The Wolf in Standard Ration Clothing
First published in Rapunzel's Daughters, Pink Narcissus Press, 2011. Image by Jade Liebes.
I trudged downstairs from the kitchen into the workroom, where Mother was working on an antique foot-operated Singer, tailoring a hem, while my sister was savagely stuffing the body of a ragdoll. My mother has always been eccentric. My sister insisted that using technology would save our mother from straining her eyes and back from leaning over the old-fangled machines all day, but Mother wouldn’t listen. She said that society’s reliance on technology had made the world the conformist wasteland it was today, and that our business was originality, not mass production.
“There’s an order on the net for some baklava,” I told her.
She peered up from her sewing and propped her glasses in her hair. “I can make some of that,” she said. Setting aside the swatch of fabric she’d piled in her lap, she then sashayed past me to the stairs that led to the storage comb. “I’ll check the books. Russian, isn’t it?”
“Greek,” I said. It was my job to know everything.
“There are some things over there that need to be painted,” she said, pointing at the shelf. “I’ve already marked all the colors.”
I nodded as Mother disappeared down the dark stairwell.
My sister swung her curly, purple-streaked bob in my direction. “I’m so sick of this. I’ll paint if you stuff.”
I shrugged. “What’s wrong with stuffing?”
“I don’t know why Mom gives you all the okay jobs and I get all the crappy ones,” she mumbled. “Plus you get paid more.”
“Because I’m older, twerp.” I was nineteen, Violet three years younger. “You can paint if you want. Just paint within the lines.”
“A fucking monkey could do that.” She slid off her stool and headed for the shelf of unfinished projects. “Long as I don’t end up a freak like you, staying up half the night doing research on pie crusts.”
“I don’t just read about pie crusts, snotface. Besides, it’s important to Mom.”
She snorted softly. “What do you read that could possibly keep you up all night?”
“Police reports, mostly,” I said, mostly to shut her up.
Violet’s hand hovered briefly in the air. She didn’t meet my eyes. Then she exhaled softly, and picked out a paintbrush, giving it more attention than it deserved. Finally she muttered under her breath, “Is that why you never go out anymore? Because of what happened to her?”
It wasn’t a question I liked. I pretended I hadn’t heard, instead staring at a piece of Mother’s art which had hung on the far wall for as long as I could remember. It had a car bumper in it, wrapped in strips of potato sack and canvas, so tactile that it made your fingers ache to touch it. Across the bumper, under the spotlights, glistened three symbolic stripes of paint: one red, one blue, one violet.
Back on her stool, Violet spoke again, this time with her usual annoying level of shrill. “So, are you, like, going to marry Richard, or what?”
Richard Woodsman: polite, clean-cut, handsome, and he had a shiny badge. He’d been the first on the scene, and the one to break the news about Scarlet’s death. That I was dating him was fucked up on many levels, but at least with him I felt safe. “I don’t know. I never see him. His department always has him out on assignment.”
“At least he makes a lot of money.”
“I know, but, what’s the point of having money if you don’t have time to enjoy it?”
“Men all suck,” she decided.
“Are you speaking from experience?”
She gave me a saccharine smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be working, Celeste? Stuff!”
...
I worked in the Honeycombs, a cluster of Bauhaus-style buildings in the downtown zone, where several retailers rented space. Ours had three living combs and a storage comb below, each tiny room stacked on top of one another like a child’s toy blocks. Across the hall from us a modeling agency had recently opened. They closed down at five o’clock every day like we did, but it was after closing that they saw the most activity. From my perch in the netbook nook in the top comb, I could look down through the slim window into the corridor, and since I’d been staying home at night I’d seen a lot of people come and go from that office. It did not take me long to solve the mystery.
When I told my best friend Kara about it, she laughed so hard that her laughter infected me, too. “The office across the hall is an escort service?” she asked. “I can’t believe it. And they have men, too?”’
“Oh, sure. Men, women... circus performers. You know, the usual.”
Violet’s question about why I never went out anymore had struck a nerve. It was true that I’d been cooped up too long. But I hadn’t wanted to return to the underground alone, so I’d invited Kara. Now we prowled the dark streets while powdered and perfumed creatures in dark clothes danced by our brightly-clad forms. Kara wore a long, form-fitting dress of sea-green satin that my mother had designed specifically for her. I wore my usual cloak, the one of velvet and as blue as a summer sky in the country. As far as I knew, there were only three such cloaks in the entire world, each made by my mother’s hands: red for Scarlet, purple for Violet, the blue one for me.
“That is really freaky,” Kara said. The gold glitter on her honey-colored skin sparkled as we passed under a rare working street lamp. “So now that you’ve figured it out, what are you going to do about it?”
I grinned wickedly. “Maybe I’ll go there tonight.”
She laughed nervously. “And do what? Pay for sex?”
“Maybe I’m curious.”
“But what about Richard?”
“It has nothing to do with him,” I said. “And I didn’t say I was going to actually have sex with anyone.”
Kara gave me a skeptical look, then shook her head with a sigh. “So... where are we going?”
“I’ll take you to my favorite club,” I said.
“I don’t know about that. I’ve heard some weird stories about that place.”
She acquiesced nevertheless so I led her into the dark depths of the Korova Milk Bar. She had never been there before, but she immediately lost herself on the spacious dance floor of the Trip Room. I didn’t feel like following. Too many people were watching the dancers in true vulture fashion.
The club had the atmosphere of – and was dedicated to – both the book by Burgess and the film by Kubrick. The bar even boasted replications of woman-shaped milk dispensers like in the film, only the milk wasn’t full of drugs. Drugs circulated openly through the club by human hands. I recognized most of the hands, but was not looking tonight. Sober, the Korova was an entirely different experience. Everyone here was so self-fascinated, and this interested me. I watched them all as the lights swirled and the music pulsated against my flesh. Some of them watched me back. No words were exchanged. I wanted it that way.
Eventually I wandered to the bar in the back of the Departure Room. I was greeted by the familiar, bitter tang of amyl nitrite in the air. Jules was still working here. He had silver and some other color artistically smeared across his face, but it was hard to discern the design in the dark. I knew him vaguely, had heard he was gay. Like everyone else at the Korova, he was probably involved with the drug trade, though he’d never admitted – to me at least – that he knew the score. Before I’d even sat down, he was ready to take my order. I asked for a beer. He slid the ice-frosted bottle before me without asking for ID. Why ID for a drink when there was a ready supply of drugs in the club that could put you in a mental heaven or hell for three days?
“How are things, Jules?”
“Really busy. You haven’t been around lately.”
“Been saving my money,” I said. “Lots of work.”
“Don’t work too hard,” he said, and gave me a conspiratorial wink before slinking off to tend to another customer.
At the bottom of the bottle is when I found Kara. She was ready to leave, so we headed back towards the Honeycombs. I was buzzed from the dark beer, and my mouth tasted less than pleasant, but I felt like a cloud – soft, all mist. Above us curled a rodent moon, half-gnawed. I’d forgotten how good it could feel to drift through the night, when the heat-haze of the smog was blown away from the wind off the river, when the buildings were quiet and dark.
“I love your mother’s pies,” Kara said, clearly a bit buzzed herself. “When is she going to make me one of her pecan specials?”
“Whenever you ask.”
“This dress she made me is so comfortable.” It looked right on her long, lank figure. “I could have danced all night if these standard ration shoes weren’t killing my feet.”
“That’s what you get for buying GX-DR-Cs,” I chided. “Faulty insteps.”
“Yeah,” she said, amazed. “How the fuck do you do that? Is there any item of clothing you can’t name?”
“It comes with the trade.” All standard ration clothing and accessories were cataloged by a series of letters, followed by a number that represented color. One was white, two black, followed by the primaries. Then came the secondary colors, then varying shades of those colors. Beyond the secondary colors, I couldn’t name them all, but colors like chartreuse and ocher were available for any product you purchased. Most manufacturing was done by highly-specialized bots. Type the numbers into the netform, and the machines would spit out your order, no human hands involved. Mother hated it. She believed that modern manufacturing had made life impersonal, that people weren’t allowed to truly be individuals anymore, that there was no love in consuming goods made by robots. Hence, her business, Craft Works, had been born. And my sisters and I had been dragged along into it.
