The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  He made me shiver, she told me. Made me bow down, like Heaven’s king himself. Persia, don’t ever forget . . . he made you.

  I learned to hate just about every person I saw, during those days. While my Ma grew more and more tired, more and more silent, ’til the morning came she wouldn’t say nothing at all, wouldn’t even open her eyes. Wouldn’t even call after me when I left her there by the roadside, sleeping under a tree like King Minos’ daughter after the wine-god told old Theseus he wanted her for himself, so’s he and his had better cut and run ’fore she woke up to complain about it.

  I was glad she’d told me stories like that one, eventually; they gave me different ways to look at things and bright scenes to play out inside my head when I sore needed ’em – like radio-music to most, I guess, or those Motion Picture shows I never had a coin worth wasting on. Helped me make my mind up, and told me how one day I’d know I was right to do her like I did. But the further I got from her side, I found, they didn’t give me no damn comfort at all.

  It was on down that same road a spell I first met with the two Mizes, though, once Momma’s face had faded into the same dust as everything else that ever fell behind me. And it was only ’cause of them yarns of hers I knew what-all tale them paintings on their caravan’s side spelled out, which (like I told you) soon proved to at least count for something, in their eyes. With that one conversation, I gained what few keys to the kingdom they ever seemed like to dole out: The knowledge while this was their show, in the end, we at least had open invitation to try and keep up with it, for exactly so long as it suited them both that we should.

  Miz Forza and Miz Farwander offered an open hand and a shut mouth, which was a hell of a lot more’n most; they didn’t care where you’d been or where you was bound for, and they neither of ’em seemed to count the straight law as a friend. Hard work spent setting up and tearing down got you a share in whatever food might come their way, a part of the day’s take and the right to sling your bed-roll near their fire.

  “Depression”, they called it, and that was the God’s own truth. You felt it in your empty gut, your equal-empty chest, as though it was you who’d died instead of everybody else and all this living on you’d done was only a cruel trick, a walking ghost’s delusion. Made your days so bone-weary it was like you was still dreaming – and not a good dream, either, nor yet a bad; nothing so easy. Most like them awful dreams you have where you work all day, then muse on doing the exact same thing all night, back-aching and useless: Ones you wake up from spent as ever, but with nothing to show for all your toil.

  So the cooch, with its tinsel and soft light, its sway, its trailing crinolines . . . the curve of a woman’s flesh barely wrapped, then peeled free by stages . . . that was a show worth the seeking out, for most men. And at the end of it all they went knees-down for a glimpse of that ultimate holy mystery, some girl’s secretest parts shining like a rose on fire, exposed at the tangle crook of two thighs and framed in stocking-tops and musk.

  Under the Mask or not, working cooch was fast cash that left almost no taste of sin behind. Unlikely as hell any of ’em would find herself recognised once she chose to move on, and we didn’t truck with private viewing parties after the lights went down, either – not like most others did. Not unless someone pressed too hard for Half-Face Joe to handle, wouldn’t resign himself to take “no” for an answer. And even then—

  —well, we didn’t tend to see those men again, no matter how short a time ’fore we swung back by their town, in future. And nobody, to my knowledge, ever did ask the two Mizes why.

  Yeah, I saw how the cooch made fools and kings of men both at the same time, how it drew one common sigh wept out from twenty different mouths at once. Saw how it made ’em throw down pennies they couldn’t afford, or stuff worn-soft bills they should’ve fed their kids with into the girls’ garters with lust-shaking hands.

  And I ain’t too proud to admit it, either: After so much toil and sorrow, I wanted me a piece of that, cut big and steaming. Wanted it bad.

  Lewis Boll I met in Miz Forza and Miz Farwander’s service, too. He was twice my height but a third of my weight, lanky as a giraffe’s colt, with squint blue eyes and a lick of too-long black hair that always fell down to brush his brows by noon, no matter how hard he slicked it back of a morning. He had stubble on his stubble, a shadow that started well before four o’clock and ran ’til right you could see exactly where his beard would go, if he just let it. And half-grown or not, he was the first boyfriend I ever had that seemed like a man.

