“Down that hallway you will find rooms. I’m sure you’ll want to freshen up and rest a bit after such a trip. Take whichever rooms suit you. Later, I will call you to dinner and you may tell me how things go in the outer world. Then you may make your request, if you still desire it.”
She stood, an elegant figure of night. As she passed, she looked hard at Rick, and then Annabel, and finally me. I could see the veins of age cracking the porcelain near her eyes. She was bound by time, just as we were, I thought, and she passed by, leading us across the stone to the dark hallway.
Once our eyes adjusted, the hall was the same as that we’d walked in by. Its walls glowed with the genie light of emerald fungus, and tall dark squares interrupted at intervals.
“Inside, you’ll find whatever you may want or need,” she said, waving at the dark doorways. And then without another word, she slipped away, a shadow played out against the green glow for a moment, and then fading.
“You think there’s a light switch somewhere?” Rick joked. Nobody laughed.
“Stay with her,” he ordered, and then stepped into one of the rooms. As he did, a sudden flash lit the hall and the room “turned on,” shining with twice the brilliance of the corridor.
“Not bad,” he called. “A magical clapper.”
Annabel pulled me by the arm and we stepped into the room next to Rick’s.
It was a fairyland of light. Tiny pinpricks of green and gold flickered and swayed all around us like gnat-sized fireflies.
“It’s just like standing in the center of the galaxy,” she murmured.
“Have you done a lot of standing there?” I asked, and she rammed my shoulder. Seemed like I was everybody’s punching bag today.
“What I could really use is a bathroom with a hot shower,” she said. “Think we might find one of those?”
“Try that,” I pointed. We stepped toward an interruption in the shimmering walls and as we passed its threshold, a dozen candles sprang to life all around us. Their light shimmered and licked at the ivory walls, and reflected off the spigots of a huge marble tub. The candles were spaced about the room in crystal cups along the edges of the tub, on the back of a porcelain toilet and atop a long white vanity. Flames also guttered from two wall sconces set on either side of a full mirror above the sink.
“Just what I needed,” Annabel whispered, and pulled me forward. Pulling my arm along for the ride, she opened the faucets in the tub and the ghosts of steam swirled into the air. Then she looked up at me.
“I need to do this alone.” She stared pointedly at the handcuffs which held our arms together, and I shrugged.
“Rick said to stay with you,” I said.
“I don’t think you want to stay for this,” she replied, walking towards the toilet.
“I don’t have a key,” I said.
“Suit yourself.” Annabel deftly uncinched her pants, dragging my hand uncomfortably close and squatted down on the toilet, pulling me to kneel on the floor at her side.
I’m not sure this was what
I
needed.
Later, after undressing, washing and drying off in some awkward choreography that could have made us both winners in a game of Twister, Annabel and I both emerged clean and moist from the bath. I was just about to say that it would stink to have to put our dirty clothes back on when Annabel pointed at a rack to the left of the doorway. Several items of clothing hung from its many pegs, including a man’s white shirt and black slacks, and a silky green dress.
Annabel pulled the dress down and stepped into it, and with my help eased her injured arm through one sleeve, which flared at the wrist. The back buttoned with glossy round stones, and I closed as many as I could, leaving her shackled arm exposed. She helped me pull up my pants and socks, and I slipped one arm into the shirt.
She fumbled with the button on my sleeve, and then patted it with satisfaction, tapping a finger to my chin.
“All buttoned up, sire,” she grinned. “Now let’s find the keymaster so we can finish the job.”
As we stepped back to the main room, I could feel the blood warming my cheeks, but she seemed nonplussed by the experience.
“Thanks,” I said, a little too soft and a little too late. But she heard me. She didn’t say anything, just turned and stared for a moment into my eyes, and then nodded.
I could feel my heart shudder, and the recent image of her in the tub, water glistening on her breasts and streaming down the crevice between them came unbidden to my mind. She’d run her hand—and mine—over her chest unselfconsciously, and I’d felt a torturous mix of desire and discomfort in the moment. The stream of water down her chest turned to blood in my mind, and a tear welled in my eye. I suddenly couldn’t imagine that the woman we had just seen, the gracious and noble Char-Lee, would want or require Annabel’s throat to be cut in order to grant Rick his request.
Annabel pulled me forward.
We found Rick lying back in his room on a four-post bed, rings of white smoke issuing from a deeply crooked wooden pipe. It didn’t smell like tobacco in the bowl to me.
“Que pasa,” he grinned, eyeing us and then staring upward to blow a heavy cloud of smoke at the ceiling. He narrowed an eye and turned his head to me.
“I said watch her, not wash her.”
“Could you undo this so I can finish getting dressed,” Annabel asked, holding out the cuff.
“Apparently it didn’t stop you from getting
un
dressed.” He stood up and trailed a finger up her exposed ribcage to touch the base of her breast. Then he slid it up to circle her neck. My heart stopped again.
“I don’t recall this being what you wore to the party,” he said, his hand slipping down to grip the thin material covering her breasts.
“Rick, I don’t think—” I began, but stopped with the familiar ting of a knife slipping free of its scabbard.
The hooked barb of Rick’s Bowie was at my chin in a heartbeat.
“Back off junior,” he warned. “You’ve had your fuck for the day. If I want to handle the merchandise, I will. In fact—”
He pulled a silver chain from his pocket, and deftly released the cuffs with its key.
“Wait for us outside,” Rick said to me, and pointed with the knife at the door. Then he turned back to Annabel, and instead of helping her finish dressing, he pushed the glimmering material off her shoulder and down, until the dress slipped across her thighs to wrinkle like shed skin on the floor.
Knife at her heart, he forced her to the bed, and I slid unnoticed from the room.
