In This Skin (27 page)

    ”She looked at me, her eyes all bright and shining; she
had this huge smile on her face, then she says, 'Please don't ask me how I
know this is home. All I know is I'll find it here.'

    ”By now, I'm thinking she must be on some
pretty powerful medication. In any event, the poor lady's mind must be every
which way due to the shock of learning she was dying. That'd do strange things
to a person. I'm also thinking how can I persuade her to give me the telephone
number of a family member who can collect her. And all the time she's talking
about how happy she is to find her way home… to her real home, that is.”

    That was the moment that Benedict West brought to mind the crook who the off-duty cop had shot in the convenience store. For some reason, the dying man had taken off on his motorcycle, driven across town to the Luxor, then tried to claw his way into the building. All the time he'd been claiming he was going home. And he was dying, just like the woman Lockram had found on the dance floor. Both had said that their home lay somewhere in the Luxor. Benedict's mind leapfrogged forward to finding Robyn carried by the creature with the blossoming mass of lips, and the arms that looked not like regular arms but… he strived to pull a description… stems? Did the arms resemble stems? Robyn had stated without a glimmer of doubt in her eyes that she'd somehow found herself in a forest inside the Luxor.

    Benedict had seen for himself the leaf fragments clinging to her hair.

    Was that the key to all this? If so, could all this somehow relate to Mariah Lee's disappearance?

    Benjamin's Lockram's slow voice drew his attention back to the TV where the thirty-year-old videotape ghosted images of the now-dead man across the screen.

    ”This woman, Grace, was so full of the joys of spring, as the old saying goes, that I didn't know how to begin calming her. I started to tell her to take it easy, that I'd get her a drink of water… a drink of brandy, come to that… then arrange a ride home. Only she'd have none of that. She just told me how excited she was at this miraculous vision of where her real home was. That she'd seen it before in dreams when she'd been ill with rheumatic fever as a child. That home lay beyond a gray forest on a mountainside. And there were towers and domed buildings-and that you could hear the sound of hundreds of bells pealing away; that it wasn't discordant but beautifully harmonious. 'A symphony for the soul'was how the woman described it. And that she'd been able to smell a wonderful perfume floating through the streets of this magical city. By this time, I didn't know what I could do with the woman; she was so happy she was close to mania. I was afraid she'd start dancing about the place. Just as I decided I'd have to get mean with her to calm her down (after all, I didn't want Mary to hear the commotion and come downstairs in her state. She was close to six months pregnant by then)… just as I decided I had to grab the woman by the wrists, she stopped and turned to look at the stage like she'd heard something. Only she couldn't have. Because apart from Mary asleep in the apartment, the only people in the Luxor were the happy bouncing lady with shiny eyes and myself, one Benjamin Lockram. Grace stared toward the stage. I found I stared, too, half expecting a second intruder. Only I saw nothing. But I felt something. I felt a cool breeze blow into my face. A cool wet breeze like you get in the fall. I could smell fallen leaves, moss, wet wood, dew, toadstool, mushroom. Those forest smells that fill your nostrils after it rains in the great outdoors.

    ”The lady's eyes were wide… wide! Like balls of glass in her head as if she's seen the Second Coming. 'It's here!' she shouts. 'It's here!' Then she dashed forward. I mean, she just catapulted herself, skirts flying, her arms stretched forward; she moved so fast her hair rippled straight out behind her. I ran after her. For some reason I thought she'd deliberately run into the stage to hurt herself. I remember telling myself it was those painkilling drugs scrambling her head. As I ran, my slipper flicked off my foot. The bare skin couldn't grip the floorboards properly and I went forward headfirst to land on my belly. It knocked the air right out of me. The gun and flashlight went skidding out in front of me. For a second I couldn't breathe. My ribs ached like hellfire from the belly flop. Even though it was only for a moment I screwed my eyes tight shut as I caught my breath. I put my hands out to push myself so I could sit upright. I recall the ground being soft and wet. One of the cleaners had left behind a wet cloth, I reasoned. Then I opened my eyes. The woman had gone, vanished as if she'd stepped through a hole in the atmosphere and into another world… The comparison was a truer one than I could have believed. The gun and the flashlight that went skittering away across the floor had vanished, too. And when I looked at my hands I saw I'd bunched them into fists because the pain in my ribs had been pretty bad. When I opened them I found I was clutching two handfuls of soft, wet leaves.”

