The Mammoth Book of Terror (52 page)
Read The Mammoth Book of Terror Online
Authors: Stephen Jones
“Swung?” I said. “You mean they don’t any more?”
He smiled and took my elbow, positioning me in front of an
open doorway, pointed in. I looked; a woman was lying naked on her stomach under a mirror suspended overhead. Perspiration gleamed on her skin.
“Buffet?” I said. “All you can eat, a hundred dollars?”
The man threw back his head and laughed heartily. “New in the Quarter, aintcha?” Same honey in the voice. They caress you with their voices here, I thought, holding the crumpled
go-cup tightly. It was a different one; I’d had another drink since I’d come out and it hadn’t seemed like a bad idea at all, another drink, the walking around, all of it. Not by
myself, anyway.
Something brushed my hip. “You’ll let me buy you another, wontcha?” Dark hair, dark eyes; young. I remembered that for a long time.
Wild creatures in lurid long dresses catcalled screechily from a second floor balcony as we passed below on the street. My eyes were heavy with heat and alcohol but I kept walking. It was easy
with him beside me, his arm around me and his hand resting on my hip.
Somewhere along the way, the streets grew much darker and the crowds disappeared. A few shadows in the larger darkness; I saw them leaning against street signs; we passed one close enough to
smell a mixture of perfume and sweat and alcohol and something else.
“Didn’t nobody never tell you to come out alone at night in this part of the Quarter?” The question was amused, not reproving. They caress you with their voices down here, with
their voices and the darkness and the heat, which gets higher as it gets darker. And when it gets hot enough, they melt and flow together and run all over you, more fluid than water.
What are you doing
?
I’m walking into a dark hallway; I don’t know my footing, I’m glad there’s someone with me.
What are you doing?
I’m walking into a dark room to get out of the heat, but it’s no cooler here and I don’t really care after all.
What are you doing?
I’m overdressed for the season here; this isn’t Schenectady in the spring, it’s New Orleans, it’s the French Quarter.
What are you doing
?
I’m hitting my sexual peak at thirty-five.
“What are you doing?”
Soft laughter. “Oh, honey, don’t you know?”
The Quarter was empty at dawn, maybe because it was raining. I found my way back to the Bourbon Orleans in the downpour anyway. It shut off as suddenly as a suburban lawn
sprinkler just as I reached the front door of the hotel.
I fell into bed and slept the day away, no wake-up calls, and when I opened my eyes, the sun was going down and I remembered how to find him.
You’d think there would have been a better reason: my husband ignored me or my kids were monsters or my job was a dead-end or some variation on the mid-life crisis. It
wasn’t any of those things. Well, the seminars
were
boring but nobody gets that bored. Or maybe they did and I’d just never heard about it.
It was the heat.
The heat gets inside you. Then you get a fever from the heat, and from fever you progress to delirium and from delirium into another state of being. Nothing is real in delirium. No, scratch
that: everything is real in a different way. In delirium, everything floats, including time. Lighter than air, you slip away. Day breaks apart from night, leaves you with scraps of daylight.
It’s all right – when it gets that hot, it’s too hot to see, too hot to bother looking. I remembered dark hair, dark eyes, but it was all dark now and in the dark, it was even
hotter than in the daylight.
It was the heat. It never let up. It was the heat and the smell. I’ll never be able to describe that smell except to say that if it were a sound, it would have been round and mellow and
sweet, just the way it tasted. As if he had no salt in his body at all. As if he had been distilled from the heat itself, and salt had just been left behind in the process.
It was the heat.
And then it started to get cool.
It started to cool down to the eighties during the last two days of the conference and I couldn’t find him. I made a half-hearted showing at one of the seminars after a
two-day absence. They stared, all the men and the women, especially the one who had asked me to go shopping.
“I thoughtyou’d been kidnapped by white slavers,” she said to me during the break. “What happened? You don’t look like you feel so hot.”
“I feel very hot,” I said, helping myself to the watery lemonade punch the hotel had laid out on a table. With beignets. The sight of them turned my stomach and so did the punch. I
put it down again. “I’ve been running a fever.”
