Mist and Shadows: Short Tales From Dark Haunts (2 page)

And on the wall, a picture catches my eye. Framed in gilt bronze, a woman stares at me.
 

Joanna, fair and pale.
Translucent skin, and her eyes mirror the sky, obsidian black with diamond pupils sparking in the iris. She’s come back to me, clothed in a gossamer gown that swirls to mix with the background. Cloaked in wind, in mist, in dreams. Cloaked in mystery. Her hair haloes raven wings, a nimbus of passion flowing past her shoulders.
 

I drift in her gaze. She’s tired of journeying. She’s come home to rest. I carry the picture to the counter and the old man looks at me, then at the framed image, and then back at me again.
 

“Are you sure you want this?” he asks. He’s serious. It’s not just some offhand question.
 

I nod. Pull out my wallet. “Where did you get it? What’s it called?”
 

“Well, let’s see.” He peers in the corner at what looks like chicken scratch. Takes his time, thinks before answering. “Ah…name of the picture appears to be
Ghosts
. I don’t really remember where we got it and I can’t read the artist’s name. One day, the wall was bare. Next day, there she was. Missus might know who brought it in, but she’s busy. I don’t like it, myself. Woman looks cold.”
 

She has every right to be. My Joanna’s been journeying through the ocean for months. Why shouldn’t she be cold? I carry the picture to my car. Eat my burger. Think about the last time I touched her; about how much I miss her. Did I weep when she died? I don’t remember. I should have wept. If I didn’t, I don’t want to know. I’m not a bad man. I’m not hard hearted.
 

And so I bring Joanna home. Hang her on the wall across from my bed where I can lie there and look at her, hands under my head, then under the covers. Her eyes stare down, mocking me. That’s troublesome. Joanna
never
mocked me. I’m not sure, is this really her or some other woman? There are little differences—the crease of the smile, the flutter of an eyelid. Taunting? Joanna wouldn’t taunt me…or would she?
 

And then I realize that Joanna no longer is confined to the realms of the dead. Now she stalks me in my dreams. I’ve invited a hunter into my house.
 

Most things like this start insidiously. During the weeks after Joanna’s death, I scan the papers for mention of a missing woman. Nobody finds her body. But her soul, I know exactly where it went. Not to heaven, not to hell, but straight into my dreams.
 

Each morning I wake in a fog. Brush hand over eyes. Where have I been? Where have I come from? Drifting in the currents, I suppose. Dreams of ocean waves and mournful gulls haunt me. I shouldn’t be surprised. Joanna turned my life upside down. I keep wondering if the cops will find her. Will they find me? And if they do, how can I explain that we were just sparring? Matching wits, matching wills. Matching bodies for the kill.
 

I don’t look at women quite as much. Not worth it. Too much trouble for the sport I crave. And Joanna…how can I ever find anyone else like her? She spoiled me for anyone else. I begin to hate her.
Just a little
.
 

One night I stare at the picture for a long time, wondering who posed for this portrait. Who painted her? I’ve searched the painting from top to bottom. There’s no signature. I want to name her, want to call her something, but she will not tolerate anything but
Joanna
and I’ve become superstitious about uttering that name aloud.
 

She watches me in the evenings as I surf the net or watch TV or read. I glance up, see her gazing down at me, a smirk on her lips. Beckoning. Taunting. She wants me to want her, wants me to look at her, to notice her. I curse at her, throw books at the wall but miss. Thank God, I miss. I don’t want to hurt her again, even if she’s hurting me..
 

That’s the trouble, you know, with women. They make you want them. They make you reliant on them. You long for their approval, jump through the hoops to get them just to say
good boy
. Buy them gifts, praise them, help them and they still turn on you and send you away. They make you hard, make you crazy and then refuse to let you touch them. Or they let you have their bodies but don’t share their souls. Yeah, that’s the trouble with women. I begin to hate them.
Just a little
.
 

