Beauty exists whether a person has the eye to behold it or not. That principle also applies to ugliness.
—William Arthur Herring
from A Horse of a Different Color
There are only a pair of old-fashioned cemeteries left in the Crowsea-Foxville area. All Souls, over in Crowsea, hasn’t been used in fifty years, but it’s under the protection of the Crowsea Heritage Society. Unfortunately, that protection only means that bodies haven’t been moved, mausoleums, crypts, statuary, and other stonework haven’t been torn down to make room for condos. The place is seriously run-down and overgrown, and the only people hanging there are drug dealers.
Foxville Cemetery is still a working graveyard, as witness the fresh grave I’ve just laid flowers on. Neither’s a fun place to be, but then being here isn’t about fun. It’s about closure.
I think the same architect designed both places—someone with a serious jones for New Orleans-style graveyards. Has to be that, because Newford’s certainly not under sea level, so we don’t need the crypts and mausoleums. The closest we get to New Orleans is the seriously watered-down Mardi Gras that’s organized every year by the owners of the Good Serpent Club. The parade they put together never gets to be much more than a big block party, but you can’t fault them for trying. It’s not like we have a French Quarter here, primed and geared to be party central, or the tradition of Mardi Gras. The people who observe Lent in Newford aren’t thinking along the lines of a carnival Fat Tuesday, and to everybody else, it’s just another weekday.
I look down at the bouquet of six red roses lying on the freshly turned earth at my feet, then my gaze rises to the small stone and its incomplete inscription.
ELISE
Born,. . .–Died, July 23, 1994
R.I.P.
No one claimed the body and the police never did identify her beyond what little I had to tell them.
I was working late in my office the first time I met her. No, let’s be honest. I was pushing papers around, killing time—trying to make myself so tired that by the time I did get home, I’d just fall into bed and sleep.
There was nothing left for me at home anymore. Peter took everything when he walked out on me.
What I missed the most was my confidence. My self-esteem.
Thursday night.
My business card says: FINDERS, LTD.—IF YOU NEED IT, WE CAN FIND IT. KIRA LEE, PROP., followed by my e-mail address, my phone and fax numbers, and finally my office address. The office is the least important part of the equation—at least insofar as dealing with clients. It’s basically a tiny hole-in-the-wall of a room in the old Sovereign Building on Flood Street that barely manages to hold a desk, swivel chair, and file cabinet, with another chair parked across the desk for a visitor. A computer takes up most of the desktop—the tower sits on the floor beside the desk while my printer and fax machine are on a table over by the window. There’s also a phone, stacks of papers and files, and, inevitably, a cup of coffee in some stage of depletion and usually cold.
I don’t worry about clients coming by the office. With the kind of work I do, they don’t have to. I get my contracts by phone or messenger; I get paid when I deliver the goods. It’s a simple system and helps me keep my overhead low because usually by the time a client contacts me, all they’re interested in is how fast can I get the job done, not how pretty my workspace is.
That night I’m sitting behind the desk, feet propped up on a corner while I flip through a fashion magazine. The window behind me’s tuned to the usual dull channel: a nighttime view of an inner-city block, shops on the ground floor, apartments above them. The most predominant piece of color is a neon sign that just says BAR. Looking at all the models preening on the glossy pages propped up on my legs, I’m thinking that maybe what I need is a makeover. My idea of work clothing is comfort: jeans and hightops, a T-shirt with a lightweight shirt overtop, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. About the only thing I have in common with these models is my height.
Of course a makeover means maintenance and I don’t know if I have the patience for it. Shower, brush my hair, dab on some lipstick. Anything more and I’ll be running even later than I usually am in the mornings. Then she comes walking in, drop-dead gorgeous like she stepped out of the magazine I’m holding, and I think, why even try?
Dark hair cut stylishly short, eyes darker still. The makeup’s perfectly understated. The clothes, too. Custom fit, snug black dress and heels, clasp purse, and tailored silk jacket, also black. Her only jewelry is a short string of pearls.
“I need you to find someone for me,” she says.
