—M.K. Hobson
* * * *
* * * *
M.K. Hobson’s short fiction has appeared in SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Black Static and many other fine publications. This is her first appearance in Interzone. She has a website (demimonde.com), a blog (mkhobson.livejournal.com), and is really proud to have written a story that includes the word ‘metamerism’. She lives in Oregon with her very, very patient family.
* * * *
Pamela didn’t bring the faun home from Central Park because she was lonely for companionship; for that she had her beloved son Riley, not to mention a fat tabby named Buttons. And it wasn’t that the faun was an exceptionally winning creature who entranced her with a cheerful air upon his rustic pipe; when Pamela found him, he was quite dirty, skimpily clad in raw skins, and there was a provocatively belligerent gleam in his eye that promised infinite recursions of unsavory mayhem.
No, Pamela brought the faun home from Central Park because she wanted to annoy Magdalena Delancy.
In all fairness, Magdalena Delancy was the kind of person who was so infuriating that one might think it a reasonable bargain to destroy one’s own life in the service of causing some slight perturbation in hers.
Magdalena was a creative genius at making other people feel miserable. She held fortnightly gatherings at her apartment on the Upper West Side, and at the focus of every one of these gatherings was a ‘challenge’. What vast swathes of misery lurked unexpressed within that simple noun! For Magdalena would ask her guests to do things ... things like compose extemporaneous villanelles in front of beard-stroking experts from Columbia University; receive hip-hop dancing lessons from unimaginably fit young black women with names like Edge or Funky Cleopatra; and/or scrounge up mind-bogglingly arcane costumes (“No, no, the exiled French Court of sixteenth century Aquitaine, you poor fat goose,” a grinning Magdalena had once chastised a red-faced, houppelande-clad Pamela).
Magdalena’s most recently posed challenge was a scavenger hunt. “You are to bring the most interesting thing you can find in Central Park!” she had breathed over the phone line into Pamela’s unwilling ear, before hanging up with a tooth-jarring crash.
Oh sure, a scavenger hunt. It seemed innocent enough. Too innocent. Pamela knew Magdalena well enough to foresee some bitter sting hidden in the tail of that innocent seeming. Magdalena was sure to make her guests take the objects and do something dreadful with them; lick them or render them in pastels or incorporate them into a hat to be worn on a walk down Madison Avenue.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to dissatisfy Magdalena. Like a super-evolved playground bully or the movie-version of a Nazi nurse, Magdalena was one whose cruelty held strange fascination. Her brutally whimsical power, so randomly employed and to such unpredictable ends, imbued her with a kind of attractive glamour. Pamela found herself thinking at odd moments of the cruel hollows where Magdalena’s slender throat met her knife-sharp shoulder bones. At moments like that, Pamela had to calm herself by mentally reciting the ingredients for a type of Jell-o salad her son Riley was particularly fond of.
So it was that Pamela had gone down into the ravine, a wildish, woodsy part of Central Park, and had spent the better part of an afternoon poking around listlessly with a stick, hoping to turn up a giant puffball or muskrat or something she wouldn’t necessarily mind licking.
Then she’d come across the faun, sunning himself on a glittering outcropping of granite. He was compact, jockey-sized; his man-half was elegantly muscular, his goat legs were stocky, and he had a face that was a very beautiful mingling of sweetness and menace.
Pamela’s heart gave a leap. It was, at the start, a leap of surprise, but by the end of the leap it had transmogrified into a leap of subversive joy, of rebellion, of delicious anticipation at the thought of striking Magdalena such a crushing blow. She envisioned herself arriving triumphantly at Magdalena’s apartment with the most inarguably astonishing and unique thing from Central Park that there ever was or possibly could be. Magdalena might kill her or kiss her. The uncertainty was thrilling.
“Will you come to a party with me?” she asked the faun eagerly.
The faun turned a piercing gaze on her. Before she’d spoken to him, he’d been carefully and thoughtfully disassembling a pinecone with his slender fingers. “Is there something you desire?” he asked.
Pamela scrunched her nose. “Well, of course. I want you to go to a party with me. I just asked you!”
“That is something you want,” the faun said. He seemed to be holding his breath. “What I want to know is if there something that you desire.”
Pamela thought about it. She thought about Magdalena. She thought particularly about Magdalena’s eyes, of making their condescending hardness melt into slush. Into humiliation and remorse. Into something human and touchable.
“Yes,” Pamela breathed. “Yes, there is.”
The faun sighed wearily. “Then I will help you,” he said.
