Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

"How come you don't do it?"

"You know. I'm squeamish about cutting myself like that."

"God, this is just too weird. I'm sorry but it is."

She turned and started toward the door, stumbling around in the darkness.

Outside the night went on. Cars. Trucks. A distant train. Laughter. He wished he could be a part of it.

He thought of the envelope he'd opened earlier tonight. The one with the girl's name in it.

"Wait," he said.

"I really need to go."

"You didn't tell me your name."

"My name? What's the difference?"

"I'd just like to know."

She paused on her way to the door. Sighed.

He knew what her name was, of course.

He just wanted to hear her say it.

"Doreen Jackson."

She left.

He gave her a full minute and then he followed her.

He didn't want to kill her in the apartment.

Outside the night smelled of violets and dog shit.

She had parked down the block.

She hurried toward her rusted out ancient Mustang.

Teenagers drove by saying, "Hey, babe, you wanna fuck?"

She gave them the finger.

By now he'd caught up with her.

He realised-his feet slap-slapping against the sidewalk- that he wore no shoes.

Just as she reached the car, he caught her and put the knife in her back

"You move, cunt, and I'll kill you right fucking here. You understand?"

His voice had changed. This happened every time. He had never before called a woman a cunt. He could not believe he was doing this now. It was as if the man talking were somebody else and he were merely observing the man.

He forced her to go in the passenger side of the car and he got right in after her.

He made her drive away.

All the time he kept the knife right in her ribs.

"You fucking cunt," he kept saying. "You fucking cunt."

In the moonlight, the rock quarry was silver.

And dusty.

She started coughing immediately.

She knew, of course, why they were here. "You could just let me go."

"Right."

"I won't tell anybody anything. I promise."

He hadn't realised, until he saw her out in the streetlight, that she was at least partly black "Get out of the car."

"No, listen, mister-"

"Out."

She wouldn't go, so he pushed her.

The rock quarry was deserted, pocked with huge shadowed holes. It was like walking on the moon. The sky was black, low; the stars were innumerable and gorgeous.

He felt exhilarated in a way that he knew was madness.

He wanted to scream and come and shit and cry and laugh and murder her and heal her all at the same time.

She walked two steps ahead of him.

He kept pushing her toward the largest cavern.

When they reached the edge of it, he stabbed her in the back of the neck and then he ripped the knife out and started stabbing her along the spine.

Finally, he threw her on the ground and started stabbing her face. Once he noticed how one of her brown eyes had been caught on the point of his knife.

When he was done with her, he raised her brown bloody body as if in sacrifice and hurled her down into the utter blackness of the pit.

And then he fell to the ground, feeling the thing in him twist tight, tighter, and then begin slowly working up his oesophagus and then into his mouth and then…

He lay there, helpless, as the dark snakelike being left him, twisting, twisting, like something newly born leaving the womb.

He was cold then, colder than he'd ever been and he knew he was crying there in the silent silver dust of the quarry, and he became aware of how filthy his hands were with blood and entrails and…

Around dawn he woke up.

A tabby cat walked over to him and stood there staring and the sweet green eyes of the tabby were the first thing he saw this day.

And then he looked at his blood soaked clothes and he remembered everything. The black girl and the thing leaving him and…

He was empty; empty.

Twenty minutes later he went over to the edge of the gravel pit and looked at the broken body below. Sunlight was just starting to move across the corpse. He had ripped her clothes from her and dug out whole parts of her torso. Her arms, at such odd angles, looked as if they'd been broken in the fall.

He went to the Mustang.

Somehow he got out of there.

Twenty minutes later he found a phone booth and called his sister.

Marie always called it the Agony Hour, that time of the afternoon-actually it was more like three hours — when her mother sat in front of the TV set in the living room listening to her talk shows, programs that always featured people who had been beaten by their husbands, abducted by UFOs, pursued by radiation-swollen alligators through the local sewer system, seduced by their choirmaster, unwittingly dated a transsexual for seventeen years, or traumatically lost first prize in a national nude bake-off. By turns the audience was moved to tears, laughter, the modern equivalent of hissing, and great swooping bouts of self-pity-for who in the audience hadn't (it seemed) had a husband who wore ladies' undergarments while being a practising attorney?

Marie didn't feel contempt for all the guests, of course-not the ones who'd been molested by fathers or made the quite serious decision to have his/her sex changed or found their child suddenly seized from them in a custody suit. No, these griefs were real-because she could see in the tired, swollen eyes of the people genuine sorrow. What she couldn't understand was why they went on TV. Talking about your griefs publicly cheapened and lessened them to Marie, they became spectator sport for women who feasted on sorrow the way others feasted on chocolate.

Marie and her mother had had this discussion many times over the past year. Marie would come home to their roomy and nicely decorated apartment, find her mother in tears before the TV set, and ask her mother why she liked to sit around and be sad all afternoon. All her mother would say, her voice quavering, was "Those poor people." She said this with equal compassion for babies dying of AIDS and women who had been the mistresses of politicians.

Marie's father had died when she was eleven years old. A professor, he'd left his wife and daughter comfortable on the proceeds from a large life insurance policy, which he'd dutifully kept up even in the worst of financial times. He seemed to sense that he would die young-a week before his forty-third birthday-of cancer.

After his death, Marie's mother gave up the two-storey house on the outskirts of town, and moved them into an apartment complex close to the city's largest mall and its two best schools. While Marie missed the house, she was soon enjoying herself in the vast busy city. Here, she could be anonymous, crippled to be sure, but lost in the pace and push of it all. People noticed you but they didn't notice you for long. And anyway, a mere cripple wasn't quite so freaky in a city where people wore green spiky hair and earrings in their noses and paid people to beat them.

Unfortunately, her mother didn't seem to make the transition very well. While she talked constantly of making new friends and taking advantage of all the activities swirling around her, she mostly holed up in her apartment, and went out only for mass and a few other church oriented events. Most of the time she stayed home and cleaned. In all the city there couldn't be a more spotless apartment. Furniture gleamed with wax, appliances beamed with buffing, even toilet bowls shone whitely. And somehow, in the day to day doing of these things, her mother had lost herself and her purpose in some terrible way. While she was certainly an attractive widow-a very pretty face, dark lovely hair spoiled only somewhat by the out of date pageboy style, and a trim body whose nice round breasts Marie envied from time to time-she never dated. Oh, there were men from the church, sweaty nervous widowers or lifelong bachelors, who paid furtive night calls for tea, cookies, and coffee in the front room before the great yawping electronic mouth of the TV set, but not serious men, not serious dates. So far as Marie knew, there had never been a serious man for Kathleen Marie Fane, not since the death of her husband. And so Kathleen Marie-beginning to grey now, two chins appearing where before there had been only one and the first faint brown spots of age showing on the slender hands-Kathleen Marie had her daughter and her apartment and was seemingly content with her comfortable isolation.