“That’s not exactly my line of work, Ms . . . ?”
She lets my question hang there as she sits down across the desk from me, tugs her skirt down.
“It’s extremely urgent,” she says.
I have to smile. “It’s always urgent, but I still can’t help you. I don’t do people—only things.”
“I don’t understand. Your card says . . .”
Well-manicured fingers take my business card from her purse and place it on the desk between us.
“I’m sorry if it’s misled you,” I tell her. “It just means that I find objects.” She looks confused, so I go on to explain. “You know, like tickets to Cats for a visiting businessman. Props for a theater company or a film crew. Maybe some long out-of-print book. The kinds of things that people could find on their own if they had the time or the inclination. Instead they’ve got money and I do the legwork for them.”
Now she takes a package of cigarettes from her purse.
“But it is an object I need you to find for me,” she says.
It’s my turn to look confused. “You started off saying you wanted me to find someone . . . .”
“I do. She stole my heart and I want it back.”
The woman lights her cigarette and places the package and matches on the edge of the desk. I turn in my chair to look out the window. The same channel is still playing out there.
Well, this was a first. No one’s ever contracted me to find a broken heart before. I want to send her right back out the door, except I start thinking about Peter, about how I felt when he walked out and took my heart away with him. So it was a woman who took hers instead of a man. Big deal. It had to hurt the same.
I turn back to look at her. “I have to level with you. I’m not really sure I can be of much help. What you really want is a private detective.”
“I tried a few of them, but none of them would help me. The last one gave me your card.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Can you remember his name?”
“A Peter Cross of the Vax Agency. He said it was just the odd sort of thing that would appeal to you.”
Great. First he dumps me—“You’re too intense, Kira,”—and now he’s sending crumbs of work my way. Like I can’t find work on my own. Though I’m not saying business has been good lately . . . .
I realize I’m frowning, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Instead I reach for the woman’s cigarette package.
“Do you mind?” I ask.
“Not at all.”
“Thanks.”
She gives me enough time to put a cigarette in my mouth.
“Will you help me?” she asks.
I pause with a lit match in my hand. “You know you can’t ever get something like that back. When someone wants to walk out of your life, you can’t force them to stay.”
I’m thinking as I light the cigarette, trust me on this. I know. But I don’t say it aloud.
She shakes her head. “Oh, no. You’ve misunderstood me. It’s true we had a relationship, and it’s true she left me, but I’m not looking to get her back. I just want my heart back. It’s a pendant. She took it with her when she left.”
“This is still a job for a private detective,” I tell her. “Or maybe even the police, if you can prove ownership of the stolen property.”
“It’s not that simple.”
It never is, is it?
I prop my elbow up on the desk, cup my chin with my hand. The cigarette smolders between the fingers of my free hand. It doesn’t taste nearly as good as I was hoping it would.
“So tell me about it,” I say.
“The heart was a gift to me from Faerie,” she says.
This is getting kinkier by the minute. “So you’re into gay, or I guess, bisexual guys, too?”
“Not at all.”
“Hey, I don’t have a problem with it,” I tell her. “Live and let live, I say.”
“When I say Faerie,” she says, “I mean the Otherworld. I did a favor once for a prince of the realm and he gave me the pendant in gratitude. It allows one the gift of second sight. Of piercing the barriers between what we believe we see and what is actually there.”
Scratch the kinky, I think. This woman belongs in a padded cell at the Zeb. Except she’s so earnest. I can’t help but lean forward as she talks, knowing it’s all hogwash, but wanting it to be real. I mean, how many of us didn’t go through a rainbow-and-unicorn phase when we were eleven or twelve?
So I let her ramble on about gifts from the faerie folk and how they don’t work for everybody, but then what does? How her particular pendant not only gives its bearer this second sight, but also protects her from some of the, shall we say, less friendly denizens of the Otherworld. The friendlies pretty much ignore you, but the others . . .
See, the way she tells it, once you get their attention, once they know you can see them, you’ve got to have protection or your ass is grass. Sounds like life on the street to me, business as usual, except she’s describing creatures with knives for fingers and worse.
