Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Read online

“Only a little furniture,” she says. “Not good quality. Old furniture. Not anything anyone would want.”

  “But that’s what I deal in,” he says. “Old furniture. I run an antiques store. Often people don’t know the value of what they have. Before accepting your offer, I’d like to take a look.” He glances down at her mouth again.

  “I’ll triple it,” she says. Now she’s shivering. “It’s too cold for you to be going through that unit right now! Why don’t we get out of here before the storm hits? We could have a drink, and, I don’t know, dinner or something? We can talk it over.” She smiles at him, an insinuating smile. A strand of her hair has come down, it’s blowing across her mouth; she tucks it in behind her ear, slowly, then drops her eyes, gazing down in the direction of his belt. She’s upping the ante.

  “Okay,” he says. “Sounds good. You can tell me more about the furniture. But suppose I accept your offer, that unit has to be cleared in twenty-four hours. Or else they’ll come in and do it themselves, and they’ll keep my cleaning deposit.”

  “Oh, I’ll make sure it’s cleared,” she says. She slips her hand through his arm. “But I’ll need the key.”

  “No hurry,” says Sam. “We haven’t set the price.”

  She looks at him, no longer smiling. She knows he knows.

  He should quit fooling around. He should take the money and run. But he’s having too much fun. A real murderess, coming on to him! It’s edgy, it’s rash, it’s erotic. He hasn’t felt this alive for some time. Will she try to poison his drink? Get him in a dark corner, whip out a penknife, go for his jugular? Would he be fast enough to grab her hand? He wants to reveal his knowledge to her in a safe place surrounded by other people. He wants to watch her face as she realizes he’s got her by the neck, so to speak. He wants to hear the story she’ll tell. Or the stories: she must have more than one. He would.

  “Out of here, turn right,” he says. “Next stoplight, go past it. There’s a motel – the Silver Knight.” He knows the motel bars near all the storage outfits where he bids at auctions. “I’ll meet you in the bar. Get a booth. I just need to check my other unit.” He almost says, “Book a room while you’re at it, because we both know what this is about,” but that would be rushing things.

  “The Silver Knight,” she says. “Has it got a silver knight on the outside? Riding to the rescue?” She’s trying for a light touch. Again the laugh, a little breathless. Sam doesn’t play the move back. Instead he opts for a reprimanding frown. Don’t think you can charm me out of it, lady. I’m here to collect.

  “You can’t miss it,” he says. Will she skip out on him? Leave him stuck with the fiasco? No one would know how to track her, unless she’d made the mistake of using her real name when she’d rented the unit. It’s a risk, letting her out of his sight, but a risk he needs to take. He’s 99 per cent certain she’ll be sitting in the bar of the Silver Knight when he gets there.

  He texts Ned: Traffic shit. Blizzard crap. We’ll PU AM. Nite. He has a strong impulse to slip the SIM card out of his phone and tuck it into the dried groom’s breast pocket, but he resists it. He does go offline, however: not dark, but dark grey.

  I dunno, officer, Ned will say. He texted me from the storage place. Maybe around four. He was fine then. He was supposed to come to the shop in the morning, then we were going to take the van and clear out the units. After that, nothing.

  What dried guy in a monkey suit? What’re you talking about? Search me.

  One thing at a time. First, he opens up Unit 56. All is as it should be: several pieces of furniture, good-enough quality, the sort of thing they can resell in Metrazzle. Rocking chair, pine, Quebec. Two end tables, ’50s, mahogany looks like, spindly ebonized legs. Among them, an Arts and Crafts desk. The sealed white baggies are in the three right-hand drawers.

  It’s perfect, really. Maximum deniability. There’s no traceable line from them to him. I have no idea how it got in there! I bought the unit at an auction, I won the bid, it could’ve been anyone. I’m as surprised as you are! No, I didn’t open the drawers before I brought it back to the shop, why would I? I sell antiques, not stuff in drawers.

  Then the end destination buys the desk, most likely on Monday, and that’s all there is to it. He’s just the drop box, he’s just the delivery boy.