Quickly, Pamela bundled the wild youth in her cashmere coat. She hustled him out of the park, glancing furtively to the left and right, scrutinizing each oak for possible menace. Once they were safely clear of the oaks, she marched him back to her apartment building, ignoring the soundless mouth flapping of her doorman.
Pamela left the faun standing in her entryway while she made a quiet reconnoiter to ensure her son Riley was not home—she certainly didn’t want to disturb him! But then, he typically wasn’t at this hour. Since the day was sunny, he was most likely reading tomes of philosophy on the steps of the public library (always below the stone lion called Fortitude; he had an active, and somewhat bewildering contempt for Patience) in his black beret. If it had been raining, he’d be drinking coffee in some darkened boîte over by Union Square. Such a soul that boy had! Her heart swelled with accustomed pride.
Her nose, however, was swelling with something else—the olfactory attack of goat.
Deprived of the benefit of the copious amounts of fresh air that the outdoors typically provides, the faun was stinking up the place. He had his hands clasped behind his back, and was looking around the apartment appraisingly.
“Nice,” he said. “Prewar. What, thirteen, fourteen hundred square feet? I love the built-ins.”
Pamela wrinkled her brow at him before stepping into the bathroom and turning on the tub spigot. She doped the water liberally with a French bath salt that smelled of rosemary and lavender. Then she herded the wild youth into the bathroom and relieved him of his stinking animal-skin vest. He stood regally, allowing himself to be disrobed like an antique Sultan, staring critically at the water rushing into the tub as if gauging its suitability to touch his exquisite flesh. With a silly little half bow Pamela excused herself, closing the door behind her.
The stinking vest she burned. Or rather, she would have burned it, if she’d had the means to; actually, she double-bundled it in a plastic bag and threw it down the garbage chute.
The faun emerged from the bath an hour later. He was damp and steaming and wrapped in an oversized Egyptian cotton towel. The bath had very much improved his appearance; the moist, warm skin of his upper half was a pleasant shade of cocoa, and the silky, coal-black hair of his lower half was shiny and curly, like fine astrakhan. Two delicate nubules of horn protruded from his brow.
With businesslike brusqueness she marched him into her son’s room and pointed wordlessly to some of Riley’s old clothes. When he emerged, she noticed with some horror that he was not wearing the paint-stained chinos and white T-shirt she’d laid out on the bed; rather, he’d apparently rummaged through Riley’s closet and selected items more suitable to his tastes: a pair of black silk slacks and a pale seafoam shirt that made his leaf-green eyes glisten. He buttoned the cuffs casually as he crossed the room, his hooves clicking across the oak floors.
“Riley’s not going to like that,” Pamela said tapping an anxious nail against her upper teeth.
“Worry about what he thinks, do you?”
“He’s sensitive,” Pamela said. “An intellectual. A very intelligent boy!”
“I’m sure,” the faun said.
Then, something caught his eye that made that verdant orb gleam with malicious pleasure. It was Buttons, Pamela’s fat tabby housecat, licking himself. Loosing a wild high whoop, the faun leapt at the cat, grabbing it by one leg. The cat was agile enough to escape the faun’s grasp, and it darted to hide under the entertainment center. The faun scrambled after it, falling prone and reaching his arm under the TV-VCR combo; the cat hissed and spat and yowled somewhere underneath.
All of this was taken by Pamela to mean that the wild youth of the forest was hungry. She quickly made him a liverwurst sandwich and served it to him with some chips and a glass of Appolinaris water. He ate ravenously, even devouring some pomegranates in the center of the table that she’d bought more for decoration than for devouring. He dabbed sweet blood-red juice from the corner of his mouth. “Delicious,” he said. “But I prefer cat. Then you have the skin, too.”
An electric thrill of apprehension coursed through Pamela; she hoped he wouldn’t ask what had become of his fur vest. She hurried to change the subject. “So ... do you have a name?”
“Comus,” he said. “Comus of Central Park.” He leaned back in the dining room chair, stretching out a thick, silk-clad leg. The hard black hoof gleamed from beneath the cuff.
“And you ... you’ve lived in Central Park for a long time, have you?”
“Long enough,” Comus said. He glanced at a watch on his wrist, which, Pamela noted with horror, he’d appropriated from Riley’s bedside table. “It’s getting late. Don’t we have a party to get to?”
Pamela nodded and called downstairs for a cab. While she was on the phone, the faun vanished into Riley’s room and reemerged wearing a smartly tailored Cole Haan jacket and a yellow cashmere scarf. Pamela made a small strangled noise of protest; Riley was not going to be pleased at all.
“I have no doubt that your son is a spoiled brat,” the faun said in a clipped tone, smoothing the scarf around his smooth brown throat. “But he has very good taste.”
