Kissing Carrion

by Gemma Files

  Interestingly, as a sidebar, you may have noticed that the locals—from whom the insulted retainers were recruited, and to whose ranks they later returned—still never use Dr. Peazant’s own nomenclature when referring to the house. They call it variants on the original, instead . . . Peazant’s Hulk, for one. Peazant’s Ruin. Or my personal favorite, for reasons I’ll revisit in good time . . .

  . . . Peazant’s Folly.

  * * *

  Outside, nothing too spectacular. A typical red-brick monstrosity squatting at the top of the hill like some overfed gentleman’s angioplasty-courting heart, cloaked by firs and lapped in gloom, apparently content to grow mainly by osmosis: Extrude a fresh lobe of windows, turrets and buttresses for each new decade and spread wide, sinking ever deeper inside itself, ‘till its original shape disappears from view completely.

  As you approach from below, the silhouette of the house seems to reach out in all directions at once; its proximity comes with a subtle aftertaste attached, pungent as the smell of burning rubber along some otherwise charming but inexplicably accident-prone road.

  It makes little attempt at concealment. Any passerby has only to look at it once to know: This house, this house. THIS house, beyond the shadow of a shadow of a doubt—

  —is haunted.

  * * *

  If you would please keep to our original path, however—yes, that’s the door to the interior up ahead. And what a very good observation: The hallway is indeed designed to seem considerably shorter, and less narrow, than it actually is. The source of this illusion lies in Dr. Peazant’s use of multiple archways whose columns are just wide enough to mask the next archway lying beyond; it’s an architectural trick called “forced perspective,” usually used to make things seem larger. And another interesting turn of phrase, too, considering its application.

  You will also note that the walls are hung with deliberately foggy mirrors made from hammered bronze. This serves to fracture the reflections of approaching . . . Dr. Peazant, I am relatively sure, would call them pilgrims, or even supplicants . . . in such a way that, very occasionally, one might almost—

  —ah, yes. But it would probably be far more effective simply to show you.

  Look into the mirrors, and keep walking. As you do, you may begin to see something take shape behind your own reflection, a vague shimmer at the edge of your vision. As it does, watch the way that this doubling effect seems to spread across your own reflected face, obscuring it like some sort of metallic caul; like the tough white facial membrane some children are born with, seventh sons of seventh sons and such, which must be first cut away in order to free the breathing passages and then dried, saved, worn around the neck in a small leather sack. A presentiment of prophecy made flesh, signifying some inborn ability to see your own future—or that of others—coming, ahead of time.

  Some of you may also glimpse something more, however. An actual figure rather than simply the implication of one—back bent, hands and face obscured, draped in what looks like a length of lightish coloured cloth. Its frame will be unmistakably human, yet disturbingly thin; it enters the mirror sidelong, from an unwatched corner, to hover by your own image in an obscurely threatening pose. Turning, shoulder outthrust as though its arm were about to rise, its shrouded hand about to reach, to touch—to lay itself, suddenly, upon the unwary supplicant’s all-unwitting shoulder—

  Or not. The effect doesn’t manifest itself for everybody.

  Yes, those sconces near the ceiling are for gas, and provided the bulk of the house’s emergency lighting until only a few years ago. No, I will not be lighting them tonight.

  Yes, there will be an explanation.

  I must ask you to enter into the house’s interior single-file, now—one by one, with a minimum of straggling. You may well wish to muffle the lower part of your faces while you step across the threshold; this part of the house is not very efficiently ventilated, frankly, and visitors often find the smell somewhat disturbing until they have a chance to get used to it.

  Now just keep close, if you please, while I shut . . . and lock . . . this door behind us.

  * * *

  One of the most enduring tales told about Peazant’s Folly long pre-dates Dr. Peazant’s subsequent remodeling. It implies that Edmund Peazant, the house’s original builder, buried the first of his five children alive in its foundations so that the baby’s death-agonies would help keep the structure strong and erect. This rumor has never been substantiated, though it may explain why Mrs. Peazant later—after so many births, plus a few more “miscarriages”—chose to commit suicide by first thrusting her head through the stained-glass window of her husband’s study, then slitting her throat from ear to ear on what shards of glass still adhered to the frame.

