Kissing Carrion

by Gemma Files

  I raise my hand, look at my fingers. See my vision narrow. My pressure-drunk brain, squeezing itself flat. Glitches, sparking and fading: Images fizzling. Kiley’s shadow-animals. Nanny’s hands.

  The two moons of Mars, on that childhood chart. Deimos and—

  (Phobo)

  —Phobos. Meaning panic—

  (phobia)

  —and fear.

  Fear, my motive, my spur. My dark and guiding star.

  All my life, I think, my fear has driven me to take the easiest way. And where does the easiest way lead, usually?

  Well, that would probably be—down.

  Down here, at the bottom. Where there are a lot of things, and most of them glow . . .

  Thinking: When you get what you ask for, you really have no right to be surprised.

  . . . including me.

  Skeleton Bitch

  RICTUS. THAT’S THE grin a corpse gets, when it knows you’re just too chicken-shit to bury it yet, and I should know.

  I looked it up.

  * * *

  So—Friday night at Jaime’s, two months back. Somebody’s earrings caught the light from over by the john, and I couldn’t believe anybody could possibly wear that many rings at once without ripping their lobes wide open, so I leaned past Doug Whoever’s shoulder for a closer look. She was up against the wall with a speaker at either hip, all black on black, thin as sidewalk chalk. White hair, white lips with an irregular flash of blue teeth laced between them in the kitchen light-spill. A chemical warfare jacket to mid-thigh over tights so old they were mostly runs, flag of South Vietnam dripping blood along one arm, the other nude and unexpectedly track-free. Element of surprise aside, it all seemed like the same old poser Goth shit to me—I mean, just about everybody there was trying to look dead.

  But she was the only one doing it right.

  “’Scuse me,” I said, and pushed off to investigate. Some proto-grunge epic blasted so loud my fillings ached as I stepped up beside her, but she didn’t even turn. Just said:

  “Like this song?”

  I took a second, got a smear of lash mixed with red-shot iris in return for my tact.

  “Yeah, classic. You?”

  “First time I heard this . . . it was 1987. Ozone summer. Kicked some kind of door open in my head, and I—”

  “Don’t tell me. You wanted to hunt him down and do him on the floor, right?”

  She showed those teeth again—wet, this time. A little internal thrum of laughter. Then, in that prepubescent head-cold purr of hers, entirely too detached to charm:

  “No, Mr. Man. I wanted to be him. Just like you did.”

  I followed her down the hall awhile. Pretty soon, she pulled me through a door with a big splash of paint above it, and we fell against the wall. I felt her breasts move under the jacket, pointy little nipples piercing through like slate chips. Five cold fingers toying with my fly, diffident, like she could take it or leave it, depending on how slow the music got.

  “You keep on doing that, I’m gonna have to take you into the john.” Her hand moved a little lower. “Hey,” I said, trying to keep it light—but I was drunk by then, and it came out wrong. “You think I’m joking?”

  That made her look up, for the first time. And answer:

  “No.”

  “Oh, so you’re one stone bitch, I expect.”

  A narrow blue rim of smile, like frost.

  “Yeah,” she said, with absolutely no change of tone. “I am.”

  And I laughed.

  * * *

  But by the morning after—when I woke up, alone and hurting—I believed her.

  * * *

  A couple of days later, I met Jaime on the street. “That chick I went off with—” I began.

  A wave of laughter. “Oh, yeah. Dawn of the Dead. How you make out there, anyways?”

  I shrugged. “Okay, I guess.” Then: “Listen, man—is that her name?”

  This time, he had to hold onto the wall.

  “Jesus, buddy,” he said, finally. “Next time ask, okay? It seriously helps.”

  * * *

  That was the same week we cut the demo. The same week I wrote it. We liked to leave things as close to the wire as we could, back then—before the money started coming in, and our lead guitarist started worrying about who our “real fans” still were.

  The song was “Skeleton Bitch”—just the B-side, originally—and it broke us wide open, just like we always wanted. Just like nothing we did before ever could, and nothing we’ve done since ever has.

