People he works with, especially those who sneeringly refer to him as His Lordship, wouldn’t recognize John Lyon now, ashen and trembling and sucking down a mouthful of Scotch right from the bottle. He’s so rattled he drinks too quickly and gags, forced to spit up in the sink, no dignity left in this man, it’s been frightened out of him. He tries to wash away the mess in the sink but nothing comes from the tap. Lyon remembers too late that the electricity powering the water pump won’t be turned on until tomorrow.
Walking around the perimeter of the kitchen, giving the open crate a wide berth, in fact refusing even to look at the corpse, Lyon keeps glancing out the kitchen window, still expecting that hell dog to appear there.
He finally steps right up to the window and looks into the clearing.
No dog, but Lyon is surprised by how light the night has become, the moon having finally risen high enough to top the surrounding hills. He glances at his watch, almost midnight.
Not trusting himself to carry the kerosene lamp without dropping it and catching the entire cabin on fire, Lyon takes a flashlight from the box of supplies and uses it to find his way through the living room, the dark bedroom, and into the bathroom. After peeing he flushes the toilet, but of course there’s no water to refill the tank. Next time will he have to pee outside? Where that dog is waiting for him and probably snakes too.
Back in the kitchen he finally gets enough nerve and Scotch in him to stand at the crate and look at her. Someone obviously entered the cabin while he was gone, opened the lid, and pulled the shroud loose. Whoever did that wants him to look. They’re aware of Lyon’s emotional instability and are trying to push him over sanity’s edge.
Time passes, Lyon sipping Scotch into an empty stomach, trying to convince himself to kneel at the crate and remove the cloth from the rest of her face. It’s not Claire. Lyon can tell even from her partially exposed face that the woman is much too young to be Claire. He finally kneels there on the floor, images from a dozen horror films leaping to mind, the corpse coming suddenly to life, bolting upright to grab him.
He waits for it to happen, for something to happen.
Then with the finger and thumb of one shaking hand he delicately pinches the top edge of the cloth and s-l-o-w-l-y pulls it from her face.
Seeing her, he breathes more easily, placing the Scotch bottle on the floor, staring at her face and exposed breast, surprised by his sudden sexual arousal.
The white cloth looks more like a negligee than a shroud, a negligee that’s been pulled aside by a lover to expose that breast. The woman’s face is beautifully exotic, her skin deeply black, big eyes gently closed, flared nose, prominent cheekbones narrowing to a delicate chin, her mouth wonderfully large, lips full and still tinged with a lifelike pinkness — looking nothing at all the way Tommy Door looked in his coffin, mummified and overly made up and resolutely dead. Ever since seeing Tommy like that, Lyon has been in mortal fear of ending up the same way. But what’s the alternative?
He again pinches the top edge of the cloth between finger and thumb, pulling it down far enough to expose the other breast. He wants to touch them. What would the breasts of a dead woman feel like — and why is Lyon even thinking along these lines, what’s wrong with him? Maybe he should cover her back up again. But Lyon doesn’t want to, he can’t stop looking at her.
Most of the black women he knows back in New York are, for want of a better term, American blacks, skin the various shades of light coffee, features narrowed and homogenized by the white blood in their ancestry. Not so the face into which Lyon now stares, a face shining with the heart of Africa, ebony black, racially pure, black-to-the-bone black.
She’s only a girl, can’t be much more than twenty.
Before Claire stepped in front of that cab she vowed she would send someone to help Lyon, that her soul would be watching over him — he wouldn’t be alone, she promised.
Lyon rubs his face with both hands.
Then he gets up and again walks unsteadily around the kitchen, glancing nervously at that window, worried he might be so totally crazy he’s not even aware of how crazy he is. He has dedicated his entire life to maintaining control, never letting anyone know how he feels deep inside, keeping his interior a secret for so long now that he doesn’t know what’s in there himself, all those protective layers poured like concrete over his soul: no wife, no children, living alone, selfish, independent, tough, can’t-touch-me, no social or financial debts, an island. And now that concrete is breaking up and whatever it is coming loose deep inside Lyon, that’s what’s scaring him worse than this corpse or that dog or anything else that’s happened to him this past week.
Lyon returns to kneel at the crate.
Her breasts are plump and high on her chest, a young woman’s breasts topped with deeply purple nipples so richly swollen that Lyon can too easily imagine them in his mouth, imagine tasting that soft black flesh, chewing it gently, his arousal returning as he sees all too vividly in his mind how he could bend over right now and suck that nearest nipple between tongue and palate.
He actually dangles one hand over the side of the crate.
She appears to be only sleeping. Lyon argues to himself that it’s perfectly normal to be aroused by the sight of a beautiful young woman, half-naked and asleep. He has come upon her in bed, a silken sheet slipped to her waist, and here she sleeps in front of him. He can stare at her without censure, even venture to touch a breast without awakening her. John Lyon tries hard to justify this rancid desire he’s suffering, his dangling hand moving closer and closer until the knuckles of that white trembling hand brush across one black nipple.
He’s not horrified to be doing this, her flesh feeling cool but not dead, however dead might feel, certainly not repulsive. Lyon moves his knuckles across the nipple a second time, his arousal setting itself like a steel bolt, urging him on, go ahead and take that black breast in your hand, who’s to know, you’re isolated out here and when you bring the police back in the morning she certainly can’t tell them what you did, go ahead and do it, lean your head down, John Lyon, and suck that nipple, go on, see what it tastes like, you’re the only one who will ever know what you’ve done and you can handle it, suck both of them, do it, why not?
Torn up inside by desire and by the self-hatred that desire is creating, Lyon lowers his forehead onto the edge of the crate so he can’t see what his hand is doing, covering her breast and gently kneading it.
Past midnight now, John Lyon stands at the kitchen window and stares out, waiting for what he isn’t sure.
He turns toward her again, the lust he was previously feeling replaced now by shame. He can’t tolerate looking at her. Hurrying to the crate, intending to replace the cloth over her body, he notices that her right wrist, the one nearest him, is tucked down toward the bottom of the crate and is bound in a thick leather cuff apparently anchored to the crate. Leaning over, he finds that her left wrist is similarly cuffed.
Maybe the woman was alive when she was placed in the crate, alive and struggling so that she had to be strapped down. She’s alive now.
Lyon freezes. Of course she’s alive, her nipple puckered under his touch, of course she’s alive, he’s been repressing that knowledge so that he could … Oh Jesus. And now Lyon is nervously reaching down next to her hip, pulling loose a leather thong that is laced through that cuff, taking her slender black wrist in his hand.
Just as the tips of his fingers touch the underside of her wrist, Lyon’s peripheral vision catches a movement. Lyon turns — Jesus God, at the window. He drops her hand and jerks around on his knees just in time to get a good look before it ducks down out of sight beneath the window’s ledge.