Something had happened. The landscape had all changed, I thought. When we had started, I was Rick’s right-hand man. Confidante. Friend. But over the past couple days, he’d grown rougher. Not that he hadn’t always been a bastard. He had. But now he was ordering me around like a slave, and I was apparently falling for the girl we’d brought along to kill.
Not a good chemistry. Not at all.
I walked back to the fairy dust room thinking that Annabel had gotten what she wanted, just as the Oracle had promised (at least while she’d been in our room), and Rick was now getting what he wanted.
But what about me?
There was a bed now in the center of the room, where I was sure there hadn’t been one before. I pulled on my hanging shirt sleeve and buttoned up, and then lay down on the pile of silken pillows at its head. I thought about Annabel in the bath again, and shut my eyes, focusing on that thought, imagining myself in the tub with her, soaping her back…
I must have drifted to sleep, because when I heard the gong, my whole body jolted. I rolled to the side of the bed, and as I pushed myself upright, a pain shot through my left hand.
I pulled back as if burnt, and looked. A thin red line stitched across my palm, tiny beads of blood already at the surface.
The reason was readily apparent.
The business end of a wood-handled straight razor glinted in the dull light on the edge of the bed. I picked it up to study, when I heard Rick’s voice from the corridor.
“You ready Romeo? I think that’s the dinner bell.”
I slipped the razor into my pants pocket and tucked my shirt in. Rick was looking around in irritation in the middle of the hallway as Annabel tried unsuccessfully to button up the back of her dress with one hand.
“Let me,” I said, and finished the last three for her.
“Where are we supposed to go?” Rick asked, and, as if on cue, the light in the hall that led back to The Oracle’s chambers faded out, and the hall beyond seemed to brighten.
“I’d say this way,” I said, and began to walk.
The light led us to a dining hall. A table with enough places for 40 men stretched from one end to the other, and at its head, The Char-Lee sat, resplendent in black lace. She was grace, mystery and death incarnate. Her lips were painted a deep red for the evening, and her silvering blonde hair rode in a wave to the back of her neck.
“Welcome,” she said as we entered, and gestured to either side of her. “Join me at my table.”
Plates of beef and chicken steamed in the center of the table, and bowls of corn and beans and sauces I couldn’t identify led halfway down its stretch.
We sat, Rick on The Char-Lee’s left, with Annabel at his side. I sat on her right, alone.
“I trust you found whatever you needed in your rooms,” she asked. Rick smiled widely, nodding. Annabel looked uncertain, but nodded as well.
“I receive fewer and fewer visitors these days,” The Char-Lee said quietly. “The way grows more dangerous, and my legend, perhaps, less known.”
“Your name is yet known,” Annabel said.
“Perhaps it would be better if that were not so.”
We filled our plates with food, and I stuffed my mouth with creamed spinach and Arabian olive salad as Rick answered the Oracle’s request to talk of how things went with the world of men.
“The police states of Irving and Darien have fallen to the gangs of Oakbrook and Willow,” he related, “and the cult of Moonrise continues to spread throughout the western towns that remain alive.”
He told her of the plague towns and the roving bands of mercenary armies, and of the drought that turned many a small burg into tombs of desiccation. When he began to speak of finding the book of Aurica, and studying the scribes for spells of protection, The Char-Lee turned to Annabel.
“And you, child. What of you?”
“I’m of no consequence, ma’am,” Annabel said, barely looking up from her plate. “Like everyone else, I’ve looked for love and found its taste bitter. I have worked beside the beasts to till the earth and bled enough ground to spare my life. No more than this.”
She turned to me next, and though I’d had time to prepare, I had no answer.
“I’ve had to do a lot of things to survive,” I said. “I’m not proud of it all. But I’m still standing.”
“You’re sitting,” Rick laughed.
I considered throwing my roll at him, but out of propriety, declined.
Instead, I looked at The Char-Lee and amazed even myself.
“I’ve also found the taste of love bitter, but I know in my heart that it can be sweet. And I would give my life to earn such a love.”
Rick made a gagging sound. “I’m going to lose my dinner,” he proclaimed.
“Then it is time for dessert,” The Char-Lee announced.
I saw shadows move out of the corners of my eyes, and I turned to catch them, but saw nothing but the stone walls of the chamber.
However, when I looked back at the table, the plates and bowls of food had disappeared, replaced with pastries and cookies and a cake of darkest chocolate.
There was little conversation during this final course, and even I had to smile in amusement as Annabel pushed bite after bite of cake into her mouth, smearing chocolate on her lips as if it might disappear were she not to get it all inside her quickly. Perhaps it would have, I don’t know. I contented myself with stuffed dates and a rich zucchini-honey pastry. When at last, the group of us pushed back from the table stuffed beyond memory, we all looked at The Oracle.
A sad smile crossed her lips, and she nodded.
“It is time,” she said. “You have come with a purpose, and I will hear it. But not here.”
The Oracle rose, and bade us follow her, back down the hall to her formal chambers, where she mounted the dais and sank back into her demonically encrypted throne.
Rick turned to me and hissed, “Hold her,” as he pushed Annabel's arm into my grip. Then he turned to face The Char-Lee, to plead his case, and offer his sacrifice.
“You have come this far, and claim to have studied the ways, so surely you know the duality of my gifts and power,” she said, eyes unblinking and cold. “Like the lycanthrope, it changes from cool skin to claw, a symbiotic dance of desire and death. You may leave my chambers now, with my blessing and gratitude for an evening of companionship. If you begin the path of request, at least one of you must die. Perhaps all of you will find dread and claw, not kiss in my answer. Consider carefully, before you speak.”