The Ammonite Violin & Others (3 page)

“She’ll be hungry,” she says, this thing on the floor, the woman with golden barbell pupils and then no pupils at all. “When she wakes up, she’ll be very hungry.”

“She’s always hungry,” I reply.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” she says.

“Is that the best you can do?” you growl, grinding your hips against me, crushing me into the bed. There’s pain, and I shut my eyes, wondering how much longer until I’ve sunk so far there’s no hope of ever getting back to the surface again.

“You could have joined her,” the woman says, the thing that might have been a woman—as they say—once upon a time. Back before that book of yours was printed. Before this deep place opened up like the whole wide world asking for a fucking kiss and someone hid the wound so you’d need a book to ever find it. “It would have been easier that way, easier for the both of you.”

A coward dies a thousand times before his death
...

I try to stand, because I want to see what they’ve made of you. I want to see what’s left. What you’re becoming, but my legs are so weak, and my head spins, and I sit right back down again. She watches while I draw a circle in the dust, as perfect a circle as I can manage with my fingers on the gritty, ancient cement floor, trying to remember all the things you ever taught me about casting circles, north, south, the four fucking quarters, and she laughs at me again.

“Your head is filled with music,” she says. She sounds delighted.

“There’s always a siren,” I tell her, spitting the words like pebbles, “singing you to shipwreck.” And I’m wishing there were magic in the words, magic like the mess they’ve made of you. Alchemy. Transformation. Something that changes one thing into something else entirely.

We were halfway to the bottom before it occurred to me to start counting the steps.

You sat up straight, some trick you’d learned, and those secret muscles inside you tightened around me until I gasped and clenched my teeth. Your breasts smeared with my blood, my blood trickling thick down your chin, dripping onto my belly. You licked your lips clean and grinned. “I could tear it off,” you say. “I could always find another play pretty. Someone who isn’t such a goddamn pussy.”

Inside my circle, mock safe inside my circle, and all the sea pressing down on me. There are things that are born into darkness and live their entire lives in darkness, in deep places, and they’ve learned to make whatever light they need. It sprouts from them, lanterns of flesh to dot the abyss like yellow-green stars. Stars like bare bulbs strung on electrical cords, and I wish that I could make my own light here at the bottom of the vaults of the earth.

“I see a stairway,” the demon thing says to me, “so I follow it down into the belly of a whale.”

“They’re only songs,” I tell her again.

“I built the shadows here,” it says, as though it understands. “I built the growl in the voice I fear...”

“Did you?” I ask. “Did you really?” and then she laughs that laugh that reminds me just how much darker dark can be, if it has a mind to stop fooling around and be done with me once and for fucking all.

“I could always find someone else,” you said, in case I hadn’t heard you the first time. And then you shut up and make another hole in me.

She kissed you, the way you’d always asked
me
to kiss you. She kissed you, and your eyes rolled back. Your lips moved, but the noises from the ceiling, the excited rustle of wings and the
cluck clack clack
of all those claws against concrete and the suckling sounds, all of that to mask whatever you were saying to her or to me or to whatever ravenous gods a stone cold bitch like you deigns to get down on her knees for.

She
folded
you, and I could never even have dreamt such a geometry, such a fine and terrible origami of flesh and bone and blood. A paper flower budding from nothing at all but the flatness of you. A butterfly. A scorpion of planes and angles and nightmares, and before she was finished, you’d begun to sweat the way she sweats. She’d gone deeper into
you
than I could ever have gone, a hundred times deeper, a thousand thousand times deeper, down stairs I had never even glimpsed. You sweated milk-white droplets that pooled at your bare feet, your whole body bleeding itself dry of your soul, of the humanity you’d spent your life hating and wanting someone to cut away. And then something grew from the pool, from the sweat that spoiled in an instant, going to tar or India-ink tendrils that slithered greedily around your ankles and up your long pale legs and twined themselves about you until there was no more of you left to see.

“Why so green and lonely?” she asks.

“Will she even remember me?” I ask back.

“It would have been easier for both of you,” the woman says and shrugs, and then spreads her wings. It makes me think of some great lazy animal stretching itself after a nap, and the light shines through the webbing between the supporting struts of those fingers grown so impossibly long and thin. I can see veins and capillaries like a satellite photograph of rivers from outer space, Mother Ganges, the Mekong Delta, the mighty, muddy Mississippi from five hundred miles up.

That ’s you in there,
I think and begin retracing the protective, delusory circumference of my circle.
Those are rivers of you, stolen rivers winding through her flesh.

“I’d hold you under and drown you like a sack of kittens,” you laughed as I slid out of you, trying to ignore the way my balls had begun to ache. You licked me from your fingers. You bent down and sucked my cock, taking back any stray bit of you I might have scrubbed loose. I shat my eyes and tried to lie still as your sharp, sharp teeth drew a few more drops.

“She’ll know how now,” the woman says, turning away from me, turning to see your cocoon, your black chrysalis glistening wetly beneath the two twenty-five watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “How to
drown
you, I mean,” she adds, though I’d understood the first time.

I’m a small thing dropped overboard and lost at the bottom of the sea. I’m a man slit open, stem to stern, and there are bricks and lead and ballast stones where my guts should be.

I sit within the confines of my circle and wonder how long it would take me to cross the concrete room to the foot of the stairs leading back up to the subbasement and the basement and abandoned warehouse and the city and the surface of the sea. I try to remember how many steps I counted on the way down, because twice that number might tell me how many there were altogether, and I pretend that I could ever have the courage to leave whatever you’ve become. I tell myself I’ll go. I tell myself that I could find the way back alone and you wouldn’t try to follow me. I pretend I wouldn’t see you every time I shut my eyes.

