Aaaiiieee!

Pale Fruit

The woman who opened the door in answer to Griffin’s knocks was beautiful, and it was this more than the fact that she was most certainly not the person he had expected to greet him that made him falter speechless for several beats. Her hair was long and straight, that drab shade of watery brown that was really like no color at all, but it was parted in the center and framed like curtains an oval face of great impact. The strange woman’s mouth was decadently plush, lips that had been stung by the whole hive of bees held compressed into a solemn pout. They glistened a moist and glossy crimson, some swollen exotic fruit. Her eyes had a feline shape and were of a blue that was clear almost to the point of transparency. Too much mascara only heightened the effect.

“Yes?” the woman—surely only a girl of eighteen or nineteen—asked him at last in a dark, vaguely surly voice.

“I’m sorry…um…I was looking for my landlord…uh, Guy?”

“Guy Hamlin,” the young woman droned.

“Yes. Guy Hamlin.”

“I’m Guy’s daughter, Idelia.”

Griffin smiled. “Do you call your father by his first name?”

Just that lynx-like stare for a moment or two, and then, “Yes.”

The girl—Idelia Hamlin, then— was small, and obviously very slender, lost like some dour, doleful child in her over-sized sweater. Black tights clung to legs almost alarmingly thin, and her bony feet were bare, the red polish on their nails flaking away like old blood. The dim bulb beside the door glowed on her high forehead, and made her pallid, translucent flesh seem almost softly luminous. Normally, Griffin did not care for the starving model look, that heroin chic, the anorexic waif that was the current ideal, as dictated by the media. His interest lay in substantial women, voluptuous, large-breasted, round-bottom-ed. His ex-girlfriend Natalie had been plump as a Renoir nude. This girl was anything but substantial. And yet, those ice-blue eyes, the too-ripe painted lips that seemed to overcompensate for the rest of her, pinned his heart like a struggling, dying moth inside his chest.

He might have disbelieved her about being Guy’s daughter, except that Guy also had uncanny blue eyes—if not of quite so light a shade. Yes, he could see Guy in her unsettling gaze. But otherwise there was no similarity, as Guy was singularly unattractive and a good four hundred pounds, Griffin wagered. Oh yes…Guy. He had come upstairs to see Guy. Griffin realized he’d been mutely staring again.

“I’m Griffin Shores; I live downstairs. Is your father home? I have the rent…and some books to return.” He held them up as proof. “He lent them to me.”

Idelia gazed at the books in his hand, and seemed hesitant, or indecisive as to what to do next. But finally she said, “Why don’t you come in, then.” She held the door wide for him. Before that, she had been blocking it warily with her thin frame.

“Okay, um, thanks.” Griffin slipped past her, lightly brushing against her sweater. Very consciously, he inhaled as he did so, and stole a furtive whiff of her musky perfume.

“What are the books?” Idelia asked as she turned away from the door.

“Oh, about the supernatural, the occult, mostly,” Griffin replied with some degree of embarrassment, as if caught with a stack of pornography. “Your father and I got to talking one day, and he found out I work in a book store and love to read. He’s pretty enthusiastic about these books…he thought I’d find them interesting, too.”

Idelia nodded absently, but said, “I think they’re dangerous.”

“Books?”

“Those books.”

“Oh. Well, ah, so…is Guy here?”

“No. He isn’t. He’s away.”

So why had she let him in, he wondered, when she could have just accepted the books out on the landing? There was something in her spacy manner that suggested drugs, or even a psychological problem, or both—not that it decreased his lust by much. “Um, so when will he be back?”

“Not sure. Not soon.” She shrugged vaguely. “If you don’t feel comfortable leaving the rent with me, you can wait until he returns.”

Griffin didn’t feel comfortable with that, so he changed the subject. “I didn’t know Guy had ever been married.” He didn’t add that his impression had been that Guy was a very lonely—bitterly lonely—man, who had never had a girlfriend in his life, let alone a wife with the kind of genes to produce a creature like this one. Also, he had taken Guy to be only in his mid thirties; he must have sired Idelia when quite young.

“They’re divorced,” Idelia explained. “My mother lives out of town. I’m just visiting here.”

“I see. Then I’ll bet you haven’t been to the store where I work. It’s just down the street—‘Book Plates’? We have a little coffee shop in there. If you’re not busy, maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee and a piece of pie?” His throat clicked as he swallowed a phlegmy glob of nervousness.

“Outside?” Idelia glanced rather suddenly at one of the windows in this front room, a parlor. Ancient, water-stained paper of a dark color covered the tenement apartment’s walls, and all the curtains were drawn, all the shades pulled. “No—thank you.”