  Lewis was a genuine Okie from way back in the Bowl, last left standing in a clan that’d once been thirty or so strong; he liked money far more’n he liked his liquor, so we had that in common. Right now he worked roustabout, wrangling ropes and poles for the cooch show tent, but his grand ambition was to either rob banks like Pretty Boy Floyd or get himself in my pants, whichever came first; sounded a deal nicer, the way he used to say it. But fine talk or not, he did get a tad nasty when I told him straight out which one it wasn’t likeliest to be.

  “What you savin’ it for, Persia?” he demanded. “I’m gonna be rich – hell, we both are. What’s mine’ll be your’n, you just wait a while . . .”

  “Uh-huh. Well, holler back at me when you already got some-thin’ to swap me for it – ’cause right now, what you ’n’ me both got’s ’bout the exact same amount of nothin’ much. And that ain’t enough to make me drop my drawers on-stage, let alone off-.”

  Lewis coloured a bit at the choice of words, since he well knew where my ambitions lay: Up on that same podium with the rubes all panting up at me like begging dogs, and the Mask of Fear stuck fast to my kisser.

  But: “You got your blood yet, Persia?” was all Miz Farwander asked me, back when I made my first play for the position. “No? Then you’ll just have to wait, my darlin’. ’Cause we won’t take no gal ain’t bled yet.”

  “No indeed,” Miz Forza chimed in from her crocheting in the caravan’s corner, nodding right along. “No gal ain’t bled can wear her face, for us, or elsewise.”

  “She” was what they both called the Mask, though damn if I knew why – what everyone called it, even the gals who’d put it on, none of whom got to keep it for long. Like I said, they came and went; went faster than came, if I’d stopped to think on it. And the one time I collared one to quiz her on how it felt to be inside, she’d only shook her head, as though there weren’t words enough to answer my question in the short span of time she had ’fore the next show rolled out.

  “You just sort of have to be there,” she said, finally. “Be in it. That then . . . that’s when you’ll know.”

  But being hungry makes a gal apt to stay maiden far longer than if she’s well-fed, as I’d long since found out and hitherto been grateful for, seeing how it meant no matter what-all might occur along the road, I wasn’t too like to catch myself a child from it. So all I could do ’til my courses came was sit there and watch Miz Forza handle the Mask of nights, curing its slack white face like leather with delicate strokes of that awful-stinking salve. Sometimes she’d raise it up so they was eye-to-eye and contemplate it a spell, mouth pursed and sad-set, like she ached to kiss it. Then Miz Farwander might brush by and pat Miz Forza’s dainty-gloved fingers with her own grease-black ones, delicate enough to not even leave a smudge behind.

  “Courage, my dear one,” she’d murmur. “Her time will come again, and ours with it.”

  And: “I don’t see how,” Lewis said, from the other side of the fire. “That Greek fella of Persia’s did for her way back when, ain’t that so? Took a sword to her, and sawed her neck right through. Cut the head off a snake, what the body does after don’t matter none; it’s dead ’nough from then on, all the same.”

  Miz Farwander shot him a dark look. But Miz Forza just give a light little laugh, suitable to polite dining-room conversation.

  “Oh, men do like to think that,” she replied, to no one in particular. “But a woman like Her – She’s ri
ght hard to kill, just like that serpent with a hundred heads: Strike off one, two grow back out, twice as poisonous. Cut off the head, more monsters just leak out; new monsters, maybe. Maybe even worse.”

  Agreed Miz Farwander: “A woman like that can strike every man alive blind, deaf and dumb without even tryin’, root him to the spot and make him stand stock-still forever. That’s why cooch plays so well, in the end; they say all’s we are is pussy, but what comes from pussy, exactly? Blood, and dirt, and salt, and wet . . . poison like wine, fit to turn both heads on any man ain’t queer. Any man, at all.”

  Lewis give a disgusted look, and spit hard.

  “You bitches is somethin’ else,” he announced, probably aiming it my way, as much as theirs. But I’d still been following that last thought along, which was why I suddenly heard myself come out with—

  “Well . . . everything does, don’t it? Everything.”

  Miz Farwander grinned her too-sharp grin at that, all those metal fangs a-glint in the firelight, like scales on a skittering lizard.