I feel like I’m trapped in a video edition of The Weekend Sun, directed by Roger Corman—somewhere between “Nun Gives Birth to Pig Twins” and the Elvis Spotter page—so when I find myself agreeing to help her track down her friend and the pendant, I startle myself.
I mean, this really isn’t my line of work. I’m strictly an over-the-phone girl. I do research, go electronic-tripping through the on-line services. Sometimes I have to leave the office to work the stacks at the Newford Library or something similar. I wouldn’t know where to begin to find a missing person except from what I’ve seen in the movies.
My nameless client isn’t stumped. She tells me to hit the girl bars on Gracie Street and gives me a photo of her friend. Tells me she’ll be in touch with me tomorrow night. Leaves me sitting there in my office wondering, if she knows how to do it so well, why’s she bothering to hire me? Leaves me wondering just how much Peter’s leaving me has screwed me up that I’d agree to something like this.
I don’t know my client’s name. I don’t know the name of the woman I’m looking for. My head’s spinning with fairy tales. But at least she left her smokes. I give them up every couple of months. Right now I’m off them. Was.
So I stuff the pack in my pocket and hit the street. It’s going on eleven, which means the action’s just starting on Gracie Street. It’s busy down here—not Times Square before Disney cleaned it up, but still big-city, inner-core, out-for-some-fun busy. The names of the bars range from the obvious to the less so: The North Star, Neon Sister, Girljock, Skirts. There’s plenty of traffic on the pavement, cars cruising, cabs. Plenty of people on the sidewalk, too—street people, couples, single men and women. The couples I pass are all same sex: male and male, female and female. It’s not too outrageous out on the street—you know, leather scenes and the like—but inside the clubs it’s a whole different story.
Some of the women are femmes, some butch. Lots of sexy tops, short hair, body piercing, tattoos, dancing, smoking, drinking. I try not to do the tourist thing and gawk as I show around a photograph of two women standing on a street corner—one’s my client. In the photo she’s got her hair tied back. She’s wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, black cowboy boots, and still looks like a million dollars. Around her neck, sparkling against the black shirt, is a small gold pendant in the shape of a heart. She has her arm around an attractive smaller woman who has short, spiky dark hair, angular features. The second woman is dressed in a short black dress and is barefoot. She’s holding a pair of high heels by their straps with one hand and leaning against my client.
I show the photo around, but I seem to be generating more interest for who I am than the picture. I remember what I told my client earlier—live and let live—and I believe it. But I’ve never been hit on so many times in such a short period of time as I have in the past couple of hours. And not once by a guy.
It really isn’t a problem for me. My best friend in high school, Sarah Jones, came out to me in our senior year and we’re still good friends. But I’m being hit on so often right now that I find myself seriously wondering what it’d be like to go out with another woman.
I take a look at these cigarettes my client left behind and wonder what’s in them, because first, she has me out here playing detective for her and now I’m actually considering . . .
There’s an attractive woman with short red hair sitting at the other end of the bar, looking back at me, one eyebrow raised questioningly. She makes a victory sign with the first two fingers of her right hand and then flicks her tongue through them.
No, I don’t think so.
I turn away quickly and bump into a tall black woman who’s standing on the other side of my stool. She’s wearing a white halter top, a short skirt and pumps, and has a ship captain’s hat scrunching down her kinky black hair. There are three studs in her nose, half a dozen more in each ear, running up from the lobes.
“Easy now,” she says, steadying me.
I jerk away from her. “Look, I’m not interested in—”
I break off when I realize the woman was just helping me keep my balance. She smiles at me, obviously non-aggressive, and I feel like a fool.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m just feeling a little . . .”
“Flustered?” she asks.
I nod.
“First time down here?”
“Yes, but it’s not what you think.”
When she cocks an eyebrow, I show her the photo and point to my client’s companion.
“The other woman in the picture has got me looking for her,” I say.
