Hart & Boot & Other Stories Page 13

  I didn’t feel like much of a lion as I went up the walk, up her steps. I took a breath, and I knocked on Lily’s door.

  The inner door creaked open, and Lily stood behind the screen, wearing the white robe I’d seen her in so many times. Her hair was messed up, like she’d just had sex, and for all I knew, she had. Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “Ray, get out of here.” But she didn’t close the door, didn’t move, so I didn’t, either.

  “Lily... look, we really need to talk.”

  She shook her head. “We had something good, Ray, but it’s over now, I’m sorry. Please don’t come here again.”

  “Fuck, Lily,” I said, and banged my hand against the frame of the door; she didn’t jump, just stared at me. “Look, I know something’s going on. I saw you leave the club with Steven Lee last night, and nobody’s seen him since, and I saw you with another guy tonight, and... shit, I’ve had these dreams... and Martin asked me if I wanted to have a threesome with you—”

  Lily shook her head, sharply, and I wondered if she was drunk, or on something; she seemed distracted. “I know you met Martin, Ray, he told me. I thought you’d stay away after that, that it would be enough... you have to leave here.”

  “What do you care where I go? You dumped me like a sack of shit, Lily.”

  She stared at me. “I dumped you to save you, Ray,” she said, her voice low. “I didn’t let him... have you... even though he wanted you. I was always Lily with you, not the Judas goat.”

  I just looked at her, wondering what she was talking about, afraid I sort of knew. She started to close the door, and her robe fell open, and I saw the blood smeared on her chest, on her breasts. It wasn’t her blood. I knew that.

  I thought of her in bed with Martin, and another man, the man between the two of them, the man bleeding, and the blood smearing on Lily’s breasts, and Martin’s chest. I think I lost my mind a little, then. I couldn’t make sense of what I knew of Lily, and of that image. They didn’t fit together at all.

  Somewhere in the house, a man screamed, and then the screaming stopped abruptly. Lily’s eyes widened in alarm, and she turned away, the door not quite closed.

  I didn’t think. I just wrenched open the screen door and charged in.

  “No, Ray!” Lily said, but I shouldered my way past her, into the living room. It was just like I remembered, but it was obvious Martin lived here, now; there were new books, instrument cases, a jacket hanging over a chair, boots by the door, little indelible traces of him.

  I could smell Martin, like river water and desert sand, and I smelled blood; it was like being a lion in my dream, every sense cranked up.

  I growled and went straight to the bedroom, expecting to see blood and horror, Martin crouched naked over a body, but the bedroom was empty, though there were more traces of Martin’s presence, intermingled with Lily’s. Where the hell was Martin, and the man who’d screamed?

  “Ray,” Lily said, clutching her robe closed again, doing her best to look serious and reasonable. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you have to go.” She hesitated. “Don’t make me call the police.”

  I just stared at her. “I saw the blood. Go ahead and call the police, please! Where’s Martin?”

  “He’s not here. What are you talking about, blood?” Her knuckles were white, clenching the robe closed all the way to her neck.

  I went down the short hallway, but Martin wasn’t in the bathroom or the little laundry room or the kitchen, and that was it, there was no more house.

  Except there was a basement, the doorway tucked into one corner of the kitchen, and then stairs leading down. I’d never been down there. Lily said it was full of old filing cabinets and broken chairs and shit. Move along, nothing to see here.

  Lily had trailed after me through the house, telling me to leave, but when I stared at the basement door in the kitchen she jerked open a drawer and took out a butcher knife. She held it, the point aimed toward my face, and stalked toward me. I backed up. This was some twisted shit.

  “You have to leave. You have to stop making noise, or he’ll know you’re here... and then I can’t be responsible. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, don’t you understand that?”

  I took a step forward. “Lily,” I said, my voice breaking. “How could you get mixed up in this?” Whatever the hell “this” was. Martin was doing something nasty, and Lily was helping, but I didn’t know what that had to do with lions or voices coming from alleyways; maybe nothing, maybe that was just the seasoning in this crazy soup.