  Ned won’t open the drawers either. He has a finely developed sense of which drawers to leave closed.

  Sam can leave this shipment safely where it is: no one’s going to bother this locked unit before noon the next day. Him and his van will be well on the way before then.

  He checks his phone: one new message, from Gwyneth. I was wrong, please come back, we can talk it through. He has a tug of nostalgia: the familiar, the snug, the safe; the safe enough. Nice to know it’s waiting for him. But he doesn’t reply. He needs this oblong of freefall time he’s about to enter. Anything at all can happen within it.

  When he walks into the bar at the Silver Knight, she’s there waiting. She even has a booth. He’s cheered by the instant acquiescence. She’s minus her coat now, wearing the sort of outfit a woman like her should wear: black, for widow, for spider. It goes well with her ash-blond hair. Her eyes are hazel, her eyelashes long.

  She smiles as he slides in opposite her, but she doesn’t smile too much: a faint, melancholy smile. In front of her is a glass of white, barely touched. He orders the same. There’s a pause. Who’ll go first? All the hairs on the back of Sam’s neck are alert. On the flat screen over on the wall behind her head, the blizzard is rolling mutely toward them like a huge wave of confetti.

  “I think we might be stuck here,” she says.

  “Let’s drink to that,” says Sam, opening his big blue eyes. He does the direct gaze, raises his glass. What can she do but raise hers?

  Yeah, that’s him all right, no question. I was tending bar that night, the night of the blizzard. He was with a sizzling blond in a black dress, they seemed on very friendly terms, if you know what I mean. Didn’t see them leave. You want to bet they’ll find her in a snowbank when it all melts?

  “So, you looked inside,” she says.

  “Yeah, I did,” says Sam. “Who was he? What happened?” He hopes she doesn’t descend into tears: that would disappoint him. But no, she limits herself to a quivering chin, a biting of the lip.

  “It was terrible,” she says. “It was a mistake. He wasn’t supposed to die.”

  “But he did,” says Sam in a kindly voice. “These things happen.”

  “Oh yes. They do. I don’t know how to say this, it sounds so kinky.”

  “Trust me,” says Sam. She doesn’t, but she’ll pretend.

  “He liked to be … Clyde liked to be strangled. It wasn’t as if I enjoyed it. But I loved him, I was in love with him, so I wanted to do what he wanted.”

  “Of course,” says Sam. He wishes she hadn’t given the mummified groom a name: Clyde is dorky. He’d have preferred him anonymous. That she’s lying is evident to him, but how much is she lying? For his own lies, he likes to stay somewhere within shooting distance of the truth, if at all possible – it means less to fabricate, less to work at remembering – so maybe some of this is true.

  “And,” she says, “then he was.”

  “Then he was what?” says Sam.

  “Then he was dead. With the spasms, I thought he was just having, you know … the way he usually did. But it went too far. Then I didn’t know what to do. It was the day before our wedding, I’d been planning the whole thing for months! I told everyone he’d left me a note, he’d vanished, he’d run out on me, he’d jilted me. I was so upset! It was all being delivered, the dress, the cake, all of that, and I, well, this sounds weird, but I dressed him up, with the carnation in the buttonhole and everything, he looked so handsome. And then I packed the whole thing into the storage unit. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’d been so looking forward to the wedding; keeping it all together like that was sort of like having it anyway.”

  “You put him in there yourself
? With the cake and everything?”

  “Yes,” she says. “It wasn’t that hard. I used a dolly. You know, for moving heavy boxes, and furniture and things.”

  “That was resourceful,” says Sam. “You’re a smart girl.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “That’s some story,” says Sam. “Not many people would believe it.”

  She looks down at the table. “I know,” she says in a small voice. Then she looks up. “But you believe it, don’t you?”

  “I’m not good at believing stories,” says Sam. “But let’s say I believe this one, for now.” Maybe he’ll get the truth out of her later. Or maybe not.