When he said it, his green eyes gleamed much as they had when he caught sight of Buttons. The voracity in his voice unnerved Pamela, and the suggestion that her son was a spoiled brat was both ridiculous and offensive. She suddenly thought the idea of getting Comus out of her apartment as quickly as possible was quite a good one.
* * * *
Magdalena lived on the top floor of an apartment block built some time in the 20s. Its design was a fantasy of paradox; curves tortured into angles, angles tortured into curves, floral forms springing from mechanical motifs, polished wood panels with thin channels of inlaid brass depicting stylized skyscrapers that looked structurally unsound.
It was the kind of environment in which one imagined heavy kohl, smudged around red-rimmed eyes. Asymmetrical shingle bobs, beaded dresses torn at the hem, cocaine in glass syringes, deflowered showgirls from Kansas. Just Magadalena’s kind of place.
The door to Magdalena’s apartment was standing wide open, as was customary at Magdalena’s parties. Magdalena liked to crow that this was because she was a wild spirit, she didn’t care who showed up, the more the merrier, that she would have been just as tickled to have a homeless drug addicted bum off the street walk through the door as she would an invited guest. This was just precisely as flattering to her guests as it sounded.
The open door policy suited Pamela quite well that night, however, for it allowed her to creep in unseen with the faun at her back.
This evening the usual joylessness that saturated all of Magdalena’s parties was especially pronounced, as was the smell of mud and fungus emanating from the items the guests had dutifully collected. Pamela was rather late; the others had already arrived and were sitting on Magdalena’s angular uncomfortable furniture with twee little plates of catered food balanced on their knees. It was the regular assortment of victims: a mildly successful painter and his wildly unsuccessful wife who hated him; a psychologist who specialized in assuring masochists that there was nothing wrong with them; various drab stockbrokers, corporate attorneys, and financial planners, and one man who owned a string of dry-cleaning establishments and had been implicated in some scandal involving a sheep. Each guest had things on the floor beside him or her; twisted tree limbs and clumps of moss and notable bits of trash. As Pamela crept in silently, she could see that they’d already started whatever ‘game’ Magdalena had thought up; the gray-turtlenecked painter was standing in front of the group with an abstract painting that he’d done of Central Park (Pamela felt a rush of sympathy for him, because Magdalena would certainly eviscerate him for failing to strictly adhere to the rules of the game) and he was stammering through an embarrassed monologue about metamerism and non-objective overlap. Magdalena was watching him, taking obvious pleasure in his tortured writhing. Just as it seemed he would break down and cry, Pamela broke in.
“Oh, hello everyone!” she chirped brassily. Two dozen vaguely guilty eyes jerked up to look at her. “Am I late?”
There was a heavy stillness as everyone in the room stared. They stared not at her, of course, but at her faun. At Comus. He stepped forward, presented himself to be stared at, his arms spread in an ironic “ta-da!” Everyone goggled; with astonishment, then wonder, then pride and then ... yes ... admiration. They were impressed. They were inspired. Pamela had struck a blow for freedom.
Power surged through her, power and elation. She felt like Moses. Parting the Red Sea would be nothing after such a victory. She imagined leading them all from this place, perhaps to have a rollicking Chinese dinner at a local chop-suey palace, raising glasses to toast Magdalena’s downfall, ding dong, the Witch is dead...
But Magdalena, who had been standing in her normal position by the black marble fireplace, was not going to go down without a fight. She prowled over to where Pamela and the faun were standing. Her eyes roamed over Comus appraisingly, and it was clear that she was working up to say something cutting. But Comus’ glittering green eyes and his magnificently beautiful face left even Magdalena speechless. Pamela felt like laughing out loud.
“My dear,” Magdalena murmured to Pamela, her warm breath sending a thrill down the side of Pamela’s neck. Magdalena’s eyes wandered freely over Comus. Her eyes lingered on the fabric of Comus’ Dior Homme trousers, and Pamela saw her lick her lips. “You really have brought me something wonderful.”
Then, Magdalena reached forward and hooked her arm through Comus’ arm, and pulled him away from Pamela’s side.
“Pamela’s won the game,” Magdalena tossed up a dismissive hand, as if Pamela had just broken open a Christmas cracker and extracted a paper crown. “Everyone else can throw away all that junk you’ve brought and help yourself to more drinks.”
There was a sigh of relief from everyone in the room, and many people broke into a run for the booze. Several relieved and grateful gazes were directed at Pamela, and many jealous ones, too. But Pamela could hardly fathom what had happened. Where a moment before she had felt triumphant, now she felt empty and cheated.
