THE MASQUERADE OF KNIVES
Liot felt her touch before he saw her. Small soft mahogany hands, pampered hands that smelled of substitute flowers, sliding over his corded shoulders and arms. “Why is there a strange woman on the couch?” Liot rolled to his side. Tess sat on the bed in her undergarments, smiling as a sphynx. He related his day’s adventure and Tess listened with an abstracted expression. “Did you wake her?” Tess shook her head and slid a hand into his pants and felt the smooth rising tumulus. Shifting of bedsheets. Hidden fires kindled by the weight of her thighs and the strength of his hands. Moans followed the conference of flesh and thereafter a glistening wetness. She fell against him and he trailed fingertips across the soft curve of her back and her breath tumbled as the beads of sweat from her brow.
As daylight filled the room, Tess untangled herself from his body, rose and headed for the door. “Don’t forget the Halloween dance is tonight.” Tess’ eyes grew wide. “Oh I completely forgot.” She twirled hair about a delicate painted finger. “I can’t go.”
He sat upright. “What? Why? I thought you were excited to go. Halloween is your favorite holiday. Isn’t it? I even made the costume you wanted.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “I just can’t. I already made plans.”
“You could have given me a heads up.”
“Are you angry?”
“No. Disappointed. A dance without a partner holds little attraction.”
“Oh what you’re not going now?”
“I don’t see the point. What plans did you have that were so urgent?”
“Meeting an old friend.”
“Who?”
“I’m going to be late.”
“You’re not going to tell me?”
“What is your problem?”
“I didn’t know I had one.”
“I’m not going to talk to you when you’re like this.”
“Like what?”
Liot tilted his head to one side, his searching gaze discerning ire and furtiveness in the woman’s frame. She shook her head and slipped from the room. He listened to her bare feet stomp across the corridor, patter down the stairs and fade to nothingness. The scent of her lingered. For the first time since he had laid with her, he felt revulsion and hastened to the shower. He dressed, descended and found Freja standing by the doorside window in the living room, gazing at birds fishing for worms in the dew stained grass.
“Is your girlfriend alright?”
He walked to the door, threw on his coat and turned to the woman. “I’m off to work. You can eat whatever you want in the fridge. Freezer’s in the basement. Keep the lights off when you’re not using them and don’t rifle though my things.”
She put her hand to her head in a mock salute. He smiled and shut the door behind him.
When he got to Mazaran’s shop the old man beckoned him to a chair before his desk. “Sit down.” Liot did as bade and waited with his hands in his lap. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go.” Liot’s face went taunt.
“Why?”
“I think you know why.”
“If I did I wouldn’t ask.”
“We’re in the business of making machine parts, not gossip.”
“So its about Clayton. His father tell you to fire me?”
“You accused a man of domestic abuse.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“There’s no point talking about it. This isn’t a negotiation. Your things are in that box.”
“Does Danager think I won’t say anything about his deadbeat son if I’m fired? Or was this your idea? Afraid you’d lose Danager’s sponsorship?”
“Get your things and get out.”
Liot stared hard at Mazaran. The old man figeted nervously in his chair and averted his gaze to his papers. After a long uncomfortable moment, Liot rose, gathered his effects and left as Clayton glared out from the shop.
He returned home to find Freja gone and rushed from ground floor rooms calling her name then bounded up the stairs to his study and the lockbox where he kept a large bundle of cash and the wedding ring he had planned to give Tess during the festival. The box stood ajar. Empty save for some old drawings he had made. He cursed and paced around the chamber until exhaustion dragged him to an armchair where he spent the better part of the day finishing The Rending Band. All the vile feelings of the day were subsumed by the magnificence of the unknown author’s tale. His soul soared in tandem with Halmthust’s as the latter set his dire machinations into motion. Yet wholly unsatisfying was the abrupt and irresolute ending.
He put the book aside and descended to the kitchen where he lay a large pumpkin for the fall festival. He set to carving the winter squash which took on the appearance of the golden mask from his dreams and fitted a unlit candle inside it.
As daylight died, he walked with pumpkin in arms and carving knife in pocket to the old church beside the plaza of the winged god. The house of worship was abuzz with stragglers chatting over beers and festooned with tacky seasonal decorations. Beyond the creaking wooden doors, a narrow bench adorned vestibule and Walt Clemons in oriental garb with a fascimile of a antique scimitar sheathed in a swath of red silk.
“Evening Liot.”
“Evening. What are you supposed to be?”
Walt struck a gallant pose. “Sinbad The Sailor. Fresh from the valley of giant snakes. But where’s your costume?”
“I’ll be playing the part of Sinbad The Porter.”
“Well don’t spend too long listening to my tales. You just missed your girl.”
Liot set his pumpkin on one of the benches and turned with perplexity. “Oh?”
“Yeah she came in with Derrick.”
“Derrick?”
“Derrick Rutherford. I figured you’d know him since he’s a friend of Tess. He came to town last month. Some kind of political activist, I think.”
“Crew cut, tall, orange jacket?”
“Yeah that’s him.”
Walt bent and examined Liot’s jack-o-lantern. “That’s the eeriest pumpkin I’ve ever seen. You always did have an artful eye.”
