 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
tried to hold herself together, the blood pouring down over her arms.
She tried to run, teetered against the wall, slid sidewise, and the man struck the brick surface.
She was away, stumbling over a flower bed, falling, getting to her knees as he threw himself on her
again. The knife came up in a flashing arc that illuminated the blade strangely with purple light. And
still she screamed.
Lights came on in dozens of apartments and people appeared at windows.
He drove the knife to the hilt into her back, high on the right shoulder. He used both hands.
Beth caught it all in jagged flashes--the man, the woman, the knife, the blood, the
expressions on the faces of those watching from the windows. Then lights clicked off in the
windows, but they still stood there, watching.
She wanted to yell, to scream, “What are you doing to that woman?” But her throat was
frozen, two iron hands that had been immersed in dry ice for ten thousand years clamped around her
neck. She could feel the blade sliding into her own body.
Somehow--it seemed impossible but there it was down there, happening somehow--the
woman struggled erect and pulled herself off the knife. Three steps, she took three steps and fell into
the flower bed again. The man was howling now, like a great beast, the sounds inarticulate, bubbling
up from his stomach. He fell on her and the knife went up and came down, then again, and again,
and finally it was all a blur of motion, and her scream of lunatic bats went on till it faded off and was
gone.
Beth stood in the darkness, trembling and crying, the sight filling her eyes with horror. And
when she could no longer bear to look at what he was doing down there to the unmoving piece of
meat over which he worked, she looked up and around at the windows of darkness where the others
still stood--even as she had stood--and somehow she could see their faces, bruise--purple with the
dim light from the mercury lamps, and there was a universal sameness to their expressions. The
women stood with their nails biting into the upper arms of their men, their tongues edging from the
corners of their mouths; the men were wild-eyed and smiling. They all looked as though they were
at cock fights. Breathing deeply. Drawing some sustenance from the grisly scene below. An
exhalation of sound, deep, deep, as though from caverns beneath the earth. Flesh pale and moist.
And it was then that she realized the courtyard had grown foggy, as though mist off the East
River had rolled up 52nd Street in a veil that would obscure the details of what the knife and the
man were still doing...endlessly doing it...long after there was any joy in it...still doing it...again and
again...
But the fog was unnatural, thick and gray and filled with tiny scintillas of light. She stared at
it, rising up in the empty space of the courtyard. Bach in the cathedral, stardust in a vacuum
chamber.
Beth saw eyes.
There, up there, at the ninth floor and higher, two great eyes, as surely as night and the
moon, there were eyes. And--a face? Was that a face, could she be sure, was she imagining it...a
face? In the roiling vapors of chill fog something lived, something brooding and patient and utterly
malevolent had been summoned up to witness what was happening down there in the flower bed.
Beth tried to look away, but could not. The eyes, those primal bumming eyes, filled with an abysmal
antiquity yet frighteningly bright and anxious like the eyes of a child; eyes filled with tomb depths,
ancient and new, chasm-filled, bumming, gigantic and deep as an abyss, holding her, compelling
her. The shadowy play was being staged not only for the tenants in their windows, watching and
drinking of the scene, but for some other. Not on frigid tundra or waste moors, not in subterranean
caverns or on some faraway world circling a dying sun, but here, in the city, here the eyes of that
other watched.
Shaking with the effort, Beth wrenched her eyes from those bumming depths up there
beyond the ninth floor, only to see again the horror that had brought that other. And she was struck
