Smoke and Roses

The one where I'd been seeing Annie the witch all day today.

The first time, I'd chalked it up to either wishful thinking or lack of caffeine. Or, hell, tiredness: I'd fucked Kate twice more last night, leaving her grimacing as she'd walked down the stairs that morning. She'd marveled, all buoyant, and I could virtually read her mind: she was remembering those days when we'd first started dating in college, when we'd done it several times a day for weeks on end.

She'd been in better shape then, it had to be said. Last night, I'd exhausted her with surreal ease. While I? I'd been a sexual volcano, and I well knew (with a twinge of anxiety) that I'd been thinking about Annie the witch the entire time.

And that had continued with the morning light, regardless of the wishfulness of my thinking. Or my caffeine levels. For whatever reason, it felt like I'd caught glimpses of her everywhere I'd gone all day. Never full looks, still less eye contact or words for most of the day; no, she'd seemed to be everywhere the corners of my eyes roved, dipping in and out of my awareness.

It had started at Harborside Book and Tea, as I waited for the bus, my order being poured out by the little platoon of baristas behind the counter. I'd been staring vacantly at the sweetly rounded rear end of Gretchen, the manager, when all of a sudden I'd seen her out of the corner of my eye. Heart-shaped face. Full, crimson lips. Massive eyes, and when I'd turned to catch them, I'd seen nothing but a full mane of dark hair, sweeping above pale shoulders peeking from a black dress as she left the store.

I'd thought about pursuing her outside. Tapping her on the shoulder. My mind filled itself with a fantasy: she'd smile at me, and beckon me to the alley beside Zimbardo's, where I'd pull up her dress and fuck her against the scummy brick wall with a fury that would make what I'd done to Kate last night look like a PTA social. The thought grew, gathering force until I was on the verge of actually turning and running after her, clean out the front door. "Your coffee, sir!" Gretchen had piped at that moment, and I'd blinked at her in a welter of confusion as I meekly took my coffee.

Then there'd been the girl I'd seen from the bus. No way could it be Annie, if it had even been Annie in the Book & Tea: this was miles away, along the Shore Road as the bus gathered itself for the push up the bluffs. I'd been strap-hanging, my coffee carefully balanced in one hand as I tried to shrug enough to keep my messenger bag from slipping off, gazing idly at the morning beachwalkers. One of them had caught my eye in a flickering instant as we passed, all dark hair over a wide forehead with those same meticulously shaped brows I remembered.

I'd stared hard, my head swiveling as we passed, seeing black lycra holding gloriously weighty tits in perfect suspension, and as I'd craned my head to try to keep her in view the blonde lady next to me, her body swaying with the bus, had given me a glance tinged with the annoying kind of suspicion, the one where they're not sure whether you're being a lech or simply an asshole.

But I scarcely noticed as the girl slipped far behind, my thoughts on the next stop. Jerking the pull cord. Trundling off the coughing vehicle and racing back down the hill to gather that long, dark hair in my hand and pull it, hard, as I tore down those tights and gave it to her, snarling, from behind as she bent over the seawall.

"Excuse me," the blonde had snapped icily as I'd twisted further around, "you're stepping on my foot."

"Sorry." I'd blinked, facing back forward, wondering whether anyone could see my hard-on through my khakis.

My daze had continued in the lobby of my building as I'd stood, staring at my reflection in the burnished old doors of the elevators, gaggling wordlessly with the rest of the white-collar world as we waited to ascend for another day of work. The elevator had belled its arrival, the gleaming doors sliding apart as the unknown occupants streamed out.

For an instant I caught the smell of smoke and roses, my attention wandering even as my fellow workers all crept forward to board the 'vator, and I found myself standing alone amidst the marble of the lobby, searching the departing crowd for Annie's swaying hair. I thought I saw it, peeking back at me as she rounded the corner headed for the building exit, a cool glance back toward me as her hand came up with a big pair of sunglasses.

I hesitated, torn, thinking about how easy it would be to rush after her and take her hand. The other elevators were coming down, the lobby now thinned out: how easy it would be to bundle her into one of the other elevators, then ride it all the way to the top of the building while she knelt before me, big eyes staring up over big breasts, that saucy eyebrow arched as I forced my erection past those blood-ruby lips, her hands tracing up my thighs.

How easy it would be.