  “Reckon you got the right of it there, Persia. So don’t you let no one tell you you ain’t smart enough to keep up, not when it really counts.”

  That night Lewis took me up into the midst of a fallow corn-field to show me the gun he’d won in a card-game two nights back, and I let him kiss me ’til I was wet and panting, slip my shirt off my shoulders so’s my titties could feel the night on ’em while up above a storm came rolling in, fast as Noah’s Deluge. Don’t rightly know why myself, but I wanted to, even if it wouldn’t go no further; good enough reason for that night, at the very least.

  But then ball-lightning started to roll back and forth ’cross the sky, snapping at the clouds like some big invisible body was riled near to bursting by the idea of what we were doing – and when he pushed his hand down under my skirt it come up dark red, copper-smelling, with proof of my sin come upon me at last smeared all the way up his palm to the wrist.

  “Finally!” I blurted out. “Very first chance I get to run Miz Forza down, that damn-almighty Mask is mine!”

  Lewis looked at me like I’d grew another head, then, and that made me angry – angry so much, I hardly couldn’t speak.

  “Don’t want that for you,” was all he said, shaking his head.

  “What should I care what you want, Lewis Boll, ‘for’ me or elsewise? You ain’t my damn Pa.”

  His eyes sparked. “That’s ’cause you ain’t got no Pa, Persia Leitner, nor no Ma neither; you did, maybe you wouldn’t be ’spirin’ to flash your trim at every Jack Henry got the fare. That stuff leaves a stain, gal, deep and deeper. Just ’cause it don’t show on the face—”

  “Oh, go on and shout it, preacher’s boy! I’ll have Her head to hide me, you fool; won’t no one know me from Adam’s house-cat, once that thing’s fit on.”

  “‘That ‘thing’ is right. Horrible goddamned . . .”

  “It’s a mask, is all. All of it! All of this. It’s just a damn mask.”

  A mask. The Mask. Both, and neither.

  I guess he thought we’d made promises to each other; he’d made ’em to me, anyways, that was true enough. But I never said a thing of the same sort back to him, and that’s the fact, ’cause going by my Ma’s experience alone I already knew better than to trust some snake-in-pants with my one and only future, no matter how much I liked him or how good his lips felt on mine. Any man made me shiver or want to bow down, that wasn’t exactly a recommendation; quite the opposite.

  So I left him there with his pecker out and I walked away stiff-backed, buttoning up my front again as I went, straight to the two Mizes’ caravan. And when I made ’em my offer again, this time—

  —they took it.

  * * *

  I remembered what my Ma said about that old hag-woman, Medusa. How she’d been young and pretty once, and her sisters alongside of her. How she’d been took up and played rough with by yet one more of them horny old god-Devils – the one who ruled the seas, might be? Him with his trident? And because he’d made sport of her in the temple of some goddess she served, it was her who had to bear the brunt of things when the goddess got angry, though only on her own behalf . . . Medusa who ended up getting cursed to monsterhood while the one who’d stole her virtue swum free, and the goddess she’d vowed her life to left her to weep in the ashes.

  It was her sisters who stood by her then, and them only – they who were immortal, while she could be killed. They who took on the same monstrous form, and spun a spell so’s that she could protect herself by turning any man fool enough to try and approach her to lifeless rock with her naked eyes alone, a human statue fit only to crack and crumble into dust.

  But that one Greek fella who cut her down, he used a trick to ’scape her wrath – taught to him by the same goddess who’d took against her for all time, back when the sea-god had his way. He was a god’s son himself, the cause of much unhappiness on his Ma’s part, when her Pa saw what’d come to pass. And his name, his name . . .

  . . . damn if his name wasn’t almost same as mine, now I come to think.

  But it took me a long time to recall that, afterwards. And by the time I did, at last . . . it truly didn’t matter none.

  No God but the one, down here where I was raised. And not too much of Him, neither, when things really counted.

  Skinless Jenny helped me fit the Mask of Fear on that very night while the two Mizes watched, holding hands, and Half-Face Joe extolled my charms out front, racking up the take. I hadn’t seen Lewis Boll all day, though the tent sure got itself up on time; thought maybe he’d finally run off to find himself a bank to knock over, and told myself I didn’t much care.

