Les Gargouilles and Other Stories

Les Gargouilles

He'd always wondered where she went during the nights when the moon was full and the weather was warm and sultry. She always crept out of bed after midnight to stand outside her balcony as he lay sleeping, or pretending to sleep, wondering what she was doing outside on the balcony.

The first time he had walked out there to be with her, she was nowhere to be found. For a few harrowing moments, he'd thought that maybe she'd flung herself from the twentieth floor balcony and fallen down below. But there were no sirens roaring, no lights flashing at street level, and everywhere he looked, there was nothing that could have pointed to the fact that she had fallen. Or jumped.

There was nothing, no one to comfort him from his thoughts and his fears but a pair of gargoyles leering from the edge of her balcony, standing alongside him like guardians from long time past, as if keeping guard lest he'd follow suit to his own imagination.

Les gargouilles.

Imported from Europe, she told him. She had grown up with them -- these creatures whom most people called 'ugly gargoyles' with their frozen leers. She said she just couldn't leave them behind, not even when she came to America to live a new life.

They watch over me, she told him. They were neither ugly nor fierce. He found it difficult in the beginning to agree with her, but he knew that eventually, their stony features and leering grins wouldn't really matter. There was only her.

Exhausted from that night's lovemaking, he had fallen asleep on the couch facing the balcony, its doors flung open wide, as if hoping that she would return, like the angel he always thought she was. And that morning, she appeared, standing on the balcony, leaning against the cement rails watching him with her green eyes, smiling.

You worry too much, she had told him then. There are certain things you do not need worry about. I shall always return. Especially for you.

When he asked her where she had been, she only silenced him with a warm finger against his lips, her own swollen lips following suit to explore the depths of his mouth with her tongue, bribing his silence. She won every time.

He liked the way she touched him with her searing hands, her fingers playing little circles with his hair, entwining them around and around and tugging playfully till he would laugh and grab a handful of her lustrous brown hair and drag her down to the bed. They would make love all night, never once stopping and more than once he would fall into a deep sleep, barely knowing where he was and what day it was for she had that power in her eyes to entrance him and the dominion over his heart to lull him into an infant's sleep, making him forget the cases still unsolved, the people he'd yet get back to.

Though he could never truly understand what it was he felt for her, he knew it was not something he could tell his friends. He could not even joke about it at work, especially with his partner, the conservative Max.

He had known it the first time he saw her while responding to a call of a suicide in one of the high rises off Fifth. He had only been a patrolman then. She had opened the door to them and at the sight of her green eyes and dark hair, all words left him - all thoughts rushing from his brain, spilling forth into nothing but a simple sigh when he finally remembered to say something.

Later that day, he made his way back to the building, standing by the gates across the street though he didn't know what he wanted to do or what on earth he was doing there. As if obeying some mysterious command, he looked up, his eyes drawn to the balcony with the pair of gargoyles standing guard on either side. She had been watching him all along and he remembered how all the hairs at the back of his neck stood up in attendance, and a chill traversed along his spine. It tingled and he liked it.