relapse

"C'mon. Let's get out of here."

"It's okay. I have you."

They went to the car and he held the door open for her. When he closed it again, she was looking straight forward, and the profile of her face looked cold and white and dim through the glass. He went around the front of the car to the driver's side, trying not to watch her through the windshield, half-expecting to find the car empty, half-expecting that she would have disappeared by the time he reached her.

She hadn't.

He started the car.

Neither of them spoke as he backed around and out of the row of empty spaces, his arm on the back of her seat as he looked over his shoulder, or when he turned onto the road that led back out of town through the woods. After a while he reached out, without taking his eyes off the road (it wasn't in the best repair, after all), and touched her hair, at the nape of her neck where it changed color. Making sure she was still real and still there. She laughed softly, with a hint of derision, and he put his hand back on the wheel. Outside it was getting dark.

Too dark, even, before long. The fog had gradually parted around the car and vanished as they left town, but under the thick canopy of trees there were no stars or moon, and no streetlights along this road. The icy white sweep of his headlights was as far as he could see, the only narrow cone of the world left. The double yellow line seemed to float several inches off the surface of the road. She shifted position in her seat, the rustling of her clothes sounding loud in the quiet inside the car, and reached over and put her hand on him. It felt cool even through layers of fabric. He kept slowing down, trying not to outrun the reach of his light, squinting against the dim glow from the dashboard that reflected in the windows, and the darkness pressed in on the car as if trying to crush it. His breath stuttered. Her fingers were...

The yellow lines swerved and disappeared abruptly, vanishing around a tight corner; straight ahead, where they turned, there was a gate to some piece of private property, an old white wooden gate whose paint was peeling and whose NO TRESPASSING sign was worn nigh-unreadable. His foot jumped onto the brake before any of this could be run past his conscious mind, and staring at the sign as the car slowed down he found that for no reason he was thinking of the hotel by the water again, the huge window in their room where they had sat for an hour or so one day in two chairs, his arm around her shoulders, watching the sun glittering off the water behind the tourists' canoes and motorboats, as if they were scattering jewels in their wake.

He pulled up to the side of the road in front of the gate and the NO TRESPASSING sign and turned off the car. With the headlights and the dash lights off the darkness was impenetrable. The only sound was their breathing, uneven with each other so that they came into synch and out of it and back in again, and then the soft clunk as she put her seat back.

"Don't you want to lie down here with me?"

she said, and now that she mentioned it he had to agree that it did look comfortable for a hospital bed and he was tired from the long, long day he'd had. He first sat on the foot of the mattress, barely next to the high heels of her boots, and then awkwardly scooted himself backward and lay down beside her on his back. The room's ceiling was a dingy white, a matrix of the soft-looking nubbly tiles that were supposed to damp sound, but then she reached across his chest and turned off the flashlight in his pocket, and he couldn't see it anymore. He stared up into the darkness instead. She left her arm across his chest, curled up beside him, like a plant that clung and would eventually smother. The thought was comforting. He closed his eyes.

It was impossible to tell how he came to be on top of her. The dark reversed his sense of direction, and both he and she seemed to be both everywhere and nowhere. She was soft and yielding underneath him, comfortable, like just lying on the bed, like something that had grown up out of the bed itself and yet gently and slowly and constantly in motion, a gradual twisting grind that never seemed to stop anywhere and made him a little seasick, as though the ground itself were moving, her whispering voice too soft to tell if she'd really spoken,

(don't you want to touch me?)
(I I yes I yes I want)

and her fingers were knitted with his larger ones and the skin under his fingertips the warmth of her lower belly and the inside of her hip, just above where her skirt started, where he knew but couldn't see the butterfly someone had branded into her skin, someone years ago with a needle, she was stroking the tattoo with his hand that shook from what she whispered reassuringly to him was eagerness.

His fingers slipped on her skirt and then she showed them to the tab of its zipper, and he drew it down on his own. She lay back, then, let him pull the creaking fabric off her hips and her legs, and draw her boots off and set them on the floor. Soft underneath him, and welcoming, when his weight bore down on her again, his clothed lower body brushing smooth skin and lace between her legs, and he drew the cardigan off her pliant arms and then the smaller shirt beneath over her head. She lay still. He could hardly hear her breathing anymore. Panic seized him, desperation, breath shaking in his throat, and he jittered and fumbled the bra clasp open as fast as he could, nearly ripped off the tiny scrap of panties, and he touched her hip again, and there was no tattoo, no curve of bone, no warm and living flesh under his fingers but soft plastic. Soft and cool and faintly yielding to the touch. He reached up to paw at her face and found smooth, undefined features, lidless marble eyes, lips a solid barrier. His shaking fingers bumped the dyed wig and dislodged it slightly.

He dropped the mannequin from his arms to the mattress and stood up fast, backing away from the bed, his erection wilting in a quiet dying fall. Invisible but palpable, the mannequin lay in a stiff tumble of limbs, limp, patient, somehow sly. Even in the totality of the darkness it seemed it was looking at him.

"James..."

