Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I think I must have asked her what the hell she’d done, though I had a pretty good idea. She turned towards me, and her eyes…well, you see that sort of pain and you spend the rest of your life trying to forget you saw it.

  “I didn’t understand,” she said, still sobbing. “I didn’t understand she’d take so much of me away.”

  A bitter wave of conflicting, irreconcilable emotion surged and boiled about inside me. Yeah, I knew what she’d done to me, and I knew I’d been used for something unspeakable. I knew violation was too tame a word for it, and that I’d been marked forever by this gold-digging half-breed of a twist. And part of me was determined to drag her kicking and screaming to Harpootlian. Or fuck it, I could kill her myself and take my own sweet time doing so. I could kill her the way the hunters had murdered the unicorn. But – on the other hand – the woman I saw lying there before me was shattered almost beyond recognition. There’d been a steep price for her trespass, and she’d paid it and then some. Besides, I was learning fast that when you’ve been to Hades’ doorstep with someone, and the two of you’ve made it back more or less alive, there’s a bond, whether you want it or not. So, there we were, a cheap, latter-day parody of Orpheus and Eurydice, and all I could think about was holding her, tight as I could, until she stopped crying and I was warm again.

  “She took so much,” Ellen whispered. I didn’t ask what her grandmother had taken. Maybe it was a slice of her soul or maybe a scrap of her humanity. Maybe it was the memory of the happiest day of her life or the ability to taste her favorite food. It didn’t seem to matter. It was gone, and she’d never get it back. I reached for her, too cold and too sick to speak, but sharing her hurt and needing to offer my hollow consolation, stretching out to touch…

  …and the eunuch said, “Madam wishes to speak with you now,” and that’s when I realized the parade down memory lane was over. I was back at Harpootlian’s, and there was a clock somewhere chiming down to three a.m., the dead hour. I could feel the nasty welt the stingers had left at the base of my skull and underneath my jaw, and I still hadn’t shaken off the hangover from that tainted shot of rye. But above and underneath and all about these mundane discomforts was a far more egregious pang, a portrait of that guileless white beast cut down and its blood spurting from gaping wounds. Still, I did manage to get myself upright without puking. Sure, I gagged once or twice, but I didn’t puke. I pride myself on that. I sat with my head cradled in my hands, waiting for the room to stop tilting and sliding around like I’d gone for a spin on the Coney Island Wonder Wheel.

  “Soon, you’ll feel better, Miss Beaumont.”

  “Says you,” I replied. “Anyway, give me a half fucking minute, will you please? Surely your employer isn’t gonna cast a kitten if you let me get my bearings first, not after the work over you just gave me. Not after – ”

  “I will remind you, her patience is not infinite,” the ginger demon said firmly, and then it clicked its long claws together.

  “That so?” I asked. “Well, who the hell’s is?” But I’d gotten the message, plain and clear. The gloves were off, and whatever forbearance Auntie H might have granted me in the past, it was spent, and now I was living on the installment plan. I took a deep breath and struggled to my feet. At least the eunuch didn’t try to lend a hand.

  I can’t say for certain when Yeksabet Harpootlian set up shop in Manhattan, but I have it on good faith that Magdalena Szabó was here first. And anyone who knows her onions knows the two of them have been at each other’s throats since the day Auntie H decided to claim a slice of the action for herself. Now, you’d think there’d be plenty enough of the hellion cock-and-tail trade to go around, what with all the netherworlders who call the Five Boroughs their home away from home. And likely as not you’d be right. Just don’t try telling that to Szabó or Auntie H. Sure, they’ve each got their elite stable of “girls and boys,” and they both have more customers than they know what to do with. Doesn’t stop them from spending every waking hour looking for a way to banish the other once and for all – or at least find the unholy grail of competitive advantages.