  The true reputation of Peazant’s Folly, however, only began to grow after Dr. Peazant reduced his grandfather’s home to a shell behind which he could arrange things to his own very particular, semi-arcane specifications. Periodically, its status as Canada’s least-habitable residence has since been challenged by reporters, historians, parapsychologists, exorcists, businessmen, the unwary of all stamps and stripes. Few have emerged from the experience unaltered . . . but such a place will attract tourists, even so. Even now.

  Outside, then, all as expected. Inside, however—

  —the flashlight’s beam choking to a dim glow, its lens a windowpane clogged by insects’ wings—

  —a sudden snap of wrist-deep dust, filling your throat to bursting—

  —panic narrowing your chest as you cross the doorsill, and that smell, that SMELL—

  * * *

  So here it is, at last: Peazant’s “Folly” itself, in the truest sense of the term. A plaster and limestone reproduction, built to scale, of that Mephitic Temple Dr. Peazant himself discovered in a series of caves near Delphi—“Mephitic,” meaning “up from underground,” underside of the Apollonian, most mysterious of all Mystery religions. Like their more legitimate neighbors, the Mephitium had its oracle too. But while the Delphic oracle merely squatted over a crack in the earth and breathed in the sulphurous, volcanic fumes which produced her prophetic trances only when she was directly requested to, her Mephitic sister-seers lived their lives out in the same cavern from which those gases were produced.

  The fumes in here, however, are somewhat less than natural, let alone sacred. As my employers eventually discovered, not so very long ago—after they opened the Folly to visitors in order to defray rising property taxes on the one hand, while cutting local incidences of vandalism and trespassing on the other—the smell you’re reacting to comes from the gas-sconces Dr. Peazant’s grandfather once installed, way back when. Dr. Peazant had them soldered permanently open, so that they would admit a steady stream of near-fatally pure methane mixed with hydrogen sulfide from the (only partially drained) swamp old Mr. Peazant built his house on top of. I could take you down to the basement right now and show you what’s left, but I wouldn’t advise it . . . it’s really not a pretty sight.

  Here, then, is why I’ve been instructed not to turn the sconces back on, let alone light them. This is the invisible contagion Dr. Peazant infected his family’s home with, hoping its influence might convert whoever was unwise enough to live here into a modern-day Mephitic priest or priestess whose constant oracular trance would doom them to live—and die—in the same eternally-receptive state as their predecessors: Perpetually open, perpetually God-possessed.

  But by what God, you ask? Another good question. Not Apollo, certainly; Apollo had no truck with the underworld, even in his less—appealing—aspects . . .

  Ah, but if we knew, it wouldn’t be a Mystery. Would it?

  * * *

  After thirty years of incident, recorded and otherwise, some patterns do tend to emerge. The 1983 Jay Expedition case is particularly typical of what would become known as the Peazant’s Folly “experience”: Two parapsychol
ogists (Drs. Jay and Jay, husband and wife) plus a mental medium (the late Guilden Fisk) vs. two scientific skeptics—an archaeologist (Dr. Meulendyk) and a forensic psychologist specializing in suggestion-induced psychoses (Dr. Lean.) Each team had publicly vowed to expel, or expose, the house’s secrets before the other could finish its initial diagnosis. They entered Peazant’s Folly en masse, but left it one by one . . . in body-bags, straightjackets, or simple police restraints.

  Whether their tenure ended by murder, self-mutilation, suicide or insanity, however, each survivor told a strikingly similar story. Approaching the Folly in accordance to Dr. Peazant’s instructions, they had reduced themselves to playing the part of worshipers at the Mephitium’s figurative altar; they had passed through the hallway and over the inner threshold single-file, making a ritual pilgrimage from the above-ground world of the living to some all-purpose underground Land of the Dead: Hades, Styx, Acheron, Elysium, Heaven and Hell all rolled into one.

