Another arm came out from under the lid.
“Barbara!” he shouted.
“Hey babe.”
The manhole lid dropped; the sound was so loud Sam flinched but Barbara acted as though she’d heard nothing.
“Is the front door unlocked?”
Sam tried to speak, but could only nod. The world grew calm and quiet, only darkness and clicking stiletto heels.
Unbuttoning his shirt so fast his fingers stung, Sam rounded the bed and approached Barbara. He briefly thought of the thing he’d seen in the street, but it was pleasantly distant in his tangled thoughts. He peeled off his jeans in a single swipe that brought them down to his ankles. His hand went to his boxer shorts, but Barbara’s deft fingers caught him.
“Let me,” she said and kneeled. His boxers went down. Her lips parted in a wet ruby ring. She squeezed him. He put his palm on the back of her head, drawing that ruby circle closer.”You make me feel so good. I love you.”
Her gray eyes hovering before his erection were not convinced, but she began pleasuring him nonetheless. Her teeth felt coarse around the ends, almost the texture of bristle. She’d never performed so poorly before. What was wrong? He wanted to yell, to tell her to go brush her teeth, or see a fucking dentist. But Sam Ruther knew where his dick was buttered. “I want you!” he cried instead.
Barbara pulled back. She was gummy-lipped and breathless, but still lovely. “Harder than before,” she said. “Give it to me hard!”
She was no Constance, but he entered her with relish anyway, in one great rush. “Harder!” she cried.
Sam quivered. Could it be? Was he to orgasm? But not already, he despaired. Don’t you dare! He closed his eyes and concentrated. Something uncoiled, ready to blast free, but then sucked back inside, cold in his chest. His pleasure disappeared.
Sam opened his eyes to a synergy of light and shadow breaking through liquid heavens, to rolling dunes on the ocean floor and finned forms gliding in the distant haze, and to blood. Lots of blood.
He was kneeling on a stone dais in the sand. The water did not bring his body upwards. There was a strange gravity in this ocean. His groin and hips wore shattered guts, bone fragments and blood like fragile underwear. This too did not seem to wash away.
A gray coral reef curled up a slope to the left of the dais. Computer monitor, keyboard and mouse had been integrated inside the rough gray husk. Sam drifted through walls of sparkling sediment. He walked in the throes of the abnormal pull and hunkered down next to the monitor.
It was his computer. All of his programs and story files were there, even the Nightlid story, but he bypassed looking at any of them. All the disgusting pornography he’d been too scared to download was now open for examination. He gleefully masturbated. The jism hit the water and parted in loops of white silk. Still, there was no pleasure with the coming. The ecstasy was taken from him, even in his dream.
The thing in the street, he thought. That goddamn Nightlid! He wrote about one stealing a sailor’s lust—only a story, only a story, only the truth. No! He began to stroke himself again.
A burning sword crashed through his skull, pulling him from the dream. He shrieked, made a move to reach up, but pitched over. Reality returned. Barbara held the broken neck of a vase—his favorite imitation Ming—its jagged white edges like a hundred chalky knives.
“You filthy shit!” Her dress hung from her shoulder in a slant, as though she’d hastily pulled it on.
Blood sheeted into his eyes. He put his palm there to stop the rush.
“I told you it hurt! You made me bleed, you rapist!”
“Barbara I was dreaming—”
“I almost let it go.” A disgusted sob caught her words for a moment. “But you go over and start jerking off to that!”
Sam looked at his monitor. Five opened windows showed a variety of graphic car wrecks. For a moment, one of the photographs looked like his mother, smashed between a telephone pole and three feet of Cadillac steel, in her mouth a penis torn from its scrotum. Sam’s stomach pitched. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” he struggled to find his breath. “With me, I mean.”
He tried to stand but Barbara stabbed at him with the ceramic shard.
“Don’t follow me or I’m calling the police!”
Barbara grabbed her purse. He didn’t watch her go.
It took a long time to get to sleep. Around 2 AM, Sam slipped into a deep, meaningful slumber and dreamed of a woman using him. He prayed it was Constance, but never had the chance to see the woman’s face.
The next morning the toilet was red and overflowing.
There was a diving supply store just north of the Sports complex. If he was going down into the sewers, he wasn’t risking noxious gases. Three hours and four thousand dollars later, he returned home with a trunk full of diving equipment, everything from fins to tanks.
He’d considered bringing a gun, but he had no idea if there were flammables in the sewers, and he didn’t feel like testing the theory out. Instead, when he got home he retrieved an aluminum bat and a flashlight from the back seat of his car. There wasn’t time to think up something better.
Dressed in his SCUBA gear, he walked out into the street. With each step, the world around him changed, the air deepened with bubbles and trees became swaying bands of green in a rocking sea. A yellow sandbar led to a sunken cruise ship that had landed on its side like a gunshot victim.
He climbed the side of the indistinct deck, bat and flashlight held tightly under arm. On top he found a large porthole and took a few minutes twisting off the glass before lowering himself into a corridor.
He thumbed on the flashlight, casting an indolent crescent of light ahead of him. Fish floated through the space, red and black starfish hugged the walls, plankton drifted through the thick ether. This place, this dreamland, was home to the Nightlids.
Sam saw a pair of tits poking through a nest of starfish and a series of smiling vaginas along the walls. He wanted to fully explore the wall-vaginas, but what might they be in the real world? Sewer laterals?
Instead of probing, he continued on.
The corridor opened to a wide, oaken ballroom. Torches lined the walls of massive wooden stairwells that slipped inside dark hallways.
His eyes found the bodies and he could hear his breathing intensify behind his mask. The nightmare wasn’t truth, but the bodies looked real. Two lay draped across the stairs, ripped open east to west, flesh and bone raked into the stone. Another had fallen sideways against the wall, her head split all over in a savage highway.
Sam knew her. He knew all these women. His ex Trixie, and Barbara, and a city hooker from last month. He could tell each woman from her nude signature. These bodies were not dream-induced.
His body shook and his heart blasted in and out. “What did I do?”
The hallways scraped with invisible claws. Slim figures seeped out of dark spaces, their surreal, gleaming white bodies touching the torchlight. First it was ten, then fifteen, and then dozens more. The Nightlids grouped at the top of the stairs like a welcome party.
Sam’s knuckles cracked as he gripped the aluminum bat. It felt light and inadequate. All of those solemn, black diamond eyes were on him, but none made a move. They stared—and he stared back. “Well come on!” he yelled. “I’m through with this, so come on!”
Only stares. Several flicked eager smiles, showing no teeth in their lipless mouths.
He grimaced at them. “What the hell are you?”
“Our children, Sam.”
He felt faint at her voice.
Constance stepped out of the shadows, wearing a sequined, royal blue gown that flowed back into the watery corridor behind her. It looked like the sea had lovingly dressed itself around her tender body. “It’s nice to see you where you belong, Sam.”