Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes Read online

  She’s in a playful mood.

  I pick up the panties and slip on the blindfold that I keep in my pocket for games like these.

  I bury my nose in her panties. Cotton is so much better at absorbing her odour than silk or lace. Her smell is heady, powerful: she’s at most a day or two from her period.

  I drop the panties and start my search. Step by step I cover the entire house. I open every closet. I palpate every nook and cranny. The whole time I’m sniffing. Sniffing her pussy. That smell! It’s everywhere I go. My balls tingle with anticipation.

  Is she even here? Maybe I shouldn’t have rubbed my face in her panties. Maybe that’s all I’m smelling.

  “Babe...?”

  Someone rams into me and knocks me down.

  “Silly! I followed you the whole time – you couldn’t win.”

  She yanks off my blindfold, but there’s nothing to see.

  My fly is zipped open, my cock pulled out. Moist warmth envelops my erection.

  Her smell is overpowering. I open my mouth and stick out my tongue. She presses her pussy against it. I manage to find her hips and tilt her so my nose slides into her juices.

  When I come, I see the faint milky outline of her tongue, her palate, her teeth, her cheeks – the insides of her mouth. My invisible woman.

  The Return of the Low Bunnies

  “The rabbits this year are low, very low,” said Anita Heller to Mick Farmer.

  “It’s funny you should say that, I myself noticed that they were quite large, more muscular, more awesome than in previous years.”

  “That’s precisely what I mean. Had you ever thought of rabbits as awesome before the advent of this year’s rabbits? I don’t believe that these new rabbits are all that new, but simply that they have been out of circulation for a long time, and have now just come back. It scares me how they have returned. True, they are awesome and terrifying, but they are simpler creatures than the rabbits we know. They are giant unicellular beasts. They were long gone and long forgotten. They came out of extinction with no warning. Why would they come back? I believe that humans had not yet been created the last time that these low bunnies walked the Earth. Why would they come back? Are they announcing the end of the Human Era? I believe that they are.”

  “You’re a very funny woman, Anita. Your sense of humour always cheers me up. Will you marry me and raise children with me?”

  “I am not being funny. I will not marry you; nevertheless, if you ever gave birth I would gladly help you raise your babies. But there is no time! These rabbits will be the death of all of us! They are the past returned and we are not of the past. And if the past is to be the future, then we will be of the present only. We cannot have much more than a week or two left.”

  “There’s no stopping you! Will we invite friends and family? Let’s just invite our friends and have a warm, intimate ceremony. Your family scares me. They’re even funnier than you are. Much too funny for any public event. My family never goes out of the house. They think the war will start any second now. They’ve been thinking that for the last thirty years.”

  “The war has started! We’ve already lost. The low bunnies have successfully infiltrated human consciousness. Now they’re killing us. And those are savage and bloody killings.”

  “Those reports were published in disreputable tabloids. ‘Giant Sabertooth Rabbit Chops Man Up in Tiny Bits and Eats Him.’ Who can believe a headline like that? Now give me a kiss and cuddle up.”

  “I refuse to give you a kiss. A kiss would soothe you and help drive away nightmares. Tonight you need nightmares to believe in the truth of current events. On the other hand, I need comfort because I believe and understand these events, so I will cuddle up.”

  And she did. And they pulled the sheets to them. And she fell asleep in his arms because she loved him and would not marry him. But he ... he could not sleep and his eyes stayed wide open until sun-up, watchful of rabbits.

  The Family Portrait

  I inherited from my mother a profound and irrational fear of cats. I remember, at age four, bringing inside a lost kitten who had wandered into our backyard. Mother killed the trusting little creature by hitting it repeatedly with the handle of a broom. From that point on, she made it her mission in life to ensure that I both loathe and fear all felines, telling me nightmarish cat stories every night before bed.

  I never did come to loathe them, but the fear took hold of me quite fiercely, ultimately causing me problems as I reached early adulthood: most girls I met would have a pet cat or two, which caused more than one budding relationship to end before it could really start.

  When I was nineteen, Mother died in the bathtub one night. Father was out with his brother that evening, and only returned quite late. The coroner ruled that she had had a stroke while in the tub, and then drowned while she was unconscious. We were asked about our cat, but, of course, we had no cat. “Curious,” said the coroner. “I found cat hairs in her mouth.”

  The funeral was sparsely attended, only me, Father, and a handful of Father’s closest relatives. Mother had no friends and was estranged from her own family – in fact, even Father did not even know if any of her relatives were still alive; he had never met her family, and she had never spoken of them.

  Near the time of my 25th birthday, I finally acquired some information about Mother’s family. Apparently, I was the last survivor of that line; a lawyer tracked me down to inform me that I had, by default, inherited the holdings of my great-aunt Gertrude. I was suspicious, but Father’s own lawyer looked into the matter and assured us that it was all aboveboard.

  The estate included investments that would guarantee me a comfortable life for the rest of my days and a large mansion on the outskirts of a depopulated former fishing village by the coast, some five hours drive from the city.

  Strangely, for such a large house, there was no staff, but aside from a thin layer of dust and a faint, unpleasant mustiness, the property was in surprisingly good repair.

