The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
Dr. Frances Stone wasn’t at all nervous, though. She was already there when I arrived. She was preoccupied with picking the peanuts out of her gaeng massaman and arranging them over her rice plate in such a way that they looked like little eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
“You like to play with your food?” I said, taking my shoes off at the edge of our private booth and sliding my legs under the table across from her.
“No,” she said, “I just prefer them crushed rather than whole. The peanuts I mean. You must be Mr. Leibowitz.”
“Russell.”
“The man I’m supposed to charm out of a few million dollars.” She was doing a sort of coquettish pout, not really the sort of thing I expected from someone in medical research. Her face was ravaged, but the way she smiled kindled the memory of youthful beauty. I wondered what had happened to change her so much; according to her dossier, she was only in her mid-forties.
“Mostly we’re in town to take,” I said, “not to give. R&D is not one of our strengths. You might want to go to Hoechst or Berli Jucker, Frances.”
“But Russell ...” She had not touched her curry, but the peanuts on the rice were now formed into a perfect human face, with a few strands of sauce for hair. “This is not exactly R&D. This is a discovery that’s been around for almost a century and a half. My great-grandfather’s paper—”
“For which he was booted out of the Austrian Academy? Yes, my dossier is pretty thorough, Dr. Stone; I know all about how he fled to America and changed his name.”
She smiled. “And my dossier on you, Mr. Leibowitz, is pretty thorough too,” she said, as she began removing a number of compromising photographs from her purse.
A gong sounded to announce the next dance. It was a solo. Fog roiled across the stage, and from it a woman emerged. Her clothes glittered with crystal bead-work, but her eyes outshone the yards of cubic zirconia. She looked at me and I felt the pangs of the addiction. She smiled and her lips seemed to glisten with lubricious moisture.
“You like what you see,” Frances said softly.
“I—” .
“The dance is called Chui Chai, the dance of transformation. In every Thai classical drama, there are transformations—a woman transforming herself into a rose, a spirit transforming itself into a human. After the character s metamorphosis, he performs a Chui Chai dance, exulting in the completeness and beauty of his transformed self. ”
I wasn’t interested, but for some reason she insisted on giving me the entire story behind the dance. “This particular Chui Chai is called Chui Chai Benjakai ... the demoness Banjakai has been despatched by the demon king, Thotsakanth, to seduce the hero Rama . . . disguised as the beautiful Sita, she will float down the river toward Rama’s camp, trying to convince him that his beloved has died . . . only when she is placed on a funeral pyre, woken from her deathtrance by the flames, will she take on her demonic shape once more and fly away toward the dark kingdom of Lanka. But you’re not listening.”
How could I listen? She was the kind of woman that existed only in dreams, in poems. Slowly she moved against the tawdry backdrop, a faded painting of a palace with pointed eaves. Her feet barely touched the floor. Her arms undulated. And always her eyes held me. As though she were looking at me alone. Thai women can do things with their eyes that no other women can do. Their eyes have a secret language.
“Why are you looking at her so much?” said Frances. “She’s just a Patpong bar girl ... she moonlights here . . . classics in the evening, pussy after midnight.”
“You know her?” I said.
“I have had some . . . dealings with her.”
“Just what is it that you’re doing research into, Dr. Stone?”
“The boundary between life and death,” she said. She pointed to the photographs. Next to them was a contract, an R&D grant agreement of some kind. The print was blurry. “Oh, don’t worry, it’s only a couple of million dollars . . . your company won’t even miss it. . . and you 11 own the greatest secret of all . . . the tree of life and death ... the apples of Eve. Besides, I know your price and I can meet it.” And she looked at the dancing girl. “Her name is Keo. I don’t mind procuring if it’s in the name of science.”
Suddenly I realized that Dr. Stone and I were the only customers in the Club Pagoda. Somehow I had been set up.
The woman continued to dance, faster now, her hands sweeping through the air in mysterious gestures. She never stopped looking at me. She was the character she was playing, seductive and diabolical. There was darkness in every look, every hand-movement. I downed the rest of my Kloster lager and beckoned for another. An erection strained against my pants.
The dance ended and she prostrated herself before the audience of two, pressing her palms together in a graceful wai. Her eyes downcast, she left the stage. I had signed the grant papers without even knowing it.
Dr. Stone said, “On your way to the upstairs toilet . . . take the second door on the left. She’ll be waiting for you.”
I drank another beer, and when I looked up she was gone. She hadn’t eaten one bite. But the food on her plate had been sculpted into the face of a beautiful woman. It was so lifelike that ... but no. It wasn’t alive. It wasn’t breathing.
She was still in her dancing clothes when I went in. A little girl was carefully taking out the stitches with a seamripper. There was a pile of garments on the floor. In the glare of a naked bulb, the vestments of the goddess had little glamor. “They no have buttons on classical dance clothes,” she said. “They just sew us into them. Cannot go pipi!” She giggled.
The little girl scooped up the pile and slipped away.
“You’re . . . very beautiful,” I said. “I don’t understand why ... I mean, why you need to . . .”
“I have problem,” she said. “Expensive problem. Dr. Stone no tell you?”
“No.” Her hands were coyly clasped across her bosom. Gently I pried them away.
“You want I dance for you?”
“Dance,” I said. She was naked. The way she smelled was different from other women. It was like crushed flowers. Maybe a hint of decay in them. She shook her hair and it coiled across her breasts like a nest of black serpents. When I’d seen her on stage I’d been entertaining some kind of rape fantasy about her, but now I wanted to string it out for as long as I could. God, she was driving me mad.
“I see big emptiness inside you. Come to me. I fill you. We both empty people. Need filling up.”
I started to protest. But I knew she had seen me for what I was. I had money coming out my ass, but I was one fucked-up yuppie. That was the root of my addiction.
Again she danced the dance of transforming, this time for me alone. Really for me alone. I mean, all the girls in Patpong have this way of making you think they love you. It’s what gets you addicted. It’s the only street in the world where you can buy love. But that’s not how she was. When she touched me it was as though she reached out to me across an invisible barrier, an unbreachable gulf. Even when I entered her she was untouchable. We were from different worlds and neither of us ever left our private hells.
Not that there wasn’t passion. She knew every position in the book. She knew them backwards and forwards. She kept me there all night and each act seemed as though it been freshly invented for the two of us. It was the last time I came that I felt I had glimpsed the grail. Her eyes, staring up into the naked bulb, brimmed with some remembered sadness. I loved her with all my might. Then I was seized with terror. She was a demon. Yellow-eyed, dragon-clawed. She was me, she was my insatiable hunger. I was fucking my own addiction. I think I sobbed. I accused her of lacing my drink with hallucinogens. I cried myself to sleep and then she left me.