Scott Sheridan could not exactly remember where he met Lucinda Arnold, but from their first acquaintance, books had been part of it. He recalled crowded book tables, people packed in and jostling for space, long lines of adoring fans waiting to see a favorite author, her mention that she worked in a small private bookstore — these images came to mind; and through them all was Lucinda, stylishly dressed, with her long hair and dark, hip clothing, a volume tucked under her arm, in line beside him, or near him, smiling, chatting, her eyes intensely fastened on him.
After attending a book signing at a Barnes and Noble they went out for something to drink. Sitting across from each other, lights low, sharing a decanter of merlot, they talked about their favorite works. He stole glances at her penetrating black eyes and noticed her full lips, burgundy lipstick, and long fingernails painted deep-colored red. He kissed her by her SUV that frigid February night. They made a date for Saturday. She said she wanted to talk about a story by J. B. Priestly called “The Dark Old House.”
He looked it up on the internet, remembering J. B. Priestly as the editor of his high school English textbook. He found an anthology that carried the story, bought it, and read it.
The next week was the first week he slept with her. She came to his place; they had wine and began to talk about the story by Priestly. He tried not to be too academic, though he noted that this particular story became the template for countless creepy tales of people trapped in ancient houses where some horrid secret was lodged. The more he talked, the closer she moved to him. Soon her arms were around him and they were kissing; his hands in her blouse and under the hem of her black miniskirt. They tumbled over each other to get to the bedroom. He had never been certain about his prowess as a lover but she was so absolutely enraptured by what he did he decided his skills maybe weren’t so shabby after all.
This began their liaison, which always involved reading. She would give him a book to read. He would read it, they would talk about it, and during the discussion she would start to warm up; then came an explosively erotic episode like nothing he had read in all the times he had dipped into romantic or erotic literature.
Scott immediately perceived the connection of reading and passion. Book-talk obviously turned her on. He concluded there were more bizarre fetishes to which a woman might be addicted. And for supplying her need, he thought with a smile, he was the guy more qualified than anyone else he knew.
He diligently read the volumes she gave him, even if he had a lot of reading to do for his classes. Scott was a compulsive re-reader. He went over works he had read several times in preparation for teaching. He had read Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dozens of times but doggedly went through them again when he taught a new round of classes. When he told her this, she beamed with happiness and told him she loved him.
Having a lover made things easier at the small college where he taught. He was up for tenure this semester, and though his student evaluations were high and he had a portfolio of respectable scholarship, he faced a Division Chair and Dean who were intoxicated with the power they possessed and who enjoyed belittling and bullying junior faculty. He found himself the victim of their academic sadism.
His Division Chair, Pauline Farley, came into his office once when Lucinda was visiting.
Pauline Farley was old with red hair that had almost turned the color of dishwater. She had taught at the school for years, got in on the ground floor in the early days, and had secured her position by simply hanging around. She had published nothing and deeply resented his numerous articles in high-class academic journals. The fact that her report on him would determine whether or not he got tenure was a source of deep, malicious delight to her.
She was cordial to Lucinda, who looked pretty and was well-dressed that day. She mentioned that she had just finished Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
“We’re reading ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ in one of my classes,” Pauline said. “The Reeve was the man who had a sore on his leg.”
“That was the Cook,” Lucinda put in with bird-like quickness.
Pauline gave her a look. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I believe it was the Reeve.”
Lucinda quoted: “Greet harm was it, as it thoughte me / That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.”
Scott marveled. She pronounced the Middle English exactly as a recording he had of British scholars who had reconstructed the sounds of the old tongue. Lucinda smiled.
“The Cook had a mormal,” she said.
“Yes,” Pauline replied, her rude edge starting to manifest itself. “That’s a boil.”
“Actually it is more like an abscess — a wound that never heals.”
“Do you teach?” Pauline asked, looking as if she smelled something bad.
“No. But I’ve given the language of Chaucer quite a bit of attention.”
“What do you do?”
“I work at a bookstore.”
“Which one?”
She told her.
“Well, I’m suppose you’re around books a lot,” Pauline said, smugly smiling, assured that Lucinda was a foolish amateur and not the expert she was. She delivered some less-than-encouraging news to Scott about his tenure review. She left, telling Lucinda she was happy to meet her, though her tone of voice did not exactly convey as much.
After she left, Lucinda looked over at Scott.
“She’s your boss?”
“Unfortunately.”
Lucinda said nothing but looked thoughtfully and, he fancied, with a glint of malice in her eye, at the door through which Pauline had exited. They went to lunch and came back to his office. She left a copy of The Lovely Bones. As she left, one of his colleagues, Mike Seefgan, came in.
“Who’s that?”
“Girl I’m dating,” Scott replied, trying not to sound too proud.
“I’ve seen her somewhere.”
“She works at Dorn’s Bookshop.”
“Not there — somewhere else.”
He went back to work, glad Lucinda had not merited one of the ugly outbursts of self-indulgent anger for which Pauline was notorious.