“I like that bar,” she decided. “I even met a guy tonight with spiky blond hair and a black leather jacket with fringe. Do you know him? I didn’t want to give my contact number to a mass murderer...”
Kara trailed off suddenly, crestfallen. “Shit, Celeste! I didn’t mean it like that... I wasn’t thinking.”
I pulled my cloak tighter around my body against a sudden chill. The stars were tarnished nails, holding up the sky. I forced a grin. “Don’t worry about it, Kara. Wolves don’t wear leather fringe. They wear fur.”
...
It was cooler in the building when I got back. Although I had my money chip in my pocket and I had brushed my teeth to remove the lingering bad taste from my mouth, I was hesitating outside the agency door. When a couple finally stepped out, I darted in through the diminishing crack. Standing behind a narrow counter inside the lobby was a tall, thin droid in dark round glasses and a champagne pink zoot suit – a JYS-EF-W-33, if I wasn’t mistaken. His modulated voice vibrated through the air. “May I help you?”
An eerie glow from the neon lamps emanated from his silver casing. “I’m looking for some company for the evening,” I said, wishing that the beer buzz hadn’t dissipated so soon.
“Male or female?”
“Male.”
Metal joints whirred and clicked. “Please – this way.”
He took my chip, popping it briefly into a slot in his neck. “Do not let the fee influence your selection. All our male escorts are equally priced,” he said. Which meant that the women were not equal. I wondered what factor determined a woman’s price. Age? Beauty? Body shape? Vaginal size? But I didn’t ask, as we had arrived at a room.
I followed the droid inside. A dozen men lounged about, practically motionless, as though they were only manikins on display. I wondered if they were models making money on the sly. I glanced over them quickly, feeling uncomfortable, then surprised as I recognized the man closest to me as Jules, the bartender from the Korova Milkbar, sitting – appropriately – on a barstool.
I looked at the men again, this time with more scrutiny. I passed from face to face. There was something generic about their beauty, all chiseled features and sculpted bodies. Too perfect, and not my type. But I was determined to select one, too committed to retreat. In fact, within me, the anticipation was building as the idea was becoming tangible. A part of me wanted to go through with it, to choose a man I would pay to fuck tonight, and nothing more than that, no strings attached. I realized that there was music playing in the background. I recognized it as classical, which my Mother often played, but you didn’t hear it anywhere else – popfuck-rap abounded. The strains of the piano and strings were oddly comforting. I suddenly liked the atmosphere in that room of the agency – I felt powerful.
In no hurry, I studied the merchandise again, and my eye fell on Jules, perched on his chair, seeming extremely bored. Strange how he had looked at me without a spark, a smile, or even a wink of recognition. No, more than strange it was absurd. Absurd and annoying. And yet my gaze lingered on Jules; in the harsh light I could see how pretty his face was, with sloping cheekbones and a square jaw, his eyes heavy-lidded from a trace of exotic Asian blood. The make-up was missing. I was so annoyed by the fact that Jules – the same man who had served me a drink a scant two hours ago – was pretending that he didn’t even know me, that it hadn’t immediately occurred to me that I could pick him.
“I’ll take Jules,” I said.
Still showing no sign of recognition, Jules rose, smiled at the droid – my host, or guide, or whatever it was – and whisked me from the room, through the building, and out into the night.
“Is it all right if we pick up a few things at the market, Celeste?” he asked, taking my hand. I assumed it an obligatory gesture, but I found it as comforting as the sound of my name on his lips.
“I’m not familiar with the usual procedure, so anything is fine.”
He didn’t seem bored anymore, no longer a manikin but a sleeping beauty brought back to life. Neon signs threw patches of color as we flew past them, whizzing through his spill of black hair. His smile was as dark and light as a blackbird’s wing. “Don’t worry. It’s included.”
In the shadowed labyrinth of the underground market, I watched his deft hands pick out the ripest fruits and plop them into plastic bags. He took my hand again and we returned to the building, only through a different door. After a few twists, we entered a small, warm, dimly-lit basement comb. Behind a counter stood a girl. Behind her, a fully-armed droid.
“Would you like something?” Jules asked. “Something to slow you down, or pick you up?”
“Such as?”
“Anything you want. Benders, tweakers, poppers, heaven, coke, blacks, blues, junk, crank, sleeping beauties, snow whites...?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps just some Ecstasy, then?” he asked lightly.
I was intrigued by all this black market dealing, but I wasn’t in the mood to alter my reality. “No thanks.”
“Just one,” he told the girl, and she disappeared into a back nook. “Are you sure?” he asked. “It really enhances the experience.”
I refused a third time, then the girl returned and handed him a small box, gorgeously adorned with a painted bird, which he secreted away in a pocket.
We continued up a rickety back stairwell, Jules still holding my hand. We wound up in the comb directly over my mother’s kitchen. I had always wondered what was up here, but I never would have guessed that it was a room – albeit a very comfortable room – where money and flesh were traded.
“Are drugs always part of the deal?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm.” He withdrew the box and then pressed a spot on the bird’s head. There was a tiny click as the box popped open, revealing a secret compartment in which a small blue pill nestled. “To tell you the truth, I got into this business for the X. The agency produces most of the hard stuff on its own. It’s pure.”
“Ah,” I said.
He smiled softly. “I’m going to change into something I think you might like.”
He slipped into a nook that I assumed was a changing room, pulling a curtain across the rod. But I was not watching him. The room had captured my attention.
It was almost modest, except for its decor. Sexual paraphernalia was tucked subtly away: oils, feathers, books, bits of leather, chains. Antique night tables, bookshelves, and elegant decorations filled the space, with carpet underfoot, all luxuries in this age. The bed was a marvel of wrought iron and brass fittings. As I was considering going over to the bed for a closer look, Jules emerged from the changing room. His flesh was exposed through a slip of black silk that I recognized as a garter, hooked to opaque stockings. All this hardly concealed by a drape of some gauzy material wrapped around his slim hips. I knew that garters used to be worn by women, but I found the effect on Jules intriguing.
I was still discovering hidden treasures in the room as Jules carried a glass of water over to the bed. “I can still give you half.”
“No, forget it,” I said. Then, “How many people are there at the agency?”
“About sixty or so. Though only about twenty are men.”
“That explains the selection.”
“I know what you mean.” He trailed a lazy hand through his dark hair. “I don’t like most of them.”
Because money was involved, I could be blunt. “Really? I thought you were gay.”
“Does it matter?”
I watched him silently from my brightly-lit side of the room.
He tilted his head coyly. “Actually, I don’t consider myself much of anything. I spend all my time sleeping or working. I don’t have time for romance.” He fingered the crystal water goblet. “Help yourself to something.”
I reached into the bag and pulled out a peach. “Do you want one?”
“Maybe later.”
I bit into the fruit. Real peach juice, sticky, sweet, dripped down my chin.
Jules watched me, then stretched his legs, displaying the smooth skin of his thigh between the straps. “Is this what you were saving your money for?”
I half-smiled, amused. “Actually... no. I just came here because I was curious.”
“You’d be surprised how many people say that.”
“Did my sister say it?”
“Violet?”
“Scarlet,” I said. He cocked his head at me, so I added, “Three years older than me. Dark hair. Wore a red cloak with a riding hood.”
I watched Jules’ fingers as they trailed a slow path along the goblet’s rim, and as he watched me. “I knew her. She used to come into the Korova every now and then.” He studied me intently. “I heard what happened. Do you want to talk about it, Celeste?”
It had been a year since that night. Because of Richard, I knew what the Feds knew. Grandmother had been ill, so Mother had sent Scarlet to her house with a basket of baked goodies. To get to Grandmother’s house, it was probable that Scarlet had passed through the Woods – the bad part of town. Maybe she’d stopped to talk to a stranger – that part was unclear. All we knew for certain was that some maniac the press had nicknamed the Wolf had gotten to Grandma’s house first. He’d eaten half of Grandma after he’d had his way with her. Parts of Scarlet, too. They’d found my sister’s heart on a plate on the second shelf of the fridge, between a jar of orange marmalade and a bottle of ketchup. As for the Wolf, he was still at large.