  “Thank you,” she says again. “You won’t tell?” The tremulous smile, the bitten lip. She’s laying it on thick. What did she really do? Whack him over the head with a champagne bottle? Shoot an overdose into him? How much money was involved, and in what form? It had to be money. Was she skimming the poor guy’s bank account, did he find out?

  “Let’s go,” says Sam. “The elevator’s to the left.”

  The room’s dark, except for the faint light coming in off the street. The traffic’s muffled, what there is of it. The snow has arrived in earnest; it’s spattering softly against the window like an army of tiny kamikaze mice throwing themselves at the glass, trying to force a way in.

  Holding her in his arms – no, holding her down with his arms – is the most electric thing he’s ever done. She hums with danger, like a high-tension wire; she’s a raw socket; she’s the sum of his own ignorance, of everything he doesn’t understand and never will. The minute he releases one of her hands, he might be dead. The minute he turns his back. Is he running for his life, right now? Her harsh breath chasing him?

  “We should be together,” she’s saying. “We should always be together.” Is that what she said to the other one? To his sad, mummified double? He grips her hair, bites down on her mouth. He’s still ahead, he’s gaining on her. Faster!

  Nobody knows where he is.

  I DREAM OF ZENIA WITH

  THE BRIGHT RED TEETH

  • • • • • • • • •

  “I had a dream about Zenia last night,” says Charis.

  “Who?” says Tony.

  “Oh, crap!” says Roz. Charis’s black-and-white mystery-mix dog, Ouida, has just smeared her muddy paws down the front of Roz’s new coat. The coat is orange, perhaps not the best choice. Charis claims that Ouida has special perceptive powers, and that her paw smearings are messages. What is Ouida trying to say to me? wonders Roz. You look like a pumpkin?

  It’s autumn. The three of them are shuffling through the dry leaves in the ravine, taking their weekly walk. It’s a pact they’ve made: to get more exercise, to improve their cellular autophagic rates. Roz has read about this in one of the health magazines in the dentist’s waiting room: bits of your cells eat other bits that are diseased or dying. This intracellular cannibalism is said to help you live longer.

  “What do you mean, ‘crap’?” says Charis. With her long white crinkly face and her long white crinkly hair, she’s more sheeplike than ever. Or more like an angora goat, thinks Tony, who prefers the specific to the general. That inward, ruminative look.

  “I didn’t mean your dream,” says Roz. “I meant Ouida. Sit, Ouida!”

  “She likes you,” says Charis fondly.

  “Sit, Ouida!” says Roz with some annoyance. Ouida bounds away.

  “She’s so full of energy!” says Charis. She’s been a dog owner for just three months, and already every irritating thing that mutt does is beyond adorable. You’d think she’d given birth to it.

  “Awesome!” says Tony, who sometimes echoes her students. She’s now a professor emeritus, but she still teaches one graduate seminar, “Early Technologies of War.” They’ve just done the scorpion bombs, always popular, and have now reached the composite short bows of Attila the Hun, with their bone stiffeners. “Zenia! Unfuckingbelievable! Did she ooze out of a tomb?”

  She peers up at Charis through her round glasses. In her twenties, Tony looked like a pixie. She still does, but a freeze-dried pixie. More papery.

  “When was it she died?” says Roz. “I’ve lost track. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Shortly after 1989,” says Tony. “Or 1990. When the Berlin Wall was coming down. I’ve got a piece of it.”

  “You think it’s real?” says Roz. “People were chipping cement off anything then! It’s like the True Cross, or saints’ finger bones, or … or fake Rolex watches.”

  “It’s a memento,” says Tony. “They don’t have to be real.”

  “Time isn’t the same in dreams,” says Charis, who likes reading about what’s going on in her head when she isn’t awake, though sometimes, thinks Roz, it’s hard to tell the difference. “In dreams, nobody’s dead, really. That’s what the man who … he says, in dreams the time is always Now.”

  “That’s not too comforting,” says Tony. She likes things to stay in their categories. Pens in this jar, pencils in that. Vegetables on the right side of the plate, meat on the left. The living here, the dead over there. Too much osmosis, too much wavering – it can be dizzying.

