Flesh Wounds, page 18
“Do you remember,” David asked, “when we went to Fall Creek Falls in Tennessee?”
He’d been asking her things like that for several hours, holding her there on the bed. The questions were only to fill the silence, the memories they brought to the surface to fill her last hours with something pleasant. She didn’t answer. She hadn’t actually spoken since a little after noon. Her eyes were vacant and her pulse was shallow. Whatever battle she waged had turned inward.
It was his turn now, and while he awaited the opponent, he painted the dark room with memories of the good times they’d shared. The more of them he remembered, the more of them there were to remember, and he knew that despite all the hardships and buried dreams, they’d been happy.
“It was autumn and we had almost the entire park to ourselves. Remember all the trails and the overlooks? We found that one overlook that was so secluded. You wanted to make love there on the edge of the world with all of the Smokies spread out before us, but I was too worried someone would come down the trail and catch us in the act.”
He’d turned off all the lights. Moonbeams stenciled the room. The lace pattern of the curtains there. The perpendicular lines of the divided window on the far wall there. A distorted square splashed from the vanity mirror across the carpet. There was a geometric order to the night that he’d never before noticed. He took courage from this rhyme and reason, almost believing he’d imagined the night before. This is absurd, he thought. Here I am waiting for the Angel of Death like it’s someone or something I can reason with. He laughed at himself and jokingly told Maggie she should be glad she wouldn’t be around to see the men in their white coats come take him away and fit him for a special jacket.
“Remember that red Mustang I used to own when we were dating? I put more work into that car than all the others we’ve owned since. ‘Course some of those nights when I said it wouldn’t start and we’d have to stay out until the engine cooled, you knew I was making it up, didn’t you, Maggie?”
When the shadows deepened and the patterns lost their logic, when the moon-drawn lines bent and the squares of light folded in and swallowed themselves, he knew he wasn’t crazy. Setting Maggie’s head carefully on the pillow, he went to the railing and looked down on the stairs, braving the encroaching darkness this time without his revolver.
Am I dreaming or am I awake? he wondered. Or is this some place in between?
The turmoil of darkness was again advancing up the stairway.
“You can skip the melodramatics,” David told the dark cloud. “I know who and what you are.”
The demarcation of true night and false paused on the stairs, looking almost puzzled in its momentary hesitation.
“Show yourself for what you are,” David commanded. “I’m not afraid—” (This, a lie that he hoped did not seem obvious.) “—and I don’t intend to step aside.” (Truth.) “Dispense with this facade and show your face.”
He wasn’t sure what he expected. A robed figure with protracted, skeletal fingers wrapped about the handle of a scythe? No, that was too garish, too cliché, too... Hollywood. He expected something simpler. Death revealed would be bourgeois. Death without his masks would be as inconspicuous as the mailman. Death would be the lovely actress Maria Casarès in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. Death in black would not be skeletal, but rather like the character in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal: dark of robe and white of face, but with nothing frightening or terrifying in his serene, regular features.
What he least expected was a crowded stairway.
There was a slim, dark young man in a black tux, an inexplicable pair of silver scissors protruding from his breast pocket. Behind him was a line of women, their feminine curves more accentuated than hidden by long, heavy robes, their faces concealed within the folds of dark hoods. Flanking the line of hooded women, was a line of surgeons, their hospital scrubs glistening with blood and gore as if they’d just come from some horrific triage, their rubber-gloved hands full of surgical instruments that appeared to have never been washed, let alone sterilized.
The man in the tux arched one Napoleonic eyebrow. “You’ve a reason for stopping me?” He withdrew a notebook from an inside pocket, flipped a few pages, and made a production out of consulting the data contained therein. “Hunter. David Allen.” The dark eyes rose from the page to gaze up the stairs at David. “You haven’t a great deal of time, Mr. Hunter, but your appointment was not tonight.”
“You’ve come to take my wife,” David stammered.
The dark man pursed his lips and snapped the notebook closed. “I see.”
“I—” David forced his hands to release the wrought iron rail and rubbed absently at the painful indentations in his palms. “I can’t let you have her.”
“Can’t?”
David swallowed. “Can’t.”
The dark young man indicated the remaining stairs. “May I?”
David shook his head. “I’d prefer you not come any closer.” The absurdity of the situation suddenly set in. He fought an insane urge to bust out laughing. He hadn’t expected Death to be so... polite.
“Then we have ourselves a dilemma here, Mr. David Allen Hunter.” He glanced at his entourage, then at the moon shining through the window on the landing, then back up at David. “You’ve obviously realized that I can’t proceed without your permission.”
David blinked. Death needed his permission?
“I suppose we’ll have to leave.”
David shrugged and tried to smile, but it came out a grimace. “Don’t forget to lock up on your way out.”
No one laughed.
The tuxedoed man scratched his chin and leaned against the hand rail with one foot a step higher than the other. For a moment, he held this pose, as if he were deep in thought. Finally, he looked up. “You love this woman?”
“More than anything.”
“And you think she loves you?”
“I know she does.”
“Hmmm... Interesting. What if I told you there were things about her you don’t know. What if I told you she had lied to you for... let’s see—” He consulted his notebook. “Ah, yes, here it is—thirty-seven years.”