We’re both leaning against the bar now, the photo lying on the bar between us. The music’s still loud, making it hard to talk. All around us is the press of bodies, women dancing with each other, flirting with each other.
“I know them,” the woman says. “Are you sure you’re really into their scene?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the whole S&M thing. The girl you’re looking for is your client’s slave.”
“Slave?”
The woman smiles. “You really are a virgin, aren’t you? Your client’s a top—you know, a leatherdyke.”
I give her a blank look.
“The sexually dominant one of the pair. The other girl’s a femme.” She’s still friendly, but maybe a little too friendly now. “Like you.”
I shake my head. “No way.”
And I mean it. Except even I can hear the trace of uncertainty in my voice.
My companion shrugs. “Then what’re you doing with a recruiter?”
I’m getting more confused by the minute.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I tell her.
She gets a tired look on her face. “The leatherdykes are always looking for new blood, but the trouble is, you sweet young femmes don’t always know you’re looking for them, too.”
She turns away, leaning against the bar with her elbows supporting her. She doesn’t look at me anymore, her gaze on the crowd. I get the sense that this conversation is finished, thank you very much, but then she adds, “So people like your friend go out and recruit them.”
“Oh.”
What the hell have I gotten myself mixed up in?
The woman turns to look at me. “It’s nothing heavy. Nobody’s forced to do anything against her will. But sometimes people get talked into doing things that they regret later. The leather crowd can get a little rough.”
“I’m really just trying to find this woman,” I tell her. “After that, my job’s over.”
“Whatever.”
She points to the photo then, finger resting on the chest of my client’s ex-girlfriend.
“Somebody told me she’s dancing at Chic Cheeks,” she tells me. “That’s a straight club over in the Combat Zone. I don’t think her top knows about the gig. It’s a big city. Easy to disappear in, especially if you go someplace where no one’s going to look for you. At least no one in this crowd. We’ve got our own strip joints.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I really appreciate—”
“And considering the kind of clientele it caters to, you might want to go round the back like the girls who work there do.”
“I will,” I tell her.
“I’d say be careful, but you girls never listen, do you?”
I smile and leave with the photo in hand, pretending I didn’t hear her.
Back out on Gracie Street, I find myself thinking about lesbian relationships again. Do women treat each other better than guys treat us, or is it the same-old same-old only with the gender changed? Call me naive, but I don’t feel like that sailor girl would have treated me the way Peter did. But while I liked her, and I know she liked me, I still can’t muster up a sexual interest in another woman.
I pause to light a cigarette.
I remember something another friend of mine said to me once. She told me she was attracted to lesbianism, but “It’s not because I have the hots for another woman or anything,” she confided. “What I’m attracted to is the kind of freedom the word implies. These women don’t seem to worry so much about what everybody else is thinking; they just do what they think is right.”
And that makes me think of what Sarah said about lesbian sex. “It’s soft and slippery and it just never ends. There’s no hard-on to worry about and one orgasm leads to the next. Who wants a guy, if that’s what you get to do all day?”
As I light my cigarette, I see yet another woman watching me with interest from across the street. She looks as straight as I am, but I can tell she’s getting ready to come over and chat. Before she crosses the street, I walk briskly on, trailing cigarette smoke.
No, I decide. I like guys. That’s not going to change. I want my sexual partner to be tender, but I want him to have a hard-on, too. It’s just the way Peter treated me that’s got me all screwed up.
So . . . live and let live.
I catch a cab and have it drop me off in the Combat Zone. It’s only a half block to Chic Cheeks from where the cab lets me out. When I get to the strip club, I stand in front of it for a long moment, frowning at the advertising posters and thinking about what I’ve been told.
What about my client? Is she a recruiter? I think of what the woman back at the club called her—a leatherdyke—and how she looked when she came into my office, and I don’t know which is the mask. And how about all this talk about Faerie and magic and shit?
What was that all about?
I turn down the alleyway that runs alongside the club.
I’d pack it all in right now, except I’ve come this far and really, what else am I going to do? Go home and obsess about Peter? Or maybe go home and think too much about what I’ve seen tonight?