She touched my face, frowning slightly. “You don’t feel feverish. In fact, you feel pretty cool. Clammy, even.”
“It’s the air-conditioning,” I said, drawing back. Her fingers were cold, too cold to tolerate. “The heat and the air-conditioning. It’s fucked me up.”
Her eyes widened.
“
Messed
me up, excuse me. I’ve been hanging around my kids too long.”
“Perhaps you should see a doctor. Or go home.”
“I’ve just got to get out of this air-conditioning,” I said, edging toward the door. She followed me, trying to object. “I’ll be fine as soon as I get out of this
air-conditioning and back into the heat.”
“No,
wait,
” she called insistently. “You may be suffering from heat-stroke. I think that’s it- the clammy skin, the way you look—”
“It’s not heatstroke, I’m freezing in this goddam refrigerator. Just leave me the fuck alone and I’ll be
fine
!”
I fled, peeling off my jacket, tearing open the top of my blouse. I couldn’t go back, not to that awful air-conditioning. I would stay out where it was warm.
I lay in bed with the windows wide open and the covers pulled all the way up. One of the men from my company phoned; his voice sounded too casual when he pretended I had
reassured him. Carl’s call only twenty minutes later was not a surprise. I’m fine, dear. You don’t sound fine. I am, though. Everyone is worried about you. Needlessly. I think I
should come down there. No, stay where you are, I’ll be fine. No, I think I should come and get you. And I’m telling you to stay where you are. That does it, you sound weird,
I’m getting the next flight out and your mother can stay with the boys. You stay where you are, goddamit, or I might not come home, is that clear?
Long silence.
Is someone there with you?
More silence.
I said, is someone there with you?
It’s just the heat. I’ll be fine, as soon as I warm up.
Sometime after that, I was sitting at a table in a very dark place that was almost warm enough. The old woman sitting across from me occasionally drank delicately from a
bottle of beer and fanned herself, even though it was only almost warm.
“It’s such pleasure when it cool down like dis,” she said in her slow honeyvoice. Even the old ladies had honeyvoices here. “The heat be a beast.”
I smiled, thinking for a moment that she’d said
bitch
, not
beast.
“Yeah. It’s a bitch all right but I don’t like to be cold.”
“No? Where you from?”
“Schenectady. Cold climate.”
She grunted. “Well, the heat don’t be a bitch, it be a beast. He be a beast.”
“Who?”
“Him. The heat beast.” She chuckled a little. “My grandma woulda called him a loa. You know what dat is?”
“No.”
She eyed me before taking another sip of beer. “No. I don’t know whether that good or bad for you, girl. Could be deadly either way, someone who don’t like to be cold. What you
doin’ over here anyway? Tourist Quarter three blocks thataway.”
“I’m looking for a friend. Haven’t been able to find him since it’s cooled down.”
“Grandma knew they never named all de loa. She said new ones would come when they found things be willin’ for ‘em. Or when they named by someone. Got nothin’ to do with
the old religion any more. Bigger than the old religion. It’s all de world now.” The old woman thrust her face forward and squinted at me. “What friend
you
got over here?
No outa-town white girl got a friend over here.”
“I do. And I’m not from out of town any more.”
“Get out.” But it wasn’t hostile, just amusement and condescension and a little disgust. “Go buy you some tourist juju and tell everybody you met a mamba in
N’awlins. Be some candyass somewhere sell you a nice, fake love charm.”
“I’m not here for that,” I said, getting up. “I came for the heat.”
“Well, girl, it’s cooled down.” She finished her beer.
Sometime after that, in another place, I watched a man and a woman dancing together. There were only a few other people on the floor in front of the band. I couldn’t
really make sense of the music, whether it was jazz or rock or whatever. It was just the man and the woman I was paying attention to. Something in their movements was familiar. I was thinking he
would be called by the heat in them, but it was so damned cold in there, not even ninety degrees. The street was colder. I pulled the jacket tighter around myself and cupped my hands around the
coffee mug. That famous Louisiana chicory coffee. Why couldn’t I get warm?
It grew colder later. There wasn’t a warm place in the Quarter, but people’s skins seemed to be burning. I could see the heat shimmers rising from their bodies. Maybe I was the only
one without a fever now.