“It won’t work.”
“What won’t work?”
“Your lies.”
“Lies?” The dark man looked genuinely wounded. “My dear friend, there is nothing so honest as Death. Do you really know who I am?” He withdrew the scissors from his pocket and took a few practice snips at the air. “I am the Scissor Man, the Remover, the Collector of Spirits. I come for the soul. With these scissors—” He held the nondescript silver instruments up for David’s inspection. “—I separate the spirit from the flesh. If you dissuade me, you condemn her soul to perish with her physical remains. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, of her will live on.
“You don’t want that, do you?”
David found himself at a loss for words. What did he want? He wanted Maggie to be with him forever. He didn’t think he knew how to go on without her.
While David hesitated, the Scissor Man advanced to the landing and several steps beyond, his entourage following close behind. David dashed from the railing to the head of the stairs to cut him off.
“You said you couldn’t come any further without my permission!”
The Remover of Souls smiled sadly. “You gave it, Hunter. You don’t know it, but you did.” By this time, he had reached the top of the stairs. Despite his convictions, David fell back before him, terrified of the dark eyes, the dispassionate set of his thin mouth, the gleaming scissors.
“Please,” David begged. “Don’t take my wife.”
One of the surgeons stepped forward and whispered something in the Scissor Man’s ear. As he did, David got a close look at the surgeon’s face. The skin was transparently thin and drawn, as if pulled by some inner vacuum until it was stretched like a worn rubber glove, leaving the bone visible beneath it. The surgeon’s teeth were yellow and grey, held by more bone than gum. His ears were pale languets pinned to the side of his head by the band of a surgical cap. His eyes were protuberant, red-rimmed and pus-colored. He stank like road-rottened flesh. He moved as if his bones were linked with baling wire.
There was no way on Earth David was going to allow one of them near his wife.
The Scissor Man frowned. “You’re probably right,” he said to the surgeon. “Brutal, but right.” He glanced at Maggie. “She must have once been a very beautiful woman, Hunter.”
“Stay away from her,” David hissed.
“Would you like to see her when she was... say, in her early twenties?” The Scissor Man indicated the hooded women who had by this time climbed the stairs and spread out along the bedroom walls. “These are Maggie’s Memories. Each of them has captured some fragment of your wife’s mind, some element of who and what she was, some piece of the events that made her Maggie.”
“Vampires,” David spat. He could easily imagine such monsters, the source for every case of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. “They’re sucking away everything she was so that in the end there’ll be nothing but a shell!”
“Oh, no, David. No. This is preservation, not theft. This has been going on since the day she was born. Let me show you.” The Remover motioned and one of the hooded women stepped forward and dropped the dark hood down about her shoulders.
It was Maggie.
Maggie when she was about twenty-three years old, her hair full and dark, her skin smooth and firm and burnished with vitality and youth. Her eyes had that lapis lazuli hue that had first attracted him, but had faded over the years to the dull blue of twilight.
The Scissor Man motioned impatiently. “Go on, then, the robe too.”
The Memory slipped the robe over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. David gasped. He had forgotten how beautiful the bare flesh of youth could be. It was like a dagger through his heart, more powerful than any miracle they could have shown him. Still, some part of him felt like a dirty old man. This could be his daughter standing there before him. But, of course, it wasn’t. It was Maggie.
She reminded him of Christine Claremont, and that sent another pang of guilt through him. For the first time he realized why he had wanted his student so badly, why he had fallen into the seductive snare she had set. Christine’s youthful beauty had represented everything he was one day to lose. He hadn’t known it then—at least not consciously. But perhaps some part of him had known that time would take it all away. Perhaps Christine Claremont had even seen that weak link in him from the first.
“She was exceptional,” the Scissor Man exclaimed.
His words broke the spell. David looked away, embarrassed and ashamed. “Stop,” he said weakly. “Make her cover herself.”
The Scissor Man seemed not to hear him. “This is what you loved, Hunter. This embodiment of beauty. This sexual prize.” He licked his lips, and for the first time David truly hated him. “Nice, very nice.”
“Shut up.”
“But it’s only the flesh. You loved her for her flesh.”
“That’s not true!”
The Scissor Man pointed the scissors, “You never knew her for what she was. I can prove it.”
David feared to say anything.
Another of the hooded women stepped forward and revealed her face. Maggie. Two or three years after they’d married. About the time she’d started college.
“Look into her eyes,” commanded the Collector of Spirits and, despite himself, David was too fascinated not to comply.
Mirrors of the soul, they’ve been called. Windows on inner emotions, true intentions, and the deepest of torment. The eyes remember everything. In Maggie’s eyes David saw a stainless steel table draped in white paper. A woman occupied the table, her legs elevated in stirrups that supported her at calf and heel. There was a nurse to one side. There was a doctor between the woman’s legs probing for—David didn’t want to know what. When the woman on the table raised her head, he saw that it was Maggie. When blood flowed from her vagina, splattering the crisp, white paper, he saw that this was no simple gynecological exam. David turned away.
“I think,” said the Scissor Man, “that they sell drugs for this these days.”