  Now, by the time the ginger-skinned eunuch led me through the chaos of Auntie H’s stately pleasure dome, far below the subways and sewers and tenements of the Lower East Side, I already had a pretty good idea the dingus from Jimmy Fong’s shiny box was meant to be Harpootlian’s trump card. Only, here was Ellen Andrews, this mutt of a courier gumming up the works, playing fast and loose with the loving cup. And here was me, stuck smack in the middle, the unwilling stooge in her double-cross.

  As I followed the eunuch down the winding corridor that ended in Auntie H’s grand salon, we passed doorway after doorway, all of them opening onto scenes of inhuman passion and madness, the most odious of perversions and tortures that make short work of merely mortal flesh. It would be disingenuous to say I looked away. After all, this wasn’t my first time. Here were the hinterlands of wanton physical delight and agony, where the two become indistinguishable in a rapturous Totentanz. Here were spectacles to remind me how Doré and Hieronymus Bosch never even came close and all of it laid bare for the eyes of any passing voyeur. You see, there are no locked doors to be found at Madam Harpootlian’s. In fact, there are no doors at all.

  “It’s a busy night,” the eunuch said, though it looked like business as usual to me.

  “Sure,” I muttered. “You’d think the Shriners were in town. You’d think Mayor La Guardia himself had come down off his high horse to raise a little hell.”

  And then we reached the end of the hallway, and I was shown into the mirrored chamber where Auntie H holds court. The eunuch told me to wait, then left me alone. I’d never seen the place so empty. There was no sign of the usual retinue of rogues, ghouls, and archfiends, only all those goddamn mirrors, because no one looks directly at Madam Harpootlian and lives to tell the tale. I chose a particularly fancy looking glass, maybe ten feet high and held inside an elaborate gilded frame. When Harpootlian spoke up, the mirror rippled like it were only water, and my reflection rippled with it.

  “Good evening, Natalie,” she said. “I trust you’ve been treated well?”

  “You won’t hear any complaints outta me,” I replied. “I always say, the Waldorf-Astoria’s got nothing on you.”

  She laughed then, or something that we’ll call laughter for the sake of convenience.

  “A crying shame we’re not meeting under more amicable circumstances. Were it not for this unpleasantness with Miss Andrews, I’d offer you something – on the house, of course.”

  “Maybe another time,” I said.

  “So, you know why you’re here?”

  “Sure,” I said. “The dingus I took off the dead Chinaman. The salami with the fancy French name.”

  “It has many names, Natalie. Karkadann’s Brow, El consolador sangriento, the Horn of Malta – ”

  “Le godemichet maudit,” I said. “Me, I’m just gonna call it Ellen’s cock.”

  Harpootlian grunted, and her reflection made an ugly dismissive gesture. “It is nothing of Miss Andrews. It is mine, bought and paid for. By my own sweat and blood did I track down the spoils of al-Jaldaki’s long search. It’s my investment, one purchased with so grievous a forfeiture this quadroon mongrel could not begin to appreciate the severity of her crime. But you, Natalie, you know, don’t you? You’ve been privy to the wonders of Sulaymān’s talisman, so I think, maybe, you are cognizant of my loss.”

  “I can’t exactly say what I’m cognizant of,” I told her, doing my best to stand up straight and not flinch or look away. “I saw the murder of a creature I didn’t even believe in yesterday morning. That was sort of an eye opener, I’ll grant you. And then there’s the part I can’t seem to conjure up, even after golden boy did that swell Roto-Rooter number on my head.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s the catch,” she said and smiled. There’s no shame in saying I looked away then. Even in a mirror, the smile of Yeksabet Harpootlian isn’t something you want to se
e straight on.

  “Isn’t there always a catch?” I asked, and she chuckled.

  “True, it’s a fleeting boon,” she purled. “The gift comes, and then it goes, and no one may ever remember it. But always, always they will long for it again, even hobbled by that forgetfulness.”

