Gothic, page 16
No papers. No notepads. No battered Moleskine filled with old ideas. No tray filled with pens and paperclips. No drugs.
Okay, next.
As she starts to shove the drawer closed, however, something shifts inside of it. Something out of her sight. Something heavy, like a large paperweight that’s somehow trapped in the back of the drawer.
Curious, she tries to pull the drawer further out, but she’s either reached the extent of its depth or something is jamming it, hindering it from sliding its full length. “Huh,” she says.
She reaches her hand into the drawer, past the wrist, patting her fingers and palms against the back of the aged wood in search of… something.
“Snoop snoop,” a voice says.
Sarah’s head snaps up. She scans the empty office but sees no one. The voice… it sounded close, but oddly distant as well. As if she’d heard it through the thin walls of an old house, the kind you might find in a John Saul novel, where whispered secrets are carried to prying ears through antiquated ventilation shafts.
Who… and then her thought is cut off.
Inside the drawer, something hard and thin is wrapping itself around her forearm.
Sarah looks back down, puzzled. Her logical mind can’t make sense of what’s happening. The information being relayed to her brain—that something inside the desk has coiled itself around her thin wrist, and is now squeezing—isn’t registering as possible.
“I don’t…” she says quietly, almost apologetically.
More thin shoots lift lazily from the side of the desk and slide inside the drawer, like snakes being drawn to a fresh meal. One vein snakes around her thumb. Another grips her pinky. The coil holding her wrist pulls hard and she stumbles forward, half-bent, into the desk, hip pressed against the wood, her hand held firmly from inside the open drawer. Whimpering, she tries to tug her arm back, to pull it out, but it won’t come. She realizes with an odd, almost numb, feeling of despair, that the tendrils wrapped around her arm are dense with prickly thorns that bite painfully into her flesh. Combined with the feeling of tiny wooden leaves brushing lightly against her punctured skin, she suddenly feels as if she’s unwittingly stuck her hand deep into a rose bush (a bush that has somehow come alive) and cannot pull it free.
From the wall of shelves behind her, Tyson’s stereo clicks on.
She screams in surprise as white noise erupts from the speakers, any remaining calm or reason slipping cleanly away between one heartbeat and the next, her nerves filling instead with a hot, all-consuming terror. She twists her head in time to see the receiver light up, the radio dial needle wiggle jaggedly left-to-right, as if searching for a station. What to play, what to play, she thinks for no reason at all. Or has someone else thought it? Can this really be happening?
Before she can answer herself, there’s another vicious yank on her arm, as if the desk is snapping at her to PAY ATTENTION TO ME! She spins around as more ivy lifts free to wrap around her forearm so tightly that the flesh between the black coils bulges bright red with the pressure of blood beneath her skin.
She groans as a melody begins to play over the speakers, the volume gradually increasing until the music distorts, the bass vibrating the very shelves the speakers rest upon.
Don’t leave me in all this pain, don’t leave me out in the rain…
Come back and bring back my smile…
Laughter. Sarah cries out, eyes wide enough to show whites as the sensuous voice of Toni Braxton blares from behind her head. She wraps her free hand around her forearm and tries desperately to pull it from the constricting grip of the entwined branches inside the drawer, but they hold her fast and, to her chilling horror, she sees more movement along the surface of the desk now.
The carved faces are all looking at her, their wooden visages grinning and laughing. The engraved animals snap and snarl and bark, the naked figures of men and women furiously dance and fuck and writhe.
The goddamned thing has come alive!
And still the music keeps playing, the song so loud that her head is filled with it, overriding her thoughts, drowning out her grunts of exertion. Her struggle. Her fear.
Bring back those nights when I held you beside me!
UN-BREEEAAAK MY HEAAARRT!
SAY YOU’LL LOVE ME AGAAAAIN!
The drawer slides open and the vines which hold her arm force her hand outward, then, with a jerk, twist it so her palm is flipped over, the pad of her thumb pressed firmly against the edge of the desk, the back of her hand facing the lip of the open drawer.