  “We all need things,” she said. “Martin isn’t like other people— he isn’t like people at all, Ray. Anemics need iron, diabetics need insulin. Martin needs...” She shook her head.

  “Sex? Death? Rabies shots?” I said, making an effort to speak quietly, because that seemed to chill her out, a little.

  “Blood,” she said. “And... everything else. Flesh. Clothes. Life. He consumes it all. I don’t have to watch that part. I do help with the rest, sometimes, with the luring-in, the seducing.” She sighed. “He doesn’t do it often, Ray, you must understand, almost never, but... every few years... he binges. He has to, to stay alive, it’s his nature. Martin is very old, Ray, he’s an old soul. He says I have an old soul, too, that there are myths under my skin, that he can help me live forever. Who else can love me for so long, Ray? Who else could love me forever? Not you. You could love me as well as Martin, but not for so long.” Her eyes were pleading. She wanted me to understand.

  “Baby, Martin is fucking with your head. I don’t know what he’s told you, but what do you mean, you could live forever? I don’t—”

  “We all have myths inside us, strains of the old creatures, shreds of the old spirits. Our ancestors mated freely with spirits of the desert, with giants of the earth. It’s only traces in the bloodline, in most people, but some of us... some of us have more, in some of us, the old blood runs strong.” She touched her hair self-consciously. “Martin says I have an island woman far back in my ancestry, a strange ancient sort of woman who turned her lovers to stone, but loved them just the same... Martin says he can help me grow into those powers. Just being in Martin’s presence brings it out in me, I get younger, healthier, his presence does that to everyone who has the old blood. Martin won’t say what you have, but he told me about meeting you at the club, told me he saw something strong and dangerous in you. He wanted me to bring you home, bring you to him, so he could take what you have into himself... and I denied him.” She shook the knife at me like a maraca. “I have never denied him anything, but I would not let him have that, I wouldn’t let him have you, you stupid shit, because I love you. But now you’re here, and if you don’t get out now—”

  “What about Martin’s ancestry? What myth does he have under his skin?” The things she said were crazy, but they took place in the context of a greater madness in which they made sense; because suddenly I knew what I had, far back in my spiritual ancestry. Some multiple-great grandparent of mine had mated with something on the savanna, some lion god, and the lingering effects were still with me. But what the hell had Martin’s ancestors mated with?

  Lily shook her head. “Martin isn’t like us, he isn’t a half-breed. He is the myth, the thing entire. He was born in the heat of a jungle before civilization was born, and he has lived in deserts and groves. He is mardkhora, man-slayer, manticore, with a tail of stinging spines, a triple row of teeth in a human head, his voice like trumpet and flute played together...” Her voice was dreamy, distant, and her words had the flavor of a recitation; they chilled me down to the guts and marrow. “He was always partly a man, and he can make himself seem to be completely a man. Except...” she glanced toward the door at her back.

  I understood. “Except when he feeds. Right? Then he’s all monster.” I shook my head. “At least he’s got an excuse; it’s what he is. But you chose to help him.” My voice thickened; I thought I might cry. “I can’t believe I ever loved you.”

  “I t
hink you can’t love as deeply I do,” she said, simply, without malice, and it made my heart clench. “And you must know, I love you as much as I do him. He will simply be with me longer, and I had to choose.”

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  “You’ll die, if you try that.” She lowered the knife. “I don’t want you to die.”

  “He’s part lion, isn’t he, Lily?”

  She frowned. “He... has a lion’s body, sometimes.”

  “I think that’s why I hate him so much,” I said. “Because he’s a, a perversion of what I am.”

  “What you are? You’re... a lion?”

  I looked at the basement door. “I have to go.”

  “I didn’t know you were brave,” she said. “A lion.” There was wonderment in her voice, and worry. She stared at me, her eyes wide, her expression fixed. Her hair fluttered, as if moved by a breeze.

  I ground my teeth together, as suddenly my arms and legs became too heavy to move. I felt like I’d been turned to stone; there might have been concrete poured into my stomach, lead wrapped around my bones.

