Walk on the Wild Side

Cedar Lane



He was back at Cedar Lane again, in the big house where he had spent his childhood, growing up there until time to go away to college. He was the youngest, and his parents had sold the house then, moving into something smaller and more convenient in a newer and nicer suburban development.

A rite of passage, but for Garrett Larkin it truly reinforced the reality that he could never go home again. Except in dream. And dreams are what the world is made of.

At times it puzzled him that while he nightly dreamed of his boyhood home on Cedar Lane, he never dreamed about any of the houses he had lived in since.

Sometimes the dreams were scary.

Sometimes more so than others.

It was a big two-story house plus basement, built just before the war, the war in which he was born. It was very solid, faced with thick stones of pink-hued Tennessee marble from the local quarries. There were three dormer windows thrusting out from the roof in front, and Garrett liked to call it the House of the Three Gables because he always thought the Hawthorne book had a neat spooky title. He and his two brothers each had his private hideout in the little dormer rooms—just big enough for shelves, boxes of toys, a tiny desk for making models or working jigsaw puzzles. Homework was not to intrude here, relegated instead to the big desk in Dad’s never-used study in the den downstairs.

Cedar Lane was an old country lane, laid out probably at the beginning of the previous century along dirt farm roads. Now two narrow lanes of much-repaved blacktop twisted through a narrow gap curtained between rows of massive cedar trees. Garrett’s house stood well back upon four acres of lawn, orchards, and vegetable garden—portioned off from farmland as the neighborhood shifted from rural to suburban just before the war.

It had been a wonderful house to grow up in—three boys upstairs and a sissy older sister with her own bedroom downstairs across the hall from Mom and Dad. There were two flights of stairs to run down—the other leading to the cavernous basement where Dad parked the new car and had all his shop tools and gardening equipment, and where dwelt the Molochian coal furnace named Fear and its nether realm, the monster-haunted coal cellar. The yard was bigger than any of his friends had, and until he grew old enough to have to mow the grass and cuss, it was a limitless playground to run and romp with the dogs, for ball games and playing cowboy or soldier, for climbing trees and building secret clubhouses out of boxes and scrap lumber.

Garrett loved the house on Cedar Lane. But he wished that he wouldn’t dream about it every night. Sometimes he wondered if he might be haunted by the house. His shrink told him it was purely a fantasy—longing for his vanished childhood.

Only it wasn’t. Some of the dreams disturbed him. Like the elusive fragrance of autumn leaves burning, and the fragmentary remembrance of carbonizing flesh.

Garrett Larkin was a very successful landscape architect with his own offices and partnership in Chicago. He had kept the same marvelous wife for going on thirty years, was just now putting the youngest of their three wonderful children through Antioch, was looking forward to a comfortable and placid sixth decade of life, and had not slept in his bed at Cedar Lane since he was seventeen.

Garrett Larkin awoke in his bed in the house on Cedar Lane, feeling vaguely troubled. He groped over his head for the black metal cowboy-silhouette wall lamp mounted above his bed. He found the switch, but the lamp refused to come on. He slipped out from beneath the covers, moved through familiar darkness into the bathroom, thumbed the light switch there.

He was filling the drinking glass with water when he noticed that his hands were those of an old man.

An old man’s. Not his hands. Nor his the face in the bathroom mirror. Lined with too many years, too many cares. Hair gray and thinning. Nose bulbous and flecked with red blotches. Left eyebrow missing the thin scar from when he’d totaled the Volvo. Hands heavy with calluses from manual labor. No wedding ring. None-too-clean flannel pajamas, loose over a too-thin frame.

He swallowed the water slowly, studying the reflection. It could have been him. Just another disturbing dream. He waited for the awakening.

He walked down the hall to his brothers’ room. There were two young boys asleep there. Neither one was his brother. They were probably between nine and thirteen years in age, and somehow they reminded him of his brothers—long ago, when they were all young together on Cedar Lane.

One of them stirred suddenly and opened his eyes. He looked up at the old man silhouetted by the distant bathroom light. He said sleepily, “What’s wrong, Uncle Gary?”

“Nothing. I thought I heard one of you cry out. Go back to sleep now, Josh.”

The voice was his, and the response came automatically. Garrett Larkin returned to his room and sat there on the edge of his bed, awaiting daylight.

Daylight came, and with it the smell of coffee and frying bacon, and still the dream remained. Larkin found his clothes in the dimness, dragged on the familiar overalls, and made his way downstairs.

The carpet was new and much of the furniture was strange, but it was still the house on Cedar Lane. Only older.

His niece was bustling about the kitchen. She was pushing the limits of thirty and the seams of her housedress, and he had never seen her before in his life.

“Morning, Uncle Gary.” She poured coffee into his cup. “Boys up yet?”

Garrett sat down in his chair at the kitchen table, blew cautiously over the coffee. “Dead to the world.”

