Erik sat down and waited. He tried to concentrate on his plan, the lawn contractors, the supervisor, but the ideas kept slipping away. Sometimes he couldn’t think right.
But he could always remember.
Them.
Their sleek bodies, their breasts and legs—all flawless. The things they did to him, and the things they made him do. Blud. Mete. You are the meat of our spirit, Erik. Feed us. They’d consumed him, hadn’t they? With their kisses and their sex?
“Them,” he whispered.
He could still see them clearly as if they were standing before him.
But it was none of them that stood before him now. This was no midnight grove on the holy solstice—this was a psych ward toilet stall. There was none of that; the heralds were gone.
It was Duke who stood before him now. Grinning. Fat. The rasp of the zipper, however familiar, made Erik wince.
“Do it good, fairy, or else it’s no more phone calls…”
«« — »»
Later, Erik sat in his dorm. They were really cells, but they called them dorms. They called the ward a “unit,” and they called drugs “meds.” They called escape “elopement.” They had names for everything. Manacles were “restraints.” Jerking off was “autoerotic manipulation,” and shooting the bull was “vocalization.”
The steel mesh over his window was a “safety barrier.” In the window he could see the moon, and the moon was pink.
The ruckus of Ping Pong could be heard from the dayroom. Someone was playing piano. The television blared inanities.
Erik doodled in his pad. They didn’t call it doodling, of course. They called it “occupational therapy.” He drew fairly well, he was left handed. He’d read that left handed people were three times more likely to be creative. They were also three times more likely to be mentally ill. Something about inverted brain hemispheres, and a bigger corpus callosum, whatever that was. He drew the moon, and figures looking up to it. He drew their bodies to scrupulous detail. What he could never bring himself to sketch, though, were their faces.
It wasn’t that he didn’t remember their faces, it was that he did.
Around the sketch he scribed the glyph. The night mirror, he thought. How many times had he looked into it and seen the most unspeakable things?
My God, he thought, but behind the thought he was sure he heard their warm, viscid laughter, like beating wings, like screams in a canyon.
He looked at the moon. The moon was pink.
Beneath the sketches, and with no conscious thought at all, he scribbled one word:
liloc
—
Chapter 3
The dream was vivid, hot—it always was.
“Dooer, dooer.”
It was always the same: the back arching up and waves of moans. The tense legs spread ever-wide, the swollen belly stretched pinprick tight and pushing…pushing…pushing forth…
Then the image of the cup, like a chalice, and the emblem on its bowl like a squashed double circle.
She sensed flame behind her, a fireplace perhaps. She sensed warmth. Firelight flickered on the pocked brick walls as shadows hovered. A larger version of the emblem seemed suspended in the background, much larger. And again she heard the bizarre words:
“Dooer, dooer.”
She was dreaming of her daughter’s birth, she knew. Birth was painful, yet she felt no pain. All she felt was the wonder of creation, for it was a wonder, wasn’t it? Her own warm belly displacing life into the world? It was a joyous thing.
Joyous, yes. So why did the dream always transform to nightmare?
The figures surrounded her; they seemed cloaked or enshadowed. Soft hands stroked the tense sweating skin. For a time they were all her eyes could focus on. The hands. They caressed her not just in comfort but also—somehow—in adoration. Here was where the dream lost its wonder. Soon the hands grew too ardent. They were fondling her. They stroked the enflamed breasts, the quivering belly. They ran up and down the parted, shining thighs. The belly continued to quiver and push. No faces could be seen, only the hands, but soon heads lowered. Tongues began to lap up the hot sweat which ran in rivulets. Soft lips kissed her eyes, her forehead, her throat. Tongues churned over her clitoris. Voracious mouths sucked milk from her breasts.
The images wrenched her; they were revolting, obscene. Wake up! Wake up! she commanded herself. She could not move. She could not speak.
Her orgasm was obvious, a lewd and clenching irony in time with the very contractions of birth. Behind her she sensed frenzied motion. She heard grunts, moans—
—then screams.
Screams?
But they weren’t her screams, were they?
She glimpsed dim figures tossing bundles onto a crackling fire. Still more figures seemed to wield knives or hatchets. The figures seemed palsied, numb. She heard chopping sounds.
The dream’s eye rose to a high vantage point; the circle moved away. Naked backs clustered about the childbirth table. Now only a lone, hooded shape stood between the spread legs. It looked down, as if in reverence, at the wet, bloated belly. The belly was pink.
Moans rose up, and excited squeals. The firelight danced. The chopping sounds thunked on and on, on and on…
“Dooer, dooer,” spake the hooded shape.
The belly shivered, collapsing.
A baby began to cry.
«« — »»
Ann awoke suddenly, lost of breath. The dream, she thought. The nightmare. She reached blindly for Martin, but he wasn’t there. The digital clock read 4:12 a.m.
Did she always have the dream at the same time, or did she imagine that? Months now, and nearly every night. Beneath her felt sodden, and her mind swam. The dream sickened her, not just the glaring, pornographic imagery, but what it must say about some part of her subconscious. She didn’t like to think like that—she was a lawyer. She didn’t like to contemplate a part of herself that she couldn’t break down, assimilate, and recognize structurally.
She knew the dream was about Melanie’s birth. The abstractions—the bizarre words, the emblem on the chalice and the wall, the firelight, etc.—were what Dr. Harold termed “subconscious detritus.” “Dreams are always outwardly symbolic, Ms. Slavik, subjectivities surrounding a concrete point. The birth of your daughter, in other words, surrounded by encryptions. You’re here to find a means to expose those encryptions, and to identify them, after which we can determine how they relate to the central notion of the dream.”
Ann couldn’t imagine such a notion, but she suspected, quite grimly, that much of this “detritus” was sexual. She’d told Dr. Harold everything about herself that he asked, except one detail. She was having orgasms in her sleep. The wetness, as well as the acute vaginal sensitivity upon waking, left no doubt. Worse was that these “dream orgasms” had proved her only orgasmic release for some time. Martin was by far the best lover of her life, yet she hadn’t had an orgasm with him for as long as she’d been having the nightmare. This worried her very much.
Everything did.
Yuck, she thought, and got up in the darkness. Her nightgown stuck to her, she felt doused in slime, and the coldness of her sweat shriveled her nipples.
She padded down the hall and peeked into her daughter’s room. Melanie lay asleep amid a turmoil of sheets. The sheets were black and so were the walls. “Killing Joke,” one big poster read. Her favorite group. Martin had taken her to see them last year. Ann vowed one day to go to one of these wild concerts with her, but the more she determined to get involved with her daughter’s joys, the more impossible it seemed to achieve. Not trying hard enough, she lamented. She knew this neglect was part of Melanie’s seclusion. Growing up without a father was tough for a kid, and with a mother submerged at work six, sometimes seven days a week made it even tougher. Dr. Harold informed her that Melanie’s “alternative” tastes reflected a “self developed” identity. Most seventeen year olds read Tiger Beat and watched sitcoms. Melanie read Poe and watched Polanski.