Magdalena had appropriated her faun!
Magdalena was staring at Comus, and he was gazing back at her, heavy-lidded. Magdalena lifted her chin and arched her neck upward. It was a pose so unlikely to be attractive that the fact that it was attractive was an utter affront to Pamela’s notion of justice. Pamela wanted to kick Magdalena in the teeth.
“Yes, I found him in Central Park,” Pamela said loudly, more for the benefit of Magdalena than the other guests, who were either hiding in the kitchen or hastening to throw away the things they’d brought, per Magdalena’s instructions. “Down in the ravine. Isn’t it astonishing?”
Pamela wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting, but she knew what she wanted. She wanted Magdalena stammering as helplessly and foolishly as she always had. She wanted Magdalena to flounder. But instead, Magdalena had seemed to forget that anyone other than the faun existed. They were whispering to each other, smiling mysteriously, giggling like teenaged confidantes. They were getting on, in short, like a goddamn house on fire.
Then things went from bad to worse. Because Magdalena and the faun seemed to come to some kind of agreement. Pamela heard Magdalena give a loud answer to the faun, an answer to a question that Pamela did not hear.
“Yes,” Magdalena breathed, a whole ocean of implication in the word.
The faun nodded, and Pamela heard him say: “Then I will help you.”
Then, with a smooth swift movement like a wolf pouncing upon a rabbit, Comus leapt upon the gray-turtlenecked painter and threw him to the ground, straddling him. Magdalena gave a triumphant cry as Comus, with his long sharp nails, began ripping the painter’s clothes off, shredding his gray turtleneck to rags and throwing his silver wire-rimmed glasses across the room.
The other guests, most of whom were nursing stiff drinks and who’d thought their ordeal was over, watched with horror. One or two of them turned betrayed glances toward Pamela, their message as clear as if it had been spoken aloud: you fool ... what have you done?
The painter might have said something, made some comment of astonishment or protest, but it was drowned out by Comus’ voice; he was singing, high, flutelike notes in a strange language. Comus straddled the painter, lifted his head, and sang, or rather howled, or rather ... well, keened. The notes made Pamela’s chest vibrate, flutter; her groin throbbed. She was terrified and appalled. Within moments the painter was writhing rhythmically beneath the faun, tossing his head from side to side. Like erotic automatons, the spectators began to leave their banquettes and were stripping down to flesh, discarding expensive designer outerwear and flimsy designer underwear. Comus’ high keening flute-voice hung over everything like a miasma; the smell of damp goat quickly became unbearable. Soon, caviar was being licked from indelicate crevices and the white flokati rugs were damaged beyond hope of repair.
Pamela crept from the apartment, red-faced and ashamed, as Comus threw himself on Magdalena, tearing the wrap-dress from her skinny body and thrusting his goat-haunches against her bony hips.
* * * *
After that night, with the unflagging assistance of Magdalena Delancy, Comus was launched upon society like some extremely communicable virus. Magdalena took him around to party after party, each of which was less likely to devolve into an orgy than the last, and each of which devolved more quickly than the one before it.
Pamela, who had taken to sitting at home with Buttons on her lap, watching wholesome reruns of Touched By An Angel and drinking copious quantities of hot cocoa, seethed. She’d been the one who found Comus, and invited him to the party in order to humiliate Magdalena Delancy. She’d been the one who brought him out of the park and bathed him and clothed him and fed him liverwurst. She’d been the one whose cat had almost been eaten.
Comus and Magdalena ... that horrible Magdalena with that horrible white throat of hers, and Comus nibbling on it and worse...
Pamela couldn’t bear to think about it.
Her depression over the matter was so pronounced that even her son Riley, who typically never noticed things about his mother, noticed it.
Riley was Pamela’s pride and joy. He lived at home, and his mother waited on him hand and foot. He had dabbled in college courses at the New School, but had given them up as being too pedestrian. Lately, he’d taken to hanging out around Union Square and exploring his personal relationship with Marxism. She thought that was very generous of him, even if it did mean that he frequently came home late, smelling of Gauloises and cheap beer, with tracts printed on cheap red paper bursting out of all of his pockets.
It certainly wasn’t her intention to mix Riley up in the Comus affair, especially after the protracted lecture she’d received for letting the faun make off with Riley’s favorite cashmere scarf. But after she’d schlumped listlessly around the apartment for a week in a lime velour jumpsuit and fuzzy slippers, Riley could hardly help but look up from his book of Derrida essays and exclaim, rather petulantly: “Honestly, mother! You look like a cleaning lady at a used-car dealership who’s just lost her last dollar playing online poker. What is wrong?”
