Etched in Stone Read online

  “Crap, crap, crappity, crap!” she sang to herself.

  She was going to have to see the super. She hated going to see the super. For a start, he was old and grumpy. Secondly, and most importantly, every time she went to see him, she expected him to remember that she owed him money. A lot of money. She scraped up rent when she could, but for the past two years of occupying her studio apartment, she’d missed quite a number of months.

  The life of an artist wasn’t easy in New York. She still couldn’t quite see how her Aunt Olivia had managed it for all those years. Probably the same way she had: hoping and praying that the super, Ray, would keep forgetting about the rent.

  Jesse missed Olivia. She had been the youngest old person Jesse had met when she’d been dropped off that first summer when she’d been ten. Right away, Jesse had been put to work, holding iron bars while her great aunt welded them in some pattern that only she could see.

  That’s where she’d caught the bug. Art. It had seeped into her veins and into her heart. Working a desk job would have probably killed her.

  If the tile didn’t get her first.

  Jesse had never understood why the building owner let the super live in one of the two penthouse apartments. She would have thought that it would have been the highest rent in the building and therefore premium, but no, Jesse shared that luxury with not a hot, rich celebrity but a grumpy old man that she rarely saw unless she was actively seeking him out. Most of the time, it felt like she had the space to herself.

  Her studio was actually two levels, a living level with her twin bed, kitchen and couch, and her art level, up a narrow set of stairs that opened up to a grand set of skylights. Her apartment opened up to a rooftop garden that she knew Ray must totter around in because it was always watered and pruned. There was enough space for her to take her art outside and paint when the weather was good.

  There was a large gargoyle statue in the corner that stooped over the street as if watching and waiting to swoop down upon some unsuspecting person below. It had been there for as long as she could remember.She remembered asking Olivia about it on several occasions, but her aunt had been cagey about its origins. The sculpture didn’t seem to jive with Olivia’s usual aesthetic. Usually, she was in to randomly placed arms and rather abstract statuary. But this was a well sculpted, proportionate male gargoyle that could only be described as handsome.

  As a child, he had fascinated her. She’d always imagined that he had his own story. She'd talked to him, even though she'd never given him a name, and stroked the smooth stone of his wing. As a teenager, she'd ogled over his perfectly chiseled chest and his prominent chin. The bones beneath his eyebrows curled out just enough to settle into two small horn points on his head, which Jesse thought made him look more mischievous than devilish, though the frown on his face was sad and heart heavy.

  Sometimes, she even fancied that he moved.

  Jesse didn't take the garden entrance to Ray's apartment. That would have been a little creepy. She respected his privacy and he respected hers. Instead, she took the hallway past the elevator that led to his front door. She rang the bell and waited. Nothing. She was beginning to suspect that Ray was hard of hearing.

  “Ray?” She knocked again. Something banged in his apartment. Good. That meant he was home (not that she ever saw him leave) and he was awake. She hoped that she hadn't woken him up. It was nearly nine in the morning and surely that was a respectable time to knock on someone's door. Oh, God, she hoped he didn't sleep in the nude. Great. Now the image of Ray's wrinkly old backside was running through her brain.

  The door swung open and there was Ray, fully dressed as he normally was, in a button down shirt, sweater, and a pair of khaki slacks. He had a brown fedora on his head. Jesse could swear he probably showered with it, because she'd never seen him without it.

  He said nothing. Just stared at her in a silent broody manner, as if he were thinking of something totally else while he stared at the wall behind her.

  “Hi, Ray. My ceiling just came down on me. I was nearly knocked out by a tile in my shower,” Jesse said as she pointed back toward her apartment.

  “Tile.”

  “Yes. On my head. And while you're at it, the toilet banshee is getting louder.”

  “What's a toilet banshee?”

  “There's a loud screeching noise every time I flush. Can you fix it?”

  “Toilet. Tile.”

  “Yes. Do you want to come and see?”