I don’t have any trouble getting in through the side door—the bouncers are all out front. From the wings of the stage I watch a woman dressed like Alice in Wonderland go through her routine. She’s got blonde hair—same cut as mine—but I recognize her, even with the blonde wig. She looks enough like me from a distance that I’d be amused, if I didn’t feel a little sick. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” is blasting from the sound system. She’s playing the little girl, like she’s twelve years old, and the freaks in the audience are lapping it up.
I find myself wishing I was back on Gracie Street. They’re selling sex as blatantly there, but they’re sure as hell not pandering to pedophiles.
I watch a little longer. The dancer’s removed her blouse now. When she turns, I see the heartshaped pendant.
I go have a smoke while she finishes her act.
The dressing room’s about what you’d expect in a dive like this. There’s not even a door to allow the women some privacy. Anybody walking by backstage can stand in the doorway like I am and check things out. Some of the women are putting on costumes, or simply trying to relax. Some are smoking cigarettes, drinking. I can smell the joint that one of them’s lit up.
My client’s girlfriend has removed her blonde wig. She’s dressed in street clothes now—jeans and a T-shirt—and is leaning close to a mirror adjusting her makeup.
I’d be wanting to take a shower after doing a “show” like that.
I wait until she’s leaving the room. As she comes up to me, I step aside to let her go by, then touch her arm.
“Can I talk to you for a moment?” I ask.
“Sure. What’s it about?”
I thought we could go for a coffee, but she’s only got forty-five minutes until her next show so we sit on the steps of the alleyway entrance. We’ve both got cigarettes going. The alleyway’s dark, but a slice of light from the door behind us cuts through the darkness, illuminating litter, the brick wall of the building on the other side of the alleyway, the photo that I’ve passed over to the dancer.
“You have to understand,” she says. “I was never really into her scene. I mean, I swing both ways, but I’m not into pain. Or maybe I should say, my relationships are always painful, but it’s not something I go looking for. It’s not what I want. It just seems to happen. But with her . . .”
I nod encouragingly.
She shrugs. “The whips and the piercings and all that shit, it was just too much.” She pauses for a beat, then adds, “Do you know anything about that kind of scene?”
“Not really.”
“You really are their slave,” she tells me. “You cook, you clean, you do the laundry—all for free. You don’t get beaten as a punishment—that’s how they reward you. You get to feeling that the worst thing that can happen is you’ll be ignored. You start to crave the bondage and the fisting and the whips.”
I watch her as she talks. Her expression is that of one both attracted and repulsed by what she’s discussing.
“See,” she goes on, “the thing is, pain brings on an endorphin high. You know it’s just a biochemical thing, you’re not attracted to being hurt, but after a while you can’t stop craving it. You’ll be a slave, if that’s what it takes.”
She jerks a thumb back toward the door of the club. “What did you think of the scene in there?”
“It made me feel a little sick,” I tell her.
“Me, too. But at the same time it makes me feel strong. Because when I’m up there on the stage, I’m in control. I feel like they’re my slaves and I could make them do anything I want.”
I give her a sad look. “But it’s not really true, is it?”
“No,” she says with a humorless smile. “But it’s what made me strong enough to get out of her grip. Don’t get me wrong,” she adds. “I’m not saying the women in the S&M scene shouldn’t be doing what they want to do. It’s just not for me.”
I nod. “But you didn’t know what you were getting into until it was too late. That’s not right, either. Don’t you think it should be consensual?”
Her expression when she replies is unreadable, distant. “The only thing I didn’t know when I got into that scene was that I’d fall in love with her as hard as I did. But I should have known. I always do. I always fall in love with the ones that’ll hurt me the most.”
We sit there and smoke in silence for a few moments.
“So what does she want from me?” she asks finally. “Why did she send you out to look for me?”
“She just wants the pendant back.”
The dancer reaches up and closes her hand around it.
“I figured as much,” she says. “That’s why I took it. It’s like it was the only thing she really seemed to care about. If I couldn’t get her to care for me, then at least I’d have something that she does care about.”
