Penny Dreadful (16 page)

Breathless and swooning.

And finally I said, has there been a ripple in time and they just giggled like mad chickens and she said my, isn’t he eccentric? And by now they were all pawing at me and blowing into my eyes and touching me and one of them said it was just two dollars a throw. Which meant I could fuck all of them for eight dollars if only I had the strength.

And one of them was actually getting to me. She was small and dark with a mouth the color of fire and her waist was insane, maybe eighteen inches at the most. Pale yellow breasts, heavy and round. The bright smell of mint about her. She had me by the hand and I felt pretty weak, she had me in her grasp and my brain was still chanting two dollars only two dollars but the whole thing was freaking me out and finally I pushed through them like a spooked horse and when I turned to look back, they were gone. One of their bonnets lay on the sidewalk and just as I turned to go back and touch it the wind came up and lifted it up and away and I watched it disappear beyond a dark scaffold of trees.

Moon:

The dark-haired woman lingered on the sidewalk, thin arms crossed over her chest as if she couldn’t decide where she was going. Maybe she was waiting for someone. Of course, she might be waiting for her clothes to hit the rinse cycle. Moon hesitated in the doorway of the laundromat, watching her. He liked the way that heavy velvet skirt hung from her small waist, a physical shadow. It caught rays of the sun and spun them away in fragments. She was not waiting for him, for fat sad balding Detective Moon. That much was pretty clear. He was Charlie Brown. Not quite as bald, maybe. But much fatter and clumsier and plagued by nastier and certainly more powerful bodily odors. The little red-haired girls of the world tended to flash past him like flying squirrels. They rarely touched the ground and generally remained unaware of the large, slow-moving and oafish members of his species.

But one never knew.

Maybe she was in some kind of trouble of her own and needed to talk to someone. A sympathetic cop, for instance. Moon shrugged and glanced at his reflection in the window. His fly was at least zipped and his shirt was clean. What more could he ask of himself? He swabbed at his face with the sleeve of his jacket, wiping away any remaining traces of hamburger grease.

Can I help you? he said.

The woman turned. What?

Help, he said. Do you need any help.

She frowned. No, thank you.

Moon fumbled with his car keys, then dropped them. The ring of metal against pavement. Moon poked at the keys with one foot, suddenly reluctant to bend over and not sure what he was afraid of. Take your pick. His pants could easily rip open at the crotch. His body might choose that exact moment to produce some unsavory noise or odor. And he was well aware that he grunted like a pig giving birth whenever he bent to tie his shoes, but he couldn’t seem to do anything about it. The woman smiled at him, or allowed her lips to curve slightly in his direction. Moon blinked at her. He showed her his gold shield, casually.

I’m not a pervert, he said. I just thought you might need a ride somewhere. This isn’t such a good neighborhood.

Her eyes burned brightly. I live just a block from here.

Oh, well. Moon scratched his head, briefly. Helplessly. His left foot spasmed suddenly and he kicked his own keys into the street.

Your keys, she said.

Yes.

The woman bent quickly, like a bird. Black hair like spilled ink. The long braid swinging lazily around her neck. The twitch of muscle in one bare shoulder. Now the keys jingled in her palm.

She’s fluid, he thought. Fluid.

What’s your name? he said.

Dizzy, she said. Dizzy Bloom.

Nice, he said.

My great-grandmother was Molly Bloom.

Who?

Now she laughed, softly. Did you not read Ulysses in college?

Moon was paralyzed, stupid. Her wide gray eyes tugged at him like gravity and he tried to remember exactly what he had studied in college and came up blank. Sociology, wasn’t it? He spent two years reading a lot of depressing German philosophers, then dropped out to join the cops.

Never mind, said Dizzy.

She took a step forward and placed the keys in his left hand. His fingers closed reflexively. The woman sniffed him and the smile vanished from her face.

It’s you, she said. The smell of blood comes from you.

What?

Be careful with knives, she said.

Moon felt his head wobbling around on his shoulders, as if it wasn’t properly attached. He felt cold. And he had a sudden case of the creeps. He wanted to get away from this freaky bitch. It was too bad, because she had incredible eyes but there was something wrong with her.

I’m sorry, she said.

I hit a thrift store first, a cavernous place called Lost Threads.

The stink of mothballs and a rat-faced clerk wearing army fatigues. Pink Floyd seeping like loneliness from hidden or buried speakers. I counted sixteen mannequins, most of them naked and missing crucial limbs. They made the place feel unpleasantly crowded and somber at once. A mirrored disco ball glittered overhead. There were heaps of clothing everywhere, unsorted. Whole families could be burrowed in among these piles armed with sleeping bags and mosquito netting and collapsible stoves, waiting for the apocalypse. I could almost feel their eyes on me, infuriating little needles. The razor whine of imagined voices. I wandered around for a half hour and came up with an armload of clothes that might fit.

The clerk ignored me when I asked if there was a dressing room. But that was okay, really. I wasn’t proud. I could blend in with the mannequins. I tried on a few things and finally settled on an outfit that Ray Fine and I could both live with. A pair of black and blue Depression-era pinstriped pants made from an unidentified material that flared slightly at the ankles. These were a good fit, actually. They made me feel taller. A hideous, mostly white rayon shirt with a big floppy collar, a possible blood stain on the left breast, and an incongruous surfer motif: a coiled, naked woman on one sleeve and a big orange sunset on the back. A muddy brown unabomber sweatshirt that zipped up the front. An ugly but weirdly stylish wool blazer, bright pea green in color and equipped with seven mysterious pockets. And topped off by a charcoal gray fedora with grease stains along the brim and a mangy feather stuck in the band. I briefly coveted a pair of silver and green Doc Marten clown shoes but they were much too small. My own cracked and dirty work boots would have to do.

