Flapper

"Forgive me, Father. It's an imposition on you, I know, but I don't know where else to turn. She's completely out of control."

The chapel was bathed in shades of dreary grey, and the three of them were the sole, quiet occupants in the gloom. The priest shifted from foot to foot, unsure of how to proceed. He was sure this wasn't the right course of action for a parent to be taking, especially when the wayward child in question was long past the age of discipline. This sudden, unexpected arrival of domestic unrest had ruined in his plans for the evening, and he hated having to re-regiment his timetable. Of course, this should have been expected, but he hadn't learned to give up trying to understand the motivations of these creatures. Though on the surface every detail seemed so important to them, their constant, ethical dilemmas forever proved to be nothing more than an annoying whine in his consciousness.

This parent, for instance, had long known the troubles his child caused, and yet he was here, asking the help of a near stranger to guide her in the proper way, as he saw it, that her existence should be conducted. Where he came from, there was no need to ask these questions. One followed a path that was clearly set out and any deviation from it would be swiftly dealt with.

"I'm no child," the girl, who was actually a young woman in her early twenties, reminded her father. But he kept his grip tight on her arm, her silken pearls dangling near her waist as she struggled to break free.

"You act like a spoiled brat, so that's what you are. A tiny, childish little trollop. I should never have listened to your mother. A good whipping from a belt never hurt no one in their lives."

"Not one from you," she sneered. "Like you ever had the strength to lay a hand on anyone. You and your wheezing and your soft little bones."

Her father coughed shakily into his fist, his watery eyes fixed in a plea on the robed man before him. "I'm at my wit's end, Father," he admitted. "It's true, I'm not a strong man. Never saw a healthy day since I was born. My lungs, they aren't working properly, and my blood is thin. But I've done my best by my family, and I have a good job, not the best job, but one that keeps us comfortable." He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and shakily wiped his nose with it before shoving it back into its usual place, deep in the worn lining of his suit jacket. "I don't understand how this happened."

The priest nodded at him in what he hoped was an adequate approximation of sage understanding. "We cannot chose our burdens."

"No, we can't. And we've got plenty, my Martha and I. What with my bad lungs and watery blood and… and this." He fixed a glare on the lazy posture of his daughter, who had finally broken free of his grip to sink into a nearby pew. "It doesn't do us well to have her like this, not at all. Martha has a terrible heart, and this one has no qualms over breaking it day after day. She's a wayward girl, obsessed with parties and the devil's drink. We may not have much, but I assure you she comes from a good, God-fearing home. My Martha and I, we've given her the world, little that we could offer of it. And this is how she repays us, by tramping around like some common whore!"

"I wouldn't say I was 'common'," she replied, arching the drawn line of her brow.

Her father took his kerchief out again, wiping the sweat from his neck, his laboured breathing bobbing his Adam's apple in a choked, uneven rhythm. "You've been a right disappointment, Clara."

"I've been a disappointment?" she spat, incredulous. Her eyes, dark green and heavily ringed in kohl, studied the man in the black robes standing before her. He fought the urge to step back, a sure sign that he had already lost ground. He had to be tough in her presence, if only for the benefit of her long suffering father. "Priest," she said, her ruby red lips licking along the edge of the title. "You're no priest. No white collar, no crosses, no bells, books, or candles to hold the devil at bay. Fancy people calling you father, Father. I know you never had one."

"She's full of the drink," her father sputtered through his handkerchief.

"Please, I'm sober enough to know when there's a lying dog standing in front of me." She played with her pearls, her lips capturing a trio of them and staining them before she clenched them carefully between her teeth. Her voice was muffled childishly as she spoke. "He's just some crazy imposter, Daddy. You shouldn't believe a word he says."

Her sickly father clasped his hands over his soiled kerchief, his voice weak and trembling as severely as his shoulders. "I am a man of faith. You'll cast this evil out of her, in one way or another." He pulled the priest to one side, his breath coming in foul gasps as he whispered to him. "She was always a bit wild, a bit difficult, even as a young child. She…. There were things she did that were very, very wrong, but one doesn't think nothing of them. An unkindness to a neighbour's child who was younger than her. A cruel thing done to her cat. I can't speak of it, you have to understand. I promised my poor wife. Her heart would give out that I even suggested…."

"Daddy, are you waiting here all night or are you going to go home and get your rest?" She rose from her seat and staggered over to them, her long arms reaching out to rest heavily on her father's shoulders. "Go home daddy," her moist, painted lips said, their sultry shape oddly demure in their delivery of care. "I'll be fine here, you know that."

He continued to wipe at his sweating neck with the kerchief. "Yes, yes I do. This is a good choice, my dear. The good Lord will prevail, you know this."

"Sure, Daddy," she said, and left an imprint of her hoary lips on his cheek. She patted his shoulder. "Go home to Mummy. Make sure she has her medicine."

