by Slay (epub)
Tituba went to the mailroom instead. She found the tiny room was full of packages and guessed that some of them were nebulizers and humidifiers. All week long, residents had unboxed the machines in the room, leaving a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes. She had toyed with getting one herself, to combat the dryness in the building.
Fabiana was right. Bellona Heights was a sick building. Ever since she'd moved in, she had been plagued with low-key headaches that threatened to grow into full-on migraines. Her stomach was unsettled, and food tasted weird. Walking down a city block easily winded her. And she began to notice discolorations on her skin: darkness beneath her eyes, and white spots on her arms. Most of all, she was always thirsty. She would drink bottle after glass of water or juice, but she could never be satisfied. She didn't pee often, for the amount she drank. Where did it all go?
She passed by the superintendent's door, in futile hope.
"Warren not in again?" said someone behind her. It was Ty, who also lived on her floor. He was around her age and height, with a muscular lithe physique. His skin was dark and velvet-smooth, his bald head glowing with head wax. At least, that had been his appearance. Now, crows’ feet and forehead wrinkles marred the smooth expanse, and the lustrous blue-blackness of his skin was dried out to a leathery brown.
"Apparently not." Tituba looked away from Ty, hoping that he didn't notice her shocked reaction.
He jiggled the doorknob, as if to verify. Then, he glanced at Tituba, and gave her a conspiratorial wink.
"Desperate times," he said, and he pushed against the door with his shoulder. The door quivered with the pressure and after a few more aggressive pushes, it popped open.
Ty and Tituba were immediately hit with a wave of stale air that had a slight cindery taste. They simultaneously began coughing in response. There was also another smell beneath that one — a smell of turned meat and the coppery tang of old blood. A haze of carmine simmered in the room, thick enough that they both had to wave it away. The shades were drawn, so it was dim in the room.
"Oh, my god," Tituba said, after her eyes adjusted to the gloom.
There was a body slumped over a desk. She knew that it was a corpse. The angle of the head looked too uncomfortable to maintain, and the visible eye was open. She switched on the overhead light and immediately wished that she hadn't. The older gentleman was in a grey mechanic's suit, and his mouth was opened in a grimace. Dust pooled around the open mouth, on to the desk. It was embedded on his skin, in his hair, and she could see flecks of it in the whites of his eye.
Ty walked around the desk, reached out to touch the body.
"Leave it alone," Tituba said.
Ty lowered his hands, and reached for his cellphone instead, presumably to call for an ambulance.
Tituba saw the wrinkled flesh, fold upon fold of thin skin, some of it so dry that the pigment had leeched out. It didn't look like skin. It was papery, cracked like old parchment. And in the folds of skin, remnants of the red dust gathered. His mouth was open and a crumbled pink tongue lolled out past black and cracked lips.
"He looks like a mummy," Ty said after he finished speaking to the emergency operator. "I wonder how long he's been here."
Tituba heard him, but she was distracted by the thin trail of red dripping down from the HVAC vent.
Whatever lived there had drained the superintendent, had turned him into a husk. His skin had the same color and texture as a tamarind. She could only imagine the poor man's innards, the pulp toughened into sponge and coral.
"He's been sucked dry," Tituba said. "We're gonna end up like him."
With tweezers, Tituba scraped the red residue into an old nail polish bottle she had cleaned out. Something was in the vents, something that left behind this weird substance.
She brought the bottle with her to dinner at a restaurant.
The first thing Fabiana said when she saw Tituba was, "Girl, you look ashy and worn out!"
"I know," she replied, waving the comment away. "Listen to me. You were right. Bellona Heights is a sick building. Some kind of virus or something lives in the vents and gives everyone who lives there breathing problems!
"Last week, one of the other residents and I found the superintendent dead in his office. His body was dry. Bone dry. Desert dry. All of the moisture had been sucked right out of him."
Tituba pulled up a picture on her phone and handed it to Fabiana.
Fabiana shrieked. "Put that thing away!"
Tituba complied.