  So: Imagine, if you will, this disparate group wending its collective way down that long bronze hallway like a trip through the birth canal in reverse, watching their reflections split and blur and peel away before their very eyes—cracking their civilized shells open, just as instructed, in order to render themselves more properly amenable to the Mephitium’s inherent range of—suggestions.

  They all say they saw that faceless figure hovering behind them, eventually; saw it reflected in each other’s eyes, if nothing else. Even the ones who, like Meulendyk and Lean, had taken as great a care as possible NOT to research the house and its various phantoms beforehand, for fear of tainting their on-site findings.

  Maybe a God. Maybe a ghost. Maybe something else, something specific to the house itself. Self-created, maintained by a steady stream of fresh minds to infiltrate, fresh dreams to occupy . . .

  Given enough of a head-start, a house like this probably becomes its own haunting. Don’t you think? I mean—

  * * *

  —don’t you?

  Please excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I appear to have let my thoughts run away with me.

  What? Oh, no, no—believe me, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it takes a considerably longer period of exposure to the Folly and its fumes for oracular madness on a Jay Expedition scale to finally manifest itself than this tour is likely to consume. No matter how long it eventually takes Stephen to get back here with those candles.

  Actually, since we seem to have the time . . . and yes, those carvings really are lovely, aren’t there? There’s more ‘round the back, which we can examine further once the lights are on—

  At any rate: Like most tour guides, not to mention most frustrated academics—I certainly didn’t take this job for the pay, after all—I have my own theories about what Dr. Peazant’s little experiment in enforced prophecy may have succeeded in invoking. Not so much an ancient God reborn, to my mind, as a completely new construct: The Folly itself, made phantom rather than flesh. That cloth-draped vision, expressing itself through an endless series of unwilling human visionaries.

  Dr. Peazant wanted his Folly’s supplicants to become oracles themselves, answering their own unspoken questions about the past, the future, what lies beyond. Instead, he made his house into the oracle. We come and go, but it remains—and as long as we come and go quickly enough, it has no choice but to keep its own counsel.

  I wonder, though. What does a prophet prevented from prophesying feel, exactly? Does it feel relief, freedom, a welcome escape from using and being used in return? Or does it feel loneliness, depression . . . the terrible pain of being left perpetually alienated from its deepest, most integral calling?

  Nova Mephitium. It reminds me of the question posed to yet another ancient oracle, the Sybil at Cumae, who grew so old and shriveled that her worshipers were forced to keep her in a huge glass bottle, like a genie. And like some clever Arab giving away his last wish to the genie itself, one supplicant once used his—or her—turn to ask, on the oracle’s own behalf: ‘Sybil, what do you want?’ To which she replied, wearily:

  ‘I want to die.’

  Thirty years, fifty years, a hundred years: You show no one anything they really want to see, tell them nothing they really want to know—nothing they can profit from, nothing good. And then, at the end of it, the ungrateful bastards leave you all alone here in the dark, in the middle of this awful smell, with nobody to even try and understand you but the man who leads gawking groups of tourists back and forth through your hollow guts a minimum of three times a day, seven times a week, fifty-two weeks a year with almost no time off for sickness, vacation or good behavior . . .

  Which makes it rather one hell of a lot of time I’ve spent in here already, really. And I can’t believe, what with all the thousands of hours I’ve spent thinking about this house, Peazant’s Folly, its Mystery, one way or another—

  —that I’ve never, but never, thought about that before.

  Um . . .

  . . . just one moment, all right? You—just stay right there, together. Close together. And I’ll be—right back.

  Oh, God.

  No, no, I’m fine. Just . . . over there, by the door? The door I locked behind us, and I think you all definitely saw me do it—

  No, don’t turn to check—really, don’t. Really.

  Well, if you feel you have to . . .

  No, you’re right. You’re right. It’s gone now.

  Hah.

  Well, that was a nice little scare to end the tour on, wasn’t it? Things you’ll convince yourself you see in the dark . . . might be more fumes left in here than my employers have been letting on, I guess.