Lucille left the bacon for a moment and went around to the stairway. He could hear her voice echoing up the stairwell. “Dwayne! Josh! Rise and shine! Don’t forget to bring down your dirty clothes when you come! Shake a leg now!”

Martin, his niece’s husband, joined them in the kitchen, gave his wife a hug, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He stole a slice of bacon. “Morning, Gary. Sleep well?”

“I must have.” Garrett stared at his cup.

Martin munched overcrisp bacon. “Need to get those boys working on the leaves after school.”

Garrett thought of the smell of burning leaves and remembered the pain of vaporizing skin, and the coffee seared his throat like a rush of boiling blood, and he awoke.

Garrett Larkin gasped at the darkness and sat up in bed. He fumbled behind him for the cowboy-silhouette wall lamp, couldn’t find it. Then there was light. A lamp on the nightstand from the opposite side of the king-size bed. His wife was staring at him in concern.

“Gar, are you okay?”

Garrett tried to compose his memory. “It’s all right... Rachel. Just another bad dream is all.”

“Another bad dream? Yet another bad dream, you mean. You sure you’re telling your shrink about these?”

“He says it’s just nostalgic longing for childhood as I cope with advancing maturity.”

“Must have been some happy childhood. Okay if I turn out the light now?”

And he was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.

He was safe and snug in his own bed in his own room, burrowed beneath Mom’s heirloom quilts against the October chill that penetrated the unheated upper story. Something pressed hard into his ribs, and he awoke to discover his Boy Scout flashlight was trapped beneath the covers—along with the forbidden E.C. horror comic books he’d been secretly reading after bedtime.

Gary thumbed on the light, turning it about his room. Its beam was sickly yellow because he needed fresh batteries, but it zigzagged reassuringly across the bedroom walls—made familiar by their airplane posters, blotchy paint-by-numbers oil paintings, and (a seasonal addition) cutout Halloween decorations of jack-o’-lanterns and black cats, broom-riding witches, and dancing skeletons. The beam probed into the dormer, picking out the shelved books and treasures, the half-completed B-36 “Flying Cigar” nuclear bomber rising above a desk strewn with plastic parts and tubes of glue.

The flashlight’s fading beam shifted to the other side of his room and paused upon the face that looked down upon him from beside his bed. It was a grown-up’s face, someone he’d never seen before, ghastly in the yellow light. At first Gary thought it must be one of his brothers in a Halloween mask, and then he knew it was really a demented killer with a butcher knife like he’d read about in the comics, and then the flesh began to peel away in blackened strips from the spotlit face, and bare bone and teeth charred and cracked apart into evaporating dust, and Gary’s bladder exploded with a rush of steam.

Larkin muttered and stirred from drunken stupor, groping beneath the layers of tattered plastic for his crotch, thinking he had pissed himself in his sleep. He hadn’t, but it really wouldn’t have mattered to him if he had. Something was poking him in the ribs, and he retrieved the half-empty bottle of Thunderbird. He took a pull. The wine was warm with the heat of his body, and its fumes trickled up his nose.

Larkin scooted further into his cardboard box to where its back propped against the alley wall. It was cold this autumn night—another bad winter, for sure—and he wondered if he maybe ought to crawl out and join the others around the trash fire. He had another gulp of wine, letting it warm his throat and his guts.

When he could afford it, Larkin liked to drink Thunderbird. It was a link to his boyhood. “I learned to drive in my old man’s brand-new 1961 Thunderbird,” he often told whoever was crouched beside him. “White 1961 Thunderbird with turquoise-blue upholstery. Power everything and fast as shit. Girls back in high school would line up to date me for a ride in that brand-new Thunderbird. I was ass-deep in p-ssy!”

All of that was a lie, because his father had never trusted him to drive the Thunderbird, and Larkin instead had spent his teenage years burning out three clutches on the family hand-me-down Volkswagen Beetle. But none of that really mattered in the long run, because Larkin had been drafted right after college, and the best part of him never came back from Nam.

V.A. hospitals, treatment centers, halfway houses, too many jails to count. Why bother counting? Nobody else gave a damn. Larkin remembered that he had been dreaming about Cedar Lane again. Not even rotgut wine could kill those memories. Larkin shivered and wondered if he had anything left to eat. There’d been some spoiled produce from a dumpster, but that was gone now.

He decided to try his luck over at the trash fire. Crawling out of his cardboard box, he pocketed his wine bottle and tried to remember if he’d left anything worth stealing. Probably not. He remembered instead how he once had camped out in the huge box from their new refrigerator on Cedar Lane, before the rains melted the cardboard into mush.

There were half a dozen or so of them still up, silhouetted by the blaze flaring from the oil drum on the demolition site. They weren’t supposed to be here, but then the site was supposed to have been cleared off two years ago. Larkin shuffled over toward them—an identical blob of tattered refuse at one with the urban wasteland.

“Wuz happnin’, bro?” Pointman asked him.

