Unquiet Dreams Page 6
"Where're my Ho Hos?" her mother groused sleepily from the bedroom. Emma sighed and shook out the hanky from the pocket of her dress. Delicately she dabbed the droplets from her face. Her mother's voice came again, insistent. "Emma! Emma! Where're my Ho Hos?"
"First, we have to take care of Mother." Emma sighed and nodded. It would always be the way. "No, not for much longer, Emma." She tried to stifle the hope those words gave her. "It's all right, Emma, feel no shame. We will release you from your burdens."
Emma padded down the hall with a gentle smile on her face, her patience restored. She stopped in her mother's doorway and clapped twice. The light over her bed snapped on. "Where are my HO HOs!" her mother demanded.
Emma searched vaguely for an excuse. "They were all out."
"No Ho Hos? But I want—"
"Put your hanky in her mouth," said the voices calmly. Emma obeyed, balling up the cloth and sticking between her mother's still-flapping lips. The old woman's eyes bulged with alarm but she was finally silenced. Emma couldn't help but grin; how long had she wanted to do that? Not that she'd ever admit it, but oh boy, did I feel good! Her mother made no attempt to remove the gag.
"Mother needs to be rescued. Her soul is in peril. She needs to join us in heaven. You have to help us Emma, be our hands here on earth."
"Yes, I will."
"Good. Get your father's silver straight razor."
Emma blanched. She hated sharp, pointy things. Always cutting herself, she had little trust her in clumsy fingers.
"We will guide your hands, Emma. Have faith and you will be rewarded." She obeyed. At once she was in the bathroom, pulling open the bottom drawer of the vanity and reaching for the green velour case. Soft, so soft, it unrolled in her hands and the razor slid eagerly out into her palm. It almost seemed to smile at her. Emma was surprised she had never realized what a beautiful piece of work it was, clean and smooth and etched with vines and flowers along its handle. With a flip of her wrist it snapped into place, ready for work. Emma saw herself in the mirror and for once did not immediately duck away. She looked purposeful, commanding, even happy. She smiled at herself.
Back in the room, her instruction continued. "Give her a permanent smile with which to meet us, Emma. We like to see our souls smiling." Emma lay one hand over her mother's terrified eyes and with the other, swiped an arc across her neck. For a second she held her breath as a terrific spurt burst forth, spraying her dress and the bed. Her mother's hands leaped up from the bed, waving swirls in the air, but soon dropping back down to her sides. Emma waited. When the blood stilled, Emma took her hand from her mother's face. She used the hem of her dress to rub the razor clean, then gently snapped it shut. She placed it reverently on the nightstand. Her mother's eyes gazed at the ceiling. Emma looked down. They were both soaked with blood.
"This is my blood, Emma, the secret of life. Do not be ashamed or disgusted. Feel it, feel life." She put three fingers into the damp pool under her mother's neck. It felt cool and syrupy. Emma ran the fingers along her cheek—it's like Indian warpaint, she thought, imagining John Wayne movies—and licked her index finger. Salty. Life was good.
"Now we must make her smaller and hide each part separately. The devils are after her and we must not let them find her. You must work quickly."
Emma looked down at her mother's body with dismay. It was so big! How could she make it smaller? But ask and ye shall receive: "Downstairs in the root cellar, Emma, the kindling axe." Ah ha! That would be perfect. Emma scuffed her way down the hall, feeling tired. Her cheap sneakers squeaked on the kitchen tiles. The door to the cellar was swollen by the summer heat and refused, at first, to budge. When at last she tugged it open, Emma was rewarded with a blast of refreshingly cool air. At the bottom of the stairs, wedged deeply into the planks overhead, was the hatchet. She recalled her father telling her the story of The Three Sillies and smiled to think of his rough cheeks and gentle voice. Twenty years; and she could still conjure that memory effortlessly. She used both hands to pull the hatchet out. It gleamed at her in the twilit root cellar. "I could bury her here. The floor's hard, but it's still dirt."