A few days later, when he saw her he noticed she wore a piece of gauze on her left cheek. She said she had some kind of lesion on her skin. He wanted to ask if it was a mormal but decided he would not risk raising her ire.
He had not finished The Lovely Bones by Friday, the night he and Lucinda usually stayed together. Before she came over, he called to find out what kind of carry-out she wanted and happened to mention that he had not read it all.
“How much do you need to do?”
“Not much. About eighty pages.”
“Finish it,” she snapped. “Call me when you’re done. It’s not too late. I’ll come over when you’ve finished your reading.”
She clicked off.
Shocked, he stood in the middle of his living room, the phone still open in his hand. For a moment he felt anger, but then remembered how much reading meant to her. It was some kind of weird hang-up, he thought, some psycho-sexual anomaly — but a psycho-sexual anomaly of which he was the fortunate benefactor. He found the book, read the last eighty pages, and called her.
She drove over right away. They talked about the book then went to bed. She had bought an outfit at Victoria’s Secret and said she had a couple of things to “show him” that night. When she left, early in the morning he knew he would not slack off his reading ever again.
* * * * *
Pauline Faber grew worse. The abscess on her cheek became infected and defied treatment. It was growing to the extent that she had to be hospitalized. She relinquished her teaching and administrative duties to other faculty. Her replacement on the Tenure and Promotion Committee was Desiree Reece, a friend who appreciated Scott's skill as a teacher and his abilities as a scholar.
This rankled his other opponent on the committee, Warren Coleman.
Coleman was a predatory administrator who delighted in belittling and humiliating those under him. Scott had been on the receiving end of his viciousness several times. With Pauline out of the way, he had a majority of friends on the committee so that Coleman was no longer a threat. Still, memories of the abuse he had suffered at the hands of this overbearing pigheaded bureaucrat made his blood boil.
Two weeks after the abscess appeared on her cheek, Pauline died.
At her funeral, Scott noticed how Coleman had put on weight. He remarked on it to Mike, who agreed and then said, “By the way, I found out where I saw that girlfriend of yours.”
“Where?”
He smiled. “I’ll let you know Monday,” he said as Coleman began a loquacious eulogy for the departed Pauline.
* * * * *
He finished White Devil in time for their next date, but reading so much had become a burden on top of his reading for classes, and it left him almost no time for research and scholarly projects. He mentioned it to her.
“I like books,” she said, her voice flat and somewhat ominous.
“Well, at least maybe you could ask me to read shorter ones.”
She agreed. He discussed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Picture of Dorian Gray with her. The next week she gave him The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King.
Sex after those books was not the erotic donnybrook he usually experienced with her. He saw how much sexuality was tied to reading: her response to him seemed proportional to the length and intensity of the text they had studied. As soon as the semester was over, he would tell her to bring him longer books.
In the months before Scott's tenure review loomed up, Warren Coleman gained weight at an astonishing pace. The man who was athletic, trim, and strong, in remarkable shape for his age, began to border on obesity. His weight approached four-hundred pounds. A week before the tenure review, his knees gave out and he was confined to a wheelchair. His knee-replacement surgery was scheduled for the day of the tenure hearing. Like the late Pauline, he resigned from the committee for medical reasons. Someone quite favorable to Scott’s installation as a full-time tenured faculty member stepped up to replace him.
This gave him pause. He felt uneasy about the attrition of two enemies from the committee. What he previously had thought would be a cause of celebration gave him pause. He mentioned it to Lucinda.
“Why do you feel like that?” she asked, her voice full of surprise. “I thought you wanted them out of the way.”
“I did. But I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. The next day she delivered a copy of Blood Meridian for him to read. Even thought he had already read it, and found the violence in it described disturbing, he went through it again.
* * * * *
A few days later Mike left a book in his in-box. It was about the Victorians and their reading. He had marked a page showing an old sepia photography of the most-read writers of that era — Charles Dickens, George Macdonald, and Elizabeth Gaskill — sitting in chairs surrounded by a group of adoring fans. The caption said “Our greatest writers are honored by the London Society for the Advancement of Reading.” Standing behind the bearded Dickens, hands on his shoulders, was a smiling woman who looked exactly like Lucinda.
A relative, he thought, undoubtedly, though the woman looked like she could be Lucinda's twin. The piled-up Victorian hair-do and the high-collar dress did not disguise her features. On her finger, too, draped over Dickens’ left shoulder, he noticed the large onyx ring she always wore. Probably a family heirloom, he thought, but he would ask her about it. He had finished Blood Meridian. After teaching his classes he went home, cleaned his house, and waited for her. He took Mark’s book along to show her the photograph.
She arrived with two bottles of wine, fresh-baked bread, and a Greek salad. They ate, she talked about her week at work, and he asked her if she had had a relative who knew Dickens.
She gave him an enigmatic look.
“You must have seen the photo in the Sill’s book.”
“A friend who saw you showed it me.”
“Did you finish Blood Meridian?” she asked.
He told her he did and soon they were deep in a discussion of it. He talked about the graphic violence, the perversion, the dark vision McCarthy created and the harrowing ending. She listened to him. He realized she hardly said anything when they discussed books. She mostly listened and listened with full attention. Soon the ritual began. She moved in closer to him and touched him. They began to kiss and eventually went into the bedroom.
This night their embrace was violent and dark. Her intensity overpowered him, though he was able to answer it with intensity of his own. When they were finished, both were too exhausted to talk. They lay there for as long as a half hour in entranced satiety, in the unlit bedroom. Finally he rolled over to see her.
She looked beautiful in the dark: her large, luminous eyes, full lips, pale skin and black hair. Her eyes looked deeply into him and for some reason he felt a shudder of fear.
“The photograph,” she said. A long pause. “It is me.”
He thought she was joking, but the expression on her face did not change.
“It is me,” she repeated.
He grinned.
“You look pretty good for being two-hundred years old.”
“I’m a lot older than that,” she said. She looked dreamily into the darkness of the small bedroom. “I live because I find men who read. Chaucer, Smollett, Dickens — those were some of the famous ones. And there were lots of people who didn’t go down in history but were fine men who read for me — like you do, Scott, and like you will continue to do. As long as I have them, I won’t ever die.”
He looked at her, trying to keep his expression placid but realizing that what he had thought was a psycho-sexual obsession with books was a full-blown psychosis. She seemed to read his thoughts.
“You’re not convinced,” she observed.
“No.”
The dim light around her quivered and she in a dark flash she changed. Her skin became green, her eyes feline and red, mouth fanged, fingers clawed, hair writhing like snakes. He tried to get up, but her arms held him down with superhuman strength. Fire flashed from her eyes and her tongue, cloven like a snake’s, shot out at him and left a track of foul-tasting slime from his chin to his nose. He tried to scream, but fear had paralyzed him so he could not make a sound.
Then she was herself again.
“Did I convince you?”
He could not reply.
“I don’t think I did,” she said.
And she changed into something infinitely more horrifying — a creature, like a jellyfish or squid, gelatinous, pale pink, with multiple eyes, a shapeless, drooling mouth, and innumerable tentacles that enveloped him, coating him with the slimy, horrid secretions that flowed from the suckers on the underside of the appendages. He could not move. He felt the secretions start to burn him. He screamed, blind with terror. After a moment the sensation stopped. He opened his eyes and saw Lucinda.
“Can you talk?”
“Yes,” he managed to croak.
“Do you need another lesson?”
“No.”
Her eyes, which had been hard, softened.
“I’m sorry I had to do that, Scott. I didn’t want to scare you, but that was the only way I could convince you.”
He was numb with terror. She did not change again, but lay beside him. He saw what amounted almost to compassion in her face. She stroked his hair.
“I want to talk. I had to do that to show you I’m not just a woman who loves books — well, I am, but probably not in the way you imagined. Let’s get up. We’ll shower and then talk.”
He dared not disobey. Lucinda tried to be playful in the shower, as she usually was, but Scott felt as if his insides had been scraped out and fear poured into the hollow shell of his body. They dried off, dressed, and went to the kitchen table. She opened the unused bottle of wine and poured two glasses. She raised her glass. He sat there, still dumbfounded.
“For God’s sake, will you snap out of it,” she said. “Pick up your glass. Let’s drink a toast.”
He picked up his glass, his hand shaking.
“To us. To our understanding one another.”
He managed to get the wine down. Sensing her annoyance, he tried to get a grip on himself. He thought if he talked it would be better.
“You—you’re,” he said, his voice cracking, “in the pictures with Dickens and Gaskill.”
“I’ve lived a lot of years,” she replied.
“Chaucer?” he asked, still trying to get his voice.
“A lovely man. He could read French, Latin, Italian, Middle English. Each language felt different. Dickens, yes. But now you. You are as wonderful as either Charles or Geoffrey.”
They talked into the night. She assured him she loved him.
“I got Miss Faber and Mr. Coleman out of the way for you. You’ll get tenure. And you see the kind of power I have. But I am your friend and lover, Scott. Don’t be afraid of me. You don’t need to be — as long as you keep reading.”
They finished the bottle and she left. Fear had exhausted him to such a degree that he stumbled to bed fully clothed and woke up early in the morning, hoping it had all been a dream.
But he knew it had not been. It had happened. It was reality — reality with which he would have to deal.
He walked into the kitchen. There on the table stood two empty wine bottles, two glasses, and a copy of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. He picked it up. It was over 800 pages. He had a lot to do for class this week. He would have to stay up nights reading this book, but he would get it done. He would finish it before Friday when she came over. Reading would be his life now. It would be his life in a way so different than it had been before.
Coffee brewing, a pop tart in the toaster, Scott sat down at the kitchen table. Glancing out the window he saw the sun rising over the tree tops of the wetland beside his house.
He opened to the first page of the long novel by Stephen King and began to read.
|
|
|