“Too cold to sleep. Had dreams. Had bad dreams.”

The black man nodded understandingly and used his good arm to poke a stick into the fire. Sparks flew upward and vanished into the night. “About Nam?”

“Worse.” Larkin dug out his bottle. “Dreamed I was a kid again. Back home. Cedar Lane.”

Pointman took a long swallow and handed the bottle back.

“Thought you told me you had a happy childhood.”

“I did. As best I can remember.” Larkin killed the bottle.

“That’s it,” Pointman advised. “Sometimes it’s best to forget.”

“Sometimes I can’t remember who I am,” Larkin told him.

“Sometimes that’s the best thing, too.”

Pointman hooked his fingers into an old shipping crate and heaved it into the oil drum. A rat had made a nest inside the packing material, and it all went up in a mushroom of bright sparks and thick black smoke.

Larkin listened to their frightened squeals and agonized thrashing. It only lasted for a minute or two. Then he could smell the burning flesh, could hear the soft popping of exploding bodies. And he thought of autumn leaves burning at the curbside, and he remembered the soft popping of his eyeballs exploding.

Gary Blaze sucked in a lungful of crack fumes and fought to hold back a cough. He handed the pipe to Dr Syn and exhaled. “It’s like I keep having these dreams about back when I was a kid,” he told his drummer. “And a lot of other shit. It gets really heavy some of the time, man.”

Dr Syn was the fourth drummer during the two-decades up-and-down career of Gary Blaze and the Craze. He had been with the band just over a year, and he hadn’t heard Gary repeat his same old stories quite so many times as had the older survivors. Just now they were on a very hot worldwide tour, and Dr Syn didn’t want to go back to playing gigs in bars in Minnesota. He finished what was left of the pipe and said with sympathy, “Heavy shit.”

“It’s like some of the time I can’t remember who I am,” Gary Blaze confided, watching a groupie recharge the glass pipe. They had the air conditioner on full blast, and the hotel room felt cold.

“It’s just all the years of being on the road,” Dr Syn reassured him. He was a tall kid half Gary’s age, with the obligatory long blond hair and heavy-metal gear, and getting a big start with a fading rock superstar couldn’t hurt his own rising career.

“You know”—Gary swallowed a ’lude with a vodka chaser—“you know, sometimes I get up onstage, and I can’t really remember whether I can play this thing.” He patted his vintage Strat. “And I’ve been playing ever since I bought my first Elvis forty-five.”

‘“Hound Dog’ and ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ back in 1956,” Dr Syn reminded him. “You were just a kid growing up in East Tennessee.”

“And I keep dreaming about that. About the old family house on Cedar Lane.”

Dr Syn helped himself to another hit of Gary’s crack. “It’s all the years on the road,” he coughed. “You keep thinking back to your roots.”

“Maybe I ought to go back. Just once. You know—see the old place again. Wonder if it’s still there?”

“Make it sort of a bad-rocker-comes-home gig?”

“Shit!” Gary shook his head. “I don’t ever want to see the place again.”

He inhaled forcefully, dragging the crack fumes deep into his lungs, and he remembered how his chest exploded in a great blast of superheated steam.

Garrett Larkin was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.

His mother’s voice awoke him, and that wasn’t fair, because he knew before he fell asleep that today was Saturday.

“Gary! Rise and shine! Remember, you promised your father you’d have the leaves all raked before you watched that football game! Shake a leg now!”

“All right,” he murmured down the stairs, and he whispered a couple of swear words to himself. He threw his long legs over the side of his bed, yawned and stretched, struggled into blue jeans and high school sweatshirt, made it into the bathroom to wash up. A teenager’s face looked back at him from the mirror. Gary explored a few incipient zits before brushing his teeth and applying fresh Butch Wax to his flattop.

He could smell the sausage frying and the pancakes turning golden-brown as he thumped down the stairs. Mom was in the kitchen, all business in her apron and housedress, already serving up his plate. Gary sat down at the table and chugged his orange juice.

“Your father gets back from Washington tomorrow after church,” Mom reminded him. “He’ll expect to see that lawn all raked clean.”

“I’ll get the front finished.” Gary poured Karo syrup over each pancake in the stack.

“You said you’d do it all.”

“But, Mom! The leaves are still falling down. It’s only under those maples where they really need raking.” Gary bolted a link of sausage.

“Chew your food,” Mom nagged.

But it was a beautiful October morning, with the air cool and crisp, and the sky cloudless blue. His stomach comfortably full, Gary attacked the golden leaves, sweeping them up in swirling bunches with the rattling leaf-rake. Blackie, his aged white mutt, swayed over to a warm spot in the sun to oversee his work. She soon grew bored and fell asleep.