  But my enemy was below, in his lair, and I could smell him, and he was killing my pride.

  I grunted and took a step forward, breaking whatever spell Lily had put on me, whatever weight of myth she’d brought to bear. She’d tried to turn me to stone... and the worst part was, she wanted to do it for my own good, to save me. She gasped when I moved, and dropped her knife with a clatter, and fell to her knees. Something had snapped in her head, I think, or else I’d snapped it when I fought her, put too much strain on her psychic sinew and torn it. She crouched, swaying, shaking her head. She would be all right, or she wouldn’t—I couldn’t do anything about it.

  I picked up the knife with my left hand, looking at the blade, thinking of what might be waiting for me, down below. Lily could turn people to stone, maybe, sort of, and Martin was an out-and-out monster; suddenly having the soul of a big cat didn’t seem like such hot shit. But I’d do what I had to. I opened the door.

  I expected the basement to be dark, but I guess Martin liked to see what he was doing, because there was track lighting down there, bright as the inside of a supermarket. The basement was one big room, and there were dark stains on the concrete floor, some of them several feet in diameter.

  Martin was...

  When I had my dream of Martin by the river, I could see him, I could see the monster. And having that experience—ephemeral though it was—gave me some context for understanding what I saw there in the basement, seeing what Martin really was. I don’t think most people are capable of seeing and interpreting shit like that. If humans ever could see and understand such things, that ability has been pretty much bred out of us as a species.

  Martin was a monster, a manticore, but he shifted—his fur was the purple of dusk, then a matted red, then faded orange, and then tawny, lion-colored. His tail rose, segmented like a scorpion’s, long spikes sprouting from the tail and then disappearing. For a moment, I swear, his tail became a serpent, with a hissing head on the end, and it looked at me with yellow eyes, comprehending me totally. Martin, the monster, had his back end toward me, his head bowed over something that I could only see parts of—legs, a hand. His latest victim.

  I growled, and I must have stopped thinking and let instinct take over totally, because I jumped down the six or seven stairs to the floor. I landed in a crouch, the knife in my hand. I want to say I was not myself then, that I was possessed, that some greater force was moving through me—but it’s not true.

  I was me, all the way down, more myself than I’d ever been before.

  Martin didn’t even notice me. He was too busy eating. I didn’t want to see that, to understand how it could be possible, how something his size—a little bigger than a lion—could devour a whole person, clothes and all.

  The tail was a scorpion’s then, not the terribly self-aware snake, and so I approached almost without fear, my knife raised high, and plunged it into his back with a cry.

  The tail smashed me aside, though I kept my grip on the knife, and I fell to the concrete, landing so hard on my shoulder that my right arm went totally numb. The monster turned his face toward me, eyes slitted in fury, blood pouring from the wound in his side. I could only lay there, staring. The monster’s head like a baby’s, smooth and round, fat-cheeked, but it was also clearly Martin’s face. He opened his mouth, revealing the triple rows of teeth, and music came out, flute and trumpet.

  I rolled over onto my stomach, protecting my softest spot, and lifted the knife with my left hand.

  “You hurt me,” he said, in that bass-treble blatting voice. “I didn’t think you had so much lion in you.”

  I bared my teeth and struggled to my knees. His tail lifted, curling, and the spikes reappeared, sliding out like cat’s claws. The spikes were a foot long, poison, instant death, I knew it.

  “I’m part lion,” the manticore said, all trumpet now, all blatting. “I was a lion, long ago, but my line... diverged. Improved. The pure lions still hate me for that. Even your bastard, half-imagined blood has some potency, enough to sting me, but that’s all.”

  He wasn’t going to die from the stab wound. That was quite clear. I’d hurt him, sure, but not enough. I wondered if the old lion from the alley would come crashing through a basement window, jump on Martin’s back, tear him a new asshole.

  I didn’t think so. I didn’t think it was a night for that kind of miracle.

  “I’ll never know what Lily saw in you,” he said, and his tail twitched.