Joanna watches me from the picture when she thinks I don’t notice, and she laughs, her voice a choir of nightingales. A symphony of dreams. One night, I stand before the portrait. Reach up, finger the long-dried oils. Her skin, cool under my fingers. Her lips, burgundy and full-bowed. Her eyes follow my own as I trace the outlines of her body. I can feel her fury. Touching where I should not touch. Approaching where I should not approach. Drunk, I press a finger to my lips and then to her own.
 

“Luv ya babe…you’re mine and I can do anything I want with you.”
 

Her eyes flash with anger.
“We’ll see about that. You are playing a chess match with the Queen. Don’t toy with me, boy. You can never win.”
 

The dreams begin.
 

Do you want me? Do you want me in your bed, under your body, in your soul?
 

The words echo in my sleep. I see her standing before me. She lets me get close enough to where I can almost touch her and then dances away, laughing.
Follow me if you can. Catch and you can have. Come now, it’s your game but I set the rules. If you catch me, I’ll be yours forever.
 

And I give chase and find myself on the edge of the ocean. She stands on a craggy rock that juts out from the cresting sea foam, her arms upraised to the wilding moon. I begin to wade towards her and find myself in an ocean of blood. She turns and laughs and the overpowering scent of death lifts and once again, a whiff of lilacs, midnight oil of the sheiks. My empress, my lotus flower. My tease and tormentor.
 

And I wake, screaming.
 

I should destroy the picture, but I can’t. Should take it back to the store but I can’t. Tried but can’t seem to take her off the wall. Too exquisite, my temptress. I can hear her during the day now. She follows me, cajoles me. Whispers in my ear. She wants me, I know she wants me to catch her, to take her down, to plunge into her center and make her mine. I want to hear her say
“I love you.”
She wants so much for me to notice her.
 

I can’t win. Not with her. But each time she hammers me, each time she leads me astray, I find another outlet. When the pressure builds too much, there are always women who mean nothing, nameless women by the side of the road at night. Women who would twist me around their fingers if they could. And they substitute nicely. Can’t ever bring them home. Joanna is a jealous mistress.
 

Sometimes they fight, sometimes they comply. I prefer the ones who fight. Then I can twist the leather a little tighter, hold the candle a little closer, listen to the singe of delicate hair. They never return. They all disappear into the realm in which my Joanna walks, but they aren’t as strong as she is. They quietly vanish forever.
 

Joanna, queen of my dreams, leads me on my nightly chase. And during the day she haunts my thoughts.
 

“Do you dream of me?”
She whispers in my ear. I brush the wind from my neck and pull my jacket tighter. Invisible bitch. Can’t see her but she’s there. Always there, and I am always aware. Her presence, a flutter of lilac and narcissus. Her voice, a choir of a thousand nightingales singing in the moonless sky and when she beckons me, I lose will, lose control, lose all sense of self.
 

“Do you dream of me?”
Her eyes pierce my soul, scarify my heart. Two obsidian coals, glowing in the wash of skin so pale that should she fade and I awake, there will be no forgiveness, no return from core of her abyss.
 

Mortuary Man

“Jack, can you hear us?”

They whisper to him. He knows their kind, inside and out. Knows them intimately, as a lover. Touches them in all their secret places. They think they can fool him, pretend to sleep the sleep of the ancients and hide their cold thoughts behind still colder eyes.

He reaches for the phone. There is one person he can call to shake their words out of his thoughts. One person who understands him, like a mirror, reflecting. She is brilliance to his vacuum, light to his darkened candle.
 

The phone rings. I know who it is before I reach for it and it scares the hell out of me. Every night since he found out I got divorced, he’s called. He talks, endlessly, his words spiral around, catch me up in their chaos. I loved him once, would have ripped out my heart for him.
Salome’s sacrifice.
But it’s been fourteen years and even though we’re still linked, I fear that connection. He’s going mad.

“I need to hear you say my name.”

Again and again, always the same. “What’s wrong?”

“They whisper to me. They want me to do things I shouldn’t do.”

The Slim Fast shake I had for dinner sours. He’s hinted before. I never take the bait, never want to know what he does in the dark corners of the mortuary in which he works. There are some roads even my jaded mind refuses to walk.