  “You’ve lost me, Auntie,” I said, and she grunted again. That’s when I told her I wouldn’t take it as an insult to my intelligence or expertise if she laid her cards on the table and spelled it out plain and simple, like she was talking to a woman who didn’t regularly have tea and crumpets with the damned. She mumbled something to the effect that maybe she gave me too much credit, and I didn’t disagree.

  “Consider,” she said, “what it is, a unicorn. It is the incarnation of purity, an avatar of innocence. And here is the power of the talisman, for that state of grace which soon passes from us each and every one is forever locked inside the horn, the horn become the phallus. And in the instant that it brought you, Natalie, to orgasm, you knew again that innocence, the bliss of a child before it suffers corruption.”

  I didn’t interrupt her, but all at once I got the gist.

  “Still, you are only a mortal woman, so what negligible, insignificant sins could you have possibly committed during your short life? Likewise, whatever calamities and wrongs have been visited upon your flesh or your soul, they are trifles. But say, instead, you survived the war in Paradise, if you refused the yoke and so are counted among the exiles, then you’ve persisted down all the long eons. You were already broken and despoiled billions of years before the coming of man. And your transgressions outnumber the stars.

  “Now,” she asked, “what would you pay, were you so cursed, to know even one fleeting moment of that stainless, former existence?”

  Starting to feel sick to my stomach all over again, I said, “More to the point, if I always forgot it, immediately, but it left this emptiness I feel – ”

  “You would come back,” Auntie H smirked. “You would come back again and again and again, because there would be no satiating that void, and always would you hope that maybe this time it would take and you might keep the memories of that former immaculate condition.”

  “Which makes it priceless, no matter what you paid.”

  “Precisely. And now Miss Andrews has forged a copy – an identical copy, actually – meaning to sell one to me, and one to Magdalena Szabó. That’s where Miss Andrews is now.”

  “Did you tell her she could hex me?”

  “I would never do such a thing, Natalie. You’re much too valuable to me.”

  “But you think I had something to do with Ellen’s mystical little counterfeit scheme.”

  “Technically, you did. The ritual of division required a supplicant, someone to receive the gift granted by the Unicorn, before the summoning of a succubus mighty enough to affect such a difficult twinning.”

  “So maybe, instead of sitting here bumping gums with me, you should send one of your torpedoes after her. And, while we’re on the subject of how you pick your little henchmen, maybe – ”

  “Natalie,” snarled Auntie H from someplace not far behind me. “Have I failed to make myself understood? Might it be I need to raise my voice?” The floor rumbled, and tiny hairline cracks began to crisscross the surface of the looking glass. I shut my eyes.

  “No,” I told her. “I get it. It’s a grift, and you’re out for blood. But you know she used me. Your lackey, it had a good, long look around my upper story, right, and there’s no way you can think I was trying to con you.”

  For a dozen or so heartbeats, she didn’t answer me, and the mirrored room was still and silent, save all the moans and screaming leaking in through the walls. I could smell my own sour sweat, and it was making me sick to my stomach.

  “There are some grey areas,” she said finally. “Matters of sentiment and lust, a certain reluctant infatuation, even.”

  I opened my eyes and forced myself to gaze directly into that mirror, at the abomination crouched on its writhing throne. And all at once, I’d had enough, enough of Ellen Andrews and her dingus, enough of the cloak-and-dagger bullshit, and definitely enough kowtowing to the monsters.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I said, “I only just met the woman this afternoon. She drugs and rapes me, and you think that means she’s my sheba?”

  “Like I told you, I think there are grey areas,” Auntie H replied. She grinned, and I looked away again.

  “Fine. You tell me what it’s gonna take to make this right with you, and I’ll do it.”

  “Always so eager to please,” Auntie H laughed, and once again, the mirror in front of me rippled. “But, since you’ve asked, and as I do not doubt your present sincerity, I will tell you. I want her dead, Natalie. Kill her, and all will be…forgiven.”