  Portraits were hung throughout the house. All of women, their given name on a plaque at the bottom of the frame. All of those women’s faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Mother. There was one exception. One of the portraits was of a cat. The plaque named her “Samantha”. The painting was larger than any of the others and had been given pride of place, above the mantelpiece.

  It was an eerie picture, so realistic as to almost seem like a photograph. In the darkness, the eyes glowed a fiery green that appeared to flicker with life. Some trick of the light, no doubt.

  The cat’s severe disapproving expression, however, was even more troubling to me than that optical illusion. Every day I had known her, I had seen that very same expression on the face of my mother.

  The Four Elements: Fire (Metamorphosis)

  Her footprints are seared into the asphalt, leading to the woods bordering the road. I follow the trail of burnt leaves, burnt wood – that rich blend: subtly fruity, pungently ashy.

  There she is: sitting on a boulder, naked. Her face tells me she’s confused, scared – like the others I’ve tracked down.

  She doesn’t notice me. The symptoms are too overwhelming. Coarse, ragged breathing. Dizzy, sweating, and shivering all at once from the heat, nausea, and weakness.

  Gently, I say, “I can help you.”

  She tenses, panicked. Perspiration runs down her skin. Then fire bursts from her pores, enveloping her. When the flames subside, she balls up into herself, crying.

  I say, “No. It’s beautiful. Exciting. Fantastic.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “Yes. Reach between your legs.”

  She hesitates. But she opens her thighs and places her fingers on her sex.

  “Touch yourself. Focus the heat.”

  She does. She moans, closing her eyes. I take off my clothes. I masturbate, too, relishing what will soon happen.

  “These changes in your body, they’re wondrous. These hot flashes, they’re not the end: they’re a beginning.”r />
  Her breathing intensifies. She’s close.

  I say: “Let me join you.”

  Her gaze lingers briefly on my hand stroking my cock. She nods.

  I pick her up in my arms. She’s burning – scorching – hot, but her fire cannot consume flesh. I lay her down on the ground. The leaves and twigs under her burn and sizzle, releasing that delicious aroma.

  I touch her face, admiring the beauty of the lines etched by age and time.

  I enter her. We move together. I whisper into her ear, and she comes. Flames enfold us both. My skin tingles with pleasure so intense it is almost pain. Her heat rushes into me. When I come, for a moment, I too am fire.

  Manit and the Nightmares

  The situation with nightmares grew intolerable. Assuming horrifying shapes, they assailed people in bed, paralysing them and preventing them from getting any sleep. This was happening all over the world. In China they called such attacks “gui ya”; in Japan, the word was “kanashibari”; in the West Indies, “kokma”; people in Newfoundland named the phenomenon “old hag,” because the nightmares there took the form of an old witch who sat on your chest, nagging and insulting you while you lay there paralysed and awake. The council of spider gods, who had woven the different parts of the world into being, decided to act – no-one was getting any sleep and the world they had so carefully created was falling apart. They called upon Manit, god of dreams, to solve this problem.

  Manit hunted down all the nightmares in the world, banishing them one by one into a barren dream world with no-one to taunt and persecute. Eventually, he captured every single one of them.

  Rid of nightmares, humanity could finally have entered a golden age, but everyone was so tired that every single person fell, exhausted, into one long, peaceful sleep from which no-one wanted to awaken.

  The spider gods weren’t pleased by this either. They wanted the world to be a place of constant creation, with the web of reality becoming ever more intricate and beautiful.

  Once more, they called upon Manit to solve their problem.

  Now that nightmares were under his dominion, he taught them how to enter the land of sleep, forbidding them to ever take solid form in the mortal world, and dispatched them to rouse humanity from its slumber.

  And so, every night, nightmares may enter your sleep when you inhale, reminding you that the real world might be a better place than the land of dreams.

  STRANGE TALES OF SEX AND DEATH

  The title of this section was one of the titles I was considering for this book as a whole; the entire collection is comprised of strange tales about sex and/or death. That’s the unifying theme. But in the end I preferred the more intriguing and less blunt Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes.

  The seven stories in this section are closer to the contents of my debut collection, Objects of Worship. Like the stories in that book, these tales are all fantasy, horror, or science fiction. But they’re also somewhat different from the stories found in my first book.

  In keeping with the notion of nocturnes, the stories I selected for this collection are more intimate, deal more directly and more bluntly with questions of sex and/or death, and their deviation from consensus reality tends to be less extreme than in Objects of Worship. They’re only one break shy of dealing directly with the real world, whereas each story in Objects contained several such cognitive breaks.

  One other difference is that the stories in Objects of Worship were very clearly and explicitly composed in dialogue with the stories, novels, comics, and music that most deeply fed my imagination.

  These stories? I have no idea where they came from, aside from the fact that they come from the dark and weird place in my imagination from which my fiction emerges.

  Different Flesh

  Even after all these years, there’s still some rubble left, littered across the broken grid formed by rows of cracked and potholed asphalt that used to be streets. When we lived here, the train ran parallel to the neighbourhood’s largest thoroughfare. The tracks are still laid down, peeking through the weeds.