  “What was she wearing?” Roz asks. Zenia had dressed stunningly, back when she was alive. She’d favoured luscious colours like sepia and plum. She’d had glamour, whereas Roz has only ever had class.

  “Leather,” says Tony. “With a silver-handled whip.”

  “Just a sort of shroud thing,” says Charis. “It was white.”

  “I can’t see her in white,” says Roz.

  “We didn’t use a shroud,” says Tony. “For the cremation. We chose one of her own dresses, remember? Sort of a cocktail dress. Dark.” Zenia spelled backwards is Ainez, a Spanish-sounding name. There was definitely a Spanish element to Zenia: as a singer, she’d have been a contralto.

  “The two of you made that decision,” says Roz. “I’d have put her in a sack.” She had proposed the sack idea, but Charis had argued for proper vestments: otherwise, Zenia might be resentful and hang around.

  “Okay, maybe not a shroud,” says Charis. “More like a nightgown. Sort of floaty.”

  “Did it glow?” says Tony with interest. “Like ectoplasm?”

  “What about the shoes?” says Roz. Shoes once played a major part in Roz’s life – expensive shoes with high heels – but toe-gnarling and bunions have put paid to that. Walking shoes can be very nice as well, however. She might get those new every-toe-separate kind. They make you look like a frog, but they’re supposed to be very comfortable.

  “Of course, it was painted gauze, really,” says Tony. “They stuffed it up their noses.”

  “What in heck are you talking about?” says Roz.

  “Her feet were not the point,” says Charis. “The point was …”

  “I suppose she had fangs dripping blood,” says Tony. That would be the sort of overacting Zenia would go in for. Red contact lenses, hissing, claws, the works.

  Charis ought to stop watching vampire films at night. It’s bad for her; she’s so impressionable. Both Tony and Roz think this, so they go over to Charis’s house on vampire nights so at least she won’t be watching alone. Charis makes mint tea and popcorn for them, and they sit on her sofa like teenagers, cramming popcorn into their mouths, feeding the occasional handful to Ouida, glued to the screen as the music shifts to eerie, and eyes redden or yellow, and teeth elongate, and blood spurts like pizza sauce over everything in sight. Whenever wolves are audible, Ouida howls.

  Why are the three of them indulging in these adolescent pursuits? Is it some kind of grisly substitute for diminishing sex? They seem to have thrown away all the maturity and experience and wisdom they’ve collected like Air Miles over their middle years; just tossed them out, in favour of irresponsible buttery and salty munching and cheesy, adrenalin-soaked time wasting. After these curious orgies, Tony spends days picking white hairs off her cardigans – some from Ouida, some from Charis. “Have a nice evening?” Wes
t would ask, and Tony would say they’d just done a lot of boring girl talk, as usual. She doesn’t want West to feel he’s missed out.

  Things are getting out of hand: Tony catches herself channelling this opinion at least once a day. The crazed weather. The vicious, hate-filled politics. The myriad glass high-rises going up like 3-D mirrors, or siege engines. The municipal garbage collection: Who can keep all those different-coloured bins straight? Where to put the clear plastic food containers, and why isn’t the little number on the bottom a reliable guide?

  And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

  “Actually, not fangs as such,” says Charis. “Though her teeth were kind of pointy, come to think of it. And sort of pink. Ouida, stop that!”

  Now Ouida is dashing around and barking: being in the ravine and off the leash excites her. She likes to nose under fallen logs and dodge behind bushes, evading the moment of recapture and hiding her – what to call them? Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered poop, but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth.

  Hiding her Gifts to the Earth, then, while Charis dithers along behind, clutching a plastic disposal bag (such bags are almost never used by Charis because she often cannot locate the Gifts) and calling weakly at intervals, as she is doing at present: “Ouida! Ouida! Come here! Good girl!”

  “So there she was,” says Tony. “Zenia. In your dream. Then what?”

  “You think this is stupid,” says Charis. “But anyway. She wasn’t menacing or anything. In fact, she seemed kind of friendly. She had a message for me. What she said was, Billy’s coming back.”