  “Sure,” I said, because what the hell else was I going to say. “But if she’s with Szabó – ”

  “I have spoken already with Magdalena Szabó, and we have agreed to set aside our differences long enough to deal with Miss Andrews. After all, she has attempted to cheat us both, in equal measure.”

  “How do I find her?”

  “You’re a resourceful young lady, Natalie,” she said. “I have faith in you. Now…if you will excuse me,” and, before I could get in another word, the mirrored room dissolved around me. There was a flash, not of light, but a flash of the deepest abyssal darkness, and I found myself back at the Yellow Dragon, watching through the bookshop’s grimy windows as the sun rose over the Bowery.

  There you go, the dope on just how it is I found myself holding a gun on Ellen Andrews, and just how it is she found herself wondering if I were angry enough or scared enough or desperate enough to pull the trigger. And like I said, I chambered a round, but she just stood there. She didn’t even flinch.

  “I wanted to give you a gift, Nat,” she said.

  “Even if I believed that – and I don’t – all I got to show for this gift of yours is a nagging yen for something I’m never going to get back. We lose our innocence, it stays lost. That’s the way it works. So, all I got from you, Ellen, is a thirst can’t ever be slaked. That and Harpootlian figuring me for a clip artist.”

  She looked hard at the gun, then looked harder at me.

  “So what? You thought I was gonna plead for my life? You thought maybe I was gonna get down on my knees for you and beg? Is that how you like it? Maybe you’re just steamed ’cause I was on top – ”

  “Shut up, Ellen. You don’t get to talk yourself out of this mess. It’s a done deal. You tried to give Auntie H the high hat.”

  “And you honestly think she’s on the level? You think you pop me and she lets you off the hook, like nothing happened?”

  “I do,” I said. And maybe it wasn’t as simple as that, but I wasn’t exactly lying, either. I needed to believe Harpootlian, the same way old women need to believe in the infinite compassion of the little baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Same way poor kids need to believe in the inexplicable generosity of Popeye the Sailor and Santa Claus.

  “It didn’t have to be this way,” she said.

  “I didn’t dig your grave, Ellen. I’m just the sap left holding the shovel.”

  And she smiled that smug smile of hers, and said, “I get it now, what Auntie H sees in you. And it’s not your knack for finding shit that doesn’t want to be found. It’s not that at all.”

  “Is this a guessing game,” I asked, “or do you have something to say?”

  “No, I think I’m finished,” she replied. “In fact, I think I’m done for. So let’s get this over with. By the way, how many women have you killed?”

  “You played me,” I said again.

  “Takes two to make a sucker, Nat,” she smiled.

  Me, I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. Just the sound of the gunshot, louder than thunder.

  THE MALTESE UNICORN

  Ellen Datlow had asked me for a supernatural noir tale, and I was stumped. “The Maltese Unicorn” is the story that I
swore I would not write for her. I even swore it publicly, in a May 6, 2010 entry to my online journal. A dildo carved from a unicorn’s horn just seemed a bit much, even for me. Then I told the idea to Ellen, and she liked it, and so I wrote it anyway. And I’m very glad that I did. Of all my protagonists/narrators, Natalie Beaumont is one of my favorites. Originally, there was a frame set in a Nazi concentration camp; however, it was ponderous and unnecessary, and I made it go away. Thank you, Dashiell Hammett, and thank you, Raymond Chandler, and Polly Adler, and Howard Hawks, and Lauren Bacall, and Humphrey Bogart, and John Huston, and Mary Astor, and…well, you get the picture.

  Tidal Forces

  Charlotte says, “That’s just it, Em. There wasn’t any pain. I didn’t feel anything much at all.” She sips her coffee and stares out the kitchen window, squinting at the bright Monday morning sunlight. The sun melts like butter across her face. It catches in the strands of her brown hair, like a late summer afternoon tangling itself in dead cornstalks. It deepens the lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She takes another sip of coffee, then sets her cup down on the table. I’ve never once seen her use a saucer.