“You need to get out of there. Are you still on your meds?”

“No,” his voice is slow, a wisp of silk on skin. He can make me melt with the whisper of my name. “Lithium makes me go numb. I take it and can’t remember what you sound like. You’re the only one in this world I trust.”
 
A pause. “I wish I could come visit you.”
 
Plaintive, a little boy eyeing the most beautiful chocolate drop in the world.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Jack, I know you—”

“What are you wearing?”

Close eyes, lean head against the refrigerator.
 

Every night his questions get more personal, more prying. He scrutinizes me with his words, pries me open, comes dangerously close to puncturing my heart. I cry myself to sleep, both longing to help him, and fearing that someday, he’ll show up on my doorstep. I cry for the boy I knew and loved.

“What are you wearing?
 
I want to see you in my mind.”
 
His breath is slow; I can hear his anticipation.

“There’s someone at the door. Bye.”
 
I slide the receiver back onto the cradle. Sweat drenches my palms. I race outside, force air into my lungs. Slowly, the world returns to normal, but he’s out there and he’s thinking about me, and his ghosts are whispering to him in the night.

Jack…we know you can hear us…Jack, wake up.

His eyes flutter. He has beautiful lashes; any woman would be jealous of them. As his head leaves the pillow, rhythms shift, the world changes. There’s a flicker of electricity when the night descends, a buzz that signals the sleeping of the waking world and the waking of the dead.

Jack…come tend to us.

Oh, how they call, those beautiful bodies, waxen and pale. Alabaster brilliance under the light of perpetual slumber. He slips down the stairs, into the display room where the caskets rest on their podiums. Then, into the back. Here, in the chamber of the dead, they wait. He opens each vault and pulls out the slabs one by one.

Here he straightens a tie, there—shifts an elbow. As he makes his way down the row, he comes to
her
bed and hesitates a moment before venturing to wake her. She looks very much like his Mia, long dark hair, eyes brilliant pools of chocolate. But the life is hidden now, secreted away in recesses beyond the touch of the living. Except for him. He runs his hand along the silken strands, wondering what shampoo she preferred, hoping that he made the right choice. He’ll go out, buy sweet shampoos and conditioners, lotions to soften cold skin. He spends money out of his paychecks to do this and never begrudges a dime. Her hair is long, reaching well past her shoulders, and he leans down to inhale deeply. Below the scent of honeysuckle is another sweet scent. Cold, cloying, it’s the last perfume her body will make.

His lips are near her own and he looks into the dark eyes that will be shut for tomorrow’s service. Her family will never know his hands cleaned their loved one, that his careful arrangement made her beautiful for the last time. No, tomorrow they will whisper good-byes and regrets, never realizing that she still lives, that Jack can hear her, and that when they consign her to the earth, they trap her forever. Jack alone will give her the memories to last her throughout the time her body lets go of form and slides back to the primordial ooze. And now, he gazes at her beauty. He intends to give her a night to remember, to hang onto when the worms are eating their fill.

“Mia, help me.” He always calls me Mia.

I wipe the water where it runs out from under the towel and shake my long tresses free of the damp turban. “Are you on your meds?
 
You need to take your meds or you are going to have panic attacks like this—”

“No!
 
You don’t understand, they talk to me. I can hear them whispering all night sometimes. Do you want to know what I hear?”

Trembling, I want to slam the phone down, kill the connection. This is more serious than I thought, and with an instinct honed by experience, I know that he’s moved out of my league. I make a decision that I’ve avoided for weeks.
 

“Jack—”

He knows what I’m going to say, of course. Because he knows my thoughts, just as I know his. Right on cue, he starts babbling. I can feel his resistance. “Jack—listen to me.”

He pauses. I don’t want to say this, I don’t want to let go of the only man I’ve ever loved like I loved him, but every heart has its limits and sanity is a precious commodity.

“What do you want,
Mia
?”
 
The extra emphasis on my name—is he warning me?
 
Begging me?
 
Whatever he wants, it’s no longer mine to give.