  I count the streets. There are no houses, no landmarks to jog my spatial memory. It’s no use. If I could inhabit the spaces of my past, I might believe in it again.

  And then I see you. Counting streets.

  Long, straight black hair. Freckles. Cute button-nose. Just like I remember. I wonder if you dye your hair.

  It can’t really be you, though. It could be anyone. It was nearly forty years ago when we took off our clothes for each other, revealing our not-yet-budding bodies.

  I walk up to you. I say, I used to live here.

  Without looking at me, you say, “Me too.”

  I so want it to be you.

  I tell you my name.

  You laugh – a short laugh, a burst of fleeting pleasure. “Really?” Then you look at me and tell me your name.

  ~

  20 July 1969. That night I stayed up late. The whole family spent the entire day watching television. Watching the Apollo Moon mission.

  They landed. The astronauts landed on the Moon. I don’t remember hearing the famous words. All I remember are the grainy images on my family’s black-and-white television set – of the astronauts in their bulky spacesuits, of the desert moonscape, of men in ties sitting behind a desk, shuffling papers, smoking cigarettes, smiling in a strangely serious way.

  ~

  The first time, it was a Saturday morning. The Saturday following the success of the Moon mission. All the cartoons had been pre-empted because of the aliens. On every channel: news, and more news. I was five years old. All I wanted was Bugs Bunny. Or Spider-Man. George of the Jungle. Jonny Quest. Underdog.

  My parents were still asleep. I left through the back door, walked through the alleyway to your house. I stood on tiptoe to peer through one of the small rectangular windowpanes set into the wooden door, hoping to see you. But the kitchen was deserted.

  I tapped lightly on the glass – once, twice – afraid to disturb your parents and be ratted out to my own that I went around knocking on people’s doors at seven o’clock on Saturday mornings. Even though this was the first time I’d done anything like that – and only because there were no cartoons.

  Then you walked into view, still in your pyjamas.

  I smiled and gestured at you to come out and play.

  You shook your head and mouthed, “I can’t.”

  I insisted, but you still shook your head.

  You held up your index finger and pressed it to your mouth. A twinkle appeared in your eyes.

  You started to do gymnastics. Or maybe dance. I never did ask you. You flexed and stretched your limbs. You twirled around on one leg. You kicked your bare feet in the air toward me. Without interrupting your movements, you unfastened a button of your flannel pyjama top. And another. Another kick. Another Twirl. Another button. Flex. Kick. Twirl. Button. Flex kick twirl button. Flexkicktwirlbutton. And then you slung off your shirt. A few more kicks. A few more twirls. And you dropped your pants.

  I was mesmerized by this first sight of naked flesh other than my own. So pale, it almost shone.

  Utterly naked, at a steady, determined pace, you continued flexing and kicking and twirling. For my eyes.

  I think we both lost track of time. There was a thud from somewhere inside your house. Without skipping a beat and without another glance at me, you picked up your clothes and sped out of the kitchen.

  I ran back home. My parents were still in bed.

  That afternoon, I saw you in the alley, hanging out with the other kids. I joined you and our friends. We all played hide-and-seek, and neither of us mentioned our morning tryst.

  I went to your door again the next morning. You were waiting for me, standing in the kitchen, facing outside, the top button of your pyjamas already undone.

  Flex. Kick. Twirl. Button. And your naked flesh. That was the rhythm of my summer mornings, 1969.

  ~

  Their flesh was different. It wasn’t just the colour – a d
eep indigo blue – but the texture of it. The way it caught the light, I thought at first their skin was an aggregation of tiny scales. The wife let me touch her scalp once – they were bald, completely hairless – and her flesh was softer than I’d expected, almost spongy, not at all hard like scales. The weirdest thing about their heads, though, was that they had no noses and ears, just tiny slits above their mouths and on either side of their faces.

  They spoke with a musical lilt, and their vowels were always a bit off. They smiled all the time, with their wide mouths and big shiny white teeth. Or maybe it was just the way their faces were built – smiling.

  Most of the kids made fun of them, in that mean way some children never outgrow. Without exception, on our street at least, parents warned kids to stay away from the aliens. Even my parents, who should have known better. Somehow, I pulled the word hypocrites from my five-year-old vocabulary, and I was forbidden to play outside for a week after that. The next morning I snuck out anyway, to watch you strip out of your pyjamas. I snuck out every morning during that week, and every morning you exposed your pale flesh.

  The next week, when I was free again, while I played with the other kids, I watched the aliens from the corner of my eye, trying to gather the courage to go meet them.

  They had moved into a semi-basement apartment two doors north of your house. Husband and wife. No children. They always wore the same clothes: Hawaiian shirt, black pants, white socks, and sandals for the man; knee-length brown dress, orange pantyhose, and white hospital shoes for the woman. They spent most of every day sitting in the alleyway outside their place, on lawn chairs, with a little table between them. They practiced our language on each other, an exercise that often led to long, loud laughing fits. Before talking again, they’d pour some gooey grey liquid from a big jug into a glass and swallow a few gulps.