He started at the base of the pink marble front of the house, pulling leaves from under the shrubs and rolling them in windrows beneath the tall sugar maples and then onto the curb. Traffic was light this morning on Cedar Lane, and cars’ occasional whizzing passage sent spirals of leaves briefly skyward from the pile. It was going faster than Gary had expected it to, and he might have time to start on the rest of the yard before lunch.

“There’s really no point in this, Blackie,” he told his dog. “There’s just a lot more to come down.”

Blackie thumped her tail in sympathy, and he paused to pat her head. He wondered how many years she had left in her, hoped it wouldn’t happen until after he left for college.

Gary applied matches to the long row of leaves at the curbside. In a few minutes the pile was well ablaze, and the sweet smell of burning leaves filled the October day Gary crossed to the front of the house and hooked up the garden hose to the faucet at the base of the wall, just in case. Already he’d worked up a good sweat, and he paused to drink from the rush of water.

Standing there before the pink marble wall, hose to his mouth, Gary suddenly looked up into the blue sky.

Of course, he never really saw the flash.

There are no cedars now on Cedar Lane, only rows of shattered and blackened stumps. No leaves to rake, only a sodden mush of dead ash. No blue October skies, only the dead gray of a long nuclear winter.

Although the house is only a memory preserved in charcoal, a section of the marble front wall still stands, and fused into the pink stone is the black silhouette of a teenaged boy, looking confidently upward.

The gray wind blows fitfully across the dead wasteland, and the burned-out skeleton of the house on Cedar Lane still mourns the loss of those who loved it and those whom it loved.

Sleep well, Gary Larkin, and dream your dreams. Dream of all the men you might have become, dream of the world that might have been, dream of all the people who might have lived—had there never been that October day in 1962.

In life I could not spare you. In death I will shelter your soul and your dreams for as long as my wall shall stand.

What we see,

And what we seem,

Are but a dream,

A dream within a dream.

— From the Peter Weir film of





Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock





The Kind Men Like



“She was better than Betty Page,” said Steinman. “We used to call her Better Page!”

He laughed mechanically at his own tired joke, then started to choke on his beer. Steinman coughed and spluttered, foam oozing down his white-goateed chin. Chelsea Gayle reached across the table and patted him urgently on his back.

“Thanks, miss. It’s these cigarettes.” Morrie Steinman dabbed at his face with a bar napkin, blinking his rheumy eyes. He gulped another mouthful of beer and continued: “Of course, that always made her mad. Kristi Lane didn’t like to be compared to any other model—didn’t matter if you told her she was ten times better. Kristi’d just pout her lips that way she’d do and tell you in a voice that’d freeze Scotch in your mouth that there was no one like her.”

“And there wasn’t,” Chelsea agreed. “How long did you work with her?”

“Let’s see.” Steinman finished his beer and set down the empty glass with a deep sigh. Chelsea signaled to the barmaid, who was already pouring another. She guessed Steinman was a regular here. It was an autumn afternoon, and the tired SoHo bar was stagnant and deserted. Maybe soon new management would convert it into something trendy; maybe they’d just knock it down with the rest of the aging block.

“I was working freelance, mostly. Shooting photo sessions sometimes for the magazines, sometimes for the mail-order pin-up markets, sometimes for the private photo clubs where you could get away with a lot more. Of course, ‘a lot more’ back in the fifties meant ‘a lot less’ than you can see on TV these days.

“Thank you, miss.” Steinman sipped his fresh beer, watching the barmaid walk away from their booth. “I remember doing a few pin-up spreads of Kristi for Harmony Publishing back about ’52 or ’53—stuff for girlie magazines like Wink and Eyeful and Titter. They’d seem tame and corny now, but back then.

The paunchy photographer rolled his eyes and made a smacking sound with his lips. Chelsea thought of a love-stricken geriatric Lou Costello.

“After that I shot several of her first few cover spots—magazines like Gaze and Satan and Modem Sunbathing. That must have been the mid-fifties. Of course, she was also doing a lot of work for the old bondage-and-fetish photo sets, same as Betty Page. I heard once that Kristi and Betty did a few sessions together, but if that’s true no one I know’s ever seen them.”

“Did Kristi Lane do any work for Irving Klaw?”

“Not a lot that I can recall. I remember introducing them sometime about 1954, or was it 1953? I think they may have shot a few sessions—high heels and black lingerie, pin-up stuff. No bondage.”

“Why not?”

“Word was that Kristi Lane was a little too wild for Klaw, who was really pretty straightlaced.” Steinman wheezed at his joke. “People said that Kristi could get a little too rough on the submissive model when she had the dominant role. I know some of the girls wouldn’t work with her unless they played the mistress.”

“Where did she get all her work, then?”

“Mostly from the private photo clubs. And from the mail-order agencies who’d change their dropbox number every few months. You know, the ones with the ads in the back of the girlie mags for comics and photos—‘the kind men like.’ They could get away with murder, and poor Irving got busted and never showed so much as a bare tit in his photo sets.”

