The Ammonite Violin & Others (24 page)

“It’s not enough for me,” I said again, because she hadn’t replied, and I was beginning to think she hadn’t heard me. The smile faded, and she glanced towards the trailer door.

“It’s strictly a one-way trip,” she said. “The mechanism, it doesn’t swing both ways.”

“There’s nothing at all holding me here,” I told her, wondering briefly if that
were
true, if I could fairly claim to be that entirely alone, if I had managed somehow to live almost forty goddamn years without picking up so much as a single string tying me to anything or any place or anyone else.

“I can’t bring you back,” she said, as though trying to make herself more clearly understood.

“But I wouldn’t be the first?”

“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t. But I wish—”

“—it was enough for me to see it, to place my hands upon it?” She looked at me again and nodded her head. Beneath my fingertips, something small and hard rolled inside her.

“Will it
hurt
you?” I asked her.

“No. It has never yet hurt me. It has filled me up with the debris of a thousand worlds, the secrets of galaxies, but it has never hurt me.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Someplace else,” she answered and smiled again, but this time I could tell it was forced. I think I was glad that’s the only answer she had for me, because I’d half expected mad ramblings about gifts from God Almighty and benevolent aliens and the lost continent of Atlantis.

“I can’t guarantee it’s what you’re after,” she said, looking down at my fingertips pressed to her chest.

“I would never ask you to. No one ever gets a guarantee. Leastways, that’s always been my experience.”

“There are days,” she said, then paused and swallowed. “There are nights I wish I’d never found it. It’s a burden I’d never want to
lose
it, not really, but I’d be lying if I said it isn’t a burden.”

I pulled my hand away then, because there was an unexpected rush of self-doubt and second thoughts, and the tingling in my fingers was becoming almost painful, spreading across my palm and encircling my wrist. I turned my head, looking directly into the brilliant glare of the setting sun shining in through parted drapes, and though I could not
see
them, I could
sense
them—the carny folk, waiting anxiously out there in the oatmeal patch of grass and weeds between the freak tent and the silver aluminum Airstream.

“They’re so frightened that your coming here means I’m leaving them,” she said.

I turned back to her, blinking at a dazzling swarm of yellow afterimages.

“I’m ready,” I told her.

“I’m ready,” I whisper, staring out through the starship’s porthole, wishing she were here to see. Bat that was one of the stipulations, she said. One of the rules. She could serve as a conduit for countless others, but she could never travel this road herself.

Only an hour and a half ago, or maybe its been eight thousand years—and at this point I cannot see the difference—she took my tingling left hand and placed firmly against her chest. I could feel the hard, rotating object inside her, and I could feel her heartbeat.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “Close your eyes now and then count to ten very slowly. Don’t you dare open your eyes until you
get to
ten. Promise me that you won’t.”

“Like Orpheus,” I suggested. “Don’t dare look back.”

“I’m not joking.
Promise
me that.”

“I promise,” I told her.

“Don’t be scared,” she said.

The blue light falls across the black metallic substance that forms the deck beneath me and washes warmly across my face. It fills my eyes, and I lean forward, craning my neck for a better view of Cygnus X-1, dark twin slowly consuming light twin in that great cosmic waltz.

She opened herself, and I’d already started counting.

The air smelled of burning leaves and dust. There was, as now, no sense whatsoever of falling.

And the terrible yawning emptiness inside me is gone, banished in the simple count from one to ten. This blue light fills me full, and I cannot now even imagine having once felt so hollow. I do finally shut my eyes, and I only imagine that I can hear heavy canvas flapping in a hot Nebraska summer wind, and that I can also hear her opening the door to the Airstream travel trailer and stepping down to stand among them. I only imagine their relief, and I only pretend she knows how grateful I am.