  I’d worried over my state, too, knowing what-all I was going to have to do in order to earn my money that night. But Miz Forza simply smiled, and called that last gal over – she gave me her Dutch Cap, all fresh-boiled and cleanly, to cram up inside myself. “Works just as well t’keep things in as it does t’keep ’em out,” she confided, and I chose to believe her.

  I barely recognised my own body in the dim bronze mirror hung up at the back, to make the tent seem bigger – so smoothed and plucked and powdered, legs shaved and wild half-whatever hair tamed to a fare-thee-well, pinned up under the Mask’s slippery cap. I was a creature of myth, of legend, and where I moved I cast a net far wider than my gauze and crinolines alone could swing. My high heels clicked onto the stage like talons.

  “Oh, you’re a demigoddess like that, my sweet Persia,” Miz Forza told me, admiring. “I always knew it, always. Didn’t we, dear?”

  “Yes indeed,” Miz Farwander chimed back, nodding her head, her grin curling up on either side to show even more teeth than was usual. “Always. Right from when she told us what they called her.”

  And I saw her tongue poke out to touch her bottom lip, a bit too quick to notice, ’less you were looking at her straight-on – so long and red, so thin, a flickering spear. Almost as though it’d been sharpened.

  Up above, the dregs of last night’s storm still roiled, and the Mask felt hot and heavy against my sweating face. Behind one curtain, Skinless Jenny struck up on her dulcimer, hammers flying, skittering out trails of extra music while the gramophone ground on: Some mean old moanin’ blues tune I half-remembered from earlier days when I’d heard my Ma humming it, leant up ’gainst the sill in some lousy little coal-town hostel—

  Black mountain people, bad as they can be

  I said black mountain people, they bad as they can be

  They even uses gunpowder . . . to sweeten they tea . . .

  While out from behind the other, meanwhile, my fellow cooch-gal handmaidens come trooping heel-to-toe, white arms waving languid as twister-shucked branches after the real wind’s already blown by. Their palms were stained with henna and lip-rouge, a kiss pressed full-on at the centre of every one right where those lines that are supposed to map out love and marriage split apart – like they split apart now, so’s the rubes (who were standing ass-to-elbow by
that point) could catch their first glimpse of me in full regalia, with everything I had ’neath my jaw-line hanging out on display.

  Oh, and I heard ’em make that single almighty gasp, too, as they did; Jesus, if it wasn’t enough to make my own head swim same’s if I’d been punched, under the Mask’s brutal weight. Like a shot of that same rot-gut I’d been proud to never touch a drop of, sped straight through ’tween my breasts and into my beating heart.

  I let my own arms drift up, slow as parting black water. Let my own hot hands cup together ’neath Her face and made with a vampish pose, like I was Theda Bara. There in the spot’s single bright column, I shook back both our heads together, and let them snaky locks fall where they may – up, down, to either side, so’s my nipples rose up and peeped out like two new red eyes through a dreadful forest’s wall of vines. Took my cue from Miz Farwander and stuck my tongue through Her slack mouth – far as it’d go and farther still, ’til it ached right to root – to lick Her bluish-purple lips.

  And as I thrust the Mask open ’round me, forcing myself inside, it was as though I felt myself crack open too, somehow. Felt Her enter into me, through every pore, at the very same time . . .

  Which, of course, was right about the moment I finally noticed Lewis Boll standing in the third row back, with that gun of his already drawn and cocked the Two Mizes’ raptly attendant way.

  They can’t see him, I thought. Light’s in their eyes – no way, no-how. Oh, goddamn him and goddamn me too. He’s gonna go ’head and ruin every damn thing.

  “Gun!” one of the rubes yelled out, which let loose with a general back-stumble, a crash and rip and the racket of thirty men with two feet apiece set off running flat-out, not caring who they might plough into, so long’s they ended up out of range. The gals did much the same, scattering like mice when the kitchen door slams open. I saw Joe grab Jenny by the arm and haul her clear in mid hammer-fall, putting paid to the music half; one kick did for the other, as the gramophone needle skipped and tore ’cross the whole of the record at once.