The chrysalis ripples and begins to split apart.

You licked roughly at the tip of my penis and told me to open my eyes and stop being such a baby. “I haven’t bitten it off yet,” you said.

“Kiss me,” the demon sighs and folds its wings away.

And I’m only a stone or a penny or an empty, discarded bottle.

And I have no light of my own.

It’s not a wild place—not some bottomless, peat-stained loch hidden away between high granite cliffs, and not a secret, deep spring bubbling up crystal clear from the heart of a Welsh or Irish forest where the Unseelie host is said to hold the trees always at the dry and brittle end of autumn, always on the cusp of a killing winter that will never come. It’s only a shallow, kidney-shaped pool in a small, neglected city park. No deeper than a tall man’s knees, water the color of chocolate milk in a pool bordered by crumbling mortar and mica-flecked blocks of quarried stone. There are fountains that seem to run both night and day, two of them, and I suppose one might well imagine
this
to be some sort of enchantment, twin rainstorms falling always and only across the surface directly above submerged, disgorging mechanisms planted decently or deceitfully out of sight. In daylight, the water rises from the cloudy pool and is transformed, going suddenly clean and translucent, a fleeting purity before tyrant gravity reasserts itself and the spray falls inevitably back into the brown pool, becoming once again only some part of the murky, indivisible whole. There are gnarled old willows growing close together, here and there along the shore, trees planted when my grandmother was a young woman. They lean out across the pool like patient fishermen, casting limp green lines leaf-baited for fish that have never been and will never be.

No one much comes here anymore. Perhaps they never did. I suspect most people in the city don’t even know the park exists, steep-sided and unobtrusive, hidden on three sides behind the stately Edwardian-era houses along Euclid Avenue, Elizabeth Street, and Waverly Way. The fourth side, the park’s dingy north edge, is bordered by an ugly redbrick apartment complex built sometime in the seventies, rundown now and completely at odds with everything else around it. I wonder how many grand old houses were sacrificed to the sledgehammers and bulldozers to make room for that eyesore. Someone made a lot of money off it once, I suppose. But I’m already letting myself get distracted. Already, I’m indulging myself with digressions that have no place here. Already, I’m trying to look away.

Last spring, they found the boy’s body near the small stone bridge spanning one end of the pool, the end farthest from the brick apartment complex. Back that way, there are thick bunches of cattails and a few sickly water lilies and other aquatic plants I don’t know names for. I’ve seen the coroner’s report, and I know that the body was found floating face up, that the lungs were filled with water, that insects had done a lot of damage before someone spotted the corpse and called the police. No one questioned that the boy had drowned, and there was no particular suspicion of foul play. He had an arrest record—shoplifting, drugs and solicitation. To my knowledge, no one ever bothered to ask how he might have drowned in such shallow water. There are ways it could happen, certainly. He slipped and struck his head. It might have been as simple as that.

No one mentioned the hoofprints, either, but I have photographs of them. The tracks of a large unshod horse pressed clearly into a patch of red mud near the bridge, sometime before the boy’s body was pulled from the pool. You don’t see a lot of horses in this part of town. In fact, you don’t see any. I’m writing this like it might be a mystery, like I don’t already know the answers, and that’s a lie. I’m not exactly a writer. I’m a photographer, and I don’t really know how one goes about this sort of thing. I’m afraid I’m not much better with confessions.

I could have started by explaining that I happen to own one of those old houses along Euclid, passed down to me from my paternal grandparents. I could have begun with the antique bridle, which I found wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, hidden at the bottom of a steamer trunk in the attic, or... I could have started almost anywhere. With my bad dreams, for example, the things I only choose to call my bad dreams out of cowardice. The dreams—no, the
dream
, singular, which has recurred too many times to count, and which is possibly my shortest and most honest route to this confession.

(No, I didn’t
kill
the boy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m no proper murderess. It’ll never be so simple as that. This is a different sort of confession.)

In the dream, I’m standing alone on the little stone bridge, standing there stark naked, and the park is washed in the light of a moon that is either full or very near to full. I have no recollection of getting out of bed, or of having left the house, or of the short walk down to the bridge. I’m cold, and I wonder why I didn’t at least think to wear my robe and slippers. I’m holding the bridle from the trunk, which is always much heavier than I remember it being. Something’s moving in the water, and I want to turn away. Always, I
want
to turn away, and when I look down I see that the drowned boy floating in the water smiles up at me and laughs. Then he sinks below the surface, or something unseen pulls him down, and that’s when I see the girl, standing far out near the center of the pool, bathing in one of the fountains.

A week ago, I laid the pen down after that last sentence, and I had no intention of ever picking it up again. At least, not to finish writing this. But there was a package in the mail this afternoon—a cardboard mailing tube addressed to me—and one thing leads to another, so to speak. The only return address on the tube was Chicago, IL 60625. No street address or post-office box, no sender’s name. And I noticed almost immediately that the postmark didn’t match the Chicago zip. The zip code on the postmark was 93650, which turns out to be Fresno, California. I opened the tube and found two things inside. The first was a print of a painting I’d never seen before, and the second was a note neatly typed out and paper-clipped to a corner of the print, which read as follows:

A blacksmith from Raasay lost his daughter to the
Each Uisge.
In revenge, the blacksmith and his son made a set of large hooks, in a forge they set up by the lochside. They then roasted a sheep and heated the hooks until they were red hot. At last, a great mist appeared from the water and the
Each Uisge
rose from the depths and seized the sheep. The blacksmith and his son rammed the red-hot hooks into its flesh and, after a short struggle, dispatched it. In the morning there was nothing left of the creature apart from a foul jelly-like substance.
(More West Highland Tales
; J. F. Campbell, 1883)