Slippin' into Darkness

1:12 A.M.

Marvis Hanks, Junior, climbed the stairs that led from the basement to the foyer of his house. His long fingers were interlocked so that his hands made a shelf at crotch level; a stack of videotapes was scissored between his hands and the point of his chin, and consequently his eyes were trained on the ceiling instead of the stairs. Normally Marvis would have eschewed such daredevil activity, but he had been climbing these stairs for thirty-four of his thirty-five years. Each step was completely familiar.

He breathed a short sigh of relief as he left the staircase. The heels of his expensive Bally loafers clacked smartly against the white pine floor in the foyer. Marvis had lived alone since the death of his parents, both of whom had succumbed while he was in college, so the whisper of his sigh and the tapping of his heels were the only sounds in the house.

The only sounds, until he passed the living room.

A subdued giggle jolted Marvis mid-step. The crowning tape in his carefully balanced stack twisted under his chin. The videos toppled from his grasp like so many oversized dominos and clattered to the floor.

The giggling sound came again. Moonlight washed the living room from an Anderson bay window, the sash bars casting a dark net over the brass-and-mahogany pool table that dominated the room.

And lying on the pool table…something, or someone.

Marvis squinted. His green eyes zeroed in on a tangle of crisp blonde hair framed by a square of black shadow. The giggles spilled into full laughter. A pair of lips were trapped in the black shadow frame.

But these lips couldn’t laugh. It was impossible.

Stiff fingers entered the shadow-frame and caressed the waiting lips, twisting them into a dull purple smile. Marvis didn’t breathe. The girl’s long legs were beautiful, her fingers slim and eager, her skin as pale as a winter moon. A naked foot traveled her smooth calf as her fingers danced. Two perfect knees came together, then parted. And then she laughed again, her firm belly shuddering as she sat up. Straight, long hair swept a face that seemed nothing more than shadow. But Marvis didn’t need to see this face to recognize it. It was locked in his memory.

Blonde cobweb strands tickled her hardening nipples. The net of shadows embraced her, slicing her arms and legs at the joints, turning her torso into a complex jigsaw. The shadows were only a trick of moonlight and window sashes. Marvis knew that, just as he knew that the shadows had transformed the girl into something both obscene and pathetic-a living, breathing butcher’s diagram.

But she wasn’t living. Not this girl. She wasn’t breathing.

Her face was nothing more than a shadow.

He was seeing-

Her laughter was the only thing that lurked in the shadows.

He was hearing-

She was a ghost.

Somehow, Marvis managed to choke back his scream. But it stayed with him, a secret locked in his chest, even when she turned on the lights.

She closed the drapes, still laughing. “Well, it’s what you get for leaving your front door unlocked. Anybody could have wandered in.”

Something witty. Marvis knew that he was supposed to say something witty. That was the game. But he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You should have seen yourself,” she said.

He was still frightened. She wasn’t a ghost. That’s what he kept telling himself. She wasn’t a dead girl. She was only Shelly Desmond, a fifteen-year-old piece of meat who stood naked in his living room, thinking that she was funny.

“I mean it, Marvis.” She giggled. “Oh, man, the look on your face.”

He glanced away sharply. At the ebony videocassettes on the white pine floor. At his whiteboy loafers, his faded black jeans. At his black hands hanging there before him, long fingers still trembling.

Negro hands. African-American hands.

No. Not quite. His hands were the sweet color of butterscotch. Come August, any redneck had darker skin than his.

“And your eyes.” Shelly wiped away tears of laughter. “Your eyes were as big as saucers.”

Marvis glared at the girl. “As big as saucers.” The words were ice on his tongue. “Like a spook butler in some old movie. Is that what you mean. Shelly?”

She crossed her arms over her breasts, as if exasperated. “I didn’t mean… Geez, Marvis, why do you say things like that? It’s the nineties. Wake up. All that stuff happened a long time ago. Do you think I’d even be here if I was like that?”

“There’s the money.”

“That hurts, Marvis.”

She pouted, and, of course, that made her a magnet. Marvis came to her. His fingers encircled her tiny wrists. Gently, he moved her arms to her sides, forced her hands against the cold brass rail of the pool table. “You can’t imagine, Shelly.”

She didn’t look away, and that struck him as particularly brave. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what color-”

His grip tightened. “But you like my color, don’t you. Shell? You’re the one who told me that I’m the man with the sweet butterscotch skin.” She giggled, and for a moment her arms relaxed. “But what if my skin was darker? And what if my eyes weren’t green? What if they were as brown as dirt? What if my skin was black as unsweetened chocolate? Would you still want a taste of me?”

