Chapter 4
Afraid to return home immediately, Laura Enders had asked Alan Kal to take her to the city where she shopped half-heartedly. Kal, for his part, was quite content just to be with Laura, and to think she was paying him for it. Some days everything went right. The only thing bothering him was his erection, for though he'd fired a wad into Linda before leaving his apartment, it hadn't done much to reduce his hard-on. Laura affected him more than ever.
It was well after five when he started driving her home, heading east, one car, a dark blue Pinto, among many headed in that direction. Behind them, a heavy golden sun was hanging in a cloudy winter sky, spreading what little warmth it had left over Long Island.
The sun was trying, it really was, but an iciness was already creeping in from the north, dissipating and scattering the sun's rays. Thus, what was left of the day was beginning to fade, with long shadows and a crispness promising a freezing cold the like of which would paralyze any living thing out of doors within the next few hours.
Unmindful of the cold, Kal and Laura huddled together in his Pinto as the tiny heater spat out warmth to comfort them. They were moving at a snail's pace because of the traffic, hemmed in as it were, both front and rear.
They were heading for Endersville, a very small, unincorporated village founded by Laura's ancestors nearly a hundred and fifty years before.
"You mean to say this curse followed your family here, to America?" Kal was asking.
"Oh yes," Laura nodded.
"Well why didn't you just cremate all your ancestors and put an end to the damn thing?"
"I don't know," she replied. "It just never occurred to me."
"What were you shopping for?" Kal wanted to know. "I mean, I didn't really notice."
"Costumes," she replied.
"Why costumes?"
"For Myrna's and my birthday party. It's going to be a masquerade. I even picked out a costume for you."
"How could you?" he wanted to know. "You don't know my size."
"I'm pretty good at judging clothing sizes," she retorted. "It'll fit you."
"What kind of a costume is it?" he wanted to know.
"A Raggedy Andy costume, to go with my Raggedy Ann."
"Hey, that's not a bad idea."
He wanted to say how much he loved her; how crazy he already was about her, but he knew she'd think him crazy. After all, you don't just tell someone you love them after knowing them for less than a day. Yet she seemed to understand somewhat, because the fingers of her left hand were interlaced with those of his right, and they were squeezing, which wasn't doing his erection much good.
Making the appropriate turn off the Sunrise Highway, Kal passed through a number of small villages before he reached Endersville. The sun was sinking lower and lower in the west, and by the time he parked his car in the large horseshoe-shaped driveway before the huge Enders mansion, it was barely above the horizon.
Together they entered the immense, almost grotesque mansion. The butler told Laura no one was about, so she insisted on showing Kal to his room. He would be spending the night there.
She led him up a flight of thickly carpeted stairs where he saw two hallways running perpendicular to each other. Laura turned to the right and pointed to a nearby door, saying, 'That's my room."
"This is quite a place," he acknowledged, looking up and down the paneled hallway, noticing the wooden tables against the walls, above which were shiny mirrors.
"The room next to mine is empty," Laura went on. "I hope you don't mind taking it."
"Love it," he said, without thinking, his heart triphammering away inside him.
"We share a connecting bathroom," she told him. "Do you mind?"
"Uh ... no, not at all, why should I?"
"I'm glad," she whispered. "I'm so glad you're here. Just your being here gives me a feeling of security."
And with that she left him, going into her own room.
"What a fantastic female," Alan Kal said to himself, opening the door to the room Laura had assigned him. And to think he was right next door to her.
She was summer in the middle of what seemed to be a cold, endless winter. She was clarity in an otherwise muddled life. She was beauty where all else had been plainness.
Shutting the door, Kal turned on the light and looked around the room. It was a large room, with heavy, masculine furniture. The bed, an old fashioned canopied type, was to his left, against the near wall extending out into the middle of the room.
The carpeting on the floor was the same thick, brown carpeting he'd seen in the hallway and on the stairs. He didn't care for it, but then the carpeting had probably been in the mansion longer than Laura had been alive, so she couldn't have had much to do with its choosing.
A large armoire was against the room's right wall. It was larger than the walk-in closet he had in his bedroom with the sliding doors.