More juice dripped down my chin as my teeth tore into the firm flesh. “I’m not paying you to play psychologist.”
“Sure.” He studied me for another moment, then smiled sultrily as if he’d just remembered what I was paying him for. “So, Celeste... do you like to come?”
“It’s not the most important thing there is.”
“What’s important to you, then?”
“How it feels to have a cock inside me,” I told him. His interest didn’t seemed feigned. “In that moment, all my troubles just seem to disappear.”
He stretched his lean body across the mattress. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble feeling me inside you.”
“I never doubted it.”
He smiled. “And I thought men were overly concerned with the penis.” Then he laughed, and I grinned. “Do you have a lover?”
"No," I said, sucking on the pit. “Although I do have a boyfriend.”
“What kind of boyfriend is he if he doesn’t satisfy you?”
I dropped the pit, wiping the juice from my chin with the back of my hand. “He’s what my mother calls a ‘nice boy’.”
His hand dropped to his crotch, stroking silk. His voice was a seductive murmur. “I could be your bad boy.”
I realized that we were talking too much for the business we were conducting, but the conversation felt good and easy. I reached for the clasp of my cloak, letting it fall to a heap on the floor. “I think that’s what I expected.”
His smile grew, and his cock did, too. It had been a long time since I’d felt the hardness of a man’s body. I really wanted to fuck him now.
“Are you ready?”
I admitted, “I really want to walk barefoot on this carpet first.”
His smile was a sly promise. “You can do whatever you want.”
I kicked off my shoes, socks, and walked towards the bed. Thick pile rose between my toes like sand. I looked down at Jules, spread across a silken, feather quilt. “This bed is lovely.”
He glanced across it. “It’s too small,” he sighed. Then he sat up and looked at me, eyes cutting like surgical steel. “Celeste. Get comfortable.”
I padded over to him, removing my shirt, and stood before him. He set down his glass. Then he reached over to the wall switch and dimmed the lights, striking a mood like a match. He leaned forward to touch my bare arms; I touched his. All of a sudden words seemed pointless. In his eyes, there was a new intensity. I trailed my fingers over his beautiful face. He was very attractive, with a slender, silk body, strings of muscle taut under the golden brown skin. As I leaned down, his gaze grew lazy, wanting, and we kissed. His mouth was full and warm and seeking. My breath got caught in my throat.
The sex got caught in my throat, too.
...
Morning light tinged the clouds tangerine and turned skyscraper glass into silvery fish scales as I picked my way through the streets, super coffee steaming in my hand. Rusty garbage bots motored down the sidewalk, steel lids clattering against cans. The whistle of the approaching tram warned me off the tracks. The tram screeched by my face in a gust of hot metal and grease, her belly full of men in dark suits and ties, netbooks in one hand, cups of super coffee in the other. They were carbon copies, in the same suits with the same manners and the same ambitions: to be an executive VP and own a car so they wouldn’t have to ride the tram.
I hurried on, sipping my super coffee, feeling the synthetic caffeine as it coursed down to my toes. I knew which streets to avoid – those closest to the Woods. One had to or risk being mugged, murdered or raped, even at this hour. I spied some people from the Korova Milkbar slipping down a side street, and I waved. They waved back with cheerful, Heaven-induced grins.
Back home, I found Richard in the kitchen, manilla folder in hand, conversing politely with my mother. The smell of the baking bread filled me with hunger. Richard rose and kissed me on the cheek.
“There you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” I agreed.
My mother sent me to fetch Violet, so I set down my coffee and headed downstairs. Violet was curled into the couch, tapping on her texter. “Mom wants you.”
“Richard’s here.”
“So I noticed.”
“Is he taking you out on a date?”
“I have no idea.”
“You should make him take you to dinner. You never go out anymore. Loser.”
“I was out last night with Kara,” I said, but I was thinking about what had happened after the Milkbar. I remembered how Jules felt – or, rather, I hadn’t been able to think about anything else.
Violet was eyeing me with what appeared to be actual concern. “Are you okay? Your hands are shaking.”
I stared down at my hands, then shoved them guiltily into my pockets. “Must be the coffee,” I told her. “Now, move it, pipsqueak.”
Back upstairs, Violet greeted Richard and then promptly asked him if he were here to invite me on a date. He told her that he was on a case.
I sipped my coffee at the kitchen table. “If you’re on a case, then why are you here and not working?”
He flashed perfect white teeth. “But I am working. I’m investigating the modeling agency across the hall from you.”
“Really?” my mother asked. “What have they done?”
He opened the file and shook out several sheets of photographs. “We believe that this agency is just a front for a large prostitution ring. We have pictures of some of the suspects. I need to know if you recognize any of them.”
“How horrible,” she said, snatching the pictures from his hand to get a look. She plopped her glasses on the end of her nose and shuffled through the stack. “And such nice-looking young people, too. They seem so normal.”
My sister had jumped up, too, but I just sat there, feeling like a character out of a rural play. Y’all come down to the whorehouse, y’hear?
“I’ll need you to look over these, too, Celeste.”
“Sure.”
Mother shook her head. “I don’t recognize anyone.”
She passed me the pictures and I flipped through them. To be honest, the men I had seen there had all looked alike, with nothing in particular to differentiate them. But for some reason, I felt a strange quiver run up my spine when I came across the picture of Jules. Jules: draped in a long coat with a metallic sheen, standing on a street corner, slim and silvery and sharp like a knife blade.
“Someone you know?” Richard asked hopefully.
An echo from last night tingled my ear, filling it with a hot flush of blood, and making my body vibrate like a cello string: I could be your bad boy.
“No,” I lied.
...
At first I was delighted about the late date that Richard had scheduled in his overflowing agenda. I couldn’t remember the last time we had gone out. Yet, as the day wore on, the novelty wore off. Underground dealings, though more common than the normal, legitimate kind, intrigued me more. Maybe it was the deception I enjoyed. Maybe that’s why I’d lied to Richard.
It was close to the hour when my date would arrive and I was sitting at the worktable alone. Restless, I reached into a pocket and withdrew the little pillbox. It had been too beautiful to just throw away and I had always possessed a weakness for mementos. After some prodding, the secret compartment popped open and I discovered a surprise.
The pill was still safely nestled in the box, unconsumed. My mind wandered back to last night: how Jules had trembled at my touch, how many times his pleasure had been spent as he writhed beneath me, how it had felt... and none of it synthetic.
I shoved the box into the back corner of the drawer and ran to the Korova Milkbar.
He smiled in the darkness when he saw me. Not the usual smile, but with a trace of something more. I told him that I needed to talk to him. Smiling, he agreed, and I waited for him to get off from work.
An hour later, as the music and the amyl nitrite was grinding around in my head, his slender body appeared out of the darkness into my darkness. I set down my milk as he reached for my hand, drawing me out of the club into the burnt-plastic, hot-metal, chemical smell of the streets.
Before I could speak, Jules pushed me against the wall of the club, colors from the neon lights swirling about him as his mouth found mine. He tasted of apples and smoke.
Hot breath corroded my thoughts as it roiled in my ear. “I have to contact the agency. I won’t have to go in if I tell them I’m already with a client.”
We walked to a nearby netbooth. I leaned against the glass, huddling in my cloak, as he tapped in his code. I didn’t know how to explain, or even what I was doing here, so I waited, silent. With a puzzled look, Jules disconnected and met my eyes. “A strange voice answered,” he revealed. “Human. Something’s up.”
“A bust?”
“Maybe.” His eyes were cutting, twin blue lasers dissecting me. “We could walk by and see if anything’s happening.”
I drew the cloak around my cold bones. The weather in the city was a funny thing, prone to change in a heartbeat. I shrugged and followed.
We hastened through the tide of screams and laughter shattering the night, echoing off the concrete, until we reached the Honeycombs. Blue and red lights pirouetted across the windows of my building. The place was crawling with cops.