She opens her hand and looks down at the pendant.
“If I give it back to her,” she says, “I’ll have nothing.”
I nod. “Maybe it’s better that way.”
She closes her hand around the pendant again and gives it a sharp tug. The chain breaks. Standing up, she drops the pendant into my hand and goes back inside. She doesn’t say anything. Not even goodbye.
I sit there for a while longer, looking down at the pendant with its broken chain where it lies in the palm of my hand.
I don’t know what to say either.
Friday night.
I’m sitting in my office, looking out the window. It’s raining, turning the streets slick with wet reflections. I’m waiting for my client, but she doesn’t show. On my desk is the pack of cigarettes she left here last night. Beside it is the photo she gave me, the pendant lying on top of the photo with its broken chain.
I have no reason to worry about her, but I’m uneasy.
I keep going over what she told me about this business with the pendant. How it was given to her by this Faerie prince. How it doesn’t work for everybody, but when it does it can give the person wearing it second sight. How it protects the person wearing it from the dark side of Faerie—the ghouls and the goblins and the things that go bump in the night.
Not that I believe any of it. Not for a moment.
My gaze leaves the pendant and goes back to the window. It’s still raining.
But all day long, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that somebody’s watching me. There’s no one thing I can point to with certainty. It’s just a prickling sensation that I feel on the nape of my neck. A sense of movement caught out of the corner of my eye. A kind of intuition . . .
I light one of the last two cigarettes.
Or second sight?
I stand up, picking up the pendant. I can’t wait for her any longer. I’m getting the willies sitting in here on my own. There’s no one in the building except me. And whatever might be watching me . . . .
I leave the office and cross the street to the bar, holding my trench coat closed with my hand. I’ve got to be around some people. I hate being alone. I think that’s why my relationships always fall apart. I’ve got too much need. I am too intense—just like Peter said. But that’s because when I’m alone, I think too much. My imagination gets carried away with itself. I imagine the worst. I start to believe there really is a burglar lurking about. Some crazed fanatic. A rapist . . . .
Nasty creatures from fairy tales is a new one for me.
It’s pretty empty inside. A neighborhood bar with a few serious drinkers, a couple at a table near the back, oblivious to their surroundings, and me. I take a seat at a table by the window. The glass is fogged and streaked with rain, but I’ve cleared a portion of the pane with my hand so that I can look out. There are three beer bottles on my table, all empty. My glass is half full. The pack of cigarettes that I got from my client is beside it, also empty, plus a new fresh pack that has a couple of cigarettes missing. One of them’s burning in the ashtray amidst the butts. My left hand is closed in a fist on the table.
I give the window another swipe to clear the fog again. I don’t know what I’m looking for. My client? Or the things she’s got me half-believing are out there, invisible to normal sight?
I open my hand to look at the pendant lying there in the middle of my palm.
Except maybe I don’t have normal sight anymore. Maybe the pendant’s working for me like it did for her.
I sigh and have another sip of beer.
I wish she’d just show up and take this stupid thing away with her.
All I see in the window is a reflection of my own face, raindrops streaking across the glass.
I wish I had someone to go home to.
A week later.
I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, reconsidering the idea of getting up and facing the day. I’m hung over and my bedroom feels claustrophobic. The room’s small and the view’s not exactly expansive. When I look past the fire escape, all I can see is the brick wall of the building next to mine—about the width of an alley away. My room’s a mess. Clothes on the floor, the bedclothes rumpled, dresser covered with makeup, more clothes, magazines, and books. Ditto, my night table.
I’m a mess.
The cops found my business card in her purse, but no identification. That’s why they had me come in to ID her. They didn’t have anybody else and I didn’t bother to mention my client’s ex-girlfriend—not after viewing the body.
Ari—at least that’s her stage name—took it hard when I went by the club to tell her the next night. I guess she was holding on to broken hopes, pretending that she and the woman she knew as Elise would get back together again—the same way I’ve been pretending Peter will come back.