Fabiana said, "I don't think I've ever seen anything so terrible. Poor dude. He looks like one of those apple head dolls."
"I asked the EMTs if they were gonna do an autopsy to determine the cause of death. They ignored me."
Fabiana sucked her teeth in sympathetic dismay. "They always do. And we end up dead because they won't listen!"
Tituba dug around in her handbag until she found and pulled out the nail polish bottle.
"Look at it, Fab. Look closely."
"Look at an empty bottle of Carolina Beet lacquer?" Fabiana cautiously picked the bottle up and peered into it.
"Stop kidding around, girl. Tell me what you see."
Fabiana stared at it for a long moment, still looked as the server refilled their wine glasses with Rosé.
Finally, she said, "That dust moves."
"I'm glad you saw that too! I thought I was going crazy!"
Fabiana still held the bottle close to her eye. "I don't think it's dust, Tituba. I saw one fragment of whatever-it-is, apart from the others, move on its own. I see wings. Tiny, infinitesimal scarlet wings. The wings of a moth, not a butterfly. The straggler eventually joined the rest of the swarm, I suppose. And it looked like a swirling dust."
"You think it's insects?"
Fabiana shrugged in response. "I don't know. All I do know is, you have to get the hell out of there!"
Tituba was unlocking the door to her apartment when she heard the scream. It came from down the hall. She found herself running there and knocking on the door until Phylis, the grandmother who lived there with her daughter Krystle and grandson Kendrick, opened it.
"What's wrong, Miss Phylis?" she asked.
Miss Phylis was wild-eyed and apoplectic, apparently unable to speak. She gestured weakly to an opened doorway off the L-shape of the apartment. More screams came from there, mostly Krystle saying, "Lord, lord, lord!" Tituba left Miss Phylis behind to look in the doorway.
She tried to make sense of the bizarre scene. This was obviously a child's room, full of Thomas the Tank Engine paraphernalia, the google-eyed train's face on toys and curtains and posters, with its frozen smile stretched across the face. The walls were splattered with moving constellations that came from a projector lamp. Tituba saw little Kendrick being cradled by his mother, in what looked like a grotesque parody of the Pietá, his limp body draped over her lap. His eyes were closed and fluttering, as if he were fighting to keep them open, some nightmare thing wouldn't let him wake up. Things moved on his unconscious body. Scarlet specks, a tide of them spilling over his pajamas, arms, and face. The tiny little blister-colored things vibrated as they moved. And they moved with purpose, heading for his nostrils and slightly opened mouth. She imagined the minuscule things coating his nasal passages, flurrying in the chambers of his sinuses, ricocheting and embedding themselves in spongy alveoli as they drank up the mists of the boy's body, drying out mucus membranes, turning plasma into dust. She heard Kendrick begin to wheeze, heard the raspy rattling in his chest.
Those creatures have done the same thing to me, every night, she thought. She recalled her dreams about Martian-red deserts and dust storms.
She switched on the overhead light. The stars became invisible. The moth-things slowed down, and lazily detached themselves from the child's body. They drifted upward, red motes of dust, heading toward the ceiling, heading toward the grates of the vent. More of them dribbled from Kendrick's nose and mouth. It looked like a twinkling river of blood. Tituba dug around her p
urse until she found a bottle of spray lotion. She spritzed the red-speckled air with the thick mist, saturating it. A clump of the things fell from the air, a worm-like wriggling ball of red paste with the consistency of snot. The coagulated mess fell on the floor with a wet splat. Tituba, Krystle and Miss Phylis watched with disgust at the wet wings flexing in globules of oily lotion.
Tituba said, "Quick! We have to get the rest of the stuff out of Kendrick! Wake him up and make him drink water. Maybe that will flush them out."
Krystle carried Kendrick into the kitchen, where he blinkingly woke up in the harsher light. They got the confused child to slurp down a couple of glasses of water. Then he began coughing, body-wracking spasmodic coughs. His mother patted his back, calling Kendrick her little angel, her sweetheart, her precious boy.
