Edward Lee - Trolley No. 1852

You see, I had to know: exactly what was taking place on the ominous fourth story.

I gave the conductor only enough lead-time to conceal my movements; then, with stealth, speed, and deliberation, I traced his identical steps. Upon the fourth-floor landing, I hid behind another Doric display pedestal; this one providing the base for an ancient basalt idol whom I believed to be the notorious demon Baalzephon so actively worshiped by luciferic sects of the Middle Ages. Eye lined up along the pedestal’s edge, I watched the conductor propel himself to the center of the grandiose stair-hall, pause, and then enter a door.

Now’s my chance, I realised.

No one else occupied the hall, so I made haste across the plush carpeting. But my dilemma was plain; for although more than half a dozen doors lined the wall-side of the hall, I could not be certain exactly which door the blanch-faced man had entered.

Somewhere near the center, was all I could deduce. Each door I silently passed stood identical to the previous, until (somewhere in proximity to the hall’s mid-point) I stopped to stare at the tiniest brass emblem mounted upon the door I currently faced. Inscribed upon this plaque were, I’m utterly certain, the cuneiformic markings that denoted the following numerals: 1852.

I checked both ways down the hall, was satisfied I was not being surveilled, then stooped to one knee, and to the ornately plated keyhole, I then put my wide-open eye…

It troubles me that I cannot in any accuracy convey to you the details I now beheld. It was a spectacular bed-chamber displayed to my clandestine view: sumptuous carpet and wall-coverings, lovely antique furniture and in addition a veiled four-poster bed whose gorgeously carved post and headboard appeared adorned in gold leaf; oil portraits and statuary that were no doubt high-mark collector’s items. These facts, however, rendered the chamber nondescript when compared to the room’s (and I’m not sure I can even summon an adequate term) sensorial bearing…

There seemed to be a light that was not light but some peculiar cast unlike any I’d observed. This counter-luminescence ( somehow foggy yet clarity-sharpening) made the room and its contents fairly shimmer as if through mist; and seemed preternaturally magnified via some phantasmal lens-obscura , and to that I must not fail to add…

Two rod-like objects stood upright at either side of the grand bed. These objects were likely simple wooden dowels (nothing peculiar there) but what covered the top half of each was a mass of some unidentifiable substance that seemed to be partly translucent and rather ill-hued. The only simile I can summon is to say that these poles looked like bunches of wizened white grapes on a stick.

“There you are,” issued the unmistakable and faintly accented voice of Madam Aheb. She immediately stepped into view from the rightward side of the key-way, and it was the paste-faced conductor to whom she spoke. The madam’s black hair as well as the diaphanous, low-cut gown iridesce’d in the bizarre accentuation of the room’s light.

Her voice turned scolding, “And it certainly took you long enough to get here. You know how I can’t abide to have this awful stuff on me for a minute longer that it need be.”

I could only see the conductor’s back from this voyeuristic vantage point, yet the capped, heavy-jacketed man appeared to bow his head at Miss Aheb’s remark of disapproval.

“But of course, I’m aware you and the Thogg were preparing the trolley for the next ingression…”

My head turned atilt. Thogg? What was that? And what did she mean by ingression? And what was this ‘awful stuff’ she’d referred to? What I’d seen thus far assured me there was nothing at all awful about how she appeared.

“I’m ready now,” Madam Aheb said and sat eloquently in a spectacular spoke-backed Revolution-era chair.

My view of her was blocked when the conductor stood in front of the madam and, with a linen towel, appeared to be wiping off her arms, shoulders, and graceful legs. “Good, good,” she half-moaned. The conductor’s hands kept busy in their task but remained a frustrating visual blockage to exactly what was being done. Nevertheless, he continued to wipe the exposed skin of his mastress.

What in the name of Pegana is he wiping off? I pondered.

Still blocked by the bulk shape, Miss Aheb stood up from the chair; and it was the movements of the conductor that led me to believe he was now removing the madam’s gown.

“Ah, there. That’s better. I just so much prefer to be naked…”

When the silent conductor stepped away, Miss Aheb stood in full view to my prying eye—

The image forced me to press my hand across my lips; otherwise the horrific image of what I now saw would’ve surely caused me to scream quite blood-curdlingly…

I was looking at a dichotomy of unspeakable magnitude: a collision of obscene and utter opposites stripped bare; indeed, the force majeure of physical beauty and physical horror. I say, Miss Aheb now stood naked, and in her nakedness came the accentuation of the sum of all her parts: flawless contours and perfect feminine lines; the sweep of impeccable legs; a sleekness that was robust and healthily slender simultaneously; and high-riding, distendedly nippled breasts that existed without flaw.

The horror was in her complexion.

Any impeccability of Miss Aheb’s physique was howlingly counter-weighed by what I could only conceive of as some ghastly epidermal defect or pitiable disease. Every square inch of her exposed skin was made appalling by a condition far worse than the pallor, say, of the conductor’s face but instead by a skin-tone that was absolutely revolting. It was not the strange un-light that held dominion in the room: of this I was sure. It was a physical fact of the woman’s heredity.

Her skin looked like the unpleasant white of a bullfrog’s belly marbled by swaths of a mucoid green.

The image nearly overpowered me; I nearly voided my stomach’s contents. It occurred to me now that what the servile conductor had been wiping off was no doubt some mode of cosmetic make-up to conceal the madam’s true appearance to this evening’s guests; what’s more (and I don’t know how I knew this) I felt all-too-certain that this aberrancy of Miss Aheb’s skin was her natural condition!

Between her protuberant yet malignantly toned breasts hung a modest pendant whose elongated stone reminded me of a common stalactite of chalcedony, nearly colorless and rather lackluster. Yet from the thin, two-inch-long stone, after I stared a moment, I took note of the pendant’s only un common characteristic…

It seemed to, however irreducibly, generate some aspect of the room’s overall anti-light. And as this registered, my eyes slowly roved upward to the most macabre chandelier I’ve ever beheld. Uneven elongated crystals hung from each setting in the same stalactite fashion ( hundreds of them, each quite similar to the pendant) inexplicably giving off the light that was not light.

Miss Aheb grinned to her servant in an almost vulturine way. “I simply adore you so much,” came a wanton whisper and with it her gracile hand to the conductor’s crotch. “Kiss me now…”

The conductor’s gloved hand came to his chin—

“No, no,” the appalling-skinned madam interjected. “Keep the mask on—”

So I was right! I thought. It was a mask the conductor wore!

“—I want you hideous at first,” she continued. “I want you repulsive! It makes my juices flow all the more hotly…”