Serpent's Kiss (3 page)

    "Which apartment is that?" the fat man said. The collie was yipping. He wanted outside with the green grass and yellow butterflies.

    He said, too quickly, "Number 106."

    The fat man lost his expression of suspicion. Now he looked curious. "You actually know him?"

    "Who?"

    "The guy who lives in 106."

    "Oh. Yeah. Sure. As I said, he's a friend of mine."

    The fat man pawed at some kind of very red, crusty skin disease he had on one of his elbows. "Nobody's ever seen him."

    "Really?"

    "Not one of us. But we've always been curious."

    This time, the dog didn't merely yip. He barked. In the small vestibule, the sound was like an explosion.

    "Needs to piss," the fat man said. Then he smiled. "Matter of fact, so do I. But I guess I should've thought of that sooner, huh?"

    And with that, he nodded goodbye and let the collie jerk him down the vestibule stairs and outside.

    Two minutes later he stood in front of 106.

    The apartment was at the far end of the hall. Warm dusty sunlight fell through sheer dusty curtains. For a moment he felt lazy and snug as a tomcat on a sunny bed. He wished he knew who he was. He wished things were all right.

    He looked both ways, up and down the long rubber runner that stretched from one end of the hallway to the other.

    Nothing. Nobody coming. Nobody peeking out doors.

    He inserted the key.

    How had he come by this key, anyway? Exactly what was it doing in his pocket?

    The key worked wonderfully; too wonderfully.

    He pushed open the door and stepped inside 106.

    The smell bothered him more than the darkness.

    Unclean. That was all he could think of. His brother and he had once found a mouse that had died in the cellar. Over a period of hot sticky days, it had decomposed. He thought of that now. Of the way that little mouse with its innards all eaten out had smelled.

    But if he could remember his brother… why couldn't he remember himself?

    The second thing he noticed was the darkness.

    You wouldn't think, on so bright a day, that you'd be able to keep an apartment this dark, even with all the paper shades and curtains pulled down.

    But it was nearly nightlike in here.

    He reached over to turn on a table lamp. The bulb blew, blinding him temporarily.

    Shit. What the hell was going on here?

    It took long, unnerving moments for his sight to return.

    He felt helpless and stupid.

    Gradually, it did come back, of course, his sight, and so he walked through the three rooms and a bathroom and all he could think of was Aunt Agnes, how even into the 1980s she'd kept her little tract home looking just like the 1950s, complete with blond coffee table and big blond Philco TV console and lumpy armchairs with those screaming godawful slipcovers with the ugly floral patterns.

    This apartment was like that. And given the heavy layer of grey dust on everything, he doubted it had been cleaned since the 1950s, either… And then the thought:
Who was Aunt Agnes? If I can remember her…

    He had the sense that he'd just stepped into a storage closet that hadn't been opened since the last time President Eisenhower had been on the tube…

    
Why have I come here?

    On one of the blond end tables there was a telephone, one of the ancient rotary models.

    He went over and picked up the receiver and thought: Who am I going to call?

    And then, automatically, he dialled a local number.

    The dial tone was so loud it seemed to be digging a tunnel into his ear.

    Four rings.

    On the fifth a very pretty female voice said, "Hello?"

    He said nothing.

    "Hello?" she said again.

    And again he said nothing.

    Who was this? Why had he called?

    "Hello?" she said. There was something desperate in her voice now. And then she said: "It's you, isn't it?" And her voice was softer. You might even call it tender. "It is you, isn't it?"

    He wanted to say something.

    He had this sudden, inexplicable urge to cry. To sob. He felt overwhelmed with grief.

    But why? And who was this woman exactly, anyway?

    "Richard," she said. "Richard, please just tell me if s you."

    And then he hung up.

    He sat down in a dusty armchair and put his face in his hands. Again, the urge to sob. It was almost as if he wanted to vomit. To purge himself.

    He looked at the phone. In the curious brown curtain-closed darkness of the musty, dusty room, the phone looked almost alien. How queer, when you thought about it, that you should pick up this small instrument and a human voice would come through it.

    He put his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. He thought of what the fat man in the OLD FART T-shirt had said. That nobody had ever seen the man who lived in 106.

    Was he the man who lived in 106? Somehow he doubted it.

    And then he saw the envelope.

    It was a regular manila envelope, with a metal clasp close, an eight by ten.

    He saw it in his mind.

    And he saw what was inside.

    That was when he jerked forward in the chair and opened his eyes.

    He did not want to see, to know what was inside the envelope.

    The only way to avoid this was to keep his eyes open. To somehow forget all about the manila envelope.

    He stood up and started pacing.

    He should leave this apartment. Leave quickly.

    But go where?

    If he did not know who he was, how could he possibly know where he was going?

    In the cinnamon coloured darkness, he paced some more.

    This went on for ten minutes.

    Meanwhile, on the street, girls laughed and babies cried and cars honked and buses whooshed past.

    If only he could be a part of that.

    That bright, giddy flow of spring life.

    Be gone from this musty smell of death; and the sudden queer chill of the living room as he turned and looked through the gloom at the bedroom.

    Of course. That's where the envelope was. The envelope he'd seen so clearly in his mind.

    In the bureau there.

    Top right hand drawer.

    Just waiting for him.

    He tried not to go. He tried instead to go to the front door and put his hand on the knob and let himself out into the warm streaming sunlight and the sweet balming laughter of children.

    But instead, he went farther into the odd darkness of this place, deeper and deeper till he passed the brass bed and the solemn closed closet, and walked straight to the bureau and put his hand forth and-

    The manila envelope was there, of course.

    Waiting for him.