And after such an accusation, how could Pamela avoid spilling out the whole story to him (leaving out most of the seamier orgy-specific details)?
Riley listened to the expurgated version of events with sober (if somewhat supercilious, as evinced by his steepled fingertips) interest, then shrugged as if all her problems were but chaff before his keen intellect.
“Well, it’s quite clear to me that he’s a figment of your deranged ego,” Riley said.
Pamela narrowed her eyes at him.
“What?” she asked. “How could that be? I mean ... he’s real.”
“It happens all the time,” Riley said. “Fantasies become realities. You’re working them out through the creation of this faun. What was it you said he asked you? If there was anything you desired?”
“Well, yes...”
“There you have it!” Riley’s fingers snapped the exclamation point. “Comus is the product of your own thwarted desires. Projection, mother. Pure and simple.” Then, obviously satisfied with the thorough manner in which he’d dispatched his mother’s difficulties, he stuck his nose back in the pages of Derrida.
Pamela was silent for a moment, not wanting to disturb him, but not especially pleased at being asked to swallow the assertion that her own thwarted desires had somehow created, whole cloth, a mythological creature in the heart of Central Park.
“If he’s a projection of my desires, then why isn’t he here right now?”
“Maybe you should ask yourself that,” Riley muttered.
“I’ll tell you why! Because he’s off with that horrible Magdalena Delancy! If he’s a projection of my desires, then how come she’s all over him? How come they’re running around town, making whoopie with all and sundry!”
Riley looked at her over the top of his reading glasses. “I certainly haven’t the least bit of interest in delving into your deepest, most disgusting desires, mother. Whatever they are, I’m sure that they’re bourgeois and pedestrian. My only recommendation is that you figure out a way to get over them immediately. All you have to do is confront whichever of your unnatural, perverse longings called this creature into existence. Then he’ll go away. Vanish into a puff of smoke, I imagine.”
Then, clearly bored with the subject, Riley rattled the ice in an empty glass that sat at his elbow, which Pamela took to mean that he desired a refill on his Diet Dr Pepper.
Nothing more was said about the faun or Pamela’s deranged ego that night. After a while, Riley left the apartment to revive his martyred hunt for a cashmere scarf to replace the one he’d lost, and Pamela was left alone with her thoughts.
She wasn’t quite sold on the idea that she herself had created the faun. But the whole question of desire was one that had been left hanging quite egregiously. The faun had asked her if she desired anything ... and he’d said he would help. But he hadn’t helped at all! The blatant unfairness of it rankled Pamela.
Pulling out her calendar, she scanned it with a seriousness of purpose typically associated with fighter pilots. Taking a red pen, she circled a particular date with great force and decisiveness.
* * * *
On the red-circled night in question, there was a party being held at the residence of one P.K. Stubbs, an antique dealer known both for the obsessive care of the items he sheltered in his home and the fastidious daintiness of his person. For weeks the party had been the subject of pleasant anticipation, as much because of P.K. Stubbs’ notorious prudery as Comus’ now-notorious ability to overcome such old-fashioned quaintness. P.K. Stubbs wouldn’t let things get out of hand, the common wisdom ran; surely it would be Comus’ Waterloo.
But by the time Pamela got to the party it was in riotous swing, with three lovely 16th century miniatures hanging from indiscreet and utterly inappropriate hangers, a very nice Louis Quatorze bedroom set being used in such a way that it would obviously require reupholstering, and P.K. Stubbs himself, desiccated and pale, doing things to the marble statues in his library that were almost guaranteed to diminish their resale value.
Pamela found Comus in the center of a pile of naked women. They were giggling and feeding him grapes, all bosoms and hair and armpits. Prominent among them was Magdalena Delancy, pale and skinny, her shoulder bones sharp as edged weapons. The women had denuded P.K. Stubbs’ houseplants and made a wreath of ivy and philodendron to ennoble Comus’ brow. And he did look magnificent, malicious and powerful and wild. He regarded Pamela’s clothed body with intense boredom.
“Yes?” he asked.
No words came out of her mouth. Pamela was uncomfortably aware of Magdalena Delancy staring at her, her eyes shimmering and fey. Was it just her imagination, Pamela wondered, or had Magdalena’s eyes gotten ... greener?
“Yes?” Comus asked again, louder, impatience and imperiousness mixed in equal measure.
“I want ... I desire ... I desire you to go back to the park and quit all this gallivanting around!”
She said it loudly, then closed her eyes as if she were blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. But when she opened them, Comus was still there, looking at her with disdainful astonishment.
“Come again?” he said. He let a lazy hand trail over Magdalena’s exposed nipple. Pamela gasped. She reached forward and slapped Comus’ hand down.
