Megan

Chapter 2 of Microcosmia

Microcosmia

Chapter Two

Megan

As a lad Cristian was walked through these animals like a toy poodle through rottweilers, reminded again and again to distrust smiles and promises, to refuse treats and favors. Residents were introduced as aunts and uncles, Regulars as either friends of the family, business associates, or art lovers. Each had capered for his affection, and perhaps he’d have leaned to one or the other, if not for the steely hand of Karl. For the longest time, even into his twenties, he believed that Karl was his true father, and that Karl’s own father was that festering nightmare in the Big Bedroom.

His only experience with Woman, discounting those unsettling glimpses of Richard’s strumpets collapsed in their fumes, was Megan.

Meg throve in the mansion; she blossomed, if that can be said of evil things. She became, in fact, extraordinarily beautiful, but not in a way that draws healthy men. Her face, a bone-white, eerily pretty, almost Oriental mask, possessed an apparent ability to absorb or reflect light according to mood. Sometimes circles appeared beneath her eyes, vanishing even as you stared. Her cheeks might be bruised one moment and alabaster the next. And her lips, poison and plum, could swell like leeches on a pig, or thin to two slowly pursing lines.

Cristian’s paternal influence came through Karl, who had Megan pegged. But he couldn’t keep her in check forever: the Raptor, more senile by the day, nevertheless realized his son would suffocate without something resembling a mother. So old John instituted rotating possession periods. Cristian was reared alternately by both a mother figure and a father figure, permitting neither to establish a permanent chokehold on his soul. Theirs was a war of iron wills. Once in a while, however, John drifted back into the real world long enough to demand the two put up a parental front. On these occasions they could be seen coldly escorting the boy, each holding a hand as though he were a wishbone, paying no attention to Richard and Jayce, or to the ever-changing field of junkies, petty thieves, and lounging w****s. They merely strolled, quietly and mechanically, sharing a hatred so deep it was rumored to cast its own shadow.

Karl’s amazing self-control allowed him to respond to all things Megan with icy silence. He instructed the boy more as staunch lumbering mentor than as dedicated substitute father. Meg, for her part, possessed in spades the innate cunning of her gender--all those subtleties and sympathies and soft ways guaranteed to warp a sensitive youngster’s development. She practiced this age-old witchcraft on Cristian with bloodless precision, from a possession period’s saccharine commencement to its histrionic demise.

Right off the bat Mommy exposed Karl as a very, very bad man--a monster, an inarticulate felon whose every word was a lie devised solely to destroy young Cristian. This scheming pervert kept a sick old man prisoner in the Big Bedroom; the same Sick Old Man Cristian was periodically forced to view; a man like a dying fish in a diamond bowl. Karl’s one great goal in life was to poison little Cristian’s mind with hypnotic stories and “facts” out of his dirty books, and so blind him to the warmth and love only a mother could provide. Megan fought ice with fire: she smothered the boy--massaged him and caressed him and hugged him and kissed him; did all those naughty and emasculating things Karl warned of. Cristian was always “Mommy’s little man,” his upturned face ever nestled between her tight white breasts. And as the youngster approached puberty, he found his face urged deeper, and felt those bruising lips fuller, and lingering.

The boy’s confusion and emotional scarring did not escape Karl. Unable to break through John’s delirium long enough to clearly describe Cristian’s danger, he could only respond with a greater emphasis on schooling. Karl’s possession periods became spartan affairs, Megan’s periods, in retaliation, brazenly sexual. Cristian Honey Vane grew into a morbid teenager trapped in a haunted house with an iron grip.

During these critical formative years, a second woman further muddled his impulses. This lady didn’t like Mommy at all. She would show at the mansion irregularly, usually during one of Megan’s possession periods, and argue shrewishly while Karl, cold umbrella that he was, corralled the boy in a Foyer corner and monitored the action like a cobra.

This lady, always dressed in a very severe woman’s business suit, didn’t want Mommy to hold Cristian too tightly, or to speak with him about Karl or the Sick Old Man. She could get really mad, and one day she made the staring security men in the pink and white suits drag Mommy off. Once they were gone she held Cristian the way Mommy did, while Karl told him it was okay, okay, okay.

