Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

But why? Shouldn’t he have stayed where he was, let her see him? He could have delivered some line, like: They both look pretty good to me. How cool was that? Then: Come in, big boy. The college girl saying that, not the video girl. His reflexes had gotten the better of him. He was about to make up for it, to step back into the room and hit her with that line, when the door closed. Then the lock clicked. And some kind of fucking bolt slid into place. Not hard, not frantic, she hadn’t spotted him, simply noticed the open door. Shut out, just like that, by seconds, or tenths of a second. Bad luck, nothing more.

But Freedy was getting tired of bad luck. Now he was in a bad mood. Idea, plan, stick, stick, stick. They made it seem so easy.

Freedy took a deep breath, a trick he’d learned from Estrella, or maybe from the other waitress, the one who worked days, and got a grip. Stick, stick, stick. Meant doing it again and again. Meant sucking it up, being a man. He knew how to do all that, had learned in high-school football. A fucking leg breaker, a Thanksgiving crackerjack. Freedy dug down deep, stuck his head into the blue-lit room.

No one there. He walked right in, on a mission now, in search of stuff and plenty of it.

The blue light came from a computer, a laptop, sitting on a desk. Dessert, but he was in a bad mood, and the joke had lost its appeal. The laptop’s light illuminated another laptop-a second helping, to put it in dessert terms, but he didn’t see the humor in that either-this one closed, on the adjoining desk; a sound system, but not the kind that hung on a wall; a cell phone and a regular phone; and something else, reflecting blue light in the corner. He went closer, saw that this something else was a fish tank. In the fish tank hovered a single fish, bigger than a goldfish and not gold. Some other colors-Freedy didn’t really notice. What he noticed were its eyes, blue from the reflection, focused on him like it was watching. Freedy wished he had something sharp to stick right through them, but not because he was unkind to animals-he’d owned a dog, a pit bull, for a few months after his arrival in LA, and fed it practically every day. He was in a bad mood, period. Could happen to anyone.

Cheer up, he told himself. The laptops, the cell phone: a decent night’s work. Freedy walked over to the open laptop, read what was on the screen:

To: Phil. 322

From: Prof. L. Uzig

Re: Due to the late arrival of the Kaufman edition of Zarathustra, the assignment due

And other college bullshit that he would have stopped reading even if he hadn’t heard a sound. A voice; distant, female. He ripped the plug out of the machine, snapped it shut, glanced out into the hall. Saw nothing, but heard footsteps, faint then less faint, on the stone stairs at the far end. He banged through the exit at his endEmergency Only, Alarm Will Sound, but it didn’t, the college kids disabling everything they could-and zoomed down, two, three, even four stairs at a time.

Easy for him. His body handled it; his mind was elsewhere, working on something important. If he had a problem with women, and that was debatable, it had always been getting past the first step or two in meeting a certain type. Only get past that hurdle, begin from a position already inside their lives, as he had been on the point of doing with the college girl in the yellow-lit room, then they’d see him for what he really was, a stud on the road to big success. After that, well who wouldn’t jump at the chance to hook up with the CEO of a major pool corporation in Florida, maybe the entire Southeast one day? Freedy reminded himself to keep financial control out of greedy little hands, to draw up one of those agreements-prenups, there’d been an infomercial on that too-if he ever got married. Damn: he thought of everything.

Freedy’s bad mood lifted just like that. Out into the night, laptop under his arm. He felt good again.

“You caught it?” Nat said.

“Not cleanly,” said Izzie.

Not cleanly, but she’d caught the matchbook in the dark, with the last match inside, and now a candle burned, down in the hole. Not a hole, Nat could now see, but a room, a bedroom, and as far as he could tell in the dimness, a bedroom of the kind he’d encountered only in stories set in English country houses. Grace and Izzie were sitting on a bed, a red-canopied bed like Scrooge’s except that the canopy had been torn off by Izzie’s fall. Nat could make out something of the intricately carved bedposts, and beyond that, darkpaneled walls and the glint of gilt-framed paintings hanging on them.

“What is this place?” he said.

“Like in that expression,” said Grace.

“Sanctum sanctorum,” said Izzie.

“Yeah,” said Grace. “Sanctum sanctorum. You joining us, Nat?”

Nat paused. There was still the problem of getting back up, of course, candle or not, a problem no one else seemed to recognize. And other problems: he had the feeling there were other problems, but couldn’t think what they were.

“Just jump,” Grace said.

“It’s safe,” said Izzie.

They got off the bed, Grace holding the candle, their faces tilted up at him. He hesitated. The jump itself was no big deal, not with a bed to land on. Then what was stopping him?

“What’s it going to be?” Grace said, and Izzie started smiling as though she knew what was coming. “Man or Superman?”

He jumped.

A long fall, surprisingly long, maybe a bigger deal than he’d thought; a long fall, with those faces tilted up at him and the candlelight catching the gold flecks in their eyes; long enough for an odd image to pop up in his mind: Lorenzo falling out of his aquarium.

A surprisingly long fall, feet first until the thought of Lorenzo broke his concentration, and he dipped out of the perpendicular, landing on the bed, but on his back and hard. He bounced right off, out of control, and caromed into Grace, pinning her to the floor.

“Well, well,” she said.

Izzie picked up the candle, dropped by Grace, peered down at them. “Everyone all right?”

Nat got off quickly. “I’m fine.”

Grace rose more slowly. “He’s heavier than he looks.”

Izzie nodded, an expression that could have meant anything on her face. Grace took the candle, held it up, gazed at what remained of the chandelier: thousands of cut-glass crystal teardrops still shimmering from the impact, and twenty or thirty fat candles like the one Grace held, set in glass holders.

“No electricity?” she said. She turned to the lamp on the bedside table, an oil lamp, Nat saw, with a chimney and a wick. He examined it, found the reservoir dry. Underneath lay a book, coated with dust; everything in the room was thick with it. Grace picked up the book, blew off the dust; she and Izzie blew it off simultaneously. A leather-bound book. With Nat and Izzie looking over her shoulder, Grace leafed through. A French book, probably a novel because of all the dialogue, but he could pick out only a few words- fesses, jolie, and one he didn’t know, couilles- before a picture flashed by.

“Whoa,” said Grace, paging back to it.

The picture: a black-and-white drawing, pornographic, of a woman wearing nothing but one black stocking, in the lap of a mustached man sitting on a piano stool and wearing nothing at all, both of them gazing out at the reader in a matter-of-fact way. A second woman, fully dressed, leaned against the keyboard, gazing down at them.

Silence.

Then Grace said: “This is better.”

“To say nothing of the dress,” said Izzie.