Their son had died in a Chilean prison. By that time they were too old to have another child. They’d only had the one because Maggie was so determined, in those early years, to make a medical career for herself. But this... this was a child that could have been with them today.
“She never wanted a family, you know.”
“Shut up.”
“She would have aborted the second child as well, but you found out, didn’t you?”
David suddenly remembered the intercepted phone call, the message he’d taken for Maggie. And he remembered how confused she’d been when she’d come home that evening and he’d cooked her favorite dinner, complete with wine and flowers and candles. He’d told her how happy he was and at first she’d been confused. When she finally realized what he was celebrating, had she seemed less than excited herself? He couldn’t remember. But maybe, just maybe, there’d been more resignation and acceptance than joy in her eyes that night.
Still, it didn’t matter. She’d loved their son. In the end, she’d done everything humanly possible to save him.
“You never really knew her,” mocked the Scissor Man.
David ignored him. “Dostoyevsky was right,” he muttered.
“What? How’s that?”
“There are things which we are meant to take with us to the grave.”
“Dostoyevsky said this?”
“It’s a story he wrote. It’s about a dinner party where all the guests agree to tell something bad they did in their past. Everything’s going well until one guest tells of an incident which portrays him in the worst possible way. The party is ruined and all the guests excuse themselves and go home. The thing that the man told was just too horrible.
“There are things which we should never reveal, even to those we love. There are things which we are meant to take to the grave.”
The Dark Remover indicated the surgeons. “What goes to the grave is theirs, David.”
“No.”
“Yes. The spirit, the mind, and the body form the trinity.” A snip of the scissors. “Her soul is mine. Her mind—her memories—are theirs.” He indicated the hooded women. “But her flesh—”
“No!”
Again, one of the surgeons whispered in the dark man’s ear. The Scissor Man motioned him away impatiently and, it seemed to David, with something approaching disgust. But the surgeon would not be put off. “Others,” he hissed hungrily at David, “have had her flesh.”
“What does he mean?” David asked before he could stop himself.
The Scissor Man let out a long sigh.
“Show him,” said the surgeon, and the others quickly took it up as a chant. The words whipped around the room like a wave at a ball game, sour and tar-slick wet, doused with spittle and a gluttonous need that terrified David.
“Make them stop!”
The Scissor Man raised a hand and the chant died. Another of the hooded women stepped forward and dropped her hood. Again, it was Maggie, but this Maggie was in her late thirties. In her eyes David saw one of the young ER doctors she used to work with. David recognized him, had seen him at the hospital a time or two. Unable to look away, David watched as the doctor kissed, touched, undressed, and rode like a coquettish bitch the woman who’d been his wife for thirty-seven years.
David’s legs tried to go out from under him. He stumbled back to the bed and sat upon its edge. Maggie hadn’t moved. She lay there, pale against the white pillow, her face wet with perspiration, revealed to him for the first time.
She’d slept with another man.
He’d never even suspected.
The lines writ so dramatically on her face had concealed the loss of more than her youth from him. She had given a piece of herself to another man and he had never missed it. How could he have been so blind? How could he have let this happen?
“You were never the man she thought you were,” the Remover said softly. “She wanted adventure. She wanted a man who would have made love to her on that mountain top and to hell with anyone who came along, someone who’d take her in a coat closet or the back of a cab if the mood came upon them. She wanted an exuberant writer who took chances, one who wrote out-on-the-edge novels that publishers were afraid to publish, but published anyway because they knew they stood to make millions. She wanted—”
“You’re wrong,” David yelled, getting back to his feet. “She loved me. Me, goddamnit! We were married for thirty-seven years and... if there were moments when things weren’t perfect... when I failed to pay enough attention to her and she felt the need to—” He swallowed distastefully. “—to sleep with someone from the hospital... well, that didn’t change the fact that we were man and wife, that she loved me, that I loved her, and—” He began to cry. “—that you can’t take her from me like this.”
Another of the hooded women stepped forward, but David shoved her back against the wall with such violence that she collapsed. “No!” he screamed. “You can’t show me anything that changes the fact that we loved each other.” He thrust a finger under the Scissor Man’s nose. “You’re a lying son of a bitch. You show me things that make her look bad, but for every one of those events, I could show you a hundred good ones. Where are those Memories, you bastard?”
The Scissor Man daintily wiped David’s spittle from his face. “Perhaps it’s time to approach this from another angle.”
“I’ve got an angle for you!” David whirled and yanked open the night stand drawer. Snatching up the thirty-eight, he whirled and fired. The Scissor Man stood firm as each of the six rounds thudded into his chest. When the roar of the shots died down, the room was silent except for several spasmodic snaps of the trigger recycling spent rounds. When those stopped, there was not a sound.
The Scissor Man glanced down at the front of his tux. The black material began to take on a darker, wetter shade. The Scissor Man probed one of the holes in his chest and studied the arterial red coating on his finger. “Fascinating.” One of the surgeons reached out as if to sample the blood pumping from the Scissor Man’s chest, but the Scissor Man snapped the scissors at his eyes. “You’d dare this, you foul eater of carrion?” The surgeon cowered back out of reach.