  Ray stood there for a moment, as if he hadn't heard the request.

  “I should.”

  “Yes. You should.”

  Jesse felt bad about bothering the man, but she wasn't about to let that kind of thing go. Once the tile started falling, it meant more was probably on its way. She turned, and headed back to her apartment. Ray followed. How could such an old man walk so heavily? He sounded like a linebacker as he headed down the hall behind her.

  Jesse entered her apartment and Ray stopped to look around. Despite her aunt's death being nearly 18 months ago, Jesse had changed very little. It was as if she were still living here for the summer. Any minute her aunt would come around the corner fresh with some crazy new art piece in her brain. It was a happy ghost of a memory that she lived with. Jesse couldn't have been more thrilled than when Olivia's lawyer had told her that the entire studio and its contents had been willed to her.

  She shouldn't have been surprised. She was Olivia's only living heir. Most of her family had died during World War Two. Only Olivia and her sister Margaret had immigrated to New York. Margaret was Jesse's grandmother who had died when Jesse was two. Her own mother had raised Jesse on her own after her father split.

  As a single mom,she’d only too happy to send her kid off to Olivia for the summers for some free day care. Then Jesse’s mom had gotten sick and had gone quickly. From diagnosis to death in six months. She'd said it was a blessing. “Some people linger for years,” her mom had said, but still didn't stop Jesse from crying over it all, and feeling a load of self pity at being an orphan in the world.

  “Plenty of people are orphans,” Olivia said. “You have to make your own family, no matter how strange they are.”

  Jesse had a sneaking suspicion that she'd somehow been talking about Ray, even though she was pretty sure they weren't lovers. In fact, she'd never seen her aunt with anyone, male or female. Besides, Olivia had been near 90 when she'd passed. Ray couldn't possibly be that old, though he had been old as long as she could remember.

  How did someone politely ask an old man his age without offending him?

  Jesse led him into the bathroom, though she was sure that his apartment was a mirror of hers. He followed her in and stood in the doorway. She pulled back the shower curtain and pointed up. Sure enough, another chunk of tile had come down while she'd been gone. There were now three large chunks in the bathtub.

  “Yup. It's coming down,” rumbled Ray.

  “Can you fix it?”

  “I told Olivia the whole thing should have been gutted years ago.”

  “Why didn't you?”

  “Because she didn't want it. It was a pain just to get her to let me put in the grab bars.”

  Jesse eyed the bars next to the toilet and the tub. There were definitely the newest fixtures in the place.

  “You offered to get the place redone?”

  “Yup.”

  “You offering now?”

  “Yup.”

  “What kind of renovation are we talking about?”

  “You're the artist. Draw me a picture.” With that, Ray turned and left the bathroom. “Until then you can use my shower. Back door's always unlocked.”

  With that, Ray left and closed the door behind him.

  “Well.”

  2

  Frelinray

  This was never going to work. Not in a million years. Frelinray swooped out to the garden, took his normal spot, and let his body relax into a stone sleep. He did not slip into a deep sleep. He needed to think. br />
  She was the image of her great aunt. She even shared her name, Jessenia. Every time he saw her, he froze, somehow expecting to flash that same smile, that knowing glance, to reach out with her finger and trace the ridges of his brow to the point on the top of his head. It was the main feature, besides his wings that marked him as an alien to this world. Even now, after eighteen month of seeing Jesse, watching her, caring for her, Ray, as she called him, could not stop that gut reaction.

  As a child, she had stroked his wings, and he had found comfort in it. When she did it now, he felt like breaking his sleep and howling out his desire for her.

  But this wasn't his Jessenia. This was Jesse. Nonetheless, he'd promised Olivia, just as he'd promised her so many years before. The worlds still echoed in his head.

  “She's all that I have left, Ray,” Olivia had said, only days away from her impending death.

