Hart & Boot & Other Stories Page 12

  I lifted my head, full of strength and indignation, and made it clear that I would hunt this creature down and kill it.

  The old lion shook his head. Not here, he said. The monster is here, yes, but only as you are—in pieces, from long ago. You have to seek him out in the other world. It does not look like a monster there, any more than you look like a lion; but that is what it is, and what you are.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, and I wasn’t a lion anymore—just me, naked and cold, crouching on freezing rocks.

  Perhaps you will, the old lion said, and the sadness in him was as heavy as the world. Or perhaps you will die.

  The old lion rose and padded slowly away, without looking back, and I woke up in bed, thinking: Martin.

  No, I didn’t decide Martin was a monster, and that I had to kill him. This isn’t a story about me turning into a raving psycho—I don’t think. At least, I’m convinced that the things I saw later on, the unbelievable things, were real, as real as hangovers and overdue rent. After the dream, I did think I was getting a bit obsessive about things. I mean, Lily had made it clear I was out of her life; whether the reasons she gave me were true or false didn’t ultimately matter. If she’d lied to spare my feelings, hell, in a way, that was being nice, wasn’t it? So I tried to forget about her, and Martin, and really get on with my life, not just pretend to do so.

  And maybe that would’ve been it, I would’ve healed with time and all that, if I hadn’t seen Lily, and if I hadn’t known the guy she picked up.

  Look, it’s a big city, right? The odds of me running into Lily were pretty low, so I didn’t worry about it. I avoided a couple of the bars that I knew Lily really liked, but otherwise, I went about my business. So it was a bad sharp shock when I was in a club called Ugly Everything, propping up the bar while Marie danced with whoever, swinging by every once in a while to urge me onto the dancefloor, but I just kissed her cheek and said I’d rather watch her dance, tonight. She was flirting pretty hard with a blonde girl in a short vinyl skirt, who kept throwing me these meaningful glances, and I thought there might be some intriguing three-way action in my future, which made me happy in a vague sort of way—and then I saw Lily.

  Oh, she looked hot. She wore a tight black dress that stopped at mid-thigh, and she had her hair in pigtails, and she wore black boots. I’d never seen her dress like that; she wore dresses pretty often, but nothing so... well... slutty. I’ve got nothing against slutty, mind you; “slut” is hardly a pejorative term in my lexicon, it was just a surprising side of Lily, one I’d never seen before. I looked around for Martin, but didn’t see him, and I had a funny feeling that I’d know it if he were here, sense it somehow, or smell him, like something rancid in the air. That didn’t make sense, but I’d had enough to drink to accept the idea, almost enough to drink to go talk to Lily. Then I looked over at Marie and the blonde, dancing hard in the sweeping lights. I sucked back a little more of my drink, and decided I was better staying in my current situation. Hot sex was a poor substitute for true love, but it was miles better than loneliness and rejection and the ego-bruising I would surely take if I went and talked to Lily.

  But why was she here, alone, without Martin? She looked like she was on the prowl, too, dancing with boy after boy (I couldn’t help glancing at her, keeping track of her movements on the dancefloor). Had things fallen through with Martin, or had he left town already after just a few weeks, or was that stuff about them being exclusive just bullshit, as I half-suspected? I realized I was pissed-off at her, well and truly, and wondered how long I’d been feeling that way without realizing it, surprised I’d had to get a little drunk in order for those feelings to bubble up to the surface.

  I didn’t go over to her, and she never looked my way, but I saw her leave with Steven Lee. Steven and I had shot a lot of games of pool together, and gotten drunk together a couple of times; we weren’t exactly friends, but we had lots of friends in common, and we got along well enough. So when I saw Lily leading him toward the door, holding his hand, while he grinned dopily at his good fortune, I almost shouted, almost told him to be careful, she was a viper, she had a stone cold heart... but I didn’t say anything. I just watched them go, and even though I believed then that Lily was a tricksome viper, I was jealous of Steven, too. Because I still loved her. That shit doesn’t go away. It’s not like a poison you can suck out.

