"Yeah. So what?"
"Oh, little big man, don't try to fool me. What sort of creepy gimmick are you up to now? First it's making tables rise for the spirits, now you're dabbling in reincarnation. You want to make her into another Ginny, don't you? That appeals to your wizard complex."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Leo sighed. "I don't want to do anything with her. She needed a pad and she's got a good job. She can afford the rent. Why not?"
"Balls," Carla said flatly. "Your spiritualist craze has gotten the best of you. First it was zodiacs, when you buttonholed everybody to ask them what their birthday was. Then the tarot cards, the communing with the dead, and now we're playing Easter Sunday. Ginny is resurrected. Voila!"
Cold fear washed over him as he heard her mocking tones.
"What do you mean by that? Ginny isn't dead."
"Don't take me so literally, lover. I didn't mean she was dead. Who knows where she is? My point is that you can't forget the spacey little cunt, can you? She was the poor man's Holly Golightly and now you're fashioning another one from this new kid. Dr. Leo Frankenstein. Well listen buster all you need is another Ginny," she hissed. "You came close to having the vice squad on your neck when you started her whoring."
"I didn't start her whoring!" Leo snapped. "She asked me to introduce her to some guys. She was high on some kind of dope and she wanted to gangbang."
"Um-hmm," Carla purred, unconvinced. "You know, Leo, there was a book about a man like you. It's called Trilby. She was a sweet singer of sweet songs until she met Svengali, who got such a half-nelson on her psyche that she couldn't sing a note unless he were in the audience. You were fucking her ass off but that wasn't enough, was it? You had to own her soul."
He got up and fixed himself a drink.
"What the hell do you care about Ginny?" he demanded. "You hated her guts."
She did not answer right away. He looked at her curiously, seeing an unreadable expression steal over her face.
"No, I don't give a damn about her, and yes, I hated her guts. My point is that I think you are Rosemary's Baby."
He held the glass to his lips, motionless for a moment. Then he took a long pull at the scotch and returned to the bed.
"Oh, hell, I don't take all that stuff seriously," he scoffed. "I like to read about it… Who doesn't? But I don't believe in it. It's just a craze that got started when that woman started predicting the future. She hit a few times," he said with a shrug. "And everybody got going on psychic phenomena and ESP. You read detective stories," he challenged, somewhat lamely.
"That's slightly different. They don't get me in trouble."
The dog came in and jumped on the bed. Leo watched as Carla cuddled it to her breasts and whispered to it, blowing on its ear and laughing. He watched them, wondering. Was it possible that there was something to reincarnation? Now, that dog… it might have been a person in another life. Carla swore that he was almost human. All dog lovers said that.
Oh, hell! It wasn't possible. It was just a little hobby he had picked up. He really didn't believe any of it. It was just that it was so interesting. That's why he hung around the Village. There were so many zodiac coffee houses opening up, so many fortune tellers and spiritualist groups. It was just interesting, that's all.
As for Ginny…
He honestly did not know what had happened to her. She was spacey all right; Carla was right about that. It was odd that she had left so suddenly, since she had almost a full month's rent coming to her. Ginny never had enough money; he thought she would have stayed long enough to get her money's worth out of that last rent she had paid.
She told him to sublet the place for her, that she'd be back in a year. He remembered the day she had zoomed into the rental office in one of her zany get-ups.
"Leo, I'm going to be a California girl! Trendy!" she shrilled, her voice exploding in that breathless, almost fey mirth of hers. Her pale, almost colorless blue eyes had been wide and staring. Hopped up, he thought. There was something fragile and papery about Ginny, as if she would vanish into a misty night with a barely audible whisper, like a soul passing silently into the next world. The thing that fascinated him most was that she looked so unlike a girl who led the life that she did. Ginny had fucked and sucked half of the Village, yet she looked like a fairy spirit. Her skin was almost translucent and her golden hair had a glow about it that reminded him of a halo.
That was why he enjoyed making a whore out of her.
It made him feel powerful, magic! To take a girl like that and make her do the things he had seen her do in the apartment that night, with six men, all of them at her at once until the tangle of arms and legs looked like a thrashing, flesh-colored spider on the floor.
She had been broke, as usual, but more broke than he had ever known her to be. He had gotten in hot water with the big boss for renting too many apartments to jobless hippies. Ginny's rent was overdue, and she was on acid, which was probably where her money had gone.
Leo suggested that she entertain a few out-of-town real estate men that he knew and she had clapped her hands like a child. "Oooh, fun and games! We can party!"
He remembered her with that big cock in her mouth, swallowing cum, taking it up her cunt, in her ass, on her tits, everywhere, until her naked body had shone with it afterwards. Then they had poured champagne on her pussy and all the guys had taken turns having a long, slurping lick at it with the one who was down on her when she came declared the winner. His prize was a rimming job from Ginny. They had paid her and tipped her and paid her again, unable to believe her tireless enthusiasm. Any guy who has ever visited a whore – and all of them had – knew when a girl was putting on. It was obvious that Ginny wasn't putting on.
Then, poof! She was gone. Leo kept seeing her walking off into a milky cloud of fog, out into the night some nether world. He remembered the time she had flitted off to Mexico but it wasn't the same. That time, she had left when she told him she would, and had come back on the appointed date, to reclaim the apartment that had been sublet to, of all people, a graduate engineering student. Of course, she had neglected to notify the telephone company, the electric company and the gas company, and the bills continued to come in in her name. That irritated the precise young engineer to no end, Leo recalled with amusement. But the oversight had been typically Ginny.
This time, she had vanished on the spur of the moment with three weeks of rent down the drain. He had come back from lunch to find a message from his secretary: Ginny left town this morning. Said you can go ahead and rent the apt.
He had questioned his secretary but the woman knew nothing. "She just said she was leaving today… No, she didn't give me any details."
After she had gone, Leo felt lost. He missed the haunting quality that always surrounded her, the wild desperate look in her face that excited him because it reminded him of a spirit rising from a lake. Spacey – yes, that was a good word for her, the key word in fact. Leo felt that she had contact with another world when she left, she took the link with her.
Then Brenda Taylor had shown up in the office, asking for an apartment.
She looked like Ginny, there was no doubt about that. Not so thin, not so pale, not so wild and lost. But they looked alike. Carla, with her uncanny female intuition, had hit the nail on the head.
It was his intention to make Brenda into another Ginny.
CHAPTER FIVE
There was a sharp knock at the door. Brenda froze, the hairbrush poised in mid-air and her blood turning to ice in her veins. It was a knock that could not be ignored; demanding, authoritative and somehow threatening. It was not Harl, she knew that. It came again, louder this time, and she walked slowly out of the bathroom, brush still in hand and grasped like a weapon.