Christopher Leppek - Abattoir

As the pressure in his loins approached bursting point, he arched his back and opened his eyes. There he was—handsome, lithe, strong—in the reflected image of the mirror.

And there was his lover who cherished each thrust; who cried with every movement that Derek made.

David.

Instead of Susan, he saw David Dunn, the man who had expressed interest earlier that evening. Handsome, attractive, beautiful David. He was all his now.

Derek was no longer just making love. He was fucking, with the ferocity and sincerity of someone who had abstained since eternity. He savored the hard feel of his lover’s body, the deep sound he made with each assault.

He could no longer hold himself. Derek exploded deep inside David and their bodies shuddered with each violent spasm. And then they came again.

The screams became pants, which eventually became measured breathing. Derek’s lover parted from him and lay spent upon the bed, facing him.

Derek reached over to caress his face, but the touch beneath his fingers was not what he expected. It was soft and delicate. A woman’s face. Susan. She looked into his eyes and smiled.

In that moment, Derek Taylor came face to face with truth.

The time for denial, the time for hiding, was over. He knew now what he had longed for all these years; understood the lie he’d been living.

But Derek couldn’t live with it.

No! This couldn’t be him, and yet it was. The person he had believed himself to be was an illusion, and he would refuse to live as the person he had discovered.

He trembled, but did not shed a tear. His action was swift and sure, an epiphany. Without saying another word to Susan, without giving her a parting kiss, he reached to the nightstand, opened the drawer and removed the weapon.

Before her unbelieving eyes, he placed the pistol into his mouth, pulled the trigger and blew his brains all over the once spotless mirror in which he’d liked to gaze at himself.

It was very late, and the Exeter was silent as the grave until Susan ran naked, shrieking hysterically, down the hallway. Beside the remains of its former owner, the unnoticed Cartier—its once gleaming silver now streaked with scarlet—resumed its ticking.

Cantrell stood in the foyer and racked his mind.

What was wrong with it? Why doesn’t it look right ?

He hadn’t slept all night. At three a.m., tired of tossing and turning, he gave up trying. He dressed, left his apartment and wandered downstairs to the main floor into the foyer; the heart of his creation.

The main lights had been turned off, but the foyer was illuminated in the eerie glow of a full moon whose rays peeked through the skylights above.

Something was off kilter.

His tired eyes could have been playing tricks on him, or it might have been the misty moonlight, but he swore that what he saw wasn’t what he’d designed. He’d worked for months on the plans of this central room; its graceful wrought-iron staircase, the towering linden tree that provided the primary focus. He knew every curve, every plumb line; every angle and elevation of the space. But tonight it was different.

There was a skewed quality to the way the shadow of the stairs fell on the mosaic tile floor—an expressionistic perversion of what he’d originally created.

His gaze went upwards, toward the skylights and the moonbeams that were pouring through. The walls seemed to incline inward, the vertical space constricted , lending the spiral stairs a squeezed, sinister aspect.

Cantrell reached for the light switch and turned it on. He re-examined every angle. The illusion of distortion—if illusion it was—was not affected. He turned the light back off.

Troubled, he looked at the moonbeams; the way the panes above had split them into finger-like extensions; the way they illuminated some parts of the room to a state of bluish-yellow daylight, yet left others in total blackness.

Looking up, he saw something near the apex of the space, far above. At first, he thought it was an effect caused by the imperceptible motion of the moon—a subtle flicker, like the dying flash of a light bulb.

But the phenomenon began to assume a vague shape, an amorphous mass of swirling pastel color and wispy substance, not unlike a cloud or puff of smoke. The thing began to slowly descend towards where Cantrell stood.

Whatever the hell it was, it was no trick of the light.

Slowly and methodically, the thing lowered itself to the ground floor. At last, spinning lazily, it came face-to-face with Cantrell, suspended weightlessly a few feet from him. He sensed its energy, but saw nothing definitive in its gauzy substance.

Mustering his courage, he extended his hand toward it. It recoiled, spinning more quickly, its wispy qualities taking on a reddish hue. It darted away from him, flitting horizontally down the hallway. Cantrell followed. Halfway down the tunnel-like expanse, the object tilted and reversed direction, rushing past his head with incredible speed. Cantrell ducked and pursued.

When it reached the foot of the stairs, it began a vertical ascent, picking up speed as it went. Cantrell rushed behind it, forced to take the cumbersome staircase. He reached the second floor, his breath now labored as the strange cat and mouse game continued.

Past the third floor and up to the fourth, the object paused momentarily, as if considering its next move, then began to move vertically again, back down to the second floor and past the doors of the sleeping flats.

The object halted directly before the door of Su Ling’s apartment. In stunned disbelief, he watched as the spinning mass lowered itself to the floor, flattening out and seeping through the space beneath the door.

His head throbbing, Cantrell reached into his pocket for the master key. It wasn’t there. He tried the doorknob. Locked. In desperation, he pounded on the door, calling out Su Ling’s name.

It seemed like an eternity before it opened. Su Ling stood in her nightgown, hair in disarray, half asleep.

“All you all right?” he demanded, looking past her into the flat. He saw nothing unusual.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, fear already rising through her sleepiness.

“Is everything okay? Is there . . ?” Cantrell suddenly realized he had no idea how to explain himself.

“Yes, yes, everything’s fine. What’s the matter?”

“Anna… where’s Anna?”

“In her room… ”

She followed him as he rushed through the living room and yanked open the door to the child’s bedroom.

She was not asleep.

Anna perched on her bed in a pink nightgown decorated with little pictures of teddy bears. In one hand she clenched a pencil; in the other, a broad-lined writing tablet. She was scribbling frantically, the pencil ripping holes in the flimsy paper. As soon as she’d covered a page with her scrawling, she ripped it from the pad, starting again on the page beneath. The floor was already littered with her discarded scrawls.

“Anna?” Su Ling asked. “Darling, what are you doing? What’s the matter?”

The girl didn’t look up from her work, didn’t speak. The expression on her face was blank, strangely calm, in stark contrast to the frenzied motion of her hand on the paper.

The girl stopped suddenly, her gaze rising from her tablet to the ceiling.

“Anna?” Su Ling asked.

The tablet fell from the girl’s hand, her eyes growing distant and unfocused.

Cantrell kneeled to the floor and began picking up the sheaves of paper, examining each one carefully then sharing them with Su Ling.

They exchanged puzzled glances as they looked at the indecipherable drawings until, near the bottom of the pile, Cantrell stopped. He examined this one very carefully, before handing it to Su Ling.