“I desire you to quit ... fondling ... Magdalena ... Delancy!” she said, more loudly this time.
“That isn’t what you desire,” Comus said, taking her hand and placing it firmly on Magdalena’s breast. “This is.”
Pamela pulled back, clutching her hand to her chest. “That’s a lie, a horrible lie!” she screeched.
Comus shook his head. “Neither of you knows the first thing about yourself,” he said, inclining his head toward Magdalena. “She doesn’t know what she desires either.” Magdalena blushed and looked away. “She thinks her desire is to be the most hated woman in New York. But all she really wants is for one person to love her and tell her what to do.”
Pamela stared at Magdalena’s face, watched the embarrassed flush creep up into her red cheeks. Astonishment filled her. Comus was right! Pamela would never have guessed it. She suddenly felt something she’d never ever thought she’d feel. She felt sorry for Magdalena.
“Poor Magdalena,” Pamela murmured gently.
Magdalena’s face went from pink to red and back again. “Like I want pity from a ... from a mousy little goose like you! Someone who won’t even stand up for herself! You disgust me!” she screeched, shaking with humiliation. She detangled herself hurriedly from the pile of naked flesh. She ran into the bathroom, slammed the door.
“Go after her,” Comus said, looking up at Pamela. “I told you I’d help you. She is what you truly desire, all the way down to the bones of your feet. There’s nothing you can do about it. You think hating her will help, but it won’t. It’ll just make you miserable.”
“You mean, filthy-minded thing!” Pamela took a step backward, heart pounding. “You don’t know anything. You’re just ... a dirty old goat! I’m sorry I ever created you!”
Comus narrowed his eyes at her. “Created me?” he said. “What an interesting thing to say. Who told you that?”
“My son,” she said. “Riley. A good, upstanding boy! If he knew what kind of ... what you think of me!”
“Your son?” Comus said. “The spoiled brat?” Sudden interest kindled in his voice. “He sounds very perceptive.”
“Oh, he is,” Pamela breathed. “He’s a genius, and a very good boy.” Thinking about her son made Pamela feel a little better. She had a son, after all. That meant she couldn’t possibly have any ... feelings for...
It was all just too horrible to think about. Pulling her coat tight around her body, she lowered her head and turned to go. Comus’ voice rang against her back. “I can help you, if you’d like,” he said.
Silence lingered. Pamela turned, looked at him. “What do you mean?”
Comus smiled slightly, but said nothing.
“Tell me,” Pamela said, her voice low. She suddenly realized she was shaking, shaking all over, as if there was an earthquake in her belly. “Help me.”
“I will help you,” Comus said. “But not here. Not now. I’ll come to your house for dinner tomorrow night.”
* * * *
Pamela prepared for Comus’ visit with the strength of ten. She channeled her formless anxiety into cleaning, and when she went so far as to pull the refrigerator out into the middle of the kitchen in order to get the mop behind it, Riley was moved to comment:
“Is this about those filthy unexpressed desires of yours? Really, mother, this is becoming quite disturbing to my routine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Pamela snapped. “Go read one of your stupid books and leave me alone.”
Riley stared at her in amazement. His mother had never spoken to him in this way before. He drew himself up indignantly.
“Mother, you’re the one with the unexpressed desires. I see no reason why you should take them out on my poor defenseless books!”
Pamela stopped mopping, and fixed Riley with a look of such intensity that it made him take a step back. She bared her teeth at him. “I don’t have any desires!” she roared. “If you’re going to stand around, at least make yourself useful! Go put the fruit on the table! He’ll be here any minute!”
A few minutes later, the downstairs buzzer sounded. Pamela hurried to the door. Their visitor—or rather, visitors—were already on the step.
The faun was there, and beside him, curved in perfect relation, stood Magdalena Delancy. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress, beautifully simple. A fur coat hung over her arm. Around her perfect throat she wore a strand of pearls. Pamela swallowed hard.
“I didn’t expect you both,” she whispered.
“Well, don’t think I wanted to come,” Magdalena mumbled grumpily, pushing into the apartment. “But he says he can help.”
“He’d better.” Pamela glared at Comus.
The faun threw his head back and laughed. “Humans,” he said. “Always the same.”
“Comus ... Magdalena...” Pamela said, as they came into the living room, “This is my son, Riley.”
Riley stared at the faun, at his stocky goat-legs, his shining black hooves. It was clear that the reality of Comus was far more intimidating than the intellectual abstraction of Comus.
Pamela noticed his bewilderment with strange satisfaction. “Still think he’s a product of my deranged ego?”
