8

 

 

His head was rolling on the deck of a ship in storm, and would go over the side at any moment. He had lost his body, but that didn’t matter; his head was more important, even though it was blind. Suddenly he felt cold, and was sure that he was in the icy water. It was odd to feel as if he had a body, to breathe without lungs as his head sank.

He opened his eyes and saw a small room. A bare bulb hung by a black cord from a wooden ceiling. He turned his head right and then left and saw a red brick wall. He was naked on a big brass bed, arms and legs shackled to the four posts. He shivered from the cold, then cried out, “Hey, what’s going on!” through chattering teeth.

He listened to the clear silence of the chamber, until his own body-noises joined a clanging sound, as if someone were dragging a large metal can. He raised his head and saw a wooden door open between his feet.

Dierdre, now wearing blue jeans and an old flannel shirt, came in carrying a dish-shaped copper space heater of a kind he hadn’t seen since childhood, when his mother had warmed him as he dressed for school during cold winter mornings.

Dierdre plugged the heavy cord into an outlet box low on the far wall of the room and placed the dish down halfway toward the bed. The heating element began to glow, lighting up the polished copper reflector to a fierce orange brilliance.

“What are you doing?” he asked. She avoided his gaze.

“It’s chillier down here than I realized,” she said.

He felt the heat across his bare belly and laughed. “Good joke. Did I pass out or get violent or something to need this?” That he had somehow lost control of himself horrified him.

He was about to apologize when she stepped back and looked down at him. “No—I drugged you,” she said.

Fully awake now, his mind raced after explanations.

“The drug makes you suggestible. You walked in and lay down all by your naked lonesome.”

“Where are my clothes?”

“You won’t need them.”

He laughed.

“Feel warmer?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you. Now let me up.”

Again she ignored him, and moved the heater back a foot. “This can get too hot. I’ll timer it.” She turned and went out through the wooden door, closing it behind her.

“Hey!” he shouted.

He listened to her climbing the stairs back into the house and began to sweat.

He waited, startled by his situation, then heard her coming back down the stairs. The wooden door opened, and she came in carrying a folded blanket and pillow. She was dressed now in a long silk robe. Dropping the blanket next to him, she came up behind him and put the pillow under his head.

“Thanks,” he said, ready to be a good sport.

She came around again into his sight and moved the heater back against the wall. Then she let her robe drop to the floor, and the yellow-orange glow of the light bulb flattered her naked body. Her pale skin took on some color, and her large pubic region seemed to be a thick black mound of silky growth.

“Come on, now,” he objected, feeling foolish.

She touched his belly with her right toe, then sat down on the bed and began to kiss his torso, moving slowly lower, and he realized that it would be impossible to resist.

He tried to picture old crones, buckets of dirty water, and mating crabs, but nothing stopped his arousal as she worked. The word stop seemed too ridiculous to utter. If she had AIDS, then he would die, he told himself, but still his erection was inevitable, reliable.

When finally she straddled him and brought her hips down, he became a careless god flowing into her, all pride lost. She leaned down at the end of her exertions and kissed him. Her hips held him firmly as her mouth brushed his face and her teeth found his lower lip. She seized it as if it were one of the shrimp she had bitten in half at dinner, and he rose again within the prison of her pelvis.

 

He awoke in darkness under a blanket, still manacled to the bed, and listened again to the silence, wondering how much longer she would play her game. He heard a familiar click at his right and turned his head. The heater, now plugged into a timer, had come on, and the copper dish was beginning to glow orange, warming his face.

The door opened. The overhead light came on. She was on the other side of the bed, holding a tray, when he turned his head. She set it down next to him and reached for his right manacle, unlocking it with a key.

“Eat your food and use the urinal,” she said.

“Now wait a minute,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this.”

She stood up and left the room. Puzzled, he took a deep breath, loosened the manacle, and saw that he could eat, just barely. There was a bowl of soup and a sandwich on the tray, and a hospital urinal. He grasped the bowl and drank down the warm soup, then took one of the sandwiches and started to tear at it, suddenly hungry. If she still meant to play her game, then she had made a mistake, because she would be unable to get his arm back in the shackle when she came back; maybe she wanted him to escape. He smiled and finished his sandwich, then relieved himself into the urinal and lay back, waiting for his chance.

Sleep came too swiftly, giving him only moments to realize that his arm would be shackled when he woke up.

When he awoke again, she was kneeling between his legs. He pulled on his wrist manacles, raised his head and watched her fellate him. Her face was flushed, but the look in her eyes was confident as she glanced up at him, then crawled forward and plunged down on him with her hips. He longed to piss again, but held back, hoping she would finish quickly.

As her pitiless pace increased, he heard a rustling somewhere on the floor to his right. He turned his head and saw a large rat pushing through a hole at the base of the brick wall.

“We have a visitor,” he said, hoping to frighten her.