Half-in, half-out.
As her arm is unnaturally wrenched, she shrieks in pain, forced to turn her entire body to keep the bones in her wrist from snapping. Frantic now, she pulls madly, crying for release, but the coils of wood only squeeze more tightly, the thorns digging deeper into her flesh, cutting her badly enough that blood runs freely down her wrist, drips from her fingers into the open mouth of the drawer. She bends awkwardly across the surface of the desk, trying to find balance, some new leverage. Desperate, she kicks at the wooden legs, pounds the stone top with her free hand. Screams for help, for mercy.
That damned music! I can’t think I can’t THINK!
Sarah sobs and begs, tugs and jerks and fights with all her might to get free, to get AWAY!
Meanwhile, the drawer slowly slides open, further and further.
She has only a moment to think:
It’s winding up. The son-of-a-bitch is cocking its damned fist.
Then the drawer—as if pulled taut by an invisible rubber band—releases.
It slams into the desk, ramming full force into the back of Sarah’s knuckles. There’s a loud crunch as two of the metacarpal bones in her hand shatter.
She lifts her head and screams her throat raw as Toni Braxton’s voice blares through the office, as if eager to match her desperation.
UN-CRY THESE TEAAARS!
I CRIED SO MAAANY, MANY NIGHTS…
UN-BREAK MY HEEAAR-AAART!!
The drawer slides slowly, methodically, open once more.
“Stop!” she screams. “Please STOP!”
And, inexplicably, “I’m SORRY!”
A dry voice whispers into her ear and she dares not turn to look at it, dares not see who—or what—is standing beside her, jabbering into her ear, its breath hot and foul.
“Snoop!” it says, its voice a serpent’s hiss. “You hit us? We hit you back.”
Sarah arches her head and shrieks as the drawer slams shut again, snapping bones in three of her fingers against the hard edge. All the faces trapped in the black wood howl with delight, mocking her own screams, her cries of pain, relishing it. Feeding on it.
Entering shock, she slumps across the desktop, arm bent awkwardly, and tries one last time to pull her bloody, broken hand free of the wooden vines clutching it. Sobbing, her face smeared with snot and sweat and tears, she stares through blurred vision to where the ropes of strange wooden ivy have lifted away from the desk. Through her shock and pain and terror one word shoots across her mind like a crackle of lightning splitting the sky:
Impossible!
But the thought is soon lost in another white-hot blast of agony as the drawer whips shut with a CRACK against her broken bones, her split, bleeding flesh…
Again, and again, and again…
Thirty-four
The brakes of the train screech as the car slows. Violet hoped to find a seat where she could sit and read, but the car is full. Instead, she slips on her headphones and tries to ignore the guy reaching over her for the handrail. He smells of body odor with a lovely aromatic undercurrent of spoiled cabbage.
She isn’t thrilled about leaving and is already wondering if she’s made a mistake. Things at home are definitely… off. Her father, never a mountain of stability to begin with, seems downright neurotic and, apparently, borderline violent. What he’d done to Sarah is something Violet will never be able to forget, or truly forgive. Yes, she loves her father, but these last few days she’s seen a side of him she’d never known. How long, she wonders, has he been acting like this? Has Sarah been putting up with this bullshit all this time and Violet has simply been too narcissistic, too wrapped up in her own little world of college and parties, to notice?
She hates the idea of Sarah having to cope alone, but also prays it isn’t as bad as it seems. Or, at least, it’s a temporary thing the two of them will eventually work through. Her dad is a great guy, and he’s always been there for her—was there when her mother died and, if she’s honest with herself, is there for her now as she drains the coffers dry to get an education from one of the best universities in the country.
It’s this train of thought that gives Violet pause, a sick feeling growing in her stomach.