    Benedict remembered the strange-looking leaf that he'd untangled from Robyn's hair and began to understand.

    

    

    In that slow voice that held a gentle resonance, Lockram finished his story. This was where Benedict leaned forward, hands gripping his knees, waiting expectantly for the final shot, daring it to be as he remembered it from when he'd first watched the tape an hour ago.

    Benjamin Lockram sat in that tight column of white light where silver flecks danced. He gave a little shrug. ”No, I never did find out what happened to the lady I knew only as Grace. She'd entered the Luxor. She never left. Not in a way I understood as leaving, that is. I'd have seen if she'd doubled back and exited through the broken glass. And when I checked, all the other doors to the rear were secure. My gun and flashlight had vanished, too. All I had in return were two fistfuls of wet leaves. One of the star-shaped leaves attracted my curiosity. I dried it, pressed it, then took it to the library to try to identify the species of tree. I never did find a match. But by then I doubted if I ever would. I knew people were coming to the Luxor 'to find their way home,' as they described it. Some left disappointed, but I could see all were obsessed with the notion… 'compulsion 'would be a better word. Later, I took to watching videotapes from security cameras. I'd watch some individuals walk in through the lobby back there. I learned to spot the ones. They didn't dress like the fans of The Ramones or Jethro Tull or whoever was playing. They stood out from the crowd. For some reason I could never see them step out onto the Luxor's dance floor and into that other place they called home. Only I saw, when I played back tapes of the audience leaving at the end of the night, that they'd never left. Mariah Lee. Ice-water shivers flooded Benedict's bones. Mariah Lee had walked into the Luxor. Benedict had seen her with his own eyes. She'd never left. She'd never…

    ”The Luxor underwent a transformation in those final years before I finally closed its doors forever. It had always been an otherworldly place that was a step away from our mundane day-to-day world. For decades I ascribed that to it being a venue where generations of young people went to have fun; it was a little glittering splinter of show business in a land surrounded by grim factories. My Luxor was a place to escape your daily cares about holding down a job, keeping the house tidy, raising kids. But there was more to it than that. I researched its history and learned about the crows-those gangsters of the bird world, how they're omens of death-and that the creatures lay in wait to catch the soul the moment the person died and the body released its spirit. The name for these soul-catchers is a psychopomp-a funny name for a creature that struck terror into the hearts of our ancestors. All that and more. Much more. For some reason, certain individuals were drawn here. They believed-and still believe that their home lies through some invisible doorway on the dance floor. I don't know how they know. Come to that, I'm certain they don't know. They're driven by instinct just the way bears know when it's time to hibernate or geese know when it's time to migrate thousands of miles. Now it's time to draw this to an end…”

    Onscreen the old man glanced at his watch, those sad eyes tired now.

    ”… but there is one last act. My wife, you will recall, was pregnant. She gave birth to a healthy son whom we named Nathaniel. The doctors marveled at the sight of such a robust baby boy delivered by a mother of fifty. Right from the start I knew he was special. Within days he was taking notice of his surroundings. When he looked at me, I saw his eyes were knowing. He ever seemed amused, as if to say, 'Well hello there, Pop. You think I'm just a little baby. There's far more to me than meets the eye, you know.' Within a month he'd dispensed with night feeds and was sleeping through. He didn't cry so much as shout when he was hungry. Nathaniel lit up Mary's life. It seemed as if she'd waited half a century to be so happy and so fulfilled. We were old parents, by most standards, I guess, but Nathaniel gave us the shine of a married couple in their twenties. We were overjoyed; we…”

    He tailed off, remembering some bitter reality with a vividness that choked the words in his throat. He took a deep breath, then forced himself to continue. Benedict's eyes fastened on the screen. Benedict couldn't look away now even if he wanted to.

    And, dear God, he wanted to.