  “I know. But it has to be her choice.” Her grandmother, Margaret, had fled from his care as fast as she could, got married young, died young. She'd been a blink on the surface of the world. Olivia had weathered the ages.

  “She's more like me than Midge. She'll get you.”

  “You haven't told her yet?”

  “No. I haven't quite found the words for...” Olivia turned away at that moment, lost for the right phrase.

  Ray supplied it. “My almost-brother-in-law is a gargoyle space alien and he's going to watch over you when I croak?”

  “You see my point?”

  “Then put it in a letter,” he suggested.

  “She's going to think her dear old Aunt Olivia went bonkers in the end.”

  “Her dear old Aunt Olivia has gone bonkers if she thinks me telling her is going to work any better.”

  Olivia smiled and nodded, waving him away.

  “Fine, fine. I'll write a letter,” she conceded.

  Olivia had died in her sleep three days later. She still hadn't written the letter.

  There were so many things Ray had not explained to Jesse. Every time he saw her, his mind flashed back to her great aunt, the love of his life, and his words were stolen from him.

  Ray kept telling himself there was time and plenty of it. Jesse didn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, though he found it troubling that she hadn't really changed anything from when Olivia had lived there. Surely a twenty-something would want some changes in living spaces from a ninety year old. He'd waited for a request, but Jesse had just moved in and started to create art, as if she were her aunt.

  The biggest difference he could see was that Jesse had no friends, no visitors. She spent much of her time alone and no one had come to the apartment that he had noticed. Olivia had not been shy around bringing people round. Men or women.

  Ray told himself not to pry, but his old instincts were kicking in. It wasn't healthy to spend so much time alone. He should know. He'd spent several centuries that way. That was the way of his people. They were nothing if not patient.

  He'd wait a few more days until she came looking for him again. Then, maybe he could get over the way her dark hair fell on her shoulders, just as her namesake. The way the same eyes that haunted his dreams stared back at him without the slightest hint of recognition. He didn't blame Jesse for not wanting to get to know an ugly old man in an outdated sweater. Perhaps, if he could fix his blasted perception filter, things would be easier.

  He waited until dark, until the lights had been off in Jesse's studio for a good hour, then shook off the stone sleep and headed into his apartment. He opened his workbench and pulled out the tools that he'd cobbled together in the last century. It was like working with sticks and rocks compared to the technology of his kind. They'd achieved space travel before Earth had discovered fire. Ray had to admit that they'd been picking up the pace in the past fifty years, and trying to repair and replace bits of his tech by using Earth tech had become something of a hobby of his lately.

  Olivia had laughed the first time he'd managed to program the perception filter. She'd insisted on an outfit that would let him blend right in so he’d chosen an unassuming older man. She begged him to go on a walk in Central Park in broad daylight so they went. They'd even fed the pigeons. Then the circuits had fused and it had gotten stuck. He'd be a funky old man until he got off this rock.

  Every once in a while, he ordered some intriguing new tech and took it apart, seeing if there was anything that he could use or tinker with to fix his perception filter, or to add to his designs. At one point or another, he'd designed all the major components of a ship that could get him back up into space and off this planet. Building the thing wouldn't be all that difficult either. Opening a wormhole that would get him close enough to home was the real issue. While he had a knack for space design and engineering, his knowledge of spatial mechanics and astrophysics were still basic level. He didn't have a way to generate enough power to tear a hole in the universe by brute force and he didn't have the skill to direct it where he wanted to go.

  So it was either stay here and wait for rescue or take the long way home. And there was no guarantee that wouldn’t be another few thousand more years gone. It had already been near a thousand. Who knew? Maybe the war that had torn his world in two had been over for years. He had no way of knowing.

  Ray had several packages on his bench waiting since the last time he'd gone on a shopping spree. Amazon was a wonder. No longer did he have to ask Olivia to procure him some random electronic that he'd read about in a magazine. Instead, he managed a few clicks and it arrived on his doorstep in two days, no questions asked.