While Steinman sucked down his fresh beer, Chelsea opened her attache case and withdrew several manila envelopes. She handed them to Steinman. “What can you tell me about these?”

Each envelope contained half a dozen black-and-white four-by-fives. Steinman shuffled the photo sets. “That’s Kristi Lane, all right.”

The first set showed the model in various pin-up poses. The white bikini would have been too daring for its day, and Kristi Lane’s statuesque figure seemed about to burst its straps. Her hair was done in her characteristic short blond pageboy, her face held her familiar pout (Bardot’s was a careful copy), and her wide blue eyes were those of a fallen angel.

In the next set Kristi was shown dressed as a French maid. Her short costume exposed ruffled panties and lots of cleavage as she bent over to go about her dusting.

“I shot this one,” Steinman said, licking his lips. “About 1954. She said she was twenty. Anyway, they ran it in Beauty Parade, I think.”

Kristi was tied to a chair in the next set. She was wearing high heels, black stockings and garter belt, black satin panties and bra. A black scarf was knotted around her mouth, and her eyes begged for mercy. She was similarly clad in the next set, but this time she was lying hog-tied upon a rug. In the next, she was tied spread-eagled across a bed.

“All shot the same afternoon,” Steinman judged. “Do a few costume changes, give the girl a chance to stretch between poses, and you could come up with maybe a hundred or so good stills.”

The next series had Kristi wearing thigh-high patent leather boots and a matching black corset. Her maid, attired in heels, hose, and the inevitable skimpy uniform, was having trouble lacing up Kristi’s boots. Over the subsequent poses, the maid was gagged and bound facedown across a table by Kristi, who then applied a hairbrush to the girl’s lace-clad bottom.

“Could have been done for Klaw,” said Steinman, “but none of these were. The numbers at the bottom aren’t his numbering system. There were a lot of guys doing these back then. Most, you never heard of. It wasn’t my thing, you gotta understand, but a buck was a buck, then same as now.”

Chelsea pulled out another folder. “What about these?” Steinman flipped through a selection of stills, color and black-and-white, four-by-fives and eight-by-tens. In most of them, Kristi Lane was completely nude, and she was obviously a natural blonde.

“Private stock. You couldn’t do that over the counter back then. Even the nudist magazines had to use an airbrush.”

“Here’s some more.”

Kristi Lane was wearing jackboots, a Nazi armband, an SS hat, and nothing else. The other girl was suspended by her wrists above the floor and wore only a ball gag. Kristi wielded her whip with joyous zeal, the victim’s contorted face hinted at the screams stifled by the rubber ball, and the blood that oozed from the welts across her twisting body looked all too real.

“No. I never did any of this sort of stuff.” Steinman seemed affronted as he handed her back the folder.

“Who did?”

“Lot of guys. Lot of it amateur. Like I say, it wasn’t sold openly. Hey, I’m surprised a girl like you’d even want to know about this kind of stuff, Miss... uh...” He’d forgotten her name since her phone call yesterday.

“Ms. Gayle. Chelsea Gayle.”

“Miss Gayle. I thought all modern girls were feminists. Burning their bras and dressing up like men. I guess you’re not one of them.” His stare was suddenly professional, and somewhere in his beer-soaked brain he was once again focusing his 4 x 5 Speed Graphic camera.

Chelsea tasted her rum and flat cola and tried not to look flustered. After all, she was wearing her wide-shouldered power suit with a silk blouse primly gathered at the neck by a loose bow, and there was no nonsense about her taupe panty hose or low-heeled pumps. Beneath the New Woman exterior, she was confident that her body could as easily slither into a Cosmopolitan party dress. Her face took good close-ups, her blond hair was stylishly tousled, and she wore glasses more for fashion than necessity. Let the old fart stare.

“It’s for an article on yesterday’s pin-up queens,” she said, repeating the lie she had told him over the phone. “Sort of a nostalgic look back as we enter the nineties: The women men dreamed of, and where are they now?”

“Well, I can’t help you there on Kristi Lane.” Steinman waved to the barmaid. “I don’t know of anyone who can.”

“When did you last work with her?”

“Hard to say. She was all over the place for those few years, then she moved out of my league. I’d guess the last time I shot her would have been about 1958. I know it was a cover for one of those Playboy imitations, but I forget the title. Didn’t see much of her after that.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Probably about 1960. Seem to recall that’s about when she dropped out of sight. A guy told me once he’d run into her—at a hippie party in the Village late in the sixties, but he was too strung out to know what he was seeing.”

“Any ideas?”

“Nothing you haven’t heard already. Some said she got religion and entered a convent somewhere. There was some talk that she got pregnant; maybe she married some Joe from Chillico and settled down. There was one story that she was climbing in bed with JFK, and the CIA snuffed her like they did Marilyn Monroe.”

“But what do you think happened to her?”

Steinman chugged his beer. “I think maybe she got a little too wild.”

“Too wild?”