Griffin felt like he’d totally humiliated himself, as usual. He called the look women gave him when he asked them out “the tarantula”. As if, instead of asking them out, he had extended his open palm with a tarantula on it. He had gotten along with Guy, evasive as Guy was (this was the first time Griffin had actually been inside his apartment), not only because they shared a passion for books, but because they were both unlucky bachelors. Well, he had had Natalie, and Guy had had his wife, so there was always hope for the future…and Griffin felt he was at least more attractive than Guy, though that wasn’t saying much.

“Well, I’ve got to start my shift in a half hour, anyway, so I guess I should be going. You ought to drop in some time, though—I mean, just to look at the books. It’s a nice little place.”

Idelia said nothing in reply; just stared at him, as if to hypnotize him. He was hypnotizing himself, he thought, and he’d better break off; he was starting to feel light-headed just being in her aura of subtle perfume and glowing flesh.

And then, she took two steps to cross the space between them, to float toward him like a somnambulist, and her arms drifted up to him, the sleeves of the bulky sweater sliding back to reveal the thinness of her arms, and her hands alighted on either side of his face, her touch so soft it was like smoke, but cold smoke. A question half rose in Griffin but before he could give it sound, her face too floated toward him, and she pulled his face down and pressed that luxuriant mouth against his.

He put his hands on her arms, as if to push this stranger away, but her tongue slipped into his mouth, cool and anxious, and he found his arms sliding around her instead, to press her whole body to him. He could almost have wrapped his arms around her twice; he was accustomed to Natalie’s broad back, her warm cushions of flesh. This bird-like body with its sharp points of bone and its insubstantial lightness was alien to him. But that alienness of her body and of her actions increasingly stimulated him. He pushed his own tongue into her mouth in turn, and grew aroused, grew desperate to enter her down there as well…

Her hands had moved from his face down to his waist and now slid under his own sweater and the shirt beneath to the bare skin. She began to bunch the material in her hands as if to pull it off him, over his head, and this caused him to open his eyes in surprised desire.

Her eyes were open, too, perhaps had been open all along, and right there in front of his own—so blue, so intense, so very hungry that they frightened him. But it wasn’t just her hunger that suddenly disturbed him. Again, he had been reminded of Guy’s eyes. It was as if Guy had changed form so as to seduce him, but had just now dropped his defenses to reveal himself lurking beneath the mask. It was, Griffin thought later that night when mulling over these events, a ridiculous idea. Had Guy lost three hundred pounds in the two weeks since Griffin had last seen him, and had a sex change operation to boot? But the girl was, of course, a part of Guy, being his daughter—a physical extension of him.

She must be insane. Why would she try to seduce him, a stranger? He was hardly irresistible, he was the first to admit. He thought himself as bland and colorless as a ghost. So why this frantic passion? Yes, she had to be disturbed, and however beautiful she was, that knowledge began to repulse Griffin, and he stepped backwards away from her.

But she clung to the bottom of his sweater, walked forward with him. “Look at me,” she breathed. “Look at me. Want me. Want me to be here…”

Increasingly unnerved, Griffin had to actually take hold of her bony wrists and extricate himself as gently as he could. He gave a very nervous chuckle, embarrassed and horrified for the both of them. “I’m sorry, Miss Hamlin, but I have to go to work now. I’m sorry.” He turned quickly to the door, let himself out into the hall, at any moment expecting the woman to pounce upon him to drag him back…

But she didn’t, and when safely through the threshold, Griffin threw a look back at her. She remained standing where she had been, her eyes on him but seemingly having lost their focus. Huge empty eyes, eyes of a lost child, their color drained from them, and her lipstick smeared across her cheek like blood.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “It’s for the best anyway, if I go away. For the best…”

He faltered, and repeated, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. And then, he started downstairs. Above him, he heard the door quietly snick shut.

* * *

Fallen leaves scrabbled across the sidewalk like large insects that took flight, swirled briefly, settled to earth again. The leaves were dark red and soon to crumble, flakes of crusted blood drifting down from the dying sun. This sanguine orb made deep blue-purple silhouettes of the old houses along the street, narrow and huddled close together against the chill and seeming to lean over Griffin as if to box him in.

He gave a little shiver, wishing he’d brought his jacket with him, but as he’d related to Idelia the book store was just down the street and around the corner. During the week, he worked first shift hours, but on Saturdays—as now—he was scheduled from evening ‘til closing. He had no social life to sacrifice.