Carl was lying on the bed in my hotel room. He sat up as soon as I opened the door. The heat poured from him in waves and my first thought was to throw myself on him and take
it, take it all, and leave him to freeze to death.
“Wait!” he shouted but I was already pounding down the hall to the stairs.
Early in the morning, it was an easy thing to run through the Quarter. The sun was already beating down but the light was thin, with little warmth. I couldn’t hear Carl chasing me, but I
kept running, to the other side of the Quarter, where I had first gone into the shadows. Glimpse of an old woman’s face at a window; I remembered her, she remembered me. Her head nodded, two
fingers beckoned. Behind her, a younger face watched in the shadows. The wrong face.
I came to a stop in the middle of an empty street and waited. I was getting colder; against my face, my fingers were like living icicles. It had to be only 88 or 89 degrees, but even if it got
to ninety-five or above today, I wouldn’t be able to get warm.
He had it. He had taken it. Maybe I could get it back.
The air above the buildings shimmied, as if to taunt. Warmth, here, and here, and over here, what’s the matter with you, frigid or something?
Down at the corner, a police car appeared. Heat waves rippled up from it, and I ran.
“Hey.”
The man stood over me where I sat shivering at a corner table in the place that bragged it had traded slaves over a hundred years ago. He was the color of rich earth, slightly built with
carefully waved black hair. Young face; the wrong face, again.
“You look like you in the market for a sweater.”
“Go away.” I lifted the coffee cup with shuddering hands. “A thousand sweaters couldn’t keep me warm now.”
“No, honey.” They caressed you with their voices down here. He took the seat across from me. “Not that kind of sweater. Sweater I mean’s a person, special kinda person.
Who’d you meet in the Quarter? Good-lookin’ stud, right? Nice, wild boy, maybe not white but white enough for you?”
“Go away. I’m not like that.”
“You know what you like now, though. Cold. Very cold woman. Cold woman’s no good. Cold woman’ll take all the heat out of a man, leave him frozen dead.”
I didn’t answer.
“So you need a sweater. Maybe I know where you can find one.”
“Maybe you know where I can find
him.
”
The man laughed. “That’s what I’m sayin’, cold woman.” He took off his light, white suitcoat and tossed it at me. “Wrap up in that and come on.”
The fire in the hearth blazed, flames licking out at the darkness. Someone kept feeding it, keeping it burning for hours. I wasn’t sure who, or if it was only one
person, or how long I sat in front of the fire, trying to get warm.
Sometime long after the man had brought me there, the old woman said, “Burnin’ all day now. Whole Quarter oughta feel the heat by now. Whole
city.
”
“
He’ll
feel it, sure enough.” The man’s voice. “He’ll feel it, come lookin’ for what’s burnin’.” A soft laugh.
“Won’t he be surprised to see it’s his cold woman.”
“Look how the fire wants her.”
The flames danced. I could sit in the middle of them and maybe then I’d be warm.
“Where did he go?” The person who asked might have been me.
“Went to take a rest. Man sleeps after a bender, don’t you know. He oughta be ready for more by now.”
I reached out for the fire. A long tongue of flame licked around my arm; the heat felt so good.
“Look how the fire wants her.”
Soft laugh. “If it wants her, then it should have her. Go ahead, honey. Get in the fire.”
On hands and knees, I climbed up into the hearth, moving slowly, so as not to scatter the embers. Clothes burned away harmlessly.
To sit in fire is to sit among a glory of warm, silk ribbons touching everywhere at once. I could see the room now, the heavy drapes covering the windows, the dark faces, one old, one young,
gleaming with sweat, watching me.
“You feel ’im?” someone asked. “Is he comin’?”
“He’s comin’, don’t worry about that.” The man who had brought me smiled at me. I felt a tiny bit of perspiration gather at the back of my neck. Warmer; getting
warmer now.
I began to see him; he was forming in the darkness, coming together, pulled in by the heat. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, young, the way he had been. He was there before the hearth and the look on
that young face as he peered into the flames was hunger.
The fire leaped for him; I leaped for him and we saw what it was we really had. No young man; no man.
The heat be a beast.