"Very good, Emma. You're very resourceful."
Cutting her mother up proved to be more difficult than she'd anticipated. Her arms began to ache with the effort of chopping through the bones. Little shards flew up and bit into her skin like angry bees. She had to keep stopping to wipe the blade and handle, the slickness threatening to squirt it out of her grasp. When it was finally done, when the pieces were small enough to handle, Emma sank exhausted onto the edge of the sticky bed.
"You need to rest awhile, Emma. Why not go watch some TV?" It sounded like a very good idea. She stopped by the fridge to grab a can of generic diet soda and stumbled into the living room. The curtains were still drawn but it made the room cooler, so she did not open them. Emma sank into her mother's chair with a grateful sigh. She was surprised to find her left hand still gripped the axe and let it drop to the floor with a muffled thump. She clicked on the remote.
"—in Dallas earlier today. In the local news, a Miss Emma Bennett of Ridgeway Drive saved her mother from certain damnation today by her speedy intervention—" Emma fell into a doze, smiling proudly.
She awoke with a gasp. The doorbell had rung, that was all. Emma lurched out of the chair, groaning at her stiffness. What time was it? What day was it? It seemed like a week ago she had sat down here. The bell rang out again and Emma hobbled to the door, unlocked it and swung it open. "It's your favorite mail carrier," the voices whispered in her head, but she could already see that.
"Hello, Miss Bennett, nice weath—" He stopped, gazing at her in horror, his mouth a small o. She blinked back at him, then remembered: she was covered in blood.
"Oh dear, my mother's had a terrible accident! Please, you must help me!"
Gallant to the last, he threw off his mailbag and dashed into the house while she stepped back to accommodate him. "Where is she?! Have you called 911?!"
"In the back!" She pointed. He sprinted off down the hall. Emma walked over to the La-Z-Boy and retrieved her axe. She did not wait for the voices; she was not saving his soul. But it was going to feel good anyway.
A Case of Dead Faces
for the man on the 59 bus
I ran into the Buddha on the bus. I know if you run into the Buddha on the road you're supposed to kill him, but I didn't know the protocol for meeting him on the bus. I know it was him, because he was wearing a t-shirt that announced that fact and I always trust in the word of the shirt.
"You're jake with me," I told him without prompting, because it seemed like a good idea to be cool with the Buddha, not like reverential like you would be to a god, but you know you owe respect to the enlightened one.
He looked at me and smiled seraphically. "You are blessed," he said, a hand of benediction raised, several silver bands wrapping his fingers as they curved like bananas before me. "Life is a dream."
"Yeah, well for some it's more of a nightmare, you know what I mean?" I said by way of making conversation. "I can't complain much, though I often do."
The Buddha looked at me. "What do you do?"
I shrugged. "Thump the skins with a couple different outfits. Doesn't pay much, but I don't need much for hearth and home, as they say."
"You have a higher calling," the Buddha said wisely.
Everything the enlightened one said sounded kind of wise, but this seemed particularly so. I was determined to believe that I was getting the real deal from him. After all playing gut bucket rhythms with a bunch of low rent wannabes wasn't really paying off in more than a inconsequential way if you get my drift.
"What might that be?" I queried as we sailed over Waterloo Bridge.
He pointed straight at my forehead, touching the bit between my eyebrows, what I later learned was the location of the mystical third eye and said something that sounded like, "No, these-aw-tone."
Perhaps it was Buddha-speak for something particular. I didn't ge
t a chance to ask because the enlightened one hopped it and left the bus at the end of the bridge. Maybe it was some kind of lingo, but I needed a dictionary to know. I jumped off the bus at Aldwych because I knew there was this witchy book shop in the vicinity and people there would likely know what the Buddha had said and what it meant.