  Then Marie bopped over to me, kissed me on the cheek, and told me she was going back to her place, she’d see me tomorrow. She left with the blonde, and I realized if there was going to be fun tonight, I wasn’t invited. Sometimes things just don’t go your way.

  I made my way home, passing Marie’s door as I walked to my apartment. Rage Against the Machine was playing from inside, loud; that was Marie’s sex-music of choice lately. She liked something with a good driving beat to fuck along with. I don’t remember when I felt more low. I realized that Marie probably felt the same way about me that I did about her; it was fun to be together, and the sex was nice, but there was no pretense at a deep connection. That depressed me further. I sat in my apartment and watched television, which I almost never do. I don’t get cable, and the only thing on was a late movie, some interminably boring cop flick from the early eighties. I watched the whole thing, and then went to bed. I stared at the dark for a long time, and the loneliness settled over me like ashes. This was why I hated to be alone, basically; because in the night, I knew that if I died no one would mourn me, if I disappeared no one would really care; because if there was no one looking at me, shining their light on me, how could I even prove I existed at all?

  I finally fell asleep, and I had the big dream, the monster-dream, the dream to end all dreams.

  It began as the familiar lion dream, my muscles moving easily under tawny skin, the swaying grasses, the world broken into form and shadow. Everything was darker than usual; I didn’t normally prowl at night, but there was an urgency now, a sense of hunting to be done, of some beast slouching through the night that had to stopped, had to be killed.

  A horrible sound rolled across the savanna, shrill as a thousand car alarms, mingled with a low blatting noise. I hated the sound, and wanted to kill whatever made it, tear out whatever throat produced that sound. I ran toward the noise, knowing I’d never heard it before, also knowing it was the voice of my enemy.

  I found the monster near the river, drinking, and it lifted its head from the water and gazed at me, smiling. I crouched, tensed to leap, but then just stood, frozen. I’d never seen a creature like this, in or out of waking life, and it smelled all wrong—like a man, and like a scorpion, and like a snake, and—worst of all—like a lion. No surprise; it was a mix-up beast, composed of all those things. It’s body was that of a lion’s, only larger than mine, with powerful haunches and a wide chest, and the fur was weirdly purplish, like clouds at dusk. Instead of a brushlike lion’s tail, the thing had a segmented scorpion’s tail, rising behind it in a deadly curve. A drop of yellow venom fell from the stinger as I watched, and where it struck the clay on the riverbank, it sizzled.

  The thing’s head was the worst. It had a human head, bald as an infant, chubby-cheeked, with green eyes that leaked brownish fluid from the corners. It opened its mouth, showing off a triple row of triangular teeth, like a shark’s. It made that noise again—shrill piping, low blat.

  It sounded like a flute and a trumpet, played at the same time.

  Then, bang, I wasn’t a lion anymore, I was a man, crouched stupidly on all fours by the river, looking across the water at this thing, this creature that was teaching me the meaning of the word “nightmare.”

  Then the monster changed, too, and became a naked man smeared with mud and blood. He walked toward me, arms outstretched, unsmiling—but I knew he still had a triple row of teeth inside his closed mouth, nothing but shredding incisors, a bite like knives. And once he reached me, he would wrap me up in his arms, and open wide, and fucking eat me. Because he was a man-eater. And, just my luck, I wasn’t a lio
n anymore. I was a man. I was his favorite thing on the menu.

  I woke before he reached me, and rolled out of bed, rushing to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face. Somewhere on the street a car alarm was whooping, and I stuck my head under the flow of water from the faucet so the water rushing by my ears would drown out the sound.

  So the man, on the riverbank, in my dream?

  Yeah. That’s right. It was Martin.

  ***

  The next day I was at the coffee shop, trying to work, every word a struggle, with my head full of bad echoes from the dream, that awful flute-and-trumpet cry, the monster with its tripled teeth. I’d just deleted another paragraph when my friend Jade-Lynne came in and sat across from me, huffing. “Have you seen that motherfucker Steven Lee?” she said, without preface.

  I blinked at her. “Last night...”