He stood and discussed the handiworked squashes of the townsfolk and passed into the altar chamber, which had been transformed into a dance floor. Dozens of costumed participants twined under the auspices of a sonorous waltz. Through a break in the terpsichore mass, Liot spied Tess tight to Derrick Rutherford, the former done up like a vampire, the latter in the guise of a huntsman. As the music unwound, Tess draped her arms about the man’s shoulders and smiled. Derrick cradled her tapered waist with his left hand and twined his fingers through her own with his right. Liot looked on, numb to the scene before him.
Liot moved about the rim of the dance floor, and found, on one of the wall pews a discarded black cloak and oni mask. He put the mask on, secured the cape about his shoulders with a brooch and raised the narrow hood. The get up in tandem with his dark gloves, long sleeved coat, pants and boots, obscured every inch of flesh, rendering him an unrecognizable shade. As the demon masked miller returned his attention to the revelers, Malzberg brushed past, done up like a wolfman and took the hand of a woman with an entourage in the guise of fairies. The machinist recognized her as the romance author, Katie Hutching. The fat literary agent pawed at Hutching’s drunken companions who swallowed their discomfort for the sake of their mistress. Behind them, Liot made out the form of the Grangers, red and feathered like injuns, in amiable disputation with the church’s pastor, Arthur Wilt.
Across the sea of folly, a sad eyed woman sat alone in the far left corner of the room. Liot walked to her and offered his hand. She looked a long moment at the specter before her then put her small pale fingers to his palm and allowed herself to be swept to the dance floor as an ominous tune flared from the speakers. The pair swirled amid the press of tittering, gaudy bodies, and shifted by subtle degrees, close to the vampire and the huntsman, who spoke in hushed tones as the music closed upon its crescendo.
“What if he shows up?”
“He said he wasn’t coming.”
“What if he does?”
The vampire gave a one shouldered shrug. “He’ll get over it. He’s already found someone else anyway. Its just the way things go. Things happen.”
“Oh?”
Before he could say another word she kissed him and he eagerly responded, fondling her scantily clad body in leatherbound arms. So close were they to Liot that he could smell their perfume and hear the wet collision of their lips. The strings screamed and faded. Liot’s soul died with the music.
The couple pulled away and their words were lost to revel’s cacaphony. “Are you alright?” It took Liot a moment to realize the voice flowed from the woman in his arms. He was shaking. “No. Thank you for the dance,” he replied before shifting from the revelry. He stripped mask and cape, flung them to a pew as a slurred cry lit up from near distance and stagged into the piercing wind of night.
Silverblack clouds hid the moon and the waning jack-o-lantern’s arrayed about the temple’s entrance cast an inauspicious glow. He walked aimlessly forward, heedless of the trailing footsteps. The whole world was substracted and only the afterimages of Tess and Derrick remained, repeating as the figures of an insane troupe’s carousel. The inward form shattered upon the arrival of Clayton Morstyn’s inhebriated voice, grating like wet gravel. “You think that’s funny? Huh?” Liot paused, apprehending the statue of the winged god before him and Clayton behind.
“What?”
Clayton shoved him hard. “Taking my costume is what.”
“I didn’t know it was yours.”
“You angry because the old man kicked you out over me? Huh? Thought you’d pay me back?”
“I just want to go home, Clayton.”
The blow came without signal, a strong left hook to brow. Liot lost his balance and spun into the corner of the plaza fountain and felt a dull wetness spread across his skull. He clawed up the gelid marble protrusion and was hauled backward by Clayton’s frenzied hands. He took a fist to his gut and dropped to a knee, sucking air.
“You always looked down on me. Now I’m looking down at you.”
Liot raised his rubied head, left eye pooling with life’s water, and stared at his assailant. “You don’t look pleased. Is it because I’m not pleading?” Clayton stood unsteadily, his breathing heavy and his countenance twisted by halfhearted triumph and bewilderment at his own actions. “I bet Dany cries out. Is that what excites you?” Clayton moved to strike the man again but stopped as he discerned the dull blue gleam of a blade. Liot drew a violent arc and Clayton hissed and clutched his left arm which dripped beneath the star mottled abyss, his face tense with terror, a terror that intensified as Liot stepped forth. “I’ll kill you, Ravel. One of these days, I’ll kill you.” Clayton turned heel and slunk to the church like some law dogged fugitive. Blood trickled to pavement, black and glossy against the azure gloom. Liot lurched round the monument and collapsed against the northern side of the fountain. He washed the knife and his wounds in the tepid water and removed a length of faded cloth from his pocket and wrapped it slantways about his head over his left eye. Looking to the pool he discerned the aspect of some misbegotten fusilier. For an interminable spell he leaned against the soothing stone ring. He raised his head and beheld the statue and recalled when he had twirled Tess in his arms beneath its shade. Tears swelled in his eyes and every fibre filled with sorrow. He cursed and constrasted his weakness to that indomitable visage before him, that suggested a being who if roused could shake the very heavens and scatter the stars to chasms no light could break. Of man, yet greater and more terrible, resplendent in monstrous singularity. A horror to those without wings. Under the deity’s inexorable regard, he concieved an idea to rival its dreadful artistry and laughed at the thought of its fulfillment. Laughed as the tears trickled down his cheeks. His mind swirled feverishly, howling as the pipes and pistons of a fathomless machine. “The garden is desolate by trusted hands. Every carcass a meal for future maws. Seed the moldered refuse. Soon. Fruit divine from fetid soil. How I long to pluck it. To gift it! Who shall bear the taste?”
/////Logos Literature 