The muscles in Shelly’s arms became knots of nervous tension. The pool table shuddered, and Marvis caught sight of the eight ball teetering on the edge of the corner pocket nearest him.

Teetering there, on the edge of a pit of shadow. An ebony sphere on the brink of a pit. A bottomless pit like the shadow-face he’d imagined seeing earlier…

No, that face belonged to Shelly. Shelly, and a few shadows. And now the shadows were gone and Shelly wasn’t so frightening. Or brave. She looked away-not daring to struggle, actually blushing if that could be believed-and it was Marvis’s turn to laugh. He released her wrists and stroked her rosy cheeks with his sweet butterscotch fingers.

“You’re red, Shell,” he said. “You’re a little Indian.”

“A little Native American,” she corrected, and they both laughed.

His fingers left her cheeks, traveling more familiar territory.

“Don’t you want to get the camera?” she asked.

“Maybe we’ll do this just for us.”

“You want to do it here? On the pool table?”

He thought of the dead girl as he looked into Shelly’s eyes, and he had to laugh at the misplaced fear that he’d felt just a few moments before. “Yeah.” His fingers smoothed the cool green felt that surrounded the eight ball, never quite touching the ball itself. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

“I don’t know…” Shelly was looking over his shoulder now, not looking at him at all.

He sensed someone behind him, watching. In an instant the fear was back with him. There were plenty of self-righteous cops in the world and there were plenty of people in his business who were much more dangerous than any self-righteous cop.

He turned quickly, confronting nothing more dangerous than an old hand-tinted wedding photo of his father and mother that hung on the wall.

Marvis smiled. So this was the source of Shelly’s unease. He had always thought the photo told the truth. His father’s skin so black, his mother’s so white. In the wedding photo, Marvis’s mother was almost as white as her dress. In reality, his mother’s skin had been the color of a honeycomb still slick with sweetness. Marvis was nearly that light, though his hair was darker than his mother’s.

“It’s like they’re watching us,” Shelly whispered. “And your father looks so angry.”

“Of course he looks angry,” Marvis said flatly. “He was a cop. Cops always look angry, especially when they’re off duty.”

“Oh, Jesus.” She giggled. “You’re kidding, right?”

Marvis shook his head.

“Did he know? I mean, did he know what you do? How you make your money?”

“He died when I was in college. A junkie slit his throat three months before he was due to retire. My mother’s heart gave out a few weeks later. All they knew was that I wanted to open a camera shop.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Marvis knew that she wanted to say more, so he didn’t say anything. “That must make it so hard for you. Knowing what they’d think.” She stared at the picture, trying to find something of Marvis in his father’s face. “If he knew that someone like me was in his house…I mean, he’d hate me.”

Marvis stroked her pale breasts, inhaled her perfume. God, she even smelled white. “No, he wouldn’t hate you.” The conclusion was simple, logical. “Not my father.”

Marvis turned the photograph to the wall, but Shelly couldn’t bring herself to look away. “Maybe we could use a little something to take the edge off,” she suggested.

Marvis nodded. Shelly slipped from the table and started toward the hallway, but he stopped her with a single glance.

“I know where it is,” she said. “Remember? You showed me-the very first time, when we did it in the bedroom.”

“I’ll get it,” he said.

His girls were waiting for him in the bedroom.

Marvis winked at them. “I guess I haven’t lost my touch,” he said, and his voice held genuine surprise rather than the hollow ring of braggadocio.

Marvis always felt like a teenage boy when he entered his bedroom. It didn’t really seem like an adult’s room at all, not with his girls there. It would forever belong to a nervous teenager that everyone had known as Shutterbug.

Marvis stared at his girls, trying to see them as he once had, with Shutterbug eyes. To his younger eye they had been perfection. Now he could see their flaws. A nose that was just a little too large. Teenage breasts that would never swell to desired dimensions. A smile that would be eternally crooked, because orthodontia wasn’t covered on blue-collar health plans.

And here they were, eighteen years later, still locked in his bedroom. Each one of them trapped in an eight-by-ten inch frame, sealed behind a slab of clear glass. Untouched and untouchable.