So easily do we lose track of time here, as easily as drawing my next breath, and sometimes with far less effort. Time is not quite absent, no, but neither does it press in at me with the old, persistent urgency. I lie here only half awake, but also only half asleep, dreaming but free of the subconscious’ weight and nagging symbolism. The bed sheets smell like old roses, sweat, nectar, cardamom, rye whiskey, semen—all those bittersweet tinctures of you and me and the strangling moments that have passed between us. This will not ever be as simple as fucking, and I still haven’t quite gotten used to that. Like when you say to me that it’s not lycanthropy and not vampirism or schizophrenia or merely some glamour you’ve called up from the terrible old books you keep locked away behind glass. What it is, I will not say. It is not
for
me to say, to put my finger on, and I’d likely get it wrong, anyway. I roll over, and you’re here on hands and knees, watching me, and your eyes flash red-green iridescence in the candlelight. “Come here, boy,” you smile, and always I have to remind myself it’s not a mask, for there can be no masks here. No deceptions, but only the merciless, perpetual peeling away of deceit and all manner of disguisement. “Come here, boy,” and you slip your fingers between my legs, encircling my cock, winning from me a small gasp and a scrap of laughter. At first, I was surprised to hear laughter in this place, but now it seems as natural as the ubiquitous undercurrents of freshly turned earth and carrion and hothouse flowers that scent the air.

“Maybe I was busy,” I say, feigning annoyance. “Maybe: I was otherwise occupied.”

“And maybe I’ve finally grown tired of the taste of your prick,” you say, still smiling, still flashing those hyena teeth, nutcracker teeth to split open living bone, and your purplish tongue lolls from your black lips.

“Puppy,” I playfully whisper, trying very hard not to laugh, and you growl and pull faces and show me much worse things than hyena incisors and canines and grinding carnassials. Your grip on my penis tightens, and I wonder how much it’s going to hurt this time. But it’s a distant sort of wondering, because I have not been afraid of pain for what must be years or months, at least. If it has only been weeks, I would be appalled. I have not been appalled in so long I cannot now quite recollect the sensation.

In your hand, captured in the circlet of your clawed thumb and index finger, my cock writhes, become now the roughest imitation of a serpent.

“You haven’t been practicing,” you frown, though of course I have. I have been practicing quite a lot, actually, but the trick does not come so readily to me. My flesh is too set in its ways, uncooperative hidebound me, and I am grateful you can see all this in my eyes without my having to speak the words aloud. You see my shame, as well, and you see how badly I want to impress.

“Well, it’s better than last time,” you lie, and let those reticulated coils of bronze and sepia and ginger wrap firmly around your wrist. I think about biting—no venom, just teeth as sharp and fine as sewing needles—and then decide that you might not be in the mood.

“It is not either,” I reply. “It is not the least bit better. It wouldn’t fool anyone.”

“Be patient, boy,” you tell me. “There’s a lot still to forget, and forgetting isn’t ever half so simple as most people seem to think.” But already I’m taking it back, the malformed constrictor gone limp and withering, slipping from your hand and vanishing into the damp vaginal folds that have formed between my thighs. That’s one I mastered almost right away, and the transformation pleased you then, but now you snarl and seal me shut with only a thought or a careless glimmer of those scavenger eyes.

“Fuck you,” I say, staring down at the smooth nothing there between my legs, and I even wish tor a moment that I had never
Outside the Gates of Eden
met you, and you had never shown me the secret roads that lead down and down into this land where it is always neither day nor night, neither dusk nor dawn. A swarm of small white spiders washes across your cheeks and high forehead and is gone, and you watch me with a face that is almost human. And then I say it again, “Fuck you.”

“Not like that, love,” you laugh. “But don’t worry. It’s nothing you can’t undo, not if you truly set your mind to it.”

Far away, beyond the waxy black walls of our den, there are sounds I might once have mistaken merely for wind and thunder and rain falling on hot summer streets. And I close my eyes and try to concentrate on nothing but growing my penis back without your assistance.

“I brought a gift,” you say, “something from the surface,” and the
way
you say it, I can see it’s meant as an apology. And I know, also, that you’re probably not lying, because you still leave this place and scramble up the world’s throat and then come back again, traveling from this tenebrous hollow and out into the light I used to know, but which now seems hardly even as substantial as time.

“I don’t need your goddamn gifts,” I reply and don’t open my eyes. There’s a faint tingle at my crotch, but nothing comes of it.

“I think you will like her.”