My God, am I the cause of all this? The money? My tuition… it must be stretching things for him financially. I knew things were bad but are they worse than I thought? Is all this—the way he’s acting, the strain of their relationship—MY fault?
Before Violet can ponder the question (or her encroaching sense of guilt) further, the music pulsing through her headphones is interrupted by the beep-beep of her phone’s alert tone.
She has a voice message.
Brow furrowed, she wonders why the call didn’t come through, but assumes the subway train must have been too far underground at the time. She pulls the phone from her jacket pocket, sees the message had been left by sarah.
The sick feeling in her guts grows tenfold for reasons Violet doesn’t understand. But as the train slows to a stop at 110th Street, she listens to Sarah’s breathless, horrible, terrifying message.
Violet feels the blood rush from her face. Without further thought, she pushes through the dense pocket of people entering the train and flees from the car a moment before the doors slide shut. Her backpack—crammed with dirty clothes, books, and toiletries—bounces against her back as she sprints for the stairs.
As she takes them two at a time, she thinks about calling a taxi, but realizes it might be faster to run the half-mile to the Mount Sinai Emergency Room.
It takes her only seconds to make the decision.
She runs.
****
Tyson finishes lunch with Harry and walks to Westsider Rare Books, the midday stroll to his favorite bookshop more an effort to clear his head than a desire to actually purchase anything (especially given Harry’s disconcerting power-play, and Tyson’s newfound questionable finances).
After he spends some time browsing the densely packed shelves, and another chunk of time autographing the small stack of Tyson Parks first editions brought out by the proprietor (a pock-faced old hippy named Chet who is always happy to turn a profit on Tyson’s occasional visit), Tyson makes the unusual-for-him decision to walk home rather than take the subway. He’s enjoying the exercise, revitalized by the chilled, sweet post-rain breath the city rarely offers during the sacred days that mark the transition from fall into winter.
It’s late afternoon approaching dusk when he finally arrives home, feeling refreshed and invigorated, feeling himself for the first time in what feels like a long while. He’s still worried about Harry, sure, but his mind is clear, and the city’s air settles like thin armor on his weather-reddened skin.
In his elated state, he doesn’t notice the unusual cold of the house’s interior, the slight breeze passing through the air. The broken window in the adjacent room.
Humming a showtune, he pours himself a drink and sits down at the kitchen table to playback his messages.
There is only one.
He listens, wide-eyed, to the frantic, tear-strewn message Violet left with his service. As the automated voice relays the time of her call, he checks his watch, a soft moan escaping his mouth.
If Violet’s message was correct, Sarah’s already in surgery.
Panicked, Tyson stands abruptly—eager to hail a cab and get himself to the emergency room—and by doing so knocks his drink off the table.
“Damn it.”
Surrounded by early evening shadow, he flicks on the lights in order to retrieve the dropped glass before leaving.
It’s only then that he sees all the blood.
****
Twenty minutes later, Tyson is running through the automated doors of Mount Sinai’s emergency waiting room. The rain has started again and he’s soaked through, his glasses fogged to the point where he’s forced to remove them in order to find his daughter, who he locates hugging her knees on a blue chair in the corner of the room, rocking like a frightened child.
Violet embraces him and recounts her knowledge of events, which was slim as she could only relay what she’d heard in Sarah’s brief message.
Some sort of freak accident. Sarah had fallen and broken her hand—badly.
“It’s really weird, Dad, because the policeman who was here earlier told me no one answered the door, and he could see through a window that she was passed out on the kitchen floor. They had to break the window just to get inside,” Violet says with quick, gulping breaths. “There’s no way she just… fell, or whatever. Something happened to her.”
“What do you mean? What happened?” Tyson asks, shaking and nauseous, part of him knowing he doesn’t want to hear the answer to his question. Not really.
“No idea. But Dad, I talked to the surgeon before they put her under. She told me the hand isn’t just broken… it’s mangled. Something like twelve different bones are shattered, and she’ll probably have permanent nerve damage. It’s really bad,” Violet says weakly, her voice thick with emotion. “What the hell happened to her?”