  And where the hell is Stephen, anyway? With those—

  —candles.

  Fumes.

  Look does anybody smell anything, aside from me? I mean—

  —something worse?

  Uh . . .

  . . . maybe that wasn’t the best idea, all told. Maybe—I’m just going to unlock the door, and maybe we should all just—leave. Quietly, single-file, like the guidebook says. But, uh . . . quickly, too. Before Stephen decides it’s just the right time to finally show up and, um—

  —Steve, is that you? You look—bigger, somehow . . .

  * * *

  That same figure you saw inside the Folly’s door, back bent, hands and face obscured. Turning with its draped shoulder outthrust, its shrouded hand about rising to reach, to TOUCH . . .

  * * *

  Oh Christ, it’s—it’s right behind you, right fucking now. You know, the—Christ, Steve, you know what the fuck I’m fucking talking about—

  * * *

  ‘Sybil, what do you want?’ you ask. To which I reply . . .

  * * *

  —fuck, don’t look, moron, just don’t—

  * * *

  I want to DIE!

  * * *

  —STEPHEN, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DO NOT LIGHT THAT FUCKING CA—

  Mouthful of Pins

  SOMETIMES I DREAM that my father, who’s been dead for eight years now, appears at my door in the middle of the night and tells me he’s actually been living in another country with a whole new family—but he won’t tell me where or who, no matter how I plead and cry. Sometimes I dream of rain. But mostly I dream of Yle’en, the Drowned Land. I dream of the Twins and the Green Lady, of the Monocle, the Hammerheads, and the Unseen King. And that frightens me.

  * * *

  There were five of us in the game of Yle’en—Mary, and Eunice, and Ray, and Trevor, and me. We were all quite young when it began, friends mainly by virtue of our shared pain. We met at school. Hurried conversations in the yard at recess soon revealed our remarkable similarities. Mary and Eunice received midnight visits from their live-in uncle, as I recall, while Ray’s highly religious relatives’ ideas about child-rearing had left him with an awful stutter. Trevor’s fat
her ignored him. Mine beat me. We would all have gladly traded places with each other. That not being possible, we escaped—as far as we could—into Yle’en.

  We were model children, all told—quiet, neat, polite. Our bruises kept well-hidden under slightly unseasonable clothes, we faced the world each day with the calm aplomb of prisoners of war. We never talked back, or broke things, and didn’t seem actively unhappy. We simply hadn’t the strength to be.

  So we created Yle’en, which slowly gained strength enough for all of us.

  Eventually, we grew apart. Our time in hell done, we exploded out into the world, and haven’t stopped moving in completely different directions since. Ray lives with his lover in Vancouver, making sculptures from “found objects.” Eunice has three kids of her own. Trevor is a homicide detective in Winnipeg. I’m still in Toronto, working for an ad agency. You may have seen a few of my commercials for beer, cars, or the Canadian National Exhibition. I put in too much overtime, drink more than I should, and—once every two years or so—precipitate a brief but painful affair by picking up a similarly ambitious young woman in a downtown gay bar. Late at night, I often go into the bathroom and press a lit cigarette into the crook of my elbow. Just to prove that I’m really alive.

  But Mary is dead.

  * * *

  Yle’en is a cold place with a very rigid hierarchy. Being more than a little intimate with the power of fear, we populated it with the things we each feared most. I contributed my twin brother Ian, who fell from a second-story window when we were five. His memory took fresh significance as the glass-armored Twins, one of whom lies forever coiled inside the other like a twisted reel of tapeworm. Ray, who had a morbid dislike of flowers, which possibly stemmed from his love/hate relationship with female genitalia, remade himself as the Green Lady—her arms and her legs articulated like a praying mantis’s, her face a ravenous lily. The Monocle was Trevor’s father’s geometry set—Yle’en’s executioner, cutting variables viciously down to size with his razor-edge calipers. Eunice’s repressed rage finally found form as the Hammerheads, a whole shoal of sleek, stupid ghost-sharks bent on mutilation.