Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

He saw her stumbling through the park toward him, drawn along like a fly on the web of his personality, her face contorted as if from some massive, internal noise. He enjoyed the feel of insects blown against his skin, scratching across his arms and face, dancing. He withdrew the table knife from his pocket, its blade sharpened to a thin blue edge. He stroked it slowly, ready to make contact, ready to make love to her.

Jane saw him standing in front of the sculptures, their metal edges surrounded by clouds of dark insects as they attempted to tear holes in the sky. People were fleeing the park. Why was she just standing there? It was the dapper older man from the restaurant, the one who had stolen her table knife, the one who had been pursuing her. She wondered if perhaps a kiss, or even just a hug, might satisfy him and make him leave her alone.

His teeth gleamed. She turned and ran. Away from her apartment, away from the park, and as he pursued her, running ahead of her here, heading her off there, she realized she could only go where he wanted her to go.

She ran down an alley with the man pacing steadily behind her. She barked her left knee against a torn metal drum; dampness spread rapidly down her leg. Cats scattered madly as she escaped the alley, as she crossed one street and then another, as she entered a shattered block of buildings, all condemned for the cinema complex to be erected there soon, a third of the buildings already gnawed into submission by the parked machinery.

She made her way through the jumbles of debris which filled the ruins, tormented by wood splinters and insect bites. Nails protruded from raw wounds in the wood, anxious to match their scars with her own.

She stopped, staring into the night in front of her. Suddenly his eyes peered from two holes carved out of the darkness. She spun right and broke through a flimsy door, into a building with dim yellow lights in its cracked windows, the only such lighting on the block.

Mannequins littered the hallway. Pieces of clothing hung from scattered plastic arms and heads. A battered hat. A leather glove. A red rain coat. A stocking mask.

She ran through an open door, into a bedroom. Several lamps affixed with colored bulbs burned before a mirror on the large dressing table. A cat moved listlessly across piles of broken plaster toward her. It seemed to have unusually short hair; then she realized it had been shaved down to tissue-thin skin. Under the colored lights, the shaved cat’s skin looked blood-red. She leaned over and stroked it—it was too drugged to purr. She could see veins laboring just under the surface of the skin. A diagram had been drawn in black permanent marker under its torso, like a butcher’s chart.

Four naked cats lay near the dusty red bed (a bed for lovers, she thought), their tiny throats cut.

And then she heard him out in the hallway, whispering his love for her.

She crashed through the next door into an old kitchen with its piles of rusted silverware and broken plates and cups—smeared with dark, blood-like stains—littering the gray linoleum floor. Her feet, now bare, scraped across the shattered edges. The walls echoed complexly. She imagined them riddled with secret doors and passages, but more likely it was the effects of generations of rot.

She passed through another door into a hall a bit more barren than the first. Most of the ceiling bulbs in the hall were broken, their curved jigsaw pieces breaking under her bare feet like deadly eggshells, barbed edges gleaming under the remaining yellow light.

A loud noise behind her and she fell into agony. She scrambled up and stared at her left arm: a sharp shaft of bone jutted from her broken skin.

She leapt back across the hall and slammed the door into the kitchen, painfully turning the old-fashioned latch. A knife blade suddenly appeared in the crack between the door and the jamb, working its way down toward the latch. The man laughed softly, whispering love songs as he worked.

She jerked her head around, searching for the next escape. A staircase led downward. She hobbled over and stumbled down the steps.

Animal teeth scattered on the floor, rats in the corners, nesting. A Polaroid of a sliced eyeball had been nailed to the wall beneath a precisely mounted spotlight. Below this was the body it had been taken from: she thought she recognized him as the man who had sold her a comb earlier that day.

Another body lay at the end of the short, subterranean hallway: maggots had blunted the sharp planes of the face and made a curlicue border along the dark hair line, but it still bore a startling resemblance to a woman who used to sell tickets at the movie theatre.

In a small, clean room she found another woman’s body, razor blades embedded in cheeks and neck tendons. A scratching at the small window near the ceiling made her turn her head. The glass broke, as if in slow motion, across her face. It showered down before her like frozen, glittering, magical tears.

First arms, then a head, burst through the rainbow-sheened glass. The man from the restaurant grinned at her through the blood washing over his face. He looked down at the cement floor, where he had dropped his knife.

She stooped and picked up the knife off the floor. She stroked its smooth handle. She imagined using it, slipping it through clothing into flesh and beyond. She imagined making love to the man’s body with it, kissing him all over with it, until he cried. It made her feel strange, imagining a man’s tears, imagining a man’s submission.

Maxwell stared at his lover through a dull red filter. Her constant screams of passion had receded as they blended with the loud music in his head, until eventually he could not distinguish the two melodies. He desperately wanted her to join him with the knife, to make of them one creature, to blend their blood streams until they were, finally, one single, gaping wound.

But then he found himself falling the rest of the way through the basement window, glass and blood descending with him as he flew away to regions of dream.

Only when her voice finally gave out into a raw, bleeding whisper did she realize she had been screaming constantly since her discovery of the first body. The scream joined the frantic music which still filled her head.

She struck out against him even as he crashed into her, but in the course of their struggles dropped the knife. She was surprised to find him naked but for his bright red uniform of blood—at some point he had stripped away all pretension. His toenails felt like metal against her body, but his fingernails were so sharp she did not feel them at all when they slid beneath the surface of her skin.

He brought the edge of his hand down on her cheekbone, filling her vision with bright, blinding flashes of light. He grinned at her, and dipped his finger into the blood covering his face, and drew a bright red line across her neck.

She rose onto her knees and rolled, and he rolled with her, his teeth biting her ear as he whispered her name. They crashed into the door, closing it firmly on the hall and the little light it had provided.

A glint in the dark, a flat surface catching any available light. His hand was on it, and raising it high above her head.

The knife passed through her hand, nailing it to the door. She spat into his face and he pulled the knife out and thrust it at her again. The point passed through the surface of her right cheek. She stretched out her arms to ward off the blows: the blade bit at the fleshy areas of her palms, her fingers, releasing exclamations of blood. She jerked forward, catching him off-guard, jamming the webbing of her damaged hand into his throat. He fell back and she was on her feet again, slamming open the door and running back into the hall. She turned and scrambled up a pile of crates to a screened window, her hands leaving red prints on everything she touched.