Riley was at a loss for words, but it was Comus who spoke next. “Actually, our dear little Riley is almost right. At least, he’s closer to right than ordinary people ever get.”
“Hah!” Riley said.
Comus touched an index finger to the underside of Riley’s chin, gently lifted it. “I said almost, you silly, self-satisfied little twit,” Comus said, staring into his eyes. “To be precise, I am a product of the deranged id, not the deranged ego. You really should try actually reading Freud, instead of just carrying his books around as props.”
Riley pressed his lips together, obviously scrambling for a suitable comeback. Instead, he settled for jerking his head away, cheeks flushed a violent pink.
Comus smiled. “Next, I am not the product of Pamela’s deranged id, or Magdalena’s, or any one person’s in particular. I am the product of every thwarted desire in this city. I am New York City’s deranged id.”
Pamela and Magdalena, who had taken seats as far away from each other as possible, exchanged glances.
“You see, Riley ... this city is fueled by dissatisfaction. It is driven by longing, desiring, wanting. Every once in a while, however, an anomaly will occur. One person. One special person who is completely, utterly, totally satisfied.”
Pamela didn’t like the way this was going. Leaping to her feet, she grabbed the bowl of fruit that Riley had put out. “Peach, anyone?”
“Riley,” Comus said, his eyes glittering, “is there anything you desire?”
“That’s the question you asked my mother!” Riley said softly.
Pamela froze, the plate of fruit heavy in her hands. She wanted to say something, to cry out a warning, but she couldn’t force words past her lips.
“Riley,” Comus repeated, spinning each word out like a silken thread, “is there anything you desire?”
“No,” Riley said abruptly, shaking his head in annoyance. “What could I possibly desire?”
“Ah,” Comus said. “Then you are the one I have been looking for. The one for whom I have been called forth. The one I must eradicate.”
The room grew dark and green. The whole apartment plunged into a thick gloom, as if the lights and windows had been darkened all at once; there was an eruption of rustling, slithering; underbrush and vines exploding from nowhere. Couches melted away. Walls and tables were gone. And just like that, they were in a wood, a cold dark wood with oak trees stretching up to an invisible, stormy sky.
It took a few moments for Pamela to get her bearings after the abrupt translocation. She was lying prone on the muddy ground, she realized, her cheek cold and damp. And then she heard Riley screaming.
“Mother!”
Riley was some ways off. Something was advancing on him, something large and black and shimmering; Comus, Pamela thought, horrified. He didn’t look even partially human anymore, he was huge and malformed, the edges of him blurring strangely with each movement, and so black that he seemed to be pulling in what little light found its way into this strange wild place.
“The City is disgusted by you.” The thing’s voice was deep and resonant, the voice of something that could only eat from the inside out, a tree whose roots cracked concrete. “The City will not abide you. The City demands you be expelled. The City demands that purity be restored!”
“He’s the defender of the City’s purity?” Magdalena’s voice was pitched somewhere between astonishment and amusement. Pamela glanced over at the woman, who was stretched out on a mossy sward, watching the proceedings with fascination.
“Mother! He’s going to kill me!” Riley squealed.
“Like hell he is,” Pamela growled, throwing herself at the huge, light-absorbing beast. She got her arms around the thing’s waist, screeching and roaring, bracing her heels in the slippery soil and pulling back with all her might.
“Magdalena!” Pamela barked, as the thing roared and thrashed her from side to side. “Magdalena, get over here and help me!”
“Who, me? He’s not my son!”
Pamela screamed in full-throated frustration as the thing reached back, grabbing a handful of her blouse and trying to shake her free. Pamela dug in her heels, blinking back tears of rage.
“Magdalena Delancy, you selfish, self-centered, horrible bitch! You are the meanest, rottenest, vilest woman I’ve ever met. And I’ll tell you something else! Your parties stink!”
Pamela caught glimpses of Magdalena’s astonished face. “My god, you’re a tigress!” she heard Magdalena murmur. “I never imagined...”
“Magdalena!” Pamela screamed, her voice cracking with strain as the beast whipsawed her around, scraping her leg hard against a tree. She felt blood trickle down along her anklebone. “Get over here right now and help me!”
In a flash, Magdalena was at her side, digging her long red manicured fingernails into the beast’s scalp. The creature screeched, arching back, as the combined weight of Pamela and Magdalena forced him back, first one staggering step, then two. Reaching up, Pamela got a hand around the thing’s ear and she twisted it hard; it wailed and screamed, sunk to its knees. Pamela and Magdalena swarmed up over it, battling him down, their hard little fists flying, thudding against black flesh. The thing sunk deeper and deeper beneath their combined weight.