I was just about to give up the search when I finally spotted it. The window was full of crazy tomes with mystic symbols and diagrams. I leaned on the iron railing and took a quick butchers inside. It seemed to be mostly deserted, just one choice bit of calico who appeared to be working there. Not my sort of scene, but I had an itch to know about the enlightened one's wacky message.
"What you got on the Buddha?" I asked walking in, smooth as melted butter. The chick at the desk looked up and I was surprised to see that despite her bins she was a real treat. A hank of auburn hair twisted on top of her head in some kind of knot and a blue silk shirt open just enough to give a guy ideas.
"The Buddha?" she repeated, frowning as if I had said something amiss. "His life? His teachings?" She was already walking over to a shelf and reaching for a colorful spine. "This might be a good one to start with."
The tome thrust into my palms had a little circular picture of the Buddha's face which of course looked a lot different than the Buddha I had met on the 59 bus, but I figure that statues of a man are always going to look a lot different than the man himself. And I knew enough to realise that the Buddha had lived many times over and over. It was what made him the enlightened one after all.
I'm not much of a scholar though and the words were quickly jumping about on the page like they were hearing a crazy rhythm, refusing to make much of any kind of sense. "You got something easier?" I asked the chick, who was still dogging me not in a bad sense, but like she figured I might need some additional help.
She smiled—a warm gesture, one I wanted to last longer—and reached for another book, thinner than the first, with another Buddha statue on the front and a name that looked like a hi-hat sounds. It said The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. That looked more promising.
"Why don't you sit down and flip through it and see if it's more helpful," the red-haired gal purred as a mismatched couple rang in through the shop door. I parked myself in the chair and gave a pass through the covers. The first part of the book was about turning a wheel and the way the Buddha came to enlightenment. It was a hard row to hoe, but I tried to stick with it and break it down, but in a short while I had to admit it was not going gangbusters.
"How're you getting on?" the pretty chickola asked once she had dealt with the little man and the big woman, who seemed quite excited about some Hindu book they had located with her help. They wiggled out the door practically jumping into each other's clothes.
"I'm not latching on to the Buddha's groove," I had to admit. "I don't know that I need his whole message, you know? I'm just trying to make sense of what he said to me. Interpret, you know—alter it to my key, as they say."
Miss Serious looked through her lenses. "What did the Buddha say to you?"
I closed the book and set it on the shelf beside me, which I knew was the wrong place, but I wasn't thinking at the time. "He said I had a higher calling," I told her.
"Don't we all," she agreed, nodding sagely as a Buddha herself.
"He said another thing I didn't really understand."
"What was that?"
"Know this auto," I said, then frowned myself. "Well, maybe it wasn't quite like that."
"Maybe not." She pursed her lips, which didn't make them look half bad. I wondered what she might look like wailing in the dark of a club and shimmying to some of my wild rhythms. "Are you sure it was in English?"
I considered the wisdom of her words. "Now that you mention it, he might have been speaking in a foreign tongue." He had not spoken with an accent, but there was something about the bloke that seemed a bit foreign. Maybe it was the way he carried himself with a kind of stiff back, like he wasn't too willing to bend. Why would the Buddha have to bend? "How am I going to know what he said?"
She appeared to be thinking this over. Which is to say that her eyes got a far away look and she took off her glasses and tapped the arm of them against her teeth. It made a small tap-tap sound. Without the glasses on I could see just how green her eyes were, which was very green indeed. That fact seemed unusual enough itself. I could smell spring grass in the colour of her eyes.
"I think you need a reading," she said at last.
I was thinking maybe I needed a nice long session on the floor of this establishment with her riding on top of me, but I was willing to give the reading a try. You never know what it might lead to, a little rumpy-bumpy would be all right by me. "What kind of reading?"
She was lost in thought another minute, but finally said, "Tarot."
Well, at least it was something I knew. I mean, you couldn't hang out in the club scene for too long without running into a least a couple chicks who claimed to be able to read your fortune in their pretty little pack of cards. It was copasetic. I never minded. Whatever they thought worked was fine by me as long as it worked out in the end for me, which is to say getting more than a little advice.