“Fuck.” He looked at me. “If we left anything incriminating in the room...”
Near dawn, I had watched Jules gather everything up and strip the bed, sending our fluid-soaked sheets down a half-concealed chute. We had cleared everything out, except... “The peach pit.”
Jules looked at me. That he was debating was clear. It was my DNA in question, not his. But then his expression shifted. “We have to get to the room somehow.”
“The Feds know what you look like,” I warned him.
“How do you know?”
“You remember that boyfriend I told you about...?”
“You sly bitch.” He laughed weakly. “Great. Now what?”
I thought. “I can get in through the front door. If you can get around to the back, I can let you into our storage comb.”
The plan proceeded without a hitch. I felt clever. The combs were quiet, my family asleep upstairs. Leaving the lights off, I crept my way down to the storage comb, and turned off the alarm. A moment later Jules was inside, a presence in the dark. Fear of being caught had sent my pulse racing, and, in truth, turned me on.
Jules’ voice was all breath. “And now?”
“The vent in the kitchen. We could try to crawl up it. It might lead up to the room.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You don’t have to come with me.”
His hand around my wrist kept me from turning away. “Celeste. It’s too risky.”
“And when they find it?”
“It doesn’t prove anything.”
“It proves that I was in the room.”
His grip tightened as I tried to pull away. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Except pay you to fuck me.”
“You didn’t pay,” he said.
“What?”
“I reversed the charges.”
“Why?”
He smiled. In the shadows there was only the barest glint off his make-up from the Milkbar. “Stupid girl. Why do you think?”
He moved to kiss me. As I leaned into him, there was a snap in the dark, and the comb filled with light. Across the room, with one hand still on the switch, Richard stood. In his other hand, a gun, fixed on Jules.
I blinked. “Richard?”
Richard didn’t spare me a glance, focused on Jules. “Step away from the girl, now,” he growled. “You are under arrest, Wolf.”
...
The trial caused a sensation, with great fanfare in the press, and no one in my family could walk the streets without being mobbed by reporters. I stayed in, suffering nightmares until the doctor prescribed a sedative.
I talked to no one outside the family except for Richard. It was rare that I didn’t come downstairs to find him chatting with my mother at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cup of oily coffee, a plate of cookies fresh from the oven between them.
It was only on the last day of the trial, as the secluded jury debated, that I finally linked with Kara.
“It was awful,” I told her from the netbooth in the lobby of the courthouse. “The whole time I was in there, he watched me. It was creepy.”
Kara’s face loomed large as she leaned close to the screen. “They’re going to find him guilty, right?”
I told her about the evidence. Hair, saliva, and semen had been found at the crime scene: a perfect match. Although the bite marks had been inconclusive, the rest was damning enough. “I think I feel sick.”
“He’s sick,” Kara said. “Did he say why he did it?”
“He denied killing anyone. Claimed he was innocent.”
“Of course he would say that, but it doesn’t make it true.”
I sighed, leaning my head against the scratched, dirty glass of the booth, recalling Jules in the witness chair, insisting that he wasn’t a murderer. And how, for a moment, I had almost believed him. Almost believed the perverse story he had spun about what, precisely, he had been doing at Grandmother’s house right before she had been killed. “Kara, he fucked my grandmother. And my sister.”
“And you,” Kara added.
“He ate them.”
“Consider yourself lucky that Richard showed up when he did, or you would have been dessert.”
Alone in the storage comb, would anyone have heard me scream? And, then, once he’d finished slavering over me, had swallowed my flesh and sucked the marrow from my bones, would he have gone upstairs to where my little sister lay sleeping and done the same to her? And my mother, too? “I hope the fucker fries.”
“You can’t trust anyone.”
You would think I’d learned that lesson from my sister, not to trust a stranger. From now on, I would be more careful. My mother, Violet, and Kara were the only people I could trust. And Richard, of course. I did consider myself lucky. Lucky because this time, at least, Richard Woodsman had arrived in time to save the girl from the Wolf.
...
When the trial was over and Richard proposed, I knew how Dorothy must have felt. It was as if a whirlwind had swept me up and set me down in some fucked-up fableland. My sister thought it was exciting and romantic. My mother thought I was too young to be engaged, but despite her warnings, there was an undercurrent of relief. It had been weeks since the verdict and the monster condemned, but these events lingered like soot that could not be scrubbed from our skins. So when Richard appeared with two tickets to Las Vegas, Mother just smiled and said she was sure that the distraction would do me some good, and that she and Violet could manage the shop for a few days without me.
Once we were in the taxi heading towards our hotel, there couldn’t have been a girl who brooded more. I had the sinking feeling that I’d fucked up. Running off with Richard, agreeing to marry him – it had all been a mistake. A knee-jerk reaction. I’d mistaken gratitude for love, fear for need.
I had dinner alone while Richard was in the other room on the net with the Bureau. I had ordered a steak but couldn’t eat. I just sat, trying not to think about what I’d done with the man who had murdered half my family – or how much I had liked it – as the blood steadily pooled against the rim of the plate.
Later in bed, scrunched up on one side of the mattress, I believed that Richard – always the perfect gentleman – wouldn’t try a damn thing.
I was wrong. After turning off the lights he reached for me. I resisted his touch. He forced me to turn and tried to kiss me. Disgusted, I kept my lips tightly shut. Still he persisted. When he grabbed me again, I slapped his hand and jumped from the bed. “Richard, stop.”
“I can touch you if I want. We’re engaged. Now. Come here.”
“No. I don’t want to. I don’t even love you.”
Fury distorted his features, twisting them into a grotesquerie of human flesh. “You little cunt,” he hissed. “You horrid bitch. I know what your problem is. You’re just like the rest of them. You can only get off with whores. That’s the only way you can get off, by paying whores to fuck you.”
“I... what...?”
Richard snarled. “You’re nothing better than a whore yourself!”
He lunged.
I tried to run.
Claws dug into my shoulders and then a shove forced me down to the table. Silverware rattled as something cold spattered across my cheek – blood from my untouched dinner. His hands curled around my throat and I struggled for air as he started to throttle me.
I’d made another mistake.
Richard leered down at me, as saliva dripped from his lips. “I think I’m going to enjoy eating you the most.”
My head spun. I needed air. With one hand I failed to pry his fingers from where they pressed into my throat. The fingers of my other hand crawled desperately across the table until they stumbled upon the knife.
...
I woke up in a small white room I didn’t recognize. There was a dull throb of pain in my side and my hand. I had rows of tidy black stitches in both. My mind was boggled, heavy with fog, and I couldn’t remember what happened or how I had gotten here. All I could remember was a dream in which I’d been walking through the Woods to bring a basket of goodies to my sick Grandmother’s house, and Jules emerging from the shadows, taking my hand and warning me to not talk to strangers.
I heard voices from the hall, and then a face appeared at the tiny barred window of the door. “Feeling better?”
I held my tongue. I was huddled in a corner, feeling small. “What am I doing here?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said the face. “I’m Dr. Smith and I’m here to help you.”
“What big eyes you have, doctor.”
“Yes, Scarlet, all the better to see you with. Now, tell me, my dear, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“What big ears you have, doctor.”
“Yes, yes, I’m listening. Tell me. What do you remember?”
“Grandma’s house,” I said. “No, Las Vegas.”
“What else do you remember, Scarlet?” he asked, flashing a toothy grin.
“What big teeth you have, doctor. And why do you keep calling me Scarlet? And Richard!” I jumped up, ignoring the throb of the stitches pulling at my skin. “What happened to Richard Woodsman?” I seized the bars, rattling them. Startled, the doctor skittered back from the window. “He’s the Wolf! Richard Woodsman is the Wolf!”
The doctor called for some strongmen while I screamed and pleaded. A key rattled in the lock. The strongmen pinned me down, baring my arm for the doctor’s shot. Instantly a velvet-coated hammer smashed down upon my head, knocking the fight right out of me. The doctor told me to rest now, that everything would be fine, and then they all went away. I lay there and started to cry for no reason. It took me a minute to even realize that I was crying.
