He saw the severed limb thrash, cheated. It was sucked up into the sky. God…how long had it been affixed to his mind? His entire life? The greater beasts were linked to millions. They drove millions mad, drove whole countries to violence toward other countries commanded by other creatures. Was this how the creatures fought their wars, or entertained themselves? Were these, indeed…the gods of mankind? If so, Warren disavowed them. He rejected them. He would battle them, and lead others to cast off their bonds as well. He would…
But his thoughts had reached the great boiling brains. He saw tentacles slithering through the air at him. Over there. And there. He wheeled sharply and a gust of wind nearly cast him over the side. A dozen tentacles were swimming in from behind. And now a hundred. “No!” Warren shouted at them in defiance. From inside his raincoat he slid out the other knife. One in each fist. He raised both high and shook them. “No!” But how could he fend them all off? Hack them all to pieces? Any moment now, he would be buried in a mass of them. A thousand of them would burrow into his mind.
He wouldn’t let them touch him. He would bring his freedom with him where they couldn’t get at him.
In triumphant glory, Warren leapt from the roof. He was an angel of vengeance descending, his coat flapping behind him like a robe. He flailed his flashing knives like bright wings, and in plummeting he swooped down on several tendrils, hacking them as he passed…and laughed.
The clean and purging wind of descent blasted him. Yes, he was free, and he saw that he had set a few people below him free as well. He had sliced their tethers and they had glanced up at him and now were scattering. Maybe the beasts would claim them back, but now at least they had a fighting chance…
To die free. To spit in the eye of the gods. What more could a man want? He was a falling angel. So be it.
* * *
The paramedics who responded did not hustle to squat by the man to check for vital signs, to administer aid. They stood back a bit and stared.
The suicide victim was face down in the street, a knife in each locked fist embedded in the asphalt, as if he had miraculously crucified himself to the ground. CPR would be useless; even Jesus couldn’t resurrect a man after this.
One of the responding policemen watched a dark tendril of blood wind out of the man’s riven skull into the gutter. He had seen jumpers before, and the first time he had puked, but this time he had an odd reaction. His scalp constricted, and tingled.
He removed his cap to rub at his hair nervously, and shuddered.
Thunder growled above the city, and a gray rain was released to fall in a deluge.
Pale Fruit
The woman who opened the door in answer to Griffin’s knocks was beautiful, and it was this more than the fact that she was most certainly not the person he had expected to greet him that made him falter speechless for several beats. Her hair was long and straight, that drab shade of watery brown that was really like no color at all, but it was parted in the center and framed like curtains an oval face of great impact. The strange woman’s mouth was decadently plush, lips that had been stung by the whole hive of bees held compressed into a solemn pout. They glistened a moist and glossy crimson, some swollen exotic fruit. Her eyes had a feline shape and were of a blue that was clear almost to the point of transparency. Too much mascara only heightened the effect.
“Yes?” the woman—surely only a girl of eighteen or nineteen—asked him at last in a dark, vaguely surly voice.
“I’m sorry…um…I was looking for my landlord…uh, Guy?”
“Guy Hamlin,” the young woman droned.
“Yes. Guy Hamlin.”
“I’m Guy’s daughter, Idelia.”
Griffin smiled. “Do you call your father by his first name?”
Just that lynx-like stare for a moment or two, and then, “Yes.”
The girl—Idelia Hamlin, then— was small, and obviously very slender, lost like some dour, doleful child in her over-sized sweater. Black tights clung to legs almost alarmingly thin, and her bony feet were bare, the red polish on their nails flaking away like old blood. The dim bulb beside the door glowed on her high forehead, and made her pallid, translucent flesh seem almost softly luminous. Normally, Griffin did not care for the starving model look, that heroin chic, the anorexic waif that was the current ideal, as dictated by the media. His interest lay in substantial women, voluptuous, large-breasted, round-bottom-ed. His ex-girlfriend Natalie had been plump as a Renoir nude. This girl was anything but substantial. And yet, those ice-blue eyes, the too-ripe painted lips that seemed to overcompensate for the rest of her, pinned his heart like a struggling, dying moth inside his chest.
He might have disbelieved her about being Guy’s daughter, except that Guy also had uncanny blue eyes—if not of quite so light a shade. Yes, he could see Guy in her unsettling gaze. But otherwise there was no similarity, as Guy was singularly unattractive and a good four hundred pounds, Griffin wagered. Oh yes…Guy. He had come upstairs to see Guy. Griffin realized he’d been mutely staring again.
“I’m Griffin Shores; I live downstairs. Is your father home? I have the rent…and some books to return.” He held them up as proof. “He lent them to me.”
Idelia gazed at the books in his hand, and seemed hesitant, or indecisive as to what to do next. But finally she said, “Why don’t you come in, then.” She held the door wide for him. Before that, she had been blocking it warily with her thin frame.
“Okay, um, thanks.” Griffin slipped past her, lightly brushing against her sweater. Very consciously, he inhaled as he did so, and stole a furtive whiff of her musky perfume.
“What are the books?” Idelia asked as she turned away from the door.
“Oh, about the supernatural, the occult, mostly,” Griffin replied with some degree of embarrassment, as if caught with a stack of pornography. “Your father and I got to talking one day, and he found out I work in a book store and love to read. He’s pretty enthusiastic about these books…he thought I’d find them interesting, too.”
Idelia nodded absently, but said, “I think they’re dangerous.”
“Books?”
“Those books.”
“Oh. Well, ah, so…is Guy here?”
“No. He isn’t. He’s away.”
So why had she let him in, he wondered, when she could have just accepted the books out on the landing? There was something in her spacy manner that suggested drugs, or even a psychological problem, or both—not that it decreased his lust by much. “Um, so when will he be back?”
“Not sure. Not soon.” She shrugged vaguely. “If you don’t feel comfortable leaving the rent with me, you can wait until he returns.”
Griffin didn’t feel comfortable with that, so he changed the subject. “I didn’t know Guy had ever been married.” He didn’t add that his impression had been that Guy was a very lonely—bitterly lonely—man, who had never had a girlfriend in his life, let alone a wife with the kind of genes to produce a creature like this one. Also, he had taken Guy to be only in his mid thirties; he must have sired Idelia when quite young.
“They’re divorced,” Idelia explained. “My mother lives out of town. I’m just visiting here.”
“I see. Then I’ll bet you haven’t been to the store where I work. It’s just down the street—‘Book Plates’? We have a little coffee shop in there. If you’re not busy, maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie?” His throat clicked as he swallowed a phlegmy glob of nervousness.