Then, he vomited.
Out of his mouth came a stream of red paste. They saw the fragments of wings and waterlogged pieces of something drip onto the floor. The swarm of dust-insects was decimated. But more lived in this forgotten, neglected building full of brown and black bodies. Were these tiny, moth-like vampires conscious of what they did as they fed upon sleeping bodies, draining the moisture of breath, crawling down throats? Perhaps they weren't malevolent, these winged specks of decay.
Bellona Heights. More like Hellona Depths.
Back in her apartment, Tituba blocked the vent with a piece of plywood. It was a temporary measure. She thought of black mold, or Legionnaires bacteria brought to life with some dark magic. She thought about contacting the press or an exterminator. But people ignored the superintendent’s death, and the complaints bought by the other residents. It was unlikely that anyone would listen to a black trans woman.
She would have to fix this on her own. Survival was in her DNA. Survival, and its importance, was why she chose her name. Titus, her birth name, had been meek and a victim of the church, his family, and society. Titus would have succumbed to the dust-moths and been one more epidemiological statistic to be ignored.
Tituba, however, would fight. She would survive, like the historical woman she'd named herself after.
As she lay down at 4am, exhausted from saving Kendrick's life, she heard the scarlet moths skittering around in the blocked vents, banging against the plywood barrier.
"I dare you," she said.
And she began coughing. Violence was in her lungs, her chest, her throat, her head. She coughed so hard that black spots appeared before her. Some of those things must’ve found their way into me. The malevolent red moths were attacking her, with clear intention. It could not have been a coincidence. They had heard her issued challenge, and now they responded.
If -- when -- Tituba survived this assault, she would destroy miniature dust-demons. She would kill them tonight.
Love Hangover
Sheree Renée Thomas
That night disco records weren’t the only things that burned. I lost someone irreplaceable, a creature that lived off blood and music, the lifeforce of a people, but a creature that was also my friend.
Delilah brings it, and I mean she brings it one hundred percent! Delilah Divine! Sang, girl, sang!
Delilah teased death the way she teased her fans. Her voice, an odd constellation of sound.
She had tasted death and knew she would always live, in one form or the next, like the singer resurrected in the record’s groove. Every night was a different club, one after the other. Sixteen on a hi-hat, four on the floor, two and four on the backbeat, that was the sound that announced her arrival and all of Disco. Like Delilah Divine’s voice, the music was sweet water finding its own way home. It was going to get through, just a matter of time. The challenge was finding a way to listen and not get drenched. With Delilah you drowned.
The first night I met Delilah, she danced on a speaker box. Bianca Jagger rode by on a white horse, her black locks shining ebony waves, but all eyes returned to Delilah. To say she was a vision is to insult the very nature of sight. Beauty is internal and eternal, and Lilah’s beauty came through in her songs. Motown, funk, soft Philly soul and salsa. It wasn’t what she said. Not the lyrics nor the music with its lush orchestral arrangements, her soaring vocals with reverb. It was the story that was beneath her words and music, the message she carried within.
The message was about freedom. That’s what the sound was and the movement. We danced to be free. Candi Staton sang from her heart and that’s why we loved her songs, too. I had no idea how true her lyrics would be.
Self-preservation is what’s going on today. Delilah started off singing jazz, top 40 hits. When deejays arrived in clubs carrying crates between sets, she and the other vocalists sang for their own survival. And sing she did. I loved the way I moved when her music was on, the way we dove and split from our old selves into something sensual and new. The way the dance floor took us in, wet and holy in its mouth. We were all glitter and steam, blurred blazing bodies spinning in the music’s light. If I turned away from the hypnotic rhythm and the beats, from Delilah’s seductive song and dance, I could have saved myself and a lot of dead people a whole lot of trouble. Heartache was Delilah’s last name. Nothing else was fitting.