"Hey, dude, you getting on or what?" Somebody had been holding the elevator doors for me, the whole crowd of them glaring now, so I'd turned meekly back and joined them.

Then later, after lunch, leaning idly back in my chair at my desk as I proofed the last of the briefs on the Norbera lawsuit, I'd sent a yawning glance out at the street three floors below. They'd moved me to the window when I'd finally finished my law degree, a subtle hint of better things to come if I could pass the bar exam, and as I'd stared down at the street I thought I'd seen her again.

Standing.

Staring back up at me.

Black suit, hair perfect, shades big over a winsomely smiling mouth, she'd been the very vision of a professional woman out on the sidewalk at lunch. Except that her suit jacket had been tailored with great skill over a pair of delectable boobs with no discernible blouse underneath, her cleavage on mischievous display for anyone who looked out at her. But no: not for anyone. For me.

And she'd traced those ripe lips into her smirk as soon as she'd seen me looking down at her.

I'd spun my chair fast enough to nearly send it clattering over its wheels and onto the floor, forgetting my jacket as I rushed past the other paralegals' desks, seeing open mouths and confused eyes as I'd dived back into the elevator. The trip down seemed to have taken an hour, then another slowly crawling hour as I'd made my way among the executives returning from their late, long lunches, shoving my way through them and out the revolving door into the sun of the sidewalk. And, looking up, I'd seen my own window.

But there was no Annie there in the jostling crowd on the sidewalk. Just a hazy, lingering cloud of smoke and roses, half-imagined on the air as it had been by the elevators. I'd returned to my desk in a daze, fruitlessly hoping my cock would relax.

"Yeah," Jeanne said now, watching me closely in her apartment as she opened my beer, "you definitely look like a man distracted by whatever he did last night. Whatever your 'nice evening with your wife' was." She snickered with the vicarious wickedness of a woman who'd been divorced twice. "You almost tripped over my desk when you ran for the elevator this afternoon. Looked like you'd seen a ghost."

"Yeah, well, I just thought I'd seen someone I knew outside," I shrugged lamely, wondering whether I should come up with something more convincing, but at that moment John Souter's knock came booming through Jeanne's apartment, and it was time to sit down and study Contracts.

* * *

Part III: The Bridge over the Dune

* * *

Definitely, I had too many beers. But it was hardly my fault. Jeanne always bought primo stuff, the high-ABV stouts I preferred, and that night Souter brought along a four-pack of the new shit they'd just put out as a special edition at North Beach Beerworks. "Damn," I'd exclaimed, shoving aside my laptop, "is that the new shandy? Wild cherry?"

"Hell yeah, man," he'd laughed, "and there's a reason I only brought three. I already pounded the first one." We'd clinked cans lustily, downing the special edition in a raucous wave of slurps chased by a shot each of Cutty Sark, and that's the last of the studying any of the three of us pretended to do.

After John passed out, Jeanne and I stayed up on her couch while I let some of the alcohol wear off, talking about work stuff: the usual gossip about which junior partners were getting booted off the Norbera case, and which founder's daughter had whored herself out to one of the paralegals at the pool party last month, and who stood to get promoted after she and I passed the bar and soared majestically out of the para pool.

"Dude," she finally giggled as she finished tucking a pillow underneath the snoring Souter's head, "it's after midnight. If you hurry, you can get home before Kate starts googling divorce attorneys."

I thought about what I'd done to her pussy the night before and formed my buzzed mouth into what I hoped was an enigmatic grin. "Doubtful."

"I mean, you can crash here, like him," she shrugged, nodding down at Souter, "but your kids have to get up for school tomorrow, and you know she gets pissy when you don't help."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I shrugged and yawned. "I'm going." It had been awhile since I'd been this buzzed, but Kate assumed the three of us sat around every few nights and did exactly this. "Thanks for hosting."

"Yep." She yawned and started tidying up the table. "Get going. And be careful riding across the beach."

"I always ride across the beach." I shouldered my bag and stretched. "I've got special tires for it and everything."

"No, but it's Halloween." She glanced out the window. "I get that the town made the little kids trick-or-treat last night, but the older kids are probably out getting high and assaulting cyclists."

"Battery," I reminded her as I made for the door. "If they're actually attacking me physically, it's battery. It's not assault."

"Whatever," she scowled. "Shoo."