Tyson hugs his daughter close, rubs her back as she cries quietly against his thin raincoat. “I don’t know,” he says.
But deep down, with a bizarre sense of something akin to pride, he does know.
And while consoling his daughter and waiting for the doctors to desperately try and put his lover’s hand back together, Tyson fights the incredible—undeniably horrible—urge to smile.
Thirty-five
“My dear, you must understand that I can’t give out that information.” Anton stares at the woman sitting on the other side of his desk with open suspicion. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’d even ask. I have a feeling you know it’s impossible.”
Anton noticed the woman as unique the moment she walked into the showroom. She’s tall and well-dressed (in a slightly European fashion), olive-skinned with striking black hair. He immediately pegged her as old aristocratic money, a vibe that contrasted only slightly with her obvious youth. He figures she’s not a day over thirty, and strikes him as someone who knows what she wants. And how to get it.
And what she wants, it turns out, after the usual dance of greetings, small talk, and banal inquiries about some of his showroom pieces, is to know who, precisely, had acquired that Victorian gothic desk, and—if it isn’t too much trouble—how much they paid for it.
At first, he played coy, mentioning the great many antique desks he’d sold that month alone, but of course always knowing exactly the desk she meant. In fact, he’s been thinking about that very item more and more in the past week; even fantasizing—those carvings, the slick black oak, the flawless stone slab that serves as its top—about it. Truly, it is one-of-a-kind, and he’d let it go for a song. Of course, twenty-five thousand dollars is a sweet song to listen to, a tune that always brings a smile to his face with its steady beat and gay chorus. But he also knows he could have commanded nearly six figures for it, assuming he felt like putting in the time and energy to market the item, versus simply making a lone phone call to a certain writer’s wealthy girlfriend who once mentioned she was in the market for something similar.
Yes, he had let go of it easily. Almost eagerly.
And why do you think that was? he asks himself, for well past the hundredth time.
He doesn’t know the answer. It just felt like the proper thing to do. Frankly, part of him was glad to be rid of it. He would never even hint such feelings to a client, but that desk had given him the creeps. And that was before the accident, and the subsequent death of Marco, whose fifty-three-year-old heart had called it quits while on the operating table. Regardless, he’d made the sale, delivered it—along with seven strong men, heavy-duty dollies, and a pulley-rig. He still isn’t completely sure how they fit it into the office, despite his studious pre-measurements.
Regardless, that was that.
But now there’s this woman. This mysterious Mademoiselle Diana Montresor, like a femme fatale from an old mystery novel, with her many questions.
In addition to her preposterous demands, she also very much wants to know when, exactly, the desk arrived in his possession, and from whom Anton himself had acquired it.
She attempts to make all these inquiries logical by making the case that the desk is somehow her property—or, more specifically, the property of someone she represents. Someone from afar. A mysterious grandfather, a Count, or some such romantic nonsense.
Anton laughed at first, but found her interesting (and, truthfully, very attractive), and so offered to speak more about her concern, which is how they had ended up in his office, chatting like old university mates; he with an eye on asking her to dinner, and she with the questions and those brilliant black eyes, that cunning smile.
Attractive or not, he can’t help but see her as a predator—perhaps a Lycan in human form, a skin-walker, a Therianthrope whose other shape is most likely a puma, or a jaguar.
“Of course,” she replies smoothly. “I admire your ethics, Anton. However, I just want to speak to the owner for a few minutes. I want to make them an offer to buy the merchandise back. A substantial offer, I should add.”
Anton puts his feet on his desk, amused. “Then why not let me broker the deal? It’s what I do after all. If they bite, you get your desk, they get wealthier, and I get, shall we say, twenty percent?”
But Diana is already shaking her head. “I’m afraid not. I must see this person directly. If they’ve become too attached to the piece, I’ll want to know before conducting my business.”
