What a wonderful way to exist.
Weren’t fantasies symbols of our selves? Penelope’s fantasies proved her purity and her innocence. And this was the most outrageous part of all, because it was always the harmless people who wound up as the world’s worst victims. So it was best she didn’t know.
Her fantasies would not wait for her. Nor would her innocence, nor her life. All that waited was an end via her worst fear.
««—»»
The truss bridge was half a century old, and it looked it. Stained cement supports held up pale green girders. Warped planks stretched fifty feet across the sluggish creek.
Jervis Phillips stood precisely over the middle span, leaning over the rail. He stared down into the thick creek, a black mirror to his black thoughts. The sickle moon and starlight reflected nothing.
He wasn’t going to jump; he hadn’t come here for that. Besides, this creek wasn’t deep enough. He’d only get wet and be further humiliated. The little ring in his hand was why he’d come.
He was drunk. He stood unstable as the cruel world twitched and jagged around him. He’d drunk eleven bottles of Japanese beer—Kirin—to numb the pain in his black heart, but the relief was bogus. The alcohol only made it hurt worse.
Graffiti crawled over the rust patched girders, spray paint hearts and coiled 4 evers—a testament of love. It made him sick. Howard loves Sonja, Lee loves Betsey, Mary loves Jaz. Even Cathy loves Lisa. There was so much, so much love.
Jervis’ heart was a knot of pain. He’s probably fucking her right now. The thought cut through his stupor, like dried corpseskin crinkling. The little ring was ice in his palm. Yeah, he’s fucking her brains out right now. How does it feel, Jervis?
Feel? He had no more feelings. Only the image of Sarah wriggling beneath someone else. It was some rich German guy, some foreign developer’s kid. That’s all Jervis knew, and all he needed to know. Tears trickled down his cheeks like hot insects.
Now he understood the tragic logic of suicide. He understood how people could jump off buildings or slit their wrists when love abandoned them. His spectral thoughts were right. Without Sarah, he had nothing.
His tears fell into the water and made little plips.
Love stalks like a killer, he recited the Byers poem. See how freely it wields the ax.
But why should he think of killers and axes?
He opened his fist and looked at the ring. It was to verify their engagement, a diamond on a little gold band, size 4. Sarah had dumped him before he had the chance to give it to her.
When he dropped the ring into the water, he imagined not the ring but his heart sinking slowly to the bottom of the enslimed, black creek.
««—»»
Old Exham Road unwound like a lay by through a corrupt dimension. Nighted swamps and forests soon gave way to open flat fields and a crystal sky. All the way back to campus, Jervis’ despair seemed to sit beside him like a hitchhiker. He chain-smoked Carltons and drank more beer. Soon he came in range of campus reception; WHPL sizzled in like rain, Brian Ferry crooning about the same old blues and brides stripped bare. Skeletal stalks of fields of corn stretched on forever. The crescent moon looked like a reaper’s scythe—soon it would swoop down and cut him in half. Lying underwater in a foot of black muck, lying in pieces next to the little ring.
At last the endless ride began to end. The lights of the campus glittered beyond. He sped up Campus Drive, passed the Circle, and turned at Frat Row. The giant Crawford T. Sciences Center stood completely black, like an intricate carved mesa. Distant music floated down the hill, pipe sounds like druid flutes.
He idled past Lillian Hall, the largest of the female dorms. In the long lot he saw only a red 300ZX, which belonged to that weird redhead who ran the horse stables out at the agro site. But then the massed shadow lapsed. Two more vehicles were parked in the lot: Sarah’s white Berlinetta and the customized white van.
He stopped to stare at the van. It belonged to the German guy, the guy who’d stolen Sarah from him. He fucks her in that, came the simple thought. She gives him head in it. But sight of both vehicles assured what he’d feared. She was back. She would be taking classes this summer too, and her dorm was right across from his. He’d probably see her every day, her averted eyes and tight squeezed smile, and he’d probably see a lot of the German guy too. Jervis would be reminded of his loss every single day.
He got out of his Dodge Colt and trudged drunk up toward his own dorm. The moon slice had turned sour yellow. In the center court, his own heartbreak made him look back once more at Lillian Hall.
The faintest orange light flickered in the end window, second floor—Sarah’s window. They were up there right now. They were together in bed, asleep in candlelight, asleep in love.
Jervis wanted to bay at the moon. The images dropped into his head like stones. How could he live knowing she loved someone else? A crimson flash sparked through his vertigo. Was it premonitory, these jerking, unbidden mental sights? Again, he pictured himself cut in half. He pictured holes in the ground, graves. He felt that the image might be symbolic: seeing himself cut in half. Could that symbolize a separation of mind and body? Or did it mean something entirely different? Symbols, he thought. The more he looked at the candlelit window, the more he saw himself butchered.
This sensory ghost seemed to linger as he approached the opposing male dorm. He felt dead as he shuffled up the court. Wait. Dead? Was that how he felt? Yes, a corpse walking, dead but walking. Three quarters to rot and no life left inside but walking still.
Then the image, or the symbol, magnified—
—perforated dead arms slick to the elbow with blood—
(Whose blood? My blood?)
—and gaps rotted through the hands which held the bouquet of long stemmed roses—
I still love you, Sarah, he thought, his tears running.
But in this ghastly and third inscrutable image, why was his shredded green gray face set in a grin?
“Symbols,” he muttered.
His hands felt wet.
—
CHAPTER 3
SOMETHING—a word.
Suuuuuuu—
Errant rhythms somehow like pictures showed black like onyx. He saw sounds and heard colors—red, pumping. Red running over faces, flesh. Tongues licking red.
Yes. A word. Supremate.
Madness was a sound, images—pressure in his head. The word was a name. Someone was trying to tell him something. I am like a promise in the wind. Give me service and I give you power. You will have power untold. Madness, the sound, floated up from the abyss. The sound was screams.
Orgies? Or meals? Both.
Underneath, deep in black, the great face smiled at him.
Red lips sighed and parted. Bare breasts glistened in steam. The lips stretched slowly back, showing mouths full of needle teeth.
««—»»
Power, Besser thought. Power untold.
He awoke in the dark of his office. Sweat drenched his clothes, grew chill on his face. He nearly screamed.
The red lips, the hungry hungry mouths full of teeth, left his mind. The trances always left the light raw in his eyes, and any other sense perception irritating, like nails across slate. The second hand sounded like someone hitting a garbage can with a hammer. Once he’d heard an ant walk across the floor. Anything but the faintest of light hurt his eyes for at least an hour.