Page 45 of If Looks Could Kill
I made a noncommittal noise.Did I see anything!
Pearl had removed my scarf and now sat on her bed holding a mirror, gazing at her crown of snakes in rapt wonder. With one hand, she stroked one of them with a gentle finger, much as a little girl might stroke a wayward curl.
I do not like snakes. Not even where they belong. In the garden. Sunning on a rock.
I especially don’t like them sprouting from my roommate’s head.
My knees fell to wobbling once more. I sat quickly down upon my bed. Pearl’s entourage of snakes turned its heads as one toward me, and her own head followed suit.
She regarded me with disdain, as though she didn’t know me. It felt sadly familiar.
Her face was her own, yet distorted. As if all her features had been stretched taut, or sharpened. Where her eyes had been robin’s-egg blue, they were now a greenish yellow, with irises rimmed in black. Where her cheeks had been round and rosy, angular bones now gave her a proud haughtiness. Where hair had ringed her face, snakes, hundreds of them, thick as thumbs, coiled off her scalp, their golden scales blending into her head.
Had she always been a hidden Medusa, ready to spring, or was this the first time this had happened?
A Medusa couldn’t be something you just… put on and off, like a hat. What few stories I vaguely knew had never suggested that. Besides, nothing about Pearl up to this point had suggested she was living with a secret as monumental as this one. I’d bet anything that if she could see herself now, this would be as much a shock to the real Pearl as it was to me. It must be the first time.
But where, in fact, was the real Pearl?
“Pearl,” I whispered, “are you in there?”
She smiled, revealing sharply pointed teeth.
“We are Pearl.” Her voice rippled mesmerically. “We are Pearl, and we are Medusa.”
She—It? They?—sounded like a clear-cut case for the sanatorium. Through a film of my tears, the snakes blurred, and she looked for a moment like the Salvation Army maiden she had been. Dressed in navy blue with yellow and red trim. The colors of victory. Of Christ’s salvation.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. “Help us. If you can.”
I pictured Pearl as she’d been every moment since I’d met her. Aggravating, indignant, judgmental, daring. Pesky and relentless, twisting any small pleasure into a cause for guilt and shame. Ready to scold and criticize and moralize and preach.
How wonderful she was. Wonderfully human and odd. Unmistakably real. Alive. Here.
And gone.
“If you please,” I whispered, “I would like Pearl back. Just Pearl.”
The apparition rose from her bed and approached me. “We will find him,” she whispered. “You will help us find him.”
I cringed back away from her. “Him?”
She seemed confused. “Him,” she said. “All of them.”
“Who?” I asked. “All of whom?”
“The men.” She was so close, I feared her darting tongue.
All themen? “What men?”
“The men who slay and wound us without pity.”
Oh. Onlythosemen. Hardly any of those in New York City, and certainly none in the slums, beer halls, and brothels of the Lower East Side.
I remembered the cabbie. Just one glance at Pearl, this new Pearl, had felled him. What could she do if she were really trying?
They will kill her.
I know, I told the nagging voice in my head. If she doesn’t kill them first.
