Hole: A Ghost Story Page 2

  After the taping, Mrs. Rise had slipped into his dressing room and offered to give him a blowjob. It made him laugh when he thought about it later. Dean had declined, of course, even though she had insisted her husband wouldn’t mind. The Rises had an open marriage, she’d assured him, pressing her breasts out, her eyes roving hungrily up and down his body.

  Dean couldn’t say he wasn’t tempted. Despite all the makeup, she was an attractive woman, but her husband had talked about bringing Dean into the G2G family, and he didn’t want to jeopardize his prospects.

  Dean watched as the blonde in his bed brought the pills to her mouth. Her arm came up haltingly, as if she were fighting her own body.

  “Go on...”

  He smiled and nodded, and she tilted her palm up.

  “Don’t make me do this,” she pleaded, and one of the blue tablets fell from her lips.

  Dean plucked the pill from the mattress and pushed it between the woman’s teeth.

  “Here… wash them down with this,” he said, and handed her a beer.

  The woman gagged a couple times, but did as she was told. He watched her throat work, the pills sliding down.

  “All of it,” he said.

  She finished the beer, and he took it from her hand and set it on the nightstand beside the bed.

  “I don’t want to die,” the woman moaned, after burping a couple times.

  “Open your mouth,” he replied.

  She did as she was told, and Dean leaned down to make sure she’d swallowed every one.

  “Good girl. Now you can lie down.”

  The tan and gold patterns on the pillowcases and comforter seemed to writhe and twist around the woman’s partially nude body. It had been a couple hours since he took one of her pills, but he was still suffering from visual hallucinations. He blinked his eyes and looked again, hoping to dispel the disturbing vision, but the fractals continued to crawl over the linens.

  Some of the shining threads were climbing onto her skin, he saw. They looked like living things. He was reminded of serpents.

  The woman sobbed quietly. She stared at the ceiling, tears running down the sides of her face.

  Annoyed, Dean rose and walked to the window.

  He stared out at the lights of downtown Houston for a moment or two, pensive, the muscles in his neck and shoulders taut with anxiety. His eyes floated over the glittering skyline like two black holes. He shifted his attention to his reflection in the glass then, felt himself relax. Smiled. Still lookin’ good, he thought, touching his own face.

  His nerve endings sang as his fingertips trailed over his cheekbones. All his senses were exquisitely amplified. He stroked his own chest, caressed his flat belly.

  I’d fuck me, he thought with a titter. Sure.

  He brushed back his thick black hair, still wet from the shower, touched his lips, his eyebrows. His flesh, wherever his fingers roamed, glowed faintly blue.

  The ecstasy, he thought.

  He smacked his lips. His mouth was dry as cotton. He glanced over his shoulder at the woman in his bed, afraid she might have risen while he was distracted, but she was lying exactly how he’d left her.

  A thread of pain pulsed in the middle of his forehead.

  It was her own damn fault.

  She’d found his tape while he was showering, had put it in the VCR, thinking it was a porn maybe. Just being nosy, he supposed, like most women are nosy. When he finished showering and walked into the room to rejoin her, a towel wrapped around his waist, she was sprawled out on the bed with the remote in her hand, laughing.

  “You’re a preacher?” she asked, snorting in disbelief. “Oh, sweetie, that’s too rich! You must be a big shot if they’re interviewing you for TV. How much money you got? I may have to pull a Jessica Hahn on you!”

  On the TV, Dean and the Rises were praying fervently for the upcoming new millennium. It was 1999, after all.

  Dean had been invited to do a segment on their program after Robert Rise read an article he had written for the Christian publication Inspire. The essay was about the Y2K computer glitch. Conservative Christians were very concerned about the Millennium Bug and how the coming catastrophe might shoehorn into Daniel’s Timeline. Dean’s study, a masterpiece of pseudo-science and religious speculation, had garnered quite a bit of attention in the last couple months.