  “Everybody saw him last night. What I want to know is, where’s he at now?” Her hair, an explosion of black braids woven with bright ribbons, waved as she shook her head angrily. “He was supposed to be at my house at 10 o’clock this morning to help me move. Now it’s 2, and he’s nowhere to be found. I beat on his apartment door for fifteen minutes, and called his cell phone, which is turned off, and paged him, and nothing.”

  “Ah,” I said, just a meaningless syllable, while my brain swirled in its juices. Steven had left with Lily, doubtless to spend the night, so he was probably still there, right? Just lost track of time. But why wasn’t he answering his phone or his pager? And Lily was an early riser, usually up with the daylight, so I couldn’t believe they were still in bed, unless they were seriously hungover... “I don’t know, Jade. I’ll let you know if I see him.”

  “’Preciate it,” she said, and wandered off.

  I drummed my fingers on the table, sighed, and packed up my laptop. I went down the street a couple of blocks to a payphone. (I don’t have a cell; sometimes I like to be unreachable.)

  I plugged in dimes and nickels, slowly. This was crass; this was low-class; this was necessary. Steven was something like a friend, at least, and Jade-Lynne was definitely a friend, so I should do what I could to find Steven, right? Since I was probably the only person in the whole city who knew who he’d gone home with last night.

  And, I admit, I wanted Lily to know I’d seen her leave with another guy. I wanted to put her on the spot. I wanted her to twist a little.

  Love’s not just sweetness; it’s flowers wrapped in razorwire.

  I dialed Lily’s number.

  It picked up on the second ring. “Yes?” Martin said.

  I stood, frozen. I hadn’t expected Martin to answer, but why not? Why wouldn’t he be over there? Maybe they’d fucked Steven together.

  “Hello, hello?” Martin said, more annoyed than amused. “Can I help you, Mr. Silence?”

  I don’t think I was even breathing. That voice. It was exactly the same as the voice in my dream. I might have been dreaming even then.

  Then Martin shouted. I don’t know if it was just something he did to fuck with prank phone callers, or if he knew it was me, and meant me to hear it.

  He screamed, “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

  I jerked the phone away from my ear and slammed it down.

  Fuck this, I thought. Steven wasn’t my problem, and Lily and Martin had zero bearing on my life. I went to my apartment, brewed a pot of coffee, and watched TV all afternoon and into the night.

  Finally, about 10 o’clock, feeling stupefied, I roused myself. This was stupid, stupid. I shouldn’t be wallowing. I called Marie, but she wasn’t in, which meant she was probably out at a bar already, unless she was working. That almost put me down again, but I resisted the entropy that sucked at my bones, and put my shoes and jacket on. I wasn’t happy with Marie anyway, and I wasn’t going to find a better lover sitting around my apartment, so I had to go out. In the movies it’s mostly women who are concerned about finding true love, while the men drift along, oblivious; that’s just another bullet point on the list of bullshit Hollywood perpetrates, because men are out there looking for love, too, something true and deep and good that lasts. I’d spent too much time pissing and moaning over Lily, who didn’t love me anymore, if she ever had. Now it was Saturday night; moving-along time.

  I went to a bar, and then another bar, and then another, having a drink, sampling the crowd, moving on. Around 11:30 I bumped into Jade-Lynne, who was morosely drinking something made of vodka and Red Bull. “Did you ever find Steven?” I asked.

  “No.” She peered into her drink, then looked at me, her green eyes troubled. “I’m past pissed and approaching worried. Turns out a lot of people have been going missing lately. You know Charlie Johnson, plays bass for Dead Baby Joke?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “He’s gone, too, he disappeared last week, poof. Some other guys, too, people I don’t know. They go out clubbing one night, and they never come back.” She gave me a wan smile. “So watch yourself, huh? I don’t know what’s happening, but I’d hate you to join the land of the missing.”

  “Shit.” I leaned against the bar. “People are really disappearing?”

  “That’s the word. Half a dozen. Maybe more. I don’t know if the cops are involved or what. I mean, missing persons, shit. What are they going to do? People go missing all the time.”

