“Hello Stephan, you’re looking well… I almost didn’t recognize you.” … “Would you like some lemonade… just made?” … “Never were much of a talker, were you, son? Oh, don’t worry about disturbing my wife. She’s fast asleep, just in there. Would you like to take a look?” … “There’s no need to stand on ceremony in this home. She’s a beautiful woman and I wouldn’t begrudge you a peek… and maybe more. I’m an old man, as anyone can plainly see and can no longer please her as I would like.”
Josh Davies is dressed in a moldy maroon bathrobe and dirty gray house slippers.
Before shuffling through the dingy white doors of the nearby kitchen, he directs his guest to remove his hat – actually a discolored beige baseball cap of some sort – and to take a seat on a dusty sky-blue couch.
From the couch, Stephan can make out a dim green light through a crack in the bedroom door of Josh Davies’s wife. He considers approaching the door to take that peek, but without the knowledge of the man who’d invited him to do so.
The sounds from the kitchen ring loud and clear: the creaking hinges of the refrigerator door, the clinking of ice cubes against the sides of the glass decanter, the rattle of metal utensils from their tray in the drawer of the wooden kitchen counter.
“So, how did you manage to lose your head in Lisbon,” Stephan finally asks, surprised himself at the question he’s asked, just as Davies reenters the apartment’s sitting room.
The old man stops to smile, as if recalling some odd circumstance, some curious mental image possibly only obliquely related to the topic of discussion raised by this uninvited guest.
“There’s no shortage of events that can befall a man in Portugal, you should know. Its rugged coast stretched out along the mid-Atlantic, basking in the sun of past adventures, indifferent to the next warlike incursion that might erupt from the smoldering sands of the savage Sahara.”
Stephan lifts the tall clear glass of ice and yellow liquid placed on a tray in front of him and gently sips its contents with the caution of a seasoned connoisseur. Its cold stings his teeth and numbs his throat, but it’s delicious and refreshing to his parched and weary insides.
“Gazing at one’s watery image from the towers of the Torre de Blem, it’s just a short fall to perdition, head first into a voyage of personal discovery. Or maybe one might endure decapitation at the Convento do Cristo, under siege by Saracens in centuries past, a Knight Templar cut down in his prime. Or even earlier among the red bricks of Silves in the al-Gharb, where Roman, Visigoth and Moor alike stuck their necks out in defense of the established order.”
Stephan has finished his lemonade and now taken to stirring the half-melted ice along the bottom of the watery glass. And just as before, a line of inquiry erupts from within him before he can think to pose it.
“Well, I can’t get my head around it, if you’ll excuse the expression. Welsh Losser was carved up for fish food, his fireplug of a noggin attached to the end of line and pole. But from those very same waters, not so long thereafter, emerges your crown, your crumpet, your cranium, your skull, without a body anywhere in sight. As if the Dnieper itself had swallowed you whole, only to spit up what it could not digest, what it found most unpalatable and distasteful, back onto the very shores of this city from which you’d fed it another man’s body. It’s like a bait and switch – again, please pardon the expression…”
“Stranger things have happened,” remarks Davies and then disappears back into the kitchen carrying Stephan’s empty lemonade glass and stirring stick.
Stephan can hear the old man whistling as he runs water from the kitchen sink, muffling those same sounds of clinking glass, rattling cutlery, the dull scrape of the wooden drawer along its grooves beneath the kitchen countertop.
The apartment is otherwise silent: no noisy appliances, annoying neighbors or street sounds from beyond the balcony.
Stephan’s attention is again drawn to the green light emitted through the crack in the bedroom door of Josh Davies’s wife. Eyes wide and ears pricked to any change in the noise coming from the kitchen, he avails himself of the moment and approaches the door.
It’s shut tight but not locked, so he puts his weight into it while holding tight to the doorknob to avoid the door swinging open with great noise.
Within the room, upon the bed, he espies a lone sleeping figure, the long legs and slender back of a prostrate female. But she has no head!
At least it can’t be seen from the doorway in which Stephan is standing in the half-light. Maybe it’s hidden under that large down pillow, thinks Stephan. The rest of the bedding – the sheets, cover, and an empty pillowcase – have been pushed to the side and sagging off the other end of the bed. The nude female form is almost fully exposed, immobile and inert.
The rest of the room looks typically female – a large wardrobe against the other wall, clothes bulging out from its massive doors; a chest of drawers topped with a three-paneled mirror, its small lights along the top; a hairbrush, makeup, tubes of cream, perfume, a manicure case… and a mask.
Stephan feels a strange sensation over his shoulder and turns abruptly to find Josh Davies standing directly behind him, the eyes round and bulging, strained in their orbits, the mouth a large black hole, on the verge of laughter, the rest of the face petrified in grotesque merriment, like that of a clown, a circus clown, center ring, staring at a mesmerized, fear-stricken audience unable to move, much less run.
To be continued
Filed by Steve Kowalski, on assignment for the Cantankerous Curmudgeon, June 21, 2017