But she continued to rock as she turned her head and watched the animal struggling through the hole. Then her moves became frenzied as the rat broke through, stumbled on the brick floor, and came to an abrupt stop.

He saw it look up at her warily, back up, and cringe, as if fearing her gaze.

She let out a strange grunt and continued with slower strokes—

—and he saw something come up out of the rat, a bloody mass from its head, as if the animal were cut open. The lump shot across the room, glanced off one of the brass bars at the head of the bed with a wet crunch, and slapped him across his left cheek.

Dierdre stopped moving on him, breathing deeply, and seemed angry with herself as she wrapped her arms around her torso. He went limp within her as he caught the odor of the bloody mess near his cheek, then began hyperventilating as his reason rebelled against what had happened; something had ripped the rat’s brain from its body.

Gulping air and struggling to control his bladder, he looked past the bloody organ on the bed to the rat down on its belly in a pool of blood.

He cried out and tugged at his manacles.

“Be still!” Dierdre shouted, brushing the sticky brains from the bed as she climbed off him and stood by the bed. He closed his eyes and tried to float free of pain and fear in the bright red space behind his eyelids.

His breath came in fits and starts as he heard her closing the door and climbing the wooden stairs. He opened his eyes, but would not look at the dead rat on the floor, thinking that he might wake up at any moment, telling himself that it was possible for a dream to fool him; this was the third, maybe the fourth time he had dreamed a lifelike dream. It didn’t happen often, but it could happen, and here it was again in full stereo, color, smell and three dimensions. The completeness of the illusion had to be a mark against its reality, because it was the business of really good nightmares to be convincing.

Finally, he heard her coming back down the stairs. The lock clicked, the door opened, and she came in wearing a dirty house coat and carrying a large metal can, a plastic bag, and a small spatula. He watched as she knelt, set down the can, and swept the rat into the bag; then she crawled over to the bed and scraped the brain mess from the floor into the bag, sealed it with a metal tie, and tossed it over by the door, not once looking up at him, as if in a trance.

She seemed sluggish crawling over to the hole in the wall, where she pried open the lid of the metal can, scooped out some of the pre-mixed sealing compound with her hands, slapped it into the opening and said, “There, that should keep out visitors,” and worked to smooth over the opening. “As soon as this sets, you’ll be safe in here. It’s quick setting, says so on the label.”

He clenched his teeth until his jaw muscles hurt.

She resealed the can, then sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall. “Did you see what I did?” she asked tiredly, eyes closed. “Did you see it, lover?” she said with pride, like a child in a show-and-tell grade school exercise.

He watched her, unable to answer.

She opened her eyes with a start and leaned forward. “Do you fucking understand?” she demanded, fighting fatigue with her pride. This was the tell part, except that she expected him to tell the ridiculous part of it to himself, and believe it.

He stared at her. His full bladder was a cold stone. She leaned back again and seemed to fall asleep, twitching as if dreaming in her tiredness. In that dream, he imagined, was the real world.

The timer clicked, turning on the copper heater. It reached a white-hot glow and he began to sweat. Humiliated, he could no longer hold back, and tried to send his stream onto the floor, but soaked the edge of the mattress as he finished.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. He stared back, determined to show no fear or weakness, but she gave him a contemptuous smile when she saw the wet floor.

“Oh,” she said, “I thought I heard a sound. Can’t hold your water, can you? You should see someone about that.”

He struggled to pull himself together. “What do you want from me?” he demanded, startled by the growl in his voice.

She stretched, and seemed alert again. “Any reasonably presentable male would have served as well,” she said, “but I picked you.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She sighed. “Maybe I want a child.”

“What?” he asked, dumbfounded. “But why… why me?”

“Stupid! It’s got nothing to do with you personally.”

He stared at her. “But… you can’t be sure… I mean you can’t know if the trait, if that’s what it is, will be passed on,” he managed to say, realizing that he was accepting her claim, her delusion, which was all it could be; she could not have done what he had seen.

“What do you know,” she said in a whisper. “You’re just a dumb cop. I’ll find out one way or another when I have the kid.”

He took a deep breath, let his head fall back, and looked up at the ceiling, which might be a sky, for all he knew; he had been drugged, she had told him.

“Don’t worry,” she said loudly. “I’ll take care of you in here, for as long as it takes.”

“You’re going to keep me like this?” he said without raising his head.

She answered, “Look, it was your own fault for wanting to use a bag. We could have screwed our brains out for a few weeks and that would have been the end of it. You wouldn’t have known a thing after I brushed you off. Too late now that you know too much, so it’ll have to be the hard way. I have to do it this way. I’m stuck with you. My mistake.”

“And after, when you’re pregnant, what then?” he asked hoarsely, raising his head again to look at her.

“We’ll see,” she said, looking away, and he knew suddenly that she felt nothing for him, that it had all been a trap, and that he might die in this cellar room, if it was possible to die in a nightmare.