  But I’m not here to talk about the band.

  * * *

  Next time I saw her was at the launch party, wedged between a cluster-fuck of drunken music critics and the kitchen counter, keeping herself amused by making anagrams from mine honorable host’s (a.k.a. our agent’s) Froot-Loop-bright fridge magnets. I slid in behind her, one arm under her breasts, and whispered in her ear:

  “I do got a phone, you know.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, making S-H-E-S-V-A-I-N into V-A-N-I-S-H-E-S.

  Something in her voice told me to gulp my drink, and when I shook the one I’d snagged for her in front of her face, she turned—to study me close, like we’d never even met before.

  “That’s nice too,” she said, taking it. Then, sipping: “Do I know you?”

  For a minute, I couldn’t speak. Literally.

  “Last I heard,” I said, finally.

  * * *

  Because, Goddammit, it was her. Same white hair. Same white lips. Same cold limbs all a-roll in their sockets, lithe as bones. And her pale, thread-veined eyes, beneath their fresh black diamonds of mascara—still shiny, still blank, like old blood under ice.

  We ended up in the cloak-room, that time, doing it like dogs on a pile of coats worth more put together than I’d made in my entire life. She was all slick and tight under that jacket she wouldn’t take off—wet but frozen, her inner ridges icy slipknots, pulling me down. She popped my zip and ripped her tights wide open with one long thumb-nail, sliding back onto me like some well-oiled, key-swallowing lock. And her nipple seemed to burn a hole right through my palm as we fell the full fathom five together, down deep to where the only fish are blazing ghosts and the pressure crushes you flat.

  When I came, I heard “Skeleton Bitch” playing somewhere. “Wrote that for you,” I gasped, in her ear.

  She just smiled. And asked:

  “Wrote what?”

  * * *

  Hours later, I woke to find Jaime gingerly trying to extricate his date’s velvet cape from the mess underneath me.

  “Chris,” he said, “you’re one exotic guy, and I mean this in the nicest possible way—but anyone ever tell you ‘bout beds?”

  I coughed, mouth full of cat hair and whiskey fumes. “Her name’s Rictus,” I told him.

  “Yeah, great, man.”

  And he passed his date her shroud, just in time for me to stumble past them both, not quite making the washroom door before the rest of my brains all boiled up through my nose.

  * * *

  That was how it went, from then on. She was everywhere, like an itch—capillary-deep, unscratchable. If I’d had any trouble pissing, I would have thought she gave me something.

  But I wasn’t getting off that easy.

  Things got dark, then darker. I’d snap my alarm off at eight, open my eyes what felt like a few minutes later, only to find it was two in the afternoon. The phone rang, intermittently: Relatives, old acquaintances, other band members—replaced, eventually, by their lawyers. They talked about stuff I’d signed. Contracts, whatever; that fabled three-album deal everybody’d dreamed about for so long, each side at least five songs long, with not one track of it written or recorded yet.

  It didn’t matter. Turns out, I’d only had the one song in m
e.

  And now it was gone.

  * * *

  Anyways, enough said. I’ll cut to the chase.

  Three weeks of hell later, I was standing in front of Lovecraft, comparison-shopping for “marital aids”—dipsy-doodle half-inchers, bright pink rubber cartoon Japanese animals full of rotating plastic balls, two-foot ebony Pulverizers (“life-like in every way, complete with veins!”)

  And I saw her. A little black dot on the street behind me, tourists recoiling as she limped past them down the avenue with that sidewinder strut of hers well in play, swaying like kelp on a dark current. Blind, but purposeful.

  Yeah, I called after her. What do you think? And no, she didn’t turn.

  So I followed her down.

  Down past the Strip, down past Front Street, down through the underpass. Right on down to Harborfront. Down to the cold and slimy shore of Lake Ontario itself, where ducks float and fish-bellies flash, surfacing intermittently against the dark green waves. Down to the end of a long, long pier, its foundations slicked with chemical foam, where yuppies from the condos on either side stand arm in arm each night, to sip their take-out cappuccino and watch the Island ferry go by. Down where the land runs out, which is—naturally enough . . . where I stopped.