Ninety dollars, said the ratty clerk.

I gave him the money and wondered if there might be something secretly wrong with these clothes. That they might be pox- or lice-ridden, for instance. But at that price, I could live with a little infestation. I had had lice before and I was bound to have them again. It wasn’t my problem, anyway. These were Ray’s clothes. I asked for a shopping bag or something to carry my old things in, but the clerk ignored me again. I was barely visible, it seemed. I glanced around and spotted a black plastic garbage sack on the floor, bulging with donated clothes. I dumped the contents on the floor and immediately a furious white moth flew into my face. I killed it by reflex, then tossed my old clothes into the bag, tipped my new hat at the ratty clerk and was gone.

Dizzy Bloom:

The smell of cat, of a solitary man. And dust, a lifetime of dust. Boiled tomatoes. Tobacco and whiskey and unwashed socks. Blood, above all. The burned copper stench of blood. She could see the cat now, sniffing at his toes. She could see a television, a twist of leather. And another man, thin and hungry and staring.

Oh, she had a headache. Blue and crushing. A rain of brittle flowers. Her vision shrinking and she was looking through a fish-eye lens and then everything faded and she breathed with relief. She hated this, she did. She never asked for this. She never knew what to do with what she saw.

Dizzy walked through a fine white mist and hoped it wouldn’t rain before she made it home.

Yesterday she had touched a woman, a Trembler.

Dizzy took one breath of the woman’s ash-white hair and suffered a prolonged vision of her five or ten years into the future, sobbing and ripped apart as she gave birth to a damaged child, a mongoloid with fused spine. But somehow beautiful. It was still a child, a little boy-child and he was amazing and fine when he took his first breath. Even though he wouldn’t live more than a year. She couldn’t bring herself to tell the Trembler what she saw. It would have accomplished nothing and besides, the Trembler had been heavily drugged. She had been a puppet, a ninety-six-pound ghost. Her flesh had not been her own and her mind was porous.

And besides, it had been Dizzy’s choice to tell or not tell. She had owed the Trembler nothing, for the game of tongues described no parameters for the Breathers. They were unbound by the laws that guided the other players, that gave them purpose. For most of them, this was not a problem. They drifted through the game as bystanders, witnesses. They were free to help or ignore the other players as they wished. But Dizzy was the rare Breather who saw not the past, but the future. Fortunately for her, she was not tormented by every breath she took. Thank God for that. She was not plunged into an unknown and possibly terrifying future by every drifting scent. Her visions were rare, unexpected. And so she functioned well enough. The hardest to bear was the unwanted glance into someone’s last day. Even with the game, death could be very real and the scent of it left her ill for days. But when she ventured outside the game and into the realm of Citizens, she was at times visited by terrible and confusing visions. She could never be sure if what she saw was real. The Citizens were said to be unaffected, untouched by the game and any visions that swelled from them must therefore be mistaken. But no one within the game could ever agree on this. Only the Gloves knew, and they only smiled when asked for the truth.

The poor policeman. Overweight and lonely and worried about his hair. His blood had seemed real, very real. As if he had been bleeding from an unseen wound along the thigh, the ankle. And perhaps he was not an ordinary Citizen at all. There had been a fading but distinct glow of the glamour about him, the almost visible smell of flowers. He had worn the fuzzy look of the unaware Fred.

Dizzy turned down her street, walking quickly now. She wanted a bath, she wanted bubbles and steam and a small glass of wine. She wanted to shed her clothes and be alone, to sleep. Tonight she would not enter the game, and she would not drink the Pale.

Her mouth was sore but her head was clear, the brittle blue flowers forgotten. The taint of blood was gone. Dizzy sighed and looked to the wide yellow sky and reminded herself that blood was not always the end. It may come of nothing, a cut finger or crushed nose. There were black clouds in the west, seeping into the yellow and she could only hope that the fat policeman suffered nothing more than a mishap with his razor.

Home, she was home.

Dizzy opened the iron gate, started up the flagstone path. Her house was a three-story Victorian with wild roses and creeping vines and a slightly leaky roof left her by her grandmother. She saw the first shadow on her porch, then another. There were three of them and she sighed, but she was not surprised. The game had come to her. She would at least have a bath. But she might not resist the Pale.

The first shadow came down the steps to greet her with empty hands. He bowed to her and she recognized him. Chrome, the Mariner. She didn’t know him well, but she had heard rumors of him. That he was a fearsome hunter, collector of a hundred tongues. And that he was a gentleman, a charmer of men and women. Dizzy shrugged. She was not so easily charmed. On the porch behind him was Mingus, a gentle Breather. The third shadow was a young girl, thin and dark and unknown. Chrome introduced her as Goo, apprentice to the Lady Adore.

Welcome, said Dizzy.

Dear Jude.

Don’t worry about me. The pain is gone. I can tie my own shoes without whimpering. I have gained a few pounds and people don’t stare at me in the street. I don’t horrify myself in the shower.

My grandfather had this three-legged dog, a pit bull named Chaucer. And he was a fucked-up animal, he was beyond tragic. Chaucer was a hermaphrodite. I’m serious. Male and female genitalia and neither of them functional. Chaucer was sterile, thank God. A truck ran him down when he was a pup, which is how he lost the leg. And it seemed like that dog would never die. Poor fucker had arthritis, glaucoma. He had bald spots in his fur from a hundred old wounds and most of one ear was missing. He smelled of death, of sewage. He was a sweet old dog but terrible to behold. And if you shoved him into a corner and made him fight he would calmly chew your arm off without blinking because he still had all of his teeth and he just didn’t give a fuck. That old dog had no worries. He had already been crushed by a red pickup truck on a partly cloudy Sunday morning and lived. He had a worthless cock and a dried-up pussy and he could never gratify himself but he was still walking around.