"I will," he said, smiling and nodding at her in feeble, weak hope. "You are a good girl, Clara, under all that painted rot." He nodded at the priest. "You listen to what the Father has to say. He'll steer you right."

With that he left them, his wheezing breaths following him into the alley, a thin layer of steam rising from the manhole near the entrance to the chapel. It obscured him in a smoky mist, and the priest needed only to blink twice and the thin, shaky outline of the girl's father was gone. Outside, the loud revelry of party goers rose up from the secreted basement of a nearby speakeasy, the one she had been turned out of. A brown bottle smashed against a wet brick wall. Laughter, cruel and contagious, echoed after it, followed by running footsteps, choked pursuit and fists meeting bone.

He turned on her, his black robes skirting his ankles. "You have put me at a great disadvantage by coming here."

"What choice did I have? Daddy saw the light on in the chapel, and he dragged me in here. It's your fault." She placed a white pearl between her teeth and gently chewed it as he paced before her. She kept it hovering against her ivory grin, her long, painted nails edged around its circumference. "The party only just started, too. You should come by. The folks in there will get a hell of a shock seeing you being a man of the cloth."

"I chose this guise for a reason," he tersely reminded her. "It affords me anonymity."

She scoffed at this. "Not by much. You were a murdered bastard not two weeks ago, and frankly, death looked better on you." She narrowed her black rimmed eyes, and he had the eerie feeling she was peeling his borrowed skin back, revealing the monstrous creature he was beneath the atrophied sinews and flesh. "You don't look right." She let her pearls fall to her waist. "You look kind of sick. It's not catching is it? Not some alien disease that'll wipe out humanity or some such like that? Ugh, it gives me shivers."

"Hardly," he said, wiping his borrowed brow with the long sleeve of his religious garb. "I'm hungry, is all."

"Not hungry," she smiled, and it was a predatory sneer, one he had grown to dislike immensely. "Not for proper food, anyway. Don't worry, just hold on a little longer. You'll get what you need, I promise."

He bristled at this, his real, inner body shifting beneath his disguise, the pain of it making him wince. "You tell me lies."

"I never."

"One right after the other. I've never known a creature to be so fast and loose with the truth. I can't trust anything you say. When you say you have what I need, I know it means you are dangling an empty promise."

"Does this look like an empty promise?" she asked, and pulled a small, familiar can out of her purse.

He hated the way just the shape of the object made him feel. A creeping, longing pulse that ricocheted throughout his being, making the scales on his borrowed skin chip and flake as they painfully rubbed against the black robe. He shouldn't take it, for nothing was offered by Clara without a serious price to pay for it later. But he was tired, and it had been two weeks already. He couldn't bear to suffer more than he had to.

He snatched the square metal can from her grasp and quickly tucked it away beneath his robe. He would enjoy this later. In peace.

"You're welcome," she said, shrugging.

He ignored her, and instead turned his attention to the small window that allowed a good view of the establishment next door. A plaintive wailing from a trumpet meted out a death march to the swooning crowd, glittering dresses and polished pearls swaying to its funereal rhythm. Langley, as the musician was called, was in a strange mood this evening. He rested his head against the cold glass of the window, taking the slow, miserable notes in. There was nothing like this where he came from. None of this spontaneous sadness that invaded palaces of joy.

He couldn't quite articulate the feeling it gave him, his chin resting on the cold glass, Langley's horn full of the souls he'd slain. He closed his eyes, allowing himself to be lost in its ethereal hypnosis, the long, harrowing notes dragging him back to his home. Time meant nothing, no clocks ticking, no minutes counted in meagre seconds. Just an endless stream of sad, misty tones of ghosted moments.

"I didn't even have that much to drink," she said, ruining his reverie. She sprawled out onto the pew nearest him and rested her head on an open Bible. "Langley broke up with his latest catch. Caught him doing the local parish–not you, of course. Listen to those whining notes. Like no one ever had their heart broke but him. Like somehow the rest of us idiots are immune." She pulled her pearls back to her teeth, the click of their white circumference echoing into the dark shadows of the chapel. "Still, poor Langley. He'll have to blow his own horn for a while now."

Another brown bottle flew out of an opened door and into the alley. It exploded against the brick wall opposite, the layered shrapnel of revelry piled high against the cracked concrete street. "They'll be shutting it down," he said to her. "It's getting too obvious."

"As if the coppers haven't been paid off," she sneered. "I have to wonder if the place isn't full of them. Every truncheon on the block is in there having their fill of the devil's transfusion. I ought to be in there myself, but sadly I find myself here, being bored. With you."

Her face was pale in the near darkness of the chapel, her dark but glistening eyes giving her the appearance of a ghost. She was a living spectre who smiled at his discomfort, pearls dancing against her midriff as she shifted where she sat. Her manner gave off a sensation of unease, one wrapped in a persona that was both shiny and luminescent. She wasn't made of the usual terrestrial materials, he thought, for surely she was constructed from cold, damp marble rather than human skin and bones. There was nothing soft about her. He knew she could be a monster, pieced together in harrowing extremes. Even when he first met her, he'd had the impression that if he passed his touch across her neck the fingers he'd borrowed would suffer through an icy breeze, or a sudden, immovable shoulder of chilled stone.