  But she didn’t.

  * * *

  Happened so fast, after our hour-plus meander, it took a breath just to register. One minute she was there, the next—

  I heard myself scream, and plunged in after her.

  * * *

  When I made the pier again—which was a lot harder than it seemed like it would be, from dry land—I just lay there, panting. Soaked through. Jesus, that water was cold.

  The sun moved higher, drying my clothes. Dogs came and sniffed at me. Shadows flickering across the mirrored windows and distant highrises. Clouds. I shut my eyes, retreated into a dim, red roar, and lay there playing dead man—which, at that point, I very seriously felt like I might as well be.

  I just couldn’t get my head around it.

  When my back hurt too much to lie on anymore, I shuffled away; I don’t know where to. Vague images of hats and sports equipment hanging in space, mannequins contorted in pointless displays, my own eyes staring back at me from a series of department store windows. I picked yesterday’s newspaper out of the garbage and dissected it, unread. I hung around the pay-phones, hypnotized by their calling-card readouts.

  By six, the sun was setting, and I found myself back at the shore, stumbling along a seemingly endless stretch of what passes for beach in Toronto. My shoes were full of sand, so I stopped to knock them out. Right one first.

  A few drops of what I thought was rain kissed the back of my neck.

  Then a shadow fell across my bare foot.

  I looked up.

  Rictus stood there.

  * * *

  Her clothes hung slack on her, shiny and deflated, like popped seaweed pods. Water in her hair. Water in her kohl-smeared eyes. She gave a great, jaw-cracking yawn, through moist black lips, and I heard it rattle in her lungs.

  She cocked her head at me, inquisitive. But only mildly so.

  “We met before,” she said. “A while back.”

  My heart was a fistful of broken glass.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said. “You’re dead.” A beat. “Aren’t you?”

  She made that thrum again. Just as low. But more—liquid.

  “Well, you tell me . . . Mr. Man.”

  I know what real contempt is, now. Not what we think hurts us. Not words, not deeds. Not even physical pain. Real contempt is a waterlogged corpse you’ve cried over for a day, wordless and amazed at the depth of your own loss, who stands in front of you at sunset with her hair like a bloody halo—and doesn’t even have the decency to pretend she remembers your name.

  “You bitch,” I said, dry-mouthed. “I’d do anything for you. Don’t you even care?”

  She smiled, then. And I saw her mouth was ripped at one corner—not much, just enough.

  A freshwater leech pulsed, black and fat, at the base of her pale tongue.

  “Care,” she repeated, as though tasting it. “There’s a word for you. Impressive. Like it should mean . . . something.”

  Smiling wider. Showing more.

  “Problem is, I don’t know what.”

  She sank down in front of me, there on the dirty sand. Lay right on back amongst the fast food debris and the frost-bitten weeds, easing her chemical warfare jacket’s front flaps slowly apart.

  Clip by painstaking clip.

  “We did meet before, though,” she said. “Once or twice. Your name—is—”

  “Chris.”

  “Oh, riiight.”

  She pulled it open, then. For the first time. Saying, not unkindly:

  “You’re all the same to me, man. Nothing personal. I just am what I am. And being what I am, I take—what I—can get.”

  And when I finally saw what was under it, I heard myself mewl like a crushed cat.

  She just looked up at me, from under her wet white lashes. A level gaze, flat-eyed. Not secretive, so much—as patient. Like dust.

  Because I wanted her. Still.

  “So,” she said. “You coming?”

  Still. And always.

  “Or what?”