  It was too much. Such a fucking prosaic old-boyfriend thing to say, and it was coming from this fucking inhuman thing, this shiny baby-headed monster with spikes on his tail.

  I laughed. That was all I had left, right? He was going to kill me, but I laughed. And I still had the knife, after all. Maybe I could jump at him, stick it in his eye, get to his brain. What did I have to lose?

  Martin scowled, and his tail uncurled, the spikes dripping venom. I looked him in the eyes. “I bet I’m better in bed than you are,” I said.

  His tail drew back, and I tensed to jump, to laugh in his face and stab before his spikes nailed me.

  Then his tail stopped, and began to change. At first I thought it was just another transformation, that his tail would become a snake and bite me, or that the spikes would sprout barbs. But that wasn’t it—the tail was turning gray, and then tiny cracks appeared in it, like stress fractures. The spikes fell away, shattering on the concrete floor. Martin looked back at his tail, his human face wearing an expression of total horror. The grayness crept up his tail, up his hindquarters, and his horrible too-human eyes widened as his legs turned to stone.

  We both looked up the stairs. Lily was there, sitting on the steps. Her robe was open, and her front was all blood. She wept, her face shiny with tears, and her hair positively writhed, like a nest of angry snakes.

  “Lily,” Martin said, his voice all trilling flute, as the petrification crept up his body. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t look at me, either, though.

  Martin snapped his jaws. The gray slowly crawled up his neck, and then his head. He froze that way, his jaws open. He looked like a gruesome piece of cement lawn art—more cartoonish than monstrous in this fixed state, more comprehensible to human eyes.

  I dropped the knife and ran toward the stairs, but by the time my foot touched the bottom step I couldn’t move any farther—it was like trying to walk through a solid stone wall. Lily looked past me, at Martin.

  “You saved me,” I said. “You chose me.”

  “You would both have died,” she said tonelessly. “Martin would have killed you, but you would have stabbed him before you died, and there is enough lion in you for that wound to be fatal. I know; my ancestors were oracles, and I can see enough of the future to know what would happen. I wanted to save one of you. I couldn’t turn you to stone, not entirely, you’re too human... but Martin is more susceptible to these old things, these old powers. A w
eakness to go with his strength.” She looked at me then, her eyes all pupil, all black, her hair twisting on her shoulders. “I hate both of you,” she said. “I hate both of you for making me choose.”

  She went up the stairs. I couldn’t follow—the air stayed thick for another half hour, and even then I had to fight my way up the stairs, one at a time.

  I never saw Lily again.

  ***

  The next day I helped Jade-Lynne move, and we talked about Steven, how we hoped he was okay, wherever he was. I didn’t tell her Steven was in the belly of a statue of a manticore in a basement across town. She wouldn’t have believed me. I carried boxes all day. Jade-Lynne flirted with me, even, and any other day it would have gone somewhere, but no way, not then.

  This all happened a while ago, you know, months and months, but I still haven’t figured out how I feel about it. I still dream about being a lion, but I haven’t seen the old lion again. Maybe he died. I spend more time with my friends, but I haven’t been on a date in ages, haven’t had sex, either.

  I went to Nick and Susie’s wedding last weekend. They held hands at the altar, like they couldn’t stop touching each other for even that long. I decided they were better off together, just the two of them, for now, for the moment, and that had to be enough, didn’t it? I cried at the ceremony, and even I’m not sure why. Everything hurts, more or less, every day.

  You know what I wish, mostly?

  I wish Lily had turned my heart to stone. Just my heart. That would have been enough, I think. To have a still, stony heart; something heavy, but not so heavy I couldn’t forget about the weight, light enough that I could forget, sometimes, why I was still carrying it around.

  Living with the Harpy

  Living with the harpy presented certain difficulties. Her feathers clogged the shower drain, and the smell of unsavory meats cooked over chemical fires drifted from her room. She screamed profanity sometimes, as if afflicted with Tourette’s, but with obvious glee. I occasionally found drowned mice in the coffeemaker.