And then I heard it, the noise at the door. Scratching and snuffling at the metal hinges, whining and worrying at the cracks. Even when I covered my ears with my hands, I couldn’t block the noise. Nothing could stop it. Not even the velvet hammer could make it go away.
I’m not crazy, you know. The wolves are all still out there, howling at the door, trying to get in. And they are so... very... hungry.
Listen.
“There’s an order on the net for some baklava,” I told her.
She peered up from her sewing and propped her glasses in her hair. “I can make some of that,” she said. Setting aside the swatch of fabric she’d piled in her lap, she then sashayed past me to the stairs that led to the storage comb. “I’ll check the books. Russian, isn’t it?”
“Greek,” I said. It was my job to know everything.
“There are some things over there that need to be painted,” she said, pointing at the shelf. “I’ve already marked all the colors.”
I nodded as Mother disappeared down the dark stairwell.
My sister swung her curly, purple-streaked bob in my direction. “I’m so sick of this. I’ll paint if you stuff.”
I shrugged. “What’s wrong with stuffing?”
“I don’t know why Mom gives you all the okay jobs and I get all the crappy ones,” she mumbled. “Plus you get paid more.”
“Because I’m older, twerp.” I was nineteen, Violet three years younger. “You can paint if you want. Just paint within the lines.”
“A fucking monkey could do that.” She slid off her stool and headed for the shelf of unfinished projects. “Long as I don’t end up a freak like you, staying up half the night doing research on pie crusts.”
“I don’t just read about pie crusts, snotface. Besides, it’s important to Mom.”
She snorted softly. “What do you read that could possibly keep you up all night?”
“Police reports, mostly,” I said, mostly to shut her up.
Violet’s hand hovered briefly in the air. She didn’t meet my eyes. Then she exhaled softly, and picked out a paintbrush, giving it more attention than it deserved. Finally she muttered under her breath, “Is that why you never go out anymore? Because of what happened to her?”
It wasn’t a question I liked. I pretended I hadn’t heard, instead staring at a piece of Mother’s art which had hung on the far wall for as long as I could remember. It had a car bumper in it, wrapped in strips of potato sack and canvas, so tactile that it made your fingers ache to touch it. Across the bumper, under the spotlights, glistened three symbolic stripes of paint: one red, one blue, one violet.
Back on her stool, Violet spoke again, this time with her usual annoying level of shrill. “So, are you, like, going to marry Richard, or what?”
Richard Woodsman: polite, clean-cut, handsome, and he had a shiny badge. He’d been the first on the scene, and the one to break the news about Scarlet’s death. That I was dating him was fucked up on many levels, but at least with him I felt safe. “I don’t know. I never see him. His department always has him out on assignment.”
“At least he makes a lot of money.”
“I know, but, what’s the point of having money if you don’t have time to enjoy it?”
“Men all suck,” she decided.
“Are you speaking from experience?”
She gave me a saccharine smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be working, Celeste? Stuff!”
...
I worked in the Honeycombs, a cluster of Bauhaus-style buildings in the downtown zone, where several retailers rented space. Ours had three living combs and a storage comb below, each tiny room stacked on top of one another like a child’s toy blocks. Across the hall from us a modeling agency had recently opened. They closed down at five o’clock every day like we did, but it was after closing that they saw the most activity. From my perch in the netbook nook in the top comb, I could look down through the slim window into the corridor, and since I’d been staying home at night I’d seen a lot of people come and go from that office. It did not take me long to solve the mystery.
When I told my best friend Kara about it, she laughed so hard that her laughter infected me, too. “The office across the hall is an escort service?” she asked. “I can’t believe it. And they have men, too?”’
“Oh, sure. Men, women... circus performers. You know, the usual.”
Violet’s question about why I never went out anymore had struck a nerve. It was true that I’d been cooped up too long. But I hadn’t wanted to return to the underground alone, so I’d invited Kara. Now we prowled the dark streets while powdered and perfumed creatures in dark clothes danced by our brightly-clad forms. Kara wore a long, form-fitting dress of sea-green satin that my mother had designed specifically for her. I wore my usual cloak, the one of velvet and as blue as a summer sky in the country. As far as I knew, there were only three such cloaks in the entire world, each made by my mother’s hands: red for Scarlet, purple for Violet, the blue one for me.
“That is really freaky,” Kara said. The gold glitter on her honey-colored skin sparkled as we passed under a rare working street lamp. “So now that you’ve figured it out, what are you going to do about it?”
I grinned wickedly. “Maybe I’ll go there tonight.”
She laughed nervously. “And do what? Pay for sex?”
“Maybe I’m curious.”
“But what about Richard?”
“It has nothing to do with him,” I said. “And I didn’t say I was going to actually have sex with anyone.”
Kara gave me a skeptical look, then shook her head with a sigh. “So... where are we going?”
“I’ll take you to my favorite club,” I said.
“I don’t know about that. I’ve heard some weird stories about that place.”
She acquiesced nevertheless so I led her into the dark depths of the Korova Milk Bar. She had never been there before, but she immediately lost herself on the spacious dance floor of the Trip Room. I didn’t feel like following. Too many people were watching the dancers in true vulture fashion.
The club had the atmosphere of – and was dedicated to – both the book by Burgess and the film by Kubrick. The bar even boasted replications of woman-shaped milk dispensers like in the film, only the milk wasn’t full of drugs. Drugs circulated openly through the club by human hands. I recognized most of the hands, but was not looking tonight. Sober, the Korova was an entirely different experience. Everyone here was so self-fascinated, and this interested me. I watched them all as the lights swirled and the music pulsated against my flesh. Some of them watched me back. No words were exchanged. I wanted it that way.
Eventually I wandered to the bar in the back of the Departure Room. I was greeted by the familiar, bitter tang of amyl nitrite in the air. Jules was still working here. He had silver and some other color artistically smeared across his face, but it was hard to discern the design in the dark. I knew him vaguely, had heard he was gay. Like everyone else at the Korova, he was probably involved with the drug trade, though he’d never admitted – to me at least – that he knew the score. Before I’d even sat down, he was ready to take my order. I asked for a beer. He slid the ice-frosted bottle before me without asking for ID. Why ID for a drink when there was a ready supply of drugs in the club that could put you in a mental heaven or hell for three days?
“How are things, Jules?”
“Really busy. You haven’t been around lately.”
“Been saving my money,” I said. “Lots of work.”
“Don’t work too hard,” he said, and gave me a conspiratorial wink before slinking off to tend to another customer.
At the bottom of the bottle is when I found Kara. She was ready to leave, so we headed back towards the Honeycombs. I was buzzed from the dark beer, and my mouth tasted less than pleasant, but I felt like a cloud – soft, all mist. Above us curled a rodent moon, half-gnawed. I’d forgotten how good it could feel to drift through the night, when the heat-haze of the smog was blown away from the wind off the river, when the buildings were quiet and dark.
“I love your mother’s pies,” Kara said, clearly a bit buzzed herself. “When is she going to make me one of her pecan specials?”
“Whenever you ask.”
“This dress she made me is so comfortable.” It looked right on her long, lank figure. “I could have danced all night if these standard ration shoes weren’t killing my feet.”
“That’s what you get for buying GX-DR-Cs,” I chided. “Faulty insteps.”
“Yeah,” she said, amazed. “How the fuck do you do that? Is there any item of clothing you can’t name?”
“It comes with the trade.” All standard ration clothing and accessories were cataloged by a series of letters, followed by a number that represented color. One was white, two black, followed by the primaries. Then came the secondary colors, then varying shades of those colors. Beyond the secondary colors, I couldn’t name them all, but colors like chartreuse and ocher were available for any product you purchased. Most manufacturing was done by highly-specialized bots. Type the numbers into the netform, and the machines would spit out your order, no human hands involved. Mother hated it. She believed that modern manufacturing had made life impersonal, that people weren’t allowed to truly be individuals anymore, that there was no love in consuming goods made by robots. Hence, her business, Craft Works, had been born. And my sisters and I had been dragged along into it.
“I like that bar,” she decided. “I even met a guy tonight with spiky blond hair and a black leather jacket with fringe. Do you know him? I didn’t want to give my contact number to a mass murderer...”