When she pulled out the deck I nearly changed my mind. It wasn't bad exactly, but there was something a bit eerie about the pictures. "Are those all right?" I couldn't help asking.
She nodded. "They were painted by Lady Frieda Harris. She was inspired by divine forces. You have to trust in her vision." There was no one in the store. She went to the door and locked it. "I don't think anyone's coming now. We might as well go downstairs."
Yemman! I followed her down the stairs to the lower level and there was a table with a fringed cloth on it and a couple of chairs, so my initial hopes were dashed but there were other rooms curtained off and plenty of leeway, so I figured I would chill and bide my time. She might be lonely tonight you know. My chances were solid.
She asked my name and then she told me hers was Lenore, which seemed a fussy kind of name for a queen on the scene, but it sounded like a melody to me. "First, you need to relax," Lenore said as she shuffled the cards in slow motion. The flapping echo of the cards didn't seem likely to instill a calm mind, but I tried to look like I was hanging loose and not thinking about making a move.
"Concentrate your attention on your third eye," Lenore continued, her voice modulating into a kind of trance-like rhythm. It was both soothing and sexy.
"Third eye, what's that?" I asked, squelching the desire to make a crude joke.
She reached across the table and tapped me between the eyebrows. "Damn, that's just what the Buddha did!" It was freaky for sure. "There something I don't know?"
"The third eye is the seat of mystic wisdom, where resides your ability to see beyond this world." She smiled again and tapped the deck. "Cut."
I did as she said, cutting the deck a bit more than halfway down. I was beginning to get a spooked kind of feeling about all this. What with the Buddha and the third eye and this chick that was pleasing to the other two, I began to wonder if I hadn't fallen into a scene that was too much for little old me. But the possibilities of the night beyond convinced me to stick around and see.
She flipped up a card and frowned. "Seven of swords. Futile, vacillating. There's a suggestion that you might not be working hard enough to achieve the success that's waiting for you."
I shrugged. "I'm a laid back kind of guy."
Lenore pulled the next card and her brow wrinkled around her third eye. "Five of swords."
"More pointy things, eh? Not good is it."
She shook her head. "Failure and defeat mostly. An intellect that is not up to the task."
"You mean to say I'm not going win on Mastermind. I can live with that."
A third card and a third bunch of swords. Six this time. Lenore seemed to breathe a sigh of relief . "This is more promising," she said, nodding ever so slightly. "Here's the way to overcome those negative influences. Hard work and hard thought."
Lenore ignored me and went to the fourth card, one that had a strange lady in a weird chair with some kind of wild horny hat like one of those antelopes or wildebeests in a nature show. She even had a kind of goat in front of her and a big stick with a rock on top of it. "Who's she?"
"Queen of Disks." Lenore tapped her lower lip. "This is the answer."
"I need to find a horny woman?" I laughed. How much better could my luck be?
Lenore looked at me with a look that sucked all the har-hars away. "It's not necessarily a specific woman, so much as the idea she represents. Power and regrowth, a rich fecundity."
"What's that?" It sounded kind of dirty.
She pushed her glasses up with one finger, which made her look far less attractive. "Fecundity? Able to make things grow, full of life."
Horny sounded a lot better. "So I have to find her?"
"Not necessarily a person. More an idea. You need to seek that kind of richness in your life, nurture your ideas, let them grow."
"Sounds like a lot of work. Sounds like what my dad always said: get your nose to the grindstone, my son, keep a steady job, you'll find success."
"And has he?"
"Dunno. He ran off when I was twelve."
"Sorry."
We stared at the card for a moment in silence. "I suppose then I better look for this woman," I finally said to fill the abyss. I unfolded and pressed my most winning smile. "Maybe I don't have to look very far." I tried to make my voice warm and sexy. I laid my hand on hers, the one that still held the card.