    ”What happened to Nathaniel robbed Mary of every shred of happiness. After a while she took to her bed. You've heard of the phrase 'died of a broken heart.' My Mary did just that. Not in a biological sense, naturally. But the heart of her personality, the core of Mary that contained her hopes, faith and ability to be happy, was destroyed. Within a year of losing Nathaniel, Mary fell asleep and never woke up. And as for our baby boy? What happened to him? Now you realize why I've made this video recording. I couldn't bring myself to tell you. I don't possess the descriptive words. I don't have the heart to tell. But I can show you. On the evening of April 20,1971, Mary and I put Nathaniel into his crib. Outside it was unseasonably warm, so we left a window open in his room. I noticed a flock of crows flying toward the Luxor just as the sun was setting. By eleven that night we were tired, so we decided not to finish watching the show on TV and go straight to bed. Also, I'd arranged a meeting with a booking agency in the morning and needed to be clearheaded. Like we did every night, we looked in on Nathaniel. He was sleeping like a lamb. Then we went to bed, and sometime during the night there must have been… there must have been some…” Benjamin Lockram shook his head. In the brilliance of the spotlight, tears shone in his eyes. He pressed his lips together, straightened his backbone, then took a deep breath.

    ”What you will see next, my friend, is footage I have taken from the security camera that covers the dance floor. The time counter in the bottom right-hand corner reads 3:08 in the morning, April twentieth. The light source is from a sixty-watt bulb left burning for security purposes. That light is situated above the doors from the dance hall to the lobby. There is no one in the building apart from Mary and I, who are asleep upstairs in the apartment at this time. Oh? And let me tell you-on the thumb of Nathaniel's left hand is a brown birthmark that resembles the Man in the Moon.” Tears filled the man's eyes with liquid silver. ”This, then, is the security footage.”

    The edit was a rough one. The image jumped from a man who sat grieving for his lost son to a high angle black-and-white shot from a camera fixed midway up the dance hall wall above the lobby doors. In the light of that sixty-watt bulb, Benedict could see the stage only dimly as if it were partly hidden by a pearl-white mist. For a moment nothing happened. The dance floor was bare, the place deserted. And of course without taped sound, the CCTV footage was completely silent. When the time bar in the corner of the screen clicked over to 3:09, a shadow appeared on the floor, an elongated one of a figure as yet unseen coming through the doors onto the dance floor. Benedict found he was holding his breath.

    Moving slowly, without hurry, but with a purposefulness that breathed of sinister intent, a figure walked out. The picture quality was poor, the light source insufficient for real clarity, and yet Benedict saw enough to snap his muscles tight and quivering. The figure moved ten paces toward the center of the dance floor.

    Benedict shivered as his eyes widened, striving to process every black line, every gray smudge on the cathode ray tube into a coherent picture. He saw that the figure was walking hunched over the bundle it carried, hugging it to its chest.

    Benedict saw the spindle legs sheathed in torn material. The dome of its head was over-large and swelled from one temple, lending it a lumpy, lopsided look. A froth of wispy hair floated around the skull so thinly it barely appeared to grow from it. The mystery figure paused for a moment, standing there, as if waiting for some inexplicable event.

    As Benedict watched, a cylindrical shape slipped from the bundle the figure carried, to dangle beneath. Benedict leaned forward, his eyes watering as he stared hard to identify what he saw onscreen. Yes… he was right the first time. He was looking at a baby's leg. The leg moved in a kicking motion. The baby-Nathaniel Lockram-was awake. Of course, Benedict heard no screams because the camera system wasn't wired for sound. Then, just for a second, as if the figure had heard something, it swung around to look back toward the lobby And just for that dreadful, heart-stopping second, Benedict looked into the face of the figure. He saw a pair of eyes that were huge and round and hard as glass, blazing back into the camera. He saw the mouth, too. A series of rounded lips, one inside the other, growing smaller as they reached the core where a hole pulsated. The creature didn't grasp the crying baby-that oh-so silently crying baby-in a pair of arms. No. They were long tapering limbs, something like pale, fleshy stems.

    Then the misshapen figure turned its monstrous back on the wall-mounted camera (as Benedict sat with his knuckle between his teeth). Quickly it moved forward, carrying the baby parceled in its crib blanket. It must have been the poor quality of the light, its low power, surely, but the effect that Benedict saw on that grainy, indistinct security footage was of the figure vanishing into a pearl mist on the dance floor.