He was stretched out on his back somewhere --

"James?" she said, and he opened his eyes. The pale greenish light from the dashboard showed him a ghost of his reflection in the windshield. He whipped his head around to look at her, and she was alive and real again in the seat beside him, with a small and patient smile. "Did you fall asleep?"

Had he? He supposed that made sense. "I... I guess I did."

She made a small and sympathetic sound and brushed her fingers along his cheek, light enough to make all the nerves come awake. It was like being touched with electric filaments. "We should find somewhere to stop for the night." Sitting back, she crossed her legs and clasped her hands around her knee, pressed up against the panel that hid the passenger airbag. "Let's go."

"Right," he said, slowly, testing out the sound of his own voice. For a minute he thought of telling her about the dream, but when he tried, he found that he couldn't remember it now; so he started the engine again and pulled back onto the road.

The woods flew by in dark silence, frozen treetrunks posing in the headlights. They seemed to go on much longer than they had during the day. He looked over at her once, a few minutes later, to see if maybe she had fallen asleep herself, but she was still sitting up and alert, staring out the windshield. She turned her head to meet his eyes when she noticed him looking at her, and smiled again. It looked tight and strained this time, and she seemed pale. He looked back at the road, and did not ask if she was all right.

"James, stop," she said perhaps half an hour later, sharply, and he hit the brake just before he also saw the tree that had fallen across the road. Her eyes were a little better. He slowed the car down and brought it to a stop some ten feet from the tree-trunk, looking out at it in the glare of the headlights. It was huge, perhaps as thick through the middle as he was tall. Around it the woods were undisturbed, and he wondered what had brought it down.

"What do we do?" she asked him after a moment, and he turned off the ignition but left the lights on.

"I guess we'll have to move it. It'll be tough, but it's blocking the whole road."

When he looked over at her this time, she looked not just strained but frightened, but she nodded just the same. They opened the car doors and got out.

"I'm going to see if I can tell how thick it is. Wait right here."

"You won't leave me, will you?"

"Of course I won't."

She stood shifting her weight and clutching her arms around herself in the glow of the headlights as he made his way around the near edge of the tree, where the branches tapered off in a bristling skirt over the ground. The headlights left a grainy white stain on the air above the trunk, but otherwise it was dark on the far side; he pulled the flashlight back out of his coat pocket and turned it on, and turned in a slow exploring pivot.

On the other side of the tree the road ended. It did not taper off or crumble into disrepair but simply stopped somewhere underneath where the trunk had fallen; grass stretched out from underneath the other side, and soon the grass was overtaken by low shrubs and finally the trunks of trees. The forest closed itself around the road like skin with a healed scar. He stared for long, long moments.

"Maria?" he called, finally, and waited.

She didn't answer. He turned back toward where he'd left the car, frowning now, holding up his flashlight.

"Maria!"

Silence. The trees stared down without interest.

He hurried back around the end of the tree, Maria growing on his lips and then dying. The car stood with its lights on and both its front doors open. The keys were still in the ignition. The road was empty. She was gone.

He stood there for a long time. Then he turned and walked back around behind the tree, circled it once more, and then crossed to the side of the road and plunged into the woods.

There was no path, so he had to break his own. The branches and the lower shrubs snagged and pulled at his jacket and his pants, trying to slow him down, and he turned and twisted to avoid them as best he could. The trees overhead and around him walled him into a tomb. Twice he heard twigs snapping somewhere out in the darkness, not too far off, and called Maria's name. Both times there was no answer.

After a while he began to run.

It seemed like hours. He ran until a long stitch up his side felt like it would burn him and split him open, until his breath came in long sobbing gasps, until the flashlight began to flicker and sputter, until it felt like it must surely be dawn but the darkness still pressed in like a living thing. He began to stumble on every few steps, tripped on a tree root and managed to right himself, staggered forward a few more steps and got tangled in a low creeping bush of some kind and fell --

Fell too far, didn't stop, just fell and fell and fell --

James...

He was stretched out on his back somewhere that looked like --

But it didn't look like anything, because it was completely dark. Had his flashlight died? He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move, he was smothered in dirt. It was in his nose and his ears and had crumbled in between his lips, gagging him on the taste.

Panicking again, he started thrashing, pummeling away the earth around his arms and them pounding at it with his elbows, clawing with his hands. With the full length of his arms punched and stretched out above his chest he finally felt his fingertips break through to air, and he pawed and flailed until the dirt parted down to his face, just as the suffocation was beginning to weaken him. He clambered up with both his elbows, pulling his head through the gap, wheezing and spitting and sputtering and gagging as he started to breathe again. If he'd been buried any deeper...

As he was dragging himself out of the hole, he finally noticed the headstone, but by now it hardly surprised him at all. Nor did the fact that it was blank, and so were the two lined up next to it. The filled-in earth at their feet looked freshly turned. One of their mounds was steaming slightly, or maybe it was smoking.

He climbed up out of the grave and got to his feet, brushing as much of the dirt off himself as he could. Where had the entrance to the underground graveyard been? Back this way? He took a few steps, and then stopped, surprised that it had taken him this long to remember.

"Maria?" he said aloud.

"James?" a weak, small voice called back immediately from the other side of the graveyard, and he jumped. "Where are you?"