He could still feel Idelia in his mouth; she had seemed more solid there than in his arms, where despite her craving she had been so wispy and brittle. Thinking of her made Griffin dart a glance back over his shoulder at the house he shared with his landlord…a glance up at the second story.

Perhaps he had sensed a gaze upon his back, for someone was indeed staring down at him from an upper window. He stopped, and squinted, realizing that it was more than one person. Again, the buildings were murky with the sun dropping behind them, and there was no light on in that upper room, but he thought he could see three or four figures framed in the glass, crowded close together as if all of them were pressing in to get a look at him. His impression was that they were naked, all of them, but whether they were male or female it was difficult to distinguish. What he did seem to observe, however, was that every one of the pallid figures was wasted to cadaverous thinness, and splotched here and there with inky darkness as if someone had camouflaged them with black paint. These must only have been darker shadows than the rest of the gloom, but Griffin had no further opportunity to tell, for the figure closest to the front drew down the shade, and blocked them all from view.

Griffin remained staring at the window for several moments, as if the shade might be lifted again, but it wasn’t. Did the figures continue to peek at him, however, around its edges?

He decided he must have been mistaken. It must have been only one person, and that must have been Idelia. She had disrobed, and exposed herself, hoping to entice him back, but then had thought better of it. Yes, it could only be that.

Griffin turned back toward his destination and picked up his step, anxious to be out of this dark side street before it closed in on him altogether.

* * *

As he lay in bed that night, staring up at the black pool of his ceiling, he thought of the woman who was staying upstairs from him, even now perhaps in the room just above him.

Why was she visiting, if Guy were away elsewhere? To housesit in his absence?

Tonight, at work, Griffin had attempted—without success—to locate various books that Guy had lent to him and which he’d returned to Idelia. He thought he might like to purchase them so he could peruse them further, after all. He had been thinking about some of the pages Guy had turned down the corner of, or tagged with a scrap of paper as a bookmark, passages he had highlighted with a yellow marker.

One story which Guy had obviously been drawn to related how a group of Canadian researchers in the paranormal, headed by a Dr. George Owen, had in the 1970’s invented a ghost. They had concocted for him a spurious history, and the name of Philip, using the seance form as a way to focus him into being. Eventually, he apparently took on his own life, or after-life, and contacted the researchers as if he had been a real ghost. As if, Griffin thought, there were real ghosts.

Philip had communicated through rapping, and had even made a table physically “dance” about a room.

Another story that had particularly seemed to impress Guy was represented in several of the books; it discussed how the author Alexandra David-Nell, while studying in Tibet, learned how to create something called a tulpa, a thought form given its own sort of life through intense and lengthy concentration. Her tulpa was given the identity of a monk, who after a time was even physically seen by another person and mistaken for a man of flesh and blood. This monk was at first benign in aspect, but after a while grew strangely sinister even in his appearance, and took on his own life to the extent that David-Nell felt he was shrugging off the yoke of her power over him, like a child outgrowing its parents and rebelling for independence. David-Nell had then struggled for half a year to “unmake” him.

An almost subliminal sound broke into Griffin’s thoughts. It was the squeak of a loose floorboard in the room above him. He realized after several moments that he was holding his breath, as if even that sound might prevent him from hearing a repetition of the stealthy creak, but no more came.

His ceiling, lost in blackness, seemed suddenly not to be there at all. He imagined it was a gaping opening, and he imagined a figure was up there at the edge of the opening, gazing down at him, waiting for him to fall asleep. Watching, in the dark, with eyes of too light a blue.

Griffin reached for the lamp on the night stand, almost toppled it in turning it on. His ceiling returned, white and solid, if the plaster a bit cracked.

He fell asleep with the lamp still on…but dreamed of multiple sets of pale blue eyes peeking at him through those cracks in the plaster.

* * *

On Sunday, Griffin put on a jacket and set out to get a paper and a coffee-to-go at his place of employment (couldn’t even stay away on his day off, he chided himself), but found himself getting no further than the front hall, where he gazed up the stairs that ascended into the gloom of the second floor landing.

He wondered if he should apologize for rejecting Idelia Hamlin’s advances yesterday evening. He could tell she’d been hurt, dejected. She had said something like it being for the best, anyway. Something about going away. Going back home, wherever that was? Would she have already left?

More than this, however, he wondered if he should have rejected Idelia Hamlin’s advances at all.

