Clive Barker - Everville

"Phoebe?"

She snapped out of her reverie to find Dr. Powell at her side with the morning's files.

"Oh-I'm sorry."

"We're all done. Are you all right? You look a little flushed."

"I'm fine." She relieved him of the files and he started to pick through his mail. "Don't forget you've got a Festival meeting."

He glanced up at the clock. "I'll grab a sandwich and go straight over. Damn Festival. I'll be glad when it's-Oh, I've referred Audrey Laidlaw to a specialist in Salem."

"Is it something serious?"

He tossed the letters back onto the desk. "Maybe cancer," he said.

"Oh Lord."

"Will you lock up?"

That happened, over and over. People came in to see the doctor with a headache or a backache or a bellyache and it turned out to be something terminal. They'd fight it, of course: pills, scans, injections. And once in a while they'd win. But more often than not she'd watch them deteriorate, week in, week out, and it was still hard after seven years, seeing that happen; seeing people's strength and hope and faith in things slip away. There was always such emptiness towards the end; such bitter looks on their faces, as though they'd been cheated of something and they couldn't quite figure out what. Even the churchgoers, the ones she'd see in front of the tree in the square at Christmas singing hallelujahs, had that look. God wanted them in his bosom, but they didn't want to go; not until they'd made sense of things here.

But suppose there was no sense to be made? That was what she had come to believe more and more: that things happened, and there was no real reason why. You weren't being tested, you weren't being rewarded, you were just being. And so was everybody and everything else, including tumors and bad hearts: all just being.

She had found the simplicity of this strangely comforting, and she'd made her own little religion of it.

Then Joe Flicker had been hired to paint the hallway outside the surgery, and her homemade temple had cracked. It wasn't love, she'd told herself from the start. In fact, it wasn't anything important at all. He was an opportunist who'd taken a passing fancy to her, and she'd played along because she was flattered and she always felt sexier in the summer months, so why not flirt with him a little? But the flirting got serious, and secret, and before very long she was ready to scream if he didn't kiss her. Then, he did, and she was ready to scream if they didn't go all the way. Then they had, and she'd gone home with paint marks on her breasts and her belly, and sat in the bath and cried for a solid hour, because it felt like this was a reward and a test and a punishment all in one.

It still did. She was thirty-six years old, twenty pounds overweight

(her estimation, not Joe's), with small features on a moonish face, pale skin that freckled in the sun, ginger hair (with a few strands of gray already), and a mean streak she had from her mother. Not, she had long ago decided, a particularly attractive package. In Morton, she'd found a husband who didn't know or care what he'd married, for better or worse, as long as he was fed and the television worked. A man who'd decided at thirty that the best was over and only a fool would look beyond tomorrow, who increasingly defined himself by his bigotries, and who had not touched her between her legs in thirteen months.

So how then-how, how?-had she come to her present state of grace? How was it possible that this man from North Carolina this Joe, who'd had a life of adventuring-he'd been stationed in Germany while he was in the army, he'd lived in Washington, D.C., for a while, Kentucky for a while, California for a while-how was it possible that this man had become so devoted to her?

When they talked, and they talked a lot, she wondered sometimes if he was quizzing her about her life the way he did because the same question vexed him; as though he was digging around for some clue as to what it was in her that drew him. Then again, perhaps he was simply curious.

"I can't get enough of you," he'd say over and over, and kiss her in ways and places that would have appalled Morton.

She thought of those kisses now, as she let herself into the house. It was six minutes to three. He was always on time (army training, he'd said once); six minutes and he'd be here. she'd read in a magazine a couple of weeks ago that scientists were saying time was like putty; it could be pulled and pushed, and she'd thought I could have told them that. Six minutes was six hours waiting on the back doorstep (Joe never used the front, it was too conspicuous, but the house was the last on the row and there was just wooded land beyond, so it was easy to come in from that direction unseen); waiting for a glimpse of him between the trees, knowing that once he arrived time would be squeezed in the other direction, and an hour, or an hour and a half, would fly by in a matter of moments.

There he was, pushing his way through the thicket, his eyes already upon her and never leaving her, not for a stride, of for a glance. And the clock in the living room that had belonged to Morton's mother and had never kept good time until she died, was sounding three o'clock. And all was well with the world.

they climbed the stairs unbuttoning as they went. By the time they reached the spare bedroom (they'd never made love in the marital bed) her breasts were bare, and he had his arms around her from behind, toying as they went. He loved nothing better than to pleasure her this way, his face against the nape of her neck, his chest hard against her back, his embrace absolute. She reached back to unzip him. As ever, she found her hands full.

"I've missed this!" she said, sliding her hand along his dick.

"It's been three days," he said. "I've been going crazy." He turned and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her down so she perched on his knees, then opening her legs by opening his own. His hand went into her with unerring ease.

"Oh baby," he said, "that's what I need." He played with her, in and out. "That's the hottest pussy, baby. You got the hottest fucking pussy@' She loved to hear him say the words out loud, the dirty words she only wanted to hear or say when she was with him, the words that made her new, and ready.

"I'm going to fuck you till you're crazy. You want that?"

"Yes-"

"Tell me."

"I want you to fuck me@' She was starting to gasp.

"Now?"

"Till I'm-2'

"Yeah.

"Till I'm crazy."

She fumbled with his belt buckle, but he shoved her hands away and rolled her over, face to the quilt, hoisting up her dress and tearing down her panties. Backside in the air, legs apart, she reached behind her, the words always easier than she'd thought they'd be.

"Give me your cock."

And it was in her hands as though she'd summoned it, slick and hot-headed. She pressed it against her pussy. He held back for a few seconds, then slid it all inside, down to the zipper from which it still poked.

In the tiny committee room above the Chamber of Commerce, Larry Powell watched while Ken Hagenaner went through a full list of the weekend's activities and heard not a word, pre occupied as he was with his return home to Montana the weekend after next. And in the offices below, Erwin Toothaker waited while Dorothy Bullard called around to see if anyone could let the attorney into the old schoolhouse, where the Historical Society kept its collection, because he needed to do some urgent research. And while he waited Erwin eyed the yel lowed tape at the top of the window frames, still holding down an inch of Christmas tinsel, and the faded photographs of the mayor before last with his arms around the Bethany twins on their sixteenth birthdays, and he thought: I hate this place. I never realized till now. I hate it.

And outside, on Main Street, a youth called Seth Lundy-just turned seventeen and never been kissed-halted in the middle of the sidewalk outside the Pizza Place and listened to a sound he had not heard since Easter Sunday: the din of hammers knocking on the sky from Heaven's side.