"It's still in full swing," she said, nodding towards the partially opened window. Langley had given up his plaintive cry, the horn placed in its sacred place behind the bar, where none dare touch its polished brass sadness. A staccato drum beat now reigned over the party goers who whooped and hollered in time to the hammering beat.

"I've heard rumours," she promised him, her voice sickly sweet in the dank, damp confines of the cloister. She bit down on her finger, her eyes brimming with the excitement of bloodlust. "There's a stranger in their midst."

She'd caught his interest. He tried to keep the eager hope out of his voice, but it was to no avail. In this he couldn't remain secretive. "What kind of stranger?"

"An odd one out. Like you."

"Take me there."

"Not so fast." She draped herself over the pew, the silk feathers of her gown falling to the left, revealing the pale, polished gleam of her bare shoulder. "It's just a rumour, that's all. No hard, cold facts, those things you like best. But still," she gave him a half hearted shrug, "you haven't exactly been successful lately, have you? I'd say you need all the rumours you can get."

Could it be true? He held his breath, deep in the soft well of his borrowed form's belly. He'd been trapped here for what felt like a millennium and yet he knew this was an illusion. His former life of stretched minutes and infinite hours was as far from him as the dawn of creation was to this moment. She understood this, in her own ignorant way. He'd explained it once, the gleam of her knife glinting against her eye as it measured out the seconds of her acts of murder. Minutes meant hours and hours meant years. The soft waning of a heartbeat as the blood seeped out of the body was the closest she would ever come to understanding timelessness.

"Are you sure this time?" he couldn't resist asking.

"I told you, I'm not sure of anything. Don't you ever listen?" She curled her legs underneath her, now perched on the pew like a contented cat. "I could use a drink."

"No," he insisted. He wrung his alien hands, his feet pacing before the partially open window as the party began winding back up into a frenzy that would end in various acts of violence. "It's not worth the risk."

"I don't know what you're worried about. Sure, I joked about it, but you don't look like him any more, you've gone and shifted his face around with your swimming in there. You'd have to squint sideways and upside down to see him, and everyone in there is blind drunk by now anyway. Just go in and have one."

"I'll go in, but I'm taking nothing."

"You can't go in there and not drink," she told him. "It's not just rude, they'll look at you and think you're there to convert them to sobriety. And by this time, no one knows what that word means."

"I don't understand why you people imbibe what you aren't permitted to," he said.

"Oh?" she questioned him, her pencilled on brow highly raised. "And what about that tin box with its black goop, hrm? Are you so much a prohibitionist over that?"

"It's not the same."

"I've seen the way you act after a few gulps. It's like you're under the shade of a poppy."

"I'm not under its influence."

"Give it back, then."

He hesitated, the square shape of the can against his side a comfort he didn't want to release. Her hand was outstretched, a cruel smirk marring her otherwise attractive face. Angry, he took the can out from its hiding place and returned it to her. Victory was his.

Or so he thought. She only shook her head and placed the small can of motor oil back in her bag, that infuriating smirk all the more pronounced. She stood up and smoothed out her dress. "I don't know about you, but I'm thinking I've had enough soul saving for one evening. I'm heading back in. I'll meet you at the table near the back. You know the one."

A sense of panic rose within him, for he knew what was going to happen the minute she left the dark chapel for the even darker tidings across the street. "You can't," he tried to warn her, but she was already on her feet, pearls dangling at her waist, a fresh application of lipstick being expertly painted on her pert, puckered lips.

"I don't know what you're so worried about," she said, her tiny hand-held mirror held aloft as she painted on a thick line of burgundy crimson. She pressed her lips together, smearing the shade into an even deeper hue. "You've been in there before. They know you by now, you won't be hassled."

"That's the problem," he said. "I don't want to be known. I want only to do what I'm supposed to be doing: taking care of my target and leaving." He was annoyed at her, and he stood to his full height, as best he could within the tight flesh, and painfully pushed his shoulders back. This was a posture of pride, he'd learned. It was uncomfortable and daunting to his own skin.

"I'm not going on a fool's errand," he said, resolute. "You have tricked me too many times, Clara, and I won't allow it again."

She snapped her lipstick compact shut and put it into her beaded purse. She kept her back to him, her neck gracefully bowed as she rummaged through the contents of her purse. She gave a relieved sigh when she found what she was looking for.

A chill coursed through him. He knew the cold instrument she'd laid her equally frozen hands upon. He closed his eyes. Though his people couldn't dream, he wondered if it were possible, after being here all this time, if he could somehow will her away.

"The regular table," she reminded him. "Right by the rear of the stage. I'll give Langley's trumpet a kiss for you."