“You know what I mean. Maybe got in too deep. Had to drop out of sight. Or somebody made sure she did.”

Chelsea frowned and dug into her case. “This one is pretty wild.” It was a magazine, and on the front it said, Her Satanic Majesty Requests, and below that, For Sale to Adults Only. The nude woman on the cover was wearing a sort of harness about her hips with a red pointed tail in back and a monstrous red dildo in front. Her face was Kristi Lane’s, blond pageboy and all.

Steinman flipped to the centerfold. A writhing victim was tied to a sacrificial alter. Kristi Lane was astride her spread-eagled body, vigorously screwing her with the dildo.

Steinman slapped the magazine shut, shoved it back to Chelsea. “Not my bag, baby. I never shot any porno.”

Chelsea replaced the magazine. “Was that Kristi Lane?”

“Maybe. It sure looked like her.”

“But that magazine has a 1988 copyright. Kristi Lane would have looked a lot older—she’d be in her fifties.”

“You can’t tell about that sort of smut. Maybe it was bootleg stuff shot years before. You don’t worry about copyrights here.”

“The publisher is given as Nightseed X-Press, but their post office box now belongs to some New Age outfit. They weren’t helpful.”

“The old fly-by-night. Been gone for years.”

“Who was shooting stuff like this back then? This looks fresh from the racks on 42nd Street.”

“So it’s a Kristi Lane lookalike. Hey, I saw Elvis singing at a bar just yesterday. Only, he was Jewish.”

Steinman reached again for his empty glass, gave it a befuddled scowl. “Look. It’s all Mob stuff now. The porno racket. Don’t ask. Forget it. But—you really interested in the old stuff, the pin-up stuff? I got all my work filed away at my studio. No porno. Want to come up and see it?”

“Come up and see your etchings?”

“Hey, on the level. I could be your grandfather.”

“Do you have any shots of Kristi Lane?”

“Hundreds of them. Say, have you ever posed professionally? Not pin-ups, I mean—but you have a wonderful face.”

Chelsea smiled briskly and closed her case. “Tell you what, Morrie. Here’s my business card. See what you’ve got on Kristi Lane, and then phone me at work. Could be I’ll come by and take off my glasses for you.”

She gathered up her things and the bar tab, and because he looked so much like a gone-to-seed gnome, she kissed him on top of his balding head.

“Hey, Miss Gayle!” he called after her. “I’ll ask around. Look, doll, I’ll be in touch!”

Chelsea played back the messages on her answering machine, found nothing of interest, and decided on a long, hot bath. Afterward, she slipped into a loose T-shirt and cotton boxer shorts, and she microwaved the first Lean Cuisine dinner she found in her freezer. A dish of ice cream seemed called for, and she curled up with her cat to consider her day.

The old geek at the used books and magazines dump off Times Square had given her Morrie Steinman’s name after she had purchased an armload of Kristi Lane material from him. Apart from adding to her collection, she had really gained nothing from it at all—although it was a thrill to talk with someone who had actually photographed Kristi Lane back at the start of her career.

Chelsea gave her cat the last of the ice cream and hauled the heavy coffee-table book on Kristi Lane onto her lap. It had recently been published by Academy Editions, and she had lugged it back to New York from the shop in Holland Street, Kensington, certain that there was not likely to be a U.S. edition. Its title was Kristi Lane: The Girl of Men’s Dreams, but Chelsea had already been dreaming of her for years.

She turned through the pages, studying photo after photo of Kristi Lane. Kristi Lane in stripper’s costumes, Kristi Lane in high heels and seamed tights and pointed bras and lacy panties and bulky girdles and all the clumsy undergarments of the fifties. Kristi Lane decked out in full fetish gear—boots and corsets and leather gloves and latex dresses and braided whips. Kristi Lane tied to chairs, lashed to tables, spread-eagled over wooden frames, chained and gagged, encased in leather hoods and body sheaths. Kristi Lane tying other women into stringent bondage positions, gagging them with tape and scarves and improbable devices, spanking them with hairbrushes and leather straps.

Chelsea already had many of the photos in her own collection. However familiar, she kept paging through the book. Perhaps this time she might find a clue.

Of course, there was nothing new to be learned: Kristi Lane. Real name unknown. Birthplace and date of birth unknown. Said to be from Ohio. Said to be a teenager when she began her modeling career in New York. Much in demand as pin-up and bondage model during the 1950s. Dropped out of sight about 1962. End of text. Nothing left to do but look at the pictures.

Chelsea shoved the book aside and plopped her cat onto her vacated warmth on the couch. It was bedtime for the Chelsea girl.

Her dream was not unexpected. Nor surprising.

She was wearing one of those funny conical bras that made her breasts stick out like Dagmars on a fish-tail Cadillac—that was her first impression. After that came the discomfort of the boned white corset that pinched her waist and the tight girdle that squeezed her hips and gartered her seamed hose. She tottered on six-inch-high heels, as her mistress scolded her for some imagined offense. Her mistress looked very stern in her black corselet and spike-heeled boots, and it was only the flip of a page before she was punishing her clumsy maid.