  After the taping, Robert had clapped Dean on the shoulder. “I think our audience really enjoyed your appearance,” the televangelist said, then he asked Dean if he’d like to come back and do a couple more guest spots before the end of the year. Dean was walking on cloud nine when he left the studio.

  And here was this bitch, laughing at him...!

  Dean had glared at the whore, his face getting redder and redder. It suddenly occurred to him that all of this might be a setup. The woman, the pills, the sex. She had been awful eager to accompany him back to his room, hadn’t she?

  He didn’t even remember her name!

  “Are you threatening to blackmail me?” he’d demanded, angry and frightened. “Who are you working for?”

  “What are you talking about?” the woman asked, lowering the remote. She laughed again, but nervously this time. “Chill, dude. I was just kidding around.”

  And she was good, too. A real pro. She’d taken him around the world. No part of her body had been declared off limits, and he’d indulged himself, hadn’t he? Yes, sir! He’d wallowed in her filth like a swine.

  Was there a hidden camera somewhere? he wondered, glancing around the room.

  “Where is it?” he wanted to know.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The hidden camera.”

  “Dude, you’re being paranoid. It’s the Ecstasy. It’ll do that sometimes. Why don’t you come over here and lay down on the bed with me?”

  It was too late by then, of course. She’d given herself away.

  Now he stood at the window and waited for the pills she’d eaten to take effect. He turned to look at her directly. She was lying stiff on the mattress, staring up at the ceiling. She was still crying, but at least she was doing it quietly. As he watched her drift further and further from the land of the living, he continued to caress himself. He untucked the corner of his towel and let it drop to the floor. Started stroking himself.

  You fucking bitch, you whore, he thought, his fist gliding up and down his rigid shaft. He thought about murder and his cock got even harder, the head so swollen and tight it was a glossy purple, the veins standing out like pulsating worms under the skin. Killed you, didn’t I? Ahh, God!

  He closed his eyes, let his head fall back. With his eyes shut, it felt like the room was slowly spinning around him. He could see those crawling patterns against the inside of his eyelids. Snakes. They looked like twisting snakes. He watched the patterns turn like strange wheels inside his skull as he touched himself, entranced. They had a grotesque beauty, those twisting serpents.

  She was lying very still when he opened his eyes.

  He walked to the edge of the bed and sat. He watched her for several minutes, but didn’t see her chest moving. He listened for her breathing, heard nothing but the TV… and the stealthy creeping sounds of those slowly writhing patterns.

  Awful sounds...!

  He put his hand between her breasts, checking for a heartbeat.

  Nothing.

  She was dead.

  The dead tell no tales, he thought.

  He hadn’t came while he was stroking himself. His prick was still hard as a railroad spike. A real blue-veiner. That’s what his father always called it when he was joking around, being dirty. He could hear the old man: “Whoo-ee! That Farrah Fawcet gives me a real blue-veiner!” Laughing.

  Dean felt like a man in a dream. He hooked his fingers in the waist band of the dead woman’s panties and tugged them down her thighs.

  He cocked his head a little, grinned, then slid his hand up her leg and speared a finger inside her. Still warm. Still slick from earlier. He shoved a couple mor
e fingers in her, then got to his feet and pulled her panties completely off. Panting, eyes bulging, he spread her thighs and climbed on top of her.

  3.

  What is a woman but a hole, and all the blood and dirt and shit in the world goes circling around and down inside? At least, that’s how Mary Stanford felt in the final instant before she sank the hobby knife into the meat of her forearm, unzipping the artery there to let out all the pain.

  She was tired of sucking all the filth in the world inside her. She was full of it. She intended her death to be a kind of purging, like those poor fat girls who stick their fingers down their throats to sick up what they eat. Yes, she wanted to sick it all up, empty herself of it and let the rancid stew swirl down some other woman-hole.

  If someone had told her a month ago that she’d take her own life today, she would have scoffed. Not only would she have laughed. It probably would have offended her.