Their smiles glowed. Girls were different back in the seventies. At least these girls were different. A little more innocent. Not much, but just enough. They weren’t like the knowing nineties girls with caked-on vampire makeup who visited Marvis’s camera shop to pose for their senior portraits. And they weren’t at all like Shelly Desmond, who dressed like an MTV exec’s idea of a bad girl. When she wore any clothes at all, that is. No, Shutterbug’s girls would have died of shame in Shelly Desmond’s skin. They were daddy’s princesses, and they behaved as such. In Shutterbug’s photographs they wore princess smiles untouched by the cold hand of life.

At eighteen, Marvis had believed that his camera was the only thing that could get him close to that kind of girl. His tongue was more tin than silver, and he certainly wasn’t a jock. His father despised athletics, believing that too many promising black youths crippled themselves playing stupid games that didn’t mean anything. Chess club was as exciting as it got for Marvis.

But the kid everyone called Shutterbug could make wonderful pictures. He told his girls that he was going to grow up to be a fashion photographer. And they believed him, just as they believed that they were going to find careers as models or actresses. Marvis snapped some of them so often that he memorized their entire wardrobes, learning which blouses went with which skirts, which sweaters or T-shirts were acceptable with bell-bottomed Levi’s. Even now he could remember their shoes-mostly those awful cork platform things that girls had worn in the days of disco-though recalling the range of a girl’s footwear after all this time seemed a little sick, even to Marvis.

But he was never Marvis to those girls. He was Shutterbug. It was a whitebread name he could hide behind, a nickname that would have fit a friend of Marcia or Jan on The Brady Bunch, a name that got him past the vigilant mother or father who answered the kitchen phone, securing passage to the ear of the girl who lay on her bed with a pink Princess extension balanced on her flat white stomach.

Even now, eighteen years later, he had to smile at his ingenuity. A whitebread princess’s parents would have been naturally suspicious if their daughter had received a call from someone named Marvis. The kid everyone called Shutterbug couldn’t believe that his father hadn’t recognized that simple fact. The old man had certainly considered Marvis’s voice and diction, because he had taken the time to beat the neighborhood street talk out of his only son. But he’d missed the name- Marvis – a real tip-off to any bigot.

Marvis grinned at the very idea of his father making a mistake. Maybe the old man had been human after all.

Marvis still used his voice to make business contacts on the telephone, just as he still used his camera to make social connections.

The camera had brought Shelly here tonight.

No, it wasn’t the camera. The money brought her here.

Marvis laughed. “Shut up, Shutterbug.”

He opened the bedroom closet. Two shoeboxes were shoved toward the back of the middle shelf. He opened the box on the right, razored a couple of lines onto a cosmetic mirror for Shelly, then did a few discreet toots of his own with a gold coke spoon that he kept in the box.

The rush caught him and his eyelids fluttered. He was nowhere for a brief instant, and then he was staring down at a bent photo jammed in a box of high school junk. It was a shot of the cheerleading squad that he’d snapped in his senior year. Five beauties in the foreground, in the background-barely visible through a biology lab window made nearly opaque by hard afternoon sunlight-a young man’s silhouette. Faceless, but anyone who looked closely enough to see the solitary figure knew instinctively what the young man was watching.

Voyeurism. Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were. Or more simply put, Marvis thought, it takes one to know one.

Not that anyone would notice the young man’s silhouette now. The photo had been ruined long ago at the direction of the editor of the 1976 yearbook, a real ice princess named Amelia Peyton. Well, the order had come from the vice principal himself, but Amy Peyton had obviously enjoyed passing it on. Shutterbug had been forced to excise-that was the vice principal’s word-the face of the cheerleader who’d been kicked off the squad. He had backed the hole with some black mounting paper, and once that was done the viewer’s attention was invariably drawn to the stark nothingness of the black pit.

Minutes ago, in the living room, Shutterbug’s eyes had been drawn to the ebony eight ball and the pocket of shadow on the pool table in just the same way. And before that, an equally strong, nearly magnetic pull had drawn his gaze to a face lost in shadow behind a curtain of blonde hair.

The face of a ghost.

No. Only the face of Shelly Desmond.

Marvis closed the closet.

The faceless ghost was gone. Hidden away.

Shelly was in the living room.

Suddenly, Marvis wanted to be with her.

Barefoot now, wearing only a black silk robe, Marvis returned to the living room, and Shelly.

The girl had stacked the scattered videos, save one, on a shelf above Marvis’s stereo. The other cassette was playing in the VCR. Shelly lay on a throw rug in front of the 32” Sony television, a video remote held in her hand, studying her mirror image. The two Shellys moaned in unison. Marvis had to smile. To think that, even in shadow, he hadn’t recognized Shelly’s busy fingers.