Kara trailed off suddenly, crestfallen. “Shit, Celeste! I didn’t mean it like that... I wasn’t thinking.”
I pulled my cloak tighter around my body against a sudden chill. The stars were tarnished nails, holding up the sky. I forced a grin. “Don’t worry about it, Kara. Wolves don’t wear leather fringe. They wear fur.”
...
It was cooler in the building when I got back. Although I had my money chip in my pocket and I had brushed my teeth to remove the lingering bad taste from my mouth, I was hesitating outside the agency door. When a couple finally stepped out, I darted in through the diminishing crack. Standing behind a narrow counter inside the lobby was a tall, thin droid in dark round glasses and a champagne pink zoot suit – a JYS-EF-W-33, if I wasn’t mistaken. His modulated voice vibrated through the air. “May I help you?”
An eerie glow from the neon lamps emanated from his silver casing. “I’m looking for some company for the evening,” I said, wishing that the beer buzz hadn’t dissipated so soon.
“Male or female?”
“Male.”
Metal joints whirred and clicked. “Please – this way.”
He took my chip, popping it briefly into a slot in his neck. “Do not let the fee influence your selection. All our male escorts are equally priced,” he said. Which meant that the women were not equal. I wondered what factor determined a woman’s price. Age? Beauty? Body shape? Vaginal size? But I didn’t ask, as we had arrived at a room.
I followed the droid inside. A dozen men lounged about, practically motionless, as though they were only manikins on display. I wondered if they were models making money on the sly. I glanced over them quickly, feeling uncomfortable, then surprised as I recognized the man closest to me as Jules, the bartender from the Korova Milkbar, sitting – appropriately – on a barstool.
I looked at the men again, this time with more scrutiny. I passed from face to face. There was something generic about their beauty, all chiseled features and sculpted bodies. Too perfect, and not my type. But I was determined to select one, too committed to retreat. In fact, within me, the anticipation was building as the idea was becoming tangible. A part of me wanted to go through with it, to choose a man I would pay to fuck tonight, and nothing more than that, no strings attached. I realized that there was music playing in the background. I recognized it as classical, which my Mother often played, but you didn’t hear it anywhere else – popfuck-rap abounded. The strains of the piano and strings were oddly comforting. I suddenly liked the atmosphere in that room of the agency – I felt powerful.
In no hurry, I studied the merchandise again, and my eye fell on Jules, perched on his chair, seeming extremely bored. Strange how he had looked at me without a spark, a smile, or even a wink of recognition. No, more than strange it was absurd. Absurd and annoying. And yet my gaze lingered on Jules; in the harsh light I could see how pretty his face was, with sloping cheekbones and a square jaw, his eyes heavy-lidded from a trace of exotic Asian blood. The make-up was missing. I was so annoyed by the fact that Jules – the same man who had served me a drink a scant two hours ago – was pretending that he didn’t even know me, that it hadn’t immediately occurred to me that I could pick him.
“I’ll take Jules,” I said.
Still showing no sign of recognition, Jules rose, smiled at the droid – my host, or guide, or whatever it was – and whisked me from the room, through the building, and out into the night.
“Is it all right if we pick up a few things at the market, Celeste?” he asked, taking my hand. I assumed it an obligatory gesture, but I found it as comforting as the sound of my name on his lips.
“I’m not familiar with the usual procedure, so anything is fine.”
He didn’t seem bored anymore, no longer a manikin but a sleeping beauty brought back to life. Neon signs threw patches of color as we flew past them, whizzing through his spill of black hair. His smile was as dark and light as a blackbird’s wing. “Don’t worry. It’s included.”
In the shadowed labyrinth of the underground market, I watched his deft hands pick out the ripest fruits and plop them into plastic bags. He took my hand again and we returned to the building, only through a different door. After a few twists, we entered a small, warm, dimly-lit basement comb. Behind a counter stood a girl. Behind her, a fully-armed droid.
“Would you like something?” Jules asked. “Something to slow you down, or pick you up?”
“Such as?”
“Anything you want. Benders, tweakers, poppers, heaven, coke, blacks, blues, junk, crank, sleeping beauties, snow whites...?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps just some Ecstasy, then?” he asked lightly.
I was intrigued by all this black market dealing, but I wasn’t in the mood to alter my reality. “No thanks.”
“Just one,” he told the girl, and she disappeared into a back nook. “Are you sure?” he asked. “It really enhances the experience.”
I refused a third time, then the girl returned and handed him a small box, gorgeously adorned with a painted bird, which he secreted away in a pocket.
We continued up a rickety back stairwell, Jules still holding my hand. We wound up in the comb directly over my mother’s kitchen. I had always wondered what was up here, but I never would have guessed that it was a room – albeit a very comfortable room – where money and flesh were traded.
“Are drugs always part of the deal?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm.” He withdrew the box and then pressed a spot on the bird’s head. There was a tiny click as the box popped open, revealing a secret compartment in which a small blue pill nestled. “To tell you the truth, I got into this business for the X. The agency produces most of the hard stuff on its own. It’s pure.”
“Ah,” I said.
He smiled softly. “I’m going to change into something I think you might like.”
He slipped into a nook that I assumed was a changing room, pulling a curtain across the rod. But I was not watching him. The room had captured my attention.
It was almost modest, except for its decor. Sexual paraphernalia was tucked subtly away: oils, feathers, books, bits of leather, chains. Antique night tables, bookshelves, and elegant decorations filled the space, with carpet underfoot, all luxuries in this age. The bed was a marvel of wrought iron and brass fittings. As I was considering going over to the bed for a closer look, Jules emerged from the changing room. His flesh was exposed through a slip of black silk that I recognized as a garter, hooked to opaque stockings. All this hardly concealed by a drape of some gauzy material wrapped around his slim hips. I knew that garters used to be worn by women, but I found the effect on Jules intriguing.
I was still discovering hidden treasures in the room as Jules carried a glass of water over to the bed. “I can still give you half.”
“No, forget it,” I said. Then, “How many people are there at the agency?”
“About sixty or so. Though only about twenty are men.”
“That explains the selection.”
“I know what you mean.” He trailed a lazy hand through his dark hair. “I don’t like most of them.”
Because money was involved, I could be blunt. “Really? I thought you were gay.”
“Does it matter?”
I watched him silently from my brightly-lit side of the room.
He tilted his head coyly. “Actually, I don’t consider myself much of anything. I spend all my time sleeping or working. I don’t have time for romance.” He fingered the crystal water goblet. “Help yourself to something.”
I reached into the bag and pulled out a peach. “Do you want one?”
“Maybe later.”
I bit into the fruit. Real peach juice, sticky, sweet, dripped down my chin.
Jules watched me, then stretched his legs, displaying the smooth skin of his thigh between the straps. “Is this what you were saving your money for?”
I half-smiled, amused. “Actually... no. I just came here because I was curious.”
“You’d be surprised how many people say that.”
“Did my sister say it?”
“Violet?”
“Scarlet,” I said. He cocked his head at me, so I added, “Three years older than me. Dark hair. Wore a red cloak with a riding hood.”
I watched Jules’ fingers as they trailed a slow path along the goblet’s rim, and as he watched me. “I knew her. She used to come into the Korova every now and then.” He studied me intently. “I heard what happened. Do you want to talk about it, Celeste?”
It had been a year since that night. Because of Richard, I knew what the Feds knew. Grandmother had been ill, so Mother had sent Scarlet to her house with a basket of baked goodies. To get to Grandmother’s house, it was probable that Scarlet had passed through the Woods – the bad part of town. Maybe she’d stopped to talk to a stranger – that part was unclear. All we knew for certain was that some maniac the press had nicknamed the Wolf had gotten to Grandma’s house first. He’d eaten half of Grandma after he’d had his way with her. Parts of Scarlet, too. They’d found my sister’s heart on a plate on the second shelf of the fridge, between a jar of orange marmalade and a bottle of ketchup. As for the Wolf, he was still at large.
More juice dripped down my chin as my teeth tore into the firm flesh. “I’m not paying you to play psychologist.”