But it just wasn’t the same. Cristian eventually concluded that the suited lady was Karl’s wife, though she’d appeared young enough to be his daughter. Megan, stomping in the next day, solved the paradox. The Other Lady, Mommy explained, was a witch working with Karl, who was a kind of man-witch. They both lived in the Big Bedroom under the Sick Old Man’s bed. They wanted to steal little Cristian’s soul. They wanted to keep him hypnotized in a big box in the Big Bedroom, and take him out every day for miscellaneous tortures. But they couldn’t work their evil so long as the Sick Old Man was alive. Mommy was here to protect him. Richard and Jayce, all the bogus aunts and uncles, all the “Security” men, and all the little brown people in the pink and cream costumes were zombies, manipulated by the man-witch and that skanky, overdressed Other Lady. The Sick Old Man’s passing would be marked by a terrible battle of Good and Evil. It was up to Cristian to hang onto Mommy, to look at no one but Mommy, to trust no one but Mommy. Together they would destroy all the bad people and live happily ever after in the mansion.

That great battle had been slated to come any day.

But now Cristian was twenty-nine, and he was numbly enduring Megan’s penultimate Sunroom embrace. All traces of blue were gone. Her lips were plumper than ever, her cheeks dappled with rose. And this embrace was nothing like the chilly enclosure that had accompanied him on his uncertain path to manhood. It was a vital hold, full of tremendous anticipation. It was the grip of a woman with good news.

“Oh, Cris, oh … oh Cris! It’s John. He’s--I’m so afraid.”

Cristian gently pried himself loose. “We all are.”

A pair of middle-aged men, blocking the Foyer entryway like bodyguards, quietly watched him approach. They took their sweet time stepping aside. Megan hung back, her moist eyes hard.

Richard’s sideward pace was as suave as his expression. He smiled wanly and offered Cristian a facetious nod, swishing a bourbon on the rocks in one hand while tapping ash off a Parliament with the other. Richard was now fifty-one, having lived in the mansion since he was Cristian’s present age. But he no longer despised the younger man. He’d learned to observe the sole blood heir to the Vane fortune with cynical admiration, as an aloof fellow predator; one who would certainly receive the bulk of the inheritance, but would nevertheless deal the choicest cuts to those who knew him best. Besides, Richard had some really sticky stuff to sling against Cristian, against gay Jayce, and against that conniving witch Megan--and some inspired accusations to hang on Karl, if need be. He was sure Cristian would be positively relieved to have Honey’s legal dogs turn over control of a few mega-holdings, rather than spend the rest of his days denying perfectly credible tales of homosexuality and parental abuse. The Rest’s self-proclaimed Top Dog was trolling for a large piece of the corpse, and for a nice chunk of hush money on the side.

The other man’s step aside brought to mind the sideways advance of a slowly circling Sumo wrestler. Jayce was one of the scariest creatures the West Coast had spawned: obscenely tattooed and extravagantly pierced, with a face creatively slashed and sutured under a spiked platinum Mohawk. Scarier still was today’s choice of attire; a billowing silk apricot blouse draped by fifteen pounds of quarter-inch anodized steel chain, a blood-red miniskirt over leopard leggings and spurred platform shoes. On anyone other than Jayce the overall effect would have been supremely comical. But there wasn’t a damned thing funny about the man. Jayce hated Cristian, hated Richard, hated Megan, hated his gang almost as much as he hated himself. But no one on earth did he hate more than John Beregard Vane. He’d spent over two decades kissing up to that depressing cadaver, and he, like Richard and Megan, felt he’d done a sight more than the fair-haired son to earn the lion’s share.

Cristian’s impact on the crowd was that of a stone on still water. Residents backpedaled into the Foyer, stepped on darting children, collided with Help. Help, in response, backed into furniture, spilled into the Ballroom. For once, Cristian made sure he didn’t miss a single darting residential eye. All his life, he’d deliberately blocked out names and particulars, remembering Residents simply as Uncle Bungle, Aunt Fat, etc. These Residents had raised their families in the mansion. Their children and grandparents used the Sunroom and Foyer as dayrooms. Cristian parted them all like a hot knife cutting through butter, only to pause tellingly on the Foyer steps before strolling across the Ballroom into the Grand Hall. He zigzagged between the leaning busts and bric-a-brac until he met a pair of cold blue eyes.

Karl unfolded his arms. The Big Bedroom’s heavy walnut door featured a gorgeous woodcut of an eagle in repose, its head buried between its wings. The Austrian lowered his head somberly and rapped twice.

Half a minute later the quickly-reinstated Doctor Steinbaum appeared. He glowered at Cristian, then at the faces of Residents peering round the Ballroom’s Grand Hall arch.

“Go ahead,” he sniffed. “I guess it’s too late for you to do any more harm.” The men avoided eye contact. “But behave yourself. I’ll stay well back against the wall; I’d be derelict if I left you two alone.”