In the light of a new day it was difficult for him to imagine how he could have been so uncomfortable with her little…show of affection…that he would have broken off from it. It was he who was mad, not her. Here was this gorgeous fragile flower of a young woman, certainly no older than twenty, who had thrown herself at him, an undistinguished-looking man in his early thirties who had had fewer lovers in his life than his sixteen-year-old nephew had, he reckoned. Well, that must have been it right there, then. He was too inexperienced to respond to spontaneous desire. Too timid. Had he not been so bloody meek all his life, he might have been more experienced by now. Have a lover right now rather than be living alone. Own a book store rather than work in one. He stood mired in his self disgust—but his fingers had been curling around the railing of the staircase.

As if pulling a boot from sucking mud, he placed his right foot on the first step.

In the murk of the upper hall the door was an obscure portal almost indistinguishable from the shadowy wall. He rapped upon it. A timid knock, despite his new determination. Watch it be Guy who opens the door, he thought. Guy’s great bulk, and Idelia having fled away like some nervous fawn, back into the deep woods…

The door opened, and it was Idelia who stood in the threshold.

She wore the same heavy, dark brown sweater and black tights as yesterday, her feet again bare but she had wiped away her dramatic red lipstick and the dark mascara. It left her looking even more pale, if this were possible, white almost to bloodlessness, and made her eyes look more vulnerable, her too-full lips tender and more child-like. She appeared more sad than surly, as when she’d answered his knock last evening.

“Hello,” she murmured.

“Hi. Um, I’m glad to see you’re still here. I just, ah, just wanted to…I hope yesterday I didn’t hurt your feelings…you know…” He chuckled quite uneasily, threw up one hand. “I didn’t mean to run away like that and…embarrass you or any- thing…”

The young woman looked away and smiled slightly—half bashfully and half bitterly, he felt—and then looked back at him, her smile fading again, that brooding drowsiness returning. “Why don’t you come in?”

“Yeah, sure,” Griffin said, trying to sound casual while an almost nauseous passion loomed up through his guts like a solid invading object. It was as though he were penetrating himself. “Okay…”

As soon as Idelia had closed the door behind them and turned to face him, she reached beneath the hem of her sweater and slipped her thumbs under the rim of her tights, began skinning them down her legs like a snake shedding its skin. The contrast of the slender snowy limbs that were revealed from behind the eclipsing black material was shocking and mesmerizing. She balled the garment and tossed it onto a chair and then stood staring at him expressionlessly. She didn’t remove her over-sized sweater, so that it reached to the tops of her thighs and hid her private area in delicious secrecy.

She extended her hand to him. He took it, and it was small and cool, and she led him to the bedroom. Like a sleep-walker he followed, no longer questioning or protesting.

“I thought I’d starve myself,” she told him as she crawled onto the large bed that Griffin felt must be Guy’s. “I thought that was for the best. To just let myself fade away.” She stretched onto her back, still in her sweater, but pulled it up just enough for him to catch a shadowed glimpse of soft hair. “But now here you are,” she went on. “Here you are. I leave it all up to you. My own will…it isn’t like yours…”

Her words trailed away, but Griffin wasn’t listening, at any rate. He began to pull off his jacket, fumbled with his buttons. He watched her white, slim legs part like a flower opening its petals.

As soon as he was above her he was inside her, and she hooked her heels over the backs of his legs. He clamped a ravenous mouth over those tender lips as if to willingly bruise them, held her skull between his trembling hands. But she pushed at his shoulders gently, broke their kiss and gazed up at his face. Now she held his head between her palms.

“I want to see your eyes,” she breathed huskily, shakily. “Look at me. Don’t close your eyes. Look at me…”

He did as she asked. In his fevered state, it was the best he could do for her in the way of foreplay. But he awkwardly kneaded her small left breast through the heavy material of her sweater…and then lowered his hand to its hem so as to slip beneath it and touch the bare flesh of her belly, her nipples that must be as pale a pink as her lips…

She suddenly reached to stay his hand from sliding under her sweater. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please…”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m—too thin. I’m embarrassed.”

“You’re lovely. You’re so lovely. You don’t have to worry. I want to see you…please…I want to touch you, Idelia.” He braced himself higher above her, still deep within her, and took hold of the sweater’s edge. Her hand still closed on his wrist, but her grip was either weak or fatalistic, and he peeled back the sweater to bare her upper body. He wanted to taste it. He wanted to lose himself in its pale glow…

But it was not pale beneath her sweater. There was a shadow there, glaringly black against the contrasting whiteness.

A patch of liquid darkness like an inky stain covered much of the woman’s belly, starting just above the squint of her navel and encompassing the lower half of her right breast, nicking the bottom of her aureole. It was not a hole, in that its edges blended into the flesh, and yet it was of a more profound depth than any hole. It was as though the void of space itself had burned through her thin tissues. And in this oblivion, a mist or fog rose and fell in billowing, blowing and soundless waves.