“Sure.” He studied me for another moment, then smiled sultrily as if he’d just remembered what I was paying him for. “So, Celeste... do you like to come?”
“It’s not the most important thing there is.”
“What’s important to you, then?”
“How it feels to have a cock inside me,” I told him. His interest didn’t seemed feigned. “In that moment, all my troubles just seem to disappear.”
He stretched his lean body across the mattress. “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble feeling me inside you.”
“I never doubted it.”
He smiled. “And I thought men were overly concerned with the penis.” Then he laughed, and I grinned. “Do you have a lover?”
"No," I said, sucking on the pit. “Although I do have a boyfriend.”
“What kind of boyfriend is he if he doesn’t satisfy you?”
I dropped the pit, wiping the juice from my chin with the back of my hand. “He’s what my mother calls a ‘nice boy’.”
His hand dropped to his crotch, stroking silk. His voice was a seductive murmur. “I could be your bad boy.”
I realized that we were talking too much for the business we were conducting, but the conversation felt good and easy. I reached for the clasp of my cloak, letting it fall to a heap on the floor. “I think that’s what I expected.”
His smile grew, and his cock did, too. It had been a long time since I’d felt the hardness of a man’s body. I really wanted to fuck him now.
“Are you ready?”
I admitted, “I really want to walk barefoot on this carpet first.”
His smile was a sly promise. “You can do whatever you want.”
I kicked off my shoes, socks, and walked towards the bed. Thick pile rose between my toes like sand. I looked down at Jules, spread across a silken, feather quilt. “This bed is lovely.”
He glanced across it. “It’s too small,” he sighed. Then he sat up and looked at me, eyes cutting like surgical steel. “Celeste. Get comfortable.”
I padded over to him, removing my shirt, and stood before him. He set down his glass. Then he reached over to the wall switch and dimmed the lights, striking a mood like a match. He leaned forward to touch my bare arms; I touched his. All of a sudden words seemed pointless. In his eyes, there was a new intensity. I trailed my fingers over his beautiful face. He was very attractive, with a slender, silk body, strings of muscle taut under the golden brown skin. As I leaned down, his gaze grew lazy, wanting, and we kissed. His mouth was full and warm and seeking. My breath got caught in my throat.
The sex got caught in my throat, too.
...
Morning light tinged the clouds tangerine and turned skyscraper glass into silvery fish scales as I picked my way through the streets, super coffee steaming in my hand. Rusty garbage bots motored down the sidewalk, steel lids clattering against cans. The whistle of the approaching tram warned me off the tracks. The tram screeched by my face in a gust of hot metal and grease, her belly full of men in dark suits and ties, netbooks in one hand, cups of super coffee in the other. They were carbon copies, in the same suits with the same manners and the same ambitions: to be an executive VP and own a car so they wouldn’t have to ride the tram.
I hurried on, sipping my super coffee, feeling the synthetic caffeine as it coursed down to my toes. I knew which streets to avoid – those closest to the Woods. One had to or risk being mugged, murdered or raped, even at this hour. I spied some people from the Korova Milkbar slipping down a side street, and I waved. They waved back with cheerful, Heaven-induced grins.
Back home, I found Richard in the kitchen, manilla folder in hand, conversing politely with my mother. The smell of the baking bread filled me with hunger. Richard rose and kissed me on the cheek.
“There you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” I agreed.
My mother sent me to fetch Violet, so I set down my coffee and headed downstairs. Violet was curled into the couch, tapping on her texter. “Mom wants you.”
“Richard’s here.”
“So I noticed.”
“Is he taking you out on a date?”
“I have no idea.”
“You should make him take you to dinner. You never go out anymore. Loser.”
“I was out last night with Kara,” I said, but I was thinking about what had happened after the Milkbar. I remembered how Jules felt – or, rather, I hadn’t been able to think about anything else.
Violet was eyeing me with what appeared to be actual concern. “Are you okay? Your hands are shaking.”
I stared down at my hands, then shoved them guiltily into my pockets. “Must be the coffee,” I told her. “Now, move it, pipsqueak.”
Back upstairs, Violet greeted Richard and then promptly asked him if he were here to invite me on a date. He told her that he was on a case.
I sipped my coffee at the kitchen table. “If you’re on a case, then why are you here and not working?”
He flashed perfect white teeth. “But I am working. I’m investigating the modeling agency across the hall from you.”
“Really?” my mother asked. “What have they done?”
He opened the file and shook out several sheets of photographs. “We believe that this agency is just a front for a large prostitution ring. We have pictures of some of the suspects. I need to know if you recognize any of them.”
“How horrible,” she said, snatching the pictures from his hand to get a look. She plopped her glasses on the end of her nose and shuffled through the stack. “And such nice-looking young people, too. They seem so normal.”
My sister had jumped up, too, but I just sat there, feeling like a character out of a rural play. Y’all come down to the whorehouse, y’hear?
“I’ll need you to look over these, too, Celeste.”
“Sure.”
Mother shook her head. “I don’t recognize anyone.”
She passed me the pictures and I flipped through them. To be honest, the men I had seen there had all looked alike, with nothing in particular to differentiate them. But for some reason, I felt a strange quiver run up my spine when I came across the picture of Jules. Jules: draped in a long coat with a metallic sheen, standing on a street corner, slim and silvery and sharp like a knife blade.
“Someone you know?” Richard asked hopefully.
An echo from last night tingled my ear, filling it with a hot flush of blood, and making my body vibrate like a cello string: I could be your bad boy.
“No,” I lied.
...
At first I was delighted about the late date that Richard had scheduled in his overflowing agenda. I couldn’t remember the last time we had gone out. Yet, as the day wore on, the novelty wore off. Underground dealings, though more common than the normal, legitimate kind, intrigued me more. Maybe it was the deception I enjoyed. Maybe that’s why I’d lied to Richard.
It was close to the hour when my date would arrive and I was sitting at the worktable alone. Restless, I reached into a pocket and withdrew the little pillbox. It had been too beautiful to just throw away and I had always possessed a weakness for mementos. After some prodding, the secret compartment popped open and I discovered a surprise.
The pill was still safely nestled in the box, unconsumed. My mind wandered back to last night: how Jules had trembled at my touch, how many times his pleasure had been spent as he writhed beneath me, how it had felt... and none of it synthetic.
I shoved the box into the back corner of the drawer and ran to the Korova Milkbar.
He smiled in the darkness when he saw me. Not the usual smile, but with a trace of something more. I told him that I needed to talk to him. Smiling, he agreed, and I waited for him to get off from work.
An hour later, as the music and the amyl nitrite was grinding around in my head, his slender body appeared out of the darkness into my darkness. I set down my milk as he reached for my hand, drawing me out of the club into the burnt-plastic, hot-metal, chemical smell of the streets.
Before I could speak, Jules pushed me against the wall of the club, colors from the neon lights swirling about him as his mouth found mine. He tasted of apples and smoke.
Hot breath corroded my thoughts as it roiled in my ear. “I have to contact the agency. I won’t have to go in if I tell them I’m already with a client.”
We walked to a nearby netbooth. I leaned against the glass, huddling in my cloak, as he tapped in his code. I didn’t know how to explain, or even what I was doing here, so I waited, silent. With a puzzled look, Jules disconnected and met my eyes. “A strange voice answered,” he revealed. “Human. Something’s up.”
“A bust?”
“Maybe.” His eyes were cutting, twin blue lasers dissecting me. “We could walk by and see if anything’s happening.”
I drew the cloak around my cold bones. The weather in the city was a funny thing, prone to change in a heartbeat. I shrugged and followed.
We hastened through the tide of screams and laughter shattering the night, echoing off the concrete, until we reached the Honeycombs. Blue and red lights pirouetted across the windows of my building. The place was crawling with cops.
“Fuck.” He looked at me. “If we left anything incriminating in the room...”
Near dawn, I had watched Jules gather everything up and strip the bed, sending our fluid-soaked sheets down a half-concealed chute. We had cleared everything out, except... “The peach pit.”
Jules looked at me. That he was debating was clear. It was my DNA in question, not his. But then his expression shifted. “We have to get to the room somehow.”