  Ray opened a box with his nail and pulled the device out of its layers of plastic bubbles and paper. It was a newer, supposedly more advanced version of the camera that he'd already gutted for pieces, hoping that some human would have developed just the right system that would be compatible with his perception filter.

  He cracked open the case to stare at the guts. No. Apparently, ‘new and improved’ was more advertising than reality. He put it aside and opened the next box, not entirely optimistic. Something clattered behind him, out near the garden. He swirl around on his stool and scrambled toward the French door that he had left open. He paused in the center of the patio and took stock. Nothing was disturbed or out of place. He eyed the other buildings that surrounded them.

  He couldn't see any other lights on, but that didn't mean anything. Someone could have gotten drunk and decided to kick over a bucket on their way back in after a smoke break. The weather was still quite nice and all was right with the night. He didn't feel like going in and opening the rest of his packages so he resumed his spot on the ledge and drifted off into a deep stone sleep.

  3

  Jesse

  Jesse had been drawing bathrooms for the past two days and each one got more and more fanciful. She couldn't get that stupid thought out of her head. What kind of man says “draw a bathroom?”

  Her current sketch had a toilet that vaguely resembled some sort of odd tuba and a tub that was sunk into the floor like a mermaid lagoon. The walls were covered in reflective scales. It was as if a five year old with a fish fetish had thrown up all over her notebook.

  No. That wouldn't do at all. Jesse carefully pulled the sketch out of the notepad and lay it next to the one that looked like some sort of beauty parlor gone wrong. She was not an interior designer. She should show her designs to that fedora wearing grandpa and get him to pick one. Where he thought the money was coming from to pay for it was anyone's guess. The man seemed to have no clue about finances.

  She needed a shower. No, she needed a good long soak in a tub with power jets. Maybe she could convince him to put a jacuzzi on the roof. That would be lovely. He'd probably keep his fedora on while soaking. She giggled and let her pencil run wild over a fresh piece of paper. An inset tub with jets and a fedora-wearing form settled deep in the water. Except it wasn't Ray that she drew. It was the gargoyle. And he looked like he was enjoying himself. As sexy as she had drawn him, hat drawn low over his face with l
ittle more than a cheeky grin and a pair of fangs showing, Jesse wouldn't mind joining him in that tub.

  Lord knew she was well overdue for any kind of male company, but living in a city like this afforded few opportunities for meeting anyone not interested in a quick hook up. Jesse had had her fill of those. No, she was not in the mindset of the latest swipe app and a quick fix. She had some electronics that took the edge off with a buzz in the right area.

  It was her mother's fault, Jesse told herself. After her father took off, there was little else her mother was interested in sharing about men and relationships other than ‘you don't need them’, and ‘don't get pregnant’.

  She couldn't get pregnant fantasizing about gargoyles in bathtubs, that was for sure. She turned her attention to the other bathroom features. This gargoyle didn't need a tuba toilet. No, he needed something simple, with clean lines. It should be full of light, but not shiny. Classic rock of ages, smooth and polished.

  She finished the drawing and for once, was actually pleased with the design. It was probably a twenty grand renovation, but hey, she wasn't paying for it. Of course, Jesse couldn't show this version to Ray, not with the gargoyle in his fedora. That would just be weird. But she could draw the same sketch and hand it to him without a gargoyle. Though not quite yet. Right now, she really needed a shower, and since hers was out of order, she thought she'd take a deep breath and actually take him up on his offer to use his.

  She grabbed a towel and put together a little bucket of toiletries to take with her. Then, she grabbed some shower spray and a couple of rags, just in case. She'd never seen a cleaning crew over there, so there was no telling whether the whole exercise was going to be an experience in gross old man funk. In the year and a half she'd been living in Olivia's place and in all the summers she'd spent there, Jesse had never done so much as peeked into the two French doors that lay at the other end of the courtyard.