Shelly hadn’t noticed his presence. He set the coke-lined mirror on the edge of the pool table and watched her. There was almost something innocent about her unconscious nudity.

But there was nothing innocent about the girl on the screen.

And he’d never feel the same way about her, anyway. He knew that. He’d never desire her in that crazy, unquenchable way. That was the hell of it. Shelly’s eyes were wrong. They were green, not gray. And her hair was wrong. It was straight and uniformly pale, not curled and frosted, as the girl’s hair had been on that night in 1976. That girl, whose face had been excised from the 1976 Lance amp; Shield, she’d had a wonderful smile, too, one of those Mona Lisa smiles that were as good as a whispered secret you could never forget even if you wanted to.

The girl with the excised face had been the main attraction in the first erotica Shutterbug photographed (Shutterbug never called it porno – that was declasse, one of the first words you learned to avoid when you got involved in the industry). A little 16mm job he had done at eighteen. It had been a complete surprise, that film. Nothing he had ever planned to do, but those fifty feet of 16mm had started him on the road to fortune, if not fame.

And now that girl was dead. April Destino was gone from this vale of tears. Shutterbug had read about it in the paper. OD’d, or a suicide, or something.

But tonight he’d seen her ghost.

A shiver of excitement sizzled the length of Shutterbug’s spine. He smiled, amazed that he was actually old enough for nostalgia. He hadn’t watched that loop of film in quite a while. He used video these days, but he still had the 16mm equipment around. The old Bell amp; Howell projector was in a closet upstairs. The screen was in the basement. And the film itself, where the hell was it?

Shutterbug grinned. Amazing. He had a hard-on, and Shelly hadn’t even touched him.

Amazing. He’d take care of Shelly, just the way he wanted to. Do her right there on the pool table. Then he’d get rid of her, make a little popcorn, and have a retrospective of the early works of Marvis Hanks, Junior. That’s exactly what he would do.

He ran a finger along a stack of CDs until he found the one he was looking for. Some good old seventies whitebread music, the kind they used to play on KFRC. Forgotten names like K.C. amp; the Sunshine Band, England Dan and John Ford Coley, and Janis Ian.

The CD rack whirred open at the touch of a button. He studied the selections listed on the silver face of the disc. “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.” That’s what he’d play, just for the irony.

Something thumped against the bay window.

The CD box slipped from Marvis’s fingers, cracked against the floor.

Outside, someone laughed.

Marvis glanced at the closed drapes. Stared at Shelly

Her eyes were as big as saucers. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “No one knows that I’m here… Not my parents. Not my boyfriend. I… I did just like you said, Marvis. I didn’t tell- “

All he had to do was twist his head. Shelly grabbed her little backpack, unzipped the bottom compartment, pulled out a top and a pair of shorts, all the time moving across the room and into the kitchen.

Shelly was moving fast, but Marvis was moving way too slow.

Again, something thumped against the window. Again, someone laughed.

Marvis turned off the television. He summoned his courage and opened the drapes.

The slamming sound startled him, and he glanced toward the kitchen. The door to the side patio didn’t catch, swung open again.

Shelly was gone.

Had someone come in the side door and snatched her? Or had she been so frightened that she ran off? Did she know something?

Had she told someone? Had she sold him out?

Time would tell. It was very quiet. Marvis stood before the window, waiting for some answers. The front lawn was a sloping slab of blackness in the still night. His Jaguar sat in the driveway, a sleek silhouette. He framed the shot through the wood-bordered pane of the Anderson window without consciously knowing he was doing it. Second nature, and natural as could be-a picture, a rectangle of glass, and a wooden frame. The light behind him was just strong enough so that his reflection was visible on the glass in the foreground, the ghost vision of the living room sharper than the world outside.

And then it was there-in the background on the other side of the nearly opaque window, on the lawn of slate-a man’s silhouette.

Someone was out there. Someone who laughed.

Marvis couldn’t see eyes, but he knew the stranger was watching him.

Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were.

No still photo, this. No frozen frame. This figure moved, but Marvis couldn’t. He stood rooted in front of the expensive window, watching the dark man advance through his reflection.

Suddenly, Marvis’s reflection became a black hole as deep and empty as the missing face of April Louise Destino in that old photo.

A ghost’s face flew at Marvis from out of the blackness, coming fast. Coming so very fast.

But this face was not a black shadow. It was dead white.

White as a negative image of the black hole that had replaced April Destino’s face in the old photograph.

White as a negative image of an eight ball.