"I'm here! I'm coming, don't move!" Relief like a warm wave, like sunlight. She was okay, he'd found her, now they could finally get out of here...

She was lying on her back on top of another grave, an older one where grass had already begun to grow. Her hair spreading out under her head looked old and brittle, parched, her face baggy and pale and bare of makeup. She was dressed in hospital pajamas. An IV needle was patched into her arm, but its tube only trailed out and away onto the grave next to her and ended there in a ragged stump. He knelt down beside her and she looked up and reached for his hand, with a trembling smile. The headstone behind her was a large, ornate gray slab, reading

MARY SHEPERD-SUNDERLAND
BELOVED IN LIFE
BELOVED IN DEATH

"James," she said, and drew him down on top of her.

The darkness swallowed everything. Even the sound of the hospital bed's creaking springs and the soft gasping of her voice; it muffled them, made them seem far away. The darkness was a warm, wet, hungry mouth all its own, and it caressed both their bodies, gently pushing them together. Even when it was banished by the light swinging overhead, casting the shadows of the cell's bars across the cot where they lay, the darkness was still there, just outside, waiting. And then it had come back, and it seemed to shudder, to sigh, when he slipped inside her. It was like a part of her. It was like her. The darkness shut out the sight of the blind, melancholy white arms and legs and heads he knew were strewn all around the room's floor, and the thing that stood waiting and watching in the corner, equally blind but strong and reborn and red, red as all the depths inside her, black in the darkness but red.

They moved together, fast and hard and rough, her hands locked together behind the nape of his neck and her long pink nails biting into his skin. She moaned, and she moaned his name, and he thrust into her, holding himself up by his hands braced on the back of the car seat, her hip pressing against the steering column, the gearshift catching the rumpled-down fabric of his pants. He pressed his face into the side of her neck. She smelled invisible and antiseptic.

It was moving forward, out of the corner, toward the two of them. Terror squeezed around his stomach, but she was squeezing him tighter, and he lost the fear in the black sucking depths of her, in the void that had no name. She was pulling everything out of him, into her, into oblivion, unmaking him in the meaningless swamp of wet heat between her legs, and he was glad.

There was a whuff sound as the spear cut through the air, and then it had punched through his back, shattering his spine and driving through his ribs and out of his chest, through her body as well and then down into the mattress and through the metal crisscross of its frame to embed in the floor. They screamed in unison, his thick and guttural, hers high and sobbing, a parody in grotesque of the culmination of their own act. Blood drooled and spattered from his lips and his gut, drenching her clothes and her skin, gagging and choking her on his blood and her own. They writhed, together now irrevocably and eternally, two insects caught on the same pin. Their blood spread and stuck and sealed their bodies to one another, wedded her to him. His penis lay limp and shriveled inside her, with no possible retreat. And he could feel the thing still standing over them, immortal and constant in its eyeless gaze.

How could he have thought that he didn't need this anymore? How could he have thought they would ever leave? This was a sacred place.

But he wasn't there at all, and neither was she. They were somewhere else. He was somewhere else. He was on her in the passenger seat of the car, twisted awkwardly to fit them both into the makeshift bed, feeling the gentle shifting of the steel cage on its axles as they moved. He was above her in the cell with the light swinging past the bars with his eyes shut tight. He was sitting alone on the road in front of the downed tree. He was peeling up her shirt to kiss her breasts on the bed he and Mary had shared in the hotel, with wind shaking the trees outside the window and making the lake roar and seethe. He was holding a mannequin in his arms. He was holding a pillow over her face. He was stepping on the accelerator and driving the car through the gate and through the NO TRESPASSING sign and taking his hands off the wheel as they hurtled toward a dense copse of tree-trunks. He was grinding into her hand through the bars. He was sitting with Mary by the hotel room window, watching the sun glitter on the water. He was climaxing with a faint grunt of surprise inside a rotten-wet, laughing, faceless spider-legged thing, that howled and gibbered and would not let him go.

He was...

James.

He was stretched out on his back somewhere that looked like the enormous, sweeping nave of a church, a church that had been inverted and somehow put underground. Flickering light picked out the walls, candlelight perhaps, and there was a faint, unpleasant groaning hum in the air that seemed almost holy. The mangled thing with his wife's face was sprawled on top of him, moving in jittering scrambles, its cage sprung and open several feet away on the ground he was lying on. It was cutting open his chest into two separate flaps of flesh in a long, amazingly precise incision. It was quite painless. As he watched with mild interest, it lowered its head to the cut and began to eat its way through his ribs with its teeth. Soon it would reach his heart and eat that as well. He considered this, and found that he didn't mind very much. It hadn't done him much good anyway.

And Maria was sitting there with him, his head on her knees, stroking back his hair from his forehead with a soothing hand and whispering his name. So there was nothing to worry about, was there? After it was over he would take her, his prize, and they would leave. He was sure they would.

He leaned back his head and closed his eyes, and the darkness comforted him.

Just outside the town, at a small rest stop atop a hill, a car stood empty with its driver's-side door open. Down in the abandoned streets the fog thickened, imperceptibly.

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