I know that, for all our physical frailties, we humans are capable of inflicting incredible amounts of damage on each other, but there’s no way Ari could have killed Elise, so why get her involved?
Nothing human killed her. The cops are saying she got torn apart by a dog, but I’m not so sure. I keep remembering the way she looked when she was telling me about how the pendant protected her from these creatures she described to me—the ones with knives for fingers and mouths full of barracuda teeth in the middle of their palms.
I finally get up, have a shower, get dressed. When I wander into my small kitchen it feels just as claustrophobic as my bedroom. I ignore the mess and put the kettle on, but coffee and a cigarette don’t help my mouth taste any better. What I really want is another drink. I haven’t been sober for a week now, because this way I can just put it all down to the booze. I use it as a crutch—the same way I’ve been using cigarettes since that night Elise first came into my office. The cigarettes for Peter, the booze for what happened to Elise.
I would’ve had nightmares all night, just thinking about what I saw there in the morgue, if I hadn’t had so much to drink before I finally dragged myself home. If I’m drunk, I can pretend she didn’t die the way I can so easily imagine she did, torn apart by some creatures from the dark side of the Brothers Grimm.
I can pretend they’re not looking for me now.
I put my coffee mug down on the counter with all the other unwashed dishes and get my jacket from where I tossed it last night. I have to get out of here before my imagination runs too wild.
I mean, I know it’s crazy. Nasty goblins didn’t kill Elise. It couldn’t have gone down that way. It’s got to be like the cops said, she got attacked by some animal. A pack of feral dogs, ranging out of the Tombs, say.
When I step outside my apartment building, the sun hurts my eyes. But there’s no one watching me except for the old guy down the street who stares at anybody who’s got breasts, doesn’t matter if they’re no bigger than buttons, or old and sagging and hanging down to your waist.
But everything still feels different. There are undercurrents that I never sensed before the pendant came into my possession. I can’t begin to explain it. I just know now that there is more to what’s around us than what we can see. Things moving in our peripheral vision. Events. Possibilities. Omens and portents and the stuff of dreams. What I can’t swear to is that they’re necessarily malevolent.
I think what we call to ourselves is what we expect to see. We’re still not seeing what’s really there—only our perceptions of what we expect could be there. If you were haunted by inner demons and into S&M the way Elise was, then maybe you’d see a faerie world that was beautiful and dangerous. And you’d call the darkness to you, in the same way Elise’s ex-girlfriend told me she was always attracted to those who would treat her the worst, allowing herself to keep falling into abusive relationships even when she knew better.
Which isn’t to say that it’s Ari’s fault. If you’re beat on all of your life, how can you be expected to gain a sudden change of attitude all by yourself? Confidence and strength accrue in direct proportion to the breaks you get—the help and support that only someone else can give you.
I guess I’m making it sound as though I’ve suddenly gained this huge boost of confidence myself, but in my own way, I’m just as bad as Ari. She’s still shaking her ass on stage at Chic Cheeks, untouched by her contact with the pendant. She still thinks that stripping gives her some kind of power over the freaks. She’s right on the edge of another bad relationship because she can’t break the cycle.
And me? I still don’t want to be alone. The focus of my life is still eddying around the fact that Peter left me, that there’s something intrinsically wrong with me, or why would my relationships always fall apart?
It can’t just be that I get too intense. Love’s supposed to be intense . . . isn’t it?
And then there’s this business with the pendant.
I still think something’s watching me. Or somethings. I don’t know if they’re stalking me, or simply curious.
I end up on the subway, not aware of what I’m doing until it takes me downtown. I get off and head up to street level and the first thing I see is a flower cart. I buy a half-dozen roses from the old man who runs the cart and catch a bus that takes me to the Foxville Cemetery. The gates loom up above me when I go inside and make my way to Elise’s grave. When I get there, I kneel down and lay the roses on the dirt in front of her marker. It’s just a small gravestone and cost a small fortune that I couldn’t really afford. I had to dig deep into my rainy-day account to pay for it, but I felt she needed something and there was no one else to pitch in. Ari wanted nothing to do with it. I don’t think she’s willing to accept the idea that Elise is even dead.
