by Rob Bliss
Elizabeth watched her hands as she tightened her fists, passing fingers through her arm, sweeping her arm through the velvet drape. She gazed up at me. “We’re dead.”
I tried to chew my lip, but my teeth sank through. Thinking about the man in the swamp. Shook my head. “No. We’re still alive. But we’ve been made into ghosts. To interact with the dead, to receive their judgement.” I let out a long breath as I looked at the staircase. “We’re in their house now.”
Gord glanced at the silver coins on the stair, one having landed heads-up, the other tails-up. He stepped not up, but through, the stairs until the fourth stair was level with his thighs. With two fingers he reached down to see if he could pick up a coin. And to our surprise he did. He smiled, picked up the other coin, tucked both into a small inner pocket in the vest.
“If you could pick them up,” I said, “then they can’t be real.”
He shrugged. “Money’s money. They might pay for something.”
With part of his body still in the staircase, he looked up to the step of the staircase, asked, “What the fuck is that?”
Swamp vines weaved themselves into a thick mat as they grew quickly, following the contours of each stair, speeding toward Gord. He jumped back before they reached him, though they continued to grow down the stairs and across the floor, weaving a thick carpet that slipped beneath the beads and through the doorway.
We were all able to walk on the vines, and Gord tried to pass his body through the stairs again but was stopped. Instead, he could climb the vine-covered steps one foot at a time.
I understood. “The vines were a surface we could move across instead of slipping through,” I explained. “The swamp is escorting us into the House of Death.”
An unsettling thought. But like following the yellow brick road, we stepped over the carpet of vines and slipped lightly through the doorway of beads.
— | — | —
Chapter 26
The vine path weaved itself down a narrow hallway, some tendrils growing up the walls, swarming over black-and-white and sepia photographs of, I assumed, ancient family members. A woman in a petticoat and bonnet pulled down to her eyebrows sat with her tail curling out from the back of her wide dress, being held in her folded hands. A man stood beside her ornate chair wearing a black suit, a long black beard stretching down to his breastbone, a stovepipe hat rising off his head from his eyes up. The couple didn’t smile but stared with wide white eyes at the camera. Another photo showed a family of six: two girls in long dresses with large bows in their hair, two boys both in sailor suits, mother and father standing expressionless behind their children—all of them with tattoos on their foreheads. (The first couple had hats covering their tattoos, I guessed.) Another photo showed a man in a civil war uniform of the Confederacy, long curved sabre at his hip, white gloves, with a Van Dyke moustache and beard, staring away from the camera’s lens. His uniform bore designs and letters which were similar to the ones on the wedding party jackets and vests.
Down another short stretch of hall lined with photographs, some in ancient wooden oval frames, more than a few with weathering marks tainting the photographic paper, of family from bygone eras. Family members with tattoos and sometimes tails exposed to view. But these photos were a little more risqué—women wearing corsets but without dresses, bare-assed and bending over to show the length of their high-curving tails—men wearing bear pants, some with patches sewn onto the crotches, others with stitched laces, others with nothing but their penises exposed. We didn’t linger too long to see the changing generations.
At the end of the hallway, the vines grew up one wall, barring our way. Our hands could not pass through the weave. A doorway opposite this was open, the twisted green vine carpet leading us in. Elizabeth had taken the lead, ushering us into a dining room of round tables of dark wood, blue wallpaper imprinted with the family’s language, a bear’s head over the bar. Brass rails lined the bar, glasses hung upside down, taps with pump handles advertising beer I’d never heard of, an ornate mirror behind the bar that didn’t reflect the bartender nor the crowd of dead people sitting at the tables.
Smoke hazed the air. Not knowing what else to do, we followed the vine path that led to a table in a corner of the room, the vines growing to swarm it. We sat and gazed across the room, observing the dead.