The night was a black arch overhead as I collected my grey bike from beside Jeanne's porch stairs and strapped my messenger bag to the back rack. I get that cyclists are supposed to wear messenger bags, but I'm not Voodoo in Quicksilver. The bike had a shelf rack over the rear wheel: ergo, that's where the damn bag went. I bungeed it down and swung astride, headed down past the fire station toward the silent dark curve of the beach, the ocean an endless pool of ink beyond.

I made my way through the break in the old fence where the seawall started, steering as carefully as my buzz and the darkness would allow, the faded beachgrass crunching beneath until my bike found sand. You had to get across the beach here, where the rocks were, so you could head down to the tide-line and find that nice, smooth ride down by the water. My journey would take me down the long, curving mile of sand, then past the crumbling Fishermens' Chapel with its old-school public bathhouse, until it would be time to take the big wooden causeway up over the massive sandpile at the south end of the beach. It arched high, more like a bridge or a railroad trestle, the big sloping dune all silver in the starlight underneath.

I always liked hearing the thunk of my wheels hitting the bridge. It was a reminder that I was almost home.

I pumped the pedals until I felt the bike settle down, the whisper of the little waves growing in my ears as I swooped gracefully onto the packed, damp sand, tide-scoured and smooth as any road. To my left surged the sea, calm under the autumn sky, on my right a succession of lampposts far up on the promenade, way too far away to give me any illumination. They marched south, all the way down to the bridge over the dune, the lights clustering into a strange riot of color far down by the chapel and bathhouse.

But I didn't care about the lights. I cared about not losing control and rolling my ride straight into the water. The last thing I needed was for Kate's mockery to come true, and for me to get my shoes wet at the same time. And I was, honestly, a little drunker than I should have been. So I gritted my teeth and pedaled as evenly as I could, my wheels swishing beneath me.

Out at sea the sky gathered an odd, dark-green cast, the clouds meeting and shoving each other aside, and as the moon peered up over the wrack I heard the first rumblings of thunder out there. I sensed no rain: the storm was still far out at sea, but that night? On Halloween? Alone after midnight, riding through the dark in a state of inebriation?

It was a little freaky.

I squinted ahead. Usually you could see the bridge from far away, the only straight line in an otherwise lumpy black vista, but tonight I had to strain to see where I was going. Only the sheen of the sea beside me gave me a course, but I searched ahead of me anyway with a growing sense of unease, trying to get a hint of where I was in this endless ride along an eternal beach.

Around then I caught a new glitter on the water, the faint scatter of greenish sparkles among the waves. At first I thought it was a reflection from those unearthly clouds, but as my head wagged drunkenly around to see ahead I realized there was another glow, a nearer one, welling out from the cracked old walls of the Fishermens' Chapel. For years, local politicians had been telling us they'd fix the place up; those same years had merely seen more and more graffiti inside, more and more empty needles scattered in front, more and more rats.

But not more and more lights.

For months now I'd been riding home this way, ever since Jeanne and Souter and I had started studying, and never once had I seen even the faintest glow coming from the roofless old building. Now it shone, the light pulsing weirdly through the empty windows, repellant and inviting at the same time.

I kept pedaling on, but the Chapel wasn't really far off my path and, dammit, I was really curious to see what was going on in there. I blame the beer: normally I'd have just ridden airily on, but that wasn't the part of my brain that was operating at that point. Instead, my overriding thought was why not? Why not head over there and see what kind of kids were in there in a haze of spray-paint, tagging the old altar? What was causing that unhealthy light? Glow-sticks, maybe, but it was the wrong color green, and it seemed unlikely kids would have that many...

Maybe they had knives or something. But the beer didn't care.

These were the irrational meanderings twisting through my mind as I turned, curving away from the ocean, pushing harder as my tires hit looser sand. My bike moved sluggishly, as if it didn't want to get close to the ancient Chapel, but I pushed on. Curiosity had consumed me. We all know what curiosity did to the cat, but that night I convinced myself that I wasn't a cat.

I rode on, the bike hesitant.

A crumbled concrete pad surrounded the Chapel, the remains of an old patio, and as I reached it I began to hear a faint, strange music coming from inside the building. Moving more surely now on the firmer surface, I pedaled the last few yards toward the windows, the music rising, my heart beating faster. I couldn't tell what kind of instrument it was: it didn't sound recorded, and then I started to hear other sounds.