Young hearts just run free. Delilah only had time for the young and none of us, not a single soul could run away or leave her embrace. She was like Diana’s song. If there’s a cure for this, I don’t want it, I don’t want it. I thought about Delilah all the time and she gave me and all her fans the sweetest hangover. When Delilah got into your bloodstream, she controlled lives, heartbeats. I practically lived in the clubs to just to see her.
The club’s appeal was that the ultimate rocker lifestyle was available to anyone who could manage to get in. When I first met Delilah, it seemed like she was always in the club, as if she emerged from beneath the parquet floors fully formed. Dressed in slinky, silk dresses that wrapped her curves in silver-tinged moonlight, Delilah was a vision. You could not turn away from her and believe me, many tried, only to find themselves in her thrall.
* * *
Music was her spell. Deejays played with minds. Stories told with songs seeped into your soul. Walk through a door in the forest. No confidence at all, but in music spirits take shape. I became who I wanted to be, what I needed. Dancing with Delilah Divine was like that.
Five a.m. when the club was closed, most others would stumble their way home or fall into the faded booths of a diner. Delilah wouldn’t want rest or breakfast. She wanted to be near water. Delilah would sit next to the ferns and bulrushes. She said unlike the clubs, the green life formed a wall of kindness. She would bend her ear to the waves that lapped up against the shore, whispering to voices I could not hear. I tried to reach her with a joke, some laughter, or a bit of gossip, anything that might hold her attention, pull her from the faces, the arms I could not see. But she was lost in the waters, in search of depths where she could drown her weight of years. What she sought to drown was not a name but her history. Sometimes she spoke as if she lived beyond her twenty odd years.
Lilah lived for the rust of songs, for the scars and cutting parts of choruses, the hooks that dug in your soul and made you cry from recognition of depths. She wanted to laugh with the joy of it, and dance and dance until she could reach the gray vaults of sea. She said her sisters waited for her on the other side, but she could not swim her way back to them. Said she was already drowned. Each night at the club I watched her struggle to breathe. They played her songs before I knew they were hers. String sections and synthesizers, syncopated baselines and horns, and that voice, that incredible voice. She danced as if the music was a stranger. As if the songs were notes that came out of another’s throat.
“Where did you learn to sing like that?” I asked. She looked at me with dead fisheyes that should have run me away, but I was already hers before the first time we even touched or danced.
“From the throats of a thousand, thousand men and women. But the children,” she said, closing her eyes as if the memory pained her, “their voices are too sweet. I
cannot bear the taste of their songs.”
I thought she was high. I’d seen her with blow and biscuits, poppers and whippets—whatever made the music and lights, the dance and the tempo last longer.
“What do songs taste like, Lilah?”
“Like ambergris and champagne.”
She spun around, eyes staring straight up. “They’ve come back.” She pointed. The disco ball was the largest in the studio. It reflected the jewel tone beams of the strobe lights. “We used to party with these in the 20s, back in Berlin.”
“Berlin? Lilah, you are only twenty, if that. How would you know how flappers partied then?”
She stopped spinning with a shrug. “Saw it in a movie?” she asked. “Mirror balls. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Die Sinfonie der Großstadt!” she shouted, then repeated her spinning top dance. Her nipples brushed the sheer fabric of her teal, jewel-toned dress. I forced my eyes from staring. Instead I watched her sleeves flutter and float, gossamer moth wings. Lilah favored dresses that made her look as if at any moment she could fly away. She was always so restless, like a hummingbird, a kind of lightning flowed through her, even without the drugs. She was never fully present. Her eyes, her mind, the random stories—her memories, she claimed—would burst from her at any moment. And the voices no one heard but her. I thought she was schizophrenic and mentioned it to a doctor friend, a shrink who frequented the clubs. “No,” he said, after chatting with her, drink in hand. “Frankie, that one’s very clear.”
Lilah was like standing on a hill with the weeds and the wildflowers. The wind blowing through me. If I wasn’t so determined to pretend that I didn’t imagine her breasts in my mouth, the soft curve of her belly beneath the silk skin, I would have seen the tell-tale signs of the monster she really was, the creature she hid.