My fingers rise to touch the pendant that I’ve taken to wearing. I don’t think it affected Ari at all, but I can’t say the same for myself.
It’s funny how your whole life can change because of the smallest thing. Like someone walking in through the door of your office . . . . Everything still looks the same, but now I feel like the most common object has a secret history that most people can’t see. The difference between them and me is, they don’t even think about it.
I’m certain this knowledge killed Elise, but somehow I can’t believe it’s dangerous, in and of itself. The real danger would be to ignore it. The real danger would be to see what your preconceptions have led you to expect, instead of striving to see what really is there.
I’m not going to make Elise’s mistake.
I won’t say I’m not nervous. The idea of all these . . . presences around me really creeps me out. But they don’t have to be malevolent, do they? Are hopes always broken?
Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna. Maybe the world really is an ugly piece of work. But I don’t want to believe that. I want to think I’m breaking a cycle. I think I can look into this unseen world of Faerie the way that friend of mine looked into the lesbian scene. She took from it the image of a strong ideal, someone in control of her own destiny, and it made her stronger. She took the idea of it—the knowledge that it can be done—and that was what let her do it for herself.
And that’s what I want to do. I want to look into Faerie and know that everything can be different. I want to break the cycle of my old patterns. I want to throw away my crutches and addictions. I want to step into a world where anything is possible—where I can be anything or anybody.
I want to find strength in my solitude so that when I do interact with other people, I won’t hold on so tightly when they’re with me. So that I can let them go when we have to be apart.
I know the danger. All I have to do is remember what happened to Elise. If I close my eyes, I can see her ravaged body as clearly as though it were still lying stretched out in the morgue in front of me . . . .
By looking into Faerie, I might be calling the same savagery down upon myself. But there’s no point in being afraid. The danger’s all around anyway. I might have imagined all those psychotics and rapists that peopled my fears, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there. All you have to do is pick up a paper or turn on the news.
The dangers of Faerie are out there, too.
I guess what I should be saying is that while I have to be careful, I can’t let my fear overwhelm me the way I have in the past.
I reach into my pocket to take the package of cigarettes I’m currently working on and lay it down beside the roses.
Break the old patterns. The old cycles.
“It’s funny how it works out, isn’t it?” I say to my client’s gravestone. “I failed you, but you—however inadvertently—you didn’t fail me.”
I stand up and brush the dirt from my knees.
“I can’t pay you back, but maybe I can help other people the way you’ve helped me: trip them out of their old patterns and show them what they’re doing to themselves. Jump-start their lives onto a new track and then try to be there for them when they begin to put their lives back together again.”
I touch the stone, trace its smooth surface with my fingers.
“I don’t know where you are,” I tell Elise. “I don’t know if you can hear me or if it’ll make any difference if you can, but I promise I’ll give it my best shot.”
I turn away from the grave, continuing the one-sided conversation in my head.
I’m going to start with Ari and see if, together, we can’t break the pattern of her pain. Her pain, and mine. That’d be a kind of magic, too, wouldn’t it? Because we can’t close our eyes to it. Not the magic, not the pain. If we do that, we might as well close them forever.
The gates of the graveyard loom over me again as I leave, but they don’t feel as oppressive as they did when I first went in. In my mind’s eye, I’m picturing little figures the size of mice, slipping out from behind Elise’s gravestone. They look like they’ve been put together with twigs and leaves and other debris. Their heads are wide, eyes slightly oversized and slanted, noses small on some, prominent on others, mouths very wide. Their hair is matted like dreadlocks mixed up with leafy vines.
They climb over the roses. One of them pulls a cigarette from the pack I left there and is awkwardly holding it, nose quivering like a rabbit’s as it sniffs the paper and tobacco. A few of them clamber up onto the lower base of the gravestone and are shading their eyes, looking in my direction.
I don’t turn around and look back. So long as I don’t turn around, they can really be there. The magic can be real. The pain can be put away.