“You want to see me? You want to touch me?” A membrane of tears began to jiggle across her wide eyes. “Touch me.” She still held his wrist, and drew his hand toward that dark window.

Griffin yanked his hand free, slipped out of her (what darkness had he been penetrating within her?) and backed naked across the room. He didn’t want to know what that blackness felt like. Whether he would meet with solid flesh, or whether his hand would slip through her into that cold, churning mist.

She slung her legs over the edge of the bed, pulled the sweater down again to hide her wound, if such it was. “It’s spreading,” she informed him. “Every day…”

“What are you?” Griffin managed, in something like a whispered sob. “A ghost?”

Rising, Idelia smiled. “Not even that. A ghost at least was once alive.”

She was too near the door, but there was another by his left. She took a step toward him, still smiling, still weeping, and he darted to his left without waiting to gather his clothing. He plunged into another room, slammed the door, but could find no lock. He turned his back against it to see where he was. It was another bedroom, with no lamp on, just dim sunlight that struggled through the drawn shades and closed drapes. But against this wan light, a figure shuffled into silhouette. Then another. Shadows rustled now to both sides of him. Griffin whirled around and flung open the door he had just come through…but of course, Idelia was there, and he backed helplessly into the center of the room.

She flicked on a wall switch, and an overhead light came on. Griffin found himself ringed by a half dozen people. At least, they were people to varying extents.

They were all women, and all naked, but tainted as Idelia was with that plague of darkness. More afflicted than she, in fact. They were more skeletal, as well—cadaverous. One woman had no breasts left whatsoever, and one of her arms had vanished at the shoulder, where the black void gaped. Another woman had an abyss where her face should have been, this mask of nothingness framed in long straight hair like Idelia’s. One woman had no head remaining at all, but her body still stood at attention. Well, she was a kind of machine, wasn’t she? A machine Guy had made from the ether. That was it, wasn’t it?

“These are my sisters,” Idelia said. “They came before me. They were sketches, mostly, though Guy still used a few of them.”

One of them—the very first?—was not even fully in focus. She looked like a badly blurred moving figure in a photograph, though she stood quite still before him.

And what of Guy? Griffin had no doubts about a great hulking form on top of the bed. It was wrapped in a blue plastic tarp, this package wound with silver duct tape. There was a faint smell of rot which he had first, erroneously thought was coming from the decaying women. How long Guy had been dead and how he had died were the only particulars that needed answering. Idelia noticed his frantic glance at the bundle.

“We didn’t kill him, if that’s what you think. We aren’t vampires. He had a heart attack, I think. Three of us were with him.” She tittered, her lower lip quivering. “It funny, isn’t it? We with too little flesh, and he with too much? He couldn’t survive the pleasures he wanted. He was too hungry. And here we are, with no life, and we outlive him.”

Griffin looked back at Idelia. “Don’t hurt me,” he whimpered.

“You aren’t listening,” she laughed, then she sobbed, and gestured at the bulk on the bed. “I loved him, you know. We all did. He made us to love him.”

Griffin began to edge closer to her. She, at least, he knew somewhat. The others, however much they looked like her, were too silent, and too ghostly. But she was right; even phantoms were more substantial.

“Please, Idelia,” he said, “just let me go.”

She looked at him abruptly—then stepped back from the door. “I wouldn’t stop you, Griffin. I told you, this isn’t about my hunger—it’s about yours.”

He slipped through the door. She made no attempt to follow him, merely watched him from the adjoining room, along with those of her waning sisters who still possessed eyes. He dressed hurriedly, not taking his eyes off her…Guy’s daughter. Guy’s fantasy bride. And with untied laces and half-buttoned shirt he bolted out of the bedroom, out of the apartment…but Guy’s harem of apparitions made no attempt at pursuit.

* * *

The next morning, Griffin called in sick at work. He was over-tired from not having been able to sleep all night. He had sat up with a kitchen knife in his hand, watching the door and the walls as if some spectre or horde of spectres might step suddenly through them.

But when it came, the phantom knocked politely at his door. It was a faint, meek knock that he wasn’t sure he’d heard at first. Hesitantly but inevitably he went to the door. Cracked it, knife in hand. But then he opened it completely.

For a moment, with the door cracked, he had thought he saw Idelia standing outside, nearly lost in shadow. Her eyes wide and pleading, sad and afraid. A rush of concern or guilt made him open the door all the way. But when he did so, he found that she wasn’t there. There was only a swirling pale mist in the general outline of a body, he felt, but which dissipated in moments so that he was left to wonder if it had even been there at all.