A pretty woman with slit wrists talked to a thin man with smallpox scarring his face. Two men with cut nooses hanging down their backs played a game of darts. But the darts didn’t stick into the dartboard—they vanished in mid-air from each man’s hand once thrown, the board untouched, the darts perpetually returning to the thrower. Two women with faces deformed by assaulting fists, skin permanently dyed black and blue and yellow, with black eyes and swollen cut lips sat at one end of the bar, likely trading war stories. A man with a bullet hole in his forehead gave his dinner order to a waitress who had a gaping wound in her throat. A woman who was half naked, but only on the left side of her body, clothing corroded, the exposed skin burned and melted either by fire or acid, strolled around the room softly playing a concertina.
A waitress came to our table. She wore a crinoline dress and had black feathers woven into her hair which towered in tight coils off her head. Torn through her dress and skin was a charred hole, and clearly seen through the hole was her beating heart.
“Welcome to the Swamp Hotel. We move in time and space. We are everywhere and nowhere. We exist and are dead.” She spoke it all by rote, bored, then she said, “Cover charge is two heads, no tails.”
The three of us were confused. Gord reached into his pocket and brought out the two coins, inspected them, held them in a flat palm to show Elizabeth and I. On both sides of both coins were bear heads. He handed them to the waitress.
She took them, put them on her tongue, swallowed them. Then she reached into her chest cavity and pulled out a deck of ancient playing cards. Passing them to me, she ordered, “Shuffle and deal one card each.”
A loud boom and crash burst through the room. The mirror behind the bartender shattered and shot out a million shards of spinning glass which stuck into the bodies of the people in the room, spearing into walls and furniture.
No one flinched, but all eyes turned to our table.
The bartender called out, “The living have arrived to decide their fate. Ursa’s mercy upon us all!”
The mirror shrapnel hadn’t reached us in our corner. We stared at the faces which stared at us and saw the bits of mirror melt and run down the faces and bodies of the dead like mercury, which then pooled on the floor and solidified. A worm’s-eye view of the room reflected from the entire floor but superimposed over this was a constellation of stars and a full moon. I looked up and saw painted stars on the ceiling, with a bear’s outline drawn to connect the stars. In the full moon was the face of a snarling bear.
“Shuffle and deal,” the waitress repeated to me.
I let my shock pass as I concentrated on the deck of cards, each one depicting a method of death, mostly by medieval methods of torture. I tried desperately to guess what I was doing, what was about to happen, but it was impossible to predict. Surely nothing good could come of it. The dead around the room kept their eyes on us…on me.
With the deck shuffled, I dealt out a single card for Gord, Elizabeth and myself. Face down.
The waitress tapped the table with her finger and said, “Deck down.”
I sat the deck within her reach. She lifted the top card, set it beside the deck while announcing, “No more bets.”
Her eyes roved slowly over the three of us, then across the three cards resting on the table.
“Card up,” she said to Gord.
He flipped up his card. It showed a man being choked with wire as his tongue protruded and eyes bulged, blood slipping down his neck as the wire sliced as it cut.
The waitress smiled, lifted the card to show it around the room, called out, “Choker!”
The room laughed and howled, hammered fists on t
heir tables and on the bar, stomped the floor mirror of mercury, making it flex and warp, though it didn’t shatter. A man at a table with a bowler hat on his head and a blindfold of rusted barbwire across his eyes stood and brought his smile to our table. Stood beside Gord. Unwrapping the wire from around his eyes, tightening it around either fist, he held the length between his hands. He stuck out his scarred tongue to lick across the wire, cutting in freshly bleeding wounds, licking his lips at the taste of blood and rust.
His bloody mouth said, “Words can’t express how happy I’ll be to choke you to death.”
“Card up,” the waitress said to Elizabeth.
Her flipped-over card showed a figure lifted off their feet by a thick hook that entered the mouth and curved out of the eye, the eyeball stuck on the hook’s barb.
The waitress leered at Elizabeth, a corner of her lip lifted to expose a fang as she showed the card to the room and announced, “Hooker!”