  Suicide? Not Mary Louise Stanford! She wasn’t the type of person to do something crazy like that! She was a strong, independent woman. She was a survivor! Solid, dependable, levelheaded Mary Louise—only daughter of Jim and Harriet Klegg, wife of Henry.

  Mother of none.

  But maybe that was the crux of the matter, the weight on the other side of the lever, which had shifted her off her center and sent her rolling down the hill toward self-destruction.

  Mother of none.

  Maybe if she had someone to care for, someone to love, someone to be beholden to, she might have found the strength to push on past her unhappiness, and maybe she wouldn’t be reclining here in the tub with her husband’s X-Acto knife poised above her lily white forearm, but her womb, like her marriage, had turned out to be barren. Though they’d tried for years, she’d never been able to carry Hank’s children to term. She’d always aborted them in her first trimester, a bloody disappointment. Her womb, it turned out, knew her husband better than she ever had.

  Mary pressed the blade to her arm halfway between her wrist and her elbow, watching the metal point dimple her flesh there, where a delicate blue vein showed faintly through her skin. Little beads of water glimmered on her inner arm. They were beautiful to look at, really: the beads of water, her smooth white skin, the knife. In just a moment, she’d make the cut and add a splash of color.

  Hank, her husband… he wouldn’t care.

  He would pretend to care, because that’s what he was: a pretender. He’d pretend to be shocked, pretend he didn’t know she was depressed, that she’d been thinking about suicide, that she was unbearably unhappy in their marriage. At the funeral, he’d pretend to cry, maybe even pretend to need help standing. His lamentations would be masterful, and he the object of deepest sympathy. Any real pain, like his soul, would be shallow, and he-- more inconvenienced than inconsolable.

  How could he care?

  After what she’d learned, after what she’d seen, nothing he could say now would convince her otherwise.

  Oh, they’d had a marriage. That was, like every fairy tale begins, “Once upon a time, in a faraway land”. Back in those days, she believed marriage was like the “Happiness Is…” cartoons they used to publish in the seventies and eighties. The ones with the fat naked girl and her fat naked boyfriend. Happiness is…a warm chest to lie on, a little white house with a white picket fence, crayon drawings on the wall. She’d bought into the sham like any other naïve young woman-- hook, line and sinker.

  Disillusionment. Now that was a killer!

  She knew that time had cured the passion in their marriage. What else could one expect? She wasn’t that naïve. They’d been married almost twenty years now. Time had dragged her kicking and screaming into pre-menopause, the Change of Life, and he’d matured just as reluctantly, no longer young, dumb and full of cum.

  Or so she thought.

  Apparently, for Hank, the young part was the only variable subtracted from that equation.

  He was certainly dumb enough to get caught.

  The first thing she noticed was the makeup on his shirt. Nothing as tacky as lipstick. Just a smudge of foundation. The stroke of a cheek against his shoulder, perhaps. She questioned him about it and he blamed it on his sister—who did wear a lot of base. Later, it was a blonde hair, caught under a collar. A long one, too, a little over 12 inches. Again, he blamed it on his sister—who did have blonde hair.

  She called Hank’s sister Sue and asked if he’d talked to her about the Fourth of July cookout they were hosting when the two of them were having lunch the day before. Hank’s sister had paused a moment on the other end of the line, then said in careful tone, “Mary, I didn’t had lunch with Hank yesterday. It’s been… three weeks, at least.”

  The next day when he was at work, she took his dirty underwear from the hamper and inspected them. Before she was done, she’d gathered three light-colored pubic hairs. Hank, of course, was ginger. His bush was orange as a pumpkin.

  She sat on the edge of the bed with the pubes on a napkin beside her and cried, wondering how she could have been so blind. She cried until she couldn’t cry any more, then flushed the indicting hairs down the toilet and took to her bed.

  She didn’t confront him when he got home from work. She just told him she was sick. Hank had looked at her for a second or two from the bedroom doorway, then walked away.

