  “I wasn’t playing with it,” she announced coldly, shaking her head so that her jacket slipped to one side and he glimpsed the gold rings glinting from her shoulder. “You don’t care, do you? You don’t even notice anymore what’s happened. There’d be nothing left at all if it was up to people like you—”

  He swore in aggravation as she stormed off in the direction of the bridge, then hurried after her. Muck covered his shoes and he stumbled upon another cache of beer cans. When he looked up again he saw Olivia standing at the edge of the bridge’s shadow, hands clenched at her sides as she confronted two tall figures.

  “Oh, fuck,” Gordon breathed. He felt sick with apprehension but hurried on, finally ran to stand beside her. “Hey!” he said loudly, pulling at Olivia’s arm.

  She stood motionless. One of the men held something small and dark at his side, a gun, the other wore a tan trenchcoat and looked calmly back and forth, as though preparing to cross a busy street. Before Gordon could take another breath the second man was shoving at his chest. Gordon shouted and struck at him, his hand flailing harmlessly against the man’s coat. His other hand tightened around the beer can and he felt a sudden warm rush of pain as the metal sliced through his palm. He glanced down at his hand, saw blood streaming down his wrist and staining the white cuffs of his shirt. He stared in disbelief, heard a thudding sound and then a moan. Then running, stones rattling down the grassy slope.

  The man in the trenchcoat was gone. The other, the man with the gun, lay on the ground at river’s edge. Olivia was kicking him in the head, over and over, her boots scraping through the mud and gravel when they missed him and sending up a spume of gritty water. The gun was nowhere to be seen. Olivia paused for an instant. Gordon could hear her breathing heavily, saw her wipe her hands upon her trousers as she had when she freed the dying perch.

  “Olivia,” he whispered. She grunted to herself, not hearing him, not looking;
and suddenly he was terrified that she would look and see him there watching her. He stepped backwards, and as he did so she glanced up. For an instant she was silhouetted against the glimmering water, her white face spattered with mud, hair a coppery nimbus about her shoulders. Behind her the moon shone brilliantly, and on the opposite shore he could see the glittering lights of the distant airfield. It did not seem that she saw him at all. After a moment she looked down and began to kick again, more powerfully, and this time she would bring her heel back down across the man’s back until Gordon could hear a crackling sound. He looked on, paralyzed, his good hand squeezing tighter and tighter about the wrist of his bleeding hand as she went on and on and on. One of her steel boot-tips tore through his shoulder and the man screamed. Gordon could see one side of his face caved in like a broken gourd, dark and shining as though water pooled in its ragged hollows. Olivia bent and lifted something dark and heavy from the shallow water. Gordon made a whining noise in his throat and ran away, up the hill to where the crime-lights cast wavering shadows through the weeds. Behind him he heard a dull crash and then silence.

  A crowd had gathered in front of his apartment building when he finally got there. He shoved a bill at the cab driver and stumbled from the car. “Oh, no,” he said out loud as the cab drove off, certain the crowd had something to do with Olivia and the man by the river: policemen, reporters, ambulances.

  But it didn’t have anything to do with that after all. There was music, cheerful music pouring from a player set inside one of the ground floor windows. Suddenly Gordon remembered talk of this at the Coop Meeting last week: a party, an opportunity for the tenants to get to know one another. It had been his neighbor’s idea, the one with the dog. Someone had strung Christmas lights from another window, and several people had set up barbecues on the gray front lawn. Flames leaped from the grills, making the shadows dance so it was impossible to determine how many people were actually milling about. Quite a few, Gordon thought. He smelled roasting meat, bitter woodsmoke with the unpleasant reek of paint in it—were they burning furniture?—and a strange sweetish scent, herbs or perhaps marijuana. The pain in his hand had dulled to a steady throbbing. When he looked down he closed his eyes for a few seconds and grit his teeth. There was so much blood.