Too bad.
Outside of a bathtub, he’d never been more drenched than when he finally stumbled up the hill and rushed into the vestibule.
He looked through the glass panels of the inner door and saw the portrait of Harwood Gast looking right at him.
Why ain’t I got the balls to just up’n move out’a this crazy place?
Behind him, the thunder sounded like it was crushing the sky. Had he ever heard anything so loud?
Jiff remained in the vestibule for another half hour, before he actually found the courage to enter. VI
“What a nice room,” Dominique commented when Collier took her in.
You’d be surprised, he wanted to say. But he found that her being here with him dulled some of the edges of his fear.
Something snapped; his head jerked around.
Dominique lit one of several candles that sat atop the armoire. “Just in case the—”
All the lights went out with a thunk, in time with the worst shot of lightning so far.
“It’s a good thing you’re smart,” Collier said.
An orb of light floated around the wick. Dominique lit two more. “You got your wish,” she joked.
The switch from lamplight to candlelight frayed a few of Collier’s nerves. “My wish?”
“Haunted house, dark and stormy night, and now…no power.”
“That’s not exactly my wish.” The atmosphere couldn’t have been more potent now. The storm was rattling the French doors to the balcony.
Dominique walked around to the bed and quite by surprise, kissed him. “I’m so tired I can’t believe it.” Then she sat, and kicked off her shoes.
Is that her way of telling me she’s too tired to make out? Collier, in all honesty, wasn’t in the mood. “Well, of course you’re tired.” He tried to get his mind off the house. “You were in church at seven thirty, fed a hundred of Chattanooga’s homeless, and worked the dinner rush.”
“I’ll fall asleep so fast…”
She unbuttoned her blouse with no hesitation.
“Want me to turn around?” he offered.
“No. I told you I trust you. But I won’t sleep nude like I usually do. Then you really would think I’m a tease.”
“Oh, no, no, no, I wouldn’t—”
She smiled in the candlelight, and shouldered out of the blouse to expose the perfect breasts cupped in a sheer white-lace bra. Then she stood up and skimmed off her work slacks.
This is killing me…
When she turned in the candlelight he could see her nipples beneath the lace, and a tuft of pubic hair. The light chiseled her body’s contours into a wonderwork of flawless feminine lines, razor-sharp shadows and flesh.
She flopped on the bed and bounced on it. “What a great bed!”
It’s not the bed that’s the problem with this room, he reminded himself.
“And these pillows!” The back of her head sunk into the middle of one. Another she embraced, a little girl with a teddy bear. She grinned up at him. “I can’t wait to sleep with you.”
Unfortunately, Collier knew what that meant: sleep. He lost his thoughts. “You’re…beautiful…”
The grin turned serious. “I’m sorry this can’t be what you really want.”
“You might be surprised what I really want…” He almost groaned when her legs extended, her toes flexing atop the sheets.
“Come to bed. Let’s spoon.”
Collier strode to the bathroom with a candle, stripped down to shorts, then brushed his teeth, hoping to get rid of what must be awful beer breath. When he came back out, she was under the sheets up to her navel. Her cross sparked like a tiny camera flash in the candlelight.
“You want me to put out the candles?” he asked.
Thunder rumbled, then more loud lightning.
“Probably not,” she admitted.
“I agree.”
Collier crawled in, and they at once wrapped themselves up in each other. Her body’s heat and the feel of her skin buzzed him more than all those lagers. Her hand opened on his bare chest, right over his heart. Collier knew it was racing.
They kissed, sharing each other’s breath. Even after a day’s hard work, her hair was so fragrant, it hit him like a drug.
“Oh, damn it,” she muttered.
Collier’s head was spinning, just from the feel of her. “What?”
“You must really hate this. It’s not what most people are used to. It’s not considered normal.”
“I’m fine…”
“I know I’ll never break my celibacy, but if I were going to, you’d be the guy I did it with.”
It was the worst thing she could’ve said, but even more so, the best thing.
Then her voice turned joking, “Or you could always marry me, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend that. It’d be hazardous.”
“Hazardous?”
“I’d probably screw you to death on our wedding night.”
Her thigh was between his legs, and when she’d said that, she moved it off because his penis had gone hard at once.
I love you, I love you, the words in his mind seemed to flicker up the walls with the candlelight.
He should say it. He knew he should say it.
“I…”
But she’d already fallen asleep, her head on his chest.
The thunder and lightning had at least subsided enough that he didn’t quake with each flash. Sleep was inviting him within minutes, but images and words kept snapping him back to a tense wakefulness: his dream of the whore named Harriet, “Dirty dog!” the scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch as a young blonde girl shaved her legs and, presumably, her pubic hair in the brook, “Gast buried his two daughters alive, then went about the business of murdering Jessa and seeing to the gang-rape and sequent ax-murder of his wife,” horses hauling caged wagons toward a plume of smoke, “I heared they killed all the slaves when they was done. Near a hunnert of ’em,” an irate man with a gold nose scribbling checks, “He built an entire railroad to Maxon and refired the furnace solely to incinerate the innocent,” a daguerreotype of a beautiful nude woman with a shaved pubis and a single freckle an inch above the clitoris, “Rumor has it that the dog escaped, never to be seen again. But you can be sure…it escaped with a full stomach…”
Collier audibly groaned at the imagery, eyes pressed shut. But more details focused. In the room to my left, some guy was drowned in a hip bath and got his dick spat into the toilet, and in the room to my right, Penelope Gast got an ax between the legs.
And in THIS room…
Collier could feel bubbling in his belly. All of Sute’s stories and all that beer was suddenly boring a hole. The muskrat sausage probably hadn’t helped either.
Even with the thunder, he could hear his own heartbeat along with Dominique’s, and he could even hear his watch ticking. When he closed his eyes he couldn’t shake the idea that a mutt was in the room, and when he opened them, the patterns on the wallpaper seemed to shift into something like train tracks. Go downstairs and get something to eat, the idea came to him. Something bland might settle his stomach.
But did he really want to cross that big portrait of Harwood Gast? Or what if he saw Windom Fecory scribbling on checks at the writing table?
Jesus…
He knew it was his imagination when he thought he smelled stale urine.
Collier carefully slid out from under Dominique, hauled on his robe, and slipped out of the room, candle in hand.
It was late now, but certain sounds in the hall comforted him: voices of guests, television chatter, even some bedsprings creaking from the Wisconsin woman’s room. Some rumbling followed him downstairs—he didn’t look at the portrait or the desk—then he crossed the dining room to the kitchen.