From: szmagaj <szmagaj@wetware.com> Newsgroups: talk.bizarre Subject: penny dreadful Date: Mon, 1 Dec 1997 22:22:19 -0800 Organization: Castle Wetware Lines: 166 Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.96.971201222007.8642A-100000@wetware> X-Sender: szmagaj@wetware "What's your name?" I asked her when we first met. "Penny. Penny Dreadful," she replied with a little smirk that meant stay out of my closets. That was all the name she would ever give. She came to live with us in the fall, trailed her black lace and the fragrant smoke of her clove cigarettes across our lives for the space of one semester, and then was gone. She smoked a lot and bought her black-and-gold cigarettes in fifty dollar cartons every week. She ate so little I would have thought she was anorexic, had she not looked to have a perfectly healthy figure. She spoke even less than she ate, but that was to be expected. We were normals, she was a goth, and never the twain shall meet. She attended classes sketchily. We shared an evening class, to which she showed up only on scheduled exam days. A month or so into the semester, someone started killing female students. First one, then another a few weeks later, then another. It made national news and occupied the local headlines for weeks at a time. A lot of parents pulled their daughters out of school. The campus police force was increased. We were told to keep our doors and windows locked and not go anywhere alone after dark. Most class nights, I caught a ride home with someone. Everyone was eager to make sure no one was in any danger. It's amazing how something terrible can pull people together and create a sense of unity where there was none before. On exam nights, Penny and I walked home together. She dressed provocatively. For some reason, even though I didn't know her, it worried me that none of us knew where she was in the wee hours of the night and morning. She went out all the time, told no one where she was going, and didn't seem to feel the least bit nervous about walking alone. These evenings, it made me feel better to know that there was one less vulnerable female out there. We lived very close to campus, so the walk was short. We didn't talk much. We were together for convenience, not for companionship. We exchanged a few words about the test we'd just taken--she always seemed to think the tests were ridiculously easy--we talked about the leaves changing color and whether it would rain the next weekend or not. Conversation always petered out after a few minutes, and we would walk the rest of the way in silence. One night, close to Halloween, she persuaded me to cut through the cemetery that lay between our house and the campus. It would cut five minutes off the walk, she said, and besides, it was lovely. The moon was very bright that night. "I always walk through here," she told me, looking back over her shoulder as she picked her way expertly through the headstones. "It's the best place to be. It's quiet. You can think here." She smiled in an uncharacteristically friendly way. She was wearing her usual black lipstick and heavy eyeliner, and all I could see of her face was a white oval punctuated by three pools of darkness. Seeing her like that made me feel strange, and I closed my eyes briefly to get my bearings. In that moment, she disappeared. "Penny?" I called. There was no answer, but I saw some bushes moving to my right, so I pushed through them, assuming she had gone that way. She was on the other side, standing a short way from me. She was looking at two headstones, very old and crumbling, which leaned in towards one another. As I looked at her, the pools around her eyes widened, and I realized she was crying and making her eyeliner run. She looked up at me. "It's David and Harriet," she said, as if these were names I would recognize. She pointed at the headstones. I could barely discern the indentations where the names and epitaphs must have been engraved. Perhaps they were legible in daylight. I went closer, stood beside her. "Husband and wife. They died within a week of each other. Their headstones have leaned together like that over the centuries, as if they still long for each other." It was sad. Standing there in the graveyard with her, thinking about these two lovers who would never touch again, I felt a twinge of what it must be that made her dress all in black and think of nothing but darkness. I looked at her. It's strange how moonlight can do things to people. I saw her in a way I never had before. She wasn't weird, she was a human being. The wind turned her hair into a cloud around her pale face, and she was beautiful. I wanted her. I wanted to be her. The line between the two was so thin I couldn't tell the difference and didn't care. She looked up at me, and she was smiling like she knew exactly what I was thinking. She reached out and touched my face, ran a fingertip across my cheek and lips. Her touch melted me inside. She came right up to me and put her face very close to mine. I could see her eyes, which were very, very dark, gleaming. They were dry; I must have imagined that she had been crying. She smelled good--like cloves and the Opium cologne she always wore. "Don't worry, Amy," she whispered. "You're pretty, too." She saw through me, through all my life back to my little girl years. It made my head spin, and I closed my eyes again, trying not to cry and not liking how much I liked the way she made me feel. She started laughing, but not in a mean way. Her hand was cool against my face for a second more, and then she was gone. This time, I didn't look for her when I opened my eyes. I just walked home alone. We didn't see much of each other the rest of the semester. I got rides home from night class and steered clear of her cemetery. Two more girls were killed, the last one, who was not a student, just before Christmas break. The news of these depressed me even more than the ones before, and I avoided the papers and television as much as possible. When we got back from break, Penny had disappeared from the house. I never saw her again, neither on campus, nor in the town. Maybe she failed or dropped out, or maybe her parents pulled her out of school. The killings didn't resume after the holidays. Even though she had certainly just moved out--all her things were gone and she had left a check for the last phone bill--I was secretly afraid that she had become a victim. I said nothing about it to anyone, though. It was too wild to be anything but my imagination running away with me. It wasn't until March, when I was putting my winter coat into its plastic cover at the back of my closet, that I found what she had left me. It was the kind of velvet that seems to suck the light into itself and give it back only when it folds a certain way. It was long and flowing, and it smelled like her. It was the dress she had had on that night in the cemetery. I put it on, and it fit me perfectly. It was early evening, not yet completely dark. I pulled on a jacket over the dress and walked to the cemetery. It looked tame and pleasant, with a few spring flowers nodding around the bases of the trees. I went in and found my way back to David and Harriet's plot. They were there, the stones leaning towards each other as sweetly and sadly as ever. With the last little bit of twilight, I could read what was engraved on them. David and Harriet Jones, died 1758. There were some fresh carnations on the earth between the two stones. I picked them up to smell them, and a small piece of torn, faded paper fell out. Even though I had been avoiding the news, I couldn't help recognizing what was pencilled there. Six women, each with a line drawn through her name. Penny was not on the list, but then, I had never thought that was her real name. Two thirds of the way down the list, a name had been written so hard that the pencil tore through the paper in two places. The name had subsequently been erased, but it had left enough of an impression that I could still read it. It was my own. -- szmagaj@wetware.com