He’d seen this before, as he’d seen the dream, only this feeling was more touchable than a vague sense of deja vu. This was a memory. This had actually happened. If only he could remember.
Nina stood before him, her bonfire hair eclipsing the late afternoon sunlight and glowing in a corona that was hot and bright and suffocating. Yes, that was the word. Suffocating. She was suffocating him.
“Is any of this getting through to you?” she asked. She licked her lips. “Is it?”
Manion thought, Her tongue… how like a snake’s tongue. But he nodded and said, “Yes, it is. It’s getting through.”
He spotted the bulge at her crotch.
He knew he was close to remembering.
Nina was packing.
Manion has seen women pack before. They pack like they were taking bits and pieces of you and throwing them against the wall and smashing them into smithereens, and screaming at the top of their lungs, “You CREEP! I HATE your fucking GUTS, you BASTARD!” and lots of other unladylike things. Only Nina was shouting, “Why didn’t you TELL me! For God’s sake, all you had to do was TELL me—all this time I thought we had something going, that we were doing something for ourselves, and now THIS—” She clenched the rolled-up magazine in her fist, her fingers curling like daggers, or claws, around the glossy color photo of a penis. Manion wondered if her penis looked like the one in the photo. She blew out a breath of disgust and he half expected the magazine to burst into flames. She slung it against the wall, where it slapped and fell dead to the floor, then resumed cramming her things into her bags: clothes, flat onyx mascara cases, bottles of fingernail polish, pentagram pads of Post-It notes, a Depression-glass handcream jar filled with souls—God, Manion had seen this before, too, but where? When? He couldn’t pin down the memory, and maybe that was Nina’s doing. Why should she want him to remember? Better for her if he didn’t. Better for her if he let her suffocate him, put him in her jar and move along to collect some other dumb bastard.
But Manion was no dumb bastard. The memory was very close to him now. He could feel it breathing down his neck, the hairs at the base of his skull standing erect as his excitement dovetailed with these events. Everything was falling into place, and he was beginning to sense the rightness of it all, and he was beginning to understand what he should do.
—as she snatched snakeskins of jockstrap pantyhose from the shower curtain rod—
—as she opened the medicine cabinet and raked prescription bottles of sulfur and brimstone into her bag—
—as she threw open the closet door and came out with armfuls of—Christ, Manion couldn’t think of words to describe them—the skins of her dead.
This girl, Nina, with the huge erection straining beneath her jeans, was not what she had seemed.
Manion knew what to do. Manion knew what do.
He knew what to do.
Digging. In the dark. Away from the city, away from everyone, where two roads converged and where his memory lay, fully restored, like a box he’d packed off to the attic a long time ago and then couldn’t remember precisely where he had put it. He knew it was there… the rest would require a little digging.
Which is what he was doing.
He had been here before, five times in all, and he even remembered their names: Clara, who he called “Little Bo-Peep,” because she liked curls and ruffles; Maggie, who French-inhaled cigarettes and watched him with Natalie Wood eyes; Kathy, the tomboy with skinny but wellmuscled legs; and Donna, who studied aerospace engineering at college and competed in water ski competitions.
He remembered them all and everything that had passed between them, the dreams, the fights, the discoveries and angry departures. Every time the same. He remembered them as he would remember Nina and the changes that had brought them all to this place: the dark woods near a lonely country intersection where he had stopped that first time, because the man had made him stop, the man who had climbed into his car at a gas station downroad with a story about a sick wife and baby at a house trailer somewhere out there. They’d stopped and Manion had asked him which way, and the man had said This way and when Manion looked at him he was clenching a tiny gun, a lady’s gun, really, and Manion’s blood had run cold because the man was taking off his trousers and ordering Manion to do the same, and—and—
Manion remembered the shame, the shame that burned him inside out, but what he remembered most, and what his mind flinched away from on an almost instinctual level, was the glow of pleasure spreading through him as the man grasped his ankles and raised them and knelt at Manion’s upturned ass and began to push inside, pushing pleasure into him and shaking him with a sinister, giggling grunt and suffocating him with not only his weight but his will, the waves of pleasure breaking over Manion’s disgust and drawing him down, farther down into the places within himself he’d refused to explore.
The man had finished and Manion’s shame re-emerged, freshly scoured and sharp, and Manion had knocked the gun from his hand and snatched it up and put a bullet through the man’s skull with a ladylike pop.
Dead.
It was months later that Manion began to remember… the man’s batlike wings, his horns, his serpent’s tongue darting between his blistered lips. The realization came as almost a relief. It was exactly what Manion needed. An explanation. Not the explanation the psychiatrist had given him. None of that crazy business about symbols and disowning ideas about himself. This was a logical explanation, a rational explanation…
… for the pleasure. The torment. The women who were not women, the shadows of their penises visible only in dreams, slowly rising through his memory to emerge in the cold night out here, in the woods by the intersection where all this had begun, where he brought them to die again. Again.
Not dead. Yet.
“But you will be!” Manion shouted at the spot where he’d buried the man. He thought he heard a muffled gurgle of laughter. He thought he heard the leathery flutter of wings, the hiss of tongues.
From all of them.
Manion kept digging.
MASQUERADE
by Lillian Csernica
Lillian Csernica says: “Born 12/29/65 in San Diego, CA. I’ve spent the last ten years working Renaissance Faires all over the country, with the occasional Dickens Christmas Faire thrown in for fun. I do a lot of part-time costume work. My last gig involved posing as a 16th Century pirate in order to teach basic fencing lessons.
“I’ve sold stories to Midnight Zoo and The Poetic Knight as well as After Hours. Being and The Chimaera carry my regular nonfiction features on metaphysics and history, respectively. My first fantasy novel is finished and I’m working on the sequel. Book reviews are becoming a profitable sideline, and I keep busy with lots of short story projects.
“I write full time from a cabin off the California coast which I share with my husband and twelve cats. When I’m not writing, I’m locked in a struggle against the forces of entropy threatening to take over my kitchen and garden.”
See! See! Cats again! Twelve of them this time! Yes, it all begins to fall into place.
Closing night. Thank God.
My hand hit the solid wood slab of the women’s dressing room door. I shoved it open. The lights on the makeup mirrors stabbed my strained eyes. I headed for my usual seat in the back. Streaks of red, green, and gold dodged aside. The chorus girls were smarter than they looked if they knew enough to stay out of my way. I flattered myself thinking that. The actresses always ignored me. I was just a lighting technician, just another girl backstage. The audience never paid to see me. I sat up in the loft and lit the stars with the follow spot during their solos. That bought me the right to walk in here and watch the show I came to see.