“Die! Die, damn you!” Pamela was in a frenzy, her eyes alight with bloodlust and vengeance. Magdalena’s eyes kindled in response, and she took up the chant: “Die! Die! Die!”
They were sinking, sinking down, down into the ground, into the fragrant soil. All around them was the sound of the beast, roaring like the wind through trees, roaring with the pain of dreams desperately dreamed but never achieved, the agony of souls that never experienced a moment’s peace.
And then, with a roar and a mighty burst of effort, the beast freed itself, flinging both women aside. Magdalena went flying, landing hard against an outcropping of granite, her body making an awful hollow thump. Pamela fell heavily to the ground; the thing reached down and wrapped its hand around her throat, lifted her struggling to her feet, pinned her back against a nearby tree.
Pamela wrapped her hands around the beast’s grasping claw, looking into the monster’s eyes. They were a bright unnatural green. But they were Comus’ eyes, unmistakably.
“You horrible brute,” she choked past swollen lips. “If you’ve hurt her...”
“The purity of the City must be restored.” The words moved in her mind, vibrating her whole body. Lights were beginning to dance behind her eyes, light and blackness all mingled together.
“It will be,” she said, staring into those green eyes, holding them, willing the blackness to stay at bay for just a moment longer.
“Do you promise?” The beast’s thoughts were like ants in her skull, itching along every neuron. “Do you swear?”
“I swear,” Pamela rasped.
“All right, then,” Comus said. “Fair enough.”
And then, just as Riley had predicted, Comus vanished in a puff of smoke.
* * * *
Pamela fell to the ground, hands clutching at her throat. When the spots cleared from her vision, she stumbled over to where Magdalena lay softly groaning in a pool of dappled sunlight. Pamela brought a tender hand up to brush dirt from Magdalena’s cheek; when Magdalena’s eyes met Pamela’s, they were filled with wonder and admiration.
“You were magnificent!” she breathed. “The way you ... why, you killed that thing! With your bare hands!”
Pamela wrapped her arms around Magdalena’s body, held her tight, then held her a little less tight when Magdalena’s agonized yelp indicated that she must have broken a rib or two in the fall. Magdalena buried her face in Pamela’s shoulder, tears making streaks down her muddy cheeks.
“I think you’re wonderful,” Magdalena said, her voice soft and muffled. “I’m sorry ... I’m so sorry ... that I was so horrible to you all those times.”
Pamela kissed the top of her head. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”
* * * *
It was at about this moment that Riley, who had been cowering behind a tree, took up a piteous groaning. “Mother!” he sobbed. “Oh, mother!”
“Shut up, Riley,” Pamela said. “If you can moan, you’ll live.”
“I can’t believe the gall of that ... that thing!” Riley said. “So now it’s a crime to like your life or something?” He looked around himself, eyeing the verdancy with horror and contempt. He plucked a twig from his hair and held it away from him in a two-fingered grip. “Where the hell are we?”
“Central Park,” Pamela said, helping the injured Magdalena to her feet. “In the ravine.”
Riley looked at his mother and Magdalena, who remained clasped in each other’s arms long after any conceivable medical necessity would have caused them to do so. Riley’s eyes widened. “Mother, what the hell are you two doing?”
“We’re going home,” Pamela said.
“And about time, too!” Riley said, spryly leaping to his feet and dusting the muck from the back of his trousers. “I could use a bath and a nice hot cup of tea. You know how I like my tea, mother.”
“Riley,” she said loudly. “From now on, you’ll get your own goddamn tea.”
Riley blinked at her. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘from now on—’”
“I heard the words, Mother ... but I find the sentiment surrounding them egregious! Insupportable! After all I’ve been through, you choose this moment, of all moments, to...”
“And speaking of tea, you’d better get your own teapot to brew it in too. Because as of this moment, I’m kicking you out. Into the street without a penny.” Pamela lifted a hand, snapped her fingers. “I’m cutting you off like that! I’ll have your things sent wherever you’d like.”
“Pamela,” Magdalena said softly, reproachfully, “don’t do something you’ll regret. This won’t make any of us happy...”
“Exactly,” Pamela said, looking deep into Magdalena’s eyes.
Magdalena nodded once, sighing. “You know best,” she said.
“Mother?” Riley wailed plaintively, as Pamela helped Magdalena limp through the tangled underbrush. “You can’t do this to me! Run off and leave me ... you and that ... woman! I want ... I want ... I want to come home!”
Good, Pamela thought. Want that.
Around them, the spirit of the City settled comfortably back into its ancient, accustomed dissatisfaction.