Read Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories for Free Online Page A

smooth rubber mats. She stared open-mouthed, neither appalled nor frightened but fascinated by the conundrum before her: how did that hand fit there , and whose leg was that ? She inched backward, pressing herself against the door and trying to stay in the shadows—just inches ahead of her ribbons of luminous bluish light streamed from lamps hung high overhead. The chiaroscuro of pallid bodies and black furniture, shiny with sweat and here and there red-streaked, or brown; the mere sight of so many bodies, real bodies —flesh spilling over the edge of tabletops, too much hair or none at all, eyes squeezed shut in ecstasy or terror and mouths open to reveal stained teeth, pale gums—the sheer fluidity of it all enthralled her. She felt as she had, once, pulling aside a rotted log to disclose the ant’s nest beneath, masses of minute fleeing bodies, soldiers carrying eggs and larvae in their jaws, tunnels spiraling into the center of another world. Her brow tingled, warmth flushed her from brow to breast . . .
    Another world, that’s what she had found then; and discovered again now.
    “ Out .”
    Jane sucked her breath in sharply. Fingers dug into her shoulder, yanked her back through the metal door so roughly that she cut her wrist against it.
    “No lurkers, what the fuck—”
    A man flung her against the wall. She gasped, turned to run but he grabbed her shoulder again. “Christ, a fucking girl.”
    He sounded angry but relieved. She looked up: a huge man, more fat than muscle. He wore very tight leather briefs and the same black sleeveless shirt with a golden bee embroidered upon it. “How the hell’d you get in like that ?” he demanded, cocking a thumb at her.
    She shook her head, then realized he meant her clothes. “I was just trying to find my way out.”
    “Well you found your way in. In like fucking Flynn.” He laughed: he had gold-capped teeth, and gold wires threading the tip of his tongue. “You want to join the party, you know the rules. No exceptions.”
    Before she could reply he turned and was gone, the door thudding softly behind him. She waited, heart pounding, then reached and pushed the bar on the door.
    Locked. She was out, not in; she was nowhere at all. For a long time she stood there, trying to hear anything from the other side of the door, waiting to see if anyone would come back looking for her. At last she turned, and began to find her way home.
    —
    Next morning she woke early, to the sound of delivery trucks in the street and children on the canal path, laughing and squabbling on their way to the zoo. She sat up with a pang, remembering Da vid Bierce and her volunteer job; then recalled this was Saturday not Monday.
    “Wow,” she said aloud. The extra days seemed like a gift.
    For a few minutes she lay in Fred and Andrew’s great four-poster, staring abstractedly at where she had rested her mounted specimens atop the wainscoting—the hybrid hawkmoth; a beautiful Honduran owl butterfly, Caligo atreus ; a mourning cloak she had caught and mounted herself years ago. She thought of the club last night, mentally retracing her steps to the hidden back room; thought of the man who had thrown her out, the interplay of light and shadow upon the bodies pinned to mats and tables. She had slept in her clothes; now she rolled out of bed and pulled her sneakers on, forgoing breakfast but stuffing her pocket with ten- and twenty-pound notes before she left.
    It was a clear cool morning, with a high pale-blue sky and the young leaves of nettles and hawthorn still glistening with dew. Someone had thrown a shopping cart from the nearby Sainsbury’s into the canal; it edged sideways up out of the shallow water, like a frozen shipwreck . A boy stood a few yards down from it, fishing, an absent, placid expression on his face.
    She crossed over the bridge to the canal path and headed for the High Street. With every step she took the day grew older, noisier, trains rattling on the bridge behind her