Dancing with the Dead by John Lutz

Author:John Lutz [Lutz, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781453219034
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-01-20T13:00:00+00:00

24

RISING STRAIGHT UP from the bed, Mary gazed down at her sleeping form, then drifted inches from the ceiling, swooped low, and passed through the window pane as if it were a sheet of cold water.

And she was high up into the night. Everything below was in vivid detail in the artificial illumination of the city. The surgical-like seams of tarred roofs, the silver turnscrews on the domed aluminum tops of streetlights, and, as she rose higher, the geometric maze of blocks and then neighborhoods. Beneath her, unaware of her, nighthawks circled, their wings winking like black sequins.

But up here the air was thin, and she was having difficulty breathing. Her lungs pumped desperately, thirsting for oxygen that existed only at lower levels. She could hear herself begin to rasp, shrill and airless screams that trailed away in the void.

She awoke with Jake on top of her, pinning her to the mattress. Her wrists were in his merciless grip, nailed to her wadded pillow. He’d worked her twisted nightgown up above her breasts, and his nude body pressed down on her with monstrous weight. She could move nothing but her head and her legs. She thrashed her legs helplessly in the air, pounding his buttocks with her heels. He laughed, liking that.

“Jake, damn it!”

His only answer was his bellowslike breathing.

“Goddammit, Jake, get off me!”

For an instant he raised his sweating body and she could breathe. Then he was tight and hot against her again, and inside her even though she was still dry. She heard herself whine, then bit her lip against the pain.

“Mary likes that, huh?” he asked.

She made no sound.

He began the relentless rhythm.

He’d at least used some kind of lubricant, probably the K-Y jelly, so the pain lessened somewhat. He grunted, probing her particularly deep, seeking soft distances.

“Like that?” he asked again.

He released her wrists; what could she do with her hands now anyway?

After shifting his weight slightly, he began moving faster. Thrusting! Thrusting!

A woman in the room was moaning, her breath catching. Who it was Mary had no idea. What was happening had nothing to do with her. Nothing.

She lay as if crucified with her limp arms spread wide, gazing up into darkness and listening to the perfect rhythm of the headboard beating against the wall, and in her mind she danced.

“The more you feel the music,” Mel told her that evening at the studio, “the easier it’ll be to move to it.”

He took her hand gently and led her across the dance floor to where one of the big Bose speakers was standing on its pedestal. A mambo was pounding out of it, almost loud enough to rattle Mary’s fillings.

“Put your haaand on the speaker,” Mel said, imitating a televangelist, and pressed her palm to the warm side of the wooden box.

With each drumbeat or deep bass note she could feel the speaker throb. She let the syncopated rhythm pulsate up her arm and into her body, down to the floor.

Mel raised his forefinger and cocked his head to the side, listening for the one beat.

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