Why all this horniness now? he wondered.
It was a good question. Now that he thought about it, he realized his sex drive had been pretty much dead since the second season of the show. The spoiling marriage only killed it more. Job stress, stress at home, and just the stress of living in that California hellhole, he guessed. I NEVER think about sex anymore…until today. I walk into this place sweating a book deadline and suddenly I’ve got the sex drive of a seventeen-year-old. I’m going bonkers over an old lady with Jack Palance’s face and her redneck daughter who can’t talk.
So much for self-revelation.
He pulled the laptop power cord from its case but inadvertently dropped it. When he leaned down to retrieve it, he noticed something…
The gap under the bedroom door…
Somebody’s standing right outside my door—right now, he could see.
Bare toes showed in the gap. Must be Lottie, he guessed. She’d been barefoot, hadn’t she? Collier got on his hands and knees and crawled over. The toes were still there; they hadn’t budged. It occurred to him that he should stand up right now and open the door.
But he didn’t.
The keyhole…
The lock, knob, and keyhole were likely originaclass="underline" old, well-crafted brass. Collier held his breath and put his eye to the hole.
You’ve got to be shitting me…
A woman’s pubis was positioned directly on the other side of the keyhole. It was creamy white, freshly shaved—a beautiful, private triangle.
That’s what Collier saw when he looked through the keyhole.
He leaned back, blinked, and sighed. There’s a nude woman standing on the other side of this door, he resigned. But that was impossible, wasn’t it?
It must be a trick of light.
He looked again. The shaved pubis was still there. He noticed a detail now: a single freckle an inch above the clitoral hood.
All right…It was no trick of light; it was really there. He let his mind tick a moment, mulling choices, but there were really only two. I can ignore it, he knew. Or…I can open the door and see who it is.
However…
Who could it be?
It was almost as though she knew Collier would see.
Impossible.
He stood up and opened the door.
No one faced him in the doorway, just the open atrium beyond the railing of the stair hall. Collier looked quickly left, then right, and saw no woman, nude or otherwise, hurrying away.
This is screwed up, he thought. This is REALLY screwed up.
He sat on the bed and he considered the day in objective terms. He’d come to Tennessee in search of an obscure lager he thought might be worthy of inclusion in his book. The conservative sedan he’d booked at the car rental company hadn’t been available, so he got a preposterous lime-sherbet VW. What should’ve been a one-hour drive turned into a four-hour drive. After which Collier had arrived at this strange little bed-and-breakfast only to find his normally dead-in-the-water libido sent into the red zone by an old woman with a great body and her probably retarded daughter. In summation, all of the above aggregated into the most bizarre day of his life. And just when he thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre…
A woman flashed her shaved beaver in my keyhole…
Collier rubbed his temples.
I either saw it, or I had a hallucination.
Was there something wrong with him? Something clinical, perhaps?
It couldn’t be.
I know I’m not crazy…and I never took drugs so it couldn’t be some sort of a flashback.
And if it hadn’t been a hallucination, who was this discreet exhibitionist with the mystery pubis?
At first, the bare feet made him think of Lottie, but now that he thought of it, the hips seemed too wide and the flesh too plush for Lottie. Mrs. Butler, then? No, he thought crudely. There’s no way…
The woman from Wisconsin? There’s a thought. Collier thought of the groupie phenomenon, women who lose their inhibitions simply because a man’s a musician, a pro athlete, or…a TV personality. Collier had heard of such things, especially with the more flamboyant men on the channel. Like that Savannah Sammy asshole. Women mailed him their panties, for God’s sake. But as for Collier himself…
He’d never met a “TV groupie,” and doubted that any existed for the “Prince of Beer.”
He shook his head, bewildered to the point of headache.
Hallucination or not, something’s come over me. I’m hornier than I can ever remember, so what’s the reason?
But why think so negatively? Just that his sex drive had turned hyper didn’t mean there was necessarily anything wrong with him, did it? A healthy sex drive was…healthy. Something was resurfacing in him: a vigorous response to sexual attraction via the genetic urge to be reproductive…
That must be it.
Collier felt a lot better after coming to this conclusion, but in truth it was none of these things that were making him hornier than an ape in rut.
It was the house.
CHAPTER THREE I
1857
When N.P. Poltrock closed his eyes he saw rotten heads and blood being drunk from goblets. He saw limbs shorn by axes and hewers, and men and women thrown naked and very much alive into the belly of a red-hot coal bed. He saw children being raped in the dirt by faceless soldiers in stiff gray uniforms; others were merely masturbated on and strangled. Horses dragging old men and women by nooses around their necks galloped regularly into the hot, smoky compound; just as regularly great jail wagons rolled in from the nearby depot—wagons so stuffed with the beaten and the starving that the bar frames seemed fit to burst. One soldier skewered a little boy in the eye with his bayonet and flung him into the coal bed, while a little girl, no more than fourteen but hugely pregnant, was flung in behind him.
These were the visions that poured into the darkness behind Poltrock’s closed eyes. He heard endless screams and smelled the stench of human incineration.
When he opened his eyes, another stench briefly filled his nostrils: old urine.
Sick.
Sick.
That’s how Poltrock had felt since the first day he signed on with Gast.
“We will lay one hundred miles of track per year,” Gast had told him that day.
Not with only a hundred workers you won’t, Poltrock thought but chose not to voice.
Gast had told him this in the den of the mansion he shared with his wife and children. A beautiful house in the center of town, ringed by trees and full of flowers.
So why did Poltrock keep smelling piss?
The whites of Gast’s eyes looked yellow, and Poltrock thought he’d noticed that same look in the other men who’d been hired.
Just my imagination. I’m under the weather, that’s all. Too much to drink last night after the long ride out…
Gast himself looked like exactly what he was: a vastly wealthy Southern plantation owner. Tailcoats, linen shirt, bow tie, and pointed leather shoes that shined like oil. He stood tall and lean, and the lines in his face suggested he must be upward of fifty. Trimmed muttonchops didn’t look right in the incised, overserious face. “I have signed on fifty men already, some of the finest rail men in the state,” Gast assured. He’d turned just then, looking out the bow window. “But I need an operations manager. You.”