“The Feds know what you look like,” I warned him.
“How do you know?”
“You remember that boyfriend I told you about...?”
“You sly bitch.” He laughed weakly. “Great. Now what?”
I thought. “I can get in through the front door. If you can get around to the back, I can let you into our storage comb.”
The plan proceeded without a hitch. I felt clever. The combs were quiet, my family asleep upstairs. Leaving the lights off, I crept my way down to the storage comb, and turned off the alarm. A moment later Jules was inside, a presence in the dark. Fear of being caught had sent my pulse racing, and, in truth, turned me on.
Jules’ voice was all breath. “And now?”
“The vent in the kitchen. We could try to crawl up it. It might lead up to the room.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You don’t have to come with me.”
His hand around my wrist kept me from turning away. “Celeste. It’s too risky.”
“And when they find it?”
“It doesn’t prove anything.”
“It proves that I was in the room.”
His grip tightened as I tried to pull away. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Except pay you to fuck me.”
“You didn’t pay,” he said.
“What?”
“I reversed the charges.”
“Why?”
He smiled. In the shadows there was only the barest glint off his make-up from the Milkbar. “Stupid girl. Why do you think?”
He moved to kiss me. As I leaned into him, there was a snap in the dark, and the comb filled with light. Across the room, with one hand still on the switch, Richard stood. In his other hand, a gun, fixed on Jules.
I blinked. “Richard?”
Richard didn’t spare me a glance, focused on Jules. “Step away from the girl, now,” he growled. “You are under arrest, Wolf.”
...
The trial caused a sensation, with great fanfare in the press, and no one in my family could walk the streets without being mobbed by reporters. I stayed in, suffering nightmares until the doctor prescribed a sedative.
I talked to no one outside the family except for Richard. It was rare that I didn’t come downstairs to find him chatting with my mother at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cup of oily coffee, a plate of cookies fresh from the oven between them.
It was only on the last day of the trial, as the secluded jury debated, that I finally linked with Kara.
“It was awful,” I told her from the netbooth in the lobby of the courthouse. “The whole time I was in there, he watched me. It was creepy.”
Kara’s face loomed large as she leaned close to the screen. “They’re going to find him guilty, right?”
I told her about the evidence. Hair, saliva, and semen had been found at the crime scene: a perfect match. Although the bite marks had been inconclusive, the rest was damning enough. “I think I feel sick.”
“He’s sick,” Kara said. “Did he say why he did it?”
“He denied killing anyone. Claimed he was innocent.”
“Of course he would say that, but it doesn’t make it true.”
I sighed, leaning my head against the scratched, dirty glass of the booth, recalling Jules in the witness chair, insisting that he wasn’t a murderer. And how, for a moment, I had almost believed him. Almost believed the perverse story he had spun about what, precisely, he had been doing at Grandmother’s house right before she had been killed. “Kara, he fucked my grandmother. And my sister.”
“And you,” Kara added.
“He ate them.”
“Consider yourself lucky that Richard showed up when he did, or you would have been dessert.”
Alone in the storage comb, would anyone have heard me scream? And, then, once he’d finished slavering over me, had swallowed my flesh and sucked the marrow from my bones, would he have gone upstairs to where my little sister lay sleeping and done the same to her? And my mother, too? “I hope the fucker fries.”
“You can’t trust anyone.”
You would think I’d learned that lesson from my sister, not to trust a stranger. From now on, I would be more careful. My mother, Violet, and Kara were the only people I could trust. And Richard, of course. I did consider myself lucky. Lucky because this time, at least, Richard Woodsman had arrived in time to save the girl from the Wolf.
...
When the trial was over and Richard proposed, I knew how Dorothy must have felt. It was as if a whirlwind had swept me up and set me down in some fucked-up fableland. My sister thought it was exciting and romantic. My mother thought I was too young to be engaged, but despite her warnings, there was an undercurrent of relief. It had been weeks since the verdict and the monster condemned, but these events lingered like soot that could not be scrubbed from our skins. So when Richard appeared with two tickets to Las Vegas, Mother just smiled and said she was sure that the distraction would do me some good, and that she and Violet could manage the shop for a few days without me.
Once we were in the taxi heading towards our hotel, there couldn’t have been a girl who brooded more. I had the sinking feeling that I’d fucked up. Running off with Richard, agreeing to marry him – it had all been a mistake. A knee-jerk reaction. I’d mistaken gratitude for love, fear for need.
I had dinner alone while Richard was in the other room on the net with the Bureau. I had ordered a steak but couldn’t eat. I just sat, trying not to think about what I’d done with the man who had murdered half my family – or how much I had liked it – as the blood steadily pooled against the rim of the plate.
Later in bed, scrunched up on one side of the mattress, I believed that Richard – always the perfect gentleman – wouldn’t try a damn thing.
I was wrong. After turning off the lights he reached for me. I resisted his touch. He forced me to turn and tried to kiss me. Disgusted, I kept my lips tightly shut. Still he persisted. When he grabbed me again, I slapped his hand and jumped from the bed. “Richard, stop.”
“I can touch you if I want. We’re engaged. Now. Come here.”
“No. I don’t want to. I don’t even love you.”
Fury distorted his features, twisting them into a grotesquerie of human flesh. “You little cunt,” he hissed. “You horrid bitch. I know what your problem is. You’re just like the rest of them. You can only get off with whores. That’s the only way you can get off, by paying whores to fuck you.”
“I... what...?”
Richard snarled. “You’re nothing better than a whore yourself!”
He lunged.
I tried to run.
Claws dug into my shoulders and then a shove forced me down to the table. Silverware rattled as something cold spattered across my cheek – blood from my untouched dinner. His hands curled around my throat and I struggled for air as he started to throttle me.
I’d made another mistake.
Richard leered down at me, as saliva dripped from his lips. “I think I’m going to enjoy eating you the most.”
My head spun. I needed air. With one hand I failed to pry his fingers from where they pressed into my throat. The fingers of my other hand crawled desperately across the table until they stumbled upon the knife.
...
I woke up in a small white room I didn’t recognize. There was a dull throb of pain in my side and my hand. I had rows of tidy black stitches in both. My mind was boggled, heavy with fog, and I couldn’t remember what happened or how I had gotten here. All I could remember was a dream in which I’d been walking through the Woods to bring a basket of goodies to my sick Grandmother’s house, and Jules emerging from the shadows, taking my hand and warning me to not talk to strangers.
I heard voices from the hall, and then a face appeared at the tiny barred window of the door. “Feeling better?”
I held my tongue. I was huddled in a corner, feeling small. “What am I doing here?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said the face. “I’m Dr. Smith and I’m here to help you.”
“What big eyes you have, doctor.”
“Yes, Scarlet, all the better to see you with. Now, tell me, my dear, what’s the last thing you remember?”
“What big ears you have, doctor.”
“Yes, yes, I’m listening. Tell me. What do you remember?”
“Grandma’s house,” I said. “No, Las Vegas.”
“What else do you remember, Scarlet?” he asked, flashing a toothy grin.
“What big teeth you have, doctor. And why do you keep calling me Scarlet? And Richard!” I jumped up, ignoring the throb of the stitches pulling at my skin. “What happened to Richard Woodsman?” I seized the bars, rattling them. Startled, the doctor skittered back from the window. “He’s the Wolf! Richard Woodsman is the Wolf!”
The doctor called for some strongmen while I screamed and pleaded. A key rattled in the lock. The strongmen pinned me down, baring my arm for the doctor’s shot. Instantly a velvet-coated hammer smashed down upon my head, knocking the fight right out of me. The doctor told me to rest now, that everything would be fine, and then they all went away. I lay there and started to cry for no reason. It took me a minute to even realize that I was crying.
And then I heard it, the noise at the door. Scratching and snuffling at the metal hinges, whining and worrying at the cracks. Even when I covered my ears with my hands, I couldn’t block the noise. Nothing could stop it. Not even the velvet hammer could make it go away.
I’m not crazy, you know. The wolves are all still out there, howling at the door, trying to get in. And they are so... very... hungry.
Listen.