Shuffling feet.

Quiet, cunning laughter.

Harsh breathing.

The mumble of low conversation.

Fuck, was there some sort of party going on in there? Local kids, showing up in costumes or whatever, getting wasted on Halloween? But what was the music? What was the glow? I was dying to find out, my tires cracking over the sandy concrete, and as I at last reached the moldy walls of the dying Chapel, I leaned up against one of the window frames and craned my neck high, peering over the dusty sill, ignoring the way the paint flaked off in my hand as I pulled myself up. My wide eyes were not ready for what they saw.

The odd, greenish glow I'd seen came mostly from a strange man across the room, at the back where the old altar stood. He towered high, his skin giving off a putrid green luminance like St Elmo's Fire. He was hard to look at: the moment I tried to focus on him and see what he looked like, something in my mind made me look away, my memory dominated by a vaguely feline cast and a broad, wicked smile. As odd as he looked, though, there was nothing strange about the fiddle under his chin, which gave off a squeaky-toned reel that grated on my ears. Not because the dude couldn't play, really, but because it sounded like one of the strings was just slightly out of tune...

I couldn't really tell what glittered on the altar before him, but it looked unsettling. Blades glinted there, big ones and little ones, axes and tomahawks and scimitars, many of them flaked thickly with what looked like blood but had to be something else. Had to be. I saw other things on the altar too, though my gaze did not linger: lumpen, shining things, like bits of raw meat. Or body parts... Shit, I told myself, the teenagers who decorated for this party really did try to get it right.

A drifting shadow across the altar caught my attention, and I turned my unwilling gaze up to where a strange, rickety object swung, casting wavered shadows on the moldy ceiling: a cage, all rusty iron, and as I squinted harder I saw the rotting slimy fingers of some desperate hand, gripping the bar from within. Gasping in horror, I whipped my head frantically away, only to find worse: a man on the same beam, clear across the room, swung lazily by his neck, the noose creaking on the rafter above.

It looked like he'd been there for some time.

The dissonance of the tall fiddler, the sickly altar, and the gruesomely dangling men drove my eyes and ears away, scanning the sides of the Chapel with great dismay. There I saw something almost as bad, once I'd blinked a few times and convinced myself what it was: an open coffin, on end, the waxy shape inside just guessed at in the flickery glow from a thick white candle clasped in the lifeless hands within. I averted my eyes once more, the music wailing, only to see another coffin. Then another. Then another, ranked along the walls like the palisades of an Old West fort at Disneyworld. They gave the whole place a ghoulish, guttering gleam, their weird light washing over the whirling shapes in the middle of the room.

A woman stood in the center, drawn up to her full height, a smile twitching the mouth of a face of greater beauty and sensuousness than any I'd ever seen before. Her figure was hard to make out in a long, tight gown of black or purple, but everything I could see about it suggested curves, luscious curves, the kind of curves that make a man look at a woman and get the urge to make her bear his children. I squinted through the candlelight, trying to ignore the wretched fiddle, and in a flash the eyes looked familiar: they were the dark pools I'd seen by the fireside in that vision I'd had while trick-or-treating last night, the eyes of the fourth woman, barely glimpsed as Annie had made the fire flare up and drawn my eyes to her beauty.

But it was the same woman. I knew it in my soul. Which meant the twisting shapes dancing in an endless circle around her had to be the three girls I'd seen in my mind's eye and felt on my mind's dick, loving my body as I'd lain on the fur before the hearth.

Had to be.

So now I was smiling, my cock stirring strongly, as I shifted my eyes to the last part of this horrific tableau: the dancers, three of them, spinning in the middle of the Chapel's unworldly gleam, their limbs rising and falling with girlish abandon. At last, I had something pleasant to anchor my eyes to! All three of them were there, just as I remembered from that lascivious dreamscape on D Street.

First I caught sight of the small, lithe one who'd first stroked my hard-on, the one with the thin blonde hair and the brilliant shine to her satin corset. Her body filled it to perfection as she leapt and spun, dancing with her eyes closed and a blissful smile on her face, her hair whipping about her head while my dick gave its last warning lurch before twitching to life in my boxers. Her legs, smooth and busy in their black stockings, drove her powerfully in a circle around the woman in the dark gown.