There was a wall-length mirror, so Kristi could watch herself being tied across a coffee table. Her ankles were tied to the table legs at one end, her wrists bound to the legs at the other end, forcing her to support her weight with her flexed legs and arms. Another rope secured her waist to the tabletop, and a leather gag stifled her pleas. Kristi wriggled in helpless pain in her cramped position, rolling her eyes and whimpering through the leather strap. Her thighs were spread wide by her bondage, and she flushed as she saw her mistress smiling at the dampening crotch of her girdle. Her cunt was growing hotter and wetter the harder she struggled...

Chelsea awoke with the pulse of her orgasm. After a moment she decided that, in the morning, she would try to search out the photo set and make a notation. She had made hundreds of such notations.

Her secretary told her, “Your grandfather phoned while you were at lunch.”

“What?” Chelsea studied the memo. “Oh, that has to be Morrie.”

“Said he has some new etchings to show you. Your grandfather is quite the kidder.”

“He’s a randy old goat. I’ll see what he wants.”

Chelsea returned the call from her office. Morrie’s answering machine said that Mr Steinman was at work in the darkroom just now and to please leave a message and number at the tone. Chelsea started to speak, and Steinman picked up the phone.

“Hey, doll! Got something for you.”

“Like what?”

“Nightseed X-Press. The porno mag you showed me.”

“Yes?”

“Most of them aren’t really models. Just hookers doing a trick in front of a camera. I had a friend ask around. Discreetly. Found a girl who says she did some work for Nightseed about a year ago, gave me the address.”

“Did she say anything about Kristi Lane?”

“The bimbo’s maybe eighteen. She wouldn’t know Kristi Lane from Harpo Marx. No phone number, but it’s a loft not far from here. Want I should check it out?”

“I can do that.”

“I don’t think so. Not a job for a lady. Why don’t you come by here sometime after five, and I’ll make a full report. I got some photos you might like to see as well.”

“All right. I’ll come by after work.”

Chelsea hung up and opened her shoulder bag. Yes, the can of Mace was right on top.

Steinman’s studio was a second-floor walk-up above a closed-down artists’ supply shop a few blocks from the bar where they’d met. The stencil on the frosted glass read Morris Steinman Photography, and Chelsea tried to imagine what sort of business he might attract.

The door was unlocked, and the secretary’s desk had probably been vacant since Kennedy’s inauguration. It was going on six, so Chelsea rapped on the glass and walked inside. The place was surprisingly neat, if a bit faded, and the wastebasket contained only a beer can. A row of filing cabinets had been recently dusted.

Chelsea let herself into the studio beyond the front office. She smelled coffee. There was a green davenport, a refrigerator, a hot plate, and an electric percolator, which was steaming slightly. There was a large empty room with a lot of backdrops and lighting stands and camera tripods. In the back there was a darkroom with a red light glowing above the DO NOT ENTER sign on the door. As she watched, the light winked out.

“Morrie?” Chelsea crossed the darkroom. “It’s Chelsea Gayle.” The door of the darkroom slowly opened. Morrie Steinman shuffled out into the studio. He was holding a still-damp print, but he wasn’t looking at it or at Chelsea. His face was a pasty mask, his eyes staring and unfocused. Steinman stumbled past Chelsea, moving dreamily toward the couch. He was a puppet whose strings were breaking, one by one. By the time he collapsed onto the davenport, there were no more strings to break.

Chelsea pried the photograph from his stiff fingers. Blood was trickling from beneath the frayed sleeve of his shirt, staining the four-by-five print as she tore it free. The photo was smeared, but it was a good pose of Kristi Lane in a tight sweater with a bit of stocking-top laid bare by her hiked-up skirt. She was seated with her knees crossed on the green davenport.

“Morrie always did good work,” Kristi Lane said, stepping out of the darkroom. “I thought I owed him one last pose.”

She closed her switchblade and pouted—teenage bad girl from the 1950s B-movies. In face and figure, Kristi Lane hadn’t changed by so much as a gray hair from the pin-up queen of 1954. Chelsea reflected that her pageboy hairstyle was once again high fashion. “Why kill him?”

Kristi slowly walked toward her. “Not too many left from the old days who could recognize me. Now there’s one less. You shouldn’t have prodded him into looking for me.”

“There’s thousands of photographs. You’re a cult figure.”

“Honey, if you passed Marilyn Monroe jogging in Central Park, you’d know she was just another lookalike.”

Chelsea reached for the can of Mace as Kristi stepped close to her. Kristi’s hand closed like steel over her wrist before she could work the spray. The can flew from her grasp, as Kristi effortlessly flung her across the studio. She crashed heavily against the wall opposite and slid down against it to her knees.