Going to the bed, Alan Kal tested the mattress and found it firm. He decided to he down for a while and rest. He would need all his strength for the oncoming vigil.
Stretching out on the bed, he looked out the window to the west, and saw the sky slowly turning amber. Soon it would become orange, then red, violet, blue, and finally, black. Shrugging, he lay back and stared out the window, fascinated at the optical illusions caused by the earth's atmosphere.
Like a large, overripe orange the sun lay on the western horizon, slowly being sectioned. As the last of it fell away, leaving its afterglow as a final epitaph, a frigid whisper of breath was exhaled from the north. At first it was only that, a whisper, and the tiny suburban village of Endersville hunched itself and turned its back, trying to ignore the intruder. But the wind was not to be shunted aside so easily. It had come to rape with the night, and rape it would. Soon the whisper of ice became an overpowering wail, screaming threats of chilling hoar.
The naked trees in and around the village lifted up their arms, waving them in supplication, hoping the intruder would have mercy. But in the end they spread their branches as the thighs of a woman would be spread, submissively accepting the icy interloper.
But the houses of the little village did not accept the rape so easily. Doors and windows were tightly shuttered refusing entrance to the many phalluses of Boreas, and said phalluses sought out any and all cracks and crevices they could find, penetrating them violently and relentlessly.
With the wind's shrill shriek to guide it, darkness followed, stretching forth its infinite hand to blanket everything in sight, covering up the wind's rape. With one final effort the darkness swallowed the last glow of the orange sun, as easily as a woman's lips swallow the head of a penis.
The quenching of this last bit of fight, like a whore's sacreligious act, blinded the cloud-bloated sky, causing it to shake in anger like a woman's head being forced to move while her lips surround a cock. Large, dandruff-like flakes of snow fell from the protesting head, whitening the village and everything surrounding it.
No helpless woman to be attacked, the village refused to simply lie there and be raped by the darkness. It fought back the only way it could. Lights blazed from every home, surpassed in brightness only by the tit-shaped globes of the streetlamps. The patchwork of snow acted like a mirror, reflecting the glow emanating from these mercury aureolae, thus aiding the village in fighting off the second would-be rapist, darkness.
The other violater, the north wind, apparently realized it had lost the battle it had begun, and thus retreated, allowing the snowflakes to feather down to earth all the more slowly, like helpless amoebae. But like all enemies, the vanquished wind had left behind a grim reminder of the fact that it had been there, just as a rapist sometimes leaves his victim pregnant. In this case the foetus was the bitter, frosty temperature pervading the air, clinging leechlike to any and all things, animate and inanimate.
But nothing could chill the spirits of the tiny village. With lights it had fought off the darkness, and with courage it had withstood the attacking wind. From every lighted window cheerful voices emanated strongly. And the most cheerful voices of all came from the Enders mansion.
One section of the village alone remained apart and aloof from all else, shrinking from the lights in its moroseness. That section was the village cemetery. Like an English gentleman, still waiting for a proper introduction, it stood there, cold, detached, and quilted a frosty white. But the freezing snow was tepid when compared to the ground on which it lay, and the ground itself was almost warm compared to what was buried within it.
Headstones -lined row after row of graves, marking the places where dead carcasses lay. And all the rows seemed to point toward the center of the cemetery, where a huge, long mausoleum, running nearly the entire width of the graveyard, stood silhouetted against the black, moonless night sky. Inside the mausoleum, row after row of wooden sarcophagi stood side by side in musky darkness, relieved only by faint light coming in through stained glass windows, that light coming from the village itself.
Here the bodies of the dead members of the Enders family lay in final repose. Their coffins remained tightly sealed, and but for a small hole in one or two, eaten away by the few rats able to evade the eye of the night watchman, everything remained untouched.
Once in a great while a coffin was found open and empty. Where the body had been taken, no one knew, nor did anyone care. The night watchman, when finding an emptied coffin, merely shut it and kept his mouth shut. He didn't want anyone thinking him lax in his duties. And it was time for another coffin to lose its contents.