Part 24 (1/2)
Some world, he thought. He'd been thinking of the world a lot of late. The world made little sense on nights like these.
He stopped before getting into the car. He recalled his dream: being chased by something. But what? His ambitions? His failures? His success?
No, there didn't seem to be much point in anything. The world didn't care. It left people with nothing beyond their dreams.
He looked up at Kathleen Shade's windows, and wondered about her dreams.
(III).
The dream congealed, the darkness reformed into flesh by her horror. Kathleen's legs lay spread, paralytic. The sephulchral figure knelt beside her, its features not hidden by shadows but composed of them. Once again the hands of inkblack bones displayed the morbid Polaroids one after another: the cigar box with the snake in it, the snake dumped out onto the bed, the snake uncoiling, then inching photo by photo toward Kathleen's s.e.x.
”The pictures, look,” the figure whispered.
It wasn't a malicious whisper; it seemed instead consoling, compa.s.sionate, despite what Kathleen was being shown.
”They're still the same,” the figure whispered. ”The pictures are still the same. Look what's being done to you. Look, and see what you're letting someone do...”
Kathleen grit her teeth, straining against the manacles of her terror. The darkness churned before the moonlight. Her sweat ran cold.
”Such sad pictures...”
The gun! Kathleen instantly thought. She remembered the gun Maxwell had given her. If she could only break out of this paralysis, if she could only get the gun... Kathleen instantly thought. She remembered the gun Maxwell had given her. If she could only break out of this paralysis, if she could only get the gun...
But...
”What would you do then?” the figure bid. ”What would you do with the gun?”
Kathleen wasn't sure.
”Would you kill me?”
”I-”
The figure's black, gravedirt smile broadened. ”You need to look harder at the pictures.”
”I've already seen the G.o.dd.a.m.n pictures!” Kathleen shrieked. Her muscles cramped as she jerked against the force which pinned her down. Tendons seemed to pop, cartilage seemed to tear. But, still, she couldn't move. ”This is only a dream!” she shrieked on. ”It's not real!”
”But the dream comes from you, and you're real. So the dream must be real too.”
”No!”
”And what about these pictures?”
Flecks of spit shot off Kathleen's lips. ”They're just a bunch of Freudian representations, symbols of my fears, and my-”
”Your past?”
”Yes! They're symbols, just symbols! They're not real!”
”But you haven't looked at the last one yet.”
In her struggles, Kathleen bit through her tongue. The figure's hands displayed more pictures of the fat, black snake crawling forward and, eventually, burrowing itself into Kathleen's s.e.x. The third to last photo showed only an inch of the snake's tail dangling out, and in the second to last, the snake was gone.
”You're sure that the snake is just a symbol?”
”Yes!” Kathleen shrieked with blood in her mouth.
”But a symbol of what?”
”My uncle! My Uncle Sammy!”
The second to last photograph drifted: Kathleen's bare legs splayed open. No snake.
It's inside me now, she thought.
”Look at the last one.”
Her eyes could not move away, her gaze paralyzed as surely as her arms and legs. In that last photograph, a second figure-a male figure-stood at the front of the bed. A black, boney silhouetteshape against the moonlight. A caliginous, featureless face. Redlit pits for eyes. In its black hands it held a cigar box.
Kathleen screamed blood.
”Embrace your hatred,” oozed the words.
Chapter 21.
(I).
When the phone on his desk rang, Spence stared at it. A muse made him go rigid-an aural image. It was inexplicable.
Spence's mother had died of a ma.s.sive myocardial infarction back when he was still in college. They'd never understood each other very well; they were never really close. When they buried her, he remembered standing blankfaced at the graveside. The service concluded, and Spence walked away. It was only an hour later, in his car backed up on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, that Spence suddenly burst into tears.
He hadn't been crying as much for her as for himself-his concreteness, his inability to feel anything for anyone.