I try to ignore you, because maybe this is only meant as a distraction, because I know how it must amuse you, your hapless, ephebic pupil, straining just to get back to square one. I open my eyes again, thinking that liquor might help; it sometimes does. I reach for the half-empty bottle of pear brandy on the walnut stand beside our beci. That was another gift from above, the brandy. You shower me with trinkets and baubles, sweets and intoxicants, a generosity that I know well enough I must never mistake for anything so crude as mere love or affection. We are beyond such base animal sentiments, you have assured me. But you will not have me wanting for anything I might need or desire—like brandy. I drink directly from the bottle, a few drops escaping my lips and running down my chin.

“I said that I have brought you a present, boy.”

“You’re trying to distract me,” I say.

“That would be too easy,” you reply and smile, revealing gums that have sprouted dusters of green-briar thorns and a few worn shards of cobalt beach glass in place of teeth. I hear wings, and the candles flicker, gutter, but are not blown out. We are never entirely alone down here, for there are many other beings like us, and they go and come with no concern for our privacy. Long ago—unless I have only been here a short while—you told me a wonderful story of how this place came to be known, how an Hungarian sorceress found the entrance in some ancient, evil Arabian book bound, of course, in human skin. A thousand years ago, two thousand, three, and maybe the sorceress wasn’t Hungarian, but Egyptian or Persian or Syrian. Regardless, it was a good story, whichever way you told it to me. She had to bargain her way in, naturally, because there was a certain unsavory native element to contend with. But, in the end, it was nothing that could not be brokered with the proper incantations and sacrificial largesse. Eventually, others followed her, whether through independent discovery or the few abstruse hints she’d left behind. You say that we are pioneers, or you say that we are fugitives, or you say that we are unassimilated aliens, come here from our birth world. We are exotic transplants, you have said. You have also said that she is still here, somewhere, because no one makes the trip down and then returns for good. This place leeches its way into you, more addictive than heroin or religion, and we who have passed through the gates and wandered these labyrinthine passages of slate and charcoal, we who have slept beneath these vacant, starless skies, we shall not ever be free, excepting the freedom those above can’t begin to comprehend. On occasion, I have thought about searching for her, but always you dissuade me.

I concentrate on the sweet burn of the brandy, and, straining, manage to sprout something from my groin that looks like nothing so much as the barrel of a revolver fashioned not from steel but pink-grey flesh.

“Nice try,” you smirk. “At least you could take a piss with that.”

“So what is my gift?” I ask, changing the subject because I’m too tired to try again right now.

“Something I found just beyond the portal. I think she might have been trying to discover the entrance. She had that stench about her.”

“Her,” I sigh, as I have never been shy about showing disappointment. “What will I do with a
her
.”

“Don’t be ungrateful, boy.”

“I am certainly not being ungrateful,” I reply, pouting now, as I know how much you love to see me pout, my petulance so much better than all the gratitude I could possibly muster. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with a
she
.”

“Whatever you might wish. Don’t be so thick.”

Your face has become porcelain, a doll’s glazed features cracked by age and the hands of children, and your mouth is a perfect Cupid’s bow of reproach. Your eyes have filled with clockwork. I take another swallow from the brandy bottle and shrug my shoulders, dappled now with ebony down feathers and porcupine quills and the poisonous, variegated spines of a species of tropical lion fish.

“Show me,” I say, and the porcelain abruptly shatters to reveal a skull carved from jade and sporting teeth carved from the ivory of a narwhal’s horn. I
know
that face. The first one you ever showed me, and it always puts me at ease. Now there is a soft popping commotion from your chest and belly, and a moment later your torso opens wide for me, gaping like the maw of some Paleozoic monstrosity. Your whole body shudders, and then the girl you swallowed is disgorged, vomited up in a great slimy heap upon the sheets. She slides free from the tangle of organs and gears, blood and oil and stranger lubricants, and lies shivering at my feet. There is a pale umbilical cord leading from her throat, leading back to you, but it is quickly severed with a flick of your claws, and an alloy of Wharton’s jelly and claret ichor spurts from the wound. The improvised, evacuated womb of your abdomen snaps shut, and now you hug yourself tightly and mutter, waiting for the contractions to end.