The Big Bedroom’s antiseptic smell only exaggerated the underlying stench of extreme age: Karl had scrubbed the floor and bedposts with isopropyl alcohol while awaiting the doctor’s arrival, and Steinbaum had applied a merbromin solution to scrapes incurred in the old man’s bathroom fall. Karl had closed the curtains, leaving only a crack. Very little sunlight found its way in.

John looked like he belonged on a slab instead of a bed.

He appeared exactly as a cadaver--blue and white, stiff and supine, with deep blotches on his face and arms. The only proofs of life were the oxygen tubes fitted to his nostrils, a pair of chattering machines connected for ventilation and dialysis, an intravenous drip attached to his left arm, and a collection of thin wires leading from his chest to a portable monitor beside Pooh. Even as Cristian stared, that emaciated chest quivered, slowly rose an inch, and collapsed. The event was accompanied by a small pinging sound, and by a corresponding spike of light on the monitor. It seemed to Cristian, standing quietly in the dim room, that almost half a minute passed between pings.

Steinbaum leaned back against the door and watched impassively as Cristian crept to the bed.

The old man came off pretty much like last time, except for a couple of details only apparent to the three men now controlling the room. In the first place, that nauseating bruised-albino look was now profoundly underscored by purple patches that appeared to well and snake. John was hemorrhaging even as his son stared. In the second place, it was the first time the old man’s lips were not moving. On past visits John’s mouth had worked convulsively, even during deep sleep.

As a child, a spellbound Cristian had observed that mouth in perpetual motion; sometimes operating thoughtlessly, sometimes reminding him what a good boy he was. Sooner or later John would begin to ramble. The rambling would diminish to jabbering, and the jabbering to silence. But still that mouth would writhe.

Now Cristian considered the mouth with morbid curiosity. He had no familial interest in the repulsive creature beneath him. Long ago any natural concern he might have harbored had been replaced by disgust and impatience.

The eyes rolled behind the lids. At last the mouth quivered. The eyes opened as if he’d been kicked, and his chest filled with air. John’s eyes found Cristian’s.

Cristian watched the lips pull apart until there was only a black hole girded by gray, freely bleeding gums. The eyes became desperate.

“Please,” the corpse managed. “Say.”

There was an urgent exchange just outside. Cristian heard Karl open the door and realized that members of the Foundation’s legal staff were working their way in. A strange hubbub blew down the Hall. Karl squeezed around Littleroth’s enormous posterior and closed the door.

“I promise you, Father,” Cristian whispered, his eyes locked on John’s. “I promise to do you proud.”

John shuddered head to toe. His back arched and relaxed. A few seconds later his right arm rose and hovered a foot off the bed.

Karl, standing tearfully in the corner, punched a button on a wall plate. A fixture high on an adjacent wall immediately emitted a bright white beam that bathed John’s chest. As Karl continued to jab the button the beam rose slowly, an inch at a time, at last focusing on the old man’s twisted features. He pressed another button. The room’s lights dimmed until the Raptor’s purple face, flapping like a fish out of water, was cleanly lit for recording.

Sickened, Cristian took a deep step back. Littleroth oozed right around him, his usually heavy hands a blur; vacant one instant, occupied the next. In a single sinuous motion, he flipped open his briefcase, swept it onto the bed, and extracted a fistful of papers. He wiggled his fingers. A gold pen materialized out of nowhere. Thyme, video camera poised at eye level, waltzed around Cristian effortlessly and melted onto one knee. Bryant seemed to glide to the bed’s far side, where he produced a small DAT recorder from a vest pocket with all the facility of a magician plucking a rabbit from a top hat. He one-handedly played the instrument’s controls like a keyboard while whisking the recorder’s microphone to within an inch of John’s spewing lips. All three men had moved smoothly, and in concert.

The ghoulish precision made Cristian turn away, putting him nose-to-nose with Karl, instinctively advancing on these brutally efficient men surrounding his master. Cristian watched as a dark cloud cut off the light in those cool blue eyes. In slow motion Karl’s chin dropped onto the younger man’s shoulder. Cristian, reflexively extending his arms, found himself in an intensely uncomfortable embrace. He awkwardly patted the closest thing to a father he’d ever known. The room rolled backward. Karl’s arms fell to his sides, his chin to his chest. Both men listened to the small bedside sounds; the scuffing and shuffling, the whispers and whirrs, the painfully executed scratching of pen on paper. Karl stormed past with a little choking cry. There was the sound of paper being violently torn, a few mangled words.

Cristian unclenched his fists. Taking the deepest breath of his life, he turned back to face the room.