  * * *

  And I let her draw me down. Like she always knew I would, whether I’d ever found out or not—what she was. I mean, is. Rachel, Ruth, Rebecca, maybe even Rita-turned-Rictus, mouth open wide, some milky kind of liquid spilling up from deep inside her like an undertow. Oh, Christ, suffering Christ. A real man-sized portion poking up from me into the dark beneath her coat, sausage stuffed fit to fry and pop, right on up where it’s tight, and slick, and ragged, and cold. Christ. I knew exactly what I was doing this time, and it didn’t even matter. Up through the snapped wishbone of her pelvis, nudging aside a few soft coils of intestine, up through the muscle wall, up as far as I could go into that clotted seam full of black blood, the autopsy scar I’d thought all along was her vagina. Deep into the black, sweet, caustic heart of the matter. The core. Where it all gets broken down to the lowest common denominator, meaning eff-all. Nothing to the infinite power. A dead girl’s stinking stomach flapping open in the wind, cold enough to burn.

  Then a rasp of unstrung suture caught me on the back-stroke, and I screamed as I came, clutching her close—‘til her corpse’s grin finally got too much for me, and I jack-knifed my face hard into the top of her spine.

  This time, when I bit her shoulder in the grip of my passion, a bit of it tore away.

  And I swallowed it.

  * * *

  “Skeleton Bitch” went top ten in a week. I don’t care if I never sing again.

  Because somewhere out on the Strip, she’s there. I know it. My white doll muse, washed unrecognizable. Got stitches from her throat to her twat, black on bruisy white, left nipple gone limp as any supernumerary mole. Back of her right ear, under the dark roots, there’s a triangular gash—the place where somebody’s steel-toed boot went in. And part by part, she’s ugly. Part by part, she’s poison. But if you ever catch her eye, even for a second—those wide, ivory eyes, like bone, like stone, so level and calm and dead under their maps of burst blood-vessels—she’ll wipe you raw, she’ll drag you down, down deep into the trash at the bottom of the Lake, where the big fish breed. H-shot to the spine, lighter-fluid spurt, imploded orgasm cold as nitrogen, freezing your brain ‘til it shatters at a touch. And you won’t mind at all, man.

  You’ll even get to like it.

  * * *

  This is what she said, that last time—a breathless breath against my ear-lobe:

  “Bite down, baby. Bite right down. ’Cause this is all of me you get.”

  Skeleton bitch, see her grin

  As the knife goes in and in and in and—<
br />
  End of story.

  Folly

  Pentheus: You say you saw the God clearly. What was he like?

  Dionysus: Whatever he wanted. I had no control over it.

  —Euripedes’ Bacchae, Cambridge University Press translation.

  GOOD EVENING, LADIES and gentlemen—very sorry for alarming you, if I did. Yes, the lights have been out for some time up here; it happens rather frequently, I’m afraid. Localized brown-outs; that’s what happens when you have an entire town practically running off the same generator. Yet we manage, nevertheless.

  At any rate: Again, welcome! Please step through into the front portico-hallway, where our tour will begin as soon as everyone on the list is assembled and accounted for. I’ve sent my assistant Stephen for candles, but it may well take him some time to return. Until then, I guess we’ll just have to rely on my trusty flashlight.

  Very well. And . . . here we go, then.

  Though the foundations of the Peazant house—or, as its re . . . inventor liked to refer to it, Nova Mephitium—were first laid in late 1887, most of what you see here is far more recent. These alterations and additions date from 1947, when Dr. Denys Peazant took control of his grandparents’ estate. Using old money from the family business (importation, curiosities), which he augmented with a series of governmental grants that may or may not have been under-the-counter “rewards” for his extensive but secretive service in the field of post-mortem communications research during World War II, Dr. Peazant made extensive modifications to the house. So extensive, in fact, that many family retainers quit in horror during the process, accusing him of “defiling” and “gutting alive” the very home where he and his siblings had been born and raised.

  A bit strong, perhaps. But it’s certainly true that absolutely nothing now remains of the house Dr. Peazant’s grandfather built except its exterior facade, this hallway we stand in and a wing of personal apartments to which Dr. Peazant used to laughingly refer as “the Sacristy,” which lie through those doors to your left. These are potentially of great interest, but I am restrained by court order from exhibiting them to you—a codicil of Dr. Peazant’s will, you understand.