Kristi reached down for her throat, and the switchblade clicked. “We can make this as rough as you want, honey.”

Chelsea lunged to her feet and caught Kristi beneath her arms, lifting the other woman and hurtling her through a backdrop. Kristi lost her switchblade as she crashed down amidst a tangle of splintering wood.

Struggling free, she swung a heavy light-stand at Chelsea’s head. Chelsea caught the blow with her forearms and wrenched the bent metal stand away from her. Diving forward as Kristi stumbled back, she tackled the other woman—pinning her as the two smashed through the wreckage of another backdrop.

Kristi Lane suddenly stopped struggling. She stared in wonder at the woman crouched on top of her.

“Who are you?”

“I’m your daughter,” Chelsea panted. “Now tell me what I am!”

Kristi Lane laughed and pushed Chelsea off her. “Like mother, like daughter. You’re a succubus.”

“A succubus!”

“Dictionary time? A demon in female form—a temptress who haunts men’s dreams, who draws youth and strength from their lust. Surely by now you’ve begun to wonder about yourself.”

“I’d found out from agency records that you were my mother. I thought that if I could find you, you might explain things—like why I’m unnaturally strong, and why I look like I’m still twenty, and why I keep having dreams about being you.”

“I think it’s time we had our mother-daughter chat,” Kristi said, helping her to her feet. “Let’s go home.”

“Chelsea Gayle,” Kristi murmured. “I gave you the name, Chelsea.”

“Why did you give me up?”

“No place for a baby in my life. The social agency had no problems with that, although they hardly could have guessed the full reasons. Most offspring never survive infancy. You’ve been feeding off my energy all these years—and you turned out very well.”

Chelsea tugged off the remains of her blouse and slipped into a kimono. She couldn’t decide whether her mother’s gaze held tenderness or desire.

“Who was my father?”

“All men. The thousands who f*cked me in their wet-dream fantasies, who jacked off over my pictures. Their seed is our strength. Sometimes the combined energy of their lust is strong enough to create a child. It happens only rarely. Perhaps someday you’ll bear another of us.”

“I work in advertising.”

“Selling false dreams. Already you were becoming one of us.” Kristi took away Chelsea’s kimono and unhooked her bra. Chelsea did not resist.

“You shouldn’t hide your beauty,” Kristi told her. “We need to feed from their secret lusts. Both of us. Now it’s time you were weaned. Get rid of those clothes, and I’ll find you something better to wear.”

Chelsea was naked when Kristi returned from another corner of the loft. Her mother had changed into spike-heeled boots and a studded leather bikini. Her arms were loaded with leather gear.

“I’ll teach you,” she said. “They need stronger stimulation now than they did when I began. I almost waited too long; I’d become nostalgia to them, no longer their sexual fantasy. My comeback will also be your coming out.”

Kristi Lane led her over to a small stage area. Lights were coming on, and Chelsea sensed cameras and presences behind them in the encircling darkness, but she couldn’t see beyond the lights.

“Now then, dear.” Kristi set down her bondage paraphernalia and picked up a riding crop. “I am mistress here, and you must obey me in every way. Do you promise?”

“Yes, mistress. I promise.”

“After all,” her mother said softly, “this is what you’ve always known you wanted.” Then, sharply: “Now then! Let’s get you into these!”

Meekly Chelsea put on the leather corselet and thigh-high boots, then submitted to having her arms laced tightly behind her back in a leather single-glove. By then it was pointless to struggle when Kristi strapped a phallus-shaped gag deep into her mouth, then brought out what at first glance had looked like a leather chastity belt. Choking on the gag, Chelsea moaned as the twin dildos penetrated her vagina and rectum, stretching her as they pushed inward to rub together against the thin wall that separated their bulbous heads.

Her mother leaned forward to kiss her face as she padlocked the belt securely into place. “You’ll stay like me, Chelsea—forever young and beautiful.”

Kristi helped her lie down on top of a long leather sheath. As Chelsea writhed on her belly, Kristi began to lace together the two edges of the leather sleeve, tightly encasing her daughter within a leather tube from her ankles to her neck.

Kristi kissed her face again, just as she fitted the leather hood over Chelsea’s head and laced it across the back of her neck. “Their lust is our strength. I’ll help you.”

Chelsea lay helpless, blinded and gagged, barely able to wriggle so much as her fingers. She felt her ankles being strapped together. Then slowly, she was lifted into the air by her ankles until she was completely suspended above the stage.

Hanging upside down, tightly wrapped in her leather sheath, Chelsea could sense the gloating touch of the cameras. She writhed helplessly, beginning to experience the warmth that flowed into her from the hard rubber penises swollen inside her mouth and cunt and ass. She did not feel violated. Instead she felt the strength that she was drawing from an unseen prey.

Suspended and satisfied, Chelsea Gayle waited to be released from her cocoon, and wondered what she had become.