  She might once have known what he was feeling—in that special way she had of knowing such things—but he was closed off to her now. He had put a wall up between them. She laid there in bed and wondered when he’d done that—when he’d cut her off like that—and why she hadn’t noticed it before.

  He made his own dinner that night and fell asleep on the couch, leaving her to her misery.

  And he was apparently still full of cum as well.

  So full of cum it was leaking out his ears.

  After Hank left for work the next day, kissing her cheek chastely as she lay “sick” in her bed, she went to his office and booted up his PC. She’d never snooped in his computer before. She’d always considered such behavior a sign of insecurity, not to mention sort of demeaning for both of them.

  She’d never put her husband on a pedestal. She knew there was bound to be a bit of pornography hidden somewhere in the electronic crypt that sat humming on his office desk, just like she knew what people were thinking sometimes, or what song was going to play on the radio next, or when the phone was about to ring. Besides, you didn’t have to be Doctor Ruth to know that guys liked to look at dirty pictures. It’s how their brains were wired. She’d once unearthed a stash of her father’s Playboys, hidden in his closet, when she was a teenager. He’d even had the one with Marilyn Monroe in it, preserved like a treasure in a clear plastic sleeve.

  “All men are dogs,” her mother had sniffed when they talked about it years later. And now here she was, sniffing for evidence of her own husband’s doggery.

  It only took five minutes to hack his password because she knew how he thought (just like she knew all those other things… it was just there, in her mind, when she needed it) and another ten minutes to unearth all his secret peccadillos.

  For a minute or two, she just stared at the monitor without moving. A little voice in the back of her mind warned her: you do this, and there’s no going back. If you quit now, you can maybe pretend nothing has changed. It could just be a fling, after all. Men his age do that when they start feeling old, and you know it’s not the same for them. For them, sex and love are completely separate entities.

  Feeling a bit like Bluebeard’s wife, Mary pushed the voice aside and gathered her resolve.

  She found photos and video files, X-rated stories and magazine scans. Nothing too scandalous. His trove was actually kind of tame. It was as if she’d peeked inside her husband’s forty-year-old skull to find a seventeen-year-old’s brain, all his puerile fantasies frozen in a state of perpetual immaturity.

  He apparently liked blondes. There were quite a few blondes in his electronic harem. Young blondes. Blondes with big boobs. Skinny blo
ndes.

  Mary, a brunette, tried to open-minded. Men always wanted what they couldn’t have, didn’t they? Maybe she’d dye her hair, she thought with a pained smile, not yet horrified.

  He was also, apparently, into bodily fluids. There were megabytes of material that involved females getting doused in copious amounts of male secretions.

  Well he can forget that! she thought, gagging a little. Gross!

  That particular fetish could stay in Hank’s little fantasy world.

  There was a small amount of more hardcore stuff—anal, double penetration, a little bit of paddling—but not enough of it to worry her.

  She had begun to convince herself she was being paranoid, that there was a logical explanation for the strange colored hairs in his underwear, the smudge of makeup on his shirt. Mary was nothing if not a master of self-deception. She’d gotten pretty far along the road to self-deception, but then she found the e-mails.

  They were stored in a folder labeled PWE.

  At first she thought the text files were stories, but upon opening the first and reading through it, she realized it was Hank’s correspondence with a woman named Penny.

  From PennyWinkle0881:

  Hey, baby. I was thinking about you tonight. Thinking about you and playing with myself. You want to know what I was imagining while I was rubbing my vibrator up and down my clit? I was thinking about your big hard cock going in and out of my tight juicy pussy, sliding in and out... I came so hard, and then…

  On and on and on. Pages of it. Not particularly well written, not particularly imaginative, but the sheer volume of their correspondence was overwhelming. Did Hank’s mistress do nothing but sit at her computer all day and fuel her husband’s puerile fantasies? How long had this been going on? Some of the emails were time-stamped, but Mary couldn’t bring herself to believe she’d been clueless so long.