Cheers and cat calls flew up to make glasses hanging over the bar rattle and sing. Men hooked arms with women and twirled them in a dance—a man with a noose kissed the severed neck stump of a woman while digging his hand beneath her petticoat—one of the other waitresses climbed up onto a table and flashed her maggot-filled vagina at several tables—a man sitting alone took his steak knife and slit both wrists, phantom blood spraying from either arm like sputtering fountains.
A thin man with a multitude of small fishhooks piercing his lips and nose, eyebrows and ears, stood up from behind the bar. As he came closer, we saw that his eyelids were kept closed by tiny hooks lined up, their barbs jutting out from his bottom eyelashes. A hook-shaped scar was branded into his forehead, across which lay the family tattoo.
Our waitress stepped to one side to allow him to step a hobnail boot up onto the table, stretch a leg over Elizabeth’s head to balance on the back of the booth. Legs on either side of her, he slipped down the cushioned back to sit behind her, her body cradled in his. Blind eyes edged around her jaw to gaze at her. His mouth unhinged like that of a snake, releasing a wide, long tongue on which rested a rusted iron hook. Dangled it between two fingers, rocking it back and forth.
“I like hooking women,” he said, flicking his tongue back into his mouth.
The crowd yelled and laughed, kicking their legs against the unbreaking floor mirror. The man kept his hug clasped around Elizabeth’s arms.
“Card up,” the waitress commanded me.
My card showed a man from the neck up, anguish in his tightly-squeezed eyes, blood pouring in rivulets down his face and neck, a disembodied hand carving flaps of skin from his head with a straight razor.
The waitress drew a sharp fingernail along my jaw to my lips, uttered beneath her breath, “Lovely.” Then she took up my card, spun on her heel, holding the card high for all to see. “Scalper!”
The crowd danced across the mirror, making it bend and waver and rattle, the singing glasses behind the bar bursting, bottles frothing alcohol, spraying the crowd who danced under the rain of spirits with their mouths open. Ghosts fucked ghosts. Ghosts tore wider the wounds of themselves and each other, black centipedes poured out like blood and crowded up the walls and swarmed the ceiling—rained down with rum and whiskey and gin into the hungry and thirsty mouths of the dead.
The waitress slapped the card face-up in front of me and smiled with lust and the desire to see me die. She reached down to pull up the hem of her dress, exposing her shaven pudendum. Two fingers slipped across the smooth mound and curled under. She pulled an opened straight razor out of her sex, slid its edge along the cleft, splitting her mound, leaving behind a trail of fresh crimson. Bending over the table to face me, she held the bloody razor between us, let a ruby drop slip down the silver blade, then licked the razor clean.
Her eyes reflected like those of a nocturnal animal, a spot of reflected silver deep in her pupils as she whispered to me, “I’ll peel your skin if you peel mine.”
The room erupted once more as the waitress held my stare, then stood back to loom over our booth. She tipped her chin to a shoulder to silence the rowdy room. “Dealer’s card.”
We all stared down at the remaining face-down card. Our executioners watched as well: Gord’s tightening the barbwire around his bleeding palms, Elizabeth’s cocooning her body with his, chin leaning on her shoulder…and mine smiling down at me, using the thin edge of the razor to flip the card over.
It showed a Valentine’s heart violently split in half by an axe.
The faces of our executioners fell. The waitress’s form flickered for a half second to transparency, and the dead look in her eye made her appear as though she were about to die again. Her heart stopped beating and she wavered dizzily on her feet. The razor dropped from her hand to clatter on the table. She picked up the card, reached an arm behind her without turning her gaze from me, and showed the card to the room.
“Love will tear us apart.”
The mirror screamed as it shattered under the heels that rested on it. The floor sank into black marsh water, taking the crowd with it, hands reaching up a last time, hats and bonnets floating amongst the severed tree roots and marsh weeds before the bodies of every ghost sank below the mire.
Only our waitress stayed standing, as did we, all on a bridge of swamp vines leading through the still-standing doorway out of the sunken room. A silver platter on which sat three small crystal glasses with bell mouths floated to us. Each was filled with what appeared to be grey ashes.