  I nodded. Maybe I should call Lily again; she might have been the last person to see Steven, and if he was just the latest in a long line of guys going missing... Or maybe Lily was involved. Of course that occurred to me, I won’t pretend it didn’t, but come on, I didn’t really believe it. I wasn’t living in some suspense flick, you know? The idea that Lily could have something to do with disappearances, it was just too out there.

  Martin, on the other hand...

  I dismissed it. Not my problem. That’s been my mantra for a long time, and it’s gotten me through some rough shit. “Take it easy, Jade-Lynne,” I said, then paused. “You still need help moving?”

  She raised her eyebrow. “Yeah. You offering?”

  I nodded. We’d been close friends, once, and could be again, if I got my head out of my ass and my mind off of Lily. “I’ll come over tomorrow morning.”

  “You’re a good man, Ray,” she said seriously, and I laughed, kind of embarrassed, and went out on the sidewalk to smoke a cigarette.

  It was dark, and cold, and I was thinking of going home. Getting out of my apartment had cleared my head, and I felt better. The only problem with going home was that I might sleep, and that was no good, because I might dream about Martin as a monster again, or about Lily. There was no peace in being a lion in my sleep anymore.

  I finished my cigarette and pitched the butt into the gutter, and then I saw the lion across the street.

  I never thought for a second I was dreaming; I knew real life, and this was it, and there was a fucking lion across the street, but I didn’t think it was an escapee from a zoo or anything, either, because it was the old lion from my dream, silver mane, dark eyes, the dignity of years. It stood across the street, in an alleyway, and it looked at me, then trotted down the alley.

  “Damn,” I said, and looked around, but there was no one else on the street at the moment, no one to say, “Shit, did you see that lion?” so I could say, “Yeah, we’d better call 911.”

  I crossed the street and stopped at the mouth of the alley. “Is there a lion in here?” I said, not shouting but not whispering either, peering into the dark.

  “Nobody here but us chickens,” said an old-man voice, and I almost jumped out of my fucking skin, because I did not expect to hear a human voice.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to bother you.” So I was hallucinating. That was an interesting addition to my list of problems.

  “Ray, do you work at being so dumb?”

  I didn’t move. “Ah. No. It’s a native talent. Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met.” Something rustled, like a body moving on newspapers. “I
n dreams. ‘In the jungle, the mighty jungle...’” His voice was sweet and high. “Do I have to draw you a picture? There is a monster, Ray. It’s in your territory. My territory, too, but I’m old, and alone. You have people, a group, a pride.”

  I thought of Jade-Lynne, of Steven, of Susie and Nick, even of people I barely knew, like Charlie Johnson. They were the closest thing I had to family, a bunch of individuals swirling past each other, sleeping together and borrowing money and enacting petty betrayals, helping and hurting. Were they my tribe? Were they the pride I dreamed about?

  “The monster is taking your people,” the old man in the alley said. “You have to stop him.”

  “I don’t get a magic sword or some stalwart companions to help me, do I?” I said, my mouth running on autopilot, as it so often does, while my mind played catch-up.

  “This is real life, son. Even if parts of it do look like special effects.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Look up the street,” he said, and I did—

  —and there was Lily, decked out in her sexy-red-dress best, getting into a cab, pulling some guy in with her, and the car drove away.

  “Shit,” I said, and wondered if that guy, whoever it was, was ever going to come home again.

  “Follow that car,” the old voice said, and chuckled. There was another rustling noise, and then nothing.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, I’m still in the dark about a lot of stuff, here,” but there was no response, and I got the sense I was talking to empty space, anyway.

  I found a payphone and called a cab, but it didn’t come right away, so I stood on the street for twenty minutes, stomping my feet, thinking about my dreams, wondering if I was going crazy, wondering if it mattered, knowing I had to go to Lily’s and find out what was going on.

  The cab came. I gave the driver directions to Lily’s neighborhood, and got out about a block from her house. There was light in her living room window, but the bedroom was dark, which might or might not have been a good sign. I walked toward her house, trying to think what I’d say, especially if Martin answered the door. “Hi, I changed my mind, and I would like to be in a wild three-way with you and Lily”? Or “Hi, an old lion in an alley told me you were a monster, could you get the fuck out of town”?