A rendition of carousel music began to play somewhere in the back of her consciousness, an unrestrained, unpracticed, shabby and tinny sound, woodenlike, mechanical.
Suddenly she was shaken, the whole world around her collapsing, replaced with the blinding lights of the convenience store and Alex asking her if she were crazy. She was soaked from a pelting, stinging rain which she hadn't felt until now.
“ I know where she is!” she announced over the roar of the storm.
“ Whataya talking about?” he shouted a confused reply, flapping a page of the Yellow Pages in his hand.
“ A place with an alligator, a giant alligator sign over the top, a place called Gatorland Storage.”
“ I'll be damned,” Alex replied, crumpling the page of warehouses and shoving it into his pocket. “I know where it is. Come on… into the car!”
They raced toward the Mississippi.
30
I saw eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it. Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world And all her train were hurled.
Jessica's terror froze her in place while Matisak calmly took her in with that mad glint she'd come to recognize. As he towered over her where she lay, her face dirty with sawdust and grease, his laughter was cut short by his cruel words. “We're going to die here together, Jessica, with you sacrificing your blood to me and me sacrificing my life in order to go into eternity with you.”
The mad metallic, ricocheting racket of the warehouse continued as stiff mannequins marched like wooden soldiers in their suspended poses-like so many marching crosses, she thought, recalling what Kim Desinor had said about burning crosses.
Every so often, instead of a clown or masked marionette, a nasty-looking hook scurried by, winking at Jessica.
Jessica fought to regain her footing, climbing to her knees, careful to tuck her right leg behind her, careful not to alert him to the fact she still carried a gun strapped to her. She easily played the part of one completely cowed and fearful, for she was, and this only helped in her charade, allowing the madman every confidence that he had at last won.
But somehow he knew; he saw some sliver of disdain and hope left in her eyes, and so he quickly backhanded her across the face and tore at her pants leg, having seen the bulge there, and as he tore away the weapon, she tore from him, running, her life depending upon the distance she put between them. But in the dark, she ran into the fallen netting, causing her to tumble and become entangled amid the counterfeit stars and imitation planets and moons. Her heels were lost to the net.
He laughed and pounced tigerlike on her, wrenching her wrists and arms in his powerful grip, his acrid breath burning her eyes. “I've got something I want to show you, Jessica, dear.” His voice was the sepulchral sound of Hades torn open.
He forced her forward through the dark interior of the warehouse until they came to a corner where he switched on a tensor lamp, which revealed a surgical table complete with four straps, one for each of her limbs. Beside the steel table, which looked like something he'd gotten from the back room of a mortuary, stood a squat little machine with light-emitting diode numbers on a screen, its electrical humming a mewing, mild chant within the deafening sounds of the large warehouse. He'd rigged the machine and the tensor lamp to a generator, not leaving anything to chance, or perhaps because he'd cut the power to all sources but the ones he wished to use, for apparently, he also controlled the whirling parade of Mardi Gras creatures that remained spinning over his shoulder about the center of the warehouse.
“ Here is where we die together, sweet Jessica,” he whispered in her ear like a demented lover, holding her tightly against his chest, speaking directly into her ear with his putrid, hot breath. “You first, and I to follow.”
“ How do… how do I know you'll go through with it… that you'll follow?” She led him on, trying desperately to stall for time, but also anxious to know that he did indeed intend suicide after dispatching her. She would at least have that much, she told herself.
“ It's a dialysis machine, like the one I used on Dr. Arnold back in Philly, you remember?”
Now she realized what the small, portable machine was capable of, drawing blood and drawing it quickly and efficiently, Matisak's favorite hobby.
“ Only this time,” he continued, “it's going to pump me so full of your blood that I'm going to implode with you inside me and take us both into eternity's light together, dear one.” He laughed lightly at the thought which would soon be reality.
“ Think of it,” he continued as he guided her unwilling form to the table. “You and I for all time, locked in a blood embrace, filled to the brim with one another like the lovers we are, off to explosive heights, not with my blood, not with your blood, but with our life's blood, Jessica, so that we'll always be locked together throughout the rest of eternity… like I always promised.”
“ Extracorporeally transplanting my blood into you, all at once, using the dialysis machine,” she said to him. “That's no fun, taking it intravenously; it will burst your veins and you'll bleed to death internally.”
“ That's the beauty of it.”
“ But where's the kick in that? How're you going to enjoy my suffering when I won't suffer at all? It'll be over in seconds.” She couldn't believe herself, arguing for him to make her suffering last. But the moment he placed those straps on her and started mechanically inducing her blood from her body, she knew her chances for survival were nil.
“ I can't do it any other way. Drinking it all at once is impossible. You know that.”
“ Blood is a mucolytic, an expectorant. You'd be vomiting your guts out. Yeah, I know.” She tried to keep him talking, to sound as if she were on his side now, trying to help him think through the puzzle, but he was possessed, and he forced her onto the table and brought up a syringe before her eyes.
“ This will help you accept me and my plans for you, Jessica. No sense fighting what fate there is which has brought us together, Jessica. We were meant to become one, you and I, all along. Now we finish what we'd begun so many years before.”
“ But I'm scared, Matthew,” she pleaded. “Fear becomes you.” He tested the syringe, removing any air left in the miniature world of the vial. She tore at the restricting strap dangling just below her right hand as he did so, and she viciously brought it up in a burst of anger and desperation, the strap buckle hitting him squarely in the hand, so painfully and shockingly that the syringe soared over the table and onto the floor. At the same instant, she brought up a naked foot, having lost her heels in the mesh netting earlier, and she kicked him squarely in the jaw, so hard that she hurt the ball of her foot in the effort.
Matisak staggered back just long enough for her to regain her feet and ram the table into his midsection, doubling him over. She grabbed onto the polyethylene tubing and yanked with all her might, pulling it from the dialysis machine, sending it rolling off and out of the circle of light Matisak had created as his artificial bonfire.
She then ran, but she felt him directly behind her. He grabbed onto her shoulder, but she struggled free from her long coat, leaving him with only the cloth and cursing. He pursued demonically, as if he might sprout wings.