"Where have you been all my life?" Noah said.
"I bet you say that to all the girls," she replied, and they giggled like children at the stupid clichés for several minutes.
About four o'clock, Lara said she was tired and turned on to her side in the bed. Noah studied her for some time, drinking in each detail of her smooth contours, the spill of dark hair upon the pillow. He passed his hand in the air above her body, and she squirmed and made a sound of pleasure as if she felt him stroking her aura.
"Beauty," he whispered. "Love." He lay down to sleep, closing his eyes with the after-image of her white flesh burning in his mind.
Waking came with a shock in the grey of pre-dawn twilight.
He was aware at once of cold, and saw that the bed beside him was empty. A terrified pang of loss coursed through him, then he saw her clothes still draped on the pale wicker chair by the window and told himself she had gone to the bathroom, or else to get herself a drink.
He lay on his back and pulled the duvet over his chilled torso. A hiss in the corner of the room made him start.
"Lara?"
He sat up. Most of the room was still in shadow, but he thought he could make out a dark shape hunched in the corner near his clothes rail. "Lara"
He reached to turn on the bedside lamp, but the switch did not respond. The bulb must have gone.
Again, a hiss, low and sibilant.
Something moved in the shadows, sidled forward. He saw the eyes clearly first: a deep piercing blue. She was naked and had covered herself in what looked like dark paint, which was possible because there were a few tins left in the garage. Her hair was wild and straw-like, filled with a sticky substance. Her tongue protruded unnaturally from her mouth, like that of the destroyer goddess, Kali. Her teeth could not possibly be pointed. There were no tools in his house she could have used to do that. She hissed and stamped with one foot.
"Lara."
He got out of bed slowly. This was so different to the time before with Sarah. Lara wasn't screaming. She wasn't raving or weeping.
Her eyes followed him as he skirted the room.
He held out his hands in the universal gesture of peace. "Lara, wake up. You're dreaming. It's not real. Lara."
She made a threatening lunge towards him, growled and stamped both feet. He jumped back. It was unreal. He couldn't feel anything, because it was so unreal.
The night had come into the room. Not darkness, but the essence of night, the absence of light. The cold of the earth before the first dawn rose.
"Lara"
She came for him then, scuttling with crablike speed across the room. She grabbed him by the shoulders and he felt the sharp prick of her fingernails. She stank of rotten meat and there was a crust around her lips. She was bleeding from the mouth. Her teeth were filed away to ragged points.
What pain she must be in. What pain
He fought back. This wasn't Lara. This was the darkness he had hidden from for so long. Perhaps it had always been here, lurking in the shadows of his house, in his memories.
She was so strong, like a tigress. She pushed him back on to the bed and straddled him. Her breasts looked heavier than they had been earlier, scored with the marks of her own fingernails. She uttered a shriek and lunged for his neck.
He should be afraid, shouldn't he? This thing , this monstrous abomination dredged from the primal soup, was feasting on him, tearing at his flesh, kneading his skin with its claws, sucking the life from him. It stank of hell. Yet he was aroused by it. He wanted her and she let him do it, her body bucking in frenzy.
And he saw it then, the tunnel into history. The rivers of blood that carried the memories of humanity. It is within all of us, he thought. We have tamed it and dressed it up in a silk suit. We have made it dead. We have contained it in books and films and lascivious dreams. We have contained it in nightmares. But ultimately, it is within us all the time. And it is alive, pulsing, warm and wet, stinking of musk and spoiled meat.
Lara wasn't stronger than Sarah. The opposite was true. Because Sarah had rejected this. It was what she had seen and felt and had never spoken of. The search for Nosferatu didn't begin in the grave, but in the reptile brain, the primordial remnant of beast within every human mind. It was demonic. It was divine.
In the late morning, with bright sunshine coming into the kitchen, they were politely formal with each other. She said she had badly chipped a tooth falling over in the dark. They didn't talk about how she'd decorated her body. The mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by the time he had come downstairs and she was freshly showered, smelling of his patchouli body wash. She joked about her loathing of dentists as she carefully drank hot coffee. He made toast, then apologized and offered something softer: scrambled eggs perhaps? She wasn't hungry, she said.
He rubbed his neck. "Ah well"
She had to go to work at two. Worked part-time in a local shop. Perhaps she could get an emergency dental appointment before she went in.
He had work to do too. The book would be late to his publishers otherwise. Nice day, though.
Yes, nice day.
At the door, she pecked his cheek in a brief kiss. "We must do this again," she said.
"Must we?" Many words hung unspoken between them.
She smiled. She looked very tired and there were purple rings beneath her eyes. "I think I got what I wanted. Didn't you?"
"Lara"
"You can call me. Or not," she said. "I don't need you now, Noah, but I kind of like you."
He watched her run down the path to the road. She had rejected a lift. He leaned his forehead on the door frame. Once your eyes are open, you can never close them. Sarah knew this.
He shouldn't see Lara again. He should attempt to forget all that had occurred. They'd been drunk. She'd broken one tooth, that's all. It had been less than he'd imagined. As if to remind him otherwise, his neck twinged painfully. He felt light-headed, sick, suddenly able to imagine the future, the long, slow, agonising stretch of it, the descent into realms he dared not think about.
He shouldn't see her again. But she was just his type, wasn't she? Just his type.
Prince of Flowers
Elizabeth Hand
Elizabeth Hand lives on the coast of Maine. She is the author of six novels, including Winterlong., Glimmering, Waking the Moon and Black Light, as well as the story collection Last Summer at Mars Hill. She has also written the novelizations for films such as 12 Monkeys, The X Files movie Fight the Future, Anna and the King and The Affair of the Necklace.
With Paul Witcover, she created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics' series Anima, and she is a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World and Village Voice Literary Supplement. At present she is completing a novel called The Master Stroke. Her novels and short fiction have received the Nebula, World Fantasy, James M. Tiptree Jr and Mythopeic Society Awards .
" This was my first published story," reveals the author, "bought by Tappan King for The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1987; it appeared early in 1988. In a phone conversation, Tappan said that I would be a good writer for the 1990s, because my work had 'heart and also sharp little teeth' .
"At the time I was living in Washington, DC, and working at the Smithsonian Institution. The demonic puppet of the title was something I bought on my lunch hour one afternoon, walking from the Mall to a dim little shop called the Artifactory. I fell in love with the puppet and paid fifty dollars for it, a huge chunk of my meagre paycheque; but when I brought it back to my cubicle at the National Air and Space Museum I announced that it would bring me luck. It did: shortly thereafter I wrote the story, and even though it took a year or so, I finally sold it."
Helen's first assignment on the inventory project was to the Department of Worms. For two weeks she paced the narrow alleys between immense tiers of glass cabinets, opening endless drawers of freeze-dried invertebrates and tagging each with an acquisition number. Occasionally she glimpsed other figures, drab as herself in government-issue smocks, grey shadows stalking through the murky corridors. They waved at her but seldom spoke, except to ask directions; everyone got lost in the museum.