    He reached in and picked it up and then he gently closed the bureau drawer and walked back to the living room.

    With great weariness, he went to the armchair he'd been sitting in and sat down once more, a great sigh shuddering through him, his blue eyes sorrowful, knowing the images they would soon fall on.

    He made quick work of it, then, knowing there was no point in putting it off any longer.

    He unclasped the envelope and slid the photographs out.

    The surface of the black and white photographs was glossy, silken to the touch. Given the clothes the women wore, and the hairstyles, these photos had obviously been taken in the thirties. But that made them no less shocking.

    He looked away at first.

    They were even worse than he'd imagined them.

    But once more, after turning his head for long moments, he knew it was no use.

    He stared at the photos again.

    Carnage was the only word that could describe what his eyes settled on now.

    Two or three young women, naked, their faces hacked up-one of them had had her nose ripped away-and their breasts cleaved off, leaving only bloody holes.

    In the centre of a stomach a hexagram had been bloodily carved, and in another an obscenity had been cut into a forehead.

    Sickened, he sank back in the chair.

    He knew better than to close his eyes. His mind would only conjure up the photographs again.

    But he knew he was not done with the envelope quite yet. With the photographs, yes.

    But waiting inside the envelope would be a sheet of paper… He had seen this in his mind, too.

    And so once more, he sat forward, and jammed his hand inside the envelope and pulled out a small piece of white writing paper.

    In the centre of it was writing in ballpoint pen.

    He had to hold the paper close to his face to read it.

    MARIE FANE

    He knew instantly who she was, and why her name was here.

    Despite himself, he raised one of the photos and studied it again.

    Marie Fane was alive now, but soon enough she would be one of these dead and savaged women.

    And he did not have to wonder about who her killer would be.

    

    

    A sullen black youth in leg irons and handcuffs being led to a police car raised his left hand and flipped everybody the bird.

    Cut to: Three SWAT team cops kneeling down behind a car as a beefy white man swaggered across a night-time parking lot firing two handguns at them.

    Cut to: a pretty teenage girl sobbing about her addiction to crack cocaine.

    Cut to: a mayor's aide running to his car obviously trying to outdistance the reporter who kept yelling questions at him about an alleged contractor payoff and cover up.

    The one thing all these pieces of videotape had in common was the presence, at the end of each story, of a tall, redheaded woman in her mid-thirties. While nobody had ever called her beautiful she did have a vivacious intelligence that made her unabashedly sexy both on camera and off. Her full mouth was by turns wry and sombre, her green eyes by turns comic and vulnerable, and her voice by turns ironic and sad. She signed off each piece the same way: "This is Chris Holland, Channel 3 News."

    Now, a Chris Holland four years older sat in a small editing room in the back of the noisy Channel 3 newsroom smoking one of her allotted three cigarettes a day, and editing a videotape.

    What she was putting together was called an audition reel. Reporters take their best stories, edit them together, and send them out to potential employers, i.e., TV stations around the country. Maybe the reporter is a city type who suddenly longs for a few years in the boonies; maybe the reporter is trying to survive a bad divorce and feels a change of scenery will stave off putting the old head in the oven; or-and this is the most likely scenario-the reporter feels it's now time for him/her to take that shot at working in a bigger and better market-trade in Des Moines, say, for Chicago or Terre Haute for LA. Or, if you've just been fired, trade in your present situation for just about any place where the currency is American and the plumbing is indoors. At any given time in the USA it is estimated that more than five thousand newspeople are sneakily putting together audition tapes and another five thousand are at various post offices shipping their mothers off somewhere. While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it isn't an exaggeration by much.

    Just now, watching her audition reel whip by, Chris Holland made a judgement. In her earlier days, she had definitely come on as a bimbette. Oh, nothing crass and obvious like blowing kisses at the camera or hanging an AVAILABLE FOR OCCUPY sign on her back. But little things, teeny tiny things, a fluttering eyelash here, a kind of sexy inflection there, had definitely been a part of her news presentation. And while she was not one of those feminists who wore cast iron chastity belts and threw darts at posters of Burt Reynolds, she did have enough self-respect to see what she'd been doing. Just too cute and too coy by half.

    She rewound the tape, took the reel off the editing machine, put it back in its box, shut off the machine, shut out the light, and left the editing room for up front where, at this time of morning, the Channel 3 reporters gathered to get their assignments from Heinrich Himmler's illegitimate son, a fat Irishman named O'Sullivan.

    O'Sullivan had been here six years, had survived three changes of management, two changes of consultant groups, an ex-wife who still believed that adultery was okay if you didn't get caught, a teenage daughter who was dating a biker she insisted on calling 'sensitive,' and a group of nine reporters who felt he was exercising a personal vendetta against each one of them.

    Chris knew all these things because two nights a week she went bowling with O'Sullivan. Most of her co-workers saw this as nothing more than her sucking up to her boss, but in fact, she liked O'Sullivan and considered him one of the few men she could talk to. Behind the ketchup stained neckties, the dandruff flaked shoulders, the beard stubbled chin, and the extra thirty pounds was a man who knew about Baudelaire as well as boxing, about Degas as well as de Gaulle, and about Edward R. Murrow as well as MTV Early on-this was just after his wife had walked out on him and Chris's own main squeeze had started being unfaithful, too-they'd tried having an affair, but it had led to little more than some heavy eighth-grade-style petting, some dawn-sober admissions of loneliness and fear on both parts, and the awesome realisation that somehow, against all odds, a woman and a man had become very good platonic friends. Buddies, even pals, but not lovers. So they went bowling and got beer-drunk and O'Sullivan did the best he could to treat her just like all the other reporters on his news team- shitty.