The waitress raised the razor in one hand and sliced her thumb against its edge as though she were peeling an apple. Black blood wormed out. She held her thumb over each of the glasses to allow a few drops to bead on top of the ashes, then sink down to form black veins within the grey.
“Drink up, then get the hell out of here,” she hissed as she lifted the tray up to us.
We drank. It tasted exactly like ashes and blood, of course. And everything—colors, shapes, sounds—were more vivid than ever before. We followed the vine path through the doorway.
The roar of a bear spun us to look back. Saw the waitress holding her heart in hand, squeezing it down into her fist, blood both red and black drained from between her fingers, down her forearms, into the swamp at her feet.
She tore her heart in half and dropped it into the bog.
— | — | —
Chapter 27
I, and only I, arrived in a traditional Japanese room. Wood and rice paper décor, sliding doors, tatami mats covering the floor, a low black table in the center of the room, a bonsai tree sitting on a pedestal. A small room with a muted white light shining through the paper walls. The trail of vines ran along the border of the room and stopped at a wall on which hung a painting of a geisha serving tea to a samurai warlord.
I looked away from the painting to see a geisha kneeling at one side of the low table with a tea set in front of her. She sat on her heels and a large pillow sat across from her. Smiling, she gave me a low bow, palms flat on her thighs, waiting for me to be seated.
I looked at the painting. The geisha was gone; the samurai warlord drank tea alone.
I sat on the pillow cross-legged and watched as the geisha slowly poured from a porcelain teapot into small cups. She was beautiful: white powdered face, black hair stretching in a perfect waterfall down her back to the floor, her white kimono decorated with cranes and koi. Her eyebrows had been plucked and re-drawn as tattoos high on her forehead. But when I looked closer at them, I saw that they were composed of the usual family letters and symbols, only drawn small and squeezed together.
Her lips were painted white with a small fingerprint of red in the center of her top and bottom lips. She smiled as she handed me a filled teacup with both hands, head bowed, eyes averted from my gaze.
I took the cup delicately with a return bow and sipped lightly. She sipped after me, then held her cup, waiting for me to finish and put my cup down first. Once she did, her hands sank back up the wide sleeves of her kimono, then her right hand r
eemerged with a knife similar to the one up my sleeve. But hers was smaller, thinner, the handle decorated with the letters and symbols of our tattoos.
Always smiling, she raised the point of the blade to her forehead, didn’t flinch as the steel cut a line under the tattoo of her right eyebrow. Blood slipped and curled around her eyes, sped like a thick tear down her alabaster cheek and into her lips. She continued slicing around the tattoo until a thin red line framed the black ink.
She laid the knife on the small table between our cups, then wiggled a long thumbnail under the carved flap of skin. Like peeling off a Band-Aid, she pulled the tattoo off her head, exposing the pinkish-white bone of her skull beneath. She laid the flap of skin on the table beside my cup with the words facing me. Took up the knife again and cut out the other eyebrow tattoo, laying it beside the other patch of skin. The two cavities in her forehead bled, raking lines of blood down her face, but bypassing her eyes. Head bowed, she let the slow drip of crimson stain the lap of her silk kimono.
I stared at her and at the pieces of skin, not knowing what she expected of me. I took up my cup to sip again and she watched my hand. Put the cup down and waited. She smiled, but I could sense she was impatient. Knowing I was missing whatever it was she expected of me.
Her soft voice instructed, “Eat me.”
She bowed her head again and I looked at the tattooed skin. She watched the movements of my hands, smiled when I reached out and took a flap of skin, raised it to my mouth. Her eyes raised higher to watch as I stuck out my tongue and placed the skin on it. Held it, letting blood seep off it into the cup of my mouth. I pulled my tongue in and closed my lips over it. Tasted like copper and salt and felt like soft sponge. I sucked the cannibal morsel to the back of my tongue, swallowed it, felt it worm down my throat. Took up my tea cup to wash it down. She smiled, pleased.
