Until this. This child of their collective passions: this technicolour seducer; trite, crass and utterly bewitching.
Very well, she thought, it’s one thing to understand your executioner: another thing altogether to talk it out of its professional obligations.
Even as she sorted the enigma out she was lapping up the pictures in the thing: she couldn’t help herself. Teasing glimpses of lives she’d lived, faces she’d loved. Mickey Mouse, dancing with a broom, Gish in ‘Broken Blossoms’, Garland (with Toto at her side) watching the twister louring over Kansas, Astaire in ‘Top Hat’, Welles in ‘Kane’, Brando and Crawford, Tracy and Hepburn – people so engraved on our hearts they need no Christian names. And so much better to be teased by these moments, to be shown only the pre-kiss melt, not the kiss itself; the slap, not the reconciliation; the shadow, not the monster; the wound, not death.
It had her in thrall, no doubt of it. She was held by her eyes as surely as if it had them out on their stalks, and chained. ‘Am I beautiful?’ it said.
Yes it was beautiful.
‘Why don’t you give yourself to me?’
She wasn’t thinking any more, her powers of analysis had drained from her, until something appeared in the muddle of images that slapped her back into herself. ‘Dumbo’. The fat elephant. Her fat elephant: no more than that, the fat elephant she’d thought was her.
The spell broke. She looked away from the creature. For a moment, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something sickly and fly-blown beneath the glamour. They’d called her Dumbo as a child, all the kids on her block. She’d lived with that ridiculous grey horror for twenty years, never able to shake it off. Its fat body reminded her of her fat, its lost look of her isolation. She thought of it cradled in the trunk of its mother, condemned as a Mad Elephant, and she wanted to beat the sentimental thing senseless.
‘It’s a fucking lie!’ she spat at it.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ it protested.
‘What’s under all the pizzazz then? Something very nasty I think.’
The light began to flicker, the parade of trailers faltering. She could see another shape, small and dark, lurking behind the curtains of light. Doubt was in it. Doubt and fear of dying. She was sure she could smell the fear off it, at ten paces.
‘What are you, under there?’
She took a step towards it.
‘What are you hiding? Eh?’
It found a voice. A frightened, human voice. ‘You’ve no business with me.’
‘You tried to kill me.’
‘I want to live.’
‘So do I.’
It was getting dark this end of the corridor, and there was an old, bad smell here, of rot. She knew rot, and this was something animal. Only last spring, when the snow had melted, she’d found something very dead in the yard behind her apartment. Small dog, large cat, it was difficult to be sure. Something domestic that had died of cold in the sudden snows the December before. Now it was besieged with maggots: yellowish, greyish, pinkish: a pastel fly-machine with a thousand moving parts.
It had around it the same stink that lingered here. Maybe that was somehow the flesh behind the fantasy.
Taking courage, her eyes still stinging with ‘Dumbo’, she advanced on the wavering mirage, Motherfucker raised in case the thing tried any funny business.
The boards beneath her feet were creaking, but she was too interested in her quarry to listen to their warnings. It was time she got a hold of this killer, shook it and made it spit its secret.
They’d almost gone the length of the corridor now, her advancing, it retreating. There was nowhere left for the thing to go.
Suddenly the floorboards folded up into dusty fragments under her weight and she was falling through the floor in a cloud of dust. She dropped Motherfucker as she threw out her hands to catch hold of something, but it was all worm-ridden, and crumbled in her grasp.
She fell awkwardly and landed hard on something soft. Here the smell of rot was incalculably stronger, it coaxed the stomach into the throat. She reached out her hand to right herself in the darkness, and on every side there was slime and cold. She felt as though she’d been dumped in a case of partially-gutted fish. Above her, the anxious light shone through the boards as it fell on her bed. She looked, though God knows she didn’t want to, and she was lying in the remains of a man, his body spread by his devourers over quite an area. She wanted to howl. Her instinct was to tear off her skirt and blouse, both of which were gluey with matter; but she couldn’t go naked, not in front of the son of celluloid.