Jeff Gelb: Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

She took a bite of salad.

The squeaking stopped beside her. She could hear his ravaged lungs fighting for air. His voice was soft and tremulous.

"He wouldn't wear a condom, would he?"

Caryl gasped, and a few chunks of lettuce caught in her throat, making her choke. She grabbed her ice water and took a few swallows.

"Have you been tested yet?"

She coughed again and water shot from her nostrils. She dropped the glass, and it shattered her salad plate and knocked the wine over. She coughed and fought for air. A waiter approached her in an instant with another glass of water. She drank, caught her breath and looked up but —

The man with the oxygen tank was gone.

"Where did he go?" she gasped.

"Who?" the waiter asked.

"The man. With the tank. The oxygen tank."

The waiter looked confused. "Oxygen tank?"

"Yes. He was just standing here a few seconds ago talking to me!"

He shook his head and looked at her somewhat suspiciously. "Sorry, lady. I didn't see nobody."

After the waiter had calmed her, Caryl left and went straight home instead of buying Hawk a gift. She decided to fix him dinner instead, but once in the kitchen, she realized her hands were too shaky to cook, so she had another glass of wine and sat in front of the television for a while and watched Oprah and Phil.

When Hawk got home that night, she was still upset; she'd spent the day trying to keep those two thin voices out of her head…

Have you —

He wouldn't use —

— been tested —

— a condom —

— yet ?

— would he ?

When Hawk came into the bedroom to find her trying to read a magazine, she smiled with relief and sat up to embrace him, but he wandered around the room distractedly, undressing, mumbling to himself. Then he said, "Gonna take a shower," and went to a dresser, opened his bottom drawer, removed something that jingled metallically and left the room.

Caryl thought that was odd. They had their own bathroom adjoining the bedroom; why would he leave the room to take a shower? And what had he taken from the bottom drawer of his dresser?

The wine had made her sleepy and she felt even worse than she'd felt before. She put the magazine aside, turned off the light, rolled over and went to sleep. She dreamed of walking corpses that whispered of tests and condoms…

When she woke the next morning, suddenly, drenched in sweat brought about by the visions in her sleep, Hawk was already gone. He'd left a note on his pillow that read, " See you tonight, babe. Think dirty thoughts and have your legs spread when I get home. We'll fuck till our gums recede ."

The note depressed her so much she skipped breakfast. She wanted only to get out of the house. Instead of a limousine with a driver, she took one of Hawk's cars, a Corvette, and drove herself into town with no idea of where she was going. As she drove out the front gate, she saw a woman standing across the street near a patch of bushes. She was very thin, wore a sweater and had her arms folded tightly over her breasts as if she were cold. She stood as still as a mannequin, just staring at Hawk's house with deep-set shadowed eyes.

Caryl tried to fight back the shudder that passed through her and just drove. She found herself in the village of Westwood near UCLA and looked for a restaurant where she could have brunch. When she spotted one that looked good, she parked the car and walked back toward the building, strolling past a police officer who was writing a ticket for an illegally parked car. A woman walked toward her on the sidewalk. She was black and, although Caryl didn't think it was really possible, she looked rather pale. Her hair didn't look real; she was obviously wearing a wig. Just as they were about to pass, the woman stepped in front of Caryl and asked, "He's using you, isn't he?"

Caryl stopped and, suddenly angry, fed up with questions from strangers, she snapped, "Who are you? What do you — " She swallowed her words when she saw the woman's throat. It was bulging with hideous lumps, as if a number of small rocks had been slid beneath the skin. " — want from me?" Caryl finished in a breath.

The woman looked deeply into Caryl's eyes, frowning, and asked quietly, "What does he keep in the room upstairs?"

" What do you want ?" Caryl shrieked. " Why are you asking me these things ?"

"What do you suppose he keeps up there?" the woman whispered. Then she stepped around Caryl and walked on.

"No!" Caryl shouted. "You wait ! You wait just a second, lady! Who are you? Why did you ask me that? What do you want ?" She broke into a run and almost fell when —

— a police officer stepped in front of her, a ticket book in one hand, a pen in the other. "Excuse me, lady. Can I help you? Do you have a problem?" His voice was firm.

Caryl fought back tears, closed her eyes and whispered, "Thuh-that woman. That woman I was just talking to."

"What woman?" the officer asked, frowning.

Caryl pointed down the walk. "That wo —»

She was gone.

The officer shook his head, trying not to smirk, and said, "I'm sorry, ma'am. You look sane enough. But I'm afraid you were just, um, talking to yourself."

Caryl felt dizzy for a moment, scrubbed her face with a trembling hand, turned and walked away.

Two hours later, she was still wandering the sidewalks of Westwood, staring blindly into store windows, trembling in the warm sunlight as she rounded the same comer she'd rounded just a little while ago.

What does he keep in that room upstairs?… What do you suppose he keeps up there?

Staring at her reflection in the window of a small dress shop, Caryl began to think she'd made a horrible mistake in coming to Los Angeles with Hawk, although she wasn't quite sure why she felt that way. Surely the people who had been accosting her on the street knew nothing of her personal life. It was impossible ! She'd never seen them before. They never mentioned any names. They never said anything specific.

What does he keep in that room upstairs?

Well… nothing too specific. And just because other people hadn't seen them didn't mean they hadn't been there. It had to be some incredible coincidence.

But she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd made a dreadful mistake. Maybe her mother had something after all.

The reflection of a woman standing behind her and to her left appeared in the window beside her own, slightly blurry and undefined. Another appeared on her right. And behind that one, a man with a gauze patch over one eye stopped, also facing the window.

A hand touched Caryl's left shoulder and she gasped, started to spin around, but a woman's quiet, weak voice said, "Don't turn around."

"Just listen," the man rasped.

"We want to help you," the other woman said.

"He's doing to you what he did to us."

"Making you feel so important," the man said. "At first, anyway."

"But he's just using you. Someone to come home to."

"Someone to come home and fuck ," the man added.

Caryl took in an unsteady breath to speak, but the woman said, "Just listen."

The man said, in his gravelly voice, "What he really did to us was far worse than that."

"It's what he does to everyone," the second woman whispered.

"He doesn't go to the studio," the first woman said. "He doesn't go to meetings. He goes to see his lovers. All day long. Sometimes prostitutes."

"Sometimes bathhouses and gay bars," the man said. "He's insatiable."

The second woman: "And they're always nobodies. Never celebrities."

The first woman: "He saves the celebrities for parties and concerts and premieres, when he knows the press will show up. And the celebrities he never touches ."