Green Eyes полностью

  The intercom buzzed, and she smashed down a switch. ‘What is it?’ she snapped.

  ‘Uh, Otille?’ It was Papa.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Uh, the hospital called. Dularde didn’t make it. I thought I should tell you.’

  ‘Then make the arrangements! You don’t need me for that.’

  ‘Well, all right. But I was wonderin’ could I come up?’

  She cut him off.

  ‘I want you to stay,’ she said firmly to Donnell.

  ‘Listen, damn it! We have a deal, and I’ll keep my end of it. But if you want hot fun, buy a waterbed and stake yourself out in a cheap motel. I’ll write your name in all the men’s rooms. For a good time, see Otille. She’s mean, she’s clean, she can do the Temple Hussy’s Contraction!’

  She tried to slap him, but he blocked her arm and pushed her away. He stood. The lavender beams of moonlight were as sharp as lasers, and for the first time he recognized the room’s similarity to the setting of his stories.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked, his anger eroded by a sudden apprehension. ‘I wrote a story about a place like this.’

  She appeared dazed, rubbing her forearm where he had blocked it. ‘Just a dream I had,’ she said. ‘Leave me alone.’ Her eyes were wide and empty.

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the exercise.’

  The door at the end of the passage was stuck, no, locked, and the door into Otille’s room, which had closed behind him, was also locked. He jiggled the knob. ‘Otille!’ he shouted. A chill weight gathered in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Clothilde called this the Replaceable Room.’ Her voice came from a speaker over the door. ‘It’s really more than twenty rooms. Most are stored beneath the house until they’re shunted onto the elevator. Every one of them’s full of Clothilde’s guests.’

  The room was hot and stuffy. He wrenched at the doorknob. ‘Otille! Can you hear me?’

  ‘Clothilde used to switch the rooms while her lovers slept and challenge them to find the right door. Back then the machinery was as quiet as silk running through your hand.’

  ‘Otille!’ He pried at the door with his fingertips.

  ‘But now it’s old and creaky,’ she said brightly. A grating vibrated the walls, and a whining issued from ducts along the edge of the ceiling. The room was moving downward. ‘I’m not sure how long it takes for the pumps to empty the room of air, but it’s not very long. I hope there’s time.’

  ‘What do you want?’ he yelled, kicking at the door. His chest was constricting, he was getting dizzy. The room stopped, jolting sideways.

  ‘You’re under the house now,’ sang Otille. ‘Push the button beside the door. I want you to see something. Hurry!’

  Donnell located the button, pushed it, and a section of the wall inched back, revealing a large window opening onto a metal wall set nearly flush with it. He pulled off his shoe and hammered at the glass, but it held and he collapsed, gasping. The metal wall slid back to reveal a window like his own, and behind it, their desiccated limbs posed in conversational attitudes, were a man and a woman. Black sticks of tongues protruding from their mouths, eyelashes like crude stitches sewing their lids fast to their cheeks. Rings hung loosely on their fingers, and they were much shrunken inside antiquated satin rags, the remnants of fancy dress. Donnell sucked at the thinning air, scrabbling back from the window. There was a metallic taste in his throat, his chest weighed a ton, and blackness frittered at the edges of his vision. Otille’s voice was booming nonsense about ‘Clothilde’ and ‘parties’ and ‘guests,’ warping the words into mush. The thought of dying was a bubble slowly inflating in his brain, squeezing out the other thoughts, and soon it was going to pop. Very soon. Then he had a sharp sense of Jocundra standing beneath and to the right of him, looking around, walking away. He could feel her, could visualize her depressed walk, as if there were only a thin film between them. God, he thought, what’ll happen to her. And that thought was almost as big and important as the one of death. But not quite. Otille’s voice had become part of a general roaring, and it seemed the corpses were laughing and pointing at him. Bits of rotten lace flaked from the man’s cuff as his hand shook with laughter. The woman’s mummified chest heaved like the pulsing of a bat’s throat, a thin membrane plumping full of air. The room vibrated with the exact rhythm of the laughter, and the air was glowing bright red.

 Then he could breathe.

  Sweet, musty air.

  He gulped it in, gorging on it. The door to the attic had sprung open. His head spinning, he crawled toward the light of a gable window and slipped; a splinter drove deep into the heel of his palm. He rolled onto his back, applying pressure to the point of entry, almost grateful for the sensation. Blood and gray dust mired on his hand.

  ‘I”m sorry, Donnell,’ said Otille’s voice from the